Prose

Emma Grey Rose

Angels Who Fly

She did not prepare me before I entered the room. She, the doctor. We sat in the waiting room.  

He had a heart attack, she said. He fell off an electric bike.  

Can I bring my child in? I asked.  

It’s best not to, she replied.  

Then she clasped her hands.  

But why not? I asked. How bad is it? 

Why don’t you go in first? she suggested. First room on your left.

Intensive Care, Neurology. 

There were tubes, everywhere. Your face was swollen, hands cut, a black eye, broken nose, dried blood, fractured ankle, monitors beeping, a camera above the monitors, and there was a nurse. The nurse said, I’m Becky.

What happened? I asked.

The doctor will talk with you more, she said. There’s some brain damage.

She was a small woman with long black hair, and she moved toward me as she spoke. I went to the bed.  

Are you the daughter? she asked.

Yes, I said.  

I touched your hand. Your finger flicked. Your eyes did not move. Your head was turned to the side. There was an open gash on your hand, where a wound had stopped bleeding. 

Come back to the room, Becky said. The doctor will explain.

What room? I asked.

The waiting room. I’ll take you there, she said.

We went back to the room. The one where you wait.  

Do you want some water? she asked.

Okay, I said.

I sat down. She brought back water. I stared at the cup. There were six chairs in the room. There was a painting of a field. The doctor knocked, twice, then opened the door.

She took a seat. She had blonde hair. There was a blue cap over it.  

She said, He came in as a John Doe.  

Where was he found? I asked.

Downtown, she said. He was admitted at 6:30 last night.

I nodded. I asked, What happened?

She did not start at the beginning. She started in the middle.  

She said, Well. The brain can only go so long without air before it starts to die. We don’t know how long he was without air.  

Then she paused.

She said, There was a bleed in the brain. The bleed happened first, the heart attack second. That is our theory, she concluded. 

A bleed?  I asked.

Yes, a stroke, she said.

She explained, With this type of stroke there is no paralysis. These bleeds are hard to detect. Someone can seem fine while they happen. But they can cause confusion, disorientation, and imbalance.

I stare off. You had called me just a few hours before.  

You’d said, I’m going home. I love you.

The theory of your accident was this: you were downtown. You were somewhere where you normally would not have been. Nobody knows why you were there. I don’t think you knew why either. The confusion, that was part of the problem. You were on the bike, and it was getting late. You were trying to get home. You had said, to everyone, that you were going home. But you were nowhere near it. 

You were alone, also.

The bleed had already started and by this time, it had progressed. That is some of the theory. The effect of this bleed, the imbalance, is what caused your crash.  

When you crashed, you suffered a blow.  

The helmet didn’t stop it. The doctors say, they think, you hit so hard you lost consciousness. That was key. That was the issue of all issues. Because what happened is that, when you landed, you landed in a way that cut off your airway.

And because you were not conscious, you did not move.

Then, your heart became stressed. Without the air. And that is what caused your heart attack. 

And that is what caused your brain damage.

And that is what caused your body to vomit.

And then someone came along.

I do not know who they were, and the doctors said they did not either. I do not know what they saw. I only know a few things. The blood and vomit did not stop them. They performed the CPR anyways. They called 911. They stayed with you, until the ambulance arrived. But they could not revive your heart. So, the medics took over. They checked your pulse. 

They could not find one.

They cut your clothes. Then used a defibrillator. Your ribs broke. Your heart restarted.  Then you were loaded up, in this ambulance, and taken into the ER.

In ER, you went into cardiac arrest again. For a second time.

They used a defibrillator. Your ribs were already broken. They restarted your heart. You were in a coma.  

I nodded. The doctor asked, Do you have any questions?

No, I said. 

DNR? she asked. Is he DNR? 

 She was cold. There was something about her that was robotic, strange.

Then she asked, Who is next of kin?

When she left, I hit the chair. I was angry. At whom? God? The doctor? The doctors who act like God? All of them.

In my head, I screamed.

The waiting room, I thought. What a special place.

You wait for good news, you wait for bad news. But just know, you are waiting. You wait for doctors, for scans, for results. They offer you water. As if you want water.  

No, I’d like a cigarette, I think. Fuck the water.

It is a room where people cry. Nobody is happy there, nobody is joyful. It is a room of sadness, waiting, more sadness. Hysterics, antics. The beginnings of depression. The room of death, that is what it is.

I made a phone call. I walked outside.

Later, I came back into the room. I came with someone you knew. We met downstairs first, in the cafeteria.  

To get to the room was an ordeal.  

A “visitor” had to walk through the front doors, allow a guard to search their bag, get in line (if it was busy), wait in line, walk to the front desk, tell the front desk which room they wanted to visit, wait for the receptionist to call the nurse and wait for the nurse to say it was fine to come up, walk to the elevator, wait some more, get in the elevator, wait again, and then finally, walk down a long, empty hallway.

That was how a “visitor” got into the ICU you were at.  

By waiting.

When we got there, Becky was doing what she called “neurology tests.” They were performed every hour. One test involved a flashlight. When the flashlight was used, the eyelid was lifted, the light was beamed on the pupil, and the pupil reacted.  

There was a new doctor in the room. He was young. He had brown hair. He leaned over you and said, We’re just waiting for him to wake up.

That sounds hopeful, I thought.  

I held your hand. I said, I love you, Dad.  

You squeezed. I said, I’ll be back.

You squeezed again.

I left then, at 6:00 pm. It was nearly on the dot and for some reason, I remember this fact clearly. Time became an important thing, suddenly.  

I called at 8:00 pm. I asked, How is he doing?

The nurse said, He’s okay.

She said, But he’s not responding to some of tests.

What does that mean? I asked.

His pupil is not reacting at all now. That’s what she said.  

*

I cleaned your house. Even though it was already clean. Your sister flew into town the next day. She was already flying in for a visit she had planned a few months before. She changed her flight and left early. Other family arrived. I put away your laundry. You had folded it and left it aside in a duffle bag on your bed. There was not much to do besides this.  

Roxy had died a month before. Roxy, the dog. It had devastated you, I know.  

She was put down on a sunny day. Later I dropped by. You were in your bedroom, folding a shirt. I asked, How are you doing?

Fine, you said.  

You seemed fine. But you always seemed that way. I knew you weren’t. Then you said something else. You placed the shirt on the bed.  

You said, It’s a season of death.

*

Your sister hugged me when she got to your house. We talked. I made us coffee. I drank a lot of coffee. That was to compensate for the lack of sleep.  

We went to the hospital. The doctor asked to see me. I did not see you first, I saw her. We went to the waiting room, again. She said, DNR. We need to talk about DNR.

What are the chances of recovery? I asked.

She would not give a clear answer. She never did. She would talk in circles. The circle always ended with this: DNR.

DNR, for you, was not just a do-not-resuscitate. It was to remove you from life support. Because you were relying on life support.   

I said, I’ll get back to you when I have an answer.  

She became frustrated. She started to talk in medical lingo.  

Then she said, Well. He may never be the same. He already is not the same. The dad you knew. He’s not there anymore.

I waited. She went on. She said, The stress of him just being here might be too much.

She thought—out loud, really—that maybe it would have been best if you had been left for dead. She said she wasn’t sure if it was right that the medics revived you. Because, her reasoning was, nobody knew how long you were without air. Now look. Look at what’s happening.

She said, I don’t know if it was morally right to do it.  

Then asked, Do you want to remove the life support?

It’s not just my decision, I said. I’ll let you know.

Can I see the MRI? I asked.

Ludicrous, I thought. To ask me to DNR you without even offering up the MRI. Her with her medical lingo. Her with her opinions. 

I didn’t get to see the MRI right away. So I went to see you instead. There you laid. The same position as before. But your face had more swelling. You were being pumped with all sorts of fluids and medications and the monitor had a bell on it that would ring every time one of those medications or fluids ran out.  

The nurse said, He is breathing on his own.

But that you were over breathing the vent.

And that if you could breathe on your own for long enough, the vent would be removed.  You were still responding to touch. Your reflexes, I mean.

I sat down in a chair. I ran my finger along yours. This time, it flicked. But not like before. There was no strength behind it. Just a flicker.

*

The next time I came in there was a new nurse. That nurse was chatty. He was the only nurse who liked to chat. He was also the only nurse who said, The last nurse didn’t perform any neurology tests.

He said, I’ll take care of this. 

With who? I don’t know. What I do know is that I liked him.

I looked at the monitors. I looked at you. I asked the nurse, Why aren’t his pupils responding to the light anymore?

He said, Because of the bleed.

What is happening, he explained, Is the bleed has spread. When it spreads, other areas of the brain begin to die.

He went on, I used to work in the ER. We see this all the time in the ER. People come in just fine. They’re talking. They’re moving. Within hours, they’re like this.

How terrible, I thought. Really terrible. 

I stayed with you for a while. As long as I could. It was hard to look at you from the right side of the bed. That was because the swelling in and around your eyes was bad. It caused your eyelids not to close all the way. I had a hard time on that side of the bed. It was harder for me to talk as if everything is fine.

So I sat on the other side.  

And I talked to you like nothing had happened. I did this for a multitude of reasons. One of which being this: I didn’t know if you could hear me but if you could, I wanted you to know I was there.

I said things like, It’ll be okay, Dad.

I told you how my day went. I updated you on the people you knew and how they were doing. I let you know that I handled things at work for you. I did not let everything go to shit. I talked about the weather. I lamented on your diet. 

I said, I bet it’s bad. A liquid diet. I imagine it’s bad. 

I talked with you as if you are going to come home, for certain. That’s because I did not want to freak out. And I did not want you to freak out either. 

*

The MRI was provided. Once again, in the waiting room. I had come to think of this as a Hell room. It was a place of torture. Under a painting of a field. And with this doctor who incessantly asked whether or not she could remove your life support. The only thing missing from this room was Satan.

The doctor rolled in a computer. She clicked around on the screen. She did not explain the MRI, she only showed it. I stared at the monitor. There was your MRI.  

She said, He came in as a level three coma.

I said, But I was told he was a level four.

Level four? she asked. Who said that?

One of the nurses, I said.  

That’s wrong, she said. He’s a level three.

Is he a three or a four? [MA2] I wondered. Who do I trust?  

She asked, What’s the name of the nurse?

I don’t know, I said.  

But I provided a description. I felt sorry for that nurse. To be at the mercy of this woman. She sounded angry. Her face was red, again. She said, I’ll talk to him.

Your sister asked, What does a normal MRI look like?

The doctor smiled as she talked. She pointed to the fuzzy outline of your brain. She said, That’s the damage.  

Then she started to search for normal MRIs on the web. She stuttered. Nerves, maybe. Or maybe she just didn’t know what she was talking about.

I asked, Will you do another MRI?

No, she said. This is it. You can get a second opinion if you want. But I’ve already talked to that team. They’ll tell you the same thing I said.

What is the point then? I wondered. Of having a second team?

She droned on. Then asked, If your father goes into cardiac arrest again, do you want us to attempt to resuscitate? I need this for the records.

*

There was a woman who talked with me after, in your room. She needed me to fill out paperwork. The paperwork was related to medical insurance. Then she made comments. She asked, Does he have a will?

I didn’t answer. Was it her business? I asked myself. I filled out the papers. There was one paper that asked where you would be transferred if you needed to be transferred. I put down the VA. She took the paperwork. She asked, He’s a veteran?

Yes, I said. He is.

She asked, And he doesn’t have a will? My husband is a veteran. They think they’re so big and tough until something happens to them.  

I stopped listening to her after that. I looked over at you, in the state you were in. I looked back at her. 

How dare she? I thought.  

That evening the doctor called me on the phone. It had only been a few hours. She asked again, Are you ready to remove life support?  

I said, I don’t have an answer for you yet. No agreement has been made.

She pushed back. She said, I’ll call you again.

She was God, clearly. There was no time to pray. There was no time for discussion. There was no time to come to agreements. There was only time to pull plugs. She was a happy plug puller. She may as well of ridden her medical high horse through the entire ICU ward with her doctor’s coat flapping behind her, yanking out plugs. Smiling the whole way through.

