Category: Nonfiction (Page 9 of 11)

Never Too Late

8 October 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Nick Wynne

I had no experience with fatherhood, nor did I have the kind of experience with my father that would have helped me to be a better one. My father was an alcoholic, and I and all my siblings bore the brunt of that. He could be kind, but he could also be harsh and emotionally abusive. Despite his shortcomings, he and my mother made sure that we grew up with strong moral values and work ethic. Although we went through periods of severe economic stress as a family, they sacrificed to ensure that we were fed, clothed, and loved. Tragically, as a family we didn’t articulate our love for each other until after his death. It was there, but we didn’t express it.

I must confess I never really understood my father until I was in my mid-30s. Only then did I understand that he was a brilliant man who could have been anything he wanted to with an education but was forced to leave school in the third grade and work to support his mother and family. We, his own family, were five in number, and he worked hard to support us despite knowing that every job he took involved hard labor and minimum wages. Nevertheless, he persisted. It is no wonder that he took to drink to relieve his frustrations at not being able to provide more. Hard to understand, but understandable.

I do know that I never told my father I loved him until he was on his death bed. My brother Joe and I were in his room where he was in a coma. Joe left for some reason, and I was there alone with him. He briefly opened his eyes and looked at me. I felt compelled to tell him face-to-face, “I never told you this, you old sonofabitch, but I love you.” He blinked his eyes, smiled a little smile, closed his eyes, and died.

Nick Wynne is a retired educator and published author. He is a native of McRae, Georgia but lives in Rockledge, Florida. His latest book is Cousin Bob: The World War II Experiences of Robert Morris Warren, DSC. His website is www.nickwynnebooks.com.

Photo by Ronaldo de Oliveira on Unsplash

Bridging

5 October 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kate Marshall

“So many of my patients love the bridge,” the new bone doctor says, readjusting his lowriding mask.

“All well and good, but I’m really not a bridge person.” We’ve just talked about bone-enhancing medications after and I’ve brought up how if I succumb, I might not be eligible for certain dental procedures should the need arise.

The doctor tells me about other options; self-administered daily shots, twice-a-year infusions, and a once-a-month new-improved coated esophagus burner.

I nod and stare at a series of anatomical charts of urogenital and skeletal systems, predominately male, anchored to the off-white walls, while the doctor types into his web portal. I don’t say that copays for the shots and infusions could run 50 grand a year with insurance.

“Hmmmmmm. We wouldn’t want you to fall and break a hip.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that.” I think of my aunt who’d fractured a hip after being knocked over by a neighbor’s Irish Setter after a bird club meeting. Aunt’s final bedridden years bemoaning life’s unfair burdens and cursing the neighbor and her horrible red dogs before her lungs gave out in the middle of a particularly dark night.

“Let’s take another peek at your results.” He readjusts his mask while he studies my longitudinal DEXA scans, which peg me as having the bone mineralization strength of an eighty-five-year-old woman despite my being twenty years younger.

As I wait for further wisdom or elaboration, I slide back that day in Nepal. My Ph.D. reward trek that included a four-week stint in a Buddhist monastery. On that day the wind was up, the river wide and the canyon walls high. The slated wooden footbridge swayed over the water. Most of our group had decided to cross upstream beyond the canyon. Three of us hefty Americans and a Nepali guide elected to walk the bridge. We ignored the sign in Nepali, English and French, forbidding more than two at a time on the bridge at the same time. I followed the marathon runner, and my pot-smoking friend, Big Jake from Fraser, Colorado who lumbered across with the help of some black market weed he’d secured in Kathmandu. From the far side, he and the runner waved, shouting encouragement.

If they could do it, I certainly could. I was prepared for the wind-sway and could fight the urge to look down. Don’t slip, don’t fall, eyes on the prize. Don’t look down. Don’t look down. One step at a time. As the bridge shook, I brought in every self-help cliché until I came to a section where loose and missing boards had opened a one-meter gap. Was that what Big Jake was trying to convey with all his shouting? I looked back at the guide who watched silently from the start side.

Just do it, the marathon runner yelled. Three feet is nothing. You can’t give up now. Give up? I was at least fifty percent in, and I wasn’t even sure that turning back was a safer option. Up the creek without a paddle. I spat out Buddhist mantras like I was on a timed game show. May all beings have safety including me and be spared suffering and come to equanimity, especially the equanimity part.

