I shrink the size of the image. Now I feel that it reveals too much, even though that was precisely my intention when I photographed my grandmother. It is her daughter, who died when I was only 5 years old, who I wanted to find through this face. For a while I’ve started searching for my mother and decided to start with hers. I wanted to get as close as possible to this person who, to me, is distant and silent.
I’ve never known the name of the city where she was born, who her parents were, or how old she was when she emigrated to Brazil. I don’t know what it was like for her to raise six Brazilian children, all born in a Japanese colony where she lived and worked for 40 years. We’ve exchanged a few words, especially about her second daughter. I think about this silence and wonder whether it is the generations, the languages, the apprehension, or the loss that separates us.
We’re three bites into not-quite-Christmas pie when my mother breaks into the epic tale of Dad leaving her for another woman. Sometimes it’s a blonde, sometimes a spurious redhead, depending on how inspiration moves the teller. Like all great oral epics, it’s founded on a myth. My father’s been dead almost four years. The other woman he left my mother for was an inoperable brain tumor. But who wants to hear that?
“All those sexy young dental hygienists, and in the end? He leaves me for a patient.” Mom wags her fork like a finger, emphasizing, demanding attention, making just one point more. “This little Puerto Rican with big fake tits and fake blonde hair and two impacted molars. Consuela. And would you believe the worst part?”
My husband wears the Jesuit-school poker face I envy so, eyebrows raised as if he’s just been told some modestly interesting fact. Eddie, approximately 2.4 years old, is busy experimenting with whipped cream between his fingers, and my sister Judy, who drove Mom the two days from Miami, still looks a little dazed. But Larry from work hangs on Mom’s every word.
By Madeline Simms Featured Art: “Eye of Horus” by Ryan Davis
It is a Wednesday when I ask for help in the kitchen, a Tuesday night for my mother. Winter flirts with spring as she sends a photo of the Monkey Bread recipe across the Atlantic. It reaches me and my dry bones in the wet grey of Ireland. I am looking for anything sweet—
She sends a good night text when I send Good morning, alongside a picture of Rian and Jonah climbing over my groggy body. We laugh countries apart. Day or night, it is winter-dark wherever we are. I send her a video of the boys licking my face as if they are dogs, and we laugh counties apart. Our well-wishing is a promise of rising, be it the sun, the bread. I think of the day ahead of me filled with Hot Wheels, dropping off the boys at school, picking them up, snacks, spills, a likely tear or two—author unknown.
During the past few months as an au pair, I’ve grown closer to my mother. She sends me suggestions for sneaking veggies onto the boys’ picky tongues, fun games to fill our long days together. I can’t help but wonder if she feels this too, comradery despite the distance.
By Anna Sheffer Featured Art: “The Bride” by Alex Brice
The buffalo’s tail swished. Clumps of sod mashed around in its mouth. Dana watched through the sliding glass door, safely hidden behind the curtains. If she wasn’t so afraid, it would have been funny, spying on this creature demolishing their yard as if it were an inconsiderate neighbor. But the welcome pamphlet had said these animals were unpredictable—not to be approached under any circumstance—so she was on hold with the nature preserve, listening to jazz flute riffs while wrapped in the curtains she had bought less than a month ago.
Libby materialized, round four-year-old stomach protruding in front of her. A plastic horse figurine dangled by its mane from her closed fist. “Mommy, what are you doing?” She had been playing quietly in front of the TV just minutes ago; why couldn’t she go back to whatever she’d been up to?
Before Dana could reply, Libby peeked around the curtain and let out a delighted squeal. “Look, mommy, a buffafwo! Did you see it?”
“Fie on the witch!” cried a merry girl, As they rounded the point where Goody Cole Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl, A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul. —from “Wreck of Rivermouth” by John Greenleaf Whittier
By Matt Miller Featured Art: “Close Up – Spatial Neighborhoods” by Alex Brice
The world will work to twirl girls into witches, or they will twirl themselves into witches, or they will twirl and turn away from the witch they could be, would be if not for the world saying no, the world saying that their lives are their own fault. Goody Cole, the witch of Hampton, walks the marshes, haunts the dune grasses, watches the ships from the granite perch above the Atlantic shoreline of Little Boars’ Head. She is looking for her name.
“I can’t back,” my father said and so I thought this was a story about my father. In the old stories, every father is an ogre, an ogre of absence or an ogre of presence. Today he was present and being pulled out into the Atlantic, borne upon his own currents.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. You’re too kind. Thanks so much, everyone. <GESTURE TO CROWD>. There’s an excitement in the air tonight. Can you feel it? Let’s give it up one more time for our amazing speakers, shall we? Let them hear it, folks!
<LET APPLAUSE DIE DOWN>
You know, people ask me why I started Vernonox. They come up to me in the lobby, they recognize me at bars, in airports. People all over the world stop me on the street and say “Michael— Michael D. Powers—why did you start Vernonox?” I tell them there are three reasons.
Around the last week of April in 1944, farmers around the country received a letter from the DeKalb Ag seed company.
Twelve common kernels of corn would mean nothing to you, but the kernels in this envelope are far from being common. In fact, they are special seed kernels of a new DeKalb hybrid variety. […] Put them in safe keeping until you plant corn. This seed will produce a hybrid which neither you nor your neighbors have ever seen.
Stapled to the letter was a small envelope containing twelve seeds.
* * *
A seed is an embryo. Every farmer and gardener since the Mesopotamians chose seeds to save and replant the following year. This allowed people to stop roaming around looking for food in the wild. We passed seeds from hand to hand every year in a chain of nearly 450 generations. Parents and grandparents died, but the seeds continued. If the seed was lost, we were lost.
In Elizabeth Fisher’s 1970 story, “A Wall Around Her,” published in Aphra (Volume 4, Number 4), the main character pounds on the locked door of a house where she’s rented a room. As she waits for someone to respond, she is overcome by crushing loneliness and futility. “I never was in, never was and never will be, always outside, always trying to get in, beating with my fists, pleading, ‘Let me in. Let me in.’ Why don’t I just give up the struggle, stop trying to reach people, to be a human being.”
Elizabeth Fisher was a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher and feminist, but these days, she is best known—and unknown, it turns out—for sparking Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” republished after Le Guin’s death as a tiny book (Ignota, 2019). It’s safe to say that now, thousands of people have seen her name in print—Le Guin names her right there in her resurging essay, along with a partial title of Fisher’s book, Woman’s Creation (though the publication date is wrong)—in which she puts forth “The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution.”Since Le Guin’s essay was reprinted, new writings about her essay have proliferated. Nearly all mention Fisher. But people don’t seem to know anything about her. There’s all this stuff out there about carrier bags and Ursula Le Guin, but what about Elizabeth Fisher? What about her life?
Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.
I first saw her aboard the JADE PRINCESS, a cruise ship several miles off the coast of New Hampshire. She wore ribbons in her hair and a leather choker around her neck that read GIVE ME A REASON. The two of us made up the entire wedding party. I played the roles of daughter and maid of honor and she, her father’s best man. The other guests were staff on their dinner break and a couple gamblers, vying for a seat at the blackjack table.
