Prose

James Butler-Gruett

All in Favor

Even in these times, one man existed who would not say I. Just swore it off. The man said that his mother, an ophthalmologist, had run away from home when he was still a boy, and he’d never recovered. Of her he retained only one memory, the sight of her large head framed behind an office phoropter like a fruit fly behind its compound eye. All else was gone. To protest her absence, he’d undertaken a blanket ban on not only the word but the sound as well. He would not say eye or any of its homonyms—aye, ai, I.

The man, whose name was Barry, was explaining this to Jeanette, who was not his mother but his date, at a bar and café as the rain picked up out the front window.

“What do you mean, a ‘blanket ban’?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Sounds chilly.” About her: Her tone as she said this was charmed but wary. Her left arm was in a sling. She yearned to be yearned for. No one listened to her.

Barry wiped at the air, popping her dialogue bubble and ignoring her joke. “There’s a sound one can’t say.” He looked at her, secretive, coy. “Imagine the word you say most often.”

Jeanette clucked her tongue. “You’re telling me,” she said, “you can’t say fuck?”

Barry shook his head and mimed. He pointed to his eye. Sounds like… 

Jeanette got it. She dropped her mouth open in theatrical surprise. “How long has this been going on?”

Barry explained that he hadn’t said the sound once since the day his mother left, a week after his sixth birthday. He knew how this looked—sounded. He knew he had a streak to him of emotional radicalism, a strong tendency toward swearing off. As a teenager, noticing the negative impact too much time on the Internet had had on him, he’d thrown his iPod Touch away in a public trashcan. As a young man, he’d sworn off orange foods. But swearing off the sound had stuck with him the longest. It had been some twenty-five years at this point.

“How did you survive in college?” Jeanette said. “What did you talk about if not yourself?”

This was a good question, Barry said. He had been a French major. In fact, that was what he taught now, adjunct. 

“How did that solve your problem?” Jeanette said. “French majors still talk.”

“French doesn’t use that sound,” Barry said. French had no diphthongs at all, and the sound (/ī/) was a diphthong. Further, he averred that French was a language whose affirmation was collective, a language of we, a language of oui. A language of je. A language of yeux. French had protected him from the sound. It gathered us together.

A little of Jeanette’s coffee sloshed out onto her saucer. She cleared her throat.

“Is it just I on its own,” Jeanette asked (Barry cringing slightly), “or does this affect the sound when present in other words?”

“The latter,” Barry said. He produced a rhyming dictionary he carried around with him, a sticky note in the relevant section as a reminder of what not to say. The entry went on for three pages. 

“Wow,” Jeanette said. “Wow wow wow.” This certainly made things tougher.

*

“Well so why then did your mother leave?” Jeanette asked when they saw each other next. They were at the Santa Monica Pier on an overcast day, and she was wearing her most unsightly water shoes. She tilted her head forward, almost nodding.

“One never got to ask,” Barry sighed. The sun ducked behind a cloud overhead like it couldn’t bear his sorrow either. “One was six when she left. Dad thinks she may even live around here, but we don’t know. We avoid looking.” 

He stood and shook sand off himself and reached out his hand to pull Jeanette up. His mouth got twitchy, and he squinted. They folded up the beach towel and walked toward an ice cream parlor and ducked inside. Barry grabbed the hand of hers that wasn’t in a sling and began to ask her questions. What about her on this fine sunny—well, overcast—day? Had she ever been to a beach before? C’est vrai? Didn’t the ocean appear today like it was sealed beneath Saran wrap? Which part of Nebraska did she say she was from? How many miles across was the town, and did she know her neighbors? Was she looking for a relationship? When had her last been? How had she broken her wrist? Really? Did she go rollerblading often? Where exactly did she endure the wicked travails of a school counselor? 

They reached the front of the line and ordered, Barry a waffle cone of vanilla and Jeanette raspberry sherbet in a dish. As Jeanette answered his questions—“Just fine,” “No,” “Oui,” “Indeed,” “York,” “I haven’t measured, and yes,” “Looking but bad at finding,” “God knows,” “Really rollerblading,” “No,” “St. Michael’s School for Boys,”—it struck her that she did like how solicitous he was being. Shocked, she thought: he listened. It was tempting to view his solicitousness as selflessness, but she had to remind herself that the man couldn’t utter the sound and thus couldn’t freely speak of himself. In most conversations, she deflected the attention onto the other, but here she couldn’t. He had thoughts, probably, and experiences, but for now they would be submerged beneath her own. Did it make her sad to consider the submerged trials of a stranger? Yes—she found herself sad. Sad that his own experiences lived within him unwitnessed and unexcavated for years, like so many mammoths trapped in ice.

“Who gets sherbet here?” Barry said, chuckling.

 “You’re in no position to scoff at eccentricity,” Jeanette said.

“At least you didn’t get orange.”

*

Jeanette’s friend Lorrie thought he was lying. “No shot,” she said, throwing her keys on the counter as she came in the door. “He can say I in French but not English? No shot.”

“Technically French doesn’t have that sound,” Jeanette said. She sat on the couch, her legs curled beneath her like a cat. “He said so.”

“So what’s he gonna avoid every word with a long i in it?” Lorrie said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Technically he did avoid it,” Jeanette said. She sprang up from her position. “At least so far.”

“I’ve heard that defense before,” Lorrie said, taking Jeanette’s spot on the couch. “Men love technicalities.”

This, Jeanette thought, was very true.

Jeanette had moved here for Lorrie, so her opinion mattered. Lorrie, whom Jeanette had known since they wore pre wrap in their hair, had graduated college a year ahead of her and messaged her during her senior year, “Come to California. I’m lonely. We’ll go to clubs and rollerblade and get sand in our hair.” But there had been no clubbing so far. Lorrie’s nursing shifts began when Jeanette’s school days as a counselor were ending. There had been rollerblading, but that’s how she’d broken her arm, skidding on the sand that wasn’t in her hair but on the broad fucking sidewalks. Likewise there had been fiddling, gazing upon Lorrie’s trinkets—a sand dollar, a distressed sign that read, BLESS THIS HOUSE, even though they didn’t own a house. (In these times, no one could.) And most weeknights there had been affirmations. Jeanette spoke them aloud to herself in the apartment, chanted them directly into the standing fan so her voice sounded metallic and alien. Y o u  a r e  p o w e r f u l, she chanted. M a n y  p e o p l e  w o u l d  w a n t  y o u  i f  t h e y  o n l y  k n e w  y o u. 

“You’re spilling yourself to a man who won’t say anything back?” Lorrie said. “That’s fucked. You’re vulnerable, and he won’t be? He presents you with this like cipher of himself, based on a pun, as an explanation for why he can’t talk about himself? He’s a liar. Get free of him, Jeanette.”

Jeanette said, “Why do you have a sand dollar?”

“Puns don’t dictate peoples’ lives,” she said. “Lies do.”

*

If Barry was lying, he never broke. It was impossible to detect. The avoidance of the sound flustered him every moment of his life. Even when she said it, he cringed in pain. So she began to avoid it as well. Before agreeing to a third date, she hadn’t considered how many words contained the sound, and it provided her with innumerable opportunities to fuck up. In one dinner at Ygrec’s alone, she stumbled into the following errors:

●      Tried to make small talk as they were seated. Complimented his clean, stiff blue shirt, open at the neck. Said, “I’ve noticed you never wear a t—” Stopped. Corrected herself: “Cravat.” 

●      Tried for a little comic relief to show him a particularly bad faculty picture of herself on the St. Michael’s website. Told him he had to see it. He said it couldn’t be that bad. Rebutted him and said it was. Noticed her data was running slow on her phone. Flagged down the waiter as he brought their entrees. “Excuse me, but do you have a password for the W—” Saw Barry blanch. “The Internet?” she corrected.

●      Noticed certain topics were off-limits all together and turned to what she usually wouldn’t. Asked him if he believed in God. Wouldn’t normally do this, she said, as the waiter brought coffee and mints. He said that he didn’t, was an atheist. Asked her if she did. “Well, a little. Not so much in like a white bearded man in the sk—” He jumped in, “Clouds.” She nodded. 

Finally Jeanette broke down, crunching on a mint.

“How do you do this?” she said, putting her head in her hands. “How is this ever going to work?”

“It’s okay,” Barry said, patting her hands. He was less bothered by this, she noticed. He must have encountered these problems before. There was a reason he was single. He smiled at her, kind, his face acned but not egregiously so, with one sincere dead tooth cutely poking out. “One doesn’t understand how, but one hopes you will.” And that hope—that someone hoped she would work in the utterly bleak and hopeless world of post-thirties dating in the time of apps—was enough to power her.

*

In addition, Jeanette guessed in some sense that knowing a man who couldn’t say I was a good problem to have. Most people talked of nothing but themselves. One man recently hadn’t asked her a single question over the course of an hour. Another, whom she’d gone to an amusement park with, had actually forgotten she was there with him and had left early and driven home alone before she could flag him down. And she had always, perhaps because of her Catholic-Midwestern upbringing, found something admirable in self-effacement. The self should be seen and not heard, was the thought in York. She wasn’t exempt from the particular Nebraskan way of dropping the subject from sentences in the first person: Going to go to the store later. Or, Love you. 

Besides, think of the sex. For goodness’ sake, Jeanette thought, if this blanket ban of his had any benefits at all, they began below the blankets. Nowhere else did guys speak more of themselves. She slavered at the thought of a man unable to say I in the bedroom. He could talk about nothing but her. He would do everything for her, to her. Her mind raced across the possibilities of erotic servility he could enact. She’d be pampered. She wanted to be pampered—even by a lie. 

So one evening, after attending a loud rap concert for the first time, Jeanette brought Barry back to her apartment, their ears still stuffed up and the inner cilia bent with ringing damage. In the rush home, Jeanette had forgotten about the pile of coats on her counter, and Lorrie’s cat food on the floor, and the sunset lamp dangling from the ceiling fan.

She apologized for not having time to clean it. “It’s not usually this bad,” she said. “It looks like a real pig—ahem—a real mess.”

Barry shook his head, either dismissing the objection or unable to hear her.

She set the sunset lamp on her dresser, where it rocked back and forth when footfalls and buckle clankings rumbled the floorboards, sending its projected burnt-orange sphere around the walls like the miracle of Fatima. It had been a while, Jeanette realized. They’d had three drinks each, and still everything came too close in a slight, breathy rush. The ceiling fan was on a notch too high, and their skin filled with goosebumps. Jeanette spoke her favorite word. For a while, they tried to dance around the sound, as the dresser rocked. Jeanette waited for his talk about her, his sheer outward focus. She waited for the extra licks, the speedy attentions, the bowed head. They came, but only in standard portions. One helping, not two, not ten. 

Worse: he wasn’t saying anything. She wasn’t saying anything. Without being able to talk about themselves or what they liked, there wasn’t much to say. The room was silent, interrupted only briefly by their lapping and slurping. She tried to relax and focus on her own sensations, where he was pressing and pulling and prodding, but they weren’t enough. She wanted more.       

Jeanette kneeled on the bed’s edge and rolled her shoulders back. 

“Who wants me?” Jeanette said, holding his shirt by the collar as she knelt over him on the bed.

