Issue 52: In Transit

IN TRANSIT / 52

Fall 2019 $15

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ru’mi-nate: TO CHEW THE CUD; TO MUSE; TO MEDITATE; TO THINK AGAIN; TO PONDER

Ruminate is a nonprofit, reader-supported community chewing on the mysteries of life, faith, and art. We invite slowing down and paying attention. We love laughter. And we delight in deep reading, contemplative activism, telling stories, asking questions, and doing “small things with great love,” as Mother Teresa said.

PLEASE JOIN US.

Cover: ANITA GROENER . Prolonged by a Hundred Shadows (detail 2), 2019.

Painted twigs, twine, paper. 90.5 inches diameter. Photo Credit: Louis Haugh. Courtesy of Gibbons & Nicholas.

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allow us to keep the lights on and the fire going for the artists, writers, and readers of our community. This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Fall 2019 donations gave us the financial support to make this issue of Ruminate possible.

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staff

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Brianna Van Dyke SENIOR POETRY EDITOR

Kristin George Bagdanov FICTION EDITOR

Raven Leilani NOTES EDITOR

Josh MacIvor-Andersen VISUAL ART EDITOR

Carolyn Mount EDITOR OF THE WAKING

Charnell Peters NONFICTION EDITOR

Madison Salters MANAGING EDITOR

Rachel King CIRCULATION & PUBLISHING

Amanda Hitpas

PROOFREADER

Sarah Wheeler PRINT + WEB DESIGN

Scott Laumann ASSOCIATE READERS

Carly Joy Miller Amy Sawyer GUEST PANELISTS

Allyson Armistead Angela Carlson Stanley Dankoski Laurel Dowswell David Hopes Nahal Suzanne Jamir William Jones Heather M. Surls Vonetta Young INTERNS

Cherie Nelson Natalie Peterson

contents

NOTES

Readers’ 8 Contributors’ 84 Last 86

VISUAL ART

The art of Anita Groener 56–61 The art of Hadeer Mahmoud 62–67 The art of Yu-Wen Wu 68–73

FICTION

DrownTown, Joshua Gray 14 Parkside, Kate Bradley 28 Standard Uniform, Shelley Linso 44

NONFICTION

Night Piece, Anne McGrath 74

POETRY

26 Palm, Adam J. Gellings 27 Impression II, Adam J. Gellings 40 Bruised, Erika Oakvik 41 At 4 a.m., Claudia Monpere 42 A Vital History, Sean M. Conrey 43 Meditation, Sean M. Conrey 53 8oz of water, Robin Gow 54 Le Poët, Daniel Tobin 55 Sighting Grief, Katie Manning

2019 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize

SPONSORED BY THE VAN DYKE FAMILY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION

F I R ST P L AC E

S E C O N D P L AC E

JOSHUA GRAY

KATE BRADLEY

DrownTown

Parkside

HONO RAB L E MEN T I O N SHELLEY LINSO

Standard Uniform

F I NA L I STS NANCY CONNORS

JUSTIN STONE

KRISTI GEDEON

SALLY THOMAS

NEKTARIA PETROU

KIRK WILSON

GITA SMITH

We regret a typo in the Issue 48 listing for our 2018 Short Story Prize. The correct order of the recipients is as follows: Jason Villemez received first place, Heather M. Surls received second place, and Laura O’Gorman Schwartz received honorable mention.

2019 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize

FINAL JUDGE TYRESE COLEMAN WRITES:

“I absolutely loved ‘DrownTown.’ It immediately took me to the Bayou, the setting lept off the page. Post-Katrina, with its devastation, though this story is not at all what you would expect from a story set around New Orleans around that time. It left me feeling hopeful, feeling that the characters were on a path toward something new and wonderful and special. I am a sucker for romance stories, and I knew once Harp and Tricky kissed, this was the story that all the others would have to beat.”

T Y R E S E C O L E M A N is the author of the 2019 PEN Open Book Award–nominated collection, How to Sit, published with Mason Jar Press in 2018. Writer, wife, mother, attorney, and writing instructor, she is also an editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, an online journal dedicated to flash fiction. Her essays and stories have appeared in several publications, including Black Warrior Review, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, the Rumpus, and the Kenyon Review. She is an alumni of the Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University and a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Find her at tyresecoleman.com or on Twitter @tylachelleco.

readers’ notes ON IN TRANSIT

We put away our suitcases after fourteen years moving between countries and continents, and I found myself planted back in my rural hometown—the same place I was born and lived and left at eighteen looking for the whole wide world.

A few months later, I visited an art fair a few short blocks from my house, ostensibly looking for culture and accidentally finding connection. I started a conversation with an artist after admiring his work and discovered that he had recently given up urban life in an artistic community and moved to the farthest northern corner of this remote peninsula.

I asked him why and how did it feel and won’t you miss it, and I realized I was talking to myself, working through my own concerns over trading faraway countries and jet-lagged adventures for a quieter, provincial pace.

He showed me his work, how it had changed since he left the city. He told me he left because of exhaustion and existentialism, but ended up realizing he’d created a chance for himself to go deeper instead of wider.

Deeper instead of wider.

An opportunity to spend more time in one place, one cabin, one square mile, quiet enough to hear his own mind turning. To spend his days with the same few people instead of throngs of strangers.

He said: The wider world is amazing and wondrous and it is not going anywhere.

He asked: How often do we get the chance to have such deep understanding of a place and its people?

And I almost cried, not in grief but with relief.

We haven’t given up the whole wide world. We’ve dived deeper into this one.

LANE CLARK, MARQUETTE, MI

I anxiously grip the steering wheel of my newly purchased car in the parking lot of the DMV. I reach over to turn the radio toward the lower-numbered channels, toward the music I intuitively know will calm me.

As soon as the ranchera hits the speakers, my heart slows and my breathing returns to normal. The trumpets blare and the singer belts out his grito and I’m reminded of the road

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trips my family would make from our small rural town into the city, speeding past the fields of onions and potatoes and lettuce my family labored in for generations. My father insisted on playing the music on road trips, even though he barely spoke Spanish and the rest of us spoke even less.

I wait patiently for the driving test proctor. I wonder if she will notice the music coming from my car.

The music I never appreciated as a child, that my father reserved only for road trips and BBQs with extended family, is now my driving soundtrack, my entertainment in stand-still traffic, my comfort in high-speed and dangerous driving conditions. As I enter this new phase of my adult life, this music carries me forward.

KARINA AGBISIT, PORTLAND, OR

The plane took off and carried me towards a bright horizon, the Czech Republic, a new frontier. I had my paperbacks, my prescription pills, my dark interiors, and hopeful notions of what lay ahead. No map, no research, few expectations. I went in ignorant, though not blind.

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One of my many souvenirs is a wornout note covered back and front with Italian phrases. In the course of my three years in Prague, I “learned” Czech, practiced French, and dabbled in Italian. I collected languages like beautiful friends who made my journey warmer and more colorful.

One of the phrases on the note reads, Non ho perduto nulla. “I lost nothing.”

In trading one home for another country, I lost nothing except an ugly old couch, some scuffed-up end tables, some unwanted prejudices, bad habits and steadfast convictions that proved to be untrue. Our cat died, we gave away a lot of clothes and books, we lost (and gained) centimeters and kilos. What I kept for good was perspective, culture, awareness, appreciation, memories. I neither chased the sun nor fled the light but basked in both.

EMILY SHEARER, THE WOODLANDS, TX

My bike had a flat tire. I came out of work and there it was. Not partially flat, not semiflat, but so comprehensively flat you’d be insane to try riding on it.

Naturally, I tried riding on it.

readers’ notes

Soon, the rubber wedged in the brake blocks and the wheel locked and wouldn’t move. Since I couldn’t even push it home, I decided to carry it. As the grim staccato march continued, I became an angry, redfaced man sweating and grimacing and glowering.

Somebody passed me on his bike and asked, “Got a flat, mate?”

And it was at that point, as I was slowly morphing into an internet meme, that I decided to stop. I put my bike down and sat on a grass verge nearby. And it was . . . bliss, this battered slice of nature next to a motorway. Okay, maybe not bliss.

But definitely the place next door to bliss.

The tall grass gently rippling. The grubs grubbing in the soil nearby. Even an empty bottle top being used as a climbing prop by a chubby beetle. The battle with my stiffwheeled bike melted away as I just enjoyed the stillness. An emergency oasis in a fraught journey home.

JASON WOODWARD, TELFORD, ENGLAND

My husband and I were planning to walk the final 115 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago with our friend George—just enough distance for a Compostela, a pilgrim

certificate. Our friend’s ninety-year-old dad, Pap, was coming with us.

In Spain, the rainy season lingered. Pap smiled his thanks when we pulled him out of puddles and supported his steps through mud. Buen Camino, he called to pilgrims whizzing past. Buen Camino, he announced to everyone in every cafe where we stopped to rest.

George summoned cabs. Walk, rest, call a cab—it became his and his father’s routine for five days.

“Did you hear?” other pilgrims asked.

“There’s a ninety-year-old walking the trail.”

“My dad’s having some indigestion,” George whispered one morning, a mile from the nearest cafe. “Do you have anything for heartburn?”

“If I don’t make it home, cremate me here,” Pap said. “But make sure they put a veteran’s marker above the ashes.”

Pap had earned full membership in the Greatest Generation.

Cremation was not necessary—Pap walked with us into Santiago. Because of the cabs, neither he nor his son were eligible for the Compostela, but they watched us receive ours. Then we went to the bar at the Parador. Pap ordered a

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Perfect Manhattan and greeted pilgrims from around the world. Buen Camino.

He continued his journey for three days after the plane flew him home.

George couldn’t get the words out when I answered the phone. I knew.

Buen Camino, Pap. Buen Camino, George.

MARGARET KOWALSKI, DELMAR, NY

I took the call on the landline in my college apartment. Senior year. A phone interview while leaning against a bunk bed. American family working for the United Nations looking for childcare and light house cleaning. I heard the tightness in the woman’s voice. The quick admittance that she and her husband were separated but reconciling. The questions about my faith that had correct answers.

But I also heard: Switzerland. Europe.

Au Pair.

I pushed down any doubts: I would go.

At the Detroit airport on the afternoon of September 10, 2001, I am told my bags are forty pounds overweight. The woman at the counter hands me a black trash bag. People behind me sigh impatiently

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as I open my suitcases and pull out books, notebooks, scrapbooks, photo albums— tossing them into a plastic bag for my parents to drag back to their car. I had tried to take everything.

From my new basement bedroom I call my mom to tell her I’ve made it. I am already choking back tears, already feeling the sprouts of homesickness. She says she’s watching the Today Show. Something is happening. Something about planes.

New York City. The World Trade Center, but moves on quickly—how am I? What is my boss like? Where are the kids? What am I doing today?

While my fellow Americans stare at TVs, rush out of offices to be near their families, and listen to the president’s address, I unpack, then count the minutes until the kids who I’ll be watching for the next six months come home from school.

I introduce myself as their bus pulls away.

We understand so little.

DANA VANDERLUGT, HUDSONVILLE, MI

The doctor describes a miscommunication between my brain and blood vessels. When my body rises from sitting, the leg vessels, which are supposed to send extra blood to

readers’ notes

the faster-pumping heart, put the brakes on. My heart empties too fast, and in seconds, I’m swimming through a haze of black spots. I lean on the nearest wall or chair.

“Did you stand up too fast again?” my husband asks.

Staying still for a few minutes helps; not leaning over is even better.

Unfortunately, I’m driven to compulsively clean the detritus of my children’s play, swiping up toys and markers and coloring pages in transit. Tidy floors leave better space for creative thinking, which is the work I’m always moving toward. But the price of bending for Legos and sprawled books and rising to shelve them is a mind settled with fog, a benched body that sits out the writing game till this round of darkness lifts.

There isn’t much of a roadmap for posture-related heart conditions—some meds and lifestyle choices matter—so I must learn to navigate between this need to move and my body’s maxim to stand still, cleaning while passing through on a good day and leaving the clutter on a bad one, each motion a part of the day’s journey, each movement a crosscheck on my work as a house-tender versus my work as a writer, my brain and body communicating in a different way.

REBECCA MARTIN, LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA

I always wore headphones when I rode the bus, except for the university route home every Tuesday afternoon.

Like clockwork, an older gentleman with wispy white hair and a threadbare waistcoat would embark at the corner of Broadway and Alma and stand at the front, even if there were plenty of empty seats. I’d remove my headphones and smile, and he would return the grin and take a fortifying breath. And then?

Opera!

Those melodic tones filled the metal tube like honey, drowned out the roar of the engine and the hum of tires. Those who didn’t habitually ride the 3 p.m. from the university would whip their heads around, seeking the source of the melody, ready to ask the inconsiderate culprit to turn down their radio.

But when they laid eyes upon him, red-faced and raging, they would shrink in their seats to listen. He would sing full-bellied and passionate, the words flowing out in melodic Italian or powerful German, the notes ranging up and down the scales like a scampering squirrel, evoking long-buried emotions in the pits of our guts as we half-remembered dreams of Acadia and Aegypt. From Alma to Granville, then on to Cambie, he sang of heartache and loss, death and love, seduction and pain. His vocal talent coaxed gasps from the most

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stone-hearted riders. He never cracked, never paused; his throat was steel.

I don’t know where he was going; with reluctance, I disembarked at Commercial, but I always blew him a theatrical kiss to show my boundless appreciation for adding magic to my commute. My stop always came too soon, and next Tuesday afternoon couldn’t come soon enough.

K. BANNERMAN, CUMBERLAND, BC

When morning comes, I follow the river north: under the tracks, past the dried cattail stalks, and over to the pond shaped like a human heart. At the inlet where the swans flock, a hill ushers me up toward the white sky and then, quietly, west. I keep running, and when the dirt roads reach out to meet me like an open hand, I grab hold.

Farther along still there is a field, and past the field there is a road that bends like a knee. This morning, this road is stirring with the violent beginnings of spring. The branch of a tall tree snaps— and then falls. Wild turkeys ravage the

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thickets, and in the wake of the thaw, the full earth heaves and lurches.

At the bend, smoke drifts toward me from the woods, and I slow. I breathe in, then again, as if maybe, if I inhale deeply enough, the particulars of a childhood memory, suddenly recalled, will come back to me.

But already the road is rolling back down, and it becomes all but impossible not to pick up the lost rhythm. So I do— and that’s all it takes. A second later I am grinning—no, worse, laughing!—giddy with delight at having rediscovered my own ability to move, to say nothing of my own ridiculousness. Only when the road flattens like a surprise do I realize I am back at the river.

I follow it east this time, hugging the thin shoulder of the adjacent road. At the bridge, I pass a fisherman sitting in a blue rowboat. Sitting and waiting, it appears.

But the river is so still I think he must already know. About how joy is enough.

About how, sometimes, we must reteach ourselves how to pray.

