Bennington College – The End of the World Journal – June 2023

the

End of the World

BENNINGTON COLLEGE JUNE 2023

The End of the World STORIES AND ESSAYS

by the 56th Graduating Class of The Bennington Writing Seminars

JUNE 2023

Managing Editor Maddie Cowan Nonfiction Editors Rachel Greenley and Maddie Cowan Fiction Editors Chandler Ford and Maddie Cowan Cover Photography Al Abonado (front) & Rachel Greenley (back) Journal Design Ayla Graney © Copyrights retained by all respective contributors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son “I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.”

— Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

To the Teachers & Staff at Bennington College – Thank you for your support, encouragement, and dedication to our development.

To Our Fellow MFA Students – Thank you for creating a community of writers and friends, for everything you have done, from line edits to spontaneous conversations, that helped us grow and think and wonder.

Contents FICTION | Louise Bokkenheuser Earth Room

5

FICTION | Maddie Cowan This One’s For You (novel excerpt)

15

FICTION | Nikki DeLeon Susquehanna (novel excerpt)

26

FICTION | Chandler Ford Annabel

35

FICTION | Priya Gadagkar The Axmen

47

NONFICTION | Rachel Greenley Basting, Bone Meal, and Books

60

FICTION | Oona Kelly Wavelength (novel excerpt)

71

NONFICTION | Edmée Lepercq Figs

84

FICTION | Ana Nissan The Last Bulb on the Christmas Tree (novel excerpt)

89

NONFICTION | Christine O’Donnell Knead (and other essays)

99

NONFICTION | Robin Reif Oranges

113

NONFICTION | Claire Salinda The Marble

122

NONFICTION | Kristin Seeberger Ghosts, God, and Grits

133

FICTION | Victoria Shannon Rest in Peace

147

FICTION | Sarah Sullivan Ladies Night

157

FICTION | Sarah Zoric Egg Baby (novel excerpt)

167

Biographies & Recommendations

179

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FICTION

Earth Room

By Louise Bokkenheuser

I discovered the Nembutal in the cupboard above the sink where we kept the tea, and it took me a moment to understand what I was looking at. Darjeeling. Peppermint. Ginger.

Pentobarbital. The small glass bottle looked incongruous among the botanical jars with their handwritten labels, a lonely pharmacy soldier flanked by plants. My first thought was to throw it out; force Margaret to say something. But I don’t believe in subterfuge. I go straight to the marrow of things. It’s the reason Margaret married me.

I found her outside, tending to the fall chores. In the slanted afternoon light, her shadow stretched across the sloping lawn.

Our house sat on a spit of land in the southern part of Blue Hill, Maine. When we were young, our neighbors lived off the sea and the tourists, the flatlanders who came in summer. Our yearly cricket tournament drew the kids to the rocky course in front of our house. But first the fish disappeared and then the lobster, and with time, people ebbed away also, an evolution in reverse. I was born in 1969, a noisy, expansive time, and had imagined my retirement not in images, but sound: the gleeful shrieks of grandchildren on the grass; cutlery clinking on plates, my children gathered around the table; a startled loon in the night. But by the time I retired, the world had fallen silent and Maine was mostly deserted. People had gone further north and

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inland, and Margaret’s childhood home, this saltbox facing the empty ocean, seemed the last inhabited place on earth, and me the last man.

Margaret knelt in the dirt, hands kneading the ground. Some years earlier, I had made her a folding chair for the garden on account of her knees, and she had stroked my chin and told me I was the kindest man she knew. I believed her, even if she left the chair propped up against the table in the hallway and continued to kneel among the plants as if they were her religion.

As I approached her bent shape, I could hear her humming though I couldn’t make out the tune. “What are you planting?”

I asked. Her small embarrassed laugh was that of a young girl exposed, not an old woman caught singing in a garden bed. “Ron, you startled me. Are you coming to help plant these daffodils?”

What had I been looking for in that cupboard? Maybe a snack? I’d been digging through reams of data and had lost my sense of time. The way the system swallows you, with no space left for anxiety and uncontrollable thoughts, I have to say, I like it; even now, as an old man no longer able to keep up with the younger set and their AI extensions. Those guys, to my mind, they’re like hybrids, a new kind of neural-artificial intelligence.

I’m a systems thinker. But they’re fusing with the system.

“I think we have to talk,” I said and immediately regretted the preamble. Of course, I was articulating a thought. Annoying redundancy. A speck of dust in a data log.

Margaret cocked her head to one side. I considered kneeling beside her, then considered my own knees, a silly concern, given the circumstances. I took her hand as she gingerly stood up.

She looked at me, her face open. The weak sun shone through her fine white hair and she looked for a moment otherworldly.

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Behind her, an autumnal tree waved its last rust-colored leaves.

The glass bottle warm in my hand. A sudden tactile memory: the feeling of a stone in a pocket. Throwing rocks into the pond behind the school to watch the surface ripple, mesmerized by the concentric circles, cause and effect manifested across complex sets of data. It was there by that pond I became an analyst. There’s always a stone. You just have to find it.

I was practically a widower when I met Margaret and even in my sorrow, I understood she offered salvation. A cynical person might have said I was a young father looking to replace the mother of my children, and indeed I believe one of our acquaintances did say something to that effect. But unlike the system, which despite its great complexity has a binary heart, my world was full of contradictions. Despair. Hope. Desire. Her beauty didn’t move me like that of my previous wife. But I was older and I liked that Margaret seemed solid. Like the dirt she knelt in. Like the dark ocean at the end of our lawn.

I was working at Sun Microsystems in California when we met. I don’t want to sound maudlin but it was a tough time. I was just 25 but I lived the life of a much older man. My wife had stage IV cancer; I was bringing up two young children on my own, and my career was in a rut. On a trip to New York, my colleague Frank took me to see an installation by Walter De Maria in Soho. And this is where I met Margaret: in a room full of dirt. Two hundred fifty cubic yards of earth, to be precise, on the floor of a whitewashed apartment on West Broadway.

Coming up the stairs, I smelled the work before I saw it and the tactile pleasure of the dark fertile soil for a moment brought me out of my sadness. Beyond Frank and me, there was one other visitor–Margaret–and as we stood in front of the glass that held back the earth, she told us the microorganisms lived as long

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as the curator watered the piece. Perhaps I was confused by everything that was happening in my life at that time but for a moment I had the sensation the piece transcended the space on West Broadway to encompass the entire world, and somehow Margaret was central to it.

When I discovered she ran her own gallery downtown, I went to see her every day I was in the city. Then everything happened so fast. My wife died, and I went to Geneva for the First International Conference on the World Wide Web. It was there I found the language I’d been searching for; the architecture to connect everything. I no longer had to locate the stone. I could become the builder of worlds. From Switzerland, I went straight back to New York and asked Margaret to marry me. To my surprise, she agreed, even if that meant walking away from her gallery and moving with me and Sammy, then three, and Hannah, then five, to Menlo Park.

When we heard of the first one, a self-immolation on the Prospect Park lawn, we were visiting friends in Park Slope. Our proximity to such a violent suicide made it seem particularly shocking. “Really extreme,” our friend Charlotte said when we heard the news. Margaret didn’t say anything and I wondered what was in her mind. But we never talked about it, then or later, even when solastalgia spread like the wildfires and they had to install barriers on the flyovers to stop the jumpers, some of them families, holding hands. After a while, it no longer made the news. But by then it didn’t matter. Everyone knew someone who had died.

In the garden, the light was golden. Margaret brushed feebly at the dark smudges on her pants where she had knelt.

I opened my hand to show her the Nembutal in my palm. She looked at me with her clear, blue eyes, the bottle an accusation

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she had no time for. “What about me?” I said, and hated my aggrieved tone, the pleading child protesting the unfairness of the world. “My love, you should make your own choices,” she said, sounding level. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. How can you make this decision as if I don’t count? ‘To have and to hold, in sickness and in health.’ Remember?”

At this point, I should probably make clear that our marriage was a good one. In all our years together, only occasionally did I do things I shouldn’t have. I am a man, after all, with needs. I need to feel whole.

The first time I went into the Complex Dream was in the early days of the virtual world and the team had just cracked a data velocity problem. We were high-fiving, high on adrenaline, when Bill said, “this is a perfect time to go on a hunt.” I didn’t understand what he meant. “It’s not real cheating, Ron, if it’s not real,” he said, and then we plugged in. The scenarios always started out fun and exciting. But invariably, stuff would happen.

One of the girls would say something stupid and things would get out of hand. It’s not that Bill and those guys were looking for it. It just seemed to happen. And it wasn’t as if anyone really got hurt. It was just a scenario. But I always regretted it afterward.

It gave me a bad feeling, like it scrambled my sense of self.

I don’t think Margaret knew about my walkabouts. But I felt guilty nonetheless and it seemed a small thing to give her Maine when I retired. She had always wanted to return to the house her parents had left her, the place where she grew up. Her desire was to live in nature, and I wanted to build a proper camp for the kids and the grandkids. But first Hannah left for Europe and then Sammy followed. They had to consider their own kids’ future, they said, and that was hard to argue with. Margaret and I decided to take our chances. I stocked the basement with

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supplies to last at least a decade and we grew vegetables in the garden. It wasn’t so bad. But then I never thought Margaret would abandon me like my first wife had.

The next morning, she cornered me in the kitchen. “Do you want something? These are the last tomatoes from the garden,” Margaret said and sliced the loaf she had baked earlier.

A sacrament, I thought, as she arranged the slices of nightshade on the bread. She unhooked a couple of ceramic mugs from their hooks underneath the cupboard and sat down next to me on the kitchen bench. This was one of her tricks. In her younger days, if she had to give bad news, she would deliver it on a stroll, walking side by side. “Not having to look at the other person can be a kindness,” she used to say. I always wondered whom the kindness was for.

“I’m sorry,” she said and touched my hand. “There was no good way to tell you.”

“Have you spoken to Dr. Hollander?” I asked, sensing an opening.

“I did and she wanted me on antidepressants. But that won’t change the facts of the world, now will it?”

We sat for a moment in silence as I considered other avenues to bring her back to me. I could feel the constriction in my chest.

“The truth is, I will need your help,” she said. “It’s intravenous and I don’t think I can do it myself.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because you love me?”

I’ve never hit a woman in my life. Or really anyone. But at that moment, I was tempted. I slammed the door as I left.

Outside, it was dark. A cold wind blew from the water but it took me surprisingly long to realize I wasn’t wearing a coat.

Our house was secluded, with the sea on one side and a copse

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of woods on the other. I walked through the garden up to the road. When we first got here, twenty years ago, you’d hear the shooting in the fall for grouse and woodcock and bigger game, like deer. If you owned more than ten acres, you had what they called Landowner’s Privilege, which meant you could hunt without a license on your own land. Mainers took advantage of that. It drove Margaret crazy.

At the main road, I took a left, aiming for the tip of the peninsula where the boat launch used to be. I like goals, even when they’re small, like a point on a mental map. It makes life easier to navigate when the course is plotted ahead and you don’t have to think. The land had quieted. Not much left to shoot.

And no more families. The grand, shingle-style houses WASPY families referred to as cottages had fallen in on themselves as people sought higher ground. The sea had swallowed most of the point. Ours was one of the last old houses still standing.

Where the road forks, I hung right, turning south after the abandoned Wooden Boat School. The road ended abruptly where the sea had eaten the cliff. It’s hard to imagine kids learned how to sail here; that there was once a community.

Even in winter, you could glimpse the lights from houses along the shore. The world was silent and the coastline was dark as I turned back toward the house.

By the time I reached home, Margaret was asleep in her reading chair but woke up at the sound of the door. My hands were red and stung in the warmth of the house. “Are you okay?

You must be freezing,” she said. “I’ll make some tea. Unless you want coffee?”

“I’ll take a whiskey,” I said and got the bottle from the liquor cabinet in the living room. At the kitchen table, I gave myself a generous pour. Margaret kissed my head and went upstairs. She

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was sleeping in the guestroom, though that was not unusual.

Our physical life together had ended long ago.

Days passed like this. Margaret tended the garden. I plugged into the Complex Dream. At night, we ate and read; the spine on her copy of Middlemarch barely holding the pages together anymore, and me with my history books. It felt like an endurance test. She was waiting for me and I knew, in the end, she would win.

What changed? I’m not sure. Maybe this is the succor of age: you become less attached to things, even life itself. For months, we lived in this impasse, knowing we needed each other.

And perhaps this is why it became the happiest time of our marriage. It took me by surprise, this kind of contentment so late in the game.

One morning in late November, I woke up to early snow.

I lay in bed for a while and thought about particles coming to rest, and I knew this would be the day. Margaret was already at the table in the kitchen, holding a cup of steaming camomile tea in her hands. I sat down across from her.

“Tell me what needs to be done,” I said. The feeling between us was like a charge. Like the moment you know you’re going to have an affair.

“Are you sure?” She reached for my hand as I nodded.

“Thank you,” she said.

We sat like that for a while. Outside the world slowed down.

Margaret got up and opened the tea cupboard. She looked confused for a moment until she remembered I had the bottle.

“There’s no hurry,” I said. “I’m not going to change my mind.”

She ran her fingertips along the wooden counter. She looked absent. “I would like to change into my Marfa dress.”

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I followed her upstairs, superfluous, as she pulled back the hangers in the packed bedroom closet. She found the dress and laid it out on the bed. She had bought it during a trip to Texas when we were much younger and the day came back to me with sudden force; her delight at the colors of the wool—turmeric and sienna—which reflected the landscape around us. She took off her bathrobe and stood before me in her gray underwear, an old woman, a stranger. I reached for her dress, embarrassed by the moment.

“Let me help you put it on,” I said and slipped it easily over her small frame. “Are you sure you want to do this today?”

“No time like the present,” she said. “But I would like to go upstairs, to the guest room. I always liked the view of the sea from there.”

“You decide how you want to do this.”

It took her a while to climb the stairs. As I said, her knees were not great and at the top, she held onto the railing as if feeling faint. In the bedroom we stood by the window and looked across the inky sea, side-by-side. Clouds drifted in front of the weak winter sun, creating a shadowplay on the lawn.

Time suddenly moved too slow and too fast, like a moment of happiness you know will end. Except, of course, this was not happiness.

“What should I tell the children? Anything you want to say?

She shook her head.

“I know you will tell them what they need to know; that I loved them.”

As she lay down on the bed, I studied the label on the bottle, wishing I had brought my reading glasses.

“Do we have a syringe?” I said.

“Top drawer in the bathroom.”

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I felt disembodied as I returned to Margaret. I focused on breathing; on the task at hand: Uncap the needle. Push it through the rubber cap. As I pulled back the plunger, the barrel filled with clear liquid. I put it on the bedside table and took Maggie’s hand; her white hair fanned out on the pillow.

“Are you afraid?” I said.

She looked like a little girl as she nodded briefly.

“Different from what anyone supposed, and luckier,” I said. She smiled at that; trusty old Whitman. I let go of her hand.

“Can you sit up?” I asked.

I slid off my belt and wrapped it around her skinny arm.

“Make a fist,” I said.

The vein was clearly visible, purple underneath her papery skin, which I punctured, emptying the vial into her blood. I untied the belt and she sank into the bed with a little sigh. I took her hand again.

“Thank you,” she said, already drowsy. “I love you.”

I tucked her in like I used to tuck in the kids when they were young. In a way, it was a natural death. There would be no questions. I sat with her for a while and thought about Walter De Maria, then got up and went to my study.

I started a scenario.

Outside, Maggie is kneeling in the dirt, her shadow long on the sloping lawn. I can hear her humming as I approach.

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FICTION

This One’s For You (NOVEL EXCERPT)

By Maddie Cowan

From what I could tell, overnight trains served one purpose: to move cargo from one point to another. Though we may have been traveling through five states, it was as if the folks on the train couldn’t care less about the views out their window. No one was concerned about the scenery or the changing landscapes acting as an existential experience. The train whistle was their cue to sleep, not a signal of impending curiosity.

After boarding my connecting train in Chicago, even though it was only 6 p.m., everyone around me pulled out their blankets and pillows, configuring themselves in their row to settle in for the night. I seemed to be the only one who wasn’t ready to fall asleep before the sun set. Reluctantly, I grabbed the sweatshirt I had tucked away in my backpack and wrapped it into a ball between my head and the window, swinging my legs up onto the empty seat beside me. I watched as the train pulled from Union Station. Slowly, we reversed back into the plains—the houses spreading wider as we went. I slid my headphones into my ears and hit play on the playlist I put together the night before instead of sleeping—Moving Forward was all I could come up with for a title. The world darkened; we slept—pretzel formations over armrests, sweatshirts tucked beneath our heads,

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against strangers’ shoulders, slumped over folding trays—while the train carried on through the night.

Before closing my eyes, I texted Eden. My train is on time and I should get into Manhattan sometime tomorrow morning.

Eden and I had been roommates at Columbia. No one from my high school was going to college in New York. Of those who were going to college, they were staying in the midwest— Creighton, Nebraska, UNL, Iowa. I was ready to get as far away from my past as possible. After everything that happened with Daisy senior year of high school, I needed a clean slate, a cliche—a “fresh start.” I opted for a randomly selected roommate from the university’s enrollment checklist, and two weeks later, I had an email connecting Eden Fuller and me. I sent an email right away, anxious to meet the person I was going to spend the next year living with. Eden never responded. When I asked her about it on moving day, whether she received my email or not, she said she had and continued to unpack her suitcase without another word of explanation.

Eden kept to herself. At first, I assumed she was introverted because she was shy and nervous about meeting new people.

But as the year went on, I realized she didn’t have any issues introducing herself to new people; she just didn’t seem to like people, and that’s why she kept to herself. She turned out to be one of the most passive-aggressive people I had ever met—and coming from someone who grew up in the Midwest, where passive aggression is our only language for conflict, that’s saying something. She unplugged my hair straightener from the wall before she walked out the door for her 8 a.m. classes, even though I had just plugged it in and was letting it warm up while I got dressed. Silently, she got up from her desk, walked over to mine, and turned down the volume on my Bluetooth speaker playing

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classical music while I was studying. Then she walked back to her desk and continued typing. She returned to school after winter break while I was at work and took down all of our— my—Christmas decorations and put them on my bed instead of in the empty bin under my bed. But she also brought me soup when I had the flu, put a surgical mask over her face before entering our room, and then slept on the couch in our dorm’s lobby. She reported our neighbors who smoked weed with their window open and a fan blowing the smoke out of their room and directly into our open window. She reported the girls across the hall who stumbled into our dorm at 3 a.m. during finals week.

She dumped her beer on a guy at the only frat party she came to with me when she saw him put his hand on my back without my consent. She wasn’t the best roommate, but wasn’t the worst either. And once I got used to her quirks—her required quiet hours, her desired music volume, her need for a tidy space to do yoga in the mornings—I couldn’t imagine having to get to know another roommate all over again. When Eden proposed we room together sophomore year, I agreed. And junior year. And senior year. Eden had a twenty-year plan broken down into monthly goals, whereas I had no plan. Though I managed to graduate with a degree in English, I never thought about my life after college— who I could be, where I’d work, and where I’d live. Eden found a cheap two-bedroom in Inwood, signing a lease a week after our graduation. As I packed our dorm, not a single plan in mind, I found a note she had typed and left on my bed, her things long gone, with the address and monthly rent of the new apartment.

Though I had told her I was spending at least the summer at home in Nebraska and that I wasn’t sure whether I would be moving back to Manhattan, she signed off the letter wishing me a happy summer and that she looked forward to seeing me

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in August.

That summer was the first time I came home in four years.

I was able to successfully avoid returning to my hometown during my entire time at Columbia by holding a standing work-study position at the athletic center, which required me to be on campus all year for the athletes and employees who used the facilities when school was not in session. My parents occasionally came to visit me and we would spend a couple of days buying picnic supplies from a bodega and playing cards at the West Harlem Piers. My dad was obsessed with the Harlem Viaduct Arches, and my mom loved to people-watch on the riverfront, flinching at every piece of trash she wanted to pick up but was too afraid of the germs they carried. My mom tried to convince me that I could make it through school without a job, but her efforts were half-hearted because she knew it wasn’t true. I needed the money, sure, but a part-time workstudy program was barely enough to pay for my books for the upcoming term and to be able to occasionally treat myself to a real coffee instead of the coffee-flavored water in the dining hall—not going home was an attempt to keep myself from my past, from the flashbacks, from Daisy. Most of my time sitting behind the desk was spent sipping on lukewarm coffee-water and trying not to think about her.

You were only seventeen, I tried to remind myself. How was I supposed to act when my best friend and the potential love of my life came out in front of our friends and was completely rejected? How was I supposed to act when she was sent to her grandparents for the final semester of our senior year without another word? How was I supposed to move on and move forward without her? How was I supposed to tell her about what happened in the school hallway when I was eight while

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she sat on the other side of me, completely unaware that I was unraveling inside?

After sixty-three days at home, during which I kept my head down and my eyes lifted, scanning, I didn’t spot Daisy or her parents once. Every time the door rang at the restaurant, I both hoped and dreaded seeing her face, soft blonde curls tucked behind her ears in an unsuccessful attempt to contain them. The night before I sold my car, I drove the roads Daisy and I drove in high school, before everything changed—the roads where we blasted music, lost ourselves, found ourselves, and fell in love.

On August twelfth, after a summer of delivering pizzas to tables full of people who weren’t Daisy, of disgusting children whose parents didn’t tip even after their kid dumped not one but two full glasses of chocolate milk all over the floor, which my boss made me clean up, I packed my room to head back to New York. I loaded it into my dad’s car—mine I was able to sell for enough to pay for three months of rent—and sat in the passenger seat as he drove me to the Omaha train station.

When the “message read” appeared beneath my text message to Eden, I closed my eyes and let James Taylor and the vibration of the train against the tracks lull me to sleep.

“Approaching Penn Station,” the conductor said. “This is the final stop for this train—everyone must depart.”

I held down the side of my phone to turn it on. I turned it off overnight to ensure my phone had enough battery to use my maps app. I was not getting lost trying to figure out New York City’s subway system. Given that I had not been farther uptown than Columbia, the last thing I needed to do was to get lost in a completely foreign neighborhood. I laughed nervously at the thought of being a stereotypical “lost, white girl” as I shoved my headphones and sweatshirt into my backpack.

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I pulled my suitcase down from the overhead storage and watched as the rest of the train stretched from our nearly 24hour train ride. I spent most of the morning people-watching the middle-aged white guy across from me furiously typing on his laptop nonstop from 8 a.m. until we arrived at 4 p.m.

From his unwrinkled suit to his tiny bag, I imagined he was some sort of Wall Street hotshot or maybe an attorney. From how he worked and dressed, and then considering he was on an overnight train instead of a two-hour flight, he was overworked and underpaid. There was also a lady two rows in front of me, chatting loudly on her phone on speaker mode for us all to hear—one of her kids (she had three) won an academic contest, the other was home from school sick, and her wife (or sister or best friend) went on for a solid hour about how their mother was driving her crazy and refused to take the medication her doctor had prescribed and refused care at her nursing home.

Blue A train to 59th, transfer to the 1 train, and take that to 207th street. I knew the one train well enough from the four years I had spent at Columbia, but I only took the train downtown from campus. I waited in my seat until the train emptied, checking the train map on my phone to avoid talking to as many annoyed attendants as possible. Not that I needed to see the map again; I had memorized every stop and transfer, repeating them for the final three hours of the train ride while my phone was off, even copying it into my journal for safekeeping (and to pass the time).

I made it through the multiple train transfers rather uneventfully. I passed the signs for Columbia as I was transferring at 59th Street. Gabbing teenagers laughed up the stairs to the street. It wasn’t until the conductor mumbled the announcement for 207th that I started to panic; the reality of what I was doing set in. I wasn’t terribly excited about living in

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Inwood, a neighborhood I knew little about other than it was farther uptown than Washington Heights. I didn’t have a job lined up, and I was living with my college roommate, who I wasn’t entirely sure even wanted me to be there.

The only contact I had with Eden all summer was when I emailed her at the end of July, frantic about my lack of plan and unwillingness to clean pizza sauce out of another pair of jeans. I asked whether the spare room in her apartment was still available.

She emailed back an hour later, claiming it was. She also attached a questionnaire for me to complete—twenty questions about my cleanliness and bathroom habits, as if we had not just lived in the same 12x12 dorm room for the past four years.

As I carried my suitcase up the stairs and onto 207th street, a wave of burgers and cab exhaust replaced the stale smell of the subway tunnel.

I swiped from my maps to my message and sent a follow-up text to Eden—who hadn’t responded to any of my travel texts.

I’m off the train and should be there in a few minutes, I said. According to the directions she emailed me the week before, I needed to take a left on Post, and the apartment was two blocks up on the right. If you get to Pizza Palace, you’ve missed it, she said, signing off her final email with directions rather than her name or a note of excitement to see me.

I passed a group of guys escaping the heat of New York summer under a lone tree. I could feel their stares without looking in their direction. I was becoming increasingly aware that my suitcase all but put a “new kid on the block” sign on my back (not the fun 90s boy band). I kept my gaze directly at my feet, only briefly glancing at the building numbers to my right so I didn’t miss my gate. I reached the unassuming courtyard and buzzed apartment 105—Fuller, E. I heard the gate click and

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pushed it open, jumping when it slammed behind me, a narrow save for my ankles.

Apartments 101-729 read the small sign next to the door of the first building to my left. I pulled the handle, careful to keep my back against it this time, as I squeezed my suitcase into the narrow entrance. Fortunately, I didn’t have to drag my bag up any flights of stairs. I could see 105 in the middle of the third door to my left. It hit me—105 meant ground floor, and the odd number meant we faced the street. The crowd of men outside the courtyard was going to be right outside my window. I tried to shake off the fear of a stranger knocking on my window in the middle of the night with a shudder as I knocked on our apartment door. I could hear footsteps, then Eden swung the door open.

“Hey, Bella. Close the door behind you,” she said, hastily plopping back on the couch. After a moment of hesitation, I wheeled my suitcase into the kitchen . . . living room . . . both.

The kitchen counter was about four feet from the couch, but I reminded myself that this was New York City; I wasn’t in suburbia anymore. I should have just sucked it up and been happy I didn’t have to sleep on the streets or in my childhood bedroom. As I closed the door behind me, I noticed there wasn’t a single dirty dish in the sink, no article of clothing on the floor that I could see, yet the carpet was dingy, and the air was heavy with the scent of stale cat litter. I stepped toward the couch, still clutching my bags, unsure if I should make myself at home or wait for an invitation. Fortunately, Eden didn’t make me wait long.

“Sit,” Eden said, gesturing at the bean bag covered in cat fur.

I left my bags in the kitchen and sat gently on the pile of fur that would send my mother into anaphylactic shock.

“Here,” Eden handed me a packet of stapled papers.

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23

“What’s this?” I took the packet from her.

“Just a roommate agreement, some stuff to look out for, some things you’re responsible for—you know.”

“Oh—sure,” I replied, as if I knew, flipping through the three pages of neatly typed documents, but that’s when I noticed there was a place for me to sign at the bottom.

“Oh—do I really need to sign this?”

“Yep.” Eden shrugged. “Not a big deal. You can read it tonight, sign it, and leave it on the counter.”

Slightly stunned and worried, I left the agreement in my lap.

“Do you have any questions?” she said, staring at her phone.

“Yes,” I said, clearing my throat. “Do you know if any restaurants nearby are hiring?”

“Sure, my boyfriend works at a diner around the corner. He mentioned yesterday that they’re hiring.” Not a single glance in my direction.

“Boyfriend? Since when?” I said, trying to conceal my excitement (and confusion) that my roommate, who hates people, is in a committed relationship with another human being.

“Yeah, Jack, we started dating a couple of months ago.

Anyway, I can text him and ask if I can get you an interview. Do you have any experience?”

“Yeah, I mean, I worked at a pizza place all summer waiting tables and as a hostess,” I said. Eden groaned. Not that I was entirely pumped about the prospect of serving greasy food to ungrateful customers again, but I also knew I had three months worth of money in my bank account, and then I was screwed. And I had a feeling Eden wasn’t going to be flexible with rent payments.

“Okay, I’ll text him. Anything else?” An eyebrow in my general direction indicated she was annoyed.

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M A DDIE COWAN

“Just curious—how long will I be able to live here?” I had been wondering for weeks if she could kick me out mid-year, forcing me to find a new place on the fly.

She shrugged in acknowledgment but still did not look in my direction.

“Depends,” she said. “From what I heard from the building’s super, most people have only stayed in this building for six months to a year, especially the students. He said the last couple who rented this place whined about the commute as their reason for terminating their lease—which is how I was able to get this place for so cheap on short notice—but I don’t know what they were complaining about. The one train is literally right around the corner,” she said. “But that’s why I made the rental agreement. It keeps me from being without a subletter for too long, but it also clearly outlines why I could kick you out, so it protects us both, you know? The girl who sublet for me over the summer was shocked when I kicked her out,” she said, finally looking up from her phone. She stared directly at me.

“She thought she could get away with throwing a party while I was out of town, but this is a quiet building, and everyone talks, so I knew right when I got back what she had done. She got her week’s notice, and that was that.” Eden returned to her phone.

“Oh,” she said. “Your room is right there.” She gestured over her head to the door next to the fridge. “Bathroom is down the hall.” She swung her arm past the next door and towards the closed door at the end of the hallway. “My bedroom is in the middle,” she said, pointing to the third and final door.

“Got it,” I said. Standing, my roommate’s agreement rolled up in my hand, I grabbed my suitcase from the kitchen and slung my backpack over my shoulder. As I passed the fridge, I noticed meticulously hung post-it notes, all in various neon shades of

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25

blue, green, and orange. Lights, trash, keys, counters, cats, they read.

