Category Archives: Issue 15:3

Volume 15, Issue 3

To Discover a Mockingbird

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The Snark Zone: Letters from the Editors
Stephanie “Baker” Lenz

Photo Credit: Chris Gauthier/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

Photo Credit: Chris Gauthier/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

I first heard of To Kill A Mockingbird when my ambitious eighth grade language arts teacher (and basketball coach) Mr. Harper assigned it. I was bored by the opening and never caught up but moved away before our first test or paper or whatever he intended to use to grade us.

In my junior year, we had to read a novel of our own choosing off a provided list of dead, white, American male authors. Thinking of how much I’d heard about Mockingbird in the last three years, I asked Mr. Garrett if I could choose it. He looked skeptical and asked if I’d read it before. I explained the situation and he decreed that Mockingbird was an acceptable choice. I read it within a week by skipping the dry “history of Maycomb County” that stopped me before. I did, however, enjoy the use of the name “John Taylor” because he was (and still is) the bassist for Duran Duran.

I own two copies of Mockingbird. I gave away my first copy (given to me by Mr. Harper with “John Taylor” underlined with a heart in the margin when it appeared) but I have the one I bought in college and a hardback that my husband gave me as a gift. I’m a fan but it’s not a book I reread obsessively. I recommend it but I don’t gush over it. I always respected that Lee said that she’d said all she had to say with a single work and that she had no intention of writing another novel. I understood her aversion to publicity and scrutiny. Writing is reviewed and criticized, particularly writing that becomes an essential part of the canon of American literature. Writers are also criticized for writing too much or too little, on the “wrong” topic, from an experience that isn’t their own, even for using a pen name (like Nelle Harper Lee did).

So when word came in February of 2015 that a “sequel” to Mockingbird would be published in the summer, I was as skeptical as my eleventh grade teacher had been. Lee was famous for being a literary one-hit wonder and for being unapologetic about her choice. Where was a sequel coming from if she already made her singular artistic statement? What would compel a nearly 90-year-old author of one 50-year-old book to publish again?

Short version: she didn’t. According to the New York Times and other sources, this was an effort primarily by her lawyer, her agent, and Harper Publishing to make a buck.

Initial reviews of Go Set A Watchman declared that Atticus Finch had been made into a racist, that Jem Finch was dead, and that Jean Louise (formerly Scout) was returning home after an unhappy relationship up north. When I read that, I thought how similar it sounded to work I’d done in that I experimented with altering locations, shifting character ages, and changing motivations. It became clear to me that what Tonja Carter “discovered” was no sequel but what we writers call a “discovery draft.” You write and you figure things out as you go. Sometimes you keep those early drafts, as Lee did, but if you’re exploring, your finished work will be very different from those early discovery drafts.

I couldn’t help but feel for Lee. Who wants first/early drafts out there for the world to see (unless you’re asking for feedback or offering it as educational material)? I also felt for people who pre-purchased what they were led to believe was a new work by a favorite author. What they got was a glimpse into how much work writing is. They saw why her editor sent back notes to Lee when she submitted Watchman for publication in 1957. It was the right suggestion to have Lee explore Jean Louise’s childhood, particularly her relationship with her father and the setting in which she grew up as “Scout.” When Lee followed this advice, we got the nearly flawless Mockingbird: the work Lee said spoke for her completely.

Reviewers came to recognize this. Bookstores began offering refunds. But the widespread realization that the book-loving public was duped didn’t stop people from changing their sons’ names from Atticus to something else as they believed that Atticus became a racist. Atticus Finch didn’t become a racist. He began as one and that wasn’t the Atticus Finch that Lee wanted the world to know. The man who sits in front of the jail reading while protecting his client from a lynch mob, who defended an innocent man even though he knew they would lose the case, who taught his children about fairness, justice, and compassion… that’s Atticus Finch. And his place as one of the greatest characters in literature remains unchanged.

When JD Salinger died in 2010, reports circulated that Salinger had continued to write while eschewing publication and publicity. Rumors that some of that work would be made available to the public—either as books or as donations of these manuscripts to libraries—remain rumors; speculation had been that we’d see what Salinger had been writing “between 2015 and 2020.” My guess is that, particularly given what we’ve seen happen with Mockingbird / Watchman, the Salinger trust will be selective about what happens with any of his work. Any books will be definite sequels or prequels, no “discovery drafts.” I honestly doubt anyone will be changing their children’s names from “Franny” “Zooey” or “Holden.” I certainly won’t.

There has been no direct statement from Harper Lee herself about Watchman nor should there be. She earned her right to be left alone and allow her work—her single work—to continue speaking for her.

pencilEmail: baker[at]toasted-cheese.com

Orangutanka: A Story in Poems by Margarita Engle

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Candle-Ends: Reviews
Shelley Carpenter

carpenter

Orangutanka by Margarita Engle, illustrated by Renée Kurilla

Orangutanka: A Story in Poems (Henry Holt, 2015) is one of the latest works from award-winning author Margarita Engle. Engle, who writes young adult novels, poetry, and children’s fiction, has created an exceptional work in picture book form.

Engle weaves a story about a family of sleepy orangutans—all except one who leaves the family nest. The title, Orangutanka, is a word-play that encompasses the words orangutan and tanka, which is a traditional form of Japanese poetry. It is a free form of verse that includes emotion, metaphor, opinions, rhymes and simile. Organutanka has many of these elements in a lively prose filled with strong adjectives and verbs and onomatopoeia. Engle explains in a note to readers that Orangutanka is written in a “string” of tanka lines that follow a basic pattern of short-long-short-long-long lines. It is a sweet story that young readers will relate to and also enjoy hearing read aloud in its tanka form:

Towering green trees
shiver, sway, rattle, and shake
when orangutans
clamber toward colorful mounds
of bananas and mangoes

Inspired by a trip to a wildlife refuge in the Malaysian section of Borneo, Engle shows these large primates in familiar themes and, at the same time, provides scientific information including their endangered status in a fact section. Engle also invites readers to learn more about orangutans in a bibliography of books and online resources. She invites young readers to try an “orangudance” in the activity page that follows the story.

I am impressed with the picture book’s many facets. Engle created a book that contains many elements—narrative, poetry, science, and community-building—within its pages.

The illustrations are colorful and inviting. Renée Kurilla, who has illustrated many books for children, combines hand-drawn sketches and ink to lay out each page in a traditional form. The illustrations have strong elements of linear design that relate a sense of the vertical vastness of the rainforest as well as dimension, depth, and texture such as the bark on the trees, the patterns in the leaves and the even thickness of orangutan hair. The leaves, in particular, were combined with digital enhancements from Photoshop to create the shiny, spongy, organic effect. The lines also show movement such as falling rain and the swaying of leaves and the orangutans themselves, as they move about from page to page.

Another element to the illustrations is how Kurilla captures the orangutan and relates it to human emotion in facial expression and theatrically in movement. The orangutans’ hands in particular are human-like and Kurilla captures this in many gestures. My favorite is the hands up to the sky.

Color is also a dominant feature. The setting is painted in vibrant tints, tones, and shades. Kurilla used harmonizing colors to express the interior of rainforest, but also the time of day and the weather. Bright, cheery greens show the morning hours and as the day grows longer and as the rain begins to fall, the illustrations change to cooler, bluer tones that likewise relate emotion as well as artistic perspective. The rain itself is a key element to the rainforest as well as literal turning point in the narrative. When it stops, the colors appear ethereal, hinting of a warm afterglow and of twilight approaching.

Orangutanka belongs in the classroom library as well in a young child’s bookshelf.

*

Cuban-American author Margarita Engle grew up in Los Angeles, but developed a deep attachment to her mother’s homeland during summers with her extended family in Cuba. She is author of many young adult verse novels about the island, including The Surrender Tree, which received the first Newbery Honor ever awarded to a Latino, and The Lightning Dreamer, recipient of the 2014 PEN USA Award. Other honors include multiple Pura Belpré and Américas Awards, as well as the Jane Adams, International Reading Association, Claudia Lewis, International Latino, and MANA Las Primeras awards. Books for younger children include Mountain Dog, Summer Birds, Orangutanka, Drum Dream Girl, and The Sky Painter. Engle’s latest story, Enchanted Air, Two Cultures Two Wings (Atheneum, August, 2015) is a verse memoir about her childhood visits to Cuba. Margarita was trained as a botanist and agronomist before becoming a full-time poet and novelist. She lives in central California, where she enjoys hiding in the wilderness to help train her husband’s search and rescue dogs.

Renée Kurilla is an illustrator of many books for kids including Berkley the Terrible Sleeper by Mitchell Sharmat. Before transitioning to a full-time freelance career, she spent 10 years drawing, animating, and designing at FableVision Studios. Renée lives in a little house just south of Boston with her husband, her fluffy cat Timmy, and a forest full of animals. She makes books and also co-blogs on Simply Messing About. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @reneekurilla.

pencilShelley Carpenter is TC’s reviews editor. Email: harpspeed[at]toasted-cheese.com

A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire

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Candle-Ends: Reviews
Erin Bellavia

bellavia

A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire

I reviewed Chimes at Midnight, the seventh volume of Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series, back in 2013. After I finished The Winter Long (Book 8 in the series) in the fall of 2014, I celebrated by starting over at the beginning and rereading Books 1–7 in the span of about two weeks. I know some people always reread a series when a new one is on the way, but I have never been one of them.

The Winter Long, though, was a game-changer. Almost everything we thought we knew about the events of Books 1–7 was turned on its head. And the reread revealed that Seanan knew exactly what she was doing the whole time.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Seanan McGuire is an evil genius. (Kidding. I knew Seanan was an evil genius a long time ago.)

In A Red-Rose Chain (DAW, September 1, 2015), Book 9 of the series, the pace isn’t quite as intense as it’s been in the previous two installments. The stakes, though, are as high as ever. It begins with the new Queen’s seneschal being elf-shot, which leads to Toby being sent to the neighboring Kingdom of Silences as a diplomat in order to avoid a war between the two kingdoms. Fans of the series will know that Toby and diplomat are probably not words that should appear in the same sentence.

Toby gathers her team of Tybalt, Quentin, May, and resident alchemist Walther and heads to Silences. The things Toby and company learn there reveal a much, much darker side of Faerie—one that’s certainly been alluded to in previous books. To their surprise, they find their old nemesis, the former Queen in the Mists, at the side of Silences’ King Rhys. I wouldn’t have previously thought this possible, but the false Queen’s evil is somewhat dimmed by Rhys. The pair prove to be a formidable enemy.

These books are always difficult to review without spoiling too much, but I’ve said before and I’ll say again: Seanan’s character development and world-building are top-notch. Toby’s relationship with Tybalt continues to delight. This book also includes an expanded role for Walther, along with some interesting and masterfully-handled reveals and character moments.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Toby story if the gang didn’t find themselves in some incredibly tight spots, and if Toby didn’t bleed a lot. (She does. A lot.) This installment is true-to-form in terms of adventure, if somewhat slower-paced than the previous ones, and some of the events have potentially far-reaching implications for the future of the series. Again, I don’t think fans will be disappointed.

A Red-Rose Chain is on shelves now. Once Broken Faith, Book 10, will be published in the fall of 2016.

*

Seanan McGuire wrote Finding Your Fairy Godmother: A Guide to Acquiring a Literary Agent for Absolute Blank in September 2009. We interviewed her alter-ego, Mira Grant, in April 2011. You can find her at Live Journal and on Twitter as herself and Mira Grant.

pencilEmail: billiard[at]toasted-cheese.com

Get on the Plane, Jane

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A Midsummer Tale ~ Third Place
Susan Shiney

Photo Credit: Guilherme Yagui/Flickr (CC-by)

Photo Credit: Guilherme Yagui/Flickr (CC-by)

Jane Shade floated on a turtle-shaped raft in her mother’s pool. The California sun attacked her pearl skin. She slipped her foot under the raft and flipped it over, sank to the bottom, sat cross-legged, and screamed.

Forty-eight hours earlier:

Jane woke up to the sounds of roosters hollering their dominance. She heard their wings flapping and feet shuffling right outside her window. The rooster’s crow was interrupted by the morning puja of her Hindu neighbors that rolled their tongues in a high-pitched “yay, yay, yay” chanting. Then, the morning call to prayer from the nearby mosque, the Imam took awhile to clear his throat on the microphone before serenading with an elongated “Allah Akbar”. The once-jarring sounds when she had first moved to Bangladesh had morphed over a year-and-a-half into the alarm clock of an adventurer.

Jane’s back wasn’t sore anymore from the wooden slab of a bed with a thin padding. She wasn’t surprised when the fan didn’t turn on, she knew electricity was a thing to savor, not expect. She waved at the two kids staring through the window at her, the strange-looking blonde and blue-eyed foreigner. The children screamed after they realized they had been caught and pushed hard at each other trying to be the first to run away. She put on her shalwar kameez, a dress, scarf, and cotton baggy pants outfit, which felt as normal as a T-shirt and jeans once had.

She walked to her middle school to teach English. Each class was filled with fifty students and it was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants atmosphere, the books were incorrect and by the time she quieted down the back of the classroom, the front was up in arms. It was like a seesaw she balanced for an hour, and then moved on to the next class. The students would leave notes on her desk thanking her, and hugged her often. At night she taught a college class she had developed on women’s topics, a way for women to discuss current events. She often left the class feeling guilty that she was taking more from the experience than her students.

After eating a Bengali meal with her neighbors that lavished her with kindness, she would fall asleep reading a book by candlelight. Every night she would wake up with a sudden jolt to blow out the candle.

This was life. This was normal. This was now over.

Her cell phone rang as she ate her Cornflakes.

“Hello?” she questioned, since Craig had never called her before.

“Jane, you need to grab a paper and pen.”

“What do you mean? Why?” She was shaken by the forcefulness of his voice.

“Just do it.”

She moved obediently.

“Got it. What’s going on?”

“Write this down. Due to safety and security measures…” Then he paused waiting for her squiggles of writing to stop.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“…Peace Corps is evacuating the country.”

She wrote it down and it wasn’t real until she saw the words reflected back at her. “Wait. What? We are leaving? When? We have eight months of service left. Was someone hurt? Is everyone all right?”

“Jane, I don’t know anything and I don’t have time to help you process. We have eight hours to pack and go to the capital. You are my second phone call; I have to get ready to leave, and then you have two more phone calls to make.”

“Holy shit.”

She made her two phone calls and was equally as cold and rushed, the reality kept setting in as it hit the others. She thought to herself, I have to pack, I have to say goodbye, what the hell am I going to do in the U.S. I don’t have any money. The eight-month cushion had given her enough time to push away the decisions she had been avoiding since she joined the Peace Corps. She had to actually figure out what to do with her life.

She went through her apartment and rapidly started making piles and filling the one bag she was allowed to bring. She stopped as her eyes rested on a postcard from her brother she had on the table—he was backpacking before starting college in the fall.

He wrote, “Hey Sis, Europe is awesome. Loving being away from Mom. She is not doing well with both of us being gone. Total empty nest syndrome. I had to get out of that house. Anyway, I am on a train to Germany now, Munich first, then off to Berlin. I promise not to get too drunk. Stay safe! Bill.”

“I’m going to the States.” She whispered as images of home flashed before her eyes. There was some excitement bubbling up about the luxuries of the U.S., the food, the comfort, the normalcy. She had pushed away thoughts of America for so long to stay strong. Endorphins began to spread and pulsed through her body, which powered her through the next eight hours of packing, sorting, phone calls, and crying farewells. She went on autopilot and everything started to blur together in a spinning motion.

In the capital. On a plane. Debrief presentations. Apologies for the lack of information they could give about the evacuation. A readjustment allowance check would be sent “soon” with the $250.00 per month earned for every month served. Hugs and tears with the other volunteers. Medical tests. Signatures on stacks of papers.

Nine-month application process. Eighteen months of service. Forty-eight hours and life had flopped on its head. Now she was staring at her childhood home in Southern California, noticing that the air tasted light with just a pinch of pollution. She was an alien life form dealing with a new atmosphere.

In that moment, she kept blinking her eyes wondering why the house she had always taken for granted seemed to have grown and swelled to its current size, covered in opulence. She felt like the house would swallow her up and wipe clean her experiences for the last couple of years.

“Aren’t you coming in? I have lunch all ready.” Cynthia, her mother said as she gathered Jane’s things and carried them into the house, her feminine muscles extending on her tall frame.