The doctor looks up from his computer screen. “If it was my mother or sister, I would definitely recommend medication. Life in a rehab center is not pretty.”

Forward or back. A plunge seems inevitable.

I scratch my cheek through my KN95. “Do you have a sister?” I know I’m playing gotcha. But what else can a woman do when she’s up against a “Good Doctor” and “Doogie Howser” combo?

“I’ll think about it,” I say, after he blushes, shakes his head, “no” and admits he’s an only child.

But I know when I leave, I’ll do my best to move beyond charts and pills. I’ll practice ass-falling without hands until I rewire my instincts. I’ll spend an hour a week one-foot balancing on a yoga block, while repeating the same damn Buddhist mantras that helped me over the chasm in Nepal where in the end I backtracked to the place where I started, joining the upstream group, where we cold-water forged the river, abandoning poor Jake and the runner to finish off the last of the pot.

Kate Marshall is a freelance writer living in Boulder, Colorado. She has been published in 50GS, Iowa Writes: The Daily Palette, The Selkie, The Ravensperch and The Chalice.

Jacaranda

29 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Alice Lowe

A stroll through Old Town on a quest for yard art yields a 7-foot-long bronzed hummingbird rain chain to hang in the corner of our porch. Returning to the car with our treasure, my spouse and I stroll up Juan Street under canopies of lavender blossoms, floating off trees, carpeting lawns and sidewalks, lighting gently on my hair and shoulders like a soft, sweet-smelling snowfall.

Each spring we’re stunned anew by the blooming of the jacarandas, their purple flowers feathering the sky, blanketing the ground below. They flourish in Southern California from April to June and in Australia during corresponding spring months. While both we and the Aussies like to claim them as our birthright, jacarandas are native to South America. The name, from the Guarani language, means “fragrant.” They represent wisdom and wealth, and if a flower drops on your head it means good fortune. Lucky me!

Gorgeous specimens abound in our San Diego neighborhood, but one tree on this Old Town jaunt brings me to a wide-eyed, gape-mouthed standstill. Tall and full, perfectly shaped, it towers over an unassuming ‘50s-era duplex. A VW bug parked in the driveway underscores the tree’s magnificence, emphasizing that it isn’t the purview of the privileged. The next day I’m still thinking about that tree—I have to see it again. “That one!” I say as we drive down the hill. My husband takes pictures of me surrounded by a cloud of lavender.

Gail, the protagonist in an Alice Munro story, travels from Toronto to Brisbane, Australia, where she’s astonished by the wildlife and landscape, the galah birds—rose-breasted cockatoos—and the blossoming trees: “The flowers are a color that she could not have imagined on trees before—a shade of silvery blue, or silvery purple, so delicate and beautiful that you would think it would shock everything into quietness.” A local tells her they’re called “Jack Randa.”

I lived for several years on a street bordered by alternating palm trees and jacarandas, one in front of my house. The fallen blossoms surrounded the tree in wide circles, and I would scoop piles of them into a basket that I’d place on my dining table, refreshing them regularly until the last blooms had fallen. Not everyone was a fan. “They’re so messy,” a neighbor complained, raking them off his manicured lawn. My housemate considered them a menace. “Goddamn purple flowers; they’re ruining my paint job.” Are you kidding? Get a car cover, I said. Park somewhere else.

That silvery blue-purple or purple-blue evokes the bluebells that Leonard Bast wades through in the movie adaptation of Howards End. They’re what I see when I imagine myself similarly ankle deep in fields of jacaranda blooms. I have a pot of lavender lobelia that stands in for them on the deck just outside my window. And a purple chenille bathrobe, it’s soft nubby texture a reminder in winter months of the treat in store for me come Spring.

Alice Lowe writes about life, literature, food and family in San Diego CA. Recent work has been published in Big City Lit, FEED, Borrowed Solace, Drunk Monkeys, Midway, Eclectica, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She’s been cited twice in Best American Essays Notables. Read her work at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

Voicemail

25 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Megan E. O’Laughlin

You can’t seem to do the things to help you feel better. You can’t keep food down, not with this feeling of something tied around your throat. You wake up in a cold sweat, a murder of crows in your head. You sigh when you send calls straight to voicemail; the number in the little red circle increases daily. You struggle to buy groceries, walk the dog, to drop the package off for the Amazon return. You can’t make that bottle of wine last longer than an hour. Your bad memories are now three-dimensional; they sit on the couch in the living room and eat all of your chips. You just can’t seem to do the things to help you feel better. You can’t even think of what those things are anymore.

