Prose

Lacey N. Dunham

Blackbird

The screeching redwing blackbirds flash from their nests in the ditch, the red feathers a taunting delight. This is their favorite summertime game. Mr. Dyer’s crop duster blankets the corn and wheat, and the birds swoop low, attacking them in alarm. One year before Tippi Hedren in Technicolor does the same, they give chase, then scream and run like hell from the swift wings and sharp beaks. 

Pickles is fastest on her skinny fawn legs, lightening slick. Maryann and Tula are quick, too, until they grow curves the boys feel entitled to grab and squeeze. Jaspar trails the girls and Dinky is always last, always the loser. He is stubby limbed and asthmatic, crying, Not fair! Slow down! But Pickles never slows down, and they all scramble to keep up. 

Mr. Dyer’s plane chugs to another field, and the birds settle back into their nests deep in the cattails. The siblings stick out their tongues to catch the chemical sweetness peppering the air, delighted by the zinging burn. They trudge to the water pump outside the barn and take turns cupping hands beneath the rush of cold well water that cascades over their bare feet. The water tastes metallic and sharp, better than the silky stuff from the school fountain that quenches but doesn’t satisfy, though that’s not what Molly Macintyre says. Molly is a banker’s daughter, her hands white and her nails clean. 

“Your water tastes like blood,” Molly likes to say. “You’re evil vampires who drink blood water.” This is how Pickles ends up punching Molly for being a know-it-all snot.

Daddy is serious when the principal calls him in at the end of the school day. He is wearing his best shirt, though it is wrinkled, and squishes his body into the yellow plastic chair. The odor of dust and sweat spark in the air as they watch Daddy try to get comfortable. The principal pats his tie like a beloved dog. Their father repeats Yessir, Yessir. But in the swaying, rocking van on the way home, Daddy rubs Pickles on the head for having the decency to avoid Molly Macintyre’s pert nose and for only punching her once.                                                                

 *

The summer is bright with possibilities. They turn off the water pump and cross the blacktop road for the oak on the sand hill. They cannot see Pickles and Jaspar, years from now, disagreeing about their father’s funeral, their voices growing loud. The argument becomes a fistfight and Pickles breaks Jaspar’s nose but does not apologize, too proud for the words, I’m sorry. Maryann takes Jaspar’s side and neither speaks to their sister for a decade. Sitting on the hard dirt beneath the oak’s soft shade, they do not know that Tula has three kids a few years after graduation, or that Dinky surprises them all by being the first one to marry, and the only one to never get divorced. As for Molly Macintyre, her husband whisks her far away to a big house in another state where she grows squat drinking white wine in large glasses and fruit-flavored water from a can. 

That night they eat outside, propped on the bed of Daddy’s pickup, the hatch slung open. It is a treat to eat with him during the work season. The sky has not yet begun to dusk though it’s almost eight and the gnats circle. The land stretches to the thin line of the horizon as if there is no end to things. Their fingers are butter-slick from the fresh sweet corn, the fleshy kernels sticking between their teeth. Iced tea sweats in old canning jars. Green beans snap in their jaws. Dinky and Tula sit on the wheel wells and tear chunks of Tula’s homemade bread still warm from the oven. Maryann and Jaspar kick their feet from the truck bed, mouths smeared with the juice of a few late-season strawberries and ripe slices of muskmelon.  

Daddy laughs and wipes their faces with his shirttails, and Jaspar sticks his tongue out, bright red from the strawberries. Pickles balances on the box ledge, her legs spread wide like a man’s, something their momma hated but she has been dead five years. Daddy stands with his feet planted wide, his work boots dusted to faded brown. In the distance, they watch an ambulance race down the road, a screaming red-winged blackbird.

Daddy whistles. “Eighty or ninety, at least,” he says. “I’ll hear about it from the guys at the grain elevator tomorrow.”

But the news reaches him before then. As Daddy grabs his can of beer dripping with sweat, Mr. Dyer’s blue Dodge truck zips past, chasing the ambulance. Daddy’s eyes narrow, and he raises the beer to his lips, sucks the yellow liquid with its bitter, yeasty taste. He sets the can slowly on the truck’s hood and shoos them into the back, supper not quite finished. He drives more slowly than usual the half-mile home. He says he’ll be back late, and he squeezes their shoulders with something like love. Dinky, who is last, gets an extra-long squeeze, his asthmatic wheezing loud in the confused silence. Daddy instructs Pickles to wash and put everyone to bed. She swells with the responsibility.

In the morning over breakfast—dry toast and jam, milk and off-brand Cheerios—

Daddy’s face is grave. His eyes are red, but he doesn’t smell of beer. He tells them little Kara Dyer has died. He doesn’t say more, and when Pickles nudges with questions, he snaps at her. They notice how he clenches the table and looks away. In class, their teachers repeat the news with heavy, low voices. On Friday school is cancelled, and they dress for Kara’s funeral. Bright flowers cascade from the closed lid. 

Daddy changes after that. He doesn’t laugh with them as freely. He yells often. Pickles grows to hate him; they can see her hardening against him, and she splits the siblings, divides their loyalties and has no mercy for those who choose their father over her. Eventually, they all harden against their father.                                                                   

*

It is years and lifetimes before they learn about what happened to little Kara Dyer. They are together for the first and last time after their lives dash apart when Daddy has a sudden heart attack and the farm is foreclosed, since the day Pickles clocks Jaspar at the funeral. They are gray-haired or bald, and Pickles is still skinny as hell though she looks gaunt, and her face is etched with hardness. They sit around the banged-up table in Pickles’s kitchen with its one yellow bulb, and they laugh and joke as they haven’t done since they chased the blackbirds. 

They remember playing in the back of the semi truck while it filled with corn, the shifting, ebbing waves more fun than any toy or playground, though they preferred the wheat with its headless grasshoppers and husks dotting the air like snow. They remember Kara, an only child, so often alone. Maryann is quiet. She tells them how Kara died: the undulating kernels in the semi bed pulling her under as swiftly as quicksand until only the tips of her sneakers were seen.

It is so long ago that they struggle to remember the details about Kara—was she brunette or blonde? How old was she exactly? Why did they love those silly games? And they realize then that fear is the only emotion as strong as love. They feel the ashy trace of that evening on their skin, and they finally understand their father.

Their reunion ends, and they hug at the screen door. Dinky hacks a cough into his chest, says his wife will worry he hasn’t called. Tula mumbles about her twin boys and her daughter visiting. Maryann and Jaspar disappear like cats into the night, the ones who never could live more than a few miles apart. Pickles watches her siblings leave, then pours a glass, lights a smoke, and sits down to drink on her front porch, alone.

Lacey N. Dunham's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares (online), Witness, The Southwest Review, Pigeon Pages, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Midwestern Gothic, and The Maine Review, among others. A first-generation college graduate originally from the Midwest, she now lives in Washington, DC. Find her on Twitter @bookbent.

Jedah Mayberry

BEND

Willful Intent –

The outside world seeks to bombard us with endless platitudes. Be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you. Look after my needs and I’ll look after yours. Only thing, you go first.

*

We arrived at the next bend in the roadway. The crinkles forming across our teacher’s brow instructed us to remain still. Though the itch creeping along restless feet prompted us to crush to one side of the school bus, our palms spread wide as we pressed our foreheads tightly against the glass.

A scene straight out of a horror movie came glaring back at us: the rear end of a deer poking out the front end of a Jeep Cherokee, the deer’s massive splay of antlers ensnared in the Jeep’s slotted grill. The collision sent the driver careening through the windshield, momentum carrying his torso opposite the trajectory the deer had taken. Left resting on the Jeep’s hood, each played trophy to the other’s successful kill.

 “That thing dead?” Bo Jensen asked, pointing toward the deer’s hind legs, its hooves poised to buck like it had gone head-first after the front-end of that Jeep.

“That dude in the plaid lumber jacket is for sure dead,” Marcus Gladwell replied. The man’s head sat crumpled in on one side, like an overripe melon, his face pock-marked with splinters of glass from the smashed windshield. He lay prone, his arms outstretched like he had accepted the deer’s challenge head-on.

 In our meager nine, ten years, we had come to recognize a deer could be killed by a moving vehicle, a rain slicked roadway having spelled the end for untold wildlife over the course of our lifetimes. We hadn’t considered the prospect that a deer could kill a man, the stark realization confronting us on the bus ride home from a fieldtrip to Watchung Reservation.

It was early November if memory serves, the height of fall in Central Jersey. It had been sprinkling off and on the entire afternoon through a sky bright with sunlight – the devil beating his wife after all. The deer must have hesitated, its hooves sent scattering along the roadside in search of grip. The driver would have jammed on the brakes sending the vehicle into a skid, the asphalt carpeted with a heavy covering of wet leaves. Had he reacted more swiftly, had the deer been surer footed with its sprint, the incident might have been averted granting our bus safe passage, winding the remaining way down the hill then across Rte. 22 on the way back to Plainfield. A group of impressionable fifth graders would have been left to go another day, spared firsthand knowledge of the destruction one being might inflict on another, neither having set out to do the other any harm. 

The trauma of it would not soon leave our heads despite Ms. Thompson’s repeated insistence we come away from the windows and retake our seats. “Who can recall what species of bird nests along the forest trail?” Ordinarily her prompting would elicit from us calls of ‘American Woodcock’ chanted in bored unison. That afternoon, her question fell on deaf ears, our attention locked into the need to process what we’d seen, a proper understanding not bound to take hold for years to come.

Give Me Water –

This was to be our last year at Frederic W Cook Elementary School. A trip to Watchung Reservation to wind down the fall semester followed by a visit the following spring to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City then it was on to middle school.

A decade and a half later, I have been entrusted with the care for six class periods of budding teenagers, only a handful of years older than we were on that fateful bus ride home. I accepted a job teaching math at Eisenhower Middle School down in Freehold at the start of the 2019-2020 school year. None of us could have predicted even half of what this year has heaped on us. 

I had always been proficient in math. Not a math whiz. But, with sufficient hard work, I could make a go of most anything thrown my way. This was not expected of me, a little black boy in a school of mostly black and brown faces was not meant to shine in the statewide assessment exams. But only in math. I earned passable grades everyplace else. But math became my thing, my shtick as my father was known to say, beaming at his only son. 

Mrs. Hopkins, my high school guidance counselor, lamented upon reviewing my SAT results that a small boost in my Evidence-Based Reading and Writing score might have warranted an application to Seton Hall or Princeton maybe – if we’re being totally kooky. But she knew of a program that might suit me just as well. Two years at Kean College followed by a transfer to Montclair State netted this little black boy a BS in Mathematics plus a minor in Educational Leadership. Maybe I’ll work to become a school principal, at an institute offering mathematics exclusively, one that caters to black and brown kids like me. I beam at the prospect, a conceivable progression in mind for my little math shtick.

Or Leave Me Dry –

In early February, the school district began issuing warnings regarding the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Within the coming weeks, we went from wait and see, to plan and prepare, to full shutdown. By mid-March, all classes had been moved online. As one of the younger teachers on staff, I wasn’t spooked by the tech aspects associated with the move to online schooling. I was instead completely unnerved by how to teach remotely when I had scarcely gotten a handle on how to navigate a classroom full of disillusioned kids face-to-face. I held out hope the parents would be of some assistance. Nearly the opposite has proven to be the case.

Harold Baines approached me in the teachers’ lounge midway into the fall semester, my face apparently stricken with bewilderment. Harold teaches history. As the reigning senior staff member, he had undoubtedly encountered this look countless times.

“You’re not on stage,” he muttered at me, bits of blueberry muffin spilling beneath his heavy mustache. “You don’t need to perform for these kids. You’re here to impart knowledge. It’s their job to pick it up or not,” he said, stirring some dried powder meant to pass for cream into his mug of coffee, nearly filled to the point of overflowing.

“Your job is to show up every day, to be present in the classroom. See what they see. How the material is sitting with them,” he said before taking a generous gulp, sending the slosh of coffee in his mug safely below the rim. “And keep your ears peeled. Not much will get past you if you pay attention to the whispers, an excess of foot shuffling while you’re at the whiteboard, your back turned to them.”