Eden had a line of post-it notes above her desk in our dorm but had said they were to remind her of upcoming assignments.

“What are these notes?” I said.

“They’re my checklist of things to do before I go out of town—I travel a lot for my job as a private art consultant. Don’t touch them.”

Wide-eyed, I turned for my room and wheeled my suitcase inside.

“Hey,” Eden said, sitting up. I stopped and turned back towards her.

“Jack just texted me back and said they’re hiring, but they’re only looking for someone who can cover early morning shifts.”

“That works perfectly!” I said, immediately regretting the squeal in my tone.

Eden rolled her eyes and looked back at her phone.

“Great,” she said. “You have an interview Monday at 7 a.m.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, forcing a casual ease into my voice.

An underwhelming full-sized bed with a floral quilt stopped me just inside the door. A small wooden desk and dresser with three drawers completed the room. I turned around and took in my room, my home. I tossed my bags onto my bed and closed the door. But I noticed a pink post-it note on the back of the door.

It’s your turn to vacuum, it read.

“Hey Eden, what’s this?” I held the note out the door.

She turned around, annoyed, but she went stiff when she saw the pink note.

“Oh, it’s nothing.” She got up from the couch and snatched the note from my hand. She crumpled it and walked into her bedroom, locking the door behind her without another word.

26

FICTION

Susquehanna (NOVEL EXCERPT)

By Nikki DeLeon

1.

She had never learned to swim. Born landlocked into this little nowhere in the middle of Western Pennsylvania, in the place where her family had always lived since before the Revolutionary War, it had not seemed important. But now, having slipped from the same muddy bank all of the teenagers in town called Bare-Ass Beach, swept up by the rushing west branch of the Susquehanna River, that seemed incredibly inconvenient.

An old boyfriend had tried to teach her, but she never mastered the ability to hold her breath underwater without pinching her nose shut with one hand. No, she had not learned, and now, as her non-buoyant body tossed with the current, she fought and struggled against the rapids that dragged her end over end down the river, swallowing great, gritty gulps. Her feet tangled themselves in the duckweed and downed branches beneath the surface of the water. Twigs and rocks scratched the pale skin of her arms; her jeans, already water-logged, caught and now tore away from her legs. Her head rose briefly above the surface and sank again. Her eyes stung from the silt, and she coughed up soil and leaves and water, always more water.

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And as she fought against the swirling rapids that seemed to be trying to swallow her, to digest her in the deep, black belly of the river, she heard it: a clear, cheerful voice in her head, a voice that did not seem troubled, a voice that seemed as if it would never be troubled by anything at all. It was a voice she had known all her life, the voice of a woman, a voice that forced its way past all of the measures she’d built to shut it out, but always it found its way to her. It was the voice that now told her to quit struggling. That voice said: let go. That voice said: float.

Let the river carry you.

And as was her simple, girlish way of believing anyone who appeared more confident than she—and it should be said now that everyone appeared more confident than she did—she listened. She lifted her head above the surface of the water and inhaled a gulp of air. Her body rose, her midsection bobbing up first, her legs kicking out, and her arms, bruised and bloody, now feeling weightless, broke the surface of the rushing river.

She breathed in the night, she breathed in stars she could not see beneath the roof of storm clouds, she breathed in the rain.

Her body spun this way and that, changing orientation with the whim of the river, of the wind, of the rain, but still she floated.

Lightning pierced and forked the night sky overhead, a network of blinding branches of electricity, and the world turned blue-white. She saw for a second the raging river and knew then that, even if she could, there was no bank left to swim for. Trees sliced upward against the blood-colored sky, twisted black shapes looming toward her, thrashing in the wind.

The lightning disappeared leaving white spots in her eyes like an echo of stars.

Yet still the river carried her. As her body was tossed through the rapids, she felt her foot strike something large and

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unforgiving. There was lumber along the river bottom; this stretch of the Susquehanna had once been used to transport logs from upstream to the now-dead mill below, where they would be stripped and turned into pulp. It was the mill the Sugars had owned since before the Declaration of Independence, the mill where her own kin had worked, where a great or a great-great grandfather had worked felling trees until he lost his hand and later his mind. An old road nearby that no one used anymore bore his name: Ellsworth Pass. It led to the place where he’d lain in the bed of his Ford and shot himself, using his remaining hand to pull the trigger, where his blood and the gray coils of his brain, the fleshy parts of his memories, splattered into the earth.

Her blood was in this earth, the trees fed off of it, and now it appeared that having drank their fill once before, they reached for her now, hungry to feed again. Hungry for what came next.

And the voice said: Maybe they will name this stretch of the river after you.

She had to get out of here. She had to.

The rapids became more violent now as the storm howled around her, and a stray log struck her hard on the side of her head. She felt warmth stream down her face and into her mouth, and she tasted the earthy iron of her own blood. She exhaled all at once and began to sink down again. She splashed her hands against the river, searching for something in the crashing current to hold on to, searching for something wedged into the earth of the riverbed, old timber that perhaps her own ancestors had cut, something solid, immovable. She slipped under the water again. Her lungs pressed against her ribs, just as her hand grazed a branch under the surface that sliced open her palm. Tiny rocks gouged into the wound, and she nearly yelped, the cry immediately silenced by water filling the open

“Susquehanna (novel excerpt)”

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chasm of her mouth. Yet still, she did not let go.

Lightning crackled against the sky once more. Above her, through the murky ripples of the current like warped glass, she saw a white-hot spike strike a treetop at the water’s edge. Bits of spark and flame burst from the tree. The whole world had gone mad.

Let go, the voice said, different now, rasping and gurgling, like the last words of a dying woman. Let the river carry us away.

She thrashed against the current; she coughed up water and mud and the tiny shards of gravel that nicked her lips and tongue. She would not let the river have its way with her. She would not slip into the black so easily. She would get out of here.

She would not die in this river tonight.

Her body tossed again, her head bobbed up above the surface, and, water spilling from her lips, she inhaled deep, choking breaths, her lungs straining from hot, humid night air and the river creeping its way down her nose and throat. Her body broke the surface once more, bobbing up like a bloated fish, and with both hands, her bloody palms slapping against the water’s surface, legs kicking free of the weighted denim and ready for a fight, she held on.

Still holding her breath, her body arching against the current, she opened her eyes, and the torch of burning tree lit her way free.

2.

A cluster of beige-clad officers stood there, in that place where the West Branch of the Susquehanna rose right up to

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the bank—in the place where, in the rainy season, one could take a single misstep off the dark mud and disappear into the water with its green skin of algae and be spirited away without a trace. In 1939, back when his grandfather was the first Sheriff Hostetler in the county, a child had slipped from a tree branch on a Sunday afternoon near B.A. Beach further upstream, a sudden blanche of white church clothes tumbling through the air and into the water below. It had taken days to find her, but they had, here. His father had shown him this spot when he was a boy, this place where the rapids calmed, and the river released all it took from them.

Of course, she’d be here. From the moment he’d gotten the call, Sheriff Ed Hostetler, who, for most of his life, had been known simply as Hos, had known to come here, to this bend in the river’s journey. Three days earlier, when she had first gone missing, he had known he would find himself here. He had known that he would meet her in this place, the place where all of it began and ended.

His boots sank in the mud as he picked his way through the scraggle of broken-down trees and waterlogged leaves, brown from rain. The air choked with heat and wet. His clothes clung to him, the clay color of his uniform stained with sweat that poured from his body. On the radio, before he’d pulled to a stop where the road widened, the last of a long line of police cruisers, a faint voice crackled with static as it announced: 95 degrees, 95% humidity. He imagined floating in the murky green-black of this branch of the Susquehanna, passing through the shade of branches that stretched across the water and interlaced into a leafy canopy over the river, moving away from this town to the next, and he wondered at the movement of the current, how a breeze might lift the hair off of his forehead, the relief of the

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31

water, of weightlessness, of giving in, of being carried away.

Maybe there would have been a moment of pleasure, just before. Maybe there would have been an instant of relief from this place, this heavy, white heat, choking the woods back, drowning the trees, rotten at the roots. Relief from days of the air wet but the earth dry, and the building tension of static electricity that had finally birthed the most violent storm anyone had ever seen.

The circle of men parted as he approached, and he saw her.

Her hair pasted itself in harsh relief against a face bloated and bruised. Her entire body had swelled, glutted with water.

Leaves and bits of paper edged out of distended lips. Newsprint, likely, for the ink had bled down her chin, and stained it purple.

He saw a wound behind and slightly above her temple that would have, itself, been deadly, might have killed her even if the river had not. Her blouse, what was left of it, had been torn, revealing a dingy, still-wet bra translucent against her skin, dotted with a tiny pearl heart in the center between her small breasts, which were cut and slashed, as was her face, her arms, the exposed flesh of her stomach, and her legs where her hiphugger jeans had also torn.

The river expelled her amidst the sharp edges of fallen branches, her limp arms entangled in the switches and bramble.

One hand lolled at the wrist, as if she’d extended it toward someone, waiting for it to be kissed. He saw a deep cut in her palm, the skin and muscle pulled apart from each other, gaping into what would have been the deeper pink of her wound, but there was no blood now. She had done all her bleeding, it seemed, and now she was only the remaining bits of a thing that had once been something else. For a moment, she resembled the plump body of a bird, stopped in flight, and caught here in

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a branch by the river, a bird downed, drowned, and deposited at the water’s edge.

He would have known her anywhere.

“Jesus,” he said aloud. A reflex, that. He meant to be quiet, had rehearsed in the car exactly what would happen here.

Seeing her now, the glutted, green weight of her, he tasted something sour, fought the urge to retch. His men were all younger than he was, flush with the kind of youth that has no understanding of what it is to die. They watched him, looking for signs of weakness, he knew. He would not give himself away.

Deputy Yoder, always the first to speak, cleared his throat.

He’d come home from Vietnam eight years ago, three years after Hos, though it had always seemed strange to him to think of the war waging after he’d come home, that in the days he’d spent pulling over high school kids for drag racing down Main Street, the factory of war had continued to clank and smoke, to drop young men into the heat of battle in Kontum, to pump out the smell of human flesh melting and crackling from aerial fire, to pipe in the screams of grown men, their voices ripping and tearing at their vocal chords as they saw the explosion of blood and bone that had once been legs and feet and hands and heads and now were nothing at all. Yoder had served fewer than six months, but still bore the marks of a man who felt powerful before he understood what power was. He looked younger than his years, his hair shorn in the same induction buzz, short enough that Hos could make out the fresh pink of his scalp.

Yoder distinguished himself in the service, leading a small band of Marines in deep jungle when they’d been separated from their unit by VC fire. He wore this bravery like an invisible medal, stood taller, more sure, acted first before men twice his age. He might have made a good sheriff himself one day if he’d

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33

been a Hostetler and the people of this county weren’t such creatures of habit.

Yoder cleared his throat a second time, shaking Hos from his thoughts. He fought the urge to strike his deputy in the face.

“Doesn’t match any missing person reports,” Yoder said in a voice that, in the still morning, echoed too loudly through the trees. “Just waiting on state to—” Hos held up his hand for silence.

“Sir?” Hos did not answer. Instead, he knelt down. The front of her jeans had been ripped apart, likely from the rocks. Foul black insects crawled along her now discolored torso and disappeared beneath the torn waist of her pants, where, he suspected, they were feeding on the tender flesh of her genitals, as he had seen them do with the bodies of the dead in Hue, the last conflict he’d seen before coming home.

Hos flicked the insects away. Along her bare abdomen, under the congealed cling of black leaves and silt, he reached out and with only the light stroke of his thumb, swiped away a small mound of debris, revealing the faint line of a horizontal scar below her belly button. He ran his finger lightly along the pale line of flesh which tilted up at one corner like a halfhearted smile. Her skin, mottled blue-green, was icy to the touch. Her fingernails, short, chewed nearly to the quick, had pulled away from their nail beds. He touched the tips of his fingers to hers.

She had fought. If nothing else, he could say that she fought, either to live or to die. She had always been a fighter, this one, even when she should have learned to just let go.

Hos closed his eyes, so quickly that his men, if they were watching, and they were always watching, would not notice, and he pictured those same fingers flipping clumsily through

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the onion-skin pages of a small green Bible, shifting her weight from one foot to another, standing in the shade of a willow tree near his front door, a younger girl then, a child, really, even younger than the woman who had made her final resting place slung over a broken log, as if dropped from the sky to this death, like the door gunners who fell into the morass of hell, bloodied and broken and emptied of their souls, dead long before they landed.

A black-winged bird flew overhead and, dipping its wings slightly, circled twice before alighting on a branch above him. He pointed his face toward the sky and the squat raven peered down at him, her head turned, the black disc of her eye demanding the truth. The bird cried out, announcing what must come next. In his mind, he repeated her name, moving his tongue behind his closed lips in the shape of the syllables that would both begin and end all things. He parted his lips, but no words formed. He looked away from the faces of his men, all but one.

“Get me John Sugar,” he said to Deputy Yoder as he got to his feet. “This is John Sugar’s girl.”

35

FICTION

Annabel

By Chandler Ford

I can’t take my eyes off the man at the bar. He reminds me of those old spot-the-difference puzzles—friendly enough, I’m sure, but misaligned with his surroundings, the single divergent detail in an otherwise ordinary scene. We’re in the nice part of town tonight, a lounge off the Newbury strip, the type of place where cocktails are seventeen dollars. And here he sits, patchy gray beard, biker jacket, hunting knife hanging off a rough hide belt, like the bad guy off some cop show. On someone else, the get-up might have been unconvincing, but he’s a head taller than any of us and built like a weightlifter, except for the beer belly protruding from his button-down denim shirt. Watching him, it’s easy to see how he obtained it. Since we arrived, he’s been hunkered down on the corner stool, pounding Purple Sky faster than the bartender can serve them. Empty bottles line themselves up in front of him, a glass army in formation.

“Purple Sky,” I say. “Kind of a bitch drink, no?”

Claudia kicks me under the table. Her new friend from work, the one we’ve come out to drink with, laughs.

“What? The guy’s got gang tattoos.” They’re faded, but nonetheless visible through his thick, black arm hair. “Shouldn’t he have, I don’t know, a lager?”

“Something hard,” Claudia says. “A whiskey, maybe.”

“My dad’s old military buddies used to drink Chartreuse

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straight.” Claudia’s friend is speaking now. “It was the cheapest thing they could get on base.”

I don’t know what Chartreuse is. “Yeah, something like that,” I say.

“I don’t like him being here,” Claudia says.

“He’s not bothering anyone.”

“It’s odd,” Claudia says. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“What are you guys getting?” Claudia’s friend says, opening the drink menu.

“Now I feel like a Purple Sky,” Claudia says. I feel her eyes on me, but I don’t look up. “If the waitress comes by, tell her that’s what I want, if you don’t mind.” Then, she slides off her chair and heads toward the restroom.

Once she’s out of earshot, I turn to Annabel. “What the hell is going on?”

She doesn’t look up from her menu.

“Really, how did this all even come about?” “‘This all’?”

“You and Claudia.”

Annabel still isn’t looking at me, as though I’ll remain only an abstract idea outside her perception. “I got a job,” she says.

“Your wife works at said job. We sit next to each other at said job. Do I have to spell out how you make friends with someone?”

“I mean, what are the odds?” I say. “After—” “Stop. Don’t bring it up.”

“It caught me off guard. That’s it.”

She shakes her head. “Let’s get through the night, okay?

Then we never have to see each other again.”

“Fine with me.” I go back to watching the man at the bar. Claudia returns after a while and asks if the waitress has come by.

“Annabel”

37

“Nope,” Claudia’s friend says. “Not yet.”

— I hadn’t noticed it before, but stuffed haphazardly under the man’s barstool is a leather knapsack—something quality, a Tom Ford or a Saint Laurent, if I had to guess. It’s not the type of tote meant for a sticky barroom floor. I’m itching to know where he obtained it, and more than that, what he has inside.

Perhaps it’s the warm air, but I swear I can see a soft, yellow light radiating from the largest pocket. The man either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care. He waves at the bartender for another drink.

Under the table, Claudia taps my foot with hers. I return to the conversation. “So, tell me again how you ended up at FlexSolutions,” Annabel is saying.

“It’s a temporary stopover,” Claudia says. “My degree is in nursing.”

“You’re searching?”

“Well, the job market’s in rough shape.”

“Everyone I know’s had problems.”

“I doubt I’ll be there much longer.”

Claudia was fired from Mass General for lifting painkillers.

I don’t mention this.

“What about you?” Claudia asks.

“I just needed something stable,” Annabel says. “I got out of law school and felt like I was floating.”

“Is legal that bad, too?” Claudia says.

“Well, no,” Annabel admits. “More like a crisis of faith.

Nothing is ever how it looks. The big firms, the ones with DEI departments and pro bono programs, farm their associates for labor and then throw them in the woodchipper. The small firms either collapse or get bought out by the big firms.” She shakes

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her head. “The machine keeps marching. You come out of a top-twenty with all these big ideas, and then the end-point of every path is the same exploitative model. I was disillusioned.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I say.

“The first office job I found, I took it. I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Annabel says. “But—everyone’s been so nice. I never thought I’d make friends this fast.”

Claudia nods in agreement. “It’s good to get out.”

The three of us are silent, and then Annabel asks how long we’ve lived in the city. For the next few minutes, Claudia recounts our history: a college marriage, a cramped studio apartment in Eastie, a two-bedroom out in Waltham; her spiel is well-rehearsed, down to the index finger placed atop my hand.

The longer she speaks, the less I’m listening. Twice now, the man at the bar has brushed the bag with his foot, which has jostled open the outer flap. Whatever’s shining inside, it’s resting at the very top—gold, maybe, or some kind of buried treasure.

“Now we’re over in Allston,” Claudia finishes. “We got tired of the suburbs after a while. We missed the nightlife.”

“Do you come out often?”

“We try,” she says. “Everyone we knew here moved away.”

“It’s the hardest thing in the world, living somewhere you don’t know anyone.” Annabel tilts her head and smiles through me. Then, she excuses herself for the restroom.

Claudia waits until she’s gone to give me the treatment.

“Can you stop fucking this up for us?”

“What am I doing?”

“This is the first friend I’ve made in years,” she hisses. “Quit being such a freak.”

“I’m just being myself.”

“Then quit doing that.”

“Annabel”

39

“Well, you’re the one that invited me.” Both of us are silent for a minute. Before Annabel comes back, I add, “What was her name again? Sorry, you know how I am. But she seems nice.”

— Around the time I finish my second drink, the man at the bar decimates my suspicions. The bartender brings him another Purple Sky, as is typical; he puts the bottle to his lips, but this time, instead of his usual chug, he hesitates. Then, after a moment of consideration, he reaches into the knapsack and removes what I assume is a piece of fruit. If it is fruit, it’s unlike any I’ve ever seen: about the size of a guava, but round and plump and sinfully golden, with a thin, birch-white stem and a remarkably bioluminescent rind. Though I can’t see it well from here, it appears to gently pulsate, not unlike a shining, glow-inthe-dark heartbeat. The man removes the knife from his belt, makes four deep cuts; once the pulsations have ceased, he drops a slice of the quartered fruit into his Purple Sky. The beverage bubbles like acid.

I try to catch Claudia’s eye to see if she’s paying attention to him, but she and Annabel are wrapped up in office gossip. I pull out my phone and Claudia glares at me, so I stuff it back in my pocket. While I’m there, I feel around for the carts I brought— those new disposable ones, 87% THC content—which are still intact, thank Christ.

“I’ve had it up to here with Nathan,” Claudia is saying. “The man’s been there half as long as me and makes twice as much.”

“I don’t know him well,” Annabel says.

“I might not care so much, if he weren’t so loud,” Claudia says. “He speaks from one side of the office and you hear him on the other. Mick, didn’t I tell you about him?”

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I grunt. “Have either of you been watching that guy at the bar?”

“The other day, I was eating my lunch in the breakroom, and he comes in and starts talking at me. I’m nice, I engage him in conversation, and the next thing I know, I’m getting a twentyminute lecture on fluoride in the tap water.” She sips her beer.

“He’s got these . . . weird fruits.”

“He does seem to love his conspiracy theories,” Annabel says.

The man carves out another slice, sinks his teeth into it.

“Don’t get him started on the mole people.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare.”

A thick juice runs down his chin, mingles with his whiskers.

“So dumb,” Claudia says.

“The worst,” Annabel confirms.

There’s a lull in conversation as the jukebox changes songs.

The whole bar is, momentarily, eerily muted; the man at the bar loudly slurps at the fluid dripping off his hands, which reminds me I haven’t gone deaf. In the quiet, I’m hit with the overwhelming urge to know what Annabel is thinking. I rest my big toe on her shoe as “Second Hand News” crackles to life. The bar patrons are mercifully loud again. Annabel shifts backward.

Claudia breaks our silence. “Did you hear about Rich?” She says it in a whisper, as though the information is classified.

“The training manager?”

“Former training manager, as of Tuesday,” Claudia says.

“I don’t know much about it. Apparently, there were some extramarital activities taking place in accounting.”

“He got fired over something like that?”

“Well, he got fired for sexting on Teams,” Claudia says.

“Either way. He seemed so nice.”

“He still could be,” Annabel says.

“Annabel”

41

“I know,” Claudia says. “It seems like a shame, that’s all.

He’s been with his wife for twenty years. Imagine having the world and throwing it away.”

Annabel repositions herself on her barstool. I toss out a “Don’t shit where you eat” and flag the waitress for another beer.

— The alcohol is making my head light, inhibiting my judgment.

I’m finding it difficult to form full sentences, and even more so to listen to others’. The man at the bar seems to be slowing down as well—he hit his wall at, by my count, an impressive sixteen Purple Skys. Every so often, his head droops, jars right back up, but otherwise, he’s still planted firmly on his seat. Occasionally the bartender walks over and checks on him, but beyond that, he hasn’t said much to anyone. At this point, Claudia has shed the workplace gossip in favor of old nursing school stories.

I slap my hands on the table and announce it’s my turn for the restroom.

The toilets are on the far side of the bar, so I have to pass the man to get there. Quickly, I slide up next to him, tap him on the shoulder. His massive head swings in my direction. “Huh?” “This seat taken?”

He slurs something that sounds like a no, so I climb onto the barstool next to him and order a round. As I do, he reaches into his bag and removes another piece of fruit. I watch as he carves away the rind, digs out the stem. Here, close enough to smell his breath, I can see how sharp his knife is, how clean the cuts are—and how wretchedly animate the fruit is. In the short time I’ve been here, the glowing has only intensified; its veiny flesh writhes and strains against itself, generating light seemingly from nowhere. The motions are entirely alien to me, as though

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something inside it is alive, pressing up against its inner walls.

I’m afraid it will burst, splatter all over me, but the man sinks his blade in deep, and the squirming ceases.

Briefly, I consider returning to my table, pretending I’ve seen none of this, but my curiosity gets the better of me. “So,” I say, hoping it sounds natural. “What are those?”

“Purple Shky,” he says.

“Right.” I take a sip. “And what about the fruit?”

The man narrows his eyes, suspicious of me, or perhaps he can’t see me well in the dim light. A few moments pass, and he reaches the conclusion that I’m no threat. “Sunfruit,” he finally says in a low voice.

“They have those at Whole Foods?”

“K’n-yan.”

“I see. That’s around here?”

“Underground,” he slurs.

“Underground,” I repeat, and he nods, mumbling something about a giant tree at the heart of the Moloid kingdom. I want to keep prying, but his body language tells me I’ve overstayed my welcome. The thought of him cracking a pool cue across my skull convinces me to change the subject.

“You have a wife?” I ask. “Girlfriend, maybe?”

“Nope.” He lets the word hang for a while. “Married to the dig.”

“That sounds nice.” I start to ask if I can buy him another round, but his head is drooping again, and I think I can just barely hear him snoring. I get up and head toward the toilets.

— Claudia doesn’t smoke, so I feel bad pitching the idea, but the night is wearing thin and beer’s no longer cutting it. I know for

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a fact that Annabel will join me, at least. I remove the carts from my pocket and wave them around in her face. “Interested?”

Claudia glares at me. “It’s legal now,” I say, anticipating her objection. “They can’t say a damn thing.” I turn to Annabel.

“You in or out? I brought an indica and a sativa. Your pick.”

“That doesn’t mean you should be doing it,” Claudia says.

“You’re gonna get cancer.”

“No, ma’am,” I say. “These are FDA approved.”

“You still shouldn’t do it.”

I shrug and lift the vaporizer to my lips anyway. Right as I’m about to puff, Claudia yanks it out of my hands. “In here?

Seriously?”

“Why not? There’s no smoke.”

“At least take it outside,” she says, “if you’re going to be such a scumbag.”

For one moment, I think I can let it go, but there’s something in the way Annabel is looking at me—some unknowable mix of contempt, mockery, and pity—that provokes me. I reach across the table, take back the vaporizer, and say, “I’ll smoke wherever the hell I want to.”

Claudia grits her teeth, but I don’t break eye contact.

Annabel shifts in her seat.

“Try me,” Claudia says.

I lift the cart to my lips. The vaporizer lights up, and right as I suck in— The sound starts like a bellow, but slowly it transforms into a throaty howl, and then a high-pitched squeal that pierces the din of jukebox tunes and conversation. The group next to us jolts out of their seats; for half a second, I think I’ve set off the fire alarm, but the vaporizer is still cool. Someone points toward the bar and I hear the sound again. It’s coming from a person.

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“Oh, Jesus,” says Claudia. She heads toward the bar, and I follow her.

It’s hard to process what I’m seeing. The man is clutching desperately at his wrist, and his thumb—the spot where his thumb used to be, at least—is squirting blood all over the damn place. I can’t see where it landed, thank God, but his knife is laying on the bartop, the blade slicked bright red. He must have gone in for another slice and missed entirely. One of the bartenders is trying desperately to stop the deluge with hand towels and paper napkins.

Claudia, the gem she is, is already calling 911, applying pressure, giving orders to people nearby; the bar patrons, I realize, obey her instinctively. I’m standing there like an idiot, staring at the man. Suddenly I realize I’ve had one too many drinks because I swear his bleeding hand still has a thumb attached. I glance at the other one, and it confirms my suspicion—two whole thumbs. I don’t know how I missed it before. Two thumbs, six fingers. I walk back to my table and drain the rest of my beer. Annabel is there, slightly pale, watching Claudia work in quiet awe. I tap her on the shoulder and wave the carts around again.

It’s hard to read her exact expression, but she follows me out the door of the bar.

— It’s much cooler out here. We find a spot in the alleyway where we can feel the breeze coming through and hand the vaporizer back and forth, alternating drags. It had been so stuffy indoors.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t realized it before.

My head is rushing by the time she actually speaks. “We shouldn’t be doing this again.”

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“You like getting high. I like getting high. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.”

“It’s not the same as last time,” I say.

She takes another drag, blows the vapor out in three distinct puffs. “You don’t have to be so standoffish,” she says. “You make yourself suspicious when you work so hard to pretend.”

The summer air blows across my cheek. There’s nothing in the world that could make me go back inside. “You’re not planning on telling Claudia, are you?”

“And play the homewrecker?” She sighs. “No, thank you.”

“I think that’s best for everyone.”

She takes the vaporizer from me. “Doesn’t it depress you?

How easy it is to pretend.”

“Sure,” I say.

“People are who they are,” she says. “And then they aren’t.

The surface layer breaks and you see what’s underneath. The whole hollow core.”

“It would just be bad, if she knew,” I say. “She’d go berserk.

You don’t need that either.”

“Of course,” Annabel says. She sighs again.

We’re silent for a few drags.

“If you wanted . . .” I start.

“I don’t,” she says.

“She’ll be busy taking care of that guy for a wh—” “Fuck off,” Annabel says. “I’m never going to stop feeling bad, you know.” She presses the vaporizer back into my hands, rubs at her eyes. All at once, I’m aware this is the last time we’ll speak, just the two of us. I can’t think of anything to say, so I continue smoking. By the time the commotion inside quiets down, I’m through most of the cart—I’m planning to finish it off on my own, but I’m interrupted by the ambulance that pulls

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up onto the sidewalk.

Claudia emerges from the bar first, her shirt splattered up and down with unknown fluid. The man follows right behind.

He’s flanked by two paramedics, and his hand is wrapped in reddened cloth. We catch each other’s eyes. Right now, he’s human to me. I give him a half-wave, which he returns with his good hand. Then, the paramedics load him up and shut the ambulance doors.

All of a sudden, Claudia is beside me. “There you are,” she says.

“Here I am.”

“We finally got the bleeding to stop. He’ll be fine when he gets to the doctor.”

“Good news,” Annabel says.

“What happened to your shirt?” I ask.

“It’s juice.” Claudia shrugs. “One of those fruits splattered me. I guess he was in shock because he wouldn’t let go of them.

Squeezed the life out of one. Did you see those things?”

“He got them underground,” I say.

“All right,” Claudia says.

“Are you okay?” Annabel asks.

“Yeah. All good,” she says. “I feel fine, actually. You guys been okay out here?”

“We’re great,” I say.

“Things are great,” Annabel says.

47

FICTION

The Axmen

By Priya Gadagkar

Shaurya, for that is her name, heads up the mountain when the sun reaches its highest overhead. She breathes in long and deep, sifting through the fragrance of weed, of Himalayan pine burning in the stoves, and of porridge, the ground barley in goat’s milk. She closes her eyes and inhales again; she catches the delicate trace of musk rose that grows rampant on the mountain top. She studies the clouds. Mud-tinged. The sky too, at the break of dawn, had summoned the many shades of fire.

