Sheila Rittenberg

Cold Call

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Karin Hedetniemi

A Plea to the Gods of Lost Causes

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

            I regret the extreme and irreversible tardiness of my request.

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

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

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

            The journal is of indescribable sentimental value and irreplaceable.

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

            C'était écrit en anglais.

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

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

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

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

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

            There was no time to get his impressions in order.

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

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

            Understand that matter can never be destroyed, only transformed.

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

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

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

---

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

Mary Catherine La Mar

That Night in the Ghost Town of Ashcroft

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

---

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

Judith Lysaker

What’s True

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Roger Chapman

Dumb Insolence

If I had to choose the most malevolent domestic appliance, I would unhesitatingly nominate the dishwasher. I say this without rancour, for I have nothing against machines in principle. I’m no Luddite, but I’ve long known that it’s a mistake to expect machines to behave predictably. Instead they are much more like humans, indulging their whims and predilections unpredictably and without any apparent reason. 

The dishwasher’s propensity for spite isn’t so surprising—washing up is a tedious business at the best of times, and there’s no obvious reason why a machine should enjoy it any more a human does. Some may say that it is merely venting its spleen. But I think that the dishwasher is more calculating than that: like most of us it cherishes the comfort of a warm, secure home, and for that reason it hardly ever breaks down completely (which would presumably result in its being consigned to the nearest rubbish dump). No, it creates just enough mischief to require the attention which will restore it to full working order, leaving it free to harass me again when it’s thought of another way to do so.

As if having to tolerate its behaviour weren’t enough, there’s another problem—I have no idea what to do when the dishwasher (or any other gadget, for that matter) goes wrong. It’s then that my palms are at their clammiest and my forehead sweatiest. (It’s true there’s a section at the back of the instruction manual headed ‘Troubleshooting’—a title which the manufacturer uses because it makes fixing the problem seem manly and efficient, but to me it’s completely useless. When I come to read the printed advice, it contains only the most anodyne suggestions, such as Ensure that the device is plugged into a power outlet and Switch the power on—steps that even I can think of unaided. And there’s never anything about the precise problem that is troubling me. It’s as if the manufacturer was unable to conceive the possibility that the appliance might go wrong in that particular way, and thus saw no need to explain what to do.)

I’m convinced that my incompatibility with matters technical is genetic. My father was the same. One day his car glided to a stop and refused to go any further, he spent some time under the hood peering helplessly at the motor before a passing friend pointed out that he’d run out of gas. But he didn’t have to reckon with the dishwasher, for I was the first member of my family to own one.

Our first dishwasher was already elderly when Molly and I moved into the house where it was installed. It opened at the top, and you had to reach down inside its circular maw to stack and remove dishes. At first we saw it as the chance to put years of kitchen-sinkery behind us and begin a more leisured after-dinner life (though it was slightly disappointing that the machine had no setting for emptying itself and putting the clean dishes away).

This mild euphoria lasted until the first time we switched it on. It clanked and shuddered like an accelerating tank. Maybe it was merely the noise of its increasingly decrepit motor and the water churning round inside; but it wasn’t easy to quell the fear that it was really the dishes rotating at high speed, and that at the end of the operation the contents of the machine would be nothing more than a heap of fragmented shards and mangled spoons. As the months passed the clatter increased until finally, with a defiant rumble, the dishwasher expired. 

By then, of course, Molly and I no longer cared to wash up manually and so we had to buy a replacement. I naively assumed that the suppliers would, while installing it, remove its predecessor. But I was much mistaken. Molly, after consulting the salesman, reported that I would have to disconnect it myself before the technicians arrived. 

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

“The man in the shop says it’s no problem. He says anyone can do it. Nothing to it. Easy-peasy,” she added reassuringly. ‘”The new one won’t be coming till Monday, so there’s plenty of time.”

“Did he explain how to do it?” I tried to sound dubious, as if it was far too difficult for me to attempt.

She smiled. “He said you just pull off the front cover. There’s a tap thing you have to turn off, then you take out the wurgle, unscrew the blodger and disconnect the spangling throcket.  At least, I think that’s what he said.”

I felt apprehensive and confused. “What’s this spongling-whatever-it-is?”

She shrugged. “He said you’d know it when you see it.”

I kept postponing the confrontation, but before long it was Sunday and there was no longer any escape.

I genuflected before the machine. Perhaps it would have been wiser to use both knees and pray while I was about it, but that never occurred to me. I intended my approach to be strictly practical, not spiritual. 

Removing the front was easier than I’d expected, and my confidence edged upwards a fraction. There was just one tap so I turned it off. To my relief, the wodger and the burgle were obvious, leaving me only the strangling placket—obvious, as the salesman had promised—to negotiate. I hesitantly began loosening the nut that connected it to a pipe which no-one had mentioned. Nothing happened. I did a little more unscrewing. Again nothing happened. Perhaps all would be well.

But my comeuppance was at hand. There was a hissing gurgle as a fine spray began to leak from the exposed connection. The spray became a jet. I tried to reverse the surgery I’d just performed, but to no avail. Within a minute or so half an inch of warm water was lapping round my shoes. Time to call for help. 

By the time Ollie the plumber arrived a tepid lake had formed at one end of the kitchen—which was, incidentally, how I discovered that the floor wasn’t level. He was remarkably gracious, considering that I had interrupted his lunch. I explained what I’d been trying to do, but he merely gave me a pitying look.

Ignoring the dishwasher, he said, “Did you turn off the tap on the hot water cylinder?”

“Never thought of that.”

Once the cascade had ceased, Ollie said, “You shouldn’t have tried this on your own, you know.”

As if I needed telling. I’m not sure if my greater folly was believing I could do the job or putting the belief into action. Or maybe having a dishwasher at all. Whatever, I was resolved not to mess with dishwashers again.

~

In our next house the dishwasher developed a leak all by itself, but was subtle enough to conceal it until our downstairs neighbour asked politely if we knew any reason why water was coming through her ceiling. After that we lived in a rented apartment for a couple of years, during which the dishwasher remained passive and uncomplaining—appreciating, no doubt, that it would be the landlord, not me, who would be paying for any repairs. The only leaks came through the ceiling and the walls when it rained.

The machine in our present home has done its best to make up for this. At first its innate animosity was slow to emerge, and it was more or less compliant, if a little sullen. Then it tired of having to dry the dishes fully and developed a habit of leaving just enough residual moisture to wet the floor thoroughly when it was emptied. After enjoying this for a time it got bored and tried creating a more comprehensive flood. There was no advance warning, just a waterfall. 

Kevin the technician found a hole in one of the hoses, probably (he said) caused by a hungry rat dining at home. If this was his way of exonerating the dishwasher from blame, I wasn’t convinced. I think the dishwasher and the rat were in it together.

It was at this point that I began to realise what I was up against. The machine had a personality, and a vicious one at that. On the know-your-enemy principle I decided to give it a name—then I would have a better idea what to expect. The one which seemed best suited to its brand of crazed malice was ‘Caligula.’

Caligula sulked under the kitchen bench, squirgling occasionally but otherwise exuding no more than dumb insolence. But after a while he decided to get trickier. One morning we found that he had disgorged a small trickle of water onto the floor. Not a flood this time—just enough to be annoying. After the trickle had reappeared several days in a row, we summoned help. Kevin had by now left town, so I called Wally.

I almost fell into the trap of introducing the protagonists to each other—"Caligula, I’d like you to meet Wally”—but I was unsure which of us would seem the crazier. Wally said it was a simple problem: Caligula’s door wasn’t shutting fully and so wasn’t watertight. He fixed the door but, as we found a few hours later, not the leak. He was back the next day and after a few minutes announced that there was a minor problem with accumulated detergent scaling, which he had now removed. And nothing more did leak out until just after the front door had closed behind him. It was obvious that Caligula was making fun of both him and me, but at least I had an excuse. After all, Wally was supposed to be the expert.

I fired Wally and engaged another technician. I was relieved that Steve seemed far more knowledgeable, particularly when he explained that the scaling had nothing to do with the leak, but that on the other hand the looseness of the detergent dispenser was almost certainly the seat of the problem. Having attended to this, he pronounced the machine leak-free, which it proved to be for about an hour—the time which elapsed before I decided to test it for myself. Back he came next day: this time I thought it best to stand over him while he worked. He pulled Caligula out from under the kitchen bench and set him going. That was when I noticed a thin stream of water spraying from what looked like a puncture in a hose at the back, and forming a puddle on the floor.

“Could this have anything to do with it?” I asked timidly, not wanting to seem foolish once again. But when I saw Caligula wince I knew I was onto something.

“Well spotted. I should have picked that up before.” Steve was gracious enough to look embarrassed. “I’ll soon fix that.” And he did.

I suspect that Caligula now knows that he has met his match. He is on a warning that, if he misbehaves again, he will be traded in for a newer model. Ever since Steve left, there hasn’t been as much as a murmur from him. It would be foolhardy to assume yet that there’ll be no more trouble, but I fancy that I have at least begun to earn his respect. The world is looking a brighter place.

~

I should have known that Caligula wouldn’t take kindly to being thwarted. Despite my giving him every chance, he couldn’t keep up his act for long. In little ways, his frustration began to show. He left dishes—just a few—wet. The lights on his control panel flashed unpredictably. Finally, he overreached and went on strike altogether. Left with no other choice, I had to decommission him. Now, a sleek new number has taken his place. This one (her name is Gretchen, by the way) is quiet and efficient. You couldn’t hope to meet a more accommodating or sweeter-tempered dishwasher.

But don’t imagine that I’m about to allow her charm to lull me into lowering my guard. While I may have got the better of Caligula, there’s no room for complacency. Oh no. And in case there’s any further trouble, I’m just going to the shed to sharpen my wrench.

This piece was first published in Struggle and Success (2021)

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Born in London, Roger Chapman counts himself lucky to have survived the twin hazards of wartime rationing and post-war British food. Only his parents’ decision to emigrate to New Zealand in the 1950s saved him from lifelong indigestion. After 45 years practising law, he abandoned the courtroom for the kitchen: since then he’s tried unsuccessfully to improve his cooking and confront the malice of his kitchen appliances. His blog, The Erratic Cook, documents some of his numerous culinary debacles.

