Spring 2020
Issue 9
Poetry
The Trouble with Apples
Kari Gunter-Seymour
We might should blame Eve,
or that rascal Newton.
But I say it was Gessler, bastard,
though who could have known
what would come of his vengeance –
Tell’s defiance, his son’s famous stance.
This perfectly delicious one,
grievously balanced, shadow shaped.
cloud guts, pithy and sweet, spewed
insides out, beyond freckled skin,
shards and debris making slick work
of that steel, that lead, spinning fast and true.
That silly boys would forever
set one to head, aim whatever,
egged on by the romance of muscle
and munitions. Killing fruit, then birds,
then animals, then each other.
Store Bought Biscuits
Kevin D. LeMaster
While the squad picks up
life’s remains across the street,
we thank cancer’s mercy and
curse the blessing of too soon.
While her decay slowly burns in a
lifeless chest,
we are drowning our new grief
with store bought biscuits,
big as the sun my grandson colors on
his brown paper napkin.
Baked layers, laden heavy with sausage gravy.
Eggs, like eyes stare blindly at the ceilinged sky.
Outside, the air is being choked with
cigarettes and sorrow,
while we chase our fear and remorse
with a belly full, rearranging rooms
to deal with the absence of loss,
or the creation of it.
While red lights pound us to sleep with the familiar
hum of death and electricity,
more biscuits rise in the oven,
filling the void with that familiar aroma,
making us whole, one bite at a time.
Smokey Mountain Winter
Priscilla Frake
Sometimes it’s a ghost landscape.
Valleys in fog. Only branches
left to point to anything, abandoned
masts and broken spars. Everything
drowned or gray. Peaks faded from
gleam. Mist in my thoughts. Insinuation
of wisp & synapse, thickening
to a dull wall. Impasse of sight,
impasse of will. No direction
but up or down. Small wonder
I’ve lost my way, without distance
to aim me. What spell will call forth
an eye to help me see? Or haul me blind
through this curious colorless dawn
to find and claim what ails me?
Just to Ask
Priscilla Frake
Who owns the world? Who owns, let’s say,
these green tomatoes— do I?—or does
the grackle or the small horned worm,
who’s creeping up the hairy vine,
a millionaire of stems and leaves?
Who owns the yard, its fringe of green,
its trembling watercolor eye?
I pay the taxes, clean the pool
and buy the springy shoots on sale
and yet— what title do I have?
A rat lives in the Sago palm.
Doves perch along the wall and grieve.
If ownership were based on need
the mockingbird would beat me out;
his brood lives in the largest shrub.
But still, I lay my claim of love
among all other claims and needs
and shamble off to stake the vines.
Appalachia Re-Visioned
Pauletta Hansel
We never knew ourselves
as they did. We didn’t know our faces
and floors should be dirt, our red
brick homes, pink geraniums in pots
along the patio walls, should be great-granny’s
mud-chinked cabin or a rusted trailer listing
by a pitted road, either way, a row of beans
out back, one for every young’un to hoe.
We didn’t know our very names could conjure
photos, black and white in glossy magazines,
our creeks and towns strange stones
rolled against our nation’s tongue—
Elkatawa, Hardshell, Keck.
What else did we not know?
That one man pillaring coal beneath a mountain
was no different than another
man beneath some other mountain,
that all that matters is black numbers,
row by row in someone else’s bank.
We only knew ourselves to be enough
until we weren’t
and then we saw ourselves
packed tight with all the othered ones
who surely in today’s America
only had themselves
to blame.
I desire the cold.
J. Alan Nelson
The bitter bite,
the freeze.
To slow the atoms to ultracool.
A slow atom is a colder atom.
I desire a freeze to a point
which its particles no longer
have energy to overcome the force of attraction.
I take a bus from Waco to Winnipeg.
Once I arrive, I look for a glacier.
Reachable yet remote.
I walk the ancient ice,
to scout for a blue crevasse.
Before I take the last plunge,
I wonder how long I’ll lie frozen over,
broken at the bottom like an abandoned toy.
I hope centuries.
I hope to be discovered by a rogue, sentient robot
looking for something to steal
and sell long after the extinction of my kind.
It checks my form, ignoring my ring, my phone, my keys.
It chirps “I’m excited” code
as it sees a great joy
imprinted in my frozen brain circuits.
It pries me from the ice
as it chirps to a nearby satellite
“There’ll be a bidding war.”
Your Green Heart
Cliff Saunders
Come home—you are
loved as the field falls
in love with the distance.
Open the vault of your
dreams and fly through
its fire. Tell everyone
to push blades past their
unaware friends, to sit atop
old oxygen masks, to hold
fall in their own hands
like Sunday supper, to lie
in the street, recovering from
turbulence, to pick up pieces
of your bridge to the playground,
to be autonomous as a face
you’ve seen, to think about loss
while you wait for your heart
to show off shades of green.
Mystery Man
Cliff Saunders
i.
Here’s to my father, the last secret in my life.
My father: the magician in a fishbowl.
My father: the travail at the door, the quarry ghost.
ii.
He sees the world as endless bells, as a nest
casting spells. He gives me a piece of his shadow,
and now it’s too late for seizing the day.
iii.
My dad lies dying. No wonder he looks distracted.
I hold his hand, but now he’s far away, and this time he’s all alone.
What manner of man is he? Why won’t he tell me?
A Lullaby We Sing to Ourselves
Alissa Morgan
Childhood is painted in a golden hue
Like that solitary hour in a summer’s day
When the sun’s weary head droops.
In that time between the sky’s circadian sleep
And wake cycle, the grass is yellow
And the lightning bugs set fire to the fields.
You may have one or two moments of this color
In adulthood, but no more. Sundrops spilling
Onto the floor through the slats in the
Blinds to warm your toes. This is all.
If you were a child you would have no use
For blinds. The rug beneath the bay window
Would be your bed and your blanket,
That golden light. Good night. Good night.
A Day Not Far From This One
Jeff Hardin
What’s this need to say things right, as though
a voice had power to make words absolute. Only one
said, “It is finished.” We say, “What comes next?”
We give speeches, write books, compose symphonies,
try to stand in the silences expanding our words,
but all the while we’re only salmon leaping upstream.
Grandmother’s prayer journal goes up in a funnel.
Such loss is hard to take, but we always knew her prayers
could not be bound, would fly out over the world.
Grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, parents, everyone
on the porch, telling the same tales as always, yet
nothing seemed predictable, nothing already known.
A day not far from this one will also come and go.
From chestnut trees, extinct, leaves continue falling.
What I’ve whispered to night wakes shining from dew.
A Voice Imagined as My Own
Jeff Hardin
I can, with little effort, produce inside me
a voice imagined—maybe my own but just as
likely someone waiting on the barn door to close.
What does it mean, though, to seek so much
meaning, rarely satisfied, seldom comforted,
always older but still just a child before elders?
Fate, destiny, one’s lot in life, what-have-you,
is a funny thing—sometimes it finds us,
and other times we have to go searching for it.
Well, I was bored one day, and that’s how I
stumbled into who I am, and now I wake up
busy, falling farther and farther behind.
