Anne Anthony 5/1/24 Anne Anthony 5/1/24

Debbie Feit

Take Two and Call Your Therapist in the Mourning

You have been prescribed GRIEF...and it's time to take your medicine.

Parentoxetine Hydrochlordied (Extended Release)

Pronunciation: PARENT-ox-e-tine hy-dro-chlor-DIED

Brand Names: Dad-a-pentin, A-mom-icillin, Pep-sad, Depa-cope, Gluca-gone

Be sure to read the directions below so you know what to expect during your course of treatment.

** Warning--This medication is NOT recommended for use in young children**

What is this drug used for?

Developing an appreciation for the fragility of life.

Berating yourself for failing to finish writing that novel you've been working on for ten years and coming to terms with the fact that your pathological need for perfection has resulted in your dad never seeing it published.

Serving as a kick in the pants to finally plan that trip to visit your dear friend who moved to Copenhagen five years ago and who you haven't seen since. Or to at least purchase an end table for your living room instead of just indefinitely adding to your Pinterest board.

Inducing guilt and regret for all the times you rolled your eyes when she called as you were walking in the door from work or in the middle of cooking dinner or the moment you sat down, remote control in hand, after extricating yourself from putting the kids to bed.

What are some things I need to know or do while I take this drug?

You should tell the people in your life that you take this drug. (Chances are good they'll already know.)

There is no need to avoid alcohol when taking this medication.

As this may cause drowsiness or dizziness, do not operate heavy machinery, sign up to coach your nine-year-old's soccer team or feel guilty about skipping book club.

Best taken with food, such as the onslaught of deli trays that will arrive at your home.

Contraindications: Best to avoid taking with other critical life changes such as marriage or divorce, moving cross country, losing your job or birth of your first child.

Take full dose for first seven days for maximum efficacy. You may titrate down after shiva but expect it to take a year or more to no longer feel the effects.

Your prescription may automatically be refilled.

What do I do if I miss a dose?

Consider yourself lucky to have a brief reprieve from the mind-numbing sadness and unrelenting feelings of loss.

What are possible side effects?

Ugly crying jags, intermittent weeping or a flat affect

Insomnia or excessive sleepiness

Loss of appetite or sudden cravings for bagels, macaroni and cheese and other carby delights you stopped eating years ago

Jeans no longer fitting (see: loss of appetite or sudden cravings)

Stomach pain, memory problems, difficulty breathing, increased heart rate, headaches, hives, restlessness and writing of bad poetry

An inability to make critical decisions such as what type of dressing you want on your salad or which color nail polish to choose for your pedicure

A sudden urge to quit your job and apply for an MFA in playwriting, audition for Cirque du Soleil or become a Starbucks barista

Feelings of hopelessness, middle of the night doomscrolling and an unrelenting irritation with your spouse

Side effects may be managed with copious amounts of wine, Xanax or Ben & Jerry's. Spending the day in your pajamas binging on the latest Netflix miniseries may also provide some relief, as will not planning or cooking meals for your family. Monitor use closely. If you are unable to get out of bed, shower regularly or pack your children's lunchboxes for an extended period of time, you may want to consult your doctor or at least call your best friend.

Note

Any scarring that may occur will fade with time. Your body will adjust. Your dosage will taper. And side effects will lessen.

Guaranteed.

Debbie Feit is an accidental mental health advocate, unrelenting Jewish mother and author of The Parent’s Guide to Speech and Language Problems (McGraw-Hill) in addition to texts to her kids that go unanswered. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Abandon Journal, Five South, Passengers Journal and on her mother’s bulletin board. She has been a reader for Five Minutes, an advertising copywriter, and a person who used to be able to sleep without pharmaceutical intervention. Read about her thoughts on mental health issues, her life as a writer, and her husband’s inability to see crumbs on the kitchen counter on Instagram @debbiefeit or at debbiefeit.com.

Anne Anthony 5/1/24 Anne Anthony 5/1/24

Susan T. Landry

The Beach

Americans and Chinese recall memories very differently.

Americans often report lengthy specific emotionally elaborate memories that focus on the self as a central character.

Chinese tend to give brief accounts of general routine events that center on collective activities and are often emotionally neutral.

—Qi Wang, Associate Professor of Human Development, Cornell University

My American Autobiographical Self

My wet feet leave dark stains on the steps of the candy store. The wood of the staircase and the landing are so hot that the watery foot-shaped impressions vanish as soon as I move beyond the moment. By the time I have pushed through the swinging screen door, by the time I have slid open the frost-sticky top of the ice cream chest, by the time I have selected a raspberry Popsicle, a salty ghost of a foot is all that remains. I deposit a handful of dimes, nickels, and pennies and I am out the door, down the stairs, leaving no record of my errand on the silvered wood.

The seaweed forms a ragged line along the beach, halfway between the shallows of the water at low tide and the cement barrier that holds the ocean back during hurricane season. I spend hours in the water. When I cannot stop shivering and my hair hangs in clumps and the skin on my arms is a puckered milky blue, I race up past the seaweed to the soft fine-grained sand along the seawall. I burrow on my belly, my arms and legs so deep in the warm womb of sand, all that can be seen of me is the rounded bottom of my bathing suit and my shoulders, poking out like the wing cartilage of a nested shore bird.

My mother sits with the other mothers in folding beach chairs. The group of women gathers in a half-moon shape so they can keep an eye on the babies, hand out tuna fish sandwiches from the coolers at lunchtime, fumble in their purses to find the dimes and nickels for the candy store, and still keep up their conversations. My mother has summer-pale hair and wears sunglasses, even when she goes in the water to cool off. She doesn’t go swimming or ride the waves. She stands knee-deep, cupping water in first her right hand and then her left, sluicing down her shoulders and arms, over and over. A final scoop of water to soothe her forehead and dampen her hair. Sometimes she stays in the water for a long time, with her hands on her hips and talks with a friend who stands near her, two women with their gleaming salt-licked arms and their sunglasses winking in the afternoon light.

When the women talk among themselves, I hear the murmur of their voices. Like the dull cry of the gulls, the slap of motorboat waves on the sandbar, the rhyming games of the younger children, these melodies rise and fall around me as powerful as the rhythm of the tides.

It is as though I float in the air around my mother and the other mothers at the beach, like the kite that children are flying further down, away from the clusters of women. I am the kite, the thin panels of fuchsia, lime green, aqua, and yellow, now sailing with a swift breeze, the string running from its reel of driftwood, spinning in a boy’s hands. Like the string that connects the boy and his friends to the kite, I am tied to my mother, a woman on the beach. I rise into the sky, ride the song of the ocean, and travel down the rivulets of sand and seaweed. I am there, but not there.

My Chinese Autobiographical Self

The summerhouses line the road and face the sea. Like trees in the forest, these buildings stand rooted to the land; solid, plain-looking relics of an earlier generation. A place by the water; people flock here from the city, seeking sanctuary in July and August. It is the women and children who come. The men stay behind to work. Some men take the highway, arriving late for dinner, rising before dawn for the journey back. Other men sleep in the hot apartments. In the city, the night sky is swollen with light.

The sea is indifferent. Families who come from the city and families who live here all year round; it makes no difference to the sea, to the wind, to the shore birds, to the grains of sand. The children take to the beach like sandpipers, skimming along the flats at low tide. They come with their buckets and their spades, and they go home without them. Their bright kites drift off with the wind, their tumbling beach balls are lost, hidden among the wild roses.

The women, too, come and go, in and out of the water, with towels and lotions, sun hats, and canisters of drinks. They settle into their chairs, facing the arc of the sun, and turn the yellowed pages of novels. They inhale and then release soft plumes of smoke, as though their cigarettes are tiny flares, signals to distant sailors. It is their dance, the coming and going. The moon sets the pace, and the women waltz back and forth, tethered to the rhythms.

One summer, a rust-darkened freighter balanced on the thin bar of the horizon. It inched forward along the bottom of the sky, a boat-shaped silhouette, like a tin marker in an arcade game. A sea accident—a sudden squall, or a fault line in the steel—sent the slow-moving barge to the ocean floor, releasing its cargo of footwear. For years, canvas shoes wash up on the shore, one by one, or at times in matching pairs.

Summer slips away. The men, the women, the children, and the birds scatter across the landscape like so many grains of sand. The ripples of the wind leave their marks on the beach, the stones are worn smooth. Memory is like that; traces of beauty, shoes tangled in a net of kelp.

Susan T. Landry has been an editor on several print literary journals over the years, devoted to memoir & creative nonfiction, in addition to founding and editing Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie. She has been published in several magazines, including Dinty W. Moore's Brevity journal and other online outlets, as well as print collections including Balancing Act 2, an Anthology of 50 Maine Women Writers.

Anne Anthony 4/1/24 Anne Anthony 4/1/24

Angela Townsend

Bones of the Shelter

When your day begins with barrettes from Ezekiel, you have fallen into a good world. You have fallen from great heights. You have a good deal further yet to fall. Whatever comes next, an acrylic skeleton has awarded you eight glittering claws for your greying hair.

When you work with people you cannot live without, the stakes skew high. When a substantial percentage of those people are cats, and one is an acrylic skeleton with his own budget, your situation is always precarious.

But you forget, which is how you survive. You forget that people in more reasonable worlds offer you fistfuls of tickets to be bitter. Your day began with a blood glucose reading of three eighty-nine. Your arteries feel dense with risotto that your Maker has forgotten to stir. You have informed the residents of all worlds that Type 1 diabetes is tame, forbidding them to worry. You have installed amnesia under their empathy. You have carved your bones into gratitude.

You burst into the cat shelter bellowing, “Good morning, beautiful people!” You never remember not to try too hard. When your blood glucose is three eighty-nine, exuberance is essential. Your insulin pump shrieks punk rock, but the turgid cat on the reception desk is louder.

There is a skeleton taller than your boss on the lobby couch. He sits splayed like Homer Simpson on Thanksgiving, his mouth frozen open. Halloween is weeks away, but the people you cannot live without cannot wait for whimsy. He is wearing a paisley fedora. A cat bed fills his lap, and a calico sleeps well. She is a paperweight for every pelvis, with or without flesh.

The skeleton wears a shelter volunteer name tag: Hello! My Name Is Ezekiel. His bones are dusted with the receptionist’s wit. She has commissioned a Name The Skeleton Contest, and apparently you have won.

You forget that you came to the cat shelter after a misbegotten career in ministry. You cough up cobwebs from the last testaments. The receptionist presents you with a Shop-Rite bag filled with barrettes for children, orange butterflies and sparkle-spiders. You commend her for knowing you well. She reminds you that the gift comes from the one you have named.

When you silence your pump, you can hear your boss telling someone that their suggestion is “content free.” You hear his phrase in your sleep, spangled across your press releases and blog posts. Your boss is speaking to an orange cat, who is speaking in expletives. You cannot live without this man, all bluster and improbables. He founded a church costumed as a cat shelter. He Saran-wraps “fatherly” under five fedoras of wry.

You have been here sixteen years, with no training and dilute memories of the life before. You forget, which is how you survive. You expel affection. It is best that the lobby does not know this is only your top layer of cream. You chug a Diet Coke to flood your sugar bowl.

The Director of Operations and the Director of Volunteers are in your office, draped with cats who fell out of the reasonable world. A tortoiseshell without eyes is aqueous in arms. A marmalade cynic bites often. The sanctuary swaddles the just and the unjust. There is no word for “worth” in the world you cannot live without.

You cannot enter your office. A man called Laundry Tony is throwing towels overhead like terrycloth toddlers who yell, “do it again!” He places a washcloth on your head and bursts into song. He is seventy and will never know that you are three eighty-nine. You inform him that he is “glorious and victorious.” He beats his chest. Sweaty retirees and truant teenagers cackle over soapy litter boxes and soiled blankets. You are unfit for worlds where your too-many words fall.

The Director of Operations finds you where you have hidden. Do you remember that today is the Conflict Resolution Workshop? She has shared your sixteen years here, and it took the first fifteen for you to remember that you are children. You have drowned the world in tears at the deaths of cats vicious and ungrateful. She is salty and staccato, and you cannot live without her. She comments whenever your freckles “look weird,” but remembers not to name blood glucose.

You have forgotten the workshop and scheduled a tour. Your donor is driving two hours for an audience with Jellybean. Forgetting is forgiven. The schedule is supple in this world, undulating like the spotted stomachs you touch at your peril.

You are always in danger, but you forget, which is how you survive. You toss at night, banishing dreams where you fold jeans at Target or pipe cream on coffee. The reasonable world has stubby stakes. There could be little to lose. You could keep your adverbs inside. You could get the glucose under control. You could drag your bones to the pulpit and pretend you know answers.

There is a cat on three legs pursuing dual degrees in acrobatics and homiletics, and someone must extract her from the hallway. The Director of Operations excuses herself. You watch the woman you have grown up with fold herself into a corner and raise herself to her full height, screaming quarry in her arms. You know she will lead when your feral faux father retires. You remind him that this is impermissible prior to age ninety.

