Category: Nonfiction (Page 3 of 11)

The Night Nurse

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Joan Potter

“Just slip this under your tongue, honey,” said Margie, the night nurse. She held out a tiny white pill. It was six-forty-five in the morning, almost the end of her shift.

“What is this?” I mumbled. I was feeling groggy and anxious, and the pain in the left side of my chest was still there. I had spent a long night in the hospital, trying to get a few hours of sleep while bells rang, buzzers sounded, the IV needle dug into my wrist, and nurses held long, loud conversations out in the hall.

“It’s nitroglycerin,” said Margie. “It’ll help the pain in your chest.”

I dropped the pill into my mouth, and in seconds my head began to pound. Margie had walked away from my bed and was doing something across the room. My skin prickled, and I was soon covered with an icy sweat. I felt myself becoming lighter and lighter, floating upward into some other world.

“Margie, help me,” I whimpered.

I could see the silhouette of her wide back looming by the door. “Take a deep breath,” I heard her say. Slowly she turned and moved toward my bed. “Take deep breaths,” she said.

She grasped my hand and rubbed my palm with her thumb. “What’s your name? Where do you live? Do you have brothers and sisters? Where do they live?”

I couldn’t answer. Through the fog I heard her voice becoming more frantic. “The doctor…blood pressure…red cart.” Then, other voices. “She’s looking better. She’s getting some color.”

I opened my eyes and saw Margie, another nurse, and a blond woman in a white coat, a stethoscope around her neck, all standing around my bed. “Your blood pressure dropped,” the doctor said. “It was a reaction to the nitroglycerin.”

Margie walked away and I never saw her again.

My hospital experience had started the day before on a Sunday morning. I’d had an ache in my chest since Thursday. It was on the left side, but it was not a sharp pain and didn’t radiate down my arm. I thought I might have been focusing on it too much, and figured it would probably just go away. Company was arriving on Saturday, a couple I hadn’t seen for ages. I couldn’t call and tell them not to come. I had to straighten the apartment, cook, chat with them for the two or three hours of their visit, and then clean up.

But by the next morning the pain – which I’d been trying to ignore all Saturday evening – was still there, dull, but persistent. I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I called my doctor, who said I should have it checked out. My daughter lived nearby so I gave her a call, trying to sound casual. She soon appeared at my door and we sped to the hospital.

Before long I was on a stretcher in the emergency room, hooked up to monitors. For what seemed hours I lay stretched out in my cubicle, bells dinging in the background, nurses taking blood, a man x-raying my chest, each activity interspersed with periods of restlessness and discomfort.

Finally a doctor entered, a small, pale, humorless man with glasses and thin gray hair. He told me I should stay overnight and have a stress test in the morning. But all I wanted was to get out of that place, go home, and come back the next day. He managed to talk me out of that, and I was soon wheeled away and put in a room on the cardiac corridor. My TV didn’t work, and all they’d given me to eat was tasteless mushy food. I wasn’t especially worried, just exhausted and annoyed that I had to be there.

The next morning, a couple of hours after Margie had fed me the nitroglycerine pill that could have ended my life, I was wheeled down to the ice-cold stress-test room. I sat with a group of patients, all of us swaddled in blue blankets, until it was my turn to get connected to a heart monitor and run on an increasingly speedy treadmill. My heart was fine, a doctor announced. I was released.

A few days later, during a visit with my primary care doctor, I described the nitroglycerine experience. She rolled her eyes. “You could have had a stroke. At least now you know you have strong cerebral arteries.”

Joan Potter‘s essays have appeared in anthologies ad literary journals, including The Bluebird Word, The RavensPerch, Persimmon Tree, Bright Flash Literary Review, New Croton Review, and others. She is the author or coauthor of several nonfiction books. The most recent is the collaborative memoir “Still Here Thinking of You.”

Blue Jay

1 April 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Liz deBeer

A blue jay landed in a planter by my window with something in its mouth. Not wanting to frighten it away, I froze, watching the indigo bird dancing around in a circle —tap, tap, tappity, tap —with what? A peanut?

Why the hell is a blue jay flying around with an unshelled peanut? Google knew: Apparently blue jays adore peanuts. Whole peanuts. In the shell, which they peck open, often gluttonously.

But this blue jay who landed in a planter by my window couldn’t crack the peanut shell. His head shook up and down, trying to puncture the peanut against the plastic planter’s edge: Tap, tap, tappity, tap again and again.