ELIZABETH BOYLE, ANN ARBOR, MI

JOSHUA GRAY

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H A R P’S S HORT CU T out of New Orleans stumbled them into an everchanging misery

of bottlenecks and dead-ends. The young men endured detours, dodged dump-truck traffic, and circumvented sinkholes sluiced out by past floodwaters. Life after too many storms. The city marched out repair crews, but the rains always returned, prying fingerholds in the cracks and snatching away whole insatiable handfuls of pavement. When they finally caught an open street, Harp felt as if they’d unearthed a place in the Bible, cursed and rotted.

“Looks like a plague’s been here,” Harp said, lowering the truck’s passenger window. The waterline scarred houses, cars, power poles.

“Flood wounds,” Tricky said, slowing at an intersection, no working traffic lights.

He drove an old Ford pickup, once hearse black, now mottled with rust and age. It was a dry, bright day, one of many strung together in late summer.

Between them sat a container of ash. A simple black urn for Libbie, Tricky’s mother and patron saint to Harp. The two friends were on a quest to spread her remains in Belle Chasse, on Louisiana’s outer edges. Now it was well past noon, and, thanks to Harp, they were no closer to Belle Chasse than they’d been at midmorning. Harp picked up the urn and gave it a street view.

“Don’t put her too close to the window,” Tricky warned.

“You scared I’m gonna chuck her out,” Harp said, watching the waterline blur as the Ford picked up speed. He reached his hand out as if to touch it. Tricky grabbed the urn, placed it back between them.

Harp wanted to slap Tricky, draw blood. Felt that, didn’t you, he’d say. They’d worked together for nearly a year in this dying city, Harp in the kitchen, Tricky waiting tables. At parties and at work, Tricky maintained a distance. He was among people, but not of them, as annoying in his temperament as Christ among the apostles.

They drove through the abandoned neighborhood. Cat’s claw and bindweed sprouted from porches, rain gutters, rooftops, their yellow and white blooms adorning warped wood and windows still boarded for hurricanes past.

“Almost pretty,” Tricky said. “In a sad way.”

“Real pretty,” Harp said and felt like a fool.

He’d wanted to say something meaningful, anything to ease the tension, but that didn’t come easy. Harp was fluent in cheap jokes and drunken charm. He’d wait until Belle Chasse to tell Tricky that he too had once lost someone. His brother, a decade older and a god to Harp as a child, had fallen off an offshore oil rig and plopped into the Gulf with no more commotion than a coin in a fountain.

“Know any other shortcuts,” Tricky asked as he weaved through traffic drums aflutter with caution tape, the city’s new flags of surrender.

“Look, I didn’t,” Harp said, words floundering. “I mean, I’m sorry, but I think we’re getting close. Houses seem to sag more here.”

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Up ahead a crew of sweat-slicked men, heads wrapped like Bedouin, were disassembling a house with prybars and hammers. Molded carpets and broken Sheetrock were piled along the sidewalk. The men scavenged for anything of value.

Copper, aluminum, prying out nails and even metal junction boxes from within the walls. Harp admired their dark skin, their hard bodies. The men didn’t look up as they passed.

“You hear that,” asked Tricky.

Harp heard the lulling of tug boats. Another block and he smelled the river.

Tricky’s mangy Ford nosed its way into an industrial lot that still had power.

Tugboats and tankers sculled the river. Several vehicles crowded the shore, boarding the ferry. The truck squeezed in last.

Tricky and Harp sat on the tailgate and watched the gurgling river, New Orleans beyond them now, what was left of the city, a weak pulse of tourists and recalcitrants

He and Tricky worked at Geckos on Esplanade, off the Quarter, nice place, stylish.

and priests and idealists and a belly-world seething with slumlords, crimps, whores, thieves, beggars. A city with numbered heartbeats.

The ferry juddered along, diesel stench and river musk. At the railing, gulls scrummed above a woman.

“Shortcut worked,” Harp joked, but Tricky didn’t laugh. He was lost in himself, watching the gulls. The woman tossed torn bread in the air, the birds frenzied, darted below the sightline. Beggars trundled from car to car, rattling change in cups, gumming the words God bless you. Harp paid what he could.

“Well, Momma,” Tricky said, opening the urn. “Take a last look at the city.”

The wind eddied off the river and ash rose like a filthy ghost, then faded. Harp wiped his face on his sleeve, tasted ash.

Tricky tightened the lid. He licked his fingers and ran them across Harp’s brow. He’s never touched me, Harp thought. Tricky wiped his fingers on his jeans. Harp didn’t realize he was holding his breath until it was over.

“Think we’ll find Belle Chasse,” Tricky asked, eyes so wounded that Harp had to scramble for words.

“We’ll find it,” Harp lied, wishing he too were leaving the city for good.

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* H A R P HA D N ’ T S EEN T RIC KY in five days. That’s how he knew Libbie had died.

He and Tricky worked at Geckos on Esplanade, off the Quarter, nice place, stylish.

A couple of days spent visiting Ms. Libbie was expected, but she liked having Harp around. “You talk shit when you get nervous,” Tricky once said. “That makes you good company in a hospital.”

True, Harp didn’t like hospitals and visiting Libbie was a chore. She’d be propped up in bed, grousing about how the no-smokes rule would kill her quicker than gut cancer. She’d been a beauty once, in a misspent youth, a Ms. Strawberry Festival in Erath. Tricky loved her, Harp too, but she wracked him with nightmares: the hanging skin, the toothless cackle, wrinkles so deep you could hide secrets in them.

The worst was leaving. Libbie always grew frantic, suspecting that her body might expire before the next visit. She’d call Tricky to her embrace, the frayed vocal chords, sleepy-eyed at morphine-time. Harp would freeze, afraid a move or sound might ruin the moment. As Tricky climbed into the bed where mother held son, cooing and calling him sweet and precious and pretty, Harp would close his eyes and make her broken voice a lullaby.

After three days, Harp called the hospice and got put on hold, called Tricky, found voicemail. Considered going to Parnell’s, see if Tricky was hiding there, but couldn’t stomach it. He guessed Parnell could help Tricky in ways he couldn’t. So, he turned the other cheek and waited.

Geckos on day five, the restaurant quiet, Harp cleaning up. The lights died, as they had every day since the last storm. These moments were like yawns, when the whole city went quiet, waited. Then in walked Tricky with Ms. Libbie tucked under his arm. * TH E FER RY LU RC HED as it slowed for shore. The gulls were fighting the wind. The

woman kept her back to them, no more mercies, eyes on the young men.

“Think there’s something wrong with that woman,” Harp whispered. “She looks burned.”

“She’s in no hurry for someone on fire,” Tricky said, in his lazy way.

“No. I mean, like melted, like she got caught in a fire when she was little.”

She picked up her small canvas bag and readied to disembark. As the ferry docked, she walked over to the young men.

“Is that what I think it is,” the woman asked, pointing to the urn.

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She wasn’t burned. Instead, a strange mixture of white blotched her brown skin, clouded her hands and arms, and ringed her brow like a diadem.

“My mother,” said Tricky.

“Yeah, we’re laying Ms. Libbie to rest,” Harp explained.

“Where?”

“Belle Chasse,” Tricky answered. “We’re a little vague on directions.”

She studied the two young men. “Y’all look OK, but a couple of white boys with an urn got some fucked-up potential, two Ted Bundys maybe.”

Harp didn’t know any Bundys, but he thought Tricky looked like a Versace’s wet dream: pompadour, puerile, tall, lithe, and fair skinned. Harp looked a little rougher: an Irish kid who’d had a job since he was five, union member at seven, picket line at nine, barroom-brawl scar on the lip by eleven.

The woman looked at the cooler and duct-taped Seagram’s box in the truck bed.

“What you got in there?”

“Staples, really. Fireworks, alcohol,” Harp said. “A hunk of pork loin I stole from work.”

“Then it’s settled.”

“What is,” Tricky asked.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Well, this is kind of a private thing,” Harp argued, fear rising in him like nausea.

Me, Harp thought, he chose me.

“You know the way to Belle Chasse,” asked Tricky.

She nodded and said, “Name’s Nina.”

Behind her, the gulls shrieked maniacally, strung in the air like puppets. * LE AV I NG N EW OR L EA NS is like leaving civilization. Buildings, buses, city sounds

all vanish, and the world becomes a strange amphibious land under a harsh and hazy sky. Nina guided them south. They staggered along a rambling southeastern line down blacktops, gravel roads, dirt tracks, and sweated across tiny bridges as cracked as sandcastles. She rode shotgun, shifting Harp to the middle, her knee knocking his like a couple of drunks stumbling home. Harp was examining her arm, the commingling of white and black.

“Don’t worry. I’m not contagious,” Nina said, rubbing her arm against his. “You won’t turn black.”

“Might be an improvement,” said Tricky, smiling at Harp while Nina cackled.

“Thanks,” Harp said, forced a laugh, hated it, wanted to demand a map, leave her roadside, a beer and a fuck-off as thanks.

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They were sweat soaked. The wind from the open windows provided a false cool, but they couldn’t pass through the heat. It was always before them, shimmering and waving them onward like sirens.

“Tricky’s a funny name. You named after the song,” Nina asked.

“No,” Tricky answered. “Just a nickname that stuck when I was a kid.”

He said it so natural you’d almost believe it, thought Harp.

Rumors said Tricky pulled tricks. That’s how he got that name. Harp chose a simpler truth: Tricky liked older men and they liked him. Maybe they gave him gifts.

His latest admirer was the lawyer, Parnell, a regular at Geckos. Someone who struck Harp as more whiskey-priest than jurist. Came creeping in the evenings, sniffing for Tricky. One night, Harp followed them to the Garden District whose houses, with money having fled the neighborhood, lingered like neglected temples, Parnell cloistered among them.

Harp eased up to a side window, smelled jasmine and rotting leaves. He caught a break with a crook in the blinds. Parnell’s head peeked above an easy chair. Tricky stood before him, nude.

Harp lost his breath. He’d never seen such skin, fair enough to drink through a straw. Tricky looked at the window. In his face, that something between them, scattered high like panic, cried like a human, fell back. His look smooth again, not

Leaving New Orleans is like leaving civilization.

seeing anything. Maybe he smiled. Harp had hoped he smiled. When Tricky turned away, Harp finally breathed and crept into the night.

They continued southward into a landscape of deception. Meadows of floating hyacinths mimicked solid ground yet rippled from the wake of a distant outboard motor. Nina snatched the urn from Harp’s lap.

“Hold up, now, you didn’t know her—” “Don’t be an asshole,” Tricky said.

Harp shook his head, counted breaths, took a joint from the glove box to give his shaking hands something to do. Nina cradled Libbie like a newborn in the crook of her arm.

“She don’t weigh much,” Nina said, speaking over the wind.

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“Momma was always petite, but when she got sick.” Tricky skirted something dead in the road, a waste of fur. “Like she was already a ghost.”

“It happens. Two of my aunties died, cancer. They raised me, looked like saints.”

“Saints,” Harp said, lighting the smoke. “The football team or healing lepers?”

“I mean saints don’t look like they do on candles. They filthy, they stink, all nappy headed.”

“Yeah,” Tricky said. “Momma kept smiling even when her teeth fell out.”

The road was a simple two-lane blacktop. A jungle of weeds pressing its sides and palmettos breaching the receding asphalt. A road to nowhere.

“At the end, Momma would morphine-talk, couldn’t understand half of it. You’d have to be in her head, seeing it. Something about Katrina.”

Harp’s eyes grew heavy, let the others finish the smoke, listened as gnats raged in hordes along the roadside, powerlines lifeless in the weeds.

“Momma said God and the Devil made a bet. Devil said, Send a storm to New Orleans cause if you couldn’t stand Sodom and you hated Gomorrah, why you let that city live?”

People ahead in the swamp, near the roadside. Raw-skinned men lifted wire cages from the water. Crawfish fumed inside. Nina was humming now. Harp could feel it through her shoulder, hear it faintly over the wind, the engine.

“God says OK, but if I find someone good in the city, then the storm doesn’t hit.

Good, the Devil said, clarify what you mean by good. Almost a saint, God said.”

Nina kept humming, so loud now it was almost a scream. They passed a scattered settlement of stilt houses, built of tarpaper and scrap metal. Zinnias and oleanders

A church, nothing but broken steeple and frame, stood at road’s end.

rioted among the yards. Nearby stood grimy sandbag walls and beyond that crushed cars stacked as a makeshift levee, puddles rainbowed with oil.

“Katrina hit Mississippi,” Nina said. “She saying there ain’t a saint in Mississippi. I got family over there. They OK.” “You really know how to get there,” Harp asked Nina, harder than he intended.

“Why? Think I’m luring you to your doom? Got a big pot to cook you in, bunch of white pelts flapping on the clothesline?”

Tricky laughed.

20

“We need to make it before sundown,” Harp said, controlling his voice.

The conversation died. Harp rested his head on the back window, eyes nearly shut.

Tricky shifted gears. His forearm crossed Harp’s thigh, smeared sweat like an open wound. Harp felt a rivulet trickle down his skin. He touched it, looking dead ahead at no traffic, no life, only heat shimmers and dust swarms. * WI TH T HE SU N sinking low, the troop finally approached Belle Chasse. Near its

edges, a hovel stood on thin legs. Children, dirty with summer sweat, hung their legs between porch railings. A blonde girl dropped a sliver of flesh into the muddy water beneath. An alligator, long and lean, snapped its jaws, skin swallowed, primeval grin in the mud. Nina put her head out of the window. The girl waved. She didn’t miss it, and waved back.

Harp saw smoke to the west, a rutted, puddled field of small fires. An old woman in the distance carried a gas can, another woman, farther away, held a torch. One pouring, one lighting. Black smoke billowed into a blue sky. Harp thought of oil fires across deserts, what his brother had told him about working overseas: men in the distance wanting to burn the world, the roughnecks huddled atop the rig watching them try.

“Mosquito larvae,” Nina explained. “Worse than a storm surge.”

Harp had the feeling of being at the edge of something, witnessing the last stragglers at world’s end. Then they arrived. Belle Chasse was only a small settlement, even before the waters rose and the storms chased everyone away. Scrappers had picked it clean. The welcome sign was still there. Over Belle Chasse someone had painted the words DrownTown.

They drove down the main drag. The gas station was stripped to the bone. Tricky dodged potholes and the trash left by squatters. A mechanic shop was crazed over with kudzu, the snout of an old Bonneville peeking out.

“Where are the houses,” Harp wondered aloud, looking at the empty slabs scattered near the city square like coins around a relic.

“Somewhere in the Gulf,” Tricky said.

Gulls roiled in the distance, picking over a small inlet of trashy seawater, trapped until the next big storm. A church, nothing but broken steeple and frame, stood at road’s end. An empty osprey nest was perched in place of the cross.

“Here,” Nina said, sitting up straight and pointing to a rutted drive out past the chapel. “Turn up here.”

Tricky cut the wheel and took the road at speed, back tires fishtailing.

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The simple shell-graveled drive cut through a wilding of bramble and honeysuckle.

