A Green Year

This story was a finalist in the 2024 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Because Vivian almost never leaves her apartment, her niece Marie arrives there promptly at 8:00 a.m. A normal hour for Claire, the functional sister, to drop off her problem child. Maybe a little early for little Marie, who has already donned her ice skates and wobbled to the front door, one slender finger in her mouth, plucking a tooth.

Vivian has bought a sketch book for Marie, hoping that this, finally, would be the day she and her art-loving niece might connect. Hoping that this “year off” Vivian’s living might crack open and let her out. (Who’s holding you in? You know—you!) Hoping that she can help in some way with this troubled child who Normal Claire cannot fathom, Vivian has promised to actually take the girl out this time. Better for both of them, Claire insisted. Normal people can’t sustain themselves on endless streams of content and neurotic fixations on insects and the like. (Do you want her to turn out like you?!?)                

“My toof’s looth,” Marie says and then takes her finger from her mouth, spit-blood cocktail dribbling. Anything but teeth! Vivian thinks and then thinks against herself, that frantic, cruel voice of inner subversion: (Have you brushed? [how many times??] Has she? Do you have enough paste?!?)

Vivian’s mind snares such ideas like a bear trap, and they scream to her.

(Look, these teeth of yours; you’re not going to have them that long. The warranty expired, there’s no exchange policy. You’re not built to live to retirement! It’s your own damn fault if you go extending that life expectancy beyond the reproductive cycle. Wax wings, hot sun—you get the picture, sister. And it’s in those teeth.) says the script in Vivian’s head each morning as she flosses. The message and the messenger itself both obnoxious reminders of the daily bodily terror of being human: (A tragically self-aware ape), insists the postscript response, once Vivian’s resistance against the intruding thoughts but now just another line of program in her mind (soggy wiring). Like how from age ten to seventeen, everything had to be in even numbers: bites of food from a plate, syllables in a sentence, steps from point A to B. If not, cognitive dissonance, feet tripping feet, teeth grinding teeth.

For a moment, watching Marie fiddle again with the “looth toof,” Vivian almost reverts, tongue starting to count her own teeth just to be sure.

Vivian slaps her cheeks, shakes her head back and forth, and faces Marie.

“Have you brushed recently? I think I’ve got a toothbrush your size.”

The girl stares. Drool of incomprehension. They head to the bathroom for deep scrubbing.

But, during this, Vivian’s fourth brush of the morning, what bothers her is not the ever so slight—yet undeniable!—tea stains conquering territory on her lower front teeth. Nor does she sweat any more than usual about having to leave the apartment (sooner by the brush stroke, thank you Marie). What she sees are the dark, sad, puffy lower eyelids she’s had since childhood (Brother Thomas, too—genetics, ge-ne-tics). Like an age meter, they’ve gotten slightly darker by the year, and they remind her she’s a product of DNA that only needs her to breed—and then die, for all it cares. Sometimes she fantasizes about moving into an artificial body to escape death, taking her wet robot brain with her like one moves apartments. Why not, if her mind is just chemical and electrical signals?

Vivian has just gotten a hold on this thought-stream when in reflection she spots the second set of puffy eyelids in the room. (Second? Count, dear. Reflection: yours, yours again, hers, and her other one, too. Two pairs of puffy, sad eyes.)

“Ughh,” Vivian moans (counting: one, two, three . . .  four seconds), chin dripping minty. The two girls spit in unison. Foamy tadpoles slide down the drain.

~

Marie’s mother (big sister Claire, renowned neuroscientist) does not know why her daughter is unhappy, and because Marie’s ever-grinning brother Joey embodies such a perfect counterpoint to Marie’s disposition simply by existing, her frustration sometimes smacks of blame toward Marie. Joey, hotdog in mouth and the sting of a day’s game of catch in his palms, oozes sunshine. So why does Marie slide down the fire pole over and over for an hour straight instead of playing with other kids? And what makes her ask Mommy why some things taste good and others taste bad? And on learning of taste buds and neural receptors and the gustatory cortex, why, Oh God, must she lean against the fence and sob?

This, Claire had asked at lunch in Vivian’s apartment, mindlessly swallowing sticky piles of mandarin marshmallow fluff salad, which, Vivian thought, tastes good primarily on account of sugar and acid dancing in unison. Given Vivian’s preference (read: uncontrollable compulsion) to stay at home, they’d brought the barbecue to her.

“Oh, I’ve read all the books, asked my colleagues, and there are just no real answers. Get them to bed on time, give them healthy food, make sure they feel connected to others. Should I give her an iPhone? She’s eight years old!”

Vivian, having eaten some stringy barbeque chicken (sticky dead flesh waiting to rot just like teeth), pulled a folding travel toothbrush from her pocket. She jammed the dry bristles back to her right molars.

“Dash sure-tainly trouble-shum.” (Brush brush)

“You should have seen her drawings. Where could she have gotten the inspiration, dear?” Claire said to her husband, David, a big, gentle therapist several days overdue for a shave.

“I’m still paying for this, am I?” he said, rubbing Claire’s shoulders.

“Marie asked him,” Claire said, dropping to whisper, “where we go when we die. And he said—Viv, enough with the brushing, Christ almighty. David, can you analyze this girl?”

“Conflict of interest, my love. You know as well as I.”

“He’s not my dentisht,” said Vivian. She takes the brush out of her mouth and adds, “I’m not even using paste anymore. Not more than four times a day.”

“Just give it a rest. Now listen. He said, and I quote: ‘Well, Marie, daughter of mine, whom I protect and guide through this life and to whom I would never say anything twisted or disturbing, when we die, we simply go back to where we were for billions of years before we were born.’ Honestly, David, are you insane? Tell him he’s insane, Viv.”

“Confick of intresh, my shishtar. You know ush well ush I.”

“I thought it was an honest, comforting answer,” said David.

Vivian spat. “What’s comforting about billions?!”

“We couldn’t leave those drawings at school. That teacher of hers had them on display. Painting after painting of a screaming little girl in a black void of death!” Claire said, chomping more marshmallow salad, junk she’d normally avoid, which is how Vivian knew she was truly upset over this. Nobody in the family really talked about it, but there had been a growing sense of worry about their familial emotional balance since the eldest brother Thomas had lost his professorship. (During a heated conference panel regarding the orangutan in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he’d cracked the skull of a Poe scholar with a classroom projector.) And Vivian had her own, less infamous troubles. As the next generation of their family emerged and grew, each of them worried about inheritance. “And then when we had to explain to her why her art was taken down, it was like she was in her own world and couldn’t hear anyone else.”

“Vivian, we were talking,” David said. “And while even thinking about this is a conflict of interest, I feel Marie might benefit from another social outlet.”

“A friend.” (Claireified.) “Something like a sister. A big sister.”

“Izat sho?” (No coincidences. All part of the program.)

~

Vivian has come to suspect that all is program. Not only her body, an expression of DNA, and her mind, always flickering before her captive eyes like a Clockwork Orange screening, but the whole world—the universe! Whether someone else’s simulation that she’s just living or simply a purely mechanistic roller coaster she’s strapped into, she can’t say.

The notion sprouted around the same time her body (according to schedule) started manufacturing (automation) the chemicals that would make her skin bubble and her menstruation start. The voice that was and wasn’t hers elbowed into her thoughts, and she’d sit silently in classes thinking about that phrase “train of thought,” picturing the tracks (predetermination, control, clockwork timetables, please watch your hands; the doors are now closing!) extending out before her. One thought moved to the next—or were they linked like one train car to another?—drifting away from the station. Vivian struggled to focus on the buildings and trees flitting past, smearing with speed into an untouchable world. It was lonely.

Inwardly, Vivian’s selfhood had twisted into a self-devouring solipsism, but to her family, Vivian was just quietly waiting to emerge from her shell. That’s puberty! Given the extraordinary talents (hereditary, just look at your philosophy professor daddy and poet mommy) of her older brother Thomas and sister Claire, there was cover for her turn inward. Between events like Thomas’s publication of a book of literary scholarship during his last semester of undergrad to Claire’s landing first cello in the state orchestra in every year of high school, there was no light to shine on Vivian’s complications. The problem became tangible only at the holidays and at her Birthday when, oh crap, everyone had to buy her gifts to demonstrate their admittedly truly-felt (biologically-rooted) affection. But what did this girl want? What did she think?

For her twelfth Birthday, a chunk of identity inexplicably landed in the family’s lap: Vivian loved the color green! For years, the problem was solved: give her green clothes, green sheets, green curtains and trash cans and desk chairs. Paper her walls in leafy reams and roll out the grassy carpets. Soon her room looked like the Rainforest Cafe, complete with tree frogs dangling in every corner from shamrock patterned shoestring vines. Vivian was green, green was Vivian.

Her brother, Thomas, perhaps intuiting something wrong with year after year of green gifts, broke the pattern one Christmas and gave her, in green holly paper, a Franz Kafka collection featuring The Metamorphosis. Vivian stared at the bug on the cover. She had always thought that Thomas was actively ignoring her, but she felt something else then. Had he noticed her collecting beetles in the back yard?

“This one’s pretty weird,” Thomas said. “I don’t know. I thought you might like it. Something for study hall. Or bedtime. Hahaha!”

“Kafka? What are you trying to do?” their dad asked. “Turn her into Margot Tenenbaum?”

Vivian read it cover to cover, and Thomas kept giving her books. She was thus marked another reader in the family, making holidays all the easier, but soon everyone learned she was also fascinated with insects, and she started to speak her mind—the parts of it she (at least felt like she had) selected.

~

Vivian and Marie slowly waddle out onto the frozen pond in Glass Park. (Don’t yawn, you wanted it early to avoid people!) Relieved that, as planned, nobody else is out this early, Vivian holds Marie’s hand, small and soft in its tiny mitten. An embarrassing internal giggle tickles her, but Damn you mommy program, I have no intention of squeezing any little ones out of me. Still, the air is cool, and Marie is focused on maintaining her balance and so squeezes gently as they take the curved end of the pond. Vivian stops thinking then, and there is just sound: blades over ice, Marie sniffling. 

Until GACHUNK GACHUNK!

Skates slice through crunchy bumps in the ice, and the surprise sends the two down to the slick cold, Marie tumbling into Vivian’s arms, which cradle the girl’s head in the fall. Synchronized in motion as if their minds run on the same tracks, the two flop over and observe, down in the ice, frogs frozen just at the surface, some of their heads sticking just up above the floor line. Several heads are split in two where the blades have just slid. Frog brain shaved ice.

“We broke their souls,” Marie says.

“Broke their souls,” Vivian repeats, staring into the cold amphibian eyes. “Croak.”(Ribbit.)

“Mom says the soul’s in the brain.”

“Soul’s in the brain.” Vivian reaches out to run a finger over the credit card slot she’s just cleaved into this frog’s skull but stops. “Marie, who says frogs have souls?”

(Blink blink)

“Amphibian metaphysics are none of your business, young lady.”

Marie’s hand escapes its glove and wiggles her loose tooth. She is unconvinced. (Oh no, you’ve broken her soul!)

“Look, your mom, she maybe spends a little too much time in that lab of hers. It’s like a family bad habit,” Vivian says even as she starts to sweat under her coat, noticing families starting to arrive, skates in tow.  “Hey, Marie, have I ever shown you my bugs?”

~

Marie requests “Popeye” for lunch, so Vivian whips up pepperoncini pasta with sautéed spinach (Popeye) and pan-seared chicken. A recipe inherited from her brother during her “year off” of school. While Vivian cooks, Marie stares into her tank where Gregor the Eastern Hercules beetle dwells. Marie’s mouth hangs open in wonder, one finger in for tooth-wiggling. From where Vivian stands, it looks in reflection like Gregor has just stepped out of the girl’s mouth.

“Vivian’s year off” was a euphemism in the family for a year (and running) during which she locked herself away in her apartment, leaving only briefly—at night, baseball cap pulled down over brow—to get necessities. (They can’t see you, but I do.) The family didn’t know the details. (Sure, Viv, I’m sure they can’t guess.) Only that she stopped coming to see them.

When she was a high schooler, she’d begun to blabber incessantly to drown the inner voice. But in college, she spent more and more time alone in a lab surrounded only by insect tanks. Soon that old train of thought cried out within the vibrations of the cicadas and the multi-instrumental improvisations of the Bess beetles. (Sky to birds, water to fish, Vivian to Vivian)

In the lab they’d bred flies: generation after generation, heritable traits cresting and crashing into piles of crispy, indistinguishable winged bodies. At some point, Vivian stopped doing her work and just stared through a microscope at the compound eyes, imagining a strange mosaic of seemingly infinite shards of image. How could all these angles coalesce into one reality?

She went home and locked the door to be alone. Alone with herself, her other voice. 

 ~

Vivian sets two plates of pasta down, whistling “Popeye the Sailor Man.” They eat in silence, except for Vivian mumbling some Popeye lyrics between bites. When she clears their plates, Marie looks up and asks what will happen to the other frogs—the ones frozen deep in the ice.

Vivian boots up her laptop, pops her toothbrush in for idle cleaning, and the two squeeze into the squishy desk chair, Marie climbing uncomfortably aboard Vivian’s lap for a clear view of the screen.

“Shee here,” Vivian says mid-brush after a quick search. “Shum frogsh are made to freej.”

“Aren’t they cold?”

“Nod ad oll!” she says and gives up the brushing. “They aren’t going to die, either. Provided they keep their heads down to avoid ladies like us on skates. When a cold time is coming, they just have to get down deep enough and let it happen. According to this, their hearts beat only once or twice a day during this time. But they must believe it will be warm again one day.”

Marie pushes on her own chest, checking if her heart is still ticking up to speed.

“And in the spring, they’ll thaw out again . . . and nab some flies with their tongues! Yum!” Vivian licks Marie’s cheek, Marie squeals, and they take off on a chase-me game. Marie, captured and tickle-tortured, asks if they can go see the frogs again.

“Maybe another time,” Vivian says, already dreading how Claire will react to her daughter’s gruesome introduction to amphibian roadkill.

