Category Archives: Nonfiction

MAZE OF THE GIANT HEART by Allegra Armstrong

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MAZE OF THE GIANT HEART
by Allegra Armstrong

We took seats in the back of the planetarium. I glanced over at you, my face warm with anticipation. You leaned back and looked up. When the lights went out, would you cover my knee with your hand as a deep, slow voice described which stars we were seeing? Would I rest my head on your shoulder, at peace with the world and the universe, as Orion moved West, poised to shoot?

You kept your distance. We examined placards in Space Command. The fifty million year old meteorite, the gravity well. I asked if you were happier without me and you said you’d been lifting weights.

We came to the giant, papier-mâché heart. “Remember when we tried to have sex in here?” you said. We’d finished a late-night showing of Star Wars in the museum’s IMAX theater, and rather than leave, we’d taken our own after-hours tour. We’d made it as far as the right atrium when a construction worker had found us and sent us away. The exhibit had been under repair. “We were so close,” you said. “That woulda been legendary.”

We wound our way through the maze of the giant heart, which was crowded with children on a Saturday. You led the way, took the pace of the kids, which was slower than our natural pace. At one point you turned, trapping me too close to you, your mouth inches from mine. My own heart hammered, and I stepped back.

In the giant brain, I hid from you. The brain exhibit didn’t exist when we were kids. It was new to me that October, my favorite part of the museum. Made from translucent strands of plastic and ethereal LED lights wound around clear disks, the perfect size to perch on. You stood at the bottom and I climbed. I pulled myself to the top and ran down. I invented a jumping game with two brothers I met, under-five aspiring construction workers with neon vests. A security guard asked me to please control my sons, as we were intimidating the other children.

I returned to you. “I have to go,” I said. “I’m meeting someone at three.”

“I guess I’ll stay here,” you said. “Look at more stuff.”

We exited through Optical Illusions.

“I heard you broke a glass in the garbage disposal at Cameron and Emily’s new place,” I said. “It’s weird ’cause we got together at the same time as them, and now they moved in together and we broke up.”

“I mean, we were never gonna live together,” you said. “We weren’t on that trajectory.” I thought about you asking me—eight times? Nine? to move in with you, my soft rebuttals.

◊

Our breakup was a surprise. In August, I had taken a red-eye home from a week-long vacation. I got a cab from the airport and then biked to your place straightaway. You hadn’t left for work yet. You made us eggs for breakfast. I gave you a blowjob in the kitchen. You left and I fell asleep in your bed.

You came home and didn’t kiss me hello. “What do you want for dinner?” I said. “I was thinking we could go for a picnic.”

You crossed to the fridge, pulled out several mini Twix bars. “Candy,” you said. “I want candy for dinner.” You smiled at me.

“No thanks,” I said. “I want to do something.”

We went up to your roof, arranged ourselves on waterlogged deck chairs. You had a clear view of the PECO building, which projects the time all day in dull neon. I sat facing you, looked out on the spires of the Baptist church across the street. I told you several long stories about my vacation, but stopped when I realized you weren’t talking. You stuck your tongue out at me like you were gagging. Clouds rolled overhead. I felt gently disconnected from the world, the product of too little sleep and all night traveling.

“I want to break up,” you said, and your voice cracked.

“What?” I laughed.

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I thought about this a lot when you went away. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“Is this a dream?” I said. “I’ve had this dream before.” Could I win a race downstairs to your knife drawer? How badly would a leap from your roof injure me? Would broken bones postpone this feeling to another day?

“How long have you known?” I said.

“I decided yesterday.” You slipped a tiny candy bar into your mouth.

“How the fuck can you eat candy at a time like this?” I said. Mid-chew, you looked up at me. “I’m leaving.”

“Wait,” you said. “Stop.” You grabbed me, half-hug, half-restraint.

“What!” I said. “What do you want me here for?” You looked over my shoulder. Several over-forty women were watching us from a neighboring roof. They could hear every word I said.

Since the day we met we’d slept together, wrapped up like a shell around an egg, four nights a week. Two months before I left for vacation you’d moved to a new apartment, away from a roommate who hadn’t liked me, and we’d started spending every night together. I had a key to your place.

I sat back down.

“This feels wrong,” you said. “Us being together. And I was really happy with you for a while. But, I mean, we’re so different. We always said we weren’t forever.”

“You always said that,” I said. “I said I was happy. And I mean, are we really that different?”

“We’re from different neighborhoods, we’re different kinds of liberals. We think differently, we talk differently. We’re not even the same kind of feminist.” You have a spreadsheet to keep track of every girl you’ve fucked. The rows list women’s names and the columns bear different sexual acts. At the end of each row, there are “comments.”

“Yeah, but I mean, we both like going to concerts, biking, walking dogs. We do a lot of cool stuff together.”

“And that was good for a while,” you said. “I just feel like something’s wrong. I’m happy when I’m with you, but when you leave, when I’m alone, I feel—not good.”

“But I’ve been worried about that, too,” I said. “I keep telling you how I’m worried you haven’t been seeing your friends enough. And you don’t like your job, and so now it’s like, you’re gonna give up the one thing that you do like? How’s that gonna work?”

In your kitchen, I cried so loudly you came in to check on me. “I’m not breaking your stuff,” I said. “If that’s why you’re in here.” You looked at me. You went in the other room. I followed. I sat on the couch next to you.

“Legs,” you said. Nobody calls me that anymore. “I’m sorry to do this to you.” Your eyes were sad. I put my hand on your knee, my head on your shoulder. You put your arm around my waist.

“I know you don’t mean to hurt me,” I said. “You’re a nice baby.” We stayed on the couch like that for a long time.

You asked for your key back when I left. “Goodbye,” you called, and I didn’t say anything, and the door closed.

◊

I haven’t seen you in the six months since we stood outside of that slanted-wall room in Optical Illusions, made to trick museum-goers into thinking the floor is crooked. You were wearing a yellow t-shirt, so handsome it was painful for me to look. We haven’t run into one another since then, which is odd because you chose your apartment specifically for its proximity to mine.

You want to rewrite the past. Every time I saw you, I realized, as I biked away from the Franklin Institute, you might try to change a different memory, starting with how serious we’d been, negating our favorite things about one another, what we’d done together. I wouldn’t have you back, that was clear, but did being friends with you mean the slow erasure of the love we’d had, your desperate attempt to ease the pain of the loss of me?

We texted sometimes, still, after that.

“How are you feeling?” I’d say.

“The same,” you’d say. “Fine.”

We texted about how much we could dead-lift nowadays, our weight training regimens. A poet and an engineer fall in love, what had we been expecting? Numbers, at least, could not be misconstrued. When we broke up I said I would call you when I could bench 185. In January I exchanged lifting weights for swimming laps.

In April I saw your stepdad walking your dog in the park. She hugged me, twice, her paws on my chest, crying, dog hair everywhere. It was the first of many seventy-degree spring days, global warming or urban canyon effect, or the start of an early summer. Summers for us had meant outdoor parties at the drum circle in Fairmount Park, bring-your-own-forty. Saturdays at the Italian market, searching out the freshest fruit. I wonder if you still do those things, now that you work in an office. I wonder if you ever wander up to your roof deck for a joint or glimpse of dim city stars and think of me.

Allegra Armstrong is a Philadelphia-based writer. Her work has previously appeared in Steel Toe Review, Underground Pool, and The Same. You can find her at the public library, the rock gym, or biking fast through traffic. She reads original poetry aloud at armstrongallegra.bandcamp.com.

 

 

 

Image credit: Kris Gabbard on Flickr

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MY FATHER’S HAIR by Sara Schuster

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MY FATHER’S HAIR
by Sara Schuster

He took about a week to consider.

I imagine he woke up Monday, wearily shaved his cheeks and chin in his bathroom, then stared at his hair in the mirror. Tuesday, the same. Wednesday, with frustration. By Friday, disgust.

Sunday, he stood at my bedroom door with a pair of scissors and a pair of pursed lips, unwilling to verbally admit his defeat. “You swear you’ve cut hair before?”

I nodded, surprised he’d held out as long as he had.

Four months earlier, Christmas Day, my father woke up with shingles in his right cranial nerve five. We assumed a rash and a fever, perhaps the flu; he was eighty and his illnesses had begun to crash with no warning, so we had become accustomed to waiting them out. Three days later, the rash was gone, but post-herpetic neuralgia replaced it, giving way to severe nerve damage. The number five nerve extends like a hand with five fingers, if you place the palm at the ear. One finger wraps around the chin, one below the nose. One on the right cheek, one toward the right eye and eyebrow, and the thumb, running north from the ear. On nerve activity scans, all five lit up in red, which my father joked made perfect sense because it felt like they were on fire.

And that was really all he said—avoiding further discussion, he left me fuzzy on the details of his illness for most of my adolescence. I did know that he refused medication to lessen the pain, choosing hours of stony silence spent on the couch with the lights off over opiates. In later years, he’s mentioned to me that the few times he took them, he could barely keep himself awake, and for the first time truly felt old. But to a fifteen-year-old, this refusal, and the diagnosis, seemed inane—as I tiptoed through to the kitchen, I couldn’t understand why nothing was being done; no procedures, no operations, no solutions. “Incurable” made little sense to a girl who had barely had the flu. Yet here my father sat in silence for the third week, his forehead in his hands, because waiting was the adopted treatment. Petulant, teenage me was ill-equipped to partake in this stakeout, so if I wasn’t sequestered in my room with television, I was avoiding the dark living room by spending weekends at my boyfriend’s house.

The detail I was clear about was the status of his hair, which he talked about with a remarkable constancy. His standing monthly hair trim went neglected, and the fringe around the base of his skull quickly grew unkempt. He’d grumble at dinner: “I look like an old man.” “I have a mullet.” “I feel like the back of my neck is wearing a blanket.”

◊

In the early months of recovery, he’d wince if any part of his head was touched, bobbing and weaving in a self-protective two-step whenever my mother or I came near him. We stopped hugging in the mornings before I left for school. My mother, frazzled, stopped calling to find out where I was every day at five. On the nights I did come home, I quickly noted that we no longer ate vegetables (because my father hated them) and that instead my mom made pasta and put in extra meatballs because it was his favorite. Uncharacteristically, I chose not to complain.

I’d hesitate before entering the house, attempting to prepare what to say. In the way that teenagers so often do, I lacked the vocabulary to ask him about how he was hurting or what I could do, regularly scrambling for language that felt appropriate. While I had overheard murmurs of these conversations between my mother and him, emulation seemed impossible, and the strain I caught in my mother’s exhausted whisper was frightening. Scuttling in the house and mumbling a barely audible “hey” as I passed, I’d sheepishly remain hidden until dinner.

There, across the table from me, hunched over the parmesan, he didn’t look much like himself. After months of wordless observation, my gaze alit on his shoulder-length hair, and I found something to say. Between bites of rigatoni and meatballs, I volunteered.

“What?”

“Let me cut your hair.”

“Have you ever?”

“Sure.”

◊

We’re a family of vanity, so what began as tepid acceptance soon turned into a ritual. My father would peek his head into my door in the early afternoon once every third Sunday, after I had finally hoisted myself out of bed. Working up the nerve to state his intent, he’d feign nonchalance as he made his way around my room. He’d walk to the window and pull down the blinds a bit, causing the previously settled specks of dust to sparkle when they caught the redirected shafts of sunlight. He’d organize books and wipe rings of condensation off my desk. In the haze of a recently-woken adolescent, I’d continue watching Law & Order on my computer as though zombified. This round of cat and mouse would go on until he finally broke:

“Do you have fifteen minutes?”

I’d exhale, responding that I didn’t. He’d nod, and turn to leave, when I’d get up to grab the scissors. “Where are you going?”

“You just said—”

“Come on—”

“Not if you’re too busy,” but his fingers, brushed with arthritis and refusing to bend easily, were already toying with the inch or so of hair he felt was too shaggy. Not that there was even much to fuss with: the majority of his head was bald, hair only running from ear to ear, wrapped, as we joked, like a fur head-warmer. He once had thick, black hair that hung long and curly at his shoulders. A denim designer for Sears Roebuck in the seventies, he’d chosen his hair over promotions, leaving to start his own business when his boss pushed him to cut it. Though that hair left him long before I was born, I’d grown up surrounded by photographs on the walls, paying homage to his curls.

When my dad talks about his youth, he talks about his dog, King, whom he swears was half wolf. He tells endless stories about his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, where a pickle was five cents and his mother smoked a pack of cigarettes every day. He talks about the girl he tried to marry at eighteen, for whom he hitchhiked from Durham, North Carolina back to Brooklyn only to find her engaged to someone else. And he talks about his hair. For all of these vignettes, I nestle beside him on our living room couch and doze, while he watches the news and resumes his stories during the commercials— in part to me, in part to himself. As a young child, I used to bury my face in his stomach at the same time, listening as much to his voice as to the gurgles in his belly; the two together in harmony sounded satisfyingly alive and reassuring to me, and I delighted in his warmth.

◊

It took just under two years for his nerve scans to move from red to yellow, and then to a sustainable, even ignorable, green.  I went to college, and he returned to his barber.

But I can still easily feel the heartbeat in the veins beneath the silk of my father’s scalp, as though my hands are only centimeters away. I remember wondering if the pulsing lined up with the pain of the frazzled nerves, then chastising myself for creating a visible reality for an invisible occurrence. How physically tangible can the synapses of one’s nerves be anyway, or for that matter how real? I didn’t want to ask, probably because I really didn’t want to know.

The muscle memory returns, too: I can still feel the strain in my mouth, tense as I wielded the scissors and refused mistake, and feel how the the rest of my body poised like a statue as I moved the blades around the nape of his neck. I’d take barely an inch off of his baby-fine hair and watch it flutter, like feathers, down into the sink. In this real-life game of Operation, I knew intrinsically the repercussions of allowing the blades to even brush his skin.

He went from asking to demanding; I went from offering to submitting with caustic, adolescent sarcasm. We verbally scuffled every time he would scrutinize to make sure the ends were even. We brought in rulers, occasionally took photos on my cellphone to pour over and dissect how even the cut was in the back, and inevitably fifteen minutes turned into an hour.

“I don’t want to look lopsided, Sara, I’m not some crazy old man.”

“Why would I make you look crazy? Jesus, trust me for, like, one second.”

“Jesus doesn’t know you from a hole in the wall. I would trust you if it wasn’t already lopsided.” Touché.

“I think it’s your head that’s lopsided,” and our eyes would meet in the bathroom mirror. Me standing behind him with tufts of hair in one hand, big gray craft scissors in the other. Him seated below me and obstinately repressing a grin.

“Okay.”

I’d hold my breath and raise the scissors once more, knowing the hair was not even, but also that my confidence was wavering and that my fingers begged for a break. Yet, as I navigated the globe of his mostly bald scalp, he never flinched. Lost in his desire for the hair to be perfect, he’d forget the fiery nerves and the fear of being touched. Perhaps even the shingles altogether.

The truth—I hadn’t cut hair before. Somehow the blades never so much as grazed him.

Sara Schuster is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. She writes short stories and personal narratives focusing on memory, health, and bodies (especially her own). Her most recent work is a thesis on recovering from anorexia. Other published pieces can be found in the Penn Gazette.

DIARY ENTRY, by Arden Sawyer, Featured on Life As Activism

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DIARY ENTRY
by Arden Sawyer
Featured on Life As Activism

Diary entry:

The year is 2017, and it is still young. Yet already it has managed to make me very concerned about how it will turn out as it grows older.

At present, I’m staying with my aunt Rebecca in her house in San Francisco, California, under the wing of her charity. The back of the drought has been broken by a glut of rain. Every night Rebecca watches the news. She watches the news of her own will and choosing, and I am simply there for it, experiencing its noise and light because I am in the same room while it plays. Rebecca is an American, by her own identification, and lives in America. I am simply here in it, situated physically in this spot on the earth, borrowing space in other people’s lives.

The news is a series of shocks interspersed with trivialities.

A forecaster states, “Strange and exuberant bouts of unnatural weather lash the nation.”

And I think: this is what it will be like now, a series of binges and purges.

A newscaster reads, “Xenophobia and lies in the early days of the Trump administration.”

And I think: this is what it will be like now, a series of descending rungs into dystopia.

Then they discuss a new smartphone that is spontaneously combusting.

When I want to escape the noise and light, I go to the front parlor and sit by the window, looking out onto the street. School children weighted with backpacks go by. I watch them, and I write.

I imagine that this document will be found later by generations who are digging through the wreckage trying to figure out what happened. They will be humans, but different from me: mutated by waste and radioactivity; something strange and new. Thinking of this brings me hope and comfort. Humanity should be doing something new. But, all they will learn from my writing is that I was small, powerless, and lost.

I don’t know how to feel afraid for myself. The fear that I manage to feel is disembodied, like pain in an anesthetized body part. I’ve never had any hard evidence that I’m a real person, a person who exists outside of rooms where televisions play, a person who can be affected by the things out there. But, I do feel afraid for other people. I feel afraid for the people out there; the people on the TV screen during Rebecca’s news hour.

In the last segment, images played of the protests at San Francisco International Airport. There were frightened people speaking into the cameras, lamenting the sudden barrier that has dropped between them and their loved ones overseas. I stood paralyzed, first because of the sight of them, and then because of an overwhelming sense of despair at the complete absence of will in my body to move, to act, even now.

I wish people would stop saying “I can’t believe this is happening here, in the US, in 2017.” As if this is not the same place, the same country in which they live and have lived, that has contained this reality since its birth. As if this period in U.S. history arrived sans a series of traceable steps. Then I question, am I one of those shocked people who believed that modern America was a land of moral superiority, where society is a forever-ascending staircase of progress towards… what? Liberty? Did I believe that the future was a better place and we were living the future today? Did I think that love and enlightenment could be a feature of the new global monoculture?

I move into the kitchen and begin following the images on the TV screen in glances. Rebecca and I buzz around each other, making our dinners. Here I am then, watching the news, living in America, existing as an American. The news becomes a part of my nightly routine, just like Rebecca.

Maybe this is the time she and I will look back on as when everything changed, but right now everything remains the same. Right now, we are just living our lives, watching other lives in glances, hearing things from far away but feeling them only peripherally. We are not the dry aquifers or the farmers. We will not be deported. We make our dinners and then we eat them. Still I do not believe anything will really happen, because I can’t imagine the change. Even when the change is occurring still I cannot imagine it.

If I could offer the mutated humans of the future one thought, it would be that we are gone because we let circumstances advance until they were upon us, until they were irreversible; because we did not want to step away from our ordinary lives long enough even to preserve them, to abandon our projects and our routines, even when we saw a looming threat to them in the distance. We did not want to experience change, and so inevitably change came to us.

There is one good piece of news, though: I’m not pregnant. So, I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to get an IUD implanted while that is still an option. I have to enjoy as much fear-free sex as I can before my ovaries become property of the state.

Arden Sawyer is a genderless artist from Philly who utilizes the pronouns of they or them. They are an art student working on their BFA at Rhode Island School of design. They are currently taking time off of school to travel and pursue their writing.

 

 

 

Image credit: Tina Rataj Berard on Unsplash

THE SONGS OF MY YOUTH by Nancy Hightower

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Stack of vinyl records

THE SONGS OF MY YOUTH
by Nancy Hightower

Facebook has had one of those circulating memes, the ones that ask you to make lists that somehow make you feel nostalgic for a life you’re not sure you ever really had. The latest: list ten albums that influenced you as a teenager. Then: list ten albums that influenced you before you were a teenager. I do not make a list. Instead, I read your list, the choices that betrayed your rebellion or geekiness or prescient cool factor. I want to make my own list, but your list is better. I want to make my own list, but my throat catches as I hum songs I once took great pains to forget, songs that betray a disjointed yet emotionally accurate soundtrack.

1) At my grandparents’ house, I watch the Lawrence Welk show right before bed. Singers belt out “Good Night, Sleep Tight” for their final number. I am usually in my pajamas and afterwards my grandfather will tuck me in. He will touch me. He will make sure it feels good. I cannot remember him without remembering those singers dressed in bright yellow, swaying side to side, as if life will always be this grand.

2-4) In the ’70s, my mother is an amalgamation of outlaw country music songs. I sing about stolen kisses and illicit love every time she plays Sammi Smith’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “I’m Not Lisa” by Jessi Coulter, and “Angel of the Morning,” by Merrilee Rush. I don’t understand that my mother listens to them while thinking of the other men she has in her life. I am often sad and can’t understand why.

5) Kenneth Copeland’s He is Jehovah signals my mother’s conversion to charismatic Christianity. She listens to sermons about faith, prosperity, and demons. She likes knowing about prosperity and how to make money, but demons are more interesting. She wants my thoughts to be pure. My thoughts are anything but pure. She wants to enroll me in a special Christian school, that is somehow more special than the Christian school I’m already attending. In 1982, she leaves my father and takes me to Denton, Texas, to be with her lover.

6) “Endless Love” by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie is played on repeat in our small apartment. My mother’s reality starts breaking down as she begins to accuse me of being in the occult. She looks to Jim for strength. I begin to understand he is her endless love. I am the assassin no longer allowed to hug her.

7) After a few months, I am sent back to my father, where I have access to a record player and cassette tapes. Rock and roll is a musical gateway into a world of sex and drug use, so I am caught between Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and the evangelical crooning of Keith Green, Sandi Patti, Petra, and Carman. I don big stereo headphones to drown out my stepmother’s accusations that I am trying to destroy the family and listen to stories about Jesus and Heaven. I will step into any world just to escape my own.

8-10) By fourteen, I am sent to a Christian boarding school in order to preserve the family peace. Rock music is a vehicle for corruption and dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire so only approved music (indicated by a yellow sticker) can be played. My two years here are a strange mix of Amy Grant’s Straight Ahead, Howard Jones’ Dream into Action, and U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. I memorize songs that blare from the car radio when allowed home. When staying at friends’ houses I devour MTV videos, entranced by and envious of the men who are allowed to wear more makeup than I am.

It’s not until I leave my house at seventeen that I begin a journey towards creating my own musical collections. I learn rudimentary dance skills at college, which become more fluid once I begin to frequent the Denver clubs at twenty-three. I sing along to Sisters of Mercy, Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, and Peter Murphy; my white t-shirt lit up by black light. It’s during this time that I discover Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes, an album that embodies my brokenness and ferocity, my desire to move beyond mere survival. It is a beginning, the signal of a new life no longer flanked by the chorus of other people’s pain.

Headshot of Nancy HightowerNancy Hightower has published short fiction and poetry in journals such as Word Riot, Sundog Lit, Flapperhouse, Cheap Pop, Gargoyle, and Prick of the Spindle. Her first collection of poetry, The Acolyte, was published in 2015 by Port Yonder Press, and she reviewed science fiction and fantasy for The Washington Post from 2014-2016. She is currently working on a book about digital fictions with DJ Spooky and teaches at Hunter College.

 

 

Image credit: Umberto Cofini on Unsplash

BROTHERS, BOYS, AND WHAT CAN I DO By Shannon Cothran

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Person in a dark room with a streak of light over their eye

BROTHERS, BOYS, AND WHAT CAN I DO
By Shannon Cothran

The gym floor is hard, and my butt bones are pinching my rear. I shift my weight. There are a hundred kids around me in the gym sitting criss-cross-applesauce, the way our teachers demand we sit. Why do they care how we sit? I stretch my legs out in front of me, hoping my teacher won’t see. I am caught by 5B’s teacher, Miss Stugart, and refold them.

A man in thick, gold-rimmed glasses with floppy gray hair and a tracksuit—the kind my gym teacher wears everyday—starts talking into a megaphone. I forget about my aches as he explains how we can fight back against someone who is trying to hurt us. Oh yes, he’s saying, a kid can fight back against even a big, strong man. He tells us how we can insert our thumbs into an attacker’s eye sockets in just the right way to pop them out. He tells us to make ourselves puke all over the mean man. He tells us to kick or knee or elbow or punch the man’s groin or throat.

When the presentation is over, I untangle my sleeping legs, gingerly putting weight on them, and they shake under me on the way back to the trailer outside the school that is my 5th-grade classroom. My legs are covered in bruises from falling all the time. I’m incredibly clumsy. My mom lovingly calls them chicken legs because they are unnaturally white, skinny, and bony. But it doesn’t matter how skinny and little I am anymore. I know how to pop someone’s eyeballs out.

That afternoon at home, I am straddling my little brother, his arms pinned under the strength of my thighs, and I am spitting in his face while he screams. I let the spit drip slowly from my mouth onto his face, a long string of it, so he can see it coming. My mom sees it coming too and pulls me off him, sending me to my room. I get talked at for an hour by her and then another hour by my dad. You’re almost five years older than he is, they say. Someday, he’s going to be bigger than you, they say. What will you do then?

I cannot imagine a time when my little brother will be bigger than me. Plus, if he’s going to be that big, then I will be faster, I reason. And there’s always my eyeball-popping power.

◊

My 7th-grade health teacher is talking to us about sex. I’m surrounded by pimple-faced thirteen-year-old boys who are sniggering at every mention of genitalia. My friends and I are too mature for that.

The teacher plays a movie. In it, a hot guy, a football player, is getting pumped up during a pep talk by his coach. It’s the homecoming game. He wins the game; he goes to the dance with his equally hot girlfriend, who has huge, teased bangs and even huge-er shoulder pads in her dress. They go back to his dad’s boat with a cabin in the hull, and he has sex with her even while she says no.

The class is silent. I feel something inside I’ve never felt before. I don’t know what it is, then, but later I will learn it’s the melting of my invincibility.

◊

My brother is begging me. “Come on, Shannon!” he pleads. “Come outside and play with me!” I feel a twinge of guilt. I love my brother Ethan; his ten-year-old face is always open and honest. Since his birth, I have been his primary playmate. Although I still spend time with him every day, at fourteen-going-on-fifteen, I have outgrown our imagination games. I no longer want to fight the Snow Queen in the backyard. I shake my head no. “Argh!” he cries, water welling in his eyes. We are on summer break and  live out in the country—he has no other friends nearby. Without me, he sees the long hours of the day stretching out in front of him with nothing to do. “I hate you! I want to punch you so bad!” I look at him, half daring him to hit me and half afraid he will.  He gives me one last dirty look before turning away, headed for the basement and his Nintendo.

◊

Matt is so gorgeous. We meet at a church dance. I check him out as he walks past me. When he catches me, I decide not to hide it, and instead look at him like, “What? You’re cute. I can look if I want.” We exchange numbers. My parents let us go on a double date since I am sixteen now, and my best friend Jess takes one for the team and goes with Matt’s much-less-attractive friend, Joe. We come up with a crazy idea for the date: an egg-and-tomato fight in the city park.

In the grocery store, the cold air from the dairy case makes my legs erupt in goosebumps, and I wonder, if he touches my legs later, will they feel pokey instead of nice and soft? At checkout, we decide, laughing, to have the boys pay for the tomatoes and the girls for the eggs.

It’s dusk at the park, and we divide ammo and hide before attempting to stealthily attack. I get Matt in the back with two tomatoes. “Cheap shot!” he yells, chasing me.

He catches me in less than fifteen seconds. As he tackles me—the star midfielder of the girls’ soccer team—I remember how, when I was thirteen, I ran a boy down.

He had gotten the ball at midfield, and since my team was in the wrong place, I caught up to him from his team’s defensive position and kept him from scoring. He was the best striker on their team, and my dad was going nuts—red in the face, full of pride for his girl, yelling gleefully from the sidelines, “Get him, get him, YEAH!”

Matt is a video game junkie, not an athlete. Yet that night in the park, catching up to me is easy for him; tackling me even easier. We are both laughing, and I love his hands on my waist, the weight of him over my hips, but then—then I can’t get him off. I bend my legs, twist, and lift my hips, but nothing happens. My laughter becomes high-pitched. I’m scared, but he isn’t letting up. He breaks a dozen eggs into my hair, holding my arms down with one hand while I lie immobilized on the grass in August on my first date.

I had often imagined scenarios where I was kidnapped, and in my mind I always managed to escape, despite the brute strength of the man who took me. I could outwit him, outrun him, outmaneuver him, uneyeball him. But here, in real life, I am powerless.

When Matt has exhausted his ammo, he stands and bends to help me up. The yolks glop down my hair and onto my bare upper arms. We stand there awkwardly. Maybe he knows something is wrong. I definitely know something is wrong—something has shifted. Or perhaps something is as it always had been, but I hadn’t known that truth until now.

Somehow we end up in the fountain at the park with Jess and her date. We rinse off the eggs and tomatoes and go home.

◊

At seventeen, I have a sexy boyfriend, Kris. We park his car in shadowed areas around town to make out. He is sensitive to my comfort level; his hands move slowly across my back, making sure I accept his advances. I feel safe with him. His masculine smell draws me in; it is intoxicating.

I am still unsettled about my powerlessness against Matt. How could I have won against that boy in the park last year, I ask Kris from his passenger seat. If Matt had wanted to hurt me, it would’ve been so easy. I couldn’t do anything, I tell him. It’s all about balance and not power, my all-knowing, sixteen-year-old, pothead boyfriend tells me. If you had just twisted your hips the right way, you could have beat him.

I don’t contradict him even though I know he is wrong.

◊

At college, I can’t decide on a major. You can do anything you set your mind to, my mom tells me. I read articles about women balancing motherhood with careers in male-dominated fields. I hear there are no women in the engineering major, but there should be, and that my school doesn’t have enough female mathematicians. I feel like I should step up for women, but math is my worst subject.

I take a self-defense class one Saturday morning. Our instructor Daniel is short, square, blond, and muscled. He talks for the first hour, and he says to stay safe, the most important part is making good decisions. He tells us some statistics: one in five women are raped, most have long hair—we think it’s because it’s easy to grab onto, he explains. Rapists can pick rape victims out of their high school yearbook photos years before they were raped—we know there’s something that rapists sense in their victims before they choose them, we just don’t know what, he says.

Am I carrying this thing inside me—something only rapists can sense? Something that makes me rape-able?

He teaches us how to walk down streets like we own them, how to project confidence and toughness, to park our cars correctly, to never be alone in the dark, to listen to our gut and walk or run the other way if we feel an “animal-like sixth sense telling us something is not right.” He dons a red padded suit, and I learn how to hit and where. I pound on Daniel’s protected weak spots.

I go to the movies that night feeling like every man there is a potential threat I can now take down. My date and I watch Charlie’s Angels, and Drew Barrymore beats up all the men who cross her.

The next morning I fling off the too-hot blankets and sit up to drink some water. I am wearing shorts, and I notice my legs, still white but no longer so skinny, still bruised but now from others’ soccer cleats. Across from me is a print of my brother’s new wrestling picture; all the members of the high school team get them taken for the yearbook. He has big, broad shoulders, he wins matches, he’s practically balding already. He doesn’t need me to play with him anymore. He likes to joke that he got into wrestling so no one else could ever sit on him and spit in his face. What I did to him was awful, but it’s OK now, just a funny old family story.

My legs and his picture and my guilt and my memories merge, and I realize the only reason my gigantic little brother doesn’t hurt me isn’t because he can’t catch me or because I could overpower him with a few tricks I learned on a Saturday morning—it’s because he chooses not to.

Headshot of Shannon CothranShannon Cothran is a professional food writer who prefers New England’s clam chowder and ice cream to New Orleans’ gumbo and snowballs. 

Image credit: Larm Rmah on Unsplash

ALARM by Sandra Shaw Homer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

ALARM
by Sandra Shaw Homer

When it became clear my grandmother could no longer live alone, I was the one who took the initiative to find a place for her, and I wanted it to be near me.  She refused to go to the only facility in Albany, where she lived, because there was a patient there she intensely disliked, and she loathed the idea of going to Florida, near her two sons, so we found a “life-care” facility in a pretty, rural area outside Philadelphia. My sister, also nearby, handles our grandmother’s affairs while I visit and occasionally deal with the staff. This division of labor falls to each of us naturally, and I’m happy with my share.

My grandmother was only forty-seven when I was born, but because she was my grandmother, I always thought of her as old. It was only thirty years later that I began to observe that there are degrees of old. Her shoulders got smaller suddenly, her bones collapsing together. She developed an uncertainty in her step that I realized was a fear of falling (although she never stopped wearing her low-heeled pumps). To me she had always been proud and fearless, but with this new vulnerability of hers I started to assume a larger role. The shift was gradual, but my awareness of it cataclysmic. The love had always flowed unconditionally toward me. Now it was flowing the other way. It frightened me to realize that I was going to lose her. Returning that love I’d always had from her took on a special urgency, and I was grateful to be able to do it.

She enriched my life in so many ways: her frequent “rescues” from my unhappy family to her little cabin on the lake with its rag rug and bright yellow upright piano (the cabin was her trysting place—divorced before I was born, she and her lover, my “Uncle Tom,” met there for years); her constant and patient encouragement of my music (she taught voice and sang professionally); the summer orchestra concerts in Saratoga; the contented moments fishing in her little rowboat (we always tossed the sunnies back to be caught another day); the time we coasted her big old Pontiac with the amber Indian head on the hood all the way down the hill when it was out of gas (“Wheee!” we shouted.); her daily calls to me when I was in the hospital, alone in New York; her always knowing when something was disturbing me, even when I didn’t know myself; her sneakily arranging for me to take singing lessons with a colleague from Temple University. Once, when we were floating on a Thames barge through the English countryside, I looked up to see my grandmother, an unopened book in her lap, absorbed in her thoughts with a look of such serenity on her face it jerked my heart.

Every time I walk up to the door of the medical center, her new “home,” I feel all the ambivalence of someone about to visit a relative in prison. Even though it’s now called a “medical center,” everyone knows it’s really a nursing home, and we all know that nursing homes are places where people go to die. My grandmother lives on the top floor, the fifth floor (the last stop on the way to Heaven), where the patients are prisoners in more ways than one. Few eyes are turned to Heaven on the top floor, few souls prepared for death, because, in needing the greatest “medical and behavioral supervision,” most are, to one degree or another, losing their minds.

Coming off the elevator I see patients strapped into their chairs watching (and understanding nothing of) television. A gentleman in a wheelchair is facing the wall screaming unintelligibly. Near the nursing station a patient tries to engage me in nonsense conversation. Another simply grabs hold of my clothes, so fiercely that I wonder if, to these benighted souls, outsiders represent some desperate hope of escape. I feel pity, revulsion, a desire to escape this twentieth-century Bedlam myself. But for my grandmother I come. I come for myself, too, even though she’s not sure who I am.  Recently, she looked up at me from her pillow and said, “There’s always been something special between us two,” even though she can’t remember my name. Her extraordinary smile, a palpable thing like a stone bridge, was ever an invitation for my soul to cross over and give hers a hug. Nobody else in my life ever had a smile like that.

I am visiting the medical center today for a quarterly meeting of the staff to review her “case.” In these meetings, I ask, and they answer, a series of questions about my grandmother’s health, her mental deterioration, her physical needs, her participation (or not) in social or recreational programs. Four staff members and I are assembled in the “reality orientation room,” where patients come every morning to hear what day it is, where they are, who they are, what holidays are coming up, what activities are planned. All this information is spelled out neatly in large block letters on the blackboard, reminding me of a first grade school room. There are no decorations in the room whatsoever. A few plastic chairs and tables have been pulled into a rough circle for our meeting. It is a sunny winter day outside the window.

The charge nurse is just beginning to answer my first question when the fire alarm sounds. As one, the staff members rush out of the room. I sit there alone, irritated by the repeated honking of the alarm, wishing I could have a cigarette. I look out the window at the sun glare on the snow, which is still three or four inches deep, and I think that it is not a good day to take my grandmother anywhere. Even though she is having her hair done so we can go out to lunch, and even though the sun is warm, there are too many patches of ice on which an old woman could slip and break a bone.

Suddenly, a strident male voice sounds through the closed hall door: “Evacuate the building! Everyone evacuate the building!”

For the first time, it occurs to me there might really be a fire. I slip on my jacket and hat and pick up my purse, just as a male patient shuffles with agonizing slowness through the door from the recreation room. I say, “We must leave the building,” and my heart sinks as I realize he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. The charge nurse returns and, taking the old fellow by the arm, directs us both to the fire exit.

In the hall, all is pandemonium. Even the ambulatory patients are incapable of making it to the fire exit on their own. The staff is operating on adrenaline and rote training. At the exit, I hold the door open for the wheelchairs and aides guiding the patients on foot. One grand dame holds up traffic by asking me what I’m laughing about. There is a twinkle in her beautiful gray eyes. Perhaps she sees a joke and wants to share it. Perhaps there really is a smile on my face. Someone from behind gently pushes her forward. Feeling a little useless where I am, I ask one of the aides what I can do to help.

“Check the bathrooms!” she gasps. I prop open the exit door and methodically check the ten rooms along the hall. Emerging from the last one, I see an aide trying to get an ambulatory man into a wheelchair so he can be moved faster. Meanwhile, other patients are simply milling about unaccompanied. I grab the back of the wheelchair: “I’ll take him,” I say. She gives me a relieved look and dashes off to help someone else.  My passenger is tall and unshaven and wearing a baseball cap and flannel shirt. I tell him to keep his feet up so they won’t trip under the wheels of the chair. I have to keep reminding him of this. Even at this sedate speed, he could break an ankle.

There is a bottleneck around the exit. The walled terrace outside the door is still covered with snow, except for a narrow path that has been cleared around the edge. The snow makes it impossible to maneuver the wheelchairs, and there is no more space to stack people up. Fortunately, the building is set into the side of a hill, and an aide forces open the gate at the other end of the terrace and begins guiding people down the muddy slope toward the fourth-floor terrace and paved walkway beyond.

It is a bizarre collection of people out here. Some are naked, or only half dressed. Not one has a coat, gloves, or hat. In the sun, the temperature might be as high as forty degrees; even so, these frail beings will not survive out here for long. Someone comes through the door with an armload of rolled cotton blankets. I busy myself wrapping blankets around shoulders, legs, bare feet. One woman keeps up a shrill animal complaint that her blankets are wet. She’s sitting half naked in her wheelchair, a pile of soiled linen on the ground beside her. From her contorted shape I can see she is incapable of moving; I try to snake a blanket behind her bare buttocks and wrap it around her hips. Finally, I spread a blanket over the knees of the old gentleman I had wheeled down the hall. He says, “Thank you,” and I marvel at his lucidity.

The fire companies are arriving, adding their shrill sirens to the insistent honking of the building alarm. A nurse comes scrambling up the hill and breathlessly asks one of the fifth-floor aides if there is any oxygen up here. The aide shakes her head. “But I’ve got to have oxygen. Some of my patients won’t last long without it!” I tell her I have just seen one of the fire company ambulances come down the road. Surely they will have tanks. She races back down the hill.

Slowly the fifth-floor situation is brought under control. Someone does a headcount. Someone else checks names against a logbook. One by one, patients are being maneuvered off the terrace and down the hill to get farther away from the building. One of the female patients is screaming as two aides try to walk her through the muddy snow. There is still no sign of smoke or flame, but there is a rumor that a small fire in the kitchen tripped the alarm. I pray that it will be brought under control quickly before anybody catches a chill.

Finally, a breathing space. I decide to find my grandmother, who had been in the beauty salon on the fourth floor. She is standing with her back to me a little way down the hill from the fourth-floor terrace, holding herself perfectly erect, a cotton blanket draped over her head and shoulders like the Virgin Mary. I come up behind her and put my arm around her and give her a big kiss on the cheek. Her head is covered with curlers. She gives me that joyful smile and says to no one in particular, “Oh, my loving sister is here!” I whisper, “Granddaughter,” into her ear so she won’t feel embarrassed if anyone nearby has heard her.

People say she has outlived her life. Not as long as that smile is still there for me. Its shadow is on her face now, as I hug her against the cold on the snowy grounds of the medical center. If she doesn’t know exactly who I am, she knows I love her, and she knows she loves me.

Organic brain dysfunction syndrome, clogged carotid arteries, not enough oxygen to the cells. The fire in her mind is being damped out, along with the light in her eyes. Even her oldest memories are failing her now. Words fail her; sometimes they come out like nonsense syllables. The woman who stood up in front of audiences and sang Schubert Lieder in a clear, controlled contralto now can’t remember a song.

Even though I’ve got two blankets wrapped around her and my hat stretched over her curlers, she tells me that her bottom is cold. I learn later that she is finally incontinent and that she won’t wear her diapers. “She’s a lady,” the charge nurse says, which is her way of telling me that what shreds of dignity remain to my grandmother will not abide the wearing of diapers. She doesn’t resist having them put on; she simply takes them off when backs are turned. So, standing out here in the bright early March sun, my grandmother is without any underwear.

But we are giggling together now over the whole predicament. There is always confusion inherent in moving large numbers of people around, and when those people are physically or mentally disabled, it can be mayhem. When the obvious danger has passed, the whole scene takes on the quality of the ridiculous. Together we look back up the hill at all the old people milling around in the snow. My grandmother utters a rare complete sentence: “I would say they look foolish if I didn’t try so hard not to look like a fool myself.” I laugh and hug her tighter.

Philadelphia native Sandra Shaw Homer lives in Costa Rica, where for years she wrote a regular column, “Local Color,” for the The Tico Times. Her writing has appeared in several print, online literary, and travel journals, as well as her own blog, writingfromtheheart.net. Her first travel memoir, Letters from the Pacific, received excellent Kirkus and Publishers Weekly reviews. A brief inspirational memoir, The Magnificent Dr. Wao, was published as a Kindle Book, and a second travel memoir, Journey to the Joie de Vivre was released in 2016.

BARYCENTER by Sydney Tammarine

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BARYCENTER
by Sydney Tammarine

Barycenter (or barycentre; from the Ancient Greek βαρύς heavy + κέντρον centre): the center of mass of two or more bodies that are orbiting each other, or the point around which they both orbit.

Things your new doctor says I am not to ask you in the middle of a dissociative event:

What’s wrong?
Where are we?
What’s my name?
What’s your name?
How old are you?
What is my name?
Look at me
Look at me
Look at me
Please, help

Last night I found you huddled in the corner of our bedroom, wide awake and shaking. This was similar but not identical to that time one year ago when I broke down the bathroom door with a hammer to find you curled in a C-shape on the tile, the way you perhaps had slept in your mother’s womb. Both times, you said you were sorry. You had lain surrounded by the glass of a shattered fifth of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7, and twenty-seven acetaminophen 500mg/diphenhydramine-hydrochloride 25mg pills, which I scooped into the sink to count and subtract from the number on the packaging (100) to estimate the intake (seventy-three, or 36,500 mg, with an error margin of five to ten pills that I might have missed laying under your still, silenced body). It’s not the diphenhydramine-hydrochloride that will kill you. It’s the acetaminophen, and it’s slow. I didn’t know that part until later. People on internet forums say they’d rather burn to death than die from acetaminophen poisoning. Sometimes teenagers overdose on Tylenol PM and wake up the next morning—feeling heavy and nauseous but sickeningly, gloriously alive—and then three days later, right in the middle of doing homework or playing video games or something, they collapse. It snakes its way through the blood to shut down your liver. The Emergency Medical Technician told me all this with one eyebrow raised, his shiny black work shoes behind your curled body on the floor, as if I was hiding the real number from him, as if he was daring me, as if he would wait forever until I got just the right number, counting the blue pills two by two in the sink.

I’ve never told anyone this, but you’d tried to kill yourself in the five-dollar tie-dyed Rastafarian cat T-shirt that I’d put in your Christmas stocking that year as a gag gift. It was hysterical, can’t you see? It was so unbearably funny how you wore that red-yellow-green shirt with an orange kitten with black dreadlocks and a fat blunt stuffed in its mouth your first week in the psych ward. After seven days the receptionist kindly told me I could drop off one change of clothes for you, so I went to Walmart and bought another: this one tie-dyed blue and purple behind a grey cat whose sunglasses reflected the entire galaxy, all the stars and planets, captured for one brief and beautiful moment in static, swirling motion.

I brought you, too, a notebook with Franz Wright’s “Written with a Baseball-Bat Sized Pencil” taped to the cover. You know that poem. You read The Beforelife to me on our first night together, so late the sun was almost rising, our flushed, drunken legs thrown over your futon and each other. Remember, it starts: “You can meet them all here, these people who aren’t coming back?” And it ends: “And who knows, you might be one of them yourself by now, stranger things have happened—”? I asked you to write down all the interesting characters I was so sure you’d meet there, but you just shook your head and told me, “You know, it’s not like that. It’s not actually all that fun here.” I thought you’d misunderstood, but looking back, I’m sure it was me who had not been listening all along.

Definitions I never thought I’d know before you, and can now recite like prayer, in full diagnostic language:

DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA (also known as Psychogenic Amnesia): the inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature. The most common of all dissociative disorders, frequently seen in hospital emergency rooms.

