Spring 2023

ISSUE 15

poetry

FULTON ST STATION, 8:30 A.M.

The doors push open
and we pour onto the platform;

a shiny, frenetic sea of leather laptop bags,
expensive shoes, and black coats.

I am one with the torrent,
so small I almost slip through it,

the dimly lit corridor,

the left turn,

the first flight of stairs.

I step over a puddle
of stagnant something. A man,

overdosed on something,
lies face first on the ground,

limbs akimbo, fish out of water.

The sea parts and collapses together again.
We press forward, the crush of us

through the turn styles,

past the information booth,

up the second flight of stairs,
and into the cold, clear day,

almost late for work.

—Zoe Antoine-Paul

ALL THAT BURNS

The familiar is lost
to me along with the jackpines
smoldering into ash
and purple pitcher plants threatening
to devour me whole. It tastes
like spring but September
was yesterday and everything
is starved. The leaves
melted into carmine blood,
all day the fire blazed.
All that I burned, I burned
for you and have been burning
since the day you left. The boy
I once was is the boy I am.
My hands sear into my thighs
as I suck breath
from smoke. The tree I climb
is the one I cut. What’s tangible
can’t be touched and for the first time
I’m terrified of having
two hands.

HALF NAKED PRAYERS

I always imagined
my father dying
on a bleak winter night
where the snow droops so heavy
on each branch they
spill onto the ground, like ink
oozing from a pen. The words
spelling, I love you
with all my life. I imagine
his bones becoming so hollow
that not even morphine can keep them
from crumbling to dust. The funeral
attended by people
I met once as a child
who each writhe up to me
to whisper prayers that he
may be in heaven. I’d stay
once people went back to their lives,
to twirl, whimsically throughout
the tombstones, and when the air
no longer has any oxygen
left, to dig, to claw
at frozen ground
with fingertips, where his dust-filled
corpse stirs, as if beneath
these frozen layers of earth
lay a man who knows how
to love me. Because I know,
their prayers are nothing more
than attempts for half naked
hearts to blur into fear,
as if fever.

—Matt Baker

THE VETERINARIAN

Animals came
on their own
to be healed
by St. Blaise.

My patients
are brought by car.
Often looking
apprehensive, I think

some feel a trip
by car cannot
end well. I lied
to the young boy

who asked if his dog
felt the pain
of the shot, the surgery
and unfortunately

her death. The lie,
St Blaise, a venial sin
if a sin at all.
He then asked

if his dog would
be waiting in heaven.
I told him that Giselle,
his beagle, was at peace

and that, yes, dogs like his
had a special place
in the afterlife. Giselle
had already been

in heaven, sleeping
each night
on the boy’s bed,
living her best life.

I too think about life
after death, wonder
if my dog will be waiting.
I can envision the room,

the lamp’s soft incandescent glow,
the table with the unfinished book,
a fresh glass of red wine,
the dog asleep beside my chair.

—John Peter Beck

SIN

Hebrews 13:4 Marriage is honorable among all,

and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and

adulterers God will judge.

She tries to remember what it feels like
to be inside skin and she remembers
but stays without. Instead, she chases blue lotus
to relieve her extratropical cyclones. She’s scared
of the word amour. Opening the Old Testament
to search for questions that she can’t answer,
she places white tulips outside her temple,
waiting for someone to water them. Allah
drains the vase. She pours holy water over touch.
He begged her to wear a white shawl to cover her
from others in the world. She eats bread and drinks
her cup of wine and still can’t be promised healing.
When robes teach lessons, she struggles
to keep her mouth shut. Her sin lays underneath
a reservoir that no one can justify. Her sin
is a man who tied a handkerchief around her hands
and covered her mouth. The only word she learns is suffering.

—Nicole Favors

WHOM

For a long time off and on
I’d have these compensating dreams
where I was in New York and felt “Normal.”
Everyone’s agreed to let me
use that word whenever I feel like it.
It’s no accident
that the book I took home
and never returned
when last I dropped out
and repeatedly and obsessively pored over
was called “Abnormal Psychology.”
But! It didn’t have anything in it about vampires.

I come from a long line
of miserable people
who were always ready
for disaster to strike.
So many of them were quite charming
while drunk
and then incredibly angry
when the party was over.

I feel like I have to ask
someone’s permission
to be glad.
But damn, I don’t know whom to ask.

—Matthew Freeman

THE MEMORY AMENDED

Beethoven and dogs are rolling over as we speak. The Danish pastry is consumed by pirates, ersatz, on talk-like-a-pirate day. How suitable on level playing fields the induced rubric! At the intersection of two searchlights simultaneously lines of sight and Gertrude Stein arrive. A universe designed for the creation of black holes, as reconstructed from cross sections, I'm a human being, I'm a jumping bean. Over before it started surely it's a non-event . The n plus first day is a variation on the nth. I have morphology to do with then to do without then without warning I change lanes. Indifference as directed knows no nuance. If I isolate one category then I'll have to isolate them all. Under a precious chestnut tree, a stanza. Pleasures incommensurate, their product is their smallest multiple and nuclei lie roundabout like food for thought like phantom hands.

—Heikki Huotari

LADY OF THE IBIS

  after Daria Petrilli

They follow me, these red birds,
wings folded
as if flight is a dream. 

In silk pajamas
a girl and a girl and a girl 
perch on the edge of the bed.

I tell them they're warriors—
badass mythical beings
meant to rule the sky 

but all along I know
they're just wild, ruffled things
that fell through the clouds.

They scream and thrash and scratch,
their healed bones
always on the verge of breaking.

At dawn
when they recede down the driveway
wind kites the leaves

but I shutter my mind against color.
Their case worker
flashes me a sad smile

as I give them the royal wave,
sip morning coffee,
revel in uncomplicated light.

At nightfall, the windows
frame familiar eyes
wide and dark and unblinking.

Beaks peck at memory  
as the fire shadows of feathers
stain my skirt.

So I lasso a gossamer string
around each thin neck—
give (at least) their ghosts

a lesson about how easy it can be
to forget the wide, wild embrace of air   
after the sky forsakes you.

—Lori Lamothe

CONTINUATION

She’s been at the school only two months, this girl who shivers
in my office, fever pushing through her limbs. At fifteen,
her face a crossroads of beauty & despair.

She confesses to Coke & cereal in the cupboards, nothing
else. Hunger a stone in her stomach. The electricity’s been out
for a week. Her mother’s bed a Hail Mary full of men.

Days ago I drove her to the cinderblock fourplex she called home.
I'd met her mother, non-stop twitch & talk, tarnished
as a thrift store knife, smoking one cigarette after the other.

I’d seen enough to know every word was true.

I tell her what I have to do—phone calls, forms to fill. She nods Yes.
Later, the social worker arrives & the two go outside, hunker
on the picnic bench, the girl’s hair blowing about her pale face.

The passing bell rings & students spill from the portables, pausing
at the unmarked county car. They can write this story too. Waving
goodbye, they keep their distance. Overhead the sky

is dark as pavement, snow waiting its turn.

—Moira Magneson

PORTRAIT OF A LIAR

Dude. Babe. I’m cuddled up in my cardigan and Lil Bae’s got a story to tell in a bathtub big enough for tew. Let’s paint a picture of a Mississippi man who’s gonna make camping great again. Armed with his passport to America, wind with me through this rotten apple. Look out for bandits, look out for bears, we’re taking the portal to Destin-y.
Turn up the Steely Dan, this Bucs Fan is taking his Dodge Ram to the latest caravan. He’s living large with his Micro Minnie. Two dirty martinis please, one to drink, and one to spill
the drunken truth or the honest lies, whatever will stain your pants the best. 
Wander with us through the roaring aquarium, the dry casinos, the bleeding Smokies, ride straight into the Grand Lake. The long drive could be heaven or could be
Hell, maybe we should stop at Taco Smell, or how about we take that left hand slice to the golf garden instead? Hide some cigarettes in your waistband, slip on those white vans, roll a j, but please, no PD—
A Thai restaurant wedding speech, ER cocaine, white water raft, dine and dash, let’s have ourselves a day. Forget trick or treating, let’s go easter egg hunting, but wait, he’s still searching for his keys. Smash your phone, mom is calling, Ambien wandering, cancel the plans, you weren’t going anyway, taking life           day      by        day

where is day by day ever going to take you? 

From the condo view to the Crested view, let’s watch baseball and fall asleep rocking in our chair. Damn. Is life easy like a Sunday morning now? 

Didn’t   peg   you for a 

                                                             liar 

but even if you can’t smell or taste    

do you still

  promise?

—Shanna Merceron

ON MY SON’S APRIL VISIT

We spread peach preserves
over layered French brie
on a fresh English muffin.

In a too bright kitchen
he pours a cabernet.
Sit with me now a bit.

I ask how everyone is doing
and forget to ask about him.
Bordeaux photos surface—

there we are on the river
three years ago.
The French breeze in our faces

frozen on that path—
mother, son.
What lies ahead?

Take me forward
into vine tiered fields.
Sit with me a moment.

