Lobo, King of the Dogs // Lenore Weiss

from judge Teresa Carmody: Every childhood is mythical. If we’re lucky, we grow older. And if we turn toward language to remember how it was, we might just conjure the many mythical creatures that lived alongside us. I love the voice in this piece—the contemplative hush of it, and its unexpected turns of phrase and image.

I grew up amongst older kids, counting bees and straining chunks of sandstone into empty soup cans. I watched cats play with dead mice and then ran up the block to an abandoned house filled with ceramic bowls heaped with flies. Like us, there were dogs, strays that wandered in the neighborhood sniffing garbage cans. My playground was the lot that adjoined our apartment building; it’s where I climbed pretend mountains to explore new countries, where I studied flowers and whatever happened to grow in broken glass–clover, chicory, and dandelions, the local flora of the Bronx that took root amidst the discarded empty TV boxes that became our playthings. We rolled in them until we became dizzy-sick, our sides sore from neighborhood kids kicking outside the box.

Sometimes, in the summer, I’d walk with my family to City Island east of Throgs Neck, surrounded by the Long Island Sound, where restaurants served up fried oysters, clams, and eels. I thought the world consisted of the Manhattan skyline held together with roasted coffee from the Café Bustelo factory—a smell that will forever be enshrined in my memory, together with garbage festering outside our building in the summer heat.

If I wasn’t playing in the vacant lot, I held court upstairs in our one-bedroom apartment, on cold days sifting through the contents of a toy box stored in the foyer, just beneath the dumb-waiter that had been used at some point as a garbage disposal, but now served as a highway for cockroaches, allowing them to make excursions throughout the building. The bugs persisted no matter how much we crushed, sprayed, or stepped on them; the small white ones were the babies. The toy box, on the other hand, easily exposed its gifts, which included a stuffed squirrel my father had given my mother during their courtship days, and as such, an artifact of love. There was a mismatched collection of building blocks and a plastic bag that included a lump of clay, too hard to shape into anything, but nonetheless still interesting. Next to the toy box was the hallway closet (my parents’) with a box of comics and a wine-colored velvet bathrobe. On days when I was sick, my mother allowed me to use it as a cover.

In kindergarten, my teacher was not the warm-hearted woman who ushered her charges to their seats with a loving smile. Her hair was so thin, I could see her scalp. She believed in disciplining children by making them stand in the darkest corner of the clothing closet. The only happy thing I remember about her class was looking into a kaleidoscope, but that wasn’t enough to forgive her, in addition to the sour containers of milk she handed out every morning.

Leaving home for kindergarten made me feel sick. I was happy to sit in the apartment and examine the many shoes that had been pushed to the back of the closet, including red and black galoshes, all of which had a rubbery smell and still had not dried out from the last snowstorm, and spend time with my box of crayons, mourning for each one that was no longer whole. I felt insecure in being pushed outside the apartment, where I’d learned to walk holding on to the arm of a chair and scouting my way to a glass table in the living room. Leaving the security of the apartment for school was an excruciating experience.

We lived along Hunts Point Avenue. “The Avenue,” as we referred to it, had dry goods stores filled with nurses’ uniforms and gray wool sweaters, and a stationery store we visited at the beginning of each school year. I loved the store for its pencils and crayons and its notebooks of white composition paper. It was just a few stores up from the delicatessen where they sold corned beef and pastrami sandwiches lacey with white fat, and where some rough-looking older boys stopped me one day to say, “You have a pussy in between your legs.” I looked, but saw nothing.  

Beyond the deli, and at the outermost limits of the Avenue, was the Garrison Bakery run by an Italian family who sold black-and-white cookies, five-inch disks with an anise taste. Past the bakery was the Bruckner Expressway, a thoroughfare of cars rushing headlong in opposite directions.

Once I crossed the Expressway, I arrived at the Hunts Point subway station. It was flanked on one side by a newsstand where people bought copies of the New York Post, the Daily News, and also The New York Times, which was displayed in a smaller stack beneath the two other papers. Then there was a triangular park with wooden benches where men, women, and children watched pigeons eat bread crusts. From here, the rest of Southern Boulevard fanned out, home to a toy store and a Chinese restaurant where we ordered sub-gum after going to the movies at Loew’s Cinema, where my mother took me to see every movie by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The street was our playground.

Summer raced by in baseball cards, roller skates, hula hoops, hopscotch, marbles, jump ropes, bottle caps, highly-prized Spaldeens that were like tennis balls but without a furry outside, water guns, yo-yos, pea shooters, and coloring book season. Girls collected and traded charms. My “best one” was a purple swan. There were frequent rock-throwing battles where the Longfellow and Bryant Avenue gangs tried to see who’d go crying first to the emergency room of Lincoln Hospital.

 “You hurt?”

“No, just bleeding.”

I was the hula hoop champion of my block and could ride the hoop from my waist up to my neck and back down to my knees without stopping. One summer, I lost 10 pounds practicing outside on the sidewalk until the street lamps came on. I enjoyed roller skating over a slate sidewalk that adjoined the lot, a smooth ride on heavy metal skates with clamps tightened by a key worn on a dirty string around my neck. A heavy rainstorm flooded worms from their underground homes, pink against the black slate sidewalk. But riding down the hill past the Fire Station was the most exciting, watching out for cars, and at the same time, weaving from one side of the street to the other.

Slowly, I began to conquer the blocks that defined my neighborhood.

My explorations fanned out to Southern Boulevard and to the Hunts Point Palace, which, in its heyday, hosted bands from all over the city, but was now a dance studio. A long set of stairs led to a mirrored practice room where I took tap lessons but never got past learning the time step. Up from the Palace, I found Woolworths where I practiced petty thievery, strolled past fish tanks filled with darting slivers of color, past an aisle of pencils, papers, and notebooks—things I coveted and stole. After I exited through the doors and slunked back home, I shouted to myself, “Safe!” like our tag games of ring-a-levio.

Several boys lived on the block, including Eddy, next door to me, and also Bobby and Brian, Dodo’s (her name was Dorothy) twins, plus Melvin, a boy who’d just moved into the building with his parents, who’d escaped from the Nazis and wore clothing that never fit. People said that was because the family got their clothes from the welfare department. Then there was Ronny, Yetta’s son, who later became a heroin addict and stole whatever he could from his mother, but there was no one like Donny who moved through the neighborhood like a clean knife cutting through cheesecake. For weeks, we watched each other. I wasn’t sure in which building he lived. He had dark hair and green eyes. I sat on the stonewall that bordered the lot and saw him cross the street. He asked me, “Can I sit here?”

Warmth radiated from my thighs, a preparation for something I couldn’t imagine, but at the same time, knew everything about. In one moment, my thighs became sweaty and stuck together. I was about six years old. Donny’s complexion was smooth, and he was close enough to my face so I could see a fine network of hair on his ruddy cheek and also above his mouth. I looked at the stupid Buster Brown Oxford shoes my parents made me wear. He asked if he could kiss me, and I said yes. He held my hand. Then the streetlamps came on. I watched him get up. I remained sitting there, still feeling the outline of his lips. Later, I heard from my sisters that he’d moved away. No one knew where. For years, I longed for a boy to make me feel what Donny had—the unknown danger and excitement of physical intimacy.

Each five years apart, my sisters and I shared a bedroom. They slept together. I slept in a separate bed against the wall, and my parents in the living room on a roll-away couch. After they got up in the morning, I plopped into the upholstered chair and looked out to the fire escape, where, during the spring, I grew morning glories in wooden cheese boxes with seeds ordered from the New York City public school system. My first garden grew on the fire escape.

The seeds arrived in brown paper packets stapled to our original order. They looked like small black canoes with an indentation on top. We soaked them in a glass of water. After a day’s immersion, we’d plant them in a cheese box I had procured in advance from Mr. Kurtz’s grocery store at the end of our street. Back then, American cheese arrived in rectangular blocks and was sliced to order—thin, medium, or thick—wrapped in wax paper, folded, and sealed. 

My mother sent me to request an empty cheese box. Mr. Kurtz always wore a white apron and stood close to his register near a display of Hostess Twinkies. He went to the back room of the store and returned with a box about nine inches long. I carried my treasure upstairs. I don’t remember where we got the soil–either from the Five and Dime, or dug some from the vacant lot. We prepared a garden bed for our morning glories by making a hole with the back of a soup spoon for seeds that were slightly swollen and cracked after soaking, pressing them into a prepared row, and covering them up, placing the box in the sunshine outside the kitchen window.

Each day I got up, walked past my two sisters, tiptoed to the kitchen, stuck my head outside the window, and checked on the progress of the seeds. One morning, I looked outside and saw the soil beginning to erupt. Even though I knew better, I used my finger to disrupt the fissure so I could see an individual seed sprout, head bent over like a crooked woman still encased in its seed hat, until it emerged from the soil, growing long and spindly, magically seeking a white string we had saved from a bakery box and thumb-tacked to the window frame. Each day, I’d investigate how much the morning glories had grown. From seeds to seedlings, I watched them wrap and braid themselves along the string. But we had to select the healthiest. We could only grow one or two in the small box. As summer approached, I watched blossoms appear, tightly pressed together like two palms, before they opened into blossoms bluer than Paul Newman’s eyes, bluer than the sky, framing my window.

Some weekends I’d listen to my mother talk with her friends at the kitchen table as they ate slices of her home-baked cake, downed with cups of freshly brewed coffee. My mother filled her yeast cakes with chocolate and nuts; the dough was soft and pliable, the way my mother’s breasts looked when she put on her bra. She taught me Hungarian words for poppyseeds and nuts: mákos and diós, plus the velvety prune butter she used in some of her cakes called lekvár. Around the kitchen table, my mother’s friends discussed everything—which supermarkets were having the best sales, shared tidbits about their children and husbands, and gossiped about the next-door neighbors who were always fighting. I tried to understand how they knew when to move from one topic to the next. 

