Issue 58: What Remains

WHAT REMAINS / 58

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contents

NOTES

Editor’s 5 Readers’ 6 Contributors’ 78

FICTION

If Anyone Moves, Scott Pomfret 28 Man of the House, Carrie Esposito 62

NONFICTION

Never Mind, Bill Marsh 14

VISUAL ART

The art of Amy Parrish 40 The art of Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva 46 The art of Erika Diettes 52

POETRY

12 Flashback with Paper Birch and Rock Garden, Bonnie Jill Emanuel 13 Perseids, Crystal Stone 25 On Buoyancy and the Loss of the Ability to Worry, Janine Certo 26 Pasta Maker, Janine Certo 27 Waiting, Janine Certo 58 Snow, Kate Gaskin 61 Photograph Late 1980s, Jessica Barksdale 74 A Kind of Lightning, S. Yarberry 75 Gladiolus, Michael Dechane 76 C: The Language of Grief, Kathryn Petrucelli 77 Epistle for My Unborn Child, Jordan Charlton

INTERVIEW

80 An Apprenticeship with Sorrow, Laura H. Schwartz

ruminate staff

Ruminate Magazine EDITOR

Rachel King NOTES EDITOR

Josh MacIvor-Andersen VISUAL ART EDITOR

Carolyn Mount NONFICTION EDITOR

Madison Salters POETRY EDITORS

DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

Amanda Hitpas DESIGN

Scott Laumann PUBLISHING & MARKETING

Natalie Peterson INTERN

Keely Turner

Michael Mlekoday & Hope Wabuke FICTION EDITORS

Joe Truscello & Emily Woodworth PROOFREADER

Alan Good SENIOR READER

The Waking: Ruminate Online EDITOR

Cherie Nelson BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Amy Sawyer

Josh MacIvor-Andersen

ASSOCIATE READERS

ASSOCIATE READERS

Chaun Ballard Tara Ballard Rebecca Doverspike Henry Hietala William Jones Saba Keramati Craig Reinbold

Michael Moening Evan Senie

editor’s note

As I’m writing this half a million people in the United States and 2.5 million worldwide have died from COVID-19. One of those people was my neighbor, Candy, who I chatted with on dog walks. Early one summer day I saw an ambulance across the street, my neighbor strapped to a gurney. A couple weeks later, I heard Candy had died. His autistic adult son, who had lived with him, has now gone to a group home.

The front-yard roses Candy used to trim so carefully also remain, now too tall and blooming early.

My siblings all work public-facing jobs, two as nurses, one as a bartender. One nurse’s unit closed; my sister was reassigned. My brother’s restaurant has closed, then opened, then closed, then opened again. A Ruminate Magazine editor was hospitalized with COVID; other editors are trying to supervise their children’s online schooling; a couple of our readers work as an ER nurse and hospital chaplain.

I thought of all these people as the genre editors and I discussed the stories and poems and art in this issue, as I edited words and placed them on the page. I thought of those like me who are working from home, feeling isolated at times, wondering how we can best help others.

Maybe you’ve lost someone close to you in the year since the initial lockdown.

Maybe you’ve lost a job or an idea of what you, your family, your community, or the United States could be. In the face of the immense grief that surrounds us, for this issue Ruminate Magazine editors decided to explore What Remains.

“Everything is held together with stories,” writes the acclaimed author Barry Lopez, who also died this past year, a few months after the Holiday Farm Fire destroyed his house and archives. “That is all that is holding us together. Stories and compassion.”

The pieces in Issue 58 enlightened me or comforted me or challenged me or gave me a new perspective on what Francis Weller in our bonus interview calls a psychic phenomenon. I hope in the midst of everything you have the time and space to savor this issue, to grieve for, wonder at, and hold on to the things that remain.

Sincerely, RACHEL

readers’ notes ON WHAT REMAINS

A wren hit the window yesterday. The gray male with a burnish of gold bounced off the glass onto a plank of the porch and lay still. The poor delicate-boned thing, just going about its day. A chickadee, as startled and curious as I, hopped over to take a look, then flitted off to a nearby tree.

I watched from the house for the slightest breath and murmured a prayer for its small, feathered soul and the multitudes of innocents lost to spotless windows, bug-splattered car grills, predatory cats, and power lines.

My husband approached with a shovel and offered to toss the bird into the woods. “No,” I called from inside. “It may revive.” I checked it between clearing the table and loading the wash, but saw no movement from the plumy lump, its toes like tiny bent twigs.

In the half hour it took to fold the laundry, when it slipped my mind, the wren came back to life and flew away. A few tufts of down—all that remained.

TERESA H. JANSSEN, PORT TOWNSEND, WA

Grandma still has a landline. She doesn’t want a mobile or a laptop and her newspaper is delivered directly to her mailbox. She doesn’t carry cash or a credit card—only her checkbook. But that’s fine: no one can say no to her. She

was everyone’s first-grade teacher. When you go out with her, it’s like she’s famous.

Everybody knows her. Everybody loves her. She could win a local election.

It’s funny—two generations later, I haven’t kept any of this natural ease at interacting with fellow humans.

Grandma’s landline rings all day long.

She answers the Italian way: Pronto.

BEATRIZ SEELAENDER, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

When they replace his nine-year-old immune system, miraculously, he is cured. Years of sickness are erased.

Relief and joy sprinkle every thought and conversation. Life divides into a before and an after.

After is grabbing the chance to set a new course and seizing every opportunity to make up for what was missed. Distance from the last hospital stay, the last clinic visit—you shift from the role of caregiver back to just Mom. But the years of searching for answers, witnessing suffering, bargaining with God; these acts imprint on your soul. If he complains of a headache, takes a nap, or skips a meal, your mind holds a raging debate of what if? versus he is cured.

You take so many pictures (probably too many), documenting every goofy smile and snotty laugh. You say you’re capturing memories but really you are

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collecting evidence. Look, he is running, jumping, skating. He is keeping up and hanging in. He is strong enough to be here.

At night, when all the motion of healthy lives settles and the house is quiet, you scroll through your photos. You compare before and after to confirm that before stays firmly in the past. To assure yourself that he is, in fact, better. Because the fear remains.

ERIN MCDONOUGH, HAWTHORNE, CA

A man wiped the cold sweat from his brow as he finished shoveling the deep snow from his driveway. As he turned back to the house, a distant roar turned into a snarl as a snowplow rounded the corner.

He knew the plow would shove snow back onto the asphalt he had just cleared. So with a muttered prayer he met the driver’s gaze and lifted a hand to wave, hoping the driver would do him a kindness. The plow’s blade lifted as it passed, just enough to keep the snow from spraying off the road.

The world is as thick with these small mercies as the hoarfrost on that night’s trees. Squint your eyes and you’ll see them—sharp-edged crystals glinting in the faint winter light.

MATT HOBERG, PLYMOUTH, MN

The ’86 Camry belonged to an elderly couple from Rhode Island. Upon their

deaths, their son took ownership of the car. Now it belongs to us.

When I cleaned it out, I found a crumpled shopping list in the pocket of the driver’s side door: Ensure, coffee, bread, bananas, cream of mushroom soup, cream of shrimp, chopped dates, milk.

I pictured their last days together.

Maybe she wasn’t eating and needed to maintain her strength with the Ensure.

Was the soup for her? Something easy for him to heat up?

In the ashtray was a pharmacy receipt for mouthwash. A dusty breath-saver and Certs wrappers. He still wanted fresh breath for her. A broken pair of glasses in a case, sunglasses, a penny from 1967, a few fingernails—square, like my grandfather’s.

I vacuumed gray hair off the upholstery. Maybe some dog hair, too. I’m sure that running to the store for her was more important to him than cleaning out his car. The flower petals in the back— were they from her funeral? The fine, beach-like sand on the floor—did they live near the coast or just visit on Sunday afternoons?

I wonder what will remain of me, littered around my universe after I’m gone. A Dunkin’ cup? Receipts from a discount grocery store? Most likely, lots of hair. Despite the ponytail, my husband sometimes pulls a stray from the soup.

They will not find fingernails in my car’s ashtray. I chew them while he scrutinizes the stew.

AMY NICHOLSON, NORTHFIELD, CT

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readers’ notes

We chopped off each other’s hair during quarantine. When we looked into the mirror, we felt like everything might be all right in the end.

only the remains of the old me and the baggage of the new woman I’d become.

And that was enough. I’d never felt more beautiful.

ZACH MURPHY, ST. PAUL, MN

DIANNE BRALEY, HAMILTON, MA

After my first marriage, I wasn’t sure there was much left of me. I wasn’t the same person who went into it, the girl who believed in happily ever after. I mourned for her innocence but valued my strength. I wore armor now. I was bulletproof. But I wasn’t sure who’d want to be with me, angry and afraid. I could barely be with myself amidst the bitterness and resentment.

Then work boots stepped down from a truck in the driveway. I looked at them as I planted my last tulip, then past them to his legs, his face. He was here.

My date, the country boy I met online. I didn’t particularly appreciate dating, had never had any luck online, but my sister encouraged me to try again.

He was early, or I was late; I almost forgot he was coming. I was aloof, and he was interested. He seemed simple and kind. I was suspicious, and he eased my mind. I tried to hide it, but he saw my sadness; he tried to make me smile.

One night he told me he loved me, and I struggled to understand. I felt I hadn’t given anything; I believed I had nothing left to give. This man who loved me had

It was hard to breathe through my mask when I first saw it: rose-gold rays of the sunset stroking the floating bits of fractured cow-spine. It was August 2020. I was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, sitting in an old church repurposed as a lecture hall. The bonesculptor presenting was talking about repurposing. About breathing life back into dead material. About working with objects that “host a present absence.” A series of images flashed on the projection screen behind her: the dairy cow’s vertebrae dug out of a farm, washed in a river, sorted on shrouds, and hung from the ceiling. I saw my grief—dangling in its remains.

Later, I sat alone in my white-walled studio, swirling around in the black chair, burying my face in books, blasting Bach in my headphones, pounding Milk Duds and Coke. I was writing—searching for something I didn’t know. I was running my fingers across objects of loss to see: sorting through court documents from the fifth grade; hanging up blueprints of the log home; taping family portraits to the wall. I was opening windows to grief.

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It was the beginning of processing pain on the page; the start of unearthing stories long buried. It was a horrifying-divine place—that white room. A necessary space to face what remained in me. Dig up the dead. Let the memories flood in.

Step back to sort out the scenes. Look up at the ceiling from my sun-spotted stretch on the floor. Breathe through the parts still holding on.

VICTORIA SOTTOSANTI, HANOVER, NH

I visualize the spot where the tumor was, the place on the scans that appears as a smooth gray void among the surrounding folds of the brain. It is flat, like a greasy fingerprint. My doctor says it is empty. I don’t understand why the absence has not filled in. I don’t know how there could be nothing when we keep searching.

CATHERINE LANSER, MADISON, WI

My husband and I are visiting my stepmother, Pat, in her temporary Chico apartment. Pat asks if we are willing to drive up to Paradise so she can see what remains of her house. We wanted to offer but didn’t know if she was ready.

We begin our anxious pilgrimage.

Scorched earth and burnt trees, twisted metal and melted plastics, broken glass and ashes everywhere. What does the future hold? Let us cast our own coins, the ones that survived the fire, the flame, my stepmother’s deleted world, to make our own predictions for a tomorrow that could end at any time.

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Dressed in her purple coat, Pat poses in front of her home’s brick fireplace jutting proudly above the white ash and ebony rubble. To say she is queenly might seem a cliché—what I know of queens I learned from storybooks—but my stepmother has survived.

When the fire came, she quickly gathered a few belongings, stashed emergency money, her medical supplies, and her car keys and drove through the labyrinth of fire, late autumn, to stall beneath tall trees.

She prayed, but to which God? How often, aside from weddings and funerals, had she ever stepped inside a church? But she prayed that trees would not fall upon the road as she made her way slowly down through the treacherous forest. She swore by god, I will not die by fire!

“It was mid-morning,” she said. “I thought it was night.”

Now, my stepmother stands beside her fireplace, regal in a purple coat, surveying all that has been lost, happy to be alive.

ROBIN MICHEL, SAN FRANCISCO, CA

“I’ll Fly Away” was on page 333 in the Pentecostal hymnal.

We sang it regularly—dare I say religiously—in the church of my childhood. Those years I learned “thou shalt do this and not do that,” when I believed God sat in His seat of judgment checking my name each time I sinned.

It’s no wonder my adult years found me walking away from organized religion. I no longer wanted any part of a judgmental God.

readers’ notes

But in the eyes of a dying brown-andblue-eyed border collie, I saw God for the first time. When my fifteen-year-old dog fell ill last January, she went five days without eating. I thought for sure she was leaving me. As I stroked her black-andwhite fur and held her near my heart, I felt pure, positive love.

That’s when I saw God in her eyes, sitting on the floor at home, willing my Holly-girl to live.

She said, “I may not know much about anything, but I do know one thing.”

“What’s that, Holly?”

“I know that every day you wake up, love your life and the world, you are praying,” she said.

As the sun set on day five, Holly ate the scrambled eggs and sausage I offered. I don’t question why she stayed. All I know is that she didn’t fly away. Not just yet.

TRACI MUSICK-SHAFFER, SOUTH POINT, OH

I remember Christmases before closeness became dangerous. The ten-foot-tall tree in the entryway, making everyone look up, a world of memories dangling from the branches, the ornaments, laughing every year as we stacked our love in shiny wrapped boxes in whatever space we could find on the floor. Then a round of hugs, kisses on the cheek, drinks passed—it hardly mattered what we found when the paper was torn away.

Mingled voices, immediate soft touches when something struck someone as funny, the easy, careless freedom of leaning into a shoulder and whispering, Thank you, I love you, I missed you, I’ll miss you.

KATE LADEW, GRAHAM, NC

I’d found one, a half sibling, before my father died.

Dad, handsome in his day (think: Burt Reynolds), gave me no clues. He’d left me the family violin from Germany, a few miscellaneous papers, a couple dollars from the sale of his small cottage, and his old Ford sweatshirt that smelled, predictably, like Old Spice.

But I knew. I knew there were more.

And so I looked. And so I found. One by one—another brother, another sister— handing them the keys to their past, tied to mine by a thread.

It’s funny how you can reclaim so much by giving things away. They were never mine to give; I was just returning them to their original owners.

LYNN MAGILL, BOTHELL, WA

I drive to school to pick up supplies, exiting the car as Howard the Librarian emerges from the elevator entrance. He’s dragging a cart of book bags across the front of the building.

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“How’s it going, Howard?” I ask through my hot pink face mask.

“Not so good,” he says quietly through his N95. “Doing my best.”

He stands still for a moment, then shuffles off just when I think he might cry.

My colleague Yuko is in the hallway assembling homework packets for students. She’s panicked about the uptick in COVID-19. She’s not wearing a mask. She asks about my love life, says she doesn’t know how to date during a pandemic. I tell her I like her skirt and say goodbye.

On my way home I notice a bumper sticker on a blue truck: It’ll be okay. A red heart graces the lower right corner of the rectangle. I inhale slowly, make it my mantra during the drive.

“It’ll be okay,” I whisper. “It’ll be okay.”

At five o’clock my friend Usha rolls up on her bike and we head out. The warm air envelops me as I pedal. We choose a spot at the park, eat food we don’t share.

We talk and laugh, just like the Before Times except for the six-foot distance.

Later we stand on a hill of rocks and look through the Native American Sacred Circle, with its massive poles. We have a bullseye view of Mount Hood. A glimmer of light hits its peak and we think it’s the sun’s reflection melting into the dusky horizon. But the light gets bigger, rounder. It’s the full and yellow harvest moon rising from behind the mountain.

We watch in silence as the sky darkens, then ride our bikes home.

TESS KELLY, PORTLAND, OR

Uncle Roger got the farm when they all died. So we helped him pack.

We drove out of Minneapolis. Two hours through fields of feathery trees and hills of corn and tin barns. It was motor oil and seeds in our California teeth and snaking roads. Our noses burned, our gums ached, our eyes sought straight lines.

