Tag: father/daughter

Hell’s Kitchen

1 March 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

We were in my father’s car on Sixth Avenue driving uptown towards Central Park, or maybe we were on Third Avenue approaching the 59^th Street Bridge, when my father said, “Don’t marry him. I’ll take care of you.” After a long silence I said, “But Dad, I love him.”

My mother had died a few months before, and it was just my father and I in the house in Queens where I had grown up. I worried about him. I knew it was too soon to leave him alone. Val was living in New Jersey at the time. My father put his arm around Val’s shoulder and convinced him to move in with us. “After the wedding, you can look for an apartment together,” he said.

Val moved in three months before our wedding. We slept in separate rooms. He called my dad Mr. Lisbona.

We got married on a beautiful day in April. I invited my mom’s friend Beatrice to attend.

On my wedding day, my father said, “Can you stay with me a little longer?” When Val agreed, I thought he was so understanding; he was so nice about it. But then I noticed how well he got along with my father. They sat in the living room watching TV together and laughing at the same jokes. Val walked around on Sunday mornings in pajamas while my dad made coffee for them both, and on Sunday afternoons the two of them went food shopping on 108^th Street. If something needed fixing, Val was eager to do it. He started calling my father Leon. When I suggested a neighborhood that might be good for us to live in, Val didn’t show any interest. My father said, “Stay here and save some money,” and Val smiled conspiratorially.

We lived eight months as newlyweds in my father’s house.

Toward the end of that stretch, Beatrice came for an overnight visit. I noticed how happy my dad was, and then I spied them. It was just a moment, through a slice of door: She was on the bed, he was in his bathrobe; he leaned over her. I caught my breath and recoiled. I slinked down the stairs and hurried out of the house. I walked to the subway and felt the urge to squeeze my eyes shut, trying to unsee the image of my father and Beatrice that kept fluttering to my mind. By the time I got to the train platform, I realized that this was my chance to leave. The moment had presented itself like a gift.

Without telling Val, I found us an apartment on my lunchbreak. The one-bedroom was walking distance from my office building on Sixth Avenue. That evening, after kicking off my boots, I gathered Val and my father at the round table in the kitchen and announced that Val and I were moving. Val said, “We can never afford it,” and my father said, “A two-year lease?” and I said to Val, “We have five days to pack.” My father lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

A week later we took a few boxes of clothes and two rolled-up Persian rugs to the twentieth floor of 301 West 53^rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen. I liked the name of my new neighborhood. That first night, Val was working across the river in New Jersey. I was alone.

The apartment was bare. Our wedding presents, still in their unopened boxes, were scattered in our empty living room. Our only piece of furniture was our too-hard bed, which we had bought that day without thinking it through.

I lay in the bed and looked out the large plate-glass window to see the time and temperature flash atop a taller building. I listened to a bouncer arguing loudly with a patron at the back entrance of the Roseland Ballroom. I heard the trucks rumbling up 8^th Avenue and the horse and carriages ambling towards the stables. I wished Val were there on my first night away from home. Somehow, despite all the city sounds, I fell asleep.

One hour before I needed to wake up the next morning, my dad called, a pattern he took years to break. We chatted until I was sufficiently awake.

I put my feet on the Persian rug. I pulled out from a box something to wear to work. I walked two short blocks to my office and never wanted to set foot on the subway again.

In the evening, Val and I went to Central Park, walked to 9^th Avenue, and ate in a little restaurant. On the way home we stopped at Tower Records, our fingers interlocked. Val loved the spartan apartment and declared that we didn’t need any furniture. “Where will we eat?” I said. “In our hard bed,” he said, and we both laughed.

I loved him so much, and I was so happy.

A year later I was pregnant with Aaron, and my father remarried a woman who wasn’t Beatrice.

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, Metonym Journal, and Smoky Blue Literary. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Leslie’s earlier essay Taboule in The Bluebird Word.

Two Dolls and Three Kings

31 December 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Antonia Wang

I only ever owned two dolls, delicate treasures in a world where Barbies belonged to children with ties to distant lands like the United States or, in a bygone era, Venezuela.

My dolls weren’t the coveted reborn dolls of the ’80s, the ones I daydreamed about swaddling and adorning with miniature outfits like real infants. No, my dolls were not my first choice, but they were unique— a second-hand, silicone-skinned Japanese doll with straight chestnut hair, a miniature yogi ready to bend and twist to my whims. The other, a robust, plastic blonde doll with pigtail braids, remained shelved most of the time, but I could never forget her.