Another storm is on its way.

For now, the wind promises to be her friend. It brushes her temples. It holds back the vagrant tendrils of her loosely braided hair that threaten to hinder her vision . . . although she could navigate this path with her eyes closed in the dead of night.

Under the headscarf, the nape of her neck is still warm from squatting in front of the stove. She tucks the loose ends firmly under the large wicker basket on her back, while the narrow dirt track plays hide and seek with her billowing sarong. The wind ruffles the thick fabric, first from this side, then from that.

She is on her way to gather grass for her cattle and firewood for her cooking.

Her body falls in rhythm while her thoughts wander. To the day before when her husband, Badri, returned from the city. To that hour between sunset and darkness, to that discreet

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corner of the millet field where she had laid in the privacy of the rhododendron canopy with this man she had wed a year ago. She remembers the surrender and the relief—her Badri is back. The mountain stands. The river flows. The forest gives.

The men, they leave to find work in the city. Some come back.

If only to plough the land. Some will sow.

Lately, she wonders about the woman.

On the one side, the mountain rises steeply, echoing the more formidable slopes of the Himalayas that lie beyond. On the other, the mountain drops, cradling in its spacious depth the fast-flowing river. Suspended in between, on this village path, where purple primrose and yellow dandelions line her feet, the ground bears evidence of the recent rain. Her footprint, though small and shallow, is fresh and clear. One could track her down with ease today. But who would harbor such a desire?

Who would follow her? Laughter creeps into her eyes as she remembers the white lies she fed to her mother-in-law, the Old Woman, at dusk so she could tryst with her son later in the dark.

The flaming red of the rhododendrons, that creep into her line of vision, matches her mood. It’s a sign. The mountain wants to play with her too.

Further up, the sparsely sprinkled banj and deodar dot the slopes, where once there stood cluster upon dense cluster of these giving trees. The Old Woman, in her time, didn’t wander far for fodder and food. The forest awaited at her doorstep with its gifts—root, fruit, grass, leaves, wood. The herbs and the weed. The Old Woman picked while the forest, mother of mothers, embraced the dead and the rotten, soaked up the excess, and gave only life in return. The forest stood guard upon the village. Until the day of the axmen.

It is a story that has turned legend, repeated along the slopes,

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in the fields, and by the warmth of the stove. A creation story of sorts, for it placed her village on the map of the world. Through fumes of weed, the Old Woman still blooms with pride at the memory, not unlike an army soldier, a little more deserving than the rest of the world. Even though twenty years have passed since. Even though not much has changed since. Even though Shaurya has tired of the tale. The past glory has not filled a single stomach for a single day, as far as she can tell. But it helps the Old Woman pass her day. To ease it when the weed fails. After all, the Old Woman had been there, on that day of the axmen.

That morning, two decades ago, the Old Woman had retched for the fourth time since sunrise (a detail she never fails to share) when the shouting began, “The axmen are coming.

The axmen are coming.” It was a cry she had heard before—a warning that outsiders were in their forest felling their trees. She was carrying her second son, still very high in the stomach then, and her husband had been missing for two months, his longest absence yet. More terrifying was the fact that all the men were out of the village that day, in the city, called on a government matter, which later turned out to be a hoax, a ruse, used by the city contractors, builders, to smuggle out the timber without the resistance of the villagers. With the men gone, who would stop the thieves? Who would fight? Goora, a village widow, had seen the timber trucks, the axmen, making their way up the mountain the morning after their own men departed, when the forest lay unprotected. The men would not return in time. They would not even hear of it until too late. Goora sounded the alarm.

“But the women of the village? What about the women?

Did anyone think about the women?” the Old Woman asks her audience at every telling.

The Old Woman, young then, had rushed out with a son

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in tow, and another high in her stomach, to stop the axmen.

The trees were her life, and with another new baby on its way, cutting down the forest meant the slow murder of her children.

She needed the trees for her fire, her food, her fiber, and her farm. She joined her sisters, without a second thought, she insists—but Shaurya suspects that this particular detail might be the weed talking. Wouldn’t a care or two cross the mind when getting ready for your head to be chopped off? But she won’t interrupt a telling; the Old Woman is, after all, like a grand oak in the village now.

On the day of the axmen, the Old Woman stood guard by a hundred-year-old oak which she named Noni. She rooted there for three days and three nights with her arms around its trunk, and with her sons, both, stretched around her waist. They stood there until the confused axmen, hired to fell trees and not hapless village women, returned to the city, defeated, timberless.

Until the one axman, whom the Old Woman recognized from her bed of eleven years, also staggered out of their lives, forever.

What good was the forest to him, if it could not fund his booze?

— “My man . . . the weakest timber in the city,” the Old Woman jokes now, amidst slow puffs of weed, her weathered face wrinkling with an easy merriment that comes from cultivated habit.

Lately, Shaurya wonders about the trees in the city.

“There are none,” says the Old Woman, crossly. “Trees don’t grow in dead places,” says Badri, gently. The Old Woman, hard of hearing, hard of seeing, feels little for the city. Badri feels even less, neither the hollow in his stomach nor the slow bend of his overworked spine.

The well-trodden path out of the village leads into the cool

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quiet spaces of the dark forest much higher up, wherein lies Shaurya’s work. Gathering is hard, but eased when she is with her friends. They have learned to make it so. Together, they watch for bear tracks; they watch for snakes in the slithering lines of the dirt; and while they are at it, they look for the ladybird who holds the key to the secrets in their heart. When it chooses to come their way, they dare to ask that which brings color to the cheek when uttered aloud. Do I? Does he? Will I? Will he? Yes, no, yes, no, yes. Lately, Shaurya holds a secret that promises to bring color to the Old Woman’s cheek—a fiery red.

She sets down her basket and squats, in wait for Rani and Lata. In an instant, the wind is at her back as if urging her to keep moving. Like the river. She closes her eyes, lulled by the steady rush of the flowing water. She loves the early mornings that coax her fresh into the day. She loves this freedom of the afternoon on the mountain. Just like she loves the time of darkness that invites her, bone tired, onto her mattress of thatch. Where time and space stand still. At least on most nights. She laughs with abandon, remembering her bed from the previous night, of tilled dirt and gravel, hurriedly covered, softened, by the flimsy spread of her scarf, under the fragrant canopy of rhododendron, away from the watchful eyes of the Old Woman. Her laughter is laced with a young power.

Playfully, she nudges her basket with her shoulder, flipping it over. The wind, eager to engage, carries the basket down the slope. She races after it, catches up, and hoists it on her back again. Her spine shivers. The gravel has left its mark on her back. Sobering, she gazes past the tree stumps, that line the track, to a world farther beyond. A house in the city with two rooms, she would tell if anyone asks. She draws squares and rectangles in the dirt.

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— After that day of the axmen, twenty years ago, the fame of the brave mountain women, who saved the forest, spread fire-like to the nearby villages, to the city, to more cities, then to the entire country and finally the capital. Overnight, the world arrived in their village, clamoring for a photo, a sound, a story. The world called the women heroes. The title confounded them, but they basked in the attention. It brought hope that their hard life was seen and heard and pitied by the bigger world. Better days were coming, they told each other. That jobs, schools, and hospitals would flood the village. That prosperity, milked from their stolen trees, would flow back from the city to the mountain, and the flow would bring their migrant men back to the fields, to the farms, to the forest. It might even dilute the booze.

Twenty years later, the Old Woman still waits. Her pine has turned to plastic. Her ash tree, into tools and toys. The oak, into beds that triple by the minute. She waits, and she waits. Shaurya is tired of waiting. The Old Woman should know better. Can a bed become an oak no matter how long they wait?

— For now, Shaurya wonders if she must gather alone. There is a maneater in the jungle. She fingers the knife, tucked away at her waist in the layers of her sarong. Her name, Shaurya, which means courage, is not her only defense. She walks a few steps down the path Rani and Lata should be taking. It disappears in the colorful mud and stone houses that resemble steps down the mountain. There is no sign of her friends. She walks, her fingers curling around the shoulder straps of her basket. Just that brief delay threatens to mess her day. She begins to arrange and rearrange the chores so she could be done with the collecting,

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the cooking, and the cattle a little early. So she could tuck the Old Woman into her bed a little early. So she could escape to her corner of the hut a little early. Because Badri, back from the city, will return from their field a little early. Lately, she awaits him, with a full heart and with a piece of her mind.

There is a growl at her shoulder, and she reaches for her knife. But the pair of arms that grips her from behind is quicker.

She is in a firm clamp before she registers another voice at her side, shrieking with laughter.

“Rani! Moti, fatso!” Shaurya says. “I would’ve cut you open, you know that, you fool!”

“That’d be another way to get out of this hell,” Lata says.

Lata is the daughter of the headman. Her father calls her a troublemaker, a city-slave; she will not settle with a landed boy in the village. Rani and Shaurya arrived in the village as new brides a year ago. Rani has taken to her husband from the very first day. Even though he haggled and haggled to pay the lowest of prices for her strong pair of hands, a healthy pair with promise to generate more healthy hands. Rani’s father could have demanded more. He would have got more. But Rani’s father wanted less—one less mouth to feed—and fast.

“What were you thinking so deeply about, Shori?” Lata says. “ . . . or should I ask who were you thinking about? I see the city written all over your cheek.” The three girls laugh with an ease that flows from cultivated habit.

Not all life on the mountain is privilege to habit. A part has been blown away for the road that will carry more men to the plains. That will trap more women on the mountain to tend the animals and the fields and the children. A road that will watch, hard-faced, as the old disappear into plumes of smoke.

The mountain will hurt more. So will the trees. And the river

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will rise. The road, it will be only temporary—a fleeting indulgence of the mountain that will claim it back when it tires of this silly game, in a monsoon or two. So much more paid, for so much less.

“The axmen returned,” the Old Woman laments when her pain is real. “The axmen returned and all that hugged the trees were dead stories.” The Old Woman, she pines now for her banj and deodar that stood so close it was hard to tell day from night. What remains is a flattened metal sign that says ‘D G Construcshin’, incapable of casting a respectable shadow, let alone a majestic shade.

The new tar road feels foreign under Shaurya’s feet. The work has stalled in the monsoon, and loose rocks and gravel along the side of the mountain plague their climb. She looks upward to gauge the distance they have to cover. Gray clouds are gathering. The rays of the sun struggle to dent the sky. The rain has been relentless this fortnight. The river along the valley floor is up to its bank . . . Badri had compared the beating of his heart to the sound of the river as he had gathered her close the night before. And not unlike the fallen trees, she had felt herself being carried away. In the morning, when she thought about more mouths to feed, for there surely would be that time, she found herself sinking to its depth. Lately, she has started to fear the river.

At the sound of wheels around the corner, the three women halt. They hide in the bushes. Posing for pictures for the merriment of passing tourists is not appealing anymore. There is pity disguised in their wonder. Pity like stale glory does little in this remote mountain. They wait for the car to pass. But it slows down. Three youngsters not much older than Shaurya get out. The two girls are dressed in tight pants and t-shirts. One

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steps away from the car, runs her hand over a tree stump, and gazes over the sprawling landscape of the Himalayas. Shaurya can see the ink on her bare arm. A trunk, branches, and leaves.

The girl climbs on the stump. She balances on one leg, the other bent and anchored to the side of her thigh. Vrikshasana. Tree pose. She tips, unsteady, side to side. The other girl joins in, each balancing precariously, while the boy snaps pictures on his camera. The boy then stands still. Tadasana. Mountain pose.

But his head turns from side to side following the girls as they chase each other around the stumps. Shaurya is mesmerized by the clothes, the car, the confidence, even though their tree tips and his mountain wavers. She imagines herself and Lata in the car. No posing, no giving, just living. The two girls walk behind some bushes while the boy, king of the world, takes a piss right where he stands. Shaurya looks away in disgust. Why does it bother her so when outsiders relieve themselves on the mountain? The villagers do no different. Perhaps the outsiders stand different; perhaps they sit different.

When they hear the car doors shut and the wheels turning once again, the women step out from their hiding place. They have lost precious time. They hurry across the road, but not before Shaurya retrieves a small card coated in dust. It has the numbers 3287 2388 1345 6598. Lata suspects it is the card that lets city people buy things with the money they don’t have. To spend the money you don’t have! Shaurya pockets the card in her sarong. If Lata is right, then some day she could piss standing too.

It is two hours since they left home, and the wind has changed its mind. It picks up when the women reach the part of the forest where firewood is still abundant. They separate in three directions, always staying within sight and sound. Each fills her

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own basket before starting to collect for the others. As Shaurya reaches over a shrub to gather a fallen bough, she sees a familiar little thing strolling along the leaf. A bright red bead, dotted black—ladybird. It flutters its wings ever so slightly as if to fly.

Then settles down and resumes its walk, only to flutter again.

“I too am restless, ladybird,” Shaurya broods. When the ladybird finally opens its wings and takes off to the neighboring tree, it carries with it, her thoughts. To the day when a boy had sneaked away from his books, so he could walk her home.

He had led her down the path that meanders through the kafal grove, where it touches the river. They sat with their feet trailing in the cool clear water watching a little ladybird stroll out of the green, right onto her bare calf. The boy looked at her with mischievous eyes before fixing them on the ladybird. She joined in his game.

Silently, she asked the universe. “Is he the one?”

Together, they whisper-chanted, “yes, no, yes, no, yes . . .”

The ladybird spread its wings, taking off after a definite yes. The boy seemed pleased with the answer to his question too.

So, it had cut Shaurya a little deeper when, two weeks later, the boy had packed his life and moved with some hotshot uncle to start a big life in the city. What wish had the ladybird granted the boy? She couldn’t tell. And ladybird wouldn’t tell.

And neither would the Old Woman who showed up, a few weeks later, with the older, slower brother, Badri. She named the bride-price for Shaurya, a generous proposal that her father promptly accepted. Badri led Shaurya to another part of the river—the one that flows, that goes around, that perseveres.

Lately, she thinks how the persevering river ends up in the city.

—

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A gust of wind blows Shaurya’s scarf off her head. She gathers it close and calls out to her friends. In the distance, past the valley and along the visible peaks of the opposite range, the color of the sky has changed to that of charcoal.

“Look,” Rani urges, pointing to Pandu peak. It is hidden behind a wall of dense dark clouds that extends from the sky to the earth. As though the heavens have burst open, as if the gods are channeling water down a dancing funnel. A thick gray mist disperses along the sides of the wall, like liquid smoke from a monsoon fire. Shaurya wonders if it is the wrath of the gods or their benevolence. If it had been any closer, she would’ve been afraid, and the knife at her waist would’ve offered her no defense. They have all heard the Old Woman curse the axmen who undid the soil that will one day bury them alive.

Shaurya tucks the sight away in her memory. She must talk to Badri that very night. It’s only the city, only for a season, only to find your brother, we must leave . . . she might say. Older, slower, he will submit. Bit by bit. Like stone to water. It always does. It always must. Only then can the river flow to the city.

“Let’s head down right away,” Rani says. “The clouds are gathering darker.”

Descending, they arrive where grass grows in tapering rows as though it is the last gift of departing spirits. The bales are growing pitiful with each passing year. They will be even smaller today. The girls work through the thorny brush cutting what they must with restrained urgency. They will have a longer day of gathering after the storm has passed.

Their basket of firewood on their back again, they help each other hoist the bales on the head. Even from three hundred meters high, the monsoon-laced river looks forceful. One might even call it possessed. The men on the fields, way down below,

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will keep an eye on it as they plough. The men on the fields will not worry about those corners today that the plough cannot reach, and that the women must later dig with spades. The men on the fields will rest the plough early and return to their huts up the mountain slope. From the hilltop, the men will watch the river spill water into the fields below. They will rest their legs and nourish on the warmth of the hearth. Their cattle will be fed, their food will be cooked, their sons will be tended, and the cloth will be woven for them to take away to the market that lies on the plains. Some will return. Lately, Shaurya wonders about the men that stay away.

“If only I was in the city,” Lata says, as she always does.

“Especially on a day like this.”

“Any day, really,” Shaurya says, drawing a look of surprise from her friends.

“Your Old Woman loves the forest,” says Lata. “She’ll beat you up just for saying that.”

“Maybe she won’t,” says Shaurya.

“If the Old Woman doesn’t, then Badri surely will. He could never leave the mountain. He loves it, you know,” says Rani.

“Maybe he loves me more,” says Shaurya. Lately, this is what she believes.

— For now, the Old Woman will feed the cattle in the barn that Shaurya has cleaned. She will knead the flour that Shaurya has milled from the grain. She will soak the taro to coax the soil from the skin, so that Shaurya can temper and cook later that night.

And if the pain in her bones subsides, the Old Woman will wash the pots of water too, for Shaurya to take to the common tap before dusk, rain or no rain. They will weave together the rest

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of their day what the men will take to the city and sell. Lately, Shaurya thinks of the women who might follow.

— Back in the village again, they catch the sounds of children squealing in the first sprinkles. Although these are no sprinkles.

They are giant glass marbles that warp the scene. The river at the bottom of the valley is ominously magnified. It swells upward. The mountain inches downward, impatient to meet the river. Where there were fields, there is only water. Where there were pathways, there is only mud. Where there were men, there are none. Shaurya feels a numbing silence beneath the roar of the river and the sliding of the earth and the crashing of the rain and the screaming of the women. Always the women.

Shrieks overtake her from behind and disappear into the houses of mud and stone. A horror sprouts at the bottom of her heart.

Will he? Won’t he? Is he? She feels the flutter like ladybird wings . . . yes, no, yes, no, yes, no . . . She runs to her hut.

Wrinkled, the Old Woman stands outside, witness to her soil bearing down and her water raging up. Her bones, tired of the axmen, wonder which will reach her first. If not today, then soon. And while she waits, she will feed the cattle, she will knead the flour, and perhaps she will clean the pots. She would have watched over the children too.

Shaurya, for that is her name, stands guard over the Old Woman. She hugs her until what the axmen have started temporarily subsides. Then she turns to that part of the river— the one that rises, that floods, that rushes into the city. With or without the men, that is where she too must go. For the axmen will return.

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NONFICTION

Basting, Bone Meal, and Books

By Rachel Greenley

In May 2021, liberated by our vaccines, my mother and I flew from Seattle to Phoenix to visit my 93-year-old grandmother.

My grandmother lives in both a memory-care home and an alternate realm of reality. Pandemic isolation heightened the latter. She’d retreated inward as the elderly do when they lose their hearing and lack stimulation. My mother was on a mission to pull her back into some form of the present.

When my grandmother saw my mother, her face shifted from dazed to delighted. Shrunken in a wheelchair, she raised her thin arms, cradled my mother’s face in her bony hands, and said hoarsely, “Cynthia Jo,” before kissing her on the lips. I watched the hollows of her cheeks deepen with the pucker. The love between mother and daughter at that moment felt threaded beyond belonging and biology, extending through them and into the surrounding air as if emotion took a physical form.

My grandmother had been a legal secretary for Evan Inslee, the father of the current governor of Washington State. She’d balanced work and home and her four children with long to-do lists, and a penchant for quilting. Quilting requires a protractor, an inherent understanding of dimension, and the art of tessellation—it was an apt hobby for my left-brained

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grandmother. Had it been a different time, she might have been the lawyer, not the secretary. With her grandchildren, she was stoic with a slight smile that felt like it could tumble out into exuberance if she would just let go. Between our infrequent visits during my childhood, and her reserve, I always felt distance, yet I knew my stoic strength came from her, and the matriarchs before her. She sent us offerings from afar—tightly crocheted dishtowels stacked and wrapped in ribbon, and keepsake quilts.

Now, since my grandmother could no longer hear, my mother had purchased a dry-erase board and we used this to scribble out our conversations, my grandmother tracking our words with her eyes. At first, she would nod or murmur back a halting response, as if trying out her voice for the first time. At one point, she motioned for me to stand back. I did so, confused until I realized she wanted to appraise my outfit.

I stood awkwardly with my arms in a “ta-da!” position while she scanned me. She whispered, “nice suit” admiringly—even though I wore black jeans and a cardigan—and motioned for me to sit back down.

My mother had also supplied my grandmother with pads of lined brightly colored post-it notes. I found this both humorous and foreboding as we were three generations of women habituated to to-do lists, and someday maybe I would also jot down lists out of habit versus necessity. There were also quilting squares neatly folded in a basket—calicos and cartoons and flower buds—and my grandmother plucked at them with her trembling fingers, studying the squares with confusion, as if she felt a familiarity with the fabric but no longer understood its purpose.

I have a quilt my grandmother made for me almost three decades prior. It is intricately designed with hundreds of tiny

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triangles in various shades of blue blended into what is called a snail trail pattern. To me, it looks less snail, more starfish, as four arms spiral gently, touching, almost tickling, the arms of the next starfish, replicated over and over, and held within a blue border flecked with the outline of thin tree branches. She’d presented the quilt to me on my wedding day.

The man I married that day, Jim, would die less than four years later.

As our visit with my grandmother ended, I could see her start to shut down. Being mentally active was taxing. It had taken us being there to draw her out. I knew she simply sat, like a shell, in our absence. She was alive, but she was also in an in-between space of the end of life and the beginning of death.

After our visit, as we drove to our Airbnb, I joked with my mother—a passionate gardener—that in her old age, I’d bring her a flower pot full of dirt and a packet of seeds, and she could sit with the pot in her lap digging in the dirt, planting, unearthing, planting, unearthing, over and over again. Her equivalent to quilting squares. In truth, I wished that when I grew old, she would still be around to nurture me. Perhaps she would give me a book that I had once declared my favorite, like Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge—a book about matriarchy and cancer and environmental threats—and though I could no longer read or understand, I’d recognize it as something integral to who I once was. I’d run my finger along each line of the same page over and over, mouthing words to myself that lived not on the page but deep within the memory of the women before me: Basting, Bone Meal, Batting, Biannual, Bolt.

The next day, my mother and I awoke early to visit the Desert Botanical Gardens to marvel at plants foreign to our Pacific Northwest sensibilities. We are used to towering cedars

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and pines and spruce and firs. We are used to a depth of green and shadow and waving ferns and coats of moss and rich chocolate soil. Where here, all was light—both in hue and weight—filtered, sandy, floating. We were struck by the golden barrel cactus. Its tilted symmetrical orb like the glassblown art of Chihuly. We were struck by the red-tipped ocotillo.

The organ pipe. The crawling octopus. The ghost cactus, with long silvery-white stems and eerily pink stubs reaching like malformed hands.

By 8 a.m., the heat was already stifling. I’d read an article

by Dr. Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, about how trees do not compete for resources, as was long thought, but share them. The premise of what was smartly named the Wood Wide Web is that trees and surrounding underbrush are connected through mycorrhiza (my core rise ah), threadlike fungi, that braid and weld to the tree roots and act as a conduit for trees to exchange Carbon, water, and nutrients between them. I wondered if cacti had also been found to share resources. It hadn’t rained in Arizona for three months.

Soon wildfires would start in the north of the state. Who could blame a cactus if it held onto every drop of nourishment it had?

Our three days in Arizona had been the first trip my mother and I had had together in years due to both circumstances and COVID. Though we talked on the phone weekly, this in-person time felt like a luxury and I’d been peppering her with questions about our extended family, trying to better understand the stories hidden within our roots. On our last morning, my mom—tendrils of her dark gray hair escaping her loose bun—said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you.” She hesitated.

“I wondered if . . . if Jim had lived . . . do you think you’d still be married to him?”

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— This was Jim. He chanted “ . . . bed, bed, bed . . . .” When he crawled under our blue comforter each night. He left love notes under pillows, on nightstands, in my work bag—his writing scribbled at a downward slant. He spooned me as we watched TV at night, our bodies a perfect fit. He once saw a ragged man on the sidewalk leaning on a cane struggling to catch his breath. Jim pulled over and gave the man a lift and $20 to ease his day. He delivered dry irreverent jokes under his breath. Laughter lived within my life in a way it never had before. And never would again. His eyelashes were dark and long and his eyes dusky green, and he often cast his lids down and ducked his head when he spoke. I loved to travel and he would begrudgingly join me saying, “Why would I want to leave home? All my stuff is there.”

In our early thirties, I checked into one hospital to give birth to our twins while he checked into another hospital thirteen miles away for a stem cell transplant. I was sure he’d be fine. I could only envision happy endings. But he died when the twins were five months old. I know now that thinking I could wish away his cancer is akin to saying I could make it rain in Arizona.

That I could end a drought. Or stop a wildfire. Or make my mother live forever.

Jim was indifferent to the mountains—which is where, as I’ve aged, I’ve felt most at peace, and where I now spent part of my year with my second husband, Kyle.

Kyle is a woodworker and he built a small cabin at the base of the Eagle Cap Mountains in Northeast Oregon. There we’d constructed an easy life, where I hiked and he created. When I returned, he appreciated how I’d stopped to take photos of wildflowers I knew he would enjoy, while I admired the new

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towel rack he’d made from the branch of a lodgepole pine foraged at the river’s edge, and even more so the stubble that he never let grow in the city now freed in the mountains giving him a rugged appearance that elevated my desire for him in some archaic Tarzan and Jane kind of way.

Back in the Phoenix Airbnb, our roller bags standing by the door, my mother’s question hanging in the air, I hesitated.

Any answer required the comparison of my late husband to my current, which felt like a betrayal of both. Any answer was complicated. I’d mourned Jim far into my marriage to Kyle. I’d felt simultaneously a wife and a widow. I also now understood that the Jim who died at thirty-five would be different from the Jim who lived to fifty. Now I was being indirectly asked, who would I choose, even though a competition could never take place. I knew my interpretation of the question was not my mother’s intent. She loved and appreciated Kyle just as she had Jim. In her mind, if Jim had not died, Kyle would not be in the picture, so to her, the question did not beg a comparison between the men, but a comparison of who I was at thirty-three to who I was today. So, I told my beloved mother my answer.

And we flew home to Seattle.

— I always spend my birthday hiking. I contemplate the year that’s passed and the year ahead. This year, as I walked through the forest, I kept thinking back to Dr. Simard’s learnings about trees and as I placed each foot on the spongy earth, I thought about the roots and fungal threads below the surface channeling life right under me. In a Ted Talk to half-interested teens, Simard had dramatically stomped her foot on the ground, stating, “Under a single footstep, there are 300 miles of fungal cells

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stacked end on end . . . .” In the woods, I stood still for a moment.

I wanted to see what I could feel under my own feet. But all I felt was the certainty of the firm ground. I tried to imagine the miles of fungi and roots below me. The layers of earth. The sphere on which I stood. The gravity holding me to it. Around me, neon moss hung off towering ponderosa pines, serviceberry bushes invaded all around me, rays of sun cut through shadow.

My grasping for depth only left me feeling it out of my reach.

The nature around me seemed to move on a conveyor belt. A centipede slid across a log. The river flowed at a uniform pace.

The light from the river bounced gently on the cream trunk of a birch. I took a photo of a tall thick stump—two small trees grew from the side of its base, their roots wrapped around and into the stump as if an umbilical cord between mother and child.

I’m rolling these ideas around in my head. That the forest is communicating under my feet. That my grandmother will soon die. That my beloved mother will then die too. That I had an unspeakable loss, and then a second great love, and these two men are woven into me as much as the mothers in my family.

That it’s hard to imagine the tilt of the earth when standing tall, hands on a ponderosa pine. That I am opening up. That I am surviving change. That I’ve come to know it is not an either-or.

That, like trees and fungi, we are not in competition with one another but interdependent. That my life did not unfold as I’d planned yet it is still stitched together beautifully.

— In Simard’s book, Finding the Mother Tree, she takes the web of interdependence concept further, citing research that led her to discover that the “. . . biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings . . . they connect

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to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes . . . these old trees are mothering their children.” In Simard’s analysis of DNA in root tips and following the molecules through the fungal threads, she saw that it was the oldest, largest trees—thusly named the mother tree—tending to the younger, smaller trees. She found that a seedling who was not connected to the network was more likely to die. And that if a tree was indeed dying, it sends its carbon to other trees. Particularly its kin. As if an inheritance.

My sense of myself deepens when I think of myself not as an individual, but as the embodiment of the women who came before me—no-nonsense homesteaders in sod houses in Nebraska and Iowa, and before that Sweden. My great-greatgrandmother, Cecile Smith, was also a widow. Her husband fell off a ladder and left her with not my two children, but ten. She cleaned a parish rectory to support them, and charmed friends for war rations. When I envision her and my grandmother’s stoic faces but sparkling cornflower eyes, and my own mother, all compassion and kindness, I feel the roots climb up through the soles of my feet spreading like mycorrhiza through my shins, quads, thighs, lungs, lips.

I tell Kyle, “We need to find the mother trees on our land.

We need to make sure they are never cut down.”

— When my twins were in grade school, my grandmother sent them a book about the Saguaro cactus, The Seed and the Giant Saguaro. The book was lushly illustrated and followed the seed of the giant cactus as it fell to the ground in a pod, then was picked up by a rat, a rattlesnake, a roadrunner, and so on until the seed was left to grow into its own giant Saguaro, its “mother”

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Saguaro slowly dying after its 125-year reign, its skin scarred, decaying, drying and shriveling, turning to half-carcass, halfdust. My tow-headed son, compact in striped shorty pajamas, black-framed glasses perched on his button nose, curled a perfect fit within my lap as I read the book to him, over and over. I would read Saguaro as SaGAURo, and he’d correct me in a squeaky voice, “SaWAURo.” In the Sonoran Desert, young saguaros can be seen near nurse trees, like ironwoods and mesquites, which provide shade and water while the young saguaro acclimatizes to the desert heat. In time, the nurse tree will die, giving up the overstory light to the growing saguaros and decaying and gifting organic nutrients.

