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Way Back When

Nonfiction by Meredith Escudier

My little sister is seven, bundled up in a brown, corduroy car coat. I am nine, sporting a pair of orange polka-dotted pedal pushers and feeling fairly fleet-footed in my canvas Keds. Together we are walking home at dusk from our neighbor’s house where we have enjoyed yet another game of Chinese checkers.

“Can we play orphans?” she asks. Orphans. It’s a familiar game of ours, influenced by the thrill of childhood literature – The Boxcar Children or Oliver Twist or any number of hair-raising fairy tales that filled our impressionable psyches. According to the game’s unspoken rules, we must identify a house friendly enough to ask its current residents to take us in – two bedraggled sisters who have only recently escaped from the workhouse.

Perhaps in our mind’s eye, we are barefoot, ragged, dirty, but also surely sweet-faced, hopeful, and plucky. After some faux-hesitation, we will, of course, choose our own house – what else? –  but the exercise allows us to flirt momentarily with independence and adventure, only to be flooded by a warm, familiar security afterwards. Our chosen scenario, as usual, unfolds with a practiced, codified dialog:

“How about this one?” she suggests, as we walk past a large corner house.

“No, too dark,” I respond on cue, shaking my head vigorously as we march along.

“Then this one?” She points to a house whose front lawn has recently been edged. A forgotten rubber ball is wedged between a planter box and a picket fence. I appear to inspect her choice before disqualifying it with a “Naah,” aligning myself perfectly with the unwritten script. “Not cozy enough,” I announce.

“Then how about this cute little house? It looks sort of friendly,” she says, tacking on a hopeful argument for good measure. Hmm, I take a look. She could be right. Among the cookie-cutter post-war housing that went up fast in the Fifties and that provided the parents of baby boomers a decent, if not charming, place to live, this house – with its ruby red front porch and generic cement driveway – just seemed to stand out. Well, at least to us.

We stop and peer in, evaluating the odds, wondering if this family might adopt our lonesome selves. Will they show mercy? Human kindness? Would they like the addition of two beseeching little girls around the dinner table tonight? I notice the glow from the light in the kitchen and guess at our older sister studiously setting the table, carefully placing our father’s milk glass at the helm. “Yes,” I agree companionably as we turn into our own comfortable driveway and trot up the front steps. Out back, between the clothesline and the dangling tether ball, is a likeness of our handprints, marking the day when three sisters leaned down and opened their hands, stretching and splaying their fingers wide as they pressed their palms into fresh cement.


Meredith Escudier has lived in France for over 35 years, teaching, translating, raising a family and writing. She is the author of three books, most recently, a food memoir, The Taste of Forever, an affectionate examination of home cooks that features an American mother and a French husband.

At Home

Nonfiction by Joseph O’Day

When her uncles and aunts tried to embrace my nine-month-old granddaughter at our Thanksgiving dinner, she cried and struggled for freedom. I rescued her into my arms, and they called me baby hog. “She’s not yet comfortable with you guys,” I said.

I didn’t think it would take long. I’d been babysitting since September and she had settled in with me, crawling through my house using her bum shuffle—her left leg tucked underneath as her arms and right leg slid her forward. She shuffled over, then sat back and raised her arms, and I lifted her up and we toured the kitchen, the bedrooms, the dining and living rooms, and the TV room, where we watched Daniel Tiger and Rafi and Cleo & Cuquin’s rendition of La Cucaracha. She became so comfortable with me and my house that she led me on tours, moving ahead of me and turning around periodically to make sure I followed.

Our Christmas and New Year’s gatherings did the trick; familiarity bred comfort. She started initiating contact with extended family, snuggling with Aunt Patricia, Uncle Joe, and Aunt Kat as they read her books, leaping into Uncle Josh’s arms as he soared her through the hallways.

At her house months later we celebrated her first birthday. We watched as she ate yogurt-frosted cupcakes, watched it smear on her face and arms, the chair, and anyone who got near. When the party wore down, her mom gave her free reign, placing her on the hardwood floor while we washed tables, threw paper dishes and cups into the trash, and collected scattered bows and gift wrappings.

My granddaughter shuffled around the place so rapidly that it took my breath away: from living room to kitchen, from her aunts’ legs to her uncles’ arms, from her baby walker to the open dishwasher. We had to take care where we stepped. She suddenly appeared at our feet, then vanished, moving with the buoyancy of someone savoring the secure, loving, surroundings of home.