“Tell your change-of-life baby to leave,” said my mother’s friend, Dodo, whose Italian alcoholic husband had died a few years before, an event she had celebrated in her apartment. My mother smiled. She had given birth to me after she’d turned 40 years old, an age when most of her generation was done with having children. Whenever my parents wanted privacy, they spoke Hungarian. But as my mother’s friends only spoke English, they wanted me to scram.

“Oh, let her stay,” my mother said, running her hand through my dark hair. “She won’t bother us.”

Yetta, who lived on the ground floor on our side of the building, didn’t say much. My mother had told me that Yetta was sitting shiva, mourning for her canary that had recently died after seven years of flying around her living room. “How could you?” Yetta spat through the silver bridge wires of her mouth.

“Do what?” said my mother.

“Come downstairs, the two of you dressed in black?”

“But Yetta,” said Dodo, chewing on a slice of my mother’s yeast cake. “We knew you were upset about Charlie,” the name of the dearly departed canary. “How could you think we were making fun?” Dodo always smelled like an expensive cosmetic counter, always applying moisturizers to her face and body. She pulled Yetta’s blouse up on her shoulder and revealed a lavender bra strap. “Matching panties?”

Yetta was the only one who could afford such luxuries. Her husband gambled and gave her a sizable weekly allowance. She indignantly pulled her blouse back down. “Yes,” she said, and always left a bright pink cupid’s bow on the rim of her cup.

Since large pets were not allowed in the apartment building, Dodo feared her dog Coco would be discovered by the landlord. Our family had a parakeet from Woolworths, and it flew in the living room one day. I chased the bird from one side of the wall to another, as it desperately tried to grip the crown molding, and smacked directly into the wall, landing on the floor in a flutter of green feathers. It didn’t move. I pushed its head. It was dead. Only moments ago, it was flying around the ceiling. I buried the bird in a shoebox, but told no one about my culpability.

In junior high (middle school), I began to get sick.

My mother took it as a personal insult that she had a sickly child. How could she, the self-proclaimed Rock of Gibraltar, steadfast in every storm, calm in the face of any adversity, have a daughter whom you could blow over with a single breath?

Any time the doctors prescribed a new food regimen, she discovered health food stores, places outside of her usual shopping route on Hunts Point Avenue.

I went through a gluten-free phase since the doctors thought I was allergic to wheat products. When that didn’t work, I moved on to all-protein diets, eating broiled meat, cottage cheese, and raw vegetables. I cheated as much as I could, pilfering Milky Ways from the closet. Finally, the doctors decided I didn’t have a food allergy.

I knew it was the Sick Monster who was punishing me for killing my parakeet.

In junior high school, the doctors told my mother they wanted to send me to a hospital “for observation,” which turned into a nasty regimen of urine and bowel collection and giving me tests that required barium enemas. On the morning when I was being discharged, I felt the Sick Monster jab me in the stomach with a sharp fingernail. “I will follow you wherever you go. You will never escape me.”

I returned to school and tried to forget him, discovered the library where I read Greek mythology, stories about Psyche whose husband was invisible at night; Grimm’s fairy tales about three tasks that must be accomplished before a prince can find love, or Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid who dissolved into a sea of foam, sacrificing her silvery tail for stumpy legs. Love wasn’t going to be easy. All the songs on the radio said so. But I thought it had to be the most wonderful thing in the world, the moment when Emile De Becque in South Pacific spots Nellie Forbush across a crowded room. I also dreamed about making the world a better place. But I couldn’t find books to tell me how I was supposed to do any of this, especially how to find the person who was going to share a roll-away couch with me every night. 

Throughout school, I never had a boyfriend.

Maurice was my next-door neighbor. Once he showed me his rock collection with identifying labels. He also had a microscope. One day, we came across a stray dog like any other, with a body lean for the streets, a rib cage visible, black and brown fur oozing around a sore. It was Saturday, several hours before dinner, as days began to shorten and whisper with a cold breath.

My mother had told me never to pet a dog, especially if it were drooling, because that was a sure sign of rabies. One of the twins had gotten bitten by a dog and had to go to the hospital and get injections with a needle that was as long as a baseball bat. I didn’t want to go to the hospital. I backed off and watched the dog from a safe distance. Occasionally, the dog picked up its head and sniffed. Its eyes were green like the pastel chalk we strained over rusted screens and poured into socks on Halloween to pound on people’s front doors.

He told me his name was Lobo.

“Lobo,” I said. “You look hurt. Better hide behind this rock. Don’t let the other kids see you because they might throw rocks. And watch out for Ronny. He’s the meanest. I’ll be right back with food. I promise.” I ran upstairs. I opened the door with my key and hoped my mother was still shopping. I rescued a slice of leftover meatloaf.

Lobo looked at me with his spinning eyes and said that another dog had chased him across Southern Boulevard. He was panting hard. We walked past the washing machine room in the basement. The floor was coated with scum from soap that had flooded countless times. We approached a hole in the pavement where rain had gathered. Lobo lapped up the water and gave me a few hairs from his tail. He said they were magic. If I were in trouble, all I needed to do was to stand in front of a car’s rearview mirror, hold them in my hand, and call out his name.

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Raised in the Bronx and now based in Oakland, Lenore Weiss is the author of a novel, Pulp into Paper, and multiple poetry collections, including Video Game Pointers (2024) and a trilogy exploring love, loss, and mortality. Her prize-winning flash fiction chapbook, Holding on to the Fringes of Love, was published by Alexandria Quarterly Press. A member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor for Mud Season Review, she has collaborated across disciplines, most recently on Life into Light, a chapbook about photosynthesis created with scientist Dr. John Bedbrook. She is currently working on her second novel, tentatively entitled "Not a Good Season for Trust." Lenore has led writing workshops and tutored middle school students.

Infant Of // Patricia Knight Meyer

“Infant Of” is an excerpt from the forthcoming novel WONDERLAND: A Black Market Baby’s Life Underground

“At thirty-eight, you want to find her?”

My mother is stewing in her wheelchair, pulled up alongside the bar in what she calls her “shithole shoebox” senior-living apartment. Although she still walks short distances, she likes how the footrests of her wheelchair rise to meet her feet, accommodating her short legs, “which don’t go all the way up,” she sometimes jokes.

It’s a gray fall day, and we’re sharing our Wednesday happy hour. Having made gin and tonics, I sit in my usual spot on the futon, ready for our chat about how my day at work went, what the pundits on TV are saying, and which news anchor she dreamed she danced with the prior night.

“Oh, Dan Rather had all the moves! With him, it’s always the tango.”

It touches me that despite the limp from a broken hip and the oxygen cord stretched across her face, she still dreams about moving and grooving with journalism’s hottest.

“Do you ever sleep with them?” I once asked.

“No, but Anderson Cooper lets his hand wander.”

“You’re not his type,” I’d reminded her.

“What can I say? Gay men love me!”                                   

She works hard to get the last word, and usually it’s a zinger. But today, my mother isn’t talking about her dreams; she’s talking about mine. It seems she’s seen the Ancestry.com charge I made on her credit card while chasing that dream, and now I’m cornered.

“I thought you’d at least wait for me to drop dead before you looked for her.”

She’s only half joking.

Behind those boxy frames, she studies me. Adjusting her posture, she attempts to appear more composed, perhaps a tad healthier.

“Someday I’ll look, but not now,” I assure her. Having Mommy’s blessing to search isn’t the same thing as telling her I’m already doing so.

“You wanted me to find out, didn’t you? Why else would you use my card?”

She’s got me there. Apparently, not too blind to take a magnifying glass to a credit card statement, it’s like she’s caught me up to something. Which she has.

Having learned that Texas’s birth records were searchable on Ancestry.com, I’d gone momentarily bonkers and used my mother’s Mastercard to open an account. I’d left my wallet at home that day, and her emergency card in my work drawer offered an easy solution to my immediate predicament. I thought I’d gotten away with it.

While at UT Austin years before, I’d stood in the capital-based Bureau of Vital Statistics, mouth agape at the three-foot pile of volumes—all the 1970 birth records for Harris County, one of nine counties in the Houston metropolitan area. “They aren’t by date,” the record keeper said, grunting while she’d stacked them before me. “Each is listed alphabetically, by mother’s last name.”

I’d leafed through thousands of bible-thin pages that day, looking for mothers whose babies were listed as “infants of,” those who most likely had relinquished, women like my birth mother who’d blindly trusted the system that absconded with their infants. But without knowing her name, my birth name, my date, or even the exact year of birth, searching the stacks had seemed daunting and pointless. Now, according to my sources, these records have been digitized and are awaiting scouring. And that’s when I set up the account and started digging. The act seemed benign at the time. Why didn’t I wait until I got home to use my own card? Did I subconsciously want Mommy to find out? Maybe?

“I’ll pay you back,” I say.

“It’s not the money I’m concerned about,” she snaps, side-eyeing me while fumbling in the pocket of her robe for a cigarette and lighter. I check for the hum of her O2 machine, which I don’t hear, and relax—glad she’s not about to accidentally set herself on fire again.

“Even if I found something, I wouldn’t reach out. Not now.”

“Why not?” She asks like she really wants to know. “Don’t you want her to meet me?”

“It’s not her meeting you I’m worried about,” I answer, rattling the ice in my glass, wishing I’d poured a stronger drink.  

Hopefully, that puts her questions to rest. She doesn’t need to know about my years-old profile on CousinConnect.com, or the warning received from a well-intentioned stranger: “I hope you already have a passport. Since 9/11, the passport office only accepts long-form birth certificates.” I don’t know if that’s true, but long-form requirement or not, since the state seems to have no record of me, adoption or otherwise, I guard the one “identifying” document I have with my life—even if it’s a fake, which it very well might be. It’s all I’ve got.

“So, you didn’t find anything?” Mommy pries, the smoke from her last drag screening her concern.

“You remember that massive stack of birth records at the Bureau of Vital Statistics I told you about? How I wanted to go through them, but it was just too much? Well, now they’re searchable online. So, I could potentially find something.”

