Issue 22

poetry

creative nonfiction

fiction

Poetry

Seeing Like a Hollow

Michael Dowdy

composed of words in “The Recesses,”

from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain

Let them travel the slopes,
these eyes funiculars

climbing tumbles of root,
scattering leaf and sprig.

Let them savor the tang
of the equinoctial storm,

these lips the splash
of cataracts, sips of ice

distilled in streams clear
as the sound of a stone 

gashing a still surface,
sinking to its depths.

Let them plunge in falls,
these fingers reaching

for wealth’s plateaus,
their hands a rabid peril.

Let them wade the burn,
these feet servant to speed,

narrow shelters for bone,
no alien to the bottom.

Let it lay in the stream
aerated by river spirits,

this back weary from
arching for a summit.

Let it spring everywhere clear,
this mind a grater coiled

in granite defense
of its submerged shores.

Balance tarn and corrie,
rough spirit, broken body.

Distance the commons
from talk of business.

Watch the mountain
companion the hollow,

let these eyes see the earth
how it must see itself:

unaided, without focal
point or destination,

this simple presence
a buoyant becoming.

The Woman with the Paint Horse is Real Like Ghosts

Narya Rose Decker

Cold and wind carry
her voice of bird call.
She is real like ghosts.

In a winter field of brown sedge
and goldenrod skeletons, I press through snow.
I’ve not been storied by my feet
but what covers them.

When I have nothing left to prove
I pull off my winter boots and wool socks,
step into ice that bites,
crystal to look into.

Behind me now human tracks
crisscross horse
rabbit deer and bird:

my foot’s trace, the green of something new;
the horse’s, my heart;
the bird’s, three twigs;
the deer, a trail of stones;
the rabbit’s, listening and leaping.

I nestle bare feet into snow
wolf-warm.

To Reach for Something You Can Never Hold

Max Fischer

Touch something that never existed
& call it mercy.
Crack your ribs from the inside out
& call it praying
Pinch your collarbones together
& name the space between them “God.” There’s hope
there—in the ridges of your toes, sadness
in the lines you erase from your
palms with the back of snapped
pencils. There’s emptiness there—
in your stomach filled with the tears
you swallow as you reach
for something you
can never hold:                                                                                                      yourself as a baby
                                                                                                                        in your mother’s arms when
                                                                                                                        she looks at you as a girl &
                                                                                                                        never the man you’ll grow up as.
There’s nothing
you cannot do to cut her out,
cut the outline of your shadow,
& call it “Believer”:                                   the miracle cradled in the cage
                                                                           of your ribs & its silent prayers
to
exist.

Destino

Lisa Rua-Ware

My mother reminds me about God every day,
as if I’ve forgotten and left my faith at the bottom
of a bookcase. My mother doesn’t recite
an adage I can recognize but says again and again 
what’s born must one day die. A simple fact
I always knew but can’t accept, even after my father
died isolated in a hospital room, even as his brother
thins with the cancer overtaking the inside
of his bones. She says destino is unavoidable,
it’s certain as my daughters’ grip,
my tight prayer around their palms as we cross
a busy street. I look for the danger coming. 

Inner Work

Rosa Sophia Godshall

Chronic nerve pain worsens as I age, crawling in my face, under my cheek, behind my ear. Since childhood I’ve struggled with pain, my own body a battlefield. I can’t define it any more than I can define a God of my own understanding. Some say this is a path to Higher consciousness, a spiritual journey. We can develop conscious attention, observe ourselves, meditate, be of service to others. In theosophy, the Masters say TRY. I wasn’t raised with any sense of religion, but I recite the Lord’s Prayer during pain attacks. I hold on to repetition, try to bring the sensation of spirit to my feet, away from my face. I try to exist elsewhere. I leave my body, seeking relief. I discover what matters—what doesn’t. Pain becomes a gateway. The pain’s intensity gives way to visions. One day I’m sure I’ve met Jesus. I fall asleep on the bathroom floor. Dead people come to visit. They kneel beside me and whisper in my ear. At the hospital, the doctor says, Don’t worry, we’ll find out what’s going on. I promise. They don’t. They don’t know what’s wrong, and they don’t try. Pain becomes a gateway. I learn to pray. 

I forgot my heart,
closed a door against the sky.
Where is my center?
I was wrong. I remember now—
Love is the only answer.

Ode to July 4th 2002 in Central Virginia

Katsy M.

in the style of Angel Nafis

Plush pursed lips, ‘bless your heart’ with the hard R, sharp off the tongue like Splenda with the melody clank of sweet tea. Sweaty barefoot children running under the trees unheard, -- always seen past the old graves of the family near the creek. Warm melon dew strewn against the oak still tingle on the tongue; just like the quick wits slung from Jody in get-togethers before. Swarmed by the twilight pixies arriving now that the orange ball hangs low, unphased by the celebratory lightning strike sounding snap, a cold fresh can by an open fire grill. Roasted hotdogs, grade USA beef, ready to embrace the pillows of potato buns, the fine China of the evening. The old guard helming the roast instilling trickle down affection to reaffirm his classic Bush drive, missing the child left behind in the sack race invasion. The aunts gossiping about Uncle Pete’s ex-wife, fanning the heat, each flap a louder warning to move these party forward. Millions of atoms inside vibrating, -- dying, -- to take off their overpriced Sunday shoes to wade in the crystal clear water. Everyone anticipating the rainbow night sky to light up with patriotic platitudes, a promise of red, white, and blue sticky fingers while they push at the peripheral vision of gooey red faces across the world. That’ll never get to look at the Van Gogh sky with dilated pupils, feeling the empty spaces of Jody, cousin Corey, and Uncle Pete. The family unaware that their homecoming will include bloodied hands and fractured minds from orders above we’re told to celebrate tonight.

Bongsoonghwa

k. hyeri ko

back when halmoni used to dye my nails with balsam flowers
she held my hands until the paste turned them orange
behold the unfolding of spring in her delicate wrinkled hands:
wringing out bean sprouts, dancing across the ivories,
mending our garments, watering the orchids,
wrapping each fingernail with a gossamer shimmery veil

her fragmented sleep tells the story of how she dropped her mother’s hand
they fled from north to south in the dead of the night
her own hands, callused with ancient heartache
she spent a lifetime trying to undo in karmic reclamation
from that darkness her fingertips burst life-giving,
soul-bounding magic, day in and day out
and i thought mine could someday too,
the wishful thinking of inheritance

now when the flowers put on their technicolor dreamcoats
i see halmoni peeking out behind a curtain of gingko leaves
flitting butterfly-soft among the stained glass and cathedrals

this time her hand is outstretched
(this time she holds on tight)
this time her mind isn’t a shuttered field of stars,
marred by war planes and bombs,
this time there’s time,

her hand stretches out across the sea’s foaming mouth to reach mine
we rise up with opalescent pearlescent wings that stretch behind us
hands clasped so tightly i can’t tell her from me
riding the wave of a spring breeze on a makeshift raft
spun with merino yarn promises,
all the way up into the clouds

strawberry moon

k. hyeri ko

she hugs the I-83 skyline at dusk
ominously auspiciously sensually
suspends me in intricate ropes
airborne above the speeding cars
i’m gasping for air, her hand at my neck
at the mercy of her gravity

tonight, like all nights, i have the protection
of moonlit timekeeping on my side

my left thumb bound by decades-old etched silver
my index finger traces its serpentine grooves
in following the rhythms and laws of lunar seasons
last year i shed my skin like a good korean girl
molted til you could see straight through me
this year i became a horse like my grandfather
hoisted myself up onto the fiery saddle
my hands burned at the touch
but i did not flinch once
hair on my body singed clean
a different kind of casting off
the kind that destroys
rather than reveals

During a Tropical Storm I Take a Drive

Florence Murry

I pull apart the layered clouds drive 
on the unknown road in the evening blush.  

Above me clouds lace swirled pink, youth’s passion 
turns to blemished emptiness. At sunset 

I drive wrapped in a billowed sky, ruffles 
on petticoats we wore under skirts twirled 

out again and again. We danced to Twist 
& Shout and Do You Love Me. Pink chiffon,

pink crimson, pink, pink, pink. A taffeta 
life where nothing ever went haywire. 

Scorched dreams rust out & catch
in the burnt tumbleweed on these low hills

I wind & wind around curves on this road 
into the pink sky’s dust. Family dispersed

in washes, in dew, and in voluminous 
clouds. One son swims in coral reef water. 

The other bikes his way home on wide streets. 
The youth make their way. They leave Legoland

and princess dolls. They stride in their adult 
frames. One sketches dawn, another divides 

 cells in tubes, one builds buildings, one more, speed 
drifts on curves. The fifth, now gone from this world. 

The road merges with Newport Blvd. I look up
scattering pink lifts my body into mist. It dissolves

and love floods in. There is no turning back.
Rain blasts, trees bend, wind gusts. I greet the world.

Ode to a Hated Garage

Tessa Kale

Toutes les routes de la Terre
Commencent derrière ma porte
Qui ouvre sur les kilomètres
Que les roues ont le désir
D'enrouler autour d'elles.
                                                            --Pierre Albert-Birot

Red-bellied woodpeckers are nesting in our garage.
When we pulled up the door, they flew out the back,
and one looked back at us from the roof,

cricking his long neck, his head aflame
with its orange stripe, all of him pointed with attention.

It’s a mistake to think that we’re the last word
in intelligence. Certainly to conclude, as some do,
that without us looking at it, the universe wouldn’t exist.

