Category: Nonfiction (Page 7 of 11)

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.

orange leaf on chainlink fence — Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

The Leavings

17 January 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Susan Reese

I feel the days of parenthood creeping by, distant and unfulfilled. I hear the ticking of my children’s childhood clocks as that time passes forever by. Without a present and without a memory. These are feelings which fill my days and flood my heart with longing, the pain of separation and the melancholy of despair.
Lou Reese, #52760-080, 1992

You called late one night. You called every night, but it was unusual for you to call so late. After the kids were already asleep.

I was in our bed, exhausted from the day, finishing my tea and reading for a few minutes before turning out the light. That first year with you away in prison, it was hard to fall asleep.

We chatted about this and that. You had a new cellmate. Just arrived today. How was I holding up? Pretty good I guess. How was Beau’s sleepover with Orion last night? Fun. Uneventful.

I could tell there was another reason for the late-night call.

I closed my book and placed it on the bedside table. I turned off the lamp and lay on my back in the dark, holding only the phone, pretending you were lying next to me.

There was an awkward silence before you cleared your throat, lowered your voice, and said, “Susan, do you think it would be easier for the kids if you all stopped visiting me? Let them stay home, concentrate on school, their friends and having fun? Let them just pretend I’m away on a long business trip?”

My impulse was to comfort you, to say whatever I had to say to make you feel better, but my anger rose as I recognized your selfishness. I sat up and switched the light back on. Maybe that would be better for the kids, you’d said. My heart was racing as my eyes adjusted to the light. I was wide awake now.

How could you imagine our children not seeing you for three years? Hearing your voice from 800 miles away without seeing your face, or you theirs. Katie needing you for every precarious step from thirteen to sixteen. You were the most important male in her life. Beau needing you for the things I felt ill-equipped to handle. Sports, competition and before long, girls. And McKenzie—the baby. Needing you to be proud of her successes and your reassurance that she was not being disloyal having surrogate fathers for the first grade, father-daughter pancake breakfast and her first under the lights soccer game.

And me, needing you to be strong, to somehow manage to thrive. With the addition of everything else, were you willing to hand me the entire weight of parenthood for three years?

The longer we talked into the night, the easier it was for you to tell me the truth. I relaxed back into our bed and listened to you, my faraway husband.

“I don’t know if I can handle this, Susan. I’m ashamed, and I hate the kids seeing me this way.” Ashamed to be in the visiting room filled with strangers. The f***ing guards on red alert watching for a forbidden kiss between us. Ashamed of the count, having the kids watch as you line up subserviently with tattooed, long-haired inmates. Ashamed. “Every time you all come to see me, I don’t think I can stand it. When you all leave, I’m a total mess.”

Yes, the leavings hurt the most. Watching us walk away from you—off to the Comfort Inn as you head back to your dorm to climb up on your tiny top bunk, put your t-shirt over your face, and cry yourself to sleep. It would be easier for you to do your time on your own. Sure, probably. But at what cost to our kids? Not a price I was willing to have them pay.

Susan Reese is writing a book length manuscript dealing with the experience she and her family had when her husband, Lou, was incarcerated for three years. Writings include poems and essays written by Lou (the insider) and Susan (the outsider), reflecting the fact that the whole family was incarcerated.

The Rock Garden

10 January 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ron Theel

This time, I need a rock, not just any rock, but the right shape and size rock to finish the stone bench I’m making for my backyard. Usually, I find rocks easily. I forage the edges of farmers’ fields. I scavenge the curbs of newer-home neighborhoods, tracking my quarry, old stone leftovers from rebuilt patios and walkways. I bring these home like well-deserved trophies.

I’ve always appreciated stone, its beauty and durability. Things made from stone have simple lines and natural elegance. Stone endures without maintenance. No painting, staining, or waterproofing is required. I spent college summers working for a small company specializing in “stonescaping.” I learned how to use rocks and stones to beautify backyard landscapes by creating features such as waterless ponds and dry streambeds.

Today, I need Craigslist for help with the hunt. I scour headings like “free stuff” and “gardening.” That’s how I met Ilka. I saw her post, “landscaping rocks for sale, $20 each, your choice.” An email and text exchange later, I have the address and drive up to a small ranch-style home painted Easter-egg purple, nestled on top of a hill. Rocks surround her home and front yard. Tons of granite, sandstone, limestone, and more. Stacks of rocks line both sides of the driveway. The backyard is an overgrown field dotted with clusters of rocks like wild grapes waiting to be picked.