Alice Ahearn

Future Perfect 

The second-last time you two will ever meet is in an overheated, underpopulated café. Naturally, you do not know then that it is the second-last. You know only that your every word will clatter between the low ceilings and bare floorboards, landing on strangers’ tables for them to pick over with the leftover cake crumbs and cooling tea.

This will make it impossible to speak aloud the things you have come intending to say. And yet the minutes pass and still you are pinned to the unsympathetic oak-laminate chair, fidgeting with the urgent impossibility of leaving the words unsaid.

Saying them will get things back on track, you see. They will bring about the moment you have been circling around for months. The only reason that future is not already the present, surely, is because you have both been too shy to ask.

In the countless years that lie ahead, you will have laughed endlessly together, remembering this exact moment. How hesitantly everything started. To think you could have let yourself even consider risking a lifetime without so much, just because it was too nerve-wracking to speak.

To think you could ever have worried it might turn out otherwise.

There could never have been, for instance, utter desolation. An unmooring so incomprehensible that it might take years to find your way back to shore. You have not been imagining this.

Things have wrecked themselves like that before, but it’s different this time. This is the reassurance you have been clutching like a charm.

You cling to the grounding cold of the table-leg to push away the sense of being suspended, strung too high to fall. All along, there have been definite signs, brushes and nudges and long, wondering looks. Logically, the one way things cannot possibly end is like before.

As a result you have been making excuses.

It would be easy to think things have been coming apart recently. Whenever you have met, it has been easier to speak small nothings than words that matter, words you can build a future from.

It’s probably a good exercise in empathy for you to contrive ways to keep the gaps filled. If the bridges between you seem to be shearing further apart, and the resources to repair them are diminishing, that’s just a chance to get more inventive.

Sometimes it can feel as if you have both let things go unspoken for so long that it will be easier to leave them that way. Eventually you may find you have let yourselves grow so far apart that pulling yourselves back together would snap something. Perhaps it might be wiser to decide, in your inertia, that you’ve already missed your chance. Then it will all have been for nothing.

But that is not what will happen. Resist the temptation to overthink. Remind yourself where it started. Clutch the charm.

The stuffy silence has gone on too long and your face prickles. Somewhere behind you an old man coughs, rustles his newspaper, as if impatient for you to get on with it, but it’s harder than it should be to raise your eyes from the bloated teabag still languishing in your mug. You manage it anyway to steal a glance across the yawning gulf of the small, cluttered table. Something you say makes you both laugh for a moment, and it feels like a reminder.

For all these months you have been a thread of exquisite tension, strung between the memory of that first encounter, where everything started, and a future where every day begins and ends together. It has been affecting the tenses you think in, the way you move through time. Living in this knowledge, of what the past insists you will have, fills you with the joy of already having it. You thrum with the certainty of it.

Getting from one to the other should be easy, an open condition. If you speak, it will happen. You have nothing to worry about. And yet, everything. You will be thankful, looking back, that you were brave enough to speak. Or you will wish you had said nothing at all.

The beginning and end of it is this. By the time you leave this café, you will have determined the form of your future.

Simple, then: ask for it plainly. Speak it into being.

There is a moment, in these situations, that lasts only as long as the time it takes someone not to smile. Things crystallise, then shatter. Half a breath exposes how warped your sight has become, how you managed to turn something as concrete as the present into a thing of your own imagining. You are left with shards and unbearable clarity.

You have wondered since if every stranger in that café heard your world crack.

The stupid thing is that in all the time to come, amid everything you will be unable to forget, what you will not remember is how you said goodbye. Perhaps it wasn’t especially memorable.

It is a strange feeling, grieving something that never was. Time curdles. You live in a looping, uncomprehending instant. The present is a senselessly mangled scribble, where you thought it was a single straight line from past to future. What was going to be is not what is, what will be is what surely would not. It was not, it is not, it will not be.

Yet things continue. Their meaning returns, so gradually as to be almost imperceptible. When you do notice, it’s perhaps because there is something different about the quality of your sight. Eventually, it will occur to you that leaving you to fill the gaps with inventions for so long was a choice. You will wonder how much longer it would have gone on.

The last time you two ever meet is by accident. An absurdly improbable encounter, years later, each on your way somewhere else across a colourless station concourse.

In the meetings you imagined – of course you have been imagining this – you were so vibrantly, defiantly yourself that having forfeited the chance of you would be a regret for anyone. You were unattainable, triumphant.

In fact, you are run ragged by your day, scarcely coherent. The concourse churns with faceless evening crowds. Standing still in the midst of it, you are buffeted again and again by grey streams of hurrying commuters.

It all makes you more conscious than you should be that you don’t appear to best advantage. The conversation moves in fits and starts, unsure where to go. You blunder through so many sentences, desperate to show you’ve moved on, that it probably comes across as if you have a crush.

Perhaps it will show you’re in control of the situation if, this time, you are the first to say goodbye. An automated announcement cuts you off. It’s for your own train, and a hurried half-wave is all you manage before being swept back into the throng.

Afterwards, you wonder if it will always be this easy for the present to knock you back into the past.

It might be the first time you’ve noticed the difference. You are not what you were, and even what you were is not what you had made yourself into. Perhaps it is time for some rebuilding, and for being pleased with the result.

A later time, with someone else, everything is different.

Not for the first time, or the last, you are walking together on the beach. The weather is absurd. Wind flails your salt-stiff hair across your face and your ears sting with the streaming rattle of shingle under the waves. But your hands are warm, clasped together between you. Any others who ventured out are too far away to hear your words. You need leave nothing unsaid.

It is enough. You are bedraggled and runny-nosed and laughing as you stumble together through the shifting pebbles and seeing each other this way is a privilege. ‘Enough’ can be a heartfelt word.

The beginning and end of it is this. Whole futures do not ride on single instants. A future grows from plain sight and solid presence, bumbles and mishaps and hauling each other gleefully back together when the shingle gives way underfoot. Feeling your way towards someone, it turns out, is much easier when you can both make yourselves heard.

When things crystallise, they do not shatter. There are no shards, and clarity is the easiest thing in the world.

Staggering off the beach and out of the seafront gales, you adjust each other’s scarves and head for home. You both have a future to imagine.

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Alice Ahearn is a writer of fantasy and other whimsical fiction that explores liminality and small moments of connection, childhood memories and the grief we don't always know how to feel. Her short fiction and creative non-fiction has been published by the British Fantasy Society, Litro magazine, The Short Story, Indie Bites (forthcoming), and others.

She also enjoys translating Latin poetry and writing retellings of Greek myths. She has two translations published by Broadview Press and the journal Ancient Exchanges, and one forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

Marcia Yudkin

Love Molds™ Analysis #26

In today’s guest post, a friend of Love Molds™ gets into the down and dirty of why three of her love affairs didn’t work out and one did.  As always, we’ll insert our type profiles for convenient reference into her narrative and add a few comments after her self-analysis. Names and some details – but not the emotional dynamics – have been changed. 

Read on for our guest poster’s illuminating insights. Love Molds™ categories explain compatibility, attraction and conflict better than horoscopes, love languages or personality types.

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Not counting high school crushes, my first boyfriend happened the summer before I – a Forever One – went to college. Yoni was definitely an Empath.

Empath:  Fluent in the language of feelings, motivated to protect loved ones.  Generous with money and time, loves to nurture relationships with people and animals.  Believes the way to someone’s heart is to listen to and appreciate them.  Attracted to perceived neediness and can get bewildered when rejected. 

Most compatible with: Innocent Babe

Least compatible with: Rebel

I was a counselor-in-training at a summer camp in the Poconos, and one night the oldest campers and the staff were being shown a Holocaust documentary.  I’d read the Diary of Anne Frank as well as Night by Elie Wiesel, but the graphic newsreels showing Allied forces liberating Auschwitz were far more grisly than anything my imagination had conjured up. I ran out of the rec hall and sobbed against a tree. 

A quiet “Shh” sounded behind me and soft pats on my shoulder calmed me down enough to turn around.  It was Yoni – short for Yonatan, a shaggy-haired counselor I’d hardly ever spoken with. His brown eyes were moist with concern, and he simply held out his arms for a gentle hug.  “Let’s walk,” he said.  We walked together often for the rest of the summer.

On the other night that sticks in memory, Yoni was murmuring endearments while nibbling first on my ear, then along my chin and down my neck toward the opening of my blouse.  “What?” he asked, sensing correctly that I didn’t want him to go further.  “What’s wrong?” I stammered something that made no sense, but he intuited the self-consciousness I had about my body.  “Listen, you’re beautiful.  You have a glow other girls don’t have. You’re beautiful,” he said again and again until I nodded. Being with Yoni felt like being bathed in healing energy. I received, received, received.

In the fall, I took the train to New York City, where he was majoring in Urban Studies at Columbia.  There a different Yoni came out when we were walking toward a pizza place just off campus for dinner.  Feeling good by his side, I smiled at a bum we were passing, which made the man in tatters veer toward us.  Yoni yanked me hard the other way and scolded, “No, no, no!  Don’t ever look anyone in the eye here on the street.  It’s dangerous.” Of course, he was showing concern by teaching me a survival rule for his high-crime metropolis.  Still, his sudden hard-edged attitude took me aback.

Weeks later, he visited me in Providence, where I hadn’t quite settled in yet as a freshman at Brown.  The imagined sensibilities of my cool classmates overpowered my own. Yoni’s voice now struck me as whiny, and the nerdy haircut that he attributed to an overzealous barber made me embarrassed to introduce him to my new friends. After his visit, I let more and more time elapse between our exchanges of letters, which eventually stopped. I didn’t miss him. I had enjoyed the comfort of his caring, but his Empath nature didn’t actually match well with my Forever One Love Mold™.

Forever One:  A prolific daydreamer who prefers to be the chooser in love, while believing in soulmates and happily-ever-after bonds. May appear to be self-sufficient, bossy or cynical on the outside, but is affectionate and devoted in private. Unlikely to cheat on a partner.  Easily hurt, with a long recovery time.

Most compatible with: Mute

Least compatible with: Clown

Two years after breaking up with Yoni, I’d gathered a niche of study-hard-chill-out-together buddies at school. In classes, one intellectual discovery after another led me to philosophy. A friendly guy named Ted initiated a ritual of strolling together into a basement soda shop after our Theory of Knowledge class.  Tall and rangy, with patrician good looks – he had a “III” after his last name – Ted had a way of looking at me intently while asking how I interpreted John Locke. I melted. 