Joseph O’Day’s writing has appeared in Oyster River Pages, Spry Literary Journal, The Critical Flame: A Journal of Literature and Culture, bioStories, Patchwork Lit Mag, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Molecule: A Tiny Lit Mag. Joseph received his MA in English (Creative Writing) from Salem State University.

Atlanta International, Concourse D

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

Airports are teeming with constant activity: people rushing, people eating, people waiting. It’s not until I’m in one again that I realize just how much humanity is out there. How busy so many lives are. How different but alike we are, carrying our bags and checking our devices, averting our eyes or carrying on conversations with those travelling with us; but more often silent, especially amongst strangers.

I struck up conversation with two ladies as we stood waiting on the walkway to board our flight. Looked them in the eyes: saw them spark and open, perhaps smiling beneath their masks. They were headed to South Carolina, and I told them I knew of its beauty and that my children were born there. They remarked “Small world!” I agreed, and soon we departed.

Waiting on my connection, I look around the gate and see people bent to their devices, eyes shadowed, faces closed. All ages and colors: dressed down and up, masked and unmasked. Out the large five-tiered windows the figures of jetliners loom, the tarmac abuzz with action as the planes taxi in and out, landing to refuel and prepare for another take-off. Busses, trucks and tugs pulling luggage loads pass, air-traffic controllers in orange vests wave wands. Down the runway the jetliners roll, pushing faster until their noses rise into a sky settled low with gray-blue clouds. A storm is brewing to the west; rain threatens to slow the surge of activity before long.

As I write, the people around me shift and change, the air inside the gate cool but comfortable, the chatter a murmur underneath the din of a drink machine and canned music from a club bar. I’m thirsty but don’t want to overpay for coffee or need to use the restroom on my flight, so I go without.

I notice that I’m the only one here with a notebook and pen, the only one stopping to look around, to notice this atmosphere, record this experience. For most, this moment is lost in the shuffle, only an access point to a destination: unmemorable.

I sit and watch what once was unimaginable; that humans would create a machine that could fly. Something that is now such an everyday occurrence that it is no longer of note. In the time I’ve been sitting here, how many airplanes have rolled by and taken off? 10, 20, 30? Perhaps more. It’s astounding, and humbling. I knew I was small, insignificant. Seeing just how vast humanity is and how much we’ve created is amazing and frightening.

Like everything, there is a poem in this. On that vast sky and the human-made machines that fly within it, on the people that surround me but remain apart, on how my heart and mind and hand (from writing so furiously with this pen) are aching to make sense of it all, on how I feel so much a part of this crush of humanness but at the same time: solitary, apart, alone.

A woman on an island, with her backpack, notebook and pen in the center of this aerial universe on Concourse D in Atlanta International, waiting for the jetliner that will fly her home.


Stacie Eirich is a mother, poet & singer in Louisiana. Her work is forthcoming in Synkroniciti Magazine. Her poem “Blossoms,” published in Susurrus Magazine in 2023, was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. In 2023, she lived in Memphis while caring for her child through cancer treatments at St. Jude. Read more at www.stacieeirich.com

The Nest

Poetry by Barbara Santucci

For years I’ve watched the towhee build a nest
in the oak tree outside my kitchen window.
She weaves and weaves and never rests
until her home is tightly bound.
Where soon her eggs will lie in a perfection
only this master weaver can create.
Interwoven twigs rest in the branches
ready to shelter the wings of a newborn generation.
In winter, I cup the nest in my hands
and wonder how she knew the composition
that would fashion a home at her breast.

Does this mother know that her weaving
will be the wellspring for her young leaving?


Barbara Santucci has a Masters in Writing for Children from Vermont University and has published three picture books with the W. B. Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. She also has several poems in poetry journals.

The Visit

Poetry by R.M. Kinder

This house bursts with loving you—
all of you—our voices, vernacular:
“going out of a night,” “Virgie’s man,” “I had went.”
Dear to me, that peasant language I once spoke freely and well,
but it charmed only a few.

Our breed laughed often, sometimes so heartily
the laugh itself was the greatest pleasure of a day,
a day of work—toil—thorough and demanding and done!
We laughed before supper and after,
prayed before the meal and before bed.

What was class and status
but a cloud over land not ours?
We had dumplings, and pot roast, weather,
and animals close to us, named, and well kept.

I loved all of you, and, then, even our enemies
who seamed us together, separate, whole,
a nature, bearing the flags of ourselves,
nothing but that, and proud, proud, proud.