Your friends and family notice. They say—are you okay? They seem worried, maybe even annoyed, and definitely tired. They all say it’s time to get some help; perhaps something can help, someone will tell you what to do, and then you’ll do it. If you get some help, they can feel some relief.

Something needs to change, but you aren’t sure what. You need to accept some things, but you aren’t sure how. So, you finally decide to do it. You type some words in the Google search bar: Therapists near my city. Therapists for depression. Therapists for anxiety. Therapists for grief. Therapy for I-don’t-know-what.

I probably received your message, but I rarely check my voicemail. Also, I don’t have any openings. And, I don’t take your insurance. Maybe your friend recommended me, your doctor gave you my name, or you liked my website. I’m that professional person with the education and approved license to do what you are finally ready to do: psychotherapy, some coping skills, process some childhood issues, psychological assessments, even medication management. We are psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, or licensed counselors. You tried to figure out the difference between all these things, and it doesn’t make much sense. All the acronyms blur together: LICSW, PsyD, LMHC, not to mention the things we do, that we spend years and thousands of dollars on, the acronyms like DBT, CBT, ACT, EMDR. What are these things? You don’t know. You just need someone to call you back. There’s simply not enough of us to go around, especially now, especially since the pandemic, and we are burned out too. So, I’ll give you some referrals. Maybe they are full, too, and don’t call back either. Or you can go to that agency, where brand new therapists are overworked and underpaid, and yes, I used to work there too.

Maybe you come in after you waited for months. You will tell me all about your childhood three times a week. Or I will prescribe you three kinds of medication; only one is habit-forming, one causes terrible side effects, and one seems to help. Maybe I will teach you some coping skills, listen with care, and start and end our sessions on time. I might fall asleep, call you by the wrong name, or ask you the same questions every week, and you realize, wow, this therapist has a terrible memory. Maybe I’ll cry when you cry, and you feel seen. Or I’ll sit with a stone face, and when you ask me a question about myself, I’ll say, “why do you ask that question?” Maybe we’ll meet for years, months, or just a few times, but our time together will change your life. Perhaps you’ll meet with me and then decide to meet with someone else, and then they will help you change your life.

Please know it’s not your fault that it’s this complicated. Please know it’s not my fault either and yet here we are, in this system, that doesn’t work so well for any of us. It’s not perfect, but don’t give up after one call. Call again. Send an email. Show up, and then show up again. I will show up, too. In our perseverance, we might find the things to help you feel better.

Megan E. O’Laughlin is an emerging writer and MFA candidate at Ashland University. She writes about mental health, ghosts, and mythology. Megan works as a therapist specializing in mindfulness and trauma recovery. She lives on a peninsula by the sea in Washington state with her spouse, child, and two dogs.

frozen wave against sunlight — Photo by Hernan Pauccara on Pexels.com

A New Heart From Somewhere

20 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ethan Kahana

Sitting quietly in my small room overlooking the graveyard, I heard a sudden burst of joy from the halls that got me out of bed for the first time that day. What I saw was a young, skinny boy in the same light blue gown that I had neatly folded in my room. His bony legs, splayed open to fit into the wheelchair, were remarkably long. And, most notably, his mouth was dropped open in shock as he set the telephone down on his lap. His mom, holding the heart medication that fed into her son’s IV, was crying while laughing. His dad simply stood there in silence, his head buried into the shoulder of one of the doctors.

They had been wearing the same clothes for days and the wrinkles showed. Both had the look of people who had been under extreme stress for a great deal of time; there were shadows on their faces that I previously deemed impossible. When they started walking through the halls as a family, we all whooped and cheered at the opportunity that this child was getting at a new life. A second chance, albeit an arduous one. When he passed me, I excitedly held out my hand to give him a high five. He stopped, looked at me with his big brown eyes and smiled, holding my hand in his own.

