Category: Nonfiction (Page 10 of 11)

water falls and mountain — Photo by Nandhu Kumar on Pexels.com

A Woman and a Waterfall

2 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Robin Greene

We found a spot to park near the Moore’s Cove trailhead, along highway NC 276 that meanders through the Pisgah National Forest from Brevard to Waynesville.

Our plan was to take the short but rather vertical hike up to the impressive waterfall this autumn afternoon before returning to our home in Hendersonville, about forty-five-minutes away. We’d been out looking at raw land that day, thinking to purchase a couple of wooded, undeveloped acres for a second home, and we’d been previewing possibilities.

At the car, my husband decided to take his hiking stick, leave his phone and his jacket, while I decided to take nothing. I usually carry my phone to snap photos, but my pants pocket wasn’t deep, so I left it in the car.

On the trail, we met people, families mostly—kids scampering up the trail or complaining about the difficulty of the hike. There were babies in carriers, and moms and dads loaded down with backpacks. Late October, the leaves were turning and falling, and already the forest offered more winter than summer views.

Then, arriving at the waterfall, there she was. Very pregnant and almost naked. Barefoot, standing on the slippery stones just in front of the waterfall. She had a woman photographer snapping photos, and a man, probably her partner, stood out of frame, but by her side.

She wore a sheer robe and some kind of thong that didn’t cover her backside. Her large breasts bulged from what appeared to be a bikini top. Her dark skin was smooth over her enormous belly, and I thought she must be eight or even nine months along.

Then, I noticed the crown, a gold-colored tiara on top of her head.

Behind her, the large waterfall cascaded dramatically across the rocks, and hikers gathered in small groups to admire the spectacle of her. They also snapped photos. Something I, too, would have done—and, at that moment, I regretted not having taken my phone.

What had inspired her to do a photo-shoot here? What had inspired her to be so naked, so vulnerable on the wet slippery rocks? And the crown—what was her thinking about that?

I had no answers. But I, along with the crowd, watched her for a long time. A black woman, a pregnant woman, a woman barely dressed on a cool fall day, standing against the wild backdrop of a large and powerful waterfall.

As I stood there, I thought back to my own two pregnancies, which resulted in two boys, now grown men. I thought about this woman’s upcoming childbirth, imagined her struggling through contractions, and then nearly exhausted, finally pushing her baby out, into the hands of a doctor or midwife or perhaps her partner. I thought about the next decades of her life as a mother. Like the waterfall behind her, they would be an onslaught, an unstoppable rush.

She had paused to capture the moment. She probably felt like a queen—like so many women about to become mothers.

On the hike down, I found a quiet place to sit and think about this woman, this stranger, who was not a stranger because I recognized her. How she felt like royalty, something special. How her nearly-naked pregnant body was part of the larger naked world. How a woman might feel that the momentous events of her pregnancy and upcoming childbirth might shift the universe.

And now, at my desk, thinking back at the image of her, I feel both joy and sadness at my own journey of motherhood. As women, we are powerful—opening our bodies to allow another human being to enter the world. And we are powerless, as there’s so much about this human being that we won’t have the ability to control.

And after giving birth, our lives are never the same.

So, I take this moment to pause and to thank this anonymous woman for reminding me of the powerfulness and powerlessness of womanhood, of motherhood, and of the inevitability of change. And although I’ll probably never know her identity—and even without a photo to remind me—this woman’s image remains.

Robin Greene is the author of five books, and she regularly publishes her short work in journals and magazines. Greene is co-founder and current board member of Longleaf Press, and she now teaches writing and yoga in Western North Carolina.

Why the Rabbits Run

30 July 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Lindsay Dudbridge

When I first visited Madrid, just three months before moving there, my Spanish partner and I crossed the central part of the city, erratically dodging and weaving our way through people like bats catching flies. Panicked, I said, “It’s like we’re in New York City. This is too big. I don’t know if I can live here.”