Later Marie complains about her tooth, so Vivian helps her loop some floss around it (she has reams and reams of the stuff stashed away), and they do the old doorknob trick.

“Ready?” Vivian says.

Marie nods.

SLAM. POP. And the tooth is out, dragged along the floor like a fish on a hook. Marie collects it and stares.

“You know what happens, right? A new one will come in soon.”

Marie dashes to the bathroom and locks herself in. She’s in there more than an hour before Vivian finally knocks. Marie, what’s up? Are you ok?

“Jusht looking,” she says, and Vivian can picture her seat up on the sink, staring into the bloody gap.

~

Vivian wakes from dreams of fleeing a giant frog’s tongue, lashing out to close her inside its jaws forever. The early morning sun casts a familiar pattern on familiar bedroom walls. (Always the same walls.) She feels the fabric of her pajamas, often what she wears all day (Who’s gonna see you anyway?) and begins to dread. Her mind takes off: Brushing. Puffy eyes. Green goo. Sketch book. A screaming little girl in the black mouth of death. The black mouth of frog. The credit card slot of frog. Big brother splashed with the blood of the academy. Vivian splashed with the blood of brains of frog. Mountains of dead flies. The inevitable voice of DNA. Sketch book.

Crayons! Marie is going to need crayons.

Vivian dons her baseball cap, wads cash into her pajama top’s breast pocket, and, in a motion and a half, whips on her coat and a pair of sandals. Three steps out the door, she does not pause but internally (Hey, what’re you doing out here?), and by the time she is back with the crayons—the big set with every shade light and dark plus built-in sharpener—her toes have gone numb.

Before going back to sleep, she creeps into her guest room and retrieves the tooth from under Marie’s pillow. On the night stand she leaves the Crayolas, the sketch book, and in green crayon on the opened page: Up for ice skating?

~

Marie squats in the center of the pond next to the frog bumps and unzips her little backpack. She takes out the sketch pad and crayons to sketch the frogs in the ice. There are bubbles and leaves and sticks. Some of the frogs’ heads are just below the ice, and some are above, cleaved in two and topped with yesterday’s frog brain debris. Vivian wonders if she was entranced by gruesome things at Marie’s age. She probably was.

She leaves Marie to study the slain frogs to her heart’s content, skating leisurely around the pond.

If her mind is a program, Vivian thinks, she could be copied and continue this passive existence forever. But she’s not sure. She’s starting to think that there is indeed a program, but the Vivian living it is a product of motion—more like an amateur figure skater on a crowded pond than a train on tracks. Here comes a crazy big brother skating in the opposite direction to hit her with a snowball, and she takes off after him, everything shifting around her darting moves. There goes a sister, a niece, a trail of strangers and frogs in the ice that change her path. She might even trip into a pirouette.

Marie holds up her sketch as Vivian glides by: green frogs, frozen in the blue, holding acrobatic poses. Some dead, some alive. Hearts beating once a day, waiting for the thaw. Marie smiles and sticks her tongue at Vivian through the gap of her lost tooth.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Shoe Shop

You might expect a shoe shop’s window display to be filled with shoes, but in this case, you’d be wrong. Instead, a brilliant array of strange and wonderful plants pressed up against the glass, completely obscuring everything inside. It wouldn’t look like a shoe shop at all, if not for the hand-painted sign above the door that read, “Tanner’s Fine Leather Shoes,” in large white letters. I clutched the bulky bag of Mr. Branson’s shoes to my chest as Mom tugged me past the wild jungle of a window, but not before I caught a glimpse of bright brown eyes peering down at me from between the purple leaves of a vine several feet above my head.

As we entered the small shop, a bell rang on the doorframe above us.

“One moment!” A man’s voice called out from inside the mess of plants. “I’ll be right with you.”

“Oh, honestly…” Mom muttered under her breath. She’d been that way this morning—well, for the past few days, really. Short of temper, in a rush. Ever since Mr. Branson’s accident.

“My apologies,” the man said, emerging a few moments later from the maze of green with a silver watering can in hand. He was a narrow man in a green plaid dress shirt, buttoned up all the way to his throat, with a voice higher pitched than you might expect for a man so tall, as if he was speaking through his nose. “My plants are accustomed to a very precise watering schedule.”

“Yes, well. We’re on a tight schedule, too.” Mom said pointedly. The man’s posture straightened, making him even taller, and his lips pressed into a small straight line as he met Mom’s gaze. Mom stood taller too, although she still didn’t come even to his shoulder, and lifted her chin ever so slightly, until he looked away with a sigh.

“Terribly sorry, Ma’am,” he said at last. “I’m Willard Tanner. How may I help you?”

Mom’s posture relaxed. “My boy needs new shoes,” she said, “and mine need repair. I hear this is the place to come.”

“Yes,” he said, “for repairs. But not new shoes. I only sell used.” Mom and I looked around at the shelves lining the small room. Leather shoes in a myriad of sizes, each practically glowing in shades of inky black, chocolate brown, and rich velvety cream. They didn’t look used.

“My father was a shoemaker,” Willard explained, “the very best. Most of these are his work. Made lots of things, in fact. Even built this shop.” He swept a long arm about in a grand gesture. “But I,” he continued, “restore them. It’s my specialty.”

“Used will do,” Mom said quickly. “I hear you take trades, as well?”

“Naturally,” Willard replied, with a bit of an edge, “where else would I get shoes to restore?”

Mom blushed, but not bashfully. I think she was actually becoming cross with this strange man, although I found him quite funny. But we needed shoes before we left town; there was no getting around that. Mom had spent the last few days getting things in order, and this was our last errand. The big toe on my left foot peeked out now from its prison, and the sole on the right shoe was starting to detach in a flap at the side. Mom’s shoes were even worse, and we had no spares. With Mr. Branson gone, Mom needed to find new work fast, and we certainly couldn’t travel like this.

“Do you have his size?” Mom asked, nudging me forward towards Willard.

“I have all sizes,” he responded, “but we have to find the right match.”

“Don’t they all have a match?” I asked curiously.

Willard nodded and gave me a quick wink. “Naturally. I mean the right match for you.” I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

“Every shoe has a story, you see. An imprint from the last owner, and the ones before that, too.”

“You mean a wear pattern?” Mom interjected.

“No!” Willard whipped his head back toward her, frowning. “Not in this shop. They’re good as new by the time I’m done with them!”

“What, then?” I asked. Mom was clearly ready to be done with this errand, but I was still curious.

“An imprint, like I said. A history.” Willard put his hands in his pockets and smiled at me. “A personality, if you will.”

“What about this pair?” I picked up a black pair of shoes with grey laces that looked to be about my size.

“Those belonged to a young man named Patrick. Smart boy, did well in school. Got a good job. I’d recommend them, except for one thing...”

“What’s that?”

“He was a thief. Not out of need, mind you. Out of impulse, for the thrill of it—not the right match for you, I reckon.”

“Now how would you know that?” Mom’s voice dripped with skepticism, but I think she’d given up on speed by this point.

“Shoes tell stories,” Willard said with a shrug, “and I once caught him with a tin of shoe polish in his pocket, too.” He shook his head. “That boy never polished shoes once in his life, I’ll tell you that.”

Mom sighed and took the bag of shoes from me. She took a seat on the small wooden bench at the side of the room, and gestured for me to follow Willard. I set the black shoes down and trailed after Willard to the next shelf while mom removed her own worn shoes and set them beside her on the bench.

“Now here,” Willard said, in a soft voice, “is a good pair.” Tenderly, he picked up a brown shoe that had a section at the toe in a darker, textured leather. “These belonged to my nephew. Kind boy. And the reinforcement at the toe can’t hurt anything, now can it?” I looked down at my escaped toe and wiggled it as Willard bent down to untie my laces. The shoe was a perfect fit. Willard took my old shoes to the counter as I laced up the next one.

Mom stood again, in her stocking feet, and placed the bag of Mr. Branson’s shoes on the wooden counter.

“We have these to sell,” she said, as Willard walked behind the counter. “They’re good quality.”

Willard frowned as he pulled out the first pair, and then the next. Mr. Branson’s shoes were large and dark, with sleek lines.

“Where did you get these?”

“They were given to me. They belonged to my employer, Mr. Branson.”

“Curtis Branson? The man who died in the storm?” Willard looked up at her, surprised.

“Yes.” Mom’s voice sounded pinched.

“Oh. I didn’t like him,” he said flatly. He looked down, went back to examining the shoes. Mom seemed a bit taken back by his forwardness.

“But they’re good shoes,” Mom insisted, “aren’t they?”

Willard sighed. “Yes. I suppose I can find a match for them. Someone with strong moral character might manage alright.”

“Why didn’t you like him?” I asked brightly, earning a pinch on my forearm from Mom for my impertinence.

“I used to shine shoes when I was a young boy, when my father still ran the shop. Curtis Branson was a weekly customer. Cruel man.” Willard shook his head, still examining the shoes. “Stepped on my fingers every time. And I could tell from the toe of his shoes that he had a habit of kicking things.”

I was delighted by this clever shoe detective, and now, I knew for sure that he was telling the truth. Mr. Branson was not a nice man. Not at all. Mom tried to hide it from me—she told me he was a good employer, and that we should be grateful. But I knew.

 ~

We lived down past the creek from the Branson mansion, where Mom worked as a maid during the week, not returning until nearly dark each day. But in the evenings, she was home with me, so when Mr. Branson appeared at the door a few days before the storm, just as I was about to go to bed, it was a shock to us both. He was a large man, with dark hair streaked with grey, and astonishingly light blue eyes. When Mom answered the door, he staggered in off-balance and caught himself on a chair, leaving the door swinging behind him in the cold evening wind. Mom took three steps backwards towards me, her eyes large and her mouth opening and shutting without a sound. Next to Mr. Branson, she looked like a tiny bird.

“What,” she said finally in a shaky voice, “are you doing here?” Mr. Branson didn’t answer. He just smiled strangely and stepped forward, toward her.

“Not here,” she hissed, stretching out her left arm sideways, across my body. But Mr. Branson didn’t seem to hear. He stepped forward again.

“Go to bed, Thomas,” Mom said sharply, in a voice I knew couldn’t be argued with. She turned and pushed me back into the bedroom, shutting the door after me with a loud thump. I’d never seen her act so strangely. I think she pushed Mr. Branson out, too, because there was some clattering around after that before the outer door slammed shut. Although I didn’t see him again at our home, I thought I heard his rough voice and heavy footsteps once more later that week, while I was supposed to be sleeping. Mom was different in the morning, too. Quiet and distracted, staring up the hill toward the Branson residence. I stayed awake as long as I could every night, listening. Mostly, I just heard her rustling around, until she went to sleep too. Except on the night of the storm, when I heard nothing but the incessant roar of the wind and rain.

Willard pulled out the third and last pair of Mr. Branson’s shoes. He bent his face down close to them, studying something on the sole.

“This must be the pair,” he said, “that he died in.”

I felt Mom stiffen beside me.

“How could you possibly tell a thing like that?”

“Well, see here. That scrape, probably from a fall. Green from the moss that grows on the bridge. I assume that’s where he fell. Red dust embedded in the leather, from the bricks. And this here is water damage.”

“Wow!” I said, unable to contain myself, “you’re like a real detective!”

“Shush now,” Mom scolded, “that’s preposterous. And we need to go. Can you take them or not?”

“It’s not preposterous, Ma’am. It’s simple observation.” Willard straightened, looking down his nose at Mom.

Mom glared up at him silently, one eyebrow raised. After a moment, he looked away.

“I’ll take them,” he answered quietly. “They’ll be enough for two pairs.”

“Here,” I said excitedly, “do Mom’s!” I snatched her old shoes from the bench. Mom grabbed my wrist, hard, but not before I slung her shoes up on the counter in front of Willard with a thump. Her eyes widened as he picked them up.

He was quiet for a long time, looking at Mom’s shoes. At last, he said:

“Not too old, but very worn. Regular pattern of stooping; perhaps working on your knees?”

“Yes. Scrubbing floors.”

“And… you must have fallen. This scratch here…”

“Tripped on some stairs.”

Willard’s brow furrowed. “Some green residue. And… red, there by the heel.”

“I have a garden,” Mom said a bit too loudly, “clay soil.” She was still gripping my wrist, so tight that it hurt.

“I see,” said Willard quietly, not looking up. “Well, not much to tell here, except that they are beyond repair.” He set the shoes down, slowly, and reached under the counter. “But I do have a pair here that’s quite nice. I think they’ll be a good match.” He set a tan, suede pair of boots on the counter.

I was disappointed not to get a better story out of Mom’s shoes, but she was still in a hurry. “Thank you,” Mom said, grabbing the boots. “That will be all.” She spun me around and pushed me towards the door, not even bothering to put the boots on over her stockings. Just as we stepped across the threshold, Willard called out after us. Mom froze in place, her hand still on the doorknob.

“I won’t tell anyone, Ma’am … about your garden.”

Mom didn’t turn back to look at him. But I felt her breath release beside me, and she gave one slow nod, before we carried on our way.

Grownups are strange, I decided. Mom’s garden was small, but nothing to be ashamed of. When we were halfway down the street, I looked back over my shoulder. It was too far to tell for sure, but from behind the twisted tangle of plants in the shop window, I felt those bright brown eyes staring after us until we were far out of town.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Constant Weights about the Signs

contexts

writing sets itself as the act of intercepting and recording a series of phenomenological data into signs, rather than calculating them out of a signification formula;

every bit stands for an amount of energy, just as every word represents an amount of signification 

in the seamless transition from sign to sign, signification progressively sheds its content and takes on the archetypal value inherent in the sign-making or sign-discovery process;

the increasing lack of conventional text components reflects a systematic and theoretical approach rather than an aesthetic judgement;

this establishes a structural field of new formal possibilities that re-quires us to rethink where signification resides, regardless of how we use it; 

potential residual contents tend to become theoretical, trapped within the spatialised metrics that delimit and sustain the expanded textual environment;

the scene (the dark, the dusk, the desk)

UNSIGNED NOTICE, New York (1967)

nihil in mundo nisi prius in verbo

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems

Miami Gay Pride

Alas for the prisoners of masculinity
who would not be caught dead holding
a man’s hand on the boardwalk between
South Pointe Drive and First Street,
where even hetero couples get swept
out to sea, crushed under condos or
washed up on the beach to be eaten
by realtors. What do you want, nothing
is perfect. (But it might be survivable.)

