Category: Nonfiction (Page 2 of 11)

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Way Back When

1 August 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Meredith Escudier

My little sister is seven, bundled up in a brown, corduroy car coat. I am nine, sporting a pair of orange polka-dotted pedal pushers and feeling fairly fleet-footed in my canvas Keds. Together we are walking home at dusk from our neighbor’s house where we have enjoyed yet another game of Chinese checkers.

“Can we play orphans?” she asks. Orphans. It’s a familiar game of ours, influenced by the thrill of childhood literature – The Boxcar Children or Oliver Twist or any number of hair-raising fairy tales that filled our impressionable psyches. According to the game’s unspoken rules, we must identify a house friendly enough to ask its current residents to take us in – two bedraggled sisters who have only recently escaped from the workhouse.

Perhaps in our mind’s eye, we are barefoot, ragged, dirty, but also surely sweet-faced, hopeful, and plucky. After some faux-hesitation, we will, of course, choose our own house – what else? – but the exercise allows us to flirt momentarily with independence and adventure, only to be flooded by a warm, familiar security afterwards. Our chosen scenario, as usual, unfolds with a practiced, codified dialog:

“How about this one?” she suggests, as we walk past a large corner house.

“No, too dark,” I respond on cue, shaking my head vigorously as we march along.

“Then this one?” She points to a house whose front lawn has recently been edged. A forgotten rubber ball is wedged between a planter box and a picket fence. I appear to inspect her choice before disqualifying it with a “Naah,” aligning myself perfectly with the unwritten script. “Not cozy enough,” I announce.

“Then how about this cute little house? It looks sort of friendly,” she says, tacking on a hopeful argument for good measure. Hmm, I take a look. She could be right. Among the cookie-cutter post-war housing that went up fast in the Fifties and that provided the parents of baby boomers a decent, if not charming, place to live, this house – with its ruby red front porch and generic cement driveway – just seemed to stand out. Well, at least to us.

We stop and peer in, evaluating the odds, wondering if this family might adopt our lonesome selves. Will they show mercy? Human kindness? Would they like the addition of two beseeching little girls around the dinner table tonight? I notice the glow from the light in the kitchen and guess at our older sister studiously setting the table, carefully placing our father’s milk glass at the helm. “Yes,” I agree companionably as we turn into our own comfortable driveway and trot up the front steps. Out back, between the clothesline and the dangling tether ball, is a likeness of our handprints, marking the day when three sisters leaned down and opened their hands, stretching and splaying their fingers wide as they pressed their palms into fresh cement.

Meredith Escudier has lived in France for over 35 years, teaching, translating, raising a family and writing. She is the author of three books, most recently, a food memoir, The Taste of Forever, an affectionate examination of home cooks that features an American mother and a French husband.

Keeping Diana Alive

1 July 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Jennifer Pinto

The plant I carried was so bulky and cumbersome that when I hugged it against my chest and carried it to my car, I could barely see where I was going. I had to peek through the small spaces between glossy, dark green, oval shaped leaves that seemed to emerge directly from the soil. The brown stucco pot was heavy and I struggled not to drop it while slipping and sliding across the icy funeral home parking lot. I was desperate for a reminder of my dad, something that might bring me peace after his sisyphean battle with liver cancer and my increasingly contentious relationship with my step mother.

At my dad’s funeral, this solitary plant was displayed atop a pedestal next to his casket. A peace lily in all her glory, standing sentry. There were also a few flower arrangements, but most people, at the request of my step mother, slipped cash in the donation box next to the entrance to help pay for the funeral costs instead. At the end of the service when everyone was lining up to head over to the cemetery, I snuck back into the funeral home and stole that plant. I knew it was the only possession I would ever have of my dad’s and, in my twisted logic, that plant belonged to him.

Back home, I looked for the perfect spot for the plant. I googled Peace Lilies and found that they adore bright sunlight. In fact the article said, “the more light your plant gets, the happier it will be, the faster it will grow and the more it will bloom.” It was obvious that sunlight was the key to keeping this plant alive. In the years leading up to my dad’s death, between calls with the oncologist and trips to the Cleveland Clinic, I hadn’t felt like enjoying the sun. My blinds remained shut most days. But for the sake of the plant, I let the light in. I placed the pot directly in front of the patio door and named her Diana.

