Belmont Story Review: Longing (Volume 5)

VOLUME V SUMMER 2020

A national magazine of literary arts, faith, and culture

LONGING

TABLE of CONTENTS EDITORIAL STAFF Editor

Sara Wigal

FOREWORD

4

NONFICTION

6

Umbrellas on a Sunny Day

FICTION

14 32

The Skinning Knife The Exodus of Andrew McCallister

Managing Editors

Grace Carey-Hill Lauren Ash Macey Howell

Traffic Public Relations Submissions

Coordinator Coordinator Coordinator

Paige Capponi

James Kennedy

Laura Huie

Art Directors

Social Media Managers

Copy Editors

Laura Huie Annalee Tanner

Kalleigh Kaiser Kayleigh Rucinski

Grace Cope Elania Trimble

Poetry Editors

James Kennedy Kayleigh Rucinski Annalee Tanner

Former Editor

POETRY

44

45

46

48

Manufactured Days Sonnet for a Smile A Broken Record That Winter We Lived So Close to the Tracks the Train Would Shake Us Awake Some Nights

FICTION

50 62

Regan, Relict of Keira The Well

NONFICTION

80

A Pacific North West Journal

CONTRIBUTORS

90

Richard Sowienski

E-mail: belmontstoryreview@gmail.com © 2020 Copyright Belmont University

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[ FOREWORD]

ON LONGING

I

n March 2020 a tornado ripped apart the homes of hundreds in Nashville. Countless businesses were shut down not far from our campus at Belmont University, many to remain closed when a week later we were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. That same week, although we sought to complete our submissions reading for this fifth volume of Belmont Story Review, deadlines were waylaid to make room for an extended spring break while our administration watched the news and waited to decide if we would complete our semester online. We longed for a normal spring break instead of the one we spent picking trash from lawns and organizing storm survivors’ possessions. Students changed flights frantically, and we hoped to see one another in person in April.

During the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918 our ancestors hunkered down with only printed literature to inform them of how the rest of the world was faring. Today’s internet access means that although we remain socially distant, we are not socially isolated. We see our family’s faces over FaceTime calls, we connect with our friends through Instagram story comments, and although we didn’t make our way back to campus this spring, we completed our semester of study in online classrooms. In these video calls students mostly sat in their beds, and professors scrambled for professional-looking backdrops. Many a pet wandered its way into workshop discussions, for which we were grateful.

Despite our attempts at connection, we longed for a life where our social contact wouldn’t be primarily on a screen. We are counting the days until we can have that we miss—a world safe for grandparents to meet newborn babies, for unemployment rates to nosedive, for an FDA-approved vaccine.

Via the pandemic and tornado we experienced unwanted change, but a transformation we welcome is a more racially equal world. George Floyd

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was murdered while we were working hard to wrap up work on this issue.

As an educator, I used what influence I have to point students to an antiracist education and to provide spaces for dialogue about diversity. They took up this task with gusto. When our call for cover art went out, Avery Kiker’s submission transformed images from The March on Washington into a depiction of contemporary protest. Her work aligns the historic fight for equality with the renewed energy of the racial justice activists of today.

The staff of this magazine harbored its own set of longing well before any of us had our lives disrupted by the tornado, had heard of coronavirus, or re-engaged in racial justice activism—we began the Spring 2020 semester hoping to read wonderful works of writing fit for the latest issue of the magazine we lovingly nickname BSR. Student editors read up to 18 submissions a week this winter, searching for their favorite pieces to include in the volume.

I had my own desire—to honor my predecessor and mentor, Richard Sowienski, who founded this magazine with Belmont students. He gave me his blessing as I stepped into the role as the new Director of Publishing at the college, and I was handed the reins of BSR, too. It had been a long time since I sat at the Assistant Editor’s desk at Ploughshares in graduate school, and I hoped I would have the mettle to shepherd student staff.

When the world took a wrong turn, we worked harder. Alone together we longed to make something good of the art we were sent, and it was easy to pull our theme from the bottoms of our hearts and the pages of the pieces we read—we were all longing for something. Essays, stories, and poetry all reflected deep desire, and we heard the hum of our world wanting as well.

I hope you will enjoy the many representations of longing in the pages of this magazine— selections vary from poetry about a custody battle in “A Broken Record,” to a creative essay about a 1995 gas attack in Japan in “Umbrellas on a Sunny Day,” and the story of a baby found in an elevator shaft in “The Skinning Knife.” The variety of desire in this magazine feels like a totem of our times.

Happy Reading, Sara Wigal Editor

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[ NONFICTION]

I

get my Japanese news from my mother.

Having left Tokyo at 18 for college and

staying in the U.S. ever since, she’s my one portal to my home country and everything that happens in it. The news is usually light. She tells me about celebrity gossip, political scandals, new food trends, the minor earthquakes and typhoons that the international media tend to overlook. The burning down of our favorite soba shop. The emergence of even more pop idol groups. And of course, news about her, my dad, and their two Yorkshire terriers.

Umbrellas on a Sunny Day

news is so big it shakes us to the core, taking

Yurina Yoshikawa

quake and tsunami was that kind of news, an

There are only a handful of times when the over our conversations for weeks, sometimes even months or years. The March 11, 2011 earth-

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event we still talk about nearly a decade later. It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around the death toll of nearly 20,000 and the 2,500 still deemed missing. Or the invisible yet horrifying effects of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. My mother still refuses to buy produce from the northern regions, just in case.

The second time the news took over our conversations, the news itself wasn’t as big or global in nature, but it felt bigger, if not more personal, to both me and my mother. It happened on July 6, 2018, and I knew as soon as I got her text that it was another Big Event. “They executed Asahara,” she wrote. “And six former Aum members. It just happened.”

Shoko Asahara was the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, a doomsday cult responsible for multiple massacres, most notably the Tokyo Sarin Gas Attack which killed 13 and injured over 5,000 people. The attacks happened on three train lines on March 20, 1995, during the morning rush hour between 8:00 to 8:30. I was six years old at the time, living in Tokyo with my parents. And like any average Japanese kid, I, a first-grader, had taken the train by myself to school. Tokyo was (and is) so streamlined and safe that children are often unaccompanied during commutes.

After the event, all of us children were on the lookout, and in perpetual fear, of stray plastic bags, newspapers, and umbrellas—especially on unsuspecting sunny days like the morning of the attack.

“Do you remember that day?” my mother asks.

I respond that I do, but my memory of it is like a strange recurring dream that made little sense in the moment, and more sense as time went on. I had just arrived at school by the time the attacks occurred.

It wasn’t until the end of the day that we knew something terrible had happened, based on our teachers’ murmurs and how quickly they had organized every student’s homebound commutes, grouped by train lines and neighborhoods. We were told to hold hands with our designated buddies as though we were on a field trip.

Later we learned that the Aum members released toxic gas inside multiple train cars by bringing in bags of sarin wrapped around in newspaper, dropping them on the floor, and puncturing them with the tips

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of sharpened umbrellas right before departing the train cars themselves.

After the event, all of us children were on the lookout, and in perpetual fear, of stray plastic bags, newspapers, and umbrellas—especially on unsuspecting sunny days like the morning of the attack.

In the years since 1995, Asahara and the Aum members who carried out the attacks had been tried and sentenced to life imprisonment or death. But no one knew when the executions would actually take place.

In Japan, the government keeps executions a secret until they’ve already happened.

So it was that my mother—along with the rest of the Japanese public—learned about these executions after the fact, and that they took place on July 6, 2018, a day as random as any other, seemingly out of the blue, at a time when Japan seemed to have finally recovered from the collective trauma of March 11, 2011. “Why now?” was a question on everyone’s minds that the government would never end up answering.

A part of me felt relief. The nightmare was finally over. Justice had been served. But my mother was still unnerved. If anything, the news of these executions only brought these horrible memories back to life and sent with them a quiet warning: What if something like this happens again?

B When I think of the attacks, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t about the trains, it’s about a kid in my class who happened to share the same last name as the Aum leader: Asahara. We all called each other by last names, and Asahara was this bony little kid who could never sit still, who kept getting in trouble with his little antics. We went to a Catholic school, so all the teachers were nuns in crisp gray veils. They would scold us by saying, “Jesus is watching.” Although many of us came from secular households, the nuns would deliver these warnings in a way that could make us cry in an instant.

After the attacks, little Asahara came up with a new gimmick, where he’d stand on a chair and start singing the infamous Aum chant: “Soshi, soshi, soshi soshi soshi, Asahara Soshi!” Everyone would march around him in circles, joining the chant with our arms up and down with each beat.

In this particular case, the nuns seemed to be the ones afraid of little Asahara—and afraid of all of us—instead of the other way around.

We all knew the Aum chant because it had pervaded TV programs ever since the attacks. The grown-ups were trying to warn us about this evil group and their methods of mind-control, but to us children, the

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Aum followers didn’t look threatening at all. In fact, they looked friendly and familiar. Wearing plain baggy clothes, holding balloons and giant stuffed elephants, singing and dancing with big smiles on their faces, they looked just like the hosts on kids’ TV programs that we were encouraged to trust. The Aum followers, at least the ones who were featured in these videos, included pretty young women who exuded a childlike playfulness. Which I realize, in retrospect, was exactly what was so scary to adults and yet mesmerizing to us kids.

B As a Japanese girl, I was always made to understand the value and power of cuteness. Like most children of the world, I grew up with cuteness all around me. Soft animal cartoons with smiley faces and highpitched voices. Hello Kitty. Totoro. Anpanman, a popular superhero whose head is made of edible (and replaceable) red bean pastries. In Japan, though, there’s a sense that you’re allowed to continue enjoying cute things beyond childhood, or that cuteness isn’t limited to the world of children. Grown men and women can still be cute without losing their authority or maturity. Even the government can be cute. Starting in the 2000s, local governments have used cute mascots called yuru-chara to promote tourism, especially in rural areas. Kumamon, a black bear representing Kumamoto Prefecture, has earned billions in merchandising revenue alone.

Outsiders looking at the big picture might attribute Japanese cuteness to a necessary reaction to the country’s defeat in WWII. Take philosopher Simon May, for example, who has an entire chapter devoted to the topic in his book The Power of Cute. His interest lies in the intersection of the cute and the uncanny, which he attributes most prominently in the cuteness of Japan. To be cute in Japan is not just about appearing vulnerable, he says, but also self-sufficient. It’s about appearing “not just unthreatening (to outsiders and, crucially for postwar Japan, in its perception of itself) but also subtly ruthless about one’s own preservation.”

In the chapter’s climax, May argues that cuteness “allows violence to be expressed in an unsolemn, unthreatening way. As well as extirpating aggression, Cute also sublimates it.”

The Aum followers with their elephant hats were cute in this very way. And as kids imitating the Aum chant in our very Catholic school, I think we also understood the power, not only of cuteness, but of being

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children. It was our way of saying we weren’t scared. It was a way of taking cuteness back.

B After learning about the Aum executions, I decided to re-read Underground, Haruki Murakami’s ambitious oral history of the Tokyo Gas Attack which he published in 1997. He interviewed over 60 people, some survivors, some witnesses, and some family members of the victims who were willing to share their stories. While Murakami provides an essay and introductory remarks before each interview, most of the pages are written in the interviewee’s voices. One after the other, you learn about the person’s age, their job, why they were taking the train that morning, how they remember the attack, what happened immediately after, how the event affected them later on. The dreams and nightmares they’ve had since. The way they saw themselves in the news reports. The way the sarin affected their vision, motor abilities, their mental and emotional states. How their co-workers treated them afterwards. How the attacks affected their relationships with their friends, family, with themselves.

The first time I read Underground, I was a college student reading it to understand Murakami and his weird fiction. As a novelist whose stories tend to focus on dark, hidden worlds underneath all the perfections of modern Tokyo, Murakami admits that the attacks were like something pulled from one of his books. “Subterranean worlds—wells, underpasses, caves, underground springs and rivers, dark alleys, subways— have always fascinated me and are an important motif in my novels. The image, the mere idea of a hidden pathway, immediately fills my head with stories…”

But re-reading Underground in the context of Asahara’s execution, I noticed something deeper about his project, so urgently put together and published just two years after the attacks. “The Aum ‘phenomenon’ disturbs us precisely because it is not someone else’s affair,” he says. “It shows us a distorted image of ourselves in a manner none of us could have foreseen.” Us, as in Japanese people. America may have already been familiar with the dangers of cults with The Manson Family and the Jonestown Massacre among others, but the Tokyo Gas Attack marked the first time any cult made itself visible in Japanese society. Murakami seems to understand, maybe because of his attraction to hidden worlds, that “people who join cults are not abnormal,” that the followers were merely looking for “answers to the reasons why we’re living on this

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earth, and why we die and disappear. We shouldn’t criticize a sincere attempt to find answers.” This, I think, is what scares Murakami the most. Knowing what it means to be a storyteller himself, he’s not only fascinated, but horrified by storytellers like Asahara who lure followers with their well-crafted stories, labeling them as the very answers they’ve been looking for.

B When my mother told me about the Aum executions, I had just become a mother myself to an infant boy. At the time, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the day the baby spent sleeping, and I felt compelled to entertain him whenever he was awake, to expose him early to all the beauties of the world, to fill every silence with soothing music.

I think deep down, I was afraid he’d be judgmental about the world he was born into. No no, I wanted to say. Don’t worry about the frowns on our faces when we look at the news, look instead at the smiley faces on this board book. I played some of the less intense Bach suites on my viola and weirdly felt more nervous playing in front of him than when I’d played in concert halls in the past. Is this okay? I kept thinking. Is this beautiful enough?

I strapped him in the baby carrier and took him to museums and aquariums while he slow-blinked through everything. I found a book called Art for Baby with high-contrast versions of famous pieces like Takashi Murakami’s flower, Damien Hirst’s spots and simplified facial portraits by Julian Opie. I took him to library storytimes and mom-andbaby yoga classes where we sang all the baby songs and everything ended with a collective, soft, high-pitched “Yay!” All the while the baby would contort his facial muscles to everything but a smile, before crying for milk or falling asleep again.

Even as this baby is now an active two-year-old boy, it’s impossible for me to tell whether any of my efforts made a difference. As I watch him grow, I think more often about my own childhood and the ways my mother made similar efforts to shield me from the horrors of the world. How wonderful and cute my childhood truly was, thanks to her.

And yet, how seamlessly the horrors snuck in, just by living. There was no way any parent could have predicted what ended up happening on the morning of March 20, 1995, just like there’s no way for any of us to predict the tragedies that may be in the works for the morning after. But of course, we can’t live that way without going insane. I just have to take

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each day as it comes, as my mother did with me. And hope, that when he starts asking the big questions about why we live on this earth, and why we die and disappear, that he’s okay with me not having those answers, at least right away.

B The Japanese news cycle spent a good few weeks covering the Aum executions, but it quickly moved on to other scandals, murders, gossip, and the peppier, happier news surrounding, for example, the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. My mother, too, has moved on over time, and her news updates have gotten light again. We talk about her, my dad, and the two Yorkshire terriers. I tell her about her grandson. Everyone is happy. They’re smiling. They’re cute.

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The Skinning Knife Kathryn Stinson

[ FICTION]

M

iriam had promised herself that when Liam asked, she would tell him the story.

“I was living in a squat in Amsterdam…” she began.

“What’s a squat?” he asked.

How to explain? There was nothing like it anymore, no unowned spaces.

“It’s an abandoned building that people live in.”

“Like homeless people? You were homeless?”

“Not homeless,” she said. “I had a home. I lived in a squat.”

“Why?” “My mother had died, and I wanted to see where she grew up.”

“And she grew up in Amsterdam?”

“Yes.”

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“In a squat?”

“No… I lived in the squat because…. it doesn’t matter why. It’s just where I lived. On the sixth floor, down an empty hallway.”

“Why was it empty?”

“Well, the building wasn’t really fixed up, especially that floor. There was an elevator, but it was broken, and the doors were gone. So if it was dark and you weren’t careful, you could fall in.”

“But you weren’t scared?”

“No, I guess I was scared. I mean, I was careful...” She was getting stuck in the endless, looping trails of his questions. She wanted to move this forward.

Miriam slumped down into the bed, and Liam moved to rest his head on her ribcage. She began to pull his wavy blonde hair through her fingers. Her own hair was black and straight; anyone could see he was adopted. Though at seven, he had picked up enough of her likeness, her combinations of gestures and expressions, that some mistook it for a family resemblance. She had started to dread the possibility that he might never ask, that the story would fall away over time, unimportant to the everyday truth of things, until one day it came up again, much too late, and then how would she explain having kept the secret? It was nearly 10 o’clock, way past his bedtime. She couldn’t remember exactly what he’d asked that had led her to begin. Perhaps he hadn’t asked anything. Perhaps Miriam, having waited so long for the question to come, had pounced at the first glimmer of an opportunity. Still, having already begun, she had to finish.

“One night it was late,” she continued. “I heard something crying.

So I got up and went down the hallway, where the elevator was. It was coming from there.” She swallowed. “I climbed down into the elevator shaft and kept climbing down, following the sound.”

“What was it?” Liam asked.

“I didn’t know at first,” said Miriam. This was a terrible way to start, she thought. She should never have even mentioned the elevator shaft.

“It sounded like a cat crying. I thought it must be a cat that had fallen in and hurt itself. I climbed all the way down into the basement.” Miriam stopped here, unable to find the right words. Liam was silent, waiting.

