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The Editors

NOBODY BELIEVED ME when I told them demons sat next to us in the classroom or watched us pump back and forth on swings with chains that were probably illegally long. And when I described these invisible demons in intricate detail, people either made fun of me or scrunched up their faces and side-eyed me—the same way I do now when my QAnon sister tells me “demonocrats” inject the blood of children to stay young. And, like my sister, I actually believed, wholeheartedly, that what I saw was real.

One day in fourth grade, while I stood in the lunch line at school waiting for my cheese zombie and applesauce, I imagined one of these netherworldlings staring at me, as hungry for my soul as I was for my cheese zombie. The demons were short and round, with werewolf-like fur and yellow eyes. They had feet and hands like chimpanzees and square teeth with gaps between them. I knew this because my dad told me so. He dreamed of Satan and the final battle, and claimed that within those dreams, he could see demons standing beside us at school.

I was already a high-strung kid who pulled out my eyebrows and imagined thieves lurking outside my window at night as I lay sweating, heart pounding in my bed. I chewed the skin off the bottoms of my feet until they became infected. My dreams were so intense, so vivid, that I repeatedly wet the bed, believing I was using a toilet conveniently located somewhere in my dream. I’d pull my pants down, pee, wipe, not wash my hands, pull my pants back up again, and then return to my dream world.

My mom told us the Antichrist was living somewhere on Earth. He was akin to the Big Bad Wolf, only when he kills you, you die and it’s over. The Antichrist takes your soul for an eternity and apparently bats it around like a cat does a mouse.

Before I turned ten, I learned that the Antichrist could’ve been anyone—the nurse, your best friend, the grocery store clerk. But sometime around 1984, the Antichrist became anyone with the potential to become a Democratic president. This was more comforting and seemed easy enough to stay away from the White House since I was all the way in Spokane, Washington.

At one point, the Antichrist was Procter & Gamble. Sometime in the ‘80s, a rumor started that the hundred-year-old logo of Procter & Gamble was some kind of code telling other Satanists or Antichrist enthusiasts that they were on Team Lucifer—even making the claim that the swirls in the man in the logo’s beard were the numbers 666. The rumor grew branches, and people started to say that a percentage of the money P&G made went to the Devil in the form of a tithe. Eventually, the company removed this logo from their products in a rebrand, even though they proved the rumors to be false by getting the more prominent and respectable Christians to vouch for them. Maybe it was too difficult to find bank statements or checks cashed in hell.

One day, after a heated and terrifying church group meeting where all of the adults collectively panicked about that week’s end of the world, we sped home in our dark-blue 1976 Chevy Nova. My parents told us we’d have to throw away all of Satan’s products. We were so poor and had so little that I couldn’t imagine what we could possibly afford to lose. Also, how did Satan manage to get products into the grocery stores all the way from hell?

“Can I keep the art set Grandpa bought me for Christmas?” I asked.

“Sure, sure—I mean, well, ask your mom.” My dad failed to reassure me. Everything had to go through her, so by the second “sure” I remembered his meager status.

“Stephen will have to use cloth diapers now,” my mom said, indicating how much more work it’d be to change my little brother’s diapers.

When we got home, my mom started singing in tongues which formed an indiscernible God-shaped sing-song tornado through the house while she hunted for signs of the devil. My dad frantically pulled out a roll of Glad garbage bags from under the sink and ignored the two dirty dishes I hadn’t had time to wash before church—something I was sure I’d get chewed out for. At least the devil spared me that. Always hip to the possibility of a joke, I wondered what my parents would’ve done if the garbage bags had also been part of P&G.

The Cheer laundry detergent was the first to go. The little circular half-moon and stars P&G logo was big enough to see from afar—making it an easy visual target. I was thrilled to see that go as the aggressive chemical smell only encouraged me to wear my clothes until they smelled feral. Then went the Bounty paper towels. Soon, it seemed like every adult staple in the house was stuffed into a giant black garbage sack of useful damnables.

Speaking-in-tongues—or glossolalia, as the educated heathens call it—was my first exposure to anything that resembled another language. Looking back, it sounded less like a language and more like logorrhea, the gibberish of an Alzheimer’s patient. But when my mom did it, she was happy. She wasn’t depressed; she wasn’t yelling at my dad. She even opened the curtains and “put her face on,” as she used to say.

The house felt lighter.

“Here—look at this.” My mom stopped God-warbling long enough to show me the small P&G symbol on the back of a tube of Crest toothpaste. “This is the Mark of the Beast.”

This was a reference to the Book of Revelation, where all end of the world info is stored for interpretation.

“A beast, like the guy in Teen Wolf?!”

Invisible demons I could handle, but an actual beast—one we could apparently see—sent me over the edge. Even school demons seemed cute, like Ewoks. But a beast had me pulling out my eyebrows.

The little symbol looked no different from what was on quarters and dimes. I wondered if they’d soon think money was evil, too—but they were too busy throwing out soap to notice that the lack of it was an actual earthly problem.

“The Antichrist. Satan’s puppet on Earth. If Jesus isn’t in your heart, then we all—everyone with Jesus in their hearts—will go up to heaven. But you, those without Jesus in their hearts, will stay on Earth for many years with the Antichrist. Chaos on Earth and gnashing of teeth,” she said.

I didn’t know what gnashing was exactly, but I did know the feeling of teeth rotting. Since my parents believed the end of the world was imminent on a regular basis, they let my baby teeth blacken out of my head—weeks of barely eating, throbbing pain, and digging out chunks of dead teeth.

“Is it just one beast? Where is it? And is it the same as the Antichrist?”

“They’re the same—the leader of Satan’s army.”

My mom only confused me more. We learned long ago that “we” is plural and “I” is singular. Just like after I started my period, I stopped asking her questions for which she had no answers, drew my own conclusions, and learned how to plug my own holes.

I started to read the Bible like it was a survival manual. I joined every kids’ club at church I could find and won every award possible for memorizing Bible verses. I learned early that rote memory could spare me both the fiery abyss and hell on Earth. I memorized the shortest verses I could find right before the contests, then almost violently shot my hand in the air to go first, before I forgot them. The more felt patches I won, the safer I felt from this gnashing of teeth and the Antichrist.

Prayer became a matter of practice, but it felt more like a constant, one-sided conversation—like I was talking to myself. God never replied, never sent any message. No bird landed on my shoulder. No voices, no burning bushes, no indication that I was anywhere on his radar.

All I had were the occasional dreams of demons walking around at school, where life on Earth was on fire and people had no teeth, or that I was tattooed with the mark of the beast—like it was a barcode to be scanned at the precipice of heaven and hell.

No wonder Jesus wasn’t talking back. Maybe I was on Team Satan and didn’t even know it.

If I feed my baby brother, change his diapers, and stop asking for a new bike, will you let me go to heaven? If I cry now, about my grandmother dying, will that help?

My grandmother had recently died, but I didn’t know her, so I didn’t cry. There were three of us kids at that point; she lived in Seattle, and none of us were old enough to remember her. When her things arrived—boxes of books, wool blankets, and hats that smelled like what I imagined women in old photographs smelled like—my dad lost the fight to hold back tears. It was the first time I saw him cry. I tried to force myself to join him in solidarity, even spitting in my hand and rubbing it on my eyes to make them look wet—but I couldn’t find one tear’s worth of sadness. Maybe Jesus knew this and thought it was a flaw in my soul.

I made sure to include talking to Jesus in everything I did. The only way to escape soul-and-body damnation was to cover all bases. But even then, it wasn’t enough—at least according to my mom.

“There’s just no way of knowing. It’s between you and God. It’s very personal,” my mom would say, tightening the knots that already gnawed away at my chest and gut.

I tried to sing, to glossolalize, stretching my tongue and lips and throat into new vowels and casting them to the heavens. But it felt weird—inorganic—like crying for my dead grandmother. I asked my mom if she could teach me how to do it.

“Oh no, absolutely not. Everyone has their own language with God. He can’t hear you if you use my language. Be patient, it’ll come,” she said, in her smug so-close-to-God voice.

But being patient, in a world of teeth-gnashing and chaos and eternal fire and homelessness and being orphaned, which could happen at any time, wasn’t helping my anxiety. I chewed my fingernails until they were no longer even considered nails, and I gnawed the skin off the bottom of my big toe until it was hard to walk—my go-to response to anxiety in those days.

I developed a new plan. If I went to school and told all the kids about Jesus, like some kind of recruiting agent, maybe God would finally talk to me.

The next morning, I went to school in my Awana outfit (Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed, some verse in Timothy)—a yellow dress that fell barely above the knees, with a green cotton sash that had all the awards I’d won for memorizing Bible verses ironed onto it. While I was waiting for the bus, I prayed:

Jesus, I don’t know how to talk to you yet, but I’m trying. And I don’t want my teeth to gnash—partly because they already hurt, and partly because I don’t want to be in Hell. I also don’t want to not have parents—or at least not a dad, anyway. I just want to be in the spelling bee and climb the magnolia tree out front. So please make the kids at school listen to me. Please. And if you’re not going to come back, will you tell my mom? Because maybe then she’ll take me to the dentist. But if it’s too much to ask now, before we really know each other, that’s okay. I just don’t want to be on fire. Thanks, God.

The school bus driver pulled up to the stop, opened the door, and welcomed me aboard.

“Good morning, Miss K. You’re looking very accomplished today!”

Her observance of my efforts gave me confidence. She was probably the same age as my mom, but she was always smiling. She wasn’t beautiful like my mom, but it was better that way. My mom wouldn’t open the curtains, answer the door, or talk to anyone unless she went full Kabuki. And she acted differently, too, when she had her “face on”—nicer, faker. Not the woman we spent eighty percent of our lives with—the one who sat in the dark complaining about other women, screaming at and belittling my dad, threatening suicide, writing journal entries to Jesus asking Him to give her someone like Kenny G for a husband, and telling him she felt like he was her pimp—whatever that was.

“Thanks, Miss M.”

I walked toward the back of the bus to focus. On the way, someone threw an empty juice box at me, followed by laughter. My confidence plummeted—almost like coming down off hard drugs, but for kids. My ears grew hot, then my face. Surely bright red by this point, I sat down in the last seat, next to Chen, who was by the window. Chen was the only Chinese girl in my school—maybe in the entire city, as far as I knew—and my only real competition for handwriting contests and the spelling bee. Between the two of us, we always took first and second place.

Please, God... Jesus, give me strength.

Asking God for strength seemed to work, because when the adults at church went into special prayer groups, it was the most common request—or demand. It was a letdown to realize that becoming an adult, with its access to cars, sex, and R-rated movies, still came with problems.

Give me strength to save the other kids from demons, teeth-gnashing, and the Antichrist.

My face felt less hot, and my ears less purple, so maybe Jesus was finally doing me a solid. Chen held a steady gaze out the window, her hands folded squarely in her lap over a bundle of books. She smelled like foods I’d never smelled before. Most of the foods I knew were from 7-Eleven, where my dad worked nights.

“Hi, Chen.”

“Hi.” She looked at me quickly, then straight back out the window.

“Have you heard of Jesus?”

“Yes. My family goes to church on Wednesday and Friday nights, and Sunday mornings,” she replied, as if I’d asked her what two plus two was.

On one hand, this was great news: Chen and her family were saved from the Antichrist. But I couldn’t recruit her. Still, she might have some insight into other matters.

“Do you speak in tongues? Does Jesus talk to you?”

Chen’s face aged a hundred years in confusion.

“I don’t know what that is, but we study the Bible a lot. Just like homework. We take tests.”

“Oh, so maybe if you get A’s on all the tests, that means you know exactly what to do? But then does He talk to you—like He’s in your heart?”

Chen’s face relaxed a little, but she still looked at me like I was a soul barely worth saving.

“You smell like cigarettes. Do your parents smoke?”

“Yeah. They both really like cigarettes.”

They more than liked cigarettes—they smoked them all day long. The first thing both of them did each morning was light up: my dad with a cup of coffee on the front porch, and my mom hidden away in her bedroom amidst fantasies of a better life and maybe a magic mirror, telling her how beautiful she was. They didn’t always smoke in the house—just when it was cold, rainy, too hot, or too windy. Or when my mom wasn’t wearing full makeup.

“Then it doesn’t matter—they can’t achieve salvation no matter what they do.”

A new anxiety glued itself to the old ones. Maybe my parents didn’t realize cigarettes were also the Antichrist. Maybe I could be the one to save them. Maybe then Jesus would talk to me, and I could sing to Him in my own private language. But most importantly, I wouldn’t have to gnash my teeth or hide from the Antichrist—or the beast—until I died, only to go straight to hell: never dead, and forever fucked with.

When I entered the classroom, the group of cool girls stared at me. They wore the best clothes, had real Keds and the biggest sticker collections. They even had the pens with feathered, googly-eyed erasers that were kept inside pop-culture-ed-out containers at the upper right-hand corner of each of their desks. I sat down at my plain, bedazzled-with-nothing desk, which smelled like a janitor had recently been there, and tuned out.

Dear God, I don’t think my parents know that cigarettes are a deal breaker, or another kind of Antichrist. So please give me the strength to tell them, because I know they love those things almost more than anything else. Maybe even me.

I pulled A Wrinkle in Time from my desk and started to read before class began. We were reading the book as a class, but I was a chapter behind. I didn’t like bringing books home, because my parents would inevitably say they were evil and call the school. I wondered if the Black Thing was also the Antichrist. But in the book, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Who came to help the special kids defeat the Black Thing in order to save the universe. Nobody was helping me, that’s for sure. And it didn’t seem like anyone else outside of the church or my parents’ friend group was too concerned that our very existence was in peril.

Propelled by a subconscious desperation bomb, I walked to my fourth grade teacher’s desk. She was frantically making red, black, and green marks all over our papers. The lenses of her glasses were so thick that when she looked at you, her eyes seemed double-sized, like Velma’s in Scooby-Doo.

“Miss Reeves ...?”

She pushed the thick frames down the bridge of her nose and, thankfully, looked at me with normal-sized eyes.

“Go on,” she urged.

“So, is the Dark Thing like the Antichrist? And if my parents smoke cigarettes, are they going to hell? And if I get the other kids to accept Jesus into their hearts, do you think He’ll speak in tongues with me—so I don’t have to go to hell and have gnashing of teeth?”

Miss Reeves blinked a series of hard blinks that resembled Morse code and looked at me like I was a challenging math equation.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. The Antichrist?”

“Yeah, and did you know there are demons with yellow eyes in your classroom that work for the Antichrist?”

I let it all out—all of my unanswered questions—hoping Miss Reeves was like Mrs. Whatsit. But she wasn’t. The look on her face became more distorted, and this time even a little agitated.

“Okay, I have fourteen more papers to mark before everyone arrives, and from the looks of it, you have some more pages to read before the quiz. All I can tell you is that there are no demons in this school. I have no idea what an Antichrist is. And if your parents want to smoke cigarettes, that’s up to them.”

She pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, shook her head the way I did when our dog peed on the floor, and mumbled something under her breath that I couldn’t make out, which was probably for the best.

I wished I was wearing normal clothes, or had the foresight to bring a different outfit. And I wished even more that someone—anyone—had answers.

That night, after dinner, I sat on the couch while my dad smoked and yelled at the TV before his shift at 7-Eleven. The haze of cigarette smoke hotboxed the room, clinging to my clothes and furniture. I took a deep breath, inhaling the smoke and preparing to tell him what I’d learned from Chen. I looked at my dad’s face—tired, lined, and glued to the glow of The 700 Club. He looked like someone who needed to sleep, needed to play—needed a new wife.

“Dad, do you think you can go to heaven if you smoke?”

“Yeah, sure. God forgives sins.” He took another deep drag, held it in his lungs for a thoughtful second, and blew it out into the room like it was an exercise in Pilates breathing. I watched as the smoke mimicked the colors of whatever was on the TV.

“So then, if I can’t talk to Jesus like Mom does, do you think I can go to heaven?”

He rolled his eyes and smashed the cigarette butt into a heavy glass ashtray like it was something he hated.

“Look, that’s your mom’s thing. You don’t have to do that. Just don’t vote for Democrats when you grow up—keep listening to Pat Robertson. The guy’s a genius.”

Pat Robertson was my dad’s version of speaking in tongues. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I knew his voice. And I knew he hated whatever Democrats were.

“Does Pat Robertson know how to kill the demons and the Antichrist?”

My dad tapped another Winston from the pack and lit it up.

“There’s no way to do that here on Earth. Just don’t ever, ever vote for Democrats,” he said, a gulp of smoke caught in his lungs.

I felt an urge to hug my dad, but that’s just not how our family was. No one said I love you. No one hugged anyone. And for the most part, that was okay with me—the farther away from my mother, the better. The thought that I had to live inside her once, that I depended on her for nine whole months, made my skin crawl. I wanted to strip out my DNA, bleach the her parts clean, and put myself back together without any of her sequencing left behind.

Before I fell asleep, I thought for a long time. Maybe because I didn’t know what a Democrat was, or the Antichrist, or God, or Jesus—or my dead grandmother—for that matter, I couldn’t possibly talk to them, cry for them, or recruit new souls for them. All I knew was the joy of a clean room, mornings, magnolia trees, bike rides, and finding new worlds beneath rocks. But their demons were real to me.

The next day, I woke up just before sunrise. The patches of snow from winter were completely melted, and the air smelled like new pine. Waxy little fists started to emerge on the branches of trees, and crows carried sticks big enough to see from the ground to their nests. No soulless American church filled with people more concerned about the afterlife than this one could compare to these mornings.

I swapped my hand-me-down PJs for fake Keds and shorts and then brushed my teeth with hot water and vinegar. After eating a slice of bread with Jesus-approved peanut butter, I slipped out the back door and pulled my barely coherent Huffy from its dark sleeping place in the shed and went out the gate. In the only gear that worked, I pedaled hard into the morning, looking for a big dentist in the sky.

About the author:

Kevilina Burbank is an American writer living in southern France with her partner and three cats. Chess, books, and writing have always been her stable lovers. This summer, she’ll be attending Oxford University’s Advanced Summer Writing Program. This is her first publication.

The artwork for this piece is by Gustave Doré.

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The Editors

IN MY EMPTY-NESTER OFFICE, my daughter’s old bedroom, I sit through a Zoom meeting under a mobile of glow-in-the dark asteroids and stars, and my eyes wander along the postered walls—electric-type Pokémon sisters, Plusle and Minun, a black rhino storming towards me, and a big-bellied Totoro. I work on the NASA Aeronautics team; our research focuses on evolving airspace architectures to integrate more automation and new aircraft flight concepts safely. Last year, my husband and I both reduced our work week hours, so we could experiment with how retirement might feel in our last decades. We’ve each set dates to retire—many times. Last month, I announced to my team the intention to no-kidding, really retire, but I hadn’t yet gone down the path of the checkout process, which, among other paperwork, includes voiding and destroying the government passport I used for traveling abroad on government business: two holes punched in the cover and two holes in the barcode on the photo page. So after wrapping up the Zoom meeting notes on a TGI Friday afternoon, I decide that completing this simple passport “hole” task will help me take a first step. The perfect start to real retirement.

I run downstairs to scrounge up my burgundy official government passport and jam it my handheld single-hole punch. I squeeze hard and grunt for effect without much success. (Mental senior note: grip strength needs work.) Needing something with a little more umph, I dig out the heavy-duty metal three-hole punch from the cabinet and place it on my desk, insert the passport into the middle hole, push down with the full weight of my body and voila, one hole done. I shimmy the passport out. Then I punch holes two and three. I’m crushing it. But with each successive hole, I notice the passport is a little harder to extract, sticking in the hole punch because of remnants from the previous holes, but heck, I only have one hole left. I position, then punch hole four, done. I pull at the passport, but it’s stuck. The hole punch will not let go.

After a few minutes of wrestling and losing, I give the passport a couple of violent, futile tugs back and forth, but the clenched jaw of my three-hole punch is persistent. I grab my passport cover over the two first holes, lift it up, and the full weight of the three-hole-punch hangs from it, then ouch! A piercing pain jabs into my finger. I drop the punch, shake out my hand, only to find an angry tiny black fiber splinter staring back at me, halfway in and halfway out of the tip of my middle finger. The security fibers embedded in U.S. government passports to prevent counterfeiting are not only resistant to destruction but also vengeful. I go find tweezers, remove the black sliver from my middle finger, then stomp back to curse at my passport before I leave it on the carpet and walk away for the weekend.

Temperatures did rise above freezing for a short time Saturday afternoon with some snow melt, but after a cold night, I wake on Sunday to a frosty 25-degree January morning in suburban Seattle. I slip on my boots and follow my husband’s attempt at a shoveled snow path to the backyard, which has become an iced-over OSHA safety hazard for my sixty-year-old bones. It’s so cold the green grass crunches as I approach the chicken run, where I open the gate mounted between the support posts of an elevated playground platform and reach in to hang the feed off a chain on the underside of the low deck. Every morning, I duck under this deck to keep from hitting my head as I make my way over and into the coop to check for eggs and scoop chicken poop. I make a note that we need to add “rebuild a taller chicken run entrance gate” to our retirement list of to dos—just one more thing on a growing list of things we will have to come to terms with when we actually retire.

In my thirties, forties and fifties, I thought of retirement as a goal, a destination where you arrive, take your whole life in, and then sit around with the reward of having worked hard. But I’m finding that the concept of retirement is the opposite: no more great excuses to put off all those things a job kept me too busy to do, no more carrying the weight of all those years of slapped-together dinners and eat-at-my-desk-lunches on this sixty-year-old body, and instead daily decisions of what meaningful or meaningless things to do. Hello, junk drawer, hostile password multi-factor authentication takeover, forty years of photographs, retirement financial planning, cleaning the moss off the patio and sorting through packets of expired organic vegetable seeds. Now I have to live with myself. And my spouse. And the chickens.

This morning, the water in the round green plastic watering trough in the chicken run has iced over, so I bend over and twist and hammer the bottom of the tray with my bare hands to break the solid ice ring into pieces, which I fish out. Finally, a trickle of water starts to flow again, but now my fingers are numb and nearly frostbitten. I step over to the coop and use my frozen thumb to cock the latch and open the coop door.

Inside the coop, a bright infrared heat lamp glows over the indoor watering can to keep the water flowing and provide a bit of warmth for my little white Silkie hen, Daybreak. She likes to stay in on cold winter days, while Dawn, another white, and Twilight, a black Silkie, prefer to peck the frozen hard earth for bugs in vain. Opposite the door, three nest boxes are mounted a foot above the floor on the coop wall. In the middle nest box, Daybreak’s white-feathered wings fluff out and her chest feathers puff round to protect her recently laid egg. She turns her head towards me as if to beg me to close the door to keep in the heat of the 250-watt lamp furnace. There is no inside door handle to the coop, so I grasp the outside edge of the door and swing it inwards with enough momentum to set it against the door jamb. I pull my fingers out at the last moment to keep them from getting pinched, and the door swings inward faster than I expect, clunks when it hits the door frame, but then continues to close until I hear a metal-clanking rattle as the door latches and locks me in.

The upper half of the locked door is painted in a cheery bright-blue. I back up to admire both the cloudless summer sky and the roller-coaster lime green hills below that I haven’t taken notice of in nearly twenty years since my then-eleven-year-old daughter decorated the interior of our coop for her first flock of hens. My husband and I had said a dog would be a good pet, but my daughter insisted on chickens. I remember the arrival of the six fluffy peepers at the post office in a little box and the rush to finish building the coop and add the final touches. Our Ameraucana and Silkie chicks were going to be egg layers. Chickens named Princess and Sweetie are naturally not meant for consumption. We enjoyed the fresh eggs and amusing chicken antics—pacing the fence to plan their next break out of the backyard, positioning for dibs on their favorite nest box, dust bathing, scratching and pecking inches from us while we’re weeding in the garden to nab fresh bugs or wriggling worms in the turned up soil—so Paul and I kept the chicken flocks around, even after our daughter left for college and then graduate school, and now we are on our fifth or sixth generation. So much for empty nesting. Every morning, I hang out their feed and let them run in the yard. On frigid days like this, I wonder why and how many more years we’ll keep at it.

I’m sure Paul will soon notice I’ve gone missing. In the meantime, I do my business of shoveling up the chicken’s business. Then I consider the chicken hatch door. Too small. The north-facing window seems a plausible exit. I open the window, high lift my right knee, rotate my titanium hip replacement joint and side kick my leg into the open air. My crotch straddles the bottom rail while my right shoulder and torso press against the upper window sash. Now the window seems even smaller. My only hope is to Superman it out of there. My healthy hip nips that idea in the bud. I retrieve my leg back into the coop, stick my head out, and yell, “Paul! Hey, Paul!” into the quiet suburban morning. Through the sun’s reflection on the patio door, I can see my husband’s shadow moving back and forth, making breakfast, behind more-soundproof-than-I-thought windows. Daybreak eyes me curiously as I squat down to meet her eye-to-eyes, and I say, “I guess it’s just us chickens.” I pet her back and she coos. I can’t help but admire her patience and dedication to her job as she sits on that egg.

Again, I jack-in-the-box my head out and yell. All I hear in response is the whee-eet, whee-eet of the chickadees queuing up in the bushes, the chiwee, chiwee, chiwee of juncos hopping along the drive and the song sparrow’s sweet melody. The underwing orange of a Northern flicker flashes as it lands on a branch of the cherry tree, waiting for the birdfeeder I’ve yet to hang.

Time stops.

I breathe in the exhale of the seventy-year-old Douglas firs watching everything from above. The clouds slowly brighten from their dawn’s yellow, and I spot one in the sky that looks like Daybreak. The need to be somewhere to do something dissipates into something more natural that feels like just sitting on an egg.

Paul, wondering where I am and probably not wanting the breakfast burritos to get cold, finally looks out the patio door and sees me hanging half out the coop window. He slips on his shoes, opens the door, and runs out yelling, “What are you doing?”

“I’m stuck in the coop!” I draw my head back inside the window.

He swings around the back, ducks under and into the chicken run and unlatches the door. He shakes his head and reaches inside the coop, around the door frame latch jamb, and untucks a half-inch lavender cord there in the corner between the jamb and the two-by-four reinforcement stud. “Why didn’t you just pull the cord to let yourself out?” he says.

After the coop incident, an unsatisfied listlessness settles in me, and I carry it into the week. I find myself putzing around, which I rarely do until I finish my ever-growing list of job work, house demands, and life to-do’s. I don’t even have an inclination for social media or the data from the continuous glucose monitor my son-in-law gave me for Christmas—which has its own insidious way of making me want to keep checking my glucose level every ten minutes, after I eat, exercise, eat a Dilly bar (did I say that or just think it?). I quit seeking some job to be done, stop adding to the to-do list, and release my uncontrollable propensity to glorify the list itself. This frees me up just enough to consider my future a bit differently.

So I’m a career girl. Right out of college, I started an engineering job and worked as an engineer for the next forty years. The truth of it is, while I sometimes complain about job work, my work colleagues have become my community, and my job, a comfortable habit, a place to play and to solve the problems-of-the-day, satiating the engineer in me. I define myself by my work and what I create. After doing anything for that many years, way longer than Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, you get good at it, and it seems like a waste of all those accumulated skills if you stop. I’m hanging in there because I don’t want to let the team down, because I like the momentum of a team driving towards project goals, and I have to admit I still relish that adrenaline rush when things go well. Or maybe I’m just afraid of never being able to go back when I stop. Any and all these reasons make it easier to fall into the need and habit-forming routine of email, Zooming, talking strategy, and making big project plans with the team.

Over the next week, I test the waters of life outside the coop. I make an optometrist appointment that I’d been putting off, and I take the time to ask him whether he felt sorry for the Cyclops in the Odyssey. I watch an online cooking class and use my knife skills to make little cubes of apple and hold my broccoli tree upside down to knife off the branches. I wander around a lamp store clicking lights off and on, wondering who puts these fancy-pants lamps in their houses. I take the Metro bus 255 to a Seattle poetry reading at The Nature Conservancy and use the bus ride to re-lace my shoes in a ladder pattern to give my toes more space (wiggle!), and I buy a little plaque that best describes this mental space where I have finally arrived: “Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else” – J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan. I place it in counterbalance to my life philosophy: “Anything worth doing requires work.” It’s probably time to intentionally consider what worth, work, and play I’d rather be doing for my last decades on earth.

