A Poem with Lasting Impact

Ever read a story or poem that has lingered in your mind for days…even years?

If yes, poet and nurse Stacy Nigliazzo can relate. Stacy has always felt soul-stirring emotions when reading the poem “Saint Elizabeth,” which appears in this issue. (She even shares it with medical students and residents in her teaching!)

At BLR’s last “Narrative Arc” event, Stacy finally got her chance to interview the poem’s author, Rachel Contreni Flynn. The conversation is a must-see!

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Issue 18: The Cover

Children on loggia, 1908

The “A&B” building was the first of the McKim, Meade and White buildings on the Bellevue campus. This photo, circa 1908, was taken just a few years after the building opened. Loggia were included in the new building, so that patients could take in the sun and the air. Partly because of this modern design, pediatric and cardiac patients were the first to be moved to the “A&B” building.

Children often spent months in the hospital, and visiting hours for parents were limited to once per week. The beds shown in the photo do not have mattresses—only sheets pinned tightly to the bedframes.

In the subsequent two decades, cardiac patients in the A&B building gained access to the latest medical technology—the early EKG machine. Unfortunately, the motor to run the machine was located in the old Almshouse hospital building, seen in the background of the photo. After attaching the electrodes to their patient, the doctors in the A&B building would have to step out onto a loggia and wave a handkerchief to their colleagues in the Almshouse building. This second group of doctors would start the motor, signal back to the first group via handkerchief, and then the EKG could run.

BLR’s Weekly Read brings you one outstanding story, poem, or essay from our archive. This week’s read is “Saint Elizabeth” by Rachel Contreni Flynn, from Issue 18.  

Why this poem?

I’m so grateful that we always have poetry as a tool, throughout our lives, to bear witness, to acknowledge, to wish, to curse, to document and express meaning. Rachel has done that beautifully in this poem. I think it will stay with me for years to come.”

– Stacy Nigliazzo, BLR reader, poet, nurse

More from Rachel

Rachel Contreni Flynn’s second full-length collection, Tongue, won the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press, and her chapbook, Haywire, was published by Bright Hill Press. Her first book, Ice, Mouth, Song, was published in 2005 by Tupelo Press, after winning the Dorset Prize. Rachel lives north of Chicago with her husband and their two children.

Rachel participated in our 2024 Narrative Arc, which paired a reader and writer together to discuss the journey of a written work from being crafted, to published, to read. Rachel’s interview was conducted by Stacy Nigliazzo and contains not only insight into Rachel’s poem, but also a thoughtful conversation between two people that care about health and the writing process. And you can hear Rachel read “Saint Elizabeth”!

Rachel Contreni Flynn

1.

A scarecrow came for breakfast, sat in my sister’s seat and refused to eat.  It combed its straw hair
with shredded hands, fluffed its limbs and made chit-chat, happy faces, horrid little predictions.

2.

She was blonde and tough
and flawless in her
flute-playing.  I thought

she played to wake me
on winter mornings,
the sweet Gavotte.

I was wrong.  She despised
the dark animal of me,
my dirt-scent, my clawing,

my knotted hair.  But the flute
told its falsehoods, then she left
as a ghost:  coldly, lightly

as the Gavotte, as birdshot.
And me, a possum caught
in the yard at dawn.  

3.

My sister left for a few weeks, and the lid lifted
off the stock pot.  The house filled with the possibility
of eating bread dunked in the savory thickness
of her absence.  I was happy.  Happy to sit
in the kitchen, thinking.  Happy to carry
the baby – a sack of sweet apples against me.
She was gone, and I was glad the steel edge
of her had stopped carving all the faces
in the house into shriveling dolls, gouging eyes
out of the simple starch of us. 

4.

Even the hospital bore her name, called her Saint.

I too was sick.  Of driving and sitting.  Of nodding.

I knew the big building that held her would not heal her.

At home I gathered mulberries in the woods.

I told my brother stories in the barn that began

Once there was a bag of sadness locked in the attic.  

5.

Because she harms herself

we’re scared into applause, and because she steals everything shiny,
a frantic magpie, we creep behind her:  silent butlers returning the lighters,
the cufflinks, the neighbors’ spoons and coins.

Because she forbids us

to forbid her the liquor cabinet, the car crashes, we pray she’ll go away
like a bit of milkweed silk.  Instead, she returns, a dog in pain no one
will put down, that stains the carpets and wakes us all night with sharp barks
until someone rises to let her out, knowing she won’t go,

and she won’t.

6.

The girl lies small, pale, naked in bright sunlight
across a tightly made bed.  She ages before my eyes –
bones rise up, legs lengthen, but no hair anywhere
except the hay-lightness around her head which turns
and her mouth, the only red in the room, begins to scream.
This is my sister, it seems.  I close the door and back away.

7.

Even in dreams
I back away.
I forsake her.
I laugh and run.

It is too much.  The brightness of her,
and the love.  I understand certain things

about religion.  How it is to continue
to believe in the implausible thing. 

As a child, I only wanted my sister’s body
against me in sleep.  Even now I dream

of her breath in my hair.  I wake feeling
saved, then bitten and torn down.

Gregg Cusick

He stands before the class, the lectern his wheelhouse, the teen- or twenty-something-aged students his sea, the sky in the back windows his horizon. The worn paperback before him lays open to a page. If he were to brush it to the floor, the spine would strike first and the leaves would fall three-quarters right, a quarter left. The book would lay open on page 63, just as it does on the podium. Like a hymnal from which only one song has been chosen, again and again.  Today is October 11, exactly fifty years since the day he’d shipped out, in 1944.  He always notes this grim anniversary, but it’s never felt so heavy.

Hunter is not, and never was, a captain. More like the one the natives call Tuan Jim—Lord Jim, the title character in the novel open on his podium—he is something like a first mate. In 1944 he is twenty, the age many of his students will be, when he teaches in the decades to follow. Headed to England in October, he’s a private assigned as Chaplain’s Assistant. And two months later, he’s leaving from Southampton aboard a Belgian troopship chartered by the British Admiralty, the Leopoldville, crossing the English Channel on Christmas Eve, 1944. Private Hunter and 2,234 others from the 66^th Infantry Division, U.S. Army, are reinforcements for the rapidly escalating Battle of the Bulge. 

Hunter and the other soldiers are not worried about the nine-hour crossing—just twenty miles but lengthened by the evasive zig-zag pattern of British Captain Charles Pringle. But they feel themselves in a kind of uncomfortable limbo, on the water between the English mainland with its ties to home, and France where they anticipate engaging the enemy. They are missing family back home on Christmas Eve and, looking forward a few more hours, they are imagining actually facing the vilified Germans.

At just after 6:00 p.m., unseen in the rough Channel waters, a periscope rises, rotates like the head of an adder, sighting the convoy and the troopship now just five miles from the French port of Cherbourg. Moments before, in a cramped bunk below, Hunter had felt seasick, so he had gone up on deck for some air. The German U-486 fires a single torpedo. Hunter is standing near the starboard rail, midships, when the Leopoldville shudders.