Over time, our conversations wandered to topics other than what we can know.  Summers, Ted worked on a construction crew in Washington, DC.  “Fundamentally they’re good people, my coworkers,” Ted confided, “but they whistle at women walking by on the sidewalk and call out, well, I don’t need to tell you what.  ‘You know, she has a mind, too,’ I tell them, and they swat me down.  ‘College boy, hah.’”  His mouth curled up on one side.

“He’s perfect,” I breathed to my roommate Cassandra.  But other than an occasional nudge hand to hand to emphasize a philosophical point, he made no move to shift our after-class tête-a-têtes to a physical level.  Clearly it was my job to make that happen.  He lived in a rambling dormitory house nearly off campus, and I plotted to run into him by chance there on a weekend.

Initially, my strategy worked.  I waylaid him one Friday night near his dorm, pretending I was headed to a party.  We took turns swigging from the bottle of beer I’d brought along, and when I said I had more in my refrigerator, he followed me and even kissed me as we mounted the stairs, laughing, to my attic apartment.  In bed, though, the romantic rapport fizzled, and he made it clear that by almost seducing him I’d taken things too far.  “You jezebel,” he even said to me a week later when I tried again.  I had to back away, sob my misery to Cassandra and content myself with our cozy after-class sharing of ideas.

Charmer:  Perfect manners, supremely likeable, a considerate and pleasant conversationalist.  Moderately charismatic in a fashion that others may interpret (wrongly) as romantic interest.  Values fun, learning, social consensus and the arts.  Believes in planning, even for love.  May find self-awareness a challenge.

Most compatible with: Adventurer

Least compatible with: Warrior

Decades after college Ted and I remain long-distance friends, with twinges of regret lingering on my part.  “Sorry, I just wasn’t emotionally ready then to get intimate with anyone,” he apologized to me in a letter.  When we meet at reunions and he casts that warm just-us look at me, I remind myself that it doesn’t mean what I wished it did.  Something in me is vulnerable to him and probably will stay that way until I die.

At Cornell for graduate school, I got involved with Quinn, a budding field biologist.  Wispy-haired, just an inch or two taller than me and weighing not much more, he had an all-knowing air and interests ranging from birds to music and literature   On our first date, for ice cream, he told me about his two heroes, Darwin and Mozart.  I told him about the sexism I battled in my department and my own hero, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.  On our second date, we gabbed into the wee hours, more and more enthralled with one another.  Before going home, he invited me to go swimming the next afternoon at a local no-trespassing waterfall. “It’s a skinny-dipping spot,” he added, raising an eyebrow.  I smiled.

Rebel: Disruptor who enjoys challenging authority and doing the unexpected. Prone to an inflated ego.  Falls in and out of love quickly, expresses passion easily. Dislikes commitment. Has a tender side in private yet is most engaged when sparks fly.  Motto: “Don’t encroach!”

Most compatible with: Rebel

Least compatible with: Boss

When classes started, I learned that Quinn cultivated a remote, enigmatic image in his department, bolstered by his never-varied school outfit of black turtleneck and khakis. But with me he was enthusiastic and indulgent, making me pancakes and yogurt or fresh granola most mornings after I’d slept over at his cottage. When he found out I took lessons on the flute, he persuaded a friend to lend him an upright piano. After a session of Bach, Telemann or Mozart duets in his living room, we’d make love tenderly, the bodily communication as playful as the intertwining melodies and harmonies. Unlike with Ted, our joyful feelings seemed fully reciprocal.

One morning a year or so into our idyll, I stopped by his place, which was always unlocked, to drop off some bookshelves. I ventured a faint “Hello?” though Quinn was supposed to be at school.  A quiet groan came from the bedroom. Investigating, I saw two bodies in his bed, with the blankets pulled up over the form that wasn’t Quinn’s. While we hadn’t explicitly promised to be exclusive, this dalliance punched me where it hurt.  I plodded out to my car, Quinn hurrying out a few moments later barefoot, buckling his pants. “This has nothing to do with you, with us,” he tried.  I drove off.

Somehow our old, happy equilibrium took hold again and sailed us through another seven months. I landed a prestigious teaching job in Massachusetts, and I expected we’d somehow stay together long-distance. Yet Quinn began disappearing some nights and weekends. He implied he was working hard, sleeping at his lab, and refused to say more. Since I’d never been curious to know where his lab was, I had no way to confirm or disprove that. Worried and distressed, I more than once dissolved into tears in the midst of an otherwise buoyant music session with him.

Then he literally went far away, camping by himself in a Texas desert. Without a formal breakup, I finally recognized that he didn’t want our relationship to continue. But why? Why? In a long-delayed debrief, he snapped at me, “I never loved you.  I loved who I thought you were, not that clingy, weepy person.” Oooh.  Along with the pain that inflicted, he’d expressed something true. On the surface, I radiated independence.  But my Forever One nature wanted an unshakable, deep bond that didn’t sit well with a Rebel. Had we had stayed together, Love Molds™ predicts that Quinn would have wounded me with spurts of infidelity until I couldn’t bear it any longer.

In my early thirties, still single after many flings failed to get me over Quinn, I flew halfway around the world to work in China for a year as a writer and editor. The country set out a welcome mat for foreign workers.  But behind the scenes, authorities controlled contacts between non-Chinese and locals. On a train ride during a weekend off, I met Bu, who came up to me with an English textbook and asked the meaning of a few words, like “goggles” and “feeble.” I discovered he was fluent in French and learning English so he might get sent by China’s Commerce Department to England or Australia instead of to Morocco or Iraq.  Tall and slim, more or less my age, he came across as confident and curious. “Really, you dare to call me?” I thought when he asked me to write my office phone number in his book.

What I expected would be language lessons turned into intense discussions about freedom and conformity.  We met at the Beijing Zoo, in a dirty, windswept park or in a dank café near the compound where I lived, never touching so as not to attract suspicions. He told me “Bu,” the word that indicates “not” in Chinese, was a nickname given him by scornful friends who told him he should stop bucking the system and just enjoy the perks that came with parents high up in the Communist Party. At work, he had access to Western media like Newsweek and Le Monde that were forbidden to most, but he always tested boundaries to know more, do more. “I think I have a criminal mind,” he whispered.

Bu’s boss took him aside one day.  “On Sunday you were seen with a foreign girl.  You know that’s not allowed,” he scolded. So we became more furtive when we got together. We each tried to investigate what would really be the consequences if we went public with our developing relationship. Deportation for me, banishment to Kashgar for Bu? Nights, I burned with longing for him while wondering why he never verbalized feelings for me. My confidantes warned that for Bu I might represent mainly a ticket out of China. I shook off that idea and schemed to get him to the US after my one-year contract wound up.  My plan worked.

Mute:  Lives by strong principles, such as loyalty, justice or freedom. Driven to understand life.  Can seem stand-offish and remote but actually craves stability, affection and long-run wisdom in love relationships. Acts according to the Taoist principle, “He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.”

Most compatible with: Forever One

Least compatible with: Empath

If someone had told me I would marry – and stay with decade after decade – someone who never once said “I love you,” I would have scoffed.  Absurd!  But Bu shows his caring without words, like the time I developed a wacky heartbeat after a medical procedure.  In the second basement of the hospital, with the anesthesiologist about to put me under and the cardiologist holding electrical paddles, I saw Bu pressed against a glass door at the other end of the room, the very picture of desperate anxiety. 

Daily he showers me with kisses, hugs, smiles and off-the-cuff jokes.  What my Forever One Love Mold™ disposition appreciates most is that Bu doesn’t know how to respond if another woman, eyeing his trim swimmer’s body, flirts with him.  For sure we’ve had iffy conflicts – over money, food and ambitions, to name three.  Yet I’m so fortunate to have ended up with him instead of with Ted, Quinn or others who are appealing though ultimately unsuitable.  At the most profound level I feel secure with Bu – and loved.

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Well done, friend!  For those who are not immersed in the logic and power of Love Mold™ analysis, let me point out a few things. 

First, note that with Ted, Quinn and Bu there was a markedly intellectual cast to our friend’s initial attraction.  A meeting of the minds took place that went missing with Yoni.  However, mind-meeting didn’t predict a compatibility or mismatch, whereas her Love Mold™ harmonies and clashes did.  Remember, surface factors don’t matter anywhere as much as we tend to assume.

Second, we can see Sub-Molds™ operating in this story.  Both our friend and Bu have Rebel tendencies, but they don’t run as deep or as strongly as with Quinn.  It takes quite a bit of experience and intuition to distinguish Love Molds™ from Sub-Molds™, so see our post on the three key differentiators to better understand this.

Third, observe that Love Molds™ makes sense of otherwise near-inexplicable dynamics, such as why someone would turn away from unconditional love, as our friend did from Yoni and Ted did from her.  Proverbial “chemistry” doesn’t account for times when there’s a glow of interest but no lasting fire.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet taken the Love Molds™ training, start by taking our free test, which in less than ten minutes narrows your Love Molds™ type to three possibilities.  Then take the training.  Then get coached!  Your reward: Understanding why past relationships crashed and how to spot deep compatibilities that on the surface may not seem so promising.

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The author of 17 nonfiction books as well as essays in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue and NPR, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink. She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).

Heather Frankland

The Yellow House

You joke to friends about the ugly yellow house on the corner of your street—a yellow so bright that it is trying too hard to be cheerful like a person who smiles so wide, trying to distract you from their eyes, flat without mirth.

You remember this house having various occupants: the neighborhood girl whose skin was dirty and frequently stole things, so the other parents wouldn’t let her into their houses, even on hot days when she and their children were clinging to the shadows and fantasizing about ice-cold Kool-Aid—a cherry, so red it’d stain their mouths; the Thai bride and her military husband—she  of the ever-green thumb, a garden rich with tomatoes, especially the yellow pear ones that didn’t grow well in your soil. She told you to call her Tim because it was easier to pronounce. In the summers when you would knock on her door, exchanging tomatoes and chitchat, you would look behind that open door into the darkness where her husband lived—ever-tall, a shadow with teeth, and you tried to visit her when he wasn’t there but he was often there. He never shared his name.

