ISSUE 14 - Fall 2022

creative nonfiction

THOSE WHO CAN

You open the mailbox and find an invitation to a college graduation or a wedding. Some burly biker dude sends you a Facebook friend request and a message assuring you that you changed his life a quarter of a century ago. Some loquacious girl who tried your patience for an entire semester writes you a note on the bottom of her final exam declaring you to be the best teacher ever .. OMG.  You tear-up and tell yourself that you made the right life choice, but  your memories can’t always agree.

You recall that chunky, silly, little boy who could never make his subjects and verbs agree, how he always charitably chuckled at your teacher/dad jokes. You wish he hadn’t forgotten his Albuterol in that pick-up game, or that the paramedics had been just a few minutes faster, or maybe if traffic had been a little lighter.  You wish his mama didn’t have to tell you thanks for coming, everyone in the church looking at you, wondering who you were, the only pale face in the crowd.

You wish you hadn’t saved that letter of recommendation for 24 years, the Word file you avoid almost every day, the one you never got to send. You wish he had taken a different route, or maybe if he had driven a little slower. You wish you hadn’t lied to his mama, her crying on your shoulder in that intensive care unit when you assured her that he was gonna make it. You wish you hadn’t lied in his eulogy when you assured his classmates that you knew he was in a better place.

You examine that graduation photo every morning, the dark green robe, the valedictorian’s chords, your arm around the smartest student you ever taught, the one who could ace Advanced Placement exams for classes she never attended.  You wish she hadn’t used a shotgun, so at least you could have looked at her face one last time, another psychic landscape catastrophe.

You struggle to understand how an 18 year old boy could write songs like an aged and seasoned poet, tunes you still hear in your head a decade later. You wonder how he could be making us all breathlessly cackle on a Thursday afternoon, and then be breathless and cold in a coffin on Sunday morning, a heart valve older than his muse. You wish you could strum an A-Minor chord without breaking down.

You wish you had known, and you can’t forgive yourself for not knowing, that he, the most perfect human specimen you have ever known, didn’t drop by that morning just to say thanks and wish you a Merry Christmas. You now maintain that he wanted to finally reveal the secret that you had already inferred, long before he could admit it to himself.  Just once, just fucking once, you wish you would have made an exception to your long-standing personal ethical proscription and pressed him for the truth you felt he should evince at his own pace. Maybe then he wouldn’t have felt the need to use his daddy’s pistol to save us all from the shame he couldn’t bear alone.

You now realize that you really only strive to believe in God because you need these shortened lives to go on, somewhere, anywhere. You admit that you can’t possibly write the fourteen more paragraphs it would take to complete this lamentation, fourteen more souls in a yearbook you carry with you always. You look at the faces in that yearbook and long for an invitation, a Facebook message, or a note on the bottom of a final exam.

—Alan Caldwell

CATHOLIC

The children’s and young adult area of the Wallingford, Connecticut public library, where I spent a lot of time as a kid, was a basement with stone walls where I was able to sit in peace and look carefully through the books on the shelves to decide which ones to borrow. It felt private, calm, secret: you entered by a potholed alley along the side of the building, through a peeling wooden door, down some narrow stairs--and there you were, surrounded by low bookshelves and stone. It was the perfect quiet place to hunker down, pretend nobody else could see you, and figure out if whatever books you’d found on the shelves were any good.

I was drawn to mysteries, the covers of which would be recognizable to anyone of my generation: groups of kids shining flashlights into mysterious holes, girls in dresses stealthily approaching dimly lit houses at night. I also read ghost stories as well as Gothic novels, those in which a plucky young woman uncovers a secret in the family of the man she’d wind up marrying. I trusted that all these books would take me to the pleasantly dark imaginary place promised by the library’s gray walls and tiny windows.

