Tag: life decisions

And Yet This Life

1 February 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Lisa Low

Is still worth living;
even now the rain is falling, making
mud from dirt around the roots and filling
in the ragged spots where grass hardly
ever shows. Tomorrow, too, the sun
will bring its healing mix of heat and light,
and make the flowers grow, more firmly
capable, their fancy floral dresses
stiff, each new eye glazed with thick black stripe
of paint, each marigold more grandly
dressed, more rich with bright silk fabrics hung,
orange vests and epaulets . . .

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phoebe, Pennsylvania English, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.

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Rapid Transit

12 January 2023 / Editor

Fiction by E.H. Jacobs

After some consideration, I decided to move from Town X, where I had dwelt for many peaceful, if uneventful, years, to Town Y, a neighboring municipality with which I had only a vague familiarity. I had been feeling for some time that my life had become stale and routine. I had many acquaintances but few, if any, friends, and social conversation always returned to the same topics, like a planet on a fixed orbit: that week’s golf game, the latest baseball trades, and who was meeting up with whom at which expensive restaurant. Nobody seemed interested in discussing, say, the audiobook of Hemingway stories I had been listening to. I heard that the citizens of Y were a livelier lot and that interesting things went on there.

I awoke the first morning in my new home after sleeping so deeply that my memory of the move seemed suspended in a hazy semi-conscious fog. I was surrounded by boxes neatly stacked with no markings to indicate their contents or the room in which each belonged. Perhaps the strangest thing of all: there were no flaps or openings. On top of the highest stacked box was a note that appeared to be in my mother’s handwriting, although my mother had been dead for some years, which simply said: “Don’t open anything you’re not sure of.”

I went outside to see if the newspaper had arrived and a gust of cold wind – quite unexpected in July – hit me in the face, freezing my nose and slamming shut the front door. In my pajamas, I hugged myself tightly to keep warm. The sky darkened and small, white objects began drifting lazily from above, like snowflakes. They soon multiplied and I was in the middle of what appeared to be a squall. As the objects got closer, it became clear that they were not snowflakes, but loose pages from a notebook. I grabbed a handful as they twisted and torqued around me. They were from stories that I had written. A dry, rustling sound, barely audible at first, rose in volume, morphing into laughter. It was the sound of my pages laughing at me. I was hit on the head by what felt like hailstones. After each hit, I saw fall to the ground a book. Each was written by an author whom I had grown to admire: Saroyan, Woolf and Styron. The books flipped themselves open and shook their pages in laughter.

Lying in the driveway was a black high heel shoe with the bottom of the heel roughly shorn off. I looked at my feet, as if the shoe were mine, and I marveled that I could be capable of switching identities so fluidly. Alongside the shoe was a book authored by my favorite workshop leader. The wind blew the book open to a page that read: “Lesson Five: Raise the Stakes.” At that moment, blood started dripping out of the shoe.

I walked into the house in some distress only to hear a knock at the door, commanding and insistent.

Standing with his back to me was a man, broad shouldered, in a gray turtleneck sweater. He turned, holding out two fishing rods and smiling broadly with a self-satisfied, I wouldn’t exactly call it a smirk, but with an expression that definitely showed that he knew who he was and was going to tell me who I was. He had a well-trimmed, salt and pepper beard framing a very familiar face. I opened the door.

I managed to squeak: “Ernest? Is that really you?”

Hemingway let out a hearty laugh. “I’ve come to teach you to fish!” He said a little too loudly, but with good cheer.

“F-fish?” I stammered.

“Well, it was either that or bullfighting, and I didn’t think you’d be up for that.”

“But why’d you–?”

“Somebody had to. Come on, you don’t want to end up like those pansies – Saroyan, Woolf and Styron. You’ve got to learn how to fish for yourself!”

I hesitated, not knowing if I should accept his invitation or invite him in for tea. After all, how often does one get to spend time with Ernest Hemingway?

Hemingway looked past me into the house.

“What’s with those boxes?” he asked.

“I don’t know how to open them.”