The captain kept the ceremony short (on autopilot like his ship). Ma had already been married twice, yet for Husband #3, she still felt giddy and hopeful. Where I saw folding chairs and a wrinkled backdrop, she saw romance. Where I saw a cardboard cutout of her last boyfriend, she saw the love of her life. When the time came to exchange vows, I handed Ma the wedding band for her five-second fiancé, a mood ring from LOST & FOUND that glowed black in my sweaty hands. The best man gave her father a light-up jelly ring and our parents sealed it all with a kiss.
“Faye,” she introduced herself at the reception, my stepsister before I learned her name.
One morning, as he was filling up the electric tea kettle, Lev Bradley discovered a khaki-colored tooth in the corner of his kitchen sink. Mistaking it at first for a pebble, he plucked it up with a bemused chuckle. That was when he noticed the few spots of pearly sheen and the distinctly tooth-like dimples on the upper surface. A shock of revulsion shot down Lev’s spine. He flinched and flicked the tooth back into the sink, where it struck a brown diner mug with a shrill ping.
When the initial shock subsided, he peered once more into the sink to confirm what he had seen. It looked somewhat small for a tooth, but what did he know? He retrieved a pair of yellow dish gloves and, steeling himself with a deep breath, once again picked up the tooth.
“Where did you come from, little guy?” he asked it.
My dad warned us that aliens were watching him before he disappeared. He also had checked himself into a psychiatric hospital five times throughout my sixteen-year lifetime. During his last visit to the hospital, the doctors said he vanished in the night. His clothes were left in his dresser. The framed photo of my sister and me left on his bedside table. None of the night nurses saw him leave. There were no tied up sheets found dangling outside his open window. The doctors reminded our family that my dad had admitted himself voluntarily and was free to leave at any time. There was nothing they could do. My mom didn’t seem worried at first. He’d left and come back before. One time he left for almost a week and returned with a pet frog that died the next day. Another time he traveled halfway across the country to tour a NASA museum. He needed space; he’d tell us later. Most of the time he checked himself into the hospital for a long weekend, casually packing his car as if he were leaving for a fishing trip.
Everyone has to start somewhere. I began as a child stalker, or rather an accomplice to my mom’s propensity for stalking.
We first saw the man we called “Tony 86” parked in the dirt lot rest stop adjacent to the motel my dad would go to after fighting with my mom. After he left us, it became the meeting point for my parents to exchange me and my brother for the occasional weekend. Mom called it a fleabag motel for lowlifes.
“Late as usual,” Mom said. Dad was late enough I wondered if he was actually coming. He was late a lot, but this time he was really late. I’d never stayed in a motel before and made up stories about the people we’d see coming and going while waiting for Dad. Minutes passed as I watched a couple argue on the second-floor balcony, then embrace in a farewell, the woman walking away with the man holding her hand as long as her arm would stretch, until she moved out of reach. Mom had stopped nagging about Dad being late, distracted by something.
Opal had an annoying habit of leaving stuff she no longer wanted on our doorstep. What’s more, she refused to call ahead or send a warning text. She wouldn’t even ring the bell. (She once gave us a partial gallon of rainbow water ice on a warm spring day, and it wasn’t until a neighbor kid spotted it staining our stoop like an oil slick that we became aware of the leaky treat, accompanied by a sticky caravan of ants.) “It’s just Opal’s way,” was how my wife explained it to me the first few times I opened the front door and nearly tripped over one of her sister’s “offerings.” “Tell her we have enough junk of our own,” I would say, or some cranky comment along those lines. “She can take it to a flea market.” Wendy would just roll her wide-set eyes and smile her eternally camera-ready smile. “You’re missing the point, Tom. She doesn’t want to sell her stuff to strangers. She wants family to have it.” “But what if family doesn’t want it?” I’d press. At which point Wendy, who was likely late for an audition, would cut the conversation short. She was done defending her sister. Not that Opal wasn’t a bona fide blackbelt when it came to verbally defending herself.
On bad days, I thought of my sister-in-law as a mangy stray for whom depositing her gleefully eviscerated prey was a sign of great respect. On slightly better days, I thought of her as a kind of half-assed Santa Claus. Not in a million years would we ask for the sort of gifts we were routinely given: A trash bag full of bucatini pool noodles (we didn’t have a pool); a cast-iron fondue pot (Wendy was lactose intolerant); an “autographed” portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse, dressed in full-blown Dances with Wolves regalia (it was a portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse). Opal once left us a heaping brown bag of bargain-basement lingerie—assuming the basement was located at the bottom of a brothel. It was coarse, iridescent stuff, as if its wearer’s chief concern was not getting lost in the dark. Its intense color seemed to come off on our hands. Never mind that Opal was twice Wendy’s size. It’s hard to imagine any woman being taken seriously in that sort of underwear, let alone lusted after, coveted, craved. But maybe being taken seriously wasn’t the point. Opal was good-looking, but her sense of humor tended toward the shadier side of the street. In fact she looked a lot like Wendy—Wendy with a perpetual sneer and a little extra face between her features. Once, at the beach, we came across a guy armed with a Sharpie who was drawing caricatures of passersby on balloons. After a few seconds of scribbling, his zany, inflated medium squeaking like a set of handlebar brakes, he handed us Wendy’s likeness. She and I looked at each other and shared the same tipsy thought aloud: Opal.
My father told me the story of this big-time gangster from Georgia. The guy ran the streets of Tbilisi but left in the 1990s. He was running from something. He ended up a trash collector on the streets of New York City. I used to imagine this gangster’s thick gloved fingers wrapping around the handles of the plastic bins, lifting them up and flipping them into the back of the truck.
The union was strong, but not strong enough to make Detroit Steel keep a dying man on the payroll. John shouldn’t have known this, but he often overheard his parents talking in the room beneath him until late in the evening. He was a respectful boy and was never trying to eavesdrop, but in a house that’s small with heating vents that weren’t so much vents as just holes in the floor (or ceiling, depending on your perception), there wasn’t much of a way to avoid it. He knew the other men at the mill were keeping an eye on his father, Bernard. They were propping him up at his station and bringing him water and coffee throughout the day, whatever he needed to keep him going. “I don’t know why they do it, I don’t need no special treatment,” his father complained to his mother at least once a week. But he still hopped in the car of whoever showed up for him in the morning, usually Jay Mingus’s dad Jimmy who had a 1947 Studebaker with a long front hood and wild wrap-around back window. The fathers of most of John’s friends had older cars like that, bought when they first returned from the war and were fresh hires at the mill. Some bought new ones every few years, like Joseph’s dad who bought a 1957 Buick a few months back even though his old one, which Joseph’s mom had now, was only three years old. The Bondurant’s didn’t even have one car, let alone two. His father always told John it was because he liked to walk to work and couldn’t imagine missing out on the fresh New Boston air, which John assumed was a joke like when he told him his Purple Heart was from getting stabbed with a fork in the chow line. No one, not even John, who loved his town with a ferocity rivaled only by his love for Roy Rogers, would describe the air of their town as fresh.
Last night: the wall of a mansion abandoned mid-construction.
The night before: the back garage of a boarded-up health spa.
Tonight: a section of the fence that marks the end of our skinny seaside town.
No one really comes down to this fence, no one except for surfers on their way to the beach and cyclists heading south. Beyond the fence are kilometers of forest before the next town. In front of it is where Lauren’s body washed up on the sand.
