Category: Nonfiction (Page 1 of 15)

rocks shaped into a heart in shallow water — Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash

The Gift of Your Voice

9 September 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stephanie Shafran

[Trigger warning: contains reference to suicide]

Hello children, this is Daddy. Have you been good children while I’ve been away? I hope so. I just got off the big airplane after flying in the sky, all the way from Florida to New York. First the plane climbed up and up into the clouds and after a while it straightened out and zoomed along faster than you can imagine. Then it dropped slowly down and down until safely landing and letting all the passengers climb down a ladder and walk into the airport. That’s where I am right now, and I miss you both so much. I’m coming home tomorrow and can’t wait to hug and kiss you hello.

Muted for sixty years, your voice comes alive for the first time tonight, on this self-recorded “Voice-o-graph.” No gift could ever top this one.

You recorded this message at the airport, on your way back home from a business trip in Florida. Were you homesick? In the middle of the small record, a label, in your handwriting, reads: 11-16-54, New York arr from Melbourne Beach Florida, To Stephy & Lee.

I’d have my fourth birthday in a month. Lee had recently turned seven.

You’d end your life just six and a half years later.

Stephanie Shafran retired from a long career as Spanish teacher and school counselor. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Earth’s Daughters, Slant, Persimmon Tree, The Bluebird Word, and The Sun; in anthologies such as Ophelia’s Mom, by Nina Shandler, Ed.D. Stephanie published a chapbook Awakening in 2020.

Editor’s Note: September is Suicide Prevention Month. Resources are available through the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and also on the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP). Raise awareness, reduce the stigma, and encourage action to help others.

blurry close-up photo of smoke on a black background — Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

Girls Who Smoke

1 September 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Xinyi (Mel) Song

Julie was clumsily unwrapping a pack of Kent No.4

… in the back alley outside a 7-11 in Shinjuku, Tokyo, when I saw a man with long, dark hair in a black cardigan unwrap his adeptly under the streetlight. He knocked the box on his palm, and one cigarette fell accurately between his fingers.

Julie’s fingers were slender, pale. She delicately held the cigarette, took a drag, and coughed into the air. I laughed at the way her nose wrinkled up when she tried to spit out the bitterness in her mouth.

“Why do people torture themselves with this?” She asked with her eyes squinted.

I didn’t have an answer. People torture themselves in various ways. As I traced the shifting grey line on her face – half of it dipped into the darkness, the other half looked tender under the moonlight – I felt a glare from behind. As soon as I turned around, it dissolved in the street’s yellow, fluorescent light.

My friend Chrissy was busted smoking

… in the girls’ bathroom in a Chinese high school, but we all knew she wasn’t a smoker. It was during class time when the principal walked in unexpectedly and found Chrissy and another girl whispering, giggling, and bantering in the stall near the windows.

The principal dragged them outside. Without much hesitation, that girl took out a box of cigarettes. They received detention for a week for smoking. No one ever asked why the box’s plastic wrap was still intact, or questioned why the girls didn’t smell like tobacco but like peach gloss. That was the story they decided to tell, a story less threatening to the school.

Chrissy offered me a cigarette

… outside the airport, two years after graduating from high school. We were flying back to college. She was going to Vancouver, and I was flying to New York. She offered me a cigarette, and I took out my lighter. She laughed at me, saying,

“I thought you hated smokers.”

I did. I couldn’t breathe in the clouds of smoke in the room where my father and uncles used to play mahjong. I was told it was a nasty habit for girls but a rite of passage for boys. But there wasn’t much I could hold on to growing up, so I was beginning to fidget with a cigarette in my hands. A habit might be bad in the eyes of onlookers, but it doesn’t betray you; it doesn’t ask you to change. I was moving from city to city, country to country. Trying to hide the Chinese accent, trying to love who I was supposed to love, trying not to be so different. Smoking is like a safe but moldy blanket for grown-ups.

Julie took her last drag

… while the cackling sound of the burning cigarette echoed in the alley. There was no one around us anymore. I could hear the stub rolling towards the direction of that long-haired man’s silhouette.

She took a deep breath, exhaled, and mumbled,

“I don’t understand the appeal of smoking.”

“It’s ok,” I said, taking over the cig from her, finishing the rest. It tasted like honey peach.

