Prose

Sufiya Abdur-Rahman

Consider the Sunrise

Ramadan approaches with a sense of purpose, yet one of dread. We know that each day for thirty days, we must function for hours on an empty stomach. Our bellies will growl, ache, and shrink back like prey from a predator’s advance. Hour after hour, day after day, we know we will accept this void. Maybe not boast it or cheer it, but take it in nonetheless. What choice do we have? To fast, we must continue to work, caretake, socialize, and smile, at times dragging ourselves along, devoted to principle, yielding to sacrifice.

We think we will miss the eating and drinking. The way ice cubes bounce off our lips as water slips from a glass’s edge, glides over our tongues, and coats the back of our throats with smooth wet wonder. The way the aroma from a sizzling stove or baking oven wafts into our nostrils and arouses desire in our guts that all we must normally do to quench is lift our forks and open our mouths. From sunup to sundown, we imagine our thoughts will be consumed with nothing but hunger and thirst.

We don’t realize that what we will really miss is the light.

At my dining room table, I sit in a chair with a view outside. The glass double-door I face opens to a deck overlooking a small wooded area near Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. It can’t really be called the woods, although the complex where I live would like to think so. But, from where I sit, woods is pretty much all I see.

At dawn, I watch the first bursts of Allah’s fireball send ribbons of red into a blanket of blue. I pace the kitchen packing lunches and preparing breakfast, repeatedly distracted by the sky’s swirling color palette brightening beyond the glass. By the time I sit down, sunlight is easing through the branches closest to me. As the blue surrounding them fades from cerulean to periwinkle to robin’s egg, the branches—only whose curves and twists I could make out a minute earlier—I notice bare white petals and sprouts of green leaves. I stare out at the rounded treetops in the distance, at an evergreen fat and fluffy in the foreground, and at the bark that climbs tough and tall on trunks nearby that shoot higher than my door frame, the crests of their limbs grasping at spans of sky too lofty for me to view. I bite into my breakfast and wonder how long they’ve all been there.

Were these trees standing before my house was built? Were they here before I was born? Before the enslaved Africans who preceded me stopped being shipped into the nearby Port of Annapolis in chains? Before some nonconformist Puritans were promised the freedoms they had been denied in order to settle this region, my sanctuary, which was then called Providence? Were they here before the colonist George Calvert applied to charter what would become Maryland, my adopted state? Even before the Piscataway, Patuxent, Susquehannock, and other indigenous tribes who thrived on the land I now occupy were forced from it?

In the light, with my eyes open, I can ponder all this. My mind turns at reality and at possibility, recognizing what is, reasoning what could have been, and imagining what still could be.

I watch leaves flutter in the breeze, birds scavenge and soar, squirrels scurry and scamper about. In other words, with light I witness life, in all its fullness, in all its beauty. In witnessing, I am part of it, and it is part of me. 

During Ramadan, when I must eat before the sun rises and not again until after it sets, I sit at the table and face either my drawn navy-blue blackout curtains that shroud the double doors or the blackening sky. Neither allows me to see much, but darkness. In the first days of the monthlong fast, this is an adjustment but one that’s barely noticeable. As the days drag on, it is the darkness more than anything that begins to depress.

I can’t watch the landscape changing outside; can’t feel the sun’s rays shining through the glass, warming my skin. Gone is my connection to the life beyond my window, in all its fullness, in all its beauty.

By eating only at twilight, I come to realize that it is not only the food that nourishes me but my ability during mealtimes to locate my place in the universe that, when attuned to the world outside of myself and my own selfish concerns, is so easy to discern.

While we are aware that the hardship of fasting precipitates hunger, we don’t usually expect to also be starved of this light. Sans daylight, there is no visibility of our deprivation. People outside of our situation don’t notice that we are barely holding on. In a blended society, with some surviving only in the darkness and some feasting in the light, it feels as if the needs of the hungry don’t exist at all. As if without food, without sleep, with full faith but a paucity of energy, the hungry are still supposed to care for ourselves and others—and function as productive members of society—while receiving a total lack of compassion. We are expected to behave as if we aren’t suffering.

Fasting impresses upon the devout that without illumination, the direness of one’s situation is not apparent. Veiled in darkness, it becomes invisible. If not seen or heard, or otherwise witnessed, it cannot be felt. Without witnessing, I am not part of it, and it is not part of me.

By the end of April, I heard that more than 34,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza during Israel’s war on Hamas. The number thudded to the pit of my stomach, still adjusting to relative fullness only weeks after the end of Ramadan.

For more than seven months then, buildings had been shelled, burying hundreds and thousands of victims beneath slabs of concrete. Airstrikes repeatedly destroyed homes and lives, killing mostly not soldiers but civilians—children, women, and sometimes entire families—whose bodies were then mangled and crushed by fallen rubble. To those who consume American media, as I do, the deaths may as well have occurred in darkness.

I watched Hamas’s initial attack and Israel’s subsequent retaliation appear in the glare of cameras. I listened to official responses about them reverberate from banks of reporters’ microphones. Then, in the lightning quick American news cycle, I followed the subsequent flashes of light that shone on Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to secure Israel’s borders and protect its citizens; on President Biden’s endorsement of Israel’s incursion into Gaza; on the political fallout from Biden’s allyship; on hostages and underground tunnels; on missing social media posts and public statements never issued; on bombed aid workers; on genocide; on famine; on divestment; on the right to free speech on college campuses; on urban police forces’ aggressive tactics. I have seen the light diffract in myriad directions, losing track of their source, and, in watching, have felt in my gut every emotion ranging from indignation to sorrow.

But, in terms of the deaths, in terms of the tens of thousands of Gazans whose lives continue to be taken in this so-called war, I see next to nothing. American media has made me feel as though facing my drawn black-out curtains or the blackening sky. As the days drag on, it is not only the deaths but the darkness surrounding them that continues to depress.

Who among us, after all, knows names of the victims? How many of us have seen photos of the dead, or even their wrapped or bagged bodies? Who among us has heard the voices of survivors, has listened to their pleas? Unless we seek them out, the victims of this conflict remain hidden in a gaping hollow of concern that has yet to be unearthed. This void is not one I can accept.

Israel has shut our eyes to conditions on the ground, banning international journalists from Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 attack. And on that day, Hamas covered our ears when they killed four Israeli reporters. Only Palestinian journalists can now report from within the region, propagating their raw and risky coverage—that U.S. news outlets have largely decided not to trust—mostly through social media. And in their effort, more than one hundred of them have been silenced, the vast majority killed by Israeli airstrike.

Control of the narrative has apparently been too powerful a weapon to put down. Weeks into Israel’s bombardment, after already thousands of Palestinians had been killed, the American president said he refused to believe the number. Months later, as life in the U.S. went on, some turned away from the conflict and others pitted themselves against each other, embroiled in battles of opinion and ideologies about the Middle East that never actually veered outside of western policy. And so, the true deprivation, suffering, and need of Palestinians—certainly in Gaza but also around the world—remains largely hidden, without the apathetic masses to witness it, without empathetic souls to feel it. 

But, if we allow our eyes to adjust to the darkness, we begin to make out images that have existed for months but that only those accustomed to scrounging by moonlight have so far seen. An image that appeared to me was of a dough-faced girl with her raven hair pulled back and a blanket draped up to her waist. Dunia Abu Mohsen, upright in her hospital bed, was talking about wanting the war to end. It was late November 2023 and in one day, enough had been stolen from the 12-year-old as it would take an entire lifetime for most others to lose: her mother and father, who had been killed when an Israeli airstrike hit her family’s home; her brother Mohammad and her sister Dalia, who were killed in the attack too; and her leg.

“I woke up and was surrounded by rubble,” Dunia explained to a videographer and field researcher for Defense for Children International – Palestine during last November’s weeklong ceasefire. Gesturing with her hands while her purse and her charging cellphone lay on a pillow behind her, Dunia said, “I realized that my leg had been cut off. Because there was blood, and I had no leg.”

