Bellevue Literary Review was established in 2000 by founding editors Danielle Ofri, Jerome Lowenstein, and Ronna Wineberg, with Martin J. Blaser as publisher.

Subscribe to BLR and submit your writing at www.BLReview.org

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REVIEWERS: Felice Aull, Karen Beckermann, Nicholas Birns, Rose Bromberg, Theresa Brown, Joanne Chin, Joanna Constandache, Adele Dummermuth, Bonnie Jill Emanuel, Monique Ferrell, Ellen Foster, Chris Grilo, Rachel Hadas, Jacqueline Keer, Hani Khalil, Dorian Kotsiopoulos, Ajay Major, Cara Marcano, Melissa McEwen, Anne McGouran, Shanda McManus, Laura Murphy, Annie Robinson, Flannery Maeve Rollins, Pamela Ryder, Ann Savino, Catherine Sawoski, Patrick Skerrett, Barbara Skinn, Ann Stoney, Tim Suermondt, Kathy Tuominen-Lenney, Sasha Yakhkind, Abigail Zuger

INTERN: Catherine Wu

COVER ART:

Charles Philippe Jean-Pierre

charlesjeanpierre.com

Front:

L'île de la Tortue II

From the 'Drifting Once Again' series

Acrylic monotype collage on canvas, 48 × 60 inches 2025

Back:

Autobiography of My Mother II

Acrylic collage on canvas, 30 × 30 inches

2021

Bellevue Literary Review is published twice a year.

Copyright © 2026 Bellevue Literary Review

Bellevue Literary Review

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New York, NY 10010

www.BLReview.org

Printed by Sheridan PA Hanover, Pennsylvania

ISSN 1537-5048 ISBN-979-8-9956738-0-4

Indexed by Humanities International Complete

Member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)

BELLEVUE LITERARY REVIEW

Danielle Ofri Editor-in-Chief | Stacy Bodziak Managing Editor
Doris W. Cheng Fiction Editor | Lauralee Leonard Associate Fiction Editor
Alanna Weissman Associate Nonfiction Editor | Scott Oglesby Assistant Nonfiction Editor
Saleem Hue Penny Assistant Poetry Editor | Linda Harris Dolan Assistant Poetry Editor
Ronna Wineberg Contributing Fiction Editor | Kate Falvey Associate Editor
Rosalind Aparicio-Ramírez Digital Content Editor |

BOARD OF DIREC TORS

Linda C. Lombardi, Chair | Anyika Jordan
Helene Atwan, Vice-Chair | Perri Klass
Jodie Corngold, Secretary | Bettina Klein
Jacob M. Appel | Cliff Manko
Shiva Bhaskar | Michael Myers
Cynthia Cannell | Danielle Ofri
Frank Clark | Aish Sinha
Serena J. Fox | Marit Vagstad
Lesmah J. Fraser |

ADVISORY BOARD

Cori Baill, Rafael Campo, Rita Charon, Anne Fadiman,

Simone Joseph, Ruth Oratz, Abraham Verghese, Jan Vilcek

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FICTION

The Senator, Shannon Perri

Hunting Game, May Lee-Yang

Christmas Eve, 1966, Andrew Cominelli

My Name is Jin Ishida, Joongi Andrew Lee

Homecoming, Rosalind Guy

Hard, Miles Meth

Davanti all’Altare di Santa Lucia, Courtney Chatellier

Back to Bubba’s Briny Lounge, Natalie Hanagan

NONFICTION

Running Deep, Won Lee

The Last Tableau, Ardis Garcia

Eddies, Lindsay Sproul

Packing for the Descent, Amber Wolfe

Echo, Julia Motyka

Rural Ways, Nina Gaby

POETRY

Telling the Bees, Dara Laine

Stinson Beach, Miranda Saake

Spells, Ted Kooser

Riverbound, L. Annette Binder

If Not Mercy, Zoe Boyer

This Poem is Not About the Old Country/the Holocaust/the D.P. Camps, Margaret Bleichman

On Mucinex, Katie Hartsock

From Where I Sit, E.B. Licata

One-Word Forecast, Jane O. Wayne

At Risk, Elisabeth Murawski

To See This Body, Denise Miller

Unmedicated, Ken Victor

Despite What I Say, I Don’t Know If I’m Willing, Colleen Morton Busch

Refeeding, Clara Collins

Bajo las campanas, Ella Ordona

The Trauma Bay, Rachael Trotter

When You Ask About My Grandchildren, Arlene DeMaris

We Lie Late in Your Bed, Once Our Bed, Sue Churchill

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, Diane K. Martin

Underneath, H.E. Fisher

Wing Clipping, Mun Heol Cho

Exposure, Edytta Wojnar

Elegy as Pre-med Curriculum, Rick Pongratz

Blue Notes, Judith Fox

Extended Stay, Patti Nommensen

Caught It Early, Scott Dickison

When Moss Refuses to Smell like Velvet, Darcy Smith

Everyone Who Has Ever Carried Me, Olivia Mae Longoria

EXTRA

Book Review, Amelia Christmas Gramling

Contributors’ Notes

FOREWORD

Welcome to the 50th issue of Bellevue Literary Review! It seems hard to believe, but BLR is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. We certainly weren’t thinking in terms of a silver jubilee back when this all started, with a wisp of an idea about creative writing on health, illness, and healing. But these themes are universal, and using the arts to grapple with our shared vulnerabilities turned out to be a prescription that resonates with an ever-growing community.

We are excited to share this special year with our readers. All year long we’re digging back through our archives to highlight past issues of BLR in our weekly newsletters, featuring some of the most memorable poems, stories, and essays that have appeared in our pages. We’re launching a slate of new programs to invite the broader community to engage directly our themes, including Conversations on Creative Writing in Healthcare, Art in Medicine, Writing Illness onto the Page, as well as a book club and a writing studio.

The journal, however, remains at our core and shepherding a new crop of writings onto the page is one of the greatest pleasures of the editorial team. Even after fifty issues, the excitement of reading and selecting work for each issue hasn’t waned. And when these poems, essays, and stories come together in the finished issue—well, to an editor, there’s nothing better.

Issue 50 includes the winners of the annual BLR Literary Prizes, which attracted a wealth of impressive writing. Joan Silber, the judge for the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected “The Senator” by Shannon Perri as the winner. In a story that manages to be unsentimental and even humorous at times, a mother lands upon an unusual metaphor for her brain tumor as she debates how to tell her toddler. In May Lee-Yang's Honorable Mention story, “Hunting Game,” two young women participate in a college “game” that simulates the harrowing escape from Laos of their parents’ generation.

The nonfiction judge, Nicole Chung, chose “Running Deep,” by Won Lee, as the winner of the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction. A family navigates the unsettling waters of a mother with failing kidneys, never sure when the end might be near. Honorable Mention goes to “The Last Tableau,” by Ardis Garcia, which follows a woman who has returned to a home of conflicted memories to care for her dying father and ill mother.

The John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry was judged by Patricia Spears Jones. The winning poem, “Telling the Bees” by Dara Laine, moves fluidly from personal to familial to ecological: “Maybe they knew before we did. Maybe they felt it. When the line flattened. The air static. / Maybe grief hums at a pitch only bees can hear.” Honorable Mention was awarded to Miranda Saake’s “Stinson Beach,” a moving poem of parents bringing their son with leukemia to the beach: “I was trying / to recreate trips from before he was sick, / flinging himself into frigid water /on a beach so full of bleached driftwood /we believed in a kingdom of /bones.”

We recognize that BLR writings engage directly with experiences of illness, loss, suicide, and the realities of the body in ways that may be intense or affecting for some readers. We hope you will find meaning and resonance in the stories, essays, and poems contained herein.

Our thanks to the judges, the writers, and the dedicated BLR friends who sponsor our annual literary prizes—the Goldenberg family (fiction), the Buckvar family (nonfiction), and the Leslin Healthcare Leadership Foundation, which underwrites the Allman Poetry Prize. And of course the biggest thanks goes to you, our readers, who form the backbone of the BLR community. We are thrilled to share this 25th anniversary with you!

Danielle Ofri

Editor-in-Chief

2026 BELLEVUE LITERARY REVIEW PRIZES

Goldenberg Prize for Fiction

Judged by Joan Silber

Winner: “The Senator” by Shannon Perri

Honorable Mention: “Hunting Game” by May Lee-Yang

John and Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry

Judged by Patricia Spears Jones

Winner: “Telling the Bees” by Dara Laine

Honorable Mention: “Stinson Beach” by Miranda Saake

Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction

Judged by Nicole Chung

Winner: “Running Deep” by Won Lee

Honorable Mention: “The Last Tableau” by Ardis Garcia

THE SENATOR

SHANNON PERRI

The reason Greg drives Arthur to pre-K now, and to everything, is because there is a Senator in my brain. I have the same rare terminal brain tumor that a famous war-hero senator died from, a glioblastoma, and even though the metaphor doesn’t quite make sense, somehow calling my tumor the Senator keeps me from drowning myself in our neighbor’s stock pond. It also makes me laugh.

I used to fear my son or husband dying, certain I’d wither away without either, yet the possibility of my own early end had evaded me. We moved out here during the pandemic, when Arthur was two, to a few acres outside of a small town deemed the Bluebonnet Capital of the World. The hope was that our son could have a normal life, full of lakes and green and, perhaps one day, chickens. Greg works remotely as a contract web designer, and with Arthur set to start kindergarten in the fall, the plan was for me to return to freelance copywriting. For us to cultivate this sweet, quiet life, so different from the chaotic childhoods Greg and I endured. As it turns out, Arthur won’t have a normal life after all.

Despite our discord with the local politics, we migrated here for peace. It took us three rounds of in vitro fertilization and most of our savings to conceive our son. After such a medicalized existence, I craved nature. Now, I wonder if my body was smarter than me, knowing how cruel it would be to create a life it couldn’t see through. And yet we pressed on, blocked fallopian tubes be damned.

Out here in the country, Arthur has witnessed so much death. I wonder if that will make this somehow easier on him—or maybe harder. Just this year, our border collie mix, Ruby, died of a rattlesnake bite. The feral, injured black cat I attempted to catch and aid passed away on our doorstep. When we saw an owl fly above with a mouse in its talons, I wanted to shield Arthur’s eyes, but instead he said, look, Mom, the bird is bringing food to its babies.

Ever since that night driving back from the local H-E-B, where rainbow flashes lit up my peripheral vision and I panicked that a police cruiser was pursuing me, nothing has been the same. That was nearly six weeks ago. Now, Greg’s eyelids hang low, the skin on his face heavy and loose, as if it might dislodge and slide away. He’s been taking on too much, fussing about me constantly. That and I know he’s terrified of what his own future might hold, isolated and solo parenting.

Arthur has always been an early riser, and so to give Greg some reprieve, I wake with him. In the twilight before dawn, I drink black coffee on the back porch, while he sips hot cocoa. He is so big now, all limbs, but still he crawls into my lap some mornings, like today, and sometimes he even yanks my nightshirt over his head, as if he craves a return to the womb. I’ve always worried about how I’ll handle myself when he pulls away, as children inevitably do. The tugs are already there. Yesterday when I tried to adjust his inside-out shirt, he told me to cut it out. “It’s my body, my choice,” he said, reflecting back the language we’ve taught him. He’s growing more independent, which I guess is a silver lining. We haven’t shared the news about the Senator, yet, but he’s a perceptive child. Just yesterday, he asked about my pills.

Once the sun yawns its rays across the property, Arthur and I slip on our clogs, careful to shake them out first, and roam the ungroomed terrain. I miss the black cat who used to join us. Our meager five-acre track is surrounded by a seven-hundred-acre ranch, making our sliver feel even more remote and majestic. Our house originally belonged to the rancher’s daughter. These walks are my favorite part of the day, my fantasy come to fruition. It’s hard to take in, that soon I’ll no longer be doing them.

Since my diagnosis, I haven’t been able to bring myself to start any treatment, besides an antiseizure medication which has paused the rainbow flashes, for now. As independent workers, we don’t have the best insurance, but Greg says he doesn’t care about the cost. He begs me to do the surgery, to take the chemo pills and fry my brain with radiation, and I was planning to—even though the neuro-oncologist explained this harrowing trifecta is about buying a year or two, not changing the inevitable—until I came across a forum for the caregivers of those with my type of cancer. The suffering, the pain, the confessions of loved ones wishing the torture, for all involved, would end. One woman despaired how her elderly mother had lost her mind and slapped her own grandchild. Another vented how the brain operation had left her brother paralyzed. Others described the agony of watching their family member struggle to walk or eat or use the bathroom without help.

I know that’s coming, and Greg can’t possibly want me to drag this out. The idea of him changing my diaper nauseates me. During IVF, I did my own shots. Postpartum, I let him bring me things, but I kept my dignity, insisting on privacy when changing out my extra-long, extra-thick pads or cleansing in a sitz bath. He promises he will care for me through this, no matter what that entails. A body is just a body, he says. Yes, but this one is mine. There are times I wish I were an animal. I could give my family a final nuzzle, and then wander off to surrender to my fate, alone.

Greg doesn’t like when I talk that way, so focused on the end. He counters with stories of people beating various odds, of living well with chronic disease, of mysterious medical miracles. He bought me a book called Hope in the Dark. I know he’s freaking out. We’re not a religious family, but I think I’ve seen him pray. Unfortunately, I’ve always been grounded in the practical—statistics don’t lie. What’s happening is happening, regardless of how we feel. He’s quite angry with me, which I understand. It’s his way of showing love.

Next week, I have a follow-up MRI to see what the Senator has been up to. After, we’ll meet with the neuro-oncologist, a compact woman with straight red hair, flat bangs, and square-shaped purple glasses. Greg is hoping by then I’ll change my mind. At the first appointment, I asked the doctor directly what she would do if she was in my position. She said she didn’t have kids, so her calculus might be different than mine. I read that to mean she’d also forgo medical intervention. She does however have a geriatric chihuahua she brings to work, I guess to lighten the mood. Or maybe to ground herself. Somehow the dog makes me sadder, the way he shivers in the carrier tucked under her desk.

Thankfully, I’m not too tired yet, not in real physical discomfort besides headaches I can still manage with a rotation of Advil and Tylenol. My balance is a tad wobbly from losing some peripheral eyesight, but the oncologist says my brain will adapt, assuming the tumor doesn’t pummel through the whole thing first. Sometimes, I feel normal, or at the very least, numb. On these walks with my son, I can almost forget the fundamental truth, the evolutionary pull to grow grow grow to the point of destruction, is alive inside of me. How American my Senator is. How primal.

Today, on our morning adventure, the sun not yet abrasive, Arthur spots a spider web stretched between two cacti, glistening with dew. We hear the hee-haw of a donkey and the deep groan of a cow, a symphony of birdcalls. The aroma of warm, sweet hay fills our noses. We don’t see any animals until the boom of a gunshot reverberates through the hills, and the tall grass shakes with small creatures leaping up to run or fly.

“Look,” Arthur says, jerking his hand away from mine. “A baby deer.”

“A fawn?”

“It’s all alone.”

I reach for his hand but he slaps it to his side and walks over to the barbed wire fence line. I want to tell him to be careful, but we’ve said this a million times, and he’s old enough to make his own choices to avoid pain. Nobody wants to hurt.

“Don’t touch it,” I say as Arthur kneels down in his too-short Paw Patrol pajamas, and for a brief moment, I swear I see the black cat I tried to save, as if the infected slash on her paw pad never killed her. She’s stalking something by the fence line—maybe a dragonfly or lizard—like she used to do on our walks.

“It looks sick,” Arthur says, hovering over the baby deer, and he isn’t wrong. We see fawns all the time, but not like this one. This fawn, a tiny heap of bones draped with white-dotted fur, is lying on its side, its pale pink tongue spilling out like milk. I’m not sure if there is a way to help this animal.

“Give it some space,” I say. Arthur scoots back maybe a centimeter. “Remember what the animal rescue lady said? If mother animals smell something foreign, they might abandon their young.”

“And without the mom, they die,” he says. “Right?”

I pause before answering. “Sometimes, yes.”

We learned this the hard way, before my cancer, after once trying to rescue a baby rabbit. The creature fit in my palm, like a bundle of Arthur’s old newborn socks. In a Tupperware container, we made it a nest, placing my hot rollers under hand towels to provide warmth. We filled an eye dropper with milk, and the little thing, eyes still closed, stuck out its flickering tongue and drank. Yet a day later, the bunny died. Without the warm licks of its mother, the bunny couldn’t make itself urinate or defecate. We think that was the problem, anyway, based on our internet searches and a call to an animal rescue hotline.

“Are humans a type of animal?” Arthur asks, and I feel as if a rattlesnake has bitten me this time, fangs right in the chest.

“Technically, but we’re very different. Different rules.”

The wind shifts and there she is, the black cat, scratching herself against the wood fence post, not at all concerned about the barbed wire, which may very well have led to her demise. She closes her eyes, and I can almost feel the vibration of her purr. She never let me pet her, but now I feel her dark sleek fur, shiny and warm from the sun.

Arthur rests his little hands behind his head, the same pose Greg often takes. The cat saunters past him and brushes up next to the fawn, skin to skin, no doubt her scent leaking over. I stay silent, waiting for Arthur to call me out for being “unfair,” since I’m letting the cat touch the deer while he was forbidden, but his cries of injustice don’t come. There is a possibility that this is a new cat, a sibling, its features so strikingly real, more real than the fawn or even my own child, but I’m aware that hallucinations are one of the Senator’s features. A sign that things could be progressing.

Sometimes, I google the Senator—the person, that is. Though I didn’t vote for him during his unsuccessful presidential run, pictures of his white hair and maverick smile bring me calm. In an essay I found, about his five-year stint in captivity, he wrote, “the enemy can take almost everything from you, but they cannot take your spirit.” I wish I could ask him if his thinking shifted when the enemy came from within.

It’s possible that my resistance to fighting the tumor is selfish. Maybe I should try to extend this life, to make more memories, even with dwindling abilities. The Senator did the surgery, and because of that, he was able to participate in a monumental vote, thumbing down the cancellation of the very governmental program that allows us access to our, albeit crappy, health insurance plan. In the end, there is a ticking clock above all our heads. A question mark we all have to reckon with, terminal cancer or not. Maybe I will say this all to Greg when he returns from taking Arthur to school.

“Can we at least bring it water?” Arthur asks, snapping my mind back into focus. The black cat is still there, looking right at me, with those gold, round eyes.

“Do you see that, sweetie? A black cat?”

“Where?”

I don’t answer.

“Wait, I want to see,” he said. “Show me.”

“But don’t you see it now?”

“Show me, Mom!”

This is when I begin to cry. I turn away and blink rapidly. But Arthur saw.

“Mom.” He stands up, the knee area of his pajamas caked with dirt, and walks over to hug my waist. He’s grown so tall. “Is the fawn going to die? Like Ruby?”

“I think the mom will come back. We just have to leave it alone. She’s probably getting food.”

We hear the front door open, thank god, and there Greg stands waving with one hand, a steaming coffee cup in the other. His coffee is all cream. On top of pushing for treatment, Greg has started telling me about quasi-scientific theories that suggest time is an illusion, that consciousness can exist outside of the brain as a form of energy. He talks about quantum physics, the multiverse, biocentrism—words I don’t fully understand nor have the capacity to try to. But what I appreciate is the hope. The way he’s saying, we will always be connected, even when I cross the line.

“Breakfast,” he calls. Like cowboys summoned from the pasture, Arthur and I lope inside. A spread of smoked salmon and salted butter on square rice crackers decorate the table. Fresh berries with cream and basil. Dried mango from a jar that tastes so sweet yet also somehow olive-y. Greg copes by preparing strange culinary feasts. Another peculiarity I’m going to miss.

“How was the walk? Were you steady?” he asks. Arthur picks at the berries, but mostly just sucks down juice.

“We saw a fawn alone, it didn’t look good, poor thing,” I reply.

“Oh, no,” Greg says. “Should we move it to the shade?”

Arthur rolls his eyes. “We can’t touch it, Dad. Duh.”

I can’t help but smile. It’s wild how much of me—what I say or do—he takes in and absorbs for himself, of course with his own tweaks. Hopefully I’ve given him enough to work with.

“And Mom saw the cat,” Arthur adds.

Greg cocks his head. “What cat?”

“The black one.”

“I assume this land is crawling with feral kitties,” I say, dabbing the corner of my mouth with the cloth napkins Greg has lately been bringing out. Napkin rings, too.

“Did you see the cat, Arthur?”

“Nope.” He leaps from the table and darts to his Legos, scattered just beyond the kitchen archway.

“Jesus,” Greg whispers, a harshness in his throat.

“Maybe it was a rabbit, I don’t know.”

“You’re hallucinating now?”

“It could’ve been anything.”

Greg looks toward Arthur. “You need to tell him, especially since you’ve given up.”

“It’s not giving up,” I shout-whisper. “Can’t we wait until after the appointment?”

“It just feels wrong, keeping this from him.”

There is so much I want to share with Arthur, so much I should be writing down and journaling, so many photo albums I need to finish, so much wisdom I should bestow, much less discover. I’m overwhelmed with the tasks required to be a good dead mom.

“Keep what from me?” Arthur asks from his play area. Greg won’t look at me. He expects more.

“Never mind,” I say. It’s almost time for school. Usually, I help Arthur load his backpack, but Greg might as well get used to it. I head to the bathroom and draw a bath, hoping the simmering temperature will cleanse my mind. Our bathtub sits under an oversized window, which I love, because it breaks the barrier between outside and in.

I slip under the hot water, let my hair soak in the bubbles and then pop up to breathe. I greedily fill my lungs, take in the luxury. The black cat is on the air conditioner unit, which is situated under the window outside, pawing at the glass. Her gold eyes stare as she releases a pitiful meow and stretches back on her hind legs. I’m sure she’s returned to vex me, maybe for failing to ever get the antibiotics into her, but I don’t mind. I’m happy to see her in any form. I hope I’ll be able to visit, too.

A few minutes later, Arthur and Greg burst into the bathroom. “The mom came back! The baby deer is gone!”

Greg smiles at me, wearily, yet there is relief on his face. I wonder if it was a coyote or a hawk, but who knows? Perhaps the mother did return.

“That’s wonderful news,” I say.

“Can I get in with you?”

“It’s time for school, bud,” Greg says.

“Just for a minute?” I plead. It’s rare that Arthur will still bathe with me.

Greg sighs. “I’ll clean the kitchen, then we need to head out.”

Arthur cheers then strips down quickly and plops in, water splashing to the floor all over his pajamas. He nestles his body next to mine as the cat patters at the window. I know he can’t see it, yet I’m curious. Could the cat possibly be a visitation instead of a brain malfunction? Something connected to Greg’s alternative laws of the universe? Aren’t hallucinations supposed to be more distorted and stressful, like those initial flashing lights? Does it have to mean something is wrong?

It doesn’t really matter. Greg’s right, Arthur deserves to know. One thing about the Senator that no one talks about is how, only a year before he was imprisoned in Vietnam for half a decade, his first wife had given birth to a baby girl. I wonder if he and his daughter were ever able to reclaim that fragile early bond just beginning to form. I have to believe some time is better than none.

I’m working toward the conversation I know I must have, but Arthur beats me to it. “Is there something bad in your head, Mom?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“You and Dad are always whispering about it.”

The black cat presses her paw to the glass, claws extended. I see a scar on her paw pad, but no blood. I wish I could touch my palm to hers. Why is she here and not our dog Ruby or my mother? My mother. I would give anything to call her. Like Greg’s parents, she was an alcoholic for most of my life, though for the last ten years of hers, she sobered up. Liver failure still got her in the end. I remember how, when dying, her breath oozed a sickeningly sweet, musty odor. Still, all I wanted was to crawl into her body. My sister and I took turns, sleeping with her in the hospital bed. Even during the worst days of her drinking, she never forgot my birthday. There is no one like a mother to celebrate your existence.

“Sweetie, there is something I need to tell you.”

Arthur kicks the water. Sure, he did ask, but who wants to hear this kind of truth?

“There is something in my brain, a tumor, that is making me sick. I see a doctor next week to learn more.”

“Are you going to die?”

I’m not ready to answer that. Maybe I will keep an open mind at the next appointment. Maybe the futile treatments are worth it, if they can delay me having to do so. Probably I should try.

“We all die one day,” I say, a copout. “But I’m not dying today. That I’m sure of.”

“Where will you go? Will it hurt? Will your eyes stay open or do they close? Do you have to stay still forever? Can you breathe?”

This time I splash the water. “You know, I call the tumor the Senator.

It’s kind of silly.”

He curls in closer. “What’s a senator?”

I block out the current political chaos and say, “Well, ideally they’re someone dignified, someone who helps.”

“I thought the tumor was bad.”

Admittedly, this is where the metaphor breaks down.

“It’s not that straightforward,” I say. “You can talk to The Senator, you know. Ask for guidance. Sometimes I do. And you can always, always talk to me. Even if we’re apart. That’s how love works.”

“But I don’t want to be apart.”

Greg shouts from the other room that they’re late for school. It’s preschool, I want to yell back, who cares, but I know Greg needs to work. He’s rightfully worried about money.

“Just a few more minutes,” I holler back. Arthur looks out the window and his eyes land on something. He doesn’t share what he sees.

“Can we stay in until we get brain fingers?”

I try not to flinch, as this is the exact term the doctor used to describe how the tumor spreads. Even if you extract the mass via surgery, microscopic fingers have already dug their way throughout the brain, never stopping until they’ve claimed the entire organ for themselves. Manifest Destiny.

“What are brain fingers?”

“You know, when our fingers start to look like brains, from being in the water so long.”

Pruney. He means when our fingers get all pruney. How does he know what a brain looks like? What else will he soon learn? It’s unthinkable how much I’m going to miss. This is the part that feels most unfair.

Greg might get irritated, but I say, “We can stay in forever, as long as you wish.”

There’s a tap at the window. Arthur turns—he must’ve heard something—but I know he doesn’t see what I see. The black cat is still there, yes, but, surprisingly, so is the Senator himself, my bravado tumor-man, dressed in his full formal Navy uniform, brass buttons and captain hat to boot. Though his hair is already silvery white, he looks young as he caresses the underside of the cat’s chin, the cat who never let me touch her. The Senator finds my eyes and nods. I nod back. I want to be brave, for myself and my family. Maybe that’s something I can give.

I take Arthur’s hand and kiss his wrinkling fingertips. The heat from the tub hits. I feel a little woozy. “Alright, I know I said forever, but it’s probably close to time.”

I’m sure he’ll fight me on this, and I’m prepared to let him win—at least a few more minutes—but instead he grins and then springs out, wet and slippery as a newborn, racing full throttle to his room to change.

TELLING THE BEES

DARA LAINE

Maybe they knew before we did. Maybe they felt it. When the line flattened. The air static. Maybe grief hums at a pitch only bees can hear. You’re supposed to tell them—good news and bad. Everything that leaves a mark. That’s what I was told. Or maybe what we needed to believe. So I went to the hive, this time to whisper your name. Everything appeared intact—until I noticed the tilt. Had a branch fallen while we were gone? Had the neighbors dragged it away before we could see? Maybe something hungry came in the night—too eager for sweetness to notice what it toppled. In my youth, the hive stood upright—weathered, a quiet monument. Now it lay horizontal, soaked in the cold March mud. I thought the bees would flee. But softly, persistently, I heard their hum. They hadn’t gone. They kept working, slipping through the splintered wood, lifting their bodies as if to say: we’re here, it’s okay, come home—buzzing the same paths they’d always followed, as if the route was written into their wings. As if grief couldn’t touch their knowing. But maybe grief moves the hive, not the bees. The path’s still there, but it leads nowhere now. Or maybe they already knew. Or maybe they were waiting for me to say it out loud so they could finally fly away, pollen-thick and bitter. I watched them and thought: maybe they felt it before we did. Maybe it was the knowing that pulled them to the earth—tipped from the weight of it. The stillness. That awful silence after the rhythm stops. No. So there I stood, rooted like the old maple that shades their box, thinking, knowing: I should say something. I should do it right. It has fallen to me to tell the bees. I should speak. Whisper his name, the loudest sound in the world. But I couldn’t. Not that day. I just let them carry on. Working—a living hum in the wreckage.

RUNNING DEEP

WON LEE

In the early days, when my father was still training to be my mother’s caregiver, he would tell me of his nightmares about needles. In them, he’d be sweating beside my mother, bent over her arm as he struggled to find the fistula. He’d have already pierced the access point, but because the body isn’t static, the fistula—the artery sewed to a vein—would shift location, sometimes lower, sometimes higher, sometimes to the left or to the right. He would probe inside her arm as my mother cried out. Every second he failed to find the flap would prolong her pain, which was his alone to cause, this needle an extension of his finger whose every touch brought her tears.

He would tell me this over the phone in soft-spoken tones: how his nightmare would then bleed into reality, struggling that same morning to find the fistula, my mother writhing while he searched, each minute paid by a struck nerve, until he was broken down before he even began. Yet the next session he would do it again, shouldering this task, without which my mother could not live but with which my father could not either, his weeks alternating between the days he had to take up the needle and the days he spent dreading picking one up.

I felt guilt that I could not do this for him, that no one could step in and lift this burden of saving her life. And he saved it—still saves it—each time he sets up the cycler, hangs the bags of solution, opens the clamps, and lets the blood flow to be cleansed, so she can rise from her chair to live another day.

In their Maryland home, my parents set up a treatment space in a spare room off the living room. The setup includes one table for the cycler—a console that pumps and filters fluids—and another strewn with gloves, gauze pads, and tubing. There’s the waste bin where my father discards his bloodstained gloves and used lines. Along the wall are stacks of boxes of five-liter bags with dialysis solution, countless more of which he stores in the basement and carries upstairs from time to time. But the most important item, in the center of the room, is the brown leather chair my mother sits in for the duration of the multi-hour sessions.

This chair, which cost $600, is the one piece of furniture my mother avoids during her “off” days, and even right after hemodialysis. “She never sits in it otherwise,” my father once told me as he plopped down on it. “It’s a shame because it’s quite comfortable.” I tried it myself a few times, and it was indeed luxurious: the back supportive but cushioned, arms composed of plush leather, levers to recline and adjust the footrest. Under different circumstances, it would make a great reading chair. But when I later asked my mother about it, she sidestepped my question. “Oh, I don’t know why I dislike it,” she said in Korean, before changing the subject. To be honest, I’m not sure why I asked. I already knew what the chair had become for her, and that it could never be a place of comfort. Everything, each throe and episode of despair, was inscribed in that chair. And so instead she shunned the chair, as we all implicitly did while moving throughout the house, the impressions in the cushions calling out for a body—her body—to come and sit, to return to the prison of her condition, the failure of her physiology.

In the fall of 2019, before my mother started dialysis, my father organized a family trip to the West Coast. He rented a beach house in Aptos, California, and we traveled there by way of San Francisco. My partner and I flew in from Oregon, and my parents and siblings—Thomas and Kyung—from Maryland. The rationale behind the trip was that because my mother’s mobility would soon be greatly affected, we should all take one more trip to a favorite place of hers. Though this later proved to be something of a false forecast—with enough preparation, my parents learned to travel with the machine on rare occasions—at the time this possible future hung over our heads like the overcast that marked our first days there, threatening to flood us with grief.

It held back until the last day at the beach house. We enjoyed, or wore the semblance of enjoying, the ordinariness of our sightseeing—taking a drive to Muir Woods, where my parents stood marveling beneath the ancient redwoods; strolling through the streets of San Francisco and eating seafood on the northern waterfront; searching for condors while hiking at Pinnacles National Park; and visiting Monterey Bay, where we spent time at the aquarium.

The last of these destinations was the unstated objective of our trip. It was the place my parents took the three of us after my mother’s cancer diagnosis decades prior. At the time, I was two years old, and her prognosis was terminal; she had a rare form of cancer, her odds of survival less than one percent. In a last-ditch effort to create some memories, my parents landed on the aquarium, a family favorite for its displays of tropical fish, the moray eels lurking in crevices, the hammerheads whose diametrically opposed eyes made us wonder at life’s variability.

But more than any of these exhibits, we all gravitated toward the Mola mola, or the ocean sunfish, whose titanic form and stately procession around its tank entranced us. Silver-finned with an eye on each side of its disc-shaped body, it shone with the miracle of an underwater sun, a living one that returned us to an animistic universe where the elements were alive. It was evidence of an order to reality where all things in the sea and sky found their mirror and meaning. Especially for my parents, I think this is why they so loved this fish that served as witness: that my mother’s sickness wasn’t random, but written into the fabric of things.

Time behaves strangely when death approaches, then defers. We are familiar with the trope that every second with a terminally ill person acquires a heightened preciousness, the need to fulfill their last wishes taking on a sudden urgency, as old grievances fall away. But what happens when, after all the recalibration and anticipatory grief, the person lives?

In my mother’s case, this has been the motif of her life. Over and again, between cancer and recurrence, solution and complication, she’d end up in the ER, on an operating table, my father sending my siblings and me an urgent text that this might be it. But then, by some twist of fate, she would survive. She would make it through the procedures, the treatment would work, the cause would be found in time, the surgeon’s hands would be just deft enough. And our mother would again be ours, able to eke out a few more years, returning to us never healthy but alive nonetheless, and about this we were happy, or at least believed ourselves to be.