Elated, I paced around my room until the resident came by. Expecting him to be happy after participating in the joyous occasion, I was surprised when he sat down, hunched over, with his light blue eyes looking conflicted and almost mournful as he stared at the blank TV screen. When I asked him what was wrong, he mentioned how pediatric transplant was an extremely difficult rotation for him because while you do see lives saved, you also have to understand that his new heart comes from somewhere. I just stared at him.

Recently, I was observing a heart surgery on a six month old baby with aortic valve disease and was delighted that this difficult surgery went well. Although it took more than six hours, the surgeon told me that the patient should lead a normal life. As the baby was wheeled out of the room, looking so tiny and vulnerable with the pink scar on his chest, I noticed a sheet of paper on the counter: 15 months old, death by drowning.

Ethan Kahana is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan studying data science and pre med. He has work published in Idle Ink, Across the Margin, Potato Soup Journal, and Five Minutes.

gray and white wallpaper — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

Just a Glimpse

16 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Pat Hulsebosch

Scratchy stubble on long muscled legs. That memory from my 12-year old self comes unbidden in a lifetime of moments. Powerful for its uncharacteristic intimacy, and for its peek into a mother I seldom saw.

Our new color TV was reason enough to gather, and Sunday night was special. First came the magical fairy dust over Cinderella’s castle alerting us that Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was about to begin. The Ed Sullivan Show at 9 pm was a stretch, since tomorrow was a school day. But tonight, the star was Topo Gigio. I knew Mom hoped this squeaky-voiced charmer would occupy us while she got things done.

My younger sister and brother watched from the couch’s comfort, leaving me, the oldest at 12, to the maple rocker. Disdainful of that option, I sprawled at my mother’s feet as she perched stiffly in her recliner. A whiff of fresh paint mingled with the smoke of Mom’s cigarettes laced with Youth Dew as I leaned against her legs.

My brother’s and sister’s eyes were riveted as the diminutive puppet skipped onstage, pirouetting and bowing. But I had more important things to think about. My fingertips skimmed Mom’s calves as the sound of opera mixed with Topo Gigio’s giggles filled the air. Mom’s legs softened against my spine and I glanced up, knowing that my explorations could continue only as long as they went unnoticed.

We had recently settled into this new brick colonial. Our Texas to Florida move had followed my father’s fishing business. This house had been the lure that drew my mother across the Gulf, marking her success as a wife as my father’s just-built steel-hulled boat marked Dad’s cutting edge reputation in shrimping. With that boat Dad could now trawl farther and farther out into South American waters, staying for eight or more months at a time instead of the usual three. We barely noticed the difference.

Mom was usually on the move, bustling about, finding work where no one else would know to look, famous for trailing behind us, scrubbing floors as friends entered the front door. But tonight seemed different as she tenderly selected deckle-edged photos, one-by-one, from well-worn shoeboxes. Strange behavior for such an unsentimental woman, a fact attested to by my baby book, blank after the first page.

I was preoccupied with legs since I’d recently started shaving my own peach fuzz. Rumor had it that the razor magically left you with the smooth sleekness that every woman longed for. So far, I only been able to manage bloody nicks. As my hands ran up and down Mom’s womanly legs, I was startled by coarse prickly hair scattered from ankle to knee. Expecting the silken smoothness promised in Nair ads, I felt betrayed.

Ugh, is this what I have to look forward to? I wondered.

Mom glanced down.

“Patty, what are you doing? Stop rubbing my legs!” she scolded.

Caught, knowing I’d violated unspoken rules, I steeled myself to be banished. Instead my mother’s voice softened. A faint smile crossed her face, coupled with a faraway look. I was fascinated. Smiles were almost as rare as touch in our house.

“You know, my legs have always been my best feature,” Mom crooned. “When I was young my nickname was ‘Gams’ because I had terrific legs. See, take a look at this.”

Mom held out a snapshot. I recognized the Jersey Shore beach from summer visits to Grandma’s. A young woman stood on the beach on a bright sunny day, staring boldly into the camera, smirk on her face, hand on hip, as if she was in on a joke told just before the shutter clicked.

That’s my mother, I thought, noting the crisply ironed man’s dress shirt trailing over a barely visible two-piece Miss America bathing suit. Her bobbed brunette hair, flipped on either side to frame her face, seemed untouched by the sun and surf. The jaunty angle of her pose made this woman look ready to take on the world.