We walked back to our hotel in silence. Our shadows lost in the lights that were like a bright mist. It was 1:00 a.m., but the city was shrouded in a halo. I wanted to tell Julie how I felt, when I smelled the soft scent of tobacco radiating from her icy earlobes. In my hesitation, she threw away that pack of Kent No.4 and swore to never touch it.

She probably wouldn’t have known then how many cigarettes we’d gone through the night, in a few years, when she told her mother about the girl she was in love with; I probably wouldn’t have known then how much I wished that night in Tokyo was longer, when I learned that the girl wasn’t me.

Xinyi (Mel) Song is a bilingual writer. Born and raised in Sichuan, China, she moved to the United States for college and is now based in Boston. Her writing explores family, womanhood, and identity. Her essay, “Everything Is in the Meatball Soup,” is forthcoming in a Pangyrus food anthology.

lavender in sunset — Photo by Olga Prudnikova on Unsplash

I Believe in Purple

1 September 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sherri Wright

I believe in purple, the perfect blend of blue and red. A mixture of cool and calm,
hot and spicy. Negotiating between red’s passion and anger, and blue’s bravery and wisdom, purple finds grandeur and dignity.

Purple needs just the right balance of pigments—too much red turns into muddy
maroon, too much blue takes on the look of a bruise. Too light and it gets girly like a princess, too dark it becomes like the uniform of authority or the wings of a purple emperor butterfly that feeds on rotting flesh and human sweat.

Originally purple was produced by crushing shells of rare sea snails, extracting
mucus and exposing it to the sun. It took over two hundred thousand mollusks to produce an ounce of the dye. So this “Phoenician purple” was expensive and in short supply – only available to the rich and royals. It came to be associated with wealth and pretentiousness. Roman emperors used it for their robes but forbade its use by citizens. The penalty was death. Only in the 1850s did a synthetic purple pigment become widely available. Rich and royal as purple is, democracy is blessed with an abundant supply.

I believe purple is an essential element of human wellbeing. Purple draws on all
the senses. Think sweet sour purple plum, fragrant April hyacinth, supple velvet robe, purple martin’s throaty chirp and creaky rattle, last arc of the rainbow, the amethyst’s crystal clear healing power.

I believe that nothing can go wrong when you are wearing purple. No podium is too scary when you stand up there in a magenta linen sheath, a lilac silk blouse, a tiny amethyst stud. Even under the most somber black suit, lavender underwear can save the day.

Purple is a lesson in moderation. Drawing equally from feminine and masculine,
earthly and spiritual. Purple doesn’t shout, purple whispers softly, waits for you to take it in.

You do not choose purple, purple chooses you. The “Violet” in your first box of
Crayolas. Iris blossoms you picked walking to school. Petunias printed on the feed sack your mother sewed into a skirt. Your grandmother’s gladiolas. The grape jelly beans. The lilac you hid under your pillow and made a wish. A belief in purple is as powerful as Sunday school.

Ubiquitous, omnipresent purple. You can find it everywhere. But one thing is true. There has never been, never will be, too much purple.

I believe in purple.

Sherri Wright‘s work has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Delaware Beach Life, RavensPerch, and Quartet. Kelsay Books published her chapbook “Winter of My Life.” Bay to Ocean Journal nominated her essay “Braiding Sweetgrass With My Daughter” for a Pushcart Prize in 2025.

food inside two paper bags — Photo by Maria Lin Kim on Unsplash

Shoplifting At Whole Foods

1 August 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Randi Schalet

I slip a container of Fage yogurt into my canvas bag and wait, braced for the self-checkout machine to protest. It doesn’t. The silence feels like permission.

I ring up a few more groceries—a head of broccoli, oat milk—then drop in an unscanned item. Still nothing. A single clerk oversees eight registers. I’m short, white-haired, someone no one looks at twice. I call him over with a pointless question. When he steps away to help someone download their Prime code, I tuck in a bag of pancake mix. My heart doesn’t speed up. I’ve had too much practice.

The prepared foods are so overpriced, I’d never buy them without my own buy-one-get-one “discount.” I weigh one hot bar box, then stack it beneath a second heavier one—mac and cheese, rosemary potatoes, all butter and salt.

