Poetry

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Appalachian Arts

poetry

My Mother’s Body

Julie Greenough

My mother does not look
at herself in the mirror
anymore.

Her eyes wander as she dresses,
sliding off her abdomen
that droops, fat
resting atop her dormant uterus,
hidden by a stretched
belly button.

She won’t glance at her thighs,
dimpled and plump
beneath each hip, streaked by puffy lines,
faded purple and blue.  

Both fleshy breasts are already hidden,
swollen nipples
tucked away.
Her gaze remains unwavering
on her face, 
peering from the spot she has wiped
clear of condensation. 

When she is clothed, she will return
from the cracked bathroom door,
smiling while her eyes wash over me,
unafraid.

I do not tell her,
that they have found that a child’s cells
migrate through the mother,
long after her body becomes two.
Settling themselves in brain, blood, and bones.
I do not ask her if she knows,
we are still sharing
space.

Now

Julie Greenough

Driving in winter with the windows down
I can’t hear,
the wind a shocking testament to my skin
of the land I carve through for the first time,
the grass wavering with my breath.

Touch

Julie Greenough

I sit in my mother’s lap
nodding off,
her fingers in my hair
unweaving each curl
as my warm ears catch scraps
of stories wafting from her lips.

She sings me to sleep, 
nails drifting circles
along my spine,
nightshirt pulled high
each finger cool and soft,
her palms the width of my back.

She holds my hand,
every knuckle skinnier than mine
but so many freckles,
I dab at the veins
twirl the two wedding rings,
pull at the excess wrinkles of skin.

Her age is in her hands,
and I am afraid
I will forget
what they feel like. 

Beautiful Goodbye

Devon Balwit

All the temples in the world, an impasto
of pressed palms,     prayer and prostration;

the wedding tents garlanded with marigolds;
the broad river        reflecting banked pyres;

the longboats pushed into currents cradling         
sleeping kings;    the ossuaries’ 

shadowy niches, a mosaic of femur and masseter;        
and the chalk-barren     barrows 

aligned with the equinox, plunder-strewn
and chilled;        the businesslike crematory 

with its urn destined for the columbarium;
the gangway        lifting from the boat;

all the hands waving as the loved one recedes
in a beautiful        goodbye.

Power

John McKernan

When my mother found us on the darkened kitchen floor at midnight staring at the twin slices of Wonder Bread turning slowly from white to brown in the brand new Emerson electric toaster with forks in our hands and an unopened bag of marshmallows on the sleeping bag she knew she had to do something. She sat down on the linoleum floor and very quietly and patiently told us a long story about her Aunt Verna when she was seven years old who poked a fork “just like the one you have there” into the electric toaster to see if it would turn a glowing red color which it did not but instead Aunt Verna was jolted by an electric current so strong that her left eye “popped right out of its socket and landed in a pile of clothes her mother had just brought in to fold.”

The toast was delicious and the next morning when we looked up from our oatmeal at the slices of lightning crinkling the black sky we counted to seven to hear a boom rattle every plate on the table and every window in the house. The black cord of the toaster seemed to wag like the tail of some silver cat. When my brother would touch the cord he would close his eyes tight.

Leaves Between Leaves

Terry Savoie

I hoped to hold
back a small part
of the year about
to close down,
wanting in
the dead
of winter
to see colors
of mottled, dry
leaves lingering
in their final hues
on the verge of going
away: autumn leaves in
an orangey crimson
conflagration just
barely hanging
on.  I hoped
to hold each back, 
pressed leaves in-
between the leaves
of the Bible, wishing
to see something of
how the leaves
might begin
to discover
a little of what
the Hereafter
might hold
in store
for us
left behind.

My Father’s Hands

Zeina Azzam

They were not large, but thick
fleshy workers in the garden
nursing eggplants and fennel,
okra and chard,
digging and tilling and weeding,
making the soil an obliging host.

Maybe that’s what made
his fingers rough in spots,
or maybe it was the constant leafing
through books: a loving lick
and a flip-flap of the page
in search of nuggets
that would be turned over and over
in his mind.

After he died
I found bookmarks between pages
carefully pointing
like tags next to seedlings in the earth:
These are the plants I hoped for.
These are the ideas that made me grow.

Pronouns

Maya Wahrman

You heard things I never told him, sex dreams and daydreams
that never work out his body mass over mine how many
seconds would it take to flatten me no way out

all power in his arms his hips, you sat on the pool table
and told me in love you cede a part of yourself
I thumbed the pool cue, I told you she jumped she was pushed
 
how I grew and she did not, you spoke of two months
in Mexico City in my head they were sticky with sweat
the ex-exotic dancer I asked how do you change the world? you said 

you look different from this angle on the pool table my
legs over the edge you said you’re comfortable with silence. I like that.

At five a.m. we warmed our hips against the radiator now close enough
to smell man on your breath we went out through the loading dock
into distilled night I wanted to say did you notice we only spoke in 

pronouns? he, she, them, our lives we could have been anyone

roommate wanting drunk sex girl falling through stars a Mexican
ex-exotic dancer German hikers working night shifts at Mercedes a girl 

in a mansion in Syria with chandeliers a forgotten matriarch
me or you over the dead sea sun beaming over the edge
the heat of God or just another he 

to jump with the blackbird or grab a lance and become Don Quijote on his way. 
Maybe one day you will learn to be a Dulcinea.

Elijah

Cassandra Farrin

Sere bends the light
where no dew pearled
this morning
and won’t the next—

and the moon glides in the moist firmament 

    Then fire blisters
wood, and coal forms, and slag bakes
under the scalded drum
and the rain comes

The Arrival

Cassandra Farrin

Whatever it is,
hold it like the pope
is bleeding in Constantinople,
like Pompeii
in the hungry hours.

Vesuvius is flaking
and nobody cares.
Gather the smoke skirt
about you like a mantle.
Swaddled or horned,
carry your gift
up the molten flank

until your body, too, becomes a white cask
in the arms of constables and archaeologists.

unbearing

Alice Beecher 

a life grows in my stomach and
I snap it at the root--

tasted like pokeweed and persimmon,
like bitter, rough on the tongue,
an unripe forest,
an unbeating heart.

you wanted to make a mother of me,
hold me to the sea
like an oyster full of the ancients.

I steeped my belly in hawthorn and birch root,
drew you out like
sugar from a maple tree,
oil from an ocean,
a notion from
the lockbox of our lungs.

I curl my legs into knots,
trace the veins of a dead pine
against my winter skin.

It is too much,
holding all this water.

The bell jar bursts,
the blanket is ruby red.

The Kentucky moths whisper,
Bear holes into the fruit trees.
 

Homestead

Alice Beecher 

we turn into the stuff of sediment,
bare hearts on brass mountains,
brew our coffee slow
and our closeness slower,
make it like waiting for the
redbuds to blossom,
for the cicadas to crawl back home.
my friends build stricter houses,
cover them with clay and dandelions,
don't let the cats out or the cops in,
fall deep into  rivers
shivering against our small skins,
turn into crayfish and crawdad,
a hard shell host to flesh made tender,
made wet and full of wanting.

Anas says that if you
whistle too loud
inside a tunnel
you will scare all the ghosts.

these days I muffle my sugar steps,
breathe quiet as the mayflies,
stay close to bog and mud and root,
fill up my body with pokeweed and nettle
keep the bad men and the bad magic out.
 

Waking Up

William Cullen Jr.

The grace of easy moving light
gently gains the ridge
pouring down manna
on this cornfield. 
Blessed be the long shadows
of the scarecrows
who stood watch all night
until a rooster’s cry
says to stand down
and let the morning enter
still dark-lit souls
who believe that faith
only springs from the ground.

An Old Coal Mine

William Cullen Jr.

 
Descending into the night
of an old coal mine
our miner helmets' light beams
pick out the hundred year old bones
of donkeys who were born
and lived their whole lives
without ever seeing the light of day
hauling the dark residue of paradise
only so far as the coal train terminus
where the coal cars made
the final run to the surface
as white boys stood blackfaced
blinking in the sun
waiting for the anthracite to be unloaded
before dropping down again
into a purgatory
that even Dante wouldn't believe.

River Walker

Suzanne Rogier Marshall 

Below zero several days in a row. Half-crazy,
we dare each other to walk the frozen river. 
Grabbing sticks, we slide down the bank
through knotweed tangle, hobblebush, snow;
poke at the surface, then step onto ice. 
Before us, the river’s back – long and sinuous,
milky white like quartz; its mottled sky-gray
ridges, patterns of current and wind.  

At first we test our footing, jab with sticks,
then, bolder, stride along its frozen spine,
ice snapping and groaning beneath our boots. 
At the bend – boulders and deadfall,
brittle rings around the rocks, crackle-glaze, 
and bubbles pushing against glass. 
Beneath the cold, white surface, black water rages. 
We come too close. 

                                                           Even now, 
sometimes I feel I’m walking on river ice,
hear that low, hollow moan – the sound
before the crack.

Catastrophe

Mary Buchinger

what were the signs  when should you have thought something   that it might happen  what was missed   where were you looking  how long had it been leading up   a shadow   change in the air   intake of breath  hawk shifting   the river looks up says I only see what I see  I show you everything I can  there plain and clear  the bare trees leaning across   yawning limbs  gnawed by weather  ragged ice-broke branches leaking sap   the absence of clouds  a grey feather drifting on drafts 

a mix of mud and dirt-ice beside the bank  old boot tracks soften growing smooth   reckless   as the ground gives up its cold   when will the worms feel it is time  how will their churning change   what is in the works   the upthaw  February sun holding each green-necked gander along the path in its hand equinox in sight   everything lengthening  opening of wings  and whistles lacework of early leaf buds mirrored in the river  see the water breathe away from reeds  see the quiet current absorb city sirens   what should a person   where to look   how   drum of helicopter  bus brakes sighing   someone  speeding    listen    acceleration  

she was still smiling at that age    still an easiness there   must we always look back  this place of warning  what was missed   a lull of caring  a not attending   what was needed to wish to have seen   known  even now the lateness of the hour   the pastness of what was closing  the ever not moving into being attend to what  pay  pay  pay  before or after 

you will never know what seed fell from your boot   what did you carry   how will you know  have known  been knowing  tenses fail  not enough to say it was then  and until now    standing  planted  what stance   quick on furred feet  is that ready or not  it already was  is  the thing missed  is the coming in  is the what’s above  what’s below  all that you didn’t know   but if you could have  or did   or would then what  because of how it’s little and little and long put together   traps   unannounced  or  in words   unfamiliar 

how do you catch on to the change   before its wake of disaster   when there’s time  still time   the red-winged blackbird just keeps on calling Okalee! My reed It’s mine It’s  mine  Okalee! My reed It’s mine It’s  mine   what o what does the soft brown rabbit know  carried high up in a clutch of claw?