Just two days before, my 12-year-old niece popped painted press-on nails off and on her fingers as we sat in my living room for Thanksgiving dinner. Her biggest concern: whether she could wear them while playing soccer for the club she’d just joined.

Dunia dreamed of a prosthetic leg so she could “walk like other people,” she told the researchers with her hand pressing into the empty space in her lap. The following month, an Israeli tank fired on the hospital where she had been recovering and an unexploded shell struck the 12-year-old in the head. Dunia, like her parents and siblings before her, was killed.

The political-minded may want to debate about Israel’s right to defend itself, about the reality of wiping out Hamas, about the viability of a two-state solution. But with so many innocents dead, what chance do we have to think about whose land it is, who was here first, who claimed it, who colonized it, who settled it, who adopted it, who occupied it, or who pushed whom from it? In this artificial darkness, we, the faithful, are prevented from seeing far enough to ponder such debates. Enlightenment seems a long way off, so our focus shifts only to surviving the night and somehow securing illumination.

When dusk falls during Ramadan and I raise a date to my lips to break my fast, rejoicing in both the fruit’s sweetness and the temporary fullness it offers me, for a moment I am relieved. I know that with nightfall, all the meat, rice, ice cream and cookies I can stomach are mine. Not worrying about the scenes outside, I can eat almost like normal, filling myself up as if the daytime’s sacrifice—its suffering—is some distant fantasy. In darkness, I am comfortable. But at some point in the night, I must consider the sunrise.

Sufiya Abdur-Rahman is author of the memoir Heir to the Crescent Moon, winner of the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction. Her essays, articles, and criticism have appeared in publications including Catapult, The Common Online, Gay Mag, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and NPR. She has earned Notable distinction in Best American Essays, received fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and is a two-time alumnus of VONA writing workshops. She is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Cherry
Tree, a national literary journal, and teaches creative nonfiction at Howard University. Sufiya lives in Annapolis, Md., with her family. Find her at www.sufiya.net or follow her on X @MrsAbolitionist.

Angela C. Turley

THE WATCHED TOASTER OVEN

I’m terrified of my toaster oven. I watch it closely because I can’t trust it to function as it’s supposed to, doing nothing more, nothing less. Every morning repeats: I check my temperature, prep my husband’s coffee, pour my juice, take my mountain of vitamins, and make our breakfast, staring as the sanguine eye blinks on while the metal strip heats hazy orange. I refuse to use the generic toast setting—that’s a surefire way to crispy charcoal or limp sagginess. Baking is best, with a different cooking time each use, like how hens finesse laying eggs with a slightly varied cycle. Sometimes I’m haunted by their expanding clutches.

I think it started lashing out when my grilled pepper jack sandwich needed an extra crunchy crust. Comfort food after another disappointing doctor’s appointment. Melty cheese oozed over the cooking tin’s edge, burning instantly, and smelling inexplicably like charred hair. Though I scrubbed inside repeatedly, the smell remains, as does resentment. It then mocked me by working flawlessly for Mother-In-Law when she last visited. Later for me, it emitted sparks, setting off the earsplitting smoke alarm before Mother-In-Law left. I can’t retire it though, it’s not that old, and it was part of our wedding gift from my mother before she passed. I can’t. 

So, I watch, monitoring its moods as it sits innocently on the counter, purring, growling, or breathing shallowly as if strangled. I’m there, coaxing it from anger, hurt and confusion, like coaching a champ marathoner with an identity crisis at mile five. But it’s a hope tainted by terror, so unlike how I encourage my art students: Create! Let it flow and tell hidden truths. Creation is your power! My motto burns my throat like acid if I let myself think about dichotomy, irony, the toaster oven. My own paintings even lack life lately. Unfinished canvases hold up a wall in the living room.

As a plus, I’ve learned to apply eyeliner and mascara expertly in the quiet kitchen, within the toaster oven’s reflection. Just listening to it chut-chut along isn’t good enough. When its dial is turned, it makes the same devious ticking sound even when unplugged. If I merely listened, it might sound perfectly healthy, while teasing precious time away. So, I’ve adapted, observing, and keeping the chrome mirror shiny enough that I saw a glistening new forehead wrinkle earlier this week. My husband, of course, hasn’t noticed since it doesn’t involve the economy, politics,

or salmon fishing. If my belly swells at last with a miracle mini accountant, I wonder if Mark will assume I had too much fiber at dinner as he glances at me over the newspaper. 

Don’t get me wrong, Mark and I are good with our routines and goals, but sometimes routines feel like the perpetual trick of the toaster oven ticking down progress when it’s not on. Or, like when a morning treat of raspberry jam and pumpernickel becomes daily, expected, and weeks later it’s merely stale toast with blackened crumbs of intent. 

After marking the calendar, I unplug the toaster oven every night to save energy, and to be certain it doesn’t short circuit while Mark and I sleep on our opposite sides. It has engulfed a mouthwatering salmon filet in internal flames, rewarding me with a throbbing welt and seared oven mitt after the rescue mission. I imagine it could revolt, sparking a fire that devours us in sweeping plumes as Mark snores in blissful nightly hibernation (which, I remind him often, is likely making us haggard every morning). Mark has sworn he abandoned using the toaster oven altogether, but if so, where do the cinnamon crumbs come from? I clean it after every use. Can’t leave dried kindling around, can I?

No, we don’t have a microwave. Don’t get me started. It’s partly because of the scene in our holiday tradition movie Gremlins when the mother cooks that grimy monster until it implodes. Thinking about gooey green goblin splatter . . . Would lemon help disinfect that? So, a toaster oven is a must. I don’t want implosions, thank you. If any gremlins came, Mark would bore them to death with financial reports in less time and with less mess. 

I listen to his updates dutifully though, again, nodding appropriately, while pensively eyeing the toaster oven. The way it sweats, dripping condensation down the delicate glass front as if it’s a burden to evenly heat a slice of pizza, as if it strains its circuitry—one measly slice! 

“Come on come on come on cook!” I coach telepathically, my empty stomach aching. “I’m tired of watching and waiting!” Oh, how tired. Creation is your power! 

Sunday afternoon, after unfruitful progress on my work, and knowing another appointment looms the following frigid morning, my every nerve end frays anew with each chut chut. Mark catches me glaring after it burns my meticulously layered tuna melt. He tucks the newspaper under his arm, asking if I want to throw “the thing” out. 

My hands ball up. “How dare you! Do you hate me now?” 

Dumbfounded, he becomes a squinting statue, puzzling out whether this is a test. We had been married long enough for him to know that yes, sometimes I expel carefully worded questions to see if he’s listening, or if he truly cares, rather than pretending to care, or saying that he cares because he knows I want him to say so. Who wants you to say something untrue just so that it seems true because you think it’s what I want to be true? 

His jaw hangs open as I overheat with frustration. “Sarah, if something’s wrong,” he chews his phrasing, “I want to help. This is five years old, and I don’t want you to worry.” 

“Don’t you?” I retort, crossing my arms.

“What about a regular toaster and microwave?” 

“Trading for newer, shinier things is your solution?” I balk. “Typical!”

“Gremlins, right. No microwave.” He shifts his weight, eyes narrowing. “Would you rather your brother repaired it, like the cuckoo clock?” 

“The hands spin like it’s at a never-ending Wonderland Tea Party. You plan to live down a rabbit hole?”

He sighs, drawing out the paper again. “Well, then there’s a sale—” 

“How can you say that?!” I shout. “My mother gave us this. She was gone before we even used it . . .” I start to cry and grasp my stomach, wanting to see through my fragile shell to the frustrating uterus inside. This is its purpose! If it won’t work right, how can I? Multiple invasive transvaginal ultrasounds and exams hadn’t explained anything. No fibroids, no PCOS, ovaries are normal, and my damned uterus has been heavily shedding every month since I turned twelve, more consistent than that antique clock ever was, more reliable than this toaster oven, yet three years of empty routines had ticked away! Mark’s check-ups were normal, too. Haven’t I watched enough? Am I not plugged in? Is anyone listening? Doubtful. But shouldn’t someone be watching over me, somewhere? There are more tests, I know, and treatments to try—as if we can afford those, monetarily, emotionally—any-which-ally seems bleak. 