As I walk up the driveway, a woman approaches. She’s statuesque with timeless natural beauty: a tanned face framed by long, slightly graying, blonde hair, chiseled, high cheekbones, and turquoise eyes. She speaks in a deep voice, “I’m Ilka. I grow rocks in my yard. All kinds of them. They just pop through the ground like mushrooms after a spring shower. Let me know if you need help.”

I know where the rocks really come from. Ilka’s property rests upon drumlins, small hills of rocks and gravel deposited millions of years ago by receding glaciers. The alternate freezing and thawing of the ground during winter pushes new rocks to the surface every spring. I say nothing of this to Ilka. I’m sure she secretly knows that rocks cannot be grown.

It does not take long for me to find the perfect rock for the bench. It’s a large slab of limestone, beautifully imprinted with tiny seashells and fossils. Ilka helps me hoist the rock into the back of my SUV. “Come back in spring,” she calls. “I’ll have many more rocks.”

That night, I dream of Ilka, the Druid Queen. Ilka, the Earth Mother. I see her dancing and leaping across the yard, beneath a frosty autumn moon, weaving in and out of the rock piles. I hear her chanting an ancient runic rhyme, calling forth next year’s crop.

Ron Theel is an educator, mixed media artist, and freelance writer. His work has appeared in Lake Life and in the November 2022 issue of The Bluebird Word.

Faculty Recital

4 January 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Pama Lee Bennett

The college students straggle in, wearing shorts and graphic T-shirts. They no longer wear protective masks, nor do I. A teacher in jeans and a faded top posts a “quick response” code on the wall, and students crowd in to scan their attendance with their smart phones. I take a seat alone in the recital hall, on the aisle in the left section, where I will be able to see not only the featured flutist, but also my pianist friend’s hands as she accompanies her. The flutist, pretty, dark-haired, and unadorned in a black blouse and black trousers, enters the stage, followed by my blonde friend in a black, long-sleeved dress. They begin, and I lean forward slightly, listening, appreciative of the tone and skill of the flutist. It is my first concert in two years.

I enjoy the first several numbers: the “Andante Pastorale et Scherzettino,” by Taffanel; “Les Folies d’Espagne,” by Marias; the “Aria” by Dohnányi. The audience is still and attentive, the flute and my friend’s virtuoso piano filling the once-empty air. Even the unfamiliar tones of the Chinese variations, by Chen Yi, interest me. And then the flutist exchanges her soprano instrument for an alto flute, and they begin playing Arvo Pärt’s, “Spiegel im Spiegel,” and the low, slow, sustained notes reach deep into my being and bring me to tears. Missing pieces of my soul silently enter the room and tentatively float to where I am seated and hover above me, pieces that had left me behind when life became distanced and isolated.

Later, backstage, I hug my friend, and I am introduced to the flutist. I say how moved I was by “Spiegel im Spiegel.” She asks if I’ve ever heard an alto flute before. I say yes, once, at a master class given by the British flutist Trevor Wye. She exclaims, “I bought this flute from him!” I stare at her, then we smile. My missing pieces begin to fall gently back into place.

Pama Lee Bennett is a speech pathologist living in Sioux City, IA. She plays in a Renaissance recorder ensemble. She has taught at summer English language camps in Poland, and at a school there in 2019. Her poems have appeared in Bogg, Evening Street Review, Dash, and Tipton Poetry Journal.

The Gift

2 January 2023 / Editor

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Nonfiction by Cindy Jones

The brunch dishes lingered on the dining table. Clothes half-out of overnight bags and pillows lined the walls. Someone had cleared away last night’s wine glasses from the coffee table. Aaron Neville quietly sang “Please Come Home for Christmas.” I nudged two friends from their private patio conversation that it was time to come in.

He sat crossed-legged on the floor next to the tree, wavy hair the color of sunlit wheat and strawberries, locks falling into his eyes, wearing a too-small Santa hat and the softest red shirt, not bright enough to be crimson, not brown enough to be burgundy, it was carmine I think. I loved him in that shirt. He made jokes, called out names and passed gifts across the room to our daughter and friends, our hearts filled with laughter and the warmth of belonging.

That might have been our 15th Christmas or our 25th, they are a jumble in my head.

My hands moved the yarn over with the hook, and under and then pulled up a loop. I worked quickly through the simple repetitive motions, counting stitches as I sat alone in the radiation waiting room or rested in bed for months at home. The evidence of my obsession was a pile of crocheted scarves and wraps that threatened to collapse when I tossed on the latest one.