Lost in this city for eons, afraid of
HIV, of police, of dying and nobody
notices, of living & nobody notices,
of the people afraid of me (including
me), of men who need you to know
they like GIRLS (whatever), rescued
by a guy schlepping Domino’s for ten
years with no Wi-Fi and he still can’t
speak English. Yep. Feels like home.

My life unfolds in the dysregulated
hands of a clock TikToking off sun
showers in Adderall City, anesthetizing
stylers arriving by invitation only from
Argentina and Latvia and NewYorkCity
rolling up on Soho Beach House where
a Russian model sacrifices two french
fries and one bite of a half-pounder as
an oblation to the Versace angel.

If you fall into the apps without a life
vest, you may awake with the heir
apparent on a palmetto runway to
Millionaire Row. Cloned by a 3-D
printer in an intracoastal bird cage,
another Giza on the a$tral plain,
orbiting Planet Her on a flexible
itinerary the way a menu flies out of
some pop up: strictly “need to know.”

Smoothing the synchronous pillow
case into divipada pitham—bridge
pose—we met in a sketchy nebula.
Then he crawled his way out of me
like a poem, the umbrella a robotic
arm with webbed fingers carrying
us to Puerto Plata, bone-sweat-like
silver-tears on Bro-meliads. Rain
or shine, these sprinklers revolve.

They never quench this/thirsty/soil,
hungry tendrils caressing each tender,
shrinky bud and leaf, exfoliating piña
colada in the sauna, arroz con pollo
and fryde plantains at the mercado,
or an officer responding to another
unscheduled, eventual emergency
at the World Museum of Erotic Art.
(Humanity was going up in flames.)

Percolating through the food court
at Lummus Park, the carmelized chunks
are melting into sweetness, ripened
grains imbibing the savory juices. ¡La
Vida! In a heartbeat the world flips &
you can see from the Mariana Trench
through a glass-bottom boat an ahistoric
collapse of a pre-histeric ghetto.com.
Now Jews will be living north of Fifth!

You can be gay here during Pride,
he says, Erotes serving elotes on
blushing wings from a fully-erect
coconut grove on Ocean Drive, chin
strapped police & jock-strapped
waiters, flirting with the Michel-
angelo at Marshall’s admiring your
microfibre boxer briefs (say it 3x
fast lol) if all your sales are final.

But you can’t go out, because abuela
got catfished in a dream, lost her
iPhone, her rosary, her conscience.
And you will ride this sparkling
elevator alone through security forever.

Blind Date

Pulling up in darkness I’m “I think I’m here,”
and you saying prove it with a pic of your bldng
okie, which felt over the top but still I took
it through the cold glass the lights bouncing back
in my face from every direction & you were like
okie. Idk it’s like you couldn’t look out a window
where I parked or if you did you couldn’t believe
your own eyes.

Off to the left flies a giant American flag but I
don’t think you recognized any of that color-
blind landscape, the cars at the dealership near
the frontage road crossing an ocean you
never noticed like stepping onto another
planet through a door you may never see again.
How do you find your way back to a
strange place?

Waiting for an hour I drove off once but you
said to come back, and there was a licorice
whip of man-shaped hole in the snow the
smoke out your mouth a lit fuse burning into my
car under layers & layers of Gucci frosting which
granted it’s cold but you turned the weather into
another layer. No wonder you took so long
getting dressed!

“Are we staying close?” was you asking where I
lived like a scared vampire timing his exposure
to a world of curses to a white boy lost here in the
hackles of your suspicions like arguments you
rehearsed upstairs for the last hour about why you
shouldn’t come down and get burned so that
even a condom might be held against you at
the inquisition.

I’m going to New Orleans, you said later,
to be closer to “my people,” but it wasn’t
your family you wanted, either but the culture,
is what you said not soul food or jazz or voodoo
or not just that but lying still on warmth of black
asphalt under a hot moon and the earth stops moving,
no more questions where you are living with the
windows down in a place that you can see with
your own eyes.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Lazy Aging

Seemed a lazy aging local time—
a long...slow...Newtonian apple fall
from this plot’s golden height.

Seemed a ponderous passing of days
since meadows waved flaxen arms,
and a silver brook backed up
to form a beaver pond.

Relativity stretched summer and fall
longer than were—
a most protracted, agreeable, entertaining,
leisurely, passage.

Suddenly!
The speed-of-light funeral march—
seemingly—arrived unsung.

“What is time?” asked I
(scientifically, philosophically, angrily)
of passing wind—
who (if anyone) should know.

Who does time think it is:
taking responsibility upon itself
(without notice) disappearing so?

Yet, signs unveiled themselves all along—
impressed on lives contingent—
noticing.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Three Poems

Single, Thirty-Something Female

In my early twenties, I read an article in a magazine about increasing numbers of unmarried women in their forties, fifties, sixties, like an exposé or an epidemic. I always thought that by the time I was forty, I’d be married and I wouldn’t have acne anymore. But here I am, over forty—I still have acne and I never got married. Those words remain embedded in my memory, so shaken had I been to imagine that same fate might await me. A decade ago, I would have told you I'd have children by now. It was never a question, only an inevitability. I longed for love and marriage, for stability, for vows and promises. Motherhood would have been the happy byproduct of my dreams come true. I would have gladly consigned myself to that fate had my future manifested in the ways I desired it to. But wanting a thing only drove it further from my grasp. Loving men has been like watching fireworks, has been an endless stream of violent explosions and trying to remember how beautiful it all was after nothing but ash remains. It became harder and harder to believe in fairytale endings where I would be anything but alone ever after. It is a strange thing to wonder about the life I would have made for myself if I could have chosen it, if everything I’d ever clung to hadn’t withered in my grasp. Perhaps if I saw myself as a mother more than a wife, it wouldn't matter, alone or lonely, I, like many before me, would do it anyway, without asking for help, without waiting for it to arrive. Even still the idea of children glimmers enticingly in my mind sometimes, a mirage shifting on the desert horizon. But the closer I get, the joy of it always burns off like so much haze in the sunshine. Instead I feel the relief that I did not get what I wanted when I wanted it, that it gave me the freedom to decide to want other things. I still dream of love, imagine futures that surprise me. I still leave every door I walk through open behind me. Just not this one. There have never been any clear instructions for how to wrest satisfaction from a world so good at withholding. The only thing I knew to do for so long was keep revising the plan after each failed attempt and starting over. Now, I’m learning to forgive myself for feeling old, for growing tired of beginning again. I’m learning that alone does not have to mean unhappy. And when I think about what I might have had if I’d had my way, I no longer think I’m missing anything.

Biological Clock

My biological clock is ticking. I can hear it in the rhythmic trilling of the crickets hiding in their tall grasses. I hear it in the tapping of a spoon against glazed ceramic, slowly stirring honey into a hot liquid. I hear it in the pattering rain falling steadily on a sloped roof and sliding down the asphalt shingles to the gutter. Sometimes it is a dancing rhythm, a rumba, tango, waltz, two-step—at other times a dirge, a marching rhythm for a processional of the dead.

It is like any clock, quietly doing business in its place until one day, in a blanket of stillness, you notice it ticking. It is then that you turn on another noise to stop yourself from hearing its constant, ceaseless toil. But every day from then on, when the silence visits, the ticking returns. It was there, clinging to the edge of your awareness all this time like a slug on a tomato leaf, a single slimy touch away from noticing. Why is the ticking of a clock so disturbing? It is a reminder, one might say, of the forward motion of time, its nature to never relent. Time ticks away and all things are left behind, the clock ticking will outlast us all. Or perhaps because the ticking is steady and sure, which none of us are, which nothing in life ever is.

Not even clocks really, which die sometimes, too. Sometimes sudden, a brief moment of failure and the ticking ends; and should you be lucky enough to witness such a death, you'd hold your breath a moment wondering if you’d finally outlasted time itself—the utter silence left behind by the stilled ticking would feel intensely intimate, a private moment of immortality. Or otherwise, a clock's death is slow and steady. It first becomes unreliable, counting seconds twice, resting for whole minutes on end. The clock becomes a problem to solve, a patient to cure, an enemy to defeat, the clock becomes everything, the whole center of your awareness, always checking to see if still it ticks. The clock is dying but you keep fixing it and fixing it, resetting the hands to their proper positions. And when it dies, it hangs on the wall and reminds you every day that you are out of time. You begin to hear phantom ticks, imagining the clock still works and turning again and again you see it, dead. And this too is an intimacy for you, for the clock. It was a part of you once, a thing that lived and measured.

What if I had more time, I wonder? What choices would I make without a ticking clock counting down the days I have left to decide? Some days it is a war I must win against the clock, to declare my intention to fail before I meet my failure, to turn misfortune to success. But I've weighed far more than time on my scales, and always I come up wanting for desire. I've said this again and again: how many times I've calculated, accounting for the variables. But time is not a variable, it is a constant path ahead. And always I am moving forward toward the day when the choice will no longer be mine.

Sometimes I think about how much time I may have left before the final bell is rung. Sometimes I wonder if time will make me change my mind. And then, will it be too late, will I be out of time? I keep hearing the clock tick, sometimes reverberating echoes and other times a quiet whisper. Lately, I have been turning down the noises to listen to it ticking, taking comfort in its constancy, learning unforgiveness from its unwavering plodding march. The clock, like an old friend, a flashlight, a mirror, showing me things I couldn't see alone, in the dark, without a way to measure the weight of this decision.

Here, it says and indicates a single moment. Forever lies just beyond this point.

The Mother Inside Me

"In every man there is a child. In every woman there is a mother."
—Santosh Kalwar

Inside my hollow belly she coils my womb,
awaits its filling, she is patient for my mistake.

Inside I feel her alien polyp suckered
to my locked and hidden spaces. She longs

to hold with my arms, feed with my breasts;
she feasts with my eyes on the smallness of infancy.

The mother inside me is a hostile invasion of need,
is a peal of vicious laughter at each finished poem.

How long did she build her subtle residence
before I noticed her presence? Inside me,

she burns, kindled by the pilot light of hope
that has kept me from ending my worst days early.

A whispering voice in my ear, when I think of the future,
she reminds me of the endurance of decision. I can feel

her hunger bubbling inside me, but I cannot stomach her desires.
Creation is a violence I couldn’t bear to inflict—

not for loneliness, not for need, not even for love. Inside me,
the mother starves but does not wither, the mother fails

but does not relent. She is not a thing that I could kill,
only a secret I must smother. The mother inside me

is serpent shaped, slithering up my esophagus.
She opens my mouth to speak. Instead, I scream.

We are not so different, the mother and me.
We both want something we cannot have.

This piece was featured in Volume 2, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

If asked, then lie

After the “Balloon Boy Incident,”
Fort Collins, CO. October, 2009.

For six years I kept you safe from it all;
sharp countertops.  The toxic lake algae.   The toxic grass.
I shut all the windows   so the toxic air wouldn’t get in.
I checked your fever   with a thin thermometer.
I uncanned soup   and paced the linoleum.
I told you to be silent   in the attic.   I put up posters
searching for your missing body.   I did not listen to the men
at the grocery store   who said they once saw you
running away from the yard   towards the highway,
between traffic lanes on all fours   like a determined deer.

I asked countless Hollywood producers   if they could
find a team of camera men   to record our family.
I begged air traffic control   to close the Denver airport.
I told everyone you were up there,   in our silver
weather-balloon   stuck in thin air.   I asked your father
again and again how we should phrase   our loss.
I prepared myself for the interviews,   the autographs,
my Good- Morning-America   debut. I put on waterproof
mascara. I thought of the intonation and voice
I would use to posture   as remorseful.

That is why   now,   after the reporters found
nothing inside the husk   of the balloon,
and you have returned from the attic,
and the people with cameras have all gone back
to Los Angeles,   I am here,   sitting on the lawn.
Watching a family of elk   cross one end of the highway
to the other,   thinking of all the mothers
without personal stylists.   Without anyone looking   at them
at all. Watching the elk.  Mowing the grass.   Washing a dish.
Three of four elk make it   across.   One of four, don’t.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Impermanence.

Her name escapes me now, but her face was unforgettable. The woman—I will call her Sarah—had half-inch fake eyelashes, sparkly pink lips, and her forehead, cheeks, and chin were plumped and plastered unnaturally smooth across the broad bones of her face. She had long inky black hair pulled up in a bright scrunchy, and her voice, simultaneously booming and breathless, could be heard in the furthest garden behind the meditation hall whilst Sarah was still inside the communal dining area.

She looked much younger than her age—fifty-five! she bellowed gleefully to everyone she spoke to within minutes of the introduction. Sarah beamed, and although the skin on her powdered face didn’t move much when she smiled, her eyes twinkled with childish delight. You couldn’t help but smile with her.

She was a refreshing eccentric, amongst the quiet crowd of introspective acolytes. We were a pretty mild mixed-bag of a retreat crowd: we were accountants, lawyers, or something in IT. There were a few yoga teachers and a handful younger, more overtly alternate-types, adorned in cheesecloth skirts and crop-top bodices and tattoos of Sanskrit symbols.

Most of us wore shy, thoughtful smiles that did not reveal our teeth, as we milled about the orientation hall. We were contemplating the days ahead, and what we’d just signed ourselves up for: ten days of no speaking, no reading, no writing, no eye contact, no exercise, and sitting Vipassana practice in the meditation hall for around ten hours a day, starting at 4:00 a.m.

