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Recovery

A journal of humanity and human experience

Issue 43

Fall/Winter 2022

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

Our thanks to the following people who have assisted with manuscript review and other projects: Felice Aull, Karen Beckermann, Madeleine Beckman, Nicholas Birns, Rose Bromberg, Theresa Brown, Alessa Colaianni, Bonnie Jill Emanuel, Ellen Foster, Barry Jay Kaplan, Jackie Keer, Dayle Kramer, Ajay Major, Seth Michelson, Patricia Patterson, Neha Pidatala, Pamela Ryder, Fiona Salmon, Ann Savino, Ann Stoney, Tim Suermondt, Warren Wechsler, Laura Weiss, Judianne White, Jonathan Xu.

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

Cover Art:
Lauriston Avery

Front:
Alien Robot Ghost, 2021
Construction adhesive, acrylic on canvas
48 x 38 inches
Private collection Bloomfield Hills, MI

Back:
Untitled, 2019/20
Construction material on canvas
40 x 30 inches
Private collection New York

See page 186 for artist’s statement.
www.lauristonavery.com

Bellevue Literary Review is published twice a year.
Copyright © 2022 Bellevue Literary Review

Bellevue Literary Review
149 East 23rd Street, #1516
New York, NY 10010

www.BLReview.org

Printed by Sheridan PA Hanover, Pennsylvania
ISSN 1537-5048 ISBN-978-0-9998638-9-3
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

Suzanne McConnell
Fiction Editor
Sarah Sala
Poetry Editor

Damon Tweedy
Nonfiction Editor
Ronna Wineberg
Contributing Fiction Editor

Lauralee Leonard
Associate Fiction Editor
Kate Falvey
Associate Editor

Scott Oglesby
Assistant Nonfiction Editor
Abba Belgrave
Assistant Poetry Editor

Omotara James
Assistant Poetry Editor
Saleem Hue Penny
Assistant Poetry Editor

Doris W. Cheng
Assistant Fiction Editor
Alanna Weissman
Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Rosalind Aparicio-Ramirez
Editorial Assistant

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ADVISORY BOARD

Bettina Klein, President
Cori Baill

Myrna Blyth
Rafael Campo

Frank Clark
Rita Charon

Lesmah J. Fraser
Jack Coulehan

Anyika Jordan
Anne Fadiman

Perri Klass
Minda Gralnek

Lin Lombardi
Simone Joseph

Ashley McMullen
Ruth Oratz

Michael Myers
Abraham Verghese

Danielle Ofri
Jan Vilcek

Marit Vagstad

INTERNS

David Weill

Arushi Dogra

Anne Pritikin

Clara Waldheim

FOREWORD

When we initially considered recovery as a theme for BLR, Covid-19 wasn’t yet a twinkle in any epidemiologist’s eye. By the time the call for submissions swung into action we were knee deep in a global pandemic and the term recovery took on urgent medical tones above and beyond the metaphorical ones we’d been debating. Recovery seems to feel more dimensional than ever as we try to navigate this perfect storm of medical disasters, environmental catastrophe, political discord, economic stress, and social upheaval.

It can be exhausting to contemplate all that is happening, much less consider how we might ever recover. Literature can never offer a “how-to” manual for recovery—that we’ll leave to the strategists of the world. Rather, it offers an opportunity to grapple with the individual strands of our lives, teasing out one tiny aspect to ripple slowly through our fingers. Literature won’t necessarily give us the answers, but it will help us wrestle with the questions.

Sometimes recovery centers directly on the substances of addiction. “Shortly after I quit drinking,” says the protagonist of “The Dry Spring,” by Kyle Impini, “I saw the largest pile of cash I would ever see in my life.” Sent to “dry out” with distant relatives, he finds himself facing more than he expected. In the poem “Surviving You,” composed after seven years clean, Anthony Aguero writes: “I don’t know how I did it, / loved you all those years in the quiet landscape / of a burning vineyard…”

Recovery can also be about recovering a sense of self. The protagonist of “Crosscurrents,” by Meredith Talusan, navigates which dimensions of self to reveal. Walking into a writing workshop, should it be the “aspiring fiction writer—presumed Caucasian, presumed straight and cis, presumed not to know what ‘cis’ even means…” or should it be the “trans woman of color&even if you’re only half-Asian and no one can tell”?

The method of recovery can often depend on your frame of reference. Ucheoma Onwutuebe’s essay, “A Nigerian Attempts Therapy,” recounts her experience at a campus counseling center after she has emigrated to the United States: “I’m here only because I heard therapy is where bougie people come to toughen their hide against this cruel world.” In “Unraveling,” Carolyn Abram takes up knitting as she recovers from a long-term illness. “Knitting can feel pointless,” she writes, “[b]ut during my sickness, the pointlessness felt apt, as I had been reduced to what seemed like a pointless life.” Saima Afreen, in her essay “Beetroot Soup,” reflects on the universal use of soup to aid recovery and the particulars of this family recipe. “The low flame pulls the slices of beetroot, carrots, and tomatoes into a slow dance swirling to the center,” she writes. “Beetroot makes my heart bleed.”

In “A Spring Without Us,” Talia Bloch reflects on the yearning for recovery and for nature during the early days of the Covid lockdown. “Remember the scent of new grass / in the park, of earth clotting in the rain?” The poem ends: “Because we cannot, the tulip breathes.” Sometimes, it’s just the smallest gestures that nod toward recovery. Nicholas Yingling, in “Love, We Never Get Too Far,” writes, “You take my arm / and remind me which way to walk the fire / road home.”

The cover art is by Lauriston Avery. These otherworldly works were born out of his own experience of recovery. Avery’s artist statement brings us through his artistic process in the disorienting aftermath of addiction, populated by caulk guns, construction adhesive, and a bevy of power tools.

Recovery is rarely a final destination. Usually it is an ongoing journey, often an avidly detoured one. While we could never presume to offer a roadmap to recovery, we hope that the stories, poems, essays, and artwork in this 43rd issue of BLR provide insights into how we grapple with the journey. Enjoy the ride.

Danielle Ofri
Editor-in-Chief

THE DRY SPRING

KYLE IMPINI

Shortly after I quit drinking, I saw the largest pile of cash I would ever see in my life. I was staying with my mother’s second cousin and her husband up in the hills east of Bloomington, Indiana to dry out. The couple made me food and fetched me water and brewed a bitter drink they referred to as “tea” but whose taste did not resemble any tea I’d ever drunk. It was surprisingly viscous; even when steaming the stuff flowed slow like syrup. Its texture and bitterness made me feel that it must be medicinal, as no one would consume it if it had no benefit. I drank cup after cup of the stuff. Each one felt redemptive.

I saw the cash on my first day. I had been snooping. In a haze of senseless urgency, I searched for extra socks and came across the cash curled up in a duffel bag, in what I thought would be a sock drawer. For once, cash did not interest me. I understood it as a complication and nothing else; it glowed with sin. I closed the drawer and filed the money away with the rest of the strange and grotesque images that came to me in dreams. I found an extra pair of socks, put them on, and removed them five minutes later.

As moments began passing by instead of grating by, the pile of cash seemed out of place with my hosts. To my eye, they were two huddled-up retirees. Every morning for weeks, the man disappeared into the folds of the surrounding ravines—wooded and thick with springtime growth. Before long, he’d return with a bag swelling with morel mushrooms, horrid, dank little things that he showed me with boyish pride. The morel, priced for taste, novelty, and rarity, is endemic to southern Indiana and nearly impossible to domesticate. In springtime, the things wriggle from the ground, tucked in the shadows of porches and tree trunks. To the untrained eye, they are distributed with the senselessness of all blessings, but the patient few who think of little else know otherwise. My host knew otherwise. He’d spent his youth shirking responsibilities to wander the woods surrounding the house he was born in, now lived in, and would one day die in. He was possessive, calling them “his woods” with a kind of jealousy. I first thought the mushroom hunting was the type of odd but innocuous hobby with which bored men afflict themselves. The money, I thought, was a plus, nothing more: padding for their pensions. This was before I felt the tension grow as they weighed each haul. Their silent stares and furrowed brows hid private, begging prayers. Some nights, the air became tight and dreary after their weighing; on others, they tried to hide their mirth and their drinks.

Mornings after dreary nights, even the woman’s garden became a desperate, tenuous thing, more like a homestead than a hobby. When my sober hours became days, I tried to make myself useful, but she’d shoo me away from the garden, insisting that I needed rest. I tried to keep myself company with their leather-bound, illuminated copy of the Bible. The edition of the book, according to my host, was more a testament to his father’s folly than God’s wisdom; his old man had bought it from an unctuous huckster for a week’s wages. It was a Catholic Bible, he said, and therefore suspect. Its spine cracked when I opened it. I was trying to be good; I figured the Bible would be a good place to start. I leafed through the books whose names I recognized, but most of the stories were inscrutable, and the ones I did understand seemed severe and abrupt. I gave up on it without much effort and began going on walks to alleviate my boredom. They were short affairs to begin with. I did not stray far from their property. I was afraid of their neighbors. They were the types of men who had low opinions of men like me. Their overalls made me think of shotguns, righteous violence, moonlight on shovels and pickaxes digging into the side of some anonymous hill.

As the weeks passed, boredom pushed me from their property, and the walks became something more like hikes. I felt prissy out there, muddying up my Dockers, but I enjoyed my time outside the house. The woods made me feel small in a humbling, illuminating way. Sometimes I felt loved. It was spring. The air was thick; each gulp of it tasted like I was accepting a living, breathing, writhing thing into my body. I wandered farther, guided by the slanted logic of the ravines. The land gaped away at certain crests, and at these vistas, I became convinced that the whole world was in front of me, nothing behind. Looking out over one of these views, I saw my host.

He and another man were close. The stranger had one hand in the pocket of a jacket much too thick for the weather; his other gripped a grocery bag bulging with morels. My host jabbed a finger into the chest of the stranger. I hid behind a bush. I couldn’t hear anything they said; I was either too far or the sound of the chittering, churning insects was too great. My host continued jabbing his finger into the man’s chest, and soon he lurched for the bag. The stranger pushed him back and brought his hand from his jacket. He aimed a revolver, antiquated and ivory-handled at my host. The man was shaky. My host laughed and shook his head as if embarrassed on the man’s behalf. The revolver looked like a cap gun I had owned, and I could almost smell the smoke the toy gun had produced—a sulfuric odor forever tied with the endless evenings of July in adolescence. Without quite thinking, I began moving down the hill. It was satisfying, moving so coolly down into the ravine. My host finished laughing and motioned for the gun. He motioned in a casual way, as if he had loaned the stranger his plaything and now wanted it back. The stranger kept the gun on him. My host stepped toward him, still motioning, and the stranger brought the butt of the revolver down against my host’s cheekbone. My host crumpled. The stranger stared down at his body. A mixture of horror and surprise came across his face. I saw him realize that his decision had not been the end to their confrontation but rather the beginning—the introduction of a whole new set of decisions, all grisly. He started to point the gun at my host, and I ran yelling from the bushes.

I don’t know why the stranger didn’t shoot me. This moment perplexes me. I wouldn’t call it luck, but whenever I tell the story to someone they describe it as such. Either way, the man ran off.

I knelt down by my host. He wasn’t unconscious, but he was thoroughly dazed. I asked him question after question—Who was that man? Should I call a doctor? Will you be okay?—and eventually he told me to fuck off. I didn’t listen the first time, and he pushed me back and called me a miserable little twerp and told me he’d see me at the house. I ran off.

I went to my room—a guest room with a flimsy but cared for mattress—and pretended to sleep until my hostess gave a trio of knocks and told me dinner was ready. I kept my eyes on my plate for most of the meal. I looked up and there the old man was, eyeing me, fork and knife poised above his cut of ham. Something beneath language happened, and we nodded to each other—one swift stroke—and the tension left the room. I considered the nod a thank you, and, as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I washed the dishes and went to bed early.

The next morning, my hostess asked what I was going to do after here. We were out in the garden, weeding. It was a good question. I had burned a lot of bridges in Bloomington, and the ones that remained would lead me to the places that had led me here. I said that I didn’t know. Indianapolis for a year, maybe. She frowned at me. Indianapolis, she repeated. On her tongue, the word sounded dirty. She said she had been to Indianapolis exactly once, for a 4H competition. A Black man had smiled at her, and she had no intention of returning. She had not, regrettably, referred to him as “a Black man.” I flinched at her word choice and she rolled her eyes and said, “Or whatever you call them.” I suddenly felt an exhaustion with the place. I reconsidered her question with fresh intensity. What next? It was a practical concern, now, not a heady theoretical. She plucked a weed I hadn’t noticed and threw it in our compost pail.

At dinner, two extra places were set at the table. I sat and waited until my host welcomed two strangers into the home, two nearly identical-looking men, broad shouldered and hulking with big, stupid brows and knuckles like cue balls. We all ate ravenously and in silence. My host cleared his plate and leaned back, and so did the men. They complimented my hostess’s cooking without looking at her. One of them dragged his finger through the remaining grease and licked it. My hostess cleared the table of plates. Only when the sound of the kitchen faucet began did my host begin to speak.

He explained his plan for revenge. I did not know who was included when he said, “we.” He glanced over to me occasionally, but his attention was largely focused on the two others. I thought, maybe wishfully, that I was a witness, that if things went wrong during his plan—and it sounded like a lot could—I would know what had happened. He finished and the two men nodded. All three stood at the same time. My host cocked an eyebrow at me. Still seated, I shook my head and told him I couldn’t. It was the closest thing to the truth I could say. I hadn’t felt out of place before that day, but now my being here—the place’s existence, even—seemed unbearably odd. My host shrugged like he wasn’t all that surprised. The trio exited through the back door, and my hostess, wiping her hands with a dish towel, moved to the glass door to watch the woods accept them and then went into the kitchen. I heard the flicking of the gas stove and soon enough the tea kettle sang. She left by the sliding door with a steaming mug and a bottle of liquor in the crook of her arm. I had seen her do this before; she would drink the tea, ditch the bag, and start her proper drinking from the tea-stained mug. I went to my room, and, as thoughtlessly as possible, began assembling my few belongings. It was disturbing how quickly I could be ready to leave this place.

Stepping out of my room, I checked to make sure my hostess was still outside. I saw her graying head snap back while taking a shot, and I slipped into the master bedroom. There was the money, same as I had left it. I took the duffel bag and closed the drawer. I slipped back to my room and set the bag beside my own. It seemed too easy, this flight. I wanted it to feel momentous. Out of arrogance or nostalgia, I wanted to mark the moment.

I walked out of my room and into the living room. The last of the sunlight filtered in through the window cut into their front door. I said goodbye to the empty house and gave myself the creeps. I put my bags down, and I went out the back sliding door to give my hostess a cryptic goodbye, a mystery she would only understand after seeing her empty drawer, my neatly made bed. She didn’t greet me as I grunted hello. Instead, she cleared her throat.

She spoke to me at length, but it didn’t sound like she was telling a story; it sounded like she was narrating the private images that paraded between her eyelashes and her bifocals. She said that when she was a girl, she worked as a bank teller. She had been given out as a favor to the owner of the bank, a church friend of her parents. Her being too young to work legally was no issue. It was a local branch of a regional bank, the kind of place in which arrangements could be made and infractions overlooked. Her parents took half of her weekly paycheck—rent, they said—and compelled her to tithe an additional ten percent.

The work was, as they say, feast or famine. There would be rushes that turned her into a machine, where rapid repetition shaved unnecessary movements until she was a sharp tack with a dull mind; then there would be periods of idleness when she would be overtaken by a heady, unpleasant wistfulness so profound she wanted to weep. When she encountered housewives toting children on their hips, she gave them two lollipops and a wink in an attempt to clarify that, no, she was not one of the adults, that she was still one of them. They blinked and clutched at their mothers, who recounted every bill of their withdrawal with suspicion. The men who came in were taciturn and gruff with dirt under their nails. They came from the quarry and did not wish to be delayed.

There was one man, though, who distinguished himself from the crowd. She had first noticed his hands. They were clean—immaculate even. His nails were trimmed with a precision she never saw on men and seldom on women. He wore rings, too: three adorning his right hand and two on his left, all bulky, gold with inscrutable script and impressive stones. She had never seen a man wear any ring besides a wedding band. He caught her staring at them one day and clacked them against the counter.

The man’s slacks—black—always sported two smart creases, and his hair—graying black—was always slicked back. He wore a belt buckle heavy with something like a pearl but far too large and flat to be one, something milky and iridescent. The ends of his bolo ties were capped with gold aglets, and he was never without a toothpick in his mouth. For all his decoration, though, it was evident he was a hard man. There was something unflinching, taut, even a little threatening about him. She was scared to contradict him.

The man remembered things about her. During his biweekly visits, he always managed to bring up something from his last visit, something she’d forgotten she’d mentioned, and this always gave her a little trill of joy. After several weeks of this, while she counted his deposits, she realized none of her other customers brought in rubber-banded bundles of cash. His account balance, too, now seemed odd. When he returned the next week, she saw how the other customers avoided his eyes and his easy posture, and how they kept their distance from him in line. When he came into the bank, he left his Cadillac idling, window open. This implied to her a kind of power she did not yet grasp. She had long felt that the feeling he aroused in her was too pleasing to be fear but now registered it as such.

My hostess shushed me though I had remained silent. I suddenly felt bashful, as if I’d been caught eavesdropping, and I realized I had been listening with a detached, lurid fascination. She held a finger to her lips and leaned forward, peering into the woods. The darkness rendered the woods two dimensional. I couldn’t imagine them containing anything. She leaned back and took a drink. Part of me hoped she wouldn’t continue her story. Something about the way she drank made it clear that this was no fairy tale. She breathed out a liquory sigh, took another drink and continued.

She stayed afraid of the man. None of his wisecracks or little flatteries could bring them back to their previous cordiality. When he asked her questions, she tried to give curt responses. She only relaxed when his Cadillac left the parking lot. One night, she waited outside after locking up the bank, waiting for her father to arrive. It was one of those November nights when the forward march of winter seems to halt. She savored the weather. She looked up and saw a bright patch of clouds and wondered if they hid a full moon. She looked down at the crunch of steps. Before she could recognize him, the man’s breath was hot on her face, thick with a smell she would, a few years later identify as liquor. He grabbed her arm just above the elbow and spat slurred questions at her. He asked if she was the type of girl who believed anything said about a man. He asked if it was her or anyone else’s business how a man makes his money. He asked if he was undeserving of all the good soft things like her because of how he provided. He jostled her, and she shook her head “no” until the clips holding her hair came loose and between the hair and the tears she couldn’t see much of anything. The man stopped. He looked away, wide-eyed like a deer that’s caught a foreboding scent. He straightened up and looked a little embarrassed. She felt that he was going to do something, but she didn’t know what. The man inhaled sharply and ran off. Within the minute, her father was there to pick her up. It was dark in the cab. Neither of them saw each other’s faces.

For two days she was too sick to leave her room. Her parents blamed her habit of waiting outside after work and thought she was old enough to not go and do a fool thing like that. The trickle of sympathy they had for her ran dry on the third day. They allowed her to skip school but insisted she go back to work, to expose her to the real world. She resolved that if the man came in she would be pleasant and perfectly cordial. In fact, she resolved to be cheery and friendly to every customer that day and the next day and the day after that. She’d be bright and alert for all of her classes. She’d raise her hand when she knew the answer and when she had a question. She’d be the perfect daughter, too. She’d peck her parents’ cheeks and set the table and fix them drinks and wolf down dinner with gratitude. She would be perfect from now on, she thought, and life would return to normal.

She kept it up for a week. Her effort, Herculean, noble, seemed to wrench the world back into its proper shape, until the boss’s wife whispered to her that that Cadillac there sure had been idling for a while. The boss’s wife then laughed a high caterwaul of a laugh and fingered the gossamer-thin chain that suspended a cross around her neck. The girl looked through the window and saw the car. The driver-side door opened. Out from the car stepped the blondest woman she’d ever seen in her life. The little tinkling bell on the door announced her entrance, and the blond woman advanced on the counter, voice rising, brandishing a pink fingernail so long it arched like an old stone bridge. She shouted words the girl did not yet know. She accused her of playing innocent and reminded her that she was a girl just like her once and she knew exactly what kinds of schemes and plots and plans crouched behind those big doe eyes of hers. The woman concluded by asking if she knew what was coming to her if she didn’t stop running around after men she had no right running after. The woman blinked decisively, her eyelashes so heavy with mascara they moved like butterfly wings too wet to fly. She turned her nose up in victory, and turned on a spindly heel. The little bell jingled as she left.

It was quiet in the bank.

When her mother came to pick her up, the boss called her into his office and explained what had happened and told her mother what he’d already told the cashier: she was fired. The car ride home was silent. At home, she pressed her ear to the wall and heard her mother explain the story to her father. She pointed out that their daughter had not cried in the car and submitted this as evidence that she was guilty, the instigator, cunning in ways neither of them were trained to handle. A church friend had advised her father, it was best for a father to never lay hands on his daughter to avoid unnatural connections from forming in the girl’s mind, so instead he used a flat wooden spoon with slats cut to drain broth to beat her.

My hostess was drunk enough to be repeating parts of the story. Her narrative progressed like an old winding river ready to oxbow. On her third description of the spoon with which her father beat her—how she could never look at the thing the same again, how it reeked with hate—something slipped. She stopped and looked up to me. It was a pleading look. She looked unbelievably small. She asked me what it was about liquor that had entranced me. The enormity of the answer inhibited any response. It was something I thought of often—incessantly—but when she asked, my thoughts scattered like roaches from a flame. I looked out into the woods and, after a moment, responded that I didn’t like feeling brittle, and that liquor seemed to help with that. She nodded slowly. Her silence suggested that she accepted my explanation, and her unqualified acceptance made me regret not giving her the full answer, that booze made it easier to be the kind of person a very rotten part of me wanted to be. It made it easy to be a glutton and a liar and a cynic and an ass. Liquor would’ve made it easy, sensible, to walk out the front door with the money, drive off, and later relay the story as one of cunning instead of villainy.

My hostess asked if I thought her husband would return. I wanted to tell her he would, but I knew she’d think less of me if I tried to comfort her. I said that I didn’t know. I put my hand on her shoulder and let her bones turn warm from under it. Soon she slept, and I went inside.

I unpacked my belongings and restored the duffel bag to its drawer. I expected some flood of pleasure, a pleasing sense of righteousness, upon closing the drawer, but instead I only felt the dull ache of loss. This feeling, in the coming years, would return to me again and again. I’d feel it when granting forgiveness or offering help. I’d feel it when donating money or donating time. I’d feel it every time I turned down a drink. Over time, I would learn to follow it, to let it guide me. That dull ache became a signal I was moving in the right direction. That night, for the first time, sitting on my flimsy mattress, I let it envelop me. I sighed a deep sigh and waited for exhaustion to extinguish the ache.

The screen door opened to heavy breathing, strange yelps. I ran from my room and saw my host, supported by the two large men, stagger to a chair in the kitchen. My hostess threw open a drawer and removed gauze and scissors. My host’s eyes were purpled by blows. His hair, sweat slicked, clung to his forehead. I approached. “What happened?” I asked, and all the old, hunched man on the chair said was, “I gave it to ’em. I fucking gave it to ’em.” My hostess shushed him and started wrapping his wound, a gouge on the hairless underside of his upper forearm. She wrapped his arm with gauze, the gauze turning crimson then white, crimson then white, as she applied layer after layer in an attempt to outpace the bleeding. The two hulks stood to the side, wordless, motionless, while my hostess’s eyes cried out for help. Compelled by that dull ache, I ran to my host and pressed my hands on his wound to stanch the bleeding. My hostess did the same, her hands covering mine, our fingers slipping between each other, lubricated by warm, viscous blood, and I have never before or since felt a more pleasing tactile sensation.

SURVIVING YOU

ANTHONY AGUERO

After nearly 7 years clean

I don’t know how I did it,

loved you all those years in the quiet landscape

of a burning vineyard, of a toppling mountain,

of a drowned seascape, and had stayed

attentive, at-ease, hands behind my back,

waiting for the soft-hook following Go,

and the on-and-on insanity of day-after-day

of the hand reaching for the other hand,

shaking it for its own pleasure, checking

for the rhythmic music of my own pulse.

And I don’t know how I lived for myself

all those years lying on the cold surface

of a man’s bed claiming Messiah, flesh

of my flesh, and the stream of golden light

escaping from him. I can’t resist you,

that velvet head lying on my chest, soft-breath,

and the unprotected extension of my hand

to your bulging hand; non-sated, hungry

and never really safe. I sit and think of you:

our joist, our spar-to-spar, our never-ending,

and our last hour where you couldn’t comfort me.

NEAR THE HAMBURGER BAHNHOF

ANTHONY AGUERO

I hope you will probably never return,

or anything is better than unseeing you.

You whose name written in a question mark

while all the old and young men lay

naked in the park. Is it obvious

that I do not grieve for you any second;

that my coffee also lay bitter and exposed?

You touch and touched me, that day,

near the museum while the Oaks

designated themselves lush and green;

their roots, a trill of hidden veins holding

one another. I cannot remember

you, except our bones both sweating.

Except this stumbling for self-preservation.

MENTAL HEALTH DAYS

SAKENA JWAN WASHINGTON

My second miscarriage was caused by Trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality that my doctors attributed to “advanced maternal age.” This was before a team of sociologists released a study declaring Pittsburgh, the place I call home, to be the worst city for Black women. Fetal deaths are two times as likely among Pittsburgh’s Black women compared to white women. So unless I could have gotten my hands on a time machine and a moving truck, this wasn’t something I could fix overnight. At forty-one, I didn’t feel that old, but each time I saw those words on a pathology report, I imagined my eggs with little canes complaining about the weather in my ovaries. It didn’t seem too late to be a mother, but every time I considered my age, I remembered how much time I’d wasted with men whose blizzard of red flags I muscled through in denial.

In my late twenties, I ignored the memo that nearly everyone I knew from high school was dating husband material. That tip was on full display in the quarterly alumnae magazine of the private all-girls school I attended in Pittsburgh, in which scores of women posed with their college sweethearts. Many of these women pursued college degrees at highly selective schools and went on to become doctors, engineers, and executives. But I don’t remember their career updates as much as I do their wedding photos.

In my thirties, when baby announcements cluttered that same magazine, I was too busy chasing my dreams as a creative writer in Los Angeles, dealing with annoying bouts of vertigo, and pursuing pseudo-relationships that might one day lead to my very own class update in the alumnae pages. By the time I found Rick, at thirty-six, time was against us.

I was eight weeks pregnant when my husband and I took a trip to Savannah, Georgia to celebrate our third anniversary. I was on my fifth consecutive pregnancy in eighteen months.

The sun was beating down during our walking tour of the city. The shade of the Spanish moss couldn’t compete with the overwhelming humidity, as our passionate tour guide offered up the history of every park and square in Savannah. I’d been having slight cramps since the tour started, but I told myself that my abdominal ligaments must be stretching. (I knew so much about fetal development by that point in my life, I could have taught a course on it.) We were at least a mile in when we stopped at a local coffee shop.

After a ten-minute wait to enter the single stall, I realized that what I’d assumed was thigh sweat was actually the beginning of a miscarriage. I didn’t want to stop the tour or alarm my husband, so I stuffed my underwear with as much toilet paper as I could cram in.

Rick knew right away that something was wrong. “Do you want to head back?” he asked.

I refused and kept walking. I didn’t want to ruin this trip too.

For almost three years, every moment that should have brought joy was experienced through the lens of grief. When I wasn’t depressed, I was jealous, and when I wasn’t jealous, I was angry. I cried in bed, on buses, on my couch, or sprawled out on ultrasound exam chairs. My emotions lived inside me like a raging storm. They were loud and deafening, but I couldn’t find the words to describe how broken I felt to my close friends and family, the very people who could have given me the space I needed to heal. My therapist was the only one who knew the depths of my shame and blame—the shame of my infertility and the blame of waiting too long to become pregnant.

If I’d learned anything from all the healthy pregnancies in my orbit it was this—the more nonchalant you were, the more likely you were to deliver a baby. The women who snuck a glass of wine, or ate sushi, or casually forgot which ultrasound it was when you heard the heartbeat (week 10), or how soon you could screen for abnormalities (week 12), never had anything to worry about. These women, the ones taking naps instead of harassing their PCP for a quick blood test to see if their hCG was doubling or tracking mobile ultrasound units like a vigilante, always made it to week 40. Most of these women were younger and white—it’s true—but I fixated instead on how my eagerness to get and stay pregnant jinxed the whole process.

This time around, I decided to play it cool and just keep enjoying our walking tour of lovely Savannah. When we arrived at our final stop, a stately building with Corinthian columns and a story that quickly escaped my memory, our tour guide offered to take our photo. I posed next to Rick, smiling under the Savannah sun like death hadn’t found us, yet again.

As soon as we landed in Pittsburgh, we dropped our bags and drove to the emergency room, the cramps steadily worsening. As they placed me in a wheelchair, a dark red spot formed on my sweatpants like a Rorschach print in real time. The doctor pressed the ultrasound probe into my abdomen, hunting for any sign of life. But the fetus was gone. My elevated hormones were the only proof that I’d ever been pregnant.

I gave myself twelve hours to get it together before I returned to the office where I’d spent the previous four months building websites and writing content for a local university. I wanted to ask my boss for a week to lie in bed and cry, but something told me those kinds of requests weren’t honored. So, I said nothing. I arrived at work with bags of Byrd’s Famous cookies, a Savannah treat, to share with my coworkers. “How was the trip?” each of them asked, with the upbeat curiosity of a collegial work environment.

“It was great,” I blurted.

Ten days later, I walked into our daily meeting and my teammates erupted into the “Happy Birthday” song. I was forty-two, and all I could think about was the loss of another year. I forced a smile as our boss passed around a box of cupcakes.

She wiped the crumbs with a napkin and then took a beat. “By the way,” she added, “I’m pregnant.”

As the words came out of her mouth, I braced myself for impact. Pregnancy announcements always felt like a punch to the gut with a hot poker simultaneously tearing my heart out. With practiced pain, I delivered an Oscar-worthy performance of smiles and congratulations, and then escaped to the bathroom and sobbed until my eyes were bloodshot. I sat on the toilet dry heaving, cursing my body.

My phone pinged with a Slack notification from my boss—the meeting had started. I splashed cold water on my face and rushed to her office. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

I wanted to say, I feel like dying. I want to crawl under my desk and never see daylight again. Instead, I told her I had allergies.

A year later and for the first time in two years, I wasn’t pregnant or trying to get pregnant. When I finally saw a specialist about my recurrent bouts of vertigo, I learned that I’d been having vestibular migraines. Upon hearing my entire reproductive history, the doctor told me that these types of migraines are triggered by hormone fluctuations.

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, “we’ve stopped trying.”

For me, trying had come in many forms. First there was having sex on day 10 of my cycle, a calculation my gynecologist arrived at after scribbling on his desk blotter. Day 10 worked like magic: I got pregnant every single time. I didn’t need to stand on my head after sex or consult the phases of the moon. It just happened.

Friends, family, even my therapist, assured me that getting pregnant was half the battle, though I seemed to keep losing the other half. I tried IVF as a means to tease out a more viable-appearing egg, but that failed—twice. There were high dose supplements like vitamin D and CoQ10—a magical cocktail that might give my eggs a homeopathic boost. But nothing could get me to week 40. I could get pregnant, but I just couldn’t stay pregnant.

I was far more comfortable talking about vestibular migraines than I was explaining the nuances of miscarriage. Migraines never called into question my mental health, my age, or the state of my reproductive organs. They didn’t make me feel fundamentally defective, as my recurring miscarriages so painfully did.

After a series of vertigo attacks in the office, my boss asked me in to talk. I sat across from her desk as she looked at me with concern. “I think you should take a mental health day tomorrow,” she said.

I eyed her warily. A mental health day?

“You seem like you are under a lot of stress.”

The next day, instead of frantically chasing a bus, I stayed in bed and went back to sleep for eight more hours. No internet, no TV, no texting with friends—just sleep. When I woke up, I thought about all the ways I’d always fought through my depression. I thought about all the times I showed up—to happy hours and baby showers to eight-hour workdays and jury duty—when I should have stayed home.

During those three years of trauma, I never once went to any of my previous bosses and asked for a “mental health day” unless it was in jest. I worried that if I told them how much I cried, how many meals I skipped, and how little I desired to wake up every day, that it would discredit my work ethic just as my career was taking off. Severe depression isn’t exactly the career benchmark for promotion and distinguished service.

My grief over the promise of someone who didn’t have a name, but only a silly nickname, a due date, and a barely measurable heartbeat seemed too intangible for anyone to understand. There seemed to be a hierarchy of loss, with first trimester losses notably low on the scale. It was the same way that people react when you tell them your aunt died, rather than your parents or siblings, and they respond, “Were you guys close?” instead of just offering their condolences.

My body seemed to have its own way of stretching out the mourning process, of not letting go, even after an ultrasound had confirmed that our embryo stopped growing. For two of my miscarriages, it took a D&C to fully remove the tissue. Without the procedure, who knows how long my body would have stayed in denial?