Look, at the woodpecker’s bright eye, looking at you
looking at him, and tell me you don’t see consciousness.

At any rate let’s agree that the nature
of the universe is participatory.

At long last our garage is covered in green:
wisteria, grape vine, Virginia creeper.
It was built by the previous owners as a shrine.
Because the idol was a car of course it was made cheaply,

and began to disintegrate soon after we moved here.
In the winter it will be an eyesore again,
a massive decaying blot on our garden,
not sleeping, like the deciduous trees,

or fruiting, like the evergreens, yet,
thanks to the intelligence of living things,
ants and termites, spiders, squirrels and birds,
a temple of a sort to what breathes.

talbiyah for displaced birds

Adegoke Adeola

labaika allahumma labaik.  
labaika la sharika laka labaik

it rained heavily today again,  
in the unlit corner of a mosque,  
zayn recites the talbiyah with cracked vocals,  
wonders which is god's favorite character -  
the armed defenders of faith or  
charred stomachs in a continent of loss?  
how do we share the burden in the concept of heaven -  
labaika allahumma labaik,  
could its doors reconcile the killers and the killed?

she settles outside the mosque,  
hoping god houses the birds in migration,  
the birds that flew north for the sound of bullets,  
hoping god calms the birds in agitation,  
the birds that settled in unfamiliar places.
she's a bird too, a beautiful black bird, clipped wings -  
what use is a white-browed robin-chat that can't sing?  
an acanthiza cannot spell home without family.

The Data Center in Pampanga

John Brixter Tino

The carabao stands in mud up to its black knees, watching
the concrete building breathes. All night the generators
hold their one note against the silence of the rice.
Inside, racks of blinking servers store what distant people

cannot bear to lose: photographs of meals, the unsent letters,
someone's father laughing on a beach he'll never visit again.
The heat they generate could warm a hundred homes. Instead
it pours into the dark where geckos press their translucent

bellies to the outer walls and wait for moths. My cousin feeds
the cooling system, checks the gauges, earns in one month
what the farm once yielded in a season. He says the building
Dreams in a language he was never taught. At dawn the farmers

pass it on the way to fields that shrink each year, their footprints
filling slowly with water. No one here has asked what lives inside.
They know already how a thing can take the land and give back
light that touches nothing, that grows nothing, that the rain ignores.

After the Storm

Sarah Seybold

Brown metal panels. Battered, bent.
Scattered through uncut grass.
Caught against chain-link fence.
Overnight, wind ripped the trailer skirt
right out from under us. Morning,
Mom in her faded nightgown
stood in the pummeled yard,
holding a scrap of sharp skirting.
I needed to get ready for school.
She turned to me, her face pleading:
what are we going to do?

Creative Nonfiction

Among the Rice Fields

Arden Peach

After what felt like endless days at boarding school, Ye Chenxi’s lonely tears gradually subsided.

She still counted the days impatiently, waiting for the break that came every three weeks—a brief three-day respite. Every time she returned home, her first stop was always to meet her old primary school friends—the ones she felt closest to. 

“Did you know? Lin Wenjing has stopped going to school,” Hu Ying said.

“What? How can she just stop?” Chenxi exclaimed, shocked.

In the countryside, everyone knew the saying: If you don’t study, your future is planting rice in the fields.

Teachers said it. Families said it. Even the television seemed to repeat it like a warning. 

The father of a boy next door once declared at his doorway, “As long as he’s willing to study, we’d even sell our blood to support him.” 

Her grandmother had told her: “Planting rice is exhausting. The fields are full of leeches—I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them. Like worms. When you plant seedlings, you step barefoot into the muddy paddies, and they crawl up your legs, clinging and sucking blood.” She measured their length with her fingers, making a sound of disgust. “Big ones. Thick as this. Hard to pull off… ugh!”

Chenxi clenched her teeth, a chill running up her spine. 

“And that’s not the worst. In July, when it’s hottest, that’s when we’re busiest. It’s the double rush.” 

“What’s that?” Chenxi had never understood the term that drifted through the elders’ conversations. 

“Harvest the early rice while rushing to transplant the late rice. No time to breathe. You thresh the grain, dry it in the sun, burn the straw, plow the fields, flood them, transplant seedlings—from dawn till dark.” 

Chenxi’s brow knit tightly. 

…

“Why did she stop going to school?” Chenxi asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to go visit her?”

“Sure. But I’ve never been to her house. I don’t even know where she lives.”

“It’s okay. I do.”

Immediately, Chenxi led Ying along a side road branching off the main street.  Once paved with blue gravel, it was now concrete, scattered with mud and fallen leaves. 

She had been to Wenjing’s house before, but she couldn’t remember the exact location—only a vague direction. 

As they walked, Chenxi suddenly recalled a winter when everything was blanketed in thick snow—a “once-in-fifty-years blizzard,” the news had said. For primary school children, though, that year’s early winter break meant more time to play.

She and Wenjing had gone on an “adventure in the mountains,” walking along this very road. 

The snow muffled all sound. The world was quiet, white, and empty. On a sudden impulse, Chenxi had said, “Look at this scenery—let’s have a poetry contest!” 

“Okay,” Wenjing replied at once, and then recited loudly:

 “Before me, none of the ancients; behind me, none of those to come.” 

The lines rang out across the empty hills. Chenxi was stunned. She could not imagine a single line to surpass it. 

Later she learned it was a poem from a Tang dynasty poet.

That winter, they had played in the snow to their hearts’ content. Chenxi had even found two spare smooth wooden floor tiles, lined them up in the backyard snow, and tried to mimic skiing from TV, but they would not slide.  

The heavy snow had also crushed a tall cactus that once bloomed with bright yellow flowers. 

…

They passed stretches of green and brown farmland, several graves overgrown with withered grass, and a cool, shaded grove before arriving at a fork in the path.

Chenxi stopped, embarrassed. “Wait—I forgot. I think it’s the left one.”   

Ying laughed. “It’s fine. Let’s just see.”

They walked on. The trees grew taller. The road grew darker and quieter. 

At last a two-story house appeared by the roadside, with a smaller red-brick structure beside it. The front door wide open.

“I remember now—that’s Chen Jun’s house,” Chenxi exclaimed.

“Oh!  Let’s see if he’s home,” Ying said. 

Jun was a boy, a longtime classmate, who once brought his mother’s fried freshwater snails to share in class.

Since entering middle school, Chenxi had gradually lost contact with the boys from primary school. Even neighbors she had grown up with no longer saw or spoke to her, let alone Jun, who lived farther away. Ying went to the same middle school as Jun but rarely interacted with him.

Luckily, Jun was home, along with his grandmother, who sat in a wheelchair.

 “Wenjing is at home. I’ll take you there,” he said.

He led them up a grassy slope, where tall trees bore old carvings. One of them read: “Chen Jun will always love Lin Wenjing.”

The letters had stretched with the growing tree, their grooves old yet sharply defined. 

“Did you carve these?” Chenxi asked with a laugh. 

“Ha, yes, Wenjing and I did, a long time ago,” Jun said, scratching his head sheepishly.

At the top of the slope, he pointed to an red single-story house not far away. “That’s Wenjing’s home.” 

The house nestled against a hillside, built of red brick with tightly laid black roof tiles. A flat patch of earth stretched in front. Below it, terraces of farmland spread outward—radishes, cotton, rice. 

They followed a narrow path between the fields.

As they drew closer, they saw a girl in a purplish-red jacket in the field.

“That should be her,” Jun said.

“Lin Wenjing!” Ying shouted.

The girl turned at the sound of her name. They raised their arms and waved. She waved back, then began walking toward them slowly, her steps careful on the soft earth. 

“You came,” Wenjing said with a smile. 

“Were you busy?” Ying asked.

“No, not at all,” she waved her hand. “Come in and sit with me.”

Under the eaves of the red-brick house were stacks of firewood. In the yard, a Y-shaped tree branch served as a clothesline post, an old wire strung between its forks. Tangerine trees, heavy with sun-bright fruit, lined one side of the house. Chickens wandered across the packed earth. 

Inside, the walls were coated in white lime. A poster of a great leader hung in the main room. Odds and ends filled a corner. 

Wenjing led them into the room with the television. A long wooden bench and two stools stood inside. She switched on the TV. Hunan Satellite Television was airing a glossy youth drama, bright and lively. 

Then she brought some tangerines. “Here, have some.”

“Thanks,” they said.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” Wenjing said.

“I heard you’ve stopped going to school?” Chenxi asked directly.

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Why?”

“I studied for two weeks at first,” Wenjing pressed her lips together and looked away. “Middle school is so hard… I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to keep going.”

Chenxi frowned, struggling to understand. 

 “What are you doing now?” Ying asked. 

“I stay at home… sometimes help with farm work.” Her tone was even, as though stating something ordinary. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, is it?” Ying said, worried. “Working in the fields isn’t much of a future.”

“Mm…” Wenjing paused. “My mom says in a couple of years I’ll go with her to work in Guangdong.” 

For a long moment, none of them spoke. 

At twelve, they did not really know what studying—or not studying—would lead to. 

“If you study, even if you work later, it won’t be so hard,” Chenxi said, thinking of her mother. Her mother spent her days in a workshop, surrounded by machines, engine oil, and metal dust. She always said that with education, you could work in an office, clean and light. 

 “I hate school too,” Chenxi added. “Our homeroom teacher is strict. Scary. But I just try to get used to it.” 

Wenjing looked up at her, then nodded. “I know.” 

On the television, the city skyline shimmered. The heroine, dressed in a beautiful school uniform, strode through a spacious hall, about to collide with the male lead. The brightness of it drew their attention, and they began talking about the show. 