If my dad were a plant he would have been a succulent, the kind you could leave in the corner windowsill for weeks at a time without a thought or a drop of water. He wouldn’t have minded. That’s how he was, easy to please and uncomplicated. Despite being neglected, he would continue to grow, his roots digging deep for water and his stem quietly reaching for the sun. He was kind to a fault and expected as little from others as possible, a people pleaser who stayed out of the limelight. I was the one who insisted that dad get the liver transplant, encouraged him to get radiation and then chemotherapy. I fought with my step mother over hospice placement, stubbornly refusing to give up.

It only took me a few days to realize Diana was dramatic if nothing else. She demanded water by collapsing in on herself. Her broad emerald leaves wilting down and falling over like a diva fake- fainting on a velvet settee. After her thirst had been slaked she popped back up, white spaths held high as if nothing had happened at all. Only to repeat her theatrical performance a few days later. Unlike my dad, she wasn’t afraid to demand what she needed. She wasn’t polite or demure; she had no qualms about turning her leaves brown to show her disapproval.

Following my dad’s death, I was paralyzed by grief. But as the weeks went by, I found myself distracted by Diana. I watched her carefully, moved her from window to window to get the correct amount of sunlight, stuck my finger deep into her soil to make sure it was moist and wiped the dust off her leaves with a damp cloth. I talked to her and laughed at her melodramatic ways. She may not have brought me peace in the way I had imagined but at least I know what it takes to keep her alive.

Jennifer Pinto writes creative nonfiction. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband and a Goldendoodle pup named Josie. She enjoys making pottery, cooking Indian food and drinking coffee at all hours of the day. Her work has been published in Sundog Lit, Halfway Down the Stairs and The Bookends Review.

Maternal Fabric

1 July 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

The Christmas before she died, my mother gave seven-year-old Gwyn a mint-green Hello Kitty sewing machine. Believe it or not it’s a decent machine, she said, despite its small size and ridiculous color. The two of them spent the week making Gwyn’s first patchwork pillow, my mother’s gray chemo curls mingling with Gwyn’s untamed ginger. Gwyn took to sewing as I never had. Afterward I told myself if my mother were to die tomorrow, at least this happened, at least grandmother and grandchild shared days of fingering fabric and winding thread and loving what they both love.

She died that May. And one month later we needed fabric for Gwyn to sew pillow cases as a wedding present for her birth mom. Time was short so I took her to a tiny store just a mile north, a store we’d never been in because the faded mural of a quilt chipping off the exterior made me assume it would be filled with quilt kits and the cheap fabric my mother scorned. As soon as we walked in I knew otherwise. The shelves were saturated with color: bolts in batik, Japanese indigo, elegant floral cotton. It was my mother’s dream store. While Gwyn pranced between shelves I stood in the doorway, aching for my mother. Gwyn discovered the enormous bank of thread and pulled me over: “Look, Mama!” A tidy, exuberant rainbow, and she adored every spool. Gwyn’s delight soothed my sorrow. At least she’ll carry forward my mother’s sewing legacy.

Then, from the thousands of lovely artisan cloths, Gwyn chose a cutsie retro kitten print. In red, teal, and baby blue. My mother in me reared up—no, no, no! Wide-eyed cats pawing balls of yarn were the epitome of kitsch—beneath us, somehow. With every other fabric in this store Gwyn could make something beautiful. Except that Gwyn and her birth mom love cats. Gwyn was the seamstress. She knew what she wanted.

The fabric was perfect.

And just as suddenly I was grateful my mom was gone. She would have held sway in the name of good taste and reputation. For decades I’ve heard her voice in my head, sometimes heeding it, sometimes rebelling, but now her voice is disembodied. She’s dead. She’ll never see the pillowcases, which are adorable and of which Gwyn is terrifically proud. Her birth mom rests her head nightly on Gwyn’s love. The woman at the counter thumped the fabric from the bolt and snipped with long, black-handled scissors, cutting for us both a measure of freedom.

