Animal or Winter Solstice

Nonfiction / Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

:: Animal or Winter Solstice ::

There is something moving inside our walls. Something trying to get out or work its way in deeper.
Something animal. Alive. I heard it first as scratching in the middle of the night, a sound soft
enough, it could have been my husband, moving his calloused big toe against the sheets or the dog,
twitching in her sleep, her long nails grazing the hardwood, or my son, clawing at the shelf beside his
bed with nails chewed down to skin.
The next night, again peeing in the dark after again being
woken by my child screaming out for me, I thought it could have been the toilet tank, something
loose, unhinged perhaps, the way parts of me are slowly coming undone with each sleepless night.
My child’s screams lodged between the cartridges of my neck and ear so every turn of the head
creeks or pops, quiet, but noticeable if you are close.
But the night before longest night of the year,
I swear I heard teeth. And an unsteady rhythm, like a woodpecker unable to keep time against the
bark. But this is no bird. This, inside our walls, is wingless and angry. The sound got closer and
louder, chewing, grating, incessant. I pressed my palm to the wall and nearly thought I felt it. Its
longing to be anywhere else. I banged with the heal of my hand, so loud and hard the shampoo fell
down to the shower tile. For a moment, it silenced. I kept my palm on the wall, willing it to stay that
way. Quiet. My child was still asleep. I knew I didn’t have long before he’d be awake again. The
gnawing and scraping returned.
Parenthood, a repetition to a point beyond singularity. We tuck
and kiss and hug and calm and hold until everything feels like one long night, indiscernible from another.
Even touch, so repeated it becomes almost unfelt. Almost. I thought I saw a crack begin to form in
the drywall, but I have terrible eyesight. I trust my hands more, and the wall felt cold, smooth,
unruptured.
Today, the sun will appear to stand still at its lowest point. I will listen for the moment
it sinks below the horizon. It will be like a slow, steady drip from the faucet. So soft and consistent,
we don’t hear it after a while. I’m sure we will get used to the animal too. It will find a way out or
burrow so deep we forget it was ever there. But I know its body’s longing. The teeth and nails will
persist, eating, moving, devouring the house while we sleep. I know it’s not its fault. Impulse.
Repetition. Animal. How can I blame it for its nature of need unbound by want.
Tomorrow,
the night will be a glimmer shorter. We won’t feel this difference. My son will still wake screaming.
Mama! a sound more animal than love. Mama! a hunger. He will refuse anyone else’s hands or words.
He will demand more light and touch, no matter how bright or long each last. He will demand
proximity. The earth closer to the sun. His body close to mine. My palm on the wall close to the
trace of an animal. He will lose his breath and hide under the blankets on the floor at the foot of our
bed. Close your eyes, my love, find your way towards sleep and you won’t hear terror tearing up the
walls.

From the writer

:: Account ::

While I had written mostly poetry, when I had to teach a creative nonfiction course, I began to write alongside my students, reading voraciously and trying to learn the form of the lyric essay as I was teaching it. So, for the last few years, I have been working on what I now realize are linked lyric essays that deal with parenting a neurodiverse child with ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. I often found myself writing the same moment, event, or story, in both poetry and prose, trying to figure out which genre and form was the better fit. With “Animal or Winter Solstice,” I felt myself enter a hybrid space that found a union between poem and essay. The prose blocks allow me to linger and meditate on something longer, and with a more narrative progression, than I might in a lineated lyric, but the indentations, poetry-like, felt necessary for the movement of the piece, the static progression of time. This was the first lyric essay I wrote where within me, and on the page, the genres weren’t fighting against each other, but rather coming together to create something new. This was the first piece I did not feel the need to write as both prose and poetry, because it had found a way of being both. Tell Me it Gets Easier, the larger book project this piece comes from, is an unfiltered account of taking care of the many bodies depending on mine, while continuing to take care of my own through the act of writing. In other essays from this project, the struggles with parenting overlap with processing the war in my birthplace, Ukraine, as my now seven-year-old expresses his own fascination with death, violence, and the grotesque. In the essays, I am reaching towards understanding him as much as I am trying to understand myself, and what it means to be his mother.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee in 1993, when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones, and The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, among others. Her recent awards include the American Literary Review Poetry Prize and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. She is the author of the model poem for “Dear Ukraine”: A Global Community Poem https://dearukrainepoem.com/. She is currently working on a new poetry collection as well as a book of linked lyric essays which grapples with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war against Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English at Denison University and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio

All That I Can Say Now

Nonfiction / Jasmina Kuenzli

:: All That I Can Say Now ::

It was beautiful.

That’s what I hold onto. Even after everything that happened, the flashes of glowing joy and sudden, raging warmth, the blasts of cold that shivered me apart and turned my breath to frost, the way he built my Earth only to break open the ground beneath me …

It was beautiful.

When was the first time your heart was really broken? What did it feel like?

It was like this—

Koi no yokan—a Japanese concept known as ‘love at second sight.’ Not love at first sight—you know better than that. But he is a match, and you are a pyromaniac. And you know it’s only a matter of time.

Koi no yokan—that boy over there—with the backwards hat and the Harry Potter tattoo, that one who has the best jokes, who always seems like the center of attention, who feels the strongest out of everyone—you’re going to fall in love with him. And it’s going to break you in half.

What do you call koi no yokan if you see the crash, and you don’t do anything to stop the train barreling down upon you? Even after all the opportunities to throw yourself out of the way, you remain there, not even bothering to brace for impact…

What do you call it, then?

Insanity.

On the first day, he stopped and started three sentences before he just smiled, showing that gap between his two front teeth, “Words.” He shrugged. Caught me.

And I thought, Don’t.

It was that gap between his teeth. Keeping him from being too attractive, too unattainable. It made him look like someone you could trust.

I don’t want to lie to you, let you operate under any assumptions. I wasn’t the damsel, innocently lured in by someone older and darker and dangerous.

He was 18 when we met, and I was 21.

I was the one who knew better.

I was the one who should have walked away.

Spoiler alert: this is not a love story.

Spoiler alert: I’m an unreliable narrator.

Spoiler alert: we never even kissed.

If we didn’t feel like talking, we would sit next to each other and read or write while we drank coffee. Lean, ever so slightly, against each other. Easy.

I never felt nervous, never counted the spaces between his leg and mine, never measured out the distance between us. I never calculated when to break and run.

With all the other guys, I was crawling out of my skin, intimately aware of every hand brush, every accidental moment of eye contact.

But I never cared about any of that when I was with him.

He was safe.

What else?

We tried to make up secret handshakes, but we never could, because for all of my considerable mental capacity, I couldn’t get over the way my hand would slide through his.

He liked to tug on my hair ties, brushing his fingers against my wrist, whenever he was trying to tell me something important.

We stayed behind during a thunderstorm to watch The Princess Bride together.

We never said it out loud, because saying it was a curse. Like the name of a demon or a bogeyman, saying the words would spring something enormous and terrifying into being, and it would destroy us.

What we were building was too insubstantial, too fragile to withstand the weight of language.

We pretended not to hear the whispers.

And I thought, Please.

But then there was this.

A leaf blew into the pool deck from outside, and it was shaped like a heart. I picked it up and handed it to him.

“For you.”

He rolled his eyes, but he was blushing when he took it.

When I came back, the leaf was on the ground, shredded.

“This is what you did to my heart!” I gestured to the wreckage.

“No,” he corrected. “This is what you did to my heart.”

And all I’ve got is speculation, and my own insignificant feelings. Trying to convince a biased jury with circumstantial evidence.

Constructing circles of logic that never lead to anything but more circles.

I think I wasn’t the only one…

Koi no yokan echoing in my ears, keeping me awake at night.

We could look into each other’s eyes and know what the other was thinking.

I think—

But this is what happened:

I asked him.

We drove around for two hours, trying to get past the wall that had fallen between us. A big plastic something, turning the car’s space from comfort to suffocation. Awkward yawned between us, unfathomable and claustrophobic all at once.

So that’s it, I thought.

And then I thought the word that’s still chasing me.

Why?

Because then there was this.

He told me he loved me. And then immediately qualified it, but not in a weird way. He babbled and mumbled and stuttered, until I slammed the door in his face.

We didn’t talk about it.

The words unsaid piled up just like the words we said used to, harder and harder to break through. Our silences were stilted, and I couldn’t sit still if we were even in the same room.

These were the last times that I never knew were the last times. You don’t know the end until it’s over.

No, that’s not right.

What I mean is: I thought we were endgame.

Koi no yokan. Inevitable.

And we did talk again. We talked about our families, about the parallel lines our lives had run. How we’d been in sync before we met.

And I could see us in the future, sitting just like this. My head on his shoulder.

I told you I was crazy.

Because it was like this:

He didn’t care about me if there was someone else around to see it.

Like this:

His eyes followed her no matter where she was. The way they would follow me when she wasn’t around.

And this:

“He’s fucked over every other girl. You’re not the only one.”

This:

He lost weight and gained muscle. Started to look more like a model and less like an awkward former band kid who was suffering beneath the weight of his insecurities. Started to look less like you can trust me and more like you don’t have a shot in Hell.

It was like this.

We were still friends, but he only wanted to talk to her, and he only wanted to talk about her, and it was ripping me open, and even though he could have seen it, he always looked away.

What do I tell you?

He was my best friend, but only when no one was watching. And he saved my life, but he was hurting me, and he was kissing her, kissing her, and I was crying alone in a bathroom stall, because no one knew or would understand, because no one could see me break down, it’s been a year and you’re not even friends anymore, it’s never been you, it was always her, and they’re kissing, and I’m biting my knuckles to stop from screaming, and they’re kissing, and I’m…crazy.

This:

I wrote a poem about him, and when it was published, he and his friends who used to be mine took it and mocked it, reading it aloud and calling me all the things I’d thought about myself. Immature. Pathetic. Crazy.

This:

He walked out without saying goodbye, two years, all those long conversations and the connections and the hands against my skin, the way his eyes would follow me across a room, gone. Like nothing ever happened.

Koi no yokan. Bullshit.

This:

The first time I saw him again, I had a panic attack.

But it’s been a long time.

And all I can say now is:

It was beautiful.

And this:

My best poems are about him.

This:

I will never again wonder if I am capable of loving someone that much.

And I don’t think you ever really fall out of love with someone you’ve loved like this.

I don’t think you ever love the same way twice.

From the writer

:: Account ::

When I was 22, I learned an important lesson: You can be wrong about your soulmate.

When I met the subject of this piece, I felt something I never felt before. A sense of knowing, of understanding that couldn’t be shaken, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, or talk myself out of it. A few weeks later, I came across the term koi no yokan while reading, and I knew exactly what it was: a Japanese concept meaning love at second sight. I was sure: it was only a matter of time.

Unrequited love is an embarrassing emotion to have when you’re 22. All of your friends are going off on adventures in love, riding the rollercoasters of first relationships, the post-apocalyptic breakup mayhem, of ‘real’ love. But you are stuck at the station, waiting for a train that’s never coming. Unrequited love means memorizing tiny little things about the other person every day, and tallying them up like a scoreboard of speculation, all for that most stubborn and dangerous of emotions: hope.

He was one of my closest friends. There were times when I would get that feeling again, and my vision would zoom into the future, and I would see our slow talks, running laps around each other’s brains, taking note of all the knickknacks and hang ups, the sudden pitfalls and the places hidden by curtains, where we never let anyone else go. There were times that I felt understood in a way I can’t explain, a way that went beyond words. I thought that was certainty, the call of two souls across space and time to one another. Koi no yokan. Inevitable.

But just because you believe something, doesn’t make it true.

Still, I lit a candle and held it in the fog of his growing distance, of the girls he did want that he always took home, the way he always ignored me whenever they were around. I waited, and I was calm and petulant and fearless and terrified and awed at the strength of my devotion. It took a year to accept what was, instead of what I wanted.

When I finally realized it was over, I wrote it all down. “All That I Can Say Now,” is that piece, where I lay out all the evidence, from the first day to the last. Where I try to convince myself that unrequited love wasn’t crazy; or even if it was, it was beautiful. When I first wrote it, I called it my “All Too Well.”

“All That I Can Say Now,” says, in the same wild, heart-stopping defiance that can have you writing handwritten notes in your favorite book, driving through the lights of Austin, screaming your heart into the steering wheel, sinking to the floor in a bathroom stall, and picking up a shredded leaf from the disgusting pool deck: “I was there. I remember.”

Jasmina Kuenzli is an author of poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction and has been published with Crow & Cross Keys, The Blue River Review, The Elpis Pages and many others. When she isn’t writing, Jasmina can be found weightlifting, running, and holding impromptu dance parties in her car. Her life goals include landing a back flip, getting legally adopted by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and being a contributor on Drunk History. She would like to thank Brenna and Sarah, who hear all these stories first, and Harry Styles, who is sunshine distilled in a human being. Find her on Twitter @jasmina62442.

Like a Polaroid Transfer

Nonfiction / R G Pagano

:: Like a Polaroid Transfer ::

I Along the Way.

The point of living in Italy the first time was to write a novel, something that had escaped me. So I had this idea that I would try again, not knowing what would emerge while following Nancy wherever she might wander and learning more Italian along the way.

“Only a kitchen is missing,” Giovanni emailed, “which could be installed in the entrance. I could close the entrance with a glass wall and separate it from the stairway. To get to the flat you would go through the garden, our living room, and up the stairway to the second floor.”

“Grazie,” I replied.

Around Independence Day, several weeks before our departure, Nancy received her sabbatical, along with a letter from the superintendent of schools, who outlined all terms including what Nancy wanted to do most — paint and live in Italy.

I met Nancy in Boston on my way to the Museum of Fine Arts. On that snowy day, we talked about our lives — looking skyward, catching snowflakes, floating with the wind.

Nancy told me about All Soul’s Day in Venice, and the Lido where she found a green-tiled Hungarian hotel among palm trees and overgrown vines. Her description of its empty patio and three-door entrance at the top of crescent stairs made of cement engaged me.

Ten months later, we were married.

At the edge of Bassano del Grappa, near the baby Dolomites, we live on the top floor of a large home with a garden. Exotic plants and old pine trees commune with a Belgian Sheepdog named Gedi, several cats and ducks, and five ducklings promised to a friend after the summer.

Chicca, the mother duck, likes to go inside the house, mostly for Gedi’s water but also to be in a cool place away from the August heat, not a bad instinct except she’s not trained.

I’m not sure you can train a duck.

She doesn’t know, so I carry her outside to the pond where she pretends to walk on water.

Once during dinner in the garden, Chicca tossed my napkin on the ground, more than once. I carried her to the pond, but she returned after I carried her back again until I locked her in the laundry room by the garage, which worked except she’s not trained.

We’d bicycle with traffic, signaling with our hands or using the sidewalk to the old hospital, then entering the old part of Bassano past medieval walls and our favorite pizzeria, against more cars and around people, by a statue of Giacomo da Ponte in a private square. Coasting downward took us by Palazzo Roberti, where Napoleon Bonaparte stayed twice before the end of the 18th century, and into Piazza Garibaldi.

Bicycle racks waited alongside a 13th-century church across from our usual stop for espresso before continuing through Piazza Libertà toward a statue of San Bassiano, our way through the center past buildings with colonnades and a Zodiac clock across the top of the town hall. Former flour, oil, and salt warehouses sped by, and ceramic and antique stores and places to buy grappa.

Ponte Vecchio, a wood-covered bridge designed by Andrea Palladio in the middle 1500s, never disappointed. During summer, we saw men in the Brenta River swinging fishing rods, causing their lines to arch in the wind. Swans glided upstream. Behind us stood the back of a yellow building scarred with bullet marks left from the Great War.

Late in the afternoon, overlooking the Brenta Valley and its hills, we’d sometimes pause under the umbrella trees with black crosses and the names of men or the unknown who were hung on September 26, 1944 for resisting the occupation.

On an Intercity train, we left the rain storms after weeks of intense heat.

Gray clouds hung close to the hills.

Nancy opened a small box of 12 watercolor cubes, and with six brushes, a white palette, and water in a yogurt cup, proceeded to paint. Her initial work formed a tower with high voltage wires and purple mountains along the top, and brown fields and trees along the edge. The wires appeared to fall off the paper.

The train climbed hills before going into a tunnel; then came out as high as the clouds in the distance floating through valleys and above fields of sunflowers.

The initial wash of another watercolor showed a woman titling in front of two large windows. Nancy added color — red to her dress, pink to her face, brown to the tile floor, and blue around the windows.

“This is a woman waiting at a train station,” Nancy said.

Atripalda is nestled in a green province, with vineyards over hills alongside tree-lined roads over more hills, and villages winding around the tops of other hills, and in the distance, pine-covered mountains.

Atripalda had been my first home in Italy. It was where I learned Italian — where I wrote Italian words I had heard in conversation or overheard or read in the papers, and their English meanings later. Reading was easier. The words did not move into each other the way they did in conversation to produce a rhythm that did not discriminate between beginnings or endings.

I was there for six months several years after the 1980 earthquake, and six months two years later, not far from the birthplace of my grandfather near the church of Sant’Ippolisto.

Before the wedding, Nancy and I stepped inside Sant’Ippolisto.

We inspected the restoration, looking up at what was saved after the earthquake and what was not, and how the two were joined with post-modern lines and shapes to balance what had severed the symmetry. Below, we saw crypts with bones of early Christians in cases of glass and bronze in a chapel with frescoes on its ceilings and walls, and beyond the chapel, other frescoes of baby angels holding flags, staffs, and flowers.

The baby angels were above us, above the bride and groom too, injecting joy into the celebration out of the choir and throughout the church, with Sant’Ippolisto and San Sabino, the patron saint and protector of Atripalda, giving their blessings.

They were mostly butterflies whose broad wings were still yellow and orange and purple on slender frames, next to wasps and other winged insects, black with antennas longer than their bodies, and metallic beetles.

Giovanni started the collection in his teen years.

9/11

We were in the garden that afternoon. It was afternoon for us in Bassano.

On canvas, Nancy was painting red flowers inside scrub vegetation with white palms on long stems under pine tree branches, and in the back, a fence with vines.

I was writing.

Chicca, Drake, and Duck, and the five ducklings, almost fully grown now, were bathing in a pond behind us and Gedi, asleep in the sun and dreaming I suppose.

“That’s the cellphone,” Nancy said.

I looked down and reached for the phone from under the newspapers. It rang again, and inside its window, ANSWER? appeared.

“Pronto,” I said. “Ciao Carmelina.”

“Hai sentito Riccardo?”

“What?”

“… into the Twin Towers.”

“You’re breaking up.”

II Seeking Cover.

The sky was almost white. The morning mist obscured the horizon and concealed the mountains, but in the garden enriched the greens and yellows to create an illusion that nothing else existed.

Birds awoke on pines taller than the house.

Rain started to fall.

After flapping his wings, Duck settled down and fell into a kind of meditation. He was still except for his breathing. By the end of the morning, Duck was standing on one leg, leaning and stretching it in some yoga way. Then on the other leg, he extended a wing, pointing and holding the position.

A small statue of Saint Anthony of Padua saw us off. From his niche on a stone column, which along with its twin marked the way to our neighbor’s cornfield, he looked as we walked past him and baby Jesus that he held next to dried roses in a worn vase behind a wire screen.

I carried a French easel, oil paints inside of it, a Plexiglas square and canvas, sometimes two, along with my writing notebooks. Nancy had the rest — brushes in a jar and turpentine in another, both inside a Grand Marnier tin, and rags.

Nancy painted outdoors at Ca’ Cornaro, before the cold when the day began to draw back.

On one canvas, she interpreted a stone pathway covered with vines. Autumn vines, casting their shadows, lined across the stones moving over the edge of the path and turning up and slanting on the grass towards a gray wall and the evergreens behind it. Beyond the vine covered walkway, a statue enters the painting.

The statues watched over us — Apollo and Artemide among the ferns and cacti on our way up the stairway, Pomona in the courtyard, and three children of Fatima, but most of all Virgin Mary, who accompanied us out of this Renaissance villa designed as a country residence for rest and agricultural works among a forest of cedars and pines.

I wonder if most artists have a sense of what they want to express, or if their instincts guide them to create and recreate before finishing, then seeing how far their work has moved away from the beginning and what has happened along the way. The process, alive and discovery-filled, might be more important than the result.

Like an instant out of a Polaroid. Like a Polaroid transfer.

The emulsion, lifted from the instant and transferred to watercolor paper, conveys an emotional content creating art that reveals who we are. Sometimes the images are barely recognizable and sometimes they are too familiar.

If art reflects humanity, what does it show? What did it show before September 11th? Did it warn us, cry out for help? Or is it impossible to say knowing what happened will bend the explanations making them seem something else — making the symptoms obvious and easily foreseeable, causing us to feel guilty as if we could have changed something, done something to prevent it, speculating in “what ifs” to bring back our fellow Americans, then feeling angry and afraid and sad and wanting to understand the holes in the family of man.

At the 49th Venice Biennial, South Korean artist Do-Ho Suh installed a room filled with miniature carvings of people underneath a glass floor. These figures look up with outstretched arms and hands pushing against the bottom side of the floor, wanting to get out but confined to support the floor on which we walked.

It was Dante looking for farm mice who chased the ducks out from under the bushes and their home, except for Chicca knowing that cat too well to be bullied.

Drake regained his balance.

White Collar, one of the five original ducklings, used his beak to throw water on the other ducklings, except for Grey. I wasn’t at all sure if Grey was part of the five or adopted, but I couldn’t see Chicca adopting any duck.

I saw light in the studio at the top of the house.

I could see Nancy painting.

“The colors are working,” Nancy told me.

She filled the paper with watercolor — a bright strip around the edge to frame the softer tones against nine trees bending with the wind she could not paint the way she could paint the sky. The leaves intertwined to cast a place in the shade.

From the writer

:: Account ::

During the 2001/02 school year, I accompanied my wife on her art sabbatical in Italy. While Nancy painted in her studio, I hand wrote impressions about our experiences.

The unpublished collection includes past visits to Italy, primarily about my Italian heritage. The impressions acknowledge the animals, even a baby mouse or topolino. They reference heaven and hell, Dante’s tower in the Valle di Santa Felicità. They are stories about the Great War on Monte Grappa, the 49th Venice Biennale on humanity, Padre Pio and his stigmata, September 11th and understanding why while recovering from bronchial pneumonia.

“Like a Polaroid Transfer” is a small slice of that collection. The slice is more subtle, more flash in its structure; yet still conveys the inflection point after the events of 9/11, which moves the work from observations to seeking out simple places of peace.

This work, like the unpublished collection, combines aspects of a journal, memoir, and reminiscence.

Rich Pagano lives in Newton, Massachusetts. His writing is sometimes lyrical and often visual but always in the direction of meaning-making. He resided in Italy for a period of time and frequently travels there with his wife, drawing on those experiences for his creative work.

Versions of Truth

Nonfiction / H. P.

:: Versions of Truth ::

In this version, you are talking to me and her at the same time. I am not the only one you’re sending daily emails to. I am not the only one who commiserates with you about the perplexities of being human and a writer at the same time. But I mistook your Facebook posts and Spotify playlists as signs for me when they were for her. It’s hilarious. Everyone but me is crouching in laughter. I’m crouching, too. In agony. Worst hangover ever.

She’s hitting your arm now. She’s saying, between chuckles, “That poor girl!” She’s looking in your eyes now. You’re looking in her eyes now. You’re saying, between chuckles, “That poor girl!” You are taking her arm now. You are making it soft. You are making it yours.

II.

In this version, you are talking to me and trying, ever so slowly, to be my lover. In a few years. In a decade. In whatever time our lives need to align like stars and planets in an eclipse. You are trying to be my friend first, someone I trust. You are trying to let me know that it’s okay to lean on you.

I am so close to resting my head on your shoulder. I am so close to hanging onto your arm for balance. I am so close to inhaling the air you expel from your lungs. You are so close to inhaling the air I expel from my lungs. You are so close to leaving your arms open. You are so close to tipping your body sideways so I can reach your shoulders.

III.

In this version, you are talking to me like one of the orphans you visit on weekends. You see me but you don’t really know who I am beyond my weakness and my need. You only see me because of my tears. Because of the scars I thought I already covered up with my tattoos.

My orphanhood is not the only thing you should know about me. I am telling you I am also a capable KTV singer. I am also a modestly successful jester. I am also a self-taught makeup artist. Tell me more about you. Tell me about your four siblings. Tell me how you learned to play the guitar. Tell me your bad jokes. Tell me your go-to karaoke song. Tell me why you love orphans.

IV.

In this version, you are talking to me about Sartre and Beauvoir and that’s when I realize you’re the one I’ve been waiting for. You are the one I want to be my lover. You can be the subject of my endless longing, my best love poems, and my sappiest KTV songs.

I have no boyfriend in this version. I have no one at home waiting for me. I have all the time in the world to fall in love with you. I have all the heart in the world for you to break open. I am handing you a knife. I am handing you a gun. I am handing you a bomb. Destroy me. Please.

In this version, you are talking to me about taking up Philosophy in college and there’s nothing more to it. You aren’t hiding the fact that you are a priest. You did not get ordained in 2018. You did not become the youngest priest in your province. You did not fulfill your mother’s dreams for you.

You can get married in this version. You have no church waiting for you. You have all the time in the world to fall in love with me. You have all the heart in the world for me to break open. You are handing me a knife. You are handing me a gun. You are handing me a bomb. I will destroy you. As gently as quickly as hungrily as possible.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This essay is my attempt at pinning down a flurry of emotions from a recent heartbreak I had. It is an unconventional love story, to say the least. There are layers upon layers of hurt and betrayal. Essentially, this is me telling myself multiple versions of the same story. For better or worse, I have decided to share it with the rest of the world. I am not expecting salvation or clarity. My love has been doomed from the start. There were more questions than answers from the start. But writing about my grief is my way of reaching out to myself and saying, “You don’t need to drown.”

There is a lot of repetition in this piece. I also used stream of consciousness writing. The goal was to be as raw and vulnerable as possible. This is probably the only space in the world where these feelings will see the light of day. I am content with that.

H.P. is a heartbroken poet from the highlands of the Philippines.

Ne me quitte pas

Nonfiction / Karis Ryu

:: Ne me quitte pas ::

**CW: mentions of death.

Did you know?