Barry’s lips parted but produced nothing. He licked them and narrowed his eyes. 

Jeanette got very still. She pressed into him. The sunset swung past. And Jeanette, who often did nothing but soothe, found in herself a line she hadn’t yet crossed and summoned her reserves for once, what little there remained after thirty-one years of loneliness and ten years of singledom, and asked for the only thing she was looking for after all. Grabbing a fistful of his hair, she looked at him hard enough that she felt her eyes almost touching the back of his own and growled, “Who wants me?”

(It was a moment Jeanette would return to weeks later, when she tracked down Barry’s mother. She would search on the Internet in one tab for “optometrists near me” and in another for “ophthalmologists near me” and track down a Dr. Veldt and Dr. Rinkevich—the dating app hadn’t listed his last name, and he wouldn’t stick around long enough for her to ask him, would in fact vanish from her apartment the next morning before she could say goodbye and without an explanation and taking the only bit of favor she’d found with him, would in fact ghost her, a term she would find to be literal in its spooky lingering—and make an appointment with both of them in one day. She would discover that Dr. Veldt had never married and was offended that Jeanette was asking. She would wait through the next appointment across town with Dr. Rinkevich, her eyes swimming and tipsy from dilation, since she wouldn’t pay the extra fifty dollars for retinal imaging and her insurance wouldn’t cover it. As she would sit there, waiting herself behind a phoropter to see Dr. Rinkevich, Jeanette would wonder if it had been worth it to break him. Do you think it was worth it, she would ask herself, to return to nights of T-posing and yelling into a standing fan, of meals before the air fryer—to feel his want? She would casually, so casually, ask Dr. Rinkevich, whose familiarly acned face would blink in disbelief at the question, Do you have a son? When questioned, Jeanette would say to herself exactly what the ophthalmologist would say to her, exactly what Barry said that evening in her bedroom, his eyes glazed, looking up at Jeanette, unblinking.)

“I do.”

James Butler-Gruett writes fiction, poetry, and book reviews. His work has appeared in the Millions, the Broadkill Review, Poetry London, the Sonora Review online, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Professor at York University in York, NE.

Kasimma

Seeking Ebele

I turn off the stove and wipe my hands on my red shorts. Omah Lay’s Lolo plays on repeat in my EarPods. Outside, a green-and-yellow orange, reachable enough to a reaching 5ft8.5, hangs limp on an ailing branch. Outside, a mother fans flies away from the pyramids of tiny tomatoes arranged on her wooden table. Her three-year-old, his stomach as big as the tin before him, grabs a handful of sand and pours it into the tin before him, shreds a blade of grass into the tin before him, stirs the tin before him. A boy and a girl play ten-ten, clapping, singing, and throwing their legs one after the other. I need a bath. I look away from the window and a great wind slaps me on the neck. It's sudden, this wind, slapping me, slapping tin of sand, slapping tomatoes off the wooden table. The playing girl runs toward their house. The playing boy grabs his baby brother and runs toward their house. The air smells of wet sand, never mind that the rain is not started. I want to shut my window lest the wind sweeps dust into my kitchen and into my pot of rice. I perceive water so close to my left side. I turn. There are two of them, standing at the right side of my slamming window as if the wind blew them in. Their stomachs are flat but for their drooping navels. Plain white silk covers their breasts if they have any. Plain white silk covers their vaginas if they have any. Their flowing hair is as black as charcoal, as cottony as cloud. They have no scales, but their skin shines like fish. Their brown eyes are as inert as their bodies. They are standing there. Then they are not. I squeeze my eyes. I open my eyes. I’m alone. I shrug. Omah Lay’s Lolo plays on repeat in my EarPods. I shut my window. A lone grain of white rice lay on the yellow tiles. I pick it. 

I am under the ocean, or not. There are many of them, countable, but I do not count. My vision resembles underwater. But the sand is dry. Our surrounding is water; our bodies are Sahara. The day is that of the sunlight turning to moonlight. Either the weather or the sight before me or both cover my skin in goose pimples. They sit upright, like the royals, in a semicircle. Their stoic faces face me. Their legs stretch before them. Their eyes are inert, yet full of life. It’s like looking into the fixated eyes of a dead person, knowing somehow that those eyes see you. They do not move, do not speak, but I hear them. 

Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you.

There is a reason why medicine considers a brain-dead person, even if other organs are alive, dead: Dead. DEAD. A book is a book, not because the eyes see so, but because the brain says so. There is a reason why. The eyes have got only one job: absorb light. The brain does the rest: interprets the light. There is a reason why. The ears have got one job: absorb sound. The brain does the rest: interprets the sound. Silence is the absence of the presence of the brain’s sense of surrounding sounds. There is a reason why. Humans and Spirits trade in this market called earth. The enlightened know; the unenlightened know not. That is the reason why.

I am lying on the yellow tiles. The grain of white rice is in my palm. My head feels hollowed out, as though it was scraped clean with a metal spoon, and the bowl of head filled with water. I clutch the windowsill and rake myself off the ground. Outside is calm, empty, and wet from the cried sky. Tomatoes litter the ground. The green-and-yellow orange lies under the tree. Omah Lay’s Lolo plays on repeat in my EarPods. I pull my EarPods.

My brain must be foxing me. I did not lie on that ground. I did. My dream, not a dream, a dream, proves it. Your sister needs you. She is one of us. My sister? MY SISTER! I sprint to my room. I fling my white duvet, fling my white pillows, pull my white bedsheet, send my white fur mat flying in the stiff air. It's as if an anaconda is squeezing me dry like a wet cloth. I fan myself. I take deep breaths. I’m going to die. I’m going to die without checking on my sister. I’m going to… A fierce vibration rocks my right thigh. My heart and legs jump, and I fall onto the bed. I pull my phone out of my pocket. It is, of all people, my sister. Relief flushes into my voice, through the waves gushing from my eyes.

At night, I lie on my bed looking at sleep, looking at sleep looking the other way. Something is not right. I did not dream of those living statues. They were as real as matter, with weight and space accounted for. But my sister does not need me. It turns out that I am the one who needs her. I decide to comb the streets of Twitter since sleep said no. The brightness of my screen fails in its attempt to blind me.

What’s Trending. I click on #ENDSARS. As depressing as it is, I read through. It’s one year since the government of Lagos released the hound army of Nigeria to mangle the children of Nigeria who were salvaging Nigeria. October 20, 2020. The blood of Nigerian children swamped the soil of Lekki that night. Promising brains of promising Nigerian children repainted the soil of Lekki that night. Tears flowed like okun on the soil of Lekki that night. Seventeen-year-old Ebele, one of the protesters, picked up a tooth while taking cover from the hail of bullets that night. A tooth. Whose was it? If a bullet caught the person’s face and extracted a tooth, did such a person survive? Ebele’s hand had to be pried open to release that tooth two days after the massacre. The #ENDSARS clouds with pictures of the tooth’s burial. Our heroes held hands, said a prayer, and buried the tooth in an unmarked hole. Ebele, according to the scanty news, is in some undisclosed mental home. I wipe a tear and leave Twitter. 

I am sitting at the back of my bank’s sedan, the next afternoon, getting on and off the phone with the bank’s customers. The radio is near-mute. I try not to look at the two epidermoid cysts at the nape of my driver’s neck. A walnut hawker stands by my window. Funmi Adams’ song, Nigeria My Beloved Country, wafts from the radio. Would Johnson, please, turn up the radio? It appears the radio station, God bless their heart, is trying to encourage promising Nigerians that despite it all, Nigeria is still our beloved country. Despite it all, our comrades did not die in vain. Despite it all, we will rescue our Nigeria from these politicians who are adept at drinking our sweat and blood. I remember when my sister and I, seven and five, innocent and unencumbered by the worries of life, sang and danced to Adams. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. I, on impulse, snap up my phone to call my sister, but retract my hand. We spoke this morning. 

The light turns green. I pick a white thread off my navy-blue corporate gown. I hear them screaming. A painful breed of screeching! Loud like the turning of mortals to immortals. A symphony of agony. I see flashes of people in a soaring, enraged, red-orange dominion, devouring flesh, melting, rebuilding, burning, remelting, rebuilding. I shudder. Blood washes from my head to my feet, washing off the sounds and images. I tap Johnson’s shoulder. My hand brushes the cysts. Did he hear the bellows? Through the rearview mirror, Johnson gawks at me, his eyes asking what his lips will never utter: am I mad? I am serious, not mad. Did he or did he not hear screaming? He did not hear any screaming o. An overloaded tricycle zooms past. I did hear screaming. We must have passed the screamers. A stander in an oversized brown suit, arms akimbo. A strolling albino holds an umbrella over his head. My arms are fields of standing grass. But I know what I saw when the street yawned. The way I know what happened to me during the rain yesterday. The way I did not know what happened to me during the rain yesterday. Where were we? I ask Johnson. Lekki toll gate. My eyes almost fall off. The menacing burnt toll gate or its leftover stands behind us, useless, and dead. Anger floods my head. I promised myself never to pass this toll gate, dammit! I’d rather leave Lagos than donate one kobo to a government that killed promising Nigerians just to save this bastard toll gate! I must have turned red because Johnson, pallid as garlic, starts rapping that the alternative route will be impassable by this time hence his decision to take this road if we are to get to my meeting on time. Well-intentioned but wrong-footed!

The rest of the day is a blur. Me making it in time for my meeting, me sealing the blue-chip account for my bank, me getting home late, and me dissolving in bed. Me jumping up in the middle of the night, sure that I am in my room, sure that I was not alone, sure that I am alone. My heart bangs like a migraine. An acoustic bass guitar, toned to are-you-nuts, strums in my head. What in the world is wrong with me? What? I zip down my navy-blue dress to allow the free flow of blood. It relaxes my body, but not my spirit. It’s one a.m. I play music, strip, and enter my bathtub. I crouch there. The hot water pours on my cornrows, on my skin. Minister GUC’s All That Matters fills my space. Minister GUC then speaks in tongues. And I'm like, why, Jesus? You're all that matters to me. Why will you allow this happen to me? The bath feels cold. I find myself nodding. I find myself crying, unburdening, seeking help. What business have I with the underworld, Jesus? Why me, Jesus? The bath feels cold. Goose pimples quilt my skin. They must be here. I tighten my eyes shut. But the coolness persists. I must be imagining things. So, I open my eyes, and there they are. Two of them. Right inside my bath. I try to scream, but my voice is gone. Their whispering voices, coming in twos but sounding as ten thousand, overshadow Minister GUC’s.

Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you. Your mother’s child needs you: one of us needs you.

I am stiff, rendered as inert as they. Their heads tilt right. Their mouths fall open. It’s black inside. Lavender-scenting water drools out. I shriek before I realise I am shrieking. 

I run out of the bathroom, flicking every switch. I slip on the wet tiles and land on the ground. I spring up. I snatch my white towel from the bed. I run barefooted, my hair wet and dripping, my tenderized skin wet and dripping, smelling of boiled lavender and sweat. I grab my car keys and drive off that night. I am wiping tears from my eyes, driving, not knowing where I am going, but driving. There are few cars on the road. I drive until sense gradually seeps through my wet head and into my brain. Where am I going? How do I think that driving away from my house would keep them at bay? I need help: spiritual help. I reach for my phone but my fingers dip into the cup-holder. I facepalm.