Yet each round of anticipatory grief wore away at us. Our psyches could only bear so many almosts until the realization that, at times, we were disappointed by how what was promised wasn’t given, that we could not find release and step into the mourning our lives had become one long prelude to. It is not easy to admit, but we came to crave the black sun of the aftermath. It was more than curiosity and less than total desire, but it was as real as our guilt when we wished for it.

It was clear there was no winner in the zero-sum game of our mother’s survival. The deferral of loss atrophied our relief, until we noticed only how her scar tissue had found a counterpart in the hardness we inexplicably came to possess.

During that trip, I saw the sunfish in Monterey for the first time as an adult. Two aspects struck me that I’d never noticed as a child. The first was that its body was scarred—slashed and indented with its history before captivity. There were bite marks from encounters with predators, lesions from parasites, and a torn fin, which trailed in the water like a tattered flag. It made me remember the time I accidentally saw my mother naked. She’d always been careful to keep her body hidden from me throughout the years, but one time during a stay at a hotel, I walked in on her changing. It was only a glimpse, and I apologized right away while closing the door behind me, but it was enough to imprint itself in my mind—the patchwork of irregular and clustered scars, the map of all that had been done to her.

In that moment, I could not bear to look at her, even as I would not avert my gaze. And as I stared at the sunfish, this was what I saw—the grooves in her flesh, the writing of the scalpel, the palimpsest of healed tissue that could never replace what had been cut away. My mother was the sunfish, and the sunfish was my mother, exchanging places in a way that was all too mortal until I could not stare at them any longer—neither the captive swimming endlessly around its tank nor my mother watching it through the glass.

The second feature I noticed about the Mola mola was how it wasn’t exactly a sun in the typical sense. Rather than being the center of a system around which other bodies revolve, it would circle some unseen center in its tank as if the real sun were absent, the void around which the dead and living hurtle without end. In this same manner, the sunfish seemed on the brink of madness, tracing the circumference of its conical prison in a ceaseless rotation, a sad carousel around a simulacrum of ocean—tracing it until the day the sunfish extinguished and sank to the depths of its tank to settle on the floor.

If you took an accounting of all the supplies each dialysis session uses, it would amount to hundreds of pounds. There is foremost the cycler, which weighs some ninety pounds. And then there are the bags of solution, which collectively add another fifty-five. These make up most of the paraphernalia, but there are of course filters, lines, syringes, needles, masks, gloves, gauze, a blood pressure monitor, and a thermometer, which together contribute an additional twenty pounds or so.

During the first mornings I sat with my mother during her dialysis sessions, I was struck by the quantity of trash produced at the end: the lines and used needles that my father gathered, the empty syringes and bloodied gauze he placed in a plastic bag before stripping off his gloves and discarding them with the rest. It was clear that her survival came at a cost, the removal of waste from her blood made possible by the disconcerting generation of a different kind of waste.

As someone who is conscious about my consumption, I brushed against this double bind: It felt wrong to consume so much to sustain one person, but on the other hand this person was not just anyone, but my mother. It was a situation that brought me disenchantment with this medical “solution,” which still felt primitive in its effectiveness. Though many take pride in healthcare’s advancements, whenever I saw the extent of what was needed to perform the work of my mother’s dysfunctional kidneys, I felt strongly that this pride was misplaced. After all, this pair of organs—each just five inches long and weighing about half a pound—is a marvel of nature, an intricate machine that can function better than this medley of equipment. It is a contrast I still think about from time to time, how a pound of kidneys can outdo hundreds of pounds of supplies.

It was the final night of our stay in Aptos when our grief finally descended on us. My father sat us down in the living room to tell us what dialysis would mean for our lives going forward. It was a cool evening and the windows were closed, and all of us were sitting on different couches, our attention focused on our father as he spoke.

“I don’t know how long she will live once she starts,” my father began. “Statistics say life expectancy is five to ten years.” He paused to glance at my mother. “But she’s starting at an earlier age than most. And I’ve heard some even live for twenty or thirty years.” I watched his face to see what he believed. “More importantly,” my father continued, “our mobility will be greatly limited. We might not even be able to travel, and if we can, who knows for how long.”

His words hung in the air as if searching for somewhere to settle. I had already heard snippets of this, as we all had at various times when we’d called home. But there was something about being together that made it real. Before he could finish, some hidden latch opened, and Kyung began to cry. “Umma, saranghae,” Kyung choked out between sobs. “I love you.” My mother nodded and started to tear up.

“But we’re in this as a family,” my father said, as if this platitude would in any way placate us. For all of us it felt, at last, like the home stretch of her illness, the time we’d spent years preparing for. But when it came, it was just a heaviness as pure as our feelings welling up.

My father stopped talking, and for an interval we sat listening to Kyung cry. I don’t know what expression I wore on my face, but Thomas picked at his toenail as if a speck was lodged there. Then he looked up. “I can’t,” he said, and stood and walked out of the living room, leaving the rest of us to watch him go.

In that instant, I wanted to say something. But what could I say? Our silence was already articulate. In it was our fear and trembling, our mourning and the love that made it possible. As we sat there, our silence connected us like a constellation, the four of us in the living room and Thomas back in his bedroom, doubtless staring at some empty point on the wall like a shadow of the vacancy we were waiting for our mother to leave. And like our shared vigil, this night would be gone when we woke the next morning and knew that life went on, that we would go on, burying our grief into the depths of who we were.

These days, when I reunite with my mother, I can tell from her face whether it was a dialysis day. There’s a certain pallor to her cheeks, a weariness that requires her to lie down, an irritability that can tip into a glazed-over stare that does not see, an absentmindedness that listens but does not hear.

On these occasions, the most I can do is sit beside her and look—really look—at what she has become. And as I do, I imagine the future before us: a cardiac monitor, an IV line from her arm, a vase of flowers on the mantle, and myself at her bedside, saying goodbye. It is what lies ahead, and though I suppress this image, it superimposes itself over the scene before me. Her chair is already a kind of bed in which she reclines during dialysis, watching a show on her phone, pretending she is not in this room but inside the screen, living the romance or else the comic relief, while beside her the cycler whirs and my father checks his emails, rising to his feet to record her vitals or adjust the machine’s settings.

Where do I fall in this orchestration of supine body, nurse, and machine? The answer is in her expression when I enter the room. My presence reads as a different kind of escape for her. I am a respite from her solitude, but even more so, I am a reason she endures, wishing as she does to live a little longer for her children.

Somewhere in my mind, I see her moving through the house. It is her off day and she is lighthearted, telling me how the violets have bloomed in the garden. “Come look,” she says, taking me by the hand to the bay window, through which we can see the maple and the hedges, the sun filtering in to caress our cheeks. My gaze moves from the view to her face, her gray-streaked hair, the sunken pockets out of which her eyes stare through the glass at a lushness that was never hers.

But there is another scene I also picture. I am on the other side of the window, barely able to see her silhouette against the reflected light. The glass contains her, and I can only approach the pane, laying my palm on its surface, wanting to bring her where I am. And she smiles at me sadly, pressing her own palm to the window as if to say, It’s okay. I’m happy you’re out there. Go on and live your life. I hold my hand there a moment longer, then let it drop to my side. I start to move away toward the garden’s edge, stopping every few steps to glance over my shoulder. Go on, her eyes say, and I keep walking until she is in the distance, until I barely see her, until I see nothing at all.

THE LAST TABLEAU

ARDIS GARCIA

My father is dying and all I can do is play solitaire. All night, I have catalogued meds, laundered sheets, sorted files, stacked towers of boxed Depends, and prepped smoothies that will rot in the casserole-laden fridge. As my mother’s ancient blender struggles to liquefy kale and banana, it strikes me that my father was, is, like those dull blades—barreling and forceful, struggling to grind haphazard parts into something palatable. The concoction taking shape mirrors what I imagine was his approach to parenting—jumbling and splattering, blunting edges into a homogenous goop indistinguishable from the slop served in the migrant camps of his childhood.

I pour the sludge into a recycled soup container and, with a Sharpie, carefully print today’s date, ticking yet another duty off my list. What I have not done—and cannot do—is linger at my father’s bedside at the back of the house, watching the withered hollows of his chest strain to rise as the pause between each breath lengthens.

So, I play on my phone and lose round after round against myself. I ignore the shadowed corners of this house in which I never fully felt welcomed, a colonial single-story my parents bought for retirement in a subdivision containing “Country Club” in its name. The only relic of my childhood is the worn kitchen table, its set of wobbly chairs the only furniture to which I am continuously drawn. Here, amidst the piles of bills and pills obscuring faded grease stains and fingernail-thin scratches in the grainy oak, I am no longer forty-two but eight, scrawling stories in Big Chief tablets while daydreaming about leaving Texas. Only now, I make do with a computerized card game for comfort instead of the No. 2 pencil my father sharpened to a mean point with a kitchen knife. The black and red suits glide hypnotically across the glowing green tableau; my brain is soothed and numbed, impervious to everything but the orderly stacks I manipulate with a flick of my finger.

“It’s unnatural, perverted,” Dad yelled that day, in this kitchen two decades ago, spewing spittle and rice. “And I will never accept it.”

I folded into the same chair I am currently occupying and watched him scoop beans into bits of flour tortillas as my mother fluttered between the sink and the stove.

“¿Me oiste?” he demanded.

“I heard you,” I snapped.

At twenty-one, I still cowered in my father’s presence, but the spitfire of youth that spurred me to come out to him that day still simmers in my chest. I met his gaze, only to break it when my mother hit the blender button. The Roma tomatoes inside emitted a sickening gurgle as they pulpified, drowning out whatever I might have dared utter next. I left the table, then the house.

“Sin verguenza,” I heard him snarl. Shameless.

When I returned the next day to retrieve my clothes, my mother was seated by the front door, dressed head-to-toe in black. “I’m in mourning,” she said, wiping a tear I did not see.

I’m sorry, I wrote in a card adorned with doves, for all of the pain I have caused. Two months into our estrangement, I fancied this card an olive branch, that taking ownership of their emotions would compensate for my failure to be, much less live, as the nice Catholic girl with a nice Catholic boyfriend they’d envisioned. I’d hoped my handwritten apology might excuse the reckless flaunting of deviancy to which my parents, their friends, and (God forbid!) the neighbors had been subjected: the found journal entries, a tattered back issue of Curve, the rainbow heart sticker on my truck’s bumper.

When the card yielded no response, I realized that apologizing for being myself wasn’t enough to be welcomed back into the fold. Six silent years passed before I slumped back through their doorway, ever the prodigal daughter, further humbled and hollowed by heartbreaks from a stream of angry older women I’d tried desperately to please.

Now, back in my father’s castle, it is I who concedes first, waving the white flag from the heart of his house. And yet, does he even know? And if he knows, does he care?

He did in June of 1979, as the Polaroids in my mother’s photo album attest. In my favorite, two-year-old me, clad in a handsewn green dress, is smiling with my eyes closed while my father kneels on the meticulous lawn of our house that was foreclosed on the following year. He envelops me proudly, protectively. He’s thirty-eight and beaming, green tennis shorts showcasing athletic brown legs. One hand grips my elbow, the other fans three Houston Astros tickets toward the camera. It was my birthday, and baseball was the present.

I recall nothing of my first afternoon at the Astrodome, but I imagine us in the nosebleed seats—my father focused on the field, binoculars held aloft, my mother sipping a Tab, and me nestled in the metal seat between them, sticky hands clutching a Cracker Jack box. Perhaps my mother told me to raise my chubby arms and shout during the “wave” as my father, scrawling on his scorecard, grunted. Perhaps he spun me around when Cesar Cedeno circled the bases. Most certainly I imagine us leaving at the bottom of the eighth; if there’s one thing my father detested—aside from what I grew into—it was parking-lot gridlock.

“Vamanos,” he’d bark, hoisting me up over the seats. We’d scurry through the tall grass flanking South Main Street, past the seedy hotels, cheap lots, and the kiddie playland with the merry-go-round of tired ponies endlessly rounding a trodden dirt path.

My second birthday at the Astrodome is imagined, though the photo commemorating it is not. Within that frayed picture there is the image of affection, palpable through Technicolor—the proof of my father’s love, however faded, even if I cannot recall it.

No, what holds vivid memory occurred months later and involves a dark closet, a red crayon and a three-year-old in white ruffles caught scribbling cuentos—stories—on freshly painted white walls. She jumps on a bed to escape the outstretched arms and bellowing roar but is nabbed and bent over, still wriggling, to experience her first belt-lashing. Here is when the zzziiipppp of leather unfurling across denim becomes a childhood refrain; here is the tear-blind moment where writing correlates with punishment, where self-expression, no matter how hidden within the recesses of a closet, begets shame.

Soon, a bedrock truth emerges—survival demands obedience. Follow the palace rules so the king might reign in peace. Cross the threshold on tiptoes, even now; forty-year-old lashes still smart.

And yet, I still enter.

At 3 a.m., the halfway mark of my shift, I can no longer delay peeking into the back bedrooms. My socks pad the inlaid marble tile as I move deliberately, quietly, down the hall. I nearly slip when stepping over the dialysis drain line snaking from my mother’s small room into the guest bath.

“Mom?” My whisper sounds like a croak. Holding my breath in front of her closed door, I conjure the image of my once robust mother, now cruelly shrunken into the size she spent decades dieting toward. In my mind, her slight frame is swathed in a pastel bata. Thin white strands of hair fan her cheery pillowcase and frame a serene expression at odds with the dialysis tube protruding from her stomach. This plastic line tethers her to a bulky machine that filters blood toxins in eight-hour stretches. It’s a timeline she ignores when Dad’s agitated groans crescendo into the howls of dreams set in bombed-out rice paddies and trenches.

More than once I have jolted awake, not from his howls, but from the absence of machine whirring and by the hush of her murmurs in his room as she soothes him back to sleep. I’ll rise from a sticky leather couch, flushed with guilty sleep, to the sight of dislodged dialysis tubing, capped with military precision and laid carefully atop her unmade bed.

“Mom!” My whisper is nearly a yell. I wonder if my voice can penetrate a closed door and dreamscapes. Outside, the magnolia tree shakes with the promise of a thunderclap. Inside, there is no sound save my mother’s blood spooling through plastic. I’m surprised she can sleep—like the cancer and diabetes claiming my parents, so too does insomnia rage through my lineage. Visiting aunts blew Virginia Slims rings on the patio through sunrise. Cousins devoured sandwiches at midnight. The acrid scent of laundry starch and the patter of Mom’s slippers treading a carpeted hall lulled me to slumber long past many bedtimes. I imagine she looked then much as I do now: a hefty, slumped middle-aged figure with frizzy waves and furrowed brow roaming a shuttered home in silence and a bathrobe. Always tense and at the ready.

For forty-four years, Mom served my strong-willed father, ironing his guayabera shirts at dawn and rolling tortillas at night. The smack of lard-slicked palms flattening masa, a creaking sifter raining flour onto yellow Formica, a Trio Los Panchos tune hummed sotto voce—these are the auditory memories of my mother to which I stubbornly cling, not the medical beeps or whooshing flushes now reverberating through wood-paneled walls.

When her kidneys failed five years ago, she matter-of-factly turned a spare room into an at-home renal clinic. She continued driving to appointments, pureeing meat, shouldering Dad’s weight onto a bedside commode. Only in the last two weeks, after chemotherapy was deemed futile and the Veterans Affairs doctor gently suggested hospice, has my mother allowed the meager help that my brother Tommy and I provide via alternating shifts.

“We had a good life,” my father had said in the hospital room that day, clasping my mother’s white hand in his yellow one. “We did,” she replied, stroking his silver hair with her other hand, wedding diamonds gleaming brazenly in fluorescence. No one noticed me in the doorway, paused mid-step with a bag of burgers.

I wanted to run back to the overflowing waiting room. Instead, I stood rooted to the slick linoleum, an interloper halted by the intimacy of my parents’ hunched forms, a still regal king doting on his queen. My father flashed a gummy smile. When he looked up at my mother, I saw the whites of his eyes were yellowed, yet somehow piercingly bloodshot. His whole body—the sunken clavicles, the arms extending from the hospital gown—was yellow, everything tinged like a rotted lemon.

Now I reach the threshold of my father’s bedroom. In this room, the upright hospital bed is the only clinical device. There are no whirring machines or rows of medical supplies. There are only my father’s things, shelved and stacked, seventy-nine years’ worth of talismans: a worn Bible, sun-bleached prayer cards, an oft-fingered rosary draped over a faux Tiffany lamp. There are collectible model cars, still boxed, and a sepia print of a smiling Army platoon, heartbreakingly young. A black-and-white snapshot of my mother in bell bottoms is tacked above a desk from which Tommy and I also beam, gap-toothed and sweaty. Next to it a slightly blurred wedding photo, my mother resplendent in her handstitched dress, my father with Elvis sideburns, laughing. But mostly, there are carefully framed photos—of every size, at every stage, on the dressers, nightstands, and walls—of my daughter, their sole grandchild. Unlike me, my daughter feels thoroughly welcome in this home. My parents separate their image of my daughter from me, her tainted source, and at fourteen she is well attuned to the creative blend of bitten tongues, blind eyes, and willful ignorance required to maintain the grudging harmony that affords them access to her.

I draw my gaze to the bed. Like my mother, my father’s reduced frame belies how powerfully imposing he once stood, his heft casting a shadow over us all. Now, he lies under layers of mismatched bedding, shivering despite the eighty-seven-degree thermostat setting. A gilt-framed portrait of my grandmother observes.

“Suegra,” slurs my father after the morphine. “Te veo.” I see you, mother-in-law, he’ll whisper, rheumy eyes turned upward. Grandma wears black in the portrait, her expression pious yet slightly ominous, despite her lace collar and silver cross necklace. The austerity contradicts the warm memories I have of her but align with the tales of yelling and beating I’ve heard my mother and tia recount when they thought I wasn’t listening.

It occurs to me how little I know my father.

And yet, I didn’t need to know him to love him. My affection was not predicated on staying in a child’s place. Abrasive temper and whippings aside, I loved him in the adoring way an only daughter, a firstborn, reveres her father, separating the chaff of bad memories from the good ones.

“Who’s playing possum?” Dad would bellow, shaking off his work boots at the door; Tommy and I suppressing giggles under our couch-cushion fort, me nearly exploding from holding my breath. It was a Friday in fourth grade, which meant pizza if we were lucky or pizza and a rented VCR with a movie from Blockbuster if there was something to celebrate, like a small bonus or a surprise light-bill refund.

“Ahhh, too bad,” he’d say, sighing. “Everybody’s asleep.”

“Noooo! We tricked you!” we’d yell, bursting through the brown upholstery, bright afghans falling to the floor.

“You stinkers!” he’d say, enveloping us in caramel arms.

I wish my father were playing possum now, that he was pranking us, waiting for Tommy and me to swing by and order pizza and stream an action flick (never a war film). I wish he were valiantly stifling laughter, eyeballs moving rapid fire under closed lids; that he would sit up, bruised arms outstretched, and shout, “Ahhh! I tricked you!”

Instead, he lies still, my mother’s blue afghan halfway covering his diapered pelvis. Paper-thin skin falls away from the point of each elbow. In this quiet instant between dark and dawn, between this earthly world and the one beyond, I make myself look. My gaze starts at his feet, at the wrinkled soles and brittle nails fading into mottled toes giving way to swollen purple ankles. Drugs dull the pain but cause bone-deep itching, and his legs, slathered with lotion and dotted with scabs, glisten in the weak lamplight.

Seeing his legs evokes a decades-old photo: I’m toddling through shag carpet in pink ruffles, Dad’s dress boots dwarfing my chubby thighs. A boisterous party mills in the background of our new apartment. My face is dotted with mosquito bites from a beach trip where my father gripped my hands through rushing waves, lifting me above the swells. Surely, somewhere within the still body before me lies this memory and a lifetime of others—cotton fields, cherry trees, bare feet in a classroom, and a hollow stomach. And later, the sting of Agent Orange. A brunette, also from South Texas, a whirlwind courtship and then children. A timid girl followed by a smart boy born with spina bifida. Twelve months that Tommy suffered in a full-body cast. Years of labor, scrimp, and sacrifice in the name of family, and so much more I do not know.

Not that I really cared to know. At the beginning of middle school, the intensity of my love for my father waned embarrassingly, reduced to the aloof, self-important way a teenager prioritizes best friends, boyfriends, girlfriends. The more he awkwardly tried to connect—with wry jokes and random questions-—the further I sullenly retreated. In those Slim Fast years of Aqua Net and Cover Girl, my sole concerns were suppressing girl crushes and fitting in with friends, which meant fitting into clothes at 5-7-9. Starving my body to squeeze into their highest size tier required full focus. Shedding pounds and a fat-girl image came with a rebellious attitude that widened the chasm with my stern father. And so be it, I reasoned; after all, what could he know of the importance of belonging, of blending into an environment where no one else looks, speaks, or thinks like you?

Plenty, in retrospect. Somehow, across generations, gender, and geography, my father and I seem inherently alike. Like him, I observe more than I speak; my smile flashes with genuine sentiment, but only to a select few. Now I understand how his gruff manner masked his love language of service; he was always protecting, providing, and toiling in the background even as he yelled at us to be quiet, give him peace.

“Dejame en paz,” he’d snap when I dared talk back. Hours, sometimes days, of silent treatment would inevitably follow. His forgiveness was doled out in gas cards, carwash coupons, and single-peeled oranges, wrapped in paper towels and wordlessly proffered. We share a cavernous aloofness with the world, but an ocean-deep love for those we dare trust, its roaring undercurrent manifesting as overflowing cupboards and random pecks on tousled crowns. Now, I know what it is to laugh for my beloveds’ sake, even as the lines in my face deepen with fear for the dangers lurking beyond our heavy oak door. “Dejame en paz,” I hear myself muttering when the crush of responsibility threatens to flatten me like masa between kneading hands.

Yet, are we really that much alike? Is it true that the sins of the father are bequeathed to his progeny? Or that a daughter’s eggs are embedded with their mother’s sorrow? If sufficiently angered, would I (could I?) shun my daughter, do unto her as he did to me?

Dad, are you really the same man who stopped highway traffic to save a broken-winged cardinal? You fashioned a cage from an overturned laundry basket and nursed the creature to recovery but cast your daughter to the metaphorical side of the road. I’m left to wonder, Dad, did you ever come to love the woman I became?

In the lamplit semi-darkness, a faint grunt emerges through the gargle and rattle in my father’s throat. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud. I rush to his side, prop his head, hold water to his parched lips. I shush and try to calm him, using the same soothing baby talk I used for my daughter, echoing the tone he used for me—lilting Spanish phrases I heard before drifting off under a Strawberry Shortcake blanket. After a sip he opens his eyes, and I swear under Grandma’s gaze they are clear black as ever. “I love you, mi’ja,” he says, before sinking back into the pillow.

From the kitchen, I play solitaire, the Klondike version. As the array of cards flits down, I start strong with three ace piles and then set to building tableaus, stacking suits, braiding black clubs and red spades on autopilot until I reach the higher ranks. The royal court is buried under lesser cards.

I focus and study the spread. The red joker is an impediment, stuck under a black ten, but after an auto-shuffle and four strategic maneuvers, I liberate the court. Hearts and diamonds align freely once more while a baby monitor broadcasts my father’s coughs and murmurs. I move to finish the final family, my finger poised above a red heart, when the back of my mind registers something jarring—a lengthy pause between my dad’s last cough and his next. Still, my eyes do not stray from the tear-stained phone screen, and I sit, frozen, until a weighty silence fills the space. I tap my finger on the blinking, waiting heart, moving the king to his foundation. Only then do I push back my chair.

STINSON BEACH

MIRANDA SAAKE

When my son was finally well

enough to go on vacation,

I booked a house on stilts, bought books

about horseshoe crabs, limpets and a fearless black

cat who liked sand. I was trying

to recreate trips from before he was sick,

flinging himself into frigid water

on a beach so full of bleached driftwood

we believed in a kingdom of

bones. Or when we watched that trio

of swallows playing with a piece of fluff,

clicking and wheeling in the sun. I dressed

us in the colors of that place, claimed the master

bedroom as my own. My husband

slept on a sagging blue couch as I cradled

our baby in the wide white bed and a tide

bubbled under the stilts. Waves

never ceased. My son wet himself

in his sleeping bag on a hardwood

floor and an earthquake

crumbled plaster inside the walls. Later

that week he vomited on a bench

next to a Cypress. When I said I was afraid

our son might die, my husband said

I don’t think

like that.

HUNTING GAME

MAY LEE-YANG

Sometimes, when I want to make the white ladies cry—because let’s be real, that’s where the big bucks come in—I talk about how I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. I tell them, “Every time a child is born, the parents in my culture bury the placenta beneath our homes so that when we die, our spirits can find the way back to our final resting place. But I…I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. The land has been scraped clean, and I have no idea where my mother buried my placenta, or if she could even bury it in the first place. I wonder where I will go when it is time for my spirit to return home.”

This gets them every time, and they book me for more gigs. One white lady even came up to me after a poetry reading and handed me a bag of apples she was randomly carrying in her bag. She felt so terrible for what the US had done to my people, she said, tears brimming in her eyes. Because I had to stay on brand and because the apples in question happened to be Honeycrisp, which cost $3.99 per pound (I estimated she had twenty dollars’ worth), I accepted those apples and squeezed out a tear of my own in gratitude.

I mean, I’m not lying. I’m just not telling them that, most of the time, I don’t read trauma-informed poetry. I read romance novels about buff English viscounts masquerading as pirates so they can have raunchy sex on the high seas with their cabin boy who is actually a twenty-two-year-old feisty American female. But no one wants to hear about my fantasies.

Tonight, I was living a different kind of fantasy.

It was dark. The only light source came from my flashlight and occasionally Noi’s. I’m not even going to wax poetic and talk about the constellations above. Yeah, we were two hours outside the city in a small town surrounded by farmland and patches of tamarack trees. Those stars did nothing to light the way.

“What the hell are we doing here?” was what I would have asked if my voice hadn’t disappeared two hours before. But the answer would still be the same: We were failed poets who couldn’t make a living off our love poems (that would be Noi) and our sex poems (that would be me).

Noi is always lifting me up. “Listen, Gao. If you were white, people would think your poems were feminist and edgy, but because you’re Asian, they just tell you you’re shaming your elders.”

I’m not as good at lifting up Noi. “If you were white,” I said, “you’d get a book deal off your Instagram posts.”

“You know, Rupi Kaur is Asian,” she reminded me.

I gave it another try. “If you were white, you could write love poems that had nothing to do with trauma, but because you’re Asian, people only want to hear poems about how you’re ashamed of your people’s food.”

“True, true.”

That was why we had pivoted to exploiting our respective cultures. Easier for gigs and grants.

John, whose real name was Tou Cher, was one of several people who ran the Asian American Student Center at a local liberal arts college. He’d hired us for the school’s annual Asian Club weekend retreat.

John had originally asked us to share stories of the Mekong River crossing with his students. I was gonna tell the story of how Mom almost drowned along the way (true story!) and how Grandma tried to overdose some Hmong Communists with opium tea (I wish it were true), but before we got to the storytelling part of the gig, John wanted us to join something most people called the Hunting Game. “You two were born in the camps,” he said. “You should know how this goes.”

Since we’d been born in the camps—Noi in Nongkai and me in Ban Vinai—we hadn’t technically made the perilous journey from Laos to Thailand after Laos fell to the Communist regime. Our parents made that crossing so that we could be born safely inside a fenced-in camp. Still, we were old enough to know the stories and could technically claim we were first-generation refugees, unlike one poet friend who was angry he’d been born on Wisconsin soil and couldn’t claim to be an authentic refugee.

When we and the thirty Asian Club students made our way from the lodges to the “hunting grounds,” as John would say, it was nightfall. In the distance, I heard dogs barking.

“You got wild dogs roaming these woods?” asked Noi. She hated dogs. I myself was not comfortable around them, having grown up with only chickens for pets, pets who eventually became dinner.

“Those are just recordings,” John assured us. “The BSA—”

“Black Student Association,” offered Cameron, who had earlier introduced himself as President of the Asian Club.

“Every fall, the BSA does their own version of the Hunting Game,” said John.

“Oh? What is it called?” asked Noi.

“The Underground Railroad.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, they have some volunteers pretend to be slave hunters,” said Cameron.

Somewhere in these woods, at this very moment, folks were playing white slave hunters. I felt slightly better that I only had to play a Communist soldier.

John continued, “Like us, the BSA does this so the younger generation can empathize with what their ancestors had to go through. The recorded dog barks make the experience more vivid.”

John had his own ways to make this experience more vivid for the Asian students, who were mostly Southeast Asian and ninety percent Hmong as far as I could tell. When we arrived at “base camp,” a large Lord of the Flies-style bonfire was burning. John transformed into a Southeast Asian Rambo with combat boots, a headband, and black paint smudged beneath his eyes. He gave the participants their goal: They had twenty minutes to go hide in the woods, after which hunters would try and find them. If they were discovered—as in, a hunter flashed light on them—they’d be considered caught and would have to return to base camp. But base camp was also the final destination, the refugee camp. It was ironic that reward and punishment were the same location, but I chalked it up to lack of funding. John dared the students to make their way to camp without getting caught.

“What’s the reward if we get to camp?” one student asked.

“You get to live,” said John. Like Noi and me, he’d also been born in a refugee camp. Unlike Noi and me, who came to the US as toddlers, he was older and had spent a good portion of his childhood fenced in.

As soon as the student refugees ran into the woods to hide, John turned to the rest of us. He’d picked eight strapping Hmong guys—all students—to play Communist soldiers along with us.

“Don’t hold back,” he said. As John spoke, bonfire roaring behind him, he resembled an army captain and we his minions. “You can swear at people if you want to. Make it feel real to them.”

I worried about cussing out college students, even for a simulation, but as though my body was anticipating all this, my voice had disappeared during the two-hour drive out to the retreat center. I was in perfectly good health—except barely a sound came out of my throat.

Noi raised her hand. “Are we gonna get in trouble for being too rough? Like, did people sign release forms?”

“They’re Southeast Asian,” said John. “They won’t report anything.”

Yes, we were very good about keeping our problems in-house. Everyone nodded and sighed in relief. I could tell the student hunters hadn’t even thought about these kinds of things.

“Before you all leave,” John said, “take a handful of firecrackers. Every once in a while, light ’em up. They’ll simulate the sound of guns.”

I got the sense that if John had his way, he would be hiding in the woods with a Nerf gun and spraying Mountain Dew—a.k.a. “yellow rain”—at the refugees.

I didn’t like firecrackers. I could barely fry an egg because I worried about hot oil splashing on me. But I didn’t say anything. Like everyone else, I grabbed a cigarette lighter and enough firecrackers to fit in the back pocket of my jeans. Then we all disappeared into the night.

The retreat center John had rented was divided into two areas: large cabins with bunk rooms for guests and a private parkland comprised of prairie, patches of wood, and an asphalt path that wound throughout. This parkland was our hunting ground. From where Noi and I stood, I could no longer hear any sounds from the BSA’s simulation. We came up with a gameplan: We’d travel as a pair and stick to the paved walking path.

We wandered around for ten minutes but didn’t come across any refugees. Instead, we ran into a few of the other soldiers. Some traveled in pairs like us. At least one group traveled with four people. When we were alone again, Noi screamed into the night, “Come the fuck out, you little fuckers!”

I thought Lao people were sabai, chill, but I guess we had been hired to hunt. A part of me sort of imagined the two of us would just stroll around, then return to base camp in an hour and pretend we had been “hunting.” I was surprised that Noi was working so hard.

Because I felt like I had to earn my keep, I whisper-yelled into the night, “You little fuckers! We’ll get you!” I was glad no one heard this and that, like a prayer, it was something between me and my conscience.

“Gao, we gotta go into the woods,” said Noi.

I sighed.

“I know you’re a scaredy-cat, so stay near the path and shine a light on me, so I don’t get lost.”

“Okay,” I whisper-screamed.

Noi left the pavement, and I followed her movement with my flashlight. When she reached the edge of the woods, she stalked the perimeter, shining her flashlight into the trees. She yelled, “I know you’re in there! Don’t think you can hide out all night long! I’ll fuck you up eventually.”

Noi was really in character tonight. Had she negotiated more money from John? She usually half-assed gigs. One time, she and I got hired for parts in a performance art show called Anatomy of an Asian Girl. I thought I’d be representing Hmong people, and Noi thought she’d be representing Lao people. Instead, I played a kneecap while she played the pancreas. It was an inside-outside kind of thing, and though her character was supposed to be happy, she sobbed throughout her monologue. She forgot her lines and, as she said, “the emotions just got the better of her” so she went off-script. The writer-director was a third-generation Chinese American who had studied at Yale and didn’t want to make us first-generation Southeast Asian refugees with no theater training feel oppressed, so she let it slide.

My grandma was never a refugee. She stayed in Laos after my parents and all my aunts and uncles left. Grandma stayed in the old country and only moved to the US after Grandpa eventually died.

