Gina Wiste The Thousand Mile String

As I walked, a taxi skidded past and threw up sludge at me from the side of the road. I’d started to think things like that happened on purpose, probably owing to too much time spent with Raymond. All around in a Brooklyn symphony free of charge, taxis honked at the bicyclists cutting them off, and the bicyclists swore and proceeded to cut them off anyway. They all squirmed like beetles, niggling under my coat and scratching at my skin. Overhead, even the last birds stupid enough to stay in New York had had enough of the winter and flew southward.

It was two o’clock on a Saturday in January and so I was going to see Raymond. I passed a girl and thought she was coughing into her leather glove, but then I remembered my hair and realized she was laughing. She had a laugh like Sofia did, back when we were girls and she’d laugh at my portraits. I drew them silly just for her, to make her smile.

Now Sofia works somewhere in Sudan for Doctors Without Borders and when she gets some internet connection she always calls me. She tells me she’s lonely, always lonely. With some five thousand (she’s the math one, not I) miles between us, there’s nothing I can do but assure her that I am too, nothing I can do but be lonely with her. That’s something I seem to do a lot of, be lonely with other people. That’s what I was on my my way to do.

Raymond was in the second pew from the back when I arrived in the church, turned around to face the door. I dipped two fingers in the bowl of water by the door and drew the obligatory cross upon myself: forehead, lips, chest. It doesn’t very much matter to me, as I stopped believing in God the day after my eleventh birthday when my pet rat got caught in the radiator. But I know it matters to Raymond, so I go through the ritual every time I come.

“Your hair,” he called in his hoarse voice, graveling like a smoker’s but never having known a cigarette. His black and white collar pinched his solid neck, maybe his vocal cords as well.

I fingered my dishwater green locks. “It’s not supposed to look this way.” Our voices echoed in the empty church as in a cave, the incense candles on chains hanging from the ceiling like stalactites. “I’m too old for it to be intentional. I went too cheap on the hair dye this time.”

“On the Seventh Day, the Lord ruled against cheap cosmetics, Amelia.” Raymond tapped the frame of his bifocals, then waved me closer. “Come, I’ve saved a little room for you.”

He slid over and I sat down in the pew next to him, breathing in the smell of the

peppermints he keeps in his pockets. It’s a safe bubble next to him; the rest of the church reeks of incense and the musty odor of an old wine cellar.

“How is Sofia?” Most would inquire first as to my own well-being, but Raymond knew me well enough to know that my sister’s well-being was what determined my own. He turned up the volume on his hearing aid. “Just to be sure,” he always says.

“I haven’t heard from her in two weeks.” “That’s not unusual, is it?” “No, but it’s long.” Raymond sighed. “Sometimes it’s the ones we want that make us wait the longest.” “Her birthday is in two days. She’ll be thirty-two. I want to call her then.” “What will you tell her?” “I’ll sing happy birthday and ask if she’s still lonely.” “You’re afraid she won’t be.”

I swallowed hard, my tongue turning to cotton. Our loneliness was the only common experience that still bound us, and I kept that thread knotted so tightly around my finger it turned blue. I nodded, and then changed the subject.

“Any luck with the Diocese?”

“Still threatening to consolidate us with St. Mark’s,” the priest said softly, hushed as though speaking the prognosis of a dying child. His voice shook. “Not enough people come to Mass here anymore.”

“We could run an ad in the paper,” I hurried to suggest, somehow feeling my personal atheism to be at fault. “Or better yet, online.”

He wiped his eyes and laughed, low and rumbling like thunder. “Evangelization for the twenty-first century.” But then his face fell again, skin dragging at every wrinkle and line on his face, and I realized I had no idea of his age. “But if they don’t want to come, they won’t come.”

“You can’t give up so quickly! I—” I shook my head and gathered my hair into a ponytail, my voice sinking an octave. “I’m offering to help you. Sofia liked this church.”

“She came here often?”

“Very. She told me she sat in the first row, left side, right before the altar. Always. She’d kneel beside the pew if there wasn’t any space left.”

“That’s where I found you the first day we met, Amelia.” Raymond tilted his head back, remembering, and I slipped into the six-month-old memory right alongside him. I saw myself as an observer, saw Raymond limp out from his office and lay eyes upon the thirty-year-old woman crouched in tears in the pew. The woman in a dress

not made for a church, who watched the Crucifix for any sign of the comfort her sister found in it. I saw Raymond lean his cane against the outside of the pew and sit down beside her, and I saw the woman collapse onto him as if they were old friends and tell him the story of how she’d been left by her sister Sofia, the only friend she had ever had.