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is a wisdom teacher and writing coach dedicated to facilitating creative emergence. As a writer she elicits the spirit’s movement within stories; as a teacher she supports transformation within writers and on the page. You can connect with Elizabeth at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com.

At Home

1 July 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Joseph O’Day

When her uncles and aunts tried to embrace my nine-month-old granddaughter at our Thanksgiving dinner, she cried and struggled for freedom. I rescued her into my arms, and they called me baby hog. “She’s not yet comfortable with you guys,” I said.

I didn’t think it would take long. I’d been babysitting since September and she had settled in with me, crawling through my house using her bum shuffle—her left leg tucked underneath as her arms and right leg slid her forward. She shuffled over, then sat back and raised her arms, and I lifted her up and we toured the kitchen, the bedrooms, the dining and living rooms, and the TV room, where we watched Daniel Tiger and Rafi and Cleo & Cuquin’s rendition of La Cucaracha. She became so comfortable with me and my house that she led me on tours, moving ahead of me and turning around periodically to make sure I followed.

Our Christmas and New Year’s gatherings did the trick; familiarity bred comfort. She started initiating contact with extended family, snuggling with Aunt Patricia, Uncle Joe, and Aunt Kat as they read her books, leaping into Uncle Josh’s arms as he soared her through the hallways.

At her house months later we celebrated her first birthday. We watched as she ate yogurt-frosted cupcakes, watched it smear on her face and arms, the chair, and anyone who got near. When the party wore down, her mom gave her free reign, placing her on the hardwood floor while we washed tables, threw paper dishes and cups into the trash, and collected scattered bows and gift wrappings.

My granddaughter shuffled around the place so rapidly that it took my breath away: from living room to kitchen, from her aunts’ legs to her uncles’ arms, from her baby walker to the open dishwasher. We had to take care where we stepped. She suddenly appeared at our feet, then vanished, moving with the buoyancy of someone savoring the secure, loving, surroundings of home.

Joseph O’Day’s writing has appeared in Oyster River Pages, Spry Literary Journal, The Critical Flame: A Journal of Literature and Culture, bioStories, Patchwork Lit Mag, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag. Joseph received his MA in English (Creative Writing) from Salem State University.

Washington Heights

1 June 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

Two weeks ago, Aaron moved out of our house and into his first apartment. It is 20 minutes away in Washington Heights. He is 25 years old, and this is a milestone I should be proud of.

When he was born, I gazed at his pale skin and dark hair. I felt like I had been given a prize, or I had won the Olympics, or I was as strong as a woman from the Amazon.

I also couldn’t stop crying. My sister, Debi, didn’t understand. “You are a mother,” she cooed. But I cried because I loved Aaron so much. The loving was an ache. I could not live if anything happened to him. When someone else carried him, I leaned closer, hovering.

When Aaron was two-and-a-half and a big brother to five-month-old Oliver, his father and I separated and eventually divorced. Val would take both children for the weekend, and I spent hours panicking that they weren’t within reach. I was wretched; I couldn’t stand to be alone in my apartment without them.

Every mother thinks her child is beautiful, but Aaron really was. At four, his eyelashes were full, with eyebrows that defined his round face, lips that were heart-shaped and impossibly red. Whenever he laughed, you could see a space between his two front teeth.

When he was six, his father moved back in with us. We were living in a rental building in Queens. Aaron wore red Pumas and jumped in the air to show Val how high his new sneakers made him go. When he was eleven, he and Oliver watched as a judge married us for the second time in our living room, and then we all went out for breakfast. Our boys were the only witnesses.

At 16, tall, thin, with thick wavy hair, he said he wanted to go away to college. I prepared myself, thinking I would come undone when he left, but he was so happy when we dropped him off in Albany that I was okay.

Shortly before he graduated, we moved again, to a house in New Rochelle, and we got a dog. “Why are you getting a dog?” he said. “I’ll be gone soon.” I had to explain that the dog was not for him.

Then the pandemic happened. Aaron moved back home. His graduation was on Zoom. He wore a borrowed cap and a gown that was too short. I baked a pound cake, and we toasted him in our backyard.