Mothering is happening across landscapes, across species.

— Before we left Phoenix, my mother gave me one of my grandmother’s post-it-note lists. The paper was neon-yellow and folded into thirds. I opened it and peered closely at the faint checklist my grandmother had made with her weak hand.

Barbara Smith Barbara Smith Barbara Smith Barbara Smith Barbara Smith It was her name written in cursive over and over.

Was she trying to hold onto a sense of herself ? Or was she checking herself off a list, as if she were declaring her own life complete?

Later, back home, my mother texted me a picture of a small ornate frame with two oval photos found in my grandmother’s

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drawer. Both photos are of a young girl with blond curls and a striped t-shirt—they could be the same child, but they are not. One is my mother and one is me. In my home, there is a similar dual frame—although not as ornate—with myself and my daughter at the same age, with the same blond curls. My grandmother, my mother, my daughter. My late husband, my current husband, my son. All of our family. There are those who are gone, those who are going, and those who will stay longer.

Memories feed us. They bequeath wisdom like the nutrition and inheritance passed from tree to tree. Simard’s studies have shown that the diversity of a forest strengthens its resilience to withstand unexpected events—such as a wildfire, or insect, or a windstorm. I am stronger for having survived loss. I am stronger for having loved two men.

— Kyle adopted the twins when they were six years old. We celebrated with our extended family who flew into Seattle from all over the country. Kyle stood in front of our family and told a story. The twins had shy smiles and occasionally ducked their heads, cast their eyes down, and hunched their shoulders, as they flickered between pride and embarrassment. My daughter reached up and gave a gentle tug on Kyle’s blue button-up shirt. My son shifted his weight from leg to leg. There was so much love in the room—off-shoots of family, threaded through multiple generations, some related through biology, some related through connection, all equally part of what makes us who we are. Lives do not always follow the path we plan. Yet, like my grandmother’s quilts, we can blend disparate pieces to wrap ourselves in warmth and belonging.

My mother pulled my daughter onto her lap. Kyle stood

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there, holding a small stone in each hand. He’d kept these rocks for years, since the day I allowed him to meet my then toddlers, on a warm August afternoon at Seattle’s Shilshole Beach. On the beach that day, each child lifted a small stone and stretched out pudgy arms to give him these gifts.

“I think of Jim every day,” Kyle’s voice cracked, “because I now have the life he was meant to.”

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FICTION

Wavelength (NOVEL EXCERPT)

By Oona Kelly

When I saw the signs for LAX, not long after I began driving, I was tempted to abandon the catering van and all of its contents to warm and rot in long-term parking and get on a flight.

I could go anywhere, or at least anywhere that didn’t require a passport.

I’ve had this fantasy ever since I was young. Looking up at the board of outbound flights and selecting whichever city called my inmost desire, whispering the come hither of a place steeped in colors, sounds, tastes and smells different from here, wherever here was; into those sensations I could fall and lose myself, weightless because I had nothing to tie me to the ground of the city in which that particular airport stood. Anywhere you were could be a launching pad to somewhere else. That was the promise of airports.

Days before, my husband had agreed to drive the catering van, but I hadn’t heard from him since the day before, when he disappeared without warning. The last time we had spoken, things had seemed alright between us. Not good. Pretty fucking far from good. But that was to be expected, since he had voiced a demand I could not give into, an ultimatum that he refused to call an ultimatum. Given what kind of an effort I had been

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putting into our marriage, an effort which would have been graded on a negative scale, I should have been happy, in some way, because now I had an excuse to walk away. A reason that fit into a logical proof: If Julian and Em must hold a shared vision of their future together in order to stay married, & Julian wants children, & Em wants to remain childless, Then, Julian and Em cannot remain married.

I wasn’t happy though, and not just because it was worrisome that Julian had disappeared the night before and, since then, had not answered his phone to the multitude of calls I had made. I was starting to panic. Actually, panic had become an intermittent state, taking up residence in my body within the last 36 hours, even before I realized that Julian was not, as I had thought, waiting for me at my mother’s place. It was a fucking miracle a migraine hadn’t started.

After I had passed the LAX exit, I still contemplated eating fresh poke in Hawaii, or walking the streets of New York and passing through clouds of perfume and cigarette smoke as the city hummed in an orchestra of mechanized and human sounds. Even flying home to Seattle had its appeal. In Seattle, I could pluck my passport from its drawer and turn around for the airport, indulge in the real fantasy: Copenhagen, Bangkok, Istanbul, Sydney.

I knew that the romance of the outbound destinations was a mirage. Wherever you go, there you are and all that shit. Whoever said those words must have met with a lot of annoyance for the impertinence of having been so wise.

When I was younger, I tried to outrun what was deep inside me, the very experiences which had formed me. Once I left

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for college, I spoke to my mother as little as possible, but every Thanksgiving, I came back to her house like flocks of Canadian geese flying south with their encoded migratory patterns.

It was like a fiery ritual. It burnt me up. At some point over the course of the three days we were together, Nora and I found a way to get into a fight. Afterward, a glacial silence and my drive home, during which I cried until I felt expunged. By the time I returned to my dorm or apartment, I was tired from the road. There was residual rawness, but I inhabited myself, whatever a self was. Some kind of continuity which enabled us to believe in a stable sense of being, in an entity we were entitled to call “I”? So there was I. Red-faced and cried out on the floor of my rented bedroom with no real sense of home. Home was a feeling that gathered mostly because of the people or even pets who populated it, the ones we loved whose presence was like a subtle hug holding us together. I didn’t have one—a home— until Julian.

And now, maybe Julian was going to leave me because I didn’t want children, and also, oh yeah, I had been cheating on him with a twenty-seven-year-old. What a way to show up to my sister’s engagement party. I couldn’t wait to orchestrate the catering while fending off questions about where my husband was and simultaneously pretending I had not a single doubt about the viability of marriage. Then again, like a polite atheist within the sanctity of a church, I had always had to pretend that particular faith at any wedding-adjacent gathering, including my own.

I had to put it out of mind, along with all the other shit in the world, which was hard to do given the existence of the 24hour news cycle and the Internet and the ample evidence that genocide was a standard human function if you just brought

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the right circumstances together in the same room. Why did we all hate each other so much? I would start to wonder, before remembering how violence was passed down in a little thing called intergenerational trauma. The inevitable infliction of sorrow upon the next generation, because sorrow was what the world had to offer, and because it was what our grandparents gave our parents, so how could they possibly have avoided participating in the transaction?

I had already made my solution clear, whether Julian liked it or not. It ended here.

— On a Sunday afternoon seven weeks earlier, over Fourth of July weekend, I was checking my email with compulsive dedication, hoping to hear from an agent who seemed interested in turning my blog into a cookbook. When I first spoke with Rose in the fall, she had told me that she liked the professional appearance of my website and Instagram but that I needed more followers before she could seriously consider a Melon in the Kitchen cookbook. She gave me a number. Days before, I had hit that number.

When I saw the follower count I had been working towards etched in light on my phone screen, I had that feeling of nauseous anticipation that came in big moments when it was clear that life was about to change. Rationally, things were about to get better, but physically it felt like the jangling together of too many parts crowded into a small space. I had worked for months on this one goal, and on realizing it, the supposed progress it represented was flimsy. I still didn’t have a cookbook deal, let alone a response from Rose.

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, which boded poorly for firework visibility the next day, and I was leaning my hip against

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the kitchen island when I opened my mother’s email on my phone. The email contained a single succinct paragraph. My mother had realized how many vegans numbered among my sister’s friends, so she wanted to know, since “food sensitivities” were one of my specialties: would I co-cater Lydia’s engagement party with her?

To anyone who didn’t know Nora Cross, it may have sounded like obvious madness for the mother of the bride to cater a 124-person event, especially understanding that this was not a matter of sandwiches and celery sticks. She meant to make everything from scratch. However, my mother was a former chef—and, a lesser known fact, a former caterer—and for those who didn’t have one of her cookbooks on their shelves, it would have been hard to avoid seeing them on display in a bookstore or in someone else’s kitchen.

My husband Julian sat atop a barstool, typing on his laptop, and Noah, who had come over to shoot video for the blog, still wore his backpack and fiddled with the straps in his hands. I could feel him waiting for my instructions, but the email had so derailed my focus that instead I just stood there and took a large sip from my water glass. Yes, Noah was the twenty-seven-yearold I was sleeping with behind Julian’s back. And yes, it was a bit awkward when they were in the same room.

Melon—exuberant chihuahua mix and the blog’s namesake—trotted over and sniffed Noah’s feet. Noah set down his bag and gave Melon a few chin scratches before pulling out his tripod. Julian was watching their interaction.

A funny thing. Melon didn’t really like Julian all that much.

We adopted her together, but while she warmed up to him, her preference for me was unignorable. When we first brought her home, we figured she didn’t like men. But as it turned out, she

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liked plenty of men. Noah especially. And so the explanation we landed on was that she didn’t like blondes, because she rolled her dark eyes and barked relentlessly whenever any of Julian’s family members were in her vicinity.

Noah was preparing to head to Yellowstone for two weeks, which meant we needed him to shoot and edit two recipe videos ahead of schedule. While Yellowstone conjured an aerial view of Grand Prismatic Spring, notable because of the high contrast of the yellow and orange rimming the turquoise pool, what I thought of was the promise of the supervolcano that lay beneath, churning up all that heat released in its steam. I went to Yellowstone once with Julian and when we visited there was so much steam covering the spring that you could barely see the traces of its vivid colors. Even then, it was probably a shared delusion. We wanted to see it so badly that it appeared before us.

Julian asked if Noah was excited for his trip and he said Yep, he was hoping to get a shot of a grizzly. I gave him a look and asked if there weren’t rules about how close you could get to them, which he confirmed that there were and those rules were very strict.

Julian scratched his beard. “Just don’t get caught.”

“In more ways than one,” I said.

Noah and I had already exhausted the bear topic in previous conversations, at least as far as Noah was concerned. I didn’t want to “mom” him, which felt like a tripwire given our age difference, but I also wanted to do everything I could to keep him from getting mauled. In the months we’d spent together, I had come to care about Noah more than a safe amount. I was not a gifted compartmentalizer of my emotions.

On the other hand, I had discovered in myself an unexpected

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talent for deception. It had occurred to me early on that Noah and I could message via Instagram because I had already set notifications to miss my phone. His messages appeared on my watch in text so small and fleeting that I often missed the content, but I felt the buzz against my arm and knew to check my phone.

The subterfuge of the affair was made worse by an added betrayal. I had installed a location tracking app on Julian’s phone without his knowledge. It had a devious name that almost stopped me from going through with the download, but it also blasted me with notifications whenever he was nearing home. Not that I was inclined to sleep with Noah in the marital bed, but it had happened once or twice in the beginning and the app had seemed necessary in the face of such recklessness.

Many a couple might have installed such apps with one another’s permission because, after all, it was a safety precaution, but in our case, Julian never would have agreed.

Julian was against any extraneous apps that tracked him—his physical person, his internet searches and purchases—because he mistrusted the government and the hackers and basically anyone he didn’t know on an intimate basis. I did not share in Julian’s mistrust, but I rarely questioned him on it. I figured that he was as entitled to his neuroses as I was to mine, because that was how I saw his security obsession. On his insistence, we lived in a building equipped with a doorman, a security code, and an army of cameras ready to capture the image of any crime-doers. It seemed like a cruel assumption: ill-will was lurking nearby, slithering closer, inevitable. I felt watched when I entered the building, and I hated the irony of it. Julian wanted the world under scrutiny, but he wanted to remain invisible.

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— All the scary anticipatory chemicals that had been floating around in my body awaiting the agent’s email with a whiff of book deal had been transformed into a compulsion to spill my frustration at Nora’s request. What had she meant by asking my help to cater Lydia’s party?

I could not imagine that this had been Lydia’s idea. My sister was six years younger than me and the daughter of Nora’s second husband. I had come from the first ill-fated union, and although I rarely used the half-sister moniker to describe Lydia, we were not close.

Since it wasn’t for Lydia, it was Nora who wanted my help, then. But that didn’t make sense either. Nora was a control freak and it seemed unlikely that she would ever want to share equal responsibility for the goings-on in a kitchen. Any kitchen Nora was in belonged to her exclusively, and she would defend this possession with the ferocity of a toddler defending their sole entitlement to a toy. What Nora meant by help was subordination, and given that I, too, was a control freak, and that Nora understood this, her request didn’t make sense. All of this I relayed to Julian and Noah.

Julian asked to see the email. He pointed out that there was no mention of the word “help.” She had actually used the phrase “co-cater,” which Noah thought was intriguing and he suggested that I ask what Nora envisioned. He saw Nora’s request as an invigorating professional challenge. Of course I should weigh it seriously, but there was little doubt as to the outcome. I would accept.

Julian had been around longer, and while not the most savvy in family politics—an attribute I often found myself grateful for—he had learned to question Nora’s motives. He

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said that I’d never catered an event before and it was a different skill set from developing recipes and running a blog. I met his disinclination with obstinacy. I conceded that he was right, but my mother had plenty of experience catering. He pointed out that I typically became annoyed when she tried to teach me things in the kitchen. I agreed. “And remember the last time you cooked for her,” he said.

Noah looked over from where he stood fixing his camera to the tripod. “What happened the last time?”

“That’s a long story,” I said.

Julian stood and stretched and took Melon out to the dog park.

— A phrase had been dropping in and out of my mind at the time: fuck around and find out. I didn’t have the context for it, so I asked Noah. Since he was still in his twenties, he was more conscious of internet culture. It meant that if you fucked around, you would find out, he said. In particular, the consequences.

The meme originated in 2019 with a reimagining of the Gadsden flag, replacing “Don’t Tread on Me” as the text below the original snake, which then morphed into an alligator.

Maybe it was because of something to do with Florida? Noah wasn’t sure. Anyway, Bernie bros had circulated the image as a warning to the democratic party. “Fucking around” meant nominating a centrist candidate and “finding out” implied the threat of Donald Trump’s reelection.

The way Noah explained it to me, “fuck around and find out” fell into a category of antagonistic and hostile humor that I usually tried to ignore. I was disappointed. That wasn’t what I had imagined. For some reason, I had pictured it as a banner

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for a “fuck it” philosophy. Fuck around and discover what will happen!

An upcycled version of the old and cliché sentiment that you didn’t know until you’d tried it. Like YOLO, I said and felt old because Noah was probably in high school when that phrase was popular. You only live once, I said, as though he needed the explanation.

Then I asked if he was scared by the idea of standing on top of a supervolcano and he said he wasn’t. He added that if it blew, we would all be annihilated anyway, so why not get it over with? I told him that that was a myth. The Yellowstone caldera, if it erupted, would spew toxic fumes into the atmosphere sufficient to lower global temperatures for years, but according to scientific models, humanity would survive. It could be read in the layers of ash from volcanic eruptions of a similar scale which had occurred during the epoch of human existence. The species had survived, could survive again.

Seattle, however, as Noah pointed out, would likely be within the range of Yellowstone’s catastrophic destruction.

What I found was that, although Noah was so much younger, in our interactions I was often the one searching for a reason why. He was content with the circumstances he found himself in, whether or not they were desirable.

Noah and I were sitting and facing each other on opposite ends of the couch, our feet touching. So, I explained, I couldn’t say yes to my mother, but I also couldn’t say no. My whole body was alight with the pull toward him. How much time did we have? Was there some errand I could pretend to do that would get me out of the house that evening?

Before anything could happen, my phone blared to warn me of Julian’s impending return, and with one call back to reality came another. I had to find some way of responding to my

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mother. My first course of action was a steady avoidance which lodged itself like a peach pit of anxiety in my gut. That evening, a full force migraine hit, so there was no sneaking out to Noah’s.

It lasted through the next day, so I missed the fireworks and the boisterous glorification of America. Julian went out and Noah came by to keep me company. He didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July anyway, but he was gone before the fireworks started.

Melon whimpered when the pops rang out and ran to hide under the covers with me.

I’d started having migraines almost two years before and they had grown worse in that time. For a while, medication had helped, until it started to worsen the intensity of the pain.

I had an appointment with my doctor to see about changing my prescription, but the appointment was still months out. I sometimes became convinced that I had a horrible neurological condition and would one day drop to the floor never to regain consciousness or, more frighteningly, a huge swath of mental abilities. However, to this day, I have no reason to suspect any such disaster. The migraines were, more than anything, a nuisance, like a wound that needed regular cleaning and rebandaging, except on a much longer timeline.

Sometimes they laid me flat for days and ruined my entire schedule. When I had a migraine, I couldn’t look at a screen. If I tried to push through it, it only made the migraines meaner and longer. Enter Julian.

Julian had become instrumental to the blog. Once my migraines had gotten bad, he took control of the email account. He handled a lot of video meetings and relationships with advertising partners and sponsors. Invoices, accounting, moderating subscriber responses. He took care of all of it. I developed the recipes, took the photos and approved photos

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and sketched out the layout, but often it was Julian who typed my words and configured the design. This dependence had come about naturally, and I was grateful for his help, but I also resented it.

In many ways, it was nice to have a husband who always wanted to help out. Sometimes, though, I was troubled by the imbalance of my need.

At the beginning of our relationship, there was an emotional imbalance. Julian was stable and it was one of the qualities I appreciated about him. He steadied my unruly and capricious desires. What if, instead of a spectacular life, traveling the world and meeting interesting people with varied cultural upbringings, I could be satisfied with a happy life? A home and a dog and Friday nights spent in the company of a small circle of friends? Book clubs and breweries. A healthy balance in my bank account. Perhaps even children.

Eventually, after I’d been in therapy for a while, my emotions stabilized, and I signed on for that life. I signed on the dotted fucking line. I pledged forever commitment to the dream of comfort. My therapist nodded and the soft skin around her eyes creased. Good choice, she seemed to telegraph with silent benevolence when I told her I wanted these things.

Then, everything so calmed and evened out in my life, I stopped seeing the therapist. A year or so later was when the migraines started. I wasn’t sure which intrusion was first between the migraines and the doubt. The doubt was slow and stole into me on quiet feet so that one day, I realized it was there and had been sitting in darkness, waiting for me to notice.

The migraines were indisputable in their presence, announcing themselves with persistent throbs and sharp drills in the temple, and soon they became severe. With that, imbalance re inserted itself into my relationship, now a marriage, with Julian.

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I started to need him physically. And not as a lover. I needed him to update the website for the blog, to format the emails and the posts. I needed him for the mundane necessities of my livelihood. Sometimes I wondered if there was something pathological in the way that my husband loved me, and if men like Julian needed to feel necessary in order to feel love for a woman. But I knew that was uncharitable.

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NONFICTION

Figs

By Edmée Lepercq

A man I thought I loved first drew my attention to the fig tree on Amwell street. The tree is so large, its trunk and branches so thick, that either the owners or the council erected wooden poles to support its heavy limbs. As we cycled through the quiet central London street, the man told me over his shoulder that the tree was planted on the grounds of a school built in 1828.

He said the tree is at least 200 years old, and still produces fruit.

Sorry—I shouldn’t say fruit. That’s incorrect, botanically speaking. Figs are no more a fruit than a tomato is a vegetable or an almond a nut. (Even though the US Supreme Court legally declared the tomato a vegetable in 1893, by unanimous vote.)

The green or purple tear-drop appendage a fig tree produces is called an inflorescence. The Ecological Society of America defines inflorescence as “a cluster of many flowers and seeds contained inside a bulbous stem.” They call them a maze of flowers. Because of this unusual layout, they say figs require a special kind of pollinator. A wasp will weasel its way into the fig through a small opening at its bottom, the ostiole. Once inside, the wasp travels through the chamber of the fig, depositing her eggs within it while shedding the pollen she carries from the fig she was born in. Thus the inflorescence is fertilized. Once the wasp dies, her body and eggs are absorbed by the fig as it

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matures. Each type of wasp only pollinates one kind of fig. It’s an example of coevolution so profound that neither species can survive without the other.

Lest I put you off your appetite, I should note that this pollination process doesn’t normally apply to commercially grown figs— only wild ones. Store-bought figs usually come from sterile trees, which don’t require pollination. (So no dead wasps for them.)

When I research the history of the fig online, I mostly find facts related to the ancient world. In 2006, researchers discovered subfossils of fig seeds and partially burned fruit in Gilgal I, an early Neolithic village located in the Jordan valley 11,000 years ago. These remnants might be the earliest known example of agriculture, as they precede the domestication of cereals such as rye and wheat by almost 1,000 years. In Greek mythology, the goddess of agriculture Demeter told Phytalus the secret of fig cultivation to thank him for his hospitality. Greek athletes trained on a diet of figs, and when they won the Olympics, their first laurels were figs. Local figs were also a main food staple for those enslaved by the Romans and Greeks. And they killed Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. Rumor has it the figs were plucked from his garden and smeared with poison by his wife, Livia. The Romans later named a variety Liviana, but whether this was because of her murderous figs or her knowledge of plants, we do not know.

Nothing about this explains how the Mediterranean tree made it to London’s Amwell Street. So instead of “fig history,” I type “fig tree London history.” A website in the search results with the name figs4funforum catches my eye. I click on the link. It

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takes me to a thread started in 2017 by a user named petrpan.

He writes: Hello guys, I am on a business trip this and next week in London. I am definitely taking cuttings from the fig tree on Amwell street and a fig tree on Euston street with pretty big figs on it already (I’ll try to attach picture below). Any tips for fig trees with interesting figs I could take cuttings from? All suggestions are very welcome.

Thank you.

Lubos ukfigsteve, pvc12, and Dentdiz chip in. ukfigsteve notes that the tree on the grounds of the Church of St George the Martyr on Borough High Street “used to be huge but they keep hacking it back, which only seems to encourage it. Leaves look a bit like Dalmatie?” pvc12 posts a photo of a tree next to Westminster Abbey. He says the garden is called “England’s Oldest Garden” and claims this may be the country’s most famous fig tree. One user shares screenshots of Google maps with tree locations circled in and notes about potentially locked gates.

He recommends taking cuttings in the rain if the tree’s owner might object, as a large umbrella offers excellent concealment for illicit acts of botany. Another sends latitude and longitude coordinates, as though petrpan/Lubos were an explorer at sea.

Their profiles list varieties they are growing, climate zones, and wish lists. They call themselves figgers.

The man I thought I loved wasn’t a figger, but I felt a certain

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way about him because of the Amwell street tree. Without him, I would have cycled by without too much of a passing thought.

“Nice tree,” I might have said to myself, and then gone on my merry way. But with him, I noticed things. The more time I spent with this man, the more I thought of the world as full of delights, if I just cared to look.

Even so, I was surprised by the enthusiasm I found on figs4funforum for London figs. The fig trees of London are beautiful, but their fruit is inedible. I read on Ourfigs.com that the first record of a fig tree found on British soil dates back to the 16th century. Cardinal Reginald Pole planted a specimen in Lambeth Palace, in south London. He likely brought a sapling or cutting back from southern Italy, where he was exiled for a time after the Reformation and Henry the VIII’s break from Rome. Fig trees then spread quickly across England’s estates, imported from France, Spain, and Italy. Aristocrats planted them on the south walls of their gardens, and they were the only ones to appreciate this tree that produced a fruit made tasteless by England’s lack of sun. Working classes derided the tree: something of no value was not worth a fig.

Aren’t the branch thieves on figs4funforum frustrated by the tastelessness of London’s figs? What fun is there in an inedible fig? As my friend Philippe says, “decorative is nice, but decorative and edible is best.” I’m not the only one annoyed by British figs.

The 20th century food writer Jane Grigson found the climate of her country frustratingly tantalizing because of its effect on the fruit, while the Israeli-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi calls British figs the epitome of unattained desire.

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In the end the man I thought I loved wasn’t worth a fig, but I still delight in the Amwell street tree—I notice it every time I cycle by. In the spring its leaves exude a thick green fragrance, and by late summer, fruits start to appear. When I pass the tree heavy with figs unsweetened by the English sun, I pick the leaves to cook fish in them and leave the fruit to the birds.

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FICTION

The Last Bulb on the Christmas Tree (NOVEL EXCERPT)

By Ana Nissan

On August 14th, 2006, the news reports came in that there had been a confession. A man from California in his forties. He said the whole thing was an accident. He said he held her close when she died. He said he loved the little beauty queen. He said he was sorry about it. On the sixteenth, he was arrested in Thailand. He was going to be brought back to the United States, where he would be taken to Colorado.

It’s not like I had a camera or much more than a pocketsized notebook, so there wasn’t much for me to do as we waited outside the courthouse. I was now questioning why I had been so insistent on it anyway. My internship at the closet-sized Jewish news agency, tucked away in a gray, nondescript office building on the border of Hell’s Kitchen and the shrill technicolor of Times Square, was coming to an end. I wanted them to hire me even though I hated it there.

“But what’s the Jewish angle to this story?” my editor asked.

“Does there always need to be a Jewish angle?” I asked back.

“Indubitably. There does,” he replied. “Are they Evangelicals?”

“No,” I replied. “Episcopalians. I’ve been to their church.”

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“It’s not really for us,” he said.

“This is a huge story. Like, globally.”

“I know it,” he said. “But it’s just not a very Jewish story.”

“That’s probably a good thing,” I muttered. “It’s just that, I’d like to go anyway. To see my mom. I figure I could kill two birds with one stone.” I grimaced at the word choice, noticing how severe the word “kill” sounded as I said it, even if it was just metaphorical and it was just birds.

“Well,” the editor leaned back in his chair. Stroked his white beard. “You have vacation days. You have Fridays off. I can’t tell you what to do when you’re on vacation. Go see your mother.”

“Really?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll talk about your future here at JWN when you get back.”

“And tell your mother I say ‘Hi,’” he added, making the rare acknowledgement he was an old family friend. That I’d known him since I was in diapers.

— It’d been almost five years since I’d left Colorado, undoing generations of a westward migration pattern. Back east, back to New York. From the airplane window I watched as we passed over the grainy fields, the surprising flatness laid out below in a patchwork quilt, in the heat of the summer, a season I often forget, after the spring rain turns everything to velvet then it withers and dies under the furious sun. The pavement can reach near boiling points and mirages of puddles of water materialize on the roads. The horizon blurs as if looking through a flame.

I’d heard that winters were starting to come too late. The pinebeetles were infesting and overtaking the trees. Thousands and thousands of green pines would die, eaten alive, turning to rust.

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— The truth is I had no intention of seeing my mother. I didn’t even know if she was still there. No one heard from her anymore. It’s not like she disappeared completely. I still had her phone number. I just chose not to use it.

The first time we came to Colorado we drove because my mother had been too afraid to fly. She didn’t see how it was possible that the mountain peaks wouldn’t scrape the belly of the airplane and cause us to come crashing down. And it’s true, the descent into Denver is almost always turbulent. The air is thin, and the mountains make the airplane shake and spasm.

As I clutched the arm rests and felt my fingernails stab into the vinyl, I guessed I had a bit of my mother’s anxiety still left in me. I almost expected the sky to reject the aircraft altogether.

Like I was trying to reach a place and time that could never really be reached again.

Now that it was all unfolding under me, I could see so much space, empty and flat as a pancake. It was a relief from the east coast, which looked condensed and swarming even from thousands of miles up in the air. It wasn’t just the cities, it was the coastline too and its little islands, so thin and wispy like you would walk them with the ease of walking across a balance beam. In Colorado, I got the feeling you could really stretch out, both arms and legs splayed.

If we survived the landing and I made it out of the airport, I thought I’d have a puddle of dread splashing around in my stomach. The creeping menace that started at the east side baggage claim, where the walls were painted with murals depicting visions of “World Peace” – side by side images of skeletal soldiers painted in greens, some referred to as “creepy Lizard People,” piercing a white dove with a sword as starving, hollow-faced

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children wept. Then in the next mural, a rainbow sweeping across the wall, children of every color, happily clutching bundles of missiles wrapped in colorful flags of various countries.

The murals were still there in their bold use of every color.

The work was such a part of arriving here that I didn’t give it much thought as to why it had been put there of all places.

Just two months earlier, there had been news that a new sculpture being commissioned for the airport, a 32-foot blue mustang with red eyes, had crushed and killed its creator.

Perhaps, Rita Quinn had been right all those years ago.

Something sinister was afoot deep inside the Denver Airport. I made note to mention to her in the imaginary instance that I’d run into her again that “No, the runways aren’t shaped like one giant swastika. I checked.”

The moment I stepped outside the fiberglass-tented building, I realized how much every cell in my body had been craving a breath of the crisp mountain air, thin as it was. I wanted to inhale again and again. Every breath of air felt new and fresh, never inhaled before. In New York City, I was starting to get the feeling that we were all just breathing each other’s air back and forth.

— Like the great continental divide itself, my life had existed in two parts so far, towards the Atlantic or towards the Pacific. I could have gone either way. But when my father went back to New York I decided to go with him. Now that I was coming back, I told myself it wasn’t a homecoming. I was coming with the armor of a journalist. Or at the very least, an observer. Or at the very, very least an onlooker. One of the people on the sidelines trying to get a good look through the crowd, or the car that slows down to sneak a peek at another car; the one that’s

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overturned and up in flames.

Mostly though, I wanted to see that it was all real. That the place was real, the picturesque city sitting below the pointed slippery peaks, and that this all really happened right there, in front of our noses. Because the longer I was away it all began to seem like a fiction I told myself.