If Sarah was nervous, she didn’t show it. She wore a fluorescent Hawaiian jumpsuit, very short, and she appeared to be fizzing with excitement. Within half an hour she’d bounced through the shy fidgety crowd and introduced herself to everyone, leaving laughter, furrowed eyebrows, and darting glances in her wake. Sarah, as everyone soon heard, was anartiste, an actress.  She’d played minor roles in a few minor movies, and received some minor awards—here, right here, see? And look—she swiped—here was another photo of her at the award ceremony, and here—look! look!– another one, in a different dress. She had a beautiful daughter who was twenty, who was an actress also—see? Sarah’s day job was proprietor and clinician of a Botox clinic. COME! She grasped the arm of her startled interlocutor. Oh, you really must come, come and stay in her home! She would cook for you! She would give you Botox treatment, no charge, not for such a friend as you. She beamed with the earnest warmth of a doting aunt and the appraising eye of a fond expert. She could also do something with your hair and make-up, too, she added warmly. Sarah did not seem particularly nonplussed by the fact that none of the other women, from the strait-laced accountants to the cheesecloth-bodiced seekers, appeared to be wearing, or exhibiting any interest in, makeup. Nor did she seem to notice the startled quality of the stuttered thanks and smiling murmurs of Oh, Uh, Maybe. She just bounced off to the next person and repeated her kind offers of hospitality and free Botox. She was a fountain of beneficent enthusiasm.

That first evening, when the retreat coordinators reviewed the schedule and reminded us all of the 4 a.m. start, Sarah gasped loudly and sat bolt upright. Her shock was not affected; it seems she genuinely hadn’t thought to check the program of this funny place, before signing up. This amazed me. It filled me with something like awe, given the hours I’d spent scowling cynically at my laptop, making absolutely certain this wasn’t some kind of weird, woowoo cult that would make me wear flowers in my hair or flop around on the floor to the beat of amateur bongo drums. I’d vetted the philosophy and reputation of the practice and the facility for weeks before deciding. Sarah, it seemed, had just rocked up. 

She was there at 3:55 the next morning, pacing silently in the cold and dark in front of the meditation hall. She was there, on her cushion, every single morning, by 4:00.  She was there even on mornings when a good deal of the surrounding cushions were empty; when sleep had won out against the bristling self-serious determination of many of her more somber retreat companions.

Sarah never spoke a word in the meditation hall. She belched. She belched noisily, pleasantly, and un-self-consciously. She was several cushion places and one row behind me, and I could hear her exhale contentedly after each burp. I bit my cheeks, trying not to laugh.

Like all of us, Sarah shuffled. We could all hear our companions’ shuffling, in the sitting hall; the quick shift of a painful knee, the discreet stretch of an ankle on fire, or the muffled re-fluffing of cushions. We all experimented with the cushions in those first few days, apparently reasoning that if we got the configuration just right, we’d be able to avoid the pain of sitting motionless for hours at a time. We took another, and yet another, cushion from the rack before each sitting. We built clever cushion ziggurats to perch on, certain we could avoid discomfort if only we kept experimenting. After a few days, most of us finally realised the futility of this; and that there was a path through the pain, to the other side of it, that was far more interesting than our squirmy, fruitless attempts to avoid it. But Sarah didn’t bother with cushion configurations for a straight-back sitting posture. By the end of the first morning, she chose a back-support chair, oblivious to the nonsensical imaginary stigma of weakness the rest of us had subconsciously assigned to that humiliating crutch, as we eyed it ruefully beside the cushion rack. 

The days passed. Soon, we shuffled less. Then, we barely noticed even the silence of the still, quiet crowd, as all of us individually sank deeper into the fascinating experience that is an intensive Vipassana retreat. 

~ 

On the tenth day, the final morning session came to a close, and several dozen pairs of eyes opened slowly and serenely inside the hall. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who felt I’d just barely scratched the surface. I spoke to several people later who agreed that by the end of Day One, they were mortified by the torturous stretch of time ahead; and by the end of Day Nine, they desperately wanted to stay another week. It’s difficult to describe the tangible quality of the joy and tranquillity the teacher guides you into over those ten silent days, and difficult to explain what you learn about your own mind and body. It was utterly unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and as a sat there in the hall, my eyes slowly becoming accustomed to the light again, I felt semi-intoxicated. The breakfast bell sounded, peaceful faces smiled all around, arms stretched, and necks slowly craned. From the row behind came a loud, blunt, holler:

“SO! Uh . . . can we talk yet?” 

We were indeed permitted to talk in those last few hours, and the atmosphere that day was one of surreal communal elation. Strangers wandered over to a random table; the seated company warmly welcomed them; everyone inquired with warm interest as to who their companions were, what in their lives had brought them to this place, how they felt now that it was over, what they hoped to carry away from such an intense experience. Our faces glowed and our eyes shone, giddy and brimming with metta.

Sarah, too, was thrilled to be able to commune verbally again, although she didn’t seem much interesting in discussing the previous days. Within a few minutes, her conversation had returned to the appearance of the other female attendees, to enthusiastic invitations to come and stay at her house and get free Botox, to commentary on more photographs of her in evening dress at the award ceremony. She darted and flitted around, but now lingered—I noticed—a little more closely to those who seemed more kindly disposed to her. Some people were finding it difficult to hide an awkward desire to—kindly, smilingly—put some distance between themselves and Sarah.

Her conversation was mostly cheerful and bubbly, but some of it was genuinely disconcerting. She held her phone aloft for the benefit of the others at thetable—wanna see a picture of my BOYFRIEND? Haha! Just kidding. Oh my god, oh my god. She swiped, and a ridiculously tense-looking muscular young man appeared in a variety of selfie poses. Sarah dissolved into raucous giggles. My boyfriend! My boyfriend! 

Some people pressed their lips into a gentle smile, gave her a warm nod, then turned back to their conversation. Others made a cheerful rejoinder, patted her shoulder, then edged away. One or two of the younger ones simply stared at her, genuinely amazed. And it was a little surreal. Sarah was, it must be said, a fifty-five-year-old woman whose conversation skills in many ways had not developed beyond those of an adolescent. She squealed and clutched your arm, giggling over the kind of things very young girls giggled over. Her seeming indifference to the profoundly intense experience she’d just undergone was absolutely bizarre. Seated amongst a cluster of women talking intensely about their sittings in the hall, I heard Sarah blurt out unselfconsciously that she’d mainly come to lose weight. A stunned silence followed. Oh, sure! she beamed. Locked into a rigid retreat schedule where you weren’t allowed off the grounds, and only served two vegetarian meals a day—what better way to shed a few pounds? Sarah was perfectly serious. The group dissolved in kindly, stupefied laughter. Really? Oh yeah, she shrugged. Sarah had never missed a sitting; she’d practiced all those long, long hours, felt her spine and all her joints burn and ache with pain, listened to the madman ravings of her mind, and passed through to the other side of the gruelling experience, just like the rest of us. And all to lose a few pounds. I watched one young woman—dressed in a scarlet satin number reminiscent in design of Princess Jasmine’s outfit in Disney’s Aladdin, and covered in Buddha-themed tattoos—as her jaw dropped open.

Soon Sarah was enthusiastically soliciting numbers for a WhatsApp group: so that everyone could stay in touch! All friends together. Given that we were all, essentially, strangers and had only really spoken to each for the last hour or so, she was met with more surprise than enthusiasm. Some people froze, when she handed them her phone to enter their contact details. Others, after only an imperceptible pause, shared their contact, thanking her warmly for considering them. Some stuttered apologies: they didn’t have WhatsApp . . . no, nor email either, they were not really email people. I watched people tactfully duck and dart around the dining room to avoid her.

It was the group photo that Sarah insistently arranged, on the stairs in front of the meditation hall, that proved the final straw. Ok! she boomed to the tightly packed group. Now, everyone, smile for the camera! She handed her phone to the server, then bolted back to the front row and spread out peace sign fingers wide beneath a cheesy grin. Again, again, another photo! The young woman in the Princess Jasmine suit with the buddha tattoos groaned audibly. 

Ok, ok, one more! Sarah shouted up at us.

Now:

Everyone say:

ANI-CHE!

The Jasmine-suit woman hissed loud enough for the whole company to hear: this is embarrassing.

And I completely fell apart.

I never got a copy of that photo. The truth is—and I am not proud of this—that I was one of those that smiled and stammered something about not actually possessing any contact details, the automatic reaction of most introverts, when a stranger solicits phone numbers. So, I never made it into the WhatsApp group. But I’m pretty sure I know what the photo looks like. It looks like a group of people pressed tight into a stairwell, wearing facial expressions ranging from tranquil to perplexed to baffled and dread-filled. I’m pretty sure the Jasmine-suit woman is clenching her teeth. I recall a handful of kindly quiet older ladies whom I’m certain are wearing warm, loving smiles. One or two of them had even agreeably murmured the sansrkit word ‘Anicca!’ (pronounced ani-che), upon Sarah’s insistence that we all shout it, as if there were nothing odd about randomly substituting the Buddhist term for impermanence, for “CHEEEESE!”. And then there’s me, about row five, my cheeks pink and my mouth idiotically agape. I was shaking with laughter.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Sarah made such perfect fools of us all. We’d all just spent ten days in a state of deep concentration, practicing how to notice and transcend reactions of aversion. And the instant I came out of my bliss trance, here was Sarah, squealing about Botox and fad diets, thrusting grotesque amateur muscle-man photos in my face. The departure of bliss like water down a plug hole, and the resurgence of aversion was so strong I could feel it prickle up my whole body, albeit mingled with a kind of bovine, bleating denial of my own urge to run away from her.

The last day in particular had focussed on metta meditation practice, on cultivating loving-kindness and compassion for all beings. I had stumbled out of the hall feeling such abundant, overwhelming loving-kindness; for my silent companions, for that big yellow spider near the gate so beautiful it brought a tear to your eye, for the swaying bamboo overhead, for All Beings, Everywhere. And after two minutes of being cornered by Sarah, listening to her giggle and shriek about sexting with her make-believe boyfriends, I found that my cheeks were beginning to stiffen and twitch. Sarah simply refused to fit the noble, beautiful, tranquil mold into which I had mentally squished All Beings, Everywhere, in order to love them.

She revealed me—all of us—as so laughable in our earnestness, so adorable in our newfound contemplative gravity. Sarah was so kind, so generous, a woman whose frailties were no different than the rest of ours, and yet who was—in a way—so much more transparent about them. Sarah, it seemed reasonable to conclude, was one of those women who had never, her whole life, been given any respect or any regard, save in relation to how she looked. It was painful to picture her as a little girl, staring wide-eyed all around her, searching for a role model; someone to teach her how to be kind to herself, how to value herself, how to connect with others in a meaningful way. Beneath her raucous overtures was a real longing, the same longing as all of us felt, to connect; please, come to my house. Please, let me call you. I’ll give you things for free. I will feed you. 

There are a great many stories in various spiritual traditions about the importance of showing compassion and loving-kindness to all kinds of supposed undesirables: to beggars in the marketplace, to whom you should give your cloak; to adulterers and thieves, the outcast and condemned; to the poor, the incarcerated, the proud, the cruel, and the wicked, for they know not what they do. It seems to me this list of potential compassion targets is some pretty elementary stuff. In my experience, it’s far more difficult to feel loving-kindness for the average stranger loudly crunching an apple in confined public transport space than it is to give alms to the poor and embrace the pitiful and outcast. It’s easier to love the downtrodden than the noisy and flamboyant aspiring pop culture icon. Sarah was not an outcast of the world, she was everything the world had told her to be: an Instagram starlet, a woman so desperate to avoid aging she had devoted her career to artificially forestalling it, a noisy, bubbly, wealthy, body weight-obsessed, Pretty Girl, earnestly enacting a role that masked all the deeper and more vulnerable parts of herself.   

Ajahn Chah says: Anything which is troubling you, anything which is irritating you: that is your teacher. Sarah was my teacher. She made me see, for a fleeting instant when that ‘ani-che!’ photograph snapped, all of us within each other, all our states of being morphing and sliding in and out of one another. The vision wasn’t beatific, but it was rather beautiful, in a hilarious kind of way. A lovely human collage of fused-together impermanence. The stricken-faced girl with the spiritual tattoos and the Princess Jasmine outfit: that was me. I hid it better, but there I was, deep inside my innermost thoughts and feelings, cringing and groaning and deeply embarrassed to be posing for the cheesy ‘peace fingers’ retreat photo. The kindly older women who smiled for the camera so as not to hurt Sarah’s feelings, that was me too, in a way; deep, deep down, there was still a part of me able to choose kindness and compassion, despite the bleating protest of my pompous spiritual dignity. And Sarah, the odd one amongst us all, who showered generosity so profusely, whose desire for connection manifested so desperately, who wore her insecurities and misguided longings on her sleeve—that was me, too, although I wore my afflictions on a far less prominent place than my sleeve. That was all of us. People whose lives are all hunky-dory, A-Ok don’t bother signing up for an experience like that.

I’ve forgotten a lot of the recorded teachings from those ten days. I can’t remember much beyond the gist of the teacher’s evening talks. I did not march forth from the retreat and commence a stringent, unshakeable daily two-hour practice at home. I still find time on the cushion every day, sometimes for five minutes sometimes for thirty, sometimes in a state of deep tranquillity, sometimes as skittish and neurotic as a short-changed squirrel. But I’ve never forgotten Sarah, or whatever her name was (I’d know, if was in the WhatsApp group). I’ve never forgotten that mirror she held up to my face, captured in a photograph I’ll probably never see. I’ve never forgotten her inadvertent admonition to remember my own state of being, and the state of all things: all things sacred, and all things silly.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Great American Desert

There is no water but only sandy, calcareous soil,
and no trees to fell for a lean to, or to hang a noose.

Abandoned buffalo wallow gather stagnant pools.
Tendrils of creeks pass as rivers. They make no sound.

The only sound is the wind, always the wind,
as if a drunk God had forgotten how to be silent.

Come south of the mountains, warm desert winds breed
with the cold air of the north. They birth tempests.