I grew up in the Adirondack Park—with six million acres to explore. I trained for my high-school cross-country team in the footsteps of deer, bear, and coyote and recovered in rocky streams or still lakes set to the soundtrack of loon calls. Born into a life of “forever wild,” I wondered how I could ever replace soft pine and mud with concrete and stone, forests with buildings, and rugged with landscaped?

By the time I was wandering the streets of Spain, I was no stranger to cities. I had been living in the Washington, DC area for nearly 20 years. Though I always sought the wildish spaces, no matter how tiny—running thin strips of trails between backyards and strip malls. The last several years, I lived in the city itself, next to the large, forested Rock Creek Park. I mentally mapped the Park’s trails in ways beyond their intersections and where they led. If I ran up a specific hill at dusk in the spring, I could see nesting owls. If I kept running a little further along the ridge just before dark, I would meet volunteers setting up nets to capture and study bats. I knew where to see the woodpeckers, which rocks to avoid stepping on after a heavy rain, and which trees had fallen with the last heavy storm.

Madrid feels so different—like chaos. It’s an introvert’s nightmare: people are everywhere and everywhere is loud. So I run at the quiet time—the cusp of sunrise—when it’s light enough to not need a headlamp but early enough that it’s not yet considered morning by many here. I start out along the paved, well-lit river trail and head into Casa de Campo, which was once the King’s hunting grounds. There are few people, just a spattering of other runners and dog walkers at the lake near the entrance.

The damp days are my favorite, as a light fog nestles in among the tall pinyon pines. These days, I crunch along the dirt roads because the trails are covered in a heavy mud that cakes the shoes. As I jog along, some of the many rabbits freeze and others bolt, zigzagging to safety. At first, I wondered why they ran. The park seemed so tame. But one morning, I stopped in my tracks as a rabbit came tearing toward me. The fox chasing it slowed to a trot when it saw me, reluctantly turning and heading back into the field in search of more prey. How lucky to see such a thing. I felt guilty for interrupting its hunt and relieved for the rabbit. I continued my run, holding those conflicting emotions and watching the carboneros, so similar to the chickadees of home, flit from branch to branch.

I often feel like I will never fit into this new culture—the late dinners, the lack of personal space, the constant conversation. But these mornings, I can at least immerse myself in this land and understand why the rabbits run and where the foxes hunt. So I run, I learn, and I listen to my footsteps patting a rhythm into the earth. I can almost follow it, like a thread across the Atlantic to the forest where I’m from.

Lindsay Dudbridge is a professional editor from the US who has been living in Madrid, Spain since 2019. When not manipulating the written word, she is outside running, mountaineering, caving, and climbing.

Barry and friend, photo provided by author

Polio

23 July 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by David Blumenfeld

August 1, 1944

I’m almost seven. Mother tells me she’s going to have a baby. I think: That’s why her belly has gotten so big. Smiling, she says how nice it will be to have a little brother or sister. I’ll be the big brother. I feel grown up and hope for a boy.

October 3, 1944

Mother returns from the hospital with baby Barry, a fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed boy with a tiny, button nose. In our family, only Bubby Rebecca, my paternal grandmother, has blue eyes and everyone says that’s where baby Barry’s eyes came from. I wonder: Do eye colors come from relatives? How? But there isn’t a single blond in our family and Barry is a tow head, whose yellow-white hair is like a gold and silver crown. A flaxen-haired babe has miraculously been born to a dark-skinned, eastern-European Jewish family! Friends needle Dad that someone else got into the act. I ask myself: What does that mean? But Dad adores his blue-eyed baby. Does he adore him more than he adores me? Me, who was here first? Aunt Gert and Uncle Murph, who have no children, treat Barry like their own child, the one they want but, for some reason, cannot have. As the years pass, Barry becomes even more beautiful: the bright-eyed, good-natured, golden-haired child loved by all.