The fence was her training ground. Her minimalist tags run along it, as well as our father’s nickname for her in other styles: bubble throw ups, pichação pieces, the occasional wildstyle.
After adding my mimicry to the painted patchwork, I look at the precision of her lines and the sloppiness of mine. The contrast makes me petulant in the way I often was when we were kids and she was better at something, better at everything. But then my heart swells with pride and I have to get away from her symbols and signs.
I see him when I look in the mirror, my father, the coach of my 5 a.m. 800-meter runs, who sacrificed to finance my education and once presented a twenty-five-slide PowerPoint on how to live my college life in the U.S. He carried a black-and-white photo of our family in his wallet. People say we look the same.
He was the first in his village to go to college after China’s Culture Revolution. He brought honor to and redeemed his once politically shamed family. By his mid-thirties, he already made tenure and was named vice president, the youngest in his university’s history. I remember him waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, punching the air and yelling, “You can’t get me!” My mother once gave me a peek into his childhood: being hung up-side-down to the ceiling with a rope tied to his ankles while my grandfather beat him until he had broken all three broom sticks. Wrinkles cover my father’s face now, his temples all gray, sharp shoulder bones gathering under his shirt. At my wedding, he hugged me long and tight, with tears of joy and pride, though I had walked down the aisle by myself and never asked him for the honor. I freeze-frame this minute. It was the moment I want to see him in and remember.
Lakey Sturgis took a palmful of margarine from the brown plastic tub between her feet and ran it over the cheekbones of her grandson’s face. She smeared the pale-yellow spread across the boy’s sloped forehead, deep into the wrinkles of his ears, working her way down the turkey skin of his throat to his bare chest, then beyond.
Just a little more, she said to Peep, who batted long, effeminate eyelashes back at her. Nuggets of the margarine stuck to them, and for a second, Lakey was reminded of nights long past when she lived in Greenpoint and Hans was still living. She looked into her grandson’s globby lashes and saw her twenty-year-old self going to bed without caring to wipe away the makeup she spent so long painting on for nights of swing dancing and manhattans at Truffani’s. That was before Hans’ job brought them to the desert, before their daughter was born. Now Lakey was sixty-six and dying, far from any place she called home.
My mother and I were driving home at dusk on a two-lane country highway following one of our visits to the fire station where her newish boyfriend was posted. It was Memorial Day, a couple of months ahead of my eleventh birthday. A pair of vehicles were bearing down on us, their headlights filling up the rear and side view mirrors of our Toyota. The trailing drivers had already twice veered over the center line and gunned their engines, with ambitions of sling-shotting past. My mother responded by pressing hard on the accelerator, threatening a head on collision from traffic traveling in the opposite lane. Even though an 18-wheeler was now headed our direction a few hundred yards in the distance, both trailing vehicles tried again to pass. My mother floored it, forcing the drivers back into our lane or risk being entombed within thousand-pound accordions.
“They’ll have to wait until I’m ready for them to drive on by, Billy.”
Ruth Ann doesn’t drive that way anymore. She doesn’t have a car but if she did, she wouldn’t. She has no reason to go to that side of the hill anyway. All that’s left of the Alstead farm is a small sliver of land on the dark side of the hill, just big enough for Ruth Ann’s double-wide trailer. Her daddy’s old place—the parts bought by the flatlanders—sits on the sun side of the hill, empty aside from ski season or leaf-peeping. Ruth Ann heard they razed the old farmhouse and put up a new lodge, all logs, meant to look old, yet nothing like what folks used to build. She heard someone else taps their sap lines and runs their sugar house too, but they still put their name on the syrup. She would not drive to that side of the hill for a thousand dollars. Well. Hundred.
“Time, lovey.” Haley doesn’t want to go to school. She pouts, sticky fingers on the cheap screen, knowing she can test Ruth Ann. Ruth Ann reaches out and tries to paw it off the girl, her arms jiggling as she stretches, yellowed nails like sloth claws. Haley jumps up quick and they play their game, the two of them moving in the trailer like slow-motion ninjas, knowing every corner by heart, how to avoid every precarious pile of stuff or mound of dirty laundry. Ruth Ann soon stops to catch her breath. She steadies herself, hand on her knee, palm on her heart, neither body part built for such a heavy body or small space. Haley relents quick, eyebrows knitting as she tosses the screen and roots around for a bottle of stale water. Ruth Ann smiles when she takes a sip even though it hurts. “Come now. Bus will be here.”
I was supposed to go on vacation to a National Park, but I don’t vacation. I mean, I did go, but I came very close to not seeing anything at all, because here is how I am accustomed to seeing: There are windows in my home office, but my desk does not face them, so light enters from the side. I am obliquely aware of the day. Sometimes I twist my body to see if the sun has risen, whether fog covers or wind stirs the big green shrub outside. In this small room in my house, I face three computer monitors and their glowing non-sun. I do a real-time job. Creation and consumption of the product are simultaneous; I make live captions for people to read on the Internet, like a stenographer does in court. I do it for seminars and webinars and legal proceedings, in Zoom or Teams or Chime or the platform du jour. My job is to listen and talk at once. What I do is called Voicewriting. It is a job of ears and mouth, an occupation more physical than cerebral, though I’m very stuck at a desk. I receive an audio feed from a remote source and say aloud what I hear as I hear it. Voice recognition software instantly converts my speech to text, which appears in a unique URL, or onscreen in a meeting platform. Someone I don’t know, someone far away or near, reads it as it unfurls. The job is sweaty and live. I’ve parroted defense contractors, nuclear regulators, pastors and poets. It’s echo, not interpretation.
There is no time to fall behind. A dropped word can be fatal to sentence meaning, a dropped sentence is dereliction. Tethered to my laptop by a web of cords, in my black microphone-headset, I resemble an air traffic controller. When a meeting has weak audio, I jack the volume up, and with my palms I press the headphones to my skull, so I am filled with sound and its vibration, then quickly I move my lips and tongue. If I get a very speedy talker, I close my eyes to eliminate all extraneous stimuli. The trick of the job is to tune out your own noise, to be a channel of syllables divorced from sense.
A Friday afternoon, late March of 1990, suburban New Jersey. A second-floor apartment in a series of two-story brick buildings. In the living room there is a slumped brown couch, a scarred coffee table, and a television with dial controls and bunny-ear antenna that stick out garishly from a lop-sided wicker shelving unit strewn with artificial flowers. Beside the shelves is an unshaded window. Outside, the branches of a close maple tree bud neon green. It is almost evening. The light is warm, crepuscular.
Two girls laze on either end of the couch, sleek as seals on a dock, stretched out as far as they can be without touching one another. The television blazes. Cassie is ten. Franny is eight and has been suspended from school. Not for the first time.
When the phone rang at two in the morning, Michael leapt out of bed so as to not wake Natalie, his exhausted wife who’d been working far too much and far too late for a fifty-three-year-old. In the hallway outside his bedroom, Michael looked down at the screen of his phone and saw his son’s face staring at him. It was a photo of Ezekiel as a little boy, which was how Michael liked to picture his son, who was no longer little. He was actually quite tall. Six foot two at least. And old as well. Nineteen with a flop of uncombed hair and a tattoo on his forearm that he still tried to hide from his mother even though there were few if any secrets among them.