Maybe it’s how the mountains subdue the sky,
alter its jet streams, shade its sun, impede its views

of unbroken horizons, maybe these are why storms
bloom into yellows and purples and greens and blues,

with clouds that seem to tumble over each other,
as if above us were an Edenic formal flower garden

fenced, furrowed, and sown by a maniacal bachelor
who breeds hybrids, lives with cats, and breathes dust.

As for me, I feel more awe than fear at a prairie storm.
The child in me excites, as if a father, gone to war,

has returned, more myth than man, with the rage
only men too hurt to know pain carry as a fetish.

With such a brooding nature, a squall line entices:
“Come. Trust me. In my violence is freedom.”

In a derecho, the rain parallels the earth.
Droplets sting like miniature flint arrowheads.

Trees rip from their roots. Walls topple like sticks.
Streets back up with sewage. Lives turn upside down.

But it is the peace after the storm that admonishes.
We do not often hear what the silence says.

When I listen, what does it say? That true silence
does not exist. There is always a whisper in the air,

a prophecy that in a world of unbroken vision,
there is also life to lose, and life to make.

That is what one finds here, among the scrub
and shortgrass. Silence is another order of voice.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

The Art of Survival and Passions

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Artist’s Statement

My art captures the unseen narratives within everyday lives moments of struggle, the beauty found in resilience, and the quiet presence of love. I aim to capture the strength we discover within and alongside each other. To give our shadows a voice within the light. To reveal the importance of both in our lives. Inspired by my past experiences, and my journey as a father and husband. I aim to create works that resonate with viewers on a personal level, reflecting the emotions we all carry. How love shapes our deepest passions. My art explores the subtleties of human connection, and the ways in which color and imagery influence our emotions. Using light and shadow as expressive tools. I explore the contrasts we encounter in life, where darkness can reveal comfort and light can unveil truths, conveying the balance we encounter in life. My work is not only a personal story but a collective one, an invitation for viewers to find pieces of themselves within the art.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Care Bear for Sale

I’m about to be mugged over a fucking Care Bear. Togetherness Bear. Don’t ask how it came to be in my possession. Okay, fine, go ahead. I opened my front door one morning, and it was sitting there. I’m not lying. There was a box and I opened it and there he was.

I hear you say, “That’s a bit unusual, mate.”

Well, yeah, I guess it is. But unusual has this way of happening to me. Like the time I opened my door to find detectives standing there. I would have preferred the Care Bear, especially as the house was surrounded by armed police officers. 

Two words for you: past occupants. The detectives mumbled apologies and left, but this Care Bear has stayed.

The first time I was mugged it was over a pair of drumsticks. I thought the man running toward me in the flannelette shirt was going for a late-night jog—until he stopped and began throwing punches. The second time I was mugged, it was over a traffic cone. This will be the first time I’ve been mugged for a Care Bear.

Why am I so certain I will be mugged for the Bear?

It started two days ago, with someone who shares the name of a Bronte novel.  She came at me within seconds of creating the listing. 

“I really, really want this,” she said. “When can I get it?”

“How does tomorrow sound?”

And so, while I sit waiting, I browse her profile and notice something.

Care Bears. Everywhere.

Buying, selling, it doesn’t matter. She needs Care Bears like a junkie needs their next fix. 

“I’m really sick,” she tells me, and I think to myself, in the head?

“I can’t make it today,” she continues. “I’m pregnant.”

I say congratulations, and tell her it’s okay, and that in the meantime, other people are longing for this Care Bear, and she understands this, because at this moment she wants nothing else more than said Bear.

“Can you please hold it for me?” she asks, and for a second, I think she wants me to embrace the chap; to cuddle him, and let it know that a new owner will be with it soon. But then I snap out of this Care Bear daze of insanity.

“Yes, of course,” I reply. “Same time?”

“Yes!” she says. “I want him so much.”

So, here I am on this couch, rocking back and forth while reading a news headline:

MAN BEATEN BY THUGS POSING AS BUYERS FOR HIS IPHONE.

“This isn’t an iPhone,” I reassure myself.  But thoughts of rooms filled with Care Bears, like those on her profile, start to infiltrate logic, and I resign myself to fate.

MAN STABBED FOR CARE BEAR.

I can see the headline now. I ponder my final words. 

“Shhh!” I whisper to the empty house. I hear a car pull up outside. I run to the toilet window, because it’s inconspicuous, and no one will expect anyone to peer at them through there.

But shit. She has already escaped my vision, she’s already at the door. This is it.

I pick up the box, the same one that appeared on my doorstep on that sunny morning in November. My dog stares directly at me.

“Really?” she says. “You could be making something of your life.”

I shrug my shoulders. The Care Bear is life.

I turn the door handle and there she is. Dripping wet, curly red hair and barefoot, as if she has taken part in a triathlon to get here. I look around, expecting to see a bike and other competitors, before remembering that I’m about to be mugged.

She stares at the ground, unable to make eye contact, waving cash in the air.

“I’m here for the Care Bear,” she says, breathing heavily, eyes fixated on my feet.

“Here it is,” I say, presenting her with the Bear. 

This is when it will happen; the shanking. The box arrives in her hands and I reach for the money. The knife will pierce my skin any minute. I’ll fall to the ground, arms outstretched, clasping for the Care Bear that caused this, reaching for the remnants of my life.

But it never comes. The money lands in my hand.

“Merry Christmas,” I say, relief washing over me like the waves that clearly drenched her hair.

“You too!” she replies, skipping away with the Bear, back towards a car that still has the engine running, driver in place for a quick getaway.

She clearly forgot the knife. I look at my dog, and she wags her tail.

The Care Bear is responsible for my next two dinners. As I sit chewing my food, gratitude hits me. I’m grateful I wasn’t shanked over a Care Bear and grateful for the food on my plate.

I still think of him whenever I open my front door. Maybe one day there will be another box. Maybe not. But I will always remember the day he arrived on my doorstep and the day he left, via a barefoot girl with dripping wet hair, heavy breathing, who was maybe pregnant, and who may or may not have forgot to bring a knife to our Craigslist sale.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

The Skeletons Wash Their Hands Before Supper

When I was seven and you were five, you moved into my bedroom. They needed your room for the new baby. I don’t remember having any feelings about it—you spent all your time with me anyways. There was plenty of room for both of us.

We wanted bunk beds, but that option was never on the table. So, we slid your twin bed down the green carpet of the hallway and into the far corner of my bedroom. Now, it was our room.

Before you moved in, I made a twelve-foot-long clover chain and hung it from the ceiling beside my bed. We wove your Barrel-O-Monkeys into it and draped our new creation around the window frame like a strange, gaudy necklace. Your porcelain birthday dolls joined mine on the highest shelf, the first five of my brunettes now standing beside blonde twin sisters. Our closet was crammed with all the toys: my Easy Bake Oven and art supplies got cozy with your Lincoln Logs and doll clothes. Your Barney comforter clashed severely with the rainbow bedding I’d picked a couple of years earlier, but we didn’t mind conflating the two. Dad installed the folding bed rail you insisted on keeping for the safety of your dolls. Every night, you raised the rail to secure them in your bed while I rolled my eyes behind my chapter book.

The foot of my bed was in the doorway. On your first night, you told me that was good because I was stronger and could fight off robbers. Although I insisted that I wasn’t worried, I secretly checked the window locks behind my headboard every night.

Until the baby was born, we received excellent turn-down service from Mom and Dad. After my shower and your bath, we would read books in bed until one of them came to give us little glasses of water and turn off the lights. Then they would sit on the floor for a few minutes and offer prayers, stories, or songs.

We liked Dad’s nights the best because he told us “little boy stories” from his childhood. Our favorite was the one where he knocked out six baby teeth on a rock by jumping out of a backyard swing. We also loved the one where two of his permanent teeth got knocked out in a college basketball game. Mom really tried. But her “little girl stories” frankly weren’t very interesting—her childhood illnesses and hospital stays were no match for all of Dad’s missing teeth—so instead, we asked her to sing. Her repertoire was limited to “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music, various hymns, and the handful of 1970s pop songs she had performed to with her high school dance team. Her singing voice, high-pitched and whispery, became increasingly shrill as she began to doze off. To relieve her of her duties, we would pretend to fall asleep. After she left the room, you would give me an encore, mimicking Mom’s feathery voice with an eerie precision that caused us both to erupt into giggles.

At some point after you moved in, we begged for a pair of giant pillows at the Family Dollar, just so we could have one matching item on our beds. Constructed of hot pink velvet, the pillows were a little longer than our twin beds were wide. As needed, they could transform into lightsabers or prevent our baby brother from rolling too far across the room. On the days our parents fought, they were the doors to the secret hideout under our desk. We would spread out my sleeping bag on the floor, tuck our favorite Beanie Babies into our laps, and prop up the pillows in front of the desk so no one could see in or out. You always brought a doll or two, and my job was to procure entertainment. I’d read you stories, or we’d make friendship bracelets.

When the fighting got really bad, we ducked into our closet, which was split in half by a plywood divider wall. We had to squeeze into my side because your side was genuinely spooky. For starters, there was a small, flimsy door that led down into the crawl space. (I opened it once.) Next to the door was a defunct water faucet. It didn’t turn on and didn’t have any purpose as far as we knew. Weird stuff aside, your half of the closet was full of our shoes and mine had the toy shelves. While we waited for things to blow over, we’d slide the slatted doors shut and scarf down dry packets of Easy Bake Oven mix.

After the baby came and our parents were too tired to fight all the time, I convinced you that skeletons lived under that closet. I’m not sure if I actually wanted to scare you or if I just found the story entertaining. Every night when we turned out our light, the skeletons would wake up. They would use their bony fingers to raise the latch and climb through the panel. Then they would turn on the faucet so they could wash their hands before supper. They feasted on anything they could find as they lurked in the recesses of the closet: Barbie shoes, dried-up markers, Lite Brite pegs. To wash it all down, they took swigs out of the paint can left over from the previous year’s nursery remodel. You were petrified. If I really wanted to play it up, I’d tap my fingernails on the wall by my bed and tell you a bony hand was on the loose and headed in your direction.

For practical purposes, we did have our own sides of the room. My side had stacks of chapter books and yours had under-bed bins brimming with baby doll clothes. We didn’t have room for a dresser, but there was a desk between the beds that doubled as a nightstand. When your baby dolls inevitably tumbled from your bed and started crawling toward mine, I unrolled a line of white masking tape down the middle of the floor.

At night, the sides melted away. You always wanted to talk. Or sing the alphabet. Or play games, like Twenty Questions or “Invisible I Spy,” in which one of us described an item like an animal on our wallpaper or a dress in our closet while the other guessed what the item was. Sometimes, we both masturbated and raced to see who could “get to the good part” first. Do you remember the night when Dad walked in on us? He made us stop but didn’t explain what we were doing or why he didn’t want us to do it. After that, we just made sure to be quieter. It distracted us from the robbers and the skeletons. And the demons.

The demons existed exclusively in your reality. They were the shadowy creatures that lived under your bed and possessed the power to pull you down into hell by the ankles. You often woke up needing to pee but were too scared to get up. Since I didn’t believe in the demons, we eventually worked out that we could use my ankles as bait while you made your escape. I didn’t mind protecting you. But some nights, I just wanted to read chapter books by the light of my glow- in-the-dark watch, so I would shine my watch at the floor to deactivate the demons and light your path. Other nights, I would remind you about the skeletons under the closet and tell you they might find their way into your bed if you didn’t shut up.

Every Saturday, we stripped our beds and washed the sheets. Your bed had an extra knit blanket and a waterproof mattress protector—for nights when the demons won. These were items I had never noticed when you had your own room. But the moment you moved in, making our shared world feel fair became essential. I grabbed the purple-and-blue Afghan throw from the living room sofa and an extra fitted sheet from the bathroom linen closet and called it good. I never told you, but I would continue making my bed with two layers of fitted sheets every week until you outgrew the need for a mattress protector. It took two years.

~

When I was twenty-eight and you were twenty-six, you withdrew from my life. Your husband and baby needed you. You still don’t know how I feel about it because your new brand of religion shields you from people like me. You’re convinced there isn’t room for both of us.

According to the Apostle Paul, you and I can no longer share a table. For five years, my wife and I spent holidays, vacations, and late nights on the phone with you. So, when we came to town for Grandma’s funeral that November weekend, we were happy to make room in our plans for a last-minute coffee with you and your husband.

Minutes before our departing flight, your husband opened his Bible app and scrolled to 1 Corinthians. While you nodded and stared at your hands, he explained that “we may no longer have fellowship.” That while the two of you would still be able to accept our generosity, you could no longer extend invitations. You chimed in, half-whispering that you needed to roll out this white line to secure your own family’s salvation. That your theology severely clashed with my rainbow flag, and you didn’t want anyone accidentally conflating the two.

On the plane, your words hung heavily, choking me like a too-tight necklace.

Birthdays come and go. My wife and I buy your kids all the toys: Lincoln Logs, a sandbox, really good books. It’s not their fault that you’re like this. We live in the same town as you now, so we stop by your porch with your children’s birthday gifts. We’re not allowed inside the door.

You don’t need me to protect you from robbers anymore—your husband’s bedside gun collection is more than sufficient for that. But what happens on the nights when your demons show up? I have always worried for you. Every Saturday, I still strip my bed and wash the sheets. I am guessing you do too.

If only you didn’t have to believe in so many kinds of demons. Maybe someday the sides will melt away and you will want to talk. For now, we will continue forcing smiles from across the room at holiday parties while uncles and grandparents play Twenty Questions or I Spy with our kids. I am the skeleton in your closet. Only, my hands will never be clean enough to join you for supper.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Dobbs v. Jackson Tasting Menu

the pamplemousse
has finished rotting
everyone’s sky
under my french nails
our moon translates
to spoiled egg
my goose flesh is more
a country of fowls
smacking their skulls
on the same pine
the planet says it savors
me like last drops of wine
it’s not my choice
to re-seed grenades
to lie
fresh cells are seasoning
our homes like water
for soup mmm—
notes of pyre girl—
talk hot vinaigrette
spit supercontinent rifts
delicious past genomes—
mmm
good heresy tastes
as sweet as baby
not that i would know
something ate up
all the light—everything
everything else
is night

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Pottery Royalty

On my third day in East Liverpool, I walked into an antique store on a narrow street that climbed gently up from the Ohio River.  Its neighbors were a boarded-up auto repair shop and a Christian bookstore, open but deserted. The sidewalks were empty, with grass growing in the cracks.

