Seven hours under bubbles to breakfast, practicing his terminus while they slap water with the fowl’s carcass rag and tempt him to spring- loaded striking at 1 p.m., to the matador’s applause each hot weekday and twice on Saturday, but he must only win once, tangent to his target, a holy investiture, sacred digestion, and every zookeeper has one absent moment, so he’ll wait forever like the best missionaries, for the one chance of faith to find its grim purchase, when in the coughing dark, a child’s fever breaks and prayer can be praised, so one heedless heel too close to the water, then matter of fact, not with any animus, not out of revenge, a final punctuation for the slow god of limitless perseverance, cold-scaled leviathan, to take and roll and roll until the silent ripple of dismay which is a crocodile’s patience.
By Julia Strayer Selected as the winner of the 2022 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Madeline ffitch
Featured Art: Monte Constantino, Night by Alex Spragens
I lost her the night of the squalls, when wind raged hard enough to rip trees from the ground—my husband helping neighbors with a collapsed roof, and me with blood that wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t stop. I carried her for four months. I had imagined her face.
I walked the dark house alone, not wanting to sit, hearing crying that wasn’t mine while the moon trailed after me. I searched out the front window for my husband’s headlights because it wouldn’t feel real until I could tell him, but my breath fogged the glass, and I couldn’t see. Finally, I slept because I was too tired to do anything else.
Empty and quiet. My body. The house. Except for the walls, which were run through with mice and scratching.
They say children choose their parents. What does that say of me? What does that say?
In the wild, a wolf mother will carry a dead pup around in her mouth, showing the body to the rest of the pack, before she buries it.
It was winter solstice. As day faded, we drove to the appointment through our city and over the river, a circuitous route, the golden light ennobling the derelict brick, the industry of the river, the winter hawks perching on the floodplain. The news was not that bad, but still, bad enough. We had options. We drove home toward one bright star against the pink spill of sunset. Look at this light, we kept saying. Here is a neighborhood we have never seen before. The sky shifted sapphire to black. We floated premises; they floated away. We would choose later, let the longest night take its time. We would do this right.
As retirement began in May, I placed my little reminders around the house, “Every third thought shall be my grave,” and for the first week I was dutiful, losing track of
my lists of groceries or my dog’s empty bowl, thinking of my grave easily a third of the time, keeping a running tab of each idea on my phone, sometimes unsure of when
a thought might end and another begin, was the Carolina wren’s call only one thought, and the white-throated sparrow’s another, if so, then as I dug my garden with my rototiller
that hurt my bones, I would certainly consider my grave just then, the rectangle clearly a visual reminder and the soil, only the treated lumber borders threw me off, so I thought of the pecans
so late to arrive in leaf, would they produce this year those beautiful kernels, and then by early June I bumped it up to every fifth thought, which allowed me to prepare to collect
on my investments, thinking it through without giving way to tears, thinking of the garlic bulbs I planted, the scapes— those green leaves—I ate in a frittata with salmon, line-caught,
very pure, innocent, and by the time the zinnias arrived in July, the shortest in the front, the largest in the back like a choral group arranged by range, I said, Damn it,
I shan’t be buried at all, I’ll amend my dying will to request a cremation “ceremony,” and I went around the house like in mid-January taking down every Christmas detail
including the manger with the unmoving donkey and lamb who I might try to outstare, but now I searched for my grave mnemonics, my construction paper cutouts, my calligraphy
that was poor penmanship, my silly arithmetic reminders of death, and I could go eight, on a weekend, maybe ten thoughts without a single visual of my body gone, my mind that knew
a thing or two just emptied like a bin or the compost jar that I sometimes just toss right into the ground, not caring about time, until the zinnias called it quits in early November,
the grass stopped growing and gave some color away to charity, and the birds, the birds felt something coming and shipped out sometimes in great flocks of chattering that were frightening,
or sometimes, just a single bird that flew south, though I knew and called out to it, Actually, you’re heading north, I yelled at it, and still it sailed on, maybe a breeze was showing it
the quickest way to leave, or just the least painful, until its speck must have entered a cloud.
If I said “Dead” you’d want me to describe the cause and circumstances, promise my demise is unrelated to my work, which I don’t know for sure. Most days
I’m awake to my impending doom, but the details remain dim. “In your seat” would sound arrogant and also isn’t true. I much prefer a cubicle to losing
my weekends or leading folks like me. I may be surrounded by robots, but I bet they’ll need a human standing by in case they walk into a corner and get stuck, request
a reboot to erase having learned their tasks are stupid and endless. Given you’re a decade my senior—or else really fatigued—“Retired” might offend
by rubbing in you’re nowhere close. Too much focus on the future strikes me as futile. Once the apocalypse begins, we’ll probably all do things we can’t
imagine now. If I asked you the same, I wonder if you’d have an answer prepared, be flattered someone cared, or if you’d be upset by goals you haven’t met.
Experience suggests I’ll be performing this same show for a new audience, either because the company’s at risk of shutting down, or because I’m so frustrated
I can’t bear to stay. I’m tempted to say “Standing on the roof,” then allow an awkward pause before explaining there’s also a DJ and champagne
to help us celebrate my latest great idea, which I won’t reveal until after I’m hired. I wish this question had come sooner on your list. I don’t want the words
I leave you with to ruin our rapport, but the longer we sit here the more my vision narrows to the door, the relief I’ll feel when I walk out of it.
We don’t negotiate salary because we’re already certain what you’re worth. It may be less than you’d hoped, but it’s enough to live on if you’re practical. We don’t negotiate benefits because we think you’re lucky
to get any. The single therapist is prone to naps and lousy metaphors, but you’re so sad that you’ll keep going back. We don’t negotiate duties because the job ad was crafted to include everything that we don’t want to do, and then
revised again when we got sued. Belonging to a group always requires sacrifices: someone has to do the dirty work for which no credit is received, take on difficult tasks where failure means you’ll probably get fired, and it’s not
fair for you to skip your turn. We don’t negotiate vacation time because we’re angry it exists. You’re also not allowed to work from home unless you’re quarantined— we tried it once and were so drunk by noon we answered
our email with kitten pictures. We don’t negotiate office space because you’ll be assigned a cubicle, bottle of bleach to combat creeping mold. If you choose to decorate, make sure all items fit into a single banker’s box,
which allows for ease of exit if you suddenly get fired. And should you have requests we haven’t covered, the answer’s No to those as well. We know winning a small concession would increase your confidence,
make you feel truly wanted. But honestly you weren’t our best or favorite candidate. You were the one we settled for because you seemed most likely to say yes, and the fact that you’re still listening suggests
we were correct. Regardless of your reasons for taking this job—debt, despair, misguided optimism— we think you’ll fit in fine as long as you remember: We don’t negotiate because there is no need.