Finally, he turned to face me, peanut still intact. Looked me in the eye and spat out the nut before flying off.

I got up to inspect the planter by my window where the blue jay landed. Nestled among the roots of an almost dead pink petunia lay an unbroken cork-colored peanut hull.

Why the hell did the blue jay leave the nut, supposedly its favored treat? Was it merely a lazy blue jay who couldn’t penetrate the shell of a stubborn peanut?

Or was this a sign, this bird who landed in the planter by my window? A symbol of a guardian angel or my ancestors’ spirit with a message about longevity, fertility, or wealth?

Liz deBeer, an English teacher who resides in New Jersey, divides her time among many passions, including reading, beach walking, volunteering, and experimenting with different writing genres. Although Liz has published primarily in newspapers and teaching journals, she is working on writing YA novels and flash. Liz’s website is www.lizdebeerwriter.com.

Full Circle

1 April 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sheila Rittenberg

Nose

The first time I really saw it, I was ten or younger, looking into a hand mirror while standing in profile in front of a bigger mirror. My nose. It was hookish. Not just a kink. All of it. Short but bent. Like someone started something and forgot to finish.

I stared and stared. Until then, I’d believed everyone who’d said I was so cute, such a lovable face. And that was what I’d always seen in the mirror. Their praise lifted me in the mornings, tucked me into bed at night.

My sister had a straight, slightly turned-up nose. Not a ski jump. It was trim and neat, like a sweet goodbye or the perfect toast at a party. Flawless. My parents told me I had to be more like her, keep it up, and while you’re at it, be even better! I tried. I was at the mirror every night, searching. Would my nose change? Would it grow as I grew? I daydreamed myself into my sister. Compared my every move in sister terms – boys, friends, athletics. All beyond me. She was older. Teenage older. Cheerleader. Homecoming Queen. Agile figure skater and skier. Girlfriend of redhaired Bad Boy, Johnny F.

I faced up to the mirror always avoiding my profile. But that side silhouette was one of those things you can’t un-see. In frontal view, I was a little Irish girl with big eyes. Sideways, I was Barbra Streisand but without the allure, or the voice.

Mouth

When I was twelve and getting braces, the orthodontist told me my top lip would always look something like an upside down “U.” In the space from the base of the nostrils to the top lip there is a groove, he pointed out, and mine was too short. So my lip, whether I wanted it or not, lifted up above my teeth. My braced teeth.

“Start doing these exercises now,” the orthodontist warned as he showed me how to stretch my top lip down over my teeth, “or you’ll never be able to close your mouth.”

I looked up at him – mouth wide, elastic bands about to snap – and nodded. I didn’t care if my mouth was forever open. My bared teeth would be straight ones. No more taunts of Moose or Hey, Bugs Bunny as I walked the school halls. No more ducking behind opened locker doors.

The nose, the lip, and oh yes, the inclination to pudginess, were a lot to concentrate on. Every day. Between classes. During classes. After school. I walked the hallways, eyes racing from skinny girls to golden girls to those popular girls surrounded by friends and fans. Then home to my sister and the prom date she’d snagged, or the new cheerleading routine, or the simple certainty of her beauty. Her braces were long gone. One look at her and I’d well up. There had to be a reason I was inadequate. I just didn’t know what it was.

Brain

In university, I guzzled from the intellect of others. I, the girl from the suburbs, asked a million questions of new friends with cigarettes dangling from brooding faces. What’s behind Power to the People? Was Marx a good guy? What exactly is wrong with capitalism? We analyzed. We studied. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, every lyric, joints passing freely, the room a sweet musty void. I joined the student occupation to protest faculty racism. Blankets and sleeping bags lay side by side, students strummed guitars, organizers hammered talking points through bullhorns. The world was at stake.

I’d show up at my sister’s in a bright gauzy blouse, torn jeans, beads and bangles, paisley bandana folded across my forehead. She and her blond bob and three kids, dog and harried husband, would’ve fit right into The Brady Bunch. I’d talk about the outrage of government. She was consumed with menus for the week.

The ’60s and You Say You Want A Revolution were calling. And I answered. I tackled slum landlords, drug use in high schools, inferior pay for corporate women. My parents thought I was radical. I liked that.

Heart

Babies. My babes. Now staring into infant eyes made me high. By my late thirties, pediatrician visits and weight gains, gurgles and chortles were all it took to be happy. I made baby food from scratch and talked nonstop to my little ones, explaining the world, even when all they could say was “Mama.” I played peek-a-boo and made goofy faces. I floated. Motherhood was a prize. First Prize. My sister made faces, strained ones, she too young with too much to care for.