*

My sixty-two-year-old pastor hands me a shower coat. Its softness is welcoming. She wraps my towel around my hair. She turns up the heat until I stop shivering and can grasp and sip from my cup of hot tea. Only then am I able to tell her what is happening to me. She holds my hands, kneels before me, and prays. I do not pray with her. After praying, she holds the handle of the chair to lift herself up. She sinks into the couch beside me. She sighs. I search her sunken eyes for a sign of what the Holy Spirit said. Nothing. I study her face, study the claws of tribal marks on her cheeks. Nothing. Would she tell me what she saw? Am I possessed? She shakes her head. She did not see anything, but she kept hearing the name Ebele. Do I know any Ebele? I do not know any Ebele. I am not Igbo. I have no Igbo friends. I am positive that I do not… wait a minute… Ebele? She nods. Ebele? The one in a mental home? The tooth picker? She stamps the back of her palms on her lap. All she knows is she kept hearing the name Ebele. What business have I with Ebele? She stamps the back of her palms on her lap. So, what do I do? Find Ebele so that those people, those water spirits, will leave me alone. Come on now! This does not make sense, does it? Couldn’t she cast and bind those water nonentities to hell? I better watch my words! It’s in my best interest to find that Ebele and find her fast so that the water entities would leave me alone. When I find Ebele then what? What do I tell her? She stamps the back of her palms on her lap. It’s as if the ocean-sized silence in the room bears a calm as soothing as laughing gas. So, I laugh. I laugh at how I am dressed; where I am; at the irony of my pastor of Jesus sending me to find Ebele for some water spirits; at the hopelessness of it all. I laugh hard. I laugh alone. I feel alone. I dissolve, like an avalanche, into a glob of wailing thing. My sixty-two-year-old pastor hugs me. 

At dawn, I call in sick and go seeking Ebele. I search social media, call all the psychiatric hospitals in Lagos, return to social media, inbox one of the loudmouths of the Lekki protests, inbox those who tweeted news of Ebele being in a mental home since last year. Eventually, a web of connections hooks me with Ebele’s mother. Ebele’s mother then invites me to her house. She meets me at the end of the motorable road. She’s petite and slim. Her house is not far, she says. Her gait is a three-toed sloth's. I am forced to equalize my steps from rock to jazz. Passengers on motorcycles stare at me. A red-headed lizard chases a red-headed lizard up and down the tree, round and round, the tree. Children bathed in dust chase children bathed in dust. Petty store traders gawp at me. I must have overdressed. I should have worn a simple gown instead of blue jean trousers and bright red V-necked t-shirt. Or is it my height? But I am wearing flat slippers! If Ebele’s mother spoke, I did not hear. I am wondering where this not-far house is. Because all I see are litters of structures made from corrugated zinc sheets. Surely, these are stalls, not people’s places of abode. Boy, I was wrong! Ebele’s mother leads me to one of the zinc houses. I look at her, but I see her for the first time. She’s smiling, happy to have me perhaps. Her teeth are browned maybe by dirty water. She invites me in. Despite the open windows, inside is a heating oven. And in there lay Ebele. I sit on one of the two impoverished sofas. The cemented floor is sandy. A blackened lantern is on the stunted wooden table behind Ebele. Ebele's mother sits beside her on the orange mat and taps her. Would Ebele sit up and say hello to her guest? Ebele sits up. She is skin and bones. Her hair is a shrub of coils. Her eyes shine with disinterest. Her eye bags can house a bag of cement. Her neck is a thin tree with a hollow. She seems like a husk, dry and empty of Ebele. Tears pool in my eyes. I wipe them off. I say hi. Silence mounts on silence, visible as one’s breath in the cold. I swat off a noisy blue fly. Her mother says this is how Ebele has been since she came back from the psychiatric hospital midyear. Why did she come back? No money to keep her there. The protesters ran out of funds, so Ebele was ejected. The smile disappears from her face and her eyes well up. She told Ebele not to go to that protest! See it now! See it! I squeeze her hand. She nods and blows her nose into the edge of her red lappa. I talk to Ebele, but if Ebele is hearing me, she does not show. If she is even seeing me, I do not know. So, I squeeze her arm. Something like electric current shoots through me. Ebele must have felt it too because she turns suddenly toward me as if she is not in control of her neck. She looks into my pupils. But my guess is as good as yours that she sees something else in my brown eyes. Were my eyes inert, yet, alive? Ebele screams her head off! This kind of loud uninterrupted scream! Her mother and I scramble around like rats, confused, utterly confused. People pour into that small suffocated hot space. Someone or some people pushes me out. I sprint for my dear life away from that house, away from that yet unsliced scream. I am running in the opposite direction of everyone else who might be running toward Ebele’s house. I am running as Usain Bolt runs for Olympic gold. My driver does not need to be told. He zooms off, pouring dust on the village.

I ask my driver to turn down the thermostat. The coolness of the car dries the heat on my body but not the one in my heart. I am panting, still confused, still not sure if I made it out of that place alive or if it is my spirit sitting in this car while my body lies in that hot house, my eyes inert. It will take my standing in front of my mirror and pricking myself with a needle and feeling the pain and seeing the blood trickle and splash on my white tiles for me to agree that I am alive. That is when I call my pastor and fill her in. She asks me to send her Ebele’s mother’s number. I do after a good life-reviving bath. No more of this madness. The water nonentities can take me if they want. Enough of this!

*

I am a melted candle. My body fluids drown my spirit. I walk but don’t move; work but don’t produce. The only thing keeping my head high is my neck. My phone rings three days after I left Ebele’s. It’s my pastor. I do not answer. I do not have the strength for any Ebele story. She sends a message that Ebele’s mother is trying to reach me to say she’s sorry, to say thank you for curing Ebele, that Ebele is now sane, that Ebele is now eating, that Ebele is still tired, but that Ebele no longer mopes, that Ebele now recognizes everyone, that bla-bla-black-sheep. I hiss. Ebele’s mother’s calls come in next. Then her text. My phone won’t shut the hell up.

Why, I grab and hurl it at the wall. It falls to the floor and shuts up.

I nod. Good.

Kasimma is from Igboland (obodo ndi dike). She’s the author of All Shades of Iberibe. Her short stories, essays, poems, and scripts appear/are forthcoming in Guernica, Solarpunk, LitHub, New Orleans Review, Meet Cute, Mangoprism, The Saltbush Review, The Forge, Afreecan Read, Native Skin, Writers Digest, and other online journals and print anthologies. Kasimma is an alumnus of Chimamanda Adichie’s creative writing workshop, Wole Soyinka Foundation writers’ residency, and others across four continents.

Munroe Forbes Shearer

The Five Pillars of Intimacy Direction

Intimacy Directors and Coordinators is an international organization that provides guidelines for the ways in which scenes of intimate relationships or intimate violence (sex, sexual assault, sexual touch, etc.) are conducted in live performance. They frame them in five pillars, listed on a handout that fell out of my journal and onto the adjacent Amtrak seat on my return trip to Boston from New York. I read them quietly to myself. 

1. Context:

Before any choreography can be considered, there must first be an understanding of the story and the given circumstances surrounding a scene of intimacy. All parties must be aware of how the scene of intimacy meets the needs of the story and must also understand the story within the intimacy itself. This not only creates a sense of safety, but also eliminates the unexpected and ensures that the intimacy is always in service of the story.

Before I left for New York, Dan and I had only been on four dates. On the first, we met at a bar and he showed me his Grindr nudes folder right there in seat 3A. I tried to cover it with my hand as he shrugged and laughingly told them to enjoy the show. He was wearing a leather harness underneath a plain white t-shirt (He had planned to go to a fetish night if I flaked, which he says that boys in college always seem to.) He has a well-kept beard and a swath of chest hair bursting over the top of his shirt. Despite a gruff exterior, his hands are doll-soft; his voice sensuous and light. He has a series of tattoos of woodland creatures that run up one arm, starting with water creatures (an otter) before moving to ground animals (a chipmunk, a shrew, a bumblebee on a thistle) and ending with a soaring heron at his shoulder. He makes that intense and disquieting eye contact that only bearded blue-eyed psychiatrists in their early thirties seem to be able to, where they stare directly through your head into your innermost thoughts about how badly you want them to rail you in the bathroom at this dive bar. We talked about his psychiatric practice. His interests, his passions, his wife. 

He asked about my writing, and my theatre work. My previous relationships. I told him about Sully. I tried to make it seem like it had been longer since we had broken up because I didn’t want it to seem like I was on a rebound (I absolutely was). He told me he was sorry. I found that odd. He didn’t have to be sorry. I didn’t want to be sorry about it, I wouldn’t let myself. We kissed greedily in the parking lot before he paid for my Uber home. 

On our second date he came to my house. It was the first time I had a boy over since I left Sully. I dragged him past my squawking housemates and into my closet bedroom at the back of the house where we fucked. Hard. He spanked me until I was on the verge of tears, then slapped me in the face and spit on me (sorry, Mom) before finishing on my chest, cleaning me up with a warm towel, and wrapping me in the warmest and most hospitable grip I could’ve imagined. One hand over my back, sliding tenderly along my bare stomach while the other played music in each tight black curl on my head. He’s not much bigger than I am, and maybe an inch or two shorter, but I never noticed. He makes me feel small, but not diminished. Held, but not squeezed. Pushed, but not used. I made him watch a silly horror movie and he broke one of my wine glasses (which he cleaned up, apologizing the whole time). He had to leave when his wife called, she had locked herself out of their house. I wondered if he texted her to make up an excuse for him to leave. He insists that he didn’t. [MA1] 

On our third date we discussed our personal traumas over Cambodian food and had sex in his Honda Pilot.

On our fourth date we canoodled in a corner at an expensive restaurant in Cambridge where we made friends with our waitress. That date was memorable because he came over and we didn’t have sex. The more dating app dates I go on, the more I realize the bizarre rarity of that scenario. We fooled around a little, don’t get me wrong, but he just held me. Long and tender. The intimacy is indescribable. To be held and felt by hands seemingly made for holding and feeling is a pleasure and a pain that’s almost beyond reason. Pleasurable because you feel so safe in that moment, so seen, so removed from the painful choices you’ve made to get there, and finally able to bask in the glow of your freedom. Painful, because after you doze off nose to nose, drunk on each other’s smell, his alarm rings and he has to go home. One of his wife’s boundaries: no sleepovers. That’s reserved for her. The curse of the ethical slut is, after all, ethics. The transition of waking up wrapped in Sully each morning to sitting alone in my underwear with my sheets smelling of Dan’s cologne was painful in a way I didn’t expect. I left Sully the month before to see other people. So why did it hurt so goddamn much? 

Then Dan got COVID, so I didn’t see him for a week, and then he had to leave for a psychiatry conference in New York: Tuesday to Sunday. He offered to pay for me to take a train down for the weekend, and I don’t remember anything between that and my butt being in the seat. I knew it probably would hurt. I almost wanted it to. The sexual freedom of non-monogamy requires some masochism—knowing that no matter how much love I felt in his bed, he would send me home with a slap on the ass and a promise to text that he may or may not keep.