On January 28, 2025, I, along with 2.3 million other government employees, receive an email from HR marked with a red high importance exclamation point. The subject line: “Fork in the Road.” A 2025 Presidential Executive Order directs a reformed government workforce, the impetus for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) four-pillar plan of which the first pillar is return to office. In my case, to my research center in California, two states away, with a report date of February 28, 2025. The Fork in the Road HR email culminates in an invitation: “If you choose to remain in your current position, we thank you for your renewed focus . . .” or “If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce, we thank you for your service to your country and you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government...Upon review of the below deferred resignation letter, if you wish to resign:

1) Select “Reply” to this email.

2) Type the word “Resign” into the body of this reply email. Hit “Send”.”

It’s a process, but getting mentally unstuck over the last week has made me more comfortable leaving the coop. There are too many other things I’d rather be doing now.

My daughter points me back to the last stanza of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” to reconsider its meaning for me. I guess I’ve come to that place in a yellow wood where two roads diverge, that Fork in the Road. I once again reconsider the last stanza. Was the poem about the road I will not take at this juncture, about the road I take, or my telling of the road I choose that will determine the essence of who I will become?

I draft up my final job checklist: send draft of white paper to I, call P to thank him for the fun work I got to do, host that last architecture strategy meeting on Friday, get my government passport out of the damn hole punch, and reply to the Fork in the Road invitation.

Resign. Hit send.

Fly.

About the author:

Jeanne Yu is a writer, poet, engineer, mom, and environmentalist who lives every day in her hope for the world because of and in spite of our humanness. She completed her MFA at Pacific University in January 2023. Jeanne’s work can be found in Rattle, Grist, Breakwater Review, Paper Dragon, Bellingham Review, Intima, The Inflectionist Review, New Letters, Otter House Arts, and the Oregon Poetry Association. She has enjoyed volunteering for Northwest Review, Perugia Press, and CALYX.

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I WAS FIVE IN in 1958 when Dad broke the news to Mom that he was being reassigned to South Ruislip AFB, England. She was pregnant with their fourth, and this would be yet another move while pregnant. But this wasn’t just another move; it was a transatlantic one, despite Dad’s promises that it wouldn’t happen again after my little sister was born in 1956. Just two years later, settled in base housing on Smoky Hill AFB, Kansas, Mom was pregnant again, and he had new orders in hand. Dad’s mother lived nearby in Wichita, and she looked forward to helping Mom recover and tending to her grandkids—the first opportunity for both women to be an extended family.

Mom urged Dad to apply for a waiver, for her sake and the baby’s. Other couples were doing the same. That was the first of many arguments between my parents.

Dad didn’t get a waiver.

That summer after we landed at London Heathrow, Dad’s immediate concern was to find a place for us to live. Within days, he found a house he hoped would delight and surprise us, especially Mom.

The brick manor house was right out of Architectural Digest. Dad, an embattled veteran of WWII and Korea, had once fancied being an architect, and the house was a glimpse of a future he felt worth the sacrifices.

Mom, a Japanese War Bride, had survived the Tokyo firestorm, starvation, the surrender, and American Occupation. They met and married at Tachikawa AFB in 1953, and I was born later that year.

Dad was committed to a better life for his growing family and for Mom. The rental house was his gesture of optimism, a vision of their future.

The British landlords needed a renter during their assignment in Australia. An American military couple with children seemed perfect. Regardless, Mom knew the rent would consume much of Dad’s tech sergeant salary and leave little room for extras.

Two miles from the main gate, the house featured a large fenced-in yard, an advantage for Mom at home with four kids. Dad would ride a bike or catch the bus to work—“No car payments!”

She gave up arguing with Dad about money. He would have a facsimile of his dream house, and we would have a yard for our adventures.

On the day we first saw the house, we left the hotel and clamored aboard the red double-decker bus bound for the village of South Ruislip with a short walk from the bus stop to the gated house.

When Dad pushed the gate open, we stepped into a mossy, cobblestoned courtyard landscaped with mature pines and junipers crowding the front steps and porch. My younger brother and sister and I skipped down the path, up a few steps to the house, and stepped into a wide, rectangular foyer with the living room, bathroom, and bedrooms tucked off it.

From the foyer, a wide-bowed, pane-glass picture window pulled the eye straight across to the dining room with a panoramic view of the backyard. Fruit trees bordered the neighboring fences. At the very rear of the yard was a glass potting shed the size of a small room and built entirely of framed, pane-glass windows—tired and aged, the house of glass windows had a pitched roof that sat on four walls with a single door. Close by was a swing set that caught my brother’s attention, but I zeroed in on the glass house. He and I began conjuring games of pretend, chase, and hide-and-seek. Hide-and-seek in a glass house!

The wide dining room window would tease us with its world of greeneries, rainstorms, fog, and animals unlike anything we’d seen in dust-bowl Kansas. Hedgehogs, moles, and fat, slimy slugs roamed at will in the yard. Trees dropped worm-infested apples and plums. And the summers meant buttercups and songs, strawberries and onions. It was a yard for children, ready with imagination and keen on adventure.

Shortly after moving in, Dad led us out the back door for a walk about. We assembled around the lawn chairs with a low table. The glass potting shed was behind us. To me, the shed was a puzzle of nine-by-eleven-inch windowpanes, each pane framed a different view, a kaleidoscope of broken colors.

I was already Big Sister to my brother and sister. And soon, there would be baby brother. We would be two girls and two boys, a forever foursome. As Big Sis, it was understood I was to be a model for childhood play and cooperation, and, if needed, contain chaos.

Using his stern sergeant’s voice, Dad said, “This glass potting shed is not a toy, not your playhouse. Do not lean on it, touch it, and do not walk inside or run around it. Do not play beyond the furniture. Jenny, make sure you keep your brother and sister away. Do you understand?”

One afternoon, as our parents lounged in the lawn chairs with friends and iced tea, my younger brother and little sister ran around the glass shed, and when they popped out the other side, unharmed. Perhaps it was okay to run around it.

Another time, my brother and I noticed the glass door ajar and wandered over for a closer look. When I peeked inside, a pungent, rancid odor watered my eyes. Two rotted wood benches were shoved against the sides, the rusted nail heads jutting. It was a sad, neglected place where spiders parked next to dead bugs. Broken clay pots and corroded tools lay strewn across the dank concrete slab like abandoned toys. My brother tried to muscle in, but I held him back and shook my head. “No, it’s creepy.”

We left without touching glass, technically. We weren’t hurt and we kept our secret to ourselves.

A year later, on a fall morning in 1960, we woke to a blustery Hundred Acre Wood day. Dad had been at the office for hours. At the breakfast table, we found Dad’s cold, uneaten toast in the silver-plated toast rack. We hurried to dress and as soon as breakfast was over, Mom told us to play inside before she escaped to her bedroom.

We stood at the big picture window and watched the storm. Barren tree limbs thrashed and whipped under a sunless sky. Round and around the wind in the naked canopy rattled and shook as though stirred by witches’ brooms. The frenzied wind sounded like jet engines and overwhelmed us—that wild power. My brother and I danced and jumped about the younger ones, pretending to be those trees.

Baby brother stood at the window. Small, chubby fingers pressed onto the windowsill, turned white from his grip, and waved his arm like a chimp stomping his feet, ready to stumble-run after us.

He raised his arms and demanded, “Up! Up!” I lifted him into my arms, and we spun in circles until I was dizzy.

Suddenly, an awful bang cracked through the air, the winds clawed the trees. The shed of glass trembled and debris circled like ravens over the yard. The glass door began bouncing off its frame like a gremlin with a mallet—drumming its glass skin.

How many times would it slam like that before it flew off its hinges or shattered in place?

I wanted it to stop. Something needed to be done.

I shouted, “Who will shut that door?”

Consumed by the delusion of play, that morning, I conjured Mighty Mouse and my four-year-old brother joined me. I thought our story would be written like this: the mouse swoops in, saves the day, and we celebrate with a parade and cake—an ending fit for children. An ending where we are celebratory, brave, and safe.

We called out to Mighty Mouse, chanting, “Mighty Mouse! Mighty Mouse!”

Mighty Mouse: rocketing down out of a blue sky, muscled arms grabbing the door to latch it shut.

My brother dashed out the back door, jumped off the red-brick porch, leapt down the steps, took off past the bed of red roses, and charged downfield. He ran as I’d never seen him run before. As he neared the glass shed, he raised his right arm—Mighty Mouse taking aim, fist clenched tight. We cheered with unbridled glee and clapped harder.

The wind caught the door and swung back as though it were a sword swinging for my brother’s hand. He flexed his wrist to stop it. I could not see what happened between the door and his wrist. But suddenly, he spun like a top and was running with such vigor I sensed something wrong. The door kept banging. Even then, we cheered and clapped.

When my brother burst through the side door, his face was a contortion. His mouth, a frown so exaggerated that I am recalling it as the Greek mask of tragedy.

As my brother darted by, his leather Buster Browns barely touched the ground. He was wailing. “Mommy! Mommy!”

His cries echoed, and that glass door banged and banged. Mom was in the bedroom. Silence and then, I heard her utter, “Oh—no.”

The toddlers held onto me. Something bad had happened. And they knew it. And I knew had a part in it.

When Mom appeared from the bedroom, she had hold of my brother’s right wrist, his arm hoisted in the air, and she pulled him past the dining room into the bathroom.

Her voice was practically conversational. The faucet shrieked but did not muffle my brother’s cries as water gushed into the ceramic tub. Her voice echoed through the bathroom, but she was calm and did not stop what she was doing. He wailed louder. The cacophony shot into the foyer, through the house, through me. Worse than the gremlin drumming on the shed. More wicked than witches with their brooms. In the dining room, all we could do was listen and flinch, waiting for her instruction. I wanted a reprieve. My stomach soured, true with shame. I wondered if I should walk to the bathroom to help.

The faucet shrieked again. She pulled the rubber stopper, and it made a familiar pop. Water gurgled. The tub was draining. The nightmare bath had ended.

They emerged and headed for the front door. My brother, whimpering. Mom kept her grip on his wrist and hoisted in the air as they shuffled to the black Bakelite telephone.

With her free hand, she grabbed the receiver and pulled it to her shoulder from the small, elevated shelf next to the front door. She bent her ear to it, dialed Dad’s office with her free hand. That morning, he was at his desk instead of the vault or the briefing room.

Meanwhile, the gremlin at the door made no sound. A pea-soup fog was engulfing London. Ground visibility: zero. No one would be driving in that fog.

I heard her, “Yes. Yes—come now. Hurry!”

After she hung up, I walked slowly toward the foyer, siblings in tow.

She saw us, and said, “Jenny, go to your room with your sister and brother. Close the door.”

Hearing my name seemed assuring, she sound mad, yet. But that dark, sour dread returned: something I conjured had caused something terrible.

Mom stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. Her fingers, still handcuffed to his wrist, made her a human tourniquet. My brother quiet, strangely calm. I did not see blood or tears. The two made a single silhouette staring into the fog.

We delighted when our brother turned his head to look our way grinning like a Cheshire cat. We returned the smile. Then, as a bonus gesture, waved his left hand, flopping it up and down a few times like a rocking horse. We waved back. I wanted to run and hug him. We were four again, and whole.

My younger sister and the baby pressed against me. We craned our necks so we wouldn’t miss another moment. She stood in the doorway, quiet and distant. Was she thinking, Who would rescue me?

How did a television cartoon hero’s story overtake me and awaken my brother to an identity he liked: hero, knight. The injury was a doorway into his real-life childhood, a story he began by peering through a looking glass, the preface I conjured, a delusion.

As soon as Mom heard the ambulance blaring, she pulled my brother into the courtyard, and we scurried to the doorway to watch.

The front gate opened and Dad stepped out of the ambulance. He looked handsome and sharp in his starched uniform, as if he’d just stepped out of Air Force Magazine. His smile offered calm. My brother grinned wide when he saw Dad and we smiled too. Dad was home with the ambulance. Yay! Now he was Mighty Mouse. The driver behind the wheel stayed there. The medic, too, stayed in the ambulance, expecting a little boy to hop inside.

But as Mom closed in on Dad, she was not smiling. Mom was near collapse. She pulled my brother, his wrist over his head toward Dad, and waved it, shouting,

“Here! Take it—here!”

As she thrust the wrist into Dad’s hand, she barked, “No—grab here! Take it! Take it! Hurry! Go! Go!”

Dad tried to catch hold of his son’s hand, but before he could grab it, Mom let go, pivoted, and ran back to the house.

Dad reeled backward as blood sprang high into the damp air, splattering across his face leaving crisscrossing trails up and down the front of his khaki uniform, on my brother’s face, and he began screaming.

The medic catapulted to the curb, grabbed my brother, and put him into the ambulance.

“Sarge! Jesus, man! Hurry up! Get back here. Let’s go!”

The ambulance, sirens blaring, cautiously drove into the fog and disappeared. Mighty Mouse had not saved the day. I wanted to disappear into the fog.

On the phone, Mom was unable to describe my brother’s wound. Her thoughts were racing in Japanese, struggling to find English words and no time to ponder meaning and nuance. Yet even if English failed her, her survival instincts and skills did not. The wound triggered her adrenaline and she knew to grip his wrist precisely and tightly to stop further blood loss through the strength of her fingers. She knew where and how to press! Who knows such things? The neurosurgeon who performed my brother’s surgery was awed and credited her skilled action for saving my brother’s life. She would not have told him she survived Tokyo 1945.

The medic, too, kept my brother alive through the hour-long drive to Burderop, the nearest military hospital able to treat him. As my brother was wheeled into the ER, a renowned British neurosurgeon was touring the children’s ward, and when he heard about the pediatric emergency, he decided to perform the surgery himself. He was also a World War II veteran. His specialty was amputation and limb trauma—repairing severed veins and nerves of wounded soldiers. He labored over my four-year-old brother for eight hours suturing veins, arteries, and nerves—groundbreaking surgery, a case that was eventually published in the British Medical Journal.

After the ambulance left, Mom called us to the dining room. She pulled up a chair at the table, and we huddled around her.

“Your brother might die or lose his hand.”

I remember that well and thinking if his hand were gone, we’d play anyway. But, if he were gone, there would be a blank everywhere I would otherwise see him.

She ran a hand through her hair and finally looked at me, “What happened?”

If Mom struggled to translate her thoughts into English, I couldn’t find words for my story. My body felt cold.

We were playing Mighty Mouse like the cartoon, but it was a horror show.

I mumbled, “We were pretending like Mighty Mouse . . . and the door was banging and we wanted to stop it, so he ran outside.”

She shook off my answer and with a flick of her hand, waved me off as if it meant nothing—as if I were a child like my little sister. I was six going on seven years old.

The back door was still open. Mom walked out to the porch, grabbed the garden hose. The faucet squealed as she turned on the water and pointed the nozzle down at the porch, at the blood, washing it into the bed of red roses, the stems standing tall, in full bloom.

I watched the red lake fade and stream and waited for her reassurance—but she was unable to give me that. Her thoughts displaced. I did not know. Somewhere I could not follow. She did not want to be found. She was not ready for me to find her.

We hardly spoke of the accident; if we did in the years that followed, it was only because I asked questions. Just the facts about the wrist, pressing it, and the surgeon. The mother and son separation. Other than one or two brief exchanges, no other time did we talk about it. Not me, my brother, or our parents. The two youngest don’t remember the storm, or the ambulance, and my sister hardly remembers the yard. For them, there is no memory or grievance to work out.

My brother and I, once so close, never spoke of it, even now, decades later. He survived: the accident, the surgery, three years of relentless physical therapy, and countless follow-up appointments. Dad asked to be reassigned to Travis AFB, outside San Francisco where the military hospital was a major research center able to monitor and supervise my brother’s rehab. Eventually, he regained full use of his right hand except for his pinky finger. The nerves and tendons were too tiny to be surgically repaired. But when he was healed, his lame pinky became a puppet monster to tease—growling and chasing after us around the backyard of our tract house in Northern California.

I no longer raise the memory with my siblings. My brother does not want to pick old wounds. This is my story, my exhumation, alone.

While my brother skirted death and maiming, the accident was our family’s tsunami, a wave seeming to disappear to the horizon only to be amplified by the distances traveled, the depth of the rift. When the ambulance left with him, none of us knew what to expect.

Ninety days passed between the ambulance leaving our house and his surgeries, post-op, recovery, and my brother’s release. In that time away, the Chief Surgeon directed my brother’s transfer to a critical care hospital for observation and specialized care. His body was whole, but his wound, the separation, intense rehabilitation, and the attention he garnered, surrounded by specialists in wound and recovery, left our family adrift and wounded. The distance between my brother and mother never healed. While Dad received time and military flights to see his son, Mom only saw him a couple of times in ICU recovery and once during his hospitalization.

When Dad brought him home, he was a brittle boy, as fragile as the shed. No more cavorting, chasing, kicking the ball at each other, or hide-and-seek for fear of disturbing his sutures and risking another bleed. Fear haunted me as I figured out quiet games and watched out for him; the bandaged arm became the thing we steered away from.

The question Mom posed in the dining room lingers: “What happened?”

It was a question I’ve been trying to sort out myself.

I enjoyed being the responsible one, having my parent’s trust and confidence. Being a playful Big Sister was easy and fun. When the ambulance left, I felt myself a troublemaker.

And Mom had no explanation for herself or Dad or the doctors. As a mother, myself, I wonder whether she was cast as negligent, leaving young children in the care of a six-year-old?

Most summers, I enjoy the garden outside my window. I can see all of it from my desk. The ruby-throated hummingbirds dart in and out of magenta bee balm, feasting on the nectar until the petals wither and sag, used up after the ravaging and frenzy. I do not lament the sacrificial season. After all, hummingbirds have miles yet to travel. And from my desk, I think of those days when a glass house stood in a beautiful yard, where everything is wild and nothing protected.

What I would tell my mother now is we were children, young and bored, and she was elsewhere in the house, caring for herself for a few moments.

About the author:

Jenny Linn Loveland is an award-winning artist, writer, and teacher born in Japan, with military roots, and for the most part hails from Fairfield, nestled in the foothills and colors of Northern California. The Potting Shed is excerpted from her upcoming memoir, Calrose (working title). She is a retired Air Force officer and Gulf War veteran. She is a Pushcart-nominated poet whose poems exploring PTSD have been widely distributed and featured in several publications. Find her artwork here.

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THE FIRST TIME I suspected that my parents didn’t have all the answers was when I was six or seven and home from school, sick, with a fever. I was sniffling and telling my mother about how we had, the day prior, learned about Noah’s Ark in school. (I attended Our Lady of the Cenacle, the local parochial school in Queens that has since closed.) Sister Theresa, of whom we were all terrified—with her stern Boston accent and the thick wooden paddle she kept close as a threat—told us the Biblical account at story time. I remember her growing upset when Butch, the biggest kid in our class, interrupted her and began whispering to the girl next to him. We all feared she would hit him with the paddle, but somehow, she let it go with a loud scolding. As a child it seemed improbable to me that Noah would have been able to locate, capture, and arrange for boat transport two of every type of animal on earth. And there were other practical issues apparent even to a child. Certainly, physical space would have been a problem. And there are just so many types of bugs and insects in the world: where did they all go? I didn’t understand how Noah would even be able to find, let alone gather, two of each of those. My mother explained away one objection by saying that the Ark was “really, really big.” As to my bug objection, she said all the insects on earth crawled into the hair on the animals. I met this with even greater incredulity. So, they got to dry land, she would have had me believe, hitching a ride with the big game. I do recall the foul-tasting medicine my mother gave me that day, getting drowsy while watching cartoons, falling asleep, and dreaming about the Ark and all of the animals. My head, full of fever, fought against all the animals fitting. There were just so many of them.

My willingness to doubt some of the standard stories I was hearing from my parents and from religion class led me to lose my faith early and declare myself an atheist while still a young teenager. But that’s not my angle here. This has nothing to do with god and everything to do with animals. Just like with the Ark, throughout my sixty-two years, there has not been enough room in my life for the animals. In fact, for animals of all types, there’s been no room at all.

When I was eight, something horrific happened to me. I was playing ringolevio with a few of the neighborhood kids in front of the Milini’s house when the alarm sounded: “Prince is loose! Prince is loose!”

Prince was the Milinis’ German shepherd and the most feared dog in the neighborhood. At the instant I heard the cry I was standing on the sidewalk in front of their long driveway. I froze and resisted the urge to run. (My dad had always told me this was the safest tactic to take if a dog runs at you.) But I was terrified and trembling as this hundred-pound monster, much bigger than me, galloped straight at me and leaped up, knocking me down. While I was flailing on the ground, Prince caught my skinny right wrist in his mouth and bit. Through pure adrenaline, I bounced back up and protected my face, but he knocked me over again, this time biting me just above the mouth. Danny, the older of the two Milini boys, came charging and tackled their dog and all three of us went down, but the dog violently shook him off and jumped up and knocked me down a third time, grabbing my left hand this time and biting down hard where he found skin. Mr. Milini flew out of their side door and pounced and wrestled the dog down as Mrs. Milini, a step behind her husband and also running and—I distinctly remember—crying, plucked me up and cradled me in protection against their mad dog.

It was over. Three times I had fallen, and three times I had forced myself up, with help. As happens in the lives of children when a crisis befalls them, the adults swooped in and their mechanisms took hold and I passively surrendered to those charged with taking control. Though numb and stunned, this was my fate, or so I understood it.

My parents rushed me to the emergency room, and a doctor stitched up my wrist, top and bottom where a clear bite mark still shows, almost fifty-five years later, and my face. The bite on my hand didn’t need stitches as it was a small bony hand, and the dog didn’t have much skin to tear there. But I was left paralyzed in fear, my body beaten, bitten, and horribly sore. They gave me something to sleep and my father must have carried me into the house that evening as we returned home. My mother was crying; that I remember, as I also remember the pretty woman across the street who, upon her return the following evening from work, saw me all bandaged and recovering on our wrap-around porch; she came over, shook her head, and told me that I was a brave boy.

She sure was bright and sweet, like a lollipop, I remember thinking, and that was the first thought my shocked consciousness was able to formulate other than its stunned questioning of a god I thought would always protect me. I just couldn’t understand why he’d allow this to happen. I had taken my First Communion a year earlier, and every day I still wore around my neck this cloth scapular with a picture of Jesus that I was told, before Prince’s attack, would protect me against all harm. I had questioned how such protection could be assured when it was just a picture on a piece of material dangling from a string. I was told it just was. God always has the last word, even though sometimes logic is larger than him.

Time tripped on, as it does. A horrible phobia of all dogs, regardless of size, developed throughout the remainder of my childhood. I was rendered near-paralyzed with fear in the company of dogs and wary of all animals. I developed strategies to avoid dogs—friends’ homes not to go to; a faked upset stomach to keep me home; a longer walk to bypass the dog on that one block by school. Yet dogs are ubiquitous and hard to completely elude. They are supposed to be man’s best friend, or so we’ve been told. But not Prince, and not for me. Not only had Prince attacked me and left scars that have lasted a lifetime, but as I was apparently the second person he had bitten, the Milinis were forced to put him down. I heard the news with indifference at first and then with a budding validation of sorts as my young mind wrestled with it. But the Milini boys didn’t see it that way. I was the cause of them losing their dog, and they blamed me.

A few years passed. While dogs still terrified me, cats, being much smaller and not often in a position to hurt me, existed in my presence without much thought on my part other than an occasional flared disdain. This disdain wasn’t without prompt though the cats themselves were, I must admit, blameless. Their benefactor, with the best intentions for their well-being, no doubt, did unwittingly cause the neighborhood to find fault with the cats. Miss Eileen was an old, spinster lady who lived with her spinster sister, just the two of them, in the run-down and unkempt house next to ours. They were the neighborhood cat ladies who fed dozens of stray cats, and so the overgrown and neglected property next to ours became the home of tabbies and tomcats fending as best they could.

One cold, winter Sunday after we returned from Mass in the ’71 Chevy station wagon with the faux wood panels, as we awaited our usual Sunday pasta dinner that always started promptly at one, Mom asked my dad to pick up something from the grocery store. He asked if I’d like to take a ride. We left and got into the car and when my dad turned the ignition key, we were met almost instantaneously with what sounded like a human scream from under the hood of the car. My dad quickly turned off the car and got out and lifted the hood. He grabbed at a now dead cat who, he later explained, must have climbed up into the engine compartment for the warmth it provided just after the car had been turned off when we returned from church. The scream of the cat had alerted Miss Eileen, and I witnessed my dad carry over the dead cat and, hat in hand, apologize and explain what had happened to this time-worn, angry woman. A few years later while reading To Kill a Mockingbird in school, I was reminded of the interaction between my dad and Miss Eileen and the dead cat by the scene in the book where Atticus greets and compliments the old, cantankerous Mrs. Dubose on her geraniums and camellias which later in the book Jem destroys. The parallel has stayed with me a lifetime.

For my ninth birthday I wanted and received a pup tent as a present. My mom enlisted a local eighth grader who was friends with my sister to set it up in our backyard. I played with my toy soldiers in the tent which was just small enough for one person. The tent was supposed to be waterproof, but I wanted to test that out. So the next time it rained, I went out the back door and on my count of three, I held my breath and ran as fast as I could while trying to dodge the rain, then dove through the zippered down slit in the tent that served as an opening, and slid the foot or two on the canvas tent bottom, my eyes closed from the exertion. A moment after impact, my forward momentum pushed me toward the canvas tent wall and when I opened my eyes, I heard a high screech and saw and felt across my face a trapped cat’s paw with his claws swiping like talons. I screamed, and the cat jumped over me and escaped.

For the second time in my short childhood, I had been attacked by what was supposed to be a pet. This time I was again shocked and scared, but it was certainly less serious than when Prince had attacked me. I knew that the cat had just sought to get out of the rain, but imputing logic for the motivation of an adversary doesn’t lessen your anger against that adversary.

My phobia of dogs was heightened by the cat incident as now I saw even the tiniest of dogs—still bigger than the scratching cat—to be a threat. Curiously, though I was now really afraid of cats too, cats never seemed to want to get close to me, whereas dogs always did. Still, I spent more than the next decade escaping close proximity to all animals.

It is hard to describe how pervasive a real phobia can be. The fear becomes disproportionate to any real, objective measure of harm. All dogs—and cats—terrified me. Upon encounter, the resulting physical reactions are what you’d expect: heart pounding, lungs straining, muscles clenching, sweat coating. And of course, my goal was always to get away, to escape the immediate danger which in my mind all animals posed.

One image that has stayed with me since childhood is that of the two Doberman pinschers which guarded the house adjacent to my grandmother’s house, which lay within sight range of the church that was such an important part of our lives back then. But after the attack by Prince, I had given up any pretense that god was watching me or protecting me from predators, canine, feline, or homo-sapient. I knew I was on my own. So, when these two Dobermans saw me coming up the walk to my grandmother’s door, regardless of whom I was with—my whole family, or just my mother or father, or one of my siblings—these giant dogs would rise up on their hind feet and bark terror into my soul. They’d get so excited and try so hard to get over the four-foot fence separating them from me. I was always sure they’d leap over and attack me, Prince-like, and that this time, the encounter would end me. Helen, the old German lady who was my grandmother’s neighbor, would sometimes hear their clamoring and come out and try to quiet them, and calm me. In her thick German accent, she would attempt to reassure me that the dogs wouldn’t hurt me. But it was too late for promises of that kind. If god himself couldn’t be trusted to keep a promise, I knew that this diminutive lady couldn’t either.

But it wasn’t just big, threatening dogs or freely roaming dogs like wild wolves that scared me. Dogs of all sizes, and dogs on leashes, and dogs behind fences did too. If it barked and had four legs and those jutting, canine teeth, I was scared of it. And this continued with very little abeyance.

To this day, I am still wary of all animals. Especially dogs. However, I would no longer consider myself clinically phobic of dogs, as once I undoubtedly was. As an adult, I can and do completely control my interactions with them—which basically means avoidance—but I don’t ruminate about this now. Occasionally I enter someone’s house and their dog jumps on me, and my immediate reaction is to stand perfectly straight and to look directly ahead while offering no welcome to the animal at all. And I’m now so much larger than when I was a child, of course, so I’m sure that today dogs find me imposing. No, I view the damage that was done differently now, though there is a lasting legacy of it.