You slip into the bathroom to question your ketones. They are still angry and purple. You vault into the Community Room and tell people with mops that they are “magnificence on two legs!” Joyce stops scrubbing to hand you a box. She has crocheted you a cat as round as the moon. It is meant to be Roy, the one who died last month, the one who inspired your two-thousand-word blog. You remember that you have fallen into a world where you are paid to bleed two thousand words about a twelve-pound empath. You tell Joyce she is a shepherd.

You put barrettes from a skeleton in your hair and wash your face. You remember your donors’ cats’ names and their children’s names and their fears of highway driving. The back roads were full of Queen Anne’s Lace. Jellybean was worth the wait. They press a fistful of fives into your palm, wet-eyed and contrite. They wish it could be more. People tell you this all day. You do not tell them that you say these words to God all day.

The people you cannot live without are learning their conflict styles. The Founder is Combative. Everyone erupts in snorts and equally revelatory statements: the sky is blue. Cats are despots. Diet Coke has an aftertaste. The Director of Operations is Collaborative. All three vet techs are Avoidant. You are Accommodating, boneless, fit for laps.

The Founder thanks the workshop man. He calls you into his office and tells you not to tell them that the entire exercise was content-free. He says your color looks “off” but your “thing about Roy” was “damn powerful.” You give him your round Roy. You tell him he is a “gigantic goober.”

You are in the sanctuary. You could say more. You have only been here sixteen years, which is not quite long enough to remember you are safe. You have fallen into a good world.

Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Terrain.org, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a 2023 Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.

Anne Anthony 4/1/24 Anne Anthony 4/1/24

Julie R. Enszer

My Mother’s Furniture

House

Moving back to my childhood home with my wife, our two dogs and cat, was a fluke. Our newly rescued pup ran afoul of the law, or at least the local animal control; he could no longer live in our home; he was banned from the county. Exiled from our loving arms for eighteen days, he lived in a crate. I visited daily bringing him treats, taking him on walks, lying with him and crying, while we dithered about where to live. Rent a house somewhere? Buy a small cottage in Michigan or West Virginia? We explored every option, but nothing was quick and easy. My father was moving out of the family home, a two-story colonial in the city, to a ranch in the township. Could we live on Handley Street while we sort this all out? I asked him one day. Yes, he said. Our fate was sealed. Two days before Thanksgiving we drove to Michigan in two separate cars. I picked up our outlaw dog on the way, the cat sat in the passenger seat; my beloved drove our aging Saint Bernard. Fourteen hours later we were all together, safe, in my childhood home.

Royal Blue Couch

For a spell, my mother collected couches, shoehorning as many as possible into the living room and the family room. At one point, she had six couches in the 1,500 square foot house. When we arrived, there were only two. The royal blue was designed to seat three. I cannot remember when my parents bought it. Perhaps when we moved to Handley Street. Perhaps earlier. I have no memories of the house without that couch. It must have been forty years old and it felt like it. The cushions, hard, uncomfortable. The springs broken. It was like sitting on a bench with an overused, crushed, matted cushion. When your bottom finally reached the couch you were nearly lying on the floor. The fabric was worn, not quite threadbare, but that was in its future. I knew the first day we arrived the couch was uncomfortable. I did not know I would sit there every day for nine months. I did not know it would be left in the house for the next owner.

Full Bed

When we arrive, we camp out in my childhood bedroom; sleep in my childhood bed. A full-size mattress on an antique frame. Mother had the set refinished in the early 1980s after my father’s grandmother died; my mother was the only family member that wanted the set. I remember the transformation from dark and musty to clean and bright. The set filled one of the bedrooms in the three-bedroom colonial: a full-size bed, dresser, and vanity with a large round mirror. Each of us kids called that room our own at some point in our lives.

Now here I was in my mid-forties, smashed on a full size bed with my wife of nearly twenty years. Our mastiff pup happily jumping up on the bed trying to join us for sleep. Barely enough room on the bedroom floor for two dogs, the cat. When we woke in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, one of the critters always yelped as a dark foot landed on a paw or tail. I told my wife, In a day or two, my dad will move permanently to the new house, we’ll take the queen bed in the master.

Master Bed

Except, even in the master was not a queen. Another full-size bed, where my parents slept together for over forty-five years. It had been a decade since the beloved and I had slept on a queen-sized bed. We had smaller dogs then. The past years have been on a king, particularly since the law-breaking new pup is a bed sleeper, happy to cuddle up or sprawl across a bed. My parents’ bed smelled like them. Why wouldn’t it? Forty-five years. Even though my dad boasted it was a new mattress only ten years old. We slept on it for a month. On the last day of the year, we went to the furniture store and bought a king size bed with a Hollywood frame. I knew everyone in my family would mock the extravagance, but I could not sleep on a full one more second.

Closet

After my mother’s death, I spent the first week clearing her closets: shoes, coats, sweaters, jewelry and make up. For eight or ten hours a day, I shoveled clothes into garbage bags to donate and piled used make up—rouge, foundation, eye shadow, lipstick—into garbage bags to discard. I could not throw out her possessions fast enough. The labor of cleaning, sorting, discarding was exhausting but less draining than crying. There was sadness at her death, but not enough sadness to stop the cleaning frenzy. It was almost as if that was my mourning—to discard her things.

The summer after her death, I came home for a week to help my father. I cleaned more of the house: more clothes, more towels, more jewelry. All of the things she hoarded, I organized then discarded. Some donations, some giving to friends and other family members, but so much went to Goodwill or to the curb as rubbish. It made me feel good to put her life in order posthumously. I wanted my father to have a home that was more orderly, less cluttered, less filled to the rafters with things of my mother. I wanted him to have a second act in his life, with his new lover, a man; after forty-five years of marriage, my father is gay.

Pots and Pans

When I graduated from college, all I wanted was for mother to give me things to help me furnish my early apartments: a royal blue couch, a burgundy upholstered chair, a set of pots and pans. My mother would not give me anything other than money. She was generous, but not generous with her possessions. These are my things, she would say, I worked and spent my money on them. Around me, my friend’s mother unloaded their used household items on their children, my friends, as they upgraded, downsized and simplified. Not my mother. She held on to it all. Wedging a bit here, stuffing items there.

Twenty-five years later, I could have anything she owned but I wanted none of it. There was something liberating about being able to donate or throw away everything that she wore, everything that she touched, everything that she loved but would not share.

Antique Bedroom Set

Early in our stay, the outlaw mastiff jumps on the antique bed, breaking one of the hooks where the rails attach to the baseboard. We put the box springs and mattress on the floor; store the frame off to the side of the room. One day I take the frame to the local furniture refinisher—the best, most expensive one in town. With a moment of remorse, I want to care for something my mother loved; something she knew and constantly affirmed had value. The man in the shop tells me the bed frame is not worth what it will cost me to fix it. I tell him, I don’t care, I want it fixed. He fixes it. I move it with the dresser and vanity to my father’s new house. It fills his guest room. When we visit the beloved and I will sleep again in that small full-sized bed. Someday, I will arrange transport for these three pieces to whatever home I am living in then. This bedroom set, now repaired again, is my inheritance; most of what working families own has little value, but this set links me to previous generations.

Cabbage Roses

Mother loved mauve. If she could, I think she would have decorated the whole house in mauve. She also loved roses, particularly cabbage roses. Two accent chairs featured for years in her living room combined these passions: painted white wood with an upholstered seat and back featuring mauve cabbage roses. They were not to my taste and already moved to my father’s new home when we arrived. Relief.

A few months later, my father tells me his boyfriend wants them reupholstered. I am surprised at how rage wells within me. The chairs are perfect, I think. The chairs are the perfect expression of mother, I think. I think: If you do not like them, you should sell them, give them to someone who will love them. You cannot take her things and upholster over them for a new life. I do not say any of this. Clearly he can.

Curio Cabinet

When we finally have a date to depart the childhood home, and we are serious about emptying the house so it can be listed for sale when we leave, the small curio cabinet that has sat in the front room, next to my desk becomes my target. I empty the china treasures inside—tea cups and saucers, plates, angels with bells. I give a few items to people who might treasure them and donate the rest. I photograph the cabinet and create a listing on Craigslist at a reasonable price. It is not money I am after; I want someone to love this cabinet like mother. After months of discarding her possessions with glee and rage and anger and sadness, now I want to honor her, placing these final things in homes where people will love them as she did.

Someone responds to the online ad immediately. I strike quickly in response; we text back and forth. The price is fine, but she doesn’t have a car. She lives in the next town over, a 25-minute drive. I grudgingly agree to bring it to her.

I load the cabinet into the car on a gorgeous Michigan summer day and drive the highway with the windows open. When I arrive, the woman doesn’t quite have enough money for the cabinet or for the ten-dollar delivery fee we negotiated. She also does not have any teeth. She is younger than I but looks at least twenty years older; life has been hard for her. She tells me that she wants to put her son’s trophies in it; her son died earlier this year, and her grandmother died just today. The litany of grief and suffering feels too much, but standing at the curb, taking out the curio cabinet, which I had wrapped carefully in my mother’s towels, I know I cannot imagine the pain of this woman’s life. I also know mother would never approve selling her treasure to the woman who stands before me. Still, I take her money; she carries the cabinet away. Driving home, I realize I cannot keep the money. I donate the cash to the local homeless shelter before I even return home. If she were not dead, if my mother were hear to tell this story, to see these actions, she would not know where to direct her rage at me first: selling her treasured curio cabinet or wasting the money on charity. I can hear her say: You could have gotten something nice for yourself with that money, Julie. You kids never knew the value of a dime.

Dining Room Table

When we live on Handley Street and my wife works from home, she sits at my mother’s dining room table. Nearly pristine after years of wear, the dining room set was still well-loved, well-used. I marvel at how mother cared for it. She vacuumed weekly yet there are no nicks or dings to the base. The table top is unmarked after years of protection by custom-made pads with felt and cushions that unfold over each section, each leave as the table expands or contracts. During our months in the house we manage not to damage it; a triumph. Most wooden objects in our life carry some tell-tale scratch, some circle of sweat from a glass of Diet Coke.

On the final day before moving, my cousin’s son and his girlfriend move the table with great care from Handley Street to my dad’s new digs. They carry it carefully into his basement where his boyfriend wants it for family card nights. I am glad to be leaving town; I never want to see my mother’s dining room table in someone else’s basement. She endured so many indignities; what a blessing she never has to see this one.

Glassware

I love my father. I want him to be happy, but when I go to his new house where he lives with his gay paramour and see my mother’s furniture—her cabbage rose chairs, her multiple buffets, one in a light oak the other red oak—I feel rage and loss and grief. When I see my mother’s glassware on the table, when I see my mother’s desk in my father’s new office, I miss my mother. I hold for a moment or even longer the anger she would have, seeing her beautiful things being used without her.

Perhaps while discarding clothes and shoes and make up, I should have also burned her furniture. Perhaps it was my responsibility as her daughter to ensure that no one had any happiness with her furniture outside of her. That might have been the only right and proper way to honor mother. That would have made her happy. She would have felt that just and right. Her things were hers; they were not to be shared.

Now the moment to honor her wishes, to continue her irrational actions, is gone. Here is her furniture. In a house she never saw. In a life of my father she never imagined. Her furniture, her glassware, her table, her chairs. Here are her things being used not by her, not in the ways she intended. I am sad for my mother. My father and his new lover are using them as if they are their own. Which, of course, they are.

Cedar Chest

When I departed Saginaw as a seventeen-year-old in the late 1980s, I wanted a cedar chest. Honestly, I wanted a hope chest. Like the women in the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories, I wanted a cedar chest to hold household linens: embroidered napkins and sheets, hand knit throws, a homemade quilt, and crocheted pillow cases. I wanted linens that would last a lifetime and go with some mythical china and crystal in my future.

My mother’s cedar chest always had an old record player on top of it. I never saw her open it. Later I discover she kept fabric in it. She purchased more fabric than she ever sewed, and she stopped sewing at some point, perhaps when it became cheaper to buy clothes than to make them. Still the cedar chest smells inside and is in perfect shape outside. I wanted it as my hope chest. I wanted to sew pillowcases and embroider them and store them in the chest. I wanted to gather table clothes and cloth napkins to save for my future home. My mother would never allow that. It was her chest, hers. If I wanted one, I would have to get a job and earn money and buy my own.

I left Saginaw with a footlocker from K-Mart, a set of cotton/poly blend sheets for an extra long twin (what was in the dorms at Michigan) and navy blue towels. My mother said the footlocker was just like her cedar chest. I knew that it was not. Nearly thirty years later, the cedar chest that I coveted is now mine. Not only mother’s but my grandmother’s cedar chest, too.

They seem like an anachronism. Does anyone still receive one as a gift in her young womanhood? Do young women gather sheets and napkins and tablecloths and quilts and save them for a future family? Does anyone embroider? Crochet? Quilt? Sew? In truth, sheets and napkins are more disposable than they ever were for my grandmother and my mother. Who has a quilt that lasts a lifetime?

In my mind, I have been filling my mother’s cedar chest for years and years with the things I want in my life that my mother never had: hope for a better day, a cheery disposition, the ability to take difficult news and information and not turn it into depression, the ability to see people as good. All the things that mother never had I store in her cedar chest. I want to build my adult life with these things.