DISSOCIATIVE FUGUE (AKA PSYCHOGENIC FUGUE): a sudden, unexpected travel away from home, accompanied by an inability to recall one’s past and confusion about personal identity. Individuals in a Dissociative Fugue state appear normal to others.

DEPERSONALIZATION DISORDER: a persistent or recurrent feeling of being detached from one’s own mental processes or body, as if watching one’s life from outside one’s body, similar to watching a movie.

DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER (PREVIOUSLY MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER): the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of one’s behavior. These dissociated states are not fully-formed personalities, but rather fragments of identity that remember different aspects of autobiographical information. There is usually a host personality who identifies with the client’s real name and is not aware of the presence of other alters.

DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED (DDNOS): dissociative presentations that do not meet the full criteria for any other dissociative disorder, occurring independently or concurrent with other illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, or schizophrenia.

In the early days I read these to you like a test: A, B, C, or D? None of the above? All of the above? I even switched the order around periodically, to avoid test-taker and/or proctor bias.

The morning after you forget my name for the first time, I sit in the dark and watch television and try not to smoke cigarettes in our new apartment with its shitty paint job and toxic new-carpet smell. I try not to think about how alone we are together, 350 miles from Columbus, in a city where our health insurance doesn’t work. I try not to think about how we are here because of me, my insistence that a fresh start in the mountain air—rolling thick and real in sweet, cold clouds—might heal us, when what I’d really wanted was escape. Escape from the white bathroom tiles and its door that didn’t lock, not anymore, and the pencils you’d brought home that I tried to give away, which kept turning back up on my classroom floor, even weeks later. On the television, Detective Rossi and the Criminal Minds gang are hunting a serial killer who, like Ed Gein (and you), cared for a mother paralyzed by multiple strokes until her death. Like Ed Gein (but not like you), the killer has begun hunting women to dress up in coats made from their skin. I feel like I am wearing someone else’s skin. “What will we do?” the stoic supervisory special agent Hotchner asks, voice faltering in an uncharacteristic moment of humanity and weakness. “We will attack it with analysis and diligence,” Detective Rossi says, grim but admirable, determined. You are still asleep in the next room. I think about how to attack this, this faceless monster wearing your face, with analysis and diligence.

Around midnight I had come into the bedroom to find you wide awake, staring out the uncovered window. You had ripped the blinds right off the wall, probably from trying to draw them closed too fast, probably because you thought someone was watching you from the darkness, and now you sat cross-legged on the floor, spine strangely and precisely erect, with all the white panels fanning out around you. You were rocking side to side, hands clenching and unclenching, fingernails curling in to scrape the tender flesh of your palms. I gave you my hands to hold, do you remember? You were repeating the names of people long gone, but you were not gone, not yet, and I tried to remind you. I gave you both my hands to hold, which meant I had to crawl down onto the stiff carpet with you, let you warp my knuckles in your grip. Do you remember how we used to press our hands together, how I laughed at your short, stocky fingers ending exactly where my brittle, narrow ones did? Things I did not ask you: who I was, who you were, what would happen to us. Things you told me: Karen, Anne, James, Bricker. The names of people you had known in another life, people dead and buried, whom you wanted to save, desperately, as I wanted to save you now. I held both your hands and repeated their names back to you, one of which was your mother’s, and wondered if this—this separation from myself, watching my thumbs rhythmically stroke your knuckles while fear scaled the bones of my ribcage, clamoring up toward my mouth—was really any different from what was happening inside your head.

Things you have said after I’ve asked you my name:
3206 (your mother’s hospital room)
Dr. Bakker (your mother’s doctor)
You didn’t mean to (what you’d say after your mother threw things at you)
I’m sorry (directed at me)
I’m sorry (directed at your mother)
I’m sorry (directed at yourself)
Please don’t die (perhaps directed at me, or your mother, or one of the severed limbs you were trained to save on a Navy hospital ship, four years and 6,800 miles away)

The truth is, I do not know what it means to write down a trauma that is not my own but is so intrusive that it feels like it might be. I do not know what it would mean to forget who that ache belongs to. I want to write down what it means to live with—to love—someone who wants to give me everything, but at any moment can take away anything I’ve ever wanted, at least for an hour or two at a time, once a month or so, depending on the weather, environmental factors, various dosages. I wonder if, in this very act of recording, I am dissecting, dissociating these memories. I am making the like unlike and the unlike alike; I am seeing all at once the blue of your pills and the dusty pink of our Ohio sunrise and red of the pencils from the suicide ward in my students’ little hands—I am seeing all of these at once, and sometimes I feel so overwhelmingly present, as if everything I write only exists because I have made it so, and then sometimes I don’t see myself in it, not at all, not even a little.

Sydney Tammarine is (depending on the day) a Spanish teacher, translator, and writer currently pursuing her MFA at Hollins University. She once convinced a frozen yogurt company to run a coupon series she wrote all about yeti feet. Her work has appeared in Quiz & Quill and The Missing Slate, and her most recent book of literary translations, Diez Odas para Diez Grabados, is forthcoming in Santiago, Chile, from Taller 99.

 

 

Image credit: Malik Earnest on Unsplash

FIRST, UNCLOAK YOUR COLOREDNESS, an essay by Rachel Yang, Featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

FIRST, UNCLOAK YOUR COLOREDNESS
by  Rachel Yang
Featured on Life As Activism

Two weeks before Election Day, I took a new job at a private high school in Minneapolis. Faculty passing by in the hall poked their heads through my doorway and asked, “So, are you the New Asma?”

“Kind of,” I replied.

But, I am not the New Asma.

Asma is my friend and former colleague, a South Asian, hijabi, Muslim woman and previous occupant of my desk. Before she left this job for another, she had befriended and mentored a cohort of students—brown, black, Somali, and Muslim girls—who continue, in her absence, to hang out in my office between classes. For these girls, Asma had been—and still is—a role model, a cheerleader, and a guide to the moneyed halls of a predominantly white institution that wasn’t built for them.

On November 9, when these girls flocked to my office with panic and fear in their hearts, I listened and nodded and worried that I wasn’t doing enough. In that moment, I felt acutely that, for them, I certainly was not the New Asma.

◊

Before college, the only teacher of color I had was Ms. Morgan, a Chinese immigrant, who student-taught my ninth grade algebra class for half a semester. She spoke English with a thick accent. My white classmates complained that her verbal incompetence impeded their learning. They asked me if I could translate for her.

“She can’t even tell us apart!” They whined.

“I’m sorry!” She said one day after confusing one blond boy for another. “I have a hard time keeping everybody’s names straight. The only ones I know are Rachel Yang and Daniel Wang!”

At the back of the classroom, in my desk next to Daniel’s, I reddened as everyone swiveled in their seats to catch our reactions. They giggled at the irony: was it possible that all white people looked the same to our Asian teacher?

Embarrassed that my classmates saw similarities between me and this apparent joke of a woman, I pretended I couldn’t understand her English either—that her accent was just as much an inconvenience for me as it was for them. But at home, my dad helped me with my math homework with the same halting accent, and the same tongue-stumble as Ms. Morgan over the word “asymptote.”

Throughout high school, I distanced myself from Asian-American peers who had not only one East-Asian parent (as I did) but two. I insisted to my white peers that my family wasn’t that Chinese: we ate white people food and spoke English at home. We were average Americans living in an average Minneapolis suburb. I didn’t fuss when teachers mispronounced my Chinese surname, compromising, “Sure, you can say it with a long ‘A’ vowel. That’s easier.” If someone turned to me for help in math class, I brushed them off, “No, silly, I can’t help you with your calculus. I’m half white, remember?” When classmates made racially charged jokes, I shrugged, just to demonstrate that I did not consider myself aligned with their subjects.

As an aspiring novelist tween, I wrote stories that featured freckle-faced, auburn-haired protagonists, named Ellory or Anna Jo: girls who would never look like me or have surnames like mine; girls who represented the person I would have preferred to be, always. Growing up, I felt vividly close to whiteness. Yet, I knew that whiteness was unattainable for me, and I hated that.

In tenth grade, some friends jokingly nicknamed me “Sagwa” after a PBS cartoon, which featured a Chinese Siamese cat. Initially, I was annoyed. I had disliked the show as a child. Plus, the title character’s name is Mandarin for “blockhead.” But, I didn’t fight the nickname, maybe because I worried that my resistance would be misconstrued as race-based offense; maybe because I didn’t want to expose myself as Asian enough to be offended.

When I graduated high school, I left Sagwa behind. I didn’t think of the nickname again until last summer when Asma asked me what my Instagram username meant. Apparently, I hadn’t changed it since high school. It still read @mybffsagwa.

“That’s not okay, dude,” she said when I explained the story behind it.

Suddenly self-conscious, I scrambled to change my Instagram handle.

◊

Last summer, teaching in a middle school enrichment program, I gave a social studies lesson on midcentury white flight from American cities. A black eighth grader raised her hand and asked, “Rachel, are you white?”

I paused, surprised. Nobody had ever asked me if I was white. More often, I’m asked variations of “What’s your ethnic background?” or “Are you mixed?” or even plainly “What are you?”

Typically, I would respond, “I’m half Chinese. My dad came to the US from China as an adult. My mom is white and grew up in South Minneapolis.” This response communicates that my dad is an immigrant, that my mother is white and a local, and that I did not grow up overseas, nor was I adopted. It’s a succinct taxonomy of my otherness.

Yet, when I delivered this time-tested answer to my student, I immediately felt certain that I hadn’t said enough. Throughout the lesson, I had been saying “white residents” and “black families,” but where was I in this narrative? I’d answered as though Asian-Americans were irrelevant; as though they had nothing to do with the course I was teaching on the history of race in America. During the 1960’s and before, in the segregated American South, which drinking fountain would the chinks have used?

Nearly forgetting that I’d spent my entire adolescence denying my Chinese half, my first thought was: Of course I’m not white.

In retrospect, I could have given her a more thorough answer, “No. I’m not white. But, as a bi-racial Asian-American, I exist in a unique, in-between space in our country’s race relations. A space that positions me closer to whiteness than you, but that too represents its own history of oppression. My identity is laced with the after-effects of that flimsy American promise called “multi-culturalism”; with America’s history of Chinese exclusion and Yellow Peril; and, with threads of anti-black sentiments sewn among Asian-American communities. I am trying to figure out how to resist and rise up. I am also learning to claim my Asian-American identity with pride.”

Would this have been a better answer to her question? I don’t know.

◊

Ultimately, I will never completely escape my name or my almond-eyed appearance. To others, these qualities presume a wealth of Asian-American experiences that I haven’t had or with which I have refused to associate. Our bodies represent identities and ideologies beyond our individual selves, but my body codes differently depending on where it stands. As a child surrounded by white peers, I was invariably othered: perceived as a person of color by default. As an adult, over the past year, I’ve been asked more than once by black and Muslim peers whether I identify as a person of color. Do they ask because they know I’m half white? Or, do they ask because Asian-Americans’ proximity to whiteness—our “model minority” status—has allowed us to quietly benefit from white privilege; to distance ourselves from the Person of Color (POC) label? Unlike my hijabi and dark-skinned friends, my half white, half East-Asian body still affords me the flexibility to decide—to some extent—just how “of color” I want to be.

Now, it is clear that my previous need to assimilate may have put me at a present disadvantage in connecting with the young people I serve. I worry that I don’t know how to be a mentor to young women of color because I myself was never a mentee. Had I a woman of color as a mentor—someone who looked like me and who wore the full weight of her appearance with pride—would I now be better equipped for this role?

The day after the election, Asma’s girls came to my office exhausted, having argued all day with classmates who dismissed their fear and anger as melodramatic. Their steadfastness, their ownership of their otherness and outspokenness in its service, intimidated me. They wear identities that are not as readily shed as mine. They are strong in ways I never have been, in moments that I have never experienced. So, in response, I am trying to speak up more as a person of color. It is important that I wield my non-white identity visibly in the service of elevating other people of color, biting back against my long-held desire to be white enough.

I’m not sure what kind of role model I stand to be for Asma’s girls. But, so far, they haven’t stopped spending time in my office. These young women and I are figuring it out together.

Rachel Yang is an educator, writer, and emerging radio producer based in Minneapolis. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2016 with a degree in English Literature. Earlier this year, she co-organized the publication of a zine showcasing responses to the 2016 presidential election, online at recodinghistoryzine.com. Her new Instagram handle is @r_chel_y_ng.

 

 

 

Image credit: Tim Viola on Unsplash

PHOTOGRAPHY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Activist by Lena Popkin Featured on Life As Activism

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PHOTOGRAPHY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Activist
by Lena Popkin
Featured on Life As Activism

On Election Day, I went with my dad to the polling place, although I myself could not vote. The best I could do was push the button for Hillary. At the front of the line stood an elderly Vietnamese-American woman with a ballot in her hand. Although her English was limited, she tried to get information and assistance from the poll workers. My dad and I, as well as the rest of the voters in line, watched her many attempts to communicate with poll workers, the people whose job it was to help her. At one point, the male volunteer  with whom she had been speaking raised his voice the way Americans often do with non-native English speakers, as if that would help her understand. Unsure what, if anything, we could do, I asked, mostly speculatively, if she had the right to a translator. One of the election judges overheard me and answered, “I think that would be a waste of time, honey.” In that same moment, the male volunteer forced the woman to decide for herself, “button one or two!” Literally silenced, and helpless, the woman went inside the booth.

The day after the election, I went to school wearing no makeup—something I rarely do—and mourned in the company of my friends: a group of universally liberal, diverse, urban public high school students. Like the elderly lady at the polls, I now felt silenced and also—to an extent—violated. Only, in this case, my oppressor was the newly elected POTUS, Donald J Trump: sexual predator.

In near quiet, during class, my friends and I scrolled through Twitter, the silence broken only by someone sniffling or choking back tears. Teachers who tried to resume regularly scheduled classes were met with loud objections, and more tears.

A few days later, a friend showed me a Facebook event page advertising a candlelight vigil to be held in honor of women’s rights. She suggested we attend. I readily agreed, eager for an opportunity to be in the company of others who also longed for organized action. After school we bought paint and poster board, which we cut into two foot squares, and made signs that attempted to express our rising angst and frustration. On our way out the door and into the streets, I instinctively grabbed my camera.

The plaza at Philadelphia’s City Hall was jammed with people, many in their twenties. They touted signs scrawled with sharpie and held small candles with delicate flames. My friend and I joined the protest hesitantly at first, not sure how loudly we were supposed to yell, if at all. But, the longer we spent in the crowd, the more comfortable we became. We could no longer hear ourselves individually, but rather could feel the collective voice of the thousands of people marching together. Chants of “Not my President” and “Whose streets? Our streets,” flowed with mournful but angry intensity. Our voices echoed clearly against the downtown skyscrapers.

Camera in hand, I was drawn instantly to the signs: the handmade and the printed, the generic slogans, the personal reflections. Also to the quotes, the song lyrics, and the precisely executed drawings. Amid the commotion and in between captured moments, I realized that the camera isolated me from the rest of the protestors. It marked me as someone for whom they should pose. As a photographer, I became both activist and observer. The distance I gained from the lens allowed me to stand back and process the emotions of the protest, almost from an outside point of view, while still feeling completely immersed in the activeness of protesting.

When I got home that night, I plugged my camera into my laptop and discovered that the images I had shot—without any clear intention—had captured the heartbreaking intensity of the crowd. My photos—reminiscent of the images of the 1963 March on Washington that I had recently studied—made me feel as though I had done something valuable in documenting the first breaths of resistance, and as if they might give me a voice. After posting the photographs on social media, I was surprised to discover that they served as balm for many now politically-disillusioned viewers. They felt reassured that young people, in particular, would fight back.

Protests became a necessary part of life for myself, as well as other Philadelphians after the vigil for Women’s rights. Haphazard gatherings organized by groups like the Philly Socialist Alternative, Philly We Rise, and ResistTrump! began popping up more frequently around the city. Marches followed various routes, ending mostly in front of Independence Hall, the birthplace of our democracy; a place that felt symbolically and literally threatened by the incoming administration. These intermittent protests, held weeks before the inauguration, gave people something to do in a moment when no one knew quite what to do with themselves. It was real action as opposed to posted aggression: shared, liked, and tagged on Facebook or Twitter.

During this period, I began an academic research project on the 1920s fine art photographer Tina Modotti, whose earthy, honest, still life and portrait compositions gained her status among Mexican modernists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. As a young woman in her early twenties, Modotti took a chance and went to Mexico with photographer Edward Weston to join in and document the Mexican revolution. She applied her skills as a photographer for a the Communist newspaper, El Machete. Modotti put art at the service of social justice, using the classical composition skills she had learned from Weston to create compelling images of Mexican injustice. Studying her decision to pursue these inherently social subjects fueled my desire to grow as a photographer and to elevate my images into works of activism. The more I learned about the past of revolutionary photography, the more I felt myself wanting to contribute to its present and future.

Despite my active participation in the local protest movement, at school, I found that I had trouble defending myself to those questioning my motivations, especially leading up to the Women’s March on Washington.

Their questions and comments were varied but all ended with the same conclusion: my efforts were a waste of time.

“What are you even protesting anyway?”

“What’s the point? It’s not gonna change anything”

“That’s such a waste of your time.”

“You’re angry for no reason, he hasn’t even done anything yet!”

I would barely stutter an answer. How do you defend something when, no matter how strongly you believe in it, others will disagree just as strongly? How do you defend something in this new alt-world where facts have so little meaning?

These questions were on my mind when I boarded a train bound for Washington, D.C. at four am on January 21st, 2017. Now an experienced protestor—at least I felt experienced—I knew the etiquette, the signs, the chants. I knew to bring water and an extra camera battery and a phone charger, as well as to put the ACLU know your rights pamphlet in my back pocket. The Women’s March on Washington, so different from the first protest I had been to over two months prior in Philadelphia, seemed to provide me with some of the answers to these questions.

When we arrived, just after seven, the sky was gray, threatening rain and hovering between comfortable and cold. Washington swarmed with women in pink knit hats and handmade signs. The slogans on the signs varied, reading things like:

“White Silence is White Violence”

“Misogyny is so 1776”

“Mexican, Native American, angry, feminist bitch↓”

“Come on, Man”

“Dear Trump Supporter, you lost too, it just hasn’t hit you yet”

I observed how far the signs had come since November. While the first signs at the initial vigil had mostly to do with sexual assault and outrage at the election (e.g. “Not my President,” “Pussies Grab Back, Mr. President,” etc…), the signs at the Women’s March on Washington were often humorous, specific, and full of anger (e.g. “There are more people here today than there were yesterday. Just sayin’,” “Tampons against Douchebags,” and “Not Mein Fuhrer”). The specific slogans seemed to have universal resonance.

My shutter clicked as I tried to capture the magnitude of the event while continuing to focus on participants. There were families, individuals, hipsters, moms, babies, students, and senior citizens: people from all walks of life and backgrounds. It was difficult to capture everyone and everything. Some marchers gave me weird looks or posed in a way that was too obvious to create a natural photograph. Many were moving too quickly, or not moving at all. The overcast sky had a tendency to appear either too bright or too dark. Nevertheless, I continued framing photographs all day, running through a battery and a half, and almost filling my memory card. Despite the dense  crowd, I found myself turning to capture the people behind me; squatting to feel the overwhelming presence of the signs held proudly in the air; climbing onto unstable guardrails and into tree planters; and, holding my camera as high above my head, so that I might see where the marchers stopped. There was no visible end to the marchers: only a river of loud, determined, heartbroken pink hats and defiant signs. I felt as though I had an obligation to continue to documenting the moment.

The relationship between art and activism has often been a tense one. Many art critics have suggested that political art is too focused on political ends to be considered fine art, but then too aesthetic-minded to be considered activism. Critics suggest the photographer ought to focus on creating work that can be used for journalistic or pedantic purposes—or to focus on work that can be considered art, since you’re unlikely to achieve both.

But, I disagree. To me, politics and art are inseparable. As a photographer, I have found a place in which one does not exist without the other. As I continue documenting these protests, my hopes are that I capture each individual’s sense of presence and humanity in a time that has become difficult to feel heard and valued. I also hope to reflect the impact of voices raised out of both fury and need for action. As I chant and sing and march, I am a protestor, I am an activist, and I am angry. As I shoot my camera at the stream of people marching by. As I eagerly snap photos of women and men emanating emotion, I am an artist.

Lena Popkin is a junior at Philadelphia’s Central High School. She is a news editor of the Centralizer newspaper and a Cleaver Emerging Artist. Her poem “Pinto Los Flores Para Que No Mueren” appears in Issue No. 10 and her photographs appear in “The Body Politic”, an essay by Nathaniel Popkin featured on Life As Activism on November 22, 2016.

THE DAY AMERICA DIED, AGAIN… by Joel L. Daniels Featured on Life As Activism

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THE DAY AMERICA DIED, AGAIN…
by Joel L. Daniels
Featured on Life As Activism

shhh…

this is not an essay. no, this is not that. not a poem. not a bomb. not hydrogen. this is not blackface. not a pledge to a new allegiance. there will be no cotton picking. there are signs—a cross stump stuck in a lawn, a flag burning. there may be a march, some spring uprising to coincide with fall palettes and patterns, of bodies being flung to concretes, red pastels overshadowing the grainy elements of white hoods floating in the background.

12:58 a.m.

today could be titled the day the niggas came, but that sounds too glorious, too tied up, too bound, too tight. we are revolution in a Canon, redemption in hurricane, martyrs in a durag. revolution has chapters, too.

4:45 a.m.

the day America died again my daughter slept calm, a cough here and there but no riot in her, not like her father. he had a carousel of Watts tumbling in ribs. a parade at the burial grounds, what i imagined, feet swelling from the sweet shit circumventing the convos — “deport illegals you do not own your body more jails please”.

8:19 a.m.

pieces be unto you, America. the day you died again it was breakfast — over easy eggs, watered down OJ. hah, i remember him in those Hertz commercials. hurts, don’t it? the hearse outside smelling like 3 strikes, feeling like the Central Park Five, like all colored boys look the same in a line-up.

11:22 a.m.

some will take the anger and wear it around their neck, bandana waving, weave it into a basket or bash it down into bits for breaking atoms and spirits. yes wear us down, wear it now like those rosaries the mamì’s clutch when the diablo comes, grabbing pussy or whatever. we out here catching the debris of the lost ones peddling protest, pagans packing God in a suitcase and floating the pieces upstream.

12:04 p.m.

i heard they want us to drown. there is a sound underneath the gurgling of spirit tongue tapping the world of the drum. the word could be machine gun or filibuster, climate change or NRA. words are weapons; wounds are the way we tally progress. how much it gonna cost to vacate your rights? your baby ain’t yours until we decide it is. sincerely yours, patriarchy.

2:43 p.m.

there are several layers to death, lengthy, longing for a reprise. digging dirt for suitors. the soot and soil that tumbles over the weeds and cobblestone paved history of us, the way we lynch ourselves dry, until the bone peaks from under the skin, breaking down the roots, scaling the walls around Mexico, the waters of the transatlantic, the covert of the Bay of Pigs.

4:20 p.m.

there is no armistice here, arms legs, gone in circles, we go in to surfaces, sucking on wind, demanding acres as reparations, broken records for rhetoric.

5:55 p.m.

i have died three times already and come back a pilgrim, a Malcolm, a bishop. resurrected as rook, a King. i died and came back as nigger, catching holy wars and pitchforks for the oppressors. playing chess or die nigger die, the games we play when we run out of stories to climb.

7:09 p.m.

my friend emailed me because she needed something to hold on to. i wanted to pass her a lifeline. an okay, a be alright, a God bless, an amen. there are holes in this faith, though. they run parallel to freedom, pathways to pistols in schools and confederate flags flung inside the windows of churches. murder, a religion.

7:46 p.m.

the condos in hell are nicer than the ones my momma thought she wanted. she be playing the numbers but America is dead again, mama. you gotta read in between the lines of the amendments that men made to mend the ways we look at law, at loss, like the structure was stiff and the way the system setup whites had to build a house to put the slaves in. minute details, i suppose. the hours here don’t match anymore.

11:59 p.m.

when the dead die i will tell them after life we are not in the business of busying ourselves by selling dreams, shelling out great America fables. kitchen table got Polaroids of Tookie, posters of Bunchy. they will assassinate your character, then you. rather yours than theirs. ashes, ashes. ashé. RIP.

Joel L. Daniels is a father, writer and story-teller, born and raised in the Bronx. He was the recipient of the Bronx Council of the Arts BRIO Award for poetry, and his work has been featured in the Columbia Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN Money, The Towner, Fatherly, Thought Catalog, Phila Print, The Smoking Section, Blavity, Huffington Post, BBC Radio, RCRD LBL, URB, BRM, AllHipHop, The Source, RESPECT, and HipHopDX. He’s spoken/performed at the Apollo Theater, Joe’s Pub, Rockwood Music Hall, Columbia University, Lehman College, City Tech, The National Black Theater, NYU, Webster Hall, Pianos, and Brooklyn Bowl.

WELCOME HOME by Michael Fischer

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Person walking up a flight of stairs, viewed through a small circle lense

WELCOME HOME
by Michael Fischer

For twenty-three years you’re free. Then you go to prison.

You arrive in an orange jail jumpsuit, thin and see-through as a dryer sheet. You sit in a cage until a correctional officer calls you out. State your full name. Any aliases? How tall are you? Yeah you wish, how tall are you really? How much you weigh? Hair color? Eyes? Any scars? Any tattoos? Where? Of what? What size shoe you wear? Pants? Shirt? Get back in the cage.

When you’re called out again it’s to have your head shaved. You walk into a cubicle and sit on a beat up metal stool while an inmate shears you with barbershop clippers. You’re told it’s to prevent lice, but you know it’s just another step in taking away your identity, your individuality, your sense of self.

You wait in line with the other new arrivals for the shower. You’re handed a set of prison-issue clothes in approximately your size and a bar of tiny motel soap. You think about the old “don’t drop the soap” joke. You can’t help it.

Out of the shower, you put on your new clothes. Your orange jumpsuit has been taken away to be burned. There is no longer a single thing touching your body that came before these walls. You’ve been here all of twenty minutes and everything about your real life has been scrubbed away. They’d scrub off your birthmark if it was in the budget.

You’re assigned an ID number and told to memorize it immediately. From now on it is more important than your name. You go back to the holding cell full of all the other new guys. Everyone’s head shaved; everyone dressed identically. You joke with each other, try to keep the mood light. It looks good, hell you were losing your hair anyway, you’re better off. You’re all going to be here for a good long while.  

Time passes. Your only sister gets engaged, says she wants to wait until you get out to have the wedding, but it’s too long to wait and you feel bad and tell her to do it without you, that her starting her new life is more important than you being there to see it. You miss the wedding.

Your aunt dies of pancreatic cancer, your grandmother of old age. Both times your dad breaks the news in the visiting room and you spend the rest of those five-hour visits crying into your hands, trying not to disturb other people’s time with their loved ones, their checkers games played on frayed squares of cardboard. The visiting room guards give your dad weird looks. What’s wrong with him? Your dad is too choked up to answer. He just shakes his head.

Your friends move, start careers, get married, graduate from law school. Some of them write to you but most of them don’t. You want to be angry about this but can hardly blame them. You settle for just feeling depressed and alone, which seems like the reasonable middle ground. A few friends get landlines so you can talk to them on the phone. It’s on these calls that you realize you have increasingly less to say to anyone: no exciting news or updates to give, no energy for the witty banter. You realize you don’t have much in common with the people on the other end, and you worry they will realize this too. The calls taper off.

You’re woken up for count at five o’clock every morning. You’re woken up for urine tests. You’re woken up for property searches. You’re woken up because the guards think it’s funny. You aren’t sleeping that well to begin with, given the metal slab covered with a two-inch pad that acts as your bed. Strange, you think, to never do anything yet still be tired all the time.

You lose touch with reality. Your mind closes in on itself. It races, triggers panic attacks in the hours after dark. You dream that Taylor Swift is in your cell with you. She has a cold and asks for medicine. You tell her you’re sorry, you don’t have any—the stuff that actually works isn’t even allowed in here. For several days, you are fixated on this dream. You don’t understand. You don’t even like her music. You worry you’re losing your mind.

You’re moved to a different prison, then moved again. You bloat your stomach like a horse being saddled when the guards shackle you up. That way the chain around your waist isn’t too tight when you eat the bologna sandwich thrown at you on the transit bus.

You watch people get beaten. You watch people get stabbed. You watch people lose hope. This is the scariest to watch, by far.

You’re released. You get out. This is the hard part. This is the transition you’re not sure you can make. You sublet an apartment from someone who doesn’t bother to run a background check. You’re grateful for this because no one else will rent to you. You call a few friends, but it’s been too long. No one knows what to say anymore. Your friendship has become a burden, a chore, a charity undertaking.

You apply for jobs. You don’t get them. Eventually you find one, just enough to get by on. They don’t ask, so you don’t say. You were at the top of your class in college, grad school scholarships to choose from. Now you’re in your twenties making eleven dollars an hour, and you feel lucky to have that. Because you are lucky. Still breathing. Free.

People tell you about Breaking Bad, about Game of Thrones. They tell you about Spotify and Snapchat and the Boston Marathon bombing and everything else you missed. You make an attempt to get caught up but it overwhelms you. You decide you’re too far behind to bother. You don’t watch the shows, don’t download the apps, know nothing about the big news events from those years. You’re happier for it.

You go to the grocery store and are overwhelmed by the selection. You look in your closet and feel embarrassed by the waste. You can’t believe there was ever a time when you thought these things would make you feel better, would fill the hole where your self-esteem should be. Years spent with two pairs of green pants, three white undershirts, two green button-ups, one pair of boots burned that out of you. You fill trash bags to donate.

Your niece is born. You love her and do your best to help with her. You pray she won’t grow up thinking you’re a loser. You watch your parents get older and worry that they already do. There was a time when they were proud of you. Now they defend you to their neighbors, their friends, perhaps hoping you might still find your way through the dark.

You become a Buddhist. You become vegan. You become active. You work. You write—sometimes in the second person. You think it would be fun to volunteer with animals, to generate some positive energy in your life, but the places you apply won’t accept felons. When you lock eyes with a stranger on the street, you smile.

You keep shaving your head because you’re used to it now. You’re sleeping better. You dream about the past, about people and things you no longer have in your life. You dream about Taylor Swift again. She laughs at you, acts like she’s never seen you before. You shrug. The dream doesn’t stick with you.

It’s not that you aren’t grateful, because you are. You’ve finally learned the bumper stickers are right: that every day truly is a blessing, that nothing is promised. But you’re in mourning, confused, lost. You just got out last year so you try to be patient, tell yourself it will come in time. For now you recognize nothing, least of all yourself.

You don’t want to be here anymore; you still want what you’ve always wanted. You just want to go home.

Headshot of Michael FischerMichael Fischer was released from state prison in 2015 and is currently earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College. He is an editor of the school’s literary journal, Sierra Nevada Review, and a Moth Chicago StorySlam winner. His work is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Hippocampus, Vagabond City, and the 2016 TulipTree Review anthology. Michael is a Cleaver Emerging Artist. 

Image credit: Thomas Leuthard on Flickr

THE GRAVITY OF JOY by Charles Green

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the-gravity-of-joy

THE GRAVITY OF JOY
by Charles Green

Recently, I ruined someone’s moment of mundane joy. The hallways of my campus building were bare—students were taking exams, or locked away in the library and various study nooks they’d marked as their territory, or sprawled on the campus greens. The end of the semester was nigh; my step had a lilt.

As I walked down the hall, a faculty member from another department—I know him by sight but not by name—exited the men’s room, tossed his black umbrella in the air, and caught it with a jaunty swing of his arm. Then we saw each other, and his fluid movement calcified into the gait of a person too conscious of his awkward stride. He glanced away, then back at me, and finally fixed his eyes on some pretend middle distance until we passed one another.

I wanted to tell him I understood. I know that small, unprofound pleasure of tossing objects into the air and catching them: umbrellas, pens, my water bottle. When I’m cooking and I need a spatula, I’ll pull it from the cylinder and toss it into the air, then catch it and step to the stove. Ease extends through the arm, and gravity becomes a toy. I move without being watched.

Of course, I couldn’t say a word to him. How do you face a stranger and say, “Yes, what a pleasure to toss and catch your umbrella”?

Maybe I could have asked him if he’d seen Singin’ in the Rain. I dislike musicals as a category, but I love Gene Kelly’s 1952 film version. The performers embody manic activity at its highest pitch. Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” is one of cinema’s great one-man scenic performances, and, in the title song, Kelly incarnates thoughtless physical joy. After he drops off Debbie Reynolds at her door after a date, he dances with boyish bliss in the rain. Throughout the song, his character, Don Lockwood, is utterly unselfconscious, smiling at strangers as if they’re figures of his own imagining, treating his umbrella as a partner. He’s soaked, he’s joyous, he’s free from all propriety—until he’s stomping puddles in the street and a police officer walks up. The social norm of the law brings his mind back to watching eyes. Lockwood steps back onto the sidewalk, shakes his legs as if to dry them, and walks off into the end of the number, handing his umbrella to a soaked stranger as a gesture of his citizenship.

Of course, that unselfconscious joy is rehearsed; he’s not Don Lockwood but Gene Kelly, knowing innumerable eyes will watch him move, and yet his body still achieves a freedom. Kelly has practiced those moves and sloughed off the inelegance that comes with being watched. The mind has ceded authority to muscle memory.

But even Gene Kelly resisted being Gene Kelly. When he was eight, his mother enrolled him and his brother in dance class, but they quit because they were bullied. He only restarted dance classes at fifteen, when he was athletic enough to defend himself. In college, he studied economics; he even began law school. When he filmed the famous scene in the rain, the water shrank his wool suit, and he had a fever of 103 degrees.

Our routes to grace are never straightforward.

In tenth grade, I had to learn to juggle. I took a mime class—yes, mime, at a public Arts Magnet—and Arkansas Power & Light hired us to entertain them at a conference. (I assume we were cheap.) At a downtown Little Rock hotel, we juggled and mimed for bored professionals frequenting the bar. By that night, I could toss a ball behind my back without dropping maybe three times out of ten, so all I really remember beyond dropping my juggling balls is one specific moment: a woman hustling away from a drunken coworker who kept trying to hand her a key to his hotel room, as graceless as Gene Kelly was graceful.

Over time, I learned to juggle well enough, because juggling three balls is actually easy once you remove the invisible fourth ball: your own fear of dropping. I haven’t juggled in several years, though. I haven’t had an occasion. I turned thirty-seven recently—not that old, but roughly middle-aged, and the birthday coincided with a back injury, weight gain, and the late removal of two wisdom teeth. My back went out as I was reaching to put away a stack of clean plates, so midlife feels like a diagnosis. With that injury came a growth, a small, hard mound that feels like a pebble. When the doctor touched it, he said, “Oh, you have a back mouse!” The back mouse—yes, that is a colloquial term doctors use for it—is an episacral lipoma, a herniation that has filled with fatty tissue. That has meant countless times reaching around to feel if it’s still there or if it has changed, so I embody the pose of old age.

I worry my last days of unadulterated joy—thoughtless, in-the-moment joy—are behind me. I know that’s not true, but knowing and feeling are an awkward, estranged pair of siblings. I used to be able to slip gravity briefly, a flame flickering at the top of hot wax, but now I’m starting to feel like the burnt wick of a nubby candle.

Yes, that’s melodrama. But the back mouse, skin tags, widow’s peaks, white hairs, moles sprawling like maps of white flight: they add up. I see and feel them, and I build a straw nostalgia for what were largely unhappy days. In high school, for some reason I no longer know—I wanted attention? I liked to perform?—I did one hundred bell kicks in a row for a dollar. I never took dance, but I’d discovered the bell kick, that joyous mid-air heel click. I was already six-foot-four, and I knew watching the incongruity of a gangly white dude doing bell kicks was its own kind of pleasure. So, before first-period trigonometry, where I was the only senior in a class of juniors, where I had no friends, I asked if anyone would pony up for a show. Joe, who at sixteen had a full beard and never got carded, pulled out a single. When forced to dance for some reason, I wore the straitjacket of everyone’s imagined eyes on me. But I did the bell kicks, got my dollar, and sweated through the start of trig.

In those days, when friends talked about what they hoped to do in life, I joked that I would die at the age of thirty-seven. I don’t believe in magic or superstition, but my high-school joke has me spooked now that I’ve reached that age. In the days before my wisdom-teeth removal this year, I feared I’d die on the operating table. When my back went out and I had to start physical therapy, I feared my youth was at an end. From here on out, just maintenance. No more grace.

I’m indulging in this melodrama for a reason: I want to send a message to some future self of mine. Whether he’s forty or fifty or eighty, I want him to laugh at my melodrama and to reckon with it. More importantly, I want to tell him something: thirty-seven feels like a turning point. Not just into the melodrama of midlife, but into a closing. Aging isn’t just the body conceding to gravity; as life moves forward, we pull ourselves into the past. I see this conservatism of so many white men in midlife—not just in politics, but in life as well. The few things we know calcify, and we see those calcifications as wisdom. We mistake the gravity that leashes us for another kind of gravity—gravitas. Straw nostalgia hardens into a philosophy. The way things were becomes the way things should be; we reimagine the rusted age—the anxiety, the segregation, the violence—as the golden age. The past becomes a superstition.

It’s easier to rehearse prayers than to believe them. But rehearsing can bring a faith. I’m not a religious or faithful person, but I know that wallowing in the melodrama of aging adds a pull to the grave. It’s that fourth ball, the fear of dropping. I don’t think I can escape that fear, so I’m going to keep rehearsing my secular prayer until it’s true. To my future self—and to my present self as well—flicker against the gravitational pull of the false past. Stay in the gravity of the present. Become the Gene Kelly of tossing any object into the air until you’re no longer yourself, or Gene Kelly, or even Don Lockwood: you’re nothing but kinesis, gravity and its release, all in the same moment.

charles-greenCharles Green’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction International, The Southeast Review, and the New England Review, among other venues. He lives in Cortland, New York, with his wife and cats, and he teaches writing at Cornell University.

Image credit: Thomas Leuthard on Unsplash

TINY’S HEART by Sam Brighton

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

tinys-heart

TINY’S HEART
by Sam Brighton

For weeks the slush had been drying off the sidewalks, leaving trails of salty white mist, and still I hadn’t seen Tiny—not since Christmas when he tried to kiss me and said he’d teach me to cut white people hair. During warmer months, Tiny hustled past the social services building most mornings around nine. “There he goes,” somebody would say. We would stop tapping on our keyboards, lean a chair beyond the cubicle wall, and stretch the coiled phone cord to watch him go. Tiny was somewhere in his nineties and barely taller than the corner mailbox. He zipped by, en route to his barbershop, his gait just as steady as any of ours. Most people on my caseload were shut inside their houses forevermore and inched around their kitchens one step at a time. Tiny was my only employed client, although I wasn’t sure how officially employed—I didn’t ask, I didn’t want to know. He always wore a fedora, a necktie cinched tight into his collar, a long cardigan draped off his hunched bony shoulders. Tiny was always impeccably groomed and appropriately dressed for the weather, engaged daily in cardiovascular activity. I nearly finished my functional assessment just watching him haul ass.

Sometimes Tiny veered across the street toward our doors and tapped on the glass, waving at the receptionist until she put down her book and walked over to push open the door, even though she had already buzzed him in. “Misses,” he would shout, “I’d like to see my caseworker please,” holding his fedora in his hands, his smile wide and toothy, the bite of ancient cologne permeating the air. Our agency was a wide teal-carpeted room with tall white walls. The desks were squished together inside cubicles, but the arrangement did nothing to muffle the racket of two people politely yelling at each other about the overdue energy bill that couldn’t be paid. Protective services squeezed into one corner, the public guardians into another, and case management huddled throughout the rest of the building. Together we all watched over the older citizens of Pittsburgh.

Whenever Tiny dropped in for an unscheduled visit, which irritated me to no end, making me late for meetings at some senior housing high-rise across town, we stood in the lobby shouting back and forth. “Bring me the letter so I can take a look,” I would quietly holler. “Let’s call and ask.” Everyone knew Tiny, and everyone knew he was mine. “Oh, your little fella came in this morning,” someone would say in the break room.

◊

Most people who lived in Pittsburgh were born there, and when I told people I had moved there from across the country, uniformly they raised an eyebrow raise and said, “Why would you move here?” The culture, the history, the adorable row houses, I might have said, although really, to leave my alcoholism behind in the desert furnished a tangible sense of moving on.

Once I learned Pittsburgh’s resources and systems, I worked the shit out of that case management job. Biannually my manager marked me a point short of a perfect score during employee reviews—because she never gave out perfect scores, she said. My home visits were completed early, my documentation thorough. My billing far surpassed the monthly goal. I let interns follow me around. My job was my amends to the universe, it was how I lived with myself. I owed the public a thousand times for each and every drunken foul and fuck-up.

Right after I quit drinking, a combination of newfound commitment to self-care, state-imposed restrictions, and insurance policies suspicious of alcoholics endowed me with a vacation from social services. “I need a break from humans,” I would say when collating papers with the other temps in the air-conditioning while the cacti endured the sunlight outside the windows. Spreadsheets and adding machines were plenty to manage then.

Sobriety introduced all kinds of sharp and shiny feelings, though, and there was only so much data entry I could tolerate while refraining from eye-rolling and open insubordination. Clocking in even a minute late three times within twelve months was grounds for dismissal, and two firings in a row would look terrible on a resumé. Meanwhile, children across the city were chronically starved or forced by Mom’s boyfriend into horrible sex acts, and endured things more horrendous than most could imagine. I just couldn’t find the greater meaning in entering addresses into a spreadsheet for money solicitation purposes. After stringing together fourteen consecutive months without drinking, I sold my furniture and left Arizona.
Case managing older adults in Pittsburgh rather than abused children in Phoenix better suited my sensibilities anyway. Plus, an astonishing amount of work could be accomplished when well-rested. But I missed the fifty sober queers I had left behind in Arizona. In all the history of my life, I finally found somewhere to belong. Then I left them all.

◊

Tiny lived in a wooden box on the edge of a hill. His house matched the others stacked together across the rolling hills and pewter valleys. Pittsburgh skies were overcast most days, and the neighborhoods reflected a resident slick wet gray. White paint flaked off Tiny’s siding, and the front stoop leaned hard, lopsided, under the front door, where a screen flapped in the wind. Fluorescent green moss streaked the shingles and gutters dangled overhead. Someone had tagged the side of his house with nonsensical letters. Strand board had been nailed over a window. Deer vanished into crowded trees across the street as car tires grumbled over the road, plaid with bricks and potholes that rocked cars like boats. That hill was a bitch to climb whenever it snowed. It seemed, as Tiny said, that the city plowed the black neighborhoods last. When our agency dispatched us to deliver survival kits of high-sodium foods and batteries and blankets to our most at-risk folks, the roads near our office had been cleared long before Tiny’s hills.

Tiny had paid off his house in the seventies, before I was even born, but he owed a decade’s worth of property taxes and so was ineligible for county-funded home repair. The county offered no concession, not even after someone broke into Tiny’s house and carried his copper pipes away into the night while he snored peacefully in bed.

“Can’t we tell the county it’s an emergency?” I said, sitting in my manager’s office. “The man has no indoor plumbing in a house that’s otherwise good enough.”

“First see if he’s sitting on any assets, cash stuffed into a mattress, you know the drill.”

“How could someone steal his pipes?” I said, “He’s a little old man.”

She sighed. “Sounds like someone was really desperate,” my manager said, “I’m sure nobody wants to steal copper plumbing to get whatever it is they need.”

I wanted her to be mad with me, and here she was humanizing Tiny’s pipe thief. Heat spilled over me in her office, something like shame—it felt familiar. I remembered despair, dark and cloudy and toxic, smoldering inside my guts, gritty in my fingernails and exhaled through my breath, how I had once evolved into something inhuman. Maybe in my alcoholism I didn’t find myself stealing an old man’s copper pipes, maybe because I was lucky enough to find a way out first.

I reported this epiphany to my AA group during my turn to speak, that maybe I’m not terribly different from the pipe thief, that maybe what I feel is survivor’s guilt. The meeting that night was populated mostly by the young women from the halfway house down the street. When I looked up at their faces after speaking, most of the participants stared at the floor chewing gum or picked at scabs on their arm. I was glad I said it anyway.

◊

For Christmas we selected ten of our loneliest seniors from our caseloads and wrote wish lists, no durable medical equipment allowed. Do-gooders in the community picked cardboard ornaments off a Christmas tree containing vague demographics with gift suggestions and then bought presents. Our agency let us wear jeans on gift-delivery days, Santa hats and Steelers gear encouraged, and we crowded into each other’s cars to distribute gifts. I didn’t say much, but we laughed because my coworkers were funny. We sprinkled salty sand up slick porches and handed over wrapped packages containing hideous floral potholders or Steelers beach towels. A sort of tinkling danced in my stomach, and maybe that feeling was called delight.