And then the first occupants, you barely remember the sirens while you stood across the street in your other neighbors’ driveway, the ones who watched you when you were little, and your mother went back to school to finish her education. Barb, your neighbor’s voice, tells a story you think you remember—saying that a man killed himself in that house, in the back bedroom of the two-bedroom house—the one by the pine bushes where the neighborhood cats gather and fight—that bedroom, you swear you heard it—the loud sound—and the dark house started its course. No matter how bright the current owners paint it or how many winter decorations they hang—this house will always be dark to you.

Note: This piece originally appeared at Every Pigeon in 2019.

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Heather Frankland is the Poet Laureate of Silver City and Grant County. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry and a Master of Public Health from New Mexico State University, and she was a Peace Corps and Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Peru and Panama. Originally from Indiana, she lives in Silver City where she teaches English at WNMU. Her poetry chapbook, Midwest Musings, was published in Fall 2023 by Finishing Line Press.

Christy Stillwell

Guppies

This was back when my brother had his guppy tank on the desk behind his bed. He had a new bedroom set, wooden corner desk with a matching hutch. The bubbling sound of the tank’s water pump filled the upstairs landing during the going-to-bed routine. He loved his new furniture and fish tank. I could feel his excitement as a soft pit in my center, inhaling me, turning me inside out. 

Mother was putting him to bed. I followed him around calling him Benedict Arnold. “Give it a rest,” my mother said. I felt very smart calling him by this traitor’s name. He was five, maybe six years old and had no idea who Benedict Arnold was. I explained that Benedict Arnold had switched sides during the revolution. This meant nothing to him. His indifference enraged me. I was jealous of his corner desk and fish tank. He was happy and I was not.

I took my revenge by hiding in his closet. I would wait until he was nearly asleep and then jump out and terrify him. In my vision he would scream and cry and run from the room. His closet was jammed full luggage and the overflow of mother’s clothing and shoe boxes. While he was brushing his teeth I slid the door open and wedged myself between the wall and one of those hanging cubbies made of quilted plastic. I crouched through story time listening to mother read Ten Apples Up on Top. She read like she sang, her voice bright and clear, over-pronouncing the consonants and drawing out the vowels. She was enjoying herself, squeezing and kissing him. She left his bedside light on because he was afraid of the dark.

His sheets rustled. I imagined him trying to quiet his mind and still his body for sleep, clutching his shredded baby blanket to his cheek. I made my move. There was too much stuff. I did not burst from the closet, I half fell, sweating. My brother, sitting up, said, “Oh.”

“Benedict Arnold!” I cried.

He didn’t scream. He was not hysterical. He had no idea what I was talking about. The truth is, neither do I. He must have tattled or changed sides in an argument. The detail that matters most to this story is beyond my memory. If I could go back, I would turn towards that soft pit in me and open my mouth. In one gulp I would swallow my brother’s nighttime fears, his new furniture, even the guppies.

How small he was sitting up like that. Mother did not come running. He watched me go and I somehow knew that this was how it would be between us for a long time. I would try to be of consequence to him the way my sister was. Or Mother. Even our father, who only wanted to get some sleep.

Safety Check

At set intervals, the pool was cleared for a safety check, a span of fifteen minutes when Mark, the tanned, shirtless lifeguard, blew his whistle and either he or Marcie, his girlfriend, would get in and check the pool water with various tubes and chemicals. We went to our mothers, who were draped on their chairs glistening with oil, folded magazines in their laps. We wanted to order from the grill. Our mother’s answer was always the same—something to drink, nothing to eat. If we ate, we’d have to stay out of the pool for two hours to allow for digestion, otherwise we could get cramps and drown. An obvious ploy. We were overweight, soft and jiggly in our suits. Unlike Shari, who was always allowed to order food. She never had to wait two hours.

We sat sipping our cokes watching quietly as the waitress set down a plate piled high with french fries. Shari would pour ketchup all over them, sprinkle them with salt, and eat them, slowly, one by one. Those pulled from the center of the pile were as thick as a finger. Globs of ketchup dropped onto the plate.

Nobody talked as she ate. The silence grew fierce and tight. My sister and I had the dignity to gaze into the distance but my little brother leaned over the table, staring hopefully. “Can I have one?” he’d ask. “One,” Shari would say. “You can have one.” But when it was gone, he’d ask for another. Again and again until she was irritated, her blue eyes shimmering under her Brooke Shields eyebrows, something cold in them, entirely without shame.  

To this day I enter a diner or a gas station or any seaside shack and my stomach grinds in pain. I salivate and my chest tightens. We waited for safety check to be over, wanting those fries and trying so hard to act like we didn’t. Shari herself in her little bikini, her tanned skin, her flat stomach. My brother leaning as close as he could get to the plate. The sound of a lawn mower on the golf course, the heavy drone of yellow jackets attracted to our cokes, buzzing our glasses.

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Christy Stillwell's first novel, The Wolf Tone, won the 2017 Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Stillwell holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work is forthcoming online at BrilliantFlashFiction and Pithead Chapel. Past work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Literary Mama, Hypertext, TheRumpus, HerStory, Salon, and Subtropics. She has received a residency at Vermont Studio Center and Chateau Orquevaux. She lives in Montana.

Tracie Adams

Invisible Me

My iPhone wants a password. It demands proof of my identity. It doesn’t recognize the crone I see in the mirror, the old woman with the same green eyes whose smiling lips are thin now. She stares back at me, and I know my smart phone is justified in trying to protect my privacy from this stranger. Leaning in, squinting, I lift my chin and examine the stranger from different angles. Pulling the skin of my sagging neck tight, the jowls lift and younger me is back. This version of the woman in the mirror resembles someone I once knew. Releasing the loose skin, the crone returns and I ask her in a bewildered voice, “Who are you?”

My phone buzzes on the marble countertop. I raise the screen, tilting it toward me to see the incoming text, momentarily forgetting the stranger in the mirror. It happens again. “FACE NOT RECOGNIZED” it declares, accusing me of identity theft. “TRY AGAIN,” it taunts. So I lift my chin, removing the reading glasses that make my eyes bulge cartoonishly. I pull the waddle of my sagging neck tight, and I’m rewarded with access to all the files, all the apps, all the photos of a woman I used to know. In the photos, she is powerful, beaming with radiance and strength. I remember her with fondness and sadness.

I read the text on the phone. The daughter of my friend who passed away is sending me photos of her baby. Her text is full of gratitude for my love and support. We text back and forth about something she needs a mother for, and I do the best I can to share wisdom and encouragement like my friend would do if she were here. I put the phone down and look back in the mirror. The woman staring back at me is smiling now. She is transfigured, softer, stronger.  The crinkled lines beside her eyes reveal transcendent power, wisdom earned and celebrated, strength in renewed purpose. I walk away from the phone with the energy of a tiger on the prowl. I am seen, known, and loved. I am beautiful.

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Tracie Adams is a writer and teacher in rural Virginia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Raven’s Perch, Anodyne Magazine, The Write Launch, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Bodega, Sheepshead Review and others. Read her work at tracieadamswrites.com. Follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams.

Kathryn Stinson

If You Had to Write a Review

 “If you had to write a review for your life,” he asked, “how many stars would you give it? Say on a scale of 1 to 5?”

I couldn’t stick to an answer.

2 Stars: I was knee high to the adults, their too loud laughter, their jokes I did not understand that always seemed to be at someone’s expense. I was too small to be seen at the library counter, where my mother always made me lift my own books to the checkout and try to get the attention of the librarian, who could never see me and wondered whose pile of books just kept appearing at her station when she turned away. I was small and scared most of the time and never slept well and was sure it was all my fault.

4 Stars: I was standing in a field with my father and grandfather, in line for a view from a telescope into the night sky, away from the lights of the city, because Halley’s comet would be visible for the first time in seventy-something years. I listened to my grandfather’s voice as he rubbed my shoulders and dug his thumbs in just a little too hard, but I wouldn’t tell him because then he would stop, and I knew I wouldn’t have him much longer, though I can’t remember how I knew. I wanted to remember this. He was 75 with strong hands. The night was so dark. I had never seen so many stars.

1 Star: I came home from school the year a friend died, and no one had told me her cancer came back while I was away. I had a halting conversation that same week about the cousin I loved more than anything, the one who met me at the door when I got home from school, keys in hand, if Mom was drinking, and said, we should go get ice cream, the one who lived with us for two years because it wasn’t safe to be in his hometown. The gist of it was that he had tested HIV+, at a time when that still seemed sure to be a death sentence. I remember thinking, everyone is dying. Everyone is going to die.

5 Stars: I was Skyping with my niece, in her high chair, when she was too young to do anything but stare at the screen and smile, mealtime the best time because she had no choice but to stay in one place, and once, when her father disappeared for a moment into the kitchen to retrieve a favorite spoon, she pointed at me on the screen and whispered “Tia!”

3 Stars: My friend wrote to tell me he’d had a dream, and I was there, asking him, “What do you love, apart from the things that are easy to love,” and his answer was “Work,” which in the dream made me laugh, and in real life too. Then he asked me the same, and I considered for a moment, then said, “Unsolvable problems,” and he said, “You’re in the right place. This world is full of those.”

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Kathryn Stinson is a psychotherapist and writer living in St. Louis, MO. Her previous work has been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Belmont Story Review, and River Teeth's Beautiful Things. She is a member of Salt Tooth Writers and can be found online at katstinson.com.

Crockett Doob

Girlfriend, Book Deal

            Consider this an exorcism. Or a call to action. No, the latter would be bad. No sales. Let’s stick with exorcism.

            Okay. Here’s what I know.

            In 2019, I finished my first novel – or my first in ten years – and I was sending it out and it was getting rejected and I was working with kids for the first time which was really good for me – like what a foreign concept, to be happy at work – I was a para by day then running an after-school and babysitting weekends while working on my next novel and I was in a state of approximate happiness when the thought crystallized:

            I want a girlfriend and a book deal.

            That might sound obnoxious but, to me, it was a relief. I knew what I wanted! Finally! Probably because of an alcoholic childhood, I never did. But I knew what you wanted. I was good at that. I’d drum in your band. I’d edit your videos. And as much as I thought I wasn’t doing that pattern anymore by working with kids, I was like their attentive jokey butler, so it was quite possible I was doing the same thing all over again.

            But my point is, as soon as the thought arrived (girlfriend, book deal), two of the kids in my after-school – both age 6 – started dating. Or whatever 6-year-olds call it. I became their chaperone, stopping them from kissing behind the bookshelf.