I leave with two overstuffed bags and a small receipt. Outside, I hand ten dollars to a man in red sneakers sitting in the parking lot. I unpack the food and eat at a shaded picnic table.

Money was the language of my family. It wasn’t only about having more, it was about getting it the clever way. Don’t work too hard. Don’t ask for approval. Smart people had money because they knew how to take it.

Before they divorced, my parents owned several discount clothing stores that eventually went under when the neighborhood changed.

In the first years, the Brooklyn store was crowded—people waiting in line for the makeshift dressing room, layaway tickets stacked at the counter. My father hated shoplifters and was obsessed with catching them. Once, from behind the jewelry case, he spotted a man slip something into his pocket. He jumped onto the case, shattered the glass beneath him, and chased the man down the block, blood streaming down his calf.

The register was set to charge ten percent tax, even though New York’s rate was seven. It bothered me. When he left me alone up front, I charged seven, running the seven-times table in my head. At night, the numbers kept repeating—7, 14, 21.

The clothes my father sold as new were actually “seconds”—ripped seams, crooked stitching. He bought them in bulk from Hasidic wholesalers in the garment district, their corkscrew peyos swinging as they argued. His yellow yarmulke, printed with another boy’s bar mitzvah, kept slipping off. The men would laugh, and I didn’t know if it was at the price or him. I sat on the concrete floor and watched.

He trucked the boxes to a small, wiry woman in a dark railroad flat who replaced broken zippers and missing buttons on her machine. She was paid by the piece. When we returned, she told him how much he owed, pointing at some numbers she’d scrawled on an envelope. He said it was too high, already pulling out his wallet. She shrugged and said that was the number. I leaned against the buzzing fridge.

I only got caught shoplifting once. I was in high school, meeting friends at a parking lot flea market. I walked past tables of things nobody needed—a segmented snake with a painted head, a two-foot sword with plastic rubies—and shoved both under my coat. I just wanted to take them. The sword was practically sticking out. When a security guard with a beer gut tapped my shoulder, I jumped.

“Unbutton your coat, young lady,” he said. The sword clattered to the ground. He shook his head and led me to a tiny office with a metal desk. “You need to call your mother. I’m not letting you go without a parent.”

I called a lesbian aunt who I hoped wouldn’t tell. She didn’t answer.

He shoved a yellow pad at me. “Write down your name and phone number.” I wrote our home number, assuming no one would pick up. It was Saturday—my father was at the store.

Fifteen minutes later, he burst in, shouting, an unlit cigar clamped in his mouth. He wasn’t mad at me; he was yelling at the guard. “How do you know she didn’t buy this stuff?”

Then he turned to me. “Did you pay for it?”

“Yes,” I lied instantly.

“Give it back to her,” he told the guard.

“Pick it up,” he said to me.

I clutched the things to my chest and walked beside him to the car. In the back seat, I waited for the explosion. Nothing. He dropped me at home like the errand was finished. I ran up to my room, shoved the loot behind my bed, and never looked at it again. I didn’t grow out of stealing; I just got better at it.

I’d always known my mother took small things, switching a belt from one coat to another, rearranging a top and bottom on a hanger so they went together. After the divorce, she bought things on sale in Macy’s, changed the tags at home, then returned them for more. We still had a price gun and tagger from the store. When she had Parkinson’s and was in a wheelchair, I took them home. In department store dressing rooms, I switched tags, the gun clicking once. I folded the old tags into tiny squares and dropped them behind the bench.

I think my father hated shoplifters because he saw himself in them. He just preferred to steal on the business side—no income tax, extra sales tax, and “new” clothes stitched together in a stranger’s kitchen.

In my childhood, taking was a skill, and I learned it. I get a bit of a buzz from my weekly Whole Foods runs. Bezos won’t notice, and I stay alert enough not to get caught. Breaking the rules is where I come from.

Randi Schalet is a retired psychologist living in Berkeley, California. Her non-fiction memoir pieces have appeared in Chicago Story South, Peauxdunque Review, The Manifest-Station, Under the Sun Magazine, Belmont Story Review, The Write Launch, and Rumen. Her poetry chapbook, The Last Things I’ll Remember, is forthcoming on August 21, 2026, from Finishing Line Press.

