Vivisection

19 November 2020
Categories: Fiction

I found the creature in the middle of my lawn on the day that Ellie came home. I had no idea what type of animal it was, only that it was made of fur and bones and full of dark red blood that stained the pile of leaves it had huddled under to die. A stroke of my rake stretched that blood into seven black lines against my lawn as I gouged into it and pulled out innards and organs, freshly exposed to the slow decay of wintertime.

I crouched beside the thing, compelled and repulsed. Its fur was dark and matted, almost indistinguishable from the red of its insides in the setting sun. It was about the size of a dog with bony, angled haunches and a long tail, but its snout was more pronounced, its lips torn or decayed away to reveal a line of greying teeth. The chill had frozen its expression somewhere between a snarl and a grin, its ears bent back flush against its head. It had died fighting.

I realized in my curiosity I’d moved my face mere inches from the creature, and only then did it occur to me the cold had taken the scent of rot completely from the air.

When animals died on our property growing up, my parents made sure Ellie and I never saw them. They would dispose of the carcasses before they had a chance to form any memory more than a smudge of red or a sour stench in our minds. Grown, I could stare for as long as I wanted. But Ellie would be here any minute, so I straightened and piled a mound of blackening leaves atop the beast. By the time she arrived, it was nowhere in sight.
 
 

Ellie told me it was an accident — in fact, she insisted. I had no reason to doubt my sister; she had never lied to me in the past, and I couldn’t see why she would start now. If she said that it was an accident, that’s exactly what it was.

She arrived in a bright yellow taxi, bundled up in layers from her head to her feet like she was vacationing in the Arctic. It wasn’t until she peeled back layer upon layer that I could see how thin she had gotten since I’d last seen her; I could see the beginnings of her ribcage in lines below her neck when she removed her scarf. Her slightness made her look younger, like the ten years since high school had never happened.

I had been so nervous to see her before she arrived, worried there would be a palpable strain between us. But she didn’t look scary or different or unrecognizable. She just looked tired.

“I like to think I’ve given it a more feminine touch,” I told her as we made her bed together. She had spent less time here than me; she’d long since moved away by the time our father started getting sick, and I thought she wouldn’t realize the bed we were making had once been his. But as we unpacked, I could tell she was seeing it the way he’d had it: masculine and sparse, an empty room with nothing more than a bed stand, a lamp, and a place to sleep. “It looks good,” she said.

My father had rented the home when he and my mother first separated, when they finally realized the way they chafed against each other was leaving marks on us, too. It was clear things were over when he stopped renting the place and bought it outright. Still my parents remained legally married until the day he died. When he passed, I paid back the debts he had against the property from my own savings and put my inheritance towards it; Ellie took hers and moved out to the coast.

For a few days, it was nothing but boxes and dust and realizing how many items we both owned and throwing out the doubles. And then it was adjusting to space, to the constant weight of company. We agreed it would be temporary, but I knew with Ellie that word had no meaning.

At first it was an adjustment. But then, like every life that had preceded it, it was completely normal.
 
 

I don’t think it was Ellie’s presence that disturbed my sleep, but I found myself waking in the middle of the night more and more after she arrived. Sometimes I would read the news on my phone until I dozed off again; other times I would get up and page through a project for work until the sun rose. Once I walked into the den at 3 a.m. only to find Ellie bundled up sleeping soundly on the couch. Maybe the presence of someone new was too much energy for the house, enough to rattle through the floorboards and stir me from my sleep.

On the fourth night in a row that I woke at midnight, I found myself peering out of the window. Insomniac’s boredom piqued my curiosity, I told myself, or maybe I’d been subconsciously wondering about it for days.

Even through the dark, I could see it. It was a dark smudge in the middle of my lawn; a tiny blip that would have gone unnoticed by anyone who wasn’t searching. In a few moments I had bundled up in a robe and a scarf and galoshes, had grabbed my rake, and was standing before it.

I raked until I was pulling dead grass out of my lawn, ignoring the stinging cold to dig up dirt in a tiny circle around it to bury it deeper and deeper under debris. I kept burying it until I could no longer see it through the brush and grass I had covered it with. But I could sense that it was still there, still dark, and now despite the chill in the air I was sure I could smell it.

I only paused when I heard a rustling behind me and felt a chill of panic bloom in my chest. I turned to see my sister watching me through the window.

She unlatched the window and lifted it quickly, like she had been caught breaking the rules. She continued to stare at me through the open window, her mouth slightly ajar. I must have looked deranged, bundled up in anything but winter clothes, rake in my hand, eyes gleaming under the moonlight.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she finally offered in a half-shout that was swallowed in the air between us.

“Yeah,” I called back, dropping the rake onto the ground. “Neither could I.”
 
 

The truck had only clipped her in the accident, which the nurse at the hospital informed us was nothing short of an “act of God.” Ellie had been somewhere in Arizona, and although she never told us how she had gotten there, my mother and I knew that she must have hitchhiked.

Ellie had been hitchhiking for as long as I can remember. As a child she’d lie to classmates’ parents, informing them that our mother gave her permission to get a ride to their home or to the school. She must have ended half a dozen of my parents’ friendships after they’d called nearly the entire neighborhood, frazzled and accusatory, demanding where their daughter was. By fourteen she had learned how to travel all over the city, getting neighbors or strangers to drive her to the arcade, to bring her to dates, to drop her off at the movies where she would sneak in through the exit and watch five minutes of every film until she got bored and found someone to drive her somewhere else. The thrill of being in someone else’s car or in someone else’s control must have been more important to her than the destination ever was.

The town was small and familiar enough that my parents’ worry never escalated much higher than giving her a stern talking to and taking no action to prevent it from happening again. After one such lecture my father discovered a postcard from a small fishing town nearly 100 miles away that was addressed to him from his daughter, who at the time was curled up with a book on the couch merely a few feet away from him. His face flickered from anger to exhaustion before he finally crumpled the postcard and threw it in the trash.

Older now, I realized why my parents did not do much about Ellie’s travels: For them to have a leg to stand on in an argument, they would have to acknowledge that they were so vacant in their daughter’s life that she could disappear for days at a time without them noticing.
 
 

Mom came to visit Ellie in the hospital for one day. Our mother had long since moved to the capitol, a place where she could finally be lost in the anonymity of a larger population. I offered for her to stay the night, but she insisted against it.

I walked her out to her car when Ellie dozed off. She waited until she was in her car seat, buckled in, engine on, to tell me. “Just so you know,” she said as though it was the most innocuous thing on earth. “They were on the fence about admitting her.” She paused and laboriously took a cigarette from her purse, taking what felt like ages to fumble around for a lighter before continuing. “You know — to a psych ward.”

I knew my mother was waiting for me to ask her to elaborate. I remained silent while she cupped her hand around the cigarette and clicked her dying lighter several times before it caught. “In case she was trying to off herself,” she said. “You know, they brought the truck driver in, too, since he clipped a telephone pole, and he told one of the nurses, he told her he thought he could see Eleanor turn and look right at him and step in front of the truck while he was driving down the highway.”

She blew out a long drag of smoke into air so cold and still I could smell the menthol. She looked tired, ready no doubt to be at home in her bed, and on some level, I felt the same.

“Well, she says it was an accident,” I told her. “So, I’m sure it was an accident.”

“Right,” my mother said. “Okay.”

She looked at me another moment, but I couldn’t figure out what she wanted to hear, so I didn’t say anything. Then she rolled up her car window and pulled away from the curb.
 
 

Between the time that Ellie and I returned to bed and by the morning, the earth had frozen over. Snow mixed with rain mixed with snow again had turned the house and the yard into a glassy mop of white, punctuated with patches of dark, frozen mud. I peered out of my window at the hole beside my rake, but all I could make out was a small dark spot in the middle of the ice.

Ellie began to work odd jobs around town, at the library or the supermarket or else shoveling neighbors’ driveways and walking dogs. It felt strange sometimes to come home and find her gone, like coming home only to find that the sofa or the dining room table had disappeared. After a few weeks, we had worked our way into an impeccable routine. I kept the kitchen stocked and the house running and paid for, and she cleaned even things that didn’t need to be cleaned, cooked two meals a day, organized all of the books in my room alphabetically, and all the clothes in our closets by color. Somewhere along the line, I was sleeping through the night again, in sync with, or perhaps in spite of, her presence.

When I was growing up, I must have blamed my father moving into this home for my parents’ split, at least to some degree. I saw his departure as a way of giving up, of checking out. As Ellie and I continued to co-exist quietly, occasionally watching a movie together or going out for dinner but mostly sequestering ourselves to our own sides of the house, I began to understand how living with someone did not necessarily mean having an intimacy with them. My love for Ellie had never faded over the years, but maybe the stagnation wasn’t normal; maybe most people grew in love, whereas Ellie and I, my father and my mother, we just co-existed in it, and maybe that hadn’t been enough for them. But it seemed to be enough for us.
 
 

The temperature continued to drop off, losing a degree or two every day until I could see my breath every time I went outside. Ellie never left unless she was bundled up, a mess of different colors and fabrics as she insulated herself with layers.

“Do you miss it — the heat?” I asked one night as she opened the fridge and pulled out a stew she had made the night before, enough for both of us. Ellie kept working as though she hadn’t heard me, but I knew she had.

“Sometimes,” she said finally. “But sometimes I think it was too nice.”

People always thought that I was much older than Ellie, the way her eyes wandered around and fixated on anything except the present conversation like a child would, like she hadn’t heard. But I knew she was only waiting until she decided exactly what to say.

“You know, you’re in heaven by any standard,” she said. “It’s 70 degrees and breezy every day. And at first, you’re happy, because it’s warm and it’s new and it’s beautiful. But then, you know, life happens and things get hard. And then you start to feel bad again.” She caught my eye for a second and looked away.

“But now you’re feeling bad in heaven, this land of gorgeous people and blue skies and all the weed you could smoke without dying.” She divided the stew into two plates and brought me one. “And you think, ‘If I can’t be happy here, can I be happy anywhere?’”

I blinked at her as she pulled a chair up across from me. “At least here when you’re fighting for it, you can blame the shitty weather,” she explained.

I nodded. “I’d like to see it one day,” I said. “I always thought I would move away from here, I guess. I certainly didn’t see myself moving into Dad’s house.”

“The funny thing is,” she said around a mouthful of food. “He would have loved California. I think if he ever saw it himself, he would have left way earlier.”

I pulled a half-chewed bay leaf from my mouth and pushed it to the side of my plate. “He didn’t leave us,” I said.

Ellie shrugged.

“He was still here,” I said. “He wasn’t far. We still saw him.”

“I mean, for dance recitals and soccer games. And one weekend a month,” Ellie said. “Because he had to.”

“That plus whenever we wanted to see him,” I pointed out.

“Right,” Ellie said. “When we wanted to see him. But he only ever wanted to see us when mom asked him to.”

It was hard for me to consider her living the same circumstances as I did and remembering them so differently, like she’d read a different translation of the same text.

“Trust me,” she said. “If he were really honest about what he wanted, he would have moved somewhere else in a heartbeat. And that would be the end of it.”

“He was happy here. And I’m happy here,” I told her. “If you’re not, you don’t have to be here.”

Ellie blinked, and it wasn’t until the silence hit my ears that I realized how loud I had spoken. Maybe I had even screamed. But I couldn’t hear it anymore, and Ellie stood up from the table. She looked at me almost expressionless for a moment, like I was a painting she was trying to interpret. Then she grabbed just her overcoat from the rack and walked out of the house.