A week after our third miscarriage, Rick suggested we play tennis to get us out of the house. I resisted at first because I was angry that the clouds could part so soon for him, that he could move forward again. But I agreed to join him. As I got dressed, I felt something push out of me like a small, squishy organ. I went to the bathroom and discovered a crime scene in my underwear. Afterward, I cried into Rick’s arms, “My body is a graveyard.”

I want to tell myself that I’ve learned so much from this period in my life. I want to say that I’m better about telling employers, family, and friends what I need, even when it’s inconvenient for them. I want to say that I’m more honest about telling people that I’m not okay, instead of smiling through my pain. I want to tell women and girls that I don’t just talk about self-care, I live it. And that if something like this happened again, I would demand, even beg for all the mental health days I needed to feel whole again.

But it’s not true. Three months into my new job and a global pandemic, I got pregnant for the sixth time. It was a surprise to both of us. And like the times before, it ended in another miscarriage. I reported to work the next day. While the world was battling Covid-19 and the reckoning of Black men and women murdered across the country, I was safe and relatively healthy with a recent promotion and a healthy paycheck. I looked around me and everyone was trudging through twelve-hour workdays, layoffs, isolation, exhaustion, sickness, burnout, low morale, fear, and anxiety. So, who was I to ask for a mental health day?

WHEN IT SMELLS LIKE RAIN

MONIQUE FERRELL

when it smells like rain

I know that you are comingcan feel your proximity and your intentions

my world is colored by the threatand your impulses

and so I brace myself

want to crawl back into my warm bedand remember yesterday

the there in the beforewhen I was ableand steady on my feetready to run

and nowI’m not so sure

perhaps there should be another word for depression

we’ve become too accustomed to the soundthe pressing together

of its consonants and vowelsagainst our tongue and teeth

there should be something more formidablein its place

for a thing that makes you forget yourself

dirties each stream you drink fromblows away the footprints

of every roadyou have ever walked downuntil you become terrified

that you’ll neverfind the way back

there is no god hereor black jesusand the light is hard to come by

so you walk forwardstumbling in the dark

feeling at wallsthat are no longer there

because someone once told youyou had to…have to

every time

retrace your footsteps

and thenfind the way back home

SIDESHOW

ANDREA McLAUGHLIN

You’re at the end of a six-month tour. Only a week out from home, but that’s a long time from where you sit. Parked at a café on Silver Street in Albuquerque. Alone. It’s 10 a.m. and already you’ve fought an urge to put a waiter’s face through a window. You tip him anyway. You’ve burned through a lot of good will since last year’s stint in rehab. And you know what they’re saying now: you might be sober, but you’re still an asshole.

Before you can reach the door, it yawns open. New Mexico is a hot breath in your face. You blow past a few fans skirting in. Three sets of knees and shins. Chipped pink, blue, and red toenails spilling out of sandals. They don’t need faces to show you they aren’t pretty. You feel their eyes on your back. You know what’s coming so you walk faster. Crossing onto Gold, earbuds in, feigning oblivion.

This is meth country, the Land of Enchantment. And you’re in the territory of craving. Everywhere you look, people have what you want. A leathery Native sits between two parked cars drinking from a paper bag. He is the heart of the place: shriveled, brown, wheezing. And there’s a bald kid with a swastika burned into his skull, dragging his saggy pants through the intersection. Half the white skin he’s so happy about scratched off his neck. But you know that itch. You’d know it anywhere.

If you can make it to the end of tour, you’ll have a year. You’ll cruise into your home group in Los Angeles, and that starfucker of a sponsor will give you a cake. They’ll sing you a birthday song. Someone in the audience will say, “tell us how you did it.” If you’re honest, you’ll say it’s the meetings. The steps. The blowjobs. No particular order.

The other thing that could happen is you’ll drink. Because it’s a day between shows. Because the new keyboardist is a slob. Because everyone in the band is younger than you. Because you’re the front man, the most famous, and fuck them. Because it’s a hundred and two degrees. Because no one really cares about you anyway.

The more you think about it, you’re terrified. Like that drink can fuck you without consent. And you know where the drink takes you. You see it so clearly: coming to from a nod out, the needle planted like a flag between your toes. Please, God. Don’t let it happen.

You’re trembling before a mural of multi-colored children. They smile, hold hands. You know them. They’re painted on a wall of the fire station across from the café where you were just parked. Somehow, you’ve circled back to Silver. Two brawny white men hose down a truck in the driveway. It’s a new truck, bright cherry red. And so filthy hot the water dries on contact.

Only part of you understands you can’t black out before taking a drink. The rest believes it can happen all on its own: the left hand won’t know what the right is doing. The little scene playing out in the hotel bathroom of your mind sucks all the spit from your tongue. Your stomach turns, and you might cry. Because you know where it ends. Barefoot on the streets of Rio, your front tooth knocked down your throat, and a fresh case of Hep C. Or a gun in your mouth. You don’t know which you prefer.

In rehab, they want to know, “What’s your DOC?”

“All the drugs” is your answer. That’s your drug of choice.

Here in Albuquerque you decide to give it time. See if the craving holds up. You make a deal with the God of your understanding. If He’s still torturing you an hour from now, then fuck Him. In the meantime, you walk. Sweat in your eyes, hate in your throat, and so crushingly sad in your heart. How did you become this shitbag of a person?

Ten minutes into the hour it isn’t budging. And you make another choice, ducking into a Circle K. You’re the fire truck in reverse. Sweaty red face drying hard on contact with a blast from the AC.

Always when you enter a store, you track the liquor. It’s just where your eyes go first. And you’d be standing at the intersection between tallboy Monsters and Dos Equis now if not for that woman in the candy aisle. Small denim shorts on shiny blue heels. A bag of Skittles in her hand. “Taste the rainbow?” she says, winking.

You wish you’d showered. She smells very clean. Her breasts spill over a yellow V-neck and a soft fleshy roll peeks out between the shirt and shorts. She smiles. Glossy purple lips spreading over a set of veneers. “How you doing, honey?”

You’re suspicious. She’s either pretending, or she really doesn’t know who you are. “I’m doing.”

“Oh yeah?” She has French porcelain nails and a funny way of throwing her weight around. “What is it you do?”

Her eyes are telling the truth under all those fake lashes. You’re nobody to her. For this, she’s a godsend. “I guess I play music.”

“That’s a coincidence,” she says. “I’m an entertainer myself.”

“A good one, I bet.”

Why wouldn’t you take her up on it? You’re woke. And if they ask, you’re with the liberal line that says sex work is as good as any work.

So you wait while she pays for the Skittles. But the kid at the register spots you over her shoulder. He wears a blue backward cap and his forehead looks itchy around the little plastic snaps. The rest of his face is exploding with pubescent pus.

“Aren’t you—?”

“No,” you say.

He keeps looking. “Are you sure?”

“I know who the fuck I am. Give me the key to the bathroom.”

There you are again, going down in his Twitter feed: Asshole.

But this gift from your higher power? Bless her, she’s unfazed. She just goes on smiling while he fumbles for the key.

You use the bolt on the bathroom door to hold it open. She’s about a minute behind you. Two of three fluorescent bulbs are burnt out over the scratched-up mirror, where you can almost see her face while she washes her hands. Like a surgeon, up to the elbows. The air is thick with shit and piss and bleach. You wonder if she can taste it, too. You lean on a sticky wall, overcome by her beauty and professionalism.

She doesn’t go to her knees but squats down on those patent leather heels. Pulls gingerly at your zipper. You think someone upstairs has mixed up the order of things. That it should be you kneeling at her feet. But it isn’t. And it never will be.

You stare into the kinky roots of her ironed hair. Her long fingers wrap around your cock and her mouth is heaven, slick and warm. You think she will choke, but she only cries taking you into her throat. Those tears dribbling off her chin are the saviors of your sobriety. You come very fast. An angel has given you one more day.

The guys don’t like you. They especially don’t like the post-rehab humble act. It disallows an upgrade from this shitty bus. So when they aren’t there in the front lounge, it’s an expected vacancy. But you hear other voices in the back.

There are two, a pretty blonde and her unfortunate sidekick whose grip you will have to wrestle her from. They’re talking low around the cluttered table. Seeing you, they fall silent.

“How’d you get in here?”

“Blake let us in,” the husky friend says.

The new merch guy seems to think girls are always welcome. Your eyes on the blonde, you consider firing him. You also decide she isn’t from Albuquerque—her skin is too nice. Still, she’s small-town. And young, with big frightened eyes.

“Get out,” you say.

She stands slowly, showing her thinness in a white sundress. Her hair pulled to one side with a couple of berets.

The friend is up, too. Big and sweaty with rust-colored freckles and purple rings around her eyes. “Are you serious?” she says.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” you say to the blonde.

She flushes pink. “I can’t stay without Gina,” she whispers.

“Yes, you can.”

Gina tugs and your girl follows with her head down. You feel a twinge of sadness watching her go. But when she’s gone, your legs grow heavy. You’re relieved you won’t have to fuck her.

The bus was stopped when you fell asleep. Now the engine hums and you struggle to find your way between worlds. A moment ago, you were in that hotel bathroom. Naked, bloody, looking for a vein. The tears are still wet on your face. But your arms are smooth. No holes.

You search your memory for that moment when you picked up again and can’t find it. The nightmare isn’t real. You shake your head and shudder. You can hardly believe the luck at finding your life intact.

And what is this life? Navigated by some middle-aged driver while you sleep, entombed in bunks that stack like catacombs. Of course, you’re top shelf. The ceiling of a living death just inches from your face. With the curtain closed, it’s always night.

Blake’s nose whistles from the bed below—this is almost comforting. And your home screen says June 19th, the last day of tour. You check the weather for Vegas and twenty-three texts from almost as many women. Still, you can’t shake the sense that something terrible has happened. You think, No more hookers. You’re done with all that.

This is how you pacify the terror of being; you promise to change.

You place your feet tentatively on the ground, not really believing they are your feet. Instead, they’re made of glass. You know quite intimately how they can shatter.

Alex is the only one up at this hour, hiding in the back lounge behind A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He’s your third bass player in two years, and already, he avoids eye contact.

But you’re glass. You’re nothing. “You alright?”

“Good,” he says. “Real good.”

You don’t like the kid’s submission. It makes you feel like a monster. You pick up the New Yorker you bought in Tuscaloosa and pretend to browse. Last time you spoke to Alex was after the show in Houston. Your voice had quit on you three times that night. You were buzzing with fear—if you couldn’t sing, there’d be nothing for you in this world. And the cravings were so bad you came in like a tornado, kicking beer cans and swiping takeout from the counters.

In truth, you didn’t speak. You shouted in his face that you were surrounded by children. You owe the guy an amends. “Hey, man,” you say. “I’m sorry for whatever.”

“Not at all.” He rubs his eye with a dirty knuckle. “We’re good.”

He’s lying, but it’s not his fault. Nobody wants conflict on the last day of tour. And everybody lies to you.

Narcotics Anonymous meets at four in the drafty basement of a First Presbyterian. Congregants tumble in like litter swept off the Strip. A road-burnt biker with a court card and asphalt from his latest collision still under his skin. That shoeless homeless. And the stripper-hot ginger with natural tits and fake lips. This is what you love about NA: everyone in it is still living just a breath or two ahead of death. Plain alcoholics can’t be counted on for that kind of honesty.

If there’s anything you’ve learned in these meetings, it’s that you leave the women alone. It’s the least you can do. A kind of penance. But with the chairs set up in a circle, there’s nowhere to hide the girl from sight. You take her three o’clock. Peripherally marvel at how she plays it all down. Jeans and a plain white T. No makeup. Every time you look up from the yellowing linoleum, you notice something about her that draws you to look again. She’s been crying; her nose is pink and a little swollen.

Someone closes a door. The air is closer with the smell of burnt coffee and old white men, settling like dust on the chairs. Together you ask God for serenity and offer up your names.

“Penny,” your girl says without a qualifier. Then, “I have two days.”

“That a girl,” one of the old timers says, poking her in the arm.

She blushes up to her hairline. The prick is sober too long—he’s forgotten the fragility of two days. He wears a fanny pack on the hip of his acid washed jeans and brings his folded arms to rest on a hard, pompous belly.

You know what it is about Penny that you can’t look away from: the innocence of early sobriety. When every turn requires a reeducation, and you are blown over by the simplest exchanges. You remember it now and the fear is exquisite. If only for a moment, the memory redeems you. Finally, you surrender to the possibility that part of you remains unsoiled. And you do cry.

For a last show you can drop your defenses. Nothing left onstage today will take away from tomorrow. So you howl up at the nosebleeds. Hold the audience in your chest, all the love you siphon from their hearts. You’re lit up by it. A light that eclipses pain to blanket the stadium in a fuzzy incandescence. This is what you are for—this, and nothing else.

Then it’s over. An afterglow carries you offstage, so you can’t feel the glass feet. You can’t say with any certainty that they’ve ever touched ground. And you thank the guys. Still beaming so you can hardly make out their faces behind the glare. But you remember to address them one at a time. You think, Kindness is the key to everything. All you have to do is stop being a dick and your problems disappear.

Already, the question is creeping on you: How?

Two hours in Los Angeles and the resolution is intact. You’re not a man who pays for sex. You’re a homeowner with so much to be grateful for: a craftsman style bungalow in the cool shadows of Topanga Canyon oak trees. The place is almost normal, except for the sticker price and a thousand-gallon aquarium in the den. Still, you suffer the suspicion that none of it really belongs to you. How can it? When you believe comfort is a luxury for the deserving.

It’s this propensity to stand outside your off-tour life, looking in on the dreams you once held, that makes you squirrely. A craving comes on. You try to sweat it out on the treadmill. Stuff it down with half a cherry pie. Get ahead of it with four dark cups of coffee. Rub yourself raw to get the poison out. But there aren’t enough black gloved prostate milkers on all of Pornhub to set you free. And this—the not coming—more than anything else, makes you crazy.

At 3 p.m. you’re still packing the nostrils of your imagination with cocaine. You know what NA says: play the tape. And you do, all the way to tomorrow morning, when you trip over a paparazzi crouched in the driveway on your way down to Skid Row. Your friends Joe and Vicky are there in the A-frame tent you bought for them last year. On this tape, nobody ODs. But Joe and Vicky are still too lifted to know or care who you are—saints, really.

Before all that can happen, you take a handful of Trazodone. The only sleep drug an addiction specialist will prescribe. You crawl between linen sheets, so heavy with self-loathing your skin hurts, and close your eyes on daylight.

Anytime you’re horizontal, you anticipate rolling forward. You feel the motion of the bus. It will be a few days before you can rest in stillness. Without the promise of waking up in a new city.

At dawn you reach for the blackout curtain that isn’t there. Discovering your surroundings draws a cold, robbed feeling into your gut. You think a home should be your reward. But now the red cedar beams of your retreat remind you of something else: a wooden box. Kill yourself now and they won’t have to bother with a funeral. You’re already buried.

Writing is the only way back from this estrangement. The only path you know to take possession of your life. And you’ve had a hook whispering in your ear since Albuquerque: This is where you break. You fall apart. In her mouth, and somewhere in your heart …

You drag your feet to the stuffed chair in front of the aquarium. Feeling much smaller than your big extravagance: a silver-scaled Amazonian vampire called Kisses. With your composition book and little vape pen. She’s two solid feet of undulating muscle. Has nearly taken the finger of her last keeper with those six-inch fangs.

You know too well your lyrics, since becoming famous, don’t have any teeth. That most times a hook doesn’t catch but strings you along with a fresh hole through the gills, clouding the water.

Your phone is a lifeline. Seventeen texts before 9 a.m. Erika sends a pic of her cleavage, along with Love and light. XOXO. The boobs are nice, but you hate that brand of SoCal spirituality. Amber wants to know when you’re back in New York. Blaire’s in LA on the 24th and will you be there, too?

What do I need them for? But you do need them, and this makes you angry. You rattle off a few lines. Thinking about you, too. And, Sorry I can’t be there. Then you pull up the schedule for July. Thirteen days before the next show in Minneapolis. At this rate, you won’t survive them.

You search between the lines of a blank page until everything blurs into a white sea of failure, and you remember what today is. June 20th, your sober birthday. You should find a meeting. Pick up a cake somewhere. Call your sponsor and get back to work on that catalog of resentments you’ve been meaning to purge. But there’s no NA in Topanga. The only thing around is that shiny AA speaker meeting in Malibu, glowing with success and social-climbing ambition. You heard that actor there the last time you tried to get sober, and it was enough to send you back to Skid Row.

You can’t go to a place where copping to your birthday triggers a swarm of congratulatory sycophants. All so bright-eyed in their conviction that celebrity imbues you with special knowledge, they hang onto your every word for hints on how to get it.

You hang on a while longer to the promise that your next album lives in this isolation. But you’re so bad off that any meeting is better than no meeting. You throw on some baggy clothes and clunk down the driveway in an ’87 Mazda you bought off the gardener eight months ago. What were you thinking when you did that? You’re a ridiculous man. Hoodie and glasses up, making an unwieldy run for the canyon before that scum behind the trash cans can get a clear shot of your face.

Then it’s June gloom on Pacific Coast Highway. You wouldn’t know there’s an ocean on the other side, except for the incredible fog, drawing on it for density. And you don’t see cars, either. Only the occasional blink of red taillights that stops you just before a crash.

You think you’ve made it. No paparazzi can chase you through this. But instead of the AA meeting directory, you pull up Backpage on your phone. Every third listing offers an erotic massage by Rosie. Faceless Rosie, in a hot pink bra with black trim. So it’s the path of least resistance, making the call, and a U-turn to the 101.

Rosie lives in a brown, boxy complex in Van Nuys. It’s fifteen degrees hotter in the valley. No cloud-cover. And the courtyard smells like baked garbage. You think this is a special circle of hell, but you keep going around it to the back.

Her porch is small. A dead ficus leans like an accusation pointed at its killer behind the door. A couple hundred Camel butts pressed into its soil and heaping. And there’s a red toy truck perched, almost heroically, on this little mountain of asphyxiation.

She has a child. You’re so put off by this you forget to knock. She comes to the door anyway. Draped in a yellow dress with purple flowers. The colors are terrible; they match the bruising around her sunken black eyes.

You never could stand junkie mothers. Even in the NA meetings. Their pitted cheeks and long dry hair. You take one look at Rosie and think, It’s you birthing all this pain.

You know this is related to your mother. Not the one who raised you, but bio mom. If anyone wants the truth about you, it’s simple: you’re the waste of another such dehydrated beauty some asshole couldn’t help but push himself inside. You think she’d have done better to pick up her trash on her way out of this world.

Groping at the old abandonment, you follow Rosie. It’s a studio. Bed unmade, scattered laundry. Crumbs in the shit brown carpet. The massage table in the middle of it is draped with oil-spotted sheets. You see a toddler sized boot kicked off underneath. Finally, it’s the shoe that makes you want to bash your own skull.

“You can take off your clothes,” she says. “Unless you’re shy.”

You can’t look at her face. You hear the missing teeth in her voice and press your tongue to the back of the implant you can afford. This woman is no different from you. She might even be you, the part that’s still sick.

You don’t want any more of that part. But you undress, keeping your socks and underwear. Because your feet and bare ass are too vulnerable. Then you lie, face up on the table. Close your eyes. Wait.

On first contact, her wet hand on your shoulder shoots a chill down into your toes. That’s when you know she’s heroin. That to you all these women are just more drugs. And you laugh. All that clean time you thought you had, all the angels sent down from your higher power: they’ve only served to deliver you here. But you don’t laugh long. Because this here is where the real pain is. And there are only two choices. You can get help. Or the shame you pull from her mouth will kill you.

RELAPSE

EMILY HOCKADAY

My sister says she’s not using. Meteorites streak across

the sky like heroin entering her veins. My sister says

she’s not using, but Instagram holds her skin under scrutiny.

How do I know? The dark comes earlier but still waits

at the corners of the day. I close my eyes to get there faster.

My sister says: I’m not using,

right now. I trace the wormlike

marks on her arms and belly. I leave a bag of food outside

her door. I tuck in a box of fresh-picked blueberries.

My daughter pulled the purple orbs from the bushes with joy.

My sister says she’s not using. The porous skin on the fruit

absorbs this love—this hopeful resilience. I know the flavor

of it. Potent and sweet.

THE WEIGHT

EMILY HOCKADAY

After learning the weight of my

bones—24.8 lbs—I think of my father’s ashes,

carried in a plastic bag with a zip-tie,

disposed of, by shovel and hole,

eventually, in our family yard.

After seeing his body shut down, I

grant my own grace in aging.

Haven’t I spent enough time

hating these 49.5 lbs of muscles, 11.3 lbs of blood,

61.31 lbs of fat and organ and all the viscera

that makes me the person

that you love? This body that—

despite shedding 400 eggs—

nurtured that one chosen embryo,

and brought her into the world

with your hand on my back.

How do I tell her that all the numbers

are useless; will I say

how I kissed his forehead,

my father’s, on his last day,

and the skin felt like wax?

I don’t want her to know yet

how helpless we all are to death.

Kristie held the shovel

that dug the hole. We tipped the bag

until it was empty.

BEETROOT SOUP

SAIMA AFREEN

Hyderabad. The 4 p.m. winter light lit up the window. A pale rectangle fell on V’s burning face. I wiped his forehead with a wet towel, but the 104°F fever kept returning to claim his body. Now and then, his lips would part for a faint murmur, the paracetamol working ever so slowly. V hadn‘t eaten anything since entering this stupor earlier in the day. The doctor couldn’t come before 6 p.m. His body would shiver now and then; he needed to eat something fresh, something nourishing, something to help him recover.

The gray upholstery of the couch held his sleeping body, above which a yellowing poster of La Cupola di Brunelleschi stood guard, almost merging into the butter-white walls. The mountainous 1436 architectural wonder in Florence looked suddenly alive in this skeletal sketch, but its red dome remained dimmer than the onion I was peeling in the kitchen.

With a sharp cut, I sliced fresh beetroots which bled and left maroonish trails on the china bowl. Rang-e-uroos, they call it—the color of brides. My friend V was not fond of the vegetable, yet I was preparing the soup anyway, because it had worked for my father’s recovery when he was gravely ill.

I remembered how much Father used to relish uroosa halwa—he loved to call it by its real name—for its color. His slate-gray eyes would light up from behind the newspaper upon seeing the sweet delight on the tea table. Years later, his glint fixed only on the lacy trim of the tablecloth fluttering in the wind. I’d close the window, draw the curtains, and switch on the light. The yellow bulb was a mellow sunrise above his bed.

The wrinkles on my father‘s face, deep furrows that no light could reach, were filled with years of uncertain train schedules, Marxist flags from his college days, a forsaken haveli with its grand facade in conflict with his ideologies, diaries carrying a young boy’s cursives, memories of a cherry-red tie, the orchestra in Oberoi Grand, the river Hooghly dotted with boats, a lavender sky dawning on the New Empire cinema hall. The pages in his notebook hid couplets in Urdu—the swollen letters silently following the aging trajectory of his blood. The world was a wounded fruit bleeding at the tip of his fountain pen, spilling too much ink to write “the end.”

For Father’s dinner, the doctor had recommended a thin borscht with bread cubes tossed slightly with butter. Carrots would add a sunflower tint to the beetroot soup, bright in the bowl with curled onion ringlets asleep at the bottom. Anemones at the seabed. Unseen.

Assyrian tablets from 800 BC mention that beetroot grew in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. In 300 BC, Greeks would offer it at the temple of Delphi to Apollo. Romans ate it to heal fever.

The sun had set and V’s forehead was still hot. Patches of sweat appeared on his pullover. Three cushions supported his back as he sat up and sipped a few spoonfuls. The lamp in the corner cast a sandalwood light on his frame. He tried feebly to hum a couplet but then closed his eyes.

The soup is a river at night, its warmth gushing ahead, pushing its way through the throat carrying myths, songs, salt, and sand. The sea rises, the light fails. Father was sick, unable to get up from his bed. He didn’t want dinner but he asked me to prepare beetroot soup. It was a January afternoon in 2013 and Calcutta was wearing an ashen look. There was a power cut. I stirred the soup by candlelight. There was beauty in the simmering red broth, a thin layer of olive oil deconstructing in its own gleam. A light meal to nourish a frail body. Nourish it did, but I couldn’t keep him alive.

Whenever I think of the days when I prepared my father‘s broth, a dark pool rises, its mouth swallowing the pit in my belly. The pen falls, the light fails, the fingers rise with the seagrass but I am helpless, unable to write or think. My face, holding an ocean above, dissolves in the seabed. I don’t feel the weight of the millions of gallons, but feel it becoming me.

The sun rises in another sky, the old blue sky still brushing my father’s empty bed. The notebook on the side table seems to have grown from its sheesham wood like a mushroom in monsoon season. I try to write, but the ink fails at the curvature of the first letter. I forge ahead in the way each heartbeat pumps blood—each drop enabling more life for cells, each cell a construct of the now, a transmitter to the entire system.

American biologist Bruce Lipton’s YouTube lecture on blood makes my fingers move. He says that blood is the culture medium for our cells, and if you change its chemical composition, then you change the fate of the cells as they eavesdrop on one another transmitting your commands. It’s your mind that carries your thoughts, releases chemicals, and affects the culture. Hence, talk gently to yourself. Choose your words carefully as they manifest.

For me, each word is a tiny orchestra waiting for its conductor. Here I am holding a knife to create. Create something soothing that puts the tired flesh to sleep. Gently, lullaby-like. A candle left to last the night. A desire to begin the evening with “Once upon a time…” stories told by my grandmother on her mahogany bed. Or by our housekeeper Chanda Bibi lighting the fire to make rotis, her candyfloss hair lit up against the burning coals. She’d talk about djinns, her encounter with witches in the guava orchard at sunset. Or did she say midnight? Memory changes every time we linger a little longer in the past.

“We are also what we have lost,” a friend once quoted from an Argentinian movie. The words ring in my ears. The deep pink stripes in the beetroot look serpentine, a print seen through an Android filter, one among Caravaggio’s decadent-luscious vegetables—symbols of desire and death. The knife carves its own itinerary through the maroon flesh.

I stir the broth. The low flame pulls the slices of beetroot, carrots, and tomatoes into a slow dance swirling to the center. A candlelight sonata I cannot hear.

The sea is rising again. It fills my mouth, my eyes, my hair, the tip of my toes, the walls in my heart. Waves crash against my bones. What’s broken doesn’t break. It simply dissolves with water to become its own memory. There’s chaos, then peace.

Slowly it quiets down. Something within connects with the enormity of grief. I surrender, allowing it to take over my mind and body. To un-construct each cell, each beat, each drop, till I pulsate with pain like a wind-eaten temple which smells of hymns and sins alike. To feel with such intensity is also to dive deep into consciousness, to turn the unconstructed parts upside down and see what remains unwoven outside. To surrender again, to feel grief as grief is. To understand that grief is also me.

My face has been tightening. Almost starched. But the evening light is comforting, inducing a sense of familiarity. My facial muscles relax as I pour more soup for V. He says he’s beginning to feel better.

Hours are kind strangers, pushing our bodies in the wagons of changing landscapes, timescapes, and spaces that we frequent across cities, trains, stations, taxis, and conversations.

The mountain of my palm is still smudged with the pink juice, just as it was when I’d prepared beetroot for myself in the spring of 2019. I was living in Canterbury, England about to leave for a trip up North. I drank my soup and left a portion on the breakfast table for my housemate Benedikt, whose ruddy face was redder because of a persistent cold he’d caught in Frankfurt.

Hours later, when I arrived at Preston, my poet-professor friend greeted me at her home with a sumptuous lunch and Darjeeling tea. As we ate, she asked about the red spot on my palm. When I told her how beetroot makes my heart bleed, she held my hand and asked me to write about it. I shook my head trying to rub away the stain, but it is stubborn in its stay. Demanding surrender.

In its defiance, I ultimately found a passageway. In its ruby shadow, I found ink for what had stayed unsaid. Ink that washed the wounds within, and flew on paper and poured spoonfuls of soupy warmth inside my cold heart. Warmth that resuscitated my blood, and helped me taste life with its flavors of pain and dared me to continue.

SMOKE

GAETAN SGRO

after Anna Carson DeWitt

Things we lost in the fires—

  koala bears obviously

    also less renowned species

      the long-footed potoroo

        the dunnart’s hideaway

      the ability to run long distances

    to speak in full sentences

  the luxury of hearing sirens

without our minds stampeding

  millennium trees

    grandfather’s plumed haberdashery

      mom’s plein air paintings

        the desire to procreate

          another taco truck in

            Miami Beach

          plausible deniability

        shade

    By the time her head

  contacts the paper padding

both the scientist and the mother in her

    have already deduced the finding

      knowing exactly what’s wrong

        “with the machine”

          she wants to speak up

            to put her OB’s mind at ease

              but the young doctor seems so

                determined to fix the thing

              as if one more turn of the dial

            and the baby’s

          heartbeat

        will come back online

      and all will be well

    but it won’t be

  Things we’ve gained—

    insecurity

      the feeling that at any moment

        the grey ghost could slip through

          cracks in the siding

            a new definition of home

          meaning any place but

        the place

      where we’ve been living

    reckless end of the world sex

  nobody seems to be having

activated alveolar macrophages

  the knowledge that particles

    smaller than 2.5 micrometers

      will slip unnoticed

        past the mother’s defenses

          dissolve in her blood stream

            and take a clean shot

              through the umbilical vein

              the stubborn insistence

            that even now

          there is such a thing

        as a safe space

        space

             big sky

                  black soil

                         seedlings

CROSSCURRENTS

MEREDITH TALUSAN

Whenever you don’t want to be who you are, you call yourself Margaret Jefferson. And that’s who you are now, or who you are when you’re not yourself, walking into the conference room of an accounting firm in a random midtown Manhattan building for an open writers’ meetup in the fall of 2017. You are not a journalist whose beat is violence. You are not a journalist who has just finished a long feature on the murders of trans women of color, hundreds of them stretching back two decades to when someone bothered to start keeping track. You are not a journalist who is a trans woman of color yourself, even if you’re only half-Asian and no one can tell.

Because Margaret Jefferson, she’s just an aspiring fiction writer—presumed Caucasian, presumed straight and cis, presumed not to know what “cis” even means—who’s here to read from a story about what men and women are like, so a few of the dozen people in the room can assure her she’s on the right track. Whenever you’re in a panic about being trans, as you always are when you publish something about how the world treats trans women, you seek out places where people don’t know the truth about you, a place where you can just feel normal. This meetup has been the most reliable.

“This isn’t your first time—right, Margaret?” asks the balding accountant who runs the group.

“No, but I haven’t been in at least a year.” The last time was when you were covering the trial of a Black man who punched a Black trans woman in Harlem after he started flirting with her and then realized she was trans. She fell and hit her head on the pavement, but he kept punching her while she was on the ground. She went into a coma and died.

You survey the room and spy three open seats. You challenge yourself and sit next to the lone Black man.

“Welcome again,” he whispers when you sit down, though the two of you haven’t met before. You smile and his smile back gives you part of why you’re here: the anonymity of a white girl next door, a craving you feel guilty for indulging, especially in front of this man who can’t hide his blackness, not like your whitepassing cispassing.

You can’t help but picture the black of his skin as an eight in a ten-color spectrum of Crayola flesh tones. He’s Black in the close-cropped hair that reminds you of sandpaper, though you know not to say this out loud. He’s Black like the men on the street who taunted you back when you started dressing and who could have easily beaten or killed you. He’s Black like nearly all the men who’ve killed trans women in America, most of whom were their victims’ lovers.

Most of those women were Black too, you remind yourself. And poor, which you are by choice, but not the way those women were. You interviewed an expert about this, who told you that the perpetrators are Black not because they’re Black but because they’re poor people who live in cities, and those people are predominantly Black. They killed not because they’re Black but because poor people have much less access to the education that would allow them to be more tolerant of trans people. They killed not because they’re Black but because their lack of education crosses fatally with their access to trans women of color, who congregate in cities.

In other words, more poor white men would probably have killed trans women of color in rural America if any trans women of color were dumb enough to live there.

Also, this man isn’t Black the way those Black men looked when they taunted you. He wears metal-framed glasses on a peering, contemplative face, like he’s always wondering what’s going on. You spy the skin of his arms under a white button-down, the shape of his thighs in navy dress slacks that pull tight against his body, not in an unpleasant way, but in a way that makes you feel like their maker was imagining a customer with more contained proportions.

It’s your turn to read and your story’s a workplace comedy about a female project manager for an app, who’s trying to wrangle a group of men into doing what she wants. So she represents herself as different archetypes of women they respond to—mother, ingenue, vixen, domme—depending on the man and the situation. You don’t add “woman who used to be a man” to the list, even though that would be funny, the way it’s sometimes funny when male reporters respect your intuitions about statistics because they figure you used to be a man. But that kind of funny isn’t the kind of funny that belongs in Margaret Jefferson’s story.

You have seven minutes so you read the mother archetype scene from your phone, the project manager telling the chief engineer, “You’re such a good programmer” every time he manages to output ten lines of code before handing him a homemade cookie. Your zingers garner chuckles.