Jane didn’t rush to lift a finger.

She remembered a conversation with her mother, where she said “Mommy, I am a big girl, I can wipe my own bummy now.”

She took the toilet paper from her mom and pushed her out of the bathroom with all the force her six-year-old hands could muster.

Being a single parent for most of her life, Cynthia was used to doing everything. She was financially taken care of by her husband’s inheritance after he died. Without the need to work, her focus had always been her children.

Jane wanted to be in open spaces, she wished she could stay in a tent in the front yard.

Cynthia opened the door again. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.. Here I come.” She shook her hands trying to force out the anxiety, it didn’t work, and the cog in her neck twisted to the right and pulled in her shoulder tendons even more.

When she entered the house, her senses were in hyperdrive; her eyes darted around focusing in on the details. The doors fit perfectly into their frames. She was taken aback by the level of cleanliness in a house that had insulation and screens on the windows. In Bangladesh, you basically had to carry a broom everywhere you went. Without dirt, it felt so sterile, like a hospital.

The wooden floors were hypnotic; they caught the light in different places as she moved, and seemed to cater their form to her feet. Jane was used to cement that was cool and firm. She wondered if they had a butler, maids, and white chocolate fondue fountains that she had forgotten about.

“Did you remodel at all, while I was gone?”

“What are you talking about?” her mother said, and felt Jane’s forehead instinctively.

Jane moved around carefully inspecting the furniture and the walls like she was in a museum. She kept touching things. She was not sure where to sit.

Jane’s eyes widened the second she saw the dining table. It was covered in food: cheeseburgers, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, salad, broccoli covered in cheese, cheesecake, every favorite food she had ever had while growing up.

“This cannot be normal American portion sizes!” she yelled. She didn’t trust her memory anymore.

“What? I didn’t know what to make you, so I made everything I know you like.”

Her nose not processing the feast in the room disturbed Jane; open sewers in the streets, burning trash, and sweaty pre-teens that hadn’t had the deodorant talk yet had dulled her sense of smell.

Jane wasn’t hungry but she felt the pressure to eat. Feeling her mother’s deep need for approval, she said, “This looks amazing, very thoughtful of you, thank you.”

Three days passed in a haze of eating, sleeping, and watching really bad television. When she woke up on the fourth day, boredom set in. She gave herself a once over and imagined her body bulging at her thighs, hips, belly, and upper arms. She could hear the forklift beeping as it lifted her up off the couch. “I have got to get out of this place.”

She decided it was time to call her best friend, Nia Lascaux. Nia was the kind of friend that made sure boys always asked Jane to dance at parties, used her social capital to squash rumors before they spread in high school, and drove seven hours across California to help her decorate her dorm room. She was also the only one to follow through with their promises of sending care packages to her with all sorts of American treasures.

Jane had wanted to call her sooner, but she didn’t want to hear, “What are you going to do now?”

Jane rested on her bed and let her eyes scan her walls. She had ribbons and awards from all her accomplishments laughing at her. Now she was a couch potato, no idea of the next step. Her work was her identity; now she was a lump in her mother’s house at twenty-three years old, already a failure.

Nia answered on the second ring.

“Hi. So happy to hear from you! How are you adjusting? What are your plans? Are you staying in California?” Nia’s high-spirited tone grated on Jane’s nerves.

“I don’t know. I feel like the rug has been pulled out on my life. It was so hard carving a routine there, I had just figured it out,” she said, as she hunched over.

On the following Saturday morning, Nia came over, her silky black hair running down her cute top and her green eyes glowing as she entered the living room and saw Jane in her sweatpants engulfed by the couch.

“Ok. It is time to get out of here, let’s get dressed.”

Nia pushed her out the door and they went to their favorite Japanese restaurant. As they drove, Jane stared out the window and had this sensation of a ghost town. It looked like humans had dominated every square inch of land with concrete and asphalt, only occasionally allowing a plastic-looking palm tree to grow and highlight the parking of the sea of mini-malls. Bangladesh is one of the most populated countries in the world. It was like a cushion of people at all times, rotating conversations, people huddled in circles, everyone waving and using their hands to communicate. Here in Fullerton, California it felt so desolate and lonely. A town sprouted in the shadow of nearby Disneyland. People walked by each other on the streets and were ignored. There was no sense of community. They looked afraid of each other, taking special attention to not cross paths or make eye contact. It was hard to believe they were so close to the happiest place on Earth.

“I can’t believe I missed your wedding. Where did you guys go for your honeymoon? I remember you saying something about Hawaii.” It hurt Jane to miss the wedding; she couldn’t believe Nia was getting married so young, but kept that opinion to herself.

“I wanted to go, but Dean hates traveling, we went to Santa Barbara for the weekend.”

“How is married life treating you?”

“It is great. Dean and I are so happy. Everything is getting comfortable now, that first year was rough as we learned to live together and compromise about everything. What about you? What happened to that guy you were seeing?”

Jane hated that this was where the conversation had gone so quickly.

“It didn’t work out. We weren’t serious or anything. It was too exhausting having to be so careful about being alone with a man in my apartment. I didn’t want it to be a scandal.”

“We need to get you dating.”

A pin-like pain erupted in Jane’s side. Like she was saying they needed to get her a new arm, a body part was missing from her because she didn’t have a boyfriend. She hesitated for fear of conflict with Nia, and then pushed herself. “Why do you think I need a boyfriend?”

“Not a boyfriend, dating, it will get you back in the game. It is a muscle, you need to work out your dating skills.”

“I need to find a job. It has been two weeks, I am just wasting my time.”

“Are you thinking about teaching here?”

“I can’t. I don’t have any official certifications. I don’t even know that what I did there counts for anything here.”

“You need to get settled, want me to help you set up a profile online? We can do it now on my phone.”

No, Jane thought. That is the last thing she wanted to deal with. She looked at her friend and said, “Sure. What picture should I use?”

Nia set up five dates for her over the next couple of weeks. It gave her something to do. She pushed for coffee dates, much easier to get away from in case it didn’t work out and cheap.

Her first date was at the café in downtown. She texted that she was there and saw a hand go up. He was a fair-looking, slightly pudgy man with glasses and gelled up hair. He was wearing a crisp superman blue-and-red shirt with jeans. Nothing, not a spark, Jane thought. She was relieved so she could be more comfortable talking with him without worrying about impressing him.

“Hi. I’m Topher. Nice to meet you.”

Jane noticed Topher had a comfort in himself, strong eye contact, firm handshake, and he sat up straight.

Topher had always lived in Southern California and was working the same job he had had since high school as a grocery shop cashier.

“The pay is so good with the unions. I don’t want to leave.”

“Do you like it?” Jane heard the judgment in her voice and winced.

He looked perplexed by the question as if that was something that had nothing to do with making a living. “I guess. It pays the bills.” He laughed and shrugged; there was lightness to his manner.

“Do you think you will be a lifer there?”

“I don’t know. Should I really have that figured out right now? I am only twenty-three. I got my degree in Communications, so it is open for me to do something else. I’m young, life is short, and the present is good.”

Topher started to let his gaze drift around the café, and sat further back in his chair. Jane noticed and didn’t care. Everyone had grilled her. Let someone else share in her turmoil over the future. His lack of worry was pissing her off. Why was he exempt from the pressures of the world?

There was a silence hanging loudly between them. Jane had to break it. “It kills me that I don’t know what my path is.”

“What are you doing now?” Topher asked, half-interested.

“I just came back from teaching English as a volunteer in Bangladesh.”

Topher looked like he had been shot with a stun gun, as if she had said she had studied to be an astronaut in Texas or single-handedly created a vaccine for some unknown disease.

Eventually he cleared his throat and said, “What was that like?” He seemed impressed and annoyed at the same time.

She stared at him blankly with images of starving children, people yellowed with jaundice, rice paddy fields, and bamboo huts flashing in her mind. This was the first time she had spoken with someone who hadn’t read her email tirades for the last two years. She wished she had a book written on her experience, so she could slam it on the table: “It’s better if you just read the book.”

“It was amazing. It was hard. It is a traditional Muslim country and that brought a lot of challenges. The pace of life was so much slower. I have never been so aware of what it means to be a woman.” She looked up to his completely glazed-over eyes. This was one of the few things Peace Corps had warned them about coming home, the inability for others to stay interested in listening about their travels. The people back home tended to squirm in their chairs like kindergartners. She fought the urge to slap their wrists with rulers and yell, “Pay attention!”

After several awkward pauses one longer than the next, Topher looked at his watch and said, “Well, hey, I have a friend I need to meet up with, it was nice meeting you.” He gave her a couple pats on the back as he left.

Jane sat at the café for two more hours, staring out the window ruminating in her thoughts. She hadn’t gotten good blank, gadget-free thinking time since being home. It felt marvelous.

Two weeks later, Jane was sitting and fighting with her interview clothes that she bought in a thrift store. She felt the impulse to stretch her sleeves, like her suit was condensing a size with every breath she took. Although the Muslim costume seemed inhibiting, you had to hand it over to them for figuring out comfort. She missed the light fabric. She felt like an imposter in a suit.

She chose to apply to this job because it was closest to the beach. The beach was an hour’s drive from her mother’s house and the one thing Jane loved about Southern California. Huntington Beach had waves perfect for body surfing, an ocean floor that didn’t have rocks or muddy spots, and a coast large enough that you could find a solitary spot easily. She did a geographical search and applied to every entry-level job she could find. Let the universe choose her path by whoever called her back.

She waited to speak with the Investment Sales Representative about the secretary position.

Jane was lost in a daydream of herself filing papers in a zen-like fashion when her interviewer entered and filled the room with his personality. This was the man that talked you into investing everything you had. Tristan Mackenzie, Esquire had slicked black hair, an expensive fitted suit and shiny cufflinks.

Jane was thinking of her last interview for a volunteer position in San Francisco.

She was so shaken and awkward the interviewer interrupted her mid-sentence, put her hand on her shoulder and said, “You are doing great, honey.”

She felt the difference her time in Asia had imprinted on her. She could handle the interview for a mindless job near the beach. That power had been earned.

Tristan asked questions with general introductions and she robotically answered, verifying and expanding on her experience. While she looked around his office of various monetary trinkets, expensive furniture, pictures on his desk of yachts and cars, Jane thought to herself, I could have his job. But did she want it? She sat up straighter and felt the power surge from her spine.

“Tell me how you handled a difficult situation.”

“While living with my host family I visited a leprosy hospital in the village and had dinner with some foreigners. I came home after dark and my whole host family was livid, my host sisters red-faced from tears. They screamed at me that the Taliban was in that village. It took me two weeks to mend the relations with them. A couple weeks later I moved out because of the pressure they gave me on knowing where I was at all times, but I still kept a good relationship with them because those connections are what keep you safe. When I was out past dark after that I used a rickshaw driver I knew, and made friends at checkpoints along the road and made sure everyone could see me say ‘hello’ each time I passed. They were my guardian angels. I never felt safe, but I knew how to appear safe and adapt to life there.”

Tristan just looked at her with his mouth open and seemed impressed for the rest of the interview.

Cynthia Shade was waiting outside. Jane felt her erect posture wilt as she greeted her mom.

The next day, she got a phone call from Tristan letting her know she got the job. The excitement was followed by a hollow pit of dread in Jane’s belly. She was already mourning the loss of her couch time. That was the crappy thing about jobs, you had to actually work.

Job, near the beach, that was the aim. Her first couple days on the job were exciting with being trained and learning the ropes. The fourth day she had everything down and stared at the clock for eight hours. Time hadn’t moved that slow since the power would go out and she would watch bugs fly in the puddles of sweat her body formed. She would will those fans to come back on focusing her attention on the blades, she would say, “You will move”.

After enduring a long bus ride home from work, she sat down at the computer to check her email. She still admired the lighting speed of the Internet connection in the U.S. She opened the email browser to a new email and a surge of fireworks began at her toes and exploded in her ears. With her heart pumping she clicked on the email with the subject line: Teaching Job in Bangkok.

She realized she could keep molding back into the American cookie-cutter life or jump out of the oven before her body hardened. She was going through the motions and had a strong sense of wasting time. She didn’t know what direction to choose, but living in California felt like a derailment.

Six weeks of turmoil and in three seconds she knew the next step.

The following morning Nia and Jane had plans to spend the day together. Jane decided to tell Nia first, to practice for the discussion with her mom.

Jane and Nia were sitting by the pool with their feet dangling at the surface. It was all Jane could think about, so she just blurted it out. “I’m going to take a teaching job in Thailand.”

“What? When did this happen?”

“I got the email last night. One of my friends from Peace Corps is teaching there and they are looking for another teacher.”

“So you don’t even have the job yet.” Nia’s shoulders moved closer to her ears as she spoke.

“If I don’t get that job, I will get another job there. It turns out there are a lot of job opportunities in Bangkok. I was up all night doing research.”

“Why don’t you go back to Bangladesh, then.”

“The political situation is all messed up, that is why we were evacuated in the first place. When I joined the Peace Corps, I was hoping they would send me to Thailand.”

Nia crinkled her forehead and said, “You don’t have the money for that. You just got home and I know it is difficult for you, but even when you come back from Thailand you will have to adjust back to life in the U.S. then, too.” You could see the anger in Nia’s face rise up like a thermometer. “How are you going to settle down with a guy if you are moving all over the place. We planned to have kids together.”

This set off a fire in Jane. “In the fifth grade we talked about that. I don’t even know if I want kids at all, what is with you. I’m not like you. You are tied down by your marriage, I don’t want to compromise, I want to do whatever I want, whenever I want.” She felt empowered and light from finally being honest with her friend.

Nia moved backward as if she had been hit. “I am free to do whatever I want.”

“Why don’t you travel?” Jane blurted out without thinking.

“That is the normal childhood dream, as an adult I feel like I need to have responsibilities. You are just running away because you don’t know what you want to do with your life. I can’t just throw money away like you do.” Nia started kicking the water in frustration.

“I feel it in my bones. I need to go to Thailand.”

They heard a slam on the table behind them; they turned around and saw Cynthia with a platter of snacks spread out across the table and her eyes ablaze.

Nia and Jane both jumped up away from the pool.

“Running to Thailand?” Cynthia said this through clamped-down teeth, like her jaw had been wired shut.

“Mom, why don’t you sit down.”

“Are you leaving me again? You are finally safe now. You had to leave the country because people wanted to hurt the volunteers.” Her voice cracked as she spoke.

“Mom, you know this isn’t working out for me. I am unhappy. I am not done living abroad yet.”

“I have done nothing but take care of you for the last couple of weeks, I gave you whatever you wanted. This is how you repay me?”

“I didn’t ask for all of this. A random political group was throwing around threats, my volunteer program closed, and I was just thrown here.”

Her mom starts wailing. “I’m sorry that I make you so miserable.”

Jane could see what was happening, her mother was trying to be her puppet master and Jane was ready to cut the strings.

“I love you both, but I need to be me and make myself happy.” She left the two of them staring at the pool and went for a walk around the park, her victory lap.

After two weeks of silent treatment and awkward conversations with Nia and her mom, Jane’s readjustment allowance arrived in the mail, two-thousand-and-five-hundred beautiful pieces of freedom. She got the job in Thailand and sent all of her immigration paperwork into the consulate. She bought her ticket for Bangkok that day.

Jane purchased an open-ended ticket for Nia and put it in an envelope and shoved it under her best friend’s door. Hopefully, she would come visit Bangkok in the next year. She wanted Nia to realize her lack of traveling was not a financial issue, but her fear of the unknown.

Jane also grabbed a class catalog from the local community college and highlighted some classes for her mother to consider in the fall. The Post-it note on the front read, “You are an excellent caretaker, I think you could really help people, use your time now to go back to school like you have always dreamed of. I know you will make a phenomenal nurse. Thank you for everything. I love you so much.” She put all of the completed registration forms inside the catalog.

She took her luggage and left without saying goodbye. She didn’t want to help other people deal with her leaving, that was for them to figure out.

Twelve hours later, her plane touched the beautiful land of Siam. The nuns from the Catholic school were waiting for her at the airport. They were two tiny elderly women dressed in all-white. They were shy and kept smiling. They bowed and greeted her with a “Sawat dee ka.”

Jane bowed back and said, “Sawat dee ka.” The first Thai words out of her mouth tasted good.