“I found you in a suitcase by the elevator door. Your mother...” The word sucked the air out of her. She was his mother. “Someone had left

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you there. You were just a few days old. You had strong lungs, though. I heard you all the way up on the sixth floor.”

In the silence that followed, Miriam watched the shapes the headlights formed on the opposite wall as cars passed by. She felt him holding his breath, and she waited, her pulse fluttering in her throat.

“How did you climb down an elevator shaft?” he finally asked.

“What?”

“How did you climb down? What did you hang onto?”

“There was a ladder on the inside wall. That’s how they climb in to repair elevators when they break down.”

“Oh.” She felt the energy drain from her body. There ended the story she had waited seven years of his life to tell.

When she was Liam’s age, maybe a year older, Miriam had stolen the one thing she would ever steal, a skinning knife, from her grandfather’s bedside table. A week after Papa Jack died, she had gone with her mother to his trailer and stood in the doorway, looking at the rocks on the windowsill, the feathers he had picked up and arranged in a jar like flowers, the dirty coffee cups in his sink. Her mother, Ruth, picked up the pipe on his dresser and slipped it into the pocket of her coat, then turned to Miriam.

“You can take one thing,” she said. “Only one. The rest goes to Goodwill.”

If Ruth had a talent, it was for saying goodbye. She had been five when the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940. After her parents handed her off to strangers on a street corner to ensure her survival, Ruth was smuggled through a succession of foster families. Even after the war, she passed from house to house until she was old enough to make her own way. She developed expertise in moving on, and a set of rules: Take one thing with you. Say goodbye quickly. Don’t cry.

Eight-year-old Miriam resolved to follow Ruth’s rules. She closed her eyes, opened them, and chose the first thing they fell on: the grey and brown wool blanket slung over his chair. Ruth turned to fold it up for her.

Miriam moved sideways. Her hand glided of its own accord to the bedside table and palmed the skinning knife. She felt its cold handle slip down the sleeve of her sweater. Then, taking the blanket from her mother, she folded her arm under it and carried the bundle tight against her chest.

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What had just happened? She had not even noticed the skinning knife, but somehow she had reached for it anyway. She marveled at how easy it had been, how her hands had known what to do and acted without her consent. A little frightened, she pressed the blanket tighter.

Ruth closed the door for the last time, and they hiked to Mound Bottom, to scatter Papa Jack’s ashes.

Mound Bottom was the name for the land in the crook of the Harpeth River, state owned, and mostly left alone. Poorly kept trails led past petroglyphs and snaked around the remaining ancient mounds. Before he died, Papa Jack would pick Miriam up from school in the afternoons and take her there to walk and play until dinnertime. Once Miriam had asked him, after a long walk, as they sat outside his trailer on folding chairs, “Why don’t you have a house?”

“I don’t need a house,” he said. “I have my trailer.”

“Yeah, I know. It just seems like not much of a home,” said Miriam.

“It isn’t my home, it’s just my trailer. This whole place is my home,” he said, sweeping his arm across their view of the trees, the river.

“This is all yours?”

“I don’t own it, but owning’s got nothing to do with it.”

He also told her what he knew about the mounds and the ancient people who built them.

“Like your great, great, great grandfather?”

“Way farther back than that. So far back I can’t even say. But we all came from them.”

One November day, she remembered, the first snow of the season closed school early, and she rode in the front seat of his pickup, watching big flakes melt onto the windshield. Papa Jack trudged a path through the unmarked snow, out into the clearing, and fell on the ground, flapping his arms and legs to make a snow angel. Miriam followed, and they stayed for a long time, the backs of her legs growing numb, watching clouds move across the grey afternoon sky, the deer circling the mounds.

Miriam counted seven, but Papa Jack said twelve, searching for food, bounding white-tails up through the woods. Later, Miriam would remember listening deep into that silence, and the slight, wispy sounds of the deer pawing through the snow. She would remember it as the silence preceding things, the sound of waiting for something to happen.

His heart had been failing for some time, though Miriam hadn’t

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known it. Through the spring he visited less and less, and by summer, he came only to sit in the rocker in the living room, Sasha the cat curled in his lap, dozing until Ruth came home. Miriam had not seen the change in him, though she had been with him nearly every day. But thinking back she could now see it in her mind, how he had grown thinner and weaker a little bit at a time. He stopped eating. Ruth started canning food, something Miriam had never seen her do. She lined shelves with tomatoes and applesauce, things they never ate. Sasha the cat, old and going blind, began to cry at night, lost in some dark part of the house, until Miriam came to pick her up and carry her back to bed. Papa Jack went into the hospital, and Ruth told Miriam he would soon be gone.

Something in her wrenched open to make room for this idea. It was an almost physical feeling, like the separating of bones.

At Mound Bottom, the skinning knife still buried in the sleeve of her sweater, Miriam watched her mother open the urn and hold it out for a moment, letting the wind take most of it before she flung the rest out onto the river. She watched the ashes swirl over the ground, into the water, over the roots of trees. She felt a part of herself lurch forward, as though to follow him as he scattered across the landscape. The world seemed unreal, the air thin. It was as though she could draw back the veil of the familiar world and see beneath it, if only she could find its frayed edge. She let the skinning knife slip from her sleeve into the palm of her hand and gripped it tight. Ruth, grim faced but dry-eyed, caught her other hand as they turned to walk back to the car, the empty urn tucked under her arm.

Liam had listened to last night’s story when she first began to tell it with a familiar suspicion. His mother often told these kinds of stories when he asked questions, especially about her life growing up.

Once she told him she was born to two circus performers, trapeze artists, who took her on tour with them. She tried hard to be a circus performer herself, she said, but she didn’t have the talent. She dropped everything she tried to juggle. She could not balance well enough to walk the high wire. And although she managed to stay on the unicycle for a pretty good amount of time, she never did get the hang of pedaling backwards. But, she could draw, and she could paint, so pretty soon she was sketching posters and flyers, and more people were coming to the circus than ever, thanks to her fantastic drawings. She could even

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draw elephants, she said, which are pretty hard to draw. Liam eyed her sideways.

“There were elephants?” he had asked.

“Yes, two elephants.”

“What do elephants eat?”

“Oatmeal.”

“Elephants eat oatmeal?”

“Yes, elephants love oatmeal… with cinnamon.”

“You’re totally making this up!”

Like all her best stories, she told the story of how she found him and became his mother in pieces, starting and stopping, letting him ask questions. He looked for the setup, the piece of it that couldn’t be true. He thought it was about the elevator but wondered now if he had missed the clue.

Liam watched the back of her dark head as it moved several yards in front of him, along the trail at the edge of the water. He followed at a distance. It was April, late afternoon, still too cool to take off his shoes and sink his feet into the mud at the riverbank, which was deep and sucked his feet under like quicksand. He loved the feeling of slowly sinking into the ground, then sticking his hand in mud to break the suction so he could pull his feet out. He made up spectacular plots of quicksand and tar pits, in which he played both victim and rescuer.

Up ahead he watched her slide down the incline into the ravine. Usually her purpose in wandering off the trail was to collect things, bones, feathers, leaves, which she would bring home and place on the coffee table in the living room, arrange and rearrange them, as she would say, just live with them awhile. Eventually her pieces would take shape, mobiles and stabiles, she called them. The work would line the living room until she packed everything up for a show, then she’d sweep the leftover things off the coffee table and bury them in the backyard, “…because that’s how you make room for new things.”

Liam followed her tracks down the muddy path. He placed his feet inside them, matching her long strides with his short legs. He found the point where she had veered off the trail, spotted the coyote tracks she was following. Liam was good at tracking; he had learned to spot even partial prints, even shallow ones, how to find the single thread of one animal’s trail in the mud. He had learned the difference between dog tracks, which wander in all directions, and coyote tracks, which were straight like these.

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He had learned about wolves too, though Miriam said there were no wolves here anymore, not for years. He still looked for them, just in case.

For a while the tracks went side by side, the zigzag prints of her boots and the paws of the coyote. Then he lost the coyote tracks and frowned. She was still better at this than he was. He followed until he lost her trail too, then looked up. Her tracks had taken him far along the floor of the ravine and started him back up the other side. He turned a careful circle, looking in all directions, alert for any flicker of movement. He finally spotted her approaching the body of a dead deer. The wind shifted, and the smell of it hit him full in the face. He watched her as she knelt beside it, surveyed the hide, the antlers, the pieces the coyotes had left. Parts of it were strewn across the ground, unrecognizable, blood on the leaves. Miriam knelt on the ground, wrenched free the exposed jawbone, pulled without straining, a patient, steady pressure. He heard the sickening crack of a bone break, the joint coming apart, and the deer’s small, fragile jaw was in her hand.

Liam stopped where he was, standing on the edge of the slope. He felt sick and leaned back against a tree. Miriam pulled a hair from her head and laid it over the body of the deer, resting her hand on it before she stood up. The jawbone was in her hand, blood on her fingers, on the sleeve of her coat. She looked up at Liam. He closed his eyes. His head hurt. Her footsteps crunched toward him.

“Liam?”

Damp air entered his throat, carrying the rotten stink of the deer.

He sank down and sat on the roots of the tree.

“Liam?”

He wanted to turn and run but couldn’t quite make himself move.

Her heavy boots thumped faster toward him, cracking twigs, slogging through mud.

When she wanted to disappear, Liam knew she could do it. They had played the same game many times, her starting off in some direction, Liam following later. Then no matter how still he sat, how he strained to see some sign of her or hear a rustling that would give her up, he was lost. Everything was infuriatingly silent. He knew she was close by; sometimes he could even smell her. Eventually she would pop out from behind a tree or drop to the ground in front of him. It was a secret trick he desperately wanted to learn.

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Other secrets she gave up more easily. When she taught drawing or painting in the evening, she took him with her and set up a workspace for him alongside her adult students, a piece of pegboard on a shortened easel, taped with drawing paper. In the beginning, all his pictures were the same: a line of blue at the top was the sky, three green lumps below for grassy hills. He painted flying V’s for birds, and the sun was a perfect round ball of yellow with rays stretching down.

As she made her rounds through the room one evening, she came up behind him, looked at his work in progress, and took him to stand by the window.

“Imagine the window is your piece of paper,” she said. “What do you see?” Liam studied the window. The sun had not yet gone down completely. “Is there one line of blue at the top?” There wasn’t. He saw what she meant. There was blue against green, squares of sky visible through the trees, in all the spaces between the leaves.

He started out just trying to paint what was in the frame of the window, dark branches of trees and blue-grey of sky. It was all patches of color, he noticed, blue against green against brown.

At home, she set up a card table so he could work beside her when he wanted to. Liam developed his own method of painting, pulled a wet brush across the paper, picked a color, and touched it to the surface. He let the color spread as far as it wanted to, thinning itself out from the center, before he went on. He was patient about it, swirling the brush in a jar of water, waiting to touch another bit of paint to the surface. His creations were wrinkled and dripping, but they dried into something he liked. He flattened them under heavy books and taped them to the walls of his room.

His mom never painted at home. She used her knife to take things apart and remake them. Once she cut the wing from a dead owl and stripped the flesh off each feather. Later she twisted birch branches and wire into the shape of a wing and strung each feather to the frame. It hung in the corner for months, and when Liam opened the front door, the feathers lifted in the breeze, as though about to fly off. It seemed to him like a half skeleton, half living thing.

In the living room after their hike, Liam covered himself with a blanket while Miriam sat at the coffee table, cleaning blood from the deer jaw, then wrapping it in sinew. She had set a plate of food on his lap,

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chicken and rice. The chicken, shredded into pieces, seemed to carry the dead animal smell from earlier, which had followed them home. He pushed the chicken around with his fork but could not bring himself to eat it, set it instead on the floor and lay back on the couch, pulled the blanket over his head. He sat looking at the ceiling through the coarse weave of the blanket and feeling the heat of his breath collect under it.

“Not hungry?” she asked.

“I don’t feel good.”

“Headache still?”

“Stomach too.”

“You’ll feel better if you eat.”

“I can’t.”

“Because?”

Liam sighed, turned the blanket down, felt the rush of cooler air sharp against his face.

“I can’t eat something that used to be alive.”

Miriam chuckled. “That never bothered you before.”

“Well it bothers me now.”

“Plants used to be alive too. Just because they don’t scream when you cut them….”

“Not helping!”

Liam felt his throat go tight. He shut his eyes and held his breath to keep in the tears. He heard the bone clack as she set it down on the coffee table. She hooked her arm over the couch and pulled at his hair with her fingers. It hurt at first, but she kept at it, tugging gently at the roots, and he felt his headache giving up.

“You don’t have to eat meat. I’ll make you something else,” she said.

“Mac and cheese? I’m pretty sure nothing in that was ever alive. It may not even be food.”

Liam laughed in spite of himself. He looked at her free hand, resting on the floor, blood stains under the nails. He shut his eyes again, and breathed out a long, shaky breath.

Miriam had only seen Papa Jack use the skinning knife once, when she helped him skin a deer. His hand over hers, they had gripped the knife and slipped it under the deer hide. Miriam had imagined there was a pocket of space between skin and body, some place the knife would slip into, and the hide would separate cleanly. Not so. Papa Jack’s fore-

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arm worked the knife back and forth, the muscle bulging against the tight, rolled up sleeve of his flannel shirt. She watched the veins extend themselves, felt the muscles of his hand flexing against her grip, working the knife handle. Her wrist hurt. She could not feel a space where skin stopped and flesh began, just the hard, sawing strain of separating the two. Her stomach turned over, but Miriam kept her hand on the knife, eyes following the blade as it moved beneath the skin.

After his death, she often took the knife out at night, in the privacy of her bedroom, and turned it over and over in her hands. At first, she was afraid to use the blade. But after a time, she found a rock from the riverbed, rubbed smooth by water, and spent hours dragging the flat of the blade against it, sending its cold ringing sound into the air.

After they scattered his ashes, Ruth never went to Mound Bottom or said Papa Jack’s name again. But Miriam, as a teenager, would sometimes drive there after school and walk the trails alone. The state had sold a big chunk of the land by that time, and houses had begun to appear along the river’s edge. Papa Jack’s resting place was safe, but Miriam wouldn’t walk there. She mostly kept to the trail and just beyond, down the river. She sat under the oak tree where he would sleep sometimes. She climbed up into its branches and looked out over the mounds. She carried the skinning knife with her, loving the curve of its handle, its balance in her hand. It fit her now in a way it hadn’t when she was younger. She longed to feel what its blade could do. Finding a newly dead squirrel on the forest floor one afternoon, Miriam remembered skinning the deer with Papa Jack as a child. She slipped the blade’s edge under the animal’s skin and worked the knife handle steadily back and forth. She felt far away from her body, then deeply, thoughtlessly in tune with it. Strips of squirrel hide came off in her hands, not a clean job, but effective. She dug the knife in again and felt the blade glancing off of bone, the resistance of muscle. She spread the body out on the forest floor, unstrung its tendons, laid bare its slight skeleton. She examined each piece of it, noted its connections, imagined the way its little body must have moved. It felt like cutting through the soft matter of the surface world to reveal another, truer world beneath, brutal and beautifully spare. Standing, Miriam felt her heels sink down into the mud, towards the deep ground below, where the ancestors were buried.

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When Miriam was in college, Ruth got cancer. Those last two months, daily necessity swallowed everything else, endless small emergencies that culminated in a fast decline. Suddenly Ruth was gone, and Miriam realized how little she knew of Ruth’s life.

As a child, she had learned that it was useless to ask direct questions. Once she put two and two together in a Social Studies class, and knowing her Ruth was a Jew from Holland, asked, “Mom, were you in the Holocaust?”

“You mean the camps?” Ruth replied. “No, I wasn’t in the concentration camps.”

“Did you know people who were?”

“No.” “But… what year were you born?” It was only through many such conversations that Miriam managed to tease out the little bits of her mother’s past she did come to know, each piece hard won. It seemed to Miriam there was a story she was owed and would eventually uncover one way or another. It never occurred to her she could simply run out of time.

Miriam sat alone in the boxed up clutter of Ruth’s life and tried to follow her mother’s rules: Take one thing. Say goodbye quickly. Don’t cry. She thought of the strange clarity that had guided her in Papa Jack’s trailer, when she had stolen the knife. But this was different. Looking around her, Miriam was confronted with a long succession of one-things, all of the one-things that Ruth had taken over the years from the places she had left behind. Miriam knew nothing that could help her make sense of any of them. She knew little, even, about the circumstances of Ruth’s adult life, how she met Miriam’s father (Papa Jack’s son), or what life had been like before he left. Ruth never spoke of it, as she never spoke of anyone who had gone, and Miriam could not remember. She recognized only Papa Jack’s pipe, which Ruth had taken that day in the trailer. There was also a small gold cross on a chain, a delicately etched pair of embroidery scissors, a man’s denim shirt, size large, with frayed cuffs. She gave up on following the rules, sat in Ruth’s room, and sobbed.

In the end, she swept it all into a box bound for storage. She sold the house, quickly and for its asking price. The money paid for the funeral, the last of her college tuition, and after that, a ticket to Amsterdam, the city where her mother was born.

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At school, Liam found an upturned bed of crocuses, and they broke his heart. His teacher said they were early bloomers, not meant to last the season. Still, he gathered up as many as he could, thinking about what Miriam had said about plants being alive. It seemed wrong to throw them away, to abandon them. He stuffed them into his pockets, into his backpack, and held the remainder in his hands on the front steps of the school, waiting for Miriam to pick him up.