In elementary school, I was assigned to the same table as a boy I had a crush on and started scoring lower in class behavior because of it. When I got my report card back and saw the unfamiliar letters staring back at me, the wave of shame that hit was sudden and colossal. Before the age of ten, I learned that liking boys came at the expense of being myself. So I cut him out of my head as quickly and as sharply as he had popped into it, and through sheer force of will I drilled back into myself the words MY FUTURE IS MY OWN MY FUTURE IS MY OWN.

In middle school, the closest I came to telling a boy I had a crush on him was by proxy. He was older, and a line of girls had already liked him. I scoffed initially, so sure I would never join that line, and then a few months later I was running out of rooms the moment he entered them. On my last day, two younger girls approached me with mischievous eyes and asked if they could tell him.

“Why not?” I shrugged, feigning nonchalance. The truth was I was relieved, because I actually wanted them to tell him. I wanted him to know without having to tell him myself. I think I was afraid that if I told him myself, I would tremble and my spirit would crack into pieces and he would end up taking some of me with him, parts of me I would never get back.

I was twelve: old enough to understand that girls who felt things and said so lost their faces and never got them back.

Did you know?

I am twenty one and I am so young. People are so quick to press their hands to their foreheads and perform dramatic faux strokes when they hear how young I am. We are in the same place, yet I am three, four, five, six, ten years younger. I have worked so hard to get here. All I have done is work. After all, MY FUTURE IS MY OWN MY FUTURE IS MY OWN.

At first I thought he was impressed. Then he kept poking at it, poking at me, in nudges of embarrassed laughter and patronizing nods that bolstered his pride by pushing me down. Now I cannot help but wonder whether my presence emasculates those who have to breathe the same air as me. So I worried, when I realized how well we got along, that you would poke like he had. I worried our silences signaled your discomfort. I worried our silences signaled your boredom. That my presence dampened the room with how heavy it was. That my presence burdened you with how too-much it was. My worst fear confirmed, set in stone, the cold hard truth: I am a strange and overwhelming concoction of frenzy and fear and too many ideas, and you say I am brilliant, but that is only as long as I am at arm’s reach because if you look any closer, you will realize what I already know: I am unpalatable.

A boy I liked said this about me once, that I was too good for the guys at school. That’s all well and good, but where does that leave me? Sometimes compliments don’t mean shit if you’re lonely.

I am twenty one. I am sitting outside of a coffee shop and crying because I am so young, yes, but being so young at this stage in this place means that I am alone. I am alone, and it is heartbreaking. I have a bright future ahead of me, so they say, but I cannot do anything about it right now because I am so young. I might have grown up quickly and I might know how to do lots of grown-up things, but bandaging my own broken heart is not one of them. So I sit on this bench and cry because that’s what girls in love and pain do.

Did you know?

When I was thirteen I walked circles and circles around a lake in my neighborhood. When we lived in a city a one-hour train ride from my mother’s birthplace and a thirteen-hour flight across an ocean away from mine. Couples double-pedaled duck boats across the water. At night someone would busk on the platform, their voice echoing through the mic and through my head.

When I was thirteen I thought a lot about death. I thought a lot about whether or not I wanted to die, and how I had no answer. I thought about how my lack of an answer at the very least signaled how I felt about life: that is, my utter lack of a desire for it. Yet I could not bring myself to die.

I looked at everyone around me and remembered I was surrounded by a dialect adjacent to my mother’s, a language I kind-of-understood and just as much kind-of-didn’t, a language I was so glad not to speak and just as much longed to.

Yet I could not bring myself to die.

I thought about death so much I believed I no longer thought about boys. That wasn’t true, because there was a boy that year, there was always a boy, wasn’t there, for each new wound that the world ripped into me that I then fumbled to balm with whatever substance was closest—whatever would do for a fantasy. I thought more and more about death in the hopes that it would make me think less of the boy, of what I wanted him to be and what I knew he was not. Dying was easier. Dying felt more meaningful. It is more poetic to die than to like a boy. It kind-of-worked.

I walked the lake in a bizarre jaunt that the brightness of the sun made even more macabre. I walked the lake while thinking about dying while listening to a marimba play while Regina Spektor asked people not to leave her, feeling somewhat more livened up by it but then because of that, feeling sadder than before. Yet I could not bring myself to die.

Did you know?

I am praised a lot for my honesty nowadays, which is interesting because it’s when I’m being honest that I’m most worried about being dishonest. Like I’m deploying my honesty because I know that’s what works, that’s what endears me to people. At the same time, I cannot help the things that come out of my mouth and I am very much at the mercy of the person sitting across from me as I helplessly watch, eyes crossed, my guts push out from between my teeth and spill onto the table. I am terrified of being perceived as a too-earnest child and nothing more, but this is the only way I know how to be that feels the closest I can ever get to “true.”

I’m sure you would rather be with somebody else right now, someone nicer, someone more pleasant, not someone who was born with a triangular mouth and had to train herself out of a resting bitch face by staring into a mirror and pushing the corners of her lips up for years. Here are some things I have learned over those years:

I am admired; I am not approached. I am a statue; I am not a girl. I believed that too for a while, but I am tired now. I am a girl. I was a girl all along. I will always be a girl. A girl who giggles and feels and cries and loves and flutters and laughs like everyone else.

When I was nineteen, I walked all the way down a hill in the dead of the night. It was a dead night. My legs were dead and my eyes were dead but my soul refused to die. It just refused to fucking die. I could have walked forever. I could have walked until I died.

Please, I cried. Let me die.

Please, it begged. Don’t leave me, too.

I am just a girl who does not want to be alone.

Did you know?

I think I am thankful I did not take my life that night, or that other night, or that other other other night when I thought about doing it. It has taken me years to get to this thought. Lately I’ve been thinking it more and more. Here are just a few:

I think it when it is our second week of college and we sit next to each other in a small group where we both feel out of place. You, too? we gasp, looking at each other. We walk in the same direction after it’s over and after a while of talking outside your dorm building, you say to me: Hey, do you want to just come inside? So we talk inside your dorm for two more hours, and that night our friendship is born.

I think it when I turn seventeen and my plan was to sit in my dorm and eat a double-chocolate Insomnia cookie alone. That is when you call me, a girl you barely know, because Facebook said it is my birthday and am I doing anything to celebrate? Let’s get froyo. No, don’t bring money, you are treating me to froyo because it’s my birthday!

I think it when years pass and it is my birthday again, and another you waves a card into my hands, saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOU ABSOLUTE ANIMAL, which I know is a compliment because I know you. The card is almost illegible because of your notoriously loopy penmanship but I can read it. It is detailed, lovely, and truly something only you could write to me.

I think it when it is the middle of what was looking like the best semester of college yet, but a virus hits our little life of laughter and suddenly we are three friends sitting in Meeting Street Cafe, angry and in shock but most of all scared that our first time together in this booth might be our last one too. Yet all we can do is smile for one another, trembling mouths holding up taut frames. Later we sit by the water and we cannot help it, the words that flow out of us. When peace like a river attendeth my way. When sorrows like sea billows roll. Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say. It is well, it is well with my soul. We cry and I wonder if I will ever know tenderness like this again.

I think it after I move to a new city and we have known each other for maybe a month at most when you invite me over for bagel brunch, and I assume that this is for some party or gathering because the only way I would be included in an invitation is if it was a mass one. But I show up at your house and it is just me, and I ask you if anyone else is coming and you smile and shake your head and say no, today it’s just me.

I think it when you remember me on New Year’s and send me a text because I am who you’re thankful for.

I think it when you invite me at ten o’clock at night on an impromptu excursion to the beach because you missed me, you say, and there is another one of us, another friend, look, you again, you’re there!—to love is to be one and isn’t that wonderful—in the passenger seat of the car you are driving, and there is a pack of lychee beers in the back, and anyway you’ll be in front of my apartment in three minutes so get dressed and don’t go to sleep!

I think it when two years after we cried by the water, you are graduating and at your departmental ceremony we stand there beaming at you. We hand you a bag, and inside that bag is our gift: a cookie from Meeting Street Cafe. I almost cried while I stood in line for it, did you know? So circles do end somewhere after all.

I think it during the silences between our conversations every time you walk me home. I wonder if this is special for you, too. I think about how worried I was and at times still am that no one would ever want to exist with me like this. I think about how there is no one else I would rather exist with right now than you. I hope I mean something similar to you, and while that hope is tinged with fear that I am wrong, it is beautiful precisely because it is fragile, and I would much rather cling to it than have nothing to cling to at all. Anyway, we keep going, held by the same deep indigo sky each time, in murmur and laughter and silence, cushioned in all that I do not yet know how to say but want to let you know somehow. I am scared of what will happen when I do find the words. I am scared I already have them. I am scared of what they mean. Of losing my face. My roommate told me once that to ask for a place in someone’s heart is to ask for permission to break it one day. God forbid, but it could happen. I don’t want to hurt you. Even in my own fear of my own heartbreak, my first thought is of you. That scares me most of all. But sometimes I dare to believe that your wordless thoughts might be searching for me too. I dare to trust that whatever we are figuring out together is good, very good.

(To make a declaration is to, in the back of your mind, always wonder just a little bit if you even believe what you are declaring. But to feel anything at all is to risk being wrong, and that tension is what makes life real. So lean into it. Embrace it.)

I think God is telling me there is a way. A way to confess without losing my face. A way to love that keeps the heart intact.

(Or: Love is an exercise in trust.)

I used to think that love was about what is said. What is spoken aloud. What is communicated through touch, through stare, what is projected onto a wall in blazing letters and yelled from across a long, long room. That love is something you cannot miss.

But love is trust, and silence is sound. Love is having faith in what has not been said. Believing in a glance and perhaps in the absence of a touch entirely. Maybe you are careful with how you touch me because I am someone to treat with care. Maybe we sit side by side because we hope the time we give each other says what we do not speak aloud, because the dam holding back everything we could say or do is so thin and oh, how exciting and terrifying it is, how dearly I would hold you to me if you would let me. But first I have to let you know.

Love is as shy as it is bold. It is shy because it is bold. It takes the breath out of you to expose the heart for one second. Blink and you might miss it. But if you do, that’s okay. Trust that it is there, because you are loved. You are loved and so you love, because I trust you, I trust you.

You are my friend. You say my name. “Have you ever judged someone for being honest about their feelings?”

No, I respond. I always thought they were brave.

“Exactly.” You nod your head. You say my name again. “So why are you scared?”

In May, you tell me how strange it is to think we have only known each other for less than a year, because you feel like, in the best way, a lifetime has passed between us. And I say, I can’t comprehend sometimes how I love you as fiercely as I do. And you say, you know where it says that eternity is written on our hearts or something like that, and I think, yes, and you say, in feeling like I’ve known you for a long time, eternity is the freedom to love you as if I have.

From the writer

:: Account ::

As the reader can tell, I was twenty one years old when I wrote this piece. It has been revisited and revised periodically since then, but at the beating heart of this confession of an essay was and is the earnestness of a person crafting a burgeoning definition of love as she learns to love others and to love herself.

The inspiration to write this piece first struck me one spring afternoon, while I cried on a bench outside of a coffee shop near my apartment. (This scene made it into the essay. In a way, perhaps I started there.) I was, in short, processing many firsts: my first year out of college, my first year in a new city, and the chances I had taken on experiences and people during that time. The love those risks had brought me, but also the hurts and the losses—and the heartbreak of realizing that the time had come to say goodbye again. Growing up as a military child, I had built up antisocial detachment mechanisms in order to mitigate the hurt of getting attached. Twenty one was the year I truly began to shed those walls—and had to face the beautiful consequences.

These ongoing tumults wouldn’t quite resolve for some months’ time. But writing this piece over those difficult summer months kept me company during periods of loneliness, confusion, and growing pains. I have, of course, grown since I first wrote this, and am sharing the experiences and feelings of a past me, but I continue to hold this piece dearly for its vulnerable honesty. That’s the person I want to stay true to in all that I write and do.

Karis Ryu is a writer, artist, and graduate student currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. She grew up moving frequently across North America and the Pacific as a U.S. military child of Korean descent. Her work has previously appeared in Chaotic Merge Magazine, HerStry, The B’K, and other publications. Find her in a coffee shop, a library, or at karisryu.com.

Unspoken

Nonfiction / Faye Srala

:: Unspoken ::

Sister, can I come in? The door opens slightly, partially obstructed by furniture behind it. Yapping dogs come running. Down, DOWN! STOP IT, you yell. Somewhere inside a TV blares a commercial and the parrot who learned how to bark long ago adds to the cacophony. The cats arrive, their lethargy having been defeated by their curiosity. I take small steps into your house, careful not to step on little paws; they are not so careful with me. I try to get closer to you for a hug but give up in the brown and black eddy swirling below my knees.

Can we talk? My mind is muddled. Wispy images flicker, like a photo abandoned in a damp basement. Water spots obscure portions, and the edges blur. Shards of broken glass pulse fractured images; a man, legs planted wide, his fists clenched, leans into a woman screaming. Neither are whole, they are distorted by fuzzy edges of the same torn picture, pieces are missing. Can you remember? I ask, was it real? Stop it, you yell – the dogs are chasing the cats. Stop it, stop it,the parrot chimes in from her perch in the corner. Fragments of improbable scenes flicker in my mind. They seethe and froth, just out of the corner of my eye, slinking, sneaking, and sulking. They want out – you open the door and fourteen animals sprint for the backyard. You fix yourself a drink and ask if I want one too.

I sit at the dining table and fidget while I wait, carefully crafting my opening words. I part the drapes beside me a little. A welcome blade of sunlight cuts a yellow swath through the dimness illuminating floating particles of dirt and fur rearranging themselves. Unopened UPS deliveries lining the walls come into focus; throw rugs and precariously stacked junk mail complete the towers, and I wonder in what way the forgotten specters of our past manifest themselves in my life. Neither of us sleep. I was well into my twenties when I realized the gaunt dark and hollow eyes of insomnia wasn’t just a genetic attribute. I take a sip of the drink you hand me and wince at the glass of iced vodka with a splash of orange juice.

I need to know. We can speak about it now, can’t we? Surely you can explain why my childhood is veiled behind a shroud, like a body unfit for viewing. Do you know how hungry I was, or that I was four going on five when our father asked me to kiss his…, That’s enough, STOP IT, you rise to break up a cat fight. The parrot starts to sing her ABCs in a crackling falsetto.

Your pets, they found sanctuary with you after mistreatment and neglect. My splintered memories, like these animals, need rescuing. They need to find a home too, somewhere they can be safe from harm and learn to be themselves. Somewhere they can run, without judgement. Just one place of comfort. Can they have a home with you too? You’re the only other one that knows them.

Let’s reminiscence, sister, pretend we’re just like everyone else. Let’s talk about our family traditions; except when we get to the part about what dad did, instead of in stitches at his antics, like normal people, we’ll talk about the time mom needed stitches. Instead of cracking up at his pranks, we’ll talk about mom’s cracked ribs. WILL YOU STOP? You scold Professor Jameson for gnawing on Cookie. STOP IT STOP IT, the parrot can’t help herself.

Was mom very bold or just naïve when she gave our father his walking papers? Did she know what awaited her? Was it normal to watch our mom raise her fists in the air and scream at an impotent sky, then drop to her knees and pound the floor in fury hoping the physical pain replaced the emotional. God and the devil were house guests that never left; we fed them, but not ourselves. As the hands of justice hovered above us undecided whether or not to snatch us up in the rapture, depraved pulsating paisleys of flame nipped at our heels. Prosperity preachers convinced her their offering plates on our table was all that was needed to tip the scale. “Sow what you have in order to reap what you need. God will provide,” the TV preacher would bellow. “Plant the seed and it will grow. The Lord multiplies the reward for a faithful follower.” Delighted to be the conduit, his voice would culminate in a crescendo to encourage the hesitant. Mom gave. She gave until the cockroaches fled in search of spoils elsewhere. She blamed herself for our difficulties. Her faith was not strong enough. Maybe it was normal to prepare dinner from a few crackers and moldy cheese. Maybe that’s why mom liked wine so much, it kills the taste of cheese mold. It does.

Years have vanished between this perverted parade of nightmares that flair in bits of strobe light and dissipate upon waking. This missing time, is this the reason neither of us had children, or why you live blockaded in perpetual twilight, or for my former youthful powerlessness to thwart unwanted male attention? I tried once, remember? I asked if you were hungry, too. The next day you gifted me two cats, rescued from abuse. Like I needed a distraction. I was thinking too much. Please, talk to me. Hmmm? You say, as your eyes swing back from the menagerie of foster fails.

They tumble, swirl and curl. They need to be let out, they ask you to go out, they can’t escape on their own, they need your help, your consent. You open the door and a rotating vortex of madness races away. But you’re happier when they’re in, better than when they’re out. It’s safe to keep them in, so no one can see how many there are, or how unacceptable they are, even though they need to get out occasionally, but once they do, people will see, they’re too exposed, you’re too exposed. Better to bring them back in, where it’s more comfortable. You close the slight part in the curtains, ending the dance of the dust.

The parrot babbles her full repertoire in her piercing scratch; hello, goodbye, A B C D E F G, peanut mm mm, bad bird bad bird whatcha gonna do (to the tune of the TV show “Cops” theme song), hello, goodbye, A B C… All this intersperses with barking and hissing.

My drink is finished. The animals come running when I stand up. Wagging tails follow swarming teeth and claws. I pick my way carefully through them and the cats mounted on boxes like sentries manning a turret overlooking a fortress. You move the small table behind the door so I can leave easier. The parrot’s acrid voice rises above the rest, goodbye.

Unspoken doesn’t mean never happened, dear Sis.

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Unspoken” is true in its entirety, except for the part about the cockroaches, they actually stayed. I’ve written a series of poems and prose pieces in an attempt to understand, and heal, a painful childhood. In all of my work, my intent is to place the raw ache, humiliation, and rage on the paper while still honoring my mother for her bravery and unwavering maternal instincts, who never expected to be a single mother in the 1970s. It’s not easy to be honest after a lifetime of trying to suppress memories, and sometimes creative choices can help explain the inexplicable. This is why I chose a metaphor – the distraction of a house full of animals is used to avoid confronting the past. It is an apt choice to describe the relationship between my sister and I, who is older and suffered through those extra years with our abusive father. My creative liberties are inspired by Brenda Miller’s “A Case Against Courage in Creative Nonfiction,” which appeared in AWP Writer’s Chronicle, Oct/Nov 2011. In her essay, Miller makes the argument that sometimes courage doesn’t always pay off in CNF, sometimes cowardice in the form of metaphor, syntax, imagery, or using a container, much like a hermit crab uses a shell for protection, produces better literature.

Faye Srala is a retired chemist living in Idaho pursuing a creative outlet with writing. She earned a BS in Chemistry from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, an MBA from the University of Utah, and is a current English major with the creative writing emphasis at Idaho State University. She waited until retirement to pursue an artistic outlet because her career was both rewarding and demanding, and because she didn’t trust her creativity enough make a switch. When not busy with classes, she bakes decadent desserts, drinks wine, and hikes off those calories in the extensive Idaho wilderness.

Smoke

Nonfiction / Caitlin Cowan

:: Smoke::

In 1989, I lit myself on fire, just a little bit. At a Fourth of July barbecue, someone gave me a sparkler and it caught the hem of my dress on fire. Every year the story looms like smoke, is smoke, made of and by its foggy tongues. I was three. I was on fire. I’ve never forgotten that day, though I’ve forgotten every fireworks display I’ve ever watched. It’s easy to remember the first time you ever felt truly alone.

My father liked to smoke a cigar on the Fourth of July. More than anything, he liked to light the fireworks with their glowing tips. No—most of all, he liked running away from the sparking promise of their explosion, cigar in hand, boat shoes on his feet though the lake was neighborhoods away and we never used it anyway. One day, years from now, he’ll run our boat up on some rocks in Lake Michigan—my mother will say he did it to ensure it would have no value when it was ordered to be sold in their divorce. But that blaze comes later. For now, a controlled burn.

The Fourth was the only time my mother allowed him to smoke. Or at least the only time when her protests were quiet enough for him to ignore them. An occasional cigar seemed like a middle-class indulgence, not a lethal habit. I expect that he looked forward to this holiday very much. Mosquitos, smoke, sparkling, and the tang of tobacco.

The way he feigned his fear: that’s what I remember most. After bending low in the grass to light the puny legal fireworks we’d procure in a multipack from a local Meijer, he would anoint the fuse with a kiss of his cigar. He would run, muttering a little too loudly, oh shit! He would comically dart away from the sizzling display as fast as he could, as if he were actually in danger, as if the greatest dangers he would face were behind, not ahead of him. He would smile, almost imperceptibly, as he ran. All memories I have of his performance on the Fourth are now, so many years into his absence, the same memory.

Allen Carr, author of The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, says that the occasional smoker suffers much more than the habitual one. The habitual smoker is able to assuage his cravings on a near-constant basis if he chooses, while the social or occasional smoker must discipline himself terribly. Think of how hard he must work, Carr says, to sustain himself between smokes. I think that my father was this kind of smoker. No, he was not the pious reformed smoker my mother imagined him to be nor the inveterate liar, furtively smoking at every opportunity, stealing away in the night to crouch behind the garage with a Marlboro, as I once imagined him to be. I think he abstained most of the time in order to smoke some of the time, assuring himself that his darker impulses could be controlled. But something that can combust will always combust. If you can burn, you burn.

Gestalt psychologist Fritz Perls, an inveterate smoker for all of his 76 years on earth, once wrote that smoking separates the self from others. When I heard this wisdom for the first time, it startled me like a sudden crackling in the sky. I knew it to be true in every sinew.

Smoking surrounds you with a literal barrier, if an easily penetrable one: a curtain of gray pollution that’s all your own. Even smokers prefer not to be enveloped in someone else’s smoke, choosing to stay safely ensconced in their own. It’s private. Blowing smoke in someone’s face can be considered battery in some places in the world; in others, it’s an invitation to fuck. There is intimacy in that corrupted air: the smoke enters your body, gets to know you inside, then makes itself visible outside, having absorbed something essential from you. Perhaps it’s even stolen a little piece of your life.

Though I barely remember the moment of my first cigarette, I remember the path that led me there acutely. It wasn’t pouty-lipped celebrities letting them dangle beautifully from their lips or the allure of being transgressive. It was their emotional shorthand, I think, that I admired the most.

Before my senior year of high school, I had to decide whether or not to take AP Calculus. I’m only a little ashamed to say that I took it out of arrogance, out of a sense of challenge. I earned two A+ grades on the first two exams. Then, having already gotten into the University of Michigan, I let the heavy mantle of academics go. I finished the year with a D in AP Calc. I then received a letter from the university saying that my offer of admission might be revoked because my senior-year grades had slipped.

Gripped by terror, uncertainty, and resignation, I became a fist of pain. I had not secured admission to any other schools. I had been raised to value education over everything else, and when I found out that I might not go to college, I felt as if I’d been handed a death sentence. It was, I can see now, my first interaction with grief since my parents had split up when I was 12. But an 18-year-old can do a lot of things that a 12-year-old can’t. And one of them is purchasing a pack of cigarettes at a gas station, as I did after receiving that letter from the academic review board.

An 18-year-old can find a physical outlet for her pain. She can find a spot under a tree. That tree will not be in a park or a quiet forest. It will jut out from some commercial landscaping near a strip mall or parking lot, because that’s what the vistas of suburbia are. She will sit and smoke cigarette after cigarette, barely inhaling at first, but braving up to inhale deeper and deeper as she goes along. Sickness will settle in.

She can think to herself, You are no longer alive. Your life, brief as it has been, is over. You do not serve a purpose. You are not as smart as everyone says you are, as you think you are, you arrogant little shit. You will never escape this sordid town, your mother’s house, your reach that perpetually exceeds your grasp. Cigarettes seemed to be the best way to telegraph to myself a singular, perverse message: I am bad and fucked up. And though I would get into U of M after my teachers wrote letters on my behalf, I would hold onto my smoking habit for another 15 years. It helped me keep myself separate—separate from myself.

Dusk. Choking. The Fourth of July. And yes, the running. This is the fire and the rest is the tinder—two years later, my mother made me hold an unlit cigarette to shame my father. Six years later I would write an award-winning school essay about avoiding cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, though I would not be offered any for two more years beyond that. Fourteen years later, I would buy my first pack of cigarettes, and when I tried on that shroud of smoke, it felt like it was made just for me. I wore its noxious lace for decades, always smelling vaguely of burning.

Why couldn’t they see I was on fire? I was burning and they didn’t know. No one could help me. Every breath choked me so my brain said run. I had to keep running. If I stopped: pain. Like I always would, when something went wrong I ran away from others, ran toward myself, into myself. My mother insists that it was a minor incident: nothing more than a singe. A scorched dress. But to a child, there is no sense of relativity: not now and not ever. I have so few memories of my early childhood. This one pulsates—has its own heat.

One thing I know for certain is that I started smoking because it seemed like the adult thing to do at that precise juncture in my life. Looking back, I think that young girl, crouching under a tree and wondering how she would get the stink of cigarettes off her hands before she went home, wanted someone, an actual adult, to see that message and send help.

But no one saw it. My mother saw my academic failure but did not see my pain. I think she would continue to turn a blind eye, and a blind nose, on my pain in its various forms for years. When I ran out to grab baking powder from the store on Christmas Eve for a pie, when I got up early to go to Starbucks to buy us both lattés, running out to the car at the mall to drop off our bags because they were “too heavy.” I think to myself now, she must have known. Though I’ve now quit for good, my partner was able to smell my only slip-up on me even though I hadn’t smoked in eight hours, had brushed my teeth, and had washed my face. If he could tell, then so could she. She had so many more chances to see, and smell, the truth.

Some part of me thought I was getting away with my furtive smoking, dousing myself in Designer Imposters Coco Mademoiselle, rolling the windows down to let the wind have its way with my hair, studding my cheeks with sugared mint gum so strong it made my teeth ache. The other part of me wished to god that I would get caught. I remember a friend of a friend in high school saying that her mother issued her the following warning: If you come home smellin’ up of spray with gum in your mouth, you’re grounded. She was smart enough, as I assume most human beings are, to recognize the smell of the cover-up as easily as the smell of the crime.