Online instruction has its advantages. Most notably, never is my back turned to them. I stare at the tiny squares housing a classroom full of anxious faces bobbing in the Zoom window. Peer inside their living spaces to see whether Mom or Dad is standing nearby to make sure I’m delivering it straight. To offer the assist in the event their particular tadpole is not catching on at the rate needed to keep pace with the rest of the class. I wonder what trauma these kids have seen, whether this is the worst experience they’ve endured. 

9/11 stands hazy in my memory. I was five years old, a snot-nosed kindergartener, when those planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon. Things stopped for a time, the world on standstill working to make sense of the trauma we as a collective had experienced. COVID-19 feels different. 9/11 affected international relations, stymied US economic development with long-felt, lingering effects trickling to the rest of the world. COVID-19 has people on lockdown the world over, not a soul spared the trauma.

 We had crested the semester’s midway point shortly ahead of the lockdown. Now well into May, the end of the school year looms ahead of us, summer break finally, mercifully in sight. Another benefit of online schooling: no snow days. No place for anybody to have to be, us teachers included. Though, come to think of it, the past winter barely delivered any meaningful snowfall. Maybe Mother Nature herself has contracted Coronavirus.

I celebrate the coming end to our ordeal silently inside my head: ‘June 18th and we’re outta this piece,’ I say reverting to a familiar slang I slip into anytime I get to catch up with some of my Plainfield crew. 

As instructors, we are not meant to pick favorites. But I have grown to look forward to seventh period. It spells the slow march toward the end of the day. Plus, there’s a lone black boy in my seventh period class – cat whiskers in a bowl of fresh milk. Dahvoo Simpkins reminds me of me. A Melvin Jenkins 2.0 – similar skin-tone, an affinity for formulas and equations, an innate grasp of basic geometry. He’s that and then some. Seems more alert, more with it than the rest of the kids in the class. More with it than I imagine I was at his age.

“Dahvoo, would you care to explain for the class the meaning of the Pythagorean Theorem?” I ask. I expect him to regurgitate a canned formula. He instead goes straight for the physical interpretation.

“Take three squares, lengths A, B and C on a side. Place squares A and B at a right angle in a stairstep pattern, a diagonal aligning the squares, one corner to the other. Lean square C against the lip of the tread formed by square A to the lip marking the edge of square B.” Dahvoo shares his screen, begins drawing freehand in the Zoom window. “Call the line marking one side of square C as it extends from the edge of square A to the edge of square B the hypotenuse,” he continues. “The length of the hypotenuse shares a relationship with the lengths of squares A and B, one that won’t change provided A and B maintain a right angle, C extending from the tips of the treads formed by their stairstep arrangement.”

I scan the Zoom window. Blank stares across the board. The teen attention span is hard to hold. With the school year coming to a close, hope of widespread participation is all but futile. If only the world were populated with more kids like Dahvoo. A timer pops up in the Zoom window and begins counting down: 00:59, 00:58, 00:57… Less than a minute to go and this day is done.

A long weekend lies ahead of us – Memorial Day. Let the Zoom universe rejoice. “Enjoy the break,” I say to the panel of evenly spaced squares. “And Dahvoo, thank you for such a thorough explanation. Good work.” I end the Zoom session then immediately begin panicking that I’d been beaming at him. Please tell me I wasn’t beaming. You can’t beam at a kid in your middle school math class, even a kid who reminds you of you – a Melvin Jenkins 2.0. 

Pythagoras’s Dread –

Everyone seems especially sluggish in my Tuesday morning sessions – typical aftermath of a three-day weekend, everybody afflicted by a school-wide hangover of some sort. By seventh period, everyone is especially fidgety, their hands lost in their laps working to keep the commotion on their phones offscreen, behind my back technologically speaking.

Even Dahvoo appears distracted. “What gives?” I ask.

Naturally, he’s first to respond. “Take three peace officers,” he says. “Place Cops A and B at a right angle to one another. Have Cop C take a knee, pin a cuffed, unarmed subject face-down on the pavement. What do you get?” 

“A hypotenuse?” I presume, struggling to grasp his meaning.

“Just a noose,” he replies, holding his phone up to the Zoom camera. “You get a modern-day lynching. Another black man snared in a proverbial hangman’s noose.”

I reach for my phone, pull up Google news. And there it is: cellphone footage of George Floyd pinned down by three police officers, a fourth officer preventing a small gathering of civilian bystanders from intervening despite repeated pleas to render aid. To check the man’s condition.

Officers A, B and C hold the man down for eight minutes and 46 seconds, until he is asphyxiated. Until George Floyd is dead.

I send the kids off in search of a parent, close the Zoom session. Class is excused for the day. 

 The next morning, I receive a note from Principal Allyn. She wants to arrange a private videoconference with me. ‘What can this be about?’ I think. Ending class forty minutes early? Given the circumstance, I feel it was the right move.

She begins slowly, her words carefully measured, as is her custom to do. “Mr. Jenkins, I want to commend you for your quick thinking. Not every member on staff was as nimble. Attempted to muddle through, if not oblivious to what the kids had pulled up on their phones, what they were seeing.”

I thank her for the vote of confidence, for the responsibility she has entrusted me with. Still, I hesitate. There’s got to be something more.

We stare across Zoom-land at one another an uncomfortably long while. One of the school counselors eventually joins the conference. Peggy something or other. Haven’t had much interaction with her. “One of the students asked if he might speak with you, he and his father,” Principal Allyn announces. “I’ll leave you and Peggy to it. She’ll observe on the school’s behalf.”

Dahvoo and his father appear on the screen. Melvin 2.0, I think to myself. I must have messed up royally. His father thanks me for taking the time to meet with them then turns to Dahvoo. Nods. “Go ahead, son.”

Dahvoo begins, methodically doling out the words as is his custom. “Mr. Jenkins, I wanted to ask someone who I believe will give it to me straight, someone who sees the world like I do. Rooted in logic. Only filled with things that don’t always go how we expect.” I had sprinkled a little calculus in on them the other week, just to see how they might react. It did not go how any of us expected.

“Go on,” I say hoping to give him the confidence to proceed, my Education Leadership skills being put to the test.

“Officer B?” he asks me.

“The other white guy,” I say, eyeing Counselor Peggy’s Zoom square. Her expression remains unchanged suggesting she hasn’t been agitated by my choice of words.

“Yeah. That’s the one,” Dahvoo confirms. “His name, Thomas Lane. Been on the force four days.”

“That’s what I hear,” I say, my jaw tightening.

“What do you think he hoped to become when he was a kid?” Dahvoo asks.

“A cop, I suppose.”

“For four days?” he asks, his forehead crinkled. I look away, fidget in my chair.

“I imagine not how he expected things to go,” I respond, turning my attention back to the screen.

Dahvoo nods in agreement. “Are you a religious man, Mr. Jenkins?” he asks. I know from the bit of juggling we needed to do to get him into my seventh period class that Dahvoo and his family are devout Muslims. Sixth period is for my advanced class which would better suit his abilities, did it not overlap midday prayer time. I suppose some concessions must be made, even at the expense of advanced mathematics.

“I believe a force bigger than ourselves exists,” I reply. It’s an answer I’d begun handing my grandmother whenever she asked why I no longer accompany her to church. I was nine or ten when I stopped going, around the time the deer and the man driving that Jeep wound up killing one another.

“In honor of my religion, I pray several times a day,” Dahvoo explains. “Some of my prayers are more pointed than others. Have a more direct aim in mind.”

“Yes,” I reply to convey he has my full attention. “What do you pray?” I ask.

“That in the morning I will not be afraid.”

“What do you fear?”

“I fear there are people in this world who pray the opposite before they go to bed each night,” he says. “Who ask in their prayers that I live the rest of my days in fear. Who see it as just that a person who looks like you and me is free to be hunted.”

“That is not how things are meant to go,” I reply. It is the only response I can muster.

Jedah Mayberry was raised in southeastern CT, the backdrop for his fiction debut. The Unheralded King of Preston Plains Middle won Grand Prize in Red City Review’s 2015 Book Awards and was named 1st in Multi-Cultural Fiction for 2014 by the Texas Association of Authors. In 2018, he completed a Hurston-Wright Foundation Workshop in Fiction, used in part to revise the manuscript that resulted in a second book, Sun Is Sky, due from Jacaranda Books. His work has appeared at Linden Avenue, Brittle Paper, Black Elephant, Akashic Fri-SciFi Series, Solstice, Permission to Write, and A Gathering Together among others. Jedah resides with his wife and daughters in Austin, TX.

Jenn Blair

Everything Happening Below

There would be no Mike the squirrel, no smartly labeled container of peanuts.

Let me back up.

My mother moved into my head about a month and a half ago.

Let me back up some more.

When I first decided to put the space up for rent, I suppose I was inspired by a few of the places my family has been fortunate enough to stay at over the years. There was the sweet cottage near the Tybee lighthouse with the red and white striped awnings and the cabin in Elijay with an animatronic country music belting deer head trophy that made my children giggle. Then this last summer (thanks to the generosity of a great-aunt) my husband’s extended family was able to gather together at a Frank Lloyd Wright inspired looking house perfectly nestled on a wooded cliff right above the beach in Newport, Oregon. We enjoyed the hot tub on the deck and breezy linen curtained bedrooms while playing board games that weren’t ours, smiling as we read the personalized note in the plastic sleeve left by the Portland couple renting out their dream home til they could retire there themselves—happily hoodwinked into believing we were their distant kin for the privilege of over a thousand dollars a night, excitedly writing about all the whales we’d seen out the dining room window (as if they’d care to know about those diminutive interchangeable puffs rising out of the water) and, after talk of the whales was through, putting one last entry into the guest log about the continuing exploits of Mike the squirrel, who was to be allowed two peanuts a day out of the aforementioned jar. When we locked ourselves out that last morning, my oldest daughter yelled ‘wait’ then ran back and added a shell to the already crowded front sidewalk, thrillingly ushering us into the larger stream of human history.

There was one other specific reason I finally went ahead and took the plunge: a pair of women’s white ankle socks. The first week of fall semester, when all uninspired teachers press students to share an interesting fact about themselves, a blond girl in the front row revealed that every year her family rented out their house for the Master’s and went on vacation, a fact I remembered a few weeks later when the ankle socks first appeared, each of them festooned with a golf flag proudly sticking up out of the yellow lower forty eight, their official logos crisp and impeccable to the point of intoxicating. Those flags, if a breeze hit them just right, would have been waving directly at me. Do it, do it. Today.

Now mind you, I never planned to charge more than around 72 dollars a night. This particular lobe of my brain isn’t right by the sea or mountains or a magisterial golf course; also, a fresh coat of Coastal Fog paint and a new sisal rug from Wayfair can’t hide the fact that the queen sized bed pretty much occupies the same space as the kitchenette and couch. Though the bathroom is separate, it’s miniscule—a walk-in shower stall and one shell-shaped sink, its scallops long out of date but not yet quite old enough to be retro-charming. Also, since it’s my head we’re talking about, it’s probably fair to say the zip code isn’t shared with an Ivy league school so much as a very thoughtful gas station. I honestly thought that if anyone ever actually did book the place, it would probably be someone coming in to work a temporary assignment, an out of state worker looking for an extra quiet spot to sleep. The site hadn’t been up for a full twenty four hours yet (I was still trying to figure out what amenities to include—that huge beach house only allotted two extra rolls of toilet paper and one extra paper towel roll which struck me as a bit cheap but perhaps some people took anything “spare” with them when they left?) when I first heard the strange clanking. After I got up from the computer, I smelled it, even before opening the front door. Sulphur and Fritos.

*

“How long have you been in there?” I ask, a little angry.

“I don’t know. A couple of days?”

 “Who drove you?”

“I took the bus.”

“Why didn’t you knock?”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Have you unpacked yet?”

“Almost.”

“Did you ever think about asking first?”