The lobby of the midtown hotel, packed with disheveled travelers asleep on loose rows of waiting room chairs, or fidgeting next to their rolling suitcases in line for the electronic kiosks, resembled nothing less than a Greyhound bus station. Otto cut briskly over the unmopped floors, spinning out into the livelier air over the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue, jogging across the standing traffic and merging with the crowd onto the escalator that carried him down into Penn Station to catch the 3:13 Amtrak Keystone to 30th Street Station. Leaving his conference early, buoyed by the prospect of improved surroundings, carefully weighing his snack and magazine options, he was warily eyeing a copse of NYPD officers and their German Shepherd on a leash, when he heard the pattering of the first shots.
We’re waiting for a hot air balloon ride up by the old Warren County airport, in the middle of an open field, nothing around us but the long airport shed and a guy with a bushy beard sitting on the flatbed of a truck. Kent’s talking to the pilot about the weather, asking about refunds because it’s a little windy out. The pilot laughs. White teeth flashing in the middle of all that dark hair on his face.
“It’s a breeze,” he says. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Sherri calls me then. She’s lived across the street from us for years. She’s a gossip, telling me things that she shouldn’t, like who in the neighborhood is fighting over money, whose child is questioning, whose husband needs a lawyer. Last year, she asked my daughter, Aimee, to babysit for her while she played tennis. Apparently, Aimee turned on the television almost instantly and forgot to feed the kids their lunch and by the time Sherri came home, the house was wrecked and the children were stunned from all the shows they’d watched, and a boy was coming down the stairs, tucking in his shirt.
I moved fast always hoping to slip into the house and up to my room unnoticed. I made it to the first landing of the wide staircase before I heard the pop pop and grind and looked up. My little brother, Alex, was perched above me, kneeling on the long cushioned window seat. His chicken-wing shoulder blades stuck out on either side of his old fashioned undershirt. The afternoon light, filtered through the two-story stained glass window, hit his pale skin and formed a glowing checkerboard of red, yellow and green patches all across the back of his shorn head and bent neck. He gripped the plastic handle of a large Phillips-head screwdriver with both hands, pumping it like a tiny jackhammer straight out from his concave chest, shattering square after square of swirly rainbow glass. He must have been at it for a while, because by the time I reached him the first three rows of bread-slice sized panes were gone.
My brother was a watchful, wary sort of kid, circumspect in all his actions by the age of six in a way I still can’t manage in my thirties. I gave him a quick once over. I didn’t see any blood, so I left him to it. The snap crackle pop of each new shattered pane followed me up the stairs to the next landing and down the long hallway to my room. I wasn’t an idiot or monster. I was fourteen. I got it, Alex’s desire to expose that house to the elements, chip away at its candy colored Victorian shell.
I kept listening until the sounds of Alex’s demolition project stopped. The silence freaked me out way more than his vandalism. I don’t know why. I should have been thinking about broken glass and the paper-thin flesh on the undersides of his skinny wrists all along. But I wasn’t. He had seemed so preternaturally competent back then. I don’t know why I finally had the sense to sprint back down the hall. Alex was curled up on the window seat, his cheek pressed into bits of colored glass. I don’t know why there wasn’t more blood, why the cuts weren’t deeper. I scooped him up and carried him up the stairs. He stayed limp and floppy until I reached the third floor, where he wrapped his legs tight around my waist.
When the doctor found the tumor in his brain, when the surgery was first scheduled but not yet scalpeled, before the poorly fitted tracheostomy tube which introduced the sepsis, your father forbade you from coming to Connecticut. He didn’t want you to see him like that, he said. That when your grandfather died, your father could only picture him ill and threadbare in a hospital bed. He did not want that for you, if he didn’t make it.
“No.” You lifted your laptop from the coffee table and clicked your internet browser. “Absolutely not. I’m pulling up Delta.” The ticket would be expensive from Iowa City, but you would pay anything to be there.
He told you that you could visit when he was well again, for Thanksgiving, maybe. “Look, Kimmy,” he said. “I got some bad apples, but we can still make applesauce out of them. It’ll be okay. The surgeon’s good. I’ll have to do some PT, but I won’t lose any cognitive function. That’s pretty good applesauce.”
You wanted to tell him there was nothing applesauce about a brain tumor. That you didn’t care how small, or how easy the recovery, or how experienced the doctor. You wanted to tell him that twenty-two was too young to be fatherless. If it was your Iranian mother, you would have had permission to scream and rip hair from your scalp and weep. But he wasn’t one for big sentiments, your father. He was American. So you laughed because you knew he wanted you to laugh.
After the phone call, you drove to the grocery store and picked out a jar of applesauce. It sat in your cupboard through his entire sickness, and you ate a spoonful a day as if it could keep him safe.
We are walking along the dunes at Corn Hill Beach with my grandfather, Baba. The sun is broiling our backs, and there aren’t any clouds. We smell like suntan lotion and laundered clothes. Baba breathes heavily as he walks. He wears clean sneakers with white socks pulled halfway up his calves. I have a new pair of flip-flops in one hand, my toes seeping into the sand. My brother runs ahead, an inflatable red lobster tucked under his arm.
We were supposed to leave the Cape a week ago to go back home to our mother, but we are still here. At night, after we’ve been bathed and fed, my grandparents fight about what to do with us. The day camp with the dreadlocked artist has ended; neither of us did well with tennis.
Wyatt is eight, and I am ten. We sleep in bunk beds in my grandparents’ renovated wing. When I close my eyes, I hear large ice cubes fill my grandmother’s glass, the freezer open and close. We have a whole dresser of new clothes they’ve bought us, some colorful toys in a wicker basket. If they yell at each other loudly enough, Wyatt sniffles and cries. “Be quiet,” I try to tell him, but he doesn’t understand. On my back, I lie as still as I can be in the top bunk, pretending I’m frozen in glass. If my grandmother hears my brother cry and peeks into the room, she’ll think that I’m asleep.
“Over here,” Baba says, and we move toward the water. He’s packed a cooler with Goldfish and Milano cookies, juice boxes, and cans of Coke. His white hair sneaks out the back of his baseball cap. Wyatt throws his shirt off and runs into the water, thrashing wildly in the waves. Baba takes off his shoes and socks carefully. He looks far out into the ocean, his soft skin glistening in the sun. The waves crash onto the sand, and the wind twirls through my hair.
Last week, when I asked my grandmother why we weren’t going back home to our mother, she wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Your mother is busy,” she said. She was staring at herself in the mirror of her bathroom, fluffing her hair. “She’s writing a paper for her Statistics class.” My grandmother sprayed perfume on her wrists and then rubbed them together. Her gold bracelets slid down her arm. “She needs more time.”
“Don’t you want to go in the water?” Baba says.
The truth is I am afraid of swimming, but I get up and walk slowly through the thick sand, sitting down at the water’s edge. Wyatt is pretending to be a shark, flapping his hands like fins and growling. We are two different islands; we almost can’t see each other.