The Catholic church my family went to then was dark and quiet too, mostly brown, the stucco walls a dull pink and the floors hard, uninviting slate. When I would kneel as required during various times of the Mass, all I could see was the back of the mahogany pew and the shelves underneath for prayer books and hymnals. I found church excruciatingly dull, especially during the week before Easter, when my mother made my sister and me go to Mass on three separate days and listen to the story of Christ’s Passion. Good Friday service was three hours long, and sad.

I did, however, enjoy Easter Vigil Mass, the night before Easter Sunday when the lights went off in the entire church and we lit candles so it was dark and light at the same time. Easter Vigil Mass also involved trumpets blowing when the candles went out and the lights flew on to announce the escape of Jesus from the tomb. I didn’t care as much about the resurrection as I did about the trumpets, because I had never heard such loud noise in the building all year, and for a change the church seemed happy.

****

In April 2019 my mother died, 95 years old and ready to leave: the day before, she’d told a hospice nurse that she had talked to my grandmother, who told her it was time to come home.

My sister Donna and I went to clear out her apartment the day after the funeral; when we raised the shades to let sunlight into the living room, I was struck by all the religious iconography. Our house didn’t have much when I was growing up—though there was some--but upon moving into assisted living, my mother went full throttle. Though there were a number of photos of my kids, her only grandkids, you had to wonder who had pride of place. Or maybe you didn’t: a painting of the Virgin Mary sat on a table in the entryway, so it was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door. Elsewhere hung other pictures of prominent religious figures, notably the famous one of Jesus Christ bearing his bleeding heart in his hand, extending it toward the viewer as if offering a drink. A crucifix I remembered from my youth hung on the wall; the top slid open to reveal tiny candles and empty vials for holy water, to be set up and used for last rites. There were Bibles, prayer books. Donna and I were superstitious about throwing these away, though neither of us had been a practicing Catholic since college. We donated them to the assisted living facility.

We also found, in a dark corner of a desk drawer, an old school photo of my son Nick. He was a favorite of my mother’s: she related to him because he too was reserved and shy, but when I told her Nick wasn’t just reserved and shy but had bipolar disorder, she had a hard time understanding that. Maybe it was just too scary. Maybe she didn’t know what bipolar disorder was. She certainly didn’t know about the speeding tickets, the therapists, the hospitalizations, the medications that didn’t work well enough, the voices in his head saying he was worthless. When Nick took his own life, Donna and I debated whether to tell her and decided not to; my mother’s Catholic upbringing would’ve made her think Nick was in hell, because “suicides go to hell” was church doctrine for many years. She died four months after he did. I’m still glad I never told her about Nick’s death, because I always would’ve wondered if the knowledge had killed her.

***

To my mother’s great displeasure, I stopped going to Catholic church when I was twenty. Though my parents had sent me to Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school, and Catholic university, I eventually decided that any 2,000-year-old organization that had once burned heretics at the stake wasn’t really Christian. Then there was the problem of women not being able to be priests, as well as that of the Trinity: one God but three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I still don’t understand that, but the Catholic Church says you’re not really supposed to, that it’s a mystery, that you’re supposed to have faith. I’ve never been satisfied with that answer. There’s also “Why do bad things happen to good people?” which I’ve pretty much stopped asking.

***

When someone dies by their own hand, police treat the death as a homicide until the medical examiner’s report comes back. It took only a few hours to rule Nick’s death a suicide. We were then able to plan the calling hours and the funeral. The funeral director asked if we wanted the casket open at the calling hours. No, I said, absolutely not. “Are you sure?” she asked, as if I were going to be sorry about that decision eventually. Yes, I said, yes, I’m sure. I hadn’t even been able to muster the courage to see Nick’s body after my husband and our oldest son, Sam, found him in the darkness of our unfinished basement. Though my psychiatrist says it isn’t a problem, I had one friend who looked at me, concerned, when I told her I hadn’t been able to see Nick after he died. “Well,” she said, “that’s something for therapy.” I try not to think too much about that comment, though it’s difficult not to. I’ve made a note to remind my psychiatrist of the Pietà, Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding her crucified son in her lap.