Her legs do look pretty good. Lean and strong and very long. Maybe I’ll have Mom’s legs when I’m older.

I was yanked back from the future by Mom’s voice as she continued.

“We were always fooling around, playing ball, hanging out at the beach, wandering around town,” Mom recalled.

“I felt like such a kid with this crowd. I was the baby in the family – really an afterthought,” she added. But I had brothers and sisters who looked out for me, and nieces and nephews who were my age,” she explained.

“How old were you there?” I asked.

“I was 28,” said Mom. “I’d come home from secretarial school in New York City. No job, no ambitions. Just having a good time, playing ball and going to the shore,” she added with a twinkle in her eye. “Then, two years later, your father proposed and friends said I’d better say yes since I this might be my only chance.”

Topo Gigio bowed and left the stage. I held my breath, longing for more, even as I began to inch away, sensing we were done. My mother stiffened as she stood up and briskly shoved the shoeboxes back on shelves.

“Bedtime you kids,” she commanded. The moment passed as suddenly as it had arisen.

As I drifted to sleep, I reveled in the brief transformation from dutiful, detached Mom, husband perpetually at sea, to another mother. Mom as the baby in the family. Mom as an overgrown kid in her twenties. Mom with the gorgeous gams.

Waking early next day I ran downstairs for another peek at the photos, another glimpse at a young woman with her life ahead of her.

Gone. The shoeboxes had disappeared.

But I’d now had a glimpse of possibilities. Possibilities of playfulness. Possibilities of intimacy. I vowed I would be that kind of woman and that kind of mom. Long muscled legs that went on, maybe even danced, scratchy stubble and all.

Pat Hulsebosch is a queer Pippi Longstocking wanna-be who writes about cultures and identities in a never-boring life of teaching and learning. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Columbia Journal, Lunch Ticket, Furious Gravity, Grace & Gravity, Vol. I, and The Washington Post.

worm s view photography of trees — Photo by Anton Atanasov on Pexels.com

Sunday Afternoon on the Eagle Trail

11 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

On a path towards peace, I wind my way past families, grandparents, children, couples, dogs, bikers — eclipse them and am surrounded by trees, stillness, and sun. Heat rises as I step past fallen leaves, pinecones, branches, roots, mud piles, marsh. Dry stretches crackle under my old tennis shoes, wet patches soggy with mud, leaving smears of earth on my calves.

At a fork in the dirt marked by wooden signs I read ‘Eagle Trail,’ follow the winged path deeper into the trees. Light shines through in spaces, dappling a canopy of leaves overhead, a crochet pattern of glaring green, rust red, burnt brown. I stop, listening to distant sounds of humanity, drinking in the moist scent of warmth. Only the breeze speaks, moving long grasses slow and tender. A rustle now and then, creatures scattering, hidden under fallen logs, months upon months of earth. A silent fluttering of yellow moth, I watch her fast flight. She could have spawn from the sun, she is so bright.

She lingers as the sun settles into my skin. Each step takes me further from the road, deeper down the path, zig-zagging past places where time matters. Into a space without, a space to just be.

There are signs of death among so much life, signals that nature runs a course and falls prey to a cycle. Not one destined by years or months, days or hours on a clock or calendar, but seasons of light and dark, warmth and chill, nourishment and hunger— the steady dawn and relentless night that comes. A tree may live hundreds, even thousands of years, but even it must rest. Like a giant trunk hewn from Earth, unmoored, with a pool of life underneath, even the greatest, oldest tree must sleep. (So many dead things amongst teeming life…the trail speaks to me of sadness and grief yet yields to acceptance and change.)

There is beauty in its space apart from us, in its perseverance to thrive. Wild iris, purple bulbs bursting from tall grass shoots in marsh waters. Ruby red Cape Fuchsia flowers droop upside down in bunches, their bleeding hearts like offerings beside the path. These are few but sparkle within a landscape of green, rust, brown. In the moss and algae covered waters swim turtles, their dark heads peeking up at blue bared sky.

I wait on the footbridge for a grandmother to lift her grandson to see them, exclaim how many he sees. Then he rushes past, small sandals clomping down the boards, grandma following. The turtles scatter as I bid them a quiet farewell.

I lift my face to the sun, breathe in—breathe out. Step forward, rising to meet the life that awaits on the other side.

Stacie Eirich is a writer, singer & library associate. She holds a Masters Degree in English Studies from Illinois State University. Her work has recently appeared in Art Times Journal, Avalon Literary Review & The Bluebird Word. She lives near New Orleans with three cats, two kids and one fish (www.stacieeirich.com).

bird flying — Photo by Frank Cone on Pexels.com

A Hawk in the Night

4 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Claire Galford

“All right, folks,” the naturalist says. “We’re about to start our Birds of Prey presentation. But please don’t step any closer than that line on the floor.” I get it—some of the larger raptors look as though they could rip your face off before you could flinch.

I’m at the High Desert Museum south of Bend, Oregon, a thoughtful and humane mix of live animals, history, Native American artifacts and native flora on the edge of the Central Oregon desert. The Museum is a great place for serendipity: you can wander around inside or outdoors without a plan and usually come across something new and interesting.

I’ve been distracted by the rattlesnakes in an exhibit adjacent to the Birds of Prey talk and am now trying to locate my family, probably outside at the River Otter Pond or the dirt-floored pioneer cottage. Poisonous snakes make me uncomfortable, and the Museum has some huge ones (“Big shouldered snakes,” as one tribal chair always described them to me). I notice the raptors and happily conjure up an image of the larger ones grabbing and eating the snakes.

The naturalist points out the floor-to-ceiling window across a stream to the large wire screen enclosure that’s home to the raptors when not being shown. “Now, all our birds at the High Desert Museum are rescue animals. All of them have some condition that makes it impossible for them to survive in the wild.”

He describes each species, its habits, characteristics and role in the high desert biome. He points out each bird’s disability (e.g., broken wing, partial blindness, injury to beak or talon) that keeps it from living out its life in the wild. I touch my knee, the one without any cartilage, that someday soon will end my running, my antidepressant of choice for 45 years.

One by one, the naturalist holds and describes each member of the Museum’s Birds of Prey cohort: Great Horned Owls, bald eagles, hawks, Golden Eagles, falcons and vultures. He lets a Red-Tailed Hawk perch on his arm, her talons gripping the thick leather glove that extends to his elbow.

“Now this gal here is different. Of all our birds, she alone does not have any disability or impairment. She is as physically healthy as she can be–a perfect specimen. Yet, she can’t survive in the wild, maybe less so than many of these birds that have been injured. Although she was born and raised in the wilderness, she was not raised as a hawk. She was raised to be a Great Horned Owl. I’ve been doing this for 19 years, and this is the first time I’ve seen anything like it.”

We have nesting Great Horned Owls at our place, and I’ve watched them for years. The big Owls do not build nests. They steal the nests of other sizable birds, usually hawks. Quite likely, there was a hawk egg in a nest that a pair of Great Horned Owls commandeered. They hatched and fed this hawk and tried to teach her their ways, and the hawk imprinted on the owls.

I envision her trying to hunt at night, in the darkness, to move around in the forest without making the slightest sound, to catch and eat animals like squirrels and skunks. But hawks have evolved to hunt by day, while riding wind currents, not from trees at night. Red Tailed Hawks aren’t large enough to kill and carry off many of the mid-sized mammals that Great Horned Owls feast on. In nature, this hawk would die from long, slow starvation, frustrated at her inability to do what her adoptive parents expected of her. She had never learned the ways of hawks growing up, and other hawks wouldn’t accept her as one of them. She was alone and unable to live as a member of either species.

The hawk’s plight resonates with me. I am a female born and, until recently, living most of my life, decades, in a male body. The divergence between my female psyche and my socialization as a boy and man, which started at the moment of birth and went on in a million subtle ways, has grown into a chasm. Yes, gender is a spectrum, not either-or poles, but our mainstream culture tries to impose a sharp divide between male and female roles. I know I should embrace my part in blurring gender dichotomy, in giving the generations that follow mine greater freedom to be who they are. Still, even at this late point in my life, it feels impossible for me to reconcile what I feel and what I have been taught. Like the hawk, I belong to neither world.

I long for connection, attachment, an escape from loneliness. Does something primal in the hawk ache to soar in the air currents high above the fields and forests like other hawks? Does she feel failure because she can’t emulate her owl stepparents? Does she yearn for a mate who will love her as she is? Does she, like me, hunger for a deeper bond with her own kind, to feel more comfortable in her own skin?

Claire Galford writes from the perspective of one who has lived as a boy, a hetero man, a trans woman and now, a woman. She writes about the emotional and interpersonal aspects of her lifelong journey to self-discovery and the costs and trade-offs involved.

The Place Between

29 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Susan Pope

Nothing but white. Walls, comforter, window shades, pale light leaking around the edges. Am I awake or dreaming? Is it night or day? I’ve lost all tethers.

The fury that delivered us here to Iceland spun out. In the calm, bird song. I slip from the warmth of my husband’s side, fumble for hat, coat, gloves, binoculars, and gently open the door.

“Where are you going?”

My eighteen-year-old grandson lifts his head from a pillow in the next bed.

“For a walk.”

“At 4:30 in the morning?”

He, at least, has come to rest on local time, while my body hovers between oceans and continents, time zones and eras. We pause between our home in Alaska and our destination, Paris, where we’ll join the rest of the family for a grand tour of Europe.

Moist air skims my cheeks as I hike a worn path to the lake. Steam lifts from the shore, drifting up from thick black mud. No other humans stir, but the birds sing, each in its own language. In the distance, whooper swans trumpet to each other, surely bowing and weaving their long, elegant necks in a courtship dance. Close by, Arctic terns, bodies sleek and silver in the luminous light, hover, swoop, snatch fish from the smooth water, and hum their raspy tunes.

I imagine a tall, sturdy Viking woman walking this same path. She’s slipped out of her sod hut, leaving her husband and children tucked beneath their sheepskin robes, on her way to fish for Arctic char or steal eggs from bird nests along the shore. She feeds her family.

By contrast, here I am, a small, American grandmother in a blue and purple hat, wandering with no other purpose than to spy on birds and guess their names.

This extravagant journey was my idea, a gathering of three generations before my teenaged grandchildren flee my grown daughter’s nest. I hope that a glimpse of the wider world will be my legacy to them. But, more honestly, the trip is a gift to me, as I turn seventy. If I can just hold my family close one more time…. What? They will love me? Remember me? Thank me?

Eric Erickson, the developmental psychologist, believed that the task of the last phase of life is to reconcile integrity with despair. If we look back on our lives and feel a sense of accomplishment, then we will feel complete, that our life had value. If we look back and feel guilty that we have not met our goals, then we will feel hopeless. The ultimate goal in this phase is wisdom. But, I feel neither wise nor hopeless, nor ready to declare this the final chapter of my life.

I reach a small clearing beside the lake. A weathered sign proclaims this ground—heated from the earth’s molten core—a sacred place. People once traveled here for healing. Now, it’s overgrown and neglected. Perhaps no one needs to make a healing pilgrimage anymore. I move to the center of the weeds and wait for a tingle of enlightenment. Instead, I feel only the warm ground at my feet and cool breeze on my face.

My mother turned seventy the year my daughter turned twenty-one. Their birthdays were two days apart, so we held a double celebration, my daughter reaching adulthood, my mother, wisdom, or at least longevity. I discounted my mother’s life then. I tried my best to be nothing like her. She had no interest in education, career, travel, or anything broader than taking care of husband and family. By contrast, I layered my life with diplomas, careers, and travel to exotic places. It was never quite enough.

I turn back, heading up the hill to the old school turned tourist hostel. Just as I fumble for my key, the night clerk rushes to open the door for me. He must have been watching the crazy woman roaming among the birds.

When I enter our room, it smells of sweat and damp clothes. Old man and boy man. I slide off my coat and shoes and slip back into the cocoon for a few more minutes, close to my men with their soft snores and grunts.

I don’t know if my mother felt wise when she died twelve years after her seventieth birthday. I do know that she was content to fiercely love the small cluster of people she kept close to her. Maybe that’s enough of a legacy for anyone to leave.

Susan Pope writes about nature, travel, and family. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, and Alaska Magazine, among others. Her writing reflects intimate ties to the North and a restless pursuit of faraway places.

selective focus photo of white petaled flower — Photo by Ithalu Dominguez on Pexels.com

What I Can’t Forget

28 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Caryn Coyle

That morning, I don’t remember waking up, what I wore, or how I felt. I do remember Leigh picking me up in her Ford Bronco. Her son and daughter watched me from their booster seats in the back of her car. I remember green. Maybe a hedge, maybe grass next to a parking lot. The building looked liked a cement box. She left me there, saying she would return later. She couldn’t find a sitter.

