Tess Kelly

Playlist at a New Jersey Rehab Center

I hustled into the courtyard amid a flourish of violins, late for Thursday’s entertainment: Jerry. Mic in hand and perched behind a folding table, he belted out Sinatra’s classic “Strangers in the Night,” tracking lyrics that flashed across his laptop’s screen. I spotted my aunt in a wheelchair beneath a maple tree, late summer’s greenery pinned to a clear sky. Her eyes were full of clouds. “You finally got here, kid,” she said. I kissed her forehead and settled into a lawn chair beside her.

The star of the program wore a Hawaiian dress shirt, unbuttoned a little too far, revealing puffs of snowy chest hair. A toothpaste-ad smile gleamed in Jerry’s tanned face, crowned with a thatch of silver. I found him every bit as captivating as Ol’ Blue Eyes. Jerry’s eyes were a piercing cerulean.

A couple dozen patients made up the audience, the majority elderly and tethered to oxygen tanks or mobility devices. Two weeks earlier, my widowed aunt suffered what she described as a “small stroke.” I don’t know how any stroke at age 95 could be considered small but she seemed okay at the moment. A staff of bustling middle-aged women tended to the group’s needs: tucking knitted shawls around shoulders, adjusting a patient’s gown that had crept up her legs, rearranging the crowd for better views of Jerry.

He followed the Sinatra number with Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana.” My back stiffened and I stifled a groan. I hated the cheesy melodrama of that song. I recalled my “Fanilow” cousin’s decades-long crush on Barry and her persistent presence at his concerts. Although he once touched her hand in the front row of a Vegas show, her dream of joining Barry onstage remained unfulfilled.

To be fair, I tacked a Barry poster above my bed when I was twelve, where he remained for a year until ousted by John Travolta. Barry was a puzzling choice considering his predecessor, David Cassidy. The television heartthrob had occupied that prime real estate since fourth grade. Deep dimples, puka shell choker, and hair as feathery as ostrich wings. I was as wild for him as anyone who didn’t know what sex was or could be.

What prompted me to jettison a teen idol for a balladeer of adult contemporary music in a fancy suit jacket? Maybe I realized it wasn’t all that cool for Keith Partridge to be in a band with his mom. Maybe I wanted my parents to notice I’d matured. Or maybe I just loved “Mandy.”

Sometimes we’re a mystery, even to ourselves.

“I take a lot of pills now that I’m in my seventies, and the thing I miss most is BOOOOZE,” Jerry said. Then he launched into “Margaritaville,” which launched me not to Jimmy Buffett’s Key West but to the Jersey Shore. I’d stumbled through my own sand and surf days, sucking on boardwalk frozen custard, pondering lost love and an aimless life beneath the sun’s accusing glare. I once couldn’t imagine life without boooooze. But I didn’t miss it now, didn’t miss the shame and remorse. Didn’t miss the useless hours spent at the mercy of the hammer in my head.

“Some of you might remember this guy,” said Jerry, and damn right I did. Boom. From the first measure of “Knock Three Times on The Ceiling” I was ten again, sitting cross-legged with my sisters on a braided rug. Our eyeballs lasered onto a black and white TV. Vibrant even in grayscale, mustached and disco-haired Tony Orlando held the stage front and center, flanked by two chic vocalists known as Dawn. The courtyard crew nodded along or clapped hands to the upbeat chorus. I pounded a metal table on cue, with all the vigor I could muster.

Next up: “When I’m 64,” which Paul McCartney penned as a teenager. The Beatles tune came out a few years after I was born. The era when those clarinet notes bounced through my transistor radio seemed as distant as Liverpool, if not Pluto. The era when I thought 64 was ancient. The Beatles must have thought so too, back then. Half of them never made it that far: John Lennon gone at 40, George Harrison, 58. On that day at rehab I was glad to be 60 and breathing and walking unassisted, and able to listen to Jerry without subtitles.

The bonking in Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” makes it the raciest track of the set. Jerry handled the delicate phrasing with aplomb. My own youth blazed through those days-of-yore lyrics. I inhaled the Newport smoke lingering in a high school boyfriend’s jean jacket, my face buried in denim, his arms around my waist in the birch woods that edged our suburban neighborhood. We were steeped in love so electrifying it sent me flying above those trees, above my humdrum world. The embers flickered long after he moved away. I wondered how his life turned out. I wondered what he remembered of those gilded afternoons.

“I can’t hear a damn thing,” my aunt grumbled but when Jerry plunged into “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” her ears miraculously recovered. Like Sinatra, Frankie Valli hailed from New Jersey, but Frankie got the love today. Was it due to the intimacy of lyrics in the second person? Frankie sang to me, sang to all of us, reminding us that we were once irresistible, and that we were beautiful, still.

We sang along, all of us, most in time-warbled voices steeped with thousands of difficult, astonishing, and ordinary days. My aunt sang and I remembered when she didn’t just walk but waltzed, when she floated face-skyward and weightless on the swells of the Atlantic. When she and my jocular uncle drew us kids to them like vines reaching for sunlight. The music soared and even though my aunt would hold my hand for only five seconds, my pulse quickened with joy. Her retreating palm reminded me of her long-gone sister. Mom was never one for physical affection, even during those final weeks, weeks when I thought she might want a backrub or a hug lasting more than a few heartbeats. 

To cap off what turned out to be an all-white-male songster tribute, Jerry landed on Sinatra again, with “My Way,” a standard finale for crooners in that part of the world. He rose to his feet for dramatic effect to polite, if not listless, clapping. After all, the classic’s about some guy reveling in his own greatness before clocking out. Maybe no one wanted a reminder of their own dwindling journey, including me. Along with her younger sister who’s in memory care in San Diego, my aunt is all that remains of our family’s elders. The truth of impermanence deepens with each eulogy. My aunts will undam the river as they go and hasten my own rush to sea.

I’m not ready to be an elder. I’m not sure I’ll ever be.

Just past the third verse of “My Way” my aunt said, “Let’s get out of here,” as if poised to beat the throngs to the parking lot. I stood, ready to roll. “Thank you, Jerry!” I called and waved from across the patio. He waved back. Lush sounds of a full orchestra blared through speakers as I pushed my aunt’s wheelchair up the walkway and through double doors, to the room where she’d idle away the hours until Bingo tomorrow and my sister’s visit on Sunday. I manicured her nails and helped her choose a blue blouse for dinner. Then we hugged goodbye, my face buried in her neck, her white curls soft against my cheek. This time she didn’t nudge me away. 

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Tess Kelly’s essays have appeared in Sweet Lit, Passages North, Cleaver Magazine, and Dorothy Parker's Ashes, among other publications. Tess lives, teaches, and writes in Portland, Oregon. More at rainy-day-writer.com.

Jacqueline Goyette

Antwerp

I hold you tight on days like this. New Year's Eve, and we walk through the city of Antwerp and this bitter winter, hold onto each other like this is city is ours. With you, I pretend to know the streets, to have memorized the cobblestones, each one — we count them out loud in our sloppy French — un deux trois -- laugh at the accent. Is this even the right language for the city we are in? It is easy to get confused. We come to Belgium every year but to the other cities - Brussels, Bruges, Ghent — not to Antwerp, and I eat what is left of a waffle — ooey gooey chocolate that is still just warm, all over my fingers, my lips, the edge of my mouth — and we walk. We scuff our shoes against the surface of these roads, welcome the worn out sheen, the wear and tear, how many years they have been here in this shape, in this condition. Is it a lifetime or more? We are arm in arm and my scarf is pulled tight around me, too summery to be a winter scarf (unlike the scarves of the other people we pass — their cozy knit scarves snug around their necks) but I walk by and envision a new life for us : we saw it in a holiday movie, the way you can be someone else for a day, cook dinner and laugh at the coincidence when I make your favorite meal. There are Christmas lights here and I point them out: let's say we are newlyweds and that is our home, the one with the shutters, the gilded ridges, the grey smudge of a cat sitting in the window, waiting. I am your first love. Your last love. We are fluent in forever.

You said so at the restaurant last night in Brussels where the Magritte bowler hats were painted on the ceiling and you cut up your glazed ham and I slurped up spoonfuls of asparagus soup, pale green and buttery. You asked me to play pretend with you, and so we did: you counted the other Italians in the room, I recognized no Americans. Maybe I've lived here too long, a new continent that I've inherited, that can be folded up, pressed into my pocket. They say you can only fold a piece of paper in half seven times before it cannot be folded again — and I think of how many times I've folded my dreams for you, folded my life into paper squares that can fit into a carry-on bag and lugged onto a plane from Indianapolis to Rome. Folded family away, folded language into new words, folded the losses of parents, of loved ones, of so many years — seven times is not enough. Folded this room, even — tried so hard to fit you into the edges of it just to be part of this corner of you. We are older now, don't you feel it? In the windy bristle of an Antwerp morning, you crease the cardboard container where the waffle once was but now it is just chocolate, hardened in the wind cold day. I hold it in my hands. It still smells of violets, like the city itself is made of them.

If we were to live here together, I would set up camp at the base of the Rubens paintings in the cathedral, cry everyday at the opening of the triptychs, how Jesus tumbles out of them every time, dead now, the whispers of how it could have happened, his mother's tears. I wouldn't pretend at all — I would learn this new language, take long walks to the sea, start over again — even now. I would reach for the other life that includes the town square, the tram stops, the frites that you hold in little cardboard pyramids upside down, unfolded. The corner chocolate shops, the warm woolen hats, the bright red awnings, billowy like sails on a ship, carrying the last few moments of this old year. I would memorize the tram lines, walk past the hulk of a fountain everyday, the one where the soldier is clutching the severed hand of a giant and casting it out to sea: that's where the name comes from, Antwerp. Flung to sea, this fairytale of a watery mistress, this dream that someone wrote down on paper, charted the stops into roads and canals. Like maybe the city disappears when the book is closed, the map folded up. Maybe we all do. Maybe we can lose an entire city, a continent perhaps, all memory of it — drown it in the waves of the North Sea.

The next day or the one after, we will fly back to Italy and I will lean into your shoulder, hold your hand, fingers looped in yours — the us that we are, nothing changes after all. But before that we will count down to the new year, drink from glasses of champagne at a colorful bar. The band will play happier tunes, Twist and Shout, La Bamba, and the whole bar will start dancing, start blowing kisses — a celebration. The waiters will dance. Outside there will be fireworks that shout out a new day. But I will be misty eyed and nostalgic, no noisemakers, no swinging hips. Not the hope of the year to come but the grief for a year that has passed. How we lived it, isn't that enough? All of that is gone now — the day is fading fast. What are the fireworks for? The dancing? Where are the words on my lips — whatever version of me this is — for the day, that sometime-day, when we will have to say goodbye?