I sat there at the table for as long as I could. Then I stood, cleared our places, and put our dishes in the sink. I grabbed one of Ellie’s coats from the rack and walked outside, shoving my hands in the pockets for warmth. I couldn’t spot her in either direction down the street. She couldn’t have gotten far. If I ran out to the street and looked where the streetlights lit up the walk, I could spot her in a few minutes.

But I didn’t. I grabbed a shovel and walked into the yard and started to dig through the snow where I was sure it would be, slumbering exactly where I’d buried it.
 
 

When Ellie didn’t return by the end of the night, I knew it could be days before I saw her again. While I waited, I worked against the cold. I shoveled our walkway, salted anywhere we might step, and made sure that I had reburied the creature well enough that no one but me would spot it.

By the time a week had passed, I had made up my mind that she wasn’t returning. I kept all of her things, washed and dried her sheets, put all of her clothes away, just in case. I nearly considered calling my mother to see if she had heard from her, but I knew she’d be the last person Ellie would go to.

Sleep became elusive once again. Maybe my rhythm had gotten so used to twoness that it could no longer know oneness. I found myself pacing around my kitchen most mornings by the time the sun rose.
 
 

She had been gone two weeks before I let myself call her. It went to voicemail and a tinny, younger version of Ellie told me, “You can leave a message, but just text me.”

There was something about hearing her voice, young, far away, and captured in a forever recording that made me think of a truck, a massive 18-wheeler hurtling toward me at a million miles an hour down a highway and how exactly I could muster the strength of nerves and tendons and muscles to take a step out in front of it.

And there was something in her voice that made me need to find the creature. No matter how much snow I covered it with, I knew where it was. It was lurking there on my property, clumps of flesh turning green as they clung to browning bones, a meal that no animal wanted badly enough to forage under a mass of snow for. I yearned for summer, wishing for quickly devouring hawks and vultures and ants and maggots. But decay was out of season, so the creature remained.

It cracked as it met with my shovel, point first like a blade. I severed its head first. And then I turned the shovel sideways, raised it above my head, and came down hard enough to crush its skull into a thousand pieces. Now shattered, I crouched beside it and began to work.
 
 

A month after Ellie left, I got a phone call from a complete stranger.

“Your sister said I could reach you here,” a young woman told me. It was four in the evening, but the sun was nearly gone. The woman sounded calm, almost amused. “We’re on the way to the hospital. You should meet us there.”

This time it didn’t involve a truck or any roads at all. They had spotted her at the lake. They had spotted her on the lake. The woman and her husband were out looking for their lost dog, the only people willing to be out in the exceptional cold. Except for Ellie.

“I thought it was weird that she was standing there,” the woman said. “But you know. We get weirdos around here.”

Weirdos, I thought. They had waved to Ellie and kept walking. They didn’t have time to wonder what she was doing. It was so cold and the dog was so lost and they just kept going. Then the husband realized she wasn’t standing on the bank but on the frozen surface of the water.

“I thought maybe she was a ghost,” the woman said as I buckled myself into my car and put it in gear. “But my husband had to look back and see. And then it cracked right in front of us, and she fell into the water.”

As I listened to her, it occurred to me that here I was, driving with one hand holding the phone to my ear, nerves unwired, black ice everywhere, and if anyone was going to die today it may just be me. After all, Ellie didn’t seem to have much luck in that arena.

I tucked my phone into the crook of my neck as this woman, this stranger, described how she saved my sister’s life. Or how her husband did. He reached into the steps of the lake and nearly fell in himself. I pictured the wife with her arms around his waist, stabilizing the husband and my sister as he pulled. Ellie’s frozen skin must have been so cold it hurt him just to touch it, although his hands were probably aching and numb from the frigid water anyway.

“I can’t imagine falling in like that,” the woman told me, her voice registering somewhere in the back of my head. “She must have been so frightened.”

“She shouldn’t have been standing on the ice,” I said, my first entrance into the conversation in minutes. “She grew up here. She knows it doesn’t get thick enough to walk on.”

“It was a mistake,” this stranger told me of my sister whom I had known my entire life and she had met for the first time today. “It was an accident.”

I met them at the hospital. They stabilized her temperature, re-pinked her blueing lips, and administered fluids. By the time I had arrived, she was curled up in the hospital bed with an IV plugged into her arm, flicking through channels on the TV and looking completely at home. I watched her through her window, unable to go in. The couple never found the dog.
 
 

I left the hospital before Ellie was discharged. I didn’t want her to feel that she had to come back. But she did.

She must have come in the middle of the night because one morning I got out of bed and found her eating cereal at the counter. She looked up at me and smiled like it was just a pleasant happenstance we were both here, her cheeks cheerful and chipmunked full of a bright pink children’s cereal.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked her.

She nodded and chowed down another spoonful. “Hypothermia made me hate the cold a little less.” Then she winked at me, a gesture so out of place that for a moment I thought I was dreaming. “Hey, I want to show you something.”

I followed her out to the back yard, both of us in our night clothes. There was any number of things she could have been showing me, but I knew precisely what it was going to be. I didn’t know how she had found the creature under all of the snow where I was letting it rest. Maybe she had seen me out there one night, or maybe it was inevitable from the beginning that she’d find it, just like I had.

But she walked right past where I knew that it was.

“Check it out,” she said, standing beneath one of the trees that lined the yard. “It’s like they didn’t get the memo that it’s still winter.”

I heard them before I saw them. A family of tiny cheeping newborn birds, tiny balls of reddish-brown fluff, celebrating a spring that had yet to come. “They have no clue they’re going to freeze to death,” she said, dark laughter coloring her tone. She turned to me with a confused expression, wondering why I wasn’t as entertained by the most inconsequential nest of birds I had ever known.

“You can’t stay if you’re going to keep doing it,” I told her. Her head jerked back to me in a pivot so sharp it must have hurt.

“Keep doing what?”

Anger burned in my belly. “You know what,” I said. “I can’t stop you from doing it. Or trying to do it. But you can’t stay here if you’re going to.”

“I’m not trying to do anything,” she said.

Silence hung between us, heavier than the clotted snow we stood on.

“Do you want to go?” I asked her. I didn’t want her to go, nor did I want her to stay. I just couldn’t stand not knowing.

“I don’t think so,” Ellie said, taking a few steps toward me and planting her feet right atop where I had buried the creature. Beneath her, flesh and blood and then rot and bugs and then nothing but bone. Bone that I had broken apart with my shovel and then hunched over, lining out row by row, skull, vertebrate, limbs. Bones I had labored over for what felt like hours until the creature was no more a creature but simply a series of white chalky lines that radiated like an echo within the undercurrent of the earth. Bones that I had rewritten and rescripted and then reburied with dirt and snow and sweat.

She turned away to look at the home we shared, the one I — and my father — had built. Then I could see her as an eight-year-old, long brown hair curling at the nape of her neck just like it did today.

I could see an image of her at eight-years old that I’ve kept and seen every year since. Ellie rounding her way into my father’s room when we were children, before he left, and our mother was away. She wanted him to read to us, or take us to the park. I couldn’t remember the day. I could just remember Ellie’s face when she stepped into the room.

I still don’t know what kept me from walking in behind her. All I could see then and all I could see now was Ellie’s face drop from a smile into confusion and then pain. Fear twisted across her features like a sickness, something that has been there ever since just below the surface. I couldn’t know what it was then, but it was enough to keep me from following into the room. It was enough to keep me from seeing what she saw.

“I don’t think so,” Ellie said again.

The paramedics came and drove our father to the hospital. Our mother told us that he was sick and that he needed to go away for a few weeks to get better. When he came home he wore bandages on his wrists and then long sleeves for the rest of his life. It wasn’t for years that I understood it, but Ellie understood it immediately because she’d seen it. It wasn’t me who found him there, lying half dead on reddening bedsheets. It was her.

“But sometimes, I feel like I need to.”

She took my hand and squeezed it, her fingers hard and freezing. Then she turned and walked back into the house. I knew she would be leaving soon. She’d be back to hitchhiking, to jumping from city to city, to falling in and out of contact. And I knew I would hear from her in a year or I wouldn’t, or she’d reach out from a hospital bed or from the bottom of a river or she wouldn’t.

The air was still as she walked away from me, quiet enough that I could hear her feet crunch the snow as she left a pattern of footprints behind her. As I watched her disappear into my home, I realized the thing was still there, quiet, secret, undiscovered. She had never seen it, and I guess that made it mine.

Pound

19 November 2020
Categories: Poetry

One afternoon near the end, before
               the move, we walk the green by the mall
and stop at the water wall, ever-raining monolith
               amid the heat of glass-refracted sun.
Someone’s adjusted the knobs on gravity:
               kites take flight, planes boom overhead,
grackles drop to the earth and graze the grass
               for limp fries, broken chips, anything
left, even a fragment, they cry and yearn.
 
               My own feet can’t get off the ground so I shuffle
on stone beside you, ducking out of the way
               of a camera aimed at a girl in a grad cap.
We stop in a stone archway, getting misted by the falls;
               a few yards off a man leans close to a woman.
—Beloved, don’t you see it? Spacetime’s curved,
               and our gravity field’s cross sections bend
away, a hyperbolic paraboloid, a salty Pringle
               that falls from the hungry hand at 9.8m/s2
and crunches beneath shoes and bird beaks.
 
               The man is talking low. He gets down on one knee. Right
there. The grad girl’s photographer spots this,
               takes aim. It’s sunny and raining. This space city
is one big pane of glass, high as a corporation,
               a window wall to the stratosphere separating me
from something naked and flying, burning up
               as it falls. I pound it trying to get through.
 
A year later we’re back for a visit and the water’s off,
               the stone is dry, it’s just a big black wall. Cleaning it,
you say, or maybe it’s me, and the other agrees.
               We stare a minute and wait for the Nordstrom cars
to turn into the mall and park themselves.
               Those little ridges now dry, I bet I could climb
to the top, little moon man on a mission.
               And then where? Pound. Stars burn out and fall.
A mouth yelling quiet. Love you forever.
               Pound. It’s buy one get one. Product
of masses, inverse proportion of distance between them
               squared. Once you said I wish you’d just
scream and hit me. Pound. Universal constant, order
               and magnitude. My sweet glass eye take aim,
watch me flame apple red. Where else but down.
 

Masthead

4 May 2020
Categories: About Us

Editorial Team
Managing Editor: Madison Rahner
Assistant Managing Editor: Veronica Good
Copyeditor: Rose Pleasant
Design Editor: Lindsay Hickman
Fiction Editor: Rob Sperduto
Nonfiction Editor: Kayla Jessop
Assistant Nonfiction Editor: Victor Cocco
Poetry Editor: Brittany Atkinson
Assistant Poetry Editor: Olivia Dimatteo

Faculty Editors
Editor-in-Chief: Colin Foote Burch
Digital Content Coordinator: Alli Crandell
Fiction Editor: Jeremy Griffin
Nonfiction Editor: Lane Osborne

 

 

Introduction

4 May 2020
Categories: Editor's Note

Before the pandemic set in, we began to see what the writers had to share. We found moon-mad children and brackish nights. We found women holding off violence with clothing irons as tornadoes dropped from the sky. We found a poet in a green suit and heard the horse-shift of carousels gone dark. We found parents lost and alone. We found patriarchal watchdogs with their murderous offspring, yet we also found elementos that bonded so facilito.

We found these images, heard these stories, and felt these sounds unaware they were whispering of a difficult new era.

Welcome to the 24th issue of Waccamaw.