The honeysuckle smelled so sweet that their eyes grew heavy. The canopy laced its fingers above them, dimming the road. Limbs scratched against the doors and reached through windows like outstretched hands. In their wake, white dust settled over the leaves. They passed a cigar boat capsized in the undergrowth. A deep rut tipped the urn onto the floorboard. It didn’t open, but Harp heard a clattering inside, and found himself frightened. Teeth, he wondered, or perhaps a scrap of shoulder blade?

The truck emerged from the brush and the Gulf of Mexico opened before them.

At the sight of the Gulf, Harp remembered fishing with his brother on a similar beach. His brother told an eleven-year-old Harp, “If you cast off from here and rowed steady and straight”—and at this point he crouched beside Harp and pointed, arm extended toward the horizon—“you’d run aground in the Yucatan.” Harp had looked down his arm, out past his finger, like an eyeglass to the horizon. How big the world seemed then. * H A R P ROL L ED A S M A L L J OIN T and they smoked while the sun fell to only a few

fingers above the horizon. The tide had begun to pulse toward land. Tufts of tall grass, the color of Harp’s hair, bent briefly in the wind. Oil rigs on the horizon, mere insects.

Out in the belly of the Gulf lay what the hurricanes had swallowed. Homes, souls, cities, living things. It’ll keep most, Harp thought, and vomit the rest ashore someday.

Maybe his brother too.

“Let’s do it now,” Tricky said. “Before it gets too dark.”

Tricky carried Libbie, Harp close by. Nina walked behind them, singing gently. A soft wind, the distant caw of gulls and the faint whispers of the sea over sand. Harp had to overstep a beached jellyfish and the detritus of the storm-ravaged Gulf— plastics, driftwood, shingles, an Illinois license plate—until finally their feet splashed into the shallow saltwater. A little farther in Tricky stopped, the water past his knees, but clear of debris.

He opened the urn. The smell of ash drifted up.

“Momma, we lay you to rest in a place where you felt young and clean and alive.”

His words broke as he slowly poured Libbie, careful of the backdraft. As the ash wimpled, bait fish surfaced, nibbled, then sank like silver coins. * BAC K ASHORE, Harp built a fire. Nina opened a bottle of tequila. She cut the lime

with Tricky’s knife and squeezed the juice into the bottle’s mouth. Little pieces of pulp flecked her hands. They passed the bottle around and chased pulls of tequila with

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beer. When Tricky drank, Harp watched his Adam’s apple. He wanted to place his fingers there, feel it move.

Harp reheated the pork loin on a makeshift spit. Fat fell upon embers, popping and sizzling in little excitements. The sea crept closer and the wind picked up, flames cackling. Harp studied Nina in the growing dark. She wasn’t much older than him. The firelight played on her variegated skin. She looked like an oracle, ready to speak in tongues.

Soon they were all laughing, and sometimes dancing, around the fire. Occasionally they’d stop and offer a toast to their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, or anything else that needed remembering. Harp brought out the fireworks. He and Nina shot roman candles and bottle rockets and flightless firecrackers, which Harp lit and held in his hand with Nina screaming at him to throw it before finally—only a moment before they exploded—tossing them high above the waves. The air stunk of sulfur.

Harp loved how the fireworks, in those moments directly after the burst, burnt cicatrices of smoke onto the sky.

DrownTown lurked behind them. The wind moaned among the ruins. They each heard it, felt its nearness, and drank more to ignore it.

Nina sipped the tequila and stalked about the fire. “Here’s to who got washed away.

Hustlers and whores, slaves and masters,” Nina choked, began to cry. When Tricky tried to comfort her she shoved him away, and pranced around the fire, her footfalls

He spoke to the ocean, his mother, something that Harp couldn’t hear and didn’t need to.

keeping time with her sobs. She stopped and screamed out over the ocean, “Have a drink,” and threw the last of the tequila into the Gulf, bottle and all.

She stood for a moment, shoulders heaving, before removing her top. She faced them. Her hands covered her breasts, face serious and stern, her diadem alive in the firelight. A smile cracked wide and her arms fell and her nipples glanced shyly from side to side as she backed into the water.

Nina went into the Gulf laughing, shouting for them to follow. She was thigh deep and still in the fire’s light when she tugged at her cutoffs. Harp hated this, wanted to drag Tricky away, get him alone. Now was their time. The cutoffs landed at their feet as Nina’s bare bottom crested in the air, then plunged beneath a wave.

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“You wanna,” Tricky said, leaning against Harp so he could remove his pants. Harp flushed, the clean skin again, so close to his own, so at ease in its nakedness.

“Hey,” Harp said. “Let’s go checkout the town, OK.” Nina beckoned, the water at her ribcage. Tricky walked in, waves tousling his cock, and splashed water at Harp. He stepped back like a child afraid of the sea.

Harp watched Nina and Tricky for a while, playing in the water, listening to their laughter mix with the weak crash of waves. He let the water lick at his legs. It was cooler than he’d imagined. He could leave, the truck keys dangled from the ignition, never look back, they deserved each other. But he undressed, cupped himself in his hands, and crept into the water.

He swam out to them, their faces caught between the fire’s glow and the white of the moon. They splashed each other and in the dark sea, swam with their bodies warm from the tequila. Harp saw the white of teeth and sudden flashes of breasts, heard laughter choked by water.

Nina began to drift in, said she felt weak. Her head was spinning. She climbed onto the beach, wallowed in a tattered quilt pulled from the truck’s seats. DrownTown dark now, moans stifled by sea sounds.

Harp swam a short distance from Tricky, bobbing up and down in chest-high water.

He dove and grabbed Harp by the ankles, tried to flip him unsuccessfully. Tricky surfaced and they tussled for another moment, each laughing, letting the sea into their mouths. They were both erect, felt it on the skin of their bellies, their thighs. Tricky was reaching for him, stroking him now. A fear, so childlike and simple, swelled in Harp that he stepped away, glanced to the shore where Nina lay as ragged and soaked as a piece of kelp. He wondered if she was truly sick and, for a moment, made to swim to her, but turned to Tricky and said, “Tricky, I, I’m so sorry. Ms. Libbie, I wish, I”— but Tricky swam to him and kissed him so fiercely that Harp feared it’d tear his lip.

Tricky placed his hands on Harp’s shoulders and in his hair, now the dark color of the water, and Harp’s world became the lime taste of the tequila, the thyme and salt of the pork and Tricky’s warm body in the cool night. Yes, Harp thought, yes, I can help, I can carry this weight for you. Harp felt for him too, both wanting the other to feel this moment, now, right now. Harp stroked him, kissed him; everything dimming to the warmth between their bodies, skin on skin, until he felt Tricky quiver and his arm tightened around Harp’s shoulders, pulling their lips apart and Harp’s face to his chest and their slight moans mingled with the language of the sea.

When it was over, Tricky drifted onto his back, relaxing his body. Harp stood shivering, but alive in the dark water. Above him hung faint stars, bright stars, very low and very high.

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Then Tricky close again, another kiss, fingers on the nape of Harp’s neck. Tricky pulled away, the distance returning to his eyes, teeth beginning to chatter in the cold wind.

“No, don’t,” Harp said, taking Tricky’s hand and leading him ashore.

On the beach, Nina lay shivering near the dying fire. Harp held Tricky’s hand, not wanting an ending. But Tricky needed to be alone. He spoke to the ocean, his mother, something that Harp couldn’t hear and didn’t need to. Harp rinsed an empty beer can and cleaned Nina’s face and washed the vomit from the sand. He wrapped her in the quilt and tossed more driftwood on the fire. Afterward, Tricky and Harp dressed each other. Sliding shirts over heads, fingering buttons, touching, smelling, smiling, kissing, feet sinking into cool sand. Both knowing that this was their time now. They’d found it, and had almost missed it.

And there they stayed, on the beach, backs to the ruins, Nina nodding off against Harp and Tricky in his arms, watching the first strikes of light glimmer on the dirty water. The broken steeple, slabs, stripped buildings, even the distant oil rigs, all started to glow. Slowly the sun rose higher, igniting the flint-dark sea with quick, sharp sparks. First just a little, but then, right before their eyes, the entire Gulf set ablaze by the dawn and for a moment the world appeared young and clean and alive again. They held each other. That’s all they could do.

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ADAM J. GELLINGS

Palm /pɔm/

I have learned

to hold a palm in my hand.

For once I was right where it landed when it fell.

To cherish its heartshaped cascade of red knuckles round, who waited for the advent of another.

To let fingerprints glide over purplish grubs tunneling deep through watery flesh.

Almost touching in the bitter. Mouths working endlessly

to splinter this blossom

in two.

 

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ADAM J. GELLINGS

Impression II I invented a mother She was coming out from behind a patch of open timber How she stood with her young at the edge of a creek bed

Come closer I thought It happened in the middle of the body It happened in real time, the sound The breaking spine of an old book There was a wound that blazoned like lights on a grotto There was a wound that never appeared

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Parkside

KATE BRADLEY

I ’ M AT P R ESC HO OL D ROP - OF F with a vial of semen tucked into the waistband

of my leggings. Surrounding the school are meadows sparkling with frost and treedotted hills that would be mountains if we were anywhere but Delaware. The parking lot is all SUVs with sanctimonious bumper stickers about buying local and rescue dogs and kindness. It costs twelve thousand dollars a year to send your kid to preschool here, but they feed the kids a healthy lunch and give them lots of time outside, so how could I say no? I’m in my mom’s old Lexus sedan. It’s an old-man car that drives like a dream. Helen’s teacher, a barre-teaching mom of two preschoolers, is all doeeyed at the classroom door, blonde hair, freckles, linen pants. I hand her the asthma action plan. I dig October’s tuition out of my purse. It’s roughly equal to my monthly adjuncting income.

Helen’s grip on my leg tightens. I pry her off. The nurse gave me strict instructions on the semen—keep it warm, get it here in forty minutes or less.

“I can take you to see the bunny!” Helen screams from somewhere near my ankles.

I walk toward the car, blowing kisses.

“We forgot my inhaler!” she yells.

“Did we?” I pause. “Yeah, we did.” I get the inhaler from the console and go and give her the puffs. The teacher’s head is cocked empathetically. I hate the inhalers but it’s better than doctors gathered around the hospital bed, she’s really working to breathe.

“I’ll see the rabbit later,” I tell her, and get in the car. Parkside Preschool is a community and as such, the community leaders have ideas about how things should go, ideas they share frequently. Often disguised as helpful hints, they are in fact rules meant to prevent a toddler insurrection. We’ve been reminded over email to enact a confident drop-off routine. Hug and kiss cheerfully and walk away. The idea is that your child will absorb your zen. I fuck up every time. When I get to the doorway, instead of walking straight out of the building, I look back. Sometimes she’s talking to the teacher, sometimes she’s staring forlornly. Today she’s giving a princess/bitch look to a classmate, her head high and shoulders up, lips curled in what must be a taunt, brushing wayward bangs out of her face. I cringe. This is a Quaker school: no jewelry, no fancy dresses, no prima donna shit, just zen and a whole lot of granola.

On the way out, I see loads of babies. The school makes a big deal about not leaving children in cars on their property. Emails are sent out like Do not leave a sibling in the car for even a minute! so all the moms with new babies are lugging infant car seats through the front gate, their oversized cardigans blowing open, a leg extended to keep a preschooler in-line, a hand curled in a death grip around a meandering toddler’s wrist.

The fiery ones, the ones I want to make friends with, are wild-eyed and mostly makeup-free at morning drop-off. Passing in the hall, they will, when they’ve only barely gotten to know you, tell stories of their parental failures that soothe the anxious maternal mind. For example: Vivi ran away at dinnertime, one mom says.

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Half an hour later we found her wearing only a urine-soaked My Little Pony shirt in somebody else’s backyard. After school, under the shade of a sycamore tree in the play yard, the gossipy moms will share, just as an FYI, how crazy the fiery moms are. Who to believe? I can’t trust any of them yet, not when we’re new and they all know each other from Bodycombat at the Y, a class that’s always sounded a little too much like an eating disorder to me.

Twenty minutes ago, while Phil was in the bathroom providing the sample, I stood at the kitchen island eating Raisin Bran and scrolling through Facebook. Someone I

I’m at preschool drop-off with a vial of semen tucked into the waistband of my leggings.

don’t even know how I know posted a picture of her husband. At the end of the day we will whether any storm. I see Angela’s baby bump, the cover of Brenda’s new story collection, a heads-up on the Northern Delaware Moms page that the Boy Scouts of America are recalling their neckerchief slides due to possible lead content. I didn’t post, like, or comment. Instead of building a social-media platform like the agents at the big writing conference last summer urged, I have become your run-of-the-mill stalker. Phil was in the bathroom crouched down, avoiding his image in the mirror. He had been raised Catholic. I went to knock on the bathroom door just as he opened it.

He gave me the vial, lukewarm like my flasks of pumped breastmilk used to be. “You sure you don’t want me to drive it up there?”

“You should sleep,” I said. He was bleary-eyed from doing epidurals all night. Times like these I think of a Robert Frost poem from my college days, those lines what to make of a diminished thing. If I read the whole poem, I’d remember a first lesson on objective correlatives from my old Frost professor. The poem succeeds because it carries its message in a description of a bird’s song. No ideas but in things, he would tell us, quoting Williams Carlos Williams. * R EG I O NA L ASSO C IAT ES in Fertility Treatment—RAFT—is located in a strip mall

next to a Kickin Chicken and a Payless that’s going out of business. Across the highway is a shadowy operation called StarQuest Shooters and Survival Supply, a small white house with a sign announcing Guns. In the RAFT waiting room, the lights are

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respectfully dimmed. Everything’s beige, battery operated tealights, a chintzy wooden sign with Hope written in cursive. The receptionist takes the sample back. I’m here after months of hormone injections, divined from such sources as postmenopausal nun urine. They’re all being used off-label—a breast-cancer drug, an alopecia drug.

Thirty-six hours ago I’d taken a trigger shot of Ovidrel, a drug produced by genetically modifying the ovarian cells of Chinese hamsters. Why Chinese? I’d asked myself when I read the package insert. Never read those things, Phil said when I told him.

This is the third IUI, the last chance before what the doctors always termed “moving to IVF,” also known as dipping into your 401(k) to gamble on embryos of uncertain viability. Phil’s sperm zigzagged like a line of synchronized swimmers, in no hurry at all. I had been diagnosed with low ovarian reserve, a polite way of saying my ovaries were about as depleted as IVF was going to make our bank account. Before I had Helen, the clinic gave me a 45 percent chance of getting pregnant. This percentage was arrived at after months of testing: endometrial scratching and vaginal probes and blown veins and frank discussion of our sexual habits and my cervical mucus. My body was a newly colonized planet, complete with scientists performing tests to determine its compatibility with life.