They chatted about other classmates, shared small stories, laughed. 

“We should get going,” Ying said, gently tapping Chenxi’s arm. 

“Think about it,” Ying told Wenjing. “We’ve been classmates for so many years. I hope everything works out for all of us.”

 “Yeah, we’d better go.” 

“Okay.” Wenjing walked them to the door. “Bye.”

The orange sun sank behind the hills, bathing the fields in a gentle glow, as if a thin veil of mist had settled over the world. 

Chenxi did not know that this was the last time she would ever see Wenjing. 

The Ache of Empathy

Michael Sean Collard

II’m dirt poor. I live on the kind of income that people use as the “threat” in those hypothetical scenarios where you get something—but with a catch. The kind of hypothetical that turns poverty into a game.

But here’s the thing: I’ve got a roof over my head, food every day, a soft bed, my own private room with a door that closes, and clean water whenever I need it. I’ve got a private bathroom—somewhere I can run to when my IBS acts up, a private place with a door that locks, with nobody shooting up in the next stall. These aren’t luxuries; they’re basics. And yet, I remember when every single one of those things was something I couldn’t even dream of.

I remember shitting in alleys, eating out of dumpsters, trying to wedge myself between the sidewalk and the overpass at night. I remember the relentless grind of just finding a spot where I could exist—a place where nobody would chase me off, where I wouldn’t have the cops called on me. I remember the look on people’s faces as they walked by, like I was part of the scenery, something to ignore, an object to avoid. Or like I was a particularly vile bug that had crawled out from under a rock.

I'm still not sure which was worse.

People are often surprised when they find out I was long-term homeless. The agreed-upon story seems to be that that doesn’t happen to “people like me.” I’m “too well-spoken,” “too smart,” “too educated.” The compliments come wrapped around a quieter belief: that homelessness is something that happens to a different kind of person, someone already marked as lesser. When they find out I lived on the street, that I’m a high school dropout—that I was exactly the person they fear—the shock isn’t really about me. It’s about their idea of who’s allowed to end up on the sidewalk and who isn’t.

I always start thinking about this more as fall slowly turns to winter. Partly because that’s when the shelter lives loudest in my memory, and partly because every winter in the Midwest is a small apocalypse for the homeless. Out here, cold is not an inconvenience; it’s a weapon. Every winter, across the ten Midwestern states, a few thousand of us die alone in the cold. People like the ones I slept beside in Crack Alley. People like the version of me who didn’t make it out.

Every year, I see the first frost and, for a moment, I think it’s beautiful—the way it softens the edges of the world, the way it shines on the grass. And then I remember that somebody died last night because of it. Both things are true. I hold them both at the same time: the beauty and the body count, the glitter on the sidewalk and the person who didn’t wake up. That’s what I mean when I talk about the ache of empathy. It’s not a warm, fuzzy feeling. It’s the way your heart won’t stop insisting that other people’s lives are real, even when it would be so much easier to look away.


I was homeless for 10 years. I was on the street for one year out of that 10. I’ve left Crack Alley behind me, now. I’ve been housed, stable for almost as long as I was homeless. And every year, the memory of that time on the streets fades a little more. But the scars will never fade away. I carry them inside me, like a frozen shard of glass lodged deep in my core. That’s something I’ll carry until the day I die.

And the honest truth is simple: it wasn’t hard work that got me out of there. Not a damn bit of it. It was pure luck, and the support of dozens of people. From friends and family to attorneys and doctors.

I was one of the lucky ones. For every person like me, there’s a hundred others who didn’t get that help—people who fell through the cracks, people who got left behind.

And for anyone with a soul, the question isn’t whether I deserved this, but why the fuck did I get it and not someone else? I wasn’t special. I didn’t work harder or make better choices. I didn’t deserve this any more than the thousands of others I met in the same position. I was just lucky.

Merit is a lie, deservingness an excuse, and luck... luck just feels cold and arbitrary.

I guess, when you get down to it, it’s survivor’s guilt. It’s the nagging question I’ll never be able to answer: "Why me?"

When I finally got out of homelessness, I thought if I showed them what I’d been through, maybe they’d care enough to change it. To stop it from happening to others. I thought the truth was enough. If I just laid the scars bare, displayed the wounds openly with no pretense, they'd understand.

Maybe that was naive. Maybe it was foolish. But I believed it.

Then hard, cold reality hit me like a meteorite to the back of the skull. I realized most people couldn't see. Wouldn't see. Flat-out refused to look. At first I thought it was malice, that people were cruel, that nobody gave a shit. It took me years to realize the truth.

Most people don’t turn away out of cruelty. They turn away because looking too close means their tidy little lives, their comfy world, might fall apart. They can’t face the truth that this could happen to anyone—and that means it could happen to them. If they see the person underneath the labels—addict, homeless, psycho, victim—their world gets a little less safe, a little more uncertain. So they turn away. People aren't malevolent; they’re afraid. Not cruel, but perhaps cowardly, unwilling to confront the cost of seeing.

Empathy isn’t soft. It’s sharp. It demands you come close, and that you give up the idea that you’ve earned your comfort. That anyone deserves it more than another. And for a lot of people, that’s just too much. When you bring them the raw truth of suffering—especially the kind that shows the system is broken—you’re not just asking them to feel. You’re asking them to reckon with everything they believe about themselves in that system.

Most people can’t do that in real time.

Some refuse to do it at all.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that feeling isn't just a burden I carry as a survivor of homelessness; it’s a burden of empathy itself. I encounter someone begging on the street, desperate for something—anything—and I can’t help them. I want to. I want to give them everything I have—food, water, a soft bed, a private bathroom. I want to give them years of security, a support network, a belief in their own worthiness as human beings.

But you can’t carry that in a wallet. Hell, I don’t even carry cash; haven’t for years. I’m living on SSI disability—a paltry $961 a month—and it’s eaten whole by rent, utilities, and general bills. I’m dirt poor, barely scraping by, and can’t spare even $10 when someone needs it, even though I want to. The worst part is knowing how close I am to the same fate. It's not "There but for luck go I", it's "There but for luck I'd still be."

A few months back, my older sister—a half-sibling raised in a different house, with a different mother, a middle-class childhood—made a post on Facebook about how “A homeless” had set up camp near the school bus stop. About how they were disgusting and dangerous, and she called the cops on them.

And I tried to gently talk to her. To tell her about the language she was using, about how dangerous it was. About how 15 years ago, that could have been me, her brother, begging on that street corner for spare change—just trying to stay alive another day.

And she turned away. Talked about how “the homeless” were dangerous. About how they shouldn’t be allowed around children. How most of them were drug addicts or psychos, and how I was clearly “one of the good ones.”

And that hurt. I expect people not to look, to ignore me, to dismiss my story, to misunderstand what happened to me.

But not my family. Not my older sister. That…that was something I didn’t expect.

It’s there, in those moments of betrayal, that the ache really sets in. When you realize that if you were strangers—if you had met on the street 15 years ago—she’d look at you with that same expression of disgust.

It’s that constant ache—that throbbing, deep hurt—that comes with recognizing the fluke that is your current position. It’s survivor’s guilt, yes, but it’s also the ache of empathy—the understanding that I'd still be there, on that sidewalk with them, if not for the sheer, uncaring indifference of the universe. I walk away from these encounters, powerless, wishing I could do more, and I carry that weight—an unfulfilled longing—knowing full well that it’s not a lack of compassion that holds me back, but a lack of means. And in that, the ache grows, because it never truly stops.

And that ache? That’s empathy. That’s understanding just how fragile survival is, how easy it could be for any of us to end up on the wrong side of that line, and how the systems we live under will often do nothing to catch those who fall. They didn't catch me, and there was no rhyme or reason to why I made it out.

I wasn't "one of the good ones". I was just in the right place at the right time to get noticed by the right people.

Some people will never see that.

Some people will never care.

But I’m still here. And that truth still has teeth.

The Wages of Dying is Love

Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff

The only box I opened on that birthday was at Cremate Simply in Albuquerque. I imagined a menacing industrial structure, but the crematorium turned out to be a small yellow house surrounded by evergreens. The air conditioner whined as I lifted the cardboard lid; inside was a plastic bag filled with ashes and a small metal disk, buried like an artifact. The manager told us not to leave the medallion anywhere because it was traceable. People aren’t supposed to scatter without a permit, she said, but they do.

There’s always the same photograph on my dresser: four-year-old me in knee socks, standing at the oak door as my father crouches beside me, pearl buttons shiny on his faded denim shirt. It was taken after my mother finally left for good and I moved to the canyon home he shared with three other professors. The photo was taken at dusk so coyotes are probably howling from the ridge. Later, at a rickety redwood picnic table flanked by marijuana plants, he’ll serve cowboy steaks from an iron skillet and chant a song I don’t understand: hey aah, hey aaaah.

My father was the golden boy of his tiny town in northwest Nebraska – class valedictorian and a football star. He spent summers loading hundred-pound bags at my grandfather’s bean elevator and managing the political campaign of a local Lakota Sioux leader. After graduating from Stanford, he was adopted into the tribe. My father became a professor at a prominent university in Los Angeles and helped found its Native American Studies Center; he would go on to publish twelve books over a four-decade career.

As a child, I planted Play-Doh flowers on the podium while he lectured on N. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo, who often attended our backyard dinner parties. From indigenous people, we learned that people and nature are connected in ways science has yet to explain. There is healing power in stones and feathers and if you put crystals out during the full moon, they absorb its energy and deliver it back to you. Also, red-tailed hawks are good luck, but if an owl flies at you three times, death will follow. To this day, I thank the plant when I cut a flower.