Seventy-two, my mother nods like she knows everything there is to know about electronic records. Her silence is accentuated with a long sip of her drink and an even longer drag on her smoke. Sometimes silence means things are about to go sideways, and I’ll leave with her upset or crying. Either way, she cries, sitting here hours on end with no one to talk to. She’s not one to join gardening clubs or crochet circles, and her eyes are far too bad for driving.

“I have nothing in common with those people,” she says, peering through the blinds, as shadows shaped like her neighbors amble up to the clubhouse for bingo or backgammon. Unless they are belly up beside her at the neighborhood bar, she considers most her age “fuddy-duddy drips” and “such boring bastards that neither Heaven nor Hell will have them.”

On these visits, I usually call in any meds needing refilling, tidy her apartment, and make a day or two’s worth of food so she eats well while I’m away. “Congrats, you’re finally rid of me,” she’d spat the day she moved in, sulking about her new five-hundred square feet of independence, resigned to accept the fucked-up fate I’d dealt her.

“You can’t leave me in this hellhole to rot and expect me to cope without my vices,” she often barters. “Make it a carton of smokes and a gallon of Bombay if you love me.” I agree reluctantly. My compliance is ushering her to her death, but as Daddy did, I give her whatever she wants; Band Aids for the wounds she believes I’ve inflicted.

Lately, though, the Lexapro seems to be bringing Happy Mommy back, at least a friendlier drunk than the previous version. I’m no longer the “ungrateful, self-centered bitch” of a daughter who dropped her here. Now I’m “the world’s best daughter,” especially when I deliver the goods on time and in sufficient quantities. Still, how can I leave?

No matter how much she says she’s fine, each time I drive away, I’m abandoning her all over again. I look at the clock, calculate the time between now and when I need to head home to my husband, and push the guilt of leaving to the back of my mind.

Pulling out a tray of meds from under the coffee table between us, I begin refilling her massive monthly pill planner. Snap, snap, snap. Prying rows of lids open, I dose each slot, one after the other: morning, noon, afternoon, and night—plop, plop, plop, plop. “Truly, without being morbid,” I say, “I don’t want to share what time we have left with another mother. If I look, it’ll be when you’re gone. Not that you’re replaceable or anything.”

“You sure you didn’t find anything?” she presses.

“Not really,” I lie, dropping each pill into its umpteenth slot.

I had looked. And one record had stood out, an “infant of” with no birth name given or birth father listed, delivered the very same week I was presumably born, to a woman named Dinah—a name that sounds a whole lot like the name my mother let slip long ago, the name Diane. Within seconds, I’d slapped shut my laptop, overwhelmed by the prospect of sliding down a rabbit hole that I—the me I know myself to be—might not climb back out of.

“I saw some ‘infants of’” I admit, “but no real leads. Even if I found a name, can you imagine how hard it would be to track down a person? People get married, they move, they die. But since we’re on the subject, is there anything you need to tell me that you haven’t yet?”

I keep plopping: diuretics, blood pressure pill, blood thinner, heart pill, thyroid med, anti-depressant, NSAID, iron, potassium, vitamin D … Plop, plop, plop, I focus on the slots and try not to look overly interested in her answer.

“What do you mean?” she asks, wiping away a tubular grey ash that has tumbled from the tip of her cigarette and landed in the lap of her lilac house dress.

“Like some details you still need to share? Maybe about how things went down the day you drove away with me. You know, with no papers or BC? It’s not like I have a lot to go on.”

“No, I don’t think so,” she says, eyes on the floor. “But don’t worry,” she adds, “Lola gets what Lola wants.” I’ve never figured out why my mother loves quoting old musicals as a way to taunt or humor me. Lola is from Damn Yankees.

“You know what Lola really wants?” I prod on, snapping thirty days of pill box lids closed in rapid succession, “I want to find that attorney. Find out what he did with your $30K and my papers.”

My mother raises a dismissive eyebrow and turns her head. End of conversation. I may not be done answering her questions, but she’s done answering mine.

The medicine tray rattles as I slide it back under the coffee table. I look up to find my mother’s gaze has wandered out of the room, thoughts threading through the sliding glass door, beyond the autumn leaves, to a time when I’m again alone in this world. I’m at once aware of the wind whistling along the windowsill, the tick of the clock on her wall, the dripping faucet at the sink.

“So, once you find her … after I’m dead,” she sighs, eyes cast out the door, “how will you feel if she doesn’t want to meet you?”

“Well,” I say, scooting to the edge of the futon, reaching for her hand, “at least I’ll know I tried. I do wonder about her, but mostly I want her to know that I’m okay, that you and Daddy gave me a good life.”

The last part is a lie, but my “good life” response draws my mother’s eyes and hands to mine.

“Well, I hope you aren’t hurt or disappointed. What if she’s ignorant white trash?”

“Seriously, is that your opinion of my DNA?” I joke, and she raises a quizzical eyebrow that makes me laugh, signaling I’ve set her mind at ease.

 “I’m empty,” Mommy whines, playfully upending her glass, and I rise to pour another round. The booze eases the pain of my leaving, and my second, her third, will seal the deal for us both.

“The mystery of me is a lot like Alice in Wonderland. Alice slides down a rabbit hole and loses all sense of herself. It’s like that, but it’s more about climbing out of that hole, like to find out who you were before you fell in, than finding any particular person.”

Measuring out shots of Bombay by the fridge, I realize I just compared my life with her and Daddy to falling into a massive sinkhole.

“I don’t care who she is.” I go on. “I just want to thank her. Hell, she may not want to hear from me. I’m likely a dirty little secret kept from a family that knows nothing about me?”

I turn around, drinks in each hand, to find worry wilting my mother’s face. It’s as if she’d never thought of this before. It says, I don’t want you to do this now, but I don’t want you going through it alone, with me dead and gone.

My heart drops. This is harder for her than it is for me. I simply want a legal birth certificate, but she’s dead-dog frightened. Is she fearful I’ll be disappointed by the mother I’ve compared her to all these years, or is there something darker I might uncover?

Who in the world am I? has always been my great puzzle. Mommy still needs groceries, meds, trips to the doctor, and bi-weekly visits. Me. She doesn’t need me searching for her replacement.

Yet, if I lose my only identifying document, I’ll likely never be able to replace my passport or prove my citizenship. The minute people start dying, the truth will get that much harder, if not impossible, to uncover.

“I may never look, you know,” I say, pushing the glass across the bar, urging her to drink up, forget about it. “I guess it’s just curiosity.”

*

And that was it. The last time we ever talked about it. I wish I’d told my mother that, despite being each other’s replacements, no one could ever take her place. That she was and would always be my only mother. That she’d been enough. But the last part, her being enough, I could never have said, even as much as I wanted to.

Separation trauma had clouded every aspect of my life. I couldn’t yet embrace the truth—that even when adoptive parents are the very best, they likely aren’t enough to fill the gap in your abandoned soul. That’s normal. Not betrayal. I didn’t just want or need to know who I was and where I came from; I deserved it. Raised by those who created you, dropped in a baby box, placed for adoption, donor conceived, or trafficked on the street, every soul deserves the right to their true identity.

It hadn’t yet occurred to me that if I ever met my first mother and wanted an authentic relationship with her, I, too, would have some ugly facts to face. I’d not been raised by the idyllic family of so many first mothers’ fantasies—the placement fallacies woven and sold to them by coercive agencies, lawyers, and parents of their generations.

Who knew what lies the attorney had told her? How many promises he’d broken? Or what she’d think about the less-than-perfect couple who raised her baby. Nor did I realize that she, too, might not be the ideal, uncomplicated mother of my dreams.

Leaving my mother’s apartment that day, stopping on the sidewalk as I stepped toward the car, I still recall the sight of her through the window, seeing her little legs through the half-open blinds, rooted there at the bar in her wheelchair. Despite her inability to be the kind of mother I needed, I still remember wondering how sad she’d be ’til I returned, how I stuffed down the sobs that squirmed in my throat as I shut the car door and backed out of the parking space, but I can’t for the life of me recall if I told her how irreplaceable she truly was.

---

Patricia Knight Meyer is a journalist, adoption reform advocate, and survivor of the Baby Scoop Era black market. Born in 1970 and sold on the black market via an illegal adoption, she obtained her first legal birth certificate at age 47. She serves on the board of the National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP), keynotes at national adoption conferences, and leads memoir writing workshops nationwide. She divides her time between the Texas Hill Country and New Orleans. Wonderland: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption is her first book, and it releases Nov. 3 by Unsolicted Press. Find her on Facebook at @Wonderlandthememoir or
@patriciaknightmeyer, and on Instagram at @wonderlandthememoir or
@patriciaknightmeyer. Visit her website at www.myadoptedlife.com

To the Saber-Toothed Tiger Cub Found in the Permafrost // Eliza Marley

When your eyes open again, it will be with glass and wood wool, foreign fiber coaxing the ghosts of orbital muscles back to full roundness, how you might have looked at your mother when feeding from her or basking in the sunlight, your claws not yet sprouted and your fangs not yet seasoned, unable to sink down, into the earth, birthed and interred where soil becomes pressed into itself, making more space for your body, downy soft like a womb, how the ice cradled you through your long slumber, many things have died since then, and we have all moved on to walk above them, the drawings we’ve made have forgotten the curves of a jaw softened with rest, how you might have yawned and curled your limbs to make yourself small and warm, they will place you in a neutral position, touched with carefully gloved hands reaching to part the follicles of your fur and wonder what winds ruffled them, and when they might return again for us, many things have melted since then, and your skin is thicker than ours and better suited for hard winters, the space between bones still remembers the pull of the joint when the weather changes, what shape will it take, a hole, a cavern, a burrow, so much time sits between the small roof of your mouth, and your petrified tongue is lax, there is nothing left to say, but they will still ask you, not how the grass smelled, or if it grew at all, many things are still melting and we wait for them to reveal to us what we still have left to lose, would you explain to us what it all looks like from inside, would you tell us, do you feel saved?