“They were just going to throw them out,” he told her, getting into the car. Thready roots poked through the gaps in his fingers. Clumps of dirt slipped onto the floor of the car. He would start his own version of Miriam’s coffee table, things he’d found and saved from destruction, living things, not dead things like the ones she collected. He would start with these crocuses.

They took tin cans out of the recycling bin and replanted every last flower. The windowsills were covered with them, soup cans, coffee cans, cut halves of milk cartons. The flowers died out quickly, but green chutes kept growing, climbed up the window frames and tangled there.

Liam had not stopped turning the story of his adoption over in his mind, looking for its weak point, the thing that would make it probably untrue. He had tried to let it go, but the story had a mind of its own and it played itself out over and over when he tried to go to sleep at night. He would wake himself enough to get control of it, to think about something else, only to have it come back the moment he started to fall asleep again.

One night, not quite yet asleep, he thought again that the problem had to be the elevator shaft, where Miriam had said she found him. He tried to imagine her climbing down it in the dark, but the picture felt funny and wouldn’t stay in focus. Liam felt his eyes closing. He had the feeling the room was moving, that his bed was tipping backwards, slowly at first, but then faster and farther. In fact he was falling, headfirst, and fast. He thought he was asleep already but couldn’t wake up. His head hurt. He was suffocating. He saw it in his mind and felt it happening at the same time. He saw the suitcase tipping into the dark of the open elevator shaft. He felt the air moving beneath it, all around it, as it was pitched downward. He sat bolt upright in the bed and screamed.

Miriam’s feet hit the floor and started toward his room before she was awake enough to know where she was. She stumbled down the hall, following the sound of his voice, her hands finding the door before her

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eyes came to focus in the dark. As she pulled him to her, shook him fully awake, he stopped yelling and looked at her.

“It’s just a bad dream,” she said. “Just a bad dream.” Liam looked around his room. She flipped on the bedside lamp and squinted in the dim light. Liam put his arms around her. She pulled back the covers and settled into the bed, holding him tight.

“What was it about?” she asked. He just shook his head against her, catching his breath, arms tight around her. “You’re okay now,” she said.

“I promise. You’re okay.”

That night in Amsterdam, twenty-two years old, Miriam had woken to the same sound. Sasha the cat was crying, she thought. She heard it the way she had heard it all those years ago, when Papa Jack was dying.

Her legs, on the mattress, were the legs of her eight-year-old self in her childhood bed. She felt that way until her feet hit the floor, which was not the carpeted floor of her old bedroom, but the cold linoleum of her sixth floor room in the squat. The space heater hummed by her feet.

Sasha the cat was still crying. Miriam took the blanket from her bed, wrapped it around her, and followed the cat sound out into the hallway, still halfway thinking that her mother was sleeping in the next room.

She reached the mouth of the elevator shaft and came more awake at the dark edge of it. Poised there in her bare feet, she peered inside.

Total darkness. In the light of day, she had looked for the bottom and was unable to see anything but thick, old cables leading down into nothing. There was no doubt, something was crying down below. It was a cat sound, she thought, exactly like the eerie sounds that Sasha used to make when she needed to be picked up and carried back to bed.

If she had been a little more awake, if she had not woken thinking she was eight years old still, Miriam might have found a safer way to get to the source of the sound. But her first thought was to shed the blanket and reach into the shaft’s interior to find a way down. Her hands grasped the ladder, and she swung herself in. The cold air of the shaft on her shoulders, the sudden shock of bare feet on metal rungs caused her to let out a little gasp, a sound that reverberated all through the yawning spaces above and below her. She smelled dust and old oil. She climbed down, two floors, three, following the cat sound through the darkness.

She was fairly close before she realized it was not an animal, but a baby crying. She saw the broken sheet of glass before she saw the suit-

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case. The glass was wedged between the elevator cable and the door, its jagged edge inches from where her feet gripped the ladder. The suitcase, dropped from above, had hit the thick pane of glass, broken part of it, and slid down its inclined surface, landing safely in the elevator doorway.

Miriam stood shaking on the ladder. The sound of the baby crying filled the cavernous space, echoing off the walls, blending into one seamless, pained wall of noise. Feet planted on the ladder, she reached an arm out for the doorway. She swung for it, pawed for the ground with one foot. She missed, missed, then found her balance, landed most of her weight on solid ground, and scrambled out. She unzipped the suitcase and pressed him to her chest, his tiny, soft body hot with the exertion of crying. He shook and flailed against her. She startled at the power of it, the power of him, so small a thing, and so alive. His wail filled her ears, unhinged her like nothing she had ever heard. The whole of her awareness closed around it, that one sound all that existed as far into the past or future as she could see in that long, loud moment.

In early May, the water was still cold, but Liam had his shoes off anyway, feet sunk in the mud of the riverbank, his coat sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Miriam knew he had not slept well for days. She heard him stirring late at night, but he would not call out for her again. Nevertheless, her body reacted, woke her up at the slightest sound from his room so that she felt exhausted and disconnected. And Liam had hardly spoken to her.

As Miriam slipped off down the trail, the world tipped and swayed, blurry in front of her. She pushed tears away with her thumbs. Why had she been so afraid of not telling him the truth? She’d thought only of her own frustration with her mother, who never revealed anything. But Liam had not wanted, perhaps had not needed to know. Perhaps he would never have needed to know. She might have saved him from it completely, erased the brutal story of abandonment in a suitcase by keeping it to herself, the way Ruth had taken her whole past to the grave with her.

Miriam might have done that for Liam, she thought, might have been that kind of mother, a better kind of mother, one who knew when to leave the assumptions of his world intact, not always insisting on pulling back the curtain. Suddenly she missed Ruth horribly. She had not been able to remember her mother’s face for years but could almost see it now, the sweep of her hair pinned up in the back, the tilt of her chin.

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Miriam stood at the edge of the ravine and paused, heard the sound of Liam’s splashing at the river’s edge. She slid carefully down the incline, grasping one frail and swaying branch after another to keep her balance. Just ahead, the spot where she had found the deer jaw looked unremarkable, no sign of it left, bones dragged off, bloody leaves now several layers below on the thick ravine floor. She loved the way the earth took things into itself, covered everything laid upon it with dirt, with water, pressing things deeper into its surface. She almost felt it beneath her feet, a constant churning, a digesting. She thought of everything she had buried in her backyard, how every inch of earth she stood on, not just in this ancestral space, was actually burial ground.

She had always been in love with this sense of the movement of things, the visible world alive with a truth that could be found in its bones. This was what all her work came down to, the uncovering of that truth.

Around her, the leaves stirred, the ferns bobbed and bowed, not to any breeze, it seemed, but to their own felt rhythm. She had always been in love with this sense of the movement of things, the visible world alive with a truth that could be found in its bones. This was what all her work came down to, the uncovering of that truth. She felt the knife in her pocket, the curve of its handle worn smooth over the years in her palm.

She thought then of Liam’s paintings, how different his way of seeing was, all flowing lines and swimming colors, the way he layered blues and greens and browns, a forming of new surfaces, she thought, rather than a revealing. She feared she had pulled a thread that would cause something valuable to unravel.

Liam was waiting, and likely cranky from lack of sleep, so Miriam headed back towards the trail. Rounding the top of the incline, she could no longer see him. She scanned up and down the bank but spotted no sign of him. His denim jacket was in a ball by the water. She felt a sudden chill crawl down her back.

“Liam?” she called out.

Silence.

“Liam?” She broke into a run, reached the place where he had left his jacket and saw clear tracks in the mud. There were his shoes, his t-shirt

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on the ground, by the water. She watched the current rushing ahead to the rocks below. Surely he had not gone in the water. It was cold. He would know better. She scanned the surface of the water anyway. She listened closely but heard only the sound of her own heart banging in her ears. She followed his tracks until the trail disappeared. She stood completely still, searched every inch of the mud’s surface, but the trail was entirely cold.

Liam darted from a tree not ten feet in front of her, the sudden bursting of his laughter ringing in the silence. He was barefoot and covered in mud, his face, hair, arms. He had been standing at the base of a tree, camouflaged, right in front of her this whole time. She caught a look in his eyes, their wild excitement, pure joy at having tricked her, having been, for once, the one who could disappear. He started to run, and she took off after him, half laughing, half crying with relief as she chased him down the trail. She felt her lungs burning with the effort.

There was a familiar, near bursting in her chest, a sudden rush of terror, loving Liam as she did and knowing the world for what it was, all of its horrible possibilities. She thought, with every pounding step on the ground, of all that was buried beneath them, ancestors older than she could ever fathom, and somewhere deep below, a long covered earth, older even than human history, all that rested on top of it built on this great unknown.

Liam gained on her, a flying blur of mud among the trees. She fell back and let him run, watched Liam, disappearing and reappearing, against the dark stand of trees beside the mounds.

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The Exodus of Andrew

McCallister Syd Kennedy

[ FICTION]

D

aniel lifts himself up into the arms of the biggest oak tree on the tallest hill at

Moriah Christian Camp. This is easier now that he is eighteen and grown into his gawky, babydeer limbs. In past years, just the act of hauling himself onto the lowest branch would be enough to trigger an asthma attack. Now he only feels the air catch in his throat for a moment before he perches on a sturdy branch with his back against the trunk. From this vantage point, he can see all the way to town, and as he looks at the road leading up and out of the valley where it sits, he thinks about how hard it would be to leave the place that raised him.

This is his last summer at camp, and at age eighteen, the last of his childhood.

Jordan keeps a watchful eye on him while he

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settles onto the branch. As his fellow music counselor, she has taken it upon herself to act as his de facto protective older sister, despite being freshly graduated from high school, same as him. She lives on the other side of the lake and went to a different school, but they have worked together for three summers now. A head shorter, she is unable to reach the lowest branch, but she still lifts one hand and grasps at the air inches away from the bark. She scowls and tips her head up to him.

“Waiting for Andrew?” she asks, although she hardly needs to bother. Daniel wears his emotions cleanly on his face and does not lie to her or to anyone else, except by omission, because that is less of a sin.

“Yes. We’re going swimming.”

“Lake or pool?”

Daniel’s nose wrinkles. “Lake. I don’t like the chlorine.”

“Your loss,” Jordan says, reaching into the pocket of her denim cutoffs for her pack of cigarettes. “I don’t like fish touching my feet.”

“A little nibble never hurt anybody,” Daniel said. “Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures, and—” “Please.” Jordan’s lighter hisses. She already has a cigarette between her teeth, even though the grass hasn’t even sprung back up yet from where their last group of campers for the day trampled it on their way to sit around the tree for music class. “The kids are already gone. No proverbs until Monday.”

“It was Psalms, actually,” Daniel says and ducks his head on impulse, although it doesn’t do much when she’s below him and can see his smile.

He watches her for a moment. Although he doesn’t smoke, he enjoys the ritual of it. When he lifts his head a moment later, he sees gold cresting up on its way to the peak of the hill where the tree is. “There he is,” he says.

Jordan cocks her head and squints. Daniel has had ten years to grow accustomed to looking out for Andrew, made easier by the fact that he is rarely more than a few feet away, and more often than not close enough for Daniel to feel the warmth of his skin. Now, Andrew spots Daniel in the tree and waves, although he pauses a few yards away to finish up a conversation with the other cabin counselors who surround him on all sides, drawn to the gravity of his center. Sometime between receiving their camp-issued t-shirts and the first day of the summer session, Andrew had torn off all of the sleeves, but he’s loved well enough by the camp directors that no one has reprimanded him.

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Below Daniel, Jordan whistles. “Damn. Has he been lifting weights?”

Daniel hums, too quiet to be heard at first, and then louder. “Yeah.

He has a set in his cabin. Dumbbells, and, uh. Barbells.”

“Oh, honey,” Jordan says, finishing her drag and snorting out the smoke through her nose. “Why don’t you skip swimming with him this week? You can drive into town with me and the girls from the ropes course. We’re gonna grab beers before the bonfire tonight.”

They meet eyes for a few seconds. She is one of a few counselors who have tried to distract him from the ill-fated plight of being in love with his best friend. Daniel, ever agreeable, pretends to give this a moment of thought. Even as he does his cheeks, sun-tanned as they are now at the peak of the summer sun, flush with pride, the worst of sins. He will need to confess this, abstractly and without details, on Sunday. “No, thank you.”

“I just want you to be careful, okay? He’s a real heartbreaker,” Jordan says, stubbing out the butt on the sole of her shoe. She is a good friend, and the honesty of that might be what brings the tiniest bit of wetness to his eyes, but it also might be the acrid smoke. He’s always cried easily at things that do not matter.

“He’s alright,” Daniel says, then carefully swings back down to the ground as Andrew finally steps within earshot. When Daniel leaves the dappled shade of the tree, he can feel the weight of the sun on his scalp, permeating through even the densest, dark curls of his hair.

“Hi, Jordan,” Andrew says as he slings an arm over Daniel’s shoulder and ruffles those curls while flashing his teeth at her. “I like your headband.”

She raises one hand to feel it and shakes her head at him. “Shut up, you sweet-talker,” she says, giving him a gentle shove as she heads down the hill to the parking lot. He whistles and she flips him off without looking back, just saying, “See you later, Daniel.”

“Oh?” Andrew asks, releasing Daniel from his grip and shoving his hands in his pockets, all old-school charm and mock-sheepish. “You got big plans with her later?”

“I think she wants to try to get me drunk at the bonfire.” Daniel bends to grab his camp backpack from where he left it leaning against the tree trunk, but Andrew beats him to it and slings it over his shoulder before they head down the hill in the opposite direction, toward the lakeshore.

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“As if.” Andrew kicks a small branch that’s fallen onto the path, and then pauses and steps backward again so he can gently move it out of the way. “We don’t have much time, by the way. My dad’s picking me up at five.”

Daniel rolls his eyes. Unlike most of the camp staff, Andrew spends his weekends at home in town. It’s against camp protocol, but nobody’s willing to argue with Sheriff McAlister when he says he wants his son home to help him out around the house.

“We better get going, then. I’ll race you,” Daniel says before taking off down the path, sneakers skidding in the loose gravel. He doesn’t need to look back over his shoulder to know that Andrew will let him have the head start, and he takes advantage of it to sprint down the hill, past the lean-to’s in the woods, through an overgrown field, and to the tightly-packed sand of the lakeshore.

His breathing is shallow, but enough to sustain him as he slumps with his back against the lake staff equipment shed while he waits for Andrew to catch up. He leans his sweaty head against the worn wood, and hooks his hand around the same root he’d held onto the day he’d met Andrew, ten years and a few weeks ago, during the worst asthma attack of his life. While he’d struggled to breathe after a failed swimming test, Andrew crash landed in front of him and fished his inhaler out of his bag for him. He’d had a crown full of gold hair, a collection of bruises and Band-Aids, and a mouth full of gaps. When Daniel didn’t say anything to him in response, he’d barreled on with making as much conversation as he could on his own, exhausting all possible options of eight-year-old interest. It was when he asked Daniel what he wanted to be when he grew up that Daniel finally had the lung capacity to respond.

A pastor, Daniel had said. Or maybe a chaplain. He didn’t really know the difference.

Andrew said that he wanted to be an astronaut, although Daniel never heard him say that again. Ever since, he’s said that he wants to be a baseball player, or maybe a gym teacher. But that day, he crossed his finger over his heart and lisped the word astronaut through his missing front teeth.

Daniel, not knowing what he knows now, had wrapped his little fingers around the root and wondered what could be so bad to drive someone away from the entire planet. He just didn’t have the words to ask, and he hasn’t found the words since then, any of the thousand times

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Andrew has mentioned how much he wants to leave town with Daniel.

It hasn’t happened. Not because there’s nothing strong enough to drive him away, but because Daniel’s gravity has kept him pulled too close.

They’ve always been in this together.

Even if Daniel had found the words to ask, Andrew would never give him a straight answer, anyway. He’s always been more of a man of action, and he doesn’t say anything now as he catches up and lifts Daniel up by the front of his shirt to kiss him.

B “I’m gonna call my dad and tell him I’m staying here this weekend,” Andrew says.

This year, Andrew is a lifeguard in addition to his usual duties, which Daniel enjoys all too much. The role has given him a pair of red swim trunks, a darker tan than Daniel has ever seen on him, and muscles he couldn’t even name if he tried. Andrew is still wearing those trunks and nothing else after they’ve shaken off the water from the lake like dogs and fallen in a pile onto their towels in the field next to the lake to dry.

“He’ll be mad,” Daniel says. “You don’t have to stay. I promise I won’t try my first beer without you there.”

“You better not.” Andrew doesn’t disagree with the first part, but he does sit up and start to dress. “It’s fine. I want to spend time with you.

You’re worth it.”

Daniel stays sprawled on his back even as Andrew’s movement starts to jostle him. First Andrew rubs out the sand from between his toes, then pulls on his long socks up to his tan line, and then slips on his boots. Daniel watches with care, although his eyes are drooping, lulled by the buzz of the cicadas and the comfort of letting his head rest on Andrew’s thigh. Slowly, his eyelids flutter shut, out of his control.

“Hey,” Andrew says, brushing Daniel’s hair away from his forehead and blowing air onto his face until he opens his eyes. “Let’s run away. I don’t care about college. We can just leave and stay with my aunt in the city. She loves us.”

