Prose

Nancy Barnes

Hank and His Children

“Isn’t she ravishing?” Hank had said, gazing at his bride on the day of their wedding. Sonia is gorgeous. She has no idea what she might do for work but is creative in all things: she paints exquisite watercolors, her instrument is the flute, and she designs and sews her own clothes. She is notably creative with her appearance; it’s not just the clothes, but her subtle make-up and the way she inhabits the lithe, curvy body that invites everyone she encounters to look again.

Hank is highly intelligent and has been told since boyhood that he was destined for great success, but he never knew what that should be or how he was supposed to achieve it. Without any particular goals in mind he attended law school at Georgetown. Then, the summer after graduation, before he slid into a white shoe law firm in D.C., he met the ravishing young woman. Since then, his only ambition has been to make her happy, whatever that might mean.

The two of them decide to start a family and in short order they have two sons. Sonia submerges herself in the lake of motherhood; her little boys live in a charmed world: hand-sewn Halloween costumes, parties for every reason or no reason, endless seasons of fun and attention. On long lazy days at home Sonia opens her walk-in closet and schools the boys in dress-up. She shows them how to put together an outfit, all three of them giggling when they paint their toenails ruby red.

It is true that Sonia is subject to wild mood swings, but the saving grace is that her upswings are thrilling for the children. She loves to organize adventures, special trips that frequently require missing school. The little boys feel that they exist in a perfect, private world with her.

Hank’s devotion to Sonia’s happiness has not been an easy pledge to keep. Or, better put, her happiness does not last. Every few years Sonia becomes convinced that if Hank only accepts a new position, it will offer them wonderful opportunities, or that some other place, a new town or a neighboring state, will make for an ideal life. Hank always agrees with her and together they have engineered a series of moves.

When male friends at whatever law firm he is leaving ask Hank how he copes with it, moving and starting a new job because his wife wants him to, he simply smiles and says, “all I want is for her to be happy.”

The time Hank spends with the children is limited but he does plan certain activities. He builds the boys an elaborate two-story tree house in the old oak in the yard in Chevy Chase, and when they move to New Jersey he arranges his schedule so that he can take the older one to gymnastics, although he wishes the boy would play football, or at least try soccer. He is dutiful with his sons, but nothing about being a father can compete with his feelings for Sonia.

“I just wish you could tell me what you want,” he says to her. “If I only knew what would make you happy, I would do anything to get it for you.”

 *

One Sunday night in November, a raw gray month in upstate New York where they have relocated yet again, Sonia says she needs him to listen: she is very unhappy and has decided that she cannot continue her life with him. Hank is blindsided. He insists that nothing is wrong, he will do anything for her, and he starts to cry whenever anyone tries to talk with him about the crisis.

After they have separated, Hank often calls Sonia late at night and begs her to reconsider. She tries to be patient with him but she never wavers and somehow, unbeknownst to him, Hank’s grief turns into smoldering resentment. He flies into a rage at small things so that the little boys, when they are with him, are shocked and frightened. After a long year of separation, arguing and weeping in the office of the couples’ therapist they consult, Hank finally agrees to the divorce that Sonia wants.

The custody plan is loose, which is hard on the children. Hank insists that the demands of his work are unpredictable and he refuses to be pinned down. This means that the children never know when their father will yank them out of their home. When he comes to collect them in Westchester, where Sonia has settled, Hank never stops to check that the younger one has packed his favorite blue sweater or that the older boy is bringing his social studies homework -- the causes of the civil war -- or his baseball glove.

“That kid is always looking for an excuse to get out of practice,” Hank says when one of the men at the office asks if his son is into sports.

The scheduling complications guarantee Hank that he will have frequent acrimonious exchanges with the children’s mother. She is sometimes accommodating, more than once taking Metro-North into the city where Hank is living so that she can deliver a crucial item, such as the younger son’s asthma meds. Other times she flies off the handle and yells at him and slams down the phone. Whenever that happens, she turns to the boys with a big smile, “Isn’t your father just impossible?” she says.

Friday and Saturday nights, and sometimes on Sundays, Sonia leaves the children with her mother who lives two blocks away on Pleasant Ave. so that she can go out. She feels that she is blossoming, opening to her true self. During this time she embraces a number of lovers: a locally famous chef with a drinking problem, a policy wonk in the mayor’s office in her town (a nice guy who is all too similar to Hank), a staggeringly handsome firefighter. For each man, before every encounter, she spends a good two hours getting ready. Bubble bath, shaving her legs until they feel like silk, touch-up for the henna in her golden reddish hair. Then she dresses, each time in a unique and stunning ensemble. “What d’you think, boys?” she says, smiling at them as she reaches for her coat.

Meantime, Hank gives up and marries again, a woman who works in the

accounting department at his current law firm. This wife is businesslike and practical. She wears five almost identical outfits in succession on weekdays: pastel sweaters, black skirts or occasionally slacks, small gold earrings. Her body is heavy in the way that will never change even though she is constantly on a diet. On the weekends her extended family gathers around the vast amounts of food and liquor that she organizes. At these events various females pull Hank aside to ask, their voices hushed, whether he understands how desperately his wife wants to have a baby. It does cross Hank’s mind that this might be all there is to look forward to.

After two dates, Hank’s second wife had told her girlfriends that Hank was “a keeper.” Once they are married, she goes to extreme lengths to become pregnant in her forties, then nearly dies giving birth to twins, one boy and one girl. She refers to the babies on Facebook as “god’s little angels” and devotes her every waking minute to them.

Hank is pleased and relieved that she has achieved what she so ardently wished for. He believes that his second family has “worked out,” or at least this is what he tells himself. It means that he can get on with things. He continues to climb the career ladder to ever bigger corporate cases, all revolving around money. The work is not particularly interesting to him but that’s fine; Hank feels that this whole new life is good enough.

The only sign of Hank’s clinging to what he once had comes on a spring day when the babies are almost two. He is called into court in the town where Sonia is currently living because he has failed to pay child support. Such a development might well be awkward, even humiliating for an attorney, and Hank could easily afford to do the right thing. Apparently, this does not trouble him. A couple of his colleagues comment that Hank seems to relish the endless arguments over money, both the entanglement and the acrimony, but Hank maintains that that is not the case. (He does look embarrassed when the judge says, “What were you thinking, having so many children if you didn’t intend to take care of them?”)

 *

The children of Hank’s first marriage are by now growing older. Both boys are in various sorts of adolescent trouble. One son is bullied for having come out as gay at fifteen, the other one is disturbingly passive, immature for a boy in seventh grade. Hank’s parents, who are getting older themselves and have never understood the whole situation, blame the boys’ troubles on Sonia. They think she is overprotective and indulgent. The older son should not have been allowed to wear his hair down to his shoulders “so he looks like a girl.” And no one knows what to do about the younger son, who is sliding into serious pot smoking before he has even started high school. Hank is unavailable for the discussions about what to do with the boys.

Sonia continues to make a nice home for the children, and she handles the challenges as best she can. Her response, whenever anyone presses her about their problems, is the same: “I am just so lucky that both my boys are so good looking.” She finds a part-time job in an upscale dress shop, which she likes in part because the employee discount allows her to buy stylish, expensive clothes. On the weekends, Sonia dresses up and goes out on dates with a series of handsome guys. Men do still notice her, and Sonia does still look ravishing.

One way or another, the sons manage to grow up and begin their young adult lives, holding tight to the life preserver of their mother’s love. One son becomes a drag artist of note, dressing up as a woman and performing up and down the east coast. Recently, he was featured in the style section of the newspaper wearing a hot pink silk suit, his glossy long hair in pin curls that complimented his shiny black beard. When Hank calls that son, who is doing a show in another city, he tells him not to bother coming home for the holidays.

“I don’t want you around the twins unless you are wearing regular clothes,” he says.

“What’re those, Dad?” his son says calmly.

“Guy clothes,” Hank mutters.

The other son reveals, after a stay in rehab and a successful stretch of clean living, that he has never felt like a boy and he begins his transition. Hank refuses to use the appropriate pronouns; the very thought that a child of his could be trans is inconceivable.  That child has not been welcomed in her father’s home with the new family for quite some time. She no longer knows whether this is because of the drugs or the gender switch.

No one ever questions Hank about the fact that he believes both of his older children, born male, are choosing to live as women.

All Hank ever says when anyone asks about the two children he had with Sonia is that he is not comfortable having those two around “the babies,” the twins, who have turned six. He seems to believe that Sonia is responsible for this entire mess, which is how he puts it. His lawyer friends at work, all straight men, feel generally awkward about the myriad ways that gender is redefining itself in the world today. They certainly don’t know how to talk to Hank about any of it.

From time to time, however, someone does ask, “How’re those boys of yours?”

“I just wish I’d gotten one good one from that first marriage,” Hank says, usually with a laugh.

“But now,” he adds, “now, at least I have the twins.”

The girl twin is a fine little girl. She usually wears a pair of pink jeans with rhinestones on the pockets (at least as often as her mother lets her). It delights her that the pink jeans match her other favorite outfit: the tutu which her mother bought her for ballet class. She happily shares the tutu with her brother, the boy twin, whenever he wants to wear it. He adores the tutu, especially the way the skirt flies out like a little pink cloud when he twirls around the living room.

The twins are thriving, Hank is right about that.

Nancy Barnes is a cultural anthropologist who has had a wonderful life in teaching. Her work has taken her from universities and high schools to women’s prisons, adult workshops in Myanmar and swimming classes at a camp in South Africa for kids affected by HIV/AIDS. Now she is writing stories and personal essays which have been published in Hippocampus, Oyster River Pages, Harpur Palate, and Pangyrus among others. A native New Yorker, she and her partner divide their time between NYC and Northampton.

Michael Cullinane

The Fecund and the Fallow

On their walk through the gorge, down the path to the nude beach, Therese considered the likelihood of her husband Blake actually taking off his trunks. But if he insisted on public nudity, she would go along, not providing him anything to complain about in couple’s therapy, where the idea was born. When Blake told Kayleigh, their nasally, know-it-all therapist, that six years passed without a honeymoon, Kayleigh convinced them to buy tickets to Greece. And to spice up a marriage gone robotic, she suggested they step way out of their comfort zone and get naked on Agiofarago Beach. And after Blake brought up the kid thing for the four hundredth time, Kayleigh told them that maybe, just maybe, the “vacation vibes” would clear their heads and make the choice “easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.”

Therese pressed her shoulder, which flashed white at the touch, already sunburned. Blake had reminded her all morning to apply sunscreen, and she said she would but didn’t. He often accused her of doing the opposite of what he suggested. It wasn’t him. She didn’t take advice from anyone.   

Blake pointed toward a cave and whispered, “I’m going to have a look.” His weirdo message board friends told him monks sat inside the crags of the gorge, silently meditating. Spotting a monk had become an item on his to-do list, something he believed would make the trip magical.

What could possibly deliver magic to Therese at 35? Her best friend Heidi would describe the freedom of being single as magical. Heidi did whatever the hell she wanted. If she were in Greece, she definitely wouldn’t be monk-spotting.   

Therese started feeling embarrassed for Blake after his fifth little peek inside a cave. “Check out this crazy tree,” she said, trying to divert his attention. The tree, ancient, simultaneously dead and alive, floated over the sand like it came off a movie set. The trunk wrapped around itself; lifeless roots swelled above ground. She imagined that if she touched it, it would turn to dust.

Maybe the tree was magical. And the rocks surrounding them, perfectly imperfect, as if designed by Gaudi. She breathed deep, hoping the magic would burrow in her lungs. Kayleigh, in an attempt to snap her out of her Girlboss tendencies (Kayleigh’s words), gave her a copy of an insipid self-help book, The Voice Within, which was supposed to lift the veil off the mysteries of the universe. She read through Chapter Six on the plane, “Putting the I’m Possible in Impossible,” and managed to avoid vomiting in her mouth. 

The Voice Within would tell her that all of it was magical, that she was magical, and the relationship she’d forged with her husband was magical. But books like that never considered reality. Could flabby old man penises be magical? She shivered.  

“I think I saw eyes,” Blake whispered. “Like a cartoon character in the dark.”

She squinted toward the cave—a black void. She loved Blake, and it was their honeymoon, and she could focus her attention on him. It might take a couple weeks, but Therese’s mind would trim off the dead parts of the trip—the ones best left forgotten. Eventually, yes, Greece would be magical.

*

Blake memorized the online “Rules” of nude beach etiquette. Rule number one: Don’t stare (even at his own wife), but if you must look, then look without looking. So, with a sideways glance, he watched Therese unclip her bra before taking down her panties, tucking both, along with her dress, inside her hotel-provided drawstring canvas backpack. Even as a peripheral blur, Therese stunned. Blake didn’t deserve her.

They were both naked, their hands loose by their sides. Blake shrugged and Therese smiled back. He imagined the moment not in the present, but as a future memory, their bodies sagged, recounting the story to their son or daughter. 

Blake’s three-month plan of no-days-off at the gym, powerlifting, cutting carbs—all of it fell apart in a week. Despite his best intentions, he’d gained eight pounds. Kayleigh’s encouragement bobbed to the top of his mind: “Be brave enough to see the light within yourself.” Maybe he hadn’t gained weight, just light. No matter what he looked like, going nude was symbolic. Kayleigh called it a middle finger to societal expectations, the ones that made him worry too much and Therese work too hard. They needed this. The entirety of Agiofarago Beach took up maybe 300 yards with crystalline blue water lapping gently ahead, just as described to him on the online forums. “Like a bathtub,” DEAKOS14 from ilovecrete.com said. Blake smiled at Therese, but she was distracted, looking at the opposite end of the beach where three men sat on towels under a red umbrella, the sun reflecting off their green bottles.

“They’re the only ones here?” she said.

“Looks like it.”

“I wonder if they carried that umbrella the whole way?”

Blake had envisioned the beach bustling with hundreds of people looking but not looking at each other. In fact, the public part of being nude in public felt essential.

