Poetry

Fiction

creative nonfiction

Poetry

Daffodil Yawp

Tyler Dettloff

Every leaf is spirit
in retrospect. A flower can destroy
my frontal cortex. Wrecked spring
puddles in wretched rain drop
dew spots breathe hell toward
dawn. I'm melting. I'm melting.
Molting larva crept from mud,
the muffled insect crypt. Hallowed
gravel and hallelujah screams
grovel for snow banks to forgive
trash, needles, sand, and salt. 
I've severed all but taproots.
Bacteriophage gnaw regardless
of salty soils from winter roads,
inflamed by sand scrapped
shovel scoops. 
I'm only trying to compost myself,
to make the most
of myself, to choose
myself despite the piles of sweat
that stain my bed. 

I'm yearning.

Hall’r like a trumpet, a daffodil yawp, 
a crocus beaming. I awoke with dirt
in my eyelids but you let me call it soil.
Turn me to the wind, rain, lions, fog,
lambs. I roll with integrity, under
what you've named retrospect.

Oh My Goodness

Ethan Phibbs

per ritual we deliver the pitcher distending    all night
not bothering water
till it spills cloud traffic
forecast's no apropos birdswells
spokes in a chokehold spilt on the kitchen sill    
dishes exist still
as pagoda eaves of worshipping turtles
eventually invisible    in the swill
along with your narcotic trickle
light green heat lightning
trailing sage smoke    out past my post
long absconded to trek your aquarium mythos
the inside of a pummeled bulb    center ember ebbing
reverent to the sum of slumped shapes making up
the memory of distance    sticking to near-sighted tributaries
& intermittent temples like branched bivouacs
i make my way forward & back
by carving myself out along the embankment
of clay & grass    the elements of resolution
nearing home or so    i pivot
with miles to go to a lifetime
when i find you face up    the turbulence skimming
a birdbath    divine hollow whistling
into the instrument of forever phenomena
i’ve been waiting for ever
before your estuary and ferns
i jiggle loose my last carved rib     like a rare book
from the shelf of my body
an alms collapsing me    into your index
of breathless names

How to Wake Up

Brian Leibold

Swing your legs from mattress to carpet, 
stand up, get dressed, move
from bedroom to kitchen,
light the stove,
fill the kettle with filtered water
and place it on the blue flame,
play a game of pinball with spinning eyes,
win by not spinning out
if you fail to light at once upon
the only needful thing in glass
this grave and early hour,
pour boiling water
over roasted grounds, 
stir and endure
four long and forlorn minutes, 
press the plunger, and now pour
the rich black coffee into the clean white mug,
never the red one that recalls
the rushed and grasped
after bliss you achieved
after all, 
but unhappily ever after
those weak-kneed June mornings
when the force to swoon
was strong in you. This morning
is the single morning. You are, as of today, 
alone.

Bring your mug to the desk
and rest it on steadfast wood. 
Ignore the beginnings
of thought-indictments:
self for lack of steadiness; 
soul for lack of evidence.
Remember wood rots, 
and look out the window. 
It may be winter; even so, 
the slim ray of cardinal sky.
The slightly bitter brew you sip, 
dark holy water for the body,
washing away the sins of sleep
from dead-tired red eyes. 
Sleep no more, taste and see
how simple it is to hear,
to attend to the voice of a chickadee
that sends you outside with its song
and along with your seen breath
disturbs your half-sleep. 
To wake in full
will take a life of meaning
made new each morning
at the desk

upon which your elbow leans, 
on which your other hand,
long held sinister,
holds steady now.

Blank page, black pen, steam still from the coffee. 
Empty mind blindly attempting to deter
any direct penned penetration
or sad-to-be-hidden side door entry
into its brittle pitiful cut-glass cage.
Why oblige this gaunt and ingrown
mass of sundown groaning
that was never designed
to design the way out.
Resisting its resistance
is a soundless, stilted dance,
motionless funeral waltz
between the pair of chaired shadows
and the standing stunned widow, 
shut window beside her stressing
by transparent reflection
her God-given isolation, 
powerless
to dress up or redress
its viewed truths: it is dark
outside; she is, as of tonight, 
alone. 

You are, as of this morning, 
at work, the door closed
until the silence strikes
your ears open, and you hear
the green river that livens
and flows through
this withholding cloud
of a book-racked cell.
Remain here, and walk
through this desert, 
lie in the dry wash, 
lay down your arms
to the earth, 
place your hands
on the burro’s bones
by the cottonwood tree, 
hear your heart beating hard
into the heat of sunned stone, 
sense the small
sand-colored lizard crawl
down your legs to your feet as they sweat
a good foot under golden expanse.
Dive into your thirst
like this, and dig down.
Remain here, below ground, 
until the hour strikes
your ears open, and you hear
the flow you need, the life
you only can hear
from beneath, deep beneath
the thirst-stilled land, 
the sound
of water.

For this, the only need,
your eye sharpens,
your hand holds steady, 
and your mouth closes,
for now.

Original Rain

Gail DiMaggio

In one version,
the first water on earth is still
the only water on earth, 

alien molecules, carried
from the stars by asteroids
and transforming ever since:

vapor to ice, broken to healed, pure
to poisoned. Back again.
But in another version, rain began

with Eve beside a river
we can’t find anymore. Eve, 
who understood her choices

and wanted wilderness.  
So God, in a fury, 
made a storm, let it pour, and Eve 

lifted her face
into His new, original rain,
so she could brush from her lashes 

the same cold drops that course
the back of my neck. That bead
our hair, streak 

our beloved’s arms, drip
from the tips of our children’s
fingers. Today, almost-snow

coats the road, 
and over the rush and drum
of the river, I tell my daughter

Eve’s riddle: 
What stays sweet till
the first bite, costs a little more

than you’ll ever own? What is that
pecking at the dream-ground? Sleek,
black wings. Glittering eye.
 

What Eve Might Say

Gail DiMaggio

the prophets say sinful
meaning me
meaning I am full of sin
because I didn’t obey and trespassed
and gorged on all that fruit
they hate the thought of it
the juiciness the syrup
running down my chin
and then they tell each other
about the snake about my lust
for the snake
the way I let him
enter me with his words
my loins loosened
at the sound of him, 
they say
I wanted his narrow words
licked his sleek scales
truth is I barely saw
that mottled creature
blinking stupidly in the sun
what if I told them, what if I said,
I lust all right
but for a man, for a man’s voice
shoulders hips hands
sweet knowing hands
what if I said the snake
never spoke a word
and I
stole the fruit anyway
 

The East Monbo Kids

Joyce Compton Brown

could crawl
all over the river rocks
while their mamas
worked as weavers
and spoolers while
their daddies slept
for third shift
in row houses
with fans running
to keep out the noise
and stir the heat
and the kids stayed
outside at the river
or in the cool red
clay under the tall
stilt houses and
they could run like
one big family and
if anybody wanted
a real Coca Cola
they’d walk right
in the mill where
cotton floated hazy
in the heatwave air
looms hummed
and clacked  their
mamas coughed
spit out the window
and told the kids to
get on out of there fast
as they ever could
and not come back
 

Riding Lawn Mower

Denton Loving

After the first small-engine repairman
tells me five miles are too far for a house call
or a pick up, the second repairman tells me
I should disassemble the mower myself, 
bring him the offending portion. 

Lincoln said his father taught him to work
but never to like it.  My father taught me
to work on lawn mowers. Naturally, 
I think about buying a new machine.

Instead, I crawl onto summer-warm grass
like my father taught me. I pull
S-pins and retaining springs, freeing
suspension arms and the anti-sway bar,
separating clutch rod from clutch lever.  
I mechanic my way beyond my skill set
until the mulching deck falls limp.