— From the parking lot I managed to find the right bus. It was empty aside from me and a Mexican family with two young children. The route took us through Commerce City, the horizon lined with building-sized chimneys turning the sky black. We passed by the dog food factory, and it began to smell like dog food inside the bus. I laughed at how brief my affair with fresh air was. All romantic notions I may have had left about Colorado were shattered. This place isn’t as clean as it looks, I told myself. Nothing is. There is nothing left that hasn’t been touched and polluted.

As you glide into the Boulder Valley though, it gets very hard to tell. Things start to look pristine again. It’s as if it always has a halo around it. As we puttered down Highway 36, the erratic drivers and the thick black exhaust from the semi-trucks faded away. Now we were surrounded by Subarus and SUVs that drove slowly and attentively. To the west, like a lighthouse, were the jagged Flatirons, shining gold under the afternoon sun.

Had anything changed since I left? So far, I couldn’t tell one way or another. Maybe the cars were a little newer. I had heard about our beloved Crossroads Mall being torn down after sitting deserted with just a few stores left, the JCPenny, an arcade, Aladdin’s Castle, and a pizza place, Abo’s. An outdoor mall with a multiplex and an Apple Store were going up in its place.

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I was staying at a friend’s downtown who, after high school, had gone to the local college and still had no plans on ever leaving.

“I’m under the curse of Chief Left Hands,” she said. “I can never live anywhere else.” Her roommate, who she found on Craigslist, was always at her boyfriend’s, so she said I could stay in her room.

The condo was only about six blocks east of the county’s courthouse, where the trial would be held. I’d already seen the reporters on TV lined up and waiting. I dropped my stuff off while she was at work and walked along the creek path that dipped into tunnels under the road, then came out onto Canyon Boulevard, right at the corner of the courthouse.

I knew they’d all be there again, the news trucks and camera crews. This time stationed like soldiers waiting to storm a castle.

No one knew exactly when he was supposed to arrive.

“Has his plane taken off yet?” a reporter asked, waving their microphone towards their crew.

“Hours ago,” someone replied.

“Is he coming from Thailand or California?” Another reporter with an Australian accent asked.

“He was in Thailand first; they flew him back to the states through California. Put him on a private flight to Colorado this morning.”

“Wow, he’s flying private.”

“First class treatment.”

“Until he gets to prison. Then he’s the lowest of the low.

Fucking pedophile.”

They’d already been waiting for days, I knew. Taking shifts.

Sitting in foldable chairs with coolers like a tailgate. There wasn’t a lot of talking, mostly people were checking their

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phones, Nokias or Blackberries, while huddling under light reflectors to hide from the beating sun, then scrambling when the afternoon rain came down.

I tried not to think about how odd it was, all the waiting.

To get a front-row seat for some guy to appear, as if he was a Messiah. People had come from all over the world—China, Germany, Australia; they had gathered up belongings, and packed up thousands of dollars of equipment, embarked on hours of travel, just to catch the brief moment that he would emerge from a darkened vehicle and into the concrete building—maybe he would speak to the camera for a minute or two, or maybe he would just float past like a ghost or a god. The important thing was that it would be televised.

I tried to blend into the crowd so I didn’t look like a gawker.

I pulled out my notebook even though no one else had a notebook. And no one else really stood alone; they all had crews.

I knew I looked like I was reporting for a high school paper or like I thought I was Harriet the Spy or something. There were so many people swarming around the sidewalks it didn’t really matter. Every now and then, a pedestrian would try to squeeze by looking huffed.

Some of them muttered something like, “This again? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Some were more vehement.

“Get out of our town, scum,” they’d hiss. “No one wants you here.”

Then two girls walked by. If they were teenagers, it was just barely. Their arms were linked by the elbows. They stuck out in the crowd as they deliberately walked in front of all the pointing cameras, waving and making kissing faces then running away in a giggling half-run. One pulled out a blue glass pipe from the

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pocket of her dangerously low-slung jeans as they cut across the wall of reporters and down into the underpass beside the creek.

There was something vaguely familiar about it. I started to itch with reminiscence.

Before I knew it, my feet were moving, and I was following in their direction to see where they had gone. I carefully treaded down a foot trail carved into a grassy slope, a shortcut back to the creek path. I assumed they’d be sitting on the boulders or under the hundreds-year-old trees perched on the creek’s edge.

In the summer, if there wasn’t a drought, the waters were high and came roaring down like a freight train. A kayaker whisked by in the current. Then a group of college kids plopped on top of black rubber inner tubes dressed in cut-off jeans and Tevas were drinking Coors Lite, whooping, laughing as they came floating down the water, bumped, and jostled by the rocks and the waves. I tallied in my head how many news reports came out in the last ten years about deaths in this very creek doing the same thing. Yet, they still did it year after year.

A herd of long-legged runners in very short shorts jogged past, spread out into the sidewalk and bike lane in a V like a geese migration. I braced myself as they stumbled past me. I nearly expected to see my mother among them. Then I realized they were far too young, even younger than me. Probably the high school track team. They were all thin in a way that was natural, youthful. Not like the bodies of the Divine Madness runners—worn down, skin stretched taut over bone, holes in their dirty white worn sneakers. I had heard that most of them quite literally ended up having to run away.

I turned right towards the tunnels thinking that’s where my friends and I probably would have gone to smoke back then.

They were empty save for some graffiti and a homeless person’s

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old blanket. The girls had disappeared.

I kept going anyway. I walked up and down the path aimlessly, at least it was cool and shaded. Then I cut across the city library parking lot towards the Pearl Street Mall with the intention to head back to the courthouse. My throat was dry and my lips were already cracking from the change in altitude. I had to throw out my bottle of water at airport security because of some terrorist plot in England. All liquids were now banned.

Funny, it was a post-Y2K, post-9/11 world, but people still couldn’t get enough of the story. Even when so much had happened in the last decade. The moment a new door opened into the case, the cameras and lights flicked back on, and people clamored to get a view. To be fair, the whole thing seemed to be getting stranger and stranger. No wonder everyone wanted to watch. No wonder the locals were tired of the circus. Was this finally it? Who was this guy in Thailand? If he’s guilty, then what? Would it all be over? What would happen to the poor little beauty queen? Who would still care once the mystery was solved? What would happen to all the news articles and documentaries and that one straight-to-video feature-length film that was shot inside the actual house? It would all end up in a heaping pile of tragic and irrelevant information.

I walked to Lolita’s Market to get something to drink. The yellow-stucco Bodega-like deli would still be standing, I was sure.

It had always served overpriced sodas and stale candy and every type of American Spirit that would be timeless to every clientele.

Sure enough, it hadn’t changed at all. There was even the same dog parked out front. A golden retriever in a red bandana tied with a rope and a bowl of water at its feet. It was never clear who the dogs belonged to. Every homeless person had a dog here and so did every yuppie with a Subaru. The dog still

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ends up unattended and left outside with a bowl of water. I bent down to pet the panting animal and noticed that the rope was tied around a tree and that the tree was covered in a strange metallic bark. I then realized they were staples. Hundreds of them lodged into the trunk. Some were rusted over, some still silver and reflecting sunlight. When I looked even more closely, I could see bits of colored paper stuck to some of the sutures.

Some of these could date all the way back to the sixties, I thought. I imagined how the flyers must have changed over the years. I remembered the ones I probably saw in the nineties, the last time I’d been here. Greenpeace and FREE TIBET and guitar lessons, roommate postings with the pull tabs of someone’s seven-digit phone number. At one point, these trees were offering 100,000-dollar rewards, with the face of the child beauty queen, asking for information to find her killer. They’ve long been trashed. Recycled, presumably.

What had really changed since then, I wondered. Now that they had possibly found him. I followed one of the websites dedicated to her case, checking in frequently over the years.

But as interest and information was starting to fade, they began posting other cases. Line after line of thumbnails, stacking one on top of the other as new girls went missing or killed. And not just the white ones, the ones that seemed to make the evening news. There were so many more out there. Below their photos, the captions read either “Still missing,” “Justice served!” “Justice denied!” or “No justice.”

Scanned copies of their own flyers were uploaded: “Don’t give up on me.”

“Please find me.”

There were so many. How many would be remembered in ten years?

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Knead (AND OTHER ESSAYS)

By Christine O’Donnell

Shortly before I started second grade, my family moved to Nashua, New Hampshire from Billerica, Massachusetts, where they’d lived for twenty years and raised five children. One of them was my brother Steven, who died almost exactly a year before I was born, when he was eight. At the time we moved, I didn’t yet know that.

I have few memories of the Billerica house other than the hours I spent hiding in kitchen cabinets and laundry baskets, waiting for my mother to notice I was missing. I remember hiding beneath the kitchen table once, concealed by the long-embroidered cloth.

My mother was talking over tea with her friends Joan and Gloria.

I could be so silent; they must have not known I was there. “When will it get better?” my mother asked, sniffling into her tissue. She had nothing to distract her from the grief of losing a child except having to care for another, one who had no idea why her mother spent her days teetering between sadness and what seemed like frustration at her existence. “You’re too much,” she would often tell me. My father explained to our neighbors that we were moving because New Hampshire had no sales or personal income tax.

It was a simple financial decision. Many years later, though, he told me that it was because my mother could no longer be in the house where my brother had died.

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It was a typical New England summer, the kind of heat that seems to melt asphalt and humidity that slows the gait of even the most energetic children. We had fans in our new house but no air conditioner. One night after our arrival, my 13-year-old sister was asleep in the bunk bed above me while I lay wide awake. The streetlight outside our window came in through the lace curtains, which moved erratically from the fan circulating hot air around us. The light cast shadows on our bare walls.

I heard a mouse scurry in the gutter outside. Or was it inside the wall? I was alone and afraid, so I got out of bed, holding my breath, and trying not to wake my sister. I went to the door, opened it a crack, and heard the comforting sound of the television in my parent’s bedroom. I crept out into the hallway, my bare feet sticking to the wood floor, and inched my way closer to the light coming from underneath their door. As quietly as I could, I put my hand on the doorknob and opened it just enough to see the grainy black-and-white image of Johnny Carson doing his monologue. My parents were sitting up in bed on top of the sheets, my dad in briefs and a t-shirt, my mother in her bra and underpants, both laughing at Johnny’s jokes. My father blew his nose into a handkerchief while my mom applied Vaseline to her chapped elbows. I tried to get comfortable in the doorway but adjusted myself one too many times.

“Chrissy, what are you doing up?” My mother’s voice had the familiar ring of annoyance. I tried to sound pathetic, “It’s too hot, I can’t sleep.”

“Buddy, put her back to bed.” Before he could respond, I pleaded.

“Can I watch the show with you? Just for a minute, please?”

I whined this last word and watched my mother’s eyes roll.

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“Fine. But you need to stand right next to the bed and watch.

See how long you like that.” I stood up and then leaned against her side of the bed. “Nope, no leaning.” She seemed pleased with herself for setting this boundary, but after a few minutes, she let me casually rest my arm alongside her and eventually place my hand on her generous belly.

My mother was a true beauty when she was young. I’ve seen the photos. Glamorous in the late 40s and early 50s, poised with her form-fitting dresses and coiffed hair. She had soft pale skin, high round cheeks, and an unblemished complexion since she never drank alcohol or smoked or sat in the sun. She wore no makeup other than a signature red lip. She was only five feet tall, and I’d heard that when she married my father, she weighed barely a hundred pounds. To say “and then she had five children and became obese” would be flippant but true. Consumption was a solace for her loss. My father was tall and thin, and my siblings and I took after him, so my mother in many ways was an anomaly. I don’t remember noticing her weight gain because I can’t remember her body as anything other than the milky yielding mass I touched that night.

Standing next to her bed, I kept my hand resting on her belly while it jiggled wildly with her laughter. I looked across to watch my father tap his cigarette into the glass ashtray resting on his stomach, which rose and fell with his breath, his mouth half open, anticipating Johnny’s next one-liner. He let out a loose smoker’s cough and my mother said, “Buddy, shush, I can’t hear him.” Being with them like this, watching tv late at night when I was supposed to be sleeping, I knew I was getting away with something—coveted time alone with the two people I loved

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most in the world.

Then I started to doze. I absentmindedly took a handful of my mother’s flesh and began to squeeze it, knead it. First gently, the softness a salve, the repetition calming. As Johnny and his guests chattered on, she let me knead her with both hands. Her stomach had three fat rolls, like long loaves of bread. One, two, three, all in a row. Up and down, up and down, I would trace my hands along her mounds of fat. A Purina Puppy Chow commercial came on. All the while, knead, knead, knead was going through my head along with an image of my mother making fried dough on Sunday mornings, the powdered sugar and melted butter waiting at the table. I didn’t look up at her face for fear she’d make me stop. Even at seven, I felt that she preferred my siblings to me, and I wanted to suspend this moment infinitely.

As the minutes passed, I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

I rested my head on her warm chest. Soon after, I felt my father scoop me up, like he would when I’d fall asleep on the backseat of the car, then carried me to my bed. I settled my body in the fetal position, my fingers clasped together under my chin, with the smell of my mother’s skin on my hands.

THE NEW SEARLES INCIDENT Once, when I was in the fifth grade, I was a complete asshole— by accident. Like many soon-to-be middle schoolers (and many youngest children in large families), I could be obnoxious and attention-seeking. Often the class clown or being ‘underfoot’ at home, I tried to stay out of my parent’s hair and spend as much

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time outside as possible. Still, trouble found me.

Our street was right off the main road that split the neighborhood into ‘newer, bigger and better’ up the hill to the west versus ‘smaller, older and classic’ down the hill to the east. I went to the school up the hill but New Searles Elementary was just a few blocks away and had a big park where the neighborhood kids hung out. One Friday I got there later than usual because my father had made me clear some old leaves out of the gutters.

They were wet and cold and heavy, and I was angry that my dad chose Friday for chores. After I dragged the last bag to the curb, I ran down to join everyone for kickball.

At the center of the group, handing out instructions and picking teams, was David Kelly. David was full-throttle annoying—and not just because he lived in an enormous house that we had to pass on the bus every morning. Someone would inevitably shout, “Ooh, David Kelly lives in that mansion! So cool.” David had dark, thick hair and wore those boat shoes that preppies always wore without socks. He was popular and smart—though everyone seemed smarter than me back then. My bar was low and I equated having money with having intelligence. What was most annoying about him was his assumption that he was in charge. After meeting his family once at a school play, my father said the Kelly’s ‘put on airs.’ Then he threw the kitchen towel over his forearm and asked if I’d like caviar with my orange juice. Everything about David bothered me. Probably because I was at an age where I both wanted to be like everyone else and realized I never would be. I didn’t know what to do with those thoughts and feelings, so I kept them snug inside.

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I liked hanging out with the boys, and I didn’t like that they were beginning to not want to hang out with me. This was around the time they told me I couldn’t play tackle, or even touch, football anymore. Something was changing and no one was explaining it to me. Occasionally I felt a prickly sensation in my gut. That afternoon, David announced that I couldn’t be on either kickball team. “But you could try being a cheerleader,” and then he laughed like people who are careless laugh, head thrown back, eyes glancing for approval from those around him.

Maybe I couldn’t play football any longer but I wasn’t cheerleader material either. My coordination with choreography, then and now, is kindergarten level at best. He joked that maybe I’d learn a thing or two from the sidelines. As I felt the heat rise in my cheeks, David had climbed on top of one of the tall, round, wood pilings that surrounded the baseball field that served as a perimeter for the park. The pilings’ flat tops were wide enough for two children to stand on. We all began messing around, standing on them, jumping from one to another.

At some point, I got pushed off. I didn’t know who did it and I was pissed. David was acting like King of the Jungle. I was back on the ground then, standing behind him while he laughed: maybe he was laughing at me. By then, I had been taking ballet and gymnastics for years, so I had a great long-leg kick. I was just going to give him a little karate kick to the butt so he’d lose his balance and have to jump off. But at the last moment my strength failed me, and I ended up kicking him in the back of the knee instead. He buckled immediately and fell on the piling—no, fell down the piling—his back scraping along the wood from butt to shoulder blades. As soon as it happened, he started to scream, and I realized that I had done something very

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wrong. Someone began yelling to get a grownup, and someone else was asking if we should call an ambulance.

I ran. I ran faster than I have ever run in my life, back to Clydesdale Circle, back home. Except I couldn’t go home. I was too afraid of my mother. So I went to my friend Laura’s house, the first one on our street. Her family had a camper trailer, the kind you attached to the back of a car, that popped out on both sides. They had it opened in the backyard so I ran inside and started yelling for Laura to come out of her house. She came in and I quickly explained everything that happened. As we sat there, we heard a siren drive right by the trailer, slowing as it took the turn down New Searles Road. Laura was debating whether to get her dad when I heard my mother calling my name from our back porch.

“Christine Elizabeth O’Donnell, come home RIGHT NOW!!!”

I blocked out the rest of that night. Surely, I was punished, but I can’t remember how. On Monday morning, David arrived at school with his mother and a special pillow set up for his back. According to the rumors, he had thousands of splinters that took hours to remove, and he’d never be a professional athlete now, and he might be scarred for life. This is what I heard the kids repeating in the classroom, on the playground.

They brought the nurse into class a few times a day to check on him. Every time she arrived, she gave me dirty looks; so did everybody else. My teacher wouldn’t look me in the eye, though, which was worse. No one asked me how I felt. No one wanted to know. I felt what I was supposed to feel. Shame. That was the consequence of thinking I could one-up David Kelley.

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PHOTOGRAPH I found it in a box of photos I’d never seen before, in a storage area of the garage I’d never combed through. It was about four by four inches square, glossy, with 1969 written along the white rim. It was 1981 and I was eleven years old, doing research for a class autobiography project. While I thought the assignment was dumb, I wondered how I could make my childhood sound more exciting than it was. All I wanted back then was to move to Hollywood and become famous. I loved acting out scenes from Xanadu or Caddyshack, I had a knack for memorizing lines and lyrics. My latest effort was getting my mother to let me watch Fame, which was basically impossible, as she hadn’t even let me see the much tamer Grease years earlier.

Mr. Dumais, the teacher who’d assigned the project, terrified me.

When students were rowdy in class, he would strike his hands together in a thunderclap and yell “SILENCE!” Then he would revert back to a quiet, childish voice. It was both confusing and disturbing. Mr. Dumais’ daughter Laura was my best friend, though, and they lived a few houses down. Sometimes, I would peek into the window of their downstairs den where I would see her watching TV while she picked her nose and ate it. I felt ashamed for snooping but oddly justified, having caught her in this act. My mother said she was probably having a tough time since her mother had left her father for another woman and moved to Ohio. At least that was the neighborhood gossip. “To each his own,” she would say, while my father shook his head.

I continued to be her friend, despite the playback image in my head of her ingesting boogers and her scary father-teacher, because I had my own gross habit of biting my toenails. There

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wasn’t much to do in suburbia, short of riding bikes, walking to the creek, and mooning cars driving down East Dunstable Road. Occasionally, Laura and I would meet up behind the fence that separated our houses and consider trying to smoke a cigarette, but she would have to leave early to babysit her little brother or make dinner before her father got home. My three siblings were anywhere from five to seventeen years older than me and not interested in my social life, so I spent a great deal of time on my own.

I waited until the day before the autobiography project was due to start researching and writing, a habit of procrastination that has followed me ever since. My avoidance of the task at hand led me to exploring part of our garage that I’d never really noticed before. My father had built a narrow closet behind the freezer and the door had a padlock on it, so I thought it was for his job. He worked as a traveling salesman for Super Market Distributors, carting products back and forth to grocery stores every day. He sold anything that wasn’t food, he explained, from shampoo to Ziploc bags to toy soldiers with parachutes that I’d throw out from my bedroom window where they collected in his tomato garden below. The closet was unlocked, though, and I saw that it was full of boxes. One contained a bunch of paperwork and loose photos. I flipped through old black and whites of my grandparents and then stumbled on some of my siblings when they were young. That’s where I saw it.

In the image, a string of Christmas cards lines the wall behind a boy sitting on the back of a couch. He’s wearing a patterned two-piece pajama set, holding a Jungle Book board game, and beaming. Next to him is a young teenage girl, smiling demurely

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with her hands neatly folded on her lap. In front of her on the couch is a little girl of four or so, grinning widely and holding a Winnie the Pooh board game. And next to her is a teenaged boy with a sleepy smile. I recognized the girls and the older boy as my sisters and brother. But I did not know the boy on the back of the couch, which is why I brought it to my mother and waved the photograph at her.

“Who is this boy, mom?”

“What boy?” She was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of sauce. It was Wednesday, spaghetti night, and the smell of sausage, peppers and onions hung like fog in the kitchen. When she finally looked down at the picture in my hand, I saw a look on her face that confused me. Like the muscles in her cheeks flattened and her eyes glazed over. Then she turned back to the stove and began adding meatballs to the sauce.

“That was Steven. He was your brother. He died.” Then she added, “Set the table, dinner is almost ready.”

After I put out the plates and silverware, I went back downstairs to the closet under the stairs where I spent much of my free time. Inside, there were Dad’s old National Guard uniforms and Mom’s special occasion dresses hanging in plastic wrap; they were not likely to be worn again. Along the wall was a collection of storage boxes. I looked at these differently now, wondering what mysteries could be inside. I crawled past them to a secret refuge where I read books and licked Tang off my fingers, dipping in the jar I had stashed there.

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I turned on my flashlight to look at the picture again, this time more closely. That little boy is my brother. Was my brother. And my family had a life with him before they had a life with me. I crawled out of the closet and called Laura to meet up behind the fence. I had to tell someone about my discovery, though I didn’t yet understand what it meant: maybe my childhood was interesting after all.

A FISTFUL When I was 12 years old, my father taught me how to throw a punch with a roll of quarters. On our cul-de-sac, the neighborhood kids all played together—hide-and-seek, tag, mother may I, and every weekend on my next-door neighbor’s lawn, tackle football. The only thing I knew about this game was that you wanted your team to have the ball, and you wanted to run as fast as you could to the other side of the field. I wasn’t a particularly graceful child, all gangly legs and bony kneecaps.

And despite years of ballet, I couldn’t do more than balance on one leg. I did, however, run fast, and being scrappy had its advantages on the field.

One Sunday afternoon, I was headed outside to play when I saw the boys already in a huddle. I ran over to join them but they were stitched in tight, while Tommy Nicholson held court telling a story that had them snickering. Todd Andrade saw me coming and motioned for them to shut up.

“Hey, what are you guys talking about?” I asked. “Nothing!”

More snickering. Then Gary Anderson, who I always thought

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was the nicest of the group, said, “We heard from Eddie Sullivan that you’re easy.” For a moment, I thought this had something to do with the way I threw the football, but then he went on to say that Eddie had ‘felt me up’, that I was ‘looking for it’ and any of the boys could ‘do it’ with me. They continued to laugh, and I felt a weird pit opening in my stomach. I ran home crying and immediately told my Dad what they’d said. He didn’t say a word but put out his cigarette and stormed out the front screen door, the metal frame slamming behind him. I realized too late that he was going to have a word with the boys, so I stood behind the lace curtains of the living room window and watched, holding my breath, and resisting the urge to pee. When he came back inside, he walked toward his bedroom and yelled for me to meet him on the back porch. I thought he was angry at me. I wasn’t always an easy kid to have around. I was curious, and that meant trouble. But when my father came out to the porch holding a roll of quarters in his hand, I was confused.

“Ok, pretend to hit me,” he said. “Um, why?” I asked. My Dad was always kind to me. He raised his voice sometimes, in exasperation, like the time I was five and jumped up to kiss him goodnight as he was bending down and I broke his nose. He would tuck me in at night and tell me stories to make me feel safe. He went with me on amusement park rides no matter how they scared the both of us. So when he said, “Just throw a punch at me. Now!” I did. He caught my fist mid-air and said “Good, now try it with this,” and gave me the quarters. My hand wasn’t big enough to conceal the full roll but I knew instinctively that I could deliver more hurt with this in my swing. “You have to protect yourself now. Ok? Yeah?” I nodded. “Ok, try again.”

The added weight gave me confidence and I swung hard. He

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stepped back but my knuckles skimmed his beer belly and he let out a fake yelp. He smiled, then left me to go inside and lit up a cigarette.

The Sullivans lived across the street from my best friend Laura, our mothers were friends. Eddie was a few years older than me and went to a technical school. I didn’t know what that meant, just that he got out of school earlier and often had his head under the hood of the family car. He was also ‘too cool’ to play football with us middle-schoolers, but I wondered if he, too, ever felt uncoordinated. While I thought it was neat that my dad had taught me a secret punch, I knew that I wasn’t going to be carrying around a roll of quarters all the time. So, later that week, when Laura and I were sitting on her front lawn and Eddie was in his driveway greasing his bicycle chain, we had an idea.

“Hey Eddie,” we yelled. “Wanna see something?”

We giggled and lifted our shirts, just past our belly buttons.

He looked at us with that pubescent boy face—awkward and excited—and put down his WD-40. “Lemme see again!” he hollered. So I took the bottom of my t-shirt and twisted it up to tuck between my non-existent breasts. Laura and I stood and tried our best to do a sexy dance, throwing our hips right to left.

“Why don’t you get a little closer, Eddie?” I asked.

He crossed the street and approached us. Laura whispered in my ear, then went inside her house. We stood there for a moment, Eddie and I. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, blond, kind

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of freckly, sweaty like his mother who carried a tall glass of iced tea everywhere she went. He often wore t-shirts with the sleeves cut off, revealing the oily pimples up his arms.

“Come on, you gonna show me some more?” he asked, taking a step closer.

“I don’t know. I heard you were spreading rumors about me to Tommy and the guys.”

“What? Nah. Nope. So, you gonna pull up that shirt or what? I gotta finish working on my bike.”

“Maybe . . . .” I put my hand on his shoulder.

I wish I could say that I had a roll of quarters in my back pocket but being prepared wasn’t yet one of my characteristic traits.

Ultimately, my father’s lesson was about protecting myself by any means necessary, so with all the might of a 12-year-old girl done wrong, I kneed him in the balls. He fell over instantly, crying and writhing. I’d never intentionally inflicted pain on someone, and I felt awful but oddly satisfied at the same time.

After Eddie crawled his way home, his mother called my mother and there were words. That’s how my mother put it: “There were words and that’s all I’m going to say about it. Now go find something to do.”

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Oranges

By Robin Reif

We called it the Buffet of Dead Food: flaccid bacon, eggs— hard-boiled and cold—and toast so tough it scratched the roofs of our mouths. Still, the meal had a touch of grace: a pyramid of oranges, pulsing and alive in their pedestal bowl.

My roommate—I’ll call her Maggie—always took one and placed it on her nightstand to eat later.

When I first saw Maggie on arrival day for our year-abroad program, I would have cast her as Saint Joan. Willowy, with close-cropped hair, she projected stoic calm, though her eyes were so glassy that I often wondered whether she’d just been crying. It was not a love-seeking face, responsive and eager to please, like mine. Her face belonged only to her.

We were Americans—drama and English literature students— housed in a tiny London hotel, a shabby relic in what had become the decidedly swank district of South Kensington. Our walls were putty, the metal-frame beds and pockmarked desks likely bought at an auction of prison furniture. I’d unpacked by the time she showed up and, feeling in the know, introduced her to students and staff I’d already met as I helped lug her trunk up the four flights. That first night, we sat on either side of our double window’s sill, giddy to be in London—in those

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years, the ’70s, city of long-lashed models with enviably straight bangs, of Mick Jagger with his girl’s lips and thrilling bulge, of mod boys slouching in doorways, their moody, androgynous allure delicious and disturbing. Glam rock was just breaking out with Elton John and David Bowie, the most beautiful boy we’d ever seen. Beyond this, London was filled with the fabulous: bold souls who showed up naked at museums or set their hair on fire, just because. The IRA bombings didn’t gate-crash until months later, in March.

But on this night, trying to coax our hearts to settle enough to sleep, we looked out over the surrounding rooftops. “I am so lucky to have a roommate like you,” Maggie said, “so confident, so outgoing.” Ambushed by the compliment, I did something I still cannot entirely explain. I began to sing. Not with her, to her. Worse, they were songs of lost boys, from Peter Pan: “Never, Never Land” and “You Can Fly.” Perhaps I wished to show her my other talents. More likely, her expression of admiration for traits I knew I lacked ignited anxiety, and a random shard of my fragmented self just exploded into this odd performance.

I think of her in that moment—an introvert, far from home, having latched on to someone she thought was safe but perhaps was not. Still, we became friends, heading down each morning to the Dead Food buffet and each night trading class gossip and news of movies or plays we’d seen. On weekends, we’d haul our dirty clothes to the local laundromat and sit on low benches poring over medieval mystery plays and modern English poetic drama—Here is no continuing city, here is no abiding stay—as we waited for our stuff to dry. Despite her distracting looks and the sculptural beauty of her head, Maggie was not interested

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in being seen. She aspired to be a film editor, “locked in a dark room, punished for the rest of my life,” she’d joke. I envied that she could feel the reality of her existence even with no one watching. I wanted to be an actress and needed the gaze of others to reassure me that I was real. Her creative impulse was to shape and structure; mine was to enact.

That fall, I did, along with most of my classmates. As young Americans with a little money, we ricocheted among parties, openings, and hot new clubs where we found ourselves rubbing shoulders and other body parts with rock stars, celebrities, and those we mistook for rock stars and celebrities. Some of our tutors—poets and actors of modest fame—pressed their advantage with students who, by June, would be a continent away. We dyed our hair, wore outlandish clothes, changed our names. In and out of each other’s rooms throughout the long London nights, there were so many bodies, so much desire—ambient and contagious—continually pinballing in new directions. Having long labored under the yoke of stiff competition and required achievement, we were dizzy with joy at freedoms we couldn’t resist.