“Please turn your texts to page 63,” Dr. Hunter tells the sea of blank faces before him. He does not hear the sighs, the stifled groans. The literature class meets three times a week, and each meeting for the past two weeks has begun with Hunter’s same statement. By this time, the books of most students will fall open automatically to the page, just as Dr. Hunter’s own copy. “Would you read for us, Gavin.”   He picks a different student each time. “In the long paragraph where Marlow is describing Jim, beginning ‘He was so extremely calm…’” The calmness is not a feeling Hunter shares at this moment.

Gavin reads the narrator Marlow’s words surprisingly well, slowly and smoothly with some gravity. “‘Why I longed to go grubbing into the deplorable details of an occurrence which, after all, concerned me no more than as a member of an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct, I can’t explain.’”

“The ‘occurrence’ is of course what, Melanie?” Hunter interrupts.

“The incident on the ship, the Patna,” she answers, her inflection somewhere between statement and question. “What Jim is on trial for,” she finishes, not describing what happened, leaving Hunter to wonder if she knows.

There were no trials after the incident on Christmas Eve, 1944. After what was negligence, dereliction of duty, abandonment, no charges were filed.  Hunter recalls a U.S. Inspector General’s report in 1959 and a British Admiralty Board of Inquiry report not declassified until the late ’60s, both brief, vague, and reluctant to assess fault in the tragedy. He remembers the Belgian Embassy’s 1992 response no one read, full of ridiculous lies. Alleging that the Belgian crew of the Leopoldville performed admirably, and all lifeboats were deployed, filled with soldiers. When the reality was that the few lifeboats released carried only the Belgian crew and their suitcases.  They abandoned the soldiers on deck. Dr. Hunter sighs. “Please continue, Gavin.”

“. . . I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible—for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death—the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct.”

“What would you say, Jennifer, makes up the ‘standard of conduct’ Marlow speaks of?  In Conrad’s world here in Lord Jim, what qualities make up one who adheres to such a standard? What is the standard of conduct?”

She’s one of the brightest in Hunter’s class. She hesitates, searching his face, he knows, for clues to exactly what he is expecting to hear. Now, after weeks on the same page, the class has stumbled onto many correct answers. “Courage,” she says. “Honor. Sense of duty, obedience, self-discipline, bravery.  Especially in adverse conditions. . .”

From the rail of the Leopoldville, some soldiers actually see the silver torpedo streaking just below the water’s surface toward their ship. Private Hunter misses it, is lighting a cigarette in the last of the daylight. After dusk, smoking on deck is forbidden since the enemy might see the match-lights. But he feels the shudder. Like the rest of the able troops, then, he makes his way to his company’s emergency deck location—they’d been told where to go, but not what to do when they got there—to await further orders. On deck, conjecture is rampant, but many realize the ship has been hit. Still, there is no panic, and the situation seems far from dire.

Below deck is different. When the torpedo strikes, three hundred men are killed instantly. Many of the dead and wounded are washed out the gaping hole in the starboard hull into the sea. Remarkably, some of these survive. As water floods into the cramped compartments of the lowest, G Deck, soldiers gasp along the ceiling beams for air. In the cold and dark, many can be heard screaming and praying as hatches are sealed to prevent the water flow, trapping them below.

Up on deck, soldiers congregate, uniting with their companies at the preassigned areas to await orders. Many witness the Belgian crew members carrying suitcases and belongings, releasing and lowering lifeboats. Loudspeakers announce the torpedo hit, tell the men to remain on deck, that tugs from Cherbourg will arrive shortly to tow the Leopoldville into harbor. Still most feel little worry, even though the departing crew never attempts to instruct the soldiers how to release the never-before-used lifeboats. Their explanations would have been in Flemish and French, so useless, anyway, to most of the American soldiers.

Below deck, many are pulled or carried to safety by the heroic efforts of compatriots. Soldiers form human ladders in the openings left by blown-out stairs, and some climb to safety amid shouts in water and darkness beneath them. Bodies float past. Shortly after 7:00 p.m. the ship has begun listing badly to starboard.  Private Hunter waits on deck with his company in the glare of the generator lights. He does not smoke though it would be allowed now, the prohibition a safe conduct issue when, on a lightless deck, the flare of a match could be visible to the enemy. The faces and posture of his comrades show their obedience, cold, and fear.

“Marlow tells us later, of course, what became of the eight hundred Muslim pilgrims on board the ship on which Jim was first mate,”  Dr. Hunter addresses the class, somewhat wearily.  He feels vaguely nauseous in the stuffy classroom. He moves toward the window nearest, thinking to let some air in. “Can you tell us, Adam, what happened to the Leopol–, er, Patna, what the crew did, what Jim did, how they reacted?”

The chosen Adam—Hunter well knows the type—is a fraternity boy from a wealthy family whose majors include getting drunk, high, and laid. He shrugs, sits up slightly at his desk, scratches his cheek of a couple days’ fuzzy beard growth. “Jim’s ship sinks, but he saves himself, gets off with the crew. The pilgrims drown, I guess.”

A few groans from opposite corners of the room. Hunter’s class is now a sea of confusion, students calling out corrections to Adam’s retelling. “It doesn’t sink!” calls out one. “He doesn’t save himself—he chickens out!” “He breaks the code,” says another.

At this last, Hunter seems startled. Not noticing that even in the heated exchange, several students are asleep and others, weary of the familiar territory being re-explored, have the glossed blank eyes of reptiles. “Okay, okay,” says Dr. Hunter. “Remain calm.” Dr. Hunter has nearly reached the window. Two hands on, and now a simple lift.

An hour later, the tugs have not come. Had they arrived, they couldn’t have towed the stricken ship anyway, since the Leopoldville has been ordered to drop anchor because the ship is drifting toward German-mined waters. The HMS Brilliant, a British destroyer in the convoy, pulls alongside the Leopoldville. The sea is violent. Army troops line the Leopoldville’s rail, watching.   Swells of more than twenty feet hamper efforts to tie on, and when the men working do get a cable attached it snaps, like fishing line. From the Brilliant’s deck, British officers exhort, “Jump, Yank!”

The Brilliant’s pitching deck is twenty feet below the deck of the Leopoldville. The ships are held close by ropes and nets, but in roiling seas the hulls crash together and swing apart. The soldiers must time their leaps, jumping when the British officer hollers “Now!” Frighteningly, the signal to jump comes when the hulls are farthest apart and so about to swing back together. Many soldiers slip, mistime their leaps, hit the water. The ships crash back together, crushing hundreds. The hulls of both ships are stained red. Hundreds of soldiers paddle in the water, clinging to debris and each other, even drowning one another to save themselves.

By 8:00 p.m., the Belgian crew of the Leopoldville is long gone. The bow of the Leopoldville turns up at an absurd, 45-degree angle; the stern goes down. In less than ten minutes she disappears, hundreds of soldiers on the rails clinging as she goes under, more than a dozen tugs and rescue boats now circling an open hole of ocean.