On the drive to the private condo, they passed massive Buddhist temples covered in gold, red, and green tiles. Jane couldn’t stop taking pictures. She knew the tourist feeling would wear off quickly.

When they arrived at her apartment, Jane face was already sore from smiling. The nuns showed her to her room. They had filled her fridge with groceries and showed her how to use the cable TV. It was a small studio apartment and she did three circles with her arms spread out and her feet kicking behind her. It was her space.

Another foreign teacher came in to introduce herself. She had just arrived a month ago from Nebraska.

“Do you know how long you are going to stay here?” Omaha-girl said as she moved to the window to check out Jane’s view of the lake.

Jane spread herself out over her new bed and flayed out her arms and legs as if she were trying to make an angel in snow.

“No idea,” she said, and then laughed. Everything felt open and possible.

“I haven’t done much teaching before. I think I want to be a teacher when I go back to Nebraska. What about you, is education your career?”

“Maybe.” And for the first time, not knowing felt like freedom and not a prison.

pencilSusan Shiney is a writer, painter, and teacher living outside of Bordeaux, France. She received her Masters in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is originally from California and frequently misses the incredible weather. She has taught English in Bangladesh, Thailand, New York City, and now France. She loves learning languages, but hates having to speak them. Email: susanshiney[at]gmail.com

Blue Door, Dry Spell, Sinking Elliott

Posted on by

A Midsummer Tale ~ Second Place
Anais Jay

Photo Credit: Mike Bitzenhofer/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

Photo Credit: Mike Bitzenhofer/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

Elliott was talking to her over the phone when that happened in the province. He supposed this fact made meeting with her in person a necessity. She needed an explanation. Soon after his summer trip ended, they agreed to meet in Makati City.

Natasha’s now-red hair fell over her shoulder in a loose braid. Any other day, he’d have joked about how the color made the freckles scattered across her face look like a side-effect of an allergy. He smiled at her instead, knowing this was not a good time to pretend she wasn’t scowling at him. “They’re not handing Nicky over to me,” he said. “Not yet. Or maybe never. But Nicky told me he’d like to stay with me until college.”

She leaned over the table. “Elli, you may be great with caring for spoiled children—“

“You weren’t spoiled, Nash,” he said.” You were bossy. Rich kids are prone to be bossy by nature. And you’re not bossy now anyway.”

“So you’re saying I dropped the attitude because I became broke?”

“Nash.”

“I was bitchy at twelve, admit it. And any sane eighteen-year-old would’ve dropped me off in the middle of nowhere to go make out with his girlfriend,” she said. “Dad would’ve believed you had you told him I ran away. The guy trusts you. But you didn’t drop me off in the middle of nowhere. And now you want to be Nicky’s legal guardian? I was like that because I was ignorant. He’s like that because he’s in pain. He’s way worse than I was. I see it in your face every time you mention his name.”

*

He’d heard stories from his cousins, but the enormity of the responsibility hadn’t occurred to him until he came by the house to fetch Nicky. The end of March, hot enough to scald his lungs with each inhale, only signaled the start of the Philippines’ hottest summer. Worries about heatstroke and insufficient ventilation in both private and public schools forced the Department of Education to end the school year one week early. This, for Elliott, meant begging his boss to transfer his leave to an earlier date.

He sat slouched on the torn couch, listening to his elder cousins gasp and make exaggerated remarks on their experiences with Nicky. The three dysfunctional electric fans, accompanied by the heat and the house’s claustrophobic ambiance, amplified his escalating horror of spending a two-week vacation with Nicky.

Apparently, the ten-year-old boy couldn’t last a day without making one person cry. This talent of his knew no age limit. Both adult and toddler fell for his defiant attitude, which he defended was his innocent attempt at making friends. Based on the stories Elliot heard in the past two hours and sixteen minutes, though, Nicky was more likely making enemies.

Elliott’s cousins, however, couldn’t give him up to social services. Their financial troubles certainly called for it, but they loved Nicky’s parents too much to be so cruel. Besides, he suspected they enjoyed the financial support all their relatives sent them for Nicky’s sake.
As they were complaining about Elliott’s infrequent visits to their nephew, their uncle’s pick-up truck pulled up in front of the house. He stood to help, but the eldest of his cousins told him to stay put. “This is routine,” she told him while fanning herself with a dog-eared bridal magazine. “It’s simply one of the many things guardians have to cope with. I can’t believe Uncle Jackie is taking him away from us to shove into your arms! You’re only twenty-seven!”

Defending his maturity made him worry of sounding like Natasha, so he merely returned to his spot on the couch and answered with a smile. With all their complaining he was surprised they weren’t treating him like a savior.

“I’m home!” The crutch tips entered the house first, then his braced leg, followed by the rest of Nicky. “Uncle Elliott! Tang ina! Am I leaving today?”

“Excited?” he asked.

“Hell yeah!” He grinned at his aunts. “Finally!”

Uncle Jackie put a stop to the brewing commotion simply by entering the house, leaning against the front door, and lighting his cigarette. From the angry aunts to Nicky, his gaze travelled to Elliott’s face and rested there. His tired eyes reminded Elliott of bad days. “Clean up well at his parents’ house, will ya?”

After much reprimanding and chaotic packing, Elliot managed to place Nicky in his car and drive towards Batangas. Remembering the energetic waving of his cousin’s hands as they said their goodbyes made him smile as he glimpsed Nicky from the rearview mirror. He’d never know for sure whether they wanted this kid or not.

Nicky maxed the air conditioning system and lounged on the backseat. “When are you adopting me, Uncle Elli?”

“I’m not really adopting you, kid. Your aunts and uncles—the good ones—simply want to transfer you to my care.”

“The good side of the family.” He pressed the flat of his good foot against the window. “Why?”

“They want you to stay with someone you like. Please put your foot down.”

He didn’t. “I like you?”

His high-pitched voice made Elliott laugh in spite of the traffic in Edsa. “They assumed that’s the case. That isn’t the case?”

“That isn’t the case,” he said. “You didn’t even attend my birthday party. I was stuck with stupid children my age and adults who don’t really care about me. Where were you?”

His girlfriend had phoned him that day to take her to the hospital. It wasn’t spotting, she insisted. She was having a miscarriage. Of course, he couldn’t tell that to a child. He had no choice but to lie. Perhaps this was the perfect opportunity to punish his boss.

One question rolled in after another. What was the name of his boss? What did he even do for a living? Sell cars? Did that mean he had twenty cars of his own? If so, he’d like to live with Elliott. How about Elliott’s girlfriend? He had one, didn’t he? A single drive to the province gave him sufficient time to retell his life story, excluding private matters like his car accident at eighteen years old, his girlfriend’s personal dilemma, and even Natasha. For some reason, mentioning her to anybody made him feel as though he was acknowledging a part of his life he’d rather keep to himself.

The sound of rain against the car revived his awareness. The sky had switched from solid blue to a mix of pink and orange. Low, grey clouds swept in to blur the dividing line between day and night. The car traversed the narrow and muddy road to Nicky’s old house. The silhouettes of trees lining their path appeared to bend low in acknowledgement of Nicky’s return. The swaying electrical lines and continual flashes of light from nearby houses seemed to do the same for him.

As the house’s caretaker—an old man covered in a neon pink raincoat that obviously belonged to his daughter—dragged the bamboo gates inwards to let them through, Elliott held the steering wheel still for a moment to glimpse Nicky. The boy had fallen asleep and was now drooling on the seat cushion.

Elliott told him what a damn lucky boy he was.

Nicky opened one eye and then the other. “Do I look funny, Uncle Elli?”

“That brave face? Funny? Of course not!”

“Why are you smiling like that?”

“You just remind me of someone.”

*

That someone. He’d only seen Natasha once after their first encounter, at a restaurant while he was having lunch out with his colleagues near her college. She’d been with three other girls on a queue to the right of his queue, and just as they had the first time they met after eight years, they caught each other’s eye and Elliott approached her.

They might’ve exchanged numbers afterwards in a promise to keep in touch, but neither had sent the other a message in the months succeeding their second encounter. He supposed that was why he hesitated before answering her call while he and Nicky were having lunch of salted eggs, tomatoes, barbeque, and rice.

Elliott licked his fingers clean and debated whether or not he should risk staining his new phone. He put the call on loudspeaker. Nicky simply looked at him over his food, waiting for the caller to speak.

“Elliott,” she said. “Lukas is planning to buy a car and I told him I’ll ask your opinion.”

The lack of polite but awkward greetings took him aback for a moment. “Men who say they’ll buy a car are usually sure of what they want. Unless, of course, it’s a family car. Then yes, he’ll need expert advice.”

There was a hissing on her end. “Your jokes, they’re—how should I say it without hinting how much I want to chase you with a sharp object?”

Elliott laughed for Nicky’s sake. The boy had been somber since waking up in his hometown. One of them needed to act normal. “Romantic?” he said.

“Where are you?”

“You’re not serious, are you?”

“I’m serious about asking your opinion on cars. My boyfriend is an impulsive buyer.”

“We can talk about it over the phone. My hands are tied right now. Chaperoning my nephew—just to be clear. You’re on loudspeaker.”

“Where in the world are you chaperoning?”

“Batangas. The sea is a fantastic view in the morning,” he said, wiping his hands on his wet swimming trunks and putting the phone next to his ear. “Is everything okay with you?”

Her voice muffled and disappeared as the call got disconnected altogether. A local fishing boat appeared from the sea’s horizon, stealing Nicky’s attention. The laughter of children with sandy hair and deep brown skin echoed from the shore in front of a green-fenced property owned by a politician. The squawk of a bird and the shifting of the floating hut as it rode the waves reminded him this wasn’t the best place to hold phone conversations.

*

After their conversation earlier that day, he realized his father wasn’t lying when he said real friendships didn’t rust in the face of time and distance. That he’d experience such friendship with the girl who used to be only as tall as his elbow was beyond him. It seemed the years, combined with their current financial equality, made it easier to relate to one other.

Perhaps it was too obvious that he was thinking about her, because the soonest he and Nicky finished shopping (or he finished shopping while Nicky sat with the house’s caretaker in his vegetable stall) in the dry market and buckled themselves in the car, Nicky said, “Her voice is like mom’s.”

“You leg hurts?” He lowered the radio to hear him above Up Dharma Down’s “Oo.” “Stop scratching under the splint. It’ll—“

“I said ‘her voice is like mom’s!’”

Elliott gawked at him while he tried to recall which among the many women they encountered that day he was talking about. Exposure to eccentric phrases such as ‘anla pa’ and ‘ano ga’ also made it more difficult to put names on faces.

Nicky hit the back of the driver’s seat. “The woman on the phone!”

“Natasha?”

“Mom’s voice was like that,” he said, suddenly solemn. “Quiet. And kinda hoarse. Just like your friend’s.”

“Yeah. Now that I think about it, your mom’s always been softspoken.” He reclined the driver’s seat and stretched his arms overhead, tired from lifting heavy bags of groceries. Turning, he saw Nicky watching him. ”Hey, you’ve been a little down since we arrived at Matabungkay. Are you sure you’re all right with being back in your old house and packing your parents’ stuff? Just tell me and I’ll take care of it on my own for you.”

“I’m okay.” He shrugged. “I guess I’ve got to give them their stuff when they’re back, right? But I don’t understand why Dad’s selling our house. Where will we stay when Dad’s back from Kuwait and Mom’s back from London?”

“…we’ll have to think about that when they’re here, won’t we?”

“Does Dad even know you’re going to be, like, my new father?”

Elliott’s lack of response prompted him to continue.

“Because if he doesn’t, we have to tell him. I don’t care if he’s busy with his other family. So does Mom. She has to know I’m transferring to another relative again.”

Elliott wondered if Nicky’s parents even cared to know. Theirs was a classic case of abandonment. No warnings, no explanations. They simply transferred money to Uncle Jackie’s bank account and gave him instructions to care for their son.

The month prior to vacation, he and Elliott had stayed up late drinking beer and discussing Nicky’s situation. Uncle Jackie admitted he tried to stop them—sterner on Maria than Romeo—from working abroad. He was sure they were simply looking for a way to escape the mistake of their youth and the resulting obligation that bound them for years.

“That’s a good thought,” Elliott said. “I’ll give them a call once we return to the city. Sounds good?”

“That’s good enough. Now let’s go home fast. I’m starving. Cook a delicious dinner for me, okay?”

He set up the living room and prepared the couch for Nicky before heading to the kitchen. Nicky’s cast was due to be removed in five weeks, but he didn’t like to take chances. He plugged in one of Andrew E.’s movies and annoyed Nicky when he blocked the television while slipping pillows underneath his broken leg. Amidst Nicky’s complaints, Elliott reminded him to take plenty of rest and to call him for anything he may need. The boy, eyes suddenly wet, grimaced and muttered, “Fine.”

Elliott experienced his first nightmare that night.

*

Natasha returned to the armchair across from him and slipped her phone into her pocket. Curling on the chair, she pulled the cuffs of her knitted sweatshirt over her hands and motioned to his coffee. “Two things: don’t waste my money, and that’s good coffee.”

“Sorry.” He took a sip, noting how he distorted the coffee art of a bicycle in the process, and transferred his gaze to the downpour outside. It was a storm similar to this one that reunited them eight months ago. “We have a thing for storms, don’t we?”

“You’re only catching up on it now?”

“I’m guessing by your frown that your conversation with Lukas didn’t end well.”

“It did,” she said. “Doesn’t give me enough reason to be happy, though. Anyway, what were you telling me about that nightmare?”

He refrained from asking her if she was okay and instead followed her lead. “Logically, it wasn’t a nightmare.”

Natasha drank her coffee and switched to water. “Why’d you call it a nightmare?”

“I suppose it scared me enough to deserve to be called a nightmare.”

“Did you dream about having ten children, all of whom were crying in one nursery while a woman who’s supposed to be your wife is giving birth to twins?”

“Family jokes, huh?”

“Family jokes,” she said with a smirk, proud of herself. “C’mon, spit it out already.”

Elliot turned his hands palm-up and leaned back on the armchair. “It was just about me walking in this building that I know—for some strange reason—I built. The corridors are carpeted and the end of the hall has this boring square window. Fish paper instead of glass. Very traditional-looking. And the doors are blue with peepholes and silver three-digit numbers on them. And while I was passing by, I was memorizing who lived in which room. Relatives. Friends. But there’s this room at the end that doesn’t have a number or… an owner. A tenant. Whatever that person should be. I woke up parched and just feeling dry and stiff but at the same time like I was sinking in some part of the sea. I thought maybe I took warnings against the summer heat too lightly. But that was my only available time for Nicky and we had to sort his parents’ stuff. I thought of too many things at once. I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

Natasha held the rim of her cup against her lower lip. “That’s a… cute nightmare. Blue door, dry spell, sinking Elliott? Maybe it will help to pinpoint which part really got to you?”

“I thought it was just the effect of leaving the city. But I wasn’t convinced. That’s why it’s frightening,” he said, rather loudly. “Because I can’t pinpoint which part of it frightens me.”

*

If he were to guess, though, what frightened him most was its effect on him.

Their itinerary for their second day consisted of eating nothing but grilled meat, and listening to Nicky’s playlist of strictly screamo songs while they sorted out his parents’ belongings. Uncle Jackie planned to sell the furniture along with the house, which narrowed their task to exploring closets and drawers for private possessions.

The first closet they opened contained Maria’s clothes. The dust made him turn away to sneeze. He wanted to leave Maria’s things for last, but Nicky eyed the dresses with such longing that he couldn’t close the closet on his face.

He helped Nicky sit on the bed. “Your mom’s my best cousin—” tugging the dresses free from the hangers and piling them on his left arm. “—she stormed into my house the second she found out my mom left me and my father, and she embraced me and cried. Until now I can’t understand why your mother was so sad. So I cried with her, because I thought it must’ve been that bad that my cousin had to cry for what happened to me and Pops—my dad. I call him Pops.”

“Pops? That’s lame.”

“It’s cool.”

“It makes you sound sentimental. Like a girl kind of sentimental.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s my way of showing Pops that I love him.”
Nicky folded the dresses Elliott put beside him. The boy’s sullen expression made him regret ever mentioning anything about his parents. Elliott unzipped a brown travel bag and dropped some of the folded clothes inside. “Did your aunts teach you to fold clothes? You’re pretty good at that.”

“Uncle Elli, why’d your mother leave you?”