Let sun rest on our backs.
Let us feel its warmth.
Break open a bottle

taste the grape’s tart smooth
over our tongues. Let it linger.
We just found our way here.

Didn’t the heavens
just open? Didn’t we hear
the loud hosanna?

A VISIT TO BLAYE, FRANCE

A high tide rush takes us underneath the bridge into this city.
Each April, a bone chill lacerates my son and me. This spring we travel
the river that shapes the southwest French coast—

the two rivers that meet with ocean’s open water only a mile away.
A long boat brings us to Blaye. We walk cobbled streets in a once walled
town. Joey my grandson’s loss, an undertow.

In a Roman relic once captive Jesuit priests still haunt. World War II
sailor’s remains silent deep off the bank in brine-thick waters.
Ghosts are everywhere. We climb citadel steps to the medieval wall

look across the estuary to Medoc’ slow hills and twisted
vines, still green and not quite ready.  It is as if we could reach
across the body of water, as if we were close enough to spit

to the other side. The surface flat enough to skip
stones across like four years ago when my grandson’s stones
zipped the bay’s still surface. 

Later at La Petite Cave the wine shop’s owner leads
us down steep cellar steps to the cold stone bottom
where bottles rest in locked cells.

He talks about being open to what the universe sends us.
We sit at a table to taste a cabernet with a red horse label.
The wine’s ruby grapes come from porous

limestone and clay soil.  In the metallic ash death returns.
The universe calls to you. Sometimes it does try
and we don’t respond, the owner says.                                                                           

The cave walls close in like a pall. We swish; smell the melon,
the floral, and a hint of the French oak barrel tobacco.
The glass touches our lips vanilla lingers in our mouths.

White asparagus soup boils on the stove upstairs
and here in the faint stone’s musk sweat, in the translucent
glass a glimpse—Joey returns his cheeks flush a radiant pink hue. 

—Florence Murry

THE COBRA EATERS

Hanoi, 2022

When it's cut from the body
with one chop,
in Hang Ha Noi restaurant,
the king cobra's
severed head yawns. 
In the death dream, the fangs come
out to bite, then hide
inside the sleeping jaws.
The headless body
leaps
high from the metal pan,
gets tangled
with the wiggling tail.
Minutes later, it’s skinned,
slit with kitchen
knife, dripping blood
into a plastic cup.

It's still alive. In a way
we're alive when we recuse
the body
to sleep, tuck
our fangs in
in a helpless yawn,
poison hid
in the nook of the heart.
The sleeping torsos jerk
at the thud of a chop,
thump the ground
with a fuming tail:
when we cobra eaters crawl
in the hollow
of the night
slowly serpentine
between dream and death.

—Arun Paria

THE DOTTED LINES OF A SILENT NIGHT

Empty parking lots are cathedrals,
Every marked space is a confessional booth,
Curb stops like staggered pews,
Halogen lights burning like moth-covered censers                              
Burning holy over the acrylic dotted lines of a silent night.

A cigarette is a sacrament,
I touch my lips to a bottle of seven-dollar cab,
I think of the infant king, incarnated to bleed
In empty parking lots with lost sheep like me,
Staring up from shopping cart mangers swaddled in fast-food napkins
At moths and stars that are supposed to mean something.

Angels hang from darkened grocery store signs
Whispering that I shouldn’t be afraid,
They drop feathers on the asphalt as they roost in giant letters
Assure me that tonight they won’t let me cry alone.

The whole world is dark, still, unmoving, cold.
As I listen to that quiet pounding in my head,
I remember your lips moving against my ear,
Telling me you love me in the glow of our Christmas tree.
I watch the faded lines of the lot swim into an outline of your face,
And I wonder who’s ears your lips are brushing tonight,
Quiet as a mouse.

Hosanna, hosanna, the angels weep over my head.
I just nod quiet as a mouse atop my curb stop pew
And feel the emptiness
Like an incarnation shaped with dotted lines in my lungs.

—Julian Porter

FORM OF A FOX HEAD

His scalpel tongue has licked the lapis-jade
staining it with blue rust.
       The aged copper blood dripped down his chin
to form a dragon’s beard.

This fox robs instead of hunts.
His actions are no longer forgivable.
            No longer a product of nature.

This fox devoured sin by choice.

He smiles with his affectionate and pernicious eyes.                     I become
an animal
    trapped within my innocence.
     My metallic amber skin tarnished with vicious pain.

Smile fox.
Smile for all the smiles you have stolen.
                      Bring one last gift to the forsaken. Help me dream
          in amaranthine.

Lick the tears which fall from my chest – try not to let them drool between your marbled teeth.
Don’t waste.
Kiss others with my spit.
   Bite others with my teeth.

—Kate Schnetzer

Creative Nonfiction

RUBY

Ruby lived in front of the Levi’s store.

How she got there was a mystery. Perhaps she was born in a gutter but wandered away from her mother after a few months. Or maybe she lived with a family until the kids lost interest. So their father dumped Ruby on a street far from home.

Bangalore’s 300,000 street dogs led perilous lives, dodging cars, angry people, and each other. Territorial dogs attacked Ruby. Blood and dirt speckled her fur when she arrived at Levi’s. An employee sprinkled turmeric powder over each cut. The traditional Indian antiseptic soon healed her wounds.

Ruby claimed Levi’s for home and roamed nearby to fill her stomach. Every day she turned into a narrow lane where a meat shop wedged between houses. The butcher reached into a dirty wire cage and dragged out a chicken, wings flapping and squawking in terror. A few minutes later, he tossed its entrails to the dogs waiting by the open door.

Other meals lay hidden in the trash piled at street corners and empty lots. Ruby tore through plastic bags to find kitchen scraps, leftovers, and on lucky days, a jumble of bones. 

After a night of scavenging, Ruby was dozing in front of Levi’s when we saw her just after sunrise. My dog Ramona, a rescued “streetie,” strained forward on her leash. Her coloring divided her face into neat halves, like a black and white cookie. Ruby’s was a solid caramel brown, except for a narrow white streak running up her forehead. They shared spotted fur.

Ramona tugged me toward Ruby’s road every morning. Tree roots jutted from the cracked slabs of the sidewalk. I jumped over short sections of open drain. The thick black wires of defunct cable connections coiled into the branches of every tree. Dilapidation in stark contrast to the elegant boutiques and high-end eateries lining the street.

Concrete and asphalt reigned over Ruby’s territory. The only patch of grass beckoned from the other side of the street. But when Ruby scooted through four lanes of haphazard traffic, a security guard shooed her away from the half-brown lawn.

The Levi’s employees were kinder, especially the guard passing idle hours. He called her Rocky. Like many street dogs, Ruby responded to a few different names.

Ruby began walking with us, a little farther every day. At the turn-off to my house, an old black dog with cloudy eyes stood sentinel on unsteady legs. Ruby skirted past him and followed Ramona to my gate.

A flame tree fronted my building, its long branches snaking over the neighbors’ houses. Dark brown seed pods plopped to an uneven beat. Still a few weeks more until the heat kindled its reddish-orange blossoms.

Ramona ran up the marble stairway while Ruby followed me, glancing back until we entered the apartment. The spiral staircase in the back room was narrow and steep. I carried up each dog and unlatched the metal door. Afternoon light flooded the roof. Ramona ran out. Ruby paused before stepping onto the sun-warmed concrete.

The few clouds appeared solid and unreachable. Yet perspective could shift as easily as a plane ascending through the white vapor to glide above. The flame tree, towering and unclimbable from the ground, cast no shadows on the roof. Ruby peered over a ledge to the top of the tree a few feet below. Its leaves, as green as parrots’ wings, spread the width of the crown like a soft rug. 

After a bout of wrestling with Ramona, Ruby walked back to the open door. I carried her down the stairs, and she left the house without looking back. Every visit ended just as abruptly.  

Early one Sunday, an auto rickshaw drove us to Cubbon Park, the 300 acres of gardens in the middle of the city.

Ramona pulled me to the park gate. I unhooked her leash and she sped across a wide lawn sprinkled with the pale violet flowers of jacaranda trees.

Ruby still stood on the sidewalk. Then a few cautious steps and she stopped on the bright green grass. Copper-colored soil settled into the crevices of her paws. Within moments, she ran toward Ramona and chased her to exhaustion. Wilted blossoms cushioned them as they tumbled to the ground.

A week later, the government announced a curfew as the coronavirus pandemic escalated. The city emptied as college students, migrant workers, and families returned to their towns and villages. With far less people and restaurants closed, food for street animals dwindled. But finding a meal was not the only problem.

Barricades shut Ruby’s road to traffic. Ramona and I walked in the middle of the street. We did not meet the usual neighbors and pet dogs. A large padlock and chains secured the doors of Levi’s. There was no security guard sitting in his plastic chair and scrolling through his phone.

Ruby lay awake in front of the store. In the second before she jumped up and approached, I felt a wrenching pity but also something familiar. My family was thousands of miles away in California. Her caretaker and friends were gone. A shared isolation.    

So it was not a surprise when I opened my front door the next morning to find Ruby sleeping on the landing. She stretched and wagged her tail. I fed her some boiled pieces of chicken.