Hemingway pushed past me. “What’s in them?” he asked, as he leaned his fishing rods against the tallest stack.

“Secrets?” I said uncertainly.

“What kind of secrets, man!”

I shrugged. “Don’t know.”

Hemingway took out a fishing knife. “Well, let’s find out then. There are stories in there! Let’s get to work.”

Before he could start cutting the boxes, I blubbered: “But my mother—”

“Your mother? Do you always listen to your mother? I’m sure she was a lovely woman, but still, you know – fish for yourself!”

I nodded and, with shaking hands, pulled down the first box.

E.H. Jacobs is a psychologist and writer in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Coneflower Café, Santa Fe Literary Review, Permafrost Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Storgy Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, Aji Magazine, and Smoky Quartz. He has published two books on parenting and book reviews in the American Journal of Psychotherapy.

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The Holding Tank

20 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ron Theel

It was one of those old hotel restaurants. The kind that lets you select your “fresh seafood” from aquariums grouped near the entranceway. I went past it daily on my morning walk but never considered eating there.

Today I stopped. A large fish was swimming erratically near the surface of a small, rectangular tank. I needed to have a closer look. Growing up, I always had aquariums. I liked the challenge of creating and maintaining my own aquatic world: balancing predators with scavengers, separating egg-layers from live-bearers, maintaining the correct pH and temperature levels of the water.

This aquatic world offered a refuge from my father’s athletic world. He played high school football and enjoyed participating in boxer fighting while in the army. “You have to play a sport,” he demanded. “All high school boys play sports.” My pleasure came from the chess club and the debate team. My father’s world remained unexplored.

I recognized the large fish as a sturgeon. For a fish fanatic, the signs would be hard to miss.

An elongated, torpedo shaped body with lines of bony, armor-like “plates” that stretched along smooth, scaleless skin. And that distinctive, rounded nose punctuated with two tiny barbell whiskers to help locate food.

The tank was too small for the sturgeon. Too short as well as too narrow. The fish was too large to turn around by simply swimming in the opposite direction. The top of a sturgeon’s tail fin is longer than the bottom. This distinctive feature enabled the fish to flip itself over by using the top of its tail, enabling it to swim in the opposite direction. It was the only way to reverse direction since the width of the tank was so narrow. Swim about two body lengths, bump the end wall of the tank, flip, and change direction. The motion reminded me of the technique a freestyle swimmer uses to turn around when arriving at the wall of a pool.

Over the next two weeks, I frequently paused at the fish tank. The sturgeon always followed the same turning pattern. Bump the end-wall of the tank. Flip. Reverse. I felt an overwhelming sadness. There was no choice for the sturgeon whose life had to follow this endless, compulsive pattern.

I wished that the fish would somehow disappear. Go belly-up. Be plated-up. Perhaps a miraculous rescue by an animal rights activist. But there was no such drama.

I’ve come up against walls many times. Learning how to live with epilepsy. Bump, flip, change direction. A broken marriage. Bump, flip, change direction. A bankrupt business. Bump, flip, change direction. There are often bumps along any journey. But I’ve been fortunate. People were always there to hold the net for me, to help me change direction and get on with my life: family, friends, therapists, doctors, nurses, and many others. I thank God for all of them.

One morning, I decided not to watch the sturgeon. I’d seen enough. That evening, I returned to the place where I thought I would never eat, the place I came to know as the “fish tank restaurant.” I looked straight ahead as I entered and seated myself. There was no need to read the laminated menu resting in front of me. The waiter approached and asked, “Are you ready to order, sir?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I’ll have the sturgeon, please.”

Ron Theel is an educator, mixed media artist, and freelance writer living in Central New York. His work has been published in Lake Life and Rustling Leaves Anthology.

Pain Management

6 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Carol L. Gloor

A generic woman smiles
from the poster in the exam room,
her body wired with red nerves.
Mine’s the one running
down the right leg,
the one that’s caught fire.
A plastic spine stands
at attention on the shelf,
bristling with vertebrae.
The white coat points
to the bottom two,
this is where I will
insert the needle,
with very small risk
of spinal fluid release
or paralysis.
While I sign the release
I have no time to read
he’s still talking.