Summer, 1951

Every parent and every child old enough to read the daily paper or see newsreels in movie theaters lives in fear of polio, the crippling disease that typically strikes the young, especially in the summer. It has even struck President Roosevelt, though the press keeps it hidden. Newsreels show physically stunted young polio victims with crutches and leg braces trying awkwardly to relearn to walk. Worse yet are those who lay prone, encased in an “iron lung,” or early respirator, a huge box that covers them from neck to foot, leaving them immobile, imprisoned alive in a metal tomb. I shudder and pray to God neither I nor anyone I care about will suffer such a horrific fate.

September 14 – 16, 1951

Barry goes to a summer camp and after a few days, returns home with a violent illness. I try to read to him but he is too sick to listen. Mom and Dad rush him to the hospital, where they learn that he has bulbar polio, the most devastating form of the disease. The next day the family gathers at Grandpa Ben’s and Bubby Rebecca’s apartment waiting for news from Mother who is at the hospital by Barry’s side. After what seems like endless hours, Mother staggers into the apartment, her face bloodless and ghost-like, and collapses into a chair. “He’s dead,” she says, grimacing and clearly in shock. After a second’s pause, there bursts from the rest of us a wail the likes of which I have never heard before and, God willing, I shall never hear again. It says: Everything worthwhile, everything good and bright in the world, has vanished and can never be restored.

September 17, 1951

In the following days, Dad cries only briefly but looks as though someone has kicked him brutally in the stomach. Then he sucks it up and soldiers on, hiding his grief as best he can. Everyone fears that Mother, who has a history of mental illness, will collapse. But she does no such thing. She collects herself and, as if on autopilot, mechanically and with blank eyes, arranges for the funeral and for sitting shiva, the week-long Jewish mourning period when friends gather at the home of the bereaved family to support them. In the next few days, with a stolid and impassive visage, she does much else and makes many wise decisions. For more than a decade she speaks of Barry almost daily, visiting his grave at least once a week.

Years later, while rummaging through a drawer of old clothing in a room Barry and I shared, I find a little, neatly-ironed suit of his that she has preserved as a keepsake. I suspect that it is not the only such memento mori buried in the house to remind her of him. Polio casts a pall over my mother for the rest of her life.

1952

1952 sees the worst polio outbreak in U.S. history: 57,000 cases, primarily among children. In 1953, Jonas Salk successfully tests a polio vaccine and, despite some early setbacks, hope arises that someday polio will be eradicated. By 2020, the three most common forms of the disease are declared eradicated everywhere but in Asia and are endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet new strains of the disease are beginning to emerge and as we have learned, viruses that threaten one country, threaten us all. Caveat mundus: Let the world beware! May there never again be polio deaths like my brother Barry’s.

(Editor’s Note: On 22 July 2022, the New York Times publishes the story Rare Case of Polio Prompts Alarm and an Urgent Investigation in New York. “Health officials in Rockland County…urged the public to get shots as they investigated whether the disease had spread to others.”)

David Blumenfeld (aka Dean Flowerfield) is an 84-year-old retired philosophy professor and associate dean who only recently returned to writing stories, poetry, and children’s literature, which he abandoned in his thirties to devote full-time to philosophy. He is happy to have returned to a road only briefly taken.