Pottery crowded the antique store’s display window. I spotted a place setting of brightly colored Fiesta, a few chunky brown replicas of Rockingham jugs and spittoons, and one elaborately decorated Lotus Ware pitcher. That was the limit of my ceramics expertise. A bell rang faintly as I walked in.

Two women stood behind a sales counter, one on either side of a huge brass cash register, talking to each other. One of them, tiny and grey-haired, blinked and smiled at me. The other didn’t seem to notice my arrival. She was younger—forty, maybe, a couple of years older than me if so—tall and dark-haired, wearing a long black dress.

“You’d be surprised what you can find in some of these places,” she was saying. “Like those Harker ABC plates, the ones with the birds? I found those in a basement in the East End.”

The older woman murmured something.

“Illegal? Not if the house is abandoned, I don’t think. The only thing you have to be careful about is, sometimes there are junkies squatting in them.” A ripple of laughter ran through the last phrase, as if junkies in basements were just an amusing inconvenience. “I’ll take you some time if you like.”

“Thanks, probably not my thing.” The older woman moved out from behind the counter and crossed the room to ask me if I needed help finding anything.

“Just browsing,” I said automatically, and then out of idle curiosity—or at least that’s all I was aware of. “Maybe the Harker plates with the birds?”

“Of course.” If it bothered her that I’d been eavesdropping, she didn’t show it.

“Right over here. Minerva’s stall.”

I followed her to a nook at the back of the store, and she unlocked a glass-fronted cabinet.  There were three of the plates, delicate white china with a thin blue band around the rim, the letters of the alphabet arranged in a circle inside that, and in the center of each plate a brightly painted bird—a barn swallow, a bluebird, and a robin.

“Early twentieth century,” the woman said. “Beautiful, yes?”

“They are.”

A neatly hand-written card read: $100 each. Set, $250. “A little pricey,” the woman said. “You could talk to Minerva. She might come down a little.”

We both looked over at the sales counter, but the woman in the black dress was gone.

~

Three generations of my mother’s ancestors had lived in East Liverpool, back in its glory days as the Crockery City, when it produced half of America’s ceramics. The potteries were all gone now, nothing left but empty lots with foundations hidden in the grass, here and there a kiln or a chimney slowly falling to pieces. The downtown streets were lined with massive dark brick buildings from the early 1900s, banks and office buildings and hotels, most of them now empty. The factory owners and society ladies from my family tree were long dead, not to mention the potters and masons and carpenters who worked for them.

As for me, I was born and raised in California, and this was my first time in Ohio. I had no living relatives in town, or anyhow none that I knew about. I was staying in a Days Inn, kitty-corner to a graveyard where one of my great-great-grandfathers was buried. I’d spent a lot of time in graveyards since I arrived—in that one, in the much larger Riverview Cemetery, in tiny rural churchyards all over Columbiana County. I’d spent an afternoon in the city’s Carnegie library, unearthing stray references to various twigs of my family tree; toured a couple of 19th-century mansions; visited a Methodist church where a stained-glass window was dedicated to a distant cousin of mine who’d been killed in the Civil War.

Not far from the library, in a sprawling Beaux-Arts building that had once been the town post office, was the Museum of Ceramics. The docent, a tall, fair-haired woman, reminded me of a sixth-grade teacher I’d had a crush on. She led me through the cool, gently lit rooms, pointing out the high spots among the enormous variety of plates, jugs, bowls, teapots, rolling pins, doorknobs, and figurines inside the glass cases. Speaking so softly that I had trouble hearing her, she told me about the early potters, entrepreneurs who sold rough yellow ware from boats up and down the Ohio; the big industrial potteries—Harker & Sons, Homer Laughlin, Knowles Taylor & Knowles—that made East Liverpool a boom town after the Civil War; the artisans who created Lotus Ware, a line of porcelain as delicate and ornate as the finest English china. Some of this I vaguely knew, some I didn’t, but either way, the history had a weight now that I hadn’t expected.

The tour ended at a minuscule gift shop. Behind the counter stood Minerva, still in black, but this time jeans and a turtleneck sweater.

“You again,” she said.

“Me again. You remembered.” Which seemed odd, because I’d have said she hadn’t noticed me the day before. “Moonlighting?”

“Whatever it takes.” She looked at me sideways, off-kilter. Her face had the kind of lines that come more from expressiveness than from age. “Enjoy the tour?”

“I did. She knows her stuff.”

“Karla’s a gem. Her ex, on the other hand, should be in a lunatic asylum. Sorry, inappropriate.” She smiled, not at all apologetically. “Ada said you almost bought my Harker birds.”

“I thought about it. Not sure if the abandoned house provenance is a plus or a minus.”

She laughed. “Like I said, whatever it takes. Are you a collector?”

“Just a tourist.”

“Really? We don’t get a lot of those.”

“Maybe not exactly a tourist.” It shouldn’t have been a difficult question, but I still hadn’t answered it for myself.  If there was something I was looking for here, I didn’t know what it was. “One side of my family lived here back in the 1800s. I’ve always been curious.”

“Interesting. Potters?”

“Some of them. Factory owners, even. Some Bennetts. Some Harkers.”

“Ooh, you’re pottery royalty.” If she was mocking me, it was done gently enough. “Of course, I am too, if you go back far enough. There’s not much

“Sorry to interrupt...” Karla leaned into the gift shop doorway, smiling hesitantly at me. “Quick question, Minerva.”

I turned to go. Minerva scribbled a number on one of the museum’s business cards and handed it to me. “Just in case you change your mind about the birds.”

~

I didn’t change my mind about the birds, not then anyway, but I called her the next day. We had coffee and cherry pie at a dimly lit cafeteria that evening—the only place open in downtown East Liverpool at seven o’clock on a weeknight. In our back corner booth, I couldn’t tell if her dress was dark blue, dark grey, dark purple, or just black once again. Her features, too, had a shifting quality—sometimes smoothly curved, almost bland, sometimes tangled in shadows and contrasts.

On the surface, we had a lot in common. I taught history at San Francisco State; she had a graduate degree in art history from Northwestern. Our respective lists of favorite authors overlapped to an almost alarming degree—George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Balzac, Edith Wharton. Similar story with music and movies. But unlike most of the educated people I’d met in East Liverpool, she didn’t seem to be yearning for the sophistication of the coasts, and she seemed to take her city’s problems in stride.

“That’s a depressing neighborhood, for sure,” she said when I told her about my afternoon. I’d walked up and down the steep streets east of the downtown, looking for an address where my great-grandparents had lived. Most of the street signs were missing, and for every lovingly maintained old Victorian, there was one falling to pieces or boarded up. My great-grandparents’ address turned out to be an empty lot enclosed by a cyclone fence. “On the bright side, rents are low.”

I knew the broad strokes of the story: cheap imports and high production costs had killed the city’s potteries in the mid-twentieth century. The population had dropped by 50%. A freeway had taken much of the downtown and riverfront. In the 2000s, drugs—meth, heroin, fentanyl—had replaced alcohol as the coping mechanism of choice.

“But you’re still here,” I said.

“Born and bred in Madison Township. My people go way back in the Scotch Settlement. I didn’t move to town until I got married.”

I didn’t need to look at her finger to know she wasn’t married now. She had a brittle cheerfulness that spoke of intelligence and disillusionment.

Apparently, I was giving off a vibe of my own, because she said, “Never been married?”

“No,” I said. “Close, though. Twice.”

“It’s overrated. We had a big house, that was nice. But he was all about his work. He’s a prosecutor for the county. Which really put a crimp in my heroin use.”

At the time, I thought she was joking, and maybe she was. “That’s kind of the definition of incompatible,” I said.

“Incompatible is my middle name. You say you were close to getting married twice?”

“Once for sure. A long time ago—we were grad students. The other one, I don’t know, maybe we weren’t that close to it.” I still didn’t have a formula for talking about Emma.

“This was recently?”

“Three months ago.”

“You know,” Minerva said, “this was an odd place to choose if you were looking to cheer yourself up. Don’t West Coast people go to Hawaii or Cabo for that?”

Odd comment at best. But her bluntness, so unlike Emma’s chilly reserve, almost made me smile, and I found myself saying more about the trip than I had to anyone else. “It’s all kind of tangled up. I only met Emma because my great-aunt Grace died—they were friends. And Grace was from here. Not East Liverpool, but right up the road in Lisbon. Like I said yesterday, I was always curious about Ohio. But it was only after Grace died that I started to think about actually coming here.”

“Tangled up is right.” She seemed to be on the verge of asking another question, and I might have answered that one too, but then she was off in another direction. “I have to tell you, I almost said no when you called.”

“Understandable. I could totally be a stalker.”          

“It’s not that,” she said. “I was planning on doing some treasure hunting tonight. I didn’t really want to put it off just for coffee. But then I thought, two’s company, right?”

“By ‘treasure hunting’ you mean burglary?”

“Some people would look at it that way. I just have this feeling you’re not one of them.”

Was I? Maybe, maybe not. But I knew I didn’t want her to mistake good sense for a failure of nerve.

                                                                        ~

“The woman’s ninety-two,” Minerva said as we drove along a dark two-lane highway somewhere outside East Liverpool. “Her son was supposed to be taking care of her, but he OD’ed. So, they dragged her off to hospice. The house has been standing empty for months. The county’s going to take it for back taxes.”

She drove too fast, which wasn’t a surprise. The road was laid out in long doglegs between pastures and clumps of young trees, the lights of farmhouses here and there. As we came up a sharp rise I saw a cemetery on the left-hand side, tall ornate headstones and monuments sinister in the moonlight. Then, a small brick church.

“Yellow Creek Presbyterian.” She let the car slow. “Last I counted, I have ten direct ancestors buried there. MacIntoshes, Davidsons, McQueens—they all came here from around Inverness. One of them witnessed the battle of Culloden as a young boy.”

“That’s a lot of history.”

“Like I always say—if you don’t like your future, live in your past.”

                                                                        ~

The house was at the end of a long gravel driveway. Two rusted-out cars stood in long grass. A sheet of plywood with the outline of a cat spray-painted on it covered the front doorway. Minerva pushed it aside with a nudge from a crowbar. The actual door was missing.

We might not be the first people to visit here,” she said.

Inside, it smelled of pine needles and dead mice. She switched on a flashlight and swept its beam around a living room crowded with threadbare couches and armchairs. A withered Christmas tree stood in one corner, with a litter of smashed ornaments around it.

“Well, it’s only April,” I said. “If you really love Christmas…”

“Yeah. Cozy.” She glided around the room, stroking the fabric on the couches, getting down on hands and knees to shine her flashlight on the underside of a table. “Some of these were nice pieces once. Maybe I should have brought my truck. Well, no matter. Let’s see what’s in the kitchen.”

I followed her. She paused and looked up. A sprig of plastic mistletoe dangled there in the doorway. A couple of seconds went by, and as she turned away again, I realized I’d been meant to kiss her.

“No shortage of crappy pottery here,” she said. The sink and counters were crowded with dirty dishes. Grease and mold and unidentifiable chunks of food had fossilized on a sad mix of chipped and faded crockery. “Maybe there’s something better in the cupboards.”

Pots and pans; broken coffee machines; canned food with faded labels, tuna and beef stew and chili; a pile of paper grocery bags clumped together by moisture; more cheap plates and bowls; a five-pound bag of birdseed; and so on.

“This is something.” She lifted out a blue and green teapot with a spray of flowers painted on the side, then turned it upside down. “KTK. 1910 or so. Tiny chip on the handle, but very nice.”

I carried it out to the car and set it carefully on the back seat. By the time I got back to the kitchen, she was slamming the door of the last cupboard. “Disappointing. I guess we can try the rest of the house.”

As we went back through the doorway to the living room, she stopped under the mistletoe again, turning to face me. This time, I put my hands on her upper arms and kissed her lightly. Then we stood there a few inches apart in a tangle of shadows from her flashlight.

“We’re still here,” she said. “How many kisses is that thing good for?”

I kissed her again, still lightly, but neither of us pulled back this time. Her breath was minty, with a trace of smoke.

“Hello?” A faint voice from the back of the house. “Trevor?”

“Holy fuck.” Minerva twisted out of my grasp and pointed her flashlight into the kitchen. There was another doorway back there, a short stretch of hallway visible.

“Trevor?” The voice was high-pitched but weak.

“Fuck, it’s her.” Minerva put a hand over her eyes.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.

“Trevor’s the son. The one who OD’d. It must have been bullshit about the hospice. Or they brought her back.”

“Let’s go,” I said again. “We were never here.”

“My mother knew this woman.”

“Then why are we breaking into her house?”

She ignored that. “Go wait in the car. I’ve got to check on her.”

I didn’t answer, just followed her back through the kitchen into the hallway. Closed door on the right, closed door on the left, open door on the left—Minerva’s flashlight picked out crumpled balls of Kleenex on the floor, a dresser littered with medicine bottles, a brass bedstead, a tangle of quilts and blankets. At one end of the pile was a withered face under a chaos of white hair. A smell like rancid hamburger hung in the air.

Her eyes were open, but she didn’t look at us. “Cold,” she croaked.

“Mrs. Fraser, it’s me, Minerva Forbes.”

“Cold.”

“See if you can find another blanket?” Minerva looked back at me. “Mrs. Fraser, I’m just going to check your vitals.”

I asked Minerva later if she’d ever been a nurse, and she told me it was just a persona she’d learned to assume. To people who were sick or drugged or addled, it was familiar, it was comforting, and they didn’t fight it. Whatever—I was happy enough to leave the stench of that room and search for blankets. When I came back with a ragged blue and white quilt, Minerva was already dialing 911.

