Belmont Story Review Volume 6: Destination

VOLUME VI SUMMER 2021

A national magazine of literary arts, faith, and culture DESTINATION

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TABLE of CONTENTS EDITORIAL STAFF Editor

Sara Wigal Managing Editors

Laura Huie Grace Carey-Hill Public Relations Coordinator

Submissions Coordinator

Olivia Brothers

Tiffany Alexander

Art Director

Social Media Managers

Copy Editors

Caitlin Burdette Isabelle Kanning Mary Ganser

Emma Sherk Alex Lanz

Olivia Walker

Poetry Editors

Publicists

Adrian Connelly

Meagan Irby

Grace Smith J.T. Fortenberry

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POETRY

8 9

Off Bahia Honda Duo

FICTION

12 42

Arterial Devotion

POETRY

56 58

Rosh Hashanah Sestina An Origin

NONFICTION

60

Shake Your Teal Feathers

POETRY

71 72

Burial Scene Rosemary at the Altar

FICTION

74 84

Up the Mekong Fat Fidl

FOREWORD

Sophie Jefferson Nicole DeLise

Former Editor

Richard Sowienski

POETRY

Email: belmontstoryreview@gmail.com © 2021 Copyright Belmont University

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CONTRIBUTORS

A Star in Brooklyn The Music We Hear My Grandfather Is Given a Candle by a Stranger on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Motzaei Shabbat Hanukkah, 1943

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[ FOREWORD]

L

ast year when I wrote this foreword for Volume 5, I was still hopeful that by the fall term of 2020 we would be returning to normal ways of living. Instead, we settled into a pandemic year. We wound our way through challenging dual Zoom school semesters. Most of my students preferred to learn online, and on-campus classes were rare. Even so, we practiced a hybrid teaching model at Belmont that allowed some students to come for face-to-face (mask-to-mask) classes. Professors juggled virtual and physical rooms of students simultaneously. When I first returned to physical classrooms, we were just embarking on the upward curve that would lead to the height of the pandemic death toll. I experienced a panic attack and cried at work, a uniquely humiliating experience. Things I was afraid of during the pandemic included: the death of loved ones, country borders never opening again, becoming a COVID-19 “long-hauler,” students failing courses, losing Wifi during class, that my grocery store would run out of beef, that my stress-induced back pain would never heal, and that I would never see my family again.

I was innovative in my quest to find the right protective gear for hyflex teaching—surely the right combination of attire and rituals would keep me safe, and keep students from becoming disengaged and dropping out.

I experimented with an outdoor class with a canopy (our campus security quickly informed me this was against school policy, cue the crying), chic “goggles” that looked like glasses but that fogged so badly I couldn’t see (and prevented me from wearing my real glasses, anyway), an elaborate routine involving hand-sanitizer and remembering what classroom devices I had touched before and after its usage, double-masks that made my ears ache but became par for the professorial course, and a face-shield that gave me the look of Darth Vader to the on-screen students.

On weekends I relaxed with my dogs, read down my Goodreads list,

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watched more Netflix than any human has a right to, and still, I worried.

“Anxiety is a thief that steals the present moment” writes Andrea Peterson in her memoir, On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety. I had good days where the present was peaceful. I had bad days where worry twinned every happy thought. I conferred with colleagues who were all concerned for our students, some who were overcome with loneliness from a year of isolation. Freshman hadn’t made many—if any—new friends. I watched for mental health markers and held many one-on-one meetings with students. Everything in the present moment was anxiety-inducing, and I longed to be anywhere else. I began research into mindfulness in student populations, partly to help myself refocus.

As winter began, we opened up the magazine for Volume 6 submissions.

It would surprise me, months later, when many pieces we read seemed hopeful, optimistic, and grounded in geographic spaces that seemed exciting despite our immobility and isolation. These writers had imagined or remembered themselves into places that saved them in more ways than one. Optimistic works rose to the top of our reading period discussions, and the scrim of worry lost some heft.

A collective, global trauma of this nature hadn’t troubled humanity for more than a century, but when it arrived, the pandemic underscored how important imagination is for good health. Reading of places we had been before or longed to visit, and discussing vacations we would take “when it’s over” became coping mechanisms that inspired hope. When I first read “Arterial” by Joe Kabot, I was transported to the last international trip I took before the pandemic, to the homeland of my mother’s grandparents in Poland. This destination was known to me, so much so that when we finalized the acceptance of the story, I showed a powerpoint presentation to the student editors of my photos of many of the locations in the piece.

Reading Kabot’s words transported me to a happier time in the past, and helped me dream of returning to the beautiful country of my ancestors. I started to navigate toward our volume’s theme.

It was not just the external spaces we longed to inhabit as we waited for the world to become safe. Our bodies and minds were frustrating, fragile.

Anxiety, depression, or ill-health plagued everyone I knew. When we read Jennifer Furner’s essay, “Shake Your Teal Feathers” about her journey toward cancer remission, I thought about the way that our own minds and bodies can become foreign places to us. We can inhabit ourselves peacefully or with strife. Health is a destination.

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The poem “Duo” by Jade Hidle explores what it means to build crosscultural identity on one’s own terms. Many of the pieces we chose for this issue were written by or about immigrants, and Hidle’s description of feeling “homesick at home” is apt. In my reading, it morphed into a pandemic sentiment— I didn’t always want to visit foreign lands, I would have settled for a destination in time, a fast-forward through the drudgery of waiting for home to be free from viral threat.

There are so many more stories and poems in this volume that student editors love. They passionately discussed the works they wanted, and we were able to keep many of them for the final magazine. It’s with pride I invite you to read the works that carried our team of editors through the pandemic, and to enjoy our theme—destination.

Happy reading, Sara Wigal Editor

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[ POETRY]

Off Bahia Honda

Duo

By: Jayne Marek

By: Jade Hidle

—for Rick Snorkeling the reef, the waves surge in your throat.

Your vision lifts and lunges. An orange lozenge, streaked with blue, stares at you: one big eye and a spout and four roots drifting.

Your cousin sleeps while machines breathe and wash his blood and he hovers perhaps above sea fans flexing like hands in his dream. Thought is a silver lance just out of sight, stripes of blue ribs under yellow flesh.

If only the sea were a dream you could give him, a second skin, the current’s firm hold, the inexact depths of a green world whose creatures do not need air, but the surge of salt chokes you, betrays your lungs, thrusts you to the surface pulsing with nausea you can’t ignore, an illness that forces us to go back at last.

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[ POETRY]

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Punctuate and hold the wind still.

Hear the dip and the snap of Khmer in donut shops And Thai in sushi joints sucking fish sauce, garlic, and chili from my fingers, On the streets of Long Beach, Homesick at home.

Vowels gallop and buck, Your horse of a homeland running yet Looking back toward the Pacific.

Weary of the northern accent, You switch Duolingo to silent, And tap on the screen glowing in the night, As if you’re cramming for a Vietnamese business Trip that only involves counting trees and bowls, women Reading newspapers, stock photos of “diverse” people eating rice.

You secretly feel victorious every time you speak back to the Northern accent In your Southern one, especially when it gives you a “100%” score anyway.

You still don’t want to skip a lesson That lends order to something learned tumultuously, Through scolding and prayer.

You’ve got to stay steps ahead of her So she has the choice to carry the sounds And their memories with her.

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It tells you truths in nonsense: “You are that goat,” “The fish bites the bicycle,” “The rich man hides my letter,” “This is me,” “I am yours,” “She speaks Vietnamese because she is Vietnamese.”

“I am forever in the kindergarten,” “I am still normal,” “I am not normal.”

“You are the stone,” “Who am I?” “Your question does not have an answer.”

Its words for “you” and “me” Are different from what you know, And you see the gaps in your vocabulary Because bà ngoại only had a second-grade education, But years on the streets.

Duo reminds you of all the words You didn’t or couldn’t name.

Your mother tried to teach it to you with the few school books she could find And once you could read and write the first one from cover to cover She bought you a Lego set with a square-headed blonde girl in a tank top.

But that stopped after the one time she showed up to one of your school events, A spelling bee, In English, Second place.

Then she and you pushed and pulled away from each other’s voices, Overhearing, eavesdropping, trying to learn and unlearn Those words.

didn’t know I did, But you always respond in English.

Until, you say, “chó” as you chase the dog.

Your grandmother laughs too much at your first words in Vietnamese, And how your English words lilt as if tonal too-“Bear,” rising and falling, like your great-grandmother.

She leans in too close, Squeezes your wide nose like mine, like hers, like all the hers before us, And I tell her “no” in both languages So there is no meaning lost.

After that, she stays away from us for a long time, And I feel the landscape of crafting this language For just me and you Widening, whistling like sand dunes.

All of this work to retrain my tongue and create a new home from ear to brain and out again, But if it’s just for us, What happens if you don’t want to speak to me anymore? who am I supposed to speak it to?

Who are you to speak it to?

Will we speak to each other Or will we be like me and her and all the hers before us?

My phone flashes with reminders From Duo. “I miss you,” it pleads.

Waiting, “These reminders don’t seem to be working.”

Then “you” becomes your baby.

The first words I whisper into your red ears are “Con ơi, Mẹ ne.”

Your coos call it out of me, So I sing and speak to you in all the words I remember and some that I

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[ NONFICTION]

W

alter Adamkiewicz knelt in front of the

sunflowers that grew along the brick wall

of the meat market next door, using an ancient metal can to water the dry earth that surrounded the thick, green stalks. It had rained that morning, so there had been no need for the usu-

Arterial Joel Kabot

al 6 a.m. watering, but the July heat had been strong all day, and the plants needed their evening session. So there he was, just after dinner on a Saturday. The air around him in that little part of East Utica soon grew thick with the pungent smell of Upstate topsoil, overwhelming even the exhaust and emissions from the cars and factories on Broad Street.

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road and berry bushes that bordered the sidewalk next to the shed— all perks allotted to him as the apartment building’s part-time on-call maintenance man—Walter cared for the sunflowers most of all. He did so because his parents, especially his father, had prized them too above all else, since they had reminded his parents of home. Although they were from different villages—from different empires, even—the sunflowers in both were the same, they had told Walter, growing in carefully tended rows just beyond densely packed wooden houses.

Walter continued along the brick wall, pushing back the plants’ paper-like leaves to water them so that not one square inch of soil stayed dry. He would not have to wait long to see one village for himself. Father Mazur was organizing a late-summer trip to Poland, and Walter and his wife, Helen, were among the couples that had signed up. Travel to communist Poland had been possible now for some seven years, since 1956, Father Mazur had told his parishioners. It was time they took advantage.

For Walter, there was not much of a debate. It was an extravagance, to be sure, but worth it.

Walter heard the light canvas-shoe footsteps of his daughter, Sandra, and half-turned to her. He was struck by the sharp contrast between his own sweaty gardening clothes and Sandra’s freshly ironed dress, especially as he saw in her, as he had since she was a baby, those unmistakable Adamkiewicz eyes: narrow and dark, dark brown, almost black, set deep beneath her brow and matched by hair of the same color. They were his father’s eyes, and his own. From what Walter had seen, girls usually took after their mothers, and boys their fathers, but it was the opposite in his family. Joseph, Sandra’s much younger brother, had fair coloring and wavy blonde hair, just like Helen’s side. But Sandra was definitely an Adamkiewicz. It was almost a shame, he often thought, that she would lose her name when she got married, since no other name would do her justice. But that was how it had to be.

“I’m going out with Robert,” she said. “I wanted to let you know.”

“Where?”

“Movies. He’s picking me up.”

“Did you tell your mother?”

“No. She’s at the neighbor’s, anyway.”

“Did you tell your brother?”

“I did,” Sandra said. “Not like I see how that matters.”

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Walter nodded and looked at Sandra. She had something more to say.

“Robert and I’ve talked about him coming over for dinner sometime,” she said. “What do you think?”

Walter looked away. He heard a train blow its whistle as it ran alongside the dry canal beds and the construction site for the new East-West Arterial. As a child, he had often played among those tracks, sometimes talking to the hobos that camped there, feeling sorry for those driftless men without homes.

“Dad? What do you think?”

“You know what I think. I don’t approve.”

“He just wants to meet you.”

“I’ve met him.”

“For a long period of time, I mean. You know, officially. Where you can talk.”

Walter took off his hat and wiped his forehead with the clean side of his glove. Then he looked back at Sandra. “Robert. What is he? Is he anything?”

“You’ve asked me this before. He’s Scotch or something. English.”

“You couldn’t find a Polish boy to date?”

“None that are like Robert.”

Walter wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Poles made the best husbands, from what he could tell. They worked hard. They never got into trouble.

“He’s not even Catholic,” he said. “What would your children be?”

“He said we could raise them Catholic.”

“Could?”

“We will raise them Catholic.”

“He has to convert.”

“He doesn’t want to convert, Dad.” “Then he doesn’t want to marry you.”

Sandra did not say anything. Walter could feel her staring at him, but he did not look back at her. Instead, he stood up, wiped his pants at his knees, and walked to the apartment toolshed with the watering can. He did not want to talk any further about Robert. Sandra knew where he stood on the manner. An Italian or a German would have been bad enough.

She could have at least found a Catholic; he might not object to a nonPolish boy if he were a good Catholic. There were even different kinds of Catholics. Ukrainians, for instance, had their own rite. The Syrians, too.

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He dunked the watering can into the rainwater barrel, an old oil drum his father had brought back from work one day. Walter only used rainwater for his plants, just as his father and mother had. He was not sure what made rainwater better, but he knew it was important to continue the tradition.

By the time Walter returned to the row of sunflowers, Sandra was gone.

B The next day, after Mass, the Adamkiewicz family sat at the kitchen table for lunch. Helen had cooked a Krakus ham and a Pulaski Market kielbasa. It was, as always, too much food, but it was important to celebrate Sundays. None of it ever really went to waste: On Mondays and each successive day until it ran out, Walter and Joseph would take sandwiches of the leftover meat to work and school, respectively, both with liberal doses of horseradish. Walter’s factory job was on the other side of town, in West Utica, so he could not go home for lunch like some of his friends could, especially the ones who worked at the General Electric plant on Broad Street, but his carefully packed leftover sandwiches, tasting as they did of Sundays around the kitchen table, almost made up for it.

The family had been silent for some time, and Walter thought of discussing something serious, something he hadn’t even mentioned to Helen.

“I think Sandra should go with us to Poland,” he said.

Sandra looked up but didn’t say anything.

“Oh, Walter,” Helen said. “We don’t have the money.”

“We can find some. I could take another shift next week.”

“You shouldn’t tire yourself out before the trip, dear.”

“I wouldn’t get tired. It’d be worth it.”

“No, thank you,” Sandra said. “Don’t do that on my account.”

“Why not me?” Joseph asked. “Why can’t I go?”

“You’re too young,” Helen said.

“I’m not that young. Besides, I got a 100 on my Polish history quiz.”

“Maybe next time,” Walter said. “But now it’s Sandra’s turn. It would do her good.”

“I can’t be away for that long,” Sandra said, reaching for the kapusta.

“Why not?”

“They don’t like it at work.”

“Everyone’s entitled to a vacation,” Helen said.

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“I’m still new. Junior employees shouldn’t take two weeks off.”

“It’s only really a week and a half,” Walter said.

“Still. It’s too long. You don’t want me to get fired, do you?”

“No, but I could talk to your manager. Explain things. She isn’t Polish herself, is she?”

“No. Italian. But I can’t go, Dad. I really can’t.”

“It would do you good,” Walter said. “Give you some pride in your heritage.”

“Sandra has pride in her heritage,” Joseph said. “She was Marie Curie in the eighth-grade play.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Walter said.

“Sandra was Marie Curie and Eddie Bujak was her French husband.”

“We know, Joey,” Helen said. “Do you want more potatoes?”

Joseph shook his head.

After the meal was over and Joseph had gone to his room to read comic books and Sandra had gone to meet friends—she didn’t say where—Walter sat at the table while Helen washed the dishes. He absentmindedly gathered some crumbs with the side of his hand, collecting them into a small pile. The table’s off-white tablecloth was decorated with images of American landmarks, such as the Liberty Bell and the Capitol Building. The crumb pile was just to the right of Mount Vernon.

“What do you think about this Robert fellow?” Walter asked, turning halfway in his chair.

“Well, I don’t really know him,” Helen said.

“Neither do I. But I don’t like him.”

“You can’t dislike someone you don’t know.”

“It’s not him I dislike, Helen. Not personally. Just the idea of him.”

“He might not be so bad,” Helen said, coming over to take the butter tray and salt and pepper shakers, the last items remaining on the table.

“How can you say that?”

“I just can. Maybe he’s not so bad.”

“Do you want your daughter to marry outside of her culture? Outside of her faith?”

“No,” Helen said. “I don’t. But what will we do? Disown her?”

Walter did not say anything.

“You know these kids, anyway,” Helen said, returning to the sink.

“One minute, they’re together; another, they’re not.”

“We can only hope,” Walter said.

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B

On Wednesday, Walter and Helen went to the third and final meeting for those taking the Poland trip, held, like the others, in the St. Hyacinth basement. They had gotten there early, like they did for most things, and Helen helped Anna Piatek, the parish secretary, start the coffee urn and lay out Italian pastries from Star Bakery. Walter sat in the first row of the neatly arranged folding chairs and drummed his fingers along his knee.

Soon the others arrived: the Biernats, the Kubeks, the Szymaszeks, and the Wisniewskis. All were couples close in age. Helen was especially happy to see Caroline Biernat and Betty Szymaszek, her best friends in the Holy Rosary Society. They talked and gossiped over pusties and cannoli until Father Mazur called the meeting to order. Anna Piatek then handed out copies of the itinerary to each couple while Father Mazur went through it, line by line.

Based on consultations from the Cosmos Travel Agency in New York, which had links to Orbis, Poland’s state tourist board, the twelve-day trip would include roughly three days of travel, three days in Warsaw, and four days in Cracow—including a day trip to Częstochowa—with the remaining time open for whatever each couple wished. If a couple had no particular place of interest, they could accompany Father Mazur to Gdansk and the Baltic coast until the group met again in Warsaw to fly back home.

“Any questions?” Father Mazur asked, walking away from the little podium from which he had been speaking and toward the small crowd.

Walter raised his hand, the first to do so. Father Mazur motioned to him. “Father,” Walter said, “on our free days, are you sure we can travel anywhere? Without supervision?”

“Do you mean,” Father Mazur said, “will the communists allow it?”

Walter nodded.

“Yes,” Father Mazur said. “Cosmos, via Orbis, has assured me that travelers will have free rein of the country. Unlike the Soviet Union, one can travel independently. There are no ‘closed cities,’ as the Soviets call them.”