There were times when my mother would say “Give me a hug!” soon after I walked through the door after a night out with friends while I was home from college for the summer or visiting over Christmas during grad school. I used to think this was a test. Maybe it was. I don’t understand why she didn’t explode with anger when she smelled it, if she did. I kept thinking, surely, this time… But I got to keep my secret for years. Somehow, it stayed down there with everything else, ready as kindling.

I didn’t tell my mother about the letter that came from U of M at first. I simply sweated it out, held my fear like another body, breathing life into it with every passing day. This pattern of relying only on myself, of hiding the most difficult parts of my life from my mother, of retreating, Scorpionic, into my hole, fossorial like the star sign I was born under, never abated. A divorce, a breakup, a traumatic cross-country move… I dealt with these things alone, smoking my way through them, wreathed in gray, dissipating garlands that kept me apart from others.

But the smoking itself, of course, was the thing I hid most ardently from my mother. Even after she caught me smoking one day outside the Target I worked at during the summers between semesters, even after she tearfully invoked the childhood asthma that had hospitalized me countless times in my childhood, her own father’s collapsed lung, her best friend’s death from lung cancer.

It was as if nothing she said and nothing I did had any meaning at all. We were both locked in a dance, out of breath. One night, when I admitted to her that I had been smoking while on the phone with her, she said “I can’t believe I’m your ashtray.” She sobbed. Sobbed. To this day I do not understand her histrionic reaction. It’s so silly it makes me laugh. What does it even mean? It is, like most things, not about me. It’s about her. Sometimes I think she is angry at her own parents, who smoked for decades. That night, and so many nights after, I stared into her inexplicable pain, looking into the black abyss of the telephone connection. I lived in that void forever, inured myself to reality and to my own body, burning myself in earnest, making up for the mere scorching I’d suffered as a child. I had made myself into her worst nightmare. And for a long time, it felt so, so good.

I remember my baby thoughts, far away from the adults assembled on the lawn, can still taste the sourness of the smoke. It burned: some tiny, stylish frock my mother had probably purchased at Jacobsen’s in downtown Birmingham, a ring of burnt umber seared into the fabric over my tiny thigh.

The difference between the truth absolute and the truth of the mind is burned away, here, and perhaps is burned away always. There was no panic about the burning dress. That’s what I remember. My mother says they didn’t know it was happening. I feel for my mother on the other side of the divide: She did not intend to make me feel alone as I choked on the fumes of my little burning dress. And yet alone I felt. My truth as good, as heavy as hers. As hot.

What chemistry did I taste in that first fear? Aluminum, zinc, a million magnesium stars I swallowed. Unsuitable for birthday cakes; do not consume the ash. Dear reader, I consumed the ash. Consumed the smoke, the binder, the oxidizer, the fuel, the wire, and my own hand holding it. As the years go by I can’t see it as well but I can feel it: the backyard hazy with citronella, the boozed-up grandparents who could not see me, the parents who still laugh about that day, the lawn, the evening sky, my sick lungs that would never let me run until I ran.

I run now, am running, towards a man who seems both new and familiar, who sends me photographs of his nephew on his lap, pulling his face into a beautiful grimace before the fireworks explode. Sometimes he looks like my father, the one who lit a cigar every Fourth to detonate the horde, would run from its sputtering once he started something that he could not stop: fire, new love, a child’s heart. I wonder if the film will soon start over again from the beginning. Maybe this time it won’t end in flames.

Pyrotechnics are born to blow up, but sparklers are born to burn. It’s slower. It takes time. Like Natural American Spirits: my brand of choice throughout graduate school and right up until the bitter end. But before that first sparkler and before the Spirits, it was Parliament Lights in my undergrad years at Michigan. When my mother found a pack of those in my purse back then, she scoffed, “that was your grandmother’s brand.” My friends and I used to make jokes about sniffing coke because of their recessed filter. I had never tried cocaine but still brought it up at parties to seem like I was in the know. I did not know anything, least of all how much consumption and addiction dictated my young life.

When I started smoking Spirits, the hipster cigarette of choice for all free-thinking starving artists in Denton, TX, it meant that I was away for longer, outside, huddled in alleyways, shrouded in furtive corners for seven, eight, maybe even ten minutes. Smoking ultimately isolates you from other people. If you squint your eyes hard enough, it might feel for a moment, or a year, or a lifetime, like it’s keeping you safe.

But we humans have a funny mechanism built right in. The more we are alone, the more our brains push us toward other people. In “Evolutionary Mechanisms for Loneliness,” sociologists Cacioppo, Cacioppo, & Boomsma argue that “loneliness may serve as a signal to increase social connection and thus increase chances of survival.” As in, I went outside to smoke so I could come back in to the warm glow of my friends at the bar. Can you fucking believe that loneliness exists to keep us alive?

If we hold that in our hands along with the sparkler, an unlit cigarette, and the bald fact that smoking physically separates us from others, we might be able to ask this question: Did I smoke to drive myself to the edge? And more importantly, did I go there just so I could learn how to come back?

I was six the first time I touched a cigarette. The details are veiled in a haze. We were parked in front of a McDonald’s on a family trip up north. My father had gone inside to use the restroom or order food. My mother, searching for something in the car, had come across a pack of cigarettes he had apparently hidden (though not very well). He had told her that he quit many times over. Could she already tell that he would hide other things from her in the years to come? The bottle of pills I’d found in his suit coat pocket, the false business trips… the other woman?

That afternoon on the road, she didn’t explode. She smoldered, a spark traveling down the wick of her anger. She pulled two cigarettes from the pack and handed me one. I didn’t understand. Just hold it, she kept saying. I vaguely remember her even trying to show me how to hold it, the verisimilitude of an actual, adult, smoking hand. A deflated peace sign. I obeyed. I did not know what I was doing or why, but I did it.

Memory tells me that my mother rolled down her window and went so far as to light hers, though she did not take a drag from it. And there we sat, one woman and one woman-in-training, pretending to smoke for a reason that, even now, three decades later, smoking and quitting and smoking and quitting and smoking one last time after a setback at work and then finally, blessedly, quitting again, I still scarcely understand.

What was she trying to prove? She wanted my father to return to the car and see it. I suppose she wanted to cause him alarm. But what was the message? What would the equivalent be if it were a gun she had found and not a pack of cigarettes—something that kills you quickly rather than over the years? Would she have pointed it at my head? Asked me to hold it? Maybe she could have torn open some ketchup packets, told me to close my eyes, daubing her painting with alizarin crimson, could have wrapped my limp fingers around the barrel.

Her anger stoked her creativity, like mine does now. She morphed from mother to master director, setting her stage just the way she wanted. And the centerpiece, the most critical prop on the stage, was the cigarette. Can you see it? If you squint your eyes, it doesn’t look like a condemnation at all. It looks a bit like a monument.

All these little parts, little stories: the smoke I choked on as my dress burned, the smoke I gulped between sobs when things went wrong, the smoke I imagined curling from the end of a prop cigarette my mother once handed me. The whole of it is so much greater than each hazy tendril, each polluted breath. I have to look at it all, even when there’s so much smoke I can hardly see.

Though all four of my parents’ parents, my mother’s brother, and my father all smoked at some point in their lives, cigarettes were the highest taboo in my household. The story of stories is that my mother’s parents quit after some 40 years. My grandfather quit cold turkey, but it was harder for my grandmother. She had slip-ups, used nicotine replacement, and generally struggled to kick the habit. She reminds me of me, which made my mother’s condemnation of her own mother’s supposed “weakness” difficult. The fact that her father was able to quit easily after four decades permanently destroyed my mother’s ability to think of cigarette smoking as an addiction instead of as a moral failing.

But in its own way, too, this deepened her anger toward him. If it’s so easy to quit, she wondered, why didn’t he do it sooner? Of course, she can never understand what it’s really like to quit smoking. She also couldn’t know his internal struggles. She could not know the white-hot shame and anger that my father must have felt rip through him like an unfiltered Lucky Strike when he saw our faux-smoky pageant in the McDonald’s parking lot. She could not understand how her violent prohibition of smoking made it simple for me to take my habit underground, deep into my scorpion’s nest—solitude on solitude on solitude.

The smoker perpetually lives in a state of cognitive dissonance. Smoking feels like companionship but isn’t. The smoker knows, with complete certainty, that what she is doing will harm her, has the power to kill her, even. But she also knows that she enjoys what she is doing. I think this is what Carr meant when he said that quitting smoking frees you from the “black thoughts” that plague smokers: I have to quit. I’m going to get lung cancer. This is going to kill me. Maybe I’ll be ok if I quit this year. Next year. When I graduate. When I move. Next year. Next year. But Carr says less about the smoke-white thoughts: I’m enjoying this. I am truly alive because I know I am dying.

I do not remember how my father reacted. This knowledge may come as a disappointment to you. Have I blocked it out? Has time merely taken it from me as a small kindness? I do know that nothing momentous happened. He came back, said something to my mother. Someone would have taken the cigarette from me. And then we never spoke of it again. So final was our denial of that bizarre tableau that my mother insists that it never happened, and if pressed she will only admit she “doesn’t remember it that way.” Every time I’ve burned, she’s disappeared it with words, letting it all vanish like one last drag. What’s a memory worth if you’re the only one who has it? If you smoke a cigarette all alone in a courtyard, who are you separating yourself from?

On Arrested Development, hapless patriarch George Bluth was fond of teaching his children a lesson by scaring them nearly to death. At the end of his tautological pranks, he or the one-armed colleague he often hired to terrify young Michael, Lindsay, and Gob would intone, “and that’s why you always leave a note,” or “and that’s why you don’t yell.” Like any good writer, he preferred showing to telling. On TV, I laugh at it; in life, there’s less humor.

Sometimes I think my mother enrolled in the same school of thought when it came to her marriage. She wanted to teach my father a lesson that day on our way up north: And that’s why you never smoke a cigarette. But I’m not sure how the mathematics of her theatrics add up, even to this day. Was she hoping to point out that smoking made my father a bad role model? That his smoking would cause me to smoke? To this day, I’ve never seen him smoke a cigarette, and haven’t seen him at all since I was a young teenager. I smoked anyway, and with great relish.

Instead, that weird afternoon in the parking lot became an echo, sounding its report throughout my life in various rancid permutations. My mother didn’t have an actor friend with one arm like George Bluth did. Instead, she had a daughter with two arms and two hands with which to clutch tens of thousands of cigarettes she would handle in her life. Little paper ghosts passing through the forest, ten pine trunks, my baby fingers. And that’s why you don’t look for the smoke. You look for the fire.

We start to smoke because we don’t believe we’ll die. But of course, we will. We smoke because we don’t care if we die, or we want to pretend that this is true. We smoke because we believe in god. Because we don’t. Because you were raised as an atheist. Because when you asked your mother what happens when we die, she said our bodies go into the ground and flowers grow out of us.

We smoke because we feel that we are special, that we can beat the odds, that we are the protagonists of our own little dramas. How bad could it really be? We keep smoking because the smoke starts to feel like a shitty friend who, in spite of everything, always returns your calls. We smoke when it’s expensive, when it’s cheap, when we feel sick, when we feel young and healthy.

We keep smoking because the cigarettes are organic, the box is made of post-consumer materials, and the company sends you little seed bombs to plant in your yard to show how friendly they are. You never remember to plant them, so nothing—not one single thing—ever grows.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Recently I’ve focused on trying to tell stories I’ve never told. One such story relayed in this essay is a core childhood memory of mine that my mother insists is apocryphal. As I burrowed into it,I realized that the core plot element of the story—the why—was not only slippery but also, surprisingly, less interesting than what the memory has to say about shame, addiction, and loneliness. Because cigarette smoking, the larger subject of the essay, is a cultural phenomenon, branching out from this core experience also made me want to engage with the question of what the act of smoking means, if anything, in the larger sense. Here again, I found more questions than answers, but in constellating those questions, I felt, ultimately, like I could see a recognizable figure anyhow.

The work of psychologist Fritz Perls seeded this project in that respect: a jotted-down note in my journal about Perls’ assertion that smoking is designed to separate us from others had been troubling me for years, and it finally led me back here and to my childhood, adolescent, and adulthood connections to smoking. Author Allen Carr, whose audiobooks about self-hypnosis and smoking cessation I listened to, also haunts this piece. The central tenet of Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking was my first encounter with the idea smoking is actually not enjoyable at all. Carr died of lung cancer in 2006, 23 years after smoking his last cigarette.

This essay is part of a manuscript called Solitary, which is a hybrid CNF/poetry project that uses the structure of a popular pagan song to interrogate the terrestrial and spiritual origins of solitude and its relationship to womanhood, from solitary witchcraft to the peculiar weirdness of only childhood.

Born and raised outside Detroit, Caitlin Cowan earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Texas and an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School in New York City before returning to the Midwest. Her debut full-length collection of poetry is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press (2024). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Best New Poets (2021), The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Rappahannock Review, and in other journals and anthologies, including Erase the Patriarchy (University of Hell Press). Her work has received support from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. She is a Poetry Editor for Pleiades and serves as the Chair of Creative Writing at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. Caitlin writes regularly about the intersection of poetry and popular culture at PopPoetry.

Going to the Hospital

Nonfiction / Brittany Ackerman

:: Going to the Hospital ::

You are thirty-three and today you need help. You teach a class from your little desk at home, your remote set-up, and you hope the kids can’t tell that you’ve been up all night, begging your husband to take you to the hospital. He wrapped his body around yours and told you it would be okay, but you knew it wouldn’t. You told him you felt bad that he has to be married to you, that he isn’t with someone who can live, laugh, love. Someone who can enjoy life.

In the morning, you call your insurance company. You have been looking for a new therapist, someone to talk to because you want to get better—you really do—but you’ve also been having visions of standing in your backyard and letting the wind take you away. You picture your body disintegrating into particles that dissolve and pixelate and vanish into thin air.

Your insurance can’t find any openings, even for Tele-health. Nothing for this month or one after that. They send you a list of phone numbers to try and you call the numbers, one after another. Some places don’t take insurance, they aren’t sure why they’re on the list; or they’re too busy, not taking any new clients, but they can put you on waitlist. You don’t know how long the waitlist is and you need help now. You’re not sure how many other people are waiting on the list, but you assume it is a lot. All these places advise you to call your insurance, again.

You sit in your car outside your new home and refuse to come inside. You have packed a bag because you thought you might go to the gym, take a Pilates class and have a steam, clear your head, but realistically you know that won’t work, that the whole class you’d be anxious the entire time while you wait for phone calls, for good news.

Your husband comes out to the car and encourages you to come back in. You tell your husband you are going to the hospital. You close the door, start the car, and drive. It is just after 11:30AM when you pull up to ER and roll down your window. Here is where you start yelling, where you scream at every attendant, every passerby, that you need help, that you are having a breakdown, that you are not okay. This is the beginning of the yelling, of completely losing your mind. The day seems stretched and measured by fits like these.

Your husband follows you in his car and pulls up shortly after. He handles your keys that you have thrown on the ground. Your ID. Your wallet. He handles everything. The whole check-in process. You cry and yell and want to know if you can talk to a doctor soon. A woman comes up to you in the waiting room, she tells you what a great hospital this is. A man in a flowered shirt and a cowboy hat tells you you’re in the right place. He says he was once in your position, that we’ve all been here before. You are taken to triage. Your vitals are taken. The nurse asks how you are doing and you don’t answer. When she asks again you say, Not good.

You are admitted to the ER and given a bed, number 36, in an area where there are many patients in their own respective beds. Some have their curtains closed, some rest out in the open. Your blood is drawn, your nose is swabbed, you pee in a cup and are sent back to your bed. No one knows how long it’ll be until a doctor can visit. You hear the woman to your right talking about how much she loves oatmeal. The nurse asks for her favorite recipe. She’s too tired to give the whole thing, but she loves to add chocolate. You think of your mom who once told you that the meaning of life was good sex and chocolate. Your mom doesn’t know you are in the ER. Your mom is a substitute teacher at a private school in Florida. Your mom calls your phone and you don’t answer. She writes, Not important, just driving home, love you.

The woman in the bed across from you has her curtain closed. She talks in whispers on her cell phone saying she will have the money, she promises. She is given Ativan and then a nurse asks if you would like some Ativan, maybe a small dose just to take the edge off. You say no. You want to have a clear head when you talk to the doctor.

The woman catty-corner has fluid in her knee. A young man is wheeled past with a swollen testicle. He has a copay of $100. You never find out what happens to his testicle.

Everything in the hospital is blue: the curtains, the uniforms for both nurses and doctors, the piece of rubber they use to tie your arm to find a vein to take your blood, the railings on your cot, the plastic water bottles they give patients to drink, the chairs in the lobby, the ceilings and the floor tiles, the fanny pack the social worker wears.

But the blankets are sea foam green, a color that reminds you of Florida. Sea shells and pastels. Sandy beaches and the waves spreading across the shore. You finally call your mom and she wishes she could jump on the next flight to see you. Your dad tells you to get some rest, to relax. You can barely breathe when you speak to them, these people who brought you into this world. You are worried they are disappointed in you, but when they tell you they are rooting for you it makes everything worse. You can’t explain that you feel like a failure, that you are not sure you will ever be okay, if you will be able to bounce back.

A nurse named Julie in the hospital asks you what you do for work. You say you don’t want to talk about it. Your husband spills the beans that you are a writer. Julie tells you that to write is a gift, that when you write a book, no one can take that away from you. It is your power. You want to believe her. You want to believe that your work is important, that you can make sense of your life. You want to love yourself, but you don’t. She tells you to let yourself be who you’re meant to be.

You wonder if it’s worth it to keep trying. It is hard to feel like whatever you do is enough. You write about your life, about what you know. You often tell your students nothing is more interesting than real life. In real life, you are sitting in a hospital bed. You are taking notes on your phone because you think this might make for a good essay.

You think of your childhood, the things that may have brought you to this present moment. It always felt like a party you weren’t invited to. Even though you were there, you were only ever watching it happen. You were never a part of things, even though you had the same name as your friends, even though you went to the same school.

You text your Rabbi and he tells you that you are a child of God, that you have power and meaning that cannot be taken away from you. It is inherent. It is immutable. He tells you that you are strong.

You do not feel strong here. You feel sick, worthless. You stand in the middle of the lobby with your hands on your face. You cry and scream and your husband takes you aside. “They will keep you here,” he says, afraid. And he’s not wrong. Your brother has been here before, has coached you on what not to say in the ER. He told you about how they strip you naked, how you can’t call anyone, how you are treated like an animal. You haven’t spoken to him yet, but you can feel him here in the hospital with you.

You go back to your bed and lie down. You cry into the green blanket. You drink apple juice out of a small aluminum pouch.

When the sun starts to set, you see a psychiatrist through video chat. He’s having technical difficulties, so his screen remains black. He spends an hour with you. You cannot see him, but he can see you. In this way, he might as well be God. As you talk to the black screen, you feel okay for the first time all day. Someone is finally watching you, taking care of you, despite the fact that you cannot see him. But in that hour, he diagnoses you with something that makes sense. He says there is a way to live a normal life. He compares what you experience to driving a car, to the gas pedal being stuck so that your mind is going, going all the time. He says you need something in order for the pedal to release.

He suggests you might benefit from being put “on a hold” in the hospital, from staying put for a while and being monitored. But he gives you the option to leave, as you might start feeling better soon.

And then the ER doctor clears you for release. Your vitals are taken again. You will not be held here. You walk toward the waiting room, toward the door, and then you are outside. You feel something like relief, the cold air on your face, the world coming back to you. Your car pulls up and you get in.

You wait at home until your husband pulls up. You ask if you can go to Toppers Pizza. You haven’t eaten all day and you are starving. Toppers is your favorite pizza place in town, a local restaurant where there’s a build-your-own salad bar and teenagers bring your food to the table. You order a medium cheese pizza and a Coke, a warm cookie with vanilla ice cream for dessert. The first time you came to Toppers was the day you moved to this new town. It had been overwhelming, but you wanted your new life here to work out. You wanted to start over. Something about Toppers always brings you back to who you are. It’s stupid, you know, but you feel at peace here. You feel hopeful.

The next day you resume teaching, not mentioning to your students what happened the day before. You look for therapists and make more calls. While you are on your way to a yoga class, a secretary calls you back with the good news of an opening. You book the appointment and keep driving.

Your mom texts you that the WiFi is out on her campus, that her and the kids are playing charades to pass the time. It’s the end of the school day on the other side of the country and you imagine your mom in her cardigan, the way she shuffles her sore feet in and out of her shoes at her desk. You wonder if the room is cold, what she had for lunch, what she’ll make for dinner. You tell her that charades sounds fun.

She writes back: Got to go, it’s my turn.

You will start writing again soon. It’s just a matter of time.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Going to the Hospital is a true story—my story. I started writing this piece the day it happened in an attempt to document most accurately the experience. Mental illness permeates my whole life, and most, if not all of my writing embodies the inner struggles that people—both real and imagined—face day to day. I think we often want to project a linear version of healing in stories; a beginning, middle, and end to the suffering. But the truth is that pain is perpetual. This doesn’t mean it’s a hopeless pursuit to get help, but that it will be a lifelong ride of ups and downs, leaps and hurdles, and that’s okay. Post hospital trip, I encountered a lot of backlash and questioning about my mental health. I had friends distance themselves from me, not sure what to say, how to ‘deal’ with me, how to be around me. I had people tell me that my life was so good from the outside, therefore how could I struggle so much? While I can’t imagine combating someone’s openness with skepticism, I do understand the way that society and media have flattened and falsified the experience of mental illness. With the advent of the glittery meme came slogans of normalizing and opening dialogue about mental health. But can a tweet or a small carousel of words and images accurately portray the complex, unique experience of what happens in someone’s brain? The more posts I see, the worse I feel. I don’t feel the glow of community, but rather it feels like someone else, some faceless account, is speaking for me. I write in order to share my account, which is just one single story. I don’t proclaim I am one for all. I only wish to be one voice that inspires other voices to share.

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension program, Catapult, HerStry, Write or Die Tribe, The Porch, and forthcoming for Lighthouse Writers. She currently teaches writing at Vanderbilt University in the English Department. She is a 2x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Hobart, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine (Red Hen Press, 2018) , and her debut novel The Brittanys is out now with Vintage. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Since We Broke Up

Nonfiction / Cydney Mangubat

:: Since We Broke Up ::

When quarantine began in March of 2020—when the pandemic was just starting to take apart the world we’ve come to know—my relationship with my then partner of 4 years was simultaneously on the brink of shattering. And in 3 months we would end our relationship. What unfolded in between remains fogged in my recollection, a road I can’t trick myself into traversing. My mind instinctively knows that this story doesn’t begin with the messiness of our relationship, of what went wrong and why we ended up where we did. It begins after we broke up, when the cruelty of the pandemic made itself known to us and took control of our lives.

At first, news of the virus felt like a halt. I treated it like a temporary interruption to my usual course, a blip not worthy of worry. Quarantine was just a precaution, it would end in a few months—I believed this. But when it didn’t, some of us (most of us) remained caught in that illusion of a momentary pause, consumed by the ache of a return to the versions of ourselves we had left behind. Like a child in a tantrum, I was reverted to that state of restlessness I felt helpless in, just waiting to be picked up, comforted, relieved of the weight of my longing.

I was clumsily processing a breakup in the midst of navigating a new reality. Those days, closure was a luxury I only rarely tasted. Things, thoughts, often felt unfinished, abandoned. Like a door left slightly open. Or an up strum on a guitar. Or a bottle cap angled the wrong way, it’s closed but not really. As much as I wanted to give myself the space to feel as freely as I could, to ride the unending whirl of emotions that came with a breakup, it was almost impossible to let my mind wander when my body was stuck in quarantine. I longed for the kind aura of a coffee shop, where a table for one was not mistaken for loneliness. Or a trip to the grocery, the quiet thrill of going aisle to aisle searching for that one ingredient. Never did I appreciate the comfort of being around strangers until the virus deemed it unsafe.

In an email, a friend tells me about spending two months in recuperation. She’s been focusing on herself, finding time to do things she’s been putting on hold, and grieving, in quiet ways, for the person she used to be. Grief, I imagine, in its many cruel forms, is something that has taken a hold of everyone one way or another during this pandemic. To be pushed into the well of loss, free falling and bracing for an impact that will end the misery. I, too, am in constant grief for the person I used to be.

There is a line by Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk that has stuck with me since I first read it early in the pandemic: “We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.” I have since recognized that I am further in grief for the person I could’ve been, the experiences I could’ve had, robbed even of a proper post-breakup experience.

If the pandemic didn’t happen, I would’ve gone through the breakup around the comfort and support of friends who would take me out to drink, do anything to distract me. Or who would sit beside me as I stayed in the cycle of sadness and regret. Friends who would empathize with me because they had the chance to know my partner, to witness who I was around her. See, as painful and exhausting as it was to lose a partner I loved, what eventually scarred me was not the relationship ending, but the lonely and helpless experience of being a closeted adult going through a breakup around family who never even knew the relationship existed. Four years, and I was never able to introduce her as my partner. I was grieving not in quiet ways, but in purposely hidden spaces—away from the comfort and stability of a safe space. In locked comfort rooms, where bareness rereferred more to the stripping of a façade than being undressed. On a bed facing a wall that mocked me like a mirror, further compressing an already tight space. I could not risk being seen in tears, being asked why. I feared telling the truth on impulse or vulnerability, a desperate attempt to get it over with. As much as I wanted to turn to my family for support, as much as I craved the relief of their presence, of their voices assuring me with words I needed to hear, I couldn’t. Not without causing myself the even heavier, more agonizing uncertainty of what may come after mouthing the words I dated a girl. To run to my family at that time meant coming out to them.

Many times, I’ve invalidated the urgency and meaning of narrating this in the midst of a pandemic. There are stories more important than mine. Quarantine, I’ve learned, has forced me into a routine of self-negation. I have deemed it selfish to be faced by my desires and not look away. When people are sick and dying, am I allowed to struggle and be burdened by something so personal? To fear rejection more than the virus.