I said to her, No. I’ll call you.

Then the line went dead.  

Sacrilegious bitch, I thought.

*

I went to the bar you were at before the accident. I smoked a lot outside on the patio. I watched the cars go by and took a phone call. The bar was busy. The cars drove fast. I wondered about the people driving in them. I wondered how their days were going. I did not smile at the people who walked by. I looked away.  

I lit more cigarettes. I thought of you.

I sat down inside. I asked someone what you normally ordered. Everyone knew you there. Someone answered me. I stared at the menu until my eyes fell on it.

Then I started to cry. This was not a normal type of cry. It was a painful one. There was nothing in me that could stop it and so I excused myself.

I went into the restroom. I opened a stall. Then closed the door.   

I’m not sure how long I was in there. Your sister came to check on me. I said I was okay. I came out of the stall.  

I returned to the bar, and I did not order what you liked. Instead, someone ordered for me. Because I said I wasn’t having anything. They paid for it, also. It was a kind gesture. When the food came out, I didn’t eat it.

*

I read medical journals. I read about comas and heart attacks and heart attacks that weren’t stopped fast enough. My head was filled with statistics. Coma statistics, heart attack statistics, stroke statistics. I read that most people who suffer heart attacks that aren’t treated immediately go into a coma. That is everyone who has a heart attack and is alone and cannot dial 911. That is a lot of people. I read that those who go into a coma are usually taken off life support quickly. There is not much literature on the rates of survival. Because most people aren’t given the chance to survive. But there are a few cases of people who do and some of them make a full recovery.  

One lady who did called herself a miracle.

Flowers were sent. Flowers were left at your doorstep. I cleaned your house again. I picked up some cake at the suggestion of your sister. This would make us feel better. I lit your candles. You had a collection of candles and I suppose that when I lit them, it felt like you were home.

I paced around your house. At my house, I paced just the same.

I dreamed about you. I could not sleep at night. I was told that my face was breaking out. I did not care. The day of your accident replayed over and over in my mind. I thought of the phone call.

When I could, I came to see you. I chain smoked cigarettes all day long. Sometimes I stopped at the cafeteria, bought a meal, sat down at the table, and threw it away. I drank caffeine constantly. My conversations with you became less lighthearted. When I had nothing positive to talk about, I just sat. I held your hand. When I came alone, I cried. That was only when the room was empty, when I was the only visitor. Which was not often. There were always visitors. There was a nurse who saw me crying. She was not your nurse, but she was an ICU nurse. 

She came into the room, wrapped her hands around the back of my shoulders, and asked, Why are you here by yourself?

Her touch was uncanny. It was unexpected. I did not turn to face her and so she leaned her face in next to mine. I felt her hair fall against my cheek.

Because someone had to watch my kid, I thought. Because I am divorced. Because I’m not seeing anyone. Because I have no other real family. Because I am here, in San Diego, alone now. What was it to her? Who was she?

I did not like her questioning me. I did not want her pity. All I wanted was to sit with you, alone. The only visitor.  

We had a moment to ourselves, I thought. And she’s ruined it.  

She let go, eventually. Then went on with her shift.

I asked, Dad. Do you remember our plans? We had a lot of plans. 

To me—the thought of you dying—could not happen. My mother had already died. That was only three years ago. You were not supposed to die anytime soon. You were not old. You were not sick. If you were, you had to get better. We had to stick things out together.  

Me and you.

I thought about things at your bedside. There were things that had happened. Right before you died. Things that did not make sense. Things that medicine and science could not explain[MA3] . I rolled it over in my head. I held your hand some more. I cried again. A nurse told me that some tape had been placed over your eyelids. To try to keep them closed.    

A premonition, I thought. You had a premonition of your death.

*

There was one phone call that stuck out to me over all other phone calls. It was the one I made at midnight. I called the ICU. I asked for your room. The nurse picked up. I asked, How is he doing?

Well, she said. His blood pressure has dropped.

 I saw you that morning. You were put on a medication to raise your blood pressure. Over the next few days, things would go downhill. Your heart would beat abnormally. I saw the rhythm changes on a long sheet of paper. The nurse pointed out where you had a normal heartbeat. Then she pointed out where you didn’t.

There were breathing tests. During these tests, the life support vent was shut off. For a while, you were doing okay. You would breathe on your own. You did not breathe great, but you were doing it.  

But around the time that your blood pressure dropped, you stopped breathing on your own.  

The doctor with the brown hair came into the room that day. He said, We need to test his brain function.

He left the room. The nurse took over. She explained that what she would do is place some water in your ears. If you did not shake your head or move it in response to the feeling of water, then another MRI would be done.

I waited around the hospital. I went outside. The test was given. I sat back down at the bedside. The doctor entered. He said, He passed the test.

That’s good, I thought.

Your sister was there. We both said to one another, That’s good.

She held your hand. About an hour later, the doctor reappeared. He said, I’m sorry.  There was some confusion.  

 Then he said you failed the test.

 So my gut sank. So the MRI was performed.

*

Your coma lasted for exactly one week. That is not a calculation by the hour, only by the days. You went into a coma on a Sunday. Your coma ended on a Sunday.

The way your coma ended was because of the MRI result.  

Your sister and I sat in the room. The same doctor with the brown hair sat down with us. He said he would show us the MRI.

This time, there was no waiting. He pulled it up on the computer that the nurses used. The monitors beeped. They were always beeping.

He pointed to the brain scan. Then he began to talk.  

He said, Do you see how there’s no gray area here in the brain?

He pointed again. The scan showed the outline of your brain and inside the area of the brain, everything was white.

At first, I thought this was okay. At first, I did not understand.

I could not remember what your last MRI looked like. And so I asked, What does it mean? Is his brain functioning?

He shook his head. He said, No. I’m sorry.

He said, He’s brain dead.

And then I covered my face. And I said, But he’s my best friend.

And I cried in a way that was violent.  

*

The way it was explained to me was that in the State of California, brain death meant that you have legally died. And in California, someone who has suffered brain death cannot be kept alive.  

So arrangements were started. I was asked, When do you want to remove life support?

A time was set for later that day.

I drove from the hospital to your house. I was sick of the hospital. I was sick of the parking garage. I found it unbelievable that everyone had to pay to use the garage. Just to visit someone. A sick person. You had to pay. Despicable, I thought. The greed.

The parking passes began to accumulate inside my car. They were orange reminders that you were not well. That this was all happening. I hated the parking passes. I drove home and thought about how much I hated all of it.

You lived across from the beach. Because I lived near you, I was often at that beach. So I was familiar with the street across from your house. I walked across that street and smoked. I answered my phone.  

The woman asked, Can I speak with Emma?

I said, Yes. This is her.

Great, she said. I’m Rochelle.

She was with a company in San Diego. She was calling about your organs. Because, she said, You were on the organ donor list.

I said, But he isn’t.

No, she said. He is.

It was warm outside. There were people out. I looked down at my feet and started to pace the sidewalk. I asked, What list? I’m sure there’s a mistake.

The DMV list, she said.

Are you sure? I asked.

Yes, she said. I’m sure.

I said, He just died. Why do you call with this right after he’s died? 

She said, I’m sorry. I didn’t know he just died. The doctor didn’t tell me that.

I said, His organs. You want his organs. So you call right after he’s died.

The doctor should have told me this, she said. She blamed the doctor.

You couldn’t wait? I asked. You couldn’t wait for even a day?

I’m really sorry, she said. I didn’t know he just died.

So I said, He’s not on a list. I know he’s not on a list and you’re not getting his fucking organs.

Then I hung up.

*

There were two people in the room that day when your life support was set to be removed. Myself and your sister.  

What happened was this: the whole thing was stopped.

The nurse was nervous. I could tell by the way she talked. She was the one with the long hair. She said, There’s a problem. Your father is an organ donor.

I said, He’s not. I know him. He’s not on the list.

Then things escalated.  

They escalated because of what was called “hospital policy.” Because of this, a different doctor came into the room. He was higher up than any of the other doctors. He said, I’m really sorry you’re going through this.  

That was the first thing he said.  

He had gray hair and a blue cap over his head. He sat down. He started to talk about your condition. He said, If your father hadn’t landed the way he did, he would be fine right now. It was a minor bleed.

He took a piece of paper and a pen off the nurse’s desk.  

He drew a brain and a stem. He placed the pen down and marked a spot on the paper.  

He said, This was where the bleed was. It was nothing serious.  

He went on to talk about hospital policy.  

He said, Because there’s a discrepancy between what you are saying and the information we have about his donor status, there will be a twenty-four review.  

A review? I asked.

Yes, he said. Until it’s straightened out, we can’t do anything for twenty-four hours.  

He explained further. He said that if someone was on a donor list, they are not removed from life support until after their organs have been harvested.  

That can include anything, really. Their eyes, heart, lungs. They are cut open in a room by themselves. Someone dissects them. Nobody is allowed to see this person after the dissection takes place.

Because it may be gruesome, I thought. To see someone after they have been cut apart and fileted like a fish.  

There is only one person who sees them and that is whoever dissects them. When it is finished, the plug is withdrawn.

And they die alone.

*

I saw you again that night. You were brain dead. I still went. I started to wonder about your soul. I started to think about the body and the soul.  

The nurse had changed. It was night shift.

She had another nurse with her. They were busy on the computer. The fluids were still being pumped into you. She told me they were “matching you.” Which meant, they were matching bits and pieces of you to someone else. Because you were a donor.  

I didn’t say anything.  I just stayed with you.

Was your soul trapped? I wondered. Had it already left?

It couldn’t have, I thought. Because although your brain had died, your body had not.  The longer you were kept this way, alive but unable to think, the longer your soul would be stuck. The longer it would take for you to go home. The longer you would suffer.

Making him suffer, I thought. All for his organs. Money, organs.  

I called later. Just to check on you. It was the night nurse again. Before we got off the phone, she said one thing.  

She said, You’re going against your father’s wishes.

I didn’t argue with her. I said, Mhm. Have a good night.

*

I got a voicemail the next morning from the doctor who drew the brain map.  

He said, You are correct. Your father was on a donor list but removed himself. 

Then he said that nature had taken its course. He said that no DNR decisions had to be made.  

He said, You can remove him from life support when you’re ready.  But if you change your mind, you can still make him a donor.

They just don’t stop, I thought. First, they say I’m going against your wishes. They go out of their way to make this clear. Berate me, even. Even though I know better. Because I know you better than they do. I know you better than they think I do. But then they ask if I want to go against your wishes now. Because it’s not what they wanted. Because they wanted your organs.

The hypocrisy of it. I thought about that.

Your sister was due to fly out that evening. I called the nurse.  

She said, You can come right now.

We went back to the hospital. I took your Bible with me. I parked the car. Then paid the parking. The walk to the front doors did not feel good. It felt long. There was a line to get up to the rooms. We waited in line. More waiting.  

I was agitated. A new doctor was there. She had a soft voice. She apologized for what had happened.

I asked, Does the hospital check what that company says?  

She said, I know. We are looking into this. Trust me, we are looking into it.

I nodded. I thought, how many people are carted off? People who had removed themselves from the list.  

The doctor said, I’m going to tell you what will happen. 

She said all the tubes would be removed. And a pain medication would be given. If that was okay with us.

She said, We don’t want him to feel like he’s drowning. That’s what the medication is for. It prevents that.

I asked, Do you know if he can feel? Even though he’s brain dead.

She said, We don’t know. We don’t know what he can feel.

There was a nurse I had never seen before. And the nurse with the long black hair was also there. That nurse asked if we wanted anything to drink. She offered to bring us lunch.  

I said, Okay.  

The doctor said, Some people choose to be in the room when the tubes are removed. But you don’t have to be.

I asked, Is there a reason not to be?

It can be upsetting, she said. To watch.

Graphic, I thought. It must be graphic.

I’ll leave the room, I said.