For Tiny, I asked for wool socks and warm gloves. He rode the bus during snowy months, but I worried about him, wading down his hill through the snow. I watched for him whenever I drove around town, marching his ass across the city—as Tiny said—to cut hair because Social Security paid out jack shit.

Tiny’s gifts weren’t delivered on time—whoever delivered them didn’t read my note to just find him down at his barbershop. I delivered his gift myself mid-January.

“Whooee!” he said, wrapping his new scarf around his neck, “I thank you very much Misses, what a beauty.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Someone from the community bought you the gifts. I’m just delivering them.”

We stood in his barbershop, and the neon orange coils of his space heaters baked our legs. Tiny’s barbershop was four pale yellow walls on the top floor of an old brick building with creaky steps sure to buckle under my weight. Bass thumping from passing cars rattled his windows and the square mirror leaning against the wall. A black barber chair with gold foam puffing out on the corners squatted before the mirror.

It had taken me a while to find his barbershop—his shop unlisted in the phone book, not even a sign on the building. I got the address from his physician, “my main man,” as Tiny called him.

Tiny’s barbershop was in an old African American neighborhood, and by old I mean the free blacks lived there in the 1800s, during the era of slavery. When Tiny was a kid in the twenties, the area syncopated and grooved with jazz culture. Come the fifties, social forces displaced hundreds of businesses and thousands of residents, leaving poverty and drug crimes and structural decay in its wake. Trash littered yards, and weeds grew from the cracks of sidewalks. Buildings with busted out windows perished in rows. Along Tiny’s block, older women sat on the bus bench, and men leaned against buildings and parked cars. I felt self-conscious and white, like an invader of space and community. White social workers haven’t necessarily been the good guys throughout history. Sometimes the old men barked at the kids to clear a path on the sidewalk and let me, the white lady, through, and I was never sure how to respond—this white lady could step into the road to pass just as easily but wanted to acknowledge and accept their chivalry.

Tiny, with his scarf draped around his neck, stepped toward me and swooped his face toward mine, lips puckered. As I ducked away, I nearly tipped over backward.

“Whoa whoa stop,” I said. “Please step back.”

“Ah baby, why not?” he said, “I thought maybe you and me could, you know, hang out.” He straightened his frizzy mustard-colored cardigan and winked.

I explained the ethics of appropriate professional relationships—I didn’t even mention our sixty-year age difference, nor that I’m a lesbian. The first time Tiny and I met, we stood in his driveway and Tiny kept calling me “Young Man”—I assume he didn’t catch my name, which at the time was “Heather.” The supervisor training me watched me talk to him, and I was unsure whether to correct him or just roll with it.

“I apologize if me giving you the scarf was confusing,” I said. “It’s a gift from an anonymous family.”

I offered to set him up with a senior companion if he needed company—which wasn’t a dating service, but rather a group of seniors who were paid a small sum to hang out with folks.
The companion service appealed to me—not the friend-for-hire part, but beating hearts filling empty chairs, empty space left behind by some loved someone.

“Oh no, I don’t need that crap,” he said. “Last thing I need is some old person complaining about they sugars.”

“Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Hey, you too, baby,” he said as he flung the end of the scarf over his shoulder. “Come back soon. I’ll teach you how to cut white people hair.”

◊

By April the snow had melted, and the muck had receded. Birds chirped, little green buds unfolded on trees. Still I hadn’t seen Tiny since the attempted kiss. Knowing he was hard-of-hearing, I pounded on his front door longer and louder each week. His curtains were pinched shut. He hadn’t been at his shop, either, whenever I dropped in. His emergency contacts—three of his customers— hadn’t returned my calls. Tiny’s main man, his physician, hadn’t heard from him in years, but Tiny didn’t need pills and hadn’t been sick since the eighties.

In May, the city left a notice on Tiny’s front door, imploring him to do something about the thicket of weeds. When my car hobbled up the brick hill the next morning, the notice was still tacked to his door. My stomach felt punched. Maybe this was worry, or it was dread. The notice flapped in the wind along with the screen all week.

The risk in asking the cops to kick open his door for a welfare check was that, regardless of whether your client turned out to be alive or dead, the busted-up door was now your problem.

“Try calling the morgues,” my manager said. “See if he’s there before you break down his door.”

“That sounds awful.” I wanted to bury my face and cry at her desk, but I thought about kittens so that I wouldn’t. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and I usually weep whenever I’m tired.

 

Tiny was a pain in my ass, showing up whenever he pleased, loud-talking in the lobby, asking me to call the water company. Maybe this urge to cry was called sadness, and maybe it’s human to feel sad when people might be dead.

I’d never called a morgue before. I had been monitoring the obituaries online, typing in his name. Usually every month or two, someone on my caseload turned up dead. Sometimes we found the obituary or a family member called us to cancel the cleaning girl. I stored sympathy cards for bereft families in my desk, and wrote little notes about the departed.

None of the morgues had seen anybody by that name. One suggested I try the county medical examiner.

“Ah yes,” said the detective after I gave Tiny’s real name and birthday. “We have his body, haven’t been able to track down next of kin. You all have any names?”

My chest felt heavy and empty. Grief. Maybe heartbreak.
He was found in the street, said the detective, cause of death something about his heart, maybe, I’m fairly certain, but I couldn’t listen, couldn’t grab onto his words to store them and review later. I gave the name of the ex-wife, the numbers for the three customers listed as emergency contacts. I didn’t know of assets that might pay for cremation. He had cashed in his life insurance policies to replace his pipes.

◊

A man lived on the earth for ninety-some years, leaving behind the case managers who once stopped what they were doing to watch him zip down the sidewalk. Maybe the old men and the kids clogging the sidewalks honored him in some way without notifying the newspapers. I called Tiny’s main man, the physician, to relay the news. The receptionist thanked me. She would close his file.

Slipping off the earth without funereal fanfare seemed tragic for a whole human life. There was nowhere to send flowers, no bereft to receive my sympathy card with some bullshit sunset on the cover. I waited to close his file until my manager invited me to do so. (Tiny was inflating my caseload number.) I finished the paperwork, canceled his case management service in the computer system. His file would be reviewed by the quality assurance team. Then his papers pulled from the folder and shredded. A white label would be peeled off and then slapped over his name. A new name would be written on the white label with a marker. What was left of Tiny was a human body with a stopped heart, waiting to be claimed. A barber chair with a mirror and scissors. A box on a hill with plastic pipes, an overgrown yard, and back taxes. A white lady, sixty years younger with a habit of wandering toward the window around nine, feeling the sting of clean-burning sadness, sadness unsullied by alcohol, for the loss of him.

sam-brightonSam Brighton is currently working on a collection of personal essays. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exposition Review and Memoryhouse. She regularly contributes health and wellness essays filled with exclamation points and enthusiasm to a regional newsletter for people living with multiple sclerosis. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a nurse. Sam is a Cleaver Emerging Artist.

Image credit: Rawle C. Jackman on Flickr

 

 

Note: this essay was amended by the author on May 16, 2018.

CARDIO, LIGHTBULBS, AND A FUNERAL by Rick Bailey

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

CARDIO, LIGHTBULBS, AND A FUNERAL
by Rick Bailey

The day of the funeral I’m on the treadmill at the senior center.

A guy named Gordon I haven’t seen in a while stops next to me and points. I shake my head, What? He points again. So: I guess my limp is noticeable. I took a minor tumble on some stairs, more sprawl than fall. I’d rather not go into it right now. I’m listening to Ray Charles sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” on my headset and watching Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan on one of the four TVs hung on the wall. But Gordon stands there, smiling. I pause the Ray, pop out an earbud.

“You hurt?” he says.

“Not much.” I dial down the speed and nod hello. “Where you been?”

“On a yacht,” he says. “What happened?”

Gordon is a junior senior. His hair is all white. He’s retired, not yet sixty, and reminds me of the Pillsbury Doughboy. The two years I’ve worked out at the senior center, I’ll see him three days a week every week for a stretch. Then he’ll be gone for weeks at a time. He is swift on the elliptical, then swiftly done and gone upstairs for coffee and networking. I glance back at the TV. It’s confetti time on Kelly and Michael. Three days a week I watch the silent confetti drop that happens on the show. It’s goofy, and everyone in the studio loves it. I guess I do too.

I tell him I took a little fall down some stairs. There’s a pause. I’m still walking; he’s standing by. “So,” I say. “A yacht.”

“There’s no such thing as a little fall,” he says.

“Whereabouts, Caribbean?”

“Not this time,” he says. “Up in the north channel. With Don.” Don is one of the senior seniors. He says he’s too old for exercise equipment. He wears big shoes and sleds a few laps around the tiny indoor track before stopping for a long coffee. He does a couple cruises a year. Gordon must be first mate.

“Every afternoon,” he says, “cocktail hour on the flying bridge, some cool jazz. It was sweet.”

“Must be some yacht.”

He considers his answer, smiles, and says, “Not that big.”

I start to say there’s no such thing as a small yacht, but think otherwise. I kind of want to get back to Ray Charles. I point to the TV and ask what he thinks of Kelly Ripa’s hair. It’s new, a Frenchy-looking bob. I don’t think she likes it. She touches it a lot.

Gordon glances at the TV, then back at me, like, Are you joking?

Later that morning I squeeze in a trip to Home Depot, looking for lightbulbs and super glue.

◊

A few days ago my wife called to me from the basement. She said the stairway lights were out, one at the top, one at the bottom. That stairway goes down three steps to a landing, then makes a right turn to go down the rest of the way, thirteen steps in all, carpeted. I stood on a toppish step; she was downstairs. We flipped switches and talked. It was definitely dark. It turned out I didn’t know what step I was on. When I went to set my foot on the landing, it wasn’t quite there, and all of a sudden I went down in a pile; twisted and stretched muscle, bone, and fat.

“I’m okay,” I said to my wife. It was a tentative assessment, kind of a lie. It hurt like hell.

“Are you sure?”

“Probably,” I told her. I just didn’t feel like moving yet.

Falls run in the family. In his old age my father stepped off a ladder and crashed onto the cement floor in the garage. He limped for a month. When she was seventy my mother-in-law misjudged a stair-step in our house, fell, and broke her ankle. One night my father-in-law woke up, walked the length of his house in the dark to the bathroom, the one he used over by the garage, the one next to the door to the basement. He opened the wrong door and stepped into the dark stairway. There was no landing to abbreviate his fall. He tumbled straight down all thirteen stairs. Somehow, he was not hurt.

Thirteen. That should tell us something.

For some time now whenever I carry a case of wine to the basement, I imagine myself slipping and falling. You put carpet on stairs, you’re tempting fate. In this imagined fall my arms fly up, I launch the case of wine into the air, bottles fly and fall, breaking and spilling. When I roll into the glassy, winey mess at the bottom of the stairs, I cut my throat. Cheers.

In the aisles of Home Depot I decide to look for the long lasting bulbs. Bulb technology, it turns out, is taking giant, if confusing, steps forward. Really, it’s a stampede. There’s incandescent, halogen, fluorescent, compact fluorescent, and LED. Check for lumens, Watts, Kelvin value, soft light, hard light, dimmables, warm-up time. Then there’s savings per year, calculated to the penny, and year life. It’s kind of like shopping for French wine. The light steward I eventually talk to holds out a package of bulbs, recommends LED.

“How long will they last?” I ask.

He looks at me and smiles. “You’ll probably never have to buy bulbs again.” It’s an innocent remark. In my lifetime, he means. He sees something in my facial expression, intimations of my imminent demise, and offers a sheepish apology.

◊

On the way to the funeral my wife says, “They’re not supposed to die before us.”

No, they’re not.

He was fifty. He was big. He had a mountain-man beard and a soft voice, he had light in his eyes and a smile that made you want to love him. At the funeral we stand in the church vestibule for half an hour, a visitation that begins in soft murmuring and mournful glances, and by the end rises to a din of conversation and laughter so loud the funeral director can’t hush us up and herd us into the church. There’s a balm in that din, an affirmation. But still, the man is gone.

We file in, find seats in pews, and wait. Whoever made this church understood light. The floor and walls and ceiling are all white. There’s stained glass, but it’s stained glass lite. The afternoon sunlight pouring in has a kind of echo. Maybe it helps. While we wait, the pianist plays in minor keys, slowly, a lot of sostenuto. Maybe that helps too. I remark to my wife: Above the altar, the wheel chandelier hanging from the ceiling. When she looks, I whisper, A little lower, it could be a pot rack. She wags a finger: Keep quiet. Way off to the left, behind the organ, is a huge set of drums, worthy of Ginger Baker, and a pile of amplifiers, for playing God rock. The horror.

Then the pianist shifts to a major key. We stand.

Then come the family, the casket; words.

Outside afterward, we stand facing the hearse, arguably the worst time. One church bell begins to toll. I hope they’re doing it on purpose. “If a clod be washed away by the sea,” I think. We are the less.

Lying in bed that night I find my wife’s hand and remember: super glue. It’s for a ceramic lemon that she bought in Sicily and that I broke a few weeks ago. I plan to fix it. Two or three pieces, clean breakage. It will be almost good as new. We lie there, drifting toward sleep. Drifting, I think about lemons and glue, and carpet on a well-lit stairway, about my limp to wellness on the treadmill, and a yacht anchored in the north channel, floating in the dark, a couple staterooms lit by a few tiny lights, and people having drinks, feeling lucky.

rick-baileyRick Bailey writes about family, food, travel, current events, what he reads and what he remembers. The University of Nebraska Press will publish a collection of his essays, American English, Italian Chocolate in summer 2017. He and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino.

 

TEACHING REFUGEE CHILDREN AFTER TRUMP, an essay by Daniel Miller, featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

TEACHING REFUGEE CHILDREN AFTER TRUMP
by Daniel Miller
Featured on Life As Activism

I was in college when the twin towers fell. The TV footage was on every channel of my roommate’s little box set with its rabbit ear antennae. Before I had finished getting ready that morning, a call went out to everyone in the dorms that classes were canceled and a vigil would take place that evening in the university chapel. Later, when classes resumed, every professor began class with some kind of discussion about the towers. They tried to reassure a scared and shocked student body, though some were still in shock themselves. I was grateful for these talks. I needed someone to tell me that everything would be ok, that love and faith were stronger than fear and hate, that no matter how hard it might be, life would eventually regain some sense of normalcy.

Those discussions following 9/11 were the first things that came to mind when I opened the email from my principal this morning. I teach fourth grade at a public elementary school in Texas. The email was sent on November 11, three days after Donald Trump was named president-elect. “Please take a moment to talk with your students about the election,” my principal wrote to the staff. I was surprised by this because my school’s administration has never discussed or expressed any political leanings, one way or the other.

In keeping with that tradition, the email’s purpose was more pastoral than political. Throughout the election season, a slow growing fear had caught hold of much of our student body. After election night, it had changed into visible despair. I should mention that my hometown has welcomed more international refugees per capita than any city in the nation, and the elementary school I work at is home to many of those families. We boast a student population that speaks 20 different languages, and represents countries from as close as Mexico and Cuba to as far away as Iran and Burma. I say “boast” because we are proud of our diversity. Daily, we tell our students that our many colors and cultures make our school special and stronger than we would be separately.

As a teacher, I can think of little that is more fulfilling; little that is more truly American than watching our school family grow and learn together. At recess, the local city kids show new refugees how to play basketball and foursquare. The little girls from Burma teach the girls from Texas new jump rope rhymes and how to weave tiaras out of long grass and dandelions. In the classroom, a student who has never shown much interest in academics suddenly shines when he can partner read with an ESL student who knows little English. This is the first time anyone has ever asked him for help, and he takes pride in describing all the new words and how they match the pictures. One of my Thai students can explain long division to her struggling friend who grew up just a few blocks from the school with greater clarity than I could ever manage. We work hard to foster an atmosphere where all of our children can feel welcome and safe.

Throughout the election season, I noticed that some of my students seemed uneasy. After Donald Trump’s election, true fear had taken hold in many of them. A Congolese boy, who I had never before seen without a big smile, asked me why he would have to go back to his country. His village did not have enough food, he told me. People were very sad and hungry there. A second grade teacher showed me a picture one of her students had drawn. It showed two men with Crayola guns standing over a woman, scribbled red.

“This is my aunt,” the girl said. “Please don’t make my family go back.”

When I took this job, I knew that I might have to console students who were going through rough times: moving, divorce, the death of a beloved pet. I never imagined I would have to have a discussion with elementary students like the ones my college professors had with us after 9/11.

After breakfast, I gathered my students on the carpet. They were curious and excited because we usually began class with a review game.

“As you know,” I said, “we voted for a new president a couple days ago.”

Their demeanor immediately changed. One boy leaned his head against the wall with an audible thunk; another student cradled her face in her hands. I needed a new starting place.

“Our school has students from all over the world, right? Just look at your friends in this classroom. We have different skin colors and some of us speak different languages,” I continued.

They looked at one another and smiled sheepishly.

“That diversity is was makes our school special. We are lucky to have friends like this and we help each other out and care about one another. We are kind of like books. Would you want to read the same book over and over all year long?”

“No,” they said.

“That would be boring,” one boy shouted.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s much better to have a library full of different books. Each of your lives are made up of unique and important stories, and we are lucky that we get to share those stories with one another.” Now for the hard part, “I’ve noticed that some of you have been worried about having to leave our school or this country. I, along with all your other teachers, want you to know that you belong here. Being a refugee means that you and your families have been legally brought to America to get away from situations in your countries that were not good. We are glad that you are here and you make our school better.

“Just like kids can sometimes say things that are not nice, sometimes adults say mean or scary things too, even presidents. But, we all know that just because you hear something on TV, that doesn’t make it right. Being nice to each other and treating everyone with respect is better than being rude or mean. Love is stronger than hate. I know you may hear things from some adults that make you feel sad or scared, but at this school we know how to treat one another. We know how to speak kind words. Remember that each of you has an important story to tell and each of you is a valuable member of our school family.”

We talked for a few more minutes about their questions and fears. Mostly they shared good memories about meeting new friends and playing with one another. To them their different races, religions, and cultures were not cause for fear or distrust. These were merely facts of life that gave more color, fun, and even humor to the stories they told of one another. I knew that soon they would have to leave my classroom and go out into a world that did not always see them the way they saw one another: an adult world guided by different rules. I was thankful they felt safe here, and proud to have cultivated such a little community. I also felt ashamed that I could offer them so little. I wondered how my college professors had felt when they had tried to comfort their classes. I wondered if they felt then that their words and assurances had been enough.

Daniel-MillerDaniel Miller is a Texas-based writer and teacher. He holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh and Duke University. He has published one book, Animal Ethics & Theology (Routledge, 2012). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals such as Alfie Dog Fiction, Amarillo Bay, Riding Light, Rock & Sling (forthcoming), Short Story Sunday, and The Tishman Review.

 

 

Image credit: atsukosmith on Flickr

BENEATH US ALL THIS TIME, an essay by Angelique Stevens featured on Life As Activism

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beneath-us-all-this-time

BENEATH US ALL THIS TIME
by Angelique Stevens
Featured on Life As Activism

The first time Salva Dut and his drilling crew flushed water through the pipes from the aquifer deep beneath the Sudan desert, all of the villagers danced and sang.  Most of them had never tasted clean water in their lives, and here it was gushing out of the ground twenty feet above them—a cool and beautiful geyser in the dusty heat of midday. One elder approached Salva after that first well was capped and said, “I can’t believe that all of this time, people have been dying and we’ve been sitting right on top of the water.” Salva told that story the first time he came to the college where I teach, and I’ve retold his story many times.

I met Salva for the first time in 2005. I teach literature of the Holocaust and genocide as an English Professor in upstate New York. A dark subject for sure, but I’ve learned over the years that students taking courses about genocide find themselves compelled to engage more purposefully in their societies. They learn that historical lessons, especially those that are emotionally painful, have contemporary obligations. So in 2005, a group of us went looking for an organization that was making a clear and conscious difference in the world. We found Salva Dut, founder of Water for Sudan, and we asked him to speak to our little group.

His story was a powerful message, especially for those of us whom water scarcity is mostly unfathomable; our own city’s water supply is some of the cleanest water in the world. We knew then that helping Salva meant making a real difference. It wasn’t long before I joined the board of directors for Water for Sudan, and in 2008, I travelled to the country, which back then was still Sudan, with five other people to see that beautiful geyser moment for myself.

Everywhere I went in Sudan, people offered me things. I was the foreigner in their country and they could tell the minute they saw me that I was different with my lighter skin and my long hair and my rounded body. They understood that it was me who needed their help. They knew that my system wasn’t used to the extreme temperatures, that I had not sufficiently acclimated to bacteria-ridden water, that my skin was too soft for hard work, my eyes too sensitive to the dust.

In January 2015, I made a second trip to the region. This time, South Sudan had separated from Sudan making it the newest country in the world. During my two-month trip, I visited eighty villages where the organization, now Water for South Sudan, had dug its 250 wells. I visited each borehole to interview villagers and to record the impact of clean water on their lives.  

The author in South Sudan

The author in South Sudan

Even in 2015 after a recent civil war in the new country, whenever I arrived in a new village to do an evaluation, people were still offering me their generosity. A chief might send a child to find a chair for me. An elder lady would escort me out of the sun under the shade of a tree. Kids offered to climb trees to harvest honey for me. People brought me mangoes and peanuts and eggs. In one village, a woman came running towards me with a chicken. She shoved it into my hands before I knew what to do. Lion, our Director of East Africa Operations and Evaluation leader, intervened and gave the squawking chicken back to the lady; he explained to her that we had a long drive ahead of us, that we could not take the chicken in the car, that we wouldn’t have time to cook it. Reluctantly, she settled for giving me a hug. Another time a local elder who was a member of his county’s parliament gifted me a goat to show his appreciation. In a place where three meals a day consisted of rice, lentils, and okra, it was a luxury to have meat. On the last day in camp, he came again to offer us another goat to take with us to the next camp.

And it wasn’t just food that people gave. They gave their time too. Whenever I had to walk into the bush to go to the bathroom, someone offered to accompany me to make sure I didn’t get lost. One day, near Salva’s home in South Sudan’s remote north, we got lost locating a number of villages. We found a couple of teens in a market center who offered to navigate us to the nearby villages. People gave their labor too; in the village where the elder man had given me the goat, one woman stayed in our camp from dawn until dusk helping to prepare meals, wash dishes, cut wood, and start fires. When I asked her why she spent her days with us when she had her own family to take care of, she said it was because we needed the help.

We in the West sometimes see South Sudan as a place of conflict, strife, and poverty. And to some degree that’s true. The country has experienced civil war most of its independent life, even when it was still part of Sudan. There is no real infrastructure to speak of, no paved roads in most of the country and no electric anywhere. Even in the big cities, the buildings run on generator power, and in most places in the country there is no potable water. In extreme heat and across harsh terrain, people spend hours walking, pounding grain, chopping wood for cooking, and tilling the earth by hand. It is one of the hardest places in the world to live; yet through all of this, there is a humanity in the South Sudanese people that strikes me as deeply unique and necessary in our global world.

Now in this post-election climate where fear, anger, and divisiveness have welled up across the country, I’m reminded of something people kept telling me the second time I visited to study those wells. In each village, I asked a question about equal access to the borehole—whether everyone in the village, even those just traveling through could share the water equally. Most of the respondents didn’t understand what I was asking. “What do you mean?” they would say, and I would rephrase the question. And then they would laugh, as if what I was asking was ridiculous. “Sister, of course,” they would say. “What kind of person would deny access to someone who thirsts?”

Indeed.  What kind?

Over the past months in the United States, we have heard calls to deny immigrants safe shelter behind our borders. We have seen people vilify whole groups of “others.” In my own, fairly progressive city, we’re hearing about racial slurs being scrawled across local high school walls and gay pride flags being burned. I have myself sensed a gritty stream coursing beneath our feet on the verge of gushing under the pressure of hate. And instead of slaking our thirst, the change in our country feels like we’ll be swallowing sand. It has been enough to make me want to shut my doors and stay in bed.

But then something happened to me last week. I had read about the rare super moon rising, so I walked my dog to the park to watch it. When we arrived, the sun had given way to a bruised and fiery sky. My dog and I walked around the reservoir, the city’s water supply on top of the hill, while we waited for the moon to appear. Because the reservoir sits on the highest point in the city, there were hundreds of people waiting up there too. As we walked, I noticed something on the sidewalk. In intervals of about every fifty feet, someone had chalked words of hope: “Believe the future is bright and you and I can be the light.” “Be the change.” “Spread love, Spread light.”

In the midst of our grief and despair, my neighbors and I had gone to the park on the hill, thirsty for something beautiful in the setting of the sun. As I read those words marked on the concrete, and as I glanced around me at the people who had joined me on the hill—the city’s skyline in the distance—Salva’s words came to me again. I realized that if there is a darkness rising from within our country, it is also joined by a stronger current of hope and generosity that has always been there. I remind myself that human kindness must and will prevail, and that it is up to each of us to do the work of digging deep in order to bring it to the surface.

Angelique-StevensAngelique Stevens teaches Creative Writing and Genocide literature in Rochester, New York. An activist for human rights, she has lived in Chiapas, Mexico, to be a witness for peace with the Zapatista Rebels; volunteered in an elephant refuge in Thailand; studied Holocaust education in Israel, writing in Paris, and she spent two months evaluating water wells in South Sudan. She has traveled to 12 countries on three continents. Her non-fiction can be found in The Chattahoochee Review, Shark Reef, Cleaver, and a number of anthologies. Her essay, “Exposure” won second place in the Solas Award for Best Women’s Travel Writing. She is currently writing a travel memoir about her life growing up and her experiences in South Sudan. She is a member of Straw Mat Writers and an MFA candidate at Bennington College who finds her inspiration in travel—being in places that push the boundaries of comfort, experience, knowledge, and hunger.

 

THE ART OF TRUMP, an essay by Dustin Pearson, featured on Life As Activism

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THE ART OF TRUMP
by Dustin Pearson
Featured on Life As Activism
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I spent most of election night locked in my room. If I had to contend with outside voices that night, I wanted each to be of my own choosing, but I wasn’t successful. Like many over the course of that night, I watched Trump ascend to the elected head of state and government. Having taken in the concrete data that was coming from the poles and reckoning with the collective anxieties of friends and fellow writers I admire on social media, I misguidedly left my room to collect myself, to pour an emotionally charged amount of red wine into the tallest tumbler I could find. My short trek to the kitchen was interrupted by my housemate, who eyed me suspiciously.

“Who’d you vote for?” he asked.

“You don’t have the right to ask me that question,” I said.

Stunned and not understanding, he changed his tactics.

“Do you support gay marriage?”

“Why wouldn’t I support gay marriage?” I asked.

“You’re conservative,” he said.

What my housemate will never understand about me is that I’m reserved. Part of that reserve has been built into me ever since my childhood. So much of it seemed to be about minding my business and making sure to be aware of everything and my place in everything as a black person. It was about staying safe. Knowing safety when I saw it. And only when I was sure of that safety could I consider disclosing myself. I’ve never been nor do I ever hope to be conservative in the ways that my housemate implied with his line of questioning.

My housemate, on the other hand, is always disclosing himself. Voluntarily, he’s offered up intimate details of his past sexual relations, financial history, and unstable life philosophies, citing that I’m distant enough for it not to matter. His openness is incredible. His safety is all but guaranteed.

In the aftermath of the election, I overheard a phone conversation my housemate had with his friend, a conversation that was casual enough to be had while he was on the toilet. He explained he was bummed that Trump had been elected president but that he was also excited. He had plans to go out and buy a gun. He’d always wanted to play out a survivalist scenario, even if he would hate it when it finally came.

I was disgusted. It was all a game to him, and with such low stakes. Just that quickly he’d gone from being a white liberal to what I’ve always imagined as a dangerous white conservative wanting to play out his post apocalyptic American fantasy at everyone else’s expense.

He cited concrete features of his fantasy: killing and eating possums, living off the land, being forced into the mountains. He had other details and conditions, conditions that many marginalized groups in America have normalized in their daily lives. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking how privileged my housemate was for entertaining his thoughts so easily. His privilege had removed him from reality, had made him completely oblivious and ignorant and selfish. His understanding and “liberal” action in the election seemed so shallow, like he was just going through the motions.

Perhaps some would argue that my housemate is an extreme case. I would argue that even inside the academy, where I spend most of my time as a teaching artist, people like my housemate exist less overtly but are every bit as damaging. I’m reminded of such presences every time there’s a conversation about art, empathy, and political writing.

Oftentimes, what I see in the academy is a turning of literature’s historical and social importance in the world against itself, and into what feels like some highbrow entertainment, which has its own politics, and which is why so often I have to fight against my own cynical leanings. Sometimes I set myself on some morbid autopilot. One that says go ahead. Make literature about Art. Entertainment. Make it apolitical. Sterile. Write another depressed person at a bar who thinks about seeking out a prostitute. Don’t forget the pool tables, the jukebox. Make sure it’s playing a tune everyone reading can hear and has heard. Have your protagonist smoke a cigarette. Make sure he’s drinking a beer though nothing fancy because we need this to be taken seriously. Take it to workshop. Let it be praised for its gritty realism. Or, get a bit adventurous. Write another insightful piece about empathy, about how writing outside yourself increases it, rather than provide another means for you to empower yourself to do what you’ve always done: whatever it is that you want, regardless of the cost. Forget about reading the works of the groups you’re supposedly trying to empathize with. Your “research,” if you decide to do any, will be enough. I mean, if that kind of thing was effective, wouldn’t we all be getting along better by now? Wouldn’t a difference have been made?

Growing up, I struggled to understand there was a self I could write about. In grade school, I learned about the white writers and the white generals and the white scientists. When I came home and turned on the television, I watched programming that featured all white casts. During the commercial breaks I watched white men and women run their fingers through their hair, run super sharp knifes through big hunks of meat, run ads about their law firms, run me right out of my empathizing with myself and into empathizing with them. I still struggle. Of course, there was black programming, but that representation fell far short of the spectrum of blackness even within my own family. So when criticisms arise about the “political” writing of marginalized groups, I can’t help but equate those criticisms with being told that my politics, the circumstances of my art and life aren’t wanted. It’s another erasure. Yet I still exist. What would they have me do with that existence?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve engaged earnestly in these conversations, how many times people have tried to (mis)quote some prominent black writer and make it seem as though that writer would support further marginalization of marginalized writers and writing. I can’t tell you how many times someone has tried to insert the voice of a marginalized person who, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel marginalized to support that kind of negation, as if the thought process was, “that’ll do it, that’ll make me right. Even so and so is saying it.” White people disagree with each other every day over lesser and greater things, but that’s not going to reflect on them how they so often claim it reflects on “us,” right?

Then there’s the conversation about anger and the productive presentation of ideas. This complaint typically comes from “allies” whose efforts have been criticized or other well-meaning groups who have been paralyzed by the anticipation of the criticisms their well-meant actions might receive based on the criticisms that have been handed down to allies or other groups who dare to try. Oftentimes people can’t handle feeling as though they’re being discouraged with every word they hear or read when they’re already doing, have done, or imagined the perceived failures of their best (some even under the impression that their best in this context is completely selfless, as if contributing to the cause wouldn’t enrich all of our lives). I’m sensitive to that, minus the parenthetical. That’s been my experience for far too long. I’ve gotten used to it, then had to break that record of resignation.

But really, this piece is catching me at a bad time. Even a year ago, I wouldn’t have been willing to talk to anyone this way, even having gotten it much worse for a longer duration of time. I hate writing about whiteness. I hate reading “white” in pieces of writing, even as it seems to be the social currency of the world. I’d rather not spend it. I only hope to speak to the damage. Usually around this time in this particular conversation people start to think they should just ask me what I need them to do to get us all out of this mess. Maybe in every other context I would think, “yes, I’m very happy you’ve waited until now to believe I’m a genius,” and regardless of the truth of that idea, I certainly don’t have the answer. I do know, however, that the solution, convenient as it has been portrayed to be, is not to be silent.

Trump is (will soon be) our president. We don’t know what that will mean. What’s already showing is awful. At least for me, at least for the people I know and love and care about. It’s not a game. If my housemate is correct, and we’re headed toward a revolution, I certainly don’t want to go down that path having held anything back.

dustin-pearsonDustin Pearson is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University, where he also serves as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. He was awarded the 2015 Katharine C. Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his poem “The Black Body Auditions for a Play.” He is the recipient of fellowships from the Watering Hole, Cave Canem, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Born in Charleston, he is from Summerville, SC.

 

 

Image credit: Unsplash

 

LOVE OF MY LIFE, an essay by Cody Smith, featured on Life As Activism

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Berlin Wall

LOVE OF MY LIFE
by Cody Smith
Featured on Life As Activism

I am watching the election results with a friend that I’m kind of in love with. He texts me after the first polls close. I join him at the Women’s Center where they are holding a viewing party, a nonpartisan event in name only. Early numbers look bad, and then they begin to look dangerous. People leave the party visibly upset. The Friend and I decide we need a drink. I call a local Mexican restaurant to ask if they’re showing the election results on any of their televisions.

One girl suggests we come with her to a fraternity where they are watching CNN. The frat has hard liquor, and we could buy mixers on the walk over. I bite my tongue. I don’t want to come across as judgmental, but I have always hated boys’ clubs. And besides, I want to be alone with The Friend.

“The love of my life is in that fraternity,” he says. “Just kidding.”

The Friend continually cycles through moments of revealing (if exaggerated) honesty followed by sham retractions. We continue to discuss specifics.

“Do you want to go, Cody?” he asks.

“I’d be willing, but it’s up to you,” I say.

I’m hoping he’ll see the hesitation in my eyes, but he decides that we will join her.

Walking over, he inevitably tells me about the guy in this frat who he hooked up with after a Halloween party. I do not tell him how I feel like a pawn in this plan; how this night that was meant to end in celebration has taken a turn for the depressing.

Inside the frat house, there are chairs and couches filled with rowdy guys drinking cans of PBR. The Halloween Lover sits in the front of the room wearing a white baseball cap. He and The Friend don’t acknowledge one another. While I pour myself a drink, he tells me how The Halloween Lover blogs for the Huffington Post.

“His posts are really bad,” he says.

I am a good writer, I tell myself. I would write the shit out of some Huffington Post pieces.

“But he’s such a cutie,” The Friend says.

I don’t tell him I agree.

We sit together in the back of the room. A guy walks in with a girl on his arm.

“Your country is fucked!” she screams.

“Go back to Australia!” someone yells.

When Hillary wins Virginia, one frat brother cheers like he’s at a football game, and it almost starts to feel possible again.

“She has to win Wisconsin and Michigan now,” he says fervently.

I ask The Friend how he’s doing after his recent breakup with his boyfriend of over a year.

“I’ve actually never been better,” he says. He talks about his newfound freedom. He mentions his family and looming financial issues. “With all this going on, it’s just made me realize that I can’t have anything serious right now. Only casual relationships.”

I wonder how adeptly I hide my emotions.

Trump continues to pull further ahead in North Carolina and Florida.

“Fuck Florida,” I say. “I will never forgive them for this. I want them out of this country. Do you think Hillary is throwing a total tantrum right now?”

“She’s probably washing down Xanaxes with white wine,” The Friend says.

“This country fucking hates women,” I say. “Can you believe that a former Secretary of State and Senator is going to lose this election to a guy who’s never even held public office? This is fucked up. I want that asshole at the FBI’s head on a pike outside the White House.”

Numbers continue to flash on the screen and they keep getting worse. I chug my drink. Being surrounded by these strange men as they joke and get angry has lost its already minimal charm.

“We need to leave,” I say.

The Friend agrees. So we walk to a local pizza place and order a pitcher of Heineken to share.

A cashier looks distressed. “If I don’t come in tomorrow, you’ll know why,” she says to her co-worker, eyes on the television screen at the back of the restaurant.

We sit down and watch. I wonder if my dad has been following these updates. He’s probably loving it, I think. He and I had been butting heads over this election for months. He had even unfriended me on Facebook after I told him I was losing respect for him over his political posts.

In a group message I have with my brothers and parents, I text rapidly “This is a disaster right now. Dad, if you voted for Trump and he wins I might not be able to talk to you for a while!”

My brother responds that I’m being dramatic. “You act like California’s 55 votes aren’t going to Hillary,” he texts.

“The fat lady hasn’t sung yet,” my dad texts.

The Friend’s eyes grow red with frustration. Occasionally he shakes his entire body like he’s about to have a fit. I reach out and touch his hand. Maybe he retracts his hand. Maybe I retract my own hand as soon as I do it. Things are getting blurrier now and my limbs are feeling heavier. He talks about how white people, “your people” he says, have done this to America. I tell him I know. When Hillary loses Florida, we can no longer stomach being in public.

We walk to his house. He makes us drinks with gin and lemon juice. We sit on his couch watching the results on his laptop, and I black out soon after mispronouncing Antonin Scalia’s name and lamenting that Trump will be nominating justices to the Supreme Court if he wins.

I wake up in The Friend’s bed. I am wearing his sweatpants, which fit despite a significant height difference. The Friend is awake too. I am still drunk from the night before.

“Do you remember throwing up last night?” he asks me.

“Wait, are you joking?”

He assures me he isn’t. I hide my face behind my hands.

“It’s okay. Really, it’s not a big deal.”

He gets up from the bed and gathers up a ball of bedsheets to take to the washing machine.

I lie in the bed for another half-hour, still embarrassed and too exhausted to manage the walk home. A consummate morning person, The Friend showers and gets dressed. When I sit up again, I am dizzy.

“Please tell me she didn’t lose,” I say.

The Friend is digging through his closet for a sweatshirt, “She conceded last night.”

I moan, “America has fucked me up.”

“I know,” he says. “But just think, one day you’ll be able to write something really great about this.”

I don’t tell him that the thought had already crossed my mind.

The Friend leaves me to collect my sweater, jeans, and backpack. When I walk downstairs, he is sitting at his living room table in front of his laptop.

“I’ll wash your sweatpants and get them back to you,” I say.

“Well, you did vomit in them,” he says not unkindly. “So, that would be nice.”

“And thanks again for dealing with my buffoonery. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. Honestly, it distracted me from my sorrows.”

He suggests we start a book club, “just the two of us.”

As I walk out the front door, he suggests a Colson Whitehead novel.

I walk home. I charge my phone and turn it back on. I have a text from my dad, “The fat lady has sung,” he says. I can’t respond to him and I don’t know when I will feel able to respond. I climb into my own bed, still in The Friend’s sweatpants, and I sob. I miss a meeting at noon because I am still drunk and still sobbing. Friends text me to check in. I fall into melodrama.

“I have never been so disappointed in humanity,” I respond to their texts, and I mean it.

I watch Hillary’s concession speech. We have failed her. She was too good for this shitty country. I scroll through litanies of mournful Facebook statuses. I just want everyone to feel loved today. Anger has won, but we can fight back with love. It sounds clichéd but it’s true.

I send an additional two apology text messages to The Friend two hours apart. I think about everything I might have said last night while under the liquor’s influence but don’t remember how I might have embarrassed myself, how I might have told him, how he might have rejected me. I recognize that I’m becoming paranoid.

“No need to apologize,” he texts me hours later. “I’m glad we got to watch the elections together. Wouldn’t have wanted to watch it with anyone else :)”

It feels like a paltry victory in the face of such loss. So, I lie in bed and continue to sob.

And eventually, I stop.

cody-smithCody Smith is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying English literature. He is from Frederick County, Maryland and is currently working on his senior thesis about spinster characters in nineteenth-century novels. He likes pop music and desserts. This is his first publication.

 

Image credit: Berlin Wall from Pixabay

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THE LIONS’ MURDER BALLAD by Melissa Wiley

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Vintage 19th-century photos of two little girls standing next to each other

THE LIONS’ MURDER BALLAD
by Melissa Wiley

There is always a cruel sister. There is always one more beloved than the other. There is always a stronger who kills the weaker, in life as in the murder ballad “The Two Sisters,” versions of which have circulated for centuries across continents. The older sister cannot help being the uglier, making her the murderer.

Still neither sister seems to notice the landscape’s blankness as brown and leafless trees keep collapsing. Both are equally preoccupied with their appearance—one with its charms, the other with its disappointments—while thin, naked trees surrender to wind blowing the sisters’ hair across their faces, making one briefly indistinguishable from the other.

In one of the few pictures I have of my sister and myself together, I stand with my hands clasped behind my back, my stomach’s rondure thrust forward. Five years old, I have swallowed a globe, or so it seems to me decades later. An entire world beams from my navel. I resemble some town’s extremely young mayor, some town at the time I can only imagine because I have seen so few of them. I wear my turtleneck tucked inside my trousers.

I have pasted stray wisps of my hair down with saliva, wisps too short to be braided. I live on a farm where everyone is too dirty themselves to notice these pains I’ve taken. No other houses are visible beyond power lines that seem to cross in the distance yet never touch when I run and stand beneath them. My world is solitary except for my sister and parents.

I still might be running for office, so eager do I look to please the person taking the picture, who is likely my mother. I have always needed to be good for someone, however. At the time the picture was taken, I cared less about being a good sister than a good daughter. Compared to me, my two-year-old sister is reckless. She is good even when no one is paying attention.

She skulks in my shadow’s taper, her white shirt stained with ketchup that has dried into a small African continent with no ocean surrounding it. Her mouth is compressed into a silverfish. The croquet set beside us is not hers, and she knows this. She knows if only because I have told her so often. She only ever plays under rules I invent as the game progresses. If she disobeys, she knows I’ll take her ball and mallet.

Also known as “Binnorie,” “The Cruel Sister,” “Dreadful Wind and Rain,” “The Bonny Swans,” “Bonnie Bows of London,” and “The Singing Bone,” among others, the song “The Two Sisters” first appeared on a broadside in 1656 as “The Miller and the King’s Daughter” after being passed down orally for centuries. In most iterations, a suitor stokes the jealousy of the older sister by courting the younger. His ardor leads to his beloved’s drowning.

After he has paid yet another visit and charmed even the parents, the older sister invites the younger to walk with her to the sea. Pushing her in, however, proves too tempting, too easy. Yet the older sister is still more woman than villain. She cannot help exercising the strength she’s been given, strength she’s no more asked for than the younger her attractions.

Perhaps because the tale has been told so often, everywhere from Hungary to Iceland, the crime no longer shocks me. If you’ve heard the Scottish “Binnorie,” for instance, you know the murder served only as pretext for the singer to lavish yet more praise upon the corpse’s beauty. The younger sister benefited, in other words, from dying while still attractive.

In many versions of the song, a miller finds the body. The ballad becomes a panegyric to her features and proportions. Even in death, she evokes the erotic. Alternatively, the miller’s daughter discovers and mistakes her for a swan missing her lifelong partner. In still others, a harpist comes upon her washed ashore and fashions a new harp from her skeleton. The bone harp begins to play another melody named “The Singing Bone” while the harpist only listens. The harp recounts the crime of the sister still living and grown yet more repulsive.

To my own sister, I’ve been considerably kinder. I’ve done nothing to hurt her apart from making her play croquet according to rules I determined as the game advanced. “Light has legs,” I often said instead of attempting to drown her. I repeated nonsense along these lines to her over and over, a tendency that has been with me so long I cannot explain its origin.

I still pretend my chairs have kneecaps with bruises, my vases throats to swallow water. Likewise, I told my sister the peanuts in her peanut butter were brown eggs certain to hatch in her intestines. I convinced her lightbulbs harbored little men inside their filaments the lamp switch awakened.

“Light has legs,” I sang as we played croquet after my mother took the picture of us together. “Light has legs. Light loves darkness. Light loves to walk inside dark closets,” I repeated almost as an incantation meant to summon bodies from the light that made them visible to begin with. Of all the things I’ve forgotten, I remember this syllogism. I still retain the belief some truth lies buried in my own nonsense, either out of arrogance or because I swallowed the world too early.

“Binnorie,” unlike the ballad’s other versions, takes its name from a place known intimately to the writer. The title evokes the murdered sister’s longing for the home she shared with her sister and parents. Yet death means returning is not an option. She cannot revisit a landscape that itself determined how she met her end. She would never have drowned had she not lived so close to water, for instance.

Now that my parents have long since died from illness, my sister and I have no home in common. She has filled hers with children while I rent a small apartment. I can no longer visit a place where someone else now lives and, my sister tells me, breeds mastiffs. I have relinquished my old goodness toward everything except objects too inanimate to notice.

Legs, common as they are in all lights illuminating a building’s darkness, still strike me as extravagant. They are sinewed jewelry hanging from the body’s thickness. Long legs imply speed, often without any objective. They suggest restlessness, especially when a person is sitting. My legs aren’t long, but they’re longer than those belonging to my sister, who is more contented of a person, contented meaning better. “Can I be done with behaving correctly?” This is the cry of everyone with legs longer than her sibling’s.