2. Communication

There must be open and continuous communication between the intimacy director and the actors. The communication includes but is not limited to: discussion of the scene, understanding of the choreography, continued discussion throughout the rehearsal period, frequent check-ins during the run and an openness to dissent any actions in the process. Avenues for reporting harassment must be made available to the entire ensemble.

On our first night in New York, over a gluten free pizza, he was quiet. I offered a penny for his thoughts. He returned a dollar. He bucked up some courage and asked me how I was feeling about the problematic and tenebrous us. I offered a heavy sigh and shifted back in my seat. Let’s examine my options:

“I think I’m falling in love with you, I hope your wife doesn’t mind.”

“It feels like a knife in the gut every time I look over and see you scrolling on Grindr, even though that’s the reason I’m sitting here as well, and I understand that the established rules of engagement in our connection means that you, in no way, owe me chastity outside of our situationship”

“I really like hanging out with you and want to keep seeing you, but am actively conscious of my inexperience with non-monogamous relationships and what I need out of our connection as a result.”

I settled for the third. 

He’s a therapist by trade, so our conversation was almost annoyingly productive. I guided him along some of the walls I was putting up and let him run his fingers over their coarse texture. I told him I was protecting my heart from the pain of occupying the #2 spot in your #1’s life. He said he understood. He asked if I wanted the connection that he and his wife had. I said no. Because I don’t. I’m not ready to be a husband nor a wife, and have no intention of becoming ready anytime soon. It’s why I left Sully. I left Sully to be like Dan, and to be with people like Dan. Right?

I volleyed the question back to him, as is the duty of any good snarky bottom. If I have to express vulnerability at the dinner table the least you can do is offer me a sullen “good?” before changing the subject and footing the bill. Instead, he teared up. He said that he was scared of the idea of me moving away, which I had mentioned earlier. That he could see our connection continuing and blossoming, an ongoing journey of intimacy until I moved on, or he moved on, or both, or neither. I didn’t know what to say to that. I think that I blubbered something about not knowing whether or not he would ever be my boyfriend. In his convoluted answer that I block out most of, he quoted a Hippo Campus song back to me: “I don’t care what we are, it just has to work.” I don’t think men I like should be allowed to listen to music, let alone quote devastating song lyrics back at me. The song is called Understand, which is funny because I don’t. I think that I did care what we were, more than I want to believe.[MA2] 

I think I want to be a boyfriend (a wretched word that I deeply and irresponsibly adore), as inane and selfish as that sounds. I left a boyfriend who unreasonably loved every fucking inch of me because I felt like I would explode if I was a boyfriend for another second. Only to sit across the table from Dan and want nothing more in the world than to have him softly kiss me on the head and tell me that he loves me every night before going to bed. And then he did, that night. We left the gluten free pizza restaurant and returned to his hotel, where he pounded my brains out and I dozed off on his chest. Just like I used to do on Sully’s. Every night of our trip he’d kiss me on the head and say “goodnight beautiful boy” before he fell asleep with one arm looped over my ribs. I wish he’d told me that he loved me. He told his wife he loved her every time he hung up the phone. His wife didn’t know I was there. I listened to the phone calls quietly and tried to infer what was going on in her day. Sully used to tell me that he loved me when he hung up the phone.

3. Choreography

Each scene of intimacy must be choreographed, and that choreography will be adhered to for the entire production. Any changes to the choreography must first be approved by the intimacy choreographer.  

We spent most of our time in the hotel bed. Not (always) fucking, just existing. In our underwear or naked, always intimately. Touching, kissing, holding, maybe just my feet over his legs or his head sprawled over my lap. Sometimes, if we were deep in conversation, we’d both put our feet up on the wall next to each other like children trying to stay awake at a sleepover and talk about the ways in which people do and don’t exist. Or the ways we wished they did. He’s smart, and knows that I’m smart. [MA3] We have a lot of interests in common, and I would ask him to explain his psychoanalysis to me and he did. It’s kind of easy, in a strange way (at least, when he says it). We get a lot of the same references about culture and society, and true crime. He listens to me when I talk, and I keep up with him when he does. I ask him questions that he answers.

I make him laugh a lot. He told me that he was thinking about shaving his chest and I told him that that would be my own personal Hindenburg disaster. He laughed so hard that he started to cry again, like he did over the gluten free pizza. [MA4] “Oh, the humanity”, indeed.

I like sleeping next to him. He snores a little bit, like Sully used to do. Not a lot, just enough to remind me that he’s there. I slept really well the first night, partially because we split two bottles of Soju at the Korean restaurant he took me to (where they didn’t have any gluten-free options even though he said he checked online, a fact that deeply embarrassed him ((I told him that it was okay, which it was. It takes practice. (((Sully used to call every restaurant to ask about their gluten free options and how serious they were about cross contamination. ((((Just saying))))). The second night I slept less well, but it was okay. I laid there and watched him sleep for a little bit. His beard rustles when he breathes too hard, like a wave ebbing and flowing off a beach. He has a little outcrop of gray hair at the front of his forehead and a few gray drops in his beard. I think he’s insecure about it. I think it’s sexy. He certainly fears getting older (as men in their early thirties do). Sully used to talk about how much he was looking forward to going just a little bit gray, a silver fox-y type of gray. They each have a preoccupation with fixing their hair every time that they look in a mirror. 

I can’t help but think of the similarities between them sometimes. Hairy scientists, thirty-ish year old bisexuals, gentle men with sweet pets and gray streaks in their hair. They have hands smaller than you might expect, but both soft and strong. They both like paying for dinner and calling me beautiful.

There are differences, too. Sully’s cat is the love of his life, Dan likes dogs. Dan is kinkier than Sully; Sully was softer to cuddle with. Dan likes soft rock; Sully likes EDM (I like folk.) Dan revels in his non-monogamy; Sully couldn’t handle ours. Dan is married; Sully wanted to be. To me. Dan doesn’t tell me that he loves me, while Sully did on every breath. I know he meant it, too.

4. Consent

Before any scene of intimacy can be addressed, consent must be established between the actors. Permission may be given by a director, script, or choreographer; however, consent can only be given from the person receiving the action. Starting choreography from a place of understanding consent ensures that all parties are clear about to which actions they are consenting, and it provides actors with the agency to remove consent at any time.

Before I continue, I have to get something out of the way: I’m a survivor of sexual assault. I was 17 and he was 21. I stayed with him for two more years. It’s hard but it’s true, and now an inevitable story to get out of the way when engaging in new sexual relationships. It’s important context, I promise. I told Dan at the Korean restaurant, when we returned for his credit card (see: two bottles of soju). I told it in the context of another story so I could[MA5]  move on immediately, but he touched me differently after that. He was less grabby and less pushy (not that I had was opposed to the grabby and the pushy, mind you. It looked good on him.) He kissed me before and after he did anything, and asked me softly if it was okay when he wanted to get rough with me. When my mouth was otherwise occupied (we’re all adults here) he put his wrist in my hand and told me to squeeze him if I needed to stop. And I did, and he did. And then he’d kiss me again. Simple, baseline expectations, but I was still overwhelmed by the sundering power of delicate handling to peel back layers and layers of trauma-informed armor and make it possible to feel utterly and radically safe in your body, even if just for a moment. 

He can be mean. Never to me, but to others. He’ll make comments about his patients or people walking slowly in the train stations. He’ll say mean things about men we see on Grindr or men that he’s fucked back in Boston. He was rude to a woman working at H&M. It makes me wonder if he’d be mean about me someday, say that I was naive or foolish. If he’d say I didn’t know what I wanted or how to cut my feelings into a shape that fit his. On our first night in New York, he mentioned a guy he used to see and how relieved he was that they never wanted to “buy each other fucking rings,” that they could just have fun and let their relationship be what they wanted it to be in a kind of kaleidoscope, something new on each day. I understand what he meant, it’s what I had signed up for. Though I couldn’t help but feel the presence of a burdensome image of wearing a ring someday, one that he gave to me on one knee. Knowing that he could disparage me with his next conquest for feeling that way puts a knot in my stomach. He’d never admit it, though. Not to me, at least.

On our last night, over a bottle of Montepulciano that I chose and tasted, he asked me to give him the “big feelings” about our relationship like my own therapist used to: what made me happy, what made me sad, what made me scared, and what made me angry. 

I told him that the intimacy made me happy, in fact it made me deeply fucking joyous. The tiny kisses in the morning and the ravenous way that he buries his face into me. The conversations about life and death, psychology and responsible artmaking. The way I learn from him and his thoughtful listening to me. We speak the same language about the world, I find. 

I told him I was sad that he couldn’t sleep over, that it was hard to feel like our relationship was dictated by his ability to work around his existing relationship and not what we wanted for our lives and our connection. It was sad that the prospect of a life together didn’t exist, even though it was ridiculous to imagine one after knowing each other for barely a month. 

I hesitated before I got to scared, but it spilled out of my mouth before I could stop it. I said I was scared that I would fall in love with him. And that he wouldn’t fall in love with me. And that I’d spend my life being bitter that he didn’t, wondering what I could have changed. He asked what would happen if I fell in love with someone else, so that we could revel in our non-monogamous debauchery and indescribable intimacy before going home to other people that love us completely. I know that it’s possible, but it’s hard to accept when that person isn’t around right now. I left that person, remember? 

I couldn’t think of something that made me angry. Now I wonder if I’m angry at myself for feeling that way.

5. Closure

At the end of every rehearsal or scene of intimacy, actors are encouraged to develop a closing moment between them to signify the ending of the work. This small moment or simple ritual can be used between takes or runs of the scene, and/or upon the close of rehearsal. We encourage this as a moment to leave our characters, relationships, and actions from the work behind, and walk back into our lives. Likewise, we suggest all parties (including outside eyes) exercise proper self-care during and after the run or filming of intimate projects.

I’m on my way home now, on the 3:00 Amtrak from New York to Boston, train number 88. I managed to find a seat alone near the end of the train. Dan walked me to Penn station, but left me in line. He was quieter than he had been at breakfast, and we sat with my bag between us waiting for my train's gate to be announced. He kissed me before he left, and told me that he was excited to see me back in Boston. He walked away, back out into the sunlight. It was warmer today than it has been the last two, and we went for a long walk in the morning. He checked out of his hotel and his flight doesn’t leave until later tonight, so I think he might go hook up with another guy. I understand. It’s fun. His openness about his sexcapades bothers me less than it did at the beginning of the weekend, knowing that I’m more to him than just another one. I think, at least.

Soon I’ll be back in Boston, where I’ll climb into my unmade double bed and make myself some mac and cheese, do my homework for tomorrow and consider what I want from my life. It’s easy, in some ways: I want to love and be loved with everything I can muster. I want to be agile, to be unburdened, to be unstoppable. To be kind, and have others be kind to me. To have a cat named Pyewacket and for him to fall asleep in my lap. To understand myself, and others. I want to be as thoughtful as I can muster. It’s hard in others, too, though.

If closure is a ritual, consider this mine. Dan can do his on his own time.