“She and Pops didn’t get along well. The one wanted adventure, the other wanted stability.”

“Which one stayed with you?”

“Stability did,” he said. “Pops did.”

“Neither stayed with me.”

He tossed a dress to Nicky’s face. “We stayed with you. Your aunts, uncles, and cousins.”

“But that doesn’t change a thing,” he said, head bowed and fingers fumbling the buttons of a polka-dot dress. “Everybody’s been avoiding talking about her since she left me. And I really miss her.”

“Why didn’t you say so much earlier?”

Nicky blinked at him, looking torn between throwing a fit and crying.

Elliott chuckled and ruffled his hair. “I spent a lot of time with her as a child. I have plenty to tell you.”

They spent the entire afternoon going from room to room, opening drawers and packing clothes left in termite-infested closets while sharing what they remembered of Nicky’s parents. Cruel as Maria and Romeo had been to Nicky, Elliott felt the need to give him something to hold onto while he was young. The years would smear their distant images, similar to the way the image of Elliott’s mother had smeared in his memories. The lack of talk and photographs did nothing to help the rising ache of Elliott’s curiosity. Or was it the pang of betrayal that hurt him? Because he remembered Maria but couldn’t even tell if his own mother had straight or curly hair.

The second nightmare happened that night. He’d been lucky not to have hit Nicky when he jolted, especially because the boy had been curled up next to him on the bed. The banging of the balcony’s wooden sliding doors worsened his headache, so he decided to leave them open wide enough to lessen the noise.

The moon glowed faintly behind the clouds. The crash of each wave intensified the pulsating in his temples, and the whisper of the water’s retreat lugged with it his calm. Elliott closed his eyes and tried to overpower his panic with the sound of traffic—of cars zooming past the street below his apartment—and of footsteps and keys echoing in the corridor. But the province’s silence blocked the formation of these familiar images and sounds. It kept dragging him back to his dream, where this time he was standing in front of the vacant room’s door, knocking, expecting the nobody that was somebody to answer.

He didn’t start calling people until the following morning, when he and Nicky were back on the floating hut. Elliott had covered Nicky’s cast with two plastic bags and brought pillows to let the boy rest on the built-in wooden bench.

A hut owned by a family of eight floated past theirs. They waved and offered plates of liempo, paella, and sinigang. Elliott traded their packed lunch of menudo and grilled chicken and shared a bottle of beer with the older men in the family.

They asked about Nicky, who chose to hide his face in a book about school jokes, and kept his cast propped on pillows. With the chances of him interacting with strangers being slim, Elliott made up an excuse to push their hut back to shore and return home earlier than planned. The last thing he wanted was to divulge strangers with confidences. He knew how awkward it could get when people questioned the absence of a parent or—in Nicky’s case—parents. Just the idea of putting logic in abandonment was suffocating.

*

He felt outright suffocated by the time he was watching an animated series with Nicky. He excused himself and dialed his father’s number first. The conversation was brief: how are you? How are you coping with Nicky? To his father, he asked if the family he was driving for treated him kindly. Somewhere between comparing the families Pops had drive for in his life, they segued to Natasha’s family. That was when Elliott admitted to having encountered Natasha late the previous year. He hadn’t asked about Natasha’s father, Sir Edgar, but he promised to ask for Pop’s sake. Pops loved Sir Edgar like a brother. Elliott felt guilty for telling him about Natasha without news of Sir Edgar.

He scrolled down his phone’s contact records. Next he called Jake, his college friend. They discussed Elliott’s decision to resign from work and take the bar exam. “Get a license. You’d be better of working as an engineer than a car dealer. Everybody knows you’ve been unhappy with it for a while. Although, they do remember to mention you’re good at hiding it. Which is bullshit, because it’s not a compliment, Elli, it’s an insult.”

Much contemplation and sweating came with the effort to call Adrienne two days later. She answered the call on the last ring and said, “Yes?” Elliott made a final attempt to change her mind about their cool off. No, he didn’t mind that she had had a miscarriage. He didn’t mind that she cheated on him while she was on a business trip in Hong Kong. It hadn’t even occurred to him to ask if the baby was even his. He kept on repeating that he understood. He swore he did. Adrienne ended their argument with a request he’d heard before: leave me alone.

*

They spent their first two weeks there maintaining this routine. They got up at ten in the morning, settled in their floating hut, ate brunch of salted eggs, grilled meat, and fruits, and read books until one in the afternoon. Before pulling the floating hut back to shore, Elliott would swim to the coral reef to take in the view of the rest of the sea, and swim back to carry Nicky home.

Both naturally tan, they weren’t surprised when they took a picture to send Uncle Jackie and received a comment an hour later that they’d both gotten so much darker they could be mistaken for charcoal. He and Nicky laughed at each other’s sunburnt faces afterwards, having failed to notice this change for themselves due to their preoccupation with the paperbacks Nicky’s parents left behind.

Elliott took this opportunity to ask Nicky why he preferred to spend his summer this way.. Nicky merely picked his nose with a scowl, moving his pinky finger as though picking through his brain, and answered that his parents always spent summers doing the same thing day after day. “It’s never been exciting living with them, so I guess that’s why they wanted to start a new life somewhere. Can people just do that, Elliott? Will you ever do that to someone?”

He smiled at him and asked what he wanted to do for the remainder of the summer. “You’ll get bored, eventually, and we still have two more weeks to go.”

“Eh? I thought you had to get back to work soon?”

“Nah. I like it here. And this will be our last chance to enjoy this place before it gets sold.”

*

He called Natasha at sundown. While he listened to the endless ringing, he closed his eyes to push back his nausea. Last night’s nightmare progressed to the point that the blue door of the vacant room had parted, and he’d seen there was a nobody inside.

Natasha greeted him with a story of how her illustration for a children’s book won an award at her college. The prize money was five digits. She’d have enough to pay her electric bill. Elliott congratulated her and expressed his amusement at problems he never thought she’d have. Somewhere between cutting her short to tell her about his mother and her inquiries about his aloofness, the image of the sky and the sea before him blended and turned into night.

*

“Nicky saw me collapse. He tripped a number of times on his way to the caretaker’s cottage to get help, which got the both of us hospitalized for two days. Uncle Jackie and Pops weren’t happy about it—who would be? Nicky and I were like helpless children.” He lowered his cup of coffee as he laughed at the memory of them in the hospital. “Nicky’s broken leg got worse. He blamed me and we got into a fight and I made him cry. Imagine me making a ten-year-old boy cry! I surprised even myself! Doctor said I was fatigued and stressed. Pops thought it was heat stroke. I was lucky I only had a rat-shaped bruise on my upper right shoulder from colliding with a chair. I realized if I hadn’t hit the chair, I could’ve cracked my skull on the edge of the nearby table instead. It was a blessing in disguise. Gave me a good reason to slack off my responsibilities, too, and spend the rest of April idling on the beach. One time, Nicky actually thanked me for just fainting. He ran because he thought I was dying. Apparently, he knew the entire time that I’d been having nightmares.”

The rumblings of the thunderstorm and the chatter of faceless customers filled the gaps where Natasha’s jokes and Elliott’s responses fit. They stretched that gap by staring at each other for a while, quiet.

The café lost electricity. The customers groaned and threw complaints at the café staff. As the generator kicked in and the light flickered and an old Tagalog song blared on and off the speakers, Natasha finished her coffee, put her cup down, and said, “You still miss your mother, don’t you?”

pencilAnais Jay is a 20-year-old freelance writer residing in the Philippines. She produces content for clients in America, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and contributes fiction and non-fiction works to both local and international publications. Her goal in life is to shoot people with words and endless outbursts of mad art. Visit her at PapelKo.

Our Happiest of Places

Posted on by

A Midsummer Tale ~ First Place
David Thom

Photo Credit: Moti Krispil/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

Photo Credit: Moti Krispil/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

I cannot remember clearly how it happened, I don’t know if what I remember is right. I suppose all memories are like that, remain like that; they don’t belong to the time they happened, they belong to us. I remember rain, lots of rain and a little boy with his father and a pleasure I cannot remember happening since—if it has, it hasn’t stayed in my mind.

“Come on, Dad, we’re nearly there, they’ll all be gone by the time we get down there!” I yelled back at my father, letting go of his hand.

“Ok, son, slow down though, eh? These rocks are slippery so be careful, and don’t go too far,” my father shouted back (he always emphasised the be).

“Yes, Dad,” I shouted back happily with a smirk from under my baseball cap.

We had been coming to the same place for summer holidays since before I can remember. That year my dad took me fishing for the first time. No fancy boats or lessons. No apps or internet to tell you the best places to go; this was the eighties. It was just me and my dad, off the wild rocks on the outrageous North Atlantic coast with two rods and a bag of feathers. Mackerel were our prey. I remember wanting nothing more than to bring some home to an expectant and, I think that day, proud mother. When I think of childhood memories, spending countless hours on those rocks with my father and then on my own when I was a teenager, I see them as gloriously happy and sunny times. But like all the childhood memories I have of those holidays in west Cork, they are distorted by the artistry of the heart, turned poetic by passing time. But I like to think not that night. That night was and has stayed ferociously happy in my memory. It was grey when we left our holiday house and raining by the time we got to the rocks but we didn’t care. Like all good Irish men we already had our raincoats on. I was still young but had a lifetime of rain already. My father who couldn’t even light his pipe anymore looked like a drowned rat. He waited patiently so I could, as I would retell the story in later years, pull a leviathan from the sea.

“Come on, son, time to go. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Ahhhh, just one more, Dad, pleeeeeease?” I said, pulling my line in. Without waiting for permission, I threw it into the sea again, further I thought than I had done the whole evening. I focused as my rod bent with the retreating waves as it had done every time that wet evening. I watched with life-depending intensity but this time, oh no, not this time… it didn’t straighten! My dad was already dismantling his rod when I roared, “Dad, Dad, look I have one! I have one!”

“It’s probably just caught in the weeds,” he said as the rain dripped off his nose.

“No, no, come ‘ere I can feel it wriggling it must be a fish it has to be a fish come on and feel it!”

My father duly obliged. He took the rod and felt its weight and lo and behold declared, “You’re right son you have one on the line there. Now don’t panic.” He bent down to my level and handed the rod back to me, my heart racing. “Reel it in nice and slow like I showed you. That’s it, good boy.”

After a few adrenaline-pumped seconds I could see it glimmering through the water, wildly leaping to get off my feathers. But, alas, this was to be that mackerel’s last day in the foam of the North Atlantic and it was the first day I would bring dinner home to my mother.

We gutted it right there on the rocks, my dad showing me how to break its neck. He held his rough, scale-covered hands around mine as he pulled his penknife down its belly, the tobacco grinds from his pipe mixing with blood and fish guts as he thrust my fingers to pull its insides out. I was awestruck at the wonder of it all. I was a master of life in that moment, the only fisherman. We carefully climbed back up the rocks, my hand in his. I loved him so much in that moment. I felt like a champion, as if life would never be as good as this again. At home my mother grilled it with lemon, parsley, and garlic and I ate the whole thing, chips on the side, too. It was the greatest moment so far of my short life. But most of all in that place, that night I was my father’s son.

*

It’s different now, though. My parents live there now, not in the same house we rented for another twenty-odd summers after that night but just down the road. They live in a beautiful house surrounded by rolling violet-and-green wild hills that change colour every day. They are happy there. They can sit at their kitchen table and off in the distance watch the haze of the Atlantic crash on the shore. It is a million miles from the dreary suburban monotony of most of my childhood, the one that dominates my memory. It is, my mother says, the only place they can live, because it is the place she says, “where we have always been happiest.”

Those words linger in mind. “Where we have always been happiest.” They stay there at the front of mind; I can feel them pressing against my forehead. By ‘we’ she means all of us, even me and my sister. She imposes her happy memories on me. I am selfish and I know it but I cannot stop it. Those memories, hers and mine, stay there now especially as I return home again. Not to my childhood home, but to their home, their happy place. I am returning home because my mother needs me. My father is ill. It is the summer and my mother is all alone in her happiest of places. I am a teacher, no work for months, I have no excuse so I come home.

Other memories come back to me as well as I land at the airport. The way we used to drive down here from Dublin—it took seven hours back then, stopping for elevenses and lunch, always a picnic. That was before they built the motorways, of course. It still takes my parents that long to drive the same route though. Age slowing them down. I can see my sister and me fighting in the back seat, despising each other’s existence as only a brother and sister can. And I can see myself, a little boy, blonde hair, anticipating the two weeks ahead, the adventure, the beaches, ice creams and fish and chips. But most of all the break from my real life, of the long, grey, friendless summer that each holiday was a long-awaited break from. I was a shy child, introverted. I can see flashes of cheese and tomato sandwiches with dry crusts, flasks of tea and beakers of milk, the car stuffed with food and suitcases. My parents arguing and making up. The rain, the sun, the wandering western sea.

But as I walk through arrivals a more recent memory does not become reality. I am on my own, no girlfriend, no wife. Just me. Strangers embrace their returning sons, daughters, brothers and sisters and I am sick, sick with envy. I look around for my father, but as with when you wake in the blissful few seconds before you remember the awful thing that happened the day before, the memory of why he is not here comes flooding back. I walk on past strangers’ heartfelt reveries. Even if he was here I think to myself there would be no outwards show of emotion. Only a solemn hand shake and a ‘how are you?’ The silence in the car would eventually be broken by small talk about the football and asking for the hundredth time how my flight was. To an onlooker it might seem that we are strangers, but it’s our own way. In those words that have never been spoken, if you look close enough are, “I love you son it’s good to have you home,” and “I love you too, Dad.” But not this time. This time I buy a pack of cigarettes and head for the rental cars.

I haven’t been back for a while, more than a year, and now I’m going to spend the entire summer here. That thought hits me as I am driving down the dual carriageway and I break into a sweat and pull in at a service station. It’ll be me all alone with my mother who will be worrying herself into an early grave before my father goes. My sister can’t come, not yet. She lives in Australia now and the kids are still in nappies. She’s going to wait and see how ‘things play out.’ Those are her words by the way, not mine. That’s how she describes her response to her father’s impending death. She is her father’s daughter if nothing else.  I, on the other hand, didn’t get that far away from Ireland. England is as far as I went. Originally London and now Reading because I can’t afford London. How clichéd is that? Irish, both kids emigrated: Australia and England. I’ll be telling you my name is Patrick next. My girlfriend decided to take the news of my father’s impending death as a chance for us to ‘spend time apart,’ ‘a break’ she called it, so we ‘can grow.’ I told her that if she was that cold and had so little emotion in the face of a man about to lose his father we must already be related. “But Patrick you don’t even like your dad!” she said as I packed to leave. An accusation I denied, of course.

“Of course I do, he’s just my dad that’s all, and we’re not supposed to get along. Anyway, how would you know what it’s like?” I retorted. She had never known her father and any chance of reconciliation when or if I returned died with those words.

But now here I am sipping on a Styrofoam cappuccino from a machine on my way to a place I don’t want to be. I know how my mother will be. She will momentarily switch her worry from Dad to me, worrying about my job, my lack of a girlfriend and things like if I have a pension yet. Then reality will strike her again, and the thought that soon she will be alone, alone in her happiest of places will flood her mind and she will be silent.  I’m smoking as I get a text from her, she is going to the hospital to see “your father—meet you there?” I know it probably took her five minutes to write that text. ‘Ok’ is all I can write back.

*

He is much frailer than the last time I saw him. His hair is all grey and much thinner. He was a big man in his pomp but now he seems so much smaller, the disease that is taking him has devoured him already. ‘There’s not much left’ I think. But whether I am referring to him or time I don’t know. He is sleeping with a tube up his nose, one of those tubes that has two more sticking up the nostrils. I can hear his breath wheezing up and down. Nothing new there, though. In a quiet room full of people you could always hear my father breathing; it was like that for most of my adult life, the result of a lifelong dedication to tobacco. I stand there watching him sleep. He is much worse than my mother had told me on the phone. I suddenly feel her hand on my shoulder and we hug. She leads me out of the room to the canteen and we sit in the plastic wooden chairs, depressed sad-looking people everywhere, including us. I’m surprised it has a canteen, it’s a tiny hospital. I hate the place already.

‘How are you?’ she asks, how’s so-and-so? The job etcetera… etcetera… blah blah.