Spell for Misheard Sound

30 April 2020
Categories: Poetry

                                                                                                    “7°F last night. Can’t stop singing Johnny Shines:
                                                                                                    ‘So cold in Vietnam, words don’t sound the same.’”
                                                                                                    —Jake Adam York, Twitter, December 10, 2012

Last Night’s Dream was the same as any other:
salt filling the room crystalized and brackish. You
appeared with a keyboard, predicting your own
death: the words might never sound the same
the words might never even sound/ and yesterday
the murder ballads of the evening shifted before
sleep. A poet in a green suit says cannibal/ heard carnival:
the horse-shift of carousels gone dark. We are always
hearing what we want to and always hearing what
we don’t/don’t have the time to correct wrong/
simply the ear demanding its own certainty
like a god. Today I dream of a tragic green
suit’s misfit, the night’s snapping cold, an illness
we chase like a toy/ its own permanent elegy.

First Things Last

30 April 2020
Categories: Nonfiction

The end of the story is clear: the end of my parents as I once knew them. But where exactly did their end begin? I have worried the question for years. I feel like the little boy in the Sesame Street episode I used to watch with my nephews. The boy happily sets off from home for a brief adventure on his bicycle, passing random objects along the way—a street clock, a plastic house, an animal fountain—before suddenly realizing he has no idea how he got to this strange place. “I don’t like it here,” he says. “I’m really, really lost.” 

Was there a moment when the casual journey of my life—and the life of my parents—took an unexpected turn, marking the beginning of an end? Call it the end of my innocence, my fall from grace. The grace of a lucky child who had lived threescore years in a kind of Eden. At the time, I didn’t recognize it as Eden. It was simply my life, complete with the requisite bumps and sorrows of all lives. But a life more fortunate than most, in part because my parents were busy living theirs. One of the greatest gifts parents can give grown children is to live their own lives, freeing their children to live theirs. 

In the midst of his lostness, the boy encounters an odd, top-hatted creature and pleads with the creature to “Help me get unlost!” But rather than lead the boy back home, the creature gives him advice: “Try to remember everything you passed. Make the first thing the last.”  

Remember everything I passed? How many markers did I miss along the way? Or if I did notice them, I unconsciously chose to ignore: my parents’ weight loss; the empty refrigerator when I visited them in Indiana; the opened mayonnaise jars in the cabinet; bills piling up on the dining table; my mother’s constant repetitions each time I phoned—as I did every few days from my home three states away. Not to check on them, just to hear their voices. Both voices at the same time. Stereo parents, I often joked. 

“Pick up, Juanita,” Dad would call from the phone in the den. And as we waited for my mother’s voice to come onto the extension line, I could hear his breathing—oh, what I would now give to hear my father’s breathing—and his “Hold on, she’s upstairs” or “Hold on, she’s in the kitchen.” Then I’d hear the click of the second phone and my mother’s “Hello, and which kid is this?” These were the years when she still remembered that she had kids, and grandkids, and greats.

“Not so loud,” Dad would say to Mother. “Juanita, there’s an echo. Back off a little.” And she would, for a minute or two. Then she’d be back at full volume, reporting the news—Dad had changed the spark plugs on the snow blower, she was sorting through stacks in the basement, and did I want the wok because they never used it anymore. 

“Oh, yes,” she added one day. “Your dad had a bit of an adventure last night.” As I soon learned, my father’s adventure was a middle-of-the-night tumble down the hall stairs, landing headfirst on the vase that sat on the rug beside the piano. I wouldn’t know for months that he’d not only fallen before but had also suffered several mini-strokes.

“Fourteen stitches to prove it. Blood was everywhere,” Mother continued. “But he wouldn’t let me call 911.” 

“Waste of money,” Dad snapped.

As Mother explained it, after she had taped up the wound, he finally agreed to go to the hospital and to let her drive—a rare concession. Dad prided himself on his driving. He loved everything about it—the dashboard knobs and meters and gauges, the speed, the control, the feeling of floating between ground and sky. Driving suspended him not only in space but also in time, returning him to his decades of military flying assignments—from lighter-than-air gliders to solo night flyers to two-man fighter jets to transports that could hold 100 passengers. 

Dad wasn’t the kind of father you could scold, so over the phone that day I jokingly asked how many stitches the vase had required, which brought a smile to his voice. I love that you can hear a smile, even over the phone. I love that there was a time when even this sort of news did not signal the beginning of the end. 

 

Fast-forward a few years. Mother’s diabetes and balance problems had worsened; she was now what her doctor called a “wall walker,” steadying herself by grabbing whatever she could reach—an arm, a chair, a table, the wall. In the meantime, her mind had become even more fragile than her body. She kept lists everywhere: her children’s names, reminders to “turn off stove” or “lock door” or “put keys in kitchen drawer.” 

One morning my cell phone rang and I answered with a twist on my mother’s accustomed greeting. “Hello, and which parent is this?”

“This is your father. Your mother has something to tell you. Juanita?” he called out.  “Can you pick up? And don’t get up from that chair until I get down there!”

I heard the familiar click of the second phone and then my mother’s voice: “Oh, where do I begin?” She’s always been a digressive storyteller and her digressions are often more interesting than the plot. But I’d sensed urgency in Dad’s voice and I was anxious for her to get to the point, which (after several of her side trips involving, among other things, the closing of the YWCA swimming pool, a relative’s garage sale, and a description of the casseroles friends had been bringing) turned out to be this: while Dad was outside washing windows, Mother suddenly decided she’d take a walk (holding onto what, I wondered?) and as she passed some men working on a construction project, the sidewalk suddenly “just came right up” and she fell facedown, hitting “every part of me I could.” Dad knew nothing of this until the doorbell rang and he opened the door to see two strangers in work clothes, one man balancing a cement-crusted wheelbarrow into which a tiny lady was folded. Her lips and chin were bleeding and one knee had already begun to swell. 

As it turned out, the injury was a severe fracture that would require major surgery fraught with complications from which Mother would never fully recover. Over the next few months—and now years—her already fragile mind would continue to splinter into delusions, hallucinations, and blank stares into our faces alternating with occasional glimpses of recognition that at times were more disturbing, to her and to us, than the blankness.

And as the months moved inexorably forward, the mini-strokes that Dad had once hidden from us would continue like roadside flares warning of danger ahead. The danger was still three years away, a series of full-fledged strokes that would eventually land him in the hospice ward where his last breaths broke the silent air. “So sad,” Mother would say hours afterward. “About that poor old man who died.” 

 

But I could know nothing of this yet, holding the phone to my ear while Mother’s voice regaled me with tales of wheelbarrows and casseroles. Should I have sensed in that moment that we had entered a new era? Or were there markers that I had missed along the way, little details that slipped out during other phone calls? She had misplaced her dentures; she’d run out of diabetes medicine; they’d had another close call in the Buick, but no, Dad wasn’t driving too close, he’s always been a good driver you know. 

It’s true; he always had been. Throughout my childhood and up until the last decade of his life, I always felt safe with my father at the wheel. (Stateside, home from his flying missions, he had to settle for one of any number of station wagons that over the years transported our large family across town or across the country to our grandparents’ Midwest farm.) Even in the worst conditions—“a blinding snowstorm,” as weather forecasters called it—Dad was never blinded. Born and raised in Illinois, he expertly maneuvered along icy roads snow-banked high on both sides. Once in elementary school when we were studying similes, our teacher wrote the phrase “pure as the driven snow” on the board, asking for volunteers to explain its meaning. My hand shot up. “It means when everything is white and you drive through the snow without stopping,” I said proudly. “The way my dad does.”

My teacher was a kind woman and her correction was gentle. I remember that she smiled at me, then went on to explain that driven snow was snow that had been driven—carried along—by the wind, forming snow drifts. Drifts, driven: see how the words connect? 

Yes, I did. But the teacher’s explanation held no sway against the image in my mind and still doesn’t to this day. Wind might be the driver, but it is always Dad I see in the driver’s seat, his gloveless hands resting calmly, lightly, on the steering wheel (no tense death-grip for my father) as we sail through a sea of white, cutting a clean, straight path all the way across country and right to my grandparents’ door. We always arrived safely and on time. And we never lost our way. Possessed of a pilot’s sense of navigation, Dad never consulted a map or compass. His mind was his compass, his spatial memory a source of stubborn pride right up until the last years of his life.

The last years. The Buick. Of course, how could I have missed it? I walk backward in my mind to another phone call—before Mother’s wheelbarrow rescue, before Dad’s tumble down the stairs. It was a winter evening, early December, and I’d called to check on how the reunion had gone that day. Mother’s nieces had planned a holiday luncheon at my cousin’s farm about thirty miles from my parents’ house, and Mother and Dad had been looking forward to it. She was taking her famous potato salad and a green bean casserole, the same dishes she took to every celebration the relatives hosted—autumn hayrides, Christmas and Easter gatherings, summer parties by the pond. Thinking of this now, my heart seizes. How full their lives were, how connected. 

“How was it?” I asked when Dad answered the phone. “I’ll bet the great-nephews have really grown.”

“Juanita?” he called. “Pick up the phone. Hold on,” he said to me. “She’s in the kitchen.”

Mother’s voice came onto the line. “Hello, and which kid is this? Can you freeze potato salad?”

“You have leftovers?” I said. “I can’t believe those teenagers didn’t finish everything.”

“It snowed, you know,” my father said.

“Not hard,” Mother said.

“Hard enough.” I heard the agitation growing in Dad’s voice. “We hadn’t been out that way for a long time.” Only a few months, I was thinking. And he knows those roads like the back of his hand. 

“But you left by noon, right?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Mother said. “Bright as anything—with the snow and all. I had to put on my dark glasses. It was so strange. Everything looked different.”

“With the dark glasses?”

“Everything. It was like we’d never been there before.”

“I guess all the renovations at the farmhouse really changed the look of things,” I said.

“We never found it,” she answered. “We just kept driving and driving.”

“I’m hanging up now,” Dad said. There was an audible sigh, then a click, and he was gone. No stereo parents today.

“It was so strange,” Mother continued. “I said, ‘Paul, let’s pull over and ask someone.’ There was a fire station.”

There is no fire station anywhere near my cousin’s house. “You should have taken the phone,” I said. My sister had given Dad a cell phone months before, but he never used it. A waste of money, he claimed.

“We went as far as we could on that road. Then we turned around and started again. We kept looking for that sign—you know, the one off 38. Everything was just white. Nothing looked the same. But your dad wouldn’t stop. He kept saying ‘It’s got to be here somewhere.’ I was afraid we’d run out of gas.” 

“Did you eat something at least?” Mother can’t go long without food; her blood sugar plummets. 

“It was like we were in circles. We kept passing the same barns over and over. And railroad tracks. I was starting to get scared.” 

So was I, listening to her. You read about it all the time—old couples stranded on back roads, freezing to death in their car. It doesn’t take long, the experts say. 

“Then, when it started to get dark . . .” she continued.

“Good God, how long were you out there?”

“Paul finally said, ‘That’s it, it’s over.’ The party, he meant. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said. Just then, we saw the road sign leading to 38. We’d been so close all along!”

“Well, I’m glad you made it back,” I said. Then after wishing them both a good night, I hung up the phone and looked at my watch: 6:30. It must have been dark when they finally arrived home from their journey.

If you can call it a journey— the endless circling, the once-familiar landscape growing stranger by the minute. Lost-in-the-woods children. Except they weren’t children, they were my parents, and if they were lost, I must have been, too. This is what I am feeling now, years past my father’s death and deep inside the tangle of my mother’s mind. I keep replaying the phone call, imagining the snowy scene: my father in the driver’s seat, Mother beside him staring out at the fields frosted with white.  