We turned past a gate and drove through a tree tunnel where I saw our land for the first time. Miles of tan ears as warm as my hand. The whole place a sound—of crickets rubbing, of things nestling hidden, of trees soaking light.

We shook hands with the door knob on the white house where they all once lived.

A moon-shaped hole in the ceiling bathed the inside in linen light. An Easteregg-blue refrigerator holding a cracked mixing bowl. A baking table with flour drawers. A dining room, chairs set.

The pipes of an organ still breathing; milk jugs rung in white circles. Pictures framed of people, strong jawed with knuckle-y hands. I felt my face, my joints, all the places where I connect. The sky fading it all.

We rubbed our boney fingers on things, taking and taking, rolling them to the metal barns, until our legs were crooked and night fell. We left Uncle Roger there in a mobile home alongside the white house with the torn roof he swore he’d get to fixing.

We drove out to fireflies flicking a glow in darkness so black you could get lost. I thought not of the foreign miles of flat road ahead, but of my hands on door knobs touching skin.

JENNIFER CHRISTGAU-AQUINO, SAN MATEO, CA

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BONNIE JILL EMANUEL

Flashback with Paper Birch and Rock Garden for & after Cynthia Cruz Then the ambulances arrive screaming.

I’m disguised as a marigold— And stood under the lush of a white-barked tree.

The day with its kingdom of bees & scary flowerbed ring-necked snake.

An empty box of Good & Plenty trampled in peat & sugar ants.

They suctioned my mother’s stomach & wheeled her away.

How I twisted to the sun, how I stood.

How I glittered my exquisite orange sorrow in the moss.

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CRYSTAL STONE

Perseids The trees swab the clouds. The sky doesn’t understand the science.

Night dismisses day, returns with spotted lanternfly wings.

What it means to be unaffected by recent death. To have favorable conditions to grow.

We pretend meteors are stars that travel across the sky instead of disappearing. We see old light, think it’s still there, trace the past. I mistake Draco for Orion’s Belt many times, lose track of even my own sign on the horizon. We become parked cars in the empty lot like time. Each year, I age more than I mean to, even here in the arms of a quiet wish beneath streaks of invasive light.

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1.

For me the saddest thing about my brother’s Step Nine apology was that he never made it to Step Ten. He may have longed for what the program promised—a life lived “to good purpose under all conditions”—but if he ever made strides in that direction I never saw signs of it. I suppose he may have lied about it the way he lied about most everything in the months before he ditched those pesky Steps altogether and plunged headfirst into permanent liquid darkness. In late February, the tree under which we scattered his ashes casts a long, broad shadow. I step into the shady expanse, shield myself from a too-warm sun. I’m looking for answers and insight, a path to forgiveness, but all I feel is the fake sentimentality of my private performance. We are bound, my brother and I, in our elemental self-deceptions.

When I say the “saddest thing” about my brother’s phoned-in apology, I mean the cruelest and silliest, the iciest and most embarrassing. He’d since completed his fearless inventory, then his fearless list of the people he’d harmed along the way.

But when it was my turn for amends, I heard caution and trepidation in his voice as he recalled the “instance” on which he’d chosen to reflect. “There will be those who ought to be dealt with just as soon as we become reasonably confident,” he may have read in the AA handbook one sober morning. Then he thought of his younger brother among all those listed others. But why that instance? Why that harm when he had so many (some more serious) to choose from?

Scrolling through the Twelve Steps now, I know for sure what I suspected then— that he never stood a chance, never had it in him, my older brother the boozing recluse, my big brother the scrappy avenger who, when we were kids, loved to make an example of my junior sensibilities and weepy gullibility. He’s dead and scattered at the base of an oak tree, but these dueling emotions—bitterness/sadness, desperation/ resentment, anger/helplessness—are the life’s work he never finished, now handed down to me. Growing up, I thought we were arch-opposites, worlds apart in our plans and purposes, but now I’m reasonably confident we stand together, my brother and I, “under all conditions,” aligned in a fundamental misalignment.

How did this happen? Or rather, this ought to be dealt with, here and now. If forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past, then I’m ready to give up. Or am I stuck in the tree’s shadow forever?

2.

In life I try to stay positive, but my thoughts often skew negative, and not just on the subject of dead brothers. This attitudinal bias is totally normal, according to Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain and other books on the neuropsychology of human contentment. We all come hardwired with a “hair-trigger readiness to go negative,” as Hanson writes in Hardwiring Happiness. The human propensity for negativity, a kind of neurological template for die-hard vigilance, favored the evolutionary success 15

rates of those constantly “on the lookout for potential dangers or losses.” That’s why so many of us love horror movies, why we slow down for freeway pileups, why “news programs typically start their shows with the latest murder or disaster,” notes Hanson.

Most of the good news, on the other hand, slips by unnoticed because we’re too caught up in our habitual problem-solving, too busy scanning the horizon for signs of trouble. The good we do notice rarely sinks in since, as Hanson explains, we don’t pause or tarry, we don’t hold on to the good long enough—with “long enough” depending on the person and the experience but roughly speaking “the longer the better” or “at least a few seconds.”

For at least a few seconds, therefore, I’d like to curb my primal pessimism and reflect on some of the good things I learned from my brother. If neurons that fire together wire together (Hanson quoting psychologist Donald Hebb), then from day one my brother’s neurons wired and fired on the razor’s edge of high adventure. Among other things, he taught me how to strike a match, how to hop a fence, how to hook a worm and gut bluegills, how to scale the narrow gap between garages, how to ring doorbells and run away, how to launch an Estes rocket, how to patch a tire, how to pack snowballs good and tight, how to build a crystal radio and rig a preamp, how to build a cannon out of old tin cans, how to blow up frogs with firecrackers, how to slingshot water balloons over the neighbor’s roof, how to ride a motorbike, how to forge Dad’s signature, how to tap a keg, how to buy beer with his expired ID, how to act sober when I’m really drunk, how to drive drunk like I’m really sober, and so much more.

Some of this “good” skews negative, I admit, because like my brother I come equipped with hot wiring. Here I am, checking the sky for storm clouds as if my brother, now nothing but rain-soaked earth, were still a force to be reckoned with.

Death inspires this kind of cautious pause, a few moments of vigilant hesitation. In the gaps between seconds, I’m trying hard to rig a new, more positive Buddha brain, but the old one keeps getting in the way.

To beat negativity bias, according to Hanson, you have to “rest your mind” on the good and leave it there, letting the brain (almost literally) get used to what this feels like. Mindfulness meditation helps in this regard by fine-tuning and softening our neural pathways. Through focused training in self-awareness, one moves from rote conditioning to a more creative use of mind. My brother’s meditation phase didn’t last too long; he never landed in the happy realm of creative use. Once, during a rare visit to his remote, rock-studded homestead north of Reno, he pointed to the spot on his white leather sectional where he liked to sit—a worn, faded declivity, still fuzzy with the fine brown hairs of Bella, the Boxer mix he’d adopted then chased away. He said he was making good progress, going deeper every day, and I tried really hard to believe

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him—because that’s another thing I’d learned from my brother: how to doubt his every word.

I suppose I could have settled in, adjusted the bias meter, and rested there, for a few seconds at least, scanning for wisps of truth in another blunt lie. How did I know he was lying? Because brothers like us always go negative. We learn to spot the danger signs of our shared conditions. We’ve been raised on the same inventory, the same bloody news. That was our problem then and still is now. We don’t hold on long enough.

3.

Rain falls through the night and all morning. Now the sky is electric blue, the sun’s angle mid-March acute. I’m seeking an appropriate weather, the right moment to venture out and try again, but two years in a safe, shady comfort beats the blazing unknown any day.

One big difference between us remains: at times the mind is all chatter and hum, all appetite and churning out words to savor and feed upon. Other times, in death especially, the mind settles into stillness as words bubble up elsewhere and burst open, a slow saturation, a shady meadow after hours of gentle rain. The dead can drift away and rest easy, but for the living inaction is not an option, even in the grip of an acute and lasting acceptance. We may need to respond, strongly at times.

This mental chatter reminds me, too, that when the mind talks, the body knows it’s just idle gossip of one form or another: thoughts old and new, stored memories, fixed plans, hopes, and expectations, all floating on a sea of shaky feelings. In How to Meditate, Pema Chödrön advises the novice meditator to take all this in stride, to let the mind carry on while the body does the work of knowing. Meditation practice cultivates friendly attention to the mind’s rote operations and rewards with a sense of “deep satisfaction” in a realm of “dynamic flow.” All happiness, “all feeling of being alive and engaged in the world,” Chödrön observes, happens here in conscious communion with “the fluid, changing flow of things.” As a check on negativity, meditation rewires the “five-minute fundamentalist” inside us who tends to fix and freeze the world (other people, situations, ourselves) in accordance with long-held beliefs and hardened ideas.

On the cushion I’ve come up with a formula: writing + meditation = antidote to all my early training in hypervigilant risk assessment. Words in certain sequences feed the body’s active interest in resurfacing after years of immersive negativity. It seems unfair, somehow, that I have to do this work alone while you, my brother, wander off, eternally absent and unmoved. I feel like a child again in pointing out this injustice.

But never lost on me is the wicked obviousness that you have no “changing flow” to fall back on. All feeling of “being alive” now defaults to my feeling, my project to dismantle our shared fundamentalism and find a deeper satisfaction.

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Grief can assume different forms: anger, tears, silence, prayer, meditation, song, dance. For some, grief will want to be written, but these are seriously flawed conditions when words bubble up in a mind operating in the broad shadow of another.

I place my faith in the antidote, in the body that knows when the mind gives up all knowing.

But you already know this. You know Step Three calls for action to “cut away” at self-will, to surrender oneself freely to a higher purpose or power. How else set the stage for the “vigorous and painstaking effort” of Step Four, our searching and fearless moral inventory. The basic problem, the manual tells us, is desire— an “imperious urge” to hoard things like money, sex, booze, control, fame, youth, long life. There can be no peace for the human being so embattled in lack and want (“unhappiness follows”), so let’s tune in to the liabilities, the “how, when, and where” of our “emotional deformities.”

This process is forever daunting. The mind lags under the weight of thoughts old and new, but once we recognize that these thoughts are empty, the mind will no longer have the power to deceive us.

4.

When my brother called, he wanted to focus less on the lie he’d told many years ago than on the tight controls he’d placed on the truth ever since. To me this seemed appropriate and, given our history, vaguely promising. After all, the founding incident had lost its charge and taken on the milky hue of a faded Polaroid—minor in hindsight, but still suggestive, to the grown-up fundamentalist, of a significant, lasting liability.

For years he’d denied it, but now we could agree on the basic how/when/where: a book of matches and a leaf pile, two boys (one five, the other eight years old) under the back porch taking turns at the striking edge. When the flames started climbing, he hopped the fence and ran away, leaving me to take the blame for our shared emotional deformity.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he admitted forty-some years later, adding obliquely, “You’ve always been right and I was wrong.”

Childhood development experts are quick to point out how much strength it takes to tell a good lie. As kids we develop the muscles early, honing them over time in a bid (broadly speaking) to benefit self at the expense of duped others. The “cognitive demands” of a successful lie can be steep, as Victoria Talwar, Sarah-Jane Renaud, and Lauryn Conway write in the Journal of Moral Education. The child must be able “not only to produce a convincing false statement” but also “to support it throughout subsequent statements, exhibiting strength in a skill known as semantic leakage control.” The lie he’d told was unfortunate, but my brother had called that day to apologize for decades of airtight semantic cover-up, for his unflagging narrative consistency through years of stanched leakage.

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“Thanks for saying that,” I stammered noncommittally, embarrassed for his sake but my palms sweaty, my nerves on fire.

Then he got ruffled when I changed the subject and brought up the positive, a few good deeds he’d done for me along the way. I guess the handbook had said nothing about this kind of apology pushback, about fielding an impromptu response to his carefully phrased confession. Yes, he wanted to “look squarely” (as instructed) at the unhappiness he’d caused in himself and others, but it wasn’t for me to placate or ease his burden, let alone counter with my own half-assed nod to peripheral happiness.

It’s my job to discover these liabilities, he seemed to be saying, his voice a hushed rumble as he pivoted back to semantic control.

“Anyway, ancient history,” I offered before hanging up, but we both knew that was a lie.

5.

In a city on lockdown, the streets don’t feel as contagious as the news makes them out to be. I take a walk under high-noon sunshine and smile from a distance at passing dog-walkers, neighbors grilling defiantly on front porches, a young couple returned with bagged groceries and four bottles of wine in a cardboard holster. Nobody knows what we’re really up against, how bad this might get, but we all seem connected somehow in our survivalist efforts to square off against real danger and loss.

Strange times, everyone keeps saying, but the self-isolation and social distancing would have come naturally to you, as they do to me, reaffirming a primal urgency to retreat and hunker down. To put the self itself on lockdown. To embrace the prospect of fatal contagion as a check on habitual mundane dread. The fear flowing through me (but not you) these days feels live-wire hot, but under the circumstances all this negativity bias makes terrifically good sense. Nothing like a global pandemic to keep the mind sharply focused on what matters: food, shelter, soap, family, friends, health care, a living wage, our vulnerability as human beings to both visible and invisible threats, plus the simple fact that no one’s immune, that life, with its long-game illusions, just got a lot riskier, for some a lot shorter, both more and less precious for those who know nothing, meaning most of us.

On the cushion, I’m troubled by a problem with time. There seems to be both too much of it and not nearly enough to go around. Outside on the news people collapse without warning in ER waiting rooms; prisons and factories spin out of control with lethal outbreaks. But in here everything happens so slowly on the steep curve of future uncertainty. The governor says several weeks but “nothing’s written in stone.”

Meanwhile the past that got us here has no bearing on the strenuous in-breath, no hold on the quivering out. There’s a problem, too, with the privilege of private refuge, riding out this stormy weather from the relative safety of my paid-up bunker. In meditation, I can “get dirty” with these conflicting emotions and, as Pema Chödrön 19

advises, “hold the experience.” In this holding (a “brave act of becoming”) the heart warms to myself and other human beings. There’s no running from the contradictions, but I can sit with what arises. This, according to Chödrön, is the “total nonstruggle” that meditation teaches.

I’m sharing this with you because I think you’d understand. You’d relate, at least, to the brute force of intense conscious presence rubbing up against our shared addiction to compulsive thinking. We talked about it that morning when we took a slow jog through the desert, up a craggy slope toward Pyramid Lake then back down on a twolane blacktop still cool from the night’s icy temperatures. You’d been off the sauce for months, you said, meaning, I’ve since learned, you’d cleaned up for a week or two in advance of my arrival.

As the rising sun warmed our backs, we took turns assembling pet platitudes into what felt like the rudiments of a common practice. We discussed that feeling of freedom that comes from letting go of self-identification with one’s personal history and life-situation. I’d recently finished grad school, so I’m sure I took the high road by situating the conditioned mind not just in personal experience but in a vast collective mindset whose nuances seemed to bore you as my sentences, breathy and urgent, unwound in the warming desert air. You had lots to say about energy vortices and a pending worldwide transformation of human consciousness, the evidence for which you’d gleaned from those glossy paperbacks you kept on a low shelf. You offered to share them, and while you were showering I leafed through one or two, but the selfidentified PhD in me just couldn’t get past the cotton-candy covers and sophomoric prose.

Just couldn’t let go of all that high-powered thinking, in other words. My body may have known better, but my mind had all the answers. It’s a dreadful affliction, the polar opposite of total nonstruggle. The wise seem to make this point over and over: to be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time. We like to think life and death are our only problems, but at the end of this never-ending day there’s only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.

6.

In Pali, the word for forgiveness (khama) also means the earth.

Because the earth has a lock on total nonstruggle.

Because a human being who forgives is earthlike—nonreactive and unperturbed, unburdened of the weight of resentment.

