Category: Nonfiction (Page 6 of 11)

Don’t Miss the Boat

23 March 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Gloria Lauris

What had started out as a lovely, lazy excursion soon turned into a nightmare.

“The boat’s gonna leave–without us! But where is it?” I cried to my son Alex, who had scouted out ahead.

“There!” he shouted, pointing to our cruiser at port in the distance. My heart sank. No way we would make it in time before the 4 pm set-sail time. It was 3:30, and we were far away and up a hill. We had no transportation and didn’t speak the local language.

I mentally reviewed how we arrived in this predicament. Our luxury liner had moored in the Baltic Sea’s cyan calm waters at Tallinn, and we had earlier strolled ashore. My main purpose here was to buy a wood icon dating back to the 18th century from an Estonian shop, located in the city’s Old Town Square. Given my art history training, I was excited to pursue these panels which had been obtained from the hallowed walls of old Eastern European churches, and even more keen to secure a piece.

Alex and I wandered leisurely through the quaint, walled seaside town. We admired the time-worn architecture of the well-preserved medieval city, peering into windows of old museums and galleries, and picking our way along the meandering cobblestone walkways.

Stopping at the well-known antique store, I spent over an hour agonizing over the many religious items, focusing on the more affordable ones. I finally settled on a work featuring ‘Archangel Michael with St. Florus and St. Laurus’ which especially appealed to me due to the similarity to my last name. The mysterious painted eyes of the archangel’s face looked as though they held secrets or at least stories from the icon’s time on church walls.

Clutching my new prized possession, I joined my impatient son waiting for me outside the shop and we walked along the city’s streets within the marketplace, examining the fresh produce, assorted merchandise, and colourful cotton clothing.

The intoxicating and exotic smells from the food vendors mingled with the fragrant air of the lazy summer afternoon. We seemed to merge into the historic, serene landscape, caught up and lost in a timeless trance—in a dance of sorts—of life in that ancient town which was foreign yet somehow familiar. Time stood still for awhile.

Eventually rousing from the lull of relaxation and daydream, we realized that the sun was no longer overhead and it was time to return. In fact, it was very much past time to go. We also then realized that we weren’t sure exactly where we were or how to navigate our way back.

Panic set in.

Despite the day’s warmth, I felt a chill as the potential seriousness of the situation sunk in. My hands formed sweaty beads and breaths started coming faster through my parched throat.

It would be a tight race to get to the vessel in time, assuming we were going the right way at all.

Our once casual pace now quickened in an increasingly desperate effort to get back. If only we could find which road to take! This one? Or That? Signage was not helpful since we couldn’t read the words.

In asking several vendors how to find our way back to the seaport, we used charade-like gestures to communicate as their English was poor and our Estonian was non-existent. We later learned we were pointed in the wrong direction and went even further afield. We tried unsuccessfully to find a taxi.

The outline of the massive ship could be seen far away in the harbor, blasting out its loud and final no-nonsense warning signals. It was calling for us, its wayward passengers, one last time.

We were stranded and miserable.

Then, what seemed like a miracle happened.

Unexpectedly we found the right road back towards the cruise liner. Did Archangel Michael himself hear, through our icon, our feverish muttered prayers for literal guidance, and compassionately and invisibly intercede?

Separated from the ship by a steep hill, we abandoned any pretence of decorum, desperately throwing ourselves down the grassy knoll, traversing rocks, ignoring blisters on our feet, and trying not to stumble or fall. Cutting away from the pathway, we scrambled, taking the most direct way back we could.

The ship would leave shortly for Russia. Not reaching the vessel meant we would have to regroup three days later somewhere else entirely once it exited Soviet waters. Missing the evening sail-off was unthinkable, not even an option as there was no Plan B. We pushed ourselves harder, hearts thumping in our chests, and gasping for air as we ran.

My memory of the rest is a blur, and I don’t know to this day how we did it, as it seemed impossible to get there in time. Did we fly? Somehow, we found the strength to stagger, exhausted, to our floating hotel, avoiding the stern looks from the boarding crew about to hoist the loading plank. I looked at my watch: 3:58!