Munroe (He/Any) is a queer playwright and essayist from Essex Junction, Vermont, now based in Providence, Rhode Island. His work often centers his rural New England heritage and love of history to explore introspective themes of regret, family, and loss while uncovering intimate truths about human communion. Munroe was the winner of the Rod Parker Playwriting Fellowship Award and the Betsy Carpenter Award for Playwriting at Emerson College, and was a runner-up for the 2023 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest. During the day, he serves as the fellow for the HowlRound Theatre Commons in Boston, Massachusetts. munroefshearer.com

Anna Nielsen Williams

Legacy: A Sequence

Second Birth

As she looks through the film loupe, she sees her purple, infant body being raised up in the air like a chalice for a toast. The fluorescents of the hospital room refracting off of the crimson biofilm coating her flesh. Her tiny raisin face is contorted into a scowl, ignorant to the miracle of childbirth, inconvenienced by emergence. Behind her, there are glimpses of her mother’s blurred flesh–stomach incised, gaping and yet to be stitched.

Her father continues to shift the film to the right, exposing her to view varying angles of this gruesomely incredible scene. 

She doesn't move, shocked by the rawness of her existence and by her father’s intent. There is something deeply unnatural in witnessing one’s own birth. Perhaps it is the highest imposition–reliving your first trauma.

He thinks he is giving her a gift.

The Lesson

In Russia, they say that when winter hits, the birds will freeze mid-air. She thinks of this as her hands dig through the snow, the tips of her fingers stinging red. Perhaps she will freeze mid-dig.

She lost her boot an hour ago. The fort she and her sister carved out of the snow mound swallowed it and refuses to spit it back out. Her sock is damp with a frosty crunch, and she’s beginning to lose feeling in her toes. The sun has descended into the earth and the sky is taking on that dreadful sapphire hue. Soon, the blackness will eat her and her boot. 

*

The front porch is lit, but the illumination does not reach the mound. She hears the front door open and sees his figure in the doorway.

“Find it yet?” her father asks, but it’s more of a reprimand than a question.

“I can’t. I’m getting really cold.” Her cheeks dampen and flush.

“You’re not coming in until you have it.” There’s an anger in his tone that feels ancient, as if it's not even his to begin with. But it’s his now. 

“Will you help?” She regrets it as soon as she says it.

“I wasn’t the one being careless.” He walks inside and shuts the door.

She thinks she’ll burrow in the snow with her boot. It would be warmer than the house.

Accessory to Murder

This is a cause for celebration–one of his most esteemed exhibits yet. Her father’s face is proud and at peace, as though he was born to be revered.

The excitement is palpable. She’s just pleased to be the descendant of an important guest, so she smooths her hand over her braids several times before they enter the exhibit, making sure she is as presentable as the art installation her father has spent so many years perfecting. 

Upon entrance, she is met by the eyes of impressed attendees: her status is secured and she is beaming. Suddenly, her delight is disrupted by a graphic reality. The first piece of art–not her father’s–is a model posing, bloodied, in a car seat against a white backdrop. Her mother tells her it’s meant to be Princess Di. She’ll dream about her for months.

Then her eye is drawn to the center of the room. The eight-foot, bronze wolven creature sits erect atop a broken airplane wing in rubble, its jowl snarling. Milky, moth-like wings protrude from the creature’s spine and its body resembles a veiny exoskeleton: impenetrable and violent. The thing could come alive at any moment, but nobody else seems to mind. Her father looks lovingly at his baby.[1] 

Underneath the bits of rubble, she spots the stuffed, pink poodle she let him borrow for his mystery project–its body dismembered into fragments[2] . The toy wasn’t her favorite, but had she known its fate, she wouldn’t have subjected it to such cruelty.

An Apology

On days where her thoughts are more or less copacetic, she picks up his FaceTime calls.

He reaches out to her in some form on a semi-regular basis, but she often puts off their interactions until guilt chimes louder than reason.

Today, he goes on about his youth for two hours. About how his adoption impacted his sense of belonging. About how his crazy aunt didn’t save his hand from getting crushed[3]  by the clothing ringer. About how he impregnated a girl in high school because she had a good body and a passable face. That’s why he’s where he’s at now: living in a hostel, photographing a woman fifty years younger than him, and by the way, does she mind terribly that she and the girl have the same name?

“Please talk to me more often,” he says, “I miss you.”

She thinks about how he stalked their family for the better part of their last year in Moscow, creeping up from behind the cement pillars of the apartment building as they were getting into the car for school. How their mother became ill and was hospitalized for two weeks from the stress induced by his threats. How he shoved the nanny because she wouldn’t let him into the apartment, as per mother’s orders. How they had to flee their home without any closure.

She says this: “I’ll do better.”

Resemblances

“You have all of his best traits! None of the bad.”

She just graduated high school, and she’s getting ready to travel for three months before heading off to college. That time in life that feels timeless. At the dinner table, she sits across from her mother, who is seeing her off the next morning. “None of the bad,” her mother emphasizes again. She’s trying to convince herself, it seems. 

“You have his passion. Sometimes that passion really scares me, but it’s enviable.”

There’s the slip. There’s the fear. 

One-Way Correspondence

Thinking of you!

How long are you going to ignore me?

Happy birthday, pretty girl!

What are you up to?

Living in the States now–would really like to see you.

Come save me[4] . 

You don’t love your own father?

Just a minimal response would suffice.

Reflections

“Why can we only see each other three times a week? Why does it have to be on a schedule?”

Her current boyfriend asks this for the second time in twenty-four hours. He’s not the first one to ask this. The answer’s always the same–

“I really need to focus on my work.”

“But when you’re not writing. You go out. You travel. Why can’t I join you then?”

“Separation is healthy. You have your life, I have mine.”

“But does anything ever get to be ‘ours’?”

She drowns him out and thinks about the qualities of absence. How it’s perceived as emptiness. But isn’t there immense possibility in the place of emptiness? An untapped world? A freedom granted? Gifted, even. She decides it is the ultimate fullness. 

In Remembrance Of

Her friend points to a picture on the bedroom wall. The only photo she has showcased of her father; she’s three years old and he’s guiding her by hand through his studio space. It’s tender, in a way. 

“No offense,” her friend says, “but your dad looks sort of unsettling.”

You can see it in someone’s expression, you know, their capacity for malice. Something to do with the eyes. Maybe it’s the lighting.

Her mind fixates on a memory. They’re at the movie theater–her father took her to see How to Train Your Dragon. This was how they bonded: movies and walks. In this memory, she is five or maybe six. She remembers being captivated the entire time, save for a moment that broke her focus– 

The dragon, Toothless, is flying over the water. She can’t remember if the boy is riding the dragon, but in her memory he is. The sun begins to set as they slowly weave through the cliffs. The animated sky is a stunning spill of coral and tangerine. Suddenly, she hears a sniffle beside her. Then another. She turns her head, looking at her father sitting beside her. His eyes are glossy and heavy tears pattern his skin. 

“Why are you crying,” she whispers.

“It’s beautiful.” His tone is warped. Defensive, but something else too. He wipes his face.

She says nothing and turns her head forward. She understands something new then, something that will continue to evolve throughout her life when confronted by unexpected softness. She learns that perhaps there is truth even where there is deception. There is pain in those who inflict it. She will carry this knowledge, not always knowing what to do with it. 

And she knows that if she were to watch that scene now, she would cry too.

Anna Nielsen Williams is a Lewis & Clark College graduate with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology and a minor in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, and The Write Launch. She is currently writing from Burlington, Vermont.

Alida Dean

MATERIAL

February, my second semester at Smith College. Wind blew flurries through my unbrushed hair and on across the quad as I walked carefully down the icy brick pathway that led from the library to Seelye Hall, the humanities building. I dropped the used tissue I'd had in my pocket and watched it get lost in the snow. It was a Friday. The library had been mostly empty, the way I liked it; I avoided the library during midterm and finals weeks, when it became hard to find an empty carrel, or space at one of the long wooden tables in the periodicals room. At these times, I did work, or, more often, read for pleasure--or read for something--in my dorm room. If my floor-mates were being especially loud, I'd walk to the public library downtown. You never knew who might try to talk to you at the public library, but there were comfortable leather armchairs there, and if anyone was being really obnoxious, a security guard would escort them outside. 

Inside Seelye, up three flights of stairs, the door to Nora Crowe's office was open. My professor tilted her head at me. The look on her face struck me as pitying, and I did my best to mirror her expression as I stood in the doorway looking back at her. "Come in," she said. "Come in, come in, my dear." 

She'd sent me an email requesting this meeting yesterday afternoon. When I'd replied this morning, I’d told her I would be free after five today, though really I had nothing to do on Fridays; in the library, I'd passed the afternoon reading a thriller I'd picked up in one of the little free libraries near campus. Nora's course was called Getting Personal: An Introduction to Memoir Writing. For the first assignment of the semester, I'd written a mostly fictional essay about my mother's drinking problem and ensuing incarceration. It was true that my mom sometimes overindulged in red wine and become loquacious and confiding, but she was by no means an alcoholic, and had never been to jail. 

Nora must have been in her late sixties, or maybe her early seventies, old enough to retire. She was a round little woman with thin hair, and she had to lean on a cane when she walked, but she made up for these shortcomings by being an impeccable dresser.  Indeed, it was her style, I think, not her intellect, that I most admired about her. Seated at her desk, she was wearing a patterned silk shirt and a periwinkle jacket. Mauve lipstick, gold necklace and earrings. I, on the other hand, was wearing snow boots, flannel-lined jeans, and, under my leaky down coat, a cotton sweatshirt, threadbare at the elbows. The same clothes I'd worn yesterday, the same clothes I'd been wearing for years. I'd imagined myself dressing sharply once I got to Smith--pencil skirts, silk scarves, silver earrings--but I hadn't gotten around to buying any new clothes or accessories, never mind piercing my ears. Then again, and similarly to my mother, at least I had a good figure. As I sat down in the wooden chair facing her, I found myself wishing I could see Nora's shoes.

"This is a brilliant essay," she said. 

"Thank you," I said. When I'd submitted it, I'd had a feeling it would rattle her. I saw that she'd spilled coffee, or perhaps black tea, on the first page. She didn't have any drinks on her desk, and I wondered how many times she'd read it by this point, and if there were any major inconsistencies I hadn't caught; it was hard to keep track of all the details when you were making things up. 

Nora coughed softly, then cleared her throat. "It's an act of bravery to write about one's family," she said.

I nodded.

"Life with your mother has been a trial, but she's given you a wonderful gift: material, something many young writers would die for."

I leaned forward. "Or kill for," I said.

"Pardon me?"

"If you were dead, you couldn't write about it."

She put her hand over her mouth and giggled. "I see your point," she said. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

"Go ahead."

 "Are you still in touch with your mother?"

 In the final paragraph of my essay, my mom was at a detox facility outside Boston, and I was on a Greyhound bus to Northampton, about to start my first semester at Smith, everything I owned stowed in the luggage compartment beneath me in two plastic milk crates. Really, my mom had driven me to campus last August, and helped carry my stuff up the stairs to my single on the third floor of Capen House. After she drove away, I wished she'd hung around longer. I hadn't realized that most first-years went out to dinner with their parents after they unloaded their things. Indeed, some parents stayed in Northampton for the whole weekend. I sat by myself in the dining hall that night, my nose in a book. I still sat by myself most nights, reading, always reading. It was true that we'd packed some of my things in milk crates. 

