Category: Nonfiction (Page 9 of 11)

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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We Were Bugs

24 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Thomas E. Strunk

Growing up in a trailer park, one rarely feels significant. But we still had the bugs to look down on. I don’t know what went wrong with me, a boy from the forest bothered by bugs. Sure I was fascinated by the water-skaters that danced over the crick out back. I stood in awe at the ant hills we’d come upon in the woods, but had no desire to poke them. At best I ignored the daddy-long-legs that crawled over the hillside in summer. Yet at some point in my youth a fear crept in at things that crawled, perhaps it was a late-night movie, but more likely the katabasis I endured when I was twelve, my descent multiple times beneath our siding-enclosed trailer.

A real man of the woods my father, not frightened to inch his way along the length of the trailer and then creep to the other side where with flashlight and wrench he could turn off and on again the water. He wasn’t the kind of man to worm his way out of his responsibilities.

“We’ve got to crawl under there so I can show you how to deal with the water.” But I was not that man and begged off the mission.

“Can’t you just do it before work?”

Until my father made it clear, “And leave you with no water all day? There is no choice.” For the workers were coming to the trailer park when he was at work, and I was at summer bored and idle and able to go inching my way under the trailer.

And so I followed him on my belly the long way – the door through the siding at the back left of the trailer, our journey’s destination, the water pipes at the front right, so I could learn, like him, how to turn the water off and then on.

The next day, alone and reluctant, I entered through the siding door and left the daylight behind me. I held the flash light before me but did not look at what it illuminated for fear what I might see; rather I wriggled in the light’s general direction. I crawled with all that was under there in the darkness, sweeping cobwebs as I went. I made it to the water pipes and plied the wrench hurriedly, hoping I had twisted it enough to choke off the water. And then the return, always harder than the descent. I turned myself around on the dirt and made my way towards the light peeking through the siding door, far in the distance at first. Yet I hastened and did not turn to see what I left or what followed behind me. I came at last to the exit and crossed the threshold.

When I emerged from beneath the trailer into the light, I did not come forth braver or with new knowledge that I gained along the way, but joyful to see the blue sky and its birds free to fly above the ground. I feverishly shook off the dirt and whatever bugs had found me, never wanting to know their wisdom.

Thomas E. Strunk explores nature and working class life and strives to express the longing for spiritual, emotional, and political liberation. His literary work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pinyon, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Northern Appalachia Review and East Fork Journal. Thomas blogs at LiberationNow.org and lives in Cincinnati.

The Basil

20 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Emily Rankin

He bought it during quarantine, on one of our rare outings. He’d decided spur of the moment to make a new recipe, and we found ourselves wandering the grocery aisles at 8pm. He needed fresh basil, and I suggested we buy a small plant in place of a plastic carton of browning stems.

I padded into the kitchen the next morning and found it, wilted and half dead, on its side on the countertop. He’d used a handful of leaves and left it to rot. I considered abandoning it there, letting it go to show him what he’d done. But it looked so small and hurt and tired. I stood it up, pruned the decay from it, and set it in water on the sunny windowsill. I tended to it, and it was happy. It grew to be nearly two feet tall, and I bought a real pot for it, and soil. He never looked at it, never watered it. I wondered if he felt guilty. I hoped he did.

It came to me in dreams. I’d see myself, in the kitchen in the night, finding it dead. Pulling it from its pot and seeing strange roots all through the soil. Then looking more closely and discovering that it was in fact very much alive, new shoots everywhere, overtaking everything.

When I finally got out of that house and into my own apartment I took it with me, hung a shelf for it high enough that the cats wouldn’t disturb it. Watered it, added new soil.

That summer I was gone most days, no air conditioning in the place. The basil started to wilt and shrivel and no matter what I did it wouldn’t stop, until all that remained were two gnarled sticks with a few inches of new growth at the ends. I thought it was as good as dead, and it made me more sad than I’d like to admit. I gave it water and set it on the porch, in the noontime sliver of sunlight, to live out its final days with the wind against its face.

But it didn’t die. It hung on, struggling and stagnant at first, then finally growing again, slowly, in ever more bizarre twists. New shoots completely sideways, leaves sprouting at odd junctures, those two remaining branches twined like ivy. I was afraid to pull any leaves from it, afraid I might disturb its new health. After a month, I finally began to trust it wouldn’t die. At least, not imminently. I gave it new soil, more water. Set it outside in good weather. What remained of it came back to life.

A year later, it sits, sometimes, on the shelf I hung for it, winding spring-green tendrils around itself. Drooping with the weight of its own strange design, and growing ever more wild.

Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended Abilene Christian University, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work deals with the tangled threads of human connection and liminal space. She is currently based in New Mexico.

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Widowed Memories

17 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Paul Rousseau

I rent a forty-four-year-old brick house. It is a modest single-level structure with a small garage. A young couple purchased the home from an older couple and provided minor updating. I moved in once the renovations were complete.