Ruby turned in circles to lay down again. I thought about spreading a bath towel for her on the cold marble floor. But I didn’t get one. Instead, I called her name and stepped aside. She walked through the open door and I nudged it closed behind her.

—Mary-Rose Abraham

A SUMMER IN PAKISTAN

Recently, I dreamt of Islamabad. It was a view of Faisal Masjid at night and as I looked at it, a shudder of recognition went through me as if it was a place I had forgotten but still knew on a chemical level. Since then, memories of Pakistan have been catching me in unexpected moments—at the sound of the athan from my phone, the smell of burning wood, or the taste of a guava. And I am carried back to the last time I was there, so long ago now, that every memory is a teaser clip with no beginning and an abrupt end.

~

It was after taraweeh. The city wouldn’t slumber completely on a Ramadan night, but it was settling down enough that the stars were starting to appear in the black sky. I was standing on the balcony on the roof of my grandparents’ home, looking out to the horizon. Where the sky met earth, the dark outline of Margalla Hills was visible at the footpath of the Himalayan Mountains, somehow a different black from the black of the sky. A patch of lights twinkled in a hollow of one of the hills—Monal Village— and then abruptly blinked out; routine load-shedding to reduce the strain on the power plants. Moments later, scant dots of lights twinkled back on in places where there were generators. The road winding down from it was lit sparsely and although I couldn’t see it, somewhere a few miles down, was Daman-e-Koh, the hilltop where the monkeys begged for snacks at the pakora stall.

Pools of darkness stretched down from there until suddenly, the triangle of Faisal Masjid rose out of the clouds, glowing white stone and light from the four minarets. All night the mosque would be filled with the recitation of Quran by representatives from every region of the country and televised, nationally.

And then, the rest of the city, under the cover of the night, sparkling showers of open shops draped in celebratory strings of light, and naked light bulbs over street stalls, the homes of the residents of this city, the streak of red and gold as cars and taxis went by.

Under my own balcony, the street was quiet, the houses dark except for the street lamps. The occasional sound of the crackle of radio in a car driving past, the smell of its fumes, the footsteps of two people walking side by side, sometimes one mass, sometimes two as they came together then apart, distinguishable as a man and a woman when they came under the beam of the lamp, by his flat rolled brim hat and her dupatta.

It was August and the heat of the summer still lay heavy but the air moved, stirring my white, cotton dupatta, freeing a strand of my hair from under it’s confines, rustling the pink bougainvillea creeping over the railing and from behind the house, I could hear the patter of jamun fruit as they fell, bursting on the brick of the driveway below.

On the other side of the screen door, I could hear my grandfather’s TV and the voices of my cousins, rising and falling, rising and falling.

Tonight, was one of the last ten nights of Ramadan, some of the most blessed nights of the month and I was outside to be closer to the heavens, so that maybe peace would find me sooner as it fell on earth.

~

We went Eid shopping. Crowded inside a men’s clothing store, picking out Eid clothes for the boys, it was a while before we noticed that Noor, one of my youngest cousins was missing. In a panic, we rushed out and pulled up short, to find her sitting on the curb next to a little boy.

At home in the US, the English word for someone who asks for money in the streets is “panhandler”. But for a little Pakistani boy who roams Jinnah Super, the English word is “beggar”. He was wearing the uniform of street children in Pakistan, a brown shalwar kameez and cheap plastic slippers on his grey, dusty feet. He had brown spots and streaks against his cheeks from sun exposure and vitamin deficiency and his hair was brittle, an unnatural copper color, heavily bleached by the sun. His eyes were green, the violent stamp of Alexander the Great’s army or a British colonist, which perhaps was the beginning of his descent to the streets.

Noor, bored with the shopping, had noticed the boy passing by outside with a bag of chips and had wandered out to ask him for some. In sharp contrast to the boy, she was well-fed and well-dressed, headband in her shiny curls, gold in her ears, but she didn’t know that she shouldn’t be asking him for his food. He did know though, despite looking the same age as her and this unprecedented reversal of roles in which someone was asking him for food had him puffed up with importance. She was sitting a few respectful inches away from the goods, holding out her hand as he deliberated over which chip to give her. They munched side by side, swinging their legs until her mother snatched her up, scolding and the kid vanished, one last backwards glance at my strange cousin.

We passed by a jewelry stall where bell shaped jhumkas caught my eye. They are completely out of fashion now, but I love them because my mom wore them when we were small, and I thought they were beautiful. These little stalls hold a mishmash of cheap and expensive jewelry. The inexpensive ones are made of cheap metals and plastic gems and the expensive ones are made from semi-precious stones and minerals, mined locally. In the States, they would sell for tens of dollars, but these men sell them for pennies.

As I searched through the jewelry for what I wanted, my uncle chatted with the stall owner, an Afghan refugee. He’d been a professor of Physics in Afghanistan, but his documents had been lost in the war. He told the story without any self-pity. This was his fate, Allah ki marzi, God’s will.

This astonishing tale coming from this nondescript uncle in his white shalwar kameez and black vest, drooping mustache, hair neatly parted on the side, looking as if he’d dropped out of the 80’s, was nothing new. Everyone here had an astonishing story—the jewelry stall uncle, that boy who had shared his chips with Noor and that other boy crooning a cover of a Nur Jahan song at the street corner. Everyone here was astonishing and no one was special.

~

On Eid, the cousins gathered their gifts of Eid money and headed out to spend it, traveling in a mob for safety and for fun. The old shopkeeper in the convenience store behind the house, muttered a prayer into his white beard as we descended upon his store for chips in masala flavors, ice cream cones, and fizzy drinks. Noor, three feet off the floor, earnestly laid out her case to him for receiving one of the packets of chips for free—the case consisting mostly of the fact that she didn’t have the money.

Hamza flushed in embarrassment and sent Noor outside with her loot including the extra chips. I looked at my kid cousin fondly as he paid for Noor’s snacks and my ice cream as well, over my protests that unlike Noor, I did have the money. He is a respectable engineer now, recently married, but I always remember him as he was back then; a shy, lanky university student, handsome in his chivalry and his Eid best.

We, American-born and Pakistani-born cousins, had a contentious relationship. There is a total of thirty of us and most of the Americans are on the older end of the spectrum. Culturally, that makes us senior in rank. But anyone with a childhood knows that some cousins that came from America once a year, speaking the language of the colonizer and Urdu with an accent and bad grammar, had better not pretend seniority over anything. But we also knew how to quickly erase drawn lines and unite against common adversary.

The summer I was thirteen, my aunt was getting engaged and one fine afternoon, her fiancée’s family came for tea. There was a lovely spread of samosas, tea sandwiches, cookies, chaat, dhai baray, kabobs—strictly forbidden to the kids although we were promised the leftovers once the guests were gone. It isn’t as if they weren’t feeding us, but naturally all other food lost its appeal when there was forbidden food to be had.

It’s a wonder the guests didn’t choke on the sandwiches we’d resentfully cut the crusts from that morning. And because waste not, want not, we’d eaten those crusts dipped in egg sandwich filling, which by the way, I loathed then and can barely tolerate, now.

We were then processed into being neither seen nor heard, mostly achieved by shoving us all in a room upstairs. We weren’t at full capacity that day with only twenty of us, but it was still a full house.

Before I was sent upstairs, I was instructed that I was in charge and to tell my aunt to come down to greet the guests. My aunt twenty-eight at the time, was only fifteen years older than me. She was emerging from the shower, wearing yellow, hair in a towel when I passed on the message, but she didn’t hear me and ever so slowly reached for the hair dryer and brush.

I watched her for a bit then repeated my message a little louder and more slowly. Perhaps it was the bad Urdu.

“OK!”

“GOD!”

“I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME!”

I stomped out, offended.

Now that I’m of the same age, I understand. How many times have I wanted to wipe the knowing smirk from a niece or nephew’s face as they check out my makeup, my clothes, excited by the romantic image of me about to meet some potential’s family?

I went off to join more sympathetic company. Out came the contraband. In our case, this was packs of playing cards and Uno cards, completely forbidden in my grandmother’s house because it smacked of gambling. Unsurprisingly, this meant we spent hours squatting behind trees or sheds, playing games of Uno and War, shuffling cards expertly, like hardened gamblers.

Eventually, we got bored, so we got out Waaris’ tired old set of Jackie Chan bootleg DVDs and hooked up his DVD player that he’d actually brought with him in his suitcase from Florida to the ancient TV in the room. We had become quite good at connecting American and Pakistani incompatible devices by cobbling together our collective supply of converters and adapters and amazingly, we only set a computer on fire once. We watched a lot of Jackie Chan that summer. I can still quote Rush Hour to you, 20 years later. (“Wipe yourself off, man. You dead.”)

By this time, we were getting restless. Then someone had a brilliant idea. If we sneaked onto the terrace of the roof, we could watch the proceedings in the garden down below. I thought it was brilliant too—until belatedly, I remembered I was in charge.

I voiced a half-hearted objection.