Today the wind blows strong outside my window. Here in the Midwest we’re on high alert for tornadoes while hotspot cities brace for the next big surge, for vital news on PPE and respirators. Earth may be cool and untroubled, but the sky and the air we breathe feels angry, hell-bent on vengeance, maybe desperate for amends. I

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read somewhere that a good apology, like Janus of Roman mythology, is two-faced— backward-facing remorse (I was wrong for what I did), forward-facing forbearance (I will do better in the future). A virus is mechanical, not alive, and certainly not vengeful, but down on the cushion with my dirty emotions I’m convinced that what the earth will need when this is over is a big heartfelt apology, a brave act of communal becoming on the heels of our collective responsibility.

With my brother it was never a question of forgiveness, in either direction. When he was alive the gesture would have seemed excessive, irrelevant. Now that he’s dead it feels too easy, disingenuous, but also (now) all too necessary. Forgiveness by definition rewires the aggrieved in relation to the wrong done and the one who did it. If handled well, both sides may enjoy long-lasting health benefits and other net positives whereas lingering resentments and a clogged forgiveness network can lead to mental, physical, spiritual, and relational health issues. To forgive is to relinquish false pride, to acknowledge one’s own mistakes, to give up the grudges and any plans for retaliation. Where there’s no forgiveness one has to wonder: Was the apology flawed? Would acceptance come across as a sign of weakness? Or do I fear giving up old grudges because there’s power to be had on this (self-righteous) side of the moral inventory?

For years I could be certain my brother existed elsewhere—many miles away behind mountains of mixed emotions, a fully separate self bundled up in his own private memories, plans, expectations, hopes, and fears. My running sense of him living alone over there, quietly suffering, made it easier for me to live free and clear over here, feeling safe and superior in my self-serving estrangement. I know I was wrong for using that distance to safeguard a favored image of self. For that I would apologize, if I could, but the phrasing would be difficult, the semantics leaky. I tried the other day, standing in the tree’s shadow, but in the end I felt silly uttering empty words to a cold, indifferent earth.

If he’s a ghost, the haunting is neurological—two minds wired as one, one body alive and knowing, the other free of time and its bundled complications. The burden feels hot and heavy, as if my dying to the past is not living in the present but taking up space in the gap between life and death.

7.

By the age of five, the child is already filled with fear and sorrow. As adults, we can learn to listen to and understand that suffering through meditation. Sitting and breathing, you go home and touch the five-year-old child still inside, perhaps looking at a photo of yourself at that age. Next, imagine the person you perceive as causing your suffering as a five-year-old child. Think of a parent or an older sibling. We forget they too were once little children filled with fear and sorrow.

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The inner child is not just a “silly cliché,” Rick Hanson writes in Just One Thing, but a “large-scale system” embedded in the brain, “at the core” of who we are as human beings. Also at the core are learned habits of dissemblance and dishonesty, with some evidence suggesting a link between early lie-telling behavior and higher-order executive functioning. At the age of three most children will not only lie to conceal transgressions but regulate facial expressions and other nonverbal behaviors in order to appear honest, as Victoria Talwar and Kang Lee report in Child Development. At seven, the young liar deploys more sophisticated semantic controls, uttering “false information that differs from reality” while inhibiting thoughts and statements contrary to the lie. Thus, to tell a good lie requires a flexible approach to lived experience. I may know that what I did differs from what I say I did, but in memory I manage the leakage by holding fast to “conflicting alternatives.”

The first lie I remember telling was probably not my first, and certainly not my worst, but decades later I remember it clearly for the power I felt, as a five-year-old child, duping my mother with such deliberately false-true information. The truth involved a snowball and a broken window, but to hear me tell it you’d think that snow had a mind of its own. My small body leaned into the lie with a decidedly innocent, go-figure nonverbal attitude. As an adult I know my mother wasn’t duped so much as playing along, exhibiting, perhaps, what behavioral psychologists refer to as Nelsonian bias—turning a blind eye to the lie in order to avoid negative feelings (interpersonal betrayal) and preserve the parent-child relationship.

When I go home and touch that lying five-year-old, I know this is where it all started: my early fascination with words and power, with narrative chicanery, with malleable utterances designed to turn reality on its head to my personal advantage.

The mind speaks of it abstractly here and now, but my body still remembers the truth-bending relief I felt having escaped my transgression, leaving the “false” (as sketchy information, as nonverbal performance) in the hands of another, namely my mother. Lying becomes one of the strategic ways a little boy can “render his mother powerless,” bell hooks writes in All About Love. For young boys, “the earliest experience of power over others comes from the thrill of lying to more powerful adults and getting away with it.”

Truth, like a tree, from the Indo-European root meaning firm, solid, steadfast. But boys like us were raised to believe that to be honest is to be weak and soft. A good lie, by contrast, assures executive function of the highest order and supreme positionality in relation to hoodwinked others. Clearly this won’t do—not if the goal is a life lived to good purpose under all conditions. Rewriting the masculinity script means, among other things, rewiring that leaky boy-man for post-thrill honesty, for a life of humility (Step 7) untroubled by conflicting alternatives.

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8.

Clear skies, but now a persistent, bristling cold, as if the weather, stuck between seasons, can’t make up its mind. Meanwhile the joke online about soft, unreliable time—days blurred together in the absence of regimen, school, and work schedules— falls flat against daily totals, confirmed cases, the dead piling up in mobile morgues.

Today is Friday, April 10, but what does that mean? Calendar as guiding framework collapses under the weight of peak numbers. Time happens in the next refreshed bar graph.

For some, these blurry, pliable days force a stunning paradox, a back-to-basics conundrum that here I am toying with as I plan my next trip to the grocery store.

The puzzle is Buddha brainy: to be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I,” but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid.

Part of me wants desperately to be out there with people, really and truly connected (like before?), on a crowded train or bus backed up against someone’s overstuffed backpack. But the hypervigilant ego-self, in its effort to self-objectify—to make myself real and keep it that way—fears even an instant of unmasked contact the way a lizard dreads the shock of shadow on a rock bathed in afternoon sunlight.

A colleague online calls it a “viral pandemic,” and I’m struck by the double meaning: not just widespread infection but the disease itself, the pandemic, going viral like an image or video or any bit of rapidly circulated info. Widely shared and radically “popular” but in this case nobody wants it, even as some refuse to accept it. Doubters and flouters strolling by in the streets are walking examples of human clickbait, advertising the allure of an impossible outside. Through the window I watch them, envying their jaunt and open-air freedom. I may feel the seduction, the powerful draw, but I do my best to ignore it. I solve the riddle by choosing security.

I now have time to ponder, but the results, dear brother, are mixed at best. Life will never be the same, everyone keeps saying, but then I wonder, the same as what?

The same for whom? From my vantage a million miles away, the new self you pined for, out from under the bottle, looked to me like yet another addiction, twelve steps to ego-fixation as a substitute for other faulty conditions. Those books you read once then stowed on a low shelf told me everything I needed to know about the fear and loneliness parked inside your fortified “I.” When you died I saw it as proof to support my theory. Even more, I figured I had all I needed to shore up my rarified sense of self in stark contrast to your foolish escape from lived reality. Love or hate, near or far, I couldn’t make up my mind and didn’t have to because you made it up for us. Now it’s my job to take inventory, to log the liabilities while resisting the “imperious urge” to hoard them at my own expense. It’s a total struggle, a mind clearly overthinking itself. Days flow together like one long day, but this doesn’t stop me from living more days.

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9.

To reach the ninth step and give up. Inevitable? Convenient? His plan all along?

All I know is it couldn’t have been otherwise. At the memorial, talking with friends and family, I comforted myself with brainy statements about predictability and probability, the path he’d chosen for himself, his refusal to accept help, and thus the intentional, quasisuicidal nature of his slow descent and eventual self-destruction.

Like everyone I’d hoped for better, but the fundamentalist in me had no illusions about how it would end.

“He never got past the drive for one better,” his sponsor reported.

Meaning one drunk better than the last, the ultimate high reminiscent of long-ago highs—at college parties and football games, in the woods on weekend camping trips, with friends or girlfriends or all alone, then absolutely alone but anti-isolationist in his abstract striving for intimate connection, a self desperate to make himself real, finally and truly, by turning consciousness in on itself to consume itself, to drink away pain and fear, finding comfort and safety in the poison disguised as antidote, and maybe some peace in that final program, a way to survive endless lockdown.

But life is never that easy, I would say to him now. Life is never safe because life is change and endless movement. Nature has a viral way of sharing this news with us daily. At odds with flux and uncertainty, the fortified “I” tries to make sense of experience by attempting to fix it. But only a fool goes to war with an invisible moving target. The result is constant turmoil, thought and action spinning in circles, going nowhere faster and faster. Wise is the one who gives up this game, who lets the riddle solve itself, who makes sense out of change by plunging into it and moving with it, by joining the dance.

The truth is I’ll never know what game he died playing. What put him there on the receiving end of all those fateful party invitations. The last thing my brother taught me: self-erasure can be messy and brutal, drenched in ambiguity and guilty secondguessing, like a bad lie dismantling itself. But here’s the good news: when time stops for one, the next moment comes, for the other, as a release from the past, from past grievances and half-baked apologies, from leakage control, slippery denials, and selfprotective hardwiring.

Under these conditions, why worry old grudges when we all breathe the same air and dread the same noxious atmosphere. To live in the realm of dynamic flow, fully alive and engaged in this world, can be to retire from struggle, to relax the grip and die with each moment to all hopes and expectations. That’s why grieving can take the form of meditation, and why sitting here alone in my room quietly breathing suddenly feels like I’m not so alone, like I’m not really breathing, for a few seconds at least like I’m holding on.

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JANINE CERTO

On Buoyancy and the Loss of the Ability to Worry The eye of a crocodile self-adjusts, swims its sinusoidal pattern two hundred miles across the sea to feed on turtles. How worry comes from the word wyrgan, to seize by the throat and tear. When the peonies burst, it’s a reminder there’s nothing to hold on to, but to practice floating with a piano concerto on, with a berryorange scone and coffee with sugar and cream in a blue porcelain cup; to practice holding the small, light, and cheerful; to listen to a child explain how lemurs have padding on their feet so they stick when they jump and how a family bonds. It’s always the old who stand, lift a glass, and say: Don’t let anything pass you by. Buoyancy is simplicity: the ocean’s permeable edge, a refrain in the chorus, the blooming sky, your dog running up to you, and now this ten-vegetable soup your love has made, this cornucopia of colors— everything cut down to size.

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JANINE CERTO

Pasta Maker I pour flour onto the laminate, form a well.

The yolks enchant, I think, like conjoined suns. A lagoon of stewed apricots at the base of Mt. Etna. I pull scrapings from the walls into liquid. Here, nothing collapses, no fear, though I am hopelessly rough and messy.

I knead, the satin elasticity alive in my hands.

You’re at my side, all shiny and hoisting the CucinaPro Imperia, reliable as steel.

I watch you carry the sfoglia like a freshly ironed dress to a bed of semolina, lift our kettle on the stove. Tell me how to dot ricotta down the sheet, brush the perimeter with water. If you secure the top layer, I’ll press the mold, and after we’ve gathered scraps into a ball, I’ll think with all the time passed, how we still savor cuscinetti—seven pillows each, wading in truffle oil, melted butter, crispy sage. Oh, how we zest. Oh, how we drink. Isn’t this marriage, after all? How one feeds, the other gently cranks the handle, supporting on the other side. Great, one more, one of us will say, and with anticipation we’ll repeat, each notch to the next setting until it is to the precise length and fineness, the light shining through—almost sheer.

26

JANINE CERTO

Waiting It keeps coming: the jab, the hook, the cross, the uppercut. The reef break, the beach break, the bump and the hit. The longest record of consecutive days without sun was fifteen in the year 1972. That doesn’t seem that bad considering. Times, grace seems stuck, delayed, no unzipping her garment bags of light; a stopoff with no quiet path. Children can sense this, too. In pictures, an expression strained or blank. What comes together falls away like the metered tides or capes untied, pooled on the floor. Grief is naked mostly to the self, a body pillow. An utterance is a lost animal’s whimper, ripples on a distant lake. Somewhere, dry roses crumble like paper, pulverize to dust.

Somewhere, the sun tries to come through the wall of clouds like a fist. In the winter of my silence, I could barely imagine meadow at the end. I only remember unwrapping gifts.

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“TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF,” Chuckie says.

Which is fucked up. Chuckie is Adam’s best friend’s dad. Hair streaked gray. Mad crow’s-feet. Like Brandon, he’s got this barrel chest, huge made-for-TV head, and washed-out blue eyes that looked into your soul, even when Chuckie’s high as a kite, like now.

“Take it off,” Chuckie repeats.

Adam stands. He’s got no idea where his feet are headed.

Maybe out the door, he thinks. Maybe this is too fucked up.

“Take it off?”

Adam whips off his shirt in one swift movement that knocks his Pats cap off.

When he bends to retrieve it, Chuckie says, “Wait!”

Adam freezes, bent over, hat in hand, ass in air.

Chuckie swallows. It sounds like he’s got a lip full of chew. He turns down the sound of the X Games.

“I like to look at it,” Chuckie says.

“Look at what?”

“Your back. The tat.”

Relieved, Adam flashes Chuckie an encouraging smile. * THE TRAIN WRECK’S COMING, and Mrs. Chuckie’s got herself a front-row

seat. Neither of them’s noticed she’s home. From this vantage point, she sees the back of the recliner, the cock-eyed reading lamp, the top of her husband’s head, his elbows splayed on the armrests, his feet stretched out in front of him, and Tattoo Boy, naked to the waist, in baggy jeans and boxer briefs, hair wild and tufty, directly in front of the recliner, within her husband’s reach, a too-thin version of her dead son Brandon come back to haunt.

Curtains of pot smoke hang like shrouds. The family photos on the bookshelf are turned facedown because she can’t stand to look at Brandon’s face. She imagines her husband’s tongue lolling out, his cock in his hands, his panting lust-filled breaths, which she hasn’t heard in ages. She struggles to make sense of it. She wants to ask, Chuckie, were you about to have sex with our dead son’s best friend? Is that what I’m seeing? But she dares not breathe a word, for fear of jumpstarting what-comes-next.

Every plucked chicken bone in the boy’s not-broad-yet back stands out in stark relief. The TV-screen light’s dim and blue, but she doesn’t need illumination to know that across his tent-pole shoulder blades Tattoo Boy has inked the too-close dates of Brandon’s birth and death, and Brandon’s initials, and, in comically floral script, Best Friends Forever.

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She fights the urge to throw up the blinds. Let in some light. Open a window. Play a kazoo. Burn the place down.

She thinks, I’ve come home just in the nick of time.

She thinks, If any one of us moves the slightest bit, we’re all fucked. Our lives will be changed forever.

She thinks, I can’t lose anyone else. * THE TATTO O ARTIST had beer with breakfast. Maybe for breakfast. He

demanded three hundred bucks. Upfront. Showed him a dozen photos before Adam found one that wasn’t too Halloween graveyard.

“Something like that,” he said.

The artist asked where Adam had had his other tats done. He didn’t say so, but Adam knew this guy thought they were shit.

And some of them were shit. The one he did himself. The one he let Brandon ink on his right shoulder that said Dogg in gothic script, which was an inside joke, because it

The family photos on the bookshelf are turned facedown because she can’t stand to look at Brandon’s face.

got done when Adam’s Rottie Snoop got hit by a car.

After Snoop, each time shit happened, he got a new tag. When his neighbor Mrs. Pelletier kicked. When Mrs. Murphy, his English teacher, came down with breast cancer. It wasn’t necessarily super-important people. Bicep, calf, collarbone, ankle.

Plenty of room for all.

Adam knew his purpose. Far ahead of the other kids who had no idea what to do with their lives. Adam knew. Like he was born to it.

His mom hated it. He was way ahead of her, too. After the Dogg tag, she’d forbidden him to ink up again.

He’d laughed, flexed, and said, “Since when are you going to be a parent?”

The tattoo parlor stunk of hops and baked sweat. A yellowed license in a cracked frame was thumb-tacked to the wall. The needle teased Adam’s shoulder blades.

Every now and then the artist ran out of breath for no reason at all. A trickle of sweat dribbled down Adam’s back, and the lights baked his skin, but he felt like the 30

artist could do this in the dark. Someone, something was guiding the artist’s hand.

Something bigger than both of them.