On the coffee table is the Delaware Life magazine Phil’s profile is in. I open to the page and there he is, dark hair gleaming, blue scrubs and the wrinkles around his eyes that, if he gives a real smile, have begun to extend toward his cheeks. I married a golden child. We were young, more beautiful than we knew. Everyone said our wedding reception ten years ago was like something out of The Great Gatsby: a warm early summer night, twinkly lights, a piano player on the veranda of an old DuPont mansion. Those elderly relatives who have since died were all there, dancing, unburdened. The power couple, somebody said as we shook hands in the receiving line. I rolled my eyes at that, shook my head no. We were just like everyone else. The faux pearl headband I’d chosen, poised above my up-do like a small crown, dug at my skull. I couldn’t wait to take it off, unbutton the hundred satin covered buttons on the dress, undo the hook and eye closures on the corset, and get on with my new life.

After our wedding, Phil’s career proceeded on a straight track—he began his medical residency in a small town in New England, learning how to put people to sleep for a living. I found adjuncting jobs at two of the local colleges. On the side I wrote for a newspaper, driving all over the state covering high-school wrestling matches and school plays. I made almost as much money as Phil back then, a fact I like to remind him of now, when my yearly salary looks like his monthly. My plan was to bide my time until I finished a book Oprah would love.

That’s almost what happened. I’m now a “contingent faculty member”—or a failed academic, one might say—at a no-name vocational college that has the nerve to masquerade as a liberal arts college. I haven’t published a book, and the English department I work for is on the chopping block.

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It’s not as bad as it sounds. I love my students. And I love Phil, and of course Helen.

I’m just not sure how I feel about myself anymore. This morning, I stood in front of the mirror in our master, tapping a spackle-like product onto a wrinkle near my lip, wondering if it was true that everyone eventually got the face that they deserved.

Actually considering—in the way of an early millennial feminist—Botox or at least one of those trendy Korean sheet masks whose ads pop up online as if Facebook can see that my profile picture is not matching the face staring into the device.

Phil was taking his long trance-y shower, the overhead light off. When he was done he would use a towel to muss his hair. Grooming complete. He hardly had room in our shared medicine cabinet for his deodorant, its rows were so clogged with my skincare products. I snuck away to Helen’s bedroom to catch her before she woke up. The best time. She was on her back, legs bent at the knee and splayed like when she was a baby.

But she’s not, anymore. She’s learned her Rs, really goes all out on them—Cheerios sounds Spanish—and she can ride a bike.

You can’t hold a child’s hand while you write. Every story I’ve tried since she’s been alive exists in fragments, domestic, mud-smeared Post-its on the floor of the car: milk—nighttime potty training?—class parent meeting 9:15—Pilates Mom satire?— haircut Sat: lob? The stories, start-ups you might call them, are all about motherhood.

And being a mother to what is euphemistically called a spirited child—and an only, to boot—is why I never finish them. At least that’s what I tell myself.

When your child is four and sibling-less, people start to wonder. I started to wonder when I watched Helen spend afternoons swinging on her swing set, talking to herself. There are some real advantages to having one, moms with three kids will whisper. These moms sigh frequently. I believe deep down that my daughter is the equivalent of at least 2.5 of their kids, but I don’t tell them that.

The woman who takes me back to draw my blood (“Karen?” she calls, not my name but close enough) wants to be a kindergarten teacher. She takes education classes by night and uses the butterfly needles on us infertiles by day.

“A phlebotomist is a long way from a kindergarten teacher,” I say, and she just smiles and asks me to verify my name and birthdate.

At the clinic that made Helen, in the tony suburbs of New York City, I was under the care of an ex-military doctor. The only time she smiled was when she declared me pregnant, and even then the smile faded quickly. If the numbers don’t double, it might not be a good one, she’d warned.

“You know the drill,” the future kindergarten teacher says, and I nod grimly. I’m battle-hardened now. I check my patient label for any errors. I grip the squeeze ball.

After, she sets me up for the IUI, gown on, scooched to the edge of the table.

“I’m judging this sample to be marginally acceptable,” the physician’s assistant says, holding the sperm vial to the light. “Even though during the wash the count went down significantly, we’re still at twelve million. Some of those twelve million aren’t

32

forward progressing. I’d give it a C.” I let that sink in. A C . . . average, but not what I was hoping for.

I’m glad Phil’s not here; he’s never gotten a C on anything.

“Good luck,” the PA says. The lab tech, Amish looking in a severe hay-colored bun, gives me a pitying smile.

When the physician’s assistant shoots the semen up into me, I feel no spark of joy, no brief, glimmering rend in the beige fabric of this place. She tilts the chair back and I am told to rest a few minutes. * O CTO BER IS A M ON T H of preparation at the refugee-resettlement donation

warehouse, or so said the volunteer coordinator, who just gave a whirlwind tour, then abandoned us here, surrounded by people’s musty curtains and unwanted bedsheets.

Our first task is to sort donations into groups. Winter clothes, toiletries, home goods.

Then we have to make bags for children. Gloves, hats, coats, socks, boots. The

And I love Phil, and of course Helen.

I’m just not sure how I feel about myself anymore.

warehouse is gray walled, fluorescent lit, in the worst part of Wilmington. Police SUVs cruise by every few minutes. Outside, a guy nods off on a curb, his shoes held together with duct tape. The girls are cooing over a pair of tiny gloves, the boys restless, wandering.

“A lot of this stuff is trash,” one kid says. “This place needs a better business model. Is that a thing? Helping with the business model?”

“Maybe ask one of the volunteers if you can talk to a board member,” I say. I point to the office. Nobody makes a move in that direction. I go back to folding baby pajamas. This is Rewriting America, a gen-ed English class populated by first-years who want to work on Wall Street but will end up in middle management at a big-box store if they’re very lucky. The university pays me three thousand dollars a course; I used to pick up six or seven a semester, driving all over the tristate region like a traveling saleswoman of writing. Now that I have Helen, it’s more like two or three.

Only the truly desperate sign on to drag a bunch of business majors through sixteen

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weeks of essay writing. My Ratemyprofessor.com is filled with comments like She’s nice, but fifteen pages? Who is she kidding?

This semester, I’m hell-bent on making them care. We’re writing about the real world. An adjunct buddy of mine, Adrian, is married to a woman who works at the refugee agency. The idea was that maybe they’ll want to write if they had an experience worth writing about. It’s a theory that’s all over the humanities journals.

There are those who say it’s a great idea to take eighteen-year-olds you hardly know out into the world to face “the other,” and I am trying to see if I am one of them. All

I’m going to be the tranquil mom, the mom the parenting sites tell us we all have inside.

I know is standing in front of a whiteboard explaining paragraph transitions isn’t lighting anybody’s fire.

Adrian’s wife, Farzaneh, was supposed to be here to orient, but she isn’t. A group of kids fold winter blankets in a corner. Somebody’s phone starts playing Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble.”

When I was finally allowed to take a shower after Helen was born, I played Kendrick Lamar in the hospital bathroom—“i”—I done been through a whole lot . . . I went to war last night. What the song is actually about, being a black man in Compton, has no resemblance to my life. But that morning, as my blood flooded the shower floor red and I held on to the grab bar to calm my shaking, it was my song.

Kids are swaying to the music. “USCRI Wilmington. It’s lit!” a kid with dyed-gray hair yells. I tell them to turn the music off. The kid with the dyed hair starts taking a video. I see Farzaneh walking toward us. This is not how things are supposed to go.

* BAC K AT HOM E, Phil and Helen are watching a cartoon about a toddler princess.

Something about them in this house makes me think of a magazine ad—loving father and adorable blonde kid, a living room filled with Pottery Barn furniture—not even real wood, but it costs just as much. Our house has three sets of French doors on the first floor that look out to a preserve. We are suspended over a forest. I like watching the seasons from here.

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Helen tugs on my shirt. “Mommy, Princess Lizzie’s mommy is going to have a baby.

That’s just like you!”

“Is it really?”

She nods. “When the baby comes, can we put it in the swing and make it go really high?”

Phil laughs. He’s got a magazine open on the couch, a snack next to him. Dads take it easy with the best of them.

I look out the kitchen window to the front garden. “Want to help me outside?”

We all go out, Helen following me, hovering while I pull weeds from the pachysandra. I prune the redbud the way the garden center woman told me to, by making a clean cut near the spot where the branch joins with a larger one, as close to the wrinkly line that connects them as possible. I did not plant this garden. It’s probably been here fifty or more years. I’ve inherited it, and I have to be patient this first year, see what comes up.

Helen’s dancing. “Mommy, I love gardening so much. I would never want anything to happen to you. Mommy, do you remember that Popsicle the other day? I promise if you give me a Popsicle, I won’t ask you to make my dollies talk.”

I cut the branch and it falls into the pachysandra. “We aren’t having a Popsicle before dinner.”

Helen crumbles onto the asphalt. “If I can’t have a Popsicle then you have to make the dolly talk. Haha.”

“That’s backtalk,” I say. I look around for Phil. He’s attacking a stand of bamboo with a saw. The stalks drift dreamily down. “Come on, we can have a granola bar.”

She’s barely up from the ground when she collapses again, wiggling and grabbing her butt. “My underwear is too tight!”

I’m going to be the tranquil mom, the mom the parenting sites tell us we all have inside. My real mom self—the mom inside my head, a mommy who is a little bit scary—is telling her to get a grip, but lately I’ve been trying to practice patience. I kneel down to her level, the universal gesture of Good Moms everywhere. Maybe she’s stressed about preschool. “Honey,” I say. “Are you overwhelmed about something?”

She sniffles and casts her eyes around. “Yeah. I’m overwhelmed from all the vegetables you give me.”

I laugh and survey the yard. The twisted-trunk trees are my favorite—the spindly mountain laurel with its white blossoms pink tinged in the center, the rhododendron’s tropical blooms. The trunks are lit up at night, and our yard looks like a jungle.

Inside, I go to the online message boards. There’s a glossary of abbreviations: TTC—trying to conceive, DH—dear husband, BFP—big fat positive. To read beyond a page or two, I have to create a profile on TTC.com. I have to give myself a name. I start to type, then I abandon the screen.

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* TO N I G HT IS T HE PA RKSID E Preschool Moms Night Out, which means all over

town dads are having pillow fights well past bedtime. Half of the moms aren’t drinking because they’re pregnant, a few because of breastfeeding. The rest of us are two or three drinks in. We’re at one of those fancy farm-looking restaurants that’ll be dated in five years, mushrooms from the chef’s backyard and reclaimed wood and everything chalk painted. An oak bar lines the front of the restaurant and in the mirror across from it, moms check their reflections, flip hair over a shoulder, ask if they really look that tired. To my right, a part-time makeup artist and mother of Mae. To my left, the woman whose son is known as “the biter.” The biter’s mom has dark circles under her eyes because, as we all know, your child’s behavior is a referendum on you. The makeup artist is glowy; her jeans have leather stripes on the seam and her diamond sparkles every time she lifts her drink.

She turns to me. “Where will Helen go for grade school?”

“We haven’t decided,” I say. Like all of the moms here, we’ll probably choose private, one of the ones attached to an elite high school that advertises its seniors’ college acceptances online.

The makeup artist nods. “We’re thinking Friends. But tuition for three kids is killer.

Is it just Helen?”

“Yeah. We’d like another one, but we’ll see.”

“One child is like a dream!” she says. “And one girl! I tell my friends who have one girl that they don’t even have a kid, they just have a shopping buddy.” An appetizer arrives, avocado and radishes smeared on toast with a frisée of microgreens on top like unruly hair.

A few more mothers come in. Neve, my coclass mom, leans a hand on the side of my barstool. “Theo has gone through six pairs of Parkside drawers in the last two weeks,” she sighs. “He just pisses indiscriminately.” The makeup artist starts talking and I zone out, thinking about my class.

The makeup artist touches my hand. “Is Helen doing yoga this session?”

I say she is. “It gives me an extra forty-five minutes I can really use,” I say.

The mothers nod in agreement.

“I have too much going on,” says Neve. “I’m limiting Theo to three activities a week from now on. It’s just not worth it.”

Helen’s been writing love letters to Theo. She’ll drag a pencil and paper and her stuffed turtle out to the patio for privacy, but we can hear her when the kitchen window’s open. “Dear Theo, are you my friend? I want a friend. You are so kind, precious, and jealous.” She likes the –ous words.

Down at the far end of the bar, the head class mom clinks a fork to her wineglass.

She says she’s planning a winter gala fundraiser. Her long linen skirt and

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just-going-gray braids are a ruse to make her look like someone who homeschools her kids in a barn. She goes four days a week by train to the Main Line, where she runs a wealth-management firm.

All of these mothers are like leaky faucets in guest bathrooms. Running into them, I was reminded of the constant slow drip of their lives—but if I was out of earshot, it was like they didn’t exist, until I saw them and everything overflowed.

A late mom strolls in and I recognize her from Helen’s class orientation. Her jacket is labeled Dr. Hawkins, Children’s Hospital of Delaware.

I wave. “Your daughter is in the three-day pre-K, right?”

She nods. “And you are?”

“I’m Helen’s mom,” I say. “Are you a NICU doctor?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s great. They’re so important. Helen was a NICU baby.” I swig my pinot grigio.

Her eyes shift from me down the bar and settle back on me. She orders a drink. I see her manicure and wonder when she has the time. “Poor thing. What happened to her, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“She had some trouble after the birth,” I say. I wave at the air. “Ugh. Long story. I’ll tell you some other time.”

“Sure, sure. So sorry,” she says, and turns to talk to Neve. And I remember, she and Neve are neighbors across town from us. The bartender asks if I want another, but I

They’re all on Snapchat, manipulating photos of themselves so they look like cats.

don’t. I slip out, waving to a few moms. It finally feels like fall, the cold that reminds you of what’s to come. I zip my coat.

On the drive home, I go over my teaching plan for tomorrow. I used to buy what the college sold me, that I was a valued faculty member. Times have changed. Now everyone has heard of adjuncting—it sounds like a contagious eye condition, with that junct right in the middle. The adjunct union advised us to tell our students how little we were paid, but I know the kids don’t care. They’re all on Snapchat, manipulating photos of themselves so they look like cats. I’m not about to trust them to fight for my livelihood.

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We’ll start with a postmortem of the warehouse visit. “It was just so . . . humbling,” somebody will probably say. The others will nod. The word humble is catching on this class, everyone now using it to describe our project. I wonder if it’s a conspiracy.

Before class do they nominate somebody to tell me what I want to hear?

* PH I L I S LAT E for our follow-up. He’s straight from work in his scrubs, which confer

instant respect.

The doctor looks at me. “And what is it you do?”

“I teach,” I say.

“She’s a writer,” Phil says.

“What do you write about?”

“Situations a lot like these,” I say, gesturing wide, a little grin on my face.

The doctor has a model of a woman’s reproductive system, pale flesh striated by angry red tissue, on the desk in front of us. This is not good news. The model reminds me of an illustration from one of Helen’s picture books of an alligator’s wide-open mouth.

“The IUI was unsuccessful,” she says, crossing her arms. She makes a pouty face.

“I’m so sorry.”

She goes over my lab work, all normal.