What the Dog Knows

1 July 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Pippa Storey

It’s a sunny midsummer’s day in New Rochelle, on the edge of Long Island Sound. A couple stroll into Hudson Park just ahead of me, their lanky white mutt prancing excitedly around them. They climb the flank of a promontory overlooking the bay, then separate and stand a ball’s throw apart.

Slowly, teasingly, the man draws back his arm, watching the dog quiver with anticipation. He pitches toward the woman, and the dog catapults in her direction. She catches his shot neatly with both hands, barely a pawbeat before the dog reaches her. Then, grinning down fondly, she returns an underarm lob, and the dog bolts off again.

Back and forth they throw, the dog racing eagerly between them. But there’s no ball! It’s all a charade. Nevertheless, the dog is completely enthralled, ears flapping in the wind as he gallops across the grass.

Just a conditioned response, my mother will later surmise. But I can see—from the adoration in the dog’s upturned face, the frenzied wagging of his tail, his rapturous joy in their laughter—that he understands: the game was never about the ball.

Pippa Storey grew up in New Zealand, studied in France, and now lives near Hudson Park in New Rochelle, New York, where this interaction occurred. For more of her writing, digital artwork and videos, please visit pippastorey.com.

Coorong

16 June 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Roger Funston

Today I walk a sixteen kilometer transect over coastal dunes and along brackish lagoons. We are keeping a list of the migratory birds we see—Eastern Curlew and Bar-tailed Godwit, critically endangered; Red-necked Stilt, vulnerable. These birds fly 8,000 miles from China and Siberia to winter in Coorong National Park. It is April 1985, autumn in Australia. Soon these birds will make their way back to Northern Hemisphere summer.

Coorong National Park is located on the southern coast of Australia on the South Sea, where the South Pacific and Indian Oceans meet. Mixing of the Southern Sea and the Murray River create estuaries of fresh and saline waters, world class wetlands that are endangered because of reduced freshwater flows and drought. Vulnerable Southern Belle frogs and Heath Goanna live in freshwater. Water birds nest on the saline lagoons and mudflats. The Cooring has one of the largest pelican rookeries in Australia.

Yesterday, I spent the day watching Whimbrels, Red-necked Stilts, Sharp-tailed Sandpipers, Red-necked Avocets through binoculars, poking their bills in the mudflats. Recording observations. Seemingly tedious to some, but this is science and necessary for developing a management plan. The day before we cored in these mudflats to see what invertebrates live there, trying to better understand behavior, important food sources, habitat needs.

Our team is half Aussies and half Americans, mostly short-timers in a long line of volunteer field biologists. The mix of participants is both surprising and wonderful. An executive with Esso, an engineer from mining company BHP, a phone company account rep from Orange County, California, who has brought along two large trunks filled with numerous wardrobes. Perhaps we are all closet environmentalists shedding our day jobs to revel in our passions.

We live communally in roadhouse lodging, sharing cooking, stories, laughter. Card games played at night. The Aussie winner shouts out “You beauty”. Tea and bikkies mid-afternoon. Evening barbies. Singing around the campfire, looking at the stars (bush telly).

Learned a lot of Aussie slang: dog’s breakfast (complete chaos), she’ll be apples (it will be alright), whoop whoop (middle of nowhere), bonzer (awesome), whinger (complainer), sheila (female).

The days are long. Tired at night, but a good tired. I will probably never see these people again. This was my first international field project. Many more will follow. But I will cherish the fond memories of this time and place and the people I worked with.

Roger Funston came to poetry late in life after a long career as an environmental scientist. He writes about his life journey, his travels, his tribe and things he has seen that you can’t make up.

Morning at the Marsh

1 June 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Susan Pope

In early May at the shorebird festival in Homer, Alaska, I was invited to read my goshawk attack story at the site where it happened. Since the assailants were not yet nesting, I felt safe from any potential assault.

The event was a fundraiser for the land trust that had rescued a piece of forest and wetlands from bulldozing for development. Here was an opportunity to support a cause I believed in, plus a chance to plug my new book. Birding, hiking, storytelling, snacks. A perfect fundraiser. Local merchants donated food, the trust handled the logistics, the festival advertised the event, my friend Nancy provided bird identification assistance, and my husband Jim supplied the moral support. All I had to do was show up at the trail head, hike to the viewing platform, and read for ten minutes.