How did I come to possess a Japanese doll while living in the insular mountains of the 1980s Dominican Republic? My recollection is hazy, but I remember it as a gift from a Spanish missionary whom my family hosted one summer while she worked with the church. The doll had meager clothes, so I fashioned her an outfit with the little fabric I could find and my rudimentary sewing skills.

The blonde doll had been a “Three Kings” gift from my dad. Christmas gifts were for Americans. Dominican kids didn’t have Santa. We had the Three Kings, who somehow made no noise as they filled our rooms with their camels on the eve of January 6th, delivering our toys. Oh, coveted joy! They were the only gifts of the year for many of us. “At least you had toys,” my siblings would chime in. But this isn’t a sad story about growing up in a small town in the countryside of a humble island. This isn’t a sad story at all.

Sure, we had limited means, but we never lacked what truly mattered: a roof of our own, honest and loving parents, friends galore, and a multitude of cousins. Cousins to play hide and seek with, tackle homework with, attend church together, and, of course, get into the occasional trouble with. And then there were the lush mountains, always smiling around me, offering endless adventures and mysteries. Our home had no television when I was a kid, and it wasn’t until I reached my teenage years that we got a fridge. Bicycles or scooters were scarce, and cars? They were a luxury reserved solely for the ‘rich,’ although even those we deemed ‘rich’ carried their own burdens—a spouse who had migrated to the United States, the trials of managing a small-town business, or concealed guilt.

No, I never felt poor. We had what we needed and nothing more, except for food. Come what may, we had food—for everyone at home, for the neighbor who couldn’t afford to cook, for my grandpa who preferred my mom’s cooking though he didn’t live with us, for the occasional country visitor, my father’s third cousin, or the Haitian woman with a child who stopped by every few months. I couldn’t remember her name or whether she had a home. There was always plenty of food, even if my mom had to make herself a meal from our leftovers. But this isn’t a sad story, no.

This is a tale of devotion—a father who wanted to give me the childhood he never had growing up as a farmer’s kid in the mountains of Camú.

One evening, approaching January 6th, I witnessed a secret ritual. My late father, convinced I was asleep, concealed a grand, plastic doll within a duffle bag hanging from a nail on the wooden wall, believing he had hidden it where I would never think to look. I smiled and turned sideways, pretending to be sleep.

Outside, the chorus of crickets remained silent. The unsightly toads in the nearby miniature swamp, where taro root and yautía malanga thrived unbidden yet embraced, also remained silent. Nor did I hear a whisper from the brown geckos that crept about our small-town dwelling, which we regarded as an auspicious omen.

The next day, I didn’t say a word, filled with excitement as I eagerly awaited the surprise at the foot of my bed on Three Kings’ Day. I remained silent because, more than a toy, I cherished the joy of my father’s belief in magic.

Antonia Wang, poet, nature enthusiast, and yogi, weaves intricate, symbolic poems from the tapestry of everyday life and the natural world. Exploring universal themes of relationships, self-discovery, and philosophy, Antonia’s work exudes a nostalgic Caribbean essence. She writes in English and Spanish, and lives with her family in the USA.

a person ironing cloth — Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Pexels.com

How to Iron

13 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by N.G. Haiduck

My father did the ironing in our house. My mother was sick, not bed-ridden, but too sick to stand at a board pushing a hot iron over my father’s white cotton shirts. So in the evening, after supper (my father cooked) and the dishes (my sister and I washed), in the living room between the sofa and the armchair where my mother sat stone-faced in front of the TV, my father set up the ironing board.

He tested the steam iron by pressing it over a dishtowel. When the iron sputtered, he ironed: his white shirts, my pleated skirts, my sister’s ruffled blouses, my mother’s house dresses. He ironed the sheets. He taught me how to iron his handkerchiefs. First one side, fold once, iron, fold again, the monogram on the outside, iron, fold, iron. I progressed to pillow cases. Same method: iron, fold, iron, fold, iron.

To this day, my aunts disparage my mother (she died and, a few years later, he died) because “she made your father do the ironing.”

My father had a vegetable garden on a patch of land he rented from Miss Bliss, who owned the weather-beaten farmhouse next door. All summer long, I helped weed my father’s garden. On weekends, he sold tomatoes at a roadside stand on Route 51 in front of that old gray house, until Miss Bliss sold her property to a developer.