The only job he could get was at a supermarket, behind the deli counter. He was cold, his feet hurt, and he was berated daily. After that he had three more jobs that were backbreaking or demeaning. Finally he found a job he liked and a girlfriend he loved. He saved the money I told him he needed to go out on his own. It took four years longer than he had planned. I was grateful for this bonus time, to have him under my roof a little longer.

I’m glad he has moved out – it is as it should be. But I will miss having coffee with him in the mornings and lunch together a few hours later. I will miss hearing his voice as he talked on his phone in his room. I will miss the times he asked me to shave the back of his neck. Or the walks we took together on the wooded trail near our house as the dog ran between us.

Since he left, I have found reasons to go into his old bedroom. I changed the sheets, mopped the floor, discovered his lost slippers in the back of his closet, and dusted his model cars.

The day he moved out he came back to New Rochelle to drop off the rental truck, and then we decided to have dinner together. The next night he came over for Hannukah and presented me with a card and a gift. Two days later I went to his apartment because he forgot to pack his medication. The next day we dropped off a piece of furniture and then had pizza in his neighborhood. Later that week he came home to see Oliver, who had returned from his semester in Italy. That night he slept in our house, and the two boys were together the following day, laughing the way they did when they were little and so happy to see each other. A few days after that we all went to eat Persian food at Ravagh in the city for Val’s birthday. The next day we met in Queens for another birthday party at my sister’s apartment. I know there will be countless more soccer games to watch on TV with Val and Oliver. And dinners of zucchini souffle, majedra, and macaroni au gratin.

“Aaron,” I said, “I see you more than ever!”

“I miss you,” he said.

I didn’t lose him. He just doesn’t live with me anymore.

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, and others. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Hell’s Kitchen, a companion piece to this essay published in The Bluebird Word in March.

The Horses

1 June 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

I miss the horses. Those wild Mustangs that filled the fields near the old, abandoned house. I imagined the house, as all that was left by the time I visited was a stone chimney. In spring the large pasture bloomed yellow with stink weed. I loved those tall, ruffled leaves and yellow flower heads. The plant is actually named Tansy Ragwort—an invasive, noxious weed, but who couldn’t love them with a nickname like Stinking Willie? I savored Willie’s weedy, earthy smell like a sweaty man who worked the land. I never saw those Mustangs eat the plant. Instead, they ate the hay thrown off an old truck and onto the ground by a rancher.

I visited in the mornings before work. I’d bring a lidded cup of coffee that was always too cool for my liking, but I willingly gave up the heat for moments. Snatches of wild. Dust. The soft, high-pitched neigh, or whinny sounds the horses made while feeding. I drove to the old road in my Nissan truck. Pulled into a pocket of packed earth and parked. Opened the truck bed and sat on the tail gate. Sipped cold coffee. Soaked in the soothing smells of hay and horses and dirt.

I was an idiot. Knew nothing about horses, but there was an attraction, and I wanted to be near them. I knew enough not to touch them. They were wild, after all. Still, sometimes I walked into their pasture. Got too close so I could take photos. I look at one now. See numerous paint patterns in colors like copper, red, black, and white. Long tails touching hooves. Noses buried in hay. Their black shadows on the golden morning landscape.

Later, when my husband and I moved onto thirty acres in north-eastern California, we had six horses. Lloyd is my second husband. He had owned horses for years before we married. Knew how to handle them. How to ride. We adopted a wild Mustang with colors of black, white, and reddish brown. She was stunning, but never ridden, though Lloyd managed to halter her for brushing and hoof trims. There were evening runs. The horses seemed to instigate this play—walking towards the dogs who waited by the fence. When the horses and dogs were almost side by side, they ran. Horses on one side of the fence, dogs on the other; joy emerged through sounds of hooves hitting the ground, horses neighing, dogs barking.

After twelve years, we sold the place in Modoc County to return to family in the Sierra foothills. We were down to two horses when we moved. We sold our rideable, paint quarter horse. Oreo, the Mustang, was given to a trainer who specialized in wild horses. We no longer have horses, so I yearn to hear them running— their drumbeat, the song of wild.