“It’s workplace story night,” the Black man says after you’re done. His name turns out to be Nate and he starts reading a story from a sheaf of paper about a Black employee at Google who keeps being late to work because the building’s Google-powered face identification system is unable to recognize him in a vast majority of lighting conditions and won’t let him in. That’s all you find out because of his limited time, but it’s a smart premise.

“I wanna know what happens next,” you whisper when he’s done.

“Here,” he says, handing you the copy from which he’s just read. You imagine smelling where his fingers touched the paper. “My email’s on the first page. Send me your story.”

You like that he looks away before you nod.

Margaret Jefferson even has her own email account. She has an Instagram too, where she posts selfies that correspond to how you would imagine yourself to be if you were just any old white girl, not a trans halfie or really more like third-eighthie, because it’s just your grandfather who’s fully Filipino while your grandmother is proud to be half-Spanish. There’s you eating a donut, eyes half-closed in pleasure and maybe undetectable ancestry. There’s you pointing to the Statue of Liberty, the sun warming your natural chestnut highlights. There’s you just fine with not having done much in life except to be an “aspiring writer with a day job,” according to your Instagram bio.

“Project manager,” you email Nate when he asks what you do for work after you send him your story, which is what you were before you became a journalist full-time. You ask him what he does, and he replies, “Programmer for Google.” This makes you smile. You continue reading his story and find out the Black man starts getting negative evaluations when he keeps being late and sometimes misses work altogether, so he starts coming into the office an hour early just to make sure he can be at his desk on time. But the security system is rigged so that even if human beings like his co-workers recognize him, he still can’t get into the building until the system signs off because he sets off a loud alarm. The company has promised to fix the problem, but it’s been four months since he started and they haven’t yet. He starts bringing a heavy, high-powered lamp with him so he can light himself in a way the system recognizes, which works most of the time but not all the time.

In the end, you find out the reason he’s been hired: to fix a face identification algorithm that fails to recognize significant numbers of Black people.

“It’s a great story,” you write him.

“Too bad I can’t publish it,” he replies. “My bosses would fuck me up.”

“I can’t publish mine either,” you say, hoping it will bring the two of you closer. You allow him to assume that your private fantasies are private for the same reasons, but the reason you don’t want to publish as Margaret Jefferson, even as a pseudonym, is because if you do, someone will eventually figure out that Margaret Jefferson and Margaret Talusan are the same person.

You start a story called “Jane Is Really Karen” about a white woman human-rights attorney who’s oblivious to her privilege even while she’s handling asylum cases. In the first scene, she yells at a Black valet in her building for not delivering her car on time so she can get to a hearing to keep Sudanese refugees in the United States. It should be obvious to Nate that it’s written for him, and it’s obvious to you that he started a story for you about a Black woman who cornrows her white friend’s hair.

You continue working on these stories and read snippets in the group over the next few weeks. You exchange numbers but don’t text and you’re not sure why. Because maybe you don’t want to be responsible for starting. Because maybe he doesn’t either.

You read the ending of your story five weeks later, in which the valet who continues to be mistreated tells the woman he’s actually one of the refugees she had once helped keep in America, but now he wonders whether the loss of his dignity is worth having left his homeland. The woman complains over his rude behavior and tries to get him fired, but a video of her rant goes viral and she’s the one who loses her job. Nate reads his ending, where a Black woman at the white woman’s retail job chastises her for wearing cornrows, and her Black friend comes in to defend their friendship. The people in the room clap; two good stories completed at the meetup. Afterward, the accountant asks if you all want to go to a bar and he says yes, so you do too.

The bar is called Dennis, one of those lame after-work spots for straight people who are desperate to be hip, full of translucent glass tables with rounded corners. But this is absolutely Margaret Jefferson’s kind of place. Nate asks what you want to drink and you say Midori Sour because there’s something inhuman you like about the bright green color of the melon liqueur. It’s also sweet, so you don’t notice how much your third one is affecting you until ten o’clock rolls around and a DJ starts spinning a glorified Top 40 playlist and the beats sound muffled in your ears like you’re underwater. You miss drag bars and leather nights at the gay club. You wonder why a part of you still wants to be just straight and cis and white, when what you really want is to puke out your desire to be normal for good.

“C’mon everyone,” the accountant says. “Let’s get on the dance floor.”

He gives Nate a special look like he can dance because he’s Black and Rihanna’s singing, “This is what you came for.” Nate looks over to you sitting across from him like he’s passing a baton. You shrug and say, “I’m not really a dancer,” even though that’s not true, but you figure there’s no way Margaret Jefferson would be a dancer. Where would she have learned? Cheerleading camp? Besides, you figure it’ll be fun to see how Nate would lead you rather than you leading yourself.

So Nate takes you by the hand to the small square of vinyl floor in front of the DJ, under some colored lights that flash but don’t move. You’re wearing what you thought was professional writer attire when you left the house, just black jeans and a button-down, but you forgot your top ends high and your jeans are cut low, so your pierced belly button shows when you raise your arms to imitate him.

“That’s a surprise,” Nate yells above the music, lowering his arm to brush your piercing and the skin around it with his knuckle. It feels like he’s a superhero who’s emitted an electric charge.

“Britney did it,” you reply with a grin. He brushes your stomach again, then settles his hand on your hip bone. Will he notice that you’re too narrow, the shoulders under your shirt too wide? Will he laugh at you when he figures that out? You shiver and recoil.

“Are you scared of me?” he whispers in your ear.

“Just nervous,” you reply. “I—”

“—have never danced this close to a Black man before?”

You nod because that’s one thing that’s true. “Not that I haven’t wanted to.”

“Don’t worry. I get it,” he says and rests his other hand on your other hip.

It’s a lot easier after that, so easy you don’t have to think much when it’s a few drinks and dances later and he leads you to the exit where an Uber awaits, and there’s hardly any traffic when you cross the bridge to Brooklyn, get in a metal-clad elevator, enter an apartment with blond floors, a bedroom with a view of twinkling lights and water. You’ve forgotten you’re not Margaret Jefferson until he sets you down on his sleigh bed and unbuttons you, and you tremble but he doesn’t notice because his tongue is on your nipple, and you’re thankful the room is dark because that body part expresses real things about you in the light, its brownness and your quarter-sized areolas. But you’re gratified you didn’t get implants because his tongue feels good there, the new roughness of his stubble, so good that you run your hand through his hair and find an ache to stab him inside you.

You sneak your fingers down to see that your wet matches your want, since the two don’t always go together for women like you, women who are not really Margaret Jefferson. You pull at his henley, then the waistband of his slacks when he slides up to kiss you, and you wish the hair on all men’s faces could be this rough, like he’s removing all traces of you from your own skin. You get the shirt off him and he kneels to unzip himself while you unbutton your jeans. His cock is a silhouette until you touch it, and you’re relieved that it’s proportioned in a way you can welcome. A statistic flashes in your mind, the high percentage of straight Black men who are HIV-positive, but he’s not like other Black men. He’s a Google programmer. He lives in a loft in an elevator building that faces the water. You scold yourself before you pull him toward you, inside you, smell the difference of him, and wonder if he can smell the difference of you before you begin to forget because he’s a great mover, his rhythm strong like he wants you more than you’ve been wanted before. You don’t have to wonder about the pitch of your moans because you can hear yourself, your uh-huhs and ahhhs and oh-my-Gods, ardent and constant as worship, faster and faster until his one low grunt makes a ball inside you that shoots out your mouth in noises you’ve never made until now, screech-howls you’ll remember on your deathbed.

Afterward, his arm is above his head and you sniff his buried sweat, then try to expunge a map of Africa from your mind.

He turns and notices a light scar at the bottom of your chin; he touches it with his finger and asks you what happened. You’re tempted to tell him about falling from a mango tree when you were eight during one of your summer trips to the Philippines, but you’re not ready to tell him you’re not white, nor do you feel like being called a “tomboy” and having to make up details about your youth, details that never happened. So instead you say, “Some accident when I was a kid. I don’t really remember.”

He asks where you grew up and you tell him Southern California. He grew up in a North Carolina suburb, where he was one of the few Black kids in his school.

“That must have been hard,” you say.

“Not too hard,” he replies, then reconsiders. “Okay, hard.”

The pressure to be an athlete because he’s Black and has a body. The obsession with robots, not telling people he’s Black on user groups and chat rooms, the shock on people’s faces when he meets them in person, the last time he meets them in person. Being told it’ll get better and sometimes it feels like it does, but not enough. Not enough in school. Not enough at work. Not enough on the street. Hope that rage over senseless death the past few years can lead to a world that feels enough, before he turns into a senseless death himself.

“I hope my children will have a lot less of that,” he says. And you understand that on the surface of his words is the hope for a better world for Black people, but you’re convinced that under the skin, he likes Margaret Jefferson because he figures lighter children will mean lighter lives.

Those two words, “my children,” are the reason you sneak out in the middle of the night.

“I had fun,” he texts the next day. “Where did you go?”

“Early day at work. See you next week.”

You come back to the meetup and try to keep it professional. You sit far from him, but not so far that it looks like something bad has happened between you. There are smirks in the room from those who saw the two of you leave the bar together the week before. You ignore them and read the start of a new story about a woman who enjoys keeping things light. He reads something about a man who refuses to code switch from Ebonics.

“What’s up?” he asks you in the elevator on your way out.

You walk around the block with him and say that even though you enjoyed yourself a lot, you can’t do anything serious right now and you can’t picture sleeping with him again without things getting complicated.

“Complicated as in—?”

“No, not like that,” you reply. “Not like that at all.” I love that you’re Black, you add to yourself, though you know you can’t say that out loud. You just don’t love that he assumes he’ll have kids because now, when you’re together, you don’t love that you’re trans even more.

The two of you agree to be friends, though you already know you’ll be friends in a never-meet-up-again kind of way, friends in the strict confines of this writing group, which you won’t feel like going to in a couple of months after your existential panic subsides. In the meantime, he can be a presence in your life each week who you can never touch or have too much to drink around. You can just spend part of that hour and a half, while other people are reading stories you’re not interested in, memorizing what he looks like—measure the minuscule variations in the length of his stubble and imagine those hairs against your skin, touch yourself to the fantasy of him as soon as you get home, the fantasy of his seed sprouting inside you because of your light.

Three weeks later, you forget to put your phone on silent before bed and hear the ping of several texts in the middle of the night. You think it might be your editor but instead it’s Nate, screenshots of two similar pictures from your two different Instagram accounts along with a separate text that just says, “WTF???”

You stiffen from shock; no fist or knife, just dark and blank—nothing.

A shudder and you’re alive again, a thinking, writing thing. He found the only images from your two profiles taken on the same day in the same light.

“That’s my professional account,” you text back. “Jefferson’s my mom’s name. I separate my public and private lives.”

“BECAUSE YOU’RE A TRANNY,” he texts.

“I didn’t peg you for a guy who uses slurs.”

“I didn’t peg you for a lying bitch.”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Fuck you, motherfucker.”

An inner wall threatens to crush you, and you push with everything you have to hold yourself up. You cut and paste this entire exchange in an email to yourself and start writing a story about a Black man and a trans woman who looks white but isn’t. You will do this until morning so that by the time you get in bed, you’ll be too tired to cry. You wish the Black man were just himself in this story of yours, a man who got mad at you when he found out you’re trans, instead of a Black man who stands in for other Black men, a Black man who for some might represent all of Black manhood. You wish he could just be himself and that he wouldn’t continue to condition you to be more afraid of Black men than other men. You wish you could just be a trans woman to him instead of a trans woman who stands in for all the conniving, deceitful trans women he will come to picture in his mind so that for him and others like him, being a trans woman becomes synonymous with being a liar.

He sends more angry messages, so you block his number. You block him on email and Instagram. You show his picture to security at work, just in case, then wish you hadn’t. You don’t go back to the meetup. You go on with your life.

HOW TO SHIELD A DARK BODY

LOLITA STEWART-WHITE

after Jericho Brown

I study the creases of my husband’s dark body.

Dark body surgeons will dismantle come morning.

There are countless ways to dismantle a dark body:

scalpel – whistle – rope

A whistle floats across the sky and spooks the night,

At least that’s the way my grandma likes to tell it.

The way grandma tells the story of Emmett lingers,

Scent loud like the smell of a wilted gardenia.

Come morning my husband may wilt like a gardenia.

I want to pluck him from this garden to protect him.

I want to protect my husband but don’t know how.

Is there any way to shield a dark body from harm?

Emmett’s mama couldn’t shield his dark body from harm.

I study the creases of my husband’s dark body.

A NIGERIAN ATTEMPTS THERAPY

UCHEOMA ONWUTUEBE

University of Nevada, Counseling Services Intake

Name: Ucheoma Onwutuebe

Race/ethnicity: African American/Black/African/Nigerian

To be precise, I am Igbo. Where I come from, a child inherits her father’s origin. You are not from the place where you were born. You are not from the place where you grew up. You do not belong to your mother or to anyone who raised you. You belong to your father, present or absent.

My father was enlisted as a child soldier in the 1967 Biafran civil war. Like most Igbo men who survived the war, he did not talk about it, but growing up I could see my father carry both the pride and shame of it square on his shoulders. He insisted my first language be Igbo, and he didn’t fall for the identity craze of the 1990s when most Nigerian parents forbade their children from speaking their native languages.

“Say it in English,” parents would chide their children if they dared speak Igbo. In school, students were mocked and punished for speaking vernacular. But my father stood above the pressure to present his children as “polished,” refusing to tuck away their mother tongue. I said bia, before I said come. I knew Mama Ukwu before I knew she was also Grandmother. When my siblings and I prattled in Igbo, my father wasn’t concerned that we might turn out Igbotic, the local way of referring to people too provincial to adopt civility. Civility, meaning the white man’s ways, the white man’s tongue. My father, who is now dead, was a titled man, a prominent chief in our village. He favored his well-tailored senators, his walking staff, and his red chieftaincy cap over a suit and tie. He was proudly Igbo.

But he wasn’t always proudly Nigerian. On only two occasions do I remember him crying tears of joy for our country. The first time was the Atlanta Olympics in 1996: Nigeria vs. Argentina. Football was the only thread that held together our country’s worn fabric, and every Nigerian home glowed from TV rays that night. Our boys had beaten the Japanese, the Hungarians, even the almighty Brazilians. This was the final match and we wanted that gold medal. The Argentines were hammering us, and we were losing 2-1. But soon our boys equalized, and just a minute before the final whistle, Emmanuel Amunike scored the winning goal.

My father cried with joy. He danced with my uncles in the yard, waving cassava leaves in the air. As a little girl, I couldn’t know what those few hours of joy meant for a man whose country had failed him again and again, as it would also fail me in the coming years.

The second time he cried was at the death of Sani Abacha, the military leader who tyrannized the country and looted the national treasury. In those years, the entire county was hunched by fear of the despot, afraid to speak up, afraid to complain. Journalists and activists were killed by firing squad. Political opponents were imprisoned and tortured. When Radio Nigeria announced, in June of 1998, that the General was dead, my father cried and danced. So great was our collective national joy that poor market women gave away their goods to passersby. Impromptu parties broke out in the middle of our streets. “Our country will be great again,” my father said that evening, as he washed down his garri and ukazi soup with a bottle of lager beer. “This country will be great.”

I wished he hadn’t believed that.

Sex at birth: Female

My mother wanted a son. Those were the days when Nigerian hospitals were not equipped with machines that could tell a baby’s sex. Mothers hoped they would be pleasantly surprised by an answered prayer. My mother had requested a boy because her first child was a girl. It was okay if the firstborn was female; she would care for her parents when they grew old. But this was to be followed by a son, and more sons, and maybe a sprinkle of daughters. If not, people would talk. What was there to do with a litter of girls? Who would perpetuate the family name?

My mother’s parents had nine children in their aggressive pursuit of sons. Their fifth child was finally a boy yet they kept on trying for more sons, for more prestige. Stung by the ordeal of her gender, my mother wanted sons too. Her mother-in-law, Mama Ukwu, was already rolling her eyes, hoping my mother did not come bearing her people’s difficulty in producing sons.

If my father was disappointed at the arrival of another daughter, I never knew. My mother named me Ucheoma, a name too noble for a consolation prize. Ucheoma means “good thoughts.” Though this is not what I ordered, she probably thought, God still thinks good thoughts towards me. I love my mother for the gift of my name.

Many girls face violent welcomes—their mothers wail with disappointment and their fathers storm out of the waiting halls. Relatives beg them to come hold their babies. Nwa bu nwa, they say, pleading with the men. A child is a child. But no one needed to run after my father. He marched into the labor room and held me. I believed he loved me; his smiles in my baby pictures tell me so.

Gender Identity: Female

I am a Nigerian woman, plagued by Nigerian womanly problems. When I moved to America for graduate school last summer, I believed this new country would shield me from those nagging afflictions. I believed the shiny billboards and neon signs of Las Vegas would shoo away the burdens that come with being a Nigerian woman. But like my accent, the ghosts of those problems marched right alongside me. During my first winter break, I spent the holidays in Wylie, Texas with my auntie. One evening, she invited me to join her at a meeting of Christian Nigerian women. I’d been attending a lovely Pentecostal church in Las Vegas, filled with sweet, kind people, but after four months away I longed for the Nigerian-ness in the churches back home and jumped at my aunt’s offer.

We arrived late, in the middle of Praise and Worship. The women were nurses, teachers, bankers, and new wives freshly imported from Nigeria. Some were dressed in hospital scrubs, others came with children in tow. The woman who led the songs wore a colorful ankara gown and long winter boots, her outfit a blend of home and abroad.

I’d forgotten how animated church could be. The music leader slapped a tambourine against her thigh with the throbbing music. The women bent at the waist, dancing and singing. Those familiar songs, songs I did not realize how much I missed till I heard them again that evening. Songs I first sang in nursery school as we lined up for morning devotion. Songs my mother sang as she stirred a pot of ukazi soup in the kitchen. I sang along, drenched in nostalgia, my eyes stinging with tears. I was home again.

Then came Testimony time. One by one the women came forward, bearing the sheaves of God’s goodness and faithfulness. “My sisters, this our God is too good,” the first testifier panted into the microphone, as she thanked God for a wayward child who gave up video games to face his studies.

“Look at me, I am now the mother of a teen!” cried another, celebrating a child who’d just turned thirteen. A woman testified for an errant husband coming back to his senses. “Who would have thought Obumsele would look at me and touch me again?” Another testified for a cousin—an old spinster—who was finally getting married. “I was worried for Ifedi—tall and beautiful but no husband. I thank God for He has finally broken the yoke of marital disfavor upon her life.”

The common thread in all their testimonies was husbands, children, and marriage. Not one woman spoke about her own needs. I could feel my tears of joy drying up. I thought I’d left all that when I said my goodbyes at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja.

When the meeting ended, I knew what was to come. My auntie pulled me into a circle of women. “This is my little niece,” she said, her voice dripping with pride. “She is a genius. She can write, eh. She and Chinua Achebe are in the same WhatsApp group. She came to America this August and she is already a graduate assistant in Las Vegas!”

“You don’t mean it!” they cried. “Congratulations nne. Is this the one that her father died some time ago?”

“Yes,” my auntie said.

“Eiyaa.” They patted my back affectionately. “It is well, my dear. Welcome to America. Wow, she’s a grown woman. Aka oji ya? Is any hand holding her?”

“No hand is holding her, oh,” my auntie said, pushing me forward. “She is very, very single.”

“My dear,” they said to me, “life does not consist of only writing and graduate assisting. You need a man. You need God’s marital favor.”

Relationships Status: Single

Lately, I have been avoiding my mother’s calls. The last time we spoke she asked me, “So, is anyone talking to you?” trying unsuccessfully to mask the worry in her voice. “In your church, are there not God-fearing young men there?” These questions come, like clockwork, after I’ve shared some good news with her—a career milestone, an acceptance, a successful application. They pose arrogantly, as if to say, whatever you have achieved pales in comparison to this void. This singleness. This cultural crime.

I understand my mother’s fears. Marriage provided her an identity, answered her prayers to further her education, made her a legitimate mother, and placed her on a pedestal that unmarried women could not touch. “Every woman needs a covering,” my mother would say. Why? Because the world handles you less carelessly if you are married. The landlord will rent to you more quickly if you are married. The bus conductors, the rude cashier, the pastor, the iman, the wastrels on the streets, all of them are careful to treat you well if you wear a wedding band. If not, perhaps you have a husband who can throw hands, and the offenders will be in serious trouble.

My mother’s worries are founded on these grounds. Who will provide for you? She seems to ask. Who will throw hands for you? Who will shield you from the insolence that our culture reserves for women? Who will cover you?

Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual

Men are my weakness. Serve me men for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I will lick the plate clean. The way they unsteady you with their flattery and spin you with words till your brain whirls and you forget your mother’s warnings. The way they crush you like leaves under the weight of their potency.

Time will fail me to talk about ways they assault the world with their beauty, leaving casualties in their wake. I have been that casualty. No shame in saying that. I shall be a casualty in the future and I am fine with that. That is the lot of every woman who desires men. They bruise us and we pretend to be unscathed and return again to the battlefield. I have become a collector of bruises and I show them off like war marks. Look where Tunde said he would never leave but left. Look at the imprint of Ebuka’s strong hands. Look when Jamil said his mother doesn’t like Igbo girls. Look at the marks of Ifeanyi’s unrequited love.

But for man-desiring women like me who were raised in a misogynistic culture, there are so many inventive ways your desire can be wielded against you. Your desire is never a thing that can stand alone on its own two feet. It must lean on acceptability, on societal barricades, on the gospel of shame.

First to attend college/university: No

My mother studied English Literature at the University of Port Harcourt. “Your father trained me in school,” she often said to us. This means the bill was on my father. My father, at that time, was already an accomplished young man who also trained his four siblings in school. University was an ambitious option for women then but my father wanted a well-educated woman. So he paid her way. He was her covering.

My father studied chemistry at the University of Ibadan. He was amongst the first people in our hometown to attend university.

International Student: Yes

My American visa is my biggest miracle. More than winning the lotto. More than that reluctant “Yes” from the consul officer in the US Embassy, Abuja. My visa is my fair chance at life. It is also my mother’s bragging right. “Do you know that my second daughter is a lecturer in America? When I tell you I don’t give birth to useless children, you better believe me.”

A child in America is a parent’s hope. This child will send over pills for arthritis. This child will provide them with proper medical care. This child will offer them a home to retire in, a home far from the incessant kidnappings and killings in Nigeria. A child in America is an emblem of a fortunate parent, a sign that luck and favor exist in that family. Why? Because the Nigerian dream is to leave Nigeria. Because Nigeria is tottering on the rims of hopelessness. And this is how Nigeria failed me.

Why do I need to leave home to breathe? Why are there Thanksgiving services in church when visas are approved? Why do embassy officials possess that much power? Why are they able to decide our destiny, whether we go to the promised land or stay back in captivity?

This is how Nigeria failed my father. When he said his country would be great again, he likely dreamt of better infrastructure, quality education for his children, sound healthcare. When prostate cancer appeared out of the blue, it felled the big man like a weak tree. No medical insurance. No regular checkups at the hospital. We had to crowdsource funds to send him to India but by then, it was too late.

After his job at the breweries ended, my father dabbled in politics though he did not have the liver to wade in deeper. Instead, he sat home and read newspapers. He was still a big man by default, a titled man. Relatives still knocked at the door, asking for handouts and he gave what he could. But no matter how big you are, Nigeria will humble you with its madness. That’s how the man died in his prime. Entered 1954, exited grudgingly in 2018.

My father cried on his deathbed and asked God to please spare his life. He didn’t want to die and he made us read to him Psalms 118:17 where the psalmist sang, I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. My father died without driving his daughter to the airport, a ritual he performed for his children leaving town. He did not live to hear the good news of my American visa.

Top concerns that bring you to counseling: Relationship Problems

A certain boy is trying to bruise me, but my spirit is too strong for him. After experiencing Nigerian men’s sweet love and their demonic wickedness, I am convinced there is no mountain I can’t move, no valley I can’t climb. I’m here only because I heard therapy is where bougie people come to toughen their hide against this cruel world. So I have come to receive additional powers that could make me even more invincible.

It appears the creeds I learned on the streets back home are not enough for this American terrain. So I have come like an old dog, for you to teach me new tricks. Are there words you never say to men in America? Words that may be fine with men in Nigeria, but taboo here? Words like “atone”? Because I asked this American man I’d been seeing to “atone” for canceling a date impromptu (because, Hello? Have you met me? You don’t just cancel on women like me!) and he said the word “atone” messes with his mental health and it’s triggering and it’s threatening to ruin all the mind work he’s done on himself.

His reaction surprised me and that surprise brought me to this couch. I want to be like those people who balk at conflict because their therapist told them to flee at the first sign of “drama.” I want to be like those people who cancel dates because, “Sorry, my therapist says I should lie back in bed.”

In Nigeria, psychiatric treatment of any form is hidden like a dirty bra strap. Don’t let anybody know that your brain is touching wires. Don’t tell anybody that as you sleep, dark thoughts sit by your bedside. Who will marry your daughters if people know that someone in your family has a head that is not screwed on correctly? So people keep mum and walk around with mental health issues that go undiagnosed. But even if they were diagnosed, who could afford therapy?

One time in Lagos, my mind was running in circles, relaying batons of worry. I googled “therapist near you.” When I saw the astronomical price, my mind was cured immediately. Who needs therapy when you can blast music from your headphones and call up the man currently bruising you?

But now that I am here in America and my health insurance covers it, I might as well indulge myself. I need a wisecrack from this therapy session. I want to say like other people, “Listen to what my therapist said to me that changed my life forever.”

History of abuse (physical, sexual and/or emotional): None

None, if you leave out those older men who did things to you when you were younger that they shouldn’t have done. But that’s normal. And it gives you stories to trade with your friends. “Mr. Onaku, the maths teacher? Filthy goat! He asked me to raise my skirt when no one was in the staff room.” “The registrar? He told me that if I was serious about graduating this year, I knew what to do, and he wrote on a paper the address of a hotel.”

No, I do not want to unpack that.

History of other trauma: Refer to above.

Are you currently considering dropping out of school?

Are you kidding? Drop out and go back to Nigeria because of this small-man trouble? Not a chance. Plus, it would rescind my mother’s bragging manifesto and she’d never forgive me.

Any past therapy: Not unless I won the lotto.

How do you cope with depressing thoughts: Pray

Just like writing, I can pray fluently. When my father died, I prayed. When I was applying for my American visa, I prayed. When men bruise me, I pray hard. I also go to church. So far, America hasn’t changed my relationship with either church or prayer.

The other day on Twitter, a young Nigerian who now lives in America wrote, “Ever since I moved here, I no longer go to church. There’s constant power supply. You get your check on payday. The system works. What is there to pray about?”

In Nigeria, people go to church out of hopelessness. When the government fails you, starves you, refuses to protect you, denies your children education and refuses to create an environment in which to thrive, the only hope the citizens cling to is a God they cannot see. They flood the churches and mosques and traditional priests’ shrines, seeking their fortune, hoping to ferry their destiny from a place of despondency to richer soils.

They need a miracle for hospital bills. They believe that one day they will lift their pillows and find bundles of miracle money. They believe in divine health because a single illness can wipe away a family’s fortune. So they pray the headache away before it becomes a stroke. Pray the boil away before it becomes a tumor. Pray the bill away before they lose their home.

As for me, I still pray here in America because I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to forget how much I prayed for where I am now. I don’t want to forget that my mother lost her appetite for days and only regained it when I came home with my crisp American visa. I don’t want to use God as a ladder and discard Him when I hop off at my desired destination.

In my prayers, I also ask God to teach me to be a good visitor in America. I say to Him, “Remind me that America is not my home. No matter how much I grow in my career and arrive in places where I can call the shots, don’t let me forget that this is not my country. Even Your Holy Word admonishes us that this world is not our home. Teach me to be a good guest, just like my mother admonished us as children when we visited others’ homes. ‘Don’t be like those children without training that smear walls and jump on furniture,’ she’d reel out as she tied our shoelaces, ‘Don’t break the TV. Don’t follow the tray of food with your eyes and act as if you’ve never seen food in your life.’”

Coming to America is sink or swim for me, and I have no option but to swim. This is the best option life has presented me and I am here to plant my dreams and help them bloom. Perhaps America may help me recover the things my country tried to steal from me. Things like peace of mind and a chance to dream. But no matter how diligently I prune the tendrils of my life and water the foliage of my ambition, it is you, God—as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians—who gives the increase. That’s why I pray. Remind me, God, that I didn’t come to America to gawk at shiny billboards and neon signs. I came to save my life.

SPEECH DERAPY

STEPHANIE CHOI

Dey discovered it in dird grade

whenever we practiced counting

money, candy, or people

I kept saying dirty, dirty—

say thirty, thirty—see how

she cannot pronounce th, th

de teacher said to my parents.

In de car on de way home

mom said to dad, you

pronounce things like that

sometimes, she probably

gets it from you.

After dat, a lady came

dree times a week

to pull me out

of independent reading.

I can’t remember

any other kid being cruel,

laughing at me

each time I left, each time

I said dird or dirty or de—

though it might be easier

to write this poem

about that, I only remember

de small room filled

wid games we played,

memory, go fish, bingo.

I practiced following

de lady’s mouth,

pushing my tongue

into my front teeth

again and again

until I could say it.

Until I discovered

dat I might be able

to fix any ding

in myself.

BIRDBRAIN

YEN HA

Since the early 1900s, the company has welcomed scientists, tinkerers, and engineers into its renowned research laboratories. Men in somber ties and white lab coats spent their days in the camaraderie of innovation. But now the future—and affirmative action—has caught up with the company: an influx of international faces, and the occasional woman, has begun populating its hallowed halls.

Oanh, both foreign and female, attends her first department-wide meeting held on the second Tuesday of the month. Newly minted with a US degree, Oanh has yet to meet everyone, but seated in the back of the auditorium, she thinks she might not be the only freshman-level research scientist speaking accented English with an unusual name. On Oanh’s first day in the lab, their manager, Associate Laboratory Director Robert J. Harris, or “Bobby” as he prefers to be called, looked puzzled when she explained that “oanh” is Vietnamese for a kind of bird. She didn’t know the English name for the bird that sang so sweetly in the groves behind her grandfather’s house in Cần Thơ that he named his youngest granddaughter after it. She had to crane her neck to tell her new boss this. A full foot shorter, Oanh barely came to Bobby’s shoulder.

Whether the new hires came by way of affirmative action or alumnae connections, the company reassured itself that only talent mattered in its quest to change the face of telecommunications, and if they could fulfill diversity quotas at the same time, all the better. Bobby, however, didn’t understand when English as a first language became a meaningless hiring metric. He had a hard time wrapping his head around the stilted accents and exotic names, but he knew he had to call the newest addition to his team something, even if his tenure as her manager would be short-lived.

“OH-ann? Is that how you say it? How about I call you ‘little bird’ because you’re so wee. You can call me Bobby, everyone does,” he said, looking down at her round, soft visage and bright smile. Bobby, going on twenty years with the company, really couldn’t get used to the growing flocks of foreign faces in the laboratories. He wouldn’t be in the labs much longer though. He applied for a promotion last month. When he gets it, he’ll be moved upstairs to management where, in the established ranks of upper-tier execs, everyone has a solid American name. Then his mouth can untangle from the effort of strange pronunciations. Looking down at the newest, freshest recruit asking to be called something he couldn’t shape his mouth to, Bobby felt frustrated at having to work so hard in the lab he had headed for ten years now.

“You know what,” Bobby said suddenly, “I’m going to call you ‘birdbrain.’ You must be a brain to end up here, right?” He grinned at his own cleverness. Bobby’s team reinforced his misperception of himself as funny by always laughing, even if they quietly agreed behind closed doors that his jokes did occasionally misfire.

Oanh laughed because Bobby was laughing, though she wasn’t quite sure what he meant. Better to be polite, she thought. Maybe “birdbrain” was a nickname that Americans used the same way he had told her to call him “Bobby.” Her comprehension lagged a half-step behind, so she smiled instead of replying, feeling it was easier to be pleasant than frustrated. As Bobby took her and Helen, the other new hire, around the lab, he gestured expansively at the clean black lab tables. Glancing at Helen, Oanh was relieved to see someone who shared the color of her hair and skin, though Helen had a name Bobby had no problem pronouncing. He introduced Steven, his second-in-command, with a sweeping arm that took up twice his girth. Oanh backed up as Bobby explained if they had any questions, they could ask Steve. She noticed Bobby said “Steven” to her and Helen but then alternated between “Steve” and “Stevie-boy” throughout the day. Later, when she asked Helen how to address Steven, Helen told her nicknames were an American thing, and “Steve” was probably fine.

Now, watching Bobby walk to the front of the auditorium and take the podium to report on their team’s findings, Oanh tries to silently practice saying “Bobby,” but she would never call her older siblings by their first name without the proper pronoun, and she doesn’t think she can do it now with her first boss in her first real laboratory. She avoids the problem by not addressing him at all, Robert or Bobby. The meeting breaks up, and Bobby gestures her over. Oanh walks with Bobby while everyone heads back to the lab.