If I said solutionism was the greatest challenge facing us today, how many whiteboards might you fill before the irony hit home? Was your attempt to privatize the Post Office
short-lived because it was too hard to disrupt real objects, or because Jeff Bezos told you to back off? Are you more embarrassed by the bubbling sinkhole stinking up your campus
quad, the fence that fails to block its view, or the studies stating that the Valley’s so-called “pipeline problem” is merely a myth you’ve built around a rigged system? Given the resulting
poor publicity, do you regret deciding to: use live endangered animals to illustrate ideas, spend millions on a bonding trip at which most of your staff contracted STIs and salmonella,
compete pants-less at the all-hands sack race? Relatedly, what percent of the lawsuits you’ve had to settle might’ve been avoided by investing in HR before a second helicopter?
Are you aware the word “founder” also means to sink or fail utterly? If yes, do you ever dream you’re drowning and wake up afraid, and does this perhaps explain your interests
in sea-steading and extreme longevity? If I suggested several of your famous Principles, e.g., Be Boldly New, seem cribbed from other companies, would your benign
but somewhat flat affect pivot toward rage so fast I’d feel dizzy? Did you agree to this meeting in the hope that seeming open, honest, and sincere would counteract
your current image as a greedy genius hooking users on their own abuse? Or because a public busy judging your ethics, humor and haircut is less likely to notice or object
to your real work, which is not the thing you’ve gotten famous for? Assuming the latter, are you sorrier I’ve caught on or flattered by the depths of my alarm?
Featured Art: Prositabhartruka Nayika by Kripa Radhakrishnan
The kids call him Smash Dad when it happens. “Smash Dad, Smash Dad!” chant six-year-old Kevin and Kylie, voices still almost indistinguishably high-pitched. “Ha ha ha.” Robert forces a smile, squinting to repel the enemy light. I can only imagine the gouging pains and gushing nausea he describes because, while we both like to drink, only he gets these hangovers.
He’s never belligerent or weepy when he drinks. At the worst, he’s increasingly amorous, which is no trouble for me once the kids are in bed. We have a grand time, sampling this and that, lots of reds from Sonoma especially. Sometimes, even knowing what it does to him, he’ll indulge in some Californian IPAs: “Gonna let the gorilla hammer me,” he says, releasing the hop aroma. It’s one of the things that maintains the continuity of our university romance as we’ve entered the house-and-kids phase. I remember him carrying my vodka-smashed body like a bundle of loose logs after a post-exam party, performing Matrix bends to protect my head from cabinets and doorknobs. At parties a couple times a year where I choose to over-indulge, I like to relive that old marriage of tenderness and danger by making myself his unwieldy patient, the only one he takes home from the hospital. Later we sip Pedialyte in bed, and I tease him about his least favorite Beatles song (and my favorite physician, “Doctor Robert”) until our new life demands we get up and fix twin breakfasts.
But even his hangovers are atypical, never the balled-up-in-agony, stay-in- bed-all-day kind. It’s more like someone has gently popped loose his brain case, as if opening up the back of a watch, then swirled a paintbrush around in gray matter, dabbed a little of the juices over here, mixed in some tannins and grape skins, and adjusted the dial on the left, producing a new arrangement of my husband’s faculties. Picture George Martin, alcohol surgeon with a slapstick sense of humor. Parts and labor $20, rebate if you recycle the bottles.
Me, the worst I lose is some REM sleep. But Smash Dad, my remixed Robert, better a Bob in this state, he goes haywire. The man lumbers like a Sixties Toho robot (MechaDad is one of my names for this character), neck stiff and limbs clumsy like a 50-meter city destroyer. He inadvertently thumps and elbows into cupboards and door frames and hunts for the jar of pickles, cheeses and mustards and cartons of eggs spilling to the floor as he fumbles: “I know they’re in here, but they’re not in here!” I sense in these moments anger at the end of a long road of banal frustration. Like a hemorrhaged eyeball on a dopily grinning face.
I tell my wife my old friend Tom is in the car right under my seat in fact she says not funny I say I’m not joking then reach down and fish around until I produce the small blue padded envelope that contains the portion of Tom’s ashes his half-brother mailed to me from Alabama five months ago I explain my plan to scatter them on the shore of Lake Champlain where we’re going to spend a week doing nothing it’s fair to say my wife who grew up in China with beliefs and customs about death very different from mine freaks out at this point and asks that I get Tom out of the car the sooner the better please I take the next exit and look for a halfway decent spot but it’s just a Sunoco in the middle of nowhere we pull in and while my wife goes inside to pee I walk to the edge of the parking lot and pour Tom’s ashes on a struggling patch of grass which strikes me as not altogether inappropriate given that Tom spent his entire adult life drunk and unable to fulfill his great promise as a poet in the few moments I have at the edge of the parking lot I try to remember the good poems he wrote before he couldn’t write anything and I feel guilty about cutting him off years ago but I just couldn’t continue watching him drink himself to death and it grieves me that I never truly thanked him for introducing me to poetry in the first place but it’s time to say goodbye so I say goodbye to the ashes in the grass and walk back to the car where my wife greets me with a hug and a bottle of cold water and says yuàn tā ānxí may he rest in peace and then to the sky above the Sunoco sign xièxiè xièxiè xièxiè thank you thank you thank you
In dry season in equatorial Chad, the Sahel is so hot the soil Chars to red dust, the grass to a blond bristle, heat bearing down like affliction
And because the land blisters and coastal Africa is forested, humid and cool, air Is sucked easterly, darkening the horizon with fury into which a man, tending
The village flock stares, a wave so sudden and massive the Dogon has little time To corral the sheep before the air erupts with stinging needles. The storm
Sweeps across the continent until in the Atlantic thunderheads and wind Marry the doldrums, and a hurricane is born. Its updraft plunges the ocean, and swells
Spiral westward across the open sea to loom large on beaches lining the American Eastern seaboard as in Montauk Long Island where surfers
Scan the near horizon for the shadowed lines their kind read. It’s what they have prepared for The summer afternoons and cool September dawns before work, that one stirring
Pitched perfect just where a surfer waits, and he paddles to catch the lip, a chthonic uprise Heaving him high to which he surrenders, riding the rollinglevel underneath
Into rapture that I as a ten-year-old in the thick of the Ozarks heard in the treetops Swaying back and forth, a thousand miles away. The shepherd stokes the charcoal
Embers with dry twigs, the surfer packs his board, and the hurricane makes landfall In Kill Devil Hills, splintering wooden homes. I am joined.