“That wasn’t a coincidence.”

Raymond held my gaze so firmly it felt like an embrace. “I know.” His words tickled the air so softly I could have imagined them. I turned away, watching the stained glass soaking up whatever bleak rays the winter sun had to offer. Specks of dust swam around in the light, getting close and sticking before swirling away like people changing partners in a dance.

The priest rested his hand upon my shoulder. I felt it tremble ever so slightly. “Come,” he said, using me as a prop to stand. “I have something I’d like to show you.”

Raymond took his cane in his bony hands, clutching with white knuckles, and hobbled out of the pew. Even with his limp he still lowered himself to kneel, slowly like his muscles and sinew were rickety elevator system, and made the Sign of the Cross. I wondered idly what it was like to have such devotion as to make pain dull, or to make the pain worth bearing.

My devotion was on the other side of the Atlantic, or even the Pacific if you went the other way around, tethered to me by a string of thousands of miles. A string that, I realized, she could cut at any second and leave me behind clutching naught more than fraying edges in shaking hands.

Raymond led me to his office, a small box-like room behind the confessionals. There was a desk, a cloth-covered table to the left of the door, a crucifix on the wall, and hardly any room for anything else. He flipped on the light switch and the bulb overhead fizzled and buzzed before petering out altogether.

“I can see well enough anyway,” I told him. I went to the little table, expecting to see Bibles and rosaries and other religious trinkets but instead finding a black-and-white framed photograph of two young men atop a stack of Johnny Cash albums. Beside them, a miniature record-player.

“What’s all this?” I traced the top edge of the frame, and came away with a sticky film of dust clinging to the pad of my finger.

“Mine,” Raymond said simply, a chuckle bubbling at the back of his throat. “Yours?” “I’ve been at St. Agnes since I was a very young man, Amelia, and I daresay I haven’t

changed too much. Aside from the obvious, of course.” He gestured fluidly to the length of his body and paused to cradle at his stomach paunch.

“This is you?”

“And a friend, yes.” Raymond picked up the photograph gingerly, and as soon as his fingers touched the frame his voice took on a different quality, far off and hollow as if spoken through a tin-can on a string a world away. “Both of us went to seminary, but only I stayed. He always joked he was too handsome for a life like that.”

“You weren’t too bad yourself,” I said and blushed, cursing myself for being so rudely forward. I apologized hurriedly, quietly.

Raymond laughed again, but it was choked and stifled at the back of his throat. A barely audible difference but I recognized it: the reins of sorrow that pull back on an unfitting happiness.

“We were like you and your sister are, Amelia,” Raymond said. “Thomas and I. As the saying goes ‘joined at the hip’ but we were joined at the soul. Until he left the seminary, we had never been farther than across the street from each other.”

“Let me guess, he went to South Sudan, too?” I said lightly, trying to throw a sprinkle of humor in the situation, but he, unlike me, didn’t like to sugarcoat his feelings. He answered me solemnly.

“No, he went even farther. Wall Street, and I never saw him again. I’ve been waiting for him ever since. You’d think after fifty-six years in the same parish, same place, he’d know…” His voice trailed off. “But then again, there are eight million people in this city. That doesn’t tip the odds too much in my favor.”

I should’ve said I’m sorry, should’ve done anything but stare gap-mouthed at him, my jaw hinging open and shut as though cranked by a gear. My fingers fiddled with my ring as though it was the force keeping me rooted to this earth. In the photograph, I could almost see the faintest of strings running heart to heart between the two boys like a telephone wire.

Fifty-six years without seeing your own reflection. It had been two weeks without seeing mine and I was already forgetting who I was. Suddenly I was crying as if Thomas were my friend hacked off from me, crying for every friendship that had lost a limb because I understood. I understood why Raymond couldn’t let St. Agnes consolidate with St. Mark’s, why he’d stayed here all his life listening to Johnny Cash albums under decades-old lightbulbs. It was his building of hope, a bullseye that he thought would beckon Thomas home to him just as I wanted it to beckon Sofia home to me.

“Do you think he’s still alive?” I asked, swiping away running mascara from under my eyes until the pads of my fingers were black.

Raymond wiped his glasses on his sleeve, taking a moment to stare over my head. Sofia used to do the same thing when she was upset; she said it helped her put things back into focus if things were unfocused for a while.

“I don’t know,” Raymond said finally, the words a prayer on his lips just as much as any Our Father.

