Category: Nonfiction (Page 12 of 13)

selective focus photo of white petaled flower — Photo by Ithalu Dominguez on Pexels.com

What I Can’t Forget

28 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Caryn Coyle

That morning, I don’t remember waking up, what I wore, or how I felt. I do remember Leigh picking me up in her Ford Bronco. Her son and daughter watched me from their booster seats in the back of her car. I remember green. Maybe a hedge, maybe grass next to a parking lot. The building looked liked a cement box. She left me there, saying she would return later. She couldn’t find a sitter.

Her kids are grown now. She has two grandchildren.

I waited in a room with blinds on the windows. I couldn’t see out. I was nervous. Sick to my stomach. I had been throwing up and my breasts felt huge; sore and painful to touch. I was directed into a small office with no windows and sat by a desk. A woman in a white nurse’s uniform and a navy blue cardigan sat behind the desk and asked me my name. I remember asking her if I had to give my real one.

I wanted to be anonymous. If there was no record of my being there, I could forget it. Hide from it. Never speak of it again.

My next memory is the one I cannot block. The one that haunts me forty years later.

I lay on my back. My heart pounding. My head aching. I thought I had no other option.

It sounded as though he was surprised to hear from me when I called him.

“What’re ya? Pregnant?”

The tone of his voice was sarcastic.

When I said, “Yes,” he was silent.

My head crackled. The quiet was disturbing.

“Well, you’re gonna’ get rid of it, aren’t you?”

We met at a bar. He stood near the door to the restroom, smoking. One of his eyes was a different color than the other. He smiled at me; small, yellowish teeth. He asked me my name and when I told him, he said that the woman he had just divorced had the same name.

He lived on the main floor of a large house that had been divided into apartments. His bedroom had been the original living room. It had big, bay windows. His kitchen, at the back of the house, was narrow and he made me breakfast, cutting a round hole with a drinking glass he turned upside down into the soft center of a slice of bread. Cracking an egg, he emptied it into the hole in the bread and grilled it, telling me that was how his nanny had cooked him breakfast when he was little.

He drove a Volkswagen and took me sailing on a boat docked in Annapolis. We could walk to Orioles games at Memorial Stadium from his house. Together, we picked up pizza from a place with a sticky strip over the counter, heavy and black with flies. Eating that pizza in bed, we didn’t care about smearing the sheets with sauce.

Then, he just stopped calling.

I got pregnant after a Friday night happy hour. Walking into a new place — a sports bar — I spotted him. It was loud, crowded. Music thumped over all the voices and I felt my heart beat in my forehead when he smiled at me with those small, yellow teeth. A cigarette between his lips.

I said “yes,” too quickly when he asked me if I wanted to follow him home.

On the bed in the room with the bay windows, I wanted him to love me. But I wasn’t someone he wanted. I was the woman with his ex-wife’s name who would follow him home.

The doctor was short. He wore green scrubs. A frown.

My feet in stirrups, a sheet over my legs blocked my view. I didn’t feel anything. I remember a whirring, buzzing sound and I watched the ceiling; white pocked marked rectangles.

The recovery room had several cots and I listened to other women moaning. I thought they sounded pathetic. I wouldn’t join them. I had counted back to the night with him and thought the fetus was five weeks old. I have searched illustrations in medical books to see what a five week old fetus looks like. I have also tried to console myself by calling it a zygote. Not a real being, not yet.

I hope it couldn’t feel anything.

Throughout the decades, I have wondered what the child might have been like. I think of how old he or she would be. I tell myself I had no other option. He didn’t want us.

A nurse brought me my clothes, a prescription for tetracycline and a Kotex pad. On the curb outside the cement building, I waited for Leigh. The curb was warm. It was the kind of spring day that was meant to be enjoyed.

Leigh pulled up with the kids still in the back seat of her car.

When I opened the Bronco’s door, she asked me if I was all right.

I told her I was and turned to look at her children. They watched me with big, brown eyes. Neither of them spoke. I doubt they remember; they were too young.

Leigh stopped the car by the sidewalk to my apartment building and said, “Just forget about this whole day.”

“It never happened,” she added as I closed her car door.

Lying on my side, in bed, my legs folded up to my chin, I watched the light blue, streamlined telephone on my bedside table. I didn’t pick it up to call him and it did not ring.

Caryn Coyle edits creative nonfiction for the Baltimore based literary journal, LOCH RAVEN REVIEW and her work has appeared in more than three dozen literary publications. She lives in Massachusetts.

photography of twigs on the ground — Photo by Daniel Spase on Pexels.com

We Were Bugs

24 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Thomas E. Strunk

Growing up in a trailer park, one rarely feels significant. But we still had the bugs to look down on. I don’t know what went wrong with me, a boy from the forest bothered by bugs. Sure I was fascinated by the water-skaters that danced over the crick out back. I stood in awe at the ant hills we’d come upon in the woods, but had no desire to poke them. At best I ignored the daddy-long-legs that crawled over the hillside in summer. Yet at some point in my youth a fear crept in at things that crawled, perhaps it was a late-night movie, but more likely the katabasis I endured when I was twelve, my descent multiple times beneath our siding-enclosed trailer.