There was a waiting period, where the hospital staff gets ready to do this. In that period, the lunch trays were brought up. I remember the food. There were juice cups and big cardboard cases of coffee and tea. Cups, sandwiches. I took a bite of a sandwich.

I felt guilt. What a terrible time to eat, I thought. I shouldn’t eat.

Then the process started.  

We were taken outside the room and the curtain was closed. We waited in the hall. The tape was removed from your eyes. They took the tubes from your throat. They shut the machines off.

The nurse with the long hair left the room. So did the doctor. There was one nurse left and it was the one I’d never seen before. She came out and said, You can come in.

We did.  

Your sister played a song. It was a gospel. I opened the Bible and sat beside you. I did not plan out what I would read. Instead, I chose a page at random. I read from it.  

The nurse said, That’s a beautiful song.

Briefly, I hugged you. I pulled away only because I became aware of your heartbeat. I could hear it. I did not want to hear it stop. So I sat back down. Instead, I took your hand. The swelling disappeared from your face. That was because the fluids had been stopped. I saw the way your eyes opened. I saw the way they stayed open.  

That will never leave me. That tore me apart.

I prayed for you. Your sister put her arms out above you and prayed also.  

I prayed that God forgive your sins. Whatever they were. I prayed that He take your soul. I thought of the drowning sensation.  

I stroked your arm. You had freckles that went up the arm. I saw your chest move, just a little. I worried that you weren’t really brain dead. I wondered if you knew what was happening. As we held hands, you squeezed.

You did so hard. I had to let go because your hand contracted so tightly. Your fingers bent in, and the knuckles turned red. They stayed that way and I turned to the nurse. I asked, Is this normal?

She got up. She said, Yes. It’s a reflex.

But I thought you couldn’t move. I thought you had no reflexes left. That’s what I was told. The nurse took your fingers in her hand, and she pulled them out. They relaxed.

I lost track of time.  

Until the doctor came back. The one with the soft voice. She put her stethoscope to your chest. Then she said, He’s passed.

And I stood up then. I touched your hand. I said, I love you.

Even though you were already gone.

A memoir

April 2023

Emma Grey Rose is a writer based in San Diego, California. Her poetry has been published in deLuge Literary and Arts Journal, Pinky Thinker Press, the San Diego Poetry Annual, Bear Paw Arts Journal, and Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature.

Alida Winternheimer

A Vague Association Between Self and Object

We do not make sense, even to ourselves, without our chronologies. The past and the present become one, and there is only today. But when the “I” is confused, which day is today? Which “I” is present? The “I” dissolves in time without order like a drop of ink in a lake, the edges spreading, diffusing. And the spot of ink at the essential core, the lake of time will eat it, too.  

There are signs throughout the house, printed in fat, chisel-edged permanent marker, that instruct, “To Poo. Lift seat, lower pants, sit on toilet. Go poo, wipe, flush, pull up pants, wash.” The signs have evolved in both their simplicity and directness as my dad’s dementia has progressed. The first signs said things like, “Do not throw anything away.” My dad liked to ransack my mother’s piles of mail; bills, paperwork, and essential bits of paper kept going missing. The toilet instructions have been on the walls for a while, but today I discovered new signs upstairs, single words, critical markers, “Bathroom” and “Toilet.” His confusion has surpassed multi-step instructions and now necessitates the straightforward task of identifying the room, the critical fixture. My mom said, “If he starts wandering around, ask him if he needs to go to the bathroom.” I am reminded of puppies and toddlers.

My dad has Lewy body dementia, which includes Parkinson’s-like symptoms, drooping facial muscles, shuffling gait, trembling hands, and hallucinations. The house has become crowded with my dad’s imaginary friends.

A little boy, white blond, sun-kissed-gold. He plays in his front yard on a street lined with palms. It is 1950, he is in his imagination, a play land where cowboys and Indians ride horseback over a dusty landscape. Darryl is a cowboy, red felt hat stitched in white, a six-shooter strapped to his hip, paper caps that snap-bang!, while inside the pink Las Vegas rambler, his mother, a school teacher, cuts his sandwich into triangles.

My dad carries a small scar at the corner of his eye from the time his little brother shot an arrow at him. Nana, my grandmother, told me how he came running into the house, crying, his hand over his face, and in that panicked moment she thought he had lost an eye. Today, the television plays old Westerns, the worst kind of shoot-em-ups, full of stereotypes, swaggering ranchmen, saloon girls, and tumbleweeds. I cringe at the Mexican gunman named Amigo and the doe-eyed squaw in her buckskin fringe. When I was growing up, my dad went through the resurgence of Westerns enthusiastically with the rest of America. He bought a copy of Dances with Wolves and became a fan of Clint Eastwood’s mature work. We have no idea why the intolerable Western channel plays today, every day, all day. We loiter in the kitchen away from the clatter of hoofbeats and pop of Winchesters and Colts. Maybe these films, in all their outright badness, take him back to his own childhood landscape of dusty flats, jagged peaks in the near distance, water a commodity. Maybe that world, in its black-and-white simplicity, makes sense to him now or maybe it’s just familiar. Maybe it is marking how far away from us he has gone.

When we received his diagnosis, my dad liked to tell people he was dying. “They told me I have dementia.” He’d cast his gaze away and mutter, “Whatever that is.” Then back to his audience, “So, I’m dying now.” Mom and I assured him it did not mean he was dying, but we could not explain what it meant. We did not yet know ourselves.

The doctor who gave us this somber news sat behind his desk, Mom, Dad, and I across from him. He said, “A person with dementia does not remember who he was, so he doesn’t miss what he’s lost.” While that sunk in, the doctor addressed Dad. “How do you feel? Do you feel any different today than you did a month ago?”

“I feel good.” Dad’s tone left no doubt as to the conviction of his statement. “In fact, I don’t really know what all this is about. If the doctor says I have dementia, then I guess I’ve got it.”

“You see?” the doctor said to us. “In a lot of ways, it’s a blessing they don’t know what they’ve lost.”

I imagine it is better to not know who you were yesterday, so you cannot regret all that is seeping away from you. Your personality. Your personhood. And yet, just the idea of it sets me to grieving my own, so far, imaginary losses.

Dad couldn’t understand why he had to stop driving, though the clearest and most dangerous early indicators of dementia manifested behind the wheel. We could not order him—it’s not how the world works—so my mom explained to the doctor. The doctor in his white coat delivered the edict. Mom continued to hide the car keys, but whenever Dad griped, we had a new refrain. “Because the doctor says so.”

A young man, blond hair turning sandy, dresses for a date in a short-sleeved, woven, button-up shirt. He splashes on some cologne and considers adding a tie. Why not? His date is young, bubbling over with excitement. He’s not her boyfriend, but her chaperone. As a favor to his best friend, Darryl escorts Larry’s little sister to a concert at the Convention Center, a concert he can’t even enjoy for all the girlish screams drowning out the band. It is 1964. Some twenty years later, his daughter will be impressed that he saw The Beatles live. Then, as now, he will shrug and say, “It wasn’t a big deal.” 

Knowing my parents as a unit, Momandad, it was hard to imagine them as individuals, even harder to imagine them young, carefree. There is a photo of my dad with a group of young men, five or six. They wear matching t-shirts with extremely wide black and white horizontal stripes. Their hair is crewcut. They hold bottles of Budweiser and smile the smiles of youth, of mischief, of good times. This photo has always intrigued me, because there is a story behind it, a story I will never know. I am left with scraps of remembrances—things mentioned over the years, images from the past, his habits and manners I grew up with—that I stitch together, hungry for the stories I did not bother to gather.

Today, I come in and he watches me, mutters something like a greeting. Then, a flash of light animates his eyes, his smile, “Hi, honey.” I know he knows me, it is in the familiar look, the upward inflection in his voice. And then it is gone, a flicker only. 

For long stretches between these signs of life, he sits, his face hanging in a jowly approximation of my dad. He is stooped and shuffling, seldom lucid. He hallucinates. We catch one-sided conversations, like being privy to an ongoing phone call, some incoherent, some incomprehensible, some flashes of his past. Sometimes, he speaks so loud and clear I can hear him in the other room, in conversation. The curtain drops all too fast on this theatre of the past. I’d rather have the play than the bare stage, empty house, lights down.

I wonder where he is, and I appreciate the hallucinations. They place him somewhere, whether past or imaginary. The emptiness terrifies me. I would rather leave this existence than become nobody in nowhere. His mother, my Nana, had ALS. Her mind remained whole and present while her body became, slowly, over a surprising number of years, her prison. Mind. Body. Which would you rather lose? When would you be ready to exit the stage? Before Dad. Before Nana. But…if Dad’s consciousness is journeying on other planes of existence, as some people suggest, then maybe black-and-white Westerns are only a placeholder. Maybe the rare flicker of recognition is Dad popping back in to let me know he loves me, even if he is mostly gone elsewhere on business possibly important. It is a nice thought.

Darryl comments on the shape his right arm is taking while flexing the biceps. It is the arm that swings the hammer. And lifts the beer can, he jokes. He is tan, wearing swim trunks, a man in, or perhaps slightly past, his prime. He calls his mother-in-law Ma—the only person who can get away with it—and repairs her deck (or whatever she needs), hence the hammer. He drinks beer and jokes with his brothers-in-law while the children run and swim. These are sunny days on the lake, surrounded by a big family. Good times he will always enjoy, always remember. Even Orel, the reticent, cranky father-in-law, likes Darryl. Everyone likes Darryl; he is good humored and handy. In a family like this, every year there is a birth, a graduation, a wedding. Eventually, the funerals will start and the siblings will be counting down from ten, twenty with spouses, ticking off lives, ending an era. But now, he is living the era, and it may be the happiest era of his life.  

Today, my dad sits slumped in his recliner, a Nobody Home sign slung casually across his face. The vacancy is a stark contrast to the man he was: loving and funny, humorously sarcastic, occasionally biting. Dad liked taking care of his family. Whenever I needed his help, like when my last car died, stranding me on the highway, he came right away and was there through my first solo car-buying experience. Just like that. It is a dad’s prerogative to do for his children. Whether or not I still exist in his world, it is now my prerogative to do for him. It is not enough, what I do, but I offer it up. Daughter.

When my partner and I took care of Dad for five days, Mom instructed us. “His lunch. White bread only. Lightly toast it. He likes mayo on one slice, then the cheese. Microwave it for fifteen seconds to soften the cheese. Then put on the lunch meat. He likes a lot. On the other slice of bread, the mustard, Dijon, but he likes yellow on hot dogs.” I took fast notes, my hand already cramping, and we laughed at the uncompromising specificity of his demands, which if unmet would result in the grouchy old man version of a tantrum. “Cut his pills into thirds and hide them in the dressing.” Ah, if I fail the sandwich, a day’s medication could be lost. The night meds go in his ice cream. I kept thinking, Puppies and toddlers.

I assured Mom we would be fine, all of us. Go, have a good time, and our phones were silent. That was all we wanted, for Mom to be off-duty.

For the duration of our stay, I banned the Western channel. The alternative, HGTV, ran in the background every hour of the day Dad was awake, and soon the remodelers blurred together with the flippers and realtors and hopeful buyers. Before each branch in the remodel decision tree came a commercial break longer than the segment, hypnotizing us into disease: every green-meadow-smiling-couple-bicycles-happy-woman-playing-children also warns in fine print, with a deeply authoritative voice suddenly rushing the text, “may cause death.”

Everything, it seems, may cause death, and yet how slowly it comes.

When I did not sit in an HGTV-fueled stupor, mentally trapped between arthritis-diabetes-MS-asthma-erectile-disfunction, I thought about causes. Pointless, I know, for the horse has long since bolted. Big Ag, PFAS, glyphosate on everything—my dad buttered his cookies. I do not mention these thoughts to my mom; what would be the point of sharing them now, now that dementia is being called Type 3 Diabetes? Some day we will look at the Baby Boomer’s epidemic of neurological decline and shake our heads. Our lament, “If only we had known.” 

My best friend has a pact with her husband. It goes, “If I lose my mind, stick me in a (reasonably nice) home and get on with your life.” It is a good plan. So many of my friends say things like, “I’ll hike into the woods and let the elements do me in.” One said he wanted to be left on a mountain top. I said, “Sure, but who’s going to drag your old ass up the mountain?” And added, for clarity, “Not me.” I might proclaim that I, too, would end my days in the wild, suicide by nature, if I knew I could manage it myself. But I have no such delusions. Whatever infirmity would lead me to this decision would equally preclude me from acting on it. My friends’ pact is a sound one. 

Memory care costs begin around $10,000 per month. A household of two can live comfortably on less than $4,000 per month; in fact, the state calculates that figure to be 150% of the Federal Poverty Level, which in 2023 was about $3,700 per month. With one person entering a home, the same couple’s financial needs will triple, from $3-4,000 per month to around $13,000 per month. Just like that. My parents are not millionaires and do not have long term care insurance. The math puts my parents and millions of Americans like them into a quandary: how to take care of the one while preserving the other? It is a financial question, but it is also an emotional and spiritual question. The harder the caretaker works to provide a positive quality of life for the spouse, the further into the red her own quality of life slips, until that negative balance seems impossible to recover. I hope that when we finally manage to settle my dad in a home, he is as happy as it is possible for him to be. And I hope that my mom can recover her health, her peace, her identity as other than my dad’s keeper.

Today, I arrive at my parents’ house, bearing dinner and cake for Mom’s birthday. Dad shuffles through the hallway, muttering to himself. I say, “Hi Dad,” in a near shout. We don’t bother with his hearing aids. My dog passes him, heading for the kitchen to snuffle along the edge of the cabinets for crumbs. He utters a sound of surprise, smiles, waggles his fingers in her direction, and goes shuffling down the hall. I announce myself again, loud and bright, but nothing. My dog has passed through his world, but I cannot penetrate it. 

“He’s been that way all day,” Mom says. “It took an hour and a half to get him downstairs.” 

Puppies and toddlers are easier. Pick them up and get on with it.

Moving Dad requires coaxing, encouraging, and cajoling. It requires step-by-excruciatingly-slow-step instructions. The day I showered Dad, he had been agreeable to the idea of bathing, and I managed to maneuver him from his chair in front of the television across the house, up the stairs, down the hallway, and into the bathroom, which went surprisingly well and only took about twenty minutes. With that kind of progress, I expected to have him in the tub in no time, sudsing his thinning hair. 

Something short-circuited when we got to the boxers. I might be tempted to think it modesty. But being there with him, suggesting repeatedly that he drop his drawers, I can tell you it was not modesty. Maybe I was his daughter, but I suspect I was only some nice lady looking after him. I belonged there, but how I fit in felt all fuzzy around the edges. His inability to remove his boxers had nothing to do with me, but with his fragile mind, where something crackled, wires crossed or disconnected, and suddenly sense could not be made. He put his hands on the waistband, said, “What? These?” And I replied, “Yes, Dad. Pull your boxers down.” But before the words were out, he was elsewhere, where as mysterious as how to retrieve him. He did finally get into the tub, still in his boxers, stepping over the side surprisingly well. I showed him a shower chair I had bought for him. Like the boxers, it did not register. He patted it, but could not sit. One of the mysteries of dementia is the lost connections where you least expect them, like “chair” and “sit.” 

I read that difficulty telling time is one of the first signs of dementia. At first this seemed strange, since telling time, right up there with tying shoelaces, is among the earliest life skills we learn. But think about what strange things clocks are. Sixty seconds in one minute. Sixty minutes in one hour. Twenty-four hours in one day. Twelve hours on a clock face. Two hands, one long and one short. The long one moves every sixty seconds, the short one every sixty minutes, ticking off one numeral for every turn the long hand takes around the face. Don’t even get started on the second hand, that skinny devil racing round, lapping the other hands over and over and over. It makes perfect sense, then, that clocks would be one of the first connections to unplug, and with them time. 

One of Dad’s prized possessions is his Rolex, an anniversary gift from Puritan, a menswear company he worked for as a sales rep. I did not know how important it was to him until he developed dementia. He wore it daily, fretted when it wound down and stopped telling a time he could no longer read. My mom wasn’t sure how to set the delicate mechanism, and I became the only person who could bring the Rolex back to life. Whenever I saw my parents, I set the watch, while Dad urged me on. My dad’s days, spent before the television, no longer provided enough movement for the self-winding watch. Our minds, like the Rolex, are self-winding, and if we stop moving, they wind down, losing minutes, then hours, then so many precious days.

My mom has lost countless precious days, too, caring for him, captive to his needs. His confusion eats away her days. His incontinence ruins her nights. She has not had a good night of sleep for years; she accomplishes next to nothing in a week of minding her husband. She has reached the end of her ability to care for Dad. He was diagnosed in 2018, though his decline is traceable to 2015. I saw this day coming from way back there, knew she would not be ready to find her husband a new home until she had spent herself in his care. About a year ago, out of the blue, Dad told her, “I don’t want to go to a home. Don’t put me in a home.” It was a rare moment, not only for the lucidity, but the clear intent of his statement, the awareness of his circumstances. How could my mother think of herself after that? She told me only recently, finally, “I am done.”

I have found a (reasonably nice) home for Dad, comfortable and staffed with good people. I wonder how many of the people in these homes receive dwindling visits or none at all. Their position in the lives of their families slips away, a progressive demotion from dad to acquaintance. I do not want my dad to experience this, but will I have the stamina to maintain a routine of visits when I myself have gone through dementia’s demotion process?

We laugh when my mom recounts some of the things my dad says. He asks if they are married. He asks where she is when standing right beside him. He asks about his other wife. This after fifty-seven years of marriage. I would not mind if he had another wife. Imagine how much relief it would be to halve my mom’s burden. In the end, dementia makes strangers of us, the beloved.

Today, I watch Dad put the dish towel in the junk drawer. He folds it, places it, and manages to mostly close the drawer, then walks away with his slow, stooped shuffle. This constant misplacing of items is the least of things that wears on my mom, like having a slow, benign poltergeist in the house. When Dad is settled, I imagine birds will sing again, rainbows arc through the sky, and she won’t know what to do without the bang and clatter of the Wild West, the ghost of her husband roaming the halls of their life together. 

The sea is up, four-foot waves splash over the yacht’s side, cold Lake Superior water. Twenty-plus knot winds stretch her sails taut. She holds a sharp heel, toe rail skimming the lake. Darryl stands at the helm, feet planted, body angled to counter the slant of the boat, keep head and shoulders level with the horizon, squinting in the wind and spray. His wife and two children sit on the high side of the cockpit, all of them in foul weather gear and harnesses clipped to the safety cables. When he calls, “Ready about,” it is both notification and command. They shout, “Ready!” Him again, “Hardalee!” They work together, family, team, crew, releasing the main and the loaded jib, port; hauling in the sheet, cranking the winch, starboard. The boom swings across the cabin and the sail changes, luffing as it shifts, catching the wind again. She comes about, changes heel. It is exhilarating, all of it, and he is here, with his family. Alive, so alive! 

I never sit in my dad’s leather chair, as though it radiates the aura of him, as though to sit in it would be to sit, somehow, in him. When he has last vacated this chair, I think I will try it and see what I can feel of his imprint, if the old warmth of his former self is somehow retained in the favorite cushions. Or if it is a void no longer to be filled, like so much of him. 

Today, he sits there in his long, red, wool coat with the wood toggle buttons and coarse braided loops. It is showing wear, but remains a beautiful coat, classic, a stand-out in the world of nylon parkas. My dad has always worn it well, being a fashionable man, a clothier. The vibrant red contrasts my dad’s pallor, the white of his beard. I will remember him this way, in the upright red coat.

Memory care is a sweet euphemistic term for a residential facility where people need their names sewn into their clothing, where, we were told, they freely and without conflict, “shop” each other’s wardrobes. Only a few weeks ago, the idea made me smile: my dad collecting his fellows’ clothing and laying it out on a bed or dining table to assemble outfits. This is what he did his entire adult life, as a young man working in a clothing store, then as a sales rep for various clothing lines, finally as the proprietor of his own shop. My dad showed his customers possibilities in knits, wovens, woolens. He had a strong aesthetic and found lines that belonged in a specialty shop for their detailing and workmanship—pants came unhemmed, were pinned in the store, and sent to a tailor, who turned impeccable cuffs. Dad made his customers feel good and dressed them for the season in style. I imagined him, only a few weeks ago, enacting that scene in his retail store, while in reality he laid out whatever garments were at hand, various names printed on their bands. Already, that comforting image has been taken from me by the passing of too little time, the unpredictable downward spiral of dementia that robs and robs and robs again. 

It seems we discover what is at the core of a person’s identity by watching everything else fall away. The core, I now know, is not people, not relationships. As my dad has lost his hold on us, his loved ones, he has retained three things: clothing, sailing, and his hot rod. Clothing, because he was really good at it, and it was his creative outlet and how he made his place in the world. 

Sailing, because he loved it. When I was young, my parents decided to buy a sailboat, certainly my dad drove the pursuit. My mother and brother went to an evening class to learn to sail, but I don’t actually know how my dad became a sailor. Never much of a student and not a reader, maybe my mom’s learning transferred to him by osmosis while they slept. Our first sailboat, a trailerable 26’ Chrysler, named Whimsey, came stripped down. My dad built the galley. My mother sewed cushions for berths and curtains for portholes. As my dad and brother carried the wooden galley up a ladder to the boat, set on a trailer in the driveway, it slipped. The boat’s kitchen shattered on the pavement below. Dad would later shrug it off, claiming the second galley was much better than the first. We sailed her on a reservoir, called Rathbun Lake, in Iowa. Our second, a 30’ Ericson, sailed the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. Our only family vacations, stretching for weeks between my dad’s business travel, were a joy that ignited my own passion. If not for them, I am not sure how or when I would have discovered the Great Lake, my need to be on her waters, which I now accomplish in a sea kayak. My brother joined the Navy and is a merchant marine. Dad’s love of a sailboat shaped our lives. 

And the hot rod, because after sailing became a thing of the past, my dad bought himself a custom 1938 Chevy Sedan Delivery. He had his store’s logo painted on the side panels. Weather permitting, he drove it into Wayzata and parked in front of the store, Lake Country Outfitters, where the town’s main street overlooked a Lake Minnetonka bay. It was impossible not to admire the gleaming black hood, the custom paint job, the pleasure he took in it. 

Dad has busied himself collecting old photographs from web-coated corners of the basement, some of his clothing store, some of the sailboat, some of the hot rod. He will show them to you, “Look at this.” For a time, he would tell you about the picture, but he has lost that—we have lost that. Now, he points to his past, creasing and spilling on these treasures or trinkets, and the wires remain confused. He seems to recognize their importance, but no longer knows why; meaning is devoured by this disease. Recently, he found copies of a flyer for the sale of Whimsey II. Above the boat’s photo, the flyer reads, “For Sail or Trade.” I appreciate the pun; do I get that from him? He carries the flyer around, crumpling it, pointing to it, but saying nothing or nothing pertinent. Today, he picks one off the counter and blows his nose into it. Mom and I laugh at such things, because to not laugh is too, too heartbreaking. 

I wonder, what would I carry around if struck dumb by dementia? If I had to make a list of my essential core, and relationships were out, my ability to tell stories were out, I think I would shuffle about with pictures of animals, my pets but also nature generally, and books. I would be content to be placed in a library where I could roam the stacks, tilting spines off the shelves into my weathered hands, and sorting volumes, without logic, long after I could no longer register a single word. 

In the end, we are reduced to some vague association between self and object, so if dementia eats my mind, fill my room with books and pencils. That is all I will need. Leave me there in my contentment.

Alida Winternheimer is an award-winning writer, developmental editor/writing coach, and podcaster whose works have appeared in Under the Sun, Water~Stone Review, Midwestern Gothic, Confluence and others. Winner of the 2023 Page Turner Writing Award and Best Historical, she is listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2022, and has thrice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has taught fiction classes to incarcerated writers through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and hosts the Story Works Round Table podcast with over 290 episodes. Alida has published two craft books, The Story Works Guide to Writing Character and The Story Works Guide to Writing Point of View. When she is not writing, reading, or teaching writing, you can find Alida kayaking, cycling, or being walked by her golden retriever around Minneapolis, Minnesota. Find Alida at A Room Full of Books & Pencils at booksandpencils.substack.com where she writes about life, writing, and the writing life.

Rory Perkins

On Kissing Dead Rabbits

The first thing he notices are the buttons on her coat. How some are too large or too small, as if repurposed from many other pieces of clothing. He doesn’t say anything, has learnt not to. Since sitting down there have been fifty-six other things he has stopped himself from blurting out. How he has forgotten her name or how he spent twenty-three minutes picking a shirt. How he hasn’t dressed up like this since his father’s funeral and the way his family stared at him when he failed to cry. She is staring at him but he didn’t hear what she said so he smiles instead and looks down at the table. It’s oak, he thinks. Like his father’s coffin. Like the branches outside his window that sounded as if strangers were trying to climb in until a neighbour came and chopped the whole thing down. Someone is standing over them with a knife and a clipboard and the woman would like the Penne Alla Vodka but he no longer knows what to say and maybe now he will cry, far too late. She places a hand on his arm and asks the waiter if they could have some more time. He wonders how long they have. Whether it will be enough for the silence to grow into something tangible, whether the awkwardness that has followed him since childhood will be as crippling now as it has ever been and send him running home. His home which is less frightening now his father has left and his bedroom where he hid after Sarah H tricked him into kissing her. Is that where this is heading? If the waiter returns and he orders and they strike up conversation will they leave together, like in the movies, and will he know when to lean in to kiss her, unlike last time? So unlike Sarah H and the rest of Year 9 who tricked him into believing that she was in love with him. They didn’t let on until everyone was crowded around the bikeshed and his eyes were closed like he’d read in books and he thought he felt her lips on his but then everyone was laughing and the smell of perfume was replaced by something vile. Lily of the Valley and promise turning in an instant into rotting flesh and shame. This time his father was not there to scold him. He would not be locked into the bathroom while his mother sobbed outside and his father told him what sort of man he was. What maladapted meant and how men should never be rejected by a woman.

In the end she orders on his behalf and they eat together for a while, listening to the conversations of other couples around them. She asks about his life and he says that he doesn’t have one. Afterwards they walk through the city towards her apartment and she tells him about the time at college when one of the teachers found her eating lunch by herself in one of the classrooms and she couldn’t bear the embarrassment so she dropped out there and then. At one point her arm brushes against his and he pulls away in shock. Every time she gets to the end of a story he feels a tightness in his chest. His mind desperately searches for something to say, to offer a story of his own but each time she picks back up again as if it is the most natural thing ever. By the time they reach her flat the tightness has developed across his stomach, then his head.

They stand there for a moment and he half expects the guys from school to jump out at him, older now but their laughs just as cutting, the shame still unbearable. When she leans in to give him a brief kiss he closes his eyes and waits for the tickle of fur and the smell of something dead. Instead, when he opens his eyes again she is walking off down the path, turning once to smile at him before disappearing inside. 

Rory is a British writer focussing on shorter works. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Vast Literary Press, Artam’s The Face Project, O:JA&L and CandleLit Mag, among others.

Lisa Friedlander

The Crying Room

“The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.”

—Lemony Snicket

Note: Alterations of the names and details of non-family persons preserve confidentiality.

*

An armful at only three months, Jacob pulls on his new-mother’s cracked nipple so hard he might suck the rest of her into his small body. Then she could hide inside him as he hid inside her for nine months and nine days, tapping on her womb in a code not unlike Morse, sometimes a little swipe, sometimes a prod. 

Her milk lets down, one kind of relief. Then the pain of her nipple eases in Jacob’s warm mouth, his tongue working the underside of her areola. She walks around on the cold tile floor, in a basement storage room next to the classroom used for Sunday School. 

 In the Crying Room, she worships Jacob’s little body, every pore, every pulse, not to disturb the deity upstairs in the church where the rest of the worshippers mouth the psalms and listen to the sermon; say Amen. In the basement of God’s house, she paces back and forth; keeps the light off. Overhead fluorescents bother her eyes. 

 Snow falls outside the stained-glass windows above her. She wouldn’t mind if snow fell every Sunday. Maybe six feet of it so she could stay home. Her husband called her body a temple, though it feels like one in which the forces of nature have expanded, erupted, and loosened the infrastructure. 

Parts of her have collapsed, loosened, and widened. Even the delicate skin under her eyes sags where shadows pool. In her sleep she waits for Jacob to cry. Sometimes she hears him cry when he’s not crying. He cries for her, wants her more than anyone ever has. When they gaze into each other’s eyes she knows he wants her, wants his want, but dreads it. She has never been more special. Isn’t that holiness enough?  

Here, exiled to the Crying Room, the hungry are fed, the tired rocked, the discontented souls held in loving arms. This is the underground worship service. This is the navel of the universe, the place of anointment as One. Certain words don’t exist yet: individuation, differentiation, boundaries, separation. Eons ago she studied the classics. So apropos, the Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, who said, “In everything there is a share of everything.” Julie understands that now, let alone the notion of microchimerism: Jacob has left fetal cells inside her body, just as some of hers have migrated into him. If there are future siblings, and that’s a shaky ‘if’, the family will live inside her body and Jacob might live inside a sibling. 

Except for this inescapable cellular connection, everyone says it’s better when babies grow older and have minds of their own, make their own choices, can tell you what they want, can entertain themselves for a few minutes without you. For a few inspired moments you can be the non-mother parts of yourself, take a shower, read an article that requires some adult thought, or sleep in the narcotic of a quiet hour.

Often these days, Julie feels poised against the world, just she and Jacob. Harsh mirrors regard her as atilt. Not only the ones in the house, or in the lavatory where she squats to pee now, with Jacob still stuck on her breast unaware, and with one hand pulling up her underwear and leggings; then turning on the faucet to rinse the wiping hand. 

The world’s mirrors disapprove too, the church, the workplace to which she will return at some point she needs to determine; also, the television with horrors she can’t mitigate in any meaningful way. She does recycle. She sits in the dark. She takes short showers and shops with reusable bags. But these actions aren’t enough, and she is not enough.   

She looks at the fiberglass ceiling tiles in the Crying Room; so ugly they could make you cry, but the service has come to its conclusion. Upstairs people shake hands, congratulate her husband while she shakes by herself, so alone while keeping a small human alive. Her life has turned into that. The incubation period ended, her body expelled the much-anticipated baby into her arms, her home, her family, the world, the universe. She knows she will carry him as long as she’s alive and he’s alive.

*

“During crying, tears help clear and detoxify the blood by removing toxins and stress hormones, such as cortisol. In this context, studies have shown that intensive crying causes a reduction in salivary cortisol levels in women.”[1]  

*

At 7 p.m. I sashay along the aisle to the second seating in the dining car on the Auto Train from Lorton, Virginia to Sanford/Orlando, Florida. Almost everyone has gray hair or has hidden it like dried leaves under a mulchy patina of browns. Some of the men have continents of hair missing from their heads. Canes and walkers mark an increasing divide between chronological and biological age. For ambulation difficulties, some blame their bodies and others disdain the train, its narrow stairs, its zigzag movement along the track.

Trains have served as a dark metaphor for every mortal’s ride along the existential track we share. Yet our journeys differ in dramatic ways. And I’m about to feel estranged when a hostess seats me at a table with three people, two of them a couple. 

I sit next to the newly appointed marshal of a New York town that has an annual parade where he’ll preside. It’s a fair win for a man who just retired from a thirty-year career tending bar, and now occupies a different bar as second home. “Everyone knows where to find me,” he says, in his loud bartender voice, his protruding belly a trophy of service to his community. He explains that he had drinks at lunch before embarking and made a new friend; that he has popped a gummy alongside the wine that comes with dinner. Across from us, the quiet couple have wintered in Florida for eleven years since retiring. They raise their glasses, his red, hers white, and cheer their post-work freedom like they’ve gotten out of jail. “And you?” The wife inquires of me.

 “I work, still see clients in my psychotherapy practice. I walk. I write. Family comes to visit.” I ask the nice couple about their family, their work histories. I can’t help interviewing them. Curiosity got me here and none of them mind talking about themselves. But the bartender grandstands, regaling us about his golf-playing, his ingenuity in mixing drinks, and his delight in never remarrying after a nasty divorce; all said in a spittle driven baritone.  

I refuse dessert and go back to my sleeper. I take out my tear box. I could cry for the bartender and the couple, not because of their pain, but because of their happiness. It requires no more than a well-mixed drink or a sunbathing afternoon by the pool. They don’t feel driven by Divine discontent, by a creative agitation that draws someone like me into messy places, digging around for those elements which might mix to thrill an alchemist. I cry because they have friends, while I do not. I do not have friends in a life filled with people.  

The steward, Gregory, comes to turn down my bed. We talk too. He shows me pictures of his gorgeous, smart daughters. Twins. They go to a notable college. “But most of all, they’re good people,” he repeats, a few times. I imagine it’s important to him, a Black man from the south, that his daughters deserve credit beyond their beauty, their intelligence, and their drive for success. He wants me to know about their goodness, their humanity. Then he shows me a picture of his wife, an immigrant from Afghanistan. We talk about politics, lean left together in a train-full of grumbling Republicans. I give him a generous gratuity while joking that it won’t help pay for college.  

In bed, I think of my maternal grandmother, who gave me the box for my tears when I was a child. I imagined it as smaller than the jar in which I kept unwitting fireflies in my closet, or the bowl in which I placed tadpoles fished from the vernal pool next to the woods in our backyard. Sometimes the box for tears shrank or grew, its edges sharpening or softening depending on the number or shock of tear-inducing occurrences. I hid the box under my bed. I never told her on the rare occasions when she brought her homemade lace cookies, from the Midwest to New England, that I knew all the alternative uses for a wooden spoon, a hairbrush, a belt, a hanger, or the sole of a shoe. And that the box came in handy.

Granny loved me. But she delivered the box with a curse; one she’d lived with her whole life and now passed along to me. The curse helped her to care for eight younger siblings and ailing parents, to survive a fire that burned half of her body, to turn the handles of closed doors she faced as a female journalist and to endure the insults of “whore” when she attempted a career in theater. The curse helped her to live through the death of her most beloved brother, who, on an ordinary day when he’d made a sandwich and gone to work, jumped from a twenty-story building in downtown Columbus, Ohio. 

About her brother, and about my father, she’d utter the sentence, the curse, the magic spell of self-denial that kept her going during tough times: “Do you think he wants to be that way?” As if suicidal impulses and cruel actions happen to someone who acts on them rather than because of them. So, she, and I, in turn, must bear the brunt of injury without accusation, without the mantel of victim, and later of survivor. And at the same time, we must offer empathy to our offenders. Give our hearts to those that suffer from a stolen will to do good or to be a good person. And while brain pathology exists, the Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz suggested we not forget character, a coexisting, and intersecting phenomenon that must not relieve the burden of harm committed by all but the most psychotic or cognitively unaware.  

Even if she did not know it, my grandmother taught me to cry for my father rather than because of him. His lack of control, his drunkenness, and his brokenness made him hurt me. And when he came to the side of my bed hours after an offense, on his sober knees, begging for my forgiveness, I gave it. I had to forgive him for throwing my brother, Paul, against the front door when he came in late for dinner, and for dragging him downstairs by the hair to clean his room. Paul didn’t require a teacher to learn how to say nothing, to retreat, and finally, to disappear.     

I have a great capacity for empathy, for identifying the forces at work in a dark world that influence a person’s actions; that produce vulnerability and shakiness. My work as a psychotherapist has benefited from the curse. I love a good story and the tick-tock of mortality that drives anyone to accept the struggle, the challenge, the reach—out of the muck or toward the margins of the page and the finish line of their best sentence. 

But exploration in the therapy hour comes with accountability: how we got where we are; how we coped; who we harmed in the process; how we sabotaged ourselves. And how we strive toward conscious choices, or the illusion of conscious choice: all of which means to s l o w   t h e  ‘f’  w a y   d o w n. And if my grandmother still lived, I would tell her that empathizing with those who don’t want to do the bad things they do to other people, doesn’t mean they ought not take accountability.

Even when we witness errant badness or evil, we must act or else stand guilty of collusion. Such as when a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas. The U.S. border agents claimed the State barred them from rescuing the people. I don’t know how those sitting in power can sleep at night without replaying the horror they’ve wrought; this time the badness of doing nothing, when doing nothing causes harm. And we can only hold them accountable on the page, on a podcast, on a news channel, while the river rages on. 

*

“Although the production of tears from the lacrimal glands is a predominantly parasympathetically-mediated reaction, the sympathetic nervous system plays an important role as well in emotional crying. It seems that crying onset is associated with an increase in sympathetic activity, and the resolution of crying may also be associated with increases in parasympathetic activity.”[2]

*

She never knows when it might happen. Sarina falls asleep on the way to the kitchen, in the middle of reading a book, two days ago while sitting on the toilet. In the black chamber of these sleeps, she hears nothing, not her dog, not the doorbell or her phone. She might sleep for hours, losing most of a day. When she wakes, bruises purple her hands or her knees. Sometimes blisters form on the bottoms of her feet and her buttocks burn as if she’s sat on the stove.

She tells me the neighbors persecute her. They sneer at her, they blow gaseous fumes into her apartment through the vents, pour poison under the front door, hack into her phone so that no conversation goes unheard. Even the electrical outlets have seen their share of abuse. It happens when she sleeps, unaware. And she can never quite catch these tricky neighbors, as they defy even her cameras.

I worked with Sarina thirty years ago, when she was a single parent determined to rise above poverty and shame, and I was a youngish social worker in a social service agency. I lived on the West Coast then and she lives there still, while I live on the East Coast. She found me on social media recently, and felt cheered when I remembered her, but not so cheered when I didn’t remember the “important conversations” which prompted her to reach out all these years later. By a logic all her own, I would help her now to move from this hell.

I can’t find a nice way of telling her that almost no one cares if she lives or dies, not enough to warrant 24-hour surveillance and disruption. Her grown daughter has distanced herself, as has her mother. And neither her existence nor her conversations would prove of interest to the neighbors, who have their own busy lives. She won’t let me suggest a reasonable diagnosis with the best medical practice indications. When I try, she thinks I don’t believe her, or have trivialized the assaults she faces daily. Don’t I see the truth? 

In truth, I cannot argue with her sadness, her fear, and her alienation from close relationships. She lives estranged from day and night. Even though we disagree on the prima facie causes of her pain, I urge her to see a psychiatrist and a neurologist. But she wants me to change her world, not her. I would love to call in the medical troops, but she has razor wire around her mind and won’t let them in. She is drowning in a river of paranoia.

I’ve called the Housing Office and Adult Protective Services, neither of which can offer much help. Sarina has clutter, so Housing says, things stacked up against the walls, and she can’t move to a new location until she deals with the mess. Sarina says she can’t deal with the mess by herself. And from across the country, I can’t help her much; only listen because she wants my ear. Maybe I could send her a box for tears. Her fictive world would make anyone cry, and in this world, she has shed many tears.  

*

Human tears contain nerve-growth factor, which is a protein found in the lacrimal gland. Nerve-growth factor, which is crucial for the growth and survival of neurons and the development of neural plasticity, is believed to play a role in enhancing mood during crying. [1]

*

At around midnight the train stops somewhere in South Carolina, and the conductor announces that smokers can step off for a cigarette, as can those who just want to breathe fresh air. I sleep on the surface of dreams, like a sprite skimming over water, so I hear and feel the train stop, with a very slight backward motion. Part of me keeps moving, has absorbed the motion of the train, and part of me stops to consider the smokers that have had to wait, had to stay awake just to enjoy these few minutes. The night owls too, can descend with the crew members who must tend to our voyage so late in the evening. At this station stop, I look out the window at the moon, near full, and the stars that remain visible. In this sky-moment of jolting backward, I remember summers with my brother in my family’s first house: 

Paul and I dropped lumpy sleeping bags through my bedroom window onto the roof of the porch. From there we climbed out and tossed the sleeping bags to the ground on the side yard. The land rose there, abbreviating the drop from the porch. We jumped on top of the pile and spread out our bedding, tucking ourselves in to watch the sky. I was nine, he was seven, the year we did that most often. Sometimes we pointed upward, but had no words, no poetry with which to tell of our experience beneath the unfathomable expanse overhead. We’d laugh when one of us farted. Paul’s whoosh-snap silenced the crickets while critics slept, the sound-fabric of night hushed for a moment. 

We felt small, but whole together, and slept well, neither of us strangers to the night. At sunup we scratched mosquito bites and shimmied out from our dew-drenched bags. We tiptoed in through the basement door we’d unlocked the evening before. I felt then, and it feels now, like we’d roamed the world, even traveled in space, much further than this train from Virginia to Florida. But we returned to our house with its particular people. 

To think of Paul now makes me weep, as I do each May on his birthday more than in March when he died. I need a whole separate box for those tears because I know he didn’t want to die on that ordinary Wednesday when it happened.  

* *

Crying is known to increase the secretion of oxytocin, which is a hormone that helps us to cope with stressful events. During socially stressful events, oxytocin reduces the activity of the amygdala to increase calmness and overall wellbeing and decrease stress and anxiety.[1]

As oxytocin is associated with trust, sexual arousal and relationship building, it’s sometimes referred to as the “love hormone” or “cuddle chemical.” Oxytocin levels also increase when you’re hugging someone and when you’re experiencing an orgasm.[3]

*

Julie’s friend from Sudan, Olana, a 28-year-old with a baby, has just died. She had no known health issues, which would explain the shock of it. A mutual friend calls Julie to say she must go over to Olana’s mother’s house as is the custom. Julie feels shaken and unprepared. She worries that her presence will seem an intrusion, but she doesn’t break rules or insult traditions. 

When she arrives, having taken off from home a few minutes after feeding Jacob, the living room is a sea of mattresses. All the woman cry, or laugh, or prepare and serve food. It is as if everyone’s child has died, and everyone bears the loss. They call each other “Mama,” as they did at the baby shower when gifts were given. 

Julie feels blessed when they treat her whiteness as simple ignorance. Julie comes from a community that does not know how to bear death, except to deny its finality. And now she is here, where the women wake and sleep and stretch out and the men talk in another room. 

Julie told me she wanted to stay longer, but she worried that Jacob would cry in his refusal to take nourishment from a bottle. But she would go back. Next time she planned to bring two loaves of zucchini bread which everyone liked. Next time she might bring Jacob, so she wouldn’t have to worry about staying away from him too long. 

When Julie and I meet a week later, I’ve moved into my rental in Florida and set up my computer. I’ve unpacked my clothes and my books and walked the beach several times. Julie tells me that sources claim a crime of passion took Olana. She has gone back to the mother’s house a few times, brought banana bread one time. The women mourn as a family. She wishes her family felt more like that. Instead, she feels like a ghost, visiting from a family in the distant past where she belonged.

Later, Sarina whispers in my ear across the roar of the country, so no one will hear her. I offer nothing helpful. What I say is not enough, or more than she can hear. So, I echo her, like a conch shell, with its perpetual sounds of the ocean from where it came.

I stretch after a day of sessions. By now, the Auto Train has come and gone seven times. I wonder how the crew’s legs and bodies accommodate over time to the movement down a track. Maybe a ship proves more of a challenge for balance when the ocean is less predictable? 

 When we debarked, we travelers waited by the station for our cars to unload. The bartender couldn’t wait to see his winter-in-the-sun friends at his favorite snowbird bar. The couple seemed eager to meet their friends at the pool. Meanwhile, Gregory changed over the rooms, supplied fresh linens for the northbound trip later in the day, so he could go home to his wife, “the boss,” and to his beautiful daughters, those good people. 

*

[1] https://www.news-medical.net/health/How-Crying-Could-Actually-Boost-Your-Mood.aspx

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6201288/

[3] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22618-oxytocin

Lisa Friedlander is a psychotherapist in private practice who quilts together ideas, sensory details, and stories tied together by themes. Her work has been published by Shark Reef, Epiphany, Solstice Lit Mag, Ocotillo Press, Ponder Review, Pink Panther, The Forge and others.

Lisa Hentschke

Fatherland

Finn picks up the hitchhiker despite my protests. He thinks I’m too cautious. ‘You think everything in the world is out to get you,’ he says. ‘It’s just a young girl,’ he says. ‘It’s cold out,’ he says. He pulls over.

The girl in question has dark hair and dark eyes and a thankful smile. Finn rolls my window down but spares me the burden of having to talk to her, yelling ‘Get in!’ past my face. I hear the door behind me open and a small voice thanking us. The girl scoots over to sit behind Finn. I glance over my shoulder and catch her eye briefly. 

I think of movies like The Hitcher and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I imagine a pocket knife tucked into her jeans, underneath her shirt. I imagine her caressing it, almost subconsciously, before striking us with it. I’m always waiting for the knife to come out. 

‘Where are you headed?’ Finn asks. 

‘Just up north,’ the girl says. 

‘Ah. Lucky. So are we.’

‘I thought so.’ There’s no hint of a smile in her voice. 

‘What’s your name?’

‘Sarah.’

‘I’m Finn.’ He points at me. ‘That’s Conor.’

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Nice to meet you, too.’

Finn smiles. I try to exchange a look with him but he ignores me. He turns his attention back to the road and I lean my head against the window. 

The first snowflakes of the year are falling.

In the corner of my vision I see Finn’s hand move towards the radio. Surely not to turn it on; he always claims he can’t focus on driving with music on. That’s the rule. He drives, no music. I drive, music. Except I never drive. 

Finn turns on the radio. 

‘I love this song,’ the girl says from the backseat. Finn hums in agreement. I don’t hear a song playing at all. 

The roads are unmaintained, full of holes, and my head bangs against the glass painfully, at one point so hard it might bruise. Let it. Finn looks in my direction but now I ignore him. The snow outside sticks to the ground. It doesn’t melt. It lingers. 

‘Are you two brothers?’ The girl asks. 

I glance at Finn. He’s suppressing a smile. Of course he is; he doesn’t worry about anything, ever. ‘Do we look like brothers?’ he asks.

We don’t. He’s got pale skin and a sharp jaw and red hair, I’m dark and circular. The girl and I could be siblings, though. We’d pass well. 

‘Conor’s my boyfriend,’ Finn says. 

‘Oh! Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’ 

‘We get this constantly. Don’t worry.’

‘Oh my god. Still.’ She laughs awkwardly. ‘If it helps, I’ve made this mistake more often. Asking couples if they’re siblings.’

‘I’ve done it the other way around,’ Finn says. 

‘You’ve never told me this!’ I exclaim. 

‘Ah! He speaks,’ Finn says, turning to me. I hate when he does that. He doesn’t realize how condescending it is. ‘So, I assumed these siblings were a couple. Met up with them a few times and only, like, the fifth time did I find out they were just brother and sister. They had to correct me. I asked about their anniversary.’

‘Hah!’

‘It was awful.’ Finn is grinning, as always, and he mouths something to me that I can’t quite make out. I think it might be I think this is fun, do you? or something but when he sees my confusion and does it again, it looks more like I am going to kill you.

‘It’s snowing,’ the girl then says, her voice filled with almost childlike wonder. It breaks my heart. 

‘It is,’ I say. 

‘Beautiful.’

‘As the driver, can’t say I agree,’ Finn says.

For a moment we’re all silent, watching the snow. 

‘Sorry, what was your name again?’ Finn asks the girl. I can’t believe he doesn’t remember. He’s usually very good with names. 

‘Sasha.’

‘Ah.’

Was it? 

