Category: Nonfiction (Page 6 of 11)

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The Old Photographs

3 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Joan Potter

My ex-son-in-law, who’s been out of my life for several years, just mailed me two photographs. I’m looking at one of them now. It’s an 8 x 10 print, in muted colors overlaid with a faded golden tint. Resting on a table in the foreground is an oblong Pyrex dish holding the remains of a green bean casserole, some creamy sauce still coating the inside corner. Next to it is an earthenware bowl with a spoon balanced on its edge, and a glass half full of red wine.

Across the table sit three of the dozen or so family members celebrating Thanksgiving in my daughter’s dining room. I’m on the left, wearing a red ribbed turtleneck, my grey hair cut short. I’m looking off in the direction of someone out of the picture.

Next to me is my youngest grandson, still with the chubby cheeks of a twelve-year-old. He’s smiling as he digs into his plate of food; he always loved to eat. On his other side is his teenage cousin, face partly hidden by the wine glass in the foreground, glancing with amusement at his young relative.

We always gathered for Thanksgiving dinner at the house my daughter shared with her then-husband and their two girls. It was just a few miles from where my husband and I lived in our New York City suburb. Their house had the most room, as well as a fireplace we could relax in front of after dinner.

The second photograph my ex-son-in-law enclosed was taken in the living room. In this one, my eldest granddaughter, a teenager then, is in the foreground, strumming a guitar with her lips parted in song. My husband, wearing a colorful sweater and khaki pants, is seated in a chair near her, looking thoughtful.

These pictures were taken almost twenty years ago. I don’t know why my former son-in-law decided to send them now. Perhaps he’s feeling sentimental. He and my daughter have been divorced for several years – amicably, she says. The chubby-cheeked grandson is now thirty, an engineer. His older cousin, my second daughter’s son, works on an upstate horse farm. I never hear from him.

The guitar-playing granddaughter lives in a small Midwestern city where she moved to be close to her younger sister, whose husband is studying at the university there. The younger sister is now planning to file for divorce. The older one, the guitar-playing one, is pregnant with her first child. She says she’s been having some problems with her boyfriend, the baby’s father, but they’re working things out. My husband, who was pensively listening to his granddaughter’s song, has been dead for six years.

Now that I’ve pored over these two photographs long enough, there’s no reason to keep them. They’re too big to store and the quality is poor. I already have closet shelves full of albums and boxes stuffed with hundreds of pictures of family as toddlers, teenagers, new parents, grandparents. It can be both enjoyable and painful to sift through them – my mother and father smiling in front of their California house, my four kids eating lobster rolls in Maine, and the many images of my husband, looking proud and content, with various babies resting on his lap.

Joan Potter‘s personal essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals. Her piece, The Blur, appeared in the January, 2023 issue of The Bluebird Word. Her work has also been published in Persimmon Tree, The RavensPerch, Bright Flash Literary Review, Iron Horse Review, and others. She has published several nonfiction books.

The Leaving Moment

9 May 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Tracey Ormerod

I don’t remember packing, but my things must have been on the truck: the plastic-yellow colander I still use every day, the one he cursed while poking the holes with a corkscrew to dislodge spaghetti starch; and the crock pot—just last week, it slow-stewed the roast.

I do remember what couldn’t go on the truck: the propane tank. Over thirty years later, the moving guy no longer has a face but I can still see his burly body hauling it over to where I stood and dropping it at my feet. The lawn muffled the thud. “It’s full … can’t go on the truck.”

He left it there and went back to lift off the truck ramp. He was ready to leave. I turned to my mother in a panic. “What do I do with it? Do I just leave it here?”

He softened and came back. “Here, you open it up, like this.”

He turned the valve. The tank whistled.

Researchers say we alter our memories every time we look.

Quantum particles are like that too. Scientists can’t watch them without changing them, so they’ll never know how they behave when no one is looking. Nonetheless, they can’t help themselves.

Maybe that’s why countries and cultures carve their collective memories deep into stone and story.

Families collect them too. They share ‘remember whens’ that hold their tales together, until there’s a rupture and the timeline becomes a shredded thread of itself.

In a review^[1] of the film, Women Talking, Eliza Smith reflects on her missing memory of leaving her first marriage:

“I may not be able to recall my own leaving moment … but I do remember the precarious, optimistic feeling of leaving one world for another that didn’t quite exist yet.”

She mentions a friend who can’t remember her leaving moment either. So, for the first time, I learn there’s at least two other women like me.

How many of us are out there? A collective without a memory.

I don’t remember why he didn’t get the tank, except maybe the barbecue had been a gift from my side of the family, like the bone china and crystal bowls.

I also don’t recall where my two-year-old was that day.