My father’s partner selling vegetables at the roadside stand was Mike, who had a cornfield down the road. I had to go to Mike’s house one Saturday to pick up an envelope. My mother, sitting in her armchair, called after me, “Don’t tell her I don’t iron!” Mike’s wife, Mary, ironed her husband’s white shirts perfectly.

A smiling plump woman, Mary opened the door, and I came into a living room filled with waves of freshly ironed white shirts, a few pale blue shirts mixed in, on hangers hooked over doorknobs, on rods attached to closet doors, and from the wing of a floor lamp standing next to a massive ironing board in the center of the room. It smelled like spring.

I had to step over a hassock and duck under the shirts to get to the kitchen, where Mary gave me an envelope (money from the business, I suppose). Dutifully, I brought the envelope home, but my mother said she never wanted me to go back there again. “I don’t want her to find out I don’t iron.” Of course I would never tell.

Just as my grandmother never told me. Only after my mother died, she said, shaking her head, “Too bad you didn’t know your mother before she started taking those pills.” I didn’t know. Nobody told me.

My husband says his shirts come out brighter and crisper from the dry cleaners. Still, in the evening, after dinner dishes are put away, I set up the board in the living room. I turn on the TV. When the iron is hot and sputtering, I iron. My husband’s shirts: back of the collar first, then the cuffs, run the iron up the sleeves, flip to the back of the shirt and the shoulder; then the front around the buttons, the shirt pocket, and last, the front of the collar. Same procedure for my blouses. Blue jeans: pockets ironed inside out, waist band and fly pressed twice, then the seams and a sharp crease. Pillowcases (but not sheets): lay flat on the board, iron, fold, iron, fold, iron.

N.G. Haiduck taught English at The City College of New York and now writes from Burlington, Vermont. Publications (2023) include: Aeolian Harp Anthology, Cold Lake Anthology, Kakalak, and BigCityLit. Haiduck’s first book, “Cabbie,” about a young woman driving a cab in New York City, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Letter to an Estranged Father

3 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Angela Kasumova

Recently, on my way to visit a friend, I drove by Kitty’s Restaurant and Lounge in North Reading. Do you remember the time we went there? It was a Saturday, late summer, either in ‘94 or ‘95, and we’d come from Lawrence where we picked up my school uniform. We stopped by Kitty’s for lunch on the way home. It was a throwback spot: dim lighting, torn booths, cigarette smoke. The bathroom was all red tile and red vinyl and red toilets, like something from a horror movie.

We waited a long time for the food to arrive, and when it did, I remember giggling as I looked down at the brownish steak tip gristle sitting in oil placed in front of me. I don’t remember what you or Mom had, but neither was good. It was one of the worst meals we’d ever had. Comically bad.

I think we left without paying.

Despite the badness of the restaurant this memory is a happy one. We laughed and smiled in unity over the awfulness that was Kitty’s.

Not a day goes by where I don’t think about the tragic outcome of our family, my mind filling with “whys” and “what ifs” and “if onlys.” Lately though, I’ve begun widening the lens, allowing a little more light in.

Turns out we had our good moments, like bonding over bad meals.

Angela Kasumova is an emerging writer of creative nonfiction with over a decade of experience working in the fields of mental health and education. She lives with her husband and sons near Boston, Massachusetts. Read her first published piece on The Bluebird Word from June 2023: For Sale: Kawai Upright Piano, $1,250.

Photo of Father's Coat (courtesy of author)

My Father’s Coat, in Three Acts

1 July 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Cheryl Sadowski

How old am I—four? five? awaiting my father’s arrival. I stare out the picture window of our living room watching snow fall like feathers when his car rolls into the driveway. The door swings open, and my mother cheerfully calls out. I see my father’s face and run headlong into his herringbone coat: it smells of spice, wool, and winter. I huddle against his legs and look down at his shiny black shoes. Whether or not my father loves his herringbone coat, or even likes it, I cannot say. Only that it is his.

So called for its resemblance to fish bones, herringbone is an interlocking pattern of zig-zag lines known for strength and durability. Ancient Egyptians borrowed the design from nature for their jewelry. Romans laid roads in a herringbone pattern. Herringbone tweed began as a working man’s cloth, serious and sturdy, to guard against the damp climates of Scotland and England.