“Did you see any Vietcong?” I asked her one day.

She reminded me that she lived in the country of Laos. You only saw the Vietcong if you were in Vietnam or lived near the border of Laos and Vietnam, which my family did not. “The only Communists I saw,” she said, “were other Hmong people. They thought they were hot shit walking over us.”

Of course, Grandma did not say “hot shit,” but that was the essence. There were Hmong people who worked for the Communists and openly flaunted it. But the really scary people, she said, were the Communist spies and sympathizers who disguised themselves.

“That’s why your aunts and uncles had to leave our village quietly,” said Grandma. “One day, your Uncle Long said he had to go work two villages over and that he'd be back in a month. Then two weeks later, your Uncle Meng said the same thing. Of course, there was no work in the other villages, but you had to say these things out loud so the Communist spies wouldn’t know you were escaping the country.”

Once, when we were at Treasure Island Casino, Grandma saw a man sitting at a nearby blackjack table, and she spat on the floor in disgust.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That’s one of those Communists,” she said. “One of those soldiers who flaunted his guns over us.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“How can I forget his face? He should be ashamed of himself, that tiger-bitten piece of shit.”

But here he was in the United States nearly forty years after the country fell, which meant he was living undercover as one of us, a refugee. He was a traitor—to both us and the Communists he’d served. Surely there had been people like Grandma who recognized him. Did he just pretend he didn’t know them?

Tonight, I felt like a double-traitor too. Selling myself out to hunt down my own people so I could pay rent, but doing a half-assed job in the process. What the hell? I needed to stop writing poetry and just write erotica about vampires and werewolves. I’d feel less compromised then.

Somewhere in the night, I heard pop-pop-pop sounds. Someone had lit their firecrackers. Though I hated fire, I felt like I ought to do something to earn my paycheck, so I told Noi to stop walking. I pulled the firecrackers out of my back pocket. They were strung along little black ropes. I pulled out the cigarette lighter.

“Want me to do it?” Noi asked. She was a smoker, but even if not, she wouldn’t be afraid of using a cigarette lighter.

I shook my head. I had signed a contract to play a traitor; I couldn’t let her do all the dirty work. I held the lighter as far away from my face as I could, then used my thumb to flick the striker wheel. A spark lit up. Then finally a flame. I reached for the end of the firecracker. As soon as the flame touched the firecracker’s tail, I ran away from it. Noi backed away from me.

Pop-pop-pop-pop.

“You know, my dad was put into a re-education camp,” said Noi, who had taken the time to light up a cigarette.

I didn’t know. Hmong people never talked about re-education camps. Most of the stories I heard were about running away and crossing the river into safety, or running away and getting shot and killed. Was it because we mostly lived in the mountains?

When people asked me where my family came from, my answer was “the mountains.” If they asked, “What mountains? What province?” I spat out “Long Cheng? Xieng Khouang?” Those were the names of places I’d heard growing up. I knew, at least, that Vientiane was the capital city, not where most of us lived.

“My dad was in the re-education camp for four years,” said Noi.

“How did he get out?” I whisper-yelled.

The night was so quiet that Noi had no problem hearing me. “He pretended he converted. He smiled, listened to them. After they released him, he acted like he was a sympathizer, and when they let down their guard, he fled into the night.”

Noi and I hadn’t gone over what stories we’d tell the students later, after the simulation was over. Would she tell this story or another one? Would she pull from her imagination?

I knew a story of someone who had so many siblings, she was responsible for carrying one kid across the Mekong River. But the river was so wide and so few people knew how to swim and sometimes there were Communist soldiers shooting at you from the Laos border and Thai soldiers patrolling and shooting at you from the Thai border, it was a wonder anyone made it across at all. This woman said she was holding her little brother’s hand, and when they crossed the river, holding onto one bamboo pole like a pool noodle, the water was so rough her little brother’s hand fell out of her grasp. He floated down the river, never to be seen again.

But that was not my story to tell tonight.

I knew a guy, younger than me, who said he’d been born in the jungles of Laos. Long after people like my family came to the US, he and his family were still living the war. He was an infant who cried so much, his parents fed him opium to quiet him down. But they gave him too much, and everyone was sure he had died. There was no time to bury anyone, so his mother placed him beneath a large tree and the family left on foot towards the river.

“But you’re here today,” I said to him. “So what happened?”

His mother missed him so much that she abandoned her family and returned to the tree, determined to die with him. But when she arrived at the foot of the tree, she found him, her baby, crying softly. A miracle.

But that wasn’t my story to tell either.

Grandma told me that because my dad was a soldier, he and Mom lived in Long Cheng, the secret CIA army base where American soldiers and the Hmong soldiers they recruited worked together.

“When the country fell in 1975,” said Grandma, “there were no phones. Nothing. So your mom wrote me a note to say she was leaving the country with your dad and your older brothers. She gave the note to a person from our village since that person was planning to go back home to get his wife.”

“Did you ever get the note?” I asked Grandma.

“Hell no. I only know this story because when your mom and I finally reunited twenty years later, she told me.”

“What happened to that person?” I asked.

“He never made it back to our village.”

Noi and I wandered until we reached the farthest point on the asphalt path. If we turned right, I suspected we would loop back towards base camp. We didn’t turn right but looked straight ahead. Even in the darkness, we saw an expanse of grass as high as my waist.

“Gao, let’s turn off our flashlights,” said Noi.

“Why?” I whispered.

“They’re in hiding because they can see us coming from a mile away. We need to think smarter.”

Another thing about me: I don’t like the dark. How had people navigated the dark, people like my parents and the thousands of Hmong and Lao people who crossed the jungles toward safety? I had to remind myself: This was a safe place. We were merely acting out a simulation. Those college kids hiding somewhere in the high grass or woods were more afraid of us than we were of them. With our flashlights, we had the power to tap them out of this game. We were the adults. We were the hunters. They were just kids. Refugees. Noi and I turned off our flashlights and walked along the paved path again. When we passed one bend, close to the woods, Noi held me back.

“Shh,” she said quietly. I could just barely make out her finger pointing further down the path.

Not far from us, a person stood near the edge of the woods. “Come out, Chris,” the person said. “I’ll help you all escape to safety.”

I recognized the voice. Cameron, one of the soldiers. I couldn’t see anyone in the woods.

“You can trust me, Chris. I’m your big brother. I even ran away from the other soldiers.”

Silence. Then rustles. A shadow left the woods. Then another one.

Cameron’s form returned to the pavement. “Is that everyone?” he asked the shadows.

“Mai Der! Blia! Come out!” This was a different voice, perhaps belonging to Chris. More rustling, then two more shadows moved out of the woods. When they reached the pavement, flashlights lit up out of nowhere, beams attacking the huddled bodies.

“Dude, they fell for it!” one person exclaimed and cackled.

A girl began sobbing. Someone yelled, “Fuck you! How can you betray your own brother?”

Someone else said, “Go back to camp. You’re dead now.”

Not dead, I thought. John had only said captured. Kids these days used the word “dead” too casually. Had I been born five years earlier, I could have been fed opium in the jungles or strapped to my mother’s back as she clung to a bamboo pole in the Mekong River. Or dead.

Noi and I watched and waited as the group gradually disappeared. When their voices became faint, I said to Noi, “What the hell are we doing?”

She sighed. “I know, right? Shit, I need to go back to graduate school and get my master’s in public policy. Should’ve listened to my parents.”

“And I think I need to abandon poetry,” I said. I had been thinking about this for a long time. This was just the first time I’d said it out loud. Back in college, when I workshopped a short story about my first crush, a classmate said, “A love story set in the ghetto? That’s weird.” My creative writing professor told me to write about my refugee experience. He said, “That’s so much richer than romance.” I could hear the disgust when he said romance.

Love had never been as sexy as trauma, so I’d turned my back on it.

“The poetry world doesn’t give a shit about love and sex—or at least, the good kind of love and the good kind of sex,” said Noi, lighting up a cigarette. “The only thing they get off on is trauma. You need to write sexy novels that make people laugh and make people horny. Supernatural erotica, you know.”

“You mean, like vampires and werewolves?” I asked.

“Hell no. Those are white people fantasies. Tap into your culture.”

The last time someone told me to “tap into my culture,” I wrote a sex poem that went something like: I want to worship you / like I worship my ancestors. / I want to toss your ancestral / loins in my mouth the way / we toss balls at the New Year Celebration. “I don’t want to write about sex in jungles,” I said, realizing my voice had returned. It was raspy, but it had returned.

“Didn’t you hear what I said? None of that trauma porn stuff. Write about shamans and dragons.”

As we began walking back to base camp, I imagined what it would be like to write erotica about shamans and dragons. I imagined the crazy sex scenes that could come from that.

I closed my eyes hard, and I tried to imagine the joy.

SPELLS

TED KOOSER

My uncle took pills for his spells,

which kept me from seeing one

though I was curious. I had to

imagine those spells, or seizures,

from what little I’d heard. Mother

was no help at all, didn’t want to

talk about it, so I had to piece one

together, with him on his back

on the carpet, shaking all over,

his eyes rolled back in his head,

and Grandma down on her knees

holding his tongue to keep him

from swallowing it. I filled in

other details, the light through

the screen door, Grandma’s white

chickens beyond, pecking around

on the lawn, the dull, soft sound

when he fell. All these years

later, I feel sorry for putting him

through all that, even though I

only imagined it. But in memory

everything’s real, more than real,

and I’d taken advantage of him

just so I could see what those pills,

which old Doctor Palmer kept

in a tall, glass-fronted cabinet

in his shadowy front-parlor office

forever have kept me from seeing.

CHRISTMAS EVE, 1966

ANDREW COMINELLI

Ma wanted to have dinner before dark but there was no chance of that now, zero. When I crested Chopsey Hill and descended in low gear, only an orange hyphen of sun sat atop the edge of the bare woods below me. It was not yet half past four. As I eased the Ford downhill, the snow on either side of the road blazed orange but after I’d curved out of the sunshine it was the periwinkle of old ladies’ hair at church. Ma said we had to eat early because she wanted to go see the Mass. “And we’re going as a family,” she’d said, not looking up from her chopping board.

We never went to Christmas Eve Mass, but of course everything was different that year, new, and if she’d said, “I’d like to climb up the side of the church and drop a watermelon from the roof,” I’d have nodded with the same cool assent. I knew that when she said, “I’d like to see the Mass,” she was only saying your name. We were all of us finding the most roundabout new ways to say your name, our words oblique and often senseless but trying to shape you like dust tries to shape the wind.

Dad had been gone all day and calling the bars was no use anymore; each bartender had been armed by him with ready-made excuses or alibis, and they deployed these lies deftly when they heard Ma’s voice or mine over the phone. “You go and find him,” Ma had said, “because we’re going as a family,” and so I got in the Ford and drove through the brown slush, past the huddled houses of our neighborhood and then up Chopsey Hill and down it and now down East Main, squinting through the gathering dark into every bar’s parking lot for his car.

He started drinking in earnest after you died. Many nights that year, he’d come knocking into the front hall past midnight. I would hear them argue for a few minutes, Ma unleashing arrows she’d spent the night sharpening. Piercing words and as often as not the response was the front door creaking open again and his car starting again. He’d stay out drinking until work and this too was a way of speaking your name, no less or more legitimate than hers.

His Grand Prix was not at the Chowder Pot and it was not at Jenny’s. I thought I saw it parked out front of Clem’s, but it was another Grand Prix, same color and year but the license plate was wrong. I kept driving. Down East Main, checking the parking lots, onto Barnum Avenue, the night now as dark as it would be and the green glow of the dash as bright as it would be and painting a strip of sickly light over my eyes in the mirror.

I hated his drinking because it transformed me into this ramshackle authority which I had no desire to be, a parent to my parent, out trying to spot him in the delinquent night. But over time even his drinking would become, if not forgiven, then an object of sorrowful curiosity rather than one of rage. Over the years some imperceptible but momentous shift in my view of our parents has taken place; the further I move in time from their dominion over my adolescent life, the sadder they become and the more inscrutable their sadness becomes. None of us knew why you did what you did.

In those early months, we operated through a shell-shocked confusion that would not lift; your departure left us to float like ghosts through the mists of a ruin, trying and failing to act out our old mannerisms, our common familial language now dead and forgotten. Gestures once automatic were stilted now, hesitating, and our words seemed to fall from our mouths and heap on the floor’s cold tiles. A gray and stricken atmosphere filled the house. Half-alive, we haunted grief’s sudden geography and, to me, our limbo state seemed the continuation and the expansion of whatever it was you felt strongly enough to have to do what you did. As though committing the act was a means not of ending but of externalizing your private anguish, dispersing it, infusing the air we breathed with it.

There was his drinking, her sudden religious impulses, their whispered fights in the dark. I shut myself in our room with your books, reading pages at a time before realizing I’d not registered a single word. When the three of us were together, the silence compressed all our talk like a layer of sediment.

We avoided you. Any hint of you was diverted, circumvented by emergency changes of subject, and these heroic detours around you became the thoroughfares and avenues of the tenuous emotional colony we were erecting together. We spoke in patterns you would not recognize or understand, prolonged dinner-table silences riven only by talk of weather or baseball or war in Vietnam but even through these unlikely windows you seemed to peer at us and demand acknowledgment. When desperate enough, our mother and father even spilled drinks or dropped utensils in order to avoid you. Other times one of them would rise from their seat without warning to disappear down the hall and then behind a gently closed door. None of us ever saw any of the others weep and this too was another custom shaped in response to our new climate.

We never spoke your name.

So squint now down onto this map of grief and you can see the Ford’s headlights working slowly toward downtown that Christmas Eve, my first without you, the car tentative through the accumulating snow, slowing now in front of Shooter’s Lounge and then in front of McCoy’s and then in front of the old AMC lanes whose parking lot it then prowls, pressing twinned treadlines into snow lit blond by tall lamps.

At the corner of Main and Broad, I sat at a red light and looked up the hill toward Blessed Sacrament. That storied group huddled snowbound around the manger, emitting a lonesome glow that pooled at their feet and hung about them in the air like a fine gold dust, the church a tall blue eminence behind them. They huddled close, their faces downturned as is always the way in nativity scenes, something brash and committed in the eyes of the shepherd boy whose naked shoulders were epauletted with snow. A black-eyed lamb curled at his feet. I thought of how you’d once played one of the wise men in the school Christmas pageant, when you were ten and I was nine. I watched them now, three plastic kings humbly glowing in the blue night. Their paint was flaking so that the white light of hidden bulbs shot through the chips and scratches in their robes, in their hats, in their crayon-peach skin. They looked solemnly upon the infant and even these cheap decorations showed that whatever epic they’d lived through to reach that manger was now collapsed into this glowing moment of arrival. All their desert hardships were allayed and even the memories of danger and death were blotted away now as the snow swirled around them like salvation, and I remembered you tripping over your costume robe and grousing how it had been such a royal pain in your ass the whole way across the desert, and then my light turned green.

His Grand Prix was sitting at Frank’s Grille and I parked the Ford right behind it to block him. Inside the bar there were two men in stiff cloth jackets, sitting side by side like gray lumps, and a few stools away a man in dirty flannel used one fingernail to gently scrape the ruddled bald crown of his head. My ears adjusted to the silence that overtook the sound of my entrance, the wind’s whistle subsiding and giving way to what seemed an eternal and monastic quiet within the dim bar. The three long faces turned to watch me. The bartender came zooming in from a far doorway with a crate of Budweiser. As he arranged the bottles in a trough and poured ice over them, he answered my questions: Yes, my father had been there and yes, he’d left fairly recently and no, he did not know where to. And since it was Christmas, the bartender added, how would I like a shot and a beer on the house; it would warm me up.

As I sat, I could feel the three sallow faces still following me and then could almost hear the ice-breaking words being pieced out from the drunken haze of the flannel-clad man’s mind before he finally spoke them: “You Murray’s kid?” And then it was the standard Hell of a guy, and Funny as all hell, the usual horseshit about our father that set abuzz the barflies of Bridgeport, Connecticut. They all knew him in ways I did not and would not. With the shot glass of whiskey waiting before me, the bartender uncapped the beer. The bottle hissed, miniature ice floes clung to its sides, and before I could sip the whiskey, the man in flannel said, “Now waitaminute waitaminute, what are we drinking to?” and I said, without pause, “The baby Jesus.” The two lumps laughed and the man in flannel said, “Runs in the family.”

I drank the whiskey and halfway through my beer the bar began to soften a little. On the shelves, the spirits glowed blue and gold in their bottles, and glowed again in the bar mirror, and everything in that sordid place—the mottled faces, the bottles and their mirrored doubles, the lacquered sweep of the bar—lost its vaguely criminal air and all seemed the product of a single light source. I thought of the volume of Spinoza I’d found in a drawer of your desk, his theory of one substance, of which all things, forms, and ideas are merely attributes. All thoughts are just a single emanation reshaping itself obsessively and ad infinitum, varying endlessly but never piecemealing itself, and this view seemed to me the absolute truth of things for just a few moments, sitting there in Frank’s Grille as the bottles twinkled and the faces stared and the shadows lurked and the snow drifted in heaps across a window.

I heard my own voice saying, “Where is he?” and they all looked at me, foreheads bunching and jaws hanging in mock confusion, the cowards. And this made it all break apart again, the bar cleaving itself ten thousand times in a half a second, becoming again a doomed collection of discrete objects—bottles, faces, minds. The bartender said, “He said not to say,” and though this was a stingy offering, it was more than he would’ve admitted over the phone. “Tell me,” I said, and they all looked at each other.

“It’s Christmas Eve,” I said. I finished drinking and looked each one of them in the face and it took me looking at all four and then restarting the cycle for the one in flannel to finally say, “He went to Jim Elekna’s. Jim drove him.”

It was not far and when I got there the Ford slewed up over the curb and its front end bounced onto the yard and I thought for a moment it would slide all the way into the Elekna house. A dim amber light filled the living room window and a wreath with a fat red ribbon hung on the front door. I marched through the snowfall across the yard. There was no car in the driveway and no hint of life inside the house. I rapped on the garage door and, as I waited, snow collected on my collar. I rapped the door again with my knuckles. I knew from overhearing the wee-hour defenses he arrayed before Ma that he came here sometimes, that he and Jim did their drinking in the garage. Many nights I had drifted into sleep picturing them bundled up in this dank place to drink in lawn chairs, the coals of their cigarettes glowing just bright enough to out their faces from the dark. The snow on my collar melted into frigid water against my neck. I rapped again, harder, and listened as the rattle of the door fell away in slow pieces.

The tips of my fingers were numb as I rapped yet again, though I knew no one was there, not in the garage and not in the house. I knew that the drunk at the bar might have lied to me to cover for him, and I even wondered, as I stood in the cold, if our father had been behind the bar all along, hiding from me on hands and knees, holding his breath, wanting a cigarette. I rapped again, the cold bringing pain into my fingers. I imagined some invisible thread connecting us, our father stumbling half-conscious through this black Christmas Eve as I followed, haphazardly, trying stupidly to make sense of his stumbling. And then I imagined the thread was one of many in a grid that stretched over the whole city, from Broadbridge Avenue to the jagged coastline, a network laid in threads of grief, and then this grid—which, for just a minute, I felt was the true map of the world—seemed to light up suddenly, its every segment flashing at once with a bright white light, and I stopped rapping the door because I knew it was you. You were the light that gave shape to this wandering, the light twinkling in liquor bottles, glowing in the bay window, spilling from plastic statues onto the snow and hanging golden over the altar as the first timid churchgoers entered the chapel. You, the starlight behind the stormclouds that made visible the falling snow no matter where in this darkness I went—you, the light that kept the whole blue world from plunging into total black as I laced my freezing fingers and looked up and shouted, “You stupid fucker! Why did you do it?”

I watched the sky, and waited. “Can you hear me?” I yelled.

Down the street a man was plodding through the snow and I watched him move from one pool of light to the next. When I was little, Jim Elekna took me by both wrists and swung me around on the front lawn, an idea he had of good clean fun until you, seeing my fear, shouted at him to stop. Now he wore a coat with boxed shoulders and as he entered my yellow circle of streetlight I saw the contours of his fists jammed like cubes in his pockets. The smile on his face was meant for me, meant to dismiss as good clean fun an entire lifetime of decisions poorly conceived.

“Where is he?”

Jim looked over his shoulder in the direction he’d walked from, into falling snow. “He was talking crazy and I… I should have just… But I… but he swung at me first.”

I moved past him and he called after me that he was sorry and his words would have had more effect had they been spoken to the falling snow. I followed Jim’s footprints up the road to where they joined with two other sets and then from fifty yards out I saw him through the storm’s static. Our father. Kneeling like a supplicant, snow piling on his back, and soon I was close enough to see the blood, thin streaks and dots imprinting the snow beneath his bowed head. I pressed my hand into his shoulder and he took pains to sit up. When he looked at me, he flung an arm around my knees. An anger rose in me for his bloodied face, and a fantasy of violent retribution, but I only said, “What happened?”

“I could almost see him.” He looked up into the falling snow. “Your brother. I could almost… But Jim, he… he said I was crazy. Do you understand? He said that I was crazy.” He was crying now. He drew his arm from my legs and laced the fingers of his hands and he started pressing his forehead into his joined hands. “Oh Jesus,” he cried. “Oh Jesus.”

Only in his presence could I see what we were: fragments—the forgotten debris of the thing that had happened to us. We were pieces of you that you couldn’t kill and it was only our vague sense of incompleteness, of having once been something else, that made us think we saw things that weren’t there.

Beside me he sobbed and said, “Don’t you feel him sometimes? I… it’s like he’s right here.” He looked up at me. “Don’t you?” I looked down into the widened eyes, into the face covered in blood and tears, and into his voice now came a hollowness as he asked me once more: “Don’t you?”

RIVERBOUND

L. ANNETTE BINDER

The lilacs were blooming when you took your bike,

the air fragrant as a funeral parlor when you rode

to the river, the birch and maples bursting,

the water like mercury in the May sunshine, and

did you see any of these things, I wonder

afterwards—the first dragonflies swarming,

the monarchs over the irises. You rode with

purpose, a terrible calming certainty. You moved

through beauty untouched and untouchable and

nothing was quiet that day. Spring is the noisiest

of seasons, as if all the sleeping

creatures awaken at once with a shout,

the nuthatches, the peepers, the fat robins

and phoebes, the wayward owl

calling in the sunshine, and you passed

through the ruckus, through the ferns unfurling

and the teeming fields. Only the river

was still sluggish from winter. You went

to its dark waters as if pulled by some thread,

unknowable to others, perhaps even to you,

but stronger than every other bond

tying you to the world.

IF NOT MERCY

ZOE BOYER

Out stumbling through the dogwood’s

lush constellations, earth littered with

moldering stars, I nearly burst a caterpillar

beneath my feet which, just this once,

might have been a mercy, in the throes

of death as he was, all the elegance of

his articulated segments given over

to a terrible writhing. I place him in the soil

beneath a violet heaven of crested iris,

and if he pleads for some release beyond

my timid interventions, it doesn’t come.

Under the silken cover of petals,

the deft calligraphy of pines inked with shadow,

nature unspools its pitiless machinations’

the joints’ faltering scaffold, nerves’

dendritic scorch of lightning. Already listing

toward ruin, I have begged to let the dogged creep

of turkey tail have its way, but my body persists,

step by aching step. I confess I’ve grown bitter,

though I’ve praised nature’s grim glory,

seen the graceful logic of rot. Fine then,

I’ll be patient. Let my borrowed atoms

unstitch themselves in their fervent desire

to return to silicate sparks of dust, molecules

caught in the creek’s pulse—let the body

erode toward a beauty more enduring.

MY NAME IS JIN ISHIDA

JOONGI ANDREW LEE

My name is Jin Ishida, and I am undoubtedly, most decidedly, Japanese, yes, yes.

I hear whispers here and there, nefarious rumors, rumors about what I have done in the past during wartime, rumors about my true identity. They think I do not hear them whispering amongst themselves in the Noksan neighborhood. But I do hear them indeed, yes, yes. The Koreans talk not only about my supposed feeblemindedness, but how I supposedly threw a vase in Naomi’s house, the house of my dearest and only daughter, and that I even killed a man.

But I do not mind such rumors, do not mind them at all. After all, although I am aware that, at sixty-five, I am past my physical prime, I am confident I retain all my mental faculties at the highest level, yes, yes. I retired from the police force in Japan after a long and illustrious career and came here to Korea because I wished to spend more time with my daughter, not because I was deficient in any shape or form. So I do wonder where such rumors about my feeblemindedness originated. Indeed, I admit that I may have called my neighbor Mrs. Kim instead of Mrs. Jung at times and occasionally forgot (with great embarrassment) to pay my bill at Mr. Koh’s noodle shop. But does that warrant calling me feebleminded, and not only that, circulating nefarious rumors about me? I do feel terribly, terribly wronged. After all, I did not throw a vase at anyone in Naomi’s home, let alone kill a man. I recall the afternoon of our argument with great sadness, and even now, I wonder what made Naomi speak so harshly to her own dear father. All I remember is her yelling at the end that she would never forgive me.

As of late, I spend my days on the porch overlooking the beach. It is a fine view. From here, I can observe the still ocean and the golden sands in the distance, feel the cool breeze brush my cheeks. To be honest, I did not care much for Korea after it became independent from Japan in 1945, but I must admit it has fine beaches. From my youth, observing oceans has bestowed on me a sense of calm. It may have been because my parents were rice farmers who hailed from Korea. They toiled in the Japanese fields, the rice paddies of Yokohama, day after day alongside Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese, until they passed away from overexertion while I was young. I was eight years old then. Although I was adopted by a kindly Japanese couple, sometimes observing vast expanses of agricultural fields for too long weighed heavily upon me. In those moments, back in the day, I rode my bike down the hills to the coast and quietly observed the tides, falling into deep introspection.

In the end, the ideal beach, like the one in front of me now, is one that has a certain muteness about it. No excess decorations and fanfare, and of course, no people. The ocean must be a deep blue, and the sands the color of gold. The tides must lap consistently, rhythmically, so that they gradually fade into the background of one’s mind. Indeed, it must be mute, mute as a photograph. It is only then that I can begin my intense ruminations.

Yesterday morning I embarked on an investigation of utmost importance. In my journal, I named the investigation “The Incident of the Broken Vase.” I have spent all day thinking about it and jotting ideas in my journal. Here on this porch, I can focus on my thoughts and memories with greater intensity, without interruption. Unlike most conventional investigations, the only facts I am armed with are my memories, and searching these memories for clues requires intense concentration. I have made much progress in the investigation, but there is one snag. In my whole life, I have thrown only one vase, and that was four decades ago, before the Second World War. So it was quite strange, yes, yes, quite strange the day I was accused of throwing a vase in Naomi’s home.

It happened two days ago, Sunday afternoon in this very house, during an argument about her fiancé, a Korean. He was moving my things out without my permission, so I stomped upstairs to Naomi’s room to demand justice. The argument got quite heated, and since my physical condition was no longer what it once was, I had to go downstairs to get water. While I was down here, I did not do anything much. I sat on the porch and watched the ocean, pondered if I should just move back to Japan. Yet, I thought, what use was it having saved a sizable retirement fund (not extraordinary by any means, but just enough to get along without worry) if there was nobody to spend it with? After all, I moved here in the first place because it was getting quite drafty living in Japan alone. Satsuki had passed away soon after I retired. Less than a year after her death, I packed my belongings and headed straight to this house in Busan where Naomi was living with her fiancé.

When I arrived, I expected her to be brimming with joy that her dear father had gone to the trouble to visit. I only wanted to spend my final years with my remaining family. Instead, Naomi mumbled here and there about how I should have let them know I was coming. Can a father not visit his dear daughter at a moment of his choosing? Has society changed so much that a father must ask permission to visit? Preposterous, yes, yes, preposterous! But my anger subsided quickly. The house, you see, is quite comfortable, far more than I expected. I especially enjoyed sitting on the porch and observing the ocean. I no longer had to do much work either. Naomi had been well brought up, thanks to my parenting.

During my stay, Naomi cooked three meals for me every day and cleaned my room while I observed the ocean until the sun set. Time passed pleasantly. At one point, Naomi asked how long I was going to stay, noting it had been three months since I arrived. I was quick to catch on that Naomi was upset, upset her dear father might be leaving so soon despite having arrived not too long ago. I comforted her, patting her on her back. Do not worry, my dear, I said, I will not be leaving anytime soon, not at all, not at all. And so, it was pleasant, quite pleasant, observing the ocean. Doing so calmed me in ways I scarcely imagined before.

It was no surprise then that two days ago, in the middle of the heated argument with Naomi, I came to the porch to observe the blue ocean and golden sands, still and mute as a photograph. What a fine view it was. How could I have thrown the vase when I was downstairs enjoying this fine view? By the time I returned to the room upstairs, it was dark inside with the curtains closed, and I found Naomi squatting on the floor with her knees to her chest, shivering. Her fiancé lay next to her, his lower lip drooping to one side like a comatose patient, the shards of the vase I did not throw scattered all over the floor. Think how it terrified me to see her then, squatting on the floor with her knees to her chest, shivering. In that dark room, I tapped her shoulder, tapped her shoulder, you see, carefully as one would tap fragile glass to check if it might shatter. But her head was burrowed inside her arms, and she scarcely budged. How frightening, how frightening! I stalked around the scene of the crime like I had done in my old days as a detective, examining each and every detail. How cold and dark the room was! But every time I tried to piece the clues together, I could not help but focus on the shards of vase scattered over the floor. My memory’s eye reconstructed the vase, the pale white vase upon which bamboo stalks were painted with blue ink, and it floated there in the darkness, pale as if reflecting moonlight, constructed from shards that were sharp enough to kill.

No matter what anyone says, I have never thrown a vase in Naomi’s home. I have only ever thrown a vase one time in my life, and that was four decades ago in Japan, in Yokohama, at the pale boy dressed in a farmer’s indigo weave. I was twenty-five then, just about the time the Japanese Empire started to wage battle against Manchuria in the 1930s after establishing a foothold in Korea. While the country waged battle abroad, I was posted at a small police station in Yokohama, near a park in the Kanazawa neighborhood. At the time the country lacked manpower, as many were posted abroad, so the government had started to recruit foreign workers such as the Chinese and the Koreans. My patrol around the neighborhood started around five in the evening and lasted a few hours.

One evening, when the sun had started to set and the officer I was paired with took a smoke break, I wandered through the neighborhood. I heard a subtle scraping sound in one of the backyards. Although Japan was beginning to construct western-influenced residences in major cities, the houses in the Kanazawa neighborhood were mostly from the Meiji era, wood construction in the style of kura-zukuri. There had recently been cases of resident foreigners sabotaging these dwellings, as they were vulnerable to fire and their wells still used by many residents to retrieve their daily provision of water. The fires and well poisonings caused by these foreigners caused us to be in a state of continual high alert. As a result, the subtle scraping sound in the backyard was not something to be ignored.

It was hard to see much in the evening, but I had keen ears, yes, yes, keen ears able to pick up the smallest of disturbances. Crouching low, just as a lion does stalking an unassuming deer in tall grass, I made my way to a nearby residence and peered beyond the corner. I could tell the backyard was not tended well. Half the yard was piled with dirt, the other half covered by weeds and unattended grass. A shadowy figure was reaching into the well, his torso tipped inside of it. His legs dangled in the air as if he was kicking while swimming. It was most profoundly odd. I strode over to the well, and he yelped as I yanked him back to the ground by his two feet. I must have pulled too hard as his body slammed against the ground.

It took a while for him to stand back up, and when he did, I was able to study him more closely. He was a boy, perhaps in his early teens, a slight figure, and pale, dressed in indigo-dyed weave, the kind worn by foreign farmers who worked in the fields. It struck me as profoundly odd at the time, profoundly odd, yes, yes, enough to give me chills. Next to him stood a large pale vase, upon which bamboo stalks were painted with blue ink. He seemed quite unbothered by the fact that I’d yanked him from the well. Instead, he looked askance at something in the dark, jaws clenched, cheeks slightly bloated, as if he was pouting.

I prodded him with my baton, this pale ghost, prodded his shoulder. What are you doing here? I prodded. What are you doing here? But he did not answer, his shoulder swaying to the prodding. This was how he was, yes, yes. Silent as a dumb mute. Expressionless eyes, holding the only vase I have ever thrown.

When we discovered he was a Korean who worked in a nearby farming village, we quickly dispatched experts to search the well for contamination, for animal carcasses, as the foreigners tended to poison wells using the bodies of small birds and squirrels. We found nothing of the kind in the well. I asked him what the vase was. He stared into the distance and mumbled it was a gift from his parents who had worked in the fields with other Koreans, Chinese, and Vietnamese. His parents had passed away, and all he had left of their memory was this pale vase, this family heirloom that had been inherited across countless generations. That was the first and last time he spoke.