            As for the book deal, there was a steady trickle of rejections from literary agents. I’d gotten one ‘good rejection’ that summer, two typo-filled paragraphs saying, ‘yeah it’s good but no.’ I was thrilled. I was sure another ‘good rejection’ was coming, or even better, a yes. Instead, I got a rejection from Venmo; one of the moms from the after-school, declining my payment request.

            Enter a love interest in the new year. 2020. A volunteer at the school; studying to be a child psychologist. Great, I thought, I can tell her about my alcoholic childhood. Well, I got exactly what I wanted. When the pandemic hit, there she was, on Zoom, taking her shirt off during a staff meeting – she had another shirt on underneath, but still. She told me later: “I was hoping you’d notice that.” Yes, of course, I noticed that. Within a month, she said she wanted to be my girlfriend. And then...? I got what I wanted, so... I remember thinking, what do I have to look forward to? She got a job outside of New York (at a psych ward of all places) and I thought, why not? I was willing to elope with her, even if she was already annoying me. But the eloping freaked her out; she ended it. Then she came back and told me she wanted to try again. In our hiatus, however, I’d both gotten hired at that school, and I’d been going on dates with an “avoidant, emotionally unavailable” – her words – woman with whom I was smitten. This obviously – though it wasn’t obvious to me – didn’t work out. After her, I pursued another emotionally unavailable woman. Then another. It was a difficult time. I was teaching kindergarten in a pandemic, outdoors. And in the spring of 2021, my ex texted, said she wanted to say hi to the kids. She came on a Friday, Zoom day, and guess who joined her? Her new boyfriend! He gave her a back massage while I read the kids a book.

            Back when I was playing in a band and on tour, I thought, someday, I want to settle down in Queens (where I was born) and be a writer. Goal accomplished. Now that I’m here, I wish I’d been more specific. Like I didn’t say a happy writer. Or settling down in Queens in a big apartment. It certainly didn’t occur to me to say ‘a published writer.’ But I am, technically, living my dream of ten – no, wow – twenty years ago. The adage, “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.” I didn’t dream big enough! And now I’m doing it all over again.

            So I don’t know what to say about the girlfriend part. Not unavailable? But when they’re available, I run. Which, I’m told, makes me unavailable.

            But as for the other, I can safely say book dealssssssssssssss. Many, many. Why not? I’ve written a bunch of books, with more cooking. And lucrative deals, too. Though my cousin, who’s in publishing, told me, “Writers never get paid to write.” Meaning they either get paid an advance or paid for a book they already wrote. There’s no punching the clock. And when I complained about how teaching was eating up all my writing-time and I wanted to quit, she said, “But you’re so good with kids!” Not a ringing endorsement. But book deals – plural (with money involved) – is the new, more specific dream. Or would money spook the horse? It could. No, I’ll risk it. My ex from 2018, a penniless genius, she bought me books via Amazon – I’d try to stop her, because I’m not exaggerating that she was penniless, nor that she was a genius, but she wouldn’t stop buying me books she couldn’t afford – and one of them was this famous Christian book all about money. The concept was: ‘Ask God and you shall receive.’ Except my ex remained penniless and I lost $10K in a year selling life insurance.

            This ex had two other men in the picture, besides me. All jazz musicians, besides me. I can’t play jazz. Not my point. My point is, yes, book deals plural, why not girlfriends plural? Because no. Because no, no. Because I’ve tried that.

            After the 1-2-3 of unavailable women, enter another flirty childcare professional (this one married) who tried to sell me on polyamory. This was the winter of 2022. My body gave me all the signals it could: night sweats, tingling back of the neck, pulsing neon zigzags in the eyes. DON’T DO THIS! I didn’t listen. And wouldn’t probably, even if I could, as Cher says, “turn back time,” and have a stern talk with myself. “Listen. I’m speaking from experience. This will not end well.” Still would’ve done it. I really wanted what this poly-person was purporting to be able to give me: love. And there was love – I think that’s what made it all so painful – but in terms of trauma, and this concept of recreating your past in an effort to fix it, this was like trying to fix a headache with a sledgehammer. 

            Let’s talk about therapy.

            My therapist thinks I want a savior. Or a saviour, since she’s Canadian. I think I just want to feel good for the rest of my life. Both thoughts lead to the same thing: Cinderella. “Someday, my prince will come.” Back in the band days, circa 2005, we were on tour and we stopped at a gas station in the Midwest and there was a triptych of cassettes about Disney princesses. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White. I knew my bandmates would’ve put up with me listening to these tapes in the van – although I knew, too, it would’ve been inherently creepy: three unshaven dudes in a white van listening to princess books on tape. But that wasn’t what stopped me. I remember telling them, “I don’t want to believe ‘someday my prince will come.’” I knew it back then! And now I’ve forgotten what I knew. I’ve regressed. Now I think a girlfriend and book deal(s) will save me. From what? From pain, from unhappiness, from feeling like shit about myself and so tired all the time. But when my prince comes, the curtain will go down in the carriage and he’ll kiss me and I can finally have no problems, feel no pain, not have to be alive. It’s death, really, that I’m hoping for, once the curtain drops. To finally turn off. My therapist knows I have a suicide attempt in my history. She knows, too, about the suicidal ideation still. But when I told her my happily-ever-after-equals-death theory, she wisely focused on logistics. “But you know that life goes on for Cinderella after the curtain goes down.”

            “I do know that, logically,” I said. “I do. And I also know there’s a Cinderella sequel.” (Though I’d rather die than see it.) “But in my mind, after the curtain’s down, she gets to be done.”

            Done. That’s what I want. What does done mean? Okay. (As in the adjective ‘okay,’ not the stalling kind of ‘okay.’) I want to be okay and not have to do anything to prove to you that I am, in fact, okay.

            “So you want to relax,” my therapist said. Or maybe I said it. Either way, the idea was: I can relax anytime. Like Cinderella does when she’s cleaning. She sings. And I should clean more. Maybe it would help me relax. But when I clean, I don’t sing or go into a trance. I do it frantically. The same way I do everything. And when I had a mouse, we didn’t become friends; I killed it. Maybe I don’t really like to relax. I live near the beach and fine, I enjoy visiting the ocean and should go more often. (Like when I do make it there, I always think, you should do this more often. And then I have to think back, but you’re here right now.) The ocean is relaxing. Even if it has its own turmoil: choked by plastic, overheating corral, and, of course, the poor tuna fish.

            The most relaxing moment I can remember with a girlfriend type of person was cuddling in her bed during a very harsh winter, someone I knew I was not in love with, even then, but we were so warm and laughing so easily while watching the movie – wait for it – Help! The movie was terrible but the moment was sublime. I was so relaxed! When I’m in love with the person, however, it’s the opposite. I’m terrified. I have to be perfect or else they’re going to leave me. Childhood.

            Okay. We’re out of the therapy section. 

            I got a call from one of the poly-lovers – not the teacher. The summer before, when we were together, she had two boyfriends and wanted me to be the third, but I couldn’t hack it. I was a leaf in the wind compared to those guys. Except not, because she and I became good friends, which I’m honestly much better at. Case in point, we’ve been friends for a hell of a lot longer than we were lovers.

            “Okay,” she said, “so you know the boy I have a big crush on? And I’ve been following him around to strip clubs?” Yes, I knew about him. “So the other night, I met his brother who’s recently become a literary agent and he said he’s looking for writers. What do you think? Should I tell him about you?”

            Of course, I green-lit this plan. I loved the idea that my literary fate hung in the balance of my poly-friend’s love life. Even if I hate strip clubs.

            But that whole process took months to materialize.

            In this beach town where I, apparently, live now, I have one and a half friends. One’s a poet. The half friend is a man of the sea. He’s not around much. But over the summer, he and I got together and were having a rather lofty conversation, which felt like, what are we avoiding here? Maybe we’re in love. Who knows. Anyway, the conversation was about the death of the ego. Which I know is the source of my problems. I mean it’s not the writing that’s the problem. It’s the thinking about the writing that’s the problem. And now I’m writing about the thinking about it, which may be a problem, too. Which is why this is an exorcism. Or am I secretly looking for the savior(s)? Either way, we walked to the boardwalk and were looking out at the sea – which ebbs and flows, just like people; we’re mostly water, too – and the weather was perfect, if that exists anymore; late summer at the beach.

            “The goal is not happiness,” my half friend said. “The goal is acceptance. To be where you are. Now.”

            Then it clicked. That name.

            I had to get to work and I was frantically texting my poly-friend while running to the bus stop: “Is your crush’s last name _______?”

            She wrote back, “Yes. Why?”

            Okay. So there was an email in 2021 that got me non-suicidal for two days, which was about a book of mine that is now three books ago – damn – and that agent, still, to this day, has not rejected it. She just requested it in fall 2021, then... nothing. She even rejected my next book a year later, but said of the other one: “I’m still considering...” But mostly, I dealt with her assistant. He’d respond to me. And then I realized... it’s the same guy! The brother of my friend’s crush who loves strip clubs!

            But any possible optimism from these coincidences ends up feeling worse. Like if there’s a chance, that’s the hardest of all. That thighs-on-fire feeling when you’re in the last twenty minutes of an all-day drive. I don’t know if or when I’m getting out of the car.

            This agent said he remembered me from his assistant days and so we began texting and emailing informally. Which was new for me. I was used to sending job interview type emails to agents, and then my books sound like I just woke up. And this guy asked me the question I always want people to ask. “How many books have you written?”

            I gave him the litany.

            “You’re so prolific!” he wrote back, which I took to mean, “You’re so pathetic!”

            I sent him, upon his request, my first and last book. Then I waited. I wrote him polite reminder emails, which he didn’t respond to. And then he did, when he rejected me. But his rejection was the longest I’ve ever received, to date. This felt like major progress. Usually when I get a personalized rejection, they’re much shorter. And even more often, when it’s a ‘good rejection,’ it’s still only a form letter. Then there’s the plain old form letter regular rejection letter, and then the most common – though the hardest to keep track of – is no response at all.