“Maybe we could snag a beer?” he said.

She squinted and pursed her lips. He could tell she wasn’t enjoying herself. And, once again, she dug into her bag and took out her phone “just to check the time” but really to sneak a peek at her emails. Blake reminded himself that he didn’t deserve her and once again looked without looking. How many hours at the gym, how many metric tons of force had she pushed and pulled to get that body?

Nude Beach Rule Number Two: If you have a “reaction,” be sure to hide yourself. He looked down at himself, curious. He’d shrunk impossibly small. 

*

Even from afar, Therese knew the three men, with their potbellies and shaved heads, were British. Something about their dick-forward way of standing. What possible pleasure might they derive from getting drunk in naked isolation?

She watched Blake approach the men nervously, butt cheeks clenched. That morning, Therese had silently waited while he sat on the toilet, doing a crossword puzzle, drinking coffee, taking the world’s longest shit. But he couldn’t wait ninety seconds for her to check her phone. In Chicago, he begged to avoid parties, but here he wanted a social life.

A subtle fetid odor like a fish market wafted from the sea. The beach, Kayleigh’s “most beautiful place on earth,” was ugly—the sand wasn’t sand, just pebbles. Some volcanic black, others smooth and white like landscaping rocks, and others broken chunks of driveway.

She heard Kayleigh’s voice in her head. “You’re falling into a despair trap!” But Therese allowed her mind to spew bile. She had always hated traveling and all the inevitable disappointments. Even as a child, she recognized the emptiness of forced fun on family vacations. And at 24, well before she met Blake, she backpacked Europe, shouting “YOLO” in time with her friends, sleeping with a different hostel-dweller in each city. British, Irish, Australian—they all so easily lured her with their accents and swagger. Then, like the sauerbraten Therese ate in Frankfurt, good for the first ten bites but revolting after the taste settled in her belly, she found the men unpalatable. She left Europe disgusted at herself, bitter.

Her present best friend Heidi never abandoned the life, still screwing guys whenever, wherever, calling it 69th Wave Feminism. And on their weekly wine dates, she sometimes felt jealous. But mostly icky. After the hangovers wore off, she was grateful she had Blake.

Despite wanting to stand her ground, Therese walked toward the men, the rocks squishing beneath her feet with each step. She still hadn’t applied any sunscreen.

“Beautiful fucking day, eh?” one of the men yelled.

“Fucking-A,” Blake said back.

They exchanged names. Charles, Marcus, and Dudley were from Sussex. They oohed when Blake said they were from Chicago. Therese declined a beer and Blake accepted. Charles, who had the biggest belly, flicked off the cap with a lighter and handed the beer to Blake, smirking. She hated herself for peeking at his penis.

Therese smiled and laughed at jokes she only half heard as the wind pulsed inside her ears. She knew that once they were back in Chicago, Blake would tell Kayleigh about partying naked with a group of Brits, and Therese would have to pretend that it was a transformative experience, all the while waiting for Kayleigh to ask the gazillion-dollar question about whether or not they were going to have a baby.

“Thank God someone has finally joined our party,” Marcus said. Therese tracked his eyes as he stared between her legs. He was just an older, more pathetic version of the hostel dwellers trying to fuck her. An uglier plate of saurbraten.  

Oh, the lines Heidi would deliver—questioning their sexuality, teasing their weight. Heidi loved to talk about how unnecessary and disposable men were. And kids—Heidi called children “crotch fruit” and “semen demons” and “poon polyps”—best avoided at all costs.

Therese stared at the sea, wishing Heidi’s voice and Kayleigh’s voice and the Brits and maybe even Blake would float offshore so she could have a hot second to breathe.

*

Blake swallowed the last gulp of his Mythos beer and began peeling the label. Without making it obvious, he tracked the eyes of the men. They were staring at him. Looking looking. And he’d looked at them enough to know that he was the smallest—a feeling like he had while watching porn.

“Your husband’s a real shark,” Marcus shouted to Therese.  

“Why?” she asked.

“Well,” Marcus clapped his hands over his belly, “he’s swallowed up a woman like you.”

The men were at ease in each other’s company. Blake had only really traveled once with friends, a classic Hemingway tour with his former college roommates. They bought neon Speedos in San Sebastian in preparation for a legendary photo. After a group of travelers at his hostel nicknamed Blake, with his skinny body, bulging eyes, and neon green Speedo, “the tree frog,” he faked food poisoning and spent the next two days in bed, pretending to sleep while his friends squealed about their conquests—stories retold at every get-together for the subsequent eighteen years.

Blake realized Therese was trying to get his attention. “Let’s go,” she mouthed. Blake held up his index finger as subtly as he could, gesturing “One more minute.” He didn’t want to be rude; they had given him a beer. He held the bottle low, covering himself.

*

Therese wondered about these British men. Did they have wives, girlfriends? What becomes of the 20-something hostel hopper? Do they ever grow up? Or is their version of maturity shifting from hostels to hotels? She wondered only long enough to realize that she didn’t much care.   

“How’d you two meet?” Marcus asked, opening another beer, handing it to Blake. 

After Blake said “online,” Dudley did a spit take. “You mean, with the likes of thousands of men, you settled on this guy?” The word “settled” emerged like vomit from his thin lips.       

“Could I ask you, love,” Marcus said, “and I’m sorry for the bit of language. But, did he send you dick pics?”

Charles, who spoke like he had a mouthful of marbles, shouted, “Too small a file to download.”

And they all howled and Blake tittered, looking up at her like an abused puppy stuck in a cage. She wanted to smash their stupid green bottles over their heads and leave them bloodied by the shore. She hated these men. Hated their type. The sort of men who would fake wearing a condom, coming inside you, gone before you knew better.

“We apologize for him,” Dudley said. “You two are a lovely couple. Have you got some wee ones back home?”

Therese turned to Blake to gauge his reaction. His eyes locked on hers, waiting. She said “no” and he said “not yet” simultaneously, and she wondered how they’d ever defuse this landmine between them. And if they couldn’t figure it out, what did the future hold? Divorce lawyers? Vacationing with Heidi, day drinking, fucking random perverts?  

Then “the thing” crept inside her head, the thing she swore she would never share during therapy. The thing she never told Blake, not even Heidi at their drunkest. The thing she violently kept from her own mind through endless hours at the office only interrupted by CrossFit. She had come back from Europe pregnant. And it was absolutely awful.  

The men drank through the awkward silence. Blake finished first. Therese worked to unclench her jaw.

“Hey,” Blake said. “Sorry to change the subject, but did you guys see the monks hiding in the rocks on the walk over?”

The men waited a beat before howling again. “This fucking guy!” Marcus said.

Therese turned her backpack upside down, dumping the contents onto the sand. She picked up the tube of sunscreen.

*

No matter how many times Blake told himself to inhale peace and exhale worry, he still let the darkness in. Kayleigh was full of shit. You weren’t better off for putting yourself out there. He was just another idiot diving headfirst into a shallow pool.

Blake watched Therese squeeze a glob of sunscreen onto her fingers, knowing the men were eager to see where she smeared it. “We could wait to do that,” he said. She ignored him.

Charles, acting like he just wanted to have a look at the water, slowly took a lap around the umbrella, meandering behind Therese, staring at her ass—the ass of the woman Blake ate breakfast with every morning.

Blake twisted his bottle into the sand. “Shouldn’t we get going?”

Therese applied her sunscreen violently, muttering under her breath with downturned lips. When she reached deep down her back, her abs flexed. Dudley stepped forward. “Let me get that for you,” he said.

Blake wanted to tell him to stop. Wanted to make him stop. He wanted to take Therese back to the gorge, to the hotel. But he stood frozen, just watching, knowing she would tell the men to keep their hands off.

She looked up, saw Dudley approach, and stepped backward. In slow motion, her butt swiped Charles’ penis, and instead of recoiling, Charles grabbed her, two hands on her waist.

Charles faked shock. “Your wife, she’s trying to knock me down.”

“More like stand you up,” Marcus said, and the men howled.  

Throughout his youth, Blake used his intelligence to avoid fights. He’d never actually thrown a punch. Staring at Charles, he forced his fingers into a fist. Dread swamped his mind. He had to strike. As he stepped closer, Therese broke free, disgusted.   

Blake spoke through gritted teeth: “You don’t touch my wife.”

But that word, “wife” cracked, tripped over itself, squeaked. Like he was about to cry. And he was. Intimidation hung on the delivery. Before he even drew his fist back, he had swung and missed.

All three of the men locked eyes on Blake, smirking, searching for the perfect insult to deliver the knockout blow. Blake just watched Therese, ashamed of himself. She inhaled every bit of oxygen from the beach and smacked her thighs, wild and crazed.

“You pathetic, failed lotharios will not, I repeat, will not say another fucking word.” They all watched her. “Keep your chlamydia-coated dicks to yourselves.”

She packed her bag and walked away.

“C’mon,” she shouted to Blake without a glance back. He jogged to catch up to her, holding his breath. He desperately wanted a redo on the day, confident in what the future held: He would forever look back on their trip to Greece as the point when Therese fell out of love with him.

*

Therese’s left butt cheek felt tainted, like she sat in birdshit. She wanted a shower. They walked back toward the gorge. Sweat dripped down her bare back as the sun reached its apex.

“I should have slugged him,” Blake said.

“That would have made it a million times worse.”

She reached down and gave his pinky a squeeze but worried it came off insulting. She smiled, hoping he would smile back.

“You want to go see the monks?” she said.

“I want to go home.”

What if they had taken their honeymoon straight away? Might they have avoided therapy? She let her mind drift back to the wedding. Everyone calling them a “dream couple.” Heidi the only naysayer, drunkenly sobbing that she’d be alone forever, ending the night by throwing up in the alley behind the restaurant.

“Do you remember our vows?” Therese said. “The poems we wrote? Your sonnet left everyone swooning.”

Blake looked up at her with a tiny smile. “And your poem, too.”

“Don’t remind me,” she said.

Blake cleared his throat.

“You make me whole

In this brand-new role.” He spoke with passion, a dash of an exotic accent.

“Before I met-choo,

“I was just a shrew.”

“Stop!” she yelled. “It’s worse than Backstreet Boys’ lyrics.” She couldn’t believe he still remembered the words. She had long ago washed them from her memory, humiliated. The breeze tickled her back and made her skin tingle.

Even before Greece, she knew she wanted a baby. But she couldn’t tell Blake without also sharing “the thing.” She couldn’t not tell him she’d gotten pregnant. And how could she tell him now? He’d never trust her again.

On the altar, in front of 150 people, she got choked up reading her awful poem, and Blake smiled and whispered, “It’s okay.” She could say the words. Therese imagined their little girl, sweet like daddy, tough like mommy. Put like that, even Heidi might get behind it. 

Her eyes welled imagining his reaction. She’d wait until they reached the gorge. No, she’d wait until the hotel room, pour a shot of ouzo in their coffee mugs, relax, and have a private moment, not even the monks around.  

Michael Cullinane is an emerging writer and veteran Chicago Public Schools Broadcast Journalism teacher. His short story “The Movies” recently won first place in the 2023 Slippery Elm Prose Contest, and another story was a published finalist in Sunspot’s 2023 Rigel Award. His work is forthcoming in J Journal and Lotus-Eater. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Twitter @cullinational.

Hillary Gordon

I Named My Fibroid Mary

The bathroom floor of the hotel was spotted red with blood. I was lying in the fetal position on the cold tile, rocking back and forth. I thought back to the last time I was at this hotel. It was on Beverly Drive, just upstairs from the famed Swingers diner in Hollywood. My sister and I had stayed there six months prior, and we’d been irritated when they’d closed the hotel pool for filming. Later we were thrilled when we recognized the kitschy lawn chairs and flower power paintings on the pool floor in a Netflix series we loved. In my twenties I had lived just a few blocks from the diner and would spend many late nights and early mornings sobering up with coffee and runny eggs, sitting in the red booths with my friends, looking for C list actors who doubled as wait staff. I wished so badly it was then, any time but now.

 It was December. My pants were soaked through, thick and sticky, despite special ordering of extra ultra-tampons online to the tune of 25 dollars. “Prepare to feel like you’re losing your virginity again,” one reviewer had written about the ultra-wide tampons.

“Period day?” my sister had asked when I picked her up from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles earlier that afternoon, the giant Christmas tree looking an unnatural green against the gray sky.

“How did you know?”

“I can see it on your face. Of course, you had to get it today, of course.”

She came into the bathroom without knocking. The tile was cold on my cheek. I tried to concentrate on that and not the cramping that burned in my mid-section, which traveled deep down into my legs, into my knees, into my back. That had me pretzeled on the ground in hopes of any ease, any let up.

“You don’t have to go,” she said, sitting on the bathroom counter. “Not if you don’t want to.”

“But I do want to,” I said, through clenched teeth. “We’ve been planning this forever and it’s your birthday. It’s Love Actually Live!” I tried to say with some enthusiasm. “I can try some Tylenol again. I think it might be easing up.” I took a deep breath, feeling the cold air creep through the open bathroom window, into my lungs, into my chest, willing it into the parts of me that ached.

“You’re pale,” my sister said, putting on her rhinestone menorah earrings.

“It’s the blood loss, I think. I hope I don’t bleed in the theater. God, this is embarrassing.”

I let out an involuntary grunt, guttural, from somewhere deep inside me. “Fuck. fuck fuck fuck fuck. It’s a bad one. Yeah, it’s a big one.”

My sister looked at me through the mirror with a frown. I sat up, slightly dizzy from the sudden motion and grasped my mid-section. It throbbed. “What does it feel like, exactly?” she asked me.

“Like someone cut me open with a dull knife and took a red-hot screwdriver and is driving it into my flesh. Like a demon is doing a hot lava river dance in my body. Like the way you used to pinch me when we were little, remember how much I hated that? It’s like that but the pinching and pressure are inside my internal organs, and it goes on for hours and hours. It feels like I want to fucking die.”

“Please go to the doctor again,” she said.

I first felt the twinge of pain when I was 11 years old, the day I got my first period. I was playing as a halfback on the AYSO soccer field. I knew it was coming, my mom had prepared me with “the talk” a few months before. What I wasn’t prepared for was the wrenching throes of pain, the violence inside my body. One minute I was a kid doing cartwheels on the soccer field during halftime, the next I was an adult, experiencing the acute pain of womanhood. The next day, in a place I would come to know well throughout my life, I found myself lying on the bathroom floor, in the fetal position. My mom had given me an overnight pad that I bled through in an hour, and I lay near the toilet so I could throw up when the pain became too much. I rested my cheek on the green carpet fibers as I held my knees and imagined myself on the Oprah Winfrey show one day. “You’re telling me you bleed through a pad in an hour?!?!?!” Oprah would ask me in her astonished tone. The audience would look at me with sympathy, hands over their hearts.

“Yes,” I’d say. “Yes, it’s true.” Oprah would gasp. The crowd would cry out in unison.      

“Tell us your story dear. Your brave, brave story.” Oprah would say, placing a kind hand on my shoulder. 

In reality, my sister was playing with her toy horses in our adjoining bedroom and my mom was on the cordless phone, talking to her gynecologist in the kitchen. After she hung up the phone she joined me in the bathroom, placed a soft hand on my back, “it’s normal honey. The doctor says pain is just part of getting your period. I’ll get you some more Motrin.”

Thirty years later I would be lying on a bed, in the same hospital I was born in, begging a nurse for something a little stronger than Motrin. “What’s your pain level?” the nurse asked me. I adjusted my eyes, took a breath, and said, “nine, it’s a nine.” A dozen staples pierced my skin, bonding together a 12-inch incision that had cut through layers of skin, muscle, and organ. I felt like I had been cut in half, and in a way I had been.

“My mouth is dry. Can I get some ice? Just a small piece?” I asked the nurse.

“I’ll ask the doctor,” she said, and disappeared.

*

It takes the average woman 10 years to be diagnosed with fairly common gynecological issues. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis and fibroids being some of the most common. Endometriosis occurs in 11 percent of women; quite a significant chunk of the female population. It happens when tissue meant to grow inside the uterus instead grows outside. On a good day it is painful, on a normal day it’s absolute agony, and can only be diagnosed with surgery, so as one might guess, is not diagnosed often. Many times, women are given total hysterectomies to counter the pain, but that doesn't always ensure a pain free existence. Endometriosis can stick to and grow on other organs in the body. My friend and former coworker Sara had been diagnosed with endometriosis when she was 18. Tougher than stale beef jerky, when her appendix had ruptured inside her body, I watched her wait until the workday was over at 5pm before she drove herself to the ER. The pain was so bad, by lunch she couldn’t walk. When I urged her to go to the doctor at 3:00, she said, “I still have so many emails to send.”

I had watched her more than once double over in pain when she got her period. “My mom and grandma both also suffer from endometriosis,” she told me one day over lunch at her house in the woods. When her period made a surprise appearance, we had to cancel our lunch plans so she could grab tampons from her bathroom. Wondering if I had endometriosis myself, I asked her about her pain level, “It’s changed over the years. I’ve kind of grown into pain. The inconvenience, the not knowing when it’s coming, it interferes with my life a ton. That’s the worst part.”

“What did your doctor tell you to do when you were diagnosed?” I asked her.

“The doctor said it wouldn’t be anything to worry about, but I’d have some different symptoms than my friends. I wasn’t offered any treatment—they told me to take Tylenol and Ibuprofen and they told me I needed to be on birth control.”

By the time I was 24, the pain I had first experienced as an 11-year-old was getting worse and becoming more frequent. I sat on my living room couch canceling plans with my fun, hippie friend Jenny, who never had pain with her period. I wondered if it was because she did yoga. “I’m just not feeling well,” I told her as she sipped her vodka martini out of a red coffee mug.

“It’s the wind,” she said. “It’s making everyone feel off.” I looked out my window to see a palm tree swaying back and forth in my front yard.

“Let’s hope,” I thought.

I went to the doctor the next morning. I laid on your standard beige, gynecological exam bed. Feet cold in the stirrups, uncomfortable and self-conscious in nothing but a scratchy paper gown, all the parts of my body I work to hide, exposed. “I’m just going to insert this,” a young, Swedish X-Ray tech said, as she applied a condom to an ultrasound wand.

“Ok,” I said, embarrassed, but trying not to be. She had me look at the screen, pointed to my insides on display.

“Ovaries look normal,” she said, pointing to a blob on a screen. “It’s probably cysts, you probably have rupturing cysts and that’s what’s causing the pain. I imagine they’ve dissolved. It’s called PCOS. Since you’re already on the pill, there’s not a lot we can do about it. Sorry.”

I thought back to being in middle school. Third period. PE class. A group of eighth grade girls, all braces and backpacks walked to the girl’s gym (the outdated, older, smaller of the two at my school) and taped to the locker room door was the dreaded gold, sparkly sign reading MILE DAY! We would sigh and we would grunt and groan in annoyance. I was not an athlete, and have never been one, but at my school, the richer and the more athletic you were, the more popular you were. I tended to keep the company of the music-loving, poetry-writing crowd who would walk the mile as slowly as they damn well felt like, thank you. What my snail-paced friends didn’t know was that I had been practicing my long-distance running after school. I thought it would make me healthier, skinnier, a touch more popular. After many months of training, running until I was exhausted, I had improved my mile time by 2.5 minutes. I was still running a ten-minute mile—no great athletic feat—but I was proud. On this mile day though, this dreaded mile day, I had gotten my period. My insides raged. They burned. They fought and screamed. I discreetly slipped into my PE clothes, not wanting anyone to see the triple pads I was wearing, and I began to run. I focused on my breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, focused on my feet hitting the track, the dust rising from the dirt, as girl after girl passed me. The pain wasn’t easing up, in fact it was getting worse. Defeated, I slowed down, started to walk. “Come on girls! Move! Move!” Mrs. Blakey, our short-haired, red-nailed PE teacher yelled at us. In that moment, I gripped my mid-section, fell to the ground, and vomited all over the track. Mrs. Blakey ran over to me, the whistle around her neck bobbing up and down. “Honey, why didn’t you tell me you were sick?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to get a good mile time for once.”

Mrs. Blakey helped me up and walked with me back to the locker room. “It’s ok to get sick sometimes, you just have to tell me.” I was mortified then to see I had bled through my pads and stained my gym shorts. I rolled them up, stuck them in the bottom of my backpack and threw them in the wash when I got home that night.

The number one reason girls miss school is because of their periods. I tried my best to never use my period as an excuse to call out of school, or as I grew older, out of work. I thought the pain was just the penance I had to pay for being born a woman. I thought that I had to be a good girl, to not complain or disrupt, to quietly grin and bear it. “When I was younger, I would miss sports because I was in so much pain,” Sara told me as she sipped her Dr. Pepper out of the can with a straw. “I would just stay in the fetal position in bed.” When I asked her if she ever misses work at her new job because of her endometriosis pain, she said, “A week before my period I get sick. I get feverish. I’m always sick. I’m nauseous, dizzy, and I have a headache. Fluish kind of thing. I’ve gotten used to it. It makes me wanna call in, but I just work from home. When I was younger, I definitely missed some school, but my responsibility level is different now.”

When I was thirty-three the pain was constant. Not just the day before my period like when I was a teenager. Not just a week of pain like when I was in my twenties. Now it was daily. Ibuprofen had stopped working years ago. When my period would come, my skin would turn red and blotchy, hot to the touch. My heart raced so fast I thought my coworkers could hear it—things that always accompanied my unwelcomed cycles. I’d sometimes use my skin tone to measure my own pain. To make sure I wasn’t making it up or exaggerating it. I had sometimes been asked by friends if I “just had a low pain tolerance.” One friend, thin as a rice cracker, had said to me after I cancelled dinner plans, “I just don’t let my period affect my life the way you do.” Was I exaggerating it, I sometimes wondered? Was I faking it for attention? I couldn’t be 100 percent sure. But, if there were physical symptoms, sweat and blotchy red skin, it had to be real pain, right?

At work, I’d pull my knees up to my chest in my office chair, or cross and uncross my legs, and try to hold normal conversations with my coworkers. I’d sometimes lie on my office floor. I’d wear heating pads that stuck to my belly during the workday. I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on pain relief. Heating pads, pain killers, teas, electrotherapy machines, tampons dipped in CBD oil and while they would ease the pain a touch, it was never, actually gone. So, I went back to the doctor. “I was told I have PCOS,” I told her. “And I think that’s causing the pain, ruptured cysts.”

She looked at me. “You don’t look like you have PCOS.” The typical symptoms, though the disorder manifests itself in many ways, are weight gain in the mid-section, thinning head hair, and more body hair than normal. The rupturing of the cysts causes the ovaries to produce extra testosterone, which in turn creates male features in women. One in ten women suffer from PCOS, yet there is no cure and doctors have no idea why women get it. The doctor took my blood and called me a week later, “All looks normal. No heightened testosterone or androgens. All good. Want me to write a prescription for birth control?”

Many years later, I would find Cory Ruth on the internet and ask her why birth control is so often prescribed for so many gynecological conditions. She’s a registered dietician who has a Master of Science degree and specializes in women’s issues, namely PCOS. She’d long had a strong hunch something wasn’t right with her own reproductive health. Diagnosed with PCOS at 27 she was put on birth control and told she wouldn’t be able to conceive. Two kids later she said to me, “Doctors aren’t trained in lifestyle changes, so birth control is the go-to.” When I asked her what her main piece of advice would be to young women suffering from period pain she said, “Listen to your body. If something feels off or abnormal, seek medical help and don’t believe everything you see on the internet.”

By the time I was forty the pain was so intense, I began to buy drugs from friends and sometimes strangers. Norco, Percocet, Hydrocodone—whatever I could get my hands on. Like a squirrel hiding precious nuts, I’d stash the pills all over the house and only allow myself to take them when I was on the verge of passing out. More than once, on my way to or from work, I’d have to pull over to the side of the road and wait for the pain to pass, as I breathed heavily, dizzy, sweaty, blurry, in and out of consciousness—not trusting myself to stay conscious behind the wheel,  I would bleed through my clothes despite the giant tampons. On the days I would call out of work, I would lay towels down on the floor, or sit in a hot bath and let the pain consume me, take over my whole body for the six or seven or sometimes twelve hours it was going to. There was no fighting her. She was relentless.

My mom, after seeing me go through this for a year or so, begged me to go to the doctor.

“I’ve been a million times,” I said. “It’s PCOS, there’s no cure.”

“As a birthday gift to me,” she said, “please just go one more time. I can see the pain in your face. You don’t deserve this.”

I had never thought of it that way. I thought I DID deserve this pain. Because I’m a woman. Because I’m short and round and not athletic and not a yogi. Because I was born with a body that hurt. That’s just what she did. I told my mom I’d go to the doctor again.

I was nervous. Nervous they’d find something or nervous they wouldn’t. I got a call one week after my appointment. My doctor, young, kind, with her hair pulled back in a blonde pony, asked if I could get on a zoom call with her. “It’s not cancer,” was the first thing she said. I sighed, relieved. “It’s a fibroid. A pretty significant fibroid. It’s about the size of an orange, and that’s what’s probably causing your pain.” I wanted to cry. It was such a relief to know the pain was real, to know it may be cured. To know what was wrong with me all these years. It wasn’t a moral failing, it wasn’t an inability to deal with pain. It wasn’t the price of womanhood. It was pain. Real pain.

I named the fibroid Mary. After Queen Mary Tudor. Henry VIII’s first daughter, I always felt a sort of kinship with her. She married later in life, and just like her father, desperately wanted an heir to secure the throne. She suffered from incredibly painful periods, and in a time before painkillers, would spend her most painful period days taking long walks in the forest. At 42, she finally thought she was pregnant as her belly swelled and her cycles stopped. Turned out she was suffering from some sort of gynecological cancer that would kill her shortly. Also, she was famously known as Bloody Mary. I wondered how 600 years had passed, but when it came to women’s health, little seemed to have evolved.

 I began my research on uterine fibroids. They are common. As a matter of fact, 80 percent of women will have at least one during their childbearing years. They’re non-cancerous tumors that often don’t cause symptoms, but when they do, “they’re no joke,” as my doctor had told me. Once I had been diagnosed, I called my friend Shannon and asked if she wanted to go to dinner. She’d had a partial hysterectomy years before, because of large uterine fibroids. “On a scale from 1-10, the pain was 11,” she told me over chicken plicata. “It was debilitating. I had trouble walking, driving, and sleeping. I tried every pain relief under the sun.” I nodded, knowing just how she felt. “I started to plan my life around my cycle. I always carried extra clothes, sanitary products and had to special order Ultra tampons and special pads. I was super unhealthy and anemic.” When I asked her why it had taken her so long to be diagnosed, she said, “Male doctors were the worst and had discounted my symptoms. Once I found a competent doctor, it took 2 appointments to be diagnosed.”

It's unknown exactly why women get fibroids, but if they’re big, or there are multiples, they can cause heavy bleeding, pressure, bloating and severe pain in the pelvis, back and legs, and like so many other gynecological issues, infertility.

“You want kids?” My doctor asked me when I visited her in the office.

“I don’t know. Maybe? But I’m 41, so really what are the odds?”

 “You’d be surprised,” she said. “If there is even one tiny fraction of a percent that thinks you may want kids one day, we’re not doing a hysterectomy. We’re doing a myomectomy. I’ll cut into your uterus to remove the fibroid.  I’ll warn you, it’s not without risks, and it’s pretty painful. So, it’s up to you if it’s worth a major surgery with a pretty major incision and a long recovery.”

“Get it out of me,” I said, with no hesitation.