Perhaps by preserving these two cedar chests I am yearning for a time that has passed, a time that will never return. The cedar chests will not carry the linens of my future, though they carry a connection to my past. The era of cedar chests may be over; young women may not have them or want them. That is fine, each generation deserves its own talisman, its own objects to fill with hopes and dreams and desires. What vexes me still is: who will care for these two cedar chests when I am gone?

Upholstered Chair

When I was a child, my mother refinished a chair. I remember her labor on that wooden chair. The thick orange goop that removed the old stain and paint. The hours of sanding. Then washing and staining. She took it to an upholsterer and had them put on a new seat. Thick burgundy wool over a solid, buoyant cushion. The chair sat in the living room for years. At some point, my father took it up into one of the bedrooms now converted into his office. He sat on it while he worked on his computer. When we come to live in the house to save our dog, my cat Vita takes the chair as her day bed.

It is one of the pieces of furniture that I had wanted as a young woman for my own. I planned to move it when we moved out, but it was tucked away in a corner and amid the chaos of packing and loading the U-Haul, I forgot about it. I took it in the car to my father’s new house. He will use it. Perhaps someday I will move it with the antique bedroom set. I am not sad about not having the upholstered chair in my new home. My mother’s furniture brought her no lasting joy, no satisfaction in life. Her furniture was beautiful and pleasurable in moments, but it never made her happy. I know from living in her house, sleeping in her bed, using her dishes, that my own happiness will never come from something of hers. Now that I finally have some of her possessions in my home, I know that just as they never made her happy, they will not make me happy either. I can care for her furniture but must make different choices for life.

Julie R. Enszer, PhD, is the author of five poetry collections, including The Pinko Commie Dyke with illustrations by Isabel Paul (Indolent Books, 2024), and editor of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems by Lynn Lonidier, The Complete Works of Pat Parker, and Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989. Enszer publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. More at www.JulieREnszer.com.

Anne Anthony 11/1/23 Anne Anthony 11/1/23

Frances Hider

Plain Sense

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things...

—Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things

1 … a summer day

In a distant corner at the bottom of our garden where home ground meets the yellow-flowered fields, late afternoon sun plays on the berry-laden hedgerows twined with oval pointed garlic leaves. Meandering here at the end of the day, I crush soft, pulpy wood bark underfoot and surprise a flock of sparrows—who, six seven eight or more quarrel and flutter up.

Ivy scouts among the tangled undergrowth and flushes an orange-beaked blackbird, then another. They squawk, flurry, dark wings skim bottle-green nettles and shake golden seeds from tall grass stems.

Our perambulations create a stir in the lives of others.

In the house, you sleep. Peaceful in a hospital bed with side arms and moving parts, white sheets and soft pillows. You, in a room of medicines and memories, the ever present and the errant past. A sliver of light slips through a chink in the blind to lie stark across your cheek’s pallor.

It’s six p.m. Each day fatigue wins—and you sleep.

In the hedgerow the sparrows settle. The air is clammy, ambient with outsideness, and a warm, feral muskiness, which hints at life passing. In the breeze long arms of wild seeding digitalis heavy with mauve trumpeting flowers wave one to the other. While you sleep, I lie on lumpy ground shaded by long grass moist from a brief summer shower. I too close my eyes but shun slumber.

Our bedroom, with its white sheets and medicine bottles, now accommodates two separate beds, yours and mine. The room bustles with people. There are four,

you say,

and by way of pointing, lift your head from the pillow and gaze into the distance, into the past.

You say,

can you see them? that man over there by the window and a very nice woman . . .

but the thought trails away before the others—persons three and four—

conjured up out of time, can drift into view.

I sorted the problem, you say.

And I realize, you are back at work dealing in the to-and-fro of hospital politics. You, the strong, confident, well-liked anesthetist I first met, silver-haired even then.

And, as if in answer to your question, I almost but not quite catch in the corner of my eye, a figure’s glimmer.

In the refuge of my dwam, I’m lulled by the scuttle and scratch of life in the undergrowth, the buzz of a bee in the fusty recess of a fallen tree, and the sweet scent of moist grass. But in the midst of respite, a thick earthy whiff of organic decay loiters on the warm air. Life festers. The soft skin of my nose crinkles, nostril’s flare. And a rotten vapor of dread seeps into my thoughts.

The course coughing call of a magpie, a black and white passerine delinquent, dissolves the vapor of my thought; but dread lingers . . .

In the bedroom the day has run its course, a night light glows, soft and low. Sleep beckons us both. Side-by-side on our separate beds we doze, Ivy asleep at our feet. At the witching hour you call out—troubled. You lift your head from the pillow and peer into the gloom. And then, sotto voce, address the other of your dream. The wisp of your voice is fluent. Conversational. I strain to hear, eager to know where and in which landscape past your thoughts have landed.

You cough and cough again, saliva catches your throat, tickles the epiglottis. I hear you choke. Panic. I extend an arm from my bed to yours, rest my hand on your shoulder, and let my words, softly spoken, quell the storm. The moment passes. The night passes. Fret remains.

By morning light you are quiescent but weary from the night meander. While I ready for the first chores of the day, your head sinks into the hollowed pillow, you doze mouth ajar, teeth caffeine yellow, endearing, a sliver of pink gum revealed.

2 … memory

On warm air swallows swoop long and low through the stable doors to reclaim their lofty nests. In May, for a day or two, whistling and calling, they loop in and out; rustle eaves, clear old feathers and last year’s bric-a-brac. Twigs, eggshell, cobwebs and fluff, memory held in debris clings to the edge.

Then silence.

But for the white, gloopy droppings on light fittings, rafters and the stable door—the only sign of their presence—the nesting swallows are hidden from sight.

Each morning I sweep the clean wood shavings to make the pony’s bed and pile the soiled flakes ready to remove. And I wonder if the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of bristle against concrete is a reassuring backdrop in the lives of the swallows and nestlings, as their calls and swooping flights are in mine?

Silence will greet me, when later I step in the house; when I pull off my boots, when a litter of soft, white shavings flit from my trouser crease to scatter on red quarry tiles.

Silence . . . yet I know you are there. Awake, motionless, tense, your eyes wide staring at a crack in the ceiling’s plaster, your breath fast and shallow. Where are we, you ask, fretful.

I say,

we are here in our home in Scotland, it’s morning time, you are my loving husband . . .

that’s me, you say . . .

I am your loving wife, I say. We live here with our faithful spaniel, she’s nine years old . . .

that’s old, you say . . .

She’s black with a white ruff and one two three four white tippy-toes I say, as I count each toe with a tap of my finger on your hand. Your eyes focus, your breath steadies, Ivy leaps on the bed, she turns once twice three times, to settle tight against your leg. And the day begins.

Shades of you linger in fields and stables. You climbing over paddock gates, calling Ivy to heel. You delving into feed bins dishing out portions of meal. You with your back to me picking out a horse’s hooves. You whispering into a donkey’s velvet ear. You looping a loving arm over the pony’s neck. You, leaning on a gate smiling . . .

At school you were nicknamed Smiler, so you once told me.

“… and I was less alone,” writes Lia Purpura on finding the “perfect skull” of a small animal among a fall of orange-red leaves below the call of birds in maples and pines. As I sweep the stable floor, as the swallows above nest, memories of you silently warm my day. And I too am less alone.

3 … a day like any other

A day yet to break. It’s mid-morning but could be dusk or dawn. Dark gray skies shroud the tree tops, hold time still. A mist, heavy and wet clings to the air; it muffles my breath, dampens my tread on the soft wood-chipped garden trails.

To my left, veiled by unruly bushes something rustles. High above a bird volunteers a desolate cry. Then all is hushed, sound is softened. Life pending. The day is what the Scots call dreich.

There is a quiet about you today. Yesterday’s chaos of words spilling, teeth chattering, hands fluttering, all that anxiety has dissipated. I’ve left you to rest, comfortable, dozing, a smile on your lips: a kiss on your cheek. While you sleep, I walk our woodland garden paths.

While I walk our woodland garden paths, my unease lightens. That yet to be done—unwashed dishes, abandoned clothes, mounds of paperwork cluttering every surface—fades from conscious thought. Yet darkness lingers. It tightens my innards. A night past, a night still to come. Moist air presses in, settles in rivulets on my jacket, seeps through trouser seams, lingers as a fine net in my hair, and precipitates tiny cold tears on my cheeks and lashes.

In low dreich light, Ivy ploughs a furrow through the long grasses threaded with seeds and studded with water. Later, I will pick out tiny grass awns from the fine black hair on her belly. I like these days. Time rests. And I sally into the muted mist without a backward glance.

The greenhouse looms, ugly in the mist. On the angular regular man-made form the paint is peeling, the timber rotting and panes of glass are missing, or shattered on the flagstone floor. In a single pot a wild-seeded glossy leafed blackcurrant intertwines with the dry twisted arms of a perished vine, life and death coexistent.

In sleep you’re articulate. Awake aphasic. Words have become as slippery as melting ice; your thoughts progressively trapped behind amyloid plaques and tau protein tangles. Once so fluent, our conversations falter and fragment. And I wonder if the sound and form and delivery of English have become like a foreign language. Cruel considering you loved words, studied Old English in years past and spun a joke in French. As you rouse I put my ear to your mouth to catch a whispered word, your head leans into my shoulder, your hair caresses my cheek and the chasm of lost words between us becomes no distance at all.

My low mood lifts. The day is less dreich than I anticipated. Yet, it comes to me in the breach of the clearing mist: between all and nothing, life and death, white and black lies the gray-toned path of dying. While you slip into the gray-toned space between one and the other, I, tentatively, trace a path through our woodland garden.

Across the field fence, obscured by the remains of the mist, the dark shadow of a horse, then another, slide into view like phantoms, arousing fear of the unknown. And I yearn for the touch of your hand.

4 . . . September . . . moonlight and bridges

Moonlight filtered through the undrawn blind casts an ethereal veil. In your chin’s tilt, the offset line of your nose, the curl of white hair around your ear’s lobe, time bends. I glimpse the younger man’s shadow and dare to let a past shade in. You, at the bedroom window, on your feet, by my side watching the Corn Moon light the sky.

Time, eclipsed.

In the early morning, pale-yellow sunlight shimmies over the kitchen sill. Beyond the window, backyard pots of sage, rosemary, flowering parsley, chives and feathered dill thrive still. A magpie, sleek in black and white, postures, bows and ruffles his feathers. He teeters on a wire-edged seed plate, then takes to the air, his wings spread as an accordion might in flight.

You, acquiesce to the morning’s rigmarole of washing face and neck, arms and legs, and everywhere in between. One two three tiny prickles have mysteriously appeared in your bed. Your sheets are changed, clothes gathered over stiff limbs, socks pulled on feet reluctant to be encased.

I saw a magpie preening, I say, by way of distraction. You nod your head.

I say,

he’s a handsome fellow but burdened in his mythical characterization.

This captures your attention, and encouraged, I carry on.

He’s a two-toned symbol of all that is good and all that is evil; he’s a transporter of witches, a sorcerer’s shapeshifter, and the devil’s blood lingers on his tongue, or so the Scots say. He’s cursed for refusing the Ark’s shelter and is said to steal the souls of gossiping women—you grin as I mime “gossiping women.” Yet, to others he’s sacred, a bearer of good news, a symbol of love who once each year joins his kin, forms a magpie bridge, spans the Milky Way, so forlorn lovers might meet.

5 … leaves have fallen

I’m late to rise. Before this day spins out of control, before your need for my care overtakes the quotidian, I, dog at heel, step into a late September morning’s warm embrace. Sunlight skims my cheek. My hand brushes the needled fronds of aromatic rosemary and releases the fragrant scent, which lingers in my wake.

Ahead, in the woodland’s cool grip, Ivy flurries. She disrupts the nettle-thick undergrowth replete with white anemones still in flower, her beating tail a beacon of spaniel zeal. I pass an old holly bereft of berries; it leans across the path on stick and stem. Towering overhead, Scots pines—their gray trunks thick with strands of yellow large-leafed ivy curling up and around—give shaded cover. Wings slap as a wood pigeon takes flight, then another. Ivy glances back, beckons. And deep into the shaded canopy of contemplation, I follow.

It is days and months and years since we sat hand in hand in the clinician’s office. When you, laughing a little, looked to me for help with the date, the prime minister’s name, and with counting back from one hundred—in increments of seven; your grip on my hand tightening when you tried to name our location and recall five random objects after five minutes’ duration. You could tell the time—it was two p.m.—and draw the face of a clock. But for all your talents, drawing was never one, and the wonky clock face on the page screamed denial.

In the carpark—away from the airless room, the ailing spider plant on the dusty window sill, unforgiving chairs and unbearable kindness—we reassured ourselves: that it wasn’t that bad, that we would cross the bridges as we came to them.

I recall the time you first asked for reminders of once familiar family and friends, children and dogs. Was it shame I saw in your face? We were in France. I remember it well. I wrote out a family tree, which you poured over, underlined names and dates in thick black marker pen. Later and later still, in the small hours of the night, you slipped out of bed and checked it again. Did you think I was asleep?