Never have I felt a stronger urge to come out, spending every day close to my parents, sitting beside them, spending each meal together, wanting to just tap them on the shoulder and tell them. The back and forth of stepping over fear and being swallowed by it. Like playing with a light switch, the brightness of courage flickering in front of me on and off, but never left long enough for me to be embraced by it.

In the film Happiest Season, Dan Levy captured the experience of coming out best when his character says:

My dad kicked me out of the house and didn’t talk to me for 13 years after I told him. Everybody’s story is different. There’s your version, and my version, and everything in between. But the one thing that all of those stories have in common is that moment, right before you say those words. When your heart is racing, and you don’t know what’s coming next. That moment’s really terrifying. And once you say those words, you can’t unsay them. A chapter has ended and a new one’s begun. And you have to be ready for that.

The moment right before coming out that Levy described—when you can feel your bounding pulse control your whole body—is a feeling I’ve long been familiar with. There are many instances when I’ve felt close to coming out, to my mom the most. When we’re watching a film with a gay character and she tells me after that she enjoyed the story. When we’re in the car, and the smallness of the space and blurring of the outside invites vulnerability. When I was rushed to the hospital at 3am and she spent the entire night beside me. When she came to my room two weeks after the breakup to give me coffee because she felt that something was wrong. Among everyone in my family, I longed for her presence the most. For her short reassuring replies telling me kaya mo ‘yan ikaw pa. Or the tranquility of a moment when I opened up to her, how the silence would remind me that she was really listening. Or her embrace. I longed for the tenderness of a mother’s embrace during the nights I spent crying over my partner, how the idea of it still embodies the stilling encounter of seeing a mom calm a crying baby to sleep.

“I want him to see that I’m smiling this big for the first time in my life. I’m feeling like I truly am myself, but there is just one thing missing. I just want my dad back, like I just want my dad back. He hasn’t been here.” These are words from Angel Flores, a 22-year-old transwoman athlete and coach introduced in one of the episodes of the makeover reality show Queer Eye. Her father was an influential figure in her life who inspired her towards athletics, but whom she has lost contact with since telling him of her choice to transition. Anyone who has seen the episode will attest to the light Angel carries. It is impossible not to be empowered by her, to smile and laugh when she does, to be overwhelmed with joy in witnessing her fall in love with who she sees in the mirror. But there is a void inside of her, anyone will feel it too. She wants her dad back, I hear myself pleading in return.

Towards the end of the episode, Angel and her dad do reunite. As soon as he walked in the room, they both got lost in tears and fell into each other’s arms. The same void, it turns out, found itself in her father’s life and their longing for each other’s presence grew more powerful than their differences.

But what has stuck with me since is this: right before Angel’s dad entered the room, Karamo Brown, the show’s culture expert, sat with Angel and said, “I don’t subscribe to the word ‘coming out’ because the act is actually letting people in. And when you say coming out, you’re actually giving the other person the power to reject or deny you. And for me, it’s like, ‘you don’t have that power.’”

While I carry the same outlook—as I have most of my high school and college days—I can’t bring myself to hold that conviction at home. I have had people come into my life who have rejected me upon hearing how I identify, and without hesitation I have never, not even once, given them that power over me. I don’t seek their approval and can walk away living my truth without any loss. I am, as Karamo puts it, inviting them in and not waiting for them to open the door so I can safely come out. But with my parents and my sisters, it is not about power. It is about family. I have since understood that my needing to come out to them is a matter of longing, of wanting their assurance that I will be loved regardless, of filling a void in me that already exists even before I’ve told my truth. I need them. I will be pleading to have them back if I lose them.

Reader, there is nothing more terrifying to me than the thought of losing my parents. How does one even prepare for the possibility of it? How do you convince yourself that it is worth taking that risk for the sake of who you are? I want the version of the story where I don’t have to weigh those options.

I briefly dated someone else a year into the pandemic, a guy whom I had been friends with for a while. It was different, the world is kinder to these kinds of relationships. There was no risk involved or fear of being found out. I would be lying if I said that it didn’t give me moments of peace, unburdened by the consequences of being queer. I got to talk to my sisters about him. Over dinner, I told my parents where he was from, how kind he was. For a while, I was certain that the hurt I carried with me as a result of my hiding was dimming itself, and that the urgency I felt to come out during the pandemic had passed. But however freeing it was, it didn’t come without resentment, anger towards a reality that dating a man was safer, a life that was more bearable compared to the other. With my previous partner, I had to whisper on the phone with her whenever I was home. I settled on routines out of paranoia, phone always locked, any trace of our relationship to be kept in my dorm or a shoebox under the bed I was certain no one will find. She once sent me flowers and a photo of us in a frame I could never take home and put up. At dinner, my parents would ask after my sister’s boyfriend, his work, family, when he’d visit. I wanted them to ask me too. I wanted, more than anything during our relationship, to be able to tell my parents about her. All this I still carried throughout my new relationship. There is now a deep hurt in me caused by 4 years in hiding that I’m afraid will only find healing in my family’s acceptance of me.

When we were young, my sisters and I randomly found a board game in a box of toys. It was a simple ‘dice and move’ game across a numbered board; the goal was to get from start to finish first. But the board had its own tricks, every square housed a command: “take 4 steps back,” “7 steps back.” You’d be five steps away from winning and you’d end on a tile with “go back to start.” We laughed at each other’s misfortune, always going back. But it stopped being fun when none of us could reach the end and we had to stop playing. Each square was colored in annoying red, almost mocking you: you’ll never get there. This is what the pandemic is like. Just when you think you’re close to the end—restrictions easing up, children getting vaccinated, schools slowly shifting onsite—you get pulled right back, finding yourself stuck again and again at the beginning. When the January 2022 surge came, almost everyone I checked up on was either sick or had someone in their family in isolation. I had to take a breath for each how are you sent, always anticipating bad news. It was only a matter of time, I thought, until it reached our home.

My older sister was the first to get sick. It didn’t matter how long we prepared in anticipation; the thought of the virus invading your home is disquieting. My younger sister and I experienced symptoms two weeks later.

I remember I was 7 when my family visited a museum once where a house of mirrors was in exhibit. As any child would, I ran in excitement; the video by the entrance made it look inviting. But I would later discover that there was nothing more suffocating to me than being endlessly surrounded by my own image, having no place to look away to. Finding the one way out was impossible; my mother had to guide me out. Being in isolation, physically away from my family, was being back in that maze every day but no longer needing the mirrors. My room had never felt smaller. Every way I looked I was reminded that I could not walk out. Not from my room, not from my hiding, not from myself. Nothing has embodied the months of suffocation of being closeted in a pandemic than being in isolation in your own home, having my family just outside my door but never being able to come out.

I once saw a video online of a girl coming out to her parents with a cake that said “surprise I’m bi.” As I watched those moments right before she walked up to them, I could tell that she was trembling inside from the other side of the screen. Her face was red, she had been crying even before she put the cake down, her voice edged with fear. It took her parents a while to catch up, but they did eventually. They hugged her, assured her it was good news, reminded her they love her no matter what. I remember this video each time I go out to dinner with my parents. On those nights I always consider telling them, until fear seals up my throat, perhaps the same fear that pulsed through the girl in the video right before she came out.

I’ve since learned that there is a name for this fear: it’s called anticipatory anxiety. It describes fear or worry for events or scenarios that haven’t happened yet. This includes spending a lot of time anticipating worst-case scenarios, which can then lead to frustration and hopelessness. I read in an article by the non-profit organization Anxiety Canada that this anticipation to protect oneself is a system that is “critical to our survival when there is actual threat or danger, it’s a big problem when there isn’t.”

This is the part where I turn away and hide (it took me a month before returning to this section again). Reading up on anticipatory anxiety is like answering a crossword puzzle and then realizing that perhaps I’ve been using the wrong letters the entire time. I hesitate to spell this out, but I am beginning to consider that what if all this—me fearing losing my parents, not being able to come out, failing to introduce my previous partner—are all just stories I tell myself, a way of protecting myself from coming out. What if I convince myself I can’t come out, because I’m not ready to confront the harder-to-admit realization that my parents accepting me is probably not as distant and impossible a reality as I have believed it to be. How terrifying a prospect it is for me to even consider that I cling to a traditional view of my family as a defense mechanism. What if, what I am most terrified of is this: that they’ll accept me when I finally tell them, tell me they love me no matter what, and I’ll realize that all this time I was the only one holding myself back. I’ve since realized that it is for this reason that I long even more for the pandemic to end—so I can stay in the closet, escape confronting these haunting possibilities, and return to the version of my story I’ve come to know.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Writing to me is often a way of understanding things, of finding meaning in stories, experiences, relationships. I reckon that few people write with the certainty of knowing exactly what will be written down. When I write, I’m forced to understand as I write, to find structure to events, connect them, reflect. Going through that process is what I have feared most since I started writing my essay “Since We Broke Up.” I have been afraid to confront the parts of my identity I have left suspended alongside the pandemic. There are works that require greater and longer reflection before it can ever be written. This essay was a work I initially started writing in my sophomore year but was never able to complete until my senior year of college because there were still aspects of my identity in relation to my sexuality that I had yet to understand myself. It wasn’t the right time for me to write about it then. I needed the months spent writing and rewriting down reflections, getting things wrong before I could eventually get them right.

Cydney Mangubat lives in the Philippines. She is a BFA Creative Writing graduate from Ateneo de Manila University and a recipient of the Loyola Schools Awards for the Arts for Nonfiction, as well as the Mulry Award for Literary Excellence. Most days, she craves paella or buttered chicken.

Seek and Hide

Nonfiction / Laura Valeri

:: Seek and Hide ::

Sleep paralysis. Recurring nightmares. I’m three. I dream of a playground behind the school in Milan where I live. I am in the sandbox, making sand castles, the only child still at school after hours. A woman crouches next to me, interested in my moats, my half-formed mounds. The cherry-red of my scoop stands out in the colorless dream. Smiling, the woman asks why I’m alone. Where are the other children? Where is my mother? She can find her for me. What is my name? My crosswired brain confuses dreamself with bodyself and douses both in narcotic paralysis. I try to speak but cannot reach my voice. Soon, more women come. They circle me. They think I’m shy, non fare la timida, bambina, then gradually become impatient, dicci come ti chiami. I’m immured in granite sleep, my chest a tombstone. I try but my voice is sieved through the slow flow of my breath, and I barely manage a hiss. The women cross their arms, call me bad mannered. They’ll tell my mother that I’m disrespectful. Who am I? They want my name, my name, my name. I will it to come. I pull my breath through my numb chest, until my name explodes into a shout that jolts me awake and echoes into the empty bedroom.

My father’s executive job moves us to Paris. I am four. The apartment is maze-like and unfamiliar, dark, tiny rooms, a long narrow hallway with sharp angles. I sit alone in the guest room. The television plays a cartoon in a language I don’t yet know to call French. It bores me. I hear a casual “Where is Laura?” from the kitchen, and I think, come and find me. At first, it’s only my mother, her vowels stretching sing-song through the hallway, then my grandmother joins her, a choir. My name in their voices crosses the hallway, from bedroom to living room, then back to the kitchen. Here, I think, but don’t speak. How can they possibly miss this room? When my father calls my name, his voice deep and serious, I know. What started as a game will earn me a spanking. When the door handle jiggles, I prop my head on the table and close my eyes, slowing my breath, letting my mouth slacken.

The story is shared often with relatives at holiday dinners: “Once, in Paris, we found her asleep before the tv, with her head on a glass coffee table. Can you believe it? This girl can sleep anywhere.”

Hiding is a game, a trick to see how long it will take them to notice that I am not around. It’s about my hiding place, if it’s clever enough — if I’m clever enough. But the voices always grow urgent too suddenly. I only know I’ve gone too far when it’s already too late.

I’m five. Back home in Milan. The large armoire stores my mother’s freshly pressed linens — embroidered table cloths in the bottom drawers; top shelves for color coordinated bed sheets, ivory white, pastel pink and cerulean blue. Under each set, a soap bar, a couple of mothballs. I climb in, and find that I fit on the bottom shelf over the drawers, below the first shelf. I pull the doors closed and hold my breath, waiting for my mother to realize that I am not in the room anymore. The snugness. The warmth of the newly pressed sheets. The sliver of sun that slips through the crack between the doors. I hear my mother’s footsteps, my name called mindlessly, once — then, already, I’m in trouble.

At seven, I am small enough to fit between the curtain and the glass sliding doors that give out to the living room balcony. I sit quietly with my knees tucked to my chest, my chin on my knees, my forehead pressed against the cold glass. I wait to be missed. My eyes roam the view outside, the sunny afternoon after school, the pristine walls of the building across, identical to ours inside the gated condo complex. A half block away, just over the brick wall perimeter and the gated garage ramp, there’s an abandoned warehouse and a sooty low-rise tenement where I am warned never to go play. On a third-floor balcony, girls practice dance steps to the recorded music of a variety show. They take turns speaking into a mop handle, pretend-interviewing one another. Across the block, a world away, they spot me. They speak to one another in agitated whispers but when they turn to me, their voices are clear, their words unmistakable.

“Tu, stronza! Cagona. Puttana.” They say I’m spying. They want me to go away.

They can use words I’m not allowed to think. They shout for minutes at a time across the miles and worlds that separate us, and no mother yanks those balcony doors open to slap their mouths for embarrassing a “good family” before the whole neighborhood. I pretend not to hear or see them. I’m so far away. How could they be talking to me?

“Stronza! Fai finta? Ti vediamo benissimo, sai?”

I’m a fly trapped behind glass. They are free, foul-mouthed anger in the sun. I am a princess in braces and orthopedic shoes. They are striking, unionized Cinderellas clubbing the rich stepsister with cusses.

I’ll cut your face, bitch. Sneaky, sneaky snake. We said, go away. Go away. Go away.

Inside the apartment, the melodious chant of my name in my mother’s throat turns tragic against the rhythm of the girls’ mounting threats.

Then finally: “There you are. Napping? There? I was looking for you, calling you, didn’t you hear me?” She doesn’t seem to hear the ruckus outside, the two girls, or the tenement woman one floor below who yells at them, wanting to know what it’s all about.

This need and talent to disappear, to be undetected, turns into something else over the years, a curse, a virus resistant to the space-time continuum that embeds itself in my DNA.

I’m twenty in Madrid. The boys, uninvited, sit themselves at our table. They say “You girls” to describe how intrigued they are by the Italian accent behind my English, but they look only at busty, red-headed Dina, my American roommate. My jokes, when acknowledged, provoke chuckles they direct only at her.

New York. Twenty-three. I demonstrate how to backdoor into the DOS programming language to the new hire, an Ivy League blond my boss torments with predictable jokes. I answer her questions, guide her steps, repeat the same simple analogy to explain the process. “Wait, wait,” she turns to a colleague who just stepped into our work space. “You know what this is like?” My analogy in the new girl’s mouth becomes her original insight.

On a monthly catch-up phone call with my sister in Rome, I hear repeated to me the same details of the bullying episode from my childhood I shared with her a month ago. My sister recasts herself as the victim, denies it when I offer evidence that it couldn’t be her — yes, we both had short hair, but I had the braces, the orthopedic shoes. I was maschio con la gonna, boy in a skirt.

In a lengthy email exchange, I offer teaching advice to a former student. It appears weeks later on her social media post. “I can’t remember when I started thinking like this,” her post concludes. “It must have been a natural shift in perception that occurred organically, with experience.”

Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s that subversive desire entwined with my father’s deep voice that threatens a spanking; it’s the tenement girls calling me out.

I stumble on a respected author’s editorial about their decision to leave academia. Bitter, disillusioned, the author rants against students — lazy, unprepared, entitled. I think of the saying, those who can’t, teach, and reverse it, those who teach, can. How convenient to expect only talented, dedicated students, I write on my blog. Teaching is difficult because every challenge and every student deserves a teacher equipped to help. For the first time, thousands of hits. The spike in my blog’s analytics chart reminds me of a lie in a polygraph.

There I am, the child at the center of a circle of clamoring adults.

I read a message from a subscriber. “Go to the author’s website. There’s a response. Have you read it? Are you going to reply?”

The jolt of surprise, the embarrassing shout in the empty room.

“No. I said my piece, already.”

I shut down my blog. Not like this, I tell myself.

I don’t actually remember how many hits I got and when I shut down the blog. I remember that it was a lot of hits coming in thickly and I got scared and I shut the blog down.

I’m asleep when someone calls my name, a voice almost familiar, urgent in the way of a schoolteacher calling me out for getting distracted. The voice startles me out of the dream, freeing me from the conjured realm of the sleeping mind. I open my eyes to silence. I tune my ears to an empty darkness.

From the writer

:: Account ::

When I first started writing “Seek and Hide,” I was thinking about family mythos. It’s curious how the lore of who you are according to the stories told about you by family members starts to take over whatever other explanation you may have about a particular episode or event. It was just a starting point for the exploration of certain contradictory impulses that end up in toxic self-sabotage, and of the stories we tell to ourselves and others about who we are. I turn to creative writing when I sense connections that are not entirely logical or transparent, using narrative structures that resemble more closely the way our subconscious processes organize and associate memories.

Many women, especially after they reach a certain age, are “invisible” in society. Like many women, I’ve had my share of instances where I felt like a ghost, speaking up at meetings without being acknowledged, for instance, only to have a male colleague repeat what I said and receive praise for it. But in the writing process I made the deliberate choice to escalate to moments of invisibility in my life that are not necessarily attributable to the unconscious biases women normally experience. My sister recasting herself as the victim in the bullying episode from my childhood, for instance, was very disturbing to me. I felt as though even the ugly parts of my life were for sale on a market stand to be auctioned at a good price. I asked myself just how much of our interior life, our memories, our imagination, and everything we think defines us is truly our own.

I sensed a connection, albeit not an obvious one, between the isolation, invisibility, and inconsequentiality that I’ve often felt in my adult life with my inexplicable impulse to hide, to not be seen, and to put up barriers that would prevent others from understanding my thought-processes when I was a child.

The recurring dream in the first image of the piece is actually one of my earliest memories. I read a lot about cognitive science. The human brain is a story-telling machine. The memories that we choose to rescue out of the billions of events, dreams, conversations, and other bits of impressions in our lives that we will otherwise never recollect connects to the story that the brain wants to tell about who we are, so I pay attention. Though I did not consciously set out to have the sleep-paralysis become the controlling metaphor for the piece, it was inevitable that it would circle back at the end, unconscious as that process was.

The first time that something I wrote went viral, I froze, even if it was only a blog post. I’m a writer. Writers write to be read, but I cannot enumerate how many times I’ve sabotaged my own best efforts. I cannot explain that fear in logical terms. I can only illustrate it by juxtaposing other experiences that, though dissimilar, nonetheless share deep subconscious connections. Thus, the onerous effort of trying to speak my name, and the fading echo in the empty room.

Laura Valeri was born in Piombino, Italy and moved to the United States at age twelve. She is the author of two short story collections and a story cycle, and most recently, a book of linked essays titled After Life as a Human (Rain Chain Press, 2020) a Georgia Author of the Year nomination in memoir. Laura Valeri’s fiction, essays, and translations appear most recently in Griffel, (mac)ro(mic), Hunger Mountain, Litro, and others. Laura Valeri is the managing editor of Wraparound South, a journal of Southern literature. She teaches creative writing in the undergraduate program at Georgia Southern University.

Twenty-Five Years of Marriage

Nonfiction / Heather Bartos

:: Twenty-Five Years of Marriage ::

We first saw the movie “Two for the Road” when we were engaged. Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney show the twists and turns of twelve years of marriage.

They were beginners, but we didn’t know that then.

Our marriage begins on a seventy-degree Saturday under a California sycamore at high noon. Your uncle is five minutes late and misses it. The cake comes from Safeway. We drive off with a set of handcuffs dangling from the rearview mirror. Strangers in Las Vegas see the “Just Married” sign and scream, “Losers!” We watch bad public access TV after a freak snowstorm buries the first floor of our motel in Flagstaff, Arizona. I hold my ring up to the light, watch it wink and sparkle, an inside joke, a public promise, the hope of a solid-gold guarantee.

Our first apartment, one-bedroom, mysterious stains on the carpet. The hide-a-bed couch abandoned by previous tenants and too heavy to move. Particle board bookshelves hold novels like the ones I dream of writing someday. The kitchen window where I can watch another woman washing dishes each night as I wash ours. The white Toyota with the fried alternator, where we can’t turn it off at the grocery store since it may not re-start. Two and a half years of cookies for the kids down the way, magnolias blooming by the mailbox. The black and white cat catches a rat right in front of the dumpster and you shout, “Just like National Geographic!”

Blink and you’ll miss it.

Two years of graduate school. Confronting the landlord with the fact that it is illegal to rent a place without a source of heat. No bathroom sink, shower leaking into the yard. A blue Toyota with a transmission leak. Wal-Mart, beer, pizza and maple scones. The six‑a.m. phone call that my father has died, and the weekend spent packing his life into milk crates. Small town baseball, student discounts, escaping 110-degree heat watching bad action movies.

Our first apartment in Oregon, two whole bedrooms. At night racoons swim and frolic in the pool. Saturday lunch at the farmer’s market, sausage and sauerkraut. The August night that the Toyota died at a rest area off Highway 5. Starting our first real jobs with two-hour bus commutes, right after 9–11. Discovering that someone had broken into the car and left behind string cheese wrappers and a screwdriver. Buying a TV, buying a couch, then buying a two-bedroom ranch house with someone else’s odds and ends stashed in the crawl space. That red Mercury Topaz that drops its muffler right in front of the house. Another trip to the used car place.

Blink and you’ll miss it.

Friends have babies.

We don’t.

We still don’t.

The July afternoon when we get the call that our baby girl is coming home. The mad scramble for a stroller, for a dresser, for a stuffed kangaroo with a little kangaroo nestled in its pouch.

She slept through the first night.

And none of the ones after that.

Little outfits, twenty-four months, 2T, 4T, 6T, size 6X. Up and down, back and forth. Alphabet by eighteen months, reading before age three, blurred flash in motion. Our pink-despising, ninja-worshipping, Imagine Dragons-loving little lightning bolt.

Blink and you’ll miss her.

Age nine at Legoland, eating ice cream for breakfast and finding treasures hidden in the hotel room.

Age eleven, upside down in the front seat of the car, processing the facts of life, shouting, “Mom! Does this mean my kindergarten teacher has had sex?”

Blink and you’ll miss her.

Domestic wear and tear, mountains of dishes and laundry, tired, naps during football on TV.

For the parents.

Never for the child.

Decorating for Halloween in August, trips to the beach, fish tacos, salt on our lips and sand in our shoes. Seals catching fish in their paws. Shells at our ears, listening for the pulse and roar of the sea. Christmas lights and brownies on your birthday, store-bought cake on hers, strawberries and whipped cream on mine, with the April twilight lingering like a beloved guest.

Blink and you’ll miss it.

The neighbors’ children grow tall and sturdy like sunflowers. I over pay them for babysitting and mowing the lawn because we can. Putting down roots, becoming gnarled like the oaks and willow we planted. I look at our neighbors in their eighties, and I see the future. The veins on my hands stand out, recalling they belong to the earth.

The afternoon when someone has broken into your car, stolen from your stash of coupons. You continue to leave the door unlocked since they must need them more than we do.

Two funerals. And then silence.

Blinking back tears.

Three surgeries. Three recoveries, complete with Vicodin and vanilla ice cream.

The approach of age, reading glasses, heel lifts, vitamins and little bottles of bitter pills. Things that ache because we did stupid things when we were younger. Things that ache because we do stupid things now.

A pandemic that forces us inside and apart, that smothers our smiles, constraints and constricts and confines. It won’t wave the white flag. It won’t surrender.

First we contort, then we explore what we contain. We dig in and grow things. I teach on Zoom. The kids show me their pets, their Lego creations, their lives.

We won’t wave the white flag or surrender either. Life is different now. Life ought to know better by now. We give, but we don’t give in. Deeper instead of wider, less of but not less than.

Just like the TV show “Survivor.” We will outlast, outwit, outplay you. We were building immunity before you were born or thought of. Catch us if you can.

We watch March Madness and eat grilled chicken sandwiches and Jo Jos from Big’s Chicken, drench them in Yukon Gold Sauce, home-baked, mayo-saturated satisfaction, defiant in our joy.

Happy anniversary. Again.

Blink and you’ll miss it all.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This short essay was inspired by the 1966 movie “Two for The Road,” with Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn. The movie follows a young couple through their initial meeting, as newlyweds, as new parents, and finally as embittered middle-aged adults trying to remember what they saw in each other. The filmmaking is ingenious in the sense that memories overlap and at times, the characters pass their younger selves on the screen. My essay starts on the day of the wedding and moves forward through time. Marriages, or any long-term partnerships, go through phases related to the stages of life the individual partners are experiencing. This essay shows the ephemeral, quicksilver nature of the passage of time, as well as how moments, both mundane and extraordinary, come together to form something larger that their individual fragments.

Heather Bartos writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Fatal Flaw, Stoneboat Literary Journal, HerStry, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction has appeared in The Dillydoun Review, The Closed Eye Open, Tangled Locks Journal, and in other publications, and also won first place in the Baltimore Review 2022 Micro Lit Contest. Her short stories have appeared in Ponder Review, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere.

Before & After

Nonfiction / Brianna Pike

:: Before & After ::

Before & After PDF

From the writer

:: Account ::

Up until two years ago, I was writing primarily poetry as it’s been my genre of choice since I finished my MFA in 2009. However, in the fall of 2018 I wrote a lyric essay about the birth of my son and my struggle as a new mother, and I discovered this form opened me up to a whole new way of writing. I am very interested in the idea of grief, and much of my writing, poetry and nonfiction, examines grief in all its different forms. Grief was the driving force behind this essay and has been the focus of several other lyric essays I’ve written in the past year. The form of the essay comes from showing the contrast between the “before” and “after” of grief and how it transforms spaces that one used to love and find comfort in places that are, sometimes, unrecognizable. I also see it as a kind of tour for the audience through a place that was so important to me and to show how grief permeates so many different facets of our lives. The two columns also call back to stanzas and allow a blend, structurally, between poetry and creative nonfiction.