***

In addition to the religious paraphernalia, Donna and I found my mother’s album photos from our first house in Wallingford in the depths of her dark closet. I can describe these photos from memory, particularly those of my mother herself. She had short, curly chestnut hair and green-blue eyes—when I was young people told me I resembled her. She was never as happy in real life as she appeared in her wedding pictures: huge smile, open arms. In the later photos she is sadder. I remember one in particular: she stands with my sister and me next to Niagara Falls, near one of those viewers you could put a quarter into and see the Falls up close. Donna and I are laughing. My mother is looking unwillingly into the camera, trying to smile but looking tired and unhappy.

This was probably because she’d recently lost a baby who was two months premature. In 1962 or 1963 it was hard to save a newborn with underdeveloped lungs. As my mother told us many times, the baby, whom my parents named Mary, died after 18 hours. I was no older than five at the time, and so don’t remember particularly well, but I do remember that for what seemed like forever my mother slept a lot during the day, the blinds in her room drawn to keep out the sun, and would scream at Donna and me if we made too much noise.

After she recovered, she took us to visit baby Mary’s grave every Sunday, making us get on our knees and pray: Eternal rest grant unto her O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her… I liked the rhythm of that prayer, not so much the kneeling in the grass. On one occasion I had seen, perhaps appropriately, a praying mantis, which terrified me. “She’s a little angel,” my mother would say of Mary; I had some difficulty seeing an infant as a person who suddenly, upon death, translated into something more. Angels, as I thought of them, had agency. It struck both my sister and me as odd that when asked in old age how many children she had, my mother would say “three.” After losing Nick I thought this was perhaps less odd; then again, Nick had been nineteen. When my father died at 92, my mother’s last words to him were “Say hello to Mary for me.”

***

We held Nick’s funeral at the old New England Congregational church on the green of the old New England town where I live now. Except for weddings and funerals, I hadn’t been in any church for 40 years. The pastor, Jeff, was the chaplain the police and EMTs brought to our house when Nick died, and he offered the use of the church for the funeral. Church members were good to us, even though they’d never met us. They baked cakes for the post-funeral reception; they picked up the reception sandwiches at the grocery store; they made coffee. I decided I wanted to be one of those people who does things like that, who helps people she doesn’t know, so I started working with Jeff to get a mental health awareness effort going at the church. I’m still agnostic, but the church doesn’t seem to care. Women are ordained. I don’t have to call the pastor Father. There is no such thing as heresy.

The Congregational church building is light, light, light: huge clear windows, no stained glass, no dark pews or slate floors. Noise is tolerated and even welcomed: people use everyday voices to greet each other and mingle in the center aisle before services start; Jeff has to raise his voice to be heard when he calls the assembled multitude to worship. At Nick’s funeral he told the large crowd that he wouldn’t offer false consolation, wouldn’t tell them that Nick was an angel in heaven or that his death was God’s will: “No God I believe in would willingly wrest a 19-year-old man from this earth.” I wondered what my mother would’ve thought about that. Was she a better mother than I because she believed that praying every Sunday, beside a grave, in the grass, would make her child live forever, somehow? That filling her apartment with pictures of Jesus would make the sorrow go away?

I don’t know. I do know this: last night in my dream, the Congregational church was having a tag sale and I was planning to sell some old household stuff, but I had forgotten to bring it. So I went home to get it as the tag sale started. The house I found when I got there was small, dark. Nick was home; he had come back to life and was being given a second chance. I wanted to stay with him to keep him alive--to bring him out of the dark and into the light--though I knew I was supposed to get back to the tag sale. But then all at once my surroundings disappeared, and I couldn’t find Nick, and I was completely lost, and I knew I wasn’t going to solve some mysteries, ever.