When my kids were small, my father bought a house in Santa Fe and commuted to work but our connection remained strong. For years, I had only to think of him and, like magic, the phone would ring. Often, he would recite poetry from memory – especially Galway Kinnell’s “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.” It depicts a father comforting his young daughter after a nightmare; she believes, as all children do, that he is immortal. The poem concludes with a line that always confounded me: The wages of dying is love.

My father wasn’t afraid of anything until he was afraid of everything. He first saw a psychiatrist in his forties and accepted a diagnosis of depression but refused to acknowledge mania. At sixty-nine, he was involuntarily hospitalized on a two-day hold that stretched to three weeks because he would not accept treatment. Once released, his decisions became increasingly irrational. He heard voices and saw people who weren’t there.

Then, in his mid-seventies, he divorced my stepmother and burned down his house in Santa Fe. I begged him to move back to Los Angeles; instead, he bought a four-bedroom and assembled a new family. A heroin addict who stole his car was his brother, a former bank robber who scammed him was his son, and a homeless woman was his partner. I couldn’t square these relationships with the ones he had jettisoned: friends and colleagues he’d kept close for decades; three brothers and scores of cousins.

His personality continued to warp under the pressure of mania. In one year, he exhausted his savings and liquidated his retirement fund. He spent nearly a million dollars on furniture and art – some that he left outside in the snow. I fielded calls from creditors as he turned his home into a hoarder’s warren. Within five years, empty bottles in the corners, broken windows and trash at the bottom of the stairs. Roaches. Rats. In his bedroom, Christmas lights blinked on and off all night long. He lost half his teeth but refused to see a doctor or a dentist. Instead, he hammered cough drops into a powder on the bedside table; I suspected the menthol soothed his gums.

I tried and failed to help him. Visits ended in frustration and fights. Still, I called each week, hoping he might send up a flare of who he had been before. But for the first time in my life, we were truly disconnected. Finally, I talked to a lawyer. The remaining option was to petition a judge to declare my father incompetent, which would wreck what remained of our relationship. I retreated, though terror defibrillated my heart when I thought of his frail shoulders and shaky steps. I bought him an iPhone and an Apple watch to alert me if he fell.

Still, he could recite our poem as if standing on a stage:

you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

On the first Saturday in May, two weeks before my fifty-fourth birthday and two months before his eighty-first, I phoned him from a music festival in New Orleans. “I can’t really hear you, Dad, I’ll call when I get home,” I said. “I love you.” He repeated those three words back, like he always did. But he didn’t return my call nor respond to the messages I left during the week and on the following Sunday, which was Mother’s Day. I always called him on that day, as well as Father’s Day, because for me he was both.

On Monday, with my husband out of town and our three kids at school, I phoned the Santa Fe police. My heart pounded and my breath was short, expecting questions I wasn’t prepared to answer, but the dispatcher casually told me he would send someone over to do a well check. After that, I was cocky enough to joke and texted my family: “Just talked to police and they’re headed over. All good.” The subtext of my confidence was blind faith in our connection. Crystals. Owls. Despite everything we’d been through, if the worst had happened, I would know. An hour later, the police department called – someone named Ben. “Does your dad do illegal drugs?” Present tense, not past. “Why?” The heroin addict, the bank robber. My pulse thudded in my ears: Was he in jail? Ben paused before answering. “He’s dead.”

The sound erupted from so far deep inside that I almost didn’t recognize it as my own. Tears rivered down my cheeks, soaked my shirt. Hyperventilation felt like drowning. I couldn’t bend far enough, couldn’t fold deep enough, to get at the pain. The tendons in my neck were iron. The room narrowed to a womb. I curled around the photograph of the two of us, held it tight as a teddy bear. “I’m sorry, Dad.” I repeated the words like a mantra. “I’m so sorry.”

Ben called back, identified himself as the medical examiner. “We found bath salts on the bedside table,” he explained. “They’re like amphetamines, but you can buy them at a drugstore.” I saw my father tumble, calling out to nobody. How long did he lie there in pain? An Apple watch, what were we thinking. I should have hired the lawyer – betrayed my father to save his life.

By Wednesday, I could almost breathe through the anguish that ambushed me – triggered by music or memories or my uncle’s laugh, which sounded so much like my father’s that if I closed my eyes I could almost imagine him alive. We placed photographs on top of the piano, a makeshift altar: high school graduation with a crew cut so precise it looked leveled, holding my chubby baby body high in the air, with my kids that time he put jellybeans up his nose. I didn’t include any of him looking old. None with missing teeth. They all showed his beautiful smile and wise eyes, his muscled arms and broad chest. Every morning I lit the candle. Each night I blew it out. Sandalwood and roses, his favorite scents.

Ben called again. To determine the time and cause of death, they had to do an autopsy. As I hung up the phone, it hit me like a sucker punch: pulverized cough drops. A police officer walking into that desecrated room would of course suspect the powder next to the bed. That’s why they were talking about drugs. I left a message for Ben but never heard back. It didn’t matter. I knew what I knew. My father died in his sleep, surrounded by things he had chosen to give him comfort, determined by a metric only he could understand. Finally, they gave me a date and then I remembered. The day that my father died, the quartz on my dresser vibrated; I looked up to the glide of a red-tailed hawk.

Soon, he was everywhere. When I mentioned his name, the lights flickered. I thought about him and felt pressure on the back of my head, as if his hand was there. A hawk perched in a tree and watched my husband; one followed my daughter home. I stepped outside to find a perfect feather on the sidewalk outside my house, rust barbs shining like beads in the sun. We joked that he’d sent a postcard.

On Saturday, my husband and I flew to Albuquerque and rented a car. I wore my father’s oversized turquoise ring faced inward, worried at it with my thumb. After picking up the box at the crematorium, I didn’t pause for birthday cake. We planned to separate the ashes and take each portion to a different significant place, beginning with his hometown, so we put the box in the trunk and drove from New Mexico to Colorado to Nebraska. Each time we pulled off the highway, I had to laugh as my father – via Google maps – directed us to a Lincoln Street or a Lincoln Avenue or a Lincoln Boulevard.

Lincoln is our family name.

Crossing into Nebraska, battalions of black-bellied clouds performed a choreographed advance. An ocean of grass stretched out on either side, Herefords like rusted buoys. The fluff from the cottonwood trees feathered the air as gray meadowlarks swooped and dove. Telephone poles sank into ditches like abandoned crosses. Finally, we drove the red-bricked streets to the cemetery and found the family plot. It was deserted, tall grass blowing in the wind. In 1961, my father hightailed for California and never looked back. How could we leave part of him there? The trunk stayed closed and we headed back on Interstate 80 towards Wyoming.

Two days later, we drove into the Santa Fe National Forest and parked at a cross-country trail thick with aspen. I had skied the trail with my father before I met my husband and the three of us walked the route when I was pregnant. My father had trudged through the snow with each of his grandchildren on his shoulders. Chest tight and breath shallow, I slid the box that held his ashes into a pack and hefted it onto my back, dense as a newborn.

Aspen naturally self-prune by shedding branches, leaving behind scars that look like heavy-lidded eyes. The trees watched as we tramped into the woods, flashed their frosted leaves at the cerulean sky. Altitude quickened my breath and the drumbeat in my ears reached the tempo of a Lakota chant until I heard it: hey aah, hey aaaah.

Finally, we found a circle of saplings no taller than my shoulder, trunks like the knobby knees of fawns. Could we leave all of his ashes there, rather than taking some home to California? “It doesn’t matter,” my husband said. “He’s not in that box. Plus, eternal fate can’t depend on where your kids choose to drop your remains. God forbid they get stolen and you end up in Fresno.”

The dust glittered in the sunlight as I fingered the smooth silver bark and thought about the poem that had been our touchstone. Its sadness rests in the narrator’s acknowledgement that he cannot protect his daughter from the inevitability of his death. But the final line – the wages of dying is love – what did it mean? That strange construction, a disconnect between the plural subject and singular verb. I turned the phrase over in my mind like a penny until it clicked.

Here’s what I think: From birth, humans impotently fight to stay alive and for this cardinal work, we are compensated with love. The last words I shared with my father were those we had been saying to each other my whole life, even before I could talk: I love you. No matter what happens, I love you and I forgive you anything. We had not failed each other – we couldn’t. This is what he had been trying to tell me, all along.

When the bag was empty, I pulled the air deep into my lungs, cool as water. Shouldered the weightless pack and felt light enough to float. Stepped into his footprints and headed back down the trail. Bark turned to dirt. Silver leaves sequined the gossiping wind.

The following year, I returned to the music festival where I last heard his voice. Felt the ring empty and looked down to see its turquoise cracked in half, nestled in the grass. Rocks. Feathers. Was I stringing together coincidences? Maybe. It didn’t matter. My father taught me to see magic in the world and once again I saw it everywhere.

Fiction

Portal (Rendition)

Tony John

The sun sat low over the Massanutten and shimmered off the river below. He set out early to jog the lower Riverview Trail. The night before, he had attended a charity event at the Seven Bends Fire Department House No. 12, drawn by the local fare—brick oven pizza and brewhouse ale—his favorites. A good workout would burn off the calories.