The Boy had decided, finally, enough was enough. He and his sister were running away. They were with their third set of foster people since the County took them away and these were the worst yet. The parents were weird and the children were mean and Sissy cried herself to sleep every night. Read More
Featured art: American Rural Baroque by Ralph Steiner
The landline clapped as Dinah set the phone in its cradle and saw five new mini-Butterfinger wrappers in the can beneath her desk. There was a drizzle going on in the office parking lot—Giant lake weather. Billy Lloyd the Tobacco King, her Grandad, had finally died. Dinah stared into the gray matter of her cubicle, calling up the blue-frosted window in the fifth-floor bathroom, weighing whether at this hour she could finish an organic cigarette in there before someone noticed her shoes.
Dinah hadn’t spoken to her father in five months and then there he was, Billy Lloyd Jr., pronouncing emphysema, crying blubbery on the phone. Today and tomorrow would be for the examiner. The Lloyds didn’t embalm on account of a fear initiated by Lincoln’s rail-traveling corpse, though most of them had forgotten why by now, and with the heat they wouldn’t want more than three days for a body, even then. If Dinah went, she’d have to fly in the morning through Hotlanta or Dulles to land in time. Read More
“Watch out for the number seven,” my mother tells me at the start of my recent visit to her Florida apartment; I’ve just mentioned that I will soon turn 57. “You know sevens are big in our family, right?”
I’m still getting used to how old my mother has gotten. A chaos of cross-hatched wrinkles nest her graying eyes. She’s convinced those wrinkles were caused by her cataract surgery, but more likely she just wasn’t able to see them before. She huddles in her powder blue bathrobe even though it’s 80 degrees outside and she doesn’t use the air conditioner. She’s been wearing the same robe since I was in high school, the blue now paler and more powdery. Because of the arthritis in her fingers, she can no longer button it, so she does without.
“Sevens? Big?” I ask. “What do you mean?” Am I witnessing my 82-year-old mother’s fall into dementia? Without her dentures, she slurs her words, which doesn’t reassure me. I know, though that when she says something nutty, it’s often because she’s now nearly deaf. Not hearing a question properly, she makes up her own question and then answers it. This time, however, she’s watching my over-enunciating lips and guesses correctly. Read More
Featured Art: Ballet at the Paris Opéra by Edgar Degas
Today we are a cozy family of three—Daddy, Mama, and daughter. We are taking a road trip from our home in Oakland, California to a town called King City so Daddy can perform his signature role as the Sugar Plum Fairy cavalier. It’s our last trip together before the twins are born and Chiara-Noelle has told me in her three-year-old way that she is not pleased about this pregnancy. She wanted a sister, not two brothers and she can’t understand why we can’t just make what’s growing inside me be something else. Read More
It was getting late and her grandson Buddy wasn’t back, so Vera decided to brave the heat and go with Alicia to find him. She’d wanted to talk to her daughter in private, anyway, but when she stepped outside, though the sun was low, the light still bounced with a glaring intensity off the pale houses, the plastered walls. Vera felt her skin growing damp, the small shock as the heat hit her body. It just took time to adapt to a Florida retirement, she thought, and remembered Little Rock and the parks along the river, the evening fireflies above deep grass.
It irritated her that Alicia, walking placidly beside her, didn’t seem to mind the climate, or much of anything else. Her daughter was overweight and wore long, black, wrinkled cotton dresses. Her left ear was pierced in five places, and she sometimes wore a silver ring through her right eyebrow. She was making a statement, she said, and didn’t care what anyone thought.
“Then why bother making a statement?” Vera asked once, only to meet with an uncomprehending stare.
By Nicole VanderLinden Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest: selected by Lauren Groff
Featured Art:Beach Scene by James Hamilton
Vanessa had wanted the luau, something extravagant—never mind that we were a moon away from our original budget. But that was Vanessa, always doubling down. She swam in mountain lakes; she was the only person I knew who’d been arrested for playing chicken. “We’re in Maui,” she said, letting geography make its case. “It’d be fun for the kids.”
This wasn’t all true, because our youngest, Chloe, dreamed of puréed bananas. She was barely a toddler. She’d never tasted salt, and bubble baths made her shriek. It was the other kid my wife had been alluding to, the child of our concern, our Anna.
Vanessa bought tickets to the luau. I was suggestible—there were so many things I was trying to save then, money the least precious among them. We returned to the cool of our room by three so we could shower and put calamine lotion on our burns, our sun-chapped faces. Vanessa took Chloe with her and got dressed in the bathroom, where she’d laid out various makeup cases and where the tub had jets, and I waited for Anna, who was twelve and who, when she was ready, spun for me in a white sundress lined in eyelet lace.
At the luau, we inched toward the entrance on the resort grounds, entertainers beating drums and offering drinks made with canned pineapple juice. Chloe sat on her mother’s hip with her wild, straight-up ponytail and gave everyone her skeptical face, the one that prefaced an opinion you couldn’t predict. “Drum,” she said seriously, as if naming objects for the first time. “Drink.” Anna had put on a dark hoodie, though it was still hot, and shuffled ahead of us all.
Arthur is, look, you don’t want to, fine; and Bee’s, good, I’m glad.
It’s about a billion degrees out. They’re on a clothing-optional beach. Arthur had to practically drag her.
He gets up and walks away, which makes her mad. She’s all about how men retreat to their caves. Arthur stops and puts his hands on his hips and looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. There’s a half dozen guys on blankets to the left and behind him chattering. They’re all young and nude, built like Greek gods. One guy’s putting sunblock on another guy like he’s practicing the art of sensuous massage. Next to them’s what looks like a straight couple, the girl’s young, topless, with a bikini bottom. She looks good. She’s in fact gorgeous. The guy’s probably at least twice her age, well into his forties. He’s tanned a golden bronze and built solid, stretched out, arms under his head, got on one of those skimpy bathing suits Olympic divers wear. No belly at all if not quite a six-pack. The girl’s sitting up looking off at the horizon, her hand wrapped around his kneecap like she’s holding a stick shift. Arthur goes back to their blanket.
You’re back.
Look, if you don’t want to, okay, but I’m going to.
By Tania De Rozario Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest: selected by Ira Sukrungruang
Featured Art: The Last Supper By H. Siddons Mowbray
1993. That’s when it happens. Two months after your twelfth birthday. It’s a sweaty afternoon. This day which blisters with possibility. This day you learn that there are demons inside of you.
You’re on your way home from school. You know something is wrong the minute you get off the bus. Your mother waits at the bus stop, teary-eyed. Your relationship has grown monosyllabic, but the tears feel like a warning, so you ask.
What’s wrong?
It is when she smiles that something inside you unravels. You realize hers are happy tears. But her smile is vacant. Placid. A Stepford Wives smile. The tears fall but there is nothing behind them. She’s a mannequin crying on command. A talking-doll with electronics scrambled.
You don’t have the language for this yet.
She grabs you, holds you tight: Nana has been saved!
It occurred to Dennis six hours into the road trip that he might have made a terrible mistake. His daughter Natalie sat on a fold-down seat in the back of his pickup’s not-so-extended cab, plugged into her Discman and propped against the small window behind the empty passenger seat. She was reading a magazine with a cover that said something about Bedroom Tricks to Blow . . . Dennis only caught a glance when she’d pulled it from her backpack at the last rest area. He was glad he couldn’t see the whole thing in the rearview mirror.