I cut her off. “Mum,” I say with purpose. “Why didn’t you tell me how sick he is?” and with that I can see the tears in her eyes. The anxiety is eating her.

“Why didn’t you tell me he was this bad, Mum?”

“I didn’t to want to worry you is all, Patrick. I know you broke up with your girlfriend and you’re not having a great time at work, Patrick, I just wanted to…” she trailed off, crying hard. Mums are like that, though, aren’t they? Their world will literally be falling apart and they will be worried about you. She was never good at taking care of herself, my mum. She knows I tell my sister more than I tell her. She knows my sister tells her more than she tells me. Even though they live thousands of miles apart, telling my sister anything is the quickest way for my mother to find out.

There is a long silence before she speaks again. “He won’t wake up again today, love, let’s go home and have a nice cup of tea. I think I just need a nice cup of tea and I’ll be fine.” All the world’s problems, all you need is a cup of tea.

“Ok, mum, I’ll follow you.”

She smiled and left. As she walked out, I walked back into my father’s room and sat beside him. I watched his face, his big nose pointed up in the air, his chest struggling up and down. I don’t cry anymore or can’t, I’m not sure which. But there watching him, so helpless, I felt them coming, stinging my eyes. I touched his hand. In years past he would have physically pulled himself away from any non-essential physical contact with me, with another man. He had reduced us to airport handshakes and man-hugs. But now he could not resist. I had a sudden urge to hold his hand and so that is what I did. My mind focused on a vision of his mother, my granny, years ago, older than he is now, and dead in a hospital bed. I remember feeling how tragic it was. Her own husband, my grandfather, had died years before and she had lived all alone in her big house for years. I didn’t feel bad that she was dead, she had a long life, most of it happy. But I felt sick with guilt that she was all alone when she died. It had been sudden and we couldn’t get there in time. All I felt was guilt. Not so much that she was alone when she left this world, but that I was not there. The two things are different. One is remorse, one is selfishness.  I resolve there and then that I will not let that happen to my father and when he is gone, to my mother.

*

We find ourselves at their kitchen table. Drinking tea, watching the glorious Irish summer lash against the window. It is mid-June, and it is nine degrees outside, “six with the chill factor,” my mother reminds me. We have our jackets on inside—“your father doesn’t like the heating on in the summer, waste of money,” she reminds me.

“It’s good to have you home,” she says, breaking another silence. I can’t say it to her. I don’t have the heart to tell her that this isn’t my home, her happiest of places is not mine. It’s not where I grew up. This place existed for years in her mind, with every summer visit she built it until eventually with retirement they found it and bought it. This house is them; it is their whole life together, their marriage, what they always wanted. Their daily routines are etched into the place; the path from the firewood basket to the door, the tea mug stains on their bedside tables from their morning cups, the coffee cup stains on the sitting room table from their lunch cups, the dinner already being prepared mid-afternoon. But this time it’s me she is cooking for, not Dad. She hasn’t had to change her routine, not yet.

I bring the dog for an afternoon walk around the country lanes they call home. The rolling green fields endowed with gorse and heather. It is June and the foxgloves and irises are everywhere daring to bloom in the cold Irish summer bringing the countryside alive with their colour. We walk for a long time. The dog a few feet in front. She doesn’t like me, never did, she is loyal only to my father. I throw the tennis ball but she shows no interest. Every now and then she looks back at me, turning and raising to see if he is there behind her but then she realises it’s me not him. I can see the disappointment in her face. It breaks my heart. We walk further and further until I realise where we are. It’s raining again but I don’t feel it. It’s cold but I don’t care. I remember being there with him again. I stop short of walking down the grassy path to the rocks.

“Come on, Dad, we’re nearly there, they’ll all be gone by the time we get down there.”

I turn and walk away, the dog as soaking and miserable as I am as we walk away from my happiest of memories.

*

June becomes July and the foxgloves are all gone, their green skeletons blowing in the wind with curled and sun-singed purple tinges blowing in the mid-summer breeze. The weather has improved—it’s in the mid-teens now—but my father has not. He is slowly getting worse, weaker, sleeping longer, breathing heavier.

My mother and I fall into a routine. We have breakfast early and I drive us into see him. We sit with him for a while and then go and have our lunch. Sometimes we go home, sometimes to a café, never to the hospital canteen. In the afternoon, I bring my mother back and leave her there. I return to the house and walk the dog. She has not seen my dad in months now and she can’t forget. She is so lonely. I return to the hospital in the late afternoon to collect my mother and say goodbye to my father. I can tell he hates being there. It’s affecting his mind, the boredom. I bring him books and DVDs but they only work for a short while. He is grouchy, but then again he is dying.

One Sunday afternoon she says she can’t go back, that she needs a break, some fresh air. She’ll take the dog. Would I mind going to see him on my own? I can tell by the look in her eyes she needs the break. She walks out with the lead in her hand before I can think of an excuse not to. The dog is immediately happier, but I know it won’t last.

I hesitate as I get out of the car. I have a cigarette and eventually go in. He is asleep and snoring. Not like the boom he used to let out but a low, deep gurgling snore. I watch him sleep. I have seen my father asleep so many times and never watched. It’s not something you normally do, is it? Watch someone else sleep, especially your dad. As I look at him I feel that urge to hold his hand again. It’s old and wrinkled with liver spots now. But it still feels the same as it always did. Safe and warm. I close my eyes and when I open them again he is wide awake, staring right back at me. He withdraws his hand sharply, not saying anything about it.

“Where’s your mother?” he asks. I decide to be honest with him. “She needed a break, Dad.”

He understands but he is disappointed it’s me here not her. The routine keeps him going, just like the dog. There is silence for a while until he asks, “How are my tomatoes doing?” and then goes on about the broad beans and then the courgettes and the lettuces. He asks about them all: the potatoes, the apple trees. They are fine, I keep saying. Mum and I look after it all in the evenings, after dinner, and I do some in between walking the dog and collecting Mum. He never once asks about me, my life, how I’m doing, and I’ve had enough of it. I have been back over a month and we haven’t had a real conversation, not even about football. This might even be the first time we have been alone since the day I arrived home.

“I’m grand by the way,” I say sarcastically with more than a little sanctimony in my tone.

“No, you’re not,” he shoots back, darting a look at me and I am stunned. I was expecting a ‘that’s good’ or no reply but not that, not the truth.

“What?” is all I can say.

“You’re not grand at all. I can tell you know? You think I have no idea, you kids, you and your sister, you think I have no emotions, but I do, you know? I’m your father, I wiped your arse and cleaned up your puke. I can tell.”

I can’t let it go. I can’t be happy that in all these years he is now actually reaching out to me, being honest. He might even start talking about his feelings. “I’m grand, Dad, honestly, leave it out will ye?”

“Grand? Bollix you’re grand.” He has stunned me again; he never swears. “Your mother told me.”

“About what?”

“That you’ve no job, your one, that girl you were with, she’s gone, that you’re living in some shithole in Reading.” He pauses. “For fuck’s sake, Paddy, Reading! I was there was once, you know? Awful kip.”

“It’s all I can afford,” I say, hating myself for it.

He sighs and looks at me straight in the eye. I can see the disappointment he has in his only son. “Jesus, man,” he says. “It’s all I can afford,” he says, mimicking me. “You still don’t get it do you?” He is exasperated with me.

“Calm down, Dad, I’m fine, honestly.” I’m not. “You’ll make yourself…”

“What?” he shoots in. “Sick? I’m dying, you eejit. In case you hadn’t noticed. I’m riddled and my own son is sitting here telling me he’s grand when he hasn’t even started living his life yet! For fuck’s sake,” he says, looking up at the ceiling. “Give me strength. At least your sister went and saw a bit of the world. But all you did was go on the piss and become a teacher.”

I stand up to leave, not because he is wrong but because I realise I’m a self-righteous, self-indulgent little prick and I know he is right and I can’t stand it.

“When are you going to work it out son?” he calls, as I walk down the sterile corridors.

As I walk back to the car all I can think about is how since I have come back here, to their ‘happy place’ all I have thought about is myself and how I don’t want to be there. I speed out of the hospital car park.

*

After that day my father takes a turn for the worse. My mother knows something has happened between us and it weighs on her. I come home late that night after driving around for hours. I don’t talk and go straight to bed. He can now only talk on really good days. My sister books flights, hoping he’ll hang on a few more weeks so she can see him.

I don’t spend any time alone with him for a while. His words hanging over me, I walk the country lanes of that place. I walk them in July and find myself in August, the late summer sun putting stars in my eyes as I walk around the bend. My actions are hurting my mother but I still can’t get over myself. I am stuck on the now, on why things happen, feeling sorry for myself. My father is light years ahead of me and I never saw it. He is just smarter than me, older and wiser.

Each day the doctors tell us it could be days, maybe weeks. My mother is in some kind of denial or maybe she is just prepared, smarter and wiser than me. She stares at nothing and everything, at her awaiting seclusion. We continue our routine, too afraid to talk about it. Then one day she breaks the monotony and asks me to go in alone. We drive to the hospital together but as we got out of the car she looks at the sliding doors, the nurses outside smoking. I can smell the smoke mixed with the disinfectant wafting out the doors. I look at her and don’t need to ask why.

I sit down by my father and stare at him asleep under his oxygen mask. I don’t hold his hand this time. I watch, paralysed or maybe blocked. Something always stands there in my mind blocking my emotions. He has had troubling breathing on his own for a while now. I know there’s not long to go. Somewhere in his sleep he knows I am there and slowly his eyes open and he is awake. He is thinner still than when I first walked into this room months ago. But this time I do not move my hand, he moves his. He looks around the room as if confused for a while and then he sees me. His eyes lock on mine and he smiles and he moves his arm to the edge of the bed, the palm of his hand facing up. I can see my hand moving towards his. I am so scared to touch it but he takes my hand in his and I let go. Whatever has been holding me, whatever has been blocking me finally collapses and I weep and sob as he dies around me. I lower my head onto the bed and weep more, his hands still rough, in my hair.

He tries to talk but he can’t summon the strength to lift the mask off his face so I lean in and all he can whisper is ‘I’m glad you came back,’ over and over again. I have been here since we argued but I know who he is talking about now and who he is talking to. He’s talking to the boy who was his son that day, who for a brief moment he made master of all of life. I can feel his weak heart. He knows I am the one who is sorry. Sorry for wasting my life so far and that I have figured it out. I tell him and he smiles. He is happy, in pain and happy. We stay like that for a while. A son letting go and a father happy in the thought his son will live life past that day. I watch him fall asleep. I watch him sleep his last sleep. Somewhere in the time between his eyes closing on his last light and the late summer sun fading outside he takes his last breaths into his wasted lungs and the last thing he feels is his son’s hand in his.

*

The swiftness of death often belies the lifetime it took to arrive. It distorts our memories and leaves us with feelings of regret and happiness. Regret over what might have been and happiness of resolution. I really don’t remember leaving his hand back on the white sheets and walking past the nurses and I don’t really remember cradling my mother as we wept hopelessly together or the silence on the other end of the phone as I told my sister. I know these things happened but they are only visions now in my mind.

But I know I was wearing a black suit and white shirt and black tie with nice shiny shoes as I walked down the grassy path to the cliffs. The late August sun was shining down on the wet rocks and the wild green ocean was glimmering in front of me. In my hand only a rod and a bag of feathers, the best-dressed fisherman those rocks had ever seen. As I launched my line into the waves one more time I could feel all the moments to come pour over me and all the moments that had been wash away. With the sun warming my cheeks I could feel my own words, “Come on, Dad, we’re nearly there, they’ll all be gone by the time we get down there.”

And I can feel my mother’s memories.

I am in my happiest of places. I am in our happiest of places and I know that none of us will ever be alone in that place again.

pencilDavid Thom is originally from Dublin, Ireland, but has not lived there since 2007. He is currently not living anywhere. He and his wife are on a round-the-world trip (which they hope will never end) seeing the world and hoping to find a place that they might call home one day. Email: david.f.thom[at]gmail.com

Into the Dirt

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Beaver’s Pick
Matthew Everett

Photo Credit: green kozi/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

Photo Credit: green kozi/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

I pressed the camera to my face. The Wichita Mountains stood, old and sleeping, on the other side of the lake, smeared across the right half of the sky. The tops were white, even in August, and melted into patches of red and brown and green that slid down the slopes, into the silence of the lake. My other eye squinted as I pulled them into a place where I could see. They huddled in my camera, and I pressed the shutter.

Tiki was nearby, sniffing his way down a line of walnut trees by the road. He flitted from trunk to trunk, pausing, front paw dangling and nostrils pulsing, before trotting on to the next.

I wound the film and looked down at the window. Six pictures left.

I looked around. Little houses dotted the gravel drive, sleeping beneath wide, rustling trees. I started toward the lake, and a few roads over, I came to the docks that Holly and I used to swim under, when it was warm. We’d bubble up in one of the empty boat shelters and let our toes dangle in the water, and imagine that little fish were listening to our garbled voices talking. But none of them were empty today. I looked down the last road and hurried across.

The grass on the other side kissed my bare feet and ironed out the little gravel-shaped dimples on my soles. The dock groaned as I stepped out onto it, and the top of its wooden body was hot and dry and dusty. I turned right and walked toward water, weaving my way between the uneven nails that jutted up from the beams. At the end of the dock, I stopped.

A small boat, flat and aluminum, bobbed in the shade of the shelter arching over it. I put the camera to my face, but through the lens, it looked dull and colorless. I frowned.

Tiki had followed me and was lying down, panting and watching me. The shadow beneath the awning hugged me as I walked into it. I stepped into the boat, and it shifted under my feet. In the steering wheel was a small web, rocking and recently-fled. I bent down and saw a little brown spider huddled beneath the rim. His shoulders were hunched and angry, waiting with smiling eyes for my departure. I pulled my camera back to my face and took a picture.

When I climbed out of the boat, Tiki was standing next to me, looking down into the water. His reflection panted back at him, then broke apart as he leaned down to paw at a passing pair of fish. I clicked my tongue as I walked back up the dock, and he followed me, out into the sun.

At the road, I studied the walnut trees, the way their leaves grew out over the gravel. Houses ran in uneven rows in either direction. Ms. Beverley’s stood nearest to me. On her porch, a chair lay broken on its side, its body covered in a dry, brown mold. I looked up the road, and back down. The dust kicked up in the quiet wind, coating the roofs and the leaves of the walnut trees. Everything was dirt.

It was louder out back. Cicadas spoke across the trees with angry voices, and beyond the bend in the road, a lawnmower rolled in sharp, roaring circles across a dry stretch of grass. I walked toward a row of sunflowers that blinked and sprouted from the dirt behind her house.

 

“I wish you wouldn’t sit back there, Elma. Makes me feel like a damn chauffeur.”

“Watch your mouth,” said Grandma, “There’s a little sunflower in the car.” She ran a hand through the hair on the back of my head, which I didn’t think was quite as yellow as sunflowers.

“Just make sure she doesn’t spill any of that on my seats. I swear to God if she spills that again—”

“Why don’t you be quiet,” she snapped. “Let the girl enjoy her pickles.”

I pulled the camera from my pocket, found two days before, next to Christmas ornaments in her attic.

“Do you think it works?” I asked Grandma, who was still glaring at my father in the rearview mirror.

She tore her eyes away and smiled. “What, sweetheart?”

“Do you think it still works?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s see.” She pulled it from my hands and turned it over. She pointed at a window next to the lens and tapped her brittle nail against it. “Says here there are seven pictures left. You’ll have to finish the roll before we can find out.”

She handed it back to me. I set it on the seat next to me and shoved my hand back into the jar wedged between my legs. I pulled a pickle out and watched it slip from my hands onto the floorboards. My father turned around and saw it lying in a shallow puddle of itself. The truck braked hard.

“God dammit, Maggie,” he said as he unbuckled his seatbelt to swat at my face. “What did I just say?”

 

The sunflowers stared at me. They were just taller than me, and stood in two wide, shallow rows. Black pupils and bright yellow irises that watched me without blinking, like they’d forgotten who I was. I took a picture.

A white truck rolled into the edge of my vision, coming up the road that hugged the west edge of the lake. I clicked my tongue again at Tiki. “Let’s go.” He stood and raced after me, back toward the house.