“Do you remember Doris Sim’s son? Her youngest son Barry just bought a fancy house right on some lake in New Hampshire with a fully furnished basement apartment just for her. He wet the bed for years, but look at him now! An extremely successful accountant. Very often those who bed-wet the longest turn out the best. They probably just have too much going on upstairs to keep track of everything happening below.”

“I babysat him a few times. He liked playing Battleship.”

“I guess if you babysat him you’re quite a bit older. Kind of hard to believe, given everything he’s already achieved at this stage.”

“I would have thought you’d at least call me.”

“Well I told your sister to call you but I guess she forgot. You know how Sophie’s doing all that spelling bee stuff right now and Mary Beth has to drive her all over the state. As for me, I’ve given up trying to reach you. You seem to think a text is enough but it’s not. Texts don’t let you hear the full range of human emotions present in just one drop of an actual human voice. Remember Carol Withers’ daughter Ashley? She ended up going to jail off the Appalachian trail last March somewhere around Roanoke. Her dud-boyfriend put all the drugs in her backpack then conveniently went missing down 81. She’s bipolar and adopted, don’t forget, but she still manages to call Carol more than you call me.”

She also robbed Carol at least twice. And Carol pays for every dime of that phone.

“Mom, I have a lot going on right now.” 

*

The next morning I try another tack.

“Mom, I was thinking, what if I put you up in a bed and breakfast for a spell? Just for a while,” I ask in my most faux-breezy tone. 

“Are you forgetting that one your father and I stayed at here after Alex was born? The one that had fake bacon and a parrot right off the dining room that wouldn’t quit! Hello! Hello! Hello! We could barely hear ourselves chewing and swallowing for all the squawking.”

“If you’d move out for a bit though, I could make it even nicer. I was going to put some subway tile in the bathroom.”

“It’s a house not a train! Besides, I don’t need luxury.”

“Mom, I’m just asking you to go for a few days or maybe a week. I’m not quite ready for visitors yet.”

“Let me tell you honey,” she tosses my Allstate coffee mug in the sink so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t shatter. “I wasn’t ready either. I’d rather be in Florida or with your father, rest his soul. But I thought I should move in now while I still can actually totter in on my own splotched legs. Let me have some dignity here.”

 “Mom.”

“That piece of fake bacon, it stuck,” she points to her neck, “right here for a minute. Can you imagine that? Thinking you’re going to drop on some stranger’s floor and choke to death all because of something that’s not even real?!”

*

Now that my mother’s living in my head, I have a few things I’d like her to answer:

“Was grandpa having an affair? Is that why we went to Aunt CeCe’s with grandma in the middle of the week that one time when I was in fourth grade? Why else would you take me out of school like that?” (I don’t bother reminding her that I had a science project due the very next week—to make an animal cell out of household items—and that because of the trip I had to throw something together last minute when we got back. I don’t bother telling her how much it still pains me that the endoplasmic reticulum was nothing more than two hastily squished together strawberry Fruit Roll Ups).

 “There was no affair. Aunt CeCe needed us.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story.” 

“I have the time.”

“Well, if you must know, after her lady bits were taken out, her body really started grieving and then all that sadness shot straight up to her mind and started slapping it. Not just little slaps. Big nasty ones.”

Usually I didn’t get all the information I desired. But that didn’t mean I didn’t try: “Do you remember those folks who used to lived in the big yellow house right next to us, the Watsons? Why did they move so suddenly?”

“I don’t know but I still get a Christmas card from Betsy every year. They live in Knoxville now. That reminds me I need to send her my new address. Remember how you had a crush on their son Kyle and were so upset when your brother spent the night over there and pulled a pair of your underwear out of his sleeping bag? That’ll teach you to be so modest changing clothes at church camp! One of her letters said Kyle flies airplanes in the military. Next time you’re outside, look up. Someone flying over you in an F-16 has seen your skivvies.”       

Some questions, obviously, were more important than others.

“Is there a history of breast cancer in our family? Because I had a mammogram a few weeks ago and then last week they called me back again, for more scans, and now they want to do a biopsy.”

I don’t tell her how scared I was the second time I went back or how I had to sit in the little waiting room with four other ladies in robes, three of them quietly holding their clothes in the regulation clear plastic bags they’d given us while one especially diminutive patient opted to keep her clothes in a neatly folded pile on her lap as she sat there gracefully trembling.

“There’s no history that I know of,” my mother says, setting down the decoupage vase Mary Beth made in an eighth grade art class on my new Ikea bookshelf by the couch. “As for me, I’ve never had trouble with any of my pictures and as for your grandmother, you know she never told me anything about anything. Anyway, you’ll be fine. Look how small yours are.” 

This is the type of statement that routinely passes for logic on my mother’s side of the family.

“What about dad’s mom?”

“None of that type of trouble as far as I can recall.”

“By the way, why didn’t you breastfeed me?” I ask as long as we’re already discussing this specific area of the body, “I could use a few extra IQ points. There’s another level, right above the one I’m at. Sometimes when I’m trying to work, I can almost feel it, hovering right above me.”

“That study is inconclusive. Besides, I tried. More than once. You were too weak to latch and kept dropping right off.”          

*

It seems to be bothering my mother that I haven’t been checking in on her as much as my biopsy draws nigh. She never says anything about it directly until the morning she appears in my kitchen in a terrycloth bathrobe holding a loaf of bread, looking aggrieved.

“Hi, mom. What’s up?”

“I baked pumpernickel but why should I give it to a stranger?”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten,” I tell her, shooting a sideways glance at the bread (I’ve been smelling it baking all morning and trying my best to ignore it; her pumpernickel is strangely compelling), “I’m having a biopsy this week. ”

“Once,” my mother studies the loaf in her hands, “when you were about six, we were cleaning out your closet and we found an old pom-pom, one you’d gotten with your father at a basketball game, a cheap thing on a plastic stick. You looked at the handle and realized you’d chewed it so it was flat like a drinking straw and just lost it. You said ‘the next time I take this to the game everyone there will see the handle and know what I did’ then ran into the other room sobbing.”

“Your point being?”

“Your whole life is an especially nervous time. I don’t think I’m interrupting anything anymore than I would be on any other day.” 

Tossing me the loaf, she vanishes. It looks a bit burnt on the edges but I still find a plate, a knife, and half a stick of salted butter, cutting slice after slice til I feel I’m about to burst.

*

Two days after the pumpernickel incident, I suddenly hear myself telling my oldest daughter, “I’m going to go take my eyes out now”—her ensuing look of horror bringing a new revelation. I’ve vowed, for years, never to say that when I take out my contacts as you-know-who does, never use such a violent phrase that makes me sound like an anguished Gloucester versus a middle aged woman with dry retinas opting for glasses at the end of the day. It’s all too clear what’s going on. My mother is knocking out a wall and trying to add another room.

When I go to confront her about it, she’s wearing pearls, my son’s old orange and yellow neon swimming team goggles, and a dust mask. There’s a sledgehammer in her hands and a large hole in the plaster right to the left of the oven.

“That couple in Texas would knock out this wall for sure,” she grins. “Such good Christian people. And both so funny and attractive as well. The Lord gave them all the gifts.”

“Before you go and make this kind of alteration you need to ask.”

“Did you ask as you kept getting bigger and bigger for nine months, crushing all my organs, permanently dropping my pelvic floor? No. You didn’t. You took what you needed, God love you, that was your right, and now I need a little more room—wall space in particular. I have a lot more pictures to put up—six grandkids last time I checked, three of them yours. I need to put up an equal amount of frames so no one thinks I’m playing favorites.  If I have a whole separate little room it will be like a shrine. Maybe we can go get some more frames at Michael’s later. I have a fifty percent off one item coupon for a non-sale item set to expire Saturday.”

“Do you still have the photo of Alex’s soccer team?” I momentarily forget my anger to inquire.         

“Yes, but it’s a shame they put her in the back row behind that huge hulking girl so that you can barely see her.”

“That girl was a disaster. Always making faces at the coaches and referees behind their backs.”

“You can already tell it won’t end up well. She better get used to wearing numbers on her shirt.”

“Please,” I ask, finally remembering why I’m there in the first place, “could you just do the demolition during the day? The kids need to sleep at night and you know how early Karl has to get up to get on 316 and try and beat the traffic into Atlanta.”

“Of course.”

*

Now that my mother’s here, I find myself talking to Gretel even more than usual. She’s one of my oldest and best friends and I can always count on her to offer commiseration and perspective (she’s been extra wonderful lately, listening to me ramble on about all the scans and call backs I’ve had, and the impending biopsy. Normally I’d talk to Mary Beth about it but she caught her husband cheating on her about four months ago and I don’t want to add to her troubles. Gretel’s always gotten along famously with my mother, which, oddly enough, I don’t resent. The admiration appears to be mutual. My mother has told me several times before that she quote-unquote “Gets a real kick out of that tall thin friend of yours. Will she ever fix that gap in her front teeth do you think?” 

This morning I don’t have to go to school so I’ve asked Gretel to please go downstairs and talk to my mother about stopping her renovations after this one project. I think my mother will listen. Gretel has pull. Sway. When she tells me she’ll see what she can do, I give her a huge hug—it’s not altogether unlike sending in an exterminator (with copious amounts of good cheer). I wait upstairs as ten minutes pass, then twenty, and then an hour. I thought she was just going in for a brisk chat. Perhaps my mother is holding her hostage. Quietly, ever so quietly, I open the door a few inches to spy on Gretel and my mother sitting at the table with a plate of poppyseed muffins. My mother has made some English Breakfast for them and is sitting there nodding vociferously as Gretel makes wild gesticulations with her hands: “So at the fall festival this other mom on the planning committee, Louise, insisted there had to be felt unicorn horns attached to the poor ponies—as if real horses weren’t magical enough. What are we even teaching these kids?!”

“You’re right,” my mother nods, “a plain horse is all they need.”

When Gretel drops by about half an hour later, I’m busy, very busy, sorting my recipe drawer.

“I think she got the message,” she reports, eyes studying the floor in a sort of guilty downward glance.

“Alright.”

“Text me if you want to walk over at the park next Thursday morning?”

“Sure. Sounds good.”

*

The next morning at school no one wants to answer my questions about the stories I’ve made them read.

“That one that messed with the Little Red Riding Hood story that mentioned the wolf’s um, private parts being…uh…huge? That was kind of off-putting,” the girl in the front row from Augusta declares as the girl sitting beside her nods. She hasn’t worn the white socks with the Masters logo on them for weeks. Did she lose one in the laundry room or did her difficult Goth roommate steal them just for sport? (paper one was a personal essay). I ask a hunched over boy at the back of the room (the one who owns four turtles back up in New Jersey and has to pay out of state tuition) for his opinion on the matter: “I don’t remember how it ended. I had a lab report due this afternoon and I just kind of skimmed the first part of it.”

I come home fuming. No one appreciates me. No one understands my sacrifices. No one understands how much Scotch tape costs or how much I have to buy it and that I like it to remain in the desk drawer in the kitchen where it belongs so that I can find it when I might need it for something important. Where is my tape, my tape, my God-damn tape. 

“I took it,” my youngest daughter confesses after I confront her and her siblings.

“What did you even need it for?”

“Go look on your dresser.”

I go downstairs to my room and look. Right besides the mountain of Girl Scout patches I store there (I don’t know how to sew them on the sash), I see a long strip of tape, sticky side up, lying there, with a pair of googly eyes sitting atop it. I’m still staring at the eyes staring at me when the offender comes into the room.

“What is it?”

She hangs her head, bereft.

“A sign of friendship.”

*

The day of my procedure, I tell my husband he doesn’t need to go with me. Yes, I’m sure. You know how I like to do these types of errands by myself. I sit in the waiting room near a woman with a small boy in a stroller, the woman loudly feeding her crying bird sugar out of a plastic sandwich bag, just a peck more and then another peck, trying to appease the red squawling face. She sees me eyeing the sugar baggie, then turns to the boy-baby-bird and says, “It won’t be much longer now, til your blood test,” which leads me to realize I’m judging her for something she has to do. I quickly avert my gaze. When my name is finally called, I notice the woman taking me to the backroom has black spiders on each of her nails, black spiders on a dark mauve background. She’s pleased I noticed though she needs to change them—leftover from Halloween. I try not to think too much about it, meaning acrylic spiders crawling all over my boobs or the doctor in the green sweater who quickly introduces herself (where is her white coat? She looks like she’s about to push off to have a bowl of chowder in an Irish pub), the needle going in to a numbed place, but still, to feel it scraping underneath the surface and then all the blood pooled on the machine afterwards as they push the chair away and lean me back, the spiders pressing and pressing til the bleeding stops. We don’t want you to faint. You shouldn’t lift more than ten pounds. Would you like a can of soda before you get back in the car?  