Donna forgot about the cat. She had promised to take care of it when her sister went on another one of her vacations. But the cat slipped to the bottom of Donna’s to-do list until he was barely hanging on, his presence barely noticed and left to his own devices, roaming her sister’s home on his lonesome. Donna did not want the cat staying in her own home, choosing to sacrifice the time it would take to drive to her sister’s to feed it every other day rather than let its fur coat her hardwood floors.
She woke early that morning and decided to take advantage of the rare combination of a day off and unusually warm October weather to tackle the overgrown landscaping surrounding the house. At the beginning of summer, she paid a neighborhood kid to pull weeds and lay mulch, but the upkeep fell to her, and she hadn’t been particularly diligent about keeping the crab grass at bay. Her husband suggested hiring the kid again, but Donna refused. Everyone else in the neighborhood either cared for their yards themselves or hired professionals who drove around in logo-covered trucks that hauled riding lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, and leaf blowers. None of them cheaped out and hired a teenager to do a half-assed job to save a few dollars. It was embarrassing that they even hired him in the first place, like they couldn’t afford to do any better than that. Ella, who lived across the street, would have never done such a thing. Donna was sure of it.
Featured Art: Birds by Jonathan Salzmanand Tibetan Monks visiting Passion Works Studio
Ohio
We sit in the car, my mother and I, outside a large white barn with black trim. It’s a pretty barn—less than a mile from our home—and my sister Maura keeps her horse here. The horse is Culotte. His previous owner called him “Just Cool It,” but Dad said that was too much of a hippy name. He is a proud Republican. During the last election, I picked up one of the dropped campaign buttons outside the voting booths. You aren’t allowed to wear the buttons inside. The vote is private, sacrosanct.
We have stopped, as we do each morning, for Maura to feed Culotte. In March 1972, I am nine. In five minutes or ten minutes, when Maura comes back to the car, Mom will drive me to the William E. Miller Elementary School. She will drive Maura to the parking lot of the A&P, where Mrs. Besaunceny and three other students meet every day to drive to Columbus School for Girls, an hour away. CSG has no room for me in the fourth grade class. I’ll join the fifth graders next year.
Our breath is frosty in the car. I ask my mother to repeat her question.
“If your Dad and I ever got a divorce, who would you want to live with?”
She stirs with the movement of the sun. Dawn stretches over the horizon, and she searches for motion amid the brush. Her world appears in shades of gray, with bursts of blue and violet. She cannot see the orange of my vest or the green-brown pattern on my coat, but she can smell my breath in the air. She startles, bounding once, twice, before the breeze decides her fate. It shifts and she pauses next to the lone pine tree, the one that is seventy yards from my small wooden stand. She has just lost the spots of fawnhood. I pull the trigger.
The hunt is humane, my uncle tells me. The population of white-tailed deer in Mississippi is estimated at 1.75 million. It is the highest density in the nation, and only Texas has more deer. In some areas, the herd is still above capacity. A study done in Wisconsin revealed that starvation, non-human predators, and vehicle collision are the top three causes of death for deer, afterhuman hunting. Of these three, none are painless. A bullet to the heart is.
I was sixteen when my uncle first built a deer stand on family land. Deer had begun to appear on our property with increasing frequency. An outdoorsman, he eagerly anticipated teaching his three children this new skill. He convinced my father, his younger brother, to join him. It was decided. My cousins, my brother, and I would learn to hunt. My uncle taught us how to shoot in the summer when the earth was green. We aimed for slabs of cardboard, our mantra ringing louder than the echo of the gun. If it’s brown, it’s down, we said. We did not think of race when we said it, just of victory.
Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest: selected by Kiese Laymon
Featured Art: Sunset over a Pond, c. 1880 by François-Auguste Ravier
I.
The first time I walked into Grandma’s church, I was a little girl in white Stride Rite leather sandals and a pale yellow dress with a sash. The First Baptist Church of Forreston, Texas. There was no parking lot, so Grandma, like a dozen others, steered her big blue Chevy off the road into the grass in front of the sign welcoming all worshippers.
The white clapboard building looked like the school-church from Little House on the Prairie. Simple wooden porch with four steps. Plain white steeple. Two long skinny windows. Our regular church in Dallas was three times larger, had bells that chimed every hour, and its thick walls held colorful stained glass depicting Jesus carrying the cross, falling, dying.
My older brother and I trailed behind Grandma, who hung her big leather purse in the crook of one arm and used the other to grip the wooden rail to steady her arthritic knees. My brother and I jockeyed to sit next to her because we wanted to plumb her treasure-filled purse. Doublemint gum. A map of the highways crisscrossing the Texas plains. A keychain with a long plastic placard with her name blazed across it. Virginia. Same as the state. I liked to run my finger along the raised white letters.
Before we opened the door, we could hear voices singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I shot a look at my brother. We were late—something we were never allowed to be on Sunday mornings with our parents at Holy Trinity. My brother shrugged. I grabbed Grandma’s free hand and let the rush of air and music pour over me as she opened the door and led us to the back row.
Featured Art: Second Beach, Newport, c. 1878-80 by Worthington Whittredge
Coach West had just finished grilling the dogs and we were all standing in line, going crazy with hunger. We’d had nothing but concession stand sno-cones after the doubleheader, and we were ready to eat our weight in barbecue. Rudy and I were going to do an experiment to see which tasted better on dogs—onions or relish. I was going to blindfold myself with my ballcap and Rudy was going to feed me one bite of each until I discovered the answer.
But Dad’s hatchback came skidding across the gravel toward the pavilion, a long dust cloud rising up behind it like the tail of a dragon, and I knew something was about to happen. The door popped open and his hand shot down to the gravel like a kickstand as he got out of the car. He left it running and didn’t shut the door behind him.
Coach West set down his tongs and gave Rudy’s father a look. They hopped off the pavilion deck and went to greet Dad. Marcellus’s mother, our Team Mom, took over at the grill, speaking loudly and brightly, asking what everybody was doing for summer now that we were done with the third grade.
Featured Art: “Cradle of Kleptocracy” by Madara Mason
[arms & legs]
Be my arms and legs. You’re strong. You can do it! Mom would say. Mom’s body was small, fragile, needed time to move, moved differently than other bodies. I always thought she was beautiful. She was—blonde, blue eyed, narrow nose, all symmetrical. Mom had a determined presence that demanded respect and she had mastered the performance of a Eurocentric female beauty. Outfits were planned, makeup was worn, perfume was sprayed. We were late to everything. Sometimes she fell down.
* * *
Mom was diagnosed with Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, a rare and incurable neuromuscular disease, when she was thirty and pregnant with me. In our life together, she wasn’t able to lift heavy objects, things like pots or pans or dog food bags, her own body. She couldn’t run or dance or move very fast. She used a brown wooden cane, shiny wood, golden handle. When walking was too much, a wheelchair. I was her arms and legs. Elle was her arms and legs. We were good at being Mom’s limbs. Sometimes she held onto us when she walked and we took turns pushing her wheelchair. When she fell, we helped her back up. We loved Mom, her body, went to her for comfort, to cry, to laugh, for attention. Who could listen better? Care more about our days, our lives, our futures. Of course I miss her. She haunts me. Or her pain does.