I didn’t stare at myself in the mirror these days but I was okay with looking. I enjoyed the curls around my forehead, my skin, silkier than I’d known. I liked my blue-eyed moon gaze. A smile – no overbite – filled my face. All together my look was … well, evidently not so bad. The badass kid checking out groceries looked at me with desire. Same with the wild-bearded gas station guy, and the twenty-something cop who came to bash in my car window when I locked my son inside along with the keys. Maybe they’d been right long ago. Maybe I was cute, so lovable.

My face had made friends with my nose. I no longer tried to be just like my sister, or better. She was still older. I tried not to remind her.

Sheila Rittenberg retired in 2019 and became a member of the Pinewood Table, a critique workshop facilitated by mentors. She became a two-year Fellow at Atheneum, a masters level writing program at The Attic Institute in Portland, OR. Sheila writes short stories and “flash” creative nonfiction.

Image of author as young girl — Photo courtesy of author

Lucky Girl

1 April 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Carol E. Anderson

It’s 1950. I’m three years old, standing in our backyard next to a patch of wildflowers as tall as I am. My tiny right fist peaks out from the sleeve of my oversized double-breasted coat with crisscrossing lapels. Chubby knees extend into sturdy legs that lead to small feet housed in white anklet socks and polished white tennis shoes. Whisps of blonde hair flow back in the wind. My bangs, short and choppy, look like I took the shears to them myself. Atop my head is a tiny woolen cap.

My face is turned up. Eyes squint as I smile at my mom with the camera—my gleeful expression punctuated by a slight suggestion of a dimple in my left cheek. I’m anticipating something wonderful. The zoo? The circus? A birthday party?

I’m unaware that by the end of my fifth year, my father will suffer a visual disability wrought by incompetent doctors. He will never work again. My mother, a secretary, will numb her fingers typing away in a tiny cubicle to support our family, working for a boss half as smart as she. I will wish her to be like all the other moms and stay at home, fix me snacks after school, and teach me how to ride a bike. My brother will withdraw into a world of thoughts and books. We will never be friends.

Standing on the lawn in my miniature peacoat, I don’t realize that by the time I’m fifteen, I’ll be rejected by the Baptist church for loving a woman. I’ll begin to understand the word hypocrite. I’ll believe my parents’ teachings of love, kindness, generosity, and fairness are principles everyone strives to live by—tenets issued by God. I won’t know these tenets have exclusionary clauses invisible to innocent eyes, that I will witness Christian fundamentalism grow in twisted power and gird its flocks to act with naked cruelty on the belief that difference is a sin.

I don’t realize that at the age of twenty-one, I’ll be outed by my college classmates, introducing terror into my daily life. I’ll be astonished that all my efforts to guard this secret are as useless as a sheet of transparent tissue paper.

I am unaware that at age twenty-six, in my attempt to be straight, my boyfriend will dump me on our six-week road trip to be with a woman he met at his brother’s wedding the week before—and he will not repay the $800 he owes me.

Looking up at the camera without knowledge of the need for hope, I don’t know that my father will die one month before my twenty-eighth birthday, and that I’ll survive—that I will remain wrapped in the shimmering cords of his love even decades after he’s gone.

I am unaware that at age thirty-two I’ll start my own business as an organizational consultant and will coach leaders to inspire people rather than control them—that this work will help me understand the complexity of human beings, and their scars.

I don’t know that on my fiftieth birthday I’ll start a non-profit called Rebellious Dreamers to lift up women to reclaim their dreams—that it will last twenty-five years and eventually fund microloans for women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I don’t realize that when I turn fifty-four, I’ll meet my great love, each of us destined for the other, that knowing her will smooth the jagged edges of terror and loss, that we will build a home on nine acres of land surrounded by trees and be rich in our chosen family of friends.

Standing with my beloved, in our own garden now, I’m anticipating something wonderful.

Carol E. Anderson is a life coach whose passions are travel and photography. She holds a doctorate in spiritual studies, and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is the author of You Can’t Buy Love Like That: Growing Up Gay in the Sixties. Carol lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Empty Netters

1 March 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Diane Choplin

Dada Brown gently jostled me awake, forefinger finger pressed to his lips.

“It’s time,” he whispered. “You dressed?”

“I slept in clothes.”