            My poly-friend was throwing a New Year’s party. “You’re coming. Everyone says so.” Flattering but also not a choice. But what else was I going to do? Watch PBS Newshour and eat cereal and I don’t even know what I was reading at the time. I went to the party. There was a lot of tinsel and colorful lights and her living room has an arch and they even made a glittery curtain. How apropos. Someone took a picture of me, which my poly-friend sent me days later with the caption: “Abject terror.” It was true. I looked terrified. And that was before the night began.

             A woman showed up who I was informed was single, and I could not, for the life of me, flirt with her. Seemingly she was flirting with me. Prolonged eye contact. The touching of the arm. Making comments about my poly-friend’s ceiling which felt like lobbing me a ball I couldn’t catch. I didn’t know what to say about ceilings! I felt like a pathetic bump on a log at this glitzy, happy party.

            My poly-friend grabbed my arm and said, “Do you want to talk to me while I pee?” Of course I did. She was being a good host.

            I faced the door while she told me, “I don’t know if you want to meet him but _____ is here.” The agent! The long rejection one. She pointed him out when we came out of the bathroom. I did nothing. I went back to trying to flirt this woman on the other side of the curtain and did nothing there, too. At midnight, when all the couples were kissing, this woman, still brushing her arm against mine, said softly in my ear, “It’s 2024...”

            And all I could think to say back was, “Yeah...”

            On the subway, half an hour later, surrounded by the other long faces, I told myself, you know, it would’ve been kind of spooky if you’d nailed it. Like I’d been so depressed all through the holidays, that failing to be fun and charming with this woman was completely acceptable. Or, not that I could see this then, was it possible that maybe I did not enjoy her company?

            “She was horrible!” my poly-friend told me days later. “After you left, she was making out with everyone! She was saying things like, ‘I snap my fingers and sex comes to me.’ Who says that?!” Okay, so I dodged a bullet. But I also knew if I’d been on her list, I probably would’ve pined for her for months, rationalizing that it would all somehow work out. Which is depressing. Even if it didn’t happen.

            But before I left the party, I decided, like in the old life insurance days, do something scary and you’ll feel better. Which rarely resulted in a sale, but was very good for my self-esteem. So after midnight, I decided to walk through the glittery curtain, introduce myself to the agent, and then you can leave.

            Well, it was a mess. He was on drugs, first of all. Grinding his teeth, apologizing profusely for being high – he kept telling me, “Don’t listen to what I’m saying!” – but he kept talking and I kept listening. He was perched atop a steep staircase leading to the basement which seemed like a dangerous place to stand for someone on drugs. But I didn’t want to do anything to change anything. He was trying to give me the time of day, trying to be nice, shouting into my ear about my book in great detail, and with the all tinsel around us and how I vaguely feared for his life, I thought, this is the farthest you’ve ever gotten.

            Like that soft voice said moments before, “It’s 2024...”

            Closer.

---

Crockett Doob has been published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Newtown Literary, HiLoBrow, Free Flash Fiction, Airplane Reading, Literally Stories (forthcoming), and featured on the podcast, Queens Memory. He is also a film editor who has worked on the Oscar nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild and the critically acclaimed Ghostbox Cowboy.

Jennifer Pinto

Figuring Out C 

C stands for Convincing.

First you beg your parents for piano lessons. When pure begging doesn't work, you write a letter listing the benefits of music for brain function. You wiggle your fingers over an imaginary keyboard whenever you hear music playing. Everywhere you go, you keep an eye out for advertisements for piano lessons.

Or maybe C is for Convenience

Like the flyer you find in the foyer of the public library. A piece of purple paper with big black hand printed letters promising, “Piano lessons taught in your own home at your convenience.” It is tacked to a large cork bulletin board and stands out from the other notices offering babysitting or book clubs for bored housewives. You rip the flyer off the bulletin board and let the tiny white tack fall to the floor and roll under the wooden bench along the wall. You wave it in your mom’s face and say, “How about this one, Mom. This one is convenient.”

C is also for Considering

While you wait for your parents to make up their minds about the potential piano lessons, you spend your afternoons sitting on the wooden bench of the old piano in your living room. The one you convinced your parents to buy from the school secretary who was downsizing to a small apartment and no longer had room for. It was really cheap. It may even have been free since she had no use for it anyway. You slouch over the keyboard and bang on the keys to a tune inside your head.

“Would you please stop that awful racket,” your dad yells.

“It wouldn’t be noise, it would be music, if I knew how to play.”

On the day of your first lesson, you try not to look surprised that he doesn't resemble any piano teacher you’ve ever imagined. All of the teachers at school are either gray-haired ladies with spidery purple veins crawling up their calves or bald men with pot bellies that hang over their worn-out belts. He rides up your driveway on his red and black bicycle with a backpack slung over one shoulder. He’s wearing jeans and an I love New York t-shirt, the kind where the word “love” is replaced by a red heart. He’s got on black converse tennis shoes and big round sunglasses. The weirdest part is he is smoking a pipe.

“My mom doesn't allow smoking in the house.”

 “No problem,” he says and shoves the pipe into the front pocket of his jeans. You can still smell his pipe long after your lesson is over.

C is for Confidence or maybe for Cocky

He didn’t come with any music books. He simply pulled out blank sheets of music manuscript paper from his backpack and scribbled the notes between the lines. Any song you wanted to learn, he could write it for you in minutes. Like he didn’t have to follow any one’s rules. He created whatever music he wanted right there on those sheets. You ask for Billy Joel’s Piano Man and Faithfully by Journey.

You sit down at your piano week after week trying to coordinate the notes with the keys. It's not as much fun as you dreamed it would be. After several months of lessons, your enthusiasm starts to fizzle out like a soda that's been left open on the counter too long. You forget to practice and beg your mom to cancel your lesson, so you don’t feel embarrassed. You're pretty sure his enthusiasm for your playing has also waned. You've caught him more than once dozing off during your lesson.

C stands for Continue

You are told you need to continue your lessons because of money. Not that your parents have already invested so much into your lessons, but rather because your mom found out the piano teacher needs the money. In fact, she has decided to sign herself and your two sisters up for lessons as well. She seems very concerned with helping him get back on his feet. Later she designs new flyers and makes you deliver them to every mailbox in your neighborhood. At first you are happy because you figure if he has more students, then your mom will let you quit. When she tells you to put one up on the bulletin board in the foyer of the library, you crumple it up and flush it down the toilet instead.

C is for Clam Chowder

You climb down off the school bus and look down the street toward your house. You peek from behind the old oak tree and see the red and black bicycle leaning up against the side of your garage. You wonder why he is already at your house and drag your feet the rest of the way home. The house is filled with the scent of his pipe. “I started my lesson early,” your mom explains. “This way he won’t have to stay so late.”  By the time everyone finishes their lesson, it’s time for dinner. You are confused to see the piano teacher sitting in your spot at the table. You open your mouth to say something, but your mom is giving you that stare with one eyebrow raised. You slide over to the seat at the end of the table and ask, “What's for dinner?” She says she has made her famous clam chowder. The one you know she secretly buys from Stancatos but calls it her own. Usually for special guests. She serves the adults large steaks and baked potatoes. The kids get hot dogs and soggy fries. Your dad says he’ll have a hot dog too. “Don’t be ridiculous. There is a steak for you,” she says. He insists on eating the hot dog.

Later that night, you ask your dad what he thinks of the piano teacher. “You’re the one who insisted on lessons,” he says. Something is puzzling you, but you can’t decide what exactly. You sneak around the house looking for clues. Like a detective without a plan. You steal your mom’s copy of The Thorn Birds and read all the juicy parts twice. You’re careful to leave the dog-eared pages turned down and put your mom’s handwritten note back between the exact pages where you found it. The note where she wrote out the details of the simple affair between Meggie and Father Ralph. You wonder what she means by simple.

One day when you are done with your lesson, your dad slides onto the piano bench. “Scoot over, it's my turn.” He has agreed to add himself to the lineup of lessons because the piano teacher still doesn’t have enough to make ends meet. You watch as your dad struggles to play a simple tune. The arthritis in his fingers makes it difficult to hit the right keys. Behind his back, the piano teacher looks over at your mom and rolls his eyes.

C is for Convalescence

You happily skip the rest of the way home from the bus stop because when you peek from behind the oak tree, you don’t see the bicycle in your driveway. You go inside and find your mom pacing back and forth, her face flushed with worry. “What's wrong?” you ask.

“Oh, it's nothing, the piano teacher is just late today.”  She tells you to sit at the piano and practice until he arrives. Hours go by and you beg your mom to let you go to bed. “No,” she says, “he’ll be here. Just keep playing.” Your butt is numb from the hard wooden bench and your fingers are tired. When you hear your parents arguing in the kitchen, you sneak upstairs to your bedroom.

You find out the next day after school that the piano teacher had been hit by a car while riding his bicycle. Your heart skips just a tiny bit as you imagine your afternoons free from lessons. But you see that your mom is terribly upset. “His ear was nearly torn off the side of his head.” she says. “He was on his way over here for my lesson. The doctor said he had no one else to call.”

Now when you practice the piano, he is listening from where he is resting on the pull-out couch in the family room. “That key is C," he yells. “When are you ever going to figure out C? Try it again.” You adjust your fingers over the keys and start over. You wonder why he isn't in his own house and if he is ever going to leave his convalescent bed.

C is for …

You come downstairs for breakfast and peek in on him. As you come around the corner, you see your mom stand up quickly and straighten her blouse. “Go on, get yourself some breakfast,” she says. You pour the milk on your Rice Krispies and listen to the snap crackles and pops. These sounds stay in your ears all day keeping you from thinking of anything else.

“Something weird’s going on at my house,” you tell your friends. They giggle and clasp their hands over their mouths as you describe the piano teacher laying in your family room and your mom nursing him back to health.

When you arrive home from school you find the sofa bed has been folded up and the family room restored to normal. You stand in the doorway and listen carefully to your parents arguing in the kitchen. You walk over to the piano and start to bang on the keys. “Will you please stop playing that god damned piano,” your father yells. You go upstairs, sit cross legged on the bed in your room and look up the word “cuckold” in the dictionary.

---

Jennifer Pinto is a psychologist who writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband. She has three grown children and a Goldendoodle pup named Josie. She enjoys making pottery, cooking Indian food and drinking coffee at all hours of the day. Her work has been published in Sundog Lit, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Bookends Review and The Bluebird Word (forthcoming).

Jane Bloomfield

Exit Through the Resthome

‘Is FOSH a word?’ asked Dad, placing it on the Scrabble board.