The white truck was in the driveway when we arrived. A missing tailgate and empty bed. I walked around to the passenger’s side and the window was open. The dashboard was cracking and sun-bleached, and crumpled receipts and little paper straw wrappers lay scattered across the floorboard. Shadows from the branches hanging over the house fell in ripples across a dogeared Bible on the passenger’s seat. It was open to a page with words just big enough to read. I squinted and read the little letters at the top of the page. Proverbs 6:16. I took a picture.

Tiki watched me climb the stairs of the front porch, and paddled off in search of new shade. I pulled open the screen door and went inside.

My father’s voice filled the front room.

“Why don’t you let me do it? Let me take a look.”

“It’s not the accounting, Oliver.” The man was soft-spoken and stood in an apologetic way. His back was facing me. He was three or four steps from the door, and his hands slid into his pockets as he listened to my father’s resurging confusion.

“Well, what the hell is it then?” My father’s shoulders hunched as he spoke.

The man coughed and adjusted his tie. “It’s just that we don’t have any money.” A fist slid out from his pocket, and opened into an insistent palm.

My father scoffed. “I don’t remember the last time anything like this happened. Have people stopped coming? Stopped giving?”

“Well, attendance is down, but that’s only part of it. People just don’t have anything to give.”

My mother walked in from the bedroom beyond the kitchen. “Brother Bryan! I thought I heard someone talking in here!” She tore her eyes from the man and glanced at my father, then back at the man. “Please,” she said after a long moment, “sit a while! Can I get you anything? Coffee?”

“Hello, Laura. It’s good to see you. We missed you Sunday.”

My mother tilted her head to the side and laughed. “Oh, we went up to see some family in Fort Cobb,” she said. “Their youngest was getting baptized. Just a beautiful sermon.” She glanced at the time. After a moment, she added, “Nothing near as good as yours, though. Can I get you some coffee?”

“Thank you, but I’m not staying long.” His smile was gentle and warm, and I watched it float over toward my mother.

She looked at my father and his crossed arms. “Is everything all right?”

“I was just telling Oliver we might have to cancel the pageant next week.”

“Why’s that?” My mother’s voice lilted up.

“The church’s revenue is drying up. I know everyone looks forward to the bazaar and the kids’ choir recital, but all that costs money, and right now we don’t have much of it.” The man looked at his shoes.

I took a few steps forward, out from the hallway and into the living room. I spoke. “Are you going to cancel the choir recital, too?”

The man turned around and noticed me. “Hey, Maggie,” he said. “You’re so tall. You’ll be as big as your sister soon.” His eyes glinted and he forced his face back into a smile. “How are you?”

“Are you going to cancel the recital?” I repeated.

“Well,” he said, running a hand down his cheek that fell back to his side after a moment. It looked like he was holding invisible flowers. “We might have to.”

“Maggie, honey, why don’t you go in your room and play?” My mother was leaning past the man, eyebrows raised.

“It’s okay, Laura.” He squatted in front of me. “Yeah, we might have to cancel it.” He looked at one of my eyes, then the other. “But I think I speak for everyone when I say I hope that doesn’t happen.” He reached out to tuck a piece of my hair behind my ear.

“Really, Bryan, I’m sure if you just let me take a look—”

“I don’t think there’s anything to look at,” said the man, looking at my eyelashes, before standing and turning toward my father. “But if I hear anything else, I’ll give you a call. I just thought I’d tell you while I was in the area. I’m meeting Mae in a little while up in Lawton, though, so I’d better get going.”

My mother pushed herself from the side of the doorway she’d been leaning on. “Please let us know if there’s anything we can do.” She ran a hand across her forehead and then straightened her hair. Her mouth was open, and I saw her tongue lying just behind her crooked teeth. Her breaths seemed spaced out.

The man smiled. “Of course.” He turned to my father and extended his hand, which my father shook, forgetting to smile.“See you Sunday,” they said. My father watched him watch my mother.

The man buttoned his jacket and raise his hand into a still wave. “See you, Laura.” He turned toward the door, reaching for the handle. He pulled it open, and August started to seep in. He caught me staring at him. “Goodbye, Maggie,” he said, without blinking. He stepped out into the loneliness of the sun.

Almost before the door shut, my father spoke. “Jesus, Laura. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

My mother didn’t say anything. She picked up a pack of blue Pall Malls resting on the TV cabinet.

“I don’t know what your problem is,” said my father. “Every damn time he comes here, you’re a little schoolgirl, fawning over him.”

My mother walked to the couch and sat on the end farthest from the door. She pulled a cigarette from the pack, which she tossed on the coffee table, and picked up the orange lighter next to it. My father glared. She flicked the lighter three times and breathed in until the cigarette started to glow. She threw the lighter next to the pack.

“Go ahead, just ignore me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I watched her tongue moving below her brain. As her cigarette hand emoted, her other hand crossed her body and hid under her right arm—her cigarette arm—which stood, crooked at the elbow. She was looking out the window.

“Oh, don’t start with your ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ bullshit. Jesus, it’s like you’re in love with him.”

“He’s just a nice man, is all,” she said, blowing a thin stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth. Her left arm came out and brushed some hair off her forehead before returning to its hiding place. “Which is more than I can say for you.” She looked at him for the first time.

“You can’t get all starry-eyed every time he waltzes in here. Into my house. Jesus Christ.” His hands were shaking, and he was looking at her. “You can’t.”

My mother looked back out the window, at a place I couldn’t see, but I could see the lake in her eyes. Her fingers shifted as they felt the heat creeping toward them. Her hair was still, and she looked very small. I thought of the way she looked when she used to push Holly on the swings at the park, and the way her cigarette danced on the corner of her turned-down mouth, how slowly it burned. I wondered if we kept her from running away. I pointed my camera at her and took a picture.

My father looked at me. “Maggie, go to your room. I don’t know why you even use that damn thing. It’s just a disposable. Film’s all washed out by now. Probably doesn’t even have any.”

I went outside.

*

When I woke up, I lay in bed for a long while, looking at the ceiling and carving little moons in the back of my hand with my fingernails. A sponged pattern ran in semicircles toward the bedroom door, like waves against the beach. A white-blue light was pouring in from the telephone pole outside. I rolled on my side, then sat, half-up, on my elbow.

“Holly,” I said into the stillness of the room. “Are you awake?” Everything was quiet.

I slid my legs out of bed and walked to the window. A speck of light glinted off Tiki’s collar from the little wooden overhang where he slept. My hands felt empty. I went to the door and pulled it open, slow and careful, and slipped out into the hall.

Grandma’s room was to the right. I pressed an ear to the door and heard a muted snoring that grew as the door swung open. She was sleeping on her back, mouth loud and wide. Her dresser stood against an empty wall and reflected the blue window, scattering it across the floor like sand.

The top drawer creaked as I opened it, but she didn’t move. Inside, a little silver-colored box lay waiting for me, and it sparkled as I pulled it up and turned it over in my hands. Along the edges, engravings wound into each other like vines. I opened the lid, and saw dozens of little jewelries sleeping on top of each other, perfect and unwakeable. I sunk my fingers into them and felt them roll over and hold me.

I pulled each piece out and laid it on the dresser top in neat, even lines. I scanned the rows and looked for something delicate and beautiful. I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I took a pair of green and bronze earrings—thin brown chains suspending tiny emeralds that smelled like trees and old metal. I dropped them in my pocket and filled the box up and lowered it back into place. The drawer shut with a soft thud, and I looked at the bed.

Her shadow stood beside her on the wall, holding her in her stillness. After a moment, I went closer, into her shadow, and saw her upper lip crooked into a sort of satisfaction, floating through an unthinking contentment. I could see that she was somewhere else, or almost there, far away from me and Holly and the lake. Far away from her daughter’s cigarette arms, in a place where she didn’t have to worry about hearts that weren’t her own.

I went outside.

The moon was bright and empty. I turned left, then left again, toward the back of the house. Across the yard, I saw the sunflowers shivering, unaware but together in the openness. Their eyes looked up, soaking in the substitute beauty of the moon. I walked toward the woods, toward the little house where Tiki slept. He stood as I got closer, and shook his fur in tight, rapid circles. “Hey, Tiki,” I whispered. He trotted toward me and nuzzled against my leg. I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, and he followed, sniffing the air as he floated into wakefulness. I watched him blink, several times, slower each than the last. He shook his fur and his collar again.

We went toward Ms. Beverly’s and past it, and walked until the woods were all we could hear. We came to a creek, and I looked back at the way we’d come. Tiki was in front of me. He heard that the leaves weren’t crunching anymore, and stopped to look at me. The moon was coming in harder now, high and bright.

Tiki walked over and sniffed at the cypress tree between us. I looked at my feet and bent down and pushed my fingers into the dirt. It was warm. I pulled up a handful and pressed it to my face and it smelled like rain.

I set the dirt beside me, and started to pull up more handfuls. My shadow held the growing pile until there was a deep hole in the ground, and I heard the earrings stirring in my pocket. They blinked at me as I pulled them out into the openness, fast at first, then slower. The moon came through the tree branches, and fell in broken stripes across the earrings. After a few moments, I tilted my hand and watched them fall, down my palm and across my fingertips, into the earth.

Alone and crumpled up, they looked happy. I scooped some dirt into my hands and poured it on top of them. The heel of my palms pressed the dirt into itself, until it felt firm.

Tiki whined at the darkness. He blinked at me as I stood. We walked with our shadows back toward the house.

*

Impatient rain woke me up.

I turned on my side and saw Holly crouching on the dresser, her hands gripping an imaginary rifle pointed at my face.

“Bang! You’re dead.” She giggled and jumped down. “Bang bang bang.”

“Hi,” I said, wiping my eyes.

“Hi,” she said. “Wanna play?” She tossed the gun aside and walked toward the boxes of Barbies that lined the shelf by the window. She started on the end and went down the line, enumerating, without waiting for my response. “This one’s Holiday Barbie, and this one’s Groovy Barbie, and this one’s Crystal Barbie.” She didn’t pause. I watched her walking down the shelf, pointing her short fingers at each one with a passing obsession. “…and this one’s Loving You Barbie.” She stared at the last one for a long while, smiling, and didn’t look at me. Still smiling, she took a deep breath and held it. She did that a lot, when we were waiting in the checkout at Taft’s or sitting in the car after church, but I never asked her why.

“How do you play with them if you never take them out of the box?”

“Well, I don’t want to break them!” she said, exhaling and tearing her gaze from the dolls. She smiled. “When they’re in the boxes, they’re safe.” Her voice, which was always a little louder than it should have been, was sunny, and sounded like our mother’s. It was young, too, and I looked at the dust that had settled on top of the boxes.

From the living room came a loud and sudden slamming. I heard my father’s footsteps pounding toward the bedroom beyond the kitchen, before returning to the living room. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” Grandma’s voice was small next to his.

“You’re lying to me. She doesn’t work today and her car is gone. Where is she?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“What did she say when she left?”

“I don’t remember.”

I opened the door and saw Grandma standing, facing him but unmoving. My father yelled more, faster and louder, but I couldn’t understand him. Grandma walked into the kitchen and pulled the phone off the hook. “I’m calling the police,” she said. Her hair was white like the moon.

“You do that. I’ll find her myself.” The front door slammed behind my father. I heard an engine pull out onto the road and speed off.

I went back into my room, where Holly was looking at her boxes and holding her breath. I imagined my mother in someone’s living room. I imagined her smoking, and I saw her tongue dropping her cigarette and her mouth kissing a shadow. I could see the house catching fire and burning for a long time.

The front door slammed again, and I heard Grandma’s car starting up. The gravel cracked under well-worn tires as she backed out and left.

I went into the front room. The rain was louder there, and the house was empty. I went to the kitchen window and looked out into the backyard. The air was thick with rain. My throat felt like hard, like empty mud. I couldn’t see Tiki.

Holly came into the room, skipping, small and unaware. “Maggie, is there any milk?” She stopped in the doorway.

I turned toward her and walked to the fridge. I pulled open the door and peered inside. “No,” I said, “But Momma said she was going to get some more tomorrow.”

The heavy door clanged shut, and the pictures on the fridge fluttered as she nodded and disappeared back into our room, limbs bouncing at her side as she went.

When she was gone, I went back to the window and looked into the rain. I squinted, but I couldn’t see Tiki. I went to the windows in the living room and saw mud streaked out into the road in opposite directions. My camera was lying on the TV cabinet next to my mother’s cigarettes, and I picked it up. There were two pictures left.

I cracked the door open and put my hand in the rain. It was hot. I put my camera in my pocket and walked out into it.

The rain was falling heavy on my shoulders, and the world smelled like trees. I walked to the place where Tiki was sleeping. He didn’t hear me coming, so I said his name once, then again, louder. His tail beat against the dirt and woke him up. He stood and stretched and walked, warm and tired, toward me. We walked farther from the house and turned right, into the trees.

We were loud as we went, stepping through the wet, heavy leaves. Two pictures left. A clearing went past us and dissolved into denser trees. Tiki led the way, and I lost sight of him as he dipped out of view beyond a clump of forest. But I found him, waiting for me near a redbud branch on the ground. It was split by lightning and lay half-clinging to the rest of itself. Tiki hopped across the branch, toward another tree a few yards past it.

I took a necklace and put it here, in May. A turquoise necklace with three little cornstalks on the back of the pendant. Holly used to tell Grandma that it was her favorite, and I put it in the ground, here. I was walking home, but I stopped and went back and dug it up to look at it again. I could remember watching the clumps of dirt fall fast and quiet as my fingers ran down it. I remembered bringing it close to my face, feeling the chain kissing my cheek. It was cold and felt like the moon. I wanted to hold it forever.

In the rain, the tree looked the way I remembered it, except for the branch. I wound my camera and took a picture.

My clothes were sticking to my body now, and I wiped a river of hair clinging to my forehead. My mouth opened to breathe the wet air.

I looked around. Tiki had gone.

I walked toward the redbud, and it stretched up beyond a place that I could see. I looked at the branch. White wood ran, dead, from the trunk into the dirt. I went closer and looked at the ground. A few months. Where was it? I pushed my fingers into my head but I couldn’t remember. Where was it?

The dirt looked at me and didn’t blink, and I started digging. I didn’t know where I was supposed to start. My hands plunged into the ground like the ocean on my ceiling. All there was was nothing, and my hands were wet. Brown-red clung to the underside of my fingernails. Everything smelled like rain.

I stood and walked toward the way that Tiki had gone, up a hill that was steep and wet. I wanted to go home now. I yelled his name, but he didn’t come. I clicked my tongue. All I could hear was the rain. “Tiki?” I yelled.

I ran up the hill. The woods disappeared and turned into wet asphalt that stretched left and right. Wide, shallow yellow lines ran along it. The grass panted beneath my bare feet. “Tiki?”

I saw him in the rainy road, tail up like a flag behind his bouncing body.

I clicked my tongue and yelled his name.

A pair of headlights came rolling through the tree-lined bend, followed close behind by a rain-flecked car, fast and dark and metal. Tiki smelled the pavement. I screamed. The car shook as it went over him, and his fur and his head spun in fast, loose circles.

I ran. Blood poured from a seam in his skull. His breaths were distant and panicked, and his eyes were draining into a place that I couldn’t see. I started to cry.

I tried to remember how he looked when he was little, the night we first found him. The way he looked when we took him inside and when we gave him a bath and when my mother said he could sleep with me if my father didn’t find out. But it wasn’t there. I felt his face falling out of my head. I couldn’t remember, and everything was rain. I looked at him. His blood was running clear against the road.

He couldn’t breathe anymore. I bent down to touch his face. It was wet and hot and I was crying more. I wiped my face and took a picture.

pencilMatthew Everett is a Kentucky native and first-time author that currently resides in Alabama. His unpublished work can be found on his blog.

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Baker’s Pick
Ryan Dempsey

Photo Credit: Marissa Garza/Flickr (CC-by-nc)

Photo Credit: Marissa Garza/Flickr (CC-by-nc)

“I need to see you again,” Erik texted Sarah that morning from the store. He owned Sam’s Spud Hut close to Ninth Street. His dad Sam gave it to him before he passed and Erik still used the same fryer as when the store opened fifty-three years ago. Resting his elbows on the counter, he looked out over the boardwalk and at the ocean. The boardwalk was full of walkers and bikers, families on rumbling surreys and summer girls in bikinis, all out to get their sun before the forecast storm hit later that day. But it was too early for any of them to want fried potatoes. So he watched and waited for the phone to rumble a response between his arms.

“Rough night last night?” An old man startled Erik. He wore no shirt and had very tan and pickled skin. He was a regular but Erik could never remember his name and just called him Skip. Skip stopped by every morning around ten-thirty to get “the first in the oil” as he liked to say.

“No,” Erik answered as he stood from the counter and yawned. “Just the sitting here and waiting kills me. If I could work all day and keep moving I’d be fine and still have enough energy to nail the wife.” Skip laughed, but Erik knew he wouldn’t be getting anything from Molly; she was angry with him again. He picked at a drop of hardened cheese on the counter. She had no idea what was going on; she had no right to be mad.

He moved to the fryer to fill Skip’s order: double potato curly. The grease bubbled and boiled hot as the phone vibrated on the counter next to him. He wiped his hands on his apron, regarded the white cloth and decided he would order black ones as soon as he could. But that wouldn’t help with the smell. He shouldn’t have to do this; he owned the damn place.

Through the glassless window above the fryer he could see the rest of the boardwalk and the other stores. He remembered being here with his dad and every one of the stores down the wooden walkway was owned by a different family or person. Kites used to own the sky, but now all Erik saw were cranes towering over the tiny shops. One by one the shops he grew up with were being destroyed to make room for the franchised food vendors and T-shirt chains.

He took the fries from the fryer, piled them into a cardboard bucket and handed it to Skip. He remembered his phone. “I have dinner tonight with my family. But we can get together after.”

Erik smiled. “I’ll meet you after dinner.”

As he responded, the phone came to life in his hands and he almost dropped it into the hot oil. “Can you come fix the roof before the storm?” It was Molly. It was the third time in almost half a year he had to patch the roof above their bedroom.

He talked to Skip for a while only half-listening before he told him he had to leave but that he’d be back later. He watched Skip waddle off down the boardwalk. Coming out from inside the shop, Erik pulled the crimped sheet of aluminum over the front opening and lowered the sheet of steel he used over the open window above the fryer. He secured each with a padlock and a sign that said, “MAY RETURN THIS EVENING.” He’d had Molly write one up for the evening time as well, for when he closed early: “CLOSED FOR THE NIGHT.”

He wandered a few stores down, through the line of patrons waiting outside Pete’s Potatoes, weaving in and out of the groups of kids and parents that stood in front of Sammie’s Shirts and Shorts to the corner ice cream store, Duke’s. Duke knew his father. Sam, Duke, Pete and Samantha were all friends, starting their businesses around the same time. Duke Sr. was the only one left; all the others had passed their businesses along to their children. Duke’s recently moved to the corner building because he needed more room. There was a line there as well.

“Duke around?” Erik asked the cashier. A few teenage kids buzzed around her.

“I don’t think so,” she said in a Russian accent, turning her head to look for her boss. She wore a white apron, the same color as the ice cream. “I think he is at home. No. He is away on vacation. He only stops in once every few weeks. I can have you talk to the supervisor if you like.”

“No, that’s fine.” Erik looked past her. They had tables and small booths but mostly people waited at the pickup counter. “Geez, it’s not even eleven yet.”

“Duke changed the hours and now we open earlier and longer.”

“Good for him, good for him. Yeah, I’m just leaving for a few hours and I wanted him to keep an eye on the shop.” Erik pointed towards The Spud Hut.

“I will let my supervisor know.”

“Thanks,” he said

She smiled and he wondered if Duke was nailing her.

“I can hardly wait to see you again,” Erik texted Sarah from the top of a ladder that leaned against the vinyl-sided surface of his home. The clouds had started to come across the sky and he could see the line between the morning sunshine and the coming afternoon rain. He dreaded climbing the ladder but the roof needed to be fixed. He was sick of just patching it; he needed a new roof. But in order to actually replace it he needed money and in order to get money he needed to work. “But there’s no time for that,” he said aloud. “All because of those goddamn corporate companies throwing their goddamn money around and taking my goddamn business.” He hoisted himself onto the roof, the shingles warm against his palms.

“Watch your language!” Molly raised her voice from the bottom of the ladder. She was ten years his junior. She held their child who straddled her hip.

“He can walk, you know?” Erik said. He looked at the roof and cursed again at the situation, never at home because he needed to be at the store, at the store all the time because he needed the money. He thought about hiring Skip but he’d probably eat through the entire stock of potatoes. He poked angrily through the shingles with a stiff hand. His son started to cry and he listened as Molly walked away with him into the house.

Erik climbed the roof further so he was at its peak, where he got the best reception, and checked his phone. Nothing from Sarah. She was probably getting ready to go to out. He met Sarah like he always met them: at the store. And he always knew which ones were worth the time. It was never that Molly wasn’t worth it but it probably would have ended much the same way all the others did.

His son screamed.

Erik started on another row of shingles. The leak was probably from a previous search on the roof. Maybe he had disrupted how the sheets sat on top of each other. He knew the futility in searching but he had to keep the rain out before the storm really pulled through. Had the leak been anywhere other than their bedroom he could have let it be. But the drops of water started falling straight into the middle of their bed, creating a division that forced them to far opposite sides of the bed and eventually him to the couch. The thing was, it wasn’t just a leak. “We need a new home altogether!” he yelled at the shingles. And this reminded him again of the boardwalk, his threatened business and money.

“This is all because of them,” he muttered to himself again. He sat on the roof, the breeze from the ocean stronger now with the storm just over head. At first he was proud that he stood up to them, as slowly he felt each store around him becoming another carbon copy of the last one built, except for Duke’s and Sharon’s Sunshine Shop. And Bill’s Bicycle Rental and Amato’s Pizza and the other small shops whose names still blazoned their front signs and archways, shops whose names Erik could not remember.

He would probably have to give in and sell. Probably make a good chunk of change and he could probably buy a new a house, but Erik knew that wasn’t the point. The point was his dad had started the business and built it up to a sustainable form of income. There was a certain pride in that that was no longer there. Apparently his name didn’t mean much anymore. It was all about more. More, more, more. More stores, more patrons and more money.

It began very slowly like most summer storms. He hadn’t realized how windy and dark everything had gotten. First he saw the lightning then heard the thunder. He felt the mist from the rain as it blew in at him. It thudded into the roof like chisels pounding into a wall. It fell like that for maybe a whole minute before any struck him. Then suddenly it became a downpour, churning down the roof and overflowing the gutters. He let it fall on him and it felt good.

His phone vibrated then and he almost dropped it taking it from his pocket.

“You still haven’t fixed it!” His wife stood at the base of the ladder under an umbrella, their child in a diaper beside her.

“Yeah, yeah.” Erik shooed his hand towards his wife’s voice, his hair saturated, clothes soaked through, eyes transfixed on his phone, regarding Sarah’s message.

pencilRyan Dempsey currently resides with his wife and daughter in the Pittsburgh area. Ryan’s fiction is published or forthcoming in such places as The Portland Review, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Gravel, Drunk Monkeys, and Almost Five Quarterly. Email: ryandempsey82[at]gmail.com

A Field Guide to Missing

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Creative Nonfiction
Emily Pifer

Photo Credit: Fabian/Flickr (CC-by-nd)

Photo Credit: Fabian/Flickr (CC-by-nd)

First, you must leave or get left. The truth is: you have less control over the getting left, and more over the leaving. Not to mention, if you’re left, it doesn’t feel the same. It feels bad, yes, but it’s supposed to, so, it doesn’t feel as bad. You see, when it comes to missing, it’s best to do the leaving.

And it’s best, you may guess, to leave soon. Leave hard and fast and—listen—cold. Leave the ground wondering what it did wrong. Leave the walls whispering your name, unbelieving you’re gone. Leave the people, the people you know, the people who know you, grasping for remnants of your DNA.

It’s in your best interest to rush out, the wind at your back. If both the calendar tacked above your desk and the one hanging by a bright, plastic letter X on your refrigerator show you leaving Tuesday, leave before the end of the weekend. Go on Sunday afternoon when the town is taking a nap, or eating, unsuspecting. This, you’ll see, is like committing farewell robbery.

And if you really want to do this properly, rather than savoring the days before you go, the moments of sustenance, the fuel of journal writings, you should wish each painstaking moment away—far (far) away. Make a paper chain of what remains, tally the evenings standing before you and gone away, count down the sunrises left before escape.

Don’t engage in goodbyes like closure like peace of mind, careful hugs and kisses on the cheek at the last hour of so-long-bon-voyage parties. Tell guests there’s no need. If they say, “This is not goodbye, this is see you soon.” Say, “Well actually, I’m not sure when I’ll see you.” Don’t let their earth settle, your dust sink.

Pack timeworn memories, hard-fought heartaches, and small kitchen appliances in a hurried haste. Close your eyes as you fold and wrap, see yourself far away. Then it’s as simple as a crammed trunk slammed closed, keys in the ignition, eyes in the rearview mirror, but for a moment.

A note: It enhances your eventual missing if you are particular about what you leave behind. Particularly, try (try) to leave good and decent contingencies. If what you are leaving is, in general, shabby and shoddy, a deep and dark and noxious body of missing will be harder to come by—impossible, maybe. You must leave life behind. And not just any life, yours—the one you built from tears and nightmares. So, in general, as a rule of thumb, you must leave important things. Below, for your edification, are examples of such things.

An other who cares for you despite the doom threatening to boil your insides; a companion who sees through your neurosis as manageable and sometimes even charming; a friend who lets you eat their cereal; a group of souls who vibrate with your own, gentle and warm and tumbling—like they were custom-designed to help dry out the delicate fibers of your being; a comfortable chair; trees, dark corners, and cracks that have taught you; somewhere to be; books left open and unfinished, their pages flapping in the wind and soon moist in morning dew.

The second thing to do, after you’ve left only your ghost, is to point your bones toward a place as cold as you. This is the key. When you settle in this place, this new place, you should aim for a dull, but constant feeling of unsettling. Don’t harbor feelings of fitting. After all, belonging interrupts longing. Instead, cross your arms. Surround yourself with people who do not understand you and—listen—make sure you do not give them a chance to. Sequester. And do not plant seeds. And do not break ground—anywhere. Look in the mirror and yearn for what you were, before.

Begin adding all the things that were better, before. Scour your mind to remember the exact happenings in the very instant of your leaving. There was a flicker of something. Your days there came back to you in a series of unordered flashes. You felt different, suddenly, and thought maybe (maybe), but you looked down—your foot was on the gas. Knead that instant like dough. Consider pages left. Don’t just read the lines of that weathered paperback, feel it in your hands, notice how the ink blurs and evaporates right before the climax.

Fill in blanks.

Soon, if you’ve done it right, you’ll begin to notice the missing like a headache behind your eyes. Then, it aggravates into a subtle ache in your mind space. Before you know, it starts to quake. You’re rocked from somewhere off the spectrum everyday when you wake, and again at night. There is pain. It’s especially throbbing when a sliver of sunshine reaches across a precise strip of sidewalk in a certain way. In that small strip of shine, you’ll feel the vast pang of joy that can’t be shared, not because you can’t find the words, because there’s no one there.

You chose.

A third thing to do is to remind yourself of what is true: you are not permitted to miss that place you (you) left. You treated it as a marked gravel road to get somewhere else. You ignored the smoke-signal dust stirring up behind you. Despair. At this point, you’ll begin driving through a long, dark tunnel. There is an end, you suspect, but no light to guide you.

You’ll know you’ve done it—the missing—in a thorough sort of way when your tunnel becomes deeper, wider, black. Black. It turns into a well, wide enough that if you stand at the center with outstretched arms, you feel nothing but empty air. A damp breeze moves through the space between your fingers. It reminds you. All that, beyond your grasp.

*

In October of 1987, Jessica McClure Morales, then eighteen months old, fell into abandoned water well just outside the fence in her aunt’s backyard in Midland, Texas. She was trapped deep down under the well’s shaft—and the whole country watched, held, prayed. Two-and-a-half days later, she was rescued, dirty and damaged and crying and okay. Now, she says, she doesn’t remember any of it happening.

Thick, dark bangs cover the scars on her forehead. Long dresses cover the ones on her thighs. I haven’t found anything to cover mine.

pencilEmily Pifer is a candidate in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of Wyoming. She comes from the hills and hollows of Appalachia, but spent much of her childhood in suburban Ohio. Emily studied journalism and creative writing at Ohio University before moving to New York City, where she worked at Esquire and Women’s Health. She’s currently working on a collection of essays that explore cultures, conditions, and definitions of self. Email: piferemily[at]gmail.com

Freedom to Wander

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Creative Nonfiction
Mary Lewis

Photo Credit: Karah Levely-Rinaldi (CC-by)

Photo Credit: Karah Levely-Rinaldi (CC-by)

On the Tundra

In the days when we first started hearing about windchill on the radio, a cold spell in southern Minnesota brought the felt temperature down to -92, though the air temperature was only -40. That was a challenge. Pre-kids, pre-landline, pre-solar panels, Phil and I ignored the radio that blistered warnings that it would only take five minutes for flesh to freeze at that temperature, and left our little log house we built in the woods in Fillmore County to travel by skis to visit our neighbors. The fields belonged to us and them, but we could have trekked for miles over private lands, for who would have cared that we left long trails over their snow, even if the drifts had not filled them? If our eyes led us to the far horizon, nothing could stop us from going there.

We were used to living outdoors and had the gear. Layers of sweaters, down vests and jackets, snow pants, and arctic mittens that looked like we’d grown longer arms with no hands. Our eyeballs would have frozen into oval ice cubes without our goggles. Once out of the woods all trails drifted over with fine blowing snow packed so firmly our skis barely made a trace on them. For traction uphill you had to slam down each step, feeling more than hearing a satisfying thwack each time. Ears stored safely away, it was a soundless world. And bright. Too cold to hold moisture, the sky surrounded us in clean blue so clear you wondered if there really was such a color. Our snorkels gave a chance for the air to warm a little, and carried away moisture that would have frozen on our goggles. Years ago in subzero winters in Minneapolis, Phil invented this technique when he rode his bike to grad school classes at the university. Twice his width in a Frostline down jacket I sewed together for him from a kit, goggled and snorkeled, on his thick-tired Schwinn, he startled many a pedestrian, even when he gave them a cheery jingle on his bike bell.

The wind sifted snow in swirls that hid our feet, making us look like stage angels walking on billows of dry ice. Where the tiny crystals settled, tongues of frosted drifts lipped over the downwind edges of themselves like waves about to break.

You had to lean against the wind to remain standing. In every hollow, loose snow that had collected there caught our skis in sudden arrest and we nearly tumbled forward over them. Barbed wire was buried deep in the drifts, and just the nubs of fenceposts stuck up over the snow. In a world without boundaries we diagonaled our way to Judy and Daren’s, ignoring the right-angle logic of roads. We were used to going anywhere we pleased on our land, between house and greenhouse a quarter-mile away, into the fields where we were beginning to plant hazels and chestnuts, adding to our already oddness as city folk transplants with a long driveway and no plumbing. Fillmore County is corn and soybean country.

Disillusioned with our graduate programs in zoology and ecology, the land we bought as a retreat had beckoned. Familiar with backcountry camping, it was no stretch for us to live in a tent for months while we built our little log house. At first we had no clear idea of what to do with the land, but the dream grew to plant nut trees, and show that the land could grow staple crops that didn’t require the plow year after year.

We were doing it, surviving, keeping warm in the face of wind so strong it felt solid. The effort of pushing through it brought sweat to all our pores. Imagine that, I would have said to Phil if he could hear, but speech was as impossible as it would have been under water. I turned my back to the wind and took off one of my expedition mitts leaving only a thin glove on my right hand, and unzipped my jacket. Moisture left me as though sucked by some huge vacuum cleaner, and then I struggled with the tab to zip up again. I threw off the other mitt because it took two hands and now both were freezing in the inadequate gloves. Five minutes for flesh to freeze? It felt like thirty seconds. What were we thinking trying to tackle this? A drift, we could dive into one and hide out of the life-stealing wind. But the nearest ones of any size were a quarter-mile away in the box elders on our western border. I managed to pull my mitts on but the cold had crept up to my elbows. My hands were so numb I couldn’t hold onto my poles and I dragged them along by their loops like useless sticks, leaving my legs to struggle alone for balance in shuffling strides that teetered side to side.

Seeing my difficulty, Phil broke the wind in front of me, and we kept moving. Motion, that would save us. Stupid of me to release that layer of sweat. The fields passed under my numbing feet that were beginning to feel like concrete blocks. We pushed past the spindly box elders. Drifts there, but too hard to dive into. Beyond the next crest we made out the roofline of Judy and Daren’s farmhouse.

Judy just looked at us through the open door for a few seconds, something you never did in the winter, especially on a day of such historic cold. Had to be the double surprise of our alien looks, and trying to make sense out of anyone traveling on such a day. Besides, we didn’t warn them with a phone call, not having the equipment.

I tried not to rub my frozen limbs as we sat around the big kitchen table. They needed to thaw out gradually anyway. Behind a cup of hot coffee I gritted my teeth against the pain of returning sensation. Elated by survival, we told them about the drifts and the wind. Judy said she always hated the cold, and Daren, just in from chores in the cattle barn, cradled his own coffee mug behind red fingers, looking at us as though we were refugees from the Jurassic.

We talked about the cold, closing schools, how bad the roads were. Their kids Kristen and Julie, about 10 and 8, lounged on a sofa in front of the living room TV. We were not close friends. Most people in the area had extended family and church connections, and they leaned on each other for help, loans of equipment, babysitting, meals. Though we had offered to lend a hand now and then, they didn’t need us, so of course we couldn’t ask for help from them. In addition to the adventure, we made this trip to try to develop a connection, but conversation faltered after awhile. They were beef farmers; we were hard to classify, not normal farmers certainly. They and others expected we’d give up in a few years and go back to the cities.

On the way home the wind at our backs sailed us forward as though we had motors on our feet. We made it back in less than half the time of the outward journey. Familiar now with the cold, and friends with the wind, we played with them. At the pump where our old-fashioned windmill churned like mad in the icy wind I watched water turn to crystals, like a time-lapse video but in real time, sending sparkles of sunlight at me. Delicate snowflake-like branches spread in a film on the surface of a pail of water.

Ribbon of Highway

When Phil and I broke up many years later I moved to Decorah, a nearby town in Iowa, and wandered in the woodland parks there. My pleasure in them didn’t depend on ownership. When we bought the land in the first place, the whole idea that we suddenly were the owners of the land, the trees, the grasses, the creatures above and below the ground, was ridiculous to me. How could exchanging money and signing papers do that? These things didn’t need me to be their owner. If such a concept existed at all, they owned themselves. So when I sold my half of the farm to Phil, and was just as suddenly not the owner, it did not feel different to me, and certainly not to the chipmunks or mushrooms in the woods. I was yet to find out that ownership had to do with where you could go.

I reached into the bag of Cheetos against my better judgment, but nothing felt like a road trip more than orange fingers on the steering wheel, so it had to be done. My partner Maxxx sipped his mocha and munched on an oatmeal raisin cookie, three for a dollar from Kwik Star. Heading north out of Iowa we passed cornfields bristling with spiky young plants, well over knee high and thriving from recent rains, while cows pastured on closely-cropped hillsides and woodlands accented smaller areas of rougher ground, too steep to till or pasture.

“Feels like we could go anywhere out there, doesn’t it?” I said.

“So you want to go gambol with the cowsies on the hillside?”

“Well, I might want to go around them and see what’s in the woods.”

On car trips to Tracy, Minnesota to see Grandma when I was a kid, I’d fix my eyes on every patch of trees and wonder what magic land lived in the enticing shade, and even now any scrap of woodland still had the same power over me, the way it would whether or not I had spent nearly twenty years living in the woods.

“Of course it’s all an illusion.” Maxxx adjusted the tilt of his sunglasses.

“And there’s no way to tell what is real and what isn’t.”

Maxxx is a philosopher and I knew this was a big subject with him.

“I just meant where you can go out there, it’s all private land.”

He was right, we drove on a ribbon of public land and gazed out at countryside that we could not step on without trespassing. On the farm I roamed freely, and hadn’t realized the loss. Now I felt a sense of contraction as though someone had bound me up in shrink-wrap and vacuumed out all the air. Because Iowa has such good land for growing things, it was all grabbed up, with little left in public hands.

But we could still allow some freedom to wander. Years ago on a bicycle trip in the seventies in England I saw a model that worked well. The old medieval trails still existed as they traversed private land, but the law gave everyone the right to travel them. We’d open a gate, cycle past herds of sheep or wait for them as they crossed the path, and go through another gate on the other end. As long as we closed them, no problem to landowner or traveler.

Down River

I dip-twist my paddle into a strong J-stroke from my stern position to turn the bow back towards the side my paddle is on. My son Brandon at the bow sees it too, the inverted “V” we’ve come to read on the surface as the path of deepest water to follow through the next riffle, and switches his paddle to the other side to help correct our course. Perry, three years younger at ten, lounges in the middle for now, arms trailing over the sides. He’s the one who spots most of the eagles, soaring high above the limestone bluffs, green with a fringe of white pine.

The Upper Iowa is the most scenic canoeing river in Iowa, supplied liberally by cold-water springs that emerge to carry water from its underground travels through some of the oldest rock on earth. This is the only part of Iowa that has big outcrops of bedrock, having been missed by the flattening power of the last continental glaciers, and the debris of rock and soil that they left in their path over most of the region. Called the driftless region, for lack of this overburden, or perhaps just as poetically, the Paleozoic Plateau, it is a land of sedimentary rock, mostly dolomite and limestone, in which subterranean caves and crevices carry water in darkness as freely as do the sunlit streams.

We are on the most photographed part of the journey, a stretch of high cliffs that rise vertically from the left bank as much as 280 feet. We ride the rapids with a fore and aft pitch that skims us over the standing waves until they empty out into calmer water. Each one of these riffles is a thrill because you have to shoot the V just right to get the ride. Hit the bottom and it can turn your canoe sideways, and then the push of the current can tip you over.

Perry wants to touch the rocky walls and we paddle right next to the cliff where late-afternoon sun tinges the limestone with gold. We look straight up but we can’t see the top. Junipers spring out here and there in cracks where they hang on by their toes.

We don’t think about who owns this rocky wall, but the whole watershed is a complex of mostly private land. Back in the seventies there was a big push to classify the river as a Federal Scenic River, with all the land bordering it public. It did get that designation, but a group of private landowners succeeded in opposing the effort to the extent that the federal government bought up little land, and most of it along the river remains in private hands. A sad conclusion, but not unexpected in our country of private property. How can any person own a cliff, have the right to keep others away, or bash away at it with hammers and dynamite?

The odd rule is that the water itself is public, but the land is owned, even the ground under the water. Interestingly, this is the same rule that applies in England where, though roaming rights are liberal and lakeshores are public, access to streams is very restricted. There, you are trespassing if you set foot on the banks, or presumably, the ridiculous situation of walking along the streambed if your canoe tips over. Here in Iowa, though the rule is the same, the practice on the Upper Iowa is that if you pull your canoe up on shore for a picnic, no one will object, but if you climb up the bank and walk on the land next to the stream bank you’re out of line and truly trespassing.

It’s a big day on the river, and as we reach the high cliffs that circle Bluffton, we find flotillas of canoes and rafts hooked together by paddles and feet, allowing the free flow of beer and chips as the boats drift over the placid last few hundred of yards of their journey. The cliffs here are capped by relict firs left over from the ice age, and able to hold on in this area where temperatures cooler than those of surrounding areas prevail. You wouldn’t be able see these firs again until you traveled hundreds of miles to the north.

Just before the bridge there’s a big put-out point and we land and look around for our car, but briefly because so many others are waiting to get out, and we’re in the way. I don’t see the car and think it must be at the next landing. A big lesson in assumptions, in this case, that there was another one nearby.

So on we go. No one is on the river here, and we feel the chill of the shadows in the growing dusk. The boys are anxious but try not to show it. I think about food and water. We’ve been on the river for eight hours, and should be out by now. I realize that crowded landing was ours, and we just didn’t look hard enough for our car. I worry that we don’t have enough food or water, and Brandon, a diabetic, needs regular meals and snacks. We have enough surely.

I never really thought about the fact that you can’t just haul out anywhere on a river. We’ll have to wait for the next bridge, and I don’t know where that is. The only one I know about is many miles away even by road. Day is rapidly turning into dusk. How will it be to canoe in the dark?

In the river you are sunken below the level of the general terrain. More true since people began controlling rivers, including this one, by dams that slow down the river in some places and speed it up in others, where the water then cuts a channel with steep earthen sides. You have the feeling of wilderness except for the occasional bridge. Now we want that bridge like nothing else.

We stop and I get out to climb the steep muddy bank to a cornfield. From which I see nothing but more cornfield. No barn, no road. We could haul the canoe up the bank somehow, but then what? Trek over the field with the heavy canoe till we found a road? Could be a mile. We’d be trespassing the way we would if we walked off the narrow strip of a highway onto a field, and hauling a canoe would damage the corn. Still we should be allowed to walk through the field, leaving the canoe behind, without breaking the law.

We go on. Brandon, low on blood sugar, drinks a can of juice. Perry paddles in the bow to give him a break. The boys are used to country, live in it, know that it gets dark at night. There are no outdoor lights on the farm where we live. But even in July it can get chilly when the sun goes down.

We do another scouting landing, and when I climb up into the next cornfield I see a wooded ridge stretching towards the river on a long angle, and since the cornfield fills in the flat land between us and the foot of the ridge, I suspect there’s a road there, at least for farm access. Would be even better if it was a county road. Since the ridge left no space along the river for a road, the road would have to cross the stream or dead end. I hope for the bridge.

We could haul up where we were, but we might not be able to drag the canoe over the steep bank, even if we could haul it across the cornfield. We could paddle on to the wished-for bridge, if it really did exist, but the bank could be even steeper there. Only one way to know if the bridge was there before we got to it was to scramble up the bank and trek between rows of corn that probably grew three inches today.

The leaves scratch my bare arms. Someone struggled over what hybrid seed to buy and waited for the field to dry enough to bring in the heavy machinery to disc and harrow, to inject the anhydrous ammonia, to spray with atrazine, and then to drill in the precious seeds, hoping the June rains would be gentle ones. So who was I to tromp along between these long lines of carefully raised giants? I have no choice, but feel like the trespasser I am, wanting not to be found, but desperately needing to be.

In the middle of a cornfield there are no cues, and space and time are without boundary. All you see are identical plants in all directions, and the gray rows of earth vanishing in the narrowing distance between distant cornstalks in the fading light. I can’t even be sure the rows are straight, I just expect them to be made that way by the farmer who furrowed the land parallel to the river so any downhill trickle of rain would be caught by a ridge of soil. I pick a row and stay with it so I can follow the same one back to the river where my kids wait out of view below the stream bank. I should never have left them there, you don’t split up in the wilderness. Itchy with scratches and sweat that film my skin despite the chilling air, I keep on, thinking I hear a vehicle. My imagination, and there might not be one for hours if at all, on the road, if there was one.

My row runs out into a ditch, and I climb down and up onto a gravel road. Hallelujah, a real road. I mark my furrow by breaking a long, green, box elder stalk and walk down the road towards the river, looking for the bridge. And then I see it, one of those rusty old erector set affairs that arches over the river, with a number on it, 1909. That’s all I need. I race back to the cornfield, but in the dimming light have trouble finding my row. Cool air spills into the ditch, already five degrees colder than air on the road. Soon there’ll be a blanket of fog over the whole valley. I race down my row, knowing it now, that there would be nothing rough to trip over, unconcerned about more scratches.

By the time I tumble down the bank, the boys are huddled close together, munching energy bars, sipping on the dregs of water in their bottles. “A bridge,” I say, with emotion I have been repressing for so long. Now that things would be all right, I don’t have to. Cheered, we tumble back into the canoe and paddle on. When one problem is solved, the others of a lesser nature come to the fore, so now we have to make sure we don’t miss the bridge in the waning light.

For some reason we remain quiet, as though careful watching required it. Soon, very soon. But the trace a river takes is twice as long as any road or corn furrow, and I almost believe we’ve missed it somehow, when something untreelike spans the darkness ahead. We beach the canoe on the left bank, just before the bridge piling. This is no canoe landing. We unload the cooler and other gear, and drag them up the steep bank to the road, but how would we ever hoist the canoe up that far? We could leave it there till later, tomorrow even, and just get ourselves to water and food and rest. We wait on the road, listening for a car, watching for headlights. Maybe there’d be nothing for it but to hike along the road till we found a farmhouse. This was way before the days of cell phones.

Brandon slings a wet canvas bag over his shoulder, and Perry picks up another one. “It’s OK, Mom, we can start walking.”

Great, they are comforting me. I hug them and tell them how sorry I am for missing the landing. “Is this what they call an adventure, Mom?” I can’t see Perry’s face in the darkness, but I know that look on his face, brows scrunched, tight mouth. He was tired hours ago.

“Hey Perry, look up there, I found the first star,” Brandon said.

Straight above us, visible even in this narrow valley, Vega gleams out of the cerulean sky.

A rumble gathers down the road, and headlights shock our night-adapted eyes. We have no trouble flagging down the pickup, driven by a farmer and his wife from two farms over. With his help we manage to pull the canoe up over the bank, and hoist it into the empty bed. Somehow we all pack into the cab, and it isn’t one of those extended jobs. It is jolly and warm, and full of talk about river travelers who’d gone astray like us. “It’s easy to miss your put-out, because you only see it from the bank when you leave it, and it looks so much different from the river. I’ve done it myself,” says Lyle.

He and Arlene help us put the canoe on our car, the last one there, no longer hidden by other cars, and we buy munchies and get water at Randy’s store in Bluffton before heading home. I sing “Deep River” because that is the only river song I know, but no one joins in. It’s fine. The boys need to sleep.

Into the Countryside

There may not be many like me who feel restricted in where we can go in the countryside, but I think that’s because I’ve experienced the freedom to wander. Most people are like caged birds who never think about going through the open door. They are content with parks, and short hikes from the car for a picture. In Pike’s Peak State Park on the Mississippi near McGregor, most people walk the few hundred yards to the jutting overlook near where Zebulon Pike of Colorado fame intended to put a fort at one time. You can see a long expanse of the Mississippi upstream from there, and the winding silver snake of the Wisconsin River ending its journey far below in a fan of rusty sediment. That is the spot where French explorers Marquette and Joliet canoed into the Mississippi. I imagine they were impressed.

Pike’s Peak lookout is one of the best views on the upper Mississippi, but few go beyond it along the trails that twist down into a side valley with craggy witch hazels and water-sculpted cliffs to cross the stream above the falls, or climb to the ridge where one effigy mound after another hills up under your feet. People long before us revered these high cliffs and formed earth into the shape of bears and eagles along their crests.

Still, people can be coaxed into the countryside. When bike trails began to grow like a filigree of young roots across the land, people came, and they respected the private property they traveled through. We could learn from the Allemannsrett of Scandinavian countries, or the roaming rights in Britain, which open up the countryside to the public, but require a codified level of respect. Surely we can do it as well as they can. By honoring rules that require staying away from houses, crops and livestock, we could give ourselves a greater freedom than that of owning property: the right to wander freely over the earth.

The woods and streams have always drawn me, and I can find them in my park-rich town. But it is not the same as looking out at the horizon and walking there. Just that ribbon of highway please, just the water that carries your canoe, just that road where you can catch a glimpse of the lake through the trees. Everywhere else you’re a trespasser. We are all conditioned to this, and the only reason I became aware of it is that I did live a roaming life in the country, and feel the stifling restriction of not having it now.

How would it be if we could walk anywhere? The wide world that our eyes hunger for could be under our feet as well. We need some bit of nature whether we realize it or not, and if we could get it easily, how would it change us?

pencilCurrently Mary Lewis is in an MFA program at Augsburg College focusing on fiction. Before that she studied for 13 years in at the Iowa University summer writers workshops. Her story “Chimney Fire” appeared in R.KV.R.Y. Quarterly. Another, “Quesasomethings” will appear in early 2015. “A Good Session” was recently published in Persimmon Tree and “My Father’s Trees” came out in Lost Lake Folk Opera Magazine. Her essay “Mourning the Night Sky” was published in the Wapsipinicon Almanac. Trapeze, a regional journal of the arts, published 8 of her stories, 3 personal essays and a poem. Another arts and issues paper, Valley Voice, published 7 of her stories, 2 articles, and a poem. Her story “Almost Mud Time” appears in the book Frank Walsh’s Kitchen and other Stories. Email: marmax[at]mchsi.com