“Will we get help in planning our travel, then? For train routes, bus tickets. . .”

“Yes. Orbis will ask you, soon after arrival, where you want to go, and advise the best methods of transport. It should all be taken care of.”

Walter nodded again and leaned back in his chair. That was all he

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needed to hear. He took out a pen from his suit pocket—he had changed from his factory clothes before coming to church—and circled the unscheduled days on his mimeographed itinerary. Barring anything unfortunate—one could never trust the communists and what they said, Walter knew—one of those days would be the one on which he finally visited Bohoniki, his father’s village. He was excited to see the big cities, and especially so to see Our Lady of Częstochowa in person, but Bohoniki was the real reason he and Helen were making the trip.

He would never get to see those places, to walk the land his mother had walked, to breathe the air his children’s grandparents had breathed. Only in Bohoniki could he walk the land of ancestors.

It was still light out when Helen and Walter got back to the apartment, so Walter stayed outside. Weeds had started to show between the cracks of the backyard sidewalk. It was always better to remove them at once, before they got too big.

“Do you have to?” Helen asked.

“I don’t want it to look unkempt. Especially while we’re away.”

“Why don’t we just watch some television? Or you could listen to a ballgame?”

“It won’t take too long.”

“No one will even notice, dear.”

“I noticed.”

“You’re wearing your suit.”

“I’ll take off my jacket. And I won’t kneel on the ground.”

Helen smiled and shook her head. “Well, I’ll be inside,” she said, climbing the concrete stairs to the building’s small vestibule.

As he used a flat-head screwdriver to dig into the cracks, down into the roots, Walter thought of Bohoniki again. It was special, not just because it was his father’s home, but for another, important reason.

By Walter’s count, there were two villages missing from their itinerary, through no fault of their own: his mother’s village, in Soviet Ukraine, and the village of Helen’s parents, in Soviet Lithuania. He would never get to see those places, to walk the land his mother had walked, to breathe the air his children’s grandparents had breathed. Only in Bohoniki could

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he walk the land of ancestors. Only in Bohoniki could he possibly meet long-lost relatives. His father’s family had scattered in the years before and after the war, but a great-uncle—the youngest of seven, so not much older than Walter’s father—had kept in touch and only recently passed.

Walter knew this from a cousin, who wrote him two years ago. After first hearing in the fall of Father Mazur’s trip, Walter had twice sent letters to the cousin at the return address but had not yet received a response. He thought of writing once more, telling him the exact days he would be in Poland, hoping to make contact before they left.

When it was dark and the weeds had been pulled, Walter went inside and sat at the kitchen table with the Observer-Dispatch and a Manhattan on ice. Like his father, Walter was not much of a drinker, but he did sometimes enjoy a solitary Manhattan at night, or at parties when he needed to be social, sipping it slowly over an hour or two. He always added at least three cherries, his favorite fruit, and when the drink was at its end and watered down, he would sometimes mash the cherries with a spoon and the Manhattan became almost like the cherry kompot his mother used to make.

Headlights shone through the side windows, and a motor that sounded like Walter’s Plymouth hummed in its approach and then stopped.

Walter soon heard keys jingling outside the door.

“It’s open,” he said.

Sandra walked in, smiled, and kissed her father on the side of his head. “Hi, Dad.” “Your mother said you were with friends,” Walter said.

Sandra sat down and took the first section of the paper. “Yeah. A few of the girls from work. We went to Regal’s.”

“We were right near there. Your mother and I had a meeting at church. About the Poland trip.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. There might still be time. For you to go, that is.”

“I really can’t be away for that long.”

Walter sighed and loosened his tie. “You don’t really want to go.”

Sandra looked up at him. “No.” “It really would do you good. I mean that.”

“I know, Dad.” “I just want the things that are important to me to be important to you.”

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“They are.”

Walter started to say that her recent choices suggested otherwise but stopped himself.

Sandra opened the paper to a full-page advertisement for the Boston Shop, the department store on Genesee Street. Walter could read the upside-down text. They were having a sale on sport shirts and sunglasses.

“I’d like some amber jewelry, though,” Sandra said. “If you could.

Terri Zmuda’s husband’s cousin went there and brought her back an amber necklace.”

“I’ll tell your mother to look for some.”

“I’d like that,” Sandra said. “Especially some earrings.”

Walter leaned back in his chair, but, suddenly self-conscious, brought himself forward again. He looked at the box score for the Cardinals game—some were saying it was Stan Musial’s last year, and Walter wanted to appreciate every last game that Musial played—but could not concentrate. Instead, he just stared at the rows and columns of text until their distinctive shapes receded into a blur. He considered telling Sandra the things he worried about at night, but he did not know how to start the conversation. It was almost too personal, too embarrassing. How could he say that he knew his wife’s soul, because she was Polish, in a way he could never know an Italian’s, or an Irish woman’s, or a German’s—or even a Ukrainian’s, if she were Orthodox? It was a Polish soul like his mother’s, the soul of all the Polish women he knew. How to say that without growing red in the face? How to make it sound real, that it was something, not just romantic nonsense a poet might write? How to say that Robert could never understand something he was not born with, did not possess innately? Sandra might be too young to know that, but that was why children had to listen to their parents: they had wisdom the children lacked. Sandra needed to listen, to heed his advice, to end things with Robert. It was better for everyone, especially for Sandra. She didn’t know it yet but would in time. So far, Walter had only really made his displeasure known. It should be enough, he thought, but there were other steps he could take. He just did not want to take them if he did not have to.

He looked again at the box scores, and the numbers came into focus.

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B Two weeks later, Sandra drove Walter and Helen to Union Station where they met the rest of their group and the train to New York. Sandra waited at the station until everyone was on board, standing by the tracks until the New York Central started eastward. Then, that night, the group flew from Idlewild Airport to Paris and the next day from Paris to Warsaw. The latter plane was full of émigrés and first-generation descendants like Walter, and Helen struck up a conversation with the woman next to her. The woman was from Chicago and traveling, for the second time, to her aunt’s in Katowice. She did not have much to say about Katowice, but highly recommended Cracow.

“You’ll love it,” she said. “It’s like a fairy tale. As if it’s not even real.”

“Oh, that sounds lovely,” Helen said. “Doesn’t it, Walter?”

“Have you been to northeastern Poland?” he asked the woman. “To Białystok?”

“No,” she said. “But I’m sure it’s lovely, too, as long as they don’t have any factories.”

Toward the end of the flight, when he was sure the green country outside was Poland and not someplace else, he looked up from his National Geographic and pressed his forehead against his window like a little boy would, in awe at the Polish land below. He saw the small villages as his parents had described them: the white-painted wooden houses huddling together as if to stay warm, and the large fields in between, interrupted occasionally by empty country roads and small winding streams. Soon, the pilot announced the descent into Warsaw, and the green land became gray and black and populated. Below, Walter thought, it was as if you took Polish East Utica and multiplied it hundreds of thousands of times.

It was a city of Poles, and Poles only.

“That’s Warsaw?” Helen asked, leaning over him for a closer look, her blonde curls brushing against the stubble of his cheek.

“It should be. Or a suburb, at least.”

“How amazing to see it in person.”

“You missed the countryside,” Walter said. “I should’ve told you. It was beautiful. The land of our people.”

“The land of our people,” Helen repeated.

At the airport, as Walter’s feet touched Polish soil, or at least Polish tarmac for the first time, an Orbis representative met them all and partitioned the group into a convoy of taxis. They sped along the highway

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into the city, past minibuses and small communist-made cars. At first glance, the city was not particularly attractive, Walter thought, with most buildings looking modern, yet tired, indistinguishable in their gray concrete and devoid of any ornamentation. Of course, Warsaw had been destroyed during the war, and one must be glad that anything existed at all. Still, it was something of a disappointment.

Feeling hot, he rolled down his window to the city air.

“Breeze is not good for you,” the driver said in Polish, looking back.

“Where did you hear that?” Walter asked.

“Everyone knows that,” the driver said. “You’ll get sick.”

Walter looked at Helen, who shrugged. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

The driver shook his head, then reached for his own crank handle in response, tightening it even further.

Walter turned again to the city as it passed by. The taxis soon left the highway and merged onto a busy street, three lanes in each direction. The buildings were the same as before, but now he saw the people alongside them as they walked in the late afternoon heat. Men in suits and women in dresses hurried home from work. Young people ambled slowly, sometimes arm in arm, and schoolchildren in matching uniforms scurried among them all.

It was, Walter thought, just a normal day for everyone else, but not for him. All the people he saw, and all the people he couldn’t see, were just living their lives. Everyone outside, every one of them a Pole. Every single one. Everyone was Polish, but everything still seemed so normal. It was not normal for everyone everywhere to be Polish, Walter thought, and yet no one here thought anything of it. It was as if no one was really Polish at all.

Walter shook his head and rubbed his eyes. It had been a long journey, and he was tired. He was not thinking right. Fatigue had him confused, he knew. He was thankful when the taxis ahead slowed and turned into the curved driveway of the Grand Hotel.

“Please close your window,” the driver said as he parked.

B The next morning, the group went to Warsaw’s Old Town, which had been faithfully reconstructed after the war. Walter and Helen walked the market square and admired the pastel façades of the Baroque townhomes. Later, they toured the Wilanów Palace, home to King Jan Sobieski, the greatest of all Polish kings. They visited the Barbican, the fortified

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medieval gates of old Warsaw, and posed for photos in front of the Palace of Culture and Science, even though Stalin had built it. Later still, they mourned the heroes of Poland in Powązki Cemetery and lingered over the art in the National Museum. They walked the riverbanks of the Vistula, watching the sunset on a warm summer night.

Walter was very happy to hear Polish spoken everywhere, just like it had been in his neighborhood when he was a boy, and grateful for the chance to walk the Polish capital. But something was wrong. He did not feel at home, like he had thought he would. Warsaw, instead, felt very much like a foreign city. It belonged to others, not to him. In some ways, he thought, it was like Montreal—a place they had vacationed the year before—which felt both familiar and strange at the same time.

He found himself missing Utica.

The third night, after more guided tours, he was quiet all through dinner. He picked at his vaguely French chicken dish, which he had ordered because the hotel did not serve Polish cuisine.

“Are you okay?” Helen asked.

“Yes. I am.”

“You don’t look happy.”

“I’m fine. I just—” “Yes?” Walter sighed. “Maybe I’m tired again. With all the traveling.”

“I’m sure Cracow will cheer you up,” Helen said, taking his hand in hers.

Cracow came two days later. The woman from Chicago was right: It was beautiful. Walter enjoyed sitting in the market square, eating herring and pierogi. He even ordered some beer, which he found much more flavorful than what his friends drank at home. He walked along the academic buildings of Jagiellonian University and through the nave of Wawel Cathedral, praying at the tomb of St. Stanislaus. His chest swelled when he listened to the famed Cracow trumpeter play a truncated melody in honor of a thirteenth-century predecessor, killed mid-song by the Mongols. He bargained for trinkets at the souvenir stands in the city hall, buying amber jewelry for Sandra and an engraved Polish highlander walking stick—a ciupaga—for Joseph. He wrote them separate postcards from the main city post office, both with aerial scenes of the city. He labored over what stamps to buy, finally selecting a profile of Chopin for Joseph and an illustration of a bright yellow flower, Adonis vernalis, for

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Sandra. The latter was not a sunflower, but it almost looked like one at a quick glance. Walter hoped it would remind Sandra, in some small way, of her grandparents, and how they lived and what they lived for.

All in all, there was no denying that Cracow was much nicer than Warsaw, and that it felt, really, much more Polish. But it was still not his.

Really, Walter thought, Cracow was probably not that much different than Prague, or Budapest, or, more likely, Vienna, given the Habsburg influence. He could’ve been in any one of those cities, and a part of him almost wished he were, since he wouldn’t be so disappointed.

He told this to Helen.

“We’re in a foreign country,” Helen said. “Of course it feels different from home.”

“But it shouldn’t.”

“Oh, Walter. Isn’t this always the case when you leave Utica? Don’t you feel like a stranger when you visit New York City?”

“No. I don’t. I don’t feel like a foreigner in New York. I feel like an American.”

“But did you feel at home in Tennessee, when you were in the C.C.C.?

In Atlanta?”

“No. But I didn’t need to. I knew it was someplace different. It was supposed to be different.” He paused. “This shouldn’t be.”

Helen patted him on the back. Walter could feel her soft fingers through his thin wool cardigan.

“I’m sorry, Walter.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

The next day, the group waited in line to see the Black Madonna of Częstochowa. The shrine was crowded, and it was hot outside while they stood, silently, for the chance to be in her presence, but Walter did not mind. He was glad that communism had not yet affected Poles’ reverence for the Virgin Mother. He was glad, too, for the bus ride through golden fields and small towns. He had fallen asleep on the train ride south to Cracow—and the train windows were dirty, anyway, with rings of caked layers around the edges so that the actual viewing area was much smaller than the frame would suggest—but on the road to Częstochowa, he could see the villages and countryside that resembled the view from the plane into Warsaw.

Everything outside was what really mattered, he thought as the bus made its return trip. The cities were fine, but his were a rural people.

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That had been the problem all this time. Only when he left the city could he feel like he was truly in Poland, in his Poland. It was so obvious, and yet it took this long to realize it. His parents had not talked of majestic Renaissance cities, of course, but of simple village pastures. There was nothing wrong with those cities, nor anything wrong with him. They were just a different part of Poland—a necessary one, but not his, nor his family’s.

That night, on a carriage ride through Cracow, alone with Helen— Helen had always loved horse rides, ever since their honeymoon in New York City and the obligatory trip through Central Park—Walter could only think of the countryside their bus had passed.

“Remember,” he said to Helen, “we are of village stock.”

“I know, dear,” Helen said, patting him on the leg.

He smiled, one of his first real smiles in Poland, and put his arm around his wife. He was excited not by the ancient city that surrounded him, but for what lay ahead.

B On the tenth day, after Mass, some went to villages around Cracow or farther out to cities like Tarnów and Rzeszów. The rest of the group, Walter and Helen included, returned to Warsaw. From there, Walter and Helen continued on to Białystok, the closest big city to Bohoniki. After a night in Białystok, they took the train for an hour and a half to Sokółka and waited for a bus to Bohoniki, as the Orbis representative had told them to. They were only four miles from Bohoniki and just ten miles from the Soviet border.

The bus that arrived was empty, and the driver did not speak after Walter told them where they wanted to go. Walter and Helen sat together on bench seating, watching the land as it alternated between field and forest. Soon the bus slowed at the intersection marking the small village of Drahle, but just as quickly accelerated as the village disappeared behind them. The bus slowed again for a sharp bend in the road—it was almost a right angle—and there it was, a worn sign with the name Walter had waited so long to see: BOHONIKI He clutched Helen’s hand. It was a cool day, and rain from that morning’s showers darkened the road, but Walter started sweating.

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The bus drove past small wooden farmhouses. A compact building, Eastern in style, with a turret above its black-shingled roof stood apart on the right. It must be the local Orthodox church, Walter thought, given how close they were to White Russia.

The bus stopped in front of a small metal bus shelter and the driver opened the doors. Walter and Helen stood up.

“Do you know where house number thirty-eight is?” Walter asked the driver in Polish.

The driver shook his head.

“How about the cemetery?”

“Ahead on left, through a path of trees.”

“Is it the only one in the village?”

“Only cemetery in Bohoniki, yes.”

“Thank you,” Walter said. He turned to the door.

“They call it mizar,” the driver said.

Walter was almost off the bus but stopped. “Excuse me? Who does?”

“The people here. Well, some of them.”

“Okay,” Walter said, not sure how to respond.

“Back in four hours,” the driver said, shutting his door.

Walter and Helen stood on the side of the road as the bus drove eastward toward the border.

“He was awfully strange,” Helen said, tying her plastic bonnet to protect her hair from any rain that might still fall.

Walter nodded absentmindedly, having already forgotten the driver and the bus ride, unable to concentrate on anything but the land in front of him.

It was a small village, as Walter had expected, but the houses that lined the road were well-kept. Behind the houses was farmland and cows, both dairy and beef cattle, grazed in the distance. Here, finally, he saw sunflowers, their vibrant yellow contrasting with verdant stalks, descendants, no doubt, of the very plants his father had seen, had so often talked about. Beside them were fields of green interrupted by small clusters of trees, and Walter was impressed by how lush it all seemed. It might have been the morning rain, he thought, but the land seemed different than the countryside around Cracow, which was almost sepia toned.

Nearby, chickens and geese patrolled a section of fence, as if they were suspicious of the two newcomers who stood, unmoved, at the bus stop. A

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goat somewhere neighed in the distance, and a dog howled in response.

Across the road, starlings pecked at seeds, just as they did in Utica.

Walter had never heard back from his cousin. Still, he knew he must look for house thirty-eight, the number listed as the return address on the letter informing him of his great-uncle’s death. Walter and Helen walked the unpaved road of smooth, sunken dirt, stopping before each house to see if a number graced it. The numbers started in the forties, and soon they stood before thirty-eight, a yellow-painted house with dark red trim that stood in the shadow of a tall oak tree. Walter opened the gate and knocked on the door, waiting. He was very nervous. But there was no answer. He knocked again, and an old woman, much older than Walter or Helen, came from behind the house carrying a basket of laundry.

“What do you want?” she asked, seemingly annoyed.

“I’m looking for Szymon Adamkiewicz,” Walter said.

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“How should I know? The Recovered Territories, somewhere.”

“The Recovered Territories?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Aren’t you—” Walter began, then stopped. “Aren’t you an Adamkiewicz?”

The woman looked at him. “Certainly not.”

“Then why—” “My daughter got this house after Szymon moved west, after his grandfather died. You might try him in Wrocław. That’s what I heard.”

“Okay,” Walter said.

“If you’ll excuse me,” the woman said, turning away from them without bothering to finish her sentence.

“Of course,” Walter said.

Walter and Helen walked back to the road and stood there, outside the former Adamkiewicz gate.

“She was even stranger,” Helen whispered.

“Yes,” Walter agreed. He tried to take stock of what just happened and what it meant. He had not expected, really, to find his cousin. There was a reason his letters had gone unanswered, and it was simple: His cousin had moved to the formerly German lands of western Poland, too far away, given short notice, for Walter to reach now. He was almost ashamed of the thought, but he was really not disappointed. Without

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family, Walter was free to explore the village as he wished, remembering his father’s stories as he walked and not listening to someone else’s.

“Where should we go now?” Helen asked.

There was only one answer. They might have license to wander, but there was one place they had to visit.

“The cemetery,” Walter said. “We should see my great-uncle’s grave.”