I might just as easily have become a shepherd
humming a lullaby, alone with the stars, one
seeming to brighten, then beginning to move.
Like Snow, Like Manna
Jeff Hardin
Early December morning, no pasture near,
yet still I settle into a gait first learned at
the side of a man heading out to tend cows.
Wherever I go, answers fall like snow on my tongue.
Even so, I’ve no explanation how forgiveness
climbs up out of the deep-drenched darkest of hearts.
We might have lived in a heroic age and not
known it. We might have been exiles or nomads.
Manna may have fallen we stepped wide around.
Today I’ve chosen to give up my mind, whatever
it hoped to pursue. I’ll search, instead, places
a dove alights, wandering the absence of its mate.
The mind may be little more than sage grass
moved upon—breathed upon?—each word
slendering out to the farthest length of itself.
Migraine
Holly Allen
Here is a head.
It’s not the kind of head you can cut
with some plastic sham-of-a knife,
thinning out ribbons of lettuce that crackle like aluminum sheets,
yearning, pouting for some crushing touch
to put the water out.
It’s not the kind of head you can get
for twenty or fifty or more dollars,
blundering bills nervously fingered through the sheet-like shadows
to some embarrassed end in a grocery store parking lot-
some asphalt for a bed.
It’s the kind of head that’s broken.
Not a lump-covered hill of white nor the porcelain-screech
of one sorry cracked skull,
but the pressured thoughts of too-bold blood raging,
an illusion of lights, an amplified mess of sounds,
a thunder clap of emptiness.
Here is a head
that my mother once had said
was like a great chest for filling
with antiquarian treasures, aged scrolls, and happy secrets.
Like a whisper wants to be a roaring declaration,
I want to fill it to the brim,
I want those over-eager twelve-year-old hands again-
pawing pale and overpacking for a weekend trip,
hungry mongoose eyes aiming
for every date, every name, every crooked smile
left in life’s little gutters.
But
here is a head that is broken.
It cannot be cut but by its own hand,
some blade of air cleaving through open ends.
It cannot be bought but by its own time-
here’s ten minutes gone
ten hours
ten days
of hanging over the bleach-bone toilet in agony
praying for some memory
of peace.
I Lost God Last Week
Claire Scott
He was in the pocket of my favorite jeans, but must have slipped out or been
swallowed by the spin cycle. Sorry god. Sometimes it’s hard to get things right.
We talked a lot. He understood my fears, particularly of pigeons. Although he
did get upset when I poisoned an entire batch of them. But agreed not to say
prayers for the rotting winged-rats. He knew I siphoned cash from the
pawnshop, juggled the books, built a swimming pool. The problem was god
loves to swim. So he looked the other way. He knew I lowballed the treasures
people brought in. A five carat diamond ring that I said was fake, hoping the
tear-stained woman wouldn’t return. The stamp collection with a rare 1851
three-cent stamp, but the owner didn’t know and had four kids to feed. I gave
him ten dollars. God fussed a bit, but then went for a swim. I remember
afterward he looked a bit pale. I posted notices MISSING GOD. I put an ad on
Next Door South. I lost god last week. But perhaps god lost me.
Lift-Away
Cameron Morse
These are small satisfactions,
the clickety-clack of debris in the vacuum cleaner,
the way a room always feels warmer
after you’ve vacuumed but probably is just you
heating up from the heave
of the machine. Theo breaks the banana
into several sections, subtracting
a bite from each. His terrible twos started early and now
he makes me sit by patting the seat beside him.
As a teen, I fell in love by degrees,
the way we measure burns. Hard to believe Annie
made me piggy-back her over puddles.
At the time, I counted as blessed my donkeying
hands that sank into her thighs
who wanted only to preserve a new pair
of calfskin boots.
Now when my wife’s loose hairs spindle
the brush-roll of our Shark
Lift-Away, I bring her the triage scissors.
When I put the room back together, nothing feels the same.
Within the Turnip, 7/11/19
M. Daniel McCrotty
When Solomon and Si Crooker buried a kettle of Akalúa’s
ashes under a stone heap on Whitehouse Cliff, Si threw
a spring turnip on last as a parting sign. The two then descended
through a petrified river of scree but when both returned
to retrieve forgotten shovels they found the summit
shaded by full autumn colors, a new stand of oak flowered out
where the previous day berry bushes bloomed. Then both men
fell backwards through a hole into the core of a hollowed
turnip, its flesh their protection against spinning time,
and beyond its walls hung the tea-grey remains of Akalúa.
Si remarked If the Lord comes in fire, he’ll use folk’s ashes
to spread across new fields. Light poured through trees
grown in an afternoon, the once rock-strewn ground blackened
with aged humus; nearby sand slid gently away down the valley.
Sleep
M. Daniel McCrotty
My feet and hands began to twitch
and grow cold with the coming of sleep,
then first moments of dreams, lyrics
of Matty Groves and her father’s bugle horn,
the laying down of a pallet on the floor.
I saw moth dust below the porch light,
heard late night murmurs of neighbors
gathered around a fire then my head jerked
and I returned for a moment, could feel
the peacefulness of my chest unsteady
in the dark, and a lover’s hand stroking my forearm
soon became a flyrod on a warm afternoon alive
with a brook trout then splintered prism colors
sung across kitchen walls. It did not hurt.
Fiction
The Film Director’s Insomnia
John Talbird
At night I can’t sleep, so I walk the house, look out the windows at our upper class suburban neighborhood, the darkened homes surrounding us, the moths batting at the perpetually lit bulbs on their front porches. Occasionally, I walk into my kids’ rooms to watch them sleep. Now and then, I sit on the edge of my bed with a peanut butter sandwich and glass of milk, the glowing television on the bureau silent, and watch my wife sleep. She slumbers on her back, mouth slightly open. If I were to lean close, I would hear her snore although she insists that she doesn’t. Sometimes, when we have guests, I will even walk into their room and watch these strangers having their dreams.
We have many guests, as my wife loves to entertain and we have a spacious home in the country, a refuge of sorts from city life. This evening, we have a couple staying, Tony and Joanna Roberts. After the dinner of Cornish hen and broccoli rabe, a few bottles of a very good Sauvignon blanc, Joanna blurted that Tony is infertile, that they respect me so much as a person, as a specimen of manhood—yes! she really said that—and they just need some sperm. There’s nothing but trouble and desire. Just when I think our life has finally achieved a fragile calm, someone bursts into our bower wanting something, upsetting the cart and dispelling peace. I can’t help but wonder if there are end credits, any final score, any happily ever after in our future.
But there is no “us” to this story. I know the future, I have seen it: I will be the last man on Earth, tracing out his days on the burnt husk of this former green and blue globe. That’s why I hesitate in volunteering my sperm, my seed, the grain of my image, not because of vague legal or filial entanglements or even because the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It is and that’s beside the point. Why help create someone new, someone made from my stuff, who will eventually, quite soon, in fact, abandon me like all the rest?