But this time, when the Buick slows to turn around one last time, I open the door of my mind and climb into the back seat. Beside me the potato salad rests safely beneath its Tupperware seal and the green bean casserole is still warm, covered in foil. Foods from my childhood, ordinary and reliable as the stars my father once steered by: celestial navigation, he called it.  Snow is swirling around us, but Dad’s focus does not waver, his hands confident on the steering wheel. Mother moves closer to rub his shoulder. No need to worry; they know the way. Heat from the floor vent warms my feet and I slide back into the soft leather, feeling myself move heavily toward sleep as only a child can. The sun has not yet begun to set; there is still plenty of time to arrive.

Rost, Metal Brave

30 April 2020
Categories: Poetry

                                                                                                      -On a mountainside in the Nora Sacred Lands

A shadow rolls over the icecap,
                smothers a lighthouse subsumed
by steel eclipse. Braids drape

the glass, solid cold so long ground
                 does not remember ground, the buried
do not remember the buried. At dawn,

hunger lapses, buds chrysalis out
                 of ash, and with a singular focus,
lush breeds lush in the warm hands of rust.

An heirloom, alloy, visits the grave, an exile
                 carefully forgotten. Like seashore air
biting brown against iron, against time, turn

your face to the sun and survive. The seed
                 sheds the scars of the father, the daughter
bears the scars for the seed.

Even Birds

30 April 2020
Categories: Nonfiction

As a romantic, I sometimes take the evidence of love in nature as proof and prophecy, especially when it comes from birds. I used to cite bird love like that could be my reality: “Even vultures mate for life!” I would chirp to anyone willing to listen, as if birds remaining coupled season after season made it possible for me to find someone willing to do the same. However, even birds break up. In the birder realm it’s more commonly referred to as divorce.

Bird divorce is defined as two birds no longer remaining together in the next season, despite both returning to the same location. Some birds divorce after every mating season, seeking a new partner each time (looking at you, flamingos). Some birds never leave their original partner, and continue returning to them again and again. I see this as romantic and try imagining my own partner wanting to be with me through multiple seasons.

Perhaps it’s from watching too many romantic movies growing up and seeing marriage presented as the self-actualizing moment in a woman’s life, but I want that moment. I want to choose a partner for life, and I want our love to continue after that day of declaration. I want a love that will stay with me, a love that I will dream is fated, that if we didn’t meet in this life we would find each other in the next one. Birds who remain with their partners, who do mate for life, are an immense comfort to me. “See?” I say to myself, “If birds can do it, why can’t I?” I look at birds nuzzling on telephone wires and think, “Why not me?”

In studies about human breakup tendencies, I have read that people will often breakup in the spring. As the weather warms, we untangle our bodies and go outside. We see all the other options we hadn’t noticed while huddling for heat. I can’t help but feel anxious with a partner in spring. I am both excited for our entwined summer schedules, and on edge that the more we plan together, the more we will have to cancel when the relationship ends.

The reasons for bird divorce are sometimes unclear. A study focusing on the Eurasian blue tit revealed that while a bird who returned to its same mate tended to have more success than a bird seeking new partners, mating with the same partner was mostly due to timing. If Bird A returned to mate before its partner, Bird B, then A wouldn’t wait for B to arrive and would find a new love. Some 64% divorced throughout the course of the study. How could you be expected to wait to have kids if your partner might never show up again? They could be hurt, stranded with a broken wing where they last landed, or even dead.

I have overly romanticized almost every relationship I have been in, and I am still doing it today. I looked at each high school boyfriend like he was it for me. Eli was certainly the one. Well, okay, maybe not after breaking up with me, but then certainly Austin. Austin was it. Until I learn to be the one to take things less seriously, I’ll looked at each mate as my life-partner. The father of the future children I didn’t even know if I wanted.

Animals in the wild mate almost exclusively to reproduce. The end goal is babies. Always babies. However, many psychological studies on humans have debunked evolutionary psychology, which claims humans are mostly behaving out of their base desire to reproduce.

When I asked my mother to describe the defining moments of her life, her own self-actualizing points, she did not mention marrying my father, whom she later divorced. She said it was having my sisters and me. Giving birth and raising us was maybe the most important thing to her. I didn’t know what to say or how to relate to that feeling then, and I still don’t now.

I want a partner who will love me infinitely, yet I cannot guarantee offspring. I cannot promise my partner children I may never wish to produce. But would I change my mind if I loved my partner? Would they change theirs? I am of the opinion that you should decide about children on your own. If you have them out of love for your partner, not a genuine desire to have children, I think it is the wrong choice.

My present partner agrees with me. We just can’t seem to agree on our choices. But my choice of him as my partner is deep rooted. Emotionally I have built a staggering nest for us without acknowledging the consequences. When I think of losing him, of the potential breakup, I fall out of our metaphorical tree into a hole of depression I dug myself. I am endangering my own happiness, and risking his, with the thought we won’t work out. The thought that not even this one, this one I love so much, is the one.

The birds with the best record, the least divorce, 100% remaining pairs throughout their lives until one dies, are albatrosses. The albatross is a large sea bird. It is born on land and then sails the winds above the ocean for years, often traveling hundreds to thousands of miles before returning to meet its mate. They appear similar to seagulls in color but with beaks bearing a slight resemblance to the dodo, though infinitely more graceful. They look like supermodels of the bird world, sharp eyes shaded with grey feathers as if contoured for the runway. They can grow a wingspan of up to 12 feet and make seagulls look trivial and tasteless with their French fry-thieving tendencies.

Albatrosses can spend years seeking out the right mate through demonstrative dance and displays of long necks and massive wings. The dancing involves romantic moves like beak touching and a lot of screaming. When albatrosses finally settle down, they continue dancing with only each other, making specific steps between them. It may take up to 15 years to find the right mate and settle down. That sounds like a long time for a bird, but the albatross can live over 40 years, one of the oldest surpassing 68 years and she is still laying eggs with her mate.

My current relationship is arguably the most serious relationship I have ever had. He has a key to my apartment, where he stays even when I am away. I have begun wondering when people do things. When do people move in? When do people talk about marriage? When must people reconcile differing opinions on serious life decisions? When do people separate when those differences cannot be reconciled? We have friends who became engaged after one month of knowing each other. We have friends who are getting married after dating for ten years. One day I said we had our whole lives to do something and it made him happy. It made him look at me like fireworks, like someone seeing a baby bird leap out and fly for the very first time.

An albatross will lay one egg each time it mates, and both parents take turns flying, sometimes thousands of miles, in search of food for the chick. Their babies are grey, fluffy, and rather silly looking, like small Muppet creatures, very different from their elegant and smooth parents. The babies are important and treasured since an albatross will not mate every year. Sometimes pairs do not return to their nesting area for two years or more. However, mates always return to one another at the right time. We don’t know how albatrosses agree when to return to their nest, but they must make some arrangements knowing they will lose one another at sea.

We also don’t know if birds, in general, decide to find new mates due to personality differences, though researchers have hypothesized that this, along with mating difficulties, may explain divorces. The only really emotionally wrenching discussion I have had with my partner is about children. And we have had it repeatedly, each time leaving me struggling to breathe between tears. He would, if possible, like to have them. I am on the fence on good days, usually days where I haven’t heard a baby crying. The first time we tried to talk about it, we both ended up crying on a bathroom floor. We keep saying it is too early to talk about, keep asking “why are we talking about this?” and we’ll take turns telling each other it’s okay, that it’ll be okay. We will be okay. But I always worry later if, when he said “we,” he meant us together or apart.

Albatrosses have mastered isolation. While they mate for life, they are often not physically together. At sea they often split up, circling the earth alone. I am, at best, clingy. When my partner first used the word to describe himself in past relationships, it was the opposite of a warning sign to me. It was a lighthouse. The first sight of land. Someone like me. Something to cling to. If I were lost at sea for years waiting to see my loved one, I fear I would drown. Not because I don’t know how to swim, but because I simply couldn’t bring myself to go through the motions of living only to live alone. Sometimes I am afraid I might do anything to avoid solitude.

Occasionally, a male albatross might have a brief affair, especially in situations such as the one on the island of Oahu where there are same sex female couples who still intend to have a chick but need a male donor. However, after such transgressions, the male albatross will then usually return to his original mate. There is no abandonment in albatross behavior, despite familiarity with separation. When born, the baby will remain with one parent, while the other parent flies the ocean to bring back food. And when the chick is ready, it will unceremoniously leave the nest by itself, setting sail for about six years before it heads back to land to find a love.

This type of lasting love, the same kind I want, feels impossible. It feels like something people made up to justify marriage today with its basis in romantic ideals. I do not have great role models. My parents are divorced and rightfully so. But my father cried when he married my mother, a fact I always interpreted as magical. At a recent wedding I attended, the bride and groom cried while delivering their vows. Several months later, she was filing for divorce because he cheated on her even before the wedding. They had been together for nine years. Is it possible to find something I am not even sure exists? Despite my skepticism, I do not know how to stop looking at each person I am with, at my present partner, as my possible forever.

To be an albatross is to be an island, a paradise. I want to be a heaven for someone, the person someone always wants to come home to, no matter how long they have been away.

In my living room, a few months into our relationship, I taught my partner how to waltz to the soundtrack of My Fair Lady. Afterwards he wanted to keep waltzing around in small circles, letting me step on his feet even though I had shown him the moves, putting the songs on repeat. There were times in those early months, when everything was new and perfect and glowing, where he looked at me and frowned while smiling, like he was considering something immensely sad during a happy moment. He looked at me and I thought he would marry me. Sometimes I think he really would. Of course, it is far too early to tell, to think the thought. It is an imagining, a vision caught from the corner of my eye, a mistake to acknowledge. It’s still too early, and for now we will simply have to keep on dancing.

Self Portrait con Valencia

30 April 2020
Categories: Poetry

In ninth grade I discovered chemistry—

intrigued by sodium, the soft metals
                                                    and all those
cliquey elementos that bonded so facilito

the ones that stuck together
while I floated in a corner           like helium
invisible, less noble
                                              my constant struggle

to reach a stable state

Expected to memorize every single name
I carried la tabla periódica in my back pocket
my gringa lips loving a challenge

repeating each element’s name in Spanish,
sequenced, according to its atomic number
that social value I figured out

holds everyone’s place at the table
my tongue whispered their names to my brain
litio, sodio, potassio, rubidio

each grouped by their capacity to connect
and I, xenón wondered about my own valence
still not confident with my outer shell

I observed los panas and los pelados
compounds and molecules
holding hands at recess
swapping electrons like spit

my fourteen-year-old feet felt stuck
in plomo, estaño, germanium, silicón
when my chemistry teacher said don’t memorize

the glamorous synthetic elements
like Californium, and Einsteinium,
no son estábles he croaked

But ¡tecnecio!— I didn’t believe him.

So I searched that table for a secret code
to unlock the power to attract                 anything
found exotic locales, heroes, villains, and

the ability to shape-shift. To glow like tungsten,
shine like a palladium disco ball, I
Newjerseyum dreaming of Europium.

I theorized, if a man-made element
like Americium could find a seat
at that table, between plutonium and curium
and feign an octet state, then

Molybdenium! so would I.

Shepherds Take Warning

30 April 2020
Categories: Fiction

The hum of Rudy Bartles’s crop duster made us look up over the geek tent into the barren blue of the northern sky.  I-R-E-N-E in paraffin vapor, trailing behind the plane like a breath of hope.  But something wrong with the “R.”  Rudy didn’t swing out far enough on the top curve, drew the leg too low, so it came out looking like I-L-E-N-E.