That slender, dusty volume. When I was a student Roaming the poetry aisles in search of a voice, And never again so moved to open a text— If only because its hundred-year-old pages Had never been cut. That minor British poet. So minor I can’t remember his name, though I took His book home, and parted his late Victorian poems, One by one, with the edge of a razor blade.
Nameless shade, I can’t unseal your lips— But decade by decade, and ever more fervently, You speak to me from the gloom. Not even the epic Poets, returning from the underworld, Know what it means to be mute. Then back you go In your slender jacket that couldn’t keep off the dust.
My preacher brother free-climbs and fishes the ocean in small boats. Once, in a kayak, he caught a young blacktip shark. The two of them thrashed like an angel wrestling with flesh and my brother’s thigh was wounded. A hook in the mouth hurts, too. He knew the angel in the story wasn’t him. He felt the weight of original prayer in his hands and released it. My brother doesn’t run from pain. Holiness hurts sometimes, he says. Just enough to wake you. To make you remember you swallowed a spark on the day you were born. We are light, chasing light. Follow the hawk that follows the sparrow. We are called to walk with all that hums and howls and crows on the earth. Joy is not made gently. Imagine the fury and beauty of flight. Imagine swimming in warm, dark bodies of water with stingrays and cottonmouth snakes. My brother has done this and more with his sons. He touches the holy and the holy touches him. Nothing that lives can dig the divine from its heart. I have a picture of my brother on a climb where he came very close to falling. He hung there, fear and wonder alive in his eyes, laughing over the black- foot daisies and butterfly weed four hundred feet down. Dangling from the face of God.
The Italian smells of mint and chocolate, but when I blink my eyes open there is only the Midwest sun. While it’s dawn here, it’s siesta for him. Champagne bubbles up my spine—I’m sure a message awaits me.
In my sleep I had kicked off the sheets and thrown my T-shirt off. Rob doesn’t believe in air conditioning. It lets you go on as if there aren’t seasons. The humidity in our bedroom has the weight and press of a crowd without the fun and excitement of a concert. I blink at the thought of smashing into and exchanging air with strangers. While the initial lockdown lifted in June, the world has largely stayed on pause.
I roll over to watch for the slight rise and fall of Rob’s chest. Nothing. I pull a feather from the duvet he sleeps with and hold it under his nose. No quickening. Julie tells me, in our daily calls, that I’m crazy. But I swear he has no heartbeat either. I design cardiac medical devices for a living, and Rob’s vital signs baffle me.
In graduate school, Rob and I raced our bikes around city lakes. We’d fall into the grass and make out. I pressed my head to his chest, delighting in the booming announcement of him over and over. Now we ration flour and toilet paper. The least important of supply chain problems, but the most immediate in our house.
The hallway is dark, and I feel my way through the house. I expect the air on the deck to be fresh, but it is like stepping into an open mouth. The heat will build until we reach the right level of violence when, finally, the sky darkens, tornado sirens shriek, and, as if punctured by a bullet, the humidity shatters into a crackling light show. Most of summer is build up—the dramatic storms are rare moments of punctuation.
By Ken Holland Selected as winner of the New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Kim Addonizio
Featured Art: Unresolved by Lucy Osborne
It’s not that the sane are sane and we need talk no more about it . . . it’s more the question of how insanity hasn’t run rampant.
Please, if I may be an example:
If I were given the choice to suffer in poverty, or suffer fleeing that poverty, I would simply say, No thank you.
Or this: if, as the animists believe, even stones have souls, you’d be mad to think about chain gangs and what they do with sledgehammers.
More so, if there’s just one god then someone please explain the saints to me.
Here’s a longer thought: I cannot forget the bands of feral dogs roaming the streets of Cairo—their physical kinship, the tawny slope of their haunches, the wasted musculature. And it seems to me God was himself conceived in hunger. But not his own.
Madness is the muzzle of a dog that’s been muzzled and left with no way to eat.
But it’s not as if the animal can’t breathe. Even I can smell what’s coming from the kitchen. The mutterings of sanity are like gospel, while the mutterings of insanity bear the stigma of an invasive species;
though some believe the inverse to be true—
as if it were impurities that make water lucid, that still sadness into the near-notes of a nearly sung song.
This is perhaps the way dissonance sometimes resolves into a minor chord.
This is perhaps the way insanity feels when it is most composed.
My friend and I stopped in a bar we maybe shouldn’t have stopped in, but we were on the way from here to there and decided to pull off the road somewhere in-between.
Somewhere in-between has its own charm being a space where letters don’t get written, and bills don’t get paid, and old lovers just get older for all the time you get to ignore them.
A beer and a little space in-between you and your friend who’s in the same in-between space as you are, ignoring all the same things you’re ignoring.
And the jukebox is lit and a record is spinning beneath the needle but really what you’re listening to is all the solitude inside your head, one beer gone, another in its place and you barely noticed the bartender’s hands.
The thoughts you’re having are of the breed that pull up to the edge of a precipice and make you wonder if anyone’s yet laid claim to the dark acreage that lies below
what the asking price might be
just how much does the abyss go for these days
and your friend doesn’t even look when you reach over to pick up the loose change lying next to his beer. You already know which tune he next wants to hear. It’s the one in-between the one that just played and the one you’ve yet to decide upon,
as if there’s no moment more merciful than the one you’re edging toward. The quarters in-between your fingers clicking like tiny castanets on the brink of rhythm.