~

“Not quite the excursion I had in mind,” she said as we drove away an hour later.

“Same here.”

“But you’ll admit it’s a lovely little teapot.” She smiled at me as though we hadn’t watched two EMTs haul Mrs. Fraser out to their ambulance.

“Days if not hours,” one of the EMTs had said to Minerva.

“I don’t doubt it,” she’d answered. “But she won’t be alone, at least.”

The EMT had shrugged at that.

“Mind if we stop at Yellow Creek?” she said now. “I want to show you something.”

“Your ten ancestors?”

“We’ll say hi as we walk past. But no, this is something else.”

She slowed as we came to the church, a squat red brick building with tall arched windows, then pulled to the shoulder just past it. The churchyard, a lawn studded with tombstones—pillars, slabs, tablets, obelisks—sloped up from the road in a gentle knoll.

She led me through the forest of stones, pausing here and there to read a name aloud. “Alexander McBean, Isobel McBean… Ann McQueen… Jennet McIntosh…”

 The graves nearest the road were the oldest, their inscriptions so worn I couldn’t read them. Farther up the slope, the stones were clean and sharp-edged, the dates within the last century. Past the top of the knoll, with the church itself well behind us now, an almost empty stretch of lawn ran down to a line of bare trees. Half a dozen stray markers bounced random scraps of moonlight up at us.

“Running out of room,” Minerva said. “All the rest of this space is spoken for.”

“Quite a success story if you look at it a certain way.”

“Only it’s a very fucked-up way?” She laughed. “My ex got the house and the Volvo. I got the Porsche and the cemetery plots. We’ll see who comes out ahead in the end.” She looked back at the church, drew a line in the air with her hand, then took half a dozen steps toward the trees. “My plots are right about here.” She beckoned me over, and I went.

“I was thinking pottery was going to be the theme tonight,” I said. “Instead, it’s dead people?”

“Sorry, just worked out that way. Mrs. Fraser kind of derailed us.”

“She did.”

“And I left the mistletoe behind. Is that a problem?” She laid a hand on my hip.

I pulled her close to me, one hand on each of her shoulders, and looked into her eyes from a few inches away. The irises were a smoky grey-green, I knew that, but they seemed entirely clear with the moon shining on them. Then my eyes closed as her face tilted up to mine and we kissed. Accidentally or otherwise, she tripped me. We fell onto the grass, with her on top.

I’d been wanting this, if not from the moment I first saw her, then at least from the moment she said you again in the museum. But I had expected it to happen in my room at the Days Inn, or maybe in some dark cluttered space, full of Lotus Ware and Impressionist reproductions, that she called home. Still, there was precious little chance of any living people seeing or hearing us, and I didn’t feel the least bit self-conscious as my hands found their way inside her dress.

She stayed on top as we made love. No surprise there. She was loud, and she wasn’t shy about telling me what she liked and what she didn’t. I did my best to follow instructions. She was so self-assured that there were none of those awkward first-time misunderstandings. It didn’t take long for us to thrash our way to satisfied torpor.

It was chilly—a spring night in eastern Ohio—and as we lay there with her sprawled on top of me, I felt her shiver.

“You OK?” I asked. “Not too cold?”

“I’m fine. You?”

“Good.”

“I would hope so,” she said.

“But being an academic, I have to ask about the symbolism.”

“Of fucking in a cemetery? I don’t know. Awful things will happen, but good ones will too? I think I stole that from some Presbyterian minister.”

“Appropriate, then.” I looked back toward the church.

“Or maybe from Rosanne Cash.”

I could see other kinds of symbolism too, something about the ancestors, about the ex; but maybe, I thought, it was better not to go there.

Silence for a bit, except for the creaking songs of frogs.

“Question for you,” she said.  

“Sure.” I closed my eyes.

“I’m glad you’re here . . . but why are you here? Not here here,” she said, patting the lawn in front of us,“but here in Columbiana County. I mean, sure, great-great-grandparents, pottery royalty, great-aunt Grace, you’ve told me all that. But what’s the point?”

“It’s a good question,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have a good answer. Curiosity. Distraction, maybe.”

“Distraction from what?”

“Everything. Work, breakup, getting old. The rest of my family—my mother, my sisters—they moved out east after my father died. Boston. They couldn’t care less about this, about the history. But I feel like these are roots I should know about.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Minerva said, “but the feeling I get is that you’re someone who’s never really been broken. True?”

Not a standard post-coital question, not in my experience anyhow, but I answered anyhow. “True, I guess. What would be the wrong way of taking it?”

“Some people might think it was a way of saying that you’ve missed something. And I’m not saying that.”

“You’ve been there, it sounds like.”

“I have, and it was awful. But it’s part of me now. And it just strikes me that maybe you’re a little too curious about it. That it has a kind of appeal for you.”

“Well, you have a kind of appeal for me. I don’t think it’s about anyone being broken or not.”

“No?”

“Granted, we’re different.”

“And you’re thinking maybe I’d be a good change of pace from what’s-her-name?”

“Emma,” I said softly. “No, it’s not that.”

Apparently, I didn’t sound convincing.         

“No is right,” Minerva said. “That’s not going to work.  I’m kind of like East Liverpool. Interesting place to visit, lots of history, classic architecture if I say so myself . . . but you wouldn’t want to live there. It’s a little run down, weather too extreme, living in the past, substance abuse issues . . . It’s sort of a grim picture.”

I didn’t think she wanted a direct answer to that. “Ever been to California?” I asked.

“No. Never.” She said it the way most people I know would say they’ve never been to East Liverpool.

“Like you said, kind of grim here—"

“It is. And not likely to change.”

“I was going to say, not much grim about you, though.”

“Please.” She rolled off me, and we lay side by side in the grass, our shoulders touching.  “I should try and fix you up with Karla. Lovely person—much more your speed. How long are you staying?”

“My flight out is tomorrow.”

“Well, so much for that idea. Nice knowing you, though.”

The delivery was comic, but after ten seconds of silence, I realized that the message wasn’t.

“That’s it?” I said. “Not going to work, bye?”

She seemed surprised that I was surprised. “What else?”

“I don’t know.” I was, apparently, supposed to have thought this through. “Something.”

“Wait till you’ve been back in San Francisco a few days. You’ll change your mind.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Yeah, well, you can text me if you don’t. But you will.”

~

Three years later, I used the frequent flyer miles that I’d saved all through the pandemic to book a flight to Pittsburgh. As the plane dropped out of the clouds, I saw the aimless curves of the Ohio, a smudge of grey that might have been East Liverpool, the orange and red and yellow patchwork of West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. At the airport, they gave me a Ford Taurus that smelled of weed, and in half an hour I was back in the antique shop where I’d first seen Minerva.

“Try the library.” Ada, the tiny grey-haired woman I’d briefly met before, was alone behind the counter. “She works there now. Archivist.”

“Right.” I knew this—Minerva and I had kept track of each other, warily at first but comfortably enough in the end, by email and text and the occasional phone call. I could easily have called or texted her when I got to town, but somehow I’d just hoped she’d be here.

“I remember you,” Ada said. “Been a while.”

“It has.”

“You bought her Harker birds.” She smiled.

“Right again.” The morning after my night with Minerva in the graveyard, I’d bought the plates from Ada on my way out of town.

“How’ve you been?”

“I’m OK,” I said. It hadn’t been the best three years. The pandemic hadn’t hit me hard, but my mother had died of an aneurysm; I’d failed to get tenure at SF State and worked in a bookstore now; I’d gotten back together with Emma only to be dumped by her all over again. “Here for the wedding.” 

“Social event of the season,” she said with a smile that hung somewhere between mischievous and mocking. “Minerva and Karla—who’d have thunk it?”

“No one,” I said as I headed for the door. “Probably not even them.”

~

If much of East Liverpool seemed to be falling apart, that certainly wasn’t true of its library—the first Carnegie library in Ohio, built in 1900, a massive fortress-like building in brown brick, surmounted by a hexagonal tower and a red tile dome. In the lobby, an island in time with its gleaming marble wainscoting and mosaic floor, I found Minerva waiting as if she’d known I was about to arrive.

She threw her arms around me; we touched cheeks.  “I guess this is really happening, if you came all the way from San Francisco.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Glad it’s legal even here.”

“Until the Supreme Court gets around to repealing Obergefell. When that happens, we might end up in California after all.” She led me past the circulation desk and up a flight of stairs to an office with photos of nineteenth-century East Liverpool eminences on the wall and a shelf of pottery including Mrs. Fraser’s KTK teapot. “No, seriously. People in town are either OK with it, or they don’t give a shit. Most of them gave up on me a long time ago.”

“Formula for a perfect wedding.”

“I hope so. How are you?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Glad to be back in my future hometown.” This was a running joke between us, that eventually I’d move to East Liverpool, but not as much of a joke as it had been originally.

“Did I tell you there’s a 1930s bungalow for rent down the street from us? We could be neighbors. Probably half what you’re paying now.”

“More than likely. Well, I’m around for a few days. I’ll take a look.”

“If you need something to sweeten the deal, I can let you have my plots at Yellow Creek for next to nothing. Karla thinks they’re bad karma since they came from my divorce.”

“Might be bad karma for me too,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“I can’t see why.”

A little late, I realized I shouldn’t have said it. “Not like either of us believes in karma anyway.”

She paused to consider that.

There was a barely audible knock on the door.

“Come in!” Minerva shouted.

The door opened a few inches. Karla looked in, smiling hesitantly, and I knew then who it was Minerva had been waiting for in the lobby.

She came in, did a double take, grabbed both my arms but didn’t hug me.

“Congratulations,” I said.

She murmured a thank you and smiled so brightly it made Minerva laugh.

The three of us made small talk for a few minutes, but with the wedding less than 48 hours away, they had a lot of logistics to go over. I didn’t want to get in the way. We made plans to have a drink together later, and I walked out of the library and down to the river.

At the foot of Broadway, there’s a small park, with a pier, a rocky stretch of beach, and raised wooden decks looking out across the water. Doubtless in the past steamboats and barges had stopped here to take on shipments of crockery, and doubtless Minerva or Karla could give me the details if I asked.

I sat on a picnic table and watched a flock of Canada geese paddle downstream. Boats were moored on the far shore, and beyond that rose the forested hills of West Virginia. A broad stretch of water, steep hills, streets lined with Victorians and Queen Annes . . . all that was familiar. It was not that San Francisco had stopped feeling like home, but it had stopped feeling like my only home.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Poems from “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Annie Schumacher’s chapbook “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

On Persephone’s Night Terrors 

1. Either I will fall asleep or I will not.

2. If I fall asleep either I will dream vividly or I will not.

3. If I dream vividly either I will wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath or I will not.

4. If I wake up shaking and gasping for life’s breath it is because I am cursed or I am not.

5.  If I am cursed it was because I was born cursed or I was not.

6. If I was born cursed either I inherited the curse from my mother (or not).

7. If I inherited the curse from my mother then she inherited the curse from her mother, did she not?

8. If I ask my mother’s mother about it she will either deny cursing my mother or she will not.

9. If she denies cursing my mother, will I stay in hell?

10. If I eventually fall asleep, I will be seeing and listening to everything at once, my senses fixed like a dog.

11. Where is the drug to drug this hell out of me?

12. I swallow the tablets like honey.

13. Even if I never fall asleep for fear of losing what I left, which is itself a kind of curse, I will swap out new hell for old hell, or I will not.

I wake to sticky green leaves.

Swans

It takes eight years to exit the pop music museum.
Two older women, arms linked, dance to Waterloo.
We bought hats like that, we walked across a bridge
in Cuenca like that. When do you know someone?
When did I stop knowing you? My sadness spills
out a bouncy Swedish pop star’s lips,
the rising melody covering my heart in a brown sap.
The crowd carols along to the next song, searching
for cheap flights to Athens like we did. I peer through glass
at the metallic stage costumes, the headlong curve of my heart
-ache—were that it anger, I could hate the costumes.
I exit the pop music museum in heavy, platform-soled
tears. White birds sway in the water, my sister sings happy
birthday from a distant time zone. At what point in their
disillusionment did they transform?

These poems were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Flesh and Bone Zuihitsu

They think it’s been months since my mom tried to contact me.
The cousins say she’s reaching out to connect. I say it’s been years
of you are such a bitch and this whole family is done with you.

My therapist tells me I’m too resourceful and clever to let family
suck my will to live; I hear more work. She says step back.

Says observe the process and sends me an email
summary of our recent call. The subject header: Snow & Peace.
A picture of the oak in her Maryland yard.

It wears a floor length gown of white pin-dotted snow
accented with one green birdhouse, frosted cupcake feeder. It says
here, here is sustenance. How I want

to take all my therapist offers into the marrow of my mind.
Mother’s way of comforting was to declare me her own
flesh and blood. There is a bird called lammergeier,

German for lamb vulture. It raptors the bones of carrion,
drops them onto flat rocks to expose the marrow.
My therapist is one of these bone droppers. She asks

what I will gain from allowing my mother’s opinions to define me.

I see a little girl as a cloth napkin dropped beside bone china
where marrow has been sucked from the calf’s bone, just a baby,
cross-cut. Osso buco, Italian for bone with a hole.

The spongy cake of our bones consists of hematopoietic cells called

Poiesis, from ancient Greek, the emergence of something
that did not previously exist; also, poetry. That flesh and blood

is made of poetry, that lines break like bones, that I emerged
from the syntax of a mother who drops rotten rotten
daughter. Will I never find sustenance?

I find her wedding announcement, 1964, The Scranton Times.
Cake topper of a woman, the bride wore a Chantilly lace
and white silk organza chapel gown with a scalloped neck.

Her headpiece of sheer rosettes with a large flower on top
was edged in seed pearls. What about that seedless bird feeder
nailed to a frozen oak somewhere on the Delmarva Peninsula?

Peninsula, Latin for almost an island; or a daughter.