Brianna Pike is a professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. Her poems and essays have appeared in Parentheses, Fish Barrel Review, Writer’s Resist Juxtaprose, Thimble, & After Happy Hour Review. She currently serves as an editorial assistant for the Indianapolis Review and lives in Indy with her husband & son. She blogs at https://briannajaepike.wordpress.com/. Find her on Instagram @Bri33081.

Traveling the Red Road: The Life of a Menstruant

Nonfiction / Rachel Neve-Midbar

:: Traveling the Red Road: The Life of a Menstruant ::

I am bleeding the day he disappears.

A wave of cramps hits me, making me nauseous. This body, my body—my body that bleeds—how has it led me to this constricted place?

~Ψ~

“Thy soule foule beast is like a menstrual cloath,
Polluted with unpardonable sinners.”

—Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter

~Ψ~

“Blood is magic
Blood is holy
And wholly riveting of our attention.”

—Judy Grahn, “All Blood is Menstrual Blood”

~Ψ~

All the kids on Brookside Circle play together. I am perhaps four years old. A. and I are kneeling at the edge of the road, drawing with chalk on the concrete. A. tells me her mother pees blood. “No,” I tell her, “Mommies don’t pee blood.” She offers to show me and takes me into her house at the end of the block. We remove our shoes in the front hall and walk up the stairs. A. enters her mother’s bathroom first and then motions me to join her. We look together into the bowl of a beige toilet where a bit of paper stained with the smallest whiff of blood floats in the water. “Will she die?” I ask.

~Ψ~

“the flowers,” “the courses,” “the terms,” “the misery,” “monthly disease,” “the time of her wonted grief,” “excrement,” “those evacuations of the weaker sex,” “the moon,” “weeping womb,” “package of troubles,” “jam & bread,” “on the rag,” “too wet to plow,” “a snatch box decorated with red roses,” “can’t go swimming,” “tide’s in,” “tide’s out,” “flying baker” (a Navy signal meaning “keep off”), “riding the red tide,” “the red flag is up”

—Houppert, The Curse

~Ψ~

When my sister gets her first period, she is perfection, light. In the guest bathroom: right across from the TV-room where my mother is always splayed in her orange easy chair. Just the right age for a good girl: thirteen and a half. “Mommy, Mommy,” she calls, “I got my period.” How my mother touches her, “Honey I’m so proud,” smiles, takes her into her room to get belt and pad. Our father is equally proud as he has her dress in Danskin, put up her hair. He then spends hours photographing her, over and over: profile, chin up, chin down. “Now take down your hair.”

~Ψ~

“The word ‘taboo’ itself even comes from a Polynesian word that both means ‘sacred’ and ‘menstruation’”

—Why Are Periods Still a Taboo in 2018?

~Ψ~

I know it’s the time for bad girls when mine comes just two months later. Only twelve, the age for sluts, for trash, for other dirty things. In the upstairs kid’s bathroom.

Maybe I wasn’t born for joy because just before I discover the red stain I am joyful at a sixth-grade square dance. Do-si-do. Just once allowing myself to fly around the gym not worrying how I look. And then this. “Don’t forget,” my body whispers, “don’t forget what you are.”

So, I tell no one, stuff my underwear full of toilet paper, go on as usual, a secret between my legs.

~Ψ~

“The duplicity of blood as both the source of life and the cause of corruption was concentrated most in medieval and early modern perceptions of menstrual blood. Despite the menstruating body’s function as an exemplary model for nature’s expulsive and self-regulating power, menstrual blood itself carried the period’s anxieties about woman’s moral duplicity and biological weakness. Menstrual blood and menstruating woman were thought to be corrupting: they could bring madness, disease, and death to those who touched or looked upon them….”

—Johnson, Decamp, Blood Matters

~Ψ~

I’m not really sure what happens to you if you swim while menstruating. Probably it’s lethal if my mother’s reaction is any indication. So, because of a swim invitation, I finally tell my secret.

I arrange myself in the guest bathroom, call, “Mommy, Mommy.” She does ask me what the bloody wad of school paper towel is in the toilet. “Nothing,” I mumble and push the flusher. Then, yes, the belt. Yes, menstrual pad that covers me from naval to backbone: though those don’t last too long. It’s 1975. Tampons will be possible. Swimming too. Eventually even for my mother.

But, no. No Danskin. No Leica lens. Now in the moments my father gets close enough to me he lifts my arm and yanks on the new hairs growing there. And laughs. If I fight him off, he takes a pinch of newly budded breast. And laughs harder.

~Ψ~

“I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse’s for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.”

—Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

~Ψ~

The summer after my second year at Sarah Lawrence I meet D. and start to keep kosher and Shabbat. The paperwork is complete for my junior year abroad, and sometime that summer I will leave for Israel. I tell myself I am looking for freedom inside a system of law, but really I am looking to run as fast as I can into some other life.

I follow D.’s family to a cottage on a lake in Pennsylvania. My otherness is always on display. They don’t like the way I pronounce “Torah.” They don’t like my bare feet, and when I walk around the house in socks they say I dress like a mourner. His little sister asks if I am a shiksa.

When I menstruate I take a tampon from the box hidden in my closet. I carefully wrap what is used in toilet paper, set it in the basket. One morning his mother takes me by the arm and pulls me into the bathroom. She shows me a pile of old newspaper inside the bathroom cabinet. She is 5’10,” European; upright and proper, her girdle always in place, even under her bathing suit. In her accented English she tells me I must wrap my used tampons in newspaper. No one can know. “No one needs to see that.” She is almost spitting.

~Ψ~

OED. taboo | tabu, adj. and n.
Etymology: < Tongan ˈtabu
The putting of a person or thing under prohibition or interdict.

~Ψ~

“Women’s regular bleeding engenders phantoms.”

—Paracelsus

~Ψ~

D. later follows me to Israel, asks me to marry him. I want to say, “Wait.” I want to say, “I don’t know who I am.” But I see how much he needs me.

I am 21 years old.

~Ψ~

Leviticus 15:19 states: “A woman who has a flow of blood in her body shall be a ‘niddah’ for seven days, and all who touch her shall be ritually impure until sundown.”

Leviticus 18:19 states: “A woman in the ritually impure state of niddah, you shall not approach for sexual relations.”

The first verse refers to the laws of ritual impurity (tumah v’taharah), most of which are no longer applicable today.

The second verse, however, appears in the list of the most severely forbidden sexual relationships, such as adultery and incest, which remain fully relevant to this day.

“A woman ceases to be niddah—and returns to a state of ritual purity (taharah)—by confirming that bleeding has ceased (hefsek taharah), counting seven blood-free days (shivah neki’im), and immersing in a proper mikveh.”

—The Niddah Status

~Ψ~

C. is my kallah teacher. She has a face creased to smile and she smiles a lot. She is also a very stringent woman, careful in her practice, and she passes that carefulness on to me. In the weeks leading up to my wedding I visit her twice a week. She teaches me how to keep the laws of family purity: how to understand the workings of my body, to come close to my rhythms and join together with them, to watch for stains, to examine, to check, to prepare and finally, to immerse my body deep in living water and return each time to myself.

~Ψ~

The night before my wedding, I walk to the mikveh with my mother and C. I take my time preparing. I have never before given myself this permission—this concentration. What can I tell you about this carefulness, attention to myself with no one to witness, no one to watch, no one to ridicule? No one looking to see how deep and long I bow during shmona-esrei, no one to taste a good meal I’ve prepared so I can see the pleasure in their eyes. Here in the mikveh bathroom there is only me. Does God care if I comb my eyebrows? I have no idea. I only know that in the warm living water His hands reach around me, cradle me as I loosen my fingers and half open my eyes so the water can touch every part of me at once. I bow my head, fold my hands across my breasts, “Blessed are you, God. Blessed.”

~Ψ~

My mother asks me after if I feel different. “Yes,” I answer and she looks surprised. We don’t say anything else.

~Ψ~

The next morning I rise early. I go to the apartment in Jerusalem that D. and I have rented to make up our bed. I am fasting and it is summer, so I take a taxi to the Kotel where I pray for happiness, for peace. Yes, perhaps that would be enough.

It would be enough to hang some dresses in a closet. To open that closet in the morning and choose what to wear. Finally to just be home.

After a long Viduy at the Kotel, I make my way west and south to the Bayit Vegan neighborhood, to the Holyland Hotel. There I will stand under the chuppah.

~Ψ~

“The Halakha details strict rules governing every aspect of the daily lives of Jews, including the sexual lives of married couples. Jewish law expressly forbids any physical contact between spouses during the days of menstruation and for a week thereafter. According to stipulated ritual, an Orthodox Jewish wife is responsible for ensuring that she is no longer exhibiting vaginal bleeding by swabbing herself carefully with a linen cloth for each of the seven days following the overt cessation of the menstrual flow. The seven clean days after menstruation culminate with the wife’s obligation to immerse that night in the Mikvah, the ritual bath. It is only at the end of the Niddah interval, after the ritual bath, that spouses are permitted to physically touch one another. This ‘‘two weeks on/two weeks off’’ pattern of contact characterizes marital life until menopause, with two notable time frame exceptions: pregnancy and nursing (until postpartum menstruation resumes), when uninterrupted contact is permitted. These ‘Laws of Family Purity’ represent an integral aspect of identity as an Orthodox Jew.”

—Guterman, Archives of Sexual Behavior

~Ψ~

The first mikveh night about a month after we are married, I come home to find fresh sheets on the bed, a spaghetti meal, a beautiful note of love and hope for our future family. D. is wearing my short, black-silk kimono. It makes his green-gray eyes shine. Wow, I think as I fall into his arms, I could get used to this marriage thing.

That is the first and last time. I never see this version of him again.

~Ψ~

I remember the stillness, the stillness of thunder left behind, the stillness of knees held tight together, breath exhaled once, twice.

Over time, each second, sweat on my palms. Broken records stored in a closet, their shards gleam in the darkness, each groove a year of life. Moments on the floor, surrounded by books written in a language no one even reads anymore.

Don’t move or you’ll upset something. Wait. Don’t speak. Someone might think well of you. Hold your breath and time will stop, a sun held between my two palms, no bigger than the space between my fingers.

There is always that stillness. Quiet quakes in my chest, drips down my back. A chair flies across the room, hits me right on the temple. For some reason I live. Make-up covers the bruise, covers everything. He hands me a glass of something dark to drink. It changes from purple to black, a sun dropping to the bottom of an ocean.

Was it me who pushed back the entire wall of my house to become the doll inside?

~Ψ~

From the diary of Jane Sharp in 1671:

“sometimes flow too soon, sometimes too late, they are too many or too few, or are quite stopt that they flow not at all. Sometimes they fall by drops, and again sometimes they overflow; sometimes they cause pain, sometimes they are voided not by the womb but some other way; sometimes strange things are sent forth by the womb.”

—Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England

~Ψ~

Twice I have hemorrhaged, left bathrooms looking like murder scenes.

~Ψ~

I will tell you about the second time first. It’s the easier story. It’s an after birth story, from the time right after my youngest son was born. My hormones mis-calibrating, my uterus six weeks after the C‑section, just starting to return to itself, suddenly filling with blood balloons like a washing machine gyrating too much soap.

In my paper gown in the examination room the Dr. tells me to take off my underwear, sit on the chair that becomes a bed with stirrups. How can I undress when I am gushing blood like a faucet? When I glance down, he says with so much kindness, “Don’t worry. I have seen everything.”

Later when I walk into the operating room for the D&C, the Dr. is waiting for me, capped and gowned all in white, his hands clasped in front of himself, swaying slightly as if in prayer, he looks like a groom, completely kittled, waiting for me under the chuppah. What would my life be like if I had married instead this kind man?

~Ψ~

“we need a god who bleeds now 
a god whose wounds are not 
some small male vengeance”

—Ntozake Shange, “We Need a God who Bleeds Now”

~Ψ~

“red light,” “red letter day,” “my redheaded friend,” “cherry in the sherry,” “the red king,” “traveling the red road,” “the red sea’s out,” “the reds are in,” “bloody mary,” “the chick is a communist,” “white cylinder week,” “mother nature’s gift,” “it’s raining down south,”

—Houppert, The Curse

~Ψ~

The first time I hemorrhage I am in my mother-in-law’s house. I am ten weeks pregnant. My arms are already full with a two year old and a ten month old. I carry them up and down the steep stairs to the attic where we sleep. Something hurts. I am exhausted. I can’t do anything but sit all day, letting the girls play at my feet. Something is wrong. Something is wrong with this pregnancy. A pull. It hurts.

Finally it tears. Something tears inside my abdomen. The pain is excruciating. I set the girls down, run to the bathroom. There is blood everywhere. I clean up as best I can and go downstairs to tell my mother-in-law that I think I am having a miscarriage.

She looks at her watch, tells me we can’t go to the hospital for a few more hours, until her husband comes home to watch my twelve-year-old sister-in-law. I feed my girls dinner, get them tucked in.

On the drive into Manhattan several hours later she tells me “it’s all for the best.” But I know she is wrong. I am twenty-four years old, mother of two, and her son blames me for every bad thing that happens to us. Everything. Both big and small: when he loses his driver’s license from too many tickets. When he fights with someone in shul. From our money problems to his own desire for other women, everything is my fault. I can’t imagine what he will do to me if I lose this pregnancy.

~Ψ~

taboo: adj. (syn.) illegal, restricted, unmentionable, unacceptable

~Ψ~

The baby isn’t dead, though I won’t find this out until the next day. At NYU Medical, the bed they give me is broken, the floor is covered with blood. Not mine. I am no longer bleeding.

The Dr. who examines me tells me my cervix is still closed. Matter-of-factly she explains this means: 1. that the fetus was already expelled and my cervix then closed right back up after her like a slammed door. Or 2. that I have yet to expel the little life and that she will find her way out in the next few days. Or 3. that I am still pregnant. “So why all the blood then?” I ask. She shrugs.

No blood test, no ultrasound, I ride back to Queens, absently listening to my mother-in-law talk about the man in the bed next to mine who had slashed his foot on a can top when he stepped on his kitchen garbage. Forever after, as long as I will know her, she will very carefully insert the top back into the empty can before throwing it away. She will tell anyone who is willing to listen that you can’t be too careful with the torn top of a can.

The next day I drink a half a gallon of water and travel alone back into Manhattan for an ultrasound to see my daughter. No, she is not lying quietly inside me. She is not sucking her little thumb. On the screen my daughter is upright and break-dancing just above a placental tear.

~Ψ~

“Many medieval Jewish mystics saw menstruation differently. According to a section of the Zohar, the most popular work of medieval Kabbalah, the menstruant’s title of niddah tells us that ‘God flees from her.’ God abandons menstruants because God cannot suffer impurity. The niddah repels the forces of the holy, and her spiritual vacuum is immediately filled by the forces of evil and impurity.”

—Zohar, 3:226a (RM)

~Ψ~

There is always something we woman can’t do, somewhere we can’t go, something we can’t touch because we menstruate. We are not allowed to touch the Torah, even when it’s “dressed,” meaning there is a boundary between the holy vellum and our tainted fingers. We cannot dance with the holy scroll on the holiday of Simchat Torah, even if we have gone to the mikveh and are as ritually clean as our husbands. Why? Because then “people will see” who is in niddah among the women and who is not and that is “immodest.”

My husband loves the idea of my immodesty and whenever he wants to ridicule me and set me in my place he brings it up. My immodest dress, my immodest speech, my immodest behavior. When I wear sandals that “show my toes” or a dress in a shade of red, when I stick my tongue out at him in the street, when I use the word “putz” at a family party—any of these and many more are reasons to punish me.

He travels often, leaving us alone for weeks at a time. He never needs to be home for any reason because I am always there. My menstruation gives my husband complete control over me, it renders me weak, dirty, different. This is the tool of his power.

~Ψ~

And when I am “immodest”? Yes, there are punishments. Sometimes it is the set of his jaw, a cold stare. Sometimes it is a chilly silence that can last for days or weeks. It might be the havdalah wine thrown in my face in front of the children when I sing too loudly or my credit cards cut to pieces if I buy something without permission. Or it might be a backhand to the face or being thrown to the basement floor, his hands around my neck if I smile too warmly with the dishwasher repairman.

~Ψ~

How often does he show me his back on mikveh nights? After all the effort of bathing and the dressing, the undressing, the dunking, the dressing once again only to find him already asleep, turned away from me.

~Ψ~

“Come you spirits  
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, 
And fill me from crown to the toe, top-full 
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood, 
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, 
That no compunctious visitings of nature 
Shake my fell purpose, not keep peace between 
Th’effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts, 
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers”

—Shakespeare, Macbeth, (1.5.41–49)

~Ψ~

“Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.”

—Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection

~Ψ~

I just want him to stop being so angry. I pray for this every week when I light my Shabbat candles and again when I burn a small piece of challah dough. In the mikveh I dunk seven times instead of the regular three and pray finally, finally, for peace.

~Ψ~

And then comes the day he disappears. He does call—once. I ask him where he is, but he won’t tell me. Instead he telephones our daughters, tells them he is in Hawaii.

Usually he telephones constantly, but he doesn’t call again. I wait. Every day. I am ice inside, walking ice as I pack the kids’ lunches, as I fold laundry, as I take care of the company banking, watch the trading accounts. I know he can’t be alone; he always needs someone to talk to.

But he doesn’t call. Not Tuesday, not Thursday. Not before Shabbat to wish his children a good week.

My clean days come and I don’t check; my mikveh night arrives and I don’t go. When he finally comes home I am still in niddah. I tell him this when he reaches his arm out to bring me close and says, “Babe, come to bed.”

Later that day he reveals that he wasn’t in Hawaii alone, that he is in love with someone else, has been for the past eighteen months. It turns out she is the consultant he hired to help us locate gold mine deals in Nevada. It turns out there are no deals in Nevada. It turns out I have been paying $5,000 a month, about $40,000 total of company money, to his mistress, and that it was me who put through and signed the wire transfer orders.

I ask him to leave.

~Ψ~

“we need a god who bleeds
spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet
thick & warm like the breath of her”

—Ntozake Shange, “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now”

~Ψ~

In the dream we are as we are now, aged, layered, yet our passion grows as it always did, our appetite for each other in my cries that still echo thirty years later down from the long corridor of a college dorm, our desire takes root, intact and as you reach your hand between the parted branches of my legs there flows a Niagara of blood—the blood that so repelled you shoots forth, an artery opened, pushed out of me with each heartbeat, a river that moves the water-wheel that circles between the secrets of life and death, and remains in that pungent place between, that place I am in now where my breasts hang, two tears upon my chest and my face is an abandoned land.

~Ψ~

I am menstruating the day we go to the Rabbinut for the ghett. And I am acutely aware of it as the three rabbis have me stand sideways in front of their dais and hold my hands up to receive the folded vellum document. “Higher,” they say, “higher.” I stretch my hands over my head. I can feel their eyes moving up and down my body.

~Ψ~

OED: taˈbooness n. the state or condition of being taboo.

1974 Verbatim I. i. 4/1 The tabooness of fuck.

~Ψ~

Then come the years alone. My menstruation starts to change, my periods getting longer, stronger, lasting for weeks with days when I can’t leave the house because I need to change my pad/tampon combo every hour.

~Ψ~

The moon rises full, overwhelming the dark sky and all of us on the deck of this boat in Yafo port tonight. We are all women, praying and meditating together. M., sitting next to me, tells me her story: how she left her parents’ religious home for college and never went back. How after graduation she got a job on the sea and, for the next twenty years moved from job to job, from port to port, from ocean to ocean. “I have never slept with a man who wouldn’t go down on me when I had my period,” she tells me.

Incredulous, I ask, “Not one?”

~Ψ~

My girls are getting older. They are young women. They reject the pill; spend long weeks hiking in the desert, working on kibbutz, traveling the world with backpacks. They ask me to order them menstrual cups from Amazon. Small rubber bowls to be inserted inside: healthier and better for the environment. They tell me their blood will be used to water some organic garden. I wonder, can they taste themselves in each tomato bite?

~Ψ~

I buy a pair of hiking boots, look at myself in the mirror. There are no lines on my face.

~Ψ~

I google “Tel Aviv clubs for the older set”; I google “Best online dating sites in Israel.” A catalogue of faces. What many of these guys are into, I learn, is mutual masturbation via Skype. So many of them are wearing baseball caps and shades—incognito and holding their computers.

One guy keeps nudging me to meet in person. His face stands out, sculpted and strong. F. writes in English, already a relief.

I haven’t dated anyone except my husband since I was nineteen. I slip into a filmy red blouse, spread Jo Malone Lime Blossom along my neck and wrists and head to Tel Aviv.

~Ψ~

I have no idea where I am—a dark room, a nightlight switching from red to blue to the backbeat of what sounds like old disco. He touches me, kisses me, undresses me. His arms are long, reach around me. The sandpaper of his hands moves over every part of my body. My eyes adjust and I see him, long lines of satin skin, taut and strong. And his cock. Thick, so heavy it doesn’t stand away from his body, beautifully proportioned. He is talking to me. Whispering that he doesn’t do well with condoms, that he will lose his erection. I am on my back on his bed; he is standing over me. I think, “I want this.” I want this more than I have wanted anything in my life. Acronyms like STDs and AIDS flit through my mind. Six children, all mine. Tomorrow. I will deal with the consequences tomorrow. Tonight I just want the gift on this bare cock in me. “Yes,” I say, and as he slips inside, a forearm under each of my knees, he carries me through a door and into the life of my own desire.

~Ψ~

It’s like this every time we see each other. Electric. No conversation, very little sleep. I would happily see F. every night, but he tells me he “has church.” Monday night church, Thursday night church. Lots of church. Really?

We average twice a week and I become a stretched cord of desire. I walk around the house waiting for him to call and when he does, I fly to the car, speed all the way to his lips, his hands, his penis. That beautiful cock that soon becomes a divining rod to my uncertain menstruation. Our sex calls my body to bleed. More time apart. But not like D. Not Orthodox apart. No, F. will still get his: in my hands, my mouth, against my ass.

~Ψ~

“I fell off the roof,” “I’ve got my flowers,” “I’ve got my friend,” “I’ve got the grannies,” “lady in the red dress,” “Grandma’s here,” “Aunt Rosa is coming from America,” My redheaded Aunt from Red Bank.”

—Houppert, The Curse

~Ψ~

Finally the day comes when he calls and, as I get ready for a shower, I see a small stain of blood in my panties. And I’m done. Done. It is, after all, the smallest stain and what is this? It’s not some God thing. No, it’s a most human thing. My thing. My body. And I am done with letting it stop me.

I tell him nothing—shower and drive to Tel Aviv. We are together for hours in his pitch-dark room, fall asleep in each other’s arms. The next morning I leave very early to get home to my children.

~Ψ~

For the next five weeks I don’t hear from F. He doesn’t call and when I telephone him the phone rings and rings. When he finally invites me to Tel Aviv it’s to show me the stained sheets. Sheets he never threw away, that have sat all this time in the corner of his room. He holds up the cloth and informs me he wants no part of my “bad-lady juju.”

~Ψ~

Ntozake Shange, we need a “God who bleeds.” Is she here?

~Ψ~

“This is my blood.

A little history of the rules, of those who have them and of those who make them.

The menstrual revolution, in any case, is in progress. And it will probably be the first in the world to be both bloody and peaceful.”

—Élise Thiebaut, “The Menstrual Revolution”

~Ψ~

“The name—of it—is ‘Autumn’— 
The hue—of it—is Blood— 
An Artery—upon the Hill— 
A Vein—along the Road— 
 
Great Globules—in the Alleys— 
And Oh, the Shower of Stain— 
When Winds—upset the Basin— 
And spill the Scarlet Rain— 
 
It sprinkles Bonnets—far below— 
It gathers ruddy Pools— 
Then—eddies like a Rose—away— 
Upon Vermilion Wheels—”

—Emily Dickinson (J 656)

~Ψ~

At last a man steps out of the catalogue of faces, a man who sees me, who lets me know that I am seen. This is pleasure of a whole new kind, a deep pleasure. I am handed drinks before I know I am thirsty. Nothing I do or say ever upsets him.

He touches me, massages me, loves me—everywhere: between my toes, the base of my hairline, the place at where my back meets my buttocks, which he calls “nabakoo.” It might mean “dimple” or “space”; he never says. He does tell me, his voice thick with passion, that nothing is more beautiful. He sees me beautiful and this makes me beautiful. His hands are huge, but they never touch me with anything but gentleness. And they never stop touching me. In the street, in shops, everywhere. And, wherever we go, people stop to look at our grey-haired happiness.

~Ψ~

Two weeks after we start dating, I am accepted as a PhD candidate at a university in California and from that time our relationship forms itself around the knowledge that I am leaving. Four days before I am due to fly, my suitcases mostly packed, I begin to stain. I ask him if he has made love to a woman who is bleeding? He tells me he has not. Then he kneels in front of me, takes my hands in his. His face carries years, years of travel, of hardship, of life, but his eyes hold mine. “We are one body,” he says. “When you bleed, I am also bleeding.”

He makes love to me then, holds nothing back, touches me everywhere. If his penis is covered with blood after, he doesn’t burden me with it, just steps away to wash and comes back to bed where he wraps his arms around me, braids his legs with mine into twisted roots.

~Ψ~

“thirty-eight years and you 
never arrived 
splendid in your red dress 
without trouble for me”

—Lucille Clifton, “to my last period”

~Ψ~

“Our bodies shape-shift and writhe”

—Darcey Steinke, Flash Count Diary

~Ψ~

“Nothing can prepare you for this.”

—Mary Reufle, “Pause”

~Ψ~

I am newly arrived in L.A. for graduate school, staying in a North Hollywood McMansion with friends, when the bleeding becomes full. The bed in the guestroom is massively pillowed, the sheets pristine. Luckily I brought a towel from home to tuck under me at night. Despite this, I still wake in the murky light before dawn, a fresh gush slipping from me.

In the bathroom I reach down to remove my tampon and look at the full pad attached to my underwear, the streaks of brown and purple and maroon there, run a finger over this sunset of color. Sometimes, when it was especially bad with D., I would lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the toilet and lay my head down on my knees. The smell of me in those moments, the scent of how life and death could coincide inside me would bring me comfort. Now, seeing a streak of blood caught on my thumb, I touch it to my tongue before wiping it away, taste the salt and rust of me.