“There are so many questions I wish I had asked Mom before the cancer,” I choke out. 

Concern denting his forehead, Mark sets the paper aside, taking a tentative step closer. 

Still crying, I turn away, pull the asphalt off my sandwich, and fling it into the sink. It thunks against the stainless steel and I pop in a fresh wheat slice, and stare through the glass, willing everything to work right, no flames, no hot spots, no sparks. Please don’t be broken. 

“I am not broken,” I whisper. 

Mark gasps. His thick arms enfold me within the gentle cocoon hug where he nestles into my neck. My teeth clench, but he doesn’t budge, and my knees softened. Oh, I have missed his real hugs! Or have I ignored them?

“Sarah, whatever we do, we will keep this toaster oven indefinitely. Sometimes it surprises me with the best damn cinnamon bagel I’ve ever had.” 

A smile lights under my tears, clarity blooming. “You were sneaking uses. On the days you can’t make my appointments?” 

“Guilty.” His voice drops to the gravelly tone meant for me. “I love this beautiful quirky toaster oven.”

“One-of-a-kind charm?” 

“Once-in-a-lifetime find.” He nuzzles again. “I’ll cancel my meeting and go with you tomorrow, okay?”

 I can barely form the words, “Thank you.” 

He presses his lips to mine. Not a routine, but a sweet, deep kiss that hears me, knows me, relaxes yet awakens parts of me to a sizzle as it carries on until I let go of pain and worry. And I do let myself let go. We both listen again. 

“Ding!” the toaster oven rings in the empty kitchen. I barely hear it. Shared terrors fade to shadows faster than our feet entwine, freeing truths and passions to rise from ashes like a phoenix. 

No more watching—I will trust in possibilities ahead. Burned or not, together we survive. Such is the power of creation. 

Angela C. Turley has enjoyed creating since she could scribble on her mom’s art scraps. She holds a BA in English Literature and a BM in Music Composition. While soaking up rain in the Pacific Northwest, she writes literary and speculative fiction, poetry, children’s tales and more.

H. S. Easterbrook

The Offal Spell

“Any luck?” Papa asks as he comes puffing up behind me. He leans heavily on the new cane for a moment to catch his breath, swipes a loose combover lock out of his face, and then eases himself onto a stump worn smooth from weather and use.

“No . . .” I begin but lose myself before I can add anything else.

Something has been nagging at me since I crested the ridge, like a mosquito hovering just behind my ear, but mosquitoes don’t make this sort of noise. It’s deep—subsonic, almost—and I can feel it rising from the earth nearly as well as I can hear it. However, I dragged Papa all the way out here in the middle of the night for something more important than a little tinnitus with extra bass.

I shake the muddled thoughts from my head and try to start again, but our luck takes a turn for the better before I can pick up where I had left off. Below us, a dented, dust covered Wildlife Management truck comes to a squealing stop on the gravel shoulder of the road. It sits there for a few moments, idling, before two men climb out of the cab and make their way around back to drop the tailgate.

As I lay there in the dirt, watching the pair struggle with something in the truck bed, I hear a grunt from behind. Then a few more. Before long, Papa gingerly crawls up alongside me, beneath a scraggly rhododendron at the edge of the low ridge overlooking a powerline cut.

“Should you be doing that with your knee?” I ask, eyeing the finicky leg carefully stretched out as he lays on his side.

“I done my exercises,” Papa says quickly, then shifts his weight and maneuvers the cane in front of himself until the crook is resting securely against his shoulder.

While he fusses and resettles his leg, the two men finally drag something from the bed that hangs limply between them. Staggering and shuffling, with the edges of an argument drifting up to us on a sour breeze, they lurch their way through waist-high grass to a low wire fence bordering the road. All the while, Papa tracks the pair with the tip of the cane, nodding his head at nothing, agreeable as ever.

Almost as an afterthought, he adds, “’sides, it’s not like they’ll keep it from getting any worse.”

“They might, if you did them every day like you’re supposed to,” I chide him. However, Papa is too focused on the men to listen as they swing their burden back and forth, back and forth, before suddenly flinging it over the fence.

“Pow!” Papa exclaims as the body hits the earth with a dull and distant thud. “There you go,” he says, grinning, and passes me the cane. “Mind it, now, the safety’s off.” He nods at that too.

I gently take the cane and our hands brush in the dark—new callouses over old. By the time I get myself situated, the pair have already dragged another limp form from the truck and are quickly side-stepping back to the fence.

 “Looks like a young one,” I mutter as I bring the cane to bear on the larger of the two. Papa always did save the best for me.

“Think so?” he asks, squinting through the gloom and a pair of bifocals long since out of date. Then, for no one’s benefit, he shades his eyes against the rising moon. “Shame either way.”

I only grunt and sight down the barrel of the cane, rubber tip on the chest of the big man swinging his end of the corpse. Maybe the youngling is a good omen; I don’t know. I’ve never really gone in much for magic, but things have an unfortunate way of changing on you, given enough time. Then the men send the spindly body sailing over the fence, and I squeeze the trigger.

“Click.”

The small form lands in a briar thicket without so much as a rustle, but the rhododendron above us trembles as Papa rolls over to look at me.

“You alright?” he asks, but I can’t meet his eyes, and not just because of the dark.

“Yeah,” I tell him and pass the cane back, “as much as anyone. Must be jammed or something.”

Papa takes it with a puzzled, “huh,” but lets the matter be.

In the meantime, the men have gone back to the truck, closed the tailgate, and are climbing into the cab. Twenty some years of shooting folks with sticks or, in a pinch, finger guns for this one to get away. Maybe just another sign. Tit-for-tat, hopefully. After all, magic, like knees, can be finicky.

The lone taillight of the truck creeps down the road and then disappears around a bend as I climb back to my feet and then help Papa to his. He hardly has the cane under him before he’s off, shouldering his way between pine saplings as he snakes his way down to the cut.

“Come on,” he calls back over his shoulder, already out of breath, “let’s see what we bagged.”

I catch up with him at the base of the ridge, the same time that his age does. Then we wade down through the sawgrass to the fence, me on one side of him and the cane on the other.

Not much has changed from last night or the one before that or from twenty years ago, for that matter. Nine splintery posts strung together with three rusty lines of cattle wire, the only thing separating an old country road from a stand of powerlines climbing the grassy mountainside until they fade into darkness. Unremarkable, by most accounts, but even places like this have secrets—like the county’s unofficial roadkill dump—and if they have one, why not more? You can’t throw this much blood and gore at a place and expect it to do nothing with it all. That is the hope, leastwise, as Papa and I rummage through the grass and briars until we find it.

“Whaddya think?” Papa asks with a few pokes to my side, “too old or will she do?”

The corpse of the deer is folded over on itself, like a note hastily shoved under a door, and the legs jut every which way. I take a step closer and squint at the head through the weak moonlight. She turns out to be a he, with a few flecks of grey around the muzzle and a pair of nubs hardly rising from the skull. Someone must have gotten to him before the WM folks, someone with a hacksaw and not enough time to spare. That shouldn’t be an issue, though. Probably. Knees, magic, mutilated deer heads—finicky things not meant for amateurs, but you do your best with what you have.

I step back from the body and clap a hand over Papa’s shoulder. “No such thing as too old,” I tell him with a grin that can’t quite find its way to the rest of my face, “but I’ll hunt down that fawn and then see where we stand. While I’m at it, how about you go round up the others and start setting them out?”