My father’s coat is classic herringbone, tightly woven, with woolen Vs in black and gray, and an expertly tailored, glossy black lining. A sewn-in patch indicates provenance: Diamond’s Store for Men, a sartorial staple for professional attire during the 1960s and 70s.

For years the coat hangs in our cramped foyer closet amid a cadre of more flamboyant jackets: my mother’s Christmas cloak, my younger brother’s recreational wear, my high school letter jacket with a giant green ‘M’ emblazoned on the breast. I catch a glimpse of herringbone pattern—steadfast, stoic—whenever I grab my own coat and run out the door.

II.

My father’s coat accompanies me to college in Wisconsin, though I have no memory of asking him if I could take it. I wear it walking to classes, laughing and kicking through snow drifts with friends on the way to Ivan’s Pizza. Wisconsin winters are stark and cold. The herringbone acts like armor, blunting the sharp winds.

The coat is too big for me, but when I pair it with black biker boots and patterned tights, I love the way it makes me feel: artistic, complicated, like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. It is a warm, woolen talisman, cloaking me after nasty rows with my boyfriend. When I wear the herringbone with a pink velvet scarf, I am La Boheme! conjugating French verbs while I walk … je travaille, tu travailles, il travaille.

I recall a scene from Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary: Emma Bovary, fresh from the winter air, lifts her hem to warm her foot by the fire, the allure and power of her well-revealed ankle. The hem of my father’s coat brushes over the tops of my boots when I walk. My calves are strong and young beneath its shelter. I saunter, sing-songing, insouciant, and free.

III.

It’s February. Seated on a cold, steel outdoor bench, I wait for the train. Beneath the elevated platform, office workers escape the manacles of cubicles and conference rooms. I, too, am tethered to the office, and to Chicago rents and utility bills. My father’s coat, now vintage, is admired by colleagues.

Snow sifts down through the mesh muslin sky. I raise the crook of my elbow to my nose and breathe in deeply. The coat’s fibers are still coarse and sturdy, the herringbone pattern so close, familiar. But the memory is thin, a wavering white veil between myself and my childhood.

I can’t see my father’s face to know if he is happy or tired or anxious. I long for the smell of spice, wool, and winter. My black biker boots are long gone, and I have no idea what became of my pink velvet scarf.

I reach back to the classroom: Nous travaillons. We are working.

The train approaches, a rushing ribbon of herringbone on iron wheels, unspooling, unstoppable. I stare at the long track ahead. It bends around the corner and disappears into the distance. Briefcase in hand, I rise and brush the snow from my lap. For the first time I notice that my father’s coat is heavy.

Cheryl Sadowski writes essays and short fiction that explore the connections of everyday life with landscape, literature, art, and the natural world. Her writing appears in About Place Journal, Vita Poetica, Orchards Poetry Journal, EcoTheo Review, Broadkill Review, After the Art, and Bay to Ocean Journal. She lives in Northern Virginia.

piano keys — Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

For Sale: Kawai Upright Piano, $1,250

12 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Angela Kasumova

Available now! A Kawai Upright Piano, in excellent condition, beautiful walnut finish. Purchased new eight years ago by a father for his daughter. She’d been taking lessons for six years and practicing on a broken, hand-me-down piano, but when her father started having an affair, new things suddenly materialized. Like a computer, to replace the typewriter she struggled to write school papers on, and then a few months later, the piano. The daughter treasured this piano, its timely arrival allowing her to finally take pleasure in playing her most practiced and favorite pieces: Daydream by Tchaikovsky and To a Wild Rose by Edward MacDowell. And though she only played it for a year or so before she stopped lessons, it was the one thing she absolutely had to bring with her when she and her mother eventually fled. It moved with her from her semi-rural childhood house to an urban apartment, and finally to the condo her mother purchased upon her divorce, where it resides now. It’s been gently used these past few years to play Christmas songs or figure out melodies the daughter and her boyfriend enjoy, like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which is much harder than it sounds. It breaks this daughter’s heart to be selling this lovely instrument, but she needs extra money to pay for student health insurance, and this is the only item of value she owns. She doesn’t know how much she’ll miss this piano or how much she’ll regret letting it go. She doesn’t know how she’ll wish she’d found another way. Financial worries and unprocessed grief cloud her vision, but perhaps her loss may be your gain. See above: excellent condition, beautiful walnut finish.

Serious buyers only, please.