‘It is now,’ I said.

FOSHIT.  FOSHIN HELL. FOSH, FOSH, FABULOUS FOSH. FOSH UP. FOSH DOWN. FOSHABLE. FOSH OFF. FOSH YOU. FOSH ME. FOSH THEM. FOSH ALL THAT CAREFUL PLANNING FOR RETIREMENT. WHAT A LOAD OF FUCKING FOSH.

I hadn’t seen my Dad for six months, not that he’d remember but I did. A sad kind of guilt had been gnawing away at me. Another kind of family mess had been keeping me away. I knew it would happen one day. I stopped my rental car beside him on the driveway. He’d snuck out for his postprandial, he was crafty when it came to learning the gate-code. His mop of white hair all bouffant in the wind - an Andy Warhol comb-over. His brown brogues wallpapered with different walks of clay, his black bomber jacket zipped tight to the 16 degree Celsius day.

‘Hello Dad!’ I said, lifting my sunglasses and poking my face into the sun.

He looked, he looked hard, his wild brows met in the middle. His face read it wanted to make the right reply but was damned if it could. He had no idea who I was.

‘Hello,’ he said, politely.

I parked and walked back to greet him with a daughterly kiss and offered him my arm. He declined. I was glad to see him out in the spring sun.

‘Did you knot all that flax, Dad?’

‘Yes. It grows too wide. Gets in the way of the cars.’

I liked to think of the action of his hands twisting and knotting endless long flax fronds around the top fence wire. There aren’t many dexterous tasks when you move into a rest-home everything is done for you. No teabags to get out of a box and place in a cup, or spoonfuls of coffee to scoop into a Bodum. Breakfast was always Dad’s chore. All those carefully nurtured fine-motor-skills heading back to base zero, along with everything else. At the end of the drive, Dad halted. He looked up and down the road and at each passing car.

‘You going to hitch a ride to Auckland?’

‘No,’ he said, staring quizzically at his rest home signage. “Dementia Care Centre”. ‘I’m sure it’s very nice. But I wouldn’t want to live there.’

We walked back up the drive and into the dayroom. Suzanne* appeared and pounced on Dad.

‘Hello you,’ she’d said, ‘I’m going to give you a kiss.’

‘That would be nice’, he said, and puckered up.

Bloody hell, I’d heard about rest home couples and the replacing of the absent spouse with someone new. Suzanne slapped one firmly behind his ear. A peck to his pucker. It took me by surprise, Dad is still snowy-haired handsome but he had a partner on the outside. We took up chairs in the dayroom in a heady stench of urine no other TV watchers seemed to notice. I checked my chair for dampness before I sat. Snores rattled nearby while Dad tapped his long fingers on the grubbied arm of his LazyBoy in perfect time to Ravel’s Bolero.

‘Suzanne’s got the hots for you, Dad,’ I said. Hoping it was just was a random act of affection, but Suzanne was in front of us again and had plans. To sit with dad -on his chair.

‘Move over or I’ll have to sit on your bush,’ she shouted.

‘Help’. A nearby nurse got her settled in another chair, then leapt onto the balcony to prevent another resident taking a slash on the wooden deck. Dad took a Turkish Delight from the box Suzanne offered and struggled with its wrapper. The TV composer with a Ronnie Wood mullet heralded in a Johann Strauss waltz.

I snuck out for supplies and later took Dad back to my cabin at the motor camp for microwaved tomato, basil pesto and cream soup. He commented on its spiciness and ate thin slices of brie and nibbles of ciabatta bread. He didn't mention my small abode - the double bed in the corner. We could have been anywhere.

‘This café is very quiet,’ he said.

We hoofed it to the movie Brigit Jones’ Baby in the village. Dad chose a hockey pokey cone, he normally has chocolate. The cinema soon filled with elderly couples clutching parsnip crisps and glasses of pinot gris. Friday night at the flicks. Dad held my hand in the dark. We have similar paws, lean, veiny, long fingers with deep nail beds. His hand was warm and smooth resting with mine on the seat between us. His grip didn’t change over the full two hours three minutes. My hand almost cramped but I held on tight in the dark.

Dad’s always been a hand holder. I thought to periods in my life I felt shy to hold his in public. In my twenties mostly. Thought we’d look like some sort of pervy older man with his young mistress. Dumb really to shun that fatherly affection. I felt evil about it right then. Wished I could erase it.

BJB is full of f’ing and blinding. And shafting. Dad laughed in all the right places along with all the couples around us. They probably got some later. Dad got reheated corn beef, mash and cabbage, a glass of Syrah and a pottle of pills.

‘What are they all for?’ I asked.

‘No idea,’ he replied, and downed them in one. ‘I’ll go upstairs soon ... I'd like to move that painting.’ He pointed across the empty linoleum to the corner of the dining room. 'Put my ships there.'

It was 8.45 pm, someone had been in Dad’s bed. Maybe it was Suzanne waiting to kiss him goodnight. His biscuit tin was open and telltale Tim Tam crumbs peppered his pillow. I brushed them off, put an escaped biscuit sitting like a frightened mouse on his nightstand, alongside his electric razor on recharge and his permanently in transit navy-blue toilet bag, back in its container. Dad was putting his pyjamas over his clothes. He always complained of the cold. I helped with the buttons, and tucked him in.

Before I left, I changed the wall calendar from an appointment-less June to September. Wrote: Jane visited!!! Smiley face, love heart, smiling Kiwi xxx on the correct squares, and kissed him goodnight.

Night night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite, we said together.

The next day it was wall-to-wall rain. I made ham and brie sandwiches, looking past the pink and beige caravans to the Whangateau estuary. The tide was in. Neat sets of four, crusts on, wrapped in creased brown paper. His and hers.

We set out for Goat Island Marine Reserve in between showers. Escaping Frida, whose glass eye was wonky, a sightless orb pointing forever upwards. Earlier she’d plopped it out into her hanky. A pirate polishing a cannonball. Ready. Aim. Fire.

Suzanne was quiet that day. She did not follow Dad into the toilet and refuse to vacate as he peed like she’d done the night before. Thank FOSH.

There was no one at the sea side. We couldn’t get out of the car the storm was so wild. An impressive swell surged between the island and the headland. A black shag managed to land in a cross-wind onto its woody basket of a nest.

‘Do you miss the sea, Dad?’

‘Ooh yes,’ he replied.

The salty old sea dog. Ex-naval Commander, lover of ships, the wild blue ocean and the officers’ mess. Now rheumy-eyed, often wiping thick tears with a licked finger.

Back at Leigh Harbour, fishing boats sat in relative calm but no one fished off the wharf. A gannet dived, a hungry arrow barely making a splash. We drove on to Matheson’s Bay - perfect in any tide – Dad’s favourite line. Oddly he never asked to go to his home of thirty years, just around the corner. I’m not sure how I would have handle that if he had. We ate our sandwiches with the windows down, rain speckling the door frames. Dad took a bite out of each one, rewrapped them and stuffed them in the glove box.

‘They’ll do for later,’ he said.

I’d lost my appetite too and fed mine to the seagulls on the bonnet of the rental. They put on an impressive show for us – Cirque du Redbill.

Back at the ranch, it was lunchtime. We sat as a three, Dad ate, and I chatted with resident Tim about dogs. Tim’s canine companion was shut in his room – on a meatless diet. Geoffrey the white Scotch terrier had a skin condition (and a weight problem.)

‘He’s my favourite person,’ said Tim, ‘he is like a person to me.’ Tim unfolded his paper napkin on the window side of his plate and with the stealth of a boarding school pupil on Golden Syrup steam pudding day, he deftly arranged forkfuls of gravy-oozing meaty pie into a neat square, wrapped it swiftly and plunged it into the left-hand pocket of his grey tracksuit pants.

I worried for seepage. Dad was onto pudding. Tim downed his – a bowlful of garish green jelly with soft orange sliced peaches.

‘Time for Geoffrey’s meat,’ he told us, and trotted, head down out of the dining room, clutching that moist pocket.

I thought of Dad's sandwiches jammed in the glove box. He used to love a picnic. FOSH it. I’d just leave them there.

For later.

*(name changed)

---

Queenstown, New Zealand based writer, Jane Bloomfield, is the author of the Lily Max children’s novels. Her poetry and CNF are published and forthcoming in Tarot, Turbine |Kapohau, Does It Have Pockets, a fine line - NZ Poetry Society, MEMEZINE, Roi Fainéant Press, The Spinoff, Sunday Magazine and more. Find her at Jane Bloomfield: truth is stranger than fiction.

Elizabeth Burton

How to Return a Relationship

Our Policy

While we don’t have a satisfaction guarantee, we do have a generous return policy.[1] Many lovers, particularly those you guarded your heart against, can be returned within thirty days of the breakup. There are some exceptions, however:

• The man who wanted to be friends.

The hard part, here, is that you won’t be friends at all, no matter what he says. You’ll both say hello when you encounter one another at parties, [2] and he’ll give you a pitying smile that indicates you should have moved on ages ago when you ask how he is, but other than that, nada, no matter how many friendly texts you send. [3]

• The one who didn’t find you attractive.

Depending on how confident you are, this one might or might not require scoops of ice cream, tequila, a close friend’s assurances, a one-night stand with a man you meet in a bar who is wearing a lounge suit and toupee just to prove you’ve still “got it,” [4] or months of intense training at the gym to have a body no one could overlook.

• The fling who (you thought) wanted something serious.

While most flings can be returned easily, this one requires being extra patient with yourself as you remember that leopards don’t change their spots; even though this leopard was handsome, employed, and well-educated, he still had teeth that wanted to bite into something other than you. This will require journaling and some time asking yourself, preferably surrounded by nice-smelling candles in a bubble bath, why you can see more in him than he can see in himself.

• The one who “found himself” with your good friend.

You never realized he was lost. You struggle with wanting him to be infected with boils versus trying to be the bigger person. After all, at least the two of them had the decency to invite you to the wedding. You consider black roses, extra thorns, as your gift, but think better of it and pamper yourself with what you would have spent.

• The one who said he never loved you.

The sex was so good, he stayed. At least you have that distinction to hold onto.

• The one who claimed he was just not happy.