“Did you finish analyzing the chemical replenishment of the plating solution tank? I need it this afternoon,” he says. She smiles, her head tilted to the side the tiniest bit. Oanh is trying to figure out how to ask a person to repeat himself without referring to that person by name. Bobby waits for her answer. By the time they reach her desk, she still hasn’t replied.

Bobby sighs and repeats himself, quietly and slower this time. “Chemi-cal re-plen-ishment please bird-brain,” he says.

Oanh beams brightly and tells him she will finish the analysis after lunch. She watches him frown slightly before he walks away. She’s glad that she and Khiết agreed, when newly married and waiting in the refugee camp for Khiết’s sister to make her way to them, that Oanh should immediately get her master’s degree in chemical engineering at an American university. They both understood the chemistry undergraduate degree she earned in Vietnam wouldn’t go far in the States. All that time studying in English has helped her with her lab reports but not with understanding when to use a nickname at work.

At dinner that night Oanh gets into an argument with Khiết about staying half an hour later at the office for the beginning of the social hour next Friday. Khiết doesn’t understand what socializing has to do with working. And he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to ask Lông, who gives her a ride to and from work, to stay the extra half hour so Oanh can practice her English with Helen. Oanh doesn’t tell him she has already asked Lông, and he doesn’t mind at all.

Oanh stays up late the night before stewing a pot of cá kho and julienning cabbage for the gỏi, so they can eat the moment she gets home. She pre-measures the rice and makes a note for her daughter to start the machine before she gets home from work. When Oanh meets Lông in the parking lot for the ride home, she carries the dark brown briefcase Khiết bought her to celebrate her new position, full of lab reports she saves for after her husband has fallen asleep. It still takes her twice as much time to work through the scientific language in English, checking the words in the dictionary they carried from Vietnam, its pages frayed and fragile from use.

Oanh and Khiết agreed that he would take on the work of school pick-ups and doctor appointments because his teaching schedule is more flexible. It’s unconventional and they don’t tell his parents, but Oanh knows he doesn’t mind. He confessed to her late at night, before falling asleep, that he likes driving around with Khanh and Thanh chattering in the back seat, even if he sometimes has to remind them to stop speaking so much English.

As Oanh serves Khiết another bowl of rice, he asks the girls what they learned in school today. They answer but Oanh doesn’t hear their response. That morning Mr. Harris, as she prefers to think of Bobby, stopped by her desk to ask her something. He said in his slow drawl, “birdbrain,” so she would know he was talking to her. The words that followed didn’t sound like a question, so she nodded and smiled. He didn’t say anything else but called out to Helen, who sat two desks away and whose English was five years better than hers. That time she heard him asking about the covalent bond found in the round of tests the techs had performed earlier, the bond she was drafting a report on. She flushes now, thinking about it. He must think she’s stupid.

After dinner Oanh clears the table and prepares the pork ribs for tomorrow night. When she’s done making the nước mắm chấm, she sneaks upstairs to read lab reports. Khiết has retreated to the dining room where he has set up a laptop and printer. He spends the rest of the night printing logic puzzles for the girls.

In the morning Oanh makes breakfast for Khiết and helps the girls dress for school before heading out to meet Lông. She wonders if she should ask Lông what “birdbrain” means. He’s been in the States and at the company longer and his English is better, but she can’t figure out how to bring it up without telling him not to mention it to Khiết. Oanh overheard Bobby calling a technician in the lab “buddy,” and she wonders if “birdbrain” is like that, even if she doesn’t hear him call anyone else birdbrain. Maybe it’s because no one else has a name that means bird.

Oanh has learned to keep her name tag with the bright blue bar indicating research engineer centered and visible on her lab coat, having been mistaken for a secretary, cleaning lady, and intern, not always in that order. A hot wave of mortification spills over her when she has to correct the technicians. She can’t prepare her reports without them, so she always smiles when she has to repeat her request. Some days Oanh feels like a parrot. Bobby makes it worse; his impatience with her stumbling speech flusters her so she constantly forgets the words she already knows.

“Birdbrain, how’s it going today? Do you have the chemical surfacing results?” Bobby asks. At first he doesn’t notice Steve standing behind her, then he winks to let him know it’s a joke. Steve winces slightly but doesn’t say anything. Oanh ignores both the “birdbrain” and the wince and hands him the technician’s report she’s been reviewing. She mentions it doesn’t include yesterday’s analysis. Bobby’s forehead wrinkles when she speaks.

By the time Oanh’s accent elongates into smooth speech, she will have been with the company for more than two decades. Upper management will track population trends and understand that the emerging workplace contains far larger numbers of minorities and women. They will begin considering the implications of a workforce made up of accents and foreign names and what it will mean for those in the labs who are reluctant to embrace change. None of this will affect Bobby. Bobby will be collecting his pension by the time demographic shifts filter up to managerial levels.

“I don’t understand a thing she says,” Bobby tells Steve later. Bobby has been training Steve to take over his lab, the lab he built from one research assistant, a row of computers, and near-constant negotiations over equipment allocations. When Bobby’s promotion to Deputy Lab Manager comes through, Steve will run the lab how he wants. For now, he only nods when Bobby says, “Cute little thing too, so tiny.” Bobby hands Steve the initial technical analysis Oanh gave him to review and wants to know what Steve thinks. Steve nods firmly and says, “Amazing work. So thorough.” Bobby agrees, even though he doesn’t understand how someone who takes so long to respond can manage to produce such flawless reports. He corrects Steve’s grammar more frequently than hers, and Steve was born right here in town.

Mr. Murphy, Director of Research, agrees with Bobby’s assessment of Oanh’s work. He asks his latest hire, straight from his own alma mater, how she is settling in and if she has any problems navigating the lab. Oanh hesitates.

She doesn’t know what she wants to say. She still can’t tell if the enthusiasm with which Bobby calls her “birdbrain” is meant to be affectionate, or if he is making fun of her somehow. She can hear Khiết’s voice telling her not to make trouble, that it’s such a small thing, Bobby not using her proper name. It’s not as if he ignores her. He stops by everyone’s desk, including hers, throughout the day, chatting so rapidly that she can only nod in response. Mr. Murphy waits patiently while she stumbles over Bobby’s name. Mr. Harris, that is, Robert, I mean—never mind. There is nothing wrong. Everything is fine, she says firmly.

Mr. Murphy looks at her. He doesn’t like to speak badly of anyone in his department, but he tells her that Bobby has always been a bit of an airbag. He means well, Mr. Murphy adds. She frowns in confusion. He clarifies, “Bobby likes to talk, and sometimes he doesn’t always think about what he’s saying.” She still doesn’t understand, but Mr. Murphy—he is the Lab Director! Mr. Murphy tells her not to take him so seriously.

At dinner, Oanh doesn’t want to be reminded by Khiết that she should respect senior management even if they can’t pronounce her name, so she doesn’t tell him about her conversation with Mr. Murphy. He would be annoyed she even mentioned Bobby to her supervisor. She eats quietly, leaving Khiết to quiz Khanh and Thanh on their day.

“We’re reading Ramona the Brave! Can we cut a hole in the house for a new room? Then I won’t have to share with Thanh,” Khanh says.

Thanh interrupts her, “Teacher picked me for line leader today at lunch!” Both Khiết and Oanh remind them to speak in Vietnamese.

It was Khiết who insisted on Vietnamese at home. Their friends told them it was a bad idea, that the kids wouldn’t be able to keep two languages straight in their heads and they would fail in school, but Khiết was right to stand firm. The school recently agreed to his request to move Khanh and Thanh up a grade. Oanh worries they will have a hard time making new friends, but Khiết assures her it’s better they don’t become bored with school. Khiết has to find someone to fill in for his morning lecture next Wednesday so he can take them in early for testing. Oanh stays up late the night before making a batch of pâté chaud and gets up before Khiết to reheat them in the oven for breakfast. Oanh watches them leave. Usually, she’s the one saying goodbye from Lông’s car as they pull out of the driveway. Today, the girls excitedly wave to her as they get in the car.

All morning she yawns, stifling the sound behind her cubicle wall. She has to schedule a lab test for after lunch and asks Bobby if he can free up a couple techs for the chemical process models.

“What are you saying? Can you say that again?” he asks. She repeats her question. Bobby explains slowly that Steve needs the technicians for his models until lunchtime. Oanh is confused because she is sure she just asked him that. She doesn’t say anything. She smiles her thanks and leaves to schedule the techs for later in the afternoon.

“Have a nice day, birdbrain!” Bobby says as she walks away.

In Oanh’s mind she can say “Bobby” with the same casualness everyone around her does, but in reality, she can’t make her mouth speak so informally at work. Bobby does not have that problem, using his nickname for her liberally and easily, as if they were friends. She finally told Helen about Bobby calling her “birdbrain,” but Helen hadn’t noticed. And even if Helen heard it, neither freshman-level research engineer would know what to do about it, or if it even merited doing anything.

For dinner Oanh pan fries the flounder Khiết picked up at the grocery store. Khanh and Thanh are too preoccupied with retelling the jokes they learned in the Archie comic book they persuaded their dad to add to the cart to talk about the testing earlier that day. Oanh doesn’t feel like reminding them to speak Vietnamese and turns to Khiết. She wonders if they could invite Helen and her husband over for dinner. She adds that they are Chinese so they will know how to eat, but Khiết isn’t sure about having to speak English at the dining room table his parents bought them when Khiết and Oanh finally found a house they could afford in the right school district. It’s enough to struggle through lunch conversations in the faculty lounge.

Oanh doesn’t have Khiết’s self-consciousness about speaking, though it takes her longer to find the right words. No amount of practice helps her with Bobby, who seems determined not to understand her. He has started passing off her questions to Steve, so it is to Steve that Oanh now turns when she needs something.

Lông had an early meeting with his supervisor, so Oanh is already at her lab table when Steve arrives to work. She asks him for the initial write-up from the run of tests last week. He looks puzzled. Oanh catches herself before a sigh can escape. She takes a breath and begins to ask again when Steve mentions he thought he had already given them to her the day before. Oanh sits there a moment longer before realizing he’s right. She is so pleased at not having to repeat her question that she jumps up to treat herself to peanuts from the vending machine.

“Birdbrain!” Bobby calls as she passes the open door to his office. He wants the analysis she’s been working on before the end of day. She starts to tell him she already finished it and submitted it to Steve for review, but he cuts her short, launching into a speech which Oanh doesn’t realize until halfway through is about his negotiations on the price of a used car for his teenage son.

“Alright I’ve kept you chatting long enough. Don’t forget I need the report today, birdbrain.” Bobby dismisses her from his office door.

Later that night, after dinner, it occurs to Oanh to ask her recently promoted third grader, three years an American and already fluent in slang and English, what Bobby’s nickname for her means. She’ll say she heard it at the office. She won’t say it’s her, the birdbrain. She asks Khanh casually, after everyone has already left the table, when there is the least chance of Khiết overhearing.

“It means you have a small brain, like a bird. It means you’re stupid,” her daughter says.

It’s worse than she thought. Bobby does think she’s stupid. Oanh gets into bed when Khiết does, but Khanh’s explanation keeps her awake, spinning in her mind. She knows it frustrates him that she’s slow to respond, but she doesn’t know how to convince her direct report, responsible for her performance review, that she is smart. She’s the only one of her six siblings to finish high school and go to college. Khiết wouldn’t have agreed she should attempt a master’s degree if he didn’t think she could do it. And she did do it. Even when she had to study while simmering a chicken stew for the family. She saw Khiết swallowing his complaints when dinner was sometimes late, and he never said anything about the extra bit of cash they had to put aside for the Indian woman next door to babysit the girls when Oanh needed to prepare for her exams. Oanh’s thesis advisor even recommended her over her classmates for this position, telling Oanh that Mr. Murphy would take care of her. But Mr. Murphy can’t help her if she doesn’t tell him there is a problem. The problem, she thinks, is that she doesn’t know if there is a problem. She does think it would be nice to be called by her name.

“Have you ever considered an American name?” Helen asks as she places her containers of leftovers between them for lunch. Oanh adds her own containers and unwraps the pairs of chopsticks she keeps in her bottom drawer for her and Helen.

Oanh shakes her head. She explains to Helen that her grandfather chose names for her and her sisters, and she’s the only one named after a bird. They all have flower names, she adds. Helen starts eating. “Maybe you should talk to Mr. Murphy about it.”

After Oanh tucks the girls into bed that night, Oanh waits until Khiết has finished reading the paper before she hesitantly brings up the idea of talking to Mr. Murphy about Bobby’s nickname for her. Khiết’s silence and furrowed brow say enough. Oanh changes the subject.

At the next departmental meeting, Mr. Murphy makes his announcements. “I’m pleased to inform everyone that Bobby will be moving up to Deputy Program Director, and Steve will take his place in the lab.” Bobby beams with expectation. Mr. Murphy waits for the applause to die down. He continues, “I also have the pleasure of announcing the employees who have been recognized for exceptional work this month.” Oanh is so relieved Steve will be her direct report and she won’t have to tell Mr. Murphy about being called “birdbrain” that she doesn’t hear her name. When he calls out “Oanh Nguyễn,” Helen pushes her to go up and accept the award. Everyone claps. On her way back with the piece of paper, Steve stops her. Helen stands beside him as she waits to give Oanh a hug. Oanh’s eyes widen as Steve explains how impressed he’s been with her work and that it was he who nominated her for the recognition. Oanh is still thanking Steve when Bobby approaches the group.

“Little birdbrain, I confess I’m surprised they gave this award to you, given how rarely you speak. Though I grant you, your reports never need correcting,” he tells her. Helen and Steve tense at Bobby’s loud use of “birdbrain.” In another two decades, the company will implement a procedure for reporting what will be termed microaggressions, but for now, Bobby remains oblivious to the inappropriateness of his own joke.

“Nothing to say, birdbrain?” Bobby asks.

Oanh smiles at him because suddenly she knows what to say. Her hand clenches the piece of paper Mr. Murphy gave her in front of the whole department, proof she is not stupid. Overruling the cautious path Khiết might have advised her to take, she pretends she is American and not a young freshman-level scientist from Vietnam speaking to an older, more knowledgeable laboratory manager.

Her tongue moves with foreign unfamiliarity as she blurts out, “If I’m a birdbrain, you must be a turkey brain.” She follows that with a bright smile, head atilt.

Helen and Steve look away, a silent laugh between them. Bobby starts to respond. His mouth opens awkwardly, then closes, and an embarrassed grin emerges instead. He gives Oanh a congratulatory pat on the back and walks away.

That night, as she and Khiết get ready for bed, she tells him about the award and Steve taking over the lab. Too excited to remember how he dislikes hearing about her issues with the managers, she recounts the last conversation she’ll ever have with Bobby. She can see he wants to be angry with her for disrespecting a senior engineer in such a public venue, but even he has to acknowledge that it’s funny. Everyone knows the turkey is far stupider than the nightingale.

UNDIAGNOSED

ANNE-MARIE THOMPSON

after Richie Hofmann

Because I am a woman, the fragility of form

requires my daily reckoning: the geometry

of perfection in the figure

of a bass clef, Fibonacci in the body

and acoustics of a cello.

There is a reason I play the piano:

The flaws are built in, pitches tempered

evenly as an accommodating debutante.

In a suburb of Houston, a woman

cannot move from her bed,

her thin body unrecognizable

to the daughter she once balanced

on a mahogany bench as they felt their way

down to the lowest notes.

UNRAVELING

CAROLYN ABRAM

The mono tests all came back negative, but there I was, thirty-four, a mother of two in Seattle, lying in bed like a fifteen-year-old who had recently (but too enthusiastically) discovered making out. Over the first four months of 2019 I was treated for multiple strep infections, one case of walking pneumonia, several head colds, thrush, and a broken dental filling.

The throughline of it was fatigue—a symptom as difficult to explain as it was to experience. We hired a nanny to pick the kids up from daycare and keep the house running. We hired a dog walker. Before my husband left for work in the mornings he would fill the children’s bowls with cereal, even leaving out the spoons, so I wouldn’t have to do anything more than pour milk.

There were no return trips up the stairs if I forgot something. My son’s school was four blocks away, but I drove him. I couldn’t write, couldn’t even feel guilt for not writing enough. If I’d once lamented the smallness of my life with little kids—the endless loop of daycare, coffee shop, dog walk, park—I was now eating my words. My life had retracted to my bed, where I spent all day watching TV and knitting.

Knitting can feel pointless, since there are so many faster, cheaper ways to procure a hat, scarf, or blanket. But during my sickness, the pointlessness felt apt, as I had been reduced to what seemed like a pointless life. But the meditative tactileness felt like a balm. I’d slip the needle into the stitch, wrap the yarn around it, and then pull it back with a satisfying click of the needles. The next stitch would wait dutifully for the same treatment. Or not. The knitting didn’t mind if I put it down.

I stretched out the rows beneath my fingers, to see if it was bigger than the last time I’d checked. To see if it felt soft. Just to see it. “This is a very important part of knitting,” my older sister had explained when she taught me a year earlier, pressing her hand flat into the pattern she had been working on, “stopping to admire how pretty it is.”

I started with hats—one for myself, one for my son, one for my daughter—meager offerings to make up for the tubercular character from a Victorian children’s novel who’d replaced the mother who took them to parks and beaches. Hats are small projects, not too many places to go wrong. Then my sister sent me a pattern for a simple but beautiful technicolor blanket. The stitch patterns created little channels of shifting colors that peeked out from behind an ivory contrast. It was the type of blanket one could imagine in an Anthropologie catalog, artfully rumpled on a reading chair.

“I think it might be too much for me,” I said. Two months into what seemed like an endless illness, I now knew there was always more to lose. A big project tempted fate.

“Do I need to give you the spiel?” she asked.

The spiel had been given to her by her own knitting mentor as my sister embarked upon a sweater while recovering from one of her surgeries. It goes something like this: Start knitting projects with reckless abandon. Relish the excitement of looking for patterns, the rush of beginning something new, the fantasy of the finished thing. It’s not a love affair, it’s not real gambling, it’s not anything that can ruin your life. A long sweater isn’t a third medical leave from your job. To stop working on it isn’t as fraught as figuring out when, or if, you’ll be able to go back to work. A technicolor blanket isn’t children whose mother can barely microwave dinner. It’s not a husband whose fear that this will forever be our life together looms over every stilted conversation. It’s not even an abandoned novel, a decade’s worth of writing moldering on my computer. I ordered all twenty-one skeins.

It took me three tries just to cast it on, since I kept losing count of my stitches. I unraveled my progress several times—the pattern used a brioche stitch I wasn’t used to and telling which threads went where was confusing. But after a week or so of almost nonstop knitting, I settled into it. The sheer width of the thing meant once I knew what row I was on, I didn’t need to pay much attention. I could just keep going, glancing occasionally from the TV to the slowly growing blanket under my hands. Knit two together, yarn over. Purl two together, yarn over. I named it Sick Blanket.

Sometimes, when I’d been working on my hats, the sameness of one color, round and round, over and over, echoed too closely the sameness of my days in bed. But with Sick Blanket, whose colors changed every three inches, I was always making progress. The wool was soft and cushy. The channels of color, a dusky rose shifting to an electric pink, crackled delightfully under my eye whenever I stopped to admire them. And as the blanket got bigger, the mistakes in the first few rows were less noticeable.

My life began to grow again too. A tonsillectomy in March—three months after the first strep infection was diagnosed—relieved at least one of the underlying problems that had been overrunning my immune system. Within a few weeks I was able to walk around the block again. My kids were bringing fewer sicknesses home, or I wasn’t catching them as much. Sick Blanket became a security blanket as I ventured back into the world. I attended a PTA meeting, marveling that I had ever made it through these meetings in the past without something to do with my hands. People admired the knitting, and then I didn’t have to talk about how sick I had been, why I was suddenly better, and if it was going to get bad again. I didn’t want to jinx my newfound health by taking a stand on how long-lasting the reprieve would be. I’d been emptied out; I wasn’t sure how or if I would be filled in again.

As I transitioned from pink to gray, and then from gray to a deep, dark purple, my walks became longer. I was traveling old, familiar paths, but I was different. I used to hate working out, but on a whim I started attending strength classes at a local gym, fulfilling one of my husband’s lifelong dreams—that we would be a couple who worked out together. I wanted to tell my body to jump on a box and have it jump. I wanted it to lift heavy weights for no reason other than it could. Pointlessly.

Just like in childhood, it turned out my sister had already mapped these changing territories. After her first surgery for borderline tumors, she decided to get a puppy. She’d never liked animals before. Sometimes you come back different. I clamored into bed at the end of the day, relieved to be there a little less often, excited to pick up Sick Blanket, feel its soft channels and hear its metric clicks.

I continued to make mistakes, but I was faster to spot them. I could tell where the soothing pattern had been disrupted. I would go to knit two together and there was only one stitch there waiting for me. I’d purl two together and realize there was no single stitch waiting for its yarn-over. I stabbed my needles through cheat sheets so I could keep track of which row I was on, whether I should be brioche purling or brioche knitting. It was even more complicated when I was transitioning colors, or when I was approaching the end of a skein and was trying to make sure I wouldn’t run out of yarn mid-row. The blanket wants to be orderly and perfect, but human error always intrudes.

“This can’t be the fastest way to do that,” my husband chided, walking into our bedroom. I had badly botched winding the next skein into a ball. Yarn yoked around my neck and tied me to the pull handles on my dresser as I teased apart all the knots.

“Shhhhh,” I said, “it’s part of the process.”

He flopped into bed, affectionately tolerant. My pointless hobby had become a rallying cry. At Christmas, when I pulled out Sick Blanket, his family reacted with amazement—they are mostly engineers and entrepreneurs, prone to being impressed with even modest creative endeavors. “She likes the process,” he explained when they prodded for information about my rate of production, when I expected to finish. “It’s about the journey.”

I’d made it through the year. One stitch at a time, I had spun myself from nothing into the person I’d dreamed of being once I was well. I’d found myself again, after a time of being so reduced. We were on the cusp of 2020. It was going to be my year.

In February of 2020, I pulled out my knitting at a bowling party for my first grader. As Sick Blanket had grown, it had become more unwieldy. It barely fit into the tote bag I liked to smush it into when I wasn’t working on it. I probably wouldn’t be able to take it to many more events like this. I didn’t always know how to make conversation at kids’ parties, but there was only one real topic that day: What do you think of this coronavirus thing?

Here in Seattle, residents at a local assisted living facility were beginning to die—the first cluster before the virus would reach New York in March and soon overwhelm everyone, everywhere. I checked my index card to see what type of stitch I was on and thought about the impossibility of containing a disease when you lived with children. On a recent field trip, one first grader had managed to spread the flu to everyone else in my son’s class. During my sick months, I worried about getting my kids getting me sick; a simple cold was one more hit my body couldn’t handle. I’d stopped sharing food with them. On hikes we now carried two water bottles—one for me, one for the rest of the family. I already traveled in a mask, afraid that my immune-suppressing medications made me too susceptible to illness.

The week after the birthday party, my daughter’s daycare closed. The week after that, my son’s school. We were the only family I knew that already owned masks.

It was November 2020 when we finally got it. We’d been so, so careful, but it crept into our ten-person pod, starting with one of the five-year-olds. On the Saturday after a Zoom Thanksgiving I developed a runny nose and a mild fever. Two days later, my test came back positive.

Even as the symptoms stayed mild, I reverted completely to sick mode. I climbed into bed and stayed there, knitting, waiting. Purl two together, yarn over. I didn’t need long COVID or severe COVID to understand how thin the thread is that separates the healthy from the sick. Youth, strength, genetics—all illusions, mental scaffolding that allows us to climb out of bed in the morning. All I could do now was wait to see what direction the illness would take.

I was working on my favorite color sequence in the blanket: a bright springtime green that turns into a dark gray-blue and then into a bright teal. The segments grew longer and longer as I savored the colors. The days of quarantine passed by, rows of stitches stacking up on top of one another. I ran out of teal two-thirds of the way through its last row, so I subbed in purple. I could have unknit Sick Blanket to make those rows look better, but I couldn’t stand the thought of losing all that progress.

One Thursday the following March, I woke up in excruciating pain, as though air were somehow trapped in my pelvis. I texted my sister: I need you to be my pain guru. She asked if I could stand up, if I could rate my pain. You need to see your doc, she wrote me. Could be your IUD. Even an ectopic. I spent the day curled up in the fetal position until I was able to see a doctor and get an ultrasound.

“I can’t even knit!” I moaned to my husband.

Within a day an ultrasound revealed a benign ovarian cyst. Wait and they usually resolve on their own, the doctors told me. The next day the pain eased slightly and I could lie on my back again. I turned on the television and pulled out Sick Blanket. The colorful segments had been getting longer and longer, but as I approached the end—four colors to go, three colors to go, second-to-last color—I got excited and they had shortened again. I was about four rows away from the end, I calculated, opening my fancy knitting tape measure. I felt myself alternately slowing myself down and speeding up again. I wanted to get to the end but I didn’t want it to be over.

In just over an hour I was on the last row. After watching a video on how to bind off, I decided to go for it, threading the tail of the yarn through each stitch and off their needles. The videos cautioned not to pull the yarn too tight, a direction I promptly forgot and the end of the blanket started to pull in too tightly. I loosened up my stitches and the rest of the blanket flattened out. The final step was to weave in the loose ends, tails of each color that dangled off the sides like tassels.

I arranged the finished blanket over my legs, took photos of it from both sides, and texted them to my sister. It looks amazing!!! she wrote back.

I hadn’t prepared for this moment, for being finished. I had no new project waiting to begin. I’d completed the fantasy and had to live in the awkward anticlimax, my hands restless while I watched TV. “Restlessness is a good sign,” my sister had once told me when I was in the middle of my sick months. “Wanting to do something but being unable to is the first micro-step towards actually doing something.”

That’s the last loose thread; the pattern I followed up until I didn’t. I got to bind off my sickness into a tidy blanket, but my sister still wakes up in pain every day. That truth needs to be woven in as well. We waited for the cyst to dissolve, for me to return to health. My husband carried food upstairs for me. We were better than we were last time. More capable. Our kids were older and more independent. We’d done this before. We’ll do it again: follow the path from health to sickness, sickness to health, work that will be undone by the passage of time, if nothing else.

A SPRING WITHOUT US

TALIA BLOCH

The playground has been locked for months.

A swing coughs dryly in the shade.

Each night, ambulances pulse through our sleep.

Long white corridors crowd our dreams.

Remember the scent of new grass

in the park, of earth clotting in the rain?

Remember the picnickers laughing

beside the magnolia’s soft, pink lungs?

Now we distrust even the breeze

and only the birds will congregate.

The smallest gesture has grown grand

and from afar we’ve learned to love

our neighbor’s song. Our voices kiss the walls.

Because we cannot, the tulip breathes.

CAR WASH

ARYA SAMUELSON

While I wait for him to pull the trigger, I drive to the grocery store. Pick up milk, chewing gum, sponges. Drop off the dry cleaning: the dress I splattered with a spaghetti stain at Shana and Calvin’s wedding last month. Ignore the stench of the rotting plant in the backseat and keep the AC rippling. I drive my typical circuit around town, the usual left and right turns past the elementary school, the park, the bakery. Ask myself as I always do whether I should get a cupcake—they’ve got this lemon Earl Grey flavor even David loves. But the thought slides down sour, explodes a memory bomb that curdles my stomach. I veer into the right lane, cutting off a van plastered with Gifted & Talented bumper stickers and turn off at the car wash.

It’s Monday morning and there’s already a line. I shouldn’t be among these idlers. I should be answering the phone on the first ring with a voice sweet as honey: “Mitchell, Barber, and Hancock Legal. How may I help you today?” But as soon as I woke up and saw David folded over that slick black package, I knew it would be another dark morning. Still I couldn’t bring myself to call in sick. That’s what I tell people about my partner when they ask why I dodge all company outings, show up wearing the same clothes three days in a row, and never turn my phone on silent. They probably think he has cancer. So I let them think he has cancer, even old friends from school or the restaurant. Everyone thinks I’m noble, carting him around to chemo and shit. Pity makes their eyes sparkle. But if I had to say that word this morning—sick—the hiss of it, the cloying k—I’d throw up all my guts.

It’s a good thing there’s a line. I’m in no rush. And I pat myself on the back for my positive thinking. David’s therapist would be proud. “Can’t you see the silver lining?” she’d ask. But David never could. And truthfully, neither could I, though I was better at pretending. “Your depression gives you more empathy,” I’d say, caressing his leg in a way meant to signal affection. But his face was like a sauce that wouldn’t change color or texture no matter how much you stirred it. Anyway, it was a lie.

For late May, it’s hotter here in New Jersey than in Arizona. And it’s not like Arizona heat, not like scorched skin and flaming sun. New Jersey heat is a bloated woman begging to burst. I turn off the car, roll down the windows. A swath of air dense and moist as sponge cake invades the car, glues my thighs together. But at least I’m not killing the planet. The dying plant exudes its funk, encouraged by the heat. Fishy, metallic, almost menstrual. Fucking Shana, giving out potted plants as party favors at her wedding. There’s a reason some of us don’t have children or pets. We don’t need another thing to worry about. I told her this—I felt it my responsibility as her maid of honor—but of course she rolled her eyes and cooed at the plants arranged all across her kitchen counter. Her adorable mutant babies.

“Just because you’re not happy in your relationship doesn’t mean others don’t get to be,” she blurted, and I could tell she’d been rolling this remark like a shiny marble beneath her tongue since her last therapy session, desperate to dislodge it.

“Jesus, I’m talking about the plants.”

“No, you’re not. You’re convinced Calvin and I don’t know each other well enough to get married because it’s only been six months. You and David have been together three years and it’s hardly like you’re the portrait of bliss.”

“It’s just a plain fact. You can’t get to know somebody that fast.”

“Mom and Dad were engaged after three months and they were—”

“Cheating on each other their whole marriage?”

“—mostly really happy together. You’ve really got to stop it with that whole Dad cheating thing. You don’t have any proof.”

“I saw it, Shana. That’s my proof.”

Shana sighed and gazed out at the jungle overtaking her kitchen. She’s never believed me, no matter how many times I’ve told her. Instead of suggesting—as I’ve done just as many times—that she should talk with her therapist about that, I shrugged myself into the nearest chair and picked cat hair off my leggings.

“Julie?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you really not think they’re beautiful?”

I made myself look at the plants. Lush and blooming in all shapes and sizes. They reminded me of the cakes I used to bake, molding thick layers of mint buttercream into the tips of leaves, sprouting pink petals with my fingers. People like flowers. People like to grow things, keep them alive.

“I think they’re very beautiful,” I admitted and watched how Shana’s shoulders softened, her face blooming again with hope. It’s her worst quality: she’s always cared too much what I think.

The plants were a hit at the wedding. People were legitimately fighting over them, throwing passive aggressive hints at each other all throughout dinner—“Oh, my mom would just die for these flowers” or “You know, I’ve always wanted to take up gardening.” I tried to slip out of the room unnoticed, but Shana caught me and forced one of the pots into my arms. One with perky violet flowers and checkered leaves that looked like a cut-open fig. Seeded and blood-red.

“How am I going to get one of these home to New Jersey?” I complained, but it wasn’t what I meant. What I wanted to do was nuzzle its fuzzy leaves against my nose and whisper I’m sorry. I knew it’d be dead in a month.

A car honks behind me in line. It’s that soccer mom van again. I slam on the gas pedal and stop just short of the car ahead. My foot spasms with energy—I’ve gotta get out of here. The milk will sour if it’s out too long. I glance at the clock. I don’t mean to, but I do the math. It’s only been 44 minutes. If I go back now, I’ll never be able to leave him again. I ramp up the radio.

Rihanna’s propulsive rhythm throbs through the car. “Only Girl (In the World).” I remember that wanting, how it shoots right through your nostrils and heads straight to your brain. That wanting to be wanted. A hunger deeper than anything they taught at La Tulipe Patisserie Institute, even deeper than what we learned perched over the mirror in the bathroom stalls or leaning up against the alley between shifts crumbling cigarettes. The rest of the time we learned about crème chibousts and mille-feuille, a dozen ways to slice a strawberry, which flavors paired best with hazelnut. The pastry chef must speak to the deepest parts of the human soul, the part that craves nothing more or less than absolute pleasure, Mrs. Canticle crooned in her slow and sumptuous way, as if each word was a finger dipped in cream and she was sucking on it with relish. We laughed at her, David and I, first from across the room as we caught a spark in each other’s eyes, then in each other’s ears, and then late at night in bed together, rolling around like globs of dough, sticky and ready to be molded, awakening the deepest parts of each other’s souls. David had never been happy before he met me. That’s what he always said and I accepted it as fact, like everything else we were learning: hazelnut pairs splendidly with apricot, banana, mint, and plum.

No, the truth is: I took it as a compliment.

“Make up your mind, Harvard!” the lady behind me squawks. I rack my brain, then remember the crimson Harvard sticker plastered on the bumper. In the rearview, I relish a glimpse of her bad perm. All her millions of tendrils of hair capitulating to this heat. I flip her off. She rushes to shield her children’s eyes.