R. M. Kinder is a Missouri writer, author of three collections of short fiction and two novels. Her poems have appeared in Cottonwood, SHR, Appalacian Journal and other journals; her collection, The Likes of Us, was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize at SE Missouri State University.

Rooting

Fiction by Elodie Barnes

The wind is strange tonight. Sharp-edged, soft-howling. Icy tendrils carrying pinpricks of stars from the north. Leaves lie half-rotted, frozen mid-tumble. The soil is hard, unyielding, the solstice opposite of summer’s rich dampness. I soaked it up then, drank in the warmth under skies that darted with birds, their feathers inking songs onto blue that then faded with dusk. I can hear them rustling now, no longer singing, as uncertain as I am. Their claws grip my branches; branches that are naked now from the onslaught of winter, but no longer tender, no longer bloody with bursting buds and the rough scratching of owls. There is no skin left. Still, this wind makes me shiver. None of us are used to wind coming from the north.

At one time, I barely knew the wind at all. I was a child, knowing only that one day I would be gifted a seedling. A seedling that would grow as I grew, each of our bodies mimicking the channels and contours of the other until one day there would be no difference. One day I would take root in a place called home, a place from which I could never stray. I didn’t want it then. I didn’t want a home away from my mother; she never settled, so why should I? I never questioned the small plant of my mother’s that always sat on our kitchen windowsill, green and sickly and yet still trimmed every year by my father. Pruned, shaped, stunted. A tree smothered to a sapling.

She comes, sometimes, and I try to offer her the shelter I never could as a child. A blanket of branches, a waterfall of sunlight cascading through leaves. She talks, and I no longer understand. There are some words I remember – home, strong, love – but I don’t know whether those words came from her or me, and I’m even less sure of what they mean now that the north is gusting, ripping against my roots on their weakest side. The side that faces backwards; the side that knows there are too many questions about survival I never knew I needed to ask; too many questions I never dreamed she would have the answers to. Like why the winds suddenly change direction. What to do when home no longer feels safe. How to hold on, when it feels like winter will never end.


Elodie Barnes is a writer and editor living in the UK. Her short fiction has been widely published, including in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology. She is Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, and is working on a collection of short stories. Find her online at elodierosebarnes.weebly.com.

The Color of Noise

Nonfiction by Sandra Marilyn

The noise seemed to have been born of the profusion of color that swirled around the hundreds of people sharing the streets on our first day in India.

It was as if one of the gods or goddesses said, “There will be too many of you and you won’t have much money, but I’ll give you an extra serving of color and it will define your brave spirits.”

Then the color rained down on them in great splashes making their houses lavender and orange, or outrageously crimson, making their lorries bright yellow each with an individual design of flowers on every paintable surface. The color even splashed on the horns of the garlanded cows occupying their rightful place in the streets.

 The temples rose steadily up into the sky with layer after layer of deities, demons, monkeys, elephants, cows, and garlands all painted in every vibrant shade of beautiful with none of the West’s concern about appropriate combinations. My heart flew to the heavens with the soaring temples as I stood looking up letting the colors shower me with their abundance.

In the markets women with long strings of flowers in their hair sold powered colors that were displayed in rows of perfect pyramid shaped piles. The cobalt blue, lime green, scarlet, gold, orange, violet of their saris wrapped around their bodies as if to protect them from the tediousness of the world. There were no black, gray, or brown saris. The women on pilgrimage together at the shore all wore vibrant orange and yellow saris and moved laughingly together like a giant orange flower with yellow borders on its pedals.

Cars honking, cows mooing, children laughing, motorcycles revving, people shouting. The noise that might have been jarring took on the life of the colors running together in an ecstatic cacophony. Even in the noise there was no gray.

When I returned home my old house looked much bigger, much more convenient, much more reflective of my privilege than I had noticed on returning from other trips. Yet, the lack of noise and color was unsettling. I stood at the window feeling a profound boredom settle into my bones. Most of the houses I could see were versions of beige; many were gray; one was actually black. There were no flowers painted on trucks or cars; there were no animals walking freely down the street; women leaving their houses for work wore predictably dull clothes. I wondered if I would be able to live with the cheerlessness of our normal.

In the next few weeks I pulled out the ladders and tarps and set about the long task of painting my house a considerably brighter blue, shiny periwinkle actually, than it had ever been before. All the while I scraped and sanded, lugged paint buckets, and dragged my weary legs up and down ladders, I was saying a sort of prayer for my old house.