I never wanted for my husband to call her, to tell her I’d thrown my wedding ring into a green and turgid river. I told him this was where I tossed it when I’d only thrown it on the river’s bank. I told him this so he would not attempt to recover what I no longer wanted, because for years I have tried to take an axe to our marriage. I have wanted to use this strength I’ve been given to hurt something.

Later, though, I searched for and found it among a bed of ashes. I searched for it more out of lingering goodness toward my mother than my husband. It was my great-grandmother’s engagement ring more than a century before this, and my mother wore it for decades before she gave it to me after my husband proposed while we were spooning.

Originally the ring had three diamonds. To my eyes they were mute, shining sisters from the beginning. Someone, though, had made them sit on a bench, perhaps in punishment, and two gold bars framing their tops and bottoms still keep the two sisters left from squirming. When my mother paid a jeweler to widen the band to fit my wider finger, she kept one diamond. She made it into a pendant with which she was buried.

She squeezed one sister off the bench regardless. She squeezed off the sister I assume was the youngest, who was easily too the prettiest by this logic. I can no longer remember the reason for the argument I had with my husband that made me throw away the two sisters remaining. I only know that with the last possession I have of my mother’s lost to me, I had at last murdered something.

After my husband called my sister, she started crying, because he had also mentioned the suicide I’d threatened. She reminded me it was murder, bloody and vicious. She said this as if I were a kinder person than the one she’d grown up with, as if I couldn’t kill the uglier, meaner sister before she did worse damage. Only after she stressed its wrongness did I feel more tempted. Then to change the subject, I told her the ring’s two sisters had drowned in a river. I had sent both to their deaths, sparkling and ageless. There was relief on my part followed by silence.

I woke next morning from a dream that still feels more real than reality at present. I dreamt our farm was overrun with lions that wandered through our yard where we played croquet. As my mother and sister fed them grass, I watched from our kitchen as my dad slurped coffee. He smiled while watching the lions prowl our beds of roses when I asked if he planned on doing something. “Someday they will kill us, Daddy.”

He sighed and said he supposed I was right from a practical perspective. My sister had begun letting them into the house in the evenings, petting them on our couch while watching TV as I lay sleeping, because I have always gone to bed earlier than everyone else in my family. My sister was the animal lover while his oldest daughter preferred lamps and vases, he noted, laughing. He agreed to speak to her, though it was a shame, he mentioned. They offered so much beauty. In this way I knew he meant to do nothing.

The next morning, I took a gun from my dad’s shed and shot them while they lazed in our garden. Just as my sister ran outside to witness the carnage, I awakened. Still I saw the lions’ blood had stained her shirt with ketchup dried into the shape of a small African continent with no ocean surrounding it. For the first time too I knew she saw me clearly.

If light has legs, if light loves darkness, if light loves to walk inside dark closets, it does so only because it finds dark closets wondrous places. Because brightness needs a rest from all it sees. Brightness needs to swallow darkness the same as someone needing to be good for someone who is looking also wants to inflict her cruelty. She may not want to kill her sister, but she wants to kill something. She wants at least to kill the lions. She wants to punish things of pure beauty.

The last time I saw my sister, we went swimming. She brought goggles for us both, but the pair she gave me leaked, and my eyes soon reddened from the chlorine. I pulled her leg as she swam ahead of me, when she stopped and exchanged pairs readily. For her the goggles leaked just as badly, but she said nothing. When we paused for breath, half her eyes were filled with water. They looked red to bloodied.

An hour later, we were driving back to her home where I was spending a few days with her family, and the sparkle of my ring caught her eye as she turned her car into her driveway. She stopped the car and ran her finger across the two sisters’ faces. She circled their heads with a phrenologist’s sensitivity then asked how I found it. Hadn’t it drowned in a river? Hadn’t it been sucked down, as I’d told her, with the sewage?

Hadn’t they? I corrected before answering. Then no, the sisters had only fallen. I’d thrown the ring on the bank and missed the river on purpose. To have drowned them, I would have needed more courage. Then in silence I reflected there have long been too many variations of “The Two Sisters” for there to have been only one older and one younger. In truth, there must be millions of the former as well as the latter, millions of the drowned and the drowner. Given this overabundance, I’m no crueler than average.

In response, she said nothing. She only made a noise with her lips compressed, a flat hum indicating I’d lied about something important. I’d lied, but she’d let me live with it. Lied, made up, invented—there wasn’t much difference. I’d done it ever since I’d picked up a ball and mallet. Yet in these lies—in these dark closets—deeper truths lay unspoken. I hadn’t killed my parents, but I’m the one with murderous tendencies, which have always been with me. I have become mayor of nothing.

Visiting Scotland a few years ago with my husband, I enjoyed hearing murder ballads sung in a pub in the evening more than hiking in the Highlands. And I still would partly rather have dropped my ring in a river, killing both sisters so they die together. As it is, I kill only lions. I make no attempts to murder my sister but make her less than happy. I threaten suicide every time I grow miserable in my marriage. I make no effort to be good for her now that I’m done with being a good daughter.

Over time, “The Singing Bone” has become my favorite version of the ballad, because here the younger sister lives if also stripped of her skin and organs. She lives through her bones, where we all know things. She has kept her shins and femurs. She has kept her legs that fill with light when she sings from her marrow’s jelly.

In life, the younger sister’s skin was smooth and shining. In death, though, her bones glow even more brightly. When you watch the harp playing its own music, light passes through the bones forming its strings. The bones look like sea glass washed upon a beach when the sun’s last light is receding. Glass from old bottles tossed about on the Atlantic, glass with edges rounded by waves.

The wind, however, still is blowing. Brown, leafless trees keep falling over, though neither sister takes time to notice. Yet only one now is preoccupied with her appearance. The other walks inside dark closets.

And though I am the older sister, I too like to think my bones will frost and turn to sea glass in time, should I die by drowning. I hope this rather than holding out hope of my corpse inspiring a ballad. Because what would they sing? Not that anyone pushed me into the sea but that I jumped willingly.

Sea glass from a shipwreck too is the rarest kind, I’ve heard from those who comb beaches searching for sea jewelry. And if this body is not some species of shipwreck, then I have misunderstood who I am from the beginning. If light does not have legs, then I have no idea how it goes walking. I only know that you do not have to wait for your sister to push you to drown in the sea. You do not have to drown to know your bones are sea glass in the making. As long as you live, your bones are waiting to sing, to mourn the lost love and beauty.

Headshot of Melissa WileyMelissa Wiley is the author of Antlers in Space and Other Common Phenomena, an essay collection forthcoming from Split Lip Press. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in journals such as DIAGRAM, Juked, Drunken Boat, PANK, Atlas and Alice, Superstition Review, The James Franco Review, Tin House Open Bar, Mud Season Review, Under the Sun, Pinball, Squawk Back, Gravel, Eclectica Magazine, Gone Lawn, Specter, Lowestoft Chronicle, Souvenir Lit Journal, Pithead Chapel, and pioneertown. Her travels in Lapland are also anthologized in Whereabouts: Stepping out of Place.

Image credit: josefnovak33 on Flickr

WHO’S IN CHARGE by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Empty Wendy's parking lot at night

WHO’S IN CHARGE
by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

The dining room windows of Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers beam light onto the last cars in the lot—a pale-blue Pinto, a red Camaro, and a gray Buick Riviera, floorboard littered with Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and Earth, Wind and Fire eight tracks. The Buick’s mine. I’m the manager. In two weeks I’ll quit to go back to college.

I squirt hospital-sweet cleanser over gluey catsup congealed onto the salad bar Formica, scraping with my finger through a rag. Then I head to the kitchen, snack on the last batch of fries and try to balance cash against receipts. Eighteen-year-old Fat Danny washes dishes and sixteen-year-old Nina mops.

Three times, I get the wrong total. Stupid, I say to the mirror on the door. My pale, freckled face looks back under a blue and white striped headscarf.

I hear Fat Danny drag garbage bins to the back door. He gets high with friends every night after work at the edge of the trickling Kern River, so he works fast now to get there. The garbage bin cage is behind our building, not out front, so Fat Danny ignores the warning taped on the back door—Take the garbage out the front door at closing! It’s about business and safety! I ignore his ignoring it because I’m not interested in business or safety.

He unlocks the back door, drags two bins out and props the door open with a bucket.

A minute later, Nina screams and I turn, annoyed.

He’s back, without the bins, dragged by two guys in black ski-masks. One holds a machete at Fat Danny’s throat. The other points a sawed-off shotgun at Nina, whose eyes are leaking, her mouth covered by a big hand.

“Who’s in charge?”

Gun-boy’s knuckles are white, his ropy forearms dry and red.

“She is!” Fat Danny points at me.

But I’m not.

◊

Yesterday Nina noticed we were selling too many milkshakes. I tasted one, dense and sweet, like the gelato I’d discover five years later.

I served Fat Danny and Nina, who agreed it was amazing.

“You put the machine together wrong,” Nina explained, pointing to the metal piece lying against the backsplash. “That’s the part that pumps air into the mix. You’re not pumping air.” She raised her eyebrows. “This is pure, uncut milkshake.”

I scraped the last bit out of my cup. “It’s better this way.”

I said nothing more but Nina reassembled the machine, biting the tip of her tongue, concentrating, getting it right.

I’ve never been known to take charge.

◊

Gun Boy’s weapon moves up and down, side to side, like a sprinkler head. His Adam’s apple bobs below the mask.

“You!” he yells at me, in a high, squeaky voice. “Give us the money.”

“I don’t have any money,” I say.  Everything’s fuzzy.

“Not your money. Wendy’s money.” Fat Danny’s lips move oddly, in the wrong shapes, at a different pace than his words.

“Bitch!” Gun Boy yells.

He has the same slight build and just-turning voice as Gary, a guy who’d sat next to me in the Algebra I class I nearly failed.

They’re kids, I think. I’m twenty.

Everything stops then, like a broken alarm clock.

“I’ll give you the money,” I say. “We aren’t going to be any trouble.”

“Get it,” Gun Boy says, voice cracking on get.

“It’s in the safe. Do you want me to take you there now?”

“Yeah?” Gun Boy asks.

“You want to come with me?”

“Come with you! Yeah!” He licks, then chews, his top lip and a half inch of mask.

We walk past two wide sinks, full of soapy mop water, a dripping onion-ringer and a laminated poster describing labor law in plain English. I ask, “Can I sit to open the safe?”

“Sit!”

I do it, opening the safe and pulling out the zippered bag.

“I can hand it to you now.” My voice slows, eyebrows raise, like I’m speaking to a toddler.

When he holds out his right hand for the bag, the gun drops in his left. He wrenches it back up again. He stands, outstretched arms and shotgun jerking up and down, money-bag swinging below the gun. Everything is moving but me.

He’s scared. I understand.

“We’ll go into the freezer. We’ll stay ten minutes. So you can get away.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gun Boy says. He flicks his gun at Knife Boy, who opens the freezer door and pushes Fat Danny in.

Nina’s regularly olive skin is soft serve white.

I back into the freezer after her.

Gun boy’s blue eyes round through the holes in his mask.

He says, “Thanks,” almost exactly like Gary from Algebra.

“You’re welcome. Come again,” I say, reverting to script.

The freezer door thunks, huge and stainless. We’re surrounded by frozen sliced potatoes and hamburger patties. Insulated. Just us three.

“Sorry,” Fat Danny says, eyes watery behind aviator glasses.  “I fucked up.”

I’ve never looked straight at him before. Even in the freezer, his forehead shines.

“It was me,” I say. “I was in charge.”

“Well—” Nina says, not finishing.  She lets her left cheek dimple.

Fat Danny’s nose crinkles. He tries to stop a giggle but his shoulders shake, belly jiggling.

“You’ve never been much of a manager.”

“I’m not,” I agree.

Nina snorts. “Sorry.”

“You were in charge tonight, though.” Fat Danny looks at me without blinking through smudged lenses.

I shiver, open the freezer door, and yell, “Hello,” protectively. I turn back. “The coast is clear.”

Headshot of Shelley Blanton-StroudShelley Blanton-Stroud teaches college composition in Northern California. Her stories appear in Brevity Blog, Eunoia Review, Mamalode and, forthcoming, in Soundings Review. She has brought pieces of her novel-in-progress to Bread Loaf, Napa and Squaw Valley writing conferences, where nice people have tried to teach her how to be a fiction writer.

Image credit: Justin S. Campbell on Flickr

DIARY OF A HOUSE by Laurie Blauner

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Small white house with large windows in a grassy field at night

DIARY OF A HOUSE
by Laurie Blauner

Bedroom, Jan. 13, 2016

Every room is safe and dangerous. Ghosts squirm into action and wander, reenacting what made them ghosts. Words spoken in an empty room reverberate, returning to the speaker. In Medieval times people had only one space for everything. I, the bedroom, am nestled within a house that is nestled within Seattle, a subtle city. No sun comes through my two windows, only a frozen gray sky, a giant’s sigh or a sad exhalation.

Because I am a bedroom there is the usual furniture: a bed, dressers and tables crammed with old cosmetics, along with jewelry, scribbled papers, pennies, and crushed clothes. An animal that appears to be wearing white gloves and slippers is dying. The couple that sleep in the room, a man and a woman, have allowed this creature, with blue eyes, in, close to them, and now must learn to push the animal away. Everything else inside these rooms disintegrates too, but slowly, often imperceptibly, a chair thinning, wall paint streaking and worn, floors coated with dust and dirt, curtains torn, knobs wobbling. They have lived here twenty-six years. The animal can hardly walk and its shallow, fast breathing fills a corner, blurting out steadily. The animal is the size of a little plant and dies elsewhere, at the vet. The woman cries. But I want to tell her about unexpected noises, the tapping on floors, knocking on ceilings, the telltale scratching that she will continue to hear. I want to explain about the small ghost in the basement.

◊

Bathroom, Jan. 24, 2016

Every room becomes a story within a story. The old man with a leg brace that lived here alone before the couple arrived couldn’t get out of the bathtub. After flailing, his brace scratched the tub and a neighbor came to help him. I, the bathroom, am a lonely place where people have no available defenses and what happens is a result of the immediate time and space. They must face everything, and then leave.

In the Roman era water had religious as well as cleanliness value. In Tudor times people were afraid that dirty water spread illness, especially syphilis (BBC, History of the Home, Dr. Lucy Worsley, 4/11/11).

I am a witness. The woman is a biological room that is often remade, used, left. I have glimpsed sex and hidden fears and secrets. At another house in Montana, the woman’s angry ex-husband opened the bathroom door so violently that the doorknob left a fist-sized hole in the wall because their toilet overflowed.

◊

Living Room, Feb. 2, 2016

Every room is also a door. The woman used to drink and black out when she lived in Missoula, Montana. Sometimes she didn’t know where she was when she woke up in the morning. Here, in Seattle, once when her husband wasn’t around, she drank wine until she vomited up what resembled red pieces from a heart. She is doing better as she’s wearing herself out. Sometimes she’s living in the living room. She misses the trees, large and full of photosynthetic secrets, the fresh air, spaciousness, and the circle of snow-embroidered mountains outside or in Montana. Even though she almost ran into an industrial building when her car slipped on ice once when she tried to drive home snow-blind.

Before the 19th century, I was known as the “parlor,” from the French “parler” to speak. “Living room” was used more widely after 1918, after World War I, during the influenza epidemic, when it was known as “The Death Room” since it was at the front of the house and that was where bodies were held. Before it was a room for receiving guests and now it’s a room for leisure activity that reflects the personality of its designer (blogsurabhi.wordpress.com).

I keep the weather outside. I’m growing older, my expression changing. The man and woman peer out my windows at neighbors, watch television recreationally, calculating how much too much news costs emotionally. Sometimes there is a knock at the front door and someone or something outside comes inside. Sometimes it doesn’t open.

◊

Kitchen, February 21, 2016

Every room overfills with want and the desire to put certain ingredients in a mouth. People have illusions, certain food is better than other food, and electricity, the way it animates the refrigerator, stove, microwave, and explodes through the house, making everything suddenly alive. I’m a room people feel they should have done better in. What’s the difference between the woman’s hard-boiled eggs, the man’s bones, and rocks? I don’t exaggerate. Be careful of my knives and the mixers and shredders that escape from drawers.

The first censuses in England counted only “hearths,” a cooking fire over a stone, not the people. Consider times and places, the invention of utensils, graters, food processors. It’s not surprising that people ask for more.

◊

The Yard, March 3, 2016

Neighbors border the lawn and greenery. They come in all varieties. My nearest neighbors have claimed the spaces in front of their house as their private parking spaces. A family lives across the street whose young daughter is afraid of spaghetti horses and words made from fire. She sells homemade lemonade in front of her fence in the summer. Sometimes she gives it away for free.

When the woman walked her cat in his harness and lease she met:

the woman who loves cats, feeding them all, and yet owns none.

the grumpy bachelor whose walls are filled with chiming clocks and who owns two flightless, yellow birds.

a widow who thinks too much about everyone else’s life.

the couple who lived on a sailboat for many years and settled into a house only to travel as often as possible.

a couple who adore their classic Mustang car, spend all their free time washing it, and believe all the neighbors should be enthralled with its roar too.

It’s internally and externally satiating to own a piece of land. The sounds of lawnmowers and leaf blowers are the rhythm of something tame that is noisily dying. The children of the couple next door were always smashing a vehicle or motorcycle, and another used to shoot out street lights with a gun and ended up going to prison. At summer occasions firecrackers smile brightly in the sky, bursting with impatience. Some days I go wild, unkempt, with merchandise receipts, candy bags, dandelions littering the too-long grass, chickens clucking from a house a few blocks away. The neighbors are wary, yet friendly, waving at one another, not wanting attention, yet present. All are standing on their property.

◊

Basement, March 21, 2016

Every room wants to discover something about itself instead of its occupants. I’m the room where bones are excavated. I’m the room full of ghosts, which is about time and its attendant failures, how it is backwards and forwards, inside and out, up and down, sometimes all at once. Time is the enemy, or friend, of the woman and the man, and a part of living creatures. I see the cat that visited the basement often although it no longer resides here. The cat used to jump among the shadows, perhaps for something smaller that moved, insects, mice, rats, a bit of dropped food, or enticing smells. The woman talked to the cat, which a few times tried to say “hello” in return at night from the basement. The cat too was searching.

I’ve settled deeply into hard clay filled with sewer lines, water pipes, and gas lines. During a lengthy rain I leak through one corner and one wall. I’m made of tenacious cement with one wood-paneled room, three crude rooms, and a bathroom, with a shower that once resembled a coffin. There is an art studio, a shop, the man’s television room with a speckled linoleum floor and a large room with file cabinets and a washer and dryer. I’m a receptacle for some of the forgotten objects and projects of the humans that live here. I’m still in their dreams.

Sometimes one of three ancient wall telephones rings across from the bathroom. All are black and Western Electric:

a rectangular one with a rotary dial and a bell-shaped receiver.

another more modern phone with a handset, rotary dial, with keys, and a receiver.

the last one is an old pay phone with a G1 handset, rotary dial, coin return and pull.

The conversations on these phones are uneventful, having once travelled through the ears of ghosts.

I’m sinking imperceptibly but the whole house comes with me. I care very little. I believe in slow self-destruction. I believe in being self-contained. Will my ghosts go with me when I am gone?

◊

Stairway, April 21, 2016

Since her cat’s death the woman has become vague. Everything is blurred and exhausting. She constantly needs her glasses. She doesn’t wake well. Her mind wanders across the floors, rests on a window or ceiling, although something is screaming and clawing its way out of her. She is different and she wants all around her to act accordingly. She plucks a jigsaw puzzle, puts it together incorrectly and calls it done. She’s always missing.

Count every step, up or down, like a thought. Stairs have existed in some form or another for a very long time, since the ruins of Jericho. My old carpeted ones greet a closet turned into shelves near a corner that leaks rain. I am narrow, suffocating, and lead from the main floor to the basement. I am convenient. I prophesy unlinearly, seeing what uncoils from a mouth, a pool of red, or a former owner fighting with his mother and sister, or a door like a book slapping open, a motorcycle tangled in a fence, a dream filled with jokes, or a future where everything is too small. A flurry of feet is my reward, breath settles around me. And then it happens all over again.

◊

Door, April 28, 2016

What is rattling my knob wants to enter or leave. All these rooms want more future, even if it’s bloody or cursed, sad or deliriously happy. I’m a conduit. I have hinges and peepholes and locks. I can do what a room cannot. I lock people in and out. I watch other rooms. I have a trajectory.

My ancestors, the earliest known doors, are from the paintings of the Egyptian tombs. Our shapes include double-leaf, double door, French windows, half door, flush door, sliding glass door, etc. The oldest doors were made of timber (Wikipedia). The woman and her sister were kept in their bedroom when they were young and their mother was busy with men. What they wanted was inside the far kitchen refrigerator.

I bray and squeak and moan, gossiping with passersby or with a window. Beyond me could be anything and everything.

Headshot of Laurie BlaunerLaurie Blauner is the author of three novels and seven books of poetry.  Her fourth novel, The Solace of Monsters, won the 2015 Fiction Contest at Leapfrog Press and is forthcoming in October 2016.  Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review, The Collagist, Caketrain, The Georgia Review, The Best Small Fictions 2016 and other magazines. Her flash piece “Assembling an Anatomical Life” appeared in Cleaver’s Issue No. 5. This is her first published piece of non-fiction. Her web site is www.laurieblauner.com.

Image credit: Inspriation de on Unsplash

WHAT BETSY WAS by Bruce Bromley

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Large white and orange goldfish in a fish tank

WHAT BETSY WAS
by Bruce Bromley

Fin and Flesh

For years beyond counting, she lived far under water among the green things, their shine like that light before the storm comes above ground, as if seen through the veins of a new leaf, held close to the eye in a time so distant that its tale must have been whispered in her ear by a voice she no longer recalled how to speak back to. She’d look, in daylight, at the angles of the rocks that jut up from the sand below, whose bottom she was afraid to find. She’d float over the sunken ferns, the stems many-leaved and waving, watch the fish nestling there whom she called her scaly sisters, their shared kin as much a mystery to her as her own name. She thought that the moon, when it came, rose from and hovered a little above the surface of the water. That surface was the sky she knew. She’d see her hair drift ahead of her, the color of a tongue after it’s licked an apple for too long, though apples were things that she forgot, every day, except one. She forgot that she’d had a father who threw the noose of his love around her, that he condemned her to the sea because she could only refuse the rub of that noose against her skin. To fail at returning love was to be hurled into joining the heave, the burden, of water. She forgot that, once, her body didn’t taper to a fin, greeny, glinting, its fan and flap suspending her in one spot, if she chose, without end. But each year, for a single day, she remembered every part of it.

A great wind below the water hoists her up, level with what she thinks of as the sky that had filled her eyes. Pushed higher, lifted on air, she sees the water lipped by a chalk cliff coast and foaming beneath a tufty place, translucent, always moving. Then, shoved down, down, she meets the beach with its shale and pebbles and mussels, their shells opening in the sudden light. She finds her fin given way to two conch-colored legs, longer than the ferns she loved. And standing, she starts to walk across the ground that she’ll come to know, briefly, and forget again.

◊

She Looks at the Boy in the Courtyard

All this, Betsy von Furstenberg must be thinking, paused on the other side of the John Drew Theatre’s stage exit door, that East Hampton sky an iris, moodily blued by afternoon sun. Betsy imagines that the boy she turns to, whose name she believes is Bruce though it should be Bran, due to the grainy life of his curls, makes such a story of her while he sits, curled up on grass in the middle of the courtyard, waiting. He’s one of the apprentices trained to bang at the rising up of sets, to work the lights, to run over lines with actors, their memory skills gone missing, like the sun that comes and goes, like this boy’s name that wafts in and out, but out of what, she can’t wholly put a word to. He aims his eyes at her piled-up hair, dyed tomato red for the part of Mrs. Prentice in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, the words lost to her a few moments ago on stage, so that Edward Albee sent her to refocus, outside. Betsy and the boy may perform in different ways for the man she calls Edward, whom Bruce has been schooled to refer to as Mr. Albee, but both watch for the edging up of his left eyebrow, which would be partnered by thunder, if it could. It’s 1972, years after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf became a stand-in for his name, and the summer repertory company that Edward directs will fill the theater with Orton’s frenzy for all of July. That ruckus begins tomorrow, opening night. Betsy still worries at the words, at their rhythms. She moves closer to the boy, the curtain of his hair loosed across his eyes. Before running lines and standing under a linden in the courtyard’s center, its buds slowly unfolding, she scrolls in her head through the things she’s heard of him.

He’s on the far side of fourteen and fevered by a man named Stephen, who’s over thirty. They met at one of those late after rehearsal parties, in a house larger than a ship, by a wood-rimmed pool into which naked bodies plunged, like hasty dolphins. Stephen’s promise to drive Bruce home ended at his Amagansett cottage, by the dunes. You could hear wind pulling on the beach plums and piping its long vowels through the apple tree, while Stephen arced the boy’s neck back, kissing unshaven skin, and the stars seemed strung from every leaf. On the bed below Warhol’s portrait of Stephen, paid for with his mother’s money and which captured each black wave, finely gelled, Bruce misplaced what thinking was. He remembered it later, at home, when his father punched him up against the front door, and Bruce walked through the bits that were left of it. He rode his bike to the cottage, though Stephen lay in the dunes with an older boy, their sounds mingling among rolling water. Bruce broke a window, unlocked the door, and waited in bed for the Stephen who never came. And this is what love calls on us to do, Betsy thinks, shatter windows, splinter doors, and we answer it with a hunger that knows no end. Looking down at the boy while he stares up at her, Betsy sees shard-like things, dropped in the middle of his eyes. Their sound would make a shudder of the air, she knows, if he were to merge with the power to pull them out.

◊

Staging Motion

Betsy flails her arms, as Mr. Albee insists, but really she’s wondering about the horizontal people. They are those who know themselves by the speed with which they can hurry across a stage, across grass, across anything flat enough to hold them up. Betsy’s described them to Bruce, who should be Bran, in grand contrast to the vertical ones, capable of staying in a single place and looking out. At this dress rehearsal, she doesn’t know what belonging to that tribe would mean.

Was it the right decision, Betsy asks herself, to play at living in other people’s skins or to sport at raising up the Mrs. Prentice whom Orton races in a sprint, page after page, hustling for more love, more love, before Kenneth Halliwell pounded the body that wrote her into pieces, breaking his longtime lover, who couldn’t stop wanting to let him go? What does it take to decide to leave—and survive?

Betsy’s learned one of the leaving-lessons early, Bruce recalls. He sees her review it as she struts her hipbones to stage left, and Mr. Albee jabs a note into the script that he carries on his lap, which will involve a scolding.

But now she’s eight years old and in Heidelberg with her father, with her American-born mother, having left the town of Arnsberg that she can never love enough, its chorusing forest of whine, creak, crack, their stone house so wide that a day goes by before you find it possible to sniff through every inch of it and that Betsy won’t, ever again, choose to stand up in. They’ve come in 1939 to give a goodbye to what her father doesn’t want to forget, before his people, their people, ravage more lands and borders and persons than anyone could own the strength to count. Her father hikes her along what he wants to call a mountain but which looks like a hill, where the broken castle lies, numbering the time that spirals away from it. The castle’s stone, gold though seamed with grey, forecasts what will happen to her hair when she’s between husbands, many years on, her two children grown and gone to an elsewhere, without her. Betsy’s father is pointing at the Neckar that bends its arm around the city, at those pines high on the water’s other side, their needles cricket-green under snow that swoops down in a kind of time-lapse, flake by flake, her way. Booted across an ocean and in a Manhattan whose language she can’t yet master, Betsy doesn’t want the Germany that her father offered her. She wants anything except this self, inside which her parents raised her, even Mrs. Prentice, so busy scrambling for love that she never thinks to ask what might be given back to it.

What Bruce doesn’t want is the fire that yearns only for its own heat. He doesn’t want the smile that Mr. Albee flickers at his rumored bedmate of the month, at the aptly named Randy, who gets his coffee and sharpens his pencils and whose actions appear to bargain on the words, Do for me, and I’ll be done by you.

Bruce wants some mixture of Betsy’s vertical and horizontal people, as if a person could be a chord that you stare at, standing up straight on the parallel lines it clings to, the movement of its voices changing the whole that you thought was there.

◊

The Snowy Linden

They roll a water-damaged piano out into the courtyard. They’ve listened for a while, in passing, to the sound of paired bodies sticking together in the backstage shadows, most married to other partners. It’s hours after the last of Mr. Albee’s upbraidings, leveled at fumbles that will be righted tomorrow night. The moon wavers plump above the linden.  Its leaves start to rustle, though no wind stirs to push them. Betsy’s in a chair against its trunk, while Bruce plays on a cluster of chipped keys, testing their tunefulness. When she asks him to give her that song by the reedy woman who wishes she had stayed a painter, he knows Betsy means that its ache can quiet Orton’s words chattering in her head. She heard Bruce hum a few bars in the morning, and the melody’s rising curves fixed her in a doorway from which she couldn’t move, for minutes that she remembers now. Joni Mitchell’s “Willy” hymns about a man gazing through his lover’s window, unsure of his capacity for yielding to the woman next to him, afraid of finding himself like the moon outside the glass, conquered by human footprints and staked, as if he were turf. It’s about those few opening chords, moving up and down in a narrow space, gradually expanding over the piano’s range and that voice leaping widely to show how high answered feeling will take you, if you follow. Betsy concentrates on the slide of Bruce’s voice, up, up, when she sees herself, years after the death of her second husband. She sits in their Upper East Side apartment as a nurse feeds her the soupy lunch that she can manage, in a once unlikely 2015, spring flaring at the windows. The music whose source she can’t discover resembles the lone world that her eyes admit her to, at eighty-three, and it’s like sucking on a cut lime. You wake to the tart that lives in your mouth and submit to the greenness that makes a smudge of everything, later. At this moment, Bruce, who will never again be the boy or Bran, arches up his throat, about to reach the height of Mitchell’s vocal line on the words, And I feel like I’m just being born / Like a shiny light breaking in a storm, while a magpie varies its grumbly song, which springs onto a steep pitch and holds there. The linden’s a shower of snowy petals on the piano lid, on Betsy’s hair, a sugared muskiness pooling in the grass. Bruce and Betsy think of what it can mean to stand on the ground that carries every weight, the weights in the boom that the body fashions before the name of love, the weights that slam beyond hurting, those that nearly break the ones who consent to bear them. For hours, they know, the moon will speed down its stolen light, beaming over all of it.

Headshot of Bruce Bromley Bruce Bromley teaches writing at New York University, where he won the Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence. Able Muse Review nominated his fiction for a 2013 Pushcart Prize. His poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in Out Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown; 3:AM Magazine, Fogged Clarity, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Gargoyle Magazine, and in Environmental Philosophy, among other journals. Dalkey Archive Press published his book Making Figures: Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not for Us in 2014.

Of this essay, Bruce writes, “I’m interested in exploring boundary crossings, enriching what we can think of doing in fiction and non-fiction. The events in my piece are real, as are all the people, but everything is filtered through the perspectives of those involved, as experienced (in this case) by a young “Bruce” and the older Bruce, the writer, behind him.

Image credit: Brenda Helen on Unsplash

ELECTION NIGHT by Lisa Rowan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Election-Night

ELECTION NIGHT
by Lisa Rowan

I could feel his eyes on me, even though he was watching the road. “That’s private,” my father said quietly. “I don’t tell anyone who I voted for.”

He was fifty and I was on the edge of nineteen, and he was spending his night driving me back to my dorm room three hours from home. I had shown up at his door six hours prior, with almost no notice.

Earlier that day, I had paid $45 for a one-way Amtrak ticket to my tiny Philadelphia suburb. I had walked to my voting center from the train station. I had walked to my father’s house after I voted.

I had skipped class, several of them, to go home to vote, because it was my first time voting for president and I wasn’t about to miss it because the board of elections couldn’t seem to figure out how to send my absentee ballot to my dorm in time. I was sure, cross my heart, that I had done the paperwork right. It was 2004, and after the hanging chad disaster of 2000, I wasn’t willing to take any chances that my home state of Pennsylvania was going to fall other than the way I hoped.

(Two weeks later, a thick, dirty envelope tumbled out of my mailbox and onto the lobby floor. I snatched it up and waved it above my head as I stomped down the hall, a bitter victory.)

My father had a solid half-dozen reasons to be mad at me, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who held grudges. So he drove me back to Washington, D.C., a non-state that didn’t matter in this election or most elections, but still a place where you pledged your allegiance. You were red or blue or something very specific in between, and you probably talked about it with strangers without being asked.

I didn’t know what to say after he invoked his right to remain silent. He turned up the news-radio station just a bit, and I said, “But mom always tells me.” It was the worst comeback a child of parents who are no longer married could make. But she did; she always told me.

On election days when I was small, my mother hurried me into the booth with her, around seven in the morning. She was usually one of the first in our precinct to vote, because if she didn’t do it first thing, she wouldn’t have a chance the rest of the day.

We were Democrats; I knew that. My next-door neighbor, who had taken to eating dinner with us after his wife went into the nursing home, reminded me of it almost nightly across the table. He called us Dirty Democrats as he debated with my mother, always friendly but always sincere. Dad and I would glance at each other over our plates of spaghetti, as if we had cheap seats at our first tennis match and weren’t sure when it was OK to make noise. Our neighbor loved us, but he loved George Bush (the first one) a little more.

I didn’t know whom my dad loved.

For my first eighteen years, I didn’t care. Now, at year 18.75, I was concerned. Was he on my side? So there we were in the car, and I was counting mile markers, silently willing one of us to say something.

“When you vote,” he started slowly, adjusting his fingers over the top of the steering wheel, “It’s a secret ballot. You don’t get up in front of everybody to tell them who you voted for. Your name isn’t attached to your ballot. It’s anonymous. That’s the way it was designed to work.”

“You don’t tell anyone?”

“No. I don’t wear the buttons, I don’t put up any signs. I keep that to myself.” He chuckled then, just a little. “And when somebody asks me, ‘Hey, did you vote for me?’ I always tell them yes. They don’t need to know. I just tell them all yes.”

I assumed a lot about my father because of whom we were, because of where we lived. Blue state. Blue town. Union hall. But for all I knew, he was writing “Mickey Mouse” as his candidate of choice on every ballot he ever touched.

We drove three hours, and he dropped me off at the front door of my dorm, and he turned around and drove home. I don’t know whom he voted for that day. But I think he was relieved he had a daughter who cared enough to go the extra 139 miles to cast her first ballot.

And so he drove all night for me.

Lisa-RowanLisa Rowan is a writer and editor living in Washington, D.C. She co-hosts Pop Fashion, a weekly podcast that discusses fashion, culture, and creativity. Her flash piece “Kitchen, 1999” appeared in Cleaver’s Issue No. 10.

Image credit: Jake Ingle on Unsplash

UNSTEADY ON by David Wolf

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Unsteady-on

UNSTEADY ON
by David Wolf

I

Youth felt crooked then and feels crooked now. Not in the way that New York City (once home) is, was, and will remain crooked. In various ways and perhaps none, all depending on our expectations, asinine and understandable all at once. I sought to intensify my views on life as early as I could, as soon as I grew dimly aware of what that meant, jogging into the grey fuzz flying off the newly baseless conceptualizations, concentrating on a decaying tree here, a coarse cluster of beliefs there. Some of my strengths wane, some wax and those are some facts, I guess. These are patient reflections, awaiting sufficient ice to form on the semi-frozen pond of non-narrative, waiting for the body to give way to a story or two. I have encountered/endured many approaches to treating the great textbook themes: innocence and experience, conformity and rebellion, culture and identity, love and hate, life and death, given my line of “work” as a writer and a teacher of literature. “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do,” said Voltaire, who used the word sturgeon at least once in his writing to my knowledge and likely stood at a window one morning watching the rain, thinking, I mean who hasn’t? Excuse my boyish ludicality. I was a boy and it could be that the child is father of the man. I guess I’m a man. Meaning. Am I watching memory fade, lift, hover to be reborn on the winds (in the drafts) of loving truth? What a zoo.

II

Just this morning I stood before the mirror, in suit and tie, tentative as a wolf, the happy fool of my household, poised before the exit door of time. I shut off the light and apologized for all my wrongs as my image reformed in the dark. I’m telling you, in this steady-severed voice of mine, that if you would like to see me otherwise, well… OK. Let’s go back to an earlier time, before the great dissolve of steam in that dream revealing glistening melons and the Great Schism and all the experiments of friendship unfolding in the cafés around the world as I slept. Baruch atah Adonai elohaynu melech ha’olam boray pri ha’gafen. I used to be better on ladders. I still advocate precision and find many technicalities tedious, but such is the warp and woof of nothingness. Toxic rivers course through the land of lost stewards. History remains etched sizably in the glossy mead of mind’s realization that six lacks the angle of seven, as I listen for some good news about my meager retirement funds. I’m not at the end of my rope. There is a gnat on the end of rope. Resting, I hope, and not dead. “Do insects sleep?” I asked my mom one day. We were driving in our Cadillac, passing the bank that held the savings account my grandmother started for me. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Are we rich?” I asked. “Upper middle class,” she replied. I think I appreciated her precision long before I taught the appreciation of precision.

III

What more can I say? That I’ve got it bad and that ain’t good? I could say that but as far as I can tell…relatively speaking. In the huddle I was told to go long and button-hook left. I reached for the poorly thrown pass and caught it. “The lake is like glass,” my father said, commenting on the water’s surface one summer morning. I was too young to know a cliché when I heard one. My brother threw a football into the lamppost in the front yard and shattered it. I was told to say nothing so I did. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart. Poems fell from the heavens of my imagination all week like banana-peel blossoms onto the linen roads and trippy waters. Which is why I am not a philosopher. Morning has broken, right on time, sooner or later. The cities still host scads of puritanical minds. It’s a free country, as they say. Lines are forming: on faces, in box stores, in well-read thoughts. Last night, lying awake in bed, I tried to reflect on all that had happened and all that was happening in the moment and all that would happen in the entire space-time blast of the universe (including the degree to which, the day after tomorrow, I might once more seek to transcend the fragmentary and meaningless quality of life) and my head almost… exploded.

IV

And the broad countenance of settlers? What ideas, small and grandiose, blink behind the curtains of that frontier house once a face of the myth of, say, natal feelings? “You don’t have friends, you have a phone.”  “Together we’ll eat anything.” My niece said these things to her family, of her family. It was the holidays once more. Around us, meaning i.e., Love with a capital L was playfully shredding itself in the supremely financed wind tunnel of contemporary culture. What am I saying? Just another rendition of Tolstoy’s famous formulation, “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.” Which may be why I dreamed last night of a gondolier asleep and adrift across the sea dreaming of scintillating, molten freeways. Contained and shimmering in eighths, the sky fell into the lunch tray of poetry. To the tune of “The Cost of Freedom.” Ash fell as well. “Ash.”  The nickname of she who is blind justice, the light in her eyes true as her badged soul pouring fresh petrol on the smoldering city on the hill. Don’t forget.

V

The pumps are failing somewhere, no? And the text within blanks, vague, off, sleep’s recovery left to night’s assistant overcome by epic relief. Most movies these days are trash, face it, why else would they be so grossly successful? The blood tries not for new highways to soak then fade with time and traffic. Moderation is something else, I tell you. I always park in the visitor slot because who isn’t just visiting in the grand slam of things. Nixon, the French, Janet Planet. Simply surprised as I write this, so I hope the surprise in this writer is felt by you, the reader, but there are no guarantees. Frost’s formula leaves us cold again. And so another chilly week began. Who knew how it would end, how the stocks would do. How popular the Formica counters would remain. I was all ears. I decided to behave, keep the thermostat low, put on a sweater and take a nap. I awoke in the same room (of either/or light). Miasmic chimes held forth between gusts dizzy with glacial information, trimmed with the presidential motto of Business before Nothingness. It was September, securely abandoned and dismembered as Connecticut whose profiteroles proved no match for the calm felines shelving the decision to surrender to…Ted Kooser, who said, “I’d like to be on record as saying that anybody can write a poem that nobody can understand.”

VI

O ringless flings (for I am not a tree)—left my genetic fantasy at the formal, stumbling into the fog of the decentered structural so (un)consciously patriarchal and heteronormatively classist, racist, sexist, ever discursively historicized, colonial & eco-brutishly able… O. Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday, then I’ll get on my knees and pray…So I am thought, yeah, yeah, yeah. The ways of the snail came east, west, north, south, southeast, west-southwest (etc.) quickly as the holidays wound down to begin another year, finding us sprawled horribly comatose on a cracked patio strewn with canonical fodder and What ho! sniffed the saddened teachers in quasi-revelationist worship of poets and sages in bad light and some profession this is. I am waiting. I am waiting.

David-WolfDavid Wolf is the author of four collections of poetry: Open Season, The Moment Forever, Sablier, and Sablier II.  His work has appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Poet and Critic, River Styx, and elsewhere. He is a professor of English at Simpson College, where he teaches writing and literature and serves as the literary editor for Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts.

 

 

Image credit: Redd Angelo on Unsplash

BREAK A LEG by Lisa Romeo

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Horse in a stable

BREAK A LEG
by Lisa Romeo

I was doing grunt work at the stable, filling water buckets, dropping bales of hay from the loft, cleaning grungy tack, and shoveling manure.

Kate and I—lone teens among the adults who rode at the small barn—cleaned stalls while horses were turned out to run around the ring, bucking, snorting and galloping, rolling in the August dust. She’d attack one stall, I another, our shared wheelbarrow in the aisle, both of us sweating, smelly, proud to be trusted with real work of horse care.

A few months before, my father had finally bought me a horse, and the stable manager invited me to work after school in exchange for lower board. Kate, two years younger, had been around horses since she was a toddler and showed me what to do.

First, use the heavy blunt end shovel to remove big piles of manure from the stall. Next, sift stray pieces of manure and wet hay with the pitchfork, the one with a dozen closely-spaced tines, then rake the leftover shavings. On a second pass, load a wheelbarrow with fresh wood shavings, roll that into the stall, dump and spread.

Perhaps it was raining that day. Or maybe Firestarter, a rangy Thoroughbred, was recovering from an injury—ex racers were prone to that. Perhaps Melanie, his owner, asked that he be kept inside so he’d be sparkplug fresh when she arrived; she liked spunk.

Whatever the reason, I was cleaning Firestarter’s stall with him in it. I’d done this before, with my own placid horse, and others, though not the fidgety, leggy Firestarter. Kate and I were quiet, diligent, eager to get chores done before I’d climb on Poco, and she’d straddle Speckles, the pony she’d outgrown.

I headed into Firestarter’s stall, eyes on the left corner where his manure tended to accumulate. But instead of holding the shovel straight up and down, as I’d been taught to do every time when passing a horse, I held it in the extended position.

I simultaneously saw and heard it hit Firestarter’s cannon bone, hard, inches below the knee on his elegant brown leg. The shovel vibrated in my hands. How would I explain a broken leg? To Melanie? The stable manager? My parents? I watched, afraid that majestic, lovely animal would collapse. For a small second, his leg merely imperceptibly shivered, flinched. I jerked the shovel away, lunged backward into the aisle. Firestarter only inched his leg back. Kate worked on, unaware; shovels hit the wall and floor all the time. Horses shifted.

I stood trembling, waiting for Firestarter to kick me or lift his foot in pain the way horses did when they’d stepped on a nail or sharp stone. Firestarter only eyed me.

“I’m taking him out, he’s antsy,” I told Kate, who only said, “Yeah, I know.”

I tossed a halter on Firestarter, walked him down the aisle, turned and led him back to where I could secure him in crossties. He clopped on evenly, fine and solid, not just then but for days, weeks.

I hadn’t broken his leg. Yet I’d made a terrible mistake, potentially harmful to a horse, to someone else’s horse. In the moments and days after, nausea and guilt alternated with something else. A horse-crazy girl who wanted only to ride, caught a glimmer of the kind of responsible horseperson she wanted to become, and that image winked, beckoned.

Eight years later, at a horse show in Lake Placid, someone—as the story goes—a drunk groom, possibly acting on a poker bet or maybe just mishandling a gun–shot the cannon bone of the best junior hunter on the circuit, an animal worth about $50,000. When I heard about it, two hours after the elegant bay gelding was put down, four hours after someone heard the crack in the dark and the horse’s shrill, pained whinny and called the night patrol, I was riding the fifth horse my father had bought me, warming up in the dewy dawn. Police were swarming, and everyone was talking about the hideous cruelty, the horse’s sobbing young rider. I had to dismount; my hands were shaking, my breeches soaked with sweat. Then, and again when I heard the news, ten years after, about Nancy Kerrigan, I was immediately back in the stable, a shovel in my hand, a horse’s leg at the other end, a sickly swirl in my head.