I was quick on my feet. I suggested to the higher-ups I’d seen him about to pour contaminated water from his vase into the well and it was likely he’d poisoned many wells beforehand. The higher-ups concluded on the spot, due to my witness, without needing to investigate the contents of the vase, that the boy was indeed a criminal with nefarious motives, that it was likely he had already poisoned many wells beforehand, and that the dirty water in the vase was contaminated with the most horrific diseases. It was the last straw—it was time to punish these foreigners who had forsaken our country’s goodwill. So while I watched from a distance, the officers thrashed him to get a confession, to find those who had given him the orders.

We would go through this process many times after the boy, go through many foreigners, yes, yes, especially the Koreans, since the Koreans tended to trust me because I spoke their language so well. They thought I was one of them, but soon, they realized the truth: that I am undoubtedly, most decidedly, Japanese. Then their eyes changed. They stared at the other Japanese officers with hatred, but they stared at me with a kind of savage frenzy. In the future, yes, yes, I would arrest many of these nefarious criminals and earn not only an imperial citizenship but also a medal of distinction, awarded by the great General Hashimoto himself. I would wear this medal often, not only outside on my strolls but inside my home as well.

But this particular boy, he was stubborn, and he refused to talk. As the officers thrashed him, he looked upon me with expressionless eyes as I stood at a distance, observing. He did not stare at me with the savage frenzy of the Koreans who came later. He simply observed me with those expressionless eyes. By the time the officers finished thrashing him for the day, he shuddered in the corner, hugging the pale vase upon which bamboo stalks were painted with blue ink, body trembling violently in a tight little ball. When he caught me staring at him from outside the cell, he relaxed. His body unraveled from the tight little ball he’d formed, expanding physically before my eyes as he stood up, like some kind of pale and grotesque insect unravelling from a cocoon. And I thought, What could I do to take him down a notch?

The officers returned the next day and thrashed him good. But he stayed silent, this boy dressed in a farmer’s indigo weave, cheeks slightly pouting. We searched for his parents, his relatives, so the officers could give them a good thrashing as well. Evil runs in the blood. But we confirmed his parents had passed away in the fields many years ago. Just like yours, one of the officers said, turning to me, Just like yours, Ishida.

I admit my parents’ death had some impact on me. When I was young, for a day, for a day only, I was, yes, yes, quite shattered I would have to go on living life without them. But it was inevitable and for the better. Although I felt sorry for my parents who had toiled in the fields, I was fortunate to be adopted by the Japanese couple, who treated me as one of their own. As a result, I developed deep insight into the way of the Japanese mind, all of which ultimately resulted in my imperial citizenship and the medal of distinction, awarded by the great General Hashimoto. It was natural, since I was undoubtedly, most decidedly, Japanese, that I did not feel sorry for the boy dressed in blue farmer’s weave. Not at all, most definitely. One would have only felt sorry for the boy if one were Korean, not Japanese. The boy, yes, yes, he was the one at fault.

In the middle of their thrashing, the officers turned to me. What are you doing, Ishida, gaping there? Thrash him with us, Ishida, thrash him together. Are you a sympathizer, Ishida? Sympathizing with the Koreans, eh? They laughed. I laughed with them, observing the thrashing from afar.

From the porch, listening to the ocean, I think about the fiancé clearing my things out, how pitifully I watched as he sweated, jaws clenched, eyes expressionless. I chastise my aged self, so powerless, my sagging gray skin clinging so desperately to my thin bones. I should have realized sooner but failed, yes, yes, realized it far too late. I had told Naomi many times, ever since she was a child, that she must marry a Japanese man, as we must protect our heritage. I told her this many times, many times. But she rebelled against me and chose a Korean man whom I knew nothing about, except that he was some doctor idling in some neighborhood children’s clinic. I explained to her constantly how hard I had worked to make sure we were Japanese, not Korean. From a young age, I realized what I must do to become truly Japanese. Merely copying their behavior was not enough. Instead, I must understand the reasons for their behavior and overlay their thinking process with my own. Once, I saw a Japanese man slip on the pavement and another man pass him without the slightest concern. One would naturally assume the Japanese are cold people by their behavior, but instead, I realized the Japanese turn away from people in need because they think, Ah, if I try to help the man on the ground, he may become embarrassed and ashamed, so I will pretend not to notice him unless he calls for my help. I’d noticed such nuances from a young age, and after conducting years of intense introspection about what it means to be Japanese, had thus become Japanese. This is how I was, by the time I was thirty-five, bestowed an imperial citizenship and not only that, awarded a medal by the Japanese government for my excellent service.

I have shown this medal to Naomi many times since she was young to remind her of my efforts, but still, she became engaged to this Korean man, and her action sparked this whole disaster. I was helpless, yes, yes, in the face of the deep roots of fate that twisted and turned grotesquely, so obvious to me now from the porch. When I first moved into Naomi’s home and recognized the pale vase, upon which bamboo stalks were painted with blue ink, set upon a pedestal in the hallway, I should have realized right then and there what was occurring, should have become suspicious of this Korean man’s motives. While this nefarious outsider was clearing out my things, I should have stopped him right then and there, yes, yes, even if my flesh was torn and my bones shattered. But I had stood there in silence, watching him with wide eyes.

At full height, the fiancé was tall, much taller than me. His muscles bulged and rippled beneath his shirt as he heaved the last box out of my house, expressionless. Indeed, although at sixty-five years of age I have retained all my mental faculties at their highest level, I am past my physical prime, yes, yes. There was no way I could challenge this man, no brains and all brawn, to a direct contest of strength. It was unwise for other reasons as well. Rumors about me were already starting to make the rounds. The vandalism began a few weeks ago. I exclaimed, constantly, to the journalists who found our home that I had done none of the things they accused me of, that I was not a Korean who had betrayed his own country, that I had not committed heinous acts of violence against Koreans during wartime, that I was merely doing what I had to do, merely following the orders of those above me, as all Japanese had to do.

For the sake of Naomi, using violence against the fiancé was never an option. It would only fan the flames. Still, by the time the fiancé placed the last of my belongings outside and headed upstairs, I realized this was no time for hesitation. I stomped after him to Naomi’s room to demand justice. I thought, What could I do to take him down a notch?

What are you doing, Ishida, gaping there? Thrash him together with us, Ishida, thrash him together. Are you a sympathizer, Ishida? Sympathizing with the Koreans, eh? Strange why the pale boy stared only at me and not at the officers who thrashed him. Over days, his stare started to bother me, and I was able to feel it no matter where I was in the office. Even lying in the darkness, alone in the bunker, I could feel his eyes staring at me, and soon the sleepless nights made me pray the boy would flop over and die. But the boy, he continued to endure the beatings without a sound, staring at me with those expressionless eyes while hugging his pathetic vase. It continued like that for so long, I lost track of time, and I began to experience bouts of insomnia.

Yes, it continued like that until one such night, there was that one night, one night unlike any other. I had to work late to sort documents. There were many nights like this when I was in the station alone while the other officers were out. They would have me translate any documents that were originally in Korean, organize interrogation records. I was exhausted, having not slept in so long. I was sure I had left the lights on in the station before I took a nap, but it was dark when I awoke, dark when I woke to someone, or something, staring at me with expressionless eyes. How odd, how profoundly odd. He was hugging the vase and staring at me with those same expressionless eyes. I did not know how he managed to get out of his cell, as I was sure I’d locked it tight. The boy, this mute ghost, was moving his mouth rapidly, but I could not hear anything. It took me a while to understand what was happening. I could not hear anything, and I do not know what I was thinking as I was so tired, but I leaned in to listen closer.

I will kill you I will kill you I will kill you, the boy was muttering while staring at me with those same expressionless eyes. He turned to me and smiled. I will kill you and if I cannot my descendants will kill you and if my descendants cannot kill you their descendants will kill your descendants and if their descendants cannot kill your descendants their descendants will kill your descendant’s descendants, the boy muttered as if he was chanting.

I shouted at Naomi to get away from the murderer, this killer who had come to haunt me. The fiancé continued to chant as if he was cursing me and my entire bloodline, and for the first time in my life, I was chilled, and I screamed at him to stop, that he, a stupid farmer’s boy, had no right, no right at all to judge me. I shook Naomi’s shoulder, explaining that he was responsible for everything, that he was the one spreading the rumors about me in the neighborhood, that he was going after everything I held dear, that he was going to kill me after he took everything I held dear. I was chilled, terrified, yes, yes, but I was also disgusted, and the longer I stood, frozen, looking at this stupid farmer’s boy dressed in his stupid indigo weave, a nausea washed over me, a feeling so strong it made me want to vomit as I tried to tear away this pale thing embracing my dearest and only daughter. I was terrified but also disgusted, so so disgusted, and I needed to quash this pale monster forever, so I grabbed the vase he was holding and thrashed it over his head, over and over and over again, but no matter how I imagined blood exploding from his skull, he remained unfazed and he continued chanting, so I reeled back in horror still clutching the vase and flung it as hard as I could at his face.

I heard the officers laughing. They were making fun of how I looked. No matter how much I told them to stop, they did not respond to my pleas and stated the same thing, over and over again, that I looked like a madman.

I am no madman, I said to them, no madman, but they just laughed and laughed and laughed.

I am no madman, no madman at all. No matter what anyone may say, I know what I am.

I am Jin Ishida, yes, yes, and I am undoubtedly, most decidedly, Japanese.

THIS POEM IS NOT ABOUT THE OLD COUNTRY / THE HOLOCAUST / THE D.P. CAMPS

MARGARET BLEICHMAN

after Luna Rey Hall

It’s about my brother and me at home in our

Brownsville apartment the morning our mother

went out for groceries and my brother stuffed me

into my red snowsuit and pulled and snapped and

tied and zipped until I was plump and stiff as a balloon

animal. We climbed onto the table’s oilcloth, a cheery

plaid with pairs of dark cherries, then bent our shoulders

sideways and through our third-floor kitchen window and

stepped into the snowdrift embracing the entire flat roof

of the two-story building next door. The white shimmered

hush had rolled every sharp edge smooth and curved.

It covered the gritty tar paper flashing, cloaked

the low concrete parapet at the rooftop’s

edge that came only to his knee

concealed every danger

present and past

a square of joy

ours alone

fresh and

never broken

ON MUCINEX

KATIE HARTSOCK

I see expectorant and think expectant, which I am

 and am not. I learned these pills that thin and loosen mucus come

from trees, and felt somehow relieved—as if my lungs were sprung

 from factory to meadowland, from chemicals to sap;

as if my deep and frequent pharmacons did not quite trap

 me in my time. The Spanish introduced the guaiac tree

in 1533 to treat sore throats, then syphilis,

 unwanted pregnancies. So nothing comes without a trap.

A generic brand named its version Mucus Extended Release—

 maybe they meant relief. Maybe they can’t see their mistake,

how it sounds like it delivers what it’s meant to take away:

 secretions, sputum, all day long. And now I read it could aid

conception: the thinner the cervical lining, the better swim sperm.

 The best confusion: when friends remember me as being there

and I was not. I never say

 no, or I don’t think so. I like my life rewritten briefly,

in the common pages of a cosmos dazed with such belonging.

 Expectorant, from ex pectore: out of the chest, out of

the heart, where you and I expect things from each other, in

 this air between us now, its color already coming back.

EDDIES

LINDSAY SPROUL

One summer night in high school, a friend and I climbed a rusty ladder a hundred feet to the top of the water tower. We sat with our legs laced together, looking out over our small coastal town, drinking Jameson from a plastic bottle. It was a full moon, bulging-tide night, intoxicating and blurry. Somewhere down below, the faint sound of Lou Bega reached us and we talked about what happened to Mambos one through four.

“They’re probably somewhere awesome and secret, hanging out with Preparations A through G,” I said, and she knocked her knee against my thigh. I felt suddenly unsteady and gripped the neckline of her worn Red Sox shirt, as though that might keep me from falling.

She laughed, reaching up to brush the hair from my eyes. Then, she stopped abruptly. “One day, we won’t be friends anymore,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked, but I kind of knew.

Like all of us back then, with cars up on cinder blocks in our front yards, bruises blooming on us that we never discussed, and shadowy fathers, I feared being a statistic. I didn’t want to picture what I might actually become, so instead, I imagined regular things: taxes, an expectant husband I had to act happy to see at the end of a tedious day, orthopedic shoes.

“Because, like…” she leaned back and looked up at the sky, “that’s just how it is, I think. But that’s not even the worst part.”

I didn’t want to hear the worst part.

One good thing about tides was that they changed so often. But we didn’t really notice; the changes looked the same to us. We underestimated the tides in ways the periwinkle snails didn’t.

“The worst part is that we won’t even care that we aren’t friends anymore.”

I looked at my wrist, at the friendship bracelet she made me and noticed, already, the frayed edges of the floss.

Periwinkles can breathe underwater, yet they cannot swim. So few creatures can survive the intertidal zones like they can. If you put them in a fish tank, they will climb to the top of the tank and seal themselves shut, awaiting a high tide that, of course, never arrives. Eventually, they will shrivel up and die.

Chronic illness is similar—like an unraveling dock line, the body slowly forgetting how to do familiar things while the mind still holds firmly to the rope that touches, somewhere down deep, the top of that water tower I could once climb, when the threat of death was a thrill and not just a long series of arrogant doctors without answers.

I turned to her and she looked back at me. Like, really looked. “But I don’t want that,” I said.

She smiled knowingly. I can’t even remember her name, but back then, I loved her fully and fiercely. “Yeah, no, me either,” she said. “Like, at all.”

Now, decades later, I am a different statistic as yet another ambulance carries me somewhere to be poked by strangers. I remember so little, but I think of her eyes in that moment. Her eyebrows, like aerial shots of grain.

It’s the same kind of loss as she was, the way my body crawls toward its end. You live through these lasts, mostly, but not quite, unknowing. A grip you don’t know how to hold. A last swim in the bioluminescence, a last time flipping a cassette and driving to the dock, a last kiss at Damon’s Point, a last knowing look before ditching class to go drink on the fire trails. A cutting dread that eventually dulls and becomes part of your fabric, like the rush of the tide that never comes.

FROM WHERE I SIT

E.B. LICATA

So much hangs in the balance

money, time, lives—especially lives.

From where I sit, legs dangling off the table

I can see all sides

 — the world a cell, a feather, a war waged inside.

Possibilities that set my head to tilt and spin.

The doctor tells me: You could not use anything and see,

but you don’t strike me as that kind of woman.

The kind who can’t decide

between matters light and heavy?

Yes, in fact, that’s me.

ONE-WORD FORECAST

JANE O. WAYNE

Carefree days

when her child scrawled her name

in fresh concrete

and it hardened, but now

it's a doctor's words scrawled

in the air and her daughter's diagnosis

quickly hardening.

The mother turns away, shuns

the test results

as if they're someone else's mail

she has to forward. Later, too,

in a dream-translation of her day,

she steps aside

to watch a white-haired woman

slumped over a child on a gurney.

The next day leaving home, she ignores

the forecast, doesn't carry an umbrella

as if the bad weather

won't catch up with her.

By night the blood-red roses in the vase

turn black. Fatal. Once the word

escapes her mouth,

she hears nothing else.

AT RISK

ELISABETH MURAWSKI

After months of doubling cells,

I was too far gone

for further pot-shots.

I’d hung on despite the fall,

the coat-hanger trick,

the stuff she drank

to force my early out.

I kept thinking something

might snap in her brain,

that she’d holler “Fire!”

in a crowded theater,

or an artery could blow,

canceling the drumbeat.

What a tightrope!

Trapped inside the whale,

I fought with my feet,

the cord lashing my throat.

When the waters gushed,

she groaned and pushed

until I emerged,

slick as a fish.

I could feel her cold

shoulder, the flesh

of her nipple

shrink from my mouth,

her hands expert

at holding me apart.

As if exiled

to another country,

I would live in her shadow.

She never knew I knew.

I tell her, dead,

you did what you had to do.

HOMECOMING

ROSALIND GUY

Just like Jesus, Alton Hayes left the grave after three days. Unlike Jesus, Alton’s murder was never mythologized, the sting of inhumanity and depravity never removed so that his brutalized corpse became a sacrifice. No need to hold anyone accountable for the death of an innocent man when the details were malleable: Jesus chose to die for our sins. And that’s why the cross became a so-called symbol of love rather than evidence of the weapon used to commit a brutal murder. In fact, Alton was wearing a silver cross around his neck—a gift from his paternal grandmother—on the night he was murdered by the Memphis police.

Unlike Jesus, no one was waiting on Alton when he stood up from his grave. It was 1971, and he was sixteen; he hadn’t made any promises about returning from the dead. His mother Mamie, whose own mother had died when she was six, used to joke about dying young (“When I die…”) and how she planned to come back and haunt Alton like her younger brother Donald had done to her a few weeks after he was killed aboard a navy ship.

It always started with Mamie retelling the story about being outside hanging laundry on the clothesline, Alton sitting on the ground holding the wooden clothespins. She’d just placed the final pin on a blue bedsheet when she looked up and saw Donald’s ghost behind Alton. He was standing there, staring at her like one of those cardboard cutouts where if you don’t look too hard, it seems like the person is real, but the longer you stare, the more you can tell it’s a cutout. Only he wasn’t a cutout. She was sure of that. No way he could rest in peace after what happened to him.

Laughing, Mamie recalled how the sight of Donald sent her running across the backyard and into the house. In her haste to escape, she left two-year-old Alton sitting outside on the ground. “And when I die, I’m going to come back to haunt you,” she’d laugh. They never joked about what might happen if Alton died first. Everybody knew parents were supposed to die before their children. Even in a society that romanticized death, craved the death of colored people like it was a drug, and fetishized the sight of Black bodies on the ground, in the street, on TV, she and Alton held onto the belief that Mamie would go first.

Standing at the foot of the now open grave, Alton’s gaze swept across the acres of undisturbed gravesites. Half-deflated balloons and half-dead flowers marked the ones that had been most recently visited. Across the way, a very old oak tree leaning to one side was filled with cardinals. They seemed to be watching him, trying to understand what was taking place. Alton couldn’t explain it. He watched them for a while before moving on. Above him, the sun rained down its angry rays, causing him to sweat, and he had to take off his black blazer.

From somewhere far off came the scent of burning charcoal and barbecue sauce. The sound of children squealing and laughing. Tires on gravel. He started to move toward the sounds and scents of living before remembering that wasn’t why he had returned, so he kept moving towards his home. As he walked, he touched parts of his body, those places he recalled trying to shield: his head, his chest, his legs, his back. He felt the bruised places, felt wounds that had been carelessly stitched. Running his fingers along the side of his right ear, he felt a train track of scarring. He hoped his appearance wouldn’t upset his mother too much. After all, she was the one who had summoned him.

That Friday night came back to him like a movie scene he wanted to turn away from. It had just started to get cool outside. Too cool to sit on the Hill and watch the football team lose another game, so he was sitting in bed, math homework on his lap, when Peyton and Jeremy tapped on the window. Gloria Jackson, one of the prettiest girls in tenth grade, had the house to herself: her parents spent every Friday night on Grant’s Corner. He slipped out of his bedroom window and sat between his friends as Peyton drove his father’s pickup truck. Looking in the rearview mirror, he saw flashing lights. “You need to stop, man,” he begged.

“I can’t, man. If I do, I’m going to be in serious trouble.” Peyton frowned, nearly crying. “I didn’t ask to borrow his truck.”

From beside him, Jeremy yelped. “Man, you lied to us. You told us your dad knew you had the truck.”

“Well, that’s because I didn’t think we’d get stopped by the police!”

“You haven’t stopped yet!” Jeremy had his hand on the door handle like he was contemplating opening the door even as they sped seventy miles per hour down darkened streets far from their homes.

Alton didn’t say anything else. He didn’t know what to say. He closed his eyes and prayed, prayed for the nightmare scene to end. Then Peyton lost control of the truck, and they ended up on their side in a ditch. And before they could orient themselves to what had happened, the police officers were on top of them, swinging their nightsticks and punching them with their fists. So many officers. All they saw were black sticks and blue shirts. Lying on his back, his hands covering his face, Alton looked up at them, and for a moment, it was like staring at dark towering clouds. The pain was a reminder of how dangerous and angry those clouds could be.

“Why did you run?” Alton overheard one of the officers ask Peyton. “I didn’t want my dad to know I borrowed his truck,” came the weak reply. In response, those officers did their best to transform the young bodies into corpses. But Alton was the only one who ended up a dead body. A body that rested in the morgue for nearly a month before finally being released to his family for burial. He’d sensed his mother’s grief the entire time but waited until now to return to her.

Luckily, the cemetery was only a few blocks from his home, so he could walk. Not without difficulty, of course. Someone had stolen the brand-new loafers his mother bought for his burial and replaced them with raggedy house slippers. As he walked, he was forced to drag his feet against the pavement.

When Mamie opened the door, she didn’t seem to recognize the son she’d given birth to sixteen short years before. She didn’t reach out to embrace him. She didn’t startle and sing out his name through tears like she’d done at his funeral. She stood in the open doorway, her glassy-eyed stare glued to the kids playing in the street, before she let the door close.

He wondered if she didn’t recognize him because his face was swollen from the police officers’ batons; his face was nearly twice its normal size, and his eyes were hidden in engorged pockets of blood-streaked skin. He didn’t yet know he could use his dirt-stained fingers to shift the loose skin on his face, so that he looked more like the son Mamie remembered.

Without waiting for an invitation, he dragged his feet and moved inside, toward his bedroom. The radio was on, turned down low. Sam Cooke singing “A Change is Gonna Come” faded out, and then DJ Nat Williams’ voice came on with breaking news: Memphis Police Lieutenant Titus Wilkins, recently suspended with pay for his role in the beating of three

Black juveniles on October 15th, died on the operating table this afternoon at John Gaston Hospital. Wilkins was one of thirty-four officers on the scene in Capleville the night sixteen-year-old Alton Hayes was murdered following a five-mile high-speed chase. The reason for Wilkins’ surgery is unknown. Mother and son heard the news but neither acknowledged it.

In his bedroom, Alton removed the black cloth that had been draped over the mirror. He quickly shed the clothes he’d been buried in and changed into his baseball uniform. If he’d had a say in the matter, he would have asked his mother to bury him in his uniform. After his dad died, one of Alton’s teachers had signed him up for radio station WDIA’s Little League. He went along with it begrudgingly, but after a couple of seasons, he started to improve and now—that is, before he died—played for his high school team. If the police officers hadn’t killed him, he might have gone on to play professional baseball one day.

As he stared at his reflection, changed yet unchanged, he heard the bedroom door open behind him. His mother stood in the doorway, holding an open beer can, her eyes fastened on him like she was afraid he’d disappear if she looked away.

“You came,” she said finally, as if it was any other day and he was simply returning from school or baseball practice.

Startled by his mother’s attention, he felt almost human. They locked eyes, two people hungry for each other.

Mamie took a long gulp of her now lukewarm beer when she could no longer stand the indictment she felt in her son’s expressionless gaze. She wondered if this thing that was happening, whatever it was, would allow her to embrace her son.

“I don’t know the rules either,” he responded to her thoughts.

“Can we try?”

When they reached for each other, it was more sensation than feeling, like when you’re sitting on the sofa watching TV, or standing in front of the stove cooking, and you swear you feel something brush your arm but when you turn to look, no one’s there. Better than nothing—the words unfurled in Mamie’s mind. Since Alton’s burial, she’d been trying to recall the last time she touched him, the last time they embraced, but she kept hitting a brick wall that hid some of her most important memories. When she groped in the darkness of her mind, searching for something to provide comfort, she remembered only how, since he became a teenager, they were like two sides of sandpaper, chafing whenever one of them got too close to the other.

I miss you rattled around in her mind. I wish there was a way to bring you back for good.

He heard her thoughts but didn’t respond. It didn’t seem like enough to say he never stopped loving her. And he didn’t have a name for what he’d felt the last few years. Just that sometimes, it felt like he was carrying so much, like everything was pushing down on him all at once. His emotions were the silver ball in a pinball machine, jerking from anger to depression without warning. They never talked about stuff like that, so he tried to figure it out on his own. And sometimes, he took it out on her, like when he “forgot” to mow the lawn or take out the trash. But things had been good between them too.

“I’m going to sue the police and city for what they did to you,” she told him.

“That won’t bring me back.”

She looked at him like he was missing a very obvious point.

“We had some good times.” Memories like clouds filled his head. Him racing across the backyard, laughing with his mother. The two of them on their knees rolling his toy cars and trains across the hardwood floor in the kitchen. The two of them walking to the park, where she sat on a wooden bench reading a book while he pumped his legs to see how high he could swing. The Memphis Cotton Carnival: They attended every year, and he always came home with a bag of candy and souvenirs. The two of them seated at the kitchen table, eating dinner and talking.

As they stared at one another now, recognition passed between them. They allowed themselves to exist in the shared memories of that moment. “Our time,” she said, “it ended too soon.”

Alton reached for her. He wanted to feel the sensation of their almost touch again. He remembered how she always listened to him talk. About school. About his friends. About the little girl he had a crush on. In his memories, his face was round and chubby, baby-faced, not lean like it became after he started playing baseball. He tried to think back on his games. Had she missed any? No, she hadn’t missed even one. She was always out in the stands yelling his name. He’d told her that with all the noise going on, he could barely hear her, but still, he heard her. Every time. At one game, they were close to winning, but Thompson was running cold that night, couldn’t hit anything, so the coach called Alton in to pinch-hit. The loud thwack when the ball met the bat momentarily startled him, and the entire bench had to yell for him to run. He’d made a home run and brought in two other players.

“They should pay for taking you away. Someone should pay for what they did to you. You didn’t deserve to be murdered.”

Alton nodded, maybe to show he agreed, maybe not. After his home run, his mom had gone wild in the stands. After his team, the Mitchell Tigers, won, he raced over and threw his arms around her. He’d been so excited, he hadn’t noticed how tentative her touch had been, as though she was afraid to startle him away. He said, “We did have some good times, didn’t we?”

Mamie dropped the beer can on the floor and lurched forward, but when she reached out, grabbed only air. “Those other boys were beat pretty bad, but they lived.”

He started to fade like an opaque rainbow that conveys only a suggestion of itself.

“Why couldn’t you live?” Instinctively, her empty hands came up to cover her eyes, and she discovered that her face was covered with tears. When she blinked, he was gone again.

TO SEE THIS BODY

DENISE MILLER

This morning, I woke weighted with memory

of the Wednesday I almost became recollection.

So close to apparition “please don’t let me die”

spilled from my lips like signal smoke. I spoke

it so many times it split to rhyme, split to verse.

Split like an incantation sung to keep this body

in. To humanize this body. To will white coats

to see this body. To will white coats to see

this body as a body worth saving.

To see this body as a body worth saving I had to

summon this body. And to summon this body, I

had to summon this blood. This red. These red

cells straight from a father mahogany skinned

with curly hair thinning now from all his living.

This living mahogany man who at 21 tried to

incant his hands into dams to hold back the dying

of his wife. My mother. To hold back

the dying of his wife, my mother.

That morning on the day my mother died

she woke up, washed up, dressed up our baby

bodies. Dressed up her own 21-year-old body.

My mother’s too young to die body. Strollered

our bodies to the A&P under a July sun. Our

bodies. My baby body. My sister’s toddler body.

That afternoon, under that July sun, the dying

young of my mother’s sickle-celled body

bodied my father’s body into a bottle. His

body made bottle. Her body made grave. This

body made battle. My sister’s body the same.

This body. This battle. This body battle. To

summon this body is to summon the grave.

To summon the grave, I must incant this body.

To incant this body, I must summon the enslaved.

The enslaved body. The mahogany, umber, burnt

sienna, copper, chestnut, auburn, chocolate, black

as midnight enslaved body. The six foot standing

upright copper colored young man’s enslaved

body. His too-young, enslaved body made

to bend under a Virginia sun. My third great-

grandfather’s copper colored enslaved still

boy-body made to bend over a Black girl’s

enslaved body. My third great-grandfather’s

still boy-body forced into countless

Black girl’s enslaved bodies.

A Black girl’s enslaved body that bedded

under the copper of my third great-grandfather’s

enslaved body, bled lineage to birth the Black

of me. This Black. This blood. This stanza.

This poem. This incantation. This summoning.

This is a body. This is a Black woman’s body.

This is my body. A body worth saving.

UNMEDICATED

KEN VICTOR

On the one torn couch in her apartment,

my friend is talking about suicide.

This is not in the abstract. She means

her suicide. Her broken

body image. Anxiety like the hook

the fish can’t remove. Her failures

she won’t forgive. This is not

in the abstract. I am sitting

between her sobs and a lamp,

afraid to say the wrong thing,

a thing that might compel her

to turn theory into action. She names

the names of those who love her,

of how much she’ll be hurting them.

The pills I take? she says, I haven’t

been taking them, I’ve been

hoarding them. Her voice is soft,

now softer, I think I might have enough.

This is not in the abstract. Tell me where

you keep them, I blurt out to my surprise.

My voice repeats, show me where.

It’s as if I’ve stumbled into knowing

how to help, as if I’m strong enough

to save her. As if I’ve decided I will.

PACKING FOR THE DESCENT

AMBER WOLFE

Packing for a stay in a mental hospital is like preparing for a vacation in the underworld. Shoelaces are banned, and dignity is optional. There is a gap between this world and that one, crossed with the help of a chaperone. A boatman disguised as a nurse confiscates my phone in a clear plastic bag. Thankfully, insurance and credit cards are accepted in lieu of golden coins. I step into a current that has already claimed what I cannot keep. I’m carrying a duffel bag instead of a lyre, hoping the descent doesn’t steal my voice.

Orpheus was told by the gods to never look back at Eurydice, his beloved, as he climbed toward daylight. I was told by the doctors not to look at the scale, not to calculate calories in my head, not to romanticize the body that almost killed me. If only I had the luxury of blind faith instead of the buzzing of a glucose monitor.

For an anorexic diabetic like myself, the line between nourishment and survival is tenuous. The forbidden fruit is—in type 1 diabetes—every fruit. Eating an apple could spike my blood glucose to harmful levels, but taking too much insulin could cause me to collapse and thus be labeled a danger to myself. And if I don’t eat the apple, I could be seen as starving myself—same dilemma.

I’ve learned how to live inside dilemmas; I spent most of my late teens and early twenties in and out of a psychiatric hospital in Baltimore, where I once had to teach myself statistics with crayons because pens were considered too hazardous. A lot of my early dates with my now-husband, Mike, were during visiting hours, finding romance on the dayroom’s foam furniture, love tucked between plastic cutlery and supervised hugs.

Diabetes taught me to listen to my body. Despite that, I don’t always believe it. My body says, Feed me, and I say, Not yet. It says, I’m afraid, and I say, Get in the car anyway. There is no tidy line between survival and sabotage. You can do everything right and still want to retreat.

Retreating, apparently, looked threatening to my outpatient psychiatrist during our telehealth appointment. “Amber,” she said. “If you don’t go voluntarily, I’m going to have to call the ER.” There was no rise in her tone; her threat was a mere statement of fact.

I laughed. “How voluntary is it, then?”

She probably knew deep down that I didn’t truly want to die. She was aware that I knew how deadly insulin is, despite it being the drug that allows me to live. I guess I was reckless enough to become a potential lawsuit if I died on her watch. I was honest about abusing the Klonopin she prescribed me, mixing it with alcohol.

Closing my laptop after our session ends, I pull my duffel bag from the closet and start packing. I pack socks, sweatpants, a hoodie with the drawstring cut. The rituals of safety. I also pack dental floss. It’s considered contraband, but I pack it anyway. You have to request it the way you'd ask for a restricted file. Then someone stands there, watching, as you tear off a single strand and floss under supervision. When you’re finished, you hand it back. I used to say I could hang myself with just that—one thread. That’s what happens when you’ve survived long enough to find absurdity in the rules, to realize how strange it is that once you’re labeled a danger to yourself, everything is reduced to logistics. Paperwork. Protocol. A packing list that tries to convey that your intent was never real.

The duffel bag sits open on the floor. I survey my insulin, needles, spare pumps, and sensors. For a moment, I daydream that the staff won’t confiscate them. But I know all too well they won’t leave me alone with sharp objects and potentially lethal drugs. I only pack as much as I need to travel to the hospital and back home, whenever that might be. Next, I fold my underwear carefully—Monday: strawberry pink. Tuesday: soft blue. Wednesday: a little too lacy for group therapy, but I pack it anyway. Saturday’s underwear is edged in rhinestones. I hold it for a few minutes. The day I last wore them, I became a wife.

I’d stepped into my Pnina Tornai dress with trembling hands and no appetite, even though the cake had three tiers and my best friend whispered, “You look like you invented love.” Mike looked at me as if I might save him. And maybe I did, briefly. Or maybe he saw someone who hadn’t yet broken. I smiled through it. Laughed. Said I wasn’t contagious. But I was. Anxiety leaves a trace. Shame lingers in fabric and memory. In sickness and in health.

The day was radiant. It rained, soft and insistent. My dress soaked at the hem and my curls frizzed, but it felt cleansing. Something old left my body. I stood there in white, feeling transformed.

Then, six months passed. And the same body that walked down the aisle is now packing for intake—where wedding bands are forbidden, mirrors are bolted to the wall, and no one calls you beautiful unless it’s a warning. “You look thin,” they’ll say, and what they’ll mean is: We’re watching you. What they’ll mean is: You won’t get away with this again.