Daniel hums and pries a tick off of Andrew’s sock. He’s heard this refrain all summer, and it only becomes more ridiculous the closer they get to his first day of seminary and Andrew’s start at community college, both in town, not a mile from where they’ve grown up. “I can’t just not show up on the first day of classes,” he says. “I’d lose my scholarship.”

“I know. I’m just saying. I wish we could leave.”

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“I know.”

“It’s okay,” Andrew says, but before he leans down to kiss Daniel again, he glances over his shoulder in the direction of the hill to make sure they’re alone. If he didn’t know Andrew better than he knows himself, Daniel wouldn’t even be able to see the fear that remains in his eyes as he turns back and leans in to press their lips together once before he gets up slowly and heads off in the direction of his cabin. He whistles as he walks.

If not an astronaut or a baseball player or even a gym teacher, Daniel thinks that Andrew could be the best actor to ever grace the screen.

B Shame is a learned emotion for Daniel. He hadn’t gotten it from his parents or even his religion, but he finally learned what it meant the first time he felt himself pinned under Sheriff McAlister’s heavy glare. Daniel’s body has now learned to cough up the same burning feeling whenever he hears the low grumble of Sheriff McAlister’s pickup engine.

Now, he sits up from where he’s lying on a bench in the dining hall when he hears that rumble and the pop of the gravel in the parking lot just outside. His head has been in Jordan’s lap while she works on a friendship bracelet and gossips with the other girls who have settled around the bench in a semicircle. Daniel has nothing to offer to the conversation, other than being the least threatening male counselor at camp, and also very good at staying still long enough for them to test nail polish colors on his toes.

Outside, the car door slams, and Daniel shoves his feet back into his sandals. “I gotta go,” he says, and is out the door before any of the girls have a chance to say a word.

He’s too late. He emerges from the dining hall just in time to see the door of Andrew’s cabin across the parking lot slam shut. Daniel can see from even this distance that the cabin shakes from foundation to roof with the intensity of it, but he cannot hear yelling. The McAlisters speak gently.

Daniel walks over to the porch of Andrew’s cabin and sits with his feet resting in the patch of dirt below the bottom step, watching as an ant takes interest in the red nail polish, then turns back and leaves just as fast when it realizes it is not fruit. He must not enter the cabin, so he sits very still and waits, watching the sky. It was overcast earlier but the clouds are starting to clear now, revealing a sky tinged pink and orange.

The sun will set soon.

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When the door opens behind him, he springs to his feet and turns to look Sheriff McAlister in the eye. They are the same height now, but at this moment the man is much taller with the three step advantage he has above Daniel, and even larger with the weight of what he knows about him and Andrew.

“Daniel,” Sheriff McAlister says, giving him a curt nod and dropping his hand to pat at the gun holstered at his hip once, twice, three times.

“How’re you now?”

“A little tired,” Daniel says, because saying that he’s good or fine would be a lie. “How are you, sir?”

“Been better,” he says. “Tell my son to stay outta trouble.”

“Will do, sir. Have a nice night,” he says, stepping aside to let Sheriff McAlister step past him to head back to his car, then hopping up the steps in one stride and entering the cabin.

Andrew is alone. The campers sleep in bunk beds during the week, but he and the other cabin counselor have single cots by the entrance.

Andrew sits on his now, staring out the window at the sky. He does not look to see who’s entered when Daniel gently eases the creaking screen door shut. No one else would come to check on him so soon.

“Hi,” Daniel says, sitting at the foot of the bed. “How can I help?”

“It’s fine. Nothing happened,” Andrew says. He hangs his head and seems to catch sight of the fresh t-shirt on his lap. His father must have caught him when he was about to change out of his camp clothes. Now he stretches and peels the sweaty shirt off.

“Andrew,” Daniel says. He lets all the air in his lungs out through his nostrils. “Can I get you an ice pack? What’d he do? If he’s mad you can just go home. I don’t mind.”

“He isn’t mad,” Andrew says. His left elbow is weaker than the other, the result of an old baseball injury, or at least, that’s what he’s always told Daniel. He pops it now and rubs it for a moment. When he pulls on the clean t-shirt and the white cotton is stretched tight over the back of his shoulders, he doesn’t turn back around.

He’s hiding from Daniel. He never used to do that.

“Okay,” Daniel says, although he’s not sure what exactly is okay about this. “I’ll be in the dining hall. Come and get me if you need me.”

He stands back up and waits for Andrew to turn around, but he never does. Instead, he hunches his shoulders more and rakes a hand through his hair. Daniel can see that this is another type of humiliation, and it is

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not the kind that they both share by virtue of being the only two boys like this in town. That wears on them in its own way, but Daniel has always had faith that the way that they love each other is not a sin. He knows that he will have to keep it quiet for his own safety, especially as he enters seminary, but he is not ashamed.

The line of Andrew’s shoulders breaks as he lets out a sob, and Daniel turns away and quietly lets himself out of the cabin. Andrew’s shame is the kind that suffocates. You can’t grow into guilt that thick, and Daniel thinks that it must eventually reach a point where you stop even trying to escape it.

Now he realizes that Andrew is poised at that brink, and he will not move without a push.

B After the sun has dipped softly over the tree line and the air has cooled, Daniel steals Andrew away from the counselor bonfire with nothing but a hand on the small of his back. Andrew has already made his rounds through the staff in attendance, flirting his way through the girls with his warm eyes and easy smile and charming the guys just as easily. For a moment in the low light of the blaze, he turns to press against Daniel. He’s hot to the touch with happiness everywhere but his hands, which are just clammy.

When Andrew kisses him, Daniel can taste the metallic tang of blood from the fresh cut on his lower lip. It’s familiar to him by now, and he worries that he will start to associate the flavor with intimacy.

He’s gone just as fast, and Daniel aches for that feeling to return, but he cannot reach out to pull Andrew close again. “Let’s go find some privacy,” he says instead.

Andrew nods and falls into step beside Daniel, but before they can leave the flickering reach of the bonfire’s light, Jordan steps in front of them. She reaches out one cautious hand to touch Daniel’s forearm.

“Daniel, hon. Want to come spend the night at my place? A couple of the girls and I are driving over soon,” she says, gaze never drifting over to Andrew. They have both gone to parties at her house before, but it is clear that this invite is only for Daniel.

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Daniel does not have the words to tell her that he is not the one she needs to protect. He simply shakes his head and heads off into the darkness where the fire does not reach, knowing without even looking that Andrew will follow and Jordan will not. They walk down the hill and through the field to get to the lakeshore, where there are enough mosquitos and cicada cries that none of the counselors have dared to go.

Again, they stop at the shed and sit down.

When Andrew kisses him, Daniel can taste the metallic tang of blood from the fresh cut on his lower lip. It’s familiar to him by now, and he worries that he will start to associate the flavor with intimacy.

This thought is what drives him to pull away a minute later. When he whispers against Andrew’s mouth, he feels like his mouth is also bleeding.

“I think you should run away,” Daniel says, but that’s all he gets out before he can feel the burn spike without warning in his lungs. His breath hitches once, and then again, and then he keeps hiccupping in fresh air, desperate to gain traction and slow down but unable to stop from slipping. The edges of his vision go blurry as his eyes wallow up with tears and he loses sight of Andrew. For a moment, he is sitting alone and wheezing into the empty night.

Then Andrew returns, holding up the latest of the spare inhalers he’s kept in his own pocket for the past ten years. When he presses it to Daniel’s lips, he slaps it away as he finally manages to take one long, greedy gulp of air. It will not help because this is not an asthma attack.

He is not the one suffocating here.

“Jesus!” he says, shocking even himself. His voice is raspy. “I can handle it myself.”

“Okay, okay!” Andrew says, flinching backward and then crawling away to fumble for the inhaler and slide it back into his pocket. He stays there a few feet away. “I’m sorry.”

They sit there in silence for a few minutes as Daniel slows his breathing back down to a regular pace. A firefly blinks its way between them, and then heads out over the water. A cricket creeps closer. If Daniel strains his ears to hear over the night frogs chirping and the water gently lapping at the shore, he can just make out the voices of the other counselors up on the hill.

“I’m not going to be able to keep this up during seminary,” Daniel says, finally. “Hiding you is just going to be a distraction from my work.

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I can barely afford it as is, and if my grades aren’t perfect I’ll lose my scholarship.”

“I can help you study,” Andrew says. “Please, Daniel. We can make it work.”

Daniel closes his eyes for a moment. Lord, give him strength. He’s not even sure if this is the right thing to say, but he swallows the blood that may or may not be in his mouth and sighs. “I don’t want you here,” he says.

It is, in his memory, his first lie.

Andrew wears the same look he wore when he took a baseball to the gut this spring. It was the last game of the season when he’d pitched his best ever game and still lost sectionals. It is not a look that he has ever had to direct toward Daniel. Daniel cannot even bring himself to meet Andrew’s stare, so he clenches his eyes shut, finds the old root with his right hand, and clutches it like an anchor.

When he opens his eyes, Andrew has stood up. There is just enough light from the moon that Daniel can see tear tracks glistening down his cheeks. Andrew is nothing like his father, so he will not put up a fight.

“I suppose I could leave right now, then,” Andrew says.

“You could,” Daniel says, and then pats the key ring in his pocket.

Because he is a senior staff member this year he has access to every building in the camp. They trust him here. “I have the keys to the shed.

I could get you a canoe to go to Jordan’s house across the lake, and in the morning she can drive you to the train station. You can go stay with your aunt.”

Andrew chokes out something that could be either a laugh or a sob.

“Stealing a canoe, Daniel? You’ll get in trouble,” he says, but Daniel has already risen and unlocked the shed door.

Andrew follows him in and without speaking they select one of the canoes, wooden and painted a dark, forest green. They walk it out onto the dock and set it into the shallow water. Daniel can see the outline of Andrew’s phone and wallet in the pocket of his shorts, and if he wants a full weekend’s head start, it’s not worth it for him to go back for anything else.

They have done this a thousand times in their ten years at camp together. Andrew was a scout for years, so he knows how to tie a knot to keep the boat snug against the shallow dock for a moment while he checks it to make sure nothing is amiss. It bobs softly in the calm water.

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He reaches one hand down to check the temperature of the lake, and fidgets with the rope, and then the oars.

“Andrew,” Daniel says, when it has become obvious that he is only procrastinating the inevitable.

Andrew straightens up and stands there for a moment, face inches away from Daniel’s own. With the faintest shadow of a bruise on the highest point of his cheekbone and the openness of his eyes, he looks almost no different than he had the day they met.

“Well,” he says, and gives Daniel the tightest of forced smiles before his face falls and his breath hitches again. Neither of them looks down, but Andrew fishes the inhaler out of his pocket and presses it into Daniel’s hand. “I guess this is goodbye,” he says.

Daniel nods. If he opens his mouth again he will ask Andrew to stay, so he simply kneels down to hold the boat steady as Andrew carefully lowers himself down onto the bench and offers a shaky thumbs-up. He is still crying, but Daniel can’t bring himself to waste tears on something this important.

Daniel releases the tether and lets Andrew float away. The black water is still, and looking down, Daniel can see the stars as clear as if he had tilted his head up toward the sky.

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[ POETRY]

Manufactured Days

Sonnet for a Smile

By: Daniel Thomas

By: William J. Joel

It’s one thing when you don’t know what you don’t have. It’s another when you do. He grew up when the neighborhood was mostly fields— scrub and dirt and thistles—just the place for a cardboard box tent, maybe a raft on an imaginary creek. His mother and father made sure he had clothes and food. And school was a gathering of sparrows like him. But his boys have so many problems. Two jobs and they still don’t have the right sneakers, the right game-units.

Long days at the chicken processing plant and weekends doing stock at the Walmart. His boys hardly know him.

They just know what they don’t have.

He was there when each of them was born.

Out of his wife’s writhing pain came a light that filled the sleepless nights, the second jobs—a light that feels as foreign now as the Arabic translations of signs in the Walmart break room.

And the love that began as the potency of two young people, feels impoverished by the minimum wages of time, the stinking factory, the short lives of birds plumped for the kill. But he knows exactly what he has, each possibility shrink-wrapped, fresh and glistening.

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[ POETRY]

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“Life is uncharted territory.

It reveals its story one moment at a time.”

Leo F. Buscaglia Who knew you had the gift of gab, had kissed the stone, and found a thousand stories in your head, all waiting to come out. But this is where the trouble starts. It all begins where stories crowd the single road that takes them to your vocal cords, from which they ride your voice straight up into your mouth, and makes the string of words that tumble like the tide.

Yet stories don’t abide each other; taking turns is not their way. Instead they fuss about their order, squabbling that could make or break a saint or turn an ear to mush.

And though you proffer story fragments, I’ll keep list’ning, just to catch your childlike smile.

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[ POETRY]

A Broken Record By: Mandy Brown He doesn’t ring the doorbell; its windchime welcome is a lie.

The red-eye surveillance blinks, warning him: he’s on record, walking to the door. He used to have a key, and even now

Alone

he forgets and attempts to open it, turning the knob, stepping forward, and banging his body against its refusal to give.

after he left has meant letting some chores go for now.

Her body jumps at the thud. She opens the door, her thumb pressing so white hard into a cell phone recording app the screen is broken.

Don’t tell your father, she wants to beg her child, but then he’ll know for sure. And he must be collecting his own record to give a judge.

He’s wearing jeans and a wrinkled gray cotton T-shirt, his belt missing. She’s sweating.

He must think she’s the enemy; she must assume he thinks she’s the enemy or else

Moments ago she was vacuuming up maggots swarming her kitchen floor like spilled rice fountaining from the dirty dishes in the sink.

she’ll lose the child standing with her backpack on, barrette in her hair, ready for her first day of school.

She knew she had to get to them but

finding a lawyer, recording dates, times, conversations,

seeing a doctor,

applying for work, paying off collections, refilling a depression prescription,

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contacting her child’s teachers, rehoming the dog, finding a therapist, applying for more work,

paying the bills, and filling a sleep aid prescription

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[ POETRY]

That Winter We Lived So Close to the Tracks the Trains Would Shake Us Awake Some Nights By: Trevor Kelsey Knorr and we would walk out to a bridge that hung over them, cold but playing a song about gin and kerosene, which seemed like they would warm us if we ever had the guts to drink, cold but still out here because if we consumed another comfort all that could possibly be left was a memory of when we would play this album, windows down no matter the weather, a memory of when we were convinced that this was all god’s dream and the barest parts of his mind were the coldest, when we would drive up a canyon to break thin ice on an unforgiving lake, dive in like the darkness beneath these waters held Abraham, and after our bodies rebelled at what we put them through we would finally be sick enough to know how he held the knife, what kept his steps steady on the journey up Moriah

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[ POETRY] but that never was. We are too old for this, looking over these tracks and feeling men being pulled from the guts of us boys, a hideous birth that has taken too long and left us all unable to part, listening to a song about best kept secrets and biggest mistakes, knowing ours are the stomachs that these men are pulled thrashing from, how we stuffed them with Bibles and crowns of thorns so that men could never crawl from our wombs without remembering it a place where their blood mixed with the word god, over and over and over their blood drawn from veins too thick to still be in here and falling on that word, their first home the stomach of faith, where a horror was learned, every pulse carries something that god is endlessly thirsty for and we are born to let him drink.

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Regan, Relict Of Keira Jann Everard

[ FICTION]

R

egan stood in the kitchen doorway watching Hugh skim over math assignments with

with quick check marks and corrections. “I need to get out,” she said. “Waiting for news is driving me crazy.”

Hugh marked his place on the page with a finger before he looked up. “Are you feeling well enough?

What if the hospital calls about your sister?”

Regan held up her cell phone. She’d checked already with the nurse on duty and didn’t think she’d hear again soon, not unless Keira “crashed,” as Trish had so baldly put it. “I feel fine,” she said.

“It was just a low-grade fever.”

Hugh nodded that he was game for a break.

“The Urban Farm or coffee in the park?” he asked, as they walked up the stairs from the valley a half an hour later.

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Regan stopped to catch her breath. “How about the cemetery?” she said. She expected Hugh to make a wry comment, but he remained silent. They skirted the farm’s outer fences, walking on spongy spring grass. When a baby stroller blocked their path, Hugh steered Regan around it. She let him guide her and retreated into her own thoughts, wondering why the image of Keira as she’d last seen her was now the only image she could recall. As they reached the edge of the park, Hugh pointed to a sandwich board propped in the middle of the Necropolis entryway. “Maybe it’s closed,” he said, and for a second Regan thought they’d have to turn back. But it was only an apology for the ongoing cleanup of debris, old trees in the cemetery hit hard by winter storms.

Hugh hovered by the sign. “Sure about this?” he asked. “We could walk through Cabbagetown instead.”

But Regan shook her head. Cabbagetown was a more cheerful neighborhood, but she hoped Hugh understood. Walking through graves was a way of facing the possibility that Keira might end up buried among them.

They weaved around puddles at the entrance. Cleanup had just begun. Past the portico was a stack of broken branches, while smaller twigs littered lawns too soft yet to rake. Some of the monuments also showed damage. Nearby, columns lay by their bases.

“Are you having a Hallmark moment?” Hugh squeezed Regan’s hand as she turned to wipe her face with a sleeve. It was embarrassing to be rattled by anonymous headstones. It wasn’t as if they triggered some sad personal memory. She hadn’t had to pick one out for her parents—her uncle had made that choice—and she and Hugh were still too young to start planning their own burials.

And yet, they weren’t. Because Keira, at age thirty-two and only six years older than Regan, was gravely ill. And Davis, Regan’s high school classmate, had died of cancer just after Christmas.

“Did Davis’s sister ever say whether he was cremated or buried?” Regan asked. “He was one of my oldest friends, but I never thought to ask.”

“It was midwinter. I don’t think people can be buried in midwinter.”

The fresh mounds of thawed dirt scattered among the older graves suggested Hugh was right. The piles were paler than the dark earth Regan was used to, as if the ash and bone fragments of the cremated and buried had lightened them. She’d read on the plaque outside that over 40,000 people had been interred here.

The top of a hedge that lined the pathway was whiskered with ten-

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drils of new growth. Regan ran her hand over it. Would she feel different if Keira were actually dead? Until the day before yesterday, it had seemed like she’d been gone for years—that the grief of Keira’s loss had already softened with age. Seeing her in the hospital had unboxed such a tangle of emotions, the surge of hopefulness that had welled up when Trish called quashed by what she encountered. Keira clearly wanted to die and if she did—today or tomorrow—the chance to change things between them would die with her.

Regan pulled away from Hugh. What stone would best represent her sister’s life, if it came to that? Not the sleeping lions or angels or the slabs carved to look like tree stumps or boat anchors. She stopped in front of a narrow pole jutting five feet into the air from a three-foot plinth. It looked too fragile to be made of stone, too lightweight to withstand the wind. Perfect, she thought. That would be perfect for the Keira she remembered. Tall and lithe, in the skinniest jeans, the most slender-cut dresses. As a kid, Regan had admired her sister. Her most vivid memories were of evenings when Keira insisted Regan model one of her outfits. “Try this, kiddo,” she’d say, tossing clothes onto Regan’s bed. In front of the mirror, squeezed into too-tight pants or a clingy top, Regan had waited for her sister’s decision. “I think it looks better on you. I’m too fat to carry it off,” Keira would say, leaving Regan to wonder why her sister would think such a thing.

“What is it?” asked Hugh, trying to place which of the graves had caught Regan’s attention.

“Look at the inscription on that stone,” she said. “Catherine Connolly, Relict of William MacBeatty. Can you believe it? Not wife of, not widow of, but relict of, as if poor Catherine were just some ruin he’d left behind.” She began to laugh. It seemed so preposterous. But soon her laughing was out of control, a mix of mucous and hiccups, and Hugh had to help her to a bench to sit down.

B The call about Keira had come Friday evening, just as Regan was making sauce for the salmon.

“My name’s Trish,” the caller said. “I thought you should know that Keira is in hospital.”

“Keira? Which hospital?” Regan had gestured wildly at Hugh to pass her a pen. He’d packed her a sandwich before driving her to the emergency department.

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Now, not forty hours later, Regan thought back to the call. “I wonder how long Keira’s been in Toronto,” she said, her head on Hugh’s shoulder, cheeks tight from the dried salt of her tears. The bench he’d chosen was out of the wind, lit by a thin beam of sunlight that was warmer than it looked. “I didn’t even ask Trish how she knew her.”

The last time she’d heard anything about her sister—from the uncle who’d been executor of their parents’ estate—Keira had been living in Calgary, too busy to come home. After the funeral, Keira didn’t answer any attempts to stay in contact, and Regan started to think of herself as an orphan. In her shock at Trish’s call, she hadn’t asked for a number she could use to call back. She knew so little about her sister and would have liked to ask about her life. But Trish hadn’t seemed eager to talk. “Look,” she’d said, “it’s not really my business to tell you anything. But it’s pretty bad. She may not recognize you.” She’d hesitated then. “They’ll probably keep her in the ER overnight. Unless she crashes, that is.”

“What do you mean, ‘unless she crashes’?” Regan had locked eyes with Hugh.

“Heart attack. Renal failure. Your family must have known the risks of anorexia, must have told her that she needed treatment. She said your parents paid for a shrink once.”

“I didn’t know that.” Regan had plucked at the phone cord, thankful she’d kept a landline and a surname in the phonebook that Trish had been able to find. Hearing the word “anorexia” upended her. She felt as if a firecracker had gone off in her mind, the sparks igniting memories she’d suppressed. But she also felt defensive. “Our parents are dead, and Keira left home when I was only eleven,” she said.

Trish was silent a second. “Look, I’m sorry,” she mumbled finally.

“Really, I mean it.”

That call had come Friday. Now it was Sunday. Hugh—thank God for Hugh—looked comfortable on the bench with his eyes closed, his face still, absorbing the heat. With his head back, his Adam’s apple appeared enormous on the white skin of his neck. A few freckles had already appeared on his nose.

“Thank you,” Regan said to him, moving closer.

“For what?” he asked, feeling for her hand without opening his eyes.

“You haven’t judged.”

“Why would I? Why would anyone?” He dropped her hand and put his arm around her shoulders instead. Of course, she would never judge

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Hugh for anything he did. But could she withhold judgment when it came to Keira? Could she understand her sister’s choices? Whatever bonds they’d once had had been broken long ago. When she thought of family, she thought of Hugh. She hoped he knew how grateful she was to huddle together with him in a sunbeam, the rusty smell of humus and turned earth all around.

B Regan had insisted Hugh drop her alone at the hospital’s emergency entrance, promising she would text him as soon as she knew anything.

Glass panes swooshed open at her approach, first one set and then another. Inside, two paramedics stood beside a man on a gurney. A security guard held the man’s flailing feet while a nurse wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm.

Regan edged around the crowd and approached the information desk.

“My sister was admitted here. Keira Aldwin,” she said to the man through a round hole in thick plastic.

The receptionist barely looked up from his notes. “Yes, she’s here.

Did she know you were coming?”

“I don’t think so.”

He handed her a peel-off sticker marked Visitor. “Through those doors. Check in with one of the nurses at the station in the back.”

The guard stepped aside for her to pass. Beyond, the halls were brightly lit, carts of supplies lining either side. Regan crossed two bisecting corridors before she arrived at what seemed to be the last. There was nowhere else to go.

“Who are you looking for?” a nurse asked.

“I’m looking for Keira Aldwin. She’s my sister.”

The nurse walked toward a desk. She seemed to expect Regan to follow. “Do you live with her?”

“No, I haven’t seen her for years. I didn’t even know she was in Toronto. A friend of hers called me. Is she okay?” It was impossible to see the patients here. They were all in closed-off glass bays, curtains drawn behind the doors.

“Any other immediate family?”

“No. Just me.”

“Wait here, please. I’ll find her doctor.”

She stood alone. The last time she’d talked to Keira had been a year

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after their parents died in a collision with a truck on a highway. Regan had been twenty-two. Hugh had been gentle after the call. “I think,” he’d said, “that at some point, the relationship between Keira and your family became irreparably damaged. Either your parents had compassion fatigue and backed off, or Keira wouldn’t accept help anymore.”

Maybe it was clearer to someone from the outside. The relationship between Keira and their parents had always been a mystery to Regan.

She’d been so young when her sister left home. She remembered the months before as a time of raised voices and slamming doors. Once she’d asked her best friend if her older sisters yelled too. Petra had shrugged.

“Of course,” she’d said, making a face that told Regan she was crazy to ask. “All the time. That’s what teenagers do.” But when Regan asked Petra if her parents yelled back, her friend had picked up the soccer ball they’d been kicking around the yard. “Not really. Do yours?”

Yes, they’d yelled back. And then, in the years after Keira had moved out, they’d whispered. Whenever Regan asked, “Where’s Keira?” or “When’s Keira coming home?” her mother had given the same answer.

“She’s in Calgary now. Maybe she’ll be home next summer.”

But the summers had come and gone and Keira never returned. The story was always the same, never embellished when Keira’s name came up. She was in Calgary now.

B The doctor looked awake and energetic despite the late hour. “You’re Ms. Aldwin’s sister?” he asked. He had the body of a runner, tightly muscled, eager to move on.

“Yes, how is she?”

“She’s very compromised, I’m afraid. We’ve been doing some tests.

May I ask you a few questions? We don’t have much history.”

“I’ll try, but my sister and I have never been close.” It was harder than she’d expected to say the words.

The doctor handed her a tissue. “I know this is difficult.” He confirmed Keira’s full name and birth date. Then he asked, “Do you know how long your sister has had anorexia nervosa?”

Again, memories flashed and crackled: her mother’s irritation, banging around in the kitchen. Her sister’s absence at mealtimes and rants as she rushed out the front door mere minutes after she’d come home. The need for Regan to go on sudden play dates so that Keira could be driven to doctor’s appointments.

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“I was really young when she left home. I didn’t realize she was sick,” she said.

The doctor poised a pen over his clipboard. “Can you tell me if there is any family history of psychiatric illness?

“I don’t think so.”

“Drug abuse? Alcohol?”

“I don’t know.”

“Medical conditions? Allergies to medications?”

She shook her head. He tried again. “Previous hospitalizations?”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t know.”

He put the pen down, glanced at a computer screen. “Her test results are starting to come in. We did blood work and an MRI to rule out other causes for your sister’s weight loss. Do you want to see her now?”

“Yes, but why is she here?”

“It’s hard to say. Anorexia is a complicated disease. Your sister may not even be able to tell you why she controls her eating. I’ll come to find you later, once I’ve had a chance to look at the test results and work out a plan.” He opened the glass panel next to where they’d been standing and held back the curtain. Keira had been close by the whole time.

In Regan’s memory, her sister’s hair had been a deep, natural mahogany, her skin pale and unblemished. The woman on the bed had hollowed cheeks, hair grey and disheveled. If they’d met in the street, Regan wouldn’t have recognized her. She turned back toward the doctor behind her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have mentioned that she was very agitated when she came in. We had to sedate her. I’ll leave you two alone now.”

Regan stayed where she was. They’d dressed her sister in a hospital gown and covered her with a sheet. Both were now rucked up and twisted, leaving thin arms and legs exposed like broken branches tucked into fresh snow.

“Oh my God, Keira,” she whispered. All she could think about was straightening the sheet, hiding the skeleton that had once been her sister. She tugged at the cotton. It came free, as well as the bony protuberance that was Keira’s hip, knuckle-hard, no fat under a sheath of skin.

Regan swung her gaze away to avoid staring. There was nothing about this person that she remembered or recognized.

The nurse who entered gave the room a clinical once-over before

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turning her attention to Regan. “I’m Lonnie. You could move her things from the chair, if you want to sit down. I’ll get a bag so you can pack them up.”

“How much does she weigh?” asked Regan.

Lonnie checked the IV, wrote down a few numbers. “She weighed in at fifty-eight pounds, but the bed scale may be a little inaccurate.”

That was less than half of Regan’s own weight. “How’s it even possible she’s alive?” she asked.

Lonnie paused. “Did the doctor talk to you?” she asked.

Regan didn’t reply.

“Well, she won’t come out of sedation for hours yet. I can get you a blanket if you want to wait.”

Regan lifted Keira’s clothes off the chair. They seemed like mere scraps of fabric. Safety pins jingled at the pant waist and the back of the bra. She rifled Keira’s near-empty handbag, texting Hugh its contents: Sixty bucks and a driver’s license. At least I know where she lives now. She dozed and was woken intermittently by voices in the hallway. At some point indiscernible as either night or day, Lonnie said, “She’s waking up.”

She sunk into her chest, cold to her core, suddenly a kid again, hiding from the emotional exhaust that had always hung over her family.

Regan clung to the bed rail, leaned in to kiss Keira’s cheek but stopped just short of it. “Keira? It’s me, Regan.”

Keira lunged, surprisingly agile, pushing Regan’s face away. “Get her out of here!” she screamed. Regan fell back as two security guards appeared out of nowhere, the six-foot men holding the arms and legs of her fifty-eight-pound sister so tightly she was afraid the bones would snap.

They shielded the nurse from clawing hands and kicking feet. “Get her out of here,” Keira wailed. “It’s over. Over! Let me die!”

The doctor. Another nurse. More drugs pushed into the IV. Explanations, so soft-spoken that Regan could barely take them in. Cognitive impairment. Psychiatric hold for assessment. Weakened heart. Regan stood in the hallway, eyes glued to the glass that separated her from Keira. She sunk into her chest, cold to her core, suddenly a kid again, hiding from the emotional exhaust that had always hung over her family. When

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Keira was tranquilized and covered with a sheet once more, Lonnie suggested it might be best for Regan to go home. “Get some rest,” she said.

“Come back when we have some answers.”

“But she doesn’t want me here,” Regan said, and then pulled herself together. “She’s my only sister. Is she going to…?”

“She’s not herself,” Lonnie said. “She’s sick.” She held up a thermometer. “You know, you look a bit flushed, too. Do you mind?” She’d held the probe to Regan’s ear. “I’m afraid you have an elevated temperature. I know this is difficult, but until your temperature is normal you shouldn’t visit here again. Your sister is too weak to resist infection.”

Regan nodded. “But I can send some things, right?” she said. “She’ll need a toothbrush and a comb. Maybe some socks?”

“Of course. You do that.” Lonnie patted Regan on the shoulder and steered her to the exit.

B Regan took a taxi home and spent the next day in bed. She couldn’t decide whether she was really sick. At one point, she woke and sorted through her bedside table. “Did you move the square of blue fabric that was in here?” she demanded of Hugh. “Did you throw it out?” He handed her the cup of tea and backed off. “Call the hospital, Regan,” he said.

She’d put off calling until Sunday morning, just before she suggested they get out. There was little information in the nurse’s report. “We’re being slammed here with flu cases. We’re hoping to transfer her to either a medical or psychiatric inpatient unit. It’ll depend on whether we can stabilize her heart.”

Now, sitting on the bench with Hugh, the expression played over and over in Regan’s mind. What did it mean to stabilize a person’s heart?

She couldn’t stop thinking that Keira’s heart must be broken. It was the only possible explanation for the state she was in. And yet, it wasn’t. She and Keira had shared the same loving childhood. Keira had made her own choices. Her behavior was no longer baffling to Regan. Now she was angry.

She lifted her head from Hugh’s shoulder. A fly buzzed past and flew toward one of the toppled monuments. “We should keep walking,” she said.

She watched Hugh stretch and stand. He’d known her parents before they died, known the sadness and confusion that clung to her mom and dad when Keira’s name came up. He’d understood the family’s need to act with some semblance of normalcy. But the sister-daughter that

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Regan and her mother had pretended still existed somewhere was not the Keira she’d seen in the hospital yesterday.

“This wasn’t my parents’ fault, Hugh,” Regan asserted, as if responding to the first salvo in an argument. “There was never anything wrong with the way they treated us growing up. If Keira felt unloved, it wasn’t because our parents didn’t try. And I loved her, too! She was the one who was difficult.”

“Regan.” Hugh frowned as he looked at her. “No one is blaming you or your parents for Keira’s condition. It doesn’t really matter how she came to be anorexic. It’s just something we have to deal with now.”

Regan glared at him, her emotions churning. She needed a bit of distance, a moment to collect herself. Keira was doing it again. Grabbing all the attention with her drama and her needs. There was another spirelike monument nearby and she pushed her palm hard against the red granite. The rock looked smooth, but sharp nubbins punctured her skin.

“Damn you, Keira. Goddamn you. And you—” She whirled on Hugh.

“It’s not your problem, so don’t pretend it is.”

Hugh uncrossed his arms but didn’t approach her. “Regan, please,” he said.

She rubbed her sore hand. She loved the blue of Hugh’s shirt, the way a few red curls showed at his open collar. “I’m sorry,” she said, moving toward him, leaning her whole body against his, letting the anger seep into the earth at her feet. “Let’s go get Keira some of her things. We’re not far from the address on her driver’s license.” She led him out of the cemetery to the adjoining neighbourhood. They walked the streets in silence. When they were near the building—a run-down low-rise—Regan said, “I don’t have a key.”

“Hand me your ID,” said Hugh, pressing the button on the pad that read “Super.” He explained what they wanted when the man came to the door.

“I saw her leave in the ambulance,” he said. “Is she planning on coming back?”

“I can’t answer that. We just need to pick up some clothes and a toothbrush right now.”

The man opened the unit for them and was about to go when he glanced back into the room. “She’s behind in the rent, eh? Girls like her always are.”

Hugh reached for his wallet. “I’ll settle it,” he said, giving Regan a warning look. “Go on in. Take your time.”

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She was left alone in the small apartment. This was not how she’d imagined her sister’s fairy-tale life since she was a child. Slender, attractive women like Keira got good jobs out west. They wore clothes that other women envied. They didn’t stop eating for reasons no one understood. They didn’t live like pigs.

Keira’s living room held nothing but a coffee table and a pullout couch, its dirty sheets tousled. A lamp, shaded with an orange scarf, stood next to a full ashtray and lipstick-stained glasses. A fist-sized hole punctured the wall near the light switch.

In the second room, a faded-cotton spread covered the bed. Regan went to the closet, ran her hand over the few clothes hanging there so that the wires clattered together like wind chimes. On the floor, three pairs of scuffed shoes lay jumbled together.

She found a nightie under the bed pillow, a toothbrush and a cosmetic bag in the bathroom. She’d avoided the photos in frames on the bedside table when she’d entered the room, but now she approached them. In one, five women crowded together in a bar, their looks defiant, their outfits and makeup loud.

“You done here?” Hugh glanced at the photos, gestured at the second one. “You and Keira as kids?”