A pneumatic drill unlocks frozen, broken
blades turned upside down. New ones
hex bolt on, naked edges glinting in the light. 
I reverse engineer, reattach metal to metal,
secure it all with a taut pulley belt.  

Such unbindings and rebindings are common. 
This tractor and I will again tame briar hells
of blackberry, wild rose. We will battle stones
rising quietly in the pasture at night like ghosts.
There is no choice but to keep going,
to keep working until the final, unfixable end.
 

Two Christmas Stories

Jeffrey H. MacLachlan

I.

Firewood ignites in a burst of classifieds.
Marijuana joint-ends appear and vanish
in the air with fireflies while clouds arch
like surprised eyebrows and stars
close like bruised eyes.
The small fire reveals mountains
of fentanyl and paper
bills. Three men drag
a body into the water in a hush.

II.

A woman waits for her teenage
son who walked with his step-
brother at dusk to their father’s across
the lake for matches. Her womb
feels empty and she worries of spending
the rest of the night alone.
Fireworks shatter in the sky
as their twins decorate
the dark waves.
 

Inmate Work Crew

Ace Boggess

Amid tall grass & wildflowers in the median,
orange-vested over orange—one shade a warning
not to run them over, the other just a warning: 
danger. Watch them stagger their uneven path,

freed from cells, not free.
They look like zoo beasts loosed by a storm:
feral, strange. They don’t belong.
They make of this landscape a painting 

that features forests set ablaze.
With their sticks, they pick up fast-food sacks,
soda bottles, plastic shopping bags, &
cigarette butts they slip into pockets

after guards have turned away. Treats for later.
Little escapes. What there is in a world
where even weeds smell like bleach &
stand up straight, mimicking prison bars.

My Father’s Music: The Oak Ridge Boys

Ace Boggess

    
in his baby-blue pickup with bench seats
no shoulder straps or cellphones    
restricting contact like glittering cages
I’d lean against him while he drove
close enough that I could smell
his English Leather & feel oscillations
thrumming as he sang
along in almost-harmony
El-vi-ra El-vi-ra his voice wavering
like a foghorn between baritone & bass
I could sleep then on a long drive
my childhood lullaby
a country choir in the fading light
 

Abandon

Julia Klatt Singer

We fill the house with birds.
Turn shadows whole.
Wear them like skin.

Life, in abandon, is a beautiful mess.
No picking up.
No putting back.

The emptiness the sun finds--
we climb into,
make it our bed.
 

Snakeskin Revival

Paula Kaufman

Homecoming Court: King Coal & Queen Shale Biscuit                
Prince Crazy Quilt & Princess Buckwheat Pancake                   
Ramp Parade—sweet & skunk
Pepperoni Roll Band sponsored by Patriot Coal & Justice
 “West Virginia Water Smells Like Licorice”
Fire blooms rainbows                                
above silver-stemmed plants.
Export: future tall tales                                    
Import: snake, oil, revival
A demitasse rim is too small for mind                       
post disaster,            
don’t  slip on frog egg jelly,
walnut-trip, paw-paw-stumble
sleep on a boat in the River Styx
forever seining pomegranate seed ghosts. 
At the Rock & Gem Show                  
kids eagerly carve soap stone            
finger grab bag
split geodes                      
genuine Shark’s Teeth: 5 for $1.00         
pyrite                    
fool’s gold
dendrology and gold flaked off Capitol Dome
breakfast-panning for a river’s suture & soul
mouth of opioid mountain                                
deer antler cataract.
Wanted: A date to the snakeskin revival
under cinnamon banjo moon wearing lichen-fringed boots & fish bone.
Swing lantern so ancestors can find ways home. 
Drink: sassafras & elderberry. 
Entertainment: puffballs releasing dreams in rain. 
Time: labradorite moonfog. 
Tune: Wooden spoon castanet and hop tatt until
twig shavings whittle backwards  
into forest. 
 

Spaceman in New York

Dilantha Gunawardana

Your pal for the happy hour, the bartender,
Pours you a Scotch, so smooth, you forget
You are all alone, searching to paste yourself
On a stool or a booth, to collide with a world different
To yours. You wear a space suit
That keeps you a voyager, passing planets,
That ate in their own trajectories and speeds
Some like Saturn or Jupiter crowded with
Satellites, near and far, while others are searching
For the meaning of amity, of being connected
In shoulder-armistices, absented of heart matter.
Still you’re in constant danger of losing yourself,
To a woman who unfastens your helmet,
Untangles your tether and makes
You float in strange places. And still, nothing beats solitude,
That strange locality, only you can
Enter or vacate, a spaceship made for one being,
That you sit on, as you take a sip of
Scotch in, knowing that in this strange town,
Which is lost it ‘Amsterdam’ to become ‘York’,
Everything comes in journeys, to planets, even galaxies,
So unlike yours.  Aliens that stop you
On the track, with a stare or a glance,
Or brush against your pacing clavicle,
As you rush past, a bag around your shoulder,
On your way to the underground subway system.
And solitude is just insatiable skin,
And an indiscreet heart, which together search high and low
For a satellite like the moon – Selene.
Perfect as a circle on one day,
And toying with imperfection on others,
Summoning you like a space lighthouse
For you travel to the moon and back
Once landed, you vacate your space suit.  In that instant,
Selenography translates to loon.

The art of having an ending

Milla van der Have

- is not hard. I for one
like to think of a garden
preferably in the morning
the trees still forming
in the light.

The air is fresh, even cold
so that my lungs spring
to life as they once did,
sucking in that never-
ending pattern 

and partake in it.

There may be a pond
and the still life of birds
or better yet, a lake. Things
end so much better
near lakes. 

They are wilder and brooding, 
like a bohemian lover
you can never quite fathom.
Her darkness, the promise
of entrance 

the things that may wait for you.

fiction

Sisters of the Snow

Ronald Jackson

On a chill mid-November evening, Sister Anastasia curled into the alcove of her closet-sized room and took in the West Virginia landscape outside the window. The sun dipped below the surrounding Alleghenies, gilded the trees that crowned the nearby ridge, and sank into the Earth. A roof of leaden clouds rolled in, hastening the darkness. Anastasia cracked the window, sniffed for any scent of change in the air.

After the bright-lit corridors and atriums at Johns Hopkins, the sunless hallways of the cloister disheartened Anastasia. The scatter of books on the parlor shelves stood in contrast to the lacquered, high-walled library where she’d read modern poetry and prepared lessons as one of the junior faculty. When she needed to breathe, she slipped out to the woods, fields, and trails around the convent. They offered a sheltering solitude, away from cloistered life and worlds away from the rattle of downtown Baltimore.

The band of outcasts she’d joined kept apart from the mountain people around them. Business, health, and errands were the only reasons they left their surroundings. Only the mailman stopped by. The day Anastasia accompanied Sister Brigid to the hardware in Marlinton, clerks and customers stared shamelessly, even though the two women wore work clothes. People knew. When they left the store, Brigid said, “They think we’re witches.” Anastasia smiled under her hand.

Mother Egidia reached out to her last December: a recruitment letter, an interview at Anastasia’s Baltimore apartment, a visit to the cemetery. Egidia’s story moved her. At Saint Anthony’s parish, her pastor, Father Fagan, drove his black Grand Marquis around town, bedecked in the round-rimmed fedora he’d left in her bedroom on his last night visit. Her child was sent somewhere she’d never know.

At first, Anastasia thought Egidia might be unbalanced, but she’d kept in contact and changed her mind. When she accepted, Egidia told her not to bring anything unnecessary. She packed her poetry—Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, anthologies to cover the rest. She understood her scholarship was a reason she’d been chosen. That and her history.