More humming and then to the east over the elephant cars, H-E-S-S.  We figured next would be “I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U” or “M-A-R-R-Y-M-E” but when the plane turned south over the parking lot it spelled “M-I-S-S-I-N-G.”  Then it buzzed off, leaving us, to the annoyance of the barkers, gossiping in the dust instead of buying tickets to see the trapeze act.  To be fair, the trapeze lady was fully 42 and more than usually plain, so we didn’t feel too bad loitering there in the trodden pasture between the big tent and the fun house, talking about Ilene Hess, she’s the school secretary over in Pawnee Falls.  No, that’s Irene Hess.  Ilene is the organist at that Pentecostal church over by Billtown.  Aren’t there a bunch of Hesses live over by McReddy?  Well look over there, there’s Pete Hess standing by the tigers, let’s ask him.

But Pete Hess in his pressed denim overall was already in his cups and couldn’t bring to mind which of his female relatives might be missing, the Hesses being well-stocked in both Irenes and Ilenes.  “Could be Fred’s wife, she goes out catfishing and forgets to leave him a note sometimes,” he hiccupped.  But then someone saw Fred’s wife Ilene going into the big tent in a skirt so starched that it stood out in a triangle on both sides of her scrawny legs, so it wasn’t her.

In the absence of ready answers, the barker, a wrinkled outsider, finally succeeded in getting our attention and we started to buy our tickets to see the trapeze act, but then a tornado came up and tore the place to pieces so there was nothing to do but for those of us left alive to go home.

That night, as on every Saturday, I got a letter from Leavenworth.  They were always the same, but I opened them anyway.  “One week,” this one said.  The first one, four years,  eleven months, and three weeks ago, had said “Five years.”

 

Next day being church, those of us in that denomination took a good look at such Hesses as made an appearance. But it was hard to tell, the Hesses being so numerous and more or less all exactly alike, which is that none of them has a chin to speak of, and they all have round, hunted eyes with long lashes.  Seeing them together is like watching a flock of wild turkey picking its way across a dirt road.

Anyway, I don’t belong to that denomination but my friend Sadie Bartles does, and she asked me over to Sunday dinner.  I brought my iron and after dinner we did the linens while her husband Bruce watched the game.  She said that she couldn’t tell.

“I thought,” she said, “Irene Hess, Harvey’s wife, wasn’t there but turned out she was just behind Mary Bartles’s hat.  Ilene Hess too, the one that does the paper route, but she was just leaning over in the pew to smack a kid.”

“Any of them look wrought up?” I asked, flipping a napkin and spraying starch.

“Like they just lost kin?  No.  But you can’t tell with the Hesses.  They always look wrought up.”

“You think Rudy Bartles knows?”

“Myeh well, Don Bartles buttonholed him after the service. But he didn’t know anything.”  She folded the tablecloth in half and ironed the crease.  Then folded it again and ironed that crease.  “He got the order off his fax, checked the money was wired, went out and did the job.”

“No name or anything.”

“Nope, just the wire and what to write.”

“Did he at least say whether it’s Irene or Ilene?”

“He fudged it on purpose.  His fax machine is screwy with the ‘Rs’ and ‘Ls.’  Wants to get it fixed but no one services dot matrix anymore.”

There was a holler from the living room and we both nudged our iron settings higher, but it was just a touchdown.

“Frank send you a letter yesterday?” she said.

“Yep,” I said.

 

The Monday paper, second column on the third page, right under the tornado listings, said, “Missing Woman Baffles Officials.”  Sheriff Bartles was quoted as stating that the Sheriff’s department had received a missing persons report but, when he tried to pull the paperwork, a tornado had destroyed the filing room so he was not able to provide any detail.

Sadie and I and our friend Milly Bartles made a list and started counting. I only knew four or five but Milly Bartles knew 26 and what’s more, she could check, because Milly’s job as the Itinerant School Nurse took her all over the county so she could check off Irene Hesses and Ilene Hesses as she went.

Sadie said she thought there was an Ilene Hess, or maybe it was Irene, who used to work at the  Gas-N-Go who she didn’t see there anymore but we couldn’t tell anything from that because no one ever lasted more than six weeks at the Gas-N-Go.

Also on Monday I got two letters from Leavenworth.  One said, “Six days.”  The other one said, “Five days.”  This made sense because they don’t carry mail on Sunday.  So whatever Frank wrote from Leavenworth would wait on Sunday for the Monday mail.  This hadn’t happened before because Frank usually only wrote weekly, but I guess he was getting pretty excited about getting out of Leavenworth.

 

Tuesday, while I packed up the house, I tried to remember any Irene or Ilene I’d gone to school with.  There were two in my class and one in the class that graduated before mine.  In the class after mine there were none but in the next class there were four.  Or maybe there were two Irenes and two Ilenes, or three Irenes and one Ilene, or three Ilenes and one Irene, or maybe there were all four Ilenes or all four Irenes.  Maybe I could have thought of some other permutations, but I found our wedding album and decided to iron it.

I took it out to the barn where I keep the outdoor iron for grubby tasks.  I laid the wedding album on the incinerator grate and ironed the photos in their plastic covers until they dripped through.  Any place where Frank’s face didn’t get totally burned up, I pulled it back up out of the ashes and ironed it until it was gone.  The smell was like atrazine dusting low out of Rudy’s plane mixed with the smell of a car when someone forgets to take off the parking brake.

Sadie Bartles came by in the afternoon after her stint at the Pawnee Falls Public Library.

“Remember Irene Hess the cheerleader?  She was a junior when we were freshmen?”

“The one that got knocked up?”

“No that was Ilene.  This was Irene. She went to K-State for a semester.”

“Oh the one that burned an iron mark in all her skirts in Home Ec.”

“No that was the other Irene. She was a freshman when we were juniors.”

“Oh wait, I remember,” I said.  I did not remember, but I said it so that Sadie would get to the point.

“Well she’s the one who works at the hardware store over in Remington now? Ellie Bartles says she hasn’t been there since Thursday.”

“You want this iron?” I asked.  It was a spare.  It was one of those safety ones that turns off if you forget it, which is why it was a spare.  I handed it to her to inspect.  “Maybe give it to little Gladys,” I said.  “She’s old enough to start learning.”

Sadie started crying.  “I could lend you some money,” she said, “You could move to Lawrence.”

“That’ll be the first place he looks,” I said.

“OK, then London.”

“I don’t have a passport.  And anyway you and I and Milly don’t have that much money combined.  Here’s a box for you.”

I handed her the box I’d packed for her on which I’d written “SADIE” in black magic marker.  That really got her going until I said, “Bruce is going to be home soon,” and she skittered off to get her ironing started.

 

Wednesday was tornadoes so I just ironed in the basement most of the evening.

 

Thursday was Kiwanis. Or maybe it was Jaycees, or the AA meeting, I can’t remember. They had all moved to the Remington Community Center because everyplace else was blown down. Anyway, I baked cupcakes and put some boxes in the back of my car.  When I got to the Remington Community Center, Artie Bartles was saying that some of the Hesses over by the town of McReddy used to live in a corncrib they were so poor, and he was pretty sure the wife’s name was Ilene because she used to sell chicken and duck eggs at a table by Highway 16.  He said he hadn’t seen the egg stand all week.  But then Mel Bartles said, “Oh that was because she’d moved over to the intersection where Highway 92 breaks off toward Leavenworth.”

At the word “Leavenworth,” everyone looked at me sideways but I just kept on walking to the cupcake table, put my cupcakes next to Milly Bartles’s cupcakes.

“I got those cassette tapes for you,” I said, “in my trunk.  And I brought Elly my bundt pan.”

Milly started to cry.  “We could hide you,” she said.

“Where?”

We set up our ironing boards at the back of the room so the meeting could get started.  Don and Elly Bartles got into a shouting match over the budget as usual, and he was just yelling “PUT DOWN THAT IRON, WOMAN—” when a tornado came so we all got under the cupcake tables and, after it was gone, those of us left alive went back home.

 

Friday morning I was up in the attic before sunrise.  From the attic windows I had a good view of the fields burning across the county, lines of red leaping up into their smoke clouds along the horizon, grids of red intersecting and stopping each other at the edges of the sections.  The men riding herd along the edges to keep the burns in the fields.  In the attic I found the wedding dress.  I thought about taking it down to the barn for a good iron, but then I remembered my vows so I took it out of its plastic and hung it up on a rafter.  I shook out its frills and watched it swinging there.

It looked just like the time we found Ilene Hess, one of the Hesses that live up by Highway 4, swinging in her wedding dress from the bars of the jungle gym down at the school.  Principal Bartles cut her down.  Joe Bartles wrote it up in the paper as a suicide, based on the statements of Pastor Bartles and Sheriff Bartles that she’d always been troubled, but we all knew that her iron had shorted out and she didn’t have a spare.

Outside the sun began to rise against the smoke of the field burns, casting a ghoulish light on the white of the dress, so I took it downstairs and hung it up next to the pantry where I could get at it quick.  Frank’s letter that day said, “32 hours.”

 

Saturday was a revival and everyone from every denomination went because there wasn’t anything else to do.  Same pasture as the circus was the week before.  There was a tent with lemonade and meringues on the east side of the pasture, and another tent on the west side for the revival, and on the north side there was a horse tank filled up for the baptisms.  It was clear that the evangelist had brought support because there were a lot of wrinkly clothes in the crowd.  A tornado rolled by, clipping the north edge of the section, but it only took out a couple hats and hymnals so the revival went on as planned.

The evangelist said the Godless believed in climate change when the real cause of the tornadoes is our Sin.  He said that Sin was all the women working outside of the home and wearing jeans.  He said that we had been infected by Godlessness and the only way to stop the tornadoes was to get baptized.  So we stepped up to the horse tank because it was worth a try.

As we stood in line to get washed in the blood, a hum came over the top of the lemonade tent, and we looked into the brassy blue.  I-L-E-N-E.  Or maybe I-R-E-N-E.  Then over the horse tank, H-E-S-S.

Then over the revival tent, F-O-U-N-D.

Wayland Bartles kicked a dirt clod, then kicked it again, and went on kicking it right to the edge of the pasture.  Didn’t even get back in line.  The rest of us got baptized anyway, just in case, but the thrill was gone.

Shaking hands to go home, Milly sniffled. Sadie’s mouth bobbled up and down at the corners.  Even some of the men looked sorry.

“I’m baptized now,” I said, reassuring them, “I’m clean.”

“Amen,” they said.

 

When I got home I put on the wedding dress, which was loose from all the years. I sat down between my two best irons and turned them all the way up to “cotton.” One for Frank and the other for the tornado.

The Last Days of Paradise

30 April 2020
Categories: Poetry

The Last Days of Paradise

We popped pills that made us feel
like jazz, in our sealed, sub-nautical
scream. When the world came crashing
down, not much changed. We had normalized
lipstick stain chaos, shrieking at the sight
of blood but craving crimson. We welcome
patriarchal watchdogs with their murderous
offspring, for they brought paradise with them.
It was a dream, what we waited for—
so long for this world. We danced
all night long, not noticing that our marbles
had been swiped. We didn’t realize
that we had lost. Sometimes people
just need to dance and burn elegiac,
and that’s what we did,
an effigy to a life that never existed.