Tears streamed down Adam’s face. He imagined the tattoo artist was writing in blood. * TATTO O B OY has sensed Mrs. Chuckie’s presence. He shifts his posture slightly to

accommodate her, so that ambient light from the kitchen better illuminates his back.

He looks as pleased as a kid with a newly discovered ten-inch hard-on who’s not sure what the hell to do with it. He doesn’t have the decency to be ashamed.

Kid’s glad to have someone to mourn, she thinks. Mourning makes him important.

Yesterday they were best friends. Today, he’s the grieving widow. Fuck him.

She wants to say what everyone wants to say: You’re going to regret those tattoos.

She wants to say: This is forever, what you’ve done.

She wants to mutter: Loser.

Mrs. Chuckie’s a nurse. She knows the way you feel about people often changes after death. She’s seen it at the bedside. People wilt and wobble. Their lips tremble, and the unexpected comes out—laughter, fury, tears, obscenity. Absurdity, too.

Because it happens in that moment after death, whatever’s said seems especially true and revealing, and it marks the moment indelibly and can never be undone or unsaid, and for the rest of their lives anyone who overhears and the speaker himself is plagued by questions like what the fuck was I thinking?

Mrs. Chuckie can’t believe she ever let Brandon have a gun.

Tattoo Boy reads her mind. He shoots her a new, hard look. Determination, she thinks. That’s what it is. He’s decided that if I tell him to fuck off and get out, it’s only because I haven’t seen him in the right light. He feels responsible for making me see it all different. In the light of nobility.

Get outta my house, you fucking freak! Mrs. Chuckie wants to shout.

She sees herself shouting and screaming. Cradling Brandon’s shattered head in her bloody arms. No sound comes out. What happens next is neither necessary nor foreordained. She has the power to stop the world from turning. * “WHEN YOU GOING TO GET A JOB?” Adam’s mother asked. “Where do you

get all that money you pay for those tattoos? Don’t even tell me you’re selling drugs out of this house.”

“It’s cool.”

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“Walking tombstone,” she muttered and took a drag on her cigarette. “My son’s a walking fucking tombstone. What’ll people think?”

“I don’t give a shit what people think.”

She crumpled. Adam draped a long arm around her neck.

“It makes people happy,” he whispered.

He thought of Chuckie. Adam hangs with Chuckie. Every chance he gets. Chuckie reminds Adam of Brandon. They get high and shoot the shit. These days, it’s the only place Adam’s getting any chuckles at all, and it feels almost like Brandon’s still alive.

“It makes people happy,” he repeated with more confidence. * MR S. CHUCKIE TELLS HER SELF: Girl, you never saw this. Pick up your car

keys. Drive away. Start a new life downstate. Let the Chuckmeister pull his own pud.

You’re done here.

The hallway’s wood panels are dark as pools of blood. She imagines her hand breaking their surface.

She thinks: Who would have thought a nineteen-year-old kid could hold himself so still so long? Especially not this kid, who as a toddler used to tear around her kitchen in too-muddy shoes. Who just a month ago had been racing his goddamn Monte Carlo down the Hurricane Road with her only son in the passenger seat.

She remembers thinking: If you kill my son behind the wheel, I will cancel you. I will obliterate you. She remembers pulling Tattoo Boy aside while Brandon was taking a leak, and hissing, “I don’t give a shit about you, Adam, but if my son gets hurt, I’m coming for you, you hear, and there’ll be no place to hide.”

Unused to this side of her, Adam stared at Mrs. Chuckie as if she were a complete stranger. His being puzzled gave her some mean satisfaction. She’d rocked his puny punk-ass whiteboy rural fake-gangsta world. She was still capable of surprising a man (even though Tattoo Boy wasn’t really a man, not yet). And it made her feel—wrong, as it turned out—as if she bought Brandon another few years of life.

There’s a taste like ashes on her tongue.

Never let on when you value a thing, she thinks. Never give away what gets you off. * ADAM HAD BEEN Brandon’s bestie since like third grade, but even he couldn’t help

suspecting that Brandon shot himself on purpose. Sure, they were playing around. A little high. Goofing. But when the coroner’s report concluded it was an accident, Adam had been pissed. Still was pissed. For Brandon being so stupid. For everyone saying, What kind of fool plays around with a loaded gun?

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Maybe if I’d never started with the tats, Adam thinks, maybe none of it would ever have happened. Maybe Brandon had wanted nothing more than a place on my skin.

Adam runs a finger over his bristly chin.

He thinks, What would it be like to have a tattoo right on your face? How much would you have to love someone?

He catches sight of his reflection in the television screen, which Chuckie has switched off. The pale skin equally a promise and a curse. As if God’s saying: Adam, you poor bastard. Sure, yeah, you’ll someday have the blessing of loving someone so much. But you’ll lose them. You will. You’ll lose them before you die.

Adam’s belly clutches. He sucks in his tummy until he’s skin and bones. Letting his

She remembers thinking: If you kill my son behind the wheel, I will cancel you.

hands drop to his side, he wonders whether he’s a pussy. Whether he’s got the nutsack to do what it takes. He ought to have had the artist put Brandon’s name on his face.

His skin ripples, as if what’s beneath the surface is bubbling up. Like a monster from the swamp, Brandon will climb out of his back and shed him like an old skin.

Mrs. Chuckie would like that, he thinks. And I’d like to be able do that for her. I sure would.

Adam cranes his head over his shoulder, so he can see the reflection of the top of the B. For Brandon.

He thinks, I need to hit the weights again. I need to make this shit stand out.

He sees himself on the bench, killing himself, pushing the reps until he’s dog-tired and trapped beneath a load he can’t budge.

He thinks, I’ll just let the bar press the air out of my lungs.

He thinks, I’m now more than myself. I’m at least three people. And a Dogg.

Together, we ought to be able to lift a bar off my chest.

Adam grins. Adam laughs. Because he knows from experience how that scene actually plays out: he will slowly roll the bar down his body, over his ribs and belly until it’s across his waist, a 225-pound chastity belt.

I am three people (and a Dogg), but some of us are on permanent vacation, he thinks. He turns and meets Mrs. Chuckie’s eyes. * 33

UNTIL NOW, she hasn’t given it much thought, but Tattoo Boy almost always comes

by when Mrs. Chuckie’s working doubles. A conspiracy. The first necessary step.

“I want to spend time with you guys,” Tattoo Boy said the first time, but he really meant Chuckie.

“You think you can replace him?” she asked.

Tattoo Boy didn’t even blink.

“No,” he said softly. “It’s not about that.”

But after? He avoided her. Spent time with Chuckie. The Chuckmeister. Who gets high. Who laughs like Brandon used to laugh, at the same stupid shit. Of whom Brandon was the spitting image. Which bothered Mrs. Chuckie’s mother, but never her. For her, it was enough that this great big fucking miracle of a child had come from her womb. It was goddamn generous of her to let Brandon look like Chuckie, if she did say so herself.

“At least I know you weren’t fucking around on me, babe,” Chuckie used to joke, ruffling Brandon’s hair, which had been the same color as his own. “Or if you were, at least you kept it in the family.”

When Tattoo Boy meets her eye, Chuckie turns. He stares at Mrs. Chuckie blankly, like he used to look when another man hit on her, which hasn’t happened in so long

It was goddamn generous of her to let Brandon look like Chuckie, if she did say so herself.

she can scarcely credit the memory. He looks like someone coming back unwillingly from a place where he successfully lost himself.

She thinks, Chuck’s not seeing me. He’s got no idea who I am.

And then his face relaxes. The world turns. Even as she puts her shoulder against it. Even as she tries to force it back the way it came.

“Hey, doll,” he murmurs, “sit down. Relax. Take a load off.”

Like nothing’s wrong. Like he’s innocent. Like nothing’s happened. Like they haven’t lost their only son.

No apology. Not a hint of shame. Except for that turn of the head, Chuckie hasn’t moved since she showed up. Hell, he hasn’t moved since the shot rang out. Not once.

Not even to go see what the fuck. Certainly not to follow the ambulance, which didn’t bother to use its siren on these back roads because by the time it got to their trailer, there was no more emergency.

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She swears she remembers running. She remembers Tattoo Boy cowering, curled up in a ball on the far side of the tiny room. She remembers not being able to find her son in his own bedroom, the rising frustration. She remembers wanting to scream at Adam, Where the fuck’s he gone?!

And the flecks of blood? On Tattoo Boy’s skin? These, too, she’ll always remember.

She’s not exactly sure whether she’s put them there in retrospect, or whether indeed the boy had been close enough to Brandon to be bloodied by the shot. Either way, they belong there. She remembers finally realizing in a leaky rush that the crumpled figure with the fresh crater on his crown was her son.

Despite her husband’s stillness, his inertia, his total inadequacy, his desertion, his betrayal, his inaction, Mrs. Chuckie knows that deep inside Chuckie has fundamentally changed. Whether suddenly, all at once, perhaps at Brandon’s death, or whether she’s just now noticing some gradual change over time, she cannot say. But Chuckie has changed. No doubt about it. He’s not the man she married.

The name for what her husband has become lands on her tongue. She looks inside herself expecting surprise but finds none. An unwelcome thought about her husband poised with their son like he is now poised with the half-naked Tattoo Boy fills her brain. It’s so unpalatable, so piercing, so completely unthinkable (though she has thought it), that the vision instantly vaporizes, and she vows never to give thought to it again.

She has an urge to tell Chuckie what he is, what it means for him to ogle this half-naked stand-in for his dead son. Only a strong Puritan streak holds her back.

She thinks Chuckie really needs to do the telling. It has to come from him. Part of becoming what he is, is for him to tell her of his own free will, and destroy what’s left of her world. * ADAM FIR ST CRUISED Brandon’s parents’ place once his skin was healed. He

hadn’t been back since Brandon got killed, and he drove back and forth in front of the trailer like five hundred times that first day. Next day he did it again. Ditto next day after. Turning into the driveway was like forcing himself to drive into a brick wall.

Once inside, Chuckie and Mrs. Chuckie stared at him with expressions that said what the fuck’re you doing here asshole?

He answered, “I’ve got some pot!”

It was the first time he’d offered pot to a grown adult, and the exchange felt unreal, vaporous, like smoke eddying away.

But Chuckie jumped at the offer and produced a bowl. (Not like Adam hadn’t known where it was hidden. He and Brandon had secretly smoked from it a hundred times.)

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Chuckie packed the bowl from Adam’s bag and let Adam take the first hit. After, Adam offered it to Mrs. Chuckie, who searched his face a long time before she took it.

Hey, bitch, Adam thought, don’t do me any favors. I’m not aiming to make you do nothing you don’t want. Leave more for me and Chuckie, for all I care.

But the pot chilled him. And that was when he decided the time was right to display the tattoo artist’s work. Neither Chuckie nor Mrs. Chuckie said a fucking thing. The room felt jammed and yet they were at least a thousand miles away. It was good pot, at least.

“There’s a place for you, too,” Adam promised, “when you die.” * THERE’S NO MARKER on Brandon’s grave. Nothing etched in stone. If goddamn

Tattoo Boy didn’t keep coming by the house, it would have been easy for Mrs. Chuckie to pretend that someone else was buried in the plot.

She thinks, If only the undertakers were as good as everyone said, they could have blown life into Brandon’s body. Just a quick breath. Knowing Brandon, it would have taken hold. He was always a quick study. He could learn anything given half a day.

She wants to ask Tattoo Boy, Will that ink bring back my son?

Not for her own sake. But to hurt him.

He is going to live. Maybe not long. Tattoo Boy has a streak in him. He’ll wrap his car around a tree or OD on opioids sooner or later. But he’s lasted longer than Brandon. And he doesn’t—can’t—appreciate the miracle of that. The unfairness.

Not that he’s pretending his devotion. These deep feelings are obvious in his wide, bloodshot eyes. Pretending? Far from it. Tattoo Boy is genuine. Nothing if not honest.

Comically honest. Giving. Like a child who doesn’t know enough to be embarrassed by his emotions.

Mrs. Chuckie guesses Tattoo Boy’s mother is none too pleased with the artwork on her son’s back. She thinks, The bitch probably curses Brandon in her head.

This thought makes Mrs. Chuckie feel warm and defiant and pleased, a little heartfelt fuck-you she feels whenever she hears about anyone else’s suffering.

But the warmth gives way to a wire lash of questions: what on earth, why in god’s name, how the fuck, why me?

She itches to write them on Tattoo Boy’s back with a rusty nail.

She knows he would grin and bear it. Even if she drew blood. Which she would, so help her God. *

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ADAM CAN’T UNDER STAND why looking at him doesn’t make Mrs. Chuckie

happy. He sees only pity in her face. Pity.

Adam flares up, doubles his fists, same as he would have flared up if pity had been directed at Brandon himself. Why not, right? That’s what it means to have your buddy’s back.

He smiles.

He thinks, Brandon’s got my back.

He glances at the reflection in the television screen. He can’t help it. It’s a persistent itch, a spot to scratch, one hand half down your pants when you’re watching the tube and not sure why you do it, not like you can beat off twenty-four seven, but it makes you feel safe. He traces the lines of the B—the only part he can reach—as if he could pull the letters off his skin like loose threads.

Brandon’s got my back, he thinks again. He forgets why he has ever been angry or afraid. Since Brandon died, he’s had this persistent feeling like everything he does is

Tattoo Boy holds himself up a little fiercer, a little taller than he otherwise would.

being watched. And it’s not a creepy feeling, not at all like you might expect. It’s like being loved. Or at least what he imagines it must be like to be loved.

The first night he showed the tat to Brandon’s parents, he drove away from their house at seventy miles an hour. At the hairpin curve on Hurricane Road, he felt the wheels of the Monte Carlo lift from the pavement and heard the crash on the Lewis’s tree. But a hand caught him and righted him and set the wheels down again. Adam felt the hand’s touch as sure as the needle across his skin—the same flush, same tingle, same electric firmness.

He hasn’t told his own mother, yet alone the Chuckies, about the hand. He doesn’t tell anyone either how he’s come to know that once he fills up every square inch of skin, there’ll be an end of all death. * WE COULD EASILY tell him to fuck himself. He knows that we could tell him to

fuck himself, Mrs. Chuckie thinks wearily. It’s all she can do not to puddle to the floor.

But I guess there’s something in his putting himself out on a limb for us. Putting it all 37

on display. Something courageous, something proud. He gets off on his tattoos. He comes by here to show them off. To tempt my faggot husband.

There. She’s said the word, at least to herself. Faggot.

She shudders and her shoulders slump, and it’s like twenty-six years of marital dissatisfaction drain out of her and pool at her feet.

I’m not a good person, she thinks. I’m not a good wife. I shouldn’t use that word.

There are other words.

But she can’t help also thinking, Chuck’s never been a good husband, even though she knows it’s not true. She can’t help thinking, I like that word, because it’s so awful.

So damning. Faggot. Faggot.

“Faggot,” she whispers, but so quietly neither of them hears. Aloud, it sounds less powerful than in her head.

Tattoo Boy holds himself up a little fiercer, a little taller than he otherwise would.

If a woman’s going to look at his body, he wants it to be flawless. No doubt all his flaws come back to him, everything he sees in the bathroom mirror, everything he has ever complained about—it all comes back to rob him of confidence and pride. And the space left behind has to be filled with bravado instead. False pride. Defiance. Ink. Tattoo Boy puffs out his puny little chest.

Which is kind of sexy, Mrs. Chuckie thinks. In a way. She likes men thinking they are getting away with something. She likes that they pretend for her. She can’t help liking it. Some women say they like no-bullshit guys. Mrs. Chuckie likes guys with a little bullshit. Guys who suck in their guts when they see her, who strut a little. Who feel like they’ve won a prize when they’ve finished fucking her. She doesn’t mind that.

Little men, she thinks fondly. She includes Tattoo Boy in this group. And Chuckie.

She includes Brandon, for old times’ sake, and doesn’t, for the first time since he died, feel bad.

Suddenly, she aches to be loved by something fierce and young, to be touched by the boy while her husband watches. The faint ripple under Tattoo Boy’s skin makes her mouth go dry.