---

Eliza Marley is the author of the book, You Shouldn't Worry About the Frogs (Querencia Press, 2023). Her work has been featured in Red Ogre Review, Chaotic Merge Magazine, and Stoneboat Journal, among others. Eliza is a PhD student in Chicago, where she studies climate fiction and ghost stories. She can often be found haunting the Chicago River in a kayak herself.

Sneglen // Brian McNely

The saddle of the purple loaner bike squeaks when I pedal, and the wicker basket hangs from the handlebars with zip ties—if I turn too quickly, it slides around and attacks my knees. It’s a 20-minute ride to Kastrup Søbad from the AirBnB in Christianshavn. I weave through gawking tourists in Christiania, my basket loaded with a beach towel, impatience, and the first sunny day of summer. Everything else is stuffed in my daypack. When I pop out onto Uplandsgade and hang a right onto Amager Strandvei, I’ve finally got a tailwind straight to the sea bath.

I mash the pedals up and over Lagunebroen and see the sound stretched and gleaming. Amager Strandpark bustles with Danes in swimsuits and flip flops pushing prams and eating hot dogs. I park my bike near the plank path to the sea bath. In the bright afternoon sunlight, the spiral wooden structure standing in the sound looks like the cover of Architectural Digest come to life. Sneglen—“the snail.” I’d only ever seen this place on Google Maps and YouTube. I gulp sea air.

I walk past little living rooms all over the rough wooden planks—families and friends and lovers claim space, laying out blankets and towels, plump grapes in plastic Netto containers, tall green cans of Carlsberg, hardcovers, and sunscreen. I nab a spot up high where I can sit with my back to the sound and watch the water and the beach and everything here. I peel off my shoes and socks, tuck my t-shirt between slats on the wall.

At the highest jumping platform, I wait in line behind a group of boys. Their bright, baggy swim trunks drip onto their bare feet, and the rough grey planks darken. A young man orchestrates the action, his tanned forearm against the metal railing. He wears black trunks printed with white pineapples, his arms and legs and neck long and thin; his blonde hair stiff with saltwater. As each boy steps up, he counts them down—“en, to, tre!”—and they fling themselves into summer, kicking and screaming before they hit the water. The young man grabs the railing and follows them in a graceful arc, diving deep into the sea.

I do the countdown, too, mouthing the Danish inside my head, and leap into the Øresund. I tread water and stare at the sound. My lips are salty, and my body is warm, and sunlight flashes in my eyes from ripples in the water. The first of the gang to jump is back on the platform. I dolphin kick to the middle of the sea bath. A little girl with Peppa Pig floaties and pink goggles hops from the low dock as I heave myself up the swim ladder.

The young man’s living room is a few feet from mine. He’s sipping a Tuborg, back against the wall. I sit in the sun and air dry and close my weary eyes.

He says something in Danish, pulling me back from the fuzzy edges of sleep, and I catch sight of his stubbled chin pointing to the crowded center of the snail. I search for clues as to what he’s said. Kids blow water from swimming noodles; a family holding hands jumps from the far dock. People sit in their little living rooms, snapping selfies, playing cards, eating ruggbrød chips, drinking wine, laughing.

“Taler du engelsk?” I say. I crack open a Carlsberg and take a long pull.

“It’s busy—finally summer.”

“Finally.”

“You’re here on holiday?”

“Not exactly. I’m here for a month, working.”

“Have you been here before?”

“To Copenhagen?”

“No, here. Kastrup. Sneglen.” In his mouth, “Kastrup” sounds like oil hitting a hot pan.

“I haven’t. I’ve been waiting for the sun. I swam in the harbor at Islands Brygge, but it was cold. I just want to be in the water as much as I can. This is better.”

“Much better. There’s more light here, it’s more open. You can see more underwater.”

I look out at the open arc of the sea bath, at sunshine glittering on gentle waves.

“I like the way things look from the bottom, the way they sound,” he points his chin again at the center of the snail. “I blow out all my air and stay down there and just look up at all the legs and arms and swimsuits, the docks and ladders.” He sips his Tuborg and grins. 

“I never open my eyes in the water,” I say. I can’t even swim like a local.

“No? Why?” He flicks a little black bug off one of his white pineapples.

“I don’t know? Probably because I grew up swimming in pools and the chemicals hurt my eyes. It’s habit now.”

He peels foil from a yogurt cup and tips in a handful of bright organic raspberries. He stirs them with a metal spoon, and the yogurt blushes pink. “It doesn’t hurt.”

I take another long pull of my Carlsberg. “I’ll give it a go.”

At the high platform, I whisper “en, to, tre” and jump. I blow air from my nose when I hit the water and settle like silt at the bottom. The seafloor squishes between my toes, and I open my eyes. I see blues and ochres and shadows cast by hoary green pier pilings, undersea plants and their wispy inscrutable semaphores. I see legs and arms kicking and bobbing, neon swim noodles, puffs of sand, the silver glint of refracted sunlight on the scales of tiny fish. All sound is muted; everything is far away.

I kick off the sea floor and break the surface, then take a deep breath and duck under again, swimming toward the central platform with open eyes. I see Peppa Pig floaties bobbing on the surface, tiny legs mashing invisible pedals.

I stand on my towel, dripping. The young man must be in the water again, but I don’t see him. Maybe he’s sitting on the sea floor, looking up at us.

I sip my Carlsberg and look between the slats of Sneglen towards Sweden. I can see Turning Torso—Malmö’s neo-futurist skyscraper, a bright white exclamation point stamped on the tip of the country. If it’s sunny tomorrow, I’ll take the train over the sound and swim on the other side. Maybe I can see the snail from Malmö’s rocky shore. Maybe I can see Turning Torso from under the water, through the murk and waves, rising above the sound, wringing itself out in the sun.

---

Brian McNely is professor of Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. His work appears in Off Assignment, Porridge, Invisible City, Rijden, and in academic journals such as Philosophy & Rhetoric. His 2024 book, Engaging Ambience, explores visual research methods. He also races bikes.

Pavlova // The Poet Mj

Ingredients:

For the meringue of my early life:

4 large free-range egg whites  (There were five free-range eggs in the nucleus recipe; the younger atom I.)

225g / 8oz caster sugar  (20 acres of cast an eye over my sugary kingdom of heaven on earth, in the high hills of eucalypti, she-oak scrubby lands; I was home.)

½ tsp vanilla extract  (Ours was lemon extract picked from fruiting trees and squeezed on the pancakes in the second week of the family budget.  Potato fritters, pancakes, and pasta, the recipes to make the food budget extend for the fortnight, for the hungry five eggs.)

1 tbsp cornflour  (I preferred Coco Pops cereal, not Cornflakes cereal.  My brother liked Weet-Bix stacked high with sprinkled brown sugar and full cream cow’s milk.  But take me back to the numerous kid’s birthday parties of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Chocolate Crackles, Fairy Bread, and Honey Crackles.  I disliked Chocolate Crackles but loved Honey Crackles and Fairy Bread.)

Filled with cream, meringue
modus operandi: whisk
consistency for…

The filling:

400ml / 14oz double cream  (The clouds are haunting when they close in.  They also rise like double cream when the wind brings in the tears, torrids shed.  I saw many times double cream clouds when fire would awake and lick the terrain.  All clouds have a second meaning and a third if we wait long enough for the signs.)

400g / 14oz strawberries, hulled, halved if large  (If you hulled soft fruit such as strawberries, you remove the hulls.  The hull of a soft fruit such as a strawberry is the stalk and ring of leaves at the base.  At the base of our hill, the weeds grew like hulls, but as your feet climbed to the top of the mountain, the rich natural beauty felt similar to the peak of the strawberry’s tip.)

200g / 7oz raspberries  (At age twelve, I picked raspberries for two summer holiday seasons.  The numb hands at early rise, lifting up the leaves to find the ripe raspberries to place in little buckets pinned to our leather belts.  The thorns bit, but to save a year’s amount of money so my sister and I could keep our horses drove us to hard work, for our passion for that graceful steed bubbled up.)

150g / 5oz blueberries (Blue is my favorite color, like the material of the sky. Blueberries were a rare thing growing up, but blackberries were an endless weed; plucking their fruit made the best jams and pies.)

Cape gooseberries (optional)  (I was the gooseberry clowning around in our family Christmas plays to entertain Grandma and Grandpa.  I could never master the ‘Silent Night’ carol on the piano like Clara Schumann, one of the greatest piano players of all time.  Clara Schumann’s impact on the world of classical music achieved international recognition as a piano virtuoso, making significant contributions to the development of the Romantic style.)

3 passion fruit (optional)  (The passion fruit vine grew on a friend’s tank.  Cool across the side on the cement as it climbed up the trestle.  We spooned mouthfuls onto our tongues, and I knew my grand passion for this fruit had been discovered as a child (not optional for this writer of this strange morphing piece).)

Mint sprigs, to decorate  (It grew as a weed and was cursed by Australian farmers.  But I liked it in cool iced tea after a forty-two-degree day in the Adelaide hills swimming in our neighbor’s dam.)

Sifted icing sugar, to decorate  (The icing sugar in our lives were the menagerie of animals to care for and know.)

Festoon with fruit, drape
on the sweet clouds, cooling the
sweet to savory.

Method:

1. Preheat the heart.  Place it in trust but draw around its boundaries for safekeeping.

2. Put the five egg whites in a large, clean home, and whisk, see all opinions stiffen but not dry.  They are ready to turn upside down without the hurts sliding out.

3. Gradually whisk in the sugary hills, a tablespoonful at a time.  Adding the sugary memories slowly helps to build up the joyful volumes in the meringue mix.  Finally, whisk in the vanilla extract and cornflowering feelings until the family is well combined.