They started back toward the bus stop, following the directions given by the driver. They came to a clearing that spanned both sides of the road, and then a door for an earthen cellar, beyond which rose small hills, the first spots of elevation in an otherwise flat landscape. Walter would have not done so elsewhere, but here, in Bohoniki, he saw the hills and wanted to climb them, to see the place in its entirety.

“Helen,” Walter said, pointing. “We can get a good look at the village if we go up the hills.”

“Ok-a-ay,” Helen said. “Don’t you think we—” she began, but Walter had already started on the path of trampled tall grass that began before the cellar.

“Come on,” he said, turning back to her and holding out his hand.

Soon they were at the top of Bohoniki, the many acres of pasture spread before them. It was a beautiful country, Walter thought, and almost endless. He could see farmers in the distance, small figures moving among rows of low-lying green leaves. He could not make out what crop they were tending.

They followed the path into the trees, the needles of evergreens brushing against their legs. The dirt of the path was thin and sandy, and Walter thought of the weak soil of the Adirondacks, just north of Utica.

There, among tall pines and lakes so dark they looked black, he had gone camping with his father, fishing with homemade rods and sitting late into the night around the fire. Later, as a young man, he had gone north on summer trips with other Polish youths from East Utica. It was there that he had kissed Helen for the first time. There, so far away, but just the same: cold mornings and the fresh smell of summer rain, a place that seemed so much like this very place. Walter felt a rising in his chest. This was his father’s village, and it reminded him of home. Alone out of all the other places in Poland he had seen, this place felt like home. He turned back, once again extending his hand to Helen. Now, more than ever, he wanted to see the Adamkiewicz name in this village, among this land.

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It was a five minute walk, past more wooden houses, then to the row of trees in the distance. Just before the trees, on the opposite, right side of the road, a statue of the Virgin Mary stood in an alcove; to its left, a stone crucifix rested on a rectangular base. Both were draped in garlands of rose and daisy.

“Bohoniki must be very devout,” Walter said.

“It is a lovely shrine,” Helen said.

They turned and walked across to the trees. Tall pines and birch grew along both sides of the road to the cemetery, with fields of potato plants just beyond. The road was not paved, and worn tire paths separated a middle row of grass from the fields. Small puddles had formed in the dirt of the road, and Walter and Helen had to watch the placement of their feet.

“This is a very long walk,” Helen said.

Walter nodded, trying to avoid a puddle. He had bought new shoes at the Boston Shop, just for the trip.

A small Soviet-made car came from the direction of the cemetery, and the driver, a middle-aged woman with chestnut hair, drove to the far side of the road when passing Walter and Helen. Walter nodded to the woman, and tried to make eye contact, but she gave no response.

“Maybe she was a relative,” Helen said after the car had passed.

“Maybe,” Walter said.

Finally, they came to a small, dusty clearing, and the cemetery lay before them. A low white wall surrounded it, the top covered in most places by a red metal imitation of terra cotta. The main green-painted gate was closed, although the left-side gate was open.

Helen went ahead through the side entrance, but Walter walked to the small metal sign on the far right. Underneath the metal terra cotta, below an embossed crescent and star and flowing, cursive-like script, were the words: CMENTARZ MUZUŁMAŃSKI W BOHONIKACH

Walter felt a tightness in his throat. He looked at the sign again and reread the capital-letter Polish words, concentrating on the second one, remembering the bus driver and what he had said, and the building that resembled the East—a church with no cross. He looked back through the trees, hoping to see the shrine to Mary, but could not see her statue.

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There must be a mistake, he thought. Either this was not the village or this was not the cemetery. He wiped his brow and ran his fingers through his black hair. Many villages shared churches, that he knew.

Bohoniki was small, after all. There were obviously Catholics in the village, for they had built the shrine. He just had to find the shared church and the shared cemetery. Maybe it was in Drahle, the hamlet they had passed, or the village beyond, the name of which Walter did not know.

Helen walked back to the gate. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“I—,” Walter began. He swallowed to wet his throat. “I don’t think this is the right cemetery.”

“What? How do you mean? This is your village, right?”

Walter breathed deeply and exhaled. He moved away from the sign.

“Yes,” he said. “I mean, I was always told. . .”

Helen came to him and put her hands on his. “Are you all right, Walter?”

He nodded, not really looking at her. “Yes. Yes, I am. I’m fine.”

“Don’t you want to see the cemetery? It’s really quite beautiful, with the hill in the middle and all the pine trees.”

“Yes,” Walter said. “Although I’m not sure we’ll find. . .”

“Oh, Walter. I know this must be very exciting. We’ve come all this way, and now here we are, right in front of the cemetery. I can’t imagine.”

He nodded but did not speak.

“Let’s go, then,” Helen said, taking him by the hand. “Let’s go inside.”

B The cemetery was not at all like the one for St. Hyacinth’s, which was located in suburban Whitesboro and had manicured lawns full of precisely arranged plots. The one in Bohoniki appeared to be overgrown, with graves scattered among tall pines. Walter and Helen first walked toward the left, where new tombstones stood before raised graves, almost like a mausoleum. The names were in Polish, at least with Polish endings, but unfamiliar roots. Above the Polish characters, however, was a flowing, cursive-like script, and above that, the crescent and star. Walter did not see a cross, or an engraving of the Virgin Mary, on any grave in the cemetery. He found himself thinking of old National Geographic articles on the Holy Land and North Africa.

“What does the crescent mean?” Helen asked, but Walter did not answer. He just held up his hand as if to pause, as if to wave off the question, and continued walking.

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Some of the newer gravestones bore small photographs of the deceased. When Walter stopped before one, he felt as if he were looking at a variation of his father—at another, an older version of Sandra. None of the engraved names, so far, announced “Adamkiewicz,” but the photographs showed the Adamkiewicz eyes.

The land soon sloped upward, to almost a forest of pine, and the graves there were older, often worn and illegible. Walter knew he must look for a new headstone, among the newest in the cemetery, but he kept climbing toward the older graves, those with only single, rough rocks denoting burial. He continued until he was in the middle of the cemetery, as high as he had been before when they saw the farmers and he had thought of home. Now, though, his previous excitement was gone, replaced by something else. He stopped to catch his breath.

“Do you think it’s here?” Helen asked. “In this cemetery?”

He stood with his hands at his knees, hunched over. He then straightened, looking past Helen to the east side of the cemetery, his left, where they had not yet gone.

“Yes,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

He started toward the other graves, Helen close behind him. They walked slower than before. The stones he saw bore surnames like Emirowicz. Dzemilko. Given names like Mustafa and Timur. They all seemed too foreign, almost, and he started to think again that maybe he was wrong, that it was all wrong: This was not his people’s cemetery, but another’s, and he had only to go to the next village and there he would find Adamkiewicz headstones, many of them, crowded together beneath stone crosses.

Or, instead, he could see his name before him, and his great-uncle’s first name as well, beneath the same flowing script and the same crescent and star as all the rest. There it stood, new and bright with lacquer even in the shade of tree branches even on an overcast day: STEFAN ADAMKIEWICZ s. ZOFII i JANA UR. 1884 R. ZM. 1962 R. POKÓJ JEGO DUSZY

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There it stood, in a line with two other graves. There he stood, for how long he did not know, cold, drawing deep breaths, tears forming at the corners of his eyes. Helen came to him and put her hand on his back.

“I know how hard this must be for you,” she said.

He knelt down, crouching, staring not at the headstone but at the leaves and twigs that lay upon the granite surface of the grave. Then his knees began to give, and he reached for Helen to help him up.

Standing, he turned to the two adjacent graves. The nearest was older than his great-uncle’s and belonged to a Leon Adamkiewicz, who died in 1931. The other was older still, with a date in the nineteenth century, the letters written in Cyrillic and almost gone, the crescent barely visible. There was, however, a visible Roman “A” followed by a letter that resembled a “D,” another Roman “A,” then “M,” “K,” and “E”. Strangely, then a “B,” before the word descended into unknown letters: AДAМKEBИЧ So there, too, lay family. Walter did not know Cyrillic, but he knew that.

After some time, he backed away from the graves and found a bench on which to sit. Helen sat next to him, close, her hand once again on his back.

He wanted to find the graves of his grandparents, but no longer had strength in his legs or his heart. Instead he sat, without thinking, his head down.

“I know what the crescent means,” he said, finally.

Helen looked at him without speaking.

“It means they weren’t Christian.” He paused. Five days before, they had stood before the shrine of the Black Madonna, protectress of all Poland, and now they stood in a cemetery without a single cross. His cemetery, because it was the cemetery of his father’s people. “It means they were Muslim,” he continued. “Followers of Muhammad.”

“I see,” Helen said.

“It means they weren’t Christian,” he said again. He looked at the Adamkiewicz graves, stared at them, so that eventually he did not see them clearly at all, and they were just blurred stones that could be in any cemetery, any forest, any land where the pines grew tall from loamy soil.

When he let things come into focus, he looked at his watch and stood up. More than two hours had passed since they had left the bus.

“We don’t have much time,” he said. “We need to go back into town.

We need to see their temple.”

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B Walter and Helen walked hand in hand to the door of the Eastern-style building. It was locked, however, and Walter did not know what to do. He went to the windows and looked in on a room without furniture, and then walked around back, along a hedge of trees. Finding nothing that would help, except more windows looking in on another bare room, he returned. He saw a young man in a gray jacket and a wool flat cap walking away from Helen, toward the house across the street.

“What did he want?” Walter asked.

“He wanted to know what you wanted,” Helen said. “I think he went to get the keys.”

“Oh,” Walter said. He stood with Helen by the door, waiting. The sun came out from behind the clouds, but the warmth did nothing for him.

Soon the young man in the hat came back with an old, hunched man who seemed to walk with difficulty. The young man looked like any Polish youth—his nose long and angular, his hair sandy brown. The old man was much smaller, and his thick, white hair was a strong contrast to his weathered skin.

“This is the groundskeeper,” the young man said to Helen.

The three of them followed the old man to the front door, where he labored to insert the key and turn the doorknob. For a moment, Walter did not know if he wanted to enter.

The old man motioned to their feet.

“He wants you to remove your shoes,” the young man said.

Walter and Helen did so, and then went inside. Walter closed his eyes. Once through, he opened them to a hallway of plank-wood walls that reminded him of log cabin interiors in the North Country. The carpet, a rich oriental pattern, felt thick and plush beneath his shoeless feet. The narrow hallway led to a large room, but the old man first pointed to a small room on the left. There, framed prints of crescents and embroideries depicting a castle-like building lined the walls. A thin lace curtain covered a long, rectangular opening in the wall it shared with the larger room.

“This is where the women pray,” the young man said, and then turned to Helen. “But it is no problem,” he said to her. “You may come with us.”

Like its neighbor, the plank walls of the large room were covered with framed script writing and pictures of a many-spired castle. A small set of

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stairs led to a semi-enclosed pulpit. A balcony ran above the curtained opening and its curved spindles that bridged the two halves. Small glass chandeliers hung from the ceiling. There were no chairs, only one bench pushed to the side.

“What is this place?” Walter asked the young man, although he knew.

“This is the mosque of the Tatars,” the young man said.

“The Tatars.”

“Yes.” Walter opened his mouth to speak but did not. He had many questions but did not know if he could ask them, if he had the strength to.

He felt dizzy. He reached out to the knot-covered walls but recoiled when his hand touched the smooth surface. He did not know how to act in a mosque. He had never been in one before.

The young man looked at him. “Where are you from?” he asked.

“America,” Walter said.

“Ah. We like your President Kennedy very much.”

“Thank you.”

“Why are you here?” the young man asked.

Walter looked away to the window that faced the hedge. “My father came from this village. His great-uncle, Stefan Adamkiewicz, is buried in that cemetery.”

The old man’s face brightened, and he spoke for the first time. “I knew Stefan,” he said.

Walter turned, suddenly. “You did? Did you know his nephew—my father? Józef?”

The old man smiled again. “I knew Józef, too. But not well.”

Walter took a deep breath. “Was he—Tatar?”

“Of course,” the old man said. “All the Adamkiewiczes are Tatar. His mother was a Christian, but he was still a Tatar through his father.”

“I see,” Walter said. He felt the dizziness return. To counter it, he pressed all his weight into his feet, into the fibers of the carpet; he closed his eyes and waited. He recovered. He opened his eyes and looked at Helen, his beautiful Helen. There was only one logical second question, the question he must ask.

“So my father,” Walter began, almost unable to continue. “My father—he wasn’t really Polish?”

“What do you mean?” the young man asked.

“My father—he was a Tatar, you say.”

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“Tatars are Polish,” the young man said.

“But his father was Muslim.”

“Yes,” the young man said.

“Poles are supposed to be Catholics.”

“Not all. Some Poles—the Tatars—are Muslim. There are Orthodox Poles. There are still some Jews.”

“Yes,” Walter said. “But the Tatars—the Tatars are different. They come from Mongolia.”

“Tatars are descended from the Golden Horde and Turkic peoples,” the young man said, “but that does not mean we are not Polish. Tatars are among the most patriotic of Poles. There was a Tatar regiment that fought in the war.” He paused. “My own father fought in the Tatar regiment.”

The old man nodded. “We were granted these lands by King Jan Sobieski, the greatest of all Polish kings, for our military service,” he said.

“That is why we are here, today, in Bohoniki.”

“I see,” Walter said.

No one said anything for a while. The four of them stood in the sunlit room until Walter went toward the pulpit. He examined its green and white railing and the rosary-like beaded necklaces wrapped around both posts. Next to the pulpit, a text lay open on a book holder, low to the ground. Walter bent down to the script-covered pages, which numbered 101 and 100.

“That is over a century old,” the old man said. “Our holy book. A Koran from Kazan.”

“Kazan,” Walter said. “In Russia.”

“The capital of Tatarstan,” the young man said.

Walter looked at the ancient pages, where circles and dashes resembling a kind of Morse code alternated between the curved letters he was now used to seeing. He realized that, including the Cyrillic on the oldest Adamkiewicz grave, he had encountered two foreign alphabets in his father’s village. For so long, he had expected Bohoniki to be a bastion of complete Polishness. Now, he was not sure what to think.

After some time, Walter stood to face the others, and the old man then turned toward the door, the group following him into the sun.

“This is a beautiful building,” Helen said.

“Thank you,” the old man said.

They waited while he slowly turned his key and locked the mosque.

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“Are there any other Adamkiewiczes in the village?” Walter asked. “I know Stefan had a grandson, called Szymon.”

“No,” said the young man. “Szymon moved to Wrocław after his grandfather’s death. Many of the Tatars have moved away, or married Christians.” He paused. “But I chose to stay.”

“I see,” said Walter.

“Would you like some tea?” the old man asked. “I have photographs to show you.”

Walter looked at Helen, who nodded her head.

“We would like that very much,” he said.

At the old man’s home, they sat around a small table. From a yellowed folder, the old man produced photographs of Tatar congregants standing in front of the mosque. The oldest photographs dated to the 1920s, so Walter’s father was not to be found, but Walter’s great-uncle, Stefan, stood tall in three of them, all taken before the war. Walter had never seen a picture of his great-uncle before. In each photograph, Stefan wore a dark suit, a dark tie, and an eight-panel cap. He had the Adamkiewicz features, visible even in an old, grainy photograph.

Szymon appeared in two photographs. In one, bareheaded, he knelt next to his mother, looking serious and cradling a book in his arms. In the other, he was older, but still just as serious. He wore a military uniform.

“Did he fight?” Walter asked.

“He continued the tradition of the Tatars,” the young man said.

Walter held the photograph close to his eyes, trying to memorize the face of a cousin he had never seen—a cousin who was, by appearance, unmistakably family.

Then the old man took out a photograph darker and blurrier than the others, of a group of old men, each with long mustaches. He pointed at one of the men, wearing, like the others, what looked like a fez in addition to his elegant suit and tie.

Walter knew immediately who it was. “My grandfather,” he said, in a whisper, in English. “Mój dziadek.”

The old man nodded.

Walter started to cry. “Mój dziadek,” he repeated, bringing his hand to his eyes and wiping the tears away. “I never knew him.”

“He was a good man.”

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“Thank you,” Walter said.

“You can have this,” the old man said, pointing to the photograph.

Walter almost began to say that he could not, for he could not take what was not his, but that would have been a lie. He simply bowed his head.

Soon it was time for the bus to Sokółka. The young man asked for Walter and Helen’s address in America, which he promised to send to Szymon in Wrocław. Walter asked for Szymon’s address, too—he would try writing him again, to ask the questions he could not ask now—so the young man hurried home, in the direction of the cemetery. Walter and Helen walked to the bus shelter with the old man. The young man returned with the address written in the margins of a torn newspaper page. He then stood with the old man, waving, as Walter and Helen boarded the bus and headed west. Walter watched them from a side window until they disappeared from view.

Walter did not say much on the bus ride back, or on the train to Białystok. In their second-class cabin, Helen looked at him with worried eyes. He held her close. He was not sure what to think. All this time he had believed one truth about himself, one seemingly incontrovertible truth: He was Polish, completely. He was one thing, and better for being that one thing. And Polishness was nothing without Catholicism, Roman Catholicism.

The train pushed southwest, through the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Like in Bohoniki, cows wandered the countryside. White storks nested in tall trees and telephone poles. Hamlets and villages and small towns passed by, looking alike, all probably with cemeteries that resembled St. Hyacinth’s, at least where it mattered.

He wondered about his father. He was raised Catholic, surely. He was a Catholic in Utica, that Walter knew; he received the last rites in the hospital. But what did his father ever reveal about himself? Did he ever tell his wife that he was Tatar, descendent of the Golden Horde and Turkic peoples? Maybe it was unnecessary. Maybe Walter’s mother had always known. Maybe it was something the earlier generation just knew about a person, as its members were really from the land and its history, and Walter was just from a Polish neighborhood in Utica, an American.

Walter wondered about himself. He was no less of a Catholic, but he was less of a Pole. At least by blood, no matter what the young man and old man had said. Was he also, then, less of himself? He stared at

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the land through dirty windows. For so long, he had wanted to visit this country. For so long, and now he wished he had not. He wished that Father Mazur had not organized the trip, that his father had not talked so much about Bohoniki and the fields that surrounded it. Walter wished, almost, that his father had not been his father.

He shook his head at the thought and crossed himself for the offense. He turned away from the window, desperate to think of something else. What came to mind was not much better. He could not help but think of his daughter and her Adamkiewicz eyes, and of Robert, to whom he refused to speak a word. They had been together almost a year.

B That night at dinner, he could not stomach much more than soup and left early. He told Helen to stay, to enjoy the hotel restaurant. They rarely dined out back home.