“Survivor Guilt,” Dr. Hunter repeats the student’s question. Devin’s, wasn’t it? “Interesting: Jim could feel such a thing even though it would be near a century before the feeling got named that way. Of course we feel things every day, every minute, that don’t have specific, categorical names.” Hunter again begins to feel the choking lack of air. He moves back toward the open window as smoothly as possible, not wishing to attract undue attention.

“But about the Patna and its sinking. I asked Jennifer to remind us the historical or factual background for Conrad’s story. Certainly there were other ships whose crews abandoned the passengers to save themselves. Jennifer, you were going to tell us of the Morrow Castle, too, although that was many years after Conrad’s story.”

Hunter does not at this moment think how many in his stifling classroom have actually read the novel they’re trying to discuss. He does not think, as he sometimes does, that some haven’t even cracked Conrad’s book, and some have sampled only small bits, or worse, skimmed the Cliff’s Notes. After decades of teaching, Hunter still pleads with and exhorts and cajoles his students to read, to take an interest, to relate literature to their own lives. There are some “unreachables,” of course, but Hunter also has had his share of surprises, the unpredictable successes as well as failures. Some, he has thought sometimes but does not now, some learners are wired such that they will obey a command to jump, while others, inexplicably, will freeze at the rail. Cling to it even as they go under.

Hunter knows of no foolproof way of reaching students who are unreceptive. He only tries—and this he does think now—to instill some, if not respect, then at least understanding of honor, or appreciation of Jim’s code of conduct. And let them also see the doubt that Marlow speaks of, the creeping ghost that since that frigid night in 1944 will haunt Dr. Hunter always. They stood at attention, for godsakes. In his dreams they stand saluting on the bow as the ship slips below the water, a scene he never actually witnessed. Because by then Hunter was aboard the Brilliant, having regained consciousness.   He  was  cold, dazed and so cold, chugging toward Cherbourg harbor. But that Christmas Eve, hundreds of soldiers had stood awaiting orders to abandon ship that never came, obedient to the end, adhering to their code of honor. And for no reason he can imagine, Hunter survived while so many others did not.

“. . . and so with the ship on fire, just five miles from shore, the crew then abandoned the Morrow Castle, leaving the passengers. 133 died, September, 1934,” the young woman’s voice continues. “Are you all right, Dr. Hunter?”

“Of course, of course,” Hunter lies. He inhales deeply. He may have the flu, he thinks then, since he cannot otherwise explain involuntary shivers that propagate like waves through his neck, shoulders, and down his spine.

“And thank you, Jennifer, for that history.” Dr. Hunter wills relaxation into his shoulders, sighs. “Now could we talk a moment about Jim’s new start? I mean the job offer in faraway, primitive Patusan. Do you remember the analogy Marlow uses to Jim, the phrase Jim says of, ‘that was jolly well put!’ How Marlow describes what is between Jim’s past and the new job in front of him?”

A terribly leading question, yet so vague, Hunter thinks disgustedly. But in the sea of faces before him, the dull eyes of passengers on a long bus ride, there is one pair that seem to gleam. It’s Adam, strangely, who does not blurt out an answer but dutifully raises his hand. Hunter nods to him, not overly optimistic.

“It’s a door, isn’t it?” Adam pauses. Hunter nods again. “Something about Jim slamming the door on what came before. And Marlow even says something about how, in Patusan, it’ll be like Jim never existed. Jim likes this idea. Probably says ‘Jove!’ like he’s always doing.” This last gets a laugh from the class. Adam flushes, embarrassed like one who starts in on the wrong verse of a church hymn. 

After the war, Hunter has his own new start. College on the GI Bill, grad school, marriage, children.  A teaching job at a small and well-regarded private university.  Friends, family, a couple of published works of literary criticism. All the while keeping the areas of his life, the compartments, separate. Sealed off from one another. There is some leakage, of course, but for the most part he has lived by moving through these separate areas, like the colored chalk boxes of hopscotch, rarely landing on more than one at once.

“Yes,” Hunter manages a slow answer. “A door.” A hatch, he thinks. A bulkhead. Darkness, freezing water rushing in, securing hatches even as screams for help and prayers and shouts in anger, desperate anger, are heard from the other side. Fainter as the hatches are secured. Acts practiced, army protocol, designed to keep the ocean out of undamaged compartments, to keep the ship afloat. In the case of the outdated cruiser the Leopoldville, these efforts may have only bought minutes. Perhaps minutes when some leap to safety, but many others are trapped and sealed away below. Again, Private Hunter sees none of this, standing above on deck when the torpedo strikes, but he’s heard it from survivors and sees it in dreams. Pitch darkness and freezing waters rising from legs to waist to chest, then finally over his head, drowning the screams around him.

Dr. Hunter shivers again and tries to shake the memory, thinking door goddammit, not hatch. A door that, once slammed, seals off the past.  He almost believes it, himself part-romantic, and so wanting to believe it possible. That the horrible past could be closed off, and a new life begun, what an idea! Jove! he thinks.

“So can we talk about Jim as a ‘Romantic?’” Dr. Hunter asks then. He is uncomfortably far from “page 63,” which may encourage the class but leaves him anxious. “Can we talk about the relationship between a romantic and one who adheres to a strict standard of conduct?” This clarification makes him immediately feel a warmer sense of relief, while the question elicits stifled groans from several quadrants of the classroom. “Can Jim be both at the same time?”

Private Hunter stands at the rail in the numbing, deafening wind, his right arm braced around a stanchion, soldiers numbering in the dozens on either side of him. Listing badly to starboard, the Leopoldville pitches broadly in violent Channel waters. He watches as the Brilliant pulls alongside, sees the tow-cables the British officers try to tie onto his stricken troopship. The gusts smell metallic, roaring over the shouts from the soldiers on the ships, engulfing their words and carrying them helplessly out to sea.

The two ships’ hulls crash together, the Brilliant dented and becoming stained the gray of the Leopoldville, then separate, crash together and separate. The tie-on cables snap, Hunter’s ship a bulldog tethered with sewing thread. To his left, a boy from Indianapolis, from the 262^nd division, who Hunter has just met and spoke to, a boy who looks twelve—Christ, we all look twelve, Hunter thinks—stands frozen on the rail. Soldiers jump toward the deck of the Brilliant on either side of them. A British officer is timing the wave swells and the coming together and separations of the two ships. He shouts “Jump, Yank! Now!” when the ships are farthest apart. Some can’t abide the leap of faith, won’t believe the Brilliant’s deck will move back under them if they obey the command.

Hunter puts an arm around the Hoosier beside him, who is muttering about “No orders to abandon ship.” In fact, he’s right: No abandon ship order was ever given. The boy stands stiffly, frozen worse than by cold.

“We’ve got to jump for it, buddy,” Hunter screams into the chilling wind.

Too quickly the kid steps one foot on the rail, then the other. The ships mash together, and he dives. The ships separate, and the boy from Indiana hits the water not three feet from the Brilliant’s deck. Hunter watches the hulls swing back and crash into each other. And when they separate again, there is a broad red stain on the Brilliant where the boy had been. Hunter climbs the rail himself, focuses on the face and voice of the British officer. When the two ships are farthest apart and the voice screams “Now!” Hunter leaps from the rail, across the roiling Channel waters as the Brilliant’s deck slides under him twenty feet below. His body strikes the deck, his head thumps, and he’s knocked unconscious.