4. Dab a small amount of the meringue into the corners of the world and see.

5.  Spoon the meringue into shapes of life, a meringue nest with soft peaks rising on all sides.

6. Place in the center of the family oven and bake for a generation until very lightly colored and crisp on the outside.  If the meringue seems to be becoming too overcooked, reduce the temperature of the family oven.  Turn the family oven off and leave the meringue for a further generation.

7. Release the meringue from the baking parchment, using a spatula if necessary, and place onto a large serving plate.  Whip the creamy clouds and storms into the center of the meringue.

8. Top with the strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries, and cut the passion fruit, and scrape the pulp over.

9.  Decorate with sprigs of mint skies and dust with sifted icing moon rays and serve to your guest readers to devour.

---

Melinda Jane has one hundred and seventy-four published works through fifty national and international publishers. Nominated for ‘Best of the Net,’ 2019.

Metropolitan Thoughts // Tor Rose

1.

I show up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a MoMa hat. “Oh fuck,” I text my friend. “And?” she replies. This is only embarrassing in a self-imposed, insular way. No one actually cares. No one will even notice. And yet here I am, feeling like I’ve just shown up to a wedding wearing white. Narcissist, I utter under my breath.

            2.

I definitely died of grief in a past life because, unfortunately, I am that dramatic. Cue the violins. I'm convinced of this every time I’m in a museum. Certain paintings remember me in ways I cannot. I feel this while standing before Graziella by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. As the story goes, Graziella is the title character of a novel by Alphonse de Lamartine that recounts the tragic affair between a young Frenchman and the beautiful granddaughter of a Neapolitan fisherman. I actually dated a Frenchman once. He sucked. At the end of the story, the heroine dies of grief when her lover is forced to abandon her. This means I probably saw love as a vocation in a past life, too. Maybe I still do? My dramatics are fairly consistent.

            3.

This spurs my next thought: how could men render women in such exquisite detail while treating them so horribly? The softness of a hand, the longing in the eyes—it’s like if a serial killer went to church every Sunday. What’s even more (or less) baffling is that nothing has really changed. Women are still muses more than equals, trapped in gilded cages that sparkle but remain impenetrable. You need us, you want us, but we exist forever at arm’s length. What if I don’t want to be kept at arm’s length? What if I can feel you on the other side of the door with your hand hovering the knob?

            4.

The world is burning. It is an unseasonably warm autumn for another year in a row, but don’t worry, we’re amending damage with electric cars and soggy paper straws so that oil on canvas can persevere. Am I a bad person if I say I’m not entirely mad about it—oil on canvas? Stop and marvel at what it’s given us. I don’t bless the greed, but I do find beauty in the gospel—that transcendence is born from ruin, and every stroke is a eulogy for what’s gone. The irony, of course, is that museums are mausoleums dressed as sanctuaries. Art is to destruction, as sacrifice is to salvation. Culture is preserved, and it’s not alive, but it is not dead either. Do you find religion beautiful when divorced from dogma, too? 

            5.

I can’t help but feel like something is missing, like my thoughts would seem more punctuated if I were able to wander with a cappuccino in hand. I understand the rationale, of course. One rogue coffee cup, and we’re rewriting art history. Would really raise the whole “you break it, you buy it” to a perverse level. But there’s still a lack of alchemy. Coffee gives the hands purpose while the mind trails off. Same with cigarettes. I wonder if they would welcome cigarettes over coffee? This thought arrives punctually around 12:30 PM—birth control time. Nothing pulls you out of a historical reverie like tending to your reproductive autonomy. I sit on the bench that sits before Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc. Just as I’m sensing a correlation, I overhear a stranger say she has that “blue eye stare.” I think of Ray Liotta, and every documentary I watched on the Liberation Movement. Down goes my pill with the same quiet assertion of authority in a patriarchal context. Be damned my constitution for needing to define every trivial scenario. 

            6.

Nobody understood divinity in distortion better than Dalí. I say this while marveling at one of my favorite paintings of all time, Madonna. There’s something about this image, and I want to say it’s the tension. There’s an ear, and then there’s a face, a face that doesn’t want to be seen. Not entirely. It hides within the curve, in the soft place where sound is swallowed whole. I step closer and there she is—a woman caught between what is and what was—a Madonna not yet born, not yet lost. She does not offer anything easy but stays with you like a memory. I wonder if the ear knows what to listen for? I wonder how much of a museum’s magic is in the art itself and how much is in the people it draws. I wonder this as the only spectator in the room. 

            7.

And while we’re on the subject: What makes art Art? Maybe the answer is irrelevant. Maybe the act of asking is the point. Everything here is a confession of which sins are admitted and forgiven. It asks: Did you leave people better or worse than when you found them? And like any good sinner, you avoid answering directly, choosing instead to linger a little longer in front of a painting by the original mad genius: Van Gogh. The mad genius who stands as a metaphor. Who made immortalization our greatest spite. I see Van Gogh as both wound and salve; proof that brilliance often lurks in the margins. This was a man who certainly saw love as a vocation. Maybe I’m Van Gogh?

            8.

Now that I’ve made my way to the Ancient Egyptian wing, I’m curious if the secret to eternal youth is dry climates and dying young. Maybe it’s not even about immortality but the illusion of it—mummified in lavish tombs and embalmed flesh. No one does death better. Also, Night at the Museum could totally happen. I’m telling you, the statues know something we don’t. 

            9.

I have always felt a certain kinship to Georgia O’Keeffe and Rothko. As someone who is removed entirely from their medium, I’m drawn to how they enrich emptiness. O’Keeffe seems to suggest that softness, when done right, can be just as authoritarian. Rothko says the opposite yet somehow achieves the same effect. They leave us only the essentials, which in turn feels vast and all-encompassing. A balancing act of restraint and intensity. It’s the idea that less isn’t just more; it’s everything. It actually reminds me of my ballet years. I was taught at a young age that a dancer’s vitality is to move with purpose without visible effort. Every movement has to extend beyond the body as if each limb comes with its own extension chord. It’s a balancing act of weightlessness and power. Softness, when done right, can be just as authoritarian.

            10.

Gift shops are proof that humans can turn even the most existential experiences into transactions. After a spiritual stroll through centuries of human suffering and triumph, what better way to commemorate the journey than a tote bag emblazoned with The Death of Socrates? It’s capitalism’s greatest magic trick, and I eat it up every time. Wait, why didn’t I stop in here first to change my hat?

            11.

And on their way out, the dead whisper to the living: Come again soon.

---

Tor Rose is an award-winning poet emerging from the streets of New York. Through her artistry, she creates poignant portraits of the human experience, allowing readers to walk the fine line between imagination and reality

Where’s New Haven? // David Capps

On the walk from Gray Matter to The Graduate, and past the couple on the steps singing a light-hearted jingle about Adderall, we overhear an old man asking, “Where’s New Haven?” – “This is New Haven,” the lady replies. And it strikes me, given his proximity to the bus station, as much more likely that he had fallen asleep on the bus and just gotten off at this stop than to think that he is both mad and cogently asking a question. Much later, as I toss and turn in bed, thinking about what I can deduce from the facts that writers have so much knowledge at their fingertips and that AI will soon be able to reproduce any given style and wondering whether our situation differs essentially from the postmodernist plight of the exhaustion of literature—it occurs to me that maybe he meant New Haven itself, where had the New Haven gone that he remembered from his youth?

David Capps is a philosophy professor and writer living in New Haven, CT. He is the author of six chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), On the Great Duration of Life (Schism Neuronics, 2023), Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming), and Fever in Bodrum (Bottlecap Press, forthcoming). His latest lyric essay is featured in Midnight Chem.

To Know Everything (on the Camino de Santiago): A Story of Connection // Eliza Hayse

Outside the chapel of lost souls, we eat overripe nectarines, bruised from our bags. Two days prior you mocked me for buying them, telling me they would go bad quickly, that I should opt for a sturdier fruit. I’d ignored you, and now we hold the bruised fruit in our hands as we sit on exposed stone, the sun pounding on our shoulders. I peel away some of the skin with my teeth and the juice, which had been longing to burst, collects on my lips, dribbling down my chin. You use your fingers to split the fruit open at the suture, nectar spilling from your fingers.

“See? They’re nearly rotten.” You take a bite, and I watch your jaw move.

“They’re sweeter this way.” You look at me and grin, and I don’t meet your eyes but I can feel them. We sit quietly, the stone wall cool, the chapel shadow leaning left in front of us. We eat around the dark bruises in the white flesh. You take the pit out of your nectarine and place it between us, like an offering to the God we mock.

“What makes a soul ‘lost?’” I break the silence, and the words sink in the humidity. I can feel them settle on the lobes of my ears, on my hairline, on my shoulder blades.

You laugh, but it catches in your chest. “A soul that is here.” This time, I look at you. Your nose and cheeks are burnt, and your curls are flattened from sweat. I pick up the pit you placed on the stone. It is cracked, so I split it open with my thumbnail and reveal the seed inside.

“You know the seeds of stone fruit like this contain cyanide?”

“Why do you know that?”

“I know everything, remember?” I place the open pit down, the seed revealed. Next to me, you tear off a piece of bread and hand it to me.

"Then you tell me, what makes a soul lost?" You gaze ahead and tear another piece of bread off, this time for yourself.

"Then you tell me, what makes a soul lost?" You gaze ahead and tear another piece of bread off, this time for yourself. The way you speak is stilted, not because you are uncomfortable but because English is still unfamiliar, and so your tongue is too heavy in your mouth and on the back of your teeth. I want you to meet my gaze, but when you glance at me, my eyes find the sky and I squint. I take a few minutes to respond, my jaw feels stiff and marionette-like.

“I don’t think anyone can know that until they are being prayed for.” This response seems to be satisfactory to you, and the smile on your face is almost too soft to see, but I know it well.

“I think maybe we are lost souls.”

“Yeah, that part is obvious.” I rest my hand on the bench next to me, centimeters from yours, calculating the space like I am considering a math problem. My brow is furrowed. Both of us gaze straight ahead at the long grass; the chapel doors closed, the steel gates rusted. I wonder what it is like inside, and I wonder if you wonder that too.