But Maggie did. She looked on, bemused, never losing her grip on intensely regular habits—bed at 11:00, up at 7:30, homework in the afternoons. When I danced myself into a blur at gay clubs where I was a plus-one to my classmate, “Jackie St. James,” whose real name was Albert Gluckstein, or crashed West End dressing rooms, begging to borrow unpublished scripts from actors who took me for a groupie who wanted something else, I’d return home to our call-and-response: “Hi, Robs!”

“Hi, Mags!” then rehash my misadventures. Her witnessing

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amplified my experience.

Then one night we went to see Cries and Whispers, a tale of sisters whose suppressed longings Bergman excavates through layers of wealth, beauty, and late nineteenth-century clothes. Maria, a cruel flirt, and Karin, a forbidding introvert circle one another, both craving intimacy but terrified at needing it. When they finally stumble into an ecstasy of touching, talking, embracing, they just skirt the bounds of incest. Afterward, Maria withdraws.

Karin is distraught and pleads with her, saying, “You touched me. Remember?”

Emerging from this portrayal of feelings we feared, Maggie and I shuffled out of the theater and started walking the several miles back to our hotel. The streets were wet and dark, not too cold. Occasional headlights startled. At some point, I realized that we were holding hands.

Still, close as we’d become, as we moved into winter, we were like a single figure inching away from herself in a mirror. And with each step, the distance doubled. The more indulgent I became—dropping daily ballet classes, gorging on greasy pub fare and rich Indian food—the more disciplined Maggie was.

Her great cheekbones became sharper; hip bones jutted from her jeans. At cafés, I’d order pastry; she’d order plain tea. I didn’t ask what was wrong. Annulling my concern was envy that she could imprint her will upon her body. This self-denial seemed a pursuit of purity like that of Saint Joan, willing to forfeit her flesh for a greater glory. I yearned for some version of this perceived strength but lacked whatever Maggie had to make it real.

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She began to disappear at night, movie-going with Barbara, a square-framed girl with a shaved head who’d already published rock reviews in London’s hip Time Out; it was only fear of further humiliation that kept me from voicing Karin’s plea: “You touched me, remember?”

I can’t recall when I noticed the oranges uneaten on Maggie’s nightstand. There’d be one or two, and then the pile would grow. One day, I took one, telling myself what stealers of fruit have told themselves since the dawn of time: It won’t be missed.

The orange was perfect: every vesicle lush and acidic, a tiny explosion. I didn’t take it out of anger or to cause her pain. I took it because I wanted something, but I couldn’t have said what. My heart was in play but as impenetrable to me as the sludge beneath the Thames.

A few days later, I took another from her nightstand and noticed a small pad hidden underneath them: columns with sums, each adding to a bit more or less than 500. I made sure to dispose of the orange peel downstairs in the common kitchen.

Maggie grew more remote, and I began to believe she suspected me. Still, she wasn’t eating her oranges and continued to hoard them. As she said nothing, whenever the room happened to be empty and I happened to want one of her oranges, I took it.

Oranges were free on the daily dead buffet, cost five pence at any fruit stand in London, but I wanted Maggie’s.

An orange is that much more brilliant and beautiful in a dark time, and London was becoming very dark. December brought bone-chilling mists so gray I could swear ash was falling

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from the sky, turning the city’s Gothic buildings into haunted silhouettes. As the agitated Thames rolled out to the North Sea, even the stone gargoyles jutting from its bridges were not so much frightening as frozen in their own fear.

After the diversions of autumn, by December, the senior-year acting students began buckling down, prepping for graduate drama school auditions. I believed my only path forward was through one of the highly competitive programs in the States.

Unlike classmates who seemed more confident or casual and rehearsed mainly in class, I’d hole up for entire weekends in nearby Brighton, once a royal playground, now a seedy spot that Noel Coward had branded a place of “piers, queers and racketeers.” There, I’d rehearse my two-minute audition monologues thirty, forty, fifty times a day. At sorry old hotels, I’d feed the electric heater five pence every half hour and eat cheap Scotch eggs at local pubs filled with desperate smokers and, afterward, one of Maggie’s purloined oranges.

As auditions drew closer, I grew more nervous and hired a private acting coach, a shaggy-haired sometime TV actor who lived in the tiniest row house in North London. I’d schedule two or three sessions a week. Once he was fifteen minutes late.

I worked myself into a rage and roared when he showed up.

He looked terrified, but seconds later found his voice.

“Stop acting nyur-aw-tic,” he said.

What buoyed me a bit was that in rehearsal, a mysterious force would sometimes grab hold and summon me to solidarity with

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my character. I’d inhabit her, act her with surprising spontaneity and ride that wave to shore. But it was hit or miss. I lacked reliable access to the inspired flow.

Something else worked against me: any great performance—on the page, stage, or screen—is rooted in the artist’s willingness to be present and exposed. For me, that was an excruciating proposition. One classmate had called me “that smiley girl,” by which I knew he meant false and appeasing. I couldn’t admit feeling as fragmented and helpless as I did and worked overtime to hide it.

That February I flew home for auditions. My first two did not go well. Yale Drama was my last chance. In a New Haven motel, I rehearsed two monologues, one classical and one contemporary, through the night. Exhausted, strung out and hungry, having eaten only one of Maggie’s oranges that I’d managed to lift before I left, I ascended the lighted circular stage in a small campus theater and began my contemporary speech, a scene in which Velma, a troubled twenty-something, confesses the murder of her mother to a stranger who just wants to get laid.

I pulled out my imaginary knife, desperately striving to project myself into Velma’s complex terror and justification for her vengeance. A few lines into it, I knew I’d missed the moment when, in rehearsal, I would sometimes slip into that enchanted flow and bring it home. My throat constricted, flattening my voice. My heart was a trapped bird. My dress was drenched beneath the arms. The desperation that could be read from the theater’s back row was not Velma’s but mine, the actress’s whose character and future had just fled. It was a misery to finish.

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I returned in defeat to England. Graduate school had been my only plan. While I was seeing my future evaporate, Maggie, who was willing to start at the bottom, had landed a secretarial job at CBS during the time I was gone.

As I continued taking her oranges, I figured out that the columns on her pad were an account of daily calories, about a third of what she should have been eating.

One afternoon in March, a week after the IRA’s Old Bailey bombing, when we were all still rattled, I found Maggie sitting on her bed: spine curved, head down, legs crossed. She looked up. Her face was empty, as though she didn’t recognize me. “Do you know what happened to my oranges?” she said.

“They’re there on your nightstand,” I offered.

She was not deterred. “Someone’s been taking my oranges.”

I thought of the black-haired women with tragic Iberian faces who cleaned our rooms, but despite all the unswept places within me, I would not falsely accuse.

“I don’t know,” I said.

There was silence. Then Maggie asked, “Have you been taking my oranges?”

I sat on my bed along the adjacent wall. We locked eyes across the wide diagonal. Mine began to sting. Finally, I said, “Yes.”

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I wanted to tell her that I took the oranges because they were there. Or that I took them because they were alive and were hers; because, despite evidence of her emptiness, I believed she had something I needed. I took them because I knew she was hungry but wasn’t eating them. I took them because I, too, was hungry. I wanted her to know that her starvation awakened something deep within me. I wanted to tell her: I see you. You’re starving. See me. I’m starving too.

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The Marble

By Claire Salinda

I once experienced a recurring desire to hold a marble in my mouth. This was a foreign sensation occurring at a foreign time.

I’d never had an oral fixation before, and this new craving for a marble coincided with the end of my marriage, another novel event in my life. The separation was necessary but unwanted, but my longing for a marble was so visceral that once or twice, I even caught myself swirling my tongue around as if one was there between my cheeks. However, when I did eventually procure a marble, I only ever kept it in my pocket.

I bought my marble in a local crystal shop that I visited on the advice of a tarot reader. I had gone to her to learn if the separation from my husband would be permanent, if it would lead to a divorce. For reasons that are not unique to couples who meet when they’re very young, marry when they’re still young, and then suddenly, one day, are no longer young, we decided to be apart for a year. It was the mandated minimum amount of time you must be legally separated before you can file for divorce in North Carolina, where we were married and lived, and besides, we still loved one another. So no decisions would be made before the year was up, aside from the decision that I was moving to Brooklyn in a few weeks as an ostensibly, if temporarily, single woman.

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Still, I wanted to know what my husband and I would decide, which is how I found myself in front of a stranger and her deck of cards, asking her for clarity. I am not a believer in the mystical power of people or rocks. But I am also not not a believer; there is too much room for it to go either way, and I would hate to miss out on salvation just as much as I’d hate to be made a fool.

A separation is one of those events when both the possible and the impossible seem to exist in the same moment, and if there was ever a time to reap a benefit, even one of dubious origin, this was it.

The tarot reader looked at her spread of cards and then informed me, unequivocally, that this was the definitive end of my marriage. I don’t recall the specific cards that lay between us, just that they said there was no going back. I should have, and probably could have, taken a photo of the spread. It’s not uncommon for a querent to do so, and I’m sure the reader would have allowed me to document the cards. But I didn’t.

And yet, I did take a picture when I arrived at the tarot reader’s studio. In the photo, two walls of wooden shiplap converge in a partly sunny corner of a room, both painted the same shade of cream but with planks of different widths and orientations.

The greenery of the outside peeks through a four-paneled window on one of the walls. Besides that, there’s nothing else in the scene to suggest where I was: no furniture, no people, no tarot cards. Just the corner of an unidentified room. And while I don’t know why exactly I took that photo, I possess a vague memory of wanting to capture the essence of something in that moment, to mark the time just before the reading, as if I knew things would be irrevocably altered on the other side of it.

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In her next breath following her proclamation about the end of my marriage, the reader warned that my mother-in-law was harboring bad energy toward me and then gave me a list of gemstones that could help shield me from the malice. This was no great surprise to me, my mother-in-law’s contempt. This, after all, was the woman who’d worn a bone-colored dress to my wedding. Even my husband once remarked that she didn’t know how to hug, always holding her body at arm’s distance, even from her son.

Shopping for rocks is easier than dealing with the prognostication of divorce, so I set off for the crystal store straight from the reading, list in hand. There were seven kinds of stones on the tarot reader’s list, each with its unique properties to hopefully bolster my energetic wherewithal. I circled the small store and added what I needed to my basket: iridescent labradorite and inky black obsidian for sound sleep and protection, respectively; a few pieces of jade to bring me success and wisdom; lapis lazuli and red jasper specimens to help me stay calm and grounded; a chunky rod of near-transparent selenite for clarity; an optimistic slice of rose quartz, the crystal of unconditional love, for good measure. According to the shop employee, I was supposed to touch the gems to feel which ones belonged to me, and although I was there among the rocks with only a half measure of earnestness, I can attest that the stones practically buzzed in my palm.

When I went to pay for my small galaxy of crystals, I noticed a bowl full of deliciously glossy marbles next to the register. Like a child encountering a gumball machine, I salivated. Even now, the better half of a decade later, typing the word marble over and

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over again brings a pleasant fullness to my tongue. As bizarre as it sounds, it makes sense, considering that I was desiring, with every cell in my body, to understand my own life at that time, and desire is just another form of hunger. I wanted to consume the knowledge because if I did, it would no longer be apart from me. I would have control over my life. I would know.

Perhaps because I was in a crystal store, these marbles were agate and jasper and other opaque gemstones rather than glass like the ones I remembered from my childhood. Setting aside my protective stones on the counter for a moment, I submerged the tips of my fingers in the bowl of marbles and savored their cool smoothness. I lingered over one or two that immediately caught my attention—bright and striped like scoops from some sort of extraterrestrial fruits. But I eventually chose a marble that, while not dazzling in appearance, was made all the more appetizing by its milky coloring. I didn’t dare touch it to my lips, though. I didn’t feel ready yet.

— Retrospection is its own form of magical thinking and considering the marble today, it’s clear to me that I wasn’t ready then to devour an understanding. Or rather, I wasn’t able to admit to an understanding of my life because, before going to the tarot reader, I already knew that my marriage was ending.

When I claimed to want to know what was on the other side of that year to come, what I meant was that I wanted someone else to say the truth aloud. The tarot reader wasn’t a psychic then, just an empath. I thought I could hold a marble in my mouth in place of the words I lacked. Because although I had been sad before in my life, devastated even, I had never spoken this

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language of loss before, and I didn’t possess the vocabulary to explain it to myself, let alone to others.

But perhaps it also felt too tender to even get close to the place where my words were formed, and that is why I kept the marble in my pocket, next to that solar system of protective crystals. My mouth was too powerful, with its ability to render a prophecy true if I spoke it aloud. If I opened my mouth for the marble, who knew what other words would tumble out and what havoc would be wreaked, whose heart would be broken? And yet what cannot be said must still be felt. The experience of separation was so overwhelming that it demanded a somatic, almost animalistic reckoning instead of a spoken one. Of course it did.

— There were many other unfamiliar and immutable desires in my body around that time of heartbreak. My first-ever IUD was inserted a few days before I left for Brooklyn. The searing procedure was a convenient and optimistic distraction, allowing me the grounding experience of scheduling and prepping for my appointment while also giving me the space to imagine a future of protected sex with someone new or possibly, just maybe, someones plural. But even more so, the resulting pain in my abdomen provided a corporeal analog to the emotional anguish I could not express otherwise. I cramped and bled for months after, the pain eventually becoming an assumed condition of my daily existence. If you had asked my body then, it would’ve said exactly what I could not: This hurts.

There were other symbolic translations and signs, too, beyond the tarot reading. A few weeks before I moved out, the first ring given

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to me by my husband snapped in half while still on my finger. I was driving to a parking structure between work meetings so that I could cry alone in my car, and the silver band just seemed to dissolve into two. Like my marriage, I can assume there had been a weak point in its arc that I didn’t notice, the silver becoming thinner each day until it could no longer hold itself together. I had practically begged him for that ring after we encountered it by chance in a store. It was the perfect representation of how I wanted to feel in our relationship, with its chip of a diamond embedded next to its engraved sentiment: “Loved.”

On one of our last evenings together before I moved out, my husband ran the garbage disposal and it jammed against a hard object. He reached in and extracted one of my pieces of protective jade, left behind from when I was washing my stones of his mother’s bad energy. I didn’t tell him what it was or how it ended up there, and he didn’t ask.

— I arrived in Brooklyn, and the coincidences followed. For a short time, I dated a guitarist who moonlighted as a bartender, or maybe it was the other way around. Late one night when I was killing time in Washington Square Park while waiting for him to finish his shift, I was approached by a boy. I knew he was a boy, only twenty, because he told me but also because I made him show me his ID. Elliott—the same name as my husband—was from Seattle, and he didn’t know why he was in New York City.

He told me I looked scary but also that I was so pretty, like a beautiful twenty-three-year-old Puerto Rican from the Bronx.

He told me he just wanted into my vibes, cracked himself up, and then gasped when I told him that I was not Puerto Rican but

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half-Filipina, originally from Los Angeles, and that I was thirtyone. He said he’d take the L train to Brooklyn for me anyway.

He was staying at a Marriott on a stolen credit card, down from Boston University with “some dudes” he knew, who’d goaded him into talking to me. He promised he was not a skateboarder or date rapist like everyone else he knew at school. He was a sophomore at BU but knew all the senior soccer players at my alma mater in upstate New York, and, according to him, it was “a great school.” He wasn’t even that wasted, just stressed about the stolen credit card. If I wanted to have the best night ever, I should go with him and his friends.

I recognized this college boy’s manic brazenness in a previous version of myself, and for just a brief moment I was tempted to follow him. If I had in fact still been twenty-three and still lived off the L train—because those two things had once been true—and if I had actually believed that he wasn’t that drunk, I probably would’ve gone with him; adventure often trumped reason during that naively hedonistic period of my early twenties in New York. However, I was in my thirties and living off the F train in a less cool part of Brooklyn. And also, a few years before that night, I’d made the most audacious of all choices: I’d promised a man, in front of everyone who knew us, that I would love and stay with him forever, only to later learn that I was no longer a choice he would’ve made. I had since learned to be somewhat more reasonable in my decision-making.

“Goodnight, Elliott,” I called out to the retreating boy and, in doing so, repeated an exact sentiment I had uttered hundreds and maybe even thousands of times before, each time, including this one, intending it as a loving release into the dark. Then I

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turned back toward the arch in the park and continued to wait for the guitarist’s shift to end.

The guitarist was the opposite of my husband in almost every way imaginable. For this alone, but for many other reasons, he was another placeholder, his own form of translation for what I could not put words to. But it didn’t mean that it hurt any less when our fling ended. I still didn’t possess the language then to give shape to my pain, but I did start to think about using my words again in the future, drafting a list of things I should write about someday: “Bartenders I Have Fucked and Maybe Loved”; “Bathrooms I Have Shared”; “Rings I Have Worn.” Instead of writing about these things then, I sipped twelve-dollar smoothies delivered directly to my front door while I watched season after season of Frasier on my couch. Days later, when I did finally leave my apartment, I walked around the American Museum of Natural History by myself and cried when I read a display on the deaths of Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and wife within hours of each other. The plaque bore a photo of Roosevelt’s diary entry that day, just a large black “X” on lined paper with a single sentence: “The light has gone out of my life.”

A few weeks after the museum sojourn, I took the A train alone to the beach with the intention of breaking an egg into the Atlantic.

The night before, I’d attended a women’s-only energy healing circle at the urging of a sympathetic friend who knew the witch leading the ritual. If I’d had no qualms before about soliciting a tarot reader’s interpretation, I also did not see any reason to refuse a witch’s. So I sat among a handful of other afflicted women on a concrete floor, situated around a giant hand-painted eye, the eye witnessing us with its startling blue iris and we witnessing each

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other. No one spoke except the witch, but our pain required no translation. If love is a universal language, then so is pain—most especially so in a room full of aggrieved women.

The witch asked us all to embody our pain. I wish I could recall if this felt easy or difficult, if it was agonizing or cathartic to endure, but all I remember is that I did not cry like the others.

After sufficient conjuring, when the trauma was closer to the surface of our skin, the witch instructed us to rub an egg all over our bodies so that we might transfer our pain to it. In my hand, the egg reminded me of the marble: cold, hard, unswallowable, necessary to possess. I dragged it lightly, thoughtfully, up and down my limbs, across my chest and abdomen, along my shoulders and back.

After the cleansing, we placed our eggs in plastic takeout containers filled with cornmeal so we could transport them to a large body of water for disposal without incurring further psychic harm. I took my sealed egg and went to the bar next door to have a drink with the witch. Round objects seemingly beget more round objects in my life, so we played a game of pool, I taking immense satisfaction with each hard thump of the cue stick against the ball. Of course, the guitarist walked in just then with his own intentions of having a pool game with friends.

Part of the reason I had agreed to participate in the circle in the first place was because the space with the painted eye on the floor shared a wall with the guitarist’s favorite watering hole.

The witch watched me as the guitarist approached. However, I was no longer waiting for him; I trusted the witch like I had trusted the tarot reader—not necessarily with my future but with my already existing present. So just as the cards had told

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me what I already knew, the egg lifted away what was ready to be cleansed. Now I had the egg in the cornmeal and the pool balls lined up, both waiting for me to dispatch them.

Looking out of the window of the A train the next morning on my way to the beach, the contained egg in my lap, I saw an old graveyard I’d never noticed before, which made me think of Teddy Roosevelt’s black “X.” It was overcast and already chilly when I got off the subway, despite it being just a week after Labor Day, but I appreciated the ambient moodiness and subsequently deserted shoreline. When I dug my bare feet into the clammy sand and plucked the egg from the container, I wasn’t moved to cradle it as I had the marble. I held it tentatively between my thumb and forefinger instead, aware of how delicate it was despite its heaviness. I didn’t want to crack its shell before I was ready, so I lay down on the sand instead. I closed my eyes against the glaring gray sky and, in an attempt to mimic the ritual with the witch, I concentrated hard on finding the heartache in my body, identifying it some moments later as a hollowness in my chest and stomach and as a tingly weakness in my fingers, still holding the egg. I might not have been able to grieve in words yet, but at least I could give the sorrow enough shape to locate it.

I stayed on my back for a long, long time, just breathing. When I finally did wade into the whitewash and throw the egg into the oncoming waves, I never actually saw the shell break. I knew it must have happened, though, because the subway train car I boarded back to the city was empty, and I sang along to the song in my headphones, out loud, at the top of my lungs. When I reached for the marble, still carried in my pocket, I only thought to lick it.

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— I stopped carrying the crystals and the marble around the time my divorce was final, but I returned to the water often.

Sometimes it was the train to the beach, when it was warm enough; sometimes it was a stream on a weekend trip upstate.

Most frequently, it was the lap pool at my local YMCA. I had never been a strong swimmer, but when I grieved the guitarist and started to grieve my marriage, when I finally had the room to make a new life with myself, one aspect I desired for my identity was to be a woman who swam laps in the morning. It didn’t pan out exactly as I wanted—I only had time to swim at night, for one. But I did swim. I even took lessons with other aspiring adults to perfect my freestyle and master my flip turn, building an awareness of my body with every stroke. And when I returned to my hometown of Los Angeles a few years later, I translated my laps to the local pool here.

Like all translations, though, the outcome is subjective. Last week, I did a flip turn, but the pool here is shallower than the one in Brooklyn by nearly five feet, so I smacked my forehead on the hard tiles lining the bottom of my lane. The goose egg that emerged was a convenient talisman of sorts, one that I found myself mindlessly caressing in the days following the botched flip turn. The touching bordered on compulsive, and if I was writing this a week ago, I’d be rubbing my forehead the whole time. Because even though it was tender and bruised, the echo of pain I felt when I gently stroked it wasn’t altogether unpleasant, calling to mind another egg in another body of water and, before that, a marble I used to want to hold in my mouth.

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NONFICTION

Ghosts, God, and Grits

By Kristin Seeberger

Dutch shoppers found me crawling in the parking lot shrubs. I became a rabid animal: grass smells, soiled knees, scratches on my face and arms. There was no touch. There was a pandemic.

I flew from Amsterdam to Portland, Oregon the next morning in the Covid June of 2020, across five time zones to say goodbye to my son.

— Four months after James died I drove to the Oregon Coast and wandered with ghosts and sat with God to try to find my heartbeat again. James did not die here, but in his bedroom in a small yellow bungalow on Rosa Parks Way in Portland, where he lived with his older brother, Garrett. Garrett called me as I was driving to the Lidl grocery store. “Mom, James is dead,” he cried. He had to repeat it three times. When it happened, I’d been splitting my time between northern Holland and Baltimore.

I walked on the beach on a cold morning with an old film canister filled with his ashes. I wanted to take him to places and leave him there. It sounds so unmotherly to leave your child behind and to keep walking onward but that is what I did. That is what I am still learning to do.

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The ghosts appeared at low tide as strange stump-like protrusions on the horizon. There must have been a hundred; they looked like miniature monoliths walking out of the sea. The easterly wind bit my face, its salty residue burning my chapped cheeks.

The stumps beckoned me, like small children lifting their arms, asking to be hoisted up and held by their mother. I will always be a mother, so I walked toward them. The beach was empty, almost. There was a dead seal. And gulls.

The gulls circled above the carcass. They were curious too. I walked closer to the shipwrecked body. The triggered anxiety that takes over me when I see dead animals when I am driving did not happen. I was able to breathe, and my body did not spasm. I kept my eyes open. The seal had no stench. She was not dead that long. Maybe she washed up on shore in the night.

One of the gulls hopped on her. I shooed it away. Her eyes were cloudy blue, her skin spotted with irregular brown circles. She was beautiful and beautifully intact. There was no indication of trauma. I quickly pivoted away from the seal and turned to face the sea. I walked towards the stumps, jumping over a freshwater mountain stream that had made its way from the Cascades through the Siuslaw National Park to this beach, cutting a deep architectural gouge in the hard-packed sand so that it could be united with its mother, the ocean. Water seeks to find other water to amplify its abundance. What was I seeking to amplify?

I jumped over the stream.

I was walking among the ghostly remnants of Sitka trees that grew 2000 years ago. I tried to imagine what it was like when the ghost trees were alive. They were once giants, 150-200 feet tall. My son, James, was a human giant, all 6’5” of him.

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Two thousand years ago, glaciers were melting after the ice age, raising the ocean level as she pressed onward, drowning the Sitkas and poisoning them with her salt. They must have died slowly; I hope they were unknowing of their dying. I hope the seal was too. In the deepest parts of myself, I ache with this understanding of what a mother can unknowingly do.

Thousands of years later, each ancient stump had new life as the sea receded. I tip-toed between them so as not to wake up the ghosts, but I did. There, on each stump, the ghosts came alive. Each ghost was covered with breathing-sucking mussels attached to its petrified stumps, clinging on for dear life. They drown every day at high tide and then are born again with low tide. I wish James had held onto life like a mussel.

I sprinkled part of him to be with the ghosts.

The next day I hiked illegally on the Cascade Head Preserve.

The trailhead had a closure sign, but I ignored the rule that would stop me from seeing more ghosts. I climbed 1,300 feet above the sea, above the Salmon River Estuary, walking among the mythical giant Sitkas. I looked up and could not see the Sitka tops; they disappeared into the white abyss of the dense fog that was slowly rising. I looked down at my boots; they were on top of the mangled Sitka roots that traversed the trail like the veins of an old woman’s hands holding on tightly to someone beloved. I tried not to step on her, wedging my feet between her roots so I would not slip. The Sitka trunks were covered with a lush carpet of moss. Above me dangled Spanish moss from the Sitka branches, hanging like pale green chandeliers in Elysium.

The forest smelled of decaying plants and wood. I closed my eyes and breathed. All was quiet. Then a distant branch fell.

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I was in a terrarium. I was in a cathedral. I was on my knees.

I was praying.

The wild, foggy headland trail opened to a meadow that poured its cliffs to the ocean. I walked to the edge, where the Salmon River twisted below. The fog began to lift as the sun amplified.

I saw craggy islands in the distance when I briefly stopped to slow my heartbeat, but I kept walking up the trail. I knew I was here illegally, but I did obey one rule: Please stay on the trail.

In the meadows, a sign read that a rare wildflower grows here, the tall violet checker mallow is food for the threatened Oregon Silverspot butterfly caterpillars. October is caterpillar season, so I opened my eyes wide, making sure I did not step on anyone.

I looked up the Meadow Mountain I was about to ascend, where the fog was indecisive with its next move: “Should I rise or fall or just stay put” it seemed to ask. That was my question too. I looked beyond the trail, outward, and there was the wild Pacific, churning its insides out. I kept walking, slowly, stopping every hundred yards to catch my breath. I looked up again at the stubborn fog to see if it could answer my question. I decided to rise so that I could gradually move closer to the white abyss, its brume now dampening my face. As I stood there, I heard something move. I froze and inhaled, so I could make sure the silence did not include me. There, where the forest met the meadow’s edge, stood a giant bull elk. I couldn’t shut my eyes; they watered. Everything was amplified: the flight of the falcon overhead, the dried checker mallows in the meadow, my breathing, the buttermilk sky. And then more elk emerged, a herd walking from the fog-wrapped forest above me into the clearing meadow. I became the small monolith on that

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mountain meadow. There was no one to lift me up, no camera to capture them, no words spoken. These were the unspeakable minutes. Everything was just there to exist. Everything was just there for me to behold. And then they disappeared. But never forgotten. Like a ghost.

— God was a peak that jutted out and above the Pacific Ocean like a gigantic thumb. God’s Thumb, they call it, and at the tip of the thumb, there is a grassy knoll that hangs over the Pacific Ocean The muddy trail to get to the thumb of God plunges into a darkened forest of spindly alders and stocky hemlock before pushing up into a salt-spray meadow. And then the thumb emerges—a sage-colored basalt knob with a jagged brown cliff face that’s as far out as you can get without tumbling into the ocean.

I hiked along the steep ridge to reach the thumb of God. On one side was the wild Pacific, the one I was taught to fear with its Japanese currents that create underwater earthquakes and tsunamis. It was not my Atlantic “pond” with its tributaries filled with crabs and oysters and rockfish that I grew up near.

The Pacific side of the ridge I hiked was raw and hollowed, cut out by the wind and water for millions of years. The other side of the ridge was a steep grassy slope that tumbled down to a valley far below that was the color of sea foam, golden wheat, lichen, moss, and naked deciduous treetops.

This is a volcanic thumb of God, formed during the Eocene 30 million years ago, millions of years before a written account of God existed. The thumb is an extrusive rock created by an

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underground volcanic stream that made a basaltic dike, the lava so thick that air bubbles could not relieve the pressure, so the lava pushed forward and out to the sea. The thumb of God was created by the inability to release pressure. How could something so unearthly in its magnificence be made from something that couldn’t breathe? Can something that remains afterwards be as great, if not greater than its origin? Twelve hundred feet below God’s Thumb, there is a small cove created when the basaltic dike was breached, and the Pacific’s waves gouged out softer stone in the formation. They are now stacks and scattered basaltic rocks on the beach below. In a hundred thousand years, fate will pull the thumb off God, and it will become an isolated sea stack, leaving ghosts and creating a giant monolithic.

I sat on the edge of the thumb that held me tightly to her rocky point. I was twelve inches away from the Pacific twelve hundred feet below me that surrounded me on three sides. I wanted to be part of the water, I thought, part of another mother, a mother that would hold me tight with her power and fill my lungs with water so I could no longer scream. But that day God’s Thumb wrapped itself around me and held me tight.