—Rita Malenczyk

RACING IN THE STREET

The whole world is quiet as we sit on the cold steel fence in front of the station. A train comes through Seymour once, maybe twice a year. But my dad says this used to be the town where people came from everywhere for work. The brass factory was in Ansonia, but we had the Bic Pen factory. He says there were so many jobs that if you got fired on a Friday night, you could find a morning shift on Saturday. And the train had a whistle so loud you could hear it all the way over on Church Street.

Will laughs as I cough, cause he’s got a smooth smoke that comes from years of experience. He sits with his shoulders hunched and the sleeves of his flannel unbuttoned. His hands curl around the steel railing, and I try to picture this town the way it’s told in all the stories. The boys with their hatchet job engines and Timberland work boots light up the night. Lining up their bikes, they rev the engines and laugh as if they hadn’t done it every Friday night since they were fifteen. The race comes alive and echoes in the empty streets where creaking wooden doors are shut from the wind and tin storm shutters are pulled down over the liquor store and tattoo parlor. They fly from the town line, and nothing could ever feel as fast as this. Nothing so free.

“I asked my dad why the train doesn’t come around anymore,” I say towards the dead empty street and he lifts his face to mine. He takes the joint from my lips and inhales.
“Yeah?” He exhales, “and why’s that?”
“A hurricane in the fifties.” I swing my legs between the metal bars. “It wiped out everything—houses, jobs, it drowned it all. It was before route eight was finished, but he said it would’ve flooded the whole highway. There weren’t any factory jobs left because the factories were in pieces. So trains just stopped coming around.” Messing up my hair with a hand that’s permanently stained gray by oil, he hops off the fence and lifts me down with him.

“So that must be why no one ever leaves. Let’s go kid.”
“Quit calling me kid. I’m nineteen.”
“C’mon,” he takes my hand and leads me to the car. “This place is wasted.” He turns the key in the ignition and shifts his shoulder as it struggles to start up.
“You think you could ever write a book or something?”
“I doubt it. I write like a virgin.”
He laughs, checking the rearview mirror and backing out onto the dirt road. He doesn’t need to look at me, he’s been laughing at my existential crises for a long time now.
“Well, are you?” I turn from the open window to give him a sideways glance.
“All the best writers were reckless. I should be reckless.”
“Yeah, ‘were’ being the operative word. I think for now, kid, you might be better off.”

He drives a gentle thirty and as the windows roll down and the wind catches in my hair, it feels like we could’ve existed anywhere. For a moment his hand reaches for mine and drifts just over the shifter. But then he pulls back, resting it on the wheel. He shuts off the radio and there’s only silence as the moon follows us towards the main stretch. He knew all of my secrets because I didn’t have any yet. I didn’t know a single word of his. But as he runs every red light, tonight feels like a kind of secret I’ll always keep.

“Don’t you ever feel like quitting the bakery and going somewhere really far away?” He asks as he takes a swig of whiskey and I lie on his roof, somewhere after midnight, looking up at the trees.

“Yeah I think about it sometimes. I don’t know where I would go.” I sit up and the skin of our knees almost touch.

“I’ve been practicing,” he says with rebellion. “I just need a band and some way to get to California or New York.” The words rush out as if he’d been holding them in like a scream. He takes another swig.

“Do you ever think about not going?” My voice is just above a whisper. His head hangs low and he holds the back of his neck. He looks towards the road holding the glass over his knee.

“I’m not gonna end up like my dad.”

He drinks as much as his father. He started to look like him more and more each night as I helped him to bed after he fell asleep on my shoulder.

He wraps his hands around mine to warm them. I see his dark brown eyes beneath lids that weaken as the rest of him follows. But his hands are as strong as they’ve always been. He opens my hands in his, and as he looks at me, I see only his eyes in the dark. At this time of night there’s nothing alive but the air between us. He rests his forehead on my shoulder and continues to dream about lights brighter than the flickering streetlights and cars that drive faster than any he could build. And I feel him sinking the way he does each night. I slip from his embrace. Down the stairs I start on the empty streets towards home. He won’t remember it in the morning. But I always do.