Fiction

Red Peppers

Sarah Key

After Pete died and Beth had to move east to live with her daughter's family, she sold almost everything she owned. Not that she wanted to, but there just wasn't enough space in their home. Beth only had a few good pieces anyway, a cherry curio at the end of the hall filled with ceramic plates and Pete's oldest theology books, and a dining room set large enough to seat a crowd. Beth hated giving them up, but that's what happened to her life.

Beth kept the desk, a solid oak roll-top from her “college days” in seminary school, where she was never officially enrolled but stayed for five years reciting prayers, attending daily Mass, and distributing communion to the elders inside a terminal wing of a nearby Catholic hospital. She packed her bedding and linens into a leather suitcase, because Clare, her daughter, preferred cheap cotton sheets and fabric that needed no ironing. It wasn't the way she had raised her, but Beth knew better than to tell her child what to do anymore, especially while living in her house.

Clare traveled west for Pete's funeral. Her husband, Kenneth, stayed home with their son in North Carolina. The community at Saint Agnes Seminary was in a hurry to turn over the house to a new resident deacon before the spring semester began. No matter Pete and Beth had lived there twenty-four years, that Beth had their wives in for coffee or brandy countless times, or that she had kept up the home as a reflection of the school and its parish. Beth was out without so much as a question to how she might get by. She never asked Clare if she could move in with her, and Clare never actually offered either. Clare stood in the hallway studying both familiar and unfamiliar framed prints of Agnes and the Virgin Mary, arms folded with her father's hard jaw, and said, “You're going to have to part with this big furniture.”

When they picked up Beth from the airport in Durham, Kenneth was not there. Her grandson, Stephen, hid behind his Clare’s legs as they waited for her bags to slide around the belt. Beth had bought him a stuffed beagle from the airport gift shop and attempted to give it to him, but Stephen clutched Clare's waist and asked, “Why is she so fat?” Beth didn't try to give him the beagle again, and when she saw Clare stroking his black hair instead of reprimanding him, Beth wanted to fly right back to Saint Agnes, house or no house, and walk the quiet winter paths around campus.

Clare put Beth in what her family called “the back room.” It was a small office at the end of the hallway with no closet, a single window, hardwood floors, and a daybed with groaning springs. (Stephen, one evening, commented on how much louder those bed springs sounded since Beth began sleeping there. He said he could hear those bed springs from the living room even with the television on.) Beth kept most of her belongings put away and her clothes in a drawer under the daybed. She didn't complain. Her roll-top desk wasn't the same type of wood as the floors in the back room, and Clare wanted to sell it but Beth would be black and blue before turning the desk over to some junk dealer.

Beth didn't have much to do with Kenneth. Clare and Stephen were all they had in common, so the two said little to each other. If they were ever alone in a room, it fell to Beth to start a conversation. She would mention the tree at the end of the property and how it looked during winter, or that maybe they could all spend more time together with the horses and build a bonfire one evening out back, or she'd bring up Stephen's unusually silent, wraith-like nature. Kenneth would respond in one or two words. He rarely looked at Beth; he wanted to pretend she wasn't there. Most times, when Kenneth was home and not traveling for his job as a quality control manager, Beth kept quiet and listened to where he went in the house so she could be in a different room.

She asked Kenneth for one thing. Beth wanted a piece of the yard, a patch near an abandoned cottage behind the house, where the sun touched the grass through midday. She thought she could plant a garden there.

Spring arrived later than usual that year, but Beth still spent much of her time outdoors to stay out of their way. The cold reminded her of Pete's hands and how he was always rubbing them together, how they made little to no sound, because his hands were so soft from years of work at Saint Agnes. She walked with the horses in their pasture and noticed feral cats wandering through the divots, stealthy and curious about her and what she was doing there. She and Pete always had a house cat or two at Saint Agnes. Pete was the type of man who enjoyed cats, especially manx or hairless breeds, because they were different.

Clare bought cans of tuna for Beth on her weekly trips to the grocery store in town, and Beth allowed her daughter to believe she had been eating them for lunch. She was able to convince two skinny, orange cats to come around the cottage, and after a few weeks, they let Beth touch the fur along their knobbly spines. Clare never said anything, though Beth felt sure that her daughter had caught on to what she was doing in the fields.

It turned out Kenneth had delicate sinuses. Even a few cat hairs on Beth's clothing could set him off. She tried brushing the cats' hair from herself as best she could, but Kenneth kept hacking a dry cough—like his wife, not saying anything, but always making a point.

In spring, Beth announced she was moving into the cottage. Kenneth said he knew he had a reason for never tearing the thing down, and Clare said she thought moonshiners used to meet there as an exchange point to drink and play cards. “It’s not a cottage,” she said. “More like a speakeasy.” From that day forward, Beth traipses through mud to come to the house for dinner each evening. As musty as that place was in the beginning, she loved her new freedom. Beth painted the walls the saturated color of robin's eggs and didn't particularly mind that the bathroom was missing a door or evidence of ever having one. She became friends with the cats and eventually named them—Mozart and Bad Milo—according to their personalities.

Even the daybed felt more enjoyable and less noisy in the speakeasy. There was some tackiness to be seen by her good sheets on the uneven surface of the mattress, but Beth slept better there. She no longer had to listen to Clare or Kenneth whisper at night, trying to keep her from hearing them. It was difficult to tell if there was any fondness in their whispering, and it became tiresome to stay awake and attempt to pick up a word or a tone of voice. Still, Beth missed Pete and found herself thinking of him often at night, a soft and warm sleeper despite his cold hands, who rarely moved and never covered with more than a thin sheet unless feverish or stressed.

Beth spent a lot of time alone in the speakeasy, except for the occasional visit from Stephen, who became more accustomed to her, or so it seemed. He liked to open cans of food for the cats, but he was still too afraid to pet them because of his father's allergies. Of all the strange things in that speakeasy—the bathtub sunken into the floor, the roof sweating nicotine from former smokers—the strangest thing was the electric can opener fastened into the kitchen wall. The previous inhabitants made everything as nasty and inconvenient as possible, but they saw to it that opening a can was easy enough to do. The object, old and gimmicky, amused Stephen, and he gave Beth a little company now and then, even though the child was as hard to get to know as anyone Beth had ever met. The students and wives of Pete's colleagues were nothing in comparison to her grandson.

On a Saturday in April, when the land had thawed for the season, Kenneth dug out a few square yards of ground, built a couple of raised beds and tossed in some topsoil. He hooked up a PVC pipe sprinkler system that attached to a long hose outside the house. Then, he poured a trail of gravel rock from the speakeasy to the back door of the kitchen. Beth wouldn't have to manage through mud anymore when she walked up for dinner. Kenneth never told Beth that he built the garden for her, but she knew she would be the only one tending it. “Try to keep those cats from shitting in there,” Kenneth said. That was his way of letting Beth know the garden was finished.

From the first day, the garden was good and workable. Beth planted squash and zucchini in one bed, cucumbers and tomatoes in another, herbs and peppers in the last. She planted sweet potatoes around the speakeasy, because she knew the vines would grow like mad. No one seemed too excited about it. Clare said she did not remember the garden Beth kept during her childhood. She was content buying produce from the grocery store or downtown farmer's market, but Beth thought maybe she could make Stephen enjoy the warmth of a vegetable from the vine. Maybe she could persuade him to pet Mozart or Bad Milo. Maybe she could cause him to accidentally say more than one sentence at a time.

Stephen squeaked across the yard one summer morning and stood in the water spilling from the PVC pipe. He wore yellow rain boots with khaki shorts and a blue hooded jacket. Beth did not know whether his mother sent him over or if he came on his own. He stood in the water, arms by his side and head down, allowing the low stream to soak the front of his chest. With his eyes closed, he touched one hushed current with an outstretched hand and then bent slightly forward. Water parted his hair below the crown, dripped down his neck, and plastered dark hair to his forehead. When the silent child began to hum something she had never quite heard before, Beth closed her eyes, too. In that moment, Stephen was the most beautiful and alive person she had felt in a long, long time. She wanted to try and give him the gift shop beagle again.

The peppers and tomatoes grew quickly in the early summer season. Beth had to reinforce the stakes supporting the tomatoes with woven copper wire. She was concentrating on braiding with Bad Milo smacking his paws at the soles of her shoes when she felt Stephen standing behind her.

“Well, won't you be happy when these are ripe and you can slice them up for dinner?” Beth touched a large, green tomato weighing down a branch barely supporting its size.

“I'm not allowed to slice,” Stephen said.

“I can show you how.”

Beth picked two medium-sized red peppers from another bed and led Stephen inside the speakeasy. He took his shoes off by the door, not that tracking in dirt or rocks could have made the dingy linoleum tile any worse than it already was. Beth washed, gutted the seeds, and dried the peppers with a paper towel. She placed them on a cutting board and pulled a utility knife from the drawer. “Let's see,” she said. Carefully, Beth sliced one half of a pepper while Stephen watched. She moved the blade slowly and demonstrated how her other hand was kept away from the sharp edge.

Beth put the knife in his hand, but he didn't grip it naturally. His hand was limp, as though he thought his mother was nearby watching him. Beth stood behind Stephen and wrapped her hand around his positioning her finger and thumb so he could move more comfortably. She guided his hand over the cutting board, back and forth, wanting him to feel the motion and take to it on his own. Stephen looked up at Beth for what might have been the first time. She held the pepper in place with its skin facing down on the board. Stephen's grip felt loose beneath hers.

“Come on,” Beth said. She tightened her hand around his. “It's easy.”

“It's not,” he said.

“It's okay,” she said.

Neither know whose hand was actually holding the knife when it touched the pepper to make a second slice, but when Stephen jerked away, he twisted the knife into Beth's hand. Blood covered and stained the cutting board. The knife dropped, but before Beth could say a word, Stephen was gone. The screen door slammed against the frame. In the bathroom, Beth turned on the cold water in the crooked sink, ran her hand under the spigot, and watched diluted blood swirl around the drain. She could tell that her hand needed stitches. The pain was clean and sharp and too close to the bone. It was numb and throbbing at the same time. Beth thought she might need to walk up to the house and ask Clare or Kenneth to drive her to the hospital in Chapel Hill.