My voice caught. “What do you want the answer to be?” I saw the reflection of the crucifix on the wall in the lenses of his glasses. “I don’t know that either,” he said.

Gina Wiste Washington University in St Louis, ’23

Where Pink Hills Fall In memory of the 2014 mudslide in Oso, Washington.

Remember Oso? An already fading but unfamiliar yellow flier stuck out from the telephone pole outside the high school. I shrugged to pull the straps of my backpack a little tighter as I walked down Sealth Road. Didn’t everyone remember Oso?

I caught something about trees as I passed the flier, but didn’t stop to read; I was more curious who had gone through the effort to print it. Most people around here are too busy making ends meet, whether or not they support the cause. Even if they did, in a middle-of-nowhere town like this? There’s little to no chance of anything coming of it.

I hung a left and walked down the gravel road, hugging the side of the rocks but watching my feet so I didn’t slide into the nettles—those assholes seem to line all the roads around the river, waiting for someone to trip. But I’d long ago abandoned the notion of walking a few blocks further down to the covered bridge—this way was faster, and I’d never liked those bridges anyways. But still, even half a slip and the familiar sensation of dry dust in my yellowed converse would bother me till I got home.

Remember Oso. Of course I remember. Forty-three people, suffocated by rocks and mud. Dad took the cousins and me there once, on our way to the Reptile Zoo. We’d seen the hillside, or half of the hillside—the other half sprawling like lava from a volcano. As if there had never been a neighborhood there to begin with. We’d walked through the line of trees—the only trees in sight—each dedicated to one of the people trapped. Mementos, beer cans, necklaces, signs with names. It had been so quiet, like I couldn’t breathe.

Dead End.

I walked to the right of the sign and leapt the guardrail like James Bond—that is, if James Bond ever found himself at the end of a forgotten gravel road by the Rez. The path was clear down to the rocks of the riverbank—which my many afternoon commutes home had probably helped maintain.

As I walked upstream, the smell of salt and rot overcame me. My nostrils flared involuntarily, and I looked to my feet. Dad would be pissed if he had to hose down my shoes again.

Just downstream was a fish, pink flesh and needle-thin bones barely exposed, draped across the rocks. No, not just a fish—a salmon.

Apparently they do it on purpose, give themselves to the forest after laying eggs, in the same place they were born. The river used to run pink with salmon; hundreds of them lined the banks during salmon runs. It’s what made everything grow so quickly,

keeping things alive. They even turned the tree rings pink.

Now there was just the one salmon, stinking up the bank. But I guess I was glad it made it there, even if it was the only one left.

I walked further along to the log bridge, and tightroped across as I always did. So close to home I could almost smell it—dust, dogs, and a barbeque someone had started despite the fact that summer was long over. That’s the thing about trailer parks: you can always smell your neighbor’s dinner before yours. I paused, considering the huckleberry bush upstream. Home meant work, and listening to dad groan about having to cook after his shift. Food wouldn’t be ready for another hour at least, anyway. So I took the long way around, as I did from time to time, pausing to eye the berries. Most had fallen off already, but I pulled one of the last red ones off and popped it in my mouth. It awakened more hunger than it stifled since I’d skipped lunch, but was sweet enough that I didn’t mind.

I pulled myself up from the rocks by the trunk of a tree, just as a car passed by. I waited until the sound faded away to approach the road. I figured I’d stop by my old stomping grounds. I smiled at the prospect, remembering the little rabbit den beneath that crooked tree, and the neighborhood cat who liked to poke around in the bushes up there from time to time. Perhaps our fort would still be there from last summer. My cousin and I had spent hours furnishing and waterproofing it—I’d had to use my inhaler, which I hated, after working so hard. But when the little shack was done we couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride that we’d made something on our own.

I knew something was off even before I’d reached the guardrail. The light wasn’t right, and the air felt quiet, dead. I made a detour to avoid the Devil’s Claw as I made my way to the road—I’d never been close enough to find out if those green thorns were poisonous as well as painful, but I certainly wasn’t about to test it. I put a hand on the rail and looked out towards the forest, or where it should have been. A rectangular section right above the park had been cut completely bare, as if by a barber’s razor.

“Oh,” I muttered to myself, breaking the blood-drained silence.

I hopped the rail, almost forgetting to look for cars before crossing towards the sign that sat before the naked landscape. Some government notice—I’d seen it before, but I hadn’t thought to read it until now. I hadn’t realized what it meant. I looked at the tree stumps littering the browned landscape, some so big and old that, if I tried, I could probably see their rings of pink from the old salmon runs. I shouldn’t have been able to see the edge of the elementary school property way up the hill, there should have been so much more in between. But it was all gone.

