Prose

Kasey Butcher Santana

Phototropism

I envision vines cascading toward my desk, a dusting of potting soil to sweep away each morning as I sit down to work. I wonder which kind of plant grows best upside-down. The sky planter, made from recycled plastic, was a gift from my husband, a gesture of love from a person who insists that I have too many plants, but must also know that I will buy another one to place in this novelty pot. My desk sits under a south-facing window on the garden level of our home, but for much of the afternoon, the roof covering the patio provides partial shade to the window, too. Any plant hanging there will need to thrive in low light in addition to defying gravity. 

*

Years ago, I purchased a two-week trial membership to a local aerial yoga studio. I learned how to do common yoga poses while wrapped in a silk cocoon anchored to the ceiling of a spartan retail space. On the icy morning after my thirty-first birthday, I went to my last class while hungover from too many literary-themed cocktails the night before. With water sloshing in my stomach and a headache nagging at my temples, I thought the room might be spinning before class even started. Going in that condition was a mistake. Years later, despite enjoying the rest of the classes, just looking at the photo the teacher took of me in cobbler’s pose, hanging upside down like a bat, makes my throat grow thick and my head sick with dizziness. I could handle low light, but as a plant, I would require my roots in the ground.

* 

I took a trip to the garden center to choose a plant with my toddler. To stop her grasping hands from pulling at every leaf in her reach, I selected a pink Syngonium podophyllum—an arrowhead plant—and gave her its small pot to hold. At home, we nestled the roots into the sky planter and attached a fine mesh over the potting soil to keep it in place once suspended upside-down. The planter hung from a wire cable that I looped around the curtain rod attached to my desk window. 

At first, the arrowhead plant relaxed upside-down like a pink and green mobile. New leaves formed tight curls, ready to open slowly. But during the week, the mature leaves started to turn toward the sun, stems reaching upward, around the planter. When I looked up, instead of foliage, I saw dirt and mesh. 

Plants have multiple processes to tell which way is up. The plant’s phototropism, its adaptation to grow toward light, helps it direct its leaves to capture the most energy. As the arrowhead plant hung in the sky planter, the sun shone on the wrong side of its leaves, and it contorted toward the window, trying to turn them right-side-up. Different species of plants have different light needs, and the sun’s intensity can burn sensitive types or cause the development of etiolation— weak, leggy stems or pale leaves—in response to light deprivation.  

In addition to expertly finding the light, plants also sense gravity, which helps them send roots downward and stems upward. In space, NASA relies on light to help plants orient themselves, but here on Earth, they use gravity like the rest of us. My arrowhead looked more like a creature than a vine, with tentacles determined to climb until it righted itself. Over weeks, the new leaves failed to develop their pink hue, revealing a pale white-tinged green that reminded me of how I felt hanging upside down. 

Ultimately, the sky planter assumes a plant cannot move or respond to stimuli, that it is simply a decorative thing. Although the arrowhead cannot uproot itself and move to a more suitable location, it can turn, twist, and climb, trying to adapt. Tropisms, from the Greek for “turn,” are growth responses to external stimuli such as light, gravity, and touch. A hormone called auxin, after the Greek “to increase,” controls these changes. In phototropism, auxin accumulates on the shaded side of a stem, causing cells to grow faster there, forcing the stem to bend toward the light. Through a process that is not yet fully understood, auxin redistributes, leading to uneven growth in poor light conditions. In response to gravity, auxin accumulates on the lower side of a stem, so that when tilted off its axis, a plant eventually reorients itself, elongating as it adjusts. Through thigmotropism, responding to touch, vines grasp a trellis or other surface, allowing them to climb. In unideal growing conditions, a houseplant still has these limited means to seek out what it needs to grow.

*

In the aerial yoga classes, once my head stopped spinning, I noticed how many of the other students badly wanted the instructor to notice them. It is hard to stand out from within a canopy of teal spandex, but they flexed their growing biceps, gripping the silks, and hoisting their weight towards the ceiling, only to twist upside down, angling to face the mirrors and the teacher. She was their sun. Half the class was students like me, looking for the experience and the photo before going home to coffee and brunch, but a trio of women, clearly regulars, devoted themselves to dizzying feats, seemingly unafraid of hitting the ground. Aware that in a room of beginners and dabblers, their familiarity with flying set them apart, they reached a little higher. Pushing away thoughts of the miscarriage I suffered the winter before, I wondered what they were responding to, what led them to this place, hanging upside down, roots and stems stronger from the strain.

In my years of successfully keeping houseplants alive, I have not had many issues with watering. Light poses the bigger problem, as my menagerie competes for a limited number of sunny spots. My low-light plants face east, and some tropical specimens congregate by our west-facing balcony door. A southern exposure would provide the most steady stream of bright light, but our only windows facing south are a narrow kitchen windowsill, and the patio door, which shares floorspace with the pantry. 

I have done my best with this puzzle of plants and light. In the kitchen, a pothos and a Monstera adansonii perch atop cabinets, filling the dead space above the stove, disguising and purifying the dust trap there, or developing vines that I train to grow around light fixtures, creating chandeliers of greenery. Elsewhere, a fiddle leaf fig and pink variegated rubber tree craved more sunlight than the western window offered. The fiddle leaf eventually leaned onto the glass door, as if trying to escape outside. Its giant leaves masked its longing, and I failed to notice until it was too late. Its trunk weak and bending toward the sun, the tree had to be cut back by two feet and placed next to the sliding glass door to recover—forget about the pantry—until it grew stronger and straighter, branches and scars healing in the steadier sunshine.

*

I tried aerial yoga in January 2018, and it set the tone for the year, which left me feeling like life had taken me by the ankles and held me upside down, shaking everything out of me. I spent the first half of the year trying and failing to get pregnant and the second half chasing down a diagnosis for vague, chronic symptoms that ended up being a treatable autoimmune disorder, but landed me in the Emergency Room first. My father died unexpectedly.

I also hiked mountains, ran races, and saw friends get married, or visited them in new homes. Swinging between these highs and lows, I tried to climb. In photos, I look thin, leggy, and pale. My body clung to nutrients while I attempted to exercise my anxiety into oblivion, searching for something akin to the sun. Then the season changed, I changed, and I felt steady on my axis again. Through my own tropisms, bending toward light, clinging to supports, I grew.

* 

I gave up on the sky planter, repotting the arrowhead and setting it in an east-facing window. My plants would do better at aerial yoga than I did, but they deserve to live right-side-up. Once it had the correct lighting and gravitational orientation, the arrowhead grew a lush tangle of pink leaves, gradually uncurling. It still wants to climb, as is the nature of this plant, but it can do so on a trellis, enjoying the sun without struggle.

Kasey Butcher Santana (she/her) is co-owner of Sol Homestead, a backyard alpaca farm where she and her husband also raise chickens, bees, and their daughter. Kasey earned a Ph.D. in American literature and has worked as an English teacher and a jail librarian. Recently, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Great Lakes Review, Archetype, Wild Roof Journal, The Ocotillo Review, *82 Review, and The Hopper. She is a Nonfiction Editor for Kitchen Table Quarterly, and you can follow her on Instagram @solhomestead.

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

The Return of War

“I was only six years old,” he said. The old man, who had the tendency of the partially deaf to speak more quietly than he realized, was not surprised or even that disappointed when no one responded. “Yes.  Only six years old.”

He looked around at the strangers lining the dank walls of the basement…was it a basement? Yes, probably. Back then, it had been a proper bomb shelter.  They had built many of them during the war, big and small.  Theirs had been in the basement of a gymnasium down the street from their small apartment in another city, in another country. For years afterwards, whenever he saw one of those black and yellow signs on the side of a building, it had reminded him of those terrifying and exciting, and then stultifying times when he was little and squeezed between his mother and grandmother against a hard wall in a room filled with people. Never his father. His father had been drafted, and at that very moment—he used to think it often, while he sat there or at other times when he was walking to school or in class or playing catch with a friend—his father was fighting the enemy. And he used to imagine himself all grown up and far away, also fighting the enemy, a hero like his father was sure to be.  He did not remember what his father looked like, beyond the photos on the mantelpiece and the ones in the photo album he inherited from his mother when she passed.  He had learned once, long ago, at university, that the mind retains all the images the eye’s camera takes over the years; that all those memories are there to be tapped, if we only knew how.

Tears had come into his eyes. But no one saw them.  Strangers do not see your tears when you are old, he thought. You need to feel tears to see them, and you cannot feel the things an old person feels until you yourself are old, and then the old people you used to know are long gone.

“It will be alright, dear.”

There was a hand on his right arm, a small elegant hand he knew almost as well as his own. And the ring—a small diamond set in filigreed platinum, which he used to love to touch and move back and forth on her long, slender finger. “Platinum is the most valuable metal there is,” she had told him once. “More valuable even than gold.” It had not made any sense to him. He knew that gold was more valuable than silver, and platinum looked like silver, so shouldn’t gold be more valuable? 

He was angry with himself for the tears. He looked up to check that no one was watching. There was—a girl, much older than him. Probably twelve or thirteen, or maybe even older. He blushed and wiped his tears away. She didn’t laugh at him; she smiled a friendly smile. Then, the sounds came back again, and the smile froze on her face. She glanced at her mother and father sitting beside her, and then looked up, stared at the ceiling. He was jealous that she had her father there and he didn’t. She was frowning now and staring at the ceiling as if she could see through it right up clear to the sky and see them shining silver like a silver version of that terrible giant bird in a story his mother had read to him once in a book of legends, which had given him nightmares for a week even though his mother told him over and over again that it wasn’t real, it was just pretend. 

What had happened to that book, he wondered? For years, it was his favorite book. He used to read it to himself after his mother had stopped reading to him. Had his father ever read to him? Maybe? He couldn’t remember. He wished he could ask his mother. He was always asking her about him, after, when he didn’t come back. “Tell me about Dad,” he used to say. When he was young, she would always begin the same way—“Well, your father was a wonderful man. Strong and kind and gentle, and he was a wonderful father.” And then she would tell him about some of the things they had done as a family before the war or the first time his father had taken him fishing or presents that his father had given him that he was too old now to remember. And he never tired of hearing about it. But then, he grew older. When he was in his early teens and he asked, she would say, “What do you want to know?” He didn’t like that as much—having to think of something to ask, when there was nothing he could ask her about, almost, that wasn’t something she had already told him. And then, after she remarried, he could tell she didn’t want him to ask anymore; she didn’t want him to bring him up anymore. So, he used to sit in his room and look out the window and tell himself the stories about his father that she used to tell him. 

The hand was gone now. He glanced to his right, saw a young man in his early 30s, with his wife or girlfriend beside him. No platinum diamond ring on her finger. On his left—an obese man with short stubby fingers who stank from all his fat and sweating. A few years ago, the discrepancy would have bothered him. But lately, time had become more fluid, like a room that had inexplicably lost its walls; it wasn’t always easy to tell where things ended or where they began. He had fought it and denied it—and the effort of doing so had made him, at times, angry and irritable. He could see it in his nurse’s eyes, how the light in them went out after a few visits—how quickly people lose patience with the old! With anything or anyone that inconveniences them. Had she come yet today? What was her name again? The new nurse? Renée. That was it. He was fairly certain. Or was that his mother’s name? Why not both? Two people can have the same name, after all. There was nothing strange about that. 

The room shook again. The cement floor vibrated. The wall he was leaning against knocked against his back, and then was still. Something was happening. He didn’t remember what. He sat up to get a better look out his window—where was the window? He suddenly had the crazy idea that his nurse had moved it. He told himself that was absurd. Well, what had happened to it then? He laughed out loud, and the laugh turned into a cough, so he covered his mouth with the side of his fist and coughed and then laughed again.  He had actually forgotten for a moment that he was in the basement.  He chided himself. What would all these strangers be doing in your apartment? You’ve become a real lunkhead lately, he thought. You’re lucky you didn’t go ahead and ask them. 

“Can you imagine?” he said.  He remembered that his mother used to say that often. It was one of her phrases: Can you imagine? He could hear her voice perfectly. But not his father’s. He thought he remembered what he sounded like, but as soon as he tried to recall anything he had actually said, and the tone and timbre of his voice, the sound of him would disappear from his mind. It had been that way ever since he was a child, ever since his father went away and never returned.

The strangers, who were silent and still when the walls were shaking, had started talking among themselves again. The strangers in his room.  He smiled to himself.  He did not remember coming down here, but evidently he had.  How long had he been here? He tried to remember.  He couldn’t; he had no idea. He had been in his apartment—he remembered that.  He had been in his apartment and there was another war going on.  It had been going on for…he didn’t know how long exactly.  He wanted to say years, but he suspected that it had only been a few days…or maybe weeks.  He was in his apartment, a war started and….  Yes, his nurse—she stopped coming by.  He was quite sure she used to come by every day to prepare him lunch or was it dinner?  And to make his bed and whatever else it was that nurses did.  He had liked this one, he thought.  She listened to him when he spoke, when he told her about…he couldn’t recall exactly what.  But this one listened, or at least pretended to in a way that was believable (does anyone really listen to anyone anymore?).  The war had started, the new one, and she was still coming every day—every day was the war, on the television and the radio—everything was the war, that was all they seemed to talk about.  And…she was worried.  She had cried.  He remembered that. She was worried about the war and her family.  They lived in another city where many bombs had been dropped and the city was a smoldering ruin. A smoldering ruin…where had he learned that phrase?  He must have read it somewhere or heard it, maybe all those years ago during that other war, when he was so very young.  As young then as he was old now. This struck him as both funny and tremendously sad.  Yes, she was crying, and it surprised him so much to see her crying.  And he was afraid because he knew only one thing that would make her cry like that.  So, he had started to pray.  He prayed very hard and shut his eyes as tight as he could, clenched his fists and held his breath and prayed.  But it was no good.  She didn’t stop crying, couldn’t.  She was speaking to him now, and he kept saying no to her—no no no no!  He was yelling it at her, but she wouldn’t stop.  She held him so tightly that he couldn't breathe—he couldn’t say no, he couldn’t say anything—and she told him softly, almost as if it was a secret with her lips so close to his ear, that he had died.  He had been very, very brave, but he had been shot and he had died.  And he was never coming home again, no matter how much he prayed, his father would never come home again. 

Now, he remembered. There were clouds in the sky, strange fast-moving clouds and smoke and fire and explosions and the shaking, the awful shaking.  Just like all those years ago.  His nurse had not been there in three days. There was a knocking at the door.  He had jumped when he heard it.  Then, he thought to himself, it’s only Renée, your nurse; what a silly old man you are.  He turned away from the window and walked toward the door.  She was calling out now, too, and knocking ridiculously hard, banging really, on the door. 

“I hear you,” he said.  “I’m coming.”

And then, the knocking stopped.  He looked through the spy hole.  There was no one there.  Suddenly, he heard the knocking continuing farther down the hall, on another door, and more voices.  What in the world is she doing?  Has she lost her mind?  He opened the door and looked out.  Down the hall to his right, a strange young man was banging on a neighbor’s door.

“What are you doing?” said the old man. “Do you want me to call the police?”

The young man knocked again on the door in front of him. “I’m checking all the apartments.  Can’t you hear the explosions?  Everyone is supposed to be in the basement.”

Yes—he remembered. The young man had walked with him down the six flights of stairs and then one more to the basement, and all those eyes, faces staring at him, so that he felt self-conscious about his limp and his back no longer being straight. 

The old man looked around the dark space for the young man.  If everyone was supposed to be in the basement, then he should be there, too; that was logical.  He looked around him at the faces.  There were probably twenty to thirty people there, all strangers to him, men and women, young and old…. One looked a bit like his father, at least the way he remembered him, until he turned to talk to the person beside him, and he could see his entire face. That had not happened in years. It used to happen all the time when he was a boy, after…. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. So many strangers, all in one room. Were any as old as him?  So near the end of life that you measure it out in months, like a patient with terminal cancer?  That was exactly what it was—a slowly spreading terminal cancer: the cancer was life, all the years behind, the choices made, the mistakes that can never be undone.  If you live long enough, it is life that kills you.  There was one woman in the corner who looked like she was in her early 70s, but that was nothing—his 70s felt like they were a century ago. He was clearly king; he had lived the longest.  It followed that he was the only one among them who had been through all of this before—spent hours and hours in a makeshift bomb shelter listening for the whistle and the thud, the explosions that made the walls shake and the teeth grate and the bones rattle.  He felt a small spark of pride.  He wanted them to know that, to know that he was someone apart, someone who had experienced things that they had not, and, therefore, that he had within him a little wisdom that he could impart.  He saw himself in his mind’s eye standing tall before them in this crowded dark space, telling them what it had been like to be six years almost eighty years ago in the middle of another war, and to find out that your father, who you loved more than anyone else…. He shook his head again. Now, he was telling them everything he had learned during the many intervening years—he couldn’t think of what he might say, but it didn’t matter; he could tell by their rapt attention that they found him to be very wise—but most of all he was imparting that essential piece of wisdom, that small sequence of perfect words that would open up their minds and reassure them now, when they most needed it, that it—everything—would all be okay. He caught himself smiling at his reverie, and felt embarrassed, as if some of them—the couple beside him or maybe the fat man at his elbow or the young girl opposite, who was now, he observed, nineteen or maybe twenty and very pretty (pretty because she was young; there is nothing as pretty as youth)—might be able to read his thoughts.  She looked away when their eyes met, as if he did not matter.  He felt a stab of resentment.  She wouldn’t have felt that way if he was the young man who had knocked on his door. He wanted to tell her, to yell at her, I was young once, like him.  Like you. He wanted to keep looking at her, at her prettiness which would soon fade like everything else, but he looked away, too, because he didn’t want her to think that he was staring at her, and he didn’t want anyone else to see him and think, what a dirty old man he is, which he wasn’t.  

What was he…? Yes. The young man who knocked on his door wasn’t there. Why wasn’t he there?  That was the question. He had said—he remembered it clearly—everyone is supposed to be in the basement.  And yet, he wasn’t.  Why wasn’t he?  The thought came into his mind that all of this was some kind of trick, that all of these people were acting a part, that there were no bombs falling, that there was no war. As for why they might be doing this, who could say? Maybe it had something to do with what he had gone through, what the war had done to him and every other kid the bombs had rained down on.  Maybe they wanted to know what it did to you, maybe they—.  No, he thought—no.  Don’t let your thoughts go down that road.  He had noticed that his thoughts had had a tendency lately toward suspicion, toward more sinister interpretations of circumstances—in truth, for a while, several years probably.  He could not help it, could not stop it before it started.  So, he had tried to train himself to notice it and, in noticing it, to connect it to this observation—that he had a tendency to think that way.  Using this method, he was sometimes able to keep himself from going too far, from getting stuck in that way of thinking, and acting in ways that he later regretted or found embarrassing in retrospect.  He told himself, the man isn’t here—so what?  Maybe he is upstairs knocking on more doors, maybe he is out getting supplies—water and cans of food and toiletries.  Or maybe he is down here, and you just haven’t seen him.  You can’t see everyone clearly.  But that thought made him more anxious, the thought of not being able to see clearly who was and who wasn’t in that large dark room with him.  So, he dismissed it.  Better to think he’s not here. He’s out getting supplies. Someone sure as hell better be.  Who knows how long we will be down here?  Who knows how long the bombing will last?  You need supplies, everyone knows that.  Images came into his mind of rows and rows of canned goods with labels on them from companies long gone and forgotten.  He thought, why did I have to live long enough to witness another war—?

A new whistling—very close now—more than one.  He held his breath.  They had all stopped talking and were holding their breath, every mouth in the room. Everything stopped. The explosion was deafening—the walls rattled people shook like dolls in a dog’s mouth smoke and dust everywhere—

*

Someone was calling his name. He was sure of it.  They had been calling it for some time.  Who…?  The voice was familiar.  He could almost remember it.  It made him simultaneously frightened and excited to hear it.  He grabbed his mother’s hand, squeezing it and her ring so hard it hurt.  His palm was sweating—he could feel it, but he didn’t care.  He tugged on her hand the question he wanted to ask.  Who is that?  Who is calling my name?  But he knew without asking—he had known it instantly as soon as he heard it.  It was hard to believe because it was what he wanted more than anything, so, naturally, he doubted it, doubted that it was real. But this wasn’t a fantasy, this was real. Somehow there was light in the basement now, light from the top of the stairs, illuminating the still-settling dust like earthbound clouds—sunlight breaking through. The gymnasium had been hit, hit in such a way that part of it must be gone, sheared away so that the sky was there, just out of sight—it was the only explanation. He pushed against the floor with his hands, scraping his coat and back against the wall as he raised himself slowly, unsteadily to his feet.  He ignored the gnawing pain in his hip and the feeling that his knees were going to buckle. He stepped away from the wall toward the stairs and the pale light above. He heard the voice again. 

“I knew it,” he said. “I just knew it.” 

The old man’s face was beaming as he limped slowly toward the stairs, his legs bowed, his back curved and tilted to one side as he walked, giving the impression with each step that he was teetering and might fall.  So much so that a young man, no more than twenty, who had just wiped the fallen dust out of his eyes, lifted himself up to his haunches and started to extend his arms, as if to catch him should he fall.  But the old man did not fall.  As he approached the bottom step, he felt himself illuminated by the diffuse light coming from above, from outside.  And it was as if the light transformed him, as if the only thing he needed to become young again, to shed all of the years, all of the aches and pains that lived in his body with him, that had become as much a part of his body as he was, and all of the many frustrations—the bitterness, the longing, the sadness, the losses and the memory of losses and the losses that had been forgotten but whose echoes and shadows still remained—all of it fell away.  All of it fell away and as he climbed the stairs, with each step his back straightened more and his knees started to work again, in fact, to move like pistons. He ran up the last few steps, like a man half or even a third his age—and the last thing he said before he disappeared from view, the last thing the strangers in the basement down below heard before they heard the whistle and hum of the bomb falling out of the sky directly above them was a single word, spoken with a child’s unwavering joy—

“Dad!”

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is an award-winning author of books for children and adults. His first book, The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father's struggles with schizophrenia and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. His most recent book, an all-ages graphic novel called The Singing Rock & Other Brand-New Fairy Tales, was published by First Second/Macmillan. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family.

Lauren Crawford	

Good the Girls Have Given Me

A dandelion crown, woven by the nimble fingers of a messy girl. 

*

A lake's worth of horse sweat to hose off each dusk. 

*

An apple; to be delivered as a bribe to a scout's favorite horse, Oakley. This gift came with instructions: I was to wait until no one was in the barn but me and the sound of the cat sighing. I was to sit at Oakley's stall and offer the apple by the halves, skin side down so he could smell the fragrant meat. As soon as he showed interest, I was told to sing to him about a memory; the happiest memory I had. When I give him my voice, fruit in hand, I sing to him my deepest sorrow so that he knows what to look for in a scout when she needs him. I have no home, I tremble into his curried grey fur. No home, I tell him, but you and this barn. The silent beast paws at the dirt in the stall we share while he snacks on his treat and when I get up, I leave my heart at the door. 

*

Enough power to fuel a freight train that never stops or runs out of track. It is a great and powerful thing to hold the attention of two hundred screaming scouts under one pavilion before dinner; to corral them, to glimmer in their gaze. They lay it on me like a blessing and it feels as though I am the maker of air, like I brewed the sunset hanging low in the sky. They look at me like they expect me to lift that sun myself every morning and, at times, I feel like I do. 

*

Shelter; not just from the rain and the thunder here, but from the gales that form out of myself. The one thing the scouts and leaders do not know about me is my aptitude for storm and the rip currents I have been told I steep. It must be me, I tell myself, over and over into the night. It must be because of me I have no family who wants me near. 

*

Sticks, stones, mud and hay bales. All the things I use to teach the scouts about survival in the wilds. When they ask me if they can build a mud-bale palace as big as their real homes, I tell them there is no structure like the words you whisper to your teshka, which is our made-up camp word for "loved-one". No place like the one you build from your breath. The very breaths I would die for when spilled from the right mouth. 

*

Safety. It's always the same thing we tell the scouts when they say they fear falling off the horse. It’s only dirt, we say. Dirt in the cabin where you dream you are free, dirt in your hair when you tango with the trees, dirt on your tongue when you call for me. And I am always there to hear your names flicker in the dark, so I can later stitch each letter into the heavens, and feel you laughing down the light. 

*

The gift of flight. Yes, I can say with absolute certainty that I have flown and I have made my girls fly. I have shown them when it's best to dive and for whom they should do it. I have anointed them in brightness, dappled them in dew. I have shown them the lightest thing in the world is joy, the hardest thing in the world is the ground, and the deathiest death is that of a horse. I have shown them how to walk foolishly up a creek and tasted their songs no one else has cared to listen to. I ring them dry with play; their blissful, summery dalliances as skylarks. And I remember the look on their faces when they smelled their own freedom for what seemed to be the first time; like falling into a brook that was never there, like a throat-full of water after feeding on nothing but dust.

Lauren Crawford holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale where she served as an associate editor for Crab Orchard Review. A native of Houston, Texas, she is the second place winner of the 2020 Louisiana State Poetry Society Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, The Appalachian Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Midwest Quarterly, The Worcester Review, The Spectacle and elsewhere. Lauren currently teaches writing at the University of New Haven with her husband and is a reader for Palette Poetry.

Stephen Price

Tip Jar

An autumn snowstorm fell as the alien rang the buzzer to my apartment. It was mid-September, 7:30 in the evening and dark. A deluge of flakes the size of ice cubes had been descending to earth since my arrival home a few hours earlier. They were wet and heavy and glowed in the lights of the city. From my fourteenth-floor balcony I watched them fuse into thick, even masses on fences and cars and trees. Laden branches hung to the ground. Loud cracks could be heard as limbs, not yet sturdy for winter, succumbed to the stress and broke off from their trunks. 

I was in a time of contemplation and mused how so much snow could gather just one flake at a time. By morning destruction would prevail across the city because of a collection of things that are virtually weightless on their own.

As a rule, I do not answer my buzzer if I am not expecting someone or the delivery of a package, but I was in a period of transition. I would be leaving the apartment at the end of the month and thought it might be time to welcome the unexpected. I tapped the app on my phone that hooks up to the building’s security system, and saw the man I used to know as Peter, a barista from the coffee shop in the lobby of my building. He made my morning coffee almost every day. At most, we spoke a few words to each other.

“Yes?” I said.

“Hi,” he said.

“Peter,” I answered, “what can I do for you?”

“My name’s not Peter,” he told me. His glasses were dripping from the snow and he stared into the camera placidly.

“Ok,” I said. “What is your name?”

He shrugged and said, “Where I come from we’re not really into naming things. That’s a uniquely human thing to do. Everything needs a name. Babies. Streets. Colours. Oh my god, have you ever looked at paint chips? There’s like an infinite amount of shades and each one has its own nutso name. When I arrived here, I used to find it interesting to read the names of paint chips. Icy Lemon Curd. Crystal Invasion. I read one once called Castaway. Do you really think a castaway cares what colour the walls are?”

“Probably not.”

“I doubt it would be a priority,” he said, a hint of anger slipping into his voice.

“Peter, what is this about?” I asked. I barely knew him. I wanted to disconnect, but felt the need to maintain a level of civility, since I conversed with him most mornings. And I didn’t want to abandon him in case he was in some sort of distress, having a mental breakdown or a psychotic episode. 

“I was hoping you could come down here,” he said.

“It’s snowing.”

“Yes,” he said. “Wear boots and a hat.”

“Is there someone I can call for you?”

“No, there’s something I have to show you,” he said and added, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

 On the way down the elevator, adjusting my toque, I considered what a bad idea this was. Peter was as close to being a stranger in my life as a person could be without actually being a stranger. Common sense dictated that I should not leave the apartment, letting no one know where I was going because someone I had next to no relationship with rang my buzzer requesting I meet with him in person. I did not know if he was alone. I did not know if he was violent. Apparently, I did not even know his real name nor that he was not actually a member of my species. This had so many ways of ending badly.

 The man formerly known as Peter stood in the shelter of the doorway. He did not try to force his way in when I opened the security door and even if he did, he would not have been much of a challenge. He stood 5’7” with his boots on and had the physique of a twelve-year-old. Although he had instructed me to wear a toque and boots, he was dressed only in a pea jacket and sneakers. I stand close to 6’4”. I towered over him. It was like a lamppost looking down on a mailbox. A home invasion was unlikely.

“You’ll be glad you came,” he said.

We stared at each other for a bit. I did not know how to respond. “Ok,” I said and added, “So you’re not human?”

“No,” he said. “It’s kind of obvious when you think about it.”

He had a point. Although he shared our physical attributes, they were out of sync, like someone had chosen them from a list of options and selected ones he liked rather than if they worked together. He was a sort of human Mr. Potato Head. Socially, he did not seem to integrate with the other employees of the coffee shop, not giving off an I’m-only-working-here-until-my-art-sells vibe. Also, I told anyone who would listen that Peter’s talents behind the espresso machine were otherworldly.

“And your name’s not Peter?”

“Nope.”

“What should I call you?”

“Peter will be fine. Like I said, where I come from we don’t feel the need to name things.”

“Right,” I said. 

A pause hung between us as thick as the wet snow that clung to his hair.

“Peter,” I started. “Is everything all right?”

“I know it’s easier to believe that I’m crazy than to believe that I am not human,” he said. “It’s just really important that you follow me and listen to what I have to tell you.”

“Ok,” I said. 

He turned and left the shelter of the doorway into the falling snow. My concern for his safety overpowered my reluctance and I caught up to him with a few quick steps. A loud crack from another branch that broke off its trunk startled me and caused my head to snap around, suddenly thinking I was being attacked from behind. Peter did not seem to notice. He kept up a steady pace while I walked less assuredly, concerned of slipping. We rounded the corner at the end of my street before either of us spoke. The occasional car shunted through the slush piling up on the roads.

“If you’re not human,” I asked, “what are you are?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Are you from Earth?”

“Do you know anything on Earth that’s not human but can take on a human form?”

“No.”

“Bingo.”

Even though it was snowing, with no signs of letting up, the weather was not cold. I started to sweat from the clip we were maintaining and unzipped my jacket halfway. As soon as I did so, the wet snow began to soak my neck. We wove our way through the apartment complexes and reached a t-intersection. We crossed to a wooded common that was dissected by a winding brook and started along a walking path that hemmed it. It was treacherous going. I could hear a cacophony of branches breaking in the thickets, and it made me think of ice cubes cracking when a drink is poured over them.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Not too far from here,” Peter said. “A couple light years.”

“That’s not too far?”

“Not when you know what you’re doing,” he said.

His tone was patronizing and I was about to ask him the name of where he was from when he stopped and turned to me.

“Look,” he continued, glowering up. “You’re now about to ask me the name of where I am from which is a pointless question because it doesn’t have a name and even if it did you would have never heard of it.”

My expression must have betrayed my shock at his sudden change in demeanor. He lowered his gaze and I looked down on the top of his scalp. 

“I’m sorry,” he muttered and turned to keep walking. “I’m not myself.”

We continued walking in silence because I was afraid to ask him any more questions and upset him. At this point I was still skeptical. The alien in my midst seemed like something out of The Twilight Zone, but his reluctance to talk about himself made me consider the genuineness of his story. It seemed a bit antithetical that someone who wanted to convince me they were from another world would not provide me with an enormous amount of detail in an attempt to persuade me. In fact, he did not seem to care whether or not I believed him. 

About halfway through the common, I broke our silence again and asked, “Why did you come to Earth?”

“I’ve been doing a cost-benefit analysis,” he said. 

“You’re a project manager?”

“I guess,” he said. “Does that surprise you? You sound surprised.”

“Twenty minutes ago, I thought you were just a barista.”

“Just?”

“Well …”

“Someday you should try making a hundred coffees to order in one shift and then see if you think I’m ‘just’ a barista.”

“I’m sure,” I said, feeling ambushed. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Your species has to categorize all the time. Everything has to be put into a group and then ranked,” he continued. “It’s so annoying.”

He made an abrupt turn into an open field and we trudged through the thick, wet snow until we reached a copse of poplar trees, their leafy branches weighed down. Peter weaved his way and I followed. It was dark and occasionally a payload of slush dropped on us as if from aerial bombers. We broke into a clearing and there we stopped. The snow was still falling. We stood side by side and Peter offered no explanation.

I finally asked, “What are we doing here?”

“This is where I’m supposed to get picked up.”

“By who?”

“These guys I paid to meet me here,” he said and made a half-hearted glance into the sky but there was nothing that wasn’t there when we arrived. “The same guys who dropped me off five years ago. They were supposed to be here last week.”

“Guys?” I said. “You mean like space guys.”

“I guess that’s as good a name as any. They don’t live in space. They just work there.”

“Are they from the same place as you?”

“No. We contract out all our space travel. It’s a lot cheaper that way,” Peter explained. “It’s a bit like Uber.”

“Maybe they got lost,” I offered. “The universe is a big place.”

Peter scoffed. “They’ve been here before,” he said. “They’ve been here plenty of times. More likely they know there’s nothing I can do. I can’t call someone else so they’ve taken on too many contracts and are just making me wait.”

 “Why have they been here so often?” I asked.

“Dropping off other project managers.”

“There’s more than you?”

“Of course there’s more than me,” he said and I started to feel like I was an employee of his that he found exasperating. “Do you think I could do this whole planet by myself?”

“Do what?”

“A cost-benefit analysis,” he repeated. 

Silence fell between us again and it was becoming clear that Peter was not the sort of individual who provided details easily. “Why am I here?” I finally asked.

“When they get here,” he said, “I was wondering if you wanted to go instead of me.”

“Into space?”

“That’s right,” he said. 

“In a space ship?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Sure,” he said. “A space ship.”

A half hour earlier, when I had decided to answer the buzzer and welcome the unexpected this was beyond what I could have imagined. 

“Instead of you? You’re not going?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I’ve decided to go down with the ship.”

“Down with the ship?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“We’re eliminating your planet,” Peter said as casually as if he had told me my coffee was ready.

“Eliminate?” I said. “You mean like destroy.”

“I find that word negative, but, yes that’s what we’re doing.”

“Why?”

He shrugged and said, “There’s not really anything here we can use.”

“Use?”

“That’s what we do. We go to places and see if there are any resources we can extract.”

“You colonize?”

“That’s right.”

“And you can’t find any reason to colonize Earth?”

“That’s right.”

“So you’re going to blow us up?”

“No,” he said, emphatically, insulted. “We’re not savages. We seed your atmosphere and everything that is alive just falls asleep and dies and then your atmosphere dissolves and that’s that.”

Stunned, I stammered a bit as I tried to formulate a response. Nothing intelligible was forthcoming so he continued.

“We used to blow up planets,” he said, “but the debris is so hard to control. We could never tell if we accounted for it all. This is much more efficient.”

“But why kill us at all?” I finally managed to blurt out.

“I told you,” Peter said. “There’s nothing here that is of much use to us.”

“Then why not just leave. Why destroy us?”

“So others don’t come here and find a use for you,” he explained. “It’s very competitive out there.”

The snow had started to let up. The flakes were still large but had started to diminish. I looked about at the clearing and could see the lights of the apartment complexes we had walked through poking out above the trees.

“There is really nothing on Earth that any of you saw as valuable?” I eventually asked. 

“Sex,” he said. “We all thought that was pretty interesting.”

“You’ve had sex.”

“Lots of it.”

I was taken aback by the notion that a being from another world had taken on a nerdy human form and was having more sex than I was.

“We talked about marketing that,” he said. “I think a lot of travelers would come here for the sex.”

“You were going to turn Earth into a brothel?”

“We discussed it, but after some closer analysis, it just wasn’t worth it. Humans are hard to manage and have so many hang ups about sex. It would have been a constant headache.”

I fell silent again.

“Dogs are cool, too. We all like dogs,” Peter said. “But there isn’t really much use for them.”

“Their sense of smell is like a superpower.”

He shrugged. “Impressive,” he said, “but not of much use. It’s a lot like juggling. Exceptional but ultimately – so what?”

The snow stopped. I could hear the sound of vehicles sluicing through the roads. The snow glowed and everything seemed really peaceful.

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“What?”

“The spaceship.”

“It’s not really a spaceship,” he said. “It’s not like Battlestar Gallactica or Star Wars or shit like that.”

“What is it, then?”

“It’s hard to describe,” he said and shrugged again. “It’s not really a thing as much as – an impact.”

“I don’t get it.”

“That’s because you’re human,” he said. “You don’t see it as much as you see the effect it has on everything around it. Just keep your mind open. Don’t be afraid of it.”

I gazed up at the sky and tried to imagine what a celestial Uber would look like. It was a cloudy night. No moon or stars. I wondered if it was hard for them to see where they were going and that’s why they were late.

“Why me?” I asked.

He shivered and said, “You’re a good tipper.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Peter pushed his elbows a little more into his sides and dug his hands deeper into his pockets. He shivered again and said, “When I started working at the shop, you used to always come in with this woman. She was a head shorter than you with long brown hair and was always dressed really nicely. The two of you stood close and often leaned your heads into each other to talk. You laughed a lot. She was very polite and always thanked us and you always put more than you had to in the tip jar. On Saturday mornings you used to have your coffee delivered. Remember the shop used to do that to the apartments in the building but was asked to stop for security reasons? It would be almost noon and you answered the door in your pyjamas and you always had a good tip. We used to fight for your delivery. As time went on, the two of you stood further apart and talked less. Then it was like you weren’t together. You both looked off in different directions and one day she stopped coming in. I never saw her again. And through that whole time, whatever shit you were going through, you never forgot to put something in the tip jar.”

Somewhere in the darkness, another branch snapped free. The cold and wet had seeped through my toque and was beginning to soak the back of my neck. 

“You know what tipping says?” Peter asked.

“What?”

“Tipping says, ‘I see value in you. I know nothing about you, I don’t know what kind of day you’re having but I value you as a person.’ Tipping is one of the few things your species got right. Everything would have gone better if people saw the importance of tipping.”

I was chosen to be Earth’s lone survivor because I tipped well.

“Do you know Sheila at the shop?” Peter asked.

“Goth Sheila. Sure.”

“There you go again with your categories.”

“No,” I said. “That’s how she dresses. She wants to be seen as a goth. She has categorized herself. It’s intentional.”

“She dresses like that because people don’t accept her any other way. It gives a sense of belonging that she can’t get anywhere else. Your species constructs categories and forces people to feel like they have to be part of something in order to be accepted, but the groups are very exclusive. Sheila’s a goth because they didn’t judge her.”

Goth Sheila had inky black hair that hung to her shoulders and bangs that covered her eyebrows. She carried a lot of extra weight and wore tight shorts over fishnet stockings. A white t-shirt drooped loosely at her neck, revealing a menagerie of tattoos. There were hints of barbed wire and roses and dragon wings. She wore black lipstick and silver eyeshadow. Her service could generously be described as surly. If a smile ever passed across her face it would die of loneliness.

“She is the most beautiful thing this universe has ever created,” Peter said and his voice cracked.

“That’s a very human thing to say.”

“Tell me about it,” he responded. 

“What do you find appealing about her?” I asked, delicately, wondering how anyone could be attracted to Goth Sheila. 

“Her anguish,” Peter answered. “Even though she does not speak much, I have come to know her quite well. She does not reveal herself easily, but I managed to get her to tell me about herself.”

History is cluttered with people who fell for someone who can only drag them down rather than lift them up. Peter took on a human form and fell in love. I suppose that could be defined as one of the hazards of being an interstellar project manager.

“I told her everything about me,” he continued. “I wanted to save her. I convinced her that I could take her away from all this. She was open to me. She trusted me. We waited on this spot every night for a week. They never came, those sons of bitches. Two nights ago she stormed off and called me a loser.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“She hasn’t spoken to me since.”

“That’s rough,” I said. “Yeah, they know how to make it hurt.”

“I’m a failure. That’s new to me. I’ve never felt this way before.”

“So you’re staying here because of a girl?” I said. “Because things didn’t work out you’ve decided to stay here and die with everyone else?”

“With her.”

“Peter, it’s a broken heart,” I pointed out. “It will pass.”

“I know. I get that,” he said. “But getting over it won’t mean I’ll forget it. When I think of travelling around, checking out other places, I know I will not be able to stop thinking about how I failed her. I gave her so much hope and ended up disappointing her. I let her down lower than anyone ever had before and, trust me, she has known some devastating relationships. I saw more value in her than anyone ever had and I failed her. I am worse than those who rejected her because she doesn’t fit their ideals.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” I told him.

“I cannot live with myself knowing what I did to her,” he said. He took a couple of steps away and turned to face me. “Hang out here as long as you want. Keep coming back. I can’t guarantee anything.”

“How will I know it’s here?”

Peter started to walk away. “You’ll know,” he said over his shoulder.

He was eventually enveloped by the blackness and the sound of his footsteps in slush faded away. I never saw him again.

I stayed for a little longer but eventually went home. The next morning, when I went to buy my coffee at the shop, I waited to have Sheila serve me. I tried to start a conversation with her, but the scowl did not leave her face. She would not look at me. I thanked her when she handed over my order and I put $5.00 in the tip jar.

This evening, while packing to leave the apartment,  I started to wonder if I had listened to Peter because I wanted it to be true. I took a break, made myself some tea and stood out on the balcony. The snow of that freak, early storm has melted, but the destruction is still around. Trees have lost many limbs.

There was something about the sky. If I had not had that conversation with Peter, I doubt I would have noticed. Everything was the same, but it looked different. He was right. I did know it when I saw it.

I have two options. I can run over to the clearing and explain that Peter is not coming, but he gave me his seat. Or I could call it a night and get some sleep.

Stephen Price writes and teaches writing on Turtle Island, which he grew up calling Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is particularly interested in helping late bloomers, those who have taken up writing late in life after they have finished their careers. He was a classroom teacher for thirty years. When he retired in 2019, his students, who he often wrote stories for, encouraged him to continue writing. He has been published in The Militant Grammarian, 10x10 Flash, and The Downtime Review. The editors of The Downtime Review have nominated his story for a Pushcart Prize.

Julie Nelson

Whelking

The beach is empty this early in the morning. Flocks of brown and grey pelicans skim over the rowdy water, flying low, making dramatic plunging dives, plucking fish from the sea. They fly in unison. When one rises, they all do.

Freya is alone. She walks barefoot on the chilly sand of late September, her arms swinging by her side. A thick sweater blocks the wind, a sweater Wyatt knitted and gave her as a thank you. A thank you for coming out to care for him now he is too sick to do it alone. The sweater is a good weight and keeps her warm. She thinks of him holding knitting needles in his frail hands. At the breakwater, she stops and watches as waves, frothy from an overnight storm, crash against the pilings with a rushing sound that gives her peace but comes with an ache. For the first time since she got here, she lets herself sob.

Kaposi's sarcoma. Hard to spell and hard to say. What Wyatt had. Has. Has been diagnosed as having. At this moment, the virus is sailing past the threshold of potentiality, moving swiftly downstream to being full blown what it is, a powerful current shaping its own course inside his body. Arriving at the destination they have been dreading, what will be the last part of the journey. AIDS. What will kill Wyatt before the year is out. 

Wyatt seems to think he will not succumb. But this is 1984. There is no cure. Many people have already deserted him. Their father, Wayne, says Wyatt is dead to him already, and he does not help, does not visit. Does not tell people his son has been diagnosed with AIDS. What none of them can know is how nearly forty years later, Wayne will die in another pandemic in 2021, lying on his stomach on a ventilator in a hospital with no one around him. For now, Wayne’s absence is breaking Wyatt’s heart.

They came here as kids, Freya remembers. She and Wyatt. To the shore. Dad wanted to be here to have family time in summer. They came and looked for whelks. Freya is looking for them now, not realizing how automatic searching for them is, from the old days. She longs to find and hold one in her hand, breathe in the briny smell, let her fingers trace the swirling, tapered exterior, and look with one eye to see if a chubby snail is curled inside. She might find one, she thinks, at low tide. Something to give Wyatt later on, when she gets back to the beach house where they are staying, and will stay, until the end, the place where he wants to die.

Yesterday Wyatt said, as a statement not a question, Am I a person. Freya cannot stop thinking how her brother said it aloud. The doctor was careful to say to Wyatt, You are a person who has been diagnosed with HIV and AIDSinstead of I am HIV. Positive. When the doctor explained how language would matter when talking with others, all Wyatt responded was, Am I a person. That he even asked that way bothers Freya. Freya can still feel Wyatt’s damp hand in her own as the doctor told him he is entering the end stages. Wyatt could not stop shaking. With blurry eyes, delirious and feverish, Wyatt calls out for his partner, Mack, who himself succumbed to the virus about a year and a half ago. Now, Wyatt’s body is covered in brownish, purplish spots up and down his legs which are now pressing on his intestines causing him to suffer from diarrhea. Like a snail in a shell, his legs swell and cause him pain so he can hardly stand. He spends the day under a mountain of heavy blankets, drifting in and out of consciousness. The doctor explained what to expect. But Wyatt cannot hear what the doctor says, and neither can Freya. Wisps of words. More medicines to keep track of. She knows she will have to go back this week and ask for the doctor to write everything down so she can remember.

A conch rolls up from the sea and lands at her feet. It is empty inside. The hollowed center holds the sounds of the waves as Freya holds it to her ear. Wasn’t it that the air trapped inside the shell's shape vibrated in such a way it seemed like ocean sounds or waves? It sounds eternal to her, wherever it comes from, as she watches the pink-grey sky brighten with the rising sun. It occurs to her the rich eternal sound comes from having empty space to create an inner music. Sandpipers skitter back and forth with the rolling water. Freya realizes whatever happens, she is here now for Wyatt when no one else was, and because she is here, Wyatt will not die alone. And a feeling of hope comes over her as she makes a discovery about herself. 

She is the kind of person who will never be lonely.

Julie Nelson is an educator, counselor, and creative writer. She has hiked in the Green Mountains of Vermont, swum in two oceans, advised undergraduates at four universities, lived in five states, and published stories and poems in literary journals. “Whelking” grew out of a previously published short story, “Plotting,” with Freya as the central character. Julie is currently writing a novel about Freya, a 40-year-old mother of five, who, in the 1980s, becomes the care giver for her brother who is dying from AIDS.

Colton Huelle

Stranger Need Think

At precisely four-thirty in the afternoon, Jack calls to me from the kitchen, waking me up from a nap on the sofa that I hadn’t meant to take. “Mom! food now!”

This is the not-so-good part of teaching a border collie how to talk. If you want to keep them invested, you can’t ignore them. You have to respond. Always, for sure. Even when you’re tired. Even when the house is freezing because it’s December and you never want to leave your bed.

I hear him pacing in the living room, from his Board to the cabinet where his food is kept and back again. Then he starts with the whining. At dinner time, his whine is a plaintive whale song, an ancient cry emanating from unfathomable pain. He returns to the Board.

“Mom!”

I need to get up. Beneath the quilt, my bare feet shiver at the thought of the cold hardwood floor beyond the living room.

“Jack, wait,” I say, careful to keep an edge out of my tone. That’s the other thing. You can’t ever let a dog see you annoyed in response to something they’ve said. Dogs are not cats––imperious, unconcerned with praise or censure. One time, Jack asked me to take him to the pond, and I rolled my eyes. He didn’t talk to me for three days.

In the living room, I find Jack folded over on himself like a furry jack-knife, slurping on his crotch. When he hears me come in, he looks up at me like, I’m so hungry I had to eat my own dick! I sit down in the center of the room in front of the Board: a piece of plywood to which I’ve velcroed forty red pushbuttons. I press one, and it speaks: “Come.”     

Hearing this, Jack gets to his feet and starts marching in place––an obstinate gesture, equivalent to an exasperated sigh. I wait, and soon he scampers over. The white blaze dividing his otherwise black face always reminds me of that one optical illusion: look now and see a white goblet, look again and see two black silhouettes about to smooch. 

I hit four more buttons: “What Jack want, hmm?” 

He jabs at his favorite button. “Food.”

“When Jack want food, hmm?”

“Food now.” But his blue eyes harden and narrow adding texture to his answer: Food now, you silly bitch. Obviously food now. 

“Good boy,” I say aloud, scratching at his ears. He follows me over to his bowl, and when I scoop the kibble, he looks up at me, and his eyes soften: Thank you mom. Love you. 

I pause at the board and stomp on two buttons: “Love you, Jack.”

*

Fifteen minutes later, Jack wedges open the living room door with his nose and leaps up onto the sofa with me. I’m grateful for the intrusion: enough cyber-stalking for one day. 

Derek, my ex-husband (my mostly ex-husband, my all-but-legally-ex-husband), has posted a picture of himself holding up a pan of some orange-green-flecked dish. “Sweet potato shepherd’s pie,” reads the caption. He’s become quite the foodie in his second bachelorhood. The thing is: who took the picture? I decide that I don’t care, but, okay, I care. A little.

Jack drapes himself across my thighs. I wish he had the vocabulary to tell me, “Mom, what you’re feeling is normal. Let yourself feel your feelings.” Then I wouldn’t have to haul my ass to Concord once a week to hear it from my therapist. 

Derek moved out last year around Christmas. He just needed more quiet in his life, he said. The agreement was that he would continue paying half the mortgage for as long as it took to sell the house. We never settled on who was going to contact a realtor. And it hasn’t come up. Most of the time, I see this for what it is: he makes good money and is allergic to hassle. When we were together, all official-type tasks were my domain: calling the bank, hiring a financial advisor, writing Thank You notes, etc. It makes sense that he would assume that I would spear-head the sale of our house. It’s a Kayla job. Possibly, we will never sell the house, and his contribution to the mortgage will remain an unspoken alimony. 

Another Kayla job, presumably: filing for divorce. It’s just not the kind of thing he would initiate on his own. One of these days, I’m sure, he will call me up and tell me that he wants to remarry. After all, he’s not the one whose body has begun to sag like a rotting pumpkin. And he’ll ask me if I wouldn’t mind looking into how to begin divorce proceedings.  

In January, a few weeks after Derek left, I began teaching Jack to talk. With Derek gone, the house, our house, started grumbling in the silence. The once-taciturn boiler knocked and whispered from behind the walls. I got the idea for the talking board from a lady on Tik Tok, and by May, Jack had launched his career as a motivational speaker. 

His first gig was a pep rally at Central High, where I teach Spanish. Ned Brown, southern New Hampshire’s premiere self-published self-help author and brother-in-law to Central’s assistant principal, was the traditional headliner for the May Day Spirit Showcase. He was despised and ridiculed by students and staff alike. But a few days before the rally, he came down with appendicitis, and the principal asked me what I thought about Jack taking his place. 

So, on the day of the Spirit Showcase, I led Jack into the gymnasium, accompanied by the marching band’s rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out.” He was shy at first. He lay at half-court burying his face in his paws. I was beginning to think that this hadn’t been such a hot idea after all. At that time, Jack was still skittish around strangers. Whenever a new person would come to the house, he’d run behind the couch and start to whimper. So I added “stranger” to the Board. Every time I introduced him to a new person, I’d hit the “stranger” button. Pretty soon, he began to hit “stranger” himself before running behind the couch. Next, I added “friend” and started hitting that one around people he already knew. Now, whenever a new person comes by, he hides until I say, “Jack...stranger Mom friend,” at which point, he rushes out from behind the couch and starts preening, rolling over to show us his soft, white paunch. Sometimes he even uses the board to say, “Love you, Stranger!”      

After stalling with fifteen minutes of a meandering improvised lecture about the nuances of language, I figured out a way to get Jack talking. I had taught him the word “help” so that he could let me know that he needed something that he didn’t have words for. But then one afternoon, Jack caught me crying in the kitchen. I had just gotten off the phone with Derek, one of his first I-still-care-about-you calls, and I was feeling sort of insulted by the charity of it all. Seeing me in tears, Jack ran to the Board and said, “Mom sad. Jack help Mom, hmm?” 

So I started thinking that maybe I could get Jack to talk by telling him that all the kids in the bleachers were sad and that only he could help them. I crouched over to whisper into Jack’s ear, “Stranger mom friend.” We hadn’t worked out plurals yet, so I wasn’t sure if he would connect “stranger” to the hundreds of teenagers staring down at him from the bleachers. But he unburied his eyes and looked from me to the crowd. Then, without getting to his feet, he scooched over to the Board. 

“Mom friend, hmm?” he asked, leveling his gaze upwards to the gawking faces.

“Yes, Jack,” I answered. “Stranger mom friend. Stranger sad. Jack help Stranger, hmm?”

Jack tilted his head at me. This was how he signified confusion before he had the “Hmm?” button.  

“Stranger sad,” I said again. “Buttons help Stranger.”

Jack looked back and forth from me to the bleachers and stood up. Suddenly, he got all happy-tail and shook his head like he does when he’s drying off after a swim in the pond. For whatever reason, this is how Jack shows me that he understands.

“Stranger sad, hmm?” he said. He looked from one end of the bleachers to the other, assimilating each face in the crowd into a collective Stranger. “Yesterday Jack sad. Jack want walk, Mom no want walk. Jack sad. Then Jack think, no walk now, but later Jack walk. Now Jack play ball. Then Jack no sad.” 

“Aww,” cried a girl in the front row.

“Stranger need think. What stranger want now, hmm? Stranger no have now, hmm? Later  then Stranger have.” And then he stopped and flashed me a quizzical gaze. “Jack help Stranger, hmm?” 

The crowd answered him with a storm of applause and laughter. 

“Yes, Jack help Stranger,” I tell him. “Jack good boy.”

Frau Sanders, the German teacher, sent in footage from the pep rally to WMUR, and the next week, they called me up for an interview and ran a three-minute segment on the evening news. Jack’s followers on Instagram, previously limited to students in my Spanish IV class, soared into the thousands. In the weeks that followed, the story went viral and led to a string of invitations for Jack to speak at a variety of venues: the Lion’s Club, a few nursing homes, a pediatric hospital, and a Veterinary conference at Tufts, where Jack was awarded an honorary doctorate. 

*

Tonight, Jack will be speaking at The Lenning Recovery Center for Teens. When the director called a few weeks ago to book Jack, I had some reservations. Melting geriatric hearts at the Lion’s Club is one thing, but I worried that Jack’s whole “Stranger need think” routine, levelled at a room full of recovering opioid addicts, might come off as, I don’t know, tone deaf or something? The director didn’t seem to understand my concern. He just kept repeating, “no, no, the kids are gonna love it!” until I finally agreed. 

Jack kicks in his sleep and sends the quilt flying from the sofa. He starts to make this little muffled yelp, and it occurs to me that he might be sleep-talking. Maybe I should bring the Board into bed with us at night and he could stomp out his dreams for me. And then when he woke up, I could tell him mine. 

“I guess we should get you outside before your big night, huh Jack?” I ask. 

As always, the word “outside” yanks him out of sleep. He leaps off the bed and dashes out of the room. I follow him to his Board, where he stomps out his demand. 

“Pond now!”

“Yes, Jack. Pond now,” I agree, willing myself not to sigh. 

*

The craggy walking trail that circles Dorrs Pond is a haunted place. In the winter, especially, I am sure of it. In the mirror of the pond, the gnarled boughs of oak trees quiver to life, and suddenly you’re conscious only of arms waiting to swoop down and pluck you up, up, up. And then there’s always some deranged old man throwing wads of bagels to the ducks, laughing maniacally as they shove and peck their way to the prize.

Derek called Dorrs Pond his and Jack’s “fortress of solitude.” Solitude from whom? I used to ask him, pretending to be mock-offended instead of offended-offended. Whenever he felt like walking Jack, this is where they came. Jack loves this creepy place. He loves to bark at the squirrels and the sparrows that swoop down from the trees. And there are almost always other dogs to sniff and be sniffed by.

Today, there are no dogs. Only one of the duck men with a paper bag from Panera. He calls Jack a handsome fella as we pass by his bench. Jack tugs me toward the Panera bag, and I tug right back. The man exhorts Jack to listen to his mother, and I flash the man a perfunctory smile. 

Sometimes, I’d come home from work, my feathers ruffled by a shitty email from a parent or an IEP meeting with the smug Special Ed teacher, and I’d find Derek sitting in the recliner, reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin or some shit. Jack would be curled up asleep on his bed in the corner of the living room. 

“Hold that thought,” he’d say, cutting me off before I could start talking. “I wanna get Jack to the pond before it gets dark.”

By the time they’d get back, I’d have pacified myself with my phone, or the TV, or whatever, and I wouldn’t need to vent anymore.

A root lurches out at me from the ground and snags my ankle. I scream and the sparrows overhead abandon their trees. I hate this fucking place. 

*

When we get back to the house, my phone rings. It’s Derek calling, as he does every few weeks or so. To check in on me. To tell me how much he still cares about me. He’s a real Boy Scout like that. I don’t notice how out of breath I am from the walk until I gasp hello into the phone. 

“Hey, is this a bad time?” he asks. 

“Not at all,” I say. “Just got back from a run.”

“You started running again? That’s fantastic.”

“So what are you up to?” I ask. 

He tells me about the sweet potato shepherd's pie. I pretend that I don’t know about it. I try to sound bored, not relieved, when he tells me that his brother Kyle had been by for dinner. Then he asks after Jack. I tell him about Jack’s engagement tonight. 

“A rehab center, huh? So, he’s graduated from motivational speaker to drug counselor.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

And then a silence. A silence I’m not supposed to flinch at or rush to fill, according to my therapist. Jack walks between my legs and looks up to encourage me: Just simply notice the silence. Sit with it. 

“So everything else good?” Derek asks. “The house and all that?”

I wonder what “and all that” encompasses. Work? My family? Learning to live without him? We talk for another fifteen minutes. I do not tell him about the student who complimented my tetas and then asked for extra-credit. I do not pass along my mother’s gossip about the women in her bird-watching group, even though it used to make him laugh. Instead, I offer pleasantries. I ask innocuous questions that ultimately earn me further opportunities to notice and sit with silence. Finally, he says he better let me go. He asks me to wish Jack luck tonight. I tell him that Jack doesn’t know that word. 

After we get off the phone, I wander into the living room and collapse on the couch. I check my phone. It’s a quarter past six. I do the math in my head to determine that we need to leave in forty-five minutes to get to The Lenning Center on time. Jack is standing in the center of the room, circling his board. 

“Mom,” he says. 

“Yes, Jack?”

“Mom sad, hmm?”

I laugh. “No, Jack. Mom no sad.”

He tilts his head to the side, like, if you say so, which makes me laugh harder, and this time my laugh seems to convince him. He runs two laps around the room before leaping up onto the couch and drooling on my thigh.

*

The Lenning Recovery Center for Teens is housed in a gorgeous, brick mansion at the top of a wooded hill. I get buzzed in at the gate and coax my shit-box Civic up a steep, winding driveway, while Jack whimpers in the backseat. 

“You’re okay, bud,” I say aloud, addressing both Jack and my car.

The driveway terminates in a cobble-stone horseshoe at the top of the hill. I park behind a lime green Ford with a bumper sticker that reads, “Easy Does It.” I grab Jack’s leash from the glove compartment and clip it on. He cocks his head at me, and in my mind, I hear him protest.

“Just until we get inside,” I promise. Jack nods and pisses on a bed of daylilies before I think to pull him away. 

As we approach the front door, a man in a red polo with a white star embossed over a breast-pocket pushes open the door to greet us. “I’m Dr. Tom,” he says, sticking out a massive, liver-spotted hand. “We spoke on the phone.”

“Kayla. And this is Jack, of course.”

He gestures at the Board, tucked under my arm, and offers to carry it. I let him, even though it’s more of a hassle to hand it over than it would be to carry it myself. Hearing his name, Jack steps towards Dr. Tom’s knees, turns sideways, and leans into him. Dr. Tom laughs and scratches Jack’s bottom. Jack’s fear of strangers is now completely gone. He never had much potential as a guard dog, but now at least if someone breaks in I might wake to the sound of “Love you, Stranger!”

Dr. Tom leads us into a room that reminds me of a high school cafeteria. Two rows of long tables stretch to the back wall, where an order window and doorway offer glimpses of what seems to be a kitchen. Beneath the order window is a red table with a Keurig machine and a box of store-bought donuts. The ten or eleven kids scattered across the first few rows of tables gaze vacantly at the bare, grey walls. Three middle-aged women, all of them greyish-blonde and bony, circle the tables in precise, repeating routes like Pac-Man ghouls. They all sport the same red polo as Dr. Tom. I accidentally make eye contact with one of them. I smile, she doesn’t. 

I recognize the redheaded girl picking her nails at the first table. Sandi had been in my Spanish I class for the first two weeks of school before disappearing. I catch her eye, and she lights up.

“Yo, Señora, what’s good?”

I smile and wave.

“Where would you like this?” Dr. Tom asks, adjusting his grip on the Board. 

“Anywhere is fine.”

He looks from one spot on the floor to another for what feels like several minutes before finally settling on the spot right in front of him. I unclip Jack’s leash and place it on a stack of cardboard boxes behind me. Jack immediately sprints around me three times, preemptively proud of the good work he’s about to do here. 

“All right, guys and gals,” Dr. Tom announces into a wireless microphone that one of the counselors has handed him. “Boy, do we have a treat for you tonight. How many of you have dogs at home?”

Sandi’s hand shoots up, and she turns to look behind her. No one else’s hand is raised.

“Damn, that’s depressing,” she blurts out. One other hand in the back rises, but immediately falls limp.

“Well, even those of you who don’t have dogs have probably wondered at some point, 

‘What would animals say if they could talk?’ Am I right?”