I watched a CNN interview where Anderson Cooper interviews Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two oldest brothers in a plane crash when he was ten. Colbert tells Anderson he learned “to love the thing I most wish had not happened.” Anderson, who is no stranger to grief himself, having lost his father at age ten and his brother, a year older than him by a year, to suicide when he was twenty-one, was stunned by Colbert’s answer, not because he is a man of faith but because he could not imagine being grateful for his losses. Cooper, choked up, asked Colbert

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with tears in his eyes: “Do you really believe that?” Colbert fell silent with a pause that hung out like it was God’s Thumb a hundred thousand years from now, when the thumb would drop into the Pacific, and the entire world would change. Was Colbert telling us to love the hardest thing in the world, the loss of someone who was our world, and then be grateful for experiencing the loss? “Yes,” Colbert replied to Anderson’s question. “It’s a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering.

There’s no escaping that.”

Colbert’s thumb drop is telling me to be grateful for what has happened to me, even if it is the worst thing because I have to be grateful to be alive. Whether or not I wanted certain things to happen in my life is irrelevant: what has happened, happened.

If I am alive, then what happens, happens. And that’s the deal.

You don’t get to say, “I’d like to be alive only if (insert the things you do not want to happen when you are alive).”

On the precipice that day, I slowly unwrapped myself from God’s Thumb and hiked down along the ridge, back through the saltspray meadow and darkened forest of spindly alders and stocky hemlock, not realizing how much heaviness had accumulated on my boots. I reached the car and hunted for the rental key buried in my jean’s front pocket. I took off my mud-encrusted boots and slapped their soles against each other—WHAP, WHAP, WHAP—much too loud for these quiet woods. I was hungry.

I drove down 101 to Barnacle Bills, a roadside seafood market that sells smoked Chinook salmon. The wooden sign on the side of the building read: “Oregon’s Best Smoked Salmon Since 1949.” There were easel signs, handwritten with “Seabass” and

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“Lingcod” and “Cash only.” I had stopped to get shrimp. The fishmonger was a stout middle-aged man with a short shaggy beard, an apron smeared with fish gut residue around his hefty girth, a friendly enough face that was topped off with a frayed Chicago Cubs cap.

“What can I get you, Miss?” he asked over the outdoor counter.

“I need to cook for five or six. I think four pounds should be enough. Does that sound about right?”

“Depends. If you are eating steamed—and we can steam them for you—I’d go with these.” And he points to the large expensive shrimp.

“I’m making shrimp and grits.”

“Shrimp and grits! Where you comin’ from Miss?”

“Baltimore.”

“They have shrimp and grits there? I thought they just had a lot of murders.”

Oh God, I thought, here we go again, yet another Pacific Northwest person who thinks Baltimore is The Wire.

I respond with a rebuke that surprises me, “We have the best crabs in the U.S.—the Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs—and we steam them with the best spice mix—Old Bay. And we have Rockfish, Striped Bass . . . and Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald,

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Ann Tyler, Laura Lippman, Billie Holiday . . . and Blow Toads.”

He stares at me like he’s impressed. Or surprised. Or both.

Maybe he thinks that I know what I’m talking about. But I am just winging it. I have been winging it for months now. I don’t know what will come out of me next. One minute I break down on a grassy knob wanting to be part of something bigger and wilder, and the next, I am defending Baltimore with Blow Toads. He packed up five pounds of the shrimp and handed me a piece of salmon jerky—which felt like a consolation prize to something I didn’t know I was in competition for. Or maybe he just saw that I was hungry.

— It was the photographs of the kitchen on the Airbnb website that convinced me to rent the Oregon Coast house the October after James died. The kitchen had an open layout with an island countertop that also served as an eating area with a few bar stools. There was a dining table that sat six. And there was a window above the kitchen sink that I imagined opening to the sounds of coastal waves and coastal birds. I wanted what was outside to come inside, inside me, its wildness devouring my grief, making it—and me—feel smaller. No one tells you that grief makes you feel monstrous and corpulent, that you bump into things you didn’t see before, and that the only thing that can bring you back to your body’s original size is being next to things bigger than you. Like ghosts. Like God. Like friends. I didn’t know who would travel during the pandemic to get here, but I pushed “pay” on the site and paid for two expensive weeks.

My best friend, Pascaline, flew in from Baltimore; Leslie, who

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had known James since he was a baby when he was given the nickname “Butter Bean”, drove from Portland, where she now lived after moving from Baltimore six years ago; Garrett’s two best friends from his Baltimore high school came, Grace from San Francisco and Jake, who moved to Portland from Baltimore and lived with James and Garrett in the little yellow house on Rosa Parks. Jake’s mother, Martha, also moved from Baltimore to Oregon and drove to the coast from Eugene. The one-way path was clear-cut by people in my life that migrated from Baltimore to Oregon, created with cross-country road trips and jet streams.

When Garrett left Baltimore on a cross-country trip to Portland after Christmas in 2015, with Jake, I cooked them a sendoff breakfast with their favorites: bacon, pancakes, and scrambled eggs. The boys lingered over their plates, scooping second and third helpings like it was their last meal for a week, postponing their goodbyes. I imagine the bacon smells permeated the fibers of their flannel shirts for the entire road trip.

The meals cooked in the coastal house included Pascaline’s Peruvian ceviche from the ling cod, tuna, scallops, and rockfish she bought at Barnacle Bills. I made the boys’ favorite beef stew, slow-simmered all day with laurel, rosemary, garlic, and red wine. Someone made a pot of chili one night. We were always gathered in the kitchen; in the morning, over pots of coffee, bacon, eggs, and bagels, lunch was leftovers, and then the start of the simmering smells of slow-cooked dinners filled the house. One morning I woke to see a new body sleeping on the pull-out couch; and another body was swaddled in comforters and faceless on the rug in front of the couch. I quietly scooped spoons of coffee and placed them in the filter and poured water into the canister. I pushed start and grabbed

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the dog leash. Beba, Garrett’s dog, waddled happily over to me for her morning beach walk.

The shrimp was for our last night in the ocean-worn cedarsided house. Jake and Martha were going to make shrimp and grits for us. Jake and James worked together in a restaurant called The Smokery, and I learned at the coast that it was one of his favorite dishes to cook. If you had asked me what James’s favorite meal was, I would have said Maryland crab cakes and his gram’s macaroni and cheese. Garrett would have said burgers. But here was his best friend, roommate, workmate, and bandmate, cooking what he knew was James’s favorite. To really know someone, even your own child, you have to cast the net wide to catch all the parts of them.

Bacon was on the stove. Jake cooked the strips until crispy and then placed them on a paper towel to absorb the fat, just like the way I cooked the bacon I put in James’ egg bagel sandwich every morning before school. The bacon molecules hung in the air like memories. I sipped my glass of wine while I sat on the bar stool, inhaling the emergence of a meal. Garrett was sitting on the couch playing music. Jake was now chopping the cooled bacon strips and tossing them with the raw shrimp; he turned the frying pan back on and warmed up the bacon fat he had saved. He placed each shrimp circularly in the frying pan, creating a culinary spiral jetty. Leslie brought her favorite Cajun spice, Slap your Mamma, the acclaimed secret ingredient in her gumbo. There was chatter and warmth while Jake doused the shrimp with Mama spice and sauteed them in the pan for a minute or two before flipping them over. Martha worked next to him on the stove, slowly stirring the pot of grits. She had put

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butter, a few tablespoons of heavy cream, and white cheddar cheese in the saucepan. She told us that stirring released the starches preventing the air bubbles that would make the grist lumpy. Making good grits was about the release of air pressure, unlike the volcanic stream that could not release its air bubbles, so it extruded itself and became God’s Thumb. God’s Thumb needed the companionship of its ocean mother so that it could be next to something bigger than it, making it feel less alone and, yes, less corpulent.

Someone behind me was setting the table. People were moving closer to the kitchen; the smells pulling us in like hungry dogs.

“How much longer?” someone asked. Jake removed the cooked shrimp and bacon, placed the chopped red bell peppers, garlic, and green onions in the same frying pan, and cooked for a few minutes before adding a little chicken broth, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice to the skillet. He stirred alongside his mom, in tempo, perfectly timed. Jake then added the shrimp and bacon to the skillet.

Wine was poured. The cheesy grits glistened in a big blue pottery bowl placed in the center of the table. Jake carried the shrimp skillet over from the stove and placed it on a trivet next to the blue bowl. We passed around the grits, each of us spooning a large dollop on our plates. Jake stood up next to me, picked up the cooked shrimp, and spooned a generous serving on top of my cheesy grits. My plate was beautiful: it was full of color and texture, with red, green, and yellow and a buttery sauce that oozed from the grits. The smell was a cacophony of the sea, of spices—cayenne pepper, garlic—and butter and cheese. Jake walked around the table, serving each of us generously.

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We sat around the table with our plates full. No one dared to go first. There was a long silent pause, but there was no praying to God at this table. There were shrimp and grits to be devoured among friends. But before we dug in, we raised our spoons to James.

Godly Shrimp and Grits INGREDIENTS: Grits • 1 cup quick-cooking grits • 4 cups water • 1/4 teaspoon salt • 3 tablespoons butter • 2 tablespoons heavy cream • 1 1/2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese Shrimp • 6 slices smoked bacon • 1 pound large shrimp, peeled and deveined • 2 teaspoons Cajun seasoning • 1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil • 1 red bell pepper finely chopped • 3 green onions chopped • 3 cloves garlic minced • 1/4 cup low sodium chicken or vegetable broth • 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce • 2 teaspoons lemon juice INSTRUCTIONS: Bring the water to a boil; add the salt and slowly add the grits.

Cover and cook over low heat for 5-7 minutes or until smooth and creamy. Remove from heat, and stir in the butter, cream, and cheddar cheese.

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In a large skillet over medium heat, cook bacon until crispy.

Place on paper towels to drain, reserving bacon grease. Coarsely chop bacon once cooled. Add shrimp to bacon fat over medium heat. Sprinkle with Cajun seasoning and cayenne pepper. Flip shrimp after one minute, and cook for an additional one minute.

Remove to a plate.

Add vegetable oil to skillet—if needed—over medium heat. Add red pepper and cook until slightly tender; 2-3 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add green onions and garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add chicken broth, Worcestershire Sauce, and lemon juice, to the skillet, and stir. Return shrimp and bacon to the skillet and heat for 1 minute.

Spoon the cheesy grits into a bowl and add the shrimp mixture.

Serve immediately.

NOTES: Quick grits taste best with this recipe. Boil the water then add the salt and grits. Bring back to a low boil and stir to combine.

Cover, turn to simmer, and cook until tender and creamy. Stir in the cream, butter, and sharp cheddar. It is just that simple.

Use good quality smoked bacon and don’t throw out the bacon grease. Or if you prefer, add a little andouille sausage.

Use wild-caught peeled deveined shrimp. Place them over medium heat in the bacon fat. Don’t overcook them. They only need about one minute on each side. They will be added back to the pan in the second part of the recipe.

Sprinkle the seasoning on the shrimp while it is in the pan. It is easy to do and works to sear into the shrimp.

Serve this recipe as soon as possible. Shrimp does not reheat well. It can easily get overcooked and rubbery.

147

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Rest in Peace

By Victoria Shannon

In Memoriam PFC Thomas Joseph Durham 15 December 1987 – 27 September 2010 Stoverton, Va. Please post your condolences below.

LORETTA D. (10/05/2010): Tommy, I can’t believe you’re gone. So young, so happy, so full of life. You kept us all laughing and now I can’t walk in the front door without hearing your voice. Your momma and your country are so proud of you.

Love you always and forever, Momma STEVEN G. (10/05/2010): That was a lovely service, Loretta.

I’m so sorry for your loss. Let me know if you need anything from the grocery.

JOSEPH D. (10/06/2010): Your momma said I should write something. You shouldna done that. Da MOLLY M. (10/06/2010): TJ, my heart is crying. You were the rock in my life, and now I’m not knowing what to do with

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myself. Nothing seems worth getting out of bed for. I miss you so much, babe. You were just about to be here for Christmas, and I already knew what I was going to get you. I can’t face the rest of my life without you.

JAMES T. (10/07/2010): Thomas left us too soon. I was lucky to have had such a happy, good-natured young man in my classroom. He was famous around school for his pranks, but he was always surrounded by friends. I was sorry that he enlisted before graduation. Condolences to the Durhams.

ALBERT E. (10/08/2010): This is Albert here. Mr. Tufts told me I could write something. I feel so bad for Loretta and Joe. Tommy was a patriot and gave his life for his country. Sometimes that happens, you know. Okay then, I just came down to the library to see if I could do this. I hope it works. I’ll be back at the Agway after. Signed, Albert MOLLY M. (10/08/2010): My love, I miss you so much, but I think of you every day from the second I get up. I just want to hold your hand and feel your strength one more time. I just can’t seem to be strong without you. Love you lots.

LORETTA D. (10/11/2010): Tommy boy, it’s me again.

I can’t believe it’s been two weeks already since they called. I still find myself crying at the drop of a hat. Yesterday it was in the car when I drove past the Dairy Queen and remembered that ice cream thing that you love. Loved. The Blizzard, I think.

That’s all it took me, just thinking about the Blizzard and you sucking it down like you’d never had one before in your life.

I just burst out in tears and had to pull over. Love you always and forever, Momma

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AGNES G. (10/13/2010): Oh, TJ, TJ, TJ. My best bud TJ. We raised a glass for you tonight at Ed’s, me and Doug and Rosa, and Little Phil and his girlfriend, the one who used to babysit Willa. We shared a bunch of funny stories and ended up singing that Nirvana song of yours at the top of our lungs. This morning, I was taking Becca to daycare and out of nowhere I swear she said your name. But when I asked her again she wouldn’t say anything. I know she misses you almost as much as I do. Love, Agnes EMILY B. (10/13/2010): Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13. Thank you for your service and sacrifice.

TIMOTHY R. (10/13/2010): I’m very sad to hear about Tom’s death. I didn’t know him well, but he was friends with my brother. Maybe you knew him, they hung out at Ed’s Tavern together. My brother’s still in Afghanistan, so please say a prayer for him, too. May Tom rest in peace. Timothy Rudden MOLLY M. (10/14/2010): TJ, you know damn well there’s no one on earth who loves you and misses you more than me. I can’t think straight ‘cause all these pictures of you keep floating in front of my eyes and messing with my mind. I stopped by your mom’s today. She’s not much better, so if you could send her a sign that you’re at peace, that’d really help. I could use a sign, too, you know. I’m lost without you, my love. You are my soldier hero.

ROBERT C. (10/15/2010): My condolences to the family of Tom Durham. I had the good fortune to be stationed with him outside of Kabul just before the incident, and I would like his

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family to know how much this young man impressed me. He was known here for his big smile, his sense of humor, and his friendship. His passing was a blow to his fellow soldiers, as well as to the country. I regret the circumstances. Sgt. Robert Cruze WILLA D. (10/19/2010): Momma’s all sad. I miss my big brother. That’s all. Willa AGNES G. (10/25/2010): Hey, Teej. Becca got dressed all by herself today. Big step for a 2-year-old. Well, she put her shirt on backwards but hey! It was awful cute. She’s looking more like you every week. Those big brown eyes and curly locks. I wish you could see her now. Love, Agnes. P.S. You know, all I wanted was for us to be a family.

MOLLY M. (10/26/2010): Don’t go believing everything you read, TJ. ROBERTO H. (10/26/2010): Find your remedy here! See why we call it the miracle cure. Read my blog to find out how it works. www.miraclefunguscure.com AGNES G. (10/27/2010): You would be proud of your exbae, Teej. I got promoted. Took Becca out to McDonald’s to celebrate and all we did was talk about you and what you were like, and she kept asking questions like what was your favorite color and did you have a dog and like that. I was all happy to her, but it made me sad inside. When we got home, I showed her that photo of you making Max climb the high school bleachers and laughing and now she wants a dog just like Max. See, you’re having an impact on her even from the great beyond. Love, Agnes

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LORETTA D. (11/03/2010): Well, Tommy, Halloween wasn’t the same without you. I laid out one bowl of mini-Snickers just for you. Aggie came by with Becca dressed up as a puppy, with floppy ears and even a tail – you know, with a wire in it so it stuck out. I think I saw it at the dollar store. I can’t tell you how damn adorable she was. A-door-bell, you used to say. I wish it was August and you was still sending emails through the computer and I knew my boy was coming home for Christmas.

I don’t know how other mothers do this. Love you always and forever, your Momma MOLLY M. (11/08/2010): Good morning, my darling! I dreamt about you last night, and it was kind of naughty so I won’t say any more. But another part was weird good. We were at a softball game and you were in the stands with me, and someone asked where you been all this time and you said, “Over at Molly’s.” I just beamed. It was all so real, it was like I woke up and the feelings were all there still inside me and it was like I was going to see you later. But then I remembered.

I missmissmiss you so freakin’ much, my love. I just want to go back to sleep and snuggle with you forever.

LORETTA D. (11/23/2010): Please come back, Tommy. I need you. I can’t do this. Willa is losing it. I had to go to the school today to get her ‘cause she wouldn’t leave, told everyone you were coming to pick her up like you used to. She held onto that railing so tight I had to pry her fingers off one by one, with her screaming like a banshee. For God’s sake, Tommy, help this kid. This is not right for age 13. Your da won’t have nothing to do with it. Please, Tommy, do something. Love you always and forever, Momma

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AGNES G. (12/04/2010): Hey, Teej, Becca named her imaginary dog Booboo. In other news, Molly got fired today.

Billy said it was like the seventh or eighth time she called in sick and he didn’t have much choice. I guess I sort of knew she hadn’t been behind the counter a lot lately. But, shit, just before Christmas. Love, Agnes MOLLY M. (12/05/2010): Jesus, Aggie, was that completely necessary?

MOLLY M. (12/05/2010): You know, just because my heart is broken forever and the love of my life died a horrible death at war in Afghanistan doesn’t mean you get to dump all over me in public. Besides, this is for TJ and me, not all you pretenders. I HAVE been sick, for crying out loud. The doctor said it’s almost like PTSD, which you never even got a chance to have, my darling.

I’ve been on this prescription for nerves and depression, but it doesn’t work for like weeks. Should be any day now. Anyway, I still wake up and reach across the bed for you every morning and maybe one day you’ll be there again. Lovelovelove you. (Teej is such an ugly name, by the way. I would never call you that.)

PHILIP E. (12/07/2010): Okay, so, Little Phil coming at ya.

Aggie said there’s shit going down here, and I just had to come see it for myself. Holy crap, T.J.! Dead or alive, you sure know how to stir up the ladies. Never mind, I’m not falling into that trap of writing like you’re actually reading this. I miss my buddy, that’s all I really have to say.

ROGER G. (12/08/2010): To Tom’s family: My name is Roger Gerriman and I served with Tom this summer before I was transferred. I got an email from his bunkmate Erol and that’s

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how I only just found out about his horrible ending. They say war is hell and I’m sorry that it was especially hellish for Tom. May he rest in peace and may your memories comfort you.

EROL L. (12/08/2010): I’m sorry I have not been in touch with Tom’s family. Rog told me where to find this. I was very shook up by Tom back in September and I wasn’t myself for a while. A real tragedy. Just so you know, it was right after three privates in our squad lost their lives from an I.E.D. He had a hard time with that – he was pals with two of those guys. Maybe that explains something. With my sympathies. Erol MOLLY M. (12/09/2010): Loveyoumissyouloveyoumissyou. I will remember that night at Q’s pool hall – was it only two years ago? – until my dying day. I caught you looking at me all the way from the other end of the bar. Or maybe I was looking at you first. What a studmuffin, I told Ross. When he told me you were a soldier, I knew we had to meet. And then! We spent your whole leave together. Of course, with your family a lot, too. I finally belonged to someone. We had the rest of our lives, T.J. Can’t stop crying. Loveyou.

LORETTA D. (12/15/2010): Tommy, I stayed up to midnight so I could be the first one to say it. Happy Birthday! Twentythree! My, how the years go by. Willa’s going to bake you a double chocolate cake, her first one ever, but I haven’t figured out yet who’s going to blow out the candles. Maybe we’ll just put it outside and you can have at it with the wind. Love you always and forever, your Momma. P.S. Willa’s a little better and finally stopped sleeping on the floor outside your bedroom. Thanks for whatever you did.

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AGNES G. (12/15/2010): HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TEEJ!!!!!

(TEEJ, TEEJ, TEEJ!) Miss your sweet smiling face like crazy, but I see it in Becca every day. Thank YOU for that gift. Love, Agnes MOLLY M. (12/15/2010): Happy birthday, darling! You’ll adore your presents – I got you a beautiful brown sweater and a book about softball. Have to run out to a doctor’s appointment but I’ll be right back. Hugs and kisses! (And that is such bullshit, Aggie, and you know it. How dare you.)

MOLLY M. (12/16/2010): Oops, I forgot to come back. Been sleeping for days, seems like. Must be these prescriptions. Then how come I’m not feeling better?

AGNES G. (12/17/2010): Hey, Teej, I was just reading back on all this stuff. What happened over there? Anyway, I finally want to say it out loud here ‘cause SOME people are in denial. Your DAUGHTER Becca is now learning to say dada to the photos of you. I’m not going to take that away from her. It wasn’t any big deal until a certain someone made it out to be. TJ, we were the best of friends and could have been forever, except for that slut waltzing in and breaking us up. The two best things I ever did in my life was have Becca, and forgive you. She’s a beautiful, chubby, spitting image of you, with your love of life hanging all out of her, and I treasure that, Teej. I’ll be there for her, even if you weren’t there for me. Love, Agnes MOLLY M. (12/18/2010): Jesus, Aggie. I’m borderline psychotic (the doctor said so) and all you can do is shame me in public in front of TJ and all of my friends. He loved ME. He might have had an accident with you, if it was even him, but

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that’s not LOVE. My pain is so deep I can’t think straight. You wouldn’t know what that’s like, being just FRIENDS and all. I didn’t go get pregnant and have a baby without a father. How irresponsible can you be.

LORETTA D. (12/20/2010): For pete’s sake, girls, knock it off. It’s bad enough I got Tommy’s dad staring into space and Willa suspended from school. This is the one place I thought I could find some peace of mind. Keep your bitching out of here.

Christ, I can’t even think what to write Tommy now.

JOSEPH D. (12/24/10): Have a great Christmas, Tommy, you chicken-shit. Your da LORETTA D. (12/24/2010): What the heck? Now you, too, Joe? LORETTA D. (12/25/2010): Merry Christmas, Tommy. Don’t you never mind about that other stuff. Just want you to know your momma is thinking about you and wishing you were here to give us some laughs, ‘cause everyone you left behind has gone a little loopy. Including me. I never realized how much we counted on you to keep us together. You always had a corny joke to break up the fighting. But don’t you worry about us. You are still the bravest boy I know. Love you always and forever, Momma PHILIP E. (12/26/2010): Little Phil here. Can’t stay away. This is better than Facebook. Way to go, T.J. WILLA D. (12/26/2010): Da got drunk at Christmas. Told Momma to stop talking to ghosts cuz my brother killed himself over at war and he ain’t in heaven. Shot himself in the mouth.

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I heard them yelling. Da said that’s not very brave. Now they’re not talking. I’m not talking, either. I don’t know who to tell.

Nobody’s talking in our house.

MOLLY M. (12/26/2010): TJ? Tommy? Darling? Is it true?

Your dad never told me any of this. It wasn’t no combat thing?

I don’t understand. But I love you, TJ. You are my hero, right?

I don’t understand!! Talk to me, TJ! PHIL E. (12/26/2010): Holy shit, Willa. You didn’t have to broadcast it, you idiot.

MOLLY M. (12/27/2010): My darling TJ, I don’t get it. Why would you do that? Didn’t I write you often enough? Weren’t you wanting to come back for us to be together? I’m all confused.

AGNES G. (12/29/2010): I’m so sorry, Molly. Could you please answer your phone? I’m sorry if I was mean. We had no idea.

Nobody knew anything. Just answer the phone.

MOLLY M. (12/31/2010): Never mind, TJ, I don’t care what happened. It doesn’t change what we have between us. We were meant to be together. It’s a new year, babe, time for a change.

You are my everything and I can’t live without you. I just won’t live without you.

Comments have been closed.

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Ladies Night

By Sarah Sullivan

We all went to warn her, because that’s what friends do.

She was a newer friend, but a friend nonetheless and if women didn’t even the playing field for one another, who would? The four of us piled into Giselle’s pearl Range Rover, the kind we all had; glossy, powerful, and much larger than required to accommodate our 2.5 children, though sometimes there was also a husband or a large friendly dog in tow. Except for Giselle who drove a sporty red BMW and carried a tan pug in a pink designer purse with a hole in the side so that Ms. Pugsley could pop her head in and out like a prairie dog. We arrived at Elizabeth’s house, all four of us, plus the purse pug, three bottles of burgundy and an agenda. Nothing written down, of course; we didn’t take ourselves that seriously!

“My darlings!” Elizabeth cried out with open arms when we reached her front door and we all hugged and exchanged butterfly kisses, cheek to cheek, like we hadn’t seen each other just four hours earlier at the pick-up in front of Marlborough Prep where all of our children attended school.

“We brought red!” Alexis said in a sing-song tone and we all sashayed into the marble hallway where voices echoed into the rafters that were ridiculously high like those at St. Simon’s, the Episcopal church we all attended every Sunday, because that’s what you did in the Heights whether you believed in God or

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not. Who knew if any of us did? We certainly never discussed it.

We all had large homes with neatly trimmed lawns, but Elizabeth’s was the largest and good for her! We trekked to the back of the house where the kitchen was located at the edge of the white wool carpet where the beige travertine began, but we knew we congregate there because of the red. If we had brought chardonnay or Chablis or even a rose, perhaps, we would have settled into the cushy chairs in the formal living room at the front of the house with the view of the mountains, the modern artwork, the fireplace. But, since almost every surface in Elizabeth’s home was white, everything of color remained in the kitchen, except at parties when Elizabeth hired someone, a Rosa or a LeRoy, to walk around discreetly with a clean cloth soaked in a solution of white vinegar and a touch of dish soap to remove any stains. It wasn’t that Elizabeth was high-strung. In fact, she was probably the most laid-back of all of us. But she took unusual pride in keeping a beautiful home, everything fresh and lily white including her long platinum hair, milky complexion, and eyes so pale that we weren’t sure if they were blue or gray.

We gathered around a small kitchen island which the interior decorator had recommended specifically for the purpose of “cozy gatherings.” There was a larger island, but that was strictly for cooking, or maybe just to fill up the acreage in the kitchen since none of us really cooked. Presumably, someone cooked in Elizabeth’s kitchen, or more likely, prepared food elsewhere and delivered it to the house, because her pantry and refrigerator were always full of savory snacks—crudité and hummus, tabouleh salad, almond-crusted liver pate.

“Come, sit, eat,” Elizabeth said, always the consummate hostess. We took our seats. She had already stocked the little

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island with sparkling water and an assortment of crackers, vegetables and cheeses.

“Let’s get this party started!” That’s what Taylor said, even though it wasn’t a party at all. Still, it had a celebratory feel.

“So, you get the house all to yourself this weekend. How amazing is that?” Alexis said, and we all agreed this was a boon. None of us could even remember if our husbands had ever taken the kids for the whole weekend. Only the nannies or sometimes the grandparents.

“I know! Right? This is a first for me too. I’m living the dream!” Elizabeth said, throwing both of her hands up in the air.

And her life was a dream, really, even more than the lives of the rest of us. Mostly, we liked our husbands but didn’t love them all that much, and our children had various concerns that kept us up at night, ADHD or anxiety or trichotillomania.

There was a mild case of autism in the group and a girl who surely had some type of personality disorder that wouldn’t fully blossom until she reached adolescence but, at eleven, she was already a bit of a nightmare.

But Elizabeth actually loved her husband. They were one of those rare couples that we might study under a microscope if we thought we could discover a way to replicate their particular chemistry. Then we would patent the recipe, sell it on QVC, and make a bajillion-dollars. They had been together since high school and, against all odds, had grown into maturity together at exactly the same rate like identical twins or cancer cells.

They had two children, a boy and a girl (of course) and it was hard to tell which one was the greater success—both charming, good-looking, excellent students, gifted athletes. Chloe played first chair French horn and Kyle had been invited to practice with the high school debate team even though he was only in

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middle school. You couldn’t dislike them, even if you wanted to—which of course, we didn’t—since they were genuinely kind and good-natured, just like their mother.

We chatted excitedly in the way best girlfriends do. The din grew louder while the wine was uncorked and poured into goblets, a wedding gift from some movie mogul, a roommate of Elizabeth’s husband in college. Ms. Pugsley, stimulated by the commotion, poked her head out of Giselle’s purse. Her pink tongue shot up her flat profile like a dancing flame.

“Oh, Ms. Pugsley, did you want to come out? Is that okay with you, Elizabeth? Where is Poppy?” Giselle asked after Elizabeth’s golden retriever.

“Oh, of course,” Elizabeth replied genially. “He can runaround in here. I’ll open the back door in case he wants to go outside. Poppy is with Tom and the kids, so I really do have the place all to myself.”

“Cheers to that!” we cried and held up our glasses and toasted Elizabeth’s blissful respite.

We covered a lot of territory right off the bat. We discussed the probability that the sixth grade science teacher, Ms. Benson, had had a breast enhancement over spring break. We sincerely hoped that this would advance her ongoing quest to attract Mr. Dixon, the hunky gym teacher, whom all of us kept dialed into the fantasy hard drives in our heads with pictures that we sometimes needed to access while having sex with our husbands.