I have learned of the Earth’s destruction, not from scientists or politicians or preachers or any other snake oil salesmen, but from angels who have come to our house to speak to me in the middle of the night when I cannot sleep. Gabriel preaches in the library, Michael stares from the bathroom mirror as I brush my teeth, and Fred intones while I eat my third bowl of cold cereal. When the sky is clear I can see the twinkling 24-hour glow of L.A. in the distance, the supposed “City of Angels,” but there are no angels there. Instead, they tread the floors of my ten thousand-square-foot home, hover near the ceiling, float beneath the aqua tints of my night-lit swimming pool. Although they speak in hymn and riddle, in tongues and chant, the message is clear: Soon there will be no one. No one but me.
I walk through our cavernous eggshell white rooms, bare feet cool on marble floor, and regard the Kirlian photographs I’ve taken of my visitors engaged in their nighttime exercises. These blue and red glowing images that I’ve captured, my wife insists are nothing more than the anthropomorphic auras of the daytime bodies of our kids and guests ensconced in their beds like sensible humans while I make my nighttime peregrinations. These wraithlike figures echo the screensaver in the living room which flashes images from digital newspapers that correspond with those on the muted television and today’s paper spread out on the kitchen table: protests turning to riot, burnt effigies and bodies, militants praying and loading automatic weapons, civilians painting dumb and docile animals with peace symbols and flags, sowing seeds in patterns of logo. People weep and sternly pontificate. Androids, a new ethnicity muddying the melting pot, join the fight, often quite viciously, for their rights.
I step from our brightly lit white house out onto the nighttime porch, crickets singing, neighbors’ lights twinkling. If I look just right, I can see the ghostly outlines of the girders from the buildings that want to be built, the corporate entities that want to take root in this nearly virgin soil. Before that happens, the world will end and I will stand on this mountain top looking down on it all, wondering what to do with my life now that there is no one to watch my films.
How to Date a Mole Girl
T. S. McAdams
First of all, they don’t call themselves mole people. Contrary to urban legend, they are not related to moles; nor do they much identify with them. Badgers, shrews, rabbits, and ants are all more common than moles in their folklore. Their word for themselves translates as “hidden” or “private.” Just call her by her name. It may be Catherine.
#
You don’t find her in New York. True, there’s a colony under New York. Most of what you see online is not true. Those are not mole girls, any more than furry sites show actual foxes and cats. Pipe tobacco doesn’t make them horny, either. They’re not hobbits. But yes, there are colonies in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. That doesn’t mean you’ll meet one on the street in New York or Minneapolis. If you did, she wouldn’t talk to you. They can be insular.
Stay in Los Angeles. Go to Gil and Naomi’s Hanukkah party. They’ve got a big house on a street where lots are doubled and facades well-tended, but you still know it’s Van Nuys. Something about the faded asphalt, the shadows willow and acacia trees cast on it even at night. Gil’s mom actually owns the place, and she’s doing great in assisted living, but it’s no big secret how that ends. Go in and take a glass of whatever Naomi’s pouring, but keep your jacket on. You’re going to the backyard.
Raise your glass to people talking football on the patio, and go all the way back, where it’s too dark to know whether you’re standing in weeds or tended ivy. Don’t interrupt the girl holding up the spiked stick, the kind prisoners use to pick up trash along the highway. She holds it like she’s spearfishing in the ivy, but she lowers it in disappointment when the rustling moves away. Now you can talk.
Too bad you refused Gil’s rustic toast points with cream cheese and smoked salmon. You don’t like cream cheese, but she might. Never mind. There’s a jerky stick in your jacket pocket. She doesn’t thank you, and that’s fine. If you stood calf deep in a forest and a wild doe let you feed her chorizo-flavored meat, you wouldn’t expect thanks. If she goes home with you, she will chirp and twitter during foreplay and grunt fiercely during sex. These sounds are disconcerting at first. After she leaves you, it will be difficult to achieve orgasm without them.
#
Don’t overreact when she crawls into a storm drain with her stick and burlap sack. There is nothing nasty about this. Sewage and drainage are different systems. Obviously, you can’t go with her. It’s an eight-inch opening, maybe less. And she’ll be a while, so don’t stand there waiting. Go to work. If it’s the weekend, go home and read a book. You didn’t read all the classics in college. Rediscover the life of the mind.
Or you could look at a drain system map online, color coded by the Department of Public Works. Drains and channels in blue are maintained by County Flood Control, violet by the city, tan by Parks and Recreation, different shades of yellow by Caltrans or private entities. Gray means “unknown,” which is odd but not code for lizard people. The Shufelt dig of the 1930s debunked any theory of reptile civilization underneath Los Angeles. Catherine, who hates reptiles, comes home tired and happy with something in her sack. She probably won’t mind if you look in the sack, and you should. If you don’t, you’ll always wonder.
#
Kissing her leaves you flushed and disoriented. Catherine’s people have toxic saliva.
#
Don’t pretend you’re quitting your job for her. You’re just sick of processing loans and sick of that underwriter, Megan, who signs off too late and blames you when the rate goes up, lying that you didn’t get conditions in on time. You hate that beige and aluminum office with windows that don’t open and Freon-flavored air that hurts your throat. You can tell her about it, but don’t think you’re kindred spirits escaping her burrow and your cubicle for adventures in the wide world. She was as free in the tunnels as on a prairie, and to be honest, she’s barely listening. Her shiny little eyes are locked on Mr. Riley’s cat, Butterscotch, parading himself on your apartment balcony. When the cat disappears, you should set aside any nosiness about that sack.
#
She leaves you without drama or rancor, and it feels like being dumped in high school. Sure, you knew the adults were right, and this wasn’t real or serious, but what have you got now? Anime Club? She leaves a drawer full of t-shirts and leggings. What little she takes is mostly yours. Your grandparents gave you those silver dollars over four or five childhood birthdays. It’s not like you ever would have spent them. Leave the box you kept them in at the back of your sock drawer, and nothing has really changed.
You find another job, as a loan processor again. What did you expect, O Lit Major? And what happened to that passion for D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, anyway? Your new office is part of a bank, so the dress code is stricter. And a loan officer here tries to use deposit statements when real bank statements disqualify prospects for stated-income loans. Pay is a little better, though. You didn’t think pay was the issue, but maybe it was.
The blond in the cubicle next to yours says her favorite movie is Orlando. Catherine didn’t watch movies with you. The girl is conventionally attractive, as are you to a lesser extent, so go ahead and marry her. Give each other anniversary presents. Have dogs and children and love them. Leave storm drains alone. This is not a tragedy.
My Grandpop, the Villain
Matt Whelihan
My grandpop looked weird without his eyebrows and cape, and he was really taking his time with his cream-chipped beef. I wanted to get out of the diner and back to the hotel room. I wanted to draw on his eyebrows and listen to him shout, “Zantarro has returned!”
The sooner he did, the sooner we could get to the convention. And the sooner we got there, the sooner I could meet up with Brad.
“Is there anything you’d like to do while we’re in Louisville?” my grandpop asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Did you see the giant bat? That’s the Slugger factory. There’s probably a tour there.”
“You know I don’t like baseball.”
“That’s right. My apologies.”
I found the spot above his left ear, the spot that was always shinier than the rest of his bald head. I had to get the next part right.
“Today I just want to chill,” I said. “Maybe go to a coffee place or something while you’re working the table.”
I shoved some pancake into my mouth and stared at my plate as I chewed.