My grandmother in one sentence

13 July 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Reena Kapoor

When she died I was well into engineering college battling my own confusions, resisting demands on my loyalty from family, country, love and looking ahead with such desperation that I refused to bother with any kind of history, even that which surrounded me protruding from the earth in every stone at the shallowest dig, brimming over walls of old buildings awaiting renovation, bubbling up in street corners among hawkers of food, color and cloth in of one of the most history laden cities of the world so much so that part of the city had been named “New” Delhi – even this naming was by now history – in an eagerness to cast off the old and tell the world we were new and arrived and secular and departed from our native soil and brothers and concerns and even this departure came back to haunt us years later but we didn’t know it then in the same way that I didn’t know she would come back to me later in life so when at the sight of her body a shaking sob broke through my worldly concerns and forward-focused attentions, I involuntarily reached out to touch her face, causing all the micromanaging elders around me to yell, “don’t touch the body” for now she was just “the body” and not the matriarch she had once been, which they didn’t like to admit she hadn’t been in over a decade since she was forced to live not on her own terms but those of her children within their rules and fences and with Alzheimer’s merciless dissolution of her identity, the same one whose sense and strength had built and rebuilt all our lives when the fates had come knocking to extract usurious debts which she could be held responsible for only as much as any woman in a society that made it a habit of heaping responsibility and duty and tradition and religious stricture without agency at her door can be, but which were now all paid or abandoned in this final departure so all her beneficiaries could pretend to pay one last homage to her glorious past and her sacrifice, iron will and fearlessness, except at that age I wanted no part of this remembering because I had heard this ancient history umpteen times and knew it would devolve into a multilevel contest of tears and grief that uselessly distracted me from my singular focus of looking ahead to places my life was going to go where no one would want to know my tired history or even more tiresome stories of why my grandmother was forced to flee Peshawar, her home, her mohalla, her town of generational soils and how a woman who was barely fifth grade educated in a language and script whose use was confined to a daily reading of her holy book so much so that none of her children bothered to learn it and I most certainly did not except for the recitation of prayers that she taught my sister and I as children called paath which literally means “lesson” beginning with Ik Onkar (there is only one god) which I strategically utilized before school exams even as I was slowly turning atheist, something I never told her, I don’t think, but now in my middle age as I look for my voice and myself in the universe and wonder what I will leave behind, she often comes back to me and when I confess my atheism to her and that I have no use for religion and don’t find bliss in the paath she taught me, although I do remember it all, she simply ignores my protestations proceeding on to tell me qissas from her time and her journeys and when I marvel at her refusal to be cynical until the end, her kindness even to those who came to steal from her, and her steadfast attention to dharma in the face of insurmountable odds she simply smiles saying these are the only paaths I need remember.

[Author Note: paath = lesson; qissa = story; dharma = duty or the right thing to do]

Reena Kapoor grew up all over India. Her poetry collection Arrivals & Departures reflects this wandering sensibility. Work has appeared in Tiny Seed Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Visible Magazine, Poet’s Choice and India Currents. EnActe Arts produced four of her plays in 2021. Visit arrivalsanddepartures.substack.com/.

A Lifeline

12 June 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Gail Purdy

The afternoon was grey with light rain. No different than any other day during the winter months. The world appeared softer through the rain-spattered windshield as I sat motionless in the car outside my mother’s apartment building. I felt the deep heaviness that had made itself at home in my body. What else did I need to do before I went home and cocooned for the night?

My cell phone rang just as I turned the key in the ignition. The woman’s voice sounded harsh coming through my car’s audio system.

“This is the Director of Care at Evergreen Baptist Care Facility. Is this Gail?”

“Yes, it is.”

“We have a bed for your mother. You have until tomorrow to decide if you want it. If you do, you must move your mother into the facility within 72 hours. Normally it is 48 hours, but you have an extra day because of the New Year’s holiday.”

The idea of my mother moving into a long-term care facility was something I didn’t allow myself to think about. I didn’t want to hope. Was it possible that this journey of caring for my mother might soon end? Was someone throwing me a lifeline, and I just needed to grab hold of it? Could I grasp hope and not let it slip through my fingers?

It had only been two weeks since the case manager visited my mother to assess if it was safe for her to continue living independently. The regional health authority would decide if my mother qualified for a ‘subsidized bed’ in a long-term care facility. A decision that was weighted heavily on how many authorized services my mother was currently using. Any assistance I contracted privately to support my mother didn’t count. “I only gather the information and present it to the assessment team,” the case manager told me. “Every care facility in your immediate area has a six to nine-month waitlist. So don’t expect your mother to move soon if she is approved.”