Rushing out of the waiting room I notice the same rumpled National Geographic I read a few weeks ago on my first visit here, the one that discussed a study where people who were shown a photograph of their partner surrounded by cute puppies had more positive feelings about said partner, and I suddenly see my mother’s face wreathed in fake bacon, all the puppies yapping at her, lunging for the food as I yell at them to back off and yell at my mother not to wear false meat, does she want to get mauled?! 

Wait a minute! That’s not fake bacon. It’s real. Real bacon. That’s why the dogs are yapping so relentlessly. She said the bacon at that bed and breakfast down the road from our house was fake but it wasn’t. It was one hundred percent genuine pig: sizzling and crispy and pristine and what’s worse, there was no parrot, just a little silver cd player softly oozing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. She lied to me about the bird, the bacon, everything. I rush home, clattering down the stairs to the basement with misplaced anger and dread. 

“Good timing,” she looks up and grins, “I’m about to start a Hallmark movie. It has that girl in it with the cute dimples. The one who was in that other thing, you know, from that book where they go out west and she’s the new school marm the town hired because the first lady couldn’t go at the last minute? I’m pretty sure you watched it with me once one afternoon when you were home from college with the flu.”

“I don’t remember that. Maybe you watched it with someone else. Anyway, I just got back from the hospital.”

“You didn’t tell me that was today.”

“I did. A few days ago.”

“But then you never said anything again.”

“Didn’t I?”

“No.”

“I thought I did.” I honestly can’t remember.

“Didn’t you want Karl or me to go with you?”

“Karl offered but I told him I’d be fine. He’s busy.”

“Oh,” she nods taking another sip of tea, “Well anyway, I know everything will turn out just fine.  But until you know anything for sure I guess the thing to do is just put your mind on thoughts above.”

I nod and flee before she can say anything else, lying on my bed, hot indulgent tears stream downing my face as I clutch my round pink ice-pack to my smoldering breast.

The next morning, when I’m calmer, I go outside to the back and knock on her front door to apologize for rushing away the day before. As I wait on the stoop I can’t help but notice she’s put up a new decorative flag: two cocker spaniels frolicking in a patch of daisies. She opens the door wearing an apron with a green tractor on it, a swirling puff of steam neatly embroidered directly above its pipe.

“May I come in?” 

“Of course dear, it’s your place after all,” she flings the door all the way open so I can come in and sit on my couch, all but vanished under some oversized pillows with rainbow colored polka dots.

“I ordered those online. They came just yesterday. They’re not quite as puffy as I thought but I guess they’ll do. By the way, I wish you’d had time to watch that movie with me yesterday. It was very uplifting. The woman who thought she was giving up everything by moving back to her hometown to help her father with dementia, well little did she know who’d been pining for her ever since she took that job in Chicago all those years before.”

“Who was pining for her?”

“The man who ran the hardware store.”

“He just waited around for her year after year? That’s a little pathetic isn’t it?”

“No. It wasn’t like that. He married someone else but she died in a car accident. So he had a daughter to raise all alone. Well, they were all alone until she came back on the scene. She’d always wanted to have a child but she was so busy with her job that it just never happened.”

“Dementia aside, it sounds really convenient for everyone,” I mumble wondering how soon Karl will remarry if something happens to me.

“How are you feeling today? After the procedure?” Aha! So she did remember.

“I’m good. I came here because I wanted to say I was sorry for rushing off yesterday. Also, I have a question to ask you.”

“I’m all ears.” She seems happier than normal, thriving even, but for no particular reason that I can discern. Until I see the wall by the stove. Completely gone.

“Were things, well, was it always harder for me?” I ask trying to ignore the missing wall, “I mean did it seem difficult for me to just… you know…get through life.”

“Shoot yes,” my mother agrees, flopping down on the couch beside me.       

“Remember that year you went to grad school in Scotland and you called and told me about some strange boy why you saw in the cemetery in the pouring rain? I got off the phone and like to have died laughing. The only way you saw that other poor soul out roaming amongst the gravestones in the drizzle was because you were out there too but you didn’t even realize it! Instead you felt sorry for him.”

“Wow. That doesn’t sound very self-aware, does it?” I helplessly clutch one of her new pillows, trying not to notice it smells just like Elmer’s glue and day three of Disneyworld, a nasty smell that’ll sink deep into the couch’s fibers and never leave. The next person who stays here will leave a horrifically bad review online and I’ll be all but sunk.

*

The day I’m supposed to get biopsy results, I yell at my daughter and my son and my other daughter while we’re all rushing out the door for school and work in the morning, scowling at the fingernail clippings Karl has left in his sink even though they’re in his sink not mine. Right after I get in my car my mother calls me on the phone versus appearing in my kitchen, showing a respect for privacy I sincerely appreciate, but I don’t feel calm enough to pick up. I text instead: “sorry, have to leave for school now.” She texts right back, “you know I don’t text.” I’ll have to deal with the fall out later. 

At school, not much has changed: the students still don’t want to talk to me or even each other. The girl with the golf flag socks is gone, using the third of her four allowed absences. Staring at her empty chair I wonder if it bothered her that when she came back to her house that she didn’t necessarily know who’d been sleeping in her bed. What if it was an old man golf fan who left his drippy nasal spray on top of her nightstand? Strange milky colored dried droplets of some unspecified substance on the varnished wood right by the fake tiffany lamp. After my last class, I go to my office and grade quizzes, giving at least one point even when the answers seem fairly vague and I suspect the student didn’t do the reading, hoping to have some cosmic mercy returned back to me. At three thirty pm I can’t wait any longer. I call the hospital and someone says please wait, they need to go get someone else while I try not to breathe too heavily on the phone. It wouldn’t do to be mistaken for a serial killer.

“I know the sheet said today, Ma’am,” the voice finally re-emerges, “For the results. But we have two pathologists here. Both are great, very smart, but one is slow. Oh dear. Slow isn’t the word I wanted. He’s thorough. More methodical than most. None of his results are ready. Don’t you read anything into it, dear.”      

Upset, I drive home and see a clay caked shovel sitting by a few unused bags of potting soil. Thinking Karl must have started another project over the weekend, I let myself into the house. I still have a little time by myself before the kids get home, so I open the cabinet and take out a can of large pitted black olives to snack on. While I’m standing there wondering if I’ll ever actually use that old box with a few petrified lasagna noodles left in it I hear a rustle. Without even turning around I suddenly realize what’s happened. She’s made a tunnel. The tunnel is achieved. When I finally spin around to face her, she’s still in the tractor apron, red clay streaks providing a colorful counterpart to the blue-purple veins on her sallow doughy legs. I don’t ask her to explain herself. I think we both understand what she’s done. I wait for her to speak.

“I just wanted to tell you something,” she finally says, “Well, ask you something is more like it. Do you remember how you used to beg me to go to that craft store on First Street when you were a child? 

“Yes.”

“I know you liked going to any type of store in the car at that age. But it wasn’t long before I figured out that you only wanted to go there to see that model train set they had... so you could find the woodpecker they had hidden on the side of the blacksmith shop.”

“And?”

“What I never could figure out was why you always had to search all the other buildings first, like you didn’t know where it was. Were you only playing dumb because you wanted to recreate the thrill? It was a lot of gas and time ate up so I just want to know.”

“I suppose it was about, as you put it, re-creating the thrill,” I eventually reply. “I’m sorry if you thought it over-dramatic.” 

She nods agreeably until she sees the can of olives and her face falls.

“You and your father. Always eating those for a special snack. I could never keep enough in the pantry,” she turns to go, then suddenly turns back around, “Your father believed in you, so fiercely, that he kept every single ditty and doodle you ever scribbled. The light in his eyes in that man’s eyes when he saw you. Do you know how impossible it is to have even one person really believe in you like that?” she stamps a dirty foot on my carpet, “You moaned and kvetched and that’s all you’ve done to this very day but we all just play along, him and now your sister and brother and I. We’re all supposed to be pleasant to you year after year no matter how difficult you are! Do you know what’s helped me be able to stand you when I didn’t think I could stand your bullshit for even one more second? I imagine a bunch of sweet kitty cats floating all around your sour face. A halo of cute tabby orange and grey fluffballs softly purring. I can’t remember where I first read about that trick but I think they’re really onto something because it usually ushers the fondness back, bit by bit.”

I’m so shocked my mother thinks my face needs kittens to the same degree I believe hers needs bacon that I set the can of olives down on the counter and stare at the hyper-masculine shoes Karl keeps begging me to toss for an unspecified amount of time. When I finally find the nerve to look back up again, she’s already gone. Later that evening I receive a text: “You know your brother lives in that awful city up in the tundra that I can’t stand and I really did think about going to your sister’s but….THE DIVORCE.”  About ten minutes later I text back, “I’m sorry. For everything. I’m sorry I’m such a pain in the ass. And I’m sorry I kept you waiting while I pretended that I didn’t know where the woodpecker was. That was inconsiderate.” 

There’s no reply. Until a few hours later. Three emojis, which I didn’t know she even knew how to use. The face with the streaming tears, then a green heart, quickly followed by the thumbs up. 

That evening I apologize to my family for being difficult, no, extra difficult, to be around while I’ve been waiting for my results. They tell me it’s alright. It’s good that the pathologist working on my case is thorough. Better not to rush something so important. As we eat spaghetti and green beans for the thousandth time I tell them I’m sorry we’re having spaghetti and green beans again and sorry my mother lives with us pretty much all the time now. She’ll probably never leave. Is that ok? They all say it is and that I worry too much.

I turn in an hour early. In my dreams I either have cancer or don’t and I’m going to live or die and that’s that—neither particular outcome making me as special as I might have imagined in the past—a fact which brings a bit of disappointment but mostly relief. In my dreams my mother is snoring away in the queen sized bed I just bought new crème sheets for wondering what polite stranger from Valdosta or Mobile would use first.  In her dream inside my dream (or is it the other way around?) she suddenly rises from the bed and goes to the miniscule kitchen to bake another pumpernickel loaf but she uses too much yeast and it eventually explodes right out of the oven then keeps on spreading outward, every observable surface soon falling prey to its greedy tendrils. For a while I run as fast as I can screaming, “help, help, help!” but as long as my mouth is already open, what would it really hurt? Allowing myself just one more little nibble.

Jenn Blair's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Rattle, the Berkley Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Chattahoochee Review, South Carolina Review, New South, and the Southampton Review among others. Her poetry book Malcontent is out from Press Americana and her poetry book Face Cut Out for Locket is forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Max DeGenova

Vesuvio

Alonzo checks his watch only to find that the battery has died, and that the sun is going down, and that soon he’ll have to go back, but the water looks so nice. 

The last time he was in this spot, he was seven. He can remember the photo where he posed with his arms above his head, the Mediterranean up to his knees, Vesuvius smoldering in the background, but he can’t remember the rest of that trip, much less so what it felt like to be that young and that hopeful and that naïve. Maybe if he stands in the same spot it’ll all come rushing back to him. Maybe he’ll remember what it was like to still have homework, to still have scabby knees, to still have acne, to still have a father. Maybe Vesuvius will erupt and he’ll be preserved for thousands of years.

Enough melancholy now. The sun is too lush for melancholy.

He takes off his shoes and climbs onto a boulder. There’s moss under his toes, viscous and fishy. There are families on boats drinking negroni sbagliati, laughing into the evening. He hops onto another rock, then another, and the waves lap against them like bath water. He thinks about bath water. About two large hands rinsing shampoo from his head. About crying if it got in his eyes.