He tightened his shoelaces and started jogging slowly. A glance toward the river cost him—his toe caught a root. His head hit the dirt before he could drop his hands. The light began to fade…

Makani “Mak” Iona pushed himself up, unsure why he was lying there. When he reached up to rub his aching forehead, sandstone grit brushed away, and his fingertips came back wet with blood. His knees were scraped up, and his right shoulder felt as though someone had punched it. He wiped the dirt from his tattoo-covered arms.

Trying to collect himself, he turned back toward his car, but the trail was gone. The forest had changed. Old-growth trees with massive trunks towered overhead, and the understory was dense with ferns. The canopy was so full he could barely see the sky.

He pivoted himself in a tight circle, looking for a familiar landmark.

At the edge of the woods, he looked for his car—but it wasn't there. No ball fields or roads lay before him either. No sounds of Interstate traffic or airplanes in the distance, no balls pinging off bats, cheering crowds, or loud kids—no cows bellowing in the fields below. He scratched his head, and a sinking feeling bottomed out in his stomach.

The mountain before him hadn’t changed, and neither had the one across the valley. Between them was open grassland—no roads, houses, or farms. The sky was a different kind of blue—no haze. High above North Mountain to the west, a darkness fluttered across the sky like a brewing storm cloud or a never-ending flock of birds.

Then he heard a wolf howl.

#

Mak knew he had to find shelter—a respite where he would feel safe and plan his next steps. Using the mountains and sun as his guides, he walked to the river and followed it downstream. He had walked the same floodplain before, so he knew the general layout of each bend in the river—except this time, no maintained trail or suspension bridge led him where he was going. The low-water rapids offered a place to ford the river and reach the mountain. As he was crossing, he noticed a large, flat rock on his right, just inches below the surface.

On the other side, he studied the layout and chose his route up. High ground would give him a bird’s-eye view. He looked up but could not see the fire observation tower on the ridgeline. He gathered some pawpaws and started his climb. About halfway up, he heard rustling in the brush and stopped to observe. A muscular bull elk stepped out, grazing the ground in a stand of healthy chestnut trees. It stomped the ground to separate the nuts from their spiky outer shells. Its antlers spread wide—nearly as wide as a moose's. Mak stayed still and inconspicuous until it moved on. He knew this wasn’t a mere whitetail. Questions flooded his mind: what happened to his car, the ball fields, and the roads? Had he really heard a wolf? And that rock in the river? He knew that rock, the one he had waded out to and fished from before.

The elk grunted, snapping him out of those thoughts. It looked at him and snorted. Spooked, it ran off, still chewing on the chestnuts. Mak picked up a few and kept climbing.

#

At the top, where he thought the tower should have been, Mak looked to the east into Fort Valley. Still mostly forested and narrow, it looked much the same, minus the red-and-white-striped cell tower and the Forest Service Road leading to it. Looking west, however, the town of Seven Bends had vanished. An expansive prairie savannah lay below him, and what looked like herds of bison roaming the land.

I must be dreaming, he thought, and pinched himself. No change. How could he be home but not home? He knew where he was, but didn’t know where he was. He dropped his head into his hands, took a deep breath, and exhaled forcefully, as his psychologist had taught him.

Looking back down into the valley, he noticed the bison moving swiftly to the north. Smoke rose from the plain below, and fire advanced toward the herd.

Mak sat against the trunk of a white oak, taking cover under its impressive branches. His chest thumping, he closed his eyes and held back his tears.

When he composed himself, he bit into a pawpaw and savored its rich, buttery taste. He thought of the pizza from the night before and almost laughed, but the mood wasn’t there. Exhausted, he drifted to sleep.

#

A gust of wind and falling acorns woke him. For a fleeting moment, he thought he was on the trail, but it all came back to him in a flash. High in the tree above him, he heard chattering and movement within the leaves. He saw large green birds with yellow wings rummaging through the branches. They hopped and climbed about; some were even hanging upside down. One of them dropped down closer to Mak. It had reddish-orange feathers across its face, with bare white skin circling its eyes. They gazed at each other in their own silence, then the bird broke its stare and hopped back up the tree.

Mak rolled his tongue around the inside of his pasty mouth. He could still taste the pawpaw but wanted—needed—water. With no source on top of the mountain, he had to go back down. The sink faucet in his apartment entered his mind. How do I get back there?

A similar path led him through the high-bush blueberry and dense laurel stands, then onto the lower ground where the pawpaw trees grew. The river appeared clearer than usual, and against his best judgment, he pressed his face into the cool water and sucked up all he could drink until his belly jutted tight against his shorts.

The water stung the gash on his forehead, and the scratches across his knees still throbbed. A sharp, pin-prick pain in his shoulder caused him to wince as he pushed himself upright after drinking. A long, straight sycamore branch lay on the ground. It made for a good walking stick. He thought it was best to meander south with the river to find a familiar exit point. The sun was setting, and he needed a place to hole up for the night. Knowing Spring Hollow Run flowed through town to the river, he headed due west. When he reached the creek, he dropped to his knees, unaware of the beating they had taken. The view around him no longer resembled his town, his Virginia—it was more like the intermountain prairies of Montana, where he’d hunted with friends. He tried to reach for them in his mind, but what his eyes returned made that world hard to register. What about his classes? His mom?

#

The rising sun warmed his face as he stretched himself awake. The earthen hollow beneath a prominent shale ledge provided Mak shelter for the night. As he sat up, an enormous flight of birds blotted out the sun, unbelievable in number.

The morning was cool, so he needed to get moving to warm himself. The smell of burnt grass hung in the air as the tussocks still smoldered. He set out for the prairie, but as the river grew farther away, he decided to turn back. The river and mountain brought him familiarity and comfort against his odds.

Along the way, he chewed on some chestnuts that he had cracked open. They were bitter raw, so he spit them out. His last pawpaw was covered in ants, so he tossed it. Breakfast would have to wait. Because it offered good cover, Mak followed Spring Hollow to the river crossing. Digging his feet in as he climbed the steep bank, he noticed a broken arrow lodged in the dirt. He snapped off the upper portion with the stone tip and carried it. On top of the flat, he raced into the woods and found a game trail leading up a finger ridge. Thankful he didn’t have to weave through the twisted mountain laurel, Mak eased toward higher ground. A fork in the trail stopped him; he didn't know which path to take. He stepped to his right and followed fresh deer tracks through a stand of hemlocks. Broken shale made it hard to navigate, demanding more care with his footing. He stepped over a series of roots, lost his balance, and fell against the trunk of a young hemlock, catching himself before he slid down the hillside. The tree bent and swayed back into place, raining dying needles all over Mak and the trail. After brushing them out of his hair, he looked down at the river. At the edge of his vision, a figure stood motionless, less than fifty feet away. Two warriors, frozen in an awe-struck stare-down, as if neither had ever seen another man.

The other man wore an animal-skin tunic over his lower half. Dark markings trailed down both arms, from shoulders to hands. His hair was jet-black and sleek, pulled back into a tail that reached the middle of his back. Bare, his feet were surprisingly clean. He slung a hunting bow and quiver over his shoulder. The image was familiar to Mak, but he didn’t know why.

Mak stood tall, head and chest up. His gold tee, blue shorts, and running shoes caught the other man’s eye; he stepped a few paces closer. Mak tightened his grip on the arrow shank—his hand shaking slightly. After sizing each other up, they met eyes. Suddenly, a wolf's call echoed out. The man with the bow ran up the hillside. Mak stood and watched him disappear into the brush above him, wondering how a man could move so fast on that terrain. Mak made his way down the hill, slid into the river, and swam to the other side—his hand still clamped around the arrow. Grapevines helped him climb out of the water, propelling him through the scour. His lungs burning and legs quaking, he slowed and turned to look back. As he turned back, a low-hanging branch caught his head and sent him to the forest floor…

#

Mak pushed himself up, unsure why he was lying there. When he reached up to rub his aching forehead, sandstone grit brushed away, and his fingertips came back wet with blood. He heard a bat ping and the crowd's applause.

Gathering himself, he turned back toward his car and followed the trail to the parking lot. He turned his empty palm upright and thought of the arrow.

The Little League scoreboard showed an unscored game at the top of the third inning, with a pitch count of 0-2. Mak walked to the water fountain, splashed water on his face, looked up at the mountain, and headed to his car. As he got in, he glanced at his textbook on the passenger seat: Pre-Columbian Native American History. He wanted to laugh, but the mood wasn’t right—his mind wasn’t right.

Mak turned the ignition, shifted into drive, and rolled back into town to his second-story studio apartment near the County courthouse. Even though it was mid-morning, his stomach growled. A short walk north through town brought him to Ben’s Diner, where his burger and fries awaited. He flipped open his textbook and scanned the pages of “The Flora & Fauna of Native Shenandoah,” eager to find an image of the green parrot.

#

 Three weeks passed before Mak returned to the trail. He laced his shoes up tight and set out on a slow jog. He bounded over the root he had previously tripped on and continued along the loop five times, totaling about three and a half miles. No one was playing at the park. No other cars were in the parking lot. He walked to the water fountain and splashed water on his face.

Mak took a longer route home, deciding to drive by the dam to view the river’s water level. As he turned right and headed through French’s Woods, he heard a dog bark from within the trees. He slowed the car and looked over. A silhouette came into view. He slammed on the brakes and jerked forward, nearly bumping his head on the steering wheel. About fifty yards back, through the brush, stood a dark-haired man in brown clothing, a bow and quiver slung over his shoulder. Mak dropped his head into his hand and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up, the man wearing the tunic had disappeared.

Wound

Botao Liang

The oil never washes out.

Arthur Voss had learned that in forty years of clockmaking. The black grease settles into his skin's creases, into his old knuckles, into the whorls of his fingertips, until the man's hands look like blueprints of everywhere he has ever been.

