ASHLEIGH RAJALA

Do Not Resuscitate

It started with the cure for cancer. I didn’t believe it at first; no one did. It was impossible to think it was anything but fake news, and plus I was wary of getting my hopes up. We’d gone through everything you could think of with Sarah. Chemo. Experimental drugs. Naturopaths. Even positive fucking thinking.
She was more positive than I was by the end of it. I guess she had to be. It was her life on the line, not mine. I was just the husband. But it was there, all over Twitter. Facebook. Every TV channel. Texts and notifications were popping up on my phone. Is it real? Is it true? How is Sarah feeling?
Everyone says that now. “It started with the cure for cancer.” But it wasn’t really a cure.
Cancer just… stopped. Everywhere. All at once. I had my phone in my hand, staring down at the messages in disbelief. Even people I hadn’t heard from in months, those who avoided us under the pretext of “giving us space.” You know, those who are really just scared and don’t want to face it. They reached out now. Is Sarah’s cancer gone? Just like all the others?
I walked into the bedroom that I still thought of as ours, even though I hadn’t slept in there in months. Sarah had always wanted to die at home. Nothing was making sense; it all felt like a sick joke, but then I saw her, sitting up in bed, grinning.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said. I wanted to say it was the morphine, but I saw the drip dangling, useless. She’d ripped it out. I didn’t think she’d had the strength.
But it wasn’t just cancer. It was everything.
Well, almost everything. Nurses and doctors in hospices reported the terminally ill just suddenly feeling better. Emergency rooms had no more casualties. Heart attacks, car accidents, anything. They still happened, but everyone survived.
Even the very old clung to life.
For a while, any death made the news. People were still getting the hang of what was going on. No one quite knew “the rules” yet.
That is, until doctors, I guess, got cocky. With patients unable to die, what was the point of stressing out to save their life?
So this was the kicker, the thing no one saw coming: no one could die unless under someone’s express intent. Murder and suicide were still on the table. Someone jumping off a bridge with the intent to die would die. Someone with poison slipped into their wine would die.
And negligence, as it had all come to show, was equal to intent. A doctor not stepping in to save a life was effectively ending it. A paramedic dilly-dallying on their response. A parent leaving their baby in the woods.
That came like a second wave. First, no one dies. Then, too many die. Half were ruled accidents. The courts ate themselves alive with the question of culpability. If one didn’t believe their victim would actually die, how could one prove intent?
The news was too much for anyone to bear those days.
Not least of all Sarah.
And she had nothing to do but sit at home, watching the news.
She’d tried to get her job back but couldn’t. She’d quit when she’d got her diagnosis six months previous and when she was cured, they’d filled her position. There was no precedent for not dying when everyone thought you were going to. There was just a, “You quit. Sorry. New person is past their probationary period,” and a casual shrug.
At first, it was easy to say, “At least I’m alive,” but then, I suppose, the pain of living creeps back in. At least it did for her.
The rest of the world carried on. Now that we all knew “the rules,” that is.
Nurses had to keep nursing. Safety regulations had to stay in place. Food still had to be consumed.
I’d come home from work myself and find Sarah red-eyed on the sofa. She always had questions for me. “Why they’d stop calling?” I didn’t know how to answer that one. Whom did she mean? Those who stopped calling when she got sick or those who stopped calling now that she was all better?
Another day, she asked, “What will happen when we all get too old? Who will deal with us?”
And another: “Why is this happening?”
And then she couldn’t ask anything at all.
The inevitable catches up and we all act surprised though we should’ve seen it coming. But we all have to live on and live with each other.
Whatever that looks like. I can’t quite tell myself yet.
We can’t die, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna make it out of this alive.

An award-winning fiction writer and indie role-playing game designer, Ashleigh Rajala lives and works in Surrey, BC, on the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples.