Twenty pairs of sullen eyes turned on me. They’d listen if I insisted but I knew I’d be ostracized, and the rest of my trip would be miserable.

I weighed the decision briefly then shrugged and got out of the way as a horde of kids stampeded to the door and army crawled across the terrace to peer through the bougainvillea growing along the railing. It was obscuring the view though, so one by one, we popped our heads over the fencing.

“I think the samosas are finished,” I heard a disappointed whisper.

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Baqar.”

“What? Like a goat?”

“That’s bakrah, stupid.”

We snickered.

One of the tinier specimens of our clan was still having difficulty seeing and had hooked himself by his ankles and knees over the railing. Unfortunately, he was now also dangling nearly upside down over the garden. The movement caught someone’s eye down below and an adult looked up, jaw dropping as she saw the twenty of us silhouetted against the sky. Prudently, her eyes snapped down again. Two of us quickly hauled up the suspended child while the rest dropped back down to the ground and crawled hastily back inside. When someone came to check in on us next, we were innocently watching Rush Hour 2.

~

The day after Eid, we took a bus to Lahore, where my paternal grandmother lives. It was a four hour drive and by the time we passed Jhelum, it was starting to rain. At first it fell slowly and then so heavily, I was afraid that the mountain roads were going to be flooded out. The bus slowed and began to crawl. We were getting closer to the Chenab River, where millions of tons of Basmati rice are produced annually and we were surrounded by rice fields, waterlogged normally, but now flooded. We passed by a house at the edge of a rice field and two boys burst out, clad only in shalwars. Even as they ran, they were already soaked, their brown legs showing through the wet, white cotton. They stopped at the edge of the fields, kicked off their slippers and dove in, two graceful arcs. Even from a distance, I could see the white of their teeth as they laughed and splashed.

That is one of the last memories I have of Pakistan. We drove past them slowly and I could see them for a long time and it looked like something out of a storybook; the emerald fields shimmering around that old farmhouse, the boys swimming in the square pool of water and rainbows shooting through the clouds of mist rising up as rain evaporated as soon as it hit the hot ground.

~

It has been eight years now since I have visited Pakistan. As I was leaving, my grandmother faltered over to me, put her hands on my shoulders and asked me to stay another week. That grandmother is gone now, taken in the pandemic. The youngest cousins will not recognize me and some of the older ones have children now that I have never met. There is a different shopkeeper in the convenience store behind my grandparents’ home and I do not even remember how to get there anymore. I have been busy, too busy to miss it.

But as I get older and the world gets more complicated my thoughts turn to older, simpler times. I feel the desire to once more stand on my grandparents’ terrace and hear the rustle of the jamun tree as the call of the athan floats over the city and echoes back from the Himalayan Mountains. If I close my eyes, maybe I will hear the echo of the laughter of the children of my family, the creak of the basket swing on the porch, and the mewls of the stray cats asking for scraps at the kitchen door. And maybe, for one moment I will once more be back in my childhood, in a summer in Pakistan. 

—MARIAM ASHRAF

LOSING

I lost the matching sock, the single earring, the writing contest, my beloved Rapidograph drafting pen. I lost track of my best childhood friend, Carmen, the girl who could sew anything and always wore the pair of loafers I coveted. I lost the eighth grade “Spelldown” contest on TV: after spelling 99 words correctly, “tarantula” was my downfall.

I lost the ninth-grade cheerleader election, I lost arguments, I lost boyfriends. I lost my nerve atop the high dive. I lost my first dog, who ran away, and every dog I loved after that, save one. Someday I will lose him, too.

I lost my bearings, lost my perspective. I lost opportunities by silencing myself, too fearful to speak up on my own behalf, too afraid of not belonging. I shed my strong Southern accent while spending my sixteenth summer at a Montana social justice camp filled with New Yorkers.

I lost my way in college, mislaid my ambition, squandered three years in the high desert of New Mexico, sacrificed my self-respect to a man, underestimated myself while trying to learn everything my parents had neglected to teach me, raising myself into adulthood. I left behind a nearly completed degree in elementary education to pursue psychology. I lost my first dissertation advisor to narcissism (his), surviving to earn a PhD and a career I love.

Becoming a mother, I lost sleep worrying about my sons. I lost my mind to postpartum depression after the birth of my second child, Sam. Night came on and stayed for months, while I lived underwater in the darkness, unable to surface. When Sam was 8, I lost him on a wooded bike trail when he rode ahead and took an unexpected turn. Ten minutes of heart pounding terror until he appeared again.

I lost track of time as my sons grew like saplings, spread their branches, became a mighty oak and an elegant willow. I lost my own rootlessness, the sharp edges of judgement, the emptiness inside. I surrendered my shyness, freed my voice, reclaimed writing, found community.

I lost my rare, valuable Star Wars Lego figures to a fatherless child with cystic fibrosis. Our therapy session ending, he stuffed Yoda and Darth Vader into his pocket, insisting he’d brought them from home.  His mother arrived, I challenged his ownership, tears ran down his cheeks as he stared silently into the distance. I got lost in the power of his longing. What did I know then of foreshortened futures?

I awoke in menopause, surveyed my losses: working memory, perfect eyesight, hearing, hair, joint mobility, muscle mass, gray matter, billions of skin cells, an inch of height I couldn’t spare – all gone like sand being sucked from beneath my feet by ocean tides.

I lost the beautiful boy who made me a mother, when he was only 23. Along with Benjamin, I lost my hope, my life’s meaning, our expected future. I forfeited my innocence about life and death, and enrolled in the school of impermanence. Waves of subsequent loss broke over me: a brother, a mother, a father, two child patients, another dog.

I lost my fingertip in an encounter with a knife and an onion.

I just lost the old man on the corner, the one I waved to for nearly 10 years, passing his house while taking my dogs on long walks, a practice for soothing my grief over Benjamin. A bald man who listened to Benny Goodman outside on warm days and lived alone in his pink rambler. I watched the gradual erasure of his long presence on this corner: first his homemade sign (“My Hermitage”) disappeared from above the garage, then the dilapidated office chair where he gazed out from his porch. When the blazing red “For Sale” sign appeared, it was plain that I’d lost my hope of talking with him one day. Despite political yard signs I disagreed with, I’d always thought I’d walk up his driveway and say hello. Where do they go, these actions we mean to take, our imagined futures, our best intentions? What becomes of our undeclared attachments?

Befriending death, embracing grief, my emotional armor peeled away. The fear lurking underneath all my life dissipated; I had no more patience for human cruelty, smallness, or the trivia of this world. I’d survived the loss I dreaded most. No one will mess with me again. Apprenticed with the darkness, I dismissed grudges, watched old wounds soften, surrendered self-judgment, uncovered deep gratitude. I fed my soul.

—LUCINDA CUMMINGS

NAMING THE DEAD

I was at my desk in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, when my email went down.

It was about a quarter to nine. Email was hosted in our New York office, and it was not unusual to lose it briefly when a server dropped its network connection or had to be restarted for some reason. I growled and went to the workroom for coffee.

There was a television there, tuned to CNN. It showed an airliner being driven through the window of my office in New York.

I called my boss, Brad. Like most of our more senior people he had a cell phone. (The rest of us were getting a new form of cutting-edge communications tech: AOL Text Pagers.) I reached him at his home. I told him, "A plane just flew into the north tower of World Trade."

"You’re kidding. Which building is that?" he asked.

"That's World Trade One. That's us." I answered.

Ordinarily at that time on a Tuesday I would have been on a PATH train approaching the World Trade Center station, but I had changed my schedule that week. I had gone up on Monday instead, to start Scott, a new employee. Scott was in his early 30s, infectiously energetic, eager to get through the first-day-of-work formalities and dig into his new job. He had a big smile that crinkled his eyes; in a job that consisted largely of convincing people to prepare for things they didn’t even want to think about, I knew he would excel. He asked my permission to start his days early, at 8:00, so he could leave work early enough to spend time with his two- and four-year old boys between preschool and bedtime. I was glad to give him that permission.

So I was in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, and Scott was murdered by terrorists on his second day of work. Dead, just like that.

The other two members of my small team died with him.

Joel was about ten years older than I, with many more years of experience in the field than I had. He didn’t hanker to lead the team, but he helped me get my feet under me. He looked, and was, studious. Soft voiced, bald on top, his wire-rimmed glasses often hid glints of mischief, and his gray mustache masked how often he smiled. Dead, just like that.

Carol was an administrative assistant who supported our small group and several others. She was kind, diligent, and quiet. She talked with me sometimes about her mother, who was old and failing. I learned much later that Carol was a third order Franciscan, but even not knowing that I recognized her simplicity, the joy she took in small things. Dead, just like that.

All that, and it was time for me to get to work.