I live about an hour from where the stone chimney stood and the Mustangs ran. Both are gone, the land covered over by apartment buildings and new homes. Across the street is a medical complex, a few restaurants, more new apartments. So much lost in all this new. I’ve come to an age where I’m often distraught by changes I don’t want to see. Wistful of an imagined simpler life. I tell myself to be more present, but I resist. My future is shorter than the past, and I miss the horses.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer living in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, KYSO Flash, RavensPerch, Wordrunner eChapbooks, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her memoir, Snow After Fire, was released in 2023 by Legacy Book Press. Learn about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.

The Laundry Laughers

1 June 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sandra Marilyn

In the days before a washing machine came to live in my kitchen and car keys came to live in my pocket to further my isolation from the bus people and the laundromat people, I had enjoyed watching those folks. I imagined I could live inside their lives for just a moment, could learn their secrets. My family was fond of saying, “grow where you’re planted”. Since I did not stay where I was planted, I modified it to say, “learn where you land.”

On one of those laundromat days I sat on a hard chair feeling its plastic slat cut into my bottom and watching my clothes tumble in an endless circle. I was feeling a bit lonely and bored when the sounds of the people around me rose up to obscure my self-absorption. The couple in the corner were having a dust-up that sometimes threatened to become too loud for a public place but then was pulled back to an almost whisper. The old man by the front door was chatting with himself in an amiable way and chortling at his own jokes.

At the folding table next to me was a small extended family of women and girls just pulling their clothes out of the dryer and tossing them into a basket. The four young girls seemed to be in a range between eight and fourteen years. My scant Spanish caught just a bit of their jovial conversation about boys and school. Then one of the girls pulled a red sweater out of the pile and held it up for inspection. The girls were average sizes but the sweater had become so small it might have fit a tiny dog. The entire family froze for a moment, stunned by the mistake and maybe considered placing blame. They all stared intently at the tiny sweater and then wide-eyed at one another. Someone had put a wool sweater in the wash when it should have gone to the dry cleaner.

My thoughts were about how much the garment might have cost, how pretty it must have been. Had it been a gift? Which one of them counted it as a part of the wardrobe that defined her style? I would have been extremely angry at the wasteful mistake, and I definitely would have expressed that anger noisily. I would have felt defiled by the intrusion of the clumsy mistake into the collection of things I cherished, things that defined my place in the world. I thought of my own sweaters folded perfectly and waiting for their turn to impress my companions. Just waiting to announce their cashmere luxury to a world that judged my success by my assemblage of stuff. My old left-wing sensibilities rose up to argue that the world needed my intellect, my creativity, my passion, and not my cashmere. And I believed that, but it was a heavy truth laden with responsibility and it struggled to rise above the material preoccupations that lived in the swampy bottom of my soul. The swamp was thick with southern expectations I would never meet. The useless notions about what would be appropriate displays of success grew moldy there on the bottom but steadfastly refused to rot and decompose.

The moment the family had stood gaping at the tiny sweater passed and the girls began a titter that rose steadily into a boisterous mirth. The pure notes of their young voices began to fill the room with their delight. Each girl took a part of the tiny sweater and began to pull, as if they could pull it back into its original size. They pulled and laughed and laughed and pulled and spun around in a circle of mad silliness, until they collapsed on the floor in a flurry of giggles. Their joy rose to the ceiling of the room and fell back down tickling even the grumpiest of the beleaguered laundry doers. Their hilarity swirled and danced around our heads, as captivating as a quartet of piccolos. And it carried them right over the abyss where materialism would like to have captured their sparkly freedom.

Finally, a mock stern glance from their mother, who had only just managed to contain her own giggles, called them back to the pile of unfolded laundry. Mother, grandmother, and the four girls returned to the seriousness of folding clothes but occasional bursts of laughter bubbled up and were sucked back in.

Oh, how I wanted to live for a bit longer in the life of that family of laundry laughers, how I envied them their joyful freedom. I often remember them when I am tempted to believe that objects will save me, that they will present me as I want to be seen, that they matter much at all.