A few months later, Fibroid Mary was dead. I didn’t know it quite yet, but the bulk of my pain had died with her. I asked my surgeon to leave me a picture of the fibroid after it was removed. I wanted to see Bloody Mary, the mass that had been tormenting me most of my life. She was just as ugly as you’d imagine. Big, fatty, fleshy, bloody and mean. The size of a large fist. I wondered how I wasn’t able to feel the lump of it as it grew inside me.  As I lay in the hospital bed, bleeding through my sheets, unable to sit up, unable to use the bathroom without a nurse’s assistance, I took some small comfort in the thought of Fibroid Mary burning in a fire of medical waste.

I hate that it took thirty years for me to finally get a real diagnosis and finally get some relief. I hate that I was in my forties by the time I stopped living in fear of my body. Anticipating my period, waiting for it, was sometimes worse than the pain itself. I felt, as I imagine many women do, much shame around my period growing up. I was used to hiding tampons up my sleeve or in my purse on my way to the bathroom in order to not make anyone uncomfortable. I was accustomed to hearing my male family members, and classmates and coworkers crack menstrual jokes. I've been accused more than once of “being on her period” if I was upset. I’ve hidden my pain, blamed the vomiting on bad food or a flu, so no one would have to think about a woman menstruating. So, I wouldn't be made fun of for this body and how she functions.

As women, we are taught to be ashamed of our flesh and our blood. We are to be ashamed for existing in the bodies we are born into. The correct womanly body will always be just out of reach, for us all. The correct female body aches but only in silence. The correct body bleeds, but in secret. She hides her tampons. She complains of a headache when asking for painkillers to ease her cramps. She doesn’t talk about blood. She doesn’t acknowledge pain. She menstruates, but no one would know it. In fact, lawmakers are currently considering banning any discussion of menstruation before 6th grade in Florida schools. The perfect female doesn’t talk about her period.

I sometimes wonder if I had been more vocal about my pain, my heavy bleeding, if I hadn’t been self-conscious, so timid, if maybe Fibroid Mary would have been evicted sooner. I think of all the life I’ve missed: holidays, vacations, parties, work, school. Because even if physically I was there, mentally I was fighting a war with my body. When I was in that pain, only a fraction of me could ever really be present. I did end up going to see Love Actually Live with my sister. All I remember from that night was the pain I was in. The positions I would fold myself into to try to ease the pain, even slightly. The defiant spot of blood that stained the chair in the theatre, despite all my efforts.

More than anything, this makes me hope that we teach our girls not to be afraid of their own bodies, to listen to them, and to fight for them. To remind them there is no shame in their existence. While period pain is common, it’s not normal. There is almost always an underlying reason.  I often think of the physical and mental anguish this simple fact could have relieved me of- in so many stages of my life. Our girls need to know, in a way I didn’t know, that it’s not just ok, but necessary to discuss female bodies and female pain. No need to grin and bear it like I did, like my generation did, like our mothers and their mothers did. And if no one listens, I want our girls to scream about it, until they are heard. Let everyone know exactly where it hurts, when it hurts so we can figure out why it hurts. My hope is that all girls understand that just because they are born in female form, they are not destined to a life of polite, invisible suffering.

Hillary Gordon lives part time in Ojai, California and part time in Los Angeles where she is completing her MFA in creative writing. Her work has been published in Seventeen Magazine, Self Magazine, The Rush, The Harbinger and more. She currently works full time at a Los Angeles radio station.

Hayden Casey

Headache

There’s a gift shop a few blocks west of my apartment in Wallingford, on the other side of the web of the I-5. I pass the storefront on my daily walks around the city—painted forest green, with a giant white sign, and a display propped at the edge of the curb with an arrow pointed inside. Today, I decide to pop in, before I catch the bus up to my family’s house in Lynnwood. It is just beginning to mist, and a layer of condensation has formed on my rain jacket. A bell sounds as I pass through the open double doors, and a woman watches me wander through the offerings. She peers at me confused, as if I’d wandered into the wrong store. She smiles, seems invested in my search. “Anything I can help you with?” she says as she approaches from her corner.

“No,” I say. “Just my brother’s birthday today.”

“Last minute, eh?” she says with a smile, before clearing her throat, realizing she may have caused offense. Her voice carries a Canadian lilt. She hasn’t yet figured out the polite-but-distant way of this city. She tries again: “Looking for anything in particular?”

I glance around—at the wood shelves with mugs and chocolates and boxes of dried salmon, the walls lined with Washington maps and T-shirts and decorative towels, the counters crowded with water bottles and candles—and realize, with heat flushing at my neck, that I don’t have the first clue what Thomas would want in here, what he’d be drawn to, what he’d revile. He’s turning seventeen—what business could he want, I realize foolishly, from a gift shop in the state he’s always lived in?

“No,” I say, “just thought I’d pop in and look around. And”—I pull my phone from my pocket, check the time—“I actually have to go. Thank you, though.” I keep my eyes at the ground, run my hand along my buzzcut as I walk out of the shop, hear the bell ding.

“Sure,” she calls out behind me, unsurprised a guy in his late teens wants nothing from her shop.

On the way back to the apartment, I consider how slow business must be this time of year, and wish I would’ve bought something small, think about turning and going back. Think about showing up at the house empty-handed, wish I’d started looking for a gift earlier.

But I keep walking. Back at the apartment, I throw some of my things into an overnight bag, and walk outside to the covered bus stop a few minutes before the scheduled stop.

The ride home to Lynnwood is long—the mist has thickened to rain, and it drips down the windows as I climb on and take a seat. I should read my textbook for astronomy—my “easy” elective, with a surprisingly heavy work load—but I start thinking about Thomas. About how, the last time I was at home for the winter holidays, he didn’t leave the house the entire time, hadn’t left it for a month and a half beforehand, hadn’t even gone out to the yard. Mom delivered this news to me offhand, tried to brush by it and continue on to something else, but I stopped her, brought her back. He played video games, snuggled with the cat, ate meals at the table, but otherwise stayed cooped in his room. I took it all in, tried to reconcile it with the conception of Thomas I’d carried up to that point. He was an interesting guy, sure, and he loved video games, and he loved our mother, but he’d also loved his friends, loved the outdoors. I couldn’t see him trapped up in his room and entirely happy.

But when I’d gotten up there, to his childhood bedroom, which shared a wall with mine, and seen it flooded with chip bags and cracker boxes, dirty T-shirts and strewn single socks, half-read books and used tissues, he beamed at me like I’d just given him a thousand dollars, tried to pull me in for a hug as if nothing was different, and I lost my shit. By this point, I’d been living away from home for a year and a half, first in a dorm, then in an off-campus apartment with a couple of my best friends. I’d gotten used to taking care of myself, taking care of spaces, keeping them in check. To see Thomas clinging so tightly to someone else’s care enraged me. I wasn’t nice—I said my piece, stormed back downstairs, left my bags untouched at the top of the stairs, went to sit on the back porch. He knew me well enough by that point, I thought, knew I had to wander off and stew for a while, knew I’d be back to myself within the hour. My high school girlfriend, Lena, made fun of my star placements, my double Aries, and Thomas laughed along. In Thomas’s room, I’d been livid, but later, listening as the rain plopped into puddles, I was worried I’d hurt him. I gathered a handful of pebbles from one of the planters and tossed them, one by one, at his window, at the back corner of the house. After a few of them made contact, tapped at the glass like tiny fingernails, his face appeared, sullen, stormy. I waved him outside, but he shook his head. I tried again, more vigorously, and again he shook no.

Mom joined me outside, on the other side of the stretch of porch covered by the awning, and said, “Things have gotten worse for him since you left. As you can tell.” She paused, soaked in the humidity, then rushed to say, “Not that I’m saying it’s your fault—it’s not. It’s just . . . you didn’t know.”

I didn’t. When I left Lynnwood, went to my life further in the city, I shrugged off the house, the responsibilities of checking in. I felt a sort of shame, coming home and playing catch-up—it was like skipping a season of a TV show and listening to a friend shoddily explain it. But I couldn’t figure out how to do things differently.

He’d entered into a fog after that first night, and didn’t quite leave it till I went back into the city for a new term of school. On Christmas morning, the three of us exchanged gifts on his bedroom floor—tidied, now, in the time since I’d gone off on him. He and I had gotten each other socks, as was our tradition, and he was bashful as he handed my gift to me—I removed the wrapping paper and found that all the pairs he’d gotten me were science-themed, animated with molecules and telescopes and beakers and lab goggles, a reference to my failed biochem major. He’d bought them as a joke, but the air was knocked out of him now. I handed his to him—plain black, as he preferred—and wished I’d thought to make a joke with them. Felt the socks as I sat there on his floor, squeezed the pairs like stress balls. 

*

It’s a two-mile walk to the house from the Lynnwood stop, and normally I trek it, but today Mom offered to pick me up at the transit center. When I step off the bus, her red Civic is parked in the lot, waiting. I throw my bag into the trunk, and as I sink into the car, she pulls me in to her shoulder—“Hi, Matt,” she says. She strokes the bags under my eyes with her thumbs, asks if I’ve been getting enough sleep. She, too, seems slow, tired—her eyes heavy, words soft—but I don’t ask about it.

“How’s Tommy?” I ask. A pet name he can’t stand—I never call him by it to his face, only say it to Mom, when he isn’t around.

I watch her weigh things, watch her settle on “He’s OK.” She shifts into reverse, pulls out of the spot. “He’s excited to see you.”

I think of his tenor the last time I left, and wonder what things will be like this time. Wonder how his room will be—if he’ll have cleaned it, in anticipation of another explosion. If things are bad today, I will try to contain myself. Easier said than done, but I can at least try.

“I made him a cake this morning,” she says, slowing to a crawl before a stop sign. “Lemon buttermilk—you know he loves lemon. Did you get him anything?”

My neck goes red. I think of the gift shop, the rows and rows. Think of the other shops I could have gone to, the other things I could have looked for, if I’d started earlier. But I still don’t know what he would want. “I didn’t really have time,” I say.

“Ah,” she says, falsely bright, trying to shine over her disappointment. A traffic light turns red—she slows, stops at the edge of the crosswalk. We sit in silence punctuated every few seconds by the windshield wipers.

As we pass the strip mall by our house, the one we went to growing up, with the grocery store and the McDonald’s, she asks if I want to stop in and get Thomas something, somewhere. She seems strange, tense—I appreciate her offer, but I feel already like I’ve failed, like it’s too late to make it up now. “Let’s just go home,” I say, frustrated at nothing, frustrated at myself.

She asks about classes, and I rant about them as we pass by the last few blocks, till we’re parked in the driveway at the house, and the engine has clicked off. I see Nub’s head in the front window, his little ears perked up. Thomas is in the living room behind him, seated on the arm of the recliner, hair wet from a shower. He hugs me with reserve when I enter the house and drop my bag at the door—something seems to be weighing on him. I take off my shoes at the door, reveal my socks with microscopes on them, but he doesn’t notice. It’s only been three months, but he seems older, gaunter in the face, more hairs pricking at his lip. Still the same eyes he’s always had, the same ones as mine.

“How have you been?” I ask. Mom has locked the car and come into the house; she digs through drawers, pulls out clanging kitchen tools.

“I’ve been OK,” he says. He does a thing similar to what Mom did earlier, when I asked how he was: watches a film flash over his eyes of his recent experiences, weighs them against each other. I don’t push him, but perhaps he can tell I don’t believe him. “I’ve been thinking about the headache again,” he says.

My stomach drops: when Mom had suggested his worsening state, I was hoping it wasn’t this flaring up again. “I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t know.” Shuffles his toes around in the carpet, looks at his hands, folded in his lap. “I just don’t know. And I can’t stop thinking about it. Oh: that reminds me.” He walks over to the base of the steps, ascends them, skips every other stair. Pops into his room at the top, rummages around for something. I grab my bag to take it upstairs. Climb the steps, skip every other, as Thomas had.

*

Our great-grandfather died by way of headache, in 1945. He was at work on the ENIAC, in Philadelphia: The Giant Brain, they called it in the media. The first digital computer, capable of calculating artillery trajectories at a rate 2,400 times faster than a human. He was programming the machine, and then he keeled over, moaned, reported a pain in his head like it was being squeezed in a giant metal fist. Then he was dead.

At thirteen, Thomas became obsessed with this fact. When I got home from a high school basketball game and found him sobbing on the couch, he explained it to me this way: “It happened to our great-granddad, and I just know it’s going to happen to me. It was passed down. My head’s just a ticking time bomb.”

His theory was further solidified empirically when a year later, our father—who had started losing track of himself, drifting off in confusion, startling himself awake in the middle of the day, and experiencing headaches—went to the doctor and came home diagnosed with brain cancer. We buried him in the fall of my junior year. Thomas screamed in the graveyard, fell to his knees, felt responsible. He said he’d summoned it, by thinking about the headache, said it was only a matter of time before he fell prey to it too. His problem was he didn’t know how to shove a thing down, to smother it.

For a while the thought devoured him—he didn’t want to put pressure on his body, drink coffee or exert himself physically or stay up too late, lest a headache come on and put an end to him. He was worried when I applied to the computer science major, afraid I’d go the same route as our forefathers. I was hoping, when he stopped talking about it, he left it behind him, that it was the end of things. But now it seems they’re back, now it seems the thoughts are roaring in his head once again.

*

Halfway up the stairs, Mom stops me, pulls me into the kitchen. She’s making Tommy’s birthday dinner, frying chicken sausages on the stove, boiling water for tortellini. The pasta package is slit down the middle; she dumps its contents into the water. “I don’t know why I didn’t mention this in the car,” she says, “but his friends . . . he hasn’t really been seeing his friends.”

“Why?” I ask. The sausages sizzle and spit—she nudges them with closed tongs.

“He says they’ve been making fun of him,” she says. She turns the sausages, allows the pale halves to brown. “Teasing him for the . . . headache stuff.”

“God,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her eyes fall to the sausages; she pulls the cover over them, nudges the pan, stirs the tortellini. She doesn’t look at me—her mouth is a tight line. Her hesitance comes through clearly: why would she tell me? When I leave the house, I drop off the earth. She probably has tried to tell me, and I haven’t answered her call.