I have been in the home for four years. I intended to stay one year, two at most. Lassitude and complacency altered my plans; that, and the death of two dogs and the sickness of another, my own health woes, and the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.

A few months ago an older man named Thomas rang the doorbell and inquired about the previous owners. I informed him the older couple had moved but did not leave a forwarding address. He told me the wife of the older couple had died—he noticed the obituary in the newspaper—and he assumed the husband still lived in the house. He removed his glasses and patted beads of sweat with a bandana.

“Nothing stays the same, does it?” I nodded. “We lose a lot as we get older, don’t we?” I nodded, again.

Then, unexpectedly, he heaved a deep, sobbing breath, and blurted, “I lost my wife a few years ago myself.” I gently touched his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he muttered, “she was filled with cancer. But she gave it a good fight. We were together forty-nine years.”

He pulled a yellowed, dog-eared photograph from his wallet; it was a panorama of them at the Grand Canyon. “She loved the Grand Canyon. I drove two days to the South rim to release her ashes. It’s what she wanted.”

“You’re a good man, Thomas,” I replied. He pivoted toward the living room. “We spent many an evening in that room. Drank beer, played cards, watched Ed Sullivan. Good times, good memories.” He paused and scratched day-old stubble.

“But somehow our families drifted apart. I don’t know, I guess it was because the kids grew up, our jobs wore us down, and we got sick: high blood pressure, diabetes, and emphysema for me, two heart attacks and a mild stroke for him. And as I said, my wife…” He stood silent, as if in pilgrimage, then asked if he could walk through the house one final time. I jiggled my head and motioned for him to follow.

We visited each room. He stroked the walls, turned the doorknobs, flicked the light switches, opened the blinds. Afterward, he wiped his eyes and begged an apology for the intrusion. I told him no need for an apology, I appreciated the company. He took a final glance at the house, bid goodbye, and shuffled to his car. He plopped into the driver’s seat, lowered the passenger window, and shouted,

“Some memories are best forgotten.”

My shoulders slumped; the reminiscing had seemingly kindled the cinders of old grief. I began to walk toward the car to offer comfort when he turned the ignition and disappeared down the road.

That evening, while lying in bed, I thought about the older couple. They had resided in this house for forty years. It was their refuge, a shelter from an often unfriendly world; how difficult it must have been to surrender four decades of security and stability. Yet, they had their memories; abundant memories.

However, as I reflected on Thomas’s heartrending lament, “Some memories are best forgotten,” I was reminded of the book Prince of Thorns, in which the author, Mark Lawrence, writes, “Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you.” He seems to imply that all memories are dangerous and painful, an implication that is contrary to my personal experience.

And as a person who has also lost a spouse, I speak with widowed authority in agreeing with Thomas’s assertion that some memories—but not all—are best forgotten, for there are memories that provide us solace, and there are memories that remind us of what was, and what will never be again.

Paul Rousseau (he/his/him) is a semi-retired physician, writer, lover of dogs, and occasional photographer published in sundry literary and medical journals. Co-winner of flash fiction competition, Serious Flash Fiction 2022. Nominated for The Best Small Fictions anthology from Sonder Press, 2020. Twitter: @ScribbledCoffee

close up water drop photography — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The History of Everything

14 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Alexandra McIntosh

My mom took Lamaze classes before she had my brother. The instructor—in neon pink 80s workout gear—told the expectant mothers to focus on something and breathe through contractions. My mom chose my dad’s gold chain. She practiced watching it in class, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, leaning against him while the instructor counted. The chain flashed in the fluorescent light of the delivery room while she brought my brother into the world. I love the pictures of them in the moments just after— feathery Farrah Faucet hair slick against her temples, her tired smile, my dad’s eyes beaming above the gold and the tiny body of my brother.

These days my mom and I do yoga together. She likes it because of the breathing, like Lamaze; she reminds me often that you can breathe through anything. In downward dog I look under my armpit to watch her body next to mine, and imagine my small life folded into hers in the months before my birth.

My friend Brad wants to visit the hospital room where he was born. I’ve never thought of this, though I live close to my own birth-hospital. When my mom’s colon ruptured spontaneously my senior year, I did loads of homework there in the plastic chair next to her bed; and before my grandpa’s death, I spent five days and nights by the big window in his room, looking out on a gravel-covered rooftop, the wooded hillsides, the church steeple on a distant ridge. Brad thinks the room number should be on the wristband his mom keeps in his baby book, along with a plastic bag and the stump of belly button that fell off a week after she brought him home. I tell him he should paint the room—he’s a painter. A self-portrait I call it. He likes this idea.