Sandra Marilyn lives in San Francisco with her wife and a tiny dog. She believes it is her responsibility to continually reeducate herself, so she spends her days trying to pry open the doors and windows and searching for the words to describe the light that comes through the openings.

Atlanta International, Concourse D

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

Airports are teeming with constant activity: people rushing, people eating, people waiting. It’s not until I’m in one again that I realize just how much humanity is out there. How busy so many lives are. How different but alike we are, carrying our bags and checking our devices, averting our eyes or carrying on conversations with those travelling with us; but more often silent, especially amongst strangers.

I struck up conversation with two ladies as we stood waiting on the walkway to board our flight. Looked them in the eyes: saw them spark and open, perhaps smiling beneath their masks. They were headed to South Carolina, and I told them I knew of its beauty and that my children were born there. They remarked “Small world!” I agreed, and soon we departed.

Waiting on my connection, I look around the gate and see people bent to their devices, eyes shadowed, faces closed. All ages and colors: dressed down and up, masked and unmasked. Out the large five-tiered windows the figures of jetliners loom, the tarmac abuzz with action as the planes taxi in and out, landing to refuel and prepare for another take-off. Busses, trucks and tugs pulling luggage loads pass, air-traffic controllers in orange vests wave wands. Down the runway the jetliners roll, pushing faster until their noses rise into a sky settled low with gray-blue clouds. A storm is brewing to the west; rain threatens to slow the surge of activity before long.

As I write, the people around me shift and change, the air inside the gate cool but comfortable, the chatter a murmur underneath the din of a drink machine and canned music from a club bar. I’m thirsty but don’t want to overpay for coffee or need to use the restroom on my flight, so I go without.

I notice that I’m the only one here with a notebook and pen, the only one stopping to look around, to notice this atmosphere, record this experience. For most, this moment is lost in the shuffle, only an access point to a destination: unmemorable.

I sit and watch what once was unimaginable; that humans would create a machine that could fly. Something that is now such an everyday occurrence that it is no longer of note. In the time I’ve been sitting here, how many airplanes have rolled by and taken off? 10, 20, 30? Perhaps more. It’s astounding, and humbling. I knew I was small, insignificant. Seeing just how vast humanity is and how much we’ve created is amazing and frightening.

Like everything, there is a poem in this. On that vast sky and the human-made machines that fly within it, on the people that surround me but remain apart, on how my heart and mind and hand (from writing so furiously with this pen) are aching to make sense of it all, on how I feel so much a part of this crush of humanness but at the same time: solitary, apart, alone.

A woman on an island, with her backpack, notebook and pen in the center of this aerial universe on Concourse D in Atlanta International, waiting for the jetliner that will fly her home.

Stacie Eirich is a mother, poet & singer in Louisiana. Her work is forthcoming in Synkroniciti Magazine. Her poem “Blossoms,” published in Susurrus Magazine in 2023, was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. In 2023, she lived in Memphis while caring for her child through cancer treatments at St. Jude. Read more at www.stacieeirich.com

City Sounds

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ginny Bartolone

March. Manhattan tumbles into silence. I hover by the window, inhale a wave of city air, and listen to the door of the 1 train close. Descending major third. Helicopters, sirens, stand clear of the closing doors, DING-dong, and then nothing.

I loop the Natural History Museum. Frigid humidity slips through my coat. It’s colder than it should be. St. Patrick’s Day decorations slip off their windows as condensation separates the tape from the glass. I cross Columbus without looking both ways. No one’s coming.

White poster board taped to a window on the corner reads “Stay the f* home.” A singer warms up his voice. For what? Juilliard-perfected arpeggios now reserved for his neighbors.

I seek hints of progress—stores reopening, bodegas with toilet paper, someone sitting in the park. I spot a family of raccoons. One hangs on a branch with its paws flopping over the icy bark.

The pub on the corner—the one where John the bartender welcomed us the night we moved to the neighborhood—sits dark. A sign on the door reads, “We are sad to announce the passing of…” A picture of a line cook in his apron.

I head home. Cuomo talks at 11:30.