“You guys are terrible,” Elizabeth said, but she giggled and blushed and covered her face with her hands.

We critiqued the retiring principal and made bold statements about the new one who would begin in the fall. “He had better be an improvement over this last moron or else!” and “For the fees we pay, all of our kids should be guaranteed a spot at Harvard.”

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Alexis and Taylor analyzed the new therapist they both were seeing individually, and Giselle talked about the triathlon that she was planning to do in June. We briefly lamented the booming homeless population that was taking over the city and pledged to give time—or at least money (probably money)—to address the problem. We exchanged notes on all the amazing and/or frustrating things our children were up to and laughed until at least one of us begged the others to stop so that she didn’t pee herself, and we all understood.

We were on our fourth bottle of wine by the time the sun was setting. It was one of those scarlet sunsets, the kind you sometimes see when wildfires are raging. But there were no wildfires this early in May. We sat together in the kitchen under the setting sun, five friends, four of whom were waiting for the right moment to say what they had come to say to the fifth.

“So, Elizabeth,” one of us finally relented. “How is it going with the new secretary?”

Elizabeth’s husband, Tom, had been lured to the Heights nine months earlier by the largest tech firm in the valley to run the R & D department. He was well known in the industry as a maverick and a fixer, and the company was sure he would be able to boost their bottom line which, anyway, was already higher than Mount Everest. He had inherited a secretary but Tom said she was a poor fit, so he sent her packing (she’d had a good run after all—nineteen years on the job) and hired a new one.

“Oh, I think it’s going really well,” Elizabeth said innocently, and she tossed her white mane over one of her slim shoulders, then gathered it up and tied it effortlessly into a perfect knot at the back of her head so that her long elegant neck was fully exposed. “Tom really likes her. He says she’s really good.”

“I’ll bet,” Gisele said darkly, placing her hand gently on top

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of Elizabeth’s hand and looking at her with a kind of condolence as if someone had died.

“What does that mean?” Elizabeth glanced around the room, half smiling, looking at our long faces. The poor dear didn’t know a thing. And she was like a deer, really, long-limbed and graceful with a kind of innocence about her. She would never see the hunters coming.

“Lizzie Beth,” one of us started, “we have something to tell you.” And, suddenly sober, we all nodded our heads.

She paused and then said, “Okay.” A tiny nervous yelp leaped out of her throat.

“Camille Johnson saw Tom having lunch with someone.”

“And?” Elizabeth asked.

“And it didn’t look good. I mean, Camille said it didn’t look like a business lunch.”

“What do you mean? What did it look like?”

“Well, I guess there was a lot of hand-holding and eye-gazing.”

“What? I don’t even—” Elizabeth looked confused.

“I mean, when did this happen? Did she say what this woman looked like?”

“Well, it sounded an awful lot like Tom’s new secretary.”

“What? How do you even know what Tom’s secretary looks like?”

“Well, we don’t really, but when Camille was telling us —” “When was Camille telling you this?” Elizabeth sounded irritated now. “Who was she telling? All of you?”

“Now don’t get upset with Camille. She’s just trying to help.

It was last week. We were all having lunch and Camille told us that she was really concerned because she had seen Tom the week before at Le Petit Pain with some woman. She described

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her to us and, well, it sounded like her. Ebony, that is.” Ebony, of course, was the name of the secretary in question. We all knew that the correct term was “Executive Assistant,” but we weren’t prepared to give the suspect her due. “I mean, who else does Tom know who would fit that description?”

“What?” Elizabeth kept saying as if somehow the word itself would bring clarity. “This doesn’t make sense. I’m sure it’s not what she thought. I mean, she’s not even his type and, anyway, everything is great with us. I don’t even know when he would have time to have an affair. He’s either at work or with us.”

“Well, he’s not with you now,” we had to remind her.

“What are you saying? she said incredulously. “You think he took his secretary along for a weekend with our children?”

We assured her that was not at all what we meant, how silly that would be. Of course, we weren’t suggesting that. Still, Tom did work a lot and traveled frequently and sometimes the secretary had to go along. Wasn’t that true?

“Well, yes,” Elizabeth said. “But I just don’t think —” Ms. Pugsley had been sniffing around at our feet, waiting for random bits of cheese or rogue crackers to fall from above. Once the conversation turned serious, the grazing ceased. When she could see that no tidbits were forthcoming, she walked across the kitchen into the next room and squatted, leaving a little yellow puddle that immediately soaked into the white carpet, after which she deposited a small brown excretion directly on top of the wet spot, which she then tried to bury by scratching at the short tight fibers.

“Oh my God!” said Giselle. “I’m so sorry.” She picked up Ms. Pugsley and tossed her out the back door. “Bad dog!” she said, slamming the door, and walked across the kitchen to where the paper towels were sitting on the counter.

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But Elizabeth hadn’t seemed to notice what was happening in her perfectly manicured home and instead had moved to the refrigerator, where she distractedly began piling carrots, yellow peppers, and several stalks of celery onto the counter. She pulled out a large wooden cutting board and began hacking away at the vegetables with a knife that she wielded like a machete.

While Giselle cleaned up Ms. Pugsley’s residuum, the rest of us sat around feeling something like guilt, but we quickly reclassified it in our minds into a sense of compassion for our newest friend, the woman in the kitchen mutilating the innocent vegetables.

“I just don’t think Camille got this right,” Elizabeth said, and we all shrugged and agreed that Camille was not a totally reliable source anyway, which led to some general quibbling and a few scathing remarks about the state of Camille’s own marriage and her propensity for exaggeration.

“Still,” Elizabeth paused, holding the knife in mid-air. “Tom has been working late a lot. He didn’t even get home until after nine last night. And he has been traveling more the last couple of months, which, come to think of it, was just after he hired Ebony. What kind of name is that anyway?” She stood perfectly still for another second and then wham! Off with another carrot’s head.

“I never understood what was wrong with the first secretary,” Elizabeth continued, now frantically chopping at any crudites that dared to roll toward her blade. “She was older, yes, but she had worked at the company for seventeen years, for God’s sake!

She was perfectly good enough for her last two bosses. But no, he just had to have Ebony.” She spat out the words with derision making air quotes over the name and almost piercing Alexis’ eye with the knife.

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We circled Elizabeth, leaped to her defense, patted her back, and said things like: “It’s probably nothing.”

“You can nip this in the bud.”

“Do you think Tom has a fetish?”

“It’s reckless, anyway, to have a young beautiful secretary.

Tell him he needs to fire her and hire a male assistant this time.”

And then, “Maybe we shouldn’t have mentioned it. I’m sure you’re distracted right now with Chloe and the whole anorexia thing.”

“What?” Elizbeth turned on us, knife in hand, and we all took a step back. “What anorexia thing?”

That’s when we explained, calmly and matter-of-factly, that the word around Marlborough Prep was that the health teacher was seriously concerned about Elizabeth’s daughter. She said Chloe looked too thin, seemed like she was losing weight, and only picked at her food in the cafeteria.

“We thought you knew,” we said and looked remorseful for having mentioned it at all.

“What the fuck is going on?” Elizabeth cried out. She slammed the knife down, aiming for a yellow pepper, but it missed the vegetable altogether and sliced the tip of her finger clean off. The knife clattered onto the hard surface of the island as Elizabeth released it reflexively, wrapping her good hand around the injured finger. “God dammit!” she shouted.

For a moment we all just gawked at the blood seeping between her fingers. Then Giselle went off to find a clean cloth or some Band-Aids. The rest of us circled Elizabeth. We draped our arms around her and began to herd her to a chair, but someone had let Ms. Pugsley back into the house and now she ran in front of us to retrieve a piece of the bloody pepper

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that had fallen to the floor. She darted in front of Elizabeth’s feet, tripping her so that she fell. Her body lay halfway between rooms, her lower half on the travertine, her upper half splayed onto the white carpet. Alexis fell right over the top of her, causing her wine glass to fly out of her hand, spritzing the room with burgundy. She toppled a small table on her way down and a picture of Tom and Elizabeth smiling into an Italian sunset fell and jetted across the kitchen floor. Elizabeth lay on the ground, spent, and began to whimper softly. We surrounded our newest friend as Giselle arrived back with a first aid kit in hand. We looked at each other knowing that, despite this unfortunate series of events, we had done the right thing. Even if we had slightly overstated Camille’s concerns and perhaps the gym teacher hadn’t used the word “anorexic.” But Chloe was very thin and, anyway, women had to watch out for one another, didn’t we? We knew that the balance of things had been disrupted and we were just setting things right. Besides, no one really had a perfect life.

We all sat stroking Elizabeth’s long hair, making consoling murmurs. Just then, Ms. Pugsley ran across the floor and began to wretch and wheeze. In retrospect, one of us probably should have leaped up and shooed her outside, but we would have had to abandon Elizabeth, whose blood was flowing freely now.

In a final convulsing heave, Ms. Pugsley expelled a piece of something—yellow pepper or possibly the tip of Elizabeth’s finger. We looked around at one another earnestly, and as we watched poor Elizabeth’s blood pool into the white carpet, we silently agreed that it was a very good thing we had come.

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FICTION

Egg Baby (NOVEL EXCERPT)

By Sarah Zoric

When I was in the 8th grade, a girl named Canaan Twentyman was killed on our class trip to an amusement park. We rode in a school bus to get there, and I remember it took forever, especially on the way home. I think it was somewhere near the center of New Jersey. There was this ride called Devil’s Drop.

It was featured in their commercials. Devil’s Drop was why we wanted to go. Plus, my friends thought we’d meet cute boys from other schools and that they’d probably have alcohol. It was an important thing to experience together before going off to high school. Only the freaks pretended not to care.

But then Canaan died, and we had to leave. Which was, of course, what we should have done. You can’t watch a classmate die and then get a cotton candy. On the bus ride back, our teachers didn’t speak. Neither did we. I always found that suspicious. That nobody was suspicious. Nobody asked me what I’d seen. What kind of school had we been going to? What kind of place wouldn’t properly investigate a girl’s death?

It’s been twenty years since I’ve thought about Canaan Twentyman; then my eye started to hurt—the right one. It’s been going on for a few weeks and getting worse, not better.

Maybe it’s staying the same; I’m not sure. I’m finding it hard to

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remember how it used to be. I finally saw an ophthalmologist about it, who said that I’m riddled with unresolved guilt. He said that. I’m not sure he’s right. I’m not sure he’s wrong. I don’t even know if he knows what he’s doing.

Instead of diplomas or pictures of eye diseases on the exam room walls, Dr. Edwards had a framed photo of himself standing beside someone who might have been Morgan Freeman. It was a regular photo, 4 X 6, which seemed kind of small to hang up.

The two could have been brothers, with Dr. Edwards being the younger of the two. Morgan Freeman’s kid brother, that’s how alike they looked. I could have asked him if they were related and whether the other man was indeed Morgan Freeman, but that’s not the kind of personality I have.

When Dr. Edwards was through with my eye exam, he rolled back on his stool and put his hands on his manly thighs. “Vision and eye pressure are normal,” he said.

“What else?”

“Your eyes look healthy.”

“So, what is it? What do you think?”

“I think you should never underestimate the power of stress,” he said.

“I’m not stressed.”

“You told me you were when you first walked in. Rachel, do you remember saying that?”

I said no such thing. I’d said leaving work early wasn’t something I wanted to make a habit of doing, that finding a cab sucked, and that I refused to use Uber and let the few cabs there were left go out of business. It had started to drizzle, and I had commented on that too. “Will you call me with the results?”

I said.

“I just gave you the results.”

“Egg Baby (novel excerpt)” 169

“Are you sure?”

“Listen, there’s nothing wrong with feeling overwhelmed. A lot of people feel that way.” He was one of those types. Starting every sentence with, “Listen.” Or worse, “Look.”

So, I took control of the appointment. “Something happened a long time ago,” I said.

“Something you feel guilty about? Something you experienced?”

“Those are two different things.”

“Do you need help working through it?”

And then I lost control of the appointment. “I’m not crazy,” I said, which was something only a crazy person would say.

“Rachel, whatever stigma you’ve attached to needing a professional’s help, please know—” “Please know what? That it’s trendy to be nuts?”

“I’d like to help you feel less guilty about taking care of yourself,” he said.

It’s been twenty years since I’ve thought about Canaan Twentyman— well, that’s not true. I think about Canaan Twentyman all the time. Her death is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me. I’d wanted Dr. Edwards to ask me what I meant when I said, Something happened a long time ago. To be intrigued by my vagueness. A deep conversation with a handsome doctor would have been a nice way to end the day. Over a drink, even nicer.

“Rachel? What are you thinking?” He was at his sexiest.

“There was an incident,” I said.

“Something a professional could help you work through?”

He was, at his least desirable.

“This isn’t some glamorous mental health crisis if that’s what you’re thinking.” He didn’t bite. Which was too bad because I had a good story to tell, and he was making me not want to tell it.

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I like to repeat The Tale of the Tragedy at Thunder Park.

Retelling the story, with subtle adjustments based on my audience. I don’t care if someone says, You told me already—I tell them anyway. It’s a great story, and hearing it ten times would be better than hearing something boring even once. But Dr. Edwards didn’t care. Instead, he wrote something down, and it wasn’t a yummy snoozy prescription. It was the name of a therapist. His handwriting was neat, like how cartoonists draw blades of grass.

“Nice handwriting,” I said, and he opened the exam room door.

2.

You must be at least this high to ride this ride.

I got to sit next to Canaan on Devil’s Drop. She wasn’t quite tall enough—but I told her to stop being a loser, and now she’s haunting me, that little nobody. Making my eye hurt, all because the Devil dropped her.

Boom. Boom. Boom. There’s a storm coming. At.Thun.Der.Park!

3.

In the 8th grade, I missed a lot of school. I stayed home in February with the kissing disease, which I’d unfairly gotten without any kissing. I was a zombie, barely awake in the middle of the day, with glands the size of plums and a spleen

“Egg Baby (novel excerpt)”

171

my pediatrician checked periodically. But I’d lost a few pounds having mono, and my mother was jealous. My lunatic of a mother wanted what I had. It was just A FEW pounds. While I was sick, I saw her drink from my glass more than once.

After a month, I felt better. But then my father died, so I stayed home for another month. While I didn’t want him to die, unfortunately, the reality is that the only interesting thing about my father was his deadness. I desperately hoped he’d been murdered. I invented scenarios so vivid they kept me up at night. Exciting scenarios happening like movies in the dark of our living room.

For a while, I rarely left the apartment. Didn’t speak to many people either. I had to be careful because there was a camera in our bathroom mirror and microphones in the ceiling. My father was a mafia informant, a rat. No, he was involved in the 93’ world trade bombing. Fourteen-year-old Rachel Nelson knows more than she’s saying. Not on the news tonight? Tomorrow night for sure. Everyone was discussing me, me, me.

A social worker in a schmatta, the color of a dead salmon, told me how he really died. She sat me down on the yellow paisley couch where I slept, with its right arm worn thin by my father’s own right arm. He had a heart attack while betting on horses, Sweetie. My father fell to the ground at the racetrack and stopped kicking, a losing ticket in his hand. I don’t know for sure the part about the ticket.

“We should all be so lucky,” the social worker said. “He really went very quickly.”

“Your father is with the horses now. The ones, you know, the ones, when they break their legs, and they shoot them?” my mother said. She laughed, and it was inappropriate, but she was a new widow, so it was temporarily okay.

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His friends, the men from the racetrack who smoked short cigars, liked to slap each other’s backs like they were horses.

These men would ring the intercom but not come up, signaling for my father to come down to their Crown Vics. Arguably more polite than a horn, they’d tap the intercom a couple of times like code. I knew these men when he was alive, but not well. They called our apartment a lot after he died and came over just once. They brought a lasagna, and my mother thanked them for paying for the cremation. It’s a pleasure. Least we can do.

One of the men was surprised we wouldn’t be sitting shiva.

He asked my mother when she would return to work. This same man stared at my chest, which would have been flat if I wasn’t so heavy. He passed gas, and instead of pretending he hadn’t, he said, Well, excuuuuuuse me. He made us uncomfortable, this man, so my mother called him the worst curse word that exists. Then all the men left. A few days later, she made me send each one a thank-you card—even the cunt.

4.

My dull, nobody mother was the kind who gave birthday cards that she’d personalize with, Dear so-and-so/Love, Lilly. Never more than that. She was sullen and timid, living so deeply in the past that she often asked me if I remembered relatives who died long before I was born. It was as though her personality had been surgically removed.

My mother collected Disney figurines. She had about a dozen of them, all around the size of my thumb. She complained that the characters weren’t as colorful and cute as

“Egg Baby (novel excerpt)” 173

they were in her videos. She displayed them in a wood cabinet with glass shelves. Dusting them weekly, singing to them more often than that. They were the only thing in apartment #506 that was looked after and kept up. After my father died, the figurines were neglected.

One night, shortly after my father’s ordinary death, my mother suggested we do something nice together. Let’s have a spa day. It was late. She wore her robe. I didn’t have one, so I changed into my best matching pajamas. They had Santa Claus wearing Hawaiian shirts on them. We’re Jewish. It was April.

My mother painted my toenails hot pink, and I did her fingernails in the same bright color. The bottle said it was called Watermelon. I sniffed the polish to see if it smelled like fruit, but it didn’t. A smear of pink stuck to my nose, and we laughed about it. Since we didn’t have cucumber slices to rest on our eyes, we used spoons. I put them in the freezer to make them feel chilled and special. It was my idea. Then we used them to eat with. We ate and ate and ate. Scraping the bottoms of baking dishes that people had cooked to console us. Picking all the crusty parts off the sides with our fingers.

Then my mother boiled a large pot of water and called me over. “Lean your face,” she said. “Keep your mouth closed.

Stop it, you’ll choke on the steam.”

“It’s hot,” I said. “What’s this for?”

“Acne,” she said. “Lean.”

I had bangs, and they were wet and sticking to my face. She pushed my hair back with one hand and used a washcloth to wipe my forehead with the other. The fan over the stove was on, so I couldn’t hear much. Then my neck pushed against the hot edge of the pot—the one she used to make kneidlach for soup.

I swallowed and felt the hot metal. She pushed my head lower

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SA R A H ZOR IC

and lower. My slacked bangs melted forward, hanging in my eyes. They’d grown while wet as hair does. A little more, a little lower. I was dizzy from the heat and unsure if she was talking. I may have been imagining the pressure of her hand, but then my chin hit the water, my bottom lip too, the tip of my nose. That’s when I felt the pee drip down my legs. Puddles.

I jerked from her hold, backed away from the steam, and opened my eyes. My toes were smeared. My mother took a spoon to the pot and fished out a hot pink half-moon. “This came off your nose,” she said.

5.

It was boring and a little scary being home. My father refused to haunt us, so I started looking out our living room windows for something to do. I wasn’t a reader, and I’d stopped watching television. When I did, it was without volume. I didn’t want my mother to mistake the sound for an invitation.

My school was across the street from The Garfield Hill Apartments, where we lived. Close enough to read the graffiti, tell the time on the clock tower, hear if someone set off the fire alarm. When I heard rain on the windows, so did school. When I had a snow day, school took the day off too. It’s possible my parents chose to live in Garfield Hill because of its proximity to school, but more likely, it was cheap.

Downstairs from us was Heaven, a bakery older than a great-grandmother. #1 Chinese, which used to be a pizza place and a shoe repair called, The Shoe Exorcist, that a supposed pervert owned. Their motto was, Saving the Soles of Shoes. But the

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most useful store below our apartment was the bodega.

If you called the bodega’s phone number, which I never had a need to, Mr. Reddy would have probably answered, Hello, Blue Ribbon. 411 would know the store as Blue Ribbon too. The sign above the door read, Blue Ribbon. But nobody called it that, no matter how hard they tried to get us to. Because Mr. Reddy had braces, and he was too old to, a few kids called the bodega Brace Face. Called him Brace Face, too. Kids like Marcus May did that.

An old lady worked with Mr. Reddy at the bodega. She may have been Mrs. Reddy, but more likely she was his mother, who would also probably be named Mrs. Reddy. This woman read newspapers in a different language all day. Sitting in a white plastic chair blocking the candy section so that kids couldn’t steal. Coughing in front of a red curtain that led to a secret room where I think they might have lived. Picking up items and putting them in places they didn’t belong. Dusty cans of corn mixed in with the school supplies—things like that. She was the professional nuisance type.

Anyway, I started looking out our windows, and in doing so, I found a television program I actually enjoyed. I saw Mrs. Reddy do stretches in the parking lot and the women who worked at Heaven arriving before the rest of the world was awake. The son of #1 Chinese’s owners played on his scooter most days after school. I saw Mosely City Middle open and close. I watched who was late or cutting class and which teachers smoked. The isolated versus the popular, shoulders hunched or back. I saw hands slap, and heard doors slam, and witnessed probably a few drug deals. Kids without dead fathers crossed Welling Avenue.

Mrs. Martin took down the hood of her raincoat in the middle of a storm. Certain boys wore shorts to practice in the cold.

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Boys like those, like Marcus May, were impervious.

It was how the world below moved that was so interesting to me. I found that the rules we followed were made up. It turned out that anyone could change them at any time. Marcus May was the most popular because he told us he was. Tia and Emily were my best friends because they were available. My nickname was Puddles because I let them call me that.

With one eye closed, I liked to take my pointer and thumb and pinch certain people’s heads off—then all their heads off. Watching people’s vulnerability should have made me uncomfortable. Instead, it delighted me. Those people were strangers—ants who picked their noses and wedgies. Ants tripping on nothing. Walking backward and talking while they did. Laughing so loud I could hear them if I opened the windows. Laughing as though they hadn’t considered only crazy people laugh like that.

One time I saw my mother below. It was surprising because she rarely left her room. Although I knew for sure it was her in the parking lot, I searched apartment #506. I looked in the refrigerator, behind the shower curtain, and in the hall closet. I called her mother, but on that day, I sang out, Mama, Mom, Ma, Mommy. And yet, there she was, wearing slippers and a down jacket—the long type that looks like a sleeping bag. There she was, looking particularly insane and possibly homeless. Mother’s brown hair with the gray stripe. Mother’s body, shaped like an upside-down triangle. All shoulders, torso wide as a chalkboard, and itty-bitty spider legs. There she was.

From my window, I watched my mother do something strange. She lifted the door handles of parked cars. She’d lift one, then walk onto the next, stopping only once she’d triggered an alarm. I was proud of her for a moment since she was no

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longer boring. But the very next moment, I wanted boring back.

6.

Canaan and her sister Temple were both in my grade, although they weren’t twins. They wore pants, which I would never have dared do, weighing as much as I did. Moseley City Middle was one of the first public schools in New Jersey to implement a uniform policy: maroon shirts with khaki pants or a khaki skirt. We could still stab each other for sneakers, but we had to look the same from the ankles up. I chose the skirt. A pleated skirt can make even the worst physique feel provocative.

Anyway, Canaan and Temple Twentyman were pants girls.

Temple often wore a shirt with white spots across the front.

You could see them peeking through the opening of her jacket.

Bleach stains, I think. Her jacket and backpack were not militarystyled but rather military-issued, I believe. The Twentymans lived in Garfield Hill, too. As did asshole Marcus May. There was a rumor that the Twentyman girls had a morbidly obese mother who never left the apartment. I heard that when Temple was born, her mother told the delivery nurse that the father could be twenty men. The nurse heard Goody Twentyman, and that was how the sisters, not twins, got a father.

The sisters, who weren’t twins, had long, every-color hair: black, brown, auburn, red, strawberry-blonde, blonde, white, and gray. It was long, down to their khaki belt loops. Canaan wore hers in a high ponytail pulled so tight it expanded her forehead and yanked her eyes up. Temple’s multi-colored hair was usually in a French braid and not a very good one. Canaan

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was as small as a fifth grader. Temple was a foot taller. Neither girl was beautiful. Both looked mixed, maybe Hispanic. Both had acne—we all did.

Canaan, being so small, struggled with her backpack. She wore it on two shoulders, which nobody did. The pink load almost reached the back of her knees. Maybe Canaan was born prematurely; she was so tiny. She looked like one of my mother’s Disney figurines, Tinkerbell, probably. Canaan ran as a child would across Welling Avenue, and though she was a child, she was also fourteen.

For a while, the Twentymans were my favorite people to watch. Then someone unexpected offered serious competition.

From my window, I could also see a metal coffee cart. It was on the sidewalk in front of school, across from Garfield Hill.

It was the kind of breakfast cart that sells coffee, bagels, and danishes. The kind that’s the size of a large closet. You can find these carts all over the city and in urban New Jersey, and I don’t know where else. They are the pigeons of food service. The one I noticed was so ordinary it was invisible, but when the sun hit, the reflection was blinding.

There was a guy working inside. He smoked cigarettes and looked old enough to buy alcohol.

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Biographies & Recommendations Louise Bokkenheuser Louise covered art, war, and politics for the Los Angeles Times before becoming Foreign Editor at The Daily Beast, Newsweek, and HuffPost. She is a Pulitzer finalist and has won the Overseas Press Club Award. Her first book was published in her native Denmark in 2009. The Queen of Denmark awarded her the 2016 Ebbe Munck Prize for her writing.

Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys Maddie Cowan Maddie is an Iowa-based freelance editor and bibliophile (aka a novel writer who procrastinates by reading excessively).

Her favorite (self-made) genres of fiction to read and write include epistolary, queer with a happy ending, “complex female characters,” and unexpected points-of-view. She also enjoys film photography, re-watching the same three shows, wandering around New York City, and perfecting her homemade caramel latte.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

180 Biographies & R ecommendations

Nikki DeLeon Nikki is an essayist and fiction writer. This anthology features the opening chapters of her novel. During the day, she writes about art; at night, she writes about generational trauma and politely asks her beagles not to howl. She lives in Arizona with her husband and first reader, Scott, who supplies her with all the love and LaCroix a neurotic writer could need.

Chandler Ford Chandler Ford is a writer of speculative fiction. His short stories are primarily concerned with topics such as religion, technology, sexuality, and memory, as well as the great many intersections between them. He was born and raised in the suburbs of Dallas but presently resides in Chicago with his cat Gayle.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera Priya Gadagkar Priya lives in California with her husband, daughter, yoga mat, and 190-degree hot pet cappuccino. A former business consultant, then public school educator, she is determined to pursue her downward salary trajectory by now becoming a writer—partly because she self-published a historical fiction, Reva, set in India, but mostly because she fell in love with the process.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

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181

Rachel Greenley Rachel Greenley lives in Seattle with her husband and dog, cheering on her college-aged twins from afar. Her writing explores selfhood in work, nature and community. The only thing she doesn’t like about books is the weight they add to her backpack. She has no idea what’s next but is at peace that she’ll figure it out.

Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams Moby Dick by Herman Melville Oona Kelly Oona Kelly writes fiction and lives in Seattle. Although she considers herself “indoorsy” for a Pacific Northwesterner, she puts this down to being born into the wrong biome. She loves to travel, especially to swimmable beaches, but equally to be cozy at home with her two cats and one human. And, of course, a good book.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton The Friend by Sigrid Nunez Edmée Lepercq Edmée Lepercq lives in London, UK, where she works as a journalist and writes essays. She likes to procrastinate by playing Wordle and eating pumpkin seeds.

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

(translated by Sophie Hughes)

182 Biographies & R ecommendations

Ana Nissan Ana has lived in Colorado, Tel Aviv, and New York City (where she currently resides). She primarily writes fiction, but for a time found herself working in journalism covering breaking news in the Middle East.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates Christine O’Donnell Christine O’Donnell is a nonfiction writer working on a collection of personal essays. She explores familial relationships, issues around self-worth, and truth in memory. Christine currently works as a university writing consultant, and in her free time, she travels.

Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera Bird By Bird by Annie Lamott Robin Reif Robin Reif is a New Yorker whose heart is in Northampton with her daughter, Sophie, a college student, and in Rhinebeck with her partner, Don. Her current project probes a journey through the crucible of obsessive love toward selfhood, stability, and significance. Bennington Writing Seminars has made a powerful impact on her work and life. Once an alumna, she’s determined to do it proud.

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

Biographies & R ecommendations 183

Claire Salinda Claire Salinda writes essays, reads tarot, and surfs in LA, where she was born and raised. However, she spent most of her adult life in NYC and feels like that famous “Shouts & Murmurs: N.Y.C. to L.A. to N.Y.C. to L.A., Ad Infinitum” piece about the whole situation. Her writing explores this conundrum and the themes of nostalgia, power, place, and identity.

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by DJ Waldie Two Cities by Cynthia Zarin Kristin Seeberger Kristin splits her time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Friesland, Netherlands, with stops in between to make sure she collects as many sunrises and sunsets as possible. When not writing essays about liminal space, she takes photographs of things that bewitch her. She is a trustee and a volunteer at two nonprofits in Baltimore, The Creative Alliance and Love in the Trenches (LITT).

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter Victoria Shannon Victoria has been an editor, reporter, and columnist at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune in Paris. She now writes and edits from the Hudson Valley of New York. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals, including Narrative, The Write Launch, and Broad River Review, and in the anthology “Tales From the Deep.”

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

184 Biographies & R ecommendations

Sarah Sullivan Sarah Sullivan writes from her home in Montana where she lives with her husband, three children, and two herding dogs. Her goal is to publish at least one memorable story in a respectable magazine or journal before she dies peacefully in her sleep surrounded by family and friends at the age of 87.

The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry Sarah Zoric Sarah Zoric lives in Southern Vermont with her husband and two dogs, Jacques and Kate Woofington. She enjoys fly fishing, talking about New Jersey, and complaining about writing.

Heft by Liz Moore The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz