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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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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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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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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#1: Don’t expect things to make sense

IN 1994, WHEN I WAS A YOUNG US Army Infantry Private, I flew to Haiti to take part in Operation Uphold Democracy. The lawfully elected President of Haiti had been dislodged in a military coup, and we were going in there to kick this new undemocratic military regime to the curb and reinstall the real Haitian President, whose name I didn’t know at the time. 

We landed in Port-au-Prince and walked off the plane into the hottest, most humid, most burning-trash-stinking day of our lives—or at least my life—and loaded onto giant trucks called five tons. My squad leader told me I had to be what he called an “air guard,” which meant while everyone else sat in two rows in the uncovered backs of the big trucks, I had to stand behind the cab and look for any suspicious or dubious characters who might have ill will against the US Army and possibly intend harm on our persons.

“Yes, Sergeant,” I said. “But none of us have any bullets.” 

We had flown with our M16A2s, but there’s no way in hell they’d risk giving a battalion's worth of young infantrymen loaded weapons while flying, not even into a war zone.

“No bullets until we get to Camp Warrior,” the Sergeant said. He sounded tired and annoyed and was sweating heavily and looking miserable in the heat, and I was, too. 

I said, “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but if I don’t have no bullets, what am I supposed to do if I identify any suspicious or dubious characters?”

“Goddammit, Davis. Get your ass up there and keep a fucking look out.”

The day was so hot that the street shimmered into a colorful haze of busy people in vibrant clothes that stood out even more against their dark, dark skin. Women carried impossible loads on their heads: woven baskets or burlap bags full of fruit or rice. Past every block or two of stores or markets, a pile of garbage and debris burned, and the odor of burning rubber and trash mixed with frying foods I’d never smelled growing up in trailers in and around the town of Blue River, on the McKenzie River in Central Oregon. I’d never been in a war zone before. I’d never seen this many black people before. Nor had I seen people just stop walking and step into an alley and squat to take shit like it was the most natural thing in the world and then go on walking again. No one gave the truckloads of armed American soldiers more than a glance. The fact that no one seemed to care about strangers from a foreign government with state-of-the-art weaponry driving through their town unnerved me at best.

It was probably a good thing I didn’t have any bullets.

The army said they sent us to Haiti on a peacekeeping mission, but from the moment we landed, every military leader in my chain of command wanted us to get shot at. Since the end of the Vietnam War, all these hard-charging, steely-eyed warriors had been suffering through the longest span of peace in modern memory, and consequently, they were chomping at the bit to prove themselves great leaders of men in a “real world situation.” The army loved this term: “real world situation.” In practice, this meant all the officers had Combat Boners. They wanted to get shot at. They needed to get shot at. How in the hell else, other than by participating in “real violence,” would they earn those little pins and badges and medals to prove they were soldiers of true merit? 

My company commander had gone to Texas A&M on a football scholarship, taking Agriculture classes with names like Meat and Beef Science, and he had no enthusiasm for letting us get settled into Camp Warrior. We marched so far into the hills that somehow we went one or maybe two hundred years back in time, where no one had electricity, cars, or even glass for the windows of their houses. In fact, from what I could see, people made houses out of whatever junk they could find. I saw an entire shack made of one-gallon cans of Napoleon’s Italian Olive Oil and metal guard rails from the highway, Route Nationale 2.

The patrol went on for hours, well into the night, and we might still be marching out there to this day if we hadn’t have heard dozens of people screaming and chanting in a village close by. We sprinted through the darkness with all that weight on our backs. I remember running until my throat was sandpaper from breathing so hard. When we finally got there, every person in the village was jumping up and down in unison and screaming something in a language I did not understand.

The captain found out that someone had tried to steal the village television set, so the villagers curb-stomped him.

The medic called me over to help apply pressure to one of the man’s several compound fractures. I’d never seen anything like this broken man covered in his own shit, piss, blood, puss, and vomit. The mob had, very obviously, broken each of his limbs in different places. Most of his fingers, too. A huge gash in his forehead showed the yellow bone of his skull. His eyes wouldn’t stop rolling in their sockets, and every time he tried to breathe he made a coarse gasping sound.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“Agonal breathing,” the medic said.

I had never heard the term before, but I’ve never forgotten it.

“His brain isn’t getting oxygen.”

The captain stood over us and asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

The medic said, “Multiple compound fractures, internal bleeding, he’s probably stroked out or had multiple cardiac arrests. What’s not wrong with him? In fact, he’s dead, sir.”

Another gasp for air.

“He seems to be breathing,” the captain said.

“Trust me. He’s dead,” the medic said, “but he doesn’t know it yet.”

I finally unfurled my field dressing and tried to decide what wound to stick it on.

The commander called for a Humvee from Camp Warrior, so we waited in the village for hours. This guy would not fucking die. The whole time, we had to listen to his agonal breathing. Every time he did it, I jumped.

When the Humvee finally arrived, I got selected to help load up the broken man—I guess because I was already covered in his bodily fluids. I sat over him in the bed of the truck as we drove down the dirt roads; the broken man gasped, cried, and oozed at every single bump and hole.

The captain said we had a great opportunity to win hearts and minds if we helped save this man’s life. And the whole time all I wanted to do is put my boot on his neck and press down so he’d stop that damned agonal breathing.

We tried the main hospital and two small clinics. None of them had power, but that really didn’t matter since they were all looted and the whole staff had been chased off or killed weeks ago. We ended up dropping the body of the broken man off at a police station with a character who looked very suspicious and dubious and who might have had ill will against the US Army and possibly intended to harm our persons.

#2: Keep your humanity during inhumane situations  

I was happy after I left the Army in January of 1999. I enrolled in art school, but I reenlisted again the day after 9/11. For years after the Iraq War, I told people I signed back up out of pure, 100%, throat-punching patriotism, but the reality of it is, I was bored and still young enough to have some of that Viking gene in me that causes humans to do dumb shit like jump in a small ship with sails to find the end of the world or sign up for a war that only existed out of some messed-up need for revenge on people from a totally different country who are hiding out in an unrelated third country.

Our company received our first Purple Heart within an hour of arriving at Camp Taji, when insurgents mortared us while we waited to be told where to put our stuff and sleep. We were playing cards and listening to The Best of Frank Sinatra when the attack started. One of our guys was hit in the shoulder with shrapnel.

There’s something strange about realizing for the first time that people you never met before were actively trying to kill you. You really can’t help taking it personally.

A few days later, helicopters dropped us off at around 3 am at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Baghdad. The helicopters touched down for less than a minute—just enough time for each of us to scramble out, run ten feet, and throw ourselves into the prone position. The rotor wash pounded us, and we could hear nothing else until the helicopters bounced back up into the black sky and were gone. We stayed there, pulling security while waiting for the asshole in charge to tell us to move out. It seemed like way too long. I started to get pissed off at whoever was going to lead this mission, and then I realized it was me. I was the asshole in charge.

We marched in the dark. In your night vision device, the whole world turns monochromatic green. Forget depth perception or detail; the night vision goggles enhanced the light reflecting off the moon just enough to let me see the ground ten feet in front of me and not much else. I think it had to be around 4:30 in the morning when there was enough light to see our surroundings. We could barely make out dark figures around us.

At first, I halted the squad, and we all raised our weapons at the shapes. Then speakers mounted on buildings cracked to life all around us. They started playing the early morning call to prayer. A woman’s nasally voice sang haunted melodies.

I almost opened fire at the dark figures, but I remembered Rule #1: Don’t expect things to make sense.

So I took a very unsure step forward. Then another. As the sun came up, I saw that these figures were large cartoon animals with big googly eyes, toothy smiles, and dozens of bullet holes. We stood face to face with a shot-up Merry-Go-Round. Our patrol area was Baghdad’s version of an amusement park.

About ten minutes later we came to this small hill. The sun had come up a little more, but we saw some light dancing. It was obvious that someone on the other side of this hill had a campfire going. We crawled up our side of the hill with the Squad Automatic weapons on at each end of the line. When we got to the top, we peeked over to see five men standing and squatting around a fire. They all had AK-47s either slung or leaning up against rocks or something. 

I swallowed hard. It’s such a weird feeling staring at people that you know you’re going to have to kill. Two men squatted by the fire, where a teapot sat on a small metal grate. Two others stood and smoked, and the fifth man spoke to all of them—maybe telling a joke, maybe giving orders.

Finally Corporal Zedwick leaned over. “Sergeant?”

I almost dropped my finger. In another second I would have, but one thing caught my eye that didn’t make sense: they all were wearing black slacks and blue shirts. The enemy in this war didn’t wear uniforms. Was that enough?

I turned to PFC Matier and whispered, “Z and I are going to talk to them.”

“What?” Matier asked.

“What?” Zedwick asked too.

They didn’t see us until we were ten feet away, but when they did they all went for their weapons. My eyes widened, and I leveled my rifle at them. I knew without doubt that our machine guns would open up at any second. I thought, They are all going to die, and there is nothing I can do.

The only thing I could think was to scream the word for “stop” in Arabic—a word I read in the little language pamphlets the Army gave us. I screamed, “Awgaf! Awgaf! Awgaf te-ra ar-mee!”

And a miracle happened. They stopped. They all stopped. They all stared at me. Then they smiled, big silly smiles. The machine guns didn’t open up, and no one screamed in pain. The oldest man there put his hands out and walked toward me. He told me in broken English that they were zoo security. They had taken it upon themselves to help the U.S. Army, which they admired so much. They were only going for their weapons because they didn’t want us to think they were slacking. He shook my cold, numb hand and asked if I wanted a cup of tea.

I said yes. Yes, I did want a cup of tea.

Two weeks later, a violent ambush critically injured me. The only time in my life when I’ve been critically injured. I don’t know the criteria for being injured in a critical way, but it sounded bad and it fucking hurt like hell for a long time. When all my bones healed and bruises faded, one of the largest hurricanes in US history hit New Orleans, and I volunteered to go.

#3: Take time to laugh

In September of 2006, we had been in New Orleans for a couple weeks. Whoever was in charge of the whole mess did not supply us with Humvees, so we used city buses as our patrol vehicles. No one knew how to drive one, but everything was wrecked so we learned as we went along. Accidentally smashing into a car or building wasn’t that big of a deal. It was more like a learning curve. I stood in the front next to our driver with one foot on the change collector like a pirate captain directing my ship.

The dead body retrieval teams were understaffed and incredibly busy. They’d buzz around on small boats and find dead bodies floating in the flood waters, so they’d tie the body to something solid by the belt or shoestrings of the corpse. This way they could call in an eight-digit grid of where they secured the corpse. When we walked through the town after the water receded, we’d find a dead body hanging upside down or in some very undignified position every couple of blocks.

For the first week or so, it was horrifying, but I found that being horrified for more than a day or so was pretty fucking exhausting. After a while, I shrugged it off, dealt with it, and tried to find things to laugh about.

One day, we found a shark on an overpass. One of my guys cut the stomach open, and an Ohio license plate and a single deer antler spilled out with a wave of rotted fish. We made up a story about how they got there and laughed.

During one patrol, the higher-ups assigned a media team to us. We were so proud and thought we’d all be on CNN or something, but after an hour of them following us around we found out they were Dutch and none of them spoke English. We laughed about that.

Then at the end of the week we found a suicide. The guy boarded all his windows up and tried to wait out the storm. When we found him, he was wearing nothing but tighty-whities with a piece of note-paper plastic wrapped around his left thigh. He had written his name, date of birth, and Social Security Number on the paper and shot himself in the right temple with a pistol. There was nothing funny about this scene, but afterward, while waiting for the body retrieval team, we laughed. We had to. It was the only way to release all that pressure.

I left the military after coming back from New Orleans. I just couldn’t be Infantry Sergeant Davis anymore. Plus, I was tired of all these apocalypses. The world seemed to end for me every couple of years, and I guess I was good at dealing with it, but that’s not a skillset anyone voluntarily wants, no one sane, anyway.

In the years following my exit from the service, I’ve done a lot of cool things because I use these three rules every day.

Not expecting things to make sense really helped when I got into politics. I ran for mayor of Portland. I came in fourth and got to be on all the televised debates. Keeping my humanity during inhumane times helped me turn an American Legion post into a homeless shelter for a few weeks in the winter of 2016. Taking time to find the humor in life helps me maintain most of my sanity on a daily basis.

After leaving Portland in 2018, my family and I moved back to where I grew up in the Cascade Mountains of Central Oregon, and in 2020, The Holiday Farm Fire burned 106,000 acres, our entire town, and 400 homes and over 200 businesses.

This was my fourth apocalypse, but I used my rules, and we got through it.

Today, I live in Astoria, Oregon. It’s a storybook-like place with deer that roam the neighborhoods, pinball and arcades everywhere, and six amazing breweries. Giant cargo ships run up and down the Columbia River, and bald eagles and pelicans soar over herds of elk on the forested beaches. As I write the ending to this little story from the second-floor library of Clatsop Community College, I keep a weather eye on the horizon because the world never stops ending, but I’m okay with that.

About the author:

Sean Davis is the author of The Wax Bullet War. He is a Purple Heart Iraq War veteran, the 2015 winner of the Legionnaire of the Year Award from the American Legion, and the 2016 recipient of the Emily Gottfried Emerging Leader, Human Rights Award. In the same year, he was knighted by Portland’s Royal Rosarians. His stories, essays, and articles have appeared in the Ted Talk Book The Misfit’s Manifesto (Simon and Schuster), City of Weird, Sixty Minutes, Story Corps, Flaunt Magazine, The Big Smoke, Human the movie, and other publications. He lives with his family in Astoria, Oregon, where he leads the Stormy River Writers group and spends his time writing, drawing, painting, and enjoying life with Kelly, Jackie, and his two giant dogs, Luna and Bombur.

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AFTER THAT SHIT HAPPENED with my ear—and by “that shit,” I mean having my industrial piercing fucking ripped out of my ear, and after that, this older hippie-type cat gave me some triple antibiotic ointment and goldenseal powder to keep it clean so it wouldn’t become infected and swell up and ooze gooey pus and get gangrene and whatnot—and after that, I caught a ride out of Olympia and headed south.

I was livid about the entire situation—my ear pain and the cops and the paramedics—so I wasn’t the most fun on the ride down to Portland.

I was also stuck on this “FOR FREE” shit. I would growl-yell “FOR FREEEE!” and do the chainsaw fist-pump any time anyone gave me something that I didn’t have to pay for.

Cigarette? FOR FREEEE!

Half-eaten sandwich? FOR FREEEE!

Ride all the way into the town I’m headed for? FUCKING FOR FREEEE!

For example, the night before, I met a cat who had some alcohol and some kind of pressed ecstasy tabs. We drank the booze and snorted the E and kind of just chilled in the back of his truck with a camper topper and a mattress—his room, I guess.

Eventually, we ran out of alcohol. This was beer-thirty and all the stores stopped selling alcohol like five minutes ago, so I made a plan. I had dude take me to Safeway and wait out front because after a certain time at night the store locks one set of doors—the doors closest to the beer aisle—so you have to walk through the entire store to get to and from the beer. I made a play and got a couple 18-racks and walked back towards the door. I knew there was an employee following me to see what I was going to do but I just kept walking.

Finally, I got to the sliding glass doors.

And they wouldn’t open.

Fuck me.

I bounced up and down.

The guy behind me said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

The sliding doors opened and I yelled, “Getting drunk! FOR FREEEEE!” and booked it out of the store.

I kept yelling that shit all the way to Portland.

At one point, the woman driving had me explain it to her. She didn’t get it and I don’t blame her. Shit, I was drunk—with bronchitis to boot. I would always yell until my voice got shot and then no one could make out what the fuck I was saying anyway.

When I got into Portland, I made my way to the waterfront. The day was warm and bright so I found myself a piece of grass to chill and kick it on. My cartilage wound had scabbed over and hurt something fierce. I did what anyone would do in my shoes—at least, I think anyone would do it. I made a paste out of the antibiotic ointment and goldenseal, clawed the big-ass crusty scabs out of the two torn places and ground the paste into it. Made sense to me, even with dirty fingers. That entire process took a little while because I had to buck myself up with some balls before tearing those scabs off.

I ran into this cat I’d hung out with a couple times named EB. We were sitting together when two young chicks came to sit with us. They had a bottle so I kept bubbling it. I told them I would go buy another one since they didn’t have ID and weren’t old enough to buy alcohol. I was pretty schwilly and kind of out of my face when EB pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket that had a biohazard symbol on it and was full of brown powder.

I looked at the bag with crossed eyes and said, “What’s that shit?”

“Heroin,” EB said.

 And then—don’t ask me why because I have no fucking idea—I punched EB in the face and broke his nose.

While blood drained out of EB’s nose, the two chicks stuttered over excuses and reasons to leave and got up and left. It would seem that I scared them or something. I blacked out not soon after that and peaced EB out.

I’m quite sure I left my pack there because I couldn’t find it again after that. I was super-bummed because I had just beaded a wicked back piece for my leather and had hella freshies. I looked everywhere for my pack but never did track it down.

I said fuck it and went and got more beer and staggered around downtown just being a drunk-ass stalling and having to make camp somewhere. Yeah, right, I thought. How the fuck can one make camp without any gear or a blanket? I guess I was stalling having to dig a hole in the ground, lay in it, and cover the dirt back over me to keep me warm.

I ran into a group of teen yuppies—I think I asked them for a buck—who were “so very concerned” that I didn’t have a place to spend the night under a bridge or something. I told them it’s nothing, don’t worry about it, but can I have a dollar? One of the guys wanted to give me like $60 to move it along. Fine by me! But the girls in the group hella pitied me and wouldn’t let it slide until one of them got me a hotel room for the night.

I kept trying to reassure them that I would be fine and really, I would rather have the cash and be good for the next several days than have a room for a night. I mean, it wasn’t even raining. But the ladies were like, No, this poor thing needs a room! The dude caved and got me set up at the Marriott or some shit and told me not to order anything because that was all the money he had.

I was butthurt about not getting the cash but I got a shower and slept well, and in the morning, I ordered breakfast. Sausage, eggs, fruit, yogurt. When I left, I even took some with me. I needed a beer and didn’t want to waste the food that was left over. Shit, I’d eat it later or give it to someone else who would. Waste not want not, motherfuckers.

At first, I was like fuck that guy, and then after a while, I felt bad for taking advantage of his kindness. In any case, I still would have been better all-around if he just gave me the cash instead.

You Don’t Need Mother’s Milk

Feet shuffle and glasses clink to a steady rhythm. Swish, clink, swish, swish, clink. After a while the beat stops and the bartender looks up from drying a glass and asks if I’d like another.

I toy with the peppers and onions in my rancher omelet and peer at the sad tear-drop remnant of a double straight whiskey and contemplate leaving the tally at three. I decide it isn’t enough. Hell, it’s never enough.

If it were up to me, I’d have a bottle.

I’m just grateful they let me drink in the diner and eat at the bar.

I can’t eat beer all the time.

“Sure,” I say.

I drain my glass while gazing through a window that could have just as easily been a friend, a wall, or a lover.

Everything blurs together, and though I see it all nothing stands out as important or worthy of my attention.

Except him.

Always him.

We fit together like puzzle pieces—or old handmade furniture.           

Him, with his broad Norwegian build, ice-burn blue eyes, and beach sand hair. I can’t help but see him in every broken-hearted face I meet. Hear him in every hopeful sigh.

I sit in the same spot every time I come here. My surroundings are pegged—back to the wall, exit on each side, bathroom around the corner, and the bar just a coin toss away.

I remember this layout as I drink through classroom bells, rush hour, happy hour, and last call.

Anxiety shakes my leg. Up, down, up, down.

I realize I’ve been distracted when I find a new drink in front of my plate. I don’t even wince at the burn anymore. In fact, this drink has lit the furnace in my stomach and my cowardly indecision over whether to leave town or not vanishes like light rain on a sun-warmed sidewalk.

Eventually, nature calls me away from my internal conflict. I muster the will to slide my face back into form without encouraging unwanted attention.

Clouds of a lawless nature fog my vision all the way to the bathroom.

I don’t know why I come back to this bar time and again.

The need for love, a swift blackout, and an omelet, no doubt.

Without preamble, I vomit acidic stomach death, painting the porcelain bowl with a Christmas of red and green peppers.

Feliz Navidad.

A knock on the door pulls me into lucidity to let me know there’s a double on the bar waiting for me.

Good, I think, I just wasted one.

I wipe holiday joy from the latrine, singing old hobo music contemplating brown bags and rail yards, and saunter back to my stool through the silhouettes of back-alley stars and boulevard singers, and I see him.

Suddenly, the vast array of stains on the carpet captures my interest.

The early morning blues have created a dark cave soft on the eyes.

“I thought I’d find you here.” He speaks into my neck with a tired smile in his voice.

“I woke up and you were gone.” His unsaid question hangs in the air with the weight of his sincerity, his love.

I say, “A couple beers, please.”

He puts his hand up, shaking his head. “No, thanks. It’s too early for me.”

The bartender nods and moves along drying glasses, keeping busy. Swish, clink, swish, swish, clink.

“I had a good time with you,” I say.

A crow’s foot twitches in the corner of his eye and I know he’s bracing himself. I want to hold his hand and comfort him. But I do none of these things. Instead, I fumble through my pack for something to smoke.

Eventually, I blurt, “I’ve got to hit the road,” and throw back the last of my drink, avoiding eye contact.

I promised him I wouldn’t leave anymore without saying goodbye.

An awkward dribble leaves my face and falls on the last pieces of my omelet. My throat turns to gravel, and I cough through a pathetic excuse to hide my face while I grab my things and head exit right. How selfish it would be to let him see me cry.

Stay here, he’d say. And mean it.

Mend your loneliness for three easy payments of $24.95. You don’t need mother’s milk.

Outside, the light temporarily shocks my eyes and reminds me there is still night and day. I put the cigarette to my lips and light up.

I love double-fisting alcohol and tobacco.

It’s definitely time.

He crosses the street and heads to his apartment.

Hallucinogenic DT booze sweat drips from my body and falls fast like weary soldiers wounded in battle. Spongy skin smelling of the after-party. Mental clarity is forced, heavy. The sun is fierce to my eyes, eyes that have been inside for so long seeing nothing but the dim and dark, losing time.

I need sunglasses…

and another drink.

Truck Stop

I hitchhiked across America several times with no clear destination, just going back and forth. I kept on the move because I was never comfortable anywhere. I didn’t realize until later on that I was trying to outrun myself, but “Wherever you go, there you are,” and where I was wasn’t anywhere I wanted to be for a long time.

On one trip, I was riding east with a trucker when we stopped at a truck stop in Nashville, Tennessee. I had this Chihuahua, Luna Bella, who was so fucking snooty. She turned her nose up at all the dog food I would get for her yet she would eat shit up off the ground, like garbage and vomit. It made me so mad. Because of that, I had a bunch of cans of dog food that she wouldn’t eat and I didn’t want to throw them away but I didn’t want to carry them anymore, either.

While I was sitting in the truck cleaning my glasses, a couple of home bums walked past. I got their attention and asked if they had any dogs that might want the food. They said sure and asked me if I wanted some whiskey. I also said sure.

I left my pack in the cab and hopped down with Luna Bella and walked with those guys across the street from the refueling station and through some tall, swaying wheat to their camp. Their camp was close—we hadn’t gone far. There were a few guys there including the two I walked with and each had his own colorful single-man tent and tarp circled around a fire and camp stove. Their site was swept clean of debris and litter. I noticed they were getting low on firewood so I offered to chop some off a limb they had brought to their camp for that specific reason. They got a bottle out—some rotgut whiskey—and we started drinking. It was on. I was out of my element talking shit to them and not paying attention to what I was saying or who I was saying it to. Fucking classic drunk Shadow.

I chopped wood until I got blisters and chopped some more blindly driven by drunkenness and ego. It eventually dawned on me that they were saying racist shit but I kept drinking and blocking out reality and the entire situation and lost track of time.

Sure enough, it got dark and I got schwilly.

They waited until I was so wasted that I was completely nonfunctioning and then they boot-stomped me. All three of the men were around me when I came to. One of them was holding me up while another was getting a rope to tie me to the wooden pole I was being held up against. It was about the size of a telephone pole but the wood was ashy, brittle, and dry. That pole was covered in blood—not my blood, someone else’s blood. That’s when I knew it wasn’t the first time they did something like that. The third dude went to grab the steel pipe they were going to beat me to death with. I saw it in his hand as he walked toward me.

Honestly, I don’t know how the fuck I did it, but I got away. I chopped one, chopped the other and ran through the wheat field that was on the other side of the pole. There wasn’t a fence or any kind of barrier bordering that field, which was lucky as fuck for me. Luna Bella kept up with me the entire time just running hard with her little legs. I found a road once I made it through the field. Soon enough, a car came within view so I hailed them down and asked them to take me to the hospital. It seemed no one was following me as we drove away. 

When I got to the hospital, the nurse had me take my clothes off so she could examine me. I had red boot prints embedded in my legs. The cops came and I told them what happened.

On my way out, a random guy asked me what happened so I told him. He said he knew the men I was talking about and where they camped. He also said he was going to pay them a visit for fucking me up like that. Whether he did or not, I don’t know, but I like to think he did.

The cops gave me a ride back to the truck stop. The trucker I rode with was long gone, but he gave a cashier my pack and—miraculously—they held it for me. I was super lucky. I mean I don’t know many people who would do that.

The next day, I had full-sized boot-print bruises on my thighs and calves going down as far as my own boots began. They had stomped me really good.

I couldn’t walk very well and I needed a ride. I wanted to get out of there. Fuck that place. I made a sign that said East.

Everyone at the truck stop knew what happened to me so they were cool about me trying to hitch a ride out. I sat outside the automatic sliding doors next to big-ass containers of windshield wiper fluid and held my sign at the truckers getting fuel. I wasn’t much for conversation and I probably looked haggard as fuck so I was out there for a while.

Hours passed before a trucker-couple with this huge sleeper offered me a ride. Their cab was the biggest I’d ever seen then and still the biggest I’ve ever seen now. It had a king size bed, a standard size stove/oven, shower, et cetera. It was incredible. There was only one bed, though, which meant we had to sleep together. I was weird about it at first but we made it work. Gary, the husband, slept on the far side next to the window; Hera slept in the middle; and I slept on the outside. I was in a lot of pain so I didn’t move much.

They took really good care of me. Hera would rub salve on my legs, walk Luna Bella, and fry hamburger and rice for her to eat. They were patient as I took little walks to get my legs used to holding my body up again. I was weak and unsteady and shook a lot during those walks. I rode with them for four days until we got to Pennsylvania. It seemed like a good time to move on. They wanted me to stay with them longer but I felt like I had already overstayed my welcome. They said I hadn’t, but I felt like I did, which is all that matters, right? Real or imagined.

I still talk to Hera on Facebook, which I think is amazing and incredible. They were really good to me. Sometimes, Hera hits me up on Messenger to tell me which cities and states they’re driving through and ask if I need a ride anywhere. How awesome is that?

Pirate Camp

At Pirate Camp, we got our hands on some malt liquor one night. There was this guy at camp called Meat Wad—what a stupid name—who was fine as fuck! Chiseled-ass stomach, long dirty blond hair, a gorgeous motherfucker.

A couple nights before, we got our swerve on, and I stayed the night with him in his tent. We didn’t fuck around that night but in the morning, he kept trying to fuck. I wasn’t into it—don’t ask me why, he seemed like he could lay it down—I just didn’t want to, which is plenty good reason. I told him to back off a few times but he wouldn’t. That kind of behavior is unacceptable to me and I got pissed.

I was over it and finally growled in his face, “Do you want to fucking step, bitch? I said NO!”

I yanked the zipper and got out of the tent to see two guys coming towards me asking if everything was alright and what’s going on. They had heard us arguing through the thin walls of the tent. I told them, “It’s cool. I fucking told him. It’s done.”

Then, a couple days later, when I was drinking 211 tall boys with the rest of the crew, Meat Wad was there with some chick who was fucking telling him no! And he wasn’t fucking listening to her. I couldn’t allow that. No fucking way! I attacked his ass. “Fuck you, motherfucker, she said no!” 

Random—being in charge and all—sicced three chicks on me to get me off the dude. I turned from Meat Wad to the women and put them down and fucking held them down while I yelled at Random: “What the hell are you doing? You want me to beat the shit out of these women, too? Fuck him! He’s not listening! We’re not going to have that here!”

Fuck Meat Wad and his predatory self. I would have beat those chicks down and moved right back to his bitch ass. It wouldn’t have fazed me—I just didn’t want to hurt them for taking orders.

Random told the women to back off, which they did. I helped them back up and you know what? One of those bitches had a motherfucking PEG LEG! Bitch, you ain’t a soldier! But she desperately wanted to be one with her one-leg-havin’ ass.

Shit was pretty much over by that point. The chick who was with Meat Wad bounced and he slithered off somewhere. I was a mess. I hate it when women are in trouble. Random understood that.

Edward had come over to Pirate Camp to visit me that night, too. So much for my hosting skills. He was there when everything went down, but he didn’t judge me. I didn’t have a tent so Random let Edward and me sleep in his tent that night. I wish I was up to fuck because Edward was also gorgeous and sweet to boot, but that’s not how things happened. I probably mumbled a lot and hiccupped myself to sleep without even cuddling him.

The next day, someone heard someone call Shanti Sena, which means “peace army.” Help was needed from anyone capable, higher on the mountain. Mind you, this was in spring so the ground was all muddy. The only things available to stabilize yourself on the paths were the trees but, luckily, there were a lot of those. There was a grip of like seven of us. The chick with the peg leg wanted to be a soldier so bad she fucking came with us to regulate. Turned out some guy took too much acid and was being a creeper stalking camps and generally freaking people out. We went to go recognize this motherfucker.

We got up the mountain to where he’d last been seen and handled that idiot and took him back to his own camp and locked him down under the watch of his campmates. Turns out, they didn’t know where he’d been because he’d been gone like two-three days. They apologized and we went on our way. There should have been more to the story, I suppose, but there wasn’t.

It was time to go back down the motherfucking mountain, a downhill trek in the mud, and it became very obvious early on that the one-legged bitch wouldn’t be able to get down because she had one fucking working leg! So I put her little blond ass on my back and carried her.

She was like, “Wow, Shadow, why are you being so nice to me?”

I told her, “I may be an asshole but I’m not unkind. Bitch, you can’t walk.”

I couldn’t carry her the entire way so Edward carried her the rest of the way. I wasn’t going to let her get fucked up going down that hill and no one else cared. I get it, she wanted to be a soldier, but there are limitations.

About the author:

This writer flourished in the face of adversity while being a homeless and addicted teenager. They have a Masters Degree in Psychology from Antioch University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, and they hope to become either a doctor of clinical Psychology or a successful writer of stories with self-deprecating dark humor. They enjoy helping people overcome the human condition and try to write about the human condition in its purest form. Currently, they live in the Pacific Northwest with a four-year-old chiweenie name Mikloikiyk.  

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WHEN I CHECKED IN for my cab at five o’clock, the winter sun had already dropped behind the green wall of Fenway. I was an hour late and famished but had to bag a couple of fares before I could afford a slice at Santori’s. I got one to go and sat in the cab without moving, blowing on the hot cheese and watching all the other cars not moving either. On the radio, Johnny Most was making the Celtics pregame shoot-around sound more interesting than it was. I finished up, wiped my hands on my jeans, and went to work, bullying the cab across four lanes toward a Beacon Hill back street, fishing for a game-bound latecomer.

Ten minutes later, I dropped off at the Garden and wheeled around toward North Station, honking past Norm, who was leaning on the top cab, lucky 222. Norm liked to play North Station: short rides, white people going to civilized places—the airport, ritzy Back Bay, or the nearby working-class Charlestown—instead of the more “colorful” neighborhoods, as he put it, in Roxbury or Jamaica Plain, “where just robbing the driver never seemed to be enough.”

I pulled in line behind Skeeter, who was behind Rami, with Norm first, all of them out smoking, and I got out and lit up with them. Norm was telling a story about a recent fare.

“So the back door opens and a guys sticks his head in. ‘Airport?’ he says, and I say ‘You bet.’ I hear the door slam and I peel out of there, thinking it’s a good time to hit the cab pool at Logan. Traffic’s light and I’m booking it through the tunnel when about halfway through I turn around to ask the guy what airline, and fuck me, there’s nobody there.”

“What, he fell out of your cab?” said Rami.

“No, you dipshit, he never got in,” Skeeter said. “You only heard the door close, right, Norm?”

Norm’s radio squawked. “There she blows,” he said and yelled his number into the mic. The dispatcher gave him an address in the North End, and he grinned and peeled off.

I eased my cab up, flipped my spent butt out the window, already half through my first pack of Marlboros, and opened the paper to peruse the night’s events, noting the times, trying to envision the rip-tides and eddies peculiar to a given evening—the alternating current between the bars and clubs and concerts at the Orpheum or the Paradise; the migrations of horny conventioneers to the Combat Zone, who I’d pick up later from discreet Back Bay apartments; then the two o’clock last-calls, the broken hearts at two-thirty, bartenders at three, the sweet little-old-lady phone operators half an hour later. Then I might enjoy a final smoke, windows down, drifting through the clammy air of the waterfront and listening to the dinging buoys and foghorns mooing over the bay, or one night, a saxophone off somewhere, some tortured melody warping its way through the downtown alleys.

I didn’t notice that, ahead of me, Skeeter and Rami had gotten rides until I heard my own back door skritch open then slam shut. I turned to make sure somebody was actually there: a guy, maybe late-twenties, polo shirt, short hair, trim mustache. Probably coming home from work, tired, ready to call it a day, go home to his family or girlfriend or wife.

“You go to Charlestown?” the guy said. “Sorry, short ride.”

“Can’t everybody be going to New York,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Get over to High Street and I’ll show you.”

I poked the meter and U-turned toward the bridge. It was so close the guy could’ve almost walked, might even be faster this time of day. But the bridge was clear, and my luck held as the red lights domino-ed to green, and soon we were halfway up Bunker Hill, where the stench of downtown fumes gave way to a tangy ocean breeze. Off to the right, over the tops of the squared apartments and rows of clapboard bungalows, I could see the USS Constitution, silhouetted like a ghost ship against the graying sky.

“Take this left,” the guy said. “Keep going and I’ll tell you when.”

I steered down a street that wasn’t much more than an alley, threading my way between the parked cars that hugged in from either side. The road hooked a sharp left, and the cab bucked over the potholes until I was forced to a stop in front of a construction barrier.

“When,” the polo guy said. The back door opened and slammed shut, and then he was hightailing it up the hill towards what I recognized as the back of the projects. “$2.25” glowed forlorn on the meter. I was pissed, but tough shit, you just amortize it.

Halfway up the hill, polo guy turned back to me in the cab and held open his arms, staring at me, daring me, and I thought of the stories about other drivers who’d taken that dare. They weren’t happy endings. Then he gave a funny glance toward the back of my cab, and my stomach registered something that hadn’t yet made it to my mind.

Two gunshots cracked from behind the car. I ducked and went for the gearshift. A black-masked face appeared at my rolled-up window, something hard struck against the glass; then again, as I jerked down the lever. Another blow, shards flying, then one more, and broken glass avalanched over me. I got into reverse and slammed the pedal, and the cab rocketed backwards. On a Hail Mary, I dragged the wheel hard to the left and the car squealed around the turn, then bounded out from between the parked cars and into the middle of High Street, where it fishtailed to a stop.

It took a long moment before I recognized the ringing in my ears as blaring car horns, and I hardly recognized the hand that fumbled for the microphone or the voice babbling to my dispatcher. I felt around my chest, wondering if I’d been shot, looking for blood, and stupidly splintering myself on bits of glass. A voice rolled out of the radio, weirdly reasonable. “Where are you? Are you okay? Pull out of the street.” I coasted over to a red-painted curb, wondering ludicrously if someone was going to write me a ticket, then leaned my head back against the partition and held perfectly still, my entire body pulsing. My breathing slowed, and the honking gave way to the sound of traffic picking up where it left off. I used my jacket to swipe at some more glass, inspected myself for leaks, and finding none, told the dispatcher I guessed I was all right. The radio returned to business as usual, and I steered my bruised vehicle slowly onto High Street, right past a woman clutching bags of groceries with her arm outstretched.

Two nights later, I was wrapping up another shift, lined up in the drafty Town Taxi garage at four in the morning. The shaggy assemblage of drivers squinted beneath the fluorescent overheads, smoking and trash-talking. Turned out Skeeter had a hundred-dollar night. Rami was pulling an impressive lump of bills out of his sock, and a whiff of marijuana came from the Turk, who was waltzing around in some kind of tai-chi performance as if the open garage door was a stage. Norm cut into line behind me, said he’d heard about the deal in Charlestown the other night, and I told him the story.

“You’re lucky that guy was such a dumbfuck,” Norm said.

“How’s that?” I said.

“If he’d had any sense, he’d a left the back door open.”

On Christmas Eve, the Arctic express was funneling down from Canada, and I walked through swirling snowflakes to the Town Taxi garage to get an early start on the evening. When I rolled through Kenmore Square and onto Commonwealth, the snow was already piling up and the roads were getting crunchy. As far as I could see, I was one of the only cars on the road.

Maybe I was depressed. Not clinically, you know, probably just the blues. But whatever the case, for the first time in my twenty-eight years, I wouldn’t be going back to the ancestral home in Kansas City for Christmas. I’d reached the point where I could no longer explain, to myself or anyone, how I’d diddled away almost a decade since my high-falutin’ William and Mary philosophy degree. Senior year, I joined a band and that was it for my academic aspirations. I moved to Boston to attempt music school, with mixed success, and since then, I’d played in a long string of half-assed bands, wrote many doleful ballads, and felt around for any remaining handholds that would pull me into a successful career as a musician and songwriter. Five years of freezing and starving and gigging and writing. Growing up in suburban Kansas, I’d always been the smart one, i.e., the smarty-pants, but I never felt superior or enlightened. Mostly, I felt left out. And now, exhausted by the whole deal, I didn’t want to hear any more “What are you up to?” questions, which would only make me feel even more odd man out at my family’s Christmas table. I didn’t want to account to anybody for anything, because I knew I’d come out on the short end.

In Copley Square, a woman waved frantically at me, and I pulled over. She had a swaddled baby in one arm and a large Filene’s bag in the other. She huddled into the back seat.

“Oh my God, you are the gift of the angels,” she said and gave her baby a squeeze. I put on my Santa hat and handed her a candy cane. Before I could pull out, somebody pounded on my passenger side window, and against my better instincts I opened the door. A middle-aged man in a greatcoat stood there shivering and holding the hand of his young son. We worked out that they were all heading the same way, so I beckoned the father-son duo into the front and headed around the park and up Commonwealth towards Brookline.

“It’s terrible out there,” the man said. “The T’s down.”

His kid, having warmed up a bit, started poking around and zeroed out the meter.

“Billy, no,” said his dad, but I handed the kid a candy cane and told him no problem. The man fished out two twenties and handed them to me. “This should cover. Hers, too.”

And that’s how the night went. Every time I dropped off, I was greeted by more people than I could carry and worked out routes and destinations and loaded up the cab and did my best to get everyone home, to a store, to Grandma’s, or wherever they were desperate enough to want to go on this freezing, snow-plagued night. I kept the meter off and humbly appreciated the tens and twenties stacking up in my candy cane bowl. The cab itself became a festive holiday party with guests shifting in and out, everyone happy and gracious, enlivened by the season and glad to be warm and on their way. Nobody cared that I was a starving artist, that I’d blown off my privileged legacy, that I was perhaps a disappointment to my family, and to myself. Somehow it didn’t matter that I might not have first-tier keyboard chops or didn’t know how to write a hit song, or any song that anybody might want to listen to. These were my people, whom I loved unconditionally, and I was their Santa Claus, granting everyone’s wishes. Naughty or nice, I didn’t care.

By eleven o’clock, the stores were closed. The last shoppers had been tucked into their warm homes, and I was delivering the few remaining employees here and there through the pillowed snow. I was exhausted beyond belief and just wanted to hit the barn. One more ride, I thought—and just then a young man hopped into the back and gave me an address in a part of Jamaica Plain I preferred not to frequent. Plus, it was further than I wanted to go. I sized him up in the rearview but couldn’t see much more than a dark face tucked inside a puffy coat and hood. But okay, it’s Christmas, and this is the next act of kindness in a charmed night. We squeaked through the unplowed streets to his place, a three-decker on a challengingly hilly street. At this point, if he beat me for the fare, I didn’t care, but he got out of the cab like a gentleman and tossed a twenty through the partition.

I flipped around and headed toward home. A block further, a church appeared in the midst of a winter wonderland. The wind had died, and the snow drifted down in large, feathery flakes, draping itself over the grounds and piling up on the outstretched arms of the beckoning cross. Light glowed out of the arched windows, and I could hear singing from inside. I hadn’t been to midnight Mass in years and thought then how much it used to mean when I was an altar boy singing in the choir, all of us in our cassocks and surplices, holding candles in the darkened church. The magic of Catholicism had disappeared a long time ago, but at that moment I felt drawn to either nostalgia or a new mystery, so I pulled the cab over and walked into the church. The liturgy was in Spanish, and well underway, so I removed my hat and eased into a back pew. I felt warm and safe and might have dozed off a bit, because suddenly the priest was giving a final blessing, and then we were all shuffling back out into the night.

The snow-damped landscape—quiet, glowing in the ambient light from the church—was a different world from the one I’d left. I found my cab and eased back into the street, happy to end the night on such a fine note. A block away a man flagged me, but I was done, and really, this was not a neighborhood where I picked up. I tried not to look at him as I passed, but there he was in the rearview, alone, hands stuffed in his pocket. “Probably a gun,” I thought as an act of self-justification, but the glow from the previous hour intervened and against my better instincts, I steered back towards him.

“Wait here,” he said. He went up to a house and after a few moments emerged with two other men. Fuck, I thought, here we go. But then other people followed and there was Mom, Grandma, and two young kids, their arms all full of packages. I opened the trunk, and they piled them in, then squeezed into the front and back of the cab. It was a tight but cozy fit.

“So where we going?” I asked.

“East Boston. We’ll show you,” said the man I’d stopped for.

East fucking Boston? From here it was the other end of the universe, a huge ride. As we crunched down the empty streets, they explained in halting English that they were delivering presents to their family in East Boston and kept blessing me and thanking me for being there. It was a long but jolly ride, the kids bumptious and the adults laughing and trying to tell me stuff in Spanish I didn’t understand. We finally got through the tunnel and pulled up to a small bungalow where my new best friends hoisted the presents from the trunk and steadied each other through the snow to an open door that spilled light and warmth out into the night. The one man stayed behind, and I thought he was going to pay me the fare, which was humongous.

“Please wait,” he said. “We are going back soon.” He disappeared into the house without having paid the fare, leaving me alone and unsure. But ten uncertain minutes later, the door opened and the whole crew piled into the cab again, and off we went back to Jamaica Plain. In the front seat the kids fell asleep on Grandma, and I heard light snoring from the back.

It was who-the-hell-knows o’clock when I finally dropped them off. The man wished me a Feliz Navidad and slid a one-hundred-dollar bill into my candy cane basket. I wanted to refuse it, to tell him how this remarkable event—in fact the entire night—may well have saved my very soul, that I needed to pay for my shame and my doubts and give thanks that the world was not at its core the cruel and fearful thing that for so long had enabled my distrust and cynicism. But then he was gone, and I was left alone to sort out my own conflicting feelings. My conscious mind was done for the night and my exhausted brain burned with a collage of faces and traffic lights and blowing snow and doors opening and closing, the droning of the priest and laughter of the kids and howling of the wind. I put the cab in gear and headed back to the garage, to a beer and a warm bed, and to whatever might come next.

About the author:

Rick Krizman writes music, stories, and poems and holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University. His fiction has appeared in The Wising Up Press, Sediment, Flash Fiction Magazine, Star 82 Review, Medusa’s Laugh Press, Driftwood, Switchback, The Big Smoke America and elsewhere. He recently published his first novel, Big Sausage, available wherever books are sold. Rick is the father of two grown daughters and lives with his wife and other animals in Santa Monica, CA.

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I BATHED IN THE SHARP AUTUMN LIGHT of the High Holiday season in Seattle under a golden sweetgum tree. The year was 2002—or 5763 in the Hebrew calendar. My boys bounced down the steps of the yellow school bus to the curb and raced ahead of me. But I caught up just enough to scuff through a pile of tiny maple leaves alongside them, red on one side, pink on the other.

“Remember we’re going to work on the sukkah today so it’s done in time,” I said. I took the little one’s hand and swung it high in the air. He let me hold it while we turned the corner and started up the hill.

“What? No computer time?” my eldest asked. When he spun around, leaves scattered all over our porch stairs. I wanted to finish the sukkah before it got dark, but I didn’t want it to be a totally unpleasant chore for my elementary school-aged sons.

“Okay, okay,” I said and unlocked our front door. “Twenty minutes each. But we’ve got to build the sukkah today.” I left them to negotiate their computer time and descended into the basement to find the bamboo poles for the sukkah. They were hidden behind our folded ping-pong table and balanced on a shelf above the vintage late 70s external frame backpacks we hadn’t used since the kids were born. I used a paint can as a stepstool and extracted the poles from between the heating ducts in the rafters and carried the poles outside, set them on the deck, and called the kids to help.

In my neighborhood, Sukkot, the end of the Jewish High Holidays, was my domain. No one else had a sukkah—a temporary structure under the open sky where you eat for the week. Building a small hut in the backyard and decorating it with fall fruits was perfect for DIY me. We had the neighbors over for cookies and coffee every fall, hosted a special shabbat, and even invited the local preschool for a field trip to our house long after my boys went on to elementary school.

The boys burst from the kitchen door and leapt over the bamboo poles I had dropped like giant pick-up sticks. They straightened them out and handed them up to me at the top of a wobbly step ladder, where I wrestled the slippery poles into a right angle and lashed them together with twine, trying my best to balance on my tiptoes. My methods weren’t conventional because no one had taught me how to build a sukkah. I’d grown up Christian and didn’t have any family memories to guide me. But there were plenty of rules to follow.

I didn’t always want to be Jewish. I was raised in the Church of Brethren and identified with my Midwestern upbringing in that historic peace church. The Brethren practice adult baptism and dunk people three times in a deep tub of water at the front of the sanctuary. I watched many friends get dunked, but by the time I was old enough to be baptized myself, I had stopped going to church.

I backed down the ladder and almost missed the last step before I caught myself. Maybe I did always want to be Jewish. As a seven-year-old, I loved All of a Kind Family, the book where I learned about the sukkah for the first time. I sought out immigrant stories, The Diary of Anne Frank, and loads of Young Adult Holocaust stories. I loved a strong Jewish heroine. I didn’t know many Jews growing up, but when I went to college on the East Coast, I went out with mostly Jewish guys. No surprise that I married one—our family's provider who was at work while I was building a sukkah with our kids.

I handed the hedge clippers to my oldest son, who was nine, and sent him over to cut a bunch of branches, our schach, from the laurel hedge that grew haphazardly into our yard. One rule is that the roof of the sukkah has to be made with plant matter. All the rules for the sukkah emphasize the impermanence of everything: our material comfort, our bodies, our lives—telling us all we have is a rickety structure to gather our family, feed our friends, and protect our neighbors. I climbed back up the ladder and the boys tossed the cut laurel branches up to me, and I attempted to lay them on top of our bamboo cube. The schach covering is supposed to be thick enough to protect from rain drops but sparse enough so you can see stars. I stapled a couple of old saffron sheets to our fence and the poles to make the walls. Technically, my walls may not have been kosher; they shouldn’t move in the wind. For decorations, the boys made paper chains out of construction paper, just like the ones I used to make for the Christmas tree, except these were orange and yellow instead of green and red. The first year of our sukkah, when my oldest was four, I wanted to add little twinkling lights, but my husband, Alex, nixed that idea; it was a step too close to Christmas for him.

I have to admit, the sukkah was like a Christmas tree for me. The tree was the part of Christmas I enjoyed doing with my family, and I didn’t want my sons to miss out. I celebrated the Jewish holidays with the gusto of the convert. When the rest of the world was celebrating Christmas, I could say, that’s not our holiday. Remember how much fun we had in the sukkah?

But can a sukkah really compete with a Christmas tree?

The sun was about to go down, but our sukkah was finally ready. With a lot of twine and some wire reinforcements, the bamboo supports were square and true. Our walls would hold up at least for the required week.

On the first night of Sukkot, all four of us gathered in the sukkah to say the blessings and shake the lulav. The air was a chilly Seattle October mist, not quite a rain. I handed the lulav—a bundle of myrtle, palm and willow, along with its companion, the etrog, a citron grown in Israel—to my younger son, who was seven. We said the blessing that commands us to shake the lulav. He held the bundle and the etrog in his hands and extended them, shaking in four directions. The wind rattled our sukkah and some shach blew off.

“Do we have to actually eat dinner out here?” Alex asked. “It’s getting cold, and we already said the blessings.”

“It’s not even raining! Just put on a jacket. Let’s just stay out here for a little longer,” I pleaded. I told the kids to get their coats while I ladled pumpkin soup into our bowls. We huddled around our patio table. Two holiday candles flickered in the wind. Then it started to drizzle, so we dipped our homemade challah in the soup and ate quickly. Bigger drops fell through the leaves.

I wiped my nose on my damp fleece sleeve. “Okay, let’s go in now.” Maybe we could stay out longer on another less damp night during the week. The kids grabbed the bowls, and I carried the candles inside. I felt I had to remind them we were lucky enough to have a warm house to go back to unlike some of the folks in our neighborhood.

This was my fifth Sukkot since I became a Jew when we moved to Seattle from San Francisco. The move had been disorienting and isolating, and, looking for community, I signed up for an Intro to Judaism Class at a Reform synagogue near us. I wasn’t sure I would convert, but I wanted to explore it. Even though I wasn’t the Jewish parent, I wanted my voice to count. I had strong ideas about how I wanted to raise Jewish children. That we should go to synagogue. That we should observe the sabbath. Alex didn’t think it was necessary because he was a cultural Jew. I told him it’s easy to raise Jewish children in New York without having an intentional Jewish community. But here it felt different. The Jewish High Holidays fall at the beginning of the school year, and I found myself explaining to teachers why our kids wouldn’t be in school for Rosh Hoshana—even on the first day of classes—and to the soccer coach why our kid would be missing the game on Yom Kippur—even if the other Jewish kids were coming.

You’ve heard the joke: A father and son are going over business records late on Friday afternoon. As the sun starts to set, the son says to his father, “I need to wrap this up. My wife wants me home before the sabbath starts.”

The father sighs and says, “I told you not to marry a shiksa.”

I was that shiksa. Always wanting to do more, to follow all the rules, even though I’m Reform. I’m not even Jewish in many parts of the world.

At Hannukah, we kept the gifts small, played dreidel, and made latkes. I made the same sugar cookies I had made with my mom as a child—not with the Santa Claus and reindeer metal cookie cutters I inherited from her but with new plastic magen davids and dreidels.

The year I converted—1997, 5783 in the Hebrew calendar—we were in Indiana for one of the every-other-year Christmases we spent with my family that coincided with Hannukah. I remember sitting in the living room breathing in the familiar scent of the fresh-cut Christmas tree. Snow fell on the dry corn stubble outside my parent’s farmhouse. I lit the shamus and handed it to my son to light the first candle in the menorah. We said the blessings as my nephew looked on. We wouldn’t be making latkes because it was Christmas Eve. We’d have fondue: cheese and chocolate. A tradition my family carries from the seventies to this day. We’d make latkes and applesauce once Christmas was over because one great thing about Hannukah is that you don’t have to do it all in one night. Lots of other families must have been doing the same double festive celebrating throughout North America, but as I placed the menorah in the window, I was pretty sure we were the only ones in that neighborhood and possibly all of Elkhart County.

I had worked out a brilliant compromise with my mother. She wanted to do stockings, but I was anti-Santa Claus. I had a lot of issues with Santa—not just because I was Jewish now. Maybe it was my brother’s fault for telling me there was no Santa when I was three. As an adult, I hated the idea of lying to children. My mother and I agreed that we would hang the stockings she had made for the kids, but we’d tell them the cat, Willy, had filled them while they were asleep. It had a nice symmetry: magical, but not involving a Christian saint. On Christmas morning my oldest son, who was then four, was delighted with the Legos, oranges, and nuts in his quilted red and green stocking. After he finished building his Lego spaceship, he said to me, “Willy couldn’t have filled these stockings; he doesn’t have any thumbs!”

I asked who he thought really gave him those presents, fully expecting him to say one of his grandparents.

“Santa Claus!” he replied.

A sukkah could never compete with a Christmas tree.

Last year—twenty-five years after that Christmas—my mother fell in the middle of the night in the memory care unit of the senior complex where my mom and dad lived. Her hip was broken and needed surgery, but afterwards, she didn’t wake up enough to swallow. We brought her home after a week. Hospice delivered a banged-up hospital bed to my dad’s apartment.

I sat by her bed and held her hand. Her breathing was labored, but I didn’t want to give her too much morphine. I searched Spotify on my phone for the Chopin nocturnes and etudes she used to play before she could no longer coordinate her mind and fingers on the piano keys. We listened for a long time, and then I played Joan Baez albums and sang along like we used to when I was little. When my dad came back in, I gave him my seat and went to check another thing off of my death preparation to-do list.

My mom wanted to be cremated but hadn’t made any plans. The hospice people had given me a list of funeral homes, and I called the ones with the highest Google ratings. I found myself saying to several, “I don’t know how to do this. I’m a Jew. We don’t cremate.” I asked if someone would be sitting with the body—something that would happen as a matter of course at a Jewish funeral home. Or if I could accompany her in the hearse, and I was told no.

After three days, my mom took her last breath. I washed her body and called the People’s Memorial Funeral Co-op to pick her up. We moved her to the gurney and covered her with one of her homemade quilts. She rode alone in the back of a white Ford Transit van to the crematoria, and when the driver asked me what music to play down the highway, I told him to play Chopin.

Maybe I’m not that Jewish. I didn’t know when to light the shiva candle since my mom wasn’t buried. Or if I should light a shiva candle at all. All those rules I love, do I follow them for a non-Jewish parent? My progressive friends told me I could do whatever I wanted that brought me comfort, but I couldn’t figure out what to do. Every time I said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead said for a year after losing a parent, there were less than the required ten Jews present. Did it count? Who is counting? Me? The G-d I’m not sure I believe in? Anyone who saw me davening alone by the California redwood on the Interlaken trail each time I went by on my morning run? For a year—in the drizzle, in the crisp air, or in the cool shade—I stopped. I took out my phone and read the Kaddish to myself and my mother and the tree, touching her rough and spider-webby bark. I prayed and looked up through the branches, the Fibonacci spiral of the boughs. I read the transliteration of the Aramaic, because I still can’t read Hebrew letters.

Why am I even Jewish anyway? My husband never asked me to convert, even though my in-laws brought it up long before we were engaged. He was having a glass of chardonnay with his folks at his childhood home on Long Island right after we graduated. He informed them we were moving in together.

“But your kids won’t be Jewish,” they told him.

“We’re not talking about getting married,” he said.

“Still,” they said.

Of course they were right about us getting married. But not about the kids not being Jewish.

We had a Jewish (style) wedding. We agreed to raise any children we had as Jews. By then, in my late twenties, I had lost any connection to the church of my childhood. I committed to raise one more generation of Jews in our family. Just like we say in services, l’dor v’dor—from generation to generation.

My eldest son was born in San Francisco before the turn of the last century. We didn’t know the sex of our baby until birth, but we agreed on a traditional Jewish circumcision, a bris, performed at home by a mohel if we had a boy. In preparation, Alex—at that point still in charge of All Things Jewish in the family—had contacted the best mohel in the city. We just had to let him know when the baby was born, and the mohel would come to our home to perform the bris, on the eighth day.

A few hours after our son was born, Alex left our birthing suite to call the mohel. After inquiring about the health of the baby and his mother, the mohel asked if I was Jewish. When Alex replied no, the mohel asked if I was going to convert.

“No,” Alex said and wondered why these questions weren’t asked before.

“In that case, I’m sorry, but I’m not comfortable performing a bris for a baby that isn’t Jewish,” the mohel replied.

Alex hung up and returned to our birthing suite. With our newborn son swaddled next to me in a plexiglass bassinet, Alex told me we had no mohel for the bris.

I started to cry. “I’m willing to ritually mutilate my child’s genitals for your religion, but I’m still not good enough!” I screamed, and I threw my water bottle across the room.

Alex picked the water bottle up, refilled it, and brought it back to me. He snuggled the baby’s blanket a little closer, kissed my forehead, and went back out to call the JCC; we only had eight days to find a replacement. The JCC had a list of Reform mohels, all of them pediatricians. But I started to have doubts. The Reform mohels might all be doctors, but were they really good enough to trust with a delicate operation on the privates of my precious child? I hadn’t worried much about that with the Orthodox mohel because he had done so many. I called my OBGYN to check on the pediatrician mohel who was available on the day of my son’s bris.

“She’s great!” my OBGYN said. Their families were friends and my OBGYN and the mohel had gone to medical school together. “You know she’s Chinese.”

I guess my OBGYN didn’t want me to be surprised. Our Chinese mohel was a Jew by choice and performed the bris of both of my sons. But even then, I didn’t think I wanted to be a Jew.

I have heard myself say that I converted for my children, but that’s not entirely true. My mother wished I had rediscovered our Brethren/Mennonite heritage at the time of my conversion. But I didn’t. I became a Jew and refused to have a Christmas tree in my house. I chose to be a Jew because I wanted the ritual and new language I was helping the kids learn to be mine as well. Compared to the austerity of the Pietist church of my childhood, Jewish rituals felt full of movement and poetry. It felt right to connect a blessing to an action instead of a belief. I was attracted to the hands-on aspect of a religion where the observances centered on the home. In my weekly Torah study, I could wrestle with an ancient text without having to abandon my modern intellect. This was the structure I wanted for my life. I had one last question for the rabbi before I embraced the covenant: Could I be a pacifist and a Jew? He mentioned Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch and the many Jews who participated in nonviolent resistance during the Civil Rights Era. I told him I was ready.

I had a sense I had been preparing my whole life for the Beit Din, the formal questioning of your intent and knowledge before you become a Jew. Always the over-achiever, after all my reading and study, I wanted harder questions. After the Beit Din, I went to the mikvah, a bath for ritual cleansing. In Orthodox communities, women must submerse in the mikvah after their periods, and men visit (a separate pool) before Yom Kippur. Both submerge when they convert. Our Reform synagogue didn’t have one, but my rabbi reserved the Sephardic Orthodox mikvah in Seward Park for me.

On the day of my conversion, I entered the women’s side with two female Jewish friends. No one was in the changing area except for the bare heads of the faceless wig holders for the sheitels of the women who visited the mikvah once a month. My friends helped me undress, and I put on a robe. We entered a small white-tiled room where steps descended into a simple pool. The mikvah was much bigger than the baptismal at the York Center Church of the Brethren. I slipped off my robe and handed it to my friend because you must go into the mikvah naked.

The rabbi, being male, was in a separate room and called out for me to enter the pool. I eased into the tepid water and stepped down to the bottom. My rabbi shouted the blessing to me, and I repeated it: Baruch atah Ado-nai Elo-heinu melech haolam… Then I submerged myself, not touching the sides or bottom. My friends confirmed to the rabbi that this was true. The water embraced me, my heart echoed the rhythm of the blessing under the water, and I came up to breathe. I dunked three times. When I stepped out, I was a Jew.

Two years ago—thirty-two years after Alex and I struggled to find a rabbi to officiate our wedding—my son and his wife had many options to consider when they had what they called “a Big Fat Jewipino Wedding” in the Bay Area. The rabbi they chose as the officiant was more than happy to include Catholic Filipino elements in the ceremony. My son and his bride circled each other and broke glasses. Their aunts and uncles on both sides paired up as sponsors, wrapping them in the silken cord and draping them with a lace veil. We lifted them up on chairs in the hora at an elegant winery just as Alex and I had been raised up by our family in the barn on my parents’ farm. They had a money dance; we had a bluegrass band that sang some hymns without saying the word “Jesus” during the ceremony.

When my son and daughter-in-law were having a baby last year, we weren’t told the gender of our grandchild until we joined them in the recovery room, along with the other grandparents, to greet our brand-new granddaughter. I was so relieved there was no bris question.

Both of my sons are now grown and live with non-Jewish partners. They watch all the Christmas movies. My daughters-in-law love Christmas for the family closeness and happy childhood memories. My sons like being a part of the festivities. This year, the first night of Hannukah is Christmas night. I’m giving big Hannukah presents even though I spent my kids’ childhood insisting that Hannukah is only a big holiday in the United States to compete with the consumer Christmas. It’s not even in the Torah.

This fall, we helped my eldest son’s family move to California. We drove their car and dog down from Portland, and they flew with their baby girl. Rosh Hoshana was in a few days, and we flew back to Seattle from California. We left them with a supply of Pacific Northwest apples and local honey. My son and daughter-in-law are building their own family life, just like Alex and I did. I was glad they had something sweet to start the New Year, and I was grateful my granddaughter would have the devotion of her Lola and Lolo and the protective eyes of the Virgin in every room. I hope that was how my mom felt all of those every-other-Christmases.

L’dor v’dor.

About the author:

Tamara Bailey, a former grant writer and early childhood educator, writes, runs and knits in Seattle.

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When we were young and alive together in Detroit of the 1980s, we called Lee “Leroy” from time to time. Uncle Ricky, my mother’s baby brother, started the nickname. I think we got a kick out of it because Leroy was, to our young ears, an old Southern name that mothers no longer give their kids. Our parents were born in Jim Crow’s Georgia and Mississippi and moved north to the Blackest city in the country, and we siblings were used to hearing dialects transported across place and memory. Still, we didn’t yet understand how Uncle Ricky was blessing my brother. Remember: “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, the baddest man in the whole damn town.” I think that’s how the song went. I don’t know—it was before my time. 

Leroi, my son, was named after my brother Lee. My ex-wife added this other empowerment, donning him “LeRoi,” French for “the king.” So my son’s name is simultaneously ancestral, Southern, an inside joke, an inheritance (my father’s full name is Large Lee Copeland; his brothers include Tommy Lee and James Lee), a translation, a compromise, and on top of all this, a title to command respect from the white world if he should find himself there.

Sometimes, when my tongue is too tired for two syllables, I call him “Le,” which sounds like “Lee.”

I just dropped Le off with his mom. I’m back home on the east side of Detroit where cats roam like bands of nomads. I flop into a comfortable chair, stare at my laptop. At a photograph of my brother. Probably one of the last pictures ever taken of him. My mind roams.

Leroi’s twelve years old. His mother, D, has remarried and moved away from Detroit—two counties north and at least as many worlds away. He spends two weekends a month with me. That’s been a struggle, an accomplishment to even get us to this point. I remember times when he missed his mother so much that he made himself sick. I remember midnight driving an hour in each direction to drop him off when staying with me was just too much for his nervous system. His eyes and nose were a runny crying mess, heaving and stammering beside me as we drove to meet D at our rendezvous spot. 