Her kids are grown now. She has two grandchildren.

I waited in a room with blinds on the windows. I couldn’t see out. I was nervous. Sick to my stomach. I had been throwing up and my breasts felt huge; sore and painful to touch. I was directed into a small office with no windows and sat by a desk. A woman in a white nurse’s uniform and a navy blue cardigan sat behind the desk and asked me my name. I remember asking her if I had to give my real one.

I wanted to be anonymous. If there was no record of my being there, I could forget it. Hide from it. Never speak of it again.

My next memory is the one I cannot block. The one that haunts me forty years later.

I lay on my back. My heart pounding. My head aching. I thought I had no other option.

It sounded as though he was surprised to hear from me when I called him.

“What’re ya? Pregnant?”

The tone of his voice was sarcastic.

When I said, “Yes,” he was silent.

My head crackled. The quiet was disturbing.

“Well, you’re gonna’ get rid of it, aren’t you?”

We met at a bar. He stood near the door to the restroom, smoking. One of his eyes was a different color than the other. He smiled at me; small, yellowish teeth. He asked me my name and when I told him, he said that the woman he had just divorced had the same name.

He lived on the main floor of a large house that had been divided into apartments. His bedroom had been the original living room. It had big, bay windows. His kitchen, at the back of the house, was narrow and he made me breakfast, cutting a round hole with a drinking glass he turned upside down into the soft center of a slice of bread. Cracking an egg, he emptied it into the hole in the bread and grilled it, telling me that was how his nanny had cooked him breakfast when he was little.

He drove a Volkswagen and took me sailing on a boat docked in Annapolis. We could walk to Orioles games at Memorial Stadium from his house. Together, we picked up pizza from a place with a sticky strip over the counter, heavy and black with flies. Eating that pizza in bed, we didn’t care about smearing the sheets with sauce.

Then, he just stopped calling.

I got pregnant after a Friday night happy hour. Walking into a new place — a sports bar — I spotted him. It was loud, crowded. Music thumped over all the voices and I felt my heart beat in my forehead when he smiled at me with those small, yellow teeth. A cigarette between his lips.

I said “yes,” too quickly when he asked me if I wanted to follow him home.

On the bed in the room with the bay windows, I wanted him to love me. But I wasn’t someone he wanted. I was the woman with his ex-wife’s name who would follow him home.

The doctor was short. He wore green scrubs. A frown.

My feet in stirrups, a sheet over my legs blocked my view. I didn’t feel anything. I remember a whirring, buzzing sound and I watched the ceiling; white pocked marked rectangles.

The recovery room had several cots and I listened to other women moaning. I thought they sounded pathetic. I wouldn’t join them. I had counted back to the night with him and thought the fetus was five weeks old. I have searched illustrations in medical books to see what a five week old fetus looks like. I have also tried to console myself by calling it a zygote. Not a real being, not yet.

I hope it couldn’t feel anything.

Throughout the decades, I have wondered what the child might have been like. I think of how old he or she would be. I tell myself I had no other option. He didn’t want us.

A nurse brought me my clothes, a prescription for tetracycline and a Kotex pad. On the curb outside the cement building, I waited for Leigh. The curb was warm. It was the kind of spring day that was meant to be enjoyed.

Leigh pulled up with the kids still in the back seat of her car.

When I opened the Bronco’s door, she asked me if I was all right.

I told her I was and turned to look at her children. They watched me with big, brown eyes. Neither of them spoke. I doubt they remember; they were too young.

Leigh stopped the car by the sidewalk to my apartment building and said, “Just forget about this whole day.”

“It never happened,” she added as I closed her car door.

Lying on my side, in bed, my legs folded up to my chin, I watched the light blue, streamlined telephone on my bedside table. I didn’t pick it up to call him and it did not ring.

Caryn Coyle edits creative nonfiction for the Baltimore based literary journal, LOCH RAVEN REVIEW and her work has appeared in more than three dozen literary publications. She lives in Massachusetts.