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Tag: life choices

Counting

Nonfiction by Ann Bracken

I always count. Drinks, that is. I notice how many times a guy refills his beer glass or how many glasses of wine my friend drinks. I used to count my husband’s beers every night—up to three, he was pretty nice. After that, at around five, he went one of two ways—either he fell asleep on the sofa and snored like a buzz saw or he wanted to have sex. Go figure, especially after so much alcohol. 

I counted how many cases of beer I had to buy a week. Why did I have to buy the beer anyway? I wasn’t drinking it. I hated beer, its stickiness, its stale smell in the morning when he didn’t finish a can. I drank wine, but usually only one glass. The two hangovers I’d experienced in college acted as powerful deterrents. And looming over every social occasion, the specter of my mother’s alcohol abuse clung to me like a shroud.

Parties were the worst—when he had too many beers for me to count. I could always tell because he’d come find me, and spit out a barrage of cruel jokes.

One of his favorite lines went like this, “Man, you should see her when she stumbles around the badminton court. She couldn’t hit the birdie if it flew into her racket.”  

If we were playing pool, he gave a running commentary of every shot I took. “Whoa, first time you ever picked up a cue, sweetie?” or “If you want to be sure and win, just ask Annie to shoot a round with you.”

He’d get everyone laughing at me and then refuse to leave the party when I’d had enough. He always drove home. I was so numb to his drinking and pot smoking, I never questioned his fitness to drive.

“Sounds like an alcoholic to me,” the counselor said when I described how Randy never appeared drunk even after five or six beers. “High tolerance. That’s a sign.” 

I never connected Randy’s drinking and his abusive behavior because he always teased me or made fun of me in front of people. It was just worse when we were at parties and I couldn’t leave when I’d had enough. 

After the divorce, I dated a great guy—a lawyer at the EPA who invited me to dinner and a jazz concert. He had a martini before dinner, and I joined him. Then he ordered a glass of wine. I began counting.  On our second date, he told me one of his brothers was homeless because he was an alcoholic. “My dad’s an alcoholic, too, but he always kept his job.” I figured his odds for having a problem. Every time we went out, he had a martini or Manhattan before dinner and then some wine. I kept counting. 

“Last night, I went to a dinner party with some friends, and I had too much to drink.” 

“What does that look like?” I asked.

“Not much. I just get kind of loud and talk a lot. Make stupid jokes.”

Sometimes the danger signals flash early. My stomach lurched as he described his embarrassing behavior, which sounded all too much like Randy’s.

“That’s not going to work for me,” I told him. I added “bad dinner party behavior” to his count.  

One night as he measured out gin for his martini, he spilled it on the counter. Before I could give him a paper towel, he bent over and slurped it up. The next morning, I asked him if he’d ever gone to AA. “Yeah, but only because my ex-girlfriend insisted. I’m not really an alcoholic.” 

I totaled up his count. “If you want to keep seeing me, you need to stop drinking and go to AA.”

 He called me a few days later. “It’s 9PM and I’m having my first glass of wine for the evening.”

When I asked if he’d made a decision, he said, “You’re almost enough to make me stop drinking.” 

I was tired of counting.


Ann Bracken has published three poetry collections and a memoir. She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series in Columbia, Maryland. She volunteers for the Justice Arts Coalition, exchanging letters with incarcerated people to foster their use of the arts.

Bridging

Nonfiction by Kate Marshall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forward or back. A plunge seems inevitable.

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

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

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


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

Life’s a Mystery

Fiction by Ale Malick

My friend and I were on a barge, crossing the wide river, when the deadman’s telephone rung. He shouted spools of embarrassing self-defense into the phone, which was tiny in his chunky, rubbery hands. There was a whole world on the other end of that call which we couldn’t engage with, but to which he had much to say. Us, the people on the barge, were nothing to the great expanse of life that existed out there, somewhere, for him. The barge, packed tight with passengers as it was, meant I could smell his sweat and catch droplets of his spital. But we were not there to him.

Without a pause in his tirade, or even completing a sentence, the man threw his phone with as much power as an aging, obese, wheezing, suited man could do. We all watched it fly, then drop quickly into the muddy swollen swell. It had rained for days, and the river stood higher than it should have done.

I didn’t see him fall. I was still watching the ripples the phone had made. But my friend saw him go, though even he couldn’t say if he’d done it on purpose or if the force of throwing had toppled him. The man hit the water with much more impact than the phone had done, and he didn’t stay afloat any longer than it. We watched the spot in case he reemerged and swam to shore. But no one went to help him, it was impossible. In this current, the deadman was going to stay dead.

The excitement brought benches free, which my friend spotted, and we sat down for our sandwiches. He began to talk, which was unusual for him. The deadman’s sudden exit had inspired it I think. “I was in India once, long before we met of course. On a crowded street, waiting for something, but I can’t remember what. A crackle across the road gave me a focus. A bird had landed on the electricity lines and was being electrocuted. It fell after a couple of seconds, stiffly to the floor. A poor looking man, the poor of a poor city, walked over to him with a cup and fed the dying bird water. Touching of course, but in amongst all the poverty I’d seen, children begging, crippled and diseased bodies, dirt, dust and roaming wild dogs, he chose a bird to care for.”

The captain started shouting instructions about being ready with our bags. We were docking. Time had gone already. My friend never explained why he told his story right then, and I could never know if the deadman was killing himself or saving his phone.

I did ask him, but he only said, “Life’s a mystery.” Like he didn’t know himself why he’d said it. He hailed us a taxi and we moved on to something new.


Ale Malick has been a lecturer, playwright, actor, stand-up, elevator operator, labourer converting a Soviet army barracks into a factory. He writes for ROUTE magazine, on all things Route 66, and has been shortlisted for a HarperCollins anthology. He won an international award for his novel Pizza with Jimbob & Twoforks.

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