“I’m concerned about her endometrium,” she says to Phil, turning her laptop screen to face us. She scrolls through the ultrasound images of my ovaries and highlights some dark shadows. “Endometriomas,” she says. With a capped pen, she circles a spot of red on the desk model, tracing it over and over. “Right here.” She says they’re likely early endometriosis, recommends a laparoscopy. “This could explain a lot,” she says, gliding her hand down the ridge of the endometrium. “Because Phil’s results are all relatively normal.

I look away from the model. On the bookshelf behind her, The Idiot’s Guide to Adoption.

“I thought laps were only done for symptomatic cases,” Phil says. I hear a muted but distinctly pleased note in his voice. Our old doctor had used the phrase severe male infertility.

“In IVF we like to do these to determine the condition of the endometrium before embryo transfer,” she says. She tosses up her hands. “And honestly? It may help IVF outcomes, may not. The science isn’t great. Now, these spots don’t have any features of cancer per se,” she says, glancing at me and back to Phil. “Very low suspicion for that. But if we don’t go in, we can’t rule out a malignancy.”

I could walk out now. Down the dark hall, and let my endometriomas go along their merry way.

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“Of course, we’re not going to splay open the ovaries of a woman of your age,” she says, making a bagel-slicing motion with her hand.

She continues. “We have to be careful not to seed the ovaries. So what are your initial impressions?” She gives me her dopey empathetic face, then turns on the intelligent, “we’re speaking the same language” look when she glances at Phil.

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

How much money do you make off of this? I thought.

“I’ve looked at the records from your previous IVF clinic,” she says. “I’d like to go over everything, because there’s a lot. After you finally got pregnant, how was the pregnancy? Any complications?”

“No,” I say.

“And the birth was uncomplicated?”

“Yes.” “Spontaneous?”

“She was induced. Prolonged rupture of membranes,” Phil says.

“And any complications after the delivery?”

Phil takes a deep breath. “Initially she was fine, Apgar of nine.”

I interrupt. “Where’s the bathroom?”

I head down the hall and lock myself in there. What happened with the birth? Did they tell you why? Is she healthy now? I can see why this would be troubling, I can see you’re getting upset, here are some tissues. But she’s fine now, everything’s OK now, right?

I could let the medical records tell the story. But medicine, all CPT codes and sterilized gloves and fast walking, triumphant though it may be, lies by omission. A mother’s true story is too messy for medicine. The hospital charts said everything started with Primipara. Ruptured membranes thirty plus hours, Pitocin given at 0900, the doula wrote. At first Helen looked pink and healthy.

I put her stacks of medical records in the attic a long time ago. The story actually began in a crummy bar in Philadelphia. New Year’s Eve, a man dancing across the room, badly. We met each other halfway, in the middle of the dance floor. And even though we were just kids, the sudden heart-stop feeling that I already loved this funny stranger.

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ERIKA OAKVIK

Bruised i once hated the lightgreen lingering of the bruise in me. like a nectarine in september held and curious would the ring around my pit always be soft? recurring dreams of broken teeth petty thoughts, penny debts these halved crescendos create hesitancy— and curiosity is a sunset i swear to God we will exist but not together. i now accept this tenderness which has always been light— which has always been bruising the swollen proof of alive until the day a dandelion sneezes and you and the bruising and the light— it is everywhere again.

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CLAUDIA MONPERE

At 4:00 a.m.

I found an hour slumped in my closet behind a pair of boots.

It was asleep, but still I touched it.

It did not shimmer or transform or burn my fingers.

It did not rebuke me.

It was beige and smelled like baking soda.

It did not rise with the grace of a crane or unfold like a lotus flower.

It complained about being awakened.

But it knew some things about listening.

We heard the archipelagos of history whispering. We heard snails tracking silver.

A thought tethered to nothing.

Coyotes near Alhambra Creek, their howls and yips in every crevice.

Fountain grass stirring in the wind.

We heard my daughter, drowsy, sing to the child inside her, her voice a garland of rose mallow.

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SEAN M. CONREY

A Vital History By then I’ll have weighed my life against the bones of earlier selves and found it light, will have lived seven lives in seven nations, none of them just, but one beautiful, I’ll have parted the grass with my hands and seen all the way to the horizon, wedged a god into my shoes with a horn wrought a thousand years before, I’ll have made amends with this for I’ll know its kindnesses are vaster than my weakness— And in this, my bright and fickle ignorance, I’ll bask in the sun which replaces god again, laid bare and unwieldy in our nakedness together we’ll pull back the curtain of dawn, stuff the dusk into the evening’s suitcase, and in the cries of birds will ourselves to ask who is this fragile partner holding our hand in the dark just before the sun dies?

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SEAN M. CONREY

Meditation Never mind the dark pouring over the edges nor the cold, nor the vacancy of words that sit as houses emptied before the flood.

The people, my god the people stumble and at the center of the bottomland watch the light gather at the forest’s edge.

Eyes closed a man washes his hands, the water drizzles him in a staunch cold as the shivering and clouds set in.

There amongst the reeds a new river begins, finds the edge of the world and spills as rain that falls for a million years or more against the stones in the trust-riddled fields where dumbfounded and broken we’d scattered like rice before the groom’s feet.

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Standard Uniform SHELLY LINSO

44

S O MET IM ES IN EA RLY SP RIN G , when the trees were bare and everything seemed

brittle, it was difficult to imagine that soon everything would be covered in a haze of green gold. Sitting in his patrol car, Officer Gerry Chiswick, “Chitty” to his fellow officers, stared down the long straight stretch of highway in front of him, toying with his keys in his lap. A rebirth. Was it possible? Sawyer rapped on his window and Chitty rolled it down.

“You ready, Chitty?” Sawyer asked. Chitty’s own even gaze stared back at him from the reflective lenses of Sawyer’s sunglasses.

“I was born ready,” Chitty said, unbuckling his seat belt. He tried to hide a grimace as he exited his vehicle.

“Feeling your age there, old man?” Sawyer said. He slapped Chitty on the shoulder, and grinned. Sawyer had told Chitty once that he wore the gold-framed aviators because Sawyer’s father, a retired statey, wore them, and because he thought they made him look cool. He chewed gum for the same reason. Chitty thought that Sawyer was pretty much a blowhard, a throw-back kind of cop with a black-and-white view of the world, but he was a good kid, and close to Chitty’s son’s age, pushing forty, so Chitty granted him a few allowances.

Chitty hiked up his duty belt and stared across the weather-worn lawn to a splitlevel ranch. They were out on the county road that ran between Canton and Watertown. Farmland mostly, with small villages clustered around forlorn crossroads, then houses like this one that trailed behind like they couldn’t quite keep up. Roller-shades, the vinyl kind edged in fringe, were pulled at uneven levels across the front of the house, making everything look slightly off-balance.

Chitty had been here before. Domestic dispute. A Vietnamese couple. Didn’t speak much English. They owned the nail salon in the strip mall on Yancey.

“A nail salon,” Sawyer said. “Go figure.” Chitty clenched his jaw. It wasn’t necessarily what the kid said, he thought, but how he said it.

“You just let me take the lead here, son,” Chitty said, slamming the car door.

“You got it, boss,” Sawyer replied. He stopped to polish his sunglasses, then hustled to catch up.

AS C H IT T Y M A D E his way up the fractured front walk he couldn’t help but think

about the dismemberment. It was pretty messed up, one human being in two suitcases.

How long would it take? To cut a torso in two with a nine-inch serrated knife intended for a loaf of bread? It made his teeth ache. And yet that’s what had been done. With a bread knife. It had to take hours, a job like that, and where would you start? At the head? Glassy eyes staring up at you, saying: Look at what you did. Chitty had seen some strange and awful things during his career: shootings, stabbings, bludgeoning.

They were brutal. But dismemberment? The passion and fury of that hate was terrifying. It was so incredibly personal.

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Chitty rang the bell. A small brown girl came to the door and looked at them through the frosted pane of glass. She must have been fourteen, maybe fifteen, if he did the math right. Because Chitty remembered her from when she was small, clinging

It had to take hours, a job like that, and where would you start?

to her mother’s leg and wearing turquoise pajamas with a red-headed mermaid on the top. Her black hair had been in a tangle and her mother had had a green bruise underneath her left eye. Chitty remembered the fear in the young girl’s eyes as they darted between her father and himself, the strange, large man in her doorway: who could be trusted?

Sawyer rapped on the door again.

“Police,” he said, and Chitty noticed that the girl’s eyes had changed. They were no longer wet and searching, instead they were hard, like marbles. Her jeans were tight and she wore a loose sweatshirt that draped off one shoulder. The wide slash at the collar looked intentional, and the fabric was held together with an even row of oversized safety pins.

“Rosie?” Chitty asked. “I’m Officer Chiswick. This is Officer Sawyer. Is your father around?” Behind her, up the stairs, Chitty saw the hems of plaid flannel pants and two slippered feet.

“Sir?” he called, and a small, stooped man appeared in the dim hallway. “Can we come up?” The man motioned for them to come in and Chitty climbed the short half set of stairs. In the kitchen, the man had already taken a seat at the table. He ignored Sawyer and Chitty as they walked into the room, concentrating instead on a worn book of Sudoku puzzles in front of him; it seemed a strange indifference to law enforcement for a man who had just lost his son. Sawyer raised his eyebrows at Chitty and pulled out a chair.

“Thanks,” Sawyer said. “We’ll sit.”

Chitty watched the old man’s face, but his expression was like the girl’s, impenetrable, as hard and wrinkled as a walnut.

“We’re sorry for your loss, sir,” Chitty said, taking his field book from his breast pocket. “But we just have to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Sir?” Sawyer said. The man looked up suddenly, as if surprised to find they were there. Chitty looked past him, out the window over the sink. The backyard stretched for about an acre until trees and forest encroached the land. It was in a pond about

46

two acres back that a woman fielding her dog had found the suitcases. Cheap, hardsided pleather things, brown and that sickly avocado green so popular in the seventies.

One of the suitcases had been floating on the surface, and the other was recovered by divers. When they pulled it from the pond they could see the boy’s hair, caught in the zipper like a fringe.

Stupid, Sawyer had said, as they were reviewing the facts of the case, to dump them all in the same place. You’d think after all that effort . . .

“So about your son,” Chitty said. He paused and cleared his throat. “About your son.” Sawyer glanced at Chitty, then picked up where Chitty had left off.

“Were there any problems, Mr. Nguyen, between you and your son?” Sawyer asked, and in spite of what he’d said earlier, about taking the lead, Chitty was relieved.

Recently, some days were harder than others to get to the bottom of things.

The man stuck out his lip and shook his head.

“No,” he said, “no problem.”

“Because we heard there were, sir, about money. About the salon?” Sawyer said.

Mr. Nguyen pushed himself back from the kitchen table and set a kettle on the stove.

“No,” he repeated. Sawyer glanced at Chitty.

“What about this loan, Mr. Nguyen?” Sawyer pronounced it as two syllables, New-Yen. Mr. Nguyen was looking through a jar of tea bags as if he hadn’t heard.

“We know there’s a loan, sir,” Sawyer continued, “and that your wife signed it. She put the salon up as collateral?”

Mr. Nguyen returned to the table. He sat up very straight and bent his chin toward his chest. He pursed his lips and shook his head.

“No? That’s not what happened?” Sawyer asked. Chitty surveyed the kitchen counter: the toaster oven, the plastic barrel of mini-pretzels, the loaves of bread and a box of raspberry strudel. The hanging bunch of browning bananas and the earthenware jar of spoons and spatulas. The knife block that was missing a knife.

“Can I see your hands, sir?” Chitty asked. “Can you lay them flat on the table?” Mr. Nguyen clutched his hands together at his chest.

“I need to photograph your hands, Mr. Nguyen, for evidence. It’s in your best interest.”

Mr. Nguyen pursed his lips again, then lay his hands flat on the table. Sawyer came and stood over him while Chitty snapped some pictures with his cell phone. The man’s knuckles were large and gnarled and his fingernails were dirty. One looked torn.

There was a small cut running across one wrist.

“How’d that happen?” Sawyer asked.

Mr. Nguyen shrugged. “Gardening,” he said. He made a motion like digging with his hand.

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“Gardening?” Sawyer asked, dubiously. He looked out the window. “The ground’s hardly unfroze.”

“Can you tell us,” Chitty asked, “more about your son? What was your relationship like with him?” Mr. Nguyen’s eyes slid up to meet Chitty’s, and Chitty felt something shift in his gut. Mr. Nguyen shrugged again.

“Good boy,” he said. He nodded definitively.

“But not what you’d expected,” Sawyer chimed in. “Cause we heard he got mixed up in drugs, Mr. Nguyen. That he was addicted maybe?” Mr. Nguyen glared at Sawyer’s feet and Chitty rubbed one knee. It ached, deep in the bone.

“What did your son do for work, Mr. Nguyen?” Sawyer asked. Mr. Nguyen didn’t answer.

“He was a janitor, right?” Sawyer continued. “Cleaned the school? Over at Jefferson, that community college there in Watertown?” Mr. Nguyen made a hissing sound between his teeth. Sawyer went on.

“Thought he’d do more, huh? Let you down? They found him in that, you know,” Sawyer continued, “in his uniform. Ripped to shreds but still said Gary on the pocket.

That was confusing to us for a while, Gary. But I guess that’s what he liked to be called, Mr. Nguyen. Not Duong, but Gary?”

Again Mr. Nguyen hissed through his teeth. He shook his head and then let it fall into one hand. Chitty glanced at Sawyer.

Killing this guy, Sawyer had said earlier, I mean, that’s bad enough. But then to chop ’em all to bits, all chop suey and shit? I mean, Danvers said they didn’t even know at first, if it was a boy or a girl. On account of finding the bags at different times.

And they found that one last. You know, the one with the important bits and pieces?

Because he wore his hair long, like, and they’re small people, you know? The Chinese?

Vietnamese, Chitty had corrected.

Yeah sure. Asian, though, so I mean, I can kinda understand the confusion. I mean look at you, Chitty, somebody hacked you apart and tossed you in a lake, they’d look at one of your toes, your little toe even, and they’d know what’s what, you know?

Chitty had taken offense to what Sawyer had said, how he’d said it. But he’d only raised his eyebrows and nodded. Sawyer’s little rant had rattled his cage though, and each step up the dirt drive the gravel had ground under Chitty’s boot heel like grinding into his skin. He’d felt irritated, all scuffed up, because none of it made any sense. How people recognized one another. Categorized each other. And if they did find his little toe, would they know? What’s what? Because what if they found his son Michael’s toe? Michael’s toe with that pale pink polish he was wearing last time he’d come to dinner? Jeans and a T-shirt at least, with flip-flops, no skirt and blouse like the first time, all making a point. But still the flip-flops and the polished toenails, the smell of that floral perfume and his lipstick. Her lipstick. Michael had kissed him on the cheek and left a mark, like a scarlet letter that he’d hastily washed off, staring aghast at the

48

stain it left behind on the tissue. What would they make of that, a thick toe with pink polish and dark stubble on the bone?

Sitting at Mr. Nguyen’s table, Chitty scratched his chin. He stared across the room at a family portrait on the wall.