I am a disaster recovery planner. I had been recruited to lead disaster recovery planning at Marsh USA in June 2001. Marsh is the insurance services subsidiary of Marsh McLennan, or MMC. My previous position had been at MMC’s reinsurance services company, Guy Carpenter. In Philadelphia, the Marsh and Guy Carpenter offices were a few floors apart in the same building. In New York City, Guy Carpenter had offices and a medium-sized data center in the World Trade Center, about halfway up Tower Two (the south tower), Marsh had a larger office and a major data center near the top of Tower One, and MMC’s headquarters were in midtown. My role at Marsh was “IT DR,” that is, Information Technology Disaster Recovery. When Something Bad happens, the Business Continuity folks worry about the people, and I worry about the computers. My work required frequent trips to the World Trade Center, and I had a cube there in the Marsh office in Tower One.

Brad asked me to try to get hold of someone on site, to get some kind of an impact assessment. He told me later that he thought it had been one of the light aircraft that fly tourists up and down the Hudson, and that often passed our 97th floor offices at eye level.

Fifteen minutes later, the second plane flew into Tower Two. Ian Fleming’s phrase flashed through my mind: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence … “Twice is enough,” I thought. “This is enemy action.”

I tried, and of course failed, to reach Joel in World Trade. But other status checks took place spontaneously.

My son, Alex, called from his middle school to make sure I was ok. I told him I was safe in Philadelphia. My wife was taking a week’s beach vacation in Delaware before starting a new job, and I was unable to reach her. I asked Alex to keep trying. Once he succeeded, it took him a while to convince her what he was telling her was real. She gave Dover Air Force Base a wide berth on her way home.

During that first day, I went downstairs from the Philadelphia Marsh office to Guy Carpenter, to talk with Chuck, their Operations Officer, about what we would need to do to support the Guy Carpenter recovery crew. My friend Mary Ivy passed his open door and, without either of us consciously crossing the intervening space, we were in each other’s arms.

This was not typical for us. A couple of weeks later, The Onion would report “Hugging Up 76,000 Percent.” (The Onion, volume 37, issue 34, p. 1.)

It takes about 30 seconds to go down one floor – two flights of stairs – in an office building’s fire tower. After 20 floors, even an active person begins to feel it. After 50 floors, you have shin splints. Call it an hour to get down from the top of World Trade, half an hour from the 50th floor. Within an hour and 42 minutes of the attack, both World Trade Center towers had collapsed.

That did not leave a lot of time to evacuate from an upper floor, even with stairways not blocked by flame and debris. But that is exactly what Paul, the Guy Carpenter CIO did, walking down from the mid-50s of the South Tower to ground level, and then heading grimly uptown, on foot, to the assembly point at corporate headquarters.

The Guy Carpenter people in Tower Two got out safely, in part because they were below the impact area, but mostly because many of them had been through the first terrorist bombing of World Trade in 1993. They knew the attack was real, and ignored instructions from the Port Authority to shelter in place. I have heard more than one story of an older colleague taking a younger one by the hand, and saying, “You’re coming with me.”

That evening, Paul held a teleconference for his entire staff. He conducted no business until he had heard the voice every single person. I don’t think Paul could imagine handling things any other way. We cheered when the last, embarrassed, attendee dialed in. We were all alive and safe.

Other corporate responses were less humane than Paul’s. Although HR later created web pages on which we could post sightings (“I saw Fred and talked to him.” “I talked to Jean on the phone last night.”) we were told not to name the dead, and for weeks there was no list of them. I was happy to comply. It protected me from realities I did not want to face, like Scott’s wife with her two young sons on Brad’s lawn that night, screaming to be told what had happened to him.

Brad and I agreed that I should stay in Philadelphia to help with the Guy Carpenter recovery, since I was more familiar with their systems and their people. Shortly before my transfer to Marsh, I had determined that a lot of Guy Carpenter’s essential software installation media were not kept off site. Maintaining copies of such vital records in a second location is a disaster recovery fundamental, so I begged, wheedled, whined, and made myself an unbearable nuisance until I had collected software CDs for all our critical systems. I crammed them into my overnight bag and took them to Philadelphia, where we stored them in the computer room. With this background, it just seemed to make sense for me to be there with the people and systems I knew.

Nevertheless, before I went to work with the Guy Carpenter team in Philadelphia on Wednesday morning, I packed a bag. Once at work, I got a loaner mobile phone issued to me. Sure enough, Brad called me from the Marsh recovery site in North Jersey. He needed my help there.

We had contracted with a recovery services company, COMDISCO, for what are called “shared recovery resources.” That means that multiple companies contract for the use of the same computers for DR, on the assumption that it is unlikely that they will all experience disasters at the same time. That proved to be a bad assumption.

The contract addressed the possibility that multiple clients would declare a disaster concurrently by promising to assign resources based on the order in which the declarations were received. One of my first actions on Tuesday morning was to get on the phone to declare a disaster on each of our contracts.

The declaration process broke down under the volume of calls, and the order in which declarations were received was lost. We did eventually get all the servers we needed. They never gave us all the user workstations we wanted.

The Marsh recovery process was managed from England, since they were not hampered by the loss of systems, infrastructure, and people as we were in the U.S. Thirty or more people would meet on conference calls several times a day, where progress would be reported, and next steps identified and assigned. I left these calls with a legal pad on which I had written out my own list of actions, and then went from room to room in the recovery site, passing instructions and getting status updates and resource requests from the various recovery teams.

Once a janitor stopped me. “What is on these pads you all carry?” he asked. I looked around the corridor. Easily twenty people from different companies were doing exactly what I was doing.

“Lists,” I told him. “Lists of things to do. Lists.”

But there was no list of the dead.

Our wide area network connected our global user population to the servers at the COMDISCO IT recovery site. However, there was only enough bandwidth to run a few test sessions on the recovered applications, not enough to support a full workload.

Even in 2001, email was among our most critical applications. By Thursday we had recovered the email servers at COMDISCO. But how could we get around the network problem?

Our corporate headquarters in Midtown Manhattan had both upgradable network bandwidth and enough raised floor space to host the email servers, if we could get them there. We solved the network problem by buying the servers and moving them to midtown.

By this time the Lincoln tunnel was open, though security was tight, and the police were nervous. So was I, when I signed a purchase agreement for just over a million dollars’ worth of uninsured equipment to be transported in a cheap rental van into New York past heavily armed police.

Grief did not stop John, an IT project manager, from renting the van and driving it. Like me, had previously been issued an AOL text pager. So had his best friend, who worked in the data center high in Tower One. There was no route down. “I’m standing on a wing!” his friend had texted. And later, “The smoke is getting pretty bad.”

John and I now both had cell phones. After we loaded the servers onto the truck and secured them, I told him, “You will call me when you enter the tunnel. You will call me when you exit the tunnel. You will call me when you reach the loading dock.” My log shows that on Friday September 14 at 00:45 he entered the Lincoln Tunnel. By 01:00 he was at the loading dock.

There were less grim moments. On a teleconference late on Wednesday, one of the Guy Carpenter tech leads said to me, “Remember how you were after my ass to get you software, and got me really pissed, and just kept after me anyway?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“Thank you,” he said.

Another member of that team told me years later about going into the Philadelphia computer room and finding all the software they needed. “Chests full of CDs,” he said. I like that word “chests.” It transforms a drab computer room into Ali Baba’s cave.

The headquarters building did not have the resources to host all the servers we needed, but we had a data center in Massachusetts that had a large number of servers that were just about to be decommissioned. Although they did not have enough tape drives to perform the high volume restores we needed for recovery, they did have plenty of network capacity, power, and HVAC.

We restored the servers’ data from backup tapes at COMDISCO in New Jersey, compressed it, and transferred it across the network to Massachusetts, where it was decompressed and brought on line.

Thursday or Friday night I walked into the console room at COMDISCO. The lights were off, and the only illumination was from the consoles themselves. Five or six red-eyed system administrators were there. Each step in the process was slow, and had to be monitored. While they waited and watched, they browsed websites. Although the company did not publish a list of the dead, newspapers and the City did. They were looking for the names of their friends.

We had a lot of survivors from World Trade who needed a place for their desks. We found it in a new building, being built across the Hudson River in Hoboken, NJ. We moved into the new space in 2003.

The World Trade Center Memorial was dedicated on September 11, 2011.

In December 2014, a colleague invited me to guest-lecture at his business continuity class at NYU. On the way, I visited the Memorial for the first time. I entered the plaza where the towers had stood, and my heart was taken away.

The memorial for each tower is a pit, evocative of the foundation for each building. A wall of water plunges down each side to fall in a pool that covers the floor. In the center is a hollow square, and the pool rushes down into that; you do not see it reach bottom. The words to describe it are also the feeling it evokes: bottomless sorrow. The names of the people who died in each building are cut in metal plates mounted on the walls around the pits. My fingers found their names.

Carol. Scott. Joel.

—WALTER LAWN

IRREVERSIBLE

CONTENT WARNING: SUICIDE BY FIREARM

Dogs bark as I ring the bell, but they quiet when the key turns. I open the door to my brother’s house, and they rush outside to pee. They’re alert and alive, so I think I’ve made it in time.

The next sound is silence. Then my feet crunch over brokenness—lamps, pottery, shards from overhead lights. I tiptoe over the wreckage and cry out, hoping to hear a deep, familiar voice.

No response.