They will make me remove my insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor, stripping me of the devices that keep me alive. A nurse will (almost always incorrectly) estimate how much insulin I need based on my weight because they won’t trust me to administer it myself. I tuck my NovoLog pen beside my deodorant and wonder if they’ll weaponize it. From time to time, I wonder if it is a weapon. I remember how impossible it felt, when I was first diagnosed at age twenty-five, to inject insulin.

So I keep packing. I pack mascara I won’t wear. I pack conditioner, even though the water pressure will make washing my hair feel like an Olympic sport. I pack a notebook (one without a spiral binding, of course) and pray they’ll let me keep it. I do not pack perfume. Too intimate. My duffel bag bulges with oversized sweaters and pants that don’t fit quite right anymore because they hang loose on my hips. I zip the bag shut. The sudden stillness feels ceremonial.

My husband stands in the doorway, arms crossed, trying to hold the moment in place. He asks if I want to bring his shirt, the one I sleep in when my thoughts race. I pick up the shirt from the foot of the bed. It smells of cedarwood and laundry detergent and the part of him that won’t let me go. I shake my head. “I can’t bring anything that matters too much,” I whisper.

He doesn’t ask why. He nods, knowing there are some things I can’t risk losing. If they made me give it up at check-in, I’d fall apart. I press the collar of the shirt to my chapped lips, then place it gently back on the bed.

Now we are in the back of an Uber, gliding wordlessly down the roads. The atmosphere in the car has the kind of sterility you find in waiting rooms and church halls, heavy with all that is not being said. The silence stretches out like gauze. Out the window, the city softens into streaks of light and motion. I count the things I left behind: a razor, a text, a laugh.

The driver breaks the silence. “Is Cornell ER the right place?”

“I’m not contagious,” I blurt out, too quickly, too defensively. I’ve said that line before. Said it every time my blood sugar collapsed, though type 1 diabetes is the kind of thing that makes people pity you rather than run. I say it to convince him, to convince myself. As if guilt has become a pathogen I might spread by breathing the wrong way.

Eight days earlier, my friends outdrank me at my thirtieth birthday party. They danced harder and cried less than I did, but they aren’t here now. None of them are. And that’s the fear beneath it all: that I’ve already infected someone else. Someone will catch what I carry just by loving me. I leave a stain on joy, a haunting on tenderness, a bruise on the soulmates who were my shelter.

I rehearse the script under my breath that I’ll need to perform for the intake nurse. Name: Amber Renée Wolfe. Date of Birth: October 21, 1994. Allergies: Lamictal. Diagnoses:

Anorexia: the overachiever’s illness. The one that says if you can’t control anything else, at least master the art of dissolving. The only condition where getting worse gets you compliments.

Bipolar II: the kind that comes with depression and brief surges of electricity. Not as extreme as Bipolar I, but the label has stuck to me since I was sixteen, as though it were a barcode plastered in the middle of my forehead.

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: the deluxe trauma bundle. Comes with nightmares, fragmented timelines, and a fun little game called Is This a Memory or a Metaphor? My longest companion. I've written breakup letters to it, but we keep getting back together.

Yes, I packed my own bag. Yes, I know why I’m here.

The building comes into view with all the aesthetic grace of a DMV. Beige. Featureless. Like the walls have been drained of all hope and scorched with disinfectant.

For some reason, they keep calling me Renée, my middle name, as if I’m being either scolded by my mother or soothed by a lover. Or in some Freudian sense, both. I don’t correct them. I want to be someone else while I’m here. Perhaps the renaming is part of the healing. It’s hardly subtle—“Renée” means “reborn”—but this simple repetition keeps me grounded and motivated. I’m sure that it has to mean something.

Inside, the cold air constricts around my frail bones. The intake nurse at the front desk probably used to lovingly braid her daughter’s hair every morning. Now, she takes my bag and asks if I’m wearing underwire. “No,” I say. I knew better. I packed soft bras, the kind that are a compromise between comfort and compliance. The nurse inventories my belongings. When she pulls out my underwear—my Monday-to-Sunday lineup—I want to explain. I want to say, These remind me of who I am, but I don’t. She doesn’t smile. My undies look strange here. Too bright. Too pink. Like a cheer squad crashing a funeral.

“Any sharp objects?” she asks. Only the ones in my head, I think, but I’ve already learned not to be clever in these places. Funny girls get monitored more closely. Funny girls don’t get discharged quickly. I shake my head no. Another nurse pats me down efficiently, detached. My body becomes evidence.

My black blazer and black trousers feel too formal when I slip off my boots and expose my Hello Kitty socks. An administrator compliments them, apologizing that I need to replace them with grippy ones. We laugh. But I feel like the joke: a thirty-year-old married woman playing dress-up.

I am walked down a hall where I smell something overcooked. Some of the doors are open; some are shut. Mine is half open. Inside: a cot, a sealed window, a scratchy blanket, a nightstand with no drawer. The kind of room where time forgets how to move.

Later, the two nighttime nurses arrive—one young, nervous, scribbling notes; the other older, heavier-lidded. When I mention I’m a type 1 diabetic, the older one sighs and mutters, “Oh, God.” Am I a glitch in the system? A complication no one wants to chart? Suddenly, I wonder if they’ll release me because I’m too fractured. Too much work. Too much of a pain in the ass to keep overnight. Is this how people really see me? Messy, unfixable, more maintenance than I’m worth?

It is ironic, being monitored so closely, yet still the expert on my own survival. Teaching the people who are meant to save me how not to kill me while apologizing for the trouble.

I sit. I do not cry. And that night, I do not sleep. There are footsteps in the hall, someone crying softly a few doors down. The lights never go fully dark. I lie awake under the stiff blanket and stare at a ceiling that’s been painted over so many times it no longer remembers its own texture, thinking about how my husband looked at me in the doorway before we left.

In the morning, a nurse takes my vitals. Blood pressure. Temperature. Weight— facing away from the scale, of course. She doesn’t tell me the number. I pretend not to care. Later that morning, I’m interviewed by yet another nurse. This one is less buttoned-up than the others, friendly with a conspiratorial way about her. She walks in and says, “I hear you have a love affair with alcohol.” She tells me she’s a former addict herself. I tell her that alcohol and I are in an on-again, off-again relationship—the highs are cinematic, but the lows are like free-falling into concrete. She asks if I’ve done fairy dust, and I smile at the phrasing. “Not since my early twenties,” I say, “but I'm planning to be Tinker Bell for Halloween, if I get out of here in time.”

She laughs. Honest, from-the-gut laughter. She says, “We all did acid in our early twenties, girlfriend.” I tell her I don’t regret it. She replies, “Neither do I. It made me me. And I like me.”

I get it. My pain shaped me, too. I miss the glittery disasters and the euphoric highs. The suffering that carved out space for language. The nights when I wanted to fade away and ended up finding myself instead. Sometimes, I tell myself I’d go back if I could. I’d descend, try to sing something beautiful out of the dark, even knowing I might look back too soon.

I nod, homesick for the version of myself that danced barefoot on rooftops and chased the divine in bathroom mirrors. “I feel bad for people who didn’t party in their twenties,” I tell the nurse. “They’ll probably have a midlife crisis in Ibiza, all pills and regret.” She chuckles but gets serious. Says she doesn’t think I have a full-blown substance abuse disorder, that she won’t refer me to treatment, but she’s firm about the basics: you need sleep, you need structure, you need to stop treating your nervous system this way. I nod again.

“Happy Birthday,” she says as she leaves.

Back in my room, I unzip the duffel. My hand finds Monday: strawberry pink. I fold it again. Tighter. I think about all the parts of myself I’ve tried to leave behind: the teenager who turned pain into precision, the bride who vanished beneath lace, the woman who thought starving herself could be elegant if done quietly enough. I think of all the times I’ve tried to disappear without disruption, and all the ways people pulled me back with gentleness: my therapist’s firm voice, my husband’s hands on my shoulders, my own reflection in the mirror whispering, Not yet.

At some point, they’ll discharge me. After I say the right things, smile the right smile, convince them I’m no longer a liability to myself or their paperwork. And that’s okay. This place doesn’t have to be a miracle, it just has to be a respite. I’m taking a pause in a place where time warps enough to take inventory.

There’s risk in naming recovery too early. If I do that before I’ve truly returned to my safest self, something sacred might slip back into the dark. Perhaps needing a witness, needing to be seen, might be the thing that makes you disappear. Where Orpheus looked back for certainty, I’m trying to learn to walk without it. At the very least, I’ll be accounted for, like a pulse. A presence. Someone who folds her underwear with hope.

When I return to the real world, the world of the living, I’ll probably deflect. Say the food was bad, but the existential reckoning was five stars. However, if one person asks with eyes that mean well, I might say: “I’m not contagious.” This time, I’ll say it transparently.

I’ll say that I went somewhere quiet—a place of linoleum and myth. There was a descent, and something that resembles a return. Looking back at my anorexia, I see it as an addiction that gave me control when diabetes left me feeling like I was out of options. If my body was rebelling against me, then the anorexia made me feel that I was fighting back—viciously. My experience in the mental hospital won’t necessarily save me, but it can make me the storyteller. It can make space for me to survive in a fluorescent world where resurrection comes in the simple moments. I brought seven pairs of underwear into the underworld and somehow, fold by fold, found the determination to ascend.

DESPITE WHAT I SAY, I DON’T KNOW IF I’M WILLING

COLLEEN MORTON BUSCH

Your numbers oscillate,

says your sweater-vested hematologist,

trending up with the occasional dip.

Like during take-off when you feel the earth’s attempt

to wrest back what’s leaving before the plane levels

and you’re free

to move about the cabin, lucky and bored.

I don’t like this moment. I always think something’s wrong. I think,

I’m going to die now, for a trip to Michigan.

I watch the flight attendants’ faces, figuring

if something’s wrong I’ll see it there.

But then what?

Despite what I say, I don’t know if I’m willing

to assist others in an emergency.

The last time I took CPR was years ago and what

I remember best is the curious kiss of the dummy.

In a family of nurses, I’m the thin-skinned one,

slippery-kneed at the bright of blood.

Yet your blood is all around us,

measured in m-spikes, kappa/lambda light chains,

like some venous fraternity of the order myeloma,

a beautiful word, really,

a flock of snow geese

before they hit the engine inlet,

spray of white-winged shrapnel.

REFEEDING

CLARA COLLINS

Each night, a beige

turned the tube’s translucence

opaque—shoved through

the canal of his nose, sunk

into his stomach, it poured

for two seasons. Dregs remained

in daylight’a crust

where tape secured the stiff tail

to my brother’s cheek. I watched

his forced swelling,

the starchy liquid pumped

for his expansion,

his softer edges, a new silk

of thinned skin packing him

tight within. When my face pressed

into his chest, arms full

of his new flesh, he was like a stranger

to me, though, I made myself remember

how a year before, in summer, I watched him

jump out over water’riddled

with the shadow of protruding ribs,

the open blotch of his narrow mouth

hanging in air before he plunged

into the lake’s dark. Each time

slim ripples spread above,

encircling his sudden absence,

I believed that he was gone.

HARD

MILES METH

The day after my thirteenth birthday my best friend Noam and I waddled up the hill to the shower house at summer camp and saw Judah Newman walk past us wearing nothing. Unlike our Star Wars towels, which we clutched to our waists, Judah’s plain white towel dangled over his left shoulder, like how a mechanic would wear a rag. He was a CIT—counselor-in-training—sixteen years old, and he was tall, pale, and lean, fitting in with the birches around us. I had never seen a man naked before and I couldn’t help but stare at the layer of thick hair that covered his back, like brown moss, and flared down onto his buttocks.

A subtle but undeniable sensation at the base of my crotch, both pleasurable and uncomfortable—like having to pee—sent a flutter of panic through me.

I was afraid of a lot as a kid—of scaling the fifty-foot climbing wall that loomed over the soccer field, of the bats that chittered at night above our cabin, of girls and how to talk to them. But this was a new fear, not of something outside myself, but of betrayal by my own body.

Judah skipped past and called to a friend up ahead, “Shotgun the middle stall. Best water pressure in all of camp.”

Noam turned to me, stretched his green eyes playfully wide, and whispered, “Welcome to the big leagues.”

This was our first year in upper camp—teenagers finally—which meant we got to stay up late on Friday nights and use the water trampoline without a counselor supervising. It also meant that instead of showering in individual stalls in the cabins reserved for the youngest kids, we had to trudge up to the shower house.

Before I could respond to Noam, a fragment of mica, shimmering and sharp, kicked up from the dirt path and wedged itself in my sandal. I shimmied my foot out to dislodge the shard, losing my balance and nearly toppling forward before Noam put his hand on my shoulder and steadied me.

“Whoa, you good, Jordan?” he asked.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, scanning around, relieved to see no one else witnessed my stumble.

“Hey, I’m still the Obi-Wan to your Qui-Gon,” he said, and smiled a smile so full and honest it seemed to weigh down his face and make him look older than we were. “Don’t forget it.”

A feeling of gratitude welled up within me. Noam only started coming to camp last summer, but now he was my best friend. In the years prior, I’d sit crisscross in the grass with a deck of cards and play War against myself while the other boys played football. It changed everything to have him.

My unease began to melt away. “Do you think that there’s any chance Obi-Wan could’ve taken on Darth Maul alone?” I asked.

“Nah, I think he got lucky,” Noam said. “Without Qui-Gon, there’d be no chance.” We loved these hypotheticals—ways of extending the canon of a movie or a show, of bringing it new life which existed just between us.

At the top of the hill, a squat concrete building came into view. It was painted a glossy blue and surrounded by imposing oaks, like the pearl of an oyster in the woods. Laughter spilled from the doorless entrance. Echoing through the steam of hot showers, it sounded like the howls of wild animals, and the unease swept back into my stomach. It dawned on me that I’d have to get naked next to everyone else. I made a prayer. Please let my body cooperate.

As we stepped over the threshold into the shower house, I was met by a weighty smell—years of mildew mingling with the artificial vanilla and citrus of men’s soap. The shouts of two dozen boys blended with the roar of the showers, drowning out my galloping heartbeat. I stood frozen, forgetting to breathe. Everyone was naked.

There were curtains attached to wooden rods above the showers, but no one had drawn them. The display of your body was a given, a rite of passage to demonstrate your physical prowess. All around us, boys squeezed body wash in unnatural shades of green and blue from bright plastic bottles of Axe, Old Spice, and Irish Spring. Everyone was recently bar mitzvahed and had emerging musculature and armpit hair and deepening voices. Noam was no exception; he had grown since last summer and was now lanky, his movements awkward and floppy.

I was the shortest kid in the bunk and the edges of my body were still round and soft; I didn’t even have peach fuzz above my lip. As long as I could remember I had been self-conscious of my smallness, which trailed me like a crime I committed, just by being born. It presented itself everywhere: I was always the last kid picked for basketball. Girls towered over me, which made my romantic interests feel like a house cat wanting to mate with a tiger. And on Friday nights at camp, I was unable to see over the fray during the euphoric, spiritual mosh pits of Hebrew singing that took place after shabbat dinner.

Now, surrounded by the bodies of more developed boys, I was more dismayed by my own delicate frame than ever.

Noam gave me a little nod and then walked ahead, keeping his eyes to the floor. He picked a stall in the far corner, away from everyone else, and drew the stained, baby blue curtain, jiggling it with one hand to make sure it fully shielded his body from the view of other boys. Only then did he remove his towel, placing it to hang over the wooden barrier.

I felt a shock of shame on his behalf. Being nerdy was one thing. We were never going to escape that. But to cover up when everyone else was exposed? If I did the same, it would invite a question I couldn’t stand to answer: What did I have to hide? Instead, surprising myself with nonchalance, I imitated what the other boys did. With my heart tapping wildly, I dropped my towel from my waist and slipped into a stall—not next to anyone else, but not as far in the corner as Noam. I left the curtain open.

Thank God, the tickle from earlier, when Judah walked past, didn’t return. I exhaled and turned the faucet all the way hot.

Under the cover of the spray, I allowed myself to study the bodies of the oldest boys. They held court toward the back, showering together in a larger stall that had three shower heads, but no wooden barriers between them. Their arms were dimpled with muscle and the hair speckling their chests looked like cocoa powder dusted on a cake. Over the hiss of the showers, they argued about their basketball game earlier and litigated a list of the top five hottest girls in camp.

Judah stood in the middle of them all. Every time he threw his head back in laughter, he tossed his dirty blond hair from right to left. My eyes followed a single rivulet of water, from his bearded chin down and over his Adam’s apple, threading between his pectorals, through the belly button, and then, eventually, into a dark tangle of pubic hair.

He and the other boys’ penises swung gently, getting within a few inches of each other, but never touching. I was mesmerized by the casual intimacy. How was it possible, to be inches from another boy’s dripping body without fear of getting an erection? There was a sturdiness to them, a mystifying command they had over their bodies. Or perhaps it wasn’t a command, but a trust. I turned off the faucet, letting the last few drops drip onto my neck, then slide off my back and join the flow of the stream of water rushing down the drain.

That evening Noam and I sat on his bed, wearing headlamps and playing Pokémon in the dark. Across the cabin boys’ whispers mixed with the trill of crickets.

“I’ve been thinking for the radio show this summer we could do a roundtable discussion on The Lord of the Rings, page to screen,” Noam said. “Like, which book was best adapted to a movie. But maybe it’s too obvious, it’s the Two Towers?” One of the morning electives run by the counselors was to broadcast a live radio show on a local FM station. Last year, Noam and I had been the only campers who did it.

“I was thinking I might try stickball this summer,” I replied.

“What?” Noam said, his tone somewhere between teasing and

incredulous.

“Not all summer, just to try something different, for a week or two to start?”

“But you hate sports.”

“Well, maybe I haven’t given them a real shot.”

In that moment, the calm of the night was punctured by shrieks from the other side of the bunk. I craned my neck to see past Noam, where most of the other boys were gathering around, gesturing at something until their muffled laughs ripped into full blown, menacing delight.

“I’m going to investigate,” I said, trying to sound cool. Truthfully, I was scared of what I’d find. But I knew it would feel worse to not be included. Noam didn’t reply; he just turned away and pulled out a book. I slipped off the bed and tiptoed towards the commotion. What I saw stunned me.

Sam Horowitz and Eliot Fishman—popular boys, confident boys, both tall and strong for thirteen—had started a game of faux-kissing, pantomiming the motions of a passionate make-out session. They rolled around in a bed together, making exaggerated moaning and sucking noises, the only thing between reality and mockery being the thumbs each boy placed over his lips, while fanning the rest of his fingers outwards and laying them on the head of his partner. “Ooo la la!” someone shouted, which brought another eruption of laughter.

The sensual jousting only lasted a few seconds more before one of our counselors rushed over and plucked Eliot off Sam by the collar of his shirt.

“In your beds. Flashlights out. Now,” he said, trying to sound stern, but he couldn’t hide his amusement.

“Anything to report?” Noam asked as I climbed into the bunk above him.

“Nah,” I said.

But desire quivered within me. It buzzed in my stomach as I lay on my back, staring into the purple dark, unable to sleep. The desire was sexual, but something more. A desire to be self-assured, to charade like Sam and Eliot did without fear of play blurring to something which I feared could be sinister. A desire to be masculine in the way that seemed natural to other boys and unattainable to me. The more I grasped for it, the worse I felt.

The next day it rained, forcing us inside the cabin during the afternoon rest hour. Our counselors were at a staff meeting, so instead, we were supervised by CITs, including Judah. He wore a T-shirt with no text, just a black and white image of two women, sopping wet, under a shower or waterfall, kissing. On anyone else it would look try-hard. On Judah it was just right.

“So, you roll a twenty-sided die and add the result to the attack value on the starship’s card—Jordan, are you paying attention?” Noam asked. We were on his bed again. He was trying to teach me the rules to a roleplaying game.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. But I wasn’t. My ears were drawn to the center of the bunk, where Sam and Eliot were asking the CITs questions.

“Judah, what’s it like getting a handy?” Sam asked.

“Yo, chill,” Judah said, with a tone that begged for more questions.

“How do you stop yourself from, you know…finishing, too fast?”

Eliot asked.

“You guys are too young to be asking that shit,” Judah said. “That’s BS,” Eliot said.

“Watch it,” Judah replied, entertained.

“I mean, it’s all over the ceiling.” Sam pointed up toward the exposed wooden rafters, which were covered in decades of graffiti. Most of it was signatures in black Sharpie, signed and dated by campers ranging back to the ’60s, when camp first opened. But some of the writing was more elaborate, and where Sam’s finger pointed was a series of girls’ names. It was a list of everyone that Judah had hooked up with two summers ago, when he lived in this cabin.

“Look, the main thing about getting with girls is not to worry about it too much,” Judah said. “Let the ladies come to you.”

“Like this!” Eliot shouted and tackled Sam onto a mattress covered in Red Sox sheets: Aaron Steinberg’s bed. Aaron’s parents had brought him a supple, expensive bunk mattress pad. He wasn’t popular per se, but he was amenable to letting people lie on his mattress, which, the night before, had been deemed the “Steinberg Spa.” His passivity allowed him a proximity to coolness.

“Noam,” I whispered, “I’m gonna go check out what’s going on.”

“I haven’t even explained how armor works,” he replied with a small voice.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, thinking I meant it, and slipped away to join the rest of the boys. Underneath the drumbeat of rain on the tin roof, we made a semicircle around the black metal frame holding Sam and Eliot. Unlike our counselor last night who put a stop to it, the CITs egged it on, led by Judah, hooting and hollering with a drunken abandon.

I watched the scene, hearing my heart in my ears, feeling as if I was peeping in from a window. In the gray light dimmed by storm clouds, the boys twisted together, making it hard to distinguish body from body, limb from limb.

I tried to calm myself; my breath was careful, slow. I inched closer than I meant to when, suddenly, I felt two hands push me from behind, hard. I toppled forward into the bottom bunk and found myself pressed into Aaron Steinberg. Sam and Eliot had moved off, so it was just Aaron and I, tangled in a hapless heap. He wore pajama bottoms and a loose T-shirt, which hid the softness of his body, but I could feel his stomach pressing gently against mine. I had no older siblings, had never wrestled or rough-housed or done anything to be this close to another boy, to feel the rise and fall of his breath against me.

Judah cupped his hands over his mouth and cried out, “Yoooooo do it Jordan!!” I didn’t even realize he knew my name. The sound of it on his lips sent a flash of pride through me and gave me the courage to not scamper away.

Instead, I arranged myself onto my knees and peered down at Aaron, who lay on the bed with a faceless expression. Boredom doesn’t quite capture it; it instead was a face of openness, of receiving, of nothing.

Without thinking, like the moment before leaping into a frigid lake, I leaned forward and pressed into him. I brought my hands to my face and mimicked the fanned fingers I had seen the others do, leaning forward further, until I felt Aaron’s hands, but also his plush lips poking through his fingers, pressing onto my thumbs.

Something about the softness of the comforter, the way the top bunk hung low over us, the whooping and cheering melded into a nothingness. I was lost. Our heads danced and turned together, imitating a real, passionate kiss. I surprised myself by moaning, loudly, comedically, which brought a new chorus of cheers from everyone watching, a delight in my out of character boldness. The crowd that had gathered started to chant, “Kiss, kiss, kiss.”

I was in charge now. The room was mine. My emboldened hands sought out Aaron’s fleshy pectorals, outlined as small mounds emerging from his shirt. I sat up and groped for them, pressing them together firmly, like two pillows, forming a cleavage that the tips of my fingers fell between. My excitement emerged, the line between play and sincerity melding, transfiguring into my erection, which raised the thin fabric of my shorts eagerly. I froze, moving somewhere beyond panic. Stop, I told myself. Stop, stop. My erection seemed to only stretch further, as if straining to touch him.

Aaron’s eyes flashed with violence like a dry tree erupting in flames. He looked straight at me, his mouth started to move and for an awful moment I thought he might spit into mine. Instead, he leaned forward and with a thrilled hatred whispered—so quietly that only I could hear—“Fag.” It was the first time I had heard the word. But it needed no explanation. I knew it meant I was disgusting, no better than a dog humping a leg. I was a pervert.

Suddenly Aaron pushed away and slid out from under me, jumping out of the bunk, leaving me on the bed, curled forward. “This game is bullshit, it’s kinda gay,” Aaron said to the crowd as the chants began to peter out. “Who wants to switch to a push-up contest? First to fifty gets my chocolate milk tomorrow.”

Desperate to kill my hardness and unable to turn around, I thrust my hips into the bed and felt a sharp jolt of pain in my crotch. It worked. I felt a strange mix of relief and agony as my erection shriveled.

I was grateful when the attention shifted to arguments about whether close grip or wide grip was harder and who would judge if a full push-up was completed. I rolled off the bed, kept my eyes on the floor, and hobbled towards the bathroom, pain still radiating from below my stomach.

I sat in one of the stalls, in a rare moment of privacy, and tried to calm myself. No one else had heard Aaron’s whisper. Had they? As the door to the bathroom swung open another round of laughter exploded from the center of the bunk.

The next morning as Noam and I made our way to the mess hall, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find Judah, offering his hand to dap me up.

“Dude that was fucking hilarious yesterday. You were bold as hell.” I looked up at him, smiling and stunned. “Come to my table at breakfast and I’ll make sure you get Cocoa Puffs.” Usually, the CITs hoarded all the boxes of good cereal so the rest of us were stuck with Raisin Bran. When Judah walked ahead Noam raised his eyebrows at me.

“Mr. Cool!” he teased. I punched his arm.

Later that week during Friday night singing, Judah had the idea to stage dive into the thick crowd of sweaty bodies packed together. He motioned for me to come and stand on one of the tables, then picked me up and threw me into the sea of hands below. This was a case in which my small frame became an advantage. I got tossed in the air again and again, other kids taking glee in how easy it was to sling me skywards. In midair I made eye contact with Noam, who was bursting with delight for me. “It’s like you evolved into Charizard!” he shouted. “You can finally fly!”

But my joy curdled when I saw Aaron. He stood off to the side, arms crossed, his eyes razors. I was taking his place as next-in-line to the popular kids and he had the knowledge, the power to ruin me, if he so chose. I turned away, but felt his gaze lingering on my neck, as if it had nicked me.

We never played the kissing game again. It quickly became passé, replaced by push-up contests, then arm wrestling, then seeing who could tolerate the most punches to the gut. I managed to dance around actually participating, usually rooting for one of the other boys, sometimes hanging off to the side, playing Crazy Bones or cards with Noam.

Aaron began to make quiet demands of me. My weekly candy ration from the canteen became his, as did the money my parents gave me for our weekly day-trips off of the campgrounds.

On one of these day trips to York Beach, as Noam and I boarded the old yellow school bus together, Judah called to me from the back of the bus, “Aye, Jordan, we need one more for Hearts.” I felt Aaron’s penetrating eyes on my back. He was always watching me. Hovering within earshot.

“I get carsick so I gotta face forward. Aaron knows how to play though,” I said. Aaron bounded past me to join our CITs.

Noam and I slid into a seat covered in dirty green duct tape that patched holes in the vinyl.

“Glad you haven’t abandoned me for good,” he said, his voice high and thin, as if it was meant to be a joke. But I could tell it wasn’t.

“I can ask if you want to sit at Judah’s table,” I said.

Noam didn’t reply, just looked out the window as the bus began to roll out of camp. A thick silence descended between us.

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t want to sit with Judah. I mean, he’s fine. But that’s not me. That’s not us.”

“I know, it’s just—”

“Just what?” Noam cut me off. I had never seen him like this, his whole frame shaking, anger vibrating within him.

“I’m not sure if I’ll ever really get this chance again,” I said, hoping my desperation would appease him.

“To be cool?”

“I guess.”

“Look,” Noam said. “I don’t really know what cool is. I don’t think it’s something I’m ever gonna be.”

“Noam—”

“And I’m okay with that.” The bus engine roared, belching diesel fumes as we began to barrel down Route 40. “When I see you with them,” Noam pointed his thumb behind his head, towards the back of the bus. “I don’t even recognize you.”

My ears burned. Was it up to Noam to decide who was the real me? But what he said next made me feel ashamed for having felt angry at all. “I guess…I guess I just hope you don’t forget about having fun with me too.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

At the arcade on the beach boardwalk Noam and I played Pac-Man for two hours straight. On our last run of the day, we danced around in circles, hugging and yelping when we set a new high score on the machine, which spat tickets at us excitedly.

“What are you gonna get?” Noam asked.

“I think I might save up for next time we come,” I told him.

Aaron didn’t even need to ask. I slipped the tickets to him on my way to the bathroom. He patted me on the shoulder, smiled, and made a My lips are sealed gesture with his hand and mouth. During the handoff my eyes were on alert, searching for anyone watching us. No one saw.

A month later, it was another staff meeting, another rest hour with the CITs in charge. It rained again, pouring like it only did once or twice a summer, the water coming down in furious sheets, trapping us, restless, in the bunk.

I didn’t mind; it was humid and cozy in the cabin, the perfect time to practice for the end-of-summer talent show. For Chanukah that year Noam’s uncle had gifted him an instructional book on magic tricks. We practiced our sleight of hand on each other, cracking up at our failures as cards slipped between our knuckles and fluttered onto the floor.

The rest of the boys gathered around Jeremy Wilson’s bed. He had only just arrived at camp because he was on a trip to England with his club soccer team for the first few weeks of the summer. In an awful British accent, he regaled the crowd with stories of blood sausage (it really had blood in it) and watching grown men fight outside the stadium at a “football” game.

In that moment, goofing around with Noam under the hum of rain, I was content. Aaron still bugged me for favors now and then, but he had become less demanding over the last few weeks. His power over me had become fuzzy—the further we were from the memory, the less grip it seemed to have on either of us.

But still, a small, pulsating piece of me yearned to be with the rest of the boys surrounding Jeremy—not because I thought his stories were more entertaining than magic—but because I wondered whether, if I tried just a little harder, I might be able to learn how to be normal.

As we practiced sliding the queen of hearts into our shirt sleeves, Judah called out to us, “Jordan, Noam, over here,” waving us towards the center of the cabin. He meant well when he rounded us up, asked if any of us had a good get-to-know-you question to make sure if our new camper, Jeremy, had met everyone.

Aaron shouted, “Favorite sex position!” The words knocked me off balance. I felt sick.

We made a circle in the center of the cabin, Noam and I on opposite sides. I stood stiff, gripped with an animal alarm.

My thoughts felt jagged, sharp, together forming a hideous mosaic of anxiety. What should I say? Was this Aaron’s moment to expose me? Was I even gay? I didn’t fantasize about other boys. Maybe it would’ve been better if I was gay, if I could own it. I feared that even talking about sex would somehow disclose a perversion about me that I didn’t quite understand myself. All I knew was that my body could fail me at any moment, that I wasn’t fully in control, and this opened me to a new, profound possibility of humiliation.

“My name is Aaron and I like doggy,” Aaron said, his hands outstretched in front of him, grasping, thrusting, and then spanking an imaginary ass.

“Reverse cowgirl.”

“Pile-driving.”

“Throat-fucking.”

The positions went on, in a dizzying array of pornographic images, until it came to Noam.

He cleared his throat and hugged his long arms over his torso. A hush fell.

“Um, my favorite position is…,” he trailed off. Everyone leaned forward and had to strain to hear him finish. “The mission position?” he said quietly.

There was a calamitous silence. I watched Noam’s face, his nose twitching. He was searching for what he said that was wrong, off. He glanced at me, asking with his eyes if I could help him. But there was nothing I could do.

Then the snickers started. Soft at first, harmonizing with the bursts of wind outside the cabin, before swelling into laughter, quiet and cruel.

I couldn’t bring myself to look at Noam.

With a drawn out, sing-songy voice, Aaron repeated the phrase: “I like the mission position.”

Noam wilted; his face flushed. I saw Judah trying not to laugh, but when he made eyes with the other CITs it sputtered out of him. I stood frozen, horrified, until Aaron met my gaze and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, your turn, Fag.

If I could have, I would’ve run to Noam, put my arm around him, shielded him. I would have yelled at everyone “Shut the hell up!” and slammed my foot down so hard against the dark wood floor that it would rattle the metal bed frames and everyone would be frightened and feel it in their bones.

But I couldn’t. Didn’t.

Instead, I heard a laugh dribble out of me too. Not a big laugh—like the laugh only minutes ago when Noam and I messed up magic tricks and our bodies buckled, and we gasped for air as fat tears rolled down our cheeks. A polite laugh. A laugh so quiet that, at first, I thought he may not have heard it at all.

I have never forgotten the sound of Noam’s sneakers squeaking against the hardwood floor as he ran out of the bunk. I stood for a moment, my body stone, as the screen door clattered behind him. Aaron began to lead a chant: mission, mission, mission. Only a few boys picked it up. The hollowness in my stomach filled with the vibrations of their voices. I turned my back to the door and stepped in towards the crowd wearing a weak smile, wondering if this is what it meant to be normal.