The house, my mother’s house next door lay fallow over two years—the inner air still and musty, grass carpeting the gravel drive. What happens to a house where no people move about inside, breathe its air, circulate its dust? It exists as a museum of quarters suddenly vacated—blankets on the bed, water in the kettle, dishes left to be put away, mail to be opened. Two years ago my mother had a spinal implant for pain that went wrong. Her pain multiplied. She couldn’t walk at all, so she went from hospital to nursing home to assisted living. And the house languished. The carcasses of ladybugs littered the upstairs. Reluctantly I discontinued the phone, cancelled the cable TV. Her house, next door to mine, haunted me like a ghost.
The Russian
The sun shines hot on this last day of June, but a terrible, shattering thunderstorm tore through just a few hours earlier. Waiting outside the mall for my husband to drive around with the car, with a heavy boxed microwave at my feet, I watch a huge thundercloud gather over the Hudson River. Lightning flickers down like tongues of fire while the blue, air-filled balloon figure advertising Sears tools blows about wildly waving its arms until a worker comes out and turns it off. He packs the sagging figure neatly into the silenced machine while the storm roars. I make it into the car just in time. We sit in the car while several inches of water deluge the lot in a rain that blows sideways. The tortured dancing balloon figure still writhes in my head when we pick up Tatiana on the train from Brighton Beach.
Featured Art: First and Never-ending Painting by Connaught Cullen
Once the ferry to Provincetown cleared the neck, the headlands decorated with lighthouses, and it whipped along at some impressive number of knots— I do not know how much speed is in a knot but let’s just say she carried me at a spate of knots— toward some dark shape in the middle of the ocean no island to be seen, it finally resolved: a lighthouse spitless, standing alone in the roil searching the ocean on her one long and rusted leg.
I had assumed all lighthouses were mothers come to call their children in, leaning on their rocky fences, waiting, getting cold, muttering It’s an island—how far could they possibly get?
Far. And who would keep looking. I do not know what kind of hope I’m allowed.
I am exhausted by my confusion, wary of sudden fires, but dandelions, it seems, have dug in for the long haul, and to them I offer 10,000 bows— I witness the indignities they endure, the insults (weed, useless stem, filthy stalk). I admire their stand against savagery, poisons, brutal mowing; stalwart resistance of the taproots. I lie among them, listen to their whispers: we will not be moved.
You are slightly shorter than a Boston Whaler but just as difficult to park. When we’ve piled three kids in you and Frozen II’s going on the DVD, we might as well head Into the Unknown, which is what every day of parenting feels like anyway.
You are so roomy my children could Irish stepdance comfortably inside you, and so filthy cheddar Goldfish could spawn from your cupholders or several strains of bacteria from their stinky feet, socks thrown at me while I’m driving. You are useless in cities, rain and snow. In fact, you cannot drive over a single snowflake without completely breaking down into a ditch two feet from the sledding hill.
When your automatic doors slide open, people line up for bao buns from what looks like a popup restaurant, but instead, out fall woodchips and half-eaten lunches, an entire soccer team, faces smeared with chocolate ice cream ready to decapitate the other team with their ponytails.
O minivan, your behemoth shape is literally the definition of uncool and people burst out laughing when they see you in relation to me—someone who used to be cool—someone who went to NYU, once stayed up past ten, wore tight jumpsuits to underground clubs in Paris circa I can’t remember and yet, you fit seven humans comfortably. We wedge scooters, coolers, suitcases, relatives, boogie boards, hopes and dreams, pets, stick collections, and an entire folded-up trampoline in you on a pretty regular basis.
You are a superior flu-season-nose-blowing-bunker.
One seat of you is removable to allow for side-of-the-road dining, a triage room, parking lot naps, breastfeeding marathons, poop diaper explosions and mental breakdowns.
Your front headlight? Smashed into an innocent column just minding its own business in the parking garage where I park every day because I was drinking coffee and throwing apple slices into the backseat while driving.
You have been keyed.
Just kidding, that was me again. I swiped you against a metal post upon exiting the environmental center while queuing a Cookie Monster song on Spotify.
(Did I mention this van is a boat?)
Did I mention we have survived three fender-benders, the soul-sucking school dropoff procedure, that you have popcorn and sand in every crevice, that being a mom is so underrated and hard and thankless and infinite, but also kind of hilarious, even noble if you just embrace it?
That maybe minivans are magic carpets and the horizon is getting closer.
You are a so-called Sport version of nobody cares. You are a complete and total embarrassment. And when I say I hate you, you know what I mean.
I can’t imagine life without you. I can’t wait for life without you. My next car will be a vintage Porsche Carrera, or a slim Italian bicycle, or a speck of dust.
With my sister, a lean, hard girl who looks like our mother, I discuss my trouble. When I’ve said it all, we talk about money.
“Just let me help,” I say.
“You are helping,” says my sister.
“Let me help more,” I say.
Now my sister fishes a roach out of a tiny bowl from which I, as a little girl, ate ice cream, and says, “You’ve changed the subject.”
“Have I?” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “We were talking about you. Whenever we talk about you, you try to talk about me instead.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “But very well. What about me?”
She asks me whether I will do a certain thing about my trouble.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say.
In truth I will not do this thing, but I will come close. I will come so close that I cannot speak of this thing, even now.
My sister lights the roach and draws a gentle breath from it, leading it back into this life. Then she offers the roach to me.
“But should I?” I say.
“Probably not,” says my sister.
“I must warn you,” I say, accepting the roach, “that this will make me a mite dreamy.”
When we are both afloat my sister tells me of the business with her landlord, a bad situation she has only made worse by taking him to bed. I ask her how much she pays now. She tells me.
“For this?!” I say, but in truth, I adore this little place, with its seasoned hardwood and its hideous angels sculpted into the cornices.
twisted silver-streaked strands into a knot, pinned at the tip of her crown, draped her bird-bones in crossback aprons cut from calico, sewn on a pump pedal Singer, bought brand-new just after the war,
baked flaky scratch biscuits from White Lily flour, spoonfuls of lard, a pinch of salt and sass, danced the flatfoot clog around an old wringer washer, employed on Mondays without fail,
wielded a scythe and hoe good as any man, grew cabbages big as watermelons, drew us maps, where we came from, patchworks of bloodroot, furled fierce along the face of the Appalachians,
orphaned us, laid out under a pine branch blanket, a rough-chiseled stone. Daffodils regretted their unfurling. Redbuds wept purple pearls, the fields so bare they grew voices.