Nine months prior, my brother and his wife had moved overseas, leaving my nephew in charge of their home, the mail, two family dogs. Now, they couldn’t reach their son. When my brother called me, I told myself, Whatever it is, I can handle it.

This is who I am, the family fixer, wrestling skewed situations back onto their rails.

So I descend the stairs to their basement, repeating a monologue I hope will turn dialogue. I’m here. Are you? When I pause, the air grows heavy.

There are two bedrooms in the basement. One door is open, and the other is closed.

The pressure in my chest threatens to suffocate. I want to be the hero, turn depression and despair into treatment, and eventually, triumph. I believe in my nephew, envision a future of happiness, friendships, love.

The open door reveals a cherished guitar, smashed; dresser drawers, pulled off their hinges; his mirror, shattered in a million jagged pieces; Coors Light, Silk Milk, Taco Bell, discarded clothes, dirty dishes, and all the emotions and tears that I imagine underlie this chaos, strewn across the floor.

Fear thumps in my head and I push it away. I haven’t found anything, yet. Not really.

So I’m daunted by the closed door’s flat surface. At this moment, this fragile, tentative moment, possibility still exists—the idea that I can act, do something, save him.

Cold metal chills my hand when I turn the knob, inch that door open. As I do, my eyes drift down, find my 23-year-old nephew, curled like a child on the floor. I see his whole life in that posture—baby, toddler, a lanky tween sleeping till noon. And an innocent, sad, frustrated young adult turning inward, regressing, wanting to rest.

Except he’s too still, too silent. And I’m too late. Blood pools on the floor and he’s lying on top of a shotgun.

A. Shot. Gun.

The gap between the potential I saw in him and the life he couldn’t envision for himself explodes in an unfathomable instant. The trajectory of his despair, a bullet train I couldn’t reroute.

I dial 9-1-1, and the operator struggles to decipher my hyperventilated words. My body stutters as I inhale, repeat the address.

Paramedics arrive but there’s nothing they can do. One of the medics hugs me before directing me to the police, who want me to talk to the detective assigned to the case, and eventually, the coroner. I repeat and relive with each new arrival, etching the sights, sounds, odors, and emotions into my mind, my psyche, my faltering sense of stability.

I rub palms down my face as a collage of memories collides—standing back-to-back with my nephew, measuring his growth against my steady height; the way he’d shrink in stature, but expand in spirit as he’d hunch over his guitar and strum melodies he’d composed himself; his subtle, sly humor that would make his mother laugh and laugh and laugh.

My stomach seizes as I make an unimaginable call, one that spans oceans.

I’ve failed the family.

Street sounds whoosh in one ear; my brother’s silence swells in the other. Then his wife’s voice pierces the void, filled with insistent disbelief. “No. No. NO!”

And I wonder if he’s disappointed, if she’s angry. Because I was unable to intervene; because I hadn’t prevented this tragedy; because it’s my voice on the phone, instead of their son’s.

Loneliness stifles outside noises. My brother, my sister-in-law, my sweet nephew, they’re all so far away. The distance pulls, expands, threatens to snap.

When I return to my own home, the smell of their house remains. I blow my nose, wash my face, shower, throw my clothes in a big black bag and dump it in the trash.

Yet the scent lingers.

The detective had labeled the scene, “Rage.”

The psychiatrist I will later see diagnoses, “Trauma.”

I call it heartbreak.

And I slog through life differently.

Every waking moment viewed through a filter of pain as I ache for the past—wind on my face, during bike rides in crisp autumn air, with my nephew, just a few months ago.

Every instant of stillness expands, and I dread my mind’s return to that motionless room—no breeze, no familiar voice, no interaction. Only echoes.

And every evening, as darkness shrouds light, I writhe in bed and wait—for a newly prescribed sleeping pill to still my mind, fog the vivid images of my nephew’s irreversible choice.

Suicide Prevention (US): call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention https://www.afsp.org 

—LISA C. PETERSON

fiction

THE PLACE BEYOND

"There's gotta be something else, you know, like something after we die."

"Dave, not this again…"

"You can't tell me you haven't thought about it. Life after death. Everyone thinks about it at some point or another."

"Can we just drop this?"

"What if we get reincarnated? You know, like come back as something else? That would be exciting."

"Even if that were true, you'd have no memory of your past life, so this version of you who thinks it's exciting wouldn't even be able to appreciate that you're living a new life."

"Maybe, but the idea of it is pretty wild. Reincarnation, a new life, maybe as a dog. I'd love to be reincarnated as a dog."

"I have nothing further to add to this conversation," said Frank, turning his head to look out the window.

"Or maybe we die, like, our physical being, but the soul lives on. Do you think there's a heaven or hell for us?"

"It doesn't matter to me either way."

"You're not concerned about the possibility of eternal damnation? Perpetually lost in a sea of souls, condemned to torture and pain for all eternity? Or what about heaven? Everything you could have ever wanted, reunited with your family and no pain or loss ever again."

"When I die, I die. That's it."

"So you think, in this great world of ours, with all its intricacies and miracles, that when we die, NOTHING happens? We're just dead, and that's it?"

"That's it."

"No place beyond this life? No great beyond? No final frontier?"

"None. And the final frontier is about space, not life after death."

"Well jeez, Frank, what's the point of even living if there's nothing to look forward to?"

"I didn't ask to come into this world, nor will I miss it when I'm gone," said Frank, now turning to look at Dave, hoping he would catch on to his lack of interest in the conversation and drop it.

"I wonder who, or what, determines exactly if I've lived a good life, you know? Like, who decides if I go to heaven or hell? Is there a checklist of all the good and bad I've done? And are certain things worth more points? I wonder what my score is…"

"Believe me, it doesn't matter. And I don’t think anyone is keeping track of your ‘score’."

"That's sad, Frank. You've got to believe in something to make this short life here on earth mean something. What about your family and everyone who came before you? Are they also just dead, with no chance to ever reunite with them?"

"That about sums it up."

"No way. I refuse to accept the idea that there isn't at least something after we die. Maybe we'll come back as ghosts to haunt this world forever, or perhaps just until we fulfill something that we didn't have the chance to do when we were alive."

"Heck, maybe we'll come back as zombies…"

"Yes, Frank! That's a possibility too, now you're thinking! That'd be pretty crazy, right? Can you imagine being a zombie? I wonder if we'd be hungry for brains, eternally roaming the earth with no thoughts of our own, yet somehow alive."

"I was joking…"

"Some people say Jesus is a zombie. And look at him, revered and worshiped around the world. Maybe someday, people will build huge temples and shrines in our names, praying to us as gone but not forgotten deities. Books written in our memories and a special day commemorating our lives when people bow down and pray to us."

"That's unlikely," said Frank, letting his eyes now wander over to the unwashed dishes in the sink.

"But it's possible. You never know, and that's what makes life so fascinating, the idea that no one can confirm what happens when you die. I mean, it's not like someone died and then came back and told us all about it. It's mysterious, isn't it? Personally, I think what happens is…”

The buzzing in the kitchen had reached a dull roar, so much so that Mrs. Peterson had reached for her pink fly swatter and brought it crashing down onto the counter, only managing to squash one of the flies while the other took off. Frank flew to the top edge of the dusty refrigerator and watched as Dave fell to the floor, already dead before he hit the linoleum. Mrs. Peterson, with her pink curlers and floral bathrobe, took another puff of her cigarette and did a slow scan of the kitchen, hoping to find the remaining fly, but soon gave up and retired to the living room and her faded green sofa. Frank looked down at Dave and hoped that his death had given him the answers he had been searching for, while also taking solace in the fact that if not, well, no one else had them either.  

—DEGEN HILL

ON-SAY-SAY 

The woman at the counter takes Jim’s passport, runs it under a scanner and checks the computer screen. She wraps a label around the handle of his suitcase, then hands him his boarding pass.

“On-say-say.”

“I don’t understand.” He looks from the boarding pass to the woman, taking in her sallow skin, dark eyes and the jaunty cap perched on her head.

“On-say-say.” She says something else in quick sibilant Spanish, then points to his left.

Jim hesitates, and she beckons the next traveler. He’s in the way, so he steps aside.

The airport concourse stretches before him. A sign above a bank of elevators directs him to Departure Gates. He walks behind a straggle of gleeful children, jumping about and waving inflated pillows. One girl tugs her mother’s sleeve, urging her to hurry, caught up in the adventure of travel.

Jim stands on the moving stairs. The computerised voice repeats… mind the step. He inspects his boarding pass. Departure 07:15, Madrid to Edinburgh, Seat 11C.

“So that’s what she meant. 11C… on-say-say.”

He puts the boarding pass in his pocket, and worries that the couple behind may have heard him.  

Travellers mill about the waiting area. Jim checks an information screen, then makes his way to a less crowded area with vacant bench seating. Two girls sit cross-legged on the ground by a window, gesticulating and laughing and eating sandwiches wrapped in tin foil. Jim places his hands on his knees to stop his legs jiggling. It’s a short flight, only two hours, a routine shuttle—no need to worry.