The mother and father received the news on a Friday afternoon and were in the car driving south an hour later. They drove until midnight, then checked into a Courtyard Marriott for five hours before hopping back onto the road at dawn to cover the last hundred miles. They were silent in the car, which was strange: in their twenty years of marriage, they had never run out of things to talk about. There were, of course, things to talk about now—perhaps more than ever before—but neither the mother nor the father could find the words to start the conversation. By the time they navigated through the college town and parked at the police station where their son was held, they were both exhausted, irritable, and fit to burst with all the questions they’d swallowed on the way down.
The police officer behind the desk looked up as the entrance bells went off. “You must be the boy’s parents.”
The father stepped forward to shake the police officer’s hand. “That we are. Where is he?”
The officer was jovial to a fault. “Just down the hall a ways.” He turned toward a door in the back and waved an arm at them to follow. But the mother and father were silent, almost frozen, and at that silence the police officer turned around, his hand on the doorknob. “Hey, now,” he said. “Now’s not the time for that. Your boy is pretty shook up. He could use some support. Between you and me, these cases happen all the time. My guess? Your boy will be out of here in no time, clean record and everything.”
It’s so bright even though the blinds are closed. Streaks of white light gash the wall. The wall Dad painted blue last month. Your favorite color is red but you like blue, too. There’s the humming of lawnmowers in the distance. Open those blinds.
Out there it’s green everywhere. Up above, it’s blue. There’s a white car in your driveway, too. Not our car, you think. Whose car is that. Green grass down here, around the strange little white car, and blue sky up there. The colors are so pure it kind of hurts. It’s nice, though. Do your eyes hurt? You could open the window to smell the grass but Dad got mad last time. Up on the hill where green turns into blue are big brown houses. If you squint they look like blobs of oatmeal raisin cookie dough when Mom lines them up on a baking sheet. And between the houses are thin lanes of grass where the older kids go sledding on snow days. The older kids with the colorful backpacks and the best Pokemon cards. Andy said one of the Meyer boys had three holographic Charizards. There’s no way. You aren’t allowed to go sledding on the hill yet. You just got allowed to ride your bike up to the black mailbox. The green mailbox after that is too high, too far up the hill, too dangerous, Mom always says. You know you can do it but you aren’t allowed. But soon you’ll be allowed to go all the way up – to the top of the hill. Then back down super fast into the coldy sack. Like how the older kids do.
The man across the street is bent over by a bush, the man whose house is white and black and pointy and looks like a castle. He’s bent over by a bush using those big shiny scissors. The scary ones. The kind Dad uses a lot. Is Dad outside? Look down into your part of the green. Dad isn’t in your part of the green yet. Maybe later. There’s still the humming. Humming is an outside activity, Mom always says. Sometimes she hums but she does it quieter than you. And mostly outside. Her humming is nicer than lawnmower humming. Especially because when there’s a bunch of different lawnmowers all at once it sounds like buzzing. Like bugs, kind of.
We’re in a bathroom at McDonald’s and it smells like pee and I’m helping my dad put his makeup on. It’s his eyebrows that he struggles the most with. They’re supposed to arc like dark rainbows high up on his forehead. He can’t do them in the mirror—they look like mountains.
“Get ’em even, Mitchell,” Dad tells me, as he kneels down, eye-level.
I’m always drawing pictures. Now I’m drawing one on my dad. His real eyebrows are gone, lost under a mask of white. I give him some new ones with a makeup pencil, then paint the tip of his nose bright red.
He pulls on his stockings. Zips up his yellow-gold jumpsuit. I hand him his giant shoes and ask how come they’re so big. Goofy factor, he says.
He fits on his wig and it blazes like fire.
“How do I look?” he asks me.
“Like a clown,” I say.
*
Dad’s got three parties this afternoon. I count eight kids at the first and I don’t know any of them. Dad’s trying to make a wiener dog balloon and I’m at a table in the corner, drawing pictures of the motel I’ve been living in with my mom.
I sort of hate the kids Dad entertains. He gives this boy with braces the wiener dog balloon and a freckle-faced girl a turtle. They’re all cracking up and happy like Dad’s a good clown, but he’s not. Every time he tries to juggle he splatters an egg. Kids laugh, but still. He can’t do tricks. He doesn’t tell jokes. He just falls down and spills stuff, and slips in the stuff he spilled.
Two men watched fireworks from a rooftop on the night that the alien landed. One man was Scott, who had inherited the house from his father, who had built it with his own hands and, according to his will, had been buried in its basement. Scott thought that was kind of weird, but those were the man’s last wishes, and last wishes are what they are. The other was Lucas, who had brought over the cooler full of Duvel, which the alien’s landing pod incinerated. After the alien slithered, skittered, or shivered out of the pod (it depended on which section of the alien’s body was exiting the hatch), the pod lifted off on its own and zoomed back up into the boom, crackle, and hiss.
Scott and Lucas backed up until they reached the edge of the roof. The alien waved feelers and glowed red from sucking orifices as it came closer. Scott had a feeling that the alien wanted to communicate, but its appearance was so terrifying he couldn’t think of anything to say. Lucas had some ideas of things to say but also thought the alien might be dangerous. Like, just look what it did to the beer.
Here was first contact with intelligent life from beyond our world, the most important event that had ever happened to anyone ever in the entire history of everything, but both men kind of wished it was other than it was. The alien sensed this telepathically, and obliged them by skithivering down from the roof into the attic, where it wove a cocoon for itself. Scott and Lucas climbed down the ladder after it.
The cocoon hung from the ceiling and throbbed accommodating shades of blue and turquoise with calm, floral scents. When it was done, the cocoon split open, unraveling to the floor like a spilt flag, and when the last alien folds fell away, a man Scott remembered from the war stood before them.
His kid doesn’t want a smartphone. His fourteen-year-old flute-playing boy is saying, “Nah, I don’t really need one.” Mitch’s wife Shelley says, “No one’s forcing you, honey.” She beams. The boy beams. Mitch feels a faint nausea. There’s something wrong with his kid, who still likes Legos and watches network TV and keeps his room clean and calls his two nerd friends on the landline.
“Well, that’s fine,” says Mitch. For some reason, he’s pitched his voice like an actor from a 1950s movie. He tries it again: “That’s just fine, son!” He’s speaking like a man wearing a fedora, a man carrying a briefcase. But nobody seems to notice. “So what do you want for Christmas?”
His kid, Ernie, frowns as if Mitch has just asked him to poke a kitten in the eye. “I can’t think of anything at the moment,” he says. “Can I go practice flute now?”
“Yes!” says Shelley. She rises from the sofa and kisses Ernie on the ear. “I’ll let you know when dinner’s ready. I’m making your favorite.”
“Brussels sprouts?” he asks brightly. “And Salisbury steak?”
“You bet,” she says. When Ernie has disappeared down the hall, she turns to Mitch. “Don’t force him to grow up before he’s ready.”
Mitch knows better than to argue, but he can tell that his thoughts—not grow up, just join the 21st century like a normal kid!—might as well be floating above his head like a comic book bubble. Not that Ernie would get such a reference, because he doesn’t read comic books, either.
“Okay,” he says, but Shelley has stomped down the hall to prepare the kid’s Brussels sprouts.