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Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work can be found in both print and online journals, including JMWW, trampset, Phoebe Journal, Stanchion, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Citron Review, and Centaur Lit. She is a Best Microfiction and a Best of the Net nominee, and her work was recently selected to appear in the Best Small Fictions 2025 anthology. She lives in the small town of Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.

Kira Salter-Gurau

Oh Brother, How Art Thou?

My brother doesn’t get enough hugs. Each time he wraps his arms around me it feels like he’s breaking sobriety. He breathes so deeply.  He hugs me as if he’s a suicide bomber, that beneath his white hoodie are packs of explosives, taped to his skin, tugging on his slim chest. When he hugs me, I don’t hold him as tightly and guilt starts to seep from my own skin, staining his sweatshirt blue.

The doorbell jingles and he sees me in the back of the shop–his coworkers have let me in. Jason and Mike. They are kind and as my brother walks by them, his back hunched like my father’s, he grabs their hands and pulls them into a quick bro hug. He lives above the card trading shop in the West Village and in the past five years that I’ve visited him I’ve never met one of his coworkers. I watch them interact, eyes meeting and cheeks sharp with toothy grins. I think about my own coworkers I’ve had over the years, how at work I’m a different person.

My brother sees me and his eyes light up. Like in the final scene in Dirty Dancing when Patrick Swayze shimmies to the stage, my brother dances towards me, scooping me into his arms. I let myself become slack in his embrace. I am 4 again and he is 13. I unlatch and he’s almost 30. I can see it in his eyes and in his fingernails. He takes my bags and puts them away. His face is fuller than the last time I saw him and this settles something in my stomach.

“You hungry?” He’s antsy, but happy.

He reeks of cigarette smoke. Not the kind of smell when you only have one outside before rushing in for your shift ten minutes late. Not the kind of smell when you only have one after a hard conversation on the phone. Not the kind where you’ve only had one. The smell is laced into his clothing, a stale odor that’s been threading itself through his linens for the past decade.

As he lists off places we could go to eat, he paces through the back of the shop circling me like a sheepdog. He doesn’t do it on purpose, his hands shoved in his mouth, gnawing at his cuticles. He spits out the dead skin onto the floor of the shop. He mumbles to himself about restaurants, then something about sushi. I stand still in the center and stop turning to face him as he orbits me. I’m dizzy and shut my eyes for a moment.

Mike comes out back with a question about Justin Verlander, a pitcher from the Giants. My brother disappears behind the front wall of the store. I stand there in between portraits of Kobe Bryant and a signed Ken Griffey Jr. jersey. His father Ken Griffey Sr. was known for playing on the Cincinnati Reds in the 70s, winning the world series with them a few times. Yet, he was never inducted into the hall of fame and his son was. They were built with the same muscle tissue. One from another. Skin into skin. Insides making outsides.

I spoke to my dad on the phone before leaving for the trip. “Wow, you’re going on your own?” I nod. My dad repeats himself, incredulous, “are you?”

“Oh! Yes. I was nodding.” Dad says he’d never do that, do this trip. He doesn’t know how to talk to my brother.

My brother is very private. He keeps a tight hand, his fingers curling around the spades and kings of his cards. He’s hard to keep in touch with. Over the phone, he speaks in pockets of advice. He doesn’t ask how I am, but asks me what my dreams are and where I want to be in 10 years. He croons, “fear not, grasshopper, there’s plenty of time.” He tells me work is good. This trip is the first time I’m seeing what good means to him. Good must mean busy. Good must mean rush hour, when kids come in the store to trade cards after school. Good must mean the rhythmic bass of Lauryn Hill swirling through the store as customers come in and out.

For the past two years, he’s been begging for me to visit him in New York. He runs this sports card trading shop. He’s a god to the people who enter through his doors. They come to him with offerings, cards and signed paraphernalia. He gives them commandments: recommendations for their drafts. He consumes sports media and statistics. He doesn’t eat. I believe in breakfast. I pray for oatmeal and worship yogurt. My god takes form in a fried egg, over medium.

We decide to get pizza. At first, I don’t tell him I’m gluten free because I know how he’ll react. An eye roll or even a sigh through gritted teeth. After that I’ll text my mom and tell her that this is typical, that this trip was a waste.

When he’s looking up bagel places in the area, I let it slip and he looks up. I expect him to explode like he used to when we were younger. I expect him to erupt into a fit over my request telling me something like how I’m such a whiny bitch. Instead he says, “I can totally work with that.” Examining his face, I searched for some sign of irritation or anger. I feel like I’ve brought a bazooka to a knife fight. I lower my weapon.

At this point we’ve moved outside. His nose is drippy with snot from the cold air flowing past our faces. His nose is bigger than mine, but it has the same general shape. I could draw my finger along the ridge of his nose and mine at the same time. Like sister cities, they share the same map.

We walk onto Christopher street over to L’Industrie Pizzeria where the line corners the block. The city feels so expansive to me. Living in Boston for the past 3 years as a student has made me feel like a big fish in a medium pond. I know the gruff and beautiful city like a classmate. I feel equal to it. Boston is a peer to me. New York is horrific and massive. My brother moved to the city 10 years ago for college and never left. He took a sports marketing job setting up events for big beer brands and getting into the hip hop scene. He helped to open up the Hip-Hop Museum in the Bronx and then proceeded to work in cards and trading, meeting players like Derek Jeter and entertaining singers and A-listers in his store, flipping cards below his apartment where he barely sleeps.

Derek Jeter is essentially a member of my family. I first encountered him in my living room, playing shortstop for the Yankees up on my television. Each night we’d take our bowls of noodles and tofu and watch the game. My mother whispered magic to the sink where the dishes sparkled clean and danced while the kids were unnoticing gluttons in the next room.

I knew my brother liked the Yankees. To me and my other siblings that meant we liked the Yankees too. I memorized the lines of Jeter’s face, his eyes and his throw. When I see him now it’s like seeing an old family member after many years.  We had an equal amount of Jeter photos in our house as we did of loved ones: a cutout pasted to the wall of my brothers’ room, a Jeter bobblehead on the shelf from when my mom and brothers went to see the Yankees spring training in Sarasota, a magazine cover with Jeter cut out and modge-podged to the wall. When my sister and I did yoga in the living room, the Jeter’s head bobbled as we toppled over in crow position.

When Jeter came to my brother’s store, the entire family was beside themselves. A line of Salters falling down like dominoes. I saw a photo of my brother shaking Jeter’s hand. They were leaning in together in the front of the store next to the green walls and yellow lettering of the logo. My brother’s eyes were wide open, like he was experiencing a supernatural event. Business only went up from there.

Last month, my brother’s hands were on the front of the New York Times. I found this out scrolling on my phone as I perused the news that morning. I paused on a set of gnawed cuticles I knew well. Letting out a guffaw, I giggled and sent the picture to my siblings.      

I’d never realized how successful his store was. I texted him but he didn't reply. My mom confirmed it was him. I returned to the picture and my stomach raisined, should I have asked about this? Should I have asked if he had any articles published about him? Should I have pushed further even if he had said no?

I’ve had a handful of essays published online and I’ve never told my family except my sister. I feel like I have a second family online, like I’m cheating on them with another version of themselves. This is one of my few secrets.

I send the picture of my brother’s hands to my sister and other brother who hadn’t seen it either. We worry together.

Our brother in the news. Our brother’s hands, the most famous hands in our family. Our brother is fulfilling his dream. Our brother was the furthest from Maine he’d ever been. Our brother, the mystery. Our brother, the wonder.

When he didn’t tell me about friends, I assumed he had none. When he told me he had no love interests, I crafted images of a lonely man in his apartment quietly in the middle of the big, breathing city. Oh, how wrong I was.

My mom worries about him as if he were a chia pet. She waters him with words like “lonely” and “isolated” and “touch starved.” She worries like a sponsor, checking in on him constantly. Texts. Unanswered calls. Heavy conversations with her own mother about how these are signs of her own failings. Supposed signs of his depression. I hear weeping in the kitchen when I’m home from breaks. “Why doesn’t he call?” My sister and I watch the game on the tv. The summer before, we’d gone to New York to see a game and one of the players, Judge, had hit a home run. The whole family jumped into the air. I’m pretty sure I threw my fist into the air. I don’t even like baseball. The rest of the trip we fought.

For a long time my brother had addiction problems, starting when he entered college. He came home a smattering of times, his presence like heavy fog entering the house when I was in middle school. I’d return home at 3pm and there would be a dark creature in the living room, coming home after rehab and down drug induced psychosis, too depressed to eat anything except pizza toaster pops. I didn’t know how to view him, this figure in my life who was supposed to have it together. He was supposed to be the blueprint.

During those years, we took a trip to the beach in early fall. My brother sat in the front seat in a grey sweatshirt with the hoodie covering face, head buried in his own shoulder. I remember wanting to speak with him. My mom wanted us to be together as siblings. I could see her pulling on strings while not knowing what was at the end of them.

 My two other siblings and I begged for some music for the long drive up the coast of Maine. We popped on Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas, the intense drums, the plea of the lead singer, our ears begged for the melody. Lay your weary head to rest. Don’t you cry no more. NO! In the back, we headbanged our skulls to the rhythm of the electric guitar as the salt air pulled us north to the beach. I sang along as I fingered the small hole burnt by a cigarette into the back of the driver’s seat. My brother had left it when he was in high school: a youth that seemed irretrievable.

During the extensive guitar and organ duet, my mom looked over at her 19 year old son, twisting uncomfortably in his seat, his body contorting like a muscle spasm you can see beneath the skin. He writhed with frustration, something churning in his head. She turned off the music. My other siblings and I were annoyed. We rode the rest of the way in silence.

The coast of Maine looks like fingers. To get to the good beaches you drive up to the top of each finger and then all the way down to the very bottom. It takes forever. When you go to the beach you commit. It’s so worth the journey past the marshes and the shipyards. You listen to an audiobook. You must go all the way up and all the way down. Up and down and up and down. The journey is repetitive and predictable. At times it can be impossibly long and as a kid, it feels treacherous. What even awaits you at the beach? You don’t go to these kinds of beaches alone, the trip requires companions.

Angry and growing boy leaves home to go somewhere big and make it on his own. When he comes back home he becomes angry and boyish once more.

In the card shop, this boy doesn’t exist. I watch my brother gracefully handle customers with a kind hand on their back. He slides a fresh pack of cards into their hands as one of his coworkers asks him about some sports stat or what he thought of the Knicks’ last season he relaxes into a small smile, thinking hard about the question. He laughs and grumbles something about all he knows is that he knows nothing.