"Not lately," I said. I hadn't talked to my mom in a few days. "But I might reopen the channels of communication soon, when I'm ready." I planned on calling her after I left Nora's office. I might even tell her that an essay I'd written had made an impression on my professor, though I would have to be careful not to tell her what the essay was about.   

Nora nodded. "When you're ready."

"Do you have children?"

She inhaled sharply. "I do," she said. "A daughter. Margaret."

"Hm." I'd expected her to say no.

"Which brings me to my next question." She picked up my essay, looked at it, put it back down. She seemed nervous now. "Would you care to join me and Margaret for tea at our home this weekend? Margaret serves a wonderful tea."

 I did the math; Margaret had to be at least thirty. Why did she still live with her mother? I agreed to join them at three o'clock on Sunday.

"Lovely," Nora said, writing their address on an index card. "Margaret will be delighted."

My mom was a night nurse in the maternity unit at Charlton Memorial. She wore baggy scrubs to work and came home reeking of coffee and disinfectant. I'd never seen her wear makeup. She only worked three nights a week. Still, it seemed like she was always sleep-deprived, and our house, a small ranch on the outskirts of Fall River, was always a mess. Of course, I hadn't helped matters by scattering my books and school papers everywhere, neglecting to carry my dirty plates to the sink. In high school, I'd been too embarrassed to have anyone over, and desperate to get away from it all, but now that I had, I was terribly homesick. All the time, I was homesick. My mom's face didn't need any makeup. 

"Good for you," she said when I told her my professor had complimented my essay, but she didn't ask any follow-up questions. She sounded tired.

 "How's work?" I said.

"Nutty. Someone pulled the fire alarm last night and the trucks showed up before we could call them off."

I'd made it back to Capen by now, and I was glad to be on the phone with her as I walked down my hall; it meant I didn't have to interact with the girls congregated outside the bathroom, Sadie, and Ashley, and Rachel. They were trying to decide which party to go to tonight, a burlesque thing at Smith or a kegger at UMass Amherst, which would require riding the inter-college shuttle bus. "The bus makes me puke when I'm drunk," Ashley said. Rachel, who wore safety pins in her ears in place of earrings, smiled at me but the other two didn't. 

"Uh huh," I said. 

"Uh huh, what?" my mom said.

"Yep," I said, hoping my floor-mates would think I was on the phone with a friend. 

"Are you talking to me?" my mom said. "I hear voices."

I unlocked my door and closed it firmly behind myself. My room was a pigsty, far worse than our house had ever been. The problem with Smith, I'd decided, wasn't that it was all girls but the type of girl it attracted. Or woman, you were supposed to say woman. I'd imagined my classmates being shy and bookish, but no. They all seemed to be outspoken, politically active, tattooed global citizens who weren't afraid to party. Their confidence terrified me, and so I'd retreated; I curled up in the fetal position under my dirty blankets and pressed my flip phone against my ear. "I'm here," I said. "I'm still talking to you."

"What are you up to tonight?"

"I don't know, there's a party at UMass I might go to." I'd never been to a kegger. In fact, I hadn't been to any sort of party since orientation, when everyone was invited to everything. 

"Go," my mom said. "Have some fun."

Nora and Margaret lived on Perkins Ave, four blocks east of campus. I'd been expecting a stately old house, a bushy evergreen wreath on the door, perhaps, and an attic full of antiques. But the address Nora had written down led me to a condominium. As I stood there on the sidewalk, staring at the large brick building divided into half a dozen or so residences, I felt inordinately disappointed.                       

I rang the buzzer and waited, empty-handed, until a slight woman wearing an apron opened the door. She had curly brown hair streaked with gray at the temples and wore wire-rimmed glasses. She smiled at me warmly, but she didn't say anything, so I said, "You must be Margaret."

 "You can call me Maggie," she whispered. "But not in front of Mother. Mother prefers Margaret, after the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. She'll be delighted you're here," she said, raising her voice. "She told me all about your essay."

"Oh no," I said. "I wish she hadn't." The whole essay business was starting to feel embarrassing, but I didn't see how I could confess at this point. For the next assignment, I intended to write about something true.

 "Lucia?" Nora's voice called from the next room. "I was starting to worry. The sidewalks must be dreadfully icy."

 "They're not bad," I said. "It was only a ten minute walk."

 "Ten minutes!" Nora said. "Maybe with your legs." Margaret's gaze moved from my hips to my boots and back admiringly. "Take her coat, Margaret," Nora said. "And bring her into the sitting room."

"May I?" Margaret said. A few feathers escaped and drifted to the glowing wood floor as I handed her my jacket. I saw she was wearing slippers, so I took off my boots and stood them beside the door. Margaret bent down, picked up the stray feathers, and tucked them in her apron pocket before leading me to the room her mother was in.

The condo was full of the sort of things I'd expected Nora's house to contain:  oil landscapes in gilded frames, leather-bound volumes arranged alphabetically on floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a dictionary, enormous and ancient, poised on a wooden podium. In the sitting room, Nora was nestled in an armchair beside the fireplace where a small fire gently crackled. She must have lived in a house until recently, I decided, then moved here when it came time to downsize. And Margaret had moved in to help with the housework?

"Are your feet cold?" Nora asked me, looking down at my mismatched wool socks. "Shall Margaret bring you a hot water bottle?"

"No, thank you," I said.

 "Bring her a blanket at least," Nora said to her daughter, who curtseyed before leaving the room. "Do you prefer earl grey or English breakfast?" she asked me.

I looked at her blankly. Was there a difference?

"Or perhaps something non-caffeinated? Spearmint, chamomile?"

 "Earl grey sounds nice," I said.

When Margaret came back with a blanket, Nora said, "English breakfast for me and Lucia will have earl grey."

"Do you prefer currant or ginger scones?" Margaret said. "I made them both fresh this morning."

 Nora told her to bring some of each and gestured for me to sit in the armchair next to hers. There was a low wooden table between us, and a foot stool in front of Nora's chair on which her knobby, stockinged feet rested, but no other chairs in the room. "I'm so glad you're here," Nora said. "I've been looking forward to this all weekend. Now tell me, who do you like to read? What writers do you draw on for inspiration?"

Although I spent most of my waking hours reading, I couldn't think of the name of a single author. The truth was, I had almost no preference for one genre or style over another. When I finished a book, I tossed it aside and moved on to the next one. I would consume anything with pages. "Kierkegaard," I said eventually. Nora closed her eyes. "Fear and Trembling," I added, emboldened by the expression on her face.

"The leap of faith," she said, and I nodded; the leap of faith was about all I remembered from Fear and Tremblingtoo. I'd read the book last semester for my Intro to Religion class, and had gotten a C on the paper I'd written about it; my best grade last semester had been a B in Life Drawing. My mom said I shouldn't worry so much about grades, but after winter break, I'd returned to campus resolved to raise my GPA, which was the main reason I'd written the made-up essay. 

Margaret brought us a wooden tray with two matching teacups and saucers on it, a sugar bowl with a small silver spoon at its side, and a miniature pitcher of cream. "This one's yours, Mother," she said, pointing to the cup positioned closer to Nora. "I hope the earl grey's not too strong," she said to me. "If it is, just tell me and I'll make you another cup. I let it steep for exactly seven minutes."

"Where's yours?" I said.

Margaret put her hand over her mouth. "I drink my tea in the kitchen," she said. 

"But you might join us in the sitting room afterward today," Nora said. "Bring a chair for yourself from the dining room."

"Yes, Mother."

"Just try not to scratch it against the doorway this time."

Margaret blushed, brought us a basket of scones, and retreated.

I poured cream in my tea and took a small sip; it tasted the same as any other black tea. "How long has Margaret lived with you?" I asked my professor.

 "Since she graduated from Wellesley," Nora said, adding two spoonfuls of sugar to her cup. "She got into Smith, of course, but Margaret chose Wellesley, partly because her father lives in Boston. Silly girl."

 "Were you married, then?"

She nodded. "It was dreadful, the worst years of my life. I was not myself." I watched her take a large but neat bite of a ginger scone. "Delicious," she said when she'd swallowed. "You must try these. Margaret's outdone herself this time."

"My mother never got married," I said, which was true. 

"Good for her," Nora said, "although I have nothing against marriage in principle, and I think it's wonderful women can marry women now."

"And men can marry men," I said.

She wrinkled her nose. "Men. Who needs them? Excepting a handful of writers, they're worthless. Maybe you're lucky your father passed away."

In my essay, I'd dealt with my father by killing him off in a fire. It had been a relief to get rid of him so easily, in a single short sentence. In real life, my dad lived in New Bedford and drove a box truck around New England delivering seafood. I saw him once a year or so, if that. He'd left my mom when she told him she was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby. She wasn't particularly bitter towards him--he hadn't misled her, he'd told her he didn't want children when they first started going out--but I was insulted by his lack of interest in me and would have felt vindicated if he got caught in a fire. 

"Maybe so," I said.

"Oh, the strangeness of family," Nora said.

A dining room chair entered soundlessly through the doorway, followed by Margaret, who held the chair carefully by the backs of the armrests. She set it down beside me so I was between her and her mother, and they both smiled at me. Their faces looked very similar, only Margaret wasn't wearing lipstick. 

"What do you usually do on Sundays?" I said. 

"I used to be at the library, doing research," Nora said. "But I don't suppose I have another book in me, so I read, I write letters. Margaret supplies me with nourishment."

"On Sunday I do the week's baking," Margaret said. "A jigsaw puzzle if there's time. In the evening we watch Antiques Roadshow."

Had something happened to her? Perhaps she'd been attacked in Boston, and the trauma had stunted her, set her back? Then again, no-one had attacked me, and I wasn't exactly flourishing socially. Baking, jigsaw puzzles, PBS in the evening: perhaps life with her mother wasn't so bad. Would I move back in with my mom after I graduated from Smith? She wouldn't want me to, but she couldn't stop me if I insisted. I could be a decent housekeeper if I set my mind to it.

We sampled the currant scones and agreed that the ginger scones were more exciting, but if you were going to eat scones everyday, the currant would be preferable. "Of course, Mother and I only eat scones on Sundays," Margaret said.

When the scones were gone, Nora announced that she was ready for her nap, and invited me to join them for tea again the following Sunday. 

Getting Personal met Wednesday afternoons on the second floor of Seelye. Twelve of us gathered around an oval table and talked about arcs, how to find our voices, ways to sift through material. There were other girls in the class who were well-spoken and whose writing I admired, but Nora didn't seem to notice them. When she had something poignant to say, she found my gaze and addressed her comment to me. I was flattered; I'd been waiting all my life for someone to single me out as special, worthy, but I could tell my classmates were annoyed. And I'd always hoped that the person who would see me as special would be a man. A dignified, older-but-not-too-old man, and that he would take me to bed in the end, relieving me of my virginity at last, though I never imagined this part of the fantasy in much detail.         

Our second assignment was to write an episodic essay, a series of vignettes on a subject of our choice. "More like a slideshow than a film," Nora said. 

I didn't know what to write about, but I knew I needed to impress her again. It would be terrible not to have tea on Sundays to look forward to.