Papa nods at the suggestion and then ambles off, still nodding. Eager as ever to be of some use, rarely asking questions. Then I call after him, “And use the cane to move them about this time! Don’t go touching those things with your hands again!” He doesn’t reply, though, which means either he doesn’t need reminding, or I do to trim his ear hair.

While Papa rustles around in the dark, I thread my way further along the fence, between scrub brush and saplings doomed to die come spring and the clear-cutting crews. The fawn is easy to find, luckily, resting nearly chest high on a wide bed of green-black thorns. It almost looks asleep, if you can get past the new joints in its twiggy legs and slender neck. The thorns too, of course.

I’m all set to write it off as a loss, given the three or so yards of coiling briars laying between me and the fawn. However, the rush job on the antlers is still rolling around my head and I’m not going to have this whole thing come to nothing because I decided to take the easy way out at the last minute. Besides, a little more blood isn’t going to hurt anything. In fact, it might do a world of good.

So, I wade in, thinking about all the good I’m doing each time a thorn catches my pant leg or stabs the meat beneath. I keep thinking about it too, as I wrestle the fawn free, leaving behind a confetti trail of denim and flesh. Then I think of nothing and let the strange, droning buzz fill my head, because it takes a lot of concentration and a generous amount of leverage to uncork a head from a neck without making a complete mess of yourself. Afterwards, I clean up as best I can with a few handfuls of grass. Then I go looking for Papa with the head tucked securely under my arm, still a little warm from a day spent baking on the blacktop.

In my absence, Papa has arranged our collection of heads atop the fence posts in a rough order from hardly rotting at all to a sun-cracked skull at the furthest end. I take the liberty of rearranging the few closest to us, making a spot for the newest addition at the beginning of the row, and then step back to soak up the total of our nightly efforts.

“Looks like we’re a buck short,” Papa says with several nods at an empty post in the middle of the fence.

“Just so long as we aren’t a day late,” I add by reflex, but my heart isn’t in it.

Always a day late—never enough time. One moment you’re ten and romping around the woods with your best friend, then you blink and you’re thirty. Look down at your hands to wonder at the scars and callouses you don’t remember, fingernails gnawed to the quick, like an animal caught in a trap, and by the time you look up you’re ninety. What kind of crap magic trick is this? I want a do-over. Or, at the very least, a time-out.

“Do you hear that?” I ask Papa suddenly as he waves a few flies away from the gore-slicked cane.

“What?”

“That . . . humming, just behind the cicadas,” I try to explain with a vague wave of my hand.

Humming and hand waves don’t do it justice, though. It’s a humming, buzzing, blunted rumble that’s certainly louder than earlier, but still lurking behind the dog-pile of late-night summer noises. I wouldn’t even notice it if it weren’t so maddingly constant—like a bug bite just out of reach or the background roar of creation.

“One more time.” Papa says as he cocks a fuzzy ear in my direction and wipes the cane on the knee of his britches. Then he starts chiding himself softly as he brushes at the bits of offal and dirt stuck to the fabric.

“Don’t worry about it, just stay here.”

“I’m not. Some detergent should get all this right out.”

But I’ve already started up the cut, shoving my way through brush, going by feel as much as sound. The cane jamming and the big man getting away, the raggedy deer and the fawn handy to take its place—it all feels significant, like a sign or omen or something. If this last-ditch scheme is going to work, it will have to be tonight. There is something in the air, and it isn’t just flies and mosquitoes. It’s palpable and drawing me closer with each stumbling step.

I’m so wrapped up in finding whatever is making the noise that I don’t hear Papa laboring after me until his panting turns to coughing. That gets me to stop, it always does. Soon after, he leans on my shoulder for support. Together, then, we climb the grassy hillside with me holding us up and him feeling out the uneven ground with the cane.

That’s how we are when we finally stumble out of the brush and onto a barren, rocky patch of ground surrounding one of the electrical towers. It’s as if we’ve stepped onto the surface of the moon, with the real moon overhead, making the stones underfoot glow with a pale, dusty light. It’s pretty—magical, even—but we only have eyes for what lies before us. Or, more accurately, what remains of what lies before us.

Dead in its prime, or near enough to make no difference. While the hind legs have been picked down to bone and gristle, the rest is untouched—including a rack so wide and bristling with points that the head can’t even touch the stones. Between that and the distance from the road, it’s clear that no one else has been this way and WM certainly didn’t leave it. Likely, it had come here to die of its own choosing. And why not? A cemetery is a cemetery whether you dig carefully ordered graves or just huck bodies over a fence. Kind with kind, and all that.

“Would you look at the size of it!” Papa gasps out as he plops down onto a flat stone at my feet and starts to root around in his pockets for a bit of paper towel to mop the sweat from his face. He doesn’t have to tell me twice.

Cicadas throb in the trees to either side of the cut, the old lines overhead crackle with thousands upon thousands of volts, but the corpse buzzes with a power so massive and condensed that it all but smothers the others. This is what has been nagging at me all night, the last piece of our cobbled-together spell, and now that we have the missing lynchpin, I’m practically drunk with relief. With all this, I can do so much and undo even more.

“Think you can find us a way back down?” I ask through teeth clenched to keep them from chattering with giddiness. “Maybe hold some of the thicker brush aside?”

“Sure,” Papa says and hefts the cane gamely, “You gonna be able to manage that thing all on your own?”

I can’t help it—I laugh. After these last few years, manhandling only half a corpse down a hillside and mounting it on a fence post is nothing by comparison. If he says more, I don’t hear him. I only have ears for the power filling the air and cottoning up my head. Before I know it, I’m stumbling forward over the uneven ground, unable to take my eyes off the body in case the magic that conjured it whisks it away just as quickly.

As I cover the short distance, and more details come into focus, the corpse starts to look like some sort of elaborate prop. They always do, in the end. You would think, given the past few nights, that I would have gotten over it, but I hadn’t. I don’t think I ever will.

It’s not that they look unreal. They look very real, sometimes a little too real, as if they’re trying to make up for what’s missing. However, a body once dead looks like it’s never been alive; as if dying erases you forever—future, past, and every lingering moment in between. Once you make that transition from “is” to “was,” there’s no coming back. Or that had been the case, anyway.

Then it’s before me and I’m kneeling on cold, hard stone. Small things crawl thickly over the stiff fur covering the deer and take to the air as I reach out my hands. They dim the weak moonlight with their countless bodies and circle me in a steadily thickening swarm. Even so, gentle as ever, I gather the deer into my arms and hug it tight to myself. The deafening buzz becomes a thundering roar as I stand, and it feels as if the power held inside might shake me to pieces. However, it’s only once I turn back to Papa and take that first step downhill that all hell breaks loose.

The magic pours out of the gaping torso of the deer in a pitch-black stream until I’m left standing with an armload of stilled, rotting meat. It swirls and billows between Papa and me, blotting out what’s left of the moonlight, and, for once in my life, things make a little bit of sense. Here’s all this blood magic collecting interest over the years, but once you strip away all the fleshy trappings it’s just plain, old Death. I ought to have guessed. Here one second, gone the next: it’s the oldest trick in the book because it’s the only trick in the book. No need for an encore, it’ll be here all week.

Through the thickening miasma, I see a few tendrils reach out for Papa. He thrashes and flails at them with the cane, but it does no good. That doesn’t discourage Papa, though. He staggers towards me as the probing fingers coil around him, shouting my name or maybe just in fear and pain. It’s hard to tell as Death’s willowy hands close on me and sink their nails into my flesh.

The magic starts to seep into me then like venom—boiling my skin, burning my veins, reaching heights that take my breath away—but I’ve never felt so alive and relieved. Magic has never been a something for nothing business and I had worried, at times, over what the bill would come out to if we pulled off this desperate stunt. However, my life for his was never something I had dared to consider. What a bargain. It’s as if Death doesn’t realize that I’m only renting.

We aren’t quite finished, though, and I want to seal the deal before anyone can reconsider. So, I take one searing step downhill, towards the fence, followed by another. The droning cloud surrounding me follows right along, whether it’s tethered to me or the corpse at this point is anyone’s guess. I suppose we’re practically one in the same.