Later on in the day one of his coworkers, an illustrator who designs some of the baseball cards, sits down with me. I’m nursing a bellyache after a gluten-full piece of cheese pizza with hot honey, pepperoni and basil.

“He never talks about you guys,” the illustrator says. I wonder what he thinks I’m going to say. I wonder why he asks me this. He wants insight. He’s trying to get some sort of reaction. I consider breaking down into tears to see what he would do. I consider stripping off my shirt to reveal a hyper realistic tattoo of my brother’s face on my stomach. I consider falling asleep.

“He never tells me about you guys,” I say, smiling. We cheers our slices of pizza. He laughs. We discuss the art world and I tell him how I’m not interested in cards. We talk for some time as my brother runs across the store grabbing fresh boxes and signed memorabilia. Regulars sit at tables in the back flipping cards and laughing over hot drinks. A leak in the ceiling resulted in a bucket near my chair catching all the droplets. I usher customers out of the way so they don’t trip and I’m glad to be helping in some way.

My brother picks up another pizza for his friends and shoves hot slices into everyone’s hands. When I went to pick up the order with him at the restaurant next door, all the cooks behind the counter of the bustling restaurant cheered my brother’s name in unison. They came and gave him hugs, dapping him up. He asks about their spouses and children. This is what good must mean when he answers my questions over the phone.

Back at the store, the boys that he has on each Friday for Shabbat have come to flip some cards. He introduces me to each new person who enters the store. I feel like I’m reading his journal, happening upon his secrets. No one else in my family has seen this side of him, this life he lives. No one in the store has any idea who I am.

The illustrator goes on, “I love your brother. One of the good ones.” I nod. He’s in the middle of a vibrant conversation over a basketball in his hands that’s signed by the entire Knicks team. I tell my mom about what the illustrator said on the train ride home the next day and she starts to cry.

“You don’t know how happy that makes me.” I don’t know what to say. I can imagine what she looks like crying, her shaking her head, releasing a small gasp slowly like she always does just before she cries. I conjure years of tense dinners of an angry boy storming off to go smoke after the Thanksgiving dinner. He leaves through the front door and everyone rolls their eyes. Those dinners and this man don’t line up.

For the longest time, I didn’t know how to talk to my brother, didn’t know who I was talking to–my mother’s version of him or his version of him. My love for him changes form all the time, like how the shoreline of a beach changes shape each summer. New wave patterns change the shore. Each year I return and choose a new spot to put down my blanket. The water is the same, smells the same. The drive is the same length and I make the trip knowing the effort that goes into taking it. I’m prepared for the change each summer.

From January to September we don’t speak. He doesn’t call me except on my birthday at midnight. I’m always asleep. He never leaves a message. Our distance in age becomes apparent to me when I think about the feelings I was having at 19 and how I dealt with them, how at 19 I picked up smoking. How at 19 I found my own kind of despair. How at 19 I would never explain to a 13 year old how I was feeling, how a 13 year old would never understand.

One night, at 19, I called my brother while high. I’m in the Boston Common and it’s around 8pm.

“Oh, I used to hear voices too,” he says. I bite my fingernails as I listen, my mind floating behind my body like a ghost. I beckon it. “Might be good to take a break.” There’s no judgement in his voice, he says it very matter of factly, like leaving a Yelp review on my headspace. The Common is quiet on this Thursday night, couples walk past me. The air is warm.  I feel lonely and isolated, but less so than I did before the call. I thank him and toss my dab pen the next day.

When one of my other siblings, Caleb, went through his own psychosis at age 21, my brother flew to Boston to guide him through it. He caressed Caleb’s head while reassuring him it would be okay. Caleb preached about God and finding someone to sacrifice. When afraid, my brother pushed Caleb’s impulses away, like foam on top of saltwater.

I don’t know why we don’t talk. I don’t think I want to talk more. I’m okay with it.

When I take off for Penn Station the next day, I tell my brother it was good to see him and he gathers me up into a hug. I’m bigger, taller and heavier than him but his hug is tight and warm. He smells of smoke. I thank my fried-egg god that I won’t be smelling him for a while. When I see him at home for the next holiday, I’m sure he’ll be short tempered and antsy. I pull away from him and squeeze his arms like I’m a TSA agent checking for a weapon. “Okay,” I say.  We exchange I love yous and he tells me not to trust anyone on the train, handing me a wad of cash. I try to reject it but he shoves it into my pocket. His face flashes in annoyance when I try to give it back once more and then he waves me off. He gives me one more quick embrace and then leaves, frustrated. I deflate a little but am content as I start walking up Christopher Street, my fingers blue from the cold. For once, I don’t think about the hug. I let it be.

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Kira Salter-Gurau is a nonfiction writer from Portland, Maine. Her work has appeared in Yourmag, The Quinobequin Review, and Concrete Magazine among others. She's a fiend for artichoke dip and will look at any picture of cats you have.

Marin Smith

I Lie to a Pregnant Woman

“How’s your scar?” she asks, worried.

“Scar’s fine,” I say, “you can barely see it.”

I don’t tell her: the scar is just a physical reminder that once she’s a mother she will be trying to stitch up her life continuously for the rest of it, rearranging it each time it’s flayed.

That the C-section is a dismembering, and the emergence of an entirely new identity—I don’t mean my baby, who also will emerge in all her slimy glory, or the instantly activated tractor beam that would tolerate that tiny being no place but on me, nourished by my organs as she was inside me—I mean the mother that emerged, that broke out of me with a crack like Athena from the head of Zeus, a re-membering.

I don’t tell her: even though my belly returned to a recognizable size, and I can, mercifully, sleep on my stomach again with the rest of humanity (something I so longed for in those final weeks like a languid walrus), the scar doesn’t hurt, per se, but it asserts its presence occasionally with the subtlety of a spiderweb or a tiny combed foot.

The scar whispers: I’m still here, this remnant, humming beneath your emergence into bottomless worry and delicate, precious communion between the new being you became, and the one you birthed.

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Marin Smith is a wordwrangler, poet, essayist, mother, and life enthusiast. She has an MA in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her work has been published in MER Literary, Milk Art Journal, Literary Mama, Dead Flowers Poetry Rag, Considering Disability Journal, Elephant Journal, Thought Catalog, Split Rock Review, Oregon English Journal, and forthcoming in CALYX Journal and West Trade Review. She is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Abraxas Review.

Ellen D.B. Riggle

Ancestors and Legacies | Talbott Street

In the black and white photograph my mother gave me on my 28th birthday, my great-grandfather, a poised, handsome young Benjamin Harrison, wears a tweed suit jacket over a high collar white shirt with a gray bowtie, clipped hair neatly parted on the left side, and small rimless spectacles perched atop his nose ridge. The family resemblance is evident in his eyes and soft lips.

Though I was introduced to him as an infant before his relocation to the Union Printers Retirement Home in Colorado, I have no memory of him. He died a few months after my second birthday.

My mother explained she was giving me the photo because my great-grandfather was gay.

"How could you have failed to mention this in the past ten years since I came out to you?" I asked in my most incredulous tone.

She shrugged. "It just never occurred to me."

Ben’s life is now my own urgent mystery, a DNA throughline from past to present.

~

Born in 1893 in Pennsylvania, Ben moved to Illinois after graduating high school and met Mabel at a publishing company where they both worked. Ben was 18 and Mabel 24 when they married a few months later.

Did he know then?

To avoid the shame of marrying a much younger man, Mabel erased the year of her birth in the family Bible, using thick pencil to revise her age to match his. They had two daughters and eventually settled in a two-story brick home on the near north side of downtown Indianapolis, close to the main trolley line.

~

Nearly 20 years after his death, and several years before receiving the portrait, I visited a new gay bar housed in a converted movie theater a block from where they had lived. The marquee announced the name of the bar in bold red letters: TALBOTT STREET. 

My mother went with me.

She had visited the building before while staying summers with her grandparents. She was allowed to walk alone to the theater for the 25-cent matinee. In this space, she could still smell the popcorn, and the sticky floors were not much changed from the syrupy spilled soda pop of happy childhood memories. The space was a connection to her beloved grandparents, and a new connection to me.

A bored bouncer sitting at the heavy wood and glass entry door checked our IDs. If he was surprised by someone my mother’s age looking every bit a Midwest country farm woman in jeans and white blouse with tiny blue flowers, he didn’t blink an eye. He also didn’t blink at my pitifully fake ID.

Inside the lobby, the old popcorn stand had been transformed into a round wooden bar selling alcohol and poppers from the glass candy case. This was the year before AIDS exploded on the scene, so bowls of free condoms by the beer taps had not yet appeared.

The wall behind the bar was open to the theater where the upholstered seats had been removed. The concrete floor sloped gently towards the old stage and screen. People danced with the abandon of finally being set free, for just a moment, in just this place.

Was Ben ever able to dance with abandon?

Once our eyes adjusted to the dim light, my mother excused herself to the restroom. When she returned a short time later, she cheerfully described all the nice ladies she’d met. She helped them with their elaborate dresses, which required adjusting and zippering. They had wonderful conversations about where they were from and where they worked. Knowing my mother, they almost certainly also traded a recipe or two. My mother had met her first drag queens.

The music and shouting voices escalated as the evening progressed. Bodies dripped with sweat despite the cold winter night outside. I watched from the side of the room as my mother danced with a nice young gay man, smiling as he held her gently, shielding her from the throng of other dancers. Throughout the evening, my friends, old and new, surrounded my mother, talking, laughing, and soaking up her warmth.

Did Ben’s mother love him as mine loved me?

~

Ben was a member of the International Typographical Union.  As a typesetter, he meticulously created the printing plates for books. My mother remembered hearing a tale about colleagues who changed a single letter in one line during Ben’s lunch break to see if he would catch it before the end of the workday.  Apparently, he did, and everyone had a good laugh. 

I wonder if they suspected?

My mother also recounted family stories of Ben taking Mabel shopping at the downtown Ayres department store, picking out clothes for her to try on. Always dapper himself, he wanted her to dress fashionably as well.

He was a member of the social and charitable fraternity of the Freemasons, spending much of his free time at the men’s club. Was this secretive society – an organization that emphasizes morality and obedience to the law – a place to hide the transgression of an "abominable and detestable crime against nature?”

Sometime in 1950, Mabel filed for divorce. Ben moved out of the family home and into a studio apartment a couple of blocks away.

When did Mabel know?

~

After receiving the birthday gift, I peppered my mother with questions: “How do you know he was gay?” and “Did he have a boyfriend?"