I hated to use the bathroom when there were other people in it, even if I only had to pee. From the safety of my bed, I listened carefully as the door swung open and closed, open and closed, trying to gauge when the room was empty. One night, I made it to a stall while the bathroom was unoccupied, but then, right when I was about to flush, two girls barged in. I could only see their feet. The sheepskin slippers, I knew, belonged to Rachel, but I didn't recognize the white plastic flip-flops. "Can I use your toothpaste?" Rachel said. 

They ran the water, brushed their teeth, spat.

"Hey, what do you know about that girl Lucia?" the girl in the flip-flops said. 

I considered lifting my feet off the floor and resting them against the back of the stall door, but decided movement might only make the situation worse at this point, and instead sat perfectly still.

"Not much," Rachel said. 

"Do you think she's, like, a mute or something? I've never heard her say anything."

Rachel laughed. "No way, I've seen her on the phone."

"What's wrong with her then?"

"What d'you mean?" Rachel said. "Some people just do their own thing."

My third visit to Nora's condo fell on the Sunday after we'd turned in our episodic essays and before we'd discussed them in class. Nora hadn't sent me any emails about my essay, and I wondered if she would mention it over tea. If she didn't, it might only mean she hadn't read it yet, but that in itself would be a bad sign. 

Margaret met me at the door, wearing her apron as usual, but she forgot to ask for my jacket. I took it off and handed it to her without being prompted. Her face looked different. Was she wearing a light shade of lipstick? "Smells good," I said, prying off my boots. "What'd you bake?"

"Only banana bread," she said. "I was going to try a peach-rosemary scone recipe but I had to go to the pharmacy earlier, Mother isn't well."

"Oh dear," I said. "Is she ill?" I could hear myself imitating their way of speaking.

She nodded, leaned closer to me and whispered, "And in dreadful humor."

I suggested we reschedule.

"If you like," Margaret said. "But I was thinking, maybe you and I could have tea together today, in the kitchen? Though I'd understand if you'd rather not."

Of course I would rather drink tea with her than go back to hiding in my room. "That sounds nice, Maggie," I said, causing her to blush a deep shade of crimson.

The kitchen was small but tidy. The banana bread lay sliced on a wooden cutting board. I perched on a stool and helped myself to a piece as Margaret put the kettle on. It was still warm, with partially melted chocolate chips. I finished my first slice and took another. "How long has she been sick?" I said.

 "Since Friday," Margaret said, filling my mug with hot water; she'd selected two hefty, white mugs in place of the usual teacups.

"Is she showing any signs of improvement?" It would be hell if Nora cancelled class on Wednesday and I had to wait another whole week to find out what she thought of my essay. 

Margaret frowned. "She has a hard time getting over things. She's very sensitive. We both are." 

A terrible thought occurred to me: what if it was reading my essay that had made my professor sick? Perhaps I'd gone too far this time. It was hard to gauge these things. "Do you know what's wrong with her?" I said.

 "Upset stomach, chills, very low spirits."

"Oh no," I said, for it seemed entirely possible my essay, Mom's Making Love Again, a series of imagined vignettes about all the times my made-up-mom had had sex with different men when I was little, after my made-up-dad died in the fire, and her lame attempts at keeping me occupied while she was carrying on, might bring about these symptoms in a sensitive reader; in the final scene, she tells me to walk to the A&P and buy bananas, but I get stung by a swarm of wasps on my way and run back to the house in tears, only to find a naked guy burrowing his bald head between her legs on the sofa, like a tick gorging on her blood. In real life, my mom had barely dated in my lifetime. I'd never even seen her kiss anyone. I'd drawn on a low-budget film I'd rented from the public library, about a child whose mom is a prostitute, for inspiration. "I hope she gets better soon," I said. 

"It isn't the same without her," Margaret said sadly.

"No, no," I said. "I'm glad you and I have a chance to spend some time together, just us." 

"Me too," she said, blushing again. She nibbled her first slice of banana bread while I ate my third. 

 "What did you study at Wellesley?" I said.

"Chemistry. Summa Cum Laude."

"Wow."

She shook her head. "It isn't as if I've put my degree to use."

"But your baking," I said. "Isn't baking all about chemical reactions?"

"It's more about accurate measurements."

"Well, there you go."

"Don't be silly," she said. "I know I'm a disappointment." 

I could hear a clock ticking in another room. "What did you want to do after college?" I said.

She shrugged. "Work in a lab, maybe."

"You could still work in a lab." 

 "I doubt it, those positions are more competitive than you'd think. Plus, I've been unemployed for the last decade." She sighed. "It isn't as if I haven't been busy, there's always so much to do around the condo, and Mother's a hopeless cook. I used to think about getting my PhD, but then what? I'm too shy to teach."

"Me too," I admitted.

"You don't seem shy."

"I am," I said miserably. "I haven't made a single friend at college."

"What about me and Mother?" Margaret said.

"Besides you, I mean."

She smiled at me, then asked if I'd care for a glass of sherry; we hadn't finished our tea. 

"Yes, please," I said.

 She got two sherry glasses from the china cabinet, filled them to the brim, took a small sip from hers, then another, and nodded at me encouragingly. She was quite pretty when she relaxed. I'd never had sherry before. It tasted medicinal. I drank deeply from my glass.

"My first semester at Wellesley, I was so afraid of people, I only went to the dining hall once," Margaret said. 

"What did you eat?"

 "Dry cereal and apple sauce. My father took me out to dinner on Thanksgiving."

I was impressed. I hated sitting alone at meals, streaks of laughter from the other tables striking my ears like blows, but I was driven to the dining hall three times a day by my demanding stomach. "I heard these girls talking about me in the bathroom last week," I said, "wondering if I was a mute."

Margaret shivered in sympathy. "Talking to people is awful," she said. "I don't know how Mother's done it all these years."

I asked what her father was like.

"Not as awful as Mother makes him out to be," she said. "He's an engineer, very ritualistic. He eats oatmeal with raisins in it every morning. Just raisins, mind you. What about yours?"

"I hate my dad," I said. "He's a pig."

She laughed.

 "No, seriously. He's a truck driver, he delivers seafood. He lives on McDonald's and he always smells like fish."

"Men," she said slyly. "Who needs them?"

When I'd emptied my glass, I reached across the counter and clasped her hand: warm and moist. I could feel her rabbity pulse. She took off her glasses and leaned towards me--through her sweater, I saw the shape of her small breasts--and who knows what might have happened next, if Nora hadn't chosen that moment to rouse herself. We heard a door open at the other end of the condo, then the tap, tap, tap of her cane on the floor. Margaret let go of my hand, wiped her lips furtively on a paper towel, and tucked our sherry glasses in the dishwasher; she'd still had a sip left. "Feeling better?" she said as Nora entered the kitchen. 

My professor looked horrible. Matted hair, sallow complexion. Dressed in a sweat-stained flannel nightgown, her breasts sagged nearly to her expansive waist. I expected her to be unnerved by my presence, but, in a horse whisper, she said, "I'm glad you're here, Lucia. I'm sure Margaret's been lonely without me."

So, it seemed I was still welcome in their condo after all. What was I thinking? Even the most powerful essays didn't literally make people sick. "We've been having a nice time," I said.

 "Let me help you to your chair," Margaret said. "Then I'll fix you a cup of ginger tea." When she put her hand on her mother's back, I felt a pang in my chest. 

"I hope you'll join us again next Sunday," Nora said over her shoulder. 

In the sitting room, I heard her sighing as she sank into her armchair, Margaret repositioning the footstool for her. When Margaret came back to the kitchen, the feeling between us had shifted. I watched her prepare miso broth for her mother to go with the ginger tea. I wanted nothing more than to stay and watch Antiques Roadshow with them, but I could tell they were eager to be alone. I told Margaret I'd better get going, I had a lot of homework: not true, I'd already finished all my homework for the coming week. She turned from the stove and squeezed my hand one last time. "Until Sunday," she said. 

Outside, I walked in the opposite direction of campus, down unfamiliar streets, until I found myself on the pedestrian bridge that crossed over the Connecticut River. I knew where I was, I'd stood on this bridge before, but I didn't understand how I'd got there. I didn't feel like jumping exactly, but I felt like doing something rash, and I couldn't tell if I was still tipsy from the sherry, or if it was the memory of Margaret's hand in mine that was warming me, despite the cold. It was early March and the days were getting longer, but the ground was still frozen solid. 

I took my phone out of my pocket and called my mom, thinking I'd tell her about Margaret. Not that we'd held hands--twice this afternoon we'd held hands--only that I'd made a new friend, someone I was looking forward to getting to know better. I wanted her to be glad for me, but before I could say anything about Margaret, my mom said she was coming to Northampton next weekend to see me. "I miss you," she said.

"What days?" I said.

"I'll get there Sunday afternoon, leave Monday." A hunk of ice rushed by in the water below me. "I booked a room at the Motel 6," she said. "Now that you're settled in, you must have all sorts of things to show me."

"Right," I said. All sorts of things.

I got to class early on Wednesday, but Nora was already there, seated at the head of the table. Dressed in a maroon pantsuit, a neat pile of essays stacked in front of her, I was relieved to see that she looked like her usual self. I sat at the opposite end of the table. She tilted her head and smiled kindly, but she didn't say anything to me as the other students began trickling into the room. From where I was sitting, I couldn't tell if my essay was on top. 

When everyone had taken their seats, she rested both palms flat on the table--she was wearing three rings, two gold, one silver--and said, "Lately, I've been thinking a great deal about motherhood. The blessings, the responsibilities, and that bond between mothers and daughters that's oh so very hard to sever. Many of you will become mothers yourselves someday. Before your babies are born, you will be terrified, you will imagine that you are not capable." My classmates shifted in their seats uncomfortably, but I remained still, transfixed. "But you will be," she said. "You will find your way." She glanced around the table at each of us, holding my gaze the longest. "Only once in a blue moon is a woman incapable of caring for her own child, and in these instances, well--" 

She turned and looked out the window. It wasn't like her not to finish a sentence; perhaps she hadn't fully recovered from her illness after all? Outside, the sky was gray again, but the last of the snow was finally melting. The snowdrops would poke through the dark ground any day now. Nora shook her head. "In any event, I've photocopied Lucia's essay," she said, passing the stack of papers to her right. "I'd like for you all to read it now, during class, paying particular attention to the use of white space, the unsaid. When you've finished reading, we'll discuss." 

 The girl sitting next to me groaned softly. 

 I looked down at my lap, my cheeks burning with equal parts shame and pride. 

Saturday morning, I began cleaning. If I couldn't impress my mom with a dazzling set of college friends, or even a mediocre set, I could, I hoped, at least impress her with the tidiness of my room. The worst part was the ants. The easiest food to swipe from the dining hall was fruit, and I'd gotten in the habit of tossing my apple cores and banana peels under my bed, along with all the paperbacks I finished, and my dirty underwear. I stacked the paperbacks on the flimsy, laminate bookshelf the college had provided me with and wiped up what ants I could get, along with the desiccated fruit debris, with a damp towel, then shoved the mess in the trashcan in the hallway. 

Laundry next. I didn't have a laundry basket, so I stuffed three milk crates with clothes and carried the stack down to the basement, where the washers and dryers were located, only to remember that they required quarters to operate, and I didn't have any quarters. I stood there staring stupidly at the machines, weighing my options, until Rachel descended the stairs carrying a basket of whites. "Need quarters?" she said.

"Mmhm."

"How many? I have extra."

I looked at my milk crates. "A lot."

 "You can pay me back," she said, handing me an unopened roll of coins. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? We pay forty-thousand a year and we don't even get free laundry. I wanted to go to UMass, but my mom went to Bryn Mawr and she's obsessed with the Seven Sisters. Is your mom a snob like that?"

I hesitated. Was she asking about my real mom or the mom in my essays? It didn't matter; neither of them was a snob. I was the snob in our family. "Not really," I said. "I chose Smith because they gave me the best financial aid."

 "Nice, I'm glad someone's getting a deal around here." 

We loaded our laundry. When the water started running, she said, "Want to get a cup of coffee while we wait? I can't drink that dining hall shit."

 "No, thanks," I said.

"Oh c'mon," she said, nodding at the roll of quarters in my hand. "You owe me ten dollars."

We got our coats and walked downtown together to a cafe I'd passed by many times but never been inside of. Rachel was surprisingly easy to talk to, mainly because she did all the talking. She was worth listening to though. Instead of asking inane questions or going on about herself, she made funny observations, as if we were friends already. I paid for our coffees and we sat at a table by the window. She gulped greedily from her paper cup. "God, I'm hungover," she said. "Smith parties are the weirdest. I'm not even into girls and I think I made out with three last night. No, four." She shook her head in disbelief. "What'd you do last night?"

 "Nothing."

"Smart," she said. "Wish I'd been there."

Sunday afternoon, I didn't go to Nora's. My mom and I took a brisk walk around Paradise Pond, then wandered around the conservatory, checking out the Spring Bulb Show. When we got hungry, we walked across campus in the direction of town. As we approached Seelye, I noticed a small, round woman moving toward us on the pathway and my heart smacked my breastbone: Nora. I'd sent her an email cancelling at the last second. I hadn't even made up an excuse, just said I couldn't come this week after all. How could I not stop and talk to her? And if I stopped, how could I not introduce her to my mom? And then what?

But as she got closer, I saw that this woman wasn't using a cane, and her back wasn't quite as hunched as Nora's. Of course it wasn't. Nora was at home, huddled in her armchair, waiting for Antiques Roadshow to begin, and this was someone else's professor, carrying a large leather handbag. I smiled at her so widely my lower lip cracked and started bleeding. 

My mom and I went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. Over steamed dumplings, she told me she was dating someone, and I sensed that imparting this news was the real reason she'd come to see me. She said the guy's name, Billy Hanrahan, as if I might recognize it. "He's a lieutenant in the fire department," she said. He'd flirted with her the day the firetrucks were summoned, she explained, pretended she was the one who'd pulled the alarm, then asked for her number. "His wife died of cervical cancer a few years ago," she added.

"Good for you," I said.

She took a sip of her Singha. "It has been good for me," she said. "Good for both of us. I think I might move in with him, actually."

I stopped chewing. "But you just met him."

"I don't mean immediately, I just mean, we're thinking about it. He lives by himself in this amazing, old whaling house. There's a widow's walk and everything."

So. It seemed living with her after I graduated wouldn't be an option after all. Not unless I wanted to be the third wheel. 

After the waitress brought our entrees, my mom said, "You have to realize, it's been different without you. I'm not good at living alone."

"Me neither," I said.

"But you don't live alone. You live in a house full of friends, or people who could be your friends if you let them." 

When I got back to Capen, Rachel was outside smoking. "How was dinner?" she said; I'd told her my mom was coming to visit. I made a face. "Never mind," she said. "Moms suck." 

When she flicked her cigarette to the ground, I stubbed it out with my boot for her. "I like your safety pin earrings," I said. I didn't really; I thought they were ugly. But they were something to talk about.

 "You want some?" she said. "I have extra."

"I don't have pierced ears."

She touched the back of my earlobe with her thumb. "Why not?"

I shrugged. "No reason." I liked her thumb there. It felt good to be touched by Rachel, but at the same time it felt like nothing. Her thumb, firm and dry compared to Margaret's, pressing lightly against my cold skin, was just there. It didn't need anything from me.

"Wanna take care of that?" she said. "I have the perfect needle."

It isn't as if we became best friends--Rachel had lots of friendships to tend to--but she was the bridge that led me to a more regular social life in college. After she pierced my ears, we started eating dinner together a few times a week. When she came to my room to get me, she was friendly to the other girls in my hallway, and soon I became friendlier with some of them too. And she brought me to the April Fools party at UMass where I made out with Finn, the Computer Science major and off-the-cuff limericist who became my first boyfriend. I was never all that attracted to Finn, he had skinny arms and he was three inches shorter than me, but I managed to have sex with him half-a-dozen times before we broke up.

I never went back to Nora's. She invited me for tea once more, but I told her I had plans with a friend, which happened to be true, and after that, she gave up on me. For the final assignment of the semester, I wrote about the humiliation of losing the all-school spelling bee in eighth grade and received a C on my essay, which seemed fair. I felt the loss of her esteem, but it was a loss I could handle by that point. What I had instead, friends my own age and a sex life, such as it was, was, on the whole, preferable.

I found the poem she'd named her daughter after:

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

And I saw Margaret once more, at the public library, where I still hid out occasionally. It was the end of spring semester. She was pushing a cart through the fiction section, re-shelving books. "Oh, hello," she said, before I could turn and pretend I hadn't seen her. She didn't seem surprised. It was almost as if she'd been looking for me in the stacks.

"You work at the library now?" I said. "That's great."

"I'm only volunteering," she said. "But my supervisor says it could lead to a paid position someday." 

"I'm sure that's true. How do you like it?"

 "Oh, you know." She looked out the window; the lilacs in the courtyard were browning already. She seemed even smaller here than she had in the condo, where the rooms were snug. She was wearing that light pink lipstick again. I pictured her rubbing it off in the library bathroom before she went home for the day. Because Nora would disapprove or because she'd be embarrassed if her mother noticed she was making an effort with her appearance? The latter, probably. Why would Nora disapprove?

"It's a nice place," I said.

"I miss you on Sundays," she said, so softly I barely heard her. 

And I almost told her the truth again. I almost said, I miss you too. But I wanted a normal life, or that's what more than half of me wanted, and I knew I couldn't stay close to her and keep forging ahead with my new friend group; my footing was too precarious. "I've been really busy," I said.

"I'm sure."

"It's finals week."

 "Right."

"Also, I was dating someone--"

"Mother let me read your essays, you know," she said, cutting me off.

"She did? What did you think?" I was surprised by the note of desperation in my voice.

"The first two were very good."

"Thank you."

 She squinted at the safety pins in my ears. "The thing I don't understand is, what really happened to your father? In the essay you say he died in a fire, but you told me he's a truck driver." 

My cheeks flushed, I considered making a run for it--but then I came to my senses. What did it matter if I got caught at this point? My essays had served their purpose; they'd gotten me through the winter. And now that I no longer needed them, Nora and Margaret didn't have any power over me. 

Rather, the type of power they had over me had changed. 

I'd registered for a fiction workshop the coming semester. 

"That's my uncle who drives the fish truck," I said.

Aida Dean’s short stories have recently appeared in The Forge, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other venues. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and is a lecturer in the Writing Department at Ithaca College. She also teaches online fiction workshops through the nonprofit Literary Cleveland. Alida lives in Ithaca, New York with her partner and daughter.

Nancy Bell

TOMORROWLAND

You are looking into the old photo, leaning across me gruffly and peering down into my lap where I cradle it. Your body has the stillness it gets when you are trying to understand or decipher. I peek at your profile, the outrageous lashes, the angry wound of a fresh piercing from which a nasal hoop sprouts. I’m calmly appalled at this violence. You smell like bread dough.

You grab it from me and fling yourself back on the couch, pressing your thumbs into it and getting a closer look. I tsk at you. I don’t want you to wrinkle it. So rough, always so rough with the things of the world, trusting that anything can be replaced. But I submit to your will. It’s yours. Everything is yours. You are alarming and terrific in your breath and heat and volume. Home again, you seem to rearrange the molecules in the apartment. They buzz like sunshine. You are still somehow a daughter of the golden west, like I said you always would be when we moved to still Ohio. But you barely remember California. Your accent is different than mine.

I’m hoping you will say something when you are done looking—that it was wonderful, that we were wonderful. That it all turned out so well. That it turned out at all. That there is such a thing as turning out. That there is a moment from which one can look back and understand. I’m happy, Mama, I’m well. I’m safe and it’s all because of you. You did it.

*

You break from your stare and toss it aside.  I retrieve it as you return to your phone. I tuck it back in the drawer. Why did we open the drawer in the first place, I wonder.

“I told him I’d spend the night at his house before I go back.”

“Oh, good. That’s good. He misses you.”

“It’s just that I’ve stayed here most of the break.”

“Of course. It’s good. I’m glad.”

You pick up your bowl and scrape the last bit out, saying, “Mmmmm. Cimmanim.”

It’s a consolation prize. You know I can’t resist it. There was a time when you got words wrong and I didn’t correct you because it made things seems new, as they were.  Cimmanim (on oatmeal.) Aminal (at the zoo.) A day would come, and you were thrilled to share with me the correction: “Did you know that it’s actually cinnamon?” Proud of your expertise, teaching me the right way of things. You held your small index finger to your thumb as you enunciated for me in your motherese: “It’s AN-I-MAL.”

Last day (yesterday.) Next day (tomorrow.)

You take your bowl to the kitchen. Alone on the couch, the photo swims in my consciousness, an afterimage. The Southern California night was soft on our bare arms and legs. The place was just beginning to illuminate into the nighttime version of itself. There was only room for two in the miniature convertibles, which jerked their way to us as we waited, dismissing their former drivers in a line. What color would we get? Which one would you choose?

When we sat down, it was perfect. You drove. Your steering was a charming fiction. You jerked the wheel right and left as the car followed the curving track obediently, but it was real enough for you. It only lasted ten minutes. We could not have covered very much ground. But it was so cleverly arranged, concealing and revealing its scaled and varied vistas. Here, even, was a miniature approximation of a freeway, with a little onramp and then an exit. A tidy journey, entire and optimized.

For my part, I had slipped into a vision I had been carrying without knowing it: how I had assumed adult life would feel. The world would be perfected by science and enriched with the wisdom that adults carried, which would be my wisdom, too. Now here I was, the interpreter of all things. Now, at last, I was a fluent god. And all for you.

The picture is taken from one car back. Must be your father took it, from back there where he rode alone—a third wheel. Or maybe he rode with someone else, a Disneyland straggler or someone’s extra sibling. Your small, black head is set seriously forward, intent on the difficult drive. But my arm lays along the back of the seat and my chin is tilted up into twilight, to the trees parading by and the marble sky.

Nancy Bell is a theatre artist and writer living in St. Louis. She is Associate Professor of Theatre at St. Louis University and works as a director, an actor and and a playwright. Her other work has been published in New Plains Review and The Disappointed Housewife. You can learn more about her work at www.NancyEllenBell.com.