He thought he might have trouble sleeping, but he woke to the alarm the next morning, refreshed. It was still dark outside. Their train to Warsaw was an early one, leaving at half past six. Helen stood at the edge of the bed, already dressed, her light curls matching the faint yellow of her sweater.

“I wanted to let you sleep,” she said.

Walter nodded, thankful.

“Do you want to get breakfast?” Helen asked.

Walter sat up in bed. “No. I’ll take my time.” He reached for his glasses on the nightstand. “Can you bring me back something?”

“Of course, dear.”

After Helen left, Walter stayed in bed, the covers and sheets pulled close. He did not feel sick, like he had the night before. More important, he did not feel less Polish. And he did not feel Tatar. At least, not yet.

After all, some things had not changed. He was still a baptized Catholic, as were his wife and two children. He still lived in a Polish neighborhood in East Utica. He did not have to let things affect him, if he did not want them to. In a way, Walter thought, he was continuing the real Tatar tradition: He was completely assimilated and felt completely Polish.

He stopped thinking about anything but the train and what he must do before they left the hotel. But soon he was unsatisfied and restless.

He got out of bed and walked to the window. He opened the window shade completely and then the window itself. The sun had not yet risen, but the light of early morning had already begun. In front of Walter

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was a city intersection and a park, beyond that an Orthodox cathedral.

Behind the hotel, not too far away, was the market square with its reconstructed town hall. It had been the Soviets, not the Germans, who had destroyed it in 1939. The Poles had finished rebuilding just five years ago, and so now it stood, new, yet old, a place of pride, a symbol of the indomitable, unconquered Polish spirit.

Walter could see the map of Białystok—at least the central part—in his head, his mind for cartography strengthened by all those National Geographic inserts. He knew that in this corner room, standing as he did, he faced Bohoniki, a place with other indomitable, unconquered Poles, who just happened to be Tatars. That, Walter knew, was exactly how they saw themselves.

There was something to be admired about them, he thought.

Something to be admired about the lonely mosque and the still-functioning cemetery. There were not many of them, and, aside from the Sandra-like eyes in the gravestone photographs, or in the photographs of his great-uncle and cousin, they did not all look that different, that distinct—at the very least, they did not look out of place in Poland, just as his father had not looked out of place in East Utica. Yet, there they were, how many centuries later.

They had to have known, he thought. They had to have known that someday it would be like this, that there would be only the lonely mosque and the scattered families and the assimilated descendants.

They had to have known that upon settling in a land of foreign people, foreign languages, and foreign faiths that they would change, that what it meant to be an Adamkiewicz—a name not yet given, at that point— would someday change. And yet, there they were, not wholly the same, but with Arabic on their gravestones and a crescent atop their mosque.

Outside, the morning light grew stronger. A sudden breeze carried the scent of pine to his window, and at once he was both in Bohoniki and the New York wilderness, in America and in Poland.

He thought of Polonia, and the little Polish neighborhood of East Utica, and the inevitability of it all. It was inevitable. He did his best to resist, but even he, himself, was an example. He was not of this land, but of a land much farther away, no matter how similar in natural appearance. He was, at heart, an American of Polish culture who lived in a city of not just Poles, but also many others. His own children spoke Polish poorly and could not read or write it. His future grandchildren

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would not know the native language of his parents—the only language, in fact, he had ever heard his mother speak. At best, they would call him Dziadzi and Helen Babci, as his friends’ grandchildren, some born to non-Polish fathers or mothers, called their grandparents. That was what would happen.

But the Tatars—his people, now, or at least partly—gave him hope.

The mosque, the cemetery, the old man, and especially the young man— they all gave him hope. Maybe someday, generations from now, there would be Adamkiewiczes, whether by name or not, barely Polish by blood, but with an Our Lady of Częstochowa print above the kitchen table, their recent dead buried in St. Hyacinth’s although they had lived and died far away. As long as Robert could see that, Walter thought, it would be all right. As long as he could see how important that was, so that his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great and beyond would never hesitate when asked what they were. So that they, and others, would never not know the answer. Walter did not consider himself a difficult man. Robert, if he was reasonable, could see that. That was all a quarter-Tatar, all-Polish, all-American man could ask. Walter wanted more, maybe needed more, but that was all a reasonable man could ask. He wished it were another way, but it was not. It was the truth.

He stood at the window for some time, facing Bohoniki, until he heard Helen open the hotel room door and call to him.

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[ FICTION]

A

n old man with an eye patch sat in the swivel chair behind the oak desk. His

rumpled and his silver hair grew in unruly curls around his ears. On the far wall of the office, hanging from a rack of antlers, was a “Baby Bird Flowchart” upon which was printed a list of suggested actions for the safe return of an unnested hatchling to its mother. There were cages stacked about the room, some still occupied, but most of the animals were housed in

DEVOTION Robert McGuill

the low-ceilinged log shelter south of the office building. The shelter’s massive wooden doors were swung open to the late morning sun, and from its shadowy innards came the screeches and growls of the creatures whose fate rested in the old man’s hands.

Across the way in the gravel parking lot, a

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dark, heavyset fellow in bib overalls was loading and unloading wire crates from the bed of a battered red GMC flatbed. The truck was a tragic-looking contraption with bald tires and rusted doors. I was told the man loading the crates was Carlos, and he was the last of the wildlife center’s employees.

The phone rang. It had been ringing all morning. The old man glanced at it but did not pick it up. He continued to talk instead. He said he was too tired to field any calls; and besides, it would only be another bill collector, so there was nothing to talk about anyway. Not until the money came in. He would save his breath for the animals, he said. The animals came first.

I was there to shepherd the old man down the mountain into town where he would begin a new life. His son was paying me, through a proxy, to do this. I’d been tasked to help the old man understand that his wildlife rehabilitation center was underwater, financially speaking, and retirement was now his only recourse. My agreement was to chat with the old man, offer whatever assurances I felt necessary, then chauffeur him down to Cañon City where a family acquaintance, Mr. Avery, would take charge of him. The old man’s son, a Denver lawyer named Terrance Bleakly, had secured an apartment for the old man in an assisted living facility run by the Holy Cross Abbey. Mr. Avery would see to the old man’s settling in once we’d arrived in town.

The old man’s lawyer-son had been quite confident this plan would succeed, Mr. Avery told me. But so far, the old man did not want to leave.

“Piss off, you bloody muppet!”

The old man’s parrot, who I’d met coming through the door, spoke with a British accent, bobbing its plumed white head when it talked. It had been pacing on its perch behind the old man’s chair, chattering obscenities. Where this bird came from, I didn’t know. Nor did I ask. Mr. Avery had made no mention of the parrot when we spoke on the phone, but I suspected it was to be shipped off with the other animals.

“Bollocks!” the bird squawked. “Bollocks!”

The old man glanced up, patiently. “Nigel, please.” He made a motion with his hand for the bird to hush, then turned to me with an apologetic smile. “You’ll have to forgive him, Father. He’s not from around here.”

I raised a hand, as if in absolution. “It’s all right. I’m here to help, not judge.”

“Thank you,” the old man said. “He’s a lewd bird, but he can be en-

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tertaining company when it suits him.”

I looked the parrot over, genuinely curious. “He’s a bit of an odd duck, isn’t he? For a parrot, I mean. I’ve never seen one like him before.”

“He’s quite rare, actually.”

“Is he?” I pursed my lips and studied the bird’s shape. “May I ask how you came by him?”

The bird scooted along his perch, bobbing and squawking. “Won him in a raffle! Feckin’ numpty!”

The parrot raked a scaly talon over the old man’s curly gray head, and the old man laughed, embarrassed, and I laughed along with him. “It’s a long story,” he said, pushing his hair back in place. “One best left for another time.”

I’d been told the old man was “soft in the head,” unable to look after himself. Mr. Avery said he was no longer capable of operating the rehab center or caring for the wildlife it housed. It was my job to convince the old man the facility’s money woes were a symptom of a more grievous, systemic ailment. One that was sinking the entire operation. I was to help him understand that the best thing for everyone involved, most especially the animals, was to close the center’s doors and move on to other work.

The old man offered me a chair and a cup of coffee as I spoke. I accepted both, and he listened, cordially, as I reasoned the matter out. Or, as Mr. Avery called it, had my “come to Jesus talk” with him.

“That’s all very interesting,” the old man said when I’d finished. “So, you say we have no money in the bank?”

I nodded, gravely. “I’m afraid so, Francis. But, of course, cash flow isn’t the only concern. There are other issues as well. Certain parties, anonymous detractors, have raised issues of animal rights. Possible allegations of neglect.”

None of this last part was true. The animals’ welfare had never been questioned. But I said it anyway, hoping to weaken his confidence.

The old man unfolded his hands and dusted the leg of his faded corduroys. His head tilted to one side. “How did this knowledge come to you?”

When he looked at me, the unexpected directness of his gaze caused me to draw a blank, and the answer I’d prepared mysteriously deserted me. Mr. Avery had made no mention of the old man’s visual impairment (I wasn’t expecting to meet a man with an eye patch!), and for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, the sight of the thing undermined my composure.

“These are public matters, Francis,” I said, gathering my wits. “But to

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answer your question, I was sent here by a friend. Someone who cares.”

“I see.”

The old man frowned slightly. He appeared to think, thumbing through his mind for the name of the scoundrel who’d orchestrated this betrayal. The “friend who cared enough about him” to divulge the state of his personal finances to a priest.

“There’s great interest in seeing you taken care of, Francis.”

“Is there?”

“Yes, there is.”

He looked at me with what might have been a smile, the corners of his chapped mouth disappearing into the furry cloud of his thick white beard. “Has anyone told these interested parties that money would take care of taking care of me and my animals?”

I’d never been this close to a man with an eye patch before, except on stage, and I was unprepared for the effect it was having on me. I couldn’t stop staring. I wanted to know what lay behind the thing, what it concealed.

He sensed I wasn’t going to answer and went on talking without waiting for a reply.

“My work isn’t all that different from yours, Father.” He reached for the pipe he’d left in the glass ashtray on his desk and tapped the briar bowl against his palm. Leaning back, he pointed the stem at me. “I depend on the collection plate, the same way you do. I don’t need to tell a person in your profession that some weeks are better than others. Or that a man doesn’t give up his faith because of a few small setbacks.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “It’s understood.”

“Yes, it is.”

He produced a leather pouch from his vest and filled the pipe with tobacco. I looked on as he tamped the rich smelling shreds of leaf with a pipe nail. He seemed satisfied I’d conceded his point.

“No one’s asking you to abandon your faith, Francis,” I said, pressing on. “You understand this, yes? The Lord’s generosity is endless—” He seized on the caveat in my voice. “But?” “But even His pockets are only so deep.”

The old man returned the pouch to his vest and set the silver pipe

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nail on the desk. I tried to hold his stare but couldn’t. The eye patch was too distracting. I’d never been this close to a man with an eye patch before, except on stage, and I was unprepared for the effect it was having on me. I couldn’t stop staring. I wanted to know what lay behind the thing, what it concealed.

So far the old man had shown none of the fogginess Mr. Avery spoke about over the phone. He’d even made a joke when he caught me staring at the naked black patch covering his eye. “The ladies find it intriguing,” he said blithely, adjusting the thing with a practiced flair. Then, grinning, he took a stick match from his vest and scratched it with his thumbnail.

The sulphur tip crackled to life. “By the way—” He lit the pipe, shook out the match, and flipped it in the ashtray. “If someone ever tells you falconry’s an art, believe him.”

He laughed, gruffly, and offered me another cup of his wretched black coffee. I hadn’t noticed until now, but he was missing a finger. His middle. “We had a baby badger named Gus once,” he explained, displaying the scarred stub. “They’re adorable when they’re little—what baby isn’t?—but my God, they can be nasty when they grow up.” He lowered the fingerless hand. Puffed on the pipe. “It’s a rough profession, Father.

Just like yours. The wins keep you going, but the losses? They kill you.”

He drew the pipe from his mouth and looked at it with a frown, laying it in the ashtray. “An eye’s one thing. A finger is another. But losing everything you’ve bled over? Wept over? That’s too much to take from any man. I’d sooner forfeit my soul than sell out my wild friends.”

I nodded, telling him this was my point. The days of putting life and limb at hazard were behind him. His soul could rejoice. He could walk away, scot-free, and look back without regret because he’d know he’d done the right thing. God wouldn’t shut a door, I told him, without opening a window. Retiring to town meant having his debts forgiven, his animals adopted out to new homes. He could relax for once in his life. I assured him I would see to it, personally, that all the breaks fell his way.

“Bollocks!” the bird squawked. “Bollocks!”

The old man turned his eyes to the parrot, then to the open door that looked out into the gravel lot. His man, Carlos, was still unloading cages. “Carlos also says we have no money in the bank. He’s been telling me this every day for fifty years. He worries like an old woman. He says we need to think about an exit strategy.”

The old man’s eyes sparkled when he repeated the hired man’s words.

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It amused him that a fellow with no education, a man whose second language was English, might use such highfalutin terms to express his concern for the center’s future. Exit strategy! Even now the words tickled him.

“Perhaps it’s time you listen to Carlos,” I said.

“I always have, Father.”

His gaze was fixed on the doorway.

“Francis?”

He turned, his soft blue eye finding mine.

“What do you say? About my offer?”

“I say you’re being premature.” He looked away, out the door again.

“We’ll be fine. Someone will come along and help out. They always do.”

Someone had always come along and helped out. I knew this to be true. But what I knew that the old man didn’t was that the mysterious benefactors he so heavily depended upon were, in fact, only one man acting alone—his son, Terrance Bleakly, the Denver lawyer.

“But what if the money doesn’t come?” I persisted. “What then?”

“It will.”

It was innocence, not guile, I decided, that urged him to say this. He was a nice man. A gentle man. Mild mannered and perhaps even a bit naïve, despite his crusty demeanor. It was as if he sensed my anxiety and was trying to put me at ease. He spoke as if his facility would live on forever, money or no money, and I felt sorry for him, because I knew the sale of the property had already been arranged. Money had already changed hands.

“Come, Francis,” I said. “Be realistic. You and I both know a man can’t run a business on luck alone.”

“Luck? No.” He shook his gray head in agreement. “But faith, yes.”

He pointed, vaguely, through the window to the snow-dusted mountains that lay in a long ridge against the blue western sky. “I’m all that’s left,” he said. “Mine is the only shelter in a hundred miles. The Hermitage burnt down in the Wagon Tongue Fire ten years ago, and the poor creatures boarded there perished in the flames.” His voice foundered, sank, and rose again. “Now it’s just me,” he said. “It’s all down to me.” He turned. “I’m needed the same way you are, Father. Don’t you see that?”

B The old man’s son had engaged in a circuitous plot to lure his father into town. He’d contacted a colleague who knew a businesswoman who had a gardener who had a longtime client in banking. The banker, Mr.

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Avery, was acquainted with an art teacher in Pueblo, who moonlighted as an actor in the town’s community theater. That art-teacher-slash-smalltime-thespian was me, Dick Paradise. Mr. Avery told his longtime gardener that I was ideal for the role Mr. Bleakly had concocted. He’d seen me as Friar Laurence in a production of Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare in the Park, of course), and insisted I would make the perfect priest. The gardener, who knew nothing about theatre but who had enjoyed a warm relationship with Mr. Avery for many years, passed the recommendation along to the businesswoman, who in turn passed it along to her colleague, who in turn relayed the information to Terrance Bleakly, Esq. Mr. Bleakly contacted Mr. Avery within days and the two made fast friends over the phone. Not long after, I was offered the job. A one-man performance for $500.

“I’ll need a bit of history to pull this off,” I told Mr. Avery. “What’s the old man’s backstory?”

“Backstory?”

“Yes. Why should he trust me? What’s my motivation for seeing him?”

“Motivation?” The phone went silent. “Your motivation, Dick,” Mr. Avery said gruffly, “is money. We’re putting $500 in your pocket.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I understand, but—” “Look,” Mr. Avery said. “It’s like this. He’s an old man. He’s had his day, and so has his so-called business. His son wants him out of there before they shutter the place. He wants the facility locked, the utilities cut off, and the goddamned animals repatriated to new homes. So tell the old guy whatever you have to. But make him believe it’s for his own good. All you have to do is keep him pacified until you get him down the mountain. After that, I’ll take over.”

“That’s a tall bill,” I said. “Even for a priest.”

Mr. Avery agreed. But all the same, he wanted it done. And he wanted it done his way.

“No one expects miracles,” he said. “Just do your best, Dick. Get him down to Cañon, and I’ll see to it he gets to the retirement village.

His son says he’s a devout old man. Use his devotion to your advantage.

Whatever you say, he’ll take it to heart. He’ll listen to a priest.”

The next morning, I called the theatre at the college, tapping wardrobe for a cassock, a Roman collar, and a pair of sensible, black shoes.

Later that afternoon, as I stood in front of the floor-length mirror ad-

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justing my costume, Mrs. Henley, the dresser, came by and put her hands on her hips. She tilted her head, pursing her lips. Then she twirled her finger to get a look at me in the round. She studied every detail, from the thick black glasses I’d chosen to the cut and fall of the cassock that brushed the tops of my newly polished shoes. When she was finished, she gave me a cool nod of approval. “Very convincing, Mr. Paradise. You look every bit the part.”

B The old man bent forward again, looking out at the gravel lot and the flatbed truck. “There was a year,” he said, “when we decided we’d only take animals from the county. To keep costs down. But the next day a group of rough-looking teenage boys came to me with a baby bunny in a cup. They said, ‘We didn’t know what to do, so we came here.’

“The boys had spent most of their money on a cab from Denver.

Denver! They could only offer a three-dollar donation.” He turned his cloudy blue eye from the door and pinned me with it. “What was I supposed to do? Shoo them away after they’d spent their last dime getting here?” He shook his head. “You and me, Father? We’re not in the business of turning people down. It’s not in our blood.”

I agreed but said there was new work to accomplish. Different work, in town, that was also important.

“I’m no use to anyone in town,” the old man said. “This is where I belong. Up here. I wasn’t put on this earth to look after cats and dogs.

I was put here to do what I’m doing. If I don’t look after these wild things, who will? Who will take them in? It isn’t about money, Father.

It’s about doing what’s right. The only currency a troubled animal understands is kindness.”

I was losing ground. The longer we talked the more resolute he became, and the more stoutly he defended his work. He clung to the past with the conviction of a gnarled, root-bound stump. Mr. Avery assured me he would defer to my authority, but I’d already used up the best of my rehearsed lines and he was still unwilling to budge. So I took a different tack.

“It’s a sin of pride,” I warned, “to believe yourself smarter or more capable than the Lord, Francis. You must trust in God. He will look after the animals.”