I never told anyone what I had done. What I hadn’t done.

Headshot of Lisa RomeoLisa Romeo’s work has been nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in the New York Times, O-The Oprah Magazine, Inside Jersey, Babble, Under the Sun, Hippocampus, Word Riot, Sweet, Sport Literate, and in anthologies such as Feed Me! and Why We Ride. She is a founding faculty member of Bay Path University’s MFA program and the creative nonfiction editor of Compose. A former equestrian journalist and PR specialist, Lisa lives in New Jersey with her husband and sons. Connect on Twitter @LisaRomeo or via LisaRomeoWrites.

 

Image credit: Blake Hall on Flickr

 

ON PETER ADAMYAN’S “BLACKFACE BARBIE MINSTREL SHOW” by Tracy Jones

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Peter Adamyan, Blackface Barbie Minstrel Show (illustration)

ON PETER ADAMYAN’S “BLACKFACE BARBIE MINSTREL SHOW”
by Tracy Jones

Want to say “nigger” without taking the chance of getting beat the fuck up? Are you a white liberal tired of white guilt? Feeling a little transracial? Does everything about you seem black, but your skin? Do you sketch self-portraits using a brown crayon, instead of peach? Find yourself tweeting #blacklivesmatter, but still getting bussed to the #alllivesmatter side of town? What about that blackface frat party you always wanted to throw? Want to get shot for no reason? Can’t take advantage of affirmative action when applying for college? Is your blackness too hip to be down with that wigger shit?

Try Equality Snake Oil, established in 1776, rub it in your skin and let the oppression begin. Act now. Diminish your white privilege and enhance your simulated black experience. Enjoy the benefits of getting disproportionately arrested, shot, killed, and expelled from school. E.S.O. won’t crack, smudge, or run; guaranteed to give you that golden brown YOLO glow.

Warning: If you feel a burning sensation or develop what looks like permanent skin damage, please continue to use E.S.O. as instructed to get that full Nubian complexion. The screams and cries you hear when applying E.S.O. are the shackled remnants of slaves getting buried alive in the pores of your skin. Please do not mistake it for your soul hacking at its roots to dislodge itself from you. E.S.O. may turn you into a black caricature modeled after your white superiority complex. E.S.O. will not give you full lips, corn rolls, chiseled muscles, an afro or a fat ass. It will not anoint you Queen of the Nile or give you black beauty that will be copied, bleached, and become pop culture. E.S.O. will not make you tougher, jump higher, run faster, or anything else that is likely a result of big, strong slaves forced to procreate with each other to make bigger, stronger slaves. Take caution, E.S.O. will dehumanize you.

Side effects include low self-esteem, suicidal thoughts, or bouts of psychotic rage. Your blackness will be cut open, dissected and doubted. Your new history will be reduced to a sentence or paragraph. Your new ancestors will not be credited for birthing civilization. Their inventions and cultural contributions that are the backbone of American ingenuity will be whitewashed. E.S.O. may also cause you to be paranoid when driving, shopping, or jogging. If cops demand permission to enter your residence without a warrant, you may be at risk of getting shot and killed for failing to give up your rights to an unlawful home invasion. If you are standing in a crowd full of actual black people, you may be at risk of getting shot in the head. Keep in mind, said situations will give your rap career the boost and authenticity it deserves. If you are not sure that E.S.O. is right for you, please consult your social media friends and followers.

◊

I’ve been living in Japan for five years. My Japanese wife, Haruki, and I decided to start our married life here, so I could get to know her within the context of her own culture. For the first two years, I was like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in the movie They Live without those x-ray sunglasses, and the aliens still fled in horror at the sight of me. Somewhere beyond the fourth wall I could hear a faint Bob Dylan singing, “because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?”

Culture shock had me like, “Don’t tase me bro!” Consumers hugged the block waiting in line to eat this exquisite food called pancakes. They crowded the sidewalks looking at menus, waiting to be seated, all for the sweet seductive taste of an intriguing snack called caramel popcorn. Purple-and blue-haired old ladies wearing kimonos shuffled down the streets. Young adult men carted leather purses and had spiked hair that rivaled Dragon Ball Z characters. Girls with long, curly blonde hair were human dolls wearing Alice In Wonderland-dresses, detailed with embroidered red roses and ribbons with matching umbrellas, decorated stockings, and glossy platform shoes. People bowed everywhere, bobbing their heads, bending their hips as if to praise each other like Olympian Gods or benevolent members of a holy covenant. Above the red-dotted land of the rising sun, a giant omnipresent eye floats through the sky, but it can’t see beyond Japan’s shores. The eye doesn’t blink or sleep. It’s overworked and wary. It’s been conditioned to laugh, obey, gawk, stare, and smile. Through the eyes of the homogenous people below it follows me.

As I would wait in line at the grocery store, locals’ mannerisms twitched and turned. The anxiety could’ve materialized into rain. A middle-aged woman in front of me did a 180 to confront me. She had a brown mole the size of a pinky fingerprint below her right nostril. The peach hairs on her cheeks broke through the makeup layers masking her face. I could smell her breath as an aftertaste of her shampoo. I didn’t know if she was afraid of turning her back to a potential boogieman prone to savagery, she wanted to fuck, or she wanted me carried away with a hand strapped across my mouth. A gap formed in the line as it moved forward while she froze. When she realized that it was her turn she gasped, swinging around to rush towards the cashier. She folded her shoulders and fumbled through her purse, discarding the spectacle that stood behind her.

To keep my paper bag of marbles from getting wet, I filtered my reality through a self-imposed veil of willful ignorance, becoming less interested in Japan’s language and culture. Video-calling family and friends, writing assignments for Hi-Fructose Magazine, and watching The Daily Show with John Stewart was my transportable version of America. They were triggers of the familiar that virtualized home. It served me well at first. Haruki and her family had lived in the States for five years while she was in elementary and middle school. She’s been to Russia, China, and the Caribbean. Unlike me, she’s well-traveled. She went to Manhattanville College as an exchange student, where we met. Before we had a daughter, my wife and I took the idea of America’s diversity, my parents’ creed of “love knows no color,” Japan’s civility and their religion of patience, and turned our apartment into an embassy. We engaged in continuous, stop-start, at times gridlocked, at times successful negotiations, deciphering cultural differences from marital conflicts, while forging our twin values, and syncing our paths of emotional rhythm. “Forever and ever,” Haruki likes to say. “Forever ever?” I ask.

Our multi-national consulate divided itself from a nation that believes its DNA to be separate from the rest of Asia, or unique, if not at one time superior, as they believed during their alliance with Hitler. The walls of our embassy laminated their own micro cracks to soundproof our xenophobic neighbors from hearing me make my wife laugh by dancing to Kelela and Run The Jewels. The second I stepped outside I was a black unicorn that could, though probably wouldn’t, gouge out an eye when I bowed. On numerous occasions people told me that I looked like Bob Sapp. Who the hell is that? My wife wasn’t surprised when I told her.

“I’m glad we don’t have TV,” Haruki said. “You’d see blackface almost every day.” My eyes lit up like “What do you mean?” I meant, like “What the fuck?” When I searched Sapp online, his massive physique and big perspiring bald dome had nothing on my growing beer belly, chicken legs, and egg-shaped head, “Duck this dude out (-Wiki),” I rapped out loud, oh, we all look a-like. He’s a black American and former professional mixed martial artist that went from kicking people in the mouth to holding a banana like a monkey in Japanese advertisements. On TV he’s a jigaboo-acting modern minstrel who speaks strange Japanese, eats raw meat, bugs his eyes out and spears the air with his tongue, while a split screen shows Japanese hosts laughing at him. When the locals think of black people, he must be one of the first to pop into their heads, along with the other mixed martial artist turned jigaboo, Bobby Ologun.

“You go to Japan, they don’t have problems with certain folks being discriminated against because mostly everybody is Japanese,” President Obama joked when talking to a Chicago crowd about immigration. At my edge of the Western media echo chamber, the staying power of the blackface children’s book Little Black Sambo has crystallized it into a lauded classic. Japanese actor Koichi Yamadera donned blackface and twisted a head off a cat to do a rendition of “What A Wonderful World” as a tribute to Jazz great Louis Armstrong. During the first year of the first black President of the United States, a blackface “Barack” and “Michelle Obama” appeared on a Japanese variety show. “Barack Obama” is a magician saying, “Yes we can” after doing a magic trick. The clapping crowd and pundits laugh, mouths open, putting their whole bobbing heads into it. When artist Peter Adamyan showed me a collection of his work to pick from, thinking about that scene prompted me to choose Blackface Barbie Minstrel Show, a contemporary take on the face of a horrible past that, through the brush of America’s ruling class, has tried to paint itself another. It’s difficult to say whether the painting is selling snake oil, or is recruiting for the military rolled into a white-appropriated show.

Cue the twinkling suburban dream-girl music and Bob Sagat voiceover: Whoopi Goldberg is Transracial-Barbie’s token black friend and moral advisor, giving ol’ Barb street cred. “Go-on girl,” she says to Barb about escaping complacency to find true love. Meanwhile, Ken is just a simple Klansmen terrorizing coloreds at night, daydreaming of raping black girls like a real live slave owner. Barbie is a brown-toasted hot-blooded doll, twerking to pay tuition. Find out what happens when fate collides the lives of these star-crossed lovers.

Barbie and Ken’s passionate unconventional love divides dinner tables and unites multiracial bedfellows. Barb’s girl-next-door swagger and Katy Perry persona catapults Blackface Barb into primetime’s most talked about and watched TV program. This year’s Halloween saw the number of young white adults wearing blackface Barbie costumes surpass those wearing costumes that look like Orange Is The New Black character, Crazy Eyes, and like the latest unarmed black male shot dead by policemen who feared their lives were in danger. From TV, Barbie’s show gets pushed out of online’s viral womb and Barb-mania is born. The show’s makeup artist gets interviewed on daily talk shows, giving tips on how to fake black features. Mattel Toys releases Minstrel Barbie, which comes with a burnt cork and red lipstick to color Barb’s face. The new doll echoes Mattel’s past releases, including Oreo Barbie, Bull-fighting Spanish Barbie, and the wrestling action figure, Junkyard Dog, inspired by the once-real-life wrestler, a shirtless black man brandishing a chain around his neck. After rigorous animal testing, The Barbie Minstrel Show execs go for the jugular, releasing E.S.O., “when ya got that glow, ya powerful,” a blackface skin cream that paints your face a color not found in the natural world.

It’s the first painting I’ve ever owned; my luck that Adamyan was purging his old work to make room for the new. As a thank you, he shipped it to me from California, not long after I interviewed and wrote a feature about him. I was geeked to get a big package in the mail from home, let alone art. Unwrapping it, I was taken aback by the painting’s detail, which I couldn’t get from its computer image. The thin acrylic layers accentuate the contorted muscles in the characters’ faces as if they’re posing for a 3D movie poster. Mounted on my wall, they look alive, though cellophane-coated, suspended in an emotional state, motivated by the cattle prods stabbing at them from behind, “C’mon, smile, Goddamnit.” The Equality Snake Oil bottle is dyed-water, the sheen of tar sand. Uncle Sam’s grimace “wants you” to help him invade other countries and oversee war-torn regions from a drone’s eye point of view. The red and white Mattel logo behind him is a bursting bomb from an airstrike. All unintended casualties are considered enemy combatants. Framed by a red, white and blue heart, Ken and Barb are Donald Trump supporters, embracing each other for the camera, reppin’ that redneck love. Whoopi flashes her brown gleaming eyes from behind her Hollywood shades, juxtaposed with the light reflecting off each bead of her ever-looping necklace, resembling something a first-world reader would see in a National Geographic.

One benefit of our not owning a TV is that it helps preserve my faith in the progressiveness of Japan’s worldview.Adamyan’s Minstrel Show hangs above my desk as a theoretical substitute for Japanese television, but if it were an actual idiot box broadcasting a local infomercial selling a race-altering ointment, it’d probably go something like…

Want to get down black, but not be black, keeping your distinctive DNA intact? Spending hours practicing your dance routine, but wait, that public school brainwashing that made you a tool won’t let your inner robot bust a move? Got no junk in your trunk? Can’t jiggle that conservative figure? Can’t copy that sassy-sexy attitude that black girls radiate on YouTube? Want a black girl servant and a sister sex slave mistress? What about touring Japan, donning blackface, singing Motown tunes, and making money actin’ a coon? Trying to get over your fear of sitting next to that foreigner on the subway? Feeling nostalgic about the mid-90’s when you used to get your skin burnt at Blacky’s tanning Salon? Wasn’t it A Different World when you were a Ganguro girl? Are you an aspiring B-Styler, looking to live that Black Lifestyle? Ever wish you could turn into a blackface gorilla and wake your kids up on reality TV? Want to look like your favorite rapper? Is Beyoncé the true face of your character? Introducing Equality Snake Oil, invented in the Edo Period, during Japan’s most famously historical pop cultural boom. One slap of E.S.O. on your face will make you look like you’re a part of the black race. E.S.O. is perfect for taking advantage of all the good things black culture has to offer, without ever having to deal with actual black people.

Warning: E.S.O. will remain on your skin until removed with paint thinner, bug repellant, or hand sanitizer. E.S.O. will make you appear to be an exotic animal possessing bizarre homo sapien-like behavior. Please notify your co-workers, classmates, and family members that you are using E.S.O. for fear of them suspecting that you have skin cancer, or that you have turned into a monster. Strangers may assume you bleed green, and that you are scary, subhuman, and stupid, but above all, they will assume you are cool. You will not, however, be a “soul brother.” E.S.O. will not give you swagger, an afro, dreadlocks, or an onion butt. E.S.O. won’t help you rap, play basketball, or ollie higher on your skateboard.

Side effects include, but are not limited to, suffering from an acute anxiety that dwarfs the usual discomfort you get when trying to read the air in normal social situations. People may keep asking you where you’re from, prompting you to say “planet Earth.” You will be stared at, objectified and marginalized. You will be compared to a talking ape. People seeking free English lessons who have a fetish for foreigners will want to take a picture with you. Every person you encounter will ask you “Why are you in Japan?” “Are you married?” “Is your wife Japanese?” “How did you meet your wife?” “How long have you been in Japan?” “What do you do?” “Where do you live?” and “What’s your email?” Keep in mind, they will not tell you anything about themselves. As soon as said questions are neatly answered to their liking, they will walk away. They will compliment you on how well you use chopsticks. And if you speak some level of Japanese, they will say, “You speak good Japanese,” which is tantamount to white Americans telling African Americans, “You speak so well.”

If you are not sure that E.S.O. is right for you, just watch everyone else and do the same thing. If you’re still not sure, you’re not Japanese. Call now while supplies last.

Before I came here, I was told that Japan is “The black man’s paradise.” We out here, but it’s 99% Japanese. Living that one-percent-life had me spending the first three years wondering whether I was madhouse-bound. Japan almost turnt me out like Ramsay Snow did Reek. Tokyo’s architecture could be remixed palm trees built by Majesticons as offerings, trying to get right with their Infesticonian brethren. The ancient wooden temples scattered throughout this island are cowrie shells and sand dollars. The boardwalks are surreal woodblock prints by Japan’s original masters that still influence the world. Humanity is the ocean, swirling its colors until they bleed into each other, eating away at those presumptuous spaces that numb empathy and denounce cultural differences. Beautiful women stroll to the beat of the folding waves. The eye in the sky is the almighty sun, bringing light to the coldest of shivering hearts blinded by darkness. Here, God is more prone to stab me with a hand-thrown thunderbolt, than a cop’s bullet is to put me down. Still, even in paradise, the same rule applies in Japan as it does in America: White is right, but if you’re black get back.

Headshot of Tracy JonesTracy Jones is an aging skateboarder, born-again human, wanna-be photographer, recovering mind reader, and a self-published author of two books of poetry: I Think Therefore I Am and still breathing…. Winner of The Bill Gates Millennium Scholarship, he graduated from SUNY Purchase College with a BA in Creative Writing. As a freelance writer, he’s written for Mugshot, Hi-Fructose, Alarm Press, Dig In, Intouch, Tokyo Art Beat, Metro Pop, Under Pressure, and Stark Life Magazine. Originally from Orlando, Florida, he lives in Tokyo with his wife and daughter.

 

Image credit: Peter Adamyan, Blackface Barbie Minstrel Show; used with permission of the author.

 

 

ATLANTIC DYSTOPIA by Ray Scanlon

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Theme park ride called "Dizzy Dragons"

ATLANTIC DYSTOPIA
by Ray Scanlon

Halfway through my seventh decade I realize I have gained in modesty, at least in the sense of exposing skin. It is partly because I have a clearer vision of my nerd body’s attractiveness. My face is a thing of no great beauty. My dear Cheryl refers, affectionately I believe, to my toothpick legs, and my cardiologist told us that my sunken chest added risk to the standard rib-cracking heart valve replacement procedure. There is little danger that the sight of my body will be inciting lust in the general public. But, mostly, I keep it well-covered because I’m a contrarian crank playing Canute to our post-modest times, in which a twerking Miley Cyrus thrives.

Cheryl and I take our customary late-summer vacation in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. It is of course ludicrous that I pine for the discreet at a beach. Any rear-guard pro-modesty defiance that I could mount is doomed to ignominious failure. Liberal expanses of fish-belly skin that hasn’t seen the light of day for many a long Canadian winter are commonplace here. In our brave new age of no shame, things better left hidden and private are routinely foisted on the casual observer. I recoil, and my mood turns bilious.

I’m walking home uphill from the beach, navigating a short crowded stretch of the main thoroughfare between the sand and the non-maritime world, a tacky interface that seems to have expanded over the years we’ve been coming here. It provides for beach-goers’ basic needs: cash-dispensing machines, purveyors of tattoos, cheesy souvenirs, deep-fried Oreos, and electronic gaming. Signs on streetlight poles warn that you can be arrested for drinking in public. Oxygen molecules fight for their lives in a miasma of fryolator grease, cigarette smoke, and nasal French. My sneaker sticks to a discarded wad of gum.

Yet for all the wretched excess and the asymptotic approach to nakedness, the throng exhibits no joie de vivre, no laughter, not a half-smile. A father snarks at his boy, “Don’t be a whine-ass.” Pained expressions mingle with vacant masks, as if everyone is here under duress, the lucky ones under sedation. The closest thing to genuine pleasure is the screaming as the nearby roller coaster slams down the first hill into its turn. People variously trim and densely-muscled or bulbous and flabby, shirtless in low-rider shorts, or tricked out in gossamer bikinis in the one place where beachwear is unquestionably appropriate—none of them can flaunt it with verve and joy.

This crass narrow strip is what one manifestation of a poisonous culture feels like. When virtually nothing is beyond the pale, experience is cheapened to worthlessness, and it shows. There’s plenty of surliness, but we’re short on vivacity, innocence, a sense that we’re alive in the midst of something extraordinary. I fear that innocence and wonder, once bludgeoned to death, are beyond resurrection. These people have only the vaguest awareness of what they’ve lost. They are jaded. At best they are complacent sheep, and even proximity to the sea’s majesty can’t save them.

Headshot of Ray ScanlonRay Scanlon is “a Massachusetts boy. He feels lucky to be above ground, lucky to have grandchildren. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. Not averse to litotes.” Twitter: @oldmanscanlon. On the web: read.oldmanscanlon.com

Image credit: Martin Lewison on Flicker, Old Orchard Beach, Maine

MEMORIAL by Peter Tiernan

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Burial site and memorial for the TWA passengers of the 1956 TWA/United Grand Canyon air disaster.

MEMORIAL
by Peter Tiernan

My girlfriend Jackie and I came across the memorial in a cemetery near our house in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was a slanted stone slab low to the ground with two plaques on it. The smaller described a 1956 midair collision over the Grand Canyon between a TWA Constellation and a United Airlines DC-7 that killed 128 people. The larger listed the names of the sixty-six who were buried there: three Maags, four Kites, two Crewses, and so on. My eye found the groups of matching surnames, and my mind turned them into stories.

It seemed odd that this sunny patch of grass, tucked away in the aspens, looking more appropriate for lawn chairs and bocce, would be a memorial to decompression and falling and terror.

◊

Ritchie Valens died in a plane crash on 3 February 1959. The sole Valenzuela to die in the crash, his trio is rounded out by Buddy Holly and J. P. Richardson. Valens was seventeen. For my generation, he was revived in the 1987 movie La Bamba.

I turned seven in 1987. The low-budget movie Dirty Dancing became an unexpected hit on its August release, turning little-known actor Patrick Swayze into a star. Michael Jackson cemented his status as the biggest phenomenon in the universe and the idol of Crocker Farm Elementary School with the release of Bad, the first album ever to send five singles to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Some afternoons, before the busses arrived to take us home, Mrs. Kidd turned on the TV, and we watched music videos of Jackson hopping turnstiles in his leather and buckles.

The present is infallible when you’re seven. Michael Jackson and Patrick Swayze are as eternal as the sun and moon. The 1970s are as insubstantial as Atlantis.

I saw La Bamba on VHS in Kyle Stanek’s basement. The movie had swears in it, which made me nervous because Mom didn’t let me watch movies with swears. Kyle’s mom lingered in the basement, glancing at the TV as the actors volleyed the F-word back and forth. I feared she’d halt our entertainment, as my mom would have, but she didn’t.

◊

Patrick Swayze died on Bells Beach, Australia, in 1991. This was as the outlaw hero Bhodi in Point Break. A fifty-year storm, he called it: wind and lashing rain, and waves as tall as houses. This is where his friend and surfing protégé, undercover FBI agent Johnny Utah, finally tracked him down.

“Just let me catch one wave,” Swayze pleaded.

Utah un-cuffed him, and he paddled out into the awesome surf. Utah’s team thought they’d get him when he came back in, but Utah knew better.

The monstrous wave Swayze was riding crashed shut on him, and he was gone.

This ending was right. Swayze was too awesome to go out any other way.

◊

I spent the summer of 2005 in Friendsville, Maryland. It was during that summer that I first began to discover gray hairs in my beard. Also during that summer, Michael Jackson was found not guilty after being accused for a second time of child molestation. Concerts and monuments continued to memorialize Ritchie Valens, now dead forty-seven years. My friend Nate would come over to my house, and we’d watch Point Break. Neither of us surfed, but he was the best kayaker I knew—Bhodi, to my Johnny Utah. He once told me he wanted me to die in my kayak. He meant it in a good way. He wanted to die in his kayak.

“He died doing what he loved,” Nate would whisper at the movie’s finale, as though it were the ultimate expression of some principle.

◊

One summer, while working in Zion National Park, Jackie tried to hike to an old airplane crash site. After an hour of climbing up the sand and scree, she found her path blocked by a rock wall. Tiny bits of metal from the wreckage above littered the ground. Jackie took two of the larger pieces, about the size of DVD cases, home with her.

Jackie doesn’t like flying in airplanes. She imagines the time it would take to plummet to the ground, knowing what will happen yet unable to do anything about it.

In the Grand Canyon tragedy, the DC-7’s left wing and propeller struck the Constellation’s fuselage. The DC-7 was damaged beyond its ability to stay airborne, and it spiraled to the ground below. The Constellation’s tail section separated from the rest of the airplane, decompressing the interior and blasting debris into the open sky. The collision was at an altitude of 21,000 feet—about four miles. A person sucked from the Constellation would have taken about two minutes to fall to the ground, varying based on body position.

Terminal velocity in a spread-eagle position is about 120 mph. It’s faster in a streamlined position. In the movies, this is how Johnny Utah is able to catch up with Patrick Swayze in midair after jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In real life, it’s how casualties of the Grand Canyon collision might have chosen to end the terror faster, or to prolong being alive.

Whether rushed or prolonged, there was still the inescapable sensation of falling, and the certainty of lethal impact.

◊

Patrick Swayze died of pancreatic cancer on 14 September 2009. I’d shaved off my beard by then. It was an easy way to forget the gray hairs. I stubbornly believed I’d be with Jackie forever. I’d soon see the memorial with her, and hear the story of how she found her airplane part. It felt improbable that we wouldn’t be together forever.

I learned of Swayze’s illness while standing in lines at the City Market in Buena Vista, Colorado. As I’d wait with my snow peas and mushrooms and bok choy, the tabloid covers would show me what Bhodi and Johnny Castle looked like dying of cancer.

Swayze’s death was interrupted by Michael Jackson’s. One day, instead of Swayze, there was Michael Jackson on all the covers. He wasn’t waxy, as he had been for the previous decade. He was the awesome image I remembered from 1987. A few months later, Swayze finished dying, and he too was returned to his 1987 glory.

◊

Newspaper headlines and lists of names on monuments are similar in that they invite us to believe we know the unknowable.

In some cases, there’s irrefutable evidence that a crime was committed. There’s a dead body, or the money’s missing. In other cases, the only evidence is a verbal disagreement about what happened in the past. But what do we know?

We know that Michael Jackson had sleepovers with pubescent boys, and we know that we consider it inappropriate for men in their thirties to have sleepovers with pubescent boys, and we know why. We also know that Jordan Chandler, Jackson’s 1993 accuser, accused Jackson only after being browbeaten and fed hallucinogenic drugs by his father, and we know that Chandler inaccurately described Jackson’s penis as circumcised. We know that when a guy’s been accused of something twice we ought to take the allegation seriously, but we also know that the precedent of a $20 million settlement will invite more allegations whether they’re true or not.

We can arrange these details to make our own stories. I like the arrangement that does as much as possible to preserve the 1987 Michael Jackson. But nobody will ever know what happened behind closed doors. Possibly not even Jordan Chandler.

The thoughts of the 128 people who boarded two airplanes at Los Angeles International Airport shortly after 9 in the morning on 30 June 1956 are also lost. All that remains is a placid blue sky, and a block of cut stone by some grass in a cemetery in Flagstaff. We’ll never know what they thought as the DC-7’s wing split the Constellation open like a can of soup, and as they all fell to the ground at varying speeds.

A memorial is a reflection, not a portal. Here are some names, it says. You fill in the rest. Whether I memorialize outlaw heroes, FBI agents, molested children, or would-have-been Kings of Pop is up to your whim.

◊

In the early morning of 16 August 1960, as part of an Air Force experiment, Captain Joseph Kittinger departed from Tularosa, New Mexico, by helium balloon, wearing a pressurized suit. An hour and forty-three minutes later, from an altitude of 102,800 feet, the upper stratosphere, he jumped out.

Where the air is thinner, terminal velocity is faster. Kittinger reached a freefell speed of 614 mph before deploying his parachute. His descent took 13 minutes and 45 seconds. For more than fifty years, it was the record for the highest, longest, and fastest jump.

◊

Jackie discarded one of the airplane pieces when she left Zion. She took the other back to her parents’ house and put it in a cabinet in her bedroom that displayed trinkets she liked. But somewhere along the way, maybe when her parents remodeled their house, the airplane part was thrown away, or it was put in a box somewhere, never to be seen again.

I asked her why she’d kept it in the first place. She said she wanted a memento of a time and a place and an experience, and the feelings that went with it. She wanted to anchor those memories to something physical and enduring.

◊

Joseph Kittinger is now eighty-seven years old. Ritchie Valens would be seventy-four, Michael Jackson fifty-seven, and Patrick Swayze sixty-three. Jordan Chandler and I are both thirty-five. Bit by bit, the past is falling out from underneath us. Kittinger’s record has been broken. Another album has matched Bad’s five number-one singles. I haven’t spoken to Jackie in years.

I wonder if Jordan finds gray hairs in his beard. I wonder what he thinks when he thinks of Michael Jackson. I wonder whether he wishes he could buy back his anonymity. I wonder, if he could have a single moment from his life to keep forever, which one he’d pick.

There’s a picture of Michael Jackson and Jordan Chandler together, prior to Chandler’s allegations. Chandler is in the foreground, looking directly at the camera. He’s a beautiful kid. His expression is hard to read. It might be awed, smug, even bored. He’s wearing an orange button-up shirt with a stylish brown jacket over it, and a hat that looks straight out of the “Smooth Criminal” video. Jackson is slightly left of center, behind Chandler’s right shoulder. He already looks a bit ghoulish. I hadn’t remembered him looking that way until years later. In his arms, only partly in the photo, is a young girl. He’s wearing sunglasses and a black button-up shirt, and smiling just a little.

This picture lets us look back at a moment when Jackson and Chandler were only the King of Pop and an excited fan. The moment is still there. We can still see it. But with each passing year its significance evaporates more from our collective memory. The generations that experienced it are being replaced by ones that didn’t. We have the technology to record words, images, sounds—we can preserve all of these things indefinitely. But their meaning is constantly being lost.

Headshot of Peter TiernanPeter Tiernan has an MFA in fiction from Boise State University and an MA in creative nonfiction from Northern Arizona University. He was born in Maine and now lives in Idaho, where he works outdoors and spends his free time “writing, floating down rivers, and pondering the meaning of it all.”

Image credit: Chloe93 on Wikipedia. Burial site and memorial for the TWA passengers of the 1956 TWA/United Grand Canyon air disaster.

DESTROYER by Gretchen Clark

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Destroyer

DESTROYER
by Gretchen Clark

Canned laughter sounded from the television, but no one was smiling in the kitchen where I faced my mother, our dog’s metal chain cold against my palm. She was close to six feet tall, and I was only eight, but I narrowed my eyes and glared at her. “I can hit you,” I said. “I can kick you all I want.”

She looked at me, her green irises bisected by the deep lines etched in the bifocal lens she wore. “Go ahead,” she said.

I whipped the chain forward as I sprung up in my shiny Mary Jane shoes. It was a clumsy attempt; I barely grazed her shoulder. I swung again. And again, stopping only when the chain connected with my mother’s glasses. I didn’t break them, but they hung askew on her shocked face.

Earlier that morning, when I didn’t have time to finish my strawberry milk before leaving for school, my mother covered the top of my glass with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator. After school, I reached for the glass, but condensation made it slip through my hand, and it crashed to the floor of the kitchen where my mother was preparing dinner. Beneath my feet bloomed milk and glass.

The shattering shards cut through something unseen in my mother, and her mood suddenly shifted from its previous cheerfulness. The shadow across her face appeared, a shadow I had seen before. She was upset, I knew, but she’d never say so.

“Sorry,” I said, repeating my apology over and over, but she ignored me, yanking me out of the way to grab a broom and dustpan, the scrape of my mistake crunchy and sharp in my ears. There was the familiar shove of the garbage can, the slam of cupboards, the bang of the broom handle against the wall. This was my mother’s Morse code: violent gestures, often after the smallest provocation, even, yes, spilled milk. She never said what was on her mind, what was troubling her, a silence that forced me to become proficient in deciphering her unspoken messages. Waiting for this mother to appear, I was often on edge around her, anticipating the physical reaction she triggered: the adrenaline of fight or flight pumping through my body, turning my stomach to acid.

Until this moment in the kitchen, I had always chosen flight. When I saw the familiar shadow cross my mother’s face, I’d crawl under the dining room table, hide in the bathroom, or run upstairs to my room. I wasn’t concerned for my physical safety, but afraid of how the atmosphere changed during these episodes. Something radioactive and dangerous emanated from her, and it frightened me.

◊

Moments after our mother-daughter showdown, my sister Rebecca returned home from school, where she was studying to be a dental hygienist. She had temporarily moved back home while finishing up her coursework, which meant that in our two bedroom apartment, my twenty-five-year-old sister and I were roommates. I was obsessively fastidious and couldn’t stand anything unmade, unclean, or out of place. But upon her arrival, my sister staked her dingy gray flag of slovenliness in our communal space, turning my once-organized room into a hovel heaped with crusted dishes, candy wrappers, and dirty clothes. I couldn’t wait for her to move out, but today I was grateful she was here.

“Why are your glasses lopsided?” Rebecca asked our mother as she tossed her binder onto the kitchen counter.

Our mother brushed past her, taking the metal chain out of my hand. She leashed our dog, Max, and closed the door behind her with such violence that the apartment convulsed the way it did when the San Andreas fault line periodically bucked under our Bay Area home.

“Hello to you, too,” Rebecca mumbled, untwisting the plastic tie on a bag of bread.

With my mother gone, I climbed up into my father’s brown leather La-Z-Boy chair and picked up one of the many art books he kept stacked beside his seat. I chose one on the masters of surrealism and quickly lost myself in the dreamy, topsy-turvy visions of melting clocks, horses molded from clouds, and curved stairways rising up from the epicenter of a chaotic sea. This book showed me a world full of strange, illogical images and happenings; a place where a daughter hitting her mother might make sense. Mentally, I began to assemble our confrontation in the kitchen as a surrealist painting. I imagined my mother as a giant piñata covered in stripes of pastel tissue paper, suspended above me. I swung at her with the metal chain. Without much effort, domestic detritus spilled out onto the linoleum floor. A bottle of Emeralde perfume, Fire and Ice Revlon red lipstick, a Pink Lady cocktail, Oil of Olay face lotion, a pair of saddle Oxfords, and a brown curly wig she sometimes wore to dinner parties. None of these items satisfied me, so I kept swinging in my mind, not because I actually wanted to hurt my mother, but because I wanted to get at something else, something elusive, something she kept locked inside, and the only way I believed I could get to it was to crack her wide open.

Rebecca flopped down on the couch beside me. “Why is Mom so mad?” she asked, biting into her peanut-butter-slathered toast.

I shrugged, keeping my gaze on the book open in front of me.

“Gretchen Lee,” my sister prodded in a singsong tone. “What did you do?”

I ignored her and escaped back into my surrealist world, where such questioning would be turned upside down. Where the equally compelling queries would be: Why did my mother make me so mad? What had she done to me?

◊

Later that night, I woke to the sound of a heavy metal lullaby drifting out from my parents’ room. My mother always slept with some kind of music on. Tonight it was KISS’s Destroyer album.

I kicked my comforter off and fumbled my way in the dark down the short hallway that connected my room to my parents’. Dad, a dispatcher for a trucking company, was working the night shift. Mom lay on the right side of the bed, her back to me. Through the open window shone a streetlight, creating a soft yellow halo around her. Careful not to disrupt the waterbed, I sat down gently on the opposite side, listening to the music.

When the singer lamented about hearing the woman who loves him calling for him to come home, but not being able to do what she asked, I remembered being age four, crouched behind a bush in our apartment complex. I was tracking my mother through my green shield of foliage as her calls for me went unanswered and she became more frantic. I was safe, but she didn’t know that. I kept quiet, watching her suffer. I held the power to stop her misery, but something in me refused her the relief.

I held the power now. I could have woken my mother up. I could have told her that I felt bad, that I didn’t mean it. Instead, I peeled the bedding back and slipped quietly under the covers and into the empty space beside her.

My back to my mother, I fell asleep.

Gretchen-ClarkGretchen Clark grew up in the Bay Area. She holds a BA in English and teaches creative nonfiction online at writers.com. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Ray’s Road Review, Word Riot, Literary Mama, Switchback, Tiny Lights, and 94 Creations, among others. Her essay “Pink Chrysanthemum” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Image credit: George Louis on Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

RABBIT PUNCH by Lynn Houston

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Rabbit-Punch

RABBIT PUNCH
by Lynn Marie Houston

“Our wine may be bitter, but it’s our wine.”—Jose Martí

I.

I will tell you the first part of this story backwards, because that’s how I remember it. Starting with the fight. The chocolate is always an after-thought.

He was standing in front of the apartment door when I got home with groceries. My fiancé, Francis, was not yet home from work. The door to our apartment in Switzerland was at the end of a narrow hallway. Two could barely pass. Francis had said not to let his brother in when he wasn’t there. Francis had left the number to call the institution to come get him. His brother wasn’t supposed to get out, but every couple weeks he did. Francis had said his brother had killed their mother, but then he took it back. It was probably really the cancer. He repeated, probably. He’d left his brother alone with their mother and he’d pushed her, breaking her ribs. She never left the hospital. Francis’ brother was standing at the end of the very narrow hallway when I got home.

It’s difficult to remember exactly what happened. I tried to get into the apartment, he blocked my way, said he wanted to be let inside. I explained I couldn’t let him in. But the next part gets fuzzy. I’m not sure what—if anything—triggered the first blow.

I fought back. I’d never really been in a fight before, never taken or delivered a punch to the face before. After a few minutes, we were both breathing heavily from the exertion and apples from the grocery bag were rolling down the hall. I thought that he was more winded than I was. I thought I had gained on him the few seconds I needed to get the key in the lock and get inside. But just as I turned the handle, my back to him, he brought a backpack full of books down on my head. I stumbled across the threshold as he tried to push his way in. I pushed back, punched him one more time, and managed to shut and lock the door. He kicked the rest of the groceries down the hall, the raw meat unwrapping from its packaging, leaving a trail of blood.

Francis took me to the hospital. Un coup du lapin, they said. A rabbit punch. I had to wear a cervical collar until my spinal cord was no longer swollen.

A few weeks before the beating, his brother had also escaped from the institution where he was put after probably killing his mother. That visit had been more amicable. Francis called the institution and they said they would be there in thirty minutes. While waiting, I made his brother a hot chocolate, because it was cold outside and because it was his favorite drink. We didn’t have any premixed packets, so I heated milk and added cocoa powder, but I forgot to put in sugar. His brother took the first sip and made a face.

“Oh, let me add some sugar,” I said.

“No, no,” he protested, “this is chocolat de la maison.” House specialty. By which he meant it was my unique way of making it. As if hot chocolate were a jazz standard and this was my rendition. What an easy-going guy, I had thought. He drank the whole bitter cup.

I’m not suggesting that the beating he gave me a few weeks afterwards was revenge for forgetting sugar in his hot chocolate. When I made him the hot chocolate, Francis’ brother went with it, relinquishing control over the outcome. When I denied him entry into the apartment, he tried physically to change the situation to get what he wanted. What was the difference between those two scenarios? Years later, I’m still trying to understand. Not for Francis—my engagement to him ended long ago—but to know what’s right. To know when to accept with gratitude something that falls short of my expectations, and when to fight or walk away because it’s not what I want.

 

II.

Justin was supposed to call me. He’d given me three available times and I’d picked one. But no call came at the agreed upon time. I tried calling him. No luck. A half an hour later he posted a picture to Facebook—he was out at a bar playing pool. The next morning I got an apology email. He was sorry. It just slipped his mind. There was so much going on. He’d forgotten to tell me this, but his friend Jeremy was moving in while he renovated the house he’d bought after leaving his wife. Justin was busy preparing to move him in.

The next week I got a package in the mail from Justin. Some items he’d canned—chili, tomatillo salsa. I wrote an email thanking him, but I suggested in a pretty snarky fashion that it might have been better if he just hadn’t been so absent-minded about calling when he said he would; then he wouldn’t have had to send a gift in the guise of apology. At the time, I just assumed that the canned goods had been sent to me because he had to make pantry space for Jeremy.

Justin and I would continue to be best friends for another two years and he would never give me another meaningful homemade gift again. When our friendship was falling apart, I told him that I regretted I hadn’t been more grateful about the canned goods he’d sent as clearly that was some threshold for us in terms of being kind.

“Oh Lynn,” he said, “I forgave you for that long ago. I just learned not to expect you to be grateful for anything I did.”

Rabbit punch—a blow I had not seen coming. A totally unfair judgment, but the kind that is invented by a person who doesn’t call when he says he will and doesn’t like being told when he’s been remiss. Justin had a history of this: he would lead women on with promises he couldn’t keep, and when they expected him to follow through, he would find reasons to label them crazy.

For four years I fought to try to mold that relationship into something that wasn’t painful to me. For four years I kept asking him for something sweeter. But I finally reached my limit when I realized that this was his pattern, and it had little to do with me. Justin wasn’t capable of being anything other than a toxic presence in my life, like he was inevitably in the lives of so many other women. Including his wife, who’d had to turn to someone outside their marriage in order to feel loved. I cut all ties with Justin, but the four years I held on caused serious damage to my self-esteem.

I’ve often wondered how things would have been different if I’d just been grateful for the non-friendship he gave me, just accepted his “house specialty” friendship. If I’d just stayed silent about how far he fell below my expectations of respectful behavior, how far he fell below even his own stated intentions.

 

III.

Okla had been trying to date me since we first met in person at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in April. Because I’d experienced such peace in my life after ending things with Justin, I was on high alert for red flags, unwilling to get involved in anything that brought any drama back into my life.

Okla finally convinced me to spend the weekend with him after hours of passionate email conversation about literature and writing. There was some talk of sex, too.

“I’m very good at oral sex,” Okla wrote to me. “Like, incredibly good at it.”

“Words, words, words,” I wrote back.

“I will show you,” he promised.

It was like he wanted me to pat him on the back for having performed oral sex on other women in the past, ones who had seemed to enjoy it. Not all women liked the same things sexually. To assume they did was to erase any individual differences that made them people. And Okla wasn’t asking me what I wanted in terms of oral sex. He wasn’t asking me what I liked or didn’t like. This wasn’t about me at all. He was asking that I fawn over his ego. Proud of his “house specialty” oral sex, he was suggesting that I would have to accept it whether or not it was what I wanted.

I was prepared not to accept it. I went to visit him that weekend fully prepared to voice what I wanted. To the left, Okla. More gently. We never even got there, despite his promise to “show me” with more than words how skilled he was.

The first night I was exhausted from the drive and we fell asleep after talking. The second night, we were making out and he asked me for oral sex. I obliged, thinking it was my turn next. But after I was done, he rolled over and went to sleep.

Rabbit punch—an unexpected blow. So to speak.

I lay there in the dark listening to his snoring for a long time, wondering what it all meant. Then I got up and took my computer to his living room, where I began this essay.

When I got home, there was an email from him saying he’d had a great time and that he knew he owed me an orgasm. I never spoke to him again.

 

IV.

My birthday is in a few weeks. And I’d like to think I’m making some kind of progress, not just ex-ing out days on the calendar.

The therapist I’m seeing talks about expectations as if they were a yard stick. When she does, she always gestures with her hand.

“Here were your expectations of Justin and Okla,” she says, reaching her hand high up into the air of her office, “and here was what they were capable of.” She drops her hand as close to the tapestried floor as she can. “That’s a big difference.”

I nod silently from the couch.

“You have to meet people where they are,” she concludes for me.

“I’d like to know how to do that,” I say.

Just this past week, I went on two first dates in the span of three days. The first guy brought me flowers. We had a very pleasant chat over dinner. But he texted me seven times on my drive home, while he was also driving. The next morning, I woke to a barrage of long, flowery text messages about the “pools of my eyes” and the “cinnamon waterfall of my hair.” He tried calling me later that day. When I didn’t answer, he left a long voicemail. Then he texted immediately afterward to ask when he could talk to me on the phone. The next morning I let him know that there wouldn’t be a second date. I could see my therapist’s arm with her hand extended—this time, my expectations had been low on the yard stick, and his behavior had been over the top. I’d only needed a few hours to see the disconnect.

I met William later that afternoon. There were no flowers, but there was lots of laughter. Text messages afterward were sparse but meaningful. We chatted off and on, going for a couple of days with no contact, and then we met for a second date, where we spent three hours telling our life stories over tapas and a bottle of wine. William says he wants to see me again, but he seems in no hurry to schedule anything. For now, I’m granting him this distance, accepting what he has to offer. That could change if the relationship develops. The yardstick my therapist talked about is actually a moving target. But I feel like I’m figuring out something important about how to tell when a man means me emotional or psychic harm and when he is simply doing his best, even if that falls a little below the expectations I initially brought to the relationship.

Lynn-Marie-HoustonLynn Marie Houston holds a PhD in English from Arizona State University. Her writing has appeared in Word Riot, Squalorly, Full Grown People, Bluestem, and other journals, as well as in her collection of poetry, The Clever Dream of Man (Aldrich Press), which won 1st place in the 2015 Connecticut State Press’ literary awards. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Southern Connecticut State University and runs Five Oaks Press.

CUTTING CORNERS by Marya Zilberberg

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Cutting-CornersCUTTING CORNERS
by Marya Zilberberg

For a butter knife it was sharp. My grandmother must have had it for a long time. Its blade was truncated by a fracture, rust collecting at the end of its one-inch length, at the site of the break. I was never sure if she kept it because of some sentimental attachment or a deep-seated sense of Soviet scarcity made more acute by the still fresh memories of the deprivations of the Great War, which was only two decades behind her. I was attached to my distorted reflection looking back at me from its heavy silver handle.

She used it for everything: to butter bread, to peel and slice apples, to shred the beef she boiled for my grandfather as he lay ravaged by a stroke, immobile, mute on the bed in the living room that smelled of coarse lye soap. She fed him tiny bites from her own hands, and he swallowed compliantly. Unable to coordinate chewing, sometimes he choked, and she would jump out of her chair to slap him between his shoulder blades, a ritual my mother still performs when my children swallow carelessly, despite my insistence that a) it’s an ineffective way to treat choking, and b) you only need to worry if they cannot cough. But she never accepted some of these newfangled medical ideas. Or inaction.