“All I’m trying to say is,” she continues, “he could probably use your company right now.”

“You don’t have to guilt-trip me,” I say. The starchy foam atop the boiling pasta is rising aggressively; she stirs it with her spoon, turns the heat down. “He’s my brother. I get it.”

“I’m not trying to guilt you,” she says. “Just—letting you know.” 

“Great,” I say. I leave the kitchen, walk out to the living room. Nub stands in the windowsill, still—I approach him, pat his head. “Hi, Nubby,” I say. He looks particularly gray today—somedays his gray shines through more, others his orange. He nestles his face into my hand. I rub his face once more, run my fingers down his back, then pick up my bag and head upstairs.

I set it on my desk chair, look around my room. Most of my things came with me to my apartment, but some furniture remains—the room now is an odd mix of the personal and the unfamiliar. My bed is still in its spot along the left wall, dressed in sheets I’ve never seen. The old desk and its chair are still by the door, lit by a new lamp.

Thomas meets me at the door with a box in his hands. “Don’t want to forget this,” he says.

“What is it?”

“It’s for you.” His eyes are pointed at the floor, but he wears a gentle smile. “Early birthday gift.”

My birthday’s not for another month, deeper in the spring, though I guess he’s not certain when I’ll be back. My hands suddenly feel so empty, my bag so light. “You didn’t have to do that,” I say, feel regret churning in my stomach. He hands it over, and I run a finger along its gentle wrapping. “I got you something, too,” I say quickly, “but I left it at home.” I slip a finger under the wrapping, peel a corner of the tape upward. “Remembered as soon as I got on the bus.”

“It’s OK,” he says. He won’t make a fuss about it, I know he won’t.

I peel the wrapping off, and inside is a square cardboard box; I pop its tab out, pull back the lid. Peer at it, pull it out, turn the brass contraption over in my hands. “It’s a sextant,” he says, “or a replica of one. ‘Cause you said you were taking an astronomy class. It reminded me of you. Apparently sailors used to use these to navigate, measuring the stars or something.”

He’s always known to go for funny gifts, and I should laugh—the astronomy teacher sucks, and this will be a funny memory—but I feel, weirdly, like crying. Try to choke down whatever the thing is that has formed in my throat.

“I don’t know if it actually works,” he says, “but you could, like, put it on a shelf or something. It’s cool-looking.”

I look up at him. His eyes are wavering in the light—he’s afraid I don’t like it. I hope he can’t see the uncontrolled emotion in mine. “Thanks, dude,” I say around the lump. “Thanks. It’s great.”

“Oh, good,” he says.

“I need to—one sec, be right back,” I say. A horrid swelling has started in my chest; I step into the bathroom, sit at the edge of the tub, set my head in my hands. Breathe faster and faster, try to slow it down. It’s a ball in my ribs that is swelling outward, making everything feel tight—it’s spreading to my limbs, a hot kind of panic. It hurts to come home, to face my brother’s goodness, his kindness, to see it contorted, twisted, in myself.

I splash cold water on my face, then let the faucet run hot. Wash my hands in the scalding stream. Dry everything, open the bathroom door again, step into the light of the hall. When I get back to my room, he’s gone—from his room down the hall, I hear his TV, the 8-bit music of a video game loading screen.

*

When I was home for winter break, on one of the last nights, Thomas met me at the threshold of the dining room. Trying to repair, I think, though I didn’t see it at the time for what it was—my weeks at home were sullied by my initial rage-storm. I still hadn’t apologized for what I’d said to him—I’d thought about it, recognized there was regret underneath the rage, but hadn’t bitten. He’d shut down, in the days afterward, and I decided that was where he was, where he’d stay, and didn’t look for reasons otherwise. Another thing I didn’t understand then: that people changed their minds, or wanted to change them. That their emotional states could allow for anything other than a strict upholding of whatever anger-fueled decision had been made. I was stubborn in my convictions, and thus everyone else was stubborn in theirs.

I was seated at the kitchen table, old math books spread all around me, tutoring websites pulled up in different tabs on my computer, graphing calculator uncovered and blinking. I took one of my earbuds out, paused the lecture video I was watching. “Do you wanna play Smash Bros?” he asked, looking at the mess of open books around me, the chicken-scratch notes across my journal page. In the upcoming term I was taking Calculus III, and it had been a year since Calc II, even longer since Calc I: all the information had been sliding out of my brain in a steady stream since. I was grasping, I needed to get it back.

“Not right now,” I told Thomas. I was stressed, I was myopic; I didn’t notice that he’d needed me then, needed my company, since Mom had gone to a friend’s house for the evening. “Maybe later.” I put my earbud back in, resumed the video, tried to follow along with the tutor’s leaps in logic.

I remembered an hour later, too, that Mom had asked me to feed Nub: a treat, one of the cans in the pantry, scooped out into his bowl atop the last few cereal-shapes of his morning kibble. The tab on top of the lid broke off when I tried to peel it back, and I couldn’t find the can opener; I went up to Thomas’s room to ask him if he knew where it was. It wasn’t in the drawer by the sink, but maybe that’s where it was at my apartment: everything was falling from me now.

When I reached his door, I looked in his room and didn’t see him. The video game screen was still on, the remote set on his chair, but he wasn’t anywhere. I almost turned to check his bathroom, but heard a noise from further inside, beyond his bed, a series of noises, of quick breaths. I pushed through his door, past his video-game station, to the other side of his bed, the square space between the head of the bed and the corner of the room, where he sat, his spine curled against the wall, his head between his knees, his hands clasped at the back of his head. “Thomas?” I said, lowering myself to his level, seating myself on his floor.

“It’s happening,” he said through his panting, each syllable punctuated by a hyperventilated breath. “The headache, it’s happening.”

“Stop it,” I said, “no it’s not. You’re fine. Hey—look at me. Look up. You’re fine.” I didn’t really know what to say, didn’t have the words to do anything other than bring him down to this moment, bring him back here. His 8-bit video game music still blipped by in the background, replaying its same riff. His scraggly carpet beneath our feet, his dim lamplight. The fact that there was nothing more than this. “Everything’s fine. You’re fine. Your head is fine. It’s good. Nothing’s happening.”

He calmed, gradually—breath by breath, minute by minute. He was fine, his psychosomatic headache was going away, he was back in his chair, with the Nintendo remote in his hand, and then he was ushering me away, out of the room, back downstairs. “I’m fine,” he said, “you don’t have to deal with me anymore, I’m fine.”

I should’ve thought more about it—should’ve told him it wasn’t dealing with him, he wasn’t something to deal with. He was my brother. But I didn’t think about it; the crisis was over, things were fine. I asked him where the can opener was, and he directed me, of course, to the drawer across from the sink, buried beneath some other tools. I hadn’t looked closely enough the first time. I went downstairs, fed the cat, listened to his spiky little tongue lap at the pile of wet food, went back to my math.

*

I think about staying in my room, reading my astronomy textbook and doing the reading quiz, but I pad up to Thomas’s door instead. He notices my socks this time—smiles, brightens, though I can tell he’s still slightly heavy, the thing is still on his mind. “Wanna play Smash?” I ask.

He beams, for a moment, then his expression falls. “You don’t have to,” he says. Like I think he’s a charity case, like my question is a ruse.

“I know,” I say. He doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything further, so I push past him, turn the system on, pull the controllers off the shelf. I sit at the edge of his bed, leave the chair for him. He takes it, lifts the remote.

We play a few rounds, and I beast him, as is the usual. Every now and again, I hear him start to breathe quicker, start to fidget and overheat, and I say “Hey, it’s OK.” Bring him down, pull him back to the moment, as I had over Christmas break. I think of Mom, having done this for months now, while I’ve been gone. Think of the way I’ve ignored their calls, left my phone on Do Not Disturb, in the name of making a new life for myself. The way I thought of my familial relationships as obligatory. Think of how much damage I have done, how much damage I have left to undo. He turns to smack my knee when I beat him, again, after going easy for a few seconds. His head angles back toward the screen—from here, the bump at the top of his nose is pronounced, the bump he and I share, inherited from our dad. I think of when I fractured mine in high school, on the trampoline, and he brought me ice all afternoon, till Mom got home. He stood by me in the hospital, when the doctor had to set it back in place, and he didn’t look away, he wanted to watch.

I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling, but I know how to be here. I know how to try. I had to warm the muscles back up, remind them of their functions.

Mom calls up the stairs that dinner is almost ready. “Wanna play some Kart now?” Thomas asks—he knows he’s actually got a chance at that one.

“Sure,” I say. “But I’ll be right back.” I leave my remote at the edge of the bed, slip out into the hall, and he gets up to swap game cartridges. I hover at the top of the stairs, think of Mom helping him while I haven’t been here, think of her talking him down from his escalations, cooking for him, sitting across the table from him, watching him struggle to maintain his grip on the world. Downstairs, she’s gotten the chicken sausages sliced, I’m sure, mixed in with the tortellini. She’s got the cake stand set at the edge of the counter, the lemon-yellow gleaming under the plastic dome. She raised us to be helpful, but it didn’t work for me, I didn’t latch on. I’d always let other people help, always ridden behind. But tonight I’ll set the table, the plates and forks, the glasses. I’ll ask Mom and Thomas what they want to drink. When we’ve eaten, and the cake is shining at the edge of the counter, I’ll bring it down to the table, pull the cover off, let Thomas choose his slice. Watch him take the first bite, watch his face scrunch with sweet-sour. Watch him smile.

Hayden Casey is a writer and musician. He earned a BS in Psychology from the University of Washington and an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University. His fiction has appeared in Witness, West Branch, Bridge Eight, Bat City Review, Allium, and Yalobusha Review, and has been shortlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. Find him at haydencasey.co.

Allison Craig

Bald Eagle Summer

In the middle of a pose whose name I forget and am only doing because my girlfriend enticed me with goats, I look up to the sky from my mat and see it. Another bald eagle. I’ve seen them before, but this summer has been unprecedented: a pair on Thompson’s Lake, one flying over the Garden State parkway in New Jersey, seven on the Mohawk River, and the one soaring in the thermals above me, during goat yoga at June Farms. 

Bald eagles aren’t the largest birds of prey, but they have an unparalleled presence. It’s not until they’re full-grown, about five years old, that both males and females have the trademark “bald” head and tail feathers. They mate for life and only take a new partner if tragedy befalls one of them. I like to think of bald eagles as gender outlaws. For one thing, females outsize their male counterparts. Males are also the chief homemakers and are, according to wildlife filmmaker Neil Rettig, control freaks over the nest, repositioning whatever leaves and sticks females add. 

Millions of bald eagles once inhabited North America, but European colonizers decimated their populations. Not long ago, the United States’ national bird was nearly extinct. The Federal Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which made it illegal to disturb let alone kill them, was introduced five years before the insecticide DDT that would bring them to the brink. Like other raptors, they ate fish poisoned by the DDT that leached into soil and waterways. The eagles didn’t die outright, but their eggshells were so thin and brittle that the young couldn’t survive. 

By the 1960s, fewer than five hundred mating pairs remained in the continental US. The year after DDT was banned, which happened to be the same year I was born, they rebounded enough to be taken off the endangered species list and upgraded to “threatened.” In 1974, New York state recorded only two. In 2022, there were over a thousand. In 2023, a pair was even spotted in Brooklyn. Their comeback is said to be one of the greatest conservation successes of our time.

Conservation success or not, I doubt I’d be seeing so many, so often, if not for Anastasia. Anastasia is my yellow, fifteen and a half-foot, fifty-four-pound Perception “Avatar” sea kayak. I’ve had her since the early 2000s and used to paddle and kayak-camp regularly, but for years she’s done nothing but gather dust.

*

There are many reasons I haven’t paddled in so long, but chief among them is my obsession with running. I’d run all day every day if I could. I’m not an elite runner, but that never stopped me from running seventy to a hundred miles a week, up to three times a day. It wasn’t unusual for strangers to ask how my run went or what I was training for. 

What I love most about running is how peaceful everything feels when I’m doing it, and how much better the world around me feels after. When I run long enough, my brain stops its incessant analysis and enters a flow state, a kind of out-of-body experience where all my energy becomes part of all the energy around me. Seeking that flow, however, became to a perilous paradox. Running helped quiet my mind, but the more I ran, the more I needed to run. And the more I needed to run, the likelier I was to injure myself and not be able to run. It was either drought or deluge and I could never seem to find a balance.

I wouldn’t be paddling again if not for the latest stress fracture in the long list of stress fractures I’ve run myself into: both tibias, the underside of my kneecap, my acetabulum, and now my sacrum. But my bones aren’t bad because of running per se. My bones are bad because of anorexia and thyroid cancer. Anorexia that began at sixteen deprived my bones of their full potential. Since my thyroidectomy at thirty-one, the medication that keeps me alive has leached calcium from what were never strong bones to begin with. Thin and brittle.

*

When I was diagnosed, the doctor told me thyroid cancer was the “good” cancer. It was a straightforward treatment and I’d live. What he didn’t explain was that my entire emotional regulation system was about to be fucked, hard core for a good five years, and then mildly forever. Regulating my emotions was hard enough before cancer. Immediately after, it was nearly impossible. It was an awful experience, but, quite frankly, it was worse for those around me who couldn’t do anything to help.

One July a few years later, my parents traveled from southwest Virginia to stay with me for several weeks in upstate New York. None of us understood how long it would take for me to reach a steady emotional baseline. All we knew is I wasn’t there yet. I wanted to go kayaking, so they went with me to Thompson’s Lake and relaxed on shore while I paddled. Barely a mile across, it was more floating than paddling, and soon as I was lost in thought. 

A giant splash roused me from my meditation. Ascending from the water directly in front of me were two immense yellow talons clasping a struggling silver fish. It took me a beat to recognize that, attached to the talons and fish, was a bald eagle. I stared in disbelief and delight as it flew off with its catch.