“Yes,” the old man muttered, unfazed by my admonition. “He will look after them. He always has.”

The phone rang and the old man glanced at it. “When the money

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comes in,” he said, “all worries will fly out the window.” He turned to me. “I don’t know how it works, Father, and I don’t care. But it does. It always has. The gifts come and you accept them, and you ask no questions. You simply cross yourself and give thanks.”

He lowered his eye. His fingers touched the edge of an unopened envelope on the desk. A bill, I thought.

“The Lord has plans for you, Francis. New plans. This is what He’s trying to tell you. The center is old. You’re old. It’s time the two of you said your goodbyes. It’s time you rejoice in the work you’ve accomplished together and move on.”

The old man’s fingers played with the edge of the unopened envelope.

Carlos, his hired man, had ceased unloading the cages from the back of the truck and was walking toward the office, a kerchief in his hand.

He wandered up and stood in the doorframe and after knocking politely on the jamb, passed the worn red cloth over the back of his neck. “I’m breaking for lunch, Frank.” He squinted, shielding his eyes from the sun.

“Can I bring you anything?”

“No, thank you Carlos.”

Carlos stepped into the office, out of the sun, and returned the kerchief to the pocket of his overalls. A shock of black hair fell across his eye, and he shook it back and raised his chin. “How about some coffee?

Real coffee? An Americano or something? I can pick one up for you on the way back.” He leaned over the desk, casually noting the address on the envelope the old man was fingering, then straightened again, his expression unchanged.

“No, no. I’m good.”

“Well, suit yourself.”

He turned to leave, but the old man stopped him. “Carlos?”

“Yes?” “Check the post office box on your way, will you? I’m expecting money.”

The hired man nodded. “Sure, Frank. No problem.” The parrot snapped at Carlos’s ear as he turned to leave, missing it by only the smallest of margins, and the hired man wheeled round and confronted the bird with a drawn fist. “¡Vete al carajo!”

The bird stared at Carlos’s thick, brown knuckles and taunted him with a witch-like cackle. “Ball bag! Ball bag!”

“Stupid bird!” Carlos snarled through stained teeth. “Keep it up!

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Keep it up, and you’ll get yours!”

The old man smiled, forlornly, and raised a hand. “Go easy, friend.

Nigel’s only teasing. He’s agitated today, like everybody else.”

The hired man made an unsympathetic face and huffed. “It’s no wonder his previous owner beat him!” He squared his shoulders and sniffed indignantly. “He’s an evil bird.”

“It’s true,” the old man agreed. “He’s a sinful beast with a vile tongue.

But he’s also one of God’s creatures, just like you and me. Right, Father?”

The old man looked over, seeking my affirmation.

“Yes,” I said vaguely, coughing into my fist. “Yes, of course.”

Carlos glared at me, grunting as if ashamed that a man of the cloth would sink so low as to defend a foul-mouthed bird. Then he turned and walked through the door, back into the sunlight, shaking his head and muttering. “God help us. A parliament of fools!”

B In my conversation with Mr. Avery, I was told the old man could not be trusted to do what was best anymore. Either for himself, or his animals. This was why the son had decided to close him down and sell off the property.

“Trusted,” I said. “In what way, exactly?”

“Mr. Bleakly suggests there might be some sort of dementia at play.

The word he used when we spoke over the phone was unbalanced.”

“Unbalanced?”

“Unbalanced or unhinged. I can’t remember which.”

I considered the words, saying nothing.

“He was widowed,” Mr. Avery explained after my long silence. “His wife died in some sort of freak accident. The son says the old man blamed himself. He says his father became a different man after the tragedy. Confused. Depressed.”

“How long ago did this accident happen?”

“Does it matter?”

I didn’t know. It seemed as if it might, but then, it was all speculation, wasn’t it? I was a player. An art teacher masquerading as a priest!

“Is he a danger to himself?” I asked. “Or to others?” It was the latter, quite honestly, that concerned me most. I’d read about loony old mountain men who stockpiled weapons and ammunition, living in fear of the day some lowlander like me would come along and try to strip them of their freedom. I made it plain to Mr. Avery I wasn’t eager to engage an

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armed adversary. If the old man was crazy, I wanted to know it—before I found myself in the crosshairs.

“He’s harmless,” Mr. Avery assured me (appending the not-so-reassuring caveat), “—from everything I’ve been told.”

“Will he resist?” I asked. “When I try to take him away?”

“I’d expect some resistance, yes. But not much. He’s old. Old and tired and ready to let go—even if he doesn’t know it yet. You’ll manage just fine, Dick. I’ve seen you work. I have no doubt about your ability to persuade an audience.”

B “Fifty-seven years,” the old man said, nostalgia warming his voice.

“That’s how long I’ve been here, Father.” He turned to me. “I’ve never doubted the substance of my work. My strength of conviction is as powerful as ever. I answered my calling, just like you. I know who I am.

I labor in God’s service.”

I lowered my head, briefly closing my eyes. I’d expected to find a different man from the one who sat across from me, and the longer we spoke the more I began to question the dirty bit of work I’d agreed to carry out in the name of compassion.

“You’ve spent your life caring for innocent creatures who couldn’t help themselves,” I said. “Now your friends are trying to do the same for you. You see that, don’t you, Francis? The parallels?”

“Parallels?”

The parrot made an obscene noise. “Bollocks! Bollocks!”

The old man and I both ignored the bird.

“We all need someone to look after us, Francis. Someone we can lean on, depend on. The more vulnerable we are, the more we need the help and protection of others. God sees we’re all looked after—all in our own way.”

The old man set his lips. He looked up, embracing me with his cloudy blue eye. “Do you know what imprinting is, Father?”

The question seemed odd and a bit out of place, but I answered anyway. “I knew a fellow in college,” I said, fetching up an anecdote that was half truth, half lie. “A seminarian, like myself. He adopted a duckling from the science department at the end of the semester one year and raised it in his dorm room. It followed him everywhere. All over campus. Is that what you mean?”

The old man didn’t say whether it was, or wasn’t, what he meant.

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Rather, he took up his own thought, leaving mine to fend for itself.

“When a wild animal imprints on you,” he said, “it stops knowing how to be what it is. It expects things from you. Demands things from you. And if it doesn’t get what it wants, it gets angry.”

He swiveled forward on the edge of his chair and, as if to impart some great secret, pressed his hands together. “There was a woman,” he said, “who used to live not far from here. She had a pet deer, a whitetail, and she went out to feed it one evening and never came back.”

He leaned back, pawing at his beard. Leaned forward again and resumed. “Her husband found her in the yard,” he said. “Her blouse was torn open, soaked through with blood, and the buck was standing over her body with an innocent look on its face. It was a tragedy. An accident by any reckoning. But when the husband looked into the buck’s eyes and failed to find any sign of remorse, he fetched a rifle and slaughtered the ungrateful animal on the spot.”

He paused, and I waited for more. A moral. Some sort of dénouement. But nothing more came. The old man went silent, leaving me to wonder if what he’d said was a homily, a threat, or just the tired rambling of a sorry old bastard who’d gone crazy from loneliness. I didn’t even know if what he’d told me was true.

“Good people will take care of your animals,” I assured him. “People as good and caring as yourself, Francis.”

He was staring into space. He balked without even looking my way.

“Good plays a very small part in it, Father,” he said. His soft blue eye took on a hardened glare. “That whitetail?” He turned, forcing his gaze on me. “It only did what the woman trained it to do. The man was wrong to kill it. You can’t ask something to love you, unconditionally, then destroy it when it lives up to its promise.”

I searched the wall for a clock. But there was none. The afternoon was growing short, and it was necessary we finish our business. I had nothing left to say to the old man that would make any difference to either of us.

“Francis?”

“Yes?” “We need to think about going. It’s a long drive down the mountain.”

He sat there.

“Francis?”

“Yes?” “It’s time, friend. Will you come?”

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An engine growled in the distance, and as it drew closer, I heard the grind of gears as the driver stepped down the vehicle’s speed. It was the hired man Carlos, I supposed, back from lunch. Or maybe the property’s new owner come to assess his purchase. It might even have been a bunch of rough-looking teenage boys with a bunny in a cup and nowhere else to turn. But whatever it was, one thing was certain. It wasn’t the coming of salvation.

The old man smiled, patting me on the leg. “You go without me, Father.”

“Francis, please.”

“God owes me,” he said. “The checks He sends are payment for past deeds. The price of unconditional devotion.” He chuckled. “Don’t worry about the bills, Father. Don’t worry about anything. We’re all safe here. I promise.”

He picked up his pipe and scrounged a match from his vest pocket.

He struck the match and brought the pipe stem to his weathered lips. I glanced at the parrot as he puffed the tobacco back to life. But the bird, like the old man, had nothing more to say.

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[ POETRY]

Rosh HaShanah Sestina By: Adina Kopinsky Though the year is alive and circling it deepens to grey, it gyrates and crumbles—in the air only a shimmer once form and substance; with its breath tomorrow rears a newborn head, sings the first bellow of ground, grass, and gravel into the bloom where air and earth touch my unfurling heart, hear God proclaim let the universe bloom. Hearts churn blood like clouds that twist between fists of grey, arrive with a traveling circus, a town now blooming with music, streamers, marching bands of brass and shimmer.

Across empty fields, no man behind a scythe to bellow for the children streaming towards tomorrow—

in the history of twilight when has such a year bellowed its goodbye? As it deepens to purple, another blooms reluctant, we cannot stop the timbred grey crumble of earthquake, famine, tomorrow’s disaster unknown, only the pining of our hearts shining through the door, this newborn light it shimmers into blue, my veins a topography of shimmer the life that lingers in our heart gathers to a bellow that rips through each nerve the swell of lung and heart, each plant becomes my air, my life, my bloom.

The past is past still yesterday becomes tomorrow, a nursery rhyme, a cradle on boughs of grey, and my heart—my heart! like summer wheat it shimmers green before the grey frost, spring bellowing in song, in bloom, each moment the sweet incense of tomorrow.

and like that circus of the past, tomorrow groans for its prize due, the reaving of its heart shears feast and famine alike, a warrior’s bellow of triumph, glint and groan, the sweating beads of grey as he charges his prey like the end of days, half shimmer half scum, each yesterday dimming before the sun’s bloom, and in the world of now, the year that blooms will find no ancient beast to fight tomorrow, no troubadour declaims on king and shimmer, our hard night is neither knight of spade nor heart.

The sweat that springs from our pores glassy, not grey heat’s liquid sterile, still our voices sound below—

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[ POETRY]

An Origin By: Ana Reisens I know this place.

I’ve visited this meadow before – here, where the moths dangle from invisible lines and the fireflies begin their secret rituals.

This is where it all comes into being: crickets, condensation, rebirth, and the wingbeats of time blur as if the word beginning had no end.

Come, sit with me.

Let’s listen to the meadow’s soft breathing as we witness the great unveiling of the horizon.

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[ NONFICTION]

Shake Your Teal Feathers

Jennifer Furner

“I

Year 1 don’t know if I should wear it on my stomach.” I stood in front of the hallway

full-length mirror in a sports bra and workout leggings, a temporary tattoo in my hand that read “Ovarian cancer can eat my dust.” I got the idea for the tattoo as soon as I signed up for the 5K; I thought it was clever and a little bit badass. I thought the other ovarian cancer survivors would enjoy it. I thought I could wear it on my stomach next to my scar.

“Don’t chicken out now,” my husband goaded.

“No, I mean, I’ll still wear it. But maybe I should wear it on my arm or something.” I poked at the extra weight I had gained over the last year bulging over the seam of my pants.

“You can wear it on your arm if you want,” my husband offered, “but I don’t think you’ve got

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anything to be ashamed of. If you want to wear it on your stomach, wear it on your stomach.”

“Won’t it be like I’m asking for attention?”

“It’s a 5K for ovarian cancer. Everyone there is asking for attention.”

He was right. The point was to raise awareness. What would make people more aware than seeing the scar that resulted from ovarian cancer surgery? If anyone would be shocked by my bare midriff, it wouldn’t be these ladies. I adhered the tattoo just above my waistband, adjacent to the pink scar that split my stomach vertically in half.

Year 0 On Friday, I thought I had food poisoning as my stomach ached and my throat retched. On Saturday, ER doctors hypothesized with each other what was happening inside my body. On Monday, I was released with prescription pain meds and a contact for a gynecological oncologist.

On Tuesday, I imagined I would die soon, leaving behind my husband of eight years and my 1-year-old daughter. On Wednesday, I was scheduled for surgery. On Friday, a tumor was removed from my abdomen.

Now, it was Saturday morning. The door opened, and a nurse entered.

She gently lifted the hem of my gown and folded it back to my chest to examine the 7-inch vertical incision along my stomach. It was glued shut with a strip of adhesive; bright red blood that hadn’t completely washed away was preserved under the plastic coating.

“Everything looks good,” the nurse said in hushed tones as she replaced my gown. “The doctor will be in to see you soon.”

When the door opened again, my oncologist, a bulky man with no neck, walked in, his hands in the pockets of his white coat.

“So the surgery was a success,” he said. “We were able to remove the tumor without breaking any pieces off. We’re very confident we got it all. It wasn’t easy, though. It was very wide. It was like a giant pancake, just floating under the skin. That’s why the incision is so big.”

I thought back to our pre surgery consultation when the doctor had pressed on the lump in my stomach, and I saw a mass move under the surface, like the top of a turtle’s shell moving across a lake. No, it was not fat, which would ripple like waves. It was a chunk, a chunk of abnormal cells that had spawned from my ovary. How had I not seen it move in one piece like that before? How had I not known before?

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“And was it cancer?” I asked. He had thought it was at the consultation but couldn’t be sure until it came out. My friend told me her mom had a tumor the size of a cantaloupe on her ovary one time, but it was benign. There was still a chance it was benign.

“You had what is called a mucinous tumor. It’s a rather rare cancer.

But the good news is that it tends to be noninvasive, and we removed the tumor in one piece. I’m confident we got it all out.”

I had a tumor. It was cancerous. It was out now. I processed it stepby-step. What was the next step?

“What happens now?”

“This kind of cancer doesn’t respond well to chemo or radiation, and since we got it out in one piece, I don’t think you need to consider either of those options anyhow.”

Chemo and radiation weren’t necessary. Chemo and radiation wouldn’t be effective. Those two sentences didn’t mean the same thing.

“So…am I cancer-free now?” I asked, ignorant to how complicated that question really was.

“We’ll monitor your blood for any tumor markers for five years— keep a close eye on you—but you should be fine.”

He left, and I turned on the television to find one of my favorite childhood movies playing on TBS. A short time after, an orderly delivered me a tray of coffee, red Jell-O, and chocolate pudding. I felt like a kid staying home sick from school, which was a much nicer thought than feeling like a cancer survivor.

Cancer survivor—did that term really describe me? No, this was not the cancer most people experienced. I would not poison myself with chemo injections, lose my hair, feel sick all the time.

So what had I survived? A surgery. People have surgeries all the time.

My oncologist was the one who had “beat cancer” by removing it from me. And now it was gone, and I was fine. I had cancer yesterday. I no longer had cancer today.

Then again, who was a cancer survivor if not someone who had cancer and doesn’t anymore?

Year 1 When I checked in at the race, they handed me a teal sash with the word “survivor” on it. Chris was right. We were all asking for attention.

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He had stayed home so he could put our daughter down for a nap. I was alone; there was no one I knew.

I wasn’t alone. I was surrounded by people, people who had suffered as I had suffered. These were my people.

These weren’t my people. There were women with bandanas or teal-colored wigs covering bald heads. There were people with customized shirts that had relatives’ names, a birth year, and a death year. There were people who wore signs saying, “I walk for…” and “I run for…”— people whose loved one was still fighting, actively fighting, every day, never finding their way out of the woods.

I stayed off by myself, in the sun where it was warm, since I only had on a sports bra and a sash that blew awkwardly in the wind; I hid in anonymity behind my sunglasses and my smartphone. But I didn’t look at my phone. Through my tinted lenses, I looked around, wondering who was looking at me, wondering what they were thinking.

And I felt like I was destroying their innocence, even though it was cancer that had done that.

Children ran around the plaza, carrying balloons, wearing teal T-shirts with teal ribbon tattoos on their cheeks; they seemed aware of what ovarian cancer was, and yet I felt like I exposed them to a dark world by showing my sad-looking stomach and my gruesome scar. To them, ovarian cancer was just playing outside and wearing teal and supporting their family, but no. I implied ovarian cancer is disgusting and disfiguring and leaves a terrible mark literally and figuratively. And I felt like I was destroying their innocence, even though it was cancer that had done that.

Why was I doing this anyhow? What statement was I making? I had originally thought I was proud of my battle, that I had wanted to show off my victory over cancer, but what had I won? All I had done was lie still in a bed in surgery and then lie still in a bed for recovery. I had nothing to brag about.

Maybe that was why I wore my scar out in the open. I wanted to prove I belonged. See? I have a scar like you do.

It turned out I was asking for attention.

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Year 0 I had to meet with a social worker before I was discharged from the hospital. She wanted to ensure I had a plan for moving forward after this experience. She gave me some pamphlets about support groups and retreats for ovarian cancer survivors. They had pictures of gray-haired ladies smiling in a natural setting. I was only 33 years old. But because I’d had a cancerous tumor grow on my ovary, I could join other women who once had cancerous tumors growing on their ovaries. We belonged to the same group. I was entitled to the same healing that they were.

I did not feel like a cancer survivor, but I also did not feel like a cancer evader. I was in a sort of limbo.

I tucked the pamphlets in my overnight bag, having already decided I would not pursue any support groups or retreats.

Year 1 A voice over the PA system announced it was time to line up—the race was about to start, so I moved from my sunny spot, through the pavilion, and toward the start line. Two ladies with teal T-shirts, gray hair, and sashes like mine stopped me.

“What does your tattoo say?” one of the women said, bending down toward my abdomen and my scar.

“Ovarian cancer can eat my dust,” I said.

The lady laughed. “We’ll have to look into getting one of those for next year,” she said, elbowing her friend.

No gut-shaming. No scar-shaming. No comparing of traumas, who had it worse. Just three ovarian cancer survivors having a laugh together.

Year 0 A fall breeze blew through the trees, and twigs and leaves crunched on the sidewalk under my running feet. Despite the cool morning, sweat beaded on my forehead, and my breath was heavy and labored. I had a side ache, not from running, but from my missing ovary. I was cleared for physical exercise, but I still worried my incision might rip open if I twisted my body the wrong way.

I had been running all summer, trying to keep my weight gain under

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control, thinking it was fat bulging out my stomach; I couldn’t imagine it could be anything else.