Sometimes naming things helps: growing up, unemployment. But when I said to myself, “so this is clear-cutting,” it only reminded me of the salmon on the riverbank, the final veteran of a thwarted effort to let that forest on the hill grow. I remembered the cat, and hoped it had found a new home before they came. Now there were neither our carefully crafted trails nor the nooks and crannies and berry patches they led to.

I knew that it must have been private land, off the reservation. They could do what they wanted with it, even destroy it. People did it all the time. I kicked a rock by my foot, sending it scurrying across the dirt. But I hated how quickly the dust settled, so I picked up a bigger stone and hurled it at the sign. It bounced off the E of “NOTICE” towards a post by the road—another yellow flier attached. Remember Oso?

I looked back at the hill, now only a steep pile of boulders and dirt, and remembered with eerie clarity the clumps of dead tree roots in Oso, sticking up from the remains of the mudslide.

The trailer park was just below that hill. The school, too. We already flooded during rainy season, didn’t they know they were setting us up to get crushed? I thought everyone knew what caused the slide in Oso. Either I was wrong, or they just didn’t care. I picked up another handful of rocks, their ricochets off the sign punctuating my words. I loved that forest, but I loved the people below it more.

“Are you —trying—to kill us!?” I stopped for a moment, catching my breath and rolling my shoulder as the low sun cast a shadow-less light onto the hillside. Of course, the sign still stood unharmed.

Someone must have determined this was safe. They must have known about the houses, river, and trailer park below. Some big guy from out of town with his clipboard and Northface and blonde beard must have checked all the little boxes about grades and zoning and groundwater, or whatever it was they checked, and given it a thumbs up.

But it was still a mass of earth, conveniently looming above my home. I could picture the roots that once kept it all in place, that must have already started dying.

I pictured the hypothetical bearded clipboard man again—a geologist, maybe. He’d have been from out of town, probably based in Snoqualmie—or, hell, all the way down in Seattle. Maybe he didn’t have a list at all—I could clearly picture this blonde man giving his signature after barely looking at the hill, or down at the homes and river below. Like the middle school vice principal poking his head into classrooms during a half-assed lockdown drill. Maybe saying, “try to lock the door next time,” before letting them get on with their work.

I picked up another rock and stared at it in my hand, lopsided and just larger than a half-dollar. Maybe Mr. blonde bearded geologist had looked at the rocky parking lot of the high school on his drive in. Maybe he’d hoped the dust from the road wouldn’t stain his Prius like it has stained the outer walls of the school. Maybe he’d figured that students who couldn’t even find used textbooks wouldn’t spend their time reading yellow fliers.

I dropped the rock and scoured the ground until I found a bigger one.

Maybe he’d gauged the distance from the reservation and figured he could call any effects to tribal land a “phenomenon.” I picked up another rock. Maybe he looked at the trailer park longer than he looked at the hill itself. Maybe he’d said, “Perfect. Just Indians and trailer trash.”

I narrowed my eyes at the sign—pristine and permanent. I knew I’d imagined his words, like the blonde beard and the Prius. But I also knew that it doesn’t matter if the man with the loaded gun meant to point it at you.

“They won’t even notice,” he might have continued, rushing through paperwork while Yelp-ing the nearest car wash. “And even then, what could they do about it?”

The hill seemed to grow before me as I dropped the rocks to my feet. What was once welcoming and familiar was now foreboding and lethal. And it had happened silently. I swallowed, a familiar frustration catching my breath in my throat—things I’d pushed aside coming back in a rush. Every ignored fever, every expired mascara tube, every missed field trip, every pink piggy bank that dad had emptied for gas. Of course, it’s not his fault. We’re all already trapped between the fear of losing what we have and wanting more, all the while knowing we’ll be buried the same way we started—suffocated by alcohol or hospital bills or depression. But apparently, that’s not enough. Now, when the rain falls hard enough, the land itself will try to keep us from breathing.

I nudged the last rock away with my foot. I walked to the yellow flier and carefully straightened out the already curling corner; the date hadn’t passed yet, and it was near dad’s work—maybe I could get a ride. I opened an event on my phone calendar. Remember Oso, I titled it. Or maybe, Make THEM remember Oso. But that wasn’t right either. I retitled it. Fuck You, Prius Guy.

I figured: if I’ll be buried here one way or another, I should try to help things grow a little first. Maybe change the color of the tree rings. Hanna Wagner Emory University, ’22