As I stumble along, I catch a few fleeting glimpses of Papa and it’s obvious that the magic is starting to fill him as well. He’s falling back, step for step with me as the magical storm front creeps forward. He’s no longer flailing at it, instead he twitches, jerks, and slaps at himself as the magic does its work.

Eventually, his new lease on life overwhelms him. With an incoherent shout, he drops the cane and goes crashing down the mountainside as if he isn’t hauling a bum knee, two metal hips, and nine decades in tow. Despite the magic clouding my vision, I hurry after him and, in my haste, snap the cane in two underfoot.

H. S. Easterbrook received his MFA from Randolph College in 2020 and more of his work can be found in Blood Tree Literature. He currently lives in Baton Rouge, unfortunately, with his wife and two dogs, fortunately.

Rhiannon Catherwood

My Son Can’t Say Ribbon Eel

It always happens in a public place. Sometimes a shopping mall, sometimes a park, sometimes a grocery store. Sometimes I’m pushing a stroller, sometimes just carrying the baby, when someone stops me. A security guard. A police officer. A concerned bystander already summoning help. They question me. Is that your baby? Whose baby is this? It must not be mine. Who did I take this baby from? I must have stolen the child. Can I prove, somehow, that they’re wrong? Do I have identification and a birth certificate? On me? In my purse? Of course not. People walking by – some of them pretend not to notice but slow down and look sideways like drivers passing a car wreck. Others stop altogether, and a gawking crowd builds, and the more I sweat under their scrutiny, the guiltier I look. They mutter to each other, shaking their heads, crossing their arms, speculating, skeptical. They aren’t sure exactly what’s going on here, just what precisely I’m doing with this child, but there’s definitely something wrong with this picture, and we all know what it is. The dream usually ends before anyone says it out loud.

Most of these dreams happened a long time ago, and it has been over a year now since my son stopped being just a dream and started bouncing and rolling and tumbling through the waking world. It has also been over an hour since we started blowing bubbles on our back deck, and Tristan is still as utterly mesmerized looking at them as I sometimes still get looking at him. I know, objectively, that all babies are beautiful in their own way and that most every mother probably considers her own baby to be somehow especially and exceptionally beautiful, but I will also insist with great certainty that in his case it is true. He has waves of golden hair like a windswept rye field, eyes like glaciers at midnight, a laugh to light up your soul, and in a few short weeks, he will officially have a speech delay.

“Mama!” he says, drawing my attention to the fact that the last stream of bubbles has entirely burst or blown away. He scurries up to where I sit cross legged on the leaf-littered lounger, touches his fingers to his thumb on each hand and taps them together, and says, “Mah?” for “more.” These are the only words he knows.

We were ecstatic the first time he said them, but they are apparently so easy and universal that many articles detailing the number of words that toddlers should add to their vocabulary from month to month actually specify “besides ‘mom, mama, and more.’” In fairness, the first “mom” almost certainly happens by accident, long before any meaning can attach. It requires neither tongue nor teeth, being the sound that just happens when you activate your voice and open and close your lips. I assume this may explain why so many languages, even those with few other cognates, share a basic [m] and vowel combination to mean “mother” – mama, mum, mami, moer, mor, mẹ, amma, ammu, mãe, ema – sort of the way that the first thing anyone learning morse code is likely to learn is S.O.S. – three short beeps, three long, three short, repeat – the simplest and most unmistakable expression of loosely articulated need. Toddlers, of course, often use “mama” and “mah” in roughly the same way as sailors use “S.O.S..” My engine is on fire. My ship is sinking. My tummy hurts. My sippy cup is empty. My favorite song finished and stopped playing for the eleventh time. My bubbles have all blown away.

This is currently Tristan’s greatest concern. He doesn’t know he has a speech delay. He doesn’t know a lot of things. Like what I dreamed last night or why I dreamed it. It’s better that some worries are just for us.

Like many new parents, we worry a lot about milestones. We remind ourselves that every child is unique and special, yet we follow his development with an endless parade of questions. When should he start solid food? When should he take his first steps? When should he sleep through the night? Can I get that in writing?

Most of these questions, we’ve been able to answer with consistent relief that the boy was right on track. Until now.

He grabs my hand because I’m taking too long. “Hold on, Trix,” I tell him, deciding to push it a little.

“Mah?”

“More what?” I ask him. “Can you say ‘bubble?’”

“Mah?”

“Look at my mouth, buddy.” I point to it and exaggerate the movement of my jaw and lips. “Buh-bul. Start with ‘buh.’ Buh. Buh.” He watches. But it probably doesn’t look much different from “Mah,” which he declares firmly in response.

And for the hundredth time, I respond, “OK, we’ll do a little more.” Then I plunge the wand into the bottle of soapy water on which I keep a firm grip so that he won’t grab it and dump it out entirely, and I bring it to my pursed lips and give it a slow, controlled breath to usher a stream of bubbles out into the late summer air. He chases them as they gleam and refract the hues of the warm twilight.

It’s hard to resist indulging him in moments like this – the moments he wants to stay in. Tristan is good at routines, watching the signs, knowing what comes next. He’ll bring us his tiny shoes and socks and plop down before us when he knows it’s time to leave in the morning. He’ll try to climb into his highchair by himself when he notices us cooking dinner. I suppose these moments are so precious precisely because he has no sense of what comes next.

The season is changing – soon, my teaching semester will start, and he’ll spend more time at daycare, not that this would bother him. About one year ago, when he started at the on-campus childcare center, I worried he would have trouble adjusting, having never been apart from me for more than a couple hours. But he showed no signs of distress or separation anxiety. I, rather, was the one dropping off my cheerful infant every morning and returning to my car to weep out the lyrics of “Cat’s in the Cradle” on my way to the faculty parking lot.

This feeling, I knew, was perfectly normal. The abnormal feelings started a week later. I parked in the turnaround used for drop-off, unfastened the 38-point harness of his car seat, and began carrying him toward the building when I noticed an SUV pull to the curb, its passenger window lowering. I stopped and squinted, but through the glare of the morning sun, I couldn’t see who was inside. I only heard her voice shouting out, “Hey! Is that your baby?”

My body seized up, every muscle immediately tense, my free hand balling into a fist, my teeth gritting. Without thinking, I held him tighter against my thumping chest as I heard the driver’s door open and awaited her approach.

I relaxed my fist when I saw her step onto the sidewalk – a professor from another department, across campus, whom I’d been friendly with in the past but hadn’t seen in over a year. She congratulated me with that classic folksy delight, having only meant to say that she hadn’t heard I was expecting.

“I don’t think a lot of people knew except my friends in my department,” I told her. I wasn’t sure if I saw confusion on her face and wasn’t sure if this needed explaining, but I explained anyway. “I mean, you know, since I wasn’t pregnant, obviously. My wife carried him.”

“Oh, of course!” she nodded along. And then she asked his name and his age, and she cooed with delight as he slumbered in the crook of my arm. She said he was so, so beautiful. Correct. And that he looked just like me.

The remark may have meant nothing at all, may have been a matter of conversational routine, a pattern followed out of habit. Yet it felt probing. It felt as though wheels in her mind were spinning and weaving questions, and I could either answer them with their full and sticky answers, or I could leave her to make assumptions that I preferred she wouldn’t. So though she hadn’t really asked, I answered.