Sometimes I can see it. There’s this house on the corner of Maple street, between the grammar school and the graveyard. It’s painted light blue with white shutters and dead grass. The one next to it burned down a few years ago so the front yard seems bigger than it actually is. Sometimes I think about what it looks like on the inside. What my bare feet would feel like against a winter morning’s hard wood floor. Or how cold coffee being poured into the sink might sound. The end of a long day, or the final quiet when kids are asleep and our parent’s old cars are in the garage. Swaying to Tom Waits under the kitchen light, my head rested on his shoulder and his warmth so close to mine. Two people, never wanting to run away. I wonder how it all might feel inside my hands. That house with the light blue paint and white shutters is just up the road. But it might as well have burned down too.

In the tunnel underneath the station, there’s a single tungsten light that illuminates us as we cast shadows much larger than ourselves onto the cement walls. I wave my arms and he laughs as I try to balance on the narrow cement curb. He sits on the dying grass with his back to the tunnel wall, a beer hanging in his left hand.

“You know, I used to actually do my homework.”

“It did take a great deal of corrupting to turn you into one of the burnouts.” He laughs as I sit down beside him, resting my head on his shoulder as my smile dies down. He takes a drink and rests his beer on his leg. And all of a sudden, he looks as tired as his father.

“You’re too young.” I look up at him, and his eyes are dead in the water as he stares at the tunnel wall.

“You’ve always been too young. You don’t know anything yet. You still think that all this could be something.”

It’s still August, I think. It could all still change. But summer’s youth had let go of its last dying breath. And I can see it. I’m a stranger by his own hand.

My dad says in town they used to say “going west” when someone was dying. Dying and leaving the valley were sort of the same thing. We knew a few people who left for Massachusetts or New York, one for California. People never came back once they left. But most people never left once they were raised.

The end was just that, an ending. He got older and moved a few towns away. But it might as well have been the whole world. To him, I’ll stay nineteen, coughing whenever I smoke. And he’ll always be driving the car with the windows down. It was nothing violent or obvious. I was just young enough to think it would all last forever. That the boys who race in the empty streets don’t grow up to be broken men. The smoke never burns our lungs, and the streetlights never go out.

—Clare Pasley

WARM SOUP

We are the same person. I hear we share the same profile, the same smile. Perhaps we also share the same temper. And I know we share the same sense of humour because laughter always fills the room.

Tonight, like every other Sunday night, he and I are making instant noodles.

I smell the familiar scent of a burning pan — comforting and rich, like dark marshmallows above an open fire. From underneath the countertop, my eyes barely meeting the surface, I watch as he tears open a new pack of Kang Shi Fu noodles with precision. I try to memorize his exact motions so I can replicate them one day — when I am the chef and he is the lucky customer. I catch the scent of complex spices, and I wonder how they managed to fit so much flavour into such a small packet. The aroma quickly fills the room and surrounds us in euphoria. As we wait for the water to boil, we walk over to the play area and he places a bucket on my head. We laugh. Monday looms around the corner, but this does not seem to bother him. He grabs a bucket for himself, along with chopstick-swords for us both — we laugh even more. Instant noodles bring instant laughter.

I touch the side of the bowl and jump back in pain. He tells me to wait at the table, and I gaze in amazement as he manages to carry the scalding bowl of noodles with only one hand, without even the slightest wince. I think he’s very brave. I imagine him as a tightrope walker as he steadily walks towards the table. Right before he makes it to me, his hands suddenly tremble, and he is burned by the hot soup. He says nothing, but I know that he is in pain. He refuses to let any discomfort show. I hop down from the kitchen chair and walk over to grab his hand for comfort. His hands are still numb, but luckily no scar has formed. All that remains are the usual lines and creases that also creep up his neck and face. They seem to deepen every time we are not eating instant noodles on Sunday. I wish we can eat noodles more often. Some might claim he is too young for these lines and creases, but being brave comes with a price. You need to be brave to leave one life and create a new one, to find gold in white snow, to stop dreaming to dream bigger. What I don’t know is that he still dreams of becoming a literature teacher. The soup is now warm. I think he is very brave.

I taste the red beef broth through careful sips. Yummy. I smile at him, he smiles at me, and I smile back. I love the taste of instant noodles, but I hear it is bad for me because it is made with MSG. All my friends at school don’t like MSG, and I feel scared to open my lunch box sometimes. It sucks to be in the minority. He hears that I sometimes go hungry and he is furious. He offers to bring McDonald’s for lunch when he has time off work, and he always insists that he brings the paper bag directly to me. And though he arrived just once a year, holding a bag of carefully curated but rapidly cooling burgers and fries, I am embarrassed that my friends will see us, and I don’t give him a hug. He leaves quickly with a frown darkening his face. The McDonald’s tastes ok — everyone rushes to ask for a fry or two — but I go hungry that day. And when we eat instant noodles next, I smile at him but he does not smile back. I do not blame him, though, because his instant noodles have lost their warmth, yet he still burns his mouth with every bite. He eats more quickly as if to try and speed up time, to grip the clock’s hands and reverse their relentless march ahead. But these hands have grown larger and he loses his grip. He takes another sip of his MSG-filled soup. I learn later that McDonald’s also contains MSG.

I hear the sound of warm soup rushing down his throat, boiling steam escaping from his face. He begins to sing his song — the song that always accompanies Sunday night. The verse is slow but fills the room with the thick aroma of anticipation. At first I feel the urge to sing along, but I’m afraid to make too much noise. From above the counter, I see a tabletop littered with half-opened soup packets. He has tried every one, but he is still not satisfied. Suddenly, I hear the sound of shattering against the wall — the harmony to his song. A chopstick sword flies by my head before I have the chance to grab my bucket. The chorus and beat drop are deafening. We sing. I think I sing the wrong notes, and I cover my ears because the song sounds terrible. We sing. The outro is calm, quiet. I leave the room, tears streaming down my face. I think I hear him cry, too. We will sing again.

Tonight, like every other Sunday night, I am making instant noodles. I see myself tear open the packet just right. I have memorized his exact motions. I really want to be a literature teacher. And I hate the taste of instant noodles. 

…

We are the same person. I hear that we share the same profile, the same smile. Perhaps we also share the same temper. And I know we share the same sense of humour because laughter always fills the room.

Tonight, she and I are making noodles and broth from scratch. She mixes the soup carefully as to not burn herself, like a tightrope walker. I give her a kiss and she kisses me back. We sing, and even though we met just one year ago, I sing the right notes and we sing in perfect harmony. We sing all night long.

The soup is getting warm.

—Victor Wang

WORK SONG

(SOMETIME IN MID-OCTOBER)

My mother is dying while I am writing this. It’s what she’s been doing for some time, but in these past few weeks, her work has intensified.  When I say dying is “work,” I am not speaking figuratively. To look at her here on what is clearly her final bed, a sleek contraption of wheels and gears, you would think it’s the hardest work there is. Every day brings another indignity, another long series of moments when breathing becomes difficult, memory fails, joint pain overwhelms, and the confusion of time and place terrifies. I see only a fraction of what she has to put up with, and yet it’s more than enough to make me seriously consider an easier way.

She would say her curse is that of living too long – she turned 97 a few months ago – but from what I hear and read, a lingering and painful departure is a common plight. A few years ago, one of my older friends, a well-loved poet, said shortly before she died that it was “awfully easy to get into this world but damn hard to get out.” Amen to that. I almost envy the early birds, the ones who go down in a plane or get hit by a truck, even those who take a bare month to leave, the victims of some fast-moving cancer. When my mother could still speak in coherent sentences, she would often say she had never imagined she’d see the 21st century, almost as if she was apologizing, as if she might have made some different decisions had she known. The irony is that when she was born, the doctor told my grandmother not to get too attached to “this one,” so sick was my mother with rheumatic fever in the weeks following her birth. Nearly a hundred years later, she’s still beating the odds, if you can call uninterrupted days of disorientation, immobility and discomfort beating the odds.

I remember stormy afternoons on my father’s millstone of a boat, when my mother had to grapple her way to the foredeck to wipe the salt spray from the wheel-house windows which were not equipped with electric wipers, how precarious and vulnerable she looked to my sister and me from the inside, one hand holding on to a stanchion and the other smearing the glass with a rag, her face full of terror. I’ve always thought it was a miracle she didn’t lose her balance and keel into the sea, but I’d be willing to bet now, given her current level of discomfort and disorientation, that she might wish she had.  Which is not to say that those who attend to her needs are not doing their jobs. They are, and more. The women -- they are without exception women -- that I have come to know even the little that I do are probably the closest we have to saints on this planet, for their professionalism, for their genuine concern for my mother’s comfort and happiness and for their buoyant spirit in the face of unremitting reminders of our common mortality. I go to work each day like most people, but not to a job where I’m compelled at every turn to contemplate the manner of my own demise. How do they do it?

It’s not as though any of this should be a shock. If I’d been listening a little more when I was young, I would probably have registered the conversations of my parents when they spoke of friends and relatives whose passage out of this world were troubled and lengthy affairs. When I was nine, my father spent evening after evening in the hospital with my dying grandfather, sometimes heading up there immediately after work, forgoing the dinner my mother had made. His devotion and grief were so strongly visible on his face that one day I asked him if I should come up to visit the old man, too, thinking that I might be able to help in some way. But my father declined my offer, saying he wanted me to remember “Uncle Billy” as the person he used to be, not as he was now. Fifty years afterwards, I can see quite clearly that I should have demanded to be there at that bedside staring my future in the face. As it was, my father spent ten long years himself coping with the cruelties of dementia, and, having seen the toll it took on both him and my mother, who looked after him in those hard days, I would not wish his fate on anyone.

And I’m lucky. I have a sister, an older sister, who by definition is certainly more mature, and by nature far more responsible than I am. Together we spell each other off with bedside visits and the preparations for the next stage in our mother’s journey. It’s good to have her to talk to, but hard not to see both of us as a couple of kids out of our depth. They say we never really grow up until we have lost both our parents – Lady Bracknell comes to mind here for obvious reasons – but I think when that moment arrives, I will feel more at sea than anything else. Our parents place us in a narrative, a drama which they act out for us as they go, but when they exit the stage, all that remains for those left behind is doubt and fear. I’m sure they felt the same when their parents passed, but somehow they were better at hiding their feelings. My kids may not be so lucky.

My sister and I used to ride with my mother on the city bus to the fringes of Victoria where her mother and stepfather rented a small home next to a grocery store. It was a long ride, but my mother, who was not fond of driving, made the trip every week with us in tow. Our grandmother spent most days in a wheelchair, stricken with rheumatoid arthritis and had done so for over twenty-five years. My sister and I drank the ginger ale we were offered and played outside in the garden while my mother helped with household chores that were beyond her stepfather and which she knew her mother wanted done a particular way. My grandmother was a proud woman, who had sacrificed a lot for her children, but I never got the feeling she felt she was owed. Her health slipped away, and what money she’d saved dwindled too quickly, so that she spent many of her last years in government homes for the elderly. There was a stoicism about my grandmother, an attitude that probably arose from having to endure two world wars, the depression and her own challenging illness. She had no illusions about life and understood more than most that to make it through this world demands a thick skin and a spine of steel. When the old woman’s time finally came, my mother was in England on a rare holiday, a trip to kick up her heels in a modest way and to shed some of the gloom of the passing of my father a few years earlier. I felt bad for her as I spoke the news on the phone – a lifetime of being the best daughter only to miss the moment of her mother’s farewell – but she said she had been expecting the call; she had sensed something was wrong, even those thousands of miles away.

Her premonition was not lost on me. I was in Spain last year, on the island of Menorca, and one night I dreamed of coming home after a long day’s work only to look up and see my mother trapped on the other side of our skylight, holding on with both hands as though the wind might sweep her away.

“Mum!” I yelled through the glass. “How am I ever going to get you down from there?”

She waved a book at me, one that she said she had written. It was called Sketches on the Edge of a Day, and she said I should read it.  I woke up with a terrible feeling.  Shortly afterwards I received an email from my sister saying our mother was down for the count. She’d fallen prey to an insidious infection and that some drastic measures might be necessary. The next few days were hard ones, but then I received news that the doctor had persevered with my mother to see whether she wanted any intervention. It was difficult, my sister told me, just to get her attention, but, finally, in a lucid moment, she told the doctor a little cryptically,” I have a lovely family.” He interpreted her words as a stay of execution and put her on Prednisone, a drug so strong that, ironically, it often sends people on their way even after it’s beaten their disease. By the time I got home she hardly knew me, and, while I was happy to have the chance to say good-bye, I felt guilty that she had delayed her departure and prolonged her suffering just for me. The infection the doctor had treated would probably have been a less painful exit, and I can understand why they often call pneumonia the “old man’s friend.” Sometimes, it’s good to have nature take such a decision taken out of our hands. We have a tendency not to listen to what the facts are trying to tell us and, instead, invoke whatever measures we can to avoid the inevitable, even for a week or a month.

It is evening now, and another day has passed for my mother. She has slept a lot of it, and for a few hours she rotated through a series of questions I answered as truthfully as I could: where she is, when she will go home to have tea with Aunt Florrie, dead sixty years ago, and why the nurses haven’t brought her baby to her.  What she has really been doing is working hard, putting her back into it, no intention of punching the clock any earlier than she has to. The lights are low, a soft incandescence that mutes the institutional linoleum and ubiquitous beige walls. The big screen TV that has done its best to entertain her for the last few years is tuned to light classical music, a Chopin waltz playing quietly. One of the aides pokes her head in to see how we are doing. She registers me, my sister, my wife and daughter at our posts.

“If I could choose,” she says quietly,” this is the way I would want to go.” Then she leaves on her rounds.

I don’t disagree with her, even though I’d like to.

—Terence Young

contributors

Alan Caldwell is a veteran teacher and a new author. He has recently been published in Southern Gothic Creations, Deepsouth Magazine, The Backwoodsman Magazine, You Might Need To Hear This, Black Poppy Review, oc87 Recovery Diaries and is forthcoming in The Chamber, Biostories, and The American Diversity Report.

Rita Malenczyk is a writer, English professor, painter, and printmaker living and working in eastern Connecticut.

Clare Pasley is an undergraduate student at Western Connecticut State University. She is currently attaining her bachelor’s degree in professional writing, and has been featured in poetry journals such as: WomenUp and Sidelines but primarily focuses on creative nonfiction. She’s got dreams of writing novels someday, but for right now she’s happy to be here.

Victor Wang is a Chinese-Canadian, Montreal-based writer, and an undergraduate student at McGill University in Montréal. He was a culture and sports reporter for the McGill Tribune, and he received the 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau High School Writer’s Craft Award. His poetry was recognized in consecutive years from 2016 to 2018 at the Ontario Student Leadership Conference (OSLC). Victor enjoys writing poetry and stories that unapologetically project the voices and experiences of people of colour in Canada.

Terence Young lives in Victoria, British Columbia. He is a co-founder and former editor of The Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for younger writers. His most recent book is a collection of poetry, Smithereens (Harbour Publishing, 2021).