The sticker’s not mine, of course. I’d done what everyone expected and gone to the University of Arizona, ten miles north of where I was born. An average student, I never felt brave enough to raise my hand in the cavernous lecture halls. The first time I felt seen was when I baked a birthday cake for one of my sorority sisters. Vanilla mousseline with strawberries and almondine-soaked sponge cake. Soon my cakes and pastries were expected at every social function and I discovered the only thing more thrilling than being wanted was being needed.

Attending culinary school in New Jersey was the only time I’d ever lived outside the state. David dropped out of Harvard after a year, and two other schools after that. Still, he was more comfortable at La Tulipe than I was. He had a ragged sort of grace, his thick black hair never tidy but always handsome, and a sense of entitlement that bulged from his shoulders. He didn’t bother socializing with other students. He only focused when he felt like it and had no qualms about wearing his disinterest on his slouched muscular chest, yawning loud as a yodeler while Mr. Pettigrew covered basic safety etiquette. Where I followed the instructions, hammered the dos and don’ts into my head each night before bed, David flambéed Milk Duds as his final project. Every teacher sang his praises, but the week before graduation, David decided he didn’t want us to go. It’s just a stupid ceremony. We don’t even like any of those people. My stomach churned. The truth was that I liked many of our peers and teachers, but David found something ugly, stale, or saccharine in each of them, and I’d started to see them that way too—the way we learned to critique our food so harshly we couldn’t tell what it really tasted like. We’re the best ones in the class, he’d say, and the others are just trying to find out our secrets. His paranoia tugged at me, but the “we” beckoned like the smoothest whiskey at the end of the shift.

Instead of graduation, we booked a hotel room on the Jersey Shore. All week, relentless rain obliterated our promised view of the ocean, but we lay in bed eating truffles we had made ourselves and licking the dust off each other’s palms. Four days later, truffles long gone and our budgets exhausted by the restaurants on the strip, David cracked. He blamed me for missing graduation, for choosing the Shore where it was always raining in April, for what he called the most depressing vacation ever. He flung the tacky sunset paintings across the room and ran into the rain.

I followed as if pulled along by a current beyond my control. When David finally turned around, his face was twisted with derision.

“You’re like a snake, always making me do the wrong thing.”

I opened my mouth to argue, defend myself, declare my love. But no sound would come.

“See, you have nothing to say. You’re a nobody. That’s why you cling to me.”

I fled to the hotel room and assembled my things, trying to disentangle my clothing from his amid the piles we had shamelessly strewn around the bed. I carried my suitcases out to the car, where I found David slumped at its rear, slick as a pup born dead. Frantically, I probed beneath his sweatshirt for a pulse.

“See, you still care if I die.” He was almost smiling.

Carting him back to the hotel room, I remembered my father collapsed at my mother’s feet, begging her to forgive him, while I watched belly-down from the crack in the stairs, peering at the scene upside down. I was sure she’d say no, my strong, defiant mother, and I braced myself, imagining the inevitable new arrangement to come, but instead she caved around him, and from my distorted view, it looked like she was dangling from the floor and he was the one holding onto her, holding her not just upright but together, and I peeled David’s clothes off his blue-gray skin, draped him in all the blankets, towels, sweaters, and scraps of fabric I could find, and pressed against him with my whole body, my anger dissolving. What love ran deeper than this? Two bodies, keeping each other alive.

Rihanna shimmers to a close, replaced by an overly sentimental Maroon 5 song. I shut off the radio. Where am I again? Oh right, waiting at the car wash. I’ll get groceries next. We’re out of milk. Sponges, too.

The plant isn’t dead yet, but it smells like it is. When we left Arizona, I stashed it in the overhead bin, actually remembered to carry it off the plane, then promptly deserted it in the backseat of the car. I won’t lie. I thought about taking it inside and giving it a shot. Creating alarms on my phone that reminded me to water it twice a week. Googling plant survival tips. I fantasized about Shana visiting me for the first time in years and how shocked she’d be to see the plant thriving. Maybe she wouldn’t even notice the Big Mac wrappers overflowing from the garbage bin or the gloomy flesh and semen smell exuding from our blankets. She’d be so impressed by my newly minted green thumb, she’d even overlook the mummified David on the couch, staring at the ceiling like a piece of abstract art he couldn’t figure out.

“Isn’t he seeing a psychiatrist?” Shana has asked me too many times to count.

“Yes, and he’s tried just about every medication out there.”

“What about a therapist?”

And before she said what I knew she would—that maybe her therapist could recommend someone—I reminded her what she didn’t want to hear.

“He’s been in therapy his whole damn life.”

This always shut her up for a while. I knew she wanted to help. But I also knew she wanted me to leave him.

“You know, I was reading the other day about a new treatment facility…”

Back and forth we’d go until the words became mundane as dish soap. The truth is, I haven’t told Shana about the bathtub or the hospitalization afterwards, how he walked around for weeks with deadened fish eyes. The thing nobody tells you about these hospitals is how useless they are. How all they do is pump you with medication, lock you in a fluorescent-lit room, and turn you out the minute you promise not to kill yourself, leaving you with a bill you’ll never live down because restaurant jobs don’t give insurance. I don’t know why I haven’t told Shana, except there are things I don’t tell anyone. Like that I keep a secret line item of my budget, so one day we can maybe afford the pristine center with rolling hills that Shana suggested. Or that I’ve always known I might need to take that money and make a run for it.

Dread surges across my sternum as I jerk my head around. Blue-red-blue-red-blue-red. In the backseat, I spot the paper bag of groceries, fallen on its side. When did I go to the store? It’s the memory bombs. I keep trying to dodge them, but they’re too strong, lurking beneath every thought. The cops dart past the car wash, chasing after someone else. I knead the leather of my seats. Keep me here. Free of the past, sharp to the present moment. Soon the car will be clean and I can move on. But it’s too much of a coincidence, this cop car sailing past.

All I can do is roll up the windows. Blast the AC again. Inch myself forward every time another car disappears through the tunnel. Turn on a mariachi station and keep my brain quiet for a while in a place where no memories live. All I can do is reach into the backseat for the plant. Hold it in my arms and breathe in the rot.

There are other things I’ve never told Shana. Like that sometimes I come home from work to find he’s cooked dinner for us. Seared scallops with garlic and oranges. That we eat together and drink too much wine and it’s almost peaceful. That other times I’m the one who goes and picks up McDonald’s for the both of us. I join him on the couch and we watch stupid shows together, making fun of Snooki and Tyra Banks and Kim Kardashian with relish. That he’s still the smartest person I know.

I have to stop him. Swaddle him in my guilt. Chain my body to his wrists. Tattoo his heart onto my throat. Bind our flesh and make sure we won’t ever be parted again.

Something vibrates behind my hips. I wriggle around and reach for my phone, but it’s not there. Where did I put it? I rake through the car and come across the bright orange coat ticket from Shana’s wedding at La Fortuna. David couldn’t have hated the venue more—the sagging palm trees, the absurd fountains outside each room, the cringingly sweet shrimp cocktail appetizers. But he turned quiet when Shana and Calvin said their vows and abruptly excused himself during the second course. I stood up too fast, knocking over my fork, staining spaghetti sauce on my pale yellow dress, and as I hurried out of the room, I tried not to catch Shana’s eye, but of course I looked right at her. Saw her perfect day protract and shatter.

David wasn’t in the lobby. I remembered with relief that I had the car keys and found him smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. My high heels teetered on the loose gravel, the bridesmaid dress closing my legs shut like a mermaid.

“I don’t deserve you,” he whimpered. “Without me, you’d be free. You could go back to the restaurant. Go back to what you love.”

“Fuck you.”

He began to throw fistfuls of gravel—not quite at me, but like he didn’t care if that’s where they landed. His face drew back behind a dark curtain.

“I’m going back in.”

“Don’t leave me, Julie. Please.”

I wiped my dress and remembered the splotch of red at my hip. I considered staying there with him. Going back to our room and crumpling this ugly, butter-colored dress in the hotel trash bin. Then I remembered my sister, how much this stupid wedding meant to her. The way her gaze turned soft as rose petals when she looked at Calvin. Her pupils bright with alarm and horror when she looked at me, barreling after David.

Shana may care too much what I think, but the truth is, I care even more what she thinks of me.

“I’ll meet you here after. I promise.”

Wobbling back to the wedding was when the thought first came to me. Maybe David was right. I felt dangerous, on edge. I locked eyes with someone at the table next to me, a boy barely out of high school, daring him to dance. I choked up during my parent’s embarrassing toast about Shana and me naked in our ducky costumes—not from the story, but from the way my parents squeezed each other’s hands the whole time, as though they were in love and had always been. Calvin’s mom noticed my trembling lip and handed me a tissue. “Aren’t they perfect together?” she said, fawning. But the tears wouldn’t come. At the end of the night, when Shana thrust the silly plant into my arms, my first thought was that it probably weighed as much as a baby. I didn’t mind like I’d expected.

The car wash billboard shifts into view. Big bright squares of options gleaming bright as a lottery ticket: The Regular, The Deluxe, The Special, The Ultimate. Each category is arranged with checkmarks for hot shine carnauba wax, triple foam polish, double bond with teflon, something called “Complete Protection.” But what the fuck is carnauba wax? I wish I’d brought my dumb phone. A huge banner reads in bold red print, UNLIMITED MONTHLY PASS – WASH YOUR CAR AS OFTEN AS YOU LIKE. I do the math. At $46.13, it’s a good deal. Besides, I really should be washing the car twice a month, probably more. Then I remember this Toyota belongs to David and once everyone finds out what I’ve done, I won’t be washing any cars ever again.

Three knocks at the window.

The attendant is a young man with good teeth, square and bright as Chiclets. Too good to be working this shitty job.

“Shit, uh, give me ‘Complete Protection.’”

“You mean the Ultimate?”

“What’s your name?”

I want to draw out this moment as long as I possibly can, kiss each one of his teeth. I want to tell him, “Leave this crummy town and this miserable job. Do what you love. Believe in yourself.” I want to read him all the inspirational slogans my sister sends me on Pinterest. He could be an actor with those teeth, or a lawyer, or a social justice activist.

“Pardon?”

“I mean, what’s it gonna cost?”

He cocks a sweaty eyebrow and points to the sign. “All the info’s up there, ma’am.”

“Oh right.”

He stares at me expectantly. “Ma’am, you can wait inside the building while we wash your car.”

“No.”

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Only the outside, please.”

“But the Ultimate comes with everything,”

“Please.”

He shrugs and I watch him vanish from my gaze, into a future I’ll never know. Away from all these other stupid cars, the soccer moms I’ll never be, the G&T kid I’ll never have. Away from what I’ve done. Who I’ve become. I drive up to the entrance and turn off the car.

Nothing happens for a while. Long flaps of black rubber hang loosely from the ceiling. Then the car glides forward and water spits at all the windows. Foam gathers, blotting out the world. We are somewhere warm. Somewhere warm. Spread-eagled in that Jersey Shore hotel room watching the rain come down.

Rubber guts mop the windshield. Hoses whirr and wheeze. I clutch at the gears, but there’s no escaping. Everything blurs.

This morning I woke to David folded over himself, fiddling with the gun.

“I should just do it,” he moaned. “Stop tormenting myself. It’s the only way.”

Black ribbons thrash at the roof. Pummel at the doors.

I knew what he needed me to do. Tell him why I loved him. Beg him to stay alive. The world needed him. His goodness. His genius. I glanced at the clock and did the math. I’d be late for the one hundredth and second day in a row.

The gun glinted in the morning sun.

“How can you be so smart but also so unhappy?” I’d asked David once. When I told Shana later, her reply was pinched and quiet. “I’ve always wondered that about you.”

“Just do it,” I said.

The words came out like a hiss. A voice I’d never heard, shaking its rattle.

David sat up and for a minute he was really there, curtains open, looking straight at me with his intelligent eyes.

Water prisms the windows.

Then he looked down at the gun. I knew I should take it away. But I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want it to be mine to carry.

Spinning brushes batter at my sides.

“What’s stopping you?”

I forgot myself and touched his cheek. Dry. When was the last time he’d cried? When was the last time I had?

He blinked and his soul vanished again. Lips quivered on his chin like a dumb child, and I knew I had to leave.

Soap. Splattering. Fractals.

Evaporation. Empty circles spreading.

I left him there like that. Stroking the shiny gun.

Pluck off the plant’s withered leaves. Rotting flowers. Wrest the stalks from their soil. Some pull easy, a few resist, so I tug harder until they tear up the roots.

Water travels down like snakes.

The windshield sparkles.

On the other side, the sky appears again, blank as a canvas. A different attendant taps on the window.

“Your car looks good as new, Miss. Now can we do the inside?”

“I don’t need it.”

“Are you sure?”

I look down at the shriveled flowers and leaves scattered across the floor. Scrawny stalks holding onto their nest of roots. Exposed, but intact.

I nod and hand him two twenties. Twist the keys into ignition. Ram my foot onto the gas pedal until the tires squeal for mercy.

MY FRIEND IN FLAPPING STAGES TRIES TO TAKE FLIGHT

ROCHELLE ROBINSON-DUKES

April is my favorite month.

Its stormy flowers

and puddled rainbows are captivating

as is the lightning

that breaks cool spring nights

like a child’s scribble.

The cracking sound slides between raindrops

like cold feet in flannel sheets

—electricity in whitish

rapid Southern Baptist church claps.

I run through it.

But when you twisted like a lipstick plant,

became a true epiphyte, then an origami ostrich,

hopping on one leg before

biting your lip on your descent

between the kitchen and the dining room,

I ran to you to catch you.

Your seizure scattered the cats like marbles,

placed you firmly in the ER

for four hours and pushed memory from you,

just out of reach of the date, your name.

So, your life has to change; you had to admit

I guess I really have epilepsy.

Something we learned four years ago.

But it was the cutting off knowledge

that happens when the brain misfires

that shook you like wet leaves

on a most deciduous tree—

a beech, maple, or oak—holding drops like pearls,

preciously or pills epileptics must take

even when they feel free

like the natural force

in a charged midnight monsoon.

1:00 A.M. REFILL

REBECCA GROSSMAN-KAHN

It’s 1:00 a.m. and the emergency department is cold. The bright overhead lights illuminate the rows of empty desk chairs. I hear the tap-tap of rubber clogs shuffling in a far corner. There are only two patients here—the man in Room 18 with abdominal pain, and you.

From outside Room 11, I peer in through the glass walls. The privacy curtain is pulled halfway, exposing only a computer on wheels. I briefly struggle to open the door until it gives way with a click. A toddler is sleeping on the hospital bed, limbs and hair scattered, somehow taking up the entire single bed. You’re sitting next to her on the edge of a chair, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and work boots with flecks of grayish mud. You haven’t shaved in days. I look back to the girl, and you must see my surprise at seeing a child in an adult emergency-department bed.

“It’s me,” you say. “I’m the patient. Just here for a refill.”

Just your antidepressant, you tell me, and then you’ll be out of here. You thought you could do without it, so you stopped it a few months ago. But then a family member died, the pandemic raged on, and then yesterday you couldn’t stop crying. The medicine worked. You wish you hadn’t stopped it. Your shoulders are slightly tensed; your posture rigid.

I think to myself, It’s past midnight and you came for a refill? I take a seat in the stool on wheels, fiddle with the levels to adjust the height, and roll it awkwardly with my feet until we’re facing each other.

You work twelve-hour days in construction, you explain, so you can’t come to the clinic during normal hours. You tried calling but ran out of break time while the hold music played on. You put your daughter to bed as usual tonight, then waited for her to fall asleep before gently transporting her to the car so you could drive the two hours to get here. I ask a few more questions before slipping out to the corridor computer. I scan your chart, clicking through the electronic tabs. The late-night timing and long drive to get here give me an uneasy feeling. I find one hospital discharge summary from a few years ago. The reason for admission: a serious suicide attempt.

My body feels heavy as I walk back to your room and sink into the padded stool. Your face, angled toward the floor, tells me you know I’ve read your chart. Your daughter is awake now, groggily asking where she is, and you squeeze her shoulder and tell her you’ll get her back home soon. Then you lean over to rummage in a backpack under your chair, eventually producing a bag of cookies.

I want to send you on your way, with a plastic vial of the medicine in hand. In five hours, you’ll drive the toddler to daycare and then report to the construction site. In five hours, I’ll scramble to my day job, where there will be more refills to send, more phone calls to return, more hold music from pharmacies to endure.

I ask if you can come to a clinic appointment during the day; you can’t afford the time off. I know the answer is the same for therapy, but I ask anyway. “Is there anyone in your life you can lean on?”

You shake your head no.

“Any family you could call in a pinch?”

You shake your head again, slowly. You have no one. You tell me things fell apart after you returned from Afghanistan. You saw your friends die there. You drank more. That’s when the suicide attempt happened.

You divorced. You moved into a house with a room for the kid—you have her every other week. No, no guns at home. “Not with a curious toddler getting into the drawers,” you say and muster a smile. You’re sober now. Your days are spent working, then collapsing in front of the TV late at night. When you awake suddenly in the dark early morning hours, you feel too weighed down to move.

I hesitate.

“I’ll be okay.” You remind me you stopped the medication because it had worked, because you were actually feeling better. You’re holding the bag of frosted animal crackers in one hand out over the bed, as your daughter helps herself. Half of them are crushed and she sifts through the crumbs to extract whole pieces.

You look me in the eye as if to say, Don’t worry about me. All I wanted was a refill—remember?

“I’ve got her,” you say out loud, somewhat unconvincingly, as you turn to look at her. She, in turn, is silently puzzling over the resuscitation cart she’s noticed in the corner of the room. Your eyes look so tired as you assure me those thoughts of ending your life are long dormant.

My mind flashes to the many documents I’ll fill out tonight, tallying up the pieces of your life deemed risk factors. I’m thinking of the follow-up calls you’ll get from the suicide prevention team. Your past follows you through your medical chart, marking you as someone to keep close tabs on. But it’s not the imprecise calculation of risk that gives me pause.

I picture you at home, in the lonely company of a toddler, making peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. I imagine you falling asleep on the floor while playing pretend kitchen, exhaustion taking over in the middle of a make-believe sip of soup. It will be weeks before I can put into words that it was not worry I felt, but sadness.

I’m out of my usual questions but not quite ready for the visit to end. “Um, what will you do for fun this weekend?”

“We’re going to ride my bike,” your daughter shouts before you can respond. “It’s purple!” Flecks of cookie crumbs spew from her mouth and fly across the bed. You laugh, tell her other people are sleeping, even though we are the only ones in the emergency department. The patient with abdominal pain has already been transported upstairs.

The girl is trying to climb from the hospital bed into your lap. She has two hands on the safety rail and is working out how to get her legs over. You look up at me and quietly say, “She’s right. I promised her we would take her bike to the park.”

I hadn’t realized I was searching for something until I found it in the promise of a purple bike.

“Well then, let’s get you home,” I say, standing up to finish the visit. I add the usual about the nurse coming in shortly with your medicine and the discharge paperwork.

It’s 7:00 a.m. and the hospital yawns, waking up to a fresh day. Figures in scrubs and nametags funnel in through the main entry. The line at the coffee shop snakes through the hall. Staff members assume their daytime posts. Room 11 shows no trace of us. The floor is scrubbed clean of the caked dirt that fell off your boots. Cookie crumbs and your toddler’s wispy hairs have been swept away.

An administrator opens her computer and will see my early-morning notes about your emergency department visit. Based on the check boxes I clicked, she will stratify your risk and either file you away, or forward your name on to someone else’s inbox.

But the administrators won’t see the way you contorted to reach that plastic baggie of animal crackers for your daughter. I was the only one who watched how your body shifted and heard the wooden chair creak as you told me about the friends you lost to war. Only I saw your body ease as you assured your daughter she’d get to ride her bike. Only I saw how your face softened as you told me, “I’ll be okay.”

The notes won’t convey that it took me a while to fall asleep in the call room that smells of stale take-out and old carpet. You handed me your story in the middle of the night and I didn’t know where to shelve it. Nowhere in your chart does it say that I will think of you months after I met you, still holding your story, believing, steadfastly, that you’ll be okay.

It’s 9:00 a.m. on Saturday and you’re miles away. Your toddler is awake and clamoring for waffles. I imagine you and her, lugging her bike to an empty parking lot. From the road, drivers see just a flash of purple. You run alongside her, her little legs pedaling in circles, blurred like a hummingbird’s beating wings. She gains speed on a small descent and screams—equal parts fear and delight because she feels safe with you by her side. You accelerate to keep up with her down the hill. Perhaps, in that moment, you’re briefly weightless.

HAIR, PLAITED AND TIED

TARA BALLARD

You recognize the block.

Play the video of the boy, back

of his head a weeping rosewood.

Someone shouts at him to die.

At the market, cucumbers are stacked

like aqueducts across coastal plains.

Unflowering of onion skins, petals

a reminder of passage. So close are you

to the world’s center: if the house falls,

what will not turn to dust? You are a quiet deer.

The river around you, lonely. Wrap your arms

around cold metal, pressing flat your breasts

to the screen-like surface. A nurse instructs

you to Breathe deep and hold, sister. The sea washes

away a metal spine of stairs. Waves tongue and tongue

the shore. And what of submission? Words grow

into bones like jasmine, and lights of winter eat all

the clouds. The woman drawn through the square,

she shouted. A shell of watermelon halved

and broken, as your feet, on marble, chart imprint

upon imprint. You shift your weight, read

of diamonds rolled between threads of carpet,

transported sky. A girl sits tense behind the wheel,

her fingers tight. The IV machine thrums

like the wings of a helicopter, and you know

the hours are passing: the gentle, the praiseworthy.

Close your eyes, and divide your hair into present,

past, after. Do you remember how you sang

on the grass at midnight? Do you remember

the taste of dates, fresh and yellow? Braid

the time. Become the branch. May it be so.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH MOXIBUSTION AND NEUROPATHY

TARA BALLARD

Wrapped in dried artemisia, a flame

is held low over each of my toes,

one by one. My acupuncturist

tracks the time, tells me

to speak when I identify heat.

He counts under his breath.

What I soon register is not

temperature, but dis-

ease. There is a needle he places

in the curve of my ankle,

tethered to skin. I watch

as it quivers. Another is pinned

along the furthest metatarsal.

I become landscape, mapped

with poles, tied with power lines

as invisible as God,

but lines that must exist,

connecting my delays in lightning

like seconds spoken aloud

before a clap of thunder.

I see the fire, so I know it burns,

but I feel nothing.

HOPPY

WES BYERS

When I was ten years old, my mother tried to make me into a man. On the nights we waited for my father to come home, she exposed me to a battery of things she thought boys my age should enjoy. She made me watch Halloween. I’m sure she hoped the scare would shock me into adolescence, but all it did was send me further down into the loam of childhood. For two weeks, every time I closed my eyes, I saw the pale mask of Michael Myers, the glint of his butcher knife. Another night, she put on a documentary about baseball legend Lou Gehrig and her face changed when she realized the documentary focused less on his feats of athleticism and more on his ALS diagnosis.

All her schemes were designed to sever the ties, which were deep and precious, between me and what I really loved: bears.

I was obsessed with bears because of Hoppy. Hoppy was the stuffed bear I’d had since I was a baby. He was blue with a white nose and white paws. I couldn’t say why—not then, not now—but Hoppy made me feel like I was hidden beneath a pile of covers. I took him to the bathroom, to the grocery store, to school. Hoppy was always with me and it stressed my mother out. That’s what she said: “You’re stressing me out with that bear, Jake.”

The psychologist my parents took me to the year before told them it wasn’t too uncommon and that taking it away wouldn’t solve anything.

My mother was not too keen on the psychologist’s ideas.

She said things like, “That bear is going to get your butt kicked at school,” and “Imagine what girls are going to think of a boy who still carries a security blanket.”

Years later, when I discovered the wonders of nerve pills and slurred my way through every phone call we had, she would wish my only problem was an unhealthy attachment to a stuffed animal.

After I had gotten out of rehab and gotten a job at a rental car service, I met her at a sandwich shop in a suburb of Chicago where she had moved after remarrying an insurance executive named Frank. She sat across from me, her face unflinching. Even though my cheeks were concave and sores speckled my face, she kept saying I looked healthy, as though to convince herself. I heard all about her stepchildren, Frank’s two girls from his previous marriage. The girls were still in high school and were disrespectful. My mother called them hateful.

“Not like you,” she told me. “I raised you right.”

We hugged before she left, embracing each other in the close, firm way family members do when they have become strangers.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My father was a dentist. He would come home late, after nine o’clock sometimes.

“Paperwork. Insurance stuff. Very time sensitive.”

My mother would glance at her watch, purely out of show because she had been counting the hours since five. “For four hours?”

My father, slackening his tie: “It was a lot of paperwork.”

On those days when the past rises to the surface, it’s always a ringing phone that cracks the dam. Say what you will about the Age of the Smartphone, cell phones can’t emit the kind of visceral ring that old rotary phones can. There’s something in the sound that wakes you up, points a finger at you.

I was in my room, reading about bears, and my mother was washing dishes and singing along to a Carpenters song that played on the radio. Then the phone rang.

My mother turned off the radio and said, “Hello?” There was still a hint of music in her voice.

“Giovanni’s. The Italian place, yes, I know—” My mother listened to the voice on the line for a minute or so. She kept saying, “Yes,” and “Mm-hmm.”

A pause.

She said, “What did she say her name was? Huh. Well.” She laughed, but the music in her voice was gone. “Well, well, well. No, it’s fine. No, it’s not gossip. I’m sure it was probably a business meeting.” Another pause. “Oh, all kinds of reasons. They’re always trying to sell him new equipment, new drugs for anesthesia, numbing creams, that sort of thing. I’ll be sure to give him a hard time about it this evening. Uh-huh. You too, Lori. Bye now.”

That evening, my mother made a family-sized pan of Hamburger Helper and didn’t eat a bite. Instead, she took a long shower. When she joined me on the couch, her hair was still wet. She filed her nails while I watched Rambo.

It was almost ten o’clock and my father still wasn’t home. I kept glancing at my mother as she checked her watch over and over. She caught me looking and said, “Can I help you? Watch the movie.”

We heard the groan of the garage door opening. My mother turned off the television and said, “Bed. Now.”

“But I want to see Daddy.”

“We can’t always get what we want. Up. Get up.” Before I shut the door to my bedroom, I heard her yell, “And it’s Dad, not Daddy.”

That was the night I first heard her name. I snuck out of my bed with Hoppy dangling at my side. Even with their bedroom door closed, I could hear my parents shouting at each other. My mother’s voice was a shrill counterpoint to my father’s undertones.

“And what does Pauline have to say about me, or did you lie and say you were divorced?”

“Susan. Please.”

“Does Pauline know about Jake? Does Pauline even care? How does Pauline live with herself?”

The name Pauline had meant nothing to me before, but as I grew up, it became something of a symbol. It’s a more common name than you might think.

Here’s what I mean: I was twenty years old when I crashed my first car. When I woke up the next morning in the hospital, a nurse with scrubs that had little cartoon dogs on them told me what happened. Her name tag said Pauline.

And then there was the show we always watched in rehab. Some forgotten sitcom from the seventies. It was not especially entertaining, but the TV was hung high in the corner of the room and the orderlies kept the remote. In every episode, this one character, a waitress, dropped dishes, spilled drinks on important customers, even set the grill on fire. Whenever she made one of these gaffes, canned laughter would erupt into the common room of the rehab facility and another character would groan and say, “Pauline, for the love of God.”

After my parents had their argument, I stayed in my room and read National Geographic articles about bears. One night, my father came and stood in the doorway with his shoulders stooped. His hair gel gleamed in the light of my room.

“Hey, Jake,” he said. “How you doing, buddy?”

He came and sat on the edge of my bed and I scooted up against the pillows and wrapped my arms around my knees. He glanced all around the room, taking it in like he was seeing it for the first time.

“Lot of bear stuff in here,” he said. There were National Geographic posters of polar bears loping across the icy wilderness. Sitting at my desk was a little bear figurine I had gotten for Christmas years ago. The posters in my room were ones I had printed after Mom put her foot down and forbade anything that might encourage my obsession. There was a collage of low-quality photos I’d found of black bears.

“Huh,” he said. I followed his eyes where they fell on Hoppy. Dad picked him up, a little too brusquely, and squeezed his little bear body in his hands.

“Arrrgh,” he said. “I bet Hoppy could do some damage if he wanted.”

My hand went instinctively to Hoppy. “Bears are peaceful,” I said.

“Tell that to the people who get mauled by them every year.”

“They’re just defending their families,” I said. “Bears are vehement defenders of their families.”

“Bears are what?”

“They’re defenders of their—”

“Did you say ‘vehement’?”

“Yeah. It means passionate, like—”

He held up his hand. “I know what it means. It’s just—big word, pal. Here, let me see Hoppy again.”

I loosened my grip and let him take Hoppy into his hands. He held Hoppy softer now.

“Oh, Hoppy,” he said and breathed his minty breath all over Hoppy’s black eyes. “You know, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal that you love Hoppy so much.”

“You don’t?”

He turned his head to the side. “No. In fact, hey, if it’s encouraging you to read and learn, what’s the problem?” He handed Hoppy back to me and I let out my breath. “Listen, J-man,” he said. His face softened. “I have an idea.”

I didn’t speak.

“I’ve been gone a lot. Work stuff, here and there. All that.” He waved his hand. “Let’s you and I do something. Next weekend. We can have a dinner together. Maybe go to a movie. I’ll see if there’s something playing with bears in it.”

“Is Mommy going too?”

He stared for a moment with his mouth open, like I had asked him to work out a math problem. “No,” he said. “No, she’s not.”

Years later, after I had moved to Portland and he was still in North Carolina, living alone in an apartment complex inhabited by other divorcees, he and I spoke on the phone. I asked him why he wanted me to go with him that day.

“Your mother and I were calling it quits. I was seeing Pauline. Thought you knew that. And Pauline, she was kid-crazy. Always asking about you, wanting to meet you. Got to be a real source of conflict for us, believe it or not. She couldn’t have kids, you know.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you agree?”

“She wouldn’t stop asking.”

“Yes,” I said to my father. “But why?”

That Saturday, he came to my room and said, “You’re already dressed. Good. Let’s check out the movies.”

The thing is, I believed him. When we passed the movie theater, I didn’t say a word. I thought he was taking me to a bigger, fancier movie theater. Or maybe we were going to a nice restaurant first.

My father took backroads. The rear end of his sports car slid on the curves. I stayed quiet beside him, the wind from the AC blasting me the whole time.

As we pulled into the driveway of Pauline’s house, my father looked at me from the corner of his eyes.

“There weren’t any good bear movies playing. Maybe next weekend, J-Man. I want you to meet my new friend.”

When I first saw her, standing outside her house, waiting for us to pull up, I suddenly understood the transformation my father had undergone.

It was like a picture developing before my eyes. His lunchtime trips to the gym had leaned him out, made him harder. His good-natured gangliness had been replaced by a sturdiness that showed through his facial features, like a man carved in relief. It was like he had been trying, all this time, to turn into Pauline, to match her crispness.

I could see the sharp edges of Pauline’s blouse even as she waved to us in the car. Her skin was also tanned to an unnatural bronze and the loops and curls of her hair were stiffly in place, the mirror to my father’s gelled spikes.

He stepped out of the car and spread his arms to Pauline. Without hesitating, she fell into him. The two hugged and kissed like he had been away at war. After their embrace, he stepped back and put his hands on her shoulders. He said something I couldn’t hear and a smile spread across her face. He turned and motioned for me to get out of the car.

“J-Man!” he yelled. “Come say hello.”

It seems like the moment you meet a person who will change your life should be bigger. There should be a glittering aureole around this person, something that hints at the influence they will have on you. For instance, I should have known, when I was twenty-one and in the perpetually wet bathroom of a punk rock venue, that the man who had tattoos that said DON’T on one eyelid and BLINK on the other would play some role in my life. He was, after all, the man who shrugged and said, “All I got’s this,” before he proffered a small bag of something that looked like a pebble from a meteorite. He was the one who registered my blank stare and said, “It’s better than pills, cheaper. Smoke it on tinfoil. Here. First time’s free.”

But nothing rang inside me then, no alarm bells or deep emotional warnings, and when I first shook Pauline’s lotioned hand, my spirit was just as silent.

“Look at you. Don, you never told me you had a clone,” she said. “Couldn’t deny him.” I stared at Pauline’s lipstick, a shameful red, when she leaned down and lifted Hoppy from my hands.

“And who is this?”

My father cleared his throat. “That’s the bear. Hoppy.”

Pauline made Hoppy skip along the air toward my face. “Hop-hop-hoppy,” she said. “Too cute.” She handed Hoppy back to me and I melted with relief.

My father sniffed at the air, though the only smell was the chalky scent of gravel stirred up from our arrival. “What’s that you got cooking in there?”

She clapped her hands and squealed, like something a little girl would do. “I made a turkey!”

“A turkey in July. Huh.” This was a noticeably toned-down version of my father’s usual expression of disapproval. Pauline didn’t catch on.

The inside of Pauline’s house, much like her name, was suited to a person much older. There were little Elvis figurines along the mantle of the fireplace. Huge lamps with baroque shades rested on handsewn doilies that fanned out like snowflakes.