Angela Kasumova is a lifelong writer and reader with over a decade of experience working in the fields of mental health and education. She lives with her husband and sons near Boston, Massachusetts.

On Observing My Daughter At Breakfast

7 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Clarence Allan Ebert

My daughter wears a hand-me-down shirt
tie-dyed with the stars, three sizes too big.
Her clothes arrange themselves
in psychedelic constellations.
Her face is a yellow rose through the light
of honey dollops dropping in milk.
She has never tripped and has no band-aids.
She makes no fuss and sleeps with a night light
She is barely aware I love her so much,
oblivious to her own impermanence.

Clarence Allan Ebert celebrated his 70th birthday recently and pledged to maintain some Baby Boomer relevance in the world through the fine craft of poetry. Read his poem from The Bluebird Word‘s January 2023 issue.

flight sky bird blue — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Parting Gift

27 December 2022 / Editor

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Nonfiction by Marianne Lonsdale

I cooked dinner for Dad in early December, warming up canned baked beans, cut up hot dogs and a little ketchup in a pot. The television news blared from the family room accompanied by Dad’s hacking cough. Dad took up smoking again after Mom, his wife of 62 years, died four years earlier. I pushed open a window to diffuse the constant stream of second-hand smoke but worried the cold air would chill him.

I’d given up on cooking anything other than dishes with hot dogs or ground beef—Dad considered pretty much everything else an extravagance. Individual bowls of iceberg lettuce served as my attempt at something healthy and green. I whipped up his favorite salad dressing, equal parts mayonnaise and ketchup.

I put our plates on the table and we took the same spots that we’d been sitting in since we’d moved to this house when I was five years old. Dad at the head, and me to his right. We missed having my mom at the other end and being surrounded by my sister and six brothers.

He spooned the goopy dressing over the beans mix and the salad, ate quickly and handed me his plate.

“Is there more?” he asked.

He’d weighed in at just 130 pounds at his last doctor’s visit. I wasn’t sure what he ate on the nights that I or one of my siblings were not at the house, and it made me happy to see him with an appetite and eating with gusto.

“Thank you for cooking,” he said. “I really like seeing you. I appreciate your coming.”

Dad said the same few sentences to me on each visit and not much else. His world had shrunk to the walls of his house and his memories of his wife, my mother.

Mom’s death disoriented him; he still cried every time I visited. He was so lonely but had little tolerance for visitors. He was even ready for me to leave after about 90 minutes, usually heading up the few stairs to his bedroom without saying goodnight.

He objected to any help. We’d forced a housecleaner on him and he refused to pay her. He sometimes smelled. He’d just begun using a walker after several falls, including one getting out of the sports car he’d bought at age 86, and he lay on the street as cars sped by until some man eventually stopped and helped him up. But every now and then he’d perk up.

“What’s that bird?” Dad asked after he’d taken his last bite of beans. I took a few steps to the freezer, hoping he’d enjoy the vanilla ice cream I’d brought.

What the heck was he talking about? I stared at him; even his eyes, deep brown with hazel highlights, seemed to have faded, filmy and dull.

“The one that people think brings babies?”

“A stork?” I asked and brought two bowls of ice cream to the table. “Do you mean a stork?”

“That’s it! I knew you’d know.” Dad beamed.

“When you were born, the nurse brought me to the nursery in the hospital. All these babies were in clear plastic boxes, lined up. On the wall behind them was a painting of this huge stork—that bird had the most incredible brown eyes. So big and warm and beautiful. The nurse pointed you out to me and I just stared. My girl had the same eyes. So beautiful. Do you remember me calling you Birdseye? Do you remember that nickname?”

I’d hated that nickname. My sister was Princess and I was Birdseye. The name was ugly. I was jealous of Princess. I wondered why my Dad called me Birdseye but never asked why. Questions weren’t much tolerated in our household.

This story had never been told. I was near 60 years old and Dad was 89. He shared this memory with so much love. He said so little these days, like every thought was difficult to pull out.

His story surprised me. I’d never considered that the name might be one of affection. Dad had an unpredictable temper and I’d often assumed that he found humor in being mean and teasing. And I’d shut down, cutting him out of many events of my life, and not sharing how I felt with him. Now I wonder how many times he and I misunderstood each other, blocking so much love that we might have shared.