I don’t think my son and I were ever more grateful to be on board a boat. The food tasted amazing, the shower heavenly, and my small bunk bed extremely welcoming to my aching body and feet. My precious icon stowed in my luggage, to be unearthed only upon our return home.

No one wants to miss the boat, whether figuratively or literally. My son and I occasionally refer to that fateful day and shake our heads with disbelief remembering how close we came to almost doing so. It will be a story Alex will tell his kids one day: the time when their dad and grandma almost didn’t make it.

When I hung that special item on my wall at home, I could have sworn the quiet and unassuming painted Archangel Michael winked at me.

I guess our Baltic adventure is just one more story added to his silent, secret mysteries.

Gloria Lauris is a writer in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She has degrees in sociology and art history and is a retired government analyst. Inspired by her education, experiences, and observations she writes nonfiction about animal welfare, travel, gardening, and food, as well as fictional children’s animal stories with a colleague.

close up dirty door door knob — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The Trapped Door

12 March 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Daniella DiMaggio

When I was a girl, my grandma showed me a trapdoor in our house. She lived in the basement apartment, where the trapdoor was. I want to say that the door was by the staircase or in the alcove where the washer and dryer were, but I truly cannot remember. When you opened the door, there was a red ladder that took you far down into a white room that was filled with wonders that I cannot recall now. In my mind’s eye, it was filled with toys, and it was vaster than vast. It was the universe, ever expanding.

I want to say that I visited this trapdoor multiple times in my childhood. And I want to say that it was not in one single instance that this door disappeared. I want to say that as I continued to visit it, the door became more and more transparent; the handle, at first, difficult to turn, and then impossible to find. I want to say that the square outline of the door slowly faded into the wall.

I have many dreams that I’m somehow journeying through the foundation of my childhood home. In the dream, it doesn’t always look like my childhood home, but I know that’s what it is. There are secret passageways in the walls that allow me to contort and climb through. They don’t do much of anything other than transport me from one room to another.

I’m reminded of when my sister and I were girls sharing a room. We had a large white dresser, it almost reached the ceiling (or maybe I just thought this because I was small), and she used to climb on top of it and crawl across it to my bed. It wasn’t until we were older that we realized how dangerous this was, the top half of the dresser not being nailed down to the bottom half. My sister never realized that she was a precarious leaf on a branch. We laugh about it now.

I sometimes wonder if the trapdoor disappeared or if I disappeared. If I became stuck down there and slowly the wonders just vanished, and one day, a day close to my dying, in a new long lived-in house of my adult years (a house I’ve yet to even meet), I will discover a small square frame with a knob and realize that no one has been looking for me.

Daniella DiMaggio is a recent graduate of the Queens College MFA Program where she studied fiction. She teaches at Queens College and Plaza College.

The Landscape of Childhood

5 March 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Janice Northerns

R-r-r-r-r-d-d-d. That sound, the bumpty-bump-bump of our car passing over the two cattle guards near our rural West Texas farmhouse, framed my childhood. Cattle guards, metal pipe contraptions used in place of a gate across a road, are designed to let vehicles pass through while keeping livestock in; however, they meant much more than that to me.

On the long trips back from town almost 30 miles away, crossing those cattle guards often jolted me out of a sound sleep or a dreamy reverie. But it was a comforting jolt, a rumbling almost home, almost home.

My mother sometimes used the cattle guard as a boundary marker when we went out to play: “Don’t go past the second cattle guard,” she’d warn.

Daddy referred to the cattle guards as landmarks when giving directions: “Turn at the first cattle guard, go across the second one, then take the right fork in the road and you’re there.”

And the cattle guards themselves, all those wide spaces between treacherously smooth metal pipes with looming chasms beneath, presented formidable obstacles to be crossed on foot when I was small. It was a test of bravery to see if we could make it across quickly without having to grab the triangular side rail.

For many years most of the place markers of my childhood remained intact, long after I left home. But I still remember the day when I mourned the absence of one of them. It was on a trip to see my parents, and as usual, when I turned at the first cattle guard, its low rumble whispered almost home, almost home. But as I approached the second cattle guard, I saw that something was not quite right. The road had been filled in, the cattle guard removed.

No more ditch to cross, no more bumpy jolt.