“Well, he is both of ours, genetically,” I told her. “We went through in-vitro fertilization, and we used my sample that I had preserved ten years ago, before I finished my medical transition.” I said this as though it were not a strange thing to talk about the sperm I froze in anticipation of surgically turning my penis into a vagina on the sidewalk outside the daycare at 7:30 in the morning. And to her great credit, she reacted as though it wasn’t. She commended me, in fact, for my forethought. And she congratulated me again and complimented my son again, and we went about our days, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Bringing a child into the world has a way of making everything new again, of refreshing our perspective on what had become mundane, which sounds lovely except that it can include all the fears and anxieties we thought we had already worked through and left behind. I am a trans woman who came out before the great trans revolution of the 2010s, back when being transgender felt inexplicable, when being me seemed incomprehensible to others. At some point, I stopped caring so much, stopped feeling the need to explain and justify my existence, and began simply existing. Yet suddenly, I find myself feeling compelled to spill out my family medical history. If only there were an easier way.

It was one of my young queer students, having heard that I had a child with my cisgender wife, who was the first to tell me, “You’re a ribbon eel mom!”

I quietly cocked a curious eyebrow rather than say, “How dare you. And what?”

As they were thrilled to explain, a “ribbon eel mom” is the maternal equivalent of a “seahorse dad.” I actually did already know that term for a transgender man who chooses to go through pregnancy and give birth, as male seahorses do. Yet somehow, I had never heard of the term for a transgender woman like me who, in one way or another, impregnates someone else to become a mother. This aquatic creature, my student told me, begins its life as a dark and sexless thing, blooming into color as it matures into an adult male capable of inseminating eggs, and then later shifting into another color entirely as it changes its sex to become a female capable of laying eggs. “Isn’t that cool?”

“Very cool,” I told them with a smile. “Though my son has trouble with his ‘r’s and ‘b’s and, well, most of those other letters, so for now we’ll probably stick to ‘Mom.’”

Back in my office, I typed the words into the search bar as I said to myself, “Ribbon eel,” flexing the tip of my tongue near my pinched lips before withdrawing it as my lips bounced off each other, then tapping it to my alveolar ridge, and finally lowering it as my lips briefly stretched wide and then relaxed, letting it slowly release the final liquid sound. It could be a handy term, maybe exactly what I was looking for, except for the fact that if even I hadn’t heard it before, chances were slim that it would be widely familiar among the kind of people to whom I felt the urge to explain myself. Like all language, it is only useful in as much as it is mutually understood, relying on common points of reference, on shared experience, which is my problem to begin with.

Besides, I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of it anyway. When I heard the word “eel,” I thought: slimy, gross, maybe even a little phallic. But when I clicked open a scuba diver’s video of a swimming ribbon eel, I couldn’t deny its grace and beauty. Even emerging from a lush coral reef, the ribbon eel, in its male phase, is a striking stripe of electric blue with a vivid golden fin running the entire rippling length of it. It slides into view and dances through the clear water like a Chinese dragon. Delicate, ethereal, hypnotic.

I remember the image as the slow current of my breath through the loop of the plastic wand creates a long, undulating, serpentine bubble that slithers and shimmers up into the air. Tristan is enthralled.

“I know, it’s pretty, isn’t it?” I ask. “Looks like a ribbon eel. Can you say ‘ribbon eel?’”

He can’t.

And as long as there are bubbles in the air, I do not have his attention anyway. He chases them, little hands grasping for them, little feet making little footprints in the mess of those already burst. No matter how many times it doesn’t work, he seems convinced he can capture them. He keeps on trying. Until they’re gone and he turns back to me. “Mama? Mah?”

In this moment, where there are only two of us floating in this brief, fragile, private space, so little is spoken and yet nothing is ambiguous.

Soon, we will return to so much ambiguity.

Tristan will continue to thrive at daycare. He will carry on being the kind of boy who plays well with others, who shares the toys and never slaps or bites, who notices when a younger baby is crying and leads an adult to them by the hand or, if they are already being held, will sit with them and place his hand on their shoulder for comfort – no words needed.

But even a year in, I haven’t adjusted quite so well. I often find myself feeling a little out of place among the other adults. It may have something to do with being the only gay or lesbian parents – at least as far as I’ve been able to observe, and we tend to find ways to signal to each other. But then, my wife doesn’t feel the same discomfort. So maybe it’s something else. Something more specific to me, like a long history of having been told that a person like me does not belong around kids, is not “family friendly,” that my very existence is a threat, that my presence generates some vague psychic harm to which children should not ever be exposed.

To be quite clear, I’ve experienced no such prejudice at the daycare. Almost without exception, the teachers and caregivers and administrators and indeed other parents I meet are warm, friendly, and genuinely upbeat considering our almost universal sleep deprivation. But the hatred I’ve internalized, the fear that manifests in my nightmares, makes me suspicious of those rare exceptions. When I feel an inexplicable tension from just one particular teacher, a curtness, an edginess, something sharp and serrated drifting through the air between us, the consistent vibe of a woman who just does not like me despite that so far as I can recall, I have never said or done anything remotely unusual to her, my mind runs through a series of possibilities. I think:

Maybe she’s just like that to everyone. Or maybe she has a lot of stress in her life and has a hard time leaving it at home. Or maybe she’s just not as suited as the other teachers to being surrounded by screaming toddlers all day – I certainly wouldn’t be chipper in her place. Or. Maybe it’s because I’m a transgender lesbian who doesn’t look the way she thinks moms are supposed to look. Maybe.

And like any queer person or person of color or disabled person or anyone else living a life on the margins can likely attest, the times when we’re not sure are almost more frustrating than the times when we are.

We also know the discomfort that comes not from hostility, but simply from those times when we know that our difference has been noticed and noted, even if no harm is intended or done. A curious look in the hallway – who am I? A hesitation over whether to hold the secure door open for me as we’re on our way into the building for pick-up – do I belong here?

A conversation with another mom whose daughter is new to Tristan’s room. We said hello as we opened the cabinets with our children’s names on them to see if any refills were needed on diapers or wet wipes. And she asked me, “Are you Tristan’s…” and then a pause, lips parted, teeth together, lingering on the [z], the briefest caesura, but long enough to notice, and long enough that I was eager to interrupt it.

“I’m Tristan’s mom, yes.”

She introduced herself, and we chatted pleasantly as any two moms do. But I’m not any mom, and she’d noticed, and I’d noticed. And one day, it occurred to me, Tristan will notice too.

There’s the real trouble of it all – none of this is new to me. I transitioned long ago, and some people I meet realize my past right away, and some don’t, and of those who do, some are kind, and some are well-intentioned but stumbling, and I’m long past concerning myself about it for my own sake. But for those fresh arctic eyes that look at soap bubbles and see magic, everything is new, and every new thing is something potentially wonderful. He pours out love with no reason to doubt that the world will love him in return.

How will I one day explain to him why some people hate us. Why someone might mock our family at school or sneer at us in the supermarket, why strangers might insult his mothers and one of us in particular. I don’t yet have the language for it, and when I try to think of it, I fight back tears and hope he doesn’t pick up my wordless S.O.S., that even more basic expression of loosely articulated need. Some things are only understood by feeling them anyway.

“Hey Trix, come here.” I try to get his attention as he snatches at the bubbles in the air as though he still believes he might actually catch one. He never will, of course – they all go pop.

He approaches. “Mah?”

“In a minute,” I promise as I help him climb up next to me. “You know what happens to the bubbles when you try to grab them?” I ask. “They POP. Look at my mouth. Pop. Pop.” And then I lean in close enough to his cheek that he can detect the puff of breath I release when I repeat, “Pop. Pop. Pop.” He feels it – he giggles.

I pull back and invite him to try, and it happens. “Pah. Pah. Pah.” My heart sings, jaw dropping, eyes alight. I’ve witnessed magic. But Tristan, already bored of this game, points at the bottle and returns to “Mah?”

Maybe I could push him further now, but why? Why fret so much over the milestone of the month? Were we really worried that he’d wind up a college student who had never gotten past crawling? A middle-aged man who never learned to use a fork? These things came inevitably in their own time, and language will come too, and with language, all the realities of a world too complex to ever be fully expressed by it. And moments like this one will drift away into the dusk.