Regan balled up the nightie and held it against her chin. It smelled sweet, of honey and reminiscences. By some fluke of perspective, she looked taller and older than Keira in the picture. Keira held her arms straight at her sides, already wise to poses that would make her appear thinner. Regan was flouncing her skirt, so pleased she fit into Keira’s cast-off—newly purchased, unworn. She’d loved that dress because Keira had given it to her. Loved Keira because she’d chosen Regan when she’d had something to give. When the dress no longer fit, she’d kept a scrap of the fabric—the blue Viyella grown thin where she’d rubbed it lovingly between finger and thumb.

She thrust the nightie into her bag and her hand into her jeans pocket. She thought she’d felt her phone vibrate, but maybe she was just shaking with fever. She remembered setting the volume to loud; why didn’t it ring?

“Let’s go,” she said to Hugh, nudging up against his side, needing to touch him, to feel the solid, normal weight of him. Her cell phone did ring then, and she clutched it screen side down, braced like a monument for whatever news it would bring.

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The Well

[ FICTION] August 19th, 1997

Julia Leef

T

he bell chimes against the wooden frame, announcing us to everyone in Sal’s. The only

person who looks up is the cashier, but his eyes drop back down to the muted television set on the counter before the door finishes swinging shut. I want to know what he’s watching, but I’m not tall enough to see over the counter.

I can’t wait to get my growth spurt. I’m the only girl in my class who isn’t taller than the boys yet. Cassie says it’s because I’m not feminine enough, which I

think means I need to wear more dresses and act like I like the idea of kissing boys. Cassie is very feminine, but she’s only the ninth tallest person in our class, so what does she know anyway? Maybe God doesn’t let you grow too much if you’re mean to someone who used to be your best friend.

Once we’re in the store, Mom walks off immediately.

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She knows exactly what she wants, so I only have a few minutes to explore.

The overhead fan rotates uselessly in the stuffy air that smells like the inside of my grandpa’s pick-up truck. Deer antlers hang from the ceiling, crisscrossing like the branches of the dead trees in our backyard. A sign tied to one of the antlers reads, Sorry, not for sale. I run my hand along the shelves, fingering a Milky Way. It’s a funny name for a candy bar and I think about astronauts going out into space to harvest chocolate. I walk down the aisle, my giant, imaginary net scooping up galaxies of candy and stardust.

In the back of the store, next to a row of plastic sandcastle buckets with tags screaming “SALE,” I spot the pens. The sign in the back of the box says: Wack-A-Doo Crazy Pens! Light up in the dark! I pick out a blue pen, my favorite color. The trick is to bang the end against something hard, like a countertop or a wall; when I try to use my hand, it doesn’t work. I hit it against the shelf and it flashes like a strobe light. I have never seen this kind of pen before, and I know no one else at school has one.

I squeeze the pen in my hand, searching the aisles for Mom. I give the sandwich display a passing glance. Mom says they make the sandwiches on Monday and throw them out on Sunday. It’s Saturday, and I’m not that hungry anyway. Mom’s in the preserves aisle weighing a can of peas. I slip the pen into her shopping basket.

“Put it back,” she says without looking up.

“Put what back?”

“Whatever you just snuck into my basket. Put it back where you found it.”

“I didn’t sneak anything!” I pull out the pen and wave it in front of her.

She replaces the peas on the shelf and picks up a different can, checking the expiration date. “It’s blue and it lights up,” I say. “I need a new pen for school, and it’s not even—” “I’m tired of buying things you only use once,” Mom says. “I bought you one of those plastic balls to play with at the beach and you lost it a week later.

And when you wanted that little doll with the big hair more than anything else in the world, I got it and you never played with it once after the car ride home.”

“That was when I was nine,” I protest. “That was when I was little.”

It’s useless. When Mom makes up her mind about something, you can’t argue her out of it.

“It’s just a pen,” I say. “It’s not even five dollars—” “Maybe for your birthday,” Mom says, smiling slightly. My birthday is five months from now.

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“But—” “Cat, I won’t tell you again.” The smile is gone, and her attention has switched back to the cans.

I stomp away so loudly the cashier looks up from his television set again.

I roll the forbidden pen in my hand, banging it against the shelves to watch it light up. She’ll get a dozen cans of peas, which she knows I don’t like, but she won’t get me a cool pen I would use every day. This isn’t like those other things. This is practical.

I turn the pen over in my fingers, rubbing my thumb against the rough gel edges. I get good grades in school, I always brush my teeth at night, and sometimes I even help with the laundry. I think of all the lazy, spoiled kids whose parents buy them everything they want. I deserve this pen.

I walk back, hiding the pen in my jacket pocket. Now Mom’s over by the medicines, reading the label on the side of a giant bottle.

“Mom? Can I have a mint?” I ask. She always keeps mints in her purse, in the left-inside pocket. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my ears.

“Wait until we’re in the car.”

“Mooooooom—” “For Heaven’s sake, Cat, fine! Take it!” Her hands are too full with the basket, so she lets me pull the purse off her arm. I stick my hand into the right-inside pocket where she keeps her cash. I quickly pull out a five-dollar bill and crumple it in my sweaty hand.

“Thanks, Mom!” I leave the purse on the floor and walk to the front of the store. Fast, but not too fast. I throw my money and pen onto the counter.

When the sleepy-eyed cashier picks up the bill, I stash the pen in my pocket and start to walk away.

“Hang on a second, kid.”

A policeman jumps out from behind the counter and slaps handcuffs on me, saying I’ll be packed away for life. Mom complains how inconvenient this is for her—she has too many errands to run today to deal with her criminal daughter. Aunt Violet suddenly appears to tell her this could have been avoided if only she had let me go to church— “Don’t forget your change,” the cashier says.

The cashier slaps six cents on the countertop. I slide the coins off and put them into my pocket with the pen.

“Cat, I hope you’re not bothering this man.”

I jump so high I almost bash my head on the ceiling of antlers. Mom appears behind me as if drawn to my sins. She has a full basket of canned

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goods on one arm and is holding a package of Robitussin in her hand. She’s been coughing ever since last Monday. Sometimes I can hear her through the walls late at night.

“Did you know this is expired?” she tells the cashier, holding out the medicine. He turns it over in his hand.

“Just by three days,” the cashier says. “It won’t hurt you none.”

“You expect me to pay full price for expired goods?” Mom says. I hate it when she does this. I bet all the other boxes on the shelf were fine, but she picked this one out on purpose.

“Tell you what,” the cashier says. He seems tired. “Why don’t you take it off my hands? No charge.”

Mom smiles as she hands over the rest of her groceries to be scanned and bagged. The pen burns white hot in my pocket. I think about returning it, but I can’t get Mom’s money back. I have no choice but to keep it. I’ll have to remember to ask for forgiveness in my prayers tonight.

“Cat! Let’s go!”

I follow Mom out the door and the bell tinkles behind us as we walk back to the car.

September 23rd, 1997 Every afternoon when I get out of school, I have a whole hour to myself.

Mom doesn’t leave work until four, and now that I’m ten I’m responsible enough to be home alone as long as I don’t open the door to anyone or go down the street. I like to play in our backyard, running my hand through the long strands of yellow grass that grow back there. Sometimes I lie on my stomach so I can’t see the house and pretend I’m anywhere else in the world.

But my favorite thing to do before Mom gets home is to go into the woods and pick up as many good-sized rocks as I can carry until I get to the old well. Mom says the well used to be how the previous owners of our house got their water, but we don’t need it because we get our water from the town reservoir like everyone else. She doesn’t like me playing back there because she’s worried I’ll accidentally fall in, so I keep it a secret.

When I was a baby, before we moved here, a huge fire burned up most of the woods. Some new trees have started to poke out of the ground, sprouting tiny patches of green that stand out against the blackened stumps. Mom says by the time I’m her age, the trees will have grown back. It’s hard to tell now whether there are more live trees than dead ones, and sometimes I’ll count them to see which side is winning.

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The well dips down where the ground has collapsed beside it. The grass there is spongy, and when it’s warm out I like to take my shoes off and squish my toes in the muck. If I shove off the wooden cover blocking the opening, I can see the water way deep down below. I give my reflection a little wave and then drop the rocks down the well one by one, waiting for the plop of the water and the echoing splash. I could stay out there for hours, and sometimes I forget the time until I hear Mom calling me from the back porch.

By the time Mom comes home today, half an hour later than usual, I have already been to the well and am now sitting on my bed with a book in one hand and a chocolate-chocolate cookie in the other. Mom made them for the school bake sale, but she won’t miss one. I hear the front door slam and hastily jam the rest of the stolen treat into my mouth, wiping away the telltale crumbs. When I’m sure I’m clean, I run downstairs. Mom always starts dinner when she gets home. I hope we’re having mashed potatoes tonight.

I skid into the empty kitchen, my dirty socks sliding on the floor, but there’s no sign of Mom. I find her in the living room instead, sitting on the couch with her shoes kicked off and her eyes closed. She hasn’t even taken the chicken out to thaw yet.

“Are we eating out tonight?” I ask, leaning on the couch arm. Mom sighs and looks at me.

“I’ll start dinner in a minute. I just need to rest my eyes for a bit.”

“Want to hear what I did at school today?” I ask, hanging off the couch so that my toes slide against the floor. Mom sighs again. She still looks sick, even though she’s been through the entire pack of Robitussin. Maybe the expired pills were no good after all. Her hair is spilling out of her work bun and her eyes are red.

“I just want to rest for a minute, Cat,” she says. “Can we please just be quiet for one minute?” Mom leans her head against the back of the couch and closes her eyes again. I’m not used to seeing her like this. I have to say something. I can’t help myself. I don’t want to think about the fact that her cough hasn’t gone away yet. I count to sixty in my head, fast.

“So guess what I did at school today.”

Mom opens her eyes and slowly pulls herself up from the couch.

“Okay. Tell me about it while I get the pans out.”

After we eat and Mom helps me with my homework, I wait in bed while she showers. I’m supposed to be asleep, but I like to stay up because Mom always makes sure to check on me when she’s done.

I’m almost asleep when she finally comes in. She stands in the doorway

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for a long time before I hear her feet shuffle across my carpet. When she leans down, her hair falls over me and the scent of strawberries tickles my nose.

“Cat?” she whispers. I open my eyes. She’s sitting on the bed, combing her fingers through my hair. I shut my eyes again. It feels nice.

“Cat,” she says. “Aunt Violet might visit us a lot over the next few weeks.

She might even stay overnight sometimes.”

I usually don’t see my Aunt Violet much outside of my birthday and the holidays when we all go over to Grandpa’s house. Once, when I was six, Mom asked Aunt Violet to watch me for the weekend while she covered a co-worker’s catering shifts. We went to the movies and mini-golfing on Saturday, and then on Sunday morning Aunt Violet took me with her to church. She told me about God, how He washes away our sins and that we should pray to Him every night to ask for help and thank Him for the good in our lives. I didn’t understand all of it, but I liked the idea of someone who could grant wishes and would forgive me for anything as long as I asked.

I try to listen to what Mom’s saying now, but it’s like listening for a rock I have dropped down the well, the echoes fading back into silence.

Mom was furious when she found out. She said it wasn’t right to “impose her fanciful beliefs” on me, especially when she had made it clear that I was not going to be raised a Christian. I didn’t see Aunt Violet for a while after that. Now Mom wants her over again. I hope that means they’ve made up.

It’s hard getting together for family dinners when no one wants to talk to each other. I try to listen to what Mom’s saying now, but it’s like listening for a rock I have dropped down the well, the echoes fading back into silence.

“Things are going to change, and I need you to be brave. I need you to be brave for me, because I’m very scared. Cat?” I try to open my mouth to ask why, but sleep takes hold of me and I slip away, the echoes of her touch lingering in my hair.

October 5th, 1997 The car is silent. Aunt Violet has her head buried in some papers she printed out this morning. She’s come over almost every day this week. Behind the wheel, Mom stares out the windshield while the wipers tick back and forth like a metronome.

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I watch the raindrops race each other across my window. I like to root for a single drop and see how many others it can eat up before it falls out of sight beyond the glass. I’m not sure why I had to come with them to the pharmacist. I think it might be because Aunt Violet doesn’t approve of my being left alone. She’s been making a lot of suggestions lately.

“You really should look at some of these articles, Barb,” Aunt Violet says.

I keep staring out the window. I have no idea what they say; Aunt Violet snatched them out of the printer before I could see.

“Leave them on the kitchen counter before you go,” Mom says. It doesn’t sound like she’s interested. They stop talking and my mind wanders again.

Today has not been a good day for me. I brought my blue, light-up pen to school and when Cassie saw it she made fun of me for liking “baby things,” which is stupid because babies don’t use pens and anyway I don’t see why she needs to say anything at all when we haven’t spoken to each other since before the summer. She was laughing about it with Marnie, another girl I used to be friends with until she and Cassie decided they didn’t want to be friends with me anymore, only they won’t tell me why, which is the most unfair thing of all. I called them bad names in my head and had to ask God for forgiveness.

“Barb, I know you don’t want to talk about it—” Aunt Violet says.

“Then don’t bring it up,” Mom says.

“But you need to consider the real possibility—” “Vi, not now.”

“Then when?” The shrill in my aunt’s voice startles me, brings me out of school and the raindrops. Aunt Violet has put the papers down and is staring at Mom, who has not taken her eyes off the road. Her hands are tight on the steering wheel. “You need to accept that this isn’t going to go away. You need to think about the future, about preparations you’ll have to make.”

“I’m so glad to hear you’ve already written me off!” Mom’s shouting frightens me. It’s not the first time I’ve heard them arguing since Aunt Violet started coming around, but they always stop when they see me. Now it’s like they’ve forgotten I’m here. “You want to go pick out a nice plot for me?

Already got your speech all prepared for the service? It’ll be hard to top the last one. You even made Dad cry.”

I wish for a police car, a dead deer, an accident, anything to stop this conversation. When Aunt Violet speaks again, it sounds like she’s trying not to cry.

“This doesn’t have to be like Mom. Don’t you see that’s why I’m trying to help you with all this research? I want to fight this as badly as you do, and I

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think you can beat it, Barb, I really do. But we were left stranded after Mom died. I just want to make sure we’re prepared. Think about Catherine—” “Don’t say ‘we’ like this is happening to you,” Mom says. “This is happening to me, not you!”

“Just because I can’t feel your pain doesn’t mean I don’t share in it,” Aunt Violet says. “I pray for you every day, you and Catherine.”

“Well, shit, cancel the chemo then because if you’re praying for me I’m as good as cured!”

“God provides for me. And He’ll provide for you too, if you let Him.” “I don’t need anyone to provide for me. I do just fine on my own.”

“Is that what you told Dad after Daniel left?”

Even though I am wearing my seatbelt I am still thrown to the side when Mom jerks the car off the road. She throws the gear into park and gets out, slamming the door behind her. For a second our eyes meet through the rainwashed window and I can see her crying. Then she hides her face with her hand and turns from me. The rain soaks her in seconds as she marches down the road, away from the car, back toward home. Aunt Violet gets out too, shouting Mom’s name. She drops back into her seat, slamming the door shut and muffling the sound of the rain. Her papers lie discarded on the floor. She buries her face in her hands.

I don’t say anything. I want to stay in this moment, this instance before she has to explain everything to me. I’m not stupid. I know what chemo means. And I know what happened to my grandma, why she died before I was born. But I don’t want to say it out loud. As long as no one says it, it doesn’t have to be real.

Aunt Violet looks at me. Her eyes are red and her face is soaking wet from the rain. A thin strand of dark hair hangs over her face. She and my mom have always looked alike, even though Aunt Violet is five years older. I look a lot like Mom, too, when she was young. Grandpa tells me so every Christmas.

“Catherine, honey,” Aunt Violet starts. “There’s something your mother should have told you. It isn’t right that you go on not knowing.”

Don’t say it, I think. You don’t have to say it.

“Your mother has breast cancer,” Aunt Violet says, and now it’s real, it can’t be taken back. I hate her in that moment, even as she keeps talking.

“She is very sick and, well, we all want her to get better. But it’s going to take a long time and there’s going to be some changes. You and I, we’ll both have to be there for her, even though she may not want us to be. Do you understand?”

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The rain runs down the front windshield in sheets. It drums against the roof of the car, tiny beats hammering into the empty space. My throat feels like it’s closing up and my eyes sting like they do when I open them underwater in the ocean. I think of our trips to the beach during the summer, collecting seashells in the surf, begging Mom for ice cream money, digging holes in the sand and watching the water rush in to fill them.

“We should go find her,” I say, my voice barely louder than the sound of the rain. “It’s cold outside, and she doesn’t have an umbrella.” Rainy days stuck inside, bouncing off the walls of our house with too much energy.

Doing jigsaw puzzles together wrapped in blankets. Watching the season’s first snow settle in and Mom promising to let me know if school is cancelled tomorrow. “When she goes to the hospital, will you take care of me or will Grandpa?”

Aunt Violet looks like she might cry again, and it’s not fair because I want to cry, too, and if we’re both crying who’s going to get Mom out of the rain? There in the car, I pray to God, the hardest I have ever prayed for anything in my entire life.

Please, don’t let my Mom die.

March 23rd, 1998 “Remember, everyone, your career projects are due tomorrow. Don’t forget to tell your parents about the special presentation night on Friday.”

I have been staring out the window and don’t notice that the other students have left until Miss Perry sits in front of me.

“Catherine? Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Two squirrels are chasing each other up and down the trees in the schoolyard. They both run off as kids start to come out of the building, heading to buses or cars.