What did live independently really mean? The only reason my mother had been able to live alone in her apartment over the last several years was because of me. She had fallen five times in less than four months, and each time I found her lying on the floor, not knowing how to call for help. When she stopped bathing, I arranged for someone to assist her. When she could no longer make sense of microwave instructions to reheat prepared meals, I hired someone to purchase groceries and prepare meals for her. Afraid of falling again, she had become reluctant to leave her apartment.

Fingers deformed by arthritis made it difficult for her to remove medications from the pharmacy-sealed blister packs. Yellow and red pills were found among the forks and spoons in the kitchen drawer, and a zip-lock sandwich bag containing a handful of pills sat near the toaster. Evidence of what had been lost and retrieved over time.

Each square on my mother’s large calendar contained the names of people who came to help her each day. Confusion set in each time she looked at it or when someone showed up to help her. “Why are you here?” she asked. “I don’t need any help.”

As the woman on the phone continued to speak, I heard her voice, but I couldn’t respond.

Frustration and anger had taken their toll. Trying to manage the needs of my aging mother was crushing me. As hours turned into days and days into months, I felt fragile. Feeling myself slowly breaking apart, I wondered if I would be lost in the shattering. Self-preservation was screaming at me. Responding to these needs had become a way of life for me, and I didn’t know how to be any different. And now I was slowly losing myself.

Anger bubbled just beneath the surface of my self-control. With a force and energy of its own, anger surfaced at will. I wanted to live my life, not my mother’s. She no longer knew how to keep herself safe, and I was anxious about what might happen when I couldn’t be with her. I was afraid of losing her, and at the same time, I wanted her gone. Fear and anger wrestled inside of me, each fighting to take control.

Only a few seconds had passed as images from the last year flashed through my mind. I slipped back into the present, aware of the rain on the windshield and the woman on the phone.

“Yes, we will take the room,” I heard myself say as numbness spread through my body. Fog descended over the streets as I drove home.

Gail Purdy is an emerging writer and multi-disciplinary visual artist living on the west coast of British Columbia. She is the runner up recipient of the 2021 International Amy MacRae Memorial Award for Memoir. Her story “The Parking Lot” was part of the 2021 Amy Award Anthology.

photo of pink roses in vase — Photo by Nubia Navarro (nubikini) on Pexels.com

Grateful Heart

29 May 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Allison Wehrle

The rose, its five-inch bloom too heavy for its stem, brushed against my leg. It hung over the edged garden bed onto the narrow walkway alongside our garage. I had planted this rosebush just a few months prior, sprinkling its roots with ashes as I emptied the contents of a paw-printed urn into their final resting place. It flourished quickly and now demanded my attention, just like its furry counterpart. I set my toddler down and knelt in front of the insistent plant, cupping the massive flower in my hands. Pulling the pruning shears out of my back pocket, I clipped the bowed stem along with a couple other blossoms, dense petals still unfurling. I brought the trio into the house and placed them in my grandma’s delicate bud vase.

Jack, our beloved black cat (who once shattered a mirror) lived to be 13 and passed on the Ides of March. I acquired him when he was just five weeks old and, as far as either of us was concerned, I was his mama. My constant companion, this fluffy soot sprite blossomed into a stunning feline, with plush fur, inquisitive green eyes, and a supple, panther-like tail.

Our family – and square footage – grew considerably over the years: cat, husband, kids; apartment, condo, house. And with the house came a (postage stamp of a) yard. Finally, I could get my hands dirty and plant something other than the same boring annuals in a window box. Perennials. Pollinators. Vegetables. I wanted them all. But then I had a baby, who was too mobile come spring for me to do much gardening, so I stuck some petunias in a pot and tended to my offspring instead. We spent that summer on a blanket in the back yard, while the cats lounged on the deck.