I often take Leroi to hockey games and practices. I remember when his hockey bag was too big and heavy for him to pull himself. We parents would come into the locker room to prepare our kids for ice time. He’d lift up his arms and I would pull his jersey down over his chest. I used to help him snap his helmet. I used to tie his skates, stretching my fingers to pull the laces as tight as I could to support his ankles. Now I drop him off at the front door of the arena and he makes his own way to meet his teammates. The arena’s cold isn’t solely from the rink’s frozen temperature; I sometimes feel a chill when I’m the only Black parent in the stands, especially at away games.

Seven years ago, he came home from school and told us he wanted to play ice hockey. I doubt if either his mom or I had ever said the word “hockey” in the house. I don’t think we’d ever even taken him ice skating. We would be just as surprised if he came home fluent in Arabic. Where did you get that from? A couple times a year he has tournaments in distant cities scattered around the state like Traverse City or Bay City. The team stays in a hotel together. The boys eat pizza together, they run the hallways, they take over the pool area, laughing and splashing.

Laughter has always been Leroi’s love language. When Leroi was maybe five years old, he joined me at a community event I helped host at the UU Church’s memorial hall. The whole place thrummed to the DJ’s beat: seventy or eighty people eating food from local soils and roaming over the chipped linoleum floor and talking about food justice and laughing with each other and listening to poets pull thunder from their hearts.

Towards the program’s end, as people were bundling up to face winter’s wind and we started to wipe off the tables, our collective children were brought to the front of the room to do the Whip and Nae Nae. They lined up in front of a huge hand-painted banner that said “Environmental Action.” With the other children pointing and turning, prancing around him, Leroi stood straight and still, reaching for the mic. He wasn’t even tall enough to reach it on the stand. I looked up and promised him he could speak after the event was over. While we were putting up tables and chairs, he roasted us all with his best fart and poop jokes.

Now he’s a comedian only in the passenger seat of my car. My Ford Focus is cluttered with his hockey gear, wrappers from our meals on the road, sweatshirts and blankets. Salt scattered from a few winters has begun to eat away the car’s white paint. Each year more rust near the wheels. And Leroi’s approaching his teenage years. He’s much quieter in public. He’s grown into his own anxiety after his folks’ divorce. It takes him much longer to warm up to people he doesn’t know.

He says, “You were such a nerd when you were younger, Dad. Do you even have any friends.”

Mines. He knows he’s the funny one between us. Driving him to school or picking him up, going to the movies, west to Dearborn for miniature golf, a trip north to meet his mom in the Meijer parking lot, leaving the city for a weekend tournament. As soon as he closes the door, he lets loose. He loves it when I have to stop him from joking: “Boy, you’re gonna make me crash this car.” His imitation of a nerd—how does he know this is what I was (am?)—is one part vampire, one part creep, one part Quasimodo: slurring, dragging, drooling, unsuccessfully stumbling towards companionship.

In January 2024, after what would have been my brother’s 43^rd birthday, Lee’s friend Kamal messaged me a picture of him. I saved it to my computer and keep returning to it. Because I don’t have many memories, I hold tightly to the photograph, looking, looking: Lee, Kamal, and another friend, D’Juan, are in the center of a crowd; they’re lit like they’re the center of attention. He’s in high school, still alive. Above their heads are speckled square drop-ceiling tiles, the kind that were probably made of asbestos.

That picture was taken at Renaissance High School—a magnet school where kids had to test and apply to enter—a gem of Detroit’s public school system. During the 1980s, Renaissance was completely college prep. By the late 1990s, it had respected sports programs and a marching band, and my brother played drums and was on the football team. He would have graduated in 1999. The building that held his footprints—the one from that picture—was demolished and a new one erected in 2005.

What are we looking at in this picture? Is it 70s night? A pep rally? A talent show? A roasting battle? Who are these three young Black men, angels of their own realm? Did they win the costume contest? It looks like the three are parting a crowd.

Kamal is the shortest of the three. He’s wearing a tan trench coat with a fake fur collar and looks like a lion roaring.  He’s popping his collar, spreading his angelic wings.

D’Juan is wearing a bright smile, a black hat, and a white suit with all three buttons buttoned.  

Lee is wearing a brown leather coat. I remember this coat. Did it used to be mines? Did he wear it while I was hundreds of miles away at school? Did he wear that jacket to think about his older brother? His white fedora is tilted forward. His white collared shirt, open at the neck. His arm hangs around DeJuan's shoulders. Lee looks like their bodyguard, standing over them, their protector. 

I’m lost in the look of sadness in Lee’s eyes. Is it my sadness or his I see? He looks down and away, his lips parted loosely as if he’s holding something back or holding something in. The only one in the photo not showing his teeth. Is he mourning his mother while surrounded by friends? Is he out when he was supposed to be home, steeling himself to cross the assault threshold with Father later that night?  Are you at the party, Lee, or are you somewhere else altogether? Are you putting on your armor or are we seeing a glimpse underneath the protection?

That hand you put on your friend’s shoulder, Lee! The smiles all around you. Your comforting hand makes all that possible. That’s a party, flickering Black joy. For that fleeting moment, everything is going to be all right.

I talk to my brother more frequently than I ever have before, lighting candles during sacred time squeezed between sessions on my laptop. My dining room table is an altar, a writing desk, an inside joke, a gift from my dad and stepmom. The lit flame watches over this writing, my looking.

I look at that photograph again and feel a flicker of failure. I don’t know what he is thinking. Is he writing his script for how he will say goodbye, planning his own departure at the party? 

A memory arises: in the front seat with my brother. I had flown home from California on a school break. I was driving my father’s Jeep, Lee riding shotgun. Running errands or driving nowhere in particular. By this time my younger brother was taller than me. I don’t think he lived long enough to get a driver’s license.

Hip hop was a love that we shared. Lee rapped on local radio shows and at high school parties. We sat side by side listening to Mobb Deep. I can’t remember what song was playing as we cruised by things we’d see every day: pizza joints, beauty shops, high schools before they were boarded up, liquor stores, Black folk watering their lawns: “as time goes by/ an eye for an eye/ we in this together, son/ your beef is mines/ so long as the sunshine can light up the sky” or “until my death/ my only goal’s to stay alive/ we living this/ to the day that we die/ survival of the fit/ only the strong survive.”  We probably listened to the entire The Infamous album. Or maybe just these two raps on repeat. Two brothers listening to a hip hop duo speak rhythmically of overcoming odds: Havoc and Prodigy. Special moments together listening to words of death. The impact of the sparse drums repeat like punches and kicks.

Between my son and my brother, I feel like I am going to explode. I wish I could be closer to both of them. I feel I’m supposed to be closer. Close enough to… 

To do what, I don’t know.

When our laughter dies down, Leroi asks me, “Do you even have any friends?” He means dudes. He’s steeped in the casual camaraderie of his suburban hockey team. At the team dinner, he takes a white boy’s hat. The boy chases him. They sit shoulder to shoulder, watching each other play games on their phones. Heroes who run endlessly to new levels, grabbing power objects, jumping over obstacles. Get the timing right and scoring more and more goals. 

Leroi doesn’t want to pray at an altar. He doesn’t want to play tai chi with me. He doesn’t want any of my “wisdom,” just to play with his friends. He doesn’t want to answer my question “How was your day” with more than a single word. He wants to laugh and cuss in the front seat of my Ford Focus. He wants me to drive him by his former school, by the house in Detroit where all we used to live together. He asks me to reconnect with his friends’ mothers and make arrangements for them to get together.

The candle is burnt out. Now an extinguished, solitary wick. I stare at the photograph, at the memories that remain in my heart, and light a new small flame to get close enough to close the distance between us. Close enough to feel the heat’s warm fingers. I speak until the fire burns bright. The words are still staggering, dragging, tumbling slow as syrup. How many years did I miss? I’m sorry for all the times I was unable to hold him.

As the years pass, memories fall from my mind, and my son grows taller and further away. These echoes both haunt and strengthen me.

Owólabi Aboyade

(born William I. Copeland)

About the author:

Owólabi Aboyade is a multidimensional essayist/poet/critic/hip hop artist (Will See Music) from Detroit. He studies nonfiction in Pacific University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing (class of 2025). His poetry chapbook, Lee,Young Lee was published by AWE Society Press in the eventful summer of 2024. Order it here! He’s currently working on a collection of essays about grief, culture, and masculinity in gentrifying Detroit.

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MARTHA THORNE AND I WERE the only dry-eyed girls in the bunch. Everyone else was crying, to put it far too mildly. Imagine a three-year-old who falls flat on her face so hard she loses a firmly-rooted front tooth and after a second of pure bewilderment about what the hell just happened contorts her face like one of those hideous apple dolls and starts wailing. It was like that, except we were fifth and sixth graders. And there were twenty of us. With teeth. Arizona Desert Ponderosa Girl Scout Troop #316, huddled together in the middle of a large canvas mess tent with our leaders, all of us wailing. Except me and Martha Thorne.

Our troop was clustered so as not to touch the sides of our tent during the storm. Surges of rain were coming at us sideways like God was just outside our camp doing donuts in a monster truck through an ocean-sized puddle. His rapture was our torment. We were like penguins hoping to fend off an Antarctic blizzard with a show of defenseless fellowship.

Suddenly, the rain paused and the hair stood up on my arms and I had this weird taste in my mouth like I had popped a transistor-radio-flavored jellybean. Lightning had struck a pine tree right outside the tent. The ground seemed to fall away. Time stretched. I glimpsed the pure light at the beginning and end of the universe.

The second strike was like a defibrillator, a well-timed jolt capable of returning a faltering heart to the present instantiation of a meaningful life—in our case, the quest for badges reflecting our survival preparedness. Who wouldn’t fall to her knees and weep openly at the chance for more of this?

What variation there is in this apparently natural reflex comes down to its attendant sounds: there are whimperers and heavers and snifflers and those people who don’t make any sound at all until they gasp in approximately a gallon of air all at once. All were represented here. For some, no doubt, these were tears of joy for having narrowly skirted electrocution. For others, spontaneous expressions of a primal fear; the sudden recognition of our puniness against the mountain squall; a jarring glimpse of one’s soft, fleshy impermanence.

I was dithering, swallowed in this cowering blob of pigtails and green jumpers. Martha Thorne and I locked eyes and immediately read each other’s minds: A disaster of the highest magnitude! We do not fit in. We are freaks. Our lives will be miserable. No one will love us.

We both started to giggle uncontrollably, followed by desperate maneuvers to cover it up. We overplayed the shuddering motions of the sobbing girls all around us, which induced more giggling, which led to covering our faces with our hands, which was the right move, it turned out. We blended in perfectly with our blubbering peers (and leaders), while nevertheless convulsing in some kind of maniacal mirth.

It had already been a trying week. Survival preparedness is no joke and they don’t give away those coveted badges for nothing. The first thing we needed to learn was how to identify and avoid poison ivy, which was everywhere. In the first couple of days several cool girls broke out in rashes and thus the pink stain of calamine lotion swiftly became a desirable symbol of grit. Soon my best friend Stephanie had to be hauled away in a forest service truck thanks to her newly discovered hypersensitivity to the poison ivy, which came to light because she and I were picking the leaves and rubbing them on our wrists and necks like perfume samples. Stephanie was thereafter a legend, earning in absentia the Budding Botanist Badge. I proved somehow immune.

The sleeping tents at Camp Whispering Pines were more like canvas buildings than tents, complete with raised floors and wooden doors and just enough room for five thin foam mattresses arranged in a starburst pattern. Stephanie’s vacated pallet was taken over by a plump girl who requested a move after one or more of her original tent-mates had spread a substantial helping of cooked carrots and lima beans inside her sleeping bag. News of the prank exploded and, as you might expect, elevated the pranksters in all the ways that counted. The way I heard it, the victim happily zipped herself in before feeling something clammy, leapt out of her bag with some mushy chunks of the unpopular side dish stuck to her PJs, fumbled for her flashlight, tumbled over her personal medical emergency kit blocking the door, yelled “Witches!” and ran into the night without shoes. Outside, she was intercepted by Mrs. Kavanagh, who was sitting behind the leader’s tent on a stump having a clandestine smoke. After a good long talking-to about respect and rules, the assumed perpetrators were sentenced to two days of latrine duty, which earned them the Community Service Badge.

In our tent, the new girl introduced herself by way of instructions about what to do if she were to slip into a seizure: “Don’t put anything in my mouth, clear the space around me, and make sure I don’t die”—which, she assured us, “hardly ever happens.”

In the specter of that possibility, we settled into our bags in that dark dark that only happens when you’re far, far from streetlights and nightlights and stuffed animals and parents snoring across the hallway. I hovered my hand inches above my wide-open eyes. Nothing. Only one way to deal with this level of vulnerability: do not, under any circumstances, fall asleep.

All the sniffling and shuffling and zipper-adjusting trailed off, and our tent was quiet. It was my other best friend Patty’s turn to tell a ghost story—that hallowed tradition of conjuring images of child dismemberment and live burial in the suffocating darkness of a fabric-walled shelter in shadowy woods chock-full of nocturnal predators. My stomach rolled.

Patty was a little tank: short, fearless and tan. She owned boxing gloves. She was allowed to see R-rated movies. She sometimes skipped church with her brother, who could already drive and smoke. Her brother had long straggly tan hair and was the sort my parents liked to call a bad influence, which led me to decide without further evidence that he was the one stealing bikes from open garages in our neighborhood—probably to sell for drugs and guitars. Her brother was also the source of Patty’s deep knowledge of strange but true facts, which is how I knew that some people were actually the hybrid children of space aliens and there was no way to tell until, say, they invite you to their “dad’s” cabin in the woods, which happens to be a spaceship, and the next thing you know your parents are crying on television and your picture is on the side of a milk carton.

Naturally, Patty’s ghost story turned out to be an alien story: A grapefruit-sized capsule containing a whole planet’s worth of microscopic aliens crashes to Earth. They’re here to take over this world by getting under our skin. As soon as you touch one, it works its way up under your fingernails where there’s not only gross stuff they like to eat but the conditions are right for alien mating and whatnot. But if you bite your nails, they get into your saliva and you swallow some, and once they’re in your stomach and intestines they make you hungry for super disgusting foods like cottage cheese and canned creamed spinach, which the aliens love. Eventually elder-aliens make it to your brain and whisper things to you, negative things, things that make you feel small and hopeless, things about how you can’t sing or you look like a boy or you’re stupid and not as cute as your sisters because your teeth are crooked and you cry too much.

Patty told it better, of course, leaning into the drama of the details. Four kids at this very camp (!) just last year (!) snuck out of their tents at midnight (!) and gathered at the pond’s edge where, wedged under a rock, tucked into a Sucrets tin, a small stash of sugary contraband awaited. As the girls struggled to open the stubbornly rusted-shut tin, the sky lit up! A fiery object traced a long arc and hit the ground on the other side of the pond. Thanks to their recently-awarded Astronomy and Canoeing Badges, they concluded it was a meteorite, donned appropriately snug-fitting lifejackets, jumped into a canoe, and paddled across to have a look.

One kid spotted a smoking orb on a bed of scorched pine needles and led an all-out sprint to retrieve it. It was pretty light, maybe hollow. She shook it. It sounded like a maraca. Another girl grabbed it and threw it down on a rock, over and over. It didn’t even dent! They decided to bring it back to camp and try to open it with an axe, which would have involved breaking into the tool locker, since—as with pocket knives and strike-anywhere matches—axes were strictly off-limits to junior scouts.

But guess what? They didn’t need to open it! Already, at least a hundred thousand million aliens had crawled out of their microscopic door and were chowing down under each kid’s fingernails! Before long the kids had no friends because they were eating the most revolting things (even the camp oatmeal!) and saying things like, I hate school. I hate camp. I hate my parents. I hate myself.