Ben barges in with a sighting. There was a man sitting at the bar of the pub. Inside. Drinking a beer. But the restaurants aren’t open. It’s only May. He was alone, Ben explained. No bartender. Just a man sitting alone drinking a beer.

“I yelled through the open window,” he goes on, “I asked ‘Are you reopening?’ And he answered, ‘I hope so!’” The man raised his glass in celebration.

“He must be the owner,” I add.

“I thought John was the owner, but maybe not? They’re still closed. So how else would he be inside?”

I sit on the roof for most of May. Nails, puddles, pigeons. Almost warm enough for the cockroaches. At 7 p.m., we cheer and bang on pots and pans. Cheering, helicopters, sirens, stand clear of the closing doors, silence.

The pub reopens in September, and we hurry through the hot autumn air toward to outdoor seating area still under construction. John appears.

“You’re here!”

“We are. Somehow,” he answers. I can’t think of what else to say.

“May we never go through something like this again,” comes out of my mouth. John pats me on the back while looking across the street toward nothing in particular.

Ben asks about the man sitting at the bar in May.

“Oh, I’m the owner,” John confirms, “That’s Mark. He’s usually here. When they locked down the city, he stopped leaving his apartment. Lost all muscle mass in his legs. Bunch of us started carrying him down the steps every few days for fresh air and a pint.”

They’re closing the restaurants again. One more night before the silence. Ben and I march up Amsterdam but an early blast of icy air has the city more on edge than usual.

A bundled man shuffles in jagged patterns behind us, and then next to us, and then in front of us. He turns his head—once, twice, again.

Ben whispers, “Let’s go into the pub, just to get off the street a minute.”

John stands behind the bar. Caution tape wraps up the stools.

“Still open for a drink?” We ask, “And food of course.” It’s illegal to get a drink without food.

“Or you know,” John says out of the side of his mouth, “You get a drink or two, you look at the menu, and oops, you can’t decide, and then you pay your bill and storm out without eating.” He shrugs with a laugh and a wink and we take a spot in the loft above the main floor.

It’s the first night of Hanukkah. The only other group sits in the far corner and sings songs and exchanges gifts. We order Manhattans.

“Cheers,” we toast with a clink.

We order another. We toast.

John carries a platter of shots around the room. We toast in the air and all drink.

We climb—stumble—down from the balcony, and line up at the cordoned-off caution-taped bar with shot glasses beside strangers. When was the last I talked to a stranger? Toast. Drink. My memory blurs.

“They just announced vaccines for under 40. Tomorrow,” I yell to Ben across the apartment. It’s March again.

We’ve been training for this. Open the NYC vaccine website. Hit refresh, hit back, hit refresh again. Don’t wait for the circle to stop spinning, just keep clicking. Grab any appointment that isn’t at the Aqueduct Racetrack. That’s too far. Two hours on a train full of a virus. We justify other neighborhoods an hour away. Are we taking slots from other people?

I holler, “I got one! Police station off the F at 7a.m.” Ben gets one for 2p.m. at the same police station.

My alarm chimes at 4:30. We’re told to get there an hour before our appointment. I leave at 5; the sun hasn’t risen. Clouds of roasting bread fill Broadway. My 1 train doors ding open—DING-dong. Descending major third. Sleeping essential workers rest with their heads against the metal poles. They lived a different pandemic. I change at Columbus Circle.

The sun rises as I crest the steps. The line around the station reaches an overgrown parking lot. It inches forward. A handwritten sign on the door comes into sight. “J&J.” I show my ID to a couple of cops at a folding table and wait. Sing a song in your head when you get a shot, that’s what I always learned. I sing “Start spreading the news,” and the shot is done.

The volume knob twists. Someone laughs. A car honks. The bass of a song thumps. As I leave the station, even the sun melting the soot-covered snowbanks makes a sound. I listen with my eyes closed and breathe in the city air.

Ginny Bartolone is a writer who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’s been writing about travel and the creative process on her blog since 2011. Her fiction and nonfiction are published in literary journals such as The Closed Eye Open and Flumes.