A real man of the woods my father, not frightened to inch his way along the length of the trailer and then creep to the other side where with flashlight and wrench he could turn off and on again the water. He wasn’t the kind of man to worm his way out of his responsibilities.

“We’ve got to crawl under there so I can show you how to deal with the water.” But I was not that man and begged off the mission.

“Can’t you just do it before work?”

Until my father made it clear, “And leave you with no water all day? There is no choice.” For the workers were coming to the trailer park when he was at work, and I was at summer bored and idle and able to go inching my way under the trailer.

And so I followed him on my belly the long way – the door through the siding at the back left of the trailer, our journey’s destination, the water pipes at the front right, so I could learn, like him, how to turn the water off and then on.

The next day, alone and reluctant, I entered through the siding door and left the daylight behind me. I held the flash light before me but did not look at what it illuminated for fear what I might see; rather I wriggled in the light’s general direction. I crawled with all that was under there in the darkness, sweeping cobwebs as I went. I made it to the water pipes and plied the wrench hurriedly, hoping I had twisted it enough to choke off the water. And then the return, always harder than the descent. I turned myself around on the dirt and made my way towards the light peeking through the siding door, far in the distance at first. Yet I hastened and did not turn to see what I left or what followed behind me. I came at last to the exit and crossed the threshold.

When I emerged from beneath the trailer into the light, I did not come forth braver or with new knowledge that I gained along the way, but joyful to see the blue sky and its birds free to fly above the ground. I feverishly shook off the dirt and whatever bugs had found me, never wanting to know their wisdom.

Thomas E. Strunk explores nature and working class life and strives to express the longing for spiritual, emotional, and political liberation. His literary work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pinyon, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Northern Appalachia Review and East Fork Journal. Thomas blogs at LiberationNow.org and lives in Cincinnati.

The Basil

20 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Emily Rankin

He bought it during quarantine, on one of our rare outings. He’d decided spur of the moment to make a new recipe, and we found ourselves wandering the grocery aisles at 8pm. He needed fresh basil, and I suggested we buy a small plant in place of a plastic carton of browning stems.

I padded into the kitchen the next morning and found it, wilted and half dead, on its side on the countertop. He’d used a handful of leaves and left it to rot. I considered abandoning it there, letting it go to show him what he’d done. But it looked so small and hurt and tired. I stood it up, pruned the decay from it, and set it in water on the sunny windowsill. I tended to it, and it was happy. It grew to be nearly two feet tall, and I bought a real pot for it, and soil. He never looked at it, never watered it. I wondered if he felt guilty. I hoped he did.

It came to me in dreams. I’d see myself, in the kitchen in the night, finding it dead. Pulling it from its pot and seeing strange roots all through the soil. Then looking more closely and discovering that it was in fact very much alive, new shoots everywhere, overtaking everything.

When I finally got out of that house and into my own apartment I took it with me, hung a shelf for it high enough that the cats wouldn’t disturb it. Watered it, added new soil.

That summer I was gone most days, no air conditioning in the place. The basil started to wilt and shrivel and no matter what I did it wouldn’t stop, until all that remained were two gnarled sticks with a few inches of new growth at the ends. I thought it was as good as dead, and it made me more sad than I’d like to admit. I gave it water and set it on the porch, in the noontime sliver of sunlight, to live out its final days with the wind against its face.

But it didn’t die. It hung on, struggling and stagnant at first, then finally growing again, slowly, in ever more bizarre twists. New shoots completely sideways, leaves sprouting at odd junctures, those two remaining branches twined like ivy. I was afraid to pull any leaves from it, afraid I might disturb its new health. After a month, I finally began to trust it wouldn’t die. At least, not imminently. I gave it new soil, more water. Set it outside in good weather. What remained of it came back to life.

A year later, it sits, sometimes, on the shelf I hung for it, winding spring-green tendrils around itself. Drooping with the weight of its own strange design, and growing ever more wild.

Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended Abilene Christian University, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work deals with the tangled threads of human connection and liminal space. She is currently based in New Mexico.

old photos in the wooden box — Photo by Kaboompics .com on Pexels.com

Widowed Memories

17 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Paul Rousseau

I rent a forty-four-year-old brick house. It is a modest single-level structure with a small garage. A young couple purchased the home from an older couple and provided minor updating. I moved in once the renovations were complete.

I have been in the home for four years. I intended to stay one year, two at most. Lassitude and complacency altered my plans; that, and the death of two dogs and the sickness of another, my own health woes, and the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.