At that point in Patty’s story, a tiny fleck of a mouse scurried over my legs and I freaked out. I screamed and jumped up, holding my sleeping bag up to my neck. I hopped on top of the plump girl—Jasmine was her name, I think—and she started writhing, and the others were yelling at me to get off of Jasmine in case she was having a seizure. We were like dogs, barking like crazy because the others are barking, having lost all track of what started it. Except I was the only one standing on top of another girl when Mrs. Kavanagh burst in to see what the commotion was all about.

We couldn’t say, “Ohm, it was just a mouse,” because that would not look good for us, especially me. Jasmine shoved me down and yelled, “Aliens! Our camp is being taken over by aliens!” That didn’t look so good for us either.

The next night we were gathered to earn our Hunting Badge, which I’m pretty sure does not exist for Girl Scouts. There was a badge for cooking dead squirrel or whatever over an open fire (that someone else would start, of course), and one for gathering edible berries and wild herbs. But hunting was generally thought to be Boy Scout business. Nevertheless, there we were, a bunch of girls armed with flashlights and paper bags preparing to hunt down and capture the elusive forest-dwelling snipe.

We got instructions before heading into the woods: girls will take turns holding a paper bag’s open end to a crack between rocks, or a hole in a tree, or anything that looks like a promising snipe habitat. Everyone will douse their light and stomp on the ground, trying to scare the snipe from its home into the paper bag.

“Ready?” Miss Pringle asked.

Miss Pringle was somebody’s aunt, tall with a crescent moon-shaped face and tight pony-tail. She had big teeth and big bulgy eyes that locked onto yours like scanners attuned to any form of fibbery or false bravado. She was also the camp medic and always followed the intimate closeness of Band-Aid application with “There. You’re fine.” I desperately wanted her to like me.

A litany of questions lit up my not-fully-formed brain: Do they bite? What if they have babies in there? What do we do with it after it’s caught? But I was afraid to ask a dumb question, even though everyone says there is no such thing. So off we went, trampling a gravelly path, all these circles of light twirling and bouncing ahead. I was marching hard so the snipes would hear us coming and hunker down.

Miss Pringle suddenly shushed us and signaled with her light to a spot on the ground. I saw nothing there but dirt, but the others seemed impressed. One of the cool girls stepped forward and positioned her paper bag. We stomped in the dark, my light footfalls easily drowned out by the zealous majority. The bag wiggled like she’d snared something but then, no, it got away. Everyone was surprisingly dramatic about the loss.

No one wanted to give up on that Hunting Badge—we had to keep trying. Another girl, another hole, another bag, more stomping, still nothing. This went on for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, we caught one. All the other girls were extraordinarily elated. The bag crackled against the frantic snipe and its captor carefully handed it off to Miss Pringle who, taking control of the bag, asked for a volunteer to take the snipe home. “Otherwise,” she said, “we will have this furry little fellow for lunch tomorrow.”

The bag rattled furiously. In a rare moment of fearlessness, I blurted out before anyone else could: “Me! Can it be me?”

That was the longest night in a series of very long nights. Miss Pringle took the snipe to the leader’s tent “for food and water, and brushing,” which made everyone laugh. I laughed too because, you know, that’s what you do. I couldn’t wait to meet the little fellow but they all said, tomorrow. So I lay there thinking about what to call him (Gus), where I would keep Gus, what Gus would want to eat, if my dad was going to be mad that I volunteered to take Gus home. I bit my fingernails and thought about microscopic aliens in my intestines and brain. I dreamt I was home and a giant grotesque spidery monster was lurking under my bed, waiting for me to doze off and mindlessly let an arm dangle off the side so this fiend and its babies could shred me to pieces in a hungry frenzy. I woke up starving and gobbled down the long-cooked sticky unsweetened oatmeal. I sat alone, hating Stephanie for leaving without me and hating Patty for telling that crappy story. I even hated Patty’s brother for no good reason.

It started to hail and our last chance to get an Archery Badge went out the window. All I wanted was to collect Gus and go home, which I mentioned to Jasmine when she plopped her tray down across from me and some of her oatmeal spurted up and hit me in the eye.

“Who is Gus?” she asked.

“I named the snipe Gus. Remember? I’m taking him home.”

“Oh, right.”

Jasmine, like the rest of our hunting party, knew but failed to reveal that there was no snipe to name or bring home, that it was all a funny prank. She sat there noisily wolfing down her oatmeal just as I had. I didn’t learn about Gus’s nonexistence for another seven hours or so. We spent the entire day in the mess tent, our whole troop, waiting out the weather. We did puzzles. Sang songs. Ate lunch. We made God’s Eyes and pine cone paraffin candles to give to our moms. Patty finally broke the news to me when I asked if she could loan me her old hamster cage. For Gus.

That’s when the rain started coming down in sideways sheets. Mrs. Kavanagh reminded us to stay clear of the tent sides. Flash—Kaboom—and a second later everyone was crying except for me and Martha Thorne. I have no recollection of how long the sobbing went on, but I remember how it ended. Mrs. Kavanagh broke free from the giant group hug, sat down on a chair and pulled a partial pack of Marlboro Lights out from between her breasts. She lit one and took a long drag. Smoke drifted from her nostrils and she tilted her head back, making smoke rings with her mouth, puckering like a fish. I watched the little saucer shapes drift up, dissipate and disappear, listening to the thrum of my own heart.

“Girls,” she said, deftly moving the ordeal to past tense, “that was as real as it gets.”

About the author:

Gina Calderone lives in and wanders around Auburn, California.

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IN 2014, A PRISON INMATE gifted me two beautiful hummingbird necklaces that he had meticulously handcrafted out of hundreds of seed beads. Each pendant is about half the size of my palm, one in shades of green and the other in shades of blue. The hummingbirds are forever mid-flight, with bronze beads strung together to outline the edges of their wings. They have white and yellow beads on their chests and bellies, and their beaks are long and slender, as thin as sewing needles. The tails of the birds are clusters of beads that tickle against your chest when you wear them.

For a long time, the necklaces seemed too delicate to wear. I kept them on a white jewelry plate with a yoga bracelet and one of Dad’s sobriety tokens. But years later, when my sons were little, two and five, they were drawn to the birds. They loved to wear them during the pandemic when we were trapped in the house all day. I draped the necklaces around their little necks and watched them flap their arms all over the living room, jumping off the couch onto a bed of pillows, calling themselves Greeny and Bluey. One time, my oldest son asked to climb up onto my shoulders with the necklace on. I channeled my father’s playful spirit and let him. He hoisted himself up and clasped his fingers into my outstretched hands, and we swayed throughout the house, an unsteady human tower, flapping our arm-wings together, saying, “Buzz Buzz” (because we guessed this might be the sound a hummingbird makes). Greeny bounced on my head and we took a few laps around the kitchen table before it was time for my youngest to take his turn.

For all the times the kids wore these necklaces, not a single bead ever broke off.

Now Greeny is the only bird on my jewelry plate because Bluey is in a black box with my father’s ashes. In November of 2023, he passed away due to the health consequences of addiction—a battle that spiraled out of control in his fifties, with periods of sobriety he heartbreakingly couldn't hold onto. My sister Julie and I hated the illness, but we loved him, this person who gave us the childhood of our dreams, who lost his way climbing the corporate ladder, who strived to give his daughters "everything" despite the fact we already had it.

When he entered hospice care at Hartford Hospital, he was sixty-nine years old. Julie and I spent four days and three nights by his bedside, and before he passed, Julie put a rock engraved with an infinity symbol into his left hand and gently folded his frail fingers over it. I put the Bluey necklace into his right. He could no longer speak or open his eyes by this time, but still, I hoped he felt the power and intricate beauty of a necklace crafted by someone who had lived inside the walls of a prison cell, the way he did back in 2012. I hoped Dad felt the spirit of his grandchildren wearing the necklace, and the lightness of a world spent on the shoulders of someone you love. There was something about the strength of these tiny beads, the way they stuck together all these years. I hoped he felt that, too.

The last week of Dad’s life was filled with cold, gray New England skies, but the morning after his passing, the sun finally breaks through. I wake before the rest of the house, having barely slept, and carry my fourteen-year-old blind Terrier, Bella, into the backyard. I set her down in the grass to do her business. Tiny diamonds of dew cling to the blades. Everything is bathed in a radiant, golden glow, and this sudden burst of sunshine feels unfair. I want to go back to Dad’s final days and give him this kind of warmth and light outside of his hospital window. I want to go back thirty years and tell him that the trips to sunny places he worked so hard to give us during his 25-year sales career—before he lost it all—were nice, but I’d trade the beaches of Florida and California and Hawaii for him any day.

I’ve been to enough Al-Anon meetings to know that the complexities of addiction can’t be boiled down to one cause, and that his inability to recover was not my fault, but I still wonder, was there anything I could have done to keep those business trips from turning into benders that turned into the black hole he couldn’t climb out of. Should I have sat him down and said, Listen, Dad, I know that you think your value as a man comes from providing, from not giving up, from making it big…but you were a giant the moment you were born, and bigger than all the galaxies in the universe to your daughters, and sometimes, even the biggest and best of us need help.

Was there anything I could have done to change his fate? Did he know how much we loved him before he died? Did I ever thank him for all the times he carried me up on his shoulders around the house, pretending he was a magic carpet and I was Princess Jasmine? Did I thank him for learning the choreography to ‘N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye” and practicing with me for months in the living room? For coaching my eighth-grade basketball team and for helping me survive Algebra that year? For the time my high school crush called to say that he liked another girl, and Dad helped me cut his picture out of my yearbook and then rip it into a million pieces and then took me out to get ice cream?

Did he know how much it meant to me when he gave me his thirty-day sobriety token, or brought me to a meeting with him, and that time he made amends to me in a church basement in 2009, saying, “Honey, I’m going to spend the rest of my life making up for the pain I’ve caused you. I love you more than you’ll ever know”? Did he know I was in the room with him the moment he took his last breath? Are these the kind of questions on every person’s mind the morning after losing someone so central to their being?

Bella makes her way back to me. She bumps gently into my leg, her tail wagging against my calf. A murder of crows caw somewhere nearby. Bella’s nose twitches as she sniffs the air, trying to identify the source of the commotion. I follow her gaze upwards and spot three crows flying overhead, their black silhouettes stark against the blue sky. When they disappear into the horizon, I remember something I once read about hummingbirds. Unlike most birds, hummingbirds don’t flap their wings up and down—they rotate them in a figure-eight, in an infinity symbol.

In April, six months after Dad passes, the temperature in Connecticut soars into the seventies. My husband is away on a business trip, and my mom offers to watch the kids, now seven and three. I drop them off at her house twenty minutes away and return home to Luna, a nine-month-old Hound mix that we adopted ten months ago from a local rescue group. It’s the perfect afternoon to take her for a long walk.

When I enter the front door of our house and close the door behind me, Luna is sprawled across the living room couch, chewing on Greeny like a bone in between her paws.

“Oh my God, Luna!” I scream. She leaps off the couch and dashes away. I pick up the necklace from the wet spot on the couch where Luna left it. The clasp is missing but otherwise, it’s miraculously intact. The pendant is slick and covered in slobber and a few white, wiry dog hairs stick out from the wings.

“What the fuck!” I scream again and pace around the house looking for her. Luna started destroying things the week we brought her home. She ate the pair of new black shoes I bought for my father's funeral, gnawing the heels off just hours before the service. Then she ate the floral arrangement I brought home from the service. Just yesterday, she chewed the arms off of one of the kid’s favorite transformer toys.

I find Luna cowering in the back of her crate, her floppy, copper-colored ears pushed back, her long tail tucked, and I immediately feel bad. I shouldn’t have yelled like that. I take a deep breath and try to calm my voice. “Luna,” I say. “Please stop eating everything.” She tilts her head as if she is listening, but I doubt it.

I attempt to dry Greeny with a towel and pick the dog hairs out and place him on a bookshelf where my sons keep their finished Lego vehicles. Bella, who got in a thousand times less trouble as a puppy, sleeps in her bed peacefully, oblivious to the Luna/Greeny drama. I apologize to Luna again for yelling and close her crate door.

I decide I’m going to the park alone. Not to walk the dog, not to push a swing, but to just be. This might be the first truly solitary moment I've had in weeks. Perhaps I've been alone while doing the dishes or on the way to the grocery store or in the carpool pickup line, but that is a functional, on-the-way-to-somewhere kind of alone, and today, I need the other, more spacious, less hurried, kind. So does every other mom I know.

I pull my black Toyota into the same parking lot where my father taught me how to drive. That day, in my first attempt to back out of a parking spot, I accidentally put the car in Drive instead of Reverse and we plunged over the curb and nearly into the trees. I can still see Dad now: his hands flying up in the air in a moment of stunned silence. Then, with his head tilting back and laughter erupting from somewhere deep in the belly, both of us found ourselves breathless and teary-eyed from laughing so hard.

Today, I walk past the trees I nearly drove into all those years ago, then past two handmade birdhouses, one teal and the other a fiery red. An old, familiar sign reads “Sundust Trail.” The mailbox full of walking maps stands sentry near the trail, and I cross a bridge over the babbling stream. Someone has penned in big letters on the underside of the bridge: “How are you doing?” and I think to myself, pretty shitty.

My problems at forty are different from the ones I came to this very trail to walk off at fifteen, seventeen, and twenty—troubles that all worked themselves out eventually: the F I got on an Algebra exam did not, in fact, ruin my life; the boy I swore was my soulmate was not; and my father’s battle with addiction ended. Not in the way I wanted it to end, but it ended.

I make my way deeper into the woods, the air thick with the scent of pine needles and damp earth. Sunlight filters through the canopy of branches and budding leaves. Soon, coming in the opposite direction, a mother pushes her baby in a jogging stroller. We smile at each other. Her baby is perhaps a year old and screaming his head off. The mom looks tired, and I hope, as they walk closer, that my smile communicates that I see her, and I am her.

When we're about to pass each other on the path, my smile suddenly doesn’t feel enough, and I say, hoping it’s not taken the wrong way: “Mama, you’ve got this.”

“Ughh, I sure hope so,” she says. She lets out a nervous laugh over the baby’s cries and lifts one hand from the stroller handle and places it briefly on the baby’s forehead.

“You do,” I say.

We smile at each other again and keep walking our own separate ways. A multitude of downed trees lies in a shallow pond, some half-submerged, their branches reaching skyward like skeletal arms, while other trunks stand tall, roots anchored in the muddy pond floor. The water is still deep enough to reflect the surrounding trees, creating a mirror image of the forest. A squirrel scampers across one of the tree trunks and disappears into the brush. A fat bumblebee flies by, the first one I’ve seen this season.

Last night, my oldest son and I listened to an episode about bees from our favorite podcast, But Why, where two librarians from Vermont answer questions from kids all around the world: If I swallow bubble gum, will it stay in my belly forever? If I eat too many blueberries, will I turn blue? Why are pandas black and white? Is it true that my brain will turn into mush if I watch too much TV? How do bees make honey? In the bee episode, the librarians visit a beekeeper in Maine and discuss how important all kinds of bees are to the planet, how they are the earth’s greatest pollinators, and how their honey not only tastes good but can be used to heal wounds. My son moved the teddy from between us where we lay on his Star Wars-themed bunk bed, looked into my eyes and said, “Did you know bees weren’t all bad? I thought they were just mean bugs that sting us.”

I told him that few things in life are “all bad,” but now, as I walk the trail that I once walked with Dad, it’s difficult to see Dad’s battle with addiction and his death as anything but all bad. Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino from The Jersey Shore recently posted a picture of his family, two young kids and his wife, with a two-layer Funfetti cake and the caption, “I’m 8 years clean and sober today. The comeback is always greater than the setback.” His son is adorably swiping a finger through the rainbow sprinkles on the cake. Mike has millions of followers, book deals, and a separate Instagram account dubbed “The Hope Dealer.” Even though I don't follow him, his stuff still finds me, as if Instagram knows I was the daughter of an amazing dad who couldn’t get clean and sober, who had the potential to heal and make an inspiring comeback, but never did.