“Coffee place?” he said. “Since when do you hang out in coffee places? You don’t even drink coffee.”
“I just don’t want to be in there all day with the nerds,” I said.
“Don’t forget that those nerds pay the bills.”
Brad called the convention goers basement dwellers and mouth breathers. He knew it wasn’t normal for adults to spend so much time buying toys and shaking hands with old actors, and so did I.
But I kept chewing my pancakes. I wasn’t going to say anything that could screw up the plan Brad and I had been working on for weeks.
“All right,” my grandpop said. “I get it. You can do the coffee shop. As much as I don’t want to admit it, you’re thirteen, and you need your freedom. And besides, you’ve been working hard, and I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re my manager! My right hand!”
I hated his stupid stage voice, but I had to smile. I was one step closer.
*
I was ten when my mom died. I remember finding her on her bed with one arm hanging down, and I remember the dumb things people said to me, people who didn’t even know me or my mom. Like the ambulance guy saying, “Sometimes people’s bodies just stop working,” or the lady in the apartment next to ours telling me, “The stress your mother went through was enough for two lifetimes.”
I wanted to laugh and tell them that I wasn’t an idiot. I knew what a drug addict was, and I knew what the spoons and cotton and needles were for. But I couldn’t say anything. I had what some doctor told me was shock, or trauma, or something like that.
My grandpop came and got me at some point. I didn’t know anything about him cause I’d only met him a few times before that, usually when my mom needed money. I knew he was an actor, which seemed pretty cool, but the one time I’d asked my mom if we could watch his movies, she had laughed.
“He was never in a movie,” she said. “Just some terrible space show in the ‘80s. Like Star Trek, but worse.”
I had to use the posters on the walls of his apartment to figure him out. Most of them were for plays I didn’t know, ones where he had wear suits or old clothes with baggy pants and frilly shirts. But three of them were for Final Planet. Those were the ones I liked. They had spaceships and explosions and Zantarro. They had my grandpop shooting electricity out of his fingers as he faced down Commander Rightson and tried to conquer the galaxy. They were pretty cool.
I went to my first convention a little while after that, and it was like a mix between a parade and a toy store. The people were dressed like robots and animals and super heroes, each one this amazing mix of plastic, spandex, Styrofoam, and face paint. And my grandpop was dressed up too, wearing his purple cape and showing off the eyebrows I’d drawn on.
And then there was the merchandise. There were boxes full of comics I’d never read, racks full of action figures and dolls I’d never seen, and tables covered with trading cards, prop guns, posters, DVDs, t-shirts, and dozens of other things I wanted to take home with me.
I’d watch my grandpop shout at the convention goers as they passed, saying stuff like “Ah, another peon dare approach!” or “If you know what’s good for you and the rest of mankind, you will purchase something!”
And they would all smile, would all head over to our table to get an autograph or take a selfie and buy something. And for a little while, it felt like I was related to someone famous.
*
My grandpop’s friend Harold was at our table when we got there. He had played Commander Rightson on Final Planet, and My grandpop claimed he was the show’s “hunk,” but I didn’t see it. He needed a cane to get around, his jumpsuit had holes in the elbows, and he just looked old, like some crazy, wrinkled wizard.
The two of them covered our table with the usual crap. My grandpop brought headshots he’d autograph for fifteen dollars and stacks of Final Planet DVDs. Harold brought some book he’d written about himself and old lunchboxes he called “collector’s items.”
When the doors opened, the freaks spilled in. There were two people who looked like Harley Quinn, a bunch of Spider-Mans, at least four Transformers, and some dude who was way too old to be dressed like the kid from Pokémon. They were obnoxious, and they smelled like sweat and dirty feet.
I smiled through a half hour of it, playing my role as a good right hand and manager, and then I got ready to go.
“So where is this coffee place?” my grandpop asked.
I stared at the tiny spot below his nose that he always missed when he shaved.
“Right around the corner,” I said. “Like a three-minute walk. I’m not going all over the city or anything.”
My grandpop sighed.
“Well, like I said, you deserve a little freedom. You’re starting to break out of your chrysalis, and I need to let you spread your wings.”
I wanted to groan, but I hugged him and headed out the door.
*
About a year after my mom died, I was eating Hamburger Helper with my grandpop when he said he had an announcement.
“Why should we have one home,” he started, “when we can have a million? Why wake to the same landscape every day when you could be treated to a new view with each sunrise? Why limit ourselves to a static lifestyle when we can roam free like nomads of the states?”
I had no idea what a nomad was or what he was going on about, but I was smiling like a dumb little kid, getting all excited like we were about to meet Taylor Swift and move into her mansion.
“I think it’s time for me to take on a new job,” he said. “And I am going to need you as my manager! My right hand! I want to hit every hall, every store, and every event in this country that will have me! I want to bring Zantarro back to the masses!”
Just like I knew my mom was using, I knew that my grandpop was pretty broke. He never said anything about money, but I saw the way he got in the grocery store. The way he’d look at two boxes of the same thing to see which one was cheaper. And I knew why he cancelled the cable, even if he said it was cause we had plenty of movies to watch.
But I also knew that people went on vacations. They got to see beaches, mountains, rollercoasters, and other incredible things, and that was something I’d never done. All I ever got to see were three places: home, school, and the stores down the street.
Of course, after a few months of conventions and cyber school, I realized it was nothing like a vacation. There were no exotic destinations or amazing experiences, just big rooms packed full of the same cheesy stuff and the same goofy people. It was just me getting pretty sick of my grandpop.
I mean, he took better care of me than my mom ever did. He made sure I got to eat more than just cereal and frozen pizza, and he even asked me about my schoolwork and got me a cake for my birthday. But I couldn’t tell him what I was really thinking. Like how I felt pathetic when I saw that pageant girls were staying in the same hotel as us, or the fact that I actually missed cafeterias and lockers and teachers.
And, on top of that, I think he was kind of freaked out by me. He couldn’t even say the words “bra” or “tampon.” Instead he’d say “lady things” and turn red. Then he’d hand me cash and wait outside the store while I got what I needed.
The only thing that kept me from losing my mind was my computer. Each day, I’d get all my school stuff done in an hour or two, and then I’d tell my grandpop I was still working. That’s when I’d check Instagram and Twitter. It’s when I’d watch videos on YouTube and TikTok. It’s when I’d talk to other people like me—actual, real, thirteen-year-old girls who weren’t obsessed with Deadpool, Walking Dead, or Star Wars. They worried about the same things as me, and unlike my grandpop, they didn’t get all weird when we talked about them.
And Brad was online too. He was a really good listener, probably cause he was a little bit older. He’d tell me the pageant girls were shallow and that I deserved something better than the conventions. And he’d tell me how much he liked talking to me and explained that we had something special. And then he was saying we should meet up, that talking in person would be even better than online.
*
I got there before Brad, and I didn’t want to look like some little kid, so I ordered a cup of coffee and grabbed a table. I added four sugar packets to my drink, but it still kind of sucked.
I was thinking about getting more cream when I heard some guy say, “Hey there!”
He was just this basic, dad-looking dude in jeans and a blue t-shirt.
“Shannon?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how the guy knew my name.