“Dr. Hunter. Dr. Hunter?” It’s Allison’s voice. Hunter stands at the lectern, still as a sleeping horse. “Did you want me to read a passage?”

Hunter gazes out at the sea of faces all staring back at him with looks of concern, of amusement, even derision. He thinks perhaps he blacked out, hopes only for a second or two. His wife would be worried, had she seen him then, he knows. He still feels so cold, thinks I should shut that window. Begins to recognize the faces of his students, the classroom, the details of this place where he’s taught for over forty years. He holds the edges of the lectern, his ship’s wheel, with both hands firmly. He remembers then the question that the girl’s voice had posed him.

“Yes, yes, please, would you read for us,” he looks down at the book laying open before him. “In the long paragraph on page 63 beginning with the words ‘He was so extremely calm. . . .’”

Ben Orlando

I saw the man before he died, under the front tire of my father’s truck. He was pinned and the truck stalled and then settled in the mud and three grown men were not enough to push the truck forward or backward to stop the man’s pain. I was not a grown man. I was a girl, fourteen, puny, under a hundred pounds, not useful to their efforts, so I crouched by the man under the tire and tried to distract him from his fate.

We were on our way, me and my father, to a junkyard in Applebox, to abandon a couch, an old refrigerator and four mattresses, leftovers from my mother’s life; we didn’t need the things anymore now that we had the money from her death.

“Worst time of the year for driving with loads,” my father said before we got stuck; he liked to throw out comments that turned into prophesies. He was right this time about the loads, about the time of year: April, when the snow ran down in liquid form from the Appalachians, turned front roads into concrete river beds and back roads into mud.

In the truck I talked about woodworking.

“What do you know about that?”

“I’m reading a book,” I told him. He shook his head to end the talk. We sat in silence until we passed another truck stuck in the mud, with two men struggling to dig it out. We couldn’t stop, said my father, couldn’t risk the break in momentum. So we kept going and their eyes followed us, a hundred, two hundred feet and then we hit the bog, and we lost it, tires spinning, truck jerking, rear end sliding, load tipping, a moment of freedom, a spurt. We burst around the corner and then we hit him, the young man standing by the edge of the road. We hit him and rolled over him, and he sank and we sank.

The men from the other truck came running to us; they must have heard the scream. We were outside looking down at the victim when they—one man, older, heavy, gray beard to add merit to his weight, and a younger man, maybe his son—stopped when they saw what we’d hit. They were stoic, taciturn men, speaking in gestures and long stares instead of words. I saw the words coming through their eyes, their stiff bodies as they stopped a few feet from us: why didn’t you stop to help us? And my father’s response, stoic in return, remorse kept hidden for the sake of his pride. Still, the young man under the tire helped us struggle out of the moment, his screams turning to moans.

“He was just standing on the side, waiting,” I said, looking at each man, willing them to forget, to move on.

“Back tires are stuck in the mud, can’t move it,” said my father. They nodded and moved to the back of the truck.

“Katie, put the truck in gear and step on the gas,” said my father, and the two men looked at the man under the tire as a piece of wood, an inanimate dilemma. I started to climb into the truck.

“Extra weight,” said the older man, shaking his head at me. “Don’t wanna put extra weight on the fella, bad enough.” Another pause, a new problem. My father wanted to argue but he held back, closed his mouth.

“Put it in neutral,” he said and I did it. I leaned in over the seat, slipped the gear and pulled back out without shifting any of my weight inside. I stepped around to the back to help but they left no space for me. I moved toward the man. No one had said a word to the man under the tire.

Dead road, no other cars, us on the way to the dump, these men I didn’t know. I crouched down, looked at the man under the tire, really, for the first time. He’d stopped screaming and his moans came out as whispers.

“What were you doing there?” I said, instead of comfort, instead of finding something to set him at ease, choosing to satisfy my needs. He didn’t speak. He turned his head. The tire sat square on his stomach, the softest spot. He wore a thick black coat, flattened; the tire, I thought, probably crushing every organ, digging down, trying to make contact with the spine. The back of his head touched the edge of the metal wheel well; when he lifted it, he came within an inch of the tire. When he turned, he looked like a man bothered by someone disrupting his sleep. He was older than me but younger than the others.

When he turned I could see the strain from the hard breaths. His face was terrible, depressing, hopeless, horrifying. I wished I’d seen my mother with his face, in this state, in some state. I hadn’t seen her at all. Here and then gone. The nurses wouldn’t let me see her, as if they knew what was best. Stoic like the men behind the truck, dressed in white like wolves undercover, faces attempting compassion for the sake of their roles, telling me with their lines that she was not in a state to see anyone, that her appearance would only make things worse for others.

“Push! Again!”

The frame rocked, the tires moved, an inch forward, up, and then down; each time the truck stopped, the tire settled and a heavier groan pushed out of his mouth—the last air, I thought. Each time the last air.

“They’re going to move it,” I said. “And then we’ll get you to a hospital.” Every few seconds the frame rocked again.

His jeans were old, worn, four rips I counted, frayed to nothing at the bottoms, next to the brown boots, brown socks. I saw his coat again, dark blue patches blended in with the color, a frayed red and green flannel leaking out the base of his waist. All his clothes were beat, like he’d pulled them off a dead man rotting in the woods, like the clothes marked him in a line of bearers of these fabrics, and I imagined another man, the next man, desperate, taking anything, pulling the shirt and pants and coat from this man and staggering away to his own fated end and I looked away, my mind wandering as it did, as was my habit—something to get over, said my father.

“Hey,” I said.

His head was back, under the tire, head touching the black, rust-stripped metal.

“Hey!”

His eyes didn’t open. I grabbed his left hand, pressed my warmth into him and his eyes moved, fluttered as if he were dreaming.

“C’mon!” My father’s voice directed at the sky.

“Hey!” I spoke in quick thrusts, choppy whispers. I squeezed his hand.

“Do you want to see my breasts?”

His head turned. His eyes opened.

I’d gone from an A to a C in the last eight months. Many of the boys wanted to see my breasts, my tits, jugs, I didn’t know which word was best. Breasts, I thought. The dictionary term.

We were on a mud road, middle of nowhere and I looked around before I unzipped my coat, reached in, unhooked my bra, let it fall, then tucked it into my coat pocket. I lifted my sweatshirt and the T-shirt underneath. He looked. I don’t know what he saw: part of my head behind layers of coat and shirt, two cups of concentrated flesh slightly dangling. He looked for a moment and then closed his eyes, let his head fall back against the metal. I leaned forward, grabbed his hand and placed it on my chest, let the shirts fall over our hands— held it there while the grunts sounded behind us, while the truck rocked.

They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t dislodge the tires with their strength. The two men couldn’t push with their truck because their truck was stuck, still stuck, because of us.