*

Discussing my cancer is much easier than discussing my eating disorder. While public understanding about mental health in general has vastly improved, the stigma around eating disorders continues to be pervasive, and the internalized shame debilitating. Even as I type this, I have to challenge my internal dialog saying things like “Don’t be so self-centered,” “There are more important problems in the world,” and “You’re too sensitive.” The loudest and hardest to resist is the ever-present, “You did this to yourself.” And let me tell you, I’ve tried to undo it myself. I’ve analyzed and reanalyzed the origins, thinking, if I can understand it, I can overcome it. 

It started fairly textbook. I was very much the athlete in high school and thought I could up my game by improving my fitness. I lost weight, my performance improved, and I started getting positive affirmation from people around me. But somewhere along the way—I’m not sure when or why or how—losing weight superseded all else. Eventually I couldn’t think of anything but the food I wouldn’t let myself eat and the exercise I wasn’t doing enough of. I felt trapped. My world narrowed as the image in the mirror became perpetually distorted and loathsome. My mental health deteriorated first. I became volatile and erratic. I played worse. I was impossible to be around. I pushed away the very people I wished would help me. My physical health went more gradually, though even early on I’d leave class to hide in the empty coach’s office, curled up with agonizing stomach pain. 

But the more threads I pull from the past, the more complicated it gets. Sometimes I worry I’m mixing up cause and effect, overemphasizing some factors while underemphasizing others. What if my body dysmorphia was the impetus, not response, to losing weight? Or that I focused on improving my athletic performance because sports were a refuge from the alienation I felt nearly everywhere else? I longed for connection but struggled to understand, let alone conform, to the social roles expected of me. The distress was so powerful that I avoided activities that might force me to confront my divergence, or worse, reveal it to others. 

In my teens, I became extremely self-conscious about how poorly I fit in, so much so that I would stay awake at night, ruminating about whether I’d acted normally enough that day. I’d often replay a conversation in my head and think about what I should have said instead or what I’d say the next time something similar happened. I’ve always visualize words in my head, like my own interior subtitles or the ticker tape at the bottom of a news show. At night, in the dark, getting stuck on a sentence could be overwhelming. The words would start to repeat on a loop, and with each pass before my closed eyelids, the speed would increase. Over and over, faster and faster, until the sentence ceased to be a sentence and became, instead, a stream of light. I’d put my pillow over my head to make it stop. I didn’t tell anyone it was happening at the time, worried I might be going crazy.

*

“I’d rather be race support” is what I say when people ask why I don’t race anymore. I’ve logged far more miles as race support than have raced myself. In the last miles of a marathon, nearly every runner goes through a mental versus physical calculus distilling all ambitions to making it across the finish line. We runners employ all sorts of tricks and coping strategies to overcome the growing desire to stop, but nothing beats a friend being on the course to run you in. The satisfaction of my fastest race pales in comparison to the joy of providing that encouragement for others. 

I’m not sure even my closest running friends know that, as much as I love the supporting role, I’d rather be racing. Unfortunately, it’s less a choice between racing or race support and more a gamble about how likely I am to make it to race day versus how likely I am to get injured. I try to focus on how it’s been a gift to run as long and as well as I have, and that my body functions remarkably well all things considered. As long as I can run with my friends, why risk it? Besides, racing always keeps me too much in my head, whereas running for the sake of running feels like fun, like freedom. I wouldn’t be truthful though if I didn’t say I occasionally feel sad, self-pitying even, and sometimes really, really angry—at my body’s frailty and inability to accomplish what it could if healthy, at myself for making it that way, and at my eating disorder for dominating it all.

*

Water has always felt like home. Maybe it’s because I grew up sailing with my dad. Our sailboat was nothing fancy—it couldn’t have been more than twelve feet long—and we were completely out of place considering South Holston Lake was primarily filled with motorboats. Sometimes Dad would drag my brother Brian and me behind the boat on a rope and we’d pretend we were skiing. When there was wind and we got to sail, it felt like flying. Sometimes we’d be going so fast the boat would feel like it was on the verge of tipping over, and we’d have to position our bodies on the opposite side to counterbalance. I never felt scared, only thrilled. Dad would never let us tip.

There was the one time we ran aground, but that wasn’t Dad’s doing. We were at sailing school on the Chesapeake Bay. Just me and my dad on a boat for a week. During one particularly windy day, our young captain, who came aboard during the day, kept ignoring my Dad’s suggestion to move further into the channel where it was deeper. Dad grew up in Norfolk and was familiar with the bay. He’d also had done six weeks in Captain school himself. Dad says the “hot shot” was trying to impress me, but if he was, I was oblivious. We felt a series of bumps and the last one stopped us flat. They tried everything to get us off the shelf, but eventually had to give in and get towed. 

Later that week, while eating the pasta he’d boiled on the sailboat’s small galley stove, Dad started the conversation I hoped wouldn’t happen.

“What’s up with Brian and Billy?” he asked.

“What do you mean,” I responded, knowing exactly what he meant.

“They spend an awful lot of time together,” he said.

Silence.

“Are they together?”

“You should talk to Brian, not me,” I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d answered despite trying not to. My dad was an FBI agent. What I didn’t say mattered just as much as what I did. 

But the conversation didn’t go as I thought it would. Dad and Brian didn’t have the best relationship, and while I didn’t expect Dad to be mad, I also didn’t expect him to be as soft-spoken and sympathetic as he was. He’d suspected since Brian was little, worried about his safety and happiness, lamented not spending more time with him. And then, sort of joking sort of not, said he should’ve played more football with him.

“You played plenty of football with me though,” I said to lighten the mood.

At Thanksgiving that year, I watched as Dad sat on the couch next to Billy and started asking him questions. Not interrogation-style but making-an-effort-to-get-to-know-someone style. Brian was in the other room and missing it all. I considered going to get him but didn’t, knowing that, because our experiences were so different, we wouldn’t see the same things. It was as though we couldn’t find a channel wide enough or deep enough for all of us to sail through unimpeded.

*

I keep losing track of time. Reflecting earlier on Thompson’s Lake, I could’ve sworn my parents were there because I’d put myself in the hospital. Now I remember it wasn’t long after radiation treatment and we’d just returned from a road trip to Quebec. To be fair, some befores are harder to disentangle from their afters. The madly-in-love phase with my soon-to-be fiancé is forever overshadowed by the despondent phase after she’d cheated on me and broken our engagement. In my grief, I stopped eating, which only served to heighten the painful emotions. Emotions I was less able to manage than usual because my body had not yet reached equilibrium after losing the organ that regulates mood. 

This means it wasn’t until after the bald eagle encounter that Dad got on an emergency flight to New York. When I learned he was coming, I was angry. I thought he would be harsh or judgmental. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was then I came to understand he’s the person you most want around in a crisis. I was every emotion possible and cried nonstop. He was consistently gentle and patient. When I spiraled, he told me to think about my thoughts like they were a cassette tape recording. I didn’t have to stop them altogether, but, even if just to give myself a break, I could hit pause. Later, ideally when I was in a better mental space, I could hit play again. I couldn’t always do it, but that it worked at all was a revelation, and an important first step in learning how to separate my feelings from what I thought those feelings meant. 

*

I’ve been told “you’ll never run again” twice. Both times were devastating, but neither time did I believe or accept it. The first time was before I began running marathons. The second was after my last race, a personal best, and forced me to drop out of my third Boston.

The sacral stress fracture has been a different kind of devastating. I was working hard to stay healthy. Keeping my mileage down, running on dirt roads, tracking my heart rate, eating as much as I could tolerate, taking supplements. I knew the risks, but I felt strong and was running faster than I had in a decade. Just one last time, I thought. I’d selected an obscure race and planned not to tell teammates until after. With only a few weeks to go, I went for what should’ve been an easy shake out. A few miles in I had to stop mid-stride. I was certain it was a pulled muscle but, out of an abundance of caution, went to my doctor. He thought so too, but given my history ordered an MRI to make sure. 

More jarring than finding out it was a stress fracture were the bone density test results showing significant bone loss. Worse yet has been visualizing the bleak timeline of where this bone loss is taking me. 

*

Paddling again has provided a tranquility I didn’t expect. When I go out alone, I call Mom and Dad after to let them know I’m off the water, even though they can track me on Find Friends. They’ve heard all about my bald eagle sightings, seen my iPhone blurry pictures and videos, and listened to me marvel at why people seem so strangely uncaptivated when I point out the eagle flying nearby. I told them how I had to punt through a gauntlet of water chestnuts on the Mohawk River to see a couple with their nest full of eaglets, and about one day deciding to forgo the eaglets and paddle the opposite direction, only to find a new couple three miles downriver. I fumed about the man on his mountain bike who wouldn’t stop to let his daughter look at the enormous bald eagle nest on the trails near Thompson, and about another time there when I saw a bald eagle fly across the lake and perch atop a tree directly over three boys catching crawdads with nets. I paddled over and watched for a spell, then got the boys’ attention.

“Hey,” I said. 

They looked over. 

“You’ve got company.” 

I pointed to the tree. 

To my delight, they reacted with genuine surprise and awe. They called their mom down to see it. And then after about a minute, they got back to playing in the water and ignored the apex predator directly above them. 

After a while, I started thinking that my bald eagle experiences must be important. I wanted my story and theirs to be joined. Perhaps they were trying to tell me something. Something like, even if I couldn’t run, if I could be brave, I could still feel free. And so I started reading and researching and watching documentaries, chose paddling excursions where I thought they’d be, talked incessantly about them. I learned how to distinguish their wing shape from buzzards, ospreys, and gulls. 

And then the sightings stopped. I didn’t expect to see them everywhere. OK, yes, I did expect to see them everywhere despite knowing I shouldn’t expect it. I went to Kinderhook Lake, none, Lake George, nope. Saranac Lake, nothing. Back to the Mohawk, where I saw them frequently, and I just stared and stared into the sky to no avail. I went to Thompson habitually, in spite of getting cyanobacteria twice, because I could count on seeing at least one of the resident pair. Until one night, I saw neither.

*

I came out at twenty-four. I told Brian first. He, Rhonda, and I were planning on renting an apartment together, but I hadn’t yet told him she wasn’t just my “roommate.” He was scared for me. He also didn’t want me to tell our parents, because he thought he’d have come out if I did. I couldn’t bring myself to say Dad already knew, which I assumed meant so did Mom. I didn’t think they, or my oldest brother, would react badly, but I’d resolved myself for any eventuality. I couldn’t bear the guilt of keeping it hidden from them, of feeling like I was constantly lying about who I was. My life was starting to make sense and I refused to return to the emotionless void I’d locked myself inside.  

I said I was driving home to talk in person. I lived in Virginia then, so the drive was only an hour and a half. I regret creating such anxiety but didn’t know how else to proceed. When I arrived, Mom was still at work. Dad, a private investigator then, was in his home office. I walked in and sat in the chair across from Dad at his desk. The picture of J. Edgar Hoover on the wall glared at me. Dad and I shared nervous smiles. I didn’t think Mom knew about Rhonda, but I was sure he had picked up on the subtle nuances and purposeful hints I’d been dropping. Surely he’d noticed our matching rings. He broke the tension by asking what I’d come home to say.

I recollect little of the conversation itself but remember being shocked that he was blindsided. He wasn’t calm like in the conversation on the boat. We went back and forth, me trying to explain that I thought he knew, him explaining that he didn’t. I tried to deescalate by cracking an ill-conceived joke.

“At least now we don’t need to find a three-bedroom apartment.”

“You mean you’re sleeping together?” he shouted.

“Dad, it’s not like we can wait till we’re married,” I replied, adding a terse, “I’m leaving!”

“You’re staying to tell your mother!” he insisted.

I waited for Mom. She was barely in the room when I choked out through tears, “I’m gay.” She laughed, and I started crying. 

I later learned that Mom and Dad had run the gamut of possibilities for why I wanted to talk, including that I had eloped with my ex-boyfriend or had cancer. Mom’s laughter was an expression of relief. Not long afterwards, Dad unexpectedly gave Brian, Rhonda, and I each a set of keys. Without fanfare or discussion, only a hint of a smile, he explained that they were to the house he bought, and we’d be splitting the rent.

*

Polycythemia vera is a rare blood disease that makes blood unusually thick. It’s managed with the same medication given to Leukemia patients. That and bloodletting. Doctors call it therapeutic phlebotomy now, but it’s the same thing practiced since antiquity. Someone might not know they have PCV until they have a stroke. A spinal tap usually confirms the condition, but to do that, you can’t be on blood thinners, which makes the procedure dangerous for those with heart conditions.

Although the TIA resolved itself, Dad didn’t make it to the spinal tap before the first heart attack. I was relieved to talk to him on the phone, until he began saying how tired he was, and how proud of me he was. It felt like a goodbye and I couldn’t stand it. I tried to redirect, but his tone remained the same.

A few days later, because the insurance company denied the more expensive anticoagulants, the new stents gathered blood rather than kept it flowing. The second heart attack was a STEMI, commonly called a widow maker. When Mom called to tell me that Dad was back in the OR, I was at the gas station, filling up my tank on the way home from a run. I paced the parking lot, trying not to panic at the fear in her voice. Did I need to get in the car immediately and drive the twelve hours? Should I take leave for the rest of the semester and move home? Remain calm, focus on logistics, I told myself. That’s what Dad would do. That’s what Mom needed me to do. But the fear kept creeping in. If Dad’s the best at handling a crisis, what do we do now?

*

The park ranger at the Emma Treadwell Nature Center calls the Thompson’s Lake bald eagles Martha and Fred, after the Center’s benefactors Fred and Martha Schroeder. Martha has been at Thompson for fifteen years. Fred has been around for three. 

I’m disappointed. I’d hoped the eagle I saw catch the fish, some eighteen years ago, was one of the ones I still see. I wanted the pieces to fit together neatly so there’d be a clearer trajectory between where I’ve been and where I’m going.