But first, Beth cleaned the utility knife and put it away. She rinsed the red pepper and the cutting board. Light poured into the speakeasy onto her secondhand furniture and roll-top desk that she had not used once since leaving Saint Agnes. The beagle from the airport gift shop stood on top of her miniature refrigerator next to votive candles and bottle of brandy. Her hand continued to throb and bleed through the paper towels wrapped around it. She was almost out of paper towels. Beth knew she should tend to the cut on her hand, and she would, and she would see Stephen and quiet all the silly fears his parents put in him, but the room felt warm and she tired, so before she did anything else, Beth lay down on the daybed and just rested and became pleasant in her drowsiness and age and weight.

When Clare burst through the screen door—she almost never came to the speakeasy —Beth thought she was there to pick up Stephen's shoes.

“Stephen is hysterical,” Clare said. “He says he stabbed you.”

Beth sat up, and Clare looked so angry that for a moment, Beth thought she had been the one to hurt Stephen.

“For Christ sake, Mom. Look at your hand.”

When Beth did what her daughter asked, she saw the bedding and linens ruined beneath her. Clare removed the damp paper towels. Blood glued bits of paper to the cut where Beth's skin felt the most tender.

“Honestly,” Clare said, “he's crying his head off, and Kenneth is not happy.”

“Well, I wouldn't want Kenneth bothered,” Beth said.

“I'm going to get the car and bring it down. Where is your insurance card?”

“The wallet.”

“Great.” Clare inspected the speakeasy, like there was something entirely foreign about the place and her mother, and found Beth's wallet on the kitchen table next to an empty tea cup, a folded copy of USA Today, and rosary. Before leaving, she said: “Mom, that secretary really needs to go.”

Like everything else in the speakeasy, the screen door was askew, and with the door open, Beth watched Clare disappear. She wished she had her husband to care for her instead. If Pete were here, Beth could count on him to wrap her wound and make a nice bowl of soup out of the red peppers she left on the counter with onion and garlic and parsley and okra. Why had she chosen not to plant okra in her garden?

At twenty years old, Clare moved away for college, and when she returned home for breaks at Saint Agnes, she would roll her eyes when Beth asked Pete to do something for her, like fix breakfast or clean her shoes. As an adult, Clare did all her cooking and cleaning, and she seemed to forget how she used to tie Pete's apron strings around her body so that the two of them were attached. Pete allowed his daughter to waddle behind him in the kitchen and pretended not to notice her or her laughter. Pete would dramatically narrate his every movement like an actor on a stage reciting Shakespeare or Marlowe: “And now, He is going to taketh these hot-hot potatoes to the sink and draineth them there. He hopes only that the townspeople, the great provokers, are in proper accord with decision such wrought. Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.”

Beth smiled and heard the car idling outside the speakeasy, but she did not move. It occurred to her that she had not turned on the PVC pipe to water the garden that day, and if the garden was not watered, all her work would be wasted. Beth followed Clare outside and sat in the passenger seat holding her hand above her heart. She looked at the garden and saw Mozart and Bad Milo—fattened up since she had begun feeding them—digging in the soil and nightshade of the pepper plants. It appeared that they were now hers.

Sarah Key is Craft Talk Editor at The Tishman Review. Her work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, Tricycle, Kudzu, NAILED Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the director of a secular non-profit organization, Nashville Women in Atheism, and teaches English as a Second Language to immigrants and refugees.

Saamiya

Desmond White

Their hands are spiders on my scarf when I'm not looking. They pull the cornice in the back until my forehead is uncovered and I notice and hiss. They untie the knot by my right breast or pinch the cloth, leaving wrinkles. Worse. They talk, talk, talk and though I try to drown them out by putting my fists against my ears in a pose made to look like I'm focused on reading, I hear snippets of bitch and terrorist below the rumbling of my blood. Worse. The teacher ignores the intrusions like an actor in a film who can't hear the DVD commentary, but each insult unrefuted is another legitimized, each remark unobstructed leaves the door open.

I try to ignore the parallels between their decision to harass me and the book we are reading in which good children with dirty faces and long hair named Ralph and Piggy and Sam and Eric confront wild children who've turned bad because there aren't any adults to stop them. Under the green light of the island they’re trapped on, the Forces of Good stand on a ledge between red pinnacles and the ocean forty feet below, and ask politely for justice and peace and the return of Piggy’s glasses so they can relight a signal fire and wait for rescue. But the wild ones have become a tribe of hollering monkey-demons, their faces painted black-and-green with mud.

For a moment, I can ignore my classmates as Piggy makes one last stand for Civilization, facing bristling spears and the cackles of bullies, before a deliberate boulder tumbles down and strikes Piggy from chin to knee, and he tumbles, too, to the rocks below.

Piggies always die, whispers the boy behind me. I shut Lord of the Flies before my tears wet the thin pages and expose me, but nothing stops the sob that crawls from my throat like a snort. Something, they all laugh and imitate, that sounds like a boar.

After school they throw rocks (I wonder where they got that idea), shouting Piggy! Piggy! Piggy! and all I can do is scream fuckers! before biking home to examine crescent-moon bruises. Mom wants me to share what happened. She knocks at my door impatiently. But I've already locked it and slipped into the bedwaters of my mattress, because how can you share pain? And if you can, why would you? I imagine gripping her arm and allocating a mote of agony. Imagine Mom shrinking to her knees, shrieking how can you live like this?

That night, I take off my scarf and glasses and stand naked in the mirror. Piggies always die, don’t they? I think, surveying a face brown and red-eyed and pocked with moles and acne scars like bottle flies. They’re strong in all the wrong ways and weak to rocks. I open the medicine cabinet and take an orange bottle. A vestige from when I had my wisdom teeth pulled. I had thought it would be useful. I put the bottle on my bed, and think it kind of looks like a frozen amber tear filled with the white pebbles you put in aquariums.

I think about endings. When does Piggy end? When the boulder slams into his chest? When he hits the rocks below, his brains seeping out like yolk from an egg? When the sea pulls his body swirling under? William Golding might have known.

But in Islam, this is not a person's true ending. After his blood mixes pink with the waves, Piggy’s soul drips out of his body like a water droplet from the sink to be caught in the palm of a sunfaced angel. This angel carefully takes his spirit to the many-doors of Jannah. Without his body, Piggy does not feel asthmatic, despite the wispy air of Jannah’s upper mountains, worn thin from prayers and the altitude. And he doesn't need his spectacles (broken and on Jack’s belt) because he can see the geography of heaven’s manors and mosques with spiritual distinction.

His journey ends before Allah, who tells the heavenly scribes to record Piggy's name in the Book. I imagine the scholars pause to scratch their beards. What do they write for this little soul? They want to ask William Golding but he's busy resting in his coffin. So they opt for Abu Pig. 

Even in the Afterlife there is a registrar like the one where students get their school ID. And there is a test, too, an end-of-course exam that occurs when the soul returns to its tomb. Passing the test turns the tomb into a pleasurable waiting room for Judgment where sentient corpses spend their days in a space expanded like the Tardis into rose gardens and castle halls. Failing the test turns the grave into a torture chamber, and it can fill with snakes or constrict into a stinking bathroom or even a decimal point, a punctuation mark, like what happens in the middle of black holes. It can even dissipate, crushing the owner's rib cage into crystallized dust and starving him of air. But Piggy does not have a grave. When the ambassador returns Piggy's soul to his body, his body (I imagine) has floated, nearly headless, into a blue-green crevice where it lies peacefully, limbs floating freely like sea anemone, and silver fish peeking into the gaps.

There, two angels come to Visit. Even without the ocean deep they are blue-faced and wild-haired, only now they’re intimidated by the Expanse around them, preferring the cloister of a tomb. They have come to see if Piggy deserves to rest in Jannah or the evil Chaos reserved for sinners. The test is the most stressful part of the whole thing and I fear that because he’s not a Muslim he will answer the questions wrong. Piggy, who is your Master? ask the Denier and Denied, peering into his rubbery, dead face. Piggy replies: “Oh, I suppose my Auntie.” Piggy, what religion are you? ask Nakir and Munkar, and he answers honestly: “I am a good, proper Anglican. At least, my Auntie says so.” The angels already know where this is going, but they ask the final question anyway: Piggy, who is the person called Muhammad? Piggy scrunches his wet face in confusion: “Sorry? Who is Muhammad?” Yes, who is this person? "I'm not quite sure," he responds. "Sounds Oriental."

The angels look at each other. If they weren't made of light they might have rubbed their eyes in frustration. They like this child, but he's failed the test.

The angels are prepared to adapt the ocean to their use: shark baths, nibbling fish, electric eels, crushing pressures. But it's not Piggy's fault that William Golding didn't make him a Muslim. They decide to forgo the usual nasties. Instead, they put his corpse in a yellow conch with pink-and-white walls and a drowsy whistle. They give him twenty thousand books to pass the time, including the Qur'an in English, and say: Wait. And that is where Piggy is by the time Ralph faces the Boys with Sticks and crawls up the feet of a Sailor.

But why let death solve everything? I think, and my vision returns to the yellow grains of the ceiling I've been staring at from my bed. I feel generous. Elated, even. And I have an idea. I open my bag and put my take-home copy of Lord of the Flies on the bed, covering the bottle of painkillers from sight, and open to the last page. In the space below the last line, where a rescuing military officer looks sheepishly away from Ralph, who has been overwhelmed by thoughts of innocence lost and darkness found and a wise friend called Piggy, I write:

"Meanwhile and not too far away, Piggy pulled himself up onto the square red rock, feeling a mean headache. He looked up the side of the wall and was impressed by how far he fell – the blur of the cliff's peaks making it seem further. He vomited sea water and tiny white crabs like white pebbles, like a mouthful of sleeping pills, vomited until they were all out of his system, and then he found and pulled the pink mess of brains, soaked in sea foam and littered with pieces of shell, back into his head. His scalp was flapping wildly in the wind, so he ripped his shirt into strips and wrapped it from the top of his head to his chin. Scarf complete, he could look up at Castle Rock without losing his mind, although its pinnacles remained out of focus. 'That's some climb,' he muttered unhappily, but then he perked up. 'I expect Ralph needs me,' he said. 'And the painted boys, too, if they'll listen. I had better begin.'"

I stare numbly at the brown splotches where my tears have landed. "'It’ll take more than rocks to break my bones,'" I make Piggy say, letting him articulate my decision to keep my life.

Desmond White is a licensed professional educator in secondary education (that’s ‘high school teacher’ in layman’s terms) who writes short stories when his students aren’t looking. He currently resides in Houston, Texas. For more of his work, look no further than www.desmondwrite.com.