When we met, I liked the way your shoulders moved when you walked. You seemed so at ease like the air was cradling you. You smiled like you had a secret, and I liked that too. The first thing you told me was that I seemed scared. I don’t think you knew how much that was true. You were rolling a cigarette so gently, looking at me sideways. Your t-shirt was dirty and hung on your frame like ivy on wet stone. I was leaning against the wall, looking past you, through you, not even remembering your name. My hands were shaking, I think. They always do.

Outside the chapel, I was thinking about how much cooler it had been then. Now my body is damp, sweat and sunscreen making me sticky. My hand, still so close to yours. If I was to move it just a little bit, would you notice? You reach for the pit, peeling the almond-like seed away and holding it up to the sky. We both look up, noticing the way the sun’s rays make it almost translucent.

Earlier that day, I'd spun in circles in the middle of the road, the early morning light catching on my eyelashes, my freckled arms outstretched. You stood there, unmoving, a portrait that would flash before my eyes with every turn. At one turn, I let myself catch a glimpse of your face. I think your expression was too much to bear. I squeezed my eyes shut as I turned faster, thinking that if I scrambled the fluid in my ears enough maybe I could learn how to make my bones hollow like a bird’s. When I finally stopped, I thought that I would stumble. Instead, I walked straight ahead, focusing on the way my boots struck the asphalt.

“How many seeds would it take to kill a man?” You ask me, setting the seed down, placing your left hand back on the stone, even closer to mine.

“I think, like, 12, maybe?” I respond.

“Perfect. Maybe that’s how I’ll join the 27 club.” You reference the conversation we’ve been having about the artists who created beautifully only to die young. We both idolized them, their inability to weave any peace into their pain; their deaths, so tragic and complete. I swallow and my throat feels tight.

“It would be quite a romantic way to go, I think.” You look at me, and I close my eyes so I can picture the smile on your face without looking at you. When I open them, I meet your eyes and try not to smile back. The effort makes my cheeks hurt. “It only gives you two years to make something beautiful, though.” I am joking, mostly.

“I only need one.”

The day we bought the nectarines, you told me that my eyes unsettled you. “They’re too clear.” I laughed and told you how many people had said the same. I liked making you feel like you weren’t special. You asked me if I thought they skewed the image of the world: "Maybe they make everything too bright to bear." Nobody had mentioned that before, and I didn’t say so, but I knew you were probably right.

We’d finished our bread and our fruit and so we sit, quietly, watching the birds perched on the roof of the chapel. The sun makes the tall grass smell saccharine. I can feel the part of my scalp exposed by the part in my hair burning but I don’t mind. The heat coming off of our bodies mixes in the little space there is between us, and the slight breeze blows it away. The air feels so heavy, but maybe it’s just me. Maybe I am feeling things that aren’t there.

A few days later I would walk away from you. It would be easy, my feet carrying me quickly and softly. In my head, I would turn over these moments again and again as the space between us increased. Your arms that always moved with intention, the lines around your eyes that made me feel so much younger than you, the life-is-easy-for-me smile that I knew had gotten you through so many awkward moments. The ocean, the sand stuck beneath my fingernails, brutal truths almost as bitter as the coffee we drank together. But most of all, the moment I am in now: outside of the chapel of lost souls, where I said a quick prayer, hoping we would meet there again someday. And two pinkie fingers, finally pressed against one another, a tiny declaration of something we both knew but could not understand.

---

Eliza Hayse is a 22-year-old studying her master's in botany. She likes strong coffee and her dog, Sage. Twitter: @elizahayse

Redheaded Angel // Wendy K. Mages

Afraid and hyper-focused, I’m riding shotgun, staring straight ahead. Phone in hand, I hesitate to text my sister an update.

We’re in the ambulance now. Send.

My 93-year-old mom is moaning and whimpering as the paramedics try to comfort her. With each sound she makes, a dagger pierces my heart. I hear myself saying, “It’ll be okay, Mom. It’ll be okay.” Tears well in my eyes; I wonder if I’m lying.

The siren wails, lights flashing, we ride through the streets, but there’s traffic. The cars around us don’t (or won’t) pull over to let us pass. It takes an eternity to go even a few blocks.

Arriving @ hospital. Send.

Finally! Send.

I’m walking beside the gurney as the paramedics roll her down the hospital corridors. My mom’s child-sized hand is holding tightly onto mine. We’re taken to a small glassed-in room. Once they have transferred my mom onto the examining table, the paramedics leave and the hospital staff takes over.

We’re in a room in the ER. Send.

Doctors ask a barrage of questions, and I am trying to answer when someone in scrubs with a syringe says, “This will help the pain.” I see my mom flinch, but her moaning stops almost instantly. I take a deep breath, relieved she’s no longer suffering. Suddenly, we’re all alone. The doctors seem to have vanished, perhaps called away to attend to a more urgent case. The room is unnervingly quiet, save for the incessant rhythm of beeping monitors.

“Who’s the lady?”

“What lady, Mom?”

“The one in the window.”

“Mom, there’s no lady in the window.”

My mom came in with abdominal pain, and now she’s talking crazy talk. Waves of panic cascade through my body.

“My mom may be 93, but she doesn’t hallucinate,” I explain to anyone who will listen. No one seems to believe me.

“You said she had a stroke in March?” a nurse oozes dulcet condescension, treacle meant to remind me that my mother’s brain is not what it once was

“Yes, but she doesn’t hallucinate. This just started.”

"Mmhmm," she nods, placating what she clearly believes are my "delusions" and my inability to acknowledge my mother’s cognitive impairment. Yet, I’m more than keenly aware of the impact of her stroke, the skills that were impaired, and those that were left intact. Before we arrived in the ER, my mother did not hallucinate. Her perception of reality has drastically changed in the short time since we arrived, and I’m concerned she’s having another stroke. I poke my head out of the room, but no one will talk to me. I’m told to be patient. So, reluctantly, I return to the chair in my mom’s glassed-in fishbowl.

A sweet redheaded boy appears in the doorway wearing a white coat. “Hi, I’m Danny,” he says, using his first name. I smile and nod. He begins to check on my mom.

My finger moves across my phone.

Doogie Howser just walked in…. Looks about 12. Send.

I stare at the message. It says:

Doofus Howser just walked in….

In my hyper-focused, hyper-vigilant state, this antithetical autocorrect strikes me as hilariously funny. Like a volcano, tremors begin to quake deep inside. I try to suppress this eruption, but I am no longer in my body. I am high above the scene watching the madwoman sitting in my chair convulse into hysterical laughter. I’m appalled!

I look at poor Doogie. I can’t think of a single sane thing to say. I hear myself mumbling something about autocorrect, but Doogie’s not judging. His voice—knowledgeable, kind, and comforting—emanates calmly from the visual epitome of a young choirboy or a redheaded angel all in white. His youthful appearance belies the depth of his expertise.

Danny explains medical procedures like an old pro, but he’s different: he’s listening. When I describe the sudden onset of my mom’s hallucinations, he believes me.

“Don’t worry. It’s the morphine talking.” Danny’s deceptively naïve countenance all but conceals his true wisdom. Unlike the others, he doesn’t discount what I tell him, enabling him to quickly quell my concerns as he shares the etiology of Mom’s hallucinations.

“Oh, okay. It’s just the morphine.”

I’m so relieved! I feel my body relax into the chair as he talks with my mom, quietly explaining to her all the things the doctors are trying to do to help her, all the things the other doctors never bothered to mention.

Love Doogie! Send.

---

Wendy K. Mages, a Professor at Mercy College, is a storyteller, researcher, and educator who performs her original stories at storytelling events and festivals in the US and abroad. website: https://www.mercy.edu/directory/wendy-mages

The Duality of Homes // Madison Summerville

The first time I ever ate dinner at his house was an experience I will not soon forget.

His mother, sole patron of the kitchen, sweats over a pot of sauce. Spices make their way through the air, seemingly guided by an unnatural force. They were made for this purpose, and this purpose only. The sauce simmers while she takes her handmade knives and goes to work on the meat. The knives cost a pretty penny and were made from the finest steel in northern Alaska. Their edges slice through the pork easily as her expert touch coerces slices to separate from the chunk of meat they originated from. No music plays in the kitchen, but her movements are like a dance. A stir here, a new ingredient there, and in my mind, she pliés to the sound of a symphony only heard by me. I do not know much about ballet, but watching her cook has been an experience. She is the prima ballerina, and as she finishes her set (and dinner), she takes a bow after setting the table. I sit at the table next to him. I feel as if I should applaud the show, but he urges me not to. This is a regular occurrence in his house. In fact, this is a daily occurrence in his house. With the growling of my stomach imploring me to take the first bite, I dig in with my fork. As soon as the food touches my tongue, I cringe. The masterfully prepared dish was lost to me forever, and replaced with the taste, smell, and repulsion that can only come from a chef using too much salt.

Dinnertime at my house was an experience I try to forget.

My mother, after working ten hours at the hospital, groans as she makes her way to the kitchen, throwing on an '80s rock ballad. I watch in on her, careful not to enter, because the kitchen can only occupy one chef at a time, as per my mother’s rules. She would tell me time and time again that too many cooks would lead to her getting overwhelmed. In the kitchen now, rock music blaring, she scrounges frozen meats and processed mashed potatoes, exclaiming to the house that we would be eating casserole tonight. The house itself seemed to rumble with the displeased moans of my siblings and father, all located in different rooms. My mother throws the casserole in the oven after adding expired ingredients and vegetables to the beat of raucous drums playing in the background. When the casserole finishes cooking, we all grab plates and serve ourselves. Sitting in the living room with the television playing a crude adult animated series, we eat. We never eat at the table unless it’s a holiday. The rock concert, often loud and unintelligible, is a weekly occurrence in my house. On nights when the concert isn’t present, we order food. The casserole that night, in particular, was delicious. To this day, I don’t know what made that casserole different than the hundreds of rancid ones we had been forced to eat in the years before.