The smell of the house was another thing. It’s difficult to put my finger on, even now, but the smell was of something indulgently sweet, too sweet, like butterscotch. Pauline seemed to revel in the sweetness, prattling as we followed her to the dining room.

“Have you ever cooked a turkey? My gosh, it is a total chore. Felt like a scientist, all that measuring and weighing. Oh, I hope it’s not dry. That’s the risk, you know, a dry turkey.”

She turned the corner to the dining room and crossed her arms. “Well,” she said. “How does it look?”

“What do you say, J-Man? How does it look?”

The table was decorated with a cornucopia of fake fruit that spilled inert colors around the steaming turkey. The candles positioned at both ends of the table flickered in a way that seemed quite fancy, but the effect was weakened by the sour light pouring down from the fixture. It was too much food for a family reunion and ridiculous for a dinner intended for two lean adults and one scrawny child.

“That’s a lot of food,” I observed and my father hooted with laughter. Pauline beamed.

My father said, “You hear that? Someone’s hungry.”

“Oh, it is too much, isn’t it? Well, my parents are coming over.” In a slightly hushed voice, she added, “I hope that’s all right.”

“Hey, the more the merrier.” He squeezed Pauline’s shoulders.

Her parents arrived thirty seconds after they were mentioned, as though they had been summoned like demons to our gluttonous feast. The trappings of the elderly that filled Pauline’s house made her look younger by contrast, but when her parents walked in, they seemed absorbed by the decorations. Their wrinkles matched the sagging bands in the frieze that ran along the top of the dining room. Her father’s dust-colored hair seemed a lesson in atrophy beside the Elvis figurines, their plastic pompadours shining in the light.

“Mom. Dad. This is Don’s son, Jake.”

My father cut in. “Jake, this is Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds.”

The old man and woman took their places as the introductions were made and after a long period of settling into their seats, the man nodded and the woman said, “Hello, Jake.”

Dinner went something like a stand-off between my father, who shouldered through the conversation with a nervousness I had never before witnessed, and Pauline’s parents, who were as stony as sentries guarding a beloved kingdom. It was clear the warring parties had met before.

“Tell you what, Pauline must have had a heck of a cooking teacher. This dinner is out of this world.”

Her mother’s voice was brittle. “I never made turkey like this.”

Pauline giggled. “Oh, that’s not true, Mom. You made turkey twice a year. Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“I said I never made it like this.” Her mother chewed another bite with exaggerated difficulty.

Throughout the dinner, Pauline’s parents seemed only able to respond to remarks and questions made by my father, whose tactics for de-thawing the room grew more and more like that of a dog nervously circling the floor, licking its chops, holding out its paw, anything to prompt reward.

“Who’s the Elvis lover? I see all these lovely figurines.”

Another grunt from Pauline’s father. “Used to love him. Till he died a drug addict.”

Pauline kept smiling, even as she chewed her food. She might as well have been another child at the table, expected to be seen and not heard.

Just when the uncomfortable dinner had nearly reached its end, as my stomach began to feel heavy, full almost to my throat, Pauline’s mother addressed me directly.

“Jake. I see you have a bear there. Is that for something at school?”

Pauline and my father exchanged looks. She straightened up. “That is Jake’s friend. Hoppy.”

Pauline’s mother narrowed her eyes. “His friend?” she said, feigning confusion. “Why, it’s a teddy bear, like something a kid would have.”

“Jake is a kid, Mom.”

“How old are you, Jake?”

Before I could answer, my father spoke up. “He’s ten.”

Pauline’s mother widened her eyes and swiveled her head from my father to me then to her husband. “Do you hear that, Tommy? A teddy bear.”

Tommy hovered close above his plate but still managed to spill most of his food before it reached his mouth. He glanced up with dark eyes that assessed me like a no-count hunting dog.

“Hm,” he said. “Weird.”

From my corner vision, I noticed my father making several nervous motions. He wiped his mouth, fluffed out his napkin, adjusted himself in his seat.

“Yes,” he said. “Well. The teddy bear thing, it’s mild in comparison to what he could be doing. He could be torturing small animals or something. We’re fine with it.”

“Those are the options, huh?” Pauline’s father must have been finally getting full because he seemed to have started paying attention.

“We,” her mother repeated. “Your ex-wife and you?”

I was confused. I kick myself now for not understanding, for acting like a child in the way I hadn’t intended, for my obliviousness.

“My mom and dad are still married,” I said. “She’s not his ex-wife.”

If it is possible to scream without actually producing any sound, that was what came from Pauline and my father.

“Pauline, honey. What is Jake talking about?”

“Mom, let’s talk in private.”

“No, I don’t think we should. I want to know why he said that.”

My father wore a grin that went against every other signal his body was sending. “He’s—we decided, as Jake’s parents, to ease him into the transition.”

But Pauline’s mother was looking at me. She tinked her fork against her glass to get my attention. “Jake. Who do you live with?”

I glanced at my father and in an instant his sharp edges had turned soft once again. His eyes poured out a message I couldn’t understand.

“With my mom and dad.”

“He means we split the time.”

Pauline’s mother stopped my father with her hand.

“Mom, please.”

“Jake, look at me. Do you all live in the same house?”

The implication of the question escaped me. The idea of us living in separate houses seemed a lie too unreasonable to utter. Of course we all lived together.

I nodded. Pauline’s father stood and stared down the table at his daughter and my father. Her mother put her face in her hands and the reedy sound of the old woman’s cries filled the room.

“My daughter is a homewrecker,” she moaned.

Her father pointed a finger at my father. “We’re going to have a chat, bud.”

“Mom. Dad. If you’ll just listen to us.”

“No,” her father said. “Don. Outside. Let’s go.”

It was like something from one of the movies my mother and I watched, the way the night had split open into something potentially violent. Even if the man who seemed to want to sock my father was a frail septuagenarian, it was enough to send my breathing into a quick rhythm.

My father said, “Okay, okay. We can talk. We should talk, yes,” and followed the man outside.

Pauline leaned toward her mother, who was sitting frozen with her hands over her eyes like the shock had killed her. When Pauline’s hand grazed her mother’s shoulder, the woman jerked away. Her mother’s hands dropped from her face to reveal red-rimmed eyes that burned at Pauline.

“Don’t you touch me. I did not raise a homewrecker. For Christ’s sake, look at this child.” Pauline did not look at me at first. “Look at him!” she screamed. Finally, Pauline turned to me and saw me huffing away, chasing the breaths that would not stay long enough to impart any useful oxygen.

“Jake, sweetheart,” Pauline said. She held her hand out to me across the table, but I was too far away so she rested it near one of the fake apples.

Her mother leaned back in her chair and said, “Yes. You need to take care of this child whose life you’re ruining. I can’t stay here a moment longer.” She threw down her napkin and stomped, as much as she could, out the front door, leaving me alone with Pauline.

I could hear the old man’s voice rasping outside at my father, whose own voice rose in two-syllable hums in the silence that followed the old man’s outbursts. Pauline winced every time the yelling started back up. The two of us sat there long enough for the sounds of the argument to sink into background noise. Finally, our eyes caught one another’s, and she gave a weak, watery-eyed smile.

“Jake,” she said, like it was the first time she had ever heard the name, period, in her whole life. “It’s going to be okay.”

I hugged Hoppy. I knew how it must look, this oversized toddler squeezing his bear. It should have been embarrassing, but it wasn’t. Maybe it was the fact that Pauline had every reason to be embarrassed too, by the outburst of the evening, by her role in dismantling my parent’s marriage. Whatever it was, something in the way she dropped her eyes when I hugged Hoppy made it look like she was jealous that she didn’t have her own stuffed animal to comfort her.

“I’m so sorry, Jake. I know this is a lot to deal with.” Pauline paused for a moment. She closed her eyes until her breathing slowed. “You hold on to Mr. Hoppy,” she said. “If he makes you happy and brings you comfort, you hold on to him.”

Hoppy sat on my lap. I squeezed him tighter.

Pauline started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said and fanned herself. “I’m sorry, Jake. I just want you to know it’s okay. It’s okay to have Hoppy. So you keep him with you, all right, Jake? For as long as you can because when you give him up, there’s no going back.”

It would be years before I knew what she was talking about. It would take a journey through spiritual reawakening, guided by a woman I met in Portland at a coffee shop just six weeks after getting clean. Alice. Alice, who radiated peace and goodness, would eventually save me. She had approached my table where I sat reading An Addict’s Guide to Self-Improvement and said, “You look like you need a friend. Can I sit with you?”

On rainy afternoons, the two of us sat in the living room of her apartment, my gaze fixed on her face as she asked me to go back, back, back, to the part of me untarnished by the suffering of this reality. The last struggling traces of light from the Pacific Northwest sunset canted in through the blinds and spilled over us as I was instructed to “listen, just listen” to my breathing.

These weekly sessions with Alice, the woman I married three years later, always brought me back to when I was sitting across from my father’s mistress in that garish room with the Elvis figurines staring us down. When Alice guided me through the warrens of memories and asked, “Now. What do you feel? What do you see?” I always came back to this moment, with me holding Hoppy as I sat across from Pauline, the woman who eventually married my father, lived with him for two years, then died after swallowing seventy-two different pills at once.

If I had to put a date on it, I would say it was sometime in the summer of 2009, about fifteen years after the dinner at Pauline’s. I was in Northern California and everything I owned fit into a duffel bag.

There was this camp outside of Truckee where people like me fell in with hikers. We were all dirty, so it was easy to avoid attention. We all had bags and many of us had tents. On all our faces was a look of fatigue, the puce color of sustained sunburn.

One night, I fell asleep next to a guy who said he was from Pennsylvania but had an accent that made me think he was actually from Alabama. They called him Trip. We shared a bottle of Wild Irish Rose while Trip talked about how he was going to head to Washington soon, get a fresh start. He said maybe I could go with him. Trip said he knew how to weld and he could teach me. I told him that sounded like the best idea I’d ever heard.

When I woke the next morning, Trip was gone and so was my duffel bag. I’m fairly certain that’s when I lost Hoppy, but who knows if Hoppy was actually in that duffel bag. Maybe I had already left him behind in Spokane or Tacoma, places where I had lost myself so thoroughly in dirty apartments, sleeping on floors with people who were just as lost as I was. Maybe Hoppy is still lying on the soiled carpet of a drug den, his blue fur fading more every year.

Wherever he is, it doesn’t matter anymore. If I concentrate, I can still feel his soft fur. I can look into his inscrutable eyes and see the past and the future curling together in that hard plastic, and if I let myself breathe, I can accept what his eyes tell me about myself. This is what Alice taught me. I can finally let go.

I’ve been chatting with my mother and father regularly, one week him and the next her, alternating like they still had shared custody. The phone calls are casual, easy. My mother tells me that Frank’s girls, the ones she had called hateful, are in college now, and I can tell she’s proud of them. My father, he always calls with a pretext, asking how to set up a smart TV or interpret some missive from the insurance company, but eventually we start talking about whatever.

Before hanging up, my parents and I say “I love you” and then linger on the line for a moment or two, just in case one of us decides to say more. So far, it hasn’t happened. We always end with a cheery goodbye. If someone overheard these conversations, they might think nothing had ever gone wrong.

LOVE, WE NEVER GET TOO FAR

NICHOLAS YINGLING

from water. Since the fall

summer’s shade brittles on the canyon floor

and I must press my lips to the faultline,

that fissure where each drink weeps slowly

out of the back of my skull. I’d like to lie, to play

Moses and strike a miracle out of stone,

but most days all I can do is wander

through smog and dust, trying to remember

a wave’s direction. I follow

you now. Three years in and you’ve learned

how to be in this state of lateness, this post-

concussion syndrome. Like a ghost, you say.

Like the soul it never quite shows up on an MRI,

but here we are, just out of focus

and keeping faith.

You take my arm

and remind me which way to walk the fire

road home. How strange to be this soft, to look down

an ammonite circling into concrete and return

to this question of one’s final shape.

The final shape will be shale, a metacarpal or two

to point the way to fossil reefs, the mollusks

I imagine as ossicles listening in the rock

for some hand to bridge the shores

on our canyon wall. But you were never the type

to walk among these alders, their coral of split-gills,

and find yourself in just the shallow end

of eternity, never that romantic. You know

drowning is as much a predicament of time

as water.

Soon winter will lift the fall

to its surface like a leaf on a stream

and there’ll be months to stay in and write

a single poem. Soon the muscle will work

toward something dry and hard enough to keep,

to worry the blade of a seismograph

as these songs of whales

held in our mountains like a breath.

SUBWAY STORIES

WILLIAM WALKER

The N train is rumbling into the station. I tell my son to stand back a bit more so that if somebody were to push him, he might catch his balance. “Obviously, always look behind you and make sure there’s not some guy talking to himself.”

“If I got pushed onto the tracks I’d lie flat between the rails and let the train pass over me,” he says. “I’d just have to be sure not to touch the third rail.”

“And hope, of course, the rats don’t chew on your ears while you’re down there.”

My son is twelve, and his middle school is in Bay Ridge. Unfortunately, we do not live near Bay Ridge. From our apartment, it’s an hour by subway and an hour back. Twice, for me, since there’s drop-off and then pick-up. Last year was my son’s first year at this school; he was partially remote, and I was teaching from home, so we only had to commute two or three days a week. This year, my son’s school and my university are fully in-person. I’m thankful for this—don’t get me wrong—but even when my wife does the drop-off, I can still end up spending over five hours on the trains. This new element of post-pandemic life is not sustainable; next year, at the very latest, our son will need to ride the train by himself, but he’s nowhere near ready.

My students are mostly freshmen and their past two years on Zoom have been mostly horrendous. They tell me they have done nothing, learned nothing. They are exhausted by boredom. They appear skeptical when I tell them I am the first person in my family to go to college, that it changed my life, and that I will do anything humanly possible to help them succeed. I lean forward and implore them about reading: just two pages with breakfast, two with lunch, and one with dinner adds up to six books a year. They stare at me distantly as if I am a hologram.

After school, my son and I step onto the N and the doors bong shut. We do not fiddle with our phones, listen to music, or play video games like the people around us. In this time, my son wants to talk. But by the time I pick him up at 2:30, I’ve taught three classes, ridden five trains and walked a trillion steps. Sing to me Muse, I beg. Whisper some tale of hope, for I feel as though my eyeballs have been cored out with ice cream scoops.

Since I am not producing conversation, my son takes a stab. “What’s the name of that guy who was in your class who had just gotten out of prison?”

“I believe the name you seek is Leon,” I say.

Leon was a student of mine several years before the pandemic. He was in his late twenties, with a sculpted physique. After our first class, we locked eyes, then he smiled slightly and gripped me with a crushing handshake. There was something oddly playful in his show of strength. He wanted to know if I thought he could write a book.

When Leon did show up to class, he spoke with emphasis, refusing to be interrupted until he’d made his entire point. I praised his intelligence and perspective, but I also told him that if he’d hand in his assignments and come to class more often, it would make both of our lives easier.

Leon shook my hand with his usual iron grip. When I winced, he smiled and said, “Strong hands are the key to surviving prison.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

At some point, my son Googled Leon’s name and discovered an array of mugshots. Depressingly, it appeared Leon had been incarcerated the majority of his adult life.

“I can’t remember,” my son asks now, “did Leon miss all those classes for being in jail the first time he was your student or the second time?”

“The first time. He said his friend hid a gun under the seat of his car. And that he needed to make better friends.”

“Were you afraid when you failed him?”

“I fear no man.”

“Yeah, right.”

At Atlantic Avenue, we weave through exhausted commuters, past the poles, benches, strollers, and carts. Then we ascend the mobbed stairwell, one slow step at a time.

A man with underdeveloped arms and legs panhandles from a wheelchair. An indigenous woman with a kitchen knife slices mangos in front of a column. I remind my son to walk with his chin up and not look like he’s trying to disappear into the concrete. “Like you’ve got things under control, baby. And don’t swing your arms like that, you look like a crazy man.” An MTA worker emerges suddenly from a cinderblock chamber, a room that could be used for kidnapping and torture. My son bumbles along, oblivious.

My wife says she rode the subways alone when she emigrated from Korea, at age ten, when the trains were dangerous. She pulls up a photograph of a spray-painted GG train from the eighties.

“Everybody I knew was a latchkey kid,” she tells our son. “All our parents worked in sweatshops or drove taxis. I don’t think Halmoni and Hal-abeoji even knew how I got to school. It probably never crossed their minds that I could’ve been kidnapped. Things were just different then. I remember Hal-abeoji sending me to the bodega to pick up cigarettes and beer for him. I’m sure I wasn’t any older than you are now.”

My wife’s mother lost her family in a bombing and was raised in an orphanage. Her father saw his third-grade teacher shot against the schoolhouse wall and shortly thereafter escaped the communist North under cover of night.

By the time I was my son’s age, I’d already smoked some cigarettes, drunk some alcohol, played with some gasoline, even shot some guns. Kidnapping certainly never crossed my Midwestern parents’ minds when they made me stand, alone, beside Randolph Road selling sweet corn to earn money for school clothes. My father, teaching me how to use a chainsaw, simply said, “You want to make sure you pay attention and not cut your leg off.”

My son is a rule follower and rules generate endless questions, the answers to which often reflect the crushing reality that I cannot guarantee his safety, that there is an unsettling element of chance in a city of over eight million people.

“If the train fills with smoke, how will I know when to get out of the car?”

“You’ll know. Just follow everybody else.”

“What if it’s dark in the tunnel and I can’t see which one is the third rail?”

“There’ll be MTA employees in orange vests. Just listen to them.”

“But what about the rats?”

“Rats don’t like people. They’ll scram if there’s a bunch of people evacuating the train.”

“What if the train gets stuck in the tunnel and there’s no reception? How will you know where I am?”

“I’m a smart guy. I’ll figure it out.”

“If somebody grabs me and tries to drag me off the train, I scream for help?”

“Screaming for help is your most powerful weapon.”

“Because bad guys don’t want to get caught, right?”

“Exactly.”

I’ve told my son how I got punched in the mouth by some kids trying to steal my bike when I was nineteen and first moved to New York. I’ve told him how my buddy Herbie cracked a guy in his eye with a Heineken bottle that time in the pool hall; how Raymond landed in Rikers for harpooning a man through the cheek with a pen; how my sister got hired as a dog groomer and was fired and back home within an hour and how, years later, I still cannot get her to laugh even a little about it. My son loves to hear about the time I was twenty-five and sleepwalked out of my Brooklyn apartment in my boxer shorts, in February. These stories. They’re what I have to give.

I need my son to know that, should fate call, there’s savage survival in his veins, that the majority of predators out there are pathetic goons who pilfer laundromats in Sheepshead Bay, and that our DNA didn’t stagger this far to get taken down by the likes of those. If some scumbag grabs you, you plug a plastic fork into his eyeball, if that’s all you got. You clench your teeth and twist that bitch until he ponies up the key to his homemade dungeon.

I ride the N train with my son, who might look like a 75-pound kid with a Johnny Ramone bowl cut, but is the blood of my blood. I want to grab his hand and make sure he hears what I’m telling him. Yeah, sure, we might look like nobodies in this town. We might even be nobodies, but Odysseus was the motherfucker who made it home. Remember, Odysseus? He was the baddest of the bad. He wasn’t like Achilles just out there flexing his muscles; Odysseus was slick.

And if Wordsworth was right, that the child is the father of the man, then, like Telemachus, every day, after school, I’ll be awaiting your arrival.

APRIL FOOL’S BABY

HOLLY MITCHELL

Beneath the impossibly high ceiling

of a New York hospital’s waiting room,

your aunt read Crime and Punishment

translated as a Spanish graphic novel,

and I watched her. I don’t remember

whatever else I did to pass the hours.

We drank bottled water and echoed

in the veined belly of all that marble.

The nurses called her up to help midwife,

she and your father roped in like ranch hands.

I’d never heard of a natal ward doing that.

But you were quick, or so it seemed to me.

And when I came in with our purses,

chargers, and bags of unfinished takeout,

we exceeded the limit: three visitors

trying to see you here as you cried out

and settled against this new-to-you side

of your mother’s skin. You, the first baby

in my circle, changing us from daughters

to aunties past midnight on April Fool’s,

the blood of your birth speckling the floor.

BEENIE AT FOURTEEN

MARGARET BUCKHANON

We are in the emergency room, Grandma, Jamal, and me. Jamal won’t stop crying, eyes are invisible, drowned by tears, snot keeps running out of his nose. “Rubena, get him back here.”

“His nose still runny, Grandma!”

I can’t find enough tissues; Grandma is yelling at me not to bother the nurses. Her sugar is high and Jamal is crying because he thinks his electricity caused “Grandma’s sugar to run out.” I tell him to stop crying but he won’t. I tell him Grandma is old, old people get diabetes. He does not believe me even though he can tell when I’m lying or telling the truth.

The people in Grandma’s building say Jamal is psychic. Grandma’s friends always bothering Jamal to pencil in winning numbers, give them the first six numbers that pops in his head. Those old people so happy a seven-year-old won them thirty, forty dollars. Grandma stopped him because it’s a sin to gamble, she’s stingy, wants Jamal’s powers for herself. Jamal says Grandma pulls him close to her whispering, “Baby, what’s your favorite numbers today?”

But this morning, Jamal’s magical power is not working. He still crying, despite Grandma telling him to hush. The doctor, an African with every letter of the alphabet in his last name, cannot control Grandma’s blood sugar. He tries to cheer Jamal up, placing the stethoscope around Jamal’s neck letting him hear Grandma’s heart is working. This works far better than Grandma telling him to hush as his crying is now a whimper.

The doctor says unless Grandma’s blood sugar comes down, she may be admitted. Jamal’s eyes are as large as saucers. Grandma dismisses the doctor saying she ain’t staying unless her real doctor says so, ordering the African doctor to contact her doctor but either he did not hear her or he ignored her. Grandma shouts she has private insurance as the door closes behind the doctor.

We still don’t know where Ma is. Grandma real pissed about it, that’s the reason her sugar is up. Ma promised to take Grandma to her doctor’s appointment. She called reminding Ma, but Ma neglected to tell Grandma the repo man took the car a couple of months ago. She had a ready-made lie every time Grandma asked about the car Grandma and Uncle March gave Ma the down payment for. When the latest wig arrived, Ma blew her off, forgot about Grandma. She depended on Ma driving because her legs were bothering her. After waiting, she realized again, Ma is not dependable. The pain forced Grandma to catch a cab with Jamal and me in tow to the emergency room.

Grandma proudly handed her private insurance card to the ER clerk now in our cubicle using a computer on wheels. She then gave the supplemental insurance card to the lifeless girl banging away at the keys, not bothering to acknowledge Grandma talking about her primary, secondary, private insurance. She says her insurance is of working people, not charity insurance. It is shade, a diss; Ma and Jamal, they have state insurance. I’m on my father’s private coverage, but Jamal has welfare insurance, Grandma calls it. She says Ma better get a job real soon cause the government getting tired of taking care of sorry people like her daughter. She knows Jamal and I would not repeat her words.

She still gushing about her coverage to the uninterested girl who forces a fake smile, returns the cards and leaves without saying goodbye or feel better. Grandma put off by the non-responsive clerk, commenting about young people’s lack of respect, not possessing an ounce of manners loud enough for her to look back and leave.

Like a ghost, Ma waltzes in with a smile and a stench revealing she has not seen soap and water in days.

Ma’s voice cracks, fake tears ready. “The neighbors told me to go to the ER,” she says. Grandma’s face tightens into a big knot, her eyes, her nose, gone, like a car disappearing into a black hole. Slowly Ma approaches Grandma, rubbing her hands, walking on eggshells like befriending a rabid dog. “How you feeling, Ma?”

Grandma’s face is completely gone. Gone are her happy brown eyes twinkling when she is talking to God, giving me a hug, or making a joyful noise in church. Jamal moves side to side looking for her face.

Ma looks over at me for rescue as I tuck in my arms without saying a single word. Beads of sweat march down the side of her face, she shifts her weight, cracking her knuckles, another Grandma irritant.

Grandma barks at Jamal and me to get out of the room then roars like a wounded lion for Ma to shut the door behind us. I take one last look as Ma’s smile dissolves, stiffens, chest puffed out, and tells us to wait in the lobby. We are going home with her.

I run after Jamal who thinks we are playing a game, laughing, screaming down the corridor until a blue man with a thick accent inquires who are we and where are our parents.

“My daddy’s in jail,” Jamal says like it’s a badge of honor. He makes a gang sign and says, “You step to me, my daddy’s gonna check you.”

I grab him by the collar as Jamal yells at the security guard, calling him a punk. I yank him by the arm and apologize to the guard for his behavior. His feet refuse to cooperate as I drag him down the hall, navigating us to the lobby.

“Grandma gonna give Ma a beating?” Jamal asks as his spindly legs dangle off the plastic chair in the waiting room.

“Nah, Ma’s too big. She’ll give Grandma a beat down.”

“She gave me a whipping,” Jamal reminds, referring to the other morning Grandma whipped him for breaking her favorite coffee cup after warning him three times to use a plastic one for his milk.

“You’re hardheaded.” I playfully slap him upside the head.

He punches me hard on my arm. “Ma’s hardheaded too.”

We did not wait long, Ma fast walks out looking for us like lost children in a store. Her tear-stained face, runny mascara says Grandma has won again. We follow her quietly outside and sit on the sidewalk in front of the hospital entrance. She rummages through her bag, hands Jamal a box of sugar-coated cereal. I warn Ma of Grandma no sugar edict for Jamal.

“A little won’t hurt him.” Her voice is empty, defeated. Jamal indulges victoriously beside her, eating the cereal.

Ma fires up a stick, exhales a thought on her face. She’s scheming again. Every time Grandma wins, she has the urge to hide from her. She ain’t no match for Grandma. No one is—except Jesus. Grandma does not fear anybody but God. God and Jesus are the only things that can make Grandma cry.

Ma catches me staring hard at her, returning the stare long enough to take a second puff then quickly away, fearful of exposure. What happened to her dream date? Was she dumped, why so early? Where is her pretty Beyoncé blond wig, why is her makeup melting? Did the polar bear come out? Did the polar bear frighten him away? Why didn’t Miss Tamara come to her rescue like she always does? Did she finally listen to Grandma?

“I’ll be back,” Ma says.

She does not bother looking at me as she lifts herself up from the concrete sidewalk, dusting off her dirty booty jeans. The bags under her eyes tell me she ain’t seen sleep in days, hair electrified, breath smells of alcohol and Newport 100s; her pores reek too.

She flops back down on the concrete for a second, then shoots up as though she sat on a spike, searching the sky, cars whizzing by, waving at strangers like lost friends, ignoring the twisted look on their faces. She stubs her cigarette, rummaging in her bag for a lighter and another Newport 100.

“You disappear like you always do. You’re irresponsible.” I shake my head waiting for the scowl to appear on her raggedy forty-year-old face, what I know she knows I know. She can’t handle what Grandma said to her, preparing to run away. She can’t fool me anymore.

Ma freezes, staring down at me. The truth has paralyzed her. She lies so much she don’t know what the truth feels like, looks like and it cannot blind me anymore. She narrows her eyes, fists ball tight, wanting to slap me silly but she won’t for public display.

If she were standing near the edge of a cliff, I’d stand up to push her off.

“Can’t I go with you?” Jamal now too hyper from the sugar cereal Grandma and I warned about. I told her not to give it to him and she, as always, undermines Grandma out of spite. Ma is too childish to have children. Grandma said that too.

“No baby, I got business to take care of.” She cups Jamal’s sugar-stained face while eyeing me at the same time. “Stay with Beenie.”

I lean close to Jamal. “She lying again, you can’t go where she’s going, she is—”

The unfinished cigarette flies across the concrete, she grips my arm so tight the blood flow cuts off. “I’m sick of people disrespecting me.” Ma grinds her teeth at me, spit lands on my face. “I’m sick of it! You better respect me, you hear me? I’m not gonna stand for it!” she snarls like Busby’s pit bull Tiny, exposing her once perfectly aligned teeth now ruined by neglect.

She is hurting my arm, but I will die before I let her know this. We are engaging in a staring match so fierce, I’m thankful our eyes aren’t shooting missiles. We would obliterate each other before Jamal’s hysterical ashy face.

Jamal is no match in the strength needed to separate Ma from me. His face washed in snot, tears running down his cheeks again. I will not break, neither will Ma, each grip on my arm is a life jacket in the rip tide of lies that will drown her. For a brief moment, I let up, feeling sorry for what she reads on my face. I see the pain in her eyes, how much I hate her, but then redouble my efforts to punish her before she hurts me. She can’t hurt me if I don’t let her.

“I want you to respect me!” She is yelling but it sounds like begging, not caring people in the hospital parking lot are now looking at us. They gather around us like witnessing a terrible storm approach.

I add gasoline to the fire. “You said you had somewhere to go. Go!”

She jerks at me again like a child wanting to be picked up. Jamal is jumping up and down pleading with Ma to stop. The storm picks up speed; more and more people are gathering. Ma releases her grip, stepping back, hands raised up. “What da freak y’all looking at?” is all she says to the crowd.

“You all right, honey?” an old white woman with fried hair and bright red lipstick gingerly approaches me, watching Ma, fearful. I’m impressed by her bravado that she would risk her life for me.

Ma blocks her, obstructs her view, bucking her eyes at the woman not to take another step.

“Shall I call the police?” asks a Black man, gut belly stretching his cotton shirt at the seams, a comb-over in full view. Standing next to him an Indian man with a turban holding a baby. He has a curious look on his hairy face, waiting.

Jamal yelling, shaking his fists at the man, “You better not call 5-0, you big belly pig!”

Ma collars him to quiet, then over to the nosy people. “We’re fine.” She shoos them away with one hand, the other firmly on Jamal squirming under her talon grip. “Keep it moving.”

The people exchange looks, some mumbling to each other, like a jury undecided whether to convict or acquit, conferring what to do, then at me. I am keeping them in suspense. I appreciate faces of concern, leaving me with Ma, but I’m fine. Ma cannot steady her legs to keep upright, letting go of Jamal using his small shoulders to balance her. She has no powers, she has lost. Again.

A collection of eyes jumps to Ma then me, and back at Ma, my rescuer old woman shifts her cane to distribute her weight, as the comb-over black man leans forward waiting.

“All good in the hood,” I announce to the waiting crowd with the widest smile almost strangling me, cheeks burning not looking at Ma.

“Yeah, keep it moving.” Jamal moves towards the crowd, waving them away. “We cool, right, Ma?”

Ma too, waits for people to leave, shaking the cramp in her leg left to right, rubbing her face. She looks hurriedly at them, then at Jamal, but not me. She won’t look at me. “Stay here with your brother,” her voice trails as she walks briskly away. She nearly collides with a van pulling into the entrance, the driver’s screaming at Ma as they exchange curses, flipping each other the bird.

I space my fingers in front of me with Ma in view. As she gets smaller and smaller within the space between my thumb and index finger, I press together to squash her like a bug. Jamal watches quizzically. “Whatchu doing?’ He shoots up before me ready to fight.

“Making Ma disappear.”

“Stop.” He pulls at my hands.

I elbow him away as my fingers press so tight it burns.

“Stop it, Beenie!” Jamal ready to cry again.

He resumes his seat beside me, loudly chomping away at remains of cereal. I have no psychic powers, but I know what will happen to Ma.

She gonna die.

I’m ready.

But I cannot share this with Jamal, he’ll start crying, hollering, become too hyper for Grandma to deal with.

TEASPOONS

DENISE DUHAMEL

- July 10, 2021

When I arrive the nurse has just given my mom Ativan

because she was agitated, had belabored breathing. I can’t

rouse her with kisses on her forehead or by telling her I’m here.

My cousin Johnny sent her a birthday card which I read aloud.

My mom’s chest is lifting up and down, a stubborn machine,

her breathing a wheeze. It’s not called the death rattle

anymore, it’s not called the Last Rites, it’s not even called

pulling the plug. The different lexicon doesn’t ease my worry.

The CNA says my mom had two teaspoons of water

and juice for breakfast. Teaspoons? Because I am a poet,

I think of T.S. Eliot, Prufrock’s declaration—

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

Because I love pop culture, I think of the Crash Test Dummies’

song. I find myself humming “I’ve watched the summer evenings

pass by / I’ve heard the rattle in my bronchi.” How easy it is

for the young to think of death in the abstract, how easy it once was

for me, but now I am here staring at Death, watching it creep

into my mother. “Someday I’ll have a disappearing hairline /

Someday I’ll wear pajamas in the daytime.” I’m humming

and crying. To distract myself, I look up how long a person can last

in hospice without eating. To distract myself, I hum.

WHAT ANNA LUDWIG SAW

DIANE LEBLANC

The bones of my hand glow in the X-ray, as the surgeon explains my options. I should be focused on my fourth metacarpal, which I snapped two days ago. But seeing the X-ray for the first time, I’m more fascinated by the silhouette of my wedding ring. The diamond-studded band floats like one of Saturn’s rings between my swollen knuckles. It hovers in space, not daring to touch bone.