“He did drugs, Mr. Nguyen? Owed some people?” Sawyer said, leaning back with both hands against the counter. “His momma helped him out and you got mad?”

Mr. Nguyen rubbed at a smudge on the table, then kept rubbing.

“Where is his momma?” Sawyer said. Mr. Nguyen propped both elbows on the table and roughly rubbed his face. “Where’s his momma?” Sawyer repeated and Chitty

He’d felt irritated, all scuffed up, because none of it made any sense.

made a motion for Sawyer to back off. Sawyer wasn’t green but he was eager. Too eager, maybe, and all fired up. He wanted to make his daddy proud, that was pretty obvious, given the sunglasses and all. And Chitty would imagine Sawyer’s daddy would be proud. He’d come out as expected, Chitty would guess. No surprises.

Michael, on the other hand, had always been a little, well, different. He had been attracted to floral patterns, for one, these button-down shirts from the eighties, and when he sat he usually crossed one leg over the other at the knee. Uninterested in video games or in riding bikes with other boys, Michael had always enjoyed clothes shopping with his mother. When they got home, displaying the bounty of their efforts, Michael would finger the fabric of a blouse Caroline had bought and say things like, It’s silk, dad, real silk. Not polyester chiffon. Not like Chitty, suffice it to say, but if Chitty ever mentioned his concerns to his wife, that Michael was different, feminine, Caroline would shrug her shoulders and say, Well that’s Michael, I guess.

All through Michael’s teens and early twenties Chitty had been poised and waiting for Michael to tell them he was gay, but then Michael’d met Chelsea at college. He’d gotten a good job as a reporter for a paper in Syracuse. He’d married Chelsea and they had a daughter, Eloise. She was nine. Michael was desk editor now and when he’d announced his transition he said the office had been supportive, changed the name on his office door and everything. Had a little party, imagine that? And poof! He wasn’t Michael anymore. He was Rachel. She was. It felt like Chitty’s brain backfired every time he thought about it. Like it just wouldn’t process. Why did he choose the name Rachel?

Not that Chitty loved him any less. Michael. He loved him, her, so much it hurt. And what the kid had to go through. Like Sawyer, here. A good guy, but his mouth, and

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his sort of mixed-up morals. What would Sawyer have to say about it? What would Sawyer have to say if his wife, his little girl, walked into a ladies restroom and Rachel followed behind, a man in high heels? A big man, too, like his father. Chitty could only imagine Sawyer’s hand on Rachel’s elbow. Hold on there, fella, Sawyer might say. Where do you think you’re going? I think you’ve got the wrong door. Chitty could only imagine the pressure of Sawyer’s fingers on his son’s upper arm. He could only imagine the shame that Rachel might feel, the rage.

“Should we see his room then?” Sawyer asked, and Chitty nodded.

“Can you take us to his room, Mr. Nguyen?” Mr. Nguyen looked at Chitty. He leaned back in his chair and pushed both hands deep into the pockets of his robe.

“Mr. Nguyen?” Chitty said. Mr. Nguyen moved slowly. His slippers slapped against his heels as he made his way down the dark hall. At the last door on the left Mr. Nguyen cracked the door ajar and Sawyer’s hand went to his gun.

It was dark in the room, darker, even, than the hall, and at first Chitty could only make out the faded grey light of the windows and bulging shadows of clutter and disarray. A strange music was playing, exotic string instruments and a woman’s dissonant voice. The green and red lights of an old stereo pulsed erratically in the dark. But even through the music, a muffled sob could be heard from behind the closed closet doors. Mr. Nguyen pushed forward, speaking loudly in Vietnamese. Sawyer released the snap on his holster.

“Stand back, Mr. Nguyen,” he said, drawing his gun.

Mr. Nguyen backed himself out of the bedroom, still speaking toward the closet in Vietnamese. There was no way to know what he was saying.

“On your knees, Mr. Nguyen,” Sawyer continued, “hands behind your head.”

Carefully, with his own gun drawn, Chitty made his way to the closet. He slid the door open to find Mrs. Nguyen on the floor, surrounded by so much stuff—papers, books, and clothes—that she was practically buried, and at first Chitty couldn’t tell whether she was hurt. He couldn’t tell whether there was any blood. Chitty holstered his gun and crouched down beside her.

“Mrs. Nguyen,” he asked, “are you hurt?” But the old woman only moaned. Behind him Sawyer had the old man cuffed and was leading him back down the hall.

“Mrs. Nguyen,” Chitty said again, “are you injured?” Chitty reached out one hand but she flinched, clutching a fistful of clothes to her mouth. Chitty tried to pull the fabric away from her face, but she wouldn’t let go.

From down the hall Mr. Nguyen yelled something in Vietnamese, and Mrs. Nguyen paused in her keening. Chitty couldn’t know what words had been exchanged, and he didn’t know how to help her.

“Mrs. Nguyen,” he said again, and she raised her eyes, skewering Chitty with the ferocity of her emotion, grief as cutting and sharp as glass. She clung to the flannel fabric. A shirt. Her son’s, Chitty thought. She was clinging to her son.

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Chitty eased Mrs. Nguyen to sit on the edge of the bed, and then, violating protocol, he sat beside her. Her son’s bed. Where he had slept and sulked and dreamed, like any other kid. Jars of paintbrushes and pencils cluttered the top of the battered bureau and a box of worn-down pastels was beside the bed. A backpack and a stack of what looked like textbooks sat next to the bedroom door. Art classes would be free, Chitty thought, for a community-college employee. Chitty looked more closely at the drawings on the wall. Sci-fi stuff in black ink. Even he could appreciate the attention to detail, but maybe to Mr. Nguyen it didn’t make any sense, spending hours every day hunched over a piece of paper with a pen.

A month ago, when Michael had told Chitty about his transition, a million thoughts, maybe more, had raced through Chitty’s mind. You’re what? Chitty had finally said, and Michael had talked, probably for a long time, but Chitty hadn’t been able to listen.

He hadn’t been able to process. Instead he’d interrupted and said, Wait. I’m sorry.

You’ll have to start again.

Michael had told him about his transition over the phone, and in retrospect it must have been a decision that was carefully thought out. Of course it had been carefully

Carefully, with his own gun drawn, Chitty made his way to the closet. thought out, Chitty thought. It had to have been years in the making. How many years Chitty could never know, and that still pained him, how many years his son had been trapped in the wrong body and too scared to come out. It hurt Chitty to think about.

Sometimes it hurt so much it took his breath away. Sometimes he felt like he had to throw up.

It hadn’t been hard to find empathy, but it had been hard to find the words. Of course there had been awkward questions. And then, after he’d hung up, his wife had said in careful, deliberate words, so that it was clear: They’re coming for dinner on Thursday. Chelsea and Eloise and Rachel. So that we can meet her. Meet Rachel. And Chitty had only been able to nod his head. He knew it wasn’t right, the mourning, but no two ways about it, it was a loss. He found himself staring at pictures of Michael as a boy, smiling in his Little League uniform, and he had to remind himself that Michael wasn’t dead. He was sad, melancholy, and his wife had to remind him that it was also a celebration.

On the bed, Chitty straightened up and stood. Mrs. Nguyen watched him, her eyes emptied for the moment of sorrow and filled instead with fear and wonder: What will happen next? Chitty adjusted his duty belt. Sometimes the damn thing felt too heavy.

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“Are you in danger, Mrs. Nguyen? Would you like to come to the station?” he asked.

“You and your daughter? You’ll be safe. Protected.” But Mrs. Nguyen shook her head.

“You’re sure?” he repeated. Mrs. Nguyen nodded. Yes. She was sure. Chitty glanced once more about the room. They would be back, other officers and detectives, to rifle through drawers and try to make sense of things. But Chitty understood the answers would be somewhere else.

LATE R , CHIT T Y ST O OD beside Sawyer’s patrol car on the county road. Sawyer

stood with the driver-side door open, his foot propped up on the frame. The old man was with his wife and daughter inside the house; there wasn’t enough evidence to detain him.

“You think he did it?” Sawyer asked, and Chitty shrugged.

“Not really,” he replied. Both of them mused in silence.

“The mother gambles, that’s what the daughter said,” Sawyer said finally. “Could be something there.”

Chitty nodded. “Sure,” he said, “could be.”

“Don’t want to jump to conclusions,” Sawyer said.

“No,” Chitty said. “That wouldn’t be wise.”

C H I TTY WAT CHED SAWY ER pull his patrol car off the gravel embankment until the

car disappeared past the horizon and the sky was once again empty and gray. Buds had not yet started to form on the branches of the trees and the maples along the road looked skeletal. Chitty remembered Mr. Nguyen’s comment about the cut on his wrist: Gardening. He remembered Sawyer’s reply: The ground’s hardly unfroze. Curious, Chitty made his way back up the drive. At the top of the hill he noticed a small, metal shed that he hadn’t seen before. A fresh path between the shed and the side door of the main house gave him pause, and once again he imagined that hacked-up body, the blood and meat and bone that made up a soul. How to be recognized? How to be known? When so much depends on the uniform?

Chitty pushed open the shed door. Inside, the air was warm and wet and the light was uncertain. But even then, Chitty could recognize the filagreed leaves of marigolds, tiny buds of orange and gold in plastic trays lining the walls.

TH E LAST T IM E she’d come to dinner, Rachel had helped him with the dishes. She

had caught him staring as she pulled on rubber gloves, something Chitty couldn’t remember Michael having ever done before, and she had smiled sheepishly.

“I just got a manicure,” Rachel had said, and Chitty had nodded.

“Of course,” he had said, and he had watched Rachel wash a glass in the same sink where his wife had bathed their son when he was just a baby.

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ROBIN GOW

8oz of water the day of surgery you can only drink 8oz of water & i want to use mine to house a goldfish. i want to get it right this time. it seems like all my goldfish died too young. they ask if i have a living will & i say no. the thing about goldfish is if they get sick no one tries to save them. i asked my parents to take my goldfish to the doctor when the fish sank to the bottom of the tank, staring blankly into the blue pebbles, i imagined a doctor in a white coat dipping his stethoscope in the fishbowl.

He would nod & give us a little jar of pills to save the fish’s life. we never flushed our fish down the toilet like normal people. i ask them where the parts of human bodies go that get cut off during surgery & they say “medical waste.” we buried the fish behind the garage. i made them tombstones from scrap wood. another one of our fishes had a stroke which made the fish bend in half & swim in circles. i hadn’t realized until then that fish could have strokes, that fish had so much body like we do. blood & organs. no one performs surgery on a fish. it’s not worth it. the oldest goldfish on record lived to be 43 which is nearly twice as old as i am. if i met that goldfish i would grow gills & crawl into the tank with the fish & ask him about what he knew of life. i would tell the fish that i imagine “going under” for surgery will be a lot like living in water & it excites me. fish stares forward beyond the walls of the tank. i wonder if i would be a more insightful creature if i also couldn’t blink. i kiss the fish on the forehead & thank him.

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DANIEL TOBIN

L e Po ë t From This Broken Symmetry

“There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible.”

—G r a v i t y

a n d G r a c e by Simone Weil, 1909 –1943

Not as in that Alpine photo below the chalet years before, Smiling into the camera’s caress of light, skis edging grass And the downhill’s white rush of snow, but on the cold floor In Le Poët (long lavender fields in autumn mountain air) She sleeps fitfully, having refused the heartened room Where her parents rest, where she did not want to wake, But hoped to be greeted as Plato did Diogenes, Good Day, Dog, as though by naming to banish the animal inside her, As though by self-cruelty prune gravity from the terrestrial.

What she sees looking back is the species’ errant slalom, Downward track of monkey mind past stations pointing up; Ahead: decadence, opulent flat out byway heading nowhere, This hopelessness abiding until humans resume their caves.

Daily she digs potatoes with the locals, nightly memorizes In its original Greek the Our Father, an “infinite sweetness” Until, with great concentration, she repeats it over and over, Its words tearing the thoughts from her body: her transport To a place “outside space,” no vantage, no point of view— Space itself opened, she would recount, filled with silence, “A true silence, not absence of sound,” like song perfected, While in Le Poët long lavender fields in autumn mountain air Brim in quickening chill, so on the church the sundial brims Along its raised Vitruvian arms and the script’s gilded light Beyond all longing not to be, Look Into My Living Heart, See Life.

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KATIE MANNING

Sighting Grief a cento for Marthe Reed

There are fewer galaxies here: there, here, lodged in time, words dramatic beside the window the way light opens day.

What I meant to say was you’re gone, but no voice came.

We part laughing and dead— line and pause like a code tapped through a wall— a warning (maybe), a long cry from there, an ache that is not pain.

Note: The title, even lines, and final line come from Marthe Reed’s coastal geometries and (em)bodied

bliss. The odd lines come from work by Emily Capettini, C. S. Carrier, J. Bruce Fuller, Katie Manning, Forrest Roth, and Ki Russell, who were Marthe’s doctoral students at UL-Lafayette.

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ANITA GROENER . Witness (detail), 2016. Photography. Paper, pins. 1 x 193 inches.

Collection: The Arts Council of Ireland. Photo Credit: Roland Paschhoff.

ANITA GROENER

Asking what it is to be human today, Anita Groener explores the substance of trauma and loss rooted in this question. She makes work for what needs language, experimenting with both figurative and abstract geographies. The artist focuses on specific current events, their archetypal and psychological resonances, tracing urgent connections between people driven from their homes through armed, economic, or political conflict and her own life and family. The deliberately modest means of Groener’s installations and line drawings—twigs, cut paper, straight pins, gouache, twine—speak to the fragility of life and society that the refugee crises expose. Her art implicates herself and us, asking questions about the ethics of witnessing and aesthetic response. Find out more at www.anitagroener.com and/or www.gibbonsnicholas.com.

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ANITA GROENER . State (detail), 2016. Polymer painted paper, pins. 51.5 x 51.5 inches.

Collection: Sun Communities Inc. USA.

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ANITA GROENER . The Past Is a Foreign Country (detail), 2018. Twenty birch trees, paper, twine.

118 x 157 x 118 inches. Courtesy of Gibbons & Nicholas.

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ANITA GROENER . How Fragile We Are {I Am an Invisible Man} (detail), 2017.

Painted twigs, paper, twine. 31.5 x 39.4 x 2 inches. Private collection, Amsterdam.

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ANITA GROENER . Citizen (detail), 2016. Painted paper, twigs.

59 x 31.5 inches. Courtesy of Gibbons & Nicholas.

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ANITA GROENER . Prolonged By A Hundred Shadows (detail), 2018. Painted twigs, twine, paper.

43 inches diameter. Courtesy of Gibbons & Nicholas. Photo Credit: Roland Paschhoff.

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HADEER MAHMOUD. Ethopian Woman Waiting, 2015. Photography. 18 x 18 inches.