His flight is announced. He gets up, dawdles by the information screen before joining the end of the queue, and is the final passenger to board the plane.

He finds his seat and examines the illuminated 11C overhead. A large woman across the aisle complains about her seatbelt. She harrumphs and twists in her seat.

“It doesn’t work,” she tells Jim.

A flight attendant brings an extension and clips it in place. She touches the shoulder of the passenger in the next seat, a man with a ponytail protruding from the back of his baseball cap.

“Can you please hand me your bag to put in the overhead locker?”

The man nods. “I just need to get my book.” He unzips the bag and takes out a glossy doorstopper with an image of tanks and flames on the cover.

The passenger in the window seat beside Jim begins muttering. Whatever he’s saying is unintelligible, but the rhythm suggests prayer. Jim hadn’t paid him any attention when he sat down. All he can see from his peripheral vision is the cuff of a dark suit and short thick fingers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the crew I ask that you please direct your attention to the monitors as we review the emergency procedures. There are four emergency exits on this aircraft. Take a minute to locate the exit closest to you…”

Everyone here is going to die. A surge of realisation grips Jim. The queasiness in his guts tells him it’s certain. The passengers, Jim included, have been assembled on this plane, which is going to crash… into the sea, or a forest, or buildings.

The plane rolls forward. Jim pushes back against the seat, his fingers interlocked, thumbs rubbing together. The plane bumps, and bumps again as if rolling over cobblestones. This can’t be right—the runway should be flat. A heavy bump sends the passengers swaying, their heads bobbing. The plane judders, the creaking sounds ominous.

No one will survive this flight.

Jim squeezes his hands into fists and focuses on the seat number. On-say-say. He imagines the news coverage.

Flight from Madrid to Edinburgh crashes.

A list of names, ages, occupations, details regarding the pilot and co-pilot, how many hours they’d flown, an unblemished record until this fatal flight. Photographs of the victims: Jim pictured alongside the large woman and the guy with the ponytail, people he’d never seen before.

His brain burns at the prospect of the final moments; knowing what’s happening, grabbing and clawing and screaming, hopeless acts of desperation as the plane goes down.

The man with stubby fingers beside him continues muttering. A flight attendant walks by, checking seatbelts and smiling. The guy with the ponytail turns a page.

Jim thinks about his wife in Edinburgh, fast asleep or luxuriating in drowsiness, ensconced in the security of her soft quilt world. He hadn’t wanted to take this trip. The client insisted on meeting a senior member of the accounts team, and management decided that had to be Jim. He delayed the trip as long as he could, and now he’s ended up on this plane.

He grips the armrest, every sense tuned to the rocking motion. Did the engine sound just change? A different pitch, deeper rumbling. The plane brakes abruptly and stops. The sudden stillness accentuates his unease. His chest hurts. He can’t get enough air, as if his lungs have shrunk.

The plane rattles down the runway, springs and ratchets surely coming loose. Lumbering onwards, a cumbersome heaviness and, then, weightlessness. The plane veers to the right, dipping and turning. A vibrating growl as the landing gear retracts.

Jim glances across at the window, but all he sees is the surface of the wing. A leak of air comes through the overhead unit. The engines thrum. He checks his watch. Two hours to go.

Arrive, his nerves scream. Arrive. Arrive.

The flight attendants come by with trolleys. The large woman wants tea with skimmed milk. She asks if they have shortbread. The guy with the ponytail is handed a wee can of Heineken.

Jim stares at his knees, avoiding eye contact with the attendants. He looks over at the window once they’ve passed. The clouds below are too thick to see anything. Above, a glaring blue. Puffy white balls and gossamer-thin striations glide by.

He closes his eyes, and opens them immediately. Dozing is out of the question, his veins fizzing at the thought of waking to the reality of being on this plane. Instead, he gazes at the seat number, on-say-say, and performs mental calculations. Eighty-five minutes to arrival—thirty percent of the journey complete, each minute almost an extra percent. The second hand of his watch stutters forward.  

The sky changes, reassuring blue replaced by caliginous grey and mistiness. Water droplets spread across the window. Darker grey fingers of cloud reach out as the plane flounders, drops, steadies and lurches.

He breathes through his mouth and keeps his eyes on the back of the seat, following a line of white stitching on the green cloth cover. The passenger beside him flexes his thick fingers, his muttering relentless. Jim studies the stitching but he has to look, has to see, and turns to face the window. The sky is black.

The air in the cabin tastes stale. Sweat runs down his back, his shirt clinging to his skin. The airplane drops. His insides shrivel.

The cabin lights go out, come back on, and flash on and off.

The large woman crosses herself. A child somewhere at the back of the plane squeals.

An announcement from the captain…experiencing heavy turbulence…necessary to take a slight change of course...

The flight attendants return, strained smiles, uttering reassurances. The plane vibrates, shaken by a monstrous force, plummets and stops in mid-air.

Jim repeats his mantra… on-say-say on-say-say... Just get free of this, he begs, fly out of the grasp of what’s doing this.

Arrive. Arrive.  

The plane lands in Edinburgh. The pilot gives the local time and details of connecting flights. The passengers get ready to exit, their eyes glittering. Jim stands to one side, allowing his neighbour access to the overhead locker. He’s not how Jim had imagined him, this stern middle-aged businessman with sharp blue eyes. Jim considers saying something to mark their safe arrival, but can’t find the correct words. The businessman turns away. They wait for the doors to open.

As he walks down the steps, Jim marvels at the solidity of the buildings, the grandeur of the control tower, and the workers unloading bags onto carriers. A gleaming morning, the air chills his forehead and cleanses his lungs. It’s the first day of October, and he will experience the whole of autumn.

In the forecourt, the taxi roofs are coated with frost.

“Where to, pal?” the driver asks.

“The top of Leith Walk, by Picardy Place.”

Jim settles in his seat and looks up, momentarily surprised not to see an illuminated 11C. The taxi drives by long-stay parking lots, passing the replica Spitfire, and joins the queue at the exit traffic lights.

Jim leans forward, compelled to speak, to tell someone.

“The plane I was on almost crashed.”

The taxi driver half-turns, and shakes his head. “Almost crashed?”

Jim regrets sounding so melodramatic. “Terrible turbulence,” he says. “The worst I’ve ever experienced, plane thrown around like it was a toy. The lights in the cabin went out.”

“Sounds scary. I wouldn’t fancy that.” The driver checks his rear mirror, then pulls into the middle lane. “Well, you survived.”

The flat is empty. Jim puts his suitcase in the bedroom, sits at the kitchen table and stares at the fridge. He hears the front door open and close with a loud click.

His wife calls from the hallway, “Are you back?”

“I’m in the kitchen.”

Jim waits. She takes her time, hanging up her coat and then going into the bedroom, the sound of drawers opening and closing. Finally, she comes into the kitchen and lays her bag on a chair.

“So, how was the trip?”

“The plane almost crashed.”

“Really?” She opens the fridge, and takes out a carton of milk. “Would you like some tea or coffee?”

“Did you hear what I just said? The plane almost crashed.”

She looks at the wall clock. “But you must have arrived on time.”

“Terrible turbulence. The plane plummeted repeatedly and was knocked this way and that, flung about like a piece of flotsam. The lights went out in the cabin.”

“You get flotsam in water.” She unplugs the kettle. “You must be exaggerating.”

“I’m not.” Jim puffs out his cheeks. “It was the worst experience I’ve ever had. I was sure that was it. The end.”

She turns on the tap and fills the kettle.

“I was in seat 11C.” He fiddles with a jute coaster on the table, running his finger along its edge. “On-say-say.”

Her phone pings. She takes it out of the bag, and swipes the screen.

“On-say-say,” he repeats.

She continues swiping the phone.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes.” She doesn’t look up from the phone. “I can do two things at the same time. I heard you. 11C, your seat number.”

Monday, back at work, Jim struggles to concentrate as he types up the report of his meeting in Madrid. He joins his colleagues for morning coffee in the breakout space, and recounts his near-death experience.

“I won’t be taking any plane trips for some time,” he says.

Gillian from human resources grimaces in a show of concern. “I don’t blame you.”

“Terrible,” says Holly.

The other secretaries nod their agreement.

“That must have been an awful experience.”

“Dreadful.”

“Frightening.”

Jim takes a handkerchief from his pocket and blows his nose, concealing his disappointment at these banalities. Some of his co-workers ask questions, but not with sufficient awe. Was it very stormy? Which airline? Was the plane full?

One of the partners stops by, and Gillian tells him about Jim’s close call.

“You must have been relieved to set foot on terra firma,” the partner say, and walks away.

“It was complete chaos,” Jim tells them. “Utter bedlam. The air masks dropped from the overhead panel. That’s when I knew it was serious. The passenger beside me burst into tears. Other passengers had to be restrained. The captain begged for calm. He told us to be prepared for an emergency landing.”

Howard Webb, Head of Audit, purses his lips. “Sounds like a close call.”

“Who knows what the future holds,” Gillian says, then leans forward, her eyes widening. “Did you hear the latest? You know Maggie Nicholson, one of the cleaners? She won a hundred grand on the lottery.”