BAJO LAS CAMPANAS

ELLA ORDONA

even though your creator says you are twinned

it’s love, it isn’t  your mother’s bared teeth

what passes for devotion in your father’s sloped shoulders.

this nest is your ancestor’s caroling heart,

a bloodletting - a nest of devastation:

love of country a chain - your great-grandmother’s famine

self-love - nothing is the dark matter

or maybe a belt buckle that holds your universe

made to ring together.

a call to prayer for your great-grandfather who stands

200,000 spirits behind your eternal mother

clanging, echoing pointing her at your

cells splitting into grandchildren -

eternal waves of thunder like a gun

THE TRAUMA BAY

RACHAEL TROTTER

The air is iron-rich like good potting soil

here, where the sun won’t ever reach, only

the exam light beam boring down

on the life raft of a gurney, the patient

barely afloat at its center. The trauma bay

now so loud and full, buzzing and fierce,

blue-gloved hands in constant motion,

orders thrown across the patient’s body:

give an amp of bicarb and push harder

and we need more gauze and does anyone

feel a pulse. But the defibrillator’s squeal

before a shock cuts through the noise. And no,

their bodies don’t leap from the bed

like they do in the movies but sometimes you’ll see

their fingers curl inward like they’re grasping

at something. This time, his hands, wide-knuckled

and broad like my father’s, splay open in mercy

Now, the raft is empty, now I keep my own hands

busy sweeping up broken ampule necks, gutted

plastic packages, what’s left of his Levi jeans,

knees worn, a ring of brass keys still hooked

to his belt loop, limp. I scrub the floor clean,

tuck the drawers tightly closed, line up my needles

and syringes, run water over the cracked steeples

of my fingers, wash up to my elbows—ready

WHEN YOU ASK ABOUT MY GRANDCHILDREN

ARLENE DEMARIS

I say the scar where my womb was cut

out is a dirt road through fire-marked forest.

I say imprints of fish have been found in shale in Wyoming

thousands of miles from the sea.

I say the human ovum is an infinite set

of nesting dolls telescoping.

I say when I clip my fingernails on the patio,

ants carry the crescent moons away.

I say my voice has become a violin with all the strings

missing,

every word true and silent as my grandchildren

playing in the next world.

WE LIE LATE IN YOUR BED, ONCE OUR BED.

SUE CHURCHILL

You rest your hand

anywhere on my body,

shoulder, breast,

ribs, thigh,

fingers neither

asking nor telling,

tracing surely

an invisible path

winding, worn,

the way sheep

will to shade.

We won’t be hurried,

wherever it is

we must go.

ECHO

JULIA MOTYKA

The first time I walked through the doors of the John B. Houston Memorial Funeral Home in Newark, New Jersey, Dad had been dead for twelve hours and I had only known he was gone for three. Intermittently, I found myself crying but unaware of when that had started or of any feeling attached to my tears. I kept trying to locate sadness—it had to be there—but all I could find was confusion.

It had been twenty-five years since Dad was first admitted to the hospital for AIDS-related illnesses; twenty-five years since I’d been told he only had days to live. He had been dying for so long—surviving for so long—that I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting him to walk through the funeral home doors any minute with a joke and sit down next to me, with his fingertips pressed together in studied contemplation of my predicament. I was waiting for him to tell me how to feel.

Emotionally, Dad had been my compass for as long as I could remember. Practically, I had been cleaning up his messes for years. And suicide is the ultimate mess.

So that morning, about ninety minutes after learning Dad had killed himself, I remained dry-eyed while my brother Toby and I called the few remaining members of the family. At the hospital, my hands were steady as I received the gold cross he’d worn to die in, sealed in a tiny baggie and marked with his name. With a polite smile, I got our parking validated. When the staff chaplain handed me and my brother a list of local funeral homes, we googled them and chose the one that had done the best on Yelp.

Walking into the funeral home that afternoon, disbelief still coursing through my body, I knew immediately that we had found the perfect place. The hundred-year-old house had been meticulously restored. The wood was polished, the windows new, the floors shiny. An early portrait of Obama greeted us in the entryway, sharing that promising smile from the beginning of his first term in office. Mr. Houston showed us into the receiving room with such tender formality that I knew that everything would be handled just right: There would be a grand reception for a grand and dramatic life.

“Yelp, for the win,” Toby said quietly as we sat down, across from Mr. Houston. I smiled. He was right. Yelp, for the win.

The questions that Mr. Houston began asking us were carefully curated to understand both our logistical needs and to learn some essentials about our father. His questions were simple enough, but when people say the word father, my father is never who they imagine. He was not pater familias at the head of the table, wrinkled face creased by smiles, bespectacled and white-haired. He did not die of cancer or old age in a beautiful home, surrounded by those he loved.

No, my father was my most fabulous gay best friend, leather clad and head shorn. A world-renowned voice teacher, he was the host of lavish brunches and salons in various New York City apartments, all with high ceilings, marble tables, and antique chairs. After living with AIDS-related and mental illness for more than a quarter century, though, he died alone—a year after secretly going off his medications, estranged from me and my brother—in a basement apartment overrun with mice.

I didn’t know how to respond to Mr. Houston’s straightforward questions. My breath caught, and I could feel Toby looking at me. We both knew I would do the talking because I’d always taken care of Dad. In my family, I always take care of everything. But now, facing the less practical needs of the moment, I suddenly felt the edge of the sadness I’d been looking for, a yawning chasm with Dad’s absence the river at its base. But Mr. Houston’s job was Dad’s death, not my grieving; he needed simple answers to his simple questions. With a deep breath, I exercised the muscle of control I knew so well and deftly moved my waiting grief aside. I pressed my fingertips together as Dad would have done and began sorting through possible answers, trying to imagine what he would want known and how he would have said it.

“How did he die?” Mr. Houston asked.

AIDS, suicide, or slow-growing hemorrhage. “A brain hemorrhage.”

“Was he a man of faith?”

Raised Polish Catholic, Pansexual Pagan, Queer Humanist. “Raised Catholic, but not practicing.”

“Do you want to schedule a viewing?

God no—he can’t be ‘viewed’ like some kind of MOMA exhibit; and I haven’t even seen him yet. I need to. “No, not a public one. But we would like to see him one more time before cremation.”

“We’ll figure something out.” Mr. Houston said. Then, with a nod and a smile, he moved us toward the door. It turned out Yelp had guided us to the funeral home of choice for the Black families of Newark. Dad’s gift from the beyond perhaps; he always said Black folks knew how to do death right. I never understood exactly what he meant by that, but he was always making grand pronouncements about right and wrong that we had to accept without question.

The second time I walked into the John B. Houston Memorial Funeral Home, three days later, I was there to say goodbye. I arrived early and waited a few minutes in my car under the shade of an old oak tree. The emotional confusion of my first visit had given way to chaos in my body. The grief from his loss mixed constantly with the rage I felt at how he had left us; at how I had been excluded from his departure. After so many years of managing his care, his death had been taken out of my control; after his passing, I had to control whatever small thing I could. I willfully stayed awake all night, retreading all the choices I’d made about our relationship, testing them for regrets and self-recriminations. I didn’t eat, mostly to feel the violence of my hunger but also because it was one of the few things I could control.

Over the next several days, Toby and I cleaned the small apartment where Dad had lived. His few clothes were threadbare, and what little else he owned was covered in mouse droppings and unsalvageable. On the third day, we hauled six large garbage bags to the curb, loaded two boxes of books into Toby’s trunk for donation, and packed small parcels of mementos for each of us to ferry home. Seventy-two years of life, bagged and boxed in three days.

That Friday morning at the funeral home, Mr. Houston’s associate—Denise—showed me into the vestibule, where I waited again under the hopeful gaze of young Obama. The year 2008 had been a hopeful time for us, too. I was in love with Scott, and Dad was in love with Kobi. They lived on Avenue A in the Village and we often had double dates. Dad even came to my South Bronx loft to trim the Christmas tree, where he gave me the cherub ornaments that still make me smile when I bring them out every December. When he’d call on the phone, he always had some new exciting idea to host a party or a salon where he would appear fabulously dressed with everything meticulously planned. Our conversations were joyful and conspiratorial: Ah! Darling. Good. You’re there.

That day in Newark, I arrived fabulous in my most colorful floor-length summer dress—my favorite flowing robes, he'd have called them—and wearing the gold chain with a small diamond at its center that he had given me the day I was born. I hadn’t brought clothes for him; he was to be cremated so what was the use. I hadn’t arranged for a funeral, or for flowers or a coffin. It was just me and Toby, no one else coming, so who would the flowers have been for? For a moment, I panicked at these failures and prepared myself to find him on a table covered only by a white sheet and inappropriately dressed for his most important final party. But when Mr. Houston walked me into the receiving room, there Dad was, regally shrouded and tucked in black velvet in a beautiful coffin surrounded by red roses.

I looked at Mr. Houston, who just smiled. “We have a service later on today, so we borrowed their flowers,” he said. “They’ll never know.” He touched me gently on the shoulder before leaving me to myself.

Denise set out two chairs; the rest stayed stacked along the wall. I stared at the two seats; the empty space that surrounded them felt enormous and the silence, loud. So many unopened chairs. So many of Dad’s friends were long dead from the virus or cast out of his life—casualties of his unmedicated mania. However they’d left us, there were too many ghosts. Denise settled herself in a chair adjacent to the casket, hands folded in her lap. A sacred witness. But I couldn’t tolerate a witness; I needed to be alone. I asked her to leave, and she did.

What does it mean to do death “right” when the dying was on purpose? And how do you honor a life you no longer knew, when the person you are grieving was lost to you long before they died?

I crossed the creaking floor and stood over his body. His eyes were sewn shut, the skin of his face slack and smooth. Small folds of wrinkles collected along the edge of each ear, where the extra skin from seventy-two years of daily living lay like a blanket folded at the foot of a bed. How much of a person is in the animation of the face? I stood staring, remembering him in motion. 1983: him in the doorway and just home from work, looking down at me with a smile filled with wonder and amusement. 1997: at the piano in the old studio down the block from Carnegie Hall, teaching me to sing Bach and Sondheim and Korngold. 2004: Café Reggio on MacDougal and giggling so hard that we nearly knocked the table over. 2011: dawn on Avenue A, cramming his possessions into my car to get him out before the landlord called the cops. 2018: midnight on 82nd Street, eyes downcast, fingertips pressed together in contemplation of an inevitable moment. I felt something break inside me while hearing him say he would be evicted (again), homeless (again), that he was in debt (again).

The momentum of the past was so strong, it seemed he almost breathed. But it was my eyes—so used to his everyday movements—that were playing tricks. For better and worse, they kept trying to turn his body back into him.

When Toby arrived, we settled into the two folding chairs that creaked from the movement of our breath. We listened to some music that we’d brought, none of it right but all we could come up with. Dad would have known what to listen to. Why had I never asked? I’d always wanted to seem knowledgeable in his eyes. Important. Now, so many things I hadn’t learned were lost. And for what? Toby put his head on my shoulder and we sat still and quiet in the creaky chairs.

After a while, I left Toby alone with him and retreated again to the vestibule to stare up at Obama, my witness and historical guide. By Obama’s second presidential term, Kobi had been deported, the relationship ended, and Dad evicted from his apartment on Avenue A for non-payment of rent. Scott and I were married—“An ordinary choice, Darling, for an extraordinary woman,” Dad had assessed. He moved to Newark, to a warehouse with artists, while Scott and I ended up on the Upper West Side, and were thinking about starting a family. No more phone calls. No more ornaments. No more fabulous outfits.

Toby and I traded places. I stood looking down at Dad’s face, feeling our shared history like a heartbeat. Things I'd learned from him were a pulse within me, his life now embedded in mine. And the things he'd never told me or taught me—they echoed off into silence. Everything became quiet, as though even the breeze bowed down, the trees out the window leaned in close, and the old house exhaled. For a moment, everything was suspended. I gazed at Dad’s stilled form, wrinkle-free and cased in velvet. This was his body. He was gone.

I inhaled and felt searing pain in my chest as I said goodbye to the father who was adored by little-girl me, the five-year-old racing up the stairs to be scooped into arms so strong with a “whoa baby,” and coffee in the breath of his surprised laughter. I said goodbye to my father, my first champion, who believed me capable of greatness—an extraordinary life—and told sixteen-year-old me that everything I dreamed for myself, I was special enough to possess.

Another breath, and this time there was relief so strong it almost buckled my knees. Goodbye to twenty-five years of care and keeping; to the endless parade of lovers and the suicide threats that came when his flings ended; to the parties and debts and the anxious days spent not knowing which version of him would be on the phone when he called; to the years spent wondering what the end of his life would be like, and whether I would ever be free of his exacting standards and scathing disappointment. There we were. Here we are. Here I am, alone.

“This is where I leave you,” I whispered. I exhaled and all those visions of myself who had loved and lost and worried seemed to settle down next to him. I hoped they could be peaceful at last, or maybe almost ready—finally—to let go.

How do you do death right when you realize that you are burying a part of yourself with the person who is gone? What does it mean if you find yourself wishing both of you good riddance? When I walked out of the room, I heard only the sound of my feet as they moved across the empty floor.

The third time I walked into the John B. Houston Memorial Funeral Home, I did not go all the way inside. In the two weeks since saying goodbye to my father’s body, the chaos I’d felt became a hollow-limbed numbness. Having cleaned out his small apartment and settled his debts, my normal routines had resumed, but my life in the face of his death felt impossible. I didn’t know who I was, now that I was no longer in constant consideration of his care, and in constant reaction to his magic and chaos. Even over the four years of our estrangement, he was never far from my mind. His needs were always the call, my life and choices the constant response. Without him next to me, there was too much space. I stood on the front porch feeling like an empty vessel in search of its liquid.

Denise, when she opened the door, gave me a big hug. “You’re here alone?” she asked.

I nodded. Toby was back at work and so was my husband Scott, and it hadn’t occurred to me to call anyone else. She gave me a look filled with care and a small smile that seemed to say, white folks do not know how to do death right. Or maybe she wondered why I was so determined to do it all on my own.

She patted my arm and said, “I’ll be right back.”

What does it mean to do death wrong? Is it to miss the moment or make it about the wrong things? To do it alone or with too many witnesses as though something was stolen? Death as criminal, grief as crime?

Joy in community, grief in isolation, Darling. Dad never said it in so many words, but that is what I was taught. When his father—my dziadzi—died in 2005, Dad didn’t go to the funeral. His Polish-Catholic family never accepted his partners or his “lifestyle.” A conversation with his older sister, my Aunt Elaine, began their decades of estrangement. “Where my lover is not welcome, I will never go.” Dad didn’t go to Dziadzi’s funeral, but I did—for the both of us, like so much else in my life. When I told him about the formalwear at mass and the many black cars making the trip to the cemetery, he was scathing in his commentary. “So much pomp, Darling, and no feeling.”

But later, sorting his few things after he died, I found letters from Aunt Elaine that he had saved and held dear. She was his big sister and love—like grief—is full of contradictions. I invited her to come view his body, but she never got the message. Or so she said.

When Denise returned with the ashes, they were boxed up tight and nestled in a shiny brown shopping bag. That was Dad, ever one to travel in style. I was surprised by the small size of the box inside it. Standing there—holding the bag filled with what was not him, or even his body anymore, but ash—there was nothing left to say. Nothing to do but leave and walk with my shiny bag of ashes back into the world of living where they would become part of the wind and water and earth. After this moment, people who had never met him would never know him. This bag was not heavy enough, the box too small to hold all the contradictions his life had held.

“He would be so proud of you,” Denise said to me.

Proud.

In recent years, what I’d felt from him during the few times we had spoken or seen each other was disappointment, not pride; a look on his face that suggested that maybe I wasn’t so extraordinary, after all. A quotidian life. A mother, a wife, a former actress. Never a star. None of his grand plans for me realized. What a shame, his face seemed to say. What a loss. Would he have felt proud of me in that moment, standing with his ashes alone in the summer heat, having given him a good death? Had I done it right?

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it, even though I wasn’t sure it was the truth.

When I got in the car, the sun shone through the leaves, making a dappled dance of light on the dashboard. I put the bag on the passenger seat and buckled it in. I put my hands on the steering wheel but I couldn’t start the car. I began to cry. I was just a collection of cells, not a body or a being, but also not ash. I was not gone. Anyone who meets me now, I thought, will only ever know the echo of the person Dad saw when he looked at me. No one saw me quite the way he did, although there were limits—so much of me he was unwilling or unable to consider. So much that I hid from him and so many possibilities I never allowed myself. Our distance and our intimacy each contained a desire to live up to something I couldn’t name, let alone reach. I missed him. And still, I was relieved that he was gone.

My breathing settled. I watched the sunlight shift its pattern across my hands on the steering wheel as the leaves rustled in a gentle breeze. Time gently inched forward, bringing my life without him along with it. I dried my eyes and, with sadness, let him fade a little. As I let go, I felt—just a little—the emerging possibility of my life without him, in the open space ahead.

ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY

DIANE K. MARTIN

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny was my father’s

rallying cry, his declaration of the theory

that developing organisms pass through

all stages of evolution, a concept as passé

as predicting personality by head bumps.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny! he’d say,

triumphant, meaning there was no feat

accomplished or contemplated, no deed

done on this earth that he hadn’t done

already and doubtless better—long before

I happened to be born. So when the car

I drove didn’t smashup, Dad applauded

evidence of his perspicacity for enlightening

me on the use of brake, turn signal, & mirrors.

But my near death from ectopic pregnancy

—unmarried woman that I was at 27—

was entirely mea culpa, a blunder wholly mine.

UNDERNEATH

H.E. FISHER

My father’s weekend chores: laundry, watching me—

below the house, our domain, in the climate

of concrete and gray stone. Washer, clotheslines,

a toy monkey on roller skates, and bins, racks,

cold storage where I unearthed two mahogany

donkey heads brought back from Cuba after the war,

a scar like a dry river bed from an ear glued back on,

another ear gone, stump necks: unable to stand;

neither bookend nor sculpture, lying cheek to shelf,

like a rebuke: not everything has a purpose.

My mother never visited the basement as if unattached

to our home, as if it didn’t exist in her household, the way,

later, my father dismissed my older brother’s hallucinations.

I never asked why she stayed out of the basement—

I knew: the basement was the underneath of my father,

where he stowed the blessing he believed his firstborn lost.

She argued—What if his illness was physical?

Years on, after both parents died, I took

the donkey heads, brought them home,

placed them on their sides cheek to shelf.

Not everything has a purpose you can name.

They were donkey heads and they’d been broken.

DAVANTI ALL’ALTARE DI SANTA LUCIA

COURTNEY CHATELLIER

I will die from this heat if my brothers do not come back to the garden soon. They have gone off somewhere on their own—as they so often do now—and left me tied to this spiny tree, in this Italian heat that is so different from the swamp heat at home.

It is our fiftieth day in Naples. In the beginning, I marveled at the passage of time. Like Mama, I considered us castaways, each dawn the herald of new and calamitous trials. Like her, I prayed for Papa to receive a telephone call from Washington, perhaps from the President himself, calling us back home. I thought often of the big wardrobe in my room, the hidden shelf at the back, where I keep my collections—four rough-edged arrowheads, a stack of velvet ring boxes, the pearl earring and the ruby one I found in Rock Creek Park—and, although it had been months since I’d placed them all in a line on the carpet, as soon as we arrived in Naples I wanted more than anything to touch them again. To know that they were real. Lately, though, I miss home less and less—no longer think of it, really, except as one thinks of places in storybooks.

The sun seems to touch me directly; I am impaled beneath it. My brothers’ voices, distant a moment ago, have vanished completely. There is only the roar of the cicadas, and the heat, and the chafe of my back against the tree. Closing my eyes, I try to summon the damp stillness of the church where, yesterday, our maid Lucia took me to see the Saint Lucy. Her namesake. After the brightness of the street I was half blind as she pulled me into the chapel, stumbling on the stone floor. “Guarda, Maria Caterina!” Lucia whispered, and I felt my neck flush. But then I saw that she was not looking at me, but rather gazing, rapt, at the painting. The Saint Lucy who holds her eyes out before her, two fleshy walnuts on a brass plate, smiling with her head bowed, looking very luminous and holy but also—I couldn’t help but think—crazy. A girl so beautiful, she gouged her eyes out and sent them to her suitor on a plate. Who on this earth would do such a thing? A saint, I suppose. And what did Lucia want me to see, when she stood with me before this image and told me the whole gruesome story as though it happened just last week?

I rub my wrists together to scratch a mosquito bite. A bead of sweat rolls from under my arm down the side of my ribs. If my brothers don’t return soon, the sun will reduce me to dust. Or else my soul will burst steaming from my earthly flesh: a miracle, like when Diocletian told his soldiers to take Saint Lucy to the casa di puttane, and she became so heavy that a thousand oxen couldn’t move her.

Since our arrival, Lucia has spoken to me incessantly, as if the faster the words crash over my head, the sooner I’ll learn Italian. In the beginning, Maria Caterina was the only phrase that surfaced from this churning stream. Maria Caterina, Maria Caterina, which no one else calls me—I’ve been Kitty for as long as I can remember. “Guarda, Maria Caterina,” Lucia commands me as I walk alongside her to the market, pointing to a woman with a white parakeet perched on her hat. And, “Ascoltare, Maria Caterina!” at a man’s voice spilling from a café: flying, oh oh oh, in the blue of your eyes, oh oh oh… I suppose she is trying to rouse me from the dream state I’ve inhabited for my twelve years on earth. My parents and older brothers have always been pleased with my habit of disappearing inside my own mind, though they affect a kind of dismay. Not Lucia. Since our arrival, she has treated it as a crisis. When she senses my attention drifting, she pinches the back of my dress and snaps the elastic band of my bra against my skin.

Already, I have come to love her. I love to watch her hang the laundry and press Papa’s shirts and rise on tiptoe to whisper in her husband Tomasso’s ear, as though each day of housework has furnished a new cache of secrets. Tomasso, who cooks and keeps the grounds and serves us dinner when Mama and Papa are home, is tall and dark like Clark Gable. Lothario, Mama calls him, wiggling her eyebrows to Papa when she thinks none of us are listening. Together, he and Lucia came with the house, a jewel box of marble floors and mirrored walls, chandeliers gleaming sharply overhead. “The House of the Embarrassed Politicos,” Mama calls it. Another American family lived here before us. Like Papa, the man “rubbed somebody the wrong way,” apparently. I suppose our exile, like theirs, will be only temporary. Yet it is hard to remember a time when Lucia and Tomasso were not threaded into all of our minds. Once, before dawn, soon after we arrived here, when I could only sleep in the afternoon and spent whole nights mooning around these strange polished rooms, I stopped in the kitchen doorway, frozen at the sight of Lucia’s white knees hugging Tomasso’s back. He was bending over her on the big table where earlier I’d watched him chop an onion. Her good eye met my gaze over his shoulder and for a moment, I was afraid for her. And then her mouth formed a gleaming sickle, and I fled as silently as I could, my cheeks burning less for what I saw than for my childish failure to recognize what had become, in an instant, unmistakable.

When I open my eyes again in the garden, a string of spit hangs from my mouth. The blue of the sky seems to scream until I remember: I’m in Italy, and the sound is only the cicadas, invisible in the trees, and beyond their endless roar is the sound of the sea.

It occurs to me that my brothers are not coming back. That they have truly forgotten me this time.

I rock side to side until the laundry cord loosens and I can slip my wrists free. I shake my hands until the blood comes back, tug the cord down from my waist to my ankles. The sun blinks dark and the ground pitches beneath me as I stagger across the garden, then make a run for the open door. Inside, I sink to my knees and crawl across the cold white tiles. Under a table I press my cheek to the floor and wait for the earth to stand still.

A high, bristling laugh cuts through the air. I open one eye. I am still under the table. Silhouetted against the garden’s hot glare, two shadows merge, split apart, merge again. One shadow has Papa’s voice but the words are unhinged, nonsense words: veeny, cobeady, soper…

I shiver. I should slip away, crawl into my bed.

Instead, I keep still.

The other shadow laughs again. My eyes adjust to the glare and Lucia’s sharp chin and snake-coil hair come into focus. The shadow with Papa’s voice puts his face to her neck. The sounds arrange themselves into meaning: Vieni con me di sopra… You and me, baby…

Hot acid bubbles in my throat. Scrabbling in my Mary Janes—the ones Lucia picked out for me, my feet having grown a size already since we arrived—I hit my head against the underside of the table. The world tilts. I reach the kitchen in time to retch into a metal pail where fruit flies drift around the papery scraps of onion skins.

When I lift my head, the house has gone silent again.

For two days, I lie in bed watching shadows pass over the walls. Lucia visits me: I wake to her pressing a washcloth to my forehead, scanning me with her eyes that travel on two separate paths, one of them always drifting up and away. In my delirium, I wonder if her eyes are sad: do they miss each other? I sleep, and on waking seem to receive, as a holy revelation, the wisdom that it’s better for her this way. That unlike Santa Lucia, her eyes are safe. No suitor will ever proclaim their beauty. She will never have to pop them out of her skull, to rescue him from temptation.

When the fever breaks, the image of Papa and Lucia embracing comes back to me. It fascinates me to no end.

Papa is tall but looks nothing like Clark Gable. What’s left of his hair is copper red. He has liver spots, eyebrows that grow in too many directions. For years I waited to look in the mirror and see Mama’s heart-shaped face, her fine golden hair. But as I so often do, I seem to have taken the wrong fork in the road, and each day I look more like Papa. He was lucky, I’ve heard my Aunt Charlotte say to my Aunt Tippie more than once, to have found Mama “second-hand.” What a lark, she murmurs, that Papa met her during such an uncertain time, saddled with two young boys, stunned by the loss of her first husband, her once dazzling prospects brought down to earth.

What could Papa possibly want with Lucia, when he has Mama? And, just as puzzling: what does Lucia want with him, when she has Tomasso?

The discovery of Papa and Lucia’s liaison is a bright porthole, beyond which lies the great ocean of everything that surpasses my understanding.

What if beauty doesn’t matter?

What if there’s something else that matters more?

I have time to ruminate on these things, now that I’m left more and more to my own devices. School has let out for the summer. My brothers discovered recently, and to their immense delight, that they are no longer little boys. And so basta, our little games of cowboys and Indians; now it’s Fellini, Ferrari, and Lucky Strike that enthrall them.

Ten days have passed since that first glimpse, and now that my eyes are open, I see Papa and Lucia’s secret everywhere. They can’t be in the same room without sending a flock of small disturbances aloft. Quick glances, lapses in conversation, Papa’s knuckles grazing her arm when he thinks no one is watching.

Mama, who has always worn an air of tragedy like a glittering crown, has taken up reading: for hours, she sinks into the pages of French novels, pressing them to her chest with a soft gasp when any of us comes too close. As though it is she who’s been caught in the midst of some disgusting act.

“Maria Caterina!”

I stop in the doorway. Lucia stares at me, swirls a cloth inside a pan.

On the other side of the kitchen, Tomasso hacks at a red slab, rabbit or boar. “Ciao, Kitty!” He waves jauntily with his bloodied knife hand.

“Ma dove sei andato?” Lucia asks.

I have taken to walking along the bay in the afternoons, testing how long I can disappear. Or else I go back to the church, and visit the Saint

Lucy. So far, only Lucia notices these absences. Now she says she looked for me, but that I drifted away: una piccola nuvola, here and then gone at the slightest breeze.

I smile and nod, thinking it is true, I am like a little cloud, drifty and mute. But then, a small unexpected door opens, and out tumble words: “Ma il vento mi ha riportato a casa.”

Lucia’s eyes widen. “Brava, Maria Caterina!” Cobwebs of doubt fall away from her face, her former conviction returns: I am not a lost cause, after all. “Brava. Devi parlare di più, continua così…”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Sì. Lo farò!” And then, like a piccola nuvola, I drift down the hall. But when it’s time to turn right, I go left.

I’ve never seen Lucia and Tomasso’s rooms before. What did I expect? Shades of red and pink, of course; a boudoir fit for Sophia Loren. The reality that greets me is monkish austerity: two long narrow beds, packaged neatly in white sheets. A crucifix watching from a blank white wall. A dark wooden wardrobe. A table with a bible, an almanac, a hairbrush.

Relief mingles with disappointment. Before I have decided what I am looking for—before I have decided that I am looking for anything at all—I see that perhaps there is nothing hidden here.

I open the wardrobe. Tomasso’s shirts, and a dark suit I’ve never seen him wear, and Lucia’s dresses: blue, gingham, red, green. I slide my hand down their pockets and when I touch the small dry packet, I know that this is what I have come for.

I stuff the folded papers in my bra, close the wardrobe, and run from the room.

After dinner Papa disappears to smoke a cigar. My brothers resume their game of chess. Mama gazes at the book in her lap, her face as still as a porcelain doll’s.

While a hush settles over my family, I am ablaze with excitement. Fortunately, no one sees: for once, my invisibility has a purpose to serve.

At last, we say goodnight. In my room I unfold the letters one by one. They are tissue thin and smell like laundry soap. I lay them out on my bed in a grid. Some contain a single word (tonight?). Others are filled edge to edge with Papa’s regimented handwriting, an odd mix of English and Italian. Some of it is sappy, the way he talks to Mama, exaggerating his Southern drawl, and some of it makes my stomach turn, and I have to flip the paper over and look away as a cold feeling comes over me. But then I go back and read these parts again and again. I sleep badly. Never have I been possessed of such power: to keep Lucia and Papa’s secret or to reveal it.

In the morning, I hide the letters in my Latin notebook, where at first I can feel their thrumming power even when I am far away, across the house. And yet it grows weaker each day, and I know that, if I do not make up my mind soon, it will wither to dust.

I can hardly stand to meet Tomasso’s eyes when he waves at me across the road and calls, “Hallo, Kitty!” But I still follow Lucia down the steep hill and into the city in the mornings. I study her more closely than ever. (For Mama, I tell myself: for Mama’s sake, I am keeping an eye on the enemy.)

“Fa’ attenzione, Maria Caterina!” Lucia calls over her shoulder, as I nearly step in the mound of donkey shit that escaped my notice while I was busy memorizing the precise mechanics of her gait, the way her skinny legs propel her plump torso.

“Che ti prende?” Lucia asks, frowning, and as the riddle unfurls in my head—what has me? what has caught me?—she turns forward again. I watch her curls quiver with disappointment. In her mind, I’ve regressed: the tentative Italian I had started to utter now catches in my throat. My English, too: words turn to wet paper on my tongue.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” Mama cried, faint worry lines marring her forehead, when I asked if I could sit on the bed while she got dressed last night. “I mean, more fun! A young lady…”

My heart sank. I came up with a grin that Mama and I could both pretend was real, but a fear spread through me. I thought of Papa’s letters to Lucia, pressed between my verb declension charts, and felt myself out at sea, unable to turn back, or move forward, waiting for the tides to choose my course for me. I went to my room and looked out the window, at the cypress trees as unmoving as a painting. As unmoving as this life, as our exile in Naples, as my life.

And then suddenly this stasis, the tableau of our life here, is upended: the Embarrassed Politicos are coming to dinner.

For Mama, our very lives hang in the balance.

Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Moran are the Americans who lived in this house before us. There was, Mama explains, a faux pas, a simple misunderstanding—“Truman couldn’t stand the SOB!” Papa corrects her, slamming his newspaper to the table—but now the Morans are back in Washington and very happy. Mama once played bridge with Mrs. Moran, and while she’s “not the brightest card in the deck,” Mrs. Moran may nevertheless possess a secret, the road that will lead us out of Italy, and so it is imperative that the evening be a success—no, a triumph.

“When are the morons coming?” my brothers keep asking, falling over each other laughing while Mama’s face turns to stone.

For days, Papa and Tomasso debate what wine to serve. “Not a chianti,” Papa’s voice booms from the dining room, “Dear God, not another chianti!”

When at last the evening arrives, Mama glitters in her silver evening gown. She’s been to the parrucchiera, to have her hair done like Marilyn Monroe. Even my brothers are awestruck at the sight of her.

Thanks to Lucia, I am wearing, for the first time, lipstick. I wait for Mama to notice—her approval is almost too much to wish for, I would settle for a rebuke—but her pale green eyes are far away, and even as she gasps at the sight of the Embarrassed Politicos, and takes Mrs. Moran’s hands and kisses her cheeks, I can see that a part of her is still, as ever, in a different, distant room.

Mr. Moran, soon to be Senator Moran, claps Papa on the shoulder, then bends to kiss Mama’s hand. “Hope you’re treating her well,” he says to Papa, “because if you don’t, I will.” The adults laugh. He shakes my brothers’ hands and then, turning so that Mama and Papa can’t see, opens his jacket and flashes a deck of cards. “I expect a run for my money at Canasta later on,” he says through the side of his mouth. My brothers go bug-eyed with delight.

Mama and Papa usher Mrs. Moran toward the sitting room. I hang back, wait to follow them quietly.

To my astonishment, I find that Mr. Moran has come to stand before me.

“Principessa,” he murmurs, and makes an extravagant bow. From a different pocket of his jacket he extracts a tiny, exquisite china doll. “You must forgive me,” he says, pressing it into my hand. “I recalled a little girl.”

He offers his arm. I bite my lips to keep from grinning. Behind us, as he escorts me down the hall, I feel my brothers’ envy like a warm breeze.

In the sitting room Tomasso brings a silver tray. Lemon soda, for me and my brothers. Martinis with olives, for Papa and Mr. and Mrs. Moran. More dry sherry for Mama. When it’s time for dinner we go into the red dining room, where the long table is laid out with plates and crystal I haven’t seen before. “Oh! I remember these darling tureens,” Mrs. Moran exclaims, tracing her fingertip over her place setting as though admiring a photograph of an old friend. She is seated next to me. She is younger than Mama, and very pretty. Her heavy necklace of blue stones matches her watery eyes, which she continually dabs with her napkin.

When Tomasso starts to pour wine into her glass, Mrs. Moran covers it with her pale hand. She waits a moment, until everyone is looking. “We’re expecting,” she says quietly.

Mama reaches across the table to clasp her hand. “Well, isn’t it wonderful!” She looks at Papa, who responds by making a dry sound in his throat and turning back to Mr. Moran.

“I suppose you and I are going to miss out on the fun,” Mrs. Moran says to me wistfully as Tomasso moves on to fill Mama’s glass. For the first time, my brothers’ and my places have been set with wine glasses.

“Too bad,” I say, and yet when Tomasso comes back around I look away and pretend not to notice as he fills my glass. I take a sip, and then another and another, until my back starts to melt into my hard wooden chair. When I venture to ask Mrs. Moran if she’s enjoying her time in Italy, she doesn’t ignore me or give a brusque, impatient answer, but with the smallest prompting on my part, responds instead in long anecdotes, one after another, and it dawns on me as though I’m remembering something I always knew: how simple it is, to make conversation. Across from us my brothers kick each other under the table, and I feel warm and full with my new knowledge, what it means to be grown up. I make sure that my glass is empty at the same time as Mama’s, and Tomasso fills it again, red wine this time that leaves my tongue puckered and dry. When Lucia comes out to clear our soup bowls, I excuse myself from the table, my legs loosening underneath me as I walk down the hall to the powder room.

In the mirror, my face is strange to me, my pink lipstick tinged with purple from the wine. And yet I can see clearly for the first time the way the cupid’s bow of my lip curves upward. The way my dark eyes kaleidoscope the light.

Perhaps I’ll turn out to be beautiful, after all.

When I come out, Mr. Moran is standing in the hallway. I gasp, and before I can say excuse me, spit catches in my throat and I start to cough. My eyes fill with water. Worst of all is the realization that he may have heard me urinate. I long to vanish, to disappear again into the silent child I was before this evening, but when I step to the side to get around him, my timing is bad; he has already moved to let me pass, we’re in lockstep. I put my hand on the wall so that I don’t stumble into him.

“The wine must have gone to your head,” he says.

I take a step back. He’s smiling, his mouth a wet shining wound. “Why don’t you step in here with me.” When he sets a hand on my shoulder, I can smell the coniglio all’Ischitana, Tomasso’s mother’s recipe, on his breath.

Even in the moment of knowing that this isn’t what he has in mind, I still imagine that perhaps what he wants is for me to go back into the powder room to splash some water on my face. That perhaps he’s worried about me and wants to help. At the same time, a cold wind passes through me, and I know that I’m doing something wrong and disgusting by not extracting myself immediately from this spot, this situation in which I find myself. And yet when I try, the floor seems to buckle. In the instant it takes Mr. Moran’s hands to travel across the front of my dress and pull me towards him, I find that I can no longer move, and although I remember what Saint Lucy told Diocletian—the body cannot be defiled if the mind does not consent—I know now, decisively, that I am not a strong or even a good person.

He steers us over the threshold into the powder room. It’s no good, I think. The room is too small. The room is too small, we can hardly squeeze inside. He will have to change his mind. When he turns to shut the door, I reel around to grasp the edges of the porcelain sink, something hot and acrid pushing at my throat.

Behind me I hear a thump like meat thrown on a counter. In the mirror above the sink, I see a flash of movement. I turn and for an instant Mr. Moran appears, miraculously, to have vanished, replaced by Lucia. I look down and see Mr. Moran there on the floor, on all fours, half in and half out of the powder room, making a sound like trying to stoke sparks with his breath.

Lucia steps around him, grabs my arm, and marches with me to the end of the hall and into the pantry.

She takes me by the shoulders and gazes into my face with her good eye. “Sei brava, Maria Caterina. Non aver paura.”

My whole body trembles, a plucked string. Lucia wraps her arms around me, and I am no longer afraid. She smooths my hair and tells me to go through the front door, around to the terrace, and back to my seat at the table.

I follow Lucia’s instructions and take my seat again next to Mrs. Moran as if nothing happened. Only the trembling continues: I take a sip of water and explode in sputtering coughs, my nose and eyes streaming. My brothers look at me like something stuck to the bottom of their shoes. At last, Mama speaks to me—“Kitty, you’ve hardly touched your food”—and my fork clatters onto my plate.

When Mr. Moran takes his seat a few minutes later, he is very pale. “Dear…?” Mrs. Moran says, and he lifts a hand, waving her concern away.

Then Lucia appears and sets a glass of water with Alka-Seltzer beside him. “Prene questo, signore,” she says, shaking her head, clucking over his great sensitivity.

The next morning I take the letters Papa wrote to Lucia with me on my walk. I tear them into small pieces and sprinkle them over the surf.

Over breakfast, some days later, Mama looks at me. Her fingertips perch like little birds on the sides of her teacup.

I set my napkin down.

She clears her throat. “Papa received a telegram last night…” A smile blooms across her face as she tells me it’s all settled. He has a new job with the State Department. We will be home in time for me to start the year at Holton Arms. The boys will go back to Landon. We leave in two weeks.

It seems the Morans have been very helpful.

She takes a sip of tea. “Well, isn’t it wonderful?”

For a moment I can see it so clearly: While Tomasso brings our suitcases across the lawn and into the car, I’ll slip away, down the big staircase that leads to the bay. I’ll walk for hours along the sea. By the light of the moon, I’ll return to the house, where my bed will be waiting for me. Lucia and Tomasso, who will have moved into Mama and Papa’s room, will be asleep down the hall. In the morning they will smile, pleased yet unsurprised to see me. My family will be halfway across the Atlantic before Papa turns to Mama, puzzled, and says: Have you seen Kitty?

Now I lean forward to kiss Mama’s cheek. “Yes,” I tell her. “I can’t wait.”

WING CLIPPING

MUN HEOL CHO

You pinion me down and I do not say a word. No,

I do not cry or shout. I am perfectly docile

in this room. Blinding fluorescent light,

stock image flower in its cheap frame,

discarded syringe on linoleum. Inanimate

and blank, I open my whole self to cruelty.

You remove your white coat first;

you do not want to dirty it.

Only then do you begin to dismantle

everything about me that would allow

flight from your grasp. Your frustration

trapping me with you in this box, caged,

you deny me what you have never had.

You who sit alone. You who are avoided,

who are only feared and never loved.

Amputated, blood feathers, I refuse to flinch.

What could you offer that would be worth

even a single tear of mine, your prized fledgling?

EXPOSURE

EDYTTA WOJNAR

I don’t remember the cause of my abdominal pain

the test’s results or doctor’s opinion

yet every time I have to lie on an x-ray table

I recall my freshman year being asked

to remove all clothing except my underwear

lie on my back on a starched white sheet

hold completely still while

the machine guided by a technician’s hand

focuses on my concave stomach & as instructed

I hold my breath while his fingers

like invisible beams slip beneath my panties

parting my thighs

his penetrating eyes lock with mine before he slides

behind a glass fence.

ELEGY AS PRE-MED CURRICULUM

RICK PONGRATZ

for Don

When you had four T-cells we gave them names,

but most importantly,

we tried to give them friends.

The new friends were fickle, of course,

unlocking the door to anyone

if the key was even close.

The viral nature of the unwanted guests,

impossible to control,

they tore down your cell walls

and spilled into the neighborhood of your body,

like uninvited drunks at a party who,

trash the house,

stumble outside,

and move on to the next.

I still see the fire of you, first to get every joke,

laughing louder and longer than the rest.

I see you exploding out of your flip flops,

beating Madonna to the chorus,

except at karaoke

where your timing was impeccable.

I see you smoldering in jeans and a striped polo,

at the family reunion,

reaching out to me,

hoping to find one family member to confide in.

I see you waiting, in the future lives,

of all the students in this lecture hall.

Smart as hell and cocksure —

they’ve memorized the receptors, meds, and charts.

I wonder if I can get them to see you.

See your eyes instead of a failing immune system.

See your smile instead of CD4 and viral load stats.

I try to make them see what a death looks like

when a family and a religion

embrace shame over son

to the point that the spark is snuffed out before the life.

I try to unlock them,

open them up

and place you inside

to be the firekeeper

for every patient they ever have.

I see these students,

their self-conscious, perfectionist facades slipping,

as they realize they love you as I do.

RURAL WAYS

NINA GABY

In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another;

loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.

- Willa Cather

It has been said that Jessie buried the dead horses up the hill in the paddock. For years, the ground next to the barn would spit up big horse teeth. Jessie and her partner, Miss Butters, owned the property long before we did, since about 1932, running it for years as a young ladies’ equestrian school and a resort across from a famous floating bridge in a tiny village in central Vermont. The paddock became an event area over the years, a level space halfway up the big hill, just below the leach fields. Weddings and concerts and graduations would take place under tents lugged up the hill behind tractors and set up by local guys who needed extra cash to augment the always-plummeting dairy prices. Now it’s just where the dog likes to suss out the groundhog dens and the deer scat, and where the native wildflowers try to claim space from the invasives.

If you climb up there just before the summer vegetation takes over, you will find a flat granite rectangle—an intentionally placed yet blank marker. I meant to ask Jessie’s great-grandniece— who’s lived in the old one-room schoolhouse across the dirt road since the school relocated south to the Ridge—if there was a favorite who may have won that spot. But I guess what I really wanted to know was: Who shot the horses? In my mind, Jessie could do anything, even that. But the great-grandniece died while I procrastinated. Which is how it seems to go these days.

If you keep going east on the trail up the rise just off the paddock, you will come upon a one-room cabin that Jessie built in the 1940s and ’50s. That parcel of land, which had been in our original 2001 purchase agreement, was—unbeknownst to us—quietly transferred to our neighbors, Norm and Esther, after some sleight of hand typical in these parts.

Norm died and Esther was eventually moved to a nursing home, and the cabin remained open and untouched until it became their youngest son Michael’s, when he returned sometime in the late aughts. He fixed it up cozy, installed windows and a lock on the door. If you hoisted yourself up on the foundation, you could see in and find a kerosene lantern, a bed, and a table covered with a floral cloth. Towels folded on a stand, linens likely last washed and ironed by Esther years before. The neatly folded towels, the floral tablecloth—these were quite in contrast with the Michael we knew. I’d never spoken directly to him, even when he was with his older brother Leonard, who would stop by for a check after collecting the trash every week. Some five years later, our lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter because the brothers had been using our property as a shortcut. The day Michael received the letter—by this time Leonard died as well—he called to say he wanted to come over, that he would be wearing a dark hat and had a gun. Everyone in this town has guns. I just didn’t expect it to be a machine gun, slung across his chest under a black leather coat. I lied to myself that I didn’t feel threatened, although when I told my husband about it later, he was horrified that I let Michael in. “He just wanted to talk about getting to the cabin,” I said, “so I blamed it on the lawyer. I told him that the lawyer said it would be okay, as long as he asked before crossing our property.” Michael left that day satisfied, though always angry about something, it seemed, and I didn’t see him again for a good long while.

It wasn’t planned that my husband would drive Michael the hour up to the airport in Burlington on a bitter October day another five years later—we’d had little to do with Michael since that cease-and-desist—but an early blizzard was coming in and Michael, half blind now from brain cancer, couldn’t make the trip to pick up his son who was flying north to drive him back south so he wouldn’t die alone in his parents’ old falling-down house with two aging cantankerous cats that he didn’t know what to do with.

In the car, Michael talked to my husband about the cabin. I imagine him as a child, wandering up to it, a place designated in the village mythology as a place only for those in Jessie’s riding circle, Miss Butters serving tea and treats after a day on the trails. Michael also spoke of his role in the family, the child chosen to do the killing. “Don’t know why these cats have me so turned around. Once I had to kill fourteen horses, all sick.” He called himself the executioner. It was more talking than we had ever seen Michael do. Maybe it was the cancer eating his brain, turning down the filters. Maybe it was the last time anyone would ever hear these stories. Maybe it was the only time.

Driving through the village the day before the blizzard, I saw Michael stacking wood. Normally, I drove on by because of that machine gun he carried about and the side-eye he’d give me as he’d toke on a blunt and not say anything.

But that day I stopped and turned my car around. Who knows why we suddenly change our ways, stop a car on a cold October day to talk to a neighbor we barely ever knew? But I do stop, and I notice that he’s moving wood from one pile to another, lining up the split logs in neat rows. With each set he adjusts his gloves, which now seem too big for his hands. At first, he just keeps on stacking, and then finally turns.

“My son’s flying up tomorrow,” he tells me, sunglasses obscuring his blown right iris. I know he has brain cancer and I know he sits alone in his falling-down house, and I have carried shame that I have known that but have not known how to help because I am afraid of the gun, afraid of the cancer, afraid of the falling-down house.

“I’m going down south to die.” He’s an old-time Vermonter, and he says that straight up. “Leaving Sunday. Trying to fix out this woodpile before I go.” He usually doesn’t acknowledge me, but I’ve inserted myself between the wood and the car that I’ve left running, nose towards the road, poised for flight. A pickup swerves to get around and the driver yells at us. Michael removes his sunglasses and narrows his good eye at the truck. His arms drop heavy to his side. “Lot changing around here.” He’s leaving the falling-down house and the cabin to his son, says he hopes he will come up and do something with it all.

“I’m sorry,” I say as I search for excuses. “We really didn’t know what was going on.” I am lying. Part of me wishes I’d just driven on home and I’d be back stoking my own fire and stirring my soup instead of shivering with a dying man with a blown iris who, for some reason of pride, does not want to leave behind a messy woodpile. “Is there anything we can do?” I think about my own woodpile, spilling across the driveway.

He tells me things are pretty well set. Just didn’t know what to do about the cats. He tells me he’s going to have to shoot them before he leaves to go south with his son on Sunday to die. Says this straight up. Another truck swerves around my car and I move closer to Michael and pause. “Do you want to shoot them?” I ask. They are his to shoot, after all. And I think of Jessie and this place and how different it is from anything I have ever known. I ask if he would like me to see if there’s anything else to be done.

He says they are good hunters, outside most of the day but always come in at night. I can’t have good hunters in and out of my house, I think, my old phobia of rodents having resurfaced since finding a pile of tiny dead baby mice in the woods next to the cabin. Especially that. I don’t mention taking the cats as an option, but my brain is scrambling. Could we put a heater in our barn? Could I learn to live with cats that bring in their proud fresh kill? “I wish we could take them,” I say instead. He nods.

I say, “Let me call the Humane Society before they close. Is that okay?” He nods again and we exchange cell phone numbers, and I don’t start sobbing until I get in my own driveway. The Humane Society listens to the story. They say they’ll call back; I don’t expect them to, but they do. I call my husband, who says of course he’d drive Michael to the airport.

I get the carriers out of our barn and drive them back down to Michael’s. He invites me in through a long, dark passage along the woodshed, through the barn and what was once a mudroom. I brought a pen and paper from home to document permission that he gives the cats over. In a fancy, shaky hand he does this, adds a flourish here and there and a few facts about the cats. “Age nine-ish”… “Healthy!”… “Tinker, friendly”

“Tiger, shy”… He adds, “If an old lady needs a comfort cat, Tinker’s the one,” and I have a hint of what these cats have meant to him over these past few months since his mother was taken away from the cold little house with her double pneumonia and his older brother, the nice one, died. He says he didn’t want to have to crack their skulls with a bullet and thanks me for getting involved. I tell him my husband will drive him to pick up his son, and he takes off his sunglasses, wipes his eyes with the back of his too big glove.

We are in the old kitchen. Curls of once-lovely wallpaper hang on the walls; scattered patterns of linoleum collage the floor. A broken hand-painted chandelier hangs just beyond the kitchen in a parlor, dark now because the electricity has been turned off. There are three stoves in this kitchen, measuring centuries. A twin bed has been placed by one of the stoves, neatly made up.

I figure this house was built around the same time as ours, late 1790s, when the village was a thriving center of commerce: a blacksmith, an engraver’s shop, a photographer, an ice-house, a pitchfork factory, all powered by a spillway off the lake across from our property. Our barn, once the equestrian center of town, needs a new roof and hasn’t seen a horse since 1963.

From atop one of the cold stoves, Michael picks up a book with a stained cover made from yellow construction paper that says “White House Cookbook” in fancy script. He’s proud of the yellow construction paper cover he has made for it, you can tell by the way his stiff, calloused fingers caress the folds one last time before he hands it to me, telling me he can only think of a couple people who’d like this. “Was it your mother’s?” I ask, thinking she must be one hundred by now. But no, it was her mother’s. I open it, and he tells me it’s really about more than cooking. It’s about how to dress your meat after hunting. How to cut it up and store it in your small icebox. I don’t have the heart to tell him I’m pretty much a vegetarian and have never touched a gun in my life. I don’t yet know that killing has been his family role since he was a child. I hold the heavy book close and thank him.

Tinker comes out and rubs and purrs, and again I wish I could keep him. Tiger is nowhere to be found. I remind Michael of the plan, tell him I will be back just before noon the next day, Saturday, because the Humane Society needs to process the cats before they close until Tuesday.

I’m thinking I could hug him, so I do, and his small body stiffens. I realize even with the machine gun strapped over his long black leather coat, I have always wanted to hug him and hold on to what he represented. In our village of transplanted professionals and wealth, this neighbor, his brother, his mother, and his stepfather were some of the last of the authentic rural breed. The rest of us nurse our moods and leave our mistakes for the raccoons and the banks to clean up.

As I drive back to the village the next day, through the sleet that has already begun to fall, I suck on some calming lozenges. Michael calls, says the cats are caught and in the carriers, and to please forgive him, but he can’t wait outside and listen to them cry anymore. I pull in just in time to see Tinker make his way out of his carrier and run out of sight. I put Tiger’s carrier in the back seat. I call Michael, whose cell barely works in the house and who can’t hear me knocking, and he finally comes out. He is having trouble speaking. I eye the storm and tell him I’ll take Tiger the twenty miles north. I smile and tell him then I’ll come back for Tinker. It will all work out.

Driving is dangerous going north; I stay in second gear. Cars are off the road. My husband makes it to Michael’s and they set out for the airport. Tinker is found, my husband tells me, and securely tied into the carrier, waiting for me in the woodshed.

I hand Tiger over to the Humane Society worker and she reviews the note from my neighbor. She comes back out with the carrier and kindly tells me Tiger went calmly into the cat room. She thinks he is very handsome. I tell her I hope to be back with his Houdini counterpart before closing, but the driving is terrible. “It’ll all work out,” she tells me.

I pass more cars off the road; I chew on more lozenges, trying to focus. The slushy road swims. I have to get back to the woodshed. I can’t just fall apart. I open the door and Tinker is sitting on a chopping block, out of the carrier, purring. He lets me pick him up and stuff him in the car. He fights but doesn’t claw me. I think about how my neighbor described him. I’m certainly an old lady who could use some comfort, but I don’t let that distract me. I have precious cargo. I have to take care of these cats, and by extension, their owner, who is dying from brain cancer.

The kind worker takes the carrier again. In a few minutes she’s back out. “He’s very handsome, too,” she tells me. “You did the right thing, bringing him to us. The alternative … well.”

“I wish I could take them.”

“They’re fine. They found each other in the cat room and they are curled up together.”

I think she’s lying, but I call my husband on his cell to tell him to let Michael know that the cats are cuddling and warm. “You’re on speakerphone,” he says, and later tells me Michael cried.

Months pass and the snow has blown on and off the neatly stacked woodpile. The house is dark, and by spring it will be filled with raccoons that cross the dirt road from the abandoned house on the other side. I meant to call Michael on Christmas. I still haven’t called the Humane Society to find out where the cats ended up. I do what I can and write a donation in honor of Tinker and Tiger.

It’s summer again, the vegetation just starting to cover the graves of the horses. The dog bounces about the groundhog dens. Two fox kits are seen cavorting above the weeds, and when their mother is found dead next to the trail beside the paddock, my husband quietly buries her.

BLUE NOTES

JUDITH FOX

At dusk, after rain scrubs the air

of pollen and smog, I see Prussian blue sky

settle over the Hollywood Hills.

I look for blues to befriend,

to claw from river beds.

From these veins of colored clay,

I’ll make blue pigments, paint

cobalt songs you loved to sing, to swing to,

powder-blue cotton shirts

you pressed and wore to work,

periwinkle jacaranda flowers that complicated

our street, clung to the soles of your shoes.

If I dig deep enough—collect and sort,

wash and sieve—I’ll find

the blue

to match the ink on the notes you wrote,

then seeded throughout our home

for me to find after you died.

EXTENDED STAY

PATTI NOMMENSEN

Your hairless head, round and smooth fits snug

as a ball joint in the socket of the pillow;

the rest of you hangs like a sock from a nail.

The air in the room and the fluid from your lungs

are engaged in contrapuntal combat; you surrender

to suction: a barbarism of basins, pumps, tubes and gloves.

I thought I would be better than this,

but the gurgling makes me gag.

If left alone, you would drown.

Plastic clips quicken and quiet the drips that maintain

the monitor’s digital dirge which confirms

you are not sprung for this fight.

I try to rub life into your fireless thigh,

squeeze a grip from a hand that goes limp in mine,

hoping you will forgive me my part in lengthening the wait.

I am schooled in the mechanics of disposable diapers,

having had three children of my own, and I will pretend for you that

it means nothing, father, to change yours.

CAUGHT IT EARLY

SCOTT DICKISON

I imagine them sitting

in my father’s Nissan

at the oncology office

as they laid across

their laps the mess

of papers with scatter

plots shadow boxes and

marginalia written like loose

cells about the lymphatic

system trying to make

sense of this new language

 scholars hovering over

some Ugaritic text when

four words emerged

familiar and precise

five-year survival rate

and they knew that they

that we had not

BACK TO BUBBA’S BRINY LOUNGE

NATALIE HANAGAN

Before I saw my twin brother cry for the first time, crumpled drunk against his hand-me-down couch, I pulled him off some poor girl in Bubba’s Briny Lounge and took a ring-studded smack to the back of my skull. Travis had been trying to chat her up for the last hour or so while she ignored his slurred ramblings about his work on a commercial fishing boat off the coast of Cape Cod. If you asked him, he’d tell you he hated that job. And yet it was all he ever talked about, especially when it came to picking up women. Trying to pick up women, I should say.

The girl was pretty. Beautiful, even. No stranger to being bothered by drunk dudes in pubs, I’d assumed. It wasn’t until Travis’s hand found its way to the small of her back and he leaned in toward her neck that she and her friends turned on him, jewelry clattering and creep and dickheads flying. The steady buzz of chatter in the bar died down as every patron within earshot tuned in. All I could do was spew stale apologies to them, the bouncer, and the people I shoved past as I dragged Travis toward the door.

Thing is, this was our first night out in quite some time, and it was meant to be a celebratory affair. One week before, I had filled him in on my new life over dinner: the cushy management position at a local chain of car dealerships, the gorgeous downtown apartment, the new girlfriend with a wealthy family. And since it had been a year since we’d spent proper time with one another, I was startled when he clapped me on the back and hollered something about going out and getting shitfaced like the good old days.

“I don’t know,” I’d told him, picking at my food. “That kind of shit’s not good for me these days.”

Travis gave me a shove that caused my bad shoulder to flare in pain. I remembered how much stronger he was than me. We’d never looked much like twins. I was lanky and had significant height on him, while he was broad and bulky, built like an ox.

“Lighten up, man,” he said. “They didn’t zap all the fun outta ’ya, did they?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on. Just give me one night to have some fun with my brother again. I miss doing that shit with you. I miss you.”

With this, his tone softened considerably, something I still wasn’t used to hearing. Travis had this infuriating ability to make you feel guilty even when you knew you shouldn’t.

“Fine,” I sighed, massaging my shoulder. “But I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

“Easy. Then don’t start any trouble.”

“I’m talking about you, asshole. Don’t go getting into anything crazy. I want this to be relaxing.”

“I’m not gonna do anything, Matthew. I swear. This is about you, not me.”

I gave in, partially because I felt bad for him, but mostly because I really did miss drinking with the guy. Over a decade ago, when we’d finally made it out of the house and into a college dorm, drinking was practically all we did. We picked up odd shifts at gas stations and pooled our money on liquor and happy hour at Bubba’s, back when they didn’t card and fully embraced the nightly crowds of baby-faced college kids. It was terrible, the number of nights we had spent carrying each other up the stairs, painting the sidewalks with puke and crumpled cans. And every morning I’d wake up feeling like shit and tell myself I was done, but then I’d just go back out and do it again the very next night.

I wouldn’t say I had a drinking problem. Sure, my consumption was far from healthy, but it wasn’t the alcohol I was addicted to. Drinking was a means to an end, just another way to hurt myself without feeling any pain. But Travis needed to drink like he needed air. He needed it more than he needed to stay in school, more than he needed to pay his bills on time. More than he needed love. I never brought it up to him, though; I had no right to interfere with another man’s self-destruction. We were always more alike than I recognized, me and him. Frankly, it scared the hell out of me. My life had felt defective without him.

By the time I dragged Travis out to the salted sidewalk in front of Bubba’s, I was pissed. I drove a fist into his shoulder hard enough to bruise. “What the fuck was that all about?”

“M’sorry,” Travis slurred, “didn’t mean to.”

“You promised me you wouldn’t cause any trouble! God, you’re such a dick.”

“I didn’t mean to, Matty.” He looked at me like a kicked puppy, eyes glassy and half-open. He had a cut on his temple from where one of the girl’s rings caught him just right, leaking a feeble stream of blood into a strawberry blond sideburn.

I wiped at the blood with my sleeve. My shoulder ached. “I shouldn’t have trusted you to begin with.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head against my wrist. “Prob’ly not.”

“Guess that’s on me. Come on, dude, you’re a mess. Let’s get you home before those girls come out and cut you up worse.”

I put a hand on his back and began to guide his stumble back in the direction of his apartment. After our mother died during our junior year of college and Travis dropped out of school, he’d moved into this run-down place near campus and just down the road from Bubba’s. And now, at thirty-two, he was still in that building. It was a dump, but it was cheap, and for reasons I never understood, the landlord took a liking to him.

“I’m not an asshole,” Travis mumbled as we approached his street.

“Just keep walking.”

My own buzz began to fade in my brother’s bathroom as I cleaned his face with the industrial-sized bottle of isopropyl he kept beneath the sink. He used that stuff for everything—wound care, household cleaning, dishwashing. I once watched him use it to douse and incinerate a fistful of blood-swollen ticks he’d picked off a stray dog that used to hang around his building. The smell was like nothing else. I remember feeling strange watching the way he stroked the dog’s muzzle tenderly as he plucked the ticks out of its flesh, like I was intruding on something private. As a child, he’d thrown so many rocks at our neighbor’s cats that it was startling to see him treat an animal gently. He got drunker than usual the night he found that dog dead behind the building’s dumpster.

Wiping the blood from Travis’s temple, I realized to my chagrin that I missed this, missed us taking care of each other. We never knew our father, and growing up, our mother spent more time with six-packs of Sam Adams and strange men than with us. So for a long time, it was just me and him: When he got his nose broken by a bigger kid in school, I was there to clean up the blood, and when I became delirious with fever every other flu season, he was there to change the cool washcloth on my forehead. Bandaging his face and depositing him on the couch like a load of laundry was a familiar feeling, though I now struggled to move his weight.

“You mad at me?” he asked, his words muffled by the couch cushion.

“Not any more than usual,” I said.

My head was beginning to ache. I pushed a window open, letting a breeze into the stuffy living room. It was a lovely night; I hadn’t noticed until now. The air was pleasantly cool, despite the muddy snowbanks piled around the sidewalks. The distant snore of cars on the freeway filtered between buildings. Somewhere nearby, a lone cricket chirped. The streets were unusually still.

With considerable effort, Travis propped his head up on the arm of the couch. For the first time, I noticed his hair had begun to thin, slivers of smooth scalp reflecting lamplight.

“Matty?” he asked.

“Quit calling me that.”

“D’you miss Mom?”

I rolled my eyes, then immediately felt terrible about it. This was far from the first time he’d gotten all mushy on me while he was wasted. More often than not, it was about our mother. Travis had always loved her, even when she didn’t deserve it.

“Sure,” I said, “of course I miss her.” It was about halfway between the truth and a lie.

“Is that why you tried to kill yourself?”

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself, dickhead. I drank too much and got in an accident. You know that.”

This was a lie; I had been dead sober when I wrapped my car around a tree last winter, and it sure as hell wasn’t an accident. I’d kept the drunk driving narrative up with Travis ever since I first awoke to him in my hospital room, my mind just clear enough through the morphine fog to know pity was the last thing I wanted from him. Pity and that nauseating, unanswerable why?

My brother wasn’t nearly as dumb as he acted; he knew it wasn’t an accident, and he knew that I knew. He was there nearly every day after the paramedics wheeled me in on a bright orange backboard, after the surgeons cut me open and bolted my bones back together. He helped me eat my pudding, brought me boxes of books I never touched. I couldn’t stand it—I felt like that stray dog, ticks all over my ribs, too miserable to fight off his kindness. I didn’t want it, not from him, not from anybody.

So as soon as I had enough strength to push him away, that’s what I did. I told the hospital staff to stop letting him in. When I was discharged, I had a neighbor pick me up and drive me home. I ignored my brother’s calls and deleted his voicemails until he took the hint. Every day I took my pills and clawed my way to normalcy, clawed my way into a stable life that had no room for a train wreck like Travis. We gave up on each other.

Yet there I was, a year later, tucking a blanket around his shoulders and placing a trashcan next to his head while he murmured something I couldn’t understand into the arm of the couch.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Why di’nt you just call me? I could’a helped you.”

“No. You couldn’t have.”

There had been plenty of times since the crash when I wanted to call Travis but didn’t. Sometimes I knew I was doing the right thing, putting the phone down and choosing my bed over the bottle of vodka in the freezer. Sometimes, I wasn’t too sure.

I sat on the floor beside the couch and rested my head against his denim-clad knees. A wide silence fell over the room, another unspoken agreement. I wished I could have explained myself to him, wished I could have wrapped my head around it all. Instead, I closed my eyes, and that’s how we fell asleep.

He was still snoring on the couch when I left. I’d woken early in the morning with an aching back and shivering skin. At some point, I’d gone from being propped against the couch to lying flat on the floor, my face half-buried in the matted carpet that had been there since the seventies and was the color of cold porridge. My shoulder was killing me. The room was freezing, and the window blinds rattled with the sporadic gusts of wind.

Travis had swaddled himself in his blanket and was curled so deep into the back of the couch that he appeared almost shapeless. His left arm was jammed between two cushions, calloused fingers limp in the air. He wouldn’t be waking for a while. I shut the window and gathered my things as quietly as I could.

I sat in the parking lot of my apartment building for a while, enjoying the warmth of my car. It had begun to rain, and a milky fog crept up the inside of the windshield.

I still wasn’t used to the car. It was too new for my liking, with a screen that glowed too bright in the center console and a disturbing lack of a CD slot. I’d purchased it from the dealership I worked at, where I got exclusive employee pricing that was hard to turn down. The car had all the newest safety features, with automatic braking and lane departure warnings. Just about everything mankind had dreamt up to prevent crashes.

When I wrecked my old sedan, the driver’s side airbag forced my arms up over my head in such a way that my left rotator cuff tore all the way through, tendon pulling free from bone. Although my fractures and concussion healed amicably, the muscle was never the same. And while months of physical therapy had helped, I still had that dull ache and the thin seam of a surgical scar to remind me of what I’d done.

I was at dinner with my new girlfriend when Travis called me again. Anne was a journalist for a local newspaper, a little older and considerably better looking than me. Her investigative aptitude didn’t carry over to her personal life—she liked that I didn’t talk about myself too much, and I liked that she didn’t ask too many questions. Both of us liked the little Italian joint halfway between her work and mine, which was pretty much the foundation of our relationship. That night, our food had just been served when my cellphone rang.

“Hold on,” I said to Anne, interrupting her work-related monologue that I’d been half listening to. “It’s my brother.”

She gave me the look she always did when I spoke of Travis, a look I mistook for jealousy at the time but that I now understand as concern.

“Matty?” Travis groaned.

“What’s up?” I pressed the phone against my ear. “You sound terrible.”

“I got in a fight. Need you to come pick me up.”

“Are you at Bubba’s?”

“Not anymore, I’m not.”

“Quit being cryptic. Where are you?”

“At the police station.”

“Jesus, dude. What happened?”

“I already told you. Got in a fight at Bubba’s. Someone called the cops. Now I’m here.”