When I was in my mid-twenties and the dog phobia was no longer a daily issue in my life, I unwittingly developed my first and only real relationship with a dog. Ironically, it was a large German Shepherd. I was working on my MBA and studying accounting and had a part-time job with Burt Rothbard. He was a local, community-based CPA and attorney practicing out of his home in Syosset, Long Island, the basement of which had been converted into an office. He gave his dog, whose name I can no longer remember, free rein over the entire house. The dog was very old and slow and as non-aggressive a dog as ever I’ve seen. The dog only had three interests: eating, sleeping, and being pet. When we used to eat lunch at our desks, he would often come over and beg for food. At first, I found this annoying. But slowly something happened. I sensed this dog needed me and appreciated the food and company I gave him. This bond strengthened over three or four months and then one Sunday night I had an odd dream—that I was working in the basement with Burt, and doing bank reconciliations on the computer—but his dog wasn’t there. In my dream, I asked Burt about the dog, and he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said he didn’t have a dog. Going into the office that day was uneventful. Burt, the work, the dog—everything was as it had always been. I petted the dog more than usual, truly appreciative of his company now, but aware of his age and mortality.

When I returned to work the next day, Burt told me that the dog had died after I had left the day before. The coincidence was jarring and made a real impression on me, though I never did assign more significance to it than that. Dogs die, especially when they’re old. And people dream, at all ages. I have always laughed to myself when somebody finds a penny heads-up or sees a butterfly and is convinced that it is a passed-on loved one sending a message. There’s no room in my worldview for such thinking. Still, as unlikely as it was, I found that I really missed that dog.

So that is it. Other than this briefest and most fleeting relationship with an old and dying dog whose name I can’t even recall, there’s been no room in my life for animals of any kind. But after living for over 60 years, I can now admit that maybe I’ve missed something important.

I could blame the dogs; I could blame the cats; I could even blame a god I haven’t believed in for decades. But I don’t. I don’t even blame life or existence itself, fatalistic as my perspective is. What happened has happened, and assignation of blame is pointless. Having spoken to others who have pets and who have expressed that special unconditional love returned by a pet, I realize now that I’d like to have such a bond. After all, it is so rare to find that even in members of our own species. I long for that connection and can imagine one day getting a pet—probably a dog—in my old age as a companion with whom to share life when time returns in abundance, and probably a burden, and when memories, good and bad, become largely what we subsist on.

About the author:

John Sergio is the COO Emeritus and was a founding partner of a mid-sized investment bank; he was the COO for over 20 years. He has enjoyed a long and rewarding career in the securities industry and has written a number of articles for national, literary, and financial industry publications. He has appeared numerous times on CNBC speaking on different topics. He is an avid reader of US and world fiction.

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Join us on Thursday, April 16, at 5 pm pacific time / 8 pm eastern time for a 90-minute live course on “keeping your story in balance.” All four of our editors will teach from examples in the magazine, their work, and other beloved texts that demonstrate how to balance exposition, scene, and summary, and when to break for reflection.

Participants will leave the class with actionable tools for how to revise and structure their own work for greater clarity and impact.

The class will be recorded and all attendees will receive a copy of the recording. We hope to see you there!

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A low, smoggy sky greeted me last Wednesday when I stepped out of the Baltimore Washington International Airport onto the grubby sidewalk to await my rideshare. 11,000 other writers and I descended on the city like a plague of small-press-loving locusts, and from Wednesday through Saturday, I feasted on panels, off-site readings, and instagrammable meet-cutes with my writer-crushes in the book fair. Regrettably, because I can only handle so much media at one time, the deluge of books and chapbooks and bookmarks and stickers in the book fair left me with no additional bandwidth for social media, so I was pretty absent from the apps all weekend, which means all the writers and editors I met and fawned over will be hearing from me today, and I hope I made a strong enough impression that they’ll connect my face (and hopefully winning demeanor) with my digitally abstracted internet profiles.

That seems to be the name of the game at AWP: interact as much as possible. Make impressions. Ask questions in the panels. (The obvious pitfall here is that writer-bros who fancy themselves philosophers will feel way too much permission to pose their pseudo-insights as questions—and yes, I am talking about you, blond dude in the Literary Criticism panel who asked if we could all just take a minute to consider the resonances of the word “criticism,” particularly as contrasted with “scholarship”, and you, man in the panel on flash nonfiction, who asked how the editors would know if you secretly submitted fiction).

Since sneaker wave magazine is informally headquartered in the Pacific Northwest, where long walks on the beach are threaded through with a constant wariness for the sneaker waves that give our magazine their name, Baltimore was too far for our entire team to travel and set up camp in the book fair. Therefore, I glad-handed my way solo through the crowded walkways, tracking down contributors I’d never before met in person and writers who I’m jittery with hope will send in their work.

Learn more and submit here!

One of my favorite parts of AWP, overwhelming as it can be, is learning about the vast profusion of outlets for writing.

These are my back-of-the-lecture-hall snapshots from panels about different ends of one spectrum of nonfiction storytelling: flash nonfiction, ranging from 100 to 1200 words, and the longform essay, in the 5000-word range and beyond. There is so much demand for great nonfiction outlets! sneaker wave magazine finds our sweet spot somewhere in the middle, since we publish stories between 2000 and 4000 words. We are still open for submissions for one more week, and we’d love to read your work! Send us your nonfiction stories, your personal essays about “that one time . . .”, your memoir excerpts, your darkest secrets.

These are three sneaker wave contributors I found in the wild (at least, the heavily moderated wild of AWP)! Gift yourself some time with their stories:

Kase Johnston, left, wrote “ring of fire,” which was instrumental in University of Utah’s decision to shut down the fraternity that Johnston wrote about. True storytelling wields power, and that’s why we’re here.

In the center of the photo grid above is , holding up the badge that explains she lost her voice during the conference! Still, you can spend time with her words in the story “dear stranger,” which reflects on her experience of unexpectedly encountering a drowning.

On the right is , author of the recent “how to get a reputation.” EC and I met at an off-site meetup hosted by Margo Steines, a writer-friend I’ve long admired and whose work continues to inform the way I think about language, structure, and the body. You can trace similar obsessions through EC’s story, below:

I’m so grateful to have gotten to see some of you in person this week, and we can’t wait to get back to our regularly scheduled programming of running compelling true stories. We’re still open for submissions until midnight on Sunday, March 15th—send us your work!

Learn more and submit here!

Excerpted from The Little Things.

When I was six years old, Mom, my two brothers—Dodd, ten years old, and Brad, eight—and I ran away from our abusive, no-good, cheating father. Over the next two years, we bounced around Milwaukee, always staying one jump ahead of bill collectors. Eventually, we left the city and moved to a row of townhouses on the outskirts of Cedarburg, a small, stuck-in-the-past town about thirty miles northwest of Milwaukee. Cedarburg has since leaned into its out-datedness by rebranding itself as “historic.” Now it’s a trendy weekend haunt for well-to-do Chicagoans escaping the hustle and bustle. But back then, it was a run-of-the-mill town (complete with an actual, if no longer working, woolen mill) in the middle of what might be referred to as Bum-Fuck, Wisconsin. There was a bakery, a butcher shop, and Paulus’s (the corner grocery store), a bank, a library, and a movie house. Doc Weber still made house calls, and nothing was open on Sundays and holidays. And, like any small midwestern town, there was a good part of town and a not-so-good part. We lived in the not-so-good part.

Our new townhouse was almost exactly like the one we just left in the city, but the yard was better kept, there wasn’t as much traffic rushing by on the street out front, and the train tracks (there were always train tracks in the neighborhoods we could afford) were about a block away and not right across the street anymore, so the rumbling clickity-clack at night was softer. Behind our group of townhouses was a construction site where another apartment complex was being built, and next to that, a wide swath of undeveloped land. I could explore for hours in the dry scrub grass and weeds that came up to my waist, picking wildflowers, and hunting for bugs, snakes, and field mice. Stretching for ten miles or so beyond that was farmland and forest before you came to Thiensville, the next town over.

Ginny Bonzon and her three kids—Stephanie, Jimmy, and Baby Nicki—lived in the other half of our townhouse. Ginny was also getting divorced, and within a month, Mom and Ginny were best friends. Three years later, Ginny and her kids moved to St. Louis to be close to Ginny’s parents—but it didn’t matter. By that time, Mom and Ginny were no longer best friends, they were sisters. Even after they moved, we still saw them as often as the seven-hour drive permitted, and Mom and Ginny talked on the phone at least once a week (usually more) for hours at a time. I still make a point of going to St. Louis to visit Steph at least once a year, even though both Mom and Ginny are gone now.

Steph and Jimmy, and the boys and I were constantly in each other’s side of the townhouse, almost like we were one big family, six kids and two moms. We didn’t look anything like family, though. Mom, the boys, and I were all tall and blond, with blue eyes and pale skin. Ginny’s parents were Sicilian immigrants, and her ex-husband was of Italian descent, too, so all of them had black-brown hair and eyes, dark skin, broad faces, and were much shorter than us.

The only one of us on our side that looked even remotely Sicilian was Mom because, at that time, her naturally blond hair was Clairol 4B—dark, chestnut brown. Ginny had dyed Mom’s hair at the kitchen table during one of their Wine and Whines (that’s what they called their late-night drinks at the kitchen table) while they complained about court orders, how expensive gas was getting, and how sad it was that the Haight-Ashbury summer of love had ended in violent riots.

One time, I came into the kitchen to get a glass of water right when Mom was saying that my father had told the judge he shouldn’t have to pay child support if he never got to see his children. He was an advertising executive (a real Don Draper prototype) and I’m sure he sold his devastation and suffering like he was selling a pawned diamond ring. I’m also sure that was just another tactic he’d dreamt up to get out of giving Mom any money—he was so good at twisting facts and turning himself into the victim to get what he wanted—but this time, the judge wasn’t buying. Instead of telling Father that he wouldn’t have to pay, the judge ordered weekly visits. Outside the courthouse Father was furious because he couldn’t stand to lose. But Mom knew we were the ones who lost; we were the ones who would have to pay.

By then, Father had married Sandy (the woman he’d been sleeping with while Mom was burying her father). They’d almost immediately had a baby, and for reasons I didn’t understand at the time (and frankly, I still don’t), they had also moved to Cedarburg—the good part.

The first time the boys and I went over to Father’s new house didn’t really count because we were there less than an hour. Mom had driven us all the way across town to the fancy new subdivision where Father and Sandy had bought, of course, the nicest house on their block. All the houses on Father’s street were lined up like cookie boxes on the grocery store shelf. Each one had a white mailbox at the curb next to a walkway that led up to the front door. There were two-car garages, and extra-wide, cement driveways with no potholes or ruts – perfect for skateboarding or jumping rope. Some of the houses were brick, some wood, all of them with shutters on the windows that could be closed to contain their suburban secrets. Father’s house was brick on the bottom, white on top with a yellow garage door, yellow shutters, and red poppies in the garden under the big living room window like a bow on the perfect present.

Mom didn’t get out of the car, just let us out at the end of the driveway. We stood there and looked at the house. It was huge and I thought it must have at least twenty bedrooms (for the record it had four, plus a family room and office on the first floor, which could have been bedrooms, too), but no matter how many bedrooms it had, I thought it was a mansion.

Father came out of the house and walked quickly down the driveway, but Mom drove off before he reached the curb. I ran toward Father and let myself hope he would pick me up, swing me toward the sky like he used to, but this time he put his hand out like a traffic cop to stop me.

“You are too old for this nonsense,” he snapped. “This ought to help you remember.” He flipped up the hem of my sundress and swung his arm back to swat my bottom, but I twisted at the last second and his meaty hand hit my bare thigh with a smack that stung like a rug burn.

I stood in the driveway, mouth agape with tears welling in my lashes. Father walked back into the house through the garage and Dodd, Brad, and I followed him into the kitchen. “Stay here,” he said and left the room. We had no idea what to do, so we sat at the kitchen table and waited. The air felt close and tight like we were someplace we shouldn’t be, and I already wanted to go home. We sat there for what felt like an hour, but it was really only about ten or fifteen minutes. It turned out that Father was waiting for Mom to get back to our apartment so he could call her. He told her he’d just received a call about a last-minute emergency meeting with clients, and that he’d have to leave for the day. He told her to come back and get us.

Sandy made us stand quietly in the foyer while we waited for Mom to come back because she didn’t want us to wake the baby or make a mess. Sandy watched us from across the room like we had an odor and I wondered why Father wanted us to come but didn’t want us there. I guess it was just one more way to assert control. When Mom came back, Father blamed her for the trouble. He said he had come out to explain but that she had driven off before he could get to the car. Mom just clenched her teeth and told us kids to get in the car. Father leaned in Dodd’s open window, apologized like he wasn’t really sorry, and promised us kids we could spend the next Saturday in his brand-new, above-ground swimming pool.

Almost every night after dinner, Dodd, Brad, Steph, Jimmy, and I would watch Get Smart, or Bewitched, or The Beverly Hillbillies, and when we couldn’t agree on a show, we’d play board games like Life, Chutes and Ladders, or Mystery Date. Sometimes we’d listen to 45s that we’d cut off the backs of cereal boxes and jump around swinging our fists up and down like we were go-go dancers.

In the summer, when we didn’t have school, we were allowed to play outside till the streetlights came on. We’d often go down to the playground at the end of our subdivision, and while the rest of us tried to launch ourselves into space on the swings, Brad sat on the top of the slide and told stories in vivid detail about how some kid at school found a thumb in his hot dog because an Oscar Meyer factory worker got it caught in the meat grinding machine, how Paul McCartney was dead and the new Paul was really just a look-alike, or that a babysitter in Kansas murdered the kids she was watching because they didn’t go to bed on time.

One night, Steph came running over to our side after dinner. She had been bugging her mom to get a cat, and that day, Ginny finally gave in. She’d brought home a stripey orange kitten the size of a navel orange named Muffin.

All us kids (except of course Nicki, who was still a baby) went over on their side to play with Muffin while the moms hung out in our kitchen. We sat in a circle on the living room floor and took turns holding Muffin. Finally, it was my turn. I snuggled the tiny helpless ball of fluff under my chin and cooed like a pigeon in her big ears. That’s when Jimmy decided it’d be fun to drop her down the clothes chute from the second floor to the basement.

“Ha, ha. Very funny,” I said.

Dodd got really quiet, his eyes drifted to the right and toward the ceiling for a minute as he worked out the logistics, and then he said, “Me and Brad’ll go down to the basement, open the crate at the bottom and hold a blanket by the corners like firemen do when someone jumps out of a burning building.”

“Guys, no,” I said. I got up and pulled Muffin even closer under my chin and closed my hands around her.

Jimmy didn’t need any more convincing. He leapt to his feet, shouted, “Steph, get the cat!” over his shoulder, and bounded up the stairs two at a time. Dodd and Brad headed to the basement.

I turned my back to Steph, pulled my shoulders around Muffin, but Steph kicked me in the back of my leg. I fell to my knees and dropped Muffin. Before I could scoop her back to safety, Steph snatched her up and followed Jimmy to the clothes chute on the second floor. She had a good head start but I gave chase.

Jimmy stood in the hall. The look in his eyes was like the Riddler on Batman—joyful and scary at the same time. The little door in the wall outside the bathroom was open, and before I reached the top of the stairs, Steph handed Muffin over. Jimmy dangled the helpless, mewling kitten in the opening of the chute. “On the count of three!” he yelled.

Dodd’s voice echoed up the tin tube. “Roger that.”

I pressed against Jimmy, reached into the opening, and tried to wrestle the kitten away, but Jimmy’s vise grip hands were clamped around her body. He rammed his elbow deep into my ribs and counted down. “Three, two…”

Steph pulled me back and wrapped her arms around my shoulders like the thick, leather straps that held Frankenstein’s monster to the table.

“Stop!” I screamed.

“One!” Jimmy shouted.

I pulled and strained, tried to get away. “You’re gonna kill her!”

Jimmy yelled, “Bombs away!” and opened his hands.

Muffin’s mew shrank as she fell. There were several dull thumps and then quiet. We all froze and strained to hear.

A couple of seconds passed and Brad shouted, “Did you drop her?”

With every ounce of frustration in me, I sunk my elbow into the soft bit of Steph’s body below her ribs just as Jimmy had done to me.

“Hey!” She pushed me forward and headed for the basement.

“Muffin never came out,” Dodd yelled.

Jimmy bent over and stuck his head into the chute. “I can’t see anything. Shine a flashlight up here, will ya? There’s one by the washing machine.” he shouted.

“Le’me see,” I said.

I pulled the back of Jimmy’s t-shirt, but he didn’t budge. Anger boiled inside me, and I balled up my fist and brought it down in the middle of his back. The force made his chest bow toward the floor and his head crank back, and whack the inside of the chute with a tinny thud.

“Ow!”

He stood up, one hand on the back of his head, and swung his fist wide. He hit me square in the shoulder. We stood still, staring each other down in a duel of might versus wit, and a faint mewl echoed up the chute.

“I hate you!” I screamed. I planted both of my hands on his chest and shoved him as hard as I could. He stumbled back several steps, and I leaned into the chute.

Dodd flicked the flashlight on below and, in the beam of yellow light, I saw the silhouette of the kitten hanging several feet down, just out of my reach, her claws stuck in one of the chute seams.

I tried to soothe her like Mom did for me when I was scared. “Hey, Muffin,” I sang. “It’s gonna be alright, baby.”

She turned her face toward me and her shiny eyes and little white teeth glinted when she opened her mouth to cry again.

“Why isn’t she falling?” Steph yelled up the chute.

“She’s stuck!” I said. “Her claws are caught in the seam!”

Jimmy yanked me back by the collar, twisted me out of the opening. “Get out of the way,” he said.

He spun me away down the hall and I turned back just in time to see him throw a sneaker down the chute. There was a loud echo when it bumped against the sides, down two stories.

“Hey!” Brad yelled. “You almost hit me!”

“Did it work?” Jimmy asked.

“Nope,” Dodd said.

“Gimme a sec,” Jimmy said and ran back to his room.

“No, Jimmy, don’t,” I said. “You’re gonna kill her!” I pulled my arm across my upper lip to wipe the snot away.

He came back with the other sneaker and leaned into the chute again. I grabbed hold of his t-shirt again and yanked as hard as I could. The unmistakable sound of ripping cut through the air, and I realized I’d pushed my fingers through the fabric of his shirt. A long piece of hem hung from my fists.

“Fuck off!” he yelled and kicked his foot back like a Viking battering ram, his heel catching me square in the belly.

I doubled over and fought to catch my breath. I needed to make them stop but I knew I couldn’t do it alone, so I ran down the stairs, through the living room and out the front door.

I was desperate because I felt like I was the one hanging in the dark and if I could save Muffin, then I could save me. I’m still trying to save the little kid in me that’s left hanging in the dark.

When I grabbed the handle of our front door, I remembered that Ginny always laid Nicki down in the living room while she and Mom sat in the kitchen and smoked their cigarettes, drank their wine, and confided all their worries to one another. I pressed the handle flapper and, as quietly as I could, pushed the door open with a soft shoosh. Sure enough, there was Nicki, bundled up in her pink and yellow blanket surrounded by pillows and cushions so that she wouldn’t accidentally roll off the sofa.

I tiptoed through the living room, through the dining room, and was ready to burst into the kitchen when Mom said, “I don’t know what to do.” Her voice was wobbly and she kept sniffling. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I listened. “The judge said I have to let him see the kids regularly.” She blew her nose and went on. “I don’t want him around Kim, but I also have to pay the rent and buy groceries, and school is starting again soon and the kids are gonna need school supplies and shoes.”

I held on to the door frame, bent forward, and turned my ear toward the kitchen. I was confused. Why was it just me she didn’t want to see Father? He was also cruel to the boys and so much time had passed, I barely remembered why we’d left. I thought we didn’t see him anymore because of his new family, but how was that my fault?

“She’ll be there though, right?” Ginny said.

“Sandy?” Mom said. “They have a new baby so, I would guess. Did I tell you they named him Peter?”

“Wasn’t that what you wanted to name Dodd?”

“That mother-fucker told me he would never have a child named Peter. He’s such an ass.”

“He wouldn’t dare do anything while Sandy is there though. Would he?”

“I don’t know. Apparently, he smacked Kim on the leg hard enough to leave a mark last week. Brad told me Dave gave her a spanking all because she wanted him to swing her up in the air.” Mom’s sigh was more like the beginning of a sob.

My face burned. I couldn’t believe Brad told her. I bit down so hard my head shook.

There was the soft tink of a bottleneck on a glass and Mom blew her nose again.

I didn’t understand all the details, but I was sure they didn’t want me hearing any of what they were talking about, so I coughed.

A chair scuffed back and Ginny whispered, “Take one more.”

When I came around the corner, a blue haze of smoke hung in the air. Ginny was holding up a box of tissues and Mom stood next to her. She stamped out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and pulled one of the tissues from the box, then turned to check her reflection in the window of the back door.

She dabbed at her eyes and pulled her cheeks up in a bright smile. “Hey, kiddo, do you need something,” she said and turned back to me.

Her face looked like a vase that had been broken and carefully glued back together. For a second, I forgot what was so urgent and then I looked at Ginny. Steph looked so much like her that it came back in a flash.

“Jimmy threw Muffin down the clothes chute and now she’s stuck and he’s throwing shoes down trying to make her come out.”

“What?” both moms said.

I started crying and the words tumbled out in an avalanche. “I tried to stop them really, but Jimmy just threw her down and now Dodd and Brad and Steph are shining a light up from the basement and Jimmy is throwing sneakers down trying to make her fall the rest of the way, but her claws are stuck, and she’s not coming out!”

Mom yanked open the back door, the half curtain at the top swung wildly.

“Stay with the baby,” Ginny said and both moms ran out. The kitchen door on the other side of the double patio opened at the same time our screen door smacked shut, and both Ginny and Mom started yelling. I went back into the living room, sat in the chair across from the sofa, and watched Nicki sleep. She seemed so peaceful, her long black lashes flitted and fluttered as her eyes rolled back and forth under her closed eyelids. Her mouth pursed in a kiss as she sucked dream milk from a dream bottle. She had no idea what her brother and sister were like. I hoped they wouldn’t try to throw her down the chute one day.

I’m not sure how long I sat there, but I know it was a while before Mom came back followed closely by Dodd and Brad. They walked single file into the living room. Mom stopped at the foot of the stairs, held her arm out, and pointed up the stairs like the Grim Reaper pointing the way to damnation. Each boy marched past, head bowed and went up the stairs without a word. Before Dodd and Brad rounded the landing, they looked back, anger flashed in their eyes, and they each shot down a threatening glare. I was sure they were gonna pound me good for snitching, but I didn’t care. I would give as good as I got.

“Is Muffin ok?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mom said. “I was able to stretch my arm just enough to reach her and she’s safe in Ginny’s bedroom.”

“Are they in Dutch?” I pointed up the stairs.

“They are grounded for a week.”

“I’m sorry I snitched. I know I’m not s’posed to.”

“Well,” she said. She scooched me over with her hip and squeezed into the armchair next to me. “Sometimes you have to break the rules. Especially when someone might get hurt.”

“Or some kitten, too,” I said.

“Or some kitten.”

Just then Ginny came in from the kitchen. She tightened Nicki’s blanket around her, picked her up, and softly patted her bottom. Ginny turned and smiled at me. “Thanks for watching her,” she said.

Mom bent over and kissed me on the head. “You’d better get to bed, too,” she said. “You’re going over to Father’s tomorrow.”

I looked at her and her smile felt fake. “Do we have to?” I asked.

“It’ll be fun,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t really believe that and neither did I.

About the author:

Kymberlee Rosen is a fiction writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University. This is an excerpt from her upcoming autofiction book, The Little Things (working title). Her work can be found in sneaker wave magazine, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change. She and her husband live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Now that their two children are grown and flown, they share their home with a dumb but loveable dog and their two feline overlords.

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The editorial staff here at sneaker wave magazine share a common origin. We all have roots with Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing. Mike Magnuson, our Editor in Chief, has been on the faculty with the program for many years. And our Executive Editor, Managing Editor, and Editor at Large—McKenzie Watson-Fore, Angela Wang, and Julie Levine, respectively—each hold an MFA in Writing from Pacific University.

We can’t recommend this program enough. We’re from the Nonfiction genre, obviously, with our dedication to publishing true stories, but the program also offers robust study in poetry and fiction, with truly world class faculty teaching in all three genres. If you enroll in the program, you will have the opportunity to study in genres other than your genre in which you’re specializing.

Now, sneaker wave magazine is not an official part of Pacific University but a group that has emerged from the wide community of hundreds of writers who have gone through the program over the years. The possibilities for us, and for everyone in the Pacific MFA community, have literally been limitless.

So today, we’re sharing some information about the program, along with a number of useful links. If you like what you see, which we know you will, we urge you to apply and to join our wonderful community of writers.

Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program celebrates writing as an art that has the potential to make a difference in the world. We start with community, gathering at 10-day writing residencies twice a year in the stunning Pacific Northwest, where our distinguished faculty and visiting writers offer lectures and classes and workshops that consider craft as our guiding light.

The Pacific MFA in Writing program is currently welcoming applications for the summer residency and Summer/Fall 2026 semester, and our Residency Writers Conference, which we’ll host on the Pacific University campus in Forest Grove, Oregon, from June 18-28, 2026. Our priority due date is March 1, and we’ll be accepting applications through mid-May.

Participants in the Residency Writers Conference join MFA students in workshop and attend craft talks, classes, faculty readings, and more. You can find more information, including how to apply, on the program website.

The MFA is hosting a number of online information sessions this spring on Wednesdays on the following dates: March 11 and 18, April 1, 15, and 29, and May 13. All sessions are held at 4 pm Pacific time. We invite you to email the MFA office at mfa@pacificu.edu to register for a session.

Meantime, here’s a photo of Tillamook Head in Seaside, Oregon, where we hold our January residencies every year.

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A FEW DAYS AFTER my daughter Emma woke up in the ICU after a major surgery, I saw a golden retriever wearing sunglasses and thought I was losing my mind.

I was sitting on the world’s least-comfortable rocking chair, feeling the bones in my spine grate against one another while I watched Wheel of Fortune and Emma dozed. The doctors had cleared her to start walking around a little bit after her surgery, but each trip took something out of her that she could not easily get back. Just getting to and from the bathroom in our ICU suite was an ordeal: a nurse had to come and move all of the devices attached to Emma’s bed to a pole she could wheel with her. These tubes, some of which went into her chest to drain fluid and air, were painful to move, and Emma was usually good and pissed by the halfway mark.

“Get the fuck off of me,” she signed to one of the nurses.

“What did she say?”

“She said she really has to go, and moving the tubes hurts. Is she ready?”

Emma shook her head angrily at me, looked the nurse right in the eye, and raised her middle finger.

“I know that sign,” she said and kept at her work.

Emma continued her profane tirade, silently hurling rude gestures and vitriol the nurse’s way. This anger was unlike her, but I also knew she was in a lot of pain. When I tried to calm her down, the vitriol came my way. I took it, preferring it be directed at her parent—where teenagers usually direct their ire—than at the poor nurse who was just doing her job. Eventually, the rearranging was complete, and the nurse helped Emma out of bed.

Getting up stopped the tirade because Emma needed to grip the IV pole with one hand and the nurse with the other to walk the ten steps across the room and into the bathroom. She was curled like a question mark, head pointed down to the floor, hunched in an attempt to mitigate the pain. It took them almost two minutes to get to the door, and as they did, I eased myself back into the chair. A new puzzle had come up on the screen, and Pat Sajak was telling the contestants that the category was “An Event.” Two words: the first one was long, sitting atop a five-letter second word.

“Anniversary Party,” I said.

The letters played out, bankrupts and lost turns notwithstanding, and soon the solution was revealed.

Anniversary Party.

“Hey! I got it with no letters.”

I looked around, expecting adulation and congratulations, but nobody was there to witness my greatness.

The toilet flushed from the bathroom, then the sink ran, then the door opened.

“Hey, guess what,” I called toward the bathroom and stopped short. Emma was sobbing. “Emma, what’s wrong?”

She wrenched her arm off of the nurse’s elbow and started signing.

“It hurts too much. Kill me.”

“What did she say?”

“She’s in a lot of pain.”

“I’ll let the doctor know.” The nurse took Emma’s hand and made the slow walk back to bed, Emma crying silently the whole way. The process of re-adjusting the tubes, drains, and machinery unfolded in reverse, and I moved to the machine-free side and stroked her hair and told her it would be better soon.

“I want to die.”

Over and over again, even after the nurse finished reattaching everything to the bed and left the room to find the doctor, Emma signed about the doctors not wanting to help her and that she wanted to die. I thought she was just overwhelmed—and boy, did I get it. I was overwhelmed, too, having slept no more than a couple of hours in a stretch since we had been admitted ten days before. I’d gone through the entirety of my wardrobe more than once and was getting to the point where I could smell myself—never good. The barely padded slab that pulled double duty as a couch and fold-down bed had found every spot of arthritis in my body and poked at them, hard. I was sore, tired, and irritable, and I hadn’t even had surgery.