Forty-three years of monthly periods. At fifty-five I am facing the change. The first signs of perimenopause have started to creep in, the heat and foggy brain, the exhaustion. But haven’t I always been changing? Or has my monthly flow kept me in rhythm, provided a back-beat to my life? And in this next iteration, who will this new woman, this new being be? Will I know her, recognize her better than I saw myself at 21? Or accept her as I never did that girl of 12, a girl who identified inside a dime sized, rusty stain the representation of every misunderstanding, every mistake, every embarrassment of her young life? And the biggest question: will I ever find it in me to forgive her?

~Ψ~

From the writer

:: Account ::

My journey into this piece began in the first semester of my PhD at the University of Southern California. I took a class in Shakespeare wherein we analyzed each play via one word from the text. In addition, we each needed to choose one word for our own semester research. In an irreverent moment, on the day we needed to announce our personal words, I chose the word “menstruation,” not comprehending in that moment that I was completely changing the direction of my research and my life. It didn’t take long to realize that I had inadvertently put my finger on the very pulse of the most ancient and pervasive way a patriarchal society has abused women. My answer could only be to tell my own story not only as an Orthodox Jewish wife but as a woman in modern society. How do we undo misogyny? We learned from #MeToo to share our stories and find power in solidarity.

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds won the 2018 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and was published by Tebot Bach in January 2020. She is also the author of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014), winner of The Clockwork Prize. Rachel’s work has appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist, and The Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. Her awards include the Crab Orchard Review Richard Peterson Prize, the Passenger Poetry Prize, and nominations for The Pushcart Prize. Rachel is currently editing the AuntFlo2020 Project, an anthology of writing about menstruation, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. More at rachelnevemidbar.com.

Here’s Your Terrifying Cat

Nonfiction / Brenden Layte

:: Here’s Your Terrifying Cat ::

I’m sitting in a rented car in a parking lot, and I’m convinced that my cat is dying. I breathe and try to talk myself down and think I remember there being a word like hypochondriac but for someone worried about something other than themselves. If I take my phone out to look it up, I’ll end up searching his symptoms for ten minutes and forget what I took it out for, so I don’t. Maybe the word I’m looking for is just anxiety.

An abridged list of my recent internet searches: cat fast breathing, cat heavy breathing, cat heavy and fast breathing, cat panting, cat panting for no reason, cat panting no exercise, cat flared nostrils, cat panting and coughing, cat not able to jump, cat heavy fast breathing and panting, cat sleeping in different places, cat trouble getting up, cat smells different.

Maybe it’s not a case of me having whatever the word I’m trying to remember is, or the fact that he is sick, but the reality that he’s not the animal he was a year, or even a few months ago, and had been in one way or another for nine years before that. And between his age and how sickness has a way of aging us even more, there’s a realization that he might never be the animal he was again. I reach over to his carrier on the passenger seat and awkwardly angle my hand through a hole to touch him. He licks my fingers until my hand begins to hurt from the carrier’s plastic and I pull it away.

I fidget in my seat, trying to comfort both myself and the scared animal next to me, and I think maybe I should just try to find that word to distract myself, but then my phone vibrates and it’s a number I don’t know, which I know means it’s the vet. I answer and they’re ready to see him. I get out and go around the car to open the door and grab the pet carrier, then wait awkwardly by the door before putting him down on a gurney when it rolls outside. The carrier was covered in caution tape the last time I left this animal hospital with him four years ago.

I apologize to the vet tech in advance for the chaos they’re going to deal with when they open the carrier, then walk back to the car and start rolling a cigarette. I wonder how far away I’m supposed to go from the entrance to smoke here. Next to the car, I’m about 15 feet from the tents they’ve put out for people to sit under because there’s a pandemic and we can’t wait inside. That doesn’t seem far enough. I know there are rules at human hospitals, and I try to remember what they are.

I start walking and end up at the far end of the parking lot huddled on a small triangle of lawn, smiling at the few people who pass by to use the nearby dog park. Their glances linger and I feel a tinge of embarrassment and the urge to tell them that I smoke like five cigarettes a month and only when I’m really anxious and it’s better than the alternatives. Instead, I look toward the building and think that my being out here instead of inside with the cat is not going to go well for them. Depending on how long things take, it’s probably not going to be great for me either.

The Halloween weekend before the pandemic, my friend leaned toward me at a bar, telling me about the time she was called into an exam room for a real pain in the ass of a cat at the animal hospital she used to work at. Since it was Halloween weekend, a band dutifully wore skeleton costumes and played a Misfits cover behind her. My friend said that when she entered the exam room, she saw a gray and white cat half-covered by a pile of towels in the middle of the floor hissing and attacking anyone that came close. It wasn’t just showing the fearful defense posture that all animals have when they’re scared, but was initiating attacks with the primal anger that creatures save for those they’re sure mean to destroy them. The kind of anger that says, “I’ll destroy you first.” The vet techs already in the room were hiding or pressed into corners. At one point, she said, one of them screamed, “He’s already been tranq’ed three times!” In the commotion, she didn’t recognize him as a cat she’d met many times before. She told me that my cat calmed down after the fourth shot.

When my cat does tricks and gets pieces of food as a reward, he picks each up with his paw and brings it up to his face and sometimes he drops it. If cats could be exasperated, I’d swear he is in those moments, but instead of taking the short cut and just reaching his mouth down, he grabs the food with his paw and brings it up to his mouth again. My cat responds to come, sit, high five, lay down, and roll-over, all of which are about what you’d think except roll-over, which has the embellishment of a protest meow about halfway through. And finally, there’s jump, which involves him jumping through a hoop made from cardboard and duct tape and meowing at the peak of the jump, this time with more pride than protestation. It’s a good thing to show people to prove that he’s actually good when they were just attacked and maybe have blood on their legs because we were outside and they came in without me to use the bathroom.

When I’m getting the cat to do tricks, he often decides that he’s had enough and just stops in the middle of roll-over and lays on his back, tail wagging side-to-side like one of those art deco novelty cat clocks. It’s not that he lays in a stupid position, or at least it’s not just that. It’s that he looks to me and seems to be trying to find a compromise, meowing up impatiently while he’s halfway through this thing that has become part of his social contract. Waiting for me to tell him that it’s okay to be tired or just not feel like it anymore and stop.

Sometimes I joke, or somebody else jokes, about how damaged my cat would be if he were a human and then I feel awful because most of the people I care about are damaged and it’s actually not that funny of a thing to joke about. My cat’s name is Pablo. He’s named after the poet and also a penguin from a cartoon I’ve never seen that a person I don’t talk to anymore watched. I did have a friend who had a gerbil named after the drug kingpin if that’s what you were thinking, though. I don’t talk to him anymore either.

Because of the attacking people and the four tranquilizers needed the last time he was at the animal hospital, it took hours for them to get a diagnosis and tell me that Pablo had a urinary obstruction and needed to be catheterized for a few days. It took less time than that for them to learn that his cage had to be covered with a blanket at all times because otherwise he would slam himself into the sides of it and try to fight his way through the metal to get to anyone that walked by.

When he got home a few days later, the usually vocal cat had laryngitis from hissing and growling and doing the cat version of maniacally screaming the entire time he was in the hospital. His mouth still constantly opened, but nothing came out. He stubbornly kept doing it, either trying to will noise from his battered throat, or maybe he knew that I knew what the noise would have sounded like if it were there, and he was fine with letting me fill in the silence.

Pablo was adopted and brought back a couple times before I ended up with him and when I tell people this, they nod knowingly before realizing what they’re doing and being polite and stopping. When I first saw him, he was just under a year old and playing with another kitten through a glass window at the shelter. The game was him running around the little room he was in, bounding through a cat tree, and stopping hard at the glass and then the kitten, no more than a couple months old, would stumble and wave his paws in the air and then Pablo would rub the glass and start another lap. When they stopped and Pablo laid in the little bed they had in his room, I asked the woman working at the shelter to see him. She opened the door and I reached in and our first physical contact was him grabbing my hand with a paw, bringing it to his face, licking it, and starting to purr. It wasn’t until after this that I saw his paperwork and found out he liked to hide around corners and pounce at people, and sometimes got really upset for no good reason, and also that he really didn’t like guests. By the time I found all that out, it didn’t matter. He was coming home with me.

Maybe it’s because of how he is, at least to people he doesn’t know, but maybe not being good enough for people who are supposed to love you and take care of you can make creatures a little difficult and prone to emotional outbursts. People don’t believe me when I tell them that Pablo often waits for me at the bottom of the stairs to my door when I go out and if I’m gone too long, he cries until my downstairs neighbor sticks his fingers under the door to comfort him and give him food. When I get home, he climbs me and desperately rubs his face into me, sometimes until he drools, and meows until I cradle him so that he can lick me until he gets overwhelmed and cuddles into my arms to doze off, limp other than the vibrations of his purring. Sometimes people don’t get the whole story because they don’t know how we act when we feel safe.

Before he got sick, while we were trapped inside for the pandemic, I’d really gotten to know Pablo’s daily rhythms and needs in a different way than I had before. I knew what would keep his complaints under control before they even came. What each little noise meant: a surprised, soft trill; a two-part meow that falls in the middle before coming back up and filling the room; a purr that seems to push the limits of the happiness a creature can experience. I was familiar with them before, but I began to anticipate his needs and have something resembling two-way communication. I learned what each tail swish and head tilt meant, what sleeping spots were for short- and long-term stays, what toys he liked at what time of day. With this, he began to stay closer for longer periods of time. The love and affection from him used to be aggressive, but often brief. Now, he sought pets and begged to be picked up. Now he came close and cuddled up more often, even going so far as to begin meowing at a certain pillow every night so that I’d lay it next to me for him to sleep on, his paws draped over my arm. At ease; content even.

I’m not in the parking lot much longer after the cigarette before I get a call and find out that they can’t really examine Pablo because he’s attacking everyone, and I have to come back next week and give him some stuff beforehand that will supposedly relax him. The good news is that there were no obvious heart murmurs through the multiple towels they were holding him down with. I guess no obvious heart murmurs is better than obvious even through towels heart murmurs.

Another week of Pablo’s chest heaving, and his body curled up next to the soothing coolness of the toilet or the sink. He has trouble moving or getting up. When he tries to, his front paws strain to get enough of his body up to commit to the act. And when he tries to play or exert himself, his eyes widen before long and he freezes and lays down right where he is, even if it’s not a spot he likes. He used to jump on top of the refrigerator from the floor, now he needs a chair just to occasionally visit me on the counter where I work. When he tries to get into the bathroom sink, a favorite sleeping spot that he’s climbed into a thousand times, he comes up short and has to pull himself up, or he comes up really short, slides down the cabinet, and just lies where he falls. He sleeps all day, his only movement the restlessness of trying to find comfort.

After a week, I get up at 6:00 a.m. and give Pablo his second dose of the medicine that the vet gave me that will supposedly make him easier to deal with, and he does seem more docile than usual. I think about how easy it is for me to give the medicine to him, and then think about how I can clip all of his toenails in a minute or two with him purring the entire time, happy for the closeness and attention. Most people that know him wouldn’t believe these things, but to me they’re just who he is.

I walk to get the Zipcar I rented; it’s early July and it’s the earliest I’ve been outside since the winter. We’ve been in a months-long series of heat waves, sweltering air crashing over and engulfing everything and then giving us just a day or two to wring everything out before crashing down again. This morning is cool. I drive back home and pick Pablo up and drop him off to wait for news all day.

I halfheartedly try to work when I get home. The lack of his presence makes the apartment seem like a different place. Finally, the vet calls. Pablo has asthma and serious hyperthyroidism. It only took three tranquilizers to examine him this time.

I’m back in the parking lot, waiting to pick Pablo up and wrestling with the pros and cons of treatment options. It sounds like he should be okay for a while but might slow down permanently. Despite this, I can’t shake the thoughts about his death. They’ve been there a lot lately, not just these last two visits, but for months now. Part of me thinks it’s because death is such a natural thing to fixate on right now, but it’s more than that. I had cats as a child, but their deaths never occurred to me as a possibility until they actually happened and the mourning set in. When a creature’s wellbeing is in your hands, it’s different. There’s a sense of dread when something goes wrong. A sense that when things change, it’s always for the worse and that it’s your fault and in the best-case scenario, you have to learn to care in a different way, and in the worst, you might not have anything to care about anymore.

But then I remember how Pablo still jumped up on the counter to sleep next to me while I worked from home, even when he was sick. One day he was right up against me, upside down with a paw over his snoring face, content until I made the wrong move and he nipped me and then vaulted over a chair to the floor and darted out of the room. And how one day he strung together a series of this noise he makes that I’d never heard before I heard him make it—a meow that he holds as it gets higher in pitch, then dives back into his throat and right back up again—and it sounded like he was happily serenading me as I got home. Or that he somehow managed to rip off a huge piece of a spider plant that’s five feet off the ground when he could barely move earlier that day.

I also think about the fact that although I’ve been treated as tenderly as he treats me by so few, animal or human, I also know that he’d be damned if he’d let anyone or anything else do anything that made him uncomfortable for even a second without repercussions. One time my friend was too drunk to go home, and I woke up to him being attacked and yelling, “I am a person, you are a cat,” over and over again and either Pablo wasn’t into discussing metaphysics at 6 a.m. or he’d had enough of the strange person on his couch and simply didn’t care and wasn’t going to let a perceived power imbalance stop him from fighting. And I start thinking that attitude probably applies even if the fight is between his will and his body.

Maybe this will be what kills him eventually, and maybe his age is finally catching up to him and it’s not possible to run so hard or so without fear forever. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe having a favorite pillow to settle into next to someone you love instead of running around all night is okay. Maybe slowing down a little is something we earn, not something we lose.

It’s this that I’m thinking as the vet tech approaches me, hands me Pablo’s case, and says, “Here’s your terrifying cat.”

From the writer

:: Account ::

The first notes that would become this piece were written during what we now know were still the early months of the COVID pandemic. Watching the unimaginable suffering of so many, it felt strange to be worrying so much about the health of an animal that, partly through the nature of pets and partly through his particular attitude toward most humans, only really mattered to me. At least in any kind of serious way. The idea that my remaining time with him could be limited, or even ending soon, really shook me. I’ve always had pets and loved a few of them a great deal, but Pablo is the first one I’ve been mature enough to love in a way that isn’t selfish. I care about him not as a plaything or a distraction, but as a creature worthy of a certain level of dignity, and there was a feeling of helplessness in not being able to provide that while he was sick. The core of this story is just that—what it’s like to watch something you care about grow old, but I also wanted part of the piece to be about the ways that I’d also changed since I’d adopted him, and how steady and comforting of a presence he has been over those years.

Brenden Layte is an editor of educational materials, a linguist, and a writer. His work has previously appeared in places like Entropy, Ellipsis Zine, and Pithead Chapel. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with his girlfriend, some goldfish, and Pablo, the terrifying cat at the center of this piece.

The Chino Center for Oral and Facial Surgery

Nonfiction / Silas Jones

:: The Chino Center for Oral and Facial Surgery ::

Today, my dad got his tooth pulled. He had an abscess. Now, he’s lying down. It’s so fucking hot here. Here equals Arizona. All day, I’m waiting for the Arizona air to cool off and trying to decide what to put in the cardboard box I’m mailing home to my apartment in New York. A wig from college, my CD collection in two fat black leather binders, a couple half-full journals. My flight home is on Sunday and I don’t want to check a bag. All weekend, I’m waiting to leave.

How to get to The Chino Center for Oral and Facial Surgery (It’s way out on 89): Pass the church that used to be a movie theatre. Take the exit after Glassford Hill, the one that swoops you around to face Antelope Valley. Notice for the first time since being back at dad’s that Antelope Valley is filling up with houses, identical, unfinished, with temporary blue tarp roofs weighed down with black stacks of shingles.

Behind the houses, there’s Mingus Mountain, and behind that, there’s the Verde Valley. My sense of direction is like those children’s books with acetate overlays that can be peeled away one by one to reveal: the hold of a pirate ship, the inner workings of an oil rig, the anatomy of the human body.

Peel back Antelope Valley, peel back Mingus Mountain, peel back Verde Valley and see a 1000-year-old stone village beside a 50-year-old heap of grey tailings from the copper mine up the hill. Peel back the Mogollon Rim and see the woods on top of it, see the San Francisco Peaks. Peel back the San Francisco Peaks and see a wilderness of purple cinder cones with Ponderosa pines growing straight from their pebbled, volcanic flanks. Behind them, the Painted Desert and Black Mountain and then the Vermillion Cliffs, their feet buried in umber badlands. Peel back the Glen Canyon Dam and see Escalante and the white sandstone piled in mile-high drifts out along State Route 12.

On the car ride home, my dad speaks to me through a wad of bloody gauze.

Wait, flip back five or six layers and return to the Mogollon Rim; he says he’s considering moving up there. He’s thinking about Payson. He’s thinking about Pine or Strawberry. Hell, what about Happy Jack? Up there, it’s cooler and the development is under control. It rains still. He’s thinking of moving to the last intact colonial town in Mexico. There’s no airport; that keeps the riffraff out. We get off 89 and whip around a new traffic circle pinned down at its pea-stone center by a giant, bronze statue of a cowboy.

The Oral Surgeon was wearing square-toed cowboy boots and teal scrubs and a wedding band made of grey silicone. I wonder if, after he pulls his hand out of the last mouth of the day, he trades the silicone ring for a gold one before driving home to Antelope Valley.

“How are you related to the patient?” he asked me when I came to grab my dad. I look at his cowboy boots and weigh my options. I’ve made enough modifications to my body that I look, I think, approximate to boy; my ID says Sophie.

“I’m his, uh, daughter,” I said, trotting after him to a small room where my dad was reclined, fucking with his IV. The oral surgeon stands with his hands on his hips and looks at me. Behind him, there’s a framed portrait of his family: a blonde wife and three small brunette daughters posed in Easter dresses beside Granite Creek. In the building’s front office, less than an hour earlier, my dad looked up from paperwork to point to an identical picture and said too loudly, “Are they scoops or what?” Scoops is what my dad calls Mormons. Scoops missing from their brains.

The scoop surgeon was wearing a mask and so was I, but my dad wasn’t. He looked activated somehow. I adjusted my eyebrows to express calm obliviousness to any embarrassing residual disorientation he might be experiencing. I smiled behind my mask and tried to look like a daughter.

“When your father was going under, we noticed some irregularities with his heartbeat,” the surgeon said. I reoriented my eyebrows to show an appropriate amount of concern plus casual disregard, for my dad’s sake. “Your dad says he exercises all the time and that he’s a healthy guy,” the surgeon said.

“He is,” I said.

“I am,” my dad said.

“Well, it’s something he should follow up with his primary care physician about,” said the surgeon (the scoop). He held his hand in a fist; “the heart is like any muscle.” He opened and closed his fingers, squeaking his silicone band; “it tires, it gets spasmy.” I made a humming sound.

“Okay,” I said.

A nurse showed my dad and then me how to irrigate the hole where his tooth used to be. I wonder what they’ve done with it. She loaded my dad into a wheelchair and I held the door for her, all daughterly. My dad slid into the passenger seat of my Subaru, told the nurse that he can handle his drugs, thank you very much, and then we drove away.

“The development out here is just out of control,” he says several times between the Surgery Center and home. There’s blood drying on his lips.

Yesterday, my dad and me went for a bike ride through the raw pink granite boulders beyond Glassford Hill. The rocks emerge glittering from the eroding slope in a tumble, like mud squeezed in drips from a toddler’s tight little fist and left to dry in pillars and blobs. There are miles and miles of them. The trail is long, wide, and flat; it used to be a railroad for the mine. We pedal past four pairs of dads and daughters. The daughters are learning how to ride bikes, or how to enjoy it. Biking carefully behind my dad, I feel like the oldest member of a club.

At the end of the trail, you can see out across Antelope Valley. To the west, you can see almost out to Kingman, out to Baghdad and Searchlight. Cowboy towns. Peel them back and see the Mojave; see California (on fire), see the Pacific.

The land beyond the trail has been cleared and leveled and measured out in squares. In the thin strip of shade cast by the nearest granite spire, some kind of bad-looking machinery is parked. I can hear the beeping of something backing up. It’s been rainy this summer, and Glassford Hill is like Ireland: green and empty.

After I get him home from the Surgery Center, I make my dad a mango smoothie. With it, he takes two Tylenol and three ibuprofen because the scoop won’t give him opiates. Then, he goes to sleep. I drive to CVS and buy ice packs and navy blue liquid eyeliner that I spend all afternoon trying to put on right. When I am not yelling down the stairs to ask my dad if he wants anything, I am as quiet as possible. He’s reading a huge book called Nixonland, or maybe he’s sleeping. I avoid him because it feels like the kind thing to do; I don’t want him to see me see him in pain. I worry I’m being inattentive.

I used to date a boy with an illness that required him to sit on an IV drip once every six weeks. He was really sick, but he was also really rich, so the treatment was administered by a home health aide in the rec room in the basement of his parents’ brownstone. The home health aide was an older black man in navy blue scrubs and matching crocs named Wilson. The needle’s folded plastic sheath looked like a butterfly alighted on my boyfriend’s arm. It stayed there for hours. I stared at the TV. I was unsure of how much my boyfriend wanted to be touched, or of how much was appropriate to touch him. I didn’t ask. Wilson sat on a plush ottoman and when my boyfriend’s dad appeared with an armful of hot sandwiches dripping oil, Wilson chose turkey.

Last time I saw my ex-boyfriend, we wandered endlessly around Fort Greene instead of sitting down for a beer like we’d planned because he was in so much pain he said he couldn’t stop moving. He finished a pack of Marlboros; he started another. We bought a six pack at a bodega and split it, and then we split another one. When the sidewalk was busy, I fell into step behind him so I could watch him walk with a beer in one hand and his aching belly flat beneath the other. I realized I’d missed my chance to take good care of him. I put my hand on his back and steered him through a crowd gathered around a bad bike accident.

I used to think he was a girl because when he gets drunk (relaxed) he is flouncy and insecure. When he was sick in the rec room, he was too quiet and still, sat on the couch with his sandwich unwrapped and untouched in his lap. That’s how I knew he was a boy for sure.

My dad keeps the windows of his house open all day and all night. Indoors, it is cool. Except today, it’s not. When the sun finally passes overhead, I escape onto the shaded porch. Behind the house, the Bradshaw Peaks sling black shadows over the whole neighborhood. Hidden in their wooded slopes are shallow pits cleared by pioneers a hundred years ago. People call them mines, but they’re just hand-dug holes gradually refilling themselves with pine needles and crumbling granite and litter. In front of the house, across 89, there’s a huge machine smashing bedrock into level dust; they are building a hotel. This neighborhood is a fire trap.

I hear my dad come upstairs and I go back inside to ask him again if he wants soup, a milkshake, an edible from the unmarked jar in the fridge. There is sweat showing through his t‑shirt. He’s standing perfectly still over the kitchen trash can with his foot on the pedal so the lid is stuck open, like a mouth. His jaw is slack and his eyes are trained on the wall.

“Dad?” I say, “dad?” and he doesn’t answer, just moves his lips like he’s talking. It dawns on me; I am in one of those moments. In this moment, I am standing half on the porch and staring at my dad who is staring at the wall. I am realizing that something is really, seriously wrong. I am in the moment of everything getting fucked up. I am in the moment before everything changes.

I’ve been in these moments before; seeing my ex-boyfriend stagger back when he stood up too fast from tying his shoes; watching my sister’s luminous face grow smaller and greener the deeper she sank into the pond; leaving Andy alone for ten minutes, ten minutes I swear, to run to the pharmacy for anti-nausea meds. They’d just had top surgery and had been throwing up for hours from the opiates. I was supposed to be taking care of them.

From those times, I recognized the sensation of a life about to be different. But those times, everything had turned out okay, stayed the same; my boyfriend caught himself against the banister, I grabbed my sister by her wrist, Andy took the medicine, kept some water down.

Then, my dad straightened up. He opened his mouth wide and began to talk around the moving shape of his own tongue. “They pulled the wrong tooth, those fuckers,” I stared into the red black space where his molar had been. They had pulled the right tooth.

“It’s fine, dad” I said, and then I helped him put his earring back in. The scoop surgeon had made him take the silver hoop out of his ear and put it in a little dime bag.

My dad hated my ex-boyfriend, I think, but he won’t tell me for sure. They met once at my college graduation and then a second time here, when my boyfriend flew out to visit and got immediately sick from the dry air and high elevation. There was a distance between them, even though I imagined they’d read the same selection of nonfiction and novels that smart, sensitive boys feel obligated to: Vonnegut and like, whatever else.

We had already been late for our flight home when my boyfriend slammed his finger in my car door. From the porch, my dad saw it happen and threw down a bag of frozen peas that left smelly, wet spots on my boyfriend’s corduroy lap. Without taking my eyes off 41 to Phoenix, I lifted a hand from the steering wheel and rested it on his head. He radiated heat.

“Please, don’t touch me right now,” he said. The fingernail turned grey and fell off and a few months later, he dumped me.

The other night, perched beside him on a park bench, I asked to see it. His hands were long and bony and the same; his fingernails were uniform. We sat for as long as he could handle, and then we kept walking. He asked me if top surgery hurt, and I told him yes.

“You know how I am with doctors,” I said, “I’m a mess.” I looked at him to see if he thought I was a mess. He didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know what I would have done without Andy,” I said. I wanted him to know; Andy is my best friend. Andy had been unafraid of the IVs and hospital smells and asked good questions of the nurses; they’d brought a pillow for the Uber ride from the hospital and made me a little snack plate when we got home and had done every dish.

Andy got top surgery three months before I did, and I had done these things for them too. I wanted him to know: I had run through the wet snow to get the medicine, Pedialyte, and ginger ale, stuff I probably should have thought to buy ahead of time. For a terrible moment when I returned to the apartment, I was sure that they’d aspirated on their own vomit.

I didn’t tell him any of that.

“No one’s ever known how to take such good care of me,” I said. I laid it on thick.

I thought about him after I cut my tits off, when I was watching TV, high and nauseous. Even though we hadn’t spoken in nearly a year, I’d considered calling him the night before, when I was so afraid I could hardly speak to the friends I’d invited over. Andy noticed me wigging out and asked everyone to leave soon after we’d finished the pizza. I didn’t tell him any of that, either.