“I will honor your soul with this magnificent color if you will protect me from the bleakness and harshness of the world.” She agreed, of course.


Sandra Marilyn, her wife, and a dog live in an old house on the side of a hill in San Francisco. She looks out the window at a view of the city and wonders about the lives of people who live in other cities. And she writes about them every day.

i have flown from my home

Poetry by Jonah Meyer

i have flown from my home
up into that carolina blue embrace which is the sky
past houses i have flown
past families in yards, past
automobiles quick on the way to somewhere else
past the factories, the outdoor picnics, the baseball games
heavy in extra innings

here i have grown, have spread two yellow wings
out over o.henry’s town, that tiny
dragon-tongue below,
over the births and the deaths and the
songs being sung inside radios

i climb, i climb, the hot thick clouds
are silk-white blankets, rugs by
my fox-trotting feet,

and still i soar into
a universe dream-eyed and naked …

O! that the night is a staircase rising,
pure piano-forte,
and i — thrown by harsh desire — i am
all-too-happy to hear such symphonic
orchestration first-hand

bending, climbing, stretching long pale arms
through such sky-dew, even the birds now

believe me
insane


Jonah Meyer is a poet, writer, and editor in North Carolina. His poetry and creative nonfiction has been published widely. Jonah plays guitar and piano, shoots photography, and studies neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy. He serves as Poetry Editor of Mud Season Review and Assistant Poetry Editor with Random Sample Review.

Widowed Memories

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

Why the Rabbits Run

Nonfiction by Lindsay Dudbridge

When I first visited Madrid, just three months before moving there, my Spanish partner and I crossed the central part of the city, erratically dodging and weaving our way through people like bats catching flies. Panicked, I said, “It’s like we’re in New York City. This is too big. I don’t know if I can live here.”

I grew up in the Adirondack Park—with six million acres to explore. I trained for my high-school cross-country team in the footsteps of deer, bear, and coyote and recovered in rocky streams or still lakes set to the soundtrack of loon calls. Born into a life of “forever wild,” I wondered how I could ever replace soft pine and mud with concrete and stone, forests with buildings, and rugged with landscaped?

By the time I was wandering the streets of Spain, I was no stranger to cities. I had been living in the Washington, DC area for nearly 20 years. Though I always sought the wildish spaces, no matter how tiny—running thin strips of trails between backyards and strip malls. The last several years, I lived in the city itself, next to the large, forested Rock Creek Park. I mentally mapped the Park’s trails in ways beyond their intersections and where they led. If I ran up a specific hill at dusk in the spring, I could see nesting owls. If I kept running a little further along the ridge just before dark, I would meet volunteers setting up nets to capture and study bats. I knew where to see the woodpeckers, which rocks to avoid stepping on after a heavy rain, and which trees had fallen with the last heavy storm.

Madrid feels so different—like chaos. It’s an introvert’s nightmare: people are everywhere and everywhere is loud. So I run at the quiet time—the cusp of sunrise—when it’s light enough to not need a headlamp but early enough that it’s not yet considered morning by many here. I start out along the paved, well-lit river trail and head into Casa de Campo, which was once the King’s hunting grounds. There are few people, just a spattering of other runners and dog walkers at the lake near the entrance.

The damp days are my favorite, as a light fog nestles in among the tall pinyon pines. These days, I crunch along the dirt roads because the trails are covered in a heavy mud that cakes the shoes. As I jog along, some of the many rabbits freeze and others bolt, zigzagging to safety. At first, I wondered why they ran. The park seemed so tame. But one morning, I stopped in my tracks as a rabbit came tearing toward me. The fox chasing it slowed to a trot when it saw me, reluctantly turning and heading back into the field in search of more prey. How lucky to see such a thing. I felt guilty for interrupting its hunt and relieved for the rabbit. I continued my run, holding those conflicting emotions and watching the carboneros, so similar to the chickadees of home, flit from branch to branch.

I often feel like I will never fit into this new culture—the late dinners, the lack of personal space, the constant conversation. But these mornings, I can at least immerse myself in this land and understand why the rabbits run and where the foxes hunt. So I run, I learn, and I listen to my footsteps patting a rhythm into the earth. I can almost follow it, like a thread across the Atlantic to the forest where I’m from.


Lindsay Dudbridge is a professional editor from the US who has been living in Madrid, Spain since 2019. When not manipulating the written word, she is outside running, mountaineering, caving, and climbing.

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