He tells me about his grandparents from Kentucky, the house they lived in by the railroad track, his grandma who held him when he was born and died a week later from cancer. He shows me a picture of her and her sisters in the 1930s in front of a mural of a swimming lady, the sisters playfully pointing at the lady’s nipples, their faces bright with laughter. He’s been busy lately, teaching classes and restoring old houses, but yesterday he painted a picture of his sister’s puppy: a Christmas present commissioned by his mom. He scrapes colors off his fingers and says it felt good; it had been days since he’d opened his box of paints, and even the smell was nice.

When I can’t write I take Grizzly for walks, let him sniff the patches of grass browned by frost, high-step through the pile of oak leaves in the church yard. I imagine the symphonic alertness of his smelling, and wonder if he pictures deer and squirrels, the neighbor’s corgi. Three birds alight from the boughs of a dead honeysuckle bush and I think of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem written decades after the Industrial Revolution—a time that Brad reminds me brought forth a renaissance of arts and crafts. In those years of soot Hopkins wrote, “but for all this, nature is never spent./ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

I’ve repeated this to myself so many times it evokes a collage of memories: the classroom where I first heard it, the university cross country trails I walked as I tried to memorize the poem. Later, the patches of chicory and black-eyed Susans tangled along the road by my first apartment. A hillside in Spain. The sun above the swimming pool in my hometown. The condensation on a bottle of water my grandpa handed me after I cut his grass. Sweat under my tee shirt sleeves, summer skin peeling. The backyard singing its bright insect song.

How humbling to know that each one of us came from the body of another. I think of this great symphony of connection, of birth and death and birth, of pain and joy, this great and marvelous history of everything, this dearest freshness. And I think of our small roles in it, of my mom preparing to welcome it in those 80s birthing classes, of her practicing her breathing, of my dad practicing with her, his smile above a gold necklace, of all the hair my brother was born with, thick dark hair, and the baby his wife will have in August.

Alexandra McIntosh lives and writes in Kentucky, her favorite place in the world. Her debut book of poetry, Bowlfuls of Blue, is available from Assure Press. You can find links to her publications and pictures of her dog on her website AlexandraMcIntosh.com.

stacked of stones outdoors — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

A Transformer Kind of Moment

8 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Clint Martin

1986

I’m a nine year old Clint. I’m on fold-down seat’s edge. Not just because scooching back risks being gobbled up by sticky, red theater chair. But also because Transformers: The Movie glows upon the silver screen. And that despicable Decepticon Galvatron has seized the matrix. He’s used it to summon the planet-devouring Unicron. This is indeed the Autobots’s darkest hour. With dozing dad at my side, I am understandably tense.

All Autobot hope now rests on the red metal shoulders of Hot Rod. And Galvatron knows it. As Hot Rod charges, Galvatron blasts. Both bots go down. I pop up. Sticky chair snaps shut. My adrenaline-crazed heart rhythmically pleads for the good guy to rally as unadorned musical notes harken from an 80s synthesizer. Hot Rod spies the battle-flung matrix. The music, the tension pulls me up onto toes. Rocker Stan Bush croons, “You’ve got the touch.” My heart spills into a sprint. Hot Rod reaches the matrix. Lifts it. “You’ve got the power.” Hero’s hands fit the matrix’s handles perfectly. He pulls. Blue lightning streaks from the opening orb. Power chords pulse, and in that cinematic instant, Hot Rod grows. Grows. Does more than transforms. He evolves. I bounce and beam in the theatre, overjoyed for the silver screen’s new hero: Rodimus Prime.

2016

I’m a beaten Clint. I’m horizontal. Crammed into couch’s crevice. It’s the middle of the day. I should be at work. But I don’t have the energy. Or the desire. Depression blasts me. Has been for years now. So much so that yesterday my wife signaled surrender: she’s filed for divorce. I have until the end of the month. So I’ve transformed myself by getting stoned. Again. Avoiding reality. Again. Stoned and horizontal and ignoring my troubles by scrolling back to the beginning of Facebook. The phone screen waterfalls before me. Like the last reel of a slot machine. As it slows, before my thumb can flick it back into full-on reeling, an unfamiliar face catches my eye. I stop my roll. The woman in the post is sitting. Cross-legged. Her eyes are closed, but it’s her forehead I’m drawn to. Her forehead. It’s soft, unwrinkled, unstained by the strain of brain. It is the opposite of the pounding slab of creases above my brow. It’s not a post I’m looking at. It’s an ad. I tap the screen.

“You’ve got the touch.”

Wi-Fi whisks me to a site on transcendental meditation. I spend a few seconds reading about the power of silence. Oblivious that the final reel has landed on Jackpot. I sign up for an intro class. It’s tomorrow night. There’s no Stan Bush soundtracking this scene, yet years later I’ll see this clearly as the transformer type of moment that it was. I will see that this was the first step in saving my marriage. This was the moment I saved my own Autobot family. This was the moment that began the from-the-ashes evolution of Clintonimus Prime.

Clint Martin lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife, two sons, and their yellow dog Waggie. When not writing, Clint enjoys transcendental meditation and identifying the birds visiting the backyard.