“Honey! We’re going to try to free their truck, use it here!” my father shouted—maybe saw the outline of me, never looked at the man, the boy and the placement of his hand—and ran off with the stoic men. I should have stepped on the gas earlier, a moment of pain for salvation. I heard their footsteps, rapid, fading away, and I knew it was too late. I leaned in.

His face was dirty, two-, three-day growth on his cheeks, neck, bare in most other spots. His hair was long, black, straight and oily, dipping into the mud beneath. I kissed him. Like touching my lips to the damp earth, salt and dirt.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. I turned his head, spoke into his mouth. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you, however you were.”

His eyes opened. I saw the green, spotted, dirty if eyes could be. My eyes adjusted to the near contact.

“I must be a fucking sight,” he whispered and cleared his throat. “Ugly as sin.”

I lowered my forehead, touching his. “You’re not.”

I set his hand on the ground, pulled myself up and looked around, moved to the back of the truck, looked at their progress, deep grooves in the mud, pockets of stone, bare road for grip. I ran forward and jumped into the driver’s side. I’d learned how to shift, add the pressure, flip into reverse at the right moment, rock it back and forth. My father said I was too young. My mother showed me how to do it. Age meant nothing to her—just another rule to ignore, like crossing only on green.

The window was down. The engine was loud on the revs, the shifts, but I thought I heard the gasps each time the truck settled back into the center. I tried to block them out. I shifted, stepped on the gas, felt the roll, shifted, stepped on the gas, a little more, a little more—he’s still alive, still alive— shifted, rocked, shifted—they’ll never get back in time. It moved, almost, shift, gas, shift, gas. The truck climbed, grabbed the hump, settled back then struggled to grab again, lifted, reached.

Suddenly, the truck climbed over. The tire hit the space of air and then thud, it settled on the mud. Nothing beneath. I jumped out and saw them from the corner of my eye, arriving breathless as I landed, slipped, and fell forward in the mud.

And we froze, all four of us, as our eyes locked on what lay under the truck.

His face did not accuse us, did not blame us. I crawled forward on my knees, reached out and wiped the sweat from his brow. The trees, the forest creatures, the air, the men—all silent, all waiting. And that’s when I saw it, through his closed eyes, in his thin, upturned lips, in his nostrils gently flared as though inhaling the perfect memory: One moment of freedom. One moment of ecstasy.

They didn’t see it, weren’t looking for it. At some point they’d lost the ability.

I remembered forever both expressions. His: what it meant to be newly alive. And theirs: what it meant to be simply waiting.

Anna Mirer

It is eleven o’clock at night, and I am stomping around with half a skull in my hand. “Where are all the goddamn pipe cleaners?” I ask the room. The situation is not really urgent enough to require profanity, but I am tired and miserable, and I am resorting to overstatement in the hope of making my tired and miserable colleagues laugh. My study partner and I are getting confused about the difference between two holes in the skull, called the inferior orbital fissure and the infraorbital foramen. They have similar names, but different functions. The characters, if you will, of the foramen and the fissure are quite distinct, and to demonstrate that, I need to push a pipe cleaner through each of them to represent the paths of different nerves.

There are five days left in the spring semester, and the anatomy lab is getting squalid. Printed lab guides and anatomy atlases with broken spines are strewn everywhere. The pipe cleaners have all disappeared; there is a shortage of forceps and probes; the dispensers are out of soap. The good model of the inner ear is missing, and is rumored to have been hidden by a crazed medical student. Skulls with the tops sawn off have been jumbled with the tops of different skulls. There is a Snickers wrapper on the floor, which means that someone first ate a candy bar in here, then littered. We have been stepping around the wrapper for two days. The maintenance staff does not like to come in this room, so the floors have not been cleaned since January, when these twenty cadavers in tanks were wheeled in. In that time much liquid has been spilled. The tanks are filled with a preservative solution that sloshes out, but there is also blood, fat, mucus, feces, and the nondescript juice that fills the crevices of an embalmed corpse.

Our last exam will cover structures of the head and neck. At this late stage in our studies, most of the body below that has already been cut away. Now the heads have been bisected to reveal the structures behind the nose. It turns out, strangely, that people still look like themselves, even with layers of their faces removed. We learned in neurobiology that there is a section of the cerebral cortex devoted entirely to recognizing faces. People with damage to that part of the brain may lose the ability to recognize others by sight, or to know their own image in a mirror. This is called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Here in the anatomy lab, faces are all that remain to remind us of human individuality.

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Tonight I am studying with Rachel. Level-headed, serious, and gentle, she wants to be a surgeon, and she likes the tactile aspects of dissection. Rachel once let fall that her lab partners don’t like to use their hands as much as she does. This being as close as Rachel comes to complaining, I surmise that she has been stepping up to the “gross” jobs, of which there are many. We are searching for a muscle on the front side of the larynx, so we flip a bisected head backwards, and lay two halves of a face flat on the table. For a fraction of a second we take in the surreal vision, and Rachel cannot stifle a murmur. I glance at her, but I do not ask her if she is okay. With a bit of a pang, I press on, and in doing so, I signal to my friend that she is supposed to be tougher than that.

Rachel’s murmur, any murmur, is such a minor thing on the spectrum of medical student coping mechanisms. Among our colleagues, anatomy lab has evoked responses which range from mild guilt to deliberate callousness. Only one student actually abstained from dissecting; some of us suspected he had a religious objection that he didn’t care to make public to the naïve and frequently judgmental population that makes up a first-year class in medical school. Many, many cultures hold the integrity of human remains sacred. Medical culture initiates its healers through ritual disintegration.

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The first day I came into the lab I was overwhelmed with sadness. I took one look at my cadaver’s face and felt a rush of love. It wasn’t like me; I’m not prone to strong emotions about the deaths of strangers. How illogical to feel bereft when I hadn’t lost anyone or anything; on the contrary I had acquired something, or someone. And I knew nothing about the character of the woman I didn’t lose. Before she donated her body, she could have been a miser, a philistine, a bigot, an abuser. Yet I felt the way I feel upon learning of the death of a friend. When I came home from the lab, I sat at my bathtub washing the smell of preservative off my arms and weeping. My husband came in to comfort me. “It was harder than I expected,” I told him, unnecessarily. “She was tiny.”

By my next visit to the lab, though, my dominant emotion was fear of screwing up. Grades (even of the pass-fail variety) have the unfortunate effect of promoting self-absorption, and performance anxiety can consume the impulse to reflect. I tended to project my insecurities onto the cadavers, imagining that with each missed test question I was letting them down. I would try to justify my presence by naming structures and reciting their functions, pouring my energy into diagrams and mnemonics and repetition. Alas, I am not very good at anatomy exams, so I was left hoping it was enough that having passed anatomy would allow me to do the things I am good at and the things I came here to do.

Obsessing over tests is a convenient, if unconscious, method of dissociating from the act of cutting into people’s bodies. But there are others. Most of my colleagues seemed to follow the grand tradition of objectification, striving to perceive the tissues in their hands as inhuman. Others relied on the equally time-honored strategy of gallows humor. One of my lab partners, a former nurse’s aide, prided herself on her strong stomach and did the lion’s share of our dissecting. By her own admission, she hasn’t got much of a filter, and she seemed at times to be daring us to object to her frankness. When we removed the brain she observed, “Mmm, the cerebellum looks just like hamburger.” At the time I considered protesting, but decided she didn’t deserve moralizing from me, so instead I responded, “More like turkey burger.” I immediately apologized to the group, but felt like my comment lingered for the rest of the day.