I worry about the birds. Remember they prepare for the cold,
stockpile seeds, and pack pockets of air around their bodies.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Irina Tall

These pieces were featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Skins

“Transmission” by Joy Division plays in the night club in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong. Cigarette smoke clouds the air. The ceiling looks like the cratered surface of the moon.

Tonight, it’s clubbing. Tomorrow, Frannie says it’s an afternoon visiting an old temple in Stanley Market to see the pelt of the last real tiger ever in the territory.

A week ago, it was a hike. I forgot sunscreen. I blistered so much I couldn’t sleep the night afterward. Even now, I feel the rawness of my skin under my shirtsleeves. Frannie who is one of my only friends in Hong Kong, gave me some Chinese ointment to use, but I haven’t tried it yet because I have the bottle still in its box on my nightstand as my only tangible gift from her. I’m in love with her. It’s hard to be around her, and I can’t not be around her.

If she talks up a hanging animal pelt in a temple, I believe it’s amazing.

I stab out my cigarette and while she’s looking somewhere else, I look—her slight downturned mouth, and the glorious soft edge of her face that I could contemplate forever. All that moves around in my head, all that keeps me going. I’m in Hong Kong for a posting with my investment firm, but I would leave in a heartbeat if Frannie wasn’t around. Problem is, she’s taken.

Her boyfriend Lawrence, also a friend of mine, is sitting next to me on the purple velvet booth cushion, and he says he’s bored. He says we should go to his place off Connaught Road and smoke weed on his roof, where there’s a great view of Victoria harbor, where the windows across the water on Kowloon side gleam like Christmas lights. He’s got some amazing Scotch and all three of us can crash if we need to.

“Don’t you want to dance?” Frannie asks him.

“I suck at dancing,” Lawrence says.

“You dance with me,” Frannie says, grabbing my hand and pulling me up.

A house beat rattles the sound system. The room with its pink and blue lighting spins a little. The floor gives slightly. I play it off like it’s no big deal, but dancing with her is the best thing in the world. I’ve had a lot of beer, but part of my dizziness is her.

Frannie turns and shimmies, then walks toward me and puts her hands on my shoulders.

“Relax!” she yells.

I move. I dance. The rising house music beat dissolves into Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”

The crowd around us—another gweilo dude with two blonde women—and a Chinese group behind him, two women and two men, all go from their somnolent movement to paying attention to us.

Lawrence taps my shoulder and steps in. He nods with his cigarette in his mouth, then pats my shoulder again and says, “I goddamn love you man. Don’t ever leave Hong Kong!”

His hands are on Frannie’s waist and they’re up against each other, blending like two liquors in a cocktail, and the truth is, Lawrence doesn’t suck at dancing.

“…once I had a love and it was a gas…soon turned out, was a heart of glass…”

Here we are, a trio of friends. A lot of loneliness on my part, despite it. I live out on Lan Tau in a small flat and Frannie, a Hong Konger, lives far away in Shouson Hill with her sister’s family. Her sister is married to a white guy, a Canadian. I should mention that I’m white, a gweilo, by way of the Chicago suburbs, and Lawrence is half-white, half-American-born Chinese, by way of a childhood in San Francisco and an adolescence attending the American International School in Hong Kong.

One of the gweilo women sidles up and faces me.

Now it’s the four of us on the roof of Lawrence’s building. He’s got a sofa set up under an awning up there, letting it be exposed to the elements, American college-town-patio style, and the gweilo woman from the club asks me for a light. Her name is Mary. She’s blonde and British, living in Hong Kong with her parents, on a gap year from uni, and it turns out she went to King George the Fifth school, and Lawrence knows her brother from high school rugby. Her father is in the government. She lives nearby but won’t say exactly where, and then I know enough about Hong Kong to realize her father is obviously not the governor, but is somewhere high on the bureaucratic ladder, and she lives near Government House, the governor’s mansion. She doesn’t want to say it because it seems like she’s royalty or something, and she just wants to be cool.

Each of us takes turns telling made-up stories about what is going on in the cruise ship docked at Ocean Terminal across the harbor. Lawrence has the best one.

“A widower grandfather is taking the cruise again, mourning the death of his late wife, wishing his son would call or write him letters. The happiest time of his life—an ocean cruise to Hong Kong where his wife and him got tailored clothes and wore them to the captain’s dinner where they started with the lobster bisque,” Lawrence says.

“Dude,” I say. “That’s fucking sad.” I get jealous of him, his ingenuity. And I find myself trying to copy his attitudes.

“No shit,” Frannie says. She punches his arm.

“Give me a hit from that,” Mary says. Lawrence is cradling a joint in his palm, which is the reason he’s getting so philosophical.

“Remember tomorrow, we’re going to see the tiger skin!” Frannie says.

“Tiger?” Mary asks.

“The last tiger in Hong Kong. The skin hangs in a temple in Stanley. I’ve always wanted to go,” I say. “All that’s left of that poor tiger—its skin.” I say it like it’s my idea, but Frannie was the first person to bring this up.

“We planned this weeks ago,” Frannie says.

“That kind of shit is supposed to be exotic and exciting but it’s usually a letdown,” Lawrence says.

“You’ve seen it?” I ask. Sometimes Lawrence talks big and knows nothing. And even though I want to be confident like him, I get annoyed with his dismissiveness.

“He has,” Frannie said. “That’s the temple his grandmother used to go to. A Tin Hau one.”

Lawrence looks at me, then looks away. He grabs Frannie and they kiss.

“Get a room,” Mary says, the kind of thing people feel like they have to say.

The night meanders on, conversations and drowsy kissing like winding smoke from incense, and eventually Mary and I fall into each other’s arms on Lawrence’s couch, but in his apartment. Down the hall I hear Lawrence and Frannie. Some arguing, maybe about him going on another trip, and then it’s quiet and I try not to imagine more, but I do because when I close my eyes, I just see her.

“Look this way,” Mary says. “This way,” and she pulls my lips onto her neck, then further down. The room swirls. But we don’t go further than that.

“I’ve had such a long week,” I say.

We lay there holding each other.

In the morning, I smell Mary’s perfume and her cigarettes and sweat on the throw pillows. Frannie is gone too—she had an opening lunch shift at Smuggler’s Inn in Stanley Village to get to.

Lawrence hands me a mug of coffee.

My head hurts.

“I got to get to the airport,” Lawrence says. “Business.”

I remind him that today Frannie wanted us to join up with her to see the tiger skin in the temple in Stanley Village, even though I know he’d avoid it.

There’s a knock on the door—it’s Mary dressed for a day out, Ray-bans on to hide the hangover.

“Can’t,” Lawrence says to me as Mary stands at the threshold. “You can. You should. Like I said, it’s kind of underwhelming but everything is worth doing once.”

I got the Hong Kong posting all excited on my East Asian Studies minor. I got here, and I thought I was supposed to go find all the obscure Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian sites in the city, study the paths of feng shui and dragons. That wore out quickly, all those places close-up and distant at the same time. Full of reverence and strangers. I met Frannie and Lawrence at a pub quiz night in Lan Kwai Fong and since then, she’s what I’ve been chasing.

“This temple in Stanley,” Mary says. “Historical, innit?”

We have more mugs from Lawrence’s Mr. Coffee pitcher. I take some of Lawrence’s clothes and shower and Mary and I, awkward strangers, get on the bus to meet Frannie at the temple. Both of us nod off in separate seats. I wake as the bus veers around a corner and upstairs where we sit, a leafy tree branch brushes into the window, across Mary’s head, and she snores through it.

When we arrive at the stop with the long railing and tin awning overlooking the market and trees, I gently tap her shoulder. Stanley, with the awnings and the one cement basketball court and displays and piles of things—a street pointing north with vegetables and fruit and one seafood stall and then the alleys south we’ll walk through, with the overpriced lacquers and ceramics and art, and the deeply underpriced name brand clothes in folded stacks like a basement bin sale in the U.S. There are American and Japanese tourists, and the only Hong Kong Chinese around here seem to be the shop workers.

Frannie is late. Or not showing. I build the drama in my mind, that she sees this as cheating on Lawrence. Then I snap out of it. We’re just friends and like usual, I’m being too dramatic. Besides, here is Mary flipping the creaking coat hangers on a rack, looking at beach shrugs, asking what I think.

Frannie finally shows up with a canvas bag. She pulls out a Schweppes lemon squash, a British soft drink she knows I like. We take a moment to look out at the sea beyond the temple as we leave the shopping area and walk along the narrow sidewalk clinging to rocks which approaches the temple, a green and yellow building behind a couple trees.

Then the three of us walk in together.

Indeed, the pelt is there behind glass, darkened with age, smaller than one would expect. It looks a bit shriveled at the edges. It’s mysterious in a sense, but on its own, yes, underwhelming, if not for it being from the very last tiger.

Frannie walks past me to kneel in front of the altar with all the candles lit and the Tin Hau statue with its raised hand of blessing, its peaceful blue dress undulated like a good current from the sea.

I turn away and look up at the curling incense hanging and around at the other gold and red shrines. I kneel myself, then look at the yellow tiled floor, waiting for something. I never got much out of church, or anything like religion. The most I can say is I’ve felt times of loneliness and times where I was less lonely.

Like last week. At a lookout on our hike, Frannie leaned her head against my shoulder as we sat on a granite outcropping, taking in the view, while Lawrence was in the bushes relieving himself. She asked if I thought she should marry Lawrence. She said she really loved him. She took my hand in hers and pointed to her ring finger and said, “I’m not sure either of us is marriage material.” Then she said, “Greg. I want the whole thing. Family and kids. Grandparents. A dog. Everything.”

My own father, a barely employable Jim Beam enthusiast, had a short fuse. I used to wish him dead. He would yell at my mom, who was just getting us through. None of that was my fault, but I feel shame about it. There was a time I asked my mom to leave him, begged her to, after he got especially violent, punching in drywall in our mudroom and breaking his hand.

When Frannie said, “us,” I wanted it to be more than the beauty of the moment and the view, that “us” was Frannie and me. I told Frannie about my growing up, which I’d done before, but never that openly. I said she and Lawrence would never be like that, but I knew it was me swearing I would never be like that. Being in Hong Kong away from home and being with her, it’s like some kind of window opens. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to religious belief.

Frannie gets up from the temple floor and we walk back out into the sunlight. Mary is still inside, silently looking at the statuary, lighting her own incense, acting like she belongs there.

I tell Frannie the pelt looks nothing like the deer pelts in my uncle’s basement in Wisconsin, which is the only thing I can compare it to.

“I really miss Lawrence when he’s away,” she says. “He hates this place because it reminds him of his grandmother and how she’s gone. You know his mom wasn’t around much, or his dad. They had gambling and addiction problems. His grandmother pretty much raised him.”

Whatever that’s like—I’ve never prayed to anything—it still is drifting over her, and I feel like I’m outside of it. And she knows a lot about Lawrence that I don’t. I try to tell her more about Wisconsin, but unlike other times, her mind is somewhere else, and she’s only half-listening.

Mary comes out to join us and says, “Brilliant!”

The three of us walk toward the small beach and sidewalk near the pub where Frannie will start her second shift. “You’re peeling,” Frannie says, pointing to the back of my neck—that bad sunburn I got on the hike a week ago in Sai Kung still doing its damage. I rub my fingers on my neck. Some of the skin comes off.

Frannie says, “I hope Lawrence is okay. There’s a typhoon headed to Taipei.”

“I hope so too,” I say.

What else is there to say? Frannie was praying for our mutual friend, that he would be safe, and that he would come back to her soon with more stories to tell. More than the ones I have, which I’ve already told. And unlike Lawrence, I don’t have the will to make them any better, or to imagine them otherwise.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Like Qafia to Radif

my lover’s eyes sing patterns of rhyme, but for me it’s those lips.
Fleshy enjambment where I end–stop, the perfect couplet, those lips.

Pressed against mine like Charon’s obol, death could be so blessed.
A modern libation poured for Aphrodite, both poetry and prose lips.

My lover’s smile, sharp as a scimitar, separates top from bottom—
Parting ways they flash a pearly shift, glossy-toothed kameez. Oh lips!

That mouth my muse, I tongue an invocation, call for inspiration:
Passion’s incarnation, my lover resurrects with save-my-soul lips.

Like the fifth bayt in an ancient ghazal, they round in rhyme-refrain.
A closing of flesh and pucker of hush, I marvel at broke-the-mold lips.

Not to whistle but to kiss, this lover’s embrace I could never resist.
Whispering Candice, they touch my ear and I hear, give me those lips.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Dish With Bamboo Leaves

Style of Ogata Kenzan 尾形乾山 (Japanese, 1663–1743)(?)

So I am trying to make sense of
this world; why my mother throws out

   anything that shows any sign of
   chipping; why she

insists on buying porcelain, or
keep the jagged

   blue-glazed pieces of hollowed clay.
   Like any traitor daughter I promised

to become rich and finally make
it out of that place. Saying absolve

   reminds me of the palm shadows
   thrown across the hot Californian

concrete, sandwiching, jarring,
captured butterflies baking in

   their own passions. Rain felt like
   absolution sometimes. October miracle,

drinking through skin like lotus root;
lips always chapped;

   our little rituals. I scratch her back for her
   every night; little jets of white;

red; dragging fingernails
across, gleaming sailboats from travel

   brochures in bloody bays;
   edens in sunrise, suns in

seas; girl practitioner, skin
horror vacui. The weather, she says.

   Needs a lot of lotion, cracking,
   damage; fine porcelain from

dream screwtape marriage; white and
blue maiden who bears her king on

   a mattress of fine porcelain.
   Threat of overthinking taken up

by Japanese kintsugi. Months repaired with
bits of urushi and gold. Exchange, take up any

   Japanese art. Self deformation. I am trying.
   The rot must precede rebirth.

The weather, pottery chips
easily; always more susceptible

   to hives and clinical paraphernalia under
   the sun. Five bucks and I bought the sun.

Fifty sheets of gold leaf to put in my sunscreen.
Mother’s cheeks glisten with tear streaks

   when the light hits in the right way. Like hot
   concrete on Ventura, after an October rain.

This poem was featured in Volume 2, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.