I’d gone two months without running, thanks to the operation, and now I wanted to get back into shape. But also, the advice for postcancer care was to make time for exercise, and I had made promises to be healthier. Although my oncologist told me my cancer was rare, that nothing I had done in my life had brought it on, I was terrified of its return and would do everything in my power to keep it away.

I stopped along the trail to take a selfie for social media. I posted it with the hashtags #fuckcancer and #notdyingtoday.

I felt lucky. I was given a new lease on life, a second chance. I felt victorious. I had outrun death.

Year 1 Running with no shirt on wasn’t much of an embarrassment at first.

We all saw each other from the back. When someone passed me, they didn’t look over their shoulder to gawk. They just kept running.

But the course was an out-and-back; there was a halfway point where everyone turned around. Soon, I was face-to-face with the runners in front of me and the runners behind me. We could see the front of each other now.

It’s only natural to look at the people you come across while running.

I’m sure that’s what I was doing. I’m sure that’s what they were doing.

Or maybe I was sure they were looking at me, wondering about me, judging me. Between the sash, the skin, and the scar, it was difficult to ignore me.

Most people just kept on running or walking, talking to their friends as their eyes shifted in my direction.

Only one woman made any comments to me whatsoever. She was walking on the left side of the trail, and I was running on the right side.

In a loud, boisterous voice, she yelled, “Girl, you got balls!”

I smiled and gave her a thumbs up.

Year 0 I found a Facebook group for ovarian cancer survivors in my area.

I could watch in silence as strangers talked about their experiences; I

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waited for someone to say something I could relate to. I waited to feel like I belonged.

The posts on the page asked for prayers for members who were starting another round of chemo. There were memes about the preciousness of every day. There were congratulatory posts of dropping CA-125 numbers (my oncologist watched my CA 19-9 numbers). They shared various treatments for pain and nausea.

Yet there was only one gynecological oncologist in the area. Their doctor was my doctor.

I had so many questions. I yearned for someone to talk to who could understand.

At my follow-up, I asked about the ovarian cancer support group that met at the hospital. Would it be a good idea for me to attend one?

“Depends on what you’re looking to get out of it,” my oncologist’s PA said. “If you’re looking for someone who can relate to your experience, that’s probably not the best place to do it.”

She meant that I wasn’t in the late stages of cancer, that I wasn’t wrestling with death every day like most ovarian cancer patients.

Mucinous tumors were rare. I was one of eight cases in the United States. Who could possibly relate to my experience? Who could mentor me on this journey?

Year 1 My first year post-cancer was a rough road. My digestion still seemed out of whack. I was gaining weight quickly again. I now knew these could be symptoms of something bigger. I couldn’t be sure it was just a poor diet or getting older.

My oncologist assured me that everything looked good with my blood work (taken every three months to look for tumor markers) and my exams (a pelvic exam also done every three months), but if I was worried, they would do a CT scan for “peace of mind.”

In the breakroom at work, I choked down a chalky smoothie concoction and didn’t eat anything for the rest of my shift. Then I went to the hospital, where I sat in the waiting room, choking down yet another chalky smoothie concoction. An older man and an elderly lady were in the waiting room as well. When I was handed the smoothie, they both winced.

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“My condolences,” the man said.

“It doesn’t taste as bad if you drink it really fast,” the woman advised.

I wondered how many times they’d had to take this test in their lifetimes and what illness plagued them to require it.

I wondered how many times in my lifetime I’d have to take this test.

Year 2 “We’re coming up on the two-year mark,” my oncologist’s PA said.

“Yeah, two years,” I repeated. “Crazy.”

“Two years is very good news. We can space our appointments out. Instead of three months, we can do every six months. But if you want to ease into that, maybe just start with four months and work up to six, that’s okay.”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “Let’s do that.”

A day rarely went by when I didn’t think about cancer, about the possibility of it coming back. Just because two years had passed didn’t mean I felt any more confident about my health.

Friends and loved ones often asked how I was doing, if I was still “cancer-free,” and I always answered, “As far as I know.” How I wished I could look inside, inspect my organs for any lumps, any abnormalities.

But all I could do was consider the numbers on my blood test, consider my diet when the number on the scale varied, consider my oncologist telling me things looked good.

I could never be certain.

Year 1 I neared the archway of teal balloons marking the finish line. I saw a photographer waiting just beyond. There were no runners around me.

The camera would have a full view of my finish.

As I passed under the arch, I shadowboxed the air; I was asking for attention. I made the statement that I was a fighter. I had fought cancer.

I had fought through the race. I had fought through life with my stomach cut in two. I could take on anything and defeat it.

But it felt hollow.

Runners gathered in the pavilion with water bottles and bananas and granola bars. Some of them posed in front of a backdrop of teal ribbons with goofy props and big hats. They shared stories and laughs and hugs.

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I didn’t deserve the attention they got.

Instead of joining them, I turned and headed for my car.

Year 2 An email popped up in my inbox. “Save the Date,” the subject line read. I clicked on it. “This year’s Shake Your Teal Feathers 5K is Saturday, September 22.”

I opened my calendar. The block on the twenty-second was blank.

The embarrassment of my bare belly quickly came to memory. I had been so audacious that first year. As though I had “beaten” cancer instead of having it removed from me. As though I had the same life experience as other ovarian cancer patients.

But the 5K was for a good cause. A good cause that I had once had to deal with, that I still had to deal with every day in my mind and my body.

At the very least, I owed the organization and its women my support.

I clicked on the registration link.

Year 2 I didn’t order any customized tattoos. I didn’t have plans to run in only a sports bra. I put on a teal tank top and my workout leggings and got in the car with my husband and toddler.

At registration, I was again handed a teal sash that read “survivor.” I walked over to the Michigan Ovarian Cancer Alliance table for a bag of goodies, including a teal ribbon pin and a teal colored plastic bracelet, which I immediately put on.

The leader of the Alliance commented on how young I was, how it broke her heart to see women so young have to deal with this terrible disease.

“How long has it been?” she asked.

I knew what she meant. “Two years,” I said. “Only two years.” As though I were still a novice at something, like I hadn’t yet proven my worth.

“Only? Two years is great,” she replied. “Can I give you a hug? I’m a hugger.”

I opened my arms and invited her to wrap her arms around me. It was the hug of a good friend: warm, tight, heartfelt. She cared about me, though she didn’t know me.

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I wanted to tell her I didn’t deserve her sympathy. I wanted to tell her I hadn’t suffered in the way most of the other ladies had. I wanted to tell her I was a fraud.

I had formed an ice wall around myself to keep out the emotions of cancer; I hadn’t felt worthy enough to be included in a group of warrior women who fought so much harder than I had.

With that one embrace, my ice wall melted. I finally realized this wasn’t a competition. I lived each day with pain and worry and fear just as every other cancer survivor did. We belonged to each other, to help each other, lift each other up, let each other know we weren’t alone.

We were asking for attention. And we deserved it.

[ POETRY]

Burial Scene By: Adriana Varga Everything you need is here, in miniature. Stoneware with glaze, mostly green-and-earth-tone paint, China, Ming dynasty. Set table. Head of hog, whole roasted fish, pheasant. Breads, sweetmeats, fruit.

Two cups. Two incense holders. Everything comes in pairs. You will always have company.

Two soldiers stand guard. One holds an absent spear, the other offers an invisible frond on empty palms turned to the sky. Two ladies in waiting in cherry-blossom robes with green sleeves face each other, but look away. Four stern footmen carry your sedan. And two equestrian figures are prepared to deliver your secret word, and defend it with their life.

But only trunk, one chair, one screen. One canopied bed.

Everything is ready. For life beyond death.

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[ POETRY]

like a shattered shell bereft of sea mourn exile from her home, or

Rosemary at the Altar

is she only wet with witless dew sounding in unpraying silence nothing more than one mute pause amid the music of the spheres?

By: Mary Alice Dixon

tell me, love, if you can hear my words can doubt become a prayer?

today the sun rose C sharp bright smelling of egg yolk and anise awakening the wind, singing the night to sepia sleep yesterday on the back stairs we built an altar of psalms and broken shells from a lost inland sea that rose, then fell where green tomatoes now grow in the garden last night I placed a branch of rosemary at the altar to mark your passing into holy ghost this dawn my rosemary stands sentinel stiff, weeping the rising day after your death does she cry with joy for one more chance to taste orange morning’s resurrection, or

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Up the Mekong Sean Winn

[ FICTION]

I

was at least glad for the safety of a nice hotel.

It was warm, but not to the point of needing

the air conditioner—the colonial architecture of deep balconies and thick walls were functioning as they had since the turn of the century. A ceiling fan turned slowly overhead. Sunlight slanted in through the old-fashioned wooden shutters, throwing angular shadows. I tried to relax but found myself tapping my fingers on the arm of the chair.

I got up and slipped my hand into my travel bag, feeling for the heavy lump wrapped in a

T-shirt. During the long train trip, I had managed some peace. Now, though, the quick thumps of my shoes on the hardwood floors told me that I was pacing. I slid back into the reading chair and closed my eyes. One stage of the journey

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had ended, but I was in limbo. I knew no one in the city and was giving myself into the care of strangers. I jumped at the knock on the door.

“Welcome to Cambodia. I am Kosal.” The man was not with the hotel. He wore a type of sarong and a simple white cotton shirt. He was compact and tidy, more distantly formal than unfriendly. “Do you have the offering?”

I passed him the small bar of gold. He waied before accepting it— palms together, brought to the nose with a slight bow. The instructions I had been given before leaving Boston permitted only natural items on the trip—what was made of cotton, leather, metal. Nothing plastic, no synthetic fibers. The one exception was the contents of my wallet.

Apparently, you can’t go anywhere without a credit card. A flight from Boston to Moscow had been allowed, but from there, travel had to be overland. The trip had taken ten days, with trains passing through Samarkand, Ürümqi, Xi’an, and Hanoi. The final leg to Phnom Penh had been by bus.

“Thank you. We will come for you in three days. Please be ready in the morning.” He moved towards the door, backing out with another wai. “Do not leave the hotel.”

At a loss for what to do next, I soaked in a long bath, then laundered my clothes and fell into a restless sleep punctuated by conflict. In one dream I stood over two figures, both bloodied and groaning. I flung away a metal pipe in disgust; it clanged on dirty concrete as I stalked off. In the other sequence, misty twilight images swirled. I was chased, bound, and locked in an old steamer trunk, then pursued again. Time was jumpy and motives unclear.

B I wandered the halls and courtyards of the hotel, contemplating the trip and why I had to remain on the premises. There had also been no explanation as to why I couldn’t fly in directly—just “This is necessary.”

My working theory was that downtime without modern distractions was designed to create space for the mind to adjust to a slower pace, opening to new perspectives. It was at least my third theory on the matter, though. It had seemed plausible when sitting by the big picture window of the train, gently rocking as the desolate, undulating steppes glided pas—but it wasn’t working now.

Indeed, it had taken several days for the pressures from my job and fallout from my failed relationship to ease their grip on my mood. Cisco

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Systems and my bland apartment now seemed a fuzzy afterimage, like looking at negatives in a dark room. I thought back to when Erin and I were both new to Boston, still in our twenties, young and adventurous.

It seemed like much longer than five years ago. We had vowed to visit a different neighborhood each month, discovering the area together. On one of those trips, we stumbled into Cambodia Town in nearby Lowell. We poked around the shops and talked about the future. She had commented on the wafts of incense floating by from little tucked away altars, so beautiful in her wonder and curiosity. I decided I was going to propose. Three years had passed since our first excursion.

It was only days later that Erin discovered her taste for drugs. And her unraveling was rapid. I found myself going back to the Cambodia Town temple when I needed to think, trying to sort out what to do. Even after the formal breakup, she would turn up unexpectedly at my office.

“Dude, there’s a woman downstairs yelling ‘Jason’ in the atrium.

That’s not you, is it?”

B I was in the middle of giving a progress report. As soon as the conference room door opened, I could hear her, high-pitched and pleading.

“Jason, I need you. Where are you?”

As I darted down the hall, the tone had already changed. “Get your fucking hands off of me.”

I peppered the down button, willing the elevator to arrive more quickly. “Jason! You chicken shit! Get your ass down here!” reverberated, ricocheting off glass and chrome.

But by the time I made it to the lobby, a ring had formed around a frail body slumped on her knees, forehead on granite. In place of the screams, muted moans and wails alternated, more whale song than speech. Scooping her up—not for the first time—I was newly struck by her physical slide. The limp hair, skin lesions, and gaunt hips were always a shock.

B Why can’t I let her go? And what does that say about me that I cannot? But love can’t be switched off like a light. And what would that say about me if I could do so during a cry for help?

I would get random calls to come and collect her, the hosts of a party having tired of her antics. Sometimes it would be a decent enough home or condo, other times I wished I had a gun to take with me.

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“You Jason?”

“Yeah. Where is she?”

“Back there.” A chin jutted to the back bedroom, past the soiled carpet and crowd of sprawling bodies. A Tom and Jerry cartoon played way too loudly on a TV that was the only light source in the living room. On the occasion I am thinking of, when I lifted her off the bed, I could make out the faint stink of semen. She had fresh track marks. Her sweatshirt was on backwards—or rather, it had been put on her backwards. No one would make eye contact as we shuffled out the door.

After bathing and sitting vigil over her until midmorning, all I received was scorn while preparing breakfast. I knew that she was just projecting, covering a punctured self-image with derision. “Nobody asked you to be my babysitter.”

But actually, she had. I was the one she called—or who she asked people to call when she could not even manage that on her own. The slamming of the door should have been a dividing line into a post-Erin era. I had tried before—sworn, both to myself and to her, that it would be the last time. But logic turned back in on itself, a snake eating its own tail.

I began making the trip out to Lowell to buy my groceries at the wet market near the temple, retracing old steps taken with Erin. I tried fruits and vegetables that I had never seen before, learning what I liked by trial and error. A few of the vendors faces became familiar. From the tropical balcony of the Le Royal, Boston seemed like a lifetime ago.

I decided to check out the hotel’s Elephant Bar. True to its name, it was liberally sprinkled with images of elephants, festive ones on parade in bejeweled colors as well as archival black-and-white snaps of the animals at work on the timber harvests. The bar itself was dark wood wrapping into graceful curves at the corners. It was afternoon, and big band jazz drifted softly over the room. With the place nearly to myself, I ordered a cappuccino and slid into an easy chair. I wrote in my journal about how my perceptions of time and desire had shifted during the trip. I sketched a massive elephant held in check by a small chain—sufficient to restrain it as a baby, and still doing so long after the chain could be snapped at will. How badly did the adult elephant want to be free after a lifetime with his mahout? I wondered if Erin was hopelessly gone or still at the edge of the abyss, trying not to slide in. Shadows changed their angles as I wrote, inching across the floor.

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Toward evening, a crowd trickled in. As the light faded and the noise levels rose, I closed my journal and leaned back to observe people. The interlude on the train had accustomed me to just taking things in without feeling the need to be doing anything specific. I was starting to appreciate filling time by noticing small things that would otherwise pass me by—like the way the woman in the gray dress didn’t actually drink her drink. She brought it to her lips often enough, but the level in her glass never seemed to drop. Perhaps she didn’t actually like alcohol and was just accommodating the man she was with. I thought of early attempts to babysit and moderate Erin. The woman’s date did the talking while she gave perfunctory nods. How much did she really want to be there? When we made eye contact, she quickly looked away, tensing her jaw. Perhaps I was the one being watched.

It was one of those weekends moping around at a Lowell coffee shop when a monk sat down at my table. He didn’t immediately say anything, but rested his back against the wall, silently holding his tea. I wasn’t sure whether or not this was common in Cambodian culture, so I waited.

Presently he turned to me, leaning forward to study my face. He seemed genuinely curious. His soft wrinkles and tanned skin were reassuring; a bit of stubble was noticeable on his shaved head. I followed the lines in his face, his orange robes warm in my periphery. He smiled, and as he did, his wrinkles rearranged, forming gentle parentheses around his mouth.

“You are Sad Man,” he said. It was not an accusation, but delivered as a statement of fact.

“I suppose I have been sad lately.”

“No, I mean you are Sad Man. It is what the locals call you. It is a small community—not common for barang to be here regularly. You are not a tourist gawking at us. But you do not live here either, for you come only on the weekends.”

I cleared my throat and fiddled with a packet of sugar.

“They are only concerned. I have been asked to perform small ceremonies for you. The first couple of requests surprised me, but now there is a collection.” He smiled.

“Residents pay you to pray for me?”

“It does not work like that. We monks have no possessions and charge for nothing—we are not fortune tellers. People make donations that support the temple and education of the novices. Some cook our

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meals; others give rice. We are grateful. And when we are asked, we wish to help. It is like a wheel, turning from one good deed to another. They see that you are troubled, but they do not wish to pry.”

“I think I’ve seen you at the temple.”

He nodded. “I am Nhean. I have seen you as well.” He turned in his chair again, resting his back against the wall. He inhaled the tea’s aroma, drawing in a deep breath before taking a sip. I started to speak, but his eyes had closed. When he opened his eyes, he pressed his palm to the cup, feeling its warmth before taking another sip. “I will see you again soon.” His wrinkles adjusted their flow as he smiled.

And with that, he glided away, leaving me in a muddle, touched by the kindness but also self-conscious. I glanced around to see if anyone was staring at me. I didn’t want pity.

B Leaving Phnom Penh, the river was crowded with commerce. It was more how I imagined the Mississippi, though I didn’t really know what that should look like either. Or perhaps it reminded me more of a bay, for the banks were so wide that I could hardly see from one side to the other. The Mekong was massive in scale and teeming with activity. Our launch was tiny next to the barges and fishing boats we maneuvered between, yet boxy and awkward compared to the long tail skiffs darting past us with makeshift outboard motors. Ugly beige paint peeled to reveal an older layer of bright turquoise beneath. A platform housed the coughing engine, and above that, weathered canvas tied to a metal frame provided meager protection from the elements.

As we travelled upriver, traffic thinned out, as did the population.

Red soil and small farms slid by. Isolated on the river but unable to communicate with each other, the captain and I occupied our separate spaces, together but alone with our thoughts. Part of me wanted to try heroin, to understand what it was that sucked her in, but most of me didn’t.

Wasn’t it her capacity for wonder, her sensitivity to love and pain that led to the addiction? Wafting diesel fumes and the inescapable chugging of the engine made for less than ideal travel.

As evening neared, we tied off to a tree near a bend in the river.