In 1895, physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays by chance while experimenting with cathode rays. He covered a vacuum tube with black paper to see if these particular rays could penetrate the barrier. When Röntgen charged a current through the tube, crystals sitting near the tube began to glow, and a screen across the room shone fluorescent. Cathode rays might have lit the rocks, but the screen was beyond their reach.

So what kind of rays could escape a covered tube and also travel a great distance? Röntgen grew obsessed with this question. He moved his research from the university to his home lab, where he could work without interruption. For almost seven weeks he aimed the mysterious rays at keys, coins, a loose screw from the door hinge, anything within reach that he could test for transparency on a photographic plate. He found that the light waves—he called them X-rays, for lack of a definitive name—penetrated certain objects but not others.

The longer the surgeon and I study the X-ray of my hand, the more concerned he becomes. He traces his pen along a faint line on the upper piece of bone, possibly a secondary fracture. I feel more breakable by the second, as though he can’t screw me back together quickly enough. The images confirm my increasing porosity, how easily I fall and snap and need repair. The surgeon points to where he’ll enter my hand and insert a pair of quarter-inch screws. Before surgery, he’ll most likely have to cut off my wedding ring, which I’m still wearing under my temporary cast.

Röntgen didn’t work in complete isolation. Anna Ludwig, his wife, delivered food to his lab and cleared his dirty dishes. Otherwise, she rarely saw him. Little of her story exists, so we don’t know if she lay in bed at night straining to hear the lab door open, listening for her husband’s footsteps heading toward the kitchen or bedroom. And we don’t know why, when he needed her help, she agreed. Did she assist him to further science or simply to spend time with her husband?

For either reason, or both, when Röntgen asked Ludwig if he could photograph her hand with an X-ray, she obliged. The resulting image, Röntgen’s now-famous “Hand mit Ringen,” made visible the bones of Ludwig’s left hand, on which she wore her wedding ring. The metal is a dark blot obscuring a brief length of her finger bone beneath it.

My wedding ring isn’t the original band of diamonds and blue sapphires that my now-husband gave me in 1999, after our first dozen years together. Since I rarely wore blue, I asked why he chose blue stones. He said they came with the ring. So I returned that one to the jewelry store and described to the gemologist the replacement stone I imagined. It was yellow, like aspen leaves in October, with a hint of our golden retrievers’ deep amber. Our friend suggested adding yellow diamonds but warned me that a band of alternating yellow and white gems would be uncommon, the contrast too subtle. That seemed perfect. My husband is an astronomer, drawn to dark skies and seeing faraway objects through telescopes. I’m pulled toward earth, understanding through words the smallest details of nearby things. To strangers, we appear opposites, when actually we live in the intersections of our work and curiosities. I reach for his facts, and he borrows my words.

Now, looking at the image in the surgeon’s office, I see only the ring’s eerie emptiness. I’ll later learn that X-rays penetrate diamonds because, like flesh, they’re carbon-based. But in the moment, I think of a slow disintegration of bodies and funeral costumes, the flesh and fibers decomposing first until only bones are left. My husband and I imagine cremation will end our lingering. I also imagine that, for one of us, grief will cast shadows like traces of flesh and diamond.

Perhaps Röntgen emerged from his lab with the image of Ludwig’s hand and called out to her. Or they may have stood in his lab, shoulders pressed together, looking at her left hand stripped to its bones. Maybe they even marveled at her ring, a solid sphere in the primitive image, before she uttered, “I have seen my death.”

What little history exists of Anna Ludwig claims that she never again entered her husband’s lab after seeing the X-ray of her hand. She would enable Röntgen’s research with a well-ordered home, but she spared her body any future experiments. She chose, instead, the side of knowing where hunger and dirty dishes marked bearable measures of time.

345.9: EPILEPSY UNSPECIFIED

CARRIE PURCELL KAHLER

Like flying over the U.S. on the 4th of July—

first one cluster of blooming lights,

then another. The synaptic sparks vie

for brightness while you jerk tight

muscles snap back and break

against the floor, the car door, the stairs.

There is nothing to do but wait,

but your soft, your slack face stares unaware

of any other name but mine

(and that grasped as the little bird

about to fly away, oh glory), give me more time.

Your thick seconds past midnight slow and slur.

Now the light bursts blink out below.

Now your blue eyes blank as the dark plane window.

IN THE BONE

JULIA MASCIOLI

The only reason Izaak wasn’t a heroin addict was because he was petrified of putting a needle in his arm. He couldn’t stand the idea of rupturing his skin. Alcohol was easier. It used to be. Izaak was twelve years sober when his son Peter was hospitalized for aplastic anemia. A rare condition, the doctor said, in which the body stops producing red blood cells. In the Poughkeepsie hospital bed, Peter looked much too small for his fourteen years. The weeks of fatigue and fevers had taken a toll. But now, when the doctor told them his son needed bone marrow, Izaak was the one who felt like he was withering.

His wife, Zosia, started in with questions about probability, did it really have to be a parent, what about a cousin or a grandparent, she could call her parents back in Poland, how likely…

Peter grabbed her hand. “What does it mean if we don’t match?”

The doctor had not wanted to have this conversation in front of the boy, but Peter had insisted, and so Zosia had insisted too.

“We will,” Zosia cut in. She cradled his hand. Peter had long since outgrown the age where he would readily let his parents hold him. Izaak had grown accustomed to this distance, but still. But now. He touched Zosia’s arm.

“But if we don’t,” Peter continued, “there will be something else we can do, right?”

“If neither of your parents are an HLA match, our next course of action will be immunosuppression therapy. That has its own risks. If one is a match, then we’d be looking at a move to Westchester Medical, the transplant center.”

Izaak had forgotten what the doctor had explained HLA stood for, but he knew what it meant. In the absence of a sibling, their best chance was a parent. Even that was slim. Izaak wanted to hold his child. Izaak wanted a drink.

Zosia had already been tested. They’d known this was a possibility, so she had gone to the clinic one afternoon after her last class at Poughkeepsie High where she taught math. Izaak had begged out of it, claiming that besides being needed at his bakery, Martin, the man he sponsored in AA, was having an emergency. When the clinic phoned, informing her that she wasn’t a match, she wept in silence. Izaak wept too, and they stood there, side-by-side but apart by the telephone in their kitchen, weeping. There was only a 1 in 200 chance of a parent being an HLA match. For anyone else, it was 1 in a million. It was incomprehensible, Zosia said later, that their child should come from them, be of them, and in this one respect be wholly separate.

Zosia had brought him a kit from the clinic. Perhaps Izaak would be that 1 in 200 chance. Inside were three cardboard sticks with puffs of cotton on the ends. The samples had to be sent to a lab. As far as Zosia knew, he was waiting for the results.

Izaak had every intention of getting tested, but his hands had quaked when he opened the kit. It was just a swab of the cheek, but that swab seemed to carry with it the pain and terror of needles piercing his skin, of someone reaching inside and scooping out the material of his blood and bones. He saw himself unconscious on a table, with a stranger’s hands on his hip. He watched the stranger drill holes in him. Izaak had been petrified of needles, let alone surgery, since he was thirteen. Since the fragmentation, as he called it. Since the man who touched him. It had happened just months after he and his parents came to New York. In this new country, his world had shrunk, then collapsed around him like a burst balloon. Izaak thought about how long the needle would have to be in order to reach the marrow, how many layers of skin and muscles it would tear through. His hands had started shaking so hard he couldn’t grip the swab. His chest hurt. He couldn’t stop feeling hands on him and an ache under his skin. He could hear the man’s breath, so loud in his ears.

He hadn’t been able to do it, in the end.

Izaak left Zosia and Peter at the hospital after the meeting with the doctor. He’d told them he had to go to work, but he went home first. In the shed, behind the snow gear, was the kit. When he’d been drinking years ago, he’d stashed alcohol all over their home. He didn’t always drink. He would have good periods. Then something would set him off. The worst time was when she’d told him she might be pregnant. She’d come to him with a tender, fragile happiness, like a moth you could catch in your hands. But Izaak’s fear had overcome them both. So he drank.

Izaak did not remember his son’s birth, only the fear. He didn’t remember Zosia’s labor or the weeks Peter spent in an incubator in NICU. It had been Zosia who lay bleeding in a bed and hoping for her baby to cry, but he was the one who shattered. Izaak did not remember when Peter began to hold his head up, when he began to look around and smile and laugh and eventually, eventually, become a person entirely unique from her body or his.

It took two years for Izaak to gather the shards of himself back together and quit drinking. Two years of his son’s life that he could never get back.

Izaak didn’t think about what he was doing as he dug the kit out of its paper bag. In his head, he was baking. Step by step, he measured out the ingredients for challah. He mixed the dough the way his mother had taught him. Cut it into strips and braided them. And when three cotton swabs were tucked back in their envelope, he sealed it, shoved it back in the paper bag, and tried to drive the whole thing from his mind.

He got in his car. Best to drop it off now. But when he approached the turn for the lab, he couldn’t move his foot from the accelerator.

There was that breathing again, so loud, so hot against his neck. He’d had nightmares for years after the fragmentation. In his dreams, the man’s breath pushed itself into his skin, all the way through to his lungs. He walked through the world with the man’s air inside him, and himself unable to speak.

It had been twelve years since Izaak took a drink, since he’d been afraid of his own mind. Izaak kept driving.

When he arrived at the Hudson Valley Community Center, the meeting was already in full swing. Izaak settled into a chair beside Martin, who appraised him, then murmured, “Bad day?”

Izaak sipped his coffee. He was Martin’s sponsor; his role was to listen more than to speak. Martin stood up to share at one point—he had gotten his thirty-day chip, he said. Again. He smiled a little when he said it, and the laughter in the room was genuine. Izaak didn’t laugh, didn’t clap, and when Martin sat down, he could summon no words to meet Martin’s expectant gaze. Some sponsor he was.

Izaak’s own sponsor, Doretha, was sitting near the front of the room. He could see her turning in her seat to look for him. He thought about standing up and saying, “My name is Izaak. I am an alcoholic. And today I thought about putting a needle in my arm.” Martin might crack a joke, something about “one man’s poison.” Doretha might tell him to wake up and quit acting the fool. She might tell him to call her if he was thinking about a drink. But for once in his life, his addiction was not the problem.

The problem was aplastic anemia. The problem was the DNA sample in the glove compartment of his car. The problem was Izaak’s cowardice.

After the meeting broke up, Izaak dodged Doretha’s concern (“Still waiting on the biopsy results,” he lied) and found Martin by the door, fiddling with a little golden key he kept on a string. He often clutched it in his fist when he was anxious.

“You got a minute?” Martin said.

Izaak pictured the envelope in the glove compartment and the route he would take to the lab. “I’m all yours.”

Martin rode with him back to Izaak’s bakery, Good Bread. Izaak remembered driving home from the hospital when Peter was a baby. It was one of the few sober memories he had of that time. He had felt like his heart was in his throat the whole twenty minutes. So terrified that a twitch of his hand, a sneeze, could destroy everything. Today he gripped the wheel and thought about crashing.

At the bakery, Izaak said hello to the Vassar student, Maxine, who was running the counter. He took two black coffees and sourdough that Izaak had baked the night before to a table in the back corner, and Martin brought out a chunk of Jarlsberg he’d gotten from his deli job.

Izaak’s role as Martin’s sponsor precluded friendship. But sometimes Izaak looked forward to the days when Martin would call and ask for a meeting. That did not make him a good sponsor, nor would it have made him an exemplary friend either.

“I’ve been thinking about making amends,” Martin said. “Maybe she would like a cake.”

Izaak did not ask whom Martin was talking about. “The last time you tried baked goods for an apology, didn’t you eat the damn thing on your way out the door?”

Martin frowned and changed the subject. “How did Zosia like the camembert?”

Izaak didn’t know. He imagined it was aging in the refrigerator while she spent her days with Peter in the pediatric ward. People told them that they were lucky this happened in the summer. Lucky that Zosia was on vacation.

“I’ve been thinking about something you said the first time we met,” Martin continued, although Izaak had not answered him. “You said other people’s forgiveness was easy, and forgiving yourself was the hard part.” Martin looked him in the eye. “It’s bullshit, man.”

“Are you thinking of drinking?” Izaak said. Calm, measured, slow. That was who he was.

Martin shrugged. “No more than usual.”

Izaak’s fingers dug into his thigh beneath the table. He hoped it would bruise. “Then why did you ask for a meeting?”

Martin looked up from his coffee, clearly surprised at Izaak’s tone. “Are you alright?” he said. Calmly and slowly, although that was not who Martin was.

Izaak’s hand relaxed into an open palm, still pressing with all the weight and muscle of a man who spent his days kneading dough and lifting sacks of flour. He couldn’t speak, so he nodded.

“Is … Peter okay?” Martin said.

“Peter needs the marrow from someone else’s bones.”

There was a long pause before Martin spoke, then he asked, not the question Izaak was expecting, but, “Can anyone be tested?”

Izaak looked up. He waited for Martin to make a joke. He never could stay serious for long, just like he couldn’t stay sober.

Martin did not make a joke.

“It has to be a parent,” Izaak said.

Martin said “oh” and once again failed to ask the question Izaak was waiting for. The question he was asking himself. Was he a match?

Phobias were irrational by definition. His fear hadn’t been immediately apparent after the fragmentation; but a few years later, when he’d had his appendix out, he had become so frightened while they prepared him for surgery that he could not breathe. What followed was a series of impressions more than memories: his mother’s voice, strangers hovering over him, gloved hands on his arm, then a blank space, a period of unconsciousness that could have been moments or days, a dizzying sense of being untethered. He remembered waking—terrified, ignorant of where he was or what had happened, struggling to breathe and unable to voice his dread. He remembered the realization that something had been taken from inside him. He remembered that his mother couldn’t comfort him. He’d had his first drink not long after.

After three decades, he was still crippled by what that man had done to him, and he was terrified of the bad times he saw on the horizon.

“I didn’t lock my car,” Izaak said. He locked eyes with Martin. “There’s an envelope in the glove compartment. I need you to take it, but don’t look at it. Get rid of it.”

Martin’s eyebrows rose. “Why?”

“Today I thought about putting a needle in my arm.”

Martin looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. He did not ask what was in the envelope. When he stood up, Izaak didn’t watch him leave. He stared down at the cup of coffee and the half-eaten bread and cheese. It was out of his hands. He felt ill.

After Martin left, Izaak went into the kitchen. When he had finished baking tomorrow’s bread, and left a few things to rise, he stepped outside into a warm summer night. He felt light, hollow. On his way home, he thought about what he would tell Zosia. I tried, he would say. I’m trying. I’m so afraid. I don’t want to lose him. It had been a kind of losing, when he had been drinking. He’d lost the first years of his son’s life. Peter had lost a father, and Zosia a husband.

The house was dark, and the curtains were drawn in their room. Inside, he found Zosia in Peter’s room. She was lying on the bed, her face to the open window. Izaak lowered himself to sit beside her, the mattress bowing under his weight. She rolled over to face him.

Izaak was afraid of what would happen when she looked up. He had been fearful of her before, in the early days of their knowing each other. He had felt that she saw him in a way no others did. That she saw the whole of him, as much as he was whole. This left him terrified and small, and, when she loved him still, in awe of her.

She rested her fingers on his thigh.

“You’re back,” Zosia said.

He needed to tell her, needed to speak the words, but they choked him. He couldn’t breathe around the I could be a match what if I’m a match what if I’m not what if I could save him what if all they have to do is take me apart what if I’m not brave enough what if I’m not enough… He wanted her to see it in his eyes, wanted her to make sense of him as he could not.

“Zosia, I …”

She sat up. “What is it, kochany mój?”

He was weeping; she rubbed his arms and pulled him to her. She pressed his head to her chest and he inhaled the scent of her skin. Her cheek on his head was an anvil, her hand on his back a knife. He would not still be her beloved, her kochany, if he told her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Ja sie boje.”

“I’m scared too,” she murmured. “But what are you sorry for, kochany mój?”

Her hand pressed in tighter like she could pierce his skin, collapse him into the space between her hand and her heart. Izaak felt his lungs push outward with every breath.

He had always loved touching her. Some people described the act of making love as two bodies becoming one. To Izaak it was the opposite. He never felt so keenly the delineations of his own self than when he and Zosia were together.

If he told her the truth, she would leave him.

If he told her the truth, if she didn’t leave him, if she pressed her finger into his mouth, if she scraped the saliva from inside his cheek, if she sent it to the lab and if he was a match, would she hold him under the knife?

When they first knew Peter was sick, she had wrapped their son in her arms as though she could shield him from all who would harm him. As though she could take him back into her body.

Izaak’s mother had not been able to shield him. He was younger than Peter when his life fractured. He had never told anyone what the man did. He had not had the words in English or Polish. Even his mother tongue felt as foreign to him then as his own body had become. Some part of him had thought his mother would just look at him and know. Years later, he met Zosia at SUNY New Paltz; it was not long before he was bringing her home to break bread with his mother. In those days, he walked a razor wire of giddy anticipation and breathtaking fear. He had once believed his mother might see through him; with Zosia, he had been afraid she would.

Now he clutched Zosia’s nightgown. He felt her tears on his skin when she lifted his face to hers. Her hands cupped his cheeks. He did not dare open his eyes. He could not bear to see her compassion.

They fell asleep that way, curled close in the too small bed.

He woke alone. It was nearly nine, hours after he typically got up. Zosia had left a note saying she was going to the hospital. When he arrived at the bakery, it was already open and there was a line of customers at the counter. His assistant manager pulled him into the kitchen.

“What’s going on? Where have you been?”

The dough from the night before was still covered in cloth. Izaak hadn’t come in to put it in the oven this morning.

The other man softened. “Look, is everything okay? Do you need some time off? I could pick up some extra shifts, maybe Maxine could get one of her friends to help out.”

Izaak shrugged off his attempt at comfort. “Thanks.” He went to put the bread in the oven. He had to make up for lost time. He had just rolled out the dough for challah when his wife called.

“Peter wants to know when you’ll be here,” she said.

He told her he didn’t know, he had a lot to do.

“We want to see you,” she said. There was a pause, like she was waiting for him to say something. “Do you know when you’ll get the results?”

The secret caught in his throat. “I don’t know.”

When Zosia spoke again, her voice was so soft he had to press the phone to his ear to understand. “If you aren’t a match, just tell me.”

It would be easy. He could say he wasn’t. There would be no anesthesia. No strangers in blue masks leaning over him. No digging under his flesh and into the bone. As though there was anything under his skin worth giving.

“I don’t know,” Izaak said. “I have to go. I have a meeting. With Martin.”

“But you’ll come to the hospital after that?”

“I will. I’ll come.”

When he turned down the corridor towards Peter’s room, the first thing he heard was the sound of Peter’s laughter. Izaak couldn’t open the door fast enough.

Zosia was standing by the head of the bed. Peter was sitting up, colorful paper streamers strewn across his lap, and standing there, with his back to Izaak, was Martin.

Well, shit.

“Hi,” Izaak said.

Peter greeted him with a broad grin. Zosia’s smile faded; her lips pressed together in a thin line. She rested one hand on Peter’s shoulder. Possessive, protective.

“Your father and I will be right back,” she said.

Izaak followed her into the corridor and around a corner.

“You weren’t meeting with Martin,” she said.

“No. I wasn’t.” He could have reached out but the stiff way she held herself felt like she was building a wall between them. No, he corrected himself, he had built that wall.

She hugged herself. “Why won’t you tell me if you’re not—”

“I’m afraid of surgery. I can’t do it. I can’t make myself send in the sample. I’m afraid of what will happen when I do.” The words fell from his lips as though they had been gathering there all this time, coiling up inside him, now unspooling. He told Zosia about his panic the first time, how he lost control of his own body. He told her he couldn’t send the samples to the lab, that he had asked Martin to throw them away.

A part of him registered that they were still standing in the corridor, with people bustling around them. He could only see Zosia, though. Her face had gone blank. When she did speak, it was slow and deliberate, but laced with steel. “You’re his father.”

Izaak shrugged, helpless. “I tried. I’m trying. I don’t know what else to say.”

“Help me understand. Where is this coming from?”

Izaak’s throat was dry. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to look at her and see her trying to help him. “Hate me,” he whispered.

Her eyes began to well with tears. She didn’t answer. They stood at arm’s length. He wanted so badly to brush his fingers against the bare skin of her arm. If he could only touch her, he might remember that his body was his own.

She swayed slightly, then said, “You need to go.”

“Let me see him,” he said. “Please, just let me see him.”

Peter and Martin were whispering to each other as Izaak and Zosia walked back into the room. They turned towards the door when Izaak and Zosia walked in. Peter started coughing, bent forward in the bed, with his hands over his mouth. Izaak rushed to his boy, raising a hand to offer comfort in some way, when Peter started pulling something out of his mouth. Long ribbons of brightly colored paper. Izaak stopped with his hand in the air, hovering over the bed. When Peter finished, he raised the colored paper in one fist, grinning widely. “Look what Martin brought me!”

Izaak drank in the sight of his son’s wide open joy. He wanted to remember this forever.

“I have to get something from my car,” he mumbled, and was out the door as fast as he could move.

He told himself to walk. Keep walking and don’t think about it. Don’t think about what’s coming. Don’t think about the needles. Don’t think about the hands. One foot in front of the other until he was in the parking lot, then he had dragged himself to the car, then his hand put the key in the lock and opened the glove compartment—and remembered that it was gone. His hands were shaking and he dropped the keys. He didn’t feel like they were hands. His legs couldn’t hold him anymore so he sat on the asphalt next to the car. When he used to drink, sometimes he forgot he had a body. He wanted to forget now.

He hadn’t had a drink since Peter was two. He didn’t think Peter could have remembered him before he got clean, but the thought had kept him up at night sometimes. What if Peter did remember—what if Peter did know that his father had once done everything in his power to leave without leaving?

His blood was pounding at his temples. He couldn’t see the asphalt in front of him anymore. He saw a masked surgeon with a needle full of drugs leaning over him. The drugs would numb him. They would separate him from his body. Leave him defenseless while they cut into the bone, and he could see something dark and wretched coming from him and they wanted to put that in his son, his boy, who didn’t deserve to carry Izaak inside him, and—and Izaak tipped forward and vomited.

“—zaak? Izaak!”

A hand on his neck. He flinched. His chest ached. He coughed and spat something on the ground.

“Izaak? Hey man, you okay?”

Izaak drew in a breath. Martin.

“That’s it,” Martin said, “let it out.”

Izaak hadn’t realized he was crying. He touched his face; it was wet. He started to sob, and all the while he kept touching his fingertips to his cheek because he felt like his hands and feet and head would detach themselves and scatter at any moment. But he could still feel the salt water on his skin.

Eventually, Martin asked him if he needed a doctor.

No, he didn’t.

Did he want to go back inside?

No, he didn’t.

He’d lost the DNA sample. How could he have done that?

“Alright, up you go.” Those were Martin’s hands on him. He was walking around to the passenger side door. He was dropping himself into the seat, Martin was closing the door, and then Martin was there in the driver’s seat.

“I’ll tell Zosia we’re going to a meeting. Do you have your sponsor’s number? I can call her.”

“No!”

Martin looked at Izaak skeptically. “I really think we should call her…”

“What do you think?” Izaak snapped. “You’ve been sober thirty days.”

Martin turned away. He shoved his hand in his pocket. Izaak knew he was touching the secret little key on a string. Izaak tipped his head against the window and closed his eyes. Martin started the car.

At some point, he realized Martin was driving him home. “Not there,” he said. “I can’t go there.”

Martin pulled over. “I’m not going to ask about the envelope…but I really think you should call your sponsor.”

Izaak concentrated on the cool glass against his temple. The clinic was only a few miles away. Not far down Route 9. He inhaled and conjured the sound of Peter’s laughter.

What the man had done to him, back then—it had made Izaak’s body not his own. He remembered one day, a few gray weeks after the fragmentation. He didn’t recall where he’d been or what he’d been doing; perhaps he had been in school, or sitting on the stoop with his sisters, or making challah with his mother. Whatever he’d been doing, he’d stopped and stared at his hands, studied the creases on his knuckles, the blue veins beneath the skin, the angle where hands became wrists became arms. They didn’t seem like his. He’d told his fingers to move and watched them do so and still couldn’t fathom that the signals from his brain went to those digits. They weren’t the same hands that had shoved at the man so ineffectually.

Now, Izaak pressed his fingers into his thighs. His fingers, his thighs, his head knocking against the window. On the exhale, he told Martin what he needed to do.

Peter was sitting up in bed, when Izaak returned a few hours later, reading a worn-out novel with a dragon on the cover. Izaak thought Peter had read it before, by the state of its spine, but the boy read a lot of books about dragons so he couldn’t be sure. Zosia was not there, and Izaak was glad. Tomorrow, he might tell her. Tomorrow, he might hold her hand and say, When I was thirteen a man tore me into pieces. She might understand. Maybe.

Peter looked up from his book. “Hi Dad.” He closed the book but kept two fingers in his place. There were bags under his eyes and his hair hadn’t been brushed in a while, but he was awake and although he wasn’t smiling, he looked ready to smile. Like he was just waiting for Izaak to give him a reason.

“Hi,” Izaak said. “I’m sorry I had to leave before. How are you feeling?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “I don’t like that question.”

Izaak nodded. “I don’t like it either.”

“Then why’d you ask it?”

Izaak lowered himself into the small plastic chair. “Because sometimes we have to say things we don’t want to say.”

His son stared at him, then snorted. “That’s BS, Dad.” He shook his head. “Sometimes. All anyone says to me now is stuff they don’t want to say. Nobody wants to say any of this. Nobody wants to talk to me about what’s going on but nobody will talk to me about anything else.”

Izaak braced his elbows on his knees. “Well.” He didn’t know what to say. 1 in 200. “Gówno,” he swore.

Peter smiled. “Yeah. Gówno.”

This was where he could say, Don’t let your mother hear you say that. Or he could say, There is only a 0.5% chance that I am a match. He could say, I am sorry that you might wake up someday and know there is something inside you that doesn’t belong.

“Are you tired?” is what he did say because Peter had let his head fall back again. Peter nodded and scooted a little lower in the bed, the book still in his lap.

“They’re going to kick me out soon,” Izaak said, “but I can stay for a little while.” He waited until Peter’s eyes were closed and his hands slack. Izaak lifted the book and set it on the table, careful to dog-ear the page. He was too large for the bed, but he sat on the thin mattress anyway and Peter, consciously or unconsciously, tucked into him. Izaak’s hands stroked his son’s cheek. His lungs expanded and contracted in time with his son’s soft breaths that puffed in and out, and his fingers brushed the tender skin that lay too close to the bone. Even though he’d sealed a part of himself in a bag and given it away, he felt whole.

REDUCTIVE BODY

NINA CLEMENTS

Oh, these parts, these

parts, you hollowed little

gray eggs—I have never

used you as intended. You

have lain fallow in me

for the whole of my life

and finally now,

you revolt. Swelling,

swelling, multiplying,

multiplying, until your

anger has amassed

a whole body of cells

in protest against me,

against the staunchness

of my sexual economy,

against your own

unemployment. Oh,

you have reduced me

now, to the sum

of you, to the sum

of sallow gray eggs

and the bunch of dead

cells that have become

the size of a baby’s head.

SQUIRRELS

CHRISTOPHER MOHAR

Tweedy said he was microdosing for hereditary depression but really he was macrodosing for failure of imagination—at least that’s how I saw it before everything that happened happened. On the day in question, we went to Kristian’s house to borrow a gun on account of there being so many squirrels in Tweedy’s attic that needed clearing out. Nothing big, a .22 long rifle. Tweedy’d bought this huge old house outright for cash with a chunk of his settlement money, which mostly wasn’t a good idea, him being alone in an empty cavern of a place like that, except he seemed happy about having all that space to grow mushrooms, which he did in these big plastic tubs in the basement. Only his grows kept getting corrupted because your house has to be apparently sterile if I understand correctly so as to not have Trichoderma mold parasitizing your mycelium, which Tweedy most definitely did. His shit was parasitized. He kept trying, though. That I give him credit for: he didn’t give up. Until he did, but we’re getting to that. He blamed the squirrels in his attic for shitting in the house and bringing in germs, and also they’d chewed through some coaxial wires and interrupted his internet, so that’s why they had to go.

So we asked Kristian to borrow a gun. Kristian was the sort of person with a dad he still talked to, a dad who’d lived in the same house with him the whole time he was growing up, who was even sober a vast majority of said time, a dad who taught him things like what a geode was and how to fix a lamp with a soldering iron. We all thought that was why Kristian had turned out kind and less fucked up than us. Not that we resented him. He was a good dude. On the way to his place, I was driving because I’d only eaten two grams and Tweedy’d had like six. Plenty of people talk about making mushroom tea, but Tweedy was the only one I knew who made mushroom coffee. Put them right in the grinder with the beans, cream on top and everything. I was fine to drive, though, because we’d just eaten them and were still waiting to come up, and it was the middle of the day so no traffic.

What I meant earlier about Tweedy’s failure of imagination was boredom, really. And grief. All that money from the settlement, you know, and it’s not like he’d figured out how to make himself happier. Some holes are deep enough you can’t buy your way out of them, I know that now. It’s not like a few hundred thousand would bring back his dad. But in those stupid days, I just thought, he’s rich, what the fuck does he have to be unhappy about?

“These fucking rodents, man,” Tweedy said, “are driving me nuts. You ever hear a squirrel inside a wall? Just scritch scritch scritch all night. I bang on the plaster, and they stop for three seconds. I walk back to bed, I lay down. Scritch scritch scritch, right up again. I’m going goddamn crazy. How does anyone think these diseased vermin are cute? After they’re dead, swear to God, I’m going to cut off their tails and weave a crown. I’ll wear it to bed like that asshole in T’was The Night Before Christmas, like a fucking nightcap, I swear to God.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked. “Because let me tell you: I think it’s a really really good idea.”

I can see now that what was best called for was not a .22 caliber long rifle; what was best called for was rat poison and patience, but we lacked that particular poison, and patience was entirely unforthcoming in those days. And in case you’re thinking you know where this story is going, let me stop you right there because it’s not gonna be an afterschool special where the gun guy is tripping balls and thinks his friend is a cougar or an intruder and blows his brains out. Nor the sort where we get arrested making a high-speed run from the law. (Although I do know one other guy who went that route, and it’s with a mixture of jealousy and trepidation that I think of him, on the rare occasions I remember him at all.) Plus, Tweedy’s truck was brand spanking new, also paid for with the settlement money, so looks-wise getting pulled over wasn’t going to be a problem, with me driving also on account of being white and Tweedy mixed race. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, I’m just saying. Wisconsin is a shitty place to be brown. Anyway, at first nothing happened except we had a great time spending all afternoon laughing and listening to music and getting glitched out like how you do on shrooms, rubbing our fingers through the carpet nap or just loving on the color of the sky, just hanging out watching the clouds peel apart and together.

Oh, but I forgot to say something important from back when we were getting the gun. While Tweedy goes off to stash the guitar case in his truck, Kristian sort of pulls me aside and goes, “How’s he doing, Adrian?”

“He seems the same,” I say.

“That bad, huh?” says Kristian. “Fuck. Shit. What are we going to do? We have to do something, but what are we going to do? Keep an eye on him, okay? I’m trusting you, Adrian, with this whole thing, I wouldn’t give it to him if you weren’t going to be right there beside him, so I’m trusting you to make sure. You get what I’m saying, right? I don’t want to be party to that sort of thing. This isn’t that, is it? Tell me this isn’t that. Because I’m trusting you, right?” Kristian would not be joining us at Tweedy’s to do drugs and shoot squirrels, because he had somewhere else to be with his dad, some geodes to identify or lamp parts to solder or whatever.

I didn’t really get what he was talking about, so I just said, “Yeah, fine.”

Then on the drive to Tweedy’s, I kept considering it some more, and I started to sort of get what Kristian was saying, which made me wish I hadn’t eaten the mushrooms, but I already had—they were in my stomach being digested and it was just a matter of time before I started coming up. The drive wasn’t so long, but it was long enough to think how I didn’t see Tweedy as much as I used to since he moved to his house. We’d been next-door neighbors in the same duplex since we were born. Back when Tweedy’s father was alive, before the accident with the mechanical boom arm at the factory, Mr. Tweedy Senior used to invite me and my mom over for barbecue ribs in his signature maple-mustard glaze. It’s not like they were together, but they didn’t have anyone else, either. And on the nights when my mom locked me out and never came home from the bar, I’d sleep over on their futon. So it’s not like I didn’t miss Tweedy’s dad, too.

I know it’s not the same.

When we got to Tweedy’s house, I asked, “Are you sure it’s okay to shoot stuff in here?”

“It’s my fucking house, isn’t it?”

“But what if it like accidentally ricochets outside and hits a baby?”

“Have you seen these walls?” he said. “You can’t even nail up a poster. They haven’t built brick shithouses like this since 1901. They’re small caliber bullets, anyway, the heavy plaster will stop them dead.”

“What about windows? Glass won’t stop a bullet.”

“Why would you shoot out a window?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Better not. Anyway, there’s no windows in the attic.”

“Is there plaster?”

He looked at me, dumbfounded.