While bodily autonomy and individual privacy are phrases commonly associated with the current discussion of reproductive rights in the U.S., the key term for understanding the culture of abortion starting in the late nineteenth century is knowledge, according to Kristin Luker in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. As legal exceptions to the ban on abortion rested on a physician’s determination of medical necessity, abortion became the privileged ground of the doctor whose medical license gave him the sole ability to decide when abortion was medically justified. In other words, by the late nineteenth century, abortion became a question of who could lay claim to this specialized knowledge, and who could exercise their authority based on it. Luker calls this era from the 1880s until Roe v. Wade in 1973 “The Century of Silence” because while the medical community determined the necessity of abortion care, they also dominated the public narrative about abortion.
Other critics, however, point out that this was not a complete silence. In her book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867-1973, historian Leslie Reagan notes that women did “speak of their abortions among themselves and within smaller, more intimate spaces.” One such “intimate space” (which is paradoxically also very public) is within published literature. Abortion was a recurrent plot element in literature published in the early decades of the twentieth century; as Meg Gillette points out in “Modern American Abortion Narratives and the Century of Silence,” from “1910 to 1945, more than seventy abortions were contemplated or had by characters in modern literature.” This literature reveals a struggle that is firmly embedded in the narrative of knowledge and authority. In two of these texts, Edith Wharton’s 1917 novel Summer and Edith Summers Kelley’s 1923 novel Weeds, the question of knowledge is bound up with issues related to class, privilege, and connection—specifically the way the medical takeover of reproductive health care transformed the prior networks of knowledge shared among women.
In his review of Frankenstein, Sir Walter Scott defended the novel’s “philosophical and refined use of the supernatural.” Here was a novel that altered “the laws of nature” not to “[pamper] the imagination” but to illustrate “the probable effect which the supposed miracles would produce on those who witnessed them.” The reviewer for Knight’s Quarterly Magazine agreed. “Frankenstein is, I think, the best instance of natural passions applied to supernatural events that I ever met with. Grant that it is possible for one man to create another, and the rest is perfectly natural and in course.”
This way of stating the novel’s premise—“Grant that it is possible for one man to create another”—can seem, like the novel itself, to elide the fact that Victor Frankenstein is reinventing a wheel. To be sure, there are distinctions: this is an asexual reproduction process that depends on the spare parts from the dissecting room and slaughterhouse, and the new being isn’t an infant but an adult of gigantic stature. But despite his size, the Creature starts off, in mind and spirit, as an infant, a blank slate to be written on by his experiences.
Despite what might seem an obvious analogy for reproduction and birth, it would take until Ellen Moers’s work in the 1970s for Frankenstein to be widely interpreted as a “birth myth.” For evidence, Moers pointed to the material of Mary Shelley’s lived experiences: Shelley knew that her own birth had caused the death of her mother, she became pregnant at sixteen after running away with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and, during her time with him (before and after their official marriage), she was continually dealing with pregnancy, miscarriage, childrearing, and the loss of children. Despite these parallels, it had taken around 150 years and a couple waves of feminist thought for Frankenstein to be read as a Gothic analogy for pregnancy, childbirth, and the aftermath.
When I consider being pregnant myself, I imagine Sigourney Weaver from the original Alien: a wet head emerging, its teeth bared, as I scream and scream. What for others may evoke joy and anticipation for me evokes fear. In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2021 horror novel Manhunt, pregnancy itself becomes a kind of body horror as testosterone turns people into sex-crazed zombies bent on cannibalism. A fertility specialist explains the process to a wealthy patient: “When they [the changed men] impregnate a victim, the baby is XY. No variation. It undergoes viral metamorphosis in utero and eats its way out of the mother at three or four months. A few hours later, it can hunt for itself. In a year, it’s sexually mature.” Gossip tells of “a woman in Vermont whose boy twins had eaten their way out of her.” In this science-fiction world, pregnancy is not only dangerous for all the usual reasons, but also because a zombified fetus might eat its way through the abdominal wall (just like in Alien). Abortion access saves lives. To abort, in this world, is to avoid being eaten from the inside out. Yet in the post-apocalyptic world of Manhunt, as in the twenty-first century United States, abortion access varies widely and depends on the pregnant person’s financial and social resources.
Under-resourced people undergo the brunt of pregnancy-related collateral damage in Manhunt, just as they do in real life. In the novel, a wealthy “bunker brat” impregnates a dozen women with her zombified boyfriend’s sperm to see if she will be safe trying to have a baby with him. Eleven women die; one gives birth to a girl infant. Yet, as seems to be the result of abortion bans everywhere, no one keeps close track of what happens to the infant once alive: one of the characters tries to convince herself, with no knowledge to support it, that “someone must have taken her. Kept her safe.” The desperate desire for a perfect infant at any cost leads, during the novel’s climax, to the death of the bunker brat at the hands of her wannabe baby daddy as well as the annihilation of the bunker, which was previously a walled garden for the wealthy. Class-based critique underpins the novel’s attitudes toward reproductive rights, as a safe pregnancy is a privilege only afforded to the richest people remaining.
For men, it’s almost always about solving a problem. “We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before,” the male character in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” tells his girlfriend Jig. In Matt Klam’s 1997 short story, “There Should Be a Name for It,” the male narrator says of his girlfriend’s abortion, “This was her show. Soon it would finally be over.”
Of course (though maybe this isn’t as obvious as it should be), for women, it’s not over once the pregnancy is terminated. There are the lingering effects on the body as it recovers, days lost from work, stress from lies told to family or friends. There’s the money needing to be earned to replace the money the abortion cost. There might be ways the abortion shifted the woman’s relation- ship with her boyfriend or husband, or ways she was affected if the man who constituted the other half of the act that led to pregnancy wasn’t a boyfriend or husband. She might not have known or liked him very much. He might have raped her. And then there’s the cultural taboo against abortion; that, too, is in bed with the woman as she recovers.