Iggy, a big blue tomcat that spent his early years on the mean streets of Chicago, adopted me from the shelter where I volunteered at the time, not realizing that Jack and I were a package deal. He had the softest fur and the sharpest claws; the tiniest meow and the loudest purr; the meanest glare and the biggest heart. Both a lover and a biter, he was the toughest ‘fraidy cat I’ve ever known.

Iggy assumed the alpha male role upon arrival. He bit Jack’s ears to assert dominance and to try and tame that free spirit. He chattered angrily at the birds outside the living room window, to show them who’s boss. But the night a mouse dared enter our apartment, Iggy dropped all pretense. He leapt onto the kitchen table, prancing around like a housewife from the fifties, leaving Jack to deal with the squeaky intruder. Despite their roughhousing, Jack worshipped Iggy. Iggy begrudgingly came to love Jack. They made such a great pair.

If cats had middle names, Jack’s would have been Trouble. Although it was acute kidney failure – not curiosity – that took him from us, it became clear early on that his nine lives would be nowhere near enough, given his penchant for mischief. Above all, Jack adored us, his family, and was happiest when we were all at home. Although he missed it by a day, Jack would have loved lockdown.

Each summer, we made small improvements to the yard. We replaced the ugly, overgrown yew with a Japanese maple, thinned the hostas, and buried tulip bulbs among the boxwoods. Then came the year everything changed.

Stuck at home, awash in postpartum hormones, suddenly unemployed and without childcare, my home felt more like a prison than a refuge and I longed to be outdoors. The neighbors had removed a large catalpa tree, sending a stream of sunlight flooding into our backyard. I wanted to plant a rose. A rose for Jack. The new baby hampered my gardening ambitions; the slow reopening of non-essential businesses (like nurseries) derailed it entirely. And so we spent another idle summer in the backyard, all except for Iggy, who was content to lounge in the doorway and sniff the warm breeze or snooze in the sunbeams.

Not wanting to miss another planting season, I ordered plants online the next February. I chose Jack’s rose almost instantly, an exceptional, show-stopping hybrid with jumbo blooms in a velvety crimson. Even its name spoke to me: Grateful Heart. I debated whether to preemptively order a plant for Iggy, too, even as he lay draped across my lap, purring. Pragmatism edged out my guilt, as his health was steadily declining. Although the vet once declared him to be the “Timex of felines”, illness and old age soon won out.

I kept coming back to Crescendo, a delicate tea rose with petals that morphed from white to blush to pink as they unfurled. I perused the recommended add-ons and selected a highly rated plant food that edged my total up just enough to qualify for free shipping, but decided against the bone meal, which seemed morbidly redundant.

Back outside, I moved to the other rosebush. Planted the same day and enhanced with the same organic matter, for weeks it remained a cluster of thorny, lifeless branches. Had I not been so invested in its survival I would have likely given up when it first failed to thrive. But now, this late bloomer had rewarded my patience with a solitary, breath-taking rose.

As I reached to clip the single rose from its stocky bush, I punctured my thumb on a razor-sharp thorn lurking just below the leaves. It was then I knew I’d chosen the right cultivar. “Hi, buddy” I whispered, as I pressed thumb and forefinger together to discourage bleeding. Then, holding the stem by the scruff this time, I nestled Iggy’s lone flower into the vase, the perfect complement to Jack’s showy blooms.

Allison Wehrle is a former magazine editor, classically trained musician and aspiring essay writer. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two human children.

close up photo of paint color — Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels.com

Three Scenes in Sunlight

18 May 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Bonnie Demerjian

Mother and Child

I hold in my hand a creased black and white photograph, Mom holding infant Me. We’re both smiling for the camera, my father the cameraman, perhaps? With squinting eyes and open mouth, I was a picture of pure delight. Mom smiling too, her long dark hair in plaits and pinned up, a most unattractive style, but fashionable in the 40s. There we pose on that sun-filled afternoon before a house, its white planks brilliant in the clear light, a light as uncomplicated as our smiles.