In my twenties, someone in my eating disorder recovery support group correctly observed that in most areas of my life at that time, I thought in terms of black and white, all or nothing. There were good foods and bad foods, amazing days and the worst of them, and not much in between. When it came to Spirit or God or a Higher Power, however, I was gray, in between, wishy-washy.

She asked me to put my all-or-nothing thinking to good use and try out a specific walking meditation, which I did the following day on my lunch break. It was 2013 and I brought Bella with me to the pond behind the advertising agency where I worked. We walked a slow loop around the pond, past turtles sunbathing on rocks, water lilies, birds of paradise, tall grass swaying in the breeze. As instructed, I repeated to myself: God is nothing. Love is nothing. Higher Power is nothing. Over and over again. I walked and muttered those words under my breath for about five minutes, feeling so heavy and empty that even the explosion of flowers at the back of the pond didn't look all that pretty.

Then, on my second loop, I repeated: God is everything. Love is everything. Higher Power is everything. The kaleidoscope of color I saw that time around time blew me away. The glistening specks in the pavement. The birds. The light refracting off of the water. The emerald, jade, and lime leaves shimmering in the trees. Everything looked brighter, sharper, and more vivid. I remember calling my friend afterwards and telling her that I wanted to live a life like the second loop, with brightness and color. “Then start living as though Someone greater than you has your back,” she said.

In the final days of my father’s life in the hospital, I knew Someone had my back. The day before he died, my sister played several online recovery meetings on her phone near Dad’s morphine drip. In one meeting, a man who was maybe in his twenties shared that his mother took him to get a sixty-day celebratory haircut, the best haircut of his life. Someone a few decades older shared that he “couldn’t stand his big brother’s ass” while growing up, but now, in sobriety, they were close. Together, they took care of their mother who had Alzheimer’s until the very end. Just that morning, he got a call at six a.m. from his brother. The man choked up: “There were a lot of things I was looking for in sobriety. My brother calling me out of the blue just to say I love you was not one of them.”

As the meetings played, I swiped through all the beautiful Zoom box faces: different genders, races, ethnicities, ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, a diverse group of people that I instantly loved. I wished Dad could open his eyes and look at them. I wished they could see him, too.

That night, I dreamed I was at Dog Beach in Del Mar, California, with Dad, a place we once visited. Pups ran around us everywhere, panting and barking and lapping up the sunshine, but Dad and I were the only people on the beach. Dad was healthy, with black hair and tan skin. He wore a white t-shirt and red basketball shorts, the outfit I most remember him in when I was a child. He was barefoot like me, and we stood in shallow water so crystal clear we could see our toes. Dad’s eyes were chestnut brown, relaxed and easy like his smile.

Then someone started walking towards us from out in the middle of the ocean. Predictably, it was Jesus. He looked like all the pictures I’d ever seen of him in Catholic school, with long hair and kind eyes and a white robe and bare feet walking on water. The dogs didn’t seem to think the Son of God was a big deal. They just kept running about with sticks in their mouths, shaking their coats, playing in the surf.

Dad and I stared at the holy figure moving towards us. Once Jesus was about three or four feet away, his face started to change, morphing into the faces of the people from the recovery meetings my sister called into: the Black, trans woman who shared about how tough her job was; the old woman in her seventies grieving the loss of a friend; the kid with the sixty-day celebratory haircut; the man whose brother called him out of the blue to say I love you.

I woke up in the pull-out chair beside Dad’s hospital bed. He was still there, breathing right next to me. A feeling of deep peace spread through my body. For the first time since he entered hospice care, I wasn’t scared about what might happen next. I fell back asleep and slept soundly until morning.

But now, on Sundust Trail, I feel utterly alone. There is no Zoom Box Recovery Jesus walking towards me from the middle of the ocean. There is no Dad still breathing beside me. There is no still, quiet peace. There is just me and my grief and regrets and anxieties and the never-ending list of things I need to do before the kids go back to school and I go back to work tomorrow. I collapse on a rock and drop my face into my hands, a rock I probably sat on in tears when I was younger, too, with thoughts swirling in my head over some kind of loss: a break-up, a team I didn’t make, a graduation I didn’t feel ready for.

A bird lands on a nearby branch. I think he is a blue jay, but I don't know enough about birds to be sure. He has a splash of white around his chest and eyes, and a few touches of black, but mostly, he is white and ocean blue—the colors of my father’s alma mater and favorite basketball team, the UConn Huskies, and the colors of Bluey in the urn with Dad’s ashes.

The bird stays on the branch for a minute or so, either unaware or unafraid of me. The more closely I watch him, the lighter I feel. His charcoal beak opens slightly and closes. Perhaps he is chirping or singing, but I can’t hear over the wind. A crown of deep indigo colors sits on top of his head, and his feathers are dipped in white at the end. He shifts his weight from one foot to another, balancing effortlessly on a branch. His plumage and beak shimmer in the sunlight, and he opens his blue wings, and they stretch out so much farther than you’d think they could, with intricate patterns of white, black and azure on the inside. Then he soars upward into the sky and flies away.

I wonder where he’s going, what he knows, who he is.

Maybe he is en route to visit another grieving daughter alone on a walk in the woods. Maybe he is my father reincarnated. Maybe he is a message from God to take that second-loop-around-the-pond approach more often.

But one thing is for sure: he is not nothing.

About the author:

Shannon Kopp is the author of Pound for Pound: A Story of One Woman’s Recovery and the Shelter Dogs Who Loved Her Back to Life, published by William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. Shannon holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Pacific University, and has written for CNN, Maria Shriver, The Huffington Post, Good Housekeeping, BarkPost, and more. Her story has been featured in PEOPLE, NPR, CNN Turning Points with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Women’s Health, and Psychology Today. She is a member of the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau and speaks on a variety of mental health and animal welfare topics. In 2016, she founded SoulPaws Recovery Project, an accredited nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting children and adults with eating disorders, which have the second highest mortality rate of all mental health conditions. She lives in San Diego with her husband, children, and adorable rescue dog, Luna.

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T was the first person to both love and desire you. You met at the fanciest and most ornate Italian restaurant in Little Italy—marble columns, brass railings, mahogany paneling, white crisp tablecloths, you get the idea. The waiters wore formal black jackets and black dress pants with crisp clean white button-down shirts. T was s a waiter and you were the cashier, both of you working your way through college. You never saw the kitchen staff, but they must have seen you. On a slow night, one of the guys from the kitchen drew a picture of you from the waist up. It was not a good drawing, something a kid would draw. He drew you with torpedo breasts.

One of the waiters–not T–gave you the drawing. You liked that one of the kitchen guys thought you had torpedo breasts, that he thought you were someone worth drawing, that he thought the drawing was worth sharing with the others, all of them laughing and saying salacious things about your torpedoes. You were naïve back then. You had no idea that the restaurant was a mob front for a guy with the nickname Matty the Horse who came from the Genovese Crime Family and was known as the sex czar of Times Square, where he owned a lot of topless and gay clubs.

You fell in love with T’s potential, which might be another way of saying you didn’t actually fall in love with him as he was but rather with who he could be. Mostly you fell in love with T because he chose you, and you were desperate to be chosen.

T was raised by a single mother, foreign born (from Colombia); money was tight. He wanted to be from an affluent two-parent highbrow American family with an Ivy League pedigree. But he was none of these things and could never be any of these things. Your hope and his hope that he might was what united both of you.

After a year, T moved back home to Colombia because the reach in New York was too high for him. You found yourself waiting and hoping for his return, just like you did with your mother when you were younger. T sent you love letters and a book of poetry and wrote something on the front page that you didn’t understand, something about two plus two equaling five. He flew back to New York several times without telling you and showed up on your doorstep in that romantic, rom-com sort of way, but you didn’t know at the time that you could have asked and expected more from someone. T wasn’t particularly warm or generous. He could be coarse with people and even abrasive, but you knew it was all a front. He was insecure because of that I could never measure up feeling (a feeling you will relate to many years later). But when he showed up at your doorstep, he was so hungry for you, you couldn’t resist.

After three years of coming and going like this, he surprised you one spring and said, I am back for good. Let’s get married. You had already moved beyond him by then, but you slept with him anyway because part of you could not resist that being-wanted feeling.

Six weeks later, your breasts became swollen and heavy, and you felt soft and fleshy, and you had missed your period. You learned that the baby inside of you was the size of a pea. You were twenty-five, in the middle of your master's degree, in the middle of writing a thesis about female writers reclaiming their voice through their female protagonists. You didn’t tell T about the pea. He told you he was going back to Colombia to get his life together for you, but you knew it wasn’t true.

While he was gone, you went to your gynecologist who put you to sleep and suctioned out the pea. You woke to a bloody pad between your legs. Before sending you home, the doctor said, There will be minimal bleeding and not much pain. Your mother picked you up and took you back to her apartment. You were happy to be weak and infirm and have her take care of you. You slept on her couch for two days. You bled and bled, and the cramps were hard and violent. 

Six months later, you met P at a party that a friend from your feminist studies grad seminar invited you to. You weren’t looking for anything, so you didn’t bother putting on makeup and you didn’t bother dressing like you wanted attention. But after P ate a slice of banana bread that you had made, he turned to face a group sitting on the couch, a group that included you. Who made this banana bread, he said, and swallowed the last bite.

When you looked at him and when you told him that you had made the bread, his eyes shined on you and sparkled and turned up at the corners and not just when he smiled. You smiled back and tried to be shiny, too, but you felt your shine was nothing compared to his. You felt dull and dim in comparison. You wanted his shine, wanted it to wash all over you, wanted it inside of you. You felt like a like a cat who had been starved of the sun and suddenly had found a cozy spot by the window blazing with sunlight.

One year after you were married, you were in Hawaii because P was playing in a tennis tournament. While P played tennis, you read and slept and waited for him. You didn’t realize at the time that you were waiting for yet another man and that this would be a continued theme throughout your twenty-year marriage. The signs were there, and you waited for it to be like that first time, that shiny light blazing on you, but it came sporadically, and you never knew when.

The tennis players you met at dinner felt all the same to you, faceless middle-aged guys in pastel- colored polo shirts. They knew nothing about your life and your artsy parents and your absent mother and the mice that lived in your kitchen because you pretended you were someone else, a banker’s wife, but you kept it secret, and you didn’t even know how to play tennis.

You said to the man next to you, I’m so very tired.

And when he replied, You’re probably pregnant, you felt violated. Why would this faceless middle-aged tennis man in a pastel-colored shirt who you just met cross over to the inner sanctum of your womb? Why would he know something about such an intimate part of your body better than you?

The next day, you spotted a little but thought nothing of it. The day after that, you and P were home in Denver, and that evening, the excruciating cramps came and didn’t let up.

You and P went to the ER and a doctor put his fingers inside your holes. He did not ask you for permission and he did not tell you why, but he found nothing and sent you home.

Later, the cramps continued, but this time you went to a different ER where they gave you a pregnancy test and told you that you were pregnant but not where you were supposed to be. You were sure that was right because you were never where you were supposed to be. You weren’t really a banker’s wife. You were defective. You could never forget that. The doctor called it an ectopic pregnancy and told you that you needed to take care of it, or you would bleed to death.

Later that week, your gynecologist shot a long needle in your ass and you bled but then you didn’t bleed enough, so you went back for another shot in your ass.

In a couple of months, you were pregnant again and you bled again but not as badly as the last two times you were pregnant. This time, it was an early miscarriage, and the blood was more like your period.

Four months later, you were pregnant once again but in the right place this time, and your uterus held the baby this time, except you bled in your second trimester at a cocktail party, the wedding of a friend of P’s from college. The blood ran down your leg and you thought, I am not like these people. Blood runs down my leg and it doesn’t run down theirs.

Your doctor put you on semi-bed rest, but your daughter came out of you just fine at forty weeks. She had big eyes and long eyelashes, and she was fair like you. She cried and cried and never napped and you didn’t know what to do. You put her in her car seat on top of the dryer while it ran, and you turned the blow dryer on near her because she seemed to like that noise, and you put her in the car and took her for long drives.

Eventually she settled down. She started kindergarten with a big smile on her face, she was well liked and had nice friends. She easily learned her ABC’s, and when the teachers brought in pumpkins with the tops cut off so the kids could dive in with their hands and pick out the seeds, she was the only one who was not afraid of getting her hands dirty with the gooey pumpkin slime. She rather liked it.

In the second trimester of your second viable pregnancy, you and P had just moved into your new home in a fancy neighborhood in Denver, the first home you owned. It was so much bigger than your childhood home that you could not imagine how you got there. Each child had their own bedroom and bathroom. There were extra guest rooms with bathrooms, too.

Something was not right, though. Maybe your body felt it before you did. P was quiet, pre-occupied, withdrawn from you. You wondered what you did wrong, and you tried to be better. You tried to be good so he would splay his radiance on you once again.

But then you went into pre-term labor at twenty-seven weeks and took yourself to the hospital with stomach pain.

You were in the hospital for a week and then you were home on full bed rest for ten weeks. It was hard. You had a one-year-old. You didn’t have family to help because they lived so far away and had their own families and you understood this. Your mother assumed, as she always did, that you were fine because you were now the banker’s wife, so she did not come visit and take care of you. You made some good friends and they helped you with your daughter and they dropped off food for you too and brought you books to read.

When you were thirty-eight weeks pregnant, the doctor told you that you could get off bed rest. No baby came after a week, so the doctor stuck her fingers in your cervix swirling them around and it hurt a little, and after that happened your son came out so fast that you had no time for an epidural. The pain was fierce; you felt like your body was ripping in two. You screamed motherfucker at P and at the doctors even though you were not a curser back then like you are now.

Your son came out of you wide-eyed and curious and had olive skin like his father. As a toddler, he had a bad respiratory virus and then he had walking pneumonia and then bad rashes where he scratched his back all night and then he had a bad deep cough that lasted until middle school. You worried about him all the time but he outgrew all his sicknesses and one day he became taller than you and he read philosophy and cooked you roast chicken just the way you liked it with the leeks soaked in the chicken broth at the bottom of the pan so they got nice and sweet.

You stopped sleeping after your son was born. You lay awake every night no matter how tired you were. You felt like you were in a fog every minute of the day. You felt like you were drugged. You felt alone. You felt desperate. You saw doctor after doctor. They told you that you were depressed, and they prescribed meds that you never took.

Finally, you made your way to a sleep specialist. He told you; Let’s make a plan without meds. Let’s get you to a solid six and go from there. He helped you and you slept a little better and you thought later, Maybe he just saw me. Maybe you just wanted someone to pay attention to you.

You smiled through it all, through the bed rest, through the babies you loved — even though caring for them was much harder than you thought — through the sleep deprivation, through your messy childhood home and your parents who weren’t able to be real parents, through always feeling that you were alone and through always waiting for P to show up with his shininess, but you weren’t really smiling because you were happy all the time. You were just hungry and hungry for a lot of things. You thought your smile was about wanting people to like you so they filled the holes up inside of you, so you wouldn’t always feel so alone. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe the smile was a front for this thing you were hiding that had quietly lived in your body since you were a little girl that grew and multiplied over time like a parasite that had invaded your body and if you stopped smiling you’d throw it all up, the rage, the indignation, the madness of it all, all of what had happened to you and what you let happen to you, you knew if you stopped pretending and stopped smiling it would all break apart and explode. You weren’t defective after all, you knew that. You were just furious.

About the author:

Jane Myer is a writer currently at work on a memoir. She is a graduate of Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing.

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EVERY YEAR, WHEN GUTTERS FILL with candy-corn-colored leaves and disemboweled pumpkins slouch on brick lampposts, my body tingles with a familiar cocktail of excitement and trepidation. It’s about to be Halloween, and once again, I don't know what to be.

I’ve never been good at Halloween. When I was a little kid, it didn't really matter because instead of trick-or-treating, my parents took me to the Fall Harvest Festival at our church. We got to wear costumes and go for hayrides in the back field and play carnival games in the church gym to win candy—just like secular Halloween minus the devil worship!