When this one is a man, she thinks, if he ever makes it, he’ll be a man worth fucking. And I’ll be too old. Too damn old.

At last, Mrs. Chuckie feels herself glide toward the recliner, though she swears it’s someone else’s doing. She’s obeying a summons. She touches her husband on the elbow as she passes, to let him know where she’s coming from.

She stands to the side of Tattoo Boy and slightly behind him. She notices that his belt is loose, leather tongue hanging from him like a cock. She feels like she did the first time she learned Brandon was having sex: amazed, jealous, proud, disturbed.

She sees herself reflected in the blank television screen. She’s not unhappy with the way she looks. For a mother of an eighteen-year-old—former mother, anyhow (that hurts)—she’s not so bad.

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If I weren’t so tired, she thinks, I could look; I could be found. If only I weren’t, despite it all, in love with my faggot husband and his pisshole eyes.

She shakes off an overwhelming desire to sit down next to Chuckie, smoke a bowl, and relax into his arms. Maybe she’s got it all wrong. Maybe she’s just being bitter and mean because Chuckie hasn’t been exactly who she wished he was. No, the Chuckmeister would never be so ambitious as to fall for a boy like this. The Chuckmeister isn’t smart enough to be gay. She chokes out a laugh, which dies stillborn.

She traces her son’s initials on Tattoo Boy’s back, the way people run their fingers across the writing on the Vietnam Memorial or trace the words on a tomb. She’s surprised to find—though she shouldn’t be, being a nurse—a little texture to the tat, a little ridge of scar on the boy’s skin that’s not visible to the naked eye.

She wants to be written about, too. Brandon wasn’t all that was lost that day. * WHEN HE WAS A KID, Adam used to wear a shirt at the beach because he was so

shy. But at Brandon’s funeral he had wanted to take off his clothes on the altar. Lose the choking tie. Show them all what he was made of.

Adam is thrilled that people now want to check him out. He wants everyone to touch him. He feels generous when people touch him. The world’s not so lonely, and his body is big enough for everyone to get a piece.

Adam leans into the pressure of Mrs. Chuckie’s hand. Electricity runs across his skin. His nipple’s a cold, hard pebble. He imagines Mrs. Chuckie drawing a tat on his back, a single line of black ink trailing from her finger. He sees drops of blood well up at the edges of a clean wound.

He doesn’t trust her, not a bit. He’s afraid she’ll fuck up what’s already there, obliterate it, or cover it with her own obscure tag, draw a milk mustache where it doesn’t belong. He feels a quickness, a clutch of fear. For a giddy moment, he wants to be obliterated.

Then Adam relaxes. It feels daring to let Mrs. Chuckie touch him, the feeling of reward all the richer, that he has risked what he values most, and Mrs. Chuckie declined to do her worst.

His lids fall half-shut, lips part, head tilts. He no longer feels misunderstood. No longer feels he’s something to be unwrapped and discovered. It’s all out where they can see it.

He thinks of Brandon. He knows Chuckie and Mrs. Chuckie are thinking of Brandon.

If we all think hard enough, maybe he’ll appear.

Adam doesn’t believe this. But he sure wishes he did. They all do.

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AMY PARRISH . Check the Mail for Her Letter, 2020.

Photocopy with gouache and wax pencil. 4 inches x 6 inches.

AMY PARRISH: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Check the Mail for Her Letter explores memory and loss after my grandmother succumbed to dementia. Two streams of visuals weave in and out of time and space: a collection of modern photographs in the months leading up to, and following, her passing and a series of vintage portraits dating back to her childhood. I use gouache and wax pencil to obscure elements as I consider how to visualize fragmented recollections and decaying memories. For example, even when identities were forgotten, could my grandmother still remember being loved and the tender way my grandfather caressed her arm?

The last time I saw my grandmother her mind briefly slipped, as she insisted to return to the old farmhouse to check the mail. Could she have possibly known that I would be sitting here today with an unsent letter?—words that would have been my last communication before losing her completely. This letter, never mailed, unraveled an eerie string of events that led me to wonder about the space where reality and delusion intermingle.

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AMY PARRISH . Check the Mail for Her Letter, 2020. Digital Photograph.

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AMY PARRISH . Check the Mail for Her Letter, 2020. Digital Photographs.

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AMY PARRISH . Check the Mail for Her Letter, 2020.

Photocopy with gouache and wax pencil. 5 inches x 4.75 inches.

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AMY PARRISH . Check the Mail for Her Letter, 2020. Digital Photograph.

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AMY PARRISH . Check the Mail for Her Letter, 2020.

Photocopy with gouache and wax pencil. 5 inches x 4.75 inches.

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ELPIDA HADZI-VASILEVA . Fragility, 2015. Fabrica Gallery.

Caul fat, plastic, metal, and wire. 78.75 feet x 24 feet x 23 feet. Photo by Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva.

ELPIDA HADZI-VASILEVA: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

This commission, titled Fragility, took over the length, breadth, and height of the deconsecrated church and was created out of pig’s caul fat, a membrane that holds the vital organs together. Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva transformed a waste product of the meat industry into a sublimely beautiful material via a chemical process akin to embalming.

Exploring the expérience de mort imminente, or “near-death experience,” HadziVasileva focused upon the light, employing the architecture of a factory to route it through animal membrane—juxtaposing experience and materiality, taking people physically and mentally somewhere else, having them engage with a new location/ experience. For example, the suspension of many sheets of caul fat from the ceiling creates a tunnel—or nave-like space—through which visitors walk.

Fragility considers our attitudes to beauty and decay, our perceptions of finitude and the role that the body and bodily material play in Christianity and Christian art.

Located in a church repurposed as an art gallery, this signature work exemplifies Hadzi-Vasileva’s commitment to place and context.

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ELPIDA HADZI-VASILEVA . Fragility, 2015. Fabrica Gallery.

Caul fat, plastic, metal, and wire. 78.75 feet x 24 feet x 23 feet. Photo by Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva.

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ELPIDA HADZI-VASILEVA . Fragility, 2015. Fabrica Gallery.

Caul fat, plastic, metal, and wire. 78.75 feet x 24 feet x 23 feet. Photo by Bernard G Mills.

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ELPIDA HADZI-VASILEVA . Fragility, 2015. Fabrica Gallery.

Caul fat, plastic, metal, and wire. 78.75 feet x 24 feet x 23 feet. Photo by Tom Thistlethwaite.

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ELPIDA HADZI-VASILEVA . Fragility, 2015. Fabrica Gallery.

Caul fat, plastic, metal, and wire. 78.75 feet x 24 feet x 23 feet. Photo by Tom Thistlethwaites.

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ELPIDA HADZI-VASILEVA . Fragility, 2015. Fabrica Gallery.

Caul fat, plastic, metal, and wire. 78.75 feet x 24 feet x 23 feet. Photo by Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva..

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ERIKA DIETTES. Reliquaries,#48, 2011–2015.

Rubber Tripolymer, mixed media contents. 11.8 inches x 11.8 inches x 4.7 inches.

ERIKA DIETTES: ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Reliquaries are a set of cubes/capsules that are arranged on the floor as though they were graves or markers. Embedded in these rubber tripolymer cubes are garments and objects that belonged to the disappeared, treasured by their mothers and other family members like relics. But in this case the objects have been delivered permanently to the artist in order to give them “a dignified resting place,” in the words of one family member who delivered them. Relatives of victims traveled hundreds of miles to bequeath these things that would show the world their pain and what they had lost.

In Shrouds, black-and-white portraits of women, who are victims of armed conflict in Colombia, were taken at the climax of them describing the murders of their loved ones, which they have had to witness and survive. These portraits were then set on a fine silk canvas, recalling the Christian reliquary—The Shroud: the agony of Christ, the Passion and the Piety. This work has been exhibited in the context of sacred sites, thus generating a dialogue between sacred architecture, the space for prayer, the image of the artist, and grief.

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ERIKA DIETTES. Reliquaries, #150, 113, 112, & #155, 2011–2015.

Rubber Tripolymer, mixed media contents. 11.8 inches x 11.8 inches x 4.7 inches each.

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ERIKA DIETTES. Reliquaries, 2011–2015 (installation shot).

Rubber Tripolymer, mixed media contents. 11.8 inches x 11.8 inches x 4.7 inches.

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ERIKA DIETTES. Shrouds, 2011 (installation shot).

Black-and-white digital photograph, silk printing. 7.48 feet x 4.4 feet.

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ERIKA DIETTES . Shrouds, 2011 (installation shot).

Black-and-white digital photograph, silk printing. 7.48 feet x 4.4 feet.

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ERIKA DIETTES. Shrouds#15, #9, & #8, 2011.

Black-and-white digital photograph, silk printing.

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KATE GASKIN

Snow That was the winter of two snowfalls—flat stretches of dry roadside sedge hard with frost, and then a slow accumulation of snow falling on the steaming streets of Montgomery, Alabama into potholes, over the roof of the corner store, its meat and three buffet wafting fried chicken and okra with every warm, humid swing of the door opening into a frigid December noon.

I had been gone so long, lived in another flat city on the edge of a patchwork of prairie under a July sky, bluest over never-ending rows of corn. But what I meant to say about snow in Alabama is that it came twice that winter, unusual, heavy and wet, weighting the camelias until they bowed to the ground, their thin stalks like broken necks. That was my winter of crying each day on the short trip to my son’s kindergarten past rows of bougainvillea planted so close to the road their green fronds brushed the sides of the car I had to pry him from after I parked behind the school.

That year we took him to a succession of medical offices, each one beiger than the last, for test after test, while doctors with blank faces offered shrugging shoulders and stimulants

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and antipsychotics that made him better and then suddenly worse. Once, he bit me so hard I slapped him. This isn’t about my son being a little shit, or every time he kicked me in the shins, or how once I had to drag him from a children’s museum back to the car where he hit me for half an hour. Understand, this is a child who could barely talk, who walked around bleeding and rarely noticed, who ran from us as soon and as fast as he could for the sheer joy of running. If I close my eyes I can see him in his snowsuit, pulling his sled, the year we moved back to Omaha, my husband helping him build a snow fort so big that, beside it, he seemed a tiny red dot in a vast field of white. I’m taking you forward in time now. I’m showing you he probably gets better. But first he got worse, my mother a social worker—thirty-five years—for the poorest county in Alabama, sitting at our kitchen table in Montgomery saying, he’s the kind of child I removed from homes he’s the kind of child people abuse, a bright blur of Vyvanse chewables, drops of Dyanavel, Risperdal.

But the snow! Two times it snowed that winter as I staggered to my neighborhood one-screen movie theater to sit in the dark and cry while beautiful men kissed in a sunny Italian villa or a former Lakota-Sioux rodeo star cared for his autistic sister in the Badlands of South Dakota.

On my walk home, snow burdened

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branches of sweet olive, their deep glossy green buckling beneath a heavy crust that by morning was hard and sparkling. Snow is not rare in Alabama, but it’s novel enough that when thirteen inches fell in 1993 everyone called it The Great Blizzard. We didn’t have power for weeks. I was barely older than my son, falling and falling in snow that soaked my jeans as I rolled the body of a snowman and then finished it with charcoal briquette eyes, a carrot nose, my dead grandfather’s black fedora. I kept the photo my mother took on my bedside table, kissing it each night, promising myself as soon as I could I would leave for good. Even at ten I wanted less heat, fewer shrub pines, more snow, city lights glinting in an icy North I could only imagine back when I was sure a new place, a new life would fix me. It snowed twice that Alabama winter.

In the summer I taught him how to pull stamens clear from honeysuckle blossoms, touch the drops of nectar to his tongue. What does it mean to get better? Now, in our yard, he falls backward into a snowdrift, makes an angel. Listen— there are church bells in the distance. A pair of cedar waxwings tut-tut back and forth across holly cupping small pillows of snow.

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JESSICA BARKSDALE

Photograph Late 1980s We lived into the decay: the wooden retaining wall buckling, the fence leaning back in reverse swan dive, the concrete patio my father and the neighbors poured sporting tufts of dandelions and Johnson grass.

Behind us, the barn-style tool shed where forgotten things moldered: my grandmother’s steamer trunk, our childhood toys, broken furniture. It hulks behind the untended flowerbeds and the weedy green upper tier. In the dark depths of the yard, a bower of walnut trees, where thankfully, I can see nothing. A woman I don’t remember sits on the far side of the ancient picnic table drinking water from a tall glass.

One man, now dead, sits opposite her and looks into the camera, he the only one who does. Sturdy, solid, he’s the captain of this party with his boat shoes, pipe, white beard. Next to him in a metal outdoor rocker, my youngest sister. Next to her, my husband, though I can only see one brown leg, one gleaming white sock, one immaculate tennis shoe. Those legs.

My sister’s right leg is also on display, darkened, wrong, shiny strips of flesh on her shin, thigh, burns from an electric shaver, she oblivious as she pressed too hard into her own skin, destroying hair and the top layer of her body for beauty.

Neuropathy, the doctors said, but by then, she was in the hospital awaiting skin graft surgery, the first of which failed, the second leaving her with scars I see from more than thirty years away. But now she’s talking with my husband, drinking a diet soda, bottle-blonded back to the hair color she was born with, that white-haired baby come home five days old, red and squalling.

That baby I cradled here on this patio, my father holding the camera.

That baby the ghost in this photo, that baby and my father. Me, too, because I’m offstage, in the kitchen with my mother, hiding from my uncle’s relentless party lens, but really, ducking from these truths: The backyard will collapse, my marriage will fail, my sister will die.

We have four years. Maybe five.

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BEFORE MY FATHER’S FUNERAL, Rabbi Hirt ushered my mother, my sister

Ruth, and I into his office and took out a pocketknife. The rabbi’s milky eyes, above red-veined cheeks and long gray beard, looked sorry as he sliced the collar of Ruth’s blouse vertically, then sliced the left lapel of my father’s suit jacket which draped down to my knees. He tore the fabric of the jacket with his bony fingers, leaving a flap like broken skin. He cut the right side of my mother’s blouse next, and only I flinched.

With trembling hands, she completed the tear and gaped at the ruined collar. The rabbi rocked on his heels, intoning a blessing in Hebrew.

Then he motioned for us to sit in chairs under his shelves packed with volumes of Talmud. I thought he would close the door on his way out, sealing us from the stream of people out there and their tears, but he didn’t. So they formed a line, and we stayed trapped in place.

The men in our town who’d loved my father—a pillar of the community, they kept saying—one by one gripped my shoulder, and as if the person before hadn’t thought of it, pronounced how I would be the man of the house now. I couldn’t tell if they were kidding or just saying what people said, but cold sweat spread over my skin. I was nine, no more able to fill my father’s jacket or his shoes, real or otherwise, than I could make him come back. Though only two years older, Ruth, who held onto my mother’s knee, turned up her cheek for kisses and nodded at one looming face after another, was probably more suited to the job.

My father was forty-eight, which before his death I thought was kind of old, but now I understood it to be impossibly young. I hated all those men older than him with their bad breath and kippahs balanced on their balding heads. Why had they gotten to live longer than him? What had he done wrong? He was trying to catch a ball I’d thrown him. Had I thrown it too hard? Too high or low? Had he crouched down to get it or leapt in the air? After the burial, I overheard one of my mother’s cousins at the shivah talking about how a cerebral hemorrhage had killed him, and when I asked my mother why she hadn’t told me, she said she’d thought she was sparing me, though I’ve never understood from what. * TWO DAYS BEFORE the funeral, we were driving along Highway 81, on our way

back from Kingston, Canada, to where we lived in Blackwater Valley, a small town in Upstate New York. We liked to do this sometimes; travelling to another country and home in just one day felt adventurous. It was Sunday because we didn’t ride on the Sabbath. I’d begged to go but later wished I’d asked for a picture show, anything else, as if what had happened only could have in that set of circumstances.

My father drove the speed limit, both hands on the wheel. He sang along to one of his favorites, “Memories Are Made of This” by Dean Martin, even as the station came 63

in and out. Sweet, sweet memories you gave-a me . . . you can’t beat the memories you gave-a me. My mother covered her ears, teasing him for his notoriously bad singing voice. But she loved it, same as when they sang carols at our annual neighborhood Christmas Eve party at the O’Neal’s piano, our family the only Jewish one who ever went. He motioned for us all to join in as Dean Martin crooned these are the dreams you will savor. Then my father’s hands jerked on the steering wheel as the car careened to the side of the road, resting there.