“You seem really happy,” my ex-boyfriend said over his shoulder. “Are you happy?”

“I am,” I said, scissoring two fingers together until he passed me a cigarette, already lit and canoeing in the breeze off the river. Peel back Fort Green and that big hill and downtown Brooklyn and the courthouse and the Duane Reed. Peel back Joralemon street. We had walked all the way to his parents’ house; he was spending the night there and meeting Wilson in the morning. We kept walking until we got to the river.

Once, on the way home from a party at a spacious loft that belonged to one of his friends’ parents, I’d thrown up right exactly here while my boyfriend watched nervously from far away. The party had been all boys and their girlfriends. The loft had been all high ceilings and polished stainless-steel surfaces across which our reflections slipped and slid like an upside-down reflection in a cereal spoon.

The window to the fire escape was so large that when I wanted a smoke, I simply stepped through it like a door instead of having to clamber or crouch. I remember how the wet metal slats left stripes on my socked feet, the flipbook flash of car headlights between the trusses of the bridge. Peel back the bridge and see ??? I was drunk and didn’t yet understand how anything fit together or stacked up in the city. I threw up and my vomit slapped the cobbled street below, scattering tourists taking photographs with Manhattan. My boyfriend walked me back through filmy acetate layers to his parents’ house. He washed my coat and my pants while I slept.

“I always knew you would transition,” my ex-boyfriend said, offering me another cigarette. “Of course,” he added, seeing my surprise in the glow of the river. Peel back the river, peel back the dock where we’d once caught a ferry out to the Rockaways, peel back the financial district, and Battery Park, and then another river. Peel back crowded state after crowded state until you get to the one where he and me met, at college. Peel back the woods and wide mainstreets and stately red brick and then peel back a few more fly-over states and see Arizona; see my dad on the porch reading Nixonland, his cat sprawled beside him.

“At your graduation, when your dad got so drunk?” he said.

“Yeah?” I said.

“I was a really good boyfriend then,” he said, “I took good care of you then.” I walked him back to his parents’ house. He told me he’d like to see me again, and then I walked home. He has a new girlfriend; they’ve been in love for like, a year. Peel back the fanciest parts of Brooklyn until you reach the Children’s Museum; turn left, and there’s my building. The next morning, I drove to visit my dad in Arizona. I texted my boyfriend from Pennsylvania; hi to Wilson.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’m very attached to the landscape of the state where I mostly grew up. I listen to people I know from my life in New York talking about driving through Arizona on their way from L.A. to White Sands and I get really grumpy. Then, when I end up in the actual landscape, visiting home, I feel really grumpy too. It’s hard to be there because there’s no water and so much smoke and so many border patrol and the violence feels so present in general. I wrote this story about watching a landscape change, about seeing relationships change. I also grew up partly in Washington state and have always loved the way Carver throws around the toponyms I know from childhood to establish a scene. It reminds me of how my parents and uncles—outdoor guides and serious knowers of the West, hippie drugstore cowboys—talk about Arizona. I tried to do something similar here.

Silas Jones’s writing has appeared in Hobart and The Wilder Voice, and is forthcoming in this Fall’s Foglifter and in Ice Floe Press’s Pandemic Love anthology.

Names Are Always Changed to Protect the Innocent

Nonfiction / Chanel Earl

:: Names Are Always Changed to Protect the Innocent ::

So when I say that tomorrow my nephews, Peter, James, and John, will be interviewed by the police, and that afterward it will be decided if they will live with one or the other of their parents, you know their names have been changed.

And when I write that my friend Lazarus—who is seven years old and spent the last twelve months receiving regular injections of chemical poison through a port in his chest—just returned from a trip to Disney World, and decided—after losing his leg, his hair, and most of his body weight—to stop chemo, that his name has been changed too.

So have the names of his parents, Phillip and Mary, who have four healthy children, and will soon have four in the ground. I’ll call the other three—who never took in their first breaths—Bartholomew, Tabitha, and Matthew, and—for my sake, not theirs—imagine a mountain of flowers on their graves.

I sit and write in silence, and I know that Anna, Elizabeth, and Thomas are asleep in the next room. Elizabeth has strep throat, which has progressed into scarlet fever. Just a hundred years ago I would have been up all night wondering if this was our last, but I have been instructed to relax because she took antibiotics, and the doctor insists she can go to school tomorrow.

I go to her when she cries. Her forehead is still covered with bright pink spots, and I place my hands on her face and whisper, Everything will be okay. Our breathing aligns. Thomas rolls over. He is having a dream. And I know we are all going to lose each other someday, but I can’t believe that matters right now because my name is Martha, and I am going to feel this moment, and the next, and always the next.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Everything in this piece is true. One evening while processing the pain of my sister as she went through a divorce, the pain of my friend whose son was dying of cancer, and my own worry about my four-year-old daughter’s scarlet fever diagnosis, I got really worked up about the innocence of the children and parents involved in every one of these situations. I ate ice cream, and cried, and made lists about what I could do to help. Then this came out. I have tried many times to turn this piece into a poem, adding line breaks and playing with the rhythm. Ultimately, it is and remains a micro-essay about a moment in my life. A moment of grief, confusion, and the realization of mortality.

Chanel Earl is a recent MFA graduate, a mother of four, and an aspiring gardener. Her work has appeared in print and online. For more information about her and her writing, visit chanelearl.com.

The Makeshift Years

Nonfiction / Debra Monroe

:: The Makeshift Years ::

For ten years I was a single parent, not the first, last, nor only. Because I adopted, my ideas, my house, my character, and my income were assessed in advance by experts. I planned ahead for likely setbacks, and the adoption agency doublechecked. Preemptive problem-solving is a skill and a tic. On one hand, it’s planning, and planning helps. On the other, no one can anticipate all future bad luck or glaring miscalculations always so obvious after the fact. Still, as I waited for my baby, I envisioned upcoming hurdles: my worrying and readying, and rushes of elation as I’d clear them. I’ve daydreamed like this since I can remember, with hope or hubris or willed faith in my ability to spot looming pitfalls.

The elementary school principal later said: “No ex-husband, no grandma, no aunt, not even an uncle?” My extended family was geographically afar. I visited rarely and called often. Geographically afar worked: unfixable history and latent eruptions, even by phone. So I began as a mother who hoped to forestall all problems and then noticed my daughter was emerging into consciousness with the idea that, if push came to shove, no one else would love her, feed her, and save her. She asked often about her contingency plan.

She was sick when she was little, which I did foresee, that a child might have special needs. Hers were appointments with medical specialists in a city an hour away. But a problem I didn’t foresee was that I would get sick. One day she was wearing cozy pajamas and watching TV. I lay on the couch, wondering why nurses rushed me when I phoned to say I hadn’t recovered from surgery yet. My daughter said, “How will Aunt Cindy”—a friend in Florida, and we lived in Texas—“know to come on a plane and get me?”

I thought: some fantasy about going to Disneyworld?

“When you die,” she said. She’d arranged her expression to convey that she needed this information but knew I was overextended. I’d traveled to my mother’s funeral. The mother of a sitter had died a good death at home in the room near the room where my daughter napped and played. “I’m not dying,” I said, ignoring my post-op malaise.

Caregivers had a finite interest in her. They worried about their own children, their own mothers. None were terrible, though one seventeen-year-old had bulimia. I could tell by the candy wrappers and the state of the bathroom. I wondered whether to tell her mother, whom I’d first met when the mother was a childcare worker at a Methodist Church program called Mother’s Day Out, which I’d used for daycare when my daughter was two. You left your child there—Tuesdays, Thursdays, nine to three, steep fines if you’re late for pickup—to relax or shop. The childcare worker who turned out to be the sitter’s mother told me she knew by my clothes I was going to work at the university in the college town a half-hour away. I couldn’t use daycares there. My hours were erratic, midday classes Tuesdays and Thursdays, also a Thursday night class requiring a second arrangement.

“The church board is strict,” she said. “Be discreet.”

I nodded and tried to seem on the verge of shopping.

This was another problem I’d failed to foresee. I owned a small house near a visually appealing village with a low cost of living, but it had just one daycare center that everyone described as dodgy, in a pole barn between the dancehall and auto body shop. Social workers must have assumed I’d devise childcare. I did. Here are maxims I lived by:

Impatience is a virtue. It helps you get chores done quickly. 
Worry is precaution.
If you predict bad outcomes, you’ll have spare solutions stockpiled.
Wait, wait. We’re almost at the palace. It’s not midnight. Something good
will happen. (This began as an ironic aside but, after long repetition, 
turned sincere.)

When at last my daughter was enrolled in all-day kindergarten, I needed just one sitter one night a week for night class. I said this when I ran across the Mother’s Day Out childcare worker, who first told me I should put my daughter in Saturday morning ballet classes in the city an hour away, expensive yet excellent classes she’d heard. Surely I wasn’t working on Saturday mornings? Then she said I should hire her daughter who had a car.

I hired the daughter and discovered the bulimia. My habit of misgiving tumbled onto a new question: Was it my place to tell the sitter’s mother about the bulimia? Telling the mother might be wrong, thankless. This was an etiquette question, I realized. Etiquette is about conveying difficult facts kindly. Next I had to fire the sitter for not picking up my daughter—leaving my daughter’s small, dear self at the top of a hill where the school bus dropped her. One of my neighbors’ other neighbors, called Crabby Old Man, but never to his face, drove her back to school where the principal called me at work, and I rushed out of a seminar in which I let students keep their cell phones on, a new gadget then, because I couldn’t object to theirs if, alert to predicaments, I kept mine on.

After I found a new sitter, I found myself oddly missing the previous nonurgent question of whether I should tell the sitter’s mother her daughter wasn’t okay. Next I pondered why I’d found the question mildly intriguing. I’d rolled it over in my mind as I drove to and from work, as I vacuumed and folded laundry, as I’d answered my daughter’s questions about who made the sky and were animals people, as I’d helped her with her kindergarten homework, easy, fun, the two of us pasting feathers onto a drawing of a turkey for Thanksgiving or reading aloud a list of seasonal words as I quelled panic about how supervising her homework would get harder in years ahead, taking up more focus.

I probably never would have found the spare courage to tell the sitter’s mother about her daughter’s eating disorder, which was concerning. A red flag about the sitter’s well-being. A red flag about the sitter’s fitness. Something to keep an eye on. But not a firing offense, not yet, I must have decided, coming home from teaching at ten p.m. to empty the wastebaskets and clean the bathroom. Problem-solving in a pros-versus-cons way had turned reflexive. Thinking about someone else’s problem, hard for them but easier for me, had felt like a pastime. Mother’s Day Out had the right idea—I needed to relax. But any new pastime had to overlap with time I’d spend with my child. Maybe gardening?

The next sitter picked up my daughter right at the school, along with the sitter’s daughter who was the same age, and at ten p.m. I’d drive to this sitter’s, heading north off my route home, otherwise western, then south again home, twenty extra miles but just one night a week. This sitter was affectionate, big-hearted, with a dry sense of humor, but she’d just begun taking an antidepressant, the first rough weeks of adjusting to a drug. When I knocked on the door to pick up my daughter, this sitter was disturbingly hard to wake.

Don’t worry about keeping my sitters straight. Think of them as members of a fractious Greek chorus, contradicting each other while letting spill with advice derived from their circumstances, different from mine. But I had to prize them as individuals since I needed them to prize my daughter. I didn’t treat them as interchangeable as they interchanged.

I slept lightly and woke often, and my dreams were as busy as action movies. I’d be driving home but couldn’t decipher the infinitely branching roads just beyond the windshield. Or I was in an unfamiliar city, wide expressways crisscrossing before me like lines in an M. C. Escher lithograph. In one dream, my car wouldn’t start. So I stole a motorcycle, kickstarted it, and sped off, one hand steadying the baby draped over the gas tank. I woke, relieved to find myself in bed, my child asleep, nowhere I had to be for two hours.

Linear time was my roadmap. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday (different due to night class), Friday again. Saturday and Sunday unstructured but full of to-dos. Weekdays, seven a.m., eight, nine, ten … Starting at four p.m. on weekdays except Thursdays: meet the school bus, fix a snack, see to homework, chat happily, fix dinner. We ate. She bathed. For TV, she liked physical comedy, extravagant pratfalls. I’d be in the next room, washing dishes, and hear her helpless with laughter, chortling. On weeknights, America’s Funniest Home Videos. Saturday, British comedies like Fawlty Towers.

I now see that, despite daily progress—the clock mapping my day, the calendar mapping my week and, zooming out for a disorienting minute, my month—I’d get stuck. Any intersection with a forking set of options, with more than one way forward, possibly two, three, or four, all potentially the right or wrong way, unsettled me. Friendly landmarks looked strange. I mean those talisman-like assurances of routine like the yellow school bus coming on time in the afternoon, the alarm clock’s reliable beep every morning, Arthur switching to PBS NewsHour my cue for dinner prep. When new factors forced me to change my navigation, these talisman-like markers marked a now-obsolete route.

When my daughter had asked how Aunt Cindy would know to come and get her, I wondered if not feeling well was psychosomatic, as the surgeon’s nurses on the phone implied. They had responsibilities too, long lists of patient calls to return. They’d say “everyone has pain,” and I’d say “three weeks later and I have a fever,” and they’d say “but not a high fever,” also “so make an appointment.” I had made an appointment ten days earlier, which required the afterschool sitter a second time that week, and I’d used one of my at-home days when I should have graded papers to drive into the city to the surgeon’s.

If my daughter rode the bus in the afternoon, I had forty more minutes to work; if I drove her to school in the morning, I had forty more minutes to sleep. I drove her to school the next morning and, infused with caffeine, social reserve not yet operational, I spoke to someone else as if to myself. After delivering my daughter into the classroom, I walked to the parking lot beside a father I knew from village gatherings, our kids in slippery herds around us in Halloween costumes or bib tags for field day, clamoring about cupcakes, hot dogs. Most dads avoided me, single by choice. Mothers were curious. One said, “I have friends who are single mothers and they don’t endanger their kids, but they’re so busy they forget to turn on the old mental camcorder. They miss the fun.”

As the pleasant dad and I unlocked our cars, I said, “I had a surgery almost a month ago and don’t feel better.” He got a look on his face like a good husband would get. I eventually had a good husband so that’s how I know. But he wasn’t my husband. We’d chatted as he dropped off and picked up kids because his job was nearby and his wife’s wasn’t. I was wearing a sweatsuit. It was a cold day, so I’d thrown on my warmest coat, fake-fur, knee-length. Paired with stylish but understated clothes, with my hair washed and makeup applied, it could be an interesting fashion statement. He looked at my face, my wild eyes. My hair was wild too. I know because a few seconds later I got in my car and flipped down the visor mirror. “Maybe talk to a doctor,” he said, backing away.

I drove to the village doctor’s.

I said to the receptionist, “The doctor referred me to have a surgery three weeks ago, and I never got well.” She told me to sit down as other patients arrived. Then a nurse took me to a room and returned with the doctor who said he’d do a field test since lab test results wouldn’t come back in time. He’d place a finger on each side of my cervix, deep to the lateral fornix with pressure towards the anterior abdomen, while using his other hand to apply external pressure to the pubic bones in the center of the pelvis while watching for the chandelier sign, as textbooks call it, wherein if the patient has a post-op infection she shrieks and reaches for an imaginary chandelier, he said, as I shrieked while reaching.

The nurse drew blood for a white blood cell count, which the doctor completed in his tiny onsite lab. He wrote a prescription for a broad-spectrum antibiotic. He said: “I know you’re a single parent. Make childcare arrangements.” He explained I’d come back for another test in the morning. If the count stayed the same or went up, he’d check me into a hospital in the city or college town. “If this infection is resistant, time is not on our side.”

I called the big-hearted, sardonic sitter and asked, if need be, she could watch my daughter. I called the sitter I’d used a few years before, JoAnn, whose mother had died a good death, for a second layer of my daughter’s safety net. Or third; I was first. JoAnn hadn’t worked since her mother died but said to give her number to the other sitter in case the other sitter had a conflict. My next white blood cell count was lower. But, the nurse said, if over the weekend I had vertigo, a spike in fever, changes in vision, I’d go to the ER. On Sunday my daughter and I stood in line picking up breakfast tacos, and we saw this nurse again. She put her wrist on my forehead. “No fever. I figured. You look almost peppy.”

Another problem I didn’t foresee was that since my schedule required not just daycare but, once a week, nightcare, which isn’t a thing, my nighttime sitters would be hard to find and unreliable because a job so intermittent is a sideline. I asked to switch this class to daytime but my supervisor, due to a blind spot or preternaturally rigid managerial style, said no. When I made the request over his head, he changed my schedule to make it harder.

Who can find a virtuous woman? Her price is beyond rubies. Proverbs 31:10. That’s about a wife, though. At first, I’d found my sitter named JoAnn. I worked at home when I could, and when I couldn’t, I left my daughter at JoAnn’s, her house eight miles away, but I found a semi-shortcut, impassable in wet weather, from JoAnn’s house to the college town, and my daughter was still a babe in arms, easy to carry. When she was one, I used Mother’s Day Out to give JoAnn time off, JoAnn’s Day Off. Mother’s Day Out was also said to be good for the child’s socialization. I still used JoAnn for night class. When my daughter was two and three, I used JoAnn a few days a week and for my night class.

JoAnn’s caring was a low-key miracle that lasted until it didn’t. True, she argued about giving my daughter one of her medications. It made her heart beat too fast, JoAnn felt. I took my daughter back to the specialist who said my daughter’s heart rate was fine, that “some agitation is unavoidable,” and “this medication is vital.” JoAnn still said no, she wasn’t giving a baby speedy medicine through a plastic mask like a gas mask. One day a week, my daughter missed a dose, which the doctor okayed. He said: “I take it this is the grandma.” JoAnn also noted my daughter’s food allergies and cooked and pureed, reporting foods my daughter loved. My daughter loved JoAnn, calling out in baby patois: OJann!

But after JoAnn’s mother died, JoAnn was bone-tired. People get this way after a hard stretch of weeks, months, years. Not during. So for one year, the year my daughter was four, before kindergarten, which I relied on to go to work, along with the bulimic sitter and her successor the sardonic sitter, I used a Baptist preschool, eighteen-miles round trip, thirty-six extra miles every day. For night class, I hired a graduate student who ended up having absenteeism and, to replace her, an undergraduate with stellar references who one day stopped coming. So I called JoAnn, who finished out that semester, my night classes.

JoAnn said years later it had been hard to watch me make plans. Triggering, as we say now. She’d been a single mother. “I don’t assume childcare will fall through,” she said, “but it can.” When it did, my week stalled, broken until fixed. JoAnn’s parenthood hadn’t had the pre-supervision mine did, the interviews with social workers and pre-adoption checklists creating false confidence, no stone unturned. I turned over stones for years.

One night during the year before kindergarten—so the year I used the Baptist preschool, before I fired the graduate student with absenteeism, not a firing offense yet, I’d so far decided, finding substitutes, asking her to please not cancel again—the phone rang, my new stepfather. My mother was in the ICU. My experience with extended family didn’t match the advice I got from the Baptist preschool workers. They weren’t my friends, as one of them, not even a supervisor, said. She was a single mother who worked at the preschool to be near her son. “Don’t be friendly,” she said in a tense, puzzling whisper.

But I’d told one childcare worker, who’d said I looked tired, that my mother was in the ICU, and she’d told the others. Advice based on the advice-giver’s circumstance materialized. For context, I recounted a condensed version of my circumstance. People said: Still! Go see her or you’ll feel everlasting regret! The sitter I hadn’t fired—I liked her but couldn’t count on her—was close to her mother and told me she’d reserved cheap plane tickets for me, “bereavement fare,” which was a thing then. I just had to confirm them.

My mother had been married less than a year, her third marriage. Her first, to my alcoholic father, had lasted twenty-odd years. Her second, to an obscenely violent man, lasted another twenty years. He was violent to everyone, so I’d stopped visiting out of concern for my safety, though I remained concerned for hers, and, yes, I did advise her to leave him, but she never did. Then he died, lucky break, and she married an apparently pleasant man. When I met him and his grown children at the wedding, they seemed nice. Eight months later I flew to see her in the ICU because I hoped not to feel regret, and she died unexpectedly while I was on my way, while I was on a plane reading a book by Dave Eggers. As we planned her funeral, her husband and his grown children still seemed nice.

But I’d dithered before traveling because racing to and from Oregon with a four-year-old sounded hard. This decision was another fork in the road with optional routes into the future. Who would watch my daughter? The graduate student who’d so far canceled every other week wasn’t good at routines, but she loved emergencies. She offered to stay overnight with my daughter one night. JoAnn took a few days. Two childcare workers from the Baptist preschool, younger than me, the age of aunts, each volunteered for an overnight. People passed my daughter around, dropped her off, picked her up.

The short trip to see my mother in the ICU to preempt regret turned into ten days and nights, none of the nights with sleep for me. Even before I left, I hadn’t slept, deciding to stay, go, speculating how my mother’s death at some far-off future point might be hard to process. The night before I traveled I didn’t sleep, typical, not sleeping the night before travel, nor during, the unfamiliar bed, lights, noises. Choosing a coffin and burial clothes, writing a eulogy, delivering it, good manners by day, grief at night—my brain ran on high, making new neural paths to register that my mother, locus of love and regret, was dead.

I assumed a return to my bed, my neighbor’s dusk-to-dawn yard light making familiar squares on my bedroom walls, would relax me. When I got home, a Baptist preschool worker said, “Someone is glad to see you!” My daughter’s face was a mix of glee and terror. I put her to bed. I got into bed. I couldn’t have slept forty minutes when she shook me awake. All night, all week, all month. Weeks into these multiple shakings-awake per night, I wasn’t sleepy, just dull-witted and, once I bestirred myself, robotically coherent.

A Baptist preschool worker advised me to let my daughter sleep in my bed, but neither of us slept. I called JoAnn, who said to put a pallet in my room, show it to my daughter, and tell her if she went to bed in her room and woke she could move there only if she didn’t wake me. I went to REI in the college town and bought a pallet. A year later, during kindergarten, she was still moving to the pallet—during the months I fell ill, during the lead-up to surgery, and afterward, the virulent post-op malaise. She outgrew it, so I went to town and bought a bigger pallet. I’d kiss her goodnight in her own room, breathing deep the scent of child skin, and go to bed alone. I never woke until daytime’s first placid minute. She’d have slipped across the house, to the pallet, under the quilt, to sleep.

I tried moving the pallet a few feet from my bed with the plan to bit-by-bit move it farther from my small room toward hers. But every morning it was tucked back in the rectangular spot near my bed. She kept growing until, rolling over, she’d thump the closet and wake me. I explained this, and she offered to move to the hall outside my room and sleep there on a palliative pallet, thin layer on a hard, cold floor, harder and colder in the hall.

Quitting the pallet always registered as better sleep for both of us in a hypothetical future but a bad night right now, tonight. So I didn’t. To be clear, pallet-reliance wasn’t co-sleeping. Co-sleeping was when my daughter slept in a cradle next to my bed. Co-sleeping was when she was too big for the cradle and moved to a crib in her room, and a baby monitor amplified her small cries and I’d go feed her, falling asleep on her floor, my hand through the crib railing. Before my daughter arrived, a social worker described both bed-sharing and co-sleeping as good for bonding, though not everyone gets enough sleep while bed-sharing, she added. Co-sleeping, with the baby in your room in a playard, was easier. Playard? I’d asked her. Playard is another word for “playpen,” archaic now, bad connotations. The social worker said, “You, if you fall in love, will want privacy.” She pointed out that it would be tricky in a new relationship to have sex only during school or daycare.

When my husband and I first began to date—rare, thrilling, physical encounters, and conversation about childcare that made encounters possible—we emailed. Texting wasn’t a thing yet. I mostly nixed phone calls because, after putting my daughter to bed, I had chores. He had a cleaning service. He and his ex-wife lived near each other, with shared custody and dovetailed schedules. When his son was a baby, they’d had a nanny. One phone call to the agency will replace an unsuitable nanny, as when, for instance, a neighbor informed them their nanny smoked a cigarette in the yard as the baby napped. This couldn’t have been a firing offense for me, I’d have reasoned, thinking that even nonsmokers step outside while a baby is napping. I expressed envy, then self-castigation about my peculiar, extemporized childcare, perfected plans forever foiled, and he added that he and his ex-wife lived in a city with more options and two salaries to pay for options.

The first Saturday I drove into the city to initiate the rare and thrilling physical encounters, I paid the big-hearted, sardonic sitter, who had a daughter my daughter’s age, for my daughter to spend the night, but this sitter was still disturbingly hard to wake. So sooner than planned, then, I was having thrilling encounters frequently and always at my house.

I’d put my daughter to bed, then go to bed with my new boyfriend, who so far seemed unobjectionable. Afterward, I’d open the door, unroll the pallet. “My daughter has separation anxiety since I made a trip to my mother’s funeral,” I explained, leaving out that years had passed. One night as I unrolled the pallet, he said he was afraid of stepping on her when he got up in the night. I told him pallet-reliance was like a tide-you-over sleeping pill, easy to start and hellish to stop. I laughed wildly as I sometimes did when a mother in the village would critique my child maybe in order to check off a developmental milestone for hers, saying, “she’s not walking!?” or “don’t tell me she still naps!?”

He asked for my permission to propose a plan. The next morning he got down on one knee and held my daughter’s hand. “Is there a toy you really want?” For months she’d asked for an expensive pretend-CD player that played pretend-CDs that came with it, four tinny, shouty children’s songs. I objected. She had a real CD player with real CDs, I said. He shook his head no to me. To her, he said, “If you try to sleep one night in your room, I’ll buy it.” She slept all night in her room the first try. She liked this better, she said in the morning, better than the floor. My boyfriend and I sipped coffee. My daughter put a pretend-CD in a plastic box, as a song about a muffin man flooded the kitchen.

What the pre-adoption checklist missed:


Many single parents have extended family or something like it.
A job with vaunted “flextime” means improvised childcare.
A village is a childcare desert.
You can get so reliant on a schedule planned by the day, the hour, the minute, 
that a small tweak derails you, and you’re bone-tired after, not during.