Instead of enjoying the newly smooth blacktop, I had the distinct urge to hang on for dear life as I crossed that spot in the road, as if I were driving across a high, narrow bridge with no guard rails. It was a visceral, physical sensation, one that surprised me. How silly, I thought. It’s just a cattle guard. But there was no denying that this change in my childhood landscape left me momentarily unmoored. This no longer felt like the road home.

My father explained the removal of the cattle guard. It was in need of repair, and since my parents hadn’t owned any livestock for years, there was no longer a reason for a cattle guard. It made more sense to simply fill in the road.

I puzzled over why such a simple change affected me so strongly. Perhaps there was no longer a practical purpose for that cattle guard, but for me it served as a talisman. The bumpty thud of cattle guards marked every entry and exit to and from the larger world, a border crossing into my home country. If the borders, or the border markers, change is there still a country to enter?

Of course, it’s only natural that those external markers of childhood become fewer as time passes. Other changes have happened over the years. The old schoolhouse down the road, empty for many years, was at last removed. Houses of childhood playmates have been gone so long that not even a trace of the foundations remains. My parents are also gone now, and the house where I grew up, though still there, is no longer ours. The cottonwood trees that I played in as a child have been cut down. But those cottonwoods, their leafy green summer stirrings, are as vivid to me now as when I last set eyes on them more than 15 years ago.

Maybe I really don’t need external markers to find my way. The landscape of childhood, far from fading away with the removal of its landmarks, seems indelibly etched on some map of memory:

It is a July day in 1965 and I am not quite nine years old. My little brother and I clutch sweaty nickels and dimes in our palms as we walk to the tiny country store located just around the bend after the second cattle guard.

Barefoot, as always, we race to the first cattle guard, keeping to the side of the road where the dirt is cooler than the blacktop pavement.

At the cattle guard, my feet curve to grip the hot metal pipes as I struggle to keep my balance, hang on to my money and scamper to solid ground. Safely across, only then do I look back and down, down into the ditch my little brother and I have once more successfully traversed.

One more cattle guard and we’re at Halley’s Grocery. The interior of the store is cool and dim. We luxuriate in the cement soothing the blistered soles of our bare feet, sidle up to the Coca-Cola chest cooler and open wide the glass lid for a blast of icy air.

On the way home, we swig cold orange Nehi sodas, a bag of peanuts dumped into them. As I make my way across the last cattle guard, there is no bumpty-bump rumble; I’m on foot.

But the sound is still there, always, in my head. I look up and the house is within sight.

Almost home, almost home.

Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award (University of Kansas), the Nelson Poetry Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up in Texas and now lives in southwest Kansas. Read more at www.janicenortherns.com.

Taboule

23 February 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

Perched on a footstool, I plunged my five-year-old hand into the sink full of cold water and grabbed for the parsley leaves that my mother had soaked. They were elusive; it took me several tries to catch just one. My mom was behind me, close enough that I could smell her Bal à Versailles perfume.

Although the kitchen was small, it didn’t feel cramped. The window was open, and the spring air wafted in. I placed the leaves on a towel on the counter to dry, my hands dripping water to my elbows. My mom used a handheld metal contraption to shred the parsley. It was about the size of a book and had a crank that she wheeled around. She pushed her dark hair off her face with her wrist. Her eyes were lined with kohl. After a long while, we had a salad bowl full of leaves.

We soaked bulgur wheat into a big bowl of water. My mom said it in Arabic: burhol. She chopped scallions and let me sprinkle a thick layer of salt on top. She cut up tomatoes into little pieces as her gold bangles made soft chime-like sounds. She guided me to press the lemon halves onto a glass juicer. She smiled and said we needed a rest.

We lay on the hammock on the terrace overlooking 83^rd Avenue and the empty lot across the street. We lived on the second floor, and the terrace was an extension of our living room. My mother smoked a cigarette, pressing her red lipstick onto the filter tip, while I slid alongside her silk dress. I played with her gold bracelets. Pigeons swooped around the courtyard below. She opened her book and slit a page open with a butter knife, leaving a jagged edge. Only the French books were like that.

In the afternoon, we returned to the task. Back on the footstool over the sink, I took a handful of bulgur wheat from the water, and I squeezed as hard as I could, tightening my stomach to get every drop out. I farted with the effort, and my mother laughed, her mouth open, her head back. I couldn’t help but laugh, too.