I visualized. I timed. I practiced out loud.

I was ready.

But not for leading the hike because the official leader, having no childcare, was forced to bring up the rear with her squealing, squirming toddler. Or for the frequent stops and starts to accommodate the grandma who thought she had signed up for pre-school story hour and kept sprinting off the trail to capture her rubber-booted fleet-footed three-year-old dashing after squirrels. Or for the six-year-old junior birder so eager to find those birds she slammed into my heels each time we paused to listen for one.

Or for the young moose who blocked our path and would not move—despite our clapping, shouting, and pleading—until she’d devoured every last fiddlehead fern. Or for the helicopter circling overhead at the viewing platform where I was to read my story.

Or for the Wilson’s snipe punctuating the roar of the helicopter’s rotors with a furious ack, ack, ack each time I imitated the goshawk’s scream in my story. Or for the pair of Canada jays who swooped in to raid our unguarded snacks when no one was paying attention.

But none of this mattered as I shouted my story in a very non-literary way to people politely trying to listen. The sun shone, the birch and willow leaves popped open, the wrens trilled and twittered, the sandpipers, ducks, geese, and cranes frantically fed or nested or headed north, and parents and grandparents did their best to ensure that the next generation had a chance at this one unpredictable and magnificent life.

Susan Pope’s work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction Short Reads, Alaska Magazine, River Teeth Beautiful Things, and The Bluebird Word Literary Journal, among others. Her memoir Rivers and Ice follows five generations of one Alaskan family in the rapidly changing landscape of the North. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Lives Intersected

19 May 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Gail Purdy

“Mom, it’s me!” I call out as I enter the apartment. Silence hangs in the air. “Mom?” I call out again before moving towards the bedroom and adjoining bathroom. I see the blood-stained towel first, then my 94-year-old mother lying motionless on the bathroom floor. One of the sliding glass shower doors is off its track and rests at an angle up against the shiny white tiles. Only the metal frame keeps it from falling further and landing on her. Is she dead? I hesitate for a second, which feels more like an eternity, before reaching for her wrist. Her eyes blink open at my touch.

An avalanche of emotion surges through my body, threatening to crush me. I want to scream and cry. Instead, I shove fear and anxiety into the shadows at the back of my mind.

“Do you feel any pain?” I ask.

“My back hurts . . . and my head.” She struggles to get the words out. Dried blood has formed a crust around the gash at her temple. A large purple and blue bruise is making its way down her cheek.

“What happened?” Should I try to move her or call the paramedics? I can’t decide.

This is the fourth fall in less than two months. I push the rising dread to the back of my mind, up against the fear and anxiety already exiled there. I reach for my phone and press three digits before sitting on the floor next to my mother. No words pass between us.

When the paramedics arrive, she complains of neck and back pain. Concerned about a possible fracture, they place a rigid collar around her neck, and strap her to an orange plastic stretcher, immobilizing the rest of her body. They move fast, wheeling her down the hallway and out the door to the waiting ambulance. “I’m going to the hospital too . . . I’ll be right behind you,” I shout after her. “You’ll be okay, Mom.” Are the assuring words for her or for me?

At this early hour there is plenty of space in the parking lot near the emergency entrance. Two streetlights cast a thin pattern of light across the gravel, but not enough to illuminate anything that might be hidden in the shadows. I turn off the car engine and sit motionless, except for my shaking hands, and watch the paramedics take my mother into the ER. I take a deep breath. My lungs resist the expansion, fearful the air supply will be cut off before they grasp what they need. I release several breaths before getting out of the car.

Antiseptic smells mingled with urine and fear assault me when the glass doors slide open. The familiar odours hang in the air threatening to suffocate like they always do when the doors close behind me. “Why isn’t anyone helping me?” My mother’s cries join the chorus of voices in the room.

“There are many people who need help. The doctor is very busy. You’re his next patient.” The lie falls easily from my lips. Heaviness sits in my stomach and the weight of it anchors me to the chair next to my mother.

“My neck hurts . . . and my back hurts,” she cries out. Her body is still immobilized.