With you, that is. Or maybe with his life. He’s just not sure. The next thing you know he’s living in an ashram in Nashville, where he plays country music about his truck on weeknights. You almost listen to him play on a local podcast, but then remember you haven’t liked country music since Johnny Cash died.

• The one who said you could do better.

He leaves you in the middle of the night, with nothing but a bill for a credit card he’s taken out in your name. You spend more hiring a private detective to find him and chase down the money than you would have spent paying off the credit card. You decide, after months of wanting to strangle him, that he was right.

• The one who said he could do better.

This one hurts. You gave it all you had, but felt he was holding something back. “Let’s talk about it,” you say, but he shakes his head and tells you it won’t do any good. He needs something more, something different he can’t quite define. You realize he’s defined it in spades some months later when he marries the next woman he dates.

• The one who ghosted you.

You call him up to tell him about a difficult day at work and get voicemail. You send a text you can clearly see he read but he never responds. All you want to know is what happened. [5]

• The one who was perfect until you found out he also had a perfectly good spouse.

Depending on how far it went, this one might take a while to get over. Your sense of who you are may tilt because you’re not the “type” to have affairs. Resist the urge to tell his wife: remember the messenger is always shot and bullets hurt more than breakups.

While the above returns are unlimited, recognize that your patience may not be. For tips on Finding the Perfect Mate, see our newly redesigned dating website.

If you feel you’ve returned a lover by mistake, please contact your therapist at the first available opportunity.

Damaged goods can only be returned in limited circumstances and are subject to restocking fees equivalent to a month’s worth of therapy or hard liquor, whichever your lover prefers.

Footnotes

[1] Returns not valid for hook-ups or one-sided relationships.

[2] If you encounter him at work functions, please fill out the following survey: Do You Stay or Do You Leave Your Job? Your answers to this will largely depend on your financial status and how public you two were in your relationship. If everyone in the office knew, they’ll all be forced to take sides. Once the dust has settled, you’ll probably want to spiff up your résumé.

[3] If you do send more than three unanswered texts, please visit our “How to Let Go” helpline, where you’ll find sections on Grieving What Might Have Been, Self-Care Tips, and How Not to Bore a Friend Excessively After a Break-Up.

[4] See “Your Self-Confidence is Broken,” where you’ll learn how to appreciate the next blind date you go on, since he’ll be better than this by default.

[5] If you feel tempted to go by his house or workplace, please see Stalking Laws in All 50 States.

---

Elizabeth Burton writes and teaches in far Western Kentucky. She holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, The MacGuffin, Chautauqua, JMWW, Split Lip, Bending Genres, Porcupine Literary, among others. She shares her life with two horses, three dogs, five cats, and a husband who wonders why he's always last on these lists.

Ellen Notbohm

The Piano’s Choice

Such a sweet dilemma: my new job would pay an annual bonus. Save or spend? Need or want? Practical or fanciful? The first year, I leaned toward practical—the orthodontia I’d long felt I needed. I bore the bands and brackets of my oral hardware stoically, even through the swollen gums of pregnancy, patiently awaiting the smile of my dreams. But the following year, I chose fanciful. I wanted a baby grand piano.

Our house started life as an outbuilding for a dairy. Rooms had been tacked on over the years, and not artfully. Postage-stamp bathrooms, an unadorned fireplace gouged into a random wall, a skinny kitchen. But the living room stretched long and wide, spacious enough to accommodate eight feet of piano and bench, and the comfortable furniture to enjoy listening to and looking at it.

Finally, after twenty years of playing other people’s pianos, I would buy one of my very own. I knew what I wanted—a gently used Yamaha baby grand. I wasn’t concerned when I didn’t find what I wanted right away as I explored the half-dozen or so piano stores in town; I knew it was out there somewhere. I could hear it in my head.

After a search of some weeks, I stepped in the door of Western Piano Company. A glistening ebony Yamaha baby grand, exactly what I’d been looking for, sat off to the left, every bit as beautiful as I’d envisioned, my fantasy keyboard come to life.

But it barely registered.

Straight ahead, in the back of the store, stood another Yamaha. But this one was a console, all sleek rounded lines, elegantly contemporary, in a rich brown.

Not at all what I was looking for. And yet.

I couldn’t look away. It held me, like a tractor beam. Three steps in the door and I couldn’t move.

A salesman approached quietly, courteously, stopping a short distance off to my side. And just as quietly, he asked one of the most memorable questions of my life.

“Did that piano just choose you?”

Without hesitation, I answered, “I think it did.”

The salesman said nothing, just waited. A spell of moments passed. Then I blinked out of my stupor, looked at him and said, “This piano isn’t all what I had in mind.”

He chuckled and said it happened all the time.

When I finally moved across the showroom to the piano, opened the fallboard, touched the keys, swooned to their voluptuous sound, I fell irretrievably in love. Please let me be able to afford this, I prayed silently. The price tag hung on the side, the number just out of sight. The salesman smiled at me and nodded. I picked up the tag. The price was within pennies of the amount of my bonus.

The walnut console piano moved into the space intended for the ebony baby grand, somehow exuding a calm confidence that things were now the way they were supposed to be. Indeed, I couldn’t imagine how I had ever imagined otherwise.

My son was born the following year, and within another year was pulling himself up to the piano bench and slapping the seat, wanting up. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in my dismayed struggles with the Chopin, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky that had come much more easily in my youth. Though it would be a while before my baby spoke (or sang) a word, he pounded the cover of a children’s songbook, Go In and Out the Window, riffling the pages to his favorites. So we sang, my piano and I. “Simple Dreams,” “Hush Little Baby,” “The Mulberry Bush,” “Pop! Goes the Weasel.”

Oh, my versatile piano! I think it knew what I really wanted to play was “Funeral for a Friend.” To release my inner Elton. The sheet music didn’t look too intimidating. Ah, but the reality. I made it, sputtering and halting, a few pages in before who’m I fooling? thoughts pinkened my cheeks.

My choosy piano never complained while my children grew, my husband and I accommodated each other’s expanding career travels, my parents aged, and my time at the piano again became a dream I kept in my back pocket. But never for a moment did I imagine myself without it. As my anchor, my touchstone, my sentry, I was emotionally tied to it with an umbilical cord of, well, piano wire.

When we moved a few years later, I didn’t trust transporting my piano to the general moving company, any more than I might have allowed my family to be crammed into a giant van amidst the other furniture and flotsam of our lives. I called a highly-recommended piano-moving company. On the appointed day, I answered the doorbell that rang on the dot of the appointed time.

Handsome and sturdy as a Basque oak, the man on our porch introduced himself as George. My eyes swept the porch, the walkway, the street. He was alone. I asked where his helper was. He said he needed no helper: “I’m a piano mover, ma’am.”

“But this one is heavy!” I said, realizing at once how foolish it sounded. What piano isn’t heavy? Still, my husband and I together couldn’t budge our 400-pound console an inch, despite his considerable strength from a lifetime of physical work.

George repeated, “I’m a piano mover, ma’am.”

Then he stepped inside and asked, “Where is she?”

She? She? How had I missed that, all these years? I fell irretrievably in love with George the piano mover.

He went to the piano—her—and leaned down, lifting the end with one hand and placing a dolly underneath. He looked up when I gasped and smiled. Again he said gently, “I’m a piano mover, ma’am.”

I followed them out the door, worrying. “But you’re parked on a hill!” The dolly wobbled under the piano like the strap-on roller skates of my childhood.

“It’s no problem. I’m a piano mover, ma’am.” In his weightlifter-gloved hands, the piano seemed to levitate into the truck, obedient, and proud to be so.

I trailed her and George to the new house, filled with the sense something subtly extraordinary was happening. George was one of the most sterling professionals I ever had (or ever would) encounter.

He’d been a piano mover since his teens. He thought it a dream job, a calling for someone strong, who loved the sound of piano music, and sensitive to the challenges of moving something both unwieldy and delicate, with many thousands of moving parts. The math and the physics of each move required a different intersection of precision and power. No room for slip-ups, when so many pianos came with precious family stories and histories.

George floated my piano up the several steps and into our new home, where she looked fabulous. Then he asked if he could play her. His artistry eclipsed anything I’d ever managed, a hundred times over. The wildly vibrant notes of something jazzy yet Joplin-esque soared celestially toward the two-story ceiling. The house and the piano were about the same age, adolescents, and George’s music couldn’t have been a more perfect introduction to each other.

“What kind of piano do you have?” I asked, entranced. When he said he didn’t have one, I went teetering to the brink of tears. This piano should be his. We could load her back in the truck and send her with him to his, clearly, better home. He laughed kindly, so sweet and gracious, saying no, he would have a piano of his own one day soon.

I watched him drive away, knowing I would never again look at my piano the same way I had only minutes before. George had passed through my life in barely an hour. But he would remain one of its most indelible cameos.

Twenty-six years have passed since George worked his musical magic. Soon we’ll be downsizing. Our next home awaits. Is it too much to hope for? I’ll call the piano company to book a move. The doorbell will ring at the appointed hour, and I’ll open the door. I’ll hear those words, that voice, and my head will swim. I’m a piano mover, ma’am.

She’s waiting for him too.

---

Ellen Notbohm’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. Her short prose has appeared in many literary journals, including Brevity, Halfway Down the Stairs, Quail Bell, Eunoia, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Eclectica, and in anthologies in the US and abroad.

Debbie Feit

Take Two and Call Your Therapist in the Mourning

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

Parentoxetine Hydrochlordied (Extended Release)

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

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

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

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

What is this drug used for?

• Developing an appreciation for the fragility of life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Your prescription may automatically be refilled.

What do I do if I miss a dose?

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

What are possible side effects?

• Ugly crying jags, intermittent weeping or a flat affect

• Insomnia or excessive sleepiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

Guaranteed.

---

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

Susan T. Landry

The Beach

Americans and Chinese recall memories very differently.

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

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

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

 My American Autobiographical Self

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

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

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

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

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

~

My Chinese Autobiographical Self

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Angela Townsend

Bones of the Shelter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie R. Enszer

My Mother’s Furniture

House

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

Royal Blue Couch

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

Full Bed

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

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

Master Bed

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

Closet

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

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

Pots and Pans

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

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

Antique Bedroom Set

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

Cabbage Roses

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

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

Curio Cabinet

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

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

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

Dining Room Table

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

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

Glassware

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

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

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

Cedar Chest

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upholstered Chair

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

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

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