Looking back into the two abortion stories written by men in the context of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, I noticed in ways I hadn’t before how insistent both the male characters in these stories are about getting the abortion behind them, getting back to normal. Further, neither man has the slightest ability to empathize with or help the female character, emotionally or otherwise. Hemingway’s character is classic Hemingway: a man of few words who imagines himself entirely in control of the situation. Klam’s narrator, a 24-year-old man-child, is wholly incapable of comforting his girlfriend Lynn, and during the actual procedure, implores the reader, “Is there a way to describe how much I wanted to get the fuck out of there?” This pretty much sums up how much of a help he turns out to be.
Dystopian novels for teens, who are “trying to understand their world and their place in it” are written with gripping plots and first-person narration that “may have the potential to motivate a generation on the cusp of adulthood,” write Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz in their introduction to Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults. It’s not a coincidence, I don’t think, that a “plethora” of these texts were published in the post-9/11 era of the mid-2000s, culminating with what John Green called an “explosion” in 2007-2008 that included the first installment of perhaps the most successful of all the franchises, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. With the commercial success of this burgeoning market, YA writers created fictional worlds to warn teens about too much surveillance, like in Little Brother; the dire consequences of obsession with unattainable standards of beauty, in Uglies; and damaging conformity, like in the Divergent series. Although dozens and dozens of realistic YA novels deal with teen pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and other matters related to reproductive healthcare, not as many dystopian novels do. But Unwind, by Neal Schusterman, is an exception.
One question scholars ask of YA dystopian novels—a particularly relevant question when considering abortion—is whether the text espouses radical political change or masks an inner conservatism (Basu, et al.). Schusterman’s Unwind, published in 2007, is set in a futuristic world where the United States has fought a Second Civil War: this time about abortion. After years of deadly conflict, a treaty was signed that satisfied both Pro Life and Pro-Choice armies. The premise of this treaty—as well as other moments of didacticism—seems to reveal the “inner conservatism” of the text. (A note on the language: while I prefer to use the term “anti-choice,” Schusterman uses “pro life”; thus, throughout this essay, I will use the linguistic terminology set forth by the author to avoid any confusion.)
Motherhood was not what I was expecting. I thought I had prepared myself—I read countless articles online, learned a myriad of soothing techniques, watched videos of women’s birthing experiences. But there had been no way to know what it would be like for me. And my experience was not at all like what I had been told to expect.
I was told any woman could give birth naturally if she breathed deeply enough, if she believed in herself. My daughter’s head was stuck on my pelvis, though, and in the end, it didn’t matter how much breathing or believing I did; I needed an emergency C-section.
I was told it’s a baby’s instinct to seek out the nipple and suck, but my baby only screamed at my bare chest.
I was told every mother had instincts that would guide her in how to care for her baby. But when my daughter cried for hours on end, my instincts told me nothing about what she needed, how to fix her problems.
Before my daughter was one-week old, I already felt like a complete failure as a mother.
Mothers and would-be mothers are told a lot of lies. “Motherhood is the best job in the world” is one. “Mothers put their children first” is another. These are lies, or at least certainly over-simplifications, because they imply that women stop being separate people once they become mothers, that they suddenly lose any ambitions they had for their own lives and think only about what is best for their baby. But mothers are people, and just like any other person, they have wants and needs. And flaws.
Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy (published in Danish from 1969-71 and available in English in 2022) tells the story of the author’s childhood, youth, and dependency. Her ultimate dependency occurs after her second abortion. During the procedure, she describes the injected anesthetic as “a bliss I have never before felt spread[ing] through my entire body.” Following this abortion experience, Ditlevsen struggles with addiction. Eventually she would succumb to it, dying by suicide.
Even before her abortion, though, dependency was Tove Ditlevsen’s birthright. As an ambitious woman, Ditlevsen was exposed to unspeakable sorrow in a world shaped by systemic sexism. It wasn’t abortion that turned Ditlevsen into an addict; it was her lack of agency that left her alone with her own pain.
In the first volume of Ditlevsen’s memoir, she describes a fraught relationship with her mother in childhood. Her mother was lonely and frustrated because she, too, lacked independence and choice, confined at home alone all day with her children while her husband went out into the world. Her “dark anger always ended in her slapping my face or pushing me against the stove,” Ditlevsen writes. In the absence of maternal nurturing, Ditlevsen turns into herself, in introspection and rumination, finding an outlet for expression in the written word.
Still, she feels compelled to conceal her writing, even as an adult: “for me, writing is like it was in my childhood, something secret and prohibited, shameful, something one sneaks into a corner to do when no one else is watching. They ask me what I am writing at the moment, and I say, Nothing.” Ditlevsen learns early that any use of voice or demonstration of need could be used against her—and so she practices concealing and repressing her passions.
I first heard Lucille Clifton’s “the lost baby poem” when I was nineteen years old listening to some Napster download of a warbly and far away Ani DiFranco reciting it onstage: “the time i dropped your almost body down . . .” That year, although emergency contraception had recently hit pharmacies, a long holiday weekend in Ohio found me saved instead by a friend in my dorm who carefully counted out pills from a blister pack until they added up to the amount of ethinyl estradiol and norethindrone that would resemble a morning-after dose. To be clear, this was not an abortion. But I found myself thinking about the potential baby. I counted the months—it would have been a Pisces. I read Diane di Prima: “how am I to forgive you this blood? / Which was [. . .] to grow, and become a son?” Still, as I finished up a spring semester Incomplete and made an appointment to get on birth control, I knew I was lucky to be able to move on so smoothly.
Of two abortions she had as a young woman, Ani DiFranco—who would go on in mid-life to give birth to two children—writes in a 2019 LitHub essay: “I used to periodically count the ages that my first two children would’ve been if they had entered the world as such. [. . .] It was an exercise in the terrifying math of the near miss. Your life as you envisioned it could have effectively ended three, five . . . ten years ago. Just imagine. What kind of shell of your former dreams would you be now?”
“Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give consent to be moved).” —Leni Zumas, Red Clocks
When I was in graduate school, a friend and I were invited to write a “docu-drama” about abortion access before 1973, when Roe v. Wade enshrined it in federal law. The project was a collaboration between the Women’s Studies, History, and English departments. History grad students supplied us with nearly a thousand pages of research, and we sifted through testimonials from people who’d sought illegal abortions, interviews with the Jane Collective, sobering statistics about how common it was before Roe for women, especially those who were low-income and not white, to be injured or to die from illegal abortions. Somehow, we gathered all these voices and patched together a draft of the play, after which one of the faculty sponsors invited me into her office. The draft was too cavalier, she told me. She let me know how important it was to emphasize that getting an abortion is never an easy choice. She shared with me that she’d had an abortion, and that although she believed strongly that her right to choose should be legally protected, ending her pregnancy was the most painful decision of her life, as it was for most women. To make it seem otherwise would be playing into the hands of the other side.