A teenager in the 1950s, my mother had never directly been told of Ben’s sexual orientation, whether gay or perhaps bisexual. However, she did meet Johnny, a slight, younger man who accompanied Ben on a visit to the family farm in North-central Indiana. My mother vividly remembers her own father – a man with a volatile temper – calling Ben and Johnny perverts, kicking them out of the house, warning them to leave, and threatening to beat them to death with a two by four should they return. Later, putting the pieces together, my mother understood what had happened.

Though I was accepted in my family – or at least not rejected, my girlfriends were welcomed at family events – the one time my mother brought up Ben’s sexuality and possible relationship, the conversation was quickly shut down.

I still sometimes wonder: Who was Johnny? What happened to him? Are his queer family members now searching for clues in their own family tree?  Is his family as afraid to talk about his sexuality as mine is to discuss Ben’s? Or, do they even know?

~

I watch shows which trace a person’s ancestry, including PBS’s Finding Your Roots. In a typical episode, the host reveals outlaws and entrepreneurs, unknown marriages and scandalous out-of-wedlock children, and forgotten or hidden tragedies.  Not once have I heard the host say, “Your great-grandfather was gay!”  (Nor any other relative for that matter, but maybe I missed those episodes.)

One ancestry search site advises those looking for LGBTQ relatives to check military records for a dishonorable discharge.  Ben did not serve in the military.  They suggest consulting old newspapers and court records for arrests or convictions for sodomy or unnatural behaviors. No arrest records exist for Ben. They recommend looking at census records for those living at the same address. Ben lived with Mabel, then alone.

As in most cases, Ben’s records yield no clues. These ancestors slip into the crevices of the woodwork of time where the walls cannot (or will not) talk. When we seek our lost family members -- those hidden, silenced, rewritten, overwritten, erased – we rescue history by finding the true meaning of queer – something, or someone, beyond ordinary.

LGBTQ people are more visible now than in years past, but many still grow up in families with few, if any, openly queer relatives. Queer folks often move away from their family of origin, looking for safer, more welcoming places to belong, creating chosen families.  This act of self-preservation abandons the youth, leaving them with vicarious traumas and limiting intergenerational wisdom. We need our queer voices to be found in history and heard in the present.  What will future generations learn from our records of life, love, and struggle?

~

Ben’s portrait hangs on my wall. He is my ancestor; I am his legacy. I honor him by paying it forward as I like to imagine he was doing for me.

---

Ellen D. B. Riggle is an award-winning professor and author currently based in Lexington, KY.  Their essays and poems have been published in Earth’s Daughters, Pegasus, Rise Up Review, The ADVANCE Journal, and Writers Resist.  They are author of over 100 academic articles and several books, including A Positive View of LGBTQ.

Mandira Pattnaik

Sixteen Steps to Reach a Point of Singularity                                          

1.     Spot. Mark.

Because Edinburgh University found that, women, during the fertile part of their cycle, found pictures of men with enlarged pupils more appealing. Many believe that is because, pupils dilate when focused on someone they find attractive.

2.     Imagine you’re an archer. He’s the apple on a tree. Think apple marmalade. Think apple juice.

Eye contact makes us feel good and connects us. Prolonged eye contact has been thought to release phenylethylamine, a chemical responsible for feelings of attraction. It has also been thought to release oxytocin, the love chemical most closely associated with longer term bonding and commitment. Looking at each other’s eyes is a sign of love.

3.     Hope to stir him, aspire to win a target. Your weapon is your piercing gaze. Aim the park bench where he sits. Walk across the vast lush carpet of grass in-between.

Scientists from UChicago’s Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology and the University of Geneva found that people tend to fixate on the faces of the images of people that elicited a feeling of romantic love, and tend to fixate on the body of those that elicited sexual desire. Eye contact indicates lasting love. Harvard psychologist Zick Rubin found that couples who were deeply in love after a decade looked into at each other’s eyes 75% of the time while talking.

4.     Pay close attention. Like chequerboard. Like Chessboard.

Chess is a board game, like chequerboard. 64 squares, 8 rows (called ranks), 8 files (called files). In algebraic notation, using White's perspective, files are labelled a through h from left to right, and ranks are labelled 1 through 8 from bottom to top; each square is identified by the file and rank which it occupies. The a- through d-files comprise the queenside. As the queen you’ve always imagined yourself to be, take charge. Run through the e- to h-files comprising the kingside, his.

5.     Read him. Like poetry. Like a book.

Behavioral scientists think 93% of human communication is reading the body language, and only 7% is speech related. Before this moment, you’ve read him like poetry, now read him like a novel.

6.     Smile. Breathe. Deep breathe. Repeat. Think a simmering soup. Think brewing coffee.

You’ve been told about your smile. By him. You’ve stood in front of the mirror, practised this moment, because Amma said women shouldn’t be the first mover; shouldn’t be so bold, or desperate, to propose. Woman should wait for the man to say. Sulk if he never does, and marry someone else.

7.     Approach him like rowing. Steady. Fast. Slow. Repeat. Like slow-cooked biryani.

You think he knows how to row? So, when you go to that picnic in Ooty Lake on your honeymoon, he can row you out. Away from cousins and elders eager to eavesdrop on your conversations, because they’re gauging your compatibility index.

8.     Stand in front of him. Let him be awkward when he stands too. Talk. Ask. Listen. Say Goodbyes. Turn back. Walk solo. Think. Think. Think.

There’s a chance you two might click — instant, like butterflies, or maybe you two will have nothing in common to talk about, like crickets.

9.     Take the plunge. Dive. See him again. Talk. Talk. Talk. Listen. Listen. Listen.

It takes several meetings, they say, to fall in love.

10.  Love? Love!

Love is like the wild rose-briar,

Friendship is like the holly-tree —

The Olly is dark when the rose-briar blooms

But which will bloom more constantly?

--- Emily Bronte

11.  Fall. Fall. Fall.

Fall in Love.

Love’s not Newton’s apple. It’s — air, bubble, chorus.

12.   Did he just kiss you? Yes?

Imagine a pan of milk. Just bubbling, boiling over, frothy.

What makes you think of milk now? A huge vessel on the burner stove, ready for some sweet payasam. And how milk is a food, liquid, produced by the mammary glands of mammals, a primary source of nutrition.

13.  Walk the aisle. Sing a duet.

There are 14 reasons, according to a study, why couples who make music and sing together, stay together. One of them is that musicians are the most honest people on earth.

14.  Remember a bed of roses. Think a dinner table for two. Think of a home for many.

Plant roses, alternate with jasmine, then pansies and chrysanthemums. Line the pots to sunshine. They say, tired-from-work people love to return to friendly, green homes. Husbands included.

15.  Love. Laugh. Be childish. Be possessive. Be jealous. Be careless. Love. Repeat. Live. Add adventures.

Someone counted sub genres of romance novels to twelve. Stubbornly disagree.

16.  The final step is to reach a point. Of undisputed ‘Singularity’. Singularity as in union. As in fusion. As in combustion. As in amalgamation. Like the world curls into a whorl and vanishes there. Where we’ve come to stay.

Recent theory relates to ‘loop quantum gravity’ in the case of cosmic studies. It is a delightful release to know the theory that says space and time may be extremely curved, but gravity, or the pull of attraction, increases to infinite proportions. Don’t dispute that perfection.  

---

Mandira Pattnaik's fiction and nonfiction work appear in Wigleaf Top 50, Iron Horse Literary Review, Emerson Review, The Rumpus and Columbia Journal. Visit her at mandirapattnaik.com

Marin Smith

No One in Mexico Uses Coolant Anyway

From the cliff, the whales are specks drifting across a vast, silver eye. We’ve followed them south along Baja, and will try to catch them as they birth their calves in the bay of San Ignacio.

Had we come a week later, we’d have missed them.

You and I, we are rebounding, like the whales—our mid-twenties a helpless migration to and from the balmy shores of home. As we watch the whales, I sag from my own endless curve of swimming.

Back in your car, barreling south along with them, we roll down the windows. You drive fast, the wind covering our silence.

Suddenly your hands grip the wheel at ten-and-two, your eyes fix on the dash—together we watch the temperature pin rise. In the rear-view mirror, ominous liquid stamps the ground like a blood trail behind.

“Fuck,” you mutter, breaking to a stop, opening the hood, and peering in.

“It’s the coolant,” you say, “we’ll have to use the jug of water in the trunk.” I nod, as if I understand.

For the next twenty miles, we drive, watching the gauge until it screams too hot! You stop, pop the hood, I get out and pour water in the coolant tank, and we drive a few more miles. A limp across the desert.

“No one in Mexico uses coolant anyway,” you say, as if we can go on like this forever.

When I left you several months later, I cleared the entire apartment, leaving no sign that I’d ever lived or had even been there. I took out the trash, made the bed—things I’d rarely done under normal circumstances. It was an act of love, I thought, to erase my wake.

I only knew how to reject a person fully. No matter that there must have been some good and attractive qualities to draw me to you in the first place. No, I must have been hugely mistaken, seeing something that wasn’t there. I had to make you into a giant exaggerated smear, one easy to reject, because I was rejecting was a made-up thing.

I remember still, that night in Baja, how at nightfall we finally parked your broken car and propped our tent along an inland pond. Bullfrogs bellowed hideous songs all night—a soundtrack to our temporary trajectory, our migration through landscapes and each other.

---

Marin Smith is a wordwrangler, poet, essayist, mother, and life enthusiast. She has an MA in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her work has been published in MER Literary, Milk Art Journal, Literary Mama, Dead Flowers Poetry Rag, Considering Disability Journal, Elephant Journal, Thought Catalog, Split Rock Review, Oregon English Journal, and forthcoming in CALYX Journal and West Trade Review. She is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Abraxas Review.

Adam McOmber

Phallic Symbols

Obelisks. Actual cocks. Oak trees. Pine trees. Most other kinds of trees. Certain tombstones, especially the tall ones. Mirrors. The way I look old now in mirrors. Large things. Small things. My neighbor when he’s mowing the lawn with his shirt off. Biographies. Autobiographies. Certain phrases. “There is nothing more to be cured in me.” Death, especially Death when he’s wearing his hood. Dream work. Milk. Fire. Almost every kind of weapon. Jimson Weed. Dracula. Maypoles. What else? Spears. The notion of antiquity. Skyscrapers. Dark vitalism. The sinister creep of life. Two sailors alone on Christmas Eve. They go to a dim-lit tavern. They sit talking, their knees almost touching. Is there something else? There might be something else. All the fantasies I had when I was sixteen. The pathology of amour. Toothpicks. Toothbrushes. Fingers, technically. Freud says all of us have two fathers—the obscene one who represents transgression and the nom-du-pere, the one who says “no.” The letters of Paul to the Corinthians. Death magic. Werewolves. Desire grows around objects that fulfill a psychological need. When I was in high school, I was in love with my best friend. He was straight. Supposedly, straight. He played soccer. One time, he put his hand over my mouth on New Year’s Eve and pretended to kiss me, but he was really just kissing the back of his hand. That sort of thing. Test tubes when you turn them upside down. Anything that emphasizes the notion of “lack.” Proto-concepts. Anxiety. Strangers. Things that are similar to strangers. Moving to a city and going to your first gay bar. The music. The way the lights are. Snakes. Bathtubs. Probably not bathtubs actually. The “fiction of the ego.” I’m afraid this conversation is going to repeat.