“Honey, is everything alright?” Miss Perry has been my teacher for two years now. She moved up to the middle school just when I did, so I got to have her in fourth and fifth grade. She’s younger than Mom, and she always wears sweaters, even when it’s hot outside. Today she is wearing my favorite sweater: a thin, dark blue with silver sparkles along the neck and bottom.

She’s also wearing a blue and gold scarf wrapped around her head where her long, blonde curls used to be. Miss Perry was absent for an entire month at the end of the last school year. When she came back in the fall, her hair was gone and she wore headscarves instead. We all knew what had happened but no one wanted to ask her about it. It never used to bother me, before.

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“Your aunt called me last night about what’s going on at home.”

I see my bus in the middle of the line. Number 42. The last few kids get on and the doors close behind them. Aunt Violet is going to be worried when it doesn’t drop me off. She moved in with us two weeks ago. My mom used to fight her on things, saying she could do them herself, but now she just lets her sister take care of everything. It’s like she’s given up.

“Catherine?”

The buses pull away from the school. Miss Perry is playing with her hands. She’s covered them with navy nail polish, but I can still see where the fingernails have splintered. There’s a bandage wrapped around her left pinky where the nail’s fallen off.

“They’ll grow back eventually,” Miss Perry says. I feel bad for staring, but she doesn’t seem upset.

“I was so sorry to hear about your mother,” Miss Perry says. “But I expect you’re getting sick of hearing that, aren’t you?”

All I’ve been hearing since October is how sorry everyone is. But it feels better coming from Miss Perry.

“I wish people would stop bringing it up,” I say. “It’s like they think they have to mention it. I’m not going to forget that my mom has cancer.”

“Is that why you hit Cassie the other day?” Miss Perry asks. “You know she was just trying to be nice. You two were such close friends last year.”

“Lots of things have changed since last year,” I say, glancing up at her bald head.

“I’ve noticed,” Miss Perry says. She leans down and reaches into my bag before I can stop her and pulls out a silver charm bracelet.

“This is Marnie’s, isn’t it?” Miss Perry asks. I don’t say anything. Miss Perry sets the bracelet aside. “I’ve seen you take some of the classroom supplies as well.” She rests her hand over mine, and I want to pull away from her damaged nails. “I know this is hard. This might be the hardest thing in the world, but trust me, and I say this as someone who has gained a lot of perspective on the subject recently, acting out like this is only going to make you feel worse. We can find more productive ways for you to channel your feelings.”

“I don’t want to see a counselor,” I say.

“It helps more than you think.”

I shake my head no. Miss Perry sighs and lets go of my hand. She gets up and grabs a large, brown shopping bag from underneath her desk.

“Will you give this to your mother for me?”

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She hands me the bag.

“Catherine, when you are ready to talk to someone, just come find me, okay? We’ll get lunch together.”

“Thank you, Miss Perry,” I say, and leave the classroom. Once I’m outside, I peek into the bag. It’s filled with colored headscarves and a note from Miss Perry. I throw the bag onto the ground and some of the scarves fall out into the dirt. What is Miss Perry trying to tell me by giving me these scarves?

She should keep them for herself, she’s the one who needs them. My hands are shaking and I can feel myself slipping. I don’t want to be brave, and I don’t want my mom to have cancer.

A car horn honks and I see Aunt Violet waving at me from the bus circle.

Miss Perry must have called the house. Mom would have offered to go but I bet Aunt Violet insisted. Before, if I got into trouble, Mom would come get me and we would drive around the neighborhood until we had talked it all out. Now I’m stuck with Aunt Violet. I look back down at the scarves. There is a blue one with pink flowers, a yellow one with orange circles, and a plain green one. Mom will probably like that one best. I glance up at Miss Perry’s classroom window, then carefully gather the scarves together and put them back in the bag. Then I run over to the car where Aunt Violet is waiting.

April 8th, 1998 I wait up in bed for Mom like always. When she comes into my room, I can see how tired she is. Her hair hasn’t fallen out yet, but we think it might soon. Mom refused to shave it. She wanted to keep it as long as she could.

When she sits on my bed and takes me into her arms, I inhale her freshly-shampooed hair to preserve the scent in my memory. For a few minutes, Mom just holds me, then she pulls away.

“Do you think I’m a good mom?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Don’t you think so?”

Mom runs her fingers through my hair. I look up at her and she gives me a small smile.

“I know I was never a perfect parent. I should keep better track of your friends and your grades, and I know when I’ve had a bad day it shows at home. But I think I did an okay job raising you.”

I assume that’s the end of it, but Mom scooches me over and props herself up on my pillow.

“Do you wish you had grown up with a father?” she asks. It’s the only time in my life she has ever brought him up on her own. I learned early on

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that my father was not someone to be talked about, ever. Whenever Aunt Violet or Grandpa try to, Mom just gets up and leaves the room. Once we left in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, the turkey half-carved.

“No,” I say. “I don’t know what that’s like, so it’s not like I know what I’m missing. I like just being with you. We don’t need anyone else.”

Mom smiles, kissing the top of my head.

“When I was your age,” she says, “I didn’t get along with my dad. He always liked your aunt best. But I was our mom’s favorite. She didn’t buy into the whole God thing like they did. She’d go to church with them to stay involved with the community, but she never made me go. My dad didn’t like it, but he had my sister, so it worked out.

“By the time our mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was already in stage three. Did you read those pamphlets your aunt printed out?”

I shook my head.

“Good, I don’t think she checks her sources. When you have stage three breast cancer, there are still treatment options, but because the cancer is so advanced, they need to be more aggressive, and the rate of recovery isn’t as high as in the earlier stages.

“When my dad found out, he was determined my mother would beat it.

He went with her to all her appointments, held her hand during chemo, even tried to take over her church duties for a while until the other ladies took pity on him. Vi and I helped around the house, ran errands in town, and picked up summer jobs to help pay for her medical bills. For three years, our lives revolved around her. We were like a team, working together to conquer the cancer. But when she died, it felt like all of that had been for nothing. I remember sitting at the funeral, listening to the pastor talk about how she had lived a good life and now she was with God and at peace. And I thought to myself, ‘Well what if she didn’t want to be with God? What if she’d wanted to go on living?’

“After that, my family and I grew apart. I went to college on the other side of the country, stopped coming home for the holidays. I feel bad about the missed time, which is why I force us to visit now, even though it almost always turns into a disaster. I was in my junior year when I met your father.

We dated for a few months, and just before the year ended, I found out we were going to have a baby. You. I wanted to stay with him for the summer, but he said he needed time to process things. He promised we would talk.

The summer passed but he never reached out or answered my calls. When senior year rolled around I found out he’d transferred to a different state.

After that, I stopped trying to contact him.

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“My dad was more okay with it than I thought he’d be. He offered to have me live with him but being home brought back too many memories, and I didn’t want to be that girl who got knocked up in college and had to move back home. But I think he took it personally, and our relationship wasn’t that strong to begin with. Last year, when I told him about my cancer, I thought he would step up the same way he did with my mom, but I think it’s too hard for him to go through all of this again. That’s why Vi’s been trying to ‘help’ so much. Sometimes I wish she’d just leave things alone, but it is nice to be cared for. Don’t tell her I said that though, she doesn’t need the vindication.”

She stops and there is silence between us. I don’t know what to say, or if I’m supposed to say anything. There is something final about her having told me this story. I have to sort out the two conflicting images of “Mom” and “Barbara” and I’m not sure I can do that just yet. I want to go back to before, when she was just “Mom” without all these extra details attached to her.

“Why did you tell me all that?” I ask after the silence has gone on too long.

“I’ve just been thinking lately that you don’t know a lot about your own history, or mine,” Mom says. “I wanted to make sure I told you about it. Your aunt would say you’re too young to understand, but I don’t think she gives you enough credit. You’re a smart cookie.”

Mom kisses me again and gets up to leave. I have a feeling that there is something more to tonight, but right now it seems easier to just sleep and worry about it later. I close my eyes as Mom shuts the door behind her, and I’m asleep before her footsteps fade away down the hall.

June 26th, 1998 I can hear them arguing from upstairs. My bedroom door is only cracked open a bit (Aunt Violet says nothing wholesome ever happens behind closed doors), but this house has always had thin walls, and no matter where I go I can’t escape the fighting. Sometimes it’s about my mom’s chemo appointments, sometimes it’s about Grandpa or God or something else Aunt Violet’s done. Today it’s about me. Aunt Violet found out about the stealing, and she wants Mom to make me see a therapist.

I don’t see what the big deal is. Most of the kids haven’t even realized they’re missing anything. I stopped taking stuff from the classroom once I knew Miss Perry was watching me, but no one pays attention to their backpacks at lunch.

And it’s not like I’ve taken anything valuable, except for Marnie’s charm bracelet, which Miss Perry gave back to her after she “found” it in the classroom.

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On my lap is a shoebox filled with the things I have taken over the past few months. Some are things that I wanted, but others I just took because they were easy; bags left unzipped, items sitting on desks while everyone went to recess. I only take what people won’t miss. I’m not doing it to be mean. Except for Marnie, but that was a special case.

Aunt Violet is saying something about me stealing wallets next. Mom doesn’t like this.

“My daughter is not a criminal! God, Vi, you make her sound like the next Jesse James or something.”

That’s when I finally leave my room, rucksack in hand. I inform them both that I am leaving this life behind in exchange for adventure out in the Wild West, full of train robberies and bank heists. I walk outside to where my gang is waiting for me, mount my horse, and we ride off into the sunset, to a place where no rules apply and our only limit is the horizon.

Downstairs, Aunt Violet is talking about therapists again.

“Plenty of people see them, there’s nothing wrong with it. Dad and I both saw a therapist after Mom died and it really helped us process our grief.”

“She’s just acting out. All kids her age do it.”

“Not all kids her age have mothers with cancer.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault?”

“That’s not what I said.”

I try and tune them out, shifting around some of the objects in my box.

The trading cards I keep at the bottom. I don’t have enough for a full deck yet, and even if I did I have no one to play with. There’s a Polly Pocket case I took from someone’s desk—I don’t even remember who—but I lost the doll a while back and now all I have are the accessories. I’ve got gel pens in every color except blue, and the blue light-up pen from the store only writes in black ink. It still works though, and I like to bang it against my headboard in the dark when I can’t sleep. They’re just little things. It’s no different from when Mom cheats the store out of their expired goods.

“I don’t care what her teacher supposedly told you,” Mom is saying. “I trust my daughter.”

That one stings. I replace the lid on the box and shove it back into its hiding spot underneath my bed, behind some sneakers and an old winter coat. Aunt Violet isn’t allowed in my room, but after this I wouldn’t put it past her to make some excuse to search it. I walk downstairs as quietly as I can, intending to sneak out the back door. But when I get there, Mom and Aunt Violet are in the kitchen, and I have no choice but to walk past them,

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trying to pretend like I have not just heard every word they were shouting at each other.

I also try to pretend I can’t see how awful my mom looks. She hasn’t washed her hair recently, and it’s getting thinner every day. Her clothes are a lot tighter than they used to be. She’s got her head in her hands so I can’t see the shadows underneath her eyes. She doesn’t look at me as I walk past, but Aunt Violet tries to stop me.

“Catherine, we need to have a discussion with you.”

I keep going. Sometimes, if I pretend I haven’t heard her, Aunt Violet will pretend she never said anything.

“Young lady, get back here.”

I’m almost at the door but at the last second she grabs my shoulder, her nails digging into my shirt. Our eyes meet, and for the first time I notice she has shadows under hers, too.

“Don’t you think your mother has enough to deal with right now without having to worry about you?” she says.

“Violet, that’s enough.” Mom’s voice is low but dangerous.

“I’m only trying to—” “What do you know about raising children?”

Aunt Violet lets me go. There are tears in her eyes. I might feel bad if they weren’t there so often. Mom says nothing as I disappear out the back door and head into the woods. Part of me is glad, but part of me wishes she would make the effort to stop me, instead of just watching me go.

August 19th, 1998 I hear the front door open but make no move to go downstairs. I’ve been spending a lot more time in my room lately. My blue pen lights up but then quickly fades. It doesn’t work as well as it used to, and sometimes it doesn’t light up at all. I bang it against my headboard again. I can hear them moving into the living room, the groan of the couch as Aunt Violet sits Mom down.

“Catherine? We’re home. Come down and say hello to your mother!”

I bang the pen again, watch it flash and die out quick as a firefly.

“Catherine!”

I slide out of bed and drag my feet into the hallway. When I reach the stairs I set down one foot, then the other, making enough noise so Aunt Violet won’t call out again. I smack my pen against the railing, watch it blink once and then go dark. I shuffle into the kitchen. I can see dust motes floating through the slanted sunbeams. The kitchen table is covered with papers,

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pill bottles, and a few of Miss Perry’s headscarves. Aunt Violet insists that Mom wear them when she goes out, but she usually leaves them at home.

She makes a big show of proving that she doesn’t care what other people think. Sometimes I wish she would just wear them.

I’m caught in the space between the two rooms, and I waver on the threshold. Aunt Violet is finding her place in the book she’s been reading to Mom. Slowly, I drag my eyes across the scratched hardwood floor and over the red, braided rug that covers up the worst of the damage, tripping over my aunt’s green toenails poking out of her open-toed sandals, and up the faded, floral print of the couch.

Mom smiles at me, her cheeks flushed with health and her eyes dancing at me from between strands of her long, dark hair. The scent of strawberries washes over me, and I have never been so happy because she is cured, my mother is cured. God fixed her, He made everything better. Everything is fine now.

Only that isn’t what I see when I look at the couch. No matter how hard I imagine otherwise, I cannot overwrite what is real with what I only wish. Thin, dead wisps of hair clinging to a bald scalp. Eyes that have sunken deep, leaving bluish rings against sickly-white skin. She is wrapped in so many blankets you almost can’t see all the weight she’s gained. My throat clenches, my eyes burn.

I’m afraid of her.

I don’t want to look. The more I look, the more my mother as I knew her disappears. Her long, beautiful hair that smelled of strawberries, the feel of her fingers against my forehead. How she would send me to bed without dessert if I didn’t finish eating all my greens but would pack something sweet in my lunch bag the next day. How she fought against Aunt Violet, against anyone who told her she couldn’t do something. Everything about her that made her my mother. Mine.

“Come here, Catherine,” Aunt Violet says, and my memories scatter like minnows. She has found her spot and is holding the book out to me. “Your mother wants you to read to her.”

“No thanks,” I say, gripping the doorframe. Then she, this stranger that used to be Mom, fixes her distracted stare on me, and I finally meet her eyes.

“That’s a nice pen, Cat,” she says. “Who gave it to you?”

I look down, surprised. I had forgotten I was holding the pen, bought so long ago with stolen money. I remember this and the guilt grips my heart and holds it tight. I never told her, tried hard to keep the pen hidden from her, and now it’s out here in the open and it doesn’t even matter.

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“Cat? What’s wrong?”

I turn and run up to my bedroom. I dig under my bed until I find my box and take it with me back downstairs. I can hear Aunt Violet calling out. but the screen door bangs closed behind me and I am outside running through the backyard. Feathery strands whip past my knees, then the brightness of the sun dims as I hit the trees and enter the coolness of the woods. I run with my pen clutched in a tight fist and my box clamped underneath my arm. I trip over an exposed tree root and come up bloody, but I keep running until I reach the well. I drag off the mossy cover, stare down into the unreachable depths, see my own face staring back. I hate my reflection with my long, thick hair and my red, flushed cheeks that might one day become pale and sunken as my hair falls out and I disappear within myself.

With a broken scream, I fling the bright, blue, light-up pen into the well. I open my box, filled with the things I’ve stolen over the past year, just because I could, because I deserved them more than other people, but if God won’t fix my mother then he won’t forgive me for these either. I throw down erasers and mini-staplers after the pen; a Hello Kitty watch, three bent Pokémon cards, a yellow Tamagotchi, the entire Polly Pocket set. Finally, I dig into the corner of the box and pull out the nickel and penny I could never bring myself to spend or give back. They hit the water, shattering my reflection into a hundred pieces. My legs give out and hot, painful tears drip off my chin. My sobs can’t get out, as though an invisible hand is choking me, strangling me, refusing to allow my selfish grief out into the world.

I gasp for air, slumped on the ground. My jeans are soaked from the wet grass. It rained last night and the trees are still dripping from the downpour.

The burnt trunks tower over the younger saplings that have sprung up between them. They are so small. It doesn’t seem possible they could ever erase the memory of the fire. But Mom promised that the woods would grow back someday. I suck in one last shaky breath, prop myself up against the well, and start to count.