“It's me, Brad,” he said. “It's so good to finally meet you in person.”
He sat down at the table. His face had this perfect, post-it-on-your-profile smile, but I was a little weirded out.
“I was so excited when I heard you'd be coming to Louisville with your grandfather,” he said. “On the way to the coffee shop I started to get scared that I’d imagined the whole thing!”
He laughed, and I tried to smile.
“So how was the convention today?” he asked. “As bad as usual?”
I knew photos weren’t always super real. The one my grandpop sold at the conventions made him look twenty years younger, and my friends had shown me apps you could use to make your boobs look bigger or your pimples disappear.
“Yeah,” I said.
I looked at my coffee.
“Did he call anyone a peon?” Brad asked.
I laughed. Before going to sleep, we would type “goodnight peon!” to each other.
“He did!” I said. “Right before I left. He said it to this fat guy with some DVDs.”
“That’s hilarious,” he said. “Well, listen, I don’t know how much time we have, so I want to give this to you now.”
He took a small box from his pocket and pushed it across the table.
“Go ahead and open it,” he said.
I thought about saying no, but I also thought about the fact that nobody else was giving me presents. Inside the box was a pair of silver earrings with turquoise in the middle of them.
“That's my favorite color,” I said.
“I know,” he answered. “Did you think I'd forget that?”
I lifted one of the earrings from the box when something dawned on me.
“My ears aren't pierced,” I said.
“I know that too,” he said. “That's why the second part of the gift is going to get them pierced. There’s a place close by. The whole thing will only take half an hour.”
It didn’t seem like the best idea, but it was Brad. We’d had so many conversations, and he had helped me to forget about the conventions, the nerds, and my grandpop so many times.
“It will only take twenty minutes,” he said.
He reached across the table and put his hand on mine. A warmth spread like somebody had spilled something inside me. It was weird, and kind of scary, but kind of awesome too.
“It’ll be a quick trip,” he said. “I’ll have you right back.”
I looked at our hands. Then, I looked at his face again.
“I know,” he said. “I look older than in the picture I sent you. It was from a couple years ago, but it’s my favorite. And you look younger than you said.”
I’d forgotten about that. I’d said I was sixteen, and I’d made sure I was wearing makeup when I took the pic.
“Okay,” I said. “I really do want to get them pierced.”
We were at his car a minute later. He opened the passenger door for me, and I moved towards the seat. But it was weird. I had spent almost two months imagining our meeting, and that car and that guy were not the way it had looked.
“What’s wrong?” Brad asked.
He put a hand on my back and leaned in until our faces were real close. There were wrinkles coming from the corners of his eyes—maybe not as crazy and big as my grandpop’s, but they were there. And I could see these little gray hairs by his left ear. I took a step back.
“I don’t think I can—”
He grabbed my arm before I got it all out.
“Come on,” he was saying in this super nice voice. “It will be fast. I’ll have you back before the convention ends.”
He was still smiling, but it felt like his fingers were pressing into my bones. I wanted to run away, but didn’t really know how. It was hard to talk too, to even think of the words I wanted.
“Just get in,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”
He got behind me and pushed. My head and shins smacked into the car’s doorframe, but I hardly felt it. Then half of me was in the car, and he was still pushing. I could see a can of soda in the cup holder. I could see all the terrible, gross things that would happen to me. And then, it was hard to see anything at all.
The sound of Brad yelling and cursing brought me back, and that’s when I realized his hands weren’t on me anymore. I stepped away from the car and found him holding his head. Behind him, gripping Harold’s cane like a sword, was my grandpop.
“Get the hell away from her!” he yelled as I ran towards him.
“Jesus Christ,” Brad said. “You stupid old man. What are you doing? I am going to fuck you up.”
My grandpop lifted the cane higher.
“You better get out of here while you still can,” he said.
I was scared Brad would charge, maybe try to tackle my grandpop, or at least punch him in the head. But he just closed the passenger-side door, ran around to the other side of his car, and got in. After he drove off, my grandpop lowered the cane.
I hugged him and tried telling him about it, but all that came out was stuff like, “He was different. Wasn’t him.” My grandpop seemed to get it, though. He told me it was okay, and he hugged me back.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Harold was taking a smoke break,” he said, “and I was still a little concerned about you going to a coffee shop alone, so I came out with him to check on you.”
I looked up at him as he searched his pockets for his cell phone. There was the shiny spot on his head, the whiskers he always missed when he shaved, and the eyebrows I’d drawn on in the hotel room that morning.
“We can talk in a minute,” he said, “but right now I need to call the cops before I forget that license plate number, and then I should get this cane back to Harold. I don’t know how long that telephone pole he’s leaning against can hold him up.”
It was bright and sunny that day—like the kind of background a kid puts in a picture when he draws his house and his family. My grandpop was standing there with his cape flapping around behind him as he talked on the phone. He looked like he could command a space fleet and conquer a galaxy. It was pretty cool.
Creative Nonfiction
A Spontaneous Day in Rome
Dan Morey
I was walking around Rome with my mother. We stopped at the Piazza Navona to listen to a gypsy string band and view a truly striking scaffold. It was a tall, wobbly-looking exoskeleton, composed primarily of steel piping and wooden planks. Loose canvas hung about it, flapping in the breeze and blocking any view of the monument beneath.
“What’s that?” said Mother.
“This is the Scaffolding of the Fountain of the Four Rivers,” I said. “It’s a modern structure, with wood dating to the first term of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The canvas, while appearing quite ancient, is in fact less than a decade old, having been replaced after the great windstorm of 2007. Most of the piping is original, though certain substitutions have been made due to rust.”
“The fountain must be huge,” said Mother.
“It contains an obelisk, which would account for the extreme height of the scaffolding.”
Mother expressed some frustration at finding so much of the beauty of Rome in dispose.
“Not to worry,” I said. “There are two more fountains in the Piazza Navona.”
We walked to both ends of the square and admired the Fountain of Moro and the Fountain of Neptune. Mother said they were nice, but wanted the Baedeker guide’s opinion. I read: “‘Neither the Fountain of Moro nor the Fountain of Neptune can compare to the Fountain of the Four Rivers in terms of beauty and artistic quality.’”
“Figures,” said Mother.
“Yes. Well, let’s go find some more scaffolding, shall we?”
I had decided to make this a spontaneous day, with no specific destinations and no map. As we meandered the muddle of confusing streets that surround the Piazza Navona, I began to second-guess my plan.
“I love all the little workshops and things. It’s like stepping back in time,” said Mother.
I took her deeper into the maze of cobbled streets. The further we went, the more residential they became. Soon all evidence of commercial activity had vanished.
“Where are we going?” said Mother.
“Nowhere in particular. We’re having a spontaneous day. Rick Steves said we should be sure to schedule at least one spontaneous day in Rome.”
“If you schedule it, how is it spontaneous?” She leaned against a stucco wall, under a wrought-iron balcony dripping with bougainvillea. “I’m tired. Let’s go back to the piazza.”
Though I had no idea where we were, I led on, exuding what I hoped to be a comforting degree of mock confidence. One road twisted into another, and we dead-ended at a deserted church.
“Baroque,” I said, examining the façade. “Possibly by Boromini.”