He closes his eyes.

There is salt, algae, and branzino in the air. There is a mandolin in the piazza. There are twenty people in a room filled with flowers, wondering where Alonzo went. He realizes that he’s standing on a rock in a black suit, staring at a volcano with his hands above his head. No one seems to care. Nearby there are at least five couples kissing, sipping limoncello, waiting to settle into a bed with each other. These people here live their lives knowing that the next day could bring sudden, molten death. Shouldn’t we all be so lucky, he thinks. To not have to think about tomorrow.

He steps down and finds the bar. 

Due limoncelli, per favore. 

He drinks them both and feels their warmth. He sits at a table and watches the sea slip into nighttime, lulling these lovers into a slumber that won’t break until the pescatori set off for their catch and the world comes back. The sun is almost gone. If he can see the moment that it crosses the horizon, will he know how to say goodbye? Should he have said goodbye sooner? Should he have come back sooner? Should he have taught his sons Italian? Should he have ever left? Should he have done more, anything more?

The light disappears and he starts back. The nighttime here is so peaceful. Back in San Diego the Pacific ceaselessly roars, eating everything, sucking up the unfortunate. Here, the Mediterranean is a lullaby. As he walks he thinks about all those bodies that are still suspended in volcanic ash. He wonders if they’re having nice dreams.

Max DeGenova is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, and musician. He practices art so that he might better understand himself and others. He lives and works in Chicago, IL, and can be found on Instagram @mtdegenova.

Alli Parrett

In an Onsen

Mom and I strip naked. It’s a locker room without lockers. Just plastic bins in which we place our shoes and clothing before we shower. Everything will be safe. I should not be worried that my clothes will be stolen but I’m aware of this mistrust I carry in my mind and body. The showers are low to the ground. I cannot stand under a faucet and let the water fall over me. The shower heads are attached to long metal hoses and in front of them sits a wooden stool. I turn on the shower and test the water. There isn’t a single surface in this entire ryokan that suggests the stool is not clean, but I think of how many people might have sat there before me. I’ve always worn shower shoes in the gym locker rooms. I rinse off the seat. We are meant to clean ourselves before we enter the onsen. We clean the day of travel off of ourselves and then, without hesitation, sink into the geothermal water. 

There are two onsens in our ryokan (small, traditional Japanese inns, typically with tatami-matted rooms and communal baths, or onsens), one for men and one for women. They switch at certain hours of the day so that guests have a chance to see and use both baths. This one is a large square room divided in the stages of intended use. Storage bins, showers, bath. The bath is lined with dark rocks, maybe slate, while the rest of the tub is lined with a smooth, light stone. For a bit, we’re alone. 

I think about the last time Mom and I sat naked together. It was in a sauna in Helsinki. They have similar traditions. Separated by sex, clean body before use, no clothing. This time it doesn’t feel strange, but the Puritan prudishness of the US feels more visible, more visceral. I have several more tattoos than last time. I am aware of them, their lines and colors. How they stand out on my pale skin. I feel Mom’s eyes examine my skin, altered and marked. This is not the skin as she made it. But it’s the skin of her daughter, nonetheless. It used to be that onsens and ryokans did not allow people with tattoos—those with tattoos were often associated with the Yakuza. I am a white lady from the States, so I doubt people assume I’m with the Yakuza (I’m definitely not) but rules are rules and stigmas are stigmas an there are onsens that still don’t allow tattooed patrons. 

The trip in some respects has felt like an extended double-date. I don’t tell Mom this, though. They have been to Japan several times, but this was the first visit for Reese and myself. None of us have been to Kinosaki. Dad had seen the town featured on a travel show on NHK, a Japanese television channel in the US. The town is known for its onsens, or geothermal baths, and Matsuba crabs, and that’s is all we have planned for our 24-hour visit: soaking in hot tubs and eating crab. 

I’m grateful we have some time alone and in a place that is quiet and peaceful. I do not thrive in big cities—Tokyo overwhelmed me. Overloaded my senses. At times, walking through a park, or down a residential street, it felt like any other park or street I’d walked through before. But then there were places like the electronics district, Akihabara, where every sign was large, neon, and flashing. Shelves were filled floor to ceiling. The sheer amount of information about each floor, each aisle, each product was an overload. When the train pulled in to Kinosaki, I took a breath. The lush green of the mountains was dotted orange with persimmons that ripened on their trees. Rain fell, thick and cold, the cold that seeped into bones as soon as it touched skin. A river ran through the center of town, streaked orange and yellow with koi. A place I had never envisioned and yet felt familiar.

Two other women walk in and begin the process, stripping and cleansing. When they step into the onsen, it’s as if we’re meeting them at an office party or neighborhood get together.

“So nice to meet you,” they both say. They tip their heads forward in a gentle bow. 

“Where are you from?” they ask. We say Seattle and ask the same question in return. 

One woman is from Taiwan and the other is from Singapore. 

We’re all visiting on holiday. 

They sit across from us. They seem to acclimate to the hot water much faster than I did, with their shoulders already submerged. 

I look down at my chest and there’s now a stark line of my body below the water and my body above the surface. Below, my skin grows rosy while above my skin is pale and dewy. 

The women ask about our families. Mom is proud as she talks about my dad, my two siblings, and myself. She tells them about my grandma, who lives with my parents now, and my other grandma that moved out to Seattle to be close to the rest of us. I like watching her talk about her family. Her smile is wide with love and gratitude. The lines around her eyes become more pronounced when she smiles.  

The women turn to me. “And are you married?”

I tell them yes, that my husband is on this trip with us. He’s in a different onsen with my dad. I hope he’s not also being interrogated. 

Interrogated isn’t quite the right word, but as I sit there, naked, there are few other words that capture this feeling. The women are polite and curious but I know the questions that follow. 

“Do you have children?”

“No.”

“When are you going to have children?”

Part of me is surprised by this question. Though we were all sitting togther in a bath, naked, we had only been talking for twenty minutes, maybe. It reminds me of the times at parties when women I knew weren’t drinking because they were pregnant or were breast feeding and asked me about kids. At least then, if I didn’t feel like answering their intrusive question, I could feign not hearing them correctly or suddenly excuse myself to go to the bathroom. In the onsen, there is no music playing, no other people to talk over, no nearby bathroom to sneak off to. There is no avoiding this. 

“I’m not sure we want children.” Uncertainty is always better received than an outright never.

When I was in high school and college, I was certain I wanted children. I babysat, nannied, mothered other peoples’ kids. I was curious about what it would feel like to have another being growing inside me. And then I wasn’t. Like a light switch had been flicked. 

Sometimes I would tell my mom of my life goals. I wanted to have a partner someday, own a home, have kids. She always said, “wait until your mid-twenties to make these decisions. They will come.” She told me something happens for women in their early twenties. Hormones settle or something. Things are clearer, she said. 

She wasn’t kidding. 

Between turning twenty-two and getting a dog the following year, I didn’t want children. My feelings hardened as friends asked if I wanted children someday. Back then, when I decided to engage, I used to say I wasn’t sure, not to ease their fears, but because I knew they could process that answer easier than ‘no’. Back then, I wasn’t sure it was okay to say I didn’t want children. Some would tell me “when you’re ready, you’ll know.” As far as unsolicited advice around family planning, this is by far my most preferred answer. It can apply to so many things. 

When our friends started having kids, I made myself available. Admittedly, I love children. I enjoy watching them learn things, trying to mimic the actions of people around them. I love watching their personalities develop.

It’s difficult to explain to people the difference between wanting kids and liking kids but not wanting to have them yourself. People seem to assume they are mutually exclusive. 

“Oh of course you do. I’m sure your mother wants to have grandchildren,” one woman says. 

“You must want grandchildren, right? It’s a wonderful time in our lives.” 

I don’t look at my mom. I can feel the women shift their eyes between us, waiting for an answer. 

“It’s up to them if they want children,” she says. I am grateful because I know she means it. 

“You must want grandchildren, though.”

“I do,” my mom admits, “But it’s not up to me. They have to choose their own paths in life.”

The women look at each other. They seem perplexed. I would be easy to chalk this up to culture, East meets West, but people everywhere seem to think that, not only should I have children, but that they should be the one to weigh in and change my mind. 

The water feels hotter. I slide myself out of the water and sit on the edge, my calves and feet still submerged. My skin looks lobster red right now. Steam comes off of me. 

“Good time to cool down,” one woman says. 

Both of them look over the tattoos that face them. They do not stare, they notice.

The women focus on my mom. In motherhood they have a shared lived experience. 

It seems as though motherhood replaces womanhood. Maybe womanhood can only exist in the space of motherhood. 

I ask what they do for work. One was an architect before she became a mom. I don’t catch what the other one does before she too tells me that she stopped working after motherhood. 

We excuse ourselves from the hot water to get ready for dinner. My clothes feel cool and rigid on my skin. 

The ryokan hosts kaiseki, or multi-course, dinners each night. These meals are an art that balances taste, texture, appearance, and colors of food, usually centered around fresh seasonal ingredients. It is autumn. Matsuba crab are in season. Kinosaki is known for their crab and we are meant to taste it in all its glory. For me, the evening is sure to be an adventurous one. I am not a lover of seafood. Growing up in the Midwest, my exposure to seafood was mostly fried fish sticks and I wasn’t a fan. This trip to Japan is something I have worked up to, in a sense, slowly expanding my culinary interests. But this night, it felt like I was diving in headfirst into the ocean. 

Each course is served on small, individual plates. The plates are art just as much as the food, showcasing what we are about to eat. Crab-miso tofu in a small bowl the color of red clay, the white of the crab meat and tofu bright in its center. Silky tofu weaves itself around bits of crab, a foreign texture in my mouth. Crab cake clear soup comes in a deep indigo bowl. The soup broth is clear but light and briny like a small sea sitting in front of me. On a bed of ice sitting in a deep, granite gray plate, is the dish I anticipate liking least. A selection of sashimi, the freshest I will likely ever see or eat. Squid, sea bream, amberjack, and raw crab. We all look around the table. I don’t think it occurred to any of us before this moment that crab could be eaten raw. I distribute my portion of squid to my parents and husband. I’ve tried squid once or twice and don’t need to have a third go. Trying tuna sashimi in Tokyo and Kyoto prior to arriving in Kinosaki gives me courage to try the sea bream and amberjack. I prefer the amberjack to the veiny texture of the sea bream. 

The raw crab stares me down. 

The shell is intact at the knuckles, metallic and orange, but is pulled away from the opaque spheres of raw crab meat. I have seen and eaten crab before. It can be pulled apart like string cheese. Yet the raw leg of crab in front of me looks like white pearls of caviar. It sits in my fingers like the flat of a chicken wing. It melts in my mouth like a jelly. It’s sweet and then salty. I finish the whole piece. It is unusual and delicious and I find myself reaching back to the gray plate for more. Everyone else around the table stares at me as I eat a second piece. Sake flows from the bottle into our sake cups at the beginning and end of each course. When I excuse myself to use the highly technical Toto toilets (complete with a heated seat and bidet with far too many options for washing) I hear that we are the loudest table at dinner. Whatever privacy the shoji screen walls are meant to provide, we challenged. No one is around to see me giggle to myself. 

After dinner, we walk down the road to another onsen. The rain has let up. If water is falling at all, it’s a fine mist. Star light makes the sky the deepest blue before it’s black. City light does not exist here. This onsen seems popular with locals and tourists alike. It’s mostly families. We divide by sex. This locker room has lockers and locks but no one seems to lock them. We wait in line for the showers. Our keys are pinned to the small towels meant to wipe sweat from our faces. The onsen is divided between indoor and outdoor spaces. The indoor section feels familiar, with smooth, tiled surfaces and a functional square layout. Mom and I wade through the water to get outside. The air is a nice contrast to the hot waters. The floor and the walls are rocky like the onsen was built into the side of a hill, though I am unsure if the rock formations were natural or staged. We find a rock big enough for the two of us to sit on and place the towels on top of our heads. I keep my chest and everything else submerged in the hot waters until my skin is red again. Until I’ve cooked my dinner for a second time. 