On settling in, it was the vigil and the comfort of remembering together in silence that sustained her. The Sisters of the Snow began their formal watch in early autumn. Anastasia couldn’t wait till then and began a routine soon after she arrived, right after spring thaw. It didn’t matter that the snow would not come soon. She sat as if each evening by itself might bridge the distance from spring till snow.

To pass the days, she took the lead from the others. After breakfast, she helped put up the preserves and the bake the quick breads, muffins, and pies that stocked the cafés in Snowshoe and other towns. For the cold season to come, Egidia assigned her to fill the pantry and freezer with the flawed and unsold fruits of their labors. She composed new meditations, as requested by Egidia. She cut wood in the afternoon, another welcome time outdoors, although it took weeks to discover the release of swinging the axe vigorously. After dinner, she sat with the others in the front parlor and joined in the mending by the light of the pom-pom lamps. There was no radio or television, and one computer, business only. The only human interactions were their seeking eyes and murmurs floating in the semi-dark.

On this Saturday night, as blue-black clouds billowed over the mountains, Anastasia slipped under her quilt, rested her head on the pillow. She thought of one thing, one spirit, as she’d done every night for three years. Lyra. The wobble-kneed ice skating at the Pandora rink along the Inner Harbor. Six birthday parties, a seventh they’d been looking forward to. Her daughter’s four-year progress at the Montessori near Fels Point. New memories rose to the surface like bubbles in Lyra’s baths. She fell asleep in mid-fantasy.

In the still-dark of early Sunday, she awoke and resumed her reverie. At bedtime, Lyra—mother and father trailing—had marched onto the piano mat in her bedroom and toed the button that sequenced through the pre-set tunes. She always stopped at “Hot Dog Man.” They knew the words by heart, and now Anastasia sang under her breath about the woman who loved the man who ran the hot dog stand, and how she planned to be his wife.

As her voice began to quiver, a soft knock sounded on her door, and Sister Hedwig hurried into the room. Anastasia’s face stiffened as the nun knelt and whispered:

“It’s come.”

She sat up on the edge of the bed and peered into the sister’s face, as if the snow might fall straight from Hedwig’s eyes. She rushed to the window, parted the curtains, and took in the soft-falling flakes until Hedwig spoke.

“We have to go.”

“What told you?”

“It kissed the ground outside my window.”

Anastasia dressed quickly, paused at the book resting on her nightstand. It was open to the page she visited every day. Words were crossed out and written over, and the margins were crammed with scribbles. She placed the bookmark in it, the one with Lyra written on it, then picked it up and walked out. She started down the long hallway to join the other six waiting at the front door, sped up when she saw how restless they were. Egidia nodded and they moved out. A veil of snow fell before them in the darkness, and the soft hiss of snowflakes gave backdrop to the silent air. Anastasia took her place at the rear of the column.

Seven women in flowing black vestments and sturdy black shoes with block heels moved past the small pond behind the convent and toward the deep wood that lay at the bottom of the downslope. They moved by the bottled moonlight in the cloud cover and a few flashlights casting beams here and there. When the light hit just right, wet snow jeweled the folds of their habits. They stepped carefully through a stretch of criss-crossing roots, and Anastasia almost tripped. She righted herself, hurried to catch up, clenching her book tightly. When they reached the path leading in, Egidia turned and inspected them. Her eyes met Anastasia’s and she smiled grimly before resuming the procession. Sister Brigid, from East Boston, walked behind Egidia. Sister Hedwig, from Atlantic City, and Sister Lucy, from Philadelphia, walked in tandem in the middle of the file, each gripping a side handle of a small oaken crate. From the back of the line, Anastasia caught glimpses of one or the other as the line twisted and turned. They seemed like parents holding the hands of their toddler between them. Sister Ursula, from the Washington Highlands projects, walked behind them. Sister Yasmin, from San Juan, walked just ahead. Anastasia thought that the procession might look from above like a cross moving slowly through the trees.

Once in the wood, the line of nuns stepped more briskly. The snow was sparse under the canopy, and pine straw softened their footfall through the winding up-and-down trail. Then the snowfall stopped, and fragments of moonlight brightened their way intermittently until the full moon shone steadily. They vaulted a narrow runnel, water flowing fast. They slowed as a circular clearing loomed into view, covered by a silvery whiteness reflecting moonlight from above. Egidia stepped aside, and her followers positioned themselves around the circle’s edge, careful not to taint the scene prematurely. When Anastasia reached her assigned place, she breathed again and took in the moist, iron smell of the snow. She felt like a wide-eyed innocent in a fairy tale.

Egidia nodded and Brigid tinkled her little bell, the one she used to call the sisters to devotions. Hedwig and Lucy carried the crate in a straight line to the center of the clearing and placed it on the small mound they’d built there. They walked back along the same tracks to the fringe of the circle and took their places.

Brigid sounded her bell again, and each of them withdrew a single-edge razor blade from the sleeve of her habit, unwrapped it, and took a step forward into the clearing. Anastasia observed the others, then cut an L into the first layer of flesh on her forearm as she moved forward. She winced at the sting, began to swoon as the incision pulsed, but caught herself. The air filled with a thick milk of pleasure. As Anastasia moved toward the center with the others, her blood dripped, staining the snow. A wheel of dotted red spokes extended from the crate.

The blood incited a memory, the last moments of her family. Three years ago, she’d rushed out the kitchen door into the deep snow of the back yard, Lyra in hand. Her husband caught up and wrenched her around by the shoulders. She read the cold click in his face, suffered his slaps and punches, their child kicking at his legs. Lyra’s father shoved his daughter hard, and she landed facedown in the snow and cried out. The steel rake had been covered by the snow, tines up. The approaching sirens wailed, drowning Anastasia’s sobs.

She watched as each of the nuns shed her habit and undergarments. Brigid’s and Ursula’s nakedness revealed scars suffered in defense of their children. Anastasia was the last to disrobe. The cold air invigorated her, and she felt warmed as she embraced the others in turn. Egidia opened the lock on the crate and lifted the hinged lid. Resting inside were remnants of their children: a tiny hospital wristband, a yellow cotton blanket, a teal 1948 Ford model pickup, a purple velvet bag of ashes, a sparkly plastic horse, a blue satin hair ribbon, and a rainbow-shaded piano mat. Into that sepulchre, each nun dripped her blood and spoke the soft name of her innocent: Clement … Fiona … Daniel … Zoe … Claire … Gabriel … Lyra. After much silence, Egidia nodded and Brigid tinkled the bell. Yasmin retrieved antiseptic pads and large bandages from her habit and treated her own wound, then attended to the others. As Hedwig and Lucy lowered the lid, Anastasia stepped forward and stopped them. She reached into the crate and pressed the button on the mat a few times until “Hot Dog Man” began playing. The nuns stood naked and still around the crate and listened as Anastasia sang along in a barely audible voice. When it ended, Anastasia had the moment she’d been seeking. She drew back and Egidia locked the crate.

All the nuns except one focused on the top of the crate, where seven short phrases were emblazoned in smoky black. Each had taken a turn with the wood-burning tool, etching a few words from the poem their new sister had chosen. Anastasia’s eyes fixed on the open page of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. She’d revisited her paraphrase of Stevens so many times, that she navigated easily through the markups. She read the stanza slowly, with careful emphasis, the way she’d read to Lyra at bedtime. As light from the climbing sun filtered through the trees and the moon above the clearing faded into the coloring sky, the others took in each word, as if the images were carving into their oaken souls on this Sunday morning:

Somber and resolute, a ring of women
Shall chant in anguish on a wintry morn
Their ardent devotion to the snow,
Not as a goddess, but as a goddess might be,
Naked among them, with a savage strength.
Their chant shall be a chant of communion,
Out of their blood, returning to the earth;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The icy lake wherein their spirits sink,
The trees, afflicted, the echoing hills,
That keen among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the sorrowed fellowship
Of children taken early and unremitting grief.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The snow upon their feet shall manifest.