We Were All There

30 April 2020
Categories: Poetry

Down at the river’s lip
                                                     we strip and wheel
off the dock like moon-mad children, strewn
into brackish nights
                                                     with wounds we don’t want
to heal. Struggling and spitting,
                                                     we swim; we spoon
currents, rippling out
                                                     toward each other, grouped
in pairs like mating critters, yawping, flinging
baptismal mud,                    we loop
ourselves like Ouroboros,
                                                     teething on tongues.

Goose-bumped and cold, each takes their turn.
“Who here believes in sin?”
                                                     —our childish prayer
bewildering no one
                                   but us, and off-kilter

we stray, careening back up the bank still set
to fail again and again, forgetting to find regret.

Introduction

20 November 2019
Categories: Editor's Note

Welcome to the 23rd Issue of Waccamaw,

Our favorite rivals are beauty and pain: pink skies in the evening
traffic, sad women hanging on the walls of museums,
violins echoing off hot pavement as old men busk for spare change.

In these pages, find the small details that remember you. Bring them
up in conversation, like ice breakers.

You’ll leave from the same dock, but you’ll never cross the same river.

With the testimonies of this edition, we are not adrift. As long as we glimpse
either beauty or pain, we have rudders, paddles, sails.

Love,
The Waccamites

What Sticks

20 November 2019
Categories: Poetry

This is not a poem of leaving
               those velveteen branches or that frowning
hedge at the yard’s edge. This is not about the brushes left
               unwashed in the sink. They are already
forgotten, outside the frame. But see how the yellow paves
                                the bristles like something wanting
to remain? Once, you reached for my hands
               like you had just remembered
                                a name. And I think it has almost
               worked—smudging the exile around
your eyes, blending the lines
                                into a brighter color. I want to tell you
how my hands have already changed.
               There’s a song my fingers wrote for you
                                but my left-hand waltz won’t find lines
               the right shade of purple. And around
the house I sprinkled allspice and almost
                                felt your wooden spoon, almost remembered
something you said about pocketed hands
               and split seams. There’s a wanting
                                in vacant spaces the morning paves
               with counted days and already
flavorless foods. Those couches I left
                                will never miss me. I told you about a frowning
city skyline and nothing, no one, leaving.

Carriages

20 November 2019
Categories: Fiction

 
 
 

You walk Ajax the Dog three times a day, minimum. Often five times, up and down the cobblestones — you chose this neighborhood because it was historically registered, after all. The uneven stones make it impossible to push a baby carriage but you don’t have to worry about that. All you need to do is walk a dog. Across the antique brick crosswalks three, four, five times a day. Your personal world record is nine. Ajax the Dog still hates you for that day, gives you that eyebrow look whenever you jingle the leash after dinnertime, like, Let’s go easy, boss, and looks around the room, maybe to see what you’ve been drinking and how much of it.

World Record Day was a Thursday, the night your favorite prime time show ended forever and the last time you forgot to re-up your twice-a-day meds. You needed walking more than the dog. Damned animal refused even a single backyard outing on Friday, just whizzed right there in the kennel like every book and TV show and trainer assured you dogs never do. Pissed in his own bed, like, That’ll teach you.

So now you walk him three times a day, never less. Sometimes five, never more. You let him guide you. He’s part bulldog and part something else that gives him the energy and temperament of the sun. And you’ve moved the TV to the room above the garage that scares you because it’s full of spiders. You try not to spend nights up there. You succeed here and there. You miss Derek. Your mail has been delivered by Naomi for three weeks while he’s on vacation. You ask Naomi where Derek is but all she’ll tell you is “away” though one time she lets you know that he’s somewhere “stingrays are an ever-present danger.” You imagine New Zealand. You imagine South Africa, Indonesia, East Timor. You imagine Derek shooting laser beams out his eyes underwater and flying home on wings he grew from his shoulders to come back and deliver your mail. You imagine New Jersey and then think “stupid” but turn on the TV and see a clip about a guy from Trenton whose father paid for him to get feathers implanted in his biceps, triceps, and all the other -ceps you’ve never had time to learn about. He died after jumping off Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “Investigators are operating on the assumption that it was a suicide, but the County Coroner tells Fast News Nine that, ‘You never know what’s in a person’s head.’”

You spend the whole night awake, trying to dream harder and softer at the same time.

***

For a while the Beast walks Ajax the Dog but never as much as you. You adopted Ajax the Dog on the same day your friends got their baby, which tangled the emotions even more. And the Beast was the one who wanted a dog in the first place but for the most part it’s been you who picks up his shit piles, mounds, snakes, kernels, bowling pins. The Beast doesn’t even know how many shapes Ajax the Dog’s shit takes, the names you have for the shits. The Beast never calls Ajax the Dog by his full name. It’s always “Ajax” or “the dog.” One time “A.J.” but you said, “No. That name is reserved, asshole.” The Beast didn’t raise an eyebrow, much less a hand, so you know you were right. You deserved that baby. Maybe the Beast didn’t but you did. Your friends — Slam and Slap — didn’t even want one but they got one. You got a dog but they already had three of those. They didn’t even get a bill from the hospital but you did. Here’s your prize, you imagine the doctor saying, handing over the baby and then, Here’s another prize, when the outtake secretary handed over a bill that read Nothing due. For you, no one said anything but you saw the looks, like, Sorry for you, I guess, but also sorry for us for having to bear your tragedy with you for two seconds when we could be giving prizes out down the hall.You didn’t even get a note of condolence from the one kind nurse. Just the bill. Overdue. The irony of that word.

Being all about fairness is your Achilles heel. It’s the wrong world to be all about fairness. It was you, after all, who came up with the idea that whoever plates the food for dinner, the other person gets to choose first. You never eat the larger sliver of an oddly segmented orange. When it’s your turn to pump gas you don’t complain, even if you’re on the passenger side. Even if you’re sitting in back, because you already gave up the front seat for the Beast’s visiting whoever, not even a real mother, who refers to the Beast as “Sweetbeast,” as if that’s ever been true. Even if you’re asleep in the back seat when the car pulls to a stop under the rusted pump awning. You always wake right up when the Sweetbeast says “Sammy!” and stumble out of the car and pump the gas, half asleep, full mad.

These are not your rules alone. Rules don’t exist for a single person. Only an insane person makes rules for a community of one. Rules are made so that communities can thrive. What better community than a marriage? What better rule than fairness? You think about this when you walk the dog. The Beast never walks the dog, but does other things you don’t do. Like…? You think about this when you plate the food evenly and the Beast makes a show of weighing the plates, one in each hand, before choosing the heavier one. Is that supposed to be some kindness? You lost the baby but not the baby weight yet. Maybe it’s supposed to be a kindness but it doesn’t feel like one, especially when the Beast says, “I don’t even know how you managed to gain baby weight. I’m the one who should have gained the weight.”

The Beast got a job that involves driving eighty miles away twice a week. The Beast thinks this is just beyond the threshold (79 miles?) of sanity and no sane person would drive that far in the morning and back that night so the Beast lives in a hotel down in Lucedale twice a week. You’ve been to Lucedale. There’s nothing there. No supermarket, no mall, just a misspelled Kwik Shawp. No gas station, just a year-round fireworks stand. No hotel, just an Extended Stay America. Who wants to extend a stay there? And according to the plastic alphabet sign on the rusted pole looming over the highway, the shortest stay that qualifies as extended is one week. Does the Beast rent long-term? The Beast won’t say. The Beast does your taxes and says that’s all the accounting for that’s required.

You find a receipt in the Beast’s jeans pocket. It says, “Big Bosses Storage Fortress.” It says, “$64 monthly.” The handwriting under the printed section of the receipt reads, “5 X 10, approx studio apartment.” You say, “I didn’t know you were an artist” and the Beast doesn’t get the joke and you let it stew and say, “Nothing, nevermind, forget I said anything.”

Your jaw still hurts where your college girlfriend (your first one) kicked you while you were tickling her, thinking that was sexy. You still wonder if there’s a chipped bone in there. Lately it’s begun hurting on the other side too. You wonder if that means it’s cancer. Didn’t you hear that Bob Marley died of cancer after stubbing his toe playing soccer? Pathetic. At least Peter Tosh got assassinated. But who remembers him? Keith Richards is still alive, making more money than ever for playing the same old tunes. Sadness all around. Maybe you’re just grinding your teeth. Or maybe that stupid girl broke your jaw all the way around and it’s taken all these years for the fracture to travel behind your skull. Maybe your head will just fall clean off one of these days. Maybe everything is only held together by skin. Skin slowly growing brittle in the increased, throbbing sun. You spend days in thoughts like these, walking the dog, cooking dinner, cleaning dishes, Googling Lucedale, zip codes, hotels, calling 1-800 numbers and putting on varying foreign accents and asking for Room number 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, forgetting where you left off, falling asleep to the sound of ringing on the end of the line when the man, woman, or whatever at the front desk figures out your gig, probably in cahoots with the Beast, and just hangs up the phone without speaking.

When the Alley Cats you took in over the Beast’s objections piss on the bath mat, the Beast tells you for the fortieth time what a bunch of bad ideas you harbor. Ajax the Dog eats your glasses case and you go crazy and the Beast says, “The glasses weren’t even in there, right?” and you can’t even get the breath to claim that’s not the point. The Alley Cats hate Ajax the Dog and the Beast hates conflict but when you’ve got the house alone you let Ajax the Dog in the bathroom when the Alley Cats are pissing on the bath mat and watch the fur, claws, and shit fly. You fight with yourself over not cleaning the place up before the Beast comes home but you always leave the house shining brighter than ever.

You’re not a cat person. You hope no one thinks you are. You’ve never had a dog before Ajax the Dog but you always felt like a dog person. Before you had one, that is. The Beast isn’t an anything person and that’s part of why you got along so well to begin with but then you started to feel like not being an anything person might mean not really being a person at all. Or at least not a person person. You’re willing to accept that you’re not a person person but you’re not sure you want to be with someone who’s not a person person. Why would someone like that want to be with you, who are, after all, supposedly, another person?

How did you meet the Beast? Where was your first date? When did you first kiss? You remember all of this, but it doesn’t mean anything anymore. When did you first fight? When did you stop listening? What was the thing the Beast said that first made you roll your eyes? Walk out of the room? Slam the door? Wake up angry? How did it get to be like this? You don’t remember any of this and this is all that matters anymore.

At 11:17 AM, while you’re rewashing the hall mirror, the Clerk of the Court Calls. That’s what it says on caller ID. You say hello and the clerk starts his end of the conversation with a rising, “Heyyyyyyyyy” as though he just caught you in a compromising position. You say, “Who is this?” and he responds with, “Who is this?” You identify yourself. He says, “Oops, sorry,” laughs, and hangs up. Probably not the actual clerk. Probably a secretary. Does the Beast know any secretaries? Mailboys? Legal interns? You wonder if the Beast is in trouble with the law. You should really get a job. This is one of many reasons it’s bad to be home all day by yourself.

Your neighbor to the east has twice as much engine as car. He leaves for work at 5:15 AM, six days a week. Your neighbor to the west has a dog who whimpers when the sun comes up. You always sleep through the whimpering, never through the growling, the hollered threats from the facing window. Across the alley behind your bedroom window lives a couple with an infant. You heard that new families make the best neighbors and you find this to be true until your neighbor to the west tells you she hasn’t enjoyed a meal since her dog died six months ago. You never noticed how high her voice is. The whimpering and the deep hollered threats continue, echoing oddly from the alley. Sometimes they seem to be coming from directly above your bed. Sometimes from under it. In it.