The small shop was full of the smell of copper, of rust, of slow-burning time. In the corner, on a narrow cot, Clara breathed in shallow, ragged pulls.

Each one a countdown he could not stop.

He had built sixty-three clocks in this room. He was so obsessed with time that he had missed their first anniversary, their tenth, their twentieth, and the lovely holidays that seemed to exist. He had given her gears instead of tears, oil instead of toil, time instead of rhyme.

"Arthur," her voice came out thin as paper. "Come sit with me."

He stood at his bench, hands moving over the golden watch. It was his masterpiece. Its case was worn brass, soft as skin, its face a metallic sheen that caught the light, its second hand a whisper of silver that never lied and never faltered. He had built it to outlast everything. He had believed, with the furious faith of a foolish man, that perfect things could rescue imperfect ones.

"I can fix this," he said.

Clara closed her eyes. "You cannot fix everything with your hands." "I fix everything with my hands."

The silence was long and soft and sorrowful as winter snowfall. When she spoke again, her voice had gone somewhere far. "Arthur. Let the time go."

As Arthur was so focused, he could barely hear her voice from afar. He pressed his thumb to the crown of the watch.

Suddenly, something strange came into the room. A white powder-like gas filled the little shop. Clara's body vanished like smoke in a hard wind. Arthur screamed. His hands flew to his face. The white came after. The white colour like heavy fog swallowed the walls, the cot, the dark, each thing blinking out faster than the last. It pressed against his eyes like two burning coins and kept pressing. His scream died in his guts before it ever left his throat. Then he went too.

He woke up over his workbench. A dream, he thought. He looked at the cot where his wife used to be. Empty. He looked at the watch. It hummed against his palm, low and smug and settled.

He ran to the door.

White flash. The chair. The bench. The hum.

He raged. He wept. He begged. Anger and confusion made him drive a chisel through his own palm. He smashed every clock in the room to glass and brass and silence. He tried a dozen other ways to end this questionable phenomenon, to escape, each more desperate than the last, each rewarded with the same bright nothing and the same mocking tick-tick-tick of the watch on his desk. He was trapped in a prison of his own loving. He was, in every way that mattered, already dead.

What does a clockmaker do when brute force fails?

He had no patience left. He tore the watch open. The gears inside were reversed, rewound, running hard against themselves. He worked anyway, jamming each wheel back, forcing each spring, sweat dripping onto the mechanism; his breath loud in the silence.

Something snapped.

The door swung open.

He stepped outside.

A strong push of air hit him hard. The street looked right but felt like a copy of itself, like someone had built it from memory and gotten most of it correct. He stopped at an intersection. A woman crossed ahead in a yellow coat. The car was rounded, chrome-trimmed, wrong.

He looked down.

A newspaper, face-up on the cobblestones between his feet. He read the date.

Then he read it again.

The numbers did not change.

His stomach dropped through the pavement. His mouth went dry. The watch had not erased her. It had sent him back. Ten years. She was alive.

In a coffee shop, she sat with her friends, dark hair loose at her shoulders, a coffee cup cradled in her hands, her whole face open and lit from somewhere deep inside. She was so vivid it hurt. She was so real he forgot, for one terrible and magnificent second, everything else.

Through the door, through the room, through ten years of time that had no right to be crossed, his hand found her shoulder the way a drowning man finds the surface—desperate, shaking, too late to stop.

Clara looked up.

No love. No warmth. No recognition. Just a woman looking at a weeping, wild-eyed stranger who had grabbed her on a Tuesday.

To her, he was no one.

The coffee shop walls began to peel away like burning paper. Arthur looked down at his shaking fingers. The black grease wasn't oil from a workbench. It was ash, bleeding out from under his skin. The watch on his wrist cracked right down the middle, spilling out a tiny, swirling sky of stars. He wasn’t a man who had lost his wife. He built hearts for a living and never owned one.

Now, the whole pretending world was breaking. The people in the room melted into grey clay. Clara shrank back, her eyes wide, staring into the dark void where his face should have been.

"What are you?" she whispered, her voice rattling like copper.

He fell through the floor as the universe unraveled, watching her young, beautiful face get smaller and smaller. There was no grief in her eyes. There was no love. Just that terrible, polite look she gave a dying monster on the street.

The darkness slammed shut. The machine in his head reset, stuffing his huge, broken mind back into the skin of a helpless old man, forcing him to wake up and lose her all over again.

The oil never washes out. Arthur Voss had learned that in forty years of clockmaking.

The Curator Of Half-Broken Things

Zhaoming Li

The third roll of bubble wrap she ordered this month arrives smelling of cold rain. She cuts the plastic sheath with a box cutter and the wrap exhales—a tight, chemical breath—slackening into the room. On the floor of the apartment, twenty-three cardboard boxes wait in stacks of four.

She lifts a Royal Albert teacup from its newspaper bed. The crack runs from rim to base, hair-thin, holding a faint line of tea-stain. Someone else's tannin. Someone else's mornings. She wraps it in three layers of small-cell bubble wrap, folding the edges with the precision of a nurse dressing a wound, and places it in the box marked FRAGILE in letters pressed so deep the cardboard puckered around each stroke.

The Etsy notification pings. A buyer in Oregon: Does it leak? She types: It holds. Just keep the water under boiling.

The closet in the hallway hangs half-open. The empty hangers clink against each other when the heater kicks on—a cheap, accidental wind chime in the draft. She has not moved his remaining coat. It still holds the shape of shoulders.

For three months, she has popped the bubbles methodically, one by one, as she wraps each piece. It is not a habit. It is a countdown.

The blue extension cord. He texted about it last Tuesday. Not how are you. Not I'm sorry. Just the cord. She wrote back: I used it for the lamp. She did not add that she left it by the bookshelf so he would have to walk past her, or that he never came.

Tonight's shipment: the teacup, a porcelain cat missing one ear, and a sugar bowl with a hairline fissure visible only when held to the light. She presses her thumb along the edge of the crack, feeling where the glaze turns rough, where the integrity of the thing gave way and did not shatter. She wraps each piece until nothing moves inside the box.

The heavy vinyl tape has worn her fingers raw. The skin around her nails has split in three places, and the taste of adhesive lingers on her tongue from licking the packing slips—a bitter, industrial salt. The lamp above her flickers, its blue cord snaking across the dust toward the bookshelf—the bulb he said he'd replace and never did.

She seals the last box at eleven. The tape screeches from the roll—brown vinyl splitting in a clean, straight line—and she presses it down with the heel of her palm. She drags the final stack to the drafty hallway, leaving them by the door.

Outside, the FedEx truck idles in the midnight frost, its engine a low, steady frequency in the February dark. The driver loads them without knocking. He knows the routine.

She sits on the floor among empty rolls and newsprint rubbed grey with forgotten crises. The apartment ticks as it cools. She finds one last sheet of bubble wrap, one unpopped cell she missed, and presses it between her thumb and forefinger. A tiny, contained gasp—it sounds exactly like a truce.

The Butterfly Fall

Olivia Ellisor

Mama taught me how to swim the summer I turned thirteen. It was a sticky July, and the sun washed over our clothes so heavily they turned stark white. My fingertips stayed stained with sour cherry juices. That was the summer I took a boy behind the tree with the porch swing and let him touch the roof of my mouth with his tongue. I didn’t like it. I can’t wait to do it again.

I liked to sit in the rocking chair in the summer evenings and watch Mama waddle up the porch steps, some seven months pregnant. She was having Papa’s last baby before he died. He was thrown from his horse, Mama said, so high in the air the trees caught his fall. She said it was a Butterfly Fall, because he never came down. He just flew away like a butterfly into the clouds. It wasn’t nothing he hadn’t done before. Papa was a bullrider before I was born. He would be thrown from those bulls so high he’d see sunlight we’d never seen before. While he was up there he’d grab clouds for Mama to sleep on. But Papa got old, and had a bad hip, so he quit bullriding and moved to this town where I was born. Papa used to say I was born bucking like a horse, all legs and hooves and sneering teeth. 

Mama never let me sleep with the clouds Papa brought. I used to ask her every night when she’d tuck me into bed. Before we’d say our prayers, I would ask. Then I’d pray for her to say yes tomorrow. She never did. I would also pray for my brothers, but only halfway. They never wanted to play with me. I had to swim by myself. So I only prayed for their safe passage into heaven. That’s all Mama told me I had to do for them, so that’s all I did.

I learned to swim four months after Papa died. Mama just had the baby, and Papa didn’t leave any instructions for his burial. So Mama had to ask the neighbors down the road to dig Papa’s grave. I would have dug it myself, you know, but Mama said that my skinny arms couldn’t carry the shovel right, so I was tasked with washing and drying the dishes again. I hated washing and drying the dishes. My hands would get shriveled up like a prune and I couldn’t grip the plates right. It wasn’t anything like swimming. 

Mama taught me how to swim in the lake behind the church. She had me strip down to my britches and practice the motions on the shoreline. Sometimes she’d let me go ankle deep in. The mud squished underneath my heels. Only thing was, we’d practice after supper and by that time the sun had gone down and the water was cold on my toes. It was so dark I was left with eyes straining to see my bare skin arms paddling the air in front of me. Mama would haul me out of the lake by my ears while I howled for my dry stockings and a warm fireplace. She didn’t like me to make noise.