Corrupted memories, loss of words, confusion of time and place. Between the random and the lucid, the frailty and fatigue, you are you. And I embrace the person you are. But admit I miss the person you used to be.

I have come full circle. Underfoot, the path is littered with early fallen russet brown leaves and lime-green winged keys of maple trees scattered in yesterday’s breeze. As I step out of the woodland, the house in sight, I glimpse a future time. By the garage in a grim spot trapped by a wall, alongside a spiral of rusted wire and discarded irregular shaped stones, there lies, scattered in disarray the wing, the bone and downy feathered breast of a pigeon. All that remains.

I haven’t got long––very short, you say, in a moment of lucid thought.

At night, as you doze, I stretch my arm across our two beds and lay my hand on yours. Curled in a cocoon of blankets Ivy snuffles in her sleep. The relentless passage of linear time, marked by the dresser’s ticking clock, echoes and echoes in the room.

Yet the house is timeless in the familiarity of its sounds; the clicking clock, the distant vibration of the kitchen fridge, an unexplained creak, the soft burr of a car passing by, the muffled too-wit of an owl in the garden calling its mate and the eerie answering too-woo.

I put aside the task of imagining the unimaginable, in this moment the future has no place. I allow my sadness to subside and take comfort in the plain sense of things, the present, and the warmth of your hand beneath mine.

Author’s Note:

Lia Purpura, “Poetry is a Satisfying of Desire for Resemblance,” in Rough Likeness: Essays, (Louisville, Kentucky: Sarabande Books: 2011), 26. The author refers to a blue sky in the original text not maples and pines.

Frances Hider won the Women on Writing creative nonfiction essay competition in 2021 with her essay “Safe Haven.” She lives and writes in Scotland.

Camille Griep 10/2/23 Camille Griep 10/2/23

Leah Mueller

Eulogy for an Almost-Ex

I’m not sure how we found out about ex-lovers’ deaths before Facebook was invented. The last time I saw you was in 1993. An awkward yet pleasant visit, filled with cannabis and sexual tension. I had a hunch it would be our last. You dropped me off on a street corner and drove away in your Camaro. I moved every few years, trying out different cities like they were shoes. You remained sedentary, staying in the same shabby apartment for almost two decades. We didn’t have any friends in common. If it weren’t for social media, I might’ve spent the rest of my life wondering about you.

When we first met, you already had a girlfriend. Supposedly, she gave birth to several kids and became a dental hygienist. But that was later. Our furtive affair lasted a year, overlapping your real relationship. You told your girlfriend about our trysts. Of course, she blamed me and not you. Why do people do that? I owed her nothing, but you owed her everything. You can’t betray someone if you don’t even know them.

It didn’t help that she resided in the suburbs, and I lived right next door. Your apartment was only a few inches from mine, on the fourth floor of a cockroach infested apartment building. Chicago’s north side had thousands of dwellings like that during the early 80s. Hive-like boxes, overstuffed with tenants. Bodies in every available crevice. I was too young to care.

I could smell your cologne when you left for work. My senses went into overdrive as I lay on my futon, listening to your morning preparations. They were always the same. Loud hissing of shower water, followed by blasts of wakeup music. You rustled through your closet, banged your cupboard doors a few times, and wandered into the hallway. The elevator whooshed you away.

You tempted me with your jazz collection. Miles Davis. Stanley Clarke. John Coltrane. One night, I crept across the stained hallway carpet and knocked on your door. After ushering me inside, you gestured towards your Formica table. “I was just getting ready to smoke a bowl. Care to partake?”

You pinched a bit of Mexican marijuana from a dusty Ziploc bag and pressed it into your pipe. Ignited the contents with your lighter. Handed the pipe to me, smiling. “I don’t have much left.” Your tone was apologetic. “But there’s enough for tonight.”

I spent the next three evenings at your apartment. It was one of those humid, insufferable Chicago summers. Nighttime temperatures hovered in the mid-eighties. No one in the building could afford air conditioning. A rattling fan in your window moved the hot air in lazy circles.

We drank cheap wine and talked about death. This was an unconscious ploy, designed to keep us from thinking about sex. “I’ve always had a hunch that I wouldn’t live long,” you said. “Even as a kid, I couldn’t imagine going past fifty. Whenever I try to picture myself as an old person, I draw a blank.”

“I know what you mean.” I took a huge gulp of wine from my glass. “But the women in my family live a long time. I’m hardwired for longevity.”

On the fourth night, we discussed Kurt Vonnegut’s book, “Cat’s Cradle.” Though we were unclear about the plot, we recalled a heady scene in which the two main characters made love with the soles of their feet. It was the best sex they’d ever had. Vonnegut called the technique “boko-maru.”

The premise seemed implausible, but we decided to give boko-maru a whirl. You pushed your battered furniture into one corner. We removed our shoes and placed them side by side, in two neat rows. They looked comfortable together, like old friends.

Finally, the two of us reclined on the floor with our heads against opposite walls. We pressed our feet together and waited for something to happen. You wiggled your toes against mine. Our insteps quivered together. My heels pulsated with an odd warmth that seemed to come from nowhere. Four nights of pent-up erotic tension radiated through our soles.

“I’m starting to feel something,” you confessed. “It’s exciting.”

“We must be doing it right.” Such a clever comment, made under duress. I’d gone beyond nervousness and headed into the realm of pure terror. Like I was falling into the Grand Canyon in slow-motion and would never be able to climb back to safety.

A few minutes later, we decided to switch our focus to more conventional sexual methods. The two of us had finally found a language we could understand. We were young, so our copulation ended quickly. Afterwards, we lay on our backs and gazed at the ceiling. “I feel so close to you,” you said.

Our affair went downhill afterwards, but I didn’t hold it against you. I knew the rules and had decided to break them. You were just another guy caught in a romantic triangle. I fantasized about you leaving your girlfriend and spending your time with me. On weekends, I heard her voice through the wall. When she saw me in the hallway, she sneered and turned her head away.

I moved out of the building, but that didn’t fix our problem. A year later, I relocated to Seattle. We sent each other a couple of postcards. I had a long series of recurring dreams about our apartment building. They featured three different scenarios:

I walk down Granville Avenue towards our building, excitement growing as I draw closer. The blocks keep getting longer, but I trudge forward, hoping to arrive before everybody leaves.
I stroll through the hallway corridor towards your door. You aren’t expecting me. I’m not sure if you’ll be home. I wake up before I have the chance to find out.
I’m standing in the downstairs lobby beside a row of mailboxes. I’ve decided to rent an apartment in the building. A temporary lease, until I return to my real home in Washington. Everything looks just like it did in 1982.

I visited Chicago on several occasions. You’d already split up with your girlfriend. It felt weird to walk into our old apartment building and surprise you with a visit, just as I had in my dreams. But you were always glad to see me. You threw open your door and invited me inside. Rolled a joint. Apologized for not having more marijuana. Cleared a space so I could sit at the table.

Your apartment never changed. A jogging suit hung in the bathroom, unused. An acoustic bass perched in the corner like a watchful owl. Your cheap stereo stood near the window, surrounded by a mound of albums. “Listen to this,” you said, flipping a record onto the turntable.

During those years, we had sex exactly once. You reminisced about our boko-maru experience and said that you wanted to try it again. I hesitated because I had a boyfriend. The two of us weren’t getting along, however. I reluctantly agreed, hoping for a blissful experience that I already knew was beyond my grasp.

We sprawled on your stained carpet and pressed our feet together, but nothing happened. It wasn’t your fault, or even mine. Perhaps our passion required hotter temperatures, or we needed to be five years younger and almost in love. Your toes felt chilly and hard against mine, as if they were made from stone.

We stumbled over to your couch. The act didn’t take long. Afterwards, we wandered to a small park near Lake Michigan and stared at the waves. You looked satisfied, like you had proven something to yourself.

“That was so intense,” you said. “As always.”

Do two people ever have the same experience together? “I’m glad.” My voice sounded soothing, like I was trying to comfort you. But I was the one who needed consolation. I scooped a couple of fallen maple leaves from the grass. The brilliant red and orange hues made me think of flames. “I miss autumn colors. The Pacific Northwest mostly has evergreens.” I stuffed the leaves in my purse. “I’m going to dry these when I get home.”

I kept the leaves for a while, but they eventually crumbled into dust. We never had sex again. Our infrequent visits settled into a strange mixture of comfortable familiarity and submerged desire. During our last meeting, you lamented your lack of a girlfriend. “I keep having these relationships that last a couple of months, then fizzle. Maybe someday my luck will change.”

A thunderstorm raged outside your window, rattling the flimsy panes. I had tickets to a Neil Young concert. The outdoor amphitheater was forty miles from Chicago, so I’d arranged a ride with a friend. I hoped the rain would stop in time, but it didn’t look likely.

“I wish I could come along,” you said. “I’m busy tonight, but I’ll give you a ride to your meetup spot.”

When we reached our destination, you turned towards me. “I’m still attracted to you. Perhaps we can throw a blanket in the bushes or something.” Your tone was only half-serious.

I laughed. “Well, I’m flattered. I feel the same, really. But I need to meet Maggie in half an hour. Thanks for the ride.” I gave you a hug and jumped from the car. “Maybe we’ll see each other around.”

Those words weren’t the last we spoke to each other, but they were close. You found a steady girlfriend and moved out of your apartment. I married a kind, intelligent man who eventually died from cancer. His death was long and painful. I’ve never seen someone fight so hard to stay alive. Is life worth that sort of battle? I would have given up much sooner.

In July 2021, I drove from LA to Chicago on Route 66. It was a strange, unsettled time. My husband had been gone less than three months. The protracted coronavirus madness had subsided, at least temporarily. People were re-learning socialization. I found your cellphone number on Facebook. Perhaps we could get together for a beer. Chat about the past. Compare battle scars. The kind of shit old people do when they haven’t seen each other in three decades.

Your voice sounded just as I remembered. “Sorry, I’m at a softball game. I’d like to talk later, though. It’s been a rough year.” I could hear cheering in the background. “Can you call me in a day or two?”

“Sure,” I said, but I never did.

You didn’t spend much time on social media, but last year you were online more often. You took up landscape painting and shared your creations with the world. Sometimes you commented on my Facebook posts. Your tone sounded cheerful, even flirtatious. I never suspected that you were posting from a hospital bed.

One morning I turned on the computer, clicked the Facebook icon, and instantly saw your face. The second anniversary of my husband’s death had come and gone. Your 66th birthday was three weeks away. You were never going to celebrate it, because you were dead.

Your distraught brother chronicled your demise in painstaking detail. He harbored a lot of rage towards the medical system. Shortly after our last phone conversation, doctors found cancer in your esophagus. They opted against outpatient treatment, confining you to the hospital for a year and a half. You spent your last months on a feeding tube.

There must have been a monetary motive for their decision. Your brother’s anger seemed to corroborate my hunch. He wrote eloquently about your final days. How he wiped the bile from your mouth when your digestion failed you. How you chose silence over music, because you were in survival mode and could focus on nothing else. How you longed for an ice-cold, fruity beverage and he finally brought you one. You sipped your Gatorade with perfect, monk-like concentration. Lime-cucumber. Who knew there was such a flavor?

Your brother’s pent-up words tumbled onto the page. He had kept your illness secret. Only your closest family members knew that you were in the hospital. Like many sick people, you didn’t talk about your cancer. The disease holds an unwarranted stigma. Its sufferers are often consumed by shame, as if they carried a curse that could spread to others.

The usual condolences appeared beneath your brother’s post. “I’m sorry for your loss.” “He’s in God’s hands now.” Well-meaning proclamations that struck me as woefully off-base. Fear of death creates many euphemisms. Our loved ones don’t pass, like they were wandering through a hallway into the Great Beyond. We don’t lose them, they die. After sixty-four years, I still don’t know where we go after we leave our bodies. I hope we get some well-earned rest.

On the other hand, perhaps cancer patients want their loved ones to think of them as healthy and strong. Which is something I can understand. I like to remember the two of us strolling down Broadway to shoot pool at the Double Bubble. Or climbing the fire escape ladder to our rooftop and lighting sparklers. Or just sitting at your kitchen table, listening to Miles Davis with perfect concentration.

Leah Mueller's work appears in Rattle, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Citron Review, The Spectacle, New Flash Fiction Review, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She is a 2022 nominee for both Pushcart and Best of the Net. Leah's flash piece, "Land of Eternal Thirst" appears in the 2022 edition of Best Small Fictions. Her two newest books are The Failure of Photography (Garden Party Press, 2023) and Widow's Fire (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Website: www.leahmueller.org.