Mothers hold their young daughters and stroll through the waters with tender touch and movement. I think of the signs posted around hot tubs in the US that say, “not suitable for persons under 13.” It occurs to me that those signs are likely posted out of liability not out of safety. The American society of injury damages and lawsuits seems to be an accepted norm and shows no signs of changing. Here, this is pragmatic and tradition. A girl, maybe six or seven, lays her head on her mother’s shoulder. 

When we leave, mothers have pajamas ready for their children. They bundle them up to keep the heat of the warm waters surrounding them. I watch this nighttime ritual, so wholesome and loving. I wonder what they think of the onsens being a destination for others. We walk back to our rooms. No one talks above a whisper so as not to disturb the night.

Alli is a prose writer with a Masters in Creative Writing from University of Glasgow. Her work is featured in Allium Magazine, The Bookends Review, Farside Review, and others. In addition to writing, Alli makes wheel-thrown pottery. She lives in Seattle with her spouse and two dogs. You can find her on twitter (@abusyparrett) and instagram (@a.busy.parrett).

Eric Odynocki

In Search

The American is born, unknowingly broadening the definition of the nationality with each breath. The nurse looks askance at mamá and papa. Her pen quivers over which box to check. 

*

After the coyote leaves mamá and the others on a street corner, she finds her way to East LA, to a green door of a house with a low-pitched roof where Titi Carmen lives, who is waiting for her, who was the only one of the family to escape the clutches of the agents during Repatriation.

*

And the wheat will grow this high, the Soviet declares, pointing to his hip. The villagers promptly thunder their applause. After the meeting, walking along the path with its unruly edge of wild grasses, dziadek and babcia look at one another. What did you think? she asks with her eyes. Chi pukha! he mutters in the tongue of the Kremlin. They stifle laughter so the neighbors won’t hear. The wheat always towers two meters.  

*

We’ve come so far, the history teacher says, clicking to the next slide about Jim Crow. 

*

… the candidate for governor has died in a car accident. The PRI candidate is now running uncontested. Abuela turns off the radio in the kitchen where mamá sits on the floor, playing with a doll. 

*

Say something, babcia tells her father. He’s kneeling on the wooden floor in prayer, his back to her. You’ve made your choice, he says without looking up. Curse the gentile for now my daughter is dead. 

*

Yes, spell “half” with an “l.” But it’s silent. It’s there, just never said aloud. 

*

Go to New York, Titi Carmen says. She lies in bed and mamá sits at her side. Live with your cousin, Alba. She works in a restaurant and can get you a job there. Mamá nods, holding Titi Carmen’s frail hand. 

*

The POW stumbles through barbed wire and frontlines and the mud, the mud, the mud, to the front door, his once proud shoulders hunch over with nightmares. Go east, dziadek urges babcia, panting, his breath here illegal. To Siberia. They won’t find you there. Babcia nods, holding her swollen belly. Go now. 

*

On Heritage Day in fourth grade, the American sits with his friends and laughs. His classmates shared their families’ Mayflower and Emancipation and Ellis Island stories. Now they eat samples of different cultural foods. Mozzarella sticks, curry, and jambalaya. Mamá had prepared tacos with kielbasa. The lesson is clear to the American. It’s the 90’s. The Disney Renaissance. The dawn of the Internet. Who would go anywhere else?

*

“We must secure our borders from the threats we know exist on the outside,” said the senator. In other news, new evidence shows the gunman from yesterday’s mass shooting was active on white supremacist websites. 

*

Go out with me, papa tells mamá. We’ll be happy together. 

*

A cup half full or empty? abuela asks. She shrugs. It depends if someone filled it or drank it. 

*

Eat up, malchik, babcia says, rubbing the American’s shoulders with her plump hands. Eat up. We have food today. And we never know what will happen tomorrow. 

*

In the next chapter, we will learn how the US was successful in routing out the Communist threat from Central America, liberating its people.

*

Babcia and papa sit in the schoolmaster’s office. Khrushchev’s eyes glare out of his portrait on the wall above the disapproving eyes of the schoolmaster. Papa has a black eye. I couldn’t help it, he says. They called me a Jew bastard. 

*

They are in the den. The American is playing. Papa sits in his large green leather armchair. Mamá is on the couch folding laundry. The adults’ eyes are on the TV. There are images of crowds, a graffitied concrete wall, and sledge hammers. The American puts down his action figures and crawls into papa’s lap. The Wall is falling down, a news reporter’s voice says. Like London Bridge? the American asks. Papa’s lips curve into a small smile. Yes, malchik, he answers. The American thinks he sees tears in papa’s eyes.  

*

And the Pilgrims invited their Indian neighbors to a feast to say thank you. 

*

The American studies linguistics and learns truth and tree share the same root. Because something true is sturdy and steadfast like a trunk. 

*

Go north, abuela whispers, walking arm-in-arm with mamá, eyeing the men in the plaza with their machetes, their chelas, their gapped risas. They won’t find you there. 

*

What else should I do? papa asks. I cannot go to university. There are no jobs for us. It is illegal to be Jewish again. Dziadek puts down his Pravda. Babcia’s knitting needles pause their swirling waltz. They look at one another and then their son. Then go, they say. You’ll be safe in America. 

*

Go to college, papa says. Get yourself an education. They can never take away your knowledge. The American applies to college. He must decide between: White (Non-Hispanic) or Hispanic (Non-White).

*

2016 and the tragedy of E pluribus unum.

Eric Odynocki is a teacher and writer from New York. His work is often inspired by his experience as a first-generation American with Mexican, Ukrainian, and Ashkenazi roots. Eric’s fiction has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared or is forthcoming in Gordon Square Review, pacificREVIEW, and Sheepshead Review. Eric’s poetry has recently been published or will appear in Jabberwock Review, Plume Poetry, The Night Heron Barks, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. 

Teresa Pham-Carsillo

Outgrowth

One Tuesday morning in late August, Eleanor woke up with an aching lower back and a foreign pulsating heat nestled between her breasts. Panic coursed through her bloodstream so that her first moments of consciousness were spiked with sharp surreality. 

She tore off her silk pajama top (purchased at a Black Friday sale the previous year) and scoured her skin until she found the culprit: a translucent bean-shaped growth. Despite the discomfort, she reasoned that it was nothing too alarming. 

Still, to be on the safe side, Eleanor called her mother. She always did this; in the decade since she had gained employee-sponsored health benefits, she had never been to the doctor. Underneath her tasteful wardrobe of mix-and-match neutrals, Eleanor was still the girl raised in a hippie-dippy Californian family, still heavily reliant on pungent oils and homemade poultices. She could not shake her natural suspicion for sterile hospitals and doctors shilling for Big Pharma. 

“Have Nana look at it, just in case,” her mother advised. “She’s good with skin ailments. Remember when Rachel had that horrible rash?” 

Nana, the family matriarch, lived in a shabby house in the San Rafael hills that was now certainly worth several million dollars. This, despite the fact that the kitchen hadn’t been updated since the 1950’s. She and Eleanor’s grandfather (a man who died too soon, remembered by his descendants only through dog-eared photo albums and secondhand stories) purchased their home in the halcyon days when young Bay Area couples could reasonably expect to someday own property. Now Nana lived alone, boxed in on all sides by tech millionaires, precariously navigating her ancient station wagon around Teslas whenever she drove the winding road into town. 

Eleanor decided to wait until the weekend to visit. It didn’t make any sense to sit in rush hour traffic for two hours after work, not for such a minor complaint. She would wake up early on Saturday and splurge on pour-over coffee from the fancy cafe down the street. Then she’d pick up a gift for her Nana before heading out. With luck she’d make it up the coast in less than an hour. 

*

Everyone in Eleanor’s family had a story that was repeated over and over again, the story that would be remembered by grandchildren and great-nieces when they were long gone. Eleanor’s story was decided early in life, on the day of her first birthday. 

It went something like this: 

On every child’s first birthday, Nana (and her mother before her, and her grandmother before that) laid out a carefully curated assortment of objects on a worn red and purple rug. These objects were a cornucopia of both highly valuable and mundane temptations—strings of pearls and worn toothbrushes, silver serving dishes beside a formless lump of clay. 

The birthday child would choose one of the offerings on display, and that choice foretold his or her life path. Eleanor’s cousin Rachel, the one with the rash, had closed her fist around the handle of a mirror. She now worked as a beautician to the stars, doing make-up for red carpet galas and awards shows. Eleanor’s uncle Greg had picked a lump of rock candy, and he turned out to have the most cavities of anyone in family history. 

On Eleanor’s first birthday, the entire extended family—dozens and dozens of great-aunts and second cousins and children who belonged to someone or another—gathered together at Nana’s house. There were never enough chairs at these occasions, so people sat cross-legged on the floor or perched on a splintery windowsill. Nana unrolled the rug and pulled each individual object out of a velvet bag. When she was done, she motioned for Eleanor’s mother to put her down. 

And Eleanor chose… nothing. 

At first, this wasn’t a cause for concern. There were chuckles of amusement around the room as the baby guest of honor sat in one place, blinking her wide brown eyes and slapping her hands against her pudgy thighs. 

“She’s a slow thinker.” 

“No, she’s clever. Going through the options. I bet she’ll take the pearls!” 

“Nah, my money’s on the biscuit. Have you seen the rolls on her thighs?” 

But ten minutes passed, then another, then another still. People grew restless and uncomfortable. A young cousin inched forward and pinched Eleanor on the upper arm. Even Eleanor’s mother shifted from foot to foot before leaning down to whisper in her daughter’s ear. 

“Don’t you want any of the nice things, sweetie? Go on. Take whatever you want.” 

But Eleanor remained unmoved. The party guests approached the rug, each picking up a different object to dangle in front of the baby. Here was a shiny spade! What about a ceramic pie dish? Didn’t she want this toy puppy on a string? 

The unspoken rules forbade anyone from placing an item directly into Eleanor’s hands. She looked upon each offering with a bland, disinterested smile as a dribble of drool glistened down her neck and into the collar of her petal pink dress. Nana was the only person in the family who did not tempt the one-year-old Eleanor with anything; she sat in the dark wood rocking chair that was her throne and simply watched the child. Whenever someone came too close to Eleanor, Nana coughed a warning that made them take three steps back. 

“What are we supposed to do if she doesn’t pick anything? Has this ever happened before?”

The shadows grew long as the atmosphere in the house turned from celebratory to uneasy. By the time the clock struck midnight, most of the other children had passed out from too much sugar and sunshine. The adults, on the other hand, sat stock still in the dimly lit drawing room and stared at Eleanor. 

When the final chime sounded, Nana stood up and addressed the room. 

“The day is done,” she said. “The child has chosen.” 

And so Eleanor grew up without having given her family a single clue about what was to come. Her mother despaired at this whenever a complex issue arose, wondering how she was supposed to discipline or reward her child in the right way? Why did all of her siblings get an instruction manual for their brood? 

Eleanor’s story was told again and again at family birthday parties. Nana always gave her that half-wondering, half-amused smile whenever she greeted her. 

“You are the only one here who I can’t figure out,” Nana had whispered to Eleanor on more than one occasion, breath raising the transparent hairs on Eleanor’s cheek. “And that’s why you’re so special to me.” 

*

Being special to Nana came with its downsides. Eleanor always felt like an exotic bug that the older woman wanted to study underneath the hot lens of a magnifying glass. When she arrived at Nana’s house on Saturday morning bearing blueberry muffins, she felt the force of Nana’s attention straight away. 

“Hello, Eleanor,” said Nana. “I had a feeling you were going to stop by. Here, give me those. You didn’t have to bring anything. I still have half a pound cake in the freezer.” 

Once they moved past the pleasantries and Eleanor was seated in the living room, she told Nana about the growth on her chest. 

“Let me see,” Nana commanded. Her eyes skimmed the square of white gauze that peeked from the neckline of Eleanor’s navy cardigan. She made a disapproving noise. “You shouldn’t have put rubbing alcohol on it, dear. And you know those wart removal treatments don’t do a thing! You wasted your money.” 