“Atta girl.”

Cautiously fumbling our way in the dark, so as not to wake Mama Brown, I felt my way down the hall as he gathered our gear. Once outside, we clicked on flashlights and made for an old chest freezer advertising Creamsicles in faded, cyan lettering. Dada Brown held open the lid while I stood on tippy toes and reached inside, plunging all ten figures into loose soil.

“We just need a handful in this styrofoam cup.”

I was six years old, digging for red wigglers on my first crack-of-dawn fishing expedition with grandpa. He and Mama Brown, my grandma-too-young-to-be-called-that, lived on riverside acreage in La Grange, California – a tiny gold rush town surrounded by rolling hills dotted with gnarled oak trees. Two blocks of nineteenth-century western-fronted shops defined its center. Overlooking these was a hilltop one-room schoolhouse with bell and similarly designed Catholic Church with pioneer cemetery.

We loaded Dada Brown’s forest green ‘66 Dodge truck, smooth-fronted like a VW bus, while Toby, his collie, hopped in the back, pacing excitedly. A short rumble down windy road brought us to a gravel pull out looking like any other. Adamant No Trespassing and No Hunting or Fishing decrees were nailed to nearby trees. Though Dada Brown was one of a privileged few locals permitted to ignore the signs, I still felt an exhilarating prick of danger defying them.

Juggling our poles, net, folding chair and cooler, we made our way across uneven pasture to a four-strand barbed wire fence, sunrise softly illuminating oak savannah. Dada Brown pushed down its menacing top line and climbed deftly over, one leg at a time. Then, as he would on every successive trip, he stepped on the bottom wire and pulled up the next adjacent, prying them apart for my passage through. Some fragment of me inevitably caught. He’d free my fly-away morning hair, my corduroy pants or yellow windbreaker, and we’d continue on, dodging cow pies. Toby led the way down the hill, skirting the lichen splotched dry stone wall, his tail moving in happy circles. When frog chorus suddenly halted, we knew he’d made the pond.

Squeamish about putting worms on hooks, I recoiled at first effort.

“They can’t feel it,” Dada Brown said, reassuringly.

I was skeptical about worms not feeling pain, thrashing as they do when poked.

“Did you know,” he added, “that worms have five hearts? If you cut one in half, they’ll heal and live on as two.” (His voice returns to me when I accidentally cleave one with my shovel: “It’ll be okay, Diane. You made one into two.”)

Somewhat appeased by their regenerative superpower, I reluctantly baited my hook.

Lines cast, Dada Brown settled on his folding chair, pole in one hand, thermos at his side. Unable to sit still, I propped mine against a log, braced it with a rock, and explored with Toby. We stalked bright green tree frogs, shy crawdads and praying mantis, catching each for closer examination. Once, I even managed a young garter snake, Toby barking wildly in what I imagined to be congratulations.

Tugs on line reclaimed my attention, but I don’t remember ever catching a fish. For lunch Dada Brown brought hotdogs we’d roast on sticks over a fire, or wax paper wrapped bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. We ate while making up stories about wily fish evading hooks, occasionally tossing pebbles for Toby to chase.

“Get the frogs,” we shouted. He gleefully obliged, biting water where stones broke the surface. Our raucous game eliminated all hope of hooking dinner.

Once the sun reached its apex, hot and glaring, we packed up. Not wanting to return empty handed, we stopped by the general store for a whole fish, later telling Mama Brown we’d caught it. She no doubt saw through our ruse, but my child brain, giddy to share in a secret, believed she believed.

I’ve been on a few fishing excursions since my early trips with Dada Brown, none nearly as fun. Trapped in a boat, I got antsy, itching to move. Casting lines from watercraft isn’t my idea of a good time. I can’t just park my pole and run around a bank, exploring. I have to sit still and wait. I’m not good at sitting still.

“Isn’t this great!” someone inevitably exclaims. Feet up with a fishing pole in one hand, cold beer in the other, they say: “I could be out here all day!”

Half smiling, I shift uncomfortably and stare off into the distance, where shoreline dissolves into dense forest, wondering what treasures might be found there.

Diane Choplin‘s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Countryside Magazine, Oregon Humanities, Monologging, and The Oregonian. She lives and writes on a five-acre farm where she also raises rotationally grazed lamb, welcomes Airbnb guests, and keeps hopeful eye out for edible wild mushrooms.