Camille Griep 9/1/23 Camille Griep 9/1/23

Keith J. Powell

Bog Baby Pant Rip

Alan and I meet for coffee and both recognize the woman with the expensive stroller and cruel French braid as someone we went to high school with, even though we can’t pluck her name from the tips of our tongues (she ran in a different circle than us but all the attractive girls had a certain baseline fame in those younger days) and so I suggest saying hello but Alan shakes his head and when I rise anyway he snatches his coffee and zips out the door and I don’t know why he rushes off but before the door to Deja Brew even swings closed I’m texting our group chat, telling everyone how Alan and I bumped into a girl he’d had a crush on in high school and when she waved at us he ran away spilling his vanilla iced latte with extra whip on his pants and everyone is LOLing at the thought of Alan soggy and dripping with cream and asking what happened next so I say Alan got flustered, tripped and fell in the doorway splitting the seat of his Brooks Brothers, and that he tried to act like he wasn’t embarrassed but I could tell he wanted to cry and by this time Alan is in his car reading this unspooling thread, trying to set the record straight, but it’s too late, too too late, the yarn is already braided into my cannon of Alan lore — like the summer he and his college roommate spent grooving to Santana, shaving each other’s chest (the Summer of Smooth) or the day he went to the office wearing a fringed woolen poncho and ten-gallon hat (he’d heard Wild West was the new business cas) — and understand, I do wonder why I can’t stop spinning these fantastical Alan tales especially considering he’s kept so many shameful truths from my drinking years but I’m nowhere near prepared to pull at that loose string and instead continue onward, explaining how this isn’t even the first time Alan’s fallen and ripped his pants running from a girl — that in high school it happened so much his nickname was Bog Baby Pant Rip (autocorrect swaps “big” for “bog”), and they all say “yeah I can see that” while Alan swears that I’m a liar, a maniac, and everyone replies “sure, Bog Baby, sure, why would he make that up?”

Keith J. Powell is co-founder of Your Impossible Voice and has recent or forthcoming work in SoFloPoJo, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, 100 Word Story, and The Disappointed Housewife. Find more at www.keithjpowell.com.

Camille Griep 8/1/23 Camille Griep 8/1/23

Bella Mahaya Carter

Planted | Ghost of Christmas Past

Planted

I fill two terracotta pots with lavender cosmos and place pink and white impatiens underneath the camellias. Still, six weeks pregnant, I don’t have the strength or stomach to yank the dying rose bushes and create a new summer bed, like the realtor suggested.

“I’ll do it,” Jim says, dragging my recliner chair through the sliding glass doors onto the brick patio and bringing me a glass of water. It’s noon, but not too hot for July.

He sinks a shovel into the ground, digs, and with leather-gloved hands, twists and pulls thorny stems.

I close my eyes and wonder, when was our child conceived? At what moment? My calendar says we had sex on May twenty-sixth. I’d gotten up early to call my mother and sisters while Jim slept and crawled back into bed before he awakened. I must have charmed him into me, knowing I was ovulating. But then again, he never needed my charm—he had plenty of his own.

I didn’t feel the moment of conception. No owl hooting. No choir of angels singing Halleluiah. No magical feeling deep inside my womb. No flash of recognition or spark of new life.

But our sex afterglow lasted longer than usual. It lingered into the afternoon as we held hands in the back seat of our realtor’s white Mercedes on our way to see three, small Spanish-style houses walking distance from Melrose Avenue.

It lingered into the evening listening to Ron Carter’s band at the Catalina Bar and Grill. A jazzy night filled with sexual innuendo and touching, we kissed with red, wine-stained lips, and smiled at each other in the dark. Was conception happening while I tapped my foot to acoustic bass notes?

Or had our child’s life begun before that night?

Was she conceived fifteen years earlier at my surprise twenty-second birthday party in Grace Scripps Hall? I barely knew Jim then, but he watched me give a male stripper a run for his erect, gyrating money. The young women of Grace had found it fitting to celebrate me, their Resident Advisor, in this way, perhaps because of my fearless rendition of “Flamin’ Mamie” performed spontaneously at freshman orientation, where I hammed it up big time on the Miss America steps stage.

Or, perhaps, our child’s conception had been set into motion the night Jim and I first spoke in Merrill’s dorm room. Stoned, sprawled over her down comforter, coupled away from the others, we gazed out the window into the courtyard. Palm trees. Ivy. Terracotta roof tiles. Through the pot and purple, shadowy moonlight, we decided the campus looked more like a castle. Together, we weaved a tapestry of stories about stone walls, turrets, a draw bridge, and a mote.

Later, he asked, “May I walk you home?” We laughed because “home” was down the hall. We shared sleep but not sex because I first had to break up with a newish, impotent boyfriend.

But what if the inception of our child’s life took place before we even met? Had our baby been a speck in the universe—a particle floating in my great, great grandmother’s body?

There were numerous possible points of entry, and many seeds planted.

“How’s this?” Jim asks.

I open my eyes. He is kneeling beside our new summer bed, sparkling with pink petunias, orange and yellow marigolds, red dianthus, and purple salvia, bordered by blue lobelia and white sweet alyssum.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

I watch him burrow into the rich, fragrant earth, loosening root balls and patting soil, and I think, my husband is planting me a garden.

Ghost of Christmas Past

The living room floor was a sea of torn wrapping paper. All eyes were on Mom. Even the grandkids looked up from their toys to watch Nonna unwrap Papa’s present. She’d saved the best for last. Her eyes twinkled. She removed the red bow and stuck it on her wrist like a corsage, smiling at her husband. Mom untied the ribbon with her knobby, dexterous fingers, removed the paper, and shook a rectangular box. She lifted the lid and peeked inside. Her smile vanished. She stared at her gift.

“Do you like it?” Ralph asked.

Mom hesitated, then said, “No.”

Kicking a piece of reindeer wrapping paper off his brown leather slipper, Ralph stormed out of the room.

Silence.

“What happened?” my eight-year-old nephew asked.

“I was just being honest,” Mom said. “What was I supposed to do, lie?” Tears filled her eyes.

“What is it?” my sister asked.

Mom held up a massage gift certificate.

“That’s nice,” my other sister said. “It sounds very relaxing. You could definitely use that.”

“I was hoping for something—” Mom paused and added, “more personal.”

I’m not sure what she expected. Fine jewelry? Chanel N°5? A wide-angle lens for her Pentax?

After church, all sixteen of us gathered around Mom’s table: Italian lace cloth, gold-rimmed china, crystal, polished silver, starched napkins, place cards, candles, and a poinsettia centerpiece. After the Antipasto, Mom served Tortellini in chicken broth, followed by turkey with all the trimmings: potato casseroles, stuffing, cranberry sauce, fluffy, home-baked bread with butter, string beans in garlic and olive oil, and later, homemade cookies, pies, and Neapolitan Struffoli.

Sated, we retired to the living room, the morning’s mess cleared. Mom played Christmas carols on the piano. Some of us sang, others unbuttoned a waistband and complained of being too full.

The next day, Mom ended up—as she often did after Christmas—in bed with lower back spasms. For seventy-two hours, she did not leave her room. She dozed, stared at snowy tree branches outside her window, and cranked up the heating pad while knitting and watching TV. She was done planning, shopping, baking, decorating, wrapping, cleaning, and entertaining. Extended family and friends had received her handwritten cards and tins of home-baked sweets. She’d been driving 100 miles per hour and crashed—for the second time that season. Her grown children and grandchildren would soon return to their own lives.

***

Thirty years have passed since that last time our whole family gathered for Christmas.

Every year since, Mom’s “No,” my ghost of Christmas past, shows up around Thanksgiving. “Slow down,” it says, but I forget.

In 2012, after Mom’s heart attack, I surrendered all holiday tasks to sit by her hospital bedside. I was given a get-out-of-Christmas-jail-free card. It was the holiest of seasons.

You don’t need someone to die for that, my ghost of Christmas past whispers.

Bella Mahaya Carter, an award-winning author of three books, believes in the power of writing to heal and transform lives. A devoted wordsmith and lifelong student of spiritual psychology, Bella facilitates online writing circles for writers, artists, healers, and seekers. She’s currently working on an intergenerational family memoir in Flash.

Camille Griep 8/1/23 Camille Griep 8/1/23

Carol Phillips

Altered Realities

On June 29, 1979, I strolled into the Golden Gate Park from Fulton Street hoping to find a place out of the cold wind blowing in San Francisco’s ubiquitous fog. I had an hour to wait until I would meet friends and view the King Tut exhibit.

I followed an earthen path through Monterey cypresses and pines that grew out of a carpet of ferns. Wind roared through the upper branches of the hundred-foot trees but as I walked, the air grew still and almost warm. And almost silent too—not even rustles from the squirrels, rabbits and birds I knew were around—only the soft crunch of my footsteps as I walked on dried needles.

The path sloped down a short ridge and opened where it met two other trails to create a glen where a fallen log, spotlighted by the sun, invited me to sit. I relaxed into the stillness before pulling out my book, Lord Foul’s Bane, from my purse and got lost in the magical world of the Land. The Land where the leper Thomas Covenant somehow suddenly appeared and then just as suddenly left. The Land where he was no longer sick, but infused with power he didn’t understand.

Sirens cracked the silence—police, fire engines, both? I didn’t know. I tried to find the source of the maelstrom swirling around the edge of glen but saw only the trees. I felt someone coming, but there was no one. A man appeared on the path to the right of me, standing, watching me. He appeared as suddenly as Thomas Covenant appeared in the Land. An average-sized man. Ragged. Homeless I figured. Maybe from the camp just off Haight-Asbury. I watched as he moved towards me and stopped a few feet in front of me.

We looked at each other. His eyes held fear but determination also. “Do you have any money? I’m desperate. I need your money.”

“No,” I lied. “I have no money.”

“Not even some change?”

“No. No change.”

He stepped closer. “I don’t believe you. Do you want me to take your money? I’m desperate.”

I looked at him for a moment, then reached down to get my wallet. Sirens filled the air, wrapping us and the glen in incessant high-pitched wails.

The man startled. “Wait. Stop. You’re a cop, aren’t you. Don’t pull a gun on me. You’re a cop. I can tell. Don’t shoot me.

“No,” I said, concern now rising from my gut. “I’m not a cop. I don’t have a gun. I’m just getting my wallet.”

He leaned closer to me as if trying to see inside my purse. “Okay.”

Letting out a breath, I pulled out my wallet and gave him a twenty-dollar bill. Half of what I had. “I need the other twenty to take my friends out to dinner,” I told him.

“Give me your money. All of it.”

We looked at each other again and I felt like there were just the two of us; like the sirens created a barrier beyond the trees and cut us off— him and me—from the rest of the world. It would have been romantic if he wasn’t robbing me.

I gave him the other twenty, hiding $.89 in change. He plucked the bills from my hand. I watched him back up the slope I had descended.

“I need this money. I know you’ll call the police. You know what I look like.”

He continued to slowly back up the hill. “You know I have brown hair; I’m wearing blue jeans and a black jacket.” I’m in your power he seemed to tell me.

Then the man was gone. Vanished. Like Thomas Covenant disappeared from the Land. Silence descended—the wails of sirens gone as abruptly as they started.

I let the quiet, the stillness, seep into my soul, then picked up Lord Foul’s Bane wondering if Covenant could stay in the Land forever.

“Carol!” I don’t know if I said this out loud or shouted the words in my mind. “You bloody fool. Get out of here. You could have been beaten up, raped, killed.”

I put my book in my purse and walked toward the museum. The glen and the man and the robbery and Thomas Covenant pushed from my mind by the growing voices of the crowd waiting to be admitted to the King Tut exhibit.

A tent had been set up in the staging area in front of the de Young Museum and wine could be had for a dollar a glass. Just what I needed. A glass of wine before my friends arrived. I made my way through the crowd to the table and asked for a glass. I pull out my wallet and suddenly remembered I had no cash. I placed the $.89 in my outstretched palm and turned to the man beside me: “May I have eleven cents for a glass of wine. I’ve just been robbed, and this is all the money I have.”

“Robbed?” the man said, handing the server a dollar and me a glass of wine. “Where? What happened? You need to report this to the police. Now.”

I didn’t think telling the police would do any good. Besides, I remembered my feeling as the man disappeared: I have him in my power. I didn’t want to use that clout any more than Thomas Covenant wanted to use his newly found power.

But my benefactor dragged me off to find a cop who dutifully took notes and said: “We probably won’t find him.”

I went looking for the glen some days later. I didn’t find it. Only the memory lingered—a waking dream someone called it. An altered reality. Like the Land. One that costs forty bucks admission.

Carol Phillips’ essay, “Waiting In Time,” appears in the Main Street Rag Publishing Company’s anthology About Time. Her short story “Driving Lessons” won Second Place in the Carolina Women’s 2020 Writing Contest. Carol has written columns about mild traumatic head injuries and invisible disabilities for the Chapel Hill News, part of the News and Observer group. In addition, her short stories and haiku have appeared in small journals. She has been a member of the NC Writers’ Network since 2006, and served as a Regional Rep for four years.