“Really!” Holly swivels on her chair, mouth agape. “If I won the lottery, I’d be straight down to the travel agency. A holiday in Dubai, non-stop cocktails by the pool. Or maybe Barbados. Somewhere sunny, anywhere but grey Edinburgh.”

Jim drops into The Blue Blazer for a drink after work. He sits at the bar, and leafs through a copy of The Evening News left on the counter. A fire in North Edinburgh had claimed two lives. An earthquake in Asia killed thirty. More fighting in the Middle East. He puts the paper aside and rubs his eyes. In his mind he pictures white stitching on a green seat cover.

A man with long straggly grey hair and a goatee orders a drink. The barman reaches for a bottle on the shelf of single malts. Jim contemplates the dregs of his pint and considers having another.

“Ahhh… that hit the spot.”

Jim turns to see the customer lower his glass onto the counter. He smiles at Jim, and the man’s striking blue eyes remind him of his neighbour on the plane.

“I’ll have one of those,” Jim tells the barman. “Let me get you another,” he says to the customer. “I have good reason to drink after what I’ve been through.”

“If you’re buying, why not. It would be churlish to turn down the offer of Talisker.” He shakes Jim’s hand. “You can call me Eric. So tell me, what have you been through?”

Jim describes the plane trip: the woman at the desk, on-say-say, his presentiment of disaster, the bumping and rattling before take-off, the turbulence, plummeting and rocking, lights going off, his fear and certainty he would die. He doesn’t exaggerate, encouraged by his new companion’s obvious interest in what he has to say. The man’s attention deserves the courtesy of accuracy.

“A difficult experience, sure enough,” Eric says. “One that’ll stay with you, and one that warrants careful consideration and analysis.”

“Exactly.” Jim shifts on his stool, and taps the counter for emphasis. “That’s just what I’ve been doing.”

Eric raises a hand to attract the barman’s attention, and orders two more drinks.

“Conventional wisdom would have you count your blessings and feel lucky you survived.” Eric swirls the whisky in his glass. “After coming through such a confrontation with the possibility of death, you’re expected to think that life is more precious and you took it for granted. You’ve been given a second chance. Appreciate life. Live every day like it’s your last.” He sips the whisky and places his glass gently on the counter. “You know that’s all trite, well-meaning or not. It’s the same life, before and after you got off that plane. Life hasn’t changed.”

Jim nods but says nothing, not wanting to interrupt Eric.

“That said, such an event is important in one crucial way. It can tell you things you do not know about matters that are kept hidden. Information you may not wish to have.” He pauses, and strokes his goatee. “Even so, this is an opportunity offered to few. An opportunity you should seize.”

Eric swallows what’s left of his whisky, and steps back from the bar. “I suggest you tell the people closest to you what you experienced on that flight. Reveal as much as you dare—your insecurities and frailties, your deep-seated fears.” 

“He adjusts his scarf and buttons his coat, preparing to leave, all the time eyeing the silent Jim.

“Tell them, and then observe.”

—MARK KEANE

FIRE IN THE SKY

Far off to the west, a shawl of muted colors moved and broke apart as the memory of the sun gave way to a gray darkness. Lightning flashed in the near distance. He could smell the coming rain.

In the hills, twenty miles from the nearest town, he made his home. And a mile down a winding gravel track to the highway sat his store and gas station. He had one employee who alternated the six-hour late shift with him. That’s all he needed. A small store for a meager income and a small home in the hills. He was happy, rarely questioning his aloneness or wondering of the happenings beyond. And he sat on the flat table-rock behind his home and looked down on the light and shadow of the steel canopy that sheltered the two gas pumps. This he did on his off nights, counting the cars that visited his store.

A car pulled in, then disappeared from his view, parking close to the store. His vision took in only the canopy lights over the gas pumps and the shadows. A couple minutes later, another two cars arrived, seconds behind each other, and parked at the pumps. Busy night, he thought.

A young woman stepped from her car. She eyed the gray sedan parked close to the store, then turned as a small sports car pulled into the bay next to her. The young man in the convertible smiled and stood, closing his car door.

“You’ve been following me,” she said to him.

“I have. Sorry. It’s a lonely road, and I thought if this British machine dies on me, I could flash my lights at you, and you would rescue me.”

She laughed. “I’ve not heard a line like that before.” She stepped to the pump.

“I stopped to put the top up. It looks like rain. Did you see the lightning?”

“Where are you going?” she said, waiting for the credit card approval. “What’s your destination?”

“Bakersfield. Yours?”

“L.A.” She pulled the pump nozzle to her car and saw two men inside the store stalking the front aisle. Behind the counter, the clerk loaded a dispenser with packs of cigarettes.

The man for Bakersfield finished latching his car’s top in place. He said, “Los Angeles. Can I follow you? This car really is finnicky.”

“If you can keep up,” she said over her shoulder, then glanced back to the store. The two customers were talking to the kid behind the counter.

A flash of light from the sky, then thunder echoed. Heavy drops of water hit the pavement and sounded atop the metal canopy like falling marbles.

She removed the nozzle and hung it on the pump. Her follower filled his tank. He looked up and smiled. She couldn’t help but smile back. That smile, his eyes…

Claws of lightning opened the sky above them, illuminating the store and the surrounding hills. Immediately, thunder sounded. The young man filling his tank felt a shiver of electricity hit his hand. He dropped the pump nozzle.

“Damn.”

A muffled pop, followed by an explosion of sparks on the power pole.

The lights went out. They stood in darkness listening to the remnant thunder peel off the hills.

“Wow,” she said. “The transformer got hit. Are you alright?”

“Every hair on my arm is at attention. I don’t think I want to touch that pump.”

The pebbling rain muffled his voice. An emergency generator started. Behind him, she saw the interior of the store light up. He could see her face now and followed her gaze. The two customers stood behind the counter, one holding a gun, the other rifling the cash drawer.

He pointed. “Holy shit.”

“Did they kill that kid? We should go. Now.”

She stepped to her car.

“I’ll follow you,” he said, his eyes on the robbers.

“Hurry.” She started her car, watching as the gunman walked around the counter to the door. Pulling forward, she angled for the road, then looked over her shoulder for the man in the sports car. He flashed his lights. His car wasn’t starting. She braked. In the rearview mirror, she saw the robbers standing at the doorway. Her passenger sprinted into the rain, carrying his backpack.

On the hillside, rain fell at the store owner’s feet and stopped. As if he had nature on a leash. He often felt, high above the store, watching the hills as their hues and shadows changed in the twilight, that he was a god on some new Olympus. Tonight, though, he had to deal with a power outage. He’d seen the sparks from the transformer. He shrugged, gazing down at his store, the pumps beneath a dark canopy, only a faint glow from within the store. His thoughts were on closing the store as quickly as he knew how, rearranging the coolers, shutting a couple down to minimize the load on the generator. The store was his life. It occupied the full extent of his vision from the table-rock to his dreams: a tiny structure along a tiny stretch of highway. All else was unimaginable to him, all else happened beyond his knowing.

Lights from two vehicles left the parking lot, moving west. Perhaps, he thought, the other driver is lingering in the store, searching for a Klondike bar for the long drive ahead. He turned toward his home. He would call his night help and tell him he was on his way down.

A coyote barked. The man stopped at his door and listened. He smiled. Life goes on, he said to himself, and to the coyote: “I think I’ll get a Klondike bar. Before they melt.”

—BEN RATERMAN

TRAIN HOPPING

I ride the train half-expecting to be ejected at the next station, half-expecting to be left alone because I do not look like I belong, the only white man in a sea of brown people who smile and stare, an exchange of nods and the few who manage to speak whom  I—the dumb American—do not understand them.

The young girl across from me carries a backpack and reads from a book that looks twice her age. She only looks at me in passing, never looking directly, unlike the older women who analyze my place. When the train fills to standing-room only I am uncertain if I should offer my seat but my stop is four hours away and I paid for this seat, a row and a number. The further we get away from the city, the more people fill the train.

I hear people walking on the roof of the car and I recall pictures of people riding on top of trains here in India. I suspect there are no tickets for the people above me, braving injury or death to simply get from one place to the next, likely a job that requires such a trip daily. When I get off at my stop, I turn around and am shocked that there are no handles, no fencing on top of the train to prevent a slip or fall. While mostly young, there are people of all ages riding on top. No one is reading, they are staring off to a distant fixed point or talking to someone next to them now that they can get in a few words while the train loads and unloads passengers and packages.

Back at his house, my host explains that riding on top of the train is technically illegal. If you get hurt you cannot sue for damages. He says it is tolerated because it serves a purpose: how the poor get to and from work, visit family, attend funerals. He tells me this while walking around the house closing the windows despite the heat. He explains that a cremation is scheduled for the hour, and that the smoke from down the hill will fill the house if he doesn't close it up.

He says many of the people who got off the train at my stop are probably there to attend, as the deceased was a beloved headmaster and also his father. I ask if he means actual father or is that a term of reverence. My actual father, he says. The man my grandmother raised.

—MICKIE KENNEDY