Hell’s Kitchen

1 March 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

We were in my father’s car on Sixth Avenue driving uptown towards Central Park, or maybe we were on Third Avenue approaching the 59^th Street Bridge, when my father said, “Don’t marry him. I’ll take care of you.” After a long silence I said, “But Dad, I love him.”

My mother had died a few months before, and it was just my father and I in the house in Queens where I had grown up. I worried about him. I knew it was too soon to leave him alone. Val was living in New Jersey at the time. My father put his arm around Val’s shoulder and convinced him to move in with us. “After the wedding, you can look for an apartment together,” he said.

Val moved in three months before our wedding. We slept in separate rooms. He called my dad Mr. Lisbona.

We got married on a beautiful day in April. I invited my mom’s friend Beatrice to attend.

On my wedding day, my father said, “Can you stay with me a little longer?” When Val agreed, I thought he was so understanding; he was so nice about it. But then I noticed how well he got along with my father. They sat in the living room watching TV together and laughing at the same jokes. Val walked around on Sunday mornings in pajamas while my dad made coffee for them both, and on Sunday afternoons the two of them went food shopping on 108^th Street. If something needed fixing, Val was eager to do it. He started calling my father Leon. When I suggested a neighborhood that might be good for us to live in, Val didn’t show any interest. My father said, “Stay here and save some money,” and Val smiled conspiratorially.

We lived eight months as newlyweds in my father’s house.

Toward the end of that stretch, Beatrice came for an overnight visit. I noticed how happy my dad was, and then I spied them. It was just a moment, through a slice of door: She was on the bed, he was in his bathrobe; he leaned over her. I caught my breath and recoiled. I slinked down the stairs and hurried out of the house. I walked to the subway and felt the urge to squeeze my eyes shut, trying to unsee the image of my father and Beatrice that kept fluttering to my mind. By the time I got to the train platform, I realized that this was my chance to leave. The moment had presented itself like a gift.

Without telling Val, I found us an apartment on my lunchbreak. The one-bedroom was walking distance from my office building on Sixth Avenue. That evening, after kicking off my boots, I gathered Val and my father at the round table in the kitchen and announced that Val and I were moving. Val said, “We can never afford it,” and my father said, “A two-year lease?” and I said to Val, “We have five days to pack.” My father lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

A week later we took a few boxes of clothes and two rolled-up Persian rugs to the twentieth floor of 301 West 53^rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen. I liked the name of my new neighborhood. That first night, Val was working across the river in New Jersey. I was alone.

The apartment was bare. Our wedding presents, still in their unopened boxes, were scattered in our empty living room. Our only piece of furniture was our too-hard bed, which we had bought that day without thinking it through.

I lay in the bed and looked out the large plate-glass window to see the time and temperature flash atop a taller building. I listened to a bouncer arguing loudly with a patron at the back entrance of the Roseland Ballroom. I heard the trucks rumbling up 8^th Avenue and the horse and carriages ambling towards the stables. I wished Val were there on my first night away from home. Somehow, despite all the city sounds, I fell asleep.

One hour before I needed to wake up the next morning, my dad called, a pattern he took years to break. We chatted until I was sufficiently awake.

I put my feet on the Persian rug. I pulled out from a box something to wear to work. I walked two short blocks to my office and never wanted to set foot on the subway again.

In the evening, Val and I went to Central Park, walked to 9^th Avenue, and ate in a little restaurant. On the way home we stopped at Tower Records, our fingers interlocked. Val loved the spartan apartment and declared that we didn’t need any furniture. “Where will we eat?” I said. “In our hard bed,” he said, and we both laughed.

I loved him so much, and I was so happy.

A year later I was pregnant with Aaron, and my father remarried a woman who wasn’t Beatrice.

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, Metonym Journal, and Smoky Blue Literary. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Leslie’s earlier essay Taboule in The Bluebird Word.

Buy the Fanciful Ones: A Tale of New Shoes

1 February 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Melanie Faith

For over three years, I’ve gone almost nowhere to try to stay healthy. Thank you, Covid. (Eyeroll.) Although I’m short, my natural go-to is a flat shoe with a buckle or a sneaker, because they feel the best and are most practical (read: match with everything). Recently, I found a pair of burgundy mary janes with thick, ‘90s 2-inch chunky heels. This was my first time in years wearing heels, and I’d only ever worn the lower, chunkier heels (never spikes—the thin, pointy, rickety kind).

The price was right on these designer-label babies ($29.99) and just looking at the shiny upper razzle-dazzled me, so they went home with me. What did I learn from wearing them for the first time, attempting to break them in?