Camille Griep 6/1/23 Camille Griep 6/1/23

Jack Bedell

Just One Round

I’m always good for a round or two, and my kids know it. Last night, my son walked in with his laptop open and YouTube already fired up. He wanted to know the best single round of boxing I ever saw. Everything in my heart wanted to tell him the 14th round of Ali-Frazier III, but I knew I couldn’t live that pain again so told him to load up the first round of Hagler-Hearns. From the opening bell, Hagler was coming forward, just gunning. Hearns had a clear choice between fighting the fight he knew he had to fight to win and fighting the fight Hagler was coming to get. I told my son life doesn’t always put the choice of doing what we need to do on the table, so we watched three minutes of Hearns setting his feet and throwing hands with a bigger, stronger champ who didn’t know a single thing about backing up. No need to say how that would end up for Hearns in a couple of rounds, but as my old man would tell us both if he could, there’s never any shame in going toe to toe in the ring, even if it means a short night the other cat’s way.

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. His work has also been selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

Camille Griep 6/1/23 Camille Griep 6/1/23

Leslie Cairns

Just Don’t Do Mermaid

My husky plays with her dollar tree teddy bear: flinging it in the air, watching it spiral near the ceiling fan, and smirking at me when she misses – or catches it. She sleeps with it upside down, near the concave of her belly, as she dreams of Greenies, and chasing field mice, and other unsavory things. She gnaws at its ears and licks it as if it’s a baby, or a fair weather friend. Her longing, catching the bear so it cannot escape – the fever of it, makes me think of before I lost you, forever.

I held onto you then, too. I didn’t grab your ears but I wanted to. I planned lunch dates you sighed about near your birthday. Your feet wiggling in your flip flops, the pedicure you got without me. You got cared for by someone else. Someone rubbed your feet where you planted them near lilies, near orchards, the garden I watched you make as the night fell and the dust settled near the cobwebs and the crevices and the polished silver, nestled in the drawers, as they always were. You taught me home, and you showed me wedding dress shows that made me believe – for a moment– that you would help me pick one out someday.

Just don’t do mermaid, you said with a laugh. I thought of how mermaids were magic, and as we sat across from each other – mother and daughter except not – we were magic too. We never should have met. I wondered, if like fish tale green envy and mottled up nail polish that ferments– if we would last, or implode, from what we kept bottled up.

The magic is gone, you said to me once. We used to fit, but now I just need some space.

We’d exchanged words that thumped out loud in moonlight – scared rabbit on exposed skin, waiting for a moment , a salve, for everything to change. Except, of course, it never did. Like the phone that hangs heavy in my hands on your birthday, the calls I almost make – the peonies I almost send from states away– the dresses I won’t wear because I don’t want to pick one without you. The weddings we won’t mark on our calendars, the Xs getting closer and closer to days of magic, where our heads would be bent towards each other, curls spiraling, as we picked out lavender lattes or wine bars, cheese or charcuterie boards of glistening meat. If we would sit my in laws with your family, if we could bend two families at the root, making them complete and beating again.

There’s a kind of sensual loss in the way we almost planned my very best life, my very best day. Like the shriveling of the nose after smelling juniper on lounging summer days. The iced tea in the fridge too sweet, but you still devour it. Sometimes I want to draw a mermaid, make her hair turn ugly and sinister. Braid it back around her head like a crown with spears and thorns and gravel. As if the mermaid dress was what made us dissolve. As if it was me, peeking back at the episode with the tight torso and the long tail, the longing I felt there, then pretended I didn’t–

That our difference in dress and style was what did us in, not something larger, more oceanic, more wide and yawning and trite and earthquaking and dividing– the words we cannot utter, the love that fizzled out, the way the tides change without giving us a shout –

Instead I blame the dress. I sneak into a store and spill coffee grinds on the tallest mermaid fin. I hope a bride’s day is ruined like mine was. I hope that she feels that loss of dreams, the shifting of the skin.

And then, and then, I hate myself for it. I put the dress on, all ruined and grotesque. I picture you telling me it’s going to be alright. That even if the dress is ruined, our love – our love – still somehow fits.

Leslie Cairns lives in Denver, CO. She has a prose chapbook, The Food is the Fodder, with Bottlecap Press. She also has upcoming work in Ellipsis Letters, Fulminare Review, Moss Puppy Mag, and others.

Camille Griep 6/1/23 Camille Griep 6/1/23

Mario Lowther

Burrard View Park

Johnson enters Burrard View Park by the southwest corner, near the daycare center. Between the daycare and the tennis courts there’s a swath of scrub grass, strewn with dry maple buds and tiny twigs that crunch under Johnson’s black leather boots. The uneven ground rolls like a concealing carpet. This corner of the park is remote, yet the grass is cut, the swath tended. Manicured, but little used, little enjoyed.

Back at their dumpy little post-war home on Oxford Street, Johnson’s wife Annie has almost everything boxed, bagged, taped, strapped, and stacked. She and Johnson are moving, they’re leaving, they’re getting out, they’re free, they’re escaping the city. At last, they’re retiring to their cedar-shake cottage and cedar-post deck on point-six of an acre of tree-filled heaven three hours up the coast, where they intend to live comfortably and carefully on Annie’s modest government pension and whatever Johnson earns from the part-time job he desires at the village hardware outlet.

They say they won’t miss the city; it means they’ll miss the restaurants, there was always someplace to eat. Otherwise, it’s not the city they grew up in, hasn’t been a hometown for years. After one too many international facelift, it’s become a destination in a travel book, a site people scout out, transfer to, buy into, then flip. There was a time you could drive from point a to b and not encounter gridlock. There was a time when every square foot wasn’t taxed, metered or levied. A time the night fell sweetly silent and didn’t rock with gang shootings and serial killings. A time you could seek out your own small space, relax and think, watch time pass, hear the world glide, drink it in, contemplate life. There was a time when things would stay put.

It’s summer in the park; for Johnson it’s eternally autumn. Drawing his pea jacket around him, he wheezes cold air and bulls through a partition in the fence into the tennis court. The court is a skeleton, the netting gone, the lines faded, the asphalt as cracked and unreliable as a warped billiard table. He remembers when it was new, then on second glance it appears much better, and he’s halfway across the playing field when a ball whizzes past and he realizes there’s a game on. Two teenagers. One, snappily dressed in white, looks like he belongs, and has returned the ball expertly to his court mate. The other is some rock star wannabe wearing shades, a black tee-shirt and cut-off jeans, and swings his racket two-handed like a baseball bat, launching the ball over the fence into the alley. The players laugh, and snappy admonishes rock star to stop being a goof.

Johnson smiles sadly to himself and passes through. Exiting by another gap in the far corner of the court, he moves into the playground.

He stops to take in the view, his heart warming. It was a place of joy. Big toys grace a bed of green: to his left the toddler swing set, four worn wood teeter-totters, the monkey bars, and a sandbox, as much sand out as in; to his right, an old stone-and-mortar wading pool with a fountain that hasn’t flowed in years. Down from that, the big swing set; beyond a field, a tetherball pole, a box hockey game, and lawn darts kissing the ground like butterflies. At the end there’s a cottage: the park office, washrooms on one side, the caretaker’s tiny residence on the other, his fence around a few flowers, his Private sign on the gate. Although the flowers change each year, Johnson can’t recall ever seeing the caretaker. Tended by a ghost, he thinks, sighing.

Someone hurries past him, snaring his attention. A tall, long-haired, stick-like White boy, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, faded jeans, and a Dylan tee-shirt, flies toward a well-dressed, petite, pretty Chinese girl.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she declares, throwing her arms open as they meet, her father’s disapproval at her back.

Johnson fairly swoons. Her voice resounds with passion and regret, equal parts fever and storm. Johnson decides that she’s a young woman who has wrestled with logic and lost, that she knows she should run and never look back, yet her heart has compelled a reunion. She may never speak to anyone with such fervor again.

They embrace like survivors, and kiss brazenly in the open air of the park, as if to cue the roses to bloom, cartoon animals cavort, and minstrels play from the ashes of their vanquished love. Johnson stands nearby, admiring them. At last they break, and turn to him smiling.

“Do you wish this moment could last forever?” he asks.

They grin as though to say make us, and laugh. Then the kid hoists the girl into his arms, and steals her away from the playground, running wildly through the trees.

As they recede into the far end of the park, Johnson’s wistfulness fades, and there are children everywhere now. There’s a boy planted like an astronaut into one of the rubber seats of the small swing set, his fragile hands tugging the hanging chains, corkscrewing himself up, round and round to his tiptoes, then letting go to whirl back down. Another boy sits high atop the monkey bars, a king on a throne, arms akimbo, feet dangling. Another sits alone on the teeter-totter. One backhoes sand in the sandbox with his cupped hand, rrrr-ing sounds of heavy machinery. Another stands nearly up to his chest in the center deepest part of the wading pool, splashing back the screaming invaders of his hard-won territory.

You’re a brave one to hold down the deepest part of the pool, Johnson thinks, when the water is practically over your head. He grins at the boy, until the boy notices. Startled, and seemingly pleased to see an expression of approval from an adult, the boy grins back and waves. Johnson nods as if to tell him to keep up the good fight, then he goes to drink from the water fountain that hasn’t worked in years.

The hot summer breeze blows cold. Johnson rubs his hands, drives them into his pockets, and hugs his coat even more tightly around himself. This one thin layer of wool, he thinks, must be my armor. The couple have run off, out of sight around past the old juvenile hall. Worried about their happiness, Johnson follows after them, out of the playground and down a grassy slope to a gravel path lined with junior hawthorns and Japanese cedars, which runs in front of the building.

But it’s not a juvenile hall anymore, it’s a hospice, and the trees are adults. And Annie often jogs this path, Johnson remembers. He, too. Jogging helps keep them fit. Fitter than others their age. The imposing brick edifice of the hall is long gone, battered down, the smaller Tudor-style hospice grown out of it. The hall had a bathroom, Johnson recalls, with the saddest, vilest, most twisted graffiti he’d ever read and which he’d absorbed while his mother, brother and sister grappled in court.

Around back of the hospice, the hall is being demolished. A wall has toppled. A basement office full of desks, chairs, paper and filing cabinets is exposed to the open air. Johnson has never seen an odder sight. Three teenagers ferret amongst the furniture, hunting for things to vandalize. A pimply kid in glasses finds a jug of something, sniffs it, curses and decants the contents. His friend flicks a lighter to see if it’ll catch. It does. Not greatly. But there’s smoke, and paper aflame on a desk, and they’re pleased. Laughing, they call it a tribute to all those who were captive here. Then they freeze at Johnson’s calm stare. The pimply kid has an edgy glare, fearful yet defiant, intelligent yet rash. Johnson doesn’t think he looks very tough. He looks like the kind who can’t resist risk, so will do it again and again until stopped.

“Do you expect this will make your mark?” Johnson asks.

The fire slowly spreads, but there’s nothing to add to it. Even odds says it goes out. Doesn’t matter - the point is that only Johnson has seen them. And it’s not their moment. The pimply kid shrugs at Johnson, a tacit why not? He and his friends clamber out of the rubble and lope off. Johnson stays and watches. The flame dies. The smoke remains. Johnson shrugs. It’s inevitable.

Something shrieks. Great wings in full spread, a bald eagle glides directly overhead, then swoops down across Wall Street into a Douglas fir bordering two houses. Johnson hurries to the edge of the park, eagerly scans the tree, spies two glowing white heads and a bucket-sized nest in the branches. He wonders if they have an egg up there. Like eagles, he and Annie will mate forever, but nature being fickle, they’ll likely tend their nest alone.

Sometimes he wishes things had worked out different. Growing up, he was self-absorbed, too irresponsible to consider fatherhood; that changed with Annie. Pragmatic, patient and loving, she would have made somebody a wonderful child, as she had made him a wonderful husband. It saddens him when she says it no longer bothers her and he jokes that with their busy lifestyle they would’ve wanted the kid to emerge from the womb seventeen and ready to leave home. Better to be eagles and to just keep going, keep trying, keep flying together, come what may.

Speaking of seventeen, Johnson searches this end of the park for the reunited lovers. Doesn’t see her. He does see him, head down like a bull, striding alone in a patch of midnight through a line of towering poplars. He wears a black leather jacket, wields a knife in one hand, a bottle of rum in the other. If he thinks he isn’t asking for trouble, he isn’t avoiding it either. Maybe he hopes to see what he’s really made of. Maybe his footsteps are all he’s sure of.

Concerned, Johnson follows him onto the big grass field. This green mesa is one-third of the park, one block long and half a block wide, sloping down from the playground to Wall Street. Poplars border one side; cedars, London plane and a sky-high oak edge the other. Annie walks their black lab, Polly, here; lets her off her leash to run with the pack of neighborhood dogs. On the afternoon of Christmas Day, Johnson had counted two dozen dogs in packs according to size. Their owners, strangers all, smiled.

The young boy who sat alone on the monkey bars is with a group of neighborhood kids, sliding down the slope to Wall Street on sheets of cardboard cut from boxes. In winter they’ll use trash can lids. He shoots right out into the middle of Wall Street. It’s okay, there’s no traffic coming. His eyes glow with excitement as the kids celebrate; he went farther than anyone else. The younger kids applaud him. The older kids berate him. Stop trying to show off, be careful, if you’d gotten hurt we’d all be in trouble. He grins as though he has amounted to something.