11-6

Matthew Roth

The news anchor dreams there is a fire, a very bad fire. The only thing that can stop it is water. Everyone is waiting until the fire reaches the ocean. Until it does, the only thing to be done is to report on it. He reads a list of names, of people and businesses and towns affected by the fire. All the names are foreign. He does his best to pronounce each one correctly, short of putting on an accent, which doesn’t test well with the target demographics and makes him feel insincere.

He reads names. He tries to give gravity to each, knowing that among his audience are people with relatives there, people on vacation from there, people whom he is telling that their families are dead. He can’t linger long, though. There are more people waiting to hear the name of the next town to be incinerated, if it is theirs. He pauses before the next name. It is his own language, his own town—the place where he lives now. He lives two blocks away from the TV studio. He can make it to bed fast after the 11:00 news, and then he can be there bright and early for the morning news at six. It doesn’t feel like it’s burning. This must be some weird quirk of live TV, the way it’s filmed, like the five-second delay in case anybody curses.

But they are. They’re burning, and then everyone is dead.

***

The news anchor dreams he’s reporting from a convenience store, the site of a near-robbery. The cashier/owner is telling the news anchor how he foiled the erstwhile robbers. He ducked behind the counter as if to open the safe and then pulled out an ancient tribal mask. It was Gibara, the demon of chaos, whom his people believe is responsible for all randomness in the universe. His father, who still lived in their home city, was a priest of Gibara. People brought offerings to him to keep their lives predictable. The father, a shaman who performed rituals up to sixteen hours a day, was permitted to keep one-quarter of those offerings. The rest had to be burnt. All his life, he was only ever paid in food. When told his son was moving to America, that he would earn a much better living, the shaman cursed him: What use have you for money? he said. Money is a middleman, nothing but the blank space between two contracts. So are you. It is all you will ever be. And the son, who grew up with a priest and a shaman as a father, who knew that every prayer, whether blessing or curse, must be followed up with an amen or risk arousing the demon’s ire, and causing something even worse to happen, said amen.

The son told the entire story to the news anchor, staring deep into the camera, looking earnest, as if he believed his entire speech would make it to television. The news anchor’s producer has an idea: the news anchor should wait in line, buy something, as a way of making the story come to life, so he can report from personal experience. He does. As he’s paying for his purchase—he has selected a single banana—the next person in line pulls out a gun. It’s another mugging. The cashier/owner tries the mask again, but simply gets laughed at. He feels like a fool. And the news anchor, a gun digging into his back, cannot help but pray to the demon, please, I believe you, I believe you, and wishes that the cashier/owner would treat this experience with a little more reverence.

***

The news anchor has been a news anchor for a long time. He is good at his job, and it’s a good job, but that’s all it is to him, a job. Once he had ambition. He thought he’d be an actor. His dependable voice could convince an audience of anything. He could play the male lead in a romance, having A-list actresses throw their weepy selves upon the expanse of his slightly-lesser-known chest, or maybe he could be an action hero. People depended on him. He had a face people trusted.

***

But his slicked-back hair went from killer-whale black to pavement gray, and his chiseled cheeks never looked so rocky. His agent in L.A., the agent who had once seemed so keen on his weekend fly-ins for auditions, offered roles that changed from fathers in commercials to grandfathers in commercials.

The news anchor has lately taken liberties with the news. He indulges his penchant for opening lines and colorful adverbs—he has, after all, been reciting these lines longer than the copywriters have been writing them. He adds personal flourishes, things he knows, things he can guess well enough to improvise. He has been paying attention. The same people resurface in the news again and again: publicity hounds, notables, freaks. He has gained an appreciation for these people: those who don’t merely report the news but create it.

This is what led him to his latest trick. He sees a feature photo appear beside his head on the monitors. He gives it a gift: his own story, the most fascinating and riveting tale that could possibly accompany this picture of a six-year-old girl in the stark seriousness of her yearbook picture or a laughing, loose-tongued hero dog. He ignores the teleprompter, mentally blocks out the frantic producers. He knows he doesn’t have long. Until the end of the night’s newscast, or perhaps only until the next commercial break. But until it happens, and until he is dragged off the set, cameras furtively rolling, filmed by a low-grade cameraman who will release the footage of the news anchor’s breakdown over the internet vainly hoping to create a viral sensation, the news anchor will give these visuals the narration they deserve—the brightest dreams he can spin for them, the best reporting he can ever hope to offer.

Matthue Roth's latest novel is Rules of My Best Friend's Body (Hevria), which you can download for free. Slate called his picture book The Gobblings "perfect." By day, he's a creative writer at Google.

creative nonfiction

Girl I Never Met

Toti O’Brien

“You’d love Karla,” she said. “She’s extraordinary. She wakes up in the middle of the night and writes poetry.”

The artist type, driven by inspiration. Creativity rules over everything—its power magnificent, a prodigy to behold. Karla awakes in the middle of the night and writes. Does she keep a pencil and pad on her bed stand? I guess. For a moment I think I also should. Does she have a bright bedside lamp? I don’t. I consider purchasing one.

I would like for Donna to talk about me (in my absence, all right) as she does of Karla. She cannot. I don’t have such a glamorous profile, though I am a wannabe artist myself. Of the minor kind. With a too composed, restrained attitude. Discipline in my case commands inspiration, not the other way around. My artistry is and will remain provincial, domestic. I’m not possessed by the sacred fire. How I wish I were.

I’m expecting to meet Karla soon. I long for, but also am afraid, of acquainting this girl Donna praises and strongly wants me to know, hinting at some affinity the two of us might have. The idea embarrasses me. I fear our juxtaposition could only reveal how pale an imitation I am.

***

I shall be surprised. After trumpeting Karla for a week Donna shows up with Petra, about whom she hasn’t spoken a word. Petra enters our universe matter of fact, as she exits the passenger’s door of D’s car, thus emerging from the place that will be hers from now on (it was mine until yesterday).

Was Karla a screen? Just a cloud of smoke Donna puffed around to conceal the fact she was getting a girlfriend? She is not that foxy. Not consciously, at least. But I never get to meet Karla, suddenly forgotten, disappeared, though the myth of her has dug a crease in my soul, setting an ideal I’d never be able to reach.

Petra is no one I could even hope to resemble—yet I like her, perhaps because of the chasm separating us. She is reason itself. Calm. Reflective. Scientifically minded, perfectly complementing Donna’s eccentric geniality.

***

Donna and Petra have claimed the main bedroom. Suddenly I’m exiled form the king size bed D and I used to share for companionship, for long chats until we’d fall asleep, to keep warm in winter. Not for sex. I am hetero and Donna hadn’t yet decided. Now she has.

I feel strange, a bit shattered. To play cool I start sleeping with the dog. The big German shepherd (namely Donna’s, but she doesn’t care any more, gladly abdicating ownership—and responsibility—in my favor) must have noticed the vacancy. Before I realize, it is cuddling at my side. I don’t stop it. Its presence comforts me. More than all it helps my dignity. My abandonment is less evident if the place next to me is obtrusively occupied.

I don’t feel uncomfortable while referring to the dog with a neutral pronoun. I don’t deem gendering always necessary or respectful. On the contrary, allowing the animal to maintain its privacy is more appropriate, more delicate.

I could use some privacy as well, by the way. How do I stand the sound of Donna-and-Petra’s lovemaking beyond the dry wall? Do I wish I could join them? Not sure, and I am not invited. I harmonize the rhythm of my respiration with the dog’s breathing. Our shared inhaling and exhaling lulls me to sleep.

***

On the night when the three of us drink ayawaska, we collapse (just on time) on the same sofa. A large one, dark and battered, pushed against a wall of the damp and impersonal beach house belonging to… no idea. Donna as usual has organized it all. She has keys. This place must belong to someone she knows.

We have sat at a round table in front of three tall narrow glasses, filled to the brim with a muddy liquid smelling and tasting foul. We have smoked a few joints to fight nausea, to make sure we’d hold the disgusting brew in our stomach. Before we start laboring on our potions Donna gives each of us a conk shell. She’ll explain in a minute, she says between giggles. Sharp, shrill, nervous laughter always contours her speeches, like quote marks.

The conk shells were sent by the brujo who provided the drug—little freebies on the house. They are talismans we should steadily hold in our fist, to make sure we’ll come back from our journey. After all, this shit we are religiously sucking is called “the drug of death”.

Wow, we are sipping it with such compunction, such eagerness, such delight—the three of us, so different. Donna the transgressor, the irreverent, the crazy. Petra the old and wise—is she twenty-three, twenty-four already?—poised, rational, soon-to-be-doctor, whose sole weirdness is to be a lesbian in a time and place when such preference still calls for stake burning. What am I? I can’t see myself and no one sees me at the moment. Sitting face to face, Donna and Petra only have eyes for one another.

On the sofa, where we’ll be plastered for twelve long hours under the effect of the strongest psychotropic on earth, Donna is in the middle. She has already inserted her fingers in our mouths (mine and Petra’s) as she invites us to do the same—explore gums, palates, tongues, teeth, no matter to whom they belong. Identities are becoming more blurred by the minute. I comply, and why not? Our trio starts to mingle and melt.

Then in a smooth, painless way, I realize this hors-d’oeuvre is pure courtesy. Though we are eating chips from the same bowl, when the meal will arrive I shall obviously keep to my plate. Is this only my assumption? Am I getting it wrong? Would I be welcomed, indeed, if I wished to share more? I will never know. I discreetly roll away, crumpling fetus-like on my end of the couch, squeezing the shell in my palm. I will take my journey alone, and survive.

Soon the carrousel sweeping my senses is so wild, I lose awareness of the couple entangled besides me. With hindsight, I dare say their sex was on the tender side. A sigh. A concavity.

***

On the night when we take acid—a simple routine, not comparable to the smashing yage-induced delirium—Donna and Petra pick the guest room and I get the king size bed, for some reason. I am facing an uncurtained glass door opening to the back patio. The moon shines—fastidious, revealing.

The dog is there of course, but doesn’t hop at my side. It waits on the floor nearby, squatting once on a while then resuming an upright, alert posture, always staring my way. I know, because whenever I leave my hallucinated reveries for a scrap of here-and-now I meet its eyes, glaring, phosphorescent—two more greenish moons. The dog is aware of the fact I’m not my “normal” self, and I need surveillance. How comes? What does my body emit? I wish I were this sensitive, this perceptive.

Tonight—with the usual thin wall between me and the couple next door, with the dog choosing supervision over coziness—I feel cold and forlorn. Neglected? Not sure. Cut out, scissored around the edges.