I may not be able to capture it any more than he could, but I can decide to let it linger in the evening air a little longer. Gripping the bottle of soapy water in one hand and pinching the plastic wand in the other, I bring them together and pull them apart, and I give him what he wants. What we both want. Mah. Mah. Mah.

Rhiannon Catherwood lives in Syracuse, NY, with her wife, son, and cat. She is a teacher, circus artist, photographer, and road tripper. She believes that good fiction should expose truth and good creative nonfiction needs creation.

Ali Choudhary

Sweet Haemorrhage

I’ve been attracted to bodies of water since I was a child. During the summers of my early years, we’d rent out a small bleach-white cottage with the view of a bayou in the back. Through the cypresses, you could almost swear you could hear the muffled laughter of nymphs in splashing water. I would walk towards the source barefoot, cutting through a no access yard—my feet sheathing flora—and graze myself at the corner separating water from thick forest. Earth would splinter my knees indiscriminately. There were pieces of the forest inside every room of my body but it was water that chose to heal each disoriented skin cell instead of letting me become a flooded valley, its dam scraped and pinched. Potamogeton would smooth itself like a plaster over each wound. Salt became blood, blood became salt—and my grotesque fed the water and its memory.

I was twelve when I first fainted, planting myself into the hardwood floor, a blueing iris wedged between the bed and the window. I woke up in the sticky warmth of cotton sheets and felt each nerve ending contorting in the snug of arteries and veins. My mother reassured me I was not dying. The doctors echoed the same sentiments and each prescribed me a dosage of iron higher than the last.

Anaemic at the cusp of adolescence, my body broke apart from its hard exterior and became a churning mixture of organs struggling to be scaffolded by skin and bone. I spent the years after trying to gain weight back or losing the gained weight. When I swam each length during practice, I imagined water molecules rippling through my body and binding to my cells. Growing, vibrating, retrieving the remnants of lost youth. In the changing room mirror, I would study myself with scrutiny like a biological specimen. I traced my finger down my neck and felt each exhale bubbling out of my mouth. I had begun to reabsorb years and I felt joy—however momentary—permeate through me for the first time in a very long time.

After further years of conflict with myself debating what was wrong with my deteriorating mind, I was diagnosed with depression and PTSD. I realised that to be alive in this body, this corporeal vessel, there was suffering at each threshold but eventually the diagnosis led to growth in the way rotting flesh feeds the ecosystem. Much of my emotion and state of mind stemmed directly from various mental and physical traumas. When I was in hospital because of an abusive man, my skin had to teach itself to be softer and kinder, even if only for survival. I was the ship he rammed into until it was coerced into drowning, the blueprint for the exodus of grief. Blood pooled in the creeks of my arm but the boy didn’t understand intimacy, never mind at a molecular level between supple water molecules bonding or the chains of skin pulling themselves together to heal. There is a compassion in healing that I haven’t realised until now.

Facing dysfunctional relationships throughout my teenage years has made me susceptible to forming unhealthy attachments to crushes. Fiona Apple sings “hunger hurts and I want him” and I understand her. I’m prone to romanticising the wrong things that can hurt me. Mouth paralysed in hunger, I crave just one bite of the other person. A kiss to undo the cruel touch-starvedness of my traumas. For my eyes to differentiate real romantic love from men’s hedonistic pleasures. Maybe I ask too much of myself that these futile wishes syphon into my head, shrinking into nerve muscle, fear implanting in perception. When I think about my past too much, I have to reteach my body how to exhale. If I forget to ground myself, I’m worried about disappearing altogether.

In another life, I’d like to think I’m a vending machine. Take what you’d like, my lover. Free of charge, free of want. I’ll satisfy you in a way I could never with myself. When I fell in love with a boy during the refrigerator cool of February, I emptied my compartments to feed him my extensive love. I encompassed the kitchen and made it my staging ground—the knife in my hands, such a versatile tool, used to press down on slabs of my heart, deconstructing it to become tender bites for his enjoyment, then used again to slice the cookie dough for dessert. But even if you make a delicious, intimate meal out of a carcass, a boy only becomes more begrudging. I hunted answers when his love waned, racqueting between my friends and online forum threads, until attachment issues landed on my lap, leaving a sore scrubbed pink imprint. 

If I love too much, I’d rather not be a coward. I fed him from my cup for months and let the red wine trickle warmly over his fingers—a Eucharist blessing, a banquet he feasted on but failed to be grateful for. I would’ve abandoned my strained amounts of novocaine with grace just to save his life. My friends ask me if I know he’d do the same. He says he listens to Lana Del Rey but he’s not a romantic. All her past men are a lesson on how to hurt better. We don’t talk anymore: there are only so many times you can empty your contents, lose count of each time you take a dangerous uncharted route to a heart, and receive no empathy in return. Despite it all, in the gust of memory I see him, this star-spangled boy, with his black beanie, a glister of light snaking down onto his hip. And even if I hate him for the hurt, I still wear his high school hoodie for comfort in the ghostly hollow of my hometown—he’s such a Roosevelt, I could have made him a Kennedy. When I say I’ve closed the door to him, I tend not to mention how I saw him standing in the dim hallway through the keyhole, holding a kitchen knife as if anticipating my roadkill heart in a sandwich for dinner.

I’m learning to collect memory and alchemise it into intimacies: going for lunch at Pizza Hut after lectures with a friend, assembling an IKEA desk, conjugating with a crush, fulfilling the domestic ritual of reading tarot cards, tenderly massaging my face with skincare products, swallowing the painkiller that will soothe the hurt prickling my throat. I began writing about illness and physical trauma because it’s my way of writing instructions to a failing body, in the hopes that I could navigate through solitude and protect the fluidity of my identity. I’ve always anchored myself in homes that I don’t belong to like the small fourth-floor bedroom during my first year of university, in new bodies, in hearts that don’t know love; true north is a lie when your compass is not rooted in yourself.

‘Water has memory,’ I was taught. ‘Follow the tributary and you’ll reach the river’s beating heart, the blood source, the womb.’

I wonder what my friends think of me, and others who perceive me vertically whilst I lie horizontal, all sweat and haemorrhage. “Strong, confident. Former swimmer. Gifted and talented” a wary memory I’ve disposed of. For a future lover, does my broken mind and body suffice or am I a tragic use-once-only ornament, worthy of little more than pity and occasional play? It’s funny how I centre my sense of worth on romantic relationships but I was without a man when I held onto bannisters to keep my body steady after the rape, soaked in exhaustion. Like a ballerina tilted at an axis, I memorised my outline and kept myself upright. Surrendered my innocence to dance. When my own suburban home that I loved became a haunted house tossed in darkness, I found light at my ontological centre and let it guide me. I was the final girl that was never shown in horror films; mention adolescence and I visualise black and technicolor red, wrists split open like a medieval painting of Christ’s side wounds. My body has endured suffering but it cleaves grafts of skin with mercy each time. Isn’t it funny that cleave has two meanings? (1) to split apart and (2) to attach together. It leaves me wondering which is the more intimate, softer act.

When I went to the beach this summer, I ate a sandwich and tried to enjoy it. Slices of cold butter and jam slathered passionately onto bread, crumbs peppering the sand. A wave pressed its palm towards my leg as if we’re a prayer book being closed fondly and I reached out to the water, each fingertip cleaving thousands of molecules. Eyes closed, I imagined my own Adam to give me his rib to make another healed me. Eyes open, I only saw myself in the water’s reflection, my wounds glimmering as if they’re a blessing. And this Adam’s nowhere to be seen in the glass—I’d like to think I’ve become an angel, held out of any man’s orbit, bone hammered into an ark for survival. Give me a world I can eat in, I ask the glass mirror, where I’m not skinned and left to gleam raw salmon-pink with the discomforts of adolescence. Give me a room, still kept whole, just for me.

Ali is a poet. His debut chapbook is forthcoming with Ethel Zine & Micro Press in spring 2025. To read more: linktr.ee/eatmyhearts

Jack Maes

We Feral Few

There is no carpet in the living room when you arrive. Mom is smiling because you’re a chubby baby with enormous eyes, and immediately you’re the more honest one. You let it all get to your skin.