You bought two floor lamps at IKEA. Faux rice paper shades, long cylinders, from about Tall Man height down to ankle level, with step-on power switches and nondescript black bases. You bought one but realized upon plugging it in that your living room needed another for balance. It was two weeks before you got back to IKEA. The box was the same. The price. The picture. The assembly. But the second lamp is two inches taller than the first one. Taller enough that you can tell the difference unless they’re at least fifteen feet apart. You performed tests. Fourteen feet isn’t far enough. Fourteen feet is the diagonal span of your living room. You did the fifteen foot test in the driveway. Couldn’t tell the difference. But your driveway doesn’t need light. The neighbor across the street, to the south, has had his security light pointed in your direction ever since Ajax the Dog busted out the screen and ended up turning his purple hyacinth vines into very temporary chew toys.

You read an article in the New Yorker titled “A Case for Apathy” that profiles a number of couples that are so involved in the political revolution in Washington that their personal lives have dissolved as a direct result. You wish you had followed politics.

You walk Ajax the Dog thrice daily. Maximum. No more five walk days. You’ve got a routine and Ajax the Dog lives by it and likes it. Or doesn’t. You don’t care, try not to notice.

The Beast now spends every other weekend in Lucedale. Sometimes more than that. Maybe not even in Lucedale. You don’t even ask for room numbers anymore. Sometimes you daydream about the moment you realize the Beast is never coming home, but you don’t know what that would feel like. If it would feel any different than now. How could you know the Beast is really never coming back?

You don’t daydream for Ajax the Dog to disappear. You’re not that cold. You’re colder, by not even daydreaming about it. You know it’s coming, know the only power you have is to decide to fail to keep the dog safe. You feel your hand loosening its grip on the leash when Ajax the Dog tenses up upon spotting a squirrel on the opposite sidewalk. You ease down to two walks a day, then one. Then once every other day. You have it in your power to make Ajax the Dog rebel, tear up the sofa, the curtains, you. But Ajax the Dog just looks at you like, You’re in charge. So you up the walks to five, six, nine. You walk once around the block, return home, take off the leash, wait for Ajax the Dog to lie down, jingle the leash, start the process over. Twelve times. Nineteen. Thirty. Your calves throb and you’ve got blisters on your left wrist where you wrap the leash end. You jingle the leash and Ajax the Dog stands up dutifully on wobbling legs. You see yourself in that dumb face, hate what you’ve become, and keep on being it.

 
 
 
 
 
 

White Center, 1950

20 November 2019
Categories: Poetry

The figs, arranged in                still life,
              as if by Chardin’s                   quiet violence;
                         the house exists to hold them.

Bruised bodies beaded         dark wet,
               glisten pressed to                  porcelain in this
                           astonished kitchen                  whiteness, this
                                                       bewildered daybreak rose.

We know just by                    looking how
               the mouth will form             around them,
                            the subtle shape                                    of promise
                                            and of fleeting tongue-burst flesh.

From Mea Culpa to Me Too

20 November 2019
Categories: Nonfiction

I am teaching Sherman Alexie’s collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in my Native American literature class the week the sexual harassment scandal breaks. Feeling as if I must come clean by acknowledging these developments, I photocopy the Jezebel article, much of which is screencaps of Litsa Dremousis’ Twitter feed. It’s less an article than the echoes of a blown whistle.

I fear the weight that the allegations will throw over our 80-minute seminar, so I write “Jezebel” mysteriously as the fourth and last agenda item for the day. By postponing the inevitable, I put myself in the position of dissembling, of running the first hour of this class as if all is normal. We begin, as has been our pattern for this book, with making little plot maps on index cards for each story we have read, seeking to understand their mechanisms of climax, resolution, and revelation.

Then we take all the cards for all the stories we’ve read and sort them into piles or continuums. If this whole exercise sounds like a thinly disguised plot review, you are not far off: sometimes even my upper-level English classes feel like an exercise in dragging reading comprehension out of half the class by sheer force of will.

But this kind of slow, deliberate tracking of connections can yield insights that my most voracious and adoring previous readings did not. Just last week, thanks to our index cards and chronologies, I had arrived at a new theory, aligning details that had escaped me on all those other readings: Jimmy, James Many Horses from “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” is the baby James from “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation,” the child thrown from the window of a burning house by his father Frank Many Horses onto his head and raised by the man who almost caught him. I didn’t know it was possible for my love of either story to increase, but as these two stories snapped into alignment, they both lifted my heart a little more. In “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother,” the narrator maintains faith in his son James’ prescience even after years of muteness suggest he has been terribly brain-damaged in his fall, thus walking an ambiguous line between fatherly pride and delusion. Though he reports that James begins speaking, finally, at age six, the other characters and the reader don’t quite know whether to believe him. Bring the story alongside “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” though, and the father’s faith is proved merited. Jimmy’s inability to shut up is not just a fatal flaw but a miraculous gift wrested from the world’s cruelty.

After last Thursday’s elation, here I am on Tuesday with the Jezebel articles stacked guiltily face down on the desk behind me. After we finish the plot maps, we work together to sort the cards. I have tried to come up with a few new prompts for each meeting, asking things like: Who is narrating? What’s the overall chronology? Which stories are most hopeful?

Today one of my students offers the question, “Which ones have female characters?” We bend over the cards. Strong and well-developed female characters like the Aunt in “The Fun House” or Norma in “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” and “Somebody Kept Saying Powwow” are rare, but women do at least appear in most of the stories. I propose we try the Bechdel test: does this story have two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man?

Not one story passes.

Now I get an inkling of it: perhaps Alexie was always just as advertised. The male narrators and main characters in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven are alcoholic, emotionally inarticulate when it matters, and occasionally terribly cruel.

In the story, “Amusements,” the narrator Victor places an incoherently drunk Spokane man on a roller coaster and leaves him vomiting under the gaze of laughing white carnival-goers and hostile security guards. The story ends when Victor flees into a hall of mirrors and feels the sensation of “the folding shut of the good part of [his] past.”

Victor knows he is lost to himself because he saw Dirty Joe in need of care and betrayed him instead. Somehow this clarity of self-reflection produced hope in me and my students that Victor would find his way back to goodness and become the man he knows he could be.

Alexie’s ability to write a character capable of such self-conviction allowed us to imagine that Alexie lived in that goodness, but he never promised us that, did he?  I am reminded of Fuckhead, the narrator of Denis Johnson’s famous short story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” who turns to the reader at the last sentence, and, in the place where the narrative structure begs for a moment of revelation, tosses out, “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

I have been this ridiculous person through more than a decade of teaching and loving Alexie. (I nearly deleted this metonym, this habit of writing “Alexie” when I mean “Alexie’s work,” but I really do mean I loved Alexie, don’t I?)  I feel as if I have betrayed my students by holding this man and his work out to them.

At last comes the moment to hand out the article. I let the class read, and then invite my students to reflect with me upon what the revelations mean for teaching Alexie’s work in the future. Should I stop?  Should I replace these books with books by writers who have not exploited, intimidated and held back female colleagues?

My students are not all that upset. They show a strong willingness to separate the work from the man and quickly present literary-historical significance as an argument for continuing to teach Alexie’s work. They are disappointed but not surprised. One student conflates the allegations of harassment with rape allegations and makes the same argument anyway, as if rape is all she ever expected from a public figure.

I leave the classroom disappointed by the discussion. I’m the only one in agony, and my students are not going to wrestle this out for me.

Alexie’s fall strikes home for me because in some ways I wound up here—a white Americanist generalist who leapt eagerly to teach the Native American literature class when my dean was on the point of mothballing it—because of Alexie. He was the only Native American writer I read as an undergraduate. Over the years, he led me to others. I first read an Alexie story in an MFA-style fiction workshop my Junior year. Void of contexts like indigenous history or the Native American Literary Renaissance, he was presented to us as exemplary for his humor, his breath-straining titles, his pitch-perfect tonal control and ironic distance in the post-modernist bad boy tradition of Donald Barthelme, Denis Johnson, and my own professor. In retrospect, it is no surprise that the advisor who slapped my ass at my thesis reading and handed me off seamlessly to the MFA director who groped half the cohort chose Alexie to be in his boys’ club.

The creeps all know and support each other.

As I teach first-year composition that afternoon, the lesson is related to source documentation for research papers. But facing me from the back wall of the classroom are colorful fair copies of the list poems my students wrote in response to a moment near the end of Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I was so proud of their poems; students from my other classes couldn’t resist coming to read them. Now I want to tear them down. They’re inspired by that moment where Arnold says:

     I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American      immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms. And the tribe of cartoonists…

He goes on for fourteen “tribes.”  The “I realized” that starts off this passage signals a moment of revelation: Here Junior sums up what he now knows. It’s a moment freighted with meaning, as in, it unfolds with all the subtlety of a fourteen-car freight train. And I was okay with that. I valued this book as a teaching text because it has so many soapbox moments, ready-made thesis statements that invite students to assemble constellations of other text evidence around them to produce their own readings of the novel: rich and infinitely varied.

This passage had been making a liar out of me for years. I encouraged students to engage with it and write their own list poems in response because the poetic form is approachable and can produce such good results, but I was deeply skeptical of what’s going on in the passage itself. Junior’s declaration serves as a profoundly unradical moment, like the traditional marriage at the end of a Shakespeare comedy that re-contains all those wild flights of cross-dressing and female empowerment. No one ever faced genocide for loving salsa, but Alexie’s list places identities with profound social consequences–Spokane identity; poverty–on par with chosen and unstigmatized categories like being a cartoonist or a basketball player or a “tortilla chips-and-salsa lover.”

There are many moments when Alexie’s novel challenges its readers about racism, classism, systemic injustice, and cultural appropriation. My white students especially often seem to experience the “tribe of” passage as an olive branch extended to them by Alexie after so much uncomfortable prodding. I mistrust it because it’s placating.

And yet. Alexie’s long list is a vital reminder that identity is intersectional and no one should be reduced to a single identity marker. In its eagerness to welcome everyone into a “tribe,” Alexie’s poem opens up space for readers to think of themselves as having multiple identities, too, and to dream of living in a world where all those identities are honored.

When I asked my students to write their own list poems in response, they shone. Using the stem, “I belong to the tribe of,” they proclaimed their struggles, their heritage, their politics, sexuality, and dreams. I have room to teach just one novel in the yearlong first-year writing sequence and I used The Absolutely True Diary because, though it’s about a high-schooler, I have found no book that better mirrors the alienation and precarity of venturing into the world as a low-income, first-generation college student. This book had a power to call my students forward to trust me and each other with sacred parts of themselves. Every year, someone came out. Every year, I learned something lovely about my students. This year, I found an unfamiliar word–philomath, lover of learning–in a student’s list and learned that I belong to this tribe, too.

Alexie called forth this beauty from my students, and all the while, he wasn’t worthy of their trust. He wasn’t safe.

Another conversation about Alexie’s misdeeds occurs organically in my Literary Criticism class at the end of the day. Students in that class had read Alexie with me as first-years up to two years before, had had this experience of letting Alexie help us forge a classroom community of mutual care. Their agonized groans and stricken expressions mirror my own reactions. Like me, they’d been carrying an idealized Alexie in their hearts like a friend, perking their ears to his new work and bringing me news items and radio stories about his career. And now this. They feel the news has taken something from them.

I am still wrestling it out that night with my husband on the long, dark, and icy drive home from our weekly martial arts class in Marquette. I sent him the audiobook of Alexie reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian early in our friendship, just as it tipped over into courtship. I dropped that book in the mail like it was a guidebook to my values, a window into my life’s work. I believe that education can be a ladder to our dreams. I believe that people can love each other across their differences. He took to the book as I hoped he would, laughed through it with his daughter, perhaps even understood what I meant by sending it to him. So the rural college professor courted the Detroit steelworker.