---

Adam McOmber is the author of three queer speculative novels The White Forest (Simon and Schuster), Jesus and John (Lethe) and Hound of the Baskervilles (Lethe) as well as three collections of experimental short fiction, Fantasy Kit (Black Lawrence), My House Gathers Desires (BOA) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). Adam’s work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Hobart. Adam is the co-chair of the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.

Maureen Tai

Breathless

Head down/I walk the unpaved and unmarked trail/each step makes soft crunching sounds like someone chewing on their granola/undecided whether the coconut flakes were a good idea or not/when really/all I yearn to do/is gaze up into the endless blue sky/feathered with floaty clouds/I can pretend I’m not in the wild/sitting instead on an air-conditioned balcony overlooking a beach/a cocktail with a mini umbrella in my hand/but I’m afraid/deathly afraid if I must be honest/of stepping into a hole or on a rock/tripping on a branch or a vine/tumbling into the deep leafy chasm running alongside my hastily chosen route/my downhill roll prematurely ended by a lichen-covered boulder/which also cracks open my skull/the iPhone in my hand open at ‘Camera’ so only a single blurry shot of the aforementioned sky exists to document my last moments/but wait/why is the blasted battery showing only two per cent. when I left it charging overnight/as I start to curse all manner of gods and saints and mothers and sons/as I rue my decision to take a solo forest hike/not telling anyone/because I was so pissed off by the carton of milk I discovered this morning/gone sour in the fridge/feeling an anger so immense it overpowered my inexplicable fear of mosquitoes and mud/sweat and stillness/I realise/I’m overreacting/I’m not yet dead/not yet/not dead/I wrench my imagination from the edge of its self-constructed precipice/refocus my eyes on my trainers and the ground and the steps I continue to take/because I’m looking so hard to save myself/I see a flash of red on the ungroomed dirt path/nestled among the twigs and leaves/the wings/a butterfly/a whisper of life/not flitting or floating or dancing or darting as you’d expect from such winged creatures/its antennae twitching ever so slightly as if being teased by the wind/but there is no wind/just my panting like a pug on an overdue toilet walk/my heart thumping from these exertions/my mind dreaming of my unnatural demise/when the world suddenly stops/I stop/sit/wait/as the butterfly’s breath/and my battery runs/...

---

Maureen Tai is an award-winning Malaysian writer living in Hong Kong who has published creative works in literary and online magazines such as Cha, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kyoto Journal, Mekong Review, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Coffee and Conversations, Porch Lit Magazine, and the Hooghly Review, as well as in local and international anthologies. Primarily writing for children and teens, she has published short stories for children with Oxford University Press and Marshall Cavendish (Asia). Maureen’s work and book reviews can be found at www.maureentai.com.

Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Kimo

Our son took that little black and white panda everywhere—daycare, the park, to bed, chewed his fuzzy ears, gave him bear hugs, until the day we rushed him through lashing wind and rain into the classroom with its too-bright lights and primary-colored blocks and he realized Kimo was missing, twisted starfish hands toward the door, wailing Go back, go back, but we said we had to get to work, we’d find him later, he must have fallen as we ran but it was too stormy to search now and probably Kimo was back home or on the driveway, but our stomachs clenched when he looked at us like he already knew and must’ve felt the loss like a kind of death, a grief only Kimo’s velvety fur and sad, angled eyes could soothe.

For days we offered feeble attempts to console: He’s on an adventure! Maybe another boy found him and took him home. But at night we’d hear him whispering, whimpering, no doubt wondering where Kimo was, if he really was safe and loved or lost—scared and lonely, maybe run over by a car or teased and thrown around by big middle school kids.

Then five years and five thousand miles away, a graying Kimo turned up in the back window of his perplexed grandmother’s car and we had one of those omigod moments, remembering the bag of toys we’d given her to take home for charity. Kimo must’ve slipped in and hitched a long, globe-trotting ride, finally ready to come home, where nothing was the same—new house, new neighborhood, our son a big kid who didn’t play with toys any more.

And now, when we presented Kimo, a long-overdue offering, would he say, that dumb thing was never mine, return to his video game with a shrug? Or would he pause, taken back to nights alone in his room with the stars and the moon glowing on the ceiling when Kimo was the one thing he knew he’d always have to hold on to until morning finally came?

---

Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears, or is forthcoming, in Atticus Review, Centaur Lit, CRAFT, Does it Have Pockets, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, and others. Her stories were selected for the 2023 and 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlists and nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s books include award-winning flash collection, Wolfsong, and YA novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and curly-tailed pup, Kaya. kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; @kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo

Andrea Damic

Another Version of Her

Somewhere out there lives another version of her—a version that never dreamt nightmares of a bombarded city, never had her innocence plucked out, her childhood cut short, its door firmly latched not to re-open again—a version that never boarded the last convoy leaving the only home she’d ever known before the war re-wrote pages of her history.

Somewhere out there lives another version of her—a version that still plays with Barbie, watches MTV and dreams about the ballroom dancing. She can’t wait for the first snowflakes to touch the ground, always in awe at their flickering under the city lights. She knows nothing of losses as she lives next door to her best friend instead of another continent.

Somewhere out there is another her who doesn’t ask Father about us and them—them being the Oppressor—and he doesn’t respond that there are only people and their actions because he raised her to look beyond peoples’ political and religious beliefs, their nationality and the colour of their skin, to look at who they are at their core.

Somewhere out there is another her and that her never becomes Refugee, Displaced, Nameless. And never feels Unwanted. She doesn’t wave at the fading silhouettes left behind, one of them being her father. She never gets to know the mindless desperation besieging the last day of her nonage, and she never gasps for air while being crushed by the overflowing anguish of human bodies trying to secure a seat to Unknown.

Somewhere out there she doesn’t have to cope with losses no child should ever experience, let alone comprehend at the age of twelve. She is not lost to the city she was birthed into, the same one that won’t recognise her in the decades to come. That her belongs. She isn’t fragmented and her shell needn't mending like the broken pottery pieces in the art of Kintsugi.

Somewhere out there she doesn’t educate her child on the meaning of refugee from the first-person perspective. She doesn’t shy away from sadness whenever they speak about Grandfather, the one person her daughter never got to know. That her still makes frost-bitten angels no matter the snowdrift and the world she inhabits isn’t shattered because she is still naive about that world.

Somewhere out there lives another her and her future is yet to unfold.

~

It seems as if the ages passed before she stopped envying that version of herself, and though she’s thankful, she can’t help but wonder about all the ifs—about the Before Time—the moments when her memories don’t tremble like the golden beams of sunlight airborne to the furthest corners of her soul, smouldering in wait, where they don’t make the rustling sound of stories never fully written, lingering softly, the bygone spells of a childhood torn asunder, where her life is a glass half-full, an unfinished canvas, an unsung note.

In time, she has grown to accept the heritable change of being and the prospect that Endings don’t adhere to the state of non-existence, and by doing that, she has allowed herself to embrace this alternate self.

---

Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She wears many hats as her daughter likes to remind her. Aside from being a mum, Andrea is also an artist and a writer. Her education is opposite to artistic expression—she's an accountant with a master's in Economics. Being a non-native English speaker makes every publication worth the struggle. She believes there's something cathartic about seeing your words and art out in the world. Andrea is also a contributing editor of a newly founded Pictura Journal. Her literary art appears or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, JMWW, Ghost Parachute, The Ekphrastic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Alien Buddha Press, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. You can also find her fiddling with her website: https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/

Meg Robson Mahoney

Frozen Silence

I was sixteen when I sat alone, across from Dad, at his kidney-shaped desk. Dad—an inventor forced from left-handedness in childhood, his signature unreadable—had designed the desk: a six-foot curve of plywood, three feet across and piled with clutter from his fertile, furtive mind. It had been easier when there were two of us on the receiving end, back when he called both of us to sit with him and listen, before my sister Deb left for college. Across his mix of staplers and schemes, I was his project now. It was a dubious honor, being alone with Dad, the focus of his attention.

My parents were at odds about many things, one of them being religion. Dad was an atheist. On Thursday nights, after dinner was cleared and the dishes were done, Mom left for choir with the smell of pot roast or pork chops still in the air. Our Golden Retriever would circle and settle against the kitchen door as Mom closed it behind her, and Dad would draft me to sit with him at his desk across the hall, within sight of the dog and the kitchen door.

His sentences jumped from stone to stone across the river of his thoughts. The same path from week to week, gradually going deeper over months and by degrees.

“People tell the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern. That’s crap.” He tapped a Winston from its pack and flared his lighter. The cigarette bounced with his lips, the smell of it in the air as he waded in. “That was 1871, the year a comet came into the atmosphere and exploded in a shower of burning bits, centering on the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. I had a book that laid it out, but I sorted my books by height, and I can’t find it.”

My eyes followed his hand as it swept toward his wall of books, where forty volumes of Voltaire and The Great Books kept company with two look-alike sets of encyclopedias, junior and senior. My thoughts spun off. I remembered a time when I would hear the garage door come down each night, and I’d throw myself at his legs as he came up the walk. I did this even after my display felt empty. One day, I stopped. If he noticed, I never knew.

Sitting along the outside curve of Dad’s desk, I trained my gaze away from the soft folds of his belly. Relaxing in an evening, at his desk or by the fireplace in his big brown Naugahyde chair, he’d leave his red plaid bathrobe untied, loose and open. He was comfortable with his body, with nudity, and wanted us to embrace nudity too. He spoke wistfully of nudist retreats and might have chosen one as a destination for our vacations, were it not for my mother.

Back when I was maybe six or seven, my father built a six-foot fence around our backyard, the fence being another cause for tension between Mom and Dad. How tall was legal? What would the neighbors think? Could it be both beautiful and private? They argued details, never mentioning in front of us the real dispute—that he was probably angling for his own private nudist camp. Although we never used the backyard as he envisioned, the fence extended along three sides, enclosing my mother’s garden with its lilac bush at the center. My mother planted bushes along the west side, but much of the yard was still visible from my best friend Karen’s second-story window.