Johnson stands alone on the field, hugging himself against the summer chill, kicking at a twig, in a bit of a sulk. The moment these kids are having, it’s nothing, it’s a thought in passing, a leaf in a hurricane, gone forever before you realize to who knows where. You might as well search the beach for a particular grain of sand. But if it means nothing, what’s the point in living it?

It hurts too much to hear their voices echoing off the sky. Johnson spins away, and sees the boy who defended the center of the swimming pool playing baseball, with what appears to be every kid for ten square miles plugging up the diamond in hope of becoming a hero. There’s the swing and a solid crack of the bat. The boy takes off on furious feet down a well-worn base path. The ball bounds over outstretched hands, evades colliding bodies. The boy rounds first. The ball, with a mind of its own, skips past short into the outfield. The boy rounds second. The ball rolls to Johnson, who stands in the deepest part of the park. He picks up the ball. He intends to toss it back harmlessly to the nearest kid. He sees the boy halfway between second and third, running all-out, but slowing, apparently not a good runner, not much stamina. Something base, latently cruel and coldly logical, kicks in. As the boy rounds third, Johnson squints, takes aim, and fires a missile straight at the catcher, who waits at home plate. It’s a stellar throw; Johnson is proud. But in mid-air, the ball changes flight, sputters with as much as it ever had on it, and dying drops into twenty bobbling arms between short and the mound. The boy lumbers across home plate – breathless, fists raised, to a few cheers, more laughter – ahead of a last-ditch throw from the field that sails over everybody and thuds off the backstop. Home run!

It’s the end of the inning, and the teams change sides. Overjoyed, his smile unquenchable, the boy trots up to Johnson in the outfield.

“Do you think you’ll ever hit one without help?” Johnson asks.

The boy runs right past, without a glance. Another kid his age joins him. There’s a family resemblance; they’re the same wiry build, the same height for now. They make a beeline for a pair of adolescent cypress trees in the corner of the field with ladder-like branches perfect for climbing. Up they clamber, highest they’ve ever been on their own, to the top of their world, where they sit and discuss confrontations at school and on the street, the changes, reported in the news and by parents, coming down from the war and this peace movement thing, and what it all means. They pretend to be in the thick of it, fighter pilots launching tree-to-tree cypress bud bombs, making blow-up noises, counting hits, laughing, and trying not to fall.

They climb down, and Johnson is mistaken, it’s not the young boy from the pool and the baseball diamond with the kid he looks related to, it’s the pimply kid and the lighter kid from the back of the juvenile hall. They wear leather jackets and long unkempt hair. Cigarettes hang from their lips. As they stride past the hall, a fist shatters a top floor window, middle finger raised, and a wild voice bellows fuck you!

They respond with identically raised fingers. Again – now it seems forever – in a patch of midnight, they make for the playground and park themselves side-by-side in the big swing set. All around them the dark neighborhood keeps a wary distance. Only Johnson dares approach, unseen in shadow. There’s a spark and the air turns thick and sweet. Back and forth the spark is passed, along with a bottle of warm rum and Coke. The conversation is highly intelligent, raw emotion: how this felt, that felt; is pure impression: what this meant, that meant. Is profane, defiant, arrogant, sarcastic, sexual, and tuned to the moment. Johnson savors it as the language of raconteurs and rebels, of philosophers, of teenage kings.

Hey, look over there, says lighter to pimples, aiming the spark at the silhouettes of three similarly-dressed males prowling up the street. At the top of his lungs he shouts fuck off. Their heads turn. Nobody gets away with that shit. Inspired, they proceed into the park.

Whattaya doin’? pimply kid growls, nervous. There’s more ’a them than us.

Lighter kid shrugs, passes the spark back. So what? We’ll fight ‘em.

Turns out they know each other; they’re all friends. The tension evaporates, and Johnson is relieved. They pass the spark, pass the bottle. Whattaya doin’? Nuthin’. Whatta you doin’? Fuck all. Goin’ home? Fuck that. Got drugs? Fuckin’ not enough. Know where there’s more. Oh yeah? Yeah. C’mon, let’s get wasted. They leave together, a midnight posse, the night young. Anyone passing on the street will give them space, loath to discover their capabilities.

Johnson knows what they’re capable of. He takes their place in the big swing set. Grasps the chains, slowly pushes off, swings forward, glides back. Feels like floating on air, remembers this breath of freedom. Squints up into a cold summer sun in a hot summer sky, and thinks about putting one foot after the other, reaching a fork in the road, and choosing. So many forks, so many roads, and so many choices, good and bad. But in the end all his paths led him to Annie.

A chain squeaks. Johnson turns, gazes into this midnight at the kid with the leather jacket and the bottle and the knife who sits in the swing seat beside him. The kid has aged a lot in a short time. He wears a grim, thousand-yard stare, that youthful glory stomped out of him. He knocks his bottle back, lights a cigarette, sighs, the sound sad and lonely – the kind of sound someone makes when his girl has gone, his family are idiots, his few friends wouldn’t understand, tomorrow won’t be any better, so perhaps he should go back and try once again to end it all. His steel-toed boots are soaking wet, water dripping from the laces.

Beyond the park, the trees and houses of Wall Street, and the waterfront and its hypnotic omnipresent hum, the choppy waves of Burrard Inlet glisten in the afternoon sun. Two freighters criss-cross like gigantic. rusty busses. A speedboat zips between them. It makes Johnson want to take up boating. He thinks of Annie, back home, wrapped up, ready to go, and waiting for his return. He finds that the older he gets, the more he appreciates survivors. He reaches out, feels the bottle placed in his hand. With a wry smile, he takes a long, satisfying swig of memory, and hands the bottle back. His last thought, as he gets up from the swing seat, is that he wishes someone had taken a picture of the sky-high oak years ago so he could see how far it has grown.

Mario Lowther lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia in a little village half an hour from the nearest traffic light. His literary and genre short fiction has appeared in over a dozen publications, including The Lorelei Signal, Imaginarium, Books 'n Pieces, Corner Bar Magazine, Collideoscope, and confetti, and a weird fiction, pre-apocalyptic, pseudo political novel is undergoing polishing. This, and his ongoing publishing credits, continue to help convince his goodly wife that he's not just upstairs in the attic goofing off.

Camille Griep 5/1/23 Camille Griep 5/1/23

J.W. Wood

A Wild Horse on Leith Walk

I stopped for a drink on the way home from my father’s funeral. And that’s when I saw him – Scotland’s most famous man.

He looked older than in that last film he’d shot before retiring: timid somehow, meagre of face, hunched over the paperback he was reading. He wore half-moon glasses and an open-necked shirt. A pint of beer sat on the bar in front of him, flecks of foam down the half-drunk glass.

Despite his unkempt appearance, I knew it was him. And I doubted I had the strength, on that sad day, to tell him about our connection, a connection between him and my family that went back before his fame, before his money. Though I’d never met him, I knew about his life before he’d left Scotland to find his fortune – a life he’d shared, for a brief time, with my dead father.

I had to find my courage. I stepped up to the bar and ordered a double gin and tonic. The man didn’t look up from his book, the bald patch on his head larger than it appeared in photographs. I glanced briefly to my left, checking his scalp for the birthmark that would establish this man beyond doubt as Scotland’s most famous actor.

Once I’d spotted that birthmark and taken hold of my drink, all I had to do was speak. I smoothed down my skirt and made sure my necklace was straight. Then I took a pace towards him – and two bodyguards got up from a table by the window as I approached…

***

Edinburgh,1950. A city recovering from war. A city where rationing still ruled: the only hints of the indulgence that would explode ten years later found in the Balmoral Hotel or the Empire Ballroom on Lothian Road. The tram system, the original one, still operated between Haymarket and Princes’ Street – the second-richest street in the British Empire. The war was won, King George sat on the throne, and the air thrummed with optimism and the sleeves-rolled-up spirit of a nation being rebuilt.

Three miles away from the glamour of Jenners Department Store and the Café Royale lay the Britannia Dairies yard in Leith. You might not include horses and carts in your vision of the fifties, but they were still in use: great huge Shires and Clydesdales, pulling goods up and down Edinburgh’s cobbled streets, living reminders of a way of life disappearing fast.

Dad would tell me how you’d cross the dairy yard, preparing to take the milk dray out in the half-light of some freezing morning, when you’d hear a sound like cascading water. Only it wasn’t water – it was the sound of a horse voiding its bowels, pissing and shitting into the straw. He might not have had the best job back then, but at least he’d never had to muck out the stables.

After leaving school, Dad became a dray-boy at the Britannia Dairies. That meant riding on the back of the milk cart and picking orders as they were shouted out by the drayman, then running the deliveries to doorsteps on both sides of the street. He’d leave the orders outside in the chilly morning, waiting for the housewives to pick them up: milk, cream, eggs, yoghurt, orange juice. On Fridays, Dad would pick up the envelopes filled with the money owing and hand it to the drayman. At Christmas and Easter there were tips for them both.

My father was christened Thomas, known to all as Tommy. Although blessed with intellect, he never had a chance with formal education. His own father, a carriage-painter traumatised by his time in the infantry, made sure of that. When Dad came home from Leith Academy with the news he’d come top in Latin, my grandfather punched him in the face and told him not to get any ideas. Two weeks later, he’d signed on to work at the dairies.

His partnership with his drayman made life bearable. Six years older than Tommy, his drayman was another Thomas, nick-named “Big Tam” to distinguish him from “Wee Tommy.” Known around the milk yard by the epithet “Big Tam and Wee Tommy,” they made an unlikely pair: wee Tommy the eager school leaver of fourteen, and Big Tam, all of twenty but already famous in the streets and bars of Edinburgh and Leith.

Four years before, at sixteen, Big Tam passed a trial with Glasgow Rangers Football Club, then one of Europe’s finest, but turned them down in favour of two years’ National Service in the Navy. On his return to Edinburgh, Big Tam started lifting weights instead of playing football and that very year, 1950, had won the Central Scotland Prize for Physical Culture. The spiciest rumour about Big Tam, and the one that made wee Tommy look up to him more than anything, was the whisper that he’d beaten up a gangster and five of his men in the toilets of the Empire ballroom. Apparently the gangster’s girlfriend took a shine to Big Tam, and the gangster wanted him humiliated. Too bad for the gangster.

As a boy, my father was slight and studious. He’d been saved from tuberculosis by the generosity of a local doctor in the days before the NHS. He suffered at school, though he never told me about it. What a pair they must have been – Big Tam with the world at his feet, a muscular God whose thick black hair and dark complexion marked him as an icon about to rise; and my Dad by his side, wee Tommy: the most ordinary boy.

For Big Tam, this job as a drayman was about getting more money in: when he wasn’t working at the yards, he’d be lifting weights, posing for Art Students at the Edinburgh College of Art, or reading. Dad said that was what he remembered most about Big Tam, apart from his smile and good looks: he was always reading.

They say that when Big Tam was world-famous, he came back to Edinburgh to accept an award. Before the ceremony, he asked his limousine driver for a tour of Leith Walk. Big Tam stunned the driver by reciting every street name from top to bottom as they drove down – then did the same thing on the other side as they drove back up the Walk. After sixty years, he still remembered every detail of his milk-round. And no wonder, given what happened next.

***

As usual, Dad must have risen at around four o’clock in the morning, washed his hands and face, got dressed, and walked the half-mile to the Britannia yards. It was an autumn morning like any other in Edinburgh, then or now: grey and drizzly, no sunrise as such, just a gradual lifting of the gloom until the different shades of grey outside announced themselves as streets and buildings.

When he got to the dairy yard, he met Big Tam outside, smoking a cigarette and reading a book under the streetlight outside the entrance to the yards. They knocked up the night watchman to let them in, then the boys who were readying the dray handed the order sheet to Big Tam. Big Tam stepped up to the buggy-chair at the front of the dray, looking behind him to make sure the order had finished loading and wee Tommy was on the back. Then he shook the reins and coaxed the horse out of the yard on to Constitution Street, ready to start their shift with a delivery to the British Railways’ staff room at the station at the lower end of Leith Walk.

Dad said he was never sure if Big Tam had been drinking or in a fight, but he seemed sluggish that morning. Maybe he’d spent the night with that gangster’s girlfriend. Whatever the case, Dad remembered Big Tam wasn’t himself, forgetting orders and snapping at him where normally he was the model of kindness.

Halfway through their shift, as they reached the corner of Smith’s Close, Big Tam cursed.

“Tommy! We’ll be late if we keep so fuckin’ slow an’ they’ll dock our wages. And the last thing I want is docked wages.”

“Right Tam.”

“Listen son. I’ll give ye three orders for the shops on the Walk. I’ll do the orders on Smith’s Close myself. Here’s the order sheet. And look sharp, all right? If you’re quick, I’ll tell ye what I got up to last night.”

Then he winked, one thick comma of eyebrow rising into his forehead. I can imagine Dad giggling, wanting to please his hero, a man who would become hero to hundreds of thousands less than ten years later.

Big Tam got off the buggy and came to the back of the dray. He doled out three orders from the crates and put them on one side of the dray’s back shelf for Dad to deliver.

“Number 294 for that first one; 297 for the second; and the eggs and juice for that Eyetie Restaurant across the street at 300. Got it?”