Nana’s uncanny ability to know more than she should always unnerved Eleanor. She wondered if the old woman did it on purpose, to inspire fear in her children and grandchildren. Strange things happened to the people close to Nana. A drunk uncle had gone missing on the same day that a fat orange koi appeared in Nana’s backyard pond. Eleanor’s own mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer over a decade ago, and the cancer had vanished on scans after Nana gave her a rose and star anise scented cream to slather onto her chest.

Nana was the family fixer; she solved tough problems through inexplicable and often shadowy means. Eleanor had to admit that Nana’s remedies worked well. For the past year, Eleanor had gotten into the habit of drinking a lovely tea (one with lavender and honeysuckle and something mysteriously earthy) that kept her in a velvet-lined, dreamless sleep. She applied a cold cream made with ground seeds and flower petals that made her skin glow. 

Nana came closer and poked at the growth on Eleanor’s chest. She did not appear disgusted or even surprised. 

“This doesn’t hurt, does it?” 

“Not really.” Eleanor frowned. “I suppose it aches, like that time I broke my arm and I was waiting for it to heal.” 

“Hmm, so maybe you shouldn’t worry so much. Maybe this is a productive pain, like going through puberty.” 

Eleanor stepped away from her Nana. She didn’t want to be touched and prodded anymore. 

“This isn’t exactly a growth spurt, Nana. It’s abnormal!” 

She regretted raising her voice but Nana wasn’t offended. Instead, the old woman laughed. 

“Who would have imagined that you, the child who sat all day in perfect contentment, would become so impatient?” she said. “Oh my dear. Just wait. I promise that this little addition will come off in due time.”

In the meantime, Nana sent Eleanor home with a packet of strange smelling herbs to place underneath her pillow at night. They were meant to speed along the process. Nana’s lips ghosted over Eleanor’s cheeks as they parted ways, as dry and delicate as rice paper. 

* 

Eleanor was good at her job. Not phenomenal—she didn’t have the sort of passion, drive, or ambition that made for professional greatness. But she was responsible and her boss, a middle-aged man with four children, was complimentary on her annual performance reviews. Eleanor is dependable and hard-working. Eleanor works hard to form relationships with her clients. He hinted that if she kept up the good work, she could expect a promotion to Senior Account Manager for the Southeast Territory. 

So when Eleanor arrived late the following Monday (having spent over an hour in front of the mirror trying on different outfits that she hoped would camouflage her unsightly growth) she felt guilty to find her boss waiting with crossed arms and a sour expression. 

She had missed a client meeting for the first time ever. 

“Allen,” she said, gingerly setting down her shoulder bag onto the floor beside her desk. “I’m so sorry I’m late. I was stuck in traffic.” 

She wore an empire waist dress with a long cardigan, and the outfit made her feel dowdy and unprofessional. It couldn’t be helped; to her horror, the growth on her chest quadrupled in size overnight and was now shot thorough with an intricate lacework of blue veins. She was starting to feel as though the growth was a separate entity from her body, something alive and in possession of its own atavistic intelligence. 

“You missed a meeting with Matt Parcell,” Allen said. “I had to cover for you. If you want a shot at the big leagues, Ellie, you’re going to need to step up your game. You can’t let these little mistakes add up.”

What other mistakes have I made? Eleanor clenched her teeth to keep herself from saying that she hated being called “Ellie.” 

“I’m really sorry,” Eleanor said, the apology bitter on her tongue. Beneath her cardigan, the thing on her chest rippled. “It won’t happen again.” 

*

As the lump grew, its pulsations became stronger and its veins turned the deep purple of a bruise. It was almost beautiful, Eleanor mused as she undressed and slipped into the steaming shower. She rubbed the growth tenderly with rosehip oil and slept with Nana’s sachet underneath her pillow. She visualized the thing growing and growing until it one day fell off like a ripe peach from a branch. 

Eleanor was reminded of a bedtime story her mother once told her, about a childless old woman who found an oversized peach floating down the river one day as she did her washing. The woman used a piece of clothesline to snag the fruit and carried it into the hut she shared with her husband. The couple was about to slice into the peach when it split open at the seam, revealing a plump and squalling baby boy, a child born of a bitter pit and nectar.

She couldn’t remember the rest of the story. Had the boy grown into the perfect son, the child the couple had always wished for? Or had he ruined them with the strength of his need, with his demands for the food they did not have and the energy that they no longer possessed? 

“Mom, I don’t know if Nana’s right about this,” she confided in her mother. “It’s only getting bigger.” 

“Well, did she tell you that it would shrink?” 

“No. She said something about it coming off like a scab.” 

“There you go. Give it time, sweetheart. When has Nana ever been wrong?” 

Eleanor didn’t say anything. It was easy for her mother, who had selected a wooden horse on her own first birthday and grown up to be a respected equestrian and horse trainer, to believe in Nana’s firm hand. She had always felt the most at home at the stables; she had conceived Eleanor during a torrid affair with a married man but hadn’t put up a fight when he returned to his wife and family. She did not need him. She had her horses. 

Eleanor was not so certain that Nana was infallible. Over the years, Nana had steered Eleanor in many directions. She gave her piano lessons, sent her to an intensive culinary summer camp, dropped her off at silent retreats, and even signed her up for speed dating events. Though Eleanor humored Nana and graciously took the prepaid classes and went on the tepid blind dates, she never showed any real interest or aptitude. 

“You must want something,” Nana insisted. “Everyone wants something.” 

Eleanor didn’t want much, though. She wanted a job that kept her financially comfortable and mentally untaxed. She wanted quiet, but not the sort of quiet resulting from a vow of silence. No, what Eleanor wanted was long weekends spent lounging in her one-bedroom apartment with the television on low and no roommates. She wanted to wander through her spotless apartment and marvel at how little mess she accumulated. She wanted to knit booties and sweaters for other peoples’ babies and to fly somewhere tropical every other summer so that she could sink her toes in warm sand. 

And she wanted the growth on her body to go. Yes, she knew that she wanted it out of her life for good. 

*

Finally, Eleanor went to the doctor’s office. The growth had reached the size and shape of a small decorative gourd. She had trouble finding clothes that fit and obscured it. Her back ached from the added weight. And she was always tired, as though the thing on her chest was sapping her of all vitality. 

She didn’t tell her mother or Nana about the appointment. They would never approve. 

On a Friday when Eleanor knew that Allen would be working from home, she drove to the doctor’s office in a bland, beige colored business park. Over the past few weeks, Allen had obviously begun to view her in a new, less favorable light. She was constantly mixing up meetings on her schedule, forgetting minor deadlines, and failing to compliment Allen when he came in wearing a new tie. It was as though her mind had unraveled like the sleeve of a worn-out sweater. 

After waiting for fifteen minutes, Eleanor was called into the exam room. She unbuttoned her sweater and sat on the crinkly paper that covered the table, waiting expectantly for the grey-haired doctor (a woman with a kind, competent face) to remark on the revolting growth. She didn’t have much experience with real life doctors but had watched enough television medical dramas to guess at what would happen next. Perhaps the doctor would snap on a pair of latex gloves and call for backup, stat. Maybe she would order Eleanor to lie down on a gurney and wheel her into emergency surgery. 

But instead, the doctor barely looked at Eleanor’s exposed chest. She smiled and said, “So tell me a little bit about why you’re here today.” 

Eleanor gestured at her lump. 

“It’s this… thing on my chest. It keeps growing. I don’t know what to do.” 

“At first glance, I don’t see anything alarming,” the doctor said. Her placating tone made Eleanor feel hysterical. “Do you mean that you’ve felt a lump in one of your breasts? Let’s perform a physical exam to see if we can pinpoint the problem.” 

Eleanor stared at the other woman in dismay. Was this a joke? But the doctor seemed utterly bemused by the situation. She had no idea what Eleanor was talking about. Eleanor’s thoughts flashed back to the days she spent hunched over at her desk, taking pains to hide the growth. No one had ever commented. No one had ever noticed. 

Was it possible that her colleagues and this doctor couldn’t see the large, unmistakable growth that was planted just above Eleanor’s breasts? 

“Here,” Eleanor tried again. “Do you see that?” 

The doctor came closer and squinted at Eleanor’s chest. She brushed a gloved fingertip over the growth and Eleanor’s entire body shuddered in response. Nothing happened when Eleanor poked and prodded it, but at a stranger’s touch the thing seemed to recoil, to curl in on itself. But what most alarmed Eleanor was the placidity on the doctor’s face, as though she was not looking at anything strange at all. 

“I suppose there’s some dryness here,” the doctor said. “Do you have a history of eczema? An over-the-counter hydrocortisone ointment should be fine, but I can also prescribe a stronger corticosteroid. Of course these medications are meant for short term, as-needed use only. If the dryness and irritation persists, we might want to look into allergy shots.” 

Eleanor looked down at her chest. 

“You’re sure?” Eleanor said, her voice quavering. “You don’t see a big lump there?” 

The doctor’s eyebrows knit together and Eleanor heard Nana’s voice in her head saying: doctors are taught science but not compassion. Do you know how many women have suffered at the hands of these so-called medical professionals? We’re better off healing our own. 

“You know what, never mind,” Eleanor said. “A prescription would be great. Thank you.” 

* 

The tiny tube of petroleum-based ointment ran out in two weeks, the growth continued to expand at its usual rate, and Eleanor never refilled her prescription. 

Eleanor tried cutting off the growth, using a serrated kitchen knife that was usually reserved for crusty baguettes and dense wedges of cheese. But the moment the edge of the blade pressed against her chest, Eleanor felt a spasm go up her spine and through her entire body, exploding in a burst of pain behind the eyes. She panted and dropped the knife to the ground, using a hand to steady herself against the kitchen counter. 

When her vision cleared, she looked down at the growth. The place where the tip of the knife had pierced through skin was not a wound, but an unmistakable soft pink mouth. It opened and closed, wet lips forming an O like a collapsed rubber band. It let out a wheezing exhale and Eleanor fought against a tide of nausea. 

She fell into an uneasy sleep that night with her robe wrapped tightly around her torso. The mouth was still there in the morning. From then on, Eleanor did not try to harm the growth on her chest. She worried that anything she did could unleash other horrors. What if the growth developed a hundred eyes, like some kind of avenging Old Testament angel? What if rows of sharp teeth appeared? 

One small mercy was this: since the doctor’s appointment, Eleanor no longer fretted about hiding the growth in public. She could see it, her mother could see it, and Nana could see it. The one time Eleanor had lunch with her cousin, Rachel had grimaced and asked if she needed a cosmetic surgery hook-up. A family trait, then. When she took her morning walks around the neighborhood, no one stared at the breathing, sometimes mewling thing that spilled out of the top of her v-neck shirt. Her coworkers never remarked on the way her sweaters puffed in and out rhythmically, as though there was a fan attached to her bra. 

Several weeks later, the fall chill arrived. Eleanor found herself dozing in front of the television with the early sunsets, her body heavy with exhaustion. One day after work, she fell asleep with her clothes still on. She woke up in the middle of the night to a wet warmth pressing against her, the lump squirming visibly through the silk of her work blouse. She unbuttoned her shirt. 

Before, the growth had been a lumpy, formless shape. Now it had gained definition and was a squalling bundle of translucent skin and wispy hair the texture of cotton candy. Arms and legs tucked in like a diver’s. A face—pale and terrible—stuck fast to Eleanor’s breastbone. The thing blinked open one amber eye and Eleanor saw that its pupil was huge and dark as a wolf’s. 

It was, for lack of a better term, a baby.

In a daze, Eleanor drove to Nana’s house, the growth on her chest held in place with a scarf fashioned into a makeshift sling. The thing was still attached to Eleanor by the paper-thin skin on the right side of its body, melding with her from its cheek to its curling toes. Eleanor was afraid that if she did not support its weight, it would simply shear from her body when she stood up. 

“Nana, please!” she screamed, pounding on the door. It was still dark out. None of the neighbors’ lights were on. “Let me in. I need your help.” 

The door opened and Nana stood before her in a long flannel robe, her silver hair haloed around her head. She did not seem surprised. Instead, her lined face was split wide with a delighted, triumphant grin.