Joy is a shoe that you won’t wear every day. As a telecommuter who still only goes out two or three times a week briefly on errands like the grocery store, these babies aren’t gonna get daily use. But who cares? Ever hear of the good plates? As in, family china handed down that only gets a Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter place on the table? Do we like them any less for that? Hardly. They denote special care and the thought placed into the meal. These shoes denote something similar: care.

Know what you’re dealing with. Even chunky heels that disperse weight more evenly on the foot aren’t as comfortable as a flat boot or tennis shoe. Pick your places wisely. Ease into it if you have to. I wore mine around the kitchen as I made warmed-up tacos. Then I sat to eat. New shoes take a while to break in, and after a half hour, I felt done. I popped them off for stocking feet, the bones below my toes not exactly aching but calling for a break already.

Sometimes, playful and fun are worth it. It’s been a long, hard few years. Illness, the pandemic, wars, dramatic rises in costs. We’ve been bogged down and more than earned a treat, something that lights us up inside just looking at them, and these shoes do. Yeah, they had the same pair in my size in neutral black, but there was no contest: the oxblood glimmers and puts a smile on my face. They recall the ‘90s of my youth and the untold happinesses that could be around the corner now. They are a hopeful shoe. They also remind me of the kinds of shoes worn for flamenco dancing and tap dancing—two movements that surely bring a whirl to the dancers. Do I dance? Around the office for an audience of me, myself, and I. Does it bring me any less joy? Not even close!

Your frivolous something might not be shoes or something you buy at all. It might be taking a morning off to return to a hobby you’ve been meaning to do but that kept getting shoved aside for the day job and family functions. It might be getting your bike or skates or basketball or gym clothes out of storage and gearing up for some head-clearing exercise or a walk on your own around the block. Or letting your old digital or analog camera walk with you around the neighborhood.

These activities, like my shoes, give a person something to look forward to, no matter how near or far that might be. Investing in whimsy and in ourselves with just a little effort or money often lightens our moods and puts a spring back in our step. They are an engagement with the world and a reengagement with self. Priceless.

Melanie Faith is a night-owl writer and editor who likes to wear many hats, including as poet, photographer, professor, and tutor. Three of her craft books about writing were published by Vine Leaves Press in 2022. She enjoys ASMR videos, reading, and tiny houses. Learn more at https://melaniedfaith.com/.

Summer’s End

1 February 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Vicki Addesso

for Cathy

It’s now, this evening, and like this summer, I have grown older. Yes, summers grow old, and come to an end. On this last day of August, September’s eve, I sense autumn’s approach.

The mammoth sunflower growing all alone by the young maple tree in front of my house bobs its heavy head and sighs it seems to be getting dark earlier and earlier. It has never seen a summer before, does not know summer must end. Or that this is its last, its one and only. The bulbous center is bursting with fresh sunflower seeds, and come early morning I will watch the goldfinches come to pluck them out, and the bees indulge. The golden-yellow petals are many and flutter in the tiniest of breezes yet remain put. That stem, so thick and straight and tall, sways for the wind in storms and refuses to break. Before the flower at its top bloomed, I thought of Jack and his beanstalk. Could I climb the stem and find a giant in the clouds?

The lonely sunflower, from leftover seeds I dropped next to the baby tree after running out of room in the backyard gardens. Only this one of the dozen or so seeds casually tossed into the dirt grew. The backyard has many other sunflowers, autumn beauties and sunspots and Little Beckas that had bloomed a couple of weeks earlier. Some are still vibrant, others wilting. They will not wither in loneliness; they have one another. But that sunflower out in front of the house, it rips at my heart, knows nothing of its fate. Its single solitary life that will fade as this summer ends. Trees, shrubs, other plants and other creatures share a world in our front yard and have more, some many, summers ahead of them. No worries, sweet sunflower, I whisper through the window screen. After the crispness of fall, the cold of winter, the promise of spring, I will plant more seeds. Summer will return. There will be sunflowers again.

What is this evening for me? It’s crickets. Their sounds fill late summer nights. It is leaving the bedroom curtains open as the sky darkens. Sitting in my quiet room with no lamp lit, listening, watching the light leave. It’s letting the emotions of memories set butterflies to flutter in my belly and goosebumps to rise on my skin. Letting my mind wander and visions to appear. Suddenly I am a child again. Chasing fireflies. Air on so much of my skin, warm, the breeze soft. Swatting at the mosquito on my elbow, sweating, and not caring. Looking back at the house I grew up in, I see the porch light come on. Tilting my head back to glance at the sky, I get dizzy with the sensation of falling up instead of down. Then my mother’s voice calling me inside. I am young but I know it must end.