Post-adoption, your adult daughter won’t care one whit about your retrospective doubts, your belated clarity as you realize years later that the entire plan, prechecked, checked and doublechecked, was flawed, that every week wobbled on the verge of collapse like a house you’d built yourself out of odds and ends creaking and shaking and shuddering at every unexpected gust. She’ll blink and say, “That’s not how I remember it at all.” And describe instead a garden you once planted, tiny carrots she pulled out too soon; how she followed you with a toy vacuum when you used the big one; something she calls Wine and Popsicle Night; the treehouse you built for her birthday a serene porch high, high in branches.

Every weekday except night-class day, I’d wait in my car for my daughter’s school bus and talk by phone to Aunt Cindy in Florida, her voice via the cell phone tower waves like the voice of a noninterventionist god, consoling but too far-off for material help. JoAnn’s help was practical and nearby. Twenty years later, which is to say last week, she sent me this unexpected message by way of her boyfriend’s social media “chat”:

Debra, this is OJann. I had a dream at dawn about our girl. She lay in my arms. I enjoyed her so much, her sweet face. How precious she was to hold those years ago. When I had this same dream 5 years ago, I ran into her in a restaurant with her friends when I had an errand in the city that day! I’m not going out today so that won’t repeat, but she is in my heart.

Five years earlier my daughter had come home from a restaurant near her high school where she’d gone to eat. She’d heard JoAnn calling her name. They’d hugged hello, smiling.

After I got married and my daughter and I moved to the city, my commute to work was long but no longer spiraling or ever subject to change as it had been in the village, new byways always added, back when I’d be at work in midday and my body, conditioned to mapped blocks of time, shifted into palpable high-alert before I even saw the clock telling me that Mother’s Day Out or the Baptist preschool or the elementary school was ending soon. I’d wrap up my class or meeting, thinking: get in the car and drive. On night-class day, I’d think: sitter, arrive! In the city, my husband picked up my daughter at onsite afterschool care. He made dinner, then supervised homework, getting harder.

A wayward sitter replaced. An illness correctly diagnosed. When my mother died, a distressing gap in childcare filled as I negotiated tangled schedules, conflicting phone messages. I strategized. I made snap decisions about the reliability of the care and caring on offer. Stopgap expediency assembled out of shortages isn’t everyone’s experience. It was mine.

When the seventeen-year-old sitter one afternoon left my daughter alone on a hill, my neighbor the other neighbors called Crabby Old Man saw her and drove her back to school, and the principal called me to come quickly. I knocked on this neighbor’s door to thank him, and he said: “All on your own then?” I had sitters, I said. A few days later as I waited for her bus, he came outside and said he wished for my sake I was married so I’d have help. Then he smiled and said: “I guess you’ve thought of that.” I hadn’t. Despite my penchant for planning to forestall all future glitches, I’d never thought about a helpful husband because I couldn’t problem-solve one into being, nor a life in which I wouldn’t be so tired, a life in which more people than me would love my daughter all day and all night, no strings attached, no caveats, would boundlessly and unlimitedly love her as my husband does now. I was enough, timetabled, adaptive, assessing late-breaking threats, making a plan, my relief surging as reward when I cleared hurdles. I’d have continued to be. But future windfalls are as unexpected as future pitfalls. I got lucky and didn’t have to be.

From the writer

:: Account ::

When I began to write this essay about the dearth of childcare in a small, rural town, I knew its structure wouldn’t be narrative. The story of my life as a single mother was often a story of fused emergencies. Even when I used to write fiction, I felt out of patience with the idea that causality and linear time explain everything. I was walking on trails in woods one day, feeling lost, and I understood that this essay would be about being lost in a zone not adequately mapped by calendars and clocks. While writing, I also read an article about game theory—about how the gamer’s risk-taking is rewarded and perpetuated—and I understood why, back when I was arranging my extemporized and sometimes substandard childcare, I was intermittently and mysteriously elated, adrenaline rush.

Debra Monroe is the author of seven books, including It Takes a Worried Woman: Essays (forthcoming from The University of Georgia Press, 2022) in which this essay will appear. She has also written two story collections, The Source of Trouble (Simon & Schuster, 1990) and A Wild, Cold State (Simon & Schuster, 1995); two novels, Newfangled (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and Shambles (SMU Press, 2004); and two memoirs, On the Outskirts of Normal (The University of Georgia Press, 2010) and My Unsentimental Education (The University of Georgia Press, 2015). She is the editor of the anthology Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in many venues, including Longreads, The Southern Review, The New York Times, The American Scholar, Guernica, and The Rumpus.

Cycle & Circumstances

Nonfiction / Jane Hertenstein

:: Cycle & Circumstances ::

A hybrid memoir about riding from the top to the bottom of the UK

When I was fifteen, my mother worked at the local hardware store where she got a discount. That’s where I bought my Huffy Scout—I actually called it Scout (after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird). I would ride well beyond Centerville into the outskirts of Dayton and then beyond that. One time I woke early and left the house. By noon I was in Indiana.

On the way back I remember getting as far as Miamisburg (see: Stupid Kids). I’d call Mom from a payphone (remember those?) and beg her to have Dad come pick me up. It got to be a running routine—me riding too far and needing a ride home. Often when I called, Mom would be dismayed, “I thought you were upstairs in bed!”

Later she got used to my calls and would simply ask,

“Where are you now?”

Stupid Kids

Stuff you don’t think about when you’re fifteen and decide to go for a ride:

Sunscreen, food, water, money, sunglasses, no cellphone because they haven’t been invented yet, no maps or GPS, no spare inner tubes or patch kit, or tools, or any way to fix anything

Waking up early before the dust of night has blown off. There is a distant pale light throbbing on the horizon. Birds are atwitter. The dew-grass soaks my sneakers as I pull open the garage door and grab my bike leaning against the wall.

Scout is mustard yellow with brown lettering and accents. A Huffy 10-speed. Just the idea that I can go anywhere stirs my blood.

There is never any plan. I’ll be home before lunch, I think, before anyone even knows I’m gone—or cares.

The roads are empty, white lines mark the black asphalt surface. Ahead of me a ribbon that I ride, collecting speed to make it up the next swell. Small white butterflies flit above stalks of cornflowers, fields of goldenrod, tiger lilies blow in the wind growing in a ditch by the roadway, a fox skitters into a hole in a stone wall, turning a corner on a dew drenched morning and coming across a deer, startled, it darts into the river. Slowly the sun climbs.

After a while I am hot and thirsty and go faster in order to fan myself. A dog chases after me, and I stand up on the pedals and crank as hard as I can. He runs in front of my wheel and I almost hit him, only managing to slow down. His teeth nip at my heels. I escape and meanwhile forget how hungry I am.

Grasshoppers thud me in the forehead, leaving a tobacco-stain pee. I’m not wearing a helmet. It’s not a thing yet. I count telephone poles, low-hanging wires strung like a lady’s necklace. Glass insulators stud the top of the cross bar, glistening like gemstones as the sun bears down.

I stop, suddenly feeling light-headed. My breath is ragged and dense with humidity and exhaustion. I reckon I’ve been riding for four or five hours. At a small grocery store I ask about a water fountain and drink long and hard before getting back on my steed. If I can get as far as Miamisburg where Dad works at Monarch Marketing where they make labels, then I can wait until he’s done and hitch a ride home with him.

At home I lie on the couch and drink a Coke. Later, I’ll eat supper and go to bed, to wake up early to ride my bike.

I might have been fifteen or sixteen. I was on my bike riding around in the country on an asphalt road in the middle of nowhere when a car pulled up at a T‑intersection beside me. It was one of those big-boat ’70s cars, the driver had long Lynyrd Skynyrd hair. “Hey!” he called me over.

And of course I leaned in the open window to see what he wanted.

He asked me directions, said a street name that I didn’t recognize. In his lap he fingered what looked vaguely like an ice cream cone, pulsing with veiny red sprinkles.

Suddenly dread washed over me. I sped away without looking back. When I got home I never once thought about sharing this incident with my mother. I only wished I could tear my eyes out.

What am I supposed to do now? I had thought. Too many girls have this same story.

My mom could be arbitrary. I never knew which Mom I was going to get. The nice one who would promise me anything or the one who would suddenly take it all back. Who might one day sign a permission slip for camp and the next day rip it up. She was a depressive, the daughter of a depressive. When things got bad, really bad, she’d go off to the “hospital” for a few months of “rest.” The worst was the shock treatments. One Christmas she came home for a visit and presented me and my sister with gifts made during occupational therapy. I opened a box containing a leather bracelet embossed with my name. Except she had spelled Jane as Jayne. I considered pointing this out, but thought better. I kept it at the back of my closet for years, eventually leaving it when I moved out.

As a kid you have no power. No money. No control. I was always at the whim of her will. The trick was not to want. To give off the air of whatever. But this was hard; invariably I’d show my hand and blow it.

Cycling became a coping mechanism. Hills. Wind. I couldn’t make them go away, but I could tackle problems one by one. All I had to do was pedal.

Riding narrowed life down into the now. To the present moment. The wind in my face, tiger lilies waving at me as I passed, the ribbon of asphalt rising up to meet me, butterflies and bees, the thirst, the sun, the poetry of motion.

Bicycling saved me.

When I was a kid back in Ohio, I saw an advertisement for a talk at the library. A couple had just ridden their bikes from Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina, a Hemistour. Now they were proposing just in time for the country’s Bicentennial, Bikecentennial, an event intended to get people on their bikes for a ride across the country, from Astoria, Oregon, to Yorktown, Virginia.

Bikecentennial appealed to my vagabond spirit. I sat spellbound listening to Dan and Lys Burden describe their project. Folks would ride back roads, stay overnight in campgrounds, city parks, church basements, community centers; they’d see the country close-hand from the saddle; they’d experience weather and the outpouring of hospitality. They’d make friends and come home with stories.

Count me in! Except I was fifteen years old and would never be able to get my parents on board with my plan.

But it did plant a seed in my heart and mind—that someday I would strap a sleeping bag onto the back of my bike and ride and ride until tired. I’d sleep and eat beside the road. I’d be free.

At age 58 I had come to a point of reckoning, or what some people call the bucket list.

When a person is old but not too old. When on the timeline of life they are more than halfway, far from the beginning, closer to the end. When the tolling of bells reminds you of mortality, that death will one day come for thee.

It is a time of assessment, to review regrets and add up cherished moments. What is it you did, and what is it you didn’t do?

Mary Oliver, in her poem “The Summer Day,” details the minutiae of the natural world revolving around her before zooming out. The bigger picture requires us to take stock. She ends the poem with a question:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Was it midlife malaise? Grief from losing my parents? The feeling that I was on the cusp of losing my marriage?

St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost items / lost people. He is said to have suffered from despair. In this way I think we can all relate to him, from one wounded heart to another. He was told that any physical task done in the proper spirit would bring him deliverance.

Seeking solace, I did what I’d always done in the past—I got on my bike. I would pedal my way into salvation, ride to rid myself of the awfulness inside of me.

I bought a ticket to England.

So sighing for new worlds to conquer, I jumped into a JOGLE. I decided I would ride my bike from John O’Groats in Scotland to Land’s End in Cornwall—the length of the UK.

Just to put this into perspective: it would be a journey of 1,100 miles.

Just to put this into perspective: most people who attempt a JOGLE or LEJOG (if going in the opposite direction, south to north) are fit. I, on the other hand, was not fit but a frumpy post-menopausal woman in her late fifties.

Just to put this into perspective: I had no idea what I was getting into.

I assumed England would be one great, big garden path with rows of cute thatch-roof cottages. I had no idea that the Scottish Highlands was literal. Not only would I have to traverse the Highlands but several other smaller ranges. The Lake District was not only lakes but mountains, including the highest peak in England.

I didn’t have the right bike or the right gear.

Perhaps it was better that I didn’t understand. Most rational people would have turned back, stayed on the lakefront path, or never left the comfort of their couch.

I had to remind myself I was that girl who dared to dream, to risk. Who started off early in the morning with only a small rucksack slung over her back. Muscle memory recalled that gypsy spirit. Deep beneath my grey hair were blonde roots that turned white under the hot summer sun.

I just needed to summon her back, call her forth.

I had to believe it was possible.

What was I doing? I asked myself this question a thousand times.

What was I doing all alone in the far-flung Highlands on a bike? This was crazy. Stupid. I wasn’t Superwoman. I couldn’t believe what I had gotten myself into. And, why?

I fully thought after separating from my husband that we would be able to begin again. We were smart, we both loved to read, we were on the same page politically, we loved our daughter, now grown and out of the house. We had all the tools to fix whatever was broken. But, maybe that was the problem: we didn’t know how broken we were.

I pedaled in the mist, crying.

                    Going down a road hoping to end up somewhere, to be found,  
 
                              unsad

It cannot be overstated, I got lost. A lot.

Getting lost is all about perceptions. You start with a certain framework and figure out reference points. Without knowing where I was, I couldn’t even begin to measure how far off route I’d wandered.

The same could be said of my marriage. I had no idea how far off the mark I was or where to go next.

On my JOGLE I’d zigzag, careen from one crossroads to another veering toward my eventual goal.

In my marriage I moved from blunder to blunder, hoping to get somewhere, together.

I lacked a context; I assumed too much, and once I understood, I knew a course correction would cost in time and effort. I was far from where I wanted to be.

Shopkeepers, once they saw that I was by myself, would exclaim: You’re all alone!

Yes. I was constantly aware that I was a stranger in a strange land. One time I stopped at a cafe. I couldn’t figure out how to open the door. I could see they were open. Finally the counter person came out and let me in. I was pulling instead of pushing. While sitting there eating the best soup ever I shed a few tears. Alone. By myself.

After finishing my JOGLE, cycling back to Penzance—it hit me: I’d reached my goal after nineteen days, 1,100 miles of wind, rain, round-abouts, getting lost, stinging nettles, thigh-burning climbs, and broken spokes. I began to cry.

I didn’t know I possessed such endurance; I had no idea I was this strong. I deserved a pat on the back, or at least a cream tea. I practically flew back to the hostel, pushed along this time by the wind.

I sat in a tea room in late afternoon, my table facing a window looking out upon the street. I watched people flood past, their faces downturned, hurrying to escape the rain now coming down. I’d plunged headlong, thrown caution to the wind, and gone to England to cycle the country top to bottom, and now I was done. What would I do next? My life, my future seemed to waver before me like heat off a hot highway. I glimpsed a headline in a newspaper left on an adjoining table. Brad and Angelina had separated.

I contemplated my marriage. I vowed I would return and tackle this problem head-on. I’d power through it. I’d set up counseling sessions. Energized, I made lists. I was a new woman.

My husband agreed to pick me up at the airport. I texted him when I landed in Canada for a transfer. “In North America!”

At the Chicago airport I waited with my bike box. And waited. And waited. I carted it up and down the escalator, the elevator, banging it against closing doors thinking I might be on the wrong floor. By this time I’d been awake and in travel mode for eighteen hours.

Suffice it to say neither of us was in a welcoming mood when we met up. The van ride into the city was filled with awkward silence and the hum of traffic.

Sometime after this he informed me that he had taken off his wedding ring.

My heart was broken.

At writer’s conferences I’d sit invisible. The middle-aged woman. There was nothing remarkable about me. My once blonde hair had turned the color of cold shrimp.

I had no platform. I wasn’t on Twitter or Instagram.

Selling books at a book fair, sitting behind a table with people streaming by, waiting for someone to finally buy my book, I’d forget I’d done amazing things. I’d have to remind myself that I had a secret power. It was under my clothes.

                    Tan lines, left by my bike shorts.

After my divorce I went to New York City to see a friend.

When Elanor suggested we rent Citi Bikes, I hesitated. “C’mon,” she berated me, “you ride your bike all over the world.”

An exaggeration. Though since my JOGLE I’d managed a few other trips—one of which took me from Amsterdam along the North Sea and over the Telemark Mountains in Norway.

She talked me into it. We jerked the ungainly bikes out of iron racks and set off. In busy Brooklyn traffic, my oversized handlebars jiggled as I swerved to stay in a bike lane, juggling my phone and bag that kept slipping out of the loose bungee at the front of the bike.

At first all I could see was the potholes, the cars driving way too close, the trash in the streets. But then, something magical happened. I began to forget.

Soon I was a tourist flying around a big city, seeing things for the first time. The Orthodox Jews pushing baby buggies, dog walkers in the new park along the East River, old men playing chess outside a bar. They waved at us.

It was weird, people were stopping and smiling. Paranoid, I checked to see if my underwear was showing. I was riding in a skirt and pulled at the hem that kept blowing up. I tucked my tank top in at the back.

Slowly I came to realize we were summer girls. We represented freedom. We had taken a step away from the everyday routine and were buzzing around having fun.

Life at its best and happiest.

These days I dream more and more of riding my bike.  
 
In my mind I ride a thousand roads.  
 
After years, the light has changed, yet still I see,  
                    up around the next curve—a wider world! 
 
          So I keep going.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Fragility. That was the theme of the year 2020. Working as a full-time volunteer at a homeless shelter, I encountered many people who contracted COVID and a few who died from the virus. I got to see firsthand how fragile life is—especially for those living on the margins. As a woman, I’m used to being invisible, but these past few years have felt like a weight. Under the pandemic I realized I had very little agency in my life; thus, when lockdown lifted in Illinois at the end of May, I jumped on my bicycle and rode 2,400 miles to the Pacific Ocean, Chicago to Seaside, OR, following an approximation of the Lewis & Clark Trail.

I had plenty of time to think in the 45 days it took me to complete the trek. I decided, per the question put forth in the poem “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, that I needed to live my one wild and precious life, starting by taking risks.

In my piece “Cycle & Circumstances,” I write about the origins of my cycling passion—and how I believe cycling saved me from a chaotic childhood. Following up on that, in 2016 I rode the length of the UK from John O’Groats to Lands’ End in an effort to make sense of the breakup of my marriage. I needed to find once again a place of well-being—the fact that I turned my life upside down to do it is documented in the piece.

Jane Hertenstein is the author of over 90 published stories both macro and micro: fiction, creative nonfiction, and blurred genre. In addition she has published a YA novel, Beyond Paradise (HarperCollins, 1999), and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady (Cornerstone Press, 1998), which garnered national reviews. Jane is the recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Her latest book is Cloud of Witnesses (2018) from Golden Alley Press. She teaches a workshop on flash memoir and can be found blogging at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com.

Ten Scenes of Not Being in Love

Nonfiction / Amie Whittemore

:: Ten Scenes of Not Being in Love ::

1. Sitting on the front porch of a dive bar in Nashville with a man on our first Tinder date (he drank rail whisky on the rocks; I nursed a local IPA), two very drunk women approached us. Having heard our discussion about poetry, they asked to buy copies of my book, they asked to bum cigarettes from the man. I walked back to the gravel parking lot and pulled two copies from my trunk, signing them in the dark, amid the cigarette smoke, on the sour-smelling porch.

Two years later, one of those women found me on Instagram and, since it’s a pandemic, told me she painted lines from one of my poems on her window. That man? We went out twice more. He kissed like saltwater, pale and thirsty. Not my thirst. Sometimes we wish each other happy birthday.

2. In college my friends and I were very into Björk, so we went to the art theater twenty miles away to watch Dancer in the Dark. The haunting, tragic film filled me with restless energy, as if the spring air had stuffed me with lilac buds, as if the night had threaded its wings through my ribs. I walked past my favorite coffee shop and a man I barely knew called out to me to join him and his friends. It was the kind of night where you say yes to strange things, so I said yes.

He and I took a long walk around campus, ending at his efficiency on the other side of town. We drank cheap red wine, listening to Mazzy Star, and he asked if he could kiss me. I said yes.

In those days, I wore my hair in twisty buns, like Björk, like hummingbird nests, held together by bobby pins. They fell around us on the bed like metal rain. After a while, his toothy kisses tired me out. It’s late, I whispered, his head pillowed on my chest, and he offered to drive me home.

Home, in the bathroom mirror, I saw he’d left bruises on my neck, my breasts: lilacs unclenching their watery violets. I ran into him once more, weeks later, between classes. He said he still found bobby pins in his bed.

3. The night after yet another Tinder date, I dreamt my date and I were riding in a self-driving car; the dream turned lucid and I made the car fly, told him we could do anything. I woke ecstatic and texted him in the morning. I was in bed with the Sunday Times, my cats. It was June, the air balmy with promises. Sometimes that summer, he’d bite my thigh and leave such brilliant flowers there, blue and crumpled. Sometimes his kisses were black holes I didn’t want to leave. He talked and talked and never asked me anything. The last time I saw him I left a period stain on his sheets and felt embarrassed though I had warned him I had a body. I had a body I could barely control.

4. My first girlfriend asked me if it was important for both partners to orgasm and that’s how I learned I wasn’t giving her orgasms. This made me try harder, though it also made me wilt and turn toward the blue light that streams from TVs left on in empty living rooms overnight.

My second girlfriend called our sex-life “clitorific” at a sex toy party. I blushed. I still feel like someone who doesn’t know how to give anyone orgasms.

5. At his cousin’s wedding, my husband and I were recovering from one of our—I wouldn’t call them fights. It was less that we fought and more that we retreated, like waves at low tide. Still, the moon swung us back again and again; we too often found ourselves on familiar beaches, exhausted and hurt. We kept touching the parts of the other person’s body where the bruises bloomed, crumpled blue flowers.

The priest didn’t mention the riptide of marriage. Only that the bride and groom had found “not the person they could live with, but the person they couldn’t live without.”

For weeks, my husband and I chewed on that phrase, spat it out like gristle. The tide turned again. I have lived without him for as long as I lived with him: six years.

6. The woman I was dating invited me to join her and two visiting friends for a Nashville bar crawl. Their names, occupations, the way they wore their hair: unimportant. They were a straight couple and the woman loved Anne of Green Gables as much as I did. We talked about Anne on the roof, Anne in the woods, Rilla by the lighthouse in her green dress, poor, doomed Walter. The woman I was dating and the visiting man looked at each other, bemused outsiders to an unfathomable intimacy.

Later, at the woman’s home, we kissed on her bed as she tried to talk me into spending the night for the first time. Her friends in the next room, playing with her dog. Something blue haunted her—I imagined a broken kite caught in her ribs. I wanted to go home, to my cats, to my bed. What she didn’t know then is I had learned how not to feel responsible for the sad things I found in people’s chests—torn kites, wilted bouquets. Keys to nowhere.

7. Taking free yoga classes in a warehouse in Portland before Portland was Portland, I met a white woman named Saige. She had short black hair and two perfect circle tattoos on her inner wrists. One circle had a frog inside it, the other something else (a moth?). I was not good at talking to people I desired then, nor am I now, but somehow I invited her over so I could teach her to knit. And somehow I ended up at her house one evening, for supper, where I learned she and her roommates were eliminating processed sugar from their diets. I thought this was stupid (this was before sugar-free diets were trendy) and I led them through a meditation my first yoga teacher taught me. It involves a forest, a lake, a bear. A key, a throat with a stone lodged in it, if you’re me.

We lost track of each other; I moved away. Returning for a visit two years later, a friend and I saw her at the food co-op. I had to look at her wrists to recognize her.

In the parking lot afterwards, my friend said, damn that girl likes you, and it felt like a drought-thick afternoon, where it feels like it’ll rain but it doesn’t.

8. My first boyfriend was 19; I was 14. Sometimes we sat on the couch in his parents’ basement and took turns running our fingers through the other’s hair. Sometimes he drew sketches of my hands or turned us into cartoons. After he kissed me for the first time, my first kiss, which was wetter and fuller than I expected, he told me he loved me and I said it back not knowing if I meant it, which is the same as knowing I didn’t. But I did feel powerful and worthy when he showed me the blue and broken toys he kept in his chest, and I held them carefully as if doing so could mend them. I thrilled knowing no matter how he touched me he could never touch the stone in my throat, the one that hadn’t learned how to sing yet.

9. Some people want your whole hand inside them. Your whole hand. As if you could cup their swallow-nest heart, the mud and weeds of it. As if then nothing would be empty.

I don’t want anyone’s whole hand inside me. I don’t want to put my whole hand inside anyone else.

10. Two days before the pandemic shut everything down, I went on a first date with a woman. We visited the Frist Art Museum, where an exhibit inspired by the Voyager Golden Record was on display. Images and sounds were pressed onto the record for the aliens so they could understand what it is to be a human on earth, the blue and salt of it. The music quietly played, the images flickered in a dark room. I love the golden record and the woman let me go on and on about it.

Over dinner, she asked questions. Over dinner, I handed her a piece of the gray stone I carry inside, and she handed me a cloth fox in need of mending.

After dinner, we walked in nervous time-stretching circles until we passed our cars twice and had to admit the date had ended. She gave me a succulent. We hugged. We pulled away from each other, the desire to kiss lingering in the air like the promise of rain. I thought about pulling her toward me, making it rain. I thought there would be more time.

She ghosted, or perhaps more aptly, the pandemic’s thick gravity kept her far from my shores. I listened to the songs the aliens might be listening to for days. Sometimes I look at her paintings on Instagram and her palette echoes something inside me—the lilac and blue of them, the green spring of them. The rowdy, manic pink. Something bright inside of me calling out, reminding me of what I want.

From the writer

:: Account ::

At the start of quarantine, I found myself feeling both lonely and with more time than I usually have. I often think about writing creative nonfiction but get intimidated by the scope of it; as a poet, I feel much more comfortable working with a few hundred words rather than over a thousand. This means I often have to trick myself into writing a personal essay, usually by making it as much like a poem as possible.

I have read many lovely vignette-driven essays by writers (who are also often poets) and have long felt the form might get me over my fear of creative nonfiction. Works like The Crying Book by Heather Christle and Julia Cohen’s beautiful lyric essay “Geniuses of Love: To be held at arm’s length is not to be held at all” served both as maps and lighthouses for me—offering both direction and assurance.

I also, in my quarantine loneliness, found myself thinking about past romantic encounters, how some of them held a lot of emotional heat but were not actually moments of love. The moments catalogued here all occur on love’s peripheries—outside it, after it, before it, alongside it. Through writing this essay I have found that these boundary waters have taught me something about how and why I love, what factors can lead me into love’s strong currents or nudge me back to shore.

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press, 2016). She is the 2020 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the reviews editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.