How often I’ve studied this moment in its informal, close-knit sweetness. At times I’ve felt it a pang, knowing that the innocence of that captured instant was soon, very soon, to be shattered by adultery and divorce, not once but twice. So unknowing we were that day. And what about the photographer, certainly the man I was to meet only years later and the instrument of heartache. What did he know as he pressed the shutter?

I took the picture up another day not long ago. This time, instead of musing on impending pain, I saw, with a flash of insight, wordless uncontaminated love, only love and the miracle of our braided existence. An immensity of stardust commingled in we two. A moment, like that, so brief, so intense, will never come again, but, like the deep tolling of a massive bell, keeps on sounding.

Love

We met just before hitchhiking became life-threatening. Our college was on a hill several miles above town. There was a bus for those of us without cars, but of course it never ran when you wanted to get away from campus. So, we walked out to the road and stuck out a thumb. What? Me worry?

A few cars went by and then an aging MGB, a red sporty thing, pulled over. I had seen the driver in orchestra. Later, he told me he had been eyeing me too from the trumpet section lined up behind the cellos. Trumpets didn’t have a lot to do while the string players sawed through their parts and they, they were always guys, had plenty of opportunity to check out girls.

So, on a clear spring afternoon, with a breeze from the distant glacier-hollowed lake fresh on my face, I hitched a ride down the hill to town. I wasn’t afraid and even a little intrigued. After all, I had been aware of that evaluating look behind my back. The beer we shared that day, with the small searching talk that followed, are lost to time, but that brief ride marked the first mile on our lifetime journey.

This Place

I’m standing in the field behind the barn, that matriarch of the farm. She’s over a century old, red, of course, and looming three full stories. It’s a pleasantly hot late summer afternoon in this place, familiar and dear since childhood, home to grandparents, mother, and, for a time, to me. There are sprawling evergreens nearby, scenting the air with their piney aroma, trees planted by my grandfather to succeed his aging orchards. The Senecas had orchards here, too, before they were driven away. We found their flinty arrowheads and smooth grinders when the soil was turned. Dried weeds whisper softly in a light breeze. It stirs the dusty scent of grasses flavored with a hint of warm tar from the road nearby. This time of day the birds are still and only a few desultory crickets scrape away at my feet.

I’ve come today with a purpose, for this place will soon enough be sold, destined for an unseen future. I say goodbye to the barn, dim and faintly redolent from barrels of cherry brandy, product of a damaged crop, we savored long ago. Farewell to the farm house, the gray and sagging sheds, the creek bubbling to the lake in cheerful conversation. Today I raise my face, lift arms, and give thanks to all who lived and worked this land and for all the years I’ve tramped its acres. This unassuming farm, its fertile soil and deep wells, embraced and nourished many lifetimes, so, speaking for them all, I stand in a golden moment tasting of gratitude and sadness.

Bonnie Demerjian writes from Alaska. She has written as journalist and as author of four books about Alaska’s history, human and natural. Her emerging poetry and flash work has appeared in Alaska Women Speak, Tidal Echoes, Bluff and Vine, and Blue Heron Review.

Photo by Cederic Vandenberghe on Unsplash

Fight for Bedtime

13 May 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Haley Grace

As a kid, bedtime was so exciting. Right before my eyes closed I would imagine flying dragons and dancing princesses. I drifted away to thoughts of bursting colors and beautiful designs.

As a teenager, the fairytales disappeared but my imagination still soared! Only instead of castles, it was faded blue locker covered hallways that smelled of old books and musky cologne. There were no flying dragons but bright yellow school buses with torn off lettering lined up outside. I would drift away to the false reality of an 80’s movie, where butterflies flooded my belly when my crush kissed me before the credits rolled.

Now I am an adult, or at least in the eyes of society. There are no fairytales in my dreams. My brunette, blue eyed, 80’s curly headed crush is facing the other direction; avoiding a conversation we’ve had a million times. That place between sleep and awake is now where tears flood my eyes. It’s where ideas of doubt, fear, and anxiousness dance in my head. Imagination is now taken over by the fuzzy sounds of the TV I’m not really listening to. The only thing I’m dreaming of is a cigarette because nicotine cures a clouded mind.