Dad remembered Big Tam taking five orders out of the crates and gathering them in his arms, ready to head further up the Walk to deliver them and save some time. Dad wasn’t sure if it was the irregularity of Big Tam getting off the buggy and doing the orders, or the weather, or the fact that Tam had been shouting – anyway, their horse, a huge Shire called Bluebell, turned skittish.

Like all drays, Bluebell wore blinkers to stop her getting frightened by the cars and buses they encountered on Leith Walk. Blinkers work fine – as long as you’re guiding the horse and looking after it. The moment the horse thinks it’s going to be left like that, it panics.

And that’s exactly what happened. To the last day of his life, Dad remembered the sight of that huge horse, nineteen hands if she was an inch, rearing into the sunlight that rose above the top of Leith Walk. Dad had walked halfway up the side of the dray-horse when it reared, about to cross the Walk to deliver juice and eggs to the Italian restaurant. Meanwhile Big Tam was closer – he’d been running to and fro, picking out fresh orders and delivering them at a sprint along Leith Walk.

Dad would always tell me there was no way Big Tam could have seen it coming. He was running too fast. Bluebell had just reached the top of her rear, legs flailing, the whites of her eyes showing, nostrils flaring. Anything in Bluebell’s way when those hooves came down stood no chance. And Big Tam was in the way.

With no time to think, Dad dived to the front of the dray and pulled down on the wooden coupling that bound Bluebell’s harness to the cart. As Bluebell’s huge body dropped downwards, she lurched forward and the unhitched cart rolled backwards down Leith Walk, eggs, milk and orange juice smashing and crashing off the cobbles, rivers of white and orange and yellow streaming into the gutters.

“You daft wee bugger!” Big Tam shouted. “Ye’ll get us sacked!”

Dad looked up and down Leith Walk. He later told me he had wanted to cry so much he couldn’t find the tears. Then Big Tam calmed down a little. I imagine Dad’s face turned red, his slender hands gripping the sides of his leather work apron with nerves. Big Tam breathed in, then smiled.

“It’s all right, son. I know why you did it. I’d have been crushed if Bluebell landed on me.”

Then Big Tam held out his hand for my Dad to shake with a smile.

“I owe you my life, Tommy. Now, I know what to tell the bosses.”

Then Big Tam explained where he’d been the night before – at an audition in York, for a part in the chorus-line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s South Pacific. The production was going to tour provincial theatres in Britain. Big Tam found out straight away that he’d got the job, and took a few drinks on the train back up to Edinburgh the night before by way of celebration.

“So that’s why I’m a bit the worse for wear the day”, Tam concluded. “But I’d have been buggered if that bastard horse had fallen on me – and you stopped her. So listen – we’ll go back to the Yard, I’ll take the blame, then hand in my notice. I don’t need their stinking job anyway.”

Then Big Tam picked Dad up like a baby and hugged him. “Don’t think I’ll ever forget this, son. If you ever need anything from me, just get in touch, right? You’ll know where to find me.”

My father, ecstatic as only small boys can be at a moment of communion with their hero, nodded in agreement – even though he’d no idea where Big Tam lived, or how to get in touch. The fact that the man he worshipped was in his debt was enough for him.

***

Sixty-five years passed. Sixty-five years that saw Big Tam change his name and become one of the world’s greatest movie stars. Dad went on to live a life of quiet dignity, giving up his work in the drinks business to help Mum set up a care home. If Big Tam lived his dreams – and everyone else’s besides – my Dad never got to become the pilot he’d dreamed of becoming. Even if he’d lived a love story few could dream of with my mother, lived to see his only child grown up, and married, and become a mother herself – his own ambitions remained unrealised.

And now he was dead, and I stood before the world-famous man Dad saved from certain death six decades before.

I took a step towards Big Tam (as I knew him), coughed politely, and spoke:

“Excuse me. My father was your dray-boy at Britannia Dairies in 1950.”

The two bodyguards were on me in an instant.

“I’m sorry madam. No personal contact or photographs. Would you please come this –”

“Just a minute.”

That voice from behind the bodyguards. The voice known to tens of millions around the world from the films, the books, the talk shows, the exposés. The voice that made men envious and women tremble.

“It’s all right. Step back, the pair of you.”

With that, the bodyguards retreated to their table by the window and I was left face to face with him.

“So you’re Tommy Smith’s daughter.”

I nodded, and he put his book down.

“He was a good man. A hard worker. How is he now?”

I told him Dad died the week before, and he glanced at his drink.

“I’m sorry for your loss. I always remembered him.”

He paused, then smiled. The smile that had captivated millions, that eyebrow, now flecked with grey, still cutting into the lines on his forehead.

“May I buy you a drink?”

I was being offered a drink by the man women of my generation grew up dreaming about. A man from the same streets as my Dad, the same working-class background, the same blind alley of zero opportunity and Scottish hard-man tradition. Of beaten faces and hands broken in the punch. And Dad’s bravery had enabled this man to live a life no one I knew would dare to dream of living.

I noticed the bodyguards were getting more twitchy the longer I stayed in his presence. Not to mention the other bar patrons, who by now realised the true identity of the grizzled old man reading quietly at the bar. I felt my eyes prick with tears.

“Thank you for your kind offer. My father always remembered working with you and how kind you were to him. But I have to go now, I’m afraid. My children are waiting.”

He smiled and shook my hand, then bid me farewell. I left the bar and went to my car outside the hotel. And I cried – for my father, for what might have been, and for fate, that lifts some of us up only to leave others stranded in worlds they never dreamed of and cannot understand, like a horse rearing in sunlight that longs to hit the ground.

In memory of Thomas James Smith (1936-2016) and Jean "Sheena" Smith (1937-2020)

J.W. Wood's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Cat Mystery Magazine (US), Idle Ink (UK), God's Cruel Joke (US), and Ars Humanita (UK). Last year, stories were anthologised in the US, UK and Canada. Wood is the author of five books of poems and a novel, all published in the UK between 2006 and 2019; and the forthcoming novella, By Any Other Name (Terror House Press, US, 2023). He is the recipient of awards from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. For more, please visit www.jwwoodwriter.com

Camille Griep 5/1/23 Camille Griep 5/1/23

Keily Blair

Expectations on Sunbury Avenue

We ride our bikes down Dead Man’s Hill, wind whipping around us as we build speed. Our hearts beat behind our bones with the desperate flutter of hummingbird wings. We like to pretend we have the guts to ride faster and faster, but we always slow as we approach the tiny triangular patch of shrubs and grass at the end of the street.

Whoever waits the longest to brake is the bravest. We usually give in long before reaching the “Little Triangle,” right when the wind is roaring in our ears. After making the sharp turn, we glide over the asphalt, trailing one behind the other, laughing and grinning with the rush of adrenaline. The street’s sign looms over us, proudly declaring our quiet patch of suburbia “Sunbury Avenue.”

***

My neighbor, Adam, brings out his ramp—a small piece of black plastic his dad bought for him to attempt jumps with his bike. My knees are unmarred as I line up to have a try on our shaded street. It’s such a slight ramp and the airtime is brief but oddly satisfying before my balance shifts and I slam into the asphalt, bike falling on top of me. The pain is hot, intense, but my playmates—Adam and my younger sister, Barbara—are watching, so I burst into manic laughter. Embarrassed, I manage to stand and limp into my family’s driveway, blood streaming down my leg from a large scrape, later a pale scar I carry into adulthood. I refuse to cry, knowing my companions, both younger than me by two years, are watching. As the oldest, I am tough. I watch over them, not the other way around.

***

We watch the teenage boy, Daniel, who lives across the street with his grandmother, perform tricks on his skateboard. Because he is older, he will never play with us. Instead, he shows off and we whisper in awe. He is handsome though seems to never smile. Dark hair, dark eyes. He’s rather pale despite the time he spends riding his skateboard, protected by the shade of Sunbury Avenue. His grandmother waves at us from her seat on her porch, smiling.

***

I am seven when my mom gathers my sister and me into her room, her voice a soft whisper as she tries to explain what has happened. The boy across the street murdered his grandmother. I try to conjure the image of her, or some shred of sadness for the event, not knowing my mind will struggle with such things for years. My thoughts will always be grayscale and distant; my strong empathy will always be hard to tap into without self-taught coping mechanisms. Instead of crying, I ask how he did it. My mom opens her mouth, truth and fiction warring in her expression. Finally, she opts for the truth.

“He beat her with a fire poker,” she says.

The knowledge doesn’t spark the feelings I crave to have. There will be whispers for a while among the adults, acknowledgments of Daniel’s “troubled” behavior. I will remember the boy on his skateboard and struggle to connect him to the bloodthirsty killer in the news for the next two decades.

But at this moment, I feign fear and sadness, trying to become what is expected of me.

***

We know the neighbors on our street by their houses. In our way, we know the woman with the noisy Shetland sheepdogs at the top of the hill. She often waves as her dogs streak across the yard until the knowledge of the invisible fence halts their progress, yapping.

To my family’s left live the Martins, an elderly couple who always give out homemade popcorn balls on Halloween.

To the right live Adam’s family, another four-person suburban family with two giant mastiffs and a trampoline where we lost countless hours behind a private fence.

Across the street and to the right lived Randy. We ride our bikes by his house, cracking jokes about his silly, drunken antics.

***

I watch Randy sing along to some pop hit, eyes closed in rapture. He sits on our porch, invading my home with his existence. Even at eight, I know something is wrong with him. There’s something undesirable in the way he slurs and stumbles about, the way my mom defends his behavior.

I hate him.

It’s a child’s understanding of hatred—glaring at the man as he walks by and whispering jokes at his expense with Adam and Barbara. My mom’s unlikely friendship with him is shadowed by the suspicion something is going on, something secret and slimy.

It will be nearly twenty years before I learn he gave her pills, fueling addiction, stealing her from me.

***

We ride into the driveway with the painted mailbox – the one with the dolphins, sun, moon, and stars, a day mingling into night. The garden is the most beautiful on the street, carefully tended. Patches of snapdragons, bleeding-hearts, irises, sunflowers, pansies, and more, rotating throughout the year and dependent on the season. Giant rosemary bushes, tiny sprigs of thyme, and patches of sage fill the spaces between. While Barbara and Adam ride in the driveway, I tuck a piece of sage between my teeth, run my fingers over the soft fuzz of a lamb’s ear.

The porch is a deep blue marred by golden footprints, the product of one of my mom’s many crafting ventures featuring my sister and me. My mom is a gifted artist and gardener. There’s not a garden, porch, or mailbox like ours in the entire neighborhood, and pride wells in my chest.

Adam heads home, leaving my sister and me to walk the steps leading to our front door. The sun, maybe not at its highest, is still high at two in the afternoon. Dad’s not home yet, and he won’t be until it’s nearly bedtime. The coke he drinks out of Styrofoam cups will likely be supplemented with what my sister and I refer to as “the yucky stuff,” and if it’s not, he’ll be sure to bring some home in a brown paper bag. We’ve taken to sniffing his cups before trying to steal sips of sweet soda, wary of the sharp odor.

The house is silent.

I open the door to my parents’ bedroom, where my mother has slept all day, sedated by pills I won’t know she takes until years later. I stare at her breathing form for a moment before shutting the door.

Part of me is anxious we’ll have visitors. She scolded me last time I answered the door for a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses when Barbara and I were home alone. Am I allowed to answer the door now, while she is sleeping?

“I’m hungry,” Barbara says.

There’s a smile on my face when I retrieve a pack of hot dogs from the fridge, using the microwave like a big kid. The juice is trickier because the bottles are so heavy when full that my hands shake when I hold them over the cups. Cherry for her, apple for me. The liquid sloshes, but I manage to keep a firm grip. I squeeze a single line of ketchup over my sister’s hot dog.

I am eight years old when I take hold of my sister’s lunch and sit her down at the breakfast nook in our kitchen. We turn on the TV and wait for Mom to wake up.

Keily Blair (they/them) is an autistic and queer writer. They hold a BA in English: Creative Writing from UT Chattanooga, where their nonfiction won the Creative Nonfiction Award. Their fiction has appeared in publications such as The Dread Machine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Etherea, and The Vanishing Point. They are currently at work on their debut novel. You can find more details about their work at www.keilyblair.com or follow them on Twitter @keily_blair. They live in Tennessee with their husband, dog, cat, and guinea pigs.

Take Two and Call Your Therapist in the Mourning

What is this drug used for?

What are some things I need to know or do while I take this drug?

What do I do if I miss a dose?

What are possible side effects?

Note

The Beach

My American Autobiographical Self

My Chinese Autobiographical Self

Bones of the Shelter

My Mother’s Furniture

Plain Sense

1 … a summer day

2 … memory

3 … a day like any other

4 . . . September . . . moonlight and bridges

5 … leaves have fallen

Eulogy for an Almost-Ex

Bog Baby Pant Rip

Planted

Ghost of Christmas Past

Altered Realities

Just One Round

Just Don’t Do Mermaid

Burrard View Park

A Wild Horse on Leith Walk

Expectations on Sunbury Avenue

Does It Have Pockets