I didn’t know that would be our last dinner together, or that hospice care would start for Dad in a couple of weeks, and that he’d die on December 27th. I am so grateful that this parting gift, the truth of the nickname, flew from him to me and I better know how much he loved me, right from the start.

Marianne Lonsdale writes personal essays, fiction, and literary interviews. Her work has been published in Literary Mama, Grown and Flown, Pulse and has aired on public radio. She lives in Oakland, California.

red and black corn — Photo by Madison Inouye on Pexels.com

Feed

29 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Natalli Amato

It’s the good summer. Connor and I are out on the dock, beholding the St. Lawrence. There are more lily pads right here, right now, than there are lily pads I have stumbled upon in my lifetime before this point. Some of them flower. Some of them are just green. There are geese milling about on the lawn near the shoreline. We talk out loud about how much we love them.

We also talk about the seaweed we see, how Maxine wants to get rid of it all; it clogs up the boat. She thinks she can get the fish to do the excavation work for us. Connor explains her methods: the fish will uproot the seaweed, even eat the seaweed, if we lure them there by tossing scoops of corn feed into the river. This is why there is a stout metal tin at the end of the dock, full of pounds and pounds of corn feed. Connor opens the tin, scoops a good scoop, and throws the kernels. Repeat the process. Offers me a turn.

I look into the corn feed tin. The fish are not the only ones being directed towards something they would otherwise not pay a visit. There is also me, a human girl, following kernels to a different place: burlap sacks in the log garage, the cabin house, Plank Road. Nowhere near this river. Forest.

I can see the line where our property met the forest. I can see where I spread the corn feed down on the pine needled ground before the forest’s feet. I can see, too, how small I am. Four-year-old hands. So who carried the burlap bag? Who opened the burlap bag and showed me how to scoop and where to pour? I know I am here for a purpose – I am here to feed the deer. But who has taught me this? Who has told me we are people for whom the deer matter? I open my eyes as wide as I can in this vision. Someone else must be here. I see only, though, myself.

My buck shooting father. He is this someone, here but not.

I know this because of a card I found cleaning out my mother’s desk – a card he sent her from such and such recovery center, the post script note reading, Ask Natalli what a deer says.

Connor is scooping corn feed into the St. Lawrence. I am walking the forest line on Plank Road. He does not see me leave.

One fish swims to the weeds and its cousin is not far behind. One deer lowers its head to eat and its cousin is not far behind. Memories are like this, too.

Connor and I are in 113 Brady. Our apartment. I am not sure the time of day. I am fairly sure of the season, fall, because Connor is studying for exams and the good summer has already happened but the murderous spring has not.

I’ve returned from the grocery store. I’m sitting on the couch reading a magazine, Cosmo. I took the long way from the grocery store back to 113 Brady so that I could speak out loud to my father. I do that when I am alone in my car. I am alone in my car less often now that I love Connor and Connor loves me.

My conversation goes something like this:

I’m sorry I told mom to tell you I didn’t want to read the letter you’d written me that one year you were probably in AA or something because why else would you write me a letter but now I want to take it back now I want to have the chance to forgive you and have you know it now I want to know if you like country music now I want to thank you for my life now I wish I could have a beer with you even though its all those beers that killed you and I wish it could have been different and when I see the blood moon hanging low over black ontario and it is so mystifying that my heart aches instead of smiles which seems to be the more logical response to beauty – I think that has something to do with you or at least I inherited it from you or maybe I didn’t and I’m just checking in because maybe you can hear me.

When I speak out loud to my father I also cry. Not too hard but enough. Enough that Connor notices my eyes look off when he emerges from the study to give me a squeeze and remind ourselves that we are here, together. Connor asks me what’s wrong and I do the degrading thing –

I say, what are you talking about?

I say what are you talking about to the person who loves me and I love best. I say what are you talking about when he notices my suffering. I exclude him – this man I will one day break my own world over, so bereft I will be when he leaves me. I turn away and assume I will always have this option.

How far have I traveled from this? Far, far, far. And also not at all. I exist as a girl and I exist as a hungry ghost with unfinished business. It is for this reason I return here.

What’s wrong?

The corn feed, say it, the corn feed, the corn feed, my own dried kernel heart.

Natalli Amato is a poet, fiction writer, and journalist. Read her work at www.natalliamato.com

Climbing a Hill in China With My Father

13 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Marie Look

I am about to climb a staircase up a hill in southern China with my father. A local has told us the summit is called Xianggong and that it’s the best view in the Guangxi region. It overlooks the Li River and the karst mountains that rise like shark teeth along the banks.