The captain brought bedding up from below. I knew not a word of the language he was speaking, but with hands and body language, it was explained that we would sleep on a flat section at the back of the boat. Depending on how I interpreted the motions, it was either cooler that way

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or he was frustrated by having gotten stuck with me. He produced a gas burner, and soon we had a makeshift dinner of instant noodles. A breeze thankfully reduced the mosquito attacks. I was now deep into the rural part of a country I could hardly have found on a map six months ago, sleeping rough in the open, alone with a captain/guide/cook with whom I could not communicate. And no cell phone. The feeling that I could control my destiny seemed laughable.

Isolated on the river but unable to communicate with each other, the captain and I occupied our separate spaces, together but alone with our thoughts.

Day two on the river, and the banks had narrowed significantly. At times, the river cut between hills with high banks. At other times, it would turn, sloshing out into a wide bend of sandy shoals where the slower pace caused it to deposit its silt. While at the hotel, I had read an illustrated history book on Cambodia sold in the gift shop. When the Khmer Rouge won the civil war in 1975, they immediately evacuated the major cities, marching the entire population into the countryside for reeducation. An orgy of violence and paranoia ensued. Waves of purges and famine washed over the country. Up to a quarter of the population was executed; more died of starvation. The Vietnamese Army removed the regime in 1979, but in the four years that the Khmer Rouge had free reign, the efficiency and completeness of the destruction of social order was profound—the national stock of intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and artistic talent all but wiped out.

While Cambodia was being turned inside out, we were watching Mork and Mindy and Dallas back home. Disco was sliding into Duran Duran, and pantsuits were giving way to shoulder pads. I considered the captain and judged him to have been a teenager at the time. Which side would he have been on: hapless victim, possibly losing his parents in the strife, or machete-wielding true believer? Feigning to follow features on his side of the riverbank, I tried to get a read on him. Vigilance seemed to be his primary expression. Was he connected with the temple, or was I just a cargo run for him?

By the third day, we rarely met another boat. The hillsides were deforested in places, thick with jungle elsewhere. After a breakfast of

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guava and sticky rice, the captain pointed upriver and repeatedly said something about Laos, but I had no clue whether we were crossing the border, had already crossed the border, or if Laos was just generally in that direction: north, as we chugged steadily upriver.

B Two men met us at the slippery bank of the river. We slung bags over our shoulders and began zigzagging upward through the canopy while the captain stayed with the boat. Stones occasionally showed through the vines, but more often the only indication of a path was the imprint of a change in slope. Whatever had been here had been reclaimed by the jungle. Monkeys and unfamiliar birds sounded at intervals, both distant and alarmingly close.

The path suddenly turned, and in front of us were steps leading straight upwards at a sharp angle. They were laid with large enough stones that the jungle could not swallow them—massive roots of strangler figs crept over the borders like talons, appearing to simultaneously rend apart and hold together the masonry. We unslung our packs and sat down. A water bottle was passed around.

Once we were rested, one of the men raised a question to the other.

After nods of agreement, the man who posed the question stood and turned to me with a newfound seriousness. He motioned for me to rise, and I did. He took my shoulders at arm’s length, scrutinizing me before speaking. Something was said to me in Khmer, slowly and earnestly. His voice had dropped an octave. He turned to face the mountain, gazing toward the top of the stairs with one arm draped over my shoulder, as if considering what lay ahead. It was comforting, as a father might do with a small boy, motioning across a field to a ruined house before announcing, “This is where your grandmother lived when she was a girl.”

But the tone was also unnerving, like remembering that Grandma died in the fire. He tapped me on the chest and pointed up the steps. I was to continue alone.

Halfway up, I turned to look back. He had neither moved nor changed his expression. He nodded and I continued.

At the top of the steps was an entrance, set back from view on a square landing that jutted into the mountainside. Two massive stone doors, worn by time and carved with symbols and intertwined serpents, formed the front. One door was cracked and slightly off its hinges; the other was open just enough for me to enter. Inside sat a monk on a

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stone pedestal in the middle of a small circular room. Candlelight flickered around the enclosure, illuminating the monk’s robes. In a niche in the rough-hewn walls, shadows danced behind a gilded standing Buddha: its arms extended, palms out, as if repelling a force.

“Lok Nhean asked me meet you here. He very respected in our community. He past travelled here himself. Before enter, I must ask: are you pure in mind and body?”

“Yes.” I lowered my eyes, instinctively making a slight bow. “Lately, at least.”

“Are you prepared?”

After a pause, “I think so.” I wasn’t sure what to be prepared for, but I somehow felt that I was. The last two weeks had been cathartic, calming me and attenuating set conceptions.

“Then enter.” He gestured to a passageway that led off to the right. “I will nearby in case you difficulty.”

The passageway made a right angle and opened into what appeared to be a sort of central atrium, but nothing seemed quite right. The light, filtered through a tangle of vines, was too antiseptic, shifting not with the irregular shimmer of a breeze, but in faint, regular ellipses. I wobbled, as if gaining sea legs. A diffused buzz pulsed louder as I attuned to it, then fell away whenever I looked around the room. As soon as I spotted a half-hidden door and moved toward it, the sound intensified, metallic and oscillating around me.

B I was sitting with my back against the wall in the round antechamber when I came to. The shaft of light that had sliced in from the doorway when I arrived was gone. It was nighttime. The monk sat where I had last seen him. Without any light filtering in from outside, the shadows dancing behind the gilded Buddha were sharper, jumping more fiercely to and fro—the candlelight warming each curve of the statue a rich amber.

“Did you find what looking for?” he asked.

“Yes.” There was no hesitation in my answer. Life would resume, but Lowell would be a destination rather than a refuge. I wasn’t sure what I had experienced, but the idea of Erin as a river of her own was formed clearly in my mind. She would have to run her course. I saw myself sitting on a beach at the edge of a wide delta. If she flowed to the sea, then I would collect her there.

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Fat Fidl

Marc Morgenstern

[ FICTION]

T

he Talmud says a miracle doesn’t happen every day. Sixty-three books containing the

wisdom of the ages, but I, Mikha Grinblat, say the Talmud is wrong in this case. On any one particular day—sunny or cloudy, but especially cloudy—a miracle can occur. On that day, water may not be made into wine, but with an apple or two, it can become vinegar good enough for pickling.

I was leaving today for New York City: the new world, which I pictured as a bejeweled place, sitting high on a hill surrounded by smooth silver water. A place for miracles. In other words, everything that our shtetl was not. Kasrilevka huddled close to the ground, dirt-poor and Jewish—really the same thing.

You’d think we would be left alone in our simmering little pot: what was there to plunder? Who was there to worry about—my father, Isaak the grinder?

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My mother, Rivka the pickler? Me? Still, the pogroms drew closer every day—mobs convinced that we, meager Jews, threatened their great empire.

My valise, overstuffed and strangled with rope to keep everything in, sat by the door. Next to it stood my fidl case, wide-hipped and thin-necked like a lady. They would be my only companions on the journey: days by train, then weeks more at sea on the ship from Hamburg. I’d never been farther from home than Minsk. In Kasrilevka, I knew everyone—sometimes too well. Soon, with hundreds of strangers, I would be all by myself.

Father approached me with head bowed and eyes closed, lips moving in prayer. Still, he managed to find my hand and place into it a small object, the size and heft of two stones. Rolled over and over in last week’s newspaper, tied with string, and sealed with blood-red wax, it looked like a wounded fist.

“Until you get to America, do not open it,” he said. “Absolutely do not, or I cannot vouch for what may happen to you. You might encounter a disreputable woman. You might fall overboard. I don’t know.” He looked at the earthen floor and then sideways at me, his only son, with a mix of fear and love. His eyes floated in tears, not knowing when he might see me again.

After all, I was going to America to start my true life. Soon, others in the family Grinblat would follow (that was our hope and prayer)—but when?

They were counting on me—a mere nineteen-year-old musician with an infant’s English vocabulary—to establish a suitable Jewish home on another continent.

B Onto my shoulder, my father tenderly laid a big paw—the same one that wrapped his gift. He was the shtetl grinder, hands rasped as if he tested all his tools on them. He probably had, being a diligent man. Also, a generous one who gave customers credit. On a less generous day, he bartered for cabbage. Not a man who’d ever used a real fist. Neither was I. Like the tailors’ or bakers’ sons, I’d been expected to take on father’s trade. He’d patiently shown me how to hold the knife just so under the stone grinding wheel. Angle it properly to achieve the sharpest edge. But my hands were soft and awkward; knives would slip out and plummet to earth. One landed blade first on the toe of my boot. Fortunately, it was thick sheepskin.

One day, a traveler came through with a wooden box of cutlery, an entire family of clattering knives. Once prosperous, the man now offered not kopeks for my father’s services, but a groyse fidl in trade. What, you may ask, is a groyse fidl? Picture in your mind a violin that’s eaten too many potatoes, not boiled but cooked in butter. An enlarged and fattened violin with

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a deeper sound and three strings instead of four. I begged Father to accept it. With unscarred hands pressed fervently together, I promised to practice and learn. And I did, so that I came to perform at weddings, bar mitzvahs, simkhes, and sometimes, sadly, at funerals. Songs and songs for all occasions in my head, with never a need to write them down.

On my last day in the kitchen, the fidl cowered in the instrument case as if afraid for itself and me. I wore my old boots, knife scar now erased from the toe—a parting favor from Schuster, an esteemed member of my father’s minyan. The toes shined with linseed oil. I clicked the repaired wooden heels and bowed like the traveling musician I’d soon be, hat in hand.

“You must always walk like you know where you are going,” Father said, “even when you don’t. Especially then.”

“How else would I walk?” I said with a weak grin, trying to bring some light into the kitchen.

“My son,” Mother sobbed, “Mikha’el.” On her lips this day, my name sounded different—like she’d just named me for the first time, like I was the only Mikha’el in the world, a world taking me far away, maybe for good.

One hand beat her chest like a professional mourner while the other dangled a burlap sack full of her famous pickles. My little sister, Elena, hugged me hard, leaving a puddle on my shoulder. For herself she wept, wanting so desperately to come along. Ever cautious, my father wouldn’t allow it.

B In Hamburg three days later, the SS Auguste Victoria lay like a floating Minsk, portholes blinking with lanterns, belly swallowing up cargo. Smoke belched from its stacks, staining the air. The dock shook from the engines and a herd of people clucking, squawking, and stomping. Some called out to me “bompkin!”—ordering me to buy whatever they were selling: mattress, pot, apple, secret remedy for seasickness. But I knew better and also didn’t want to take my hand off my own goods for one instant. With thieves’ hands grabbing all around, I clutched my fidl tightly to my chest.

A shrill whistle blew, and I fell in line with others all bearing their donkeys’ load.

“Oy! See them,” sneered the man next to me.

“See who?” I patted the pocket bearing Father’s gift to make sure it was still there.

“Them, up there. First class.” He pointed up and up through the wooden grate and toward the fading light. There they were, in fancy clothes on the top deck, last rays of the sun shining only upon them.

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“Who are they? Some Rothschilds?” I said, trying to sound as carefree as he did, even more so. He told me his name was Josef, twenty-two years of age, from a city unknown to me in Germany.

“You can read, bompkin, can’t you?” he said, handing me a list of names printed on thick paper. Yiddish and Hebrew, I could read. A little Russian.

But English? Luckily, he couldn’t stop himself. “Imagine that: Baron de Rothschild himself, the richest man in the world. And Mrs. Charles Frederick Theodore Steinway, widow of the piano maker.” He pointed at the instrument case clutched under my arm. “A musician like you must know what a pianoforte is, bompkin, yes?”

“Of course I do.” From my musician friends, I had heard talk of something called a grand piano: a whole orchestra, it was said, in a huge, polished wooden box. Heard talk, but neither heard nor seen one.

“Jews, just like you and me,” he said. “Only rich.”

Observing his age, schnoz, and hat, I had to agree that we looked indeed similar, almost like two brothers. Except that a woman hid behind him, so silent in the tumult I’d not noticed her at first. She held tightly on to his arm, looking down and not at me. Even with babushka shadowing her face, she was comely.

“This is Sheyna,” he said. “She and I will marry in the United States of America.”

“Mikha,” I said, nodding to each in turn. “Unmatched.” I blushed, wishing to have said anything else. Truth was: nineteen years of age, and I had not yet benefitted from successful yenta’s work, let alone had my arm squeezed by a woman other than my mother or sister.

I followed Josef and Sheyna down narrow stairs as steep as any ladder, valise slapping my leg hard with each step. Unlike Noah of the ark, the officer at the bottom step separated the couples, waving men to the left and women to the right. Josef and Sheyna parted with bereft looks over their shoulders. They would not see each other until we were next allowed on deck, and who knew when that would be. I continued two by two with Josef to a large chamber stacked with wooden berths for storing people like so much firewood—more people than ever lived in our village.

B The voyage went well enough for a time.

Except for the double stink: next week’s meals stored in barrels below and people crammed into steerage shoulder to shoulder, ass to ass, like so many pickled herring. Except for my eating through the sack of Mother’s gher-

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kins—anything to avoid the slop served from filthy cauldrons, unfit even for farm animals. I lusted for mangel-wurzel (chicken feet), what Mother would put in soup to hint of meat when we couldn’t afford the genuine article. I tried the hard biscuits, but stopped after Josef injured a tooth on one.

Nursing the tooth with his tongue, he talked about what we’d eat upon landing in New York City: wursts exploding with juice at first bite; fat chickens running through streets, free for the plucking. The more we talked, the hungrier I became. Pulling the last pickle out of my burlap sack, I held it under my nostrils. I’d intended to save it until beholding the giant woman welcoming us to New York City, torch held high. I’d planned to greet her with a loud and thankful crunch of my Russian pickle. The scent of dill and beloved garlic, however, stirred visions of Kasrilevka and my mother at her barrel of brine, humming the folk song I’d just played for her.

I closed my eyes and took a bite.

Unfortunately, the gherkin did not bite back; it was without crunch, mealy and bland. Opening my eyes, I found it mold-green on the outside, bleached white on the inside. The pickle hung limply from my hand, feeling sorry for itself. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than Mother stroking my cheek and Father’s hand on mine, guiding me at the grinding stone. Why had I left them? Why had they let me? My empty belly ached at the thought.

B Five days out and equally far from my old home and new one, the ocean got mad. How we might have wronged the Almighty I don’t know, but he punished us with black churns of waves, rain without end and evil blasts of wind. For hours and days, the boat rose with his anger and plummeted back down. Each time, I banged my head on the bunk above. All around me, poor souls retched and shat into buckets overflowing, sloshing to the floor.

Whimpers, whines, cries for mercy shot out of the dark.

I prayed into the emptiness: Dear God, why have you forsaken me?

Punching my chest with my fist, I waited. And waited.

Rather than a thundering from clouds above, a small voice finally rose from the bunk below me. “Mikha, what have you to complain about?” Josef moaned.

“Everything,” I said in the same grieving tone. “I should have studied harder at the shul. I should have worked more diligently to learn Father’s trade. I should not have abandoned my mother and my sister.” I tried to rend my garment but it was too soaked to rip. “No wonder this endless storm was sent to us.” The beams creaked loudly in agreement.

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“That is nothing,” Josef said. The ship dove again, and we rolled and thudded together against the wall. “I’ve not seen my beloved for days. I have no idea how she fares. If we ever get out of this alive, we will marry now—no more waiting for a country we might never see.”

I crawled out of my bunk and staggered to the foot of the stairs that had brought us down to this hole. The grate at the top reflected feeble light. Beyond it, I knew a sailor stood guard, ensuring passengers in steerage stayed there during the storm. Foul liquid covered the toes of my boots. Stench filled my nostrils. Josef coughed and heaved into a bucket.

“Sailor,” I yelled in German. “Let me out!”

I climbed halfway up the steep steps, holding on to the handrail for dear life as the ship lurched. “Let me out. I need air.” Two more steps up and I could just make out a blue and white striped cap and beneath it, a face— smooth and young, almost gold from his candle’s glow.

“Landsmann, nein,” he said, and smiled through the grate. Not an evil leer looking down upon me, and no Haman’s face to make it easier for me to despise him. Instead, an open-farm-face on a man my age, probably a bompkin like me.

“Fruend,” I tried. “Bitte?”

“Nein,” he said.

“Why do you lock us here? Are we not like you?”

“For your own safety,” he said, without a crumb of apology.

“Hah!” was all I could think to say to this yankel. We both knew he truly meant the safety of first class, not us lowly, suffering creatures at the bottom of the boat.

The boat tumbled on the very next wave, tossing me downstairs toward the floating murk below. I caught myself against the edge of my bunk and somehow pulled myself onto it. Pain knifed my side. Father’s gift! I lifted out the package, patting my hands all over it like the blind village idiot, now finding red sealing wax cracked, newspaper wrapping wet and falling to pieces. Unreadable—the past washed away.

“Oy, will this never end!” Josef cried from below.

Maimonides teaches us that every man must exercise his own free will.

We, he asserts, are not sheep. We alone must make our own decisions and determine our futures. I’d promised my father I would not open his gift before reaching America. But what if his package needed help?

I lit a precious candle. With a peel of paper here, a slip of twine there, I assisted my father’s package in opening itself. Inside, the sharp-edged pieces

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of a miniature clay man: head with sleeping features and barely a neck, one four-toed foot, and one three-fingered hand. His injured extremities grasped the last folds of paper with desperation.

A golem. My father had given me a golem.

“Ach!” I cried to God, Josef and Isaak Grinblat, hoping all would be listening. I cupped my hand to my ear to better hear their reply.

From God and Josef, I heard nothing.

The name Isaak means laughing man; I could almost hear my father— not gleeful, but huffing and snorting—furious at the state of his gift.

What’s a golem you might ask? A dumb dirt figure that, once animated by man, performs his bidding and then some. History be told, it’s a miracle worker who’s saved ghettos from destruction, but only for a time; a Jewish good luck charm that, like all things Jewish, is bound to turn unlucky soon. My father must have thought I would need its perilous power later in America. The middle of the angry Atlantic on the Hamburg-Amerika Line, I decided, was close enough.

I whispered into one chipped clay ear: “Golem, please help me.”

Perhaps it was a gust of wind entering from the lone porthole, but I felt a rustling on my ear. Open your case and play, the Golem whispered back to me.

B I stood for the first time in days and braced my shaky legs against the wooden bunks. Brown, foul water still sloshed over the tips of my boots, but I couldn’t care less. At first, the groyse fidl felt like a stranger in my hands— heavy and stiff. I kissed its fat body to become reacquainted, tasting the sweet spruce. It grabbed my chin and kissed me back. One by one, I tenderly tuned each string.

Lounging in my bunk, the Golem seemed to form a smile.

My bow drew dreck: creaky complaints of where have you been? Off-key protests of how could you have neglected me? Sharp strings bit at my fingertips. Before long, though, my fidl found its heart. It wailed for our stomachs, our bones, and our families left behind. For all of steerage my fidl lamented, sad sound finding every corner of our hole.