Plus, I loved going to church. Its tall stucco walls meant safety. When I was at church, it didn't matter that I was a weird, buck-toothed girl with a boy’s haircut and grandma glasses (and grandma hobbies: knitting, crosswords, watching Shirley Temple movies). My best friend Hannah and I played freeze tag in the hallways and hide-and-seek during Coffee Time, and I didn't feel pressured to be anything other than myself. It didn't matter what I dressed up as for the Fall Harvest Festival because Jesus loved me for what was on the inside.

One year, I wrapped myself in fleece and pinned on some knitted scraps and said I was a piece of yarn. The next year, I wore my gray sweatpants and sweatshirt inside-out and claimed to be a nub of dryer lint. This was a family tendency, inherited from my father, who once duct-taped a bunch of multicolored cardboard bricks to his body and christened himself “Brick Man.” We drank our apple cider shaken, not stirred. We were literalists: Biblical literalists. We looked for "plain meaning" in Halloween costumes the same way we looked for it from Genesis to Revelation. In hindsight, I’m surprised I never used Halloween to witness to my neighbors by dressing up as a biblical motif like Original Sin or The Curse of Childbirth. In Bible college years later, I would learn to prioritize the context behind the ancient stories rather than the most obvious contemporary reading. In that interpretive framework, I could've gone for the “conceptual costume” by throwing on whatever I could grab and labeling myself Procrastination. But such an ideological development had not yet come to pass, so I reveled in the comfort and simplicity of church, where I didn't have to worry about demons or ghouls or monsters under the bed.

Nevertheless, as my elementary school years waned, I grew anxious in ways I didn't know how to express. Middle school lurked like a hungry predator just around the corner. I could practically hear saliva dripping from its fanged mandible. Soon enough, I would be transferring from my small Christian elementary school to a K-12 college prep charter school that was basically a normal public school, and everyone I knew believed that public schools were filthy dens of iniquity, which begged the question: What would become of me in that sullied arena?

So it makes sense to me, in retrospect, that around that time I became chronically constipated. Could it have been the stress? Or a parasite I picked up on a family mission trip to Mexico? Or both? Gone, in any case, were the carefree happy-go-lucky attitudes of childhood and the comforts of regularity that came with it.

Hannah had already been attending the charter school for years. On Sundays at church, she told me it wasn't so bad. She’d even made new friends to go trick-or-treating with. Envy and fear of abandonment iced my veins, and I yearned for greater horizons than the church's Fall Harvest Festival. I longed to prove myself as more than a scrap of lint.

When I was nine, I wrapped myself in brown butcher paper decorated with red circles: an Italian sausage. I came home hoarse because I spent the whole night singing at the top of my lungs, “Oooooooooh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Weeeeeenierrrrr!” There’s something tragic about a girl who, given the chance to be anything in the world, still chooses to dress up as something that wants to be something else.

In eighth grade, I was finally invited to go trick-or-treating with Jenny Yang, the girl who'd been inviting Hannah over every year since second grade. By then, Hannah’s public school friends were my friends, too—allegedly. Throughout middle school, I felt stuck in the role of the New Girl, Hannah's less-funny tagalong. Hannah and I filled the same social role—Quirky Christian Girl—but she had red hair, better taste in music, and a biting sense of humor. She listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and made sarcastic quips about our lame teachers and seemed to have found her niche in the social-pressure-cooker of middle school, whereas I listened to Contemporary Christian Music and the oldies station and spent my free time knitting brightly colored finger-puppets of my own design (I called them Finger Kings and considered registering a patent). But Halloween was a chance to present as something other than my dorky, socially hobbled self. I would show them. I wasn’t yet sure exactly how, but I knew the right idea would come out of me when it was ready. I would show them all.

On Halloween night, Hannah’s dad drove us across town to Jenny’s neighborhood around dusk. In the dark chamber of her parents’ minivan, Hannah sat in the bucket seat and bopped to songs playing through the headphones we shared. Her face is a map of the world, is a map of the world. You can see she’s a beautiful girl, she's a beautiful girl…

I didn't feel beautiful. Panic rose in my throat like bile. I didn't even have a costume yet—Jenny had said I could borrow something from her—and the minivan exuded the faint acrid scent of brass, the lingering aroma of Hannah's saxophone. That was another way the other girls related that I didn’t: Hannah played in jazz band and Jenny was first-chair violin in the orchestra. Her best friend, Emily, who would be there too, played viola. Instead of band, my niche was theatre, which definitely amplified my congenital uncoolness. I tried to play an instrument once. Even worse, I tried to make an instrument once, inspired by a Crafts for Kids book my mom (who always dreamed of homeschooling and 4-H) brought home from the local library. I appropriated an old Kleenex box and strung rubber bands across the hole to construct a trash-banjo that sounded like a duck being strangled to death. The other crafts in the book were similarly eccentric, but that didn’t stop me from cherishing them. My favorite was the bone dolls: dolls I made out of chicken bones. “Making them” mostly involved drawing faces on their knobby, cartilaginous joints with a Sharpie and dressing them in scraps of old dishtowels and assembling bedrooms for them, again, in old Kleenex boxes (apparently my go-to art supply). I was so proud of my bone dolls I brought them to school with me—and because it was Christian elementary school, no one even made fun of me.

Hannah stayed quiet in the car, absorbed in the music and her own thoughts. I glanced at the full moon gleaming outside the minivan’s fingerprint-smudged window and wondered if my bone dolls could come back to life, and if they did, if they would be my friends. I fiddled with a hangnail the shape of a new moon. Blood flowered at the edge of my cuticle, and I realized I’d peeled my nail to the quick. The song on the iPod switched from KT Tunstall to the All-American Rejects. Hannah hummed along to the chorus: “I’ll tell you my dirty little secret.”

Jenny Yang was smart, funny, and pretty: a triple threat. She would earn a perfect score on her SATs and be our high school valedictorian. I didn’t know much about her life at home, but I knew she had a creepy older brother and her family didn’t go to church. That’s how I made peace with my earthly inadequacies: even if I was awkward and girls like Jenny and Emily were smarter and more talented than me, at least I was going to heaven when I died. The truth was, this religious consolation did little to assuage my middle-school-girl insecurities. The afterlife in heaven would be one thing, but middle school felt like its own version of eternal conscious torment. For example: in seventh grade, Jenny, Emily, Hannah, and I had all competed on our school’s Brain Bowl team together. Right before the championship round, the other girls chose me to be the team alternate. They figured Hannah knew everything I knew and I was superfluous, so I sat in the bleachers and gnashed my teeth. I had to watch our team—their team?—lose on questions I could’ve answered: “What’s a two-syllable word that starts with R and means ‘unwanted waste’?” I knew everything there was to know about unwanted waste. Our team placed second. I took home a wariness about my tenuous social position and a sore jaw.

Don't tell anyone, the Rejects sang, or you'll be just another regret. Hannah tapped her knockoff-converse-clad toes. I couldn’t let the other girls choose Hannah over me, as they had once before. The full moon lit up my face like a spotlight. Halloween was my chance to prove myself: to borrow a costume that revealed who I truly was.

My stomach was churning by the time Hannah’s dad dropped us off. Hadn't I wanted this? The houses on Jenny’s block all looked the same, ominous and bland. I paused on the sidewalk, unsure which way to go. On top of everything else, I was nervous about running into Jenny’s lurky older brother, who was rumored to have lost his virginity to a vacuum cleaner.

A brisk wind blew from the north. Snow was coming. A full moon shone down on Hannah and me, and the air carried the comforting, familiar cow-pie scent of the countless beef farms up on the Northern Great Plains.

Emily was already waiting in Jenny’s bedroom. We all knew Emily would be drop-dead gorgeous once she took care of her mustache. She and I did theatre together, but she had perfect pitch and would get every leading role in the spring musicals throughout high school. By contrast, I would be cast as an old woman who expired mid-performance, a preteen with cystic fibrosis, and an epileptic divorcée. Emily’s characters got happy endings; mine died. If Jenny was a triple threat, with her musical talent, smarts, and general likability, Emily was a quadruple threat—and their threat levels were compounding. As high school seniors, Emily would model for Jenny’s AP Photography portfolio. Jenny would produce breathtaking photos of Emily staring ruthlessly into the distance. Later, Emily would graduate from college with dual degrees in neuroscience and opera.

But at the beginning of eighth grade, we were all just gangly girls, unaware of what we would grow into or how the world perceived us. Emily still wore floor-length prairie skirts to school every day (those would disappear about the same time the mustache did—shortly followed by the appearance of her first long-term boyfriend). But that night, she looked elegant and sophisticated, in a silky white blouse with her waist-length, chestnut hair scooped back.

“I’m the girl with the pearl earring,” Emily said. “Like the Vermeer painting.” Forget diamonds and pearls, I thought. I just wanted to be a girl with friends.

“Hey, Jen,” I said, “I still haven’t picked a costume. You said you have stuff I can wear?"

“Help yourself,” Jenny said. She tipped her head toward the closet without looking away from the vanity, which she was using to sprinkle a sheen of glitter on top of pale foundation. She was dressed as Edward Cullen, the vampire from Twilight. In Jenny’s closet, I flipped through dresses, sweaters, and a series of traditional Chinese outfits, before stopping at a chocolate brown ensemble: a calf-length wool skirt and matching long-sleeve top. I stepped into the bathroom to squeeze into it. The skirt was tight and made my stomach bulge. In the mirror, I looked lumpy and brown. Perfect, I thought. When I waddled back into the bedroom, the other girls looked at me as if waiting for a splash of realization.

“What are you?” Jenny asked.

“A turd!”

The girls cracked up. They couldn’t keep it in; the laughter exploded out of them. My costume released some unseen pressure valve among us. I was an iconoclast who would never again be dismissed as redundant. No one could embarrass the girl who dressed as a turd.

Fifteen minutes later, I was the last one to squeeze out of Jenny’s distended entryway. The moon sulked low in the sky. The night was dark and drafty, but municipal streetlamps cast domes of piss-colored light every couple hundred feet. Groups of trick-or-treaters floated up the street in clumps. A cohort of undead mummies sauntered past, dangling luminescent bottles of Mountain Dew from their incongruously animate fists. Toilet-paper-like strips of cloth unfurled behind them in the nighttime breeze.

At one house, we queued up behind a gaggle of children. A pint-sized Indiana Jones was their fedora-sporting ringleader, flanked by a pirate, a princess, and a kid wearing a gray orb with an exaggerated teardrop. When the woman at the door asked what he was dressed as, the kid answered, “I’m Pluto, and I’m sad ‘cuz I’m not a planet anymore.” The woman chuckled, but her reaction was tinged with pity. The weird ones always reveal themselves early.

We approached the door and the mom handing out candy inquired about our costumes. Jennifer went first, which gave us an air of elevation and refinement. I hung back and waited for as long as I could to emerge. I knew my costume choice would be hard to defend under the woman’s expectant gaze. I started to feel queasy from holding it in.

“And what are you?” she asked. She spoke to me in the same viscous tone she’d used with the children before us. I wondered if the voice was a kind of disguise.

“I'm a turd.”

The other girls didn't giggle that time. They slunk beyond the porch light’s glow. A scowl tugged down the woman's penciled-in brows, and I felt the fumes of her disapproval radiate out of the atrium and settle on me. Heat crawled up my neck. The woolen outfit suddenly felt very scratchy and far too tight. The woman's judgment was like a pungent smell I couldn’t shake off. Were the other girls even still there, I wondered, or had moved onto the next house without me, trying to distance themselves from me?

By the fifth or sixth house, I started wondering what other monochromatic brown thing I could say I was. Pollution—the brown cloud? Somewhere in there, I noticed my boot was squeaking. Not squeaking exactly. My boot had volunteered a soundtrack to accompany my costume. My boot was farting. It tooted along like a sign from the universe telling me that I couldn’t deny what I was: the girl who dressed as a turd.

Other roving cliques—ghouls and monsters, witches and cats, firefighters and cowboys—crossed our path and threw us curious looks. None of their costumes struck me as particularly scary. Maybe adolescence wasn't so much about the changes happening inside of us as the changes in what we feared. Instead of monsters and heights, I was starting to fear low standardized test scores, rejection, unplanned pregnancy. None of us were used to turning boys’ heads yet, but that night, everyone who saw us looked for a bit longer than necessary.

Emily, ever elegant with her blue scarf and pearls, was leading us up one serpentine walkway when a pile of flame-orange leaves under the dry skeleton of a tree leapt toward her. We all jumped back. I released a brief, involuntary scream. A high school boy in a trench coat and jeans shook off the lawn detritus and cackled at our reaction. He’d been hiding in the leaves and scaring trick-or-treaters. We scuttled away from the house, annoyed that he’d managed to startle us. Unwilling to miss out on the candy—and loathe to concede territory to his cruel, predatory fear campaign—we decided to loop the block and hit the house again.

Twenty minutes later, we approached from a different angle. The subdivision streets connected in what struck me as an inscrutable, intestine-like maze, dividing and reconvening, splitting and merging, until I could barely track where we were in relation to where we had been. I couldn’t tell what counted as progress and what was regression. When I saw the bulging pile of leaves in which the high schooler had concealed himself—and was likely still lurking, awaiting more unsuspecting marks—I immediately recognized my chance to redeem myself. I acted on instinct.

“Oooh, leaves!” I squealed—my best and loudest impression of a child delighted by fall. I took a running start and slide-tackled the guy. I was turd-turned-vigilante. I shot like a brown rocket into the leaves, where I collided with the rogue teen. He yelped, and I feigned surprise at finding a body there. He shuffled, bruised of ego and probably femur, to the other side of the driveway and pouted.

“Kenz, you’re a hero!” Jenny crowed. Hannah and Emily cheered. My turd exterior turned translucent in the adulatory glow of their praise. A prouder poop there never had been. I brushed the collision-crinkled leaves off my outfit, almost reticent to discard the evidence of my glorious triumph. I had defended our docile cohort. I’d kept us safe in the face of our most vehement threat: not razor blades in apples, as Mom had warned, but humiliation at the hands of a sneering teenage boy.

Jenny draped her arm over my shoulder. The other girls crowded in, suffused with a spirit of fellowship, and we approached the door proudly, confident we would not be accosted. Our individual costumes seemed to shimmer and change in the hazy, nighttime aura: they were the Three Musketeers and I was d’Artagnan; one for all and all for one.

Every house after that, I led our party to the front door. When I announced what I was, my friends laughed with me, not at me. Even some of the parents handing out treats laughed, and at the houses where they didn’t, I realized their reactions weren’t mine to manage. When our pillowcases grew heavy and the northern winds chilled our fingers to the bone, we made our way back to Jenny’s house. The route back seemed obvious, somehow. All of my directional confusion had evaporated. I’d learned which way to go by going.

Jenny unlocked the door. Her brother was nowhere to be seen, but if he had been around, we knew how to handle that now. I kicked off my flatulent boots by the front door and the four of us sprawled on the living room carpet and dumped our candy haul onto the floor and set to cataloging our spoils.

“Does anyone have any Twix they don't want?” Hannah asked. “Or Snickers or Butterfingers?” We bartered and traded for what we wanted most. When it came to Halloween, all the best things resembled turds. Hannah touched my arm to let me know her dad was on the way, and I slipped away from the group and changed back into my own clothes, relinquishing the costume that allowed me to be seen.

“Thanks for having us, Jenny,” I said on the way out.

“I’m glad you came,” she said. I felt a whole inch taller than at the beginning of the night.

“Bye, Hannah,” Emily and Jenny called. “Bye, Kenz! It was fun trick-or-treating with you!” Being a turd was good while it lasted.

About the author:

McKenzie Watson-Fore works at the liquor store in Boulder, Colorado. She writes about growing up evangelical and dating atheist boys and is currently at work on a memoir titled This Is Exactly What My Mother Was Afraid Of. McKenzie’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Offing, Belmont Story Review, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. You can keep up with her here.

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