I eat it to feel alive, a man confessed to me, teeth crunching through a golden reaper so hot, my eyes watered to be near. When did he feel alive? Lazarus, I mean, after he died and then came back again. We talk about him like a firebird, crumbling to ash and shaking off the coals to rise once more. But it must have been something, you know? Waking from four days of death, frankincense cloying the air, linen bandages unraveling. Did it feel good, like stretching after a days-long nap or did it sting like capsaicin, dormant limbs burning from lack of use? My father once ate a ghost pepper whole. First came the sweat, then vomiting. I think I’m dying, he told me, my life is flashing by my eyes. And that’s another question—what did he see, between? The glow of seven stars in a pierced right hand, a double-edged sword emerging from his mouth—perhaps the world tilted in resurrection like from a devastating concussion, swirling around his sisters’ grief-creased faces. Sometimes I leap from cliffs, cling to bridges, swim with sharks, but I’m not brave enough to suck a devil’s tongue, weep into a pile of sliced scotch bonnets, try to grill another chocolate habanero. Maybe the question I most wish I could ask Lazarus is which hurt more—the fever that burned him to death from the inside, or the rush of God, like a Trinidad Scorpion, like ten million Scoville shocking him alive to the face of a friend?
During the pandemic, after I told you— speaking up never easy—I was lonely for you, your kids, and your husband, you sent me tulips. Just like that, you sent tulips. I wondered, though: did I deserve them? I am sorry I was a drunk when you were a kid. Thank you for not hanging up when I call. The tulips arrived in a creamy box; your note tucked in tissue paper. I am sorry I could not keep your father around or try very hard to stop him when he said he was leaving. I am sorry I did not love him enough. Thank you for choosing such a nice, funny guy for a husband. I am sorry I pursued such a crazy boyfriend after your father left—the shouting, the slamming phones and slamming doors, the walking out, the coming back. The tulips are white and iridescent purple. Thank you for your brown eyes. I believe they are still flecked with green, although sometimes, even now, I am embarrassed to look you in the eye. I am sorry I was so sick from drinking, throwing up, and dizzy. Once, I could not take you to your dentist appointment because I felt shaky and kept falling. You cried, you said nothing works, nothing happens, everything falls apart. Thank you for your clarity. Thank you for your red face, your bursting, when you were born. Thank you for your anger when your stepfather and I screwed up the car seat as we drove the baby around the city, looking after her while you were at your conference. Boy, that woke us up! I am sorry you fell out of your stroller when you were a toddler because I was hungover and forgot to buckle you in. I don’t know if you remember. Now you know. Thank you for the tulips. You sent so many I filled three vases: one big, two small. Thank you for insisting you wanted hipster vegan donuts at your wedding instead of a white cake. That one threw me over the handlebars—drama, etc. Your stepfather was kind and calm throughout and wrote the checks. He loves you. He says, later you get all the money, no one else. In the end, I was a good sport, admit it; the donuts were delicious. You were a delicious baby.
Selected as winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest by Melissa Febos
1.
I dream I am teaching and it is not going well. I still have these dreams though I retired a year ago. Counting grad school, I taught 38 years so this particular nightmare is hardwired into my nervous system. In my usual dream, I am talking, then shouting, at students who are talking to each other and not paying any attention at all—something that never happened in real life, unless a dream counts as life. In this dream, though, it is the students who are yelling at me. I can see their mouths open, their tongues wagging, every one of their white teeth, remarkably straight after years of expensive orthodontia—but it is a silent movie. I touch my ears, a reflexive movement to check if my hearing aids are there. Yes, but somehow they seem to have swollen, tripled in size, and to be plugging my ears like fat kids’ fingers, making sure all I hear is the sounds of my body, heart, lungs, that we hear without using our ears at all.
“I felt free and therefore I was free” – Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
We pooled money and food stamps, bought the largest turkey we could afford, also, cigarettes, baking potatoes, a baggie of reefer, a bottle of Jack Daniels and Mateus, because those bottles made cool candle holders. Someone had a blue and white enamel pot, and since the bird was frozen, we kept the lid on. Someone else said turkeys were best roasted slow, so we set the oven at 300 degrees, put in potatoes, set the table for four. Four hours, five hours, the room started to smell like dinner, though with each stab we saw the bird had refused to thaw. The potatoes were good and hot, and off we shot into the icy night, streetlights solemn and glazed, the whole silent city tucked behind parked cars and glowing blinds. On the swings in a playground beside some railroad tracks, we passed the bottle of Jack, gazed up at Orion, Betelgeuse, the glow of Bethlehem Steel edging the southern sky orange. Back home, the turkey was bronze, the wine was sweet, WBFO swung red-hot jazz after midnight, and we played scrabble until the sun rose over the Trico plant, letters and words strung across the board like an epic yet to be told, a cluster of constellations.
not a spark but a blaze, not a welding torch but a glass furnace molten and glowing, heat like an express train across the tongue down the throat, not Chet Baker or Stan Getz, but Arnett Cobb, Pharoah Saunders not Ringo but Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, a box set of surprises, better to surrender. Hot enough for you? my neighbor asks. No, of course not. Give me ghost peppers, Carolina reapers, keep that Frank’s off the table, kiss with your teeth.