There are still fifty miles of dark road ahead of us, and the conversation churns, seeming only to roil up new regrets. He expresses sorrow for what we lose in Alexie as a model for craft and skill if the world turns its back on him. We are skating the thin ice of a marriage across political difference, the libertarian and the left-of-liberal. His media feed algorithms have spent the past few weeks telling him that Me Too is a witch-hunt, but I can’t blame him for wanting to snatch Alexie back from its flames. I wish I could, too. Or, rather, I wish Alexie hadn’t deserved this fall. Is there any way this isn’t true? he asks. I asked myself that, too. I am awaiting the investigative piece from NPR; I am awaiting a statement from Alexie, but I am not optimistic.

Our conversation circles outward in anecdote and analogy. I recall academic mentors whose behavior toward me or my peers had veered into sexual harassment. As we speak, there’s an awaiting tension in me, a nearness to an abyss. I want my husband to see Alexie’s behavior as a big deal. A failure to do so would feel like a failure to have my back. I feel this way even though I have continued to maintain politeness and even honor some of the harassers in my own life for the kind things they did for me when they weren’t groping me. But tonight, after Alexie, during Me Too, it feels important to set them all beyond the pale.

As a rhetorical technique, “How would you feel if this affected your wife, mother, daughter, or other female property?” is a load of nonsense, an appeal to empathy pitched for the fatally narcissistic. But in the arc of a lifetime, a man can learn a lot from daughters. I know that the experience of raising two daughters alone helped my beloved grow into the beliefs and convictions that made him feminist in all but name long before we met.

“Would you study martial arts with someone you couldn’t trust to teach the girls?” I ask.

In this shared martial arts world, we both recognize how it narrows women’s opportunities when some teachers can only safely mentor men. And from those teachers, he is firm, even men should turn their backs.

And this is our answer, isn’t it?  A clear answer can still be a painful one. My mind is already running over my bookshelves and long lists of possible replacement texts for my first-years, but the community we will build around those texts is an as-yet unknown alchemy. I still feel trapped by my Alexie quandary, by the car and the darkness and the road that demands attention and could turn slick and perilous at any moment.

Giving up on talk, we turn to an audiobook, picking up where we left off with Louise Erdrich reading her recent novel, LaRose. My Native American literature class read it some weeks ago, but I’m revisiting it now with him. In a few minutes we come to a passage that I think of as one of the tenderest descriptions of love ever penned. In it Wolfred imagines how he will care for the body of LaRose, his wife:

He closed his eyes, saw himself mixing a little mud up with his fingers. He would touch her face, smear the mud across her cheeks, down her nose, across her forehead, the blunt tip of her chin. He didn’t want his beloved to be hurt in the next life, by men, the way she had been in this life.

In imagining the gesture, Wolfred maps the treasured facial features he plans to obscure and recalls a past gesture when he strove unsuccessfully to prevent the girl LaRose’s rape by the fur trader Mackinnon. In LaRose’s adulthood, the two built a beautiful life despite the way the traumas of rape and family violence marked and stalked her. Wolfred’s love understood, acknowledged, and was utterly and tenderly present for her trauma.

Sometimes we aim far, far too low with our lessons.

I once had a flashback in my husband’s arms. I gritted my will and wished it away. It would pass; we would make love. My will and willingness remained even if my mind’s eye had, briefly, betrayed me.

He took his lips from mine and asked if I was all right. I crushed myself closer into his arms, stunned, seen.

Later, afterwards, cooing and wondering, I asked him how he’d known. “I don’t know. I just felt your energy change,” he said.

I still think back on this moment in awe. What allowed him to feel the cold lightning of that other moment running through my blood?  The empathetic leap involved nearly denies the possibility of articulability; the twice-naked intimacy of the setting makes it yet more difficult for me to write of it, but I know I must try because I walked this earth for more than thirty years without imagining that I might be granted such care from this lover who asked for–who gently invited–my whole heart, wounds and all.

Our public conversation lags somewhere behind, out in the realm of establishing the basics of good bedroom manners like enthusiastic consent and ungrudging mutual responsibility for birth control and sexual health. It’s still seeking a negative peace, a no-rape truce between the sexes. This, of course, remains vital work, but it is triage work.

What if I asked more of the books I gave my heart to?  Instead of hoping only to see badly-behaving characters like Alexie’s Victor eloquently crucify themselves, what if I sought out texts that model tender and generative relationships?  I know they’re out there, a stealthy canon of tenderness, a library of ideas for how to be more than self-aware of being toxically masculine. Erdrich contributes one image in LaRose as Wolfred lives out his 19th-century clerk’s version of masculinity. Today’s luminous queer poet Danez Smith expresses similar nurturance in their poem, “Principles,” when they write:

      Oh lords, above us and within
      let us be useful to our neighbors
      & tender their wounds.

Smith’s words are the prayer of my heart. Not all our stories need to be of men with demons imperfectly held at bay. Some few might even teach us how to be, as Smith puts it, “more bandage than blade.”  For all that is wrong in this world, not all our forebears are monstrous. Some are tender, and we might yet learn to walk in their ways.
 
 
Coda

Soon it will be two years since February, 2018, when Me Too broke over Sherman Alexie. That February 28th, he issued a statement painting Litsa Dremousis as a jilted ex-lover, but admitting, in regards to his many other accusers, “There are women telling the truth about my behavior.”  He apologized to people he had hurt, and then he went quiet.

In an interview with Time in 2012, Alexie was invited to ponder, “Why… are there not more Sherman Alexies?”   By this the interviewer meant, why are there not other wildly successful Native American writers, a younger generation coming up behind?  Alexie did not take the opportunity to praise any lesser known writer. Instead, he quickly raised and then dismissed the idea that racism in the publishing industry was to blame.  “Are you kidding?” he asked. “Publishers would die if a manuscript came flying into their offices that reminded them of me or Louise Erdrich . . . They would be dancing. But it just hasn’t happened, and I don’t know why.”  This swift dismissal of the talents of other native writers came from a man who, by NPR’s account, solicited manuscripts from at least one up-and-coming indigenous poet as a prelude to soliciting sex, and who claims to “have no recollection of physically or verbally threatening anybody or their careers,” a nicety of phrasing that still admits the possible veracity of numerous accounts of such threats.

I could not continue to hold out Alexie to my students, nor ask them to buy forty copies of his book every spring.  It was easier, at the last, to turn my back on Alexie the man than it was to give up the Absolutely True Diary.  I had to mourn the way my students and I lived with the book and used it to help us know each other. At some very fundamental level, this is what fiction is for: practice caring about a character; learn to care about your neighbor.  This is the idealistic contract that brings me to work each day. In the end, these communities of readers are just another wider and more diffuse circle of trust that Alexie chose to violate. I wonder, as I so often do of violators, if he ever saw the beauty that was possible in that circle.

My first-year students and I now read Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson.  I try not to think of this text as a replacement for Alexie’s novel. It has its own entirely different strengths, among them a brave portrayal of a teenaged mother with ambivalent feelings towards her son who comes to terms with her new role and finds power in her identity in the Caribbean diaspora.  All of this takes place in a near-future dystopian Toronto plagued by drugs and healthcare inequality but enriched by resilient, cooperative multi-ethnic neighborhoods seeking to forge a new life in the ruins of the shattered old economy. I am still learning to guide my students down the many rich avenues for discussion that this book opens.

When my Native American literature class comes around again on its two-year cycle this spring, I will teach it without Alexie.  There, I don’t think I’ll miss him much. How could I, with a canon and a contemporary scene so rich? I will have Silko and Erdrich, of course, and also the life-affirming, intricate poetry of Margaret Noodin. I will have Rebecca Roanhorse’s post-apocalyptic novel Trail of Lightning with its tough female monster hunter and Stephen Graham Jones’ working-class werewolves in Mongrels, and the historiography of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and essays by Tiffany Midge in her inimitably titled collection, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s.  There will even be Antíkoni, Beth Piatote’s contemporary play that reimagines Antigone through the lens of Nez Perce characters considering the indigenous remains in museum holdings, just published this October in her collection The Beadworkers. Who needs another Sherman Alexie when there are so many other voices, writers who remake language, worlds and genres with a brilliance and courage that makes more room for all of us to live inside?

Chitin Diaries

20 November 2019
Categories: Poetry

 
 
The kitchen full
of babies roosting
on high shelves
like cups for punch
one by one she
pinches their cheeks
sinks in the glossy
mud of their squall

*

She has a pen pal
who doesn’t write
back each time
she sends a letter
the top of the mailbox
grows more jagged
last time she swore
she saw a tongue

*

One time she
spun a revolving
door all afternoon
a fishbowl
leaking light
brass ring around
her neck the sidewalk
a leaping comet

*

After a bath
she is a hollow
egg the doorknob
sticks like wet
wool a spool
of moss down
the hall a velvet
vest of mold

*

In elevators
she pictures cables
rising like sap
in the dark
buttons slip
from the door
to orbit her hands
a flock of pocket
watches hovering
between floors

*

She was baptized
in the skinny wrist
of the river
by the interstate
popped fuses
of pine trees
her arms coiled
like water moccasins
fractured loop
of the on-ramp
their mouths soft
with spores

*

They come to her
in her sleep
each step a key
in the counter
a series of periscopes
in the morning
she picks bodies
from the bathroom
sink her face
in the mirror
a nicotine smear

*

One day last winter
she stepped outside
onto a small
bird huddled
by the door’s edge
its bones fizzed
through boot and shin
to settle on scalp
a calcium crown

*

Summer sprang
serrated wings
a prism of winds
she steams
in the bedroom
bound by cabbage
worm silk
fog crawls
over the carpet
up the stairs
the backyard flush
with weeds
her hair falling
from every nest

Masthead

20 November 2019
Categories: About Us

Editorial Team
Managing Editor: Madison Rahner
Copyeditor: Rose Pleasant
Assistant Copyeditor: Frank Sanford
Design Editor: Parag Desai
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Fiction Editor: Justin Easler
Nonfiction Editor: Kayla Jessop
Assistant Nonfiction Editor: Victor Cocco
Poetry Editor: Brittany Atkinson
Assistant Poetry Editor: Olivia Dimatteo
Staffer: Ian John

Faculty Editors
Editor-in-Chief: Colin Foote Burch
Digital Content Coordinator: Alli Crandell
Nonfiction Editor: Lane Osborne
Fiction Editor: Jeremy Griffin

 

 

Vulgar Magic

20 November 2019
Categories: Poetry

 
 
We could live suspicious, breathing
to bleed—but my mouth had nothing for strange quiet.

I was too much, waiting to make my good news face down

on the bed, years ago. Our futures
threw white linen aside, burned cold and bright and displaced.

I was an upcoming birthday, mascara-bound and dazed.

My anxieties knelt to lavish that witch heart in me with maple
and iron—my throat forever this box

of sour faith. I ran, turned my back on rotting thoughts, unable

to apologize. And the music saw me, nearer, dusty on the floor,
sprawled thorny in blue tulle. I had to turn,

see the tarnish, my name enough to make me the devil’s moon

soft and forbidding. Under my smile
I wished for an ocean to take the hours, hostility let out.

 

This is an erasure poem. Source text: Andrews, V. C. Flowers in the Attic. Pocket Books Paperback ed. New York: Pocket Books, 2014. 295-308. Print.