HADEER MAHMOUD

I take it every day to work. I stand waiting for the metro while watching its crowded cars passing by. I take a deep breath and throw my body into it like an object. And while searching for a place to stand, my personal space is violated more and more. I stand watching faces that hold so many stories and details, while listening to the unstoppable voices of salesmen crossing the underworld of the metro. It’s like another world where stories and scenes all meet underground. I thank God as I am leaving this underground world for the one above. But through my daily suffering inside it, the metro has become a part of me. A part that I must tell about.

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HADEER MAHMOUD. The Ladies Car, 2015. Photography. 18 x 18 inches.

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HADEER MAHMOUD. One of 3 Million Passengers a Day, 2014. Photography. 18 x 18 inches.

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HADEER MAHMOUD. Policeman Trying to Force Men Out of the Women’s Car, 2015. Photography. 18 x 18 inches.

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HADEER MAHMOUD. Life Five Years Past the Revolution, 2016. Photography. 18 x 18 inches.

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HADEER MAHMOUD. After the Post-Revolution Celebrations, 2015. Photography. 18 x 18 inches.

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YU-WEN WU. Currents, 2018 (detail). Thread, sand, graphite on duralar. 158 x 120 inches.

YU-WEN WU

Human migration and climate change are the defining issues of Yu-Wen Wu’s work.

Recent projects—Crossings, Currents, High-Water Mark, and Leavings/Belongings—call attention to the urgency of addressing global migration issues. In Crossings (an installation with artist Harriet Bart), Wu’s thirty-eight-foot video and an installation of six tons of rocks reiterates the upward trend of global displacement. By the end of 2018, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, approximately 68.5 million people had been displaced. Currents presents a cartographic overview of the flow of global migration.

Interconnected pathways trace movement within countries, across borders and continents.

The massive number of migration routes denote the scope of geopolitical turmoil. Red threads trace transitional ties from a place of origin in search of a safe haven. High-Water Mark is a multimedia installation that continues Wu’s work on the impact of rising sea levels and displacement of populations.

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YU-WEN WU. Currents, 2018 (installation view). Thread, sand, graphite on duralar. 158 x 120 inches.

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YU-WEN WU. Crossings, 2016 (installation view 1). 6:27’ HD video, 38’ projection, 6 tons of field rocks. Dimensions variable.

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YU-WEN WU. Crossings, 2016 (installation view 3). 6:27’ HD video, 38’ projection, 6 tons of field rocks. Dimensions variable.

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YU-WEN WU. High-Water Mark, 2019. 7:47’ HD video, Video still 4:15’.

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YU-WEN WU. Crossings, 2016. 6:27’ HD video, Video still 2:01’.

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NIGHT PIECE

ANNE MCGRATH

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I WA NT T O SL EEP, but I hear the moans and shifting plastic on the bed as my

fifteen-year-old white arthritic dog, Chip, stiffly hoists himself to a sitting position.

“What more do you want from me?” I ask him. The plastic on the bed, like something out of a Dexter murder scene, was added after he peed there twice last week. My husband Steve sleeps through it all. Like Steve, our poodle Ollie is still whistling air through his nose under the covers and doesn’t come up from his puppy dreams, not even curiosity rousing him at this hour.

I look at the green glow of the LED clock and see it is 2:23 a.m.

Pretending to be asleep, I still feel Chip’s penetrating gaze burning a hole through my eyelids. I relent, and pet his bony head, inhale his Ritz cracker scent. Sighing, I roll over to my side, to where the bed is still hot from dog-sleep, rub my eyes, and lifting the plastic I whisper into the silk blanket underneath, “This better be a business trip because if it’s about sniffing and standing on the stone wall, I’m gonna be all kinds of mad.” He looks at me softly, without judgment.

A scruffy terrier mix who tends toward white-tipped taupe, Chip used to catch snakes, chipmunks, and the occasional slowpoke squirrel in his youth. He earned his name by being so like the chipmunks he loved to chase. It was futile to call him, because he never stopped whatever it was he was doing. He once chased a groundhog up a tree where we had to rescue it, Steve climbing a ladder to face the terrified and terrifying snarling creature. We ended up bending the branch close to the grass and dashing away like cartoon characters when the groundhog hit the turf running. Other casualties: a six-inch-thick stone retaining wall that remains a crumbled mess off our driveway years after Chip demolished a chunk of it trying to dig out a family of black snakes. We had to give away our chickens because he could not get it through his head that the birds were not there for his chasing or eating pleasure, no matter how often we reminded him that we don’t eat family. These things happened back in the days when he would bark incessantly, and I had contemplated a cruel antibark collar just to get some damn quiet. Since the tumor destroyed his vocal cords, his bark comes out all wrong these days, hoarse and muted. Far more pitiful than no bark at all. He looks wounded anew each time he tries. It hurts me to my teeth.

He walks with difficulty from the foot to the head of the bed until he towers over me, panting, his expressive face leaning down inches from mine. Moist bad breath steams up my face as he stares at me through milky eyes as if to say, “It is not lack of will but rather lack of opposable thumbs that prevents me from opening the door for myself.” I can hear the coyotes yelping across the street on the horse farm. I hope none of them head over to our side while we’re out there. We’ve never had a problem with the foxes, bobcats, bears, or raccoons who frequent our property, but I always feel like I’m being watched from the hushed darkness of the woods when I’m out at night. The brambles on the edge of the lawn throb with wildlife. We live off a busy road with a couple of acres of yard flanked on all sides by trees and the rule is clear:

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the forest is animal territory. They have their tribes and histories. Like us, they take care of their sick and aged. They strive to keep their young safe and warm. I take my kimono robe off the chair, put my arms through it, and tie the belt around my waist.

WH E N M Y M OT HER WAS DY IN G , she refused most offers of help. I lived far away,

and she didn’t want to be a burden, was horrified by the thought of being dependent on any of her three children. Once, when I was visiting her, I’d had to give her an enema. I

She was, after all, the kind of woman who was still doing her everyday hair as if for the prom.

don’t remember the details, but it was mortifying for her, though only slightly gross for me, and she cried for some time after. “It wasn’t such a big deal,” I said, wanting to pretend it had never happened. “It’s done, let’s move on.” But she wasn’t having it.

“It was big for me. I never fathomed you would have to do something like that for me. Imagine one of your boys doing it to you. How would you feel.”

Terrible. I’d rather suffer whatever health ramifications than have my son insert an enema into my ass. It’s unthinkable. Until it isn’t, I guess.

At some point I said I knew she’d dealt with plenty of my gross bodily fluids and we could now call it even. We half-laughed about the enema episode, but it was lukewarm.

I don’t think she ever fully forgave the indignity of it. She was, after all, the kind of woman who was still doing her everyday hair as if for the prom.

WA LKI N G BAC K T O T HE B ED I stand up and tighten my abs as I reach down to pick

up Chip. There is a long tail to his collar because he’s losing weight, sliver by sliver, probably ten pounds in the past six months and is now a scrawny twenty or so, but still. I don’t need to mess up my back again. I place one arm carefully under his torso to keep it parallel to the floor, avoiding the enormous tumor in his belly, and carry him like a baby lamb out of the bedroom and down the stairs. He feels so fragile, like his bones might crumble if I squeeze too hard. I’ve been carrying him up and down the stairs for a couple of months now. He wants to do it himself, but his slipped disc has

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only recently healed sufficiently for him to be able to walk at all. I turn on the outside light and sense the frenetic scurrying of beings whose long shadows dart across the lawn. Unlocking the front door, I carry Chip out into the late fall night. It is the hour when an abandoned rake admits its loneliness. The retreating tail of a deer dissolves into shadows made less sinister by the glow of the moon. There are still peepers peeping, crickets humming, and leaves rotting; the wet leaves smell like something fermented, fungal, but slightly sweet. Sweet rot. The air is still with no hint of breeze.

This is important to remember. The air is still.

Placing Chip on the mossy ground I say, “Hurry up. Go potty,” and he does, crouching in his new emasculated pee-pose, all four legs bent looking like he’s about to keel over. On the ground near the front door lies a heart-shaped mound of moss I know by heart. It feels like good luck. I cross my arms over my chest and wonder what’s going on in the woods around us. I hear branches shifting. I feel eyes on us.

We’ve only been outside for a minute and already things are stuck all over Chip— small twigs, tree seeds, prickly little burs. A crumpled brown leaf hanging from his chin makes me laugh out loud. Yard debris has started using him to hitch a ride inside, his matted fur easier to cling to than in its smooth days, I suppose. He looks out at things I am too tired to consider, staring and sniffing, and I say, “Okay, all done? Let’s go back to bed,” trying to sound chipper and sing-songy. He ignores me, standing stock-still and seriously staring.

After a few minutes he hangs his head low as if he’s guilty of something.

Then, he walks slowly over to the stone wall around the brick patio, each step a monumental effort, and he carefully lifts himself up the six or so inches so he’s standing on it, statued, like a mountain goat. A frail dog who sees something I cannot.

An owl whoos, not too far away.

I wait. I know this frozen-staring-thing is what Chip most loves to do these days, that and eating and sniffing with his nose pressed so close to the ground it ends up crusted with dirt. So I wait. A small kindness. But I’m not thrilled about it. I’m sighing.

Yawning. Stretching. Shuffling around. “Finish up,” I say. “There will still be plenty to stare at in the morning.” I pick up a round green something or other that fell from a tree. A walnut, I realize. It feels like a prize. Sixteen years we have lived here and it didn’t occur to me until now that these green things we’ve been ignoring or raking away with the leaves are walnuts. How inattentive can I be?

Suddenly I am a child, some fifty years back, with skinned knees and a pronounced overbite, eating walnuts with my friends when we stopped to rest from a daylong bikeriding adventure. We were given so much freedom to explore at such a young age, dogs tagging along. We made a few bad decisions­­—like drinking from what we later learned were sewer pipes, or swimming in streams with too-strong currents—but intestinal distress and cuts from craggy rocks were all we ever suffered. Mostly we just imagined we lived in the forest and sometimes made it true.

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O N E O F M Y M A IN memories of being a young girl growing up in Virginia was the

need to be out-of-doors as much as possible. Confined indoors one afternoon by rain and parental rules, I wrote a song about the desire to live an unrestricted life. At least, that’s what it seems to be about when I think of it now, fifty-four years later.

Suzy, Suzy open the door, I want to see the birdies fly, And never ever close it, Holen, holen, rainy day.

“Holen isn’t a word,” my brother said.

“Who is Suzy?” My sister asked.

“You made up a new and perfect word,” our father noted. “Holen has a nice ring to it.”

I had little in common with my father, except for our shared love of birds and our quick tempers. He was mostly kind, drank too much, and always insisted on being right. When I was in college, he presented me with a large, framed oil painting. It is the only gift I can recall him giving me. He had painted the canvas with images from that childhood song of mine. He signed it: To Anne, who composed these words at age four. –Dad

I P E E L T HE S OFT G REEN hull with my fingernails and it parts in four perfect

sections. I crack the hard shell with a rock to find what looks like a neatly formed miniature brain inside. I eat a morsel of the bitter meat, most of it is buried too deep to extract. It makes me happy, unearthing and eating this treasure, knowing a walnut when I see one. Years running wild in the woods taught me this. Chip is still standing front feet on the low wall with a vacant look in his sagging, cloudy eyes.

I hadn’t realized the coyotes had stopped carrying on until they start up again, yelping and laughing like they are eating something alive, tearing it limb from limb.

The silence was as loud—no, louder—than all the critters combined. I sense cautious movements and hear a faint rustling from the nearby bushes. “Hey friends,” I say softly, “Chip’s just doing his thing over here . . . would never hurt you.” No reply.

A year ago, Chip would have found anything lurking around the edges and had his way with it. Now, I doubt he even hears it. A mutt blessed with a terrier’s dedicated nose, he was a wild creature once, a skilled hunter with a single-minded urge for conquest. He would race around or wait however long it took to strike and, when on his game, kill. Now, reduced to his stoic gazes, his hearing and eyesight so shot he might not guess what lies in the waiting brush, he won’t hear the footsteps of

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death walking close at his heels. But hell if he doesn’t look almost wise and brave, in the middle of the night, surveying his kingdom from on high, bones and burrs notwithstanding.

MY MO T HER talked an awful lot about the weather near the end of her life. She called

from ten plus hours away to tell me when it would be hot or cold, windy or humid, in

After a few minutes he hangs his head low as if he’s guilty of something.

my town. I’d say, “I live here, I know how hot or cold it is already.” She knew whenever it made for dangerous driving conditions. She lived in an adult home and didn’t go outside much, so I wondered why the weather was important to her.

Cover your neck, she’d say, if it was even the slightest bit chilly out. She ended up finding comfort in a narrow five-to-six-degree range; otherwise, she was forever complaining of being too warm or too chilly. I still have the long, skinny scarves she’d knitted for me. Six hundred miles away and she’d know when my neck was exposed.

Cover it up. Even buried in the ground, I think, I hope, she still knows.

I miss having someone eager to protect me.

I KN OW that we cannot, with any reliability, predict the last time our children will

need us for something. Like hair washing, teeth brushing, or middle-of-the-night comforting. And if the thing they need us for exhausts us, we can’t wait for it to end.

But then when it does end, we’re nostalgic for it and can hardly recall what was so bad about it after all. My young boys coming into our bed at night seems like a cozy gift, in retrospect. At the time when it was happening every night, I wanted peace. Now that they are nearly men, I welcome their rare requests for help.

I remember the time I took Chip to the vet when he was having nonstop seizures, the result of multiple snakebites. It was ten years ago and I thought I could not live with a dog as crazy as him. But incidents like that don’t happen anymore. Now he spends most of his time dozing in bed. One day follows another and suddenly

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our dependents no longer need us in the same ways. I know Chip has begun his metamorphosis toward death, and as annoying as I find his vomit, diarrhea, and middle-of-the-night walks, I know I’ll miss these nights, feeling needed and adored by him, when he’s gone. I’ll miss the way he looks at me with devoted, oozing eyes, the way he spins in a joyful circle when presented with food, the way we voice his imagined commentary (he mostly talks like a surfer dude, but sometimes like a petulant child, and rarer still like Stewie from Family Guy). So I wait, struggling to be patient and understanding, but feeling anxious and irked. I try to tell myself there is nothing to hurry about, that I’m already awake, and should make the best of it.

A LL MY L IFE I will remember a transformative and destabilizing experience

that happened just after my mother died three years ago, something that made an enormous impression on me and changed how I am in the world.

I was walking Chip and Ollie in the early morning, early enough it was still dark outside, and I saw something otherworldly in our backyard. I didn’t know if I was having a paranormal or religious experience. I didn’t know if I was losing it. I still don’t know. My shadow—arms stretched out to full extension on either side of me

I would bring my son back to witness it minutes later, but the leaf would be gone.

with two dogs pulling in opposite directions—was crucifix-like. But that wasn’t the odd thing, that was something I saw on every dim morning walk as the house floodlight illuminated us from behind. What was bizarre was meeting an ambassador from another realm.

Something was dreamily suspended on the air in the near distance as I walked through our backyard. I came closer and saw it was a crumpled brown leaf, hanging in the air about two or three feet in front of my face. I walked slowly toward it, feeling odd, skin tingling. The leaf was acting out of character, for a leaf or any other thing. It defied gravity.