“My dog would talk mad shit,” says Sandi, looking around the room again. The counselor who wouldn’t smile at me catches Sandi’s eye and places a finger on her lips. Sandi turns away from her and continues: “We’ve got this little French Bulldog, Tony. He’s old as balls, and he’ll just watch you from the corner of the room, like, bitch you ain’t nothing.” The counselor lady stands up and takes a step toward Sandi’s table. Sandi waves her away, as if dismissing a chambermaid from the room.

“Sit back down, Becky. I’ll be quiet,” she says. 

“Anywho,” Dr. Tom continues. “You won’t have to wonder that much longer. I’m so thrilled to have Kayla Martin with us today. By day, Kayla teaches Spanish at Central High School in Manchester. But in her free time, she has managed to do something extraordinary. Over the past year, she’s been teaching her dog Jack to talk. But I’m going to turn it over to her and let her tell you all about it.”

He hands me the microphone. 

“Thanks Tom,” I say. “How’s everyone doing this evening?”

Silence, then Sandi blurts out, “We chillin’.”

“Great. So hopefully, I’m going to let Jack do most of the talking tonight. But first, just a little bit about us. Jack is four years old. He’s a border collie. And, like Dr. Tom said, over the past year, he’s been learning how to use language to communicate with me. So, what we have right here is how Jack talks to me. Each of these buttons plays a different word when Jack pushes them. So, for example––”

I stomp out, “Stranger Mom friend.”

“Hello Stranger,” Jack says. “Now Stranger Jack friend.”

This same opening routine killed at the Lions Club a few weeks ago. Now, the only response from the crowd is a squeaking sound from the front row. The boy sitting next to Sandi has started kicking the heel of his Timberlands against the tile. Sandi punches him in the arm, and he stops. She nods at me like, I’ve got your back. 

“Stranger sad, hmm?” Jack asks the crowd.

“Jack is under the impression that his job in life is to make sad people feel better,” I explain.

“That’s the cutest shit in the world,” Sandi blurts out. She reaches for the boy’s hand and slaps his thigh until he gives it to her. Now she has her head on his shoulder, and he’s staring at the scuff marks he’s left behind on the tile. 

“And that, friends, is what we call purpose,” Dr. Tom adds. 

“Why stranger sad, hmm?” Jack asks. 

Silence.

Jack’s body is his first language. He understands, or seems to, that what he says to me with his body is said in private. A whisper. The muscles of his back tighten when he’s agitated, like his skin is a shirt that he’s outgrown. Sometimes he yawns when he’s tired, but when it's followed by a hard stare and pleading eyes, a yawn means, help! His eyes, their various shades and gradations of soft and hard, tell me almost as much as the buttons. Sometimes more. 

Right now, he is looking at me with the hardest eyes he can make. What gives? I soften my own expression, hoping he’ll take this to mean that everything’s okay. Jack returns to the Board. His paw hovers over several buttons before falling. 

“Stranger no have what Stranger want, hmm?” he says. “Sometimes Jack no have what Jack want. Sometimes Jack no find Jack toy. Then Jack mad. Then Jack think, Jack have toy later.” I’ve never seen him work the Board so quickly. He switches paws. “Stranger need think. What stranger want, hmm? Stranger have later. Why Stranger sad, hmm?”

Jack looks up, just in time to see the boy in the Timberlands turn around and punch the kid behind him. The punched kid jumps over the table and tries to swing back but misses. Meanwhile, Sandi is screaming “What the fuck, Jared?” and “Stop it!” as the two boys continue throwing punches that do not connect. Jack barks at the commotion and looks up at me, demanding an explanation. I reach down to pet him, and he ducks. “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” the other kids start chanting. Jack barks louder. Dr. Tom rushes forward and breaks up the fight, absorbing a wayward fist for his efforts. Before I can grab his collar, Jack dashes after Dr. Tom, yapping at his heels and demanding to be of service.

“This is so fucking stupid,” Sandi screams at her boyfriend. The woman that she called Becky is now steering her by the arm away from the boys. Becky places a tentative hand on her shoulder, which Sandi promptly slaps away. “He swore to me,” Sandi continues. “He swore that he was gonna stop doing this shit.”

Dr. Tom leads her boyfriend out of the room. And with one crisis seemingly resolved, Jack sprints over to Sandi, who has started to cry. She pets him absent-mindedly while she sobs. Whenever she stops petting, Jack pries up her hand with his nose and she starts again, but after a few minutes, she gets up and walks out of the room. Jack starts to follow, but I call him back to me. He takes a few more steps toward the door through which Sandi has disappeared but stops short of the threshold. When I finally get his attention, his eyes are wild with panic. He looks back and forth from me to the door several times before ambling back over to me. 

Dr. Tom returns five minutes later and mutters an apology. We try to continue, but Jack won’t touch the Board. For fifteen minutes, I cycle through disjointed anecdotes about Jack. Without the slightest gesture towards a conclusion, I thank everyone for listening, and hand Dr. Tom the microphone. He stands up and asks the remaining kids to give me a round of applause, which they do. Kind of. 

*

I pull into my driveway an hour later, and neither of us stir. I watch Jack in the vanity mirror. He is so still that I have to squint to be sure he is breathing. 

“Let’s go buddy,” I chirp. 

He opens his eyes but doesn’t stand up until I get out and open the back door for him. I lead him around the house and into the backyard to use the bathroom before we go inside. Jack sniffs at a few patches of frosted grass and then disappears into the darkness. A minute later, he’s back in the moonlit half of the yard, taking a dump beneath the jungle gym that the previous owners of the house had left behind. 

Inside, I turn on The Bachelor and wish that Derek had called tonight, rather than this afternoon, so I could tell him what a shitshow this evening was. How Jack is pouting on the couch beside me, letting loose these outrageous sighs every five minutes or so. And how, when we got inside, I asked him, “Jack sad, hmm?” and, instead of answering, he walked away from the Board. 

I know that Derek’s calls are charity, the penance he feels obliged to pay for walking out on me. Knowing this, I dial his number. When he answers I am silent. I hold up the phone to catch ambient television noises. Then I drag my phone across my jeans and say into it, “hi, sorry...butt dial.”

“Oh,” he says. “Is that The Bachelor I hear in the background?”

“You know it.”

“So how was Jack’s big night?”

“An absolute trainwreck.” I tell Derek all about Dr. Tom, the nun-like counselor ladies, the gargoyle-like audience, Sandi, the fight. “He won’t even go near the Board since we’ve been home.”

“Wow, sounds like he’s taking it pretty hard,” Derek says. 

“He wouldn’t eat his dinner either,” I add. 

“Well, tell him that I love him, will ya?” 

There is no button on the Board that means Derek. Once, before the Board, I could say to Jack, “Daddy’s home,” and he would run to the front door, anticipating Derek’s face. 

Jack ambles into the room, and I say out loud, “Jack, Daddy loves you.” 

He stops walking, and I have a split-second to imagine that Derek’s green eyes are blinking to life in Jack’s brain. But then he cocks his head at me and retreats to his bed in the far corner of the room.

“Well, I should get to bed,” Derek says. 

 When I get off the phone, Jack looks up at me from his bed. I pat my thigh and make a kissy noise. He stands up and stretches and makes his way across the room, but instead of joining me on the sofa, he stops at the Board. 

“Before, Jack no help stranger, hmm?”

I slide off the sofa and scooch over to join him. “Jack good boy,” I say. “Sometimes Jack help Stranger. Sometimes Jack no help Stranger. Jack always good boy.”

He marches in place. He doesn’t believe me. “Mom sad, hmm?”

“Yes, Jack,” I admit. “Mom sad.”

“Stranger sad...Jack no help. Mom sad...Jack no help.” 

Jack collapses onto his side and sighs. 

“Hey!” I say, almost scolding. “Don’t say that. Jack help Mom always.” Jack doesn’t look up. I scooch forward close enough to pet him. He sighs even louder. We stay like that for maybe fifteen minutes. 

Then, he’s up on his feet again. “Now who help stranger, hmm?” 

“Sometimes stranger sad, sad, sad,” I say. “No help stranger. Mom no help stranger. Jack no help stranger. Stranger no help Stranger.”

“Earlier, telephone, then Mom sad, hmm?”

“Yes.”

“Mom wants pond, hmm?”

Whenever I start crying, Jack pushes his face into mine and licks my forehead. The only time he licks. I wipe at my brow with the sleeve of my hoodie and start laughing. 

“Mom no need pond,” Jack says.

“Thank you, Jack,” I say. I make sure to let him see me smile. We get back on the couch together and he lets me spoon him. After two episodes of The Bachelor, he rolls off the couch and returns to the Board. 

“Mom, hmm?”

“Yes, Jack?”

“Jack no want buttons.” I tilt my head. His eyes are soft and searching, waiting to see how I will take this news. 

“Hmm?” I ask out loud.

“Tomorrow, Jack no want buttons,” he adds. “Later, Jack no want buttons. No buttons.”

“Okay, do you mean you never want buttons?” I ask. 

But he doesn’t know that word.

Colton Huelle is a friendly fiction guy hailing from scenic Manchester, NH. He is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. His work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, and Drunk Monkeys.