My other two lab partners were quite open about their discomfort. One usually tried to get out of the lab as quickly as possible. She sometimes seemed to retreat mentally, distracting herself by trimming fat off our cadaver’s organs. The other one occasionally got faint and needed to step out. Both would become agitated if the shroud covering our cadaver’s face began to slip off. They never saw her face until the day it had to be skinned. “She looks like such a nice lady,” the one prone to faintness observed sadly, as I was preparing to cut into the forehead. “She may have been,” I replied. “We know she did a very nice thing.”

The woman whose cadaver we were dissecting had, in fact, done something great for us: she had willed her body to the school through the Anatomical Gift program. It’s a comfort to me to know that all of the people whose bodies we were using in this way knew what would happen to their remains. We have no John Does in the anatomy department, and like many schools we honor the donors every year with a student-run memorial service to which the donors’ families are invited.

I was involved in planning the memorial in the beginning, but stepped down over creative differences. My notions of how to honor the dead involved too-candid descriptions of the bodies, and too-open discussion of our ambivalence. Where I come from, people take offense at the slightest hint of sugarcoating, especially at memorial services, where grief is the point. But, as I am daily reminded, I’m not from around here. Even if it wasn’t my cup of tea, the service was still quite moving in the end.

Curiously, it seems that every year all of the donors have been white. That is remarkable even in a Midwestern state like this one, teeming with Caucasians. I have no idea why it is so, but it makes me wonder. What kinds of privilege might be invisibly woven into the decision to donate one’s body to science?

The skull I poked with pipe cleaners did not come from our cadaver, or from any other donor. It came from the remains of a person who died in India many decades ago, and who was probably extremely poor. Some people or some company made a living by hauling away the bodies of the destitute and burying them with a particular species of beetle that ate away flesh. Months later they dug up perfectly clean skeletons and sold them to Western medical schools. The schools are no longer allowed to buy skulls this way, so our professors remind us that the ones we have are irreplaceable. Treating them with care includes not resting them on top of cadavers, so that they will not be covered in juices. Despite the warnings, slime accrues, spiny prominences break off, teeth fall out. None of the skulls is completely intact; only an expert could look at one and imagine a face. Any connection to the memories that used to lie inside these bones was broken long ago.

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Though Rachel and I can still find the vision of disoriented flesh uncanny, the moment passes and is quickly forgotten. We have a long list of structures to identify, and as the evening wears on I must fight the temptation to panic. We cannot find a useful example of the stylopharyngeus muscle on any of the cadavers dissected by students, so we move into the room with the prosections (a near-cute nickname for professional dissections, which are the work of trained anatomists).

We open up the tank full of heads. Some still have all their hair, many have broken noses, a few still have eyes over which the lids do not close. Rachel shows me one specimen, identifiable by its color, that has been here since the 1960s. The man it once belonged to must have been born in the nineteenth century. “What do you think he would have thought,” I ask her, “if he could have known that forty years after his death, medical students would still be learning from his preserved head?” I like to think he would have been proud, but I am inventing. He may have wanted nothing more from his donation than to save his family funeral expenses. Perhaps he was so sure of the finality of death that the fate of his remains wouldn’t even have interested him.

I find it easy to imagine stories for him, because I can see his nose and mouth and eyelids. It is harder to construct a biography from the contents of the next tank, the tank full of female pelvises. We used these specimens to study structures like the labia majora and the clitoris. Occasionally when my mind wandered I would think these are what someone used to make love, and perhaps to bring people into the world. In the beginning I covered our cadaver’s genitals with a shroud whenever possible. A friend pointed out that I was using the same draping technique we had been taught to preserve a patient’s modesty during a physical exam. Eventually, though, so much of the lower body had been cut away that it no longer felt like a meaningful gesture. I no longer felt I was looking at a naked body, only parts.

A student at a medical school in another state told me a story about a cadaver. When she took anatomy, her group dissected the body of a man who had died young. Young body donors are very unusual (among those at our school the average age at death is eighty), and this person seemed to have been in excellent health—athletic, strong, and apparently free of injury or disease. On the ankle was a tattoo of his own name. Curious about the man’s story, the student looked him up on the internet. She learned that he had been a serial rapist and murderer, who was executed by lethal injection. She would go on to dissect the rest of his body, including his penis, thinking all the while of how it had been used as a weapon.

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I had been hoping to learn our donor’s name at the memorial service, but I didn’t recognize her among the photographs brought by the families. Although we were not to learn about her life, one of my lab partners eventually learned the contents of her death certificate from the school morticians. I was expecting the cause of death to be complications of an aortic aneurysm, since we could see the place in her chest where her largest artery ballooned out, and crunch the plaques in the vessel wall between our fingers. We knew from the fragility of her skeleton and the exaggerated curve of her backbone how severe her osteoporosis had been. Once when we were flipping the body over, I broke her scapula just by bracing against the turn. We also knew she had been feeble at the end, because her muscles were too atrophied to have been well used. Her stomach was empty, and so small that she could not have eaten normally in some time. According to her documentation, she died in her late seventies from dementia and advanced Parkinson’s disease.

Because of the woman’s progressive deterioration, on the day of the face dissection we couldn’t make out the muscles used for chewing or forming expressions. We called a professor over to help. “I don’t blame you for having trouble,” he said, probing and cutting through the unrecognizable mush below her cheekbone. “This is the body from hell.” I took his comment personally. She was old and sick and paralyzed, I wanted to snap. She’s not from hell, and she’s not in it either.

I prefer Rachel’s response, when I tell her about the face dissection. “I don’t want to die with mushy muscles,” she says. Neither do I. I think I might like to die of an epidural hematoma, caused by a falling geranium pot that cracks my skull while I am out for a stroll on my 108th birthday. I wouldn’t mind having my body donated afterwards, but I’d rather it be put to use testing automobile crashes or something—not for dissection.

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After that first day in the lab, my feelings of love remained, but I never felt sad again. Eventually I found I didn’t need to dissociate, or to objectify my cadaver, because I was sure that my cadaver was not a person. It was an aspect of a person. I feel lucky to hold that conviction, because as long as I believe that to be true, I know the work we did in that room was not an unfortunate means to an end, but was itself the right thing to do. We began with a dead body, and over many months we transfigured it into memory, skill, strength, gratitude, and indistinct organic matter. No matter what we make of our lives next, we have done a good and appropriate thing to honor twenty people by respecting their wishes for their remains. They did not wish for a semblance of rest, and they did not wish to seem whole. They wished for us.

Alexa Rose Steinberg

Throughout the evening, I hear explanations of why people can’t talk when I call. “I’m cooking dinner for my kids,” women tell me, harried. “You know how it is.”

“My husband will be home soon,” one woman says. “Dinner is our time together.”