No one tells you there is no imagination before adult bedtime. You slowly learn about stiff tension between you and your partner from a fight you swore you would never have. And a racing mind of questions. And lists impossible to complete.

Maybe this is all inevitable.

But if you can: Fight for the dragons. Dance with the princesses. And let the kaleidoscope of butterflies take over as you kiss that curly headed kid.

Haley Grace is an Appalachian raised LGBT+ emerging voice just getting her start in writing. She graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College with a degree in Communication and Literature. She is working on her Masters in School Counseling and enjoys writing about her adventures, heartbreaks, and observations of life.

Grandma’s Refrigerator

8 May 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Abigail Mathews

Grandma’s refrigerator is the color of the world. It is everywhere.

When the sky is no longer dark, but painted with rising yellows, then the smell of the kitchen is nearing, and I am reminded of milk jars and oven mitts.

Oh, when the flowers finally bloom, and the yellow petals fall to the mud, I see cigarette smoke wafting out windows, and oven-crisped cookies sliding from the pan onto dirtied white floors, and Grandma’s refrigerator is humming.

And the bumblebees are humming, and their yellow hue is familiar.

If the soil were to be peeled back and the dirt dried by the yellow sun, then the grass would turn yellow and die, and the flower roots would turn yellow and die, and the leaves have turned yellow and died, and I wonder when it became Fall again.

It was just yesterday that the dragonflies nibbled my ankles, and the skin on my shoulders were freckled, wasn’t it? The air crunches again, as does my chest with my fiberglass inhales. My yellow lungs heave like the chest of my grandfather.

The Autumn air brings a stale smell, but it is not a painful stale, because it is the stale smell of grandmother, and you remember how she cooked for you while you sat at the kitchen table picking apart napkins, and she wore an apron lined with yellow lace.

And the lace was as thin as her skin and as yellow as her refrigerator.

Abigail Mathews is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she is pursuing a major in creative writing.

Broken Wing

5 April 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Jennifer Weigel

I am still processing everything that has happened over the past year and then some, in part due to COVID and in part due to life. These haven’t been the most difficult times I have endured, nor have they been silver linings amidst challenges, but they kind of came at me out of left field and I stood there reeling for quite some time.

Early in 2019, I found myself without my voice: I had nothing to say, no art to share. When I first started making art again, I began by taking photographs of the empty sky. Not the nuance of color as you near the horizon, but as close up as I could zoom in on the most flat blue tone I could find, resulting in a pixelated wash of color with no real content.

This sense of drift eventually subsided and I was able to make art again. Flash forward to now, I have returned to photo documenting my surroundings and have even taken up horror writing. I am drawing and painting again. I am no longer at a loss for words. But I still feel incomplete and uncertain.

It’s funny the things you notice when you are in the midst of change. The butterfly is a symbol of metamorphosis and of becoming, but it is fragile and fleeting. Beauty and life are much the same. As I was walking down the sidewalk, I noticed this diminutive shard of a swallowtail wing and was struck by its delicate beauty. I have always noticed things that lie unobserved, some of which can be difficult to gaze upon because they bespeak past violence or hardship that cannot be undone. But at the time, it stood out as a symbol of the past year, the anguish and the hope.

I stood and stared at the wing for some time before a gentle wind caught it and it blew away like an unspent wish. This is my reflection upon the course of the past year and a half. I don’t entirely know where it has gone. I have experienced a lot of changes, some good, some bad. The wind has carried away the time and my thoughts with it and I still sometimes find myself reeling, gazing up at the sky awash in blue and contemplating the fragility of a found butterfly wing.

Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media: assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, and institutional critique. Weigel’s art has been exhibited nationally in all 50 states and won numerous awards.