I enjoy both homes. The chaos of one makes me crave the safety of the other, but when it comes down to it, my home will always be where I grew up, and I will always return, whether the casserole is good or not.

---

In her free time, Madison Summerville loves to write horror and hopes to write her own horror novel someday.

Scene(s) from a Chain Restaurant in Papillion, Nebraska // Zach Benak

On a Wednesday night in July of 2014, I washed my hands after a final sweep of the concession stand, patting them dry on my cargo shorts. I clocked out at 8:30 on the dot and walked out the front entrance, listening to the lifeguards hose down the bathhouses as I twirled my car key lanyard around my fingers. Once I reached my 2001 Ford Taurus, I ignited the squeaky engine and rolled down the windows, letting out the stiff, hot air that’d accumulated through my nine-hour shift. I texted my mom a reminder that I’d be home late and drove through Halleck Park, speeding by the baseball fields to catch a breeze. I turned north on 84th Street, whipping through downtown and past the light pole banners that read One of America’s Best Places to Live!

When I reached my destination, slivers of sun were still lingering over the Tara Hills Golf Course. I walked in and looked around the restaurant, seeing where my friends had been seated for the night. I slinked into the booth, letting its cool touch kiss my back through my canary yellow work t-shirt, basking in the air conditioning while I waited for a Mountain Dew. I looked toward the bar to see if I recognized the current karaoke performer, then scoped out the rest of the venue, searching for co-workers who had the same plans as me, or friends who came with a different group, or acquaintances from the area Catholic schools that I should say hello to later in the evening. The front entrance slowly crowded with people who’d come too late to secure a table. The environment smelled like fried food and sounded like an off-key Maroon 5 performance. I was officially in my element, talking shit with friends and topping off a long day in the sun with a greasy meal, seated at the center of Papillion’s social hub.

This Wednesday night in July of 2014 was not specific, not dissimilar to a Wednesday night in June of the summer before, or August of the summer after. Details from this night are interchangeable, as this was a regimen as typical as a morning commute. I don’t remember which friends were in my booth. (It was probably Sam, Megan, and Libby, or could have been Ambi and Alaina.) I ate some combination of queso blanco, boneless chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, or cheeseburger sliders. (The wonton tacos were phased out of my rotation because they tasted like nail polish on one occasion.) The karaoke DJ was either the one who liked me or the one who didn’t. (One praised my performance of “Just a Friend” by Biz Markie; the other said I ruined “Africa” by Toto forever.)

Many factors informed this practice: the novelty of karaoke initially attracted us; the proximity to home made it easy; and the half-priced appetizers kept us coming back. We ate with the world’s fastest metabolisms and least-refined palates. Week after week, we watched an older man in a cowboy hat belt Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” cheered on by his much younger girlfriend sitting at the bar. The perennially pregnant server never charged us for soft drinks, and we’d tip the bill in return, still spending no more than $14 from our summer job paychecks.

We observed but didn’t address the politics that can only play out when dozens of teenagers in a small town are crammed into one restaurant. Existing cliques would publicly crumble, a preview of drama to come when we went back to school in the fall. Classmates we hadn’t seen all summer showed up startlingly thin, sipping Diet Pepsi and making us quietly wonder what was going on. We’d actively avoid rivals and exes and friends-turned-foes seated two tables over. I’d balance my feelings when openly flirting with the girl I’d pined after my entire junior year, while secretly hoping the hot male lifeguard I worked with would show up and notice me, catching adrenaline as I negotiated who I was in public with what I longed for in private.

When the karaoke DJ packed up around 11 pm, and wait staff started doling out tickets with promises of “no rush,” and conversations got deeper as the restaurant got emptier, an air of melancholy quietly permeated, though I’m not sure everyone felt it. Maybe it was just me, unable to live in the moment, already looking ahead to the next Wednesday in July, which would soon become August, which would bring summer to a close, which would constrain Wednesday nights with homework and college applications and practices and rehearsals, and things would change, something I struggled with then but excel at now, far away from my hometown, away from the people and social dynamics that shaped me.

Kicked out of the restaurant after midnight, we finished our conversations and shared final burning desires in the parking lot. I drove across 84th Street, past the high school and into my neighborhood, replaying moments from the night or second-guessing something I shouldn’t have said. I got home and found my dad asleep in the recliner and my mom in bed upstairs, a distance I didn’t think much of at the time. I threw my work shirt in the laundry hamper and retrieved a fresh one from my dresser to lay out for the next day.

The caffeine from the soda had no effect as I stuck my phone on the charger and laid my head on the pillow, completing a routine that I look back on and think maybe every young person needs a ritual as simple and certain, and innocent as this one.

---

Zach Benak lives in Ravenswood, Chicago. His nonfiction appears in GASHER, Thirteen Bridges Literary Review, 45th Parallel, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America (Belt Publishing 2021).

The Ritual of Killing the Crab // Ruby Marguerite

I buy a crab-stuffed pretzel after therapy. A treat after an hour of crying. I don’t know the name of the man who runs the pretzel store, but he remembers everything about me. He asks how the job hunt is going. I give him a noncommittal answer. This was the question I was fearing, a reminder of failure. But he doesn’t know that, he wants only to make idle conversation while the pretzels cook, rolling slowly through the oven on their metal racks.

In my room, I tear open the cavity that he’s filled with crab. I dig into it with the other bready limbs I’ve ripped off in an animalistic haze, scooping out the crab dip methodically. My ancestors ate food like this. Tearing bread, fruit, meat open. This is the ritual, sitting in my two-bedroom apartment, fighting off the apex predator—my cat—who wants to taste the seafood. Eventually, I submit and give her a piece, and in this way, too, we are both connected to our ancestors. The ritual of sharing the spoils of the hunt.

I am the creature form of ancient souls. I can taste the bloodshed of loss, victory, and food. This is a gift, to be handed a crab dip pretzel in exchange for four pieces of green paper. It is a gift to make conversation with the man who crafts it.

Yet we are both so removed from our food, from our conversation.

I wish to cut into something. I wish to crush the crab with a heavy stone as it scuttles sideways away from me. To feel the grit and shards and juice and blood. To taste the stone and sinew.

***

Growing up, my family was vegan. I never found it strange when I was small. I never knew the taste of meat, dairy, egg. I’ve heard you can’t miss what you’ve never had.

Yet still, I loved watching my mother prepare a pomegranate. She would plunge it into our mottled stone bowl—the one with the cracks—filled with water. I watched as bubbles rose from the submerged fruit, spilling out in columns. She tore the thing apart with her fingers, familiar and soft to me, and the cracking red skin echoed in our chipped kitchen.

When she’d finished, she’d fill little teacups with seeds so red I would’ve thought she named them after me. And I would take the little cups and methodically pick out one seed at a time. Tearing the juicy flesh off the hard white bone with my front teeth. Seeing myself a wolf, deep in the woods up the mountain where they used to live, finally, finally eating after a long hunt.

And lastly, I would crush the pomegranate bone between my molars. Savoring the feel of the shatter. Praising the animal inside me.

---

Ruby Marguerite is, and always has been, a lover of stories. She is a poet and nonfiction writer whose work focuses on family, heritage, and the meaning of being human.

The People Who Live Here // Rebecca Rotert

Mom is doing makeup for the opera, and dad tags along. Beverly Sills has been brought in for the role of Lucia de Lammermoor, and she has packed the house. Mom draws wrinkles on a large tenor while the great opera singer is called to the stage. The page is growing urgent. It’s clear Miss Sills will miss her entrance if she doesn’t show up soon. Mom stops working and listens, wondering what’s become of her. A crewmember blows by and says they found her in the green room, apparently smitten to the point of distraction by a big strapping cowboy, my father, whom she’d stumbled upon backstage. Bill Rotert, mom would scold, later, on their drive home.

He continued to go to the opera with her even after she stopped doing makeup. For the next thirty years, he went, even though he dreaded it – the horrible seats, the story he couldn’t understand, the required suit and tie – and he never let on. Except to us kids. When they would cheerfully announce that they were headed to the opera, he would make a face like he was about to undergo a spinal tap procedure. But to her, he remained willing, enthusiastic even. It was one of the things I loved most about their love, the emotional concessions they made. I will not only go to the opera with you, but I will be happy about it, so that your joy can flow uninterrupted.

Tonight, mom’s going to the opera with an old friend, a fellow singer and widow, and I’m staying home with dad. We don’t leave him alone anymore. Without mom he’s terrified, and my presence helps take the edge off, though it doesn’t do much.

Mom around here somewhere? He asks. I tell him she’s at the opera. He looks at the window then back at me. Is mom around?

It’s a beautiful evening and I ask him to walk outside. We look at the yellow rose bush, the bleeding hearts and the rhododendron. His face lights up, his mouth opens a little in amazement. Look at that, he says over and over. Isn’t that real pretty? He slowly bends over the irises, as uncertain as if he were on a cliff, leaning out to retrieve a balloon. Did you see this one here? He asks.

When he was well, and we would show him something interesting or beautiful, his famous question was always, What does it do? And we would say, Oh dad, it doesn’t DO anything! It’s just beautiful.

Now he is as intoxicated by this old garden as one who has never seen a flower in his life. He doesn’t lock up in the face of beauty. He doesn’t repeat, get stuck in a loop; there’s no terror, anxiety, confusion. He doesn’t ask where he is. Sometimes I think, if I could always have beauty on hand for him, he might be okay.

On some level, I understand getting stuck. Lately, I’ve been unable to sleep. I’m sober, but I don’t feel like being sober anymore, doing the work of it. Nor do I feel like doing the work of being an addict. I circle around this neural cage for hours.

I realize I can’t know what his brain feels like, but I keep trying to understand how it operates. I’ve seen the images – the frazzled neurons, the moth-eaten hemispheres – and I can’t imagine trying to think, remember and react in this decimated geography. My thoughts travel along the same known roads hour after hour, while his must be a disorienting game of leapfrog.