“Arthur?” My mother gripped the dashboard.

“Now, Minnie, don’t worry. I’ll check things out, and you make sure Ruth and Joseph stay put.”

Outside, the sun beamed, and the radio continued to play, though no one sang. I couldn’t remember ever seeing my father underneath the hood of a car. My mother

Outside, the sun beamed, and the radio continued to play, though no one sang.

clutched her purse and glanced out the window. Maybe she was worried that we still had most of the drive ahead of us, and we had school the next day. Maybe we would get home so late that we would miss school. My father would tuck us in and say why don’t we all play hooky tomorrow? We could hit some balls and get hot dogs after at Skimmers. I lay back, kicking my legs.

Ruth flicked my foot. “What are you smiling about?”

Instead of answering, I popped up on my knees, trying to see what my father was doing out the windshield, but the car hood blocked my view. I flopped back, disappointed. Ruth liked to say I was his little puppy, always at his feet or watching him, no matter what he was doing—twirling my mother after work before kissing her forehead, speaking on the bima as president of the synagogue about dues and upcoming services, or showing a customer the perfect chair at his store, Burwald & Meisel Furniture. When his attention turned to me, I was always ready. If he wanted to play ball, I grabbed my glove. If he wanted to do the crossword together, I found a pencil. I never bragged about him to my friends, but secretly I knew I had the best father of all of them. Unlike Tommy, whose father knocked him around whenever he

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felt like it, or Jacob, whose father woke the whole neighborhood when he came in late from the bar.

My father appeared right at my window, shaking his head and laughing as he rapped on it. I rolled it down.

“Well, I’ll be. It was a flat. Come on out here, Joe, and take a look.”

I swung the car door open and scrambled to him. We crouched. I thought it almost unfair how it looked whole and undamaged on the outside. He opened the trunk, taking out the spare and a bag of tools. But as he set it down, he frowned.

“Son of a gun. The spare’s flat.”

My mother and Ruth came out, both looking at my father expectantly.

“There was a pay phone at that gas station we just passed, right?” he said, nodding to himself.

“Can I come?” I asked. “Please?”

“I think it’ll be faster if I go on my own, son. You watch over your mother and Ruth.”

“Will you be gone long?”

He tousled my hair. “Not long at all.”

Ruth got our baseball gloves and a baseball out of the trunk. She threw pretty good for a girl, but she didn’t like to play anymore in front of her friends. While we waited, we tossed the ball back and forth, staying close to my mother. She leaned on the car, every once in a while closing her eyes and tilting her face up to the early September sun. Then she would look down the road in the direction my father had gone and back to the sky, as if afraid something would happen up there before he could return.

When he reappeared, his short-sleeve shirt flapping against his khaki pants, I ran to him, tugging his hand with mine still in its glove.

“Are they coming to fix it? Can you play catch?”

He grabbed his glove from the trunk and kissed my mother on the cheek.

“The mechanics will be here soon with a new tire, Minnie. No cause for alarm.”

She nodded, her shoulders softening. Ruth, my father, and I stepped over the guardrail and into the long grass. We stood in a triangle, and I backed up as if I was almost in the outfield, wanting to show how far I could throw. My mother watched us with a smile. Ruth went first, flinging the ball underhand to me. I caught it easily, and my father hit the inside of his glove, grinning. I wound up like Whitey Ford, stirring the warm air in big circles, my knuckles grazing the grass that came to my knees. The ball arced toward him, infallible as gravity itself, and then he was on the ground, the ball lolling near his fingertips.

My mother jumped over the guardrail, dropping to her knees next to where Ruth was already shaking him, while I scooped up the ball and cradled it in my glove.

“Daddy! Wake up!” Ruth cried.

“Arthur!” My mother scrambled back over the guardrail. “Wait here!”

She sprinted down the road, kicked off her heels, then continued to run.

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For some reason, Ruth turned him on his side.

“It’s going to be okay,” she murmured over and over, patting his shoulder.

“Mommy’s going for help.”

I sat with my feet splayed in the grass, the ball burning into my palm through the leather of my clenched glove. With my other hand I tore out pieces of grass in clumps and tried not to look at his chest to see if it rose and fell, even a little, or at his nostrils, eerily still.

Then the ambulance skidded behind our car, and my mother jumped out with two men dressed in white button-down shirts tucked into white pants. They kneeled next to him, as I clambered to my feet and backward. One checked his pulse, while the other felt his chest. The one with his hand on my father’s wrist lifted it and said they were sorry, ma’am, and my mother screamed at the sky, just one scream that burned to an end then started again, an ugly, inhuman sound. I covered my ears, afraid she would do that forever. Ruth went to her, patting her back. The man who’d said he was sorry looked at me.

“Um, sorry, kid, but do you know where we should bring the body? Maybe tell me where you’re from?”

I kept my hands over my ears because my mother was still screaming and also because I hoped he would go away. Wasn’t he supposed to know what to do? I made myself very, very still and wondered how long I could go without moving. A police officer pulled up and got out of his car, touching my mother’s shoulder. He spoke in a quiet voice to her until she stopped screaming and said something back to him. The officer spoke to the two men, and they took out a stretcher.

As they pulled his body onto it, I watched a circle of ants twitching in the dirt, fighting the urge to throw myself on top of him and beg them not to take him away.

Then they were gone before I could tell them my mother didn’t drive, so we had no way to get home. Ruth took my hand and put her other arm around my mother’s waist as she walked us to the guardrail. She motioned for us to sit, and dimly, I was surprised my mother sat on the rusted metal in her dress. Ruth told me my mother had asked the police officer to call Uncle Isaac and Aunt Edna, my father’s sister, to come for us. Then she put our baseball gloves and his back in the trunk, closing it with a soft thump that later became inseparable from the sound of dirt hitting his coffin.

Tears slipped down my mother’s face, one after another, becoming indivisible streams. The occasional car went by throwing dust and sometimes slowing down. If they slowed down too much or stopped, Ruth would wave them on. I stared behind me at the spot where I thought he’d fallen, but couldn’t find it. Where were we standing?

Where was the sun then, and where would it be now, an hour later? Had it been longer? Or just minutes?

My brain ached, and I stared in the direction he’d gone to use the pay phone. I stared so hard I could almost see him running back to us, saying he was so very sorry 66

to have scared us. He wasn’t sick, and people didn’t die unless they were sick or very old. I hung my head sideways to look at Ruth, wanting to see what she thought of this, but she was busy wiping my mother’s cheeks with the hankie from her purse. Ruth must’ve sensed me looking at her, because she looked back, her dry eyes filled with this strange pain. I couldn’t remember a look like that on her face, even last summer when she’d fallen off her bicycle and my father had sprayed the open cuts on her knee with Bactine. She touched my cheek and said she knew how much I loved him. I sprang up because she’d said loved, not love. In that moment, I hated Ruth.

I would go find that phone for myself and call somebody. I didn’t know who exactly, just the right person, the person who’d tell me the truth. I fished in my pocket for

I made myself very, very still and wondered how long I could go without moving.

a dime, but didn’t find anything except some donut crumbs and a baseball card of Yogi Berra, which I carried around for good luck because he was my father’s favorite player.

I smoothed the card against my palm, remembering driving all the way down to Yankee Stadium with my father, Uncle Isaac, and our only first cousin Lawrence this summer and seeing Yogi catch. I placed the card carefully back in my pocket as Aunt Edna and Uncle Isaac pulled up in their giant red Cadillac that my father would joke was a bit showy for his serious sister. As soon as they got out, Aunt Edna folded her arms around me and said she was very, very sorry. I opened my mouth against her chest to tell her how she didn’t need to be because it wasn’t real and all that came out was a sob until I was drooling snot and spit all over her. I felt lots of hands on my back, hers and my mother’s, maybe my uncle’s, I didn’t know. I just kept crying, and it didn’t make one bit of difference.

The mechanic pulled up then and climbed out of his truck, looking at us in confusion. Uncle Isaac spoke to him in a quiet, firm tone, then we got into the Cadillac, my mother between us in the back on the red leather seat. She held Ruth’s hand and mine tightly. I didn’t dare let go, though I didn’t like it. The adults spoke in low voices.

Uncle Isaac was saying something about life insurance policies and how my mother would be fine, just fine. Aunt Edna kept asking how could this happen, the man was 67

healthy as a horse, and my mother kept repeating how the officer assured her he didn’t suffer. She nodded along with this, as if it was good, but how could the officer know?

My mother switched to repeating a story of the day—how it was such a nice day, how we’d toured Fort Henry and walked along the St. Lawrence River. How he’d discovered the flat, then how the spare was also flat. How we ended up playing catch by the side of the highway. Saying these things again and again made her cheeks a garish rose, and I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t stop.

Ruth stared at her lap, her free palm pressing against her thigh. People in town always called Ruth a daddy’s girl.

“I’ll take care of them, my babies. Of course, I’ll take care of them.”

My mother had just murmured this to Aunt Edna, and I wished I’d been paying attention to what Aunt Edna had said before that. What did she mean she would take

I would sometimes crawl between the dresser and the wall, watching my father put on a tie before work.

care of us? Who else would, if not her? But what if she became like Stephen’s mother who’d smoked cigarettes and drank wine all day ever since his father ran off? Stephen always bragged he ate candy bars for breakfast, lunch, and supper, but the thought made me feel like vomiting.

When the car pulled into our driveway, none of us got out. Finally Aunt Edna said she would go inside to collect a few things, and we would stay at their house. * THE NEXT DAY, I woke up alone on the cot they always set up for me in Lawrence’s

attic bedroom, though it had been a long time since I’d stayed overnight. I dug into the cardboard box of marbles always by Lawrence’s bed harder and harder, liking the furious rumbling they made. We used to shoot them across Lawrence’s uneven wood floor until Aunt Edna told us we’d better get to bed, especially when I got to sleep over on a school night. It crossed my mind Ruth and I wouldn’t be going to school today, and I squeezed my fist around as many marbles as I could, angry at myself for my dumb fantasy.

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When I got downstairs, Ruth told me Uncle Isaac went with my mother to the synagogue to talk to the rabbi about delaying the funeral past twenty-four hours so Lawrence could get here from his college in Pennsylvania, and also my mother’s sisters, who had moved to Florida.

“They’ll have to get men to be shomers,” Ruth said knowingly.

“What’s that?”

Ruth didn’t act like a know-it-all, but she did seem to know everything, which mostly I liked.

“Guardians. For his body. It’s Jewish law. He has to be watched until he’s buried.”

“Could I do it?”

She shrugged, and I felt sort of relieved.

“I think you have to be a grownup and very religious.”

In the afternoon, they still weren’t back, and Aunt Edna walked us to Puffs for ice cream. The place was dim and empty, and the woman behind the counter frowned listlessly at the tubs. Did she really have anything to be so sad about? But what if she did? I hid behind Aunt Edna until she just picked chocolate for me, Lawrence’s favorite flavor.

After we’d stared at our melting ice cream for a long time without eating it, Aunt Edna said we had to go to our house because our mother wanted us to look for black clothes. We walked there on the side of the one-lane road, past the new supermarket, then past farmland until the streets became small neighborhoods clustered with houses. At ours, I stopped, looking up at it. Would it smell like him? Would his ghost be there somewhere? The thought made me want to sprint away, but I didn’t know why. His ghost would be nice like him.

I followed Ruth and Aunt Edna up the driveway and onto the concrete path, obeying his rule not to stamp up the lawn to the front door. Inside, the toes of his black leather work shoes pointed at us, and his black umbrella with its hooked handle leaned against the open door to his study. On his desk sat his ledger book, opened to show the small ink notations inside, his ticker tape marked up in pencil, and his cup holding black pens. His encyclopedias and bridge trophies lined one shelf, and on the other were pictures in matching silver frames—one of Ruth and me, then he and my mother on their wedding day, one of his father from World War I, and himself from World War II. I imagined closing the door quietly, and from now on pretending he was in there, but that would be impossible. He’d always left his door open.

Ruth went to her room, so I went to mine. I sat on the bed, knowing I didn’t have any suits or even black clothes. I waited to see if my room would make me feel any different. My eyes landed on my albums of baseball cards stacked on my dresser. I thought of my father stretched out next to me before bedtime, commenting on the players as I flipped through the pages. This did not make me smile or want to throw the albums against the wall until Ruth and Aunt Edna would have to come running. If 69

anything I felt blanker here than anywhere else, and since this space was the one most my own, I understood then what things would be like for me.

I got up and went to Ruth’s room where she faced her open closet, though she’d already laid out a black dress and black tights on the bed.

“I don’t have black clothes,” I blurted.

Ruth turned to me and nodded. “We’ll have to look through Daddy’s things.”

I got a sick feeling like when my father had taken us on a Tilt-A-Whirl. At the doorway to our parents’ bedroom, we stopped. Neither of us was in there often and certainly not alone. Ruth sometimes stood by my mother when she did her makeup or put on jewelry, asking for some eye shadow or clip-on earrings. I would sometimes crawl between the dresser and the wall, watching my father put on a tie before work.

He’d look both like my father and some stranger who frowned in the mirror while getting a knot straight, and just as I was afraid I’d misunderstood everything, he’d wink at the reflection of my face, my chin resting on balled fists.

Ruth steered me over to his closet where brown and blue suit jackets hung, and crisp shirts in pale colors. Pushed to one side, she found his only black suit jacket, which he wore to weddings and funerals. Ruth placed it around my shoulders, whispering that I should put my arms through the sleeves. I did, and she rolled them up, her eyes searching mine. I looked over her shoulder.

“Thanks,” I managed to say, shaking my arms to be sure the sleeves would stay put.

I hadn’t wanted to wear it, but now that it was on, I thought I’d never take it off.

“You can wear those dark blue pants and white shirt, remember, that you got for Yom Kippur last year? I hope they still fit. And this.” She slid one of my father’s black ties from his tie rack and looped it around my neck. I’d watched him all those times and still, I had no idea how to do it myself. Ruth and I sat helplessly on the edge of the bed.

I imagined if he was there, he would clap my shoulder, say how I was a growing boy and a growing boy needed his own suit. He’d bring me downtown to Empsall’s, two stores down from his. Like everywhere else, everyone knew him, and he would stride through the departments, checking in on this or that person’s husband or wife or child.

The front door to the house closed, and we left their room, peering over the stair railing. Uncle Isaac helped my mother inside. Ruth trotted to her, and my mother looked up at me.

“It’s too big,” she said hoarsely. “Come here, Joe.” I scooted down on my bottom, hoping she wouldn’t make me take it off. When I got to her, she only ran her palm down the length of the jacket sleeve, then took our hands, leading us to the couch with a purpose that seemed to drain out of her before she could speak.

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It was so quiet, the silent green screen of the television reflecting our hazy forms.

But then the phone jangled, and Aunt Edna was saying how it was all very sudden, yes she knew, then the doorbell rang, and Uncle Isaac waved several of our neighbors inside, carrying covered dishes. They cried and kneeled next to us, patting our arms.

The next few hours until dark passed like that, with the phone piercing the air like a wild animal, and people, even some I didn’t recognize, streaming in and out, until the dining room table was covered in bagels, lox, creamed herring, oranges, hardboiled eggs, and bottles of Scotch, the only liquor my father and Uncle Isaac drank.

Our neighbor Mrs. Rothstein brought me a bagel and cream cheese. She smiled sadly, saying I had to eat, and I stared at the pink lipstick on her teeth. I

His large arms swooped around me, and I clung to his wrists, wanting to keep him there.

forced down a couple bites, and it seemed as if the people talking and crying and even laughing along with the phone and the doorbell was a descending slab of noise preparing to crush us. But the earlier silence of the house had been merciless too.

What would we do now that silence and noise had become the same?