Featured Art: Fruits and Vegetables by Bright Kontor Osei
you sit down to dinner with your mother an ape appears in the kitchen and begins poking around i’m looking for the other ape he says the ape pulls out a frying pan and places it on your head he asks you if there is another ape under the frying pan you and your mother tell him no and little black hairs wriggle out of your arms and your face wrinkles like a dried apricot and your knuckles rap upon the floor no that’s wrong the ape says the other ape isn’t like that
the ape finds an empty seat at the table with an empty plate and an empty cup i love pork chops and applesauce he says and coincidentally this is what you are eating but i’m not hungry at the moment you seei am much too missing the other ape you understand him the hairs on your arm grow thicker and blacker you ask the ape if he would like to say grace the ape bows his head and says god tells bad jokes
you all open your eyes to an angel immaculate and chrome stuffing its face with pork the angel licks a glob of fat from its metallic lips and says god does not- but the ape holds up a hand and says no that’s wrong the other ape isn’t like that and crushes the angel like a sardine tin in his leathery fist the ape turns to your mother she nods and little black hairs wriggle out of her arms you all three settle in to eat but no one is hungry don’t worry says the ape it’s normal it’s all too normal everything in the room settles at this you hear the softness of footsteps upstairs wanting only to tell you all about who they spoke to today
Incredible to me now, how long I went without it. Palm, nape, arch. Shoulder blade, collarbone, top of knee. Weeks. Months. Not one for manicures, too old for club scenes.
Noting the daily ways we stop just shy of it: coins dropped into a waiting palm, elbows cased in thick wool in crowds, on trains the shared heat of covered thighs.
I moved my wrist along the cheap satin slide of drug store scarves, rubbed the budding tips of weeds, grabbed brass doorknobs still warm from the hand before.
To the skin-starved, the world’s a frisson of substitutes. If you know this, and you hear a knock, answer. I won’t stay long; you can leave the tv on. I’ll use
a fine-tooth comb or soft-bristle brush, my fingers through your hair. Let me do this. Let me make amends to my old loneliness. Your scalp’s sudden aria
flooding the studio apartment, the high-rise, the whole city sky sighed with airliners, then farther out, the dark plains with their small, hidden lives that pause to listen
and your roaming selves, returning now to the paddock of your skin. You will dream tonight, and wake up human.
When Daddy was a boss at the telephone company we lived at the big house backed up to the railroad. There was a sliding board, a sandbox, a goat we could harness to a little cart, and a live-in nanny, Henrietta with her twisted arm. We had indoor plumbing and a great big car. When Maymie wasn’t sick we went to Daddy and Uncle Gus’s club: the plushest roadhouse in southern Indiana perched at the top of Floyd’s Knobs with only one road out and one road in where pretty dancers gave me and Kotzie fizzy drinks with paper umbrellas and a Maraschino cherry. The rooms were full of smoke and music, ladies with black stockings and red lips men in double-breasted suits hair slicked back clinking glasses tinkling with ice cubes, revelers who had crossed the Ohio after sundown to play cards and craps. Upstairs Daddy’s man sat at the window on top of the toilet with a rifle between his legs overlooking the 80-foot drop, scanning the highway’s seven hairpin curves for feds and cops, roulette wheels spinning, fortunes turning all night long. Once, when no one was looking I pocketed a chip: cream-colored, printed with a dark green pine. Good thing Maymie had stashed a suitcase of cash under the four-poster before the Crash, the handcuffs, the raid, before Daddy got the dropsy and we moved in over grandpa’s store, before me and Kotzie woke up one morning to find Henrietta cold and dead lying in bed between us.
The man with the yellow hat dragged his monkey out onto the balcony and locked it inside the wire-walled kennel. He’d reached desperation. The monkey he’d named George had finally followed his curiosity to disaster. The monkey had nearly killed a man. From behind the sliding glass door, he studied the monkey’s stillness, wondered what terrifying curiosity he could be conjuring now: a swing from the powerlines, steak knives chucked from their sixth-floor apartment.
Cool fingers trailed up the back of his neck, bumping down his hat brim. “Don’t you think he’s learned his lesson?” the scientist, his girlfriend, whispered into his ear. She joined him at the glass door.
The man clenched the syringe in his pocket. After two years of fostering, the man had become certain that the monkey he’d named George couldn’t be trained. The scientist imagined the man kinder, so much more patient. But there was a frailty he hid just as carefully as his balding scalp under the hat. His patience, his compassion for defenseless animals, was rubbed threadbare. So, he carried a fatal needle for the monkey, the quick solution, finally. She was wrong about him. Everyone was wrong.
and the White Pages, to the Switchboard, Rotary Dials and Dial Tone. To the Answering Machine, to Not Being Home to Pick Up the Phone, to Being Afraid of Being Found Out You Were Home Alone. To “Voigts’ Residence,” and “Can I Take a Message?” To Forgetting to Tell Mom Someone Called. To Busy Signals and Collect Calls and Call Waiting. To Long Distance, and Listening In On the Bedroom Cordless. To the Phone Tree, Caller ID, and the Red Cross Asking for Dad’s Blood Again. To the Do-Not-Call List. To Hotlines, Nine-Hundred Numbers, Star-Six-Nine, the Pound Sign, the Operator. To Having to Ask Your Girlfriend’s Parents If She Could Talk. To My First Cell Phone, and How It Didn’t Work the First Time I Turned It On. To its Tiny Screen, and the Animated Panda We Watched There That Meant We Were Roaming Even When We Were at Home. To Dropped Calls, Low Bars, and Family Plans. To the Call Mom Got On Our Way to the Beach Telling Her That Her Mother Was Gone. To the Quiet Afterwards in Our Rental Car, Just Her Crying, and How the Seaweed Lay in the Sand Like Tangled Cords. To Numbers No Longer in Service. To the Number That Was My Grandparents’ for Decades, The Last Four Digits Their Anniversary. To Whoever Would Answer If I Dialed It Now. To My Father, Who Will Go to His Grave Never Owning a Cell. To My Mother’s Voicemails About Christmas and My Sister and Computer Problems, The Messages I Save for When She Won’t Be There to Answer, When They’ll Be All I Have Left of Her Voice, The First I Ever Heard.
The last remaining sycamore on our suburban road was a playtime shelter; its roots, fairy council seats, its hollows, a dormouse school. For developers with an interest in the spare acre, it was an inconvenience.
The men with chainsaws came, met a ring of steel-eyed children, spanning the centuries-thick trunk. I wore my favourite coat for the occasion, a hand-me-down ski jacket— across my chest, a burnished sunrise patched above a flat-earth horizon. Hope was a four-foot thing in nylon.
We shook placards, posed for photos, made the front page of the local paper, before being called in for our supper. They came again in school hours, left nothing but a stump, hillocks of saw dust, dormice scrabbling for their copy books through the still-warm crumble.
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