Carol L. Gloor has been writing poetry since she was sixteen. Her work has been published in many journals, most recently in Abandoned Mine. Her poetry chapbook, “Assisted Living,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013, and her full-length poetry collection, “Falling Back,” was published by WordPoetry in 2018.

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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.

A Lifeline

12 June 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Gail Purdy

The afternoon was grey with light rain. No different than any other day during the winter months. The world appeared softer through the rain-spattered windshield as I sat motionless in the car outside my mother’s apartment building. I felt the deep heaviness that had made itself at home in my body. What else did I need to do before I went home and cocooned for the night?

My cell phone rang just as I turned the key in the ignition. The woman’s voice sounded harsh coming through my car’s audio system.

“This is the Director of Care at Evergreen Baptist Care Facility. Is this Gail?”

“Yes, it is.”

“We have a bed for your mother. You have until tomorrow to decide if you want it. If you do, you must move your mother into the facility within 72 hours. Normally it is 48 hours, but you have an extra day because of the New Year’s holiday.”

The idea of my mother moving into a long-term care facility was something I didn’t allow myself to think about. I didn’t want to hope. Was it possible that this journey of caring for my mother might soon end? Was someone throwing me a lifeline, and I just needed to grab hold of it? Could I grasp hope and not let it slip through my fingers?

It had only been two weeks since the case manager visited my mother to assess if it was safe for her to continue living independently. The regional health authority would decide if my mother qualified for a ‘subsidized bed’ in a long-term care facility. A decision that was weighted heavily on how many authorized services my mother was currently using. Any assistance I contracted privately to support my mother didn’t count. “I only gather the information and present it to the assessment team,” the case manager told me. “Every care facility in your immediate area has a six to nine-month waitlist. So don’t expect your mother to move soon if she is approved.”

What did live independently really mean? The only reason my mother had been able to live alone in her apartment over the last several years was because of me. She had fallen five times in less than four months, and each time I found her lying on the floor, not knowing how to call for help. When she stopped bathing, I arranged for someone to assist her. When she could no longer make sense of microwave instructions to reheat prepared meals, I hired someone to purchase groceries and prepare meals for her. Afraid of falling again, she had become reluctant to leave her apartment.

Fingers deformed by arthritis made it difficult for her to remove medications from the pharmacy-sealed blister packs. Yellow and red pills were found among the forks and spoons in the kitchen drawer, and a zip-lock sandwich bag containing a handful of pills sat near the toaster. Evidence of what had been lost and retrieved over time.

Each square on my mother’s large calendar contained the names of people who came to help her each day. Confusion set in each time she looked at it or when someone showed up to help her. “Why are you here?” she asked. “I don’t need any help.”

As the woman on the phone continued to speak, I heard her voice, but I couldn’t respond.

Frustration and anger had taken their toll. Trying to manage the needs of my aging mother was crushing me. As hours turned into days and days into months, I felt fragile. Feeling myself slowly breaking apart, I wondered if I would be lost in the shattering. Self-preservation was screaming at me. Responding to these needs had become a way of life for me, and I didn’t know how to be any different. And now I was slowly losing myself.

Anger bubbled just beneath the surface of my self-control. With a force and energy of its own, anger surfaced at will. I wanted to live my life, not my mother’s. She no longer knew how to keep herself safe, and I was anxious about what might happen when I couldn’t be with her. I was afraid of losing her, and at the same time, I wanted her gone. Fear and anger wrestled inside of me, each fighting to take control.

Only a few seconds had passed as images from the last year flashed through my mind. I slipped back into the present, aware of the rain on the windshield and the woman on the phone.

“Yes, we will take the room,” I heard myself say as numbness spread through my body. Fog descended over the streets as I drove home.

Gail Purdy is an emerging writer and multi-disciplinary visual artist living on the west coast of British Columbia. She is the runner up recipient of the 2021 International Amy MacRae Memorial Award for Memoir. Her story “The Parking Lot” was part of the 2021 Amy Award Anthology.