*

In the ‘80s, a rural Southern town wasn’t a safe place for difference. I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I knew enough to know that there were things I shouldn’t voice, which translated into things I shouldn’t feel. One day, when I was eight, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood, when, out of nowhere, I was overcome by what I can only describe as rage. I rode downhill as fast as I could, my target a barbed-wire fence. I launched off the paved cul-de-sac but was slowed to a halt by the grass. It’s the first time I can remember trying to out-hurt the incomprehensible pain I sometimes felt.  

I suspect my eating disorder manifested to quell the increasing anxiety that emerged as I began questioning my sexuality and gender. I had long been aware that, although I didn’t want to be a boy, I didn’t feel like a girl exactly. Then, around the same time as the bike incident, I admitted to Brian that I was “a little gay” for Lindsay Wagner of The Bionic Woman. As soon as I’d said it, I worried he’d tell my best friend, and she’d tell the whole school. I was no stranger to teasing but I knew I wouldn’t survive being taunted as gay. It was potentially life-threatening. I decided to never mention it again. I wouldn’t even remember having said it for years after.

When my body began to develop, and the childish waif in the mirror disappeared, I panicked. Perhaps losing weight was an attempt to turn back the clock and remain in a safe, in-between space. Perhaps I thought I could somehow preempt the danger looming on the horizon. Become invisible. Unembodied. And maybe this is just more self-blame. After all, once the futility was clear—no turning back, no fitting it, peril everywhere—shouldn’t I have recovered? And what about all the other people who felt like I did and didn’t develop an eating disorder? I mean, I used to think I’d given myself cancer by ingesting too much aspartame, but even if that were true, treatment didn’t include examining my behavior. It was medication. And cutting out my diseased thyroid.

Maybe focusing on origins is, ultimately, a way to avoid how hopeless it feels to change anything in the present. It’s far easier to say I had an eating disorder than I have one. That, even though I’m better than I was, and that the severity ebbs and flows, I’ve never stopped having one. And I doubt I ever will. It’s not surprising to me that eating disorders are one of the most challenging mental illnesses to treat. The grim reality is that they’re also the most fatal. 

*

A few weeks ago, I sent the family chat a picture. The clouds above the trees give the illusion of a distant mountain range. As usual, Anastasia’s yellow bow occupies the bottom right corner.

Dad responds, “Looks really great. How are Fred and Martha!”

“I think I saw Martha today! She was very large, flying, and her feathers look a little weathered!” I text back.

“Maybe molting?”

“Martha is older? Normally I just see Fred, but I think this was Martha because she’s HUGE.”

[Thumbs up emoji], Dad replies.

The worst part of kayaking is the end. It’s one thing to get the boat off the car and into the water. Getting the boat back on the car with tired arms is another. I chose Anastasia because she was the longest boat I could lift, but that was almost twenty years ago, and it wasn’t easy then. Fortunately, lifting weights to increase bone density, paired with less running, means I’m stronger now than I was. But as a small person, I still need to rely on leverage and technique. I turn Anastasia on her side, roll her up my body onto my shoulder, and then tip the stern slightly downwards for balance. I can carry her comfortably for a short distance until I can place her bow in the front cradle of my roof rack, grab the rigging, and push.

I’m not shy about asking for help these days, or taking help when it’s offered, but when I’m hyper focused, I don’t wait around. After seeing Martha, I paddle back to the launch, where a man and woman are getting into their respective kayaks. I maneuver around them and go through my routine. When I turn around to collect the rest of my gear, I’m greeted with a robust round of applause. 

“That’s how you do it!” the woman shouts, still clapping.

I smile in acknowledgment and pick up my water bottle and the binoculars Dad gave me when I went home this summer, his best pair. 

“Have you seen the bald eagles?” I ask.

“Bald eagles?”

“Yeah, there’s a couple that lives here, Fred and Martha,” I say. “Fred usually sits atop that tree over there.”

She looks across the lake.

“I just saw Martha,” I continue. 

“Oh,” she says.

“Anyway, if you’re interested. . . .” I trail off. 

I don’t know why I do this. Normally I’ll do anything not to talk to people, but here I am telling strangers something they’re probably not remotely interested in. And fine, maybe, like most people, I’ll never fully understand the intricacies of who I am or what brought me here. But I’m here, and so are the eagles, and, in this moment, that’s enough. 

*

There’s never a time that you’re ready to give up what you most love, and yet every one of us will ultimately have to learn to live without what we don’t think we can live without. Last week, feeling heartbroken and bereft, I went to Saranac Lake to kayak-camp. I paddled to my island and set up camp. I collected kindling, split logs, and, after proclaiming myself King of Firewood, lit a fire. At night, the full moon shone so brightly that the entire lake glistened white. I slept in the open air, enveloped by the hauntingly beautiful call of the loons, their mournful wails echoing to each other across the water. Then, not knowing when, or if, I’d be back, I did something surprising. I took off my clothes and walked around completely nude, unashamed of the body that’s sustained me this long. But it wasn’t bravery. Having worked so long and hard to disavow the intensity of my feelings, I was simply exhausted.

On my last day, after transferring my gear to my car, I spent several minutes just looking at Anastasia, hull beached, stern still in the water. I couldn’t bring myself to leave, so I turned her around, got in, and paddled back through the lilypad-laden inlet. Once on the open lake, I sought out the tallest copse of trees. The crosscurrents swept me sideways, and I let them take me. As I drifted towards shore, I looked up and scanned the branches. We met eyes and lingered, neither of us in a hurry for flight.

Allison V. Craig (she/they) is a writer and scholar living in upstate NY. She teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry program at the University at Albany. Her work has appeared in Brave Voices, Entropy, F(r)iction, Plainsongs, The Colorado Review, and others.

Caleb Michael Sarvis

Father Coyote

The Coyotes move into the house across the street. The garage had been left open by the previous tenant and the whole pack, all four of them, slink inside to escape the rain. I watch them from my guest bedroom window. The father isn’t much bigger than our dog Aurora and the mother has a surprisingly dark coat compared to the rest of them. They have two pups and when I take the trash out that night, the whole family follows me with their yellow, slack-jawed gaze until the garage door shuts them in.

Lee and I are finally pregnant and we’ve made it further along than last time. Next week, we have an appointment with the OB-whatever to get a good look at the baby. Lee’s not sure she wants to know the sex, but I’m tired of calling the baby the baby. I want to call the baby Wolfgang or Cubby, which is moot because Lee’s already vetoed both of them, but the point is I want to call the baby something and there’s a chance we can start soon.

When I tell Lee about the Coyotes she suggests we bring over a basket of muffins as a gesture of kindness. But they’re animals, I say, to which Lee tells me not to speak of them that way. I dip my eyes and study my toes.

* 

Now that the pregnancy seems to be sticking, I feel comfortable running again. Everything was too fragile before, so leaving the house felt like a risk I couldn’t afford to take. But the other night, Lee was too hot to share the bed with me, so I put a movie on in the living room, one about a meteor headed straight toward Earth, and learned a valuable lesson in letting go.

There was a moment towards the end, when the meteor filled the sky, that Aurora trotted out of her bed and onto the couch with me. She plopped her head onto my lap and pawed at my hand to pet her. I scratched the soft spot between her eyes and remembered that she chose us, and that I might just prefer when things are outside of my control. Doom barrels around blindly. It sweeps us all eventually.

As I twist and stretch in the driveway, the garage across the street opens and reveals one of the pups sitting alone. He rolls onto his back and yawns. He paws at what might be a spider or nothing at all. The pup is young enough that he falls often, but old enough that he doesn’t whine for his mother. His paws are too big for his small legs and I find myself imagining what the pups looked like in the womb. Did they have a shrimp stage? A Gummi Bear stage? How many weeks in did the pups start to look like pups? The little guy in the garage is now sniffing an exposed outlet. I consider running over until I notice Father Coyote trotting around the loop of our neighborhood. He wears a neon yellow bandana around his neck. When I finally take off on my run, we pass each other and share a nod in the way that only runners do.

There was a time in my life when I thought I might run a marathon, but those days are gone and I barely make it a mile before I turn around and jog home. There’s a weight on my back that didn’t used to be there and a new kind of tension in my knees. Everything feels swollen even if it looks fine. Lee has resorted to calling me Dada when speaking to her womb, and I briefly blame her for my poor performance, for bestowing this middle-aged shape upon me. But I quickly remember my buddy Dakari, who recently had a stroke in a swimming pool. He hit his head on the wall and fractured a vertebrae. Now he can’t feel his legs.

Dakari’s sister was the one who called. She spoke so softly I thought she might be hiding in a closet somewhere. That maybe I wasn’t supposed to know this information. This was two weeks ago and I’ve yet to visit him. I tell myself the anxiety of the pregnancy has held me in place. But here I am, engaging in motion. Here I am, making decisions.

I finish the run with greater urgency. When I return home, the Coyotes are out of sight and I’m soon blinded by sweat.

*

Lee’s looking at herself in the mirror, searching for a bump at different angles. It’s frustrating Aurora, who is desperate to lie on the floor with her head on Lee’s feet. I’m playing with a light switch because the new bulb I put in the back isn’t working. It’s a motion sensor thing I installed after the incident with the tall woman, and it doesn’t seem to work. No matter how much waving I do, the light never seems to click on, and when it does, the hue is off. The coil resembles something closer to the dying ember of a campfire and does little to reveal the motion it has sensed.

When do you think I’ll show? Lee says.

Soon. The first is supposed to be slower, I think.

Lee purses her lips at this and I realize I’ve misspoken. So I leave the light alone and drop to my knees so that my face is level with her stomach. I love you, I say and hope all is forgiven.

I made a pie for the neighbors.

 Neighbors?

Will you bring it over to them?

I’m going to go see Dakari.

On your way then.

I grab my keys and find a shepherd’s pie sitting on the kitchen counter. It’s warm in my palms and smells like the pub we used to frequent before home became our life. When I’m outside, I remember it’s once again trash night, and I consider dropping the thing in the can before walking across the street and tip-toeing up the Coyotes’ driveway. There are no lights on inside and because the garage is closed it’s difficult to tell if anyone is home. I think coyotes are the type to howl, but other than that, I don’t know what kind of sound to look for. When I reach the entryway, I place the pie outside the front door and place my finger over the doorbell. After a moment I hang my fist in front of the door. I return to the doorbell. Knock or ring. Knock or ring.

I’m frozen, so I study the front lawn, which appears to be freshly mowed. Edged even. There is a set of freshly planted hydrangeas along the walkway, though when I look closer I see that the leaves have been gently chewed. My imagination can only take me so far and when the confusion settles in I have to take a seat so I don’t pass out. I see tiny paw prints in the soil, but nothing else offers a reasoning I can settle with.

I take a hydrangea leaf into my hand and caress it with my thumb until there’s a smack against the narrow window pane by the door. One of the pups is on their hinds legs, watching me, leaving tongue smears on the glass. I wave hello, until the mother appears from the dark behind. In the streetlight, she appears to be made of fire. She growls, bares her teeth, and I run.

*

Dakari’s house wallows in weak light. I park along the curb and sit in the front seat, telling myself I want this podcast to finish before I turn the ignition off. Procrastination bites me as it does anyone else, but this feels different. This feels like fear.

I only exit the car because my imagination is always worse than reality. That’s why Shakespeare kept his murders off stage. My mind is a malleable phase of matter, capable of reshaping itself to fit any container, and doom is a mold I find too much comfort in.

Dakari’s sister answers, a fuzzy orange glow behind her. Thanks for coming, she says. He’s in the lounger. The last time I saw him, he’d gained a lot of weight, a consequence of a new but manageable drinking habit. When we met, he didn’t drink at all. Now, he is all about the malty notes of some German ale I’ve never heard of.

The house smells like dog, which always surprises me because my house does not smell like dog. I have a theory, about the houses that smell like dog, and I think it has something to do with blankets. Lee washes our linens and such every third week or so, which comes to about seventeen times a year. My guess is the homes that smell like dog are filled with unwashed blankets. I turn the corner into the living room, spy Dakari in the lounger, and count four different blankets atop his body.

Either his weight has grown worse or the brace around his neck squeezes the fat up like the end of a toothpaste bottle. There are purple bags under his eyes, just barely visible on his dark skin, and he’s propped his feet up so that they are level with his chest. Dakari’s feet appear to be wrapped in multiple pairs of socks. His sister collects the mug from his end table and I see he is looking at me.

Hey, he coughs out.

You look cozy, I say.

I’m frozen. Nothing seems to help.

The heater is on in the house and my feet are starting to sweat. I take a seat on the couch next to the recliner and drum my knees. Lee and I are pregnant again, I say. Seems to be sticking. I reel at my own phrasing. It reminds me of darts, but the words continue to fumble out of my mouth. It’s becoming a rehearsed thing, this conversation. Better not to think too hard about it. Better to repeat what’s been said since it seems to keep everything moving.

Boy? Girl?

Just baby for now.

Any names? Dakari no longer looks my way. He can’t turn his neck and it’s a pill to hold his eyes in one place. The neck brace is thick and rigid. I recently rebuilt our vacuum cleaner after Aurora’s hair did a number on it. The brace reminds me of a piece I fumbled with for too long.

No names. Not yet. Got new neighbors though.

 Hmm, Dakari says. Then he smacks his lips and drifts to sleep.

The two of us became quick friends a decade prior when we washed dishes for an old sports bar down the road. He controlled the boom box in the back, changing CDs every twenty minutes or so, playing the same tracks from each. Dakari had a clear playlist in his head, but no equipment to work with. One night, I borrowed his stack, burned the CDs to my home computer and returned to work with a mix for him. We didn’t become inseparable then, no. But we became the kind of friends that last.

I sit, waiting for Dakari to wake or his sister to appear, but neither happens. I’m alone within this dog-smell. On one hand, I am relieved, because I don’t have anything to say. On the other, I feel trapped. If I’m still for too long, I can feel the weight of Dakari’s blankets pressing against my chest. The smell gets worse. It’s suffocating me.