I murmur sympathetically into my headset to each person as I mark little bubbles on the computer screen in front of me, setting up another round of appointments for tomorrow. It is nighttime in July, five years since I graduated college. Here, in my gray-carpeted cubicle, I am surrounded by other people in other cubicles. We are all calling randomly selected Massachusetts phone numbers, making small lacunae in people’s evenings. “Good evening, my name is Alexa and I am calling from the Boston Globe,” I say. “Would you be willing to answer a few questions?”

Mostly women answer when we call. There is such a statistical imbalance in who picks up that we have to ask to speak to the person with the Most Recent Birthday to recalibrate the male-female ratio. “MRB isn’t home, call back later,” I might write on my computer screen as a note. Another person on another shift will dial this number again. “He’s asleep,” I might type. “Try tomorrow, earlier.”

Despite these efforts, I speak mainly to females. The women who acquiesce respond generously to my questions of how they feel about the governor, budget deficits, about potentially paring the number of penguins at the Franklin Park Zoo. These women tend to be older. They live alone. Often they are widows, the MRBs by default. They have the time and the desire to talk.

Each interview is supposed to take fifteen minutes but, despite my boss’s wishes, I find myself staying on the phone with these women for half an hour or more. Because, in truth, I don’t know what it is like to cook dinner for my kids or to go with my husband to the Gardner Museum. I am only just learning how to live, it sometimes seems, and how to live alone. It helps me to talk to these women, even just about their survey responses. It allows me to glimpse who I might be some day.

My friend Rosie moved away for the summer and so I offered to take care of her cat. Penny is ten, a longhaired black slinking creature who desires human company above all else. I do too, but I have no complaints about Penny. She is a lovely housemate. She is a loud cat though, announcing her every unhappiness with a yowl. “What Penny, what?” I will ask her plaintively, holding my palms out for her to smell. I look down at her looking back up at me and wonder if I need her as much as she needs me.

Sometimes, I follow Penny, walking from room to room. We move from the green-painted kitchen overlooking the backyard into the tiny bathroom and then through to the yellow living room and onto the sinking futon couch. Then back again. I listen as Penny’s paws patter on the wood floors, and I try to figure out the reason for her complaint. I freshen her water, pour her some salmon-flavored kibble. I scratch her ears. When she is happy, Penny will curl up next to me and purr a constant, consistent hum. She will expose her soft belly, close both of her eyes, and lie there for hours. I am too young to become a cat lady, but old enough to appreciate these small moments of joy.

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At times, the women I am surveying will ask me questions, forgetting that I am just a paid surveyor. When I ask them the questions about how long they have lived in Massachusetts, they will query me, too, on where I live, how long I have spent there. “I’m in New Hampshire,” I tell them. “I have spent the past two years here.”

“And before that?” they ask.

How is it that over the phone we feel comfortable talking about our lives, our values, to relative strangers? Is it loneliness or is it simply some greater belief in the importance of answering survey questions for a hometown newspaper? I wonder if these women would be as conversational, as forthright, if I were a man. Do my female voice and affirming responses somehow invite coffee-klatch chatter? Can these women sense how much our conversations please me? I am still trying to learn how others see me. I am still trying to learn how I see myself.

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This job at the survey center is not my first that has required speaking to strangers on the telephone. I spent my last two years in college volunteering for the campus crisis hotline. After college, I spent another two years answering phones for the Washington, D.C. chapter of 1-800-SUICIDE. I cannot explain why I joined these campus hotlines, except that I knew instinctively I would be good at it. I tend to remain calm when others are screaming; I am someone who friends call late, knowing I’ll always pick up.

At times, though, it is terrifying to work at a hotline, to feel partially responsible for the lives of others. Even taking care of Penny, remembering to feed her each day, to clean her little box and to give her fresh water, sometimes requires brazen confidence in my own abilities.

Toward the end of the Globe survey, I soften my voice: I have to inquire about the respondent’s annual income. It is a delicate question, one I don’t enjoy asking. We have been getting along so well and I hate to ruin it. Sometimes the respondents answer, but most brush the question off and I move quickly along.

The next topic is education. The women I speak with often answer the “highest level of schooling” question with secretarial school. There is no option for that on the computer so we consider together which category fits. Does it constitute “some college”? Is it simply “other”? We decide it belongs in the “technical school” box. “It’s a skill set,” one woman says, confirming our choice.

Usually, by the time I say, “Thank you, that’s all” at the end of our conversation, there is some relief. But many respondents, by this point, have gotten into it. A polite stranger has just spent the past half-hour asking their opinions on politics, policy, and what they see as the biggest problem facing the state of Massachusetts today, and they are eager to share their thoughts. There are no wrong answers. “Is Massachusetts going in the right direction or is it way off track?” How about your life? What about mine?

As I hang up, I think about what these women will do after they get off the phone, if they will walk slowly into their Tiffany-lamped living rooms or into a bedroom with a scratchy floral comforter to pick up a book. A biography, maybe. The story of someone else’s life. Or will they turn on their aging television with its wobbling antennas? Perhaps they will call their son or daughter to announce that “a nice young woman just called me on the telephone.”

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My own grandmother lives in an apartment in New York City where all of the furniture is covered in plastic. “So it will keep,” she explains, nodding her pinkish-blond hair. It is a house of white porcelain swan figurines and red velvet chairs with gold braided tassels. My grandmother still has a rotary phone hanging in her kitchen. Her fingers are too arthritic to reach into the circular slots to dial and her eyes are too watery for her to see the numbers clearly. She has a live-in nurse now who takes care of her, who answers the phone for her and dials her daughter—my mother—to discuss things like the nice young woman who just called on the telephone. If my mother is not at home, my grandmother will leave a message: “Gloria, your mother called.” She calls nearly every day, often leaving multiple, identical messages over a span of hours.

My mother, in fact, rarely answers her phone. She is always on another line when I call, or in the subway, or she has forgotten to take her phone off silent after a meeting. When she does pick up she usually says to me, “I can’t talk now, but I’ll call you after lunch?” But I will have to dial her again a day later, as a reminder.

My mother has an iPhone now and at night she sits in her bed, next to my father who is already asleep, and plays Scramble over and over again. She can find patterns in the letters easily; she converts them into one word, then two, then many. I cannot imagine my mother participating in a fifteen-minute caller survey, but if she did, the iPhone would be next to her, attached via headset, as she painted her toenails at the edge of the bed, the cat curled beside her. She would answer call-waiting midway through.

Last week it was raining in New York. I was there visiting with my parents. Their bedroom holds the only television and so I was in there, sitting on the bed, when I first felt the sudden storm, whisking through the windows, pulsating on my bare arms. I inched away from the windows, looking fearfully out toward the abruptly blackened sky. Later, I would learn that Central Park lost over 100 trees in the storm, that parks all around the city were covered in felled branches and ripped tree trucks.

I quickly dialed my mother, who had called ahead a half hour earlier to tell my father to start dinner. She didn’t answer.