And then there’s the house keys. How did they get dropped off with the real estate lawyer? I’m not even sure how we sold our house; I don’t remember any sales agents or buyers.

So many details that would’ve been important at the time, while the only other thing I can remember is a song that played on the car radio: Wilson Phillips singing “Hold On, things can change. Things can go your way …”

We leave home. We get left—they say there’s fifty ways to leave a lover. Sometimes, we leave the country. There’s also the countless tiny leavings, like after a dinner date or a party.

We arrive. We leave. Over and over and over until, at last, we depart dearly.

I don’t remember why the mover left the tank with me, except maybe he was hungry and took a lunchbreak. It was full and emptying it would take time.

Even when gas weighs heavy in a tank, it comes out invisible, but I stood there and stared down at it like there was something to see while it hissed like a snake in a pressure cooker, making my leaving loud for the neighbours watching from behind their bay window sheers.

Silent together, we couldn’t help but watch as it grew quiet and the frost spread all over the tank, the kind that burns when you touch it.

^[1] Smith, Eliza. “The Most Satisfying Me Too Movie Yet.” The Cut, January 20, 2023. https://www.thecut.com/article/women-talking-me-too-movie.html.

Tracey Ormerod is a Canadian writer and photographer. After growing up in the wilds of the city, she now lives among the forests and farms of rural Ontario. At times an accountant, business analyst, website consultant, and classroom teacher, she is now enjoying a writing life. Read more at https://traceyormerod.com.

The Litterer and I

30 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Marcia Yudkin

This year the litter is blue – a bright, metallic hue found nowhere in nature. Not even our lake sparkling in the reflection of a cloudless sky matches that color. Nestled among stalks of ragweed or heaps of dried-up leaves along the roads near me, blue cans glint in sunlight.

In the past I spotted much more variety in the tossed-out containers: amber Michelob bottles, fruit-colored hard-seltzer cans, translucent one-shot nips of brandy or vodka, red pop-tops sporting the distinctive Coca-Cola script and white Budweisers speckled with red and blue swirls. But this summer and fall, it’s overwhelmingly blue Bud Lights blighting the roadsides.

For years I’ve waged a secret campaign against such aluminum discards. During my daily five-mile walks from home, if a can catches my eye in the quarter-mile or half-mile stretches without any houses I’ll gingerly pick it up and drop it off in the brush beside the next driveway. The cans normally disappear within a week rather than start to form a junkyard. In this way, I spread responsibility for restoring nature’s harmonious palette of greens, grays and browns, so restful to experience.

Why don’t I instead blitz through my walking routes once in a while, adding all the tossed-away cans to a trash bag like a reverse Santa Claus? Humorist David Sedaris did this obsessively in West Sussex, where he lives, his hauls becoming legendary to the point that his district named a garbage truck “Pigpen Sedaris” to honor him.

For me, though, the idea of getting known in my neighborhood as a trash vigilante makes me uneasy. While some would applaud my public service, others might kick dirt in my face over it, like the gun-loving guy one town over who taunted his opposite-politics neighbor by plunking a ratty old portable toilet at the outlet of their shared driveway. It feels safer not to be conspicuous, to carefully stick to the path of peaceful co-existence.

Until this summer and fall, I assumed from the variety of roadside trash that it came from random passers-through, drivers from other towns who had no reason to care if they littered here. “Why do people do this?” I once asked a hiking buddy who grew up in our area. In Massachusetts, Anne told me, it’s illegal to have an open container of anything alcoholic in a moving truck or car. For some reason I didn’t know this.

People who chug a beer on the way home from work therefore toss the can when it’s almost empty, Anne said, so as to not get in trouble if a cop stopped them. Yet never once in 20 years have I seen anyone pulled over by police on our back roads – not for speeding, for having an out-of-date inspection sticker or for anything else. Or maybe they didn’t want folks at home to know how many beers they were drinking.

And now because almost all the cans matched one another and because new empties would show up like overnight tin mushrooms right after I cleared a stretch of road, I began to suspect that this was from just one Bud Light fan who lived nearby. If I tracked where the blue discards appeared and which roads never had them, mightn’t that indicate the culprit’s homeward route – and maybe lead like breadcrumbs to his location? Perhaps he (yes, in my mind it was a man) would nod nicely when I told him the impact of his tosses onto seemingly neglected yet actually cherished verges.

After all, soon after my husband and I first moved to the country, a guy who often canoed in the marsh behind our house came by and complained that the regulation-blue tarp we’d hung up to shelter our back deck from rain spoiled his view. Couldn’t we put up something brown instead? Surprised, we replaced the tarp – almost exactly the vivid hue of the Bud Lights bothering me now – with something matching our dark wood shingles. Since then, the natural colorscape I live amongst has grown on me.