Before long, the doctor came in. His name was Jeremy, and we knew him well from our previous stays. Jeremy was usually jovial—leading with jokes and brimming with optimism. This time, he appeared concerned.

"I'm going to give her a little more morphine, but I don't love this cocktail she's on," he said. The "cocktail" was impressive: ketamine, morphine, regular doses of Propofol, a chalky-white liquid used to put Emma to sleep when her agitation led her to try and remove tubing, Versed—a clear liquid designed to relax her and force her to forget her suffering, Ativan—yet another anxiety-reducer, Scopolamine and Zofran for nausea, and a continuous stream of fluids and antibiotics. It made for a complicated pharmaceutical soup—a chemistry laboratory inside my daughter's body.

I didn't love it, either, but I hated the suffering Emma was going through and my inability to do anything about it. I watched the doctor write the order and the nurse leave to get the painkiller booster out of the locked drug dispenser down the tiled hallway. I watched her come back and use a silver-tipped syringe to draw up the drug from a small vial. I watched her spend thirty seconds wiping the port of Emma's IV line with an astringent alcohol pad before injecting the opioids and then flushing the disinfected port with a small amount of saline. And I watched Emma's body go slack, the tension of the pain released into the heavy air of the room. She lay back and went to sleep. The heart rate monitor changed from a flashing 118 beats per minute to a pedestrian 75.

The nurse left the room and pulled the sliding glass doors closed behind her.

I creaked back into the chair, wincing at the new knots doing so revealed. Wheel of Fortune had ended as the drugs were being ordered and administered, and Alex Trebek was setting up the Double Jeopardy round. I was not faring nearly as well as I had with Pat and Vanna, and this time, I was glad that nobody was around to see me try and guess my way through a run of clues on art history. Then I heard Emma stirring on the bed.

The look she gave was unsettling: a mix of fear and euphoria, a strange combination that did not sit on her face in the manner of her normal expressions. It looked as though someone else was wearing her body.

"Do you see the dots?" She pointed at the wall after she signed. There were no dots.

"What dots, Emma? I don't see anything.”

She started laughing then. It was a sideways laugh, a wrong laugh. A laugh that made no sense.

"They're moving around. Look!" She pointed again.

"No, wait, they're bugs." The mad laughter rearranged itself on her face to display a mad terror.

"Emma, there are no bugs."

Her face was certain. Her hands flew up in front of her face to protect herself, as if they were flying out at her. I pivoted around to put myself between my daughter and the onslaught she feared. I knew there was nothing there, but when you see your kid try to fend off danger, you put yourself in between them and the threat. She cowered behind me.

"See, kiddo," I said and turned around. "There are no bugs."

If you've seen madness on the face of someone you love, you can begin to understand how stories of demonic possession took root. Their body is the same. They have the same nose, and eyes, and mouth. They breathe the same air, but they are not the same person. They laugh differently. The way their eyes move around a room is different. The things you've seen them do for their entire lives one way, they do in a slightly different way. It's like walking into a room where someone has rearranged the furniture in ways you can't immediately identify but which has left every corner, every table leg, every dangerous construction in places where you are sure to run into them.

"Spider," she signed and pointed to an empty spot on the floor and started sobbing. One of the known effects of longer-term (beyond a day or two) stays in an Intensive Care Unit is a particular form of psychosis brought on by the combinations of stress, drugs, immobility, boredom, and the strange never-exactly-day-or-night feel of those units. It’s called ICU Psychosis. Patients often report seeing and hearing things: insects crawling around the room and on their skin, dead loved ones talking to them, demonic faces obscuring the faces of their doctors. Often, paranoia and aggression are accompanied with intense fear. I pressed the call button, knowing something was wrong, and spent the night learning about ICU psychosis in a very non-theoretical way.

The immediate treatment was to push more of the drugs that were causing the psychosis in an attempt to put her to sleep. They would work for an hour or two, during which Emma would lapse into fitful dozes, kicking her legs and writhing under her blankets. While the sleep kept her from conscious awareness of her imaginary tormentors, it did not stop their tormenting.

Around ten the next morning, Emma was mid-doze, and I was sitting up on the rock-hard bed-couch that sat along the back wall of the ICU room. I had not slept in more than twenty-four hours and was feeling utterly out of my depth and more than a little untethered from the world. That's probably why it took a minute to notice the dog sitting outside the room.

Not just any dog but a large golden retriever, with long, flowing fur, wearing a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, and carrying a backpack in its mouth. I slowly closed my eyes.

"I thought psychosis was only for the patients," I said.

When I opened my eyes, the dog was still there. He turned his snout in my direction, and I swear that—around the backpack strap clamped in his jaws—he grinned. I looked up and down the hallway outside the room. I was sure I was being punked, but there was nobody there to laugh at me. Slowly, I stood up, walked across the room to the grinning golden, and slid the glass door open along its tracks.

"What are you smiling about?" I crouched down to look the dog in the face—his eyes obscured by the dark lenses—and tried to figure out what the hell was happening.

The dog had no answer. I raised my hand for him to sniff, and he ducked his head into my palm, his soft fur catching between my fingers. And just like that, yielding to the magic only dogs can bring, a little of the tension from the past week and a half dissipated. I scratched the dog behind his ears and felt him lean into my hand. On his collar, where a dog's nametag and license would normally hang, was a Massachusetts General Hospital staff ID card, complete with his photo and the name "Ed" underneath it. I knew then that I had to be dreaming. Had to be.

"Where did you come from, Ed?"

"Sorry about that," called a voice from down the hall. "Ed likes to introduce himself sometimes."

A gray-haired man in a salmon vest was hurrying down the hallway toward the dog and me. A dog whose grin suddenly looked mischievous. I gave him another scratch and stood up.

"I'm Rhett," he called, "and that's my dog, Ed."

I reached out to shake hands and introduce myself, but Rhett held up a finger in the universal "one second" gesture. He reached below the antibiotic foam dispenser outside the room and wiped his hands with a generous dollop of the pungent substance.

"Sorry, hospital rules. I hear Emma likes dogs?"

There are two things that, no matter how sick Emma is, will bring a smile to her face if she's conscious: Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine and literally any animal that never had a larval stage. It's something the hospital staff has used to try and connect with her when she's struggling, bringing in pictures of their own pets, turning the television to Animal Planet when Emma is sleeping so she'll wake to something she loves, and asking questions about the pets in our family.

"Rhett, you have no idea."

"How do you think she'd like an animal therapy visit today?"

I looked back over my shoulder. Emma was starting to stir.

"I think she'd love one—but just so you know, she's going through some things. Don't be surprised if I'm wrong or she says some tough things."

"Every kid here is going through some things," he replied. "Want to give it a shot?"

I invited them into the room. Ed took the lead and walked right up to the bed. He stood on his hind legs and, more gently than I'd ever seen a dog move, placed his front paws on the bed next to Emma, in between the IV tubing and other medical detritus, touching none of it. Emma opened her eyes. They were the psychosis eyes, and a wrong-sided grin moved along her face. Slowly, she sat up from the waist, her legs remaining flat as her body shifted upwards at a 90 degree angle. In a horror-movie move, Emma's head turned to look at me while the rest of her body remained entirely still. Her grin hadn't changed, and neither had her eyes. Mechanically, she patted her right thigh and then snapped her finger—the sign for "dog"—and then slowly turned her head back to look at Ed.

Shit, I thought.

Rhett knelt down behind Ed.

"Would you like Ed to come up in the bed with you?"

Slowly, robotically, Emma nodded.

Rhett picked up the controls for the adjustable hospital bed and lowered Emma down to make it easier for the large dog to get up. Ed shifted to the foot of the bed, surveyed the landscape, and hopped up, again missing every tube and machine in what appeared to be an intentional act of contortion. He spun himself around a few times and then settled, resting his head on Emma's lap. She repeated the slow head-turn back to me.

"Daddy, is he real?"

I told her that he was, even though I wasn’t convinced myself, and an instant transformation came over Emma. Nothing physically changed, but suddenly it was my daughter looking through her eyes, and not her demons. Her smile was right. Her face fit back on her body, the way I had always known it to fit. She reached out her hand and offered it to Ed. A large pink tongue licked her hand, and Emma started slowly stroking his head. As she pet the dog, Rhett used the controls to move the back of the bed up behind her so she could sit more comfortably.

I invited Rhett into the room to sit down.

"No thanks," he said. "I've sat in those chairs before. I'll stand."

While we talked, Emma continued stroking Ed's fur, and Ed responded by licking her hand every time it strayed close to his mouth. It turned out that Rhett was a pilot for JetBlue, flying regular routes to Florida and the Caribbean. He told me that Ed often flew with him, resting as calmly in the cockpit as he did in the beds of patients. I told him some of Emma's complex medical history, dating back to before she was even born—cancer, mystery GI ailments, chronic pneumonias, a rare disease called cast bronchitis, and persistent tracheal tears. He told me about the special care he took of Ed, feeding him only poached chicken and boiled carrots, and taking him to swim in the ocean off of the house he was restoring in coastal Massachusetts, where he had recently relocated from the beaches of southern California. Ed didn't seem to mind that the water was much colder in the Northern Atlantic than it was in the Pacific.

Before we knew it, the ten-minute planned pet therapy visit had stretched to thirty, and Rhett had to take Ed back on the rounds to meet other patients. Emma took it better than I expected, kissing her hand and rubbing it on Ed's snout. Ed kissed her back and gently backed down off of the bed. Not a single alarm blared from Emma's many monitors while Ed and Rhett were in the room. When they left, Emma was tired, so I reclined her bed, and soon she was deep in a true slumber, calm and still, with regular breathing. I stretched out on the rock-hard couch with an impossibly flat hospital pillow and joined her in her rest.

I wish I could say that Ed and Rhett's visit permanently corrected the ICU psychosis. It did not, but it gave us what nothing else had been able to do: respite. I was able to have a conversation with an adult who was not medical—I was able to be a person of my own for half an hour instead of being solely Emma's caretaker. Seeing the power of the pup's interaction with my daughter allowed me to set down the weight of her suffering for a moment and breathe freely. That brief visit gave me the strength to continue carrying that weight a little bit longer than I might otherwise have been able to—and it brought Emma such happiness in the middle of a time where there was simply no happiness to be had. In the days that followed, as the doctors and nurses and pharmacists plotted a path back out of ICU psychosis, Emma often spoke of Ed during her lucid times. Every time she said Ed's name, her smile was her own.

More than all of the medicine in the hospital, visits from Ed and Rhett helped cure my daughter—maybe not physically, although there were certainly physical benefits: we could see lower heart rates during and after their visits, and Emma's reported pain was lower for hours—but certainly in helping her retain hold of herself through the terror, stress, and pain of the months we spent hospitalized. No matter what ward we were in, Ed and Rhett found us, spent extra time with us, and brought us peace and comfort. Other dogs and owners joined in when Ed and Rhett were in the sky. Daisy the poodle wore matching outfits with her owner. Tucker the Labrador retriever had a way of leaning right into us that somehow made us feel supported even though we were holding his eighty or so pounds up with our own bodies. Every dog and every volunteer who came to see us changed us and our experience for the better. But no matter how bad things were, when we saw the golden retriever with the sunglasses, we knew they were going to get better, at least for a while.

About the author:

Ben Jackson is a writer, editor, narrator, educator, and dad. His work appears in the Boston Globe, The Hill, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, The Penmen Review, Consequence, The Horror Tree, and anywhere else he can con an editor into publishing his drivel. He is the co-host with Alyssa Milano (yes, that Alyssa Milano) of the weekly podcast Sorry Not Sorry and teaches writing at Georgia Southern University. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston, but at this moment he is almost certainly very sweaty in sultry Savannah, Georgia.

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MY HUSBAND OF FORTY-PLUS YEARS and I had just made love in our Paris apartment, and we felt like teenagers. We were still giddy over buying one share of a romantic, Haussmannian pied-a-terre with high ceilings and ornate moldings. It would be a new adventure, living here one month every year. The October sunlight poured through the tall windows and warmed my skin. My husband hovered over my tummy, squinting his azure eyes as he scrutinized my belly button.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked. He inhaled deeply, continued to linger, and again I queried, “What are you looking for?”

“I’ve noticed it before,” he whispered and furrowed his eyebrows and interlaced his fingers with mine. “Something’s in there, dark and hard.”

I quickly got up and walked to the dimly-lit mirror above the marble counter in the bathroom. My navel is a small, deep “innie,” which makes it difficult to see or feel into the crevice. But sure enough, I saw and felt it: a black, hard stone wedged inside my belly button. A stone! I picked at it vigorously, only to get that weird sensation one does when one goes too deep into the place where the umbilical cord was cut. It’s a feeling between nausea and discomfort. The mass wouldn’t budge. It seemed attached to my navel. After interrogating my husband about when he’d first noticed it (he couldn’t remember), why he hadn’t mentioned it before (he didn’t really know), and feeling generally embarrassed and, at the same time, a tad bit scared that this could be cancer or a tumor or who-knows-what, I consulted the web to learn that “in rare cases, a navel stone can develop, properly called an umbolith, also known as an omphalotloth, from a build-up of dead skin and accumulated debris.”

Shame engulfed me.

Dead skin and debris? What? I shower every single day. And I have for years. Had I not gone deep enough with my belly-button self-care to extricate old dirt? Had I merely cleaned the surface, leaving hidden residue to build up into a rock? I immediately felt dirty. So dirty.

I vigorously scrubbed my belly button over and over and over again. I tried to pry out the stone, tugging it with tweezers. I put warm, wet swabs of cotton into the crevice, hoping to loosen the dark thing. By the time the skin encircling my navel had turned rough and red, I gave up on removing it, at least for the time being. Rather, I dressed and decided to act normal, as if I didn’t have a collection of old stuff hardened and stuck where once I was connected to nourishment and the life of my mother.

We all have a navel. It’s a profound part of one’s physical body, but for the most part, we don’t talk about it or give it any due, maybe because it’s incidental to our other physical attributes such as the size and shape of our feet, the width and length of our fingers, our skin tone, hair texture, eye color. The navel is technically a scar, a scab, a wound where the umbilical cord was severed. We refer to navel gazing, implying that we’re unable to see the bigger picture because we’re so hell-bent on gazing at our own situation, our own self and our own needs. Depending on how the scar healed after birth, we sometimes describe our navels as an innie or an outie. Other than that, it seems to me that we leave the navel out of our everyday vernacular. Yet, isn’t it the most significant physical reminder of our origins?

I think that my mother must have wrapped me as a newborn with a tight belly band, probably a trend in the early 1950s, her immaculate habits and conscientious hands guiding my navel to be as flat and unnoticeable as possible. She was fastidious—making sure my appearance was clean, wholesome, as perfect as a child’s can be. I was born six years after my mother endured a stillbirth.

She and my father lived in Rhode Island while my father was serving in the Navy. Because money was tight, they arranged for the baby’s body to be shipped by train to family in the Midwest to be buried in their hometown cemetery, and they stayed put. At the funeral home, my Mom’s brother, a photographer, took photos of the baby in the coffin so they could have pictures of their son since they were not allowed to see or hold the baby when he was born.

When I was young, Mom would show me and my sister, who came a year after me, the black-and-white 8 x 10 photos of our brother in a miniature casket dressed in a white outfit with booties on his tiny feet, fists clenched, eyelids closed as if he were sleeping—this baby whom my parents named but never met.

“Why couldn’t you hold him, Mommy?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess it was protocol. The nurses didn’t want to cause me more pain, so they whisked him away without me laying eyes on him.” She shook her head and clamped her lips together. After a few minutes of gazing at the pictures, Mom added, “I’m just so glad your Uncle Al took these.”

The photos were kept inside a tissue-filled gift box nestled between the folds of a soft, blue blanket in the top bureau drawer in Mom’s bedroom. She’d periodically pull them out, and every time, I would ask, “Why did it happen?”

She’d repeatedly explain that severe toxemia—what we now call pre-eclampsia—caused the baby’s death. “Lordy, I was swollen bigger than a balloon, sicker than a dog,” she’d say. “I almost died, lucky to be here.” When Mom would relive that December day, I thought I heard her questioning what exactly had caused the pre-eclampsia, perhaps feeling helpless that she couldn’t redo the baby’s fate, perhaps blaming herself. I was too young to fully understand, but I did comprehend that this was an awful trauma and pain she carried.

Mom, then, must have been extra careful with me when I was born, determined to keep me healthy, mothering me with the very best of intentions. A mother’s intentions are always good when we carry a baby and when we give them life. However, cutting that umbilical cord is a sudden reality that puts mother and child onto separate journeys. No wonder the navel is considered a wound. As a mother of three, I can attest that mothers will do almost anything to be their child’s lifeline as long as possible. It’s hard to let go and trust that the baby turned child turned adolescent turned adult can survive on their own. The mother-child bond is incredibly complex, be it from the perspective of the mother or the child. One can spend a lifetime trying to be independent, even when the cord is severed, even when the wound looks healed, even when one of them has passed on.

My earliest memories with Mom revolve around singing hymns, dancing with her to “The Stroll” when Dick Clark played “Blueberry Hill” on American Bandstand, waiting at the bus stop on Indiana Highway 32 to ride east to see Grandma Josie in Farmland or west to take dance lessons in Muncie on Saturdays. To say we had fun together was an understatement, though there was also an undercurrent between her and my father of mistrust and stress over money. Over time, they grew angrier and more vicious, verbally and physically. By the time I was ten years old, I was aware of my mother’s discontentment, and because she was forced to stay with my father so that he could financially support us, I believed her misery was my fault. Kids can get these things mixed up in their brains, but somewhere along the line, I absorbed responsibility for her happiness. At the same time, my mother leaned on me, or me and my sister, to ride bikes to the fireworks display, shop at the grocery with our measly budget, decide where to live—driving because she didn’t, listening to the details of her marriage to our father because she needed an ear. All that extra care for me as an infant had evolved into a role reversal, where I looked out for her, felt for her sadness, stood up to my father, earned money to help ends meet, found rental houses so we wouldn’t be kicked out on the street.

Those years seemed far, far away the morning I scurried down Rue de Courcelles to my adult ballet class at Institut Stanlowa, navel stone still lodged within me. The high-low sound of a siren jolted me. Pedestrians paid no attention, bicycle riders didn’t flinch, taxis and buses didn’t stop. The sound echoed in the distance, after all. Here I was, living my own life—free to be creative, grateful to act upon my passions. I checked the time and watched my footing as I crossed the cobblestone intersection, peering to the right where the Arc de Triomphe boldly stands blocks away, relieved that I had another twenty minutes before class started.

It must have been hard for my mother to watch me separate from her. She’d spouted encouraging messages along the way: You can do anything. Marry rich. Get a good education. Show ‘em how tough you are. And on the other hand, I heard her caution just as loudly: Don’t be a crybaby. You’re dreaming too high. Better not forget where you came from. Despite the blurry instructions, I knew to do what she wished for herself: become independent. And at the same time, I carried the burden to make her proud, to make her laugh, to give her a piece of contentment that my father didn’t.

I took on the appearance of being the perfect college student, career person, wife and mother. When I studied in Spain, I wrote to her every other day, always mentioning how much I missed her, describing the sights I wished she could see, not telling her what a wild and wonderful time I was having. In turn, she typed ten-page single-spaced letters to me weekly, detailing the antics of my father and the hardships of living in another rental with a faulty furnace. When I began my career selling Sheetrock for a Fortune 500 company, I spent my first bonus on a vacation, taking her to Florida where she’d said she wanted to go before she died. I’d mail her newspaper articles and magazine clippings that mentioned my name, hoping my professional accomplishments would bring her joy. She didn’t ask for details about my work; my father, on the other hand, wanted to know how it felt to be a district sales manager in the construction industry with men his age working for me. The day after our wedding, my mother broke down in tears, sobbing like a baby, sniveling in my arms before my husband and I left for our honeymoon. I presumed this was partly because we would be living across the country in California, far from her in Indiana, so I promised to call her every evening after work. Three years later, my husband and I moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, a six-hour drive from my parents. And we expanded our family: one, two, three babies in three years as I carried on my career. I still phoned Mom every day before I got on the commuter train to come home to my children.

The cord wasn’t severed after all.

Before I knew about the navel stone, my husband and I took Bus Route 92 to the American Cathedral, one of the oldest English-speaking churches in Paris, whose majestic spiral oversees the upscale 8th arrondissement on the Right Bank, where congregants nonchalantly don silk scarves atop their wool coats. We sat in a pew in the back. As the choir sang “Abide with Me”, the organ pipes vibrated loudly, touching something deep within me I couldn’t quite name. My eyes rimmed with tears. I fingered the paper bulletin to remind myself that I had not been physically transported. An undeniable Presence reminded me that I have never been alone. And as the dry taste of the thin communion wafer melted on my tongue and the sip of bitter wine entered me, I felt an undeniable comfort.

After the service, we ambled through the courtyard, then headed toward the Alma bridge over the Seine where we noticed flower bouquets piled upon a statue. When we walked closer, we saw that the statue was the Flamme de la Liberté, a gilded copper flame that replicates the one on the Statue of Liberty and now commemorates Princess Di who was killed in the nearby tunnel almost thirty years ago. Handwritten poems scattered among daisies and lilies and mums called us to pause, to soak in the heaviness of this Sabbath morning, to huddle closely as the chilly breeze whipped around us.

It took years of wrong turns as well as a pinnacle psychotic break for me to examine the wounds affecting my marriage, my mothering, my wholeness. I scribbled on napkins, wrote in journals and typed my way through personal stories to sort out what was true, aiming my efforts toward cleaning out the gunk stuck inside. Years of therapy gave me a new lifeline, a different perspective, drew me to self-awareness so that my own behaviors could be healthier. And I prayed. I developed a keen sense and connection to my faith—helping me forgive, leading me to rely on God to save, not acting as if it was my job, be it with my mother, my children, or anyone else I love.

When I told Mom I was quitting my full-time career of twenty years, she said, “So you’ll go home and just be with your kids. That’s enough, isn’t it? They need you.” It’s heartening to know that toward the end of her life we were finding a way to see each other.

Since my parents’ deaths, I have moved to the West Coast, far away from my roots. Every Memorial Day, my sister, who lives forty miles from the cemetery in Winchester, Indiana, sends me photos of the family gravesites she decorates. The pictures show my parents’ headstone adorned with a patriotic or pastel or rose-covered arrangement. I notice that, just beyond, she hasn’t neglected to coordinate a sweet remembrance for the baby’s grave, our brother’s lone flat headstone which lies a short distance from theirs.

Mom’s been dead for over twenty-five years now. I ponder what it will be like when one day, our spirits will meet again. Will my spirit want to hide since I’ve grown so different from who we once were together? Or will our spirits unite in comfort and familiarity, celebrating the connection we once had? Or have we both gone on our separate journeys never to meet up again? Whatever the unknown, my soul needs to quiet, to rest without fear, to let go. I trust that the mother-daughter love between our imperfect beings is what lingers, not the fragments of our flaws. I hear the whisper of assurance that all is well.

Autumn days in Paris have a way of making one appreciate the simple pleasures of strolling arm-in-arm through Parc Monceau or sitting for inordinate periods of time over a croissant and espresso at a sidewalk café. Yet I stayed vigilant, determined to rid myself of the dark rock that still resided in me. After three days of dousing oiled Q-tips and warm compresses into my belly button, trying to soften that navel stone, one morning in the shower I was able to merely lift it out. It was about the size of a guitar pick. Beneath the oblong dark flat part was a soft, pliable, putty-like mass. From top to bottom the layers blended into one another: charcoal to light grey to taupe to a pearlescent white pointy base. It didn’t have an odor and didn’t hurt when I removed it. As if it were time, the stone simply was freed.

About the author:

Connie Petersen is a writer of creative nonfiction, focusing on personal essays. Her work has been published in Ophelia’s Mom (Random House - 2001), the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, the Chicago Suburban Pioneer Press, and Post Alley. She was awarded first place in the 2018 San Miguel Writer’s Contest in the CNF category. She has also written a memoir, The Taste of Rain. Connie’s work explores transformation within the topics of career, motherhood, family roots, and faith. She lives in Seattle with her husband.

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BY THE TIME MY LIBIDO revs into gear at fifteen, I’ve seen exactly four penises. The first is a total accident. I’m a toddler who pushes open a bathroom door to find her dad toweling off, and there the thing is, hanging from a hairy nest. I squeak and stare. Dad blanches, covers himself, swings the door shut. The second is not an accident, but still, I’m unprepared. I’m maybe four, and my neighbor, a kid my age, summons me to his garden shed, steps onto an overturned bucket, and drops his shorts. The pale thing dangles. His is hairless, but no prettier for it. I scream and beat a retreat back across the street, climb a tree, and yell that no, I will not show him mine. Thus learned, the bare facts of male anatomy aren’t new to me when, at nine, I discover The Joy of Sex on our library shelf. The organ’s two-dimensional representation allows me to consider the bearded model’s penis more calmly. But careful inspection just confirms: penises are totally gross.

My aversion hasn’t changed when, in my first year at boarding school, I see the fourth. This one belongs to my boyfriend, Ryan, seventeen to my fourteen. Ryan is my first boyfriend, and he coaches me in canoodling: Nibble my ear, like this, and he nibbles my ear and I feel a nice little tug in my groin; then I nibble his and he laughs and says Ouch, no. Like I did it to you. So I try again, and he groans a little and tells me how much of my tongue he’d like in his mouth. We go on like this for weeks before he finally unzips his jeans and unleashes the thing. This is the first real one I’ve seen erect, and I really like Ryan, so I’m bummed to realize that the look of the thing, while improved by being hard and thus not wrinkly, still totally freaks me out.

I know what Ryan wants (a handjob), and I consider giving him one. Perhaps I can overcome the offensive aesthetics by averting my eyes. But what I know I can’t overcome is the fear that I’ll be bad at it, because I know that, when it comes to handjobs, boys are the experts. Boys give themselves handjobs all the time. No way can I compete with that. I ask Ryan to put it away.

He’s not the type to push, and we remain a going-steady couple even after we head home for summer break. But about ten days before returning for sophomore year, I get a letter saying that, now eighteen, Ryan’s a man, and a man needs a real woman. He has found one, and she’s deflowered him in a pool locker room. He’s so sorry but hopes we can still be friends.

I’m hurt but not heartbroken, even though, over the weeks we’ve been apart, my slow-to-manifest libido has burst into something unignorable, and while I’m definitely not ready for deflowering, or even for penises, I am ready to up the ante on canoodling. But that’s ok, because I’ve got my sights set on someone else. I’ve liked Jack from my first week of freshman year but doubted, even once my boobs started coming in, that I had a chance with him. By the time I wonder if I might have a shot with Jack, Ryan and I are already a thing.

Jack, also a junior, isn’t your typical teenage heartthrob. On the surface, he’s actually kind of average. He plays varsity sports (football, ice hockey, lacrosse) and preppy recreational ones, too (sailing), but he’s not a standout star. He does well in school but is in no way looking at any Ivies. He isn’t bad-looking (in fact, he’s quite fit from all those sports), but he isn’t markedly good-looking, either (big nose, small mouth, hairline already receding). But, oh, the confidence and curiosity and charm! Jack looks right at you; he asks questions; what’s more, he answers them, gives you paragraphs; like, he really wants to know you, and, even better, he really wants you to know him. Jack is interested in books and music and the whole wide world, and he wants to talk about all of it. Plus, he’s funny but never slapstick and only crude when it counts.

Jack has a ground-floor room in the school’s smallest boys’ dorm, just a little cottage, really, that’s been carved into an apartment for dorm parents on one side and a few student bedrooms on the other. Jack shares his room with his best friend, Drew, and they’ve got a killer stereo, a big record collection, walls covered with thin cotton tapestries and the expected posters: St Paulie’s Girl spills boobs out of her lederhosen in one, Bob Marley spills smoke out of a blunt in another. Girls aren’t ever allowed inside boys’ dorms, and vice versa, but there are no restrictions on a hard-crushing girl standing outside a boy’s window, learning her first Dylan lyrics and taking the occasional, tiny puff off a one-hitter discreetly passed over the windowsill.

By the time I get a sense that I’ve maybe got a chance with Jack, I’m smitten with Ryan. Plus, even the thought of being sneaky—much less outright lying—gives me a stomachache. So I’m all innocence when, a few weeks before the end of my freshman year, Jack catches up to me one Sunday morning, asks what’s up, do I want to hang out. I agree, sure, homework can wait, and we stroll away from the blustery waterfront and amble aimlessly, eventually finding ourselves outside the big, low building that students call The Ackey and teachers call The Academic Center. The Ackey should be locked on a Sunday, but someone’s propped a door open with a rock.