Ruth sat in my father’s armchair eating a bagel with butter by tearing off tiny pieces with her fingers. Above her head, a black square loomed. Someone had covered all our mirrors in black cloth. Even though I never looked in them much, I wanted to peek under the blackness now, to know if my face looked like it used to.

The front door opened again, and Lawrence stepped in, his eyes going straight to me. For the first time since it happened, I didn’t wish I was invisible. His large arms swooped around me, and I clung to his wrists, wanting to keep him there. The black moustache he’d started growing tickled my forehead, but other than that, he was unchanged, or at least, not crushed by all of this. Even though he was only kind of a grownup, this made him seem wiser than the other adults milling around eating bagels and saying ridiculous things about how my father had lived a great life.

Uncle Isaac handed him a Scotch, and they steered me out to the backyard. It looked like any other early fall night, which was an assault and a relief, the stars twinkling over the quiet browning grass. The swing my father used to push me on

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swayed from the rusted swing set. My father had said he’d remove it next summer, maybe turn the yard into a small baseball diamond.

Uncle Isaac lit a cigar and waved it, making orange sparks sprinkle through the air.

He puffed, then released a cloud of smoke, just like my father. I wanted to swim inside that smell.

He lowered the cigar, looking at the sky. “I’ll quit tomorrow.”

Lawrence shook his head. “You and Uncle Arthur. That old line.”

It wasn’t a line I’d heard, and I had that same feeling as when I’d watched my father put on his tie, except now, without him there to wink at me, the stranger version of him was just as possible as the one I’d thought I’d known perfectly, this other self who belonged to the world, to so many people besides me.

Lawrence eyed me fiercely. “We’ll take care of you and Ruth, Joe. Someone will be at every single one of your ball games, until you hit the Majors.”

The faintest smile tugged at the corners of my mouth.

Lawrence’s new black moustache added to the gravity of his gaze as he said, “So the spare was flat. If it wasn’t, he might have been driving when it happened. He could have saved all of you. It was his final act of kindness.”

I wanted to see it this way, but if there were final acts of kindness, why hadn’t his been to live?

Then Lawrence grinned, flicking my shoulder. “Hey, smell this.”

He held out his finger with a dab of Carmex on it. I leaned forward, and he smeared my nose with it. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for that again or that I was laughing.

Uncle Isaac laughed his hacking laugh. I thought if I could stand with them in the yard, cigar smoke caressing our skin, I just might make it. * I STILL HAD my father’s suit jacket on in the morning when my mother woke me,

saying it was time to go to the funeral. If I’d known what the rabbi was going to do with it, maybe I would’ve left it behind, or maybe I would’ve still taken it, the broken flap a place to tuck my fingers as we walked out of the rabbi’s office and into the already full sanctuary.

In the chairs in the front row, Ruth sat on one side of me and Lawrence on the other, nothing between us and the closed coffin. I clutched my siddur so it wouldn’t fall to the floor. I remembered my father telling me to kiss it if it fell, but I’d never let it, and I wouldn’t now.

The rabbi spoke about how he’d known my father since my father was a boy, a tremor breaking up his usual monotone. Next, Uncle Isaac got on the bima, and talked about the time he, my mother, Aunt Edna, and my father had gotten lost and run out of gas during a snowstorm. It was a story I knew from before I was born, where my 72

father came out the hero, but now the terror of the ice and snow and the dark night they huddled together in a freezing car was mixed up in my mind with the rabbi’s crumpled voice, and my mother’s shaking hands, and Aunt Edna’s twisting hankie until I felt gaps in my breath.

Then it was over, and Uncle Isaac asked if I wanted to be an honorary pallbearer along with him, Lawrence, and the other four men my mother had chosen. Lawrence motioned for me to join them, and I thought my father would be proud if I did, so I went to the coffin with the men, and we lifted it together to our sides. I wobbled trying to carry its weight, and then the men shifted, taking on my burden, so it was like holding air. We walked him through the center aisle of the sanctuary, the rows of somber faces blending, before turning to get through the back doors where a hearse waited in the parking lot. As the men began to slide it inside, I tugged backward, but it was no use. I fell to the gravel and stayed there, my heart soaring—maybe I could go with him. But then Lawrence and Uncle Isaac heaved me up. There wasn’t any reason to struggle. They wouldn’t have let me stay on the ground.

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S. YARBERRY

A Kind of Lightning The days pass—selected, and each morning comes— hot and slow. Another counterfeit fight to blow off steam. Mosquitoes are so unquenchable, this time of year.

A cockroach stuck on its back near the brown wood bookcase. We find so many ways to kill ourselves. When day breaks what will become of us?

The yellow finch. The squirrel digging in the garden.

Death, obviously. But what else?

After the glamour shatters.

The lipstick tube empties. Condoms all gone from the drawer. O a pile.

A heap. A body. How horrible.

I think it’s okay to be angry, I say. I am saying all the time now.

There was a small fire in the yard last night.

I put it out with the last of my beer.

Remember? You touched my hand.

It’s all I think about. The yellow finch like peripheral lightning.

It’s so easy to miss these things.

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MICHAEL DECHANE

Gladiolus for Ava The slow wither of this bled out gladiolus in our big vase on the table doesn’t make dying beautiful. But I have to say for five mornings now I have seen new colors bloom in its collapse.

Incarnadine streaks of ruined flowers hang like threads, suggesting sutures on the white wall behind them.

The drying tips all along its inflorescence have become brown as baby flesh and delicate.

The green leaves give.

The water turns.

Multiplying opacities.

I sip coffee and remember a perfect word my young niece once made in delight— it’s glorgeous.

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KATHRYN PETRUCELLI

C: The Language of Grief When the Proto-Sinaitic people borrowed its initial shape from the Egyptians, the letter C represented a hard /g/ sound; when it reached the Etruscans, they could not pronounce /g/ and assigned it a /k/ sound. Etruscan, unlike any other language, remains a mystery to historians.

I paced the jeweled asphalt in the June sun, the hospital a burning box beside me, my mother one-hour dead.

Let me go, she’d said, but goodbye locked in my throat, unable to form. Come back, I’d implored instead.

Later, I talked memories—

trailing mom through boggy trails while she snapped pictures of tiger lilies, and regret—

I should have been here sooner, more, while my sister turned away, my words gibberish to her.

Long, pink nails clicking against her phone, she waited one beat, two, then waved a hand in the air, feeling through, dialed her phone to order a cold cut tray for the nurses, keep up appearances.

Four seasons of absence gone by, my sister presents a pot of clary sage from what was my mother’s garden. She has watered it, kept it in the south window.

It wasn’t easy, she wants me to know.

She hands me the pot of clary because she fails at pronouncing gone, says, Can’t stand here all day because Good to see you escapes her; Careful with that! because grace is out of reach.

The clary flowers leap in euphoric arcs, green stem to indigo corolla.

I try to sift meaning from the herbs, imagine what sense my mother would assign them, but nothing comes, Language is only for the lucky—just as it was in the beginning— a privileged few scribes for the pharaohs.

When preparing their dead for the next life, the Egyptians threw out the brain, not knowing what it could be for, preserved only the heart.

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JORDAN CHARLTON

Epistle for My Unborn Child I watched a friend FaceTime her goddaughter

while we drank beers at the kitchen table after dinner.

They spoke like old friends. I introduced myself to the child,

told her my name and she told me hers, returning a wide, almost toothless grin. I do not remember

her name at all, as I don’t remember yours, either.

I am writing to you now because I thought of you

then as I silently cried over the shoulder of my friend, my face out of the view of the screen.

She didn’t notice at all, my friend, because when she spoke to that little girl it seemed

like only they existed, like there was no space outside of the one they shared, although they were states away.

I was standing in that moment, and unsure what to do with myself, so I gathered up the empty beer bottles,

their hollow necks clinking between my fingers, hoping not to set a bad example. I did this with a care

I do not know by name. A care I will call parental, although I and her goddaughter are not related. I will call the care maternal

because that is the only kind of love I have known.

This is the truth, Unborn Child of mine,

I have never known a father’s love and I must share this story with you soon enough. I fear

I am incapable of the something I think I need to love you, incapable of translating my mother’s love into a language

my tongue won’t know until it’s ready to speak.

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contributors J E S S I C A B A R K S D A L E ’s fifteenth novel, The Play’s the Thing, and second poetry collection, Grim Honey, are both forthcoming in spring 2021. Recently retired, she taught at Diablo Valley College for thirty-two years and continues to teach novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. Recently, she spends her free time walking her dogs and watching every show on Netflix.

J O R D A N C H A R L T O N is a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska. He works with the Nebraska Writers Collective, working with both high school youth poets and incarcerated writers through the programs Louder Than a Bomb: Great Plains and Writers’ Block.

J A N I N E C E R T O is an American poet and the author of three books, two full-length poetry collections: Elixir, winner of both the 2020 New American Poetry Prize selected by Corey Van Landingham and the 2020 Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize selected by Maria Terrone (forthcoming in 2021, copublished by New American Press and Bordighera Press) and In the Corner of the Living, first runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award (Main Street Rag, 2017), as well as a book of scholarship.

M I C H A E L D E C H A N E received his MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University in 2018.

His poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Ekstasis, Apalachee Review, and elsewhere. His poem “Jake’s Parade” was selected as a finalist in Atlanta Review’s 2020 International Poetry Contest. He is currently working on his first full-length poetry collection, featuring work that explores the landscape and many oddities of his home state. A native of Odessa, Florida, he currently resides in the Netherlands. Read more about his recent

publications and creative collaborations at www.michaeldechane.com/poetry.

E R I K A D I E T T E S is a Colombian visual artist and social communicator. She has a MA in anthropology from University of the Andes.

Diettes has exhibited internationally, and was a finalist for the Visionary Awards in 2015 and has won the Tim Hetherington Trust and the World Press Photo Foundation Fellowship scholarship (2017–2018). In 2019, Diettes was part of the group of women artists, leaders, and intellectuals to commemorate and celebrate the achievements and struggles of women around the world for International Women’s Day. www.erikadiettes.com B O N N I E J I L L E M A N U E L ’s poems may be found in American Poetry Review, SWWIM, Indolent Books: Poems In The Afterglow, MidAmerican Review, and elsewhere. She recently earned an MFA at The City College of New York where she received the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing, and the Stark Poetry Prize in Memory of Raymond Patterson. Born in Detroit, she now lives in New York.

C A R R I E E S P O S I T O ’s short stories have been published in the Georgia Review, Everyday Fiction, Little Rose Magazine, and Mused. She’s been a finalist for the Curt Johnson Prose Awards and received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train. She’s currently shopping a novel, which she began writing in a notebook on the subway ride to and from her most recent job as an assistant principal of a middle school in Brooklyn. Her secret favorite thing is dancing and singing while cleaning the kitchen with her three daughters, using the broom as a microphone.

K A T E G A S K I N is the author of Forever War, winner of the 2018 Pamet River Prize (YesYes Books). Her poems have appeared in journals

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such as Guernica, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Blackbird, and The Rumpus, and her work has been anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. She is a recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She edits poetry for The Adroit Journal.

Currently, she is a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

E L P I D A H A D Z I - V A S I L E V A received her MA from the Royal College of Art and her BA from the Glasgow School of Art. Her commissions are developed for urban and rural sites, in interior and exterior spaces in the UK and abroad.

Commissions include the Vatican for the FiftySixth International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, and representing Macedonia at the Fifty-Fifth Venice Biennale. She has received numerous awards and her work can be found in public collections around the world. www.elpihv.co.uk B I L L M A R S H is a college professor and

weekend beekeeper based in Chicago. His essays have appeared recently in Bayou Magazine, Briar Cliff Review, Copper Nickel, Lunch Ticket, and Mud Season Review. He’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist in 2019 for the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction.

A M Y P A R R I S H is an artist and writer based in West Bengal, India. Often pairing words with images in hand-crafted processes, her artwork has been recognized in selections such as the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, and internationally published and exhibited in outlets such as the Huntington Museum of Art, NPR, and the Angkor Photo Festival. To learn more, visit www.amyparrish.com.

K A T H R Y N P E T R U C C E L L I , a Best of the Net nominee, holds an MA in teaching English language learners. Her professional life has included translating “Hotel California” for Hungarian high schoolers and anthologizing poetry by rival gang members. She is extremely

partial to sarcasm and avocados and reads everything out loud. Her work has appeared in places like New Ohio Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things.

S C O T T P O M F R E T is author of Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir; Hot Sauce: A Novel; The Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails, and dozens of short stories published in, among other venues, Ecotone, Post Road, New Orleans Review, Fiction International, and Fourteen Hills. Scott writes from his tiny Boston apartment and even tinier Provincetown beach shack, which he shares with his partner of twenty years. He is currently finalizing a KnowNothing novel set in antebellum New Orleans and, separately, a retelling of the “Irish Iliad,” the epic tale of The Cattle Raid of Cooley and its hero, Cuchulainn. Scott can be reached on Twitter (@Bostonseanachie).

L A U R A H . S C H W A R T Z is a psychotherapist, writer, filmmaker, and facilitator. She lives with her family in Northern California.

C R Y S T A L S T O N E is the author of four collections of poetry, Knock-Off Monarch (Dawn Valley 2018), All the Places I Wish I Died (CLASH 2021), Gym Bras (Really Serious Literature 2021), and Civic Duty (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press 2022). Her work has appeared in many international journals including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Writers Resist, Southword Journal Online, and many others. She received her MFA from Iowa State University in 2020 and gave a TEDx talk entitled “The Transformative Power of Poetry” in 2018. In her free time, she likes to cook and roller skate. Find more of her poems at her website www.crystalbstone.com.

S . Y A R B E R R Y is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in Tin House, Indiana Review, pulpmouth, The Offing, jubilat, Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, miscellaneous zines, among others. Their other writings can be found in Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. They currently serve as the poetry editor of The Spectacle.

S. has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in English literature at Northwestern

University.

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An Apprenticeship with Sorrow LAURA H. SCHWARTZ

When COVID-19 joined the long list of climacterics we’d been enduring—hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, floods, and unprecedented housing and employment shortages—I felt an urgency to understand the overwhelming grief, loss, and uncertainty I was experiencing. The first person I called was my mentor and colleague, Francis Weller, MA, the author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief as well as The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation (with Rashani Réa) and In the Absence of the Ordinary: Essays in a Time of Uncertainty. In his work, Francis considers the kinds of environmental, political, and cultural events we are wrestling with right now through the lens of the ancient wisdoms which he has studied over the decades of his career. We met in May 2020 on Zoom.

LS: Francis, I know that you, yourself, have experienced tremendous upheaval over the past two or three years—the fires in Northern California, year after year, and now the COVID crisis. How do you think about this new crisis, the pandemic, within the context of these previous disasters?

FW: The COVID pandemic is an example of what I call a rough initiation; an “uncontained encounter with death.” Like other traumatic events, COVID has thrown us into a time of radical uncertainty. Unlike the deliberately ordained processes of traditional initiations, which I call a “contained encounter with death,” we’re still asked to encounter the same fierce edge of life and death, but without the elements that hold the initiate within a cultural lineage. Traditional initiations have always been guided by elders, following established rituals, rooted in community, with a deep grounding in both the natural world and in the sacred. The process breaks the initiate’s identity open to the widest possible aperture of affiliation; I become identified with that wider surround, a watershed, the cosmos. But trauma shatters this sense of identity, down to a singularity. I am all alone in the cosmos, I feel isolated.

This is the rough initiation.

So what we have to do—and I think that’s part of the deep work of this time—is to ask ourselves, can we reimagine this time of breakdown into our singularities as nesting into something soulful, where we can hopefully emerge with some expanded sense of an identity that links us? Our identities, which have been highly conditioned around individualism, are being shaken. It’s not my COVID crisis. It’s not my personal wounds that I’m sitting with and digesting: it’s ours. So the potential to shift into another, more inclusive sense of self is before us. But we have to utilize it and not just get through this. We don’t want to just endure it.

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LS: It seems so important to utilize this experience. Removed from our familiar lives, we are all involved in this rough initiation—regardless of geography, age, race, religion, socioeconomics. How do we not just endure this?