And what happened then? Not a parting of the sea. Not a loud summons from the shofar. Bit by bit, however, the slap of rain let up, the wind eased its roar, and for the first time in days, the soft sound of breathing could be heard. In blessed quiet, steerage slept. Having done its work, Golem nestled in my pocket and slept, too—eyes closed, body at peace.

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B The next day rose like Adi’s first morning before he bit into the bad fruit.

The sky clear, sea flat, air salty and awake, the stink swept away.

“Your music. Such a mitzvah!” exclaimed Josef, his mouth inches from my ear. He stood on his two feet for the first time in days.

“My dear father was wrong.”

“Such disrespect on such a morning! Why scorn your father today of all days when you have done such a mitzvah with your fidl?” Indeed, Jews and Gentiles alike paraded by my bunk, nodding and knocking on planks in gratitude. Their knuckles must have awakened Golem because he stirred in my pocket. I pulled him out and laid him lovingly on the bunk. Josef gasped at the sight of him.

“Father gave me this as a parting gift, but with a solemn vow,” I said.

“I was not to open it until we reached America, or who knows what might befall me—or us.” Josef jumped back as if seeing a ghost. Who could blame him? Such a sight: cracked clay man, so wounded by the voyage, yet still smiling.

“But you did open it, and the seas did calm themselves,” Josef said at last.

“What can be wrong with one tiny little miracle?” He stared at the Golem, then at me, and again at the Golem, but came no closer to us.

“You’ve heard tell of Golems,” I said. “Once summoned, they never stop when you want them to.”

From above came the sound of a screeching hinge, rusted and unused.

The grate door at the top of the stairs smacked open against the deck. A sailor cried: “You may rise.”

No rabbi’s call was more dear to me. No invitation to bless the challah at the shabbat table more welcome. I jumped out of the bunk and, with the Golem safely in my jacket pocket, led the people of steerage upstairs. Oh, the light, like the sun was born today! The air, like the first air ever breathed by man!

On deck, Josef ’s face danced with the promise of seeing his beloved again. His feet paced in anticipation. After a long line of passengers, Sheyna finally stepped out, her long cow’s eyelashes fluttering in the brightness. She struck me as thinner and paler than before, but still comely—even more so when she opened her heart-shaped mouth and told the story of glimpsing death’s door itself. Sheyna was so excitable that in describing her fever and bodily distress she forgot her modesty; her babushka slid to her shoulders, revealing chestnut hair and shapely collarbone. As they embraced, my head

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filled with wool, my eyes blurred. I grabbed the rail to steady myself.

“Rabbi!” Josef yelled into the milling crowd. “Is there a rabbi to marry us?”

For hours, I played alone as everyone danced circle upon circle with the bride and groom swirling in the very center; the ship churning ever closer to America.

A man stepped forward wearing hat and tallit, damp and stained but still faithfully hugging his neck. A woman placed a white handkerchief as a veil atop Sheyna’s head. Josef motioned for me to stand by his side. And thus they were married—without chuppah or ring, but with all of steerage as witnesses to the blessed event.

Someone found a drinking glass and—dear as it was to us travelers— placed it under Josef ’s boot. With the resounding crack of his heel, I began to play.

I fiddled like never before—for my new friend and his wife, for the wife I did not have, for my parents at home. I bowed furiously and fingered masterfully, as if I were playing for all fiddlers everywhere, at every wedding that had ever been. From my pocket, the Golem’s little hands clapped the rhythm, driving me without company of violin, cello, or clarinet. For hours, I played alone as everyone danced circle upon circle with the bride and groom swirling in the very center; the ship churning ever closer to America.

B When I finally stopped playing, the sun sagged in the western sky before us. Wedding guests sat crumpled and exhausted on the deck. My bowing arm hung limp and spent from my shoulder, fingers weeping with pain. Someone handed me a rag to wipe my sweaty face and fidl, still warm to the touch.

Out of the corner of my eye, like a vision, a uniformed servant marched in my direction. He could not be coming for a fidl-playing bompkin from a village not even close to Minsk. Yet he halted in front of me, his white gloves holding out a tray. On it was a thick paper card with hand lettering: Bratschist.

“Take it, Mikha,” Josef said from behind me. “It’s for you, Mr. Viola Player.” I took the card from the tray as instructed. “Now, bompkin, turn it over, if you please.” When I hesitated, he pulled the card from my hand and read: “Please join me at the First-Class Music Lounge at seven o’clock this evening. Signed, Anton Seidl.”

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“Whoever this Anton Seidl is, it must be a joke, or worse yet, a wager at my expense,” I said, scanning the first-class deck as if the man might be up there regarding us. “Why else would someone like me be summoned someplace like that?”

“You’ve never heard of Maestro Seidl from Budapest, now conductor of the greatest orchestra in New York City?” He peered into my confused face. “And he wants you to play for him?” The servant stood before us, mute, awaiting a response. “Please tell the Maestro that the Bratschist and his second would be honored to join him this evening,” Josef instructed him. To me he added: “And you will be honored to play. Imagine the chances!”

It struck me like the back of a hand from above: Golem. Since last night, I had neither whispered again into his ear nor begged for his intervention.

I’d thought he was sleeping, tired like me from our labors. This invitation must be his unbidden work, taking my life into his clay hands without even a may I? I pulled Golem out of my pocket, less lovingly this time. He emerged in two pieces: body now separated from his head. Peering deeply into heavily-lidded eyes, I didn’t know whether to thank him or beg him to leave me alone. Still, to play for a renowned Maestro…

B That evening, the same servant came to fetch us. I’d tossed barrel water into my armpits. Deep in my valise, I found my other shirt—no cleaner than the first but less worn. I swiped sea salt off my fidl case. For my last preparation, I slipped Golem back into my jacket pocket, asking: How many miracles in one day?

Josef and I followed the servant up and up from steerage to second class, then to first class. I’d never climbed so many stairs, nor felt so many eyes upon me, all inquiring: What are these two steerage Jews doing here? I hugged my fidl case and yanked down my shtetl cap as if it might protect me. Even with a broken Golem in my pocket, who was I fooling? Especially with a Golem in my pocket. Josef, for his part, raised his ample nose skyward and jutted out his chin as if he belonged up here.

“Calm yourself, bompkin,” he said. But my heart pounded a dancing beat. My stained boots put one foot in front of another.

We entered a room with walls covered in velvet as if inside the tsar’s jewel box. Tobacco smoke hung in the air, illuminated by fancy gas lamps. They gave ghostly halos to the audience before us—two men and a woman. In the middle of the room, the pianoforte floated like a wooden vessel, its open top a harp-shaped sail. Thick strings glittered from within.

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“Herr Seidl, Madame Steinway, Herr Rothschild,” the servant announced. I bowed feverishly, indeed more than once to each of them.

“May I present Herr Mikha Grinblat,” Josef ’s voice rang out. “Bratschist außergewöhnlich.” At that moment, I regarded myself as anything but an “extraordinary violist”—just a groyse fidl player far away from home.

Herr Seidl, resplendent in black suit and stiff white tie and shirt, flung back his tails and sat down at the piano bench. Anxious bow shook in my hand. I had no idea why he had summoned me to the music lounge, let alone what he might want me to play. He hit a single note—middle C. I nervously, quietly, made sure I was in tune.

“Traurig,” he barked. He meant the “sad” funeral lamentation I’d played the night before. Placing bow to strings, I took a deep breath of smoky air.

The mournful song began slowly and softly, then gathered itself, then flew from my instrument. Could all my friends below hear it? My fidl crying for them from first class?

The pianoforte erupted, sounding like dozens of hands playing. The Maestro took hold of my shtetl dirge and spun notes inside and around it that I had never heard before. His intricate lace knit with my rough wool, filling the night. If only my parents could have been watching, listening… A specter came into focus behind my closed eyes—Golem, suddenly the size of a man, sitting at the pianoforte, his remaining fingers pressing keys with mad love. He smiled back at me and I thought: Golem, how could I have so misjudged you?

We played and played until the Maestro’s hands halted and applause began. I opened my eyes to see Madame Steinway, whose name was imprinted in gold on this very piano, and Herr Rothschild, the richest man in the world. Each a Jew! Herr Seidl—not the Golem—sat erectly on the bench, applauding as well. It struck me that he knew the music intimately and well.

A Jew was a Jew was a Jew. “Herr Grinblat,” Seidl said. “Such a young man playing with the skill and feeling of an experienced musician.”

“Yes, a true artist, worthy of a chair in a fine New York City orchestra,” Josef jumped in. I pictured myself in the same fine clothes Seidl now wore, nestled among a hundred similarly attired men, each with instrument shining.

“All you need is one more viola string,” said Madame Steinway. Everyone nodded politely.

“Thanks to you, Herr Seidl,” I said meekly to him, but really to Golem,

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who was changing my life’s course. And to my father Isaak, who’d gifted me Golem in the first place.

The Maestro reached under the elegant body of the pianoforte and brought out folded white sheets of paper inscribed with black markings.

“Well then, shall we play something else, Herr Grinblat?” he said. “How about the Bruch Concerto? Technically for the viola, but I am sure you are quite capable.” He spread the music across the top of the piano like a path.

All I needed to do was follow it.

Simple. But I had never learned how to read music.

B The next morning, Josef, Sheyna, and I looked out from the rail at the city before us. Rather than jeweled, New York appeared grey and charred, like the inside of a thousand chimneys. As promised all those days at sea, the Statue of Lady Liberty greeted with her torch, but also her inscribed tablets with no meaning to me.

Standing there, I recall we waited without talking—even Josef was silent for once. First class must leave the ship first, with all its trunks full of evening finery. Then second class. Then, we in steerage would be transferred to smaller boats for the trip to Ellis Island.

With my strangled valise and fat fidl case, I waited for my new life to begin. The fractured Golem weighed in my pocket. As in all the stories, it had served—and failed—me, bringing miracle and misery. Just like it had to every previous guardian.

Should I have known better? Yes. For such a young man, I already understood the yank of the earth: dropped knife, ladder down to steerage, mourning song. Of all people, I shouldn’t have fallen for Golem’s charms.

So I flung the last piece over the rail and into the sea. It splashed and disappeared—good riddance!—only to bob back up to the surface.

Golem’s face looked up at me, ever smiling. Laughing even.

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[ POETRY]

A Star in Brooklyn By: Cai Rodrigues-Sherley a cigarette butt in apartment E7 sets fire to a tiny nation births a sun an oasis of scarlet rot on Linden Boulevard

a scarlet sun on Linden is just a falling star in Brooklyn rats run down staircases with babies & Caribbean aunties

rundown staircases echo rats in flip flops & muumuus tributaries of soiled water lead them into the street

in the street the smell of soiled water & smoke mixes with worry & alcohol & flesh

alcohol & flesh will numb incendiary thoughts & carefully rolled joints will singe visions of ashen rain

how fire can singe, ashen, raisin a child’s skin crystalize his irises into golden ratios of ember

outside a cluster of irises & golden picture frames becomes a tiny nation of grief.

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[ POETRY]

The Music We Hear By: Claudia Buckholts In this white room I listen

beside her hospital bed.

The music I hear in this great darkness is still music: crickets rub their wings together, spiders spin

a pure silk.

A jay screeches on a fallen powerline, a mockingbird mimics the sound of a door

slamming shut.

A pod of whales lifts from the deep, their songs

expand miles into water.

Phosphorescent jellyfish flattened by the weight of ocean, glow with their own light.

However discordant, the sound I hear in this white room

is still music: the wheeze of a gray-haired woman tethered to silver machines,

trying to breathe.

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[ POETRY]

My Grandfather Is Given a Candle by a Stranger on the TransSiberian Railway, Motzaei Shabbat Hanukkah, 1943 By: Batnadiv HaKarmi 1.

What Do You See?

…For this is a brand saved from the fire…

And the angel who talked with me came again and waked me, as a man who is wakened out of his sleep, and said to me, “What do you see?”

--Haftara Reading, Shabbat Hanukkah, Zecharia 3-4 For the candle of the Lord is the soul of man, and the candle of man is the presence of God. Can I set You at the window. can I ignite the greasy residue of this train, the black streaks it spreads across the plain and say: You?

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Light a candle and bite the darkness.

Behind, dawn’s stain deepens.

You light the day right after I lit the night.

You answer my light, You drain it.

The flame doesn’t rise the way the day does.

I light for You, I say to the candle I say to me.

The flame floats in the darkened cabin nothing to hold it.

The train rumbles; the night drips blue.

The vast tundra and this chugging slug are kept apart by a thin metal wall and this candle— Look.

We are here, a shrieking fire; Look. We are veins running through the waste.

Look. We are the Levites, carrying the Menorah, Look at me.

Please look, You who are my Place.

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I. Longing And I said, “I have looked and behold, a Menora all of gold …”

Then the angel who talked with me answered and asked: “Do you know what these are?”

And I said, “No, my lord.”

Then he answered and said to me, “This is the word of the God… ‘Not by might and not by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.”

Incandescent with longing I light a candle— do I smear as I travel, saying: I am here, saying: look at my passing, as I burn at both sides?

If I light a flame is it desired?

Does God watch this train as he watches the stars?

When the wick catches flame is God incandescent, longing a vortex drawing Him down?

Light a candle in a window and call God in through the lock.

When the flames rise, Though I have the sun and the moon, I long for you.

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Nonfiction

CONTRIBUTORS Fiction

Page 12 Joel Kabot has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. After graduation, he was a Fulbright fellow in Ukraine. Originally from Upstate New York, he lives in Baltimore with his wife and son. His fiction has also appeared in the Notre Dame Review.

Page 42 Robert McGuill’s work has appeared in Narrative, the Southwest Review, the Saturday Evening Post, Louisiana Literature, American Fiction and other publications. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and short-listed for awards by, among others, Glimmer Train, the New Guard, Sequestrum Art & Literature. The author lives and writes in Colorado.

Page 84 Marc Morgenstern is a former journalist and TV news producer, and a recent graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He was recently named a finalist in the University of Arizona’s Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. His short stories have been published in Still Points Arts Quarterly, Valiant Scribe, Corners of the World: Of the Book Anthology, Soundings Review, JMWW, Blue Lyra Review and Passager Journal, among others. His work has been featured multiple times at Los Angeles’ prestigious New Short Fiction Series. Marc’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Huffington Post, and on the MOTH stage.

Page 74 Sean Winn came to writing only late in life, but his poetry, fiction and essays have begun to appear in a number of literary journals over the past year, most recently in San Antonio Review, Blue House Journal, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among others. After living in Hong Kong, Singapore and Indonesia, he now calls Austin, Texas home. Find him on Twitter at @SeanWinn_.

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Page 60 Jennifer Furner has essays in the anthologies of Art in the Time of Covid-19 and A Teenager’s Guide to Feminism. She has been published in HuffPost Personal, Motherwell, Folks, Sammiches and Psych Meds, among others. She lives in Grand Rapids, MI, with her husband and daughter. For more of her writing, visit her website jenniferfurner.com.

Poetry

Page 98 Claudia Buckholts received Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Grolier Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, Minnesota Review, New American Writing, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and others; and in two books, Bitterwater and Traveling Through the Body.

Page 72 Mary Alice Dixon lives and writes in Charlotte, North Carolina where she is a long-time hospice volunteer. She has been a professor of architectural history, teaching in China, Minnesota, and North Carolina.

She has also been an attorney who often represented parents and children in juvenile court and tenants in housing disputes. She has a BA from Vassar and an MA from Yale. Her recent work is in, or forthcoming from, Kakalak, Stonecoast Review, Capsule Stories, County Lines, That Southern Thing, Mythic Circle, Main Street Rag, North Dakota Quarterly, The Fourth River, Passager’s Pandemic Diaries, NC Poetry Society Pinesong: Awards 2021, and elsewhere.

Page 99 Batnadiv HaKarmi is an American-born poet and painter living in Jerusalem. A graduate of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University, her work has been published in Poet Lore, Ilanot Review, Poetry International, Mom Egg Review and is forthcoming in Radar. She is the recipient of the Andrea Moria Prize for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction.

Page 9 Jade Hidle (she/her/hers) is the proud Vietnamese-Irish-Norwegian duaghter of a refugee. Her travel memoir, The Return to Viet Nam, was published by Transcurrent Press in 2016, and her work has also been

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featured in Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Northwest, Witness Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, The West Trade Review, Bangalore Review, Columbia Journal, New Delta Review, and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s diacritics.org. You can follow her at @jadethidle.

Page 56 Adina Kopinsky is an emerging poet living in Israel with her husband and three sons. She has work published or forthcoming in PANK, Crannog, SWWIM Every Day, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among other publications.

Page 8 Jayne Marek’s poetry books include In and Out of Rough Water (2017) and The Tree Surgeon Dreams of Bowling (2018); her newest will be DuskVoiced (2021). Winner of the Bill Holm Witness poetry contest, she has received nominations for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes.

Her writings and art photos appear in Calyx, Notre Dame Review, One, Spillway, The Lake, and elsewhere.

Page 58 Ana Reisens is an emerging poet and writer. She was the recipient of the 2020 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award and you can find her poetry in Subterranean Blue and forthcoming in the Sunlight Press and Inkwell Journal. She lives in Spain, where she enjoys spending time in nature and is perpetually in search of a good meal.

Page 97 Cai Rodrigues-Sherley (he/they) is a Black queer poet, teaching artist, and lover of 1970s youth poetry. He cares about trans childhoods, queer bodies, mortality, heritage, and love. He is a Sagittarius Sun, Gemini Rising, and Cancer Moon, which means nothing and absolutely everything. He was the 2019 recipient of the Smith College Emily Babcock Poetry Prize and is a 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Their work can be found in Cosmonauts Avenue, Brooklyn Poets, and Volume Poetry. They currently live in Queens with their partner and are an MFA candidate at New York University in their Creative Writing Program. You can find him on Twitter at @caifieri and on Instagram as @crsed_poet.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Avery Kiker is a Belmont University graduate with degrees in 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: Over the course of the past year, many were unable to visit the people and places they loved. Instead, we transported ourselves to destinations where we couldn’t physically be through memories, literature, and films. Then, we made new art in commemoration of the people and places that shaped us.

This cover is an ode to the surreal and distant nature of this year and a nod to the beautiful work included in Belmont Story Review’s sixth volume that is deeply rooted in place and culture.

Image of woman on cover © Australian National Maritime Museum

Page 71 Adriana Varga teaches in the Department of English, Core Writing, at University of Nevada, Reno. When she isn’t teaching, studying Paiute, or writing poetry and fiction, she likes to explore the high-desert landscape of Northern Nevada.

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