A few months ago an older man named Thomas rang the doorbell and inquired about the previous owners. I informed him the older couple had moved but did not leave a forwarding address. He told me the wife of the older couple had died—he noticed the obituary in the newspaper—and he assumed the husband still lived in the house. He removed his glasses and patted beads of sweat with a bandana.

“Nothing stays the same, does it?” I nodded. “We lose a lot as we get older, don’t we?” I nodded, again.

Then, unexpectedly, he heaved a deep, sobbing breath, and blurted, “I lost my wife a few years ago myself.” I gently touched his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he muttered, “she was filled with cancer. But she gave it a good fight. We were together forty-nine years.”

He pulled a yellowed, dog-eared photograph from his wallet; it was a panorama of them at the Grand Canyon. “She loved the Grand Canyon. I drove two days to the South rim to release her ashes. It’s what she wanted.”

“You’re a good man, Thomas,” I replied. He pivoted toward the living room. “We spent many an evening in that room. Drank beer, played cards, watched Ed Sullivan. Good times, good memories.” He paused and scratched day-old stubble.

“But somehow our families drifted apart. I don’t know, I guess it was because the kids grew up, our jobs wore us down, and we got sick: high blood pressure, diabetes, and emphysema for me, two heart attacks and a mild stroke for him. And as I said, my wife…” He stood silent, as if in pilgrimage, then asked if he could walk through the house one final time. I jiggled my head and motioned for him to follow.

We visited each room. He stroked the walls, turned the doorknobs, flicked the light switches, opened the blinds. Afterward, he wiped his eyes and begged an apology for the intrusion. I told him no need for an apology, I appreciated the company. He took a final glance at the house, bid goodbye, and shuffled to his car. He plopped into the driver’s seat, lowered the passenger window, and shouted,

“Some memories are best forgotten.”

My shoulders slumped; the reminiscing had seemingly kindled the cinders of old grief. I began to walk toward the car to offer comfort when he turned the ignition and disappeared down the road.

That evening, while lying in bed, I thought about the older couple. They had resided in this house for forty years. It was their refuge, a shelter from an often unfriendly world; how difficult it must have been to surrender four decades of security and stability. Yet, they had their memories; abundant memories.

However, as I reflected on Thomas’s heartrending lament, “Some memories are best forgotten,” I was reminded of the book Prince of Thorns, in which the author, Mark Lawrence, writes, “Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you.” He seems to imply that all memories are dangerous and painful, an implication that is contrary to my personal experience.

And as a person who has also lost a spouse, I speak with widowed authority in agreeing with Thomas’s assertion that some memories—but not all—are best forgotten, for there are memories that provide us solace, and there are memories that remind us of what was, and what will never be again.

Paul Rousseau (he/his/him) is a semi-retired physician, writer, lover of dogs, and occasional photographer published in sundry literary and medical journals. Co-winner of flash fiction competition, Serious Flash Fiction 2022. Nominated for The Best Small Fictions anthology from Sonder Press, 2020. Twitter: @ScribbledCoffee

close up water drop photography — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The History of Everything

14 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Alexandra McIntosh

My mom took Lamaze classes before she had my brother. The instructor—in neon pink 80s workout gear—told the expectant mothers to focus on something and breathe through contractions. My mom chose my dad’s gold chain. She practiced watching it in class, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, leaning against him while the instructor counted. The chain flashed in the fluorescent light of the delivery room while she brought my brother into the world. I love the pictures of them in the moments just after— feathery Farrah Faucet hair slick against her temples, her tired smile, my dad’s eyes beaming above the gold and the tiny body of my brother.

These days my mom and I do yoga together. She likes it because of the breathing, like Lamaze; she reminds me often that you can breathe through anything. In downward dog I look under my armpit to watch her body next to mine, and imagine my small life folded into hers in the months before my birth.

My friend Brad wants to visit the hospital room where he was born. I’ve never thought of this, though I live close to my own birth-hospital. When my mom’s colon ruptured spontaneously my senior year, I did loads of homework there in the plastic chair next to her bed; and before my grandpa’s death, I spent five days and nights by the big window in his room, looking out on a gravel-covered rooftop, the wooded hillsides, the church steeple on a distant ridge. Brad thinks the room number should be on the wristband his mom keeps in his baby book, along with a plastic bag and the stump of belly button that fell off a week after she brought him home. I tell him he should paint the room—he’s a painter. A self-portrait I call it. He likes this idea.

He tells me about his grandparents from Kentucky, the house they lived in by the railroad track, his grandma who held him when he was born and died a week later from cancer. He shows me a picture of her and her sisters in the 1930s in front of a mural of a swimming lady, the sisters playfully pointing at the lady’s nipples, their faces bright with laughter. He’s been busy lately, teaching classes and restoring old houses, but yesterday he painted a picture of his sister’s puppy: a Christmas present commissioned by his mom. He scrapes colors off his fingers and says it felt good; it had been days since he’d opened his box of paints, and even the smell was nice.

When I can’t write I take Grizzly for walks, let him sniff the patches of grass browned by frost, high-step through the pile of oak leaves in the church yard. I imagine the symphonic alertness of his smelling, and wonder if he pictures deer and squirrels, the neighbor’s corgi. Three birds alight from the boughs of a dead honeysuckle bush and I think of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem written decades after the Industrial Revolution—a time that Brad reminds me brought forth a renaissance of arts and crafts. In those years of soot Hopkins wrote, “but for all this, nature is never spent./ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

I’ve repeated this to myself so many times it evokes a collage of memories: the classroom where I first heard it, the university cross country trails I walked as I tried to memorize the poem. Later, the patches of chicory and black-eyed Susans tangled along the road by my first apartment. A hillside in Spain. The sun above the swimming pool in my hometown. The condensation on a bottle of water my grandpa handed me after I cut his grass. Sweat under my tee shirt sleeves, summer skin peeling. The backyard singing its bright insect song.

How humbling to know that each one of us came from the body of another. I think of this great symphony of connection, of birth and death and birth, of pain and joy, this great and marvelous history of everything, this dearest freshness. And I think of our small roles in it, of my mom preparing to welcome it in those 80s birthing classes, of her practicing her breathing, of my dad practicing with her, his smile above a gold necklace, of all the hair my brother was born with, thick dark hair, and the baby his wife will have in August.

Alexandra McIntosh lives and writes in Kentucky, her favorite place in the world. Her debut book of poetry, Bowlfuls of Blue, is available from Assure Press. You can find links to her publications and pictures of her dog on her website AlexandraMcIntosh.com.

stacked of stones outdoors — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

A Transformer Kind of Moment

8 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Clint Martin

1986

I’m a nine year old Clint. I’m on fold-down seat’s edge. Not just because scooching back risks being gobbled up by sticky, red theater chair. But also because Transformers: The Movie glows upon the silver screen. And that despicable Decepticon Galvatron has seized the matrix. He’s used it to summon the planet-devouring Unicron. This is indeed the Autobots’s darkest hour. With dozing dad at my side, I am understandably tense.

All Autobot hope now rests on the red metal shoulders of Hot Rod. And Galvatron knows it. As Hot Rod charges, Galvatron blasts. Both bots go down. I pop up. Sticky chair snaps shut. My adrenaline-crazed heart rhythmically pleads for the good guy to rally as unadorned musical notes harken from an 80s synthesizer. Hot Rod spies the battle-flung matrix. The music, the tension pulls me up onto toes. Rocker Stan Bush croons, “You’ve got the touch.” My heart spills into a sprint. Hot Rod reaches the matrix. Lifts it. “You’ve got the power.” Hero’s hands fit the matrix’s handles perfectly. He pulls. Blue lightning streaks from the opening orb. Power chords pulse, and in that cinematic instant, Hot Rod grows. Grows. Does more than transforms. He evolves. I bounce and beam in the theatre, overjoyed for the silver screen’s new hero: Rodimus Prime.

2016

I’m a beaten Clint. I’m horizontal. Crammed into couch’s crevice. It’s the middle of the day. I should be at work. But I don’t have the energy. Or the desire. Depression blasts me. Has been for years now. So much so that yesterday my wife signaled surrender: she’s filed for divorce. I have until the end of the month. So I’ve transformed myself by getting stoned. Again. Avoiding reality. Again. Stoned and horizontal and ignoring my troubles by scrolling back to the beginning of Facebook. The phone screen waterfalls before me. Like the last reel of a slot machine. As it slows, before my thumb can flick it back into full-on reeling, an unfamiliar face catches my eye. I stop my roll. The woman in the post is sitting. Cross-legged. Her eyes are closed, but it’s her forehead I’m drawn to. Her forehead. It’s soft, unwrinkled, unstained by the strain of brain. It is the opposite of the pounding slab of creases above my brow. It’s not a post I’m looking at. It’s an ad. I tap the screen.

“You’ve got the touch.”

Wi-Fi whisks me to a site on transcendental meditation. I spend a few seconds reading about the power of silence. Oblivious that the final reel has landed on Jackpot. I sign up for an intro class. It’s tomorrow night. There’s no Stan Bush soundtracking this scene, yet years later I’ll see this clearly as the transformer type of moment that it was. I will see that this was the first step in saving my marriage. This was the moment I saved my own Autobot family. This was the moment that began the from-the-ashes evolution of Clintonimus Prime.

Clint Martin lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife, two sons, and their yellow dog Waggie. When not writing, Clint enjoys transcendental meditation and identifying the birds visiting the backyard.

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/.