FW: I like talking about moving from endurance to depth: how do we not just grit our teeth and hope to not get killed, but instead, how do we really enter this place as mythic? The ground itself becomes mythic, sacred ground, asking the utmost from each of us, to think like a village, basically. I put my mask on, not so much for my own health, but for the health of the village. I’m being taught to think in a more inclusive mindset right now.

LS: I’d like to consider for a moment what that looks like. We’re seeing people in hospitals; some on ventilators, at the end stage of their lives in this battle with COVID, completely isolated; they actually die alone, without family and loved ones by their side. I wonder what you think of this?

FW: This speaks to the fact that as a culture, we have done nothing to associate our death with being inevitably attached to community. We have this fantasy of immortality, that we’re immune from ravages and tragedies, and from dying alone.

And we have ill-prepared our people for the inevitables that are coming. If we were a mature culture facing this, we would recognize this moment as an opportunity for profound intimacy with our own souls.

LS: That’s interesting—you say if we were a mature culture . . .

FW: Yes. I consider mature cultures to be those that have somehow navigated the whitewater of their own suicidal tendencies and emerged with the sustaining values of gratitude, reciprocity, mutuality, and restraint—one of our least-developed spiritual values. A mature culture recognizes their embeddedness in place; their relationship to the land, to the water, to the animals, to everything that surrounds them. An immature culture is very adolescent in its practices: it’s all about me; what can I get for myself? If we were a mature culture, we’d have reciprocity—around death, dying, grief—putting something back into the body of the Earth. That’s a lot of what ritual is about; restoration, replenishment.

LS: And so the hospitalized COVID patient—alone and dying—faces what you call an opportunity for a deeper intimacy with their own soul. How do we, as a culture, develop that capacity, to provide the opportunity for something like that to happen?

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FW: Imagine dying alone in the hospital; you’re consumed with fear and dread. You become fear and dread. Whereas, standing in the mature process, we would say, I’m in the presence of fear and dread. How do I hold that? How do I become a compassionate vessel for the experiences of fear and dread? And I’m not talking lightly here, this is fierce, fierce practice. I can barely imagine myself being in that bed in a hospital right now, and having no one touch me, no one come near me other than behind masks and gloves. And I’m being asked to basically exit this world, to disappear on my own accord. That’s an intense spiritual moment. And unfortunately, for most of us, it won’t be a spiritual moment; it will be a moment of panic and terror.

LS: What does it require in oneself to be able to form a relationship with that kind of event?

FW: Well, you first have to have some invitation to recognize that there is something to be in relationship with. Our psychology in Western culture doesn’t teach us this.

It basically says, You are what you’re experiencing. Carl Jung said we can’t heal what we can’t separate from. That’s the same thing alchemy teaches: you have to have separation. That’s an essential psychological skill, to be able separate from what I’m experiencing.

LS: And that would be the invitation, then—something emotionally overcomes you— maybe shocking, distressing, upsetting?

FW: Yes. And the moment you can turn and face it, you’re separate from it. Not distanced, but separate, distinct from what you are witnessing. That allows for a movement of kindness or caring or compassion, and a move toward the experience of suffering. Compassion teaches us how to suffer with. Not just to suffer, but to suffer with, even for ourselves. How do I suffer with my own self? How do I be with my own suffering—that is an important part of the maturation I’ve been speaking about.

LS: Is there something about the COVID-19 pandemic that gives us some hint of direction for this? Clearly, an invitation has been issued. But how do we pick it up and begin to suffer with? I think that’s one of the elements that I have been searching for, for many years: how do we suffer along with one another? It’s certainly what your work has been about. But it’s almost ironic that as we are asked to distance ourselves from others, what you’re calling for is the need to be able to suffer with.

FW: Frequently, when we get sick or we feel weakened, we feel shame; I did something wrong, or, I’m not good enough; or, I’m being punished. COVID has made suffering more ubiquitous. And maybe in that sense of communality, am I going to judge other 82

people for getting sick? No. I have a lot of compassion for all the people who are sick with this, who have died from this. I might be one of them at some point. I’m not taking it personally, or digesting it through my own personal psychology. Psyche is much larger than me—this is clearly a psychic phenomenon; it’s affecting the psyches of seven billion people. This has really never happened before. The 1918 pandemic was pretty universal, but this one is affecting the vast majority of human beings on the planet; there’s no way I can personalize this. And if I don’t personalize it, maybe I can begin to move into a different way of being in relationship to it.

LS: So in this rough initiation, we’re leaving familiar ground, and we’re in a land that’s completely uncertain . . .

FW: Yes. LS: But I think we are envisioning that once this is over, we’re going to return, once again, to familiar ground. A lot of us are saying, I can’t wait to go to my favorite restaurant and have my favorite meal or I can’t wait to go to the beaches or to the parks or sit in the backyard with my friends. But for some of us, there’s some question about what will be left when this is over. I think probably, much like the wildfires that you experienced over the past three years, there may not be familiar ground to return to. So, what does it mean to go into this meeting with death, and know that we can’t ever return to familiar ground?

FW: When the initiation is held by community, there are three things that happen.

First there is a severance from the old world. Secondly there is a radical alteration in your sense of identity—I am no longer who I was. And finally, there is a profound realization that I can never return to the world that was. You’re not supposed to return to the world that was, after initiation; you’re supposed to enter a new world.

This is where Western psychology and Western medicine are, how should I say it, not very attuned to the needs of soul. They talk about let’s get you back to where you were before the crisis began. That would be to completely waste the crisis. I don’t want to waste this pandemic. I don’t want to think, Well, how do we muscle our way back to where we were? Where we were was causing profound damage to the environment, to our watersheds, to our communities, to our children. It benefited a few and it caused suffering for the vast majority of people. Should we go back to that? God no!

LS: So what makes it so difficult for us to accept, or even embrace the experiences we’re having during the COVID pandemic? I know that, for myself, after the first month of shelter-in-place, when almost all traffic had come to a halt, I was stunned by the clear air, the intense birdsong, and the wild animal sightings reported all across 83

the globe. Many things were really different, in very significant, wonderful ways. But once the restrictions were lifted, these all began to reverse themselves again.

FW: The fantasy of returning to what was results from our addiction to productivity, efficiency, income, wealth, power. I’m hoping that we’re beginning to see through those; to see how thin their veneer is. When productivity is taken away, what am I left with? When power structures are disappearing, what am I left with? Hopefully, again, what we fall back into is a confrontation with our own being, with our own soul.

There has to be a return, but a different kind of return. We want to return, after an initiatory event, into a community that says, I see that you’ve come back different. And I see that you’ve come bearing something for us. If we just simply want to get back to where we were, we’ve probably gathered nothing. But if we can go through the whole ordeal, and have this sense of severance occur, have our sense of identity broken open, and realize that we’re not returning to the world that we once inhabited, but instead, that we’re returning to a new world, then we come back bringing real medicine to the community. That’s the role of initiation: initiation was never meant for me, individually. It was never about personal growth. The purpose of the initiation was to ripen me and prepare me to become of service to the greater body of life. Initiation was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the whole, not on my behalf.

Hopefully, we’re seeing some signs of that in this crisis; people who are shopping for the elderly, people singing to one another, musicians out on the streets playing music. Those are all acts of service.

LS: How do we bring about this shift in thinking, moving away from the separate individual, toward the integrated whole of the community?

FW: It really helps to think mythically; to see it for what it is. We’re not the first ones to suffer from circumstances beyond our control. If I can think mythically, I can see it as an initiatory event. But to think of it psychologically puts it back into me, personally, my personal experience. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think we need a much bigger vessel right now, to imagine what’s happening to us. For me, initiation is the best way to envision it, and that requires mythological thinking.

LS: It also seems that if we look at it mythically, it shifts perspective from the individual and locates us in a much longer lineage; so that when we’ve relinquished the individual ground, we can lift upward, and from above, see our place in context, something like a bird’s-eye view.

FW: Yes, that’s the value of mythological thinking. When we get ill, or depressed, or feel worthless—whatever the wound happens to be in Western psychological 84

thinking—we feel damaged, defective, apart from the community. So we work to fix ourselves, to make ourselves good enough to be welcomed. That’s a very poor premise: if I’m trying to prove to you that I’m good enough to belong, huge parts of me will never show up. Mythological thinking, on the other hand, says, by necessity, You have this, this was given to you so you could actually join with other human beings, rather than feel exceptional or different. This actually brings you into the body of the community. Because all of us know suffering.

I think we can get anxious around the idea of the collective, as if we’re going to lose our individuality. But I think my individuality is heightened by being embedded in the collective. One of my primary teachers, James Hillman, said, “The issues are rarely about resolution, they’re about spaciousness.” Right now, we’re being asked to get our arms around hundreds of thousands of people dying, millions and millions of people being sick or out of work. How do you do that? Well, you have to become quite immense. You cannot stay contracted and small and have some kind of resonance with what’s going on in the world. It can be easy to get our arms around hope and trust and love and support: it can be harder to get our arms around fear, grief, panic, dread, death. But that’s exactly how big you have to be right now. You have to be able to encompass everything.

LS: And how do we do that now?

FW: We could imagine this time of social distancing as almost a monastic time. It can be used as a hermitage, as a time to cultivate that level of intimacy with our own soul.

Rainer Maria Rilke had a phrase in one of his poems where he said “I am too alone in the world, but not alone enough to make every moment holy.” You can hear that pivot he makes in there. We all know about feeling lonely. But then he says “but not alone enough.” In other words, he hasn’t turned it into sanctuary yet. But the moment he turns it into sanctuary, every minute becomes holy.

Imagine entering these days of social distancing, this hermitage, as if you’re moving through something personified, something that had quality to it, that you could be in relationship with. There are prayers, chants, readings, reflections that you can do; again, not just for endurance, but for depth. These practices drop you into an experience, an encounter with soul, so that we actually use the time creatively, meaningfully, and not just with distraction, not just with alcohol, not just with TV, but actually seeing these times as potentially holding something of beauty, of depth.

This is part of our maturation, but not what we’re prepared for. Too often, what we’re actually encountering is our emptiness. That’s the panic that comes up when we’re asked to socially distance. We haven’t cultivated a rich interior world or rich relationship to soul, so we enter into a state of emptiness. And that’s terrifying. We don’t know how to sit with our legs dangling over the edge of that precipice. But that’s 85

what we have to do. That’s our spiritual work, too; to become acquainted with this emptiness.

LS: Would you say that that’s maybe the essential spiritual crisis of COVID, then; that we are not ready to have that intimate engagement with our depths, where we feel our emptiness?

FW: Yes, I think so . . .

LS: And that the panic drives us to distract ourselves, to become active, to drive to get back out, back to our old lives?

FW: Yes. Because we don’t know how to tolerate that void and how to begin a conversation with it. And, in a sense, also how not to read it as personal failing—we can read this emptiness as somehow my lack. But what it is, actually, is a failure of culture to offer nourishment to that deeper part of us, to the soul, and so we end up chasing what I call secondary satisfactions: wealth, power, status. And if you know about addiction, you know you can never get enough of what you don’t need; you want more and more and more. We can see it on the national level right now: these very wealthy people cannot get enough.

Part of our deep spiritual work right now is to navigate that emptiness, to come into some fruitful relationship with that. In the Eastern traditions, that emptiness is considered fertile ground—in it, there may be something that we can touch into, that we can cultivate, that we can write a poem from, that we could sing a song from, that we can dance to, that we can share in ritual. We need to respond to it, not just try to fill it up with secondary satisfactions. What we need are the primary satisfactions, which are touch, and friendship, and warmth, and starlit nights, and shared meals—a lot of these we’re not getting right now.

LS: That’s so true . . .

FW: But those primary satisfactions are still there. We’re having one right now. Just this conversation, we’re touching into soul, we’re touching into the warmth of being human. That satisfies us on some deep level.

LS: Francis, what can be offered to those who are panicked at facing that emptiness which they’ve avoided for so long?

FW: First, I invite them to set a timer for one minute. Can they sit and do nothing?

For a minute. And maybe then they can stretch that out to two minutes the next day?

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And secondly, can they ask themselves, Can I build my tolerance for sitting in the unknown, in the unformed spaces of my being? Can I begin to listen, to hear what absence is there, and not so much listen for my flaws, my failings, but to really listen for what is absent? In that absence, we might hear that we missed the sound of owls; the sound of crickets; the laughter of children; we are missing singing together; we are missing the commons: what is really at the heart of this emptiness is an absence of the other.

LS: In this kind of estrangement from the commons, how do we enter the initiatory process?

FW: Initiation is not optional. There are four ways that psyche brings us to the possibility of change: The first one is through encounters with what I call The Predator, that which threatens our very legitimacy. The second one is through our wounds, through our suffering, through the traumas in our life. The third one is through the descent into the darkness. And the last one is love. Love, in Rilke’s language, is “the great inducement to ripen.” It demands of us our utmost.

But initiation is also not guaranteed. The invitation toward initiation does not mean it will be completed. For some, it will be. And those are the ones who, through their devotion to the process, take up the apprenticeship that comes with that initiation, which is an apprenticeship of sorrow, basically. In the work of soul, this apprenticeship with sorrow, this fidelity to that threshold you crossed in initiation, is the shaping of an elder.

LS: Can you say more about the role of the elder in our culture, particularly at this moment in time?

FW: The elder is shaped in the heat of staying present to the sorrows of the world— and also to the beauty, the humor, the tragedies of the world. An elder becomes immense. We are a culture that right now loves simple answers. But we don’t have the tolerance for living into the uncertainty, the ambiguity, the complexity, the multiplicity. That’s what an elder can bring, particularly when working with young people. They’re are not coming in with the answers. They’re coming in with I can sit with that not knowing.

LS: Perhaps the elder, then, provides the container to hold the hot, molten substance of this culture as we try to get our arms around what is happening to us? What do we need to know, so that we can come through this initiatory time more successfully?

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FW: We might need to know how to lean more on the eternals, rather than on the familiar. To be able to see that, I think, is part of what an elder can bring: not so much grasping for answers or solutions, but learning to live in that uncertainty. I think that’s part of what COVID is doing right now—tearing the mask off of our fantasies of predictability. All the plans we had—from baseball games to dinner invitations to walking up the street and seeing somebody and giving them a hug—all those familiar things are gone now.

Superficial response limits our capacity for what we can hold. But when we sit and allow grief to carve out riverbeds in our soul, really feel that deepening—we are made larger and more encompassing by that long apprenticeship with sorrow. We’re being asked to really learn to sit with sorrow, if we are willing to even tolerate that guest in the house. Every trauma, every crisis like this, carries tremendous grief with it. Are we willing to sit with that and let it deepen us and, in a sense, create a deeper bottom in us, so we can hold more?

COVID exposes that grief is all around us, all the time. In our very daylit world, we can almost pretend that grief isn’t always there. But it is. And I think also what COVID is doing is preparing the ground for the coming waves of dislocation and suffering that will come with climate crisis and economic collapse and cultural decay. This might be just the warm-up band. If we can use this, it might help to prepare us for harder waves that are going to be coming ashore.

LS: What I’ve learned from you, Francis, is that my grief is most tolerable when held within community. But, as you’ve said here, many of us are unfamiliar with grief and the process of grieving. What language do we use in a culture that is disengaged and fragmented and immature in its ability to tolerate this kind of suffering and sorrow?

FW: There are individual rituals you, yourself, can do around grief, because, in a sense, you’re never alone. You can go out and sit on the grass and cry with the Earth.

You can hold a stone and speak your stories into that stone, or you can tell your stories to a tree. This idea of being alone is really Western fiction. We’re rarely alone.

We’re constantly in conversation. We just think privately. And that’s also part of why it’s so hard to grieve: I make it private—that’s my grief; I have to grieve alone.

Part of the power of gathering in community, even online, is to begin to remember, to notice, I’m just part of the communal cup of grief. It’s not just mine; I hear your story, I can relate to it, and you can relate to my grief. It might not be the same, but you can understand that I am sad, brokenhearted about it. You can relate to that. And in that way, we are no longer alone.

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AMY PARRISH. Check the Mail for Her Letter, 2020.

Photocopy with gouache and wax pencil. 7 inches x 5 inches.