When did I realize, at what age, did I learn of endings? As a baby, did I notice that the cold of March — the month of my birth —began lifting? That the sun stayed longer, warming my face as my mother pushed me in a stroller? Then, the heat of summer. The slow creeping back of early sunsets. A chill in the air. My first winter. Was I two years old, three, or four when I knew things would come to an end?

When did Eve, that second of the first two human beings, realize that everything was changing? For the first time, one season flowed into another, and nothing was sure any longer. Already banished from the paradise of the Garden of Eden, she now witnessed the utter destruction of all that was familiar. Was she frightened? Or was she too busy to notice? Being mother to the entire human race certainly must have kept her busy.

So amusing how I, and others, even after years of watching our star come and go, shift in the sky, making us alter our clocks, still say, Wow, it’s getting dark so early now, as if it’s something new. As if we were children. As if it were the first time. As if we were sunflowers.

And so, it will happen again, just as it has every year, all the years of my life — the end. These edges of the seasons are my favorite time. The end slides into a beginning. For the time being.

Now I sit, at my desk, the open window in front of me. It is dark outside. The screen of my computer bright. The crickets singing their song of summer’s old age, the sound of it so familiar. The sound of longing. Realization and acceptance. It is the song of ending, reverberating through space and time. It is falling upwards and flying away.

Vicki Addesso is co-author of the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You~A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013). Publishing credits include: Gravel Magazine, Barren Magazine, The Writer, Sleet Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and more. She was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize.

Two Dolls and Three Kings

31 December 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Antonia Wang

I only ever owned two dolls, delicate treasures in a world where Barbies belonged to children with ties to distant lands like the United States or, in a bygone era, Venezuela.

My dolls weren’t the coveted reborn dolls of the ’80s, the ones I daydreamed about swaddling and adorning with miniature outfits like real infants. No, my dolls were not my first choice, but they were unique— a second-hand, silicone-skinned Japanese doll with straight chestnut hair, a miniature yogi ready to bend and twist to my whims. The other, a robust, plastic blonde doll with pigtail braids, remained shelved most of the time, but I could never forget her.

How did I come to possess a Japanese doll while living in the insular mountains of the 1980s Dominican Republic? My recollection is hazy, but I remember it as a gift from a Spanish missionary whom my family hosted one summer while she worked with the church. The doll had meager clothes, so I fashioned her an outfit with the little fabric I could find and my rudimentary sewing skills.

The blonde doll had been a “Three Kings” gift from my dad. Christmas gifts were for Americans. Dominican kids didn’t have Santa. We had the Three Kings, who somehow made no noise as they filled our rooms with their camels on the eve of January 6th, delivering our toys. Oh, coveted joy! They were the only gifts of the year for many of us. “At least you had toys,” my siblings would chime in. But this isn’t a sad story about growing up in a small town in the countryside of a humble island. This isn’t a sad story at all.

Sure, we had limited means, but we never lacked what truly mattered: a roof of our own, honest and loving parents, friends galore, and a multitude of cousins. Cousins to play hide and seek with, tackle homework with, attend church together, and, of course, get into the occasional trouble with. And then there were the lush mountains, always smiling around me, offering endless adventures and mysteries. Our home had no television when I was a kid, and it wasn’t until I reached my teenage years that we got a fridge. Bicycles or scooters were scarce, and cars? They were a luxury reserved solely for the ‘rich,’ although even those we deemed ‘rich’ carried their own burdens—a spouse who had migrated to the United States, the trials of managing a small-town business, or concealed guilt.

No, I never felt poor. We had what we needed and nothing more, except for food. Come what may, we had food—for everyone at home, for the neighbor who couldn’t afford to cook, for my grandpa who preferred my mom’s cooking though he didn’t live with us, for the occasional country visitor, my father’s third cousin, or the Haitian woman with a child who stopped by every few months. I couldn’t remember her name or whether she had a home. There was always plenty of food, even if my mom had to make herself a meal from our leftovers. But this isn’t a sad story, no.

This is a tale of devotion—a father who wanted to give me the childhood he never had growing up as a farmer’s kid in the mountains of Camú.