The Bells

Markus Eckstein

Every time the bells ring, I know she is trying to speak to me. Jaime. How she does it, I haven’t been able to figure out yet. Maybe it’s her ghost. Maybe it’s a supernatural breeze she sends down from heaven – or wherever the hell she is. For all I know she’s in her own corporeal flesh, running through the garden and ringing the bells. It’s not as if my blind old eyes would be able to tell. However she does it, I know it is Jaime.

“What is it, Sweetheart?” I call into the darkness that doesn’t go away with the sunrise anymore. “I know you’re there.”

I smile and wait for her to speak. I listen, but all I hear is an owl hooting in the trees and my own heart lub dub-ing irregularly in my chest. 

Don’t think I don’t know what I’m listening for either. I remember her voice well, like a voicemail in my mind that I never deleted. It was like a lullaby, the faint remnant of an accent cropping up with the occasional word as an homage to her Irish heritage. 

Jaime stays quiet, so I continue making my way to the garden. I hold the line of fencing wire in my left hand, shaking it gently with every step. The bells on the line jingle as I go along, a path of sound illuminating my way. 

Jaime came up with the idea.

“We’ll buy a bunch of little bells,” she said. I still had some sight left at that time, but the macular degeneration was getting worse, and my stubborn insistence to continue smoking my daily half-pack of Marlboros wasn’t helping. “We’ll string them all around the property, and you’ll be able to get around by ringing the bells.” She smiled as she said it, and it was beautiful. I remember it clearly, because it was one of the last smiles I remember before the world became a permanent shadow. 

“And it’s not just for you,” my wife said, protecting the pride I didn’t even know I had. “I’ll need to use them, too, so I don’t trip when I’m walking in at night.” Except with Jaime it sounded like “walkin’ in at noight” and I fell in love all over again.

I let go of the line and the ringing stops. I know I’ve made it to the garden because we hung smaller bells around the perimeter – the higher pitch tells me to stop and turn to the right. I reach out and feel my tomatoes. Almost ripe. They fit nicely in the palm of my hand and have just the right amount of give when I squeeze. Jaime always said I had a green thumb. But it was never as green as her eyes. 

It’s not like God took her too early – she was seventy-nine and we had been married for fifty-six years – but I still hated Him for a while. I still do sometimes. She has been gone three years this week. Who would be surprised that I’m angry today? I need to direct these emotions at someone. 

I pick two tomatoes and place them in my bag. One would probably be enough to satisfy an old man’s appetite, but I guess I just got used to cooking for two. 

As I fiddle with the veggies – and I swear on my life that I did not touch that line of fencing wire! – the bells rang again. Just a soft jingle in the night. I perked my head up like a deer that hears a twig snap.

“Jaime? It’s okay, I can hear you. Go on, talk to me, Honey.”

She doesn’t. I’m not sure what she is worried about. She gets my attentions with the bells, but then she is too shy to speak. But shy isn’t the right word – it never was with Jaime. 

“It’s the wind, Mr. Walker,” said Tom the check-out boy at the grocery store in town. I had to tell someone. It was like I was a tomato and a worm was burrowing inside me. I had to get it out, and Tom seemed like a nice kid. “Just the wind.” I couldn’t see them, but I know his eyes were full of pity. 

I stand in my garden, straining to hear that sweet lilting voice whispering to me. The seconds turn into minutes. Silence.

After about an hour or so, I shiver and realize how chilly the night had become. I grab the line and follow the bells back into the house.

The evening proceeds as usual – usual meaning the same as every evening for the last three years. I eat the dinner I made for two, listen to an audiobook for a couple hours (right now I’m listening to Walden, and I struggle to relate to what this guy finds so fabulous about being alone), then call it a night.

My joints creak as I climb into the queen bed I once shared with my wife. I still keep to the left side, hoping that maybe this is all a dream and she will crawl in next to me like the old days – the young days, I think they should be called.

I always sleep with my window open, even in the winter, so that I can listen to the bells. So I can listen to Jaime, whatever she is trying to tell me.

Maybe it’s a warning, her trying to pass on some supernatural knowledge of a terrible fate to come, but I don’t think so. Jaime was more of an ignorance-is-bliss type. Perhaps it’s just her telling me that she loves me one last time. I like to think that’s it.

The bells start again just as I’m about to drift to sleep. I try to pick up on any pattern to the ringing – Morse code, perhaps? – but there doesn’t seem to be any particular rhythm. The jingling is as random as the breeze. 

But I can’t believe that. What would be the point of getting out of bed every morning? It’s Jaime. She is trying to speak to me, and I am going to spend every day from now until we meet again trying to figure out what she is saying.

I close my eyes. What I see doesn’t change. I listen to the bells. Like a lullaby, they sing me to sleep.

Thirty Days

Richard Childers

“It was on my finger when I went to sleep. Swear to Christ.” I tell her.

 “Then where the hell has it walked off too?” She’s started to tear up a little and her voice cracks towards the end of her question. I can only shake my head. Even I’m tired of hearing my bullshit.

We’ve spent the entire morning searching the house for my wedding band. 14 karat gold. Had it since we recited our vows 11 years ago. Pawn Man only gave me forty bucks for it. Just about enough to get a pill. Told her it must have fell off in my sleep, must have. Didn’t sleep real good last night anyways. Tossing and turning with my back hurting, legs and hips getting knotted up too.

“Maybe it slipped off in the car. It’s got to be there. I know I had it.” I don’t think she’s listening to me. Just looks to be up and gave out. I know I got to stop. Know I got to get help. Might start going to the suboxone clinic. Might help calm the Gorilla. I hate to wait in line with those junkies though.

“I ain’t looking no more.” She says.

I wish she’d look for just a little longer. Even though I know we ain’t gonna find no ring; ain’t no ring to find. Done give it to the Pawn Man and done snorted it up. I’ll get it back though. Pawn Man give me thirty days. Thirty days and just got to pay a little interest. I’ll find something to work at by then. Maybe even good work. If I could get off these oxys I could find some real good work. Job outside doing construction, stretch my legs and walk the ache out of ‘em. Gotta find something though. Gotta do something. Hard work is a whole a lot harder when you get pill sick. Never been so thirsty in my life. Never had to shit so bad neither.

“I’m fixin’ to head out and look in the car. I just about know I’ll find it out there.” I zip my jacket up and wait for a response, but she don’t say nothing. Christmas is next week.

“You and me both know that ring ain’t in that car.” She says. She’s flipping through the channels on the TV when I shut the door behind me.

It’s cold and gray outside. The trees look like skeletons reaching up. It hasn’t snowed yet this winter, but everything’s still frozen. I open the driver door to the Honda. Its paint is peeling and I wonder how many more miles it has in it. I half sit in the doorway of the car, one leg in and one kicked out in the driveway. The car’s belly is rusted out. If the ring had fallen off while I was driving it would’ve fell straight through to the passing road. Then what would make the difference. Pawn Man or the road, we still ain’t got it.

Creative Nonfiction

The White Butterfly

Shilo Niziolek

I try and unpack memories of my mom’s mom, but they are hard to find mixed around in all the years that have passed in the attic of my mind. Time tends to fuzzy up all the good things in life: a memory of a beloved family member, the games played as children, the man before he became the monster who broke my heart. I know the good memories are up there, if only I could find a light.

There are things I know for sure about my grandma from being told. They have become memories in the same way that I have a memory of me as a toddler getting my head stuck in a stair banister and having butter smeared on it to get me unstuck. I never really know if this happened to me or if I saw it on TV and I have claimed as my own. In this same way, I know things about my grandma Janice. I know she was a saint, and not in the sanctimonious bullshit kind of way I now see so often, but in a way where she genuinely cared about everyone around her. She had five kids of her own and still found it in her heart to work with the foster care system, taking in and loving kids from the worst homes imaginable. She would also take in animals off the street. She wanted to protect every form of life.