I always felt like people were watching me through the church windows out of the corner of my eye during those nights. I’d turn around to catch them, but only ever saw my own reflection staring back at me,  my eyes too round and my hair so long it reached past my wrists. I had to brush my hair three times a day to keep it slick enough. I hated having frizz and I’d picture myself with the short, sleek locks in the picture books Mama used to read to me. But the church elders told me I had to keep it long so God would recognize me and let me into Heaven when I died. I wished I knew if that were true.

Mama wasn’t liked by the church elders very much. That was because Mama and Papa never got married. Having me and my brothers they didn’t have time to. I was the second youngest and the only girl out of 6. That makes me the luckiest. I was lucky to be born a girl, because it meant I didn’t have to work in the town with my Papa and brothers. I stayed home with Mama and took care of the baby.  I changed the baby’s diaper. I fixed supper. I washed and dried the dishes. I only had time to swim after Mama tucked me into bed. I’d wait for her to be sound asleep on her cloud and sneak out to the lake behind the church, strip down to my britches, and close my eyes so I could concentrate on the motions. I never jumped in because I didn’t want to come home dripping muddy water all over and wake the baby up. I would never hear the end of it.  

I want to have a baby of my own. Two if I can. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll marry the man who gives me them. Mama told me the man gives the woman the baby. She said the woman carries the baby for the man because the man has to work in the town. The town was a long walk away from our house, but that’s okay because only the men had to go. Mama and I only went to church and the lake behind it. After I learned to swim, I asked Mama if I could go to town with my brothers. I was a big girl now, and could handle the walk. She got so mad that she raised her hand to strike me. I flinched. She put her hand down. I saw her eyes get as round as mine, like glass rocks stuck in a pile of red mud. I’d seen eyes like that before when Papa was home from working in the town. I didn’t know why he was always angry at her. Mama said it was because she didn’t dry the dishes well enough. That never made sense to me because I was the one to dry the dishes.

Mama lies to me about things sometimes. I know she lies because my brothers tell me she does. I wish I could pick the truth from her lies like I pluck straw from my mattress, sticky and yellow. My brothers sleep with straw mattresses, too. Mama is the only one to sleep with clouds. It doesn’t seem fair because it surely isn’t, but I am too scared of Mama raising her hand at me again to bring it up. I think she would never let me go swimming again.

I wonder if my oldest brother will give a baby to the girl he sits next to at church. I wonder if I will be given a baby by the boy behind the porch swing. I wonder if Mama would be mad. I wonder if Papa will ever come down from his butterfly fall. I wonder if I will die. I wonder if I will ever want to. I wonder if Mama lies about missing Papa. I wonder if Papa went to heaven. I wonder if heaven has enough room for my brothers and me. I wonder if heaven has clouds to sleep on. I wonder if I will teach my daughter how to swim. I wonder if I can swim all the way to the ocean. I wonder if I will ever make it back home.

Here Lies a Cold, Dead Heart

Olivia Ellisor

If I could live any part of my life over again it would be when she left me.

My life was an anthill, an underground galaxy of miraculous creatures, mingling with the fragrant concoction of perfumes and morning glories she grew in the garden. I often find myself there, still tending to the flowers. I can see their silky petals floating in the wet grass from the summer breeze. I can see the ants lining up like soldiers on the bricks, preparing themselves for battle against the gloopy rain droplets.

We are ants. All of us. We are smaller than you’d like to believe.  We are all ants in the same way. We plow through the soil searching for its nutrients. We are ants because we search and search for gaps to fill our heart’s holes. The universe doesn’t care about our heart’s holes.

What makes us whole? We often look beyond Earth’s atmosphere for answers. The human body has many things that connect it to the observable universe. As time ticks by, we see the decay of your cells turning into rot, deep within the dirt, mixing with the mushrooms and the soil. We see the stripes of your dress fade out of existence, the folds of your skin flattening and becoming a feast for the grub that lurks just below the surface. Stars are like that. Bursting their flames one day, then shrinking into black holes of absolute nothingness after their lifespan is up. Some stars explode into bits of new stars, birth and death all collected into one beautiful supernova. Kinda like how childbirth is harrowing and dangerous. The universe doesn’t care about danger to ants. The universe isn’t evil, it just exists to move forward.

She never understood that. How the universe works. How my mind works. Can you blame her for that? It’s not like she ever dug her fingernails into my scalp, smushing their way into my brain, the key to my thoughts. She could pull out her manicured hand, pruney and cold, and announce her findings: nothing but lust for a woman who could never understand. But my skull was too thick for that, she would say. It’s hard for me, I would say, fighting to keep my anthill strong. But it's harder for her, she would say. I’d scoff. It’s harder to be with someone who shares brain cells with a fig tree than it is with someone who knows the truth about the universe, I would retort back.

Did you know that figs come from wasps? I read that once, that wasps pollinate the fig tree’s fruits and are fully dissolved by the time their juice dribbles down your chin. Isn’t that something? Nature coming full circle. Funny how life works that way.

I told her this once, that I think life is funny. She says that life is only funny in a way that makes sense to the rest of us, to her. That life isn’t really all about fig trees and fingernails and stripes and supernovas. It’s not about that, she says, it’s just not. I don’t understand, I say, trying not to raise my voice. I’m shaking, my fists are balled and my stomach is in my throat. I don’t understand, I said, what is life about if not you? She looked up at me, her eyes boring through my body and into the depths of my soul. You just don’t get it, she said. I saw her wipe a tear dribbling down her cheek. You just don’t get me, she let out. I turned away.

She left the next evening and didn’t say goodbye. I made her chicken and rice for dinner, too much for two people but still not enough. Nothing I ever did was enough. I’m too small for her, too similar to the ants walking around on my windowsill, ignoring the crumbs on my floor and opting for everything she left behind instead.

We are ants. I’ve decided that I’ll never love again. We are ants. I don’t think she truly loved me. We are ants. I throw out the chicken and save the rice, though I don’t know what for. We are ants. I cover my body in soil, burying myself into her flowers. We are ants. The bugs crawl up my spine, gnawing at my flesh.

We are ants.

I am an ant.

I am an ant.

If I could relive any moment, it would be that one. Now I rest in her garden, letting the swallows peck at my eyeballs, my fingernails caked with dirt.

Teaches Even after His Death

Rajeshwar Prasad

“True teaching does not stop at the sound of the bell, or only during the lifetime, but at the conscience of the students, after the teacher's death.”

Belaw is an unostentatious village that rests on the verdant banks of the river Sone in Bihar. Here mornings dawn with a blanket of mist over green fields and the melodious singing of birds across the river water. The river has blessed Belaw with fertility since time immemorial with the gifts it bestows upon the village's soil. However, none could compare to the boon that the river brought along with all the other bounty to Belaw – a teacher by the name of Rambilas Singh, a teacher whose teachings have outlasted him for so many years.

Some people earn degrees. Some earn wealth. A few rare souls earn a place in human memory. Rambilas Singh belonged to the last category.

He was not merely an English teacher. He was one of those very few individuals for whom proximity was education. In fact, his name will crop up among old students whenever they get together under village trees, or in distant cities, like a well-loved mantra.

“Do you remember how he entered the classroom?” One former student asks.

"Yeah," responds the other softly.

Said he, "I felt as though the lore itself had walked into the room."

Born on May 2nd, 1940, in the village of his mother, Meghpur, he had his childhood days in Belaw. Rambilas Singh's childhood was spent in nearby Chanda while his higher studies took him all the way to Ara, Patna and Bodh-Gaya. No matter what his education has made him, he will never detach himself from the simple life of a village. Perhaps this was why he never allowed knowledge to become pride. For him, learning was not a ladder to stand on others. It was a lamp to light all others.

When he joined a high school in Obra, Aurangabad, teaching English, he came not as a worker into a profession but as a pilgrim into a shrine. Teaching was sacred to him. He believed that the duty of a teacher was not merely to complete lessons but to awaken human beings. 

Further, he poured his knowledge and wisdom into several other schools in Aurangabad and Nawada. He also taught at Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav College, Aurangabad, for a few years.

His students did not encounter dry grammar in his classroom. They encountered life.

He explained literature as if stories were happening around them at that very moment. Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, and poetry were not distant names trapped in books. Under his guidance, they became mirrors reflecting human behaviour, morality, ego, sacrifice, and truth.

A former student once recalled his explanation of George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart. While discussing King Magnus, Rambilas Singh had said: “King Magnus stands like an overgrown banyan tree that chokes all other growths.”

The students never forgot that sentence. It was not difficult because of the words, because the images jumped into their minds as if in real life. It was the genius he had, the ability to turn complex things into simple terms in your consciousness and also enrich the learning, so that one could do work for the good of humanity and the world.

But perhaps his greatest subject was not English.

It was humanity.

He treated students like members of his own family. If a student performed poorly, he did not humiliate him. Instead, he searched patiently for the hidden reason behind the failure so that he could guide them properly.

“Every child carries a light,” he would say. “Sometimes the wind around them is too strong.”

He often visited his parents personally, encouraging them to educate their children. In villages where poverty forced many young minds away from classrooms, he became a bridge between despair and possibility.

Many students who had once abandoned hope returned to books because of his encouragement. Some became teachers. Some entered government service. Others succeeded in medicine, business, literature, and science. His influence travelled far beyond Bihar and crossed international borders through the achievements of those he taught.

Among them was the internationally recognised writer Rajeshwar Prasad, who considered Rambilas Singh not merely a teacher but the architect of his intellectual life. Such transformations were not accidents. They were the result of a teacher who believed deeply in the hidden greatness of ordinary human beings.