But most likely the litterer would respond with “Who do you think you are, lady?” Right. Who do I think I am? Am I being righteous or self-righteous? Asked in my imagination, the questions echoed and echoed.

As a cleanup fairy, I’m not doing any harm, I finally decided, especially if I move the litter to unobtrusive staging areas instead of next to driveways. One Saturday I hauled seventeen half-smashed blue beasties to the town dump along with my own week’s trash. Soon a blanket of white, growing higher and higher, began to cover any cans I missed. And when the winter sun twinkled, winking at me as I walked were Bud Light-colored reflectors, waist-high on long metal stems, telling the snowplows where not to go.

Marcia Yudkin lives in the woods of Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960). The author of 17 books, she publishes a Substack newsletter called Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com) in which she critiques society’s myths and misunderstandings about introverts.

Counting

18 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ann Bracken

I always count. Drinks, that is. I notice how many times a guy refills his beer glass or how many glasses of wine my friend drinks. I used to count my husband’s beers every night—up to three, he was pretty nice. After that, at around five, he went one of two ways—either he fell asleep on the sofa and snored like a buzz saw or he wanted to have sex. Go figure, especially after so much alcohol.

I counted how many cases of beer I had to buy a week. Why did I have to buy the beer anyway? I wasn’t drinking it. I hated beer, its stickiness, its stale smell in the morning when he didn’t finish a can. I drank wine, but usually only one glass. The two hangovers I’d experienced in college acted as powerful deterrents. And looming over every social occasion, the specter of my mother’s alcohol abuse clung to me like a shroud.

Parties were the worst—when he had too many beers for me to count. I could always tell because he’d come find me, and spit out a barrage of cruel jokes.

One of his favorite lines went like this, “Man, you should see her when she stumbles around the badminton court. She couldn’t hit the birdie if it flew into her racket.”

If we were playing pool, he gave a running commentary of every shot I took. “Whoa, first time you ever picked up a cue, sweetie?” or “If you want to be sure and win, just ask Annie to shoot a round with you.”

He’d get everyone laughing at me and then refuse to leave the party when I’d had enough. He always drove home. I was so numb to his drinking and pot smoking, I never questioned his fitness to drive.

“Sounds like an alcoholic to me,” the counselor said when I described how Randy never appeared drunk even after five or six beers. “High tolerance. That’s a sign.”

I never connected Randy’s drinking and his abusive behavior because he always teased me or made fun of me in front of people. It was just worse when we were at parties and I couldn’t leave when I’d had enough.

After the divorce, I dated a great guy—a lawyer at the EPA who invited me to dinner and a jazz concert. He had a martini before dinner, and I joined him. Then he ordered a glass of wine. I began counting. On our second date, he told me one of his brothers was homeless because he was an alcoholic. “My dad’s an alcoholic, too, but he always kept his job.” I figured his odds for having a problem. Every time we went out, he had a martini or Manhattan before dinner and then some wine. I kept counting.

“Last night, I went to a dinner party with some friends, and I had too much to drink.”

“What does that look like?” I asked.

“Not much. I just get kind of loud and talk a lot. Make stupid jokes.”

Sometimes the danger signals flash early. My stomach lurched as he described his embarrassing behavior, which sounded all too much like Randy’s.

“That’s not going to work for me,” I told him. I added “bad dinner party behavior” to his count.

One night as he measured out gin for his martini, he spilled it on the counter. Before I could give him a paper towel, he bent over and slurped it up. The next morning, I asked him if he’d ever gone to AA. “Yeah, but only because my ex-girlfriend insisted. I’m not really an alcoholic.”

I totaled up his count. “If you want to keep seeing me, you need to stop drinking and go to AA.”

He called me a few days later. “It’s 9PM and I’m having my first glass of wine for the evening.”

When I asked if he’d made a decision, he said, “You’re almost enough to make me stop drinking.”

I was tired of counting.

Ann Bracken has published three poetry collections and a memoir. She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series in Columbia, Maryland. She volunteers for the Justice Arts Coalition, exchanging letters with incarcerated people to foster their use of the arts.

When Stars Align

11 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Simone Kadden

Schlepping past tailgaters in parking lots isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was my
mother’s. She stopped to examine a plate, a vase, or a necklace and speak to the vendor about a similar one in a distant place. Then, she’d put it down, and we’d move down the line.

When she was in her nineties and used a walker, we opted to drive into the countryside for our treasure hunts. Traveling along curvy back roads with handwritten road signs, we scrounged odd shops offering catches that otherwise detoured to the dump.