“The walls up there, are they plastered?”

“Your eyes,” he said. “Are perfectly rectangular.”

I was coming up now, too, but it was just that first plateau where colors are richer and you feel warm and happy, not a full-on fever dream. Then like I said about the clouds and the carpet nap and the glitched-out good times. It was later we went for the squirrels. Of the two of us, I turned out to be the better shot, but in Tweedy’s defense he was stoned out of his gourd. After the first two squirrels we both felt bad. The mushrooms had us feeling all connected to everything and at one with the universe, and when I murdered a squirrel, I felt like I was murdering part of myself. Tweedy didn’t end up making a crown from the tails because firstly just two tails wasn’t enough and secondly it was too gruesome once it wasn’t a joke anymore. I kept looking at the torn-up flesh hole in the guts of the squirrels, considering how at a fundamental level what I’d chosen to do with my actions was move a piece of metal very fast through their bodies, thereby ensuring that their biological systems would get broken, ensuring those systems could no longer respire or digest or any of the other processes necessary for life, and considering also the surprising volume of blood a tiny body contains, so small a body, so liquid, and how the red glossy liquid kept freezing and unfreezing like candle wax. When we started coming down and the feelings of happiness and connectedness weren’t as strong, that’s when things turned bad. Also by that time, we’d drunk a fair bit of whiskey, which we never should’ve—mushrooms are an up drug and booze is a down drug—but we’d killed two squirrels and Tweedy wanted to mourn them.

“What I want is, I want the squirrels out of my attic but I don’t want to have to kill them.”

“I wish we could just do an exorcism. Get thee behind me, squirrely!”

I’d been trying to make him laugh, but Tweedy just hung his head. He shot back a gulp of whiskey, passed me the bottle.

“’Scuse me, I gotta piss,” I said.

“Just go right there,” Tweedy said, backhanding toward the insulation.

“In the attic?”

“In the corner over there.”

“That’s part of your house, bro. I’m not pissing on your house, bro.”

“The insulation will soak it right up. Look how fluffy it is. Nothing will happen. Anyways, it’s my house. Once you take title, you have full privileges to piss wherever; that’s what it means to buy a house.”

I should’ve stayed, but on account of so much whiskey, I had to go really bad, afraid I’d have an accident. “I’ll just go downstairs. I’ll be right back.”

Tweedy flipped one of the squirrels over with his toe and from the way he was looking at it, I could tell his brain was doing something similar to what my brain had been doing a moment ago, thinking about the blood and life force and whatnot. “Don’t leave me alone with it.”

I should have listened, no matter how bad I had to pee. Kristian had warned me already and now here Tweedy was warning me again, in his way. I should have stayed there and not left him alone with the squirrel. Because when I came back upstairs that’s when I found Tweedy with the gun in his mouth.

I don’t remember what words exactly I told him, but it was basically that those asshole bastards at the factory had already done what they’d done and what would he prove if he killed one more person down the line because of it, and he said not a hell of a lot but at least then he wouldn’t be in interminable pain anymore. That part I remember verbatim, “interminable pain,” like he read it in a book.

I tried to think of something else I could say powerful enough to stop him. I myself had once done something similar to what he was doing to me now—not with a gun and not in an attic, but over the phone to a girl who at the time truly loved me, even if I didn’t believe her because I thought myself unlovable. So I tried to remember the things that girl had said to me and whether anything had changed my mind in the slightest, and I wanted to now steal her words and say them back to my friend and maybe save his life. Or did the words not matter, and I lived only because my mind was never really made up to begin with and all I wanted was to feel seen?

Everybody imagines that when a moment arrives to test us, we’ll be heroes. We’ll be the ones rushing through burning buildings and carrying out the newborn kittens, we’ll be the ones to karate chop the mugger taking grandma’s purse. Eventually, most of us grow the fuck up and realize life doesn’t work like that. Others of us stay stunted forever, in which case we apply for concealed-carry permits thinking we’ll shoot the gun right out of the bad guy’s hand, then go home and fuck our wives till they come, screaming our names.

Truth is, I didn’t save Tweedy one bit. I stammered. I tried to speak but I couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say because when it came right down to it, I myself at that time believed in no particular ethos that made life worth living. No god, no Buddha; I’d never even read The Myth of Sisyphus. I thought we lived and died by dumb luck, like animals rooting blind through our stupid routines, chewing on coaxial cables instead of nutrients, running fearful from the forces of death, not knowing why some of us are taken by .22 long rifles and some aren’t. So what could I, a mere squirrel, say to someone teetering on such a precipice?

As for what happened in the end, I still don’t know if it was lucky or not. Turns out a neighbor had heard all our shooting from outside the plaster walls, and she’d stopped and cared enough to call it in, so it was right around then that the officers arrived and bashed open the attic door with weapons drawn. When the lead cop saw the .22 long rifle in Tweedy’s hand, she shot him four times. Tweedy was a brown person and holding a gun, what do you think was going to happen, a polite chat? Just because it’s himself he’s aiming at?

Have you ever seen an animal panic in front of an oncoming car and zig-zag back and forth in the road instead of escaping to one side? Tweedy’s eyes looked like that. The place already smelled like blood and cordite from the squirrels, but now it did more so. I was cowering with my hands over my head, my face raw and itching in the pink candy floss insulation. My mind made a blur of the cops doing first aid and the ambulance ride, but I do recall this much: when I arrived at the hospital, I had so much of Tweedy’s blood on me that one of the nurses thought I’d been shot, too.

Was shooting Tweedy the only way that officer could prevent him from doing a more permanent job of it himself? What if I’d never gone to pee? What if I’d had better wisdom for him, or been a better friend? This is what I consider late at night, staring at my popcorn ceiling, when I’ve already smoked two bowls and still can’t sleep. Or I imagine the cop. I imagine she had to go home and live with herself, telling herself she’d done right, maybe saying to her loved ones over the dinner table: I shot a guy today and it was the right thing to do. Maybe she wasn’t even wrong, I don’t know. But I hope she fucked her wife good.

Nobody who gets shot four times is the same after, but Tweedy did pull through. I still go see him some days, after work, wheel him around through the park behind the care facility—it’s a blessing he had all that settlement money, because otherwise who can afford such a place?

I tell Tweedy secondhand stories that Kristian told me after he moved away to New York City. I assume Tweedy likes them, but it’s hard to say. He doesn’t talk anymore.

I didn’t like having to sell his house, but there was no one else to do it. I drove by recently, and the couple who lives there now has planted flowering cherry trees wrapped in faerie lights, put in new architectural siding, and two kids were riding trikes in the driveway. Parked at the curb was an exterminator’s van. A guy in coveralls and a dust mask stood amid a confusion of supplies, holding a live trap in one hand and a canister of poison in the other, as if trying to make up his mind. I hope they’ll have better luck with the squirrels than we did.

PUBERTY BY EDVARD MUNCH

KATHRYNE DAVID GARGANO

some say she existed only in his mind’s eye.

the little girl was eaten by a wolf.

some say she represents sexual repression.

swallowed whole, small fists pounding his stomach lining, small feet kicking at his esophagus. do you remember the story? a man came & carved her out of the wolf. or a man never came & she died in the wolf with grandmother. or a man or seven men gathered around her glass coffin or her marriage bed & a man found a glass slipper meant for dainty heels & a man slew a dragon or a man slew his wives & in the dungeon there are many skulls & bones. the wolf made a home for himself in her bed. the wolf made her howl or left her howling.

some say the shadow on her collarbone implies a living model.

what does a man have to do with a girl that does not involve eating?

if her collarbone is alive, when did he close his eyes?

once upon a time a girl became a cautionary tale:

do not take this road.

do not go at night.

do not leave a trail.

when she, naked, entered the room

when she sat, naked, on the edge of the bed she was warned her body would become nothing but light through the trees—untranslatable.

did he say, move your hand?

ask her to cover more or less.
ask her to turn this way & that.
ask her to lift her jaw to expose the line of her throat.

some say the shadow between her legs implies

the artist’s complicated relationship with his penis.

some say it was an innocent exploration.

what little joy in a little girl’s face.

what little joy i hold, my gaze drawn to her collarbone.

what beast am i, now? what mirrored dust has flown into my eyes. once upon a time the mirror cracked & all those splinters cleaved our hearts in two, the beautiful & the ugly. the mirror made fools of us instead of the angels, or so the story goes. but i don’t understand what angel would allow all this. what g-d, laughing, sees the mirror crack & sends only snow?

a critic, some say, must look at everything:

the touched & the untouched.

i become the artist with my gaze: why

the white bedsheets? why the shadow?

why blues:

bruises or sky or melancholy

i count a little girl’s toes. my gaze lifts to her breasts.

don’t—

& now i’m looking at a naked child & because it’s old & art

we hang the naked child on our walls & call it

what?

what line where.

what gaze.

what child sat

in the forest, on the mossy floor, waiting for a wolf

naked.

for how long.

i’m thinking about g-d in fairy tales. g-d in the face of a prince who desires a girl above all else & a father who says yes, yes—

desire her.

LAST STOP

DANIEL POPE

Outside the train station a man lies on the concrete brick walkway, his head resting in a pool of blood. His skull is buzzed and the blood leaks brightly out of a wound above his left temple. Just beyond the pool is his camouflage-patterned cap.

You’re so taken aback by the sight that at first you walk right by it. You consider pretending you haven’t noticed, swinging your gaze up past the movie theater to the clouds clotting at the pink horizon. But instead, you stop and turn. A sense of social responsibility compels you to be seen doing something.

A middle-aged guy in sunglasses stands above the injured man, studying him. Another man in a sweaty tank top stands a few feet away, talking into his phone. His shoulders are the color of hot dogs. From the look of it he’s having a casual conversation. Across the street, people file past the theater; around you, people file past the bleeding man.

The bleeding man raises a hand and presses it into the concrete. The guy with the sunglasses bends down so far it looks like he’ll keel over on top of him. Staring down through his aviators, he cups his hands around his mouth and yells: Don’t get up!

The wounded man seems to mumble something in response, but you can’t hear. At the edge of the pool, the blood leaks down into the spaces between gray bricks, creating a tiny map of an apocalyptic city, its streets lined with gore—a city that’s perhaps only one stop away for most of us.

Lie down! the guy shouts again through his hands.

The bleeding man, who hasn’t lifted himself an inch, drops his hand back at his side, where it rests beside his army-surplus cap.

A woman wearing big hoop earrings and a purple dress walks by rubber-necking, then stops where you are.

Is he okay? she asks you.

You’re startled by how close she is. I don’t think so, you say.

Should I call an ambulance?

I think he is, you say, and you point at the man in the tank top, who paces back and forth, his phone to his ear.

Okay, she says.

His sun-damaged shoulders shake in laughter.

Or maybe not, you say.

She remains there, next to you. Together, you stare at the blood. At the edge of it, where it stops flowing through the canals, the color seems to fade out. It looks like water. You wonder what the deal is with that.

Nobody is in charge here. Some people in raincoats and hoodies with a boombox sit on a low concrete barrier encircling a planted tree. The tree withers like a scolded dog. The boombox plays hip-hop, and one of the people on the low concrete wall plays a harmonica over it. You wonder if any of them know how lonely they are.

You approach them.

Excuse me, you say. Has anyone called 911 at all?

They’re not picking up, says the man on the phone behind you.

Don’t get up! the guy in sunglasses shouts again.

The injured man has sat up, clutching at his face. He appears drunk, his head lolling in his palms, but it may be the concussion. Purple blood sits in his beard like jam. On the ground, where his head was, it looks like ketchup smeared around on a plate.

Stay down! sunglasses guy shouts again. You’ll make it worse!

Why don’t I try calling? you say to the man in the tank top, who doesn’t seem to hear you.

You call. It rings for a whole minute before you hang up and try again. You let it ring for two minutes, then hang up and try again. Meanwhile, the woman in the purple dress steps closer to the injured man, who has lain obediently back into his blood puddle. She whistles low.

Lotta blood, she says when she returns to you. Think he’s going to be okay?

You hang up the phone again. I think probably not, you say. But I’m no doctor.

You’re a doctor? she says, outraged.

I am not, you clarify.

To think, she says, not missing a beat, to think we just have all this stuff—she points to the blood—inside of us. This whole time.

She looks you in the face. Her makeup is running.

And do we deserve it? she says, gesturing sharply with one livid hand. To be cursed with these bodies?

You’re startled. Nobody ever talks to you like this.

Just—fragile containers of goop? she goes on.

Goop? you say.

Jars of goop, she says. Jars made of paper-thin glass, full of goop. Do we deserve to be such fragile, paper-thin glass jars of—

Hold on, you say, putting a finger up as you answer your buzzing phone.

You called 911 and hung up, the woman shouts over the line.

Yes, you say. I’m outside the train station. There’s a man here with a head injury. There’s a lot of blood, and—

We know, the woman says. They’re on their way. Was that all?

Oh, you say. Yes. That was all. Bye.

One wrong move, the woman in the purple dress is saying, shaking her head. Her earrings ring against her jaw and she runs a pink enameled nail lightly across her neck, staring dreamily at the blood. It really makes you thankful, she says.

You think a moment. I thought it was unfair, you say.

What?

I thought we didn’t deserve to be paper-thin glass goop jars.

Maybe she thinks you’re making fun of her. Life is a wonderful gift, she says angrily.

Life is a beautiful curse, you say.

She shakes her head. You don’t understand, she says. You’re young. You’ve probably never seen anything like this before.

No, you say. I haven’t.

You don’t tell her that you’ve pictured it. You don’t tell her you almost jumped.

Don’t get up! sunglasses guy shouts down at the ailing man, emphasizing each word.

Earlier, as your train came to a stop, the one across the platform started running the other direction, jarring you with the illusion of continued movement, with no way out. You panicked for a second, but then the doors whooshed open. Floating backs of heads were replaced by floating faces. This is the last stop on this train, a recorded voice blared.

Now, standing out here with all these apparitions under a throbbing dark sky, you wonder what you were so afraid of. Where were you going, anyway? All of us are bound for the same place: the shining city on the hill, or the grave, or just the next in an endless series of identical platforms full of identical people, stepping in and out of our collective stillborn dream.

Your phone buzzes you out of your thoughts.

Hello? the same woman says. You called 911 and hung up? Her voice sounds sulky, offended that you have done such a thing.

Yes, you say. I just talked to you. The man with the head and the blood.

What?

At the station.

How many times did you call? she says, now horrified.

Just twice, you say.

They’re on their way, she says sadly, as if pitying you.

When you hang up, the woman is gone. You hear a clicking noise and look around for a moment before you realize it’s the injured man. He has turned onto his side and is now staring up at you. The carmine blood glitters under the streetlamps like a massive garnet adorning his forehead, and a streak of it is painted over his ear. With his face tipped up into the dim light, you can see clearly that his skull is cratered in above the temple. Blood oozes slowly toward your shoes. How much could be left inside of him?

You realize suddenly that you’re looking at a dying man. And he has no idea. It gives him an awful power.

He clicks his tongue a few more times and shouts: Do you hear that?

You point at yourself.

Yeah, you!

I hear it, you say.

What?

You step between channels of blood in the gray bricks and kneel down close to him. His eyes are blue, rimmed with pink. You nod gravely and shout: I hear it!

Are you shouting? he says.

Can you hear me? you yell.

He frowns. His eyes glisten.

Am I going to die? he asks.

A crack of anger runs through the ground, like a canal of blood, cutting him off from you. Why should you be the one who has to tell him? But then you pause a moment, and the anger lies down and becomes melancholy, which is dark blue, like the deepening night sky beating helplessly against the blank shoreline of distant buildings.

We’re all going to die, you say softly.

What?

We’re all going to die! you shout.

The man looks confused for a moment. Then he says: Hey, hey. It’s cool.

He reaches a hand out and pats you on the face. His fingerprints are distinctly outlined with grime. You realize you’re crying.

Am I talking right now? the man says.

You nod. He drops his hand.

Did you just nod? he says.

From a distance comes the soft whine of sirens, slowly increasing in volume. Two cop cars, SUVs, careen around a corner, pull a U-turn, and drive up alongside the curb beyond the tree. A large man with tiny arms gets out with his partner, a short red-haired man with no eyelashes. They lean against their car and cross their arms. Nobody gets out of the other car.

Am I going to die? the man asks you again.

His voice is so low you can barely hear it over the boombox. His eyes are dull. You are bent over him like a surgeon. You don’t know what to say, so you give him a thumbs-up and stand. The guy with the aviators has gone to talk to the cops.

Then what’re you doing here? he’s shouting. If you’re not taking him, then what’re you here for?

Calm down, sir, says the large cop.

Just making sure everything is above board, says the short cop.

Your phone buzzes.

You called 911 and hung up, the same voice says again.

Sorry, you say. I guess I called three times.

What?

Another siren—this one lower, making whooping sounds, like a monkey—tears through the air. It’s the ambulance, finally, swerving around the line of brake lights. It shoots past the theater across the street, zooms around the median, and pulls up behind the cop cars, its alternating red and white lights hurling frenetic, dancing shadows against the pavement. The withered tree sways. The boombox people applaud and the one with the harmonica does an impression of the siren. You put a finger into your other ear to hear the woman on the phone better.

What the hell is that racket? she says.

We just talked, you shout. About the guy at the station? I guess I called three times, but I mistakenly told you two. It’s just a misunderstanding. I’m sorry!

Unbelievable, the woman says.

Does this happen a lot? you shout.

It’s my first day, she says. Or maybe she said: Every day. It doesn’t matter. She has hung up.

You crouch again over the man, who has turned onto his back. He looks up at you out of his enormous and childlike face. The dried blood on his forehead shines like gold leaf in the swooping red light. His clay cheeks bear the thumbprints of whatever wrathful god created him.

You have to get out of there.

They’re here, you say. You’re going to be great.

What? he says.

Have a good evening, you say.

He closes his eyes. A tear clings to his chin, utterly still, like dried glue. Or maybe it’s snot. He makes a clicking noise with his tongue again. A halo of blood flashes around his head.

You stand and turn to walk across the street. The cops don’t even glance your way. Behind you, the man continues clicking. It seems to you that some fault line runs down your chest, splitting you in two, and that you have to press the two sides of yourself together to continue upright. When you get to the other side of the street, you don’t look back. You just keep walking around the theater and through the parking lot and up the next street, then turn right, then left, then cross the street to your apartment building, which stands next to a funeral parlor. Men in black suits are gathered along the sidewalk, nodding. One of them looks at you, and in a throaty, practiced tone meant to convey comfort, says: And are you here for the service?

Please don’t talk to me, you say.

Up in your apartment you lie down in the dark in your bed with all your clothes on. For a while you continue hearing the clicks. The blood creaks in your brain. Then you must fall asleep.

You open your eyes and you’re lying in a coffin, pitching along upon a river of blood, a spindly dark city rearing up on all sides. The air is like a red velvet drape resting against your face and the sun a lightbulb shining through the bright pink bladder of a fish. The air tastes like pennies and you can barely breathe for the stench. But then the phone rings.

You called 911 and hung up, the woman says.

Oh God, you say. Yes. I did. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

A PEASANT WOMAN DIGGING IN FRONT OF HER COTTAGE BY VINCENT VAN GOGH

KATHRYNE DAVID GARGANO

i’ve been staring at the paintings so long they’re beginning to merge: adam’s there, of course, reaching for an elephant on spindly legs & water lilies adorn the wanderer in the fog. i cannot tell what is wet & what is water, my own skin dry & cracked from the brutal summer sun. i dream of temperate places. oregon. that cold coastline where once, you took off all your clothes & shrieked into the ocean & out again & i tried not to look & couldn’t look at anything but you. what gentleness we might have had. there’s a room in this museum dedicated only to chairs & i sit in each one a few hours, a day, a long hot night when the mosquitos are hungry & i am hungry but there’s an ache in my stomach that i can pretend is just loneliness, so i do. it’s not that there’s nothing to eat here—sweet deer & families of rabbits—it’s just that i’m imagining my bones again. vincent slipped in & out of colors—in arles, sunflowers. in nuenen, monochrome cottages & i stare at the woman bent over a broom & the rush of her hips—her love for some straw house or her hated of it & the man inside or maybe i’m projecting. the woman with her face to the leaves had a name. i want to call her something. a body in brushstrokes feels more tangible than my own, & i’m beginning to melt. maybe into nothingness. into the backdrop, a dreary day. i don’t know. the sun is making its arc again, & the shadows are lithe, a commentary, or a mockery, or just a reminder. through the open window, i can hear the statues praying.

TO HOLD BACK NOTHING

WHITE MAGIC

Elissa Washuta (Tin House Books, 2022)

REVIEWED BY MONIQUE FERRELL

Recovery.

It is the word that followed me while reading White Magic by Elissa Washuta. It whispered at me between sentences, chasing me from chapter to chapter. In this memoir in essays, the author is looking for something—a multitude of somethings. Her people. Her genesis. A better understanding of words and stories. The physicality of her body through space and time. Her sobriety. Her very sanity.

As an Indigenous woman, Washuta walks the reader through American history and its impact on her people and culture: “I plot to travel to another world because this one seems too decimated by the white men who wanted money and skin, too dangerous to navigate because of the sentinels still roaming, raping, and gouging out the earth to maintain power.” A survivor of sexual assault, she draws connections between the generational violence experienced by her people and her constant fear of being brutalized: “Every day the universe reminds me that, yes, I am safe now, but I am in America. I could be gouged out again.” One can feel almost overwhelmed by her pain and process, but the author isn’t interested in our desire to catch our breath. She is on a long-awaited journey that requires witnesses.

With each page, she pushes toward a divinely inspired magic—one that upends the addictions that trigger the worst of our counterintuitive behaviors. Powerfully, the book also cries out for that which has been forcibly taken, while, at the same time, showcasing the desire of the author to be set on the road toward recovery, in all its varied meanings. White Magic, therefore, serves as Washuta’s blueprint for how to get there. How to get back. How to set about reclaiming the bits and pieces of one’s identity after they have been scattered. It is a historical, cultural, and woman-centered calling back of stolen things. At times, the book feels very much like a spell, and its stories seem to dictate how not to break apart once the spell has been cast.

Reading on, we learn that America’s history and the violation of her body deeply compound her battle with alcoholism and her struggle with anxiety and depression: “I cannot control this world. I shut my eyes, try to cry or not cry, and ask benevolent spirits for intercession. I make my body solid so spirits will know I believe it’s worth protecting, even if I’m not sure it’s true.” Here, the reader is floored, but we continue on with her. At this point, in the telling, we want what she wants. We too long for recovery—the taking back of what is owed.

White Magic is an example of what it means to work through the weight of everything that greets us when we enter the world at birth. It is also about how we archive and compartmentalize information to ensure our survival. In the end, Washuta teaches her readers that the self is not a separate thing; rather, it exists in myriad ways. It fights for connection, meaning, the power of identity, and it longs to reclaim our ever-unfolding story.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

LAURISTON AVERY

The cover art for this issue of BLR was created in response to my recovery from addiction. In the disorienting early days, very little made sense to me, especially in the studio where I struggled to find a connection to my art.

Whether it was defiance or desperation, I turned to what was immediately on hand—construction adhesive—something that seemed oddly fated to this unsettled moment. I played first with a caulk gun, squeezing out the adhesive into simple forms. This led to obsessively populating the surface of stretched canvas with multitudes of squares and circles in all kinds of configurations. Intermittently I would apply washes of white acrylic paint. Then came the power tools—drills, sanders, grinders, scrapers—to carve away and further manipulate the material.

As the surface of the paintings started to accrue a history, systems and relationships within the shapes would begin to appear: line work would mix with light and shadow, conduits would intertwine within clusters, texture would accent the scarred fields of canvas. The paintings began to reveal ghostly forms, fragments of landscape, and arcane architecture. I interpreted these imageries as otherworldly signals and began to lean into this notion, scanning the surface for messaging while adding my own androids, aliens, and cathedrals. It became almost a séance-like conversation with the paintings over the course of many months, until finally they were finished.

This invisible world made tangible through painting continues to animate my practice, and it’s hard to imagine how these works would have come to light without the profound and often bewildering experience of recovery.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Carolyn Abram is a Seattle-based writer. Her fiction has appeared in various publications, including the New California Writing Anthology. She is the author of eight editions of Facebook for Dummies. She teaches at Hugo House in Seattle.

Saima Afreen is a poet, journalist, and essayist. She received a Villa Sarkia Writers’ Residency in Finland, where she edited Sin of Semantics, her debut poetry collection. She was a Charles Wallace Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, UK. She is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Illinois State University.

Anthony Aguero is the author of Burnt Spoon Burnt Honey (Flower Song Press). He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was featured in The Slowdown. His poems have been published with Carve Magazine, RHINO Poetry, Foglifter, and PANK Magazine.

Lauriston Avery studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1990. Avery’s work has been exhibited internationally since 2010 with recent solo and group exhibitions in Germany, New York, and California. Avery currently lives in New York.

Tara Ballard is the author of House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press), winner of the 2016 Many Voices Project Prize. Her poetry has been published in Diode, Michigan Quarterly Review, The New York Quarterly, and Poetry Northwest. She is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Talia Bloch is the author of Inheritance. Recent poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, North American Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, The Southern Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her work has been awarded an Editor’s Prize by Pleiades and was selected for Best Short Fictions 2020.

Margaret Buckhanon was born and raised in Nyack, New York, and is a graduate of Empire State College. She inherited the love of storytelling from her paternal grandmother during visits to Alabama, where her parents are originally from. “Beenie at Fourteen” is an excerpt from her novel in progress.

Wes Byers is a writer from the foothills of North Carolina. His work has appeared in Southern Review of Books, Pembroke Magazine, and Hello, America. He currently lives in New Orleans where he is working on a novel.

Stephanie Choi’s poems appear or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Cortland Review, Electric Literature, and Poetry Northwest.

Nina Clements earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of the chapbook Set the Table (Finishing Line Press) and the poetry collection Our Mother of Sorrows (Urban Farmhouse Press). Originally from Pittsburgh, she works as a librarian in Madison, Wisconsin.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches at Florida International University in Miami.

Monique Ferrell’s writing has appeared in Reed Magazine, American Poetry Review, North American Review, Antioch Review, and Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song. She has penned three poetry collections, including the award-winning Attraversiamo (NYQ Books). Her fourth collection, bone, is forthcoming.

Kathryne David Gargano (she/her) hails from the Pacific Northwest, but isn’t very good at climbing trees. She received her MFA from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has been published in Notre Dame Review, Denver Quarterly, and Tahoma Literary Review.

Rebecca Grossman-Kahn is a resident psychiatrist in Minnesota. She is a graduate of Stanford and holds an MD/MBA from the University of Michigan. Her essays have appeared in the Examined Life Journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Intima. She is working on a collection of essays.

Yen Ha is an architect, artist, and writer. Born in Saigon, she now lives in New York City. Yen has been awarded residencies by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, MASS MoCA, and the Arctic Circle. Her short stories appear in Waxwing, Crack the Spine, and Hypertext.

Emily Hockaday’s full-length collection, Naming the Ghost, will be out with Cornerstone Press in November 2022. She wrote the chapbooks Starting a Life, What We Love & Will Not Give Up, Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide, and Space on Earth.

Kyle Impini graduated from Indiana University with degrees in English and history, and he currently lives in Bloomington, Indiana. His work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Arts & Letters, Sierra Nevada Review, and the Blue Earth Review.

Carrie Purcell Kahler’s work appears in Image, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Postcard Poems and Prose, District Lit, and Hobart. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington and lives in Seattle with her cat.

Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. Published work includes The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books, 2021), four poetry chapbooks, and many poems and essays. Diane is a holistic life coach with emphasis in creativity practice. She teaches at St. Olaf College.

Julia Mascioli’s fiction has been published in Witness and the Bellingham Review. She co-edited the anthologies When You Hear Me (You Hear Us): Voices on Youth Incarceration and The Untold Story of the Real Me: Young Voices from Prison. She has an MFA in fiction from Emerson College.

Andrea McLaughlin is an addiction therapist living in Los Angeles. She also holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction and poetry appear in River Styx, Dark Lane Anthology Series, and River Heron Review.

Holly Mitchell is a poet from Kentucky, now based in New York. Holly’s debut collection, Mare’s Nest, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books.

Christopher Mohar won the 2017 Etchings Press Novella Prize for The Denialist’s Almanac of American Plague and Pestilence. He has received a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship, and is published in the Mississippi Review, North American Review, and Creative Nonfiction. In past lives, he was a busboy, a materials science engineer, and an instructor in a men’s correctional facility.

Ucheoma Onwutuebe is a Nigerian writer. She is the recipient of the Waasnode Fiction Prize and has received residencies from Yaddo, Art Omi, and The Anderson Center. Her works have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Off Assignment, and Bakwa Magazine. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Daniel Pope is a writer and musician from Seattle. He has an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark, and his work has been published in Narrative Magazine. He is working on his first novel.

Rochelle Robinson-Dukes is a Professor of English at the City Colleges of Chicago. She is the editor of Brownstone Barrio Bards, a journal of Chicago poets. She has been published in African American Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Meridian, and Salamander.

Arya Samuelson is a writer and editor in Northampton, Massachusetts. She won CutBank’s 2019 Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, awarded by Cheryl Strayed, and has been published in Columbia Journal, New Delta Review, Gertrude, and The Millions. She teaches online writing classes and loves bearded collies.

Gaetan Sgro is an internal medicine doctor, girl dad, and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine where he directs a program in the medical humanities. His poems have appeared in Glass: Poet’s Resist, Blueline, the Healing Muse, APIARY Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, and Best New Poets 2016.

Lolita Stewart-White is a poet, filmmaker, and educator in Miami. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, Iowa Review, and Rattle. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo Writers Workshop, and Sundance Screenwriters Lab. She was the winner of the Paris Review Poetry Prize, a finalist for the CAAPP Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nominee.

Meredith Talusan’s debut memoir, Fairest, was published in 2020 (Viking) and her writings appear in Guernica, Boston Review, Grand, The Rumpus, and the anthology Anonymous Sex. She received an MFA in fiction and an MA in comparative literature from Cornell University.

Anne-Marie Thompson is the author of Audiation, winner of the Donald Justice Award. A pianist-turned-poet, she has taught music, writing, and literature at Johns Hopkins University, Westminster College, and the Syracuse Downtown Writers Center. Originally from southeast Texas, she now lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband and son.

William Walker has delivered enough FedEx boxes to Midtown Manhattan high-rises to qualify for a pension. He is now a teacher in need of neck surgery. His work has appeared in the Southampton Review, Southern Humanities Review, Subtropics, and Willow Springs.

Sakena Jwan Washington is a boomerang native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in HuffPost, ReWire, and the Jellyfish Review. When she’s not chasing her energetic toddler, she’s taking snapshots with her phone or contemplating how to fill the next blank page.

Nicholas Yingling’s work has previously appeared in Poetry Daily, the Missouri Review, 32 Poems, Pleiades, and Colorado Review. He lives in Los Angeles.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to all who have helped support Bellevue Literary Review in its efforts to bridge the worlds of literature and medicine. Special thanks to the Goldenberg family, the Buckvar family, and Lesmah J. Fraser and Lin Lombardi for their sponsorship of the BLR Prizes. BLR is 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.

Sustainer: Barrett Kashdan

Benefactors: The Goldenberg Family, Abraham Verghese, Jan and Marica Vilcek, The Whiting Foundation

Patrons: Bettina Klein, Jeremy Nobel, Robert J. Warshaw, Northwell Health

Muses: Robert Oldshue & Anne Calabrese, Marit Vagstad, David & Jacqueline Weill, Cambridge Boxhill Language Assessment, Penguin Random House

Partners: Martin J. Blaser, Myrna Blyth, Dina & Ron Borzekowski, Rita Charon, Jack Coulehan, Vida Foubister, Lesmah J. Fraser, John Froude, Sig-Linda Jacobson, Gerard Kirwan, Perri Klass, Lee Learman, Lin Lombardi, Ashley McMullen, George D. Mitchell, Michael Myers, Michael Yeaman

Advocates: Thomas Andrews, Bruce & Kathi Campbell, Eliza & Doug Chin, Frank Clark, Kathleen Gibbons, Anyika Jordan, Barron Lerner, Jerome Lowenstein, Katherine Mathews, Marion Nestle, Jennifer Nevins, Ruth Oratz, Saul Weiner

Friends: Felice Aull, Deborah Bayer, Joseph Becker, Theresa Brown, Elizabeth Crowell, Nila De La Rosa, Marlene DeLeon, David Ferris, Robin Freedberg, Abraham Fuks, Jeffrey Goldberg, Edward Ha, Rachel Hadas, Caridad Hernandez, Rana Bitar Jacob, Lydia Kang, Jeffrey Lazar, Gary Lerner, Julia Lo, Kevin Loughlin, Joyce Lowinson, Gardner McFall, Andrew Milano, Richard & Lila Nachtigall, Farzon Nahvi, Judy & Michael Pillinger, Donna Baier Stein, Catharine Stimpson, Gilbert Tauber, Peter Tesler, Warren Wechsler, Francis Perry Wilson, Therese Wolpaw

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Bellevue Literary Review is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
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