Mother sat on the steps, visibly wilted. “I don’t want to see any more churches. I thought we were going back to the piazza. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“I think if we bear left that alley will funnel us down to the Corso—”
“Get the map out.”
I informed her as delicately as I could that we had no map.
“What do you mean we have no map?”
“It’s a spontaneous day. Rick Steves would never bring a map on a spontaneous day.”
“Of course he would. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because Rick Steves isn’t an idiot.”
Mother harped, rather sarcastically, on this topic for an extended period. Her unpoetic argument was based primarily on the practical, though quite boring, assumption that finding your way around a strange city with a medieval street plan requires some sort of directional aid.
“But just look at the wonderful things you can stumble on when you don’t know where you’re going,” I said.
Mother glanced at the church. “It ain’t that wonderful. Let’s go.”
We walked a few blocks, made a turn, and miraculously popped out on the Corso Vittorio.
“Ha!” I said. “And you doubted me.”
Mother bowed to the superiority of my internal compass and requested that we take a rest at a sidewalk café. After a coffee for her and a bracing Campari for me, we recommenced our ramble.
“There’s the Piazza Navona,” she said.
“We’re not going back there. I’ve seen enough of the Scaffolding of the Fountain of the Four Rivers.”
She agreed to follow me if I promised to stick to the main arteries and not get us lost again. Within five minutes I got us lost again.
“Daniel—”
“One more block,” I said. “I know there’s something good around here—look at all the people.”
Two kilometres and a substantial amount of cursing later, we entered a small square and gasped in unison. Before us stood the peerless Pantheon, the best-preserved piece of ancient Roman architecture in the world.
I began to clap. People stared. They probably thought Mother had checked her special son out of the sanatorium for a day of sightseeing.
“Clap, damn you,” I said.
“Why?” said Mother.
“Great architecture deserves to be applauded.”
This was a reference to the Peter Greenaway film Belly of an Architect. In it, Brian Dennehy applauds the Pantheon. Mother should’ve known this since we’d recently watched the movie together. I ceased clapping.
“It’s a line from Belly of an Architect,” I said. “‘Great architecture deserves to be applauded.’ Remember?”
“No. What’s Belly of an Architect?”
“Let’s go inside.”
We passed between the grand Corinthian columns and through the bronze doors. The interior was dim, with a single beam of sunlight descending from the open oculus of the dome to the center of the floor. Looking up at the coffered ceiling and its illuminating eye was like gazing on architectural heaven.
“It’s beautiful,” said Mother.
There were pews and crosses and various other Christian bric-a-brac present, but I preferred to picture the Pantheon in its original pagan glory, when Marcus Agrippa had dedicated it to the most holy planetary gods. I asked Mother if she had anything to leave as an offering.
“I have half a candy bar,” she said.
“It isn’t a Mars bar, is it?”
“Snickers.”
She set the chocolate on the floor, in the middle of the oculus’ ray, where a pigeon promptly devoured it.
From the Pantheon, we took the Via Seminario to the Via del Corso. A quartet of snazzily clad Roman businessmen stood at the intersection, waiting to cross. One of them dropped a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, snuffing it with a twist of his loafer.
“Should we go for it?” said Mother, after the light had changed.
“Let’s see if these guys make it first,” I said.
The men slipped into the crosswalk en masse. They hadn’t taken five steps when a gang of lawless scooter girls came screaming through the red light. They bore down on the businessmen like leather-clad archangels, out to avenge some corporate misdeed. The man in the shiniest suit jumped out of the way, spun around, and let loose a roundhouse kick that grazed a scooter girl’s bum.
“Puttana!” he yelled. “Porca!”
She paused to flip him the bird before racing off to join her crew.
“That was awesome,” I said. “I should be hanging out with those chicks.”
We jogged across the street behind the ruffled businessmen, barely beating the light.
“Okay,” said Mother. “Now where are we?”
It was a fair question, but without the benefit of a map I had no way of answering it with any accuracy.
“We are moving east,” I said. “Or possibly west or north, from the Via del Corso toward some very famous stuff.”
“What famous stuff?”
“Famous Roman stuff. Known to centuries of travelers.”
We walked for a considerable distance without seeing anything remotely famous. I started making things up to entertain Mother.
“This building,” I said, “was once home to Mussolini’s favorite prostitute, Tosca Traviatta. Tosca weighed over three hundred pounds and was completely bald. She used to strap Benito to the bed and beat his buttocks with a bicycle pump.”
We turned onto a pedestrian street covered with a red carpet. I would’ve felt quite regal had it not been for the abundance of tacky tourist stands and souvenir peddlers. Though they made me cringe, their presence was not unwelcome, for I knew them to be harbingers of the beauty of Rome.
“What’s that?” said Mother.
“What’s what?”
“Don’t you hear it? Listen.”
I detected a faint rumbling; the further we progressed, the louder it grew.
“Water,” I said.
By the time we reached the end of the street and rounded the corner the rumble had intensified to a roar. Then, all of a sudden, we were face to face with the Trevi Fountain. At least I was face to face with the Trevi Fountain. Mother was staring at the backside of a large German tourist. I pulled her around him and up to the thundering waters.
“It’s the Trevi!” she said. “And there’s no scaffolding!”
Mother first saw Three Coins in the Fountain at the Dipson Plaza Theatre in Erie, PA in 1954, which meant she’d been longing to see the Trevi for over half a century. She gazed raptly at the nude statue of Oceanus, and I asked her if she was fantasizing about Louis Jourdan.
“Of course!”
People sat along the rim of the basin, tossing coins over their shoulders and posing for pictures.
“There’s a space,” I said. “Squeeze in.”
Mother got into position and dug a two-euro piece out of her purse. I snatched it away and handed her a dime.
“Cheapskate,” she said.
She let fly, and the coin plunked into the limpid water. Oceanus looked down with approval. Gods, despite their reputation for extravagance, are not incapable of appreciating thrift.
“Aren’t you going to throw one in?” said Mother.
I told her that I intended to abide by the original tradition. “In the days of Henry James, travelers used to drink from the fountain to ensure their return to the Eternal City.”
“Drink? Out of that?”
“Of course. These waters are pure. They originate at a virgin spring and flow through an ancient aqueduct.”
“But it’s filled with coins. Nothing’s filthier than money.”
Mother always knows how to appeal to the germaphobe in me. I took out a nickel and flipped it in.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go back to the apartment. I’m hungry.”
“Right. I think there’s a Metro station just around this corner…”
Mother had begun to walk in the opposite direction.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“Back to the souvenir stands. I saw a guy selling maps.”
Belle’s Lost Boys
Jenna B. Morgan
A century ago, a woman gave birth to a baby boy who could have been my great uncle.
Eighteen months later, when she was three months pregnant, he died.
Charles Glennister Crigger
b. April 3, 1919
d. September 4, 1920
Six months after she buried her baby, that woman gave birth to a second son.
And eighteen months later, when she was pregnant yet again, he died too.
Iven Dean Crigger
b. March 6, 1921
d. August 26, 1922
There is not a person left in the world who knew them.