“I’m going out,” my father called to me, opening the front door while extending his foot to prevent the cat from sneaking past. I took over making the tomato sauce for dinner. Fresh basil, oregano, some mint from the window box. My father returned ten minutes later with my mother. She had called him from beneath a nearby awning, requesting an umbrella. “It didn’t seem as though it was ever going to let up,” she said to me, shaking off her curls. “I thought the storm was going to last forever. Thank goodness Dad came with the umbrella.”

“I called you, too,” I tell her.

“Oh dear,” she says, glancing down at her phone. “I must have missed it. But that sauce smells delicious.”

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Sometimes, while I am dialing random households, seeking survey participants, I hope for my aunt in Cambridge. There is always the chance that her number will pop up on my screen. My call will find her on one of the three floors of her house with its Chinese tapestries and exhibits of wire sculptures in the style of Calder’s circus people. She lives there alone now, since her partner died three years ago. When I go there for dinner, the two of us sit at a long table of Indonesian teak and speak quietly, as though to leave the silence undisturbed.

I imagine dialing her number though and saying, “Good evening, my name is Alexa and I am calling from…” and she will cut in and say, “My niece is named Alexa,” and it will be a funny reunion that will make us both laugh. I won’t ask her about her income and she will hang up happily and dial my father, her brother, to tell him how I called and we talked about politics.

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After I speak to these women, I want to sit for a moment, to mull a bit over our half-hour interaction. It is likely the only one we will ever have. Will I ever glimpse them on the street wearing plastic rain bonnets to keep their hair? Will I catch them in South Station, at the vet or the zoo? I’ll never know. Who else am I missing? Who else will I never meet? It is silly to wonder of these things, I know.

In truth, however, right after I finish conversing with these women— women named Judith or Gladys or Sheryl, names I don’t hear anymore on people younger than fifty—I have to call someone else. Another phone number always pops up on my computer screen, blinking expectantly. “Good evening, my name is Alexa. Would you be willing to participate in an anonymous survey?”

I ask and ask and ask. Four hours straight, four days a week, I keep calling. Usually, I get busy signals or answering machines or people who hang up as soon as they hear I am not someone they know. I hope for the Judiths and Gladyses and Sheryls. In a four-hour shift I am lucky to get three of them.

It is surprising to me how much pleasure I get out of these survey questionnaires, that I am willing to put up with hours of hang ups and exhausted men who just got home from work and don’t want to talk about politics. “Why would I tell you anything?” they ask, tiredly. But I enjoy my job because of the men who do agree to participate in the survey, men who muffle the phone for a moment in the beginning of the conversation, asking their wives if it is okay to talk. I like it because of the older women who tell me about their first careers, and for the thirty-one-year-old Asian woman who was embarrassed that she didn’t recognize the name of a city council member and felt the need to explain she had only just arrived in Boston. She was not yet a U.S. citizen but engaged to one. Another woman went to high school in Hawaii with Barack Obama: “He was just Barry then,” she tells me. “He was no different than the rest of us.”

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When I leave work at 9:00 p.m., I drive slowly home past rows of lit houses and bright windows displaying families sitting around shining living room televisions. At my own home, sitting on the futon while petting Penny, I might pick up a book or watch a movie, or perhaps talk on the phone with friends. I might share with them some tidbit about the lives of the women I surveyed, some maxim that applies to us—the aquarium is a wonderful place to meet men. Mainly though, I keep the conversations to myself. They are private, after all.

Because I am used to working at hotlines where people call me, it is strange now to have this job where the people I am calling do not necessarily want to talk, are too busy to talk. Still, I understand. My friends and I also have less time to chat, as we get busier with graduate school and boyfriends and professional lives. We live far away now, from our families and each other. We see each other irregularly and fleetingly—weddings, birthdays, family affairs.

I am hoping all this uncertainty will slow and I will have time to become the type of person who answers surveys, sympathetic to the young women who call me in the evenings, working to pay the bills. That I will become the type of woman I speak to on the telephone, who volunteers at the local polling site and who brings her tow-headed children to see the white tigers pacing and pacing at the zoo.

As I walk slowly up the stairs to my house each evening, I think of all this, of how the rest of my night will unspool, of what my life will be like, of where my ex-boyfriend is now that I let him go. When I take out my keys at my heavy wood door, I lean into it for a moment and I stop to listen. Penny is inside, alone, waiting for me and yowling about who knows what.

Danielle Ofri

The Spring 2010 issue of the Bellevue Literary Review opens with the winners of the BLR Literary Prizes—the fifth year of our literary competition. More than 900 writers submitted their work to be judged by Phillip Lopate, Tony Hoagland, and Gail Godwin. The submissions were evaluated blindly, thus it was remarkable to learn that both the winner and honorable mention of the Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry were the same person—Amanda Auchter. The styles of the poems are quite different, and this dual honor is a testament to this poet’s diverse talents.

Another delightful surprise was the winner of the Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize for Nonfiction. Joan Kip’s thoughtful essays about aging, loss, and growth have graced our pages in the past, and it is a special honor that she marks her 93rd year with the BLR prize.

The winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, Larry Hill, offers a gripping story about a wounded soldier’s return to the barrio in his story “Cocido.” The editorial staff thanks the Vilcek, Goldenberg, and Cooper families, the 2010 judges, the writers who contributed their work, and our reviewers who helped read the submissions.

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Portraying the complexity of mental illness without falling prey to stereotype is a true challenge. A pair of poems in this issue helps convey the experience with understated imagery. “But you dare not close your eyes, too much concealed/ in invisible gases,” writes Virginia Chase Sutton, in her poem “On Being Bipolar and the Phenomenal World.” Rachel Contreni Flynn speaks of the penetrating effects of mental illness on the sister of the patient: “Even now I dream/of her breath in my hair. I wake feeling/ saved, then bitten and torn down.”

Characters with unexpected personality quirks turn up in several stories in the issue. M.M. De Voe’s protagonist in “The Champion” arrives at her parent’s home with a divorce to conceal and a kidney to offer. Her old-school Lithuanian father won’t discuss his illness, but will only challenge her to a competitive game of Scrabble.

In Albert Dixon’s story, “Stuntman,” a surgeon performs cash-only operations in his kitchen because “[h]e wasn’t going to let a little thing like revocation of license get in his way.”

Resonant philosophical themes such as mortality, love, and trust sometimes arise in offbeat circumstances. In “The Pope’s Boutique,” by Alison Baker, two elderly women navigate widowhood and frailty while sorting knit shirts in the local church thrift shop. Anna Mirer, in “The Wills of Twenty Strangers,” takes us into the medical school anatomy lab, an arena redolent of fear, formalin, and awe.

We are delighted that another crop of BLR writers have made the “notable” list in the top literary anthologies for 2008. Maud Casey’s story “Fugueur” was honored in Best American Short Stories, as was Merilee D. Karr’s essay “Plant Life” in Best American Essays. “Evacuation Instructions” by Elliott Holt was a notable story in the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology. The Bellevue Literary Review continues to mature. We are grateful to you, the reader, without whom this literary journal could not exist. We hope you enjoy the stories, essays, and poems in this issue of the BLR.