The halls are unlit, dim and quiet. There’s the mild thrill of trespass as we settle onto a wide upholstered bench. We face each other, legs pulled up, still-shod feet on pleather, and keep talking. I’m wearing a mid-80’s mashup of prep and pop: pegged acid-wash jeans, a loose men’s oxford, flat ankle boots, and a short string of pearls. I’m yammering on (yeah, Dylan’s definitely a poet, but his voice is kind of annoying), and Jack is, too (but you’ve got to appreciate that his voice is poignant . . . his songs make more sense with a whining wail), when he veers off topic and asks if the pearls are real. I’m saying yeah, they were a birthday gift, when he leans in with his perfect, too-small mouth, teeth bared. He scrapes his incisors against a pearl, finds the gritty texture that proves their authenticity. There’s a spark in my belly. I inhale once, sharp. Jack pulls back, grins, says yup, they’re real, then, we should get going, and we leave the Ackey and have just said see ya and turned away when I realize he’s stopped and is watching my walk. I don’t look back but hear him anyway: you’re developing nicely, Giz. You’ve already got a great ass. I still don’t turn around, don’t reveal my vicious, full-body blush. I’m shocked by the word “ass” but not insulted. His mouth at my clavicle is a promise that his crude comment seals, and I file it away like an IOU.

Which is why, months later, further developed and definitively unattached, I’m not anticipating much difficulty getting something going with Jack. I believe my biggest problem is that I still don’t want to see, much less touch, a penis. As it turns out, though, my antipathies aren’t even in play. There are several new girls at our school, many of whom notice Jack’s appeal. He takes their measure and quickly settles on a brunette named Michelle. Michelle isn’t just nicely developed; she’s fully developed, one of those teenagers who looks, unlike me, more woman than girl. Worse, she’s a day student who drives an actual Porsche (a Carrera 9-11) to and from school. Jack’s happy to see me, too, greets me with hey, Giz, you look great, come by my window soon so we can catch up. Nevertheless, Jack and Michelle are an item before the second week’s out.

I nurse my disappointment and distract myself with a more age-appropriate choice, another sophomore with nicely angular features, Clark Kent glasses, and a Jack-like interest in intense conversation, but this guy ultimately goes for a day student, too, a blond girl who gets better grades than me, has bigger boobs, and pilots a Boston Whaler—at least on good weather days—from a big house across the small bay and ties up at the floating dock that I can see through the dining hall’s big windows, my breakfast lookout.

I don’t actually stop trying for Jack, though, and he doesn’t discourage me, not yet. I’m late-blooming physically but have been a precocious conversationalist from the get-go, which helps. I don’t always or even usually understand what I’m talking about, but I’m great at noticing what interesting-seeming people take seriously. I really want to be taken seriously. I’ve been developing this skill since my first major success, at age three, when, hoping to delay bedtime, I parrot something I’ve overheard and ask a group of adults assembled for cocktails with my parents, what should we do about the OPEC crisis? The guffaws and attention this earns me are addictive, and I double down. From then on, this precocious skill is a free pass to places I imagine I want to be, ready or not (like, maybe first grade at age four is ok, but ninth grade at a boy-dominated boarding school at thirteen? Maybe that’s less ok). Plus, the hyperverbal curiosity isn’t a put-on. I’ve got an early, genuine, unstoppable impulse to hurtle a conversation down the fastest path to the most interesting (some would say the least comfortable) place, unimpeded by any wish—much less ability—to fake an interest in this thing called small talk.

While I’ll tolerate and even perform well in situations that demand socially-coded niceties, I won’t dwell very long on the surface of anything. I go deep, fast. A lot of guys aren’t into it, especially if they’re my age. The ones who are into it, like Ryan and Jack, are always a few years older than me, and while these guys are increasingly willing to let on that something beyond my conversational skills interests them, they’re cautiously embarrassed by their attraction, especially since I look even younger than my already-too-young age.

Still, even once he starts up with Michelle, Jack’s usually happy to see me at his window. So there I am one evening, early in my sophomore year, flirty and available, the talk flowing nicely, when Jack asks what I’m doing for Fall Break. I tell him I’ll be spending the upcoming late-October long weekend on campus, and he says that won’t do. I should come to his dad’s for the weekend, they’d be happy to have me. Michelle lodges a complaint when she hears this plan, but he convinces her. He’s just being nice, yeah, he knows I have a crush, but really, she’s seen me: I’m cute—freckled and pert—and I might even be pretty one day, but I’m not there yet. She’s got nothing to worry about.

I don’t agree. I’ve felt Jack’s mouth at my clavicle, after all, and I’m beside myself excited when, the following week, I travel with the team to their Saturday afternoon football game. Jack’s dad meets us there. I see his surprise when Jack introduces us. I’m not what he imagined when his son asked to bring a girl home. But, as established, Jack’s dad is not the first adult I’ve charmed. The man perks right up when I start in with my WASP-y manners. These include a firm handshake (I hate a limp one, eww), and careful, more hard-won (look me in the eye when I’m speaking to you, young lady), almost too-intense eye-contact, but the real key is my effusive, entitled, code-baiting gratitude for the invitation (yeah, my parents are in Palm Beach this month… too far to go for a three-day weekend. By the time I got there, I’d just have to head back to the airport). Soon, Jack’s dad’s slinging my quilted weekend bag into his trunk and opening the car door for me (no, Jack’ll be fine in the back, he is a gentleman, after all). Traffic’s not bad, but the sun’s long gone when we pull up to a big, cedar-shingled house in some tony Boston suburb. I’m shown to a tiny guestroom with a brass-railed double bed. Later, there’s some kind of simple dinner off the grill, after which we’re all wiped out and head to bed.

Next morning, I’m up hours before Jack. I read in bed and poke around the house, and by the time Jack’s up and about in early afternoon, he says we gotta get moving. His sister will be by to pick us up in an hour, we’re headed to his grandparents’ for an early dinner, and I can tell Jack’s a little nervous about introducing me to his sister because he tells me to not dress too preppy, she’s not into that. But I don’t realize he’s also nervous for me to meet the cousins and aunts and uncles who’ll also be there. His sister’s at college somewhere in Boston. She’s bringing her boyfriend and we’re also picking up a cousin, and this is how I find myself sandwiched between Jack and the cousin in the backseat of some sporty little car, his sister at the wheel, the boyfriend lighting a joint, taking a big hit before passing it back, me taking a littler hit before passing it on. I’ve been a sometime pot smoker for over a year now and find it calms my own considerable nerves, which in this case helps conceal my glee at being squished in the back seat next to Jack and included amongst these grown-up-seeming new people, driving rather too fast along a sea-cliff road and into the waning light, so very ready for all I hope’s coming my way.

Jack’s grandparents’ place is a grand old place with a wrap-around porch and a super view—we make it just in time to see the last bright-pink strip on the ocean’s horizon—and filled with nice people. I take a seat on a chintz-upholstered chair and settle in next to an older woman—an aunt, I think—and fall directly into a long conversation about Impressionist painting. (What’s a better representation of how we feel when we see a beautiful scene? The Impressionist’s edge-less colors or the Realist’s firm outlines?) I have opinions and I express them. I’m famished, and someone, maybe Jack, brings me a plate. Later, dessert is passed. Conversation is going on and on in this vein until the aunt almost inelegantly switches topics and asks me how Jack and I came to be friends—surely, I’m not in his class—and finally, just out with it, she asks my age, then hesitates and takes the final step: is Jack my boyfriend? No, but— and here I drop my sophistication, the one I’m surprising myself with my ability to keep up, given how stoned I am. All at once I’m just the barely fifteen-year-old, newly pubescent, eager-to-please girl that I am, and I babble that no, I’m not, he’s dating this girl Michelle, but I like him so, so much. The aunt sighs with relief, pats my hand, and says Oh, but he really is too old for you. Don’t worry, dear, you have plenty of time. Just you wait. Boys your age will catch up eventually.

This is dispiriting but not crushing, and once I’m back at Jack’s in the brass-railed bed, I practice kissing the inside of my elbow, as if kisses are handshakes, as if I might learn the right amount of pressure and tongue by feeling what feels good to me. I’m almost asleep when my dreams come true. The door opens quietly, and Jack whispers: hey, Giz, you still awake? I scooch over, glad for my practicing, because from the very start, Jack’s kisses are a whole new world of kissing. He pushes up the T-shirt I’m sleeping in and touches my finally-there breasts and pushes my underpants down and feels the wet, and his erection is hard on my thigh, and I almost want to actually touch it, and maybe penises aren’t really the problem I’ve made them out to be, and then Jack lifts himself off me and says, oh, Giz, this is a mistake, I shouldn’t be here, and I don’t protest. I’m ok, the smallest part of me’s relieved, even, that tonight’s not the night, not yet. Plus, now I’ve got real proof of his want. I can work with this.

Except . . . I can’t.

We sleep late the next day, and Jack makes us messy egg and cheese sandwiches. He turns on some football, and I try to distract him with the ear-nibbling thing Ryan taught me. This almost works. Jack even lets me touch the strip of skin above his belt where his shirt’s ridden up, but then he sighs and moves my hand and looks at me sweetly and says, Oh Giz, you’re going to make some guy really happy one day. I’m crushed to realize this isn’t so much a tease as a closing statement. By nightfall, we’re back at school, and he’s back with Michelle.

A few months later, when we return from the long winter break, he and Michelle are over. I must be next. Right? Sure enough, within days a plan is hatched. I hear about it not from Jack but from my friend Liddy, who is clandestinely fooling around with the best friend, Drew. Drew now has a single in Jack’s dorm—the same dorm from the year before, just re-shuffled—and Jack’s new roommate is off campus for the weekend, and Liddy and I are invited to sneak out! This’ll be my first time sneaking out, but not Liddy. Like all freshman and sophomore girls, she’s got a second floor room, but hers opens onto the fire escape, and Liddy has been making use of it since the start of the school year. She knows how to dodge the night-time security patrols. I don’t want to get caught, but she won’t let that happen and I know this is my chance. An hour after midnight, Liddy and I creep down her fire escape, cat burglars, then run the half mile across two playing fields and two parking lots to the boys’ dorm.

Drew’s left a rolled tube sock in the exterior door as promised, and I find Jack waiting for me. I don’t have a plan for what I’ll do, beyond knowing I won’t go all the way, not before mutually declaratory love at least, but I am open to facing my fear of the penis. There, right then, I get an idea: while I can’t give a better handjob than a boy, I’m sure they can’t get their mouths down there. Jack’s in boxers and nothing else. I don’t have to even undress to just kiss my way down his chest, tug at his boxers, close my eyes against the sight of the thing, move my lips over and around it and get it as far back onto my tongue as I can bear. I find my limit pretty quickly, but just as I start my retreat, I feel a pulsing and my mouth fills with a salty, almost clean-tasting fluid. I’ve never liked a mess, and am surprised I don’t mind the taste. I get it all down in just one big swallow, well, ok, maybe two. Jack says, Oh, Giz, oh wow, and we snuggle a bit before he gets out of bed and puts a record on and George Winston is playing “Pachelbel’s Canon.”

We doze until Drew knocks softly and says time to go, the sun’ll be up soon. I need to get back across campus while the getting’s good, so out into the frost-fallen early morning Liddy and I go. We make it back up the fire escape without even a single clang or a scrape. I’m just sure I’ve got this thing with Jack secured and am doubly sure when Liddy tells me she and Drew’ve made another plan. We’ll get a couple hours of sleep and meet the boys at breakfast and catch the bus to Boston for the day. It’ll be so much fun.

And it is, at least at first. The cab ride to the bus stop is conspiratorial and giddy. But the boys get seats next to each other—not Liddy and me—on the bus, and that’s ok but confusing. When we arrive at South Station and the door hisses open, we walk the few blocks to the Public Garden and into the Commons until the blustery cold drives us west into the wind-buffeting streets, and the boys find a place that sells them a few beers. I have one, which makes me drunk, but Jack’s not paying me much attention and is maybe even ignoring me.

We escape from the chill into the aquarium. This cheers me a bit. I love that big round tank in the center and am thrilled by the urge to climb over the rail and slip in there amongst the sharks. Later, I think, oh phew when, on the bus back in the early dark, Drew and Jack each get window seats near the back, and Liddy and I take our places next to them, and it’s hard to tell you what comes next, but here I go, anyway.

The armrest’s up and I’m sitting extra close, but Jack’s not talking to me. He’s not even looking at me. He’s just staring straight ahead, and I’m bereft. I thought the thing I did the night before meant Jack now knew he was the guy I’d make really happy, and not someday, but NOW. But he’s definitely ignoring me, still.

I stew about it until I realize: His expression’s cold, but his body’s hot. I believe the things I’ve heard (like Boys only want one thing and C’mon, I can tell you want it), and so I heed only what I want to heed, manners be damned. He’s tense, seems mad, even, but also he’s electric, almost zapping. So I will my hand off my thigh and creep it onto his. I feel, through denim, his hard proof and think, I can do this. And then his fly is down, and it’s dark enough in the night-lit Peter Pan, maybe no one will notice. I start to touch the smooth hard of him and then I know, gosh, actually . . . I can’t do this. Not because I’m worried about the public nature of the setting, but because I’m still worried I’ll botch a handjob. And what about the mess? Last night was so easy, so straightforward, really. I know the wet of my mouth will best the dry of my hand. So I just lower my head to his lap, close my eyes, and find him with my tongue. Soon, his hands grip my head like earmuffs, and I think, well, okay, then. But his hands aren’t an encouragement. Jack uses them to lift me off his lap and I open my eyes and he’s looking right in mine when he says No.

And while I manage to bury, at least for a while, much of what I do with the reputation this bus ride earns me, I’m never able to erase the memory of Jack’s expression, this very last time he looks me in the eye.

About the author:

E.C. Birdsall, a former art historian, holds degrees from Bard College and UVA. She’s currently writing a memoir.

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ONE MORNING, nearly twenty years ago, a PG&E crew drove down our gravel road and parked the white bulk of their utility truck beside the barn. Three men emerged, and one of them, with a clipboard in hand, said, “We’re here to take down trees.”

“I thought you guys were going to let me know before you came.”  

 The man with the clipboard introduced himself as Frank. He was thirty-something, balding, with a paunch, and his two co-workers were younger, one small, lithe, with coiled muscles rippling his arms, the other softer, broader, a friend of beer and television.  

“We could come back,” Frank said.  

“I would like that,” I said, unapologetically.  

“We just need your signature to remove these trees.”    

Frank bent his arm to support the clipboard for me to sign. He handed me a ballpoint pen. He didn’t know the mis-beat of my heart as I signed my name to the trees’ demise. He informed me that crews would begin their tree-felling work within just a few days.

Two days later,  Justin, one of our guardian dogs, went missing. For five years, Justin and his partner Juneau had guarded the small herd of goats from the mountain lions and bears that live in these Sierra Nevada foothills. He was Akbash, an old breed from eastern Turkey. Reserved and independent, he was gentle with people but fierce in protecting his flock. Justin looked like a giant white Labrador Retriever, whereas Juneau was a long-haired, thick coated Great Pyrenee, originally from the cold, high mountains straddling France and Spain. She was devoted to Justin. He had looked after her since my partner, Teresa, and I brought Juneau home as an inexperienced pup.

During the previous evening, the goats and dogs got out of their pasture. I was able to get the goats back inside, but when this happened before, my dogs had taken advantage of their freedom to explore beyond the perimeter of the fenced enclosure. I figured they would return by morning, because they always did, eager to get back to the job of guarding their flock, but when morning came, Juneau lay alone and bereft with her head on her paws.

It wasn’t like Justin to abandon his post.

The sun was just rising. The words Death in the east whispered in my mind. And I corrected myself, thinking, No, the east is not the place of death but of new beginnings, the place of rebirth, resurrection.

I drove several miles to our small town of Camptonville so I could put up flyers at the post office, the general store, and the forest service station, hoping that someone might have spotted him. Maybe he had run off a cougar in the night, had gotten lost, and was still searching for his way home.     

Nobody had seen Justin.

I’d been seeing a raven lately. Ravens used to be rare in these parts. Opportunistic and smart, maybe they were moving away from disrupted ecosystems in their other territories? Now they were making their homes on the margins of our fields and forest, raiding the hawk’s nests and harassing their flight. The flinty invaders would double-team and dive-bomb the hawks, constantly squawking and conquering the air, claiming the territory.

The morning after Justin disappeared, a raven landed on the fence and eyed Juneau’s breakfast of dry dog food. The raven’s scruffy black feathers shone with a purple luminescence in the sun.

This raven eyed me for an uncomfortably long moment, then cawed three times. I remembered that in shamanic traditions raven is a messenger between worlds. Maybe you’ll help me find Justin, I thought. But I was too rational to believe this would happen. Besides, this raven had only shown up for a free meal, which Juneau had no intention of sharing. As the raven moved toward her food, Juneau made a quick charge, baring her teeth and releasing one short bark. The raven lifted into the air and flapped away, toward the forest.  

The day after raven’s visit, my morning meditation was filled with the sound of chainsaws severing Ponderosa pines from their roots.  Men with orange hard hats were on the move, chainsaw blades swinging like extensions of their arms, hands gloved and ears muffled against the throatless growl of their machines. The cacophony moved closer. A shiver trembled through the earth.  

I climbed down the ladder from my meditation loft, carrying an abalone shell and stick of sage for smudging and blessing the trees, and walked into the field beside my house. Here, on the land that is my home, the PG&E lines end their long march through miles and miles of the Tahoe National Forest. I live at the end of the line. Two trees there leaned dangerously toward the high voltage wires.  

 Nine years prior, just a quarter mile up these very lines, the wind blew the top from an old gnarled pine which came crashing down on those coiled conduits of energy. Flames sparked and fire spread through the dry October grasses and Manzanita patches. The parched, low-lying brush became ladder fuel for the fire to climb the crowns of Sugar and Ponderosa pines, Douglas and White firs, cedars, madrones and oaks. Consuming everything in its path, the fire licked up the trunks of trees, burned through underground roots, through holes of mice and moles, through the deer beds and the bear’s lair, through breeding grounds of lady bugs and nests of yellow jackets. A fox with burned paws had limped through this very field, exposed and in shock. Helicopters chopped through dense smoke. Firefighters in yellow coats, faces blackened by ash, fought the massive flames.   

 But now I stood in the field below the power lines, holding the abalone shell that cradled the smudge-stick of sage. Facing east, I acknowledged the power of fire. Turning south, I remembered my grief. Turning west, I recalled the charred and blackened landscape. Facing north, I remembered the long winter of my loss. I looked toward the heavens and asked forgiveness. I looked towards the earth and asked guidance. I looked within and listened.

Where was Justin?

I approached a pine tree that had been marked by the PG&E crew with a red spray-painted X. This tree was one of the biggest in the pasture. Twenty feet up her trunk was a wide scar, as though punched hard in her belly years ago and forced to bend over for the rest of her life. In a high wind, this old wound could break her. I lit my smudge stick and sent up wisps of smoke, blessing her, and placed my hand on her coarse bark, sensed the pulse of this life soon to end.  I could see in my mind the trees all along the miles of electrical wires, thousands and thousands of them, falling now, sacrificed to power. I had made my own Faustian bargain—for fire protection, yes. But also, for power protection—so that I could have electricity. I listened to the pine and the wind sighing in her branches. I listened to the cry of a young hawk recently flown from his nest. I looked through the pine boughs to the power lines flowing with the blood of the marked trees and with the blood of whole forests. I offered my sacrifice as well, these few trees connecting me to all the trees sacrificed in this age to power.  

Our homestead is situated at the center of our 200 acres of forestland. A mile of graveled dirt road and three more miles of narrow cliff-hugging pavement connect us to the outside world. The fire had burned through all but twenty acres of beloved forest. The firefighters, the winds, and the numinous powers had somehow conspired to leave the buildings intact, along with a circle of green extending down to the creek and across the canyon where the fire did not burn quite so hot. But on the ridge top and the slopes, the flames had taken everything. 

Across the road, my goats were doing their work to control the burgeoning underbrush.  They kept down the fire danger with their voracious appetite for young ceanothus, berries, thistles, and all the ferocious growth thickening across the land since its denuding. A deep pang of loss troubled my heart to see only Juneau there in the pasture. I remembered how, when the goats were threatened, Juneau and Justin would gather the mob in a tight circle. The goats would huddle, rumps toward the center, ears pricked, eyes fixed on their protectors. Justin and Juneau, with hackles raised, would place themselves between the vulnerable little herd and whatever scented menace eluded my human gaze. It may have been a lion they were sensing, or a pack of roving dogs. We had had tragic kills by both in the past.

I went in search of Justin.

The road curved around a ravine to the east side of its ridge. From here the buzzing saws of the PG&E crews became louder, more intense. My mind moved darkly toward the men wielding their saws and beyond them to the corporation they served.  I kicked a rock out of my way and saw my black boots scuffed and covered with red dust. The rock scuttled a few feet down the road, came to rest near a clump of orange California poppies.   

 I began to chant. Hatred will never cease through hatred. By love alone, by love alone, by love alone will it end. The words come from an ancient Buddhist scripture. The chant took hold of my thoughts. I plucked one of the poppies and brought it to my lips and spun the petals across my mouth and beneath my nostrils. A light breeze lifted my hair. My eyes misted.

Justin, where are you?

 I made my way back through rocks and poison oak toward the power lines. Ten feet on either side of the poles was cleared each year of brush and hazardous trees by the utility crews. I hated to see the trees felled. But a fire could take a whole forest. I hated to see these intruding lines of the oh-so-human world soldiering through the wild woods. I hated the saws and the giant yellow machines that snaked the felled logs out of the woods, gashing the earth.

I continued to chant softly, looking down the length of my blue-jeaned legs at the dry pine needles and fallen oak leaves crunching under my boots. Mature Ponderosa pines rose up on either side of me. Since the fire I had protected these trees. They were at risk, too. They were close to the electrical wires and already scarred by the careless logging that happened after the fire in 1999.

I felt such sadness. The chant on my lips united my sorrow to losses across the planet. Hatred will never cease through hatred.  By love alone is it healed. This is an ancient and eternal law.  

I breathed deeply, but breath stuck in my throat. I thought again of the raven I had seen.

Strange how you come back to me now, I thought, remembering her penetrating eyes and feeling undigested pain in my chest.

 Something startled and flew up from the brush. I followed the sound with my eyes until I located the source. I stopped. An eagle-sized bird with a naked red head looked down at me from a pine tree ten feet away. He was perched on a solid bough fifteen feet from the ground. I looked up at the bird while it stared back at me. You’re not Raven, I told the bird, but you’ll do as a stand in. My voice broke the silence and another vulture flapped into sight. The grey-brown buzzard landed and came to rest in a tree directly across from its mate.  

I was less than a quarter mile east of my house. The east is not the place of death but of new beginnings, the place of rebirth, resurrection. There, beneath a scrubby Madrone tree, lay Justin’s magnificent white body. His belly had been ripped open and a grayish green rope of gut and intestine rested against his back legs. I pressed my fingers against a deep puncture wound on his chest. There was a gurgling sound, and I jumped back on my heels, struck with the impossible hope that, somehow, he might still be alive.

I wondered if it had been a long, drawn-out dying, alone in the forest as I slept so near. If only I had found him sooner! I knelt on the earth, stroked Justin’s face and the soft hairs on the top of his nose. I massaged the soft flap of his ear and exhaled a tender breath into it. If only I had heeded Raven. If only I had listened for the meaning—death in the east. If only . . .

I took Justin’s head onto my knees. It was then I understood the mortal blow delivered to his skull: final, fatal and immediate. Blood, sticky and thick, clung to my hand, dampened my blue jeans, stained them an inky black. I saw it as clearly as if I had been a witness: the powerful swipe of the bear’s great claws, slashing clearly, cleanly, across the left side of Justin’s face.  

Until that moment I had felt oddly subdued, as though I was standing outside myself, observing myself touching Justin and analyzing the scene of his battle. Then, I took my dog’s front paws into my own two hands. I felt the give of his calloused pink pads, traced his strong nails with my fingers, stroked the coarse hair on the top of his feet, and felt the bone beneath, the tendon, the dear life so recently flown. I held his paws tightly, tenderly, and tears began to come, streaming down my cheeks and into the ground. Once they came, I felt they would never stop.  

Under the patient eyes of the two dark birds, I cried for Justin— his sweet amber eyes, his brave and gallant spirit. I cried for myself and for the mortality that bound us. I cried for my lack of presence, for life neither totally seen nor totally lived. Through my tears I slowly stood, again lit the sage I still carried, and reverently smudged Justin’s body. I prayed his spirit would be free and happy. Looking to the east, where the sun rises, I sang a broken chant. I turned to the big pine standing close by, threw my arms around its wide, solid girth, and wept.  

Time slipped away. I slumped to the ground, my back against the coarse bark of the Ponderosa pine. I was washed by my tears. I looked down at the blood on my hands and at the stained denim of my knees. The wind had come up. It blew right through me as if my body were a hollow reed, an Aeolian harp for the breeze to play. Now I was space. Now I was blue sky. Now I was the soft sighing amidst the tops of pines. 

The image of Raven glided through my inner vision, riding on the currents, circling, spiraling nearer, eventually landing on the very branch where I had first spotted the vulture. Once again Raven fixed me with his gaze—knowingly, maybe even lovingly, maybe even wise. He seemed to gaze at me from a deep, ancient, place—a place more ancient even than death itself. If that were possible, I mused. As though reading my thoughts, Raven spread his wings and with a slight bounce lifted into the air. With a graceful descent he glided down toward Justin’s body. But the dog’s body was no longer there. Raven landed where Justin’s body should have been. He gazed slyly at me and in my mind I heard: Why do you look for the living among the dead? I watched, then flung my thoughts at the bird: Are you mocking me? Raven spread his wings, turned in a full circle there on the earth as though deliberately dancing on Justin’s grave, then lifted suddenly and flew away. 

I started, as if awakening from a dream. I looked towards Justin’s torn body. It was still there. His blood was still on my hands and jeans. I stood slowly and brushed the forest litter from the seat of my pants, turned for a moment to look at the tree I had been leaning against.  Just above eye level, I noticed claw marks. The bark was freshly torn for a long way up the trunk where the bear had climbed into this tree. I looked up toward the first limb that might have born the bear’s weight and saw that it had been broken. The remains of a jagged branch hung a couple of feet out from the trunk. Justin had treed this bear. The branch had given way under the bear’s great bulk. Had the bear fallen toward the barking dog? If that were the case it would have had no alternative but to fight. Justin had known this bear well, for it had visited outside the perimeter of Justin’s territory many times in the night. Probably it had taunted Justin. Bear and dog had been worthy adversaries, each keeping the other alert. Justin had found his chance to chase this bear out of his territory for good—away from the constant threat to Justin’s vulnerable flock. Instead, Justin had sent the bear up a tree. When the fight was upon them, Justin had given his life.  

Given his life . . . I stared at Justin’s still form. You gave your life protecting what was yours  to protect.  I spoke to him now as though he was standing in front of me, looking at me with his kind, light-filled eyes. His eyes were different than any dog’s I had known.  Other dogs had nut-brown eyes, the color of almonds. Justin’s were amber, the translucent yellow-orange color of resin from the heart of ancient trees. My good, guardian dog, I whispered to him. My good guardian dog become guardian spirit. I spoke these words softly and felt the truth in them like finding solid ground again after the dizzying currents of sadness and grief. The soul is not in the body. The body is in the soul. Who speaks, I asked? Justin?  Myself? Did we share a common soul? Now freed from the limits of form, did Justin speak from the inner depths of my own nature?   

 I would go home and tell Teresa that I had found Justin. We would return with shovels to dig him a grave in the moist soil where he died.  

 As I walked toward home, my attention turned to the end of the line, where I lived. I heard the whining frenzy of chainsaws filling the air, moving over the land. What is ours to protect? I asked myself. Is this Justin who speaks? Is this my soul? 

~For Justin~   July 14, 2001- August 13, 2007

About the author:

Diane Pendola has lived for fifty years in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California. The wildness and beauty of this living world ground her and inform her work as a writer and poet, teacher and eco-contemplative. She has an MFA in poetry from Pacific and a degree in Theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She maintains The Skyline Writers' Sanctuary and is involved with The Lioness Tale Prison Project.