I stand to leave and Dakari shivers, from his chest and arms to his legs. I wonder if the paralysis is fading. Maybe this chill is a hack for his body, something of a shortcut to jumpstart the rest of his limbs. I remove the blankets one at a time, watching his legs closely, hoping I don’t wake him. But by the time he’s uncovered, only his shoulders shake, and so I cover him again and leave.

 *

I fear Lee will hold my quick return against me. She’ll believe I didn’t give it a real go. So I take a detour towards that old pub of ours on the way home. It’s one of those places that plays Irish music a little too loud even when it’s empty. When I step inside, I’m briefly taken back to the days before we wanted to be parents, when our bartender Kit served us picklebacks after hours.

But Kit doesn’t sit behind the bar. Instead, there’s a younger version of him, some kid with more than two decades of catching up to do. He’s got the same shaggy surfer cut with more color and fewer wrinkles above the brow. This younger Kit wears the same small hoops in his ears, but the tattoos are incomplete and less visible to the patrons.

Welcome to our pub, he says. Been here before?

Once upon a time.

Hmm.

This was where I’d taken Lee on our third date, after realizing I should’ve taken her here on our first date. It’s a wonder she agreed to see me again after that steakhouse, where the table was larger than my reach and the air-conditioning so strong Lee borrowed my napkins to cover her shoulders. I’ve never been one to look someone in the eye for too long, and I haven’t sat across the table from Lee since.

Killing time is a skill no one wields properly. When you want time dead, it only fights back. I wonder how long I have to sit here to convince Lee I made an earnest visit to Dakari. My guess is an hour, which feels impossible.

What’ll you have?

Just a Jameson neat.

Young Kit gives me a generous poor and I notice a dog bowl on the bar. It’s scuffed along the rim and spotted with cartoonish paw prints. Young Kit hands me my drink, places the bowl under the tap, and fills it with something dark and flat. Once it’s about half full, he carries the bowl to the opposite side of the bar that opens to the patio. Young Kit moves on to his next customer and Father Coyote leaps into the stool by the bowl.

His mouth hangs open and his tongue falls about. Straight forward, unlike Aurora. I sip from my glass. He laps from his bowl. I wipe my beard out of habit. He paws at his snout. I raise my glass in his direction, we catch eyes, and Father Coyote does one of those warm up barks that dogs do. He drops from his stool and trots around the bar. I pull a stool out and he leaps into it. He paws at the bar and Young Kit grabs the dog bowl for him.

How you likin’ the neighborhood? I say.

Father Coyote scratches at his ear, as if to say there isn’t anything to say.

We continue to drink and lap in silence. The Jameson goes down like water. Young Kit gives me another and says, Now that I think about it, you do seem familiar. He fills Father Coyote’s bowl and the bar fills with more guests.

Do you know anything about the guy who lived in the house before you? I say. I’m not sure if you worked with a realtor or not, or if they’d even tell you, of if they’d even know, but the previous tenant killed himself.

Father Coyote tilts his head side to side.

It was a day. Lee—that’s my wife—and I woke up to the red-and-blue lights flashing through our front windows. When we stepped outside, a handful of officers had surrounded the house. I caught one leaping the fence to get to the back. We couldn’t hear anything and when I stepped outside one of the officers commanded me to go back in. It was unreal.

Father Coyote watches me. I see in his eyes the same bit of concern I’ve carried these last ten weeks. That bit of helpless acquiescence. He’s engaged with my story, expecting the worst not because I spoiled it, but because expecting the worst tricks us into thinking it won’t hurt.

It turns out, this guy had sent a bomb threat over the internet—do you know what that is?—to his old elementary school in Delaware. Something about harboring criminals in a basement, one that didn’t even exist. Anyway, the police tracked the threat pretty easily, and he shot himself before they could force their way in.

Father Coyote laps more from his bowl.

Do animals—sorry, coyotes—believe in ghosts? He doesn’t seem to understand the question. The stools around us fill and we have to lean our heads together to keep the conversation alive. None of my friends have kids. Don’t want them, either. You’re the first parent I’ve spoken to since Lee and I started trying. Any advice?

Father Coyote rests his head on the bar, thinking. Then he’s got it. He sits up straight and bares his teeth. When I don’t react, he bumps my elbow with his snout. So I sit up straight and bare my teeth. He howls softly, as if singing a song older than death itself, and I howl, too. I understand and I feel ready. Then he’s out the door and headed home.

*

At my home, I see the shepherd’s pie has been removed from the Coyotes’ front porch. When I climb into bed, Lee wants to know what she smells, and I tell her Dakari’s house reeks of dog. That no one there washes the throw blankets. She asks me how he’s doing, and I tell her he’s restless.

 *

It’s two weeks later and I’m walking Aurora around the neighborhood before we head to our baby appointment. We haven’t decided yet if we want to know the sex, but they are going to ask us and I’m afraid if I don’t say something that the baby will be born sexless. Not because I wouldn’t love the baby either way, but because I’m plenty afraid of parenthood as it is. I know Lee and I will overcome every obstacle ahead, it’s what you do, but I’m growing tired of obstacles.

Our walk turns into a trot and we complete laps around our small neighborhood. Aurora has always been poor on the leash. She is adamant about leading, of moving continuously, even as the leash squeezes her throat shut. However, now that we are jogging, the leash is slack between us. She remains ahead but doesn’t pull. A black cat darts across the street and she doesn’t chase. Just as we reach home again, the Coyotes’ garage opens up, and I see the pups have already doubled in size.

Lee’s excited to show me the progress of her bump. She flips through weekly photos on her phone so I can tell the difference and I do. They say the baby is the size of an avocado, big enough to feel real and impossible to imagine. To hold a baby in the palm of my hand, it gives me vertigo.

Have you heard from Dakari?

No.

Have you reached out?

Just once. A lie. I spent the time on the text, but never sent it. It felt too abrupt to ask: How are you feeling? I couldn’t settle on an opening. I typed Hey and Yo and Hey yo and resolved to give him space. The kind of thing that gives me permission to give myself space.

Let’s swing by after the appointment. We’ll surprise him with pictures of the baby.

Okay, I say, though I think it’s a bad idea.

*

We pull up to Dakari’s house and find the driveway empty. I look down the street and don’t find Dakari’s car anywhere. Instead, I find a For Sale sign that has been blown flat by a recent storm.

We knock and press our eyes against the glass of his door, but the house looks empty inside. Not deserted, but empty. I ring the doorbell and no one enters the foyer. When I dial Dakari’s number, it goes straight to voicemail. If he could drive, I figure I would already know, and I’m beginning to feel like I’ve killed too much time lately. That moments are dead and gone and out of reach. I’m too late for something.

We’re having a girl. We found out by accident. Dakari would have enjoyed the story. Perhaps I’ll save it for him. He and I will go out to the pub, reminisce about the old nights there, and find ourselves untethered by the prospects of parenthood. He’ll say, Remember that time we got pulled over after leaving this place? I’ll nod because I don’t want to talk about it. You asked the cop where to get your speedometer calibrated because you didn’t believe you were speeding. We were so drunk, man. What were you thinking? And maybe I’ll apologize, because I’d never seen Dakari so scared in my life, and my own recklessness put him in a danger I’ll never know. Or maybe I’ll tell the story about finding out we’re having a girl to change the subject.

Come on, I say to Lee, because what else is there to do?

*

It’s almost midnight and I’m running to shake something loose in me. The baby kicked my cheek today and a tremor has taken me hostage. I wasn’t prepared to feel something. My bones have been rattling for hours and if it doesn’t quit soon, I worry I may curl into myself like a dead insect.

I’m following a ten-mile loop near my home even though I know I won’t make it. Around two miles in, the homes turn from college fun houses to wood-framed carcasses because renters have been priced out and owners are too stubborn to sell high. Sweat slips into my eyes, fertilizing spots on my contact lenses that grow into blinders. It’s fine though. I’ve never been able to see much in the dark.

It’s been a month since I’ve seen or heard from Dakari. I’ve tried his phone only once more, again getting his voicemail, and when I finally sent a text the delivery never went through. A few years ago, he used to run a hot sauce review blog. It’s still up and so I used the contact form to reach out. Nothing’s come back.

Around the fourth mile mark that is a fallen street light there is an abandoned golf course that will soon become a strip mall. Mounds of dirt rise to the moon and at the top of one I see a wheel chair, its silhouette like a set of nostrils. I veer from my loop and up the dirt. The spots in my contacts grow and the only thing guiding me is the swelling moon. The hill isn’t very high, but it is steep, and my quads feel like they are tearing with each step. When I reach the top, I find the wheel chair upright on one wheel, balanced and fragile. Beautifully disorienting, like a still frame of a hummingbird. Panting, I quickly hold my breath, reach to touch the wheel chair, and change my mind. If I sneeze, it will fall, and everything around me will collapse.

I rub the sweat out of my eyes, but the spots grow worse. They congeal together and now I can’t differentiate between the sweat and the moon. I take a step back. My foot lands on nothing and I fall to one knee.

Stumbling.

Tumbling.

Dreaming.

* 

Long before my father died, he spent half a year at some retreat I know nothing about. Before the divorce, my mother would tell me the president needed my dad for a special project. After the divorce, she would say he suffered from a weak spirit that I was in danger of inheriting. I’ll never know the truth—retreat is a term he used by accident—but when my father did return, he’d shaved away all his hair and his shoulders were covered in bandages I later learned were tattoos. For years he wouldn’t take his shirt off in front of me, not until they’d been lasered off. At the pool, I stared at the warped skin, the scarred patches that made me think him a mutant. I wanted my own, to be like him, to be that strong, but I’ve yet to get my own ink. I’m too afraid to risk that kind of mistake. Had there been a deathbed, I would’ve asked him about the tattoos, because when I asked my mother, she threatened to never speak to me again.

*

I’m awoken by a tongue on my face and a gentle nip at my ear. My blindness is irrelevant because it’s nearly impossible to open my eyes. My head feels as if I drowned the thing in a handle and my tongue feels caked in dirt. There are questions to answer, but I’ve got to find the questions first.

Something in my shoulder burns from the inside and I’ve sobered up from my dread. There’s a part of me that will always succumb to this, that will be too weak to resist bouts of shadowy whimsy. But I have to try a little harder. Baby steps.

When I do shake the grime from my sight, the moon has swallowed the violet horizon. All I see are orange craters and impossible footsteps. There’s dirt in my socks, rocks in my ears, and the wheel chair is gone. My cheek throbs from the baby’s kick. I rise to my feet, wipe the dirt from my skin, and make my way home.

*

Aurora is going nuts by the back door. Whining and scratching at the glass. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep. Hours. Days. When I step into the living room I see the light in the back has popped on. Motion has been detected.

I don’t want to let Aurora out because if it’s a possum, she’ll pick a fight and lose. So we stand inside, snouts pressed against the glass, searching. The light illuminates all of my porch, but it shrouds everything beyond its reach in darkness. Lee calls from the back, Do you hear that?

I hold my breath and listen. Aurora cocks her head in that uncertain way. I trade my snout for my ear and after a moment I hear it, too. A high pitched whine. Something infantile. The light clicks off again and in the dark I see him. Round, yellow droplets, heavy with fear. Aurora’s desire to escape worsens, but I know I can’t free her, so I crack the door, suck in my gut, and slip out alone.

The light clicks on again with my arrival, hiding the pup, but his shape materializes a few steps into the grass. His whines grow louder and when he shies away from me, I notice he drags himself forward, unable to use his back paws. Even closer and he lets out a soft howl and I’m afraid Father Coyote is going to interpret villainy from my concern.

The pup reaches the corner of my fence with nowhere to go. He bares his teeth now, gives me a soft growl, but I resign myself to be bitten. My hands curl under his stomach and he throws his body this way and that. His claws scratch at my skin, but instead of holding him at arm’s length, I pull him into my chest so his face can rest in the pit of my elbow. He continues to fight as I carry him past my gate and around the corner of my house. I can hear his parents before I reach the front.

*

The Coyotes argue in their driveway. The yapping seems to have awoken a handful of us. The teenager down the road has her blind monster baby in a chest carrier. Our retired neighbors have their hoses at the ready. Mother Coyote is pacing up and down the pavement as Father Coyote barks at her, pointing his snout this way and that. The pup no longer fights but now shakes in my arms and buries his face deeper into my shirt. It must be a little after one in the morning. Someone will likely call the police soon.

I stand on the curb between my lawn and the street and the Coyotes ignore me. Mother Coyote’s fur stands up on her back. She growls at Father Coyote and he responds by trotting to the garden and digging up the hydrangeas. He takes one in his jaws and shakes the soil out before dropping the thing at her feet. She nips at his ear and I can hear sirens miles away.  They go nose-to-nose with one another and engage in a staring contest.

The pup wriggles in my arms and in the streetlight I can see his back paws are missing patches of fur. The blood is dry. They twitch with movement. I scratch behind his ears and shush him the way I do when Aurora’s dreams turn violent. Neighbors return to their homes in fear and the sirens grow louder. Father and Mother continue their standoff until my phone rings loudly in my pocket. Each turns their attention to me, their pup in my arms, and my phone continues to ring.

The Coyotes sniff the air as I cross the street. It’s okay, I tell each of them. He’s a little hurt but it’s okay. A police cruiser has entered the neighborhood. The siren is off but the lights continue to whirl, bathing all of us in intermittent red and blue. He needs you, I say, and carry him past the Coyotes and into their garage. Father and Mother trot next to me. The three whine in unison and my phone rings once more. We’re all inside, safe from the light, and as soon as I set the pup down on the floor, they begin to lick their wounds.

Caleb Michael Sarvis is the author of the story collection Dead Aquarium. His work can be found in BULL, Hobart, Joyland, storySouth, and others. His story "An Unfaded Black" was named one of the “Other Distinguished Stories of 2017” in Best American Short Stories 2018. You can learn more at calebmsarvis.com