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It was suspended in midair, gently fluttering, but not going any farther from or closer to the ground. I remember thinking, this is not how reality works. Things in the air are supposed to fall to the ground. That’s one of those rules that doesn’t get broken.

I dropped the dogs’ leashes and got right next to the leaf. I don’t know what the dogs thought because I was too involved with what was happening to pay them any mind. It was like when you’re in a dream but you suddenly become aware that you’re dreaming. I waved my open palm parallel to the ground above it, thinking maybe it was connected to a thread or web. It fluttered, but did not rise or lower. I waved my hand under the leaf and the results were the same.

The leaf remained perplexingly poised on nothing. Challenging all logic. It felt like there was an electrical charge in the space I occupied. For a moment, I too was suspended in time.

I thought of my mother. It seemed she was both everywhere and nowhere. Then I thought, this is my mother. Aloud I asked, “Mom, is that you?” and the leaf went twirling and spinning like it was in a wind tunnel, but stayed aloft in midair. On the still air.

I started to cry.

I opened my palm perpendicular to the ground and I slowly moved it toward the leaf. Closer. Closer. Closer still. Until I pressed my palm against it. Like a hug. Like a parade. Like a connection to something I knew was there but never really knew or if I had known I had forgotten. Holy mackerel, as my father would say. I am touching a thing behaving in a way that things do not behave. I’m glimpsing something from a place of limitless possibilities. I am moving among mysteries.

A warm surge spread through my body, making my face hot. And still, the leaf hovered. Still, my palm met it in the air, touching it, but not holding it.

My tears were in my words. “I love you, Mom. I hope you are OK, wherever it is you are. I miss you. I’m so glad you did this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank . . .” I felt crazy but also full. Like I was special, like I’d been plucked out of the ordinary and dropped into the extraordinary. I had my doubts, but I knew what I’d seen, what I’d felt. My mother was just beyond my view, not all-knowing, but still her. Flawed, funny, caring, selfish.

A leaf suspended.

No web. No breeze. Nothing to hold it there, or something magnificent for it to hold onto. I stayed out there close to ten minutes. Even in the midst of dazzling miracles there were routines to be kept, a child to wake for school, breakfasts and lunches to be made, dogs to be tended to. I would bring my son back out to witness it minutes later,

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but the leaf would be gone. I now think these things occur when we are at our most vulnerable. When we are gutted open.

I get a chill. I love these things the dead do for us.

S O MUC H Q U IET. So much dark. So much astounding wonder and possibility. Now

I am standing like a mountain goat. Bewitched. Suddenly aware of my own death. I am standing near the stone wall long enough for my legs to get tired. Chip’s eyes suddenly say it all—that he is grateful I take him out at all hours, that I carry him up and down the stairs and lift him onto the bed, that when it all becomes too much, for either of us, he trusts me to make sure his ending is a peaceful one. On this night we can both pretend I won’t ultimately fail him.

I want to ask his forgiveness in advance for the cursing I will do when I find bloody diarrhea on the white carpet, pee in my bed, and eye goo on my pillow. I want him to make allowances for the times I wished he would go away forever and leave me unburdened. Like when lifting him into the car after a walk in the park landed me in the emergency room with a destroyed back, unable to manage an upright position for three days.

I want him to absolve me for what I will do in a matter of months, right after it starts to snow, which is ask a veterinarian to jab his bony body with the needle that will stop his heart. Moments before the needle comes out Chip will look at me with those same damp, trusting eyes. Adoring me.

What I mean is I killed my dog.

Why I would do this when I know I need him as much as he needs me, when he knows things about me no one else knows, when he was the dog of our sons’ childhoods, I can’t say. Or maybe I can say but don’t want to. Okay, fine. I was tired and busy and my back hurt. You want more? I place freedom above love. I hate cleaning vomit and urine and liquid shit. I like sleeping through the night. Using baby gates to confine a dog to a space without rugs frustrates me. I want to travel without feeling monstrous. I don’t want to hear him falling down the stairs or slipping on the hardwood floors as his back legs crumble beneath him for the umpteenth time. His prospects are dim and I can’t bear to watch his decline.

After the veterinarian has given Chip a sedative, I question my judgment. “I think I’ve made a horrible mistake,” I say. “I’m taking him out of here.” I pick Chip up, despite the vet and his young assistant telling me to please come back, and I carry him out into the snow, half-running. It’s dusk. Some in-between time. I wish I could run fast to the middle of nowhere. Chip’s body goes limp as snowflakes land on his scruffy little top notch. I cry. After three or four minutes outside, I carry him back inside and tell the vet to “Go ahead and do it.”

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The vet and his assistant will alternate giving me hugs and apologies. One or the other of them will say, “It’s so hard to say goodbye. I can tell from talking to you that Chip is an important part of your lives and you’ve taken good care of him . . . he’s fought hard to keep going but he has little strength left . . . never easy, but in his best interest . . . hope the memories of his happy years help ease your pain . . . you were lucky to have him but he was luckier still to have lived with a family who loved him so much.”

The guilt over my decision will lead me to anger for having to bear it. The feeling will start in the soft, inner parts of my bones and leak out into my blood, my lymph nodes and organs. Will I ever not feel ashamed for thinking how much easier it is to do this or that without him dragging me down? Will I ever stop feeling like I’ve lost something vital? Will I ever not smell him on his favorite blanket? I can’t bear to wash out what remains of his crushed-cracker scent.

I am wondering if the ground was somehow sacred at the place where the leaf danced in the air, a liminal zone where I might find a portal between this world and another. I’ve kept my eye on the spot for three years now, sometimes going there to rearrange the air since my mother died, but subsequent leaves have behaved as leaves normally do. Among the unanswerable mysteries: Why did she (if indeed it was she) choose that place, that time, that leaf?

I’ve decided the place where the phenomenon happened is sacred, though no more so than any other place. The secret is this: All the places are sacred. Every place is saturated in Edenic wisdom. We just usually fail to notice.

On this fall night Chip is still alive and I am thinking how good animals and perhaps the dead are at receiving love. I look back at the house as a viewer, an outsider. I hear the leaves rustle and realize my neck is exposed. There is no tenderness to compare to the gathering of my robe up to my chin as we walk back inside to where it is warm.

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contributors

K A T E B R A D L E Y is a doctoral candidate in English studies at SUNY-Albany. A 2017 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference contributor, her fiction has appeared in Colonnades and Controlled Burn, and she was named a finalist for a 2016 Glimmer Train short story award. Kate has received grants from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, Kate is at work on her dissertation, a novel about motherhood.

R O B I N G O W ’s poetry has recently been published in Poetry, New Delta Review, and Roanoke Review. He is a graduate student and professor at Adelphi University pursing an MFA in creative writing, editor-at-large for Village of Crickets, and social media coordinator for Oyster River Pages. He is an out and proud bisexual transgender man passionate about LGBT issues. He loves poetry that lilts in and out of reality, and his queerness is also the central axis of his work.

S E A N M . C O N R E Y is an associate director in the Project Advance program at Syracuse University, where he teaches in the English and Textual Studies department. His poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Cream City Review, Notre Dame Review, and Tampa Review, among others. His most recent full-length collection of poems, The Book of Trees, published in late 2017, won a 2018 Catholic Press Award for poetry. Recordings of his experimental music project Mercury City Suburbs are available online.

Born in the Netherlands and based in Dublin, A N I T A G R O E N E R is one of Ireland’s most distinguished artists, exhibiting her drawings, installations, films, and animations internationally. Recently she has exhibited in Beijing, New York, Miami, Seattle, Washington, DC, Amsterdam, Paris, Basel, and Dublin. In 2005, she was elected a member of Aosdána, the prestigious official association of Ireland’s preeminent cultural producers. Until 2014, she was a professor at the Dublin Institute of Technology, where she also served as the head of fine art from 2004 to 2006. www.anitagroener.com

A D A M J . G E L L I N G S is a poet and instructor from Columbus, Ohio. His previous work has appeared in Dialogist, the Louisville Review, Salamander, and elsewhere.

J O S H U A G R A Y was born and raised in the

pine forests of the Deep South. He now lives along the Texas-Mexico border and is at work on a novel exploring narcoviolencia and sex trafficking. His stories have appeared in such places as Yalobusha Review, Per Contra, Juked, and Portland Review. He was awarded the 2018 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction.

S H E L L E Y L I N S O ’s short stories have been published or earned prizes in literary journals including the Atlantic, Roanoke Review, New Orleans Review, and Saranac Review. She received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University’s SoA and lives her life exploring the subtleties and surprises of humanity through the lens of literature. She is an assistant professor of English, writing, and literature at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA.

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K A T I E M A N N I N G is the author of Tasty Other (Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, 2016) and four chapbooks, including A Door with a Voice (Agape Editions, 2016) and The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman (Wipf & Stock, 2013), both of which she has enjoyed promoting in her Jesus costume. She edits Whale Road Review and teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University. She enjoys beaches, books, board games, brownies, and alliteration. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.

A N N E M C G R A T H ’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Teeth, Lunch Ticket, Brevity Blog, and other publications. Her audio stories have aired on National Public Radio, the Brevity Podcast, and Petrichor Audio Magazine.

McGrath is an assistant contest editor at Narrative Magazine, a reader at Hunger Mountain, and a graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she was awarded a VCFA Writing Research Fellowship.

She lives with her family in the Hudson Valley.

H A D E E R M A H M O U D is a photojournalist and storyteller from Egypt. She has been published in Amnesty International, the New York Times and through the Robert Bosch Foundation. She has exhibited internationally and has received awards and international scholarships from organizations such as World Press Photo, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and Contemporary Image. She is interested in women and documenting what they face and how they suffer and succeed in different societies. www. hadeermahmoud.com

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C L A U D I A M O N P E R E teaches writing at Santa Clara University. Her poems and short stories appear in the Massachusetts Review, the Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, the Cincinnati Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Georgetown Review Fiction Award.

E R I K A O A K V I K has been stringing words together for more than ten years. She writes to untangle the knots of hope, loss, and spirituality.

She longs for her words to evoke the irresistible holiness in being human. You can find her musings online at erikaoakvik.com.

D A N I E L T O B I N is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and most recently Blood Labors Blood Labors, named one of the best poetry books of the year by the New York Times. His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Y U - W E N W U is a Boston-based multimedia artist. Born in Taiwan, her experiences as an immigrant have shaped her work in areas of migration—examining issues of displacement, arrival, assimilation, and the shape of identity in a new country. At the crossroads of art, science, politics, and cultural issues, her wide range of projects include large-scale drawings, sitespecific video installations, community engaged practices, and public art. Her work has been exhibited in many contexts including museums, galleries, and outdoor public spaces. www.yuwenwu.com

last note ON IN TRANSIT

By definition, being in transit means that one has not yet arrived. There is the possibility of a destination, but not a promise. Our right now is always an in-between, an indeterminate place of perpetual transformation. According to astronomy, transit can also be loosely defined as the time when one celestial body passes the meridian of another body. In spirit, we are all celestial bodies, influencing each other in various degrees along our journeys. Together, our transit is the space of singular and collective evolution. Evolution can be painful and it can be gruesome, but if we place our faith in the integrity of the human spirit, we can find beauty even in the darkest spaces.

SHELLEY LINSO, FICTION

The pregnancy book says, “One hundred and seventy-five days to go.” Somehow it feels like I’ve been pregnant my whole life. Every morning, I eat tiny bites of toast in bed. I’m waiting for movement.

The baby is only the size of a pear, my husband reminds me.

The pregnancy book claims that I may receive compliments now that I’m at the stage where I’m glowing. But there is no glow save for the light produced by my cell phone as I anxiously google my symptoms. Meanwhile, my belly piques my four-year-old daughter’s curiosity.

“Where was I before I was alive?” she asks. “Before I was even in your belly?”

“We don’t know,” I say. “But we’re glad you’re here now.”

KATE BRADLEY, FICTION

Over the last few years, I’ve lost an unusually high number of people who are dear to me. I said to a friend that I’ve become a citizen of grief; I just live here now. This has caused me to see everyone differently. I have more grace for people who frustrate me because I realize that most of us are grieving, or if we’re not, we soon will be. I see it as an honor to be present with loved ones as they leave this life, whether I’m holding their hands in person or weaving our words together in poems.

KATIE MANNING, POETRY

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The Latin word limen, literally “threshold” or “doorway,” means the transition between places, states of matter, and states of being. It may be the most common experience in human life, but as with so much that’s so close to us, it is one of our least articulable experiences. By definition, it resists definition; simultaneously both/and, either/or, as well as neither/nor. Plato said that such concepts could only be understood through “bastard reasoning,” and poetry, as a form of divine madness (he’d say), is a rich vein for articulating this kind of thinking.

SEAN M. CONREY, POETRY

My pregnant daughter, Angela, who appears in my poem in this issue, would call my love life in transit. A bad marriage that ended when my husband wanted a divorce and died before it became final. A five-year, on-and-off-again relationship with a kind, intelligent man whose compulsive talking finally did me in.

Time in transit dating this guy and that.

A second five-year relationship with another kind, intelligent man whose inability to enjoy reading and desire to camp for every vacation finally did me in.

Now, finally, I’m no longer in transit— except in the best way, moving into new experiences and new perceptions with a man I’ll love forever.

CLAUDIA MONPERE, POETRY

I live in transit—that’s where I’ve learned to be comfortable as a neuro-diverse queer trans person. I thrive in the inbetween. I turn toward the surreal in my poetry as a way of exploring the space between reality and magic/fantasy because that’s what feels most truthful.

I wrote the poem in this issue the night before I had top-surgery, and I was hopping from friend’s house to friend’s house. I had a backpack full of everything I needed and I felt comfortable in that drifting because of the other queer people who supported me through it.

ROBIN GOW, POETRY

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last note

Beginnings and endings: I’ve spent most of my life with a binary view of these terms, as if they were either/ors attached to events. Now I see my starts and finishes as all mixed up, not only with each other, but also with my loved ones’ firsts and lasts. I like a beginning I can twirl into.

An ending that looks me in the eye. As my youngest son graduates high school, I feel a gathering of strength in my bones and an unfamiliar kind of courage shaped like a circle eight rising up from the pit of my stomach. Where I previously imagined I’d be settled like dust at this point, I instead find something thrumming through me. My view has moved to the outer perimeters where fireflies swirl. I’m here to say hello.

The first question of 2019: what is arriving?

That the light at the end of the tunnel is just a trick of the eye.

That the mystery of grief is how it too often shows up before the going.

That the empty spaces mean something.

That there’s a reason we find more comfort in unknowing than certainty.

That these are things that make us become.

That there’s a difference between arriving and becoming.

Since then, I’ve spent the last six months surrendering. I’m learning that transition is tricky, it’s complicated.

Feeling free is complex.

ANNE MCGRATH, NONFICTION

ERIKA OAKVIK, POETRY

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HADEER MAHMOUD. Waiting, 2014. Photography. 18 x 18 inches.