A nurse moves between us and slips a little blue pill under my mother’s tongue before she turns and settles her gaze on me. Her eyes are soft with kindness as she places her hands on my shoulders. “Your mother has lived her life . . . you need to live yours.” Her touch is gentle, but her words split my heart open with an unexpected force. The weight of being a caregiver is slowly crushing me. I want to leave but I can’t move.

“Where’s the doctor? Why don’t they help me?” Mom’s voice now shrill.

My voice breaks through her mounting fear. “The doctor is busy. An ambulance just brought a man into the hospital. He’s been shot, and he might die if the doctor doesn’t help him first.”

I continue to evolve the fictional tale until I see the blue pill take effect. Mom’s eyes close, and I see her face soften. My eyes close too, releasing the tears I can no longer hold back.

Gail Purdy lives life on the west coast of British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in Four Tulips, rhizomag, Witcraft, Missing Pieces (a grief anthology from Quillkeepers Press), Last Syllable, The Bluebird Word, and the 2021 Amy Award Anthology. Long walks in the forest accompanied by her inner child nurture her creative soul.

Photo by Ramakrishnan Nataraj on Unsplash

Standing

16 May 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Thomasin LaMay

They stood. And stood for something. Just by standing.

“Lupins” by Seamus Heaney

Last summer, a business planted dozens of tiny saplings in a field near my home, green space in an urban area where I walk my dog. It was an attempt to fix poor choices, but the project went untended. The young trees tried to root through a dry fall, then rare, brutal winter. Now, in spring, they stand.

Proud, bone brittle, brown.

A mirror of world events. So much broken, being torn. I used to think I was in the world to look with goggle eyes, that awe was grace, maybe even faith. Now I am unsure. Feelings fracture. Kindness is scared. I want to feel useful, for things to make sense.

So there’s a certain perspicacity in these fragile and mostly dead trees which I start to embrace. I’ve watched them all spring as everything else turns green and flowers. Cherry limbs with pink blossoms dance against a bright blue sky. New-born fawns wander the creek’s edge. And all across the field, those un-bloomed saplings stand full-flaunt in their plots, stretching their splayed tips to the sky like cheerleaders. As if they were actually alive. Birds sing from their branches. A snapping turtle burrows and leaves her eggs. There’s no judgment, no anger at their neglect. They take what is given, as if to say yes. Yes, and thank you.

Mine are timid hands, but one morning I wrap them, warm and wanting, around each little spindle. You can do it, I say. You can do it. But I’m not sure what I mean by “it.” Perhaps their stand is not static. I wonder if such “standing” is a way of intrinsic belonging, that we’re all doing the “stand” but we just don’t (want to) see it. Because Heaney’s lupins, like these little trees, are also readying their own transformations, the inevitable. Knowing that is hard. Even though we’re doing it, all of us, together.

I’m not sure why that brings me comfort. Maybe because it makes sense.
The saplings remained through much of summer, but today when we go for our walk they are gone. Dug out. Small holes left behind, clumps of black dirt in a freshly cut field. Scraps of bark in the grass. Some were simply mowed over, their bodies intact on the ground. We bring one of them home, stand it in water on the porch.

In my backyard, late summer Obedient plants are starting to bloom. Not lupins, but a good look-alike. Tall, leggy, purple. Called “obedient” because if they fall over, you simply stand them back up. Also like lupins, they come back every year. New flowers, a long-established root system. Something to count on.

Thomasin LaMay is a writer, singer, and teacher in Baltimore, MD. She’s taught music and women/gender studies at Goucher College, and currently teaches high school. Her writing appears in Thimble Literary Journal, Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, Yellow Arrow Vignette (online August 2025), and Tiny Memoir (January 2026).

Learning to Drive

13 May 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Dr. Nancy J Rennert

Daddy picked me up outside my cousin’s apartment building in New York City for the drive home to Long Island. Our car crawled in the rush-hour traffic.

As darkness approached, Daddy weaved back and forth over the line separating the driving lanes, his neck craned toward the windshield, eyes darting back and forth. His left foot came off the recently installed left gas pedal as he depressed the brake, then returned to the gas pedal. His right artificial leg, no longer attached to his body, was splayed on the front seat between us.

“I can’t see the lines…”, he said, his shoulders sagging. His advancing diabetes was slowly eroding his eyesight.

“I’m pulling over. You drive.”