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ON THE FIRST TUESDAY in November of 2024, I stand at my stove all afternoon simmering soup. This is my practice before all impending threats: blizzards or deaths or births or the months of December and June, which, as every parent of school-aged children knows, are when family order and maternal sanity completely break down. The stove gives me a little island of agency and caregiving to stand on because when the world ends, I will offer anyone near me the comfort of a warm bowl of soup. Later that night, as the first polls begin to close on the East Coast, where I live, one of my neighbors texts the neighborhood WhatsApp group to ask, “How’s everyone holding up???” The group texts back with what they’re doing to busy themselves: some fold laundry or watch the news. I make soup and pray. Waiting rituals as old as time. The text thread goes silent as the night progresses, and one by one, each lighted window in each house in our neighborhood goes dark.

The next morning, I wake without an alarm and refresh the New York Times on my phone for a split second and put it away. So. This is what it will be.

I drop one teen off at the train station where he sprints to a train’s loading door and gets in line with the other passengers under the watchful eye of a conductor who rides the train back and forth every day, shepherding the citizens of Boston from home to work and back again. He knows all the high school kids, where they get on and off. He wakes them if they fall asleep in the dark early morning.

My twelve-year-old daughter rides to school on a yellow school bus, driven by a woman who is almost too punctual, sometimes leaving the bus stop early, just before we get there.

I drive out to the grocery store to pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy. I thank the cashiers—one woman with smile wrinkles and another with dyed hair and gray roots—and I drive home. Every few minutes, texts light up my phone. Little missives of care from friend to friend, group to group.

When I arrive home from my errands, I reopen the neighborhood text thread. “I don’t have a lot of profound words,” I say, “but I’m around a lot today.”

Within the hour, my neighbors and I embrace each other in the street outside our houses—one neighbor going to an appointment, two others walking their dogs, two of us coming out just for the sight of friends. It’s a sober, quiet circle. We will take care of each other, we say, and we mean everyone. That’s what we have done, and that is what we will keep doing: our resignation struggling to become resolve. We disperse, buoyed up a bit by each other.

I go from bedroom to bedroom with a laundry basket and gather sweaty running clothes to wash. We are a house full of runners, and even slow ones like me generate a lot of laundry. The basket of clothes under my right arm gets heavier and smellier as it fills, but I’m used to this. I carry the basket down one flight of stairs and pass through the kitchen and down another flight of stairs to the basement laundry. Our house was built in the 1930s, and in the dark basement, the unfinished rock walls of the foundation have been slowly crumbling. Above my head are exposed floor beams and plumbing and electrical wiring—the inner workings of a beloved house, crusted with cobwebs and dust. Often centipedes scuttle into the shadows as I approach, and my bare feet pick up the gritty dust from the rough concrete floor, so I try to hurry at the machine, tumbling in the salty shorts and socks. I trot back up the stairs and leave the soap and water to wash away the stains.

I feel restless and sad. I’m a doctor and working part-time is wonderful for parenting, but today I wish I was at work. When I’m there, I know how to help and what to do. I can just be in one exam room at a time and focus on one person in front of me. In primary care, it’s a way of life to hold belief in what’s possible. But now, here alone in my home, I don’t have the heart to read any online analysis of the election or the future. The past eight years of politics have saturated my capacity to absorb words on screens.

I live in Boston, five miles from the ocean. Gulls fly overhead when I drive to work, and the closer you get to the waterfront, the more the brine in the air pricks your nostrils. Here, the tide comes in and goes out, twice each day. Not far from my primary care office and exam rooms, the harbor bustles with ferries to Cape Cod and container ships unloading and fishing boats coming and going from places like Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine.

A few years ago, on a ferry ride through the harbor, I noticed that at one dock, a steel ship painted bright red stood out against the industrial palette of brown and black. She was smaller than a cargo ship but bigger than a tugboat and was tied up broadside. Her name, along the length of her hull in white letters several feet high, was visible all the way across the harbor: “NANTUCKET.” Odd that a ship would have such bold attire when named for an island of subtle wealth and white sails. She sat alone and still in a harbor that is always moving. The sun glimmered off the city skyline across the water, and the passenger jets from Logan airport took off just overhead. I had seen her a few times on ferry rides over the past few years and wondered about her. The other boats and even the birds have places to go, but the old red ship is always tied up at the same place.

The Nantucket is an abandoned lightship that has been rescued by a nonprofit and is being restored and turned into a museum. Before modern navigation techniques, it was too dangerous to build a permanent lighthouse structure along some stretches of coastline, so instead, ships were permanently anchored near underwater hazards with lantern lights burning atop their masts. The lightships were painted red, with the names of their location in big white letters along their sides. For years I have not stopped thinking about this idea: a vessel of light.

The Nantucket Shoals are sand bars that spread 50 miles east and south of Nantucket Island, 100 miles from the Massachusetts mainland along the edge of the North Atlantic shipping lane for boats traveling from Europe to New York Harbor. In some places, the rocks are just three feet below the water’s surface, and there are hundreds of shipwrecks asleep in those waters. The shoals also sit at the convergence of two major ocean currents: the cold Labrador current coming from the North and the warm Gulf Stream coming from the South. The collision of these cold and warm currents creates fog that hangs above the water. Two ships less than a mile apart could be hidden from each other in the mist, close together, but alone on the sea.

To reduce the loss of ships and souls, a lightship was stationed on Nantucket Shoals from the 1850s to the 1980s, when it was replaced by an automated navigation buoy. The Coast Guard stationed men there year-round, in shifts for weeks at a time, anchored in one place, out of sight of land, with the ship blown and tossed by the wind but holding its ground, diffusing its light. For over a hundred years, sailors lit the lamps each night and sounded bells each day the fog rolled in. Theirs was the last light visible when leaving East Coast waters and the first light visible coming home.

I tend to romanticize stories like this, and to counter that weakness, I try to think about the harsh conditions implicit in this beautiful story: the forty-degree seawater, the seasickness and the storms, the monotony and loneliness. Maybe visiting the boat would ground me, give some texture to my imagination and offer a counterweight for the news.

So I send an email to the caretaker, and in no time he writes back. We can meet at the ship at one o’clock today.

I drive into the city, first through the neighborhoods of houses, then past my clinic and along the Charles River lined with universities and biotech companies and through the tunnel under the harbor, where I try not to think of the weight of water over my head. I emerge into the sunlight of East Boston, with its oceanfront condos alongside bodegas and school playgrounds.

To get to the Nantucket, I walk over a rusty floating platform strewn with broken purple and white fragments of clam shells, and at the end of my journey, I meet Bob, the ship’s caretaker, a tall man with a trim white beard and cap. We walk up the gangway and stand on the deck and squint in the sunlight that reflects off the city and the water and the ship's bell. Bob points out the masts, the lanterns atop them, and shows off the foghorn. The light from this ship was visible for twenty-three miles, he says, and the foghorn could be heard for fourteen.

When I was a little girl, we stayed with relatives on Lake Michigan for my grandmother’s funeral, and I remember falling asleep under a wool blanket, listening to the bellow of the foghorn from the Grand Haven lighthouse. A sound of safety.

Bob details the history of lightships and their use around the world, in the Atlantic and the Pacific and even the Great Lakes, where I grew up. He tells stories of the original wooden lightships, with lanterns fueled by whale oil, and how the nor’easter storms battered the ships, sometimes breaking the anchor chains and casting the boats to drift miles away. During a storm in 1867, a lightship in this area broke free of its anchor and sank. The crew’s families believed the men had drowned until they received a telegram months later reporting that the men had been rescued by a boat heading for New Orleans, and they were alive and safe in Louisiana.

The steel ship we are in now was built in the 1930s—the same age as my house—and was built to be unsinkable. To keep it in one place, a seven-ton anchor was lowered by a thick chain to the ocean floor. We look into the hold that stores the chain, and I imagine the huge iron interlocking links unspooling from the ship down into the dark and darker depths of water, down to the anchor resting on the silty bottom among the crawling lobsters and crabs. Since the Nantucket was towed to Boston, volunteers have been slowly restoring the ship, turning her into a museum, piece by piece, power washing away the barnacles and marine creatures encrusting the hull and putting fresh blankets on the crews’ bunks and repainting and making her seaworthy and sharp all over again.

There’s not a lot of money in restoring old worn-out ships, and to raise funds, they keep the boat open for tours while they work. Five dollars a tour. Maritime history buffs come to admire her, and old Coast Guardsmen sometimes stop by to see their former home and share stories of storms or swimming in the sea when it was sunny and calm. Bob says they speak of boredom and loneliness and how the conditions were even worse before radio communication with shore was invented. To pass the time, the men on the ship in those days learned to weave baskets to sell on shore.

We circle down the metal stairs into the hold of the ship where the sailors slept and ate, then through the galley and the engine rooms and back up to the deck. Bob is happy to be sharing his boat and his knowledge of history and geography. We don’t speak a word about politics or the election, and for an hour in the sun and on the waves, the weight of it is lifted.

In the helm, I lean against the ship’s wheel and feel the boat gently rising and falling on the harbor waves. The sun warms the navigation room and Bob points out the nautical maps and the barometric pressure gauge and the engine control, set to “dead slow.”

At some point, Bob asks why I wanted to tour the ship, which is a hard question to answer. How did a mother in her forties come to be standing on the deck of an old boat on a Wednesday afternoon? I tell him how I’d noticed the boat in the harbor years ago, and after I’d learned about lightships, I couldn’t stop thinking about them and about people who would plant themselves in a dangerous place to light a torch that will keep others safe. I am trying to figure out what it takes to keep doing that, when the full force of nature feels against your efforts. I can tell that this is not what Bob expected me to say and not quite the angle most visitors ask about on these tours.
“This ship did save lives,” he says. We can hear a water taxi buzzing past, voices of tourists laughing over the wake. The boat shifts, and without looking, Bob places his hand gently against the hull to steady himself. He looks past me for a moment and says, “I believe ships have souls. The sailors who come back to visit her think so too.”

When it’s time to leave, I crunch my way back over the shells and the rusty dock. The salt brine in the air is thick. The first time I saw the ocean, I was surprised at how different it smelled from the lakes I knew. I’d had no idea that saltwater and freshwater don’t smell the same. Sometimes what we have is better than what we imagine. I look back at the lanterns atop the masts, still standing. I drive home with the radio off, thinking about restoring what’s been abandoned and about the sound of the foghorn echoing across the water.

The kids return from school, one at a time, carried home by the train conductor and the bus driver. I put the soup pot on the stove. The food I made last night in a time of waiting will feed us tonight. I open my front door for the mail and see another neighbor. She is walking down the street to find me with her arms open. We stand on the sidewalk and hug and we don’t have to say anything. We have done this so many times: after the election in 2016, after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, in our masks during the summer of 2020 with its racial violence and pandemic deaths, after October 7^th. There is never anything right to say. The events in the world feel so big and these things we can do feel so small.

My twelve-year-old daughter comes outside to stand with us. My neighbor puts her hand on my daughter's shoulder and says, with feeling, “The most important thing for all you kids to know is: We’ve got you.”

One neighbor volunteers in the food pantry in the church near the train tracks, another in a nature sanctuary. One family hosts zoom calls about local elections, and another couple takes care of everyone’s homes and pets when they travel. We shovel each other’s sidewalks in the winter and host dinners and our neighbors invent yard jobs for my kids to earn money and learn responsibility. This week we’re in the street talking over the election, but there will be more times we need to reach for each other rather than go inside.

The sun is setting, and we go home to our dinners. I turn on the lamps and go back down into my basement to bring up the clean laundry. I think of that anchor chain, spiraling down in the darkness to what’s solid, weighty enough to resist the force of water and air. Kelp forests in the Pacific do this too. Each long rope of seaweed tethers itself to the ocean floor by wrapping one end of itself around a rock, leaving the rest of it able to move with the current. Flexible, playful, alive, the kelp forests shelter many tiny forms of marine life and nourish them with nutrients they diffuse into the water. The knot of rock and kelp wound together into an anchor is called a holdfast. A fragment of Scripture comes to mind: “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” I think about my neighbor’s hand clasping my daughter’s shoulder, about the train conductor showing up to work every day to get my kid to school, about myself as a little girl, standing on the lake shoreline, feet burrowed in the sand.

I walk from room to room with my laundry, distributing piles of clean running clothes, free of their sweat and salt. In a few days I will repeat my steps and do this all over when they are worn again. The soup simmers and the house is warm, and all the while my phone lights up with texts from friends and family—little signals of connection invisibly passing through the air, reminding us we are not alone, we are close together even if we can’t see each other. I dish up the food and gather with my kids and my husband around our table. Outside, each house in the neighborhood glows from its windows.

The lanterns atop the lightship masts shone out into darkness, too, waiting through the night for the sun to rise. When the light of the sky matched the brightness of the lanterns, the lights merged. When the warm and cold sea currents collided, and fog hung low over the water, the bell sounded so others could orient. To light a lamp and sit on a boat was a small thing to do in a vast ocean. But to the crews sailing by it was not a small thing. How many presidents came and went in the century that sailors guarded the shoals? They weren’t the ones who sat anchored out on those boats. It was ordinary people with families needing to be fed. Men who trained their restless hands to weave ways to hold things. We still need to be those people for each other. Humans who go out on the dangerous waters rather than come in. Souled vessels keeping other souls safe, by radiating light.

About the author:

Susan Hata practices medicine, mothering, and writing in Boston. She and her family hike and explore in New England, the Great Lakes, and the Pacific Northwest.

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ON MY LAST DAY IN PARIS, I receive a text from a longtime friend and coworker back home in Minneapolis: Secret police are executing us in the streets, in broad daylight. Another friend and her spouse had recorded a video, which was attached, of the scene in the street in front of their house where a woman had just been shot in the head. Our friends were okay but shit was blowing up on Portland Avenue in South Minneapolis. The woman was Renee Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother and wife—and, like me, a poet—executed on film by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who was whisked away from the scene and moved by Greg Bovino and his Reich-cosplay greatcoat out of state, where he remains free and yet to be charged.

I am standing in the Place de la Concorde, where the world’s most famous guillotine lopped off the heads of King Louis and Queen Marie to cheering crowds. I can see sniper holes in the shutters of a corner room in the Hotel de la Marine, through which Nazis who had occupied the hotel shot resisters as they rose up in anticipation of the arrival of liberating forces of the US Army's 2nd Armored Division. Around the corner are plaques along a wall of the Tuileries commemorating students—the FFI—regular people who died in those final days of the occupation.

Between the sniper holes in the shutters and the plaques to the Resistance’s dead are marks in the stone walls of the Hotel de la Marine. The dozen and half marks are not the result of wear and tear on an aging facade. They are a preservation of the literal crossfire, where bullets hit and ricocheted.

I need to get home.

In Minneapolis, ICE and CPB and DHS agents arrive in our neighborhoods in rented vehicles—the windows often illegally tinted to opaque—to terrorize. This is not an immigration enforcement operation as they claim, and the proof of this—the evidence—is that we are capturing it with our phones and eyes. The agents act as if Stephen Miller’s promise of complete immunity were not decree but something they embody with their jungle camo, their tactical gear, their flashbangs and teargas and pepper balls and rubber bullets and Glocks and SIGs and ARs and balaclavas.

Federal agents are here to provoke responses that will allow them to justify lethal force against the peaceful, and because they do not encounter the responses they seek, they punch, knock down, swarm, beat with fist and buttstock and handgun and teargas canisters. They spray chemical agents in faces at point-blank range. They are always advancing on, advancing on, advancing on. They abduct without cause. They imprison without charge. You might be five years old waiting for your dad to pick you up after school. You might be a citizen with your papers on you. The agents could give a shit less. They are not here to enforce any laws. They are here to terrorize such that, terrorized, the populace will submit. As many have been saying, the cruelty is the point.

Where ICE alights come the whistles and honks and crowds. Outnumbered, ICE retreats behind walls of teargas, leaving behind vehicles, unused teargas canisters and flashbangs, fully loaded magazines.

The whistles are a siren call. You will drop everything upon hearing one and will go outside to bear witness, to resist with your body, to record with your phone. You are a new kind of first responder.

Many businesses are operating under protocols like those they invented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Doors are locked. You knock to gain entrance and are asked by a neighbor, a fellow freedom fighter, “Are you a federal agent?”

“Fuck ICE,” I have discovered, works well to unlock the doors.

Menus at the restaurants that remain open are limited to basic offerings. The regular kitchen staff, the brown people who prep and cook so much of our food, are afraid to leave their homes. They are US citizens. They are afraid to leave their homes.

Some restaurants and cafes are giving everything away for free. They accept free-will donations to pay staff. They are giving away their food for free so that they do not have to collect taxes that support the agents of ICE, CBP, DHS.

At night, many of us gather outside the hotels where ICE, CBP, and DHS agents are staying, making noise with musical instruments—a full drum kit at one place, brass bands and heavy metal bands at others—to make it hard for the invaders to get sleep or rest.

Just as a cakemaker, per the MAGA/Roberts majority on the Supreme Court, need not make a cake for gay people, we kick ICE/CBP/DHS out of our gas stations, restaurants, and other places of business. Companies that support ICE/CBP/DHS are listed and shared and boycotted.

I have thrown away well-worn favorite T-shirts that bear the names of local restaurants who by serving ICE/CBP/DHS are now complicit.

First thing in the morning, we open our Signal apps and check both our rapid-response and information groups. The rapid-response groups are for those currently active on the streets or at home coordinating those on the streets, providing info and guidance like air-traffic controllers. If we have been away from the app—working, say—when we return and open it again there are hundreds of posts in each of the groups we are in. We click to fly past the old posts to get the most recent and scroll in reverse chronological order until we feel caught up to speed. In between the posts with information on ICE sightings—between requests for license plate checks or urgent calls to gather with whistles and phones to stop abductions in progress—are lists of those joining the groups. Always, every time you check, more and more people are joining, the names in centered lists that remind me of Rorschach tests. On Signal, we know each by pseudonym, none of us using our real names, the pseudonyms, like the nicknames of soldiers, often providing needed comic relief.

We know ICE is in our groups and are wary that ICE may be in the meetings, where we have not known the people in our groups for very long. We end Signal chats and start new ones, whack-a-mole style. It strikes me that this has been the case with resistance movements forever, the assumption that certain communication channels are compromised but still necessary, good tools even if the wrong eyes are on them. It is a kind of dance.

There are communication channels that are safe safe, where we know ICE is not present. This is where more and more of my friends who I would never think would arm themselves are asking about how to acquire guns and training. They ask about whether to get long guns or handguns or both. They seek information on left-friendly conceal and carry permit and shooting courses.

Too many—one would be too many, in my opinion—chastise those whose resistance, as they see it, is limited to posting on social media, is not front-lines resistance with the body, with physical presence. They write in their own posts that people “need to do more than post!”

But in-fighting and a yearning for the sort of normalcy that is going backwards rather than forward kills resistance movements. Posting on social media is a start and can also be an important end. It reflects a mindset gone public. It is probably true that once the mind is infused the body tends to follow. It is probably true that social media posts can improve mental health and make us stronger individually in the long run, for the long fight. For me, social media posts are our barbaric yawps—our calls in the forest that we hope the likeminded somewhere else in the forest hear, echoing till another calls back and we fill the air with the prosaic song of resistance.

When Billy Bragg—the singer-songwriter with busking roots from the punk vein going way back, who has more than a little bit shaped my politics and understanding of injustices worldwide—writes a song called “City of Heroes,” not about Soweto or miner’s strikes or the Soviet Union but Minnefreakingapolis, I well up, hard, memorizing lyrics for singing along when he comes to town next:

When they came for the five-year-olds,

I got in their face

When they came to my neighborhood

I just got in their face

I will bear witness to terror

I will bear witness to tyranny

I will bear witness to murder

I will bear witness to fascism

I could not have guessed how much these things would sustain me, how necessary they would become. The history of resistance postering, of resistance graffiti, et cetera, is as long as the history of resistance. It is how we build an identity to stand against the identity of an enemy—who wears a red baseball cap today—who is already well established. And that identity feeds us.

The old-school punk rockers, by the way, were right about pretty much everything.

Our response as a city is built upon our response to the murder of George Floyd outside Cup Foods in South Minneapolis in the spring of 2020, when protesters converged at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue and then along Lake Street, many wearing masks, trying to social distance. The protests were met by militarized violence from the MPD—tear gas, pepper spray, flashbangs, rubber bullets. The protests became riotous. Fires were started, businesses looted. Opportunists catalyzed the violence against the neighborhoods and their establishments. In a widely circulated video, a white man dressed in black and carrying an umbrella and hammer smashes the windows of an AutoZone shop, one of if not the first buildings set on fire. The man flees as nonviolent protesters questioned him and his actions.

Vehicles from out of state or with no plates were spotted in many neighborhoods. Homemade incendiary devices were found stashed in alleys and backyards, planted during the day for use at night.

On May 28, 2020, police abandoned the third precinct building in South Minneapolis, leaving it to be burned. The many who speculated that the MPD deliberately abandoned the neighborhood to let it burn found their speculation bolstered the following night when the police amassed to protect the fifth precinct building. A Minneapolis City Council member wrote to describe how the MPD systematically delayed response to calls to blackmail the council into passing budget increases. The nights were filled with sirens, choppers, bangs, booms. Curfews were announced. The burning and looting expanded to St. Paul.

The residents of South Minneapolis felt abandoned. The neighborhoods organized, held mass meetings in public parks—Powderhorn Park, Martin Luther King Park, others—and developed plans for our self-defense. We packed evacuation bags, went on patrol, used social media and our smartphones to warn each other of suspicious vehicles, activity, people, packages, containers, and so on. We watered our lawns down so that they would be harder to burn. We left our lights on and brought our trash receptacles up or in, or filled them with water, lest they be set aflame.

During the day and before curfew, couples and families walked their dogs. They were doing more than exercising themselves or their pets. They were our eyes and ears. Those with guns had them ready.

On another of the nights, five or six cars drove down my street at intervals of perhaps ten seconds, perhaps twenty seconds, a kind of battle formation. The cars bore no license plates, were painted all black with the windows, except for the windshield, blacked out. Another night the same number of blacked-out motorcycles proceeded in the same battle-ish formation, again at intervals of about ten or twenty seconds. The gossipy Nextdoor app was used to identify and trace suspicious vehicles from neighborhood to neighborhood, a kind of citizen-brigade democratization of the surveillance state. Everything I had read—which was a lot—regarding the desire of the white power movement to foment strife and eventually civil war, to come together when the time was right, felt like it was happening, like Minneapolis had become a gathering place.

There is a lot of blurring between then and now and also some very important differences. The Proud Boys and Bugaloo Boys and other white power groups who were acting as accelerationists in Minneapolis and St. Paul in late spring 2020 and as insurrectionists at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, are now the ICE agents on our streets, here less for the $50,000 bonus payable over five years in 10K increments (meaning a next president if the union lasts will have to sign off on the whole shebang for them to cash in on all of their blood money) than for the opportunity to be the monsters they are with impunity. Pick your favorite historical secret police force. ICE is its descendent.

I write to you under a big “London Calling” poster I’ve had since renting my first apartment in my early twenties. On the poster, Paul Simonon of The Clash is frozen in black and white, his bass guitar overhead like a great ax, his legs wide. He is perpetually ready to bring it down and smash it—as if on a Grecian urn—and in doing so smash all that needs smashing in this world.

If things go south, I want you to know what we have done, what we’re doing. If like me you graduated from high school in 1984, it’s hard not to think back to the movie Red Dawn and compare what we’re doing here in Minneapolis to the Wolverines, the kids in Red Dawn who became guerrilla fighters after NATO was disbanded and the Soviet Union invaded their Colorado town. The kids lose the short game but win the long one. The movie ends with a shot of a plaque on a rock that says, “In the early days of World War III, guerrillas, mostly children, placed the names of their lost upon this rock. They fought here alone and gave up their lives, so that this nation shall not perish from the earth.”

They were decentralized, leaderless, a pod among many pods. They learned by doing, on the fly. It is like that here, too.

Experts who study civil wars have published pieces calling this the start of one. This is fascism, and you have to call it what it is. What the Trump regime has visited upon Minneapolis and Minnesota is an unwelcome visitor. Trump wants a small civil war to break out in Minneapolis so that he can call in paratroopers—the power of the US military—to quash it with martial law, ending the republic and replacing it with a model Putin would love. And he will not stop with subjugating the US. He will expand, just like Putin.

Fascism never stops in one city. Fascism doesn’t stop until the people stop it. In the early days of fascism, when it hasn’t yet come to your city, your town, your countryside, all seems normal. It has always been this way. The playbook is very old.

Here’s how it is on the ground today, January 31, 2026: Greg Bovino, the chihuahua-complex Nazi, has been replaced by Tom Homan. Mainstream media are reporting that this will lead to a de-escalation, a drawdown of ICE/CPB/DHS presence in Minnesota.

In the vacuum that is a sigh of relief, the intelligence we are receiving indicates that Secretary of War and Minnesota native Pete Hegseth—who I have it on good word, from a primary source, is loathed by his extended family—has signed off on expanded operations.

ICE/CBP/DHS, our intelligence says, are amassing here in number, quartering more territory, bringing in more of the munitions of war, like the LRAD sound cannons already reported to have been deployed in the suburb of Maple Grove. The fear is that what you see now will seem like nothing when the amassing turns into operations on the streets.

ICE/CBP/DHS have teamed with the tech bros of Palantir and their ilk to track us. Almost all of us are hyperconnected and carry smartphones that tell them exactly where we are, all the time. Legal and constitutional observers—anybody, really, who isn’t wearing a MAGA hat or the nouveau-Gestapo gear of ICE or similar branding—are photographed and databased by ICE/CBP/DHS agents for the purposes of tracking, for the purposes of hunting down. Our vehicles are tagged and traced. They know where we live. The Minneapolis mission goes beyond the targeting of the brown-skinned to targeting the any-color-of-skinned who dare call into question, who dare to stand up for democracy and the rule of law, who dare to witness.

They surveil in order to exact retribution for witnessing. It seems Alex Pretti was in their sights for at least a week before they had him where they wanted him and could make, as they see it, an example of him. As one proudly unmasked ICE agent recently said to the person filming him—likely now a target—“You raise your voice, I erase your voice.”

Some of us contribute to the resistance by participating in food distribution networks. We get lists of the needs of various Anne Franks from human sources, not on the group apps. We buy what they need and meet those who will do the distribution, the feeding, the clothing. We do not know who will deliver the food, the clothes—whatever they need—nor where they will deliver it to. It is better not to know.

ICE/CPB/DHS agents, the intelligence says, are following the white-skinned when they leave grocery stores, hoping they will be led to an Anne Frank. Eat the piece of paper you’ve written the address on.

It is better not to know.

Somehow, life continues as usual. If you are not where ICE/CBP/DHS agents and their convoys have decided to deploy, things can seem normal, pre-ICE. If you are where the agents have deployed to terrorize, you are a likely candidate for PTSD.

After a massive and uplifting general strike in Minneapolis on January 23, with a reported 50,000 people marching downtown and many thousands more in smaller marches and gatherings on a day when the low temp was -21ºF, we woke the next day to news that ICE/CPB/DHS had killed another of us. I saw the first video taken from Glam Doll Donuts on Nicollet Avenue. I saw it for what it was, for what those who shot the footage, who can be heard on the sound clip, saw for what it was: the bloodlust execution of Alex Pretti.

In other clips released later, ICE/CPB/DNS agents in the immediate aftermath of the execution clap to say job well done. A doctor—a pediatrician who ran from her apartment in the neighborhood to provide assistance on the scene—testified that the agents counted bullet holes in Pretti rather than checking for signs of life or providing potentially life-saving assistance. She told The Independent, “I am not sure when I will return to my apartment. I do not feel safe in my city. In less than one month, ICE agents have shot and killed two people for protesting and observing their actions. I worry that I or someone I love will be shot and killed for voicing their displeasure and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

In another clip of the immediate aftermath ICE/CPB/DNS agents say in range of a hot mic, “It’s just like Call of Duty. Pretty cool, huh?”

A call for a citywide candlelight vigil to honor and memorialize Alex Pretti on the night of his execution is shared widely. If it’s too cold for people to be outside, the call says, they can leave candles on their stoops.

I walked outside at five to seven, the time of the vigil, to see what was happening. The air was frigid but still. I was well bundled—all but for my face. I saw candles on stoops, usually two, one for Renee Good and one for Alex.

Two and a half blocks away I saw a bunch of people holding candles at an intersection. I started to walk toward them. A few others came out from houses, condos, and apartments along the way. They must have received notice that didn’t make it to me of this particular gathering, which I found by accident. We all walked toward the candles and people on the corner.