There are thousands of his disciples around India and the world, who are professors, teachers, doctors, engineers, officers, successful businessmen, government officials, enriching the legacy of his virtues and strengthening the fabric of humanity in their own ways.

Yet what made Rambilas Singh extraordinary was not only knowledge.

It was character.

Against the casteism, religious division and egoism that have gripped this world, Rambilas Singh stood silently. He never measured people by their social identity. He measured them by their humanity.

“All rivers,” he often said, “ultimately meet the same ocean.”

He considered religions to be divergent roads towards a singular reality. Religion in the name of hatred was, in his view, the largest human tragedy. He revered all spiritual and moral beings from various walks of life – Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Abdul Gaffar Khan, Leo Tolstoy, Kabir, Khalil Gibran, Abraham Lincoln and many others whom he deemed followers of peace and humanity.

His spirituality was not loud. It was lived.

He mostly sat in the Hanuman temple in Kushwahanagar, post-retirement. There, he explained issues like morality, compassion, metaphysics and the underlying principle of existence. The villagers, along with many listeners, sat in silence for hours listening to his explanations of divine principles, illustrated with everyday instances.

“God,” he once told a gathering, “does not ask how powerful we became. He asks how truthful we remained.”

What he said was not like someone who was performing but speaking from experience. His way of living was disciplined, truthful, moderate and nonviolent. Strict vegetarian, he was of the opinion that animals should not die to satisfy human greed or to facilitate ritual. Purity, for him, was an attitude rather than a show.

He was deeply punctual and believed that noble goals could never be achieved through immoral means.

“If the path was wrong, he would say.

He said further, “The destination can never be right.”

In this era where failure is a disgrace and success is worshipped without morals, such philosophies might seem archaic and archaic, which is the exact reason why the life of this man never ceases to be. He belonged to that disappearing generation which considered integrity more important than ambition.

And still, though it was his nature to be serious, he never remained distant.

He enjoyed music, conversation, rivers in the summer for swimming, good food, stylish attire and the pleasures of the day-to-day. He was quick to laughter, knew suffering intimately, but equally knew joyous, vibrant occasions. He earned regard not by demanding it, but because gentleness simply gravitated to him.

People of the village always came to him with their individual disputes and problems. He listened carefully and responded without arrogance. In many homes, his advice prevented conflicts from becoming permanent wounds.

“He never made us feel small,” an elderly villager once said. “Even while correcting us, he preserved our dignity.”

That quality is rare.

Many teachers transfer information. Very few sustain the self-regard of the student.

With the passing of time, age began to wither his body but not his mind. His life came to an end due to disorders of the urinary system and spine.

He was well nursed by his family members, particularly by his son Radharaman and daughter-in-law Manju.

The 23rd of February, 2026, arrived.

By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, it was felt that a great light had gone from the village.

News of his death spread quietly through Belaw and beyond. Former students called each other with trembling voices. Some wept openly. Others were left unable to speak, still unable to accept that the man who had carved out their lives was dead.

His dead body was cremated on 24 February at the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, which is a historical place for cremation, and where the dead body of his wife, Suryakali, was cremated, and people believed that the person who is cremated, their soul gets a heavenly place.

His sacred ashes were floated in the holy Ganges, which reached the Indian Ocean, touching thousands of villages and cities.

Today, he is survived by his sons: Radharaman, Arbind, Arun, Kulshrestha, and Ravi Prakash and several other grandsons and granddaughters.

But perhaps he was not truly gone.

For certain individuals do not disappear. They continue through memory, values, and influence. Their physical departure becomes smaller than their spiritual presence.

Rambilas Singh belonged to such souls.

Up to this very day, while bringing up his own child, completing his own tasks, making moral choices, his students unconsciously continue speaking in the tone of their master. And somewhere, a doctor educated by him continues to heal. Somewhere, a teacher explains literature with patience because he once witnessed Rambilas Singh doing the same. Somewhere, a writer searches for truth in language because his teacher taught him that words possess moral power.

This is immortality in its purest form.

Not statues.

Not monuments.

But living influence inside human hearts.

The villagers still revere him in their memory. In discussions about education, morality or old village life, somebody says:

“There was once a teacher here who taught people how to live.”

And another voice quietly adds:

“He is still teaching us.”

Perhaps this is the true meaning of a teacher’s greatness. A teacher, then, not only gets pupils ready for exams but also for life. He is like a sower of hidden seeds; their blooms open, perhaps, thirty years hence, in strange gardens

It was Rambilas Singh who taught English. However, besides the nuances of grammar and intricacies of literature, he taught the essence of humbleness, understanding, discipline, truth and brotherliness. He revealed to the world that the purpose of education without morality is void and religion without humaneness is hazardous.

His life serves as a reminder that wisdom is defined not by the accumulation of knowledge, but by the extent of transformation of another.

The River Sone still flows at the side of Belaw as it did during his days. The seasons change, generations fade, and children are not children anymore. But some things remain oddly animated, lingering in the air.

In Belaw, in the morning, the wind passes through the fields and village, coming slowly under the sunshine, it looks like an old teacher is softly travelling through the air, reminding humans to be true, humane and compassionate.

And somewhere, beyond our perception, Rambilas Singh is perhaps still smiling softly at his students, his untransmitted lesson.

For death may silence a voice, but it cannot silence wisdom.

And a true teacher never really dies.

People pay their tribute to him, saying, “Our great lighthouse is no more to teach us, but his values and virtues are even more powerful to guide our minds and hearts. His ideals and practices will not inspire only us but thousands of people in the future, enriching the legacy of mankind and the world. We salute such a great spirit millions and millions of times! We also salute millions of times his parents, Manmati and Ramratan, who gave birth to such a great son who was our great lighthouse!"

Winterlude

Thaddeus Rutkowski

On a winter afternoon, my siblings and I were watching television in our living room while our father was sleeping upstairs. My mother was at work in the laboratory at the county hospital. Now and then, my brother and sister and I laughed at what was on the TV or spoke loudly to each other. Presently, my father came downstairs and called me to his studio door.

“What do I have,” he asked, “another twenty years? That’s not enough time with you children around. Children should be seen and not heard.”

Not wanting to be heard, I left the house and walked to the nearby schoolyard.

*

No one else was around, so I sat on the swing set. A puddle had frozen under my seat. It was hard to push against the ice, but once I was in the air I bent my knees and kicked. I leaned back as I went up, then leaned forward as I came down. Each arc was longer than the last. I wondered if I could go high enough to make a complete circle around the crossbar. I extended my legs at the top of my forward motion but couldn’t get past an angle of about ninety degrees—maybe a hundred degrees. I was well short of the three-hundred-sixty degrees I needed to go all the way around.

But I didn’t want to stop. I kept moving like a pendulum as the sun went down.

Presently, my brother and sister appeared. “He wants you to come home,” they told me.

“I like it here,” I said.

“You have to come now.”

I got off the swing and walked back with them.

*

My mother wasn’t home when we got back. I guessed she’d been given an extra shift at the hospital lab. Perhaps an accident victim had come into the ER and needed a crossmatch.

My father set up chairs around a coffee table and gave my siblings and me drawing pads. He laid a green towel on the table and set a white vase and a blue-enameled pot on the towel. He draped a maroon cloth behind the objects, then gave each of us a small box of pastel sticks.

“From now on,” he said, “there won’t be any more TV.”

The three of us picked up the pastels and scraped them across the papers. The sticks were almost pure pigment, so the colors were intense. Sometimes, my father took a pastel and drew on our pictures for us. He focused on my sister’s sketch. When we were finished, he said to my brother and me, “You can keep yours.”

He tacked my sister’s drawing to a wall for all of us to see. Then he went into the kitchen and sat at the table with a bottle of beer. He waited there until our mother got home.

*

The next morning, my father woke early. I could hear his voice coming up the stairs from the kitchen.

“We should never have had that kid,” he said to my mother. “He was a mistake.”

“You’re traumatizing him,” my mother said.

“I have to keep him in line.”

“He needs me,” she said.

When my brother walked past my bedroom door, I asked him, “What are they talking about?”

“Look at my wall,” he said.

I went into his bedroom and saw a drawing on the white plasterboard. It showed a creature with the head of a bird and the body of a man. In one hand, the male creature held a sword. A woman in a tattered dress knelt on the ground beside him. She was looking up at the creature’s head. Around them, crows were frozen in flight. The drawing, in black marker, covered the entire wall.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“I stayed up until it was done.”

Shortly, my father confronted my brother. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear my father’s high-pitched shouts. Then I heard scuffling. I ran to see what was happening and saw my father on the floor, with his hands on his knees.

“What happened,” I asked my brother.

“He pushed me, and he fell.”

*

I returned to the swing set in the schoolyard, but my new goal was not to push myself as high as I could. My idea was to jump off the swing at the top of its path. I would fly far before hitting the ground.

I got onto the seat and started pumping my legs. I tried throwing myself off when the seat wasn’t very high—maybe four feet from the ground. The force threw me up and away from the metal support. I landed on my feet and rolled forward. My bones didn’t break, at least as far as I could tell. Even so, I decided against another launch off the swing.

Still, I didn’t want to go home. The problem was, I had nowhere to go. I looked down a hill to where the schoolyard ended. There was a place where water from the nearby stream had overflowed and frozen. I ran toward one of the frozen patches and jumped onto the ice. I planted my feet as if I were on a skateboard and slid. There was no friction, and I covered a few yards. I had good balance. I repeated the motion, running faster and sliding farther each time. If I’d had ice skates, I could have been like Hans Brinker. He didn’t win the big prize—the silver skates—but he helped his family and went on to have a good life.