I chewed on my cheek and began to fiddle with my wallet. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Still, despite the trouble he caused, Travis had never been arrested before. Not that I knew of, at least. “Okay,” I said. “Sit tight. I’ll be there soon.”

I ended the call and sighed, cocking my head at Anne. She gave me a disappointed look, and I suddenly felt exhausted.

“I’m assuming you need to go,” she said. She had dark, knowing eyes that I often struggled to look directly into.

“Yeah. I’m really sorry. I have to help him out with something. Take my food home with you.”

I placed a fifty on the table and left, my pasta sitting steaming and untouched across from her.

Travis moped like a teenager in the passenger seat of my car. He had a ring of dried blood around one nostril and the reddened beginnings of a bruise beneath his eye, but otherwise he seemed fine enough. I’d paid his bail in cash and told him about a hundred times he didn’t need to pay me back. I hoped he would do it anyway.

“They said I can’t go to Bubba’s anymore,” he told me as he leaned his seat back.

“Probably for the best, huh?”

To this, he just grunted and reached to slide the sunroof cover open, fixing his eyes on the starless sky. My shoulder began to ache.

“So,” I said, “are you gonna tell me what happened?”

“Don’t wanna talk about it.”

We drove in silence for a few miles. We were taking the long way across town, rolling through some quieter neighborhoods and dark, wooded backroads. I enjoyed the stillness, and I figured Travis did, too. He leaned back in his seat, his hands in his lap. The edges of his face were illuminated warm blue by the dashboard lights. “Can I ask you something, Matty?” he said.

“If you stop calling me that, sure.”

“What did it feel like?”

“What did what feel like?”

“You know.”

I did know. I remembered it quite well, actually. The lethal feeling of no way out, the vague sense that I was about to lose control. My hands sticky on the steering wheel and my mouth dry; wanting to sleep, to dissolve, to squeeze on the gas pedal harder and harder until it was just squealing rubber and sour smoke and broken bones. I remembered seeing the tree bark through slivers of shattered windshield and feeling a strange admiration for all those vivid ridges and fractured valleys, complete cultures of lichen and insects. I thought my life could never be half as intricate as that single tree I’d rammed my car into. In my last moments of consciousness, I felt freed by this fact. Euphoric, even. Only later, in the hospital and beyond, would the regret set in, and my old, familiar emptiness would be replaced with searing shame.

I couldn’t tell my brother all this, just like I couldn’t tell my doctors or therapists. As far as they knew, I had no recollection of the accident or the moments leading up to it. They’d all assured me these memory gaps were a normal response to a traumatic event.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said to Travis, “but I would cut it out if I were you.”

It was then that he lunged forward from his half-reclined position and reached for the steering wheel, trying to jerk it toward the shoulder. His breathing was frenzied.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted, fighting to maintain control of the car. The tires shrieked against asphalt as they swerved. “Let go, you piece of shit!”

I panicked. Travis had always been so much stronger than me. Just as the car began to veer off the side of the road, it finally occurred to me to slam the brakes. We lurched to a stop halfway into a shallow grassy ditch, our four hands still white-knuckled on the wheel. I shoved him back into his seat. “Jesus Christ, man,” I panted. “Why would you do that?”

He didn’t respond, just swallowed hard and leaned his head against the passenger side window.

We sat there for a while, catching our breath. I felt that I should have said something, but I couldn’t begin to imagine what. So, I stayed in that lonely, familiar place of silence, telling myself that I didn’t need to say anything, that Travis and I had some mutual understanding that transcended words.

After God knows how long, I fired the car back onto the road and pulled over in front of Travis’s apartment building. He still wouldn’t look at me.

“How drunk are you?” I asked against the purr of the engine.

“Not enough.”

“Do you want to stay at my place?”

“No.”

I walked him up to his apartment even though he insisted he didn’t need it. Before I could help him to his room, he tossed himself onto the couch and pulled his ratty old throw blanket over himself.

“Come on, man, you’re gonna hurt your back if you keep sleeping there.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled into the cushions.

I chuckled humorlessly. “Don’t apologize to me. I’m saying it for your own good.” I then realized he was crying and that his apology had nothing to do with the couch. I had never seen Travis cry before, at least since we were toddlers; even when he got into fistfights as a teenager, even when he was drunk and rambling on about our mother, he always managed to keep his eyes dry around me.

I was very uncomfortable in that moment, and all I could think to do was stand there stiffly beside him and rub his shoulder in some robotic show of reassurance. I didn’t dare look down at him for fear that my face would betray the same dripping sense of pity I’d seen on him a year earlier when he loomed over my hospital bed. I wanted nothing more than to spare him the feeling of being a broken animal.

So I stood there with my gaze averted until he began to calm down, and once his eyes started to close and he seemed more tired than sad, I told him I would be leaving. I brought him an extra pillow and blanket from his bed, and put a glass of ice water on the coffee table. Before I left, I made him promise not to do anything stupid.

When Travis and I were young, we loved winter. Every year, we built forts and igloos together, packing snow until our cheap cotton gloves were soaked through and our fingers turned waxy white. When our mother was drunk or angry or both, I’d curl up and hide in our constructions, which had felt surprisingly warm on the inside, while Travis staked out bus stops and threw snowballs at younger kids.

The older we got, the more I hated the cold, and the more he sought it out. As soon as he dropped out of school, he went down to the docks and found work fishing pollock year-round.

“That’s gotta suck, being out there in the wintertime,” I’d once told him over the noise at Bubba’s. “I can’t imagine it.”

This was years ago, long before my accident. I was fresh out of college, and Travis still had an innocent pudginess to his face and a light of naïve hope in his eyes.

He polished off the rest of his Jack and Coke and burped. “Time passes differently on the water, Matty. All your worries, everything about you … it just slips away.”

“I never know what you’re talking about, man. You want another round?”

“’Course I do,” he said, and I ignored the bitter edge in his voice.

Late that night, when we stumbled out of the bar and onto the slushy streets, Travis kept mumbling about wanting to show me something.

“Let’s just go home,” I said. “It’s too cold.”

“C’mon, jus’a few minutes. Please?”

“Fine. Make it quick.”

I followed him down a little side road and through a sleepy, well-off neighborhood where the air turned thick with salt and the rotten stench of seaweed. The numbing warmth of gin and tonic had started to fade, and the frigid ocean air stung my ears.

“We almost there?” I called up ahead. Travis kept tripping over his own heels, but he walked with a purpose.

“Yup. Ri’here.”

We had reached the shoreline, and the wind had picked up. Travis’s flimsy hoodie flapped wide open around his budding beer belly, and his freckled cheeks were bitten red. He clambered up onto the seawall, his legs dangling over darkness. For a moment, I worried he would fall; there was no telling how far above the ground he was. I pushed the thought away and stood behind him. “What did you want to show me?”

He leaned back on one hand and pointed straight ahead with the other. “Look how dark.”

“Yeah, buddy. It’s nighttime.”

“No, look. S’like there’s nothing there.”

He was right. Though I could hear the rumble of the sea, I couldn’t make out anything beyond Travis’ shoulder. There were no streetlights, no moon in the sky, nothing to reflect the waves back at us.

“I like to pretend it’s the edge of the world,” he said with startling sobriety.

I stood staring out at the void before us, contemplating the idea of true emptiness. A terrible feeling had begun to bloom inside me, a nameless fear in the depths of my gut. I felt helpless.

“We need to go home,” I blurted. My voice sounded wrong in the gaping silence. He didn’t move until I grabbed his sleeve and tugged him in my direction. Even then, he seemed reluctant to leave, but he didn’t fight.

It was this memory, more than anything, that I played over in my head after he died.

Not long after his arrest, Travis showed up on the pollock boat acting stranger than usual. Some of his crewmates thought he was on something, or that he was having a manic episode. A couple others insisted he was fine. At some point, he fell overboard despite the relatively calm ocean conditions. No one actually saw it happen, but they all watched in horror as he began stripping his gear and clothing off, leaving his floatation suit and insulated gloves bobbing in the brine. In the midst of a February cold snap, his rescuers fought a losing battle.

In the following weeks, I thought often about that night by the seawall. I thought about how badly Travis wanted me to see such vast nothingness, how desperately I wanted to leave. I thought about his feet dangling over blackness and the way the low roar of the ocean seemed, in that moment, emptier than any true silence. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to go back to it or forget it all entirely. Sometimes, I wished none of this ever happened: the death of our mother, the car crash, all those horrible nights at Bubba’s. Other times, I just wished I’d hit that tree a little harder.

I told Anne what happened, though I spared her the details. Boating accident, I’d called it. I told her not to worry about me, and she said she wouldn’t. Somehow, I believed her, and found this more comforting than anything else. Still, we didn’t last long after that. We both know this isn’t going to work, she told me over dinner one night, and I said, you’re right. We finished our meal together like nothing had changed, and then never saw each other again. It didn’t feel like I had lost anything.

Ever since we loomed over our grandfather’s open casket when we were teenagers, Travis insisted he didn’t want a funeral. Just burn me up and throw me in the ocean, he said then and during many a drunken night at Bubba’s.

So that’s what I did. His ashes were deceptively heavy in their little cardboard box. I held them close to me one afternoon, swaddled inside my winter coat, and followed my memory back to that dark place by the seawall.

In the daylight, the edge of the world was far more peaceful than I imagined. A meager strip of beach was spared the brunt of the waves, cradled in an alcove of nearly still water. Far from the bottomless pit I had envisioned in the dark, the sandy shore was hardly five feet below where I sat on the wall.

Frigid water sloshed over the top of my rain boots as I waded into the steely ocean, the wind against my back. I couldn’t find it in me to care as my socks grew spongy and my toes numb. Once I was in past my knees, I opened the box. The ashes billowed in the cold wind like smoke before settling in a film atop the water. I watched until the last of the gray flakes ducked below the surface. Then I made my way out of the sea and walked, alone, back to Bubba’s Briny Lounge.

WHEN MOSS REFUSES TO SMELL LIKE VELVET

DARCY SMITH

My son’s ex tells me, I’m not sure he wants

to live. The world thrums between my grown child

and me, my dirt-creased palms, his distant eyes.

Spring wields her most gaudy plumes, discordant

sun. Forsythia, daffodils – drowningly loud.

Lay down three bags of mulch. Keep dandelions

at bay. This sudden day, this verdant whorl,

too resilient. Rid me of these tender

violets, hyacinths, red-bud bloom. We’re caged

roses. Petals, torn. Silt in my throat, river stones, gallop

& clatter. I’m not sure he wants to – I hear the clouds

scrape, howling down his sky. We are one breath, one

ache. Lay down three bags of mulch. Keep dandelions at bay.

He called when the weather settled, said not to worry.

It’ll be fine, Mama. Next time,

I’ll leave a note.

EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER CARRIED ME.

OLIVIA MAE LONGORIA

First, my mother.

Shortly after, my father.

A few of their friends, whom I call aunt or uncle.

A doctor with a chart and the result of a genetic test.

A hiatus for a while.

Then, my first love,

who adjusted my toes in my sandals when I could not.

Now, my forever love,

who lifts me gently from the floor and dances to make me laugh.

And in between, my friends, always my friends.

Up the stairs, down the block, onto the dance floor,

Into clean clothes and to the kitchen for tea.

Someday, sons and nephews,

whose hands will press to a pine casket.

Before then, a motorized chair, maybe not.

In any case, thank you.

“A FEELING ON THE BODY I KNOW”

MULE BOY

Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press, 2026)

REVIEWED BY AMELIA CHRISTMAS GRAMLING

In the last chapter of Andrew Krivak’s Mule Boy, one of the novel’s central characters recalls that the mining patch in Pennsylvania where she’s from is “a place known only for one day …”

That day, of course, is a day of unmitigated catastrophe, localized apocalypse, the 1929 New Year’s Mining Disaster outside of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, of which Ondro—the narrator and titular “Mule Boy”—is the sole survivor. The day subsumes the town and all its inhabitants. Ondro escapes the mine, but he remains trapped inside the instance of collapse. He is arrested, stagnant, inchoate; not the boy he was when he went down, but not a man with concrete subjectivity—what we might, in literary terms, call character—either. It is as if Ondro descends beneath several thousand tons of hollowed rock, and loses all claims to individuality in the coal mine’s primordial murk. He emerges carrying “a dark wholly absent of light, like a beast carrying its burden along a steel track.”

The novel’s first-person narration, then, isn’t like being invited into a consciousness so much as it is like joining Ondro, for a while, shoulder-to-shoulder, in the darkness. The book is written in a single sentence, and Krivak—like his literary forebear, Cormac McCarthy—repudiates quotation marks. The syntax is liquid, the narration slippery, the “I” amorphous; it is difficult to parse the miner from the mine, the rhythm of the prose from the rhythm of the shaft’s relentless “heartbeat throb,” the presence of the living from the echoes of the dead.

Welcome to coal country.

In Kentucky, where I’m from, we have our fair share of places that are known “only for one day” if they are known at all. Last spring, I taught my New York students Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” and I asked them, by way of introduction, what they knew about Appalachia. If they knew anything, they knew the tragic—the abject poverty, the opioid crisis, and what more than one of my students euphemistically called the “backwards politics” of the place.

And it’s true that whatever we might call “American progress,” its politics or its aesthetics, has steered largely clear of rural Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky—despite the fact that these tragic places accrue tragedies because they have unilaterally supplied the raw materials from which that progress is hewn.

Coal towns are uniquely insulated and uniquely insular, not just because they are mono-economic, or mono-cultural, but because their inhabitants are given over to the monumentality of the undertaking: taking a pickax to a mountain, mining the earth. The individual isn’t extricable from the collective, because no one escapes the brutality of the labor, and no one is free from its cost. Krivak, as Ondro, returns again and again to the Book of Jonah, to the Old Testament, as if out of a need to explain the mine, the town, and the disaster incurred:

And so he [Jonah] crosses the vast city and speaks of God’s anger, and the Ninevites repent and believe, as though they have come from darkness into a light, and they cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes, a feeling on the body I know, a feeling every miner with a coal stove knew, a feeling every miner’s child whose job it was to empty those ashes from the stove knew as well, the weight of them, the burned-off sulfur smell of them, the scratch of cinders to the arms and body when they got inside your clothes and worked their way along the waist and back after you had dumped them on the ash heap, yes, every miner and miner’s child knew this ancient feeling of repentance as surely as they knew the need to keep warm …

The Old God, and The Old World, are not so easily forgotten in this place, and what is buried tends to return.

Where the prose style is maximal, the plot is deceptively simple, Scriptural. We begin in Ondro’s old age, in a small cabin in New Hampshire, his adopted home, at the edge of a “mountain that will never be mined.” Ondro is visited by the surviving family of a man who perished in the disaster. After several decades, the family has come looking for answers. The first visitation sets a precedent, and before the novel is over, Ondro will be visited by all the families that remain, in some form, to ask.

He is called upon to recount to each survivor the last moments their father or grandfather lived, and slowly, through reminiscence, the reader learns not only what happened all those years ago beneath the earth, but also what has become of Ondro in the aftermath of disaster. His abortive attempts at university education, his annulled marriage to Magda (the daughter of a miner who perished in the collapse), his alcoholism, and his imprisonment after refusing conscription for the Second World War: “this was why I would not serve, would not fight, would not go to war, because I had seen death in men’s faces, in their eyes by the light of nothing more than a carbide lamp shining from the peak of a cap, and I carried the faces of those men with me each day of my life …”

The questions which propel the novel are twofold: How did Ondro survive, and how, trapped in the prison of his survival, will he live?

In answering the latter, Krivak mines his own life. Growing up stifled and bullied in rural Pennsylvania, he turned to books as a means of escape and a mode of meaning-making. Likewise, Ondro, insofar as he is saved, is saved by reading. The only class he loves and never skips during his doomed tenure in academia is Professor Elias Gray’s class on Shakespeare, “because Shakespeare and Professor Gray seemed completely out of place in that college of engineering, and yet there they were, writing of and speaking of tragedy, ambition, love, and the struggle … the old Greeks called the agon …”

Later, in prison, he explores the ancient philosophers by way of a prophet-like fellow prisoner named Jacobson, who specializes in Plutarch, Maimonides, and Parmenides—and has a preternatural talent for smuggling illicit texts. It is from this period of isolated study and reflection that Ondro, and the reader, receive one of the central metaphors through which Ondro’s trauma—his state of permanent darkness—can be made legible, even livable.

Parmenides, per Jacobson, theorized that we have nothing to fear from death, because “to become nothing is impossible and that what matters is the being our bodies consist of and that death is simply a change, Nor is there a way in which what-is could be / More here and less there, since all inviolably is …”

Throughout the novel, Ondro is haunted by his own survival, unable to reconcile why he lived when the others perished. But Parmenides (per Jacobson) offers relief from this burden by suggesting that his fate was unavoidable, because it couldn’t have been otherwise, i.e., “all inviolably is.”

The men in the collapsed mine shaft weren’t lost, but changed, transmuted into another state. Like the rosary Ondro has carried with him since childhood—anointed by Ondro’s father, the beads blackened by coal—Ondro himself was anointed by the men he left behind in the darkness. He carries them still.

There is a simplicity to this resolution but also a profound sadness, the implications of which are hinted at, but—at least by my reading—never quite fully explored.

Krivak’s prose style is stunning, and yet a novel-in-one-sentence makes for a rather slim epic. I longed, quite simply, for more. Krivak’s power lies in his unrelenting, hypnotic descriptions—the obsession with cataloging, in exquisite detail, the raw materials and manual labors by which Ondro fills his days. The lack of punctuation and the aural quality of the prose lends itself to a loftiness, a buoyancy, a lovely horizontality, but not often to a penetration of depths. For instance, the reader is often told, in list form, the contents of Ondro’s reading, but we don’t linger long enough on any text to witness Ondro probe, argue, or wrestle. Indeed, books, despite the fact that the novel is replete with them, mostly inhabit the world as objects.

Likewise, Ondro recounts the facts of his life as one pointing out landmarks; he circles events and characters in concentric maneuvers, but rarely lands. A distance remains between him (and so, us) and the narrative itself.

At times this distance is frustrating, even tantalizing, as when Ondro, in comparing himself to Jonah, muses: “And Jonah must be taught with questions, as though a child, taught about God’s mercy and magnanimity, which aren’t meant to be questions but reminders of mercy and magnanimity … because I needed in those days to put more than the memory of being in the mine in front of me, needed to be reminded of mercy and magnanimity.” Which questions? Which reminders? Which days? On what basis, precisely, does Ondro fear or desire the comparison with Jonah? When does he talk to God?

And then there is the distance between Ondro and Magda—Ondro’s love interest, whose father died in the collapse, and who Ondro’s alcoholism drives away shortly after their marriage. Magda, like all the characters in Mule Boy, strikes me as a bit shadowy, blurred, as if sketched from a very great height, and never more so than at the end of the novel when, as an old woman, she returns to Ondro on his mountain refuge and finally asks him to recount the last moments of her father’s life. In fact, Magda’s shadowiness, her sense of not quite thereness, permeates the story; it’s diegetic: Ondro compares Magda to a “flash of shadow … the opposite of a flash of light.” When she appears, he can’t accept her solidity, her reality, that she’s not a vision or a ghost: “even after I have felt her presence and seen her in the chair, I think for a moment she may yet be a flash of shadow, so I look up at the top of the mountain as if to clear my sight and back at the chair beneath the tree and she is still there… .”

And while Ondro may ultimately be convinced of her presence, the reader never quite is. Magda tells her story—the luckless marriage she endured after she left, her disconnection from family, the loss of her mother—but as she narrates, her feelings, desires, and motivations stay inaccessible, elusive, vague. At one point she says, “All I’ve ever wanted was to love and be loved,” as simple as a child, as cliched as a dream.

But it is precisely those cliches, those universalities, that we return to at the end if we’re lucky (or unlucky) enough to see the end’s approach—as Magda does in her old age, as her father did trapped with Ondro in the mine’s “seventh breast.” Disasters—private or collective—are not characterizing. We fall on cliches, we recite childhood prayers, we repeat the names of loved ones we’ll never see again. Krivak is not interested in exploring character as an individual phenomenon (the phenomenon of the individual). He’s interested in exploring the character of disaster, how disaster flattens and pluralizes, how disaster can become inextricable from a family, a town, or a region (i.e., Coal Country)—or as is increasingly true in 2026, an era.

I am not the first reviewer to refer to this novel as elegiac, but I don’t think what’s being lamented here are the miners, but the act of mining itself, how the labor once put us in physical contact with the darkness, with the monumentality, intimacy, and material reality of the earth. We still mine now, but at a significant remove, by way of machines remotely operated (coincidentally, the same means by which we wage war).

At the end of the novel, Ondro tries to recite an Ave Maria as he did in childhood, “but he doesn’t remember the words anymore, then thinks it’s not the prayer or the sound of the prayer but the feel of the [rosary] wood that changes him.” The words aren’t important. The words obfuscate, elide, put distance between us and another, between us and the land. Through words, Krivak delivers us beyond words, back to the raw materials, the wood, the rock, the water, and our human hands moving and moved by the earth. Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

L. Annette Binder has published poetry in PRISM International, Hunger Moun-tain, and The Summerset Review. She lives in New Hampshire with her family.

Margaret Bleichman is a poet, queer activist, and educator who has published in Writers Resist, Atlanta Review, Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, and The Dewdrop. Their chapbook upon waking was a Finishing Line Press semi-finalist. Two of their poems have won Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry awards.

Zoe Boyer was raised on Lake Michigan, completed her MA in the Arizona high desert, and now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Terrain.org, RockPaperPoem, West Trade Review, Little Patuxent Review, The Penn Review, and Pleiades.

Colleen Morton Busch is the author of the nonfiction book Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, selected as a best book of the year by Publisher's Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Barnes and Noble. Her poetry collection, Smolder, won Ex Ophidia Press’s 2025 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Prize and will be published in 2026.

Courtney Chatellier grew up in the Hudson Valley. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Witness and the Los Angeles Review. She teaches at New York University and is currently at work on a novel.

Mun Heol Cho is a second-year medical student at Drexel University College of Medicine. They come from a lineage of Korean beekeepers and are fascinated by eyes.

Sue Churchill is a former teacher who works on a family farm in Kentucky. Her farm life offers an up-close interaction with nature that is reflected in her chapbook, Toward the Fold, published by Workhorse Press in 2020. Sue’s poems have also appeared in The Appalachian Review, jelly bucket, and Literary Accents.

Clara Collins is a poet and teacher based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Radar Poetry, Bicoastal Review, and Ellipsis.

Andrew Cominelli has published writing in Guernica, The Barcelona Review, Quarterly West, and Redivider. He is working on a novel, an excerpt of which was awarded the Faulkner Society’s prize for Best Novel-in-Progress in 2023.

Arlene DeMaris is a freelance writer living in Avon, Connecticut with her husband, Michael, and two cats. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Rattle, Radar Poetry, and Maine Review. She holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College.

Scott Dickison is a poet and pastor living in Jackson, Mississippi. Originally from North Carolina, Scott holds an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte and a theological degree from Harvard Divinity School.

H.E. Fisher is the author of the collection Sterile Field and the chapbook Jane Almost Always Smiles, and co-editor of The Big Brutal Bill. H.E.’s work appears in Tupelo Quarterly, EcoTheo Review, MER, SWWIM, Whale Road Review, and DMQ Review, and has received nominations for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize.

Judith Fox, a poet and a fine-art photographer, won Honorable Mention in the 2025 Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook contest. Her poems appeared in Poet Lore, Rattle, Jabberwock Review, Notre Dame Review, and BLR. She’s been a global advocate and speaker on behalf of Alzheimer’s awareness and family caregivers.

Nina Gaby is a writer, visual artist, and psychiatric nurse practitioner who spent years hunkered down across from the longest floating bridge east of the Mississippi, maintaining a clinical practice from her kitchen counter while trying to finish a memoir. Her writing appears most recently in Fourth River, Short-Reads, and Oldster.

Ardis Garcia writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Previous workshops and residences include Anaphora Arts, the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writer’s Retreat, Macondo Writers, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and Boldface. A queer native Tejana, Ardis is based out of the New York City area.

Amelia Christmas Gramling is a writer and teacher from southwestern Kentucky now living in New York. Her work can be found at Bloodletter Magazine, Autostraddle, Southlands Mag, and The Masters Review where she was named a Best Emerging Writer of 2025.

Rosalind Guy received her MFA from the University of Memphis. Her poems and essays appear in Glass Poetry Journal: Poet's Resist, Southern Indiana Review, Boulevard, and Georgia Review. She also won in the adult category for the 2024 Tom Lee Poetry Prize competition. She has work forthcoming in Prairie Schooner.

Natalie Hanagan is an author of poetry and short fiction from Maine. She holds a degree in criminology and creative writing from the University of Southern Maine, and works in substance use and mental health resource navigation. She is currently working on her debut poetry manuscript.

Katie Hartsock received the Philip H. McMath Poetry Prize for her second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse). A limited-edition letterpress chap-book, Love-Gifts To Be Delivered Via Subterranean Rivers, will be published in 2026 by Aureole Press. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan.

Charles Philippe Jean-Pierre, a Haitian American artist from Chicago, is an adjunct professor at Howard University and has art in U.S. Embassies in Benin, Malawi, and Niger. He has exhibited at the Smithsonian, curated for the Embassy of Haiti, been invited by President Obama to the White House, and collaborated with institutions from Alvin Ailey to the IMF.

Ted Kooser is a former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner. His most recent collection is Raft from Copper Canyon Press.

Dara Laine is a poet based in Baltimore, originally from a hay farm in New Jersey. Her work centers grief, memory, and the sacred ordinary through restrained lyricism and domestic realism. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Pine Hills Review, and Sky Island Journal.

Joongi Andrew Lee grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and studied philosophy at Wesleyan. He is pursuing an MFA in fiction at Columbia.

Won Lee is a Korean-American writer based in Chicago. He is a Litowitz MFA+MA student at Northwestern University. His poetry appears in Bellevue Literary Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Action, Spectacle. His criticism can be found in Bear Review and TriQuarterly.

May Lee-Yang has been published in Water~Stone Literary Review and anthologies including What We Hunger For. She has received support from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, The Playwright Center, the National Performance Network, and the Loft Literary Center. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Minnesota.

E.B. Licata is a Seattle-area writer, editor, and poet. Her poems have appeared in the poet’s billow, Hummingbird Press, and Pontoon Poetry.

Olivia Mae Longoria is a writing MFA candidate at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her pitbull, Joey Pepperoni, proofreads all her work. Olivia discusses disability and identity on her Substack, Chronic Coping. When she is not writing, she is riding her tricycle, wandering the bookstore, or snuggling Joey.

Diane K. Martin lives in Sonoma, California. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Field, Harvard Review, Laurel Review, and PLUME. She received a Pushcart Special Mention and won first prize from Smartish Pace. Her first book, Conjugated Visits, a NPS finalist, was published by Dream Horse Press; her second, Hue & Cry, by MadHat Press.

Miles Meth is a queer, Jewish writer and community organizer living in Boston. They are a candidate for an MFA at the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine and have previously published in The Boston Globe, The Forward, and The Bias.

Denise Miller is a poet, playwright, and mixed media artist whose work explores race, identity, and violence. Their books include Core, Ligatures, A Ligature for Black Bodies (2020 Sexton Prize winner), and How to Make an American Mass Shooter.

Julia Motyka is a writer, performer, and teacher based in New York City, where she lives with her children and an ever-growing menagerie of animals. She is the founder of The Clubhouse on Substack and has recent work in The Manifest Station and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.

Elisabeth Murawski is the author of Heiress, Zorba’s Daughter (May Swenson Poetry Award), Still Life with Timex (Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize), Alias Irene, and Voyage to the End. A native of Chicago, she currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Patti Nommensen has written screenplays and short fiction as well as poetry for the Houston Poetry Fest, Poetry at Round Top, the Common Ground Teachers Institute, and the Menil Museum and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Formerly a teacher of English Literature and Film Studies, she now lives in Austin, Texas.

Ella Ordona is a Filipino-American interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of images, poetry, and code. Her work explores diaspora, memory, and family legacy, examining how personal and collective histories are shaped by language and environment. Her visual work has been exhibited in Seattle, London, and virtually; her poetry is forthcoming in About Place Journal.

Shannon Perri holds an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University and a master’s degree in social work from the University of Texas. Her writing has appeared in Joyland Magazine, Sycamore Review, Texas Highways, and Texas Observer. She lives in South Austin with her husband and two children.

Rick Pongratz is a poet and psychologist whose work has appeared in Rattle and The New Verse News, with poems forthcoming in Frogpond and Modern Haiku. As an adjunct faculty member, they teach a variety of courses on mental health-related topics and study creative writing at Idaho State University.

Miranda Saake is a writer, teacher, and mother from Northern California. She has been published in The Rebis, Clarion, and Gossamer Arts. She was recently shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for poetry.

Darcy Smith writes poetry that explores family, loss, substance abuse, mental health, and domestic violence. The rural northeast informs Smith’s poetry collections, River Skin and Fissures, Bloom, both from Fernwood Press. Awards include winner of the Please See Me Mental Health Poetry Prize and the Medmic Poetry Prize.

Lindsay Sproul published her debut novel, We Were Promised Spotlights, in 2020. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, Epoch, and Witness. She has received fellowships from Columbia University, VCCA, and MacDowell. She is distinguished professor of English at Loyola University and editor-in-chief of the New Orleans Review.

Rachael Trotter is a veteran of the Army Nurse Corps, and works in a local emergency room in Reno, Nevada. She holds a BS in Nursing and aims to further her studies in poetry to one day hold a degree in the fine arts as well. Her work has been previously featured in Collateral and The Meadow.

Ken Victor has been writing poems since he fell under the influence of A Gift of Watermelon Pickle, the book of poems he read in Mr. Gibson’s 7th grade English class. His collection of poetry, We Were Like Everyone Else, was a finalist for the Concordia First Book Prize.

Jane O. Wayne has published four poetry collections: Looking Both Ways, which received the Devins Award for Poetry; A Strange Heart, which received the Marianne Moore Prize and the Society of Midland Authors Award; From the Night Album; and The Other Place You Live. Her work has appeared in JAMA, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and The American Scholar.

Edytta Wojnar, born and raised in Poland, now lives in New Jersey. The author of Dandelions in Third Space, Red Rain, Here and There, and Stories Her Hands Tell, Wojnar is the recipient of a 2025 poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Amber Wolfe earned a BA in writing from Loyola University Maryland and an MA in clinical psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. She has tutored reading and writing in Baltimore and worked in suicide prevention research. Amber lives in New York City, where her work examines the body and mind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to all who have helped support Bellevue Literary Review in its efforts to bridge the worlds of healthcare and the arts.

BLR Literary Prize Sponsors: Buckvar Family, Goldenberg Family, Leslin Healthcare Leadership Foundation

Patrons: Jacob M. Appel, Cynthia Cannell, Jodie Corngold, Francis Goldstein, Anyika Jordan, Amy Lushing, Michael Myers, Jeremy Nobel, Northwell Health, Danielle Ofri, Ruth Oratz, Robert J. Warshaw & Deborah A. Schmidt

Muses: I. Cori Baill, Martin J. Blaser, Gerard Kirwan, Bettina & Michael Klein, Cliff Manko, Olberg McFall Family Foundation, Robert Oldshue & Anne Calabresi, Rhonda Soricelli, Donna Baier Stein

Partners: Helene Atwan, Lesmah J. Fraser, Sig-Linda Jacobson, Linda C. Lombardi, Kevin Loughlin, Ira and Deborah Palgon, Dwaine Rieves, Aish Sinha, Marit Vagstad, Michael R. Yeaman

Advocates: Thomas Andrews, Deborah Bayer, Michael & Mary Brabeck, Jack Coulehan, Kati Eisenhuth, Perri Klass, Gardner McFall

Supporters: Janet Akman, Eileen Allman, Bruce & Kathi Campbell, Frank Clark, Linda Dove, David Ferris, Serena J. Fox, Darilyn Moyer, Allie Nava, Allen Newman, Kevin Scollan, Dympna Lynch Weil

Grant Support:

Thank you to the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses, Amazon Literary Partnership Literary Magazine Fund, and Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund for their support.

BLR’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

For a full list of supporters, please visit our website.

This year, Bellevue Literary Review turns 25! We started out with a deep belief that health, healing, and the arts are natural companions, and in the quarter century since, our readers have shown us how true this is.

We’re grateful to have a community that believes in this shared vision. Time and again, you’ve proven that what BLR does matters. That sharing stories about health and illness matters. That using these stories as opportunities for connection and creativity might even offer a possibility for healing.

Your support means everything. A gift of any amount makes a difference. You’re not only helping to sustain BLR and its mission, but also to lay the foundation for the future.

Here is how to add your support:

Make a fully tax-deductible donation online at blreview.org/donate

Send a check to the address below.

Recommend a grant through your Donor-Advised Fund. (EIN 85-1666012)

Contribute stock. Donating securities directly can help you maximize both your impact and your tax benefits. Please contact info@blreview.org for more information.

Check whether your company matches donations.

Bellevue Literary Review

149 East 23rd St, #1516

New York, NY 10010

Bellevue Literary Review is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

Donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law.