ADRIAN KENNEDY

Jaguar, but Pronounce the “U”

I became the one thing I sought to destroy
A child?
No!
A velociraptor
It eats people raw
Bones wet with blood and flesh
Like a Big Mac
Blood being the sauce
How gross.
In Catholic Church we drink gods blood
And we eat his body
So
How could we be so different than a velociraptor
If not even worse
Eating our savior
Stop
Don't think of it that way.
A wasp
It stings people
And it’ll never tell you why because it’s a wasp and it can’t speak
Yet
They can grow, just like anything.
You’re doing it again, you know you need to stop.
It’s a human
Who does very bad things
Who can’t be forgiven and doesn’t want forgiveness
That’s what they say
Constantly.
But I am also human
The apple must not fall far.

This hasn’t been helpful. I’m sorry.

Adrian Kennedy is a writer whom chooses to remain nondescript. Their work, "To Face the Sun," has previously been featured in In Parenthesis online blog.

TANA BUOY

Avocados

“I still don’t understand why the forks don’t go in the same way as the knives,” I say while loading the dishwasher. Stabby ends down. Three prongs are just as sharp, just as painful on a careless palm reaching in blind for a spoon for sneaking late-night ice cream straight from the carton. You don’t answer, yet I hear your cheeky voice say, then stay out of the ice cream. In the living room, the television flickers with one of your favorite food shows. They’re all the same to me: renovated restaurants, mystery baskets, bad cooks, soggy bottoms, the pressure cooker. Is it cake or is it cancer?

I open the fridge, inhale cold air tasting of leftover egg salad, search the door for lime juice. The oat milk for your matcha lattes expired weeks ago. I’ve continued to push it further back on the shelf with the excuse the trash is already full. Next time. Always next time. I’m sorry I yelled when you hammered nails and pinholes into the wall without levelling, measuring, searching for studs. You always were trial and error—a little less of this, a little more of that—just go for it and try again as you put up the pictures I was always too busy to hang: Finny as a puppy, the grizzly in Glacier, honeymooning in Maine. Our wedding portrait. My god, we were babies then. I thought we had time.

I open the cupboard above the stove and fight through all your cookbooks for the Ziplock bag containing the recipe for your great-great gran’s guacamole. Set it on the counter safe inside the plastic. What started as oral tradition passed through your matrilineal ancestry is now on a notecard which you repeatedly told me was blasphemous as you wrote down the ingredients, stopping at every letter to rest your shaky hand. Scared the words wouldn’t be legible. Scared it would die with you—In case you meet someone new, you offered.

“Stop it,” I’d said. “You’re not dying. I won’t let you.” Pinky promises.

I want you to know I’m still finding your hair balled in my hoody pockets and stuck like Velcro to the back of my t-shirts and the bottoms of my socks. I’m pulling it out of my ass crack. I don’t know how it gets there, and I slap the long strands onto the shower tiles like you used to do and watch them slither down like thin snakes into the drain.

I’m already fucking this up, aren’t I? Not using the fresh limes, and I think I grabbed the wrong kind of onion. Trying to dice the tomato, but the cutting board quickly runs bloody with tomato guts. Try to stopper it with my hand from bleeding out onto the counter. Fail. These days and nights are an endless fog, thick and gray and void of sunlight, and Finny doesn’t sleep at the end of our bed anymore. Still waits by the door. How do I explain to the goddamn dog you’re never coming home and that I’m a liar? With the crook of my arm, I wipe away the tears burning my face. Definitely grabbed the wrong onion, and my cilantro cuts are atrocious. You once held this knife in your hand, rocking the blade in smooth even strokes. I should have been more present.