I remember things that aren’t real memories either, but memories of home videos or pictures my Grandpa had taken in their house in California. There is a video where my Grandma is standing in the kitchen, leaning on the counter and chatting on the phone. Grandpa is pestering her while she tries to hold a conversation, when she passes gas, loudly. Grandpa begins chuckling from behind the lens, and he accuses her, “Did you just fart?” I hear the sound of grandma shooing him away while trying not to laugh, it is forever in my mind, as is the way she said, “Tom!” to my grandpa. This is the only time where I can conjure her voice. It is so clear to me how she loved him in that one word, the way she said his name.

The first real memory I have of her is from the short period of time where my grandparents, my mom, sister, brother, and I all lived in Wyoming. It was 4:00 in the morning. I remember the bright red lights of the digital clock as I passed through the room, into the hall, on the way to the faint glowing light from the living room. I had been crying and I wasn’t much older than a toddler, when I saw my Grandma Janice sitting in a chair, completely dressed for the day. Even her tennis shoes were on and laced. She sat scribbling under lamplight in a journal as dawn crept through the windows. I am not sure how long I stood there in silence, frozen by the quiet moment that stretches out in my mind like a long summer day. Suddenly, she noticed me and my tear-streaked cheeks. I explained through gasps of air that my hands hurt like they were tingly and on fire. Grandma assured me that they had just fallen asleep, a concept I did not quite understand. She massaged my hands until they were awake, and then she sent the rest of me back to bed.

That is what is real: that memory of a kind woman who sat up early in the morning, sharing her private thoughts with paper; someone who took others’ pain away; who was awake and living while the rest of the world was sleeping. Maybe that is the moment I wanted to become a writer, for there has never been a time when that was not what I wanted to be, so the dream must be distilled in some far-off time in a way I cannot see it even form. Maybe, something in my grandma Janice knew her time would be cut short, so she had to fill every last bit of her time with everything she had to give. Maybe, even now, I can learn from the woman who I haven’t known in over 17 years, an amount of time which is officially over half my life span, at 26.

Janice Sannar was 54 years old when she died of a heart-attack. She had diabetes (the type which is now known to be an auto-immune disease) she ate healthy, she didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs, she went for walks every day, but there was nothing she could have done to stop the heart-attack from coming. I was 8 years old the day that Grandma Janice passed away.

 It was a hot summer day in Cody, Wyoming. By that time, my sister was old enough to stay at home with us to babysit, although my mom came home on lunches when she could to check on us. She was at home on lunch break, outside watering the plants, when the phone rang. My brother brought the cordless phone out to her. After a couple of minutes, Dustin came back in and told us that a Grandma had died, although he did not know which one. For some reason we all assumed it was a Grandma we didn’t know very well, not thinking that death could attach itself to anyone we really knew or loved. I do not know what prompted me to cross to the window. There, I saw my mom outside in the grass on her knees, her pastel pink dress billowed out around her, and her brown curly hair lay limp down the side of her tear-drenched face. That was the first time I saw my mom cry, bent over her garden of succulents, which we had always referred to as mother-hens. My little brother Dustin, always brave beyond his own knowledge, went out to her and held her while they cried. I often wonder about how many women have been there before, on their knees, hearts torn open.

I remember the outfit I wore to my Grandmother’s funeral: ocean blue t-shirt—sweater material—and a matching blue and black checkered skirt. It came in a set. I remember standing outside the funeral home and watching as my mom and little brother went in to see my Grandma in her open casket. Even then, I was afraid of death. I knew it was something beyond my reach, something you could not return from. I had this fear that it was something catchable. I did not want to see my grandma that way. I was not ready to be changed. I did not want her death to touch me, but it did, despite my ardent protests. I remember my little brother coming out of the funeral home and telling me he put a rose on grandma. Even now, the image of this moment in my mind horrifies me. Dustin was fearless back then, and I was so weak.

My mother told me just a couple of years ago that she was very worried about me during the weeks after grandma passed away. She said I did not cry, that she would find me hiding under counters and in small places, doing nothing but sitting in silence. On the day of Grandma Janice’s funeral, I remember sitting in the grass with Dustin, at our mom’s feet. I recall looking up at my mom during that sermon and seeing silent tears slip down her face, a hollow-silent cry I could not possibly yet understand, though something inside of me recognized it and part of me split right open, torn at the seams of my hot blue sweater on that August day. I had been able to shut out the death that surrounded me, but my mom’s grief could not be ignored, for it was through her that I had always found my strength. Though I could not grieve for the grandmother that I dearly loved, I could grieve for my mom, for her loss. I have always been better at feeling others’ pain because what I feel is so compressed and compacted. I have always been so stone cold that my loss, in comparison, seemed so small and insignificant.

Many years later, I would have an accident, a tubal pregnancy, really an un-pregnancy: an egg and sperm had joined together, but my fallopian tube did not have the room for them, so it would not let them pass. The un-baby tried to form a life in my body, but I was not meant for such a thing. My body proved to be an inhospitable environment. At 20, I was already barren. My tube ruptured and I lost nearly all of my blood. I nearly lost my life. In fact, I did lose it—twice, my heart stopped beating. The death I had so ferociously avoided had found me anyways. When I awoke from my surgery in a drug-induced haze, I was told that my living was nothing short of a miracle, that it was my feisty-stubborn spirit that saved me. Somewhere, in a vague memory, I think I told my parents that is was Grandma Janice who saved me, that she had told some unnamed god to put me back, as my time was not yet done on this earth. It was my grandmother’s feisty-stubborn willpower that had saved me. Real or not-real, this is what I know.

Everything I have accomplished since then has been with that in my mind. Here I sit, early in the morning. No one is awake yet, except the dogs. The morning is quiet, and a pen is in my hand. No little girl will ever ask me to rub the sleep from her hands, but here I sit scribbling in my journal in the early hours of the day. I do what I can to help rescue pit bulls, I love deeply, I battle auto-immune disorders, and one day, hopefully, the things I write in these journals will reach people and will help ease their pain in the way that my mom and my grandmother have eased mine. In this way, my grandma, a woman I can barely remember, lives on.

One spring day, I was walking home from the park when I noticed a small white butterfly floating through the air next to me. That same butterfly followed me all the way to my front door. When I stepped inside I sent a message to my mom telling her of this experience. I said, “I think the butterfly may have been Grandma Janice.”

Mom said, “It might have been, or maybe it was a message from her.”

A small, simple, hello.

Shilo Niziolek is a student of Creative Writing & English Literature at Marylhurst University, and a lifetime student of the birds and the trees. She lives in Portland Oregon with her partner Andrew and their two dogs. Her work has been published in the Broad River Review, M Review, Z Publishing's Best Emerging Oregon Poets Anthology, and a short fiction piece is forthcoming in The Gateway Review. 

The Graveyard Custodian

 Cat Pleska

If he noticed me, he gave no sign. He crept along the graveyard’s wall, swaying his round head side to side, scanning for movement, I’m sure hopeful. His white fur stood in stark relief against the charcoal-grey stained gravestones. Part of his fur, ginger warm, allowed me to see his muscles rippling as he jumped down to the gravel path. He approached a huge birch tree rising from the middle of a grave. Sitting down delicately at the tree trunk’s base, he cautiously began to climb. Then I saw what he’d spotted: a Blackbird. The bird, out of reach, remained silent, his feathers smoothed, his demeanor serene, as if he knew the cat would never reach him. But suddenly he flapped and he flew, out over the high stone wall that encircles the Holavallagardur Cemetery. I quickly lost sight of him rising through the tree canopy.