 
*

Finn was born on an old farm in the middle of nowhere. Growing up, his friends were the sheep, pigs, and chickens. Elementary school was his first real contact with non-family members and even then he wasn’t too interested. He’d refuse invites to playdates and birthday parties in favour of going home and reading books. Poetry, even. How he turned out to be such an extrovert is a mystery. 

I’m paraphrasing. His mother told me all this when I first met Finn’s parents about a year ago. A year. Feels long, doesn’t it? And somehow short, too. Too short. We’ve been together for a little over a year now and it doesn’t represent our relationship well. It feels like we’ve known each other for decades. 

Sometimes I think about how we would have been if we’d met and gotten together as teenagers. How would we have changed each other in those developmental years? Would he have been able to get me out of my shell? Would I have experienced all those things everyone always tells you to experience when you’re young? Would I have gone to parties, started drinking alcohol, cheated on him? Or would I have motivated him to continue his studies? I fantasize about all the different people we would have become. Me, the wildcard. Finn, the genius. Me, ending up in rehab. Finn, stuck in a miserable job. Us, breaking up before we’re thirty, before we were even supposed to meet. 

The day I met his parents was unplanned. We’d driven all the way over to his childhood home, yes, but his parents were supposed to be away for the weekend. He wanted to pick up some old stuff. I just wanted to see the place. 

It wasn’t uncomfortable. It wasn’t. I shook their hands, made the eye-contact, did the talking. It was they who barely knew how to keep up a conversation. And Finn kept correcting them, thinking I wouldn’t be able to understand them unless they spoke perfect English. It was all a bit…well. It went alright.

At one point his mother found me alone in the kitchen. I was feeling awkward and doing their dishes because what else could I do, and she told me she had a miscarriage about eighteen years ago. Finn doesn’t know about it and I’m not supposed to tell. I don’t know why she told me. Maybe because she didn’t know me. Maybe she doesn’t have too many people in her life. It doesn’t seem like she does. If Finn and I had been together since we were teenagers, she wouldn’t have told me. 

I wouldn’t have been with Finn as a teenager.

I like to fantasize about the impossible. I know I wouldn’t have liked him enough to get to know him, let alone become friends—all in love—with him back then. I would’ve found him annoying, boring, pretentious yet dumb, and all those things he might have been able to turn me into are the things I hate. I would never have allowed him to turn me into anything other than what I already was, back then. Sometimes I wonder why I’ve allowed it now. 

And him…I couldn’t have improved him, either. You can’t soften the edges of a boy who grew up on a farm. You just can’t. 

I do love farms, though. I love all animals except birds. I’d hoped to see the sheep and pigs and maybe even cows when I went there, but instead I got a pair of old people and the sight of a group of black birds circling the stalls. ‘A murder,’ Finn told me. ‘A group of crows is called a murder.’ I stayed far away from them.

On the way back Finn told me his parents liked me. I’m not sure what made him think so. I told him I liked them, too. 

 
*

‘You can still go back home,’ Sasha says from the backseat. I turn around. 

‘Sorry?’

‘What?’

‘I—you said something.’

Sasha looks at me, frowning. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Are you sure?’ 

‘Yeah. Sorry?’

‘No, no, okay.’ I turn back. I can’t go home, anyway. Not now. 

The world looks pure and unbothered—especially out here, on these secluded roads Finn always insists on taking. The only other sign of life is a crow rising from the snow. I think Sasha should be more scared of us. I think she should be more careful. I don’t know how to say this to her without sounding threatening. I think of a knife tucked into someone's pants, someone’s pockets, hidden behind layers of clothing. 

‘What are you going to do, up north?’ I ask. It’s a neutral question; she can answer it however she wants. I don’t want to be invasive. 

‘Join the circus.’

‘Oh, wow, that’s—ambitious.’ 

Finn laughs. ‘She’s joking, Conor.’

‘I—Really?’

Sasha ducks her head and smiles. ‘Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun.’

‘Don’t worry, Sasha. He’s a bit slow.’ Seriously. He doesn’t notice he’s doing it. 

‘Sam,’ she corrects Finn. 

‘Oh, fuck, sorry. I’m bad with names.’

‘What are you doing up north? Anything fun?’

‘Not really,’ Finn says. I think about our destination: a dying childhood home, a place now surely filled with tears, a murder of crows. Not really, indeed. 

‘Ah.’

I look back at her one more time. Sam. She’s an older woman with intelligent eyes. She looks like me. Maybe I’ve seen her before, I don’t know. 

The road stretches out before us until it disappears into the white of the world. The snow has covered everything by now; all is hidden. You can’t even see where the sky ends and the ground begins; the falling flakes blur the lines between matters. They’re from the clouds, from the sky, from the ground, they’re everywhere, all the time. It makes me uncomfortable. The world should have its boundaries.

‘Conor, look,’ Finn says, softly, not trying to get Sam’s attention. He’s gesturing towards the window. ‘Do you see the old house to the left?’ 

I don’t see anything. ‘Yes,’ I say. 

‘I used to go there almost every day.’

‘What for?’

‘Just…because. The guy that lived there would offer me odd jobs, sometimes.’ 

‘We have an hour left to go. You didn’t live here, did you?’

‘No, I did. For a while.’          

He doesn’t elaborate. I don’t ask. 

Sam—or was her name Sandra?—asks us to stop at a gas station because she wants to use the bathroom. ‘God,’ Finn says as we watch her enter the shop. ‘I should have offered. Who knows how long she’s been without a bathroom?’

‘What do you think her deal is?’ I ask him. 

‘Her deal?’

‘Yeah. What’s happened to her?’ 

‘Life, probably.’ 

I look at her one more time. Her hair, though completely gray, looks full and thick. Her wrinkled face demands respect. She could have been my grandmother, but my grandmother never had that kind of spirit. 

She doesn’t come back. We wait for twenty minutes before Finn gets worried enough to go ask about her in the store. 

‘They said no woman like her had come in to use the bathroom,’ he says when he sits back down behind the wheel. 

‘What?’

‘They said—’ 

‘Yeah, I heard.’

‘They probably weren’t paying attention. We saw her go in.’ 

Did we? It’s already escaping my memory. What did she look like again? When I think back to turning towards the backseat, I see myself sitting there. 

‘Let’s just wait a few more minutes,’ Finn says. ‘Should I turn the radio off?’

‘Is it even on?’

‘Can’t you hear the music?’

‘Turn it up.’

He does. It sounds like static at first, but then I hear it: there’s a voice in there. Soft. Not quite masculine, not quite feminine; not quite singing; not quite speaking. ‘Are you satisfied? If there’s something you could ask for, what would it be? Between safety and freedom, what would you choose? You’re choosing safety, I can see. You’re a safety kind of guy. If you had the balls to do what was necessary you wouldn’t be sitting here, clutching that—’

‘She’s not coming out,’ Finn says. ‘She must have left.’

‘Probably went back home,’ I say. I turn the radio off. 

*

When I lie in bed at night, I dream of a monstrous black bird entering through the window of the bedroom and landing at the foot of my—our—bed. If I were to close the window, the bird would just break through. 

First, I notice it by the dipping of the mattress near my feet. A threatening weight. If I look at it, I’ll see it stare, head cocked, black eyes glistening in the dark. It will lean closer and expand its wings a little. But I don’t have to look. I know it’s there. In the last few dreams I’ve found it easier not to look. I just lie there, frigid, sweating, feeling the painful beating of my heart. Waiting for the knife to come out. I know where this is going. 

 Second, I feel it picking at my feet. Slowly, softly, almost gently, like a parent cleaning its baby. It does not feel comfortable. I tried kicking it the first time, but that did not end well for me. So I lie still, allow it to caress my fragile skin, to place its beak wherever it wants, and it will move up my body. It takes its time getting to my legs, my hands, my arms, my neck, and, finally, my face. 

Third, the pain. I can’t help but scream every time. There’s so much blood—always—even if it doesn’t stain the sheets. This isn’t about the sheets. It snaps at my mouth and tears my lips right off of my face. It eats the skin off my nose. It digs into my sockets until it can take a whole eyeball out. It tears at my cheeks. I think it might be trying to get at my brain, but I’m always gone before I can see if it succeeds. 

When I wake up, I vividly remember the pain. 

 ‘You should get this checked out, Con,’ Finn has said to me more than once. I told him how I sometimes debate whether to wake him up in those nightmares—even though I know, even within the dream I know, I would only be waking a fake Finn up. A figment of Finn. Random parts of Finn my brain’s glued together that will pretend to be a person. Dream-Finn always sleeps through my screaming.

 Sometimes Finn lies with his back to me while I am awake. I’m either afraid to fall asleep or afraid to wake up the next morning, and imagine if I were to lean over him, I’d see his stomach cut open and all his guts spread out over the mattress and the floor. Sometimes I look at him and his space in the bed looks empty in the dark.  

*

‘Do you want to stop for lunch?’ Finn asks. I’m happy Sandra is gone, but it’s been silent for a while and it’s a relief to have Finn breaking the tension. I’ve been unable to do it. 

‘Do you want to? I’m fine.’

 ‘I’m fine, too.’

 ‘Okay.’

‘Is that a hitchhiker?’ Finn asks after a moment.

‘What? Where?’

‘Ahead, in the distance. A silhouette.’ Finn nods his head once. 

‘We’re not picking up anybody else.’

‘Okay.’

‘Just don’t hit them.’

‘I won’t.’

Now I see her: a young girl with dark hair and round shapes. She’s holding out her right hand, thumb up. In her other hand is an unfolded pocket knife, the blade reflecting the sun. She looks me right in the eyes. We drive past her. 

‘I didn’t think we’d made her feel unsafe,’ Finn says. 

‘Who?’

‘Sophie.’

‘Who?’

 ‘Sophie. The girl we’d picked up.’

‘I’m sure that’s not why she left,’ I say. But what I’m thinking is, I’d get the fuck out of here, too, if I were her. I would’ve never gotten in. 

‘She reminded me of you, you know?’

‘She did? How?’

‘She seemed like the kind of person who could make me laugh.’

Where did he get that impression? ‘I could use a laugh,’ I say. ‘Been feeling awful all day.’

‘I know. I can see it on you.’

‘Grumpiness?’

‘Dissatisfaction.’

I wonder what dissatisfaction looks like. On me, it might just look like a regular day. I think it looks like old mattresses and scratches on the wall and freezing phone screens. I sent Finn’s mum a dick pic once, just to see what would happen. I don’t know why I’m thinking of this now. I got a response a full week later. ‘Interesting,’ she wrote. 

‘I wrote a poem for tomorrow, you know.’

I look up. ‘You did?’

‘Yeah. Didn’t I tell you?’

‘No. And if you thought I knew, you wouldn’t have felt the need to remind me.’

‘Good point. Do you wanna hear it?’

‘You know it by heart?’

‘Of course. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it, though, once I’m standing there. It might be too much.’

‘Recite it to me. It might help.’

‘It’s called Fatherland. Okay. Here goes.’ He clears his throat, then clears it again. ‘Fatherland. / Another word for home. / Another word for a piece of land. / Another word for wanting. / I don’t count the ground I have been born on to / be the ground I shall die on, / because I have been an unloyal son. / I have wanted to destroy borders, / to set the childhood home on fire, / to leave behind nothing short of a goodbye. Do you want me to continue?’ I nod. ‘Okay. Respect for the Fatherland is just a reluctant acceptance of what you can’t change. / Love for the Fatherland is nothing but an illness for the short-minded. / Pray for those who aren’t faking it. / I can’t cut off my roots but I can bury them, / I can bury them in the Fatherland. / I can bury you, Fatherland, / and I can forget about you. / I can forget about you.’ A beat. ‘That’s it. The poem.’

I say it before I can help it. ‘I don’t think you should recite that tomorrow.’

‘What?’ Finn turns his head towards me and I can see he’s upset. ‘You don’t think it’s—I mean, it doesn’t even have to be good, I’m not a poet, but—why not?’

‘I just—I don’t know if it’s appropriate. Do you think it’s appropriate?’

‘Of course I think it’s appropriate. I wrote it for the funeral.’ 

‘Oh. I mean, you can do it, of course. I won’t stop you.’

‘Wow. Thanks for the support.’

 
*

Finn has never really liked his father. He was lucky to be able to get his own place when he did. They used to go on fishing trips every single Monday morning—very early, hours before Finn’s school would start—from the moment Finn turned fourteen until he moved out. He hated those. He’s complained about them to me. About how they’d sit in silence for hours, about how unbelievably tired Finn would be, about how his classmates would pity him for his lack of sleep, about how his father had never felt farther away than during those mornings when he sat on the cold, wet dirt beside Finn. 

I never liked Mr. O’Shara either. It’s not that he wasn’t nice to me—he was. It’s just that whenever he looked at me I got the odd feeling that he saw something else. It’s a stare Finn inherited but doesn’t use as often. I also heard Mr. O’Shara yell at his wife for telling me about the miscarriage.

What else to say about Mr. O’Shara? He’s a dominant man. If you’re sitting at the table, you wait until he takes the first bite. You have to expect the salt to be passed to him first. You have to treat him like he invented the stuff. 

‘There’s a—I don’t know, some sort of bakery near,’ Finn says. ‘I love that one. I would love for you to see it.’

‘A bakery? Near the highway?’

‘It’s only a few minutes ahead.’

‘Okay.’ I lean my head against the window but immediately snap back. ‘Is that a hitchhiker?’

‘Where?’

I squint. It’s not. There’s no one there. I’m getting paranoid. 

Finn takes an exit, a few turns, and stops in front of a building. It’s got its own parking lot, completely deserted. Finn parks in the middle. 

‘I’m so excited to be here again,’ Finn says. He rubs his hands together in an animated way and I smile. ‘They make a really good hot chocolate.’

‘You never drink hot chocolate.’

‘I do when I’m here!’

‘I love this side of you,’ I say. Finn grins and hops out of the car. I follow. The way to the front door seems endless, even though it’s right there. We slowly make our way through the snow, which is thicker than I think it should be, and my jeans get wet and cold. 

‘Wait,’ I call out, but Finn is in front of me and the wind carries my words the other way. 

There’s something wrong here. The door is too dark, the windows are too reflective. I falter but Finn doesn’t seem to notice. When he reaches the door he stops and all I see for a while is the back of his jacket, bright pink. 

‘It’s closed,’ he says when I reach him. I can barely make out the setting of the ‘bakery’ as I look through the glass door into its darkness. It doesn’t look like a bakery. 

‘Shit,’ I say. 

‘Shit,’ Finn says. I look at his fallen face and this is the closest I’ve felt to him all day.  

‘Maybe there’s another one further down the road—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Finn says, turning away. ‘I wanted to go to this one.’ 

‘Can I do anything—?’

‘No, it’s fine. Mum will have food.’

*

My mother was a strong woman. She worked, raised me, did all the household chores, and never, not once, complained. She was strict, firm, and yet kind. I think my father needed to die to bring that side out of her. Maybe a man has to die before a woman can flourish. Often I think I’m doing my part in just letting women be, by not putting myself into their bodies, their minds, their lives. There is no woman in the world who regularly thinks about me and I’m keeping it that way. I’m doing my part. I know I shouldn’t congratulate myself for sucking dick instead, but I can’t help it. 

I didn’t mean to get so crude there.

I wrote a poem about her, once. My mother. It went something like, ‘When the fatherland is empty and deserted there are other lands to flee to… / You never grew up in the fatherland because you did not have to. / The fatherland is cold and barren, / it’s been defeated in war, / bombed to the ground, / spit on, and you’re not sure it didn’t deserve to be. / The fatherland—’ 

I don’t remember all of it. 

Mum changed later on. Life had been chipping away at her until there wasn’t much left. When I turned fifteen she started bringing new men around every week. Sometimes she would leave for days and have them check up on me. I hated that. I barely knew them. 

Mrs. O’Shara seems like the kind of woman who was a good mother despite all circumstances. I wonder how Finn and I would have been if our childhoods were switched. Sometimes I think Mrs. O’Shara likes me more than Finn does. I don’t know exactly where this feeling comes from. Maybe because she told me about the miscarriage—maybe that made me feel special.

*

We park clumsily in the driveway of Mrs. O’Shara’s house. Finn will have to readjust the parking job tomorrow before the others arrive, but for now it doesn’t matter. Finn hugs his mother when he comes in and she has tears in her eyes. I turn away from them. 

‘He’s in the living room,’ she says, voice thick. Finn immediately puts his hand on the knob, but he hesitates. I don’t want to follow. I really don’t. I ask anyway. ‘Do you want me with you?’ 

I’m genuinely surprised when he nods. Why does he want the last time he sees his father to be with me? What if I dump him? The memory would be tainted forever. Maybe that’s the point; maybe it’s one last middle finger to Mr. O’Shara. And maybe he’s telling me we’re breaking up soon. Finn makes me go in first.

When I reach the coffin it takes all my strength not to stumble backward. 

It’s not Mr. O’Shara in there. It’s not. It’s a girl. A dark-haired girl, with a round face, hands clutching something sharp I can’t quite make out. It’s the hitchhiker we picked up this morning.

I can’t get myself to say anything. I stare, wide-eyed, until Finn joins me. I need him to speak. I need him to freak out. I can’t do everything for him. But when he opens his mouth, out comes, ‘hey, Dad,’ and then he’s sniffling. I look at him in disbelief. It’s all an act. It has to be. Mrs. O’Shara is playing a cruel joke and Finn plays along because it’s not on him, it’s on me. 

I stare at her. I can’t help it. She’s pretty, haunted, hands clasped around the closet thing she could find to help her protect herself from the world. 

Finn knows about my mother, he’s seen old pictures, he listened compassionately when I told him how traumatic that open-casket funeral was for me, how I saw death in a way I never had before. I look at the girl in the casket and for a moment, I’m terrified. 

Calm down. Don’t cry. That’s not mum, not me. Calm down. Look away.

This must have been Finn’s idea. He found a girl that looks like me and had her come in and lie in a casket just to see what I’d do. Just to laugh at me. I imagine Mrs. O’Shara chuckling in the hallway, imagine Finn suppressing his laughter next to me, and I breathe: in, out. I won’t give them the satisfaction, even if they’re vulnerable, even if they’re grieving and desperately in need of a laugh. I put my hand on Finn’s shoulder and squeeze hard. I wait for him to stop the act. He doesn’t. Instead, he asks me to leave the room after a while. Fine. 

The evening and the next morning fly by. I make Finn and Mrs. O’Shara tea, I go to the grocery store to give them some time together, I come back and make dinner, I go to bed early. I’m not awake when Finn comes to bed, but in my dream he is already there, his back to me, Schrödinger’s guts in or out of his stomach. The morning is much of the same. I get dressed, I fry some eggs, I arrange the snacks, I reverse the car, and I suffer through the small talk. Finn denies we ever picked up a hitchhiker at all. 

They’ve replaced the girl in the coffin with the actual Mr. O’Shara, dead as can be, and they’re all pretending nothing happened, so I am, too. I’m not letting them get to me that easily.  

*

He does end up reciting his poem. 

‘I, uh, I wrote a poem, for today,’ Finn says into a microphone placed next to the coffin. The room goes silent and I go tense. ‘Okay. So. Yeah. I’m going to recite it. The poem is called Fatherland.’ He takes a sip of his water. ‘Fatherland. / How—how impossible to have just one word… for this infinite seeming field, / for a land bigger than comprehension, / for a symbol rather than a place. / A land has a thousand meanings.’ He waits a second before continuing. ‘Dad, you were a man like a land. / There was history to you. / You had a thousand stories to tell, / a thousand laws for me to follow, / a thousand ways to make me feel at home, / a million ways to make me feel safe. / Fatherland. Thank you. That’s it.’ And then his family, because they’re his family, applaud and cheer. I do the same. 

This is not the poem he recited for me at all. 

‘I love my father,’ Finn goes on. For a moment his eyes look pitch black, like a bird’s.  ‘I… I loved, I suppose I have to say, but I can’t. I love him. I love my father.’ He chokes up a little. ‘He’s the reason I’m the man I am today. From when I was very little, he’s always told me, “Finn, if there’s ever anything you want to tell me, you come to me. There is nothing you cannot come to me for.” And I did. He’s—he was the first to know everything. I told him I was gay first. I told him I had a boyfriend first. I told him I’d crashed his car first.’ There’s a bit of laughter from the crowd. ‘My father was a proud man. He was a hardworking man. By all means, he should have been an intimidating man, but he wasn’t. He was the kind of man who would hug me first and yell at me later.’ More laughter. I can’t bring it up. In the few times I’ve been here, I’ve experienced lots of yelling and remarkably few hugs. 

Finn looks me straight in the eye before he continues, and suddenly, I know. I get it.

‘Dad always took me on these fishing trips on Monday mornings,’ Finn says. ‘I hated it at first. I mean, what kid wouldn’t? But now…When I look back, those have been some of the best mornings of my life. Not every kid gets to experience that much time with their dad, especially not alone. I think it is one of the most special things he’s ever given me. And I hope he knows that. I think he knows that. But I just—’ God, now he’s crying. Finn’s crying. I’m not falling for it.

His eyes find mine again. I look back, my mouth nothing but a straight line. I know now. He’s doing this, all of this, to humiliate me. To contradict everything I think I know about Finn and his father and to make me feel paranoid. It’s an elaborate break-up. I’m waiting for him to grow wings. I’m waiting for the knife to come out. 

I look away from Finn, into the crowd next to me, and see the girl that was in our car and then in the coffin and I want to kill her. I touch the outline of the pocket knife tucked into my pants underneath my dress shirt to calm myself down. She looks at me and smiles sadly because she knows my relationship is over. Her face looks so much like mine; maybe Finn’s cheating on me with her. I should’ve cut his stomach open last night. 

‘I hope he knows how grateful I am. For everything,’ Finn finally says, and it’s the end. Thank god it’s the end. I want to go to the bathroom and puke my guts out. I want to open the blade of the pocket knife, put it back into my pants, and have it cut into my stomach while I move. I want to bleed all over the living room. 

‘But before I go,’ Finn says, ‘I would appreciate it if you, um—’ he’s looking at me, fuck, ‘Conor, could you say something about dad? For me?’ 

He’s doing this to torture me. He thinks just because his dad died I will say yes to anything, anytime. Maybe he killed his dad himself, for this reason alone. Maybe he killed his own father just to break up with me. 

I get up despite knowing it’s a trap. I force my stiff body upright and force my feet towards the front of the room, next to the coffin, where Finn hands me the cheap microphone he’s been using. He mouths something I can’t make out and turns his back, returning to his seat. He goes to sit on mine instead of his. A hundred eyes, all squished together in Mr. O’Shara’s living room, turn to me. They all look black. 

This feels like a game show. It feels like a trial. Finn, the prosecutor; me, the defendant; the audience, the judge. Their tears and sobs and smiles will determine my fate. There are no lawyers. Outside in the snow sits a black crow, looking in. 

But I have one thing Finn doesn’t know about. A secret. A hidden weapon. I raise the microphone to my lips. 

‘Mr. O’Shara always blamed Mrs. O’Shara for her miscarriage,’ I begin.

Lisa Hentschke is a 21 year old student from The Netherlands. She completed her bachelor's in Philosophy in The Netherlands and is currently studying the MA Creative Writing in Dublin, Ireland. Her childhood mostly consisted of daydreaming, reading, writing, and avoiding contact with peers her age. Lisa has always considered the real world to be too overwhelming and used fiction as an escape, but this later evolved into a passion and a way to understand the world rather than to flee from it. These traits, and much more serious struggles, could later be explained by an unexpected diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Lisa started watching and reading horror when she was around thirteen years old and has loved it ever since. The ability to feel fear and other intense emotions in a safe environment as well as the exploration of serious and interesting themes through the lens of terror is what drew - and continues to draw - her to this particular genre. Other than writing, reading, and being in a state of fear, Lisa enjoys drawing, crafts, walking, and cuddling with her dog.