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Excerpt from

“A Pacific North West Journal of Ecological Facts and Findings” Jarrett Ziemer

[ NONFICTION] Chapter 2. Native Flora Dendrological Observations • Noble Fir:

Genus- Abies Species- Procera Common names- Red Fir, Christmas tree, The First

Observations- Occurring in the Cascade mountain range at high altitudes or leaned against a white tarp in the parking lot of your favorite grocer. The species is notable for the various colored ornaments it produces in the winter. It is the first tree you will recognize as a thing that lives and dies. It will die slowly in your house, every year, being kept on the edge of death and relinquishing needles by a green twenty dollar plastic tray of stale and then refreshed water. Your parents will wait by the tree for you to fall asleep, passing time with red and tired eyes by watching Jay Leno. You will wait upstairs, wide awake, with your older sister, under the banister. You will silently bring to fruition a plan days in the making. To your parents, you are everything and this tree stands brilliantly adorned, sparkling red and blue in your living room, displaying the unity of your family. Bending down on tired knees, they will strategically place presents around it marked: From Santa and from Mom and Dad. You will first see, from your perch behind the banister, that Mom and Dad placed all of the presents, Santa’s presents and their own, and that he is in fact, not real. You will next see the shining red and white dirt bike, a Yamaha PW50. You will ruin the surprise that night, pretend you didn’t the next morning, and never forgive yourself. Your parents will see through the sham. They will not mind as much as you think. As time passes, you will bond with your father, over the bike and your personal similarities, and you will grow more distant from your mother. The years will stretch, and the family’s unity will die slowly and painfully, like the tree. The angel on top––who patiently waits in the cardboard box until it is her time to shine every year––will watch it all unfold.

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• Western Juniper:

Genus- Juniperus Species- Occidentalis Common namesJuniper, The Tree on the Other Side of the State

Genus- Quercus Species- Garryana Common names- Garry Oak, Oregon Oak, The Ancient Ones

Observations- The coniferous and shrub-like Western Juniper prefers the dry rocky areas of high desert locations. You personally observed it in the central region on the east side of the Oregon Cascades. The tree is one you will never forget. The smell, at its simplest, is enveloping and intoxicating, and at its most complex, beyond words.

Observations- The Oregon white oak ranges from the Southern tip of the Western United States to the Northern tip of the Western United States, although you will have found the most prominent and ancient of the species lining your grandparents’ front yard. The tree is notable for its wide variety of uses, including but not limited to rope swinging, leaf pile making, and climbing (note: due to the high placement and general thickness of the lower branches, climbing is only recommended for those with no fear of heights, broken bones, and/or death). The only thing older than the ancient oaks on your grandparents’ property, the one you now call home, is your grandfather. He is a hard man and a dinosaur among men. He has worked for the state as a mechanic, wrenching on faded yellow equipment and vehicles his entire life, and done odd jobs on the side to help make ends meet. When your father and his brothers and sisters still have their baby teeth, with your grandfather’s help, they will build a tree fort high in one of the ancient oaks. Your clan has always been obsessed with the stars, where they came from and where they were going, and so in order to get closer to them, they have also always been climbers. As a child, you felt deep inside that you were one of them, and although the wooden ladder nailed to the side of the oak tree has been gone for years, your fears buried, you will climb to the tree fort. Sitting, you will wait patiently and quietly at the top of the tree until the stars come out. You will not know how to get down, and your grandfather, the dinosaur, will strap on his spurs, a tool from one of his odd jobs, and dig them into the sides of the tree, climbing up into the canopy of stars to retrieve you. Words will not be exchanged. He will take you down on his back, as you clasp tightly around his neck for your life. You will squeeze so tightly he will lose nearly all of the air in his lungs on the way down.

Safely on the ground, he will give you a once-over, a health inspection, before walking casually to the garage, replacing the spurs on their shelf, heading into the house, and watching the evening news. He will be happy you were stuck in the most ancient of the oaks and needed his help.

When he is even older, he will sit in his chair, lonely, and he will look back and remember the times when his grandchildren still needed him.

The prayers are not for the headache-inducing smoke to end, but for the magpies, and the jackrabbits, the juniper, and the sunshine.

Your grandmother’s nose will run, and her old eyes will become itchy and red when she is within a hundred miles of this tree. The acreage owned on the east side of the mountains, the magpie, jackrabbit, and fire ant hill-haven, the land that will always be a part of the sun god’s beloved kingdom and home to the Western Juniper, will largely go unused because of the allergy. Occasionally though, in the summer, your grandfather will pack the old Blazer full of his grandchildren. He will pop the hood, he will check the oil, and he will kick the tires. He will leave early and smoke cheap cigarettes the whole way, making the trek.

The air in the car will bite, and your eyes will burn, and you will pray you get there and quickly. The prayers are not for the headache-inducing smoke to end, but for the magpies, and the jackrabbits, the juniper, and the sunshine. Later in life, you will brew beer and sit around tables with other men and women that do the same. The group takes itself seriously and makes up words for the things it thinks smell good: Spicy, floral, citrusy, dank, and aromatic. Aside, you remember the juniper, the western juniper, and the time when a smell was so enveloping and intoxicating and defining, it was beyond description.

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• Oregon White Oak:

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• Western Hemlock-spruce:

Genus- Tsuga Species- heterophylla Common names- western hemlock, The Climbing Tree

Observations- The western hemlock is a species native to the entire western coast of North America and noted for its name, which reminds you of the plant that was used to poison Socrates. The tall spruce is an evergreen that will keep its needles until the day it is ruthlessly cut down. It is notable for its thin bark and its remarkably good climbing limbs. Along with many varieties of pine, the western hemlock is among the best climbing species in the Pacific Northwest. Well before you brave an oak and are rescued by your grandfather, you will learn to climb trees, by first climbing the forgiving western hemlock bordering the cow pasture in your backyard. One bare foot placed on the seeping bulbous burl a few feet up from its roots, your body will shift, spring and rocket into the tree. Securing yourself, you will enter the corridor to the canopy. Years later in early high school, you will climb to the top of it, years since you have last climbed it and higher than you have ever climbed. You will bring a pocket knife and you will carve initials and a heart into the thin bark. You understand what love is and will love the initials forever. When you are older, and forever has passed, you will return to the property and your favorite tree. The world will be smaller then. The summers that used to feel years long will now feel days long.

The days will feel like minutes. The property that used to be an ever-expanding homestead will be a few old worn-out acres. Approaching the climbing tree, all you will see is an unobstructed view of Mount Hood.

In its place, a stump remains. The carved initials, your youth, and your first love, will all be distant memories.

• Blue Spruce:

Genus- Picea Species- Pungens Common names- blue spruce, white spruce, Colorado spruce, Your Grandmother’s Favorite

Observations- The blue spruce is non-native to the Pacific Northwest, although it finds itself all over the country and in the Pacific Northwest alike in ornamental use. The tree is characterized by its

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densely packed, sharply tapered, waxy blue-grey and green leaves that you will steer clear of when mowing the lawn. The blue spruce is notably your grandmother’s favorite tree. It was once a live Christmas tree in her house. She enjoyed its company and color so much she planted it, first by digging a wide, careful, hole with a small spade. She then, reaching her yellow-tipped fingers into the soft earth, perfected the edges of the hole, patting and smoothing, before gently introducing the tree.

Your grandmother will watch the hummingbirds and the tree from her view as she smokes cigarettes on the porch. When she planted the tree, a single ash floated down on the breeze, like a tiny hummingbird feather, from the cigarette in her mouth into the hole she had dug. She has used two boney and sturdy fingers to purse a cigarette to her mouth every day of her life, from her thirteenth birthday on, and she will smoke them up until her premature cancerous death. When death comes, like the cancerous cause, it will leach out into the family. Your grandfather will not speak of it. The death will rip cousins and aunts and uncles apart, and you personally will dehydrate yourself with tears. Weeks later, in the middle of the night, the tears will subside. You will wake and sneak out to the tree with some of your grandmother’s ashes, and you will dig your brown hands into the old dirt and bury them there, mixing them with her hummingbird feather ash. You will notice the deathly white and grey bark, common to the blue spruce, that is obscured from view by the dense foliage, and you will notice the yellow and brown carcinogenic patches that line it.

• Sierra Lodgepole Pine:

Genus- Pinus Species- Contorta Subspecies- Murrayana Common names- Tamarack Pine, Lodgepole Pine, The Sacrifice

Observations- Within its general range, comprised mostly of the Cascade mountains, the lodgepole pine is a familiar and often observed staple. While camping in the Cascade mountain range, you will fish and laugh and drink feverishly under its shade. Approximately four miles northwest of Ollalie Lake, you will find a particularly rare and special Sierra lodgepole pine, towering and monstrous at the top of a rockslide above an unnamed lake. You will be a recent high school

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graduate who has lost his grandmother, and the tree will aid you in the exploration of loss and your masculinity. The tree is rare because of its location, and it is special because you will cut it down. You will remove your shirt in the summer heat. Your cross-country, rail thin, and patchyhaired figure will swing an axe with everything it has into the base of the tree. You have seen trees felled and will imitate what you have learned.

The angles will be perfect, and when you tire from exertion, your best friend will take over. Eventually the tree will begin to lean. It will crack with a swing and the sweat- and blood-soaked axe will swing one more time. The tree will become a Rube Goldberg. The axe will release it, the tree will lean, it will fall, it will topple end over end, and it will crash into the lake below. You and your friend will stand silent, waiting to feel something for the tree. You feel nothing for its loss, you will boast. You will tell each other you feel accomplished for doing nothing but killing. As the years go on, your relationship with the friend will strain and split into diverging paths, separate but equal. You will both look back at the time you killed the lodgepole pine, a rare and special tree, with fondness. Not fondness for the killing, or for the complex pleasure and sadness the cutting down brought, but for the close friendships being an adult male, busy and isolated, denies.

• Zebrawood:

Genus- Mocroberlinia Species- Brazzavillensis Common names- Zebrano, Zingana, Allen Ele, Zebrawood, The Most Expensive Thing You Have

Observations- Zebrawood is non-native to the Pacific Northwest. Zebrawood is non-native to North America. Your family, pushed apart long ago in way after way, will be nonexistent. You will be alone, and you will wander alone into Martin Lumber, looking for the most expensive hardwood they have. Past the hardwood domestics and before the odds-defying and pricey burls, next to the deep mauve purple heartwood, you will find it. You will leave with the yellow and brown striped wood that resembles a zebra under your arm. You will never see the tree, and you will rarely think about the fact that it once was one. You have a mission and are determined. For the next month you will passionately

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labor in your damp, dark and mildewy shop. Your will and your hands have hardened. You will cut and recut and sand and drill and string and stain the Zebrawood. The endeavor, your art, your handmade guitar, will be a gift for a girlfriend, a future ghost of Christmas past. She will accept the possessed guitar, and she will accept you. Then she will not. Like the Zebrawood, the relationship will be intersected by continuous light and dark, ending in a final dark note. You will question everything you knew about love and trees.

• Shore Pine:

Genus- Pinus Species- Contorta Common names- Twisted pine, lodgepole pine, Contorta pine, The Energy Tree

Observations- Shore pine is found up and down the Pacific Northwest coastline and is well-known for its wind-twisted, crooked shape. It is a resinous conifer that is also notable due to the pockets of spiral energy you will tell your counselor, your artistic teacher and spirit guide, they possess. Like the shore pine, you will have been shaped, crooked and twisted by the winds of your life. You will seek out solace and direction in the teacher you tell about the pines. She will tell you about energy, and you will feel it everywhere. The lines will quickly blur between teacher and counselor and friend, and the entire time you will wonder if she is a charlatan and a snake oil salesman whose only fault is her belief in her own medicine. You, for a time, believe in her medicine, too, and in the future will always wonder if she was onto something.

Before you part ways, she will teach you things. She will teach you that anything you give power to has it. That if you believe a tree is special, it is. If you believe a person is special, they are. And if you believe you are special, if you simply believe, then you are. She will also teach, through her own faults, to be wary of anyone that has too many answers for too many questions, and to especially be wary of anyone that asks for money for them. Years into the future, you will learn the world is a question and there is probably only one answer.

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• Yellow Grove Bamboo:

(Note- bamboo is not recognized as a tree. The circumstances of its observation, though, benefits mention in the section. For more information on bamboo see the Agrostology section.)

Genus- Phyllostachys Species- Aureosulcata Common namesbamboo, The Loving Tree Observations- Yellow grove bamboo is a running timber bamboo native to China. It is mistakenly used in many Pacific Northwest yards as an ornamental privacy barrier. To this date, yellow grove bamboo has never been kept under control and restricted to one yard or designated area. An especially robust patch of yellow grove bamboo will be located in the backyard of your new girlfriend’s parents’ house. You will date her for years and slowly grow accustomed to what it is like to have a family again. She will call you, and text you, and bother you, and tell you she loves you. Her parents will call you, and text you, and bother you, and tell you they love you. They will have no idea what they have given to you and you will have no words to describe how this makes you feel, and the patterns and ruts of an early adulthood spent alone will betray your appreciation. One day, the father of the girlfriend will ask for help taming the wild bamboo in the back of his yard. He knows your love for his daughter and fishing and will cut down one bamboo stalk and offer it to you, to make a fishing pole out of. He will then cut down ten more and offer you them all. You will take all of them, like you take the family’s love, the love that runs like the yellow grove bamboo and will never be contained.

the yearly pilgrimage clarifying, and the pine in the state especially good for home building and for dreaming of it. You will be drawn to them and an idea behind their lean trunks. Preparing ponderosa pine for a home is a process that including cutting, trimming, and laying to dry, can take many years. Preparing yourself for the process will have taken over thirty. When you decide it is what you want to do, you will do it. You will pack up the old rig. You will check the oil. You will kick the tires. You will bring Zyrtec and love letters just in case she develops an allergy to the place or you. You will keep live Christmas trees every year. Things die, people die, but your Christmas trees will not. You will invite your grandfather and parents to come stay a while and watch the grandchildren, who need looking after. You will understand that love is probably the only answer in a world that is only a question. That love is not art–– art is a gift that is a part of yourself and not the entire thing, and that it is not a name carved into a tree. You will shoot out into the world like bamboo, carrying with you the seed of all of your life and its lessons, and with them, you will plant a tree for your future to climb upon. You will climb and climb and realize that family is not a destination, a past, or a future––that family is a feeling and you are feeling it.

• Ponderosa Pine:

Genus- Pinus Species- ponderosa Common names- Bull Pine, Blackjack Pine, The Manifesting Tree

Observations- The ponderosa pine is native to sixteen western states and is the state tree of one: Montana. You will grip the steering wheel, bleary-eyed, and drive past many Ponderosa pines on the way from your current home to visit the ones under the big sky. You will find

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Nonfiction

CONTRIBUTORS

Page 6 Yurina Yoshikawa holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and teaches fiction and non-fiction writing at The Porch Writers’ Collective.

Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Hyphen Magazine, Chapter 16, and elsewhere. She is a 2019-2020 OZ Art Wire Fellow and the winner of the 2020 Tennessee True Stories Contest. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Fiction

Page 80 Jarrett Ziemer is currently a student in the undergraduate writing program at CWU. His work has been published in the Manastash Literary Journal.

Page 50 Jann Everard’s fiction has been published in Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand in journals including The New Quarterly, Geometry, The Examined Life, and Grain. Jann was the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2018 Open Season Award for Fiction and the 2019 Scugog Council for the Arts Literary Contest. She divides her time between Toronto and Vancouver Island, Canada.

Page 32 Syd Kennedy is a recent graduate of American University who now works in sports journalism. She lives in Washington, D.C. with two roommates and one ghost. You can find her hiking around local parks, watching hockey, or tweeting as @sydneykz12.

Page 62 Julia Leef received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in 2018. She is an emerging writer currently employed at Macmillan Learning in Boston. “The Well” draws on a variety of childhood memories and family stories, including a passage from her great-grandmother’s diary.

Page 14 Kathryn Stinson is a writer and psychotherapist who is privileged to work with people on navigating responses to collective and intergenerational trauma. Her work has been published in Beloit Fiction Journal and River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things.” She hails from Nashville, TN, studied writing at Knox College, and currently lives in St. Louis, MO.

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Poetry Page 46 Mandy Brown (she/her) is a queer Central Texas poet, a 2019 Poetry Half-Marathon winner, and the 2013 recipient of A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Tillie Olsen Fellowship. Her work has been published or forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Eunoia Review, and more. Mandy currently teaches at an alternative school for high-risk students and loves it! Read more at mandyalyssbrown.weebly.com.

Page 45 All things are connected. That’s the premise of what William J. Joel does. Each of Mr. Joel’s interests informs each other. Mr. Joel has been teaching computer science since 1983 and has been a writer even longer.

His works have recently appeared in Common Ground Review, DASH Literary Journal, The Blend International, Liminality, and Chronogram.

Page 48 Trevor Kelsey Knorr writes poetry and nonfiction, currently living in Salt Lake City.

Page 44 Daniel Thomas’s collection of poetry, Deep Pockets, won a 2018 Catholic Press Award. He has published poems in many journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, Poetry Ireland Review, The Bitter Oleander, Atlanta Review, and others. He has an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University, as well as an MA in film and a BA in literature.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST: Avery Kiker is a senior at Belmont University studying Publishing and Design Communications. Writing will always be her first love, but over time she has become fascinated by the visual and technical aspects of storytelling. She enjoys working on projects where words and images intersect.

Find out more at averykiker.com.

FROM THE ARTIST: All of the photographs used in the image (and the photo that inspired the illustration) were taken at The March on Washington in 1963, where MLK Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech (the text pictured). With all the protests and social justice initiatives that are taking place, I wanted to know more about the history of Black protests in America and went searching through some archives. When I stumbled upon these photos, I couldn’t help but find it ironic and heartbreaking that so many of the signs used in 1963 could just have easily been carried through the streets in one of the recent protests today—signs demanding an end to police brutality, jobs for all, and equal rights, among others.

I wondered what these men and women would think about the fact that 57 years later, their children and grandchildren would be marching for the very same causes…I couldn’t help but think of this community, and all the people who have been longing for equality, justice, and peace for so long.