At seventeen, I’d passed the written test to get my learner’s permit. I could stop at a stop sign, make a right turn and drive slowly on local streets with my instructor in the car. I wasn’t legally allowed to drive in New York City with my learner’s permit.

“But, Daddy, I can’t drive legally without…” I began.

Daddy interrupted by wrenching the steering wheel to the right. The car careened off the highway and then skidded to a stop, on the shoulder.

I tried to breathe, my heart’s lub dubs pounding against my chest. Usually, I accepted a challenge, but this was so risky. I knew we could get hurt, even die. I wanted to run away fast and disappear. But there was nowhere to go.

“You have to drive. I’ll talk you through it.” Daddy said. I heaved myself out of the front seat and watched as Daddy slid his right stump into the artificial leg. I didn’t want to drive but he was already out of the driver’s seat. He leaned on the car door with all his weight, stood and then hobbled around the front hood, holding on until he reached the passenger side door. I held him under his arm so he could ease down into the passenger seat.

Daddy had diabetes for as long as I can remember. About five years before the drive, he started to gradually lose his eyesight. Six months before the drive, when an infection took his right leg below the knee, my mother, my three brothers, and I visited him in the rehabilitation hospital and it was the first time I saw him cry.

After a few months of physical therapy, he walked with the artificial leg, and then he wanted to drive. A gas pedal was installed to the left of the brake in his car, which he operated with his remaining foot. The right pedal still worked in case someone else needed to drive his car.

The two gas pedals scared me. I’d never driven on a highway, let alone in a car with two gas pedals. Still, I moved the seat forward, adjusted the side and rearview mirrors and checked the dashboard, just like in driver’s ed class. Engine off, I moved my right foot from the right accelerator to the brake for practice. I kept my left foot as far away from the extra gas pedal as I could.

“Start the engine, and put on the left turn signal,” Daddy said.

Can he hear my heart pounding against my chest?

“Look for an opening, then give it some gas and get into the right lane. Keep your eye on the white line and follow it.” Hands trembling, I put the left turn signal on, but there was no opening to merge.

“I’ll tell you when… I’ll say NOW and then you turn the steering wheel to the left slightly and push on the gas pedal. You can do it – you have to – ease your way in.”

I gripped the steering wheel; my body hunched, and my jaws clenched.

“NOW” he said. I pressed on the accelerator and edged the car into traffic.

“Damn yes!” Daddy said.

On the drive, Daddy repeated “You can do it” so many times, I began to believe it. A shot of adrenaline surged through my body, recharging me. I focused intensely on the road, concentrating on following the lane lines, as honking cars whooshed past us.

“Just drive slow if you want. Who cares if they honk at you. Screw ’em,” Daddy advised. The next passerby gave me the finger. Same to you buddy! Get out of my way, I thought.

I’m driving!

When we neared home, the traffic let up, and Daddy began to tell jokes, which I had heard before, but they still made me smile. The one about his friend who was pleased with his new hearing aid. Dad asked, “What kind is it?” and the friend replied, “about 11:30.” Daddy also had some great one liners! If someone repeated a story, he would say “This is where I came in.” – and that was that. Conversation over. Humor was his way of coping, his shield against adversity.

About twenty minutes later, I parked the car in our driveway and stumbled out of the driver’s seat. Exhausted and triumphant. We had made it home. “I knew you could do it”, Daddy said softly, with tears in his eyes.

We shared a hug in the car. We weren’t very close, but this drive had brought us together. As we entered the house, Mom was upstairs, and my brothers were watching TV and finishing homework. I went straight to my room, plopped on my bed and thought about my fear, my accomplishment and my newfound power.

I’d been terrified of driving, but Daddy pushed me to do it. He believed in me and helped me believe in myself. Somehow, I found my strength.

A few weeks later, Daddy went to the eye doctor hoping he could have more laser treatments to improve his vision, but the doctor told him he was legally blind.

He hired a driver that day.

I passed my driving test the next month. From then on, I only drove my mother’s car.

Dr. Nancy J Rennert is a deaf physician, Chief Endocrinologist at Norwalk Hospital, CT. She is exploring creative nonfiction writing focusing on medicine, disability, family and the intersection of all three domains. Prior publications in Cool Beans Lit and Pulse–Voices from the Heart of Medicine.