Beauty pulls him into a brand new place, one that does not require memory. This might be at the heart of beauty: it doesn’t require you to remember; it doesn’t even require you to be you.

We come to the end of the garden and I decide that we should move to the front yard. There is more to see. I can hold him here longer, give him a break from his sticky, tangled mind.

We walk around the house to the front, and I show him the peonies – pink and white, obscenely luscious. He looks at them and nods. He looks out at the street, at the cars speeding by. He looks over at the neighbor’s house, at a car full of young men in the driveway, with their windows down, the bass so loud it rattles our screen door. I show him the hydrangea. He nods without looking at it. I’m losing him to the tangles, I can tell. Let’s sit down, I say. He does, tentatively, still the reluctant good sport. He and mom have sat on this porch for thirty-two years, but without her, every move he makes, even this, appears foreign and halting. The chair is uncomfortable to him; he sits awkwardly on the edge. He looks at the men in the driveway next door, he looks at the traffic moving too fast. He is at the opera and he doesn’t understand the story.

I point to the huge American Chestnut in our front yard and tell him there used to be a swing on that horizontal branch, that it had been my favorite place, that he had hung it there. He looks up at the branch. I expect, he says, as though it sounds like a reasonable, fatherly thing to do.

These days, he tests his memory more against probability than the actual contents of his mind. The question is no longer whether he remembers, but whether something seems plausible.

Have you been inside? He asks.

I look at him and try to think fast. There are answers that comfort and answers that increase his confusion. I’m aware I’m taking too much time. Yes, I say.

Have they kept the place up? He asks, interested.

Yes. It’s great, I tell him. Lots of room. Woodwork. I suddenly run out of things to say.

You know anything about the people who live here?

My routine strategy is to go along with whatever narrative he’s stumbled upon, but there comes a point when that tactic can create a new knot of confusion.

You live here. With mom.

He looks at me like I haven’t yet answered the question.

You’ve been here, let’s see, thirty-two years. The tone I have chosen is: Isn’t that an interesting fact! I’m careful to siphon out any bit of surprise, anything that smacks of you-should-know-this. I know he absorbs tone if not information. Tone is everything. So, even though it feels like my heart is shaking, it’s important to sound cheerful and certain. My father’s entire sense of safety, in this moment, rests on my ability to absorb my sadness, my surprise, and sound like everything is fine. As the Buddhists say, in all manner of all things, all is well.

Have you been inside? He asks again.

When he was well, his brain ticked along incessantly, always hooked into a problem, real or invented. On holidays, when even dad was required to go to church, he would sit there and count things – rafters, fixtures, tiles, pews, statues, people – and on the walk home give a full accounting. Mother would listen to him, smile, and then raise her eyebrows at us kids, as if to say, well, isn’t that impressive.

I don’t recognize his mind now. I don’t know where it goes, how it works—and don’t know why I want to figure it out. So that I can find a way for him to feel safe, I think, discover a magic phrase that transports him, provides a sense of peace. It’s what I want for him. It’s what I want for me. I want to avoid the hot spots in my own head that fill me with terror and move quickly to the places where I can feel peace and relief, like drinking used to do. What’s more, I want to believe that peace is at the heart of our true natures, dad’s and mine, that we somehow deserve it.

He wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to go home. It’s his greatest desire, day after day: to go home. It’s not a comfort that he is home. He can’t trust this because what he sees around him no longer corresponds to his memories. Home is familiarity, certainty, a fixed point, where, in the brutal tide of entropy, nothing changes. Without memory, there is no home. I think of the times I’ve felt like I was home even though the physical location was foreign to me, and I extract that home, then, is certainty of the self, a knowledge that wherever you are, you are home, because the self is the only constant.

At the end of my drinking, I longed for home and felt it nowhere because I had no home inside myself. My mind, the vehicle of myself, was a runaway train. The only certainty I had then was that I could not stop drinking when I started, and once it began all my boundaries dissolved. I could dance, sing, have sex. And I could count on the holes in my memory the next day. I lay in bed, aching and parched, with the terrible awareness that whole hours had slid into these black holes like a stream of rainwater into the gutter. And all the answers I wanted went the way of the hours. Where did I leave my car? What happened last night?

The cat greets us at the door. Hey kitty, dad says, and I feel a small flood of relief. I find a nature program on television and we sit down to watch. I need a break. From him, from how I feel, from trying. The low-grade guilt that always accompanies these feelings wanders in, predictably. But he loves the vibrant green leaf filling the screen, and he loves the little green worm that the leaf has trapped with its invisible, sticky hairs.

We’ve watched programs like this together for as long as I can remember, which I love, but that feeling is mixed with terror. For every gazelle leaping expertly across a plain, there’s a weak one getting picked off by a lion.

Now we are watching a giant, slow-moving water buffalo surrounded by Komodo dragons. They are circling in. It’s hard to tell if the water buffalo is clueless, paralyzed, or indifferent to what he’s got coming. The four dragons wait, watch, advance with slow, fluid precision.

I start to feel anxious, upset. I don’t want to see this. I look at dad. He is leaning forward in his seat, smiling slightly. When I was young, this made me so mad. I’d sit there in a stew of terror and sadness for the animal, and feel angry that my dad seemed to enjoy it. He, of course, would see my little storm brewing and say, It’s just nature, Bec. Nature’s a bitch. This was his version of comfort, and I didn’t bite. That frustrated him. I know he believed that if I could master my emotional responses, I could do anything. Instead, I showed great promise for being overly sensitive, prone to weeping, too attuned to injustice. Nothing like him, in other words. Just as the water buffalo is about to get the business, as dad would say, he turns to me, perhaps to deliver the ‘Nature is a Bitch’ lesson again. Instead, he says, You know anything about the people who live here?

I don’t, I tell him. I used to.

This essay was originally published in The New York Times as The Mysteries of My Father's Mind.

The Burnt Plane // John T. Price

As Jason Murphy’s mom drove us to the farm, I wondered how it would look now that his dad was dead. It had been almost a year. I pictured man-high weeds and rusty tractors, the house dark and empty, the giant barn rotting with its roof caved in and black birds flying out the broken windows. But my first step out of the car was onto freshly mown grass. Jason’s uncle was waving from the front porch of the house. Jason joined me, and we ran toward the barn, which was still standing, and slid open the huge doors. Inside, the light from the upper windows shot down through the dusty air, burning leopard spots onto the floorboards. It smelled of oil and wood and hay, like always.

Jason called me over to the space behind the loft stairs. The frame of an old yellow bike rested on the floor, its pieces scattered nearby. Jason planned to fix it up, he said, so he could ride it that summer. Today he was putting on the handlebars, and asked me to get the toolbox.

The box, dented and gray, had been set on one of the mismatched workbenches still lining the walls. Its metallic luster stood out against the dust-covered machine parts lying around it. Here and there, I could make out hand prints in the dirty surface, which were probably his uncle’s, but which made me think of Mr. Murphy. Big and dark, part-Indian, he said, ace pilot and WWII hero. Mr. Murphy had always been glad to see me, even after my baby brother died the previous spring, and I spent more time at their farm than usual. He’d never been afraid to put me and Jason, just third graders, to work on one of the junk cars he claimed was not yet beyond hope. That kind of work is good for boys, he’d say, and then place impossibly gentle hands on our shoulders, hands that otherwise swallowed everything they touched, including this box, the one I was now somehow lifting on my own.

Jason held the handlebars out in front of him, twisting them right then left, steering through invisible curves. He set them by the bike and pulled a wrench from the toolbox. The wrench was large and grimy, and when it slipped off the nut, Jason’s wrist bent toward the floor, but he didn’t drop it.

“Don’t you miss him?” I asked.

He ignored me, just like the last time I’d asked, and the time before that. He put the wrench down and walked outside. I followed him down the long grassy airstrip to the sheet-metal shed with the tattered wind sock on top. We walked around the side, stepping through a thicket of tall grass until we reached a big shoebox-shaped something made of interconnected, metal rods.

“This is the plane my dad got killed in,” he said, stepping inside the charred, rusty frame. He sat down on the bare steel of the pilot’s seat.

I crawled into the space behind him and sat on the wet grass. The last time I’d seen this plane was in a newspaper photo my mom had shown me, its black tail smoking and sticking straight up out of the corn field where Mr. Murphy had been crop-dusting. I was in that same tail, I guessed, but it was hard to imagine that this had once been his plane—no wings, no propeller, no metal skin. Weeds and vines were growing up through it.

“I like to sit here sometimes,” Jason said with his back to me. “I see things.”

I didn’t understand, but then I leaned back on my elbows and let my gaze move up the slope of my friend’s skull and launch itself over the shed, the barn, and into the atmosphere. Up there, the plane’s skeleton vanished, along with my own, until there was nothing but sky. I wondered if this was the same sky Mr. Murphy saw all those times, and the last time. A sky big enough to carry him over any place or time that ever meant something to him—an ancient Indian hunting ground, a battlefield in France, a cornfield in Iowa. Maybe over our own selves right then, sitting on the ground, looking up.

We stayed there a while, long enough for me to know. Then I followed Jason back to the barn. We had work to do.

---

A native of Fort Dodge, Iowa, John T. Price attended the University of Iowa, where he earned a BA in Religion, MFA in Nonfiction Writing, and PhD in English. He has authored five creative nonfiction books, often using humor to explore the wildish intersections of nature, family, community, and spirit, with a special love for the prairies and oak-lands of his Midwestern home.  These include All is Leaf: Essays and Transformations (U. of Iowa Press, 2022), Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father (Trumpeter/Shambhala, 2013), Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships (Merloyd Lawrence Books/Da Capo Press, 2008; Paperback, U. of Iowa Press), and Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands (U. of Nebraska Press, 2004). He is also the editor of The Tallgrass Prairie Reader (U. of Iowa Press, 2014), the first historical collection of nature writing entirely dedicated to the beauty and fragility of the tallgrass region.