I remembered to cut the avocados last because you told me that once exposed to air, the fruit begins to lose its bright green color. Like a doctor performing life-saving surgery under duress, I tear the plastic baggy open from the side, pull out the three avocados one by one. At the grocery store, I’d selected them from the box labeled RIPE because I couldn’t remember how to tell the difference between a good avocado and a bad one. Something about squeezing and being too proud to ask for help. The blade presses against the first and the insides give way before the leather skin does. Same with the other two. My throat constricts. Shaking, I drop the knife onto the counter, pick up the avocados and press them between my hands, a non-bright green mush oozing from between my fingers, shedding their suits and seeds in my fists. You were in remission. RIPE is supposed to mean ready to go, and I can’t stop feeling cheated. We were coming home from dinner and a movie and rocking out to '90s ballads and finally planning that dream trip to Scotland when a black Nissan pickup jumped the median into our lane. I mix the ingredients together right there on the cutting board, bits of cilantro and onion and tomatoes all sticking to my palms. Pour on the lime juice and the salt and slap it into the bowl. I felt your soul leave, slip between my fingers. I wipe my hands, the counter, and load the cutting board and the knives into the dishwasher, press the quick cycle button. The machine groans and gurgles to life, and I swear I hear your giggle. That looks like diarrhea, Mikey. There’s a half bag of chips in the pantry.

I drop onto the couch just as Anne Burrell is coloring a contestant’s finger red with a marker for holding the knife incorrectly, and you’re laughing at the uncanniness of it all. I dip a chip into the bowl of guacarrhea, bring it to my lips. Surprisingly, it’s not as horrible as it looks. Finny walks out from the shadows of the entryway, shoves his muzzle into my crotch for pets. I glance at the wall where you’d hung the large canvas of my favorite sunrise from our last beach vacation, where crooked sunlight pours through the holes in the storm clouds moving across the Atlantic. Seagulls fly in form along the coastline and fishing boats are scattered across the dark blue ocean like mini marshmallows and the silhouette of the freighter teetering the edge of that burning horizon.

Tana Buoy received her MFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha in 2021 and is a micro/flash fiction editor for The Good Life Review. Twitter: @ThrowMeABuoy

MATTHEW ELLIS

French Impressionists

I long to wrap myself in the canvases of the French impressionists
Let Sisley and Monet hold me as I weep

I’ll plunge into the Loing or the Seine itself,
into ultramarine and cobalt blue
I’ll wade into the waters of Giverny,
lie amongst the water lilies
madder red and cadmium yellow against emerald, violet waters

I’ll hide in Eragny with Pissarro
in the blossoms of orchards,
white to peach,
blending into the viridian ‘round poplar trees sparkling with autumn hues

Matthew Ellis (he/him) spends his time teaching yoga and following creative pursuits in music and writing. You can follow him on Instagram (@matthewellismusic3) or visit his website (www.MatthewEllisMusic.com).

LAINE DERR

Buttons I Keep

I still have
glimpses of her –
mouth wiped
on a soiled sleeve,
snow falling
on a February day,
trees etched
on a blouse of blue

buttons
I keep
like a lost
eye – a jar
next to a jar
filled w/ white.

Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Phillips Collection, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, Chapter House, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Laine lives in a landscape, free and quiet.

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

DANIEL NEWELL

Two Poems

BLACKBERRY PICKING

When I remember my mother happy
I go back to her emerging from brambles,
a loaded bucket keeping her from dancing.
How she’d get into it, thumbs and fingers
purpled from berries that also stained
the cutoff milk jug she carried. Handing me
a used ice cream tub, lugging their dark weight.
Some were sour, not ready for the trip.
But the big sweet ones in hot cobbler
with vanilla ice cream melting over an evening
at the bottom of summer. I'm getting ahead of her.
And her scratched shins and hands. Sweaty legs. Sneaking
over the old Battlefield where the best patches were
without competition. Picking half a day of illegal berries.
Dodging the park ranger, dropping in waist-high grass
when his truck would pass, lying belly-down on the stained
shirtfront she’d sometimes flipped up as a makeshift basket.

RODGEY POEM

I hope I get the news late
when you die. That I live a while
more with the thought of you
alive. Maybe the paper misses it,
or you're missing for days
and for all we know, you might
return in a week from the woods
hungry and filthy, crawling with stories.