One Out of Ten

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stephanie Shafran

“No one has feet like mine,” my ninety-three-year-old mother announces to the hovering doctor.

“Well, let’s see what brought you here today,” the young doctor smiles as she pulls up a stool directly facing her new patient. After removing the sock as if it were a ticking time bomb fastened to my mother’s foot, she examines the flame-red toe yielding to her curious, slender fingers. It is the third toe on her left foot, rubbed raw by my mother’s second toe, which has long ago snaked over the big one—and twisted itself into an awkward, but permanent position. This deformity is a logical consequence of my mother’s lifetime habit of jamming her foot into ill-fitting shoes.

When I arrived at her apartment yesterday, I found my mother sitting on the bed, cradling her bare foot in her lap. Spotting me in the doorway, she stood up— a grimace spreading across her face as her left foot touched the floor.

“It’s my damn good-for-nothing toe again,” she’d scolded.

My heart slumped, remembering her excuse for refusing to undergo the surgery years ago to remove it. Three weeks off her feet and out of work! she’d whined. I knew the truth—her fear of misshapen body parts. At the Boston skating rink, there was a girl whose stumped arm had barely developed beyond the shoulder. After three Sundays of spotting her on the ice, my mother made excuses whenever I asked why we weren’t going skating anymore.

“Let me see it, Mom. Sit down.”

Plunking her body back on the bed, she lifted the foot an inch from the floor and pointed to the swollen, tomato-colored toe.

“Yikes, that looks infected. We’ll have to see a doctor.”

“You’ll take care of it, won’t you?”

“Yes, of course. By tomorrow, I hope.”

I’d have to take her to urgent care, take time off from work, cancel my afternoon hairdresser appointment most likely.

A day later now, we’re seated side by side on grey metal chairs in the clinic’s examination room. The throbbing in my head has finally quieted.

The doctor’s slender fingers wander across the bloated flesh.

“Does this hurt? Or this?”

Savoring this caress, my mother lets out a deep sigh. She shakes her head from side to side, yet her brow furrows and her eyes shudder as the doctor probes the toe.

“I was wondering, Doctor, will you have to amputate this corkscrew toe?”

The doctor lifts her soft brown eyes to my mother’s.

“Heavens no. We’ll just treat the infection on the toe next to it. You’ll be free of pain in no time.”

My eyes moisten. This doctor’s reassurance to my mother—like a mother to a needy child.

Now the doctor swivels her stool to face me.

“I’ll write a prescription for a two-week course of antibiotics. I’d like to check her toe in three weeks.”

Then she swivels a half-turn, shifting her gaze to my mother.

“You must be proud to have a daughter who takes such good care of you. I imagine she learned that from you.”

“Well, I don’t know if she’d agree.” My mother’s eyes ping pong between the doctor’s and mine. “At least I made sure she had a new pair of shoes every September. For the new school year, of course.”

She offers me a shy nod. I can’t deny it—yearly trips to Stride Rite Shoes in Brookline each August, just before the start of the new school year. Choosing a new pair of shoes with sturdy soles and laces, sized correctly to fit my feet, whether I loved the color and style, or not.

As the consultation wraps up, I lift the sock from my mother’s lap. Like a suppliant, I kneel at her feet and lift the bruised foot into my hands. As I do, my mother’s hand reaches to rest on my shoulder. After a long intake of breath, she announces,

“Nine miscarriages. I almost gave up—your father convinced me to try for ten. And then you, one out of ten, like a miracle.”

Her foot still in my lap, I give its heel a gentle squeeze.

Stephanie Shafran’s recent writing appears in literary journals such as Emulate, Persimmon Tree, and Silkworm. Her chapbook “Awakening” was released in 2020. A member of both Straw Dog Writers Guild and Florence Poetry Society, Stephanie resides in Northampton, Massachusetts; read more at stephanieshafran.com, including monthly blog posts.

Category: Nonfiction (Page 2 of 11)

Way Back When

Keeping Diana Alive

Maternal Fabric

At Home

Washington Heights

The Horses

The Laundry Laughers

Atlanta International, Concourse D

City Sounds

One Out of Ten

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