And I make up my mind, or else the dog does… something leaks out of its body, brain, soul—wiser, more mature than what I am able to produce. In the morning I pack my suitcase, leave a goodbye note and take off. I have decided I’ll quit fooling with drugs, at least for a while.

***

Before I came into the picture Donna had lived with Katriona. I am not sure what the nature of their relationship was. Actually, Donna’s living arrangements before my time and Petra’s also implied a trio of sorts. A certain Tod was involved.

Now she talked about him with disgust—a crook, a drug dealer, he had put the girls in some trouble. Katriona had to travel abroad in order to solve the problem. Slowly, in bits and pieces, I learned she had gone to purchase a stock of cocaine, needed to pay the debts due to Tod’s misgivings.

With Tod out of the picture, Katriona overseas, Donna must have found herself in a vacuum—a strange place for her gregarious temperament. That is when she had reached out to me. Was she attracted? I don’t think so, but we were compatible. She wished for an easy follower, ready to accommodate her foolishness, her desire to try it all, push boundaries, make a life of her own devising. I needed her edginess, her lack of concern, beautiful immorality, to help me overstep all remains of my decent upbringing.

We started hanging together on a regular basis, then living together. Then the book arrived in the mail. Donna was in heaven.

***

We had locked ourselves in the restrooms of the college from which we’d be soon kicked out. We had an exam one hour later. Donna carefully peeled off the book inside cover with the help of a small pocketknife. A thick layer of sparkling powder appeared. I had no idea of the quantity of money lying under my eyes. Donna did.

Katriona had made it! She had managed to purchase, hide, send over what would pay for the debt she and Donna had contracted. She must have taken huge risks, all alone in the distant world where she had ventured. In vain. Donna and I snorted the bounty in less than a week.

I must say in my defense I knew nothing of the story behind the snowy banquet we shared. Donna generously offered, I was happy to oblige. I learned way too late about Katriona’s despair, Donna’s bitter regrets. She had been unable to resist, she said. Was she ever?

Did it matter? I’m sure Donna managed to make it up to Katriona, resourceful as she was. Affluent. The black sheep of wealthy old aristocracy—her family had disowned, not disinherited her. Donna would pay back.

***

When we had just met and we drove together a lot, scanning the town outskirts for a cheap place to live (I didn't know she could have bought a castle) we listened to the radio non-stop.

A pop song was relentlessly aired—a recent hit, nothing special. Quick pulse, hammering beat, endless echoing of a catchy fragment of tune. I remember the title—“Feel No Pain”—that was also half of the lyrics. When we listened to it (at least twice a day) D took on a pensive and moody look.

Once she said: “This song made me stand the psychiatric ward, and get out of it”. Her statement left me perfectly cool. Being treated for mental something wasn’t rare an occurrence, with our lifestyle and the amount of illicit substances we used. I didn’t ask what she exactly… what for… I wasn’t curious. I felt fine about a roommate with a slightly psychiatric past—even proud, since she had overcome it. Kind of a war veteran, was she? She had survived thanks to a song.

Her point left a mark. After a lifetime I still catch myself judging music with her statement in mind. “Yes, it’s good but... would it sustain me through a mental breakdown? Show me the way out?” I weigh many things (art, poetry, friendship, romance) on the same scale. Not much passes the test.

And I hear Donna’s voice, with the nasal resonance due to her cleft lip, her malformed palate, the painstaking reeducation she had endured as a child. I had not known until she mentioned it—the scar on her mouth was minute, almost invisible. A small dent, kind of sexy—a muffled sensuality in her tone. Efforts and humiliation seemed unreal and remote. Sometimes she hinted lightly, ironically, at what she had gone through.

***

On the night when we drank yage and she inserted her fingers in our mouths, prompting Petra and me to do the same, was she exorcising something, visiting an old battlefield, blessing it with some sort of holy water? I didn’t realize at the moment.

On the night of the drug Donna princely shared—as she had shared thousands bucks worth of cocaine—I had an out-of-body experience. I stood up, walked to a side of the room clear of furniture, lowered myself to the cool tiled floor and performed a yoga posture—the star. It implied my hands and feet touching, all my energy cycling. A strong, revitalizing ritual.

As I assumed the pose I looked back at my body slumped on the sofa—a limp shell. And my body, on the sofa, looked at the star of myself shining across. Perhaps I longed for companionship after all. Starved for some kind of dialogue. Perhaps I didn’t want to be alone.

***

After I packed and left I never saw Donna again. No bad feelings, no hurt, though I don’t recall which pretext I gave for my desertion. I don’t think Donna cared—she had found her landing. Petra momentarily anchored her, while I broke loose like a kite. Rather I flew like a blinded canary, bumping into whatever obstacle I met.

A thousand years later, I have learned how to wake up and write. In the middle of night, I mean, Donna. Now I can follow inspiration as it takes the lead, uncaring of reasonable limits. While growing old I have grown wild. I could meet any Karla you might have in store—boldly, without a blink.

Still, when I switch my lamp on and I grab my pen, I don't think of that wonder girl of yours. I have never met her, you know? I hear the thick nasal tone of your voice instead, your laugh of self-irony, self-defense.

Let me tell you. I have crossed rivers of sorrow on narrow bridges, thanks to several songs of the cheap kind. Strong obsessive pulses, easy melodies, a few biting words, and that’s all. Feel no pain. Feel no pain. I think I don’t anymore.

Toti O'Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. She was born in Rome then moved to Los Angeles, where she makes a living as a self-employed artist, performing musician and professional dancer. Her work has most recently appeared in Fiction SouthEast, NonBinary Review, OVS Magazine, and The Adirondack Review.

Gravity

Dallas Woodburn

Nirvana. “Heart-Shaped Box.”

You are the one who tells me about The 27 Club. You are not my fiancé at the time, nor are you my ex. You are my new boyfriend. Four years older. I am 23. You are 27.

You rattle off the names: “Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin. Jim Morrison. Kurt Cobain.” Later, you will introduce me to most of their music, sending me YouTube links and playing riffs on your secondhand guitar. Burning me mix CDs, even though you say nothing compares to vinyl.

“Why The 27 Club?” I ask.

You finger-pick a melody. “Because they all died at 27. Just gotta make it four more months and I’ll be out of the danger zone.” You laugh. I laugh. We are giddy with each other. Death—of us as individuals, of us as a couple—is ludicrous. Impossible.

The Doors. “Hello, I Love You.”

We meet on a “false spring” day when the snow recedes to shallow puddles and then evaporates entirely. Grey leaks from the sky like puss from a wound, leaving a soft blue in its wake. I wear a sleeveless top and drive to school with the windows down. My hair blows into hopeless tangles. I don’t care. Sunshine! In February! Something special is in the air. Something extraordinary is about to happen. I repeat that word in my head, feeling its shimmer and heft—something, something.

The moment I first glimpse your face, I have an odd feeling of recognition. Like time slips out of its tracks and I am looking back on the moment as I live it, knowing that what happens next will be important, a story I will tell and retell.

Jimi Hendrix. “Gypsy Eyes.”

My friend Holly describes falling in love as gravity.

That is what falling in love with you is like. Effortless, unstoppable. A natural law.

Here is our romantic montage: you bounding up the stairs to my apartment, so excited to see me that you can’t help but run. The gentle strength of your gloved hand in mine as we walk down the street. The amused gleam in your eyes when I tell a funny story from my day and I can tell you are listening. Really listening.

All of these things feel like miracles.

Amy Winehouse. “Rehab.”

A month to the day after you turn 28, we sit in the lobby of a London hotel watching the breaking news of Amy Winehouse’s death. She is 27. The latest addition to The Club.

We are melancholy, both of us. Her death casts a pall over the final hours of our vacation. In the morning, I catch a flight home to Southern California. You return to Chicago. The rest of summer stretches out before us. We will be apart until August, when grad school resumes. Every night we talk on the phone. Every night:

“I miss you so much,” you tell me.

“I miss you too.”

“I don’t want to ever be apart like this again.”

“Summer will go by quickly. You’ll see.”

And I do miss you. You know that, right? But it is complicated. I savor my time at home with my family. I go to bed when I want to. Get up when I want to. Eat when and where I want to. Hang out with my friends without feeling guilty.

I feel reconnected to myself. My self before you.

But the undeniable truth is that I love you. Fiercely.

Taylor Swift. “Mine.”

School resumes. We are again inseparable. I feel supremely comfortable around you. Free to be my silly self. You never make me feel insecure. Curled up beside you on the couch as we grade papers is my favorite place in the world.

You lavish me with praise—my writing, my wardrobe, my off-key singing. When I cook, you rave, “Delicious!” No matter what it is. Even the recipes I accidentally burn or undercook or over-salt. We celebrate our anniversary the 19th of every month with handwritten cards.

Once, when I am sick with the flu, you venture out in a heavy rain and return with chicken-noodle soup and a Taylor Swift CD. (Pop music: for you, the ultimate concession.)

Jimi Hendrix. “May This Be Love.”

You come with me to California for part of winter break. The final day of your visit, we go for a walk along the pier. You seem quiet, distant. We stand together looking out at the iron-gray ocean, choppy with waves. The Channel Islands way off on the horizon. It is an overcast afternoon threatening rain. Slivers of sunlight poke through the clouds. The beach is empty except for three squawking seagulls fighting over a fast-food wrapper.

And then. All of a sudden. You let go of my hand. Drop to one knee. Ask me to marry you. Just like that.

I think: This is it. The moment I’ve been dreaming about my whole life.

I am not sure what to say. Not sure what I want. Not sure.

I start to cry. Manage to choke out the word, “Yes.” You beam and stand up, wrapping me in your arms.

I am lucky, I tell myself. I am happy. In the back of my mind, a nagging voice asks, Are you? Is this what you want? But I tighten my arms around your back and push my doubts away.

Janis Joplin. “Piece of My Heart.”

We decide on a summer wedding. The upcoming summer is too soon—no way can we plan a wedding in the midst of school and teaching, my upcoming graduation, your dissertation deadline, all of our obligations. We decide to wait until the following summer. You will be 31.

I will be 27.

Our relationship is a scratched CD that begins to skip. Things downspiral. Quickly. Your anxiety and insomnia grow worse and worse. But you refuse to seek help. Instead, you lash out. More and more, the littlest things set you off into a storm of rage and despair. And a bad night for you is a bad night for me.

Here’s you: throwing your shoe across the room.

Here’s me: bleary-eyed, trying to coax you back to bed.

Here’s you: punching the wall.

Here’s me: curling away into my pillow. Fighting back tears.

These days, it seems I am constantly fighting back tears.

Eventually, morning comes. Half-light tentatively pokes through the cracks in the curtains. Always, you apologize and promise to be better. Always, I nod my head and forgive you, clinging to the belief that things will improve.

You are two people—the gentle, guitar-strumming guy I fell in love with, and the bitter, enraged man who occasionally emerges at night, when it is just us alone. I tell myself that the calm and loving person is the real you. The other version will fade in time. I will chase your demons away, like a bright light chasing away shadows.

The Doors. “The End.”

St. Patrick’s Day. We are parked on the side of the road during a late-spring blizzard. Nothing but static on the radio. I am crying. You are a stone wall.

I have realized I cannot save you. You need to chase your own demons away. You need to cast you own light.

When we get home, I pack a bag and tell you I need to think about things. We both know it is over. Raw, brutal, irreversible. Gravity.

Nirvana. “Lithium.”

I move out. You keep your distance. I force myself to eat, mostly pieces of sandwich bread that I tear off the loaf in little bits. Mutual friends report you are seeing an undergrad, a former student of yours I always knew had a crush on you. We used to joke about her. Called her your “Fan Club.” Now, you’re sleeping with her. Thinking about it makes me physically ill.

And—yet. Yet. I also feel an undeniable release. No longer am I drowning. No longer do I dread the sunset, the onset of night. I am alone, yes. I am lonely, yes. But when I am tired I climb into bed and hold myself until sleep comes.

Amy Winehouse. “Tears Dry On Their Own.”

A muted Friday evening. You are waiting outside my office. My stomach drops. You ask if we can talk—just once more. You still have a few things to say.

I hesitate, scanning the deserted hallway, surprised at how vulnerable I feel. Exposed. It’s not that I’m worried you’re going to harm me. Not exactly. But I look at your muscular arms and know that if you want to, you can.

“Okay.” My heart is beating fast. “But I only have a few minutes.”

I follow you out of the English building. The trees have burst into beautiful bloom, white flowers like clouds of cotton. We head over a stone bench. As we sit down, you ask how I am. Squinting at me through your glasses. Your expression unreadable.

I gaze at the trees. Their scent fills the air. Springtime. The world keeps turning and turning. “I’m doing okay.” I look at your clenched hands. Brace myself for an explosion.

After a moment, you say, “What I don’t get is why you lied. All this time, you acted like you loved me. But you didn’t.”

“Of course I did. You can love someone but not be right for each other.”

Your smile is eerie, empty of feeling. “You’re going to look back and regret this. You’re never going to find someone else who loves you like I did.”

I bite my lip. You have found the throbbing wound of my greatest fear and dug your thumb into my flesh. What if no one else ever loves me? What if I end up alone? What if I’m making a mistake?

Soon, I will turn 27. In my former life—our former life—we would be getting married. A candle flame flickering low. A lost girl joining The 27 Club.

I look at you. You, the man I once thought I would spend my life with. Yours is the same face, yet different. Angry. Bitter. Looking into your eyes, I see hatred.

“I don’t have to take this.” I stand up from that gray stone bench. You are yelling after me. I block out your words.

As I walk away, I almost glance back at you.

But I don’t.

I look straight ahead. My boots tap a new melody against the sidewalk. I keep walking.

Dallas Woodburn, a recent Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing, has published fiction and nonfiction in Zyzzyva, Modern Loss, Fourth River, The Nashville Review, and The Los Angeles Times, among many others. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she won first place in the international Glass Woman Prize and second place in the American Fiction Prize. A passionate teacher and writing coach for all ages, she is the founder of Write On! Books, an organization that empowers youth through reading and writing endeavors:  www.writeonbooks.org. Dallas lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wonderful husband, always-overflowing bookshelves, and windowsill succulent garden.

Heartwood

Lynn Houston

I fell in love with a country boy who loved to climb trees. When I met him, though, he was a man and lived in the city, where the only two trees on his street were scheduled to be cut down. I found the removal notice from the city hanging on his door one day, near the end of our relationship. I took the flyer inside his apartment and waved it around, ranting. The two ash trees across the street were the only break in the monotony of run-down apartment houses, the only visual reminder of earth and the life that grew in it. I’d only lived in New Haven for a year, but I already missed the Catskill Mountain forests of New York, where I grew up. And although William was much more rational about the loss of the trees—they had a fungus and needed to come down or they could fall on someone, he said—he also missed the wooded lots of Missouri where he’d spent his childhood, when his parents were still together, when his mother was still alive. These losses weighed heavier on him since his own marriage had fallen apart and his 3-year-old daughter—despite his best intentions to avoid his parents’ mistakes—would be growing up in a broken family like he did. As logical as he was able to be about getting rid of the diseased ash trees, he was still unable to practice that same level of emotional detachment with his failed marriage. And by the time I realized how hung up he still was on his ex-wife, it was too late: I’d already fallen for him.

I could hardly be blamed. There was much to admire about William. He was tall and gregarious, smart and funny, a natural storyteller. In his free time, he handcrafted bows from raw timber, so his best stories often involved trees. In his basement, he hoarded thick logs he’d gotten for free from roadside cutting crews. Some were stumps so large they didn’t fit into his Subaru, so he’d drive them home strapped to its roof-racks.

Our third date was a hike in Branford, Connecticut, where we found lots of trees. William pointed out a sweet gum. He picked up one of its spikey pods from the ground and put it in the palm of my hand, where he opened its casing to show me the seeds inside, his fingers grazing my skin, his hand lingering on mine. Just then, a squirrel ran across the trail. William chuckled as he rested against a rock cropping.

“Reminds me of a story.”

“Oh yeah? Tell me.” I sat down next to him on the rock.

“One time my daddy was squirrel hunting in Missouri, and he wounded one pretty badly. So, hillbilly that he is, he decides to go up the tree after it, thinking it wasn’t right to let it die slow. But he’s not thinking about his age, about how long it’s been since he’d climbed. Anyway, he skinnies up this tree. To hear my dad tell it, he was 30 or so feet up, with no strength left, just hanging on, hugging that tree. The squirrel was nowhere to be found and he was stuck up there like a bear, looking down at the ground, registering the fall.”

“What happened next?”

William grabbed my hand, smiling.

“He fell.”

“Was he okay?”

“He was fine.”

William turned to face me, looking deeply into my eyes.

“But it just goes to show you’ve got to go after something if it feels right, no matter if you could get hurt by it later.”

For our fourth date, William invited me to dinner at his place, the two ash trees on his street not yet marked then for removal by the city. He made me baked chicken and sweet potatoes heavy with butter. I brought cornbread. Then we watched woodworking videos, quaint CDs he lovingly removed from their cases one at a time. They featured a man dressed in a flannel shirt and suspenders who first handcrafted all of his tools and then used them to clear trees and build things from the raw lumber. This was William’s vision for the future, living off the land as much as possible, doing things by hand.

In the next CD, the woodworker was readying some timber to build a structure. The camera zoomed in on the cross-cut end, as the man applied a lotion to the grain, rubbing it in with his fingertips as he circled the ribbed striations, getting closer and closer to the dark center circle of heartwood.

“Are you showing me wood porn?,” I teased William, as I moved closer to him on the couch in the darkly lit living room.

It was the last video we watched that night.

William and I began spending more time together. Sundays were our days to hang out. We fished, hiked, cooked, played guitar, and read poetry. One evening, we were watching a bowmaking video on his computer, and I finally worked up the nerve to ask him what we were to each other.

“Are we. . . just dating casually? Are we in a committed relationship?”

He paused the video and looked at me.

I continued. “Because I’d like to propose that we try being exclusive for two to three months and see how it goes.”

He leaned in to kiss me. “You have my exclusivity.”

He hit play, and we went back to watching the bowmaking video. Noel Grayson was explaining how the Cherokee worked with the heartwood to make a bow. You get in between a growth ring and take it all the way down, running a cut the length of the lumber. If you get to a knot, let the wood do what it wants to do it in terms of your cut. The most important thing is to make the ends bend evenly. If they both snap at the same time, then the bow shoots straight.

William told me about the first bow he’d ever made using the technique Grayson was describing. It had failed because he’d used pine.

“Is pine bad?,” I asked.

“It’s a brittle wood and can’t withstand the tension of the bend. Yew is great.”

“Aw, honey, ‘yew’ ain’t so bad yourself.”

He flashed a bright smile. “But I really like Osage. It used to grow all over Missouri. Here in the Northeast, it’s pricey.”

“Quality things usually are.”

Later, as we were lying in bed, he told me about pine trees in colonial America, how the King of England had claimed for himself all the giant pines in the northeast, had them marked as his property to be used as masts for his ships. No one else could cut them down without penalty.

“What’s the moral there?”

“No moral. I just thought you liked my wood. . . stories.”

“Very funny,” I smiled, and rolled over to look at him. “I do like your wood. . . stories.” I kissed him, and we fell asleep.

But much later, I discovered that there was indeed a moral to the story he told me. The Pine Wars were part of what led to the American Revolution. The colonists wanted to be free to do what they wanted with their wood. They didn’t want a British ruler making exclusive claims on it.

***

I didn’t register when William first started pulling away, because it wasn’t an absence so much as a refusal to invest. I didn’t think he would make such a decision so early, only a few months into our relationship. William was that guy, still in his thirties, who believed that love should be a hard fall in the beginning, not something you tend and grow over time. In my experience, any kind of initial spark was usually just the flame of physical attraction.

One February a few years back, I’d tapped a sugar maple in my parent’s yard, hammered the spiles into opposing sides and hung the buckets. I’d named the tree Bessie, like a milk-producing cow, because I could hardly keep the buckets from overflowing. Someone told me that I only needed to boil the sap to 219 degrees Fahrenheit to make syrup, and that anything more made maple candy. But 219 degrees only resulted in a kind of buttery water. So I kept it on the flame. No matter how long I boiled the sap, it never became a thick syrup. Time plus heat had never yet yielded sweetness for me.

William and I had great physical chemistry, and we liked all the same things. I figured out later that he had wanted to play a game of chase, while I was ready to settle into something more meaningful. I’d forgotten that the last time he tried to take steps toward something more serious—his marriage—that he’d felt betrayed when the relationship had failed.

One Sunday night, after a hike past a waterfall deep in the woods, we settled in to watch the documentary Alone in the Wilderness. A few minutes in, he grabbed my hand and said he had to talk to me. I immediately tensed up.

“You are very important to me, Lynn,” he said. “But I don’t have the normal feelings I might expect to have at this point.”

“I’m not sure what that means. Are you saying you want to break up?”

“No. I’m saying that I think I never processed my divorce. I feel numb.”

“It’s still early on. Those feelings might come.” I squeezed his hand. “What can I do to help?”

“Just guard your heart. I can’t promise that there’s a future for us. I’ve been the one who cared more in past relationships, and I got hurt. I don’t want to hurt you.”

I leaned closer to him. If I had been honest with myself, my mind was already made up—William made my life better. I was all in. There was no guarding my heart. And it seemed so clear to me that he wasn’t going to find anyone else who connected with him like I did. I just couldn’t conceive of us not working out.

“Listen, William, no one can promise a future. There are no guarantees in life. We don’t even know for sure we will wake up tomorrow. So I think we should just live in the moment.”

“Okay.” He seemed relieved of some burden.

“I don’t care if there’s no future between us because you make me happy right now.”

“You make me happy, too.”

And I believed that he meant it.

We returned to watching Dick Proenneke fell trees and hew timber for the log cabin he built by hand in Alaska.

“Those are spruce trees,” William pointed out. “You can’t find good trees like that just anywhere these days.”

“Why not?”

“So much has been cut down for farming. When I was a teen, I worked for a guy who reclaimed barns. That was in Illinois, where we moved after my folks split up. They didn’t have hardwoods there anymore because they’d cleared the land for crops. Some of the wood that used to be readily available—like chestnut, black walnut—had been used to make barns. The guy I worked for would tear down a barn and resell the timber. He would quote a price based on what the barn was made of. If it was made of a good hardwood, he would tear it down for less.”

William was still holding my hand. I picked it up and placed his palm on my face.

As I moved it to my lips and kissed it, I remembered a story he’d told me about the damage his hands had done to a tree. There’d been a wagon wheel in an empty lot next to his childhood home, and he’d taken it apart, but a piece of the center hub remained attached to one of the spokes. He began swinging it like a mace, and hit a nearby tree. He kept hitting it, cutting into the bark all the way around its trunk, leaving deep wounds. The tree later died, and he felt terrible. It was the tree he used to climb and sit in when his parents started fighting.

I thought about the vastly different childhoods William and I had and how those differences might have led us to incompatible ideas about romantic relationships. My mother and father had been happily married for the past forty-six years. While money had been tight growing up, we never lived on state assistance or had to go without indoor plumbing, like William had done as a boy. I remembered the wooden plank hung by a rope to the tree outside my bedroom where I would swing while my father cut the grass after work. I remembered when my parents wanted to have an above-ground pool installed in the backyard for me and my brother, and the company said it would have to cut down one of the birches on our property in order to get the truck through. My mother was adamant—that tree was a living thing and she wouldn’t allow them to kill it. Instead, my father grabbed the trunk of the birch and swung it back toward him, pulling on it with all of his weight. He cleared enough space for the truck to get through.

A few weeks after he had told me to guard my heart, William broke up with me on a hike, after I introduced him to one of my favorite trees. The tree stood in a little clearing as the trail veered away from the Mill River toward East Rock Park. I’d named the tree Fred after visiting him a few times during the winter when he’d had no leaves. I couldn’t figure out what kind of tree he was, but every time I passed him I leaned my cheek against his bark and placed my arms around his trunk. I often talked about him to William, sending pictures of the bark and branches, trying to describe what Fred smelled like. William had promised to help me identify Fred.

William stood next to Fred and looked up to see his leaves with their numerous pointed lobes.

“It’s a red oak.”

“I’ve named him appropriately, then. I’ll call him Fred Oak.”

William chuckled weakly.

“Lynn, there’s no easy way to say this. I’m not in love with you.”

“It’s a little early still to know that, don’t you think?”

“No, I think I would feel it by now.”

“Do you think you could feel it for someone else?”

“Yes.”

“Is there someone else?”
“No. It’s not about that.”

I stood looking at Fred instead of William, my hand on his bark for strength.

“Is this still about your divorce?”

“I think so. Maybe not. I don’t know.”

I turned to face him again.

“Let me ask you this. If your ex-wife said she wanted to try again, would you? Would you try to work things out with her?”

He sighed and hung his head. “She would never want that.”

“But if she did.”
“Hypothetically? If she wanted that, then I would have to try. For my daughter’s sake.”

“Well then, there’s my answer. This is technically about someone else. You’re still in love with your ex.”

We walked along in silence for a few minutes while he thought about it.

“I’m sad, William. About so many things. We never even got to shoot the bow you’re making.”

“Yet,” he added. “We didn’t get to shoot it yet.”

He glanced at me. Outwardly, I was holding up. Inside, I was in deep pain. I couldn’t imagine my life in Connecticut without William. He made every day magical with his humor and his stories.

“I have another story for you,” he grinned. “The Plains Indians used to set fire to the forests. They burned them down to create space for the buffalo. But what they found is that destruction promoted growth, that razing everything allowed the grasses and trees to grow back stronger and healthier. They discovered species of pine trees whose cones were glued shut with a resin that made their exterior a hard shell. When the fire passed through, its high temperature would melt the resin and allow the cones to seed. All of this to say that there are some kinds of trees that can’t grow until a fire comes through and seemingly destroys everything.”

It’s been four months since I’ve spoken to William. I imagine him happy, taking his daughter to the park, maybe even teaching her to climb a tree. Not the ones that were on his street—those are gone now.

And me? I’m happy, too, in my own way. I’m still waiting for the seed season after the fire has passed.

 Lynn Marie Houston is a poet, essayist, and educator. Her writing has won prizes from Cultural Weekly, the National Federation of Press Women, Broad River River, The Heartland Review Press, and others. The Editor-in-Chief of Five Oaks Press, she holds a Ph.D. from Arizona State University and an MFA from Southern Connecticut State University. "Heartwood" was written during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

The Keeper of the Napkins

Hope Yancey

After my grandmother Ruth passed away, I drew the figurative short straw, and the task fell to me to clean out her home here in North Carolina before it could be put on the market. The items I discovered while emptying the house made me wonder at my grandmother’s penchant for accumulating material possessions. She always fancied beautiful clothes, wanted to maintain appearances, and seldom would reveal how old she was – even to close friends. She lived her life her way, and when she died, an obituary underneath a portrait of her in a smart suit jacket made no mention of her age or date of birth, in strict accordance with her wishes. Ruth was a Southern woman, and she had her notions about things.

From the outside, her house was a nondescript patio home like others on its cul-de-sac. On the inside sat a veritable museum paying tribute to women’s fashions. For the price of admission – in this case, several months’ worth of work – I uncovered objects I hadn’t known existed, such as the hairspray shields still fresh from a beauty supply store. Their purpose, as best I could determine it, was to protect the user’s eyes. Clearly, my grandmother had lived a different sort of life from my own, as I had never seen – much less owned – such an item.

“I look like a haint!” my grandmother had been known to exclaim, if anyone dared try to take her picture when she wasn’t dressed to the nines in a perfectly accessorized outfit with her hair professionally styled. (A haint, for the uninitiated, is a ghost, spirit, or apparition in the vocabulary of the South.) Then she might proceed nonchalantly to asking my mother: “Ann, which pair of my beads do you want when I die?” This was despite being in relatively robust health at that point.

If she found something she liked, it was customary for her to purchase it in more than one size and color, whether it was a sweater, a pair of high heels, or a jacket. Just in case. She had so many garments, handbags, scarves, and belts, they flowed from the closets like the waters of the Catawba River and had to be hung on racks out in the rooms. I held onto 20 pairs of her shoes and donated the other 82 pairs. There were also identical red-sequined coats in differing sizes in a spare closet. I couldn’t fathom anyone’s wardrobe requiring one of these garments, much less multiples. Those, too, went to Goodwill.

Some people have skeletons in the closet; my grandmother had evening jackets. Summer 2014 was a long one for me. In the event my grandmother had harbored any family skeletons rattling their bones among the racks of clothes arranged like an upscale boutique, I have no doubt she would have made the most of them. Draped them in a few of her costume-jewelry necklaces. To borrow from Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw, not a Southerner, she would’ve taken the skeleton out of her closet and taught it to ballroom dance.

Unlike other Southern women who prided themselves on heirloom recipes, I never knew my grandmother to cook, which meant she ate most of her meals in restaurants and ordered lots of takeout. She was a study in inconsistencies. Lavish in her spending in some ways; frugal in others. I lost count of how many packages of condiments from fast food places I found in her refrigerator, on countertops, and in cupboards. Wherever she went, she acquired extras of all the free accoutrements available to her: little packets of sugar, plastic utensils still in their sleeves, and paper goods. She could have launched an eponymous chain of convenience stores with this inventory. Maybe called it Ruth’s Cabinet. She once directed the women of the family to prepare a large quantity of iced tea at a funeral gathering, opening pack after small pack of sugar from her cache, not needing to provide a full bag of sugar from a grocery store. Sometimes, when she went out to eat, she casually drove her dining companions to the verge of crawling beneath the table with embarrassment. She accomplished this by negotiating with the manager the purchase of a set of salt and pepper shakers right off that same table, if the style was to her liking. I wish she were here to embarrass me one more time.

There were plenty of objects I wanted to save from the house for nostalgic or aesthetic reasons, but my husband was strictly practical in what he collected for himself. Brian gathered drinking straws, cups, and aluminum foil. He also stacked a tool caddy with piles of paper napkins. And what a bounty of napkins it was! Plain napkins, napkins with the names of sandwich shops, personalized napkins, purple napkins, peach napkins, and napkins featuring Scottie dogs wearing ribbons around their necks. Let’s not even talk about the holiday napkins with their snowflakes and red-and-green stripes, Christmas trees, and Thanksgiving turkeys: a flurry of paper ephemera. I may never need to buy napkins again, I thought. Like a tidal wave, the napkins threatened to overtake me.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America notes the estate of one matron in 1654 with 18 tablecloths and 66 cloth napkins. This colonial woman had nothing on my grandmother and her paper napkins. Thank goodness my grandmother never got serious about her napkin hoard, because I’m afraid to think how far it might have gone. Hers was not a curated, organized collection of tens of thousands of napkins with no duplicates, like that of some of the paper-napkin collectors I discovered while doing an online search to see how common an affliction napkin fixation is these days. Now, those ladies’ napkins would make even my grandmother’s stash seem paltry. I am grateful she stopped when she did.

In the following months, we worked our way through the haul of napkins we’d brought home. One day, leafing through what remained on our dining room table, I plucked out a baker’s dozen that caught my eye. They were crisp white paper napkins with the Maisons-sur-Mer logo in blue, loosely translated from the French to mean houses-on-the-sea. These napkins were in pristine condition. Maisons, as we all abbreviated it, was the South Carolina beachfront condominium building where my grandparents owned a vacation unit when I was a child. Its ocean view from the balcony elevated it to mythical status in my mind. My mother remembers watching from that balcony one Fourth of July a “spectacular” fireworks display streak the sky. Those were the pyrotechnics to which the colors of all future ones down through the years would be compared and found wanting.

The condo was the place my younger sister surprised our parents by first pulling herself to a standing position as a toddler, using luggage for support. Judith was beginning to learn to walk then. I wanted to remember more, so I asked my mother to unearth an ancient picture album. Recorded sounds of shorebirds and rolling waves played on my computer as I flipped the adhesive pages of the disintegrating album. The rooms were outfitted in 1970s beach décor with a gold, green, and white color scheme. I still have the cactus-shaped lamp from that era. In a picture from 1978, I was four years old and stretched across the green-and-gold sofa wearing a ruffled two-piece bathing suit. An imposing arrangement of orange silk flowers occupied the table in front of me, my beaded child’s purse emblazoned with the words Myrtle Beach resting nearby. I don’t recall it, but I wonder if my grandmother brushed my hair in that condo. She had a gentle way of gathering my hair behind me for brushing. This is the grandmother everyone says I resemble in appearance. We have the same dark hair, the same eyes, same nose.

In other beach place snapshots, ceramic monkeys perched around the rooms, surveying the scene. My grandmother always liked monkeys – not real monkeys, which she wouldn’t have cared for. She wasn’t sentimental about animals, even if she did tolerate my grandfather’s affection for his cats when he was alive. Inexplicably, she favored anything with a monkey motif: monkey decorations, monkey wallpaper, even shoes with monkeys on them.

The condo was sold eons ago, but my grandmother kept the Maisons napkins for some 36 years. The beach condo napkins survived several household moves and numerous life transitions. They were manufactured to be disposable, yet here they were, evoking the past. Now, I had them. I wondered if she ever succumbed to temptation and retrieved the napkins to wipe crumbs from the kitchen after polishing off her favorite sweet coffee cake from the farmers market, or to blot her rose lipstick, only to reconsider and put them back unspoiled.

Unless you’re planning a party, or you’ve run out of them, napkins aren’t something many of us think much about. Most people focus on a napkin’s utilitarian purpose of maintaining cleanliness when eating. Diving deeper, this small square of paper had a symbolism that belied its humble role. Perhaps my grandmother simply forgot the beach condo napkins were there, but they may also have been important mementos, their significance known only to her. She was one of 10 children born in a farm family of modest means. I imagine the ability to purchase a vacation home signaled to her she had arrived in life, transcended her early economic hardship, and the napkins represented that ascent. Safeguarding this bounty of trivial artifacts gave her a feeling of security as an adult. A sand castle with turrets and walls nothing could wash away.

I hate to admit it, but my grandmother may have been on the right track. If you save them, paper napkins mark time, or memories of a special place, in a way cloth napkins don’t. Cloth napkins are thought of as more elegant, formal. What paper napkins lack in elegance, they compensate for in fun. Choosing the right paper napkin with the appropriate theme can be a whimsical exercise. I like to think my grandmother found her truth: Having a lot of something, no matter whether it was clothing or napkins, made her feel good. Or prepared, at least. When it came to stocking a closet with clothes, a pantry with paper products, or to life in general, she was wise enough to know the value in having a backup plan. Regardless of the reason she saved them, the napkins made it this long, and I won’t be the one to use them. Although, if I ever wanted to test my creativity, I think I could repurpose them into some really eye-catching kitchen art.

Somehow, her home got emptied that summer. I don’t resent the short straw after all. Fact is, I was the lucky one to have this time in her house, among her belongings. From memory, I inhaled the smell of salt air on the beach one more time, felt the softness of the napkins in my hand. I thought about what is transient, and what lives on. I’ll be the keeper of the napkins. I tucked this inheritance gingerly in a drawer. After all, I am a Southern woman, and I have my notions about things.

Hope Yancey is a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hope is a graduate of Queens University of Charlotte and Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Charlotte Observer and elsewhere. She finds herself curiously drawn to displays of paper napkins in stores, but it’s probably an understandable compulsion, considering.

Judge

Ann Fisher

At first, I am numb, writing down the name my father spits at me over the phone lines. He is angry at me, as if what this judge did today was somehow my doing. As if I could have, and should have, stopped it all from happening. Simply by believing what I’ve been told. And if I can’t manage do that, for God’s sake, I could at least have the decency to feel the same way he does. Betrayed by the justice system. Incensed, wronged by this judge who had the nerve to sentence my brother for a crime he did not commit.

But I don’t feel the same indignation. Instead, a strange calm fills me. It’s not appropriate for the situation, I know. Miles away and protected by cell satellites, I carefully write down “Judge Buth”. I am already crafting the thank you letter in my head while my father rages on. I’m glad he can’t know how good it feels to hear this news. I feel closer to this stranger than I do to the man on the phone.

My father’s words are like cars in rush-hour traffic- no space for anyone to enter, no on-ramp for conversation. I have years of practice, hours of holding the phone near me, uttering appropriate interjections at the correct time. He doesn’t notice. My father, the lawyer, is caught up in disbelief that the legal system has failed him, failed his son. His own profession turned on him. At least he knows what is right and wrong, he rants, which is more than he can say for those lousy, factory-educated mush-mouths they are turning out for the bench these days in those sub-par law schools. Not like when he went to University. Not when quality mattered. To hear my father tell it, he is the last good lawyer left on this earth. I began to question this verdict years ago. His current anger at justice served has solidified my judgment.

Judge Buth’s legal opinion of my brother draws new lines around my life. I can go home now, safely. If I wanted. Better yet, I don’t have to worry any more about my father’s welfare. About his finances, his credit cards. But Dad’s anger crashes into my elation. I push down my feelings, like always. I realize I am going over and over this judge’s name with my pen, the words dark and solid. My Dad roars on.

In my wildest dreams, I never pictured my brother actually getting caught for his many crimes. When he was deep into selling drugs on the streets of our neat little suburban town, my parents gave him money to run away to California. They refused to believe that he was running from people who wanted to kill him for the rip-offs he dealt on the streets. Perhaps the bullet hole in their picture window should have alerted them to what was going on. But they simply could not- or would not- connect the right dots. They chalked the wrecked glass to the violence creeping in from the bad part of town. Blamed it on the good-for-nothings without jobs, then turned up Fox News to verify their opinions.

When he robbed them, stole my mother’s family silver and brandished a story about people who broke into the house, my mother and father changed the locks on their doors. Felt sorry for my brother. Gave him money to fix the car they bought for him so he could find new friends. Welcomed him back into their house, gave him their basement. And complete access to their bank accounts.

I left home as soon as I graduated from high school. At first, I came home some, short visits at the house where empty spaces yawned their tired messages. Bare spots on dining room shelves where my mother’s favorite silver tea pot used to live; the gaping hole in the garage door where “someone” had broken in; the inevitable missing checkbook, wallet, credit card. I kept my own wallet clutched tightly to my side when I did go back. I never slept in the house, either, always staying close by with high school friends. Another slight against my family.

Filling all those empty spaces were the stories my family told to protect the truth. Cobwebbed tales of people who were always after my brother, keeping him from getting ahead. My parents built truths of gangs and criminals who for some reason, targeted only their house on their quiet suburban street. No other homes in their neighborhood were broken into, no other car windows smashed with baseball bats. Still, my mom and dad left the vacant spots on the shelves, waiting. They gave the police photos of heirlooms, demanded that they check the local pawn shops. As if everything could be erased by a recovered piece of silver.

For years, he lived in their basement, sometimes with one woman, sometimes with a different one but there was always one constant- the stealing from my parents- underlining what had happened to my family. Blind hope laced with too much trust built my brother into some kind of a god.

“Your brother is very intelligent,” my father would tell me over the phone, when one of John’s schemes- or brilliant story-telling of a scheme- had hooked my father, reeling him into a make-believe world of success.  A jeweled egg of promise, my brother riding high, soon to be rich, moving out, making his move up the ladder to become the head of the company. And this they believed. And then each short-term job would break apart, too fragile a fantasy to hold true, the stories crashing in on them, so broken even the three of them could pretend no longer. My brother retreating back into the basement with their wallets and his new schemes like a dark drain.

I stayed away. My parents saw it as oppositional, as being too good for them. “You just stay out there, then. You enjoy your time away.”  When I challenged them about my brother’s behavior, hinted that there might be wrongdoing, mentioned the word “danger”, they defended him. Abruptly, I’d hear the dial-tone heavy in my ears.

When my mother died of congestive heart failure, my father found all the receipts for the money she was funneling to my brother. Her own heart suffocated her, like the trail of truth, heavy and constrictor-like. There were no amazing jobs, no managerial offers or rising promise in any company. He was living on my mother’s inheritance, buoyed by choice items from the house. But never dangerous; never a criminal.

My father forgave my brother. Blamed my mom for her weakness, for coddling him. Gave him another chance. And many more after that. Through occasional phone calls, I gathered parts of the stories and tried to put the truth together. Why did he continue to let him tear his home and his world to pieces?

And then this news. My father’s anger covers up his devastation, I know; his oldest child, the heir apparent, the last male carrying the family name. Torn from a father’s grasp by a judge who fails to see the truth. A son who could make it. Who just needs another chance. My father skips over the details of this current conviction; apparently the truth is not that important. A knife, a woman’s accusation (“she’s not the kind of girl who is worth much, I’ll tell you!”), the mention of “force” that my father writes off as a woman hell-bent for pleasure, a black eye my father explains away (“she got that from those derelict people she lives with”). As if my brother doesn’t fit that description.

My father’s tone turns almost begging now. He needs me to agree with him. And if I don’t, I’ve judged him. Judged them all.

At my desk, the scrap holds Judge Buth’s name in a paper island. The letters are dark and real to me. A familiar feeling rises- relief, edged by shame. I’m glad my father can’t see that I’ve always been a traitor, a disbeliever. Or maybe he can. Maybe that’s why he talks on and on, trying to convince me of something I should already know. Something I should believe if I loved him. Except I do believe. I trace this judge’s name, over and over again.

Ann Fisher is the co-founder and facilitator of the Bristol Writer’s Community group, and has led the Middlebury Branch of the Burlington Writers Workshop since 2015. Her creative nonfiction piece, “Long Trail Home”, recently appeared in ZigZag Lit Mag. “Judge” is part of a longer memoir work-in-progress. She lives in Lincoln, VT.