I was one of those kids that spent a lot of time on the internet. Chat rooms, message boards. ASL, S2R, and some gender tricks too. That stuff was normal in the Nineties. And it was all good clean fun until I fell in with some gun nuts when I was fifteen years old, the type of people that encrypt shit. Way down in the web. Amateur blacksmiths and whatnot. I got so into it I ended up putting together a makeshift muzzle loader out of Schedule 80 piping, cold American steel, something I saw on the blacksmithing forum. I tried it in the basement but it didn’t work so I got a slightly bigger ball bearing for ammunition, about the size of a marble. I took it to the backyard, propped it on some dunnage, put a flame to the fuse. And by god, it worked. There was this huge discharge, a cloud of smoke. It shot wildly though. Fucking hit my kid brother square in the leg. He was clear across the yard. Dad came running from the house. There was so much blood that none of it seemed real and after Dad stopped the bleeding he came at me and that’s the deepest fear I’ve ever felt.
But that all happened fifteen years ago. I’m an adult now, turned thirty recently. Lacey’s my girlfriend these days. We met at a support group for those that’ve been injured by firearms: Tuesday night, St. Vincent de Paul, where I was the only one whose wound wasn’t visible. It’s like Lacey says: “Pretty baby’s hurt on the inside.” When she was ten years old she was making herself a necklace out of scrap—a little bit of twine, whatever else—then she found the perfect final piece, this shiny gold thing. All it needed was to be flattened. She grabbed a hammer and that was that. It was a live .22 round. Went off in her face. Took a half-dozen surgeries to put her back together. As a result she’s permanently blind in the right eye, with a spiderweb of ice covering the whole thing; little scars that don’t look like much until they’re pressed together.
Manuel relayed buckets of moist earth to the concrete stairwell. It was Héctor’s job to hoist the buckets up and ferry them over to the dumpster. They had to work quickly to keep the buckets moving or the Bangladeshi contractor, a slight man with a beard, would start yelling at them, “Taratari koro.”
The workers down below had broken up the existing basement floor of the six-story building with jackhammers and then used pickaxes to pry out the concrete. Now they were excavating eight to ten feet of earth to increase the height of the basement.
Héctor was grateful to work in the open air instead of underground like a mole with the thick damp air and the artificial light from lamps. It was also safer up here. The men in the basement would dig themselves into three-foot-square holes up to eight-feet deep and there weren’t even any planks of wood to brace the sides. Suddenly someone would look up to see the sides crumbling in on him. He suspected that the contractors didn’t know what they were doing. It was only a matter of time before a worker was buried alive.
Still, it was regular work, something Héctor hadn’t had in a while. He had spent several months going to the parada on Roosevelt Avenue, getting picked up occasionally for one- or two-day stints in demolition or renovation. He found this job through Jesús, a slim Oaxaqueño, always clean shaven with dimples and a broad smile. Jesús used to talk big on the corner about his influence in the construction world. The men would rib him. “So why are you here at the parada, dumbass?” It didn’t bother Jesús.
It wasn’t the voice that woke me, but the jolt of the trailer. It was Dad. He’d lurched out of bed. Fumbled upright as if in a dream, as if he’d skippered a boat upside a pier in the dark, struck a piling and—pow—off the pitch of the deck and onto the dock he stumbles.
Not that the camper was what you’d call terra firma. Less like a home on wheels and more like a traveling dollhouse, everything pretending to be more than it really was—parlor the size of a bathroom, bathroom the size of a fridge, fridge the size of a toaster, toaster the hearth around which we’d huddle when the rain shattered and the dark thickened and the cold rose up to stab us in the ankles. The Cookie Tin’s what Mom called the trailer. Dad and Mom in the fold-out bed at the back, at the foot of which you got a curdle of flannel, Ben-Ben, not a toddler anymore but still squat enough (Tater-Tot we called him) to wedge in cross-wise. Up top of that the rack for Cece—canvas on a pair of poles, like a stretcher. Down below a carpet runner rolling out a luxurious four feet to the front-end boudoir—Len and me bull-dozed into the same bed together, head-to-toe across a table-top that, every morning at eight, we’d pop back up into place.
Oh. And Sal. Little Miss Bon-bon. Seems like the second a girl gets a couple of—what would be the polite word for it?—bosoms—you got the whole damn troposphere torqueing up to accommodate the blessed event. The VW van should’ve been for Len and me but no, Sal’s gotta have her privacy, her womanly solicitude, as if a girl who burns a whole afternoon spot-welding a girder of curls into a confectionary (what would be the word?) spectacle could give a damn about privacy.
Winner, New Ohio Review Fiction Contest selected by Mary Gaitskill
By Analía Villagra
He was gone for eleven years, and Jackie is still getting used to the idea that Victor is out. Exonerated. His release had warranted a few sentences on the local NPR station, so Jackie knows that he has been at his mother’s place, three blocks away, for a week. She has not yet run into him on the street. Each time she leaves her apartment she scans the sidewalks, and when he does not materialize she feels equal parts relief and disappointment. Thursday afternoon she goes out of her way to walk past his building, willing him to be on the front steps or looking out the window. She slows down. Would he even recognize her now? Her hair is short, with a few stray glints of gray, no longer halfway to her waist and shimmering black. Her eyes have shadows beneath them. Her hips have spread. She’s thirty years old, in good shape she thinks, unless you’ve spent a decade fantasizing about a nineteen-year-old body. Jackie blushes. This is the first time she’s admitted to herself that she wondered—hoped? assumed?—that Victor thought about her while he was away. Eleven years. Maybe he’ll recognize her, maybe he won’t. She can’t decide which is worse, so she stares down at the sidewalk and hurries past the building.
She goes to the Y to pick her daughter up from camp. Graciela is running around the outdoor play area with a group of other kids, their hair wild, their clothes and faces filthy.
“Mama!” Grace shrieks when she sees her.
Jackie waves. She locates the teenagers wearing staff T-shirts, and they hand her the sign-out sheet without pausing their conversation. Jackie half-listens to the latest counselor drama while Grace gathers her things.
At three years old, you will sit beside me in a rusty Ford as we head south on I-95. The air conditioning will blow lukewarm air, and you will feel hot and sticky. From the carrier in the backseat, our cat will growl long and low. Looking out of the passenger window, you will see stacks of steel lattice speed by, connected by strands of drooping lines. Through the back windshield, a shrinking ribbon of asphalt, lengthening and disappearing into the horizon. After many hours, the dirt will turn from brown to orange.
“I want my daddy,” you will say.
“Daddy’s staying in Maryland,” I will reply.
A few weeks later, after boxes have been unpacked in the Georgia apartment complex called Cherry Tree Hill, a card will arrive in the mail. Tearing open the envelope, you will find a photograph of your father. He’ll be sitting in a leather office chair, smiling for his daughter’s benefit and wearing neatly pressed blues. You will clutch the picture to your chest, pressing your cheek against its sharp edges. You will kiss the photo over and over. I will tell you to stop.
“You’ll ruin it,” I’ll say.
I will hold you as you cry, and you will hear my heart beat as you lie against my chest. At three years old, you will learn: your mother is flesh and blood. Your father is envelopes and stamps.
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