One day, after the fence was built and years before I sat with Dad at his desk, Karen and I were playing in the shadow of the lilac bush, building miniature worlds in crinkly aluminum pans left over from frozen chicken pot pies. After filling each with dirt, we lay delicate pebble pathways and used fragments of mirrors as ponds for my glass animals to pause and drink. Karen and I were cool in the shade, while Dad was mowing the lawn in the searing Illinois sun, crisscrossing past us with the smell of cut grass in his wake. Each time he passed, he exhorted us to “Peel!” and I pictured a time when, at his suggestion, my family had indeed peeled ourselves naked to lounge and play along a deserted shore in Glacier National Park.

Karen’s puzzled eyes found mine.

I said, “Let’s go inside.” We left our dish gardens behind.

Trapped across the desk from Dad at sixteen, I listened as he leapt from one thing to another, from Peshtigo to Easter Island and “thirty-two other disasters! They’re in the Almanac. At Easter Island, it was a volcano.”

His stories hopped from catastrophes among the Anasazi to earthquakes in the Midwest to the Illinois town of Olney, named for an ancestor of ours who disappeared in a Mississippi flood. As his words swept by, my eyes fell on his hand-held stamp for embossing plastic labels amid his jumble of handy items. As I recall, he had several labelers. If something’s good, why not have two? If you have an idea, why not repeat it? It was an endless process for him, coming up with ideas to rearrange the world—his family, his home, his work, and beyond.

Downstairs in his basement workshop, he had lined the wall above his workbench with pegboard, painted with the shape of every tool. When a project was under way, his tools left their painted ghosts behind, returning rarely. Once, he built an electric circuit board for one of his inventions. It was a work of art, its wires color-coded to signify their intentions, bending in synchrony and crossing in patterns.

One Christmas, he jigsawed several sets of three-inch-tall balsa ornaments, each symbolizing one of the world’s religions, none of which was his. At his behest, Deb and I painted them in the basement, and he gave them out as gifts: Christmas hopes for tolerance. He was a recruiter to his causes, but people were harder to organize than things.

He never sought my ideas. His questions were rhetorical. My eyes would aim high to one of his model airplanes suspended in flight from the ceiling to a landing strip on an empty shelf among his books—a Boeing B-17 Fortress, say, or a Douglas A-20 Havoc. He’d wanted to fly in the war, but his color-blindness sent him into the army instead. Like the planes circling over his desk, I was suspended too, halfway between the urge to fly and a desire to be accepted by Dad. Eventually he’d say something that would bring me back.

“We lost half our outfit in Burma. Besides me, there was only one other virgin in the whole battalion—Tony. When Tony got his head blown off, I thought I might get home with mine. I know that doesn’t make sense.” He rarely mentioned the war and didn’t go on about it. He leaned back and let his chair swivel a few degrees to face me. I shifted in mine.

“Your mother was a virgin too. I wish someone had told me how important it is to try sex before marriage. Our society sees the human body and sex as shameful, but they’re not. You know, I’ve done a lot of reading about sex in other cultures,” he said, with a sweep of his hand toward his bookshelves.

“I’ve got books by anthropologists who’ve studied cultures around the world. In some places, young people are initiated into sex by their elders. Children learn about the pleasures of their bodies from experienced hands.”

“I’ve got a lot of books.” He gestured toward the hidden door behind him, which led to his private sanctuary, his bathroom. It was invisible to anyone beyond our family. He’d built it, with my mother’s dad, in this room that alternated between dining room and office over the years, so the house would have a second bathroom. This bathroom—“Dad’s bathroom”—was small, with space enough for a toilet, sink, shower, a few shelves for towels on one end, and a wall of books on the other—books on anthropology, along with novels, Playboys, and other magazines with centerfolds of naked women. Beyond the family, no one guessed the room was there. Its door opened inward on hidden hinges and was paneled like the room it robbed space from. Sometimes the only telltale sign that Dad was home was the drone of the fan in there. Dad would secrete himself for hours—and read, I guess. Mornings and evenings. More on weekends.

We weren’t forbidden to use his bathroom. In high school, I visited it like a library, choosing one book at a time to stash under my mattress for late-night flashlight reading. No one knew since I made my own bed each morning and changed the sheets each week. There were no overdue notices or late fees. It was a good way to learn some things I’d missed.

No one at home ever actually explained anything to me. In fourth grade, on the day they showed a film about reproduction and passed out packets with brochures and sanitary pads, I was sick at home. Once I spent a night with my aunt, who must have realized how little I knew. As she said good night, she stayed a while to explain things in the dark, and I was puzzled into wakefulness by visions of blood and cotton pads, too surprised to find a question. I was fourteen when I finally summoned the courage to ask my mother, “How do the sperm and egg get together?” I’d pictured some kind of exchange at the wedding ceremony, perhaps having to do with the rings.

“The penis fits into the vagina,” she said. That was that.

By the time I was sixteen and sitting with Dad at his desk, I knew more, but his bathroom library was a spotty way to learn. I’d gotten used to the near-naked bodies in there, and I’d read The Harrad Experiments by Robert Rimmer, about young lovers exchanging partners, but I’d never had a date, never had a boyfriend, never been kissed.

Back at the kidney desk, Dad’s voice jolted me out of my thoughts again.

“Your mother doesn’t want those books out where they might be seen. She and I can’t talk about sex,” he said with a dismissive sweep of his hand. “She doesn’t care for it. I think she’s frigid.”

Frigid? I didn’t know what he meant by that. It sounded bad. Did a person inherit it? Was it contagious? Could I fend it off?

I knew what virginity was, and I resolved then and there to lose it the first chance I got, to prevent this thing called frigidity if I could. Definitely before I turned eighteen.

Those one-sided conversations with Dad would end at the sound of Mom coming home from choir. The dog always heard it first—the automatic garage door in the backyard sounding an alarm that only a dog might hear. He would circle at the door with friendly barks and a wagging tail that beat against the wall as he rose and wiggled to greet her. Dad’s words would take a precipitous turn toward a neutral topic, releasing me from my frozen silence. He would applaud the dog’s excitement and reach for something on his desk to busy his hands. I’d get up, pat the dog, greet my mom, and escape to my homework.

It’s odd how my experience of listening to Dad was a kind of training in feeling cold and distant, silent and unresponsive.

Odd, too, how we adjust. At seventeen I joined the choir, leaving Dad to shuffle things around his desk and in his thoughts alone.

---

Meg Robson Mahoney has been published in The Baltimore Review, Tiny Molecules, HerStry, and teaching artist journal. Retired from teaching dance in a public school, she lives in Seattle and explores the Salish Sea and the world beyond with her husband. Website: megrobsonmahoney.com; Substack: megrmahoney.substack.com

Lauren Smith

Twenty-Seven of My Fears at Age 17:

A Password-Protected List

1. Rejection

2. Letting people in

3. That if I come out, I cannot be platonically affectionate with my girl (space) friends anymore

4. When you are served a chicken dinner at a restaurant but they leave the ribcage in and you are forced to grapple with the mortality of eating something with a bone structure that resembles your own

5. An empty plate

6. A full plate

7. Everyone else’s plate empty while mine is full

8. College and relapsing and losing control

9. That this is what my life will always look like

10. Getting my period at prom and bleeding all over my dress

11. School shootings

12. Fire

13. The dark

14. Regret

15. Losing my home

16. Let me repeat this since I don’t know if it sunk in: chicken. ribcages.

17. Religion

18. That my relationship with my parents will always be this

19. Recovery

20. Being alone

21. Getting better

22. Never getting better

23. Living

24. Dying

25. Diarrhea

26. Never being content with what my life is

27. Endings

---

Lauren Smith is a queer writer living in Boston. She can be found often with her steam cleaner, getting into the nooks and crannies of her apartment. She loves prose filled with long sentences that swell all around the reader, candles that smell like water, and crocheting to whatever reality dating show just premiered. Find her on substack @heyitslalasmitty

Nancy Jorgensen

Alias Disclosure 

Please note: By responding to this questionnaire, you consent to publication and understand this information could limit or extend boundaries of self-image, professional advancement, social expectations, and/or stereotyping.

Please answer the following questions regarding aliases.

1.     Please state the name you are currently known by: Nancy Jorgensen                

2.     Please list any other names you have been known by in the past:

1. My wrestling name is The J-Town Slanger. A couple of my choir students, high school boys, gave it to me. They set up imaginary wrestling matches between me and my teaching partner—Super Freak Cathy Snookem. “Big match tonight, J-Town,” they would call as they left for football practice. Talented tenors were hard to come by and if wrestling talk garnered me a few, I played along.

   The boys posted our fictional results each morning on the whiteboard, using so much dry-erase marker the room smelled like paint thinner. Super Freak Cathy Snookem and I never took it personally when we lost in the ring. As two women running a 400-student choral program, we’d done our share of fighting and losing.

2.  When we produced Cats or The Music Man or Beauty and the Beast, I sat at the keys, simultaneously playing, and conducting guitarists, drummers, saxophonists, and trumpeters. The pros were there for the money, the kids for the fun. So, while adult musicians made raspy noise penciling in notes, the kids hollered potential names for our group and then insisted we take photos. They named us The JCrew Band, and in their fantasies the shots would adorn our album cover. An official name seemed to legitimize their participation and moor them to the grown-up world.

3. A few years after my wrestling days, students started calling me Nancy Pants. While male colleagues conducted concerts in tuxes, Super Freak and I were expected to wear gowns. We rebelled and flung silky fuchsia scarves atop our white lapeled jackets and wide-leg satin pants. I appreciated my students’ recognition of my resistance.

4. I confiscated a note one day as it passed student to student in Freshman Baritone Chorale. Despite the professional-sounding course title, this 80-voice group tended toward unruly. At fourteen or fifteen years of age, the boys weighed between 90 and 250 pounds, measured from 4’5” to 6’6”, smelled of underarm stink and too much Axe, and acted between outrageous and immature. As I snatched the note, the offender flushed deep crimson from hairline to fingertips. I read their new name for me, printed in all caps: TILF.

5. My everyday name was Mrs. J, muddled by lazy mouths into Ms. J or Miss J. Then, the school hired my daughter, Elizabeth Jorgensen, to teach English. We shared some of the same students, and that forced kids to be more precise in pronouncing honorifics.

   An alto stopped me after class one day. “Mrs. J!” she said, “your daughter, Miss J…or Ms. J…is my favorite teacher!”

   Elizabeth used the confusion to teach grammar. I noted students’ faces when they realized Mrs. J was also Mom.

6. My childhood nickname was Nanny-Poo. Bestowed by my brother. It wasn’t snappy like his—Smirk. Or funny and clever like my boyfriend’s—Josephinistine. But it seemed to be a term of endearment, so I answered when he used it. 