By the time I got there, the vigil was underway. A woman who said she was a restaurateur—I think she runs the Creole joint on the corner—was leading the gathered in a simple, short singalong. Old people. Kids. All ages between. Most were singing. It was easy to pick up the lyrics. The woman called them out. We responded.

After a few times through the woman stopped leading songs and talked to us. She told us she had attended singing resistance training earlier in the day. This was her first protest. She asked us all who was from the neighborhood? Minnesota? First protest? Protest vet? People raised hands to answer.

I’m guessing there were maybe twenty-five to forty people in all who gathered, a broad range because not everyone stayed for the whole time, due to the cold. The numbers were fluid and I didn’t think to count until after I got home, from memory.

We did what you do when it’s this cold out and you are stationary. We stamped our feet. We held our mittens to faces, blowing to warm them.

The candles people held were both real and battery powered. Some sang and some didn’t. A pattern was established: Sing a few rounds of a simple protest song, provide time for people to say what they need or want to say. The woman leading kept asking if anybody else had songs they wanted the group to sing.

One close friend and another coworker of Alex Pretti told us about him. The close friend stayed only long enough to present his eulogy and then left in a car. My guess is he drove from vigil to vigil to share what he had to share about Alex, driving through the night towards gatherings of candlelight.

An older woman told us how most of her family had been killed by Nazis in World War II. She said that it’s starting the same way here, now.

I shared some fresh info that I’d gotten on new ICE/CBP/DHS tactics.

One man during a singalong yelled “she’s on fire” when candle flame ignited a woman’s long blond hair. After the fire was tamped out, the woman put her hand on her kid’s head. The kid was standing in front of her and came up to a bit over her waist. She smiled and said, “It’s just hair.”

Somebody from the crowd asked if we could sing “Amazing Grace” and the woman leading said “Sure!”

I love “Amazing Grace.” I always have. I know the words to more than just the first verse.

We started singing, and I planned to be a big voice. And I tried to be that, a big voice, but I discovered on the first note that I hardly could get the words out. Whenever my mouth tried to make music of those words I know so well, it felt like I was going to bawl. Like I was going to break down.

So I was a small voice in a small gathering. I wish I could have seen the city from the air. How many others were thinking the same?

My maternal grandfather—my Grandpa Greg—a soldier in the 95th Infantry, the Victory Division, landed at Normandy a month or so after D-Day, the first mission to drive from there through Paris to the front and back, bringing supplies, returning with casualties, with the dead. As the Nazis retreated, my Grandpa Greg and his division went north to first liberate Metz, a city that had not been taken by siege for more than fifteen hundred years, earning them the nickname the Iron Men of Metz. They would then go further north, through Luxembourg and Belgium and into Germany, engaging in heavy urban fighting as they won the Ruhr Valley. My grandpa’s unit, the 378th, was one of those that discovered camps and forced the local “good Germans” to witness what they had been living next to, what they had been smelling, making them bury the dead.

There is old war footage of my Grandpa Greg’s regiment on the streets of Metz and in the Ruhr Valley. Most of the footage is of soldiers securing places they’ve captured. Some of it depicts battle, a few gunfire volleys.

I can’t help but compare it to the videos of the clashes in Minneapolis between residents and Trump’s secret police. The violence in the color footage from Minneapolis is crueler and more continuous, is more depraved and indiscriminate than in the black and white footage of the soldiers in WWII.

The good guys now are not the ones in the uniforms but those in civvies.

My Grandpa Greg was a devout Catholic. He had always been a Catholic but I wonder how much the devoutness increased after his service in the European theater? If you ever spent the evening with my grandparents, you prayed the rosary. Often they would take a drive around the small midwestern town they lived in, praying it bead by bead. They prayed it the same way it was prayed in church before mass. Grandma Mary would start the Hail Marys and Grandpa would finish them. If you were visiting, you joined Grandpa Greg.

Grandpa Greg promised his God that he would pray the rosary every night for the rest of his life if he made it back home alive. Though he enlisted and wasn’t drafted, he must have been afraid for his life, afraid of losing it.

Grandpa Greg was a young man then. I am becoming an old man now, and the arrival of tyranny on the streets of my town—plus my accumulated life experiences, I guess—has brought a gift like no other: I no longer fear death or dying.

I do not plan to die. I am not going to put myself in a place to die, am not going to court death, am not going to be reckless with my one wild and precious life. But neither anymore do I fear it.

I read a lot of Marvel comic books growing up, and although I am well past the age of inclusion in that universe, I feel like this is my origin story, that I have been deposited deus ex machina style into issue number one.

There is no radioactive spider bite. No gamma rays. But a new superpower is mine.

About the author:

Matt Mauch is the author of five books of prose and poetry, including the hybrid memoir A Northern Spring. Mauch’s work has appeared in numerous journals and has been recognized by the Minnesota State Arts Board and as a finalist for National Poetry Series and other national and international contests. Mauch lives in Minneapolis and teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College. He and his books can be found online at mauchmauch.com.

Cover photo used with the permission of Jeanne Minnick. The editors of sneaker wave magazine are so grateful for her work.

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I MET STEPHEN before one of his band’s shows in New York City. I felt like I already knew him; for the previous few months he’d been emailing me his tour diaries, which in turn I published for a segment on a small-time blog while he was on the road. The blog was an unpaid second “job,” my passion project. I thought even if I didn’t have direction, art could give my life some purpose.

I was fresh out of college, and the recognition that my degree didn’t mean anything wasn’t the revelation it was to my peers. I had known I would never use my economics degree. I had wanted to study art, but I did something practical as a sort of last-ditch effort to improve my relationship with my father, an engineer who only believed in the utilitarian; anything that didn’t guarantee livelihood was not to be seriously engaged with. My mother was supportive of my interest in music and writing but still encouraged what she called a “practical” degree I could “fall back on” should I need to.

I got a job as a staff writer at a health and wellness magazine. I hated it. I was a twenty-one-year-old fat brown Arab girl in an office full of blond white women whose hobby was teaching Pilates. A job was just a paycheck, and it would enable me to do what I wanted—write and make things I was proud of—without having to stake my ability to feed myself on something I felt fed my soul.

I loved music but knew I was never meant to make it. Still, I wanted to be around it. I had been reading Lester Bangs, Richard Hell, Jack Kerouac—I thought I can do that. I can string together words in ways that make meaning out of the banality of life, I can reflect, I can show. I felt like an artist who didn’t know what my art was, then I found it: writing.

Stephen’s writing was funny and smart; he made references to strange artists and niche ‘80s movies I loved, and I started listening to his music. I thought he was talented. I’d seen his band before we became intertwined, but I hadn’t met him and didn’t know what he looked like—he was always the only one in the band to punctuate his normal outfit with a homemade mask that looked reptilian and buglike.

After three months of email correspondence, he was back in New York City for his band’s homecoming show. He emailed me, “You’re on the list! I’m excited to meet you!” I was broke, naive, and like twenty-two so this all seemed like a big deal—I didn’t yet understand that no one wants to go to a noise show on a Tuesday night.

The venue was a glorified dive bar and an unusually large space for New York City. It was dotted with middle-aged men, and he had to be one of them. It was the first time I got an idea of his age. Eventually we picked each other out by staring too long and mirroring each other’s shifty questioning body language. The one other time I had seen him perform, he lay limp over the amp like a swatted fly. He carried that same hunched-over energy off stage.

I had no idea how old Stephen was. I just knew he was at least a decade older than me, but youth makes you blind to time, and old men in art are never their age. He could have been a very athletic and nimble sixty-year-old. He also could have been a thirty-year-old whose years of heroin use had leathered his skin and punctured his looks. Trying to accurately guess their age gets worse when you whittle down the artists to just the punks—they’ve dedicated themselves to eternal immaturity and are so emotionally stunted that the only way you’ll get through is by assuming the lowest age possible.

I was used to artists. Both my mother and older sister worked in art galleries. I spent a lot of time there, at openings, hanging out with their artists. Contemporary art is often a scam—at first I thought I was too young or stupid to understand what the possible genius or even meaning was behind a photo of a lazy boy pasted onto a cut open garbage bag. These openings were insufferable and stuffy, the artists horrible to interact with. You can’t just tell an artist you “like” their painting, you have to be taken aback by the subtle symbolism, the undertext that explains the human condition, or whatever other bullshit. Music isn’t like that. It’s good enough to just like the song or the energy a band has on stage.

But the galleries are where I learned that, most of the time, the more intriguing or interesting the art was, the more dull the artists were as individuals. I thought Stephen’s music, his art, was intriguing. I liked the music. I wouldn’t have given Stephen this much credit, even during my infatuation, but I’m always reminded of Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a book as controversial as Lolita, but was otherwise, by his own admission, a dull man with no personality.

Stephen felt different, like there wasn’t a tradeoff between talent and personality. I thought his wrinkled eyes were from lives lived and wisdom gained. His body was covered in an erratic collection of tattoos done by famous (to me) punk friends. He wore good shitty T-shirts from Goodwill and nondescript jeans.

After the night we met, we continued to hang out at two bars—the one where we met and one named after Handsome Dick Manitoba. I’d ask anything I could think of—a lot of the time it felt like I was administering a personality questionnaire—“Did you go to the Mannequin Pussy show last week?” “How often do you visit your mom in California?” “How long have you lived in Bushwick?”—and he would talk but never asked me anything. I would run out of things to say, and it felt like the inside of my body was sweating. I had never felt this way and couldn’t tell if it was good or bad—maybe this is what it meant to “have butterflies.” I’d wipe away the condensation on my glass until he’d take a break from staring blankly at the wall, physically perk up, pull down the collar of his shirt, and say, “Oh! Look! I have a tattoo of a panther.” He’d rise up and down with no discernible rhythm, like someone was always kicking his chair.

He vacillated between being affectionate and being withholding—we had agreed to not watch a Marvel movie I had no interest in until he was back from tour. When the agreed-upon day came, I texted him asking him for details of the plan. “Just looked and there aren’t any tickets. I’ll see you another time!” He hadn’t bothered planning the movie or any alternative; he didn’t apologize, either. The brief intimacy of waiting for someone was pulled out from underneath me completely callously. This withholding behavior made me obsessive. When I get like this, I become consumed by thought loops that suck me in like black holes, and I can think of very little else. Should I text him a meme? Should I ask if he’s mad at me? Should I try to compensate for whatever error I’ve committed to cause this? Is he behaving like this because I’ve gained weight or had unsightly hair on my face or because he caught an angle of me that erased any of my beauty? I didn’t know what it was, I never know what it is, but that type of behavior still makes me obsessive. It feels familiar and the cliché is that it’s related to my father.

He doesn’t like me the way he likes my other four siblings. He invites my siblings to meet him on his business trips, he calls them regularly, he sends them money during the holidays. If my sister were to say “I hate olives,” and I said the same things word for word a few minutes later, my dad would turn it into a fight. “Why are you negative? Why do you say you dislike an important food in your culture? Why do you disrespect your father who likes olives?” These seemingly benign things would turn into huge arguments. They only ended because my mom and siblings would intervene. A forced reconciliation always followed. My dad would sit down next to me, but he wouldn’t say, he’s never said, “I love you”. The closest I’ve gotten is “I don’t hate any of my children.” But my dad did love me when I was a child—he took extra care to buy me gifts when he’d go on his endless business trips, he’d buy me the impractical sparkly sandals my mom had said no to, he’d call me halawa, the Arabic word for sweetie.

All displays of affection completely disappeared by the time I was eleven. I don’t remember how the end started, and I still don’t know why. But when the care stopped I thought it would come back, and it took me two decades to let that hope die. When I think about the shape his disinterest or disdain in me ended up taking, it must have started with my weight, comments about how I look better when I’m smaller, chastising me at meals for the normal amount I was eating or for the dish I’d order at a restaurant. I’d feel embarrassed for existing like this, my dad would see the sadness and lighten up, call me cute, buy me a gift but these were conciliatory, apology gifts for the way he had and would behave. The older I got, the bigger the chasm between the treatment my siblings and I endured became. It wasn’t subtle. People were confused, thought maybe I was from a different marriage. But I was the middle child, and we all share the same face, versions of my father’s. My siblings would split their holiday money with me, they’d try to redirect his attention when he started picking on me. My mother tried to make up the difference, and she became both parents to me.

When Stephen would disappear, I felt eleven years old again. I’d spend hours thinking about how I could have fucked it up and even longer hoping he wasn’t gone for good. But he always came back, so I called him a good man instead of a cruel one.

He took me to a John Waters standup special on Christmas Eve, then he ignored me until my birthday passed in early January. No response to my texts or to my birthday invite. He didn’t reappear until after my birthday party, because the event would have required him to show he cared through his presence or a gift.

Whenever he reappeared, I’d pretend to hesitate, but we knew it was for show, some postured dignity. I would always give in. He texted me a week after my birthday. “Come to my show tonight. I want to see you. I’ll put you on the list.” I showed up with some nail polish for him, his nails were always chipped and looked like the walls of an abandoned building. He had a basket of nail polish and I wanted to add to it to show him I thought about him even in his absence and maybe force him to do the same.

He seemed genuinely happy to see me, excited even. It seemed like he perked up when I got there. I was in layers of lace body suits, fishnet tights, and layered sheer shirts given some modesty by their obfuscation of fabric. He got me a drink, and we flirted. He told me he was happy to see me, it meant a lot to him that I had come. He told me my hoop earrings were neat and reached to touch them as an excuse to brush his fingers on my neck.

And then he turned, became distant, like he didn’t want me there and was put off by the fact I was. The night soured. I don’t know what happened but he walked away while I was getting another drink—by the time I got back, he was clear across the venue surrounded by busted groupies for a failed band I didn’t think could have fans. He kept touching their hair and giving me one-word responses if I tried to talk to him during those moments when they had scattered.

This not-relationship should have been over several times, but he had a fucking bat signal. If he felt me slipping away he’d text out of the blue, “I thought I saw you lying face down at the tattoo shop! I was so excited! But it wasn’t you.”

These were his half-baked attempts at rekindling our “romance.” We’d meet up at what I thought was our bar, but that was just a bar where he didn’t have to pay for my drinks. Months into our hanging out, Stephen’s friend mentioned in passing that Stephen drank there for free. The routine was the same. He’d sit down with a beer and tell me, “I’m going on tour for two months.”

“Where are you going?”

“South America with my old band. It’s shitty pop-punk but we’re still big down there. They pay us a lot of money. The drugs there are good, too.”

I’d look down at the table and try to conceal that I felt dejected. We’d talk for a little and then he’d say he had to go. He’d get up, finish his drink, and gently tug one of my earlobes twice, kiss me on the forehead or hug me with the tightness of someone who knew they wouldn’t see you for a long time or even ever. It was both touching and weird as shit, like your uncle saying goodbye.

My friends would say he’s a piece of shit and I’d respond, “If he was he would have tried to fuck me by now but he’s been very respectful. The last time I saw him, he kissed me on the forehead.” They’d groan and make a bleh, gagging face because—yeah, why is a twenty-two-year-old being kissed on the forehead by a fifty-year-old man who she’s not not dating?

The longer it took for us to fuck, the more special I thought this was to him. Afterwards, I was embarrassed to have ever thought that. He was just a weird old man who needed to think of me as being virginal until he made me not. The that this wasn’t true, didn’t matter.

The transition from handholding and forehead kisses to fucking was not smooth. He had been back from the latest tour for some time, and the routine that had been established over a year started to reestablish itself. We were at a coffee shop and he said, “Let’s go to my apartment, I want to show you this zine I made when I was living next to the Butthole Surfers.” I was managing a band, and they were going to open for Gibby Haynes in a few weeks, which was a big moment for us. I texted the news to the band and jumped off the bench too eagerly to go to his apartment and see the zine.

His apartment was small and filled like a hoarder’s den with 35mm film from album covers of Courtney Love, posters he’d inherited from a relative who had been in Charles Bronson’s movies, original Velvet Underground concert posters, test pressing records from Richard Hell, and boxes of undeveloped film. There were open half-packed suitcases, and I wondered where he was going this time, why he hadn’t given me the usual tour spiel, when he pointed at the mess and said, “My son is home for the summer from college.”

I’m uneasy but it’s also our first time hanging out in the daylight, I just found out about a child my age, and I’m about to fuck someone completely sober. I can’t tell if it’s normal butterfly nerves or something in my body saying I don’t want to do this—I figure if I really don’t want to, there will be an obvious sign. My skull will echo with sirens and red lights.

He was on the couch and said, “Is this the point in the date where we make out?” I didn’t know how to answer with words. Truthfully, I didn’t want to make out with Stephen. I wanted to skip through his feigned tenderness. I didn’t feel the impulse to kiss him as foreplay to sex. I knew it would be when I tasted him and the dollar store sparkling water he drinks to stave off alcohol until the sun sets. Making out would be when I learned how much shittier still he would become, when I felt how deep the pit he would dig in my stomach was. It’s when I knew he’s not an artist whose time hasn’t come but a man who used his “art” to shirk maturity and adult responsibility. It’s when I could feel the oppressive presence of secrets time was already revealing—a child he hasn’t told me about, later a secret girlfriend who’s somehow younger than me. It’s when I knew the ending is both near and bad.

This unwanted knowledge was why I wished we had skipped the kissing and gone straight to the next part. He took my shirt off and marveled at my body. I was self-conscious, in that I have always been acutely aware of the way I am not the traditional image of beauty. I’m too fat, too short, too brown, too curly haired.

But he admired my body so intensely I felt beautiful. He said my pudgy flesh reminded him of Venus, and he appreciated the way the only bones he could feel were my kneecaps. It was several fifty-year-old men later that I realized the novelty was simply my youth.

He was my first old man but I thought this was normal—this is what adulthood looks like, this is what a life lived does to the body, this is why a man Stephen’s age could appreciate someone like me. But when he took off his pants, I was finally surprised—twice. The first shock was that he wasn’t wearing underwear. He was walking around underwear-less in corduroy pants in the middle of summer. The second shock was a hoop piercing on the part of his penis in between where his shaft connected to his balls.

We fooled around and then started fucking. I don’t know what exactly went on. It was a general prodding sensation, the stucco-popcorn ceiling, the dinky, inappropriately small light, a tube of something that looks like the dollar soap my grandmother keeps in her bathroom, something I don’t know if he’s put in me. The sex is occasionally being snapped out of, disassociating thanks to a term of endearment “my dear” that seems out of place during this act of impersonal vulgarity. One that he had never used when we had our clothes on.

I either faked having an orgasm or I just didn’t have one—I’m on too many antidepressants for it to happen and don’t remember which method I was using at the time. But he came, he always did for the last months of our time together. The whole production would have made me laugh if I hadn’t been struggling to understand what was going on.

He was convulsing on the bed holding me with one arm and spouting gibberish for minutes. It was a mixture between speaking in tongues and skeet bopping. For a second I thought he was possibly speaking Yiddish.

Afterward we lay there, and in our nakedness I felt like I could finally tell him about the last few months. How my mother had suddenly fallen sick, that I had become her caretaker, that I had quit my job to look after her, that I might be in New Jersey for a few months so she could do experimental radiation treatment. I didn’t know it then, but I was telling him that she was dying.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said. “I remember feeling very lost when my father died. I was very productive, though. I made a lot of art.” What the fuck? But I said thanks and kissed his shoulder.

We continued to hang out for the months after that, though it was less urgent on my end—not because I’d adapted or he’d become better but because my life, my time, and my brain were consumed by mother’s sickness. I guess I’d also taken for granted that at his age and having lost his father, he would finally extend me unequivocal kindness and care in the relative sense that he could muster. I had mistakenly, even stupidly, assumed that kindness was coming.

The last time I saw Stephen during our year or two (I do not have the emotional wherewithal to revisit the timeline) of on-and-off not-not dating was a few months after the conversation about Mom. I had just come back from her funeral. I didn’t tell him that she had died before we met that day. I didn’t want to text about it and didn’t want him to think I needed much from him, although that’s what I wanted. When I told him, he said the things you read in Hallmark cards, gave me his condolences, said he would think of my family. He said that he would pray for us, which is cruel considering he doesn’t believe in god.

A week later he “broke up” with me over text.

Hey lady.

After therapy today i think i’m gonna take a little break from dating.

But i am thinking of you and your rough month and I send good vibrations.

X

About the author:

Tamim Khalanj is a Palestinian-American writer who lives (and will die) in New York City. Her work has been featured in Mid Cult, Another Chicago Magazine, Byline, Nylon, Bustle, Mini Mag, Shadowbanned Magazine, and more. She is on Instagram, PI.FYI, and has a website.

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THE DAY BEFORE SHE DIED, I called my mother a cockroach. Not to her face. I shouted this across the Gardner School parking lot at pickup time, across the jubilant sounds of the last day of school, across the ignored history I thought I could pretend wasn’t mine.

Mom’s health was failing—again. “She’ll be fine. She’s a cockroach,” I yelled to the man who had just wished me, and my mother, well. “Nothing can kill her!”

I may have even laughed.

The man, an ophthalmologist, looked at me as though I was out of focus. A bit of his disgust hung in the air, air that I breathed easily while my mother’s lungs three thousand miles away started their final collapse. I should have known he wouldn’t appreciate the strain of humor grown in the peculiar Petri dish of my life. Not many “nice” people did.

For my daughter’s sake, I wanted to be nice. I wanted to celebrate her second grade year the way a good mother should, but I was tired of myself, of always feeling the need to hide and pacify and gloss over the shitty truths of my mother’s life so that no human within a hundred yards of me, friend or foe, would have to feel any discomfort. I worried what others thought about my mother and, by default, about me. I thought life would get better and less complicated the moment she left earth for good. Then she left me standing in a body that looked and moved like her body, a body now with the similar motions of a vessel adrift at sea, straining to circumnavigate her grief, my grief, our grief.

My mother had many names. Her family called her Maynan. The lawyers settled on Mary Ann Strippy Sullivan Moore. There were two marriages; neither of them stuck. Who could blame her for marrying at nineteen with a maiden name of Strippy?

Her three children were all from the first marriage to my rock-solid dad, Tom Sullivan, also known by her kin as The Damn Yankee and, after a few drinks, The Goddamned Yankee, a verified S.O.B for moving Maynan all the way from Savannah, Georgia, to Pennsylvania: the god-forsaken place (her words, not mine) where she endured thirty-six winters.

The second marriage was to a die-hard believer in the Confederacy, her high school sweetheart, Charlie. The marriage proposal happened after he read in the Savannah Morning News that my grandmother had died and assumed correctly that Mom was back in Savannah and had inherited some money. Charlie had been sober for twenty years, but after a few months with Mom, he was drunk and flat broke. I suspect he was almost broke when they got hitched. A few years after their union, his name was added to her checking account (Mom’s signature looked forged), and she got the “flu.” I can’t prove he was trying to kill her but he sure as hell wasn’t trying to keep her breathing when she would forget to turn on her oxygen and then forget to eat or drink water. She ended up in the hospital, severely dehydrated and weighing eighty-seven pounds.

My daughter was three at the time, and Mom’s living situation had cast a long, worrisome shadow over our family Christmas. Two weeks later, on my birthday, my sister and I managed to move her back to Pennsylvania on a winter day when the temperature was sixteen below–which meant her prediction of when she’d ever move north again came true. Hell had frozen over. Her northern inferno welcomed her with ice. I guess she forgot Pennsylvania was her children’s native soil when she got to trash talking the state and its people.

My mother’s charm and wit could mask her ugly moments…or years. Her southern friends took special care at the cemetery letting me know that she could never conform, in spite of how beautiful and smart she was. Northern acquaintances called her spunky. (I had many other descriptive words for her and spunky was not among them). She kicked her final bucket on June 12th, 2008.

Oddly enough, Mom and I had decided sometime in my my thirties that we would unofficially switch my birthday to June 12th if friends and family kept dying or getting injured on or around my actual birthday of January 12th.

My birthday weeks were mayhem for my family: my brother totaled his first car, my step-grandfather went into the hospital and never made it back home, my brother totaled his sixth car, Mom was involuntarily committed to York Hospital Psych ward, I came down with walking pneumonia and an inner and outer ear infection, our favorite cat walked into the woods and never returned…I could go on. The birthday curse is what we called it, but just like with everything else in her life, Mom broke it.

Quite often in my youth, after the strain of Christmas and while heading into the deepest part of a Pennsylvania winter, my mother would crack. She would go south in every way a person can go south. Sometimes it only involved geography when she would leave for Georgia on or very close to my birthday, but we didn’t talk about that when we collaborated on moving the date.

We also never talked about my twenty-sixth birthday. I’d started a new job in Rochester, New York, and she sat in her La-Z-Boy and dialed my new phone number just after midnight while a nor’easter raged along most of the east coast. My father was sound asleep upstairs in their home in Harrisburg.

My mother was pie-eyed drunk most nights by then, but that night she was suicidal and called me even though my sister Peggy lived only twenty minutes away. After an hour of my pleading, she hung up. I didn’t know what to do, so I called Peggy, and she drove through the ice storm to our parent’s house to find our mother vomiting blood. She also found all our framed high school and college portraits in the kitchen garbage can.

From my perspective, Mom set her dull world on fire so she could enjoy the flames. Flare-ups inevitably led to flare-downs, and a Pennsylvania January was a hard, dark month to be a southern girl living north of the Mason Dixon line.

A few birthdays later, I began calling my mother early in the morning. I would thank her for giving birth to me and tell her how much I loved her. I used to think this was so I wouldn’t have to feel the disappointment when she neglected to call me for so many years to simply wish me a happy birthday on my birthday. Sort of a weird twist on a You can’t fire me, I quit phone call. I’m not sure now why I called. I’m not sure now why she chose June 12th as her day to die.

The hospice nurse said the dying wait for a loved one either to show up or to leave, and in all their years of experience the nurses and caregivers had never seen anyone go through the task of dying as fast as my mother. Closed her eyes on a Tuesday afternoon and was gone by Thursday morning.

It was Peggy who later came up with the plausible theory that our mother “offed herself.”

Mom was frail in body only; her mind remained sharp until the end and she knew she was running out of money. On her final birthday, she told Dad’s sister that she didn’t want to be here anymore, and when the physical therapists tried to get her to come to the weekly appointment available to all the residents at the assisted living center, her response was always the same: “Pshaw, just spitting in the wind.”

Peggy could remember many visits to The Woods Assisted Living facility when Mom would tell the aides to leave her twice-daily dose of ten pills on the nightstand and that she would take them when her daughter left. Mom, like me, couldn’t swallow pills unless she placed them at the far back of her throat one at a time, then washed them down with a large, loud gulp of water.

Peggy has told me about her last two visits with Mom many times: both on the same day, before Peggy was scheduled to fly to Paris for a long-awaited European vacation with her family. In the morning Mom told her, “Go enjoy your family. I’ll be okay, and if I die while you are gone, I’ll try to get a message to you that I’m fine and have moved to the great beyond.”

Peggy’s flight wasn’t until evening, so she went back in to see Mom after lunch. Mom’s eyes were closed. Peggy started talking to the aide who had come to get the untouched lunch tray, and the second Mom heard Peggy’s voice her eyes popped open, and she said, “What are you doing here?” At this point in her story, Peggy slips into her Daffy Duck voice: “Curses! Foiled again.” We laugh until we cry and then we laugh again.

Peggy left for her European vacation two days before I boarded a plane in Portland, Oregon, and I was thinking, I’m on my way to be with my mom to appease my sister. I was resentful about being worried–again. I was resentful, too, because I had something good going on in my life, and Mom’s dramas, health or otherwise, habitually coincided with when my days began to feel settled, manageable…normal. I had just returned home from my first-ever writer’s workshop in Vermont—The Orion Writing Workshop—and I was excited to tell Mom all about it, which is silly now that I think about it. In so many of my “adult” conversations with my mother, even after I became a mother, no matter what words I spoke about myself they sounded the same: Mom, watch me. Are you watching? Did you see me? 

The workshop wasn’t the first time I admitted to myself I wanted to be a writer, but it was the first time I did something about the wanting. Writing was Mom’s turf, and I didn’t want to be anything like her by the time I started college, which led to my B. S. in Biology.

Mom had gone back to school when I started first grade. She got a degree in English and then her teaching credentials, and at our house on Walnut Street, there were many evenings when Mom and her three children’s heads bent down at the same angle while we did our homework together at the maple kitchen table. In my elementary school days, it was rare not to see Mom at night with her head bent at the same angle engrossed in a book while the rest of us watched TV. But by the time I started middle school, her head would often bend at a more severe angle after too much Cutty Sark, and there was no book in her lap.