“No,” Eleanor said as realization sank in. “You didn’t. How could you do it?” 

She thought of the sachet she’d trustingly placed underneath her pillow every night before bed, of the certainty in her Nana’s voice when she said on the phone, everything will work out exactly as it should, my dearest. She thought of her mother imploring her to be patient with her Nana, to go to all the boring workshops and take the ballet lessons. To be a woman in this world, even one with a family where mothers were feared over fathers, meant having a body that could be molded against her will. 

Nana didn’t say anything, only stepped aside so that Eleanor could come inside. She wanted to shove the older woman away when her fingers reached for the scarf, but a lifetime’s deference couldn’t be undone in a single moment. 

“Oh, she’s a beauty,” Nana breathed when she saw the fully-formed baby attached to Eleanor’s chest. “She looks just like you did when you were a little one.”

“I don’t want this, Nana. You need to get it off of me,” Eleanor said. “You need to take it away. I’ll never forgive you for this.” 

The thing let out a pathetic cry and Nana clucked. 

“She’s hungry, the poor lamb. She looks nearly ready to cleave. Let’s get you settled down and we’ll begin. I’ll call your mother first. She’ll want to be here for this.” 

A wave of weariness swept over Eleanor. She stumbled to the velvet couch in the corner of the living room and lay down. Even with her eyes closed, she felt the thing squirming, straining that membrane of skin that held them together. 

“It’ll be over soon,” she whispered dully, patting it on the back.

Nana came back into the darkened room and held a bottle filled with caramel-colored liquid up to the thing’s searching mouth. It drank greedily, suckling and mewling in pleasure. Eleanor found its noises repulsive, though her body regained some of its strength as the thing had its fill. When the bottle was empty, the thing settled against Eleanor’s breastbone and let out a soft sigh before closing its eyes. Eleanor looked at the shadows of those strange, dark pupils moving underneath delicately veined, almost translucent skin.

The doorbell rang and Eleanor’s mother came into the house with her hands clasped over her heart. If Eleanor had questioned her mother’s complicity in this scheme before, all doubt was now gone. Her mother and Nana both radiated joy and satisfaction. Eleanor felt nothing but hollow betrayal. 

“She’s beautiful,” her mother said once she’d had a good look at the thing. “What will you call her? How about Katherine, after your great-aunt? Or maybe Matilda?” 

Before Eleanor could respond, the thing opened its eyes and smiled up at her. She was momentarily charmed; a normal newborn could never do that. Then she felt a searing, but  not altogether tearing sensation at her chest. Both Nana and her mother crowded closer, their hands coming to rest on her body, on the thing’s body, until she could not tell where she began and where they ended.

She squeezed her eyes shut and bore through the discomfort, focusing on her own breathing and the sound of her family’s calming voices. Then there was a sudden lightness and a warm rush of what could only be blood, and Eleanor felt free. She opened her eyes just as Nana pulled the thing away from her body and wrapped it on a worn bath towel. 

It let out an almighty wail that made Eleanor’s teeth chatter. She had hoped that no longer being physically tethered to it would bring relief. Instead, she felt a tug of excruciating pain. Except pain was an insufficient word—this was deeper, extending beyond the bounds of her own body. She watched as Nana retreated with her bundle and walked into the kitchen. 

“Where are you going?” Eleanor demanded and tried to sit up. “What are you doing with her?” 

Her mother held a wet towel to Eleanor’s chest. “It’s alright. Nana’s cleaning up the baby. She’ll bring her back soon.” 

A few minutes later, Nana came back into the room and turned on a lamp. By the dim glow, Eleanor saw that the thing was now clean and swaddled in a pastel receiving blanket. She wondered if Nana had knitted it in preparation for tonight. Nana handed the thing into Eleanor’s arms and she examined it up close. It appeared helpless and almost pitiful, with its scrunched up face and balled fists. 

Holding it brought on an unexpected sense of relief and contentment. Eleanor closed her eyes and felt its body relax against her. She breathed in its familiar earthy scent that was now mixed with a hint of sourness, like newly curdled milk. 

Together, they fell into a dreamless sleep. 

*

Eleanor’s act of rebellion was refusing to give a real name to the thing that had come from her body. She didn’t like to call it a baby. Real babies didn’t start their lives as red angry boils. They didn’t grow adult teeth in their first two weeks, so that their tiny mouths were crowded with bright white stones. But she had to call it something, and so she settled on “Lump.” 

At nights, during the brief spurts of sleep afforded to her, Eleanor dreamed of her life before Lump. Nothing very special—just the sweet mundanity of drinking her coffee in silence every morning or enjoying a leisurely dinner with friends. She ached to go to the movies alone, which had been her favorite indulgence. But she always woke up to Lump’s piercing cries and had to drag herself out of bed to perform one of many repetitive tasks: warming a bottle, humming a lullaby, or simply standing watch until the thing dozed off. 

She had terrible thoughts, of placing a pillow over Lump’s slack mouth and applying steady, unrelenting pressure. She considered dropping Lump off at the nearest fire station and peeling off like a getaway driver in a heist film. She even contemplated driving to Nana’s house and leaving Lump on her porch. Let the meddling old bitch take care of the abomination she’d created. 

But Eleanor knew that these were only fantasies. Every time she was away from the thing, her whole body hurt. When Lump was hungry, Eleanor’s gut twisted. When Lump was sad, Eleanor’s eyes stung with unshed tears. 

But when Lump was happy (like when the song from Frozen played on the radio, or when Eleanor made boxed mac and cheese, or when a colorful bird landed on the windowsill), Eleanor was overwhelmed by the pure joy that coursed through her veins.

It was a narcotic, sweet enough to make her forget about everything else. 

*

Eleanor became less and less interested in work. Eventually, she quit without having anything lined up. She had lived frugally for years and amassed substantial savings. Her apartment was paid for by Nana—a generous twenty-first birthday gift. She had something in her life that needed her. Maybe when Lump was older, Eleanor could figure out something else. 

She and Lump spent all of their time together. Eleanor had never experienced this much physical closeness in any of her relationships—not with her mother, whose legs always twitched to be with her horses, and not with any of her lovers, who had respected her desire for space and boundaries. But she found Lump’s neediness oddly comforting. She needed to burrow into Eleanor’s body, to grip Eleanor’s fingers with her tiny hands. 

She was unlike other infants in some ways: that strange mouth crowded with too many adult teeth, those dark and clever eyes. But Lump was also small and helpless. She was a repository of regenerating needs, just like any other child. 

*

On Lump’s first birthday, Eleanor woke early and dressed her in a frilly pink dress with a matching headband. For once, Lump didn’t howl or squirm when Eleanor ran a brush through her hair. She sat still and obedient, staring at her own reflection in the mirror. Eleanor leaned over and sniffed the top of Lump’s head. It was the most comforting scent in the world. 

All the way to Nana’s house, Eleanor gripped the steering wheel and thought about turning the car around and driving in the opposite direction. They could go south, taking Highway 101 all the way down through a hundred seaside towns, passing through the haze of Los Angeles and the Spanish-style mansions of San Diego until they crossed the border. 

But then what would they do? With despair on her mind, Eleanor drove on auto-pilot until she found herself taking the narrow, winding road into Nana’s neighborhood. 

There were at least a dozen cars parked illegally in front of the house, blocking neighbors’ driveways and crowding the recycling bins. The neighbors wouldn’t complain though. For reasons they probably couldn’t articulate or understand, they too feared Nana. 

Eleanor helped Lump through the open door and into the crowded living room where they were greeted with hellos and hugs. With family, Lump wasn’t a secret. She belonged to them all. She was one of them. 

When one of the great aunts reached out to pat Lump on the head and the child shied away, Eleanor picked her up. She felt Lump’s cheek resting against her chest, drawn to the very place where their bodies were once joined. 

They reached the rug, which was covered in a familiar array of incongruous objects. Eleanor ignored both her mother and Nana. She focused on Lump, who still clung to her with wide round eyes. 

Maybe Lump would wrap her chubby fingers around the slender neck of a violin, or pick up a gleaming jeweler’s loupe. Maybe she would be unable to resist the scent of fresh bread. Or maybe she would be drawn to one of the more menacing options: a pearl-handled pistol or the sheath of a hunting knife. 

The particulars didn’t matter to Eleanor, so long as Lump made the choice for herself. 

“I’ll be right here with you,” she whispered into Lump’s hair. “You have nothing to fear.” 

Then she set her daughter down on the rug and waited. 

Teresa Pham-Carsillo is a Vietnamese American writer who was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. After graduating with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, she became an office-bound marketer, stealing time in the early and late hours of the day to write short stories and poems. 

Teresa's fiction and poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in various publications, including: Poetry Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, The Minnesota Review, Passengers Journal, The Penn Review, and St. Katherine Review. She can be found online at www.teresaphamcarsillo.com or via email at teresampham@gmail.com 

Eileen Vorbach Collins

Hold On Till the Sun Goes Down

My mother was lacking the distal phalanx on the fifth finger of her right hand. In other words, the tip of my mother’s right pinky finger had somehow gone missing.

The stories of the finger’s plight changed with the seasons and with my mother’s mood. A childhood fall on a cobblestone street, the wheel of a horse-drawn cart loaded with cabbages. Or cantaloupes.

A wringer washer, always a danger, could pull a whole girl all the way through along with a thread-bare towel, flattening her like Popeye’s girlfriend, Olive-Oyl.  Lucky for mom she only lost a finger, and not even the whole thing.

Or, she exploded that finger when she set off a firework on the Fourth of July, her cries unheard over the booms all around her, the stars she saw bursting out of the pain from the tip of her pinky-finger.

Playing with a saw. A butcher knife. Dipping her hand in a dirty pond where a hungry, snaggly-toothed fish waited. Or a snapping turtle that wouldn’t let go, even after her daddy had chopped off its head. Not until the sun went down, because that’s what snapping turtles do. They hold on till the light fades, then they relax their jaws so the decapitated head falls off taking with it a perfectly good finger.

My mother’s stories always carried a lesson. Be cautious. Danger lurks everywhere. But I didn’t care. I loved to follow behind the pony cart of the man who sold cantaloupes, hoping for a chance to pet that velvet nose. I shoved clothes through the wringer as fast as I could so I could get back to my adventures.  I bought cherry bombs from a friend to light and throw into alleyways on the Fourth of July, loving the ear-splitting booms. Scaring the littler kids and making them cry. I stole my brother’s pocket knife and wanted to be an explorer. I taught myself to float down a murky creek in an industrial area, hoping to meet a turtle.

And then, I grew up and had children. I tried not to become my mother, but I soon became aware of danger everywhere. I bought cabinet locks and soft corners to stick on furniture, looked for sharp edges on toys, and gauged the safety of all loose things by the relative size of a small trachea. 

My son is grown now and gets annoyed when I warn him of any danger, real or perceived. Just hearing me say those words, Be Careful, pisses him off. I know this and I try, I really do, not to say it. Still, I can’t see a pair of safety goggles without wanting to buy them for him—even though I know he already has a collection of them. All gifts from me. Whenever there’s a gift-giving occasion, I look at helmets. Bicycle lights. First Aid kits. Air Horns. Fire extinguishers. 

During a recent visit, the first in a long pandemic time, I watch my son chop onions, potatoes and cabbage with my sharpest knife. We’re having Irish Stew and I’m reminded of the bottle of Holy Water I brought back from a trip to Limerick years ago. At 18, my son bought his first motorcycle, and after I stopped yelling, I said a prayer to anyone who might be listening and christened that vintage Honda. 

In my kitchen now, he’s showing off. He attacks the cabbage like he’s a Japanese sushi chef. I watch his fingers closely. I ask, with practiced unflappability, “Did I ever tell you how your grandmother lost her finger?”

Eileen Vorbach Collins is a Baltimore native. Her work has appeared in SFWP, Reed magazine, The Columbia Journal, The Citron Review and elsewhere. Her essays have received the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, The Gabriele Rico Challenge Award, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is working on a collection of essays about child loss and bereavement by suicide.