I tossed the drained bulgur into the bowl with the leaves. Then we did the same with the scallions. The juice from the scallions was viscous, turning my hands slimy. She added the tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil and mixed it all together. Then she gave me a taste. “Maybe more lemon,” I said through a mouthful of parsley, and she hugged me saying, “Ya rochi,” my darling.

Debi, my sister, came home from Russell Sage Junior High, her long blond hair hanging like ribbon past her shoulders. “Ohhh, taboule,” she crooned. She went to our room, and I followed her like a magnet. She threw her bag on the waterbed, and I fell beside it, making waves, my body jerking up and down. She kissed me and called me Leslie Pie. She smelled like rebellion, cigarettes and Herbal Essence shampoo.

My brother, Dorian, came home from work and said, “Oh wow, taboule!” and I scrambled to follow him around the apartment. “Hey, Arn,” his name for me, and he picked me up and swung me onto a shoulder. I loved the sheer strength of him. I rested my hand on top of his head, his dark wavy hair laced around my fingers.

My dad came home, and I ran into his outstretched arms. His cheeks were prickly, and I put my hands to mine to protect them. He kissed my neck. I giggled. “We made taboule,” I said. “I can’t wait,” he said.

I stood in the middle of my family as they moved around one another, reaching for bowls from the cabinet. We ate the taboule with whatever else my mother must have cooked when I wasn’t paying attention. The parsley stuck to our teeth; “Don’t ever eat taboule on a date!” my mom said. The taste was kaleidoscopic, citrusy, dense, complex, and comforting.

My parents talked to each other in Arabic, with French words mixed in. My mother called my dad “Cherie.” The singsong of their voices was tender and affectionate, their expressions frozen in time and unchanged since they had left Lebanon in 1949.

The taboule gone, my mom washed the bowl and laid it on a towel on the counter, swatting the hair from her eyes and exhaling deeply. She smiled at me and checked that her nail polish wasn’t ruined. Sleepy, I went to the living room, dragging my feet on the tan shag carpet to find my father asleep in front of the TV, still in his suit and shoes. I reached up and changed the channel to “I Dream of Jeanie.” I sat on the rug near my father as he dozed, the sensation of taboule and the nearness of my mother still present in my body.

Leslie Lisbona has been part of a writing workshop for ten years. She recently had her first piece published in Synchronized Chaos. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Most of her writing has to do with her upbringing.

Tony Told Me

16 February 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Susan Mannix

I remember the moment. The look he gave me through the iron bars of his stall, straight in my eye, said it all. “It’s time to let me go.”

But I wasn’t ready, no one in my family was, most of all my sixteen year-old daughter Lauren. Tony (Registered Jockey Club name: Spartans Pride) was her heart horse. The one we searched for and she chose. The one who started making her dreams come true. I remembered how her face lit up in surprise and delight as she ran across the grass parking lot to our trailer. “Mom, I won! I won! My first blue ribbon!” She held it up proudly. That was a year ago and just a month after we bought him

What a day that was.

So different from today.

Tony started showing signs of discomfort earlier while Lauren was at school. “Camping out” (stretching his hind legs behind to relieve abdominal pain), pawing, pacing. This wasn’t the first time with him and I waited for it to pass like it usually did.

It didn’t. The pawing became more frantic and he started to roll.

Phone in hand, I ran out into the paddock and hollered at Tony. He popped up and as I lead him into the barn, I called our veterinarian. In the twenty minutes before he arrived, I walked Tony around in the front of our barn to keep him from rolling, which could cause a deadly twist in his intestine.

The vet determined it was an impaction – a blockage caused by a mass of grain and hay in his gut. The only thing to do was pump mineral oil and warm water in him in hopes of loosening it. Once done, Tony was given a dose of Banamine, an equine pain reliever.

The wait began. I checked him often, relieved to see each time he was comfortable. He even passed a little bit of manure – another good sign. Once the drugs wore off in a couple of hours, we’d know more.

The pain returned. Then came the on-call emergency vet. By now Lauren and her sister, Brooke, were home from school and had set up in the barn with a close friend to keep constant watch on Tony. More mineral oil and Banamine, Another wait. If this didn’t work, the only option was surgery.

“He seems more comfortable.”

“I bet this will work.”

“Look, he’s nosing around for hay. That’s a good sign.”

Statements of hope that were delivered with eyes that were desperately grasping for reassurance. To each one I nodded vigorously and gave an enthusiastic “Yes, I agree!” I sent the girls up to the house for a quick break and stayed behind.

The soft spring air and the chirping of the tree frogs could not ease the heavy stillness of the barn. Darkness pressed in on all sides.

I looked into Tony’s face seeking a way to push back the darkness. Our eyes met. Mine begged him to get better; his said it’s time to face what’s happening. That’s when he told me, even though he stood quietly.

Hours before we loaded him onto our trailer and made the fifty-minute drive to the Marion duPont Equine Medical Center in Leesburg. Before his worried, scared eyes said “I can’t do this,” as veterinary techs took his vitals. Before the staff prepped him for emergency surgery, his body wracked with pain. Before my daughter sat for hours on the cold hard floor of a dimly lit hallway, offering up her dreams so her horse could graze once again in our pasture.

Before the phone call that woke us after only two hours sleep.

Before the desperate voice of the veterinary surgeon came through the receiver begging for permission to let him go.

Before I knew it was time, Tony told me.

Susan Mannix is from Maryland, where she lives on a small farm with her family and menagerie of horses, dogs & cats. Formerly a biomedical research editor, she is now working towards a Master’s degree in creative writing from Wilkes University. Find her at susanmannix.com and on Twitter at @lynsuze.

small

8 February 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Michele Johnson

1. Not large, comparatively less-than, insignificant (see also: slight, tenuous, negligible)

You were small to begin with. During freshman year, your health professor has everyone perform a skinfold test to calculate their BMI. He announces yours in front of the class. The room is filled with desks and the increasing distance between them. His voice sounds far away: You’ll have babies soon. Eat for them.

2. Minor in influence or power, unlikely to cause problems (see also: secondary, inferior) 3. Humiliated, as in (H)e made me feel small.

You are so small that men hold the door for you. This is called chivalry, a code of conduct named after a kingdom built high in the sky on an invisible pedestal. In the center of this kingdom is a town populated by little women who are seemingly never hungry, owing to a litanous supply of apples, which are espaliered along well-swept streets. The women navigate (never prune) the canon of sturdy trellises. Sticky, sweet juice drips from their chins.

You’d think it difficult to travel to, but Chivalry is actually harder to return from. A (M)an you used to worship blamed altitude sickness.

4. Operating on a limited scale 5. Young (see also: underdeveloped, stunted, child-like)

It’s obvious now; you’re getting smaller. After lying in bed for six weeks, there’s a full-inch discrepancy between the tips of your protruding hip bones and the salvation in your womb. Your left hand rests on a Ziplock bag warm with a few tablespoons of foamy yellow bile. Your husband offers to buy anything you might keep down. When he returns, he doesn’t tell you he stopped for General Tso’s chicken and ate it in the car. He doesn’t have to. You lose a few more tablespoons of yourself to the Ziplock bag.

Days later, the nurse tells you if you don’t eat we’ll have to put you in the hospital. Her breath stinks of fermented apples. You wonder why she’s scolding you as if you were a child.

6. Weak (see also: fragile, frail, ashamed)

Signs and Symptoms of Hyperemesis Gravidarum:

Severe nausea and vomiting
Weight loss of 5% or more of pre-pregnancy weight
Food aversions
Extreme fatigue
Confusion
Anxiety/depression
Increased ~~salvation~~ salivation

Though there’s no proven cause of hyperemesis gravidarum, researchers suggest several possibilities. These include genetics, rising levels of a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin, and increased estrogen and progesterone. If you weren’t so small, you’d add to their list:

eating affected apples
altitude sickness

7. To dwindle, as in * . . . smalled till she was nought at all.^{^[1]}

Years of altitude sickness (?) give you intestinal metaplasia, putting you at high risk of stomach cancer. Your physician instructs you to take smaller and smaller bites, which you do because you love your husband and five children (They, too, have sworn off all varieties of apples).

You somehow lose another ten pounds and wonder if this is how you will finally disappear.

^{^[1]} From “The Clock of the Years” by Thomas Hardy (1916).

Michele Johnson (she/her) (Instagram: @thelyricalwild) is an emerging writer living in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state with her husband and five unschooled kids. As an introvert, she enjoys exploring both the Pacific Northwest backcountry and her vast inner world, and she sometimes confuses the two.

Dear Chair

5 February 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Susan Hodara

I never sit on you, but you sit beside me day after day while I work at my desk. I sit on the big black swivel-y chair, whose vinyl surface the cats pockmarked when they were kittens. I roll into and away from the desk as I think. You remain still; the only part of you not tucked beneath the tabletop is your gently rounded back.

You are my witness. You watch as my fingers graze my keyboard, flurrying then pausing. Do you notice that when I stop, my eyes travel upward to gaze out the window in front of me? There is much to see out there. Cars passing, neighbors jogging, the mail truck gliding up to our mailbox across the street. At night, the glow of flashlights dancing before dogwalkers. Wind, rain, snow. Our Japanese maple, branches bare now but soon to sprout crimson buds and later to obscure my view with its bouquet of fluttering red. Then I start up again – tap tap tap, the sound of unspooling words.

You are wooden, old-fashioned, sturdy. You are painted an unnamable color – part green, part gray, part ochre, flecked in places, scuffed, with three faded red blotches on the edge of your seat. I don’t know how they got there. I don’t know how you got here. Were you in this room when it was Sofie’s bedroom, when I came in here each evening to kiss her goodnight? I do know I chose you to be next to me, out of all the other chairs.

You are the only one who hears my telephone conversations, who watches as I get up and walk over to peer at myself in the mirror behind me. You see me shuffling between emails and articles and online shopping, interrupting myself when I can’t maintain a thought. You see me meditating, eyes closed, headphones in my ears. You see me sipping coffee from my red flowered cup in the morning, and then, after lunch, tea from the heavy mug I brought home from some town along the Pacific Coast Highway, swirls of blue and white with a sad chip at the top of the handle. Eating my salad out of a round stainless steel bowl, wiping my fingers on a crumpled white paper napkin so I can type as I chew. The food grounds me, as do the coffee and tea.

Your back is a curve of wood resting on six turned spokes. There is a slot carved out in the center, its inside edges smoothed, big enough to insert a small hand that might want to drag you somewhere or lift you up. But you never move. You wait silently when, sometimes in the late afternoon, I slip under the covers of Sofie’s old twin bed, still where it was when she was growing up. If I fall asleep for half an hour, I am pleased that I rested, assured that my brain will be more forthcoming in the aftermath.

You are beside me as I arrange my calendar, pay my bills, make my doctor appointments. Teach my Zoom students. Finish a writing assignment and hit send, then feel the freedom I’ll have for a few days before I tackle my next one. And, as I sit beside you, you are present while the deepest, most honest parts of my life unfold.

You are my “extra” chair, ready for a guest who might want to sit with me to keep me company or to look at my computer with me. But guests are rare at this desk; it is my place of treasured solitude. You are squat and unintimidating. Welcoming. Pushed into place, nearly hidden. Always there.

Susan Hodara is a journalist, memoirist and educator. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times and more. Her short memoirs are published in assorted literary journals. She is co-author of “Still Here Thinking of You” (Big Table Publishing, 2013). She has taught memoir writing for many years. Visit www.susanhodara.com.

Resolutions

1 February 2023 / Editor

Special Selection for one-year Anniversary Issue

Nonfiction by Heather Bartos

I go out for a run on the morning of New Year’s Day. There’s a fog advisory and everything more than ten feet away is blurred, a smudge, too far in the future to bother with. The things I can see are chilly and clammy and gray.

On the way back, once my three laps are done, I walk over to my garden. It’s not much more colorful than the rest of the neighborhood, a shush in a silent library. I make a halfhearted promise that I’ll plant those buttercup bulbs I bought in October later today if it doesn’t rain. Working out here doesn’t sound too appealing.

My plants aren’t stupid. They know this is the wrong time, that more cold and dark is coming, and that the proper and logical thing to do is roll back over and go to sleep until it becomes the right time. Their new year is a few months out yet, when the days lengthen and stretch and the soil warms up. The calendar date today means nothing to them.

Instead of lingering in bed, in their warm nests of blankets, the humans around me are ready to take on New Year’s resolutions. They are facing the gray skies with grit, with new gym memberships and steely purpose. They will wrestle time to the ground, pin it down, make it produce. The holiday feasting is done, the gifts are unwrapped, the decorations and lights are gone. There’s no cheery distraction, only the worship of discipline and sharp resolve, our egos feathered and puffed on full display, challenging ourselves.

The plants are probably wiser.

But I’m a human being, and I make resolutions. I take them seriously and make charts and boxes. And you know what? More years than not, I meet them.

“I’m growing taller this year than last year,” says the peach dahlia. “Really. I’m going to do it. Just watch.”

“I’ll make more buds this year,” says the lavender. “I’ve learned my lesson, being so close to the street during that last ice storm. Gotta plan ahead.”

“I think I’m going to hire than personal trainer and drop twenty pounds,” says the vine maple.

Of course, they are silent. They know not to make promises. They know that they are at the mercy of the weather, vulnerable to insects, dependent on the hummingbirds and the bees and the butterflies.

And so are the humans. We like to think it’s all about us, all up to us, our own striving and effort and conquests, as if time and the future are uncharted territories and all we have to do is conquer them and bend them to our will.

I can’t imagine subjecting my garden to the kind of discipline humans go through. I can’t imagine coming out here and screaming military chants at my tulips.

“Booyah! Man up and do it again!”

“Bloom faster, damnit! Hit the ground and give me twenty!”

There’s a cheering and encouraging that goes on out here on quiet afternoons and early mornings, but it’s one based on reverent observation, a parent watching their toddler learn to walk, listening as babbling becomes words.

And if we think it’s all up to us to sculpt this blobby future into something fitter, something more shapely, then it’s all on us when we don’t succeed, and that may not be true. If we take all the credit when we succeed, that only reinforces that we think we’re in charge instead of looking at how circumstances shaped either outcome.

We are not at the center, as much as we delude ourselves, pressure ourselves into thinking and wanting to believe otherwise. I can plant the buttercup bulbs, but a million little connections have to happen in order for them to grow, and I’m in control of very few of them.

Should we even bother to plant anything, then? Should we bother to make goals if so many other forces can interfere?

Of course we should. It’s our partnership with whatever creates us, whatever mysterious forces lead us forward. It’s our hand extended halfway, into the fog, where we can’t see what’s out there. But no plant ever bloomed because it was screamed at, starved, or otherwise subjected to extreme measures. Human beings are no different.

So I’ll go plant those buttercups. Even though I didn’t get to it yesterday because I was napping on the couch, I resolve I will do it today. I’ll extend a tentative hand out to whatever may want to hold it.

Heather Bartos has published essays in Fatal Flaw, Stoneboat Literary Journal, HerStry, and The Bluebird Word, and upcoming in McNeese Review. Her fiction has been in The Dillydoun Review, The Closed Eye Open, Tangled Locks Journal, and elsewhere, and won first place in the Baltimore Review 2022 Micro Lit Contest.

The Lamp in the Room

28 January 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Melissa Knox

The bell-shaped white lilies, stretching upward, concealing tiny light bulbs, charmed me. With the delicacy, though not the colors, of Art Nouveau, the lamp softened the room. There was a little white plug. I wondered why it wasn’t plugged in yet.

The furniture was white and mostly square, except for a small black leather sofa near the bed. Between it and the bed, a laminated white bedside table held my husband’s toiletries bag and plastic bottles of pills. The window, which didn’t open, looked out on the white, rectangular buildings of the university hospital. Beyond that, the road filled with pitched-roof German houses, tidy, so much neater than ours. From that road, I figured, he and I could walk to our house in six minutes. But he was never going to walk that road again.

“Oh, look at this pretty lamp!” I said, as the nurse wheeled him to his bed. He cast a blankly sad look at the lamp.

My husband knew what the lamp meant before I did. It didn’t charm him, I now think, because he’d correctly identified it. Where I just saw lovely design, he, raised Catholic, had seen many a virgin-and-child scene strewn with lilies, symbols of life after death. His tumor markers had vaulted up, after a few weeks of dramatic descent. His doctors couldn’t pull any more rabbits out of hats. A few days earlier, he’d had one last immunotherapy. The doctors said it had no side effects. My husband and I sat on his white bed and read the plastic bag listing the side effects, one of which was sudden death.

“It’s just death!” we joked. We spoke of the children and their triumphs, chatted about the one who’d gone vegan for a week and now demanded steak, discussed the wet spot in the left-hand corner of our guest room and how to repair it, held hands. “I couldn’t have asked for a better wife,” said my husband. What came out of my mouth was, “Please send a message to let me know you are okay.” I wished I could have taken that one back. It fell into the whiteness of the room.

The lamp was lit when I returned around one in the morning with my middle child. The room was white, but my husband was yellowing, his lifeless face looking surprised. He’d fallen forward so quickly he knocked over the nurse who was stabilizing his breathing. Just like that, what I knew would happen astonished me when it did—and now the white seemed the blankness of unknowing, the move toward “that undiscovered realm from which no traveler returns,” which we cannot describe—it’s white. Waiting for us to draw on when we get there? Or just nothingness? The room couldn’t tell me; the lilies gleamed—the lamp plugged in, the light shining.

Melissa Knox‘s recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Counterweight, Areo, Parhelion and ACM. Read more of her writing here: https://melissaknox.com

The Blur

22 January 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Joan Potter

Every day when I take off my glasses to brush my teeth, I see my blurry face in the mirror above the sink. I close my eyes before I start brushing so the mint spray won’t hit my sensitive eyes. But when I’m finished and put the glasses back on, the bathroom, the kitchen, the whole apartment is still fuzzy.

My eye condition, macular degeneration, was diagnosed three years ago, and is gradually getting worse; I know it can eventually lead to blindness. At two o’clock in the morning, when I tend to wake up awash in anxiety, I start thinking about what my life will be like as the blurriness, the distortions, the wavy lines and blind spots, keep getting worse. What if I can no longer read, or stream movies on my iPad? I wonder what people do all day when they can’t see.

I’ve been receiving treatment – regular injections into both eyes. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Searching online, I read about aids for people with what is called low vision. There are magnifiers of various sizes, voice-to-text software, text-to-voice software, and other devices I might have to use someday when my world gets foggier.

I try to avoid telling people about my diagnosis. When I do, I feel embarrassed, apologetic, and strangely ashamed. My sons know, of course. They drive me to the supermarket and Target and help me find things on the shelves. They watch me carefully when I’m walking with them to make sure I don’t trip over a bump that I didn’t see. I’ve told a few friends so they’ll understand why I can no longer drive to their houses or take long walks.

One of the first symptoms of this condition is the inability to make out faces of people seen from several feet away. It’s almost impossible for me to recognize acquaintances who are across a room or heading in my direction when I’m walking down the street.

Sometimes I see a friend, Lisa, coming my way. On warm days I know it’s her because she always wears a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, revealing her many tattoos. But one day her sleeves reached her wrists. I didn’t wave and smile as this figure walked toward me; when we were face to face I explained why. Now, whenever I bump into her downtown, she comes really close to me and announces, “I’m Lisa.”

Two weeks ago, a smiling woman waved to me in the library parking lot. I responded with a tentative gesture but couldn’t figure out who she was until she had already driven away. A couple of days later I squinted at a man relaxing on a bench in the sun near my apartment building. I thought he might have been one of my favorite neighbors, but it was too awkward to approach him for a chat, in case he wasn’t.

So far, the worst experience was when I didn’t recognize one of my closest friends, a woman I’ve known for twenty-five years. She was walking toward me on a downtown street. From the little I could make out, she appeared to be happy to see me. Hers was a face I had looked at hundreds of times. And yet, she had to do what Lisa had done, stand close to me and say her name.

For days afterward, I was haunted by the scene. Not only that I couldn’t see her face, but that I imagined she saw me as pitiable, a version of myself – once energetic and independent – that I’ve been trying to conceal.

Joan Potter‘s personal essays have appeared in several anthologies as well as such literary journals as Persimmon Tree, The RavensPerch, Bright Flash Literary Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Stone Canoe, New Croton Review and others. She is the author of several nonfiction books.