Maybe that explains why through so much of my daughter’s youth I uprooted our plans and routines to visit Mom in Pennsylvania. Olivia was four when we started the frequent flights from Portland to see her ailing grandmother. In between visits, I would fret and feel responsible for my mother’s happiness or lack thereof. 

One flight, when Olivia was four and a half, the plane descended, and I leaned over to see what view she was taking in. We looked out to the quilt of a Pennsylvania spring–orderly fields, some planted, some freshly plowed. I was grateful for the gentle landscape of my home, the rolling hills, and quiet valleys, and slow, wide rivers. Then we flew low and close over the cooling towers of Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant. Unearthly white clouds of steam rose high and rolled like small thunderheads.

“Mama, what is that?” Olivia’s body leaned into mine. Her gaze out the window remained fixed on the towers.

“Oh, that’s Three Mile Island. It’s a nuclear power plant.”

With dish-plate eyes and more than a hint of fear and confusion in her voice she turned her face toward me and said, “That’s a PLANT?”    

In my mind I heard her thoughts. Where is Mom taking me? What are they growing in Pennsylvania? Do not land this plane. Abort, abort!

I tried hard not to laugh—or cry. I despised being the adult in her life who had to relay the tragic aspects of the world, and I had to explain this in a way that wouldn’t terrify her. “Oh no, honey. Not that kind of plant. A plant can also be where something is made, like a car plant makes cars, a toy plant makes toys, a nuclear power plant makes nuclear power.”

“What’s nuclear power?”

“Well, peanut, I’m not sure how nuclear power works, but I know it gets made into electricity so we can turn lights on and have heat.”

Truth was, it still terrified me to think about how cooling tower number two had almost rendered her mother’s young healthy body into a radiated cancer-filled void, where no babies should ever grow. When the near meltdown of Three Mile Island occurred, I was in my 11^th grade English Class. We lived close, twenty miles as the crow flies, downwind.

“Oh, I bet Aunt Peggy has lots of goodies for you!” I said.

Of course I chose the easy out, and of course I felt guilty for not telling her a child’s version of the truth, and of course I eventually decided to write about it.

When Olivia was in 2nd grade, we flew on Valentine’s Day to see Mom because Peggy was sure Mom was on her way out since her decline was sudden, and she was so out of it, but a few hours after we landed, one of the staff at The Woods Assisted Living Facility noticed that a wheel of Mom’s hospital bed had rolled onto the tubing to her oxygen. Mom was out of the woods, yet still in The Woods—not dying, only in need of fresh air.

During one of our visits to her small room, I asked Mom why we didn’t leave like so many had after the news of the accident at Three Mile Island. Why hadn’t we gone to Georgia until it was safe? She said our neighbor was an engineer at Peach Bottom, another nuclear power plant in the area, and he said everything was fine, that they had it under control.

Mom wanted to know why I was asking after so many years. I told her that I had gotten into a writing workshop and wanted to get the Three Mile Island essay reviewed. She said I always had a way with words. And then she told me whenever she tried to write she could never get past the editor in her head.

I didn’t know how to respond so I shrugged. I didn’t know that it would be my last visit with Mom. Olivia was getting antsy and truth be told, I was too. I held Olivia’s young hand while I gave my Mom’s hand a gentle squeeze, and then we left. I wish now I had thought of something kind to say, that at the very least I had acknowledged how hard that feeling is when the critic is louder than the creator. Talked to her like another writer and not my mom, who was dying.

The next morning, I went alone to see her before our plane left. She turned on The Price is Right, couldn’t miss that showcase showdown. I got up to leave, gave her a quick peck on the cheek, and was more than slightly pissed but tried to pretend all was fine.

My final image of Mom: she is smiling, waving goodbye from her bed with boney hands and sad eyes as I waited for the elevator. Maybe she was tired and just wanted me to sit with her, maybe I asked too many questions, maybe she was a little loopy from the days before when she wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

Two days after we got back Olivia’s teacher called me and asked if something had happened in Pennsylvania. Olivia, who loved school and was an easy kid, was acting out. When she got home, I asked if something had made her sad on our last trip. She was very clear, and said, “I don’t like where grandma lives. Those people – they’re like ghosts.”

Olivia and I had taken many flights to Pennsylvania from Portland, many of them last minute and none of them cheap. I probably shouldn’t have counted but in the two and half years before Mom died, Peggy had summoned me for six other “it” times. Seven, if the flight to Georgia to move Mom back to Pennsylvania counted. Olivia’s dad was a cardiologist and his schedule was almost impossible to shift, so Olivia was on all those flights but two. It hadn’t yet dawned on me that maybe my sister wanted to see Olivia without having to fly to Oregon. It also hadn’t occurred to me that I could say no to my sister. My brother, who only lived a half-hour drive away, deferred the tending of our mother to Peggy, but he was with her as was my dad most of the day before she passed, even though she was already in a coma. Not one of her children was with her when she died.

Olivia was not with me on my final 11^th hour flight to Pennsylvania. I kept my promise to her that she wouldn’t have to ever go back into The Woods again. Mom had died the morning before my last flight to see her. Part of me felt guilty and the other part felt empty. At 30,000 feet, I had plenty of time to replay my last phone call with Mom four days before her death. Our dialogue was not Hollywood material.

“Hey, Mom, how are you?”

Her gravelly voice created by her love affair with cigarettes came through the phone line with a pissed off tone. “Well, I’m still here, rah, rah, rah.”

“Is there anything I can do? Should I send chocolate?”

“No.” Her voice wavered but her mind was steady. “I’m not very hungry these days.”

“Should I come see you?”

“That’d be nice.”

“I won’t be able to get there right away. I just got back yesterday from that Vermont writer’s workshop for a week, and Olivia’s last day of school is Wednesday.”

“It would be good to see you,” Mom said.

Participants at the workshop were allowed to bring one essay for the editor of Orion Magazine for a one-on-one review. As the week progressed, I saw many of the other writers return from their reviews dejected and feeling that their work had been harshly judged. I thought about canceling my review to save my new and tender writing ego.

“Mom, I got a great review of my Three Mile Island essay. The editor thought if I cleaned it up a little it would be worthy to submit to the Op-ed departments of The New York or LA Times!”

“Well, of course she has to say something nice. That’s her job, honey.”

The words left a taste of something that I could not discern but had tasted before. Sometimes the flavor seemed so trivial that I didn’t notice I had been insulted until after she left the room or hung up the phone–or died. What was it that she had fed to me, what had I swallowed? I didn’t write for three years after that. 

“Okay, well,” I said, “I better get busy with the laundry, hope you feel better soon. I love you, Mom.” At least I said that.

“I love you too, Reeni bean.”

I hung up and immediately called Peggy and stated my theory that Mom was way too ornery to be on death’s door. Peggy couldn’t explain, but she felt that Mom was close to leaving for good and it was impossible to know how long it was going to take. Mom had been on hospice. For. A. Year.

My mother had an extraordinary ability to live through health episodes that would kill average humans. A lifetime of hard living, of entering and exiting psych wards committed and undone in a day or a month, did not weaken her vital organs–it gave them stamina. Five years before her final exit, she dropped to eighty-seven pounds, got pneumonia, and refused oxygen and a hospital stay because she wasn’t allowed to smoke. She left the hospital against medical advice with a handful of antibiotics and lived. My mother didn’t want to survive. She just wanted to know that we would be concerned about her survival. Make a fuss. She needed us to offer her our help so she could refuse it. I believe it was about this time when the cockroach humor began. I may have joked with Peggy, or her with me, that it might be possible to cut off our mother’s head and have her live for a few more months.

The thing about Mom is, if she had known why we called her a cockroach and had she been sane when she overheard us say it, she would have belly-laughed, loud and large. Larger than what made sense for her bird-boned body. Her blue eyes, magnified by her thick glasses, would have widened and her eyebrows would have arched toward her always frosted up-do. Her head would have tilted back, and every bit of dental work in her mouth would have been exposed, her beautiful smile so wide, her laugh so true.

Yet the fact remains that I called my dying mother a cockroach. Worse yet, I had said it to someone who didn’t laugh, would never get it—an outsider. In hindsight, it might have been more respectful to nickname her after the flashier, giant, tropical roach with wings that every southerner swears is not a roach: the Palmetto Bug, which is a pretty name for a roach in the south. The bugs are roaches. They die hard and crunch underfoot. My mother was not a roach, but she was by all accounts, southern. And when she died, in my mind, being southern was one small notch above being a roach. I did not yet comprehend how being raised by a southern mother classified me by my own definition, also, as one small notch above a roach.

On the plane during a short, fitful dream, the bluest, most beautiful eyes in my life surfaced. Olivia’s innocent face looked up at me, and in her gaze of adoration and need they asked me to see her. The pilot’s announcement about turbulence woke me, and I doubted if I had ever truly seen my daughter. What would my seven-year-old’s nickname be for me when she was my age, and I was old? I buckled up, raised the shade and looked out the window to billowing clouds and a blue-black sky.

About the author:

Maureen Sullivan teaches English at Clark Community College. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in 2015 and is working on a memoir about the reverberations of childhood in Pennsylvania with a bipolar, southern mother. Coming to terms with her southern bloodline has been more difficult than accepting her mother’s mental illness. Maureen lives on a remote San Juan Island, with her husband and her ridiculously large Great Pyrenees and, in the good years, a few hundred thousand honeybees.

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DEER LINED THE STREETS by the thousands, a cervid-filled post-apocalyptic landscape. They wandered, docile and unbothered by any tourist’s attention, eager to uncover the morsels of food hidden in pockets or handbags. With legs celery-thin and winter bodies blubbery, the Dalí-esque animals seemed unstable, like a breeze could blow them over. Kate and I left the train at Kintetsu-Nara station and followed them. It wasn’t hard: they left a pungent, organic smell behind them.

But when Kate and I looked closer, we realized the most remarkable thing about the deer was what they were missing. Every one of the thousands that lived in Nara had the points of their antlers filed to nubs, a measure taken to avoid piercing tourists. But their blunted stubs gave the deer a haunted look as they nosed through our bags as if searching for a part of themselves that had disappeared forever.

I sympathized with the deer near the station. I, too, felt filed down. And although I didn’t know it then, my own blunt conversation would occur two months later, on a cold February morning back in Chicago, when Kate and I agreed to split our assets and trim each of our separate lives down to the nub.

In December 2018, Kate and I were two days away from the end of our vacation to Japan. A month before, we’d been in Vancouver to celebrate her 35th birthday but chose to end that trip early after the severe talk where we first vocalized the word divorce over Tuna Pepperdine. Divorce is a heavy word, one that shakes the table when it lands. But our trip to Japan had already been planned and paid for, so if nothing else, we figured it would be an opportunity to do something we both loved: travel.

2018 was tumultuous, as unresolved resentment on both our parts had surfaced in unusual ways. We’d argued about a wrong turn while she was driving us to a movie four years earlier, and since then Kate had refused to get behind the wheel, and I was forced to chauffeur her to work, shopping, and meet-ups for drinks to which I wasn’t even invited. Some part of me believed this deliberate pedestrianism on her part was just a phase, and if I played along, she’d see how difficult it was on us both. I didn’t realize how enabling my acquiescence was for her and in turn how exasperated I felt with my own compliance. All my resentment simmered until, under the guise of needing some time to myself, this frustration manifested in a massive 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle I constructed by myself in the basement. I stayed up until two in the morning every night for a month and succeeded in avoiding her. It didn’t help. I still felt used; she just felt sad and alone.

But in Nara, Japan, in the safe anonymity of a foreign country halfway around the world, we could play at normalcy: neither one of us had to drive, there were no late-night puzzles. We’d long been accustomed to one another’s rhythms. With the familiar schedules of life stripped away—up at six am, dog walks twice a day—we could fall back on being strangers in a strange land, forgetting—or ignoring—all that awaited us at home. Japan presented pretense: every experience heightened. The streets were as clean as everyone said they would be, the steamed-bun vendors as friendly as we had been promised. The trains really did run precisely to the minute; the people-pushers really did push people.

This trip to Nara occurred two days before we flew back to Chicago, and I figured the deer could capstone the trip before our impending fifteen-hour flight and return to whatever awaited us at home. I stuffed the map of Nara in my pocket while Kate, wearing a leather jacket and a light red scarf, pulled ahead of me in the crowd. She had big brown eyes—not unlike the deer—and a wide smile that showcased all her teeth. I’d always loved her exuberance when experiencing something new. She embraced the newness with her entire being.

Now, with her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, she seemed anxious to move forward while I lingered behind, taking in the surroundings. The white peaked mountains of Kasuganocho Park rose in the distance, pointing towards Mt. Kasuga Primeval Forest, an ancient woodland so close and foreboding it seemed Macbethian. Everything in Japan seemed closer than sites at home, and traveling a mile in any direction one might stumble across a wooden, ancient temple, a futuristic glass building, and a forest that had existed for more than two thousand years. Japan reminded me that the future is built on the past—and that the past is inescapable.

As soon as we left the station, the deer mobbed the streets with the bossy attitudes of toddlers who marched in both confidence and ignorance. The air smelled stale and earthy, like wet grass or hay on a farm after a rainstorm.

In person, deer are larger than you imagine, and fluffier, too, their winter coats like floating pillows on sticks. The deer had threads of black hair interwoven in their dusty grey-umber fur, making them look dark and broody, and they all had a bright white splodge of fur covering their tail, as if they’d been marked with paint. They did not look like Bambi or Rudolph or even the deer we might see in the woods of the States. They looked both out-of-place and at home, like they belonged in the streets and we humans had intruded on their natural, concrete habitat. They wandered everywhere, like drunks at a party who insisted on not being avoided.

The day sparkled, beautiful and sunny. December in Japan feels pleasant, jacket-weather, and I wore a short-sleeve button shirt, jeans, and a hoodie. The deer loved the hoodie. They nipped at the zipper and pulled on the drawstring. To this day, one end is still missing its knot.

Kate and I had met in upstate New York when I’d been in grad school and she’d worked at a bookstore. She’d grown up the area, and I was a newbie, so she took me sightseeing around upstate. Leaf-peeping, she called it. We’d just started dating, and on the spur of the moment—I didn’t have class, she wasn’t on the schedule—we decided to go on a spontaneous trip to Vermont. We stopped in the Green Mountain range, found a funky, roadside motel with a vacancy, and hunkered down for the night. The next morning, we explored southern Vermont, trying every creamery and brewery we could find on our way home. I’m certain our love for each other was born on that trip, twelve years earlier.

The deer were not the only reason Kate and I had come to Nara. We also planned to visit Tōdai-ji Temple. We loved that fusion of novelty and history, to see in one place two things we never would find at home. Nara seemed ideal for this mix. The Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religious order, raised the deer in Nara, and legend tells that the Shinto God of Thunder, Takemikazuchi, rode into Nara on a white deer—quite a different image than the dark brown, dusty deer we saw in the city. In contrast, the Buddhists, who arrived from China in the 6^th century, built the Tōdai-ji Temple, and Buddhists still travel to Nara to find satori, spiritual enlightenment—the same enlightenment the Shinto find with the deer. The Shinto and the Buddhist, the Japanese and the Chinese, have blended today, intertwined in a culture impossible to cleave.

Kate and I began our own excursion down the kilometer-long stretch of road to Tōdai-ji Temple. We could cover a kilometer in twenty minutes, but it seemed to take hours as Kate and I zigzagged from one side of the street to the other, always careful to stay within eyeline of each other but otherwise content to wander alone and without saying a word. The west side of the street housed scores of touristy restaurants and stores selling souvenirs, and they burst with visitors. The buildings, like many of the residences in Japan, had the slanted, rippled roofs that I’d expected to see; others reminded me of the brick bungalows I saw back home. To the east of us, the park expanded, the winter-dead grass empty of color. Other tourists would approach the deer that lounged on the side of the road like unhoused humans. Despite being warned approximately every seven steps by multilingual signs reading The deer of Nara Park are wild animals, everyone stopped to pet them—children, grandmothers, teens. Their fur wasn’t as soft as I’d expected; it crunched under my fingers, like hair left under a dryer for too long. They especially liked to have the spot between their one-inch antler stubs rubbed. Maybe it reminded them of what was missing.

I thought about what I was missing, too. Missing home, missing work, missing Christmas, missing my dog. Kate walked ahead of me, unaware I’d paused, and took pictures of the people and deer on the path. I knew that at some future point, back at home, I would be looking back, missing this moment, too: this feeling of escape and performance in equal measure. I paused, stuck in the beautiful pain of nostalgia, in the pause between breaths in a memory I’d only think about in retrospect.

In contrast, the street teemed with life: full of deer, full of people with the deer, full of people selling deer trinkets and deer food and tiny statues of deer. Some of the deer lounged at the base of trees, nibbled at the grassy nubs, yawned. Others swarmed the street, their hooves jackbooting on the pavement. The sound of their snorting echoed. I felt a soft tug on my behind, like being goosed or groped; startled back to reality, I turned to see a deer holding my paper map in its lips, munching like he’d just found a delicious piece of fruit.

But they also slumbered under the trees. Many nestled together in packs of five or six, curled up in what Kate described as families. She grinned when she saw them and knelt to pet them; she loved the licks she received from the herd in return. I smiled back but was drawn to a lone deer, the one keeping to herself, sound asleep, eyes closed and still. I got close and she raised one eyelid in curiosity. Deer’s eyes are deep and dark, like a clear night sky. When they look at you, you can’t help but think about the secrets you hang onto, and the ones you want to let go.

Everything on the street revolved around the deer. An old man, face creased like paper, beamed from his street cart where he sold Shika-senbei, “deer crackers,” large, round discs of baked grain, which we could buy five in a pack to break up and feed to the animals. They smelled oaty and crumbled to the touch. The signs on the street said, A polite request from the deer when feeding them: …When you don’t have any crackers left, show us by raising both hands in the air. I bought some and the vendor nodded at me, the same nods I got the entire time we were in Japan from locals who didn’t know English, like a half bow and a bob. I gave half of the stack to Kate. She wandered away, feeding some of the deer who approached her, but as I held the biscuits in my hands the deer overwhelmed me, and I imagined myself not as a tourist but as a virus, attacked by identical-looking white blood cells. I felt their lips on my hands and arms, pinching and grasping like two long fingers, as they devoured the leftover crumbs. Their large, muscular tongues seemed to pierce the air like fingers, with a plunging, probing prehensility. I threw my hands in the air, complete surrender to the deer, but they ignored me, obviously unable to read the sign and obstinate in their insistence for sustenance, and continued to maul at my body. Kate never noticed. I escaped by shooing them away with a yelp, and ran to catch up to her.

Other vendors sold people food, like fried beef or Taiyaki, sweet fish-shaped cakes. Kate and I stopped for a snack. That’s another thing we did well together—new gastronomic adventures. My pescatarianism becomes somewhat more flexible in foreign cities, but during that year Kate had abandoned her vegetarianism wholesale, a choice I’d become annoyingly sanctimonious about at home. But here in Japan, over the course of the trip, Kate and I had tried a jellied octopus on a stick, baked crab claw, Takoyaki (balls of fried octopus), multiple types of saki, monkfish, sea urchin, the best piece of sashimi I’ve ever eaten, a fried spaghetti sandwich, Fugu—the fish that poisons if prepared improperly—and multiple braised meats or veggies on sticks. Neither one of us, however, could try the roasted sparrows, which turned on small spits like pathetic, skinny bats.

Despite twelve years together, we still travelled in opposite ways. Kate sees a city through the lens of her phone, always aware that she’ll post about the trip that night or send the snapshots across the ocean to her mother. I’m impatient with both the photo-taking process and the posting after-the-fact, and my own family has chided more than once that I don’t share my snapshots. If only I had them to share. I wish I could say I’m so immersed in the beauty of the moment, but the truth is, I’m just impatient, wanting to see the next sight, wanting to visit the next place, wanting to eat the next meal. Eager to take in as much as I can. But now as I write this, I’m amazed how the very few pictures of the deer and of Nara that I do have spark such clear memories.

What would I remember if I still had all the pictures Kate took, too?

We made our way past the deer to the imposing Tōdai-ji Nandaimon Gate, a wooden structure that marked the entrance to the temple grounds. Constructed in 1199, the gate towered over us. A hundred people could fit beneath the structure, which stretched a hundred feet above our heads, under two flanged roofs stacked on top of eight immense crossbeams. Columns of wood as thick as redwood trunks dominated the gate. On both sides, two menacing 25-foot statues monitored the temple grounds, each housed in its own mammoth room. The Nio Guardians have huge, angry faces atop powerful, warped bodies lithe in contrapposto. They protect the temple from evil spirits, demons, and robbers. Like everything here, I can’t help but make meaning out of these guardians. Their names, Agyo and Ungyuo, are the first and last syllables in the Japanese language. Agyo and Ungyuo, birth and death, beginnings and endings. They look to the past and to the future, to see what has happened and what is yet to come. I recognized the look in their faces, contorted in expressions of pure animosity. They seemed fierce and angry, their bodies muscular and twisted. The closer I looked, however, the more I realized they weren’t mad at all—their twisted bodies were simply writhing in dance. They’re playing a game with us, taunting us with all the knowledge we cannot see.

A few hundred yards away, the enormous Tōdai-ji Temple rose from the dull yellow grass. A huge, gaping entrance spanned the mouth of the building, above which four rows of ornate, white and brown patterns zigzagged under a swooping roof. And crowning that roof, two bright gold towers curved inwards like horns. It was as if it were mocking the antler-less deer. I remarked to Kate that it looked like an optical illusion, like a normal-sized building much closer to us, with minuscule, fawn-like people entering yards ahead. It felt that way too, the walk up to the building taking far longer because the building imposed so much more than one might expect. I suppose the illusion is deliberate, to encourage satori as visitors walk the path. Kate chuckled then meandered down the track to photograph the surroundings. As usual, I felt impatient for the temple itself but forced myself to follow and found a small pond of koi fish nearby. I relished the quiet reflection the water offered.

I thought about the last two weeks of this trip with Kate. I felt pulled in two directions at once, looking to the past and to the future like the Nio Guardians. Everything with Kate felt so strained at home—the forced drives, the midnight jigsaws—but the trip had seemed to reconnect us. I hoped Kate and I would continue that reconciliation when we got back. Considering all the antagonism and loneliness we experienced at home, I had enjoyed pretending in Japan, and maybe we could build on that. We’d been doing it throughout this trip, first visiting the tourist-trap Robot Restaurant (a laser-light, live-action Power Rangers episode), then with two days in Tokyo Disney and Universal Studios Japan. But we’d also been learning about traditional Japanese culture: Just the day before we’d seen the thousands of bright vermillion torii gates at Fushimi Inari Temple, the ones that stretch for miles up a mountain. At the entrance to the shrine, we’d been stopped by a Japanese tourist who recognized us as foreigners. He spent half an hour practicing his English with Kate. I could tell she enjoyed this, her face erupting in wide, open-mouthed grins, telling him that “his English was amazing, far better than our Japanese,” and bowing when he thanked her repeatedly. She glowed for the rest of the day, and I was reminded of what I loved about her.

I turned away from the pond and back to the temple grounds, eager to see the two main attractions in Tōdai-ji Temple. The first, the Giant Buddha statue, greeted me when I walked in. Magnificent and towering, the Buddha is the world’s largest bronze representation of the deity Vairocana, and he draws your eyes as soon as you enter. He sat with arm outstretched; one hand upright, as if pushing against the future, and the other calmly placed in his lap. The aloft palm’s span was the size of a human. The metal glowed as if lit from within, the smooth bronze impressive at five hundred tons and fifty feet tall. Although he had been reconstructed multiple times, he still had the gravitas of ancient wisdom, like he could survive a post-apocalyptic world. His utter materiality, his presence, is ironic, though. Vairocana embodies the concept of śūnyatā, an Indian philosophical concept often translated as emptiness or the void. In all his majesty, in all his absolute being, in its desire to be something, to make its mark on the world, the Giant Buddha statue symbolizes absence and loneliness.

In contrast to the symbolism, the second attraction in the temple literalizes absence: a hole in the bottom of a wooden support column. This supporting post, about four feet in diameter, has been called “Buddha’s nostril,” for at its base the small hole is said to be the same size as one of the statue’s nose holes. Legend has it, if you can squeeze your body through the hole, to be “sneezed” out the other side, you will obtain enlightenment in your life. A line stretched ten people deep to try to fit through the hole, which was no bigger than a doggie door, and I saw a few young children and some slender people slip their way through. I knew I could never fit; Kate could have but chose not to try. It was like she was giving up.

Maybe we didn’t need the trip to understand each other. We’d been going to couple’s counseling to renew our relationship, to find ourselves again. But instead of healing, we’d discovered that our absences and loneliness were just symptoms of a disease that had been part of relationship for years, starting at the beginning when we married and moved to Chicago, away from her family and friends. Away from her home. The one trip it turns out she hadn’t wanted to take.

Even as Kate and I explored the temple together, we split apart. I wandered to the back and watched all the people streaming in. A podium of incense sticks was positioned at the front of the temple, and an aromatic breeze wafted back to me. It smelled like warm tea. I saw Kate walk up to the podium and grab a stick, light it, and plant it in the sand at the top. A thin line of smoke rose from the stick, and she followed it up until she caught my eye, staring back at her. She gave a closed half-smile and waved me over.

When I look back on that moment I knew that Kate and I had come to the end of our relationship. That smile, etched in my memory, echoed acceptance more than happiness. My memories of Japan intertwine with the two months after our return, during which we would quit couples therapy; we would fight and make up, and then fight again; we would weep and spiral and crawl away from each other; we would admit truths we had been too scared to talk about and too confident to admit to ourselves. We would storm and sit in silence. In less than a year, we’d be divorced, living in separate houses, splitting up our small family of dogs and cats by species and thinking of all the endless possibilities that were to come and those that would never be.

Kate and I stared up at Vairocana, standing together in silence as streams of tourists and pilgrims washed past us.

When we left the temple half an hour later, we found a door that led back to the main street. Wooden, like everything in Tōdai-ji Temple, this one at least was human-sized. A sign taped on the deep brown wooden slats read, in Japanese, Chinese, English, and Korean, Please close the door or the deer will come in. For that hour in the temple, I’d almost forgotten about the deer that roamed outside the gates.

I thought of the people that traveled to Nara. How many of these people fell back on familiar roles in this unfamiliar space? When we travel, we play at being, whether we’re trying to fit into a culture to which we don’t belong or enjoying the kitschiness of a manufactured experience. In some way, all travel is a masterclass in acting: acting like you belong, like you are different from every other traveler out there, like you can blend in, like you can play the part you’re supposed to play and live the life that’s been prescribed to you.

Is marriage the same thing? I didn’t think so at the time, but Kate and I had long been stuck in a performance of marriage. Our everyday interaction had become a recital which recalled a past when we’d first gotten together rather than the future we were working towards. Being in Japan on our last trip as a couple allowed us to play, to act: to perform the roles we had cast ourselves in over a decade before. We recited by rote the same interactions, the same scripted anecdotes at parties, the same stories we told ourselves when we convinced ourselves counseling was working. Maybe we travelled for this reason: to make obvious the one type of performance in order to hide the other, the one we didn’t want to admit to ourselves.

Maybe we went to Tōdai-ji Temple, to the Giant Buddha Hall, to Vairocana for this reason: to discover the absence at the heart of our lives. But still my strongest memories of Nara are those deer, their antler stubs always reminding me of the parts they were missing, and of the part of me that I’d miss when I returned home.

Walking to the train to take us back to Kyoto, Kate ahead of me and hundreds more tourists pouring down the street towards the temple behind us, I looked at the deer crowding the streets. Their home would always be this manufactured life in the park. Neither pets nor wild animals, they exist in between, their antlers stubbed in the name of their conformity and our safety. The deer’s pretense has become their reality.

On that train back to Kyoto, on the plane back to Chicago, and for the next two months, Kate and I would also pretend. But at some point, we had to make the decision to stop pretending, and find our own separate way back to a reality neither of us wanted to face, to an absence that was there the whole time.

About the author:

Paul Booth is an author and academic living near Chicago. He holds an MFA from DePaul University and a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His work has been published by Doctor Who’s Big Finish Productions, The Worlds Within, Freedom Fiction, Killer Nashville, Uncanny, Stygian Lepus, InMediaRes, Outside In, Antenna, and more. He has also written or edited more than 15 academic books on topics as diverse as fandom, Doctor Who, digital media, time travel, and board games. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee.

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