One evening, approaching January 6th, I witnessed a secret ritual. My late father, convinced I was asleep, concealed a grand, plastic doll within a duffle bag hanging from a nail on the wooden wall, believing he had hidden it where I would never think to look. I smiled and turned sideways, pretending to be sleep.

Outside, the chorus of crickets remained silent. The unsightly toads in the nearby miniature swamp, where taro root and yautía malanga thrived unbidden yet embraced, also remained silent. Nor did I hear a whisper from the brown geckos that crept about our small-town dwelling, which we regarded as an auspicious omen.

The next day, I didn’t say a word, filled with excitement as I eagerly awaited the surprise at the foot of my bed on Three Kings’ Day. I remained silent because, more than a toy, I cherished the joy of my father’s belief in magic.

Antonia Wang, poet, nature enthusiast, and yogi, weaves intricate, symbolic poems from the tapestry of everyday life and the natural world. Exploring universal themes of relationships, self-discovery, and philosophy, Antonia’s work exudes a nostalgic Caribbean essence. She writes in English and Spanish, and lives with her family in the USA.

Family Photo courtesy of Terri Watrous Berry

Jack and the Box

31 December 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Terri Watrous Berry

It was the perfect size to hide a dog toy, plus it needed no wrapping since a brightly colored festive design ─ Santa in fact ─ was imprinted right on the cardboard. A loose-fitting detachable lid made it easy for him to nudge open with his nose, and since we used it year after year to hide his gift, Jack knew that box was his. We watched in awe once as he located it among other wrapped gifts, nudged it off the shelf where it was being kept with the rest until Christmas, flipped off the lid and trotted away with his new toy like a successful bandit.

The first Christmas after he passed, seeing his box again of course broke my heart anew, but I decided to make use of it one last time to hold a gift for my daughter Cathy’s cat, Misty. After stuffing two bags of cat treats inside, I inscribed the cat’s name across the lid in indelible red marker and placed it under the tree with the rest.

After all the gifts were opened Christmas day, Cathy began to scoop up the mountain of crumpled wrap, beleaguered bows, and boxes too abused to be of future use, stuffing it all into a big black garbage bag. When she picked up the box, she paused before calling, “Mom?” and then asked gently if I wanted to save it. I hesitated only a moment before telling her to dispose of it with the rest, thinking to myself of its heart-wrenching memories.

Apparently, however, Jack did not agree.

We live on several acres in a rural area, and our trash cans have to be hauled down the long driveway to the road the evening before the truck comes the following morning. The first pick-up day following that first Christmas without our beloved Springer, after donning coat, hat, boots, gloves and wrapping a scarf around my neck, I stepped out into the frigid air to retrieve our emptied cans. Jack used to accompany me on that chore.

I was keenly feeling his absence again on that drab grey Michigan morning, head down, listening to the snow crunch while watching my boots shuffle through even more that had fallen during the night. Rounding the bend as I approached the road, I looked up and saw the emptied cans lying in our yard as usual, their lids flung nearby, but something else caught my eye, something colorful standing smack dab in the middle of our driveway.

When I realized what it was I stopped abruptly, and then I laughed out loud. For Jack’s box had managed somehow to escape not only the garbage bag but also the grinding maw of the garbage truck that day ─ it was the only thing that did ─ and had landed undamaged in such a conspicuous spot that I could not have failed to notice.

Make of it what you will.

As for me, that empty little gift box was a gift, and it wasn’t empty at all. No, it was simply brimming with wise advice from a dear and faithful companion, telling me to remember the good times we had together not try to forget them, and that those we truly love are never really gone. Still chuckling as I bent to scoop it up, I continued to do so off and on all the way back up to the house.

Misty’s name that I had inscribed on the box with what claimed to be an indelible marker easily wiped right off, and now every year when decorations come down from the attic, Jack’s box is one of the ones I most look forward to seeing again. And it never fails to make me smile.

Terri Watrous Berry is a Michigan septuagenarian whose work has appeared over the past thirty-five years in anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, with awards for prose from venues as diverse as The Hemingway Festival and the Des Plaines/ Park Ridge NOW Feminist Writer’s Competition.

Category: Nonfiction (Page 3 of 11)

The Night Nurse

Blue Jay

Full Circle

Lucky Girl

Empty Netters

Hell’s Kitchen

Buy the Fanciful Ones: A Tale of New Shoes

Summer’s End

Two Dolls and Three Kings

Jack and the Box

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