The knife seemed never to leave my grandmother’s hands. She would sit in the kitchen talking with my mother, slicing a block of doktorskaya*, lining buttered bread with the thin rectangular pieces of meat, and berating my mother for marrying a rag of a man who could not stand up to his own mother. My eyes would follow the sun’s reflection from the handle as she deftly moved the knife around the plate, until the grown-ups noticed and shooed me out of the kitchen, so they could continue their grown-up conversations.

She would have brought it with her when we emigrated in 1976, if it hadn’t disappeared one day, five years earlier, when I was nine. Or maybe I just stopped noticing it after that gathering at our communal flat.

People poured in on a weeknight. Unusual, I thought. Then there were the looks, men and women towering over me, glancing at each other as they slid their thumbs down my cheek or held my chin briefly, making searching eye contact, walking away sighing. There were whispers and vodka and sliced salami with pickle wedges, and deviled eggs and potato salad, and pickled herring, all on a starched and ironed table cloth, all prepared by my mother in the dead of night after work and before I suspected anything. I stood there, frozen, knowing that I wasn’t supposed to know, knowing what they all knew, but still having the option to lie to myself because no one had actually told me.

What happened to that knife? Did she bury it with my grandfather? Did she fling it out the window, outraged that he could just give up like that, leave her? When he got sick, she made him her life. Now he was dead. Who needed a knife?

I ask my mother why they didn’t tell me. She says it was a mistake and looks away. I smile a tipsy smile, because I cannot ask this question sober. And we just sit there, she and I, in my kitchen, with the silverware glistening between us in its steel tub on the tabletop.

The silence will not last long. I can count on her to break it.

*A type of bologna more regularly available in the Soviet food stores of the Brezhnev era than any other deli meat.

Marya-ZilberbergMarya Zilberberg came to the US at fourteen from what was then the Soviet Union. She now lives in Western Massachusetts, where she splits her time between numbers and words, the latter mostly in English. By day she studies the spread of superbugs and ponders conundra in evidence-based medicine. By night, she gives in to her creative impulses. She is the author of the book Between the Lines: Finding the Truth in Medical Literature. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Six Hens, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Vox Poetica, The Blue Hour, and Boston Poetry Magazine, among others. She blogs at Arkadia.

 

NOT EVEN A GLASS OF WATER by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Black-and-white image of Harold and Matilde Bolton on their wedding day

NOT EVEN A GLASS OF WATER
by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Think of this as an old movie. Black and white and crackling.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1959, while the businesses along Chapel Street in downtown New Haven were emptying out for the glittering holiday, the staid New Haven accounting firm of Rosen & Rosen was receiving an unexpected visitor. The receptionist was gone for the holidays and one of the partners, my father’s cousin David Rosen, got the door for a young woman in a state of great agitation. An old woman, the girl’s aunt, trailed nervously behind, fanning herself with a train schedule. The pair had traveled from Grand Central Station.

The older woman was there for the younger one, her niece Matilde. And Matilde was there for Harold Bolton. Three weeks earlier Harold had left her at the altar in Havana.

Matilde screamed in a thick Cuban accent, “Where is he?” She was carrying a B. Altman shopping bag that ripped as she extracted a crumpled white silk gown. The gleaming silver that followed registered as a butcher’s knife.

Hijo de mala madre. Son of a bitch. Matilde said it over and over in Spanish until she had no more breath.

The aunt, la Tía Ester, muttered in Ladino: “Dio de la Zedakades.” God of righteousness.

Harold emerged from his office at the sound of the commotion. There was Matilde smoothing the handmade wedding dress against her body. This was just the kind of erratic behavior that was among the reasons he had backed out of their wedding at the last minute—that, and his parents’ appalled reaction to his intention to marry a Cuban girl almost half his age. A girl who didn’t know a salad fork from a dinner fork. I imagine her Latina volatility was part of her allure for Harold—a sturdy, only son of Jewish immigrants born in Ukraine who insistently cultivated an American identity. But that afternoon, in the offices of Rosen & Rosen, Harold had no doubt that Matilde was capable of cutting herself or even of stabbing him to death.

Yet Harold also knew that Matilde had reason to be furious. What he had done had been uncharacteristically cowardly, even if it had been for the best. Harold had long ago given up on the idea of marriage, and, at forty, he felt too old to start a family. But when Matilde swept into his life just four months ago like high winds, he latched on to his dreams of marriage and family.

The pressure on Matilde to marry, particularly from her father Jacobo, must have been suffocating. At twenty-four, she should have been long married to make room for her younger sister Raquel who was already engaged. But after Matilde had finally found her groom, a telegram from his parents arrived at Numero 20 La Calle Merced. It said, “Nuestro hijo no puede carase con su hija, Matilde. La Boda esta cancelada.” The wedding in Havana was cancelled a little over three weeks before the December 20, 1959 date.

Matilde’s mother had been pinning her daughter’s wedding gown when Matilde read the Western Union message to her. Matilde keened, “Ay Dios.” Her mother nearly swallowed the pins.

◊

Harold grabbed Matilde, but she wrenched free of his grasp in the reception area of Rosen & Rosen. She dropped the butcher’s knife as her gown fell limply to the floor. She knelt and pulled off the brooch strategically placed on the gown’s neckline to hide just enough cleavage to satisfy her Old World father.

“Look at this,” she hissed at Harold as she caressed the brooch. “It sparkles like the stars—the stars that lined up to cause my misfortune.”

Matilde laid out the gown on the floor so that it looked like the chalk outline of a murder victim. She made sure she had Harold’s attention before she slowly, deliberately raked the dress with her knife in a semi-successful attempt to cut long, raw tourniquets.

“I’m calling the police,” Harold announced. He started dialing a black rotary phone perched at the edge of the empty receptionist’s desk. The dial sounded hoarse, like a smoker. “The police,” he repeated, pointing at the receiver. “Policia.”

He was pretending much the way he would when I was behaving like a recalcitrant child, and he said he had my teacher on the line. But Matilde was unmoved. Her Tía Ester knew that there weren’t many options for an unstable girl from an unstable country. Ester was suitably alarmed and panicked as she shoved the mutilated dress back into the crumpled, torn shopping bag—a bag whose exuberantly scripted B. Altman logo echoed the bold strokes of Harold Bolton’s distinctive signature. With Harold now pointing the receiver at the two women as if it were an officer’s pistol, David Rosen herded Matilde and Ester into the hallway and backed them into the elevator.

“God help both of you,” David Rosen said as the elevator doors closed.

◊

Before the wedding gown was a stand-in for my mother’s homicidal fantasies, my parents had married in a separate civil ceremony as required by Cuban law. A Justice of the Peace in New Haven’s City Hall married them in November of 1959. It was the first time Matilde realized that her distinguished groom was older than the thirty-five years he led her to believe. She gasped less from the sting of being lied to than the superstitions that anchored her life. “We won’t see our fiftieth anniversary,” she cried. They nearly didn’t make it to their first anniversary.

◊

My Abuela Corina had painstakingly mended the dress and arrived with it from Cuba the day before the sparsely attended ceremony on March 20, 1960—four months after City Hall and three months after the botched attempt at a formal wedding in Havana. My mother marched down the aisle of the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue on Central Park West in Manhattan, skirting the annulment my father had initially wanted.

I needed to see the aisle down which they had walked all those years ago. On a late January afternoon in 2012, after I had missed my train back to Boston, I hailed a cab to go to the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, where, fifty-two years earlier, my parents had married. Off I went against a tide of red brake lights. The driver said that he didn’t have any ones or fives. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get to the synagogue, so I paid twenty dollars for a nine-dollar ride. On the cold, dark cab ride, I felt a mixture of longing and curiosity and excitement, as if I were about to go back in time and lurk on the sidelines. I needed to see the place to picture the dimensions of my parents’ wedding, to create pictures that were not taken during the actual ceremony.

My parents posed for a formal portrait a week after they were married. My father wore a dark suit with the white hyphen of a handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket. My mother, already pregnant with me after her wedding night, wore the dress whose plunging neckline was held in check by the sparkling broach. In her white-gloved hands was a cascading bouquet of flowers. Her eyes were rimmed in kohl. Instead of a veil, an embroidered triangle of cloth comes to a point with a pearl at the center of her forehead, creating a lacy widow’s peak. The lipstick unnaturally dark; my father’s cheeks unnaturally pink. They do not touch each other; they do not smile. I have never seen a photograph of them kissing or holding hands. I have never seen them look happy.

The entrance to the synagogue was locked, but through one of the door panes I saw a custodian vacuuming.

“No puede be here,” he said through the glass. “Servicio en six-thirty.”

“Por favor,” I pleaded. “My parents were married in this synagogue mas de cinquento años.” I hoped that such a long stretch of time would impress him enough to open up the chapel for me. “I need to see it. Muy importante.”

He opened the door and motioned for me to put my bag down—my wallet, iPad and train ticket were transferred to this man’s possession. I took off my coat and reflexively put up my hands as if I were being arrested.

“Rapido,” he whispered. As if sending me on a reconnaissance mission he added, “Buena Suerte, Señorita.” Good luck.

I sprinted around the corner into the plush, dark chapel where I stopped at the bima—the raised platform from which the service is conducted—in the middle of the small room. My parents’ huppah—the marriage canopy—must have consisted of four poles to hold up the tallit—the prayer shawl—borrowed from the synagogue and erected in front of the reader’s lectern.

The huppah symbolizes the first home a married couple shares. It is also a stand-in for the tent in which Abraham and Sarah welcomed visitors passing through the desert. With the tallit doubling as the symbolic roof of this makeshift home, it is opened on all sides to represent the couple’s vulnerability to life’s vicissitudes.

As bride and groom, my parents faced the ner tamid—the eternal light above the ark. The Ten Commandments in this chapel were etched in gold on whitewashed tablets. This was a traditional synagogue where men and women sat separately during services. In the style of a Sephardic Jewish synagogue, the women were relegated to the raised benches along the side rather than corralled behind a makeshift wall at the back of the room. But, for this wedding, the Boltons had demanded that men and women sit together. I imagined my grandmother muttering, “My poor boy,” as my grandfather patted her hand. “It’s hard to marry off a son,” he would say.

A few people, just ten—barely a minyan, a prayer quorum—witnessed my parents’ marriage. Among them were my grandmother and aunt, surely elegant in white gloves, hats perched on coiffed hair and shoes fastidiously dyed to match their outfits. My grandfather and uncle would have worn sleek, dark suits with pocket-handkerchiefs like my father. Abuela was too cold to take off the coat she borrowed from my mother’s landlady.

All eyes were initially on my father who stood wide-eyed under the huppah, looking for his bride beyond the same shiny horizon he stared at from the deck of his supply ship during the war. Grandma Bolton called his piercing gaze the “Asian stare.” According to her, it happened to men who were stationed on ships in the South Pacific for months at a time. Their hopes and dreams lay beyond where the thin blue line of ocean met an illusory land mass.

In my mind’s eye, my mother enters the chapel draped in white silk. The significant train of her gown dwarfs the aisle, a long veil covers her face, and flowers tremble in her gloved hands. If the wedding portrait is any indication, my father had the expression of a dial tone throughout the brief ceremony. When the wedding was over, Abuela said that she knew of widows whose second weddings were more joyous.

“Señorita, por favor,” said the custodian interrupting my reverie. Please, Miss. He ran his fingers through his pomaded hair, but I wasn’t quite finished with the chapel. I could see my father shift his weight under the huppah and feel around in his pocket to make sure that he had the white gold band to slip on my mother’s index finger. He also checked his breast pocket to make sure he had the transliteration of the Hebrew words Jewish grooms have said to their brides for centuries.

Harai et mekudeshet lee b’ta ‘ba zi k’dat Mosheh v’ Yisrael. Be sanctified to me with this ring in accordance with the laws of Moses and Israel.

And with that, after seven months of stormy courting and one canceled wedding, my parents were married. After the ceremony, there was no reception, no celebratory dinner with family.

“Ni un vaso de agua,” my mother always says.  There wasn’t even a glass of water.

In accordance with Jewish custom, my father had stepped on the only available glass.

Headshot of Judy Bolton-FasmanJudy Bolton-Fasman is an award-winning writer whose creative nonfiction has appeared on The Rumpus, Salon, Brevity, Cognoscenti, Lunch Ticket, the Rappahannock Review, and 1966: A Journal of Creative Non-Fiction. This essay is based on Judy’s unpublished memoir The Ninety Day Wonder. She lives and works outside of Boston.

Image credit: Harold and Matilde Bolton on their wedding day. Courtesy of Judy Bolton Fasman

THE BABY TRAIN by Bryanna Licciardi

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baby in a mug

THE BABY TRAIN
by Bryanna Licciardi

“I’m not much of a kid person.”

“Do you mean infants? Toddlers? Young children?” the therapist asked.

“All of the above?”

“I see,” she said casually, writing something down in her yellow notepad, though we both knew the question was anything but casual. In this society, it’s always asked shouldering the answer, because everyone wants children, even if only “someday.” As a woman who has never enjoyed the company of children—who in fact has been known to hide when she hears one coming—I’ve found it easier to just evade questions like this with humor. However, this was a serious decision I was about to make, so I answered truthfully.

Without looking up, she said, “And I’m assuming you’re not married?”

Assuming? “Yes, I’m single.”

“Why do you think you’re single?”

What kind of question was that? Because men suck at dating me? Because I suck at dating them? Because I’ve become an expert at not dating?

Instead, I said, “I’m a virgin. And guys tend not to know what to do with that.”

Her face was priceless—mouth open, eyes crooked and bugging. She looked stunned, like she’d just discovered the missing link. “Virgin…” she mumbled. “And you’re twenty-four?”

I nodded.

She leaned forward, pen pressed hard onto her notepad, and spewed out textbook clichés trying to unlock the secret: was there a history of trauma; was I controlled by the church; had I any daddy issues? But alas, as hard as it was to believe, I was a virgin simply because I’d never had sex.

“Well, being in your…situation…as an egg donor is unusual. Do you think that would affect your inclination to meet the child?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, glad to finally have a question I felt comfortable answering. “I couldn’t see the kid as being mine in anyway. No attachment; nothing to compel me.”

“And why do you want to be a donor?”

“Have you tried being a professional student lately?” I scoffed. “Graduate school is expensive. I mean, I’m glad I can help people by doing this, but honestly, I need the money.”

She handed me a business card in case I ever wanted to “talk about things.” I looked at it curiously during the elevator ride down. In the lobby, I threw it away and walked out of the big revolving doors.

◊

After the doctors and agents confirmed my health and sanity, I was transferred to a lawyer because, apparently, the legalese behind egg donation is elaborate, and I’d need representation. I scheduled an hour with the lawyer, thinking that an hour was a bit ridiculous. Until, that is, I opened the computer the next day and watched the contract download for almost twenty minutes. In it, every detail of every possible scenario was discussed: I’d only get paid if I followed procedures exactly. If the baby came out deformed, it may or may not be as a result of my eggs. I could be investigated accordingly. Do I understand that the eggs become the parents’ property, to do with as they please? Though the donation is anonymous, the child has a right to request my identity after it turns eighteen. I have a right to decline…

Every section, subsection, and sub-subsection grew more specific. Around page thirty-eight, I finally realized how serious this was. I was giving away a key ingredient to life. I was giving them a baby, essentially. This child would have my freckles, my eyes, maybe even my cowlick.  It was surreal to think of some kid growing up with my genes, never knowing that she (I’m picturing a girl) came from me. Would I ever want to meet her? Even though I have such unease around children, with their sticky fingers and lack of social skills, I thought I wouldn’t mind seeing her. Though maybe just in a picture, happy with her parents. That way I’d feel good about what I did. Unless she came out distorted or psychopathic. I would not take credit for a serial murderer.

Once my contract was finalized and signed, the pharmacy delivered a very expensive egg-making kit. I set alarms, placed my hormones in the fridge next to the orange juice, had my last glass of wine, and mentally prepared for what was to come.

◊

Each morning, for one month, I woke at dawn to inject myself with synthetic hormones. The nurse explained that the goal of these treatments was to over-stimulate my ovaries so that the lab had plenty of chances to get it right when combining eggs with the father-to-be’s sperm. The nurse mentioned side-effects but brushed them off as no big deal. Seeking reassurance, I scoured online forums for others who’d also taken these injections. I had a hard time finding anything written by donors but found a few from women who’d taken the same medication to get pregnant: Weight gain! Strange food cravings… Migraines… I never stopped peeing… Forget sleep!  It didn’t take me long to live out their complaints for myself.

As someone who’s afraid of needles, I never thought I would be capable of sticking myself with one. To my surprise, I did it with little hesitation for thirty mornings in a row, barely awake. I sat on the toilet, grabbed a handful of stomach, and stabbed. Though my instinct was to get it over with quickly, fear that I’d mess up slowed me down. I’d try to go back to bed, rubbing the sore spot on my stomach, but sleep was often too far gone.

My nightly shots—the hormone stimulators—were even worse. The needle was thicker and the syringe harder to push. After a week, my stomach grew blotchy with bruises. It got harder and harder to find a spot to inject that wasn’t too tender. I moved on to my thighs, but ran out of room there, too.

After almost three weeks, discouragement began to tinge my thoughts. I kept trying to tell myself, One month, one less student loan. Because, after all, this decision to donate began with my mounting debt. They say everything in your life is there for a reason. Graduate school was making me a better (though broker) writer. What was this donation doing for me? I decided my mom would be the best person to talk to. She has always accepted me for who I am, even if she doesn’t understand my choices.

Over the phone, I whined about my bloated and bruised belly, my sporadic emotions; how I actually cried when a contestant from The Voice got eliminated. She paused, hmming, and said, “You know, if we could only get some semen in you, you’d be having triplets at least…and I’d have my grandchild quota.”

◊

Becoming a donor began devoid of any emotional entanglement. Helping out a couple in the process was a karmic bonus, but my incentive was mostly selfish. And because it made my parents, aunts, and cousins extremely uncomfortable, their incessant questions into when I would have children finally ceased—definitely a perk. Sure, there were other motives: guilt that I might mess up the couple’s child; an urge to prove that my body belonged to me, that I was responsible, strong, and could see whatever I wanted to through to the end.

After I started the hormones, started going to the hospital every morning for testing, I noticed my commitment deepening. I was vital to this family. My body was vital to this family, and I needed to take care of it. I read the ingredients on food boxes, avoided caffeine and steered clear of liquor stores. I went home after class because I was too tired; called it a night when parties got too smoky. It became a bizarre relationship—me and my eggs. I was the mother to a tiny thing, or to several tiny things. Though I wasn’t caressing my stomach and singing it lullabies, I knew that my eggs needed care.

I felt out of place. No one else I knew was going through this. This was especially true in the fertility clinic waiting room, a place I visited all too often during my donation. Couples sporting eager faces filled the room. During my first ultrasound visit, I sat waiting impatiently. My foot bounced so hard that my shoe kept falling off. I flipped through the pages of a People magazine. The woman next to me, who appeared to be in her mid-thirties, took notice of my jittering.

“Your first time here?” she asked, glancing not-so-discreetly at my belly. I shrugged, smiling back, not wanting to lie but realizing she assumed I was either pregnant or trying to get there. After a few seconds, she said, “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

I could guess what she was thinking: How old is she? What’s wrong with her? Is she like me? Where is the father? I didn’t belong in that room with those people. When no one was looking, I slipped my silver JCPenney ring off of my right hand and onto my ring finger. I held out my hand and looked at it, laughing quietly to myself. I left it there until my procedure ended.

When they finally called my name, I was relieved to leave the public eye. The nurse, a pretty woman not much older than me, led me down the zigzagging hallway and into a dark room. In the middle of that room was the chair. Any woman who’s gone to a gynecologist knows the chair. It’s high, usually with a stool beside to help you climb, draped in thin paper, equipped with the dreaded stirrups at one end. A large machine was set up next to the chair, its screen blinking dark blue. My nurse pointed to a bathroom door on the opposite side of the room. “You can leave your clothes in there,” she said, handing me a hospital gown. “Take off everything below the waist.”

I felt ridiculous climbing into the chair, paper crinkling underneath, my gown tangling and slipping open behind me. The nurse placed my feet up in the stirrups and entombed my legs with a sheet. She unsheathed the ultrasound probe from a drawer. It was a thick, long, white, rounded weapon-of-an-instrument covered in clear plastic. When the nurse handed it to me, telling me to guide it in myself, I looked at it gravely.

“No. You don’t understand,” I said weakly, laughing, seeing how awkward this conversation was about to become. “This isn’t going to fit. I’m still…I’m pretty much…I’m a virgin.”

“Really? Well,” she said, hesitating a bit. “There might be some slight tearing, but it will go in. I promise.”

Liar. That’s what I tried to say, but then the probe moved its first millimeter, and a scream/laugh/gargle came out of my mouth instead. I pretended it was funny because she kept laughing. I’m sure it was, to her. Especially if you ignore the blood I had to wipe from between my legs.

◊

As luck would have it, the extraction surgery fell on Thanksgiving Day. The nurse called me two days prior with instructions to stop the hormones that day and details to administer one last shot. The big one. They called it the hCG, or in layman’s terms, Human Chorionic Gonadotropin. I looked it up, and, according to the web, its job was to force my eggs to tear from my ovary wall in preparation for surgery. Because this shot needed to go all the way into my muscles, the nurse said that the buttocks would be the best injection site, and she recommended I find someone to inject it for me. Since it was a holiday, everyone I knew was leaving town, leaving me alone to put this shot in my butt.

One of my roommates, who was studying to be a nurse, offered to set up the syringe before leaving town. She pulled it out of its box, and I almost fainted. The needle itself, not including the syringe, was the length of my hand and almost as thick as a pencil. As she mixed the medicine, she explained that since I couldn’t reach my butt, I’d have to inject this monster into the next thickest place—my thigh.

“You’re pretty small,” she warned. “So be really careful not to hit any bone. That could do some serious damage.”

I watched all of my roommates leave and, once alone, set my alarm for 2:40 AM. I thought it might be easier to stay up but I didn’t make it past midnight. When my alarm went off, I was awake instantly. I ran to the fridge, snatched the ready-made shot, and jumped back into bed. With the lights on and my legs spread out before me, I stared at the left thigh, the chosen victim. How fragile it looked; how much it depended on me to keep it safe. Before I could chicken out, I stabbed.

After every last drop had left the syringe, I slipped the needle out. When the last of it escaped my skin, a steady stream of blood followed. I hadn’t prepared for that and tried to stop the bleeding with my hand while I grabbed the nearest thing, a yellow bandanna, to tie around my thigh. When I woke up the next morning, I had a bloody yellow tie-dye bandanna tied to my leg, and a limp. My thigh was swollen and sore. I spent the day in bed, massaging it, avoiding any thoughts of my impending surgery, of what I was doing to myself.

◊

I arrived at the hospital in the early afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, aware that families across the country were already on their second helpings of casseroles and turkey legs. The hospital was busier than I’d anticipated, and it took a while to check in. I’d only gotten a few hours of sleep, so I was tired, and luckily so. Sleepiness overrode my nerves, though the nerves built up the longer I waited.

Eventually, a nurse called Kathy led me through double doors covered in cautionary signs. “WARNING: NO PERFUMED CREAMS, LOTIONS, OR DEODORANTS BEYOND THIS POINT!” I couldn’t remember if I’d put on any deodorant and discreetly sniffed my armpits.

Kathy ushered me to an empty bed and gave me a gown to change into. As she prepared the anesthesia, she asked me to hold out my arms so she could find a “juicy” vein. She gasped at the bruises on my arms. “Oh, honey.”

I looked down at them, seeing the many needle marks left behind from the countless blood tests I’d been subjected to. Her reaction startled me, and, whether from exhaustion or fear, I started shaking. She tried to get the anesthesia into place, but none of her needles found a vein. Three stabs and bloody swabs later, Kathy gave up. “You’re too cold and dehydrated, and your veins are too beat up,” she said, rubbing her warm hands over my cold ones. Before she left, Kathy wrapped my arms in a blanket and placed small heating pads in my hands. I was so weak I could barely hold onto them, and the weakness felt like defeat. A few minutes later, Kathy came back with a tall, very pale man, an anesthesiologist, who quickly slipped the needle into my forearm. He spoke with a European accent I couldn’t place and told jokes without smiling as he followed Kathy and me to the operating room.

While the nurse secured my IV drip, one of the doctors helped me climb onto the operating table and flung my legs from the side of the table into very tall stirrups. I didn’t think I could reach them but somehow slid in my legs up to the calves. As I tried to ignore the fact that my lady parts were now very exposed, I noticed how many people were there with me. I counted at least eight faces, half-concealed by masks, before the anesthesiologist slipped a plastic mask around my face. This was beginning to feel like torture.

“Please put me out,” I murmured to him, my voice muffled by the plastic of the mask. There was a slight, bitter smell I recognized as the laughing gas from the dentist, but my nerves kept me alert. “I don’t want to be awake for this.”

“Ah,” he said in his quiet accent. “Since this is your holiday, I make you a special cocktail. It tastes bad, but you will no care.” In my last few seconds of consciousness, I saw the crowd of scrubs creeping in.

◊

My stepmom told the rest of our family that I’d missed Thanksgiving because I had “come down with something.” She said she did it to keep my privacy, but I think she did it out of embarrassment. “My family wouldn’t understand,” she said. “They’re Catholic.” I didn’t know what my eggs had to do with being Catholic, but I didn’t care. It was over. My check would be in the mail Monday morning, and I had finally seen this thing through. I thought I’d feel more accomplished, more relieved. But I lay in bed for three days, bleeding and lonely. At first I thought it was because nobody could understand what I’d gone through, that I’d worked so hard for so many weeks and it was suddenly over. I later read that this is a normal reaction, that my body was crashing from hormone withdrawal.

◊

If someone asked me to describe donating eggs, I’d call it awful, fascinating, transformative, hilarious, and, of course, lucrative. I’d half anticipated that my maternal instincts would emerge, but children still look cuter from way, way, way far away. It did make me realize that this urge to have a family is very real for other people. What I’d undergone to donate must be ten times worse for the woman on the receiving end of my eggs. I want people to accept my choices. Therefore, I must also accept that other people are not me. A simple idea but one that took me more than twenty years to learn.

So perhaps I’ll never want to give birth. Perhaps I’ll never want to raise a family. Perhaps I’ll never be able to look at an egg and see a child any more than I could look at a child and see an egg. Then again, eighteen years from now, if one of my donations asks to meet me, I might be forced to change my mind.

Headshot of Bryanna Licciardi Bryanna Licciardi has an MFA in poetry from Emerson College, an overweight yet incredibly agile cat, and a passion for humiliating herself for the sake of an audience. She is currently a doctoral candidate, studying literacy and reading disabilities. Visit bryannalicciardi.com to read about her past and forthcoming publications.
Image credit: Andrew Mason on Flickr

NIGHT OWL by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol

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Spotted owl with bright orange eyes

NIGHT OWL
by Carmella de los Angeles Guiol

Nuit Blanche

I once loved a man who was a creature of the night. Like me, but more so. He slept through most of the daylight hours, his wily hair a halo on his satin pillowcase. Sometimes I stopped by his room between classes to curl up next to him and feel his dreaming body register mine.

One night, before our bodies had ever laid beside each other, before I’d ever run my fingers through his curls, before I saw that pair of women’s shoes outside his bedroom door, before I tried to push the door open and found it locked, we shared an email exchange that ended with this message: “Meet me at the memorial in fifteen minutes.” It was four in the morning when we stumbled down the hill and across the football fields, into the dark forest where even the crickets slept.

The crisp fall air kept us close. Half-bare trees guided our path until thicket gave way to moon-soaked pasture. He dug a joint out of his pocket, and we found a log where we sat, huddled close to the heat, watching stars streak across the silty sky, silent bursts of light in the still dawn. The grass glowed white with frozen dew; in a few hours, the ice crystals would seep down their spines, leaving the meadow withered with frostbite.

◊

Kin

I ride out of the forest just in time to see a winged one swoop down, out of the sunset sky, and land on a fence post, wood dark with rot. It’s big, that’s all I know, even when its cloak settles like wood shavings beneath a carpenter’s steady hand.

I dismount my bike and step gingerly, holding my inhale like a little girl holds a spiny rose. But my gears squeak, a leaf crunches underfoot, and, quick as lightning, there is a swivel of the head. Two eyes glare at me, black beads mended into a mask made of shadows.

I freeze mid-step, heart batting against ribs beneath its pointed gaze. We stand eye-to-eye, two wild creatures caught in the last wrinkles of twilight.

Some believe owls are a bad omen, the keepers of the underworld.

After a century of silence, this one has deemed me the untrustworthy one. Head swivels forward and wings unfold, a curtain of barred feathers. Then flight—to the outstretched arm of a live oak tree where its plumed coat flusters and settles once again.

From its perch, the owl regards me with a stare as I walk my bike down the road toward the park exit. I will keep my head bowed, as if in the presence of royalty, peeking from the corner of my eye at the winged one on high.

◊

Rosebud

If a rainstorm threatens from behind the hills, the firekeepers heap logs onto the flames, a feeding frenzy. The fire can never go out, for this is the engine that powers the prayers of the Sundancers, warriors who have committed to dancing for four days without food or water.

On the third night of the dance, the night of the full moon, I am honored to take my place among the firekeepers. We stand guard around the glowing coals, rakes and shovels in hand, our bare feet covered in ash.

Around three in the morning, we ready ourselves for the real work of the night: heating stones for the morning sweat lodges. With our grandmother moon watching overhead, we build a base of logs on top of the coals. We carry the stones one by one, set them on the wood, and then lay down more logs.

As we work, sweat shimmering on our skin, I notice a woman watching us, a thin silhouette against the ghost white of a teepee. It is Joan, the woman who brought me here; this is her tenth summer dancing. She looks frail in the cold darkness, but I have seen her stamp her feet in the Sundance circle, knees high, arms strong, her gaze never leaving the tree of life at the center of the altar where thousands of prayer ties flutter in the dusty wind.

The next morning, as I help her prepare for her last day of dancing, she describes the scene to me: “It was so beautiful,” she says, “watching the firekeepers do their dance.”

“I know,” I say. “I was there.”

She had no idea.

During the dance, the dancers no longer exist on this earthly plane. For a time, they become part of the spirit world. Watching us work the fire, we could have been anyone, anything. All she knows is that she witnessed something sacred beneath a buffalo moon.

◊

Birdsong

The first time I went to Ted’s house, it was nearing midnight. We walked out to the garden so he could harvest greens for me to take with me.

“You play classical music for your plants?” I asked.

“It’s good for them,” he said, smiling in the darkness, bent over a bed of lettuce. “Makes them happy.”

Ted follows the sun to bed and stirs with the first birdsong—although when I was around, we fought sleep until dawn, twisting the bed sheets until they lay useless in a pile on the floor. When we were spent, he held me in his wood-chopping arms, his body quivering as he released the reigns of consciousness. Outside, frogs sang night songs to their fish-tailed young.

At the end of the summer, I left the patchwork fields of corn and soybean, my duffel bag filled with rogue sage harvested in highway ditches. Back in Florida, classes started and routines returned. I still stayed up late, sharing my bed with half-read books, all sharp edges and smeared ink. My mailbox filled with letters from Ted—poems scribbled on yellow pages from a legal pad, updates on the fall garden. He wrote to me before the sun was up, while watching the birds peck at his many bird feeders. Sometimes there would be a feather folded into the weathered pages—barred owl, goldfinch, speckled woodpecker, cardinal, blue jay, mourning dove.

◊

Ritual

Lying in bed, I stretched my hearing as far as I could, following my mother’s footsteps as she walked between the sink and the fridge or out the front door where she’d stand in front of the Royal Poinciana, a wedding gift from her father, waving water onto green elephant ears and the orange beaks of birds of paradise. Sometimes she’d leave the hose at the feet of the prickly bougainvillea while she tidied up the kitchen.

After the dishes were rinsed and the plants were watered, she moved toward the bedrooms. I could hear her outside my door, walking between her room and the bathroom, switching lights on and off again. Then the click of the bathroom door shutting, a final pull from the inside to make sure it was closed. The squeak of the faucet. The rush of water. It starts off hollow, you know, the sound of water filling a tub. As the water rises, the sound softens until it hits nothing but depth.

Another squeak, then silence.

The quality of this solitude must be different, I imagine. When the kids are asleep in the bedroom, your husband reading on the couch. The cats scattered like slumbering curlicues around the house, the neighbors’ cars resting like moonlit rocks in front of darkened windows.

This time belonged to her alone.

During the day, she was on: on the phone at work, on our backs about homework, on top of this household as best as a working mother can be.

But in the blessed stillness of night, she was weightless.

Headshot of Carmella de los Angeles GuiolCarmella de los Angeles Guiol hangs her hula hoop in South Florida. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Toast, The Normal School, Lunch Ticket, Spry, The Fourth River, and The Inquisitive Eater. You can often find her working in the garden or kayaking the Hillsborough River, but you can always find her writing at www.therestlesswriter.com.

HAMLET THERAPY by Maud Burnett McInerney

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Hamlet-Therapy

HAMLET THERAPY
by Maud Burnett McInerney

The last time I had seen a live production of Hamlet, I was a teenager, and I fell in love with the Melancholy Dane. He was beautiful and blonde and had one of those resonant voices, trained by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I learned all of Ophelia’s lines—this seems disturbing to me now, but then I played her over and over again in the privacy of my bedroom.

Nearly forty years later, I saw Hamlet again on the very same stage at the Canada’s Stratford Festival. This time, I saw a different play entirely. I was no longer in love with Hamlet, I was Hamlet. Watching the play from the dark shadow of my own depression, I recognized myself on stage. I could taste the flavor of Hamlet’s every mood because his moods were mine.

Just to be clear, the precipitating cause of my depression was not that my uncle killed my father and married my mother. It was more mundane and yet horribly painful: my husband of over 20 years left me for a much younger woman, with whom, I eventually learned, he had been involved for some time. Not tragic, just sad and disappointing and commonplace, and yet, because betrayal is betrayal, I felt what Hamlet felt.

The second Stratford production was both stylized and extremely naturalistic, especially when it came to how the actors spoke. No one declaimed, no one used British-y accents, the words were clearly and rapidly delivered in ordinary Canadian tones. The characters spoke as you and I do but using Shakespeare’s words, and thus those words gained an intimacy they all too often lack in stagier performances. And the lines of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, so familiar and yet so new in this plain delivery, went through me like an electric current:

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canons ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.

Oh, I thought. That’s how I feel every single day. I wish I simply weren’t here, weren’t suffering what I suffer. People often call Hamlet suicidal, but he’s not; he’s perfectly clear that killing himself is not an option, and so, for different reasons, am I. To live in a world which has lost all its colors, flavors, and scents is constant pain, and he simply wishes to be out of it. There’s some critical debate around the word “solid;” some people think it’s a joke of Shakespeare’s at the expense of a presumably portly leading man, Richard Burbage. Some think it should be “sullied.” But “solid flesh” makes sense to me as I watch my own solid flesh diminish, ten pounds in six weeks because I have no appetite.

The speech ends when Hamlet hears his friend Horatio arriving: “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” And when Horatio, Marcellus and Barnardo enter to tell Hamlet about their encounter with the ghost, Hamlet is a different person. He’s energetic, enthusiastic, and affectionate. Throughout the play, the same transformation occurs. In the soliloquies, Hamlet is full of pain, crippled by it, but when others appear (the players, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) he becomes almost manic:

You are welcome masters, welcome all! I am glad to see thee well. Welcome, good friends.—Oh, old friend! Why thy face is valanced since I saw thee last. Com’st thou to beard me in Denmark?—What, my young lady and mistress! By’re lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine!

He is courteous, jovial, friendly—and the players, who will become part of his plot to “catch the conscience of the king” have no idea what lies behind all of this bonhomie.

This too I recognize. I sit in my office, writing this, and I weep. And then I dry my tears and go downstairs and teach an absolutely kickass class on Antony and Cleopatra. I go to administrative meetings, and I am informed and competent and forceful and to the point. People ask how I am, and I say I’m fine. I perform fineness. I laugh I talk about ideas and books, about why I find King Lear disappointing, about politics, and I’m funny and I’m smart and no one can see the blank despair inside. Just like Hamlet, for whom the step from performing normalcy to performing madness is a small one, since both conditions are equally artificial. Hamlet is not insane. His mind works perfectly well, even if it works to his own perdition, as depressed minds do.

“The conscience of the king…” What Hamlet wants is to know that his uncle Claudius is truly guilty. Hamlet suspects but he doesn’t know. In fact, he suspects a great many things. How long have his mother and his uncle actually been sleeping together? The marriage of his mother to his uncle comes only two months after his father’s death. My husband’s new relationship started a few weeks after our separation. And before? Like so many depressives, Hamlet is obsessive. He can’t stop thinking about what might be happening between his uncle and his mother, in their bed, when it started, what conversations, what plans they might have made even while his father was living. He can’t look at poor, innocent Ophelia, because she reminds him of his mother. His mind runs always in the same patterns, and like Othello in a different play, he needs “ocular proof” which he gets when he observes Claudius’ response to the play within the play. He needs Claudius to recognize his own guilt and to recognize Hamlet’s recognition of it.

This too, I get. What did they say? When did they say it? What kinds of violations of a bond I thought secure were enacted? Around and around it goes, and Hamlet and I can think of nothing else. Everything turns back to this one thing. “The conscience of the king…” How I wish I could catch it, but to what end? What would it tell me to know?

And then the dreams, from the most famous speech of all: “To sleep, perchance to dream… Aye, there’s the rub! For in that sleep of death, what dreams might come?” Hamlet dreams of his father, of his uncle—in the recent production I saw, Claudius and the ghost were played by the same actor, a move so brilliant that I can’t believe it isn’t done more often. He dreams of his mother, and he dreams of Ophelia, but they all become interchangeable in the nightmare. I have dreams where my ex-husband presents me with a baby that is not mine, but is his, and demands that I take care of it; I dream that I’m with him on a ship, and he thinks he knows where we’re going, but the waves are crashing over us; and worst of all, I have dreams where we are together as we used to be, happy, laughing, walking together hand in hand, making love. These are the dreams from which I wake in tears.

Everyone knows how Hamlet ends, with a stage full of corpses: Claudius, Gertrude, poor innocent Laertes and Ophelia, and Hamlet himself. “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” says Horatio, the friend who has always loved him. But these days, I’m trying to imagine an alternate ending. In Act IV, the king sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who carry letters that will ensure his murder upon arrival. They are attacked by pirates on the way. Hamlet is taken prisoner but ransoms himself, and the pirates bring him back to Denmark, filled with thoughts of revenge, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry on to England and their own eventual deaths. I’m imagining a scenario in which Hamlet stays with the pirates, becomes their captain, and sails with them to the fabulous Indies (West or East, geography doesn’t matter here), living a life of bloody but satisfying adventure.

Or perhaps they maroon him on an island like that of Prospero, where “the air is full of noises, sounds and sweet music,” where he can reflect, like the philosopher he is, and walk on the silver sand and sleep in a bed of soft leaves and be quite alone and heal, and cease from dreaming.

Maud-Burnett-McInerneyBorn in Chicago, Maud Burnett McInerney grew up in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, where she had the opportunity to see nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays by the time she was twenty (exceptions: Timon of Athens, Henry VIII ). She teaches Medieval Literature at Haverford College but spends as much time as she can in in her house near Dijon, in France.

Image credit: Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, Wikipedia

 

TRIP by Rheea Mukherjee

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tripTRIP
by Rheea Mukherjee

The door that led into the house my parents owned in Denver needed an extra nudge for it to open. Once prodded, a bell attached to the knob jingled before you could set foot on the white tiles. This jingle, the thrust of the door, was a short prelude to the potent smell of mutton being fried in canola oil. The smell of curried meat, intense and intrusive, compared to the odorless winter air outside. Clumps of snow would fall from the sides my boots onto the floor as we took off layers of sweaters and coats.

For me there would be vegetarian dishes. My father always made sure of that. He wearing shorts that reached his knees, his elbow poking against the thickness of masala vapors, stirring his curry, a universe of flavors condensed into an offering of love. The TV in the living room was massive, reminiscent of the American suburban nineties. CNN or some other news channel would be blaring, and the house not yet warmed enough for a Colorado winter, would temper the spattering of oil.

This is how I remember my father. Not because there wasn’t more. Not because I don’t remember other things. Like him driving his car, his head attached to a cellphone, bantering to clients in Hindi or English about real estate: houses, liquor stores, another closing. Not because I don’t remember vividly him telling us ghost stories when I was eight, coddled by pillows, in the backseat of our car being driven somewhere in Georgia, one of the many family road trips that entailed pit stops at gas stations and the endless tar of an American interstate highway. Not because I don’t remember him telling me that it was not possible I had gotten three C’s in Social Studies, Math, and Science in 4th grade, I had studied too hard. Because I do remember him marching up to my favorite teacher, Mrs. Berks, who looked up my tests frantically and then realized that it was true. I had gotten straight A’s that year and she had made a mistake, a miracle I still can’t fathom. Only he knew.

I remember by father cooking in Denver because, as an adult, this was the last familiar image I was offered. His image of flesh: curly hair, thinned legs, and a curved stomach is what I knew before I saw that same flesh burnt at cremation. I saw his body still, pumped with preservatory chemicals that had made his body last through a frozen drawer in a Denver hospital and 24-hour flight in the cargo hold of a plane all the way to India. His body now in the homeland provides an irrefutable place of gathering for his transcontinental family.

An ambulance transports him to the cremation ground near Old Madras Road. He lays still, his wedding ring blunt, gold, tight against his swelled fingers. It would be nice if my mother could have this ring, but they simply can’t remove it, too tight, too ingrained into his body to remove. He won’t say anything because he is dead. The body is stunned into silence, into frozen flesh. I touch his hand. It’s unreal. It’s hardened by the absence of flowing blood. But the image, this body, I can see it wake. I can see it being concerned about me, about my choices, the way I am not doing enough. I can see it proud; I can see it hungry for his own cooking. I can see lips part into a familiar daze of sleep, like when he would prop himself on our Denver sofa. Our dinner finished, TV still blaring, his snore a reciprocal thank you because we had eaten, we were around, even though our worlds were so different and our agendas so disconnected.

My mother was made from entirely different fibers. She sat silent on many things. She couldn’t be pushed into an argument easily, and it made parts of their marriage and parenting frustrating for the both of them. Like my father, I have inherited a source of reckless passion, I will hop to a side, stick firmly to it: politics, family dialogues, right and wrong. My rationale is thick, meaty, informed, the emotions that go with it are irrational, teary, sobbing hiccups in the middle of pointed debates. The one person I don’t debate with is my father, our irrational sides emerge, my mother would be silent, and we quickly realized our differences were best met in cars singing familiar tunes and drinking coffee from gas stations.

When the cremation is done, we are left with ash and bones. Ash was expected, but not bones. Pieces of white that were harder to process emotionally than the Bollywood-suggested relief that ash offered family members. Bone reminded us that there was flesh once resting upon it. That there were thoughts, actions, and voluntary muscles that worked with a brain, coaxed a body to move, to thrive, to be able to fry meat in canola.

My father left this body suddenly, with no warning, no sign. He died alone in a city where the sun shone in spite of the winter snows. He left when I lived in a country he wanted me to know the most. He left when I was just about to figure myself out. Just about to really say I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. About to say maybe I didn’t know what I was doing and needed him to be OK with it. He left when I hadn’t figured out how a father-figure figured into my life. Before I weighed the pros and cons of our relationship.

Plane trips and long drives, my father was always trying to escape the mundane regularity that other people found solace in. He booked tickets to Mexico and Europe, we packed, we collected stamps on our passports, and documented our travels with early-2000’s digital cameras. My father never really drank, but on vacations he offered silent negotiations: margaritas were sipped with my mother, in return he waited for us to talk more in-depth about life.

This anticipated conversation can only happen in death, when the body is no more and the threat of an argument or disappointment no longer exists. Once he has died, we are in huddles; an assortment of friends and family openly discuss the force he was, the good and bad times. We sketch his life story in anecdotes, people argue the accuracy of incidents, and his intent and purpose are surgically dissected. Grief allows a tongue more honesty than the most potent Mexican tequila. The tea being passed round is overly sweet, how he liked it.

When he was alive, our honesty held the potential of a zygote. And a zygote it stayed, a group of unaware cells unable to calculate its larger context. At the family table, my brother and I made jokes only beer-guzzling twenty-somethings would find funny. At best we offered vague observations about the architecture or the food of the place we were visiting. We cannot at this time fathom the flick of the match; the short burst of light life is, the existential crises brewing in all of us.