Scavengers have their Holy Grail—tea cups, costume jewelry, bird cages, dishware, and figurines. For us, it was buttons. As a kid, I collected them in a tin when I wasn’t arranging them on the floor. Each was a piece of art, distinct in size, shape, and design.

Aunt Lisel, my mother’s older sister, was my leading supplier. As Head Seamstress at Bergdorf Goodman, Manhattan’s premier department store, she brought buttons from coats, suits, and gowns she altered for the rich and famous. “Where did you get this one, Tante Lisel?” I asked, and she described in detail the article of clothing and its prominent owner.

One day, my mother and I took a 20mph cruise down a sleepy main street in a mountain town. Suddenly, my mother extended her left arm and grabbed my right elbow. “Hold it! Slow down and park the car.” I followed her orders and helped her out of the car. We walked a short distance until we stood before The Button Up, where the window displayed bolts of fabric, yarn, and crocheted throws. Blanketing the entire black floor were buttons, studs, and toggles made of velvet, glass, leather, pearl, rhinestone, and fabrics in vibrant colors, dazzling like the night’s brightest stars.

“When you were little, we collected buttons and kept them in a container, remember?” my mother asked, without turning from the display.

“Of course, I remember. We had a tin with triangle-shaped wafers on the lid we always struggled with, as if its bottom were bigger than its top.”

My mother laughed at what she had forgotten. “On rainy days when you were a little girl, we sat on the floor for hours, spreading them out and making pictures.”

“Remember when we had enough duplicates to design twins?” I asked, to which she knowingly nodded.

I still had the collection at home and wanted to go spill out all the buttons, thinking, like a Ouija board, they’d offer a mysterious projection into the future.

“When I was four,” my mother began, “my wild imagination was my best friend after my mother died, and I dreamed the impossible. My grandmother’s apartment was on the first floor of our house. I loved to visit her and thought my mother would be there, hiding behind the couch or under the bed where I liked to crawl.

“My grandmother would take all her buttons from a black silk coin purse and create designs on the dining table. ‘Let’s make something pretty that your mother would have loved,’ my grandmother would say. Sometimes she mentioned one button came from my grandfather’s coat or another was from my mother’s sweater. It was a lovely distraction for a sad little girl.

“The emerald glass buttons, the enamel ones with gold filigree, and the square silver-plated ones found homes in my creations. The jewel tones reminded me of my mother’s green eyes, though her jewels had gold flecks dancing in them.

“One autumn day, during the afternoon’s waning hours, Oma Julie entered the room with the silver tray holding hot cocoa and homemade butter cookies. She placed the tray on the table, and from the buffet, she retrieved a bundle tied with a purple ribbon. I unwrapped it to find a deep burgundy velvet pillow, the color of grapes in the vineyards that blanketed the hillsides. Sewn on the pillow were buttons duplicating the image we last created. A little face (me!), a house with a black chimney churning out brown and gray buttons resembling smoke, yellow and white flowers, and the sun peeking out from the pillow’s corner.”

My mother wanted to show her mother what she and Oma Julie had created, even
though my mother didn’t know when that might be. Her sweet memory continued.

“I hugged Oma Julie’s tiny frame and put my face against her neck. I inhaled the jasmine-scented soap she used. The warmth of Grandma Julie’s body encircling mine, the scent of freshly baked cookies, and the beautiful pillow left me missing my mother more than ever, and I unraveled into tears. My lost mother, wherever she was, had come from this petite woman, and in my child’s mind, I thought my mother might be nearby and return to the place from which she came.

“My Grandmother slowly pulled away from me. Her gentle hands cupped the sides of my head. She looked at me intently, as if hoping I would record the moment within my young soul.

“‘Gretel,’ Oma Julie said softly, ‘this pillow is for both of us. What we share is ours forever. We will keep this pillow as a reminder that people sometimes leave us and don’t return, but they are not lost. Every day we find them again. We only need to know where to look.’”

My mother sighed deeply and shifted her gaze from The Button Up window to me, indicating the story had ended. She looked at me with what I believe was the same look her grandmother gave her 90 years earlier. With a slight shake of her head, as if releasing a moment, my mother asked, “Now, how about some hot cocoa and cookies?”

It sounded like a tender toast to another time.

My mother stores her memories like a squirrel stashing nuts within a tree trunk. She retrieves them one by one, and when the stars align, she reaches for her silver tray.

Simone Kadden lives in Madrid with her husband and rescue dog, Lulita. She’s collected stories, relationships, jobs, and dogs in Manhattan, DC, Chicago, Boston, and Sonoma County. She taught at Harvard, worked at The Washington Post and on U.N.-sponsored projects, and wrote two books for the University of Michigan Press.

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.

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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.