7. My ancestors’ names are Simon, Smirl, Johnson, Newman, Hudson, Moh. These surnames and family lore led me to believe I was British and German, Episcopalian and Catholic. In grade school, kids parsed out heritage in percent. “Mine,” I said, “is fifty-percent English, a quarter German, a quarter Luxembourg.”

   It would be decades before genetic testing made me a liar.

The big reveal packed two surprises.

First, I’m 8.1% Scandinavian. Not astonishing since I assumed European heritage.

Second, I’m 9.1% Ashkenazi Jewish. In the blink of a computer, what I called myself changed.

Records show only a small number of Americans have been tested for ancestry, but a majority say they are interested. I am too. But I haven’t pursued details—has anything really shifted? Does a label change who I am? Or is it simply a reflection of who I am?

I no longer interact with clever teenagers who invent epithets, endearments, and appellations. I’m not Nancy Pants, but still a rebel. I’m not part of the J Crew Band, but still a musician. I’m not Nanny-Poo, but still my brother’s favorite sister. Now I’m just Nanc, Mom, or Grandma Nancy. Fine with me.

Your Signature: Nancy Jorgensen 

---

Nancy Jorgensen is a Wisconsin writer, educator, and musician. Her most recent book is a middle-grade sports biography, Gwen Jorgensen: USA’s First Olympic Gold Medal Triathlete (Meyer & Meyer). Her essays appear in Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, The Offing, River Teeth, Wisconsin Public Radio, and elsewhere. Find out more at NancyJorgensen.weebly.com

Esther Ra

the best & the brightest

I listen to elite law firm attorneys speak of students from lesser schools or lower grades, and a look of disdain crosses their faces, like a cloud briefly obscuring the blinding blue sky. We hire only the best & the brightest… Presumably I am included in this category, because I am at Stanford, and I have been hired by an elite law firm, and invited to this party. But I swirl the wine in my glass, feeling flushed & self-conscious, like stepping into a suit the wrong size. I cannot shake off the feeling that I am speaking through a glazed mask that could crack at any moment, or treading lightly through fields of artificially pristine grass. If I close my eyes, I can still see the cheap signs blinking dimly in the red-light district, right by the small church where I lived. I can still smell the sharp stench of the gutters underneath our house, or my mother’s nightmares where she steps back into her childhood, pushing through bathroom stall after stall, each overflowing with shit. I was as shocked as anyone to find myself here; still feel my head swim in classes; still feel clammy and afraid every time I take an exam. I tell my best friend from Stanford, It worries me, because I don’t identify as the best or the brightest, and he bursts into laughter: I don’t think that’s something you can choose to identify with if you aren’t, Esther. It’s just something that you are!

But how can you measure worth by pedigree? I think of my friend back home who never went to college, her glowing beautiful eyes, her witty tongue, her strong hands so much faster and more efficient than mine. The way she was one of the few people in Korea who ever saw my sadness: It worries me when you say you love the ocean, Esther, she wrote to me once in a letter, because I do, too, and it’s the people who are loneliest who fall in love with the ocean. I think of the ocean of souls across every country and continent, each blazing with their own specific gift, their own beautiful usefulness to the world, despite the coin flip of country or family or circumstance. I think of the brothers sisters lovers fathers mothers who shape the world to become a kinder place, regardless of their place of origin or the level of their degree. I know I have been given much, and therefore I speak too much, but it is not those who narrate the loudest who have the most important stories to tell. This is what I believe: worth is not a price tag or a resume, not a voice we fashion out of a mask, but something we’ve been given—something that, as my friend said, we are. It is the invisible jewel pulsing inside of our chests. The good, quiet work of tongues singing, of bread rising, of children sleeping under a safe sky. It is the brightness that dwells—not in our hands, but in reflection. We turn our faces like sunflowers, towards the same light that shines down on us all.

---

Esther Ra is a bilingual writer who alternates between California and Seoul, South Korea. She is the author of A Glossary of Light and Shadow (Diode Editions, 2023) and book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018). Her work has been published in Boulevard, The Florida Review, Rattle, The Rumpus, PBQ, and Korea Times, among others. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Award, 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, and Sweet Lit Poetry Award. Esther is currently a J.D. candidate at Stanford Law School. (estherra.com)

Jacqueline Doyle

Teachers’ Pets: Five Micromemoirs

First Grade

It was perfectly acceptable to have teacher’s pets in those days, at least that’s how I remember it. I can see my first-grade teacher, plump, with tightly curled hair. Was she really named Mrs. Darling? Her teacher’s pet was named Lynn and Mrs. Darling used to pick her up and swing her high above her head and they both laughed in delight. If I were to run into Lynn on the street today I would immediately dislike her, even after all these years. I already knew how to read in first grade, this was before Sesame Street, most kids learned later in school, but I’d learned at home with my father and a phonics book with a picture for each letter of the alphabet and ladders in the back of the book that you could climb as you sounded out words, one word to a rung. I’d read ahead in our first-grade English book during our reading circles, and finished the entire book way ahead of time, but Mrs. Darling didn’t believe me. Mrs. Darling had her pet who followed the rules and I was the sassy little girl who claimed she knew so much. I wasn’t trying to make trouble, not then, but reading ahead eventually got me out of the New Jersey suburbs. It was a relief.

Sixth Grade

Did she really commit suicide later, Mrs. W., the only teacher I remember singling me out for special praise? In sixth grade we did a lot of creative writing and Mrs. W. liked mine, one I remember from the point of view of a chess piece in an ivory chess set that changed hands and traveled around the world like I wanted to. A gawky eleven-year-old, I thought I needed to become less of a tomboy but didn’t know how and I even didn’t mind when she had my parents in for a conference because she thought I’d plagiarized a rhyming poem about a tiger, since that seemed like a compliment, it was good enough to be plagiarized. I hadn’t plagiarized, not from William Blake or anyone else, but my father always read a lot of Rudyard Kipling out loud to me and that’s what the poem sounded like, though why anyone would want to imitate Kipling, I still don’t know. My mother told me on the phone about the suicide, an offhand do-you-remember-so-and-so? It figures that I’d be drawn to the teacher harboring darkness inside. She told me once that I needed to learn how to take a compliment, and I still haven’t, but I think about that a lot.

Senior Year

I stole a book he’d checked out of the library and somehow believed he wouldn’t notice. This was high school when I enrolled in an independent study with Mr. McD., an English teacher who also had a pet, her name was Bonnie, a cheerleader I think. I really wanted to read things they weren’t teaching, for example James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, and this was a small book of literary criticism called The Golden Nightingale by Donald Stauffer, beige with gold lettering on the spine, which was frayed, he got it out of the county library for me and I treasured it and didn’t know how to get a book like that. He never asked me to return it to him. So I kept it and later when I was in college I ran into him in a small grocery store when I visited home for vacation and he nodded, tight-lipped, barely acknowledging my greeting. I would have been unfriendly too. He was dying of cancer then, so that might have been the reason, not the theft. He was wearing the tweed sport coat he always wore. I stole a book from the library once when I was in grad school in upstate New York, writing literary criticism myself. I underlined passages in fine point black magic marker in the book, which was out of print, but that’s another story.

Yoga Class

In my yoga class in California I didn’t tell anyone that I was an English professor. Because I hate how people suck up to you when they find out, or how people like my dentist say they’ll have to mind their grammar. But I didn’t really like being seen as a featureless housewife in the yoga class either, and I really disliked my yoga teacher’s pet. A girl-on-girl crush that seemed to make the student uncomfortable. I think the student’s sister may have been a yoga teacher too and they knew each other outside of class. Whenever we had to voice intentions or talk about what yoga meant to our everyday lives, the teacher would ooh and aah over the student’s pretty unremarkable answers. I’m still petty about pets, as you can see.

My Pets

You’re probably wondering whether I’ve had pets as a teacher, and the answer is yes, but I don’t think I made them obvious, and they weren’t the ones you might expect. Not the hard workers or students who followed the rules, not the ones who got the best grades either. I secretly admired the outliers, the ones who took risks with their writing, the ones who alienated the class with their off-the-wall comments. My pets were the ones who couldn’t care less about being pets. My pets played with grammar and ignored outlines and liked writers who did that too. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Whitman said and really can you teach Whitman and then insist that fragments and comma splices and long coiling sentences with participles are wrong? Can you teach Gertrude Stein who said grammar was patriarchal and then insist on the perils of repetition and digression? It may have been a typo or it may have been intentional but Whitman ended the original Song of Myself with no period I think because life goes on and on

---

Jacqueline Doyle has published flash fiction in Wigleaf, CRAFT, and trampset, and flash nonfiction in F(r)iction, The Collagist, and matchbook, among others. Her flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press, and her flash nonfiction has been featured in Creative Nonfiction’s “Sunday Short Reads” and numerous anthologies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter @doylejacq.

Sheila Rittenberg

Cold Call

You’re in the consignment store scouring for finds amidst ragged cuffs and sweater holes when you get his call. The ultrasound is bad. It’s probably cancer. You have to move, from your city to his small town, right now, tonight, because there may not be as many nights left as you thought and you have to be together, not only together but married. You marry within a week in his living room, now your living room.

Children come, sisters and brothers, too. You stand alone downstairs, listen to the racket above, picture the faces, fat grins, anguished frowns.

Happy-sad. The sweet sticky smell of flowers. The note cards, cold and iron gray as if they were granite. We wish you well, we know this will be okay, love to the wonderful couple.

Your friend caters the meal, no payment permitted. You look at her and cry. You take in the fairytale silver urns and platters and plates, golden spoons, the long dining room table covered in fine whites, the crystal turned this way and that.

The ceremony is rose-scented honey. The family sits in living room rows, each person an open petal in the afternoon pastel. Your daughter-in-law sings and her voice breaks. Everyone looks down.

Then you’re married and he stomps the glass and “mazel tov” echoes and the frantic kiss, no passion, just a promise. You embrace, embrace, and sit together for a photo as if you’ve never heard of cancer.

You’ve crossed the divide between the rainy valley and the dry high desert. You’ve broken through. The trees you see change from dogwood to ponderosa, the bushes from rose to manzanita. You find the shops for buying your bread and your bras. The buzz of a city, once intoxicating, is far away. Now the bossy jays and mourning doves are the hubbub. You know you’ll be fine. You know he won’t die. He doesn’t.

---

Sheila Rittenberg is a retired nonprofit leader born in Montreal. She’s lived in three countries, and in addition to English, speaks French, and Hebrew (rusty!). Bend, OR, is home. She was a Fellow at Atheneum, a master level writing program based in Portland, OR, and is co-founder of the Stepping Stones Writing Retreat. More of her work can be found in The Bluebird Word and Fiction on the Web.