My daughter laid the old camping blanket down and slid the Douglas fir across the back seat. Through my rearview, its tip leaned out the open window, bending in the wind. I dreaded dragging up the ornaments from the garage and recounting the stories that went with each one. Christmas had abandoned me in a new house in a new town. What remained were gamma rays cooking me from the inside, my daughter leaving for her father’s house and me wandering the deserted hallways of my past, tripping over the shattered dreams and broken trust.

I walked down my dark hallway, pulled a new skein of yarn randomly from my basket and got back in bed.

“I made it safely Mom,” she texted, “I’ll miss you for Christmas.”

I pulled the covers higher and reached for my hook and yarn. Long lengths of gray drifted from light shades to dark, morphing into sections of carmine, and pops of yellow, warm as Christmas lights. I began to work, quickly and mindlessly at first and then the movements became slower and slower, and more deliberate.

The sensation wafted stealthily through my bedroom window, open even in December, settling in the middle of my chest before I could stop it, blanketing me like a newly fallen snow over the rage and devastation that festered inside.

I stilled my hands from the over-under, closed my eyes to the colors, quieted my mind from the counting, inhaled the sweet belonging that lived in me, and tasted the unexpected gift of grace.

Dear Louis, Today I am filled with the spirit of Christmas. I thought of you when I saw these colors.

After I wrapped the scarf in tissue paper and placed it in a small shipping box, I imagined his hand reaching in to lift it out, my note falling to the floor. I saw him raise his arms and slide it around his neck, brushing across his stubble to the small fine hairs on the back, as my lips used to do.

Cindy Jones is currently living her best life in Mazatlán, Mexico while navigating Stage IV cancer. She spends her days walking on the beach, enjoying live music, writing creative nonfiction and photographing the external world in ways that reveal our inner landscapes.

man hiking in snowy mountain — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Mount Kenashi

29 December 2022 / Editor

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Nonfiction by Victoria Clayton

Dear Mount Kenashi,

Our journey together started years before I first met you in the winter of ‘16. It was our first-time being introduced and to be honest, I wasn’t particularly enamored by you. You seemed cold and aloof, mysterious, and strange. To get to know you seemed rather arduous. Other things sparked my interest more, the warm embrace of hot spring waters, easy on the eyes snow-covered landscapes and sweet tasting fruits – all much more charming and needing less effort on my part.

For a few days we brushed shoulders, caught on the edges of one another’s existence. To be honest, I thought you were slightly brash and coupled with my inexperience I found myself constantly tripping over myself around you. However, I will admit, we did have a few good runs together but nothing like how others gushed of you. After that brief encounter we parted ways, said our pleasant goodbyes and despite my best intentions I never really expected to see you again. It wasn’t love at first sight, or ride. And I left you, with some fond memories and large indifference; but still, I did promise to call you again, someday.

Years passed by and my desire to see you grew further from my mind. Then this summer, I met some people who knew you. They spoke of your wonder, your warmth, and I knew I had to see you again. Five years later, to the day I found myself in the exact same spot, but this time round, I decided that I would try and get to know you.

It started like any dream would with snowy skies and easy rides. Green fueled adrenaline rushed through my being, and I couldn’t get enough of you. I rose early every morning to come and be with you until the last hours of daylight slipped below the horizon. For a short while the smooth, effortless gliding through the uncomplicated terrain of a new love as light as the morning’s freshly fallen snow was all I needed.

That was, until we hit our first challenge. Everyone who witnessed our whirlwind thought we were ready. Oh, how wrong they were. Ill-prepared for this first confrontation, we ended free-falling down the side of a slippery slope with nothing under our feet to grip on to. The honeymoon had hardened, and your colder side was revealed. Feeling humiliated and hurt I stumbled back into the arms of an old companion and warmed my weary body in healing waters. The next day, persuaded to reconcile, we tried again to find a solution, but neither of us had changed. I walked away tired and bruised; I needed a break.

In our time apart, I dreamt of you every night, your softness, your serenity. In waking hours, I tried to distract myself from thinking of you yet always found myself back, lost daydreaming in old albums. Determined to make it work I came back to see you. This time there was no blizzard or storm just blue skies propping up the illusion of harmony. I still dared not to reapproach the path of where we both got lost. I just wanted to have fun with you again. So, we did, all while ignoring the elephant in the room or rather the tanuki on the mountain.

Victoria Clayton is an artist, writer and wanderer living and working in western Japan.