The physical body is a piece of the grand puzzle, whether we are aware of it or not, our physical selves are roaming the corners of this illusion in search of the heart flutter only purpose and love can offer.

This is what I think my father wanted: We were to chisel our multi-cultural existence into a beautiful sculpture, a family integrated as one, different, restless, traditional, modern, and tremendous. In a pot, blended, one day we would make sense: Our half-formed comprehension of Bangla, our non-existent knowledge of Konkani, our nine-year stint as Bangaloreans in the 90’s, our Colorado Tax Resident status, and our Christmas churchgoing habit. We were to be a family stitched asymmetrically, a lovechild of MLK and Gandhi. But we were too confused ourselves, so we did what was easier. We held to our own sides, we drew a line with chalk against each other and I created this delusion: I was worldly and internationally skillful, and my father was as industrious and as unimaginative as the Indian railway system.

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My father’s restlessness always kept us on edge. A Saturday family road trip to Albuquerque would be proposed on a Thursday phone call. The conflict was my friends and weekends planned around cocktails, hookah, and making snow penises outside our dorms. A friendly Friday call would be made to make sure I would drive to Denver to spend the weekend at home, which I would. The conflict was his scantily hidden judgment on independent plans I might have made otherwise. The call would inevitably come when I was in college surrounded by friends, shot glasses filled with disgustingly sweet peppermint liquor. Calls I wanted to avoid because it was here where he dovetailed into the Indian parent stereotype, the one which would demand weekends to be spent at home in a tone that revealed his weariness and discomfort for American dorm room parties. I could feel the twisting of his soul. His dichotomy in parenting always an unresolved sea between us: a murky liberal-conservative broth with no authentic roots. His decades in the U.S. had birthed a cultural cancer, an identity crisis; one that had him constantly juggling the Indo-American cultural influences he had to stand in support of. Years later, I chose India, not in rejection of American values, but in acceptance that my soul and life work lay in a city that changed its landscape every two weeks.

In the self-important moments we all give ourselves, I have imagined myself the master curator of my father’s juggling, the ringmaster to showcase his good and to facilitate the termination of his cultural confusion. In his death, I can be deluded to think I could have done this when he was alive. But this is why death becomes the purpose, a domino block that falls onto the living and allows us to create another story, another purpose, another memory. This is why my father’s death will contain my death as well, and the purpose I might leave for another here on Earth.

The parent memory is perhaps the most unimaginative and limited calculation of a person. He has left others in far more expansive ways. He has left memories of being a lover, a brother, an uncle, a friend, a problem-solver, an advisor and well-wisher. Now I know who grieves. We grieve. In tiny pockets of isolation. In private memories and images. His sisters and brother may remember younger limbs, younger skin attached to a younger smile. His wife may remember conversations and facial expressions I’ll never know. His nephews and nieces will be myopic and only see him as a generous uncle. Everyone who once knew him will grieve his mischief, his iconoclastic and rebellious ways that I had tried to imitate. People will remember him as a man who ordered a small coffee in a large cup. Five sugars. As a man who moved continents, from India to the U.S. to India, and back again to the U.S. with a mere shrug of his shoulders.

He left before I could condense our memories into tighter scenes, specific colors. Before I could transcribe his voice into an unmistakable echo. Before I could have said, Fine, I’ll come on one of your silly adventures, humor his wanton travel needs. Foster his addiction to planning road trips in Eastern Europe or driving aimlessly on deserted Indian highways.

I talked to him last on a Monday in 2012, four days before he died. I had lost a cousin that I had been close to that week, and as soon as I heard his voice I started crying. He said we had to come together at a time like this. We had to be strong. His nephew’s death had scarred his heart and he remembered at that moment what he did best: He made a whimsical travel plan, right there on the phone. A family trip to remember that life was short. He proposed that we go to Ireland next month; random and sudden, like his death. And we all had said yes and booked tickets. Not knowing we would become better travelers only after he left. Not knowing that his next plane trip would not be a European family extravaganza. It would be a cold cargo hold carrying his image from a city where he cooked warm meals for a family that used to nudge open a stubborn white door on wintry Colorado nights.

Rheea-MukherjeeRheea Mukherjee received her MFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her work has been published in Scroll.in, Southern Humanities Review, Cleaver Magazine, CHA: An Asian Literary Magazine, QLRS, The Bombay Literary  Magazine, A Gathering of Tribes, Everyday Fiction, Bengal Lights, and Out Of Print Magazine. Her book, a collection of short stories, Transit For Beginners, is forthcoming from Kitaab International in 2016. She co-founded Bangalore Writers Workshop in 2012 and presently co-runs Write Leela Write, a Design and Content Laboratory in Bangalore. 

Image credit: lee roberts on Flickr

THE BUSINESS OF BODIES by Gwendolyn Edward

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

The-Business-of-Bodies
THE BUSINESS OF BODIES
by Gwendolyn Edward

Late on the fourth of July, my friends arrived home to find it had caught on fire, everything blackened and damp from fire hoses, their two dogs and cat perished amid the scorched remnants of their house. Early the next day a mutual friend called me. We don’t know what to do, Anna told me over the phone, about the bodies.

She’d called me specifically because I’d worked in the veterinary industry for years. Everyone had heard about the time I had to decapitate a cat we feared might have rabies. She assumed, I think, that I’d be one who might know what to do. But I’d never dealt with a situation like this either. When I called an emergency vet I was told they would charge at least two-hundred dollars an animal for disposal: an impossible immediate expenditure for our community of still-struggling ex-college students.

I’ll go get them, I told her, and keep them until tomorrow, a Monday when the regular clinics would be open again and we could dispose of the bodies at a more reasonable price. No one else, wants to, you know, Anna said. What she meant was no one wanted to look at broken and burned bodies of pets we knew. No one wanted to house those bodies, dead pets in the garage. I asked if we knew anyone with a deep freezer, but no one wanted to share their space for food with corpses.

Years ago when I had to decapitate the cat I learned a bruising lesson about practicality and death. We needed to send its head to the veterinary school at Texas A & M for rabies testing; it seemed awfully inhumane to cut off an animal’s head off, wrap it in plastic and put it in a cooler, but that’s the way things are done.

The clinic I was working in was new and didn’t have all the equipment we needed. A scalpel, no matter how sharp, would most likely only cut through skin and muscle, not bone. I was sent to the grocery store for gloves, heavy yellow ones used for washing dishes, and I also bought a large cleaver. In the clinic, we hacked at the spinal column, and when the head finally came loose, I thought its neck looked like a Christmas ham and afterwards was so sick with the imagery that I dry-heaved in the bathroom while other employees packed the head for shipping. We wrapped its body in paper towels and plastic Kroger bags and put it in the top section of our refrigerator next to microwave our meals; we didn’t have the money to buy a deep freezer then, either.

I think it’s common, when shedding our skins, to not even know it’s happened until afterward. When Anna called me, I thought about how in the days following the decapitation I pulled my food from the freezer—meatloaf and mashed potatoes, rigatoni, lasagna—right out from beside the cat’s body, and I ate it in the break room during lunch. The animal had become a thing, reduced to an inquiry, just as ear mites under a microscope are so foreign they can’t possibly be alive, just as a preserved dog’s heart, erupting with heartworms, never belonged to someone’s pet.

My friend’s brother did the dirty work at the burned house—dislodged the pets’ bodies and brought them to my home in boxes where we stacked them in the garage. They’re… charred… you know, he said, and I replied I suspected as much. I felt the need to explain to him why I didn’t mind keeping them when no one else would. I felt like I had to explain to him that the business of pets dying was something I was used to and that someone had to be detached. But I didn’t say anything because he fidgeted with his keys, looking over his shoulder at his car. It was clear that I was the only one who felt the need to say more.

◊

Overnight I was awakened by my dog whining at the bedroom door: he needed to go outside. It was still dark and I refused to look at the clock. I lay on the sofa next to the backdoor and waited for him to paw the glass, signaling that he wanted to come in. With my eyes closed and my head on the sofa cushion I smelled something vaguely revolting, a smell like steamed broccoli left in a pot on the stove too many days after cooking. When I awoke the next morning, I realized the smell was from the dead pets, the odor in the garage sucked up into the attic and distributed around the house via the air-conditioner. At first I was disgusted. Then I was annoyed. I turned off the AC and spent the morning with my the ceiling fans turned to high-speed, irritated that the temperature was rising—summer in Texas—and that moving air was not the same as cold air.

Anna had arranged for cremation, and when a man from the service came, he said he was sorry for my loss. I explained what had happened—it wasn’t my loss exactly—and together we opened the garage to remove the boxes. In the frank language of death and with my “I used to work in veterinary clinics” preface his initial somberness dissipated. I haven’t seen them, I said, my hand on top of the smallest box, for the cat, and I don’t know how much is left. I think they were charred pretty bad. If there’s fur left, the black dog is Buffalo. I’m sorry the boxes aren’t labeled.

I didn’t have to over-explain or pretend with the man who shared this private world. This was his business, our business, the business of death and pragmatism. It was the business of moving bodies and signing paperwork and being unmoved.

At one of my first hospitals I watched one of our clients, a massive ex-rodeo champion, curse God with a cracked voice and tears on his cheeks when we discovered his cat had a tumor in his brain. Once, a mother made her nine-year-old son stay in the room while we put down their cat; he couldn’t look and faced the wall while his pet spasmed in my hands and when the boy began to cry the mother didn’t even touch him. For a long time I would cry with these patients, and sometimes I would cry even after they left, holed up in the back room with the deep freezer and checking my reflection in a compact to see when my puffy face looked normal again. I have assisted in the euthanasia of eighty-six animals, but somewhere along the line—Lord knows I wish I could remember when exactly—I stopped crying.

I can’t imagine anyone ever enjoying pulling plastic around the body, that final frozen nothingness look of an animal’s face before the bag is tied off in a harsh knot; but that’s the way it is. Dogs and cats went into heavy black plastic bags and were placed in a deep freezer, methodically almost. The pet ceased to be a pet. It became a thing: an it. Even the language we used in the clinic was a reduction when the names of pets were replaced with the words “pick-up” and “body”.

Let me be clear. I am used to and now comfortable with the act of putting an animal to sleep. I am also comfortable disposing of bodies. It isn’t either of these that bothers me now. It’s knowing that something in my understanding and actions towards animals and people shifts right after death.

It wasn’t until the man had taken out the smallest box with the cat to his truck, after we dropped the mourning language, that I realized what it was about my interactions with death that disturbed me. It was knowing, finally, that empathy had become a stranger to me: only sympathy remained, and then when the business of bodies occurred, that too disintegrated into strict efficiency, leaving me without the ability to feel anything. And with my friends’ pets in the garage, the empathy-to-sympathy-to-business process had also now become about me, not them, some malformed narcissism that comes—and this is how I rationalize it—when one starts to feel inconvenienced by death.

And while I filled out paperwork, carbon-copied onto duplicates against the garage door, it clicked again. It’s also some form of guilt, I suppose, that I don’t hold on and that I’m not affected the way I think I should be. Guilt that I couldn’t cry for my friends who treated their pets like children and guilt too for regretting, wishing on and off for a few hours, that I didn’t take the bodies into my garage, the stench of them heavy in my nose and the back of my throat. And later as I received texts from friends thanking me for what I’d done, I felt more guilt for knowing it didn’t mean as much to me as it did to them. Perhaps utility is its own form of giving, but it’s not the form I want. I want to remember what it feels like to still possess this small node of compassion and to feel, without guilt, that I haven’t lost an essential quality of my humanity.

When the man was leaving there was a brief awkwardness. I was not the owner of these pets, and the way I spoke had aligned me like him. What were we to say to each other in a business where one of us was supposed to be grieving, but neither was? He was about to say I’m sorry again, I could tell by the way he nodded, returning to a more formal posturing, the smile sliding from his face, holding his hand out to shake mine, but in the end he didn’t say anything. I went inside my house to my dog, sitting by the window, his ears perked with interest at the man getting in the truck, and I sat next to him while we watched it drive away.

Gwendolyn-EdwardsGwendolyn Edward is a Pushcart-nominated writer of non-fiction, poetry, and fiction. Her work has been accepted by Crab Orchard Review, Fourth River, Bourbon Penn, Crack the Spine, and others. She holds a MA in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas where she worked with American Literary Review, and she is currently pursuing a MFA at Bennington. She works with Fifth Wednesday Journal as an assistant non-fiction editor and also teaches creative writing.

Image credit: Skott Яeader on Flickr

Ten Years in Belgrade by Sara Alaica

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Ten-Years-in-Belgrade

TEN YEARS IN BELGRADE
by Sara Alaica

It had been ten years since I’d been to Belgrade and the first things I noticed were the billboards. The blasted-out skeletons of iron had been rebuilt, painted, and were skinned in colorful faces smiling down on the grey skyline. They seemed so oddly out of place, as if they had landed straight out from the sky.

I’d spent my childhood in the city, but I’d gone abroad and hadn’t been back since just after the war. The airport hadn’t reopened, so I had flown into Frankfurt, rented a car, then driven 120 mph in the slow lane of the Autobahn through the deep tunnels of the Viennese Alps. The highway linking Belgrade to Zagreb was empty, and the deep impressions of tank treads were still visible on the shoulder.

On that trip I had been shown the ruins of Avala, the tower on the hill overlooking the city where I had gone as a child to see the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was just a wet tangle of cables and rubble all along the slope of the hill, as if someone had pushed it too hard and it had fallen, exhausted, on its side.

But now, ten years later, it had been rebuilt, more beautiful than before, and everywhere that had once been rubble was now so new that I couldn’t recognize the turn-off to my aunt’s house, and I almost missed it.

I was meeting my sestra there, who had agreed to take me through the city and show me what had changed. As we drove back across the Danube she pointed out a hotel down by the water. It was yellow and gold, framed by old oaks in the traditional style of old Europe. Do you know what that is? I looked at the exit that led down to it and marveled at the change. That’s where that old decrepit factory used to be.

That’s it, she replied, and I didn’t understand. It’s the same building – they renovated it and converted it into a hotel. We had already zipped past it, but I looked over my shoulder and kept repeating the same thing. It was the same building? That’s what it looked like? It was the same building?

We drove straight down Bulevar despota Stefana toward the National Theater, and Maja leaned forward and pointed out the new buildings through the front of the windshield, on the left, on the right, until we pulled off the main street and found a side street to park on. Downtown had always been beautiful, the nineteenth-century buildings covered in carved balustrades and winking cherubs over windows, but now the cracked plaster had been filled in, the soot removed, and inside the glass fronts of the newly pastel buildings were clothes and purses from European brands, and it all felt new, as if the long haze of socialist concrete had never been there at all.

I stopped often, taking photos of this place I half-recognized, when I saw something I had never seen in Belgrade: a man with a map. It was a tourist. I asked him in English if he needed directions, showed him where we were on his map and where he needed to go, and he smiled and thanked me so I couldn’t tell if he was more surprised to find me there or I him.

He wanted to go see the oldest part of the city, Dorćol, where we were headed. This had been the heart of the city during Turkish occupation and had all of the oldest buildings, but I only remembered it from late nights at cafes, drinking in bars that spilled out onto the streets and then eating palacinke from street vendors on the way home.

As we walked through Studentski park and between the university buildings, the city that I recognized from my childhood began to reappear along the small streets. Concrete apartment buildings, gray and stained with water runoff, sat above shuttered shop windows scrawled over with spray-painted nationalist graffiti. Old trees burst through the sidewalk, trash collecting in their roots, and everywhere little babas with black kerchiefs wrapped around their heads hurried along, carrying groceries from the market.

We stopped at Čukur česma, the fountain commemorating the start of Belgrade’s revolt of Turkish occupation. In 1862, Turkish soldiers killed a young Serbian boy at that spot, and the outrage led to outbreaks of violence culminating in the complete withdrawal of Turks from Serbia.

But Serbian Muslims were expelled too, and where there had once been over 200 mosques in Belgrade, there was only one left. I had asked Maja to take me to see it. All those years and I had never even known it was there, a remnant of some other Belgrade that was just as foreign to me as the sand-blasted downtown that I had just walked through.

The white minaret wasn’t immediately visible, and if my sestra hadn’t been there to point it out I would have missed it entirely. The mosque sat at an angle to the street, hidden between the folds of the other buildings, still following the layout of some long-forgotten neighborhood.

During the war, the mosque had been burned in anti-Muslim violence in retaliation for attacks on Serbs in Kosovo. But as I gazed up at the building there was no trace of this left, only the subtle gradations of the yellow stone broken by the pointed arches of the low windows.

There’s been a mosque in that place since 1575, destroyed and rebuilt again over hundreds of years. My ten years away had been just a moment, only a heartbeat, in the life of the city.

Sara-AlaicaSara Alaica is a citizen of the world and a nomad. She grew up in Canada and in the Balkans and has lived in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Between traveling the seven continents, she earned her BA in literature from Carleton University and an MA in literature from the University of Toronto. She currently works at Columbia University in New York City. She blogs at www.alittleroad.com

Image credit: “Dorcal, Belgrade” by Chris JL on Flickr

THE INSIGNIFICANT REMAINS by Robert Henway

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The-Insignificant-Remains

THE INSIGNIFICANT REMAINS
by Robert Henway

I don’t know why I remember walking down the stairwell that day. It was a practical staircase and extremely boring, not the type that stays in your mind years after. Gray walls, with only the slight confetti of shredded posters to add any color, covered with words imploring us to check out various clubs or work opportunities. Some sign stubs were completely gone, leaving the remaining paper looking like a spent shotgun shell; others had hardly been touched, looking like a primed firework that was later discovered to be a dud. The students in their white and blue Polos, with matching khaki pants or plaid skirts, having only backpacks to supply a sense of individuality, came and went as they always did. That afternoon however, there was an obstacle in our path, a roadblock. I only had two minutes to get to my next class. Who was this outsider who did not understand the system? Who was this nonconformist who did not follow the protocol? It wasn’t until I was very close that I could see through the huddled bodies that it was a freshman on his hands and knees. He was dressed like us, but he wasn’t walking like us. I craned my neck to see his problem, what was causing him to inconvenience us so. Everywhere brilliantly bright green and yellow highlighters, vigilant red pens accompanied by the dull black and blue scribes of our time scattered and cascaded down the hard cold steps. A single glue stick bounded down, bouncing on each judgmental step. It was presumably not found again. All the while a set of pale frantic hands reached out, desperate to grab the remains. I wondered if his frenzy was because he needed the supplies to finish an assignment, or perhaps he was desperate not to lose any because his mother had bought them for him and they allayed his homesickness throughout the day. Most likely he just wanted to get out of everyone’s way as fast as he possibly could. The reason it was taking him so long was because coming out from the blue and white crowd were red Air Jordan’s, white and black Adidas, brown Sperry’s, and even soft gray Uggs, all kicking out, attempting to knock the supplies around. Unlike my predecessors, I did not give his supplies a kick with a grunt and a laugh, but I didn’t help him either. I continued on, slithering around the gray walls like a cold product on the descending factory belt, in this conformist institution we called school. We did not help people back then, for if we did, we would become them (God forbid).

◊

I don’t know why I remember that night, but sometimes when I find myself sitting on a bench or lying awake, I will hear Sinatra’s ballad slowly creeping back into my consciousness. It was my senior year Homecoming dance, but I don’t remember much from the dance, or really even much from the after-party. What stuck with me is something a friend—no, an acquaintance, said to no one particular during the late hours of the night.

I was slouching on a brown couch in my basement after all of the pomp and circumstance had ended, still wearing my white shirt and black pants, but with my silver tie ripped off and my tweed suit jacket slung somewhere on the warm gold carpet in a crumpled mess. Off in the corner, an old crackling record player spun Sinatra’s “Only the Lonely” over and over. I was looking into my clear smooth glass, listening to the frosted ice jingle in the crisp apple ale. Next to me was Scarlett, in her black dress that was much too tight, wearing her Queen’s tiara that looked cheap and disappointing in the low lighting of my basement. I knew that she loved me, but I didn’t love her like that; we didn’t even go to the dance together.

However, that night she sat next to me, wrapped in a dull blue blanket I had grabbed for her, sipping warm cocoa I had made for her, and she seemed content. I, on the other hand, felt profoundly empty. To my left, Henry, the only other person in the room, with all the articles of his suit still on, was covered in brown crumbs. He took turns between aggressively sipping his ale and sighing deeply. He spoke up for the first time in the entire night. “I don’t know about you guys, but I am utterly depressed.”

“No?” I jokingly gasped. Next to me, Scarlett stood up from her spot and sleepily shifted over to Henry, wrapping him in the blanket, too, and rested her head on his bony shoulder.

“Sometimes I feel like the world around me just stops,” he said, “and I’m just standing there watching everyone live and laugh, and I realize I don’t fit in at all. Do you guys ever have that?”

I finished my ale and stood up, trying to swallow down a lump deep within my throat. I didn’t say it then, but I knew exactly how he felt.

◊

I don’t know why I remember reading that particular afternoon; it was as uneventful as any other Saturday. I had woken up early in the morning, when the dew becomes a sizzling steam as the sun kisses the evergreen grass. As I worked on fertilizing the ten acres of dry soil, the sun’s gentle embrace became one of a deathly smother. I had with me only one canteen and had drunk up the life-giving water hastily, but I still had half an acre ahead of me. Not far off, but under the weeping willow, my brother, too young for the summer chores, was playing on my aged mandolin. Its brown coating was peeling away, revealing the lines and circles that tell its maple tale. After locking up the broadcast spreader, I walked over to the dark shady patch where my brother sat. I joined him and picked up my copy of Cold Mountain, and for a while I just stared at the dreamy blue Carolina Mountains on the cover. I thought about how it was odd that you could feel the sweet whispers of the wind here in the shade, but it was nowhere to be found out in the sun when you needed it. “Here—Mom brought this out for you,” my brother said, interrupting my train of thought to hand me a jar of almost painfully cold homemade applesauce. I was only able to sit there and enjoy the taste of the applesauce and the feel of the wind and the view of the book cover and the sound of my brother’s spirituals for a short amount of time before I returned to fertilizing and landscaping.

It is those short tiny moments that I find myself daydreaming of as I roam about in Iowa, far away from home.

Robert-HenwayRobert W. Henway is a student at the University of Iowa working on a degree in English and Creative Writing. Originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, his passions reside in literature and music. He hopes to pursue a career in writing.

 

 

 

Image credit: j Gregory Barton on Flickr

TEET’ by Soyini Ayanna Forde

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Teeth

TEET’
by Soyini Ayanna Forde

I am at the orthodontist, getting photos taken of my mouth to be placed inside my file by the new dental assistant. My mouth widens, a pink chasm. She smothers a soft gasp, stifles it in her throat, but I hear it anyway.

“You have no molars below,” she says. “How do you chew?”

I look at her, wary. “I don’t know,” I say, “I just do.”

“So, you’re Caribbean?” She asks me during another appointment, with a smile that is too excited to see me, that I know cannot be real. Her teeth are impeccable, clean, pretty. I am convinced I’m the kind of patient about whom serious briefings are held before any appointment. She will already know the inside of my mouth well, its secrets and its deficiencies.

I’m not interested in any ol’ talk. I want to recline in the chair and stare quietly at the big lights overhead. I want to find a way out of appointments and money and teeth fixing and anxiety. I want to know why the tooth fairy only services children and doesn’t grant wishes. Isn’t that what fairies are supposed to do? I also want to tell her that I don’t want to explain about the Caribbean, I’d rather not talk now but of course, I don’t.

“Yes,” I say.

“But you sound so British.” She says this like a compliment. A congratulatory tone drips from the statement, resonates within the brilliant room. The American ear can be so strange; I’m sure I don’t sound British.

“Thank-you,” I say. I chuckle feebly, as fake as the wide curve opened across her face. Pleased as puss, she moves towards my mouth with a shiny band remover in tow.

People can make a lot of assumptions about you when you’re an adult still in braces. A guy hitting on me once included this observation: “I know you got good credit. You know how I know? You got on braces!” People also love to try to get you to ‘smile and show all your teeth’—men especially. Like Bartleby, I’d also prefer not to.

I started tracking my dreams a few years ago after someone gave me a dream dictionary for my birthday; however, I don’t usually dream of teeth. I do not. This is not something that I do. A friend, on the other hand, has a recurring nightmare about her teeth, painlessly cracking and falling away from the gum as soon as she tries to eat anything. She tells me that this terrifies her and awakens a shrill fear in her gut each time, but in reality, her teeth are glorious, straight and pristine white.

But my teeth are never far from my mind. When I smile, talk, eat, drink, wake up in the morning, exist. Teeth are reminders of the money I don’t have but couldn’t afford not to spend. They are harbingers of work still left to do. My teeth are errant children with no “broughtupsy,” corralled and being told what to do. The last time I felt a predictive twinge deep in my gum, I healed it by holding a piece of amethyst geode against my jaw. Damn, teeth, how are you both incorrigible and abatable at the same time? Every single time I knock them against a glass, I’m surprised they don’t break or chip. My front teeth are the real MVPs.

I can remember when I was a little girl and my front teeth fell out. At home, when this happens, people might call you a “no-teet’ ganga” (a kind of term of endearment)—not to be confused with the West Indian batsman or an aberration of the transcendent herb. They were little, smooth milk teeth, slightly rippled at the top edges and bloody. I rinsed them proudly in cool water from the tap, watched them emerge, clean like a baptism. It was the last time that I held any of my teeth inside of my hand. My hand, a small oyster, encasing what’s within. I still recall my excitement over the money under my pillow the next morning. Small change really: a few shillings, some red dollars, but I was ecstatic.

Later, I will have whole rows of teeth in my jaw, above and below, that never rupture the gum. A whole row becoming doubled into two like a great white shark. I can see them, some only vaguely, others more pronounced, in shapes and shadows in the x-rays. They are translucent renderings in shades of grey and black. “Supernumerary teeth” they are called. They reminded me of headstones, jostled around on an expanse of ground, a few even lying sideways. My body never gave them the cue to come down—or up, as it were—my body doesn’t send out these kinds of cues on time. My body is on “colored people time,” incessantly. Late, sometimes sheepish and embarrassed, sometimes indignant: “But at least I reach!”

“So, this is what we’re working with” is the kind of preamble oral specialists will often give. X-rays are always grandly displayed with an epic resignation before me. Dr. S was the only one who didn’t give me the sense that he was feeling sorry for me. Or he hid it well behind his glasses. He was a stout, white American man, confident in his expertise. Thick silver hair speckled his temples and the nape of his neck as he pointed out all the extraneous teeth, telling me that they would need to be removed. We will tackle one set now, and the other later, he assured me. His smile was kind. He was clearly up to the challenge. I felt sad seeing them wasted, like people who never got the chance to realize their full potential.

When my orthodontist attaches a chain to my engulfed canine (one of two) that has never seen the light or chewed food—I wonder if one day I could just will it out if I tried hard. This business of adult tooth emergence is a long, arduous process. Each month, the orthodontist tweaks the pressure on the chain, coercing, applying more pressure, pulling, and easing the tooth from the depths of the gum. It is almost like giving birth to an inanimate object; watching it painstakingly excavated, white sliver by white sliver. And if I attempted to will the tooth down, would my body even listen to me?

◊

There are few things I want to discuss less with a lover than my teeth or certain other aspects of my body.

“So how long yuh have to wear yuh braces for again?” He asked me. Instantaneously, the question tired me. My teeth act of their own accord, my body does what it wants, when it wants. And it often pays me no mind. I fight with tooth-gravity and it fights me right back. Like my slightly off-kilter spine, my body and all its skeletal extremities are filled with obstinacy.

“Who knows anymore, yes. Whenever my orthodontist ready, I guess.” Flickering under his brown eyes, I looked away. We moved around each other like pieces on a chessboard. We calculated space and implication and consequence. I wondered and I wondered, why does he even need to know this? But I didn’t ask. I carve a space out for that question, like so many things, inside of my chest and pack it tight in there with the rest.

The first time he kissed me, I wouldn’t let the soft muscle of his mouth enter my own. Pressing my tongue forcibly against his own, I blocked his way. He would always tell me (not just about his tongue but on many things in general): nobody have tuh tell me nutten twice, yuh know. Once is good enough. There were several times when I longed for him to charge into my mouth, bowling over my insecurities, my worries, my fears. I wanted to be soul-kissed past boundaries. But he never did. We kissed like our mouths held hidden unknowns, or a black hole that we were afraid we wouldn’t return from.

The last time I went to see my then-boyfriend, inexplicably I woke up with an unrelenting yearning for soca parang although it was mid-June. His house felt like a cave might, on the inside, all closed off from the gleaming light outside. Its innards were hidden (or protected, depending on one’s perspective) from the street outside. Smells languished in the far corners, the kinds trapped by too much closed-up air conditioning and not enough outside air: food, incense, sensi and the faint base notes of cologne.

The tucka, tucka, tucka rhythms of the claves accompanied the shak-shak, box-bass, violin and cuatro, all following behind the sweet refrain of Madame Jeffrey oi, wake up is Christmas morning as it rang out clearly inside the house. I shuffled through the kitchen to the beat, doing a cross between a chip, a slow two-step and the occasional rock-back; easy drop on the beat to the floor, picked up some runaway napkins, cleaned the sideboard, washed dishes, and made myself some lemongrass tea before he returned from his “errands.”

His brother showed up and nonchalantly wondered out loud about when I would leave. The brother was always bemused around me, like I was a flitting aedes aegypti needing ushering through any opening. I stayed in defiance and stretched the day as long as I could, watching the man I drove to see pulverize ginger root inside his punch. I enjoyed watching him bustle around the kitchen, sizzling chopped onions, seasoning, and soy crumbles. I knew few young men then who were truly at ease and capable in the cooking arena. All the while we saw each other, he never once let me cook him a pot. I doh eat from woman just so; I might find mehself driving to see you all hours of the day and night and don’t even know why, he explained; his voice was light, but real fear bubbled inside his irises. Up close, I “Eskimo-kissed” him, watched the tiny holes sprinkled across his nose like the pores of dried orange peel as the bristle of his facial hair swept my chin.

Small flecks of him could be found embedded in the tight spaces between my teeth, like chicken, which he does not eat. No deadas, only life. He knew me well in so many ways, then. And if I were a soucouyant, he would know where I hid my skin. He would have protected this knowledge, I’m sure, from heavy-handed, salt-wielding folks. Or else, doom me to a fiery existence himself, as a heaping ember mass dying out under a rising morning sun. Yes, I would have trusted him with my skin, but I don’t know if I should have. Turns out, I am that kind of girl after all, still loving the hell out of love without a whole lot to show for it.

During the unfolding day, we sat around his small wooden table after eating. I had a clear view through the open blinds by the sliding glass door and out into his small garden in the backyard. The tomatoes, peppers, and other plants wilted pitifully, barely clinging to the soil. A long Florida winter and not enough rain had left them in this condition. My feet were propped up on an empty chair as we talked around the things we really needed to say to each other. Invariably, during the course of our conversation, and before I picked myself up and drove back to my city, he said something to make me smile big and laugh. Unselfconsciously and with no protective restraint from the palm of my hand, joy erupted freely. My teeth, from behind their wired cage, gleamed like a supernova against the darkest sky, or so I believed.

Soyini-Ayanna-Forde-close-upSoyini Ayanna Forde grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. She has work forthcoming and in Moko, Black Girl Dangerous, Apogee Journal, SX Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Tongues of the Ocean, The Guidebook, St. Somewhere Journal, and Black Renaissance Noire. Her poetry chapbook Taste of Hibiscus was published by Dancing Girl Press. She is very interested in West Indian identity, diasporic connections, and what she can learn from the resilience of strong women. She blogs about race, her love life, and West Indian culture at www.soyluv.wordpress.com.

 

Image credit: Henry Gray () Anatomy of the Human Body

MY FATHER’S ARMS by Betsy Campbell Stone

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

My-Father's-Arms

MY FATHER’S ARMS
by Betsy Campbell Stone 

At home, we covered up. Mine was a house full of brothers.

A closed bathroom door meant it was occupied. Occasionally I’d find the upstairs bathroom door ajar and push in, only to catch my father shaving. He always shaved nude. The long mirror over the two sinks was shrouded in steam except for the watery oval he cleared in front of his face. His bicep—round as Popeye’s—flexed as he swept the razor downward to reveal a stripe of skin. Like a drop of water that knows to leap off a griddle, I pulled the door shut.

◊

Such squeamishness had disappeared by my father’s last year.

One afternoon, I heard a heavy thump while he was showering and ran into the bathroom. I opened the glass door to see him struggling like a beetle on its back.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“No, but I can’t get up.”

He’d fallen before, but on the thick carpet of his bedroom. I learned then that he didn’t have enough strength in his stomach muscles to roll over, much less to sit up. Fortunately, his leather belt made a good handle; I hauled up on it while he strained to get to his hands and knees. Then I coached him to reach forward and lean on a low chair before pivoting his bottom around to the seat. Those Popeye biceps were his salvation.

◊

As he lay on the floor of the shower, his wet skin shone like alabaster. He sucked in his breath, hiked his knee to his chest and swung it to the side. Air exploded from his lungs. He panted, then tried again.

I grabbed a towel and covered him. I wasn’t embarrassed by his nudity. I was just afraid he’d be cold. He looked at me. I had the feeling he was wondering how he—we—would get out of this mess.

I tried to explain that he had to get onto his knees, but I knew he couldn’t hear me without his hearing aids. He did his best to cooperate as I gestured instructions. I rolled him onto his side and bent his legs into a 45 degree angle. He tried to right himself. The towel slipped and I lost my grip. He rolled back onto the tile. When I threw the towel aside, he didn’t flinch.

Let’s try this again, I said. I knew I couldn’t lift his 212 pounds of mostly dead weight without injuring at least one of us. Twice more I positioned his legs and locked my arms around him. I remember noticing how hard his belly was, swollen with fluid. Just at the point of giving up, we somehow jockeyed him onto his hands and knees. He grabbed the back of the shower chair, then paused to recover before shifting the other forearm onto the seat. When he finally maneuvered himself into a seated position, I swaddled him with a bath sheet.

“It’s not easy being me,” he said.

◊

As far as I was concerned, the 45-minute wrestling match proved my father’s days of independent showering were over. He disagreed.

“You have a choice,” I said. “You can shower here with my assistance or with help back at The Hacienda.” The Hacienda was what he called the senior living community where he maintained an apartment. He never remembered its real name.

I had used the same strategy on my children—offering limited options as an illusion of choice.

I reminded him that a serious fall in the shower could mean the end of our walks. Walking with me made life worth living. Every day, when we left the confines of the house, his eyes stretched to the horizon, appraising the sky, appreciating the season. He gave in.

◊

The first time I stood sentry outside the shower, I watched through the thick glass: he wet down, shut off the water, spun the soap in the washcloth, scrubbed from head to toe, privates last, turned the water back on, rinsed off, and then repeated the entire process. It was after I handed him the towel that I discovered how he’d been upsetting his balance. He straddled the towel, grasped it with one hand in front and the other in back, and see-sawed it back and forth. Once upon a time, his routine had kept him fit for duty on Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima. Now, it was setting him up for a fall.

From that point on, I entered the shower as soon as he turned off the water, wrapped one towel around his waist and draped another around his shoulders. He grabbed the safety bar by the door and stepped gingerly onto the white pile bathmat, reaching for the handle of his walker. While he rested on its seat, I rubbed lotion into his back, arms and legs.

I saw it all then, the edema that swelled his ankles, the puddle of his feet, the scabs on his calves, the trail of brown moles, the bruises that bloomed purple, the white scar on his sternum, his pale buttocks, and still, those Popeye biceps. Once upon a time, I remembered, they’d held me high above the surf off Barber’s Point. He’d been the one to keep me safe.

Betsy-Campbell-Stone-Betsy Campbell Stone is an emerging writer from Sacramento, CA. She retired from her career as a healthcare strategy and marketing executive to care for her father, Henry, then eighty-nine. Over his final seven years of life, she returned to writing. While pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction at Bennington College, she supports nonprofits in their missions to end hunger, aid caregivers, and promote comfort at the end of life.

KEEPING TIME by Angelique Stevens

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Keeping-Time

KEEPING TIME
by Angelique Stevens 

Walking through the doors of the V.A. hospital where my stepfather is a patient, the air settles, resigned like the sun’s afternoon descent. Dust flecks float in and out of golden afternoon rays. In the stillness, I can almost follow one from foyer through corridor, up and down lifeless hallways until it finally settles on a rusted radiator. I walk cautiously like I might break the building’s trance. The building, its dirt collecting in forgotten baseboard crevices is lined with plaster walls, their cracks covered with layers of paint. An old wooden bench sits in the foyer where people remove boots and unbutton coats.

Along the right wall are two bulletin boards. One posts the day’s schedule “10:00—group meeting, 12:00—lunch: corn, meatloaf, and onion soup, 2:30—movie: Harrison Ford in Patriot Games” The other overflows with old pictures of current residents. One photo, cracked and worn, shows a young man newly pressed and proudly uniformed with an elbow on the nose of an old fighter plane. In another a young man, no older than 17, stands next to his parents. His mother lingers in the back, indifferent. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam—they all stand, young and strong, next to the armaments of their era.

In the silence, I tip-toe unconsciously. The nurse’s station in the next corridor is empty. The other workers have all gone home to their families for the weekend. Unused rooms are darkened and office doors are closed. Further down the corridor, a man slumps in a wheelchair blocking it where the sun’s rays are the brightest. He wears gray pants with dark stains that reveal his secrets. A slipper covers one foot, a cast the other. He doesn’t move to greet me; he only stares in expectation at the slit of light on the floor.

On my father’s ward, patient doors are open. In front of me, an old Asian man wearing only a hospital gown, back opened walks out of his room. His skin drooping over his body like a child wearing oversized clothes. He wheels an IV on a portable pole to the bathroom unaware that I am behind him. In the bathroom, a man sits on the toilet groaning. The nurse stooped over him tells him he has to work with her if he wants to get back to his room. In another room, a man lies on his bed with nothing but a diaper on watching a Sunday game. His eyes are glazed. I understand that look. In this place, time stills, where the future is certain and the past is left for contemplation.

I enter my stepfather’s room and he doesn’t notice me. He, like so many others, is lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. He is holding the phone to his ear and reciting a prayer. I wonder who he’s speaking to. I wonder if he’s speaking to anyone. I let him be for a moment until I realize he is repeating the same line over and over again.

“Dad?”

“Ouh fathah who aaht in heaven, hallow’d be thy name…” his Boston accent still thick after 30 years in New York.

“Dad!” Like being pulled out of a trance too quickly, he comes to wide-eyed and fearful. I wonder where he is. But then his eyes soften.

“Dad, who were you talking to?”

“Nobody”, he says. I believe him.

We chat for a bit, catching up on the week’s activities. I tell him how my college classes are going. He listens. His stories have already been told. I offer one of the chocolate kisses he keeps hidden in the drawer. Trembling fingers fumble with the wrapper so long that it is melted when he finally opens it. Chocolate runs down his chin and onto his stained hospital gown. Soon he is asleep and I am left talking with myself.

It doesn’t take long for the line to blur between patient and visitor. I move toward the window to let the shade up. As my father sleeps, I keep my own time watching the sun creep in streaks and slants along the floor. A curtain walls off half the room. His roommate is on the other side visiting with his wife. I can see their reflections in the mirror on the wall. She feeds him dinner. Silent and motionless, his mouth gives him away as he chews. She talks to the nurse about the war. She is telling his stories for him. I wanted to tell her I have stories too. There was the time just after Pearl Harbor when my stepdad was searching for wreckage… or the time the tornado came through town and the policemen walked street by street getting the number of the dead. But instead I sit silent.

My father wakes and wants me to get the nurse immediately. He has to go to the bathroom. His voice is tense as he tells the two nurses to be careful. They tell me to wait out in the hall. Instead, I walk down to the basement where an endless maze of underground corridors joins the buildings on the VA compound. On the weekends, the machines in the central area of the compound are the only place to get a cup of coffee. When dad was in better shape, just last year, he used to shuffle along with me to the café area or smoking lounge. Sitting in the little smoke-filled building we listened to others tell stories of the past.

Now, he can barely move and is plagued with bedsores. I noticed them yesterday when the nurse turned him over for a shot. He can only get out of his bed for the bathroom, and even then he needs two nurses to pick him up and put him into his chair. When I was younger, my sister and I would try to wrestle him down, but each time we lost. In the end he always told us, “Theyah will nevah come a day when yah can beat me.” All those years he took care of us, like we were his own. Now I watch him weekends as he shakes to put a fork to his mouth or sip ginger ale through a straw.

Back upstairs, he’s screaming, “Put me down!” It sounds like anger, but I know it’s fear and shame. Inside, his two nurses help him into a bed from the chair. He yells, “Holy Jesus! Oh Lord!” I try to calm him, “Dad it’s ok, they’re not going to hurt you. Just relax” Anxiety suffocates his breathing and his screams come out in choked sobs and half breaths. Growing up, I never saw him cry.

I too visit with the ghosts while I am here; one cannot help it after a while. Instead of hearing his screams, I focus on the past. There was the time he thundered into my principles office after a boy on the playground hit me. When I was hit by a car, he visited me every day for six weeks. Later, after I was released from the hospital in a body cast, he carried me up the stairs to our apartment. Once he stormed the park to find the bully who stole my sneakers and threw them in a dumpster. The man struggling in the bed is not that man I remember who came home every day at 7:00PM—his blue uniform soaked with engine grease, hands calloused, feet battered, worn down and dirt tired.

My father and I take turns being half there. He has taken his oxygen and is finally dozing off again. Thinning amber slants on the floor tell me evening will soon be here and it will be time to go. He wakes up again in a terror- screaming. He calls for me and tells me he’s ready to go now. He says, “come on get my things, we’ah leaving this place” I try to tell him he’s having a dream but he gets angry instead, “ I wanna go home NOW!” he demands. My calming words have no effect and soon he is telling me to get out of his. I kiss him on the head and hold his hand. I too am crying. He shoves me away and says “Get out Get out get out!” I told him I loved him and walked out.

Walking back down the corridor that last time, there was the bearded man again staring at the ceiling, leg shaking, still muttering. The older Asian man had made his way to his bed, but another had replaced him in the bathroom. There was the old man in the wheelchair still in the corridor keeping time. I stopped to say hello to him; but he didn’t move. Instead, he stared tired-eyed at the sun’s dying rays.

Angelique-StevensAngelique Stevens teaches Creative Writing and Literature of the Holocaust and Genocide in Upstate, NY. An activist for human rights, her travels have taken her across the globe. She lived in Chiapas, Mexico to be a witness for peace with the Zapatista Rebels, volunteered in an elephant refuge in Thailand, studied the Holocaust in Israel, and evaluated water wells in South Sudan. She writes about her travels and her experiences growing up in Upstate New York. Her work can be found in Shark Reef, The Chattahoochee Review and a number of anthologies. Her essay “If Nothing Changes” appears in Issue No. 8 of Cleaver.

THE DEATH OF A BABY by Kirsten Aguilar

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

The-Death-of-a-Baby

THE DEATH OF A BABY
by Kirsten Aguilar

The day we went to see the baby, it rained. One of those rains that dumps and then is done, leaves you soaked but not shivering. The family lived on the same road as Celia and worked a plot of land that now, in the spring, burst up in stocks of corn. The father of the baby sat on the porch and waved us in despite our dripping clothes and mud-caked shoes. I cannot remember now where we were coming from or whether we’d planned the visit, but I do know that it was evening and Celia had her camera and inside the little house, two boys sat on stools eating rice and fish with their fingers. The baby was small and warm and she slept while I held her. The TV was on. The boys ate. Celia took pictures.

A few days later, I was in a taxi alone, just me and the driver. It was hot and my thighs sweated and stuck to the seat. We drove through the city and I watched out my window when Celia called and told me that the baby, Liza, had died.

“Elle a toujours dormi,” Celia said—she was always sleeping. She told me that the baby had died around noon and, by two o’clock, she was buried in the ground, la terre, near the house. The mother had three other children, all boys, and this was the second girl she’d lost.

The French verb for dying is mourir. A word that falls back into my throat when I try to get it out. Too many vowels, not enough consonants. It reminds me of more and of mourn, of something that isn’t quite finished, something that begs for a crisp ending, the percussion of a T.

Celia asked me to come with her to bring the pictures she’d printed of Liza to her family. We went one evening that week. A group of women sat in a half-hearted circle in front of the little house. Their dresses were bright and patterned and full of fabric that crumpled up in their laps. They held between them a heavy stillness, the type of weight that isn’t dead but vibrates and hums with tension. Liza’s mother sat on a low stool near their center, curved into herself the way you might on a cold day. When we approached, they looked up, greeted us with slow nods, a few murmured ça va‘s.