Karin Hedetniemi

A Plea to the Gods of Lost Causes

I apologize for the lengthy delay in submitting this lost item claim.

            I regret the extreme and irreversible tardiness of my request.

            I am wracked with remorse for my prior inaction on this matter.

On May 8, 2016, my husband and I travelled on the TGV train departing at 14:46 from Avignon to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.

In our rush to disembark, my husband left behind a brown leather journal in seat pocket #042.

            The journal is of indescribable sentimental value and irreplaceable.

            The journal contains the last words he ever wrote from the last trip he ever took.

            C'était écrit en anglais.

Upon our arrival home in Canada, my husband realized his journal was missing.

            I cannot describe to you the profound sadness I saw flash across his face.

            I cannot describe to you the profound ache I felt for his lost words.

Unfortunately, my husband can no longer­­ speak to specific identifying features.

            There may be content about unidentified birds, music, light and shadows.

            There was no time to get his impressions in order.

I understand that after a month, unclaimed items may become the property of the French government, donated to charity, or destroyed.

            Understand that after a month, my husband did not exist.

            Understand that matter can never be destroyed, only transformed.

Despite the remote possibility of locating the journal, I remain grateful for any assistance you can provide.

            I remain haunted by the ghosting of his last written words.

            I will always long to know, exactly how he loved me then.

---

Karin Hedetniemi photographs and writes from Vancouver Island, Canada. Her place-inspired creative work appears in Grain, Welter, EVENT, Reed Magazine, MoonPark Review, and other literary journals. Find her at AGoldenHour.com or on socials @karinhedet.

Mary Catherine La Mar

That Night in the Ghost Town of Ashcroft

You see yourself as though from the outside, slumped against the steering wheel like a barely conscious crash victim, concealed inside your thick parka with only the pom-pom of your beanie visible. The abandoned ghost town of Ashcroft surrounds you, the outstretched meadow and silvery vein of the rushing Castle Creek illuminated by stars that punctuate the sky like a chorus of brilliant exclamation points. Mountains swell dark and round in the background. At their feet stand the forsaken remains of mining cabins, wooden frames collapsing beneath their own weight, window glass long shattered, leaving black rectangles like sunken eye sockets of skulls. Except for the creek, all is still. The air is unyielding as ice, as though this Colorado ghost town is holding its breath, awaiting what you might do.

Parked on a snowbank, you have come to the end of the of the winding, 12-mile road. No one will show up at this hour, and in early winter. You, Ashcroft, and the mountains are your only witnesses, none of which explain the voice that breaks through the hush.

“This spirit…has exhausted the possibilities…of this life,” it says. It seems to come from inside your head, but it’s not your voice. Not a voice, either, as in, having a distinct timbre and inflection suggesting it belongs to somebody. Its sound obscures all other thought, like sleet freezing solid on a windshield. Although the words aren’t telling you to do anything, merely stating a fact, what you hear is, “The thing you have to do—the one correct action—is kill yourself.”

~

You haven’t driven twenty miles up the highway and then up the black and desolate country road to Ashcroft at two in the morning to die. You’ve come here because you can’t live your life. Your life, with its wrong turns, missed opportunities, and mistakes, is invisible but palpable soot smothering your furniture and apartment walls; wildfire smoke hanging over your plans, dreams, and obligations; a familiar abuse scorching your thoughts, blackening time itself. You can escape all of this, or pretend to, by moving—on foot, by car, it doesn’t matter. You can escape it all by being outside of time and civilization, moving in the night while humanity—the cruelest-seeming witness to your manifold failures—sleeps.

You expected to be alone, not accompanied by a voice. The voice of the universe, the beyond, the ancient poets, or whatever is speaking to you is irritatingly cryptic. Your tears that have been pooling inside your closed lids spill down your face and into your scarf. Why not just say, “Kill yourself”?

“Kill myself,” you say aloud, clinging to the steering wheel as though it is jail bars, your scarf muffling the words. A fearsome thought, yet not one you haven’t had before. And yet before now you’ve never felt you actually might kill yourself, or wanted to. Before, it was just a thought, delicious and vicious, the way wishing something awful to befall a person who treated you badly gives you a perverse flicker of schadenfreude snuffed hastily by remorse. Now, with this thought delivered to you like an edict—no, more like a prophesy—the sadness you feel makes even breathing heartbreaking. You cry like the creek just beyond your driver’s side window, one sustained cry breaking the ice of you down in sheets, until you’re nothing but water drops merging into the sea.

~

This idea, of killing yourself, is provocative, the way inching out onto a ledge is provocative: invigorating in its danger, compelling in its stakes, which are your entire life and being drawn together into a single point in time and space, a smooth, hard bead, a period at the end of a sentence. The period says more than the words that precede it. “The End,” it says. Nothing nebulous, nothing unexpressed. The end is certainty itself.

You yearn for this darkness within you to lessen. Would it lessen if your spirit were free to find a better life for itself—maybe not a perfect life, but one better than you’ve given it?

You feel your spirit straining inside you like an elated child at the beach, tugging at the hand of its caregiver. C’mon! it exclaims with feet dancing. C’mon! You, your life, and all its circumstances and your failures are holding this spirit back. It’s meant for so much more. You’re an inadequate incarnation. How you long to see this spirit run to the water, kicking up sand with its bare feet, and dive into the waves, laughing as seaweed plasters itself on its skin and sunlight sparkles on waves’ crests. And then emerge with handfuls of seashells, exclaiming over each one, and gifting them to beachgoers with infectious joy. C’mon, c’mon! It pushes against your ribs and the walls of your mind; you sense its perplexity at being unable to move freely—or perhaps it’s your perplexity, at being so lost in life, so ineffectual, so inadequate. A failure, you are. A failure.

I’m so sorry, you whisper. The solution settles like a late-fall leaf on your mind: You contain something bigger than you, this life. And you can release it—and the cost is your life.

You lift your head from the steering wheel. Your breath migrates to the windshield, the way insects, trapped indoors, pace the glass, sensing that “outside” is there yet something incomprehensible is in their way. It has frozen into a film of frost on the glass that makes it impossible to see outside. You fumble to open your car door, stand, and gasp as the cold snatches the heat from your cheeks and replaces your warm saliva and air in your throat with an unpleasant peppermint electricity.

But oh!—the beauty. You can hear every cascade of water over rock in the creek like individual instruments in a symphony. When you shift your weight, your boots crunch the snow while a slow breeze makes the pine branches wave and whisper and the leafless aspens sway. The sky is like a speckled eye looking down on you, the only large mammal—or the only one you can hear or see—stirring at this pre-dawn hour.

~

To how many desperate moments does wilderness bear witness? The deer that falls through pond ice, frantically tries not to sink, and fails. The rabbit that races across the meadow in a futile attempt to outrun the swooping hawk. The drama of the will to live. Could wilderness comprehend the drama of the will to die? Is there, you wonder, even such a thing in nature?

I could die right now, you feel—fall forward and let your atoms flutter up in all directions like a flock of tiny sparrows. If only you could will it so. It isn’t a will to die, it’s a letting die, as though you are the deer that falls through the ice, and instead of fighting its way out simply allows itself to sink and to drown. You look around. You could climb into the creek, submerge your face into the numbing wash, and refuse to come up for air. You could strip down to your pajamas or even your underwear, curl into the fetal position on snow and fallen leaves, and shiver there until you fall asleep, never to awaken. In winter temperatures it might take a day or two…or actually you don’t know how long it will take: until this moment your endeavors always have pointed to sustaining your life, not deliberately ending it.

To make myself die, I have to kill myself. You consider how you’d have to cut, crush, freeze, burn, shatter, or asphyxiate your body. You’d have to be both witness and executor of a violent act; it won’t be a beautiful scene like a flock of sparrows fluttering up and away. Then there would be the scope of it: not just one entity, but billions of cells, each one intricately programmed to protect itself from demise. You’d be forcing death on a system comprised of infinitesimal tiny, separate living things that each would endure its own suffering amid a desperate fight to live in spite of you. I might want to die, you realize, but the rest of me wouldn’t.

The voice speaking to you seems to suggest that the only option you have is to kill yourself. But when you take your imagination through the possible details of what it would require to achieve your own death, you see you don’t want any of that. What you want is to die, so that this spirit you house can fully live. You want to let one life, or idea of a life, go, so that another life, another way of living, can thrive. Alone in the wilderness in the ominous yet unassuming pre-dawn hours, this all makes perfect sense to you, and this fact terrifies you, and you drive the twelve miles down the road toward home thinking only of your warm bed, not crying, hardly breathing, your heart beating so fast you think you might die.

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Mary Catherine La Mar lives in Colorado where she's lucky to balance her time writing at her desk with exploring in the mountains and often writing there, too. She's working on a memoir about music and the dark sides of creativity as well as a collection of "children's stories" for adults.

Judith Lysaker

What’s True

She’d decided to eat fish again. She’d leave veganism behind her in the wake of his wake and wean herself from animal advocacy to taste flesh and saltiness again. She’d force a change that might fill her.

On Saturday nights, before her vegan days, he would make salmon for her on the grill just outside the backdoor on their concrete patio, where he’d stand barefoot and shirtless flipping pink flesh until it was charred with patches of crispy blackness that camouflaged its soft insides. He would bring it to her on a square turquoise plate (his was the red one, she’d remind him) and ask her to cut it open, look inside to see if the pink was how she liked it. He’d put a small piece in her mouth and ask her to taste it for texture and sweetness.

So, she thought she’d try salmon first. She could have chosen sardines. Cans of his favorites were still stacked neatly in the pantry, taking up space he had claimed for his own salty needs. She had yet to move them, hadn’t considered clearing them out. Instead, she listened, listened to them tell her magical stories of what might be—his mouth still full of desire.

She settled on salmon. It was odd, feeling flesh again in her hands, and placing it in the pan on the stove with olive oil and capers. It was odd squeezing the lemon and watching the spatter of oil and juices mar the clean glass stovetop. But she turned the heat higher, and listened to the flesh crisp, disturbing her with unwanted images of other charred skin and pink flesh. She let the saltiness invade her nostrils and caress the edges of her eyelids.

Sitting now at the small black folding table in the family room, she cuts into the fish on the square turquoise plate. At first it is satisfying—the salty, sweet flesh moving through her. But soon she is left wanting as she sits beside his empty seat and pushes her tongue hard on the top of her palate to stop the truth, a salty wetness cleaving to her cheeks.

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Judith Lysaker lives in Indiana with her brilliant, veggie-loving German Shepherd. An erstwhile academic, she now spends long hours writing short forms. Her work has appeared in Gone Lawn and *82. In her earlier career she published books with Teachers College Press and the National Council of Teachers of English.