This ghost of their too-brief legacies remains: I wasn’t allowed so much as a butter knife until I was nine. But nobody can quite recall which almost-uncle was lost to illness and which bled out after a carving knife was left within his curious reach.
On November 26, 1922 a woman swamped by grief welcomed a third son into the world. When William Delbert Crigger was eighteen months old, she was four months pregnant again and unmoored by fear. The family still whispers: she was never quite right again.
But that third boy survived. He lived to see the births of his sister and four more siblings after her, the births of his own five children and twelve grandchildren.
***
A decade ago, I drove his pickup and Granddaddy rode shotgun. We followed Route 119 to Logan, Route 44 past Mountain View, Route 52 through Iaeger and Beartown.
At first, the roads wound wide and lazy. There were long hauls up steep grades and sloping downhill stretches punctuated by runaway truck ramps. As we got closer, the roads switchbacked tightly uphill and down, rarely a guardrail in sight.
Though I was born in the West Virginia hills, and visited family there every year of my life, I’d learned to drive in far-off, pancake-flat South Jersey. I kept my eyes on the next curve and my hands locked at ten and two.
Granddaddy was taking me to the old family graveyard down in McDowell County, West Virginia, a place I hadn’t even known existed. When I asked why, he said, “This is the thing that happens in this society. We’re going so fast, that people are buried, dead and buried, and nobody ever knows about it. I think it’s wrong but I don’t know what to do about it. Society’s moving too fast to try to remember, to go back.”
The final leg of our journey took us up an unthinkably narrow, deeply rutted, nearly vertical gravel road. I white-knuckled the steering wheel; Granddaddy laughed.
All the week before they buried his mother, he told me, it had been pouring like piss out of a bucket. The dirt tracks were washed out, and they didn’t think the hearse could make it up, so they loaded the coffin into the back of a pickup. The truck shimmied on the slick mud and damn near slid off the mountain more than once. What they wouldn’t have given back then for some gravel.
We stopped at each fork in the road, and Granddaddy stretched in his seat, looked one way and then the other, and gave half-certain directions. After a while he started to cuss the electric company, the gas company; they’d been up there cutting new roads damn it all. Trees that all looked the same crowded in. We dead ended at a gas well or two, passed the same tumbledown hunting shack, the same tattered No Trespassing sign three or four times. It took over an hour of backtracking to find our way to the top of Atwell Mountain.
For a few minutes we rode the ridge, the precariously narrow path barely wider than the truck, the hill sheering away just inches past the edges of the tires. I started to cuss myself, and if the vocabulary of a New Jersey teenager shocked my grandfather, he didn’t let on.
After a quarter mile or so, the road canted slightly downhill and widened. We pulled to a stop next to a rusted chain link fence and I peeled my hands from the steering wheel.
The only cemeteries I had known up to that point were manicured memorial parks: wide swaths of golf-course green, nice neat rows of identical polished headstones laid flush in the ground.
This place was not like that.
Where the grass grew at all, it was tall, weedy, and wild. The graves were humps of bare dirt. Some of the headstones stood plumb, some were prostrate, overcome by time and gravity.
Instead of neat rows, the only organizing logic was: where does the ground lie flat enough to take a body?
There were silk flowers everywhere. Not arrangements, just tiny individual bunches like you get at the dollar store. They were on every single grave, their plastic stems stuck straight down into the hard, dry dirt: garishly bright daisies, carnations, lilies, irises, daffodils.
Right alongside the bright blooms were bare spidery plastic stems bleached of color. The old petals had blown up toward the fence, and hundreds of pieces of grayed-out silk were caught in the rusted chain link, fluttering furiously in the wind.
The place felt more abandoned and untended than if it had been completely bare.
Granddaddy pointed out repeating surnames — Addair, Short, Mullins, Crigger, Muncy, Jones — and tried to explain the branches of the family. My great-great-great grandfather William Addair had owned all this land, he told me, the mountain sticking up in the middle of his acreage like a thumb. Eventually, the Shorts intermarried with the Addairs, and the Criggers with the Shorts. A handful of generations later, he was born on that mountain, lived in his grandparents’ house until he was six years old.
I asked if he’d been to many funerals there when he was a kid. He only remembered one, an aunt with typhoid who’d stayed quarantined in a separate house while the rest of the family crowded into another.
What he did remember was playing there, walking half a mile straight up from his grandparents’ front door into the green open space, into the sun.
I took pictures with a tiny digital camera, of the worn gravestones and faded, fluttering flowers.
I made my way to the back, where the graves stopped and the trees started and the hill fell away. The view was all horizon, the ridges receding endlessly.
When I went to look for him, I found Granddaddy pacing back and forth toward the front of the graveyard, walking slowly on the uneven ground and leaning heavily on his cane.
“I can’t find them,” he told me. “They were right here.”
What did he mean he couldn’t find them? He couldn’t find his own parents’ graves?
He moved away from me, bending and standing at each plot, cussing under his breath.
“They were right here! They moved the damn fence!”
Nobody moved the damn fence. It was older than I was with the rust to prove it. But how mad would he get if I said so? I ventured: “I’m sure they’re here somewhere…”
“They moved it! They moved the goddamned thing!” He leaned hard on his cane and gripped a fence post with his other hand; he yanked it toward him and pushed it away, loosening it in the rocky ground. Granddaddy had always been a big man; you could pass a quarter through his wedding ring. And even in his eighties, if he got good and mad enough, that fence didn’t stand a chance. He grunted with each pull and push. His face was turning red.
And I was flooded with panic. What if he had a heart attack up here? A stroke? Would my cell phone even work? How would I get him into the car? How would I find my way down the mountain? To the nearest hospital? I could not for the life of me remember any goddamn thing I learned in the fucking lifeguard CPR class I had just taken.
And then we found them.
The dormant viburnum bush had been a bundle of sticks barely the size of a basketball when my Uncle CD planted it, last time they’d been up he told me. Now it towered ten feet high in full bloom, exploding with fluffy snowballs as big around as cantaloupes.
It wasn’t planted on his parents’ graves, but adjacent to them, right between Glennister and Iven’s headstones. Their modest limestone rectangles were covered in lichen. The letters of their names were so smoothed by time that had we not already known them, we would hardly have been able to guess.
But the indelibly carved names of my great-grandparents were clearly visible on the granite headstones Granddaddy had paid for.
Mary Belle Short Crigger Charles Grant Crigger
b. November 1, 1898 b. March 16, 1892
d. January 20, 1989 d. July 19, 1992
In 1989, I was three and my mom was pregnant with my brother Grant. The roads were so bad that only the preacher and men enough to lower the casket went up. No sisters or daughters or granddaughters were there to watch Belle go into the ground.
In 1992, I was seven and Grant was nearly three and Mom was pregnant with my brother Jared. Gramps was buried next to his wife just three years after he lost her.
But Belle, she had waited a whole lifetime to be laid to rest next to her lost boys.
***
Just a year after he took me up there, we buried Granddaddy next to my Nannie in a neat and tidy memorial park near Charleston, West Virginia.
He was gone and I was left with the same inscrutable advice he’d given me my whole life: “remember who you are and where you come from.”
I was born in West Virginia, raised in New Jersey, and educated in Virginia. I live in Tennessee now, and even though I’ve set down some roots, I’m more certain than ever that I’m not from anywhere.
So who am I?
I am a woman who probably couldn’t even find the old family cemetery on a map.
A woman who is the eldest of three siblings who all survived.
A woman with two children of her own, both so young they only understand dead as it applies to the batteries in their favorite toys.
I imagine the short lives of those two other children and wonder if their names have faded completely from their headstones. I wonder if I am the last person who will ever imagine their mother’s pain.
I come from a faded-but-not-gone legacy: when she helps me cook, I make my daughter put her hands on top of her head as I chop vegetables. When I lay down any kitchen knife, I put it right up against the backsplash, as far from the counter-edge as it will go.
And I come from some indelible truths: I am the cherished granddaughter of the third-born son who survived. Who was also a brother and a husband and a father, a World War II medic, a family doctor decades in practice who sometimes took payment in chickens. Who had an antique cane with a saber inside he snuck through an airport just to see if he could, a snaggle-toothed dog whose farts could clear a room, a penchant for phrases like hotter than the gates of Hades and faster than Snyder’s hound.
When I asked him that day why he wanted to go up to the graveyard, he said: “I go up there once in a while... I don’t know why. You just need to go.”
I might not go, Granddaddy, but I promise I’ll remember.
I Will Put My House in Order
M. Christine Benner Dixon
The prettiest of Grammy’s dishes broke in the move back to Pittsburgh. It was bundled in brown paper, but paper could not absorb the kinetic jolts of the road. I heard the loss before I saw it--the green shards of glass ringing like tiny bells in the box. It was not expensive--none of her things were expensive--but I had used it in her memory; every time I filled the bowl or washed it, it was always her bowl. And when it broke, it was hers.
I am the keeper of mundane heirlooms. My house is a cornucopia of unimportant family memories: open any cupboard door, and some pebble of nostalgia will roll off the shelf at you. Even as a child, I would protest if my mother tried to get rid of anything that carried the slightest whiff of someone I loved. The rattan peacock chair, which had served as a throne for every family birthday celebration for as long as I could remember, was falling to pieces by the time she decided to burn it. I wept over the ashes like Lorca wept for his friend Ignacio, gored by a bull. I pulled charred sticks from the fire and kept them. I still have them somewhere. As a result, I have acquired not the glittering spoils of inheritance--monument to some accomplished progenitor--but the scene dressing of the past, the minor trappings of my grandmothers' daily lives: bowls, pins, books, and the like.
It is right to have the possessions of my grandmothers about me. I am an osmotic vessel. If I keep the concentration of their memory high enough outside of my body, then it will not dissipate from within me into the air. I mix cookie dough in a yellow Pyrex bowl that my father gave me years after his mother died. It is not as lovely as the green glass bowl that broke in the move, but it is more invested with her touch. Her Mennonite faith taught her simplicity and frugality--her pretty things were generally kept modestly away, saved. The dough is rolled out, and I lean the heels of my hands on the cookie cutters from my mother's mother, my Grandma. She rummaged through them every Saturday, pulling out a sailboat, an angelfish, a seashell to make cookies for the Sunday School classes at Seymour United Methodist church. I feel the precise crunch of the tin's cutting edge against the sugar in the dough. I wiggle the shape on the floured counter, just enough to be sure it is cut through. I am shadowing Grandma’s movements years after she last made them, aware that I am not the first in this line of grandmothers, though I am the last. I am not a grandmother. I never will be.
My sister and I visited Värmland, Sweden, several years ago to walk in the places our grandmother's mother and her mothers and grandmothers walked. We spent a beautiful afternoon at the house where our great-grandmother lived before her father sent for her from America. Watching my sister run through the descendants of flowers that bent under our great-grandmother's feet, I was overcome with the strange fantasy of wanting to be buried there. I am sure the kind-eyed Swedish farmer whose land this now is would hardly welcome my American corpse as a natural part of his planting, but I longed for it. I wonder, though, if it was just memory pointed in the wrong direction, if this was my past remembering me. My body did lie there, in that land; it lies there still in quiet repose. The bees gather pollen from the bellflowers and the lupines above.
Parents talk reverentially of their children's lives. In the same breath as their complaints over fickle toddler appetites and teenaged morosity, they swear that they can't imagine life without them, how they would die or kill or cheat or any wild thing to mitigate a threat to the life of their child. I do not doubt the sincerity of this elemental and violent love, but statements like these create a comic theater of parental protectiveness in my imagination. The parent, seeing their child in the path of an oncoming bus, rushes to sacrifice themselves in place of the child, only to be caught up short by their own mother, wholly and blindly devoted to her child's survival. The grandmother, of course, has a father, and now a tottering old coot elbows his way in and faces down the roaring bus. But his life is deemed precious by his parents, and they crawl from their graves to intervene. And so on. A line of devoted parents count themselves as adjunct to their children's lives, conduits for the furtherance of the family line.
And this makes me wonder about myself, who has no wide-eyed child to defend against the proverbial (and curiously reckless) bus. Is it for me that the parade of self-sacrificing ancestors shoved their way in front of danger? I guess it must be, but I am no more the epitome of my line, the fulfillment of the promise of a thousand lives, than anyone is. My life is neither of lesser nor greater purpose because I do not have a child. Your life is neither of lesser nor greater purpose if you do have one. My grandmothers designed houses and cleaned churches and wrote poetry and made cookies not to summon me but because Grandma’s hands had structures in them and Grammy’s heart housed an earnest, practical, lyrical piety, and they loved the warm breath from the oven on their faces when they turned the trays.
I will not have a child and no grandchild; no one will ever say these things of me. So I turn the anticipation of my line backward. Because the ovum that would become the embryo that would become me was nested in my mother's and grandmother's bodies, I turn back to contain them both. I wait expectantly to age into their bodies' prophecies.
Grandma kept a resolution magneted to her refrigerator: I will put my house in order in 1998. This date is crossed out: 1999. This, too, crossed out: 2000. 2001. 2002. 2003. She could never seem to order her house. I can. Because mine has an end. From there, I work backwards. I write the family figures on the page and add and subtract, working out the long division in its beautiful trailing lines.
My grandmother drew the plans for my mother’s house, and I redraw that house in a poem and put my mother in it. She will inhabit the house my grandmother and I built together forever. When I make the Thanksgiving finger rolls in the kitchen that my mother inhabits and my grandmother designed, I use the recipe of my Grandma's mother who came from Sweden, which was given to her by her mother. I feed their memories to my family in sweet, twisted rounds of bread and poetry. All I have to give is that which was given to me. When the other children complained that she never had to speak in class, the teacher said of the girl who was not yet my grandmother, "Mary speaks with her pen." I use her pen now to outline speeches which I will deliver in lieu of children. My mouth, my hands, and reams of paper are filling with them. They overflow the bowl.
But paper cannot absorb the kinetic jolts of the road, and neither can my words, though I pack them densely in. The dish will shatter into golden bells. I will be carefully transferred to the earth, far from the lupines. This will be the end. My grandmother’s house will be in order. We are not lost, having been broken. We are what we have always been: our grandmothers' granddaughters, long buried and newly hoped for. We are cut glass handed down. We are memories turned backward.