My gaze dropped down to Mr. Ginger, who jumped down from the birch’s trunk and then gracefully leapt to the top of a gravestone. He settled on his new perch to survey the grounds and assure himself all was clear.

In terms of Icelandic cemeteries’ age, this one is relatively new, established in 1838, a mile or so from Reykjavik’s City Center. The churchyard cemetery, nearby, had grown full with twenty-five generations of Icelanders. But yet, burials continued in the old churchyard for a while after the latest resting place was prepared. The new cemetery had not yet been consecrated and would not for a while. First, a custodian had to be established.

But not a custodian who was living.

Before people agreed to internment in the new cemetery, someone must be buried there prior to consecration, who then does not lie in peace and who does not decay. Gudrun Oddsdottir, the wife of the magistrate Thordur Jonassen, became the first one interred; she became the custodian who watches for those arriving later. Could it be she soothes new arrivals, who wring their hands, unsure where to go? Does she gently steer them to where they are to lie down and slumber? Perhaps the custodian holds their hand, smiles at them, assures them she will keep a tidy yard and make sure all is quiet so they can hear songbirds.

Standing in this cloistered garden, I imagine her dancing among the graves, her apron flapping in a soft breeze, watch as her hand plucks violets for her hair, or perhaps she’ll lean against a rowan or larch tree, resting, waiting for the next Icelander she will guide. Beyond the high stone walls that are topped with a moss which grows no where else in the world, traffic whizzes by, people stroll up and down the sidewalks chattering of their lives. Yet, inside the walls, where birches grow straight out of the graves, gravestone carvings bear witness to generations of sons and dottirs, the Icelandic souls sleep, sure all is well and taken care of by the custodian.

And her cat.

Cat Pleska is an author, educator, and storyteller. Her memoir, Riding on Comets, was published by WVU Press in 2015. She's currently working on a collection of travel/personal essays about Iceland and Ireland, titled: The I's Have it.

Uncle John

Justin Hunt

Uncle John, my dad’s brother, was born in Conway Springs, Kansas in 1903. He was mentally disabled, what people used to call “retarded.” When he was an adolescent, my grandparents took him to specialists in Wichita and to the KU School of Medicine in Kansas City to see if he could learn a trade, but no one seemed able to help. Determined to exhaust all options, they had him evaluated at a clinic in Chicago. The examining doctor proclaimed there was nothing he or anyone else could do to improve Uncle John’s prospects.

“He’ll never be able to work,” he told my grandparents. “He’ll probably turn violent, and it won’t be long before he does. You’ll have to find a place to put him.”

When my grandparents died in 1919, Dad, at the age of twenty-two, became his sixteen-year-old brother’s guardian. It was a responsibility he would shoulder for the next fifty-one years.
 

My first clear memory of Uncle John dates to 1955, the year I turned five and television came to Conway Springs. I was playing in our basement when I heard people in the kitchen.

“Why, hello, Brother!” my mother said.

“Mary Kayus, hon’.”

I recognized Uncle John’s voice and ran upstairs. He and Mom were standing with a man I didn’t know but would later learn was Forest Skiles, owner of Conway Springs’ radio repair shop. Next to them on the floor was a large, crated box.

“We’re getting a television, Justin,” Mom explained. “Forest just got it in today. It’s real heavy, and your uncle’s gonna help. Ain’t that so, Brother?”

“Sure is, Mary Kayus,” Uncle John replied, grinning.

“Mary K, can you make sure the door’s open?” Forest said. “John, you take the front end.”

“I got ‘er, Fory Skiles!” said Uncle John.

My uncle locked his thick arms around the crate, dragged it to the basement door and muscled it down the stairs while Forest held the other end. I followed and sat down on the couch in our reading area to watch as Uncle John and Forest pried the crate open and pulled out our TV, a big Zenith in a solid-wood console. As Forest finished wiring it up, Uncle John sat down next to me and put his arm over my shoulders.

“Whada ya think, Ookie?” he said.

Uncle John, who always called me by my nickname, gave me a squeeze. He was as excited as I was by the first image on the Zenith’s screen. Neither of us had ever seen a TV.

The following year, I started first grade and got a bicycle for Christmas. I would ride it downtown after school and on Saturday mornings to buy a two-cent stick of licorice at Nichols’ Variety Store. Sometimes, I’d go to the State Bank, where Dad was president, in order to deposit the money I’d saved up from my allowance. Uncle John, it seemed, was always in the lobby or standing somewhere outside on Spring Avenue, our small town’s four-block business street, one hand stuck in his bib overalls, a King Edward cigar in the other and a railroad engineer’s cap on his head.

“Hello, Ookie!” he’d say whenever he saw me. He’d bend down, sling his arm around my neck, pull me close and rub his cheeks and chin against mine. His face bristled with stubble, and his flannel shirt reeked of cigar smoke. But I didn’t mind. His nuzzling didn’t bother me either, unusual as it was in a family not given to displays of affection. He was my uncle John. And sometimes he would slip me a shiny, silver quarter—the same amount I got at home each week, but only after doing chores.

In my early years, Uncle John lived by himself in an upstairs room at the Midland Hotel, above Wheeler’s Grocery and Dry Goods. He took all of his meals next door at the Northside Café and paid for them with tickets Dad bought in advance and doled out each week. My uncle never strayed from his set menu. For breakfast, a stack of hotcakes with bacon and eggs. At lunch, the Northside’s daily special, either fried chicken or chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and lima beans. Dinner was steak with French fries and pie à la mode. Uncle John’s appetite was prodigious, his body sturdy and muscular.

When the Midland Hotel closed in the early 1960s, about the time I turned eleven and began working summers at the State Bank, Dad leased a room for his brother from Mr. Leddy, a widower whose house was just a few yards down the alley from the Northside Café. Other than his sleeping quarters, nothing changed for Uncle John. He continued to go to the post office several times each morning to pick up the State Bank’s mail. After lunch, he’d sit for a while with the old men who gathered at the front end of Meils Hardware. Then he’d resume his rounds up and down Spring Avenue, shouting hello and waving to everyone he met.

One morning in June 1963, fifty-some years after the doctor in Chicago had warned my grandparents about their son John, I was working at the bank and saw my uncle through the front window. He was trudging over the sidewalk toward the lobby door, balling his fists and scowling. He threw the door open and stomped across the floor toward the desk where Ash Cranmer, the bank’s cashier, was typing a letter.         

“By God, you better leave that satchel alone!” Uncle John yelled as he pointed to the leather mail pouch on Ash’s desk. His outstretched arm trembled. His deep-set eyes glared. I’d never seen him like that before.

Ash said nothing and kept on typing. Uncle John released a torrent of dark words—garbled curses and oaths not even Dad could decipher. But it was clear he was angry that someone had picked up the day’s first mail drop at the post office. That was his job, by God, and the satchel was his, too. That much we understood.

Uncle John grabbed the satchel and tromped over to Dad’s end of the counter. Although he’d yelled at Ash, it was his guardian brother he looked to for satisfaction.

“It’s okay, John,” Dad said, his voice even. “It’s harvest, and we thought you were workin’ at the grain elevator.”

“They ain’t cuttin’, Brother. Dew’s too heavy.”

“Well, that’s good, ‘cause we’re awful busy today,” Dad said. “It’d be a big help if you’d keep checkin’ our box.”

Uncle John snorted and looked at Ash again, not realizing I was the one who’d picked up the bank’s mail that morning. But his face had already begun to loosen. With the satchel under his left arm, he walked out of the lobby and turned west toward the post office.

I was a senior in high school the winter Uncle John asked for a new sweater. As was often the case when he wanted something, he approached my mother first.

“I sure do need it, Mary Kayus. Don’t know if that brother of mine’ll buy me one.”

“Well, John, I’ll talk to him.”

Mom prevailed on Dad to tap my uncle’s guardianship account and order an extra-large sweater from the John Plain catalog. A week later, John Plain sent a postcard saying they no longer had the item in stock. My parents then placed an order with Sears & Roebuck. Each day, Uncle John would pick up the mail and expect to find a package with his sweater. Each day, he’d come in the bank, empty-handed and crestfallen. As it turned out, Sears was also out of stock. When Mom gave him the bad news, Uncle John fumed and stomped his foot against the lobby floor.

“By God, I better have a sweater here by sundown!”

“Now, Brother, we’ll see what we can do,” Mom said.

She called Woolf Brothers in Wichita and arranged for a fancy cardigan to be sent by special delivery. After it arrived the next day, Uncle John saw Mom in the bank. He sidled up to her and laid his head on her shoulder.

“Oh, Mary Kayus, hon’. I’m so sorry I talked rough. I’m so sorry.”

“That’s alright, John, just forget about that.”

Although my uncle had a child’s temperament and sometimes boiled over from frustration, he was never violent. His flashes of anger always gave way to remorse.

Uncle John couldn’t read and wasn’t able to hold down a regular job, but he worked throughout his life. Everyone knew he was eager to earn his own spending money, and people gave him opportunities that matched his abilities. Dad paid him to pick up the State Bank’s mail. Until diabetes weakened him at age sixty-five, he shoveled out wheat trucks every summer at the Garretson Grain Company. Business owners like Forest Skiles and Ike Meils tapped him for odd jobs. Others lent him their cars and pickups so he could run errands for them. In those years, getting a Kansas driver’s license didn’t seem to require literacy, and my dad would let him use our Cadillac to deliver items to my Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Pip in Cheney, a farm town twenty miles away. Uncle John was, as Dad used to say, “pretty darn stout” and a reliable hand for moving anything heavy.

But Conway Springs’ engagement of my uncle ran deeper than work. During the five summers I worked at the bank, I could see that the town sheltered him as much as our family did. He was the son of early-day settlers and had never lived anywhere else. He was never more than a hundred paces from people he’d grown up with. He was a town fixture, known to all and loved by most.

No mental images of my youth stick with me more than those of Uncle John with his friend, Fred Hoover, a retired railroader who also spent his days on Spring Avenue. The two of them would sit on a steel window ledge on the south side of the Talbert Lumber Company, just across the street from the State Bank. When the sun rose to an intolerable angle, they would shift to the shade of Talbert’s southeast corner, where the words “COAL, LUMBER & NAILS” were painted in huge white letters on the building’s red brick wall. As cars, pickups and farm trucks rolled by on Highway 49, their drivers would wave, and Uncle John and Fred would wave back. They smiled but seldom spoke, Uncle John puffing on his cigar, Fred hooking leathery thumbs under the straps of his blue denim overalls. Every now and then, they would remove their engineer caps, wipe sweat from their foreheads and look skyward for signs of rain before pulling their caps back on—often at the same time, always at the same angle as before.

Almost fifty years have passed since Uncle John and Fred Hoover sat for the last time on their Talbert Lumber Company perch. When I was growing up, it didn’t occur to me that they would never have met had our family lived in a city, even one of modest size. I couldn’t have understood that urban life would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for my uncle to live in his own place and find meaningful work. Nor could I have fathomed how living anywhere but Conway Springs, or another small town like it, might have proved the Chicago doctor right. He’ll never be able to work. He’ll probably turn violent, and it won’t be long before he does. You’ll have to find a place to put him.
 

Whenever I think of Uncle John, I am flush with his kind touch. And I think of how Dad, Mom and the people of Conway Springs looked after him until his last breath. I recall the drinking fountain that “The Friends of John Hunt” installed on Spring Avenue in his memory—beneath a brass plaque bearing his name. I remember the way Mom’s voice warmed whenever she spoke of her brother-in-law. I remember the tear that trailed down Dad’s cheek one night, years later, as our family reminisced about his late brother.

And I am haunted by what is lost: a time and way of life that are no more. A landscape wide enough to weave the threads of people like my uncle into our tribe’s common cloth. A town small and tight enough to hold them safe.

Uncle John died in 1970. For the next sixteen years, Dad used his brother’s leather satchel to carry mail and other paperwork. Every day, he would take it to the bank, go to the post office and bring it home. Every day, until he retired at ninety. Dad called the satchel “John” and kept it on a stool in our kitchen.

I have “John” now. It’s in one of the boxes I packed up in Conway Springs in 2010, the year I moved Mom to North Carolina and our family left Kansas for good. Before I die, I must find someone to give it to.

Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. In 2012, he retired from a long business career in order to write full-time. His work has been published by The Atlanta Review, The Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, The Live Canon Anthology (U.K.), WinningWriters.com, Spoon River Poetry Review, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose and Bacopa Literary Review, among others. Hunt’s recently completed memoir, Dominoes Are Played at Joe’s Place (working title), probes his relationship with his late father, who was born in 1897 to Kansas settlers. He is currently writing a novel based on the true story of a complex and enigmatic cousin, a bank robber who died while on the run in the Kiamichi Mountains of southeast Oklahoma.

The Walnut Tree

Susan Strayer

For John

It has always seemed to me that death is more about the living than the dead.  How we cope and carry on, how life is better or worse without those who have passed.  Losing you has forced me to confront the empty spaces you left behind.

***

The walnut tree grew tall and strong, spreading its feathery leaves over the yard like protective wings.  We loved it for its shade as well as the sweet nuts it provided.  As children, we would gather these and crack the shells between rocks to get at the meat inside, littering the yard with sharp surprises for unsuspecting feet.  Its trunk stood in for the characters of our made-up games, as base during tag, and as a counting place for hide-and-seek.  In its shade we lazed away long summer days, sucking the sweetness from clover and watching ants march to and fro over the bumpy roots.  In winter it supported our snow forts and offered dropped branches for snowman arms.  We watched its leaves turn slowly yellow and brown in the fall and sprout fresh and green in the spring.

The tree was planted by our many times great uncle, who had been a reverend in his time.  It was one of three relics of the past that Father had clung to while alive, and that Mom maintained in his memory.  I often wondered if this was a sign that she still loved him.  Even though he beat my brothers.  Even though he made my sisters into little housekeepers befitting his Catholic beliefs that women were worth less than men.  Perhaps instead I should have wondered if it was her way of dealing with her guilt.

When we were forced to play inside, you and I often gravitated to the reverend’s chair.  The seat was big enough to accommodate us both between the square oak arms, the back tall enough to hide behind.  It smelled of old wood and leather, the padded seat and back cushions beginning to crack and peel with age.  We would sit there and listen to “Sloop John B,” making up hand motions and silly faces to go along with the sailor’s lament. 

Nearby sat the family bible, a solid tome with thick leather-bound covers beginning to fall off the well-loved pages.  Our siblings tell me stories about Father reading the story of baby Jesus from it every Christmas.  Mom recorded all of the family births and deaths in the front.  I loved to look at it.  Gently leafing through the thin, gilt-edged pages.  Reading the names of all the relatives who had come before me.  Seeing your name just above mine.  There were just four years between us, and you were my best friend in the world until we both started school.  Then it seemed as though the distance between us were too vast to cross.  After you finished elementary school, we never played on the same playground again.

Moments became precious because they were so few.  I remember us spelling all of our siblings’ names backwards and deciding that the eldest sounded distinctly Klingon.  We wrote a story together about twins and airships and travel and wonder and hope.  Now that you are gone, I can’t help but think of one particular conversation. 

“What do you think death is like?” I asked. 

“I try not to think about it,” you said. 

“That’s just it,” I said.  “I worry that I won’t be able to think anymore.  That’s what scares me the most.” 

You just shuddered and changed the subject, but I know that you agreed.  Now I wonder if you were still afraid when the end came.

Our first brush with death came when you were in high school.  You had a seizure while playing a computer game, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t wake you up.  The ambulance came and the paramedics strapped you to the board, and you struggled and finally came back to yourself.  They took you away and I finally allowed myself to cry, wondering what happened and why it should have happened to you.  Later we found out that the seizure was caused by multiple sclerosis, and that you would need to take medicine for the rest of your life.

For weeks afterward, I was awakened by the slightest noise, terrified that you were having another seizure or that Mother had stopped breathing in her sleep despite her CPAP machine.  Unbeknownst to anyone, I frequently left my room to check on everyone and make sure that you were all still alive.  To make sure that there were sounds of breathing on the other side of doors.  To make sure that I was not alone.  I would sleep in blanket nests on the floor of my closet, reassured by the small space and the enclosing curl of my bedding.

Soon enough you went off to college and I learned to forget about my fear.  I stopped being afraid of death once I learned that human beings are all made up of the same elements as the stars burning millions of miles away in the night sky.  I imagined my bones disintegrating into stardust and blowing away to join with the Milky Way and the smallness of death began instead to feel like vastness.  Death began to feel like hope.  But that wasn’t enough to prepare me for losing you.

***

I’m home from college to find that the walnut tree is gone.  It was blighted and rotted from the wet spring that year.  It is too sunny now that there are no shady limbs to cast shadows.  Mom has taken to staring out at the yard from the back window.  I wonder if she is remembering all of her happy times under the tree, too.  I wonder if she feels empty without Father, the same way the yard feels empty without the tree.

I feel empty, too.  Now that I am done with school it’s hard to envision what step to take next.  I wish it were possible to keep learning forever and never have to take up a job I don’t like and face the adult task of paying bills.  You have been in this situation for four years before me, and the toll it is taking on you makes my heart hurt.  More than the weight of debt and a job that offers no sense of permanence or hope for advancement, it is the way you have changed that scares me the most.  Why, I wonder, do we have to keep on doing things that kill our very souls?

I hear the story from the rest of the family, second-hand: a coworker reported you for your general demeanor, claiming that you creeped them out and they didn’t want to work with you.  How, we all wonder, could someone see a quiet, introverted human being and come to this sort of conclusion about someone they haven’t bothered to get to know?  (How much quieter would you be, I wonder, if Father had been alive to keep beating you?)  The event hits you hard, and you start to become self-effacing, apologizing for any little thing.  You become a shadow of yourself.  You lose all self-confidence and become even more entrenched in this rut that your life has become. 

Looking back, I can’t help but see this as the beginning of the end.  How could you fight back against cancer when you had already lost all your strength fighting a battle you couldn’t win?

It has been months since I last saw you, and when we meet I am shocked by your appearance.  There is a gray tinge to your skin, and you are gaunt and bony in a way you have never been. 

“You look like crap,” I say bluntly.

“Gee, thanks,” you reply.  “It’s the medication.  One of the side effects is death.”

I stare at you for a moment, shocked into silence.  I suppose I had an inkling then that you were not far off the mark.  But this was supposed to be a treatment for your MS--a clinical trial for a new drug that might prevent your flare-ups.  Shortly after, the doctors send you to the hospital for testing when they find elevated levels of calcium in your blood.  The results aren’t good: cancer has taken root in your gut and has already metastasized to your ribs, pelvis, and liver.

Despite this, the doctors tell us your prognosis is good.  They are optimistic about treatment and all of our lives are immediately turned upside down.

Except mine.  I actively avoid getting involved in your treatment, which is easy to do now that I’m not living at home anymore.  I don’t think very hard about my reasons for doing this, and choose to believe that I’m simply too busy to visit regularly.  The truth is that I don’t want to see you like this.  I want to remember you as the boy who played with me under the walnut tree.

Mom tells me that you can’t believe this is happening to you.  The doctors put you on antidepressants and tell you to be hopeful, but it takes only three months for the cancer to win.  It hasn’t responded to any treatment.  I want to yell at the doctors for their optimism, but I’m too busy ignoring that this is happening in the first place.  Mom calls me on a Wednesday to say that you’re not doing well and to prepare myself.  Family who we haven’t seen in years start coming to visit you in the hospital.  You use up your words telling everyone how much you love them.

I don’t come to visit you until Friday.  Mom has called again and says that you are on hospice treatment only and that you haven’t woken up since the night before.  I feel obligated at last to see what the cancer has done to you.  To witness you at the end, despite knowing that if you were yourself you would hate all of the attention everyone is giving you.

I force myself to look at your face when I come into the room.  You don’t look like my brother, and I am relieved.  It would be so much worse, I realize, if you looked like the man I remember instead of the one the cancer has made.  I am relieved, too, that I won’t have to hear your last words or see your pain or your thoughts writ plain on your face.  Seeing your body failing is hard enough.

Our niece is there, and she holds your hand frequently as the family gathers to keep vigil over your dying form.  We tell stories and laugh, and I know that if you can still hear us you are glad that we are not moping about or crying over our remembrances of you. 

The hospital sends the pastor in, and I cringe as he tries to force us to speak about you in artificial ways.  He does not belong here.  He is a reminder of the religion our father forced on us, and the excuse it became for his abuses.  You have been quiet for some time, but when the pastor leans over you to say a prayer, you make a loud exclamation.  I imagine that this is you objecting to the man’s presence and his words of devotion.  Whatever you think death will be now, it is not what this pastor thinks he is sending you to.

We all stay until it grows dark outside and we need to get back to our own lives, now that we have celebrated yours.  You slip away quietly once we are gone, as though you were waiting until you were alone to finally let go.  It doesn’t matter to me that the doctors say people often do this at the end of their lives--I choose to believe that you held on to one last stubbornness by waiting until we had all left to die.

***           

Mom will write your death date beside your birthdate in the family bible.  I will take possession of the book and pay to have it restored to its former glory, the binding painstakingly reassembled so that the covers are no longer separate from the spine.  I will know that this is an act performed out of guilt--an attempt to make up for the distance I placed between myself and your illness.  The guilt will follow me for a long time, until I can accept that creating distance is just another way of coping with death and illness.  Others will tell me not to feel guilty and it will take me a long time to believe them.

We will go through your things, and I will possess many more books that once belonged to you.  Science fiction and fantasy volumes that you once shared with me will become memories of you that are stirred every time I pull one from the shelf to re-read.  You wrote all of your computer passwords in the pages of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World.  Knowing that I can never get rid of this book will haunt me until I find a way to safely dispose of it.

Your body will be cremated, and Mother will arrange to have your remains interred in the family plot next to Father and baby Matthew.  I will be the only one to dress up; the only one to wear black; the only one who feels guilty enough to swathe myself in mourning.  We will bury your ashes inside a box made from walnut, as a substitute for your request to plant a walnut tree over your grave.  It will not be enough to satisfy my own sense of honor, but I will feel helpless to do anything else.

Someday I may own a home of my own.  I will remember our happy days in the shade of a walnut tree.  I will remember your request.  I will plant a walnut tree in my own backyard.  Beneath its roots will rest a worn copy of The Eye of the World that has long since lost its dust jacket.  I will watch the walnut tree grow, feeding on the dusty, disintegrating pages of a worn out book and long-cherished memories of a brother who is no longer with me.

Susan M. Strayer recently earned her Ph.D. in Literature for Children and Young Adults at The Ohio State University. She also has an M.F.A. in Children’s Literature from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She primarily writes for young adults in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, but also dabbles in poetry, contemporary realistic fiction, and creative nonfiction when the mood strikes her. She currently lives in Hilliard, Ohio with her cat, Rigel.