“Bonjour,” we said. We stood and they sat and Celia held the pictures out to the mother. “The pictures,” she said, “of Liza.” There was a moment of hesitation before the mother took them and then set her hand on the edge of her knee, left a bit of distance between herself and the images. She waited a moment before she let herself look. She flipped through them and she didn’t smile and she passed them around to the other women who said, elle est belle, elle est belle. When all the pictures had left her hands, she leaned her forehead into her palm and closed her eyes. “Merde,” she said. The kind of word that reminds you of dirt and of soil, of something raw and musky and fecund. She stayed like that for a while, forehead pressed into palm. Celia and I stood and waited and one woman, older than the rest said, “C’etait la choix de dieu.” It was God’s choice.

I do not believe in God and yet sometimes I find myself angry at him. I look up at the sky and I try to find the outline of his presence. I shake my fist, I shake my head, I shake because I cannot fathom why some things happen and others do not.

It has been two years since I was in Cameroon. I have tried, over and over, to write about Liza. For a while, I’d place my pen on the page and only a few words would come out. I’d scribble and scratch and end up with half a sentence, the inkling of an idea. I have tried to make sense of Liza and her death and I have not been able to. It stays a knotted and needless thing no matter how much I try to make it unravel. I have tried to justify it—maybe it was God’s choice. How easy that would be. I have thought about her, flipped my mind back to that little house, walked into its room, stayed there for a while, tried to meditate on the details: the pink of her baby clothes, the shut of her eyes. I have dreamed about her a few times, simple dreams: she is there and I hold her and that is it.

Sometimes, there is a thing inside of me that pools like colored oil on water. I notice it most when I do things that hurt others, when the events in my life leave me feeling raw and ugly and exposed like skin peeled away from muscle. I think of Liza sometimes, and wonder what could have happened had I not held her—if somehow this oil inside me seeped into her and like a poison made her sleepy and still. I wonder if there is something innately bad about me that has the power to wilt and ruin the things that I touch. When I think these things, I curl my fingers in. My hands become fists, my body shrinks. I find myself as knotted as Liza’s death.

A few weeks ago, I was at a plant shop with a friend looking for a succulent to give as a gift. There were plants in the window, plants on the shelf along one wall and plants in three refrigerators along the other. Baskets hung from the ceiling. It was simple and humid and the fridges hummed as the shopkeeper wrote out the receipt by hand and wrapped the succulent that we chose in pink tissue paper. We commented on the beauty of the flowers as we waited: Look at this. And this! There was one that spilled out of its vase, reached toward us like a handshake. It was white and the edges bled blue—a sort of rich, endless blue, the type that reminds you of falling. It seemed awake and alive and urgent. I felt somehow that I was locked in its gaze, that it, and I, couldn’t look away.

Kirsten-AguilarKirsten Aguilar was born and raised in Sonoma, California. She graduated from Middlebury College in 2014 with a degree in International Studies and now lives in Chicago. Most recently, her fiction has appeared in The Boiler Journal.

Image credit: canonim on Flickr

NOM DE VOYAGE by Travis Kiger

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The-Island

NOM DE VOYAGE
by Travis Kiger

It was less about ego surfing than curiosity is what my fingers self-consciously whispered into the keys spelling my name in the box. If you did this, you would find, even before finished, that Travis is a former city councilman of Fullerton County, CA. Click one of those links your search produces and you would read critical blogs with critical comments written about him. You would read the headline, “12 Year Old Takes Fullerton’s Travis Kiger to School on Bullying.” You would learn that he is a progressive politician by finding a video posted of his rant purporting DUI checkpoints as unconstitutional and are a union scam. Scroll down—he plays soccer for Lee University. Scroll down—he coaches debate. But mostly, thanks to busy bee search engine optimizers, you would see that he is a former city councilman. Each Travis Kiger with a different face. Each with a different occupation.

Our names are arbitrarily shared, which isn’t surprising as they were given to us. Gifts. Mine was born of conflict resolution. My parents were traveling to New Orleans from Thibodaux in their royal blue Chevrolet station wagon. They were arguing, my mom pregnant, my dad belligerent, about what they would name me. My dad wanted to name me Cory. My mom wanted to name me, “Not Cory.” In the heat of the battle for my identity, the Chevrolet headlights shined upon a glimmering green rectangle of a road marking—TRAVIS DRIVE. My dad saw the sign and in frustration indignantly pitched, “Let’s just call him Travis.” My mom said, “I like Travis.” My dad said in defeat, “Well, I do too.” You will not find this out on the Internet. You would have heard this in the same blue station wagon on the way to New Orleans from Thibodaux as my mother explained to me every time—“TRAVIS DRIVE. Dat’s where ya got ya name.”

The way my dad tells it: “Ya motha was in labor fo eighteen hours, and we were cryin and she’d worked so hard, so I looked at her an said, ‘Ya name him whatever ya want.’ And she said, ‘I still like Travis.’ And I wasn’t gonna argue wit her.”

Felix-and-the-Big-Fish

Felix and the big fish, c. 1952.

In Grand Isle, LA, however, I am Travel. What Felix, my grandfather, called me. When you asked him why, his cracked face would spit out an explanation like he would his stale tobacco after a long chew—as if the question required no modicum of dignity in response, “Cuz dats da boy’s name.” He very well could have called me this because it was easier to say than Travis, but my dad also admits that my grandfather forgot things. Even years after the divorce cap-stoning eight years of marriage, the old man called my mother Susan (her name was not Susan)—the name of my father’s ex. I think he called me this most because it bugged my mom, who subscribes to the strict sentiment that you name people what they are to be called, and then you call them that thing that you have named them. But perhaps the rationale behind Travel was not so sinister.

Felix Kiger lived a habit of calling articles by other names. My dad ruminates in attempt to discern whether Felix called things by what he wanted or by what he understood. Felix called me Travel. My dad’s best friend Bennie Gatz—Biddy Gat. Those variations were understandable. But he also evaporated Up Da Bayou fo’ da’ hurricane. And he called Tommy Casanova—LSU football great—Castrano and sometimes Snowball. He cooked for Casanova’s family when they visited their camp on the island, and so Felix dragged my dad down to the sideline of Tiger Stadium during a game. He yelled over the crowd noise to the security guard, “Where’s Snowball?! I know dat’ boy!” The bewildered guard held my grandfather off, as there was no Snowball on the team. Casanova, injured at the moment, saw my fat little grandfather in his polyester leisure pants—that had been taken up considerably on account of his short legs—causing a commotion on the sideline and crutched over to greet him, clearing the air.

“Mr. Kiger, thanks for coming out.”

“Hey boy, how come you not in da’ game?”

Casanova held up his crutches and shrugged. He extended his mammoth footballing hand and covered my grandfather’s stubby fisherman’s mitt. My grandfather then narrowed his eyes and looked to the security guard. “I tol’ ya I knew dat boy!”

Maybe names simply did not mean much to my grandfather, either. Recently, I was researching his census history the best way I knew how—on the Internet. I found that Kiger was sometimes spelled Keiger. I also found Felix represented as Fidelis. Fidelis Kiger. Felix Keiger. Fidelis Keiger. Travis Kiger. Travis Keiger. Travel Kiger. Travel Keiger.

Names didn’t hold any amount of sacred significance to me growing up. My youth league baseball jersey was forever wrong. Kieger. Keiger. Koger. Kyger. I don’t know why copying Kiger from an order form should be any more difficult than copying Smith, but nonetheless, I was never bothered by it. When teammates called me T, T-Dawg, Trav, Trever or Larry, I didn’t mind. I intuitively felt cool that someone thought enough about me to make up their own name for me. Then I started teaching.

In the classroom, calling your students by nicknames can help develop rapport. I do this every year. I call out these nicknames like I am a game show announcer and they are characters on American Gladiators. My classrooms are as diverse as the colorful gladiators, and the practice works to keep the students engaged—on the edge of their seats to hear who will be branded next. Mike-n-Ike? Tommy Gun? Gio? They really get into it and typically wear this nickname as an insignia of pride. “I was in Kiger’s class and he called me Little John or A-train or Jack Attack or Weapon X or Slice or W-2 or Ray Ray or Madison Square Garden.” However, last year, a ninth grader with hair as blonde as her ambition responded to her nickname with indignation. I’d called her Goldilocks.

“Please do not call me that. That is not my name.”

I callously apologized, and continued with my lesson for the day. But, even if my mouth and eyes were discussing the theme of pride acting as a great motivating factor of men in The Old Man and the Sea, my thoughts were consumed by, “How dare she interrupt my mojo by assuming power of what I was to call her? What was wrong with this person?”

Then, in preparing an introduction to a unit on spoken word poetry, I chanced upon a video of a young poet who brands herself Ethiopian Girl. Her poem began, “I’m tired of people asking me to smooth my name out for them. They want me to bury it in English so that they can understand.” And then she continued, “No, you can’t give me a nickname to replace this gift of five letters.” I paused the video. Her name was Hiwot.

And then came that moment when teachers realize that they should accept their students every day in the present. That even though there is much repetition in content and technique, that each session is an evolving organic thing. That judging the present according to the past is a mistake. I’d forgotten that sometimes I acted like an asshole. I’d forgotten that my age and education did not forge an armor insulating me from learning lessons from my students. I realized that names meant something, and that someone gave my indignant student her name with no small amount of thought and deliberation. She was certainly more complex than my ill-inspired story time allusion and her blonde hair. Maybe her parents argued about her name for months. Maybe her name was a trophy earned by her mother’s labor. Or maybe it was a legacy conveyed by her heritage. I hit play on my screen. Hiwot described her name as, “The only line I have to a place I’ve never been—a vessel carrying me to the earth I’ve never felt.” I watched the video three times. And then I wrote a not-so-callous apology to my student. And then I typed Travis Kiger into my search engine.

Travel became the Kiger stamp on my sense of self. It has become what I’m called on my dad’s side of the family. This is more so since the death of my grandfather fifteen years ago. It seems that every interaction with me births an imagined interaction, as if calling me Travel can raise the dead and conjure a conversation with a ghost. This badge of his legacy is quite unexpected. My godfather, Bennie, breathes sustenance into this badge every time he hears Travis by emphatically demanding, “His name is Travel!” Very recently, not a week after a pilgrimage to Grand Isle to visit Felix’s only surviving sister, Aunt Moe, I called her to check in.

She answered, “Who’s dis?”

“It’s Travis.”

“Who?”

“Can I speak to Margarie Bradburry, please?”

“Who da fuck is dis?”

“Aunt Moe, it’s TRAVIS. TRAVIS KIGER.”

“Oh, Travel, hunny, why didn’t ya say so? I was about ta cuss you out. I don’t know no fuckin’ Travis. Next time, just tell me it’s Travel. What do you want, boo?”

Travel was sacred text. This ritual of my renaming seemed mysterious and whimsical to me until my encounter with my indignant student. Until my run-in with Ethiopian Girl. I then understood Travel as a gift of six letters. The name as a lifeline to someone that has given up gone some time ago. The name as a vessel carrying my family into memory and affection for the fat little man that called things by whatever he wanted.

The author's parents with his grandfather, Felix Kiger.

The author’s parents with his grandfather, Felix Kiger, c. 1979.

When I typed Felix Kiger into my search engine, I was bombarded with ancestry and genealogy sites fishing for a registration fee to learn more about my past. I also saw information about his gravesite and the gravesite of a Felix Kiger before him—a farmer in Fairfield County, OH, whose grandfather was Henry Kiger, an early pioneer to Ohio who fought in the War of 1812 and lived to be more than 100 years old. And then I saw a Louisiana sportsman blog and this passage by e-man, motorboat describing a shrimping occurrence called a jubilee:

A very old gentleman in Grand Isle, Felix Kiger (now passed away) would always talk about the ten-fifteen baskets (champagnes) of shrimp he would catch on those rare occasions. I was fortunate enough to see one with him in early 80s and yes we could have caught as much shrimp and crabs as we wanted. In his vast amount of Cajun wisdom, he swore that the jubilee was caused by the exact alignment of the moon with some of the planets. I have no idea of the cause, but viewing [it] was probably the greatest outdoor event I ever saw.

After reading this, I smiled considering my Pa Pa, The Cajun Astronomer. The man who could not say my name correctly. Then I typed Travel Kiger into my search engine. I did not see any thumbnail images reflecting my handsome mug. I did, however, find a great deal on travel to Kiger Island, OR. I saved the link in my browser. Kiger Island sounds like a nice place to visit.

Travis-KigerTravis Kiger was born in Thibodaux, LA, and grew up in a lot of places. He earned his MFA at the University of Tampa, and he teaches Rhetoric and Persuasion at Illinois State University. He has previously written for The Rostrum, Bull Men’s Fiction, and Bridge Eight Magazine. He is a husband, father, dog owner, and beer drinker.

 

 

 

All images © Travis Kiger
Cover image: Grand Isle, Louisiana, 2014

TOUCHED FROM THE SKY by Shannon Viola

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Touched-by-the-Sky-ovid

TOUCHED FROM THE SKY
by Shannon Viola

Whenever I read Tacitus in the Latin, I want to crawl underneath my bed with twelve cupcakes and curse myself to Dis and back. He’s a sassy Roman author. One time, Tacitus used an ablative absolute to lead into a result clause. You might not know what either an ablative absolute or a result clause is, and I wouldn’t expect you to, but trust me. Connecting those two grammatical constructions in Latin is mental. But Tacitus did it anyway.

If you haven’t already guessed, I am a Classics major.

If you don’t know what a Classics major is, that’s okay too. My roommate, Erica, has known my major since we moved in. One day in October, however, I was lounging on my bed, translating some Tacitus, when I peered up to Erica and said:

“You know, I just really love Latin. Translating just makes me happy.”

So Erica, with a face as sincere as a mother’s and in a tone as dulcet as vernal dew, said, “Well, Shannon, if you love Latin so much, you should major in it. Really. Just do what you love.”

I squinted my eyes and stifled a guffaw. “Erica—that’s what a Classics major is.”

“Oh,” she laughed, “I never knew what a Classics major was, so I just pretended to know whenever you mentioned it.”

A locked-in definition of Classics is so broad and controversial that it could keep any set of polymaths raving at each other into the night. How valuable is ancient art to the written record? How far do we rely on Vitruvius in our excavations? And what about those Phoenicians? Yet essentially, Classics is the study of Latin, ancient Greek, and the history of ancient Greece and Rome, with some archaeology thrown in if you’re feeling feisty. In my own study, I focus on Latin and ancient Greek literature, on the sweet, sweet stanzas of Vergil and the antagonizing intellectual spawn of Tacitus.

I already know what you are thinking. What kind of a job can you get with a Classics major?

One does not major in Classics for the money.

I began my Latin when I was fourteen. My Latin teacher, the illustrious Jane Lienau, stood at the white board ordering us to chant, bellum, belli, bello. Whenever she tasked us with a passage to translate, my friend Kelsey would whip around in her seat, moving stray strands of hair out of her lips, and we would attack the Latin. She picked at the grammar while I fed her the vocabulary, and together we were scholars. We continued translating together until junior year, when I skipped Latin III for Latin IV which was a sea of seniors and intense Vergilian syntax.

During my senior year, Mrs. Lienau and I translated Ovid together— just us and a cuppa Earl Grey. I opened the Metamorphoses with no knowledge of the ensuing vocabulary, and Mrs. Lienau encouraged me to translate with context clues and an internal encyclopedia of Latin words. By the end of the year, with three books of Ovid and three of Vergil under my belt, I wrote a Latin poem in dactylic hexameter. I dreamt of elisions and spondees for the month in which I wrote it, and that brutal experience of tearing up words and cutting my fingers on Cassell’s Latin dictionary yielded only a tiny smack of poetry. I transcribed my seven lines on a sheet of computer paper soaked in tea, so that it would look like it was just unearthed from the ruins of Herculaneum. Mrs. Lienau was proud of my contribution to the dying art of severely-constructed, transcendent poetry.

I am proof that a study of Latin deepens one’s understanding of the world. I know the statues at the National Gallery more deeply, and I can dissect English sentences, right down to the prefixes, with such dexterity that the meanings that flow from twenty-six symbols are tactile, and I can roll the words in between my fingers, and when I translate Latin my brain flips upside down and I am somebody else, someone who can express mighty sentiments in three words and who understands why pagans worship the sky.

You can’t feel that way with an economics major.

When I read Tacitus, however, my metaphysical Latin mode stalemates. Tacitus takes no prisoners. He wants me to struggle, flip the table over, and storm out of the room. He hopes that I keen and scratch at my breast. He wants me to draw blood.

Yet in the last Latin class of my first semester, Tacitus was describing the omens following the death of Agrippina, the emperor Nero’s mother. Apparently, all fourteen districts of Rome were struck by lightning: tactae de caelo. Literally, “touched from the sky”. I let the pencil drop from my fingers after we had translated that participial phrase. Tacitus—for once—was being exceptionally lovely. Lightning, like a rugged finger, is our link to the sky, to God, to company beyond ourselves. That channel comes in a blink, but, by Jupiter, it’s possible. All of that, in three words.

That is the poetry I tried to emulate for Mrs. Lienau, with my ink-muddied fingertips and scores of scansion notes. My poem was about the hairdresser pinning fragmenta of baby’s breath into my curls for prom, how wrinkled mouths sighed as we gathered our skirts and then jumped into a car for a night we could only have once. Yet I am not Tacitus; I’m a reticent millennial listening to Matt Pond and ordering iced chai lattes. I will never fall in the wake of a powerful lightning strike, holler at the emperor to give the gladiator the death blow, or recline at a symposium. In order to write tactae de caelo, I would have to be born Roman.

I’m studying Classics so that I can connect with a former version of myself, for when I read Latin poetry, even Tacitus, I know my world from another era and space. I would trade a six-figure job for that knowledge any day.

Shannon-ViolaShannon Viola grew up on the coast of Maine and studies Classics and Writing at Gettysburg College. She has been published in Cleaver and Wayfarer Journal among others, and in the past, she attended NEYWC at Bread Loaf and was a winner of the 2013 Mayborn National History Writing Contest. Her essay “In My Time” appeared in Issue No. 5 of Cleaver.

 

 

 

Image credit: Wikipedia

RUSSIA IS NOT LIKE US by Barbara Haas

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Russia-Is-Not-Like-Us

RUSSIA IS NOT LIKE US
by Barbara Haas

An inch or two of new snow has fallen since morning, flocking the graves at Novodevichy in feathery white. Black marble obelisks and basalt monoliths create a vertical as well as horizontal tombscape, a way to organize death into the narrow alleys and lanes of a space-cramped necropolis.

Shostakovich, Chekhov, Yeltsin, Kruschev—they lie here. Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Gogol, Tretyakov—tons of granite guard their rest.

Moscow is never more silent than under a mantle of soft mounded snow and winter never more Russian than on a somber day whose gray sky is woolly with constantly sifting flakes.

An occasional bouquet of faded flowers brings a splash of color to this cemetery. Even the grave of a mathematician from the nineteenth century is graced with a spray of scarlet gladioli, proof of memory’s persistence. Roses lie crushed at the feet of alabaster statues, their petals made pale by the lacework of snow, forgotten bouquets in a forgotten season left to commemorate the lives of legends.

The statues themselves are arresting. Human figures seem to stride out of polished rock slabs but stop just short of stepping free, something in the granite leashing them to eternity. The opera singers, ballerinas and artists stare across the black and white austerity, honored guests at a quite exclusive cocktail party, VIPs on the A-list forever. Sculpted larger than life, the carvings illustrate the way death has forced upon those who rest here super-human proportions. Their stone faces reveal the dignity of luminaries who know strangers will gaze upon them for centuries.

Basically everyone is having a good hair day in the Novodevichy Cemetery, except the living whose fur-trimmed hoods and fleece caps guarantee a flat-on-one-side helmeted look once the hoods come down later in a café and the caps come off over steaming mugs of tea. I point my camera at the lavishly chiseled equations on the broad “chalkboard” of a physicist’s polished tombstone, and my friend Elena eases her way between the graves, walking like an Egyptian occasionally so as to sidle on through, the spaces are so tight. She takes a shortcut to Gerasimov’s elaborate sculpture, her right elbow bumping Stanislavski’s chunk of limestone, her left knee knocking against Eisenstein’s slab. I tag along, my Yak-Traks scraping down through the snow layer to bare rock. We are rasping our way through this geometry of stone.

When she turned fifty-five, mandatory retirement age in Russia, Elena put her translation skills to good use and became a guide. She could walk Novodevichy backwards in the dark and find every grave, she has brought so many people through. Sometimes she talks religion with a visitor, sometimes architecture or the atomic age. With me, she talks Totalitarianism, which is tantamount to walking backwards in the dark through history. On Stalin: “The horrors our citizens endured under his regime show what happens when a mentally unstable person comes to power.” On Lavrenty Beria, head of the NKVD during the purge: “He was a rapist. Women knew not to walk past his Moscow villa, because he snatched victims off the street.” On the way the West does not understand Russia: “We don’t understand either! It’s madness!” She jabs her forehead with the tip of her index finger, as if to punctuate the craziness. “What we don’t understand could fill a whole library.”

This is mid-January, 2015. The ruble has cratered; oil prices have plummeted. Economic sanctions are taking a bite. President Putin’s approval rating hovers at 85 percent, however.

Knitted hat pulled low to her eyebrows, Elena uses her gloved hand to sweep fluffy snow from the pedestal of painter Alexander Gerasimov’s statue. The bare-chested portraitist reclines as if sunbathing, arms stretched behind his head, a lounging, unconcerned pose better suited to a sandy beach. Today, he has a lap full of snow. Elena stands back while I frame the shot. Bristly tufts of iron gray hair poke out from under her cap, the gray mixed now and then with coarse black curls. She gazes down at the dates that encompass Gerasimov’s time here on earth, and it’s obvious that her mood is matching this somber place.

“The last two months have been very hard,” she says. Her husband’s health—diabetes and fibromyalgia. Her twenty-six-year-old son still at home and with few employment prospects. She brightens when speaking of her granddaughter, however, a nine-year-old in primary school here in Moscow—and the fortunes of her daughter and son-in-law, both educators, bring her cheer. “They bought a new car,” she tells me. “Right before dealers suspended sales. Not everybody could act so quickly.”

When the ruble fell to half its valuation, people made a run on luxury goods—IKEA furniture, Jaguar sedans, Swarovski crystal. Dealerships shuttered their doors until they could adjust to the swooning currency. Meanwhile, the salmon blini that last summer went for 650 rubles on a restaurant’s menu was still 650 rubles—but it cost twice as much. Bearing up under this hardship meant fewer meals out. “Not a big deal,” Elena said a while ago, “because, like you, I enjoy cooking. Cooking is relaxing. Cooking is what I would do almost above anything. But I love avocados. Do you know a that single avocado costs $7 U.S.?”

I glance over at Elena now. She has shoved her glasses up, propping them on the brim of her knitted cap, and she is ransacking her iPhone for examples of Gerasimov’s paintings so she can show me his style. Her family has been in Moscow for more generations than one can sensibly count. She’s Jewish, which in Russia brings a hardship saga all its own. She has talked a lot about her grandmother, an inspirational figure through Elena’s girlhood, a formidable and resourceful woman whose ninety years encompassed Revolution, a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, purges, unremitting anti-Semitism, Nazi assault, Communism, the Cold War.

Elena and I are both Baby Boomers—she circa 1955, I circa 1957. The boom was less boomy on the Soviet side, however, because the Great Patriotic War took an estimated twenty million men from the gene pool.

Prosperity didn’t happen here. A spend-happy middle class never formed. Capitalism was as odious on these shores as Communism on our own. People lived with material deprivation. The sophisticated consumption that marked a rising class in the West never came about. Stagnant economics accentuated some of the most Russian of qualities, however: endurance, sacrifice, persistence, stoicism, and the ability to suffer through hard times. Taken together, these qualities had long fortified the people of this country, even during the Imperial Era, a Russianness forged in one’s DNA. Displayed against a backdrop rich with the music of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsokov and the literature of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, these qualities bespoke a time-tested hardiness, something Elena’s grandmother knew well.

It’s easy to walk the streets of contemporary Moscow, see the accoutrement of modern consumerism—the smartphones, the iPads, the new cars—and think that Russia is just like us. Subway restaurants, Starbucks cafes, KFCs, and Burger Kings. The place looks reassuringly familiar. Moscow feels as comfortable as a Saturday afternoon spent in the Food Court at Mall of America. We almost start looking for Olive Garden, Cinnabon, and P.F. Chang’s, the place is so run of the mill. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to believe that the Bill of Rights which protects us in the U.S.—and the freedoms the Bill guarantees—protects the people here, too. It’s alluring moreover to assert that the people want a Bill of Rights like ours and a style of government like ours. That they yearn for a full-on U.S.-style democracy. That a full-on U.S.-style democracy would make sense here. This is typical American hubris.

Russia-Is-Not-Like-Us2

Russia is not like us.

Elena hands me her iPhone. “Scroll left,” she says. “Alexander Gerasimov pioneered Heroic Realism in the Socialist style. Posh, pompous, and fawning.”

I see red canvases, glittering Soviet pageantry on an industrial scale, a cast of thousands, many paintings headlined by Stalin or Lenin, sometimes both.

“That one,” Elena says. She has shoved her glasses up again and is peering closely over my shoulder.

I pause at Hymn to October, 1942.

“Massive,” Elena says. “Grand. Maybe 800 centimeters wide.”

I do the quick calculation: 12 feet. I imagine the painting engulfing me. In it, Stalin addresses Party Big Wigs on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Revolution. Onstage behind him, dominating the scene, is a bust of Lenin, perhaps ten times life-size. Stalin’s pose at the podium, mid-speech, is characteristic. Lenin’s visage is classic and representative, as if stamped on. Both are static, frozen. I am standing in a cemetery gazing upon a painting that is its own cemetery of Major Players—Stalin, Lenin, other dignitaries—all of them buried by Time.

Elena pockets her phone and gazes across Novodevichy. “A whole library, Barbara? Is that what I said?” She shakes her head. “A whole library is not big enough to hold the things we don’t understand.”

Sifting flakes melt against my cheeks, a vanishing moisture. Low clouds reflect down on the graves the dark opaque dullness of well-handled pewter. It’s as if we’re on a game board of immovable pieces, everything welded by Death into place—whether history or vanity or Truth. It’s no longer possible to move anything or change the order of play. The permanence is profound and epic. Impenetrable.

In a country like this, one might reasonably ask, How long before the bad times end? When I hang out with Elena, however, that’s the last thing on my mind. Her grandmother bequeathed to her a legacy of resilience, a thing one cannot commodify. It occurs to me that our inability to see this place through Western eyes, to acknowledge it as a separate and valid entity, stems from the fact that when we look at Russia we don’t really even actually see Russia. We see ourselves. A co-opting gaze, that. Russia is a mirror to reflect back the image we prefer, which is our own.

Snow scatters down on these musings, so suited to a place like Novodevichy, a stark white container where death and winter can clasp hands all season long. Elena has walked on ahead and now beckons to me from the cosmonaut’s tomb. “Sputnik Generation,” she says when I’ve stood in admiring silence an appropriate interval. She locks her gaze with mine and smiles impishly. “That’s me.”

Some of the best things about Russia do not export.

Later, she will see me back to my hotel where we’ll stand on the snowy sidewalk saying goodbye, sharing a hug like friends who will get together again next week. It’ll be kind of an abrupt farewell—no time to luxuriate over a cup of tea—because she’s got to dash off. This evening her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter are coming over for dinner, and she’s going to do her signature dish, the eggplant one with walnuts. She’ll set the bread on the table near the salt cellar as they’re brushing the snow from their coats and hanging their scarves up in the hall. When Elena moves about her kitchen, wreathed in the fragrance of baking, I like to believe that she finds enough here, plenty here, more than enough of what she does in fact understand to outweigh the things she does not.

Barbara-HaasBarbara Haas’s work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, Western Humanities Review, and Quarterly West. She is a repeat contributor to The North American Review, Hudson Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Prose, and her MFA is from UC-Irvine.

 

 

 

Image credits: “Novodevichy Cemetery” by Barbara Haas

MY BOYFRIEND’S ESTRANGED GRANDFATHER by Rachael Tague

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MY BOYFRIEND’S ESTRANGED GRANDFATHER
by Rachael Tague

He was an alcoholic, a wealthy engineer, and a butterfly collector. He traveled all over the world, especially in South America, specializing in Southern California and Neotropical specimens, amassing a collection allegedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time of his death in late 2007.

His house in California must have been nothing but walls and racks of display cases—wings ranging from the size of a buttercup blossom to an oak leaf. Splotched, banded, eyed, lined, swiped, swirled. Splayed and mounted, framed, flocking Emperors, Brushfoots, Daggerwings, longwings, snouts, and Swallowtails, sleek, fuzzy, feathered—frozen.

It happened on a bridge—or rather, off a bridge—in the Kosnipata Valley of Atalaya, Peru. He ventured away from the Association for Tropical Lepidoptera early on the morning of November 4. As there were no witnesses, they can only assume that he spotted a rare butterfly—perhaps the one he traveled to Peru to find—misjudged its distance from the bridge railing, and flung his net too hard.

Accounts of the height of the fall range from thirty to five thousand feet, frozen in flight for an instant, barely long enough to snatch a breath of the air rushing around him before he met the dry riverbed. His association initiated a search when he didn’t show up for dinner and discovered his body in the ravine, net in hand, and the butterfly trapped, flapping in the fibers.

Rachael-TagueRachael Tague grew up in the Indianapolis area and is currently studying English and Creative Writing at Cedarville University. This is her first published piece of nonfiction.

JUDGING DISTANCE by Hannah Allen

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Judging distanceJUDGING DISTANCE
by Hannah Allen

A word is flung into the dark from the sidewalk behind me, but I don’t recognize the voice it belongs to. What did he say? Tighten my scarf around my neck, hold my umbrella a little lower, glance left to scan the approaching expanse of parking lot for other students leaving campus. Night classes out, parking spaces vacant. Streetlights punctuate the November darkness. I step off the sidewalk into the lot. My steps quicken.

“Slut!” The word, clear and hard, snaps against my ears. I sidestep a sheet of ice. Fingers involuntarily fumble in my coat pocket. Is he talking to me? I meant to sew up the hole in my jacket, the one that sucks change, lighter, and keys deep into the lining. Too late now. My fingers can’t make sense of the mess. Slow down to feel out my keys. Mom’s voice in my head: You should already have them out, dear.

“SLUT! HEY, SLUT!” The voice, closer. Coming from the right but from how far back, I’m not sure. Never been good at depth perception. It’s near enough that I forget about finding my keys. Why did I leave work early? Only had ten minutes left. Head down, I march towards my old Buick at the far end of the empty lot. Rain, lashing below the umbrella, blinds me. My hair works free from its slack bun. Sharp, wet strands slap at my face. Tears gather at the corner of my left eye. I think of my boyfriend. Wish Drew would’ve answered my fucking call. Pull my phone from my slacks and try again. Voicemail.

Do I look like a slut? Overworked, overweight graduate student in a too-tight jacket, brown bangs plastered down, one-shoulder messenger bag warping my frame. Does he want me to answer? Just ignore him. Get to the car, get to the car, get to the car. Thoughts sync with the rhythm of my rain boots.

Who does he think he is? Finally work my keys out of the black hole of my jacket, but I’m not unlocking my car. I hold them in between each finger, makeshift brass knuckles. I don’t know what to do now. Squinting through the icy rain, I search for the voice. Don’t know what I expect to see. I thought maybe there would be two or more of them, one showing off, but it’s just him. He’s wearing a gray hoodie, “Class of 2014” in block white on the back. The canvas strap of a Jansport hangs low off his shoulder. He’s walking up the sidewalk to campus, past the parking lot entrance now, away from the late-night coffee shop a couple blocks down. Sometimes I sip a dark roast and read for class there, the atmosphere humming with caffeine and anxiety of early morning tests. I’ll be teaching boys like him in a few months, new duty as a grad assistant. I don’t even know him. He bends to pick up a discarded Coke can. The water beads catch the light of the street lamp as it clangs into a metal garbage bin.

I turn and walk the remaining fifty feet of the parking lot to my car. Stab the unlock button on my key fob, throw my bag and umbrella into the back, fall into the driver’s seat. Think about turning right out of the parking lot instead of left, back towards campus. Wonder if my car would get damaged if I ran it up on the sidewalk. These half-formed thoughts evaporate out the window with a curl of smoke from my cigarette. What could I possibly say to him? Nothing I’ve learned would teach him anything. A question I don’t ask: Why me? I already know that answer.

A college reader, colored with Post-its and scrawled notes, is on the floorboard of my car. From my rearview, the yellow corner of a legal pad labeled “Assignment Prompts?” pokes out of my messenger bag. The start of my teaching career, edging nearer to reality, has been on my mind the last few weeks. New clothes, straight pages of unopened textbooks, heads full of summer. A room of faces, closer than ever, waiting for answers.

hannah-allenHannah Allen, raised among the honeysuckle and hollers of Wolf Creek, Kentucky, is a graduate student of English at Western Kentucky University. Her work has appeared in Zest, on crumpled sheets of paper at the bottom of her backpack, and in frantic emails to her creative writing group members. Hannah, her fiancé, and their cat live outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

 

 

Image credit: Erich Ferdinand on Flickr

COMPOST AND BAD POETRY by Diane Payne

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

compost

COMPOST AND BAD POETRY
by Diane Payne

1.
The dogs and I walk to the neighborhood park and there are four cars in the parking lot; usually there are none. My first thought: Damn it, they’ve all killed themselves.

That’s what happens when there’s been a week filled with suicide.

Years ago, I remember walking to this park with my teenaged daughter. We noticed a car that appeared to be empty, yet moving. Curious, we peered through the window. The dogs started barking. The dogs were smarter than us. Embarrassed because they were classmates, my daughter took off running.

It had been too long for me, and yet never happened for she. Screw the words. This is one of those times when the universal bark of a dog says it all.

Today I take a long look at the parked cars. Not one car has a hose hooked to the window. No blood marks on the windshield. I don’t know why they are just sitting alone in their cars, not outside enjoying the park.

At least they are alive.

After finishing our walk through the neighborhood on the other side of the park, I notice the cars are still there. I check out the cars one more time, relieved to not see any dead bodies. Oddly enough, they all seem to be alone. No shaking cars. No hoses. No blood. Just four people sitting in their cars.

2.
I never asked how my former student killed himself. I know that my colleague shot herself in the head in a parking lot. Does the knowing how do more than create a vivid final image? I rarely try to think of how other people looked that final moment when I learn that they are now dead.

A few months ago, after one of my dogs died, I dreaded walking through the neighborhood and enduring everyone asking about my dog, then telling me their dead dog stories. Oddly enough, at work, I was the one who said we need to talk about suicide, have it mentioned in the obituaries, curse and fear depression the same way we do cancer.

Later that day, a friend was crying in her office at the university. She told me an eighteen-year-old student just told her about his cousin killing herself. Says his preacher told him she’d never get to heaven.

“Fuck that self-righteous preacher. Who wants to go to his heaven?” My friend regretted that her door was open and I curse so loudly.

My friend’s fourteen-year-old sister killed herself several years ago. She was searching the web trying to find resources for her student, searching the web remembering her sister picking up the gun, and not her phone.

Google search for Suicide: 1-800-273-TALK

In this world of The Walking Dead, surely people realize they mean talk before you’re dead.

I remember searching madly for help after a friend parked his truck out in the desert, drank a lot of booze, took pills, hooked up the hose, and was found by hikers the next morning. I ended up calling the suicide hotline just to talk to someone. I had no known intentions of killing myself, but I blamed myself for not preventing his suicide.

The woman who answered the phone knew what to say: He would’ve done it anyhow.

I could only hope that was true because the guilt was immobilizing me.

3.
Heading home from the park with the dogs, I see a former student doing lawn work. The first thing he yells out is: “Man, isn’t that crazy about the librarian?” Yeah. Crazy. He didn’t know about the first suicide of the week. I tell him. Of course I tell him. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I put myself on my infamous (only to me) Asshole List.

“Fuck,” he sighs. “Why’d he do it?”

Then he tells me of another classmate who recently killed himself. “Wild, isn’t it?” he says.

Fucking wild crazy shit.

I e-mailed another friend who was also a classmate of the first suicide of the week. He writes back:
Goddammit. This fucking world and what it does to people.

4.
I’ve been listening to Van Morrison, my absolute go-to music for despair. Suck up that wine in the dark. When someone dies, I wallow in grief for all the other dead.

Drunk, I write pathetic poems that start with foolish lines: There is a certain element of finality in being dead.

There’s not much value in being a drunken martyr or a shitty poet.

5.
Tired of all this wild fucking crazy death, the dogs and I head home where I shovel shitloads of mulch into the wheelbarrow, haul it to the front lawn, and start working on the garden. The first crocus emerged today. I fill the wheelbarrow with the leaves covering the garden, haul them to compost pile. Fill up wheelbarrow with mulch. Dump it on the garden. Fill wheelbarrow with leaves. Repeat. Easier using my hands to dig the mulch from the pile and to gather up the leaves. The pile of mulch is almost depleted. I think about the dead dogs and cats buried beneath this compost pile and wonder if that’s why the dogs are becoming so interested in the hole I’ve been digging. Enough wheelbarrowing for the day.

Soon they will be laid to rest.

As a teen, about a month after my mother died, I’d wake up certain she’d be alive. She had a good long rest from her cancer and it was time to return. She’d been lying down for a long time. Enough of that wretched resting.

I suspect this is when my optimism shifted to cynicism.

Patience is a virtue. Those virtuous saints annoy the hell out of me.

Unlike the optimists waiting for heaven, I wait for unexpected snow, first plunges into a lakes, and being surprised by the taste of something as simple and ancient as apple cider vinegar. It’s these simple moments that shift the cynicism back to optimism.

6.
Curses to that long overrated perpetual fucking crazy eternal rest.

Diane-PayneDiane Payne is the author of Burning Tulips (Red Hen Press) and Freedom’s Just Another Word (Sweatshoppe Publishers).  Most recently, she’s had work published in Story South, Lascaux Review, Flyover County Review, Rathalla Review, Lunch Ticket, Split Lip, Switchback, and Literary Orphans.

Image credit: Susy Morris on Flickr

THUNDERBIRD by Nick Greer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

thunderbird

THUNDERBIRD
by Nick Greer

The Ojibwa call it Animikii. The Tlingit call it Shangukeidí. The Kwakwaka’wakw call it Kwankwanxwalige’, for the way it makes thunder (kʷənxʷa) lightweight (kʷəs) by pounding (ləka). No matter the tribe, its description is the same: a bird so large it creates thunder when it beats its wings. Dîné myth claims that thunderbirds live on a floating mountain Tse-an’-iska’ (“A Tall Rock Standing”). They named the thunderbird Tse-nah-ale after the fashion in which they carry men to the top of the mountain and let them fall against it: tse (“rock”) + nah (“guide”) + ajei (“heart”). The hero Nayenezgami (“slayer of alien gods”) killed the thunderbird that preyed in their lands with an arrow made of lightning. As the bird fell off its mountain, smaller birds, what we now call bald eagles, flew from its wound.

Cryptozoologists were quick to connect these myths to reports of a massive bird: a wingspan up to 5.5 meters, indigenous to the more remote forests of North America, commonly encountered during storms. The most compelling and widely circulated hypothesis is that thunderbirds are the nearly extinct descendants of Teratornis (Greek, “monster bird”) merriami, thus explaining recurring reports of young children snatched from sandboxes. Fossilized “thunderbird” skeletons found in La Brea and Woodburn often circumscribe the skeletons of lesser animals, juvenile primates being most common.

In my only encounter with a thunderbird, I was the object of such predation. I spent my childhood summers up at my family’s Sierra Nevada country house, mostly unattended while my parents hosted cocktail parties. I passed the time playing make-believe with the many pinecones and pillbugs that littered the property. During a particularly long, rainy afternoon, a great crescent shadow appeared overhead and chased me into the safety of the house’s mud room. When I was sure the bird was gone, I inched out of the doorway armed with a ski pole to discover a feather as big as my arm stuck in the sap of a tree stump. I took the feather straight to my secret hideout beneath the staircase where I kept all such treasures in a cigar box: baseball cards, invisible ink, flint arrowheads, contraband candy, a butterfly knife, a photograph of a camp girlfriend never kissed and later, tear-outs from an old Playboy, quartz and pyrite stolen from Truckee Trinkets, and finally Cannabis, sativa (Latin, “sown”) and indica (Latin, “Indian”) both.

The only other time I got close to a thunderbird was in Klukwan, Alaska, population 139 on the days Shakey wasn’t off in Sitka or Juneau, dealing smoked salmon to gourmet export companies. I was there for a summer community service trip, a punishment of sorts, for drinking half of my parent’s liquor cabinet and lying about it. Among my many jobs—babysitting kids just old enough to not need babysitting; renetting the rustbitten basketball hoops; cutting down the summer brush, vertiginous weeds like great willowherb (Chamerion angustifolium) and skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus), all so bears couldn’t sneak up on the 40 or so houses that comprised the town—my favorite was fishing. If I managed to wake up at sunrise, around 4 in the morning at that latitude, I could go out on the water with Shakey and help him pull in barbell-anchored nets that glittered with salmon, their eyes alive and dumb, continually surprised. He showed me how to kill them: either a hook through the skull or a baseball bat to the same. His was a hammerheaded aluminum bat, the same used for T-ball. I was surprised by how easy it was, to kill, but even this surprise was expected somehow. There are long histories to these motions.

Shakey kept hootch in a military-style canteen that he sipped from throughout the day, always patting the equator of his gut afterwards. By day three, I was allowed to have a sip when he did. He showed me his own treasures: the wallet full of photographs. Kids with bowl cuts and missing baby teeth, no one I’d seen among the 139. I asked if he’d ever seen a thunderbird and he shrugged. The next day after unloading the day’s haul into the smokehouse, he extracted an iodine-colored bottle from his backpack. Thunderbird, “The American Classic,” 375 mL, 17.5% ABV, bottled in Modesto, CA, not so far from my home. Its $1.99 label was half scratched off. Thunderbird is a blind, fighting drunk I’ll come to know well in the basements of old frat houses where others like me put on their facepaint and tell stories about the mythic beasts they’ve slain. ‘No,’ I said, taking the bottle anyway. ‘I meant the bird. The monster.’ I flapped my arms in a gesture that was sadly helpful. Shakey nodded and later that night he took me to the place where he and his brothers gathered. From my readings I knew it to be a widden, a special Native American landfill, the oldest of which sometimes contain fossils. I could almost make out bone beneath cigarette butts, candy wrappers, a pen knife, and the remains of countless Thunderbirds, once intact but since smashed onto the heap by Shakey and the town’s other alcoholics, now congregating around my unopened bottle just like the vultures I make them into.

After Nayenezgami killed Tse-nah-ale he found the creature’s children, roosting in a nest thatched from dead saguaros. He commanded that they sit before him and he prepared a smoke from the herbs he kept in his headdress. He puffed smoke on his fingers and drew the residues over the birds in a cross. He told them to forget their father and that his spirit would not enter them again. “The tribe called Dîné shall use your feathers. In case of famine we will eat you for meat. Whatever you say will have a double meaning: it can be taken for a lie or for the truth.”

Older now, I see why Nayenezgami killed his thunderbird with lightning. When 18th century Russian explorer Yevgeni Namag moored his boat on the shore of what he would later name Baranof Island, he didn’t expect one and then two rowboats of his well-armed men to disappear into the island’s tall coniferous forests. Instead of muskets the men on the third rowboat carried jugs of vodka and thereafter Namag found safe passage up and down the Alaskan coast. His logbook describes the natives who greeted him as red-faced men, as if this were their morphology, something to be taxonomized. But he, like all alien gods, couldn’t see it was he who was alien. It was he who made their faces red, who sent them tumbling from their perches, generations of lesser beings born from their wounds. This is the double meaning of the cryptid. We are animals both sacred and profane. A god is as easily a monster.

I am in my hideout now. I prepare a smoke and rummage through my old cigar box, its treasures intact, but changed. My thunderbird feather, once so massive, is now as small as my index finger. Hidden, it has been allowed to be special, a fetish, but revealed to the world, it loses its magic. I dip the feather in ink, no longer invisible, and bring it to the knotty pine I can only see with the flame of my Bic. There I write this, my double meaning. Should scholars later find this writing, they will mistake it for a faithful record of events, a logbook or a confession, and they will be content to know what they know. Others will recognize it as myth, but will be drunk on the wisdom this promises. And here I am: alien and red-faced, still telling stories of an animal I search for in the wilderness. Hearing thunder in the beating of a single feather.

nick-greerNick Greer is currently pursuing an MFA Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. His writing has appeared in Anamesa. He is the recipient of a Tin House Scholarship and an Academy of American Poets Prize. This summer he will be a research intern at Microsoft’s Studio 99.