It’s a late November afternoon. There’s only a little time before the last bus back to Guilin and our hotel, but we don’t want to leave this hill unexplored. With naïve optimism, we begin. The stairs are steep, constructed of stone and wood and reinforced with metal. It’s humid, and my shirt sticks to me.

My father was born here sixty-seven years ago, on rural farmland in China. When he was seven, his mother sent him to the United States to live with a relative he had never met. He didn’t make it back to China again for decades, not until he was thirty-three, a little younger than I am now. Today we are both tourists in his native country, where neither of us can interpret the road signs or speak Cantonese with the locals.

The path uphill zigzags, and we can’t see the whole of it from any single vantage point. The level of exertion humbles us.

“Good thing you’re still hitting … the tennis courts … three times a week,” I gasp as we take the next turn.

“This is why you run … all those half marathons … right?” my father replies.

We discuss slipping our camera bags from our shoulders and resting. But we remember the bus, which will come soon and leave with or without us. So we ignore our screaming quads, our hearts beating in our ears, and we press on.

Some fathers and daughters have a favorite pastime they enjoy together. They take up cycling or become cinephiles or shop for vintage records. My father and I travel. We make discoveries, we collect experiences. But this trip is different from the others, in that we seek more than just a sense of place. We’re uncovering parts of ourselves in the local features, in this landscape that has remained unchanged since my father was born—possibly even since the time of his own father or grandfather. Who were they? Who are we? And if a man and his daughter manage to climb a question in the shape of a hill in southern China, what will it prove?

“What was your village called?” I often asked my father this while growing up in Oklahoma. But he couldn’t remember the name. Months would pass and I would ask him again, hoping for a different answer. I had so many questions about his origin story, which I understood to also be my origin story. Did he have siblings? How did my grandparents meet? What was China like? How many relatives still lived there? The details were always sparse. There were no stories handed down, no photos to pass around.

“I think it’s hard for him to talk about,” offered my mother, a Kansan with blue eyes and fair skin. “Or it’s possible he really doesn’t know.”

More discoveries await my father and me on this trip. The ancient city walls of Guangzhou, the hump of Victoria Peak, the stilt houses of the Tai O fishing community. But at present we’re chasing the bird’s-eye view of these limestone mountains, which for millennia have granted the tropical landscape around the Li a quality of otherworldliness.

Earlier, my father and I experienced the valley from the Li itself, aboard one of the ferries meandering southward from Guilin’s Zhejiang Pier to Yangshuo village. We stood on the upper deck, transfixed, as every bend introduced a perspective more compelling and timeless than the last. Fishermen on bamboo rafts. Serene-looking pagodas. Wading deer and buffalo. Over and over, we raised our cameras to capture it all.

Now, as we climb Xianggong, I feel every ounce of what I carry—especially my camera, a digital Canon EOS Rebel my father gave me several Christmases ago when I was still in my twenties. I call it my “big girl camera” because of its heft. It’s an expensive piece of equipment that requires responsibility, and I take good care of it. I know how to hold it, how to store it, how to clean it.

In the ’90s, my family lived in Broken Arrow, in a house on Orlando Street, where my father would empty the contents of a brown, leathery bag onto his and my mother’s bed. Lying on my belly on their floral comforter, I’d watch him clean his own camera and help him organize the lenses, the film canisters, and the various cleaning cloths as he explained apertures and F-stops, ISO and granularity. Negatives could reveal pictures if you used the right chemicals, he told me. I marveled at the system of it all. Photography was a superpower—the power of supersight, of supermemory.

At last, my father and I—chests heaving, legs shaking—lug ourselves and our cameras onto the hill’s highest point. Thoughts of the bus evaporate. The sun at our backs throws the jagged mounds of stone into light and shadow for as far as we can see. White ferry boats dot the river, appearing toylike.

Click. A moment captured.

Click. A memory created.

Click. A question answered.

Then there are no significant words exchanged, no particular actions I expect to recall later. Just an indefinite moment of wonder at the sky above us and the earth below us, and my father and I standing in stillness between the two, catching our breath.

Marie Look is an emerging writer of creative nonfiction and short fiction. As a journalist, she’s contributed interviews, travel articles, and more to regional and national magazines. She studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma and creative writing through UCLA Extension. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles.