ELIZA HAYSE

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

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

WENDY K. MAGES

Redheaded Angel

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

MADISON SUMMERVILLE

The Duality of Homes

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 on. 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 of 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 expiring 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.

ZACH BENAK

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

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 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 11pm, 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).

RUBY MARGUERITE

The Ritual of Killing the Crab

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.

REBECCA ROTERT

The People Who Live Here

Mom is doing makeup for the opera and dad tags along. Beverly Sills has been brought in for the role of Lucia de Lamermoor 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, who 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 stay 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

JOHN T. PRICE

The Burnt Plane

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.

The Burnt Plane was originally published in Brevity Journal.