We grow up together in that house, we navigate and find rhythm. We invent the joke and the cartwheel and the same movie run raw until we know all the lines and pauses. You are my closest friend, but knowing someone is an effort, not a prize.

 ***

As a twenty-something I visit the house again in winter, pulling up the drive, wary of slick. The tires shuffle loose on the ice like they are absorbing every direction. When I press on the brakes, the chassis settles but does not stop, a gentle mistake. The headlights catch the outside air and betray it. Every moving particle and gust of wind is licked with light and trailed in motion. My blood is moving I think. The pond out front of the drive is only a few yards across and is frozen over, the water swelling just above the calm meter of the surrounding dirt. From the car window where I idle, the marbling from the freeze makes it look like a striped stone, gray and white, something I could pick up and thumb in my pocket for luck. I try to make my blood halt. I really try this time.

***

Whenever I visit home I still hear you breaking things. In my mind, you’re chained still to the window you smashed with a rock from the yard when they’d locked you out. I can’t hear any words, but your scream I know, so close to bone I writhe to it, so loud you woke the police that night, woke their three cars and their floodlight and the obnoxious bark of their sirens. I met them at the driveway while you pleaded at the front door behind me. You only wanted to be let in, but you had torn through drywall and slammed our mother against granite, then wall, then wood.

Please, I said, and something about your condition I think, your mania. Please, only now without arms to beg, undone at the knees, shouldered to the concrete. “Don’t hurt her,” and then your scream again but sharper, more brittle. One of the officers lifted me and bent me tall around the edges of his cruiser. He pressed my face inward at the house so I could watch the other two take you. I saw you bite one of their fingers as they tested your flesh flat against the front stoop. I watched you wail and struggle as they cuffed you and shook you like a broken machine. I watched our mom and dad stare from the blistered window until my eyes were too fogged from the cold to track anything but shapes. The officer straightened me by the shoulders once the other two had driven off to the station with you. He let me wipe my eyes and nose and took my statement. You’re lucky, he said after, we really should’ve brought you in too, the way you acted. I looked away because I felt too ferocious and because I thought I might do something. Maybe I could take a finger, too.

***

I’m ahead of myself. This one is a greeting. You were my baby sister and I can’t remember your face from then but I’ve seen all the photos. And I was to be your big brother, though I too was slight and unformed. I gave you the first hug I ever built. I mimicked what I thought mom and dad were doing, arching my shoulders over yours like some silly tunnel of Tetris brick and dust. I wanted the world to know you were protected, and so I took the makeshift swords and imitation bows I had built to defeat imaginary villains and practiced with them in the backyard. Hours it felt like. I’d come inside every so often to kiss your forehead. That’s okay, you didn’t know because you could hardly hold together and had only just spawned, but I think at the time it felt like a pledge. We’d look out for one another.

***

When you were nine and I was thirteen you fell from a tree and the wind left you. Mom was out drinking with a friend. I ran to you and you looked so confused, eyes panicked, clutching your stomach and half-heaving. I held you like you were dying because the way you looked at me, maybe you were. I saw it in your face. You didn’t know the feeling would pass just fine.

***

Sometimes when you call, I see that face or part of it and it makes me want to be a different person. You swallow a mix of pills; you drink too heavily; you beg for answers; you teeter and shake. I call the hospital; they clear your stomach; our sleep is shallow. I used to look into your eyes with such surety and make grand statements about what would get better and what wouldn’t. I was a faulty oracle. I only wanted for time to clean up its messes and for you to believe in such things. I don’t know what time can fix anymore. I’m sorry not everything is just a fall from a tree.

***

The psychiatrist is old and tall like a dim streetlamp and he has us wait for him in a large conference room. When he does arrive he talks too slowly. He says it’s not just a focus issue, that it's petit-mal seizures and borderline personality disorder, and that he has a fourteen-year-old granddaughter who just got into the Montessori magnet school where they give stickers instead of grades so he understands. Mom hardly spoke, and I pretended to be ready. I bought four books on your condition and one more that turned out to be a graphic fanfiction with a misleading title. I read through a chapter or two of each. I lost focus, regained it. I practiced talking to you. And I forgave you, not selflessly but like a muscle twitch, a growing reflex.

***

Years later our father called and asked me to star in his science-fiction thriller. It was set in the basement of the home we grew up in. Every inch of floor was covered in old cassette decks and calculators and CD players. They’re for the control panel and the interface of the spaceship, he said. He painted styrofoam poster board an ungodly light gray and sheeted the walls in it. He took my old metal tea kettle and hung it upside down as an orb that eliminates radiation. For the crewmembers, he said. There’s a lot of shit out there and they need to get clean.

I call you that night and tell you what I saw and you laugh at him, which I admire. I always just get indignant. I could learn a lesson here but don’t, which will become important later if you read into that sort of thing. I read a chapter from one of the BPD books but also from the fanfiction. It’s about trains and pirate sex, and the protagonist has finally lost something. That’s always the good part.

***

Routinely, you call about a boy who does not love you. Never the same boy, always the same call, and you cry and say the crooked, foolish things that rejection presses out of all of us. Well anyway, you say, I’m drinking again. I tell you that the person you will be when you quit forever is someone you will love, but these are not real words to you. I think of our mom and nearly accuse you of something cyclical. Too tender. Then I think of a guy I knew in college with blonde, thinning hair and a frontpage smile. He once told me he was just living out his bachelor life until there was no blonde hair left and then, maybe, he’d settle in. I label it a clunky corollary in my head because, like you, he lived in temporaries and lacunas. The fact that I am a person is astounding when I am talking to you. I feel like a shrill yelp.

***

Our mom kicked you out four times and melted you, as zinc, each time you came back. She called it distillation. She reacted to the ample light and the sacred puddle, but not to us. We are the glass in her hand or on the floor.

When we both lived with her, I was a rotary machine or a pricing gun. I brought you home from school and set you to your homework, though not diligently; I had my own. I made dinner and we hunched over it like the mess it was, we feral few. We lived untamed but ordered, a study in ethology and whatever it is an animal does before it knows the pack or how to roar. I’d always have you safely in your room before she got home.

 ***

When I left for college, I built separation. I only checked in with you once a month and I hardly listened when you spoke. I was finally out and thought I was weaving a narrative of self, so I let you unclasp like a loose bracelet and never addressed it. I let you turn eighteen in her home.

***

When I visit your first apartment your fridge is empty. We have to go out and eat the food of our people, you say, and you laugh and grab your keys. We get in your car and you point out the grocery store you work at a block away. I make some joke about the empty fridge and the irony. I play with the fraying seat belt and tell you I’m proud of you for holding down a job.

Are you really?

Yes, really.

Most people are in college at nineteen, you say. Do you think I should be in college?

I pose the question back to you in my discount therapist voice. You don’t like that. I tell you it’s good that you’re away from mom and finding your rhythm.

It gets quiet and I scratch something sticky off the dash. You pull out a flavored vape pen and I’m suddenly aware of how many cartridges of different hues litter the cupholders and the dividing cubby. Energy drinks, too, maybe five empty cans, and about the same number of malt liquor bottles and travel-sized spirits. A pink Narcan box in the seat pocket. A color anthem.

You see me looking and tell me to stop judging. I say I’m not and you tell me not to talk to you condescendingly. Your hand is shaking. These don’t mix with your pills, I say. I tell you you’re hurting yourself. You don’t see it that way, but you don’t say why.

We grab birria tacos like good Latinos and I put a hand on your shoulder that you quickly duck. We can’t roll like this, I say, as if we’re a team. We really used to pull it together. You can’t roll like this, I say, and you don’t give a shit but you say you know.

***

One year you ask if we can live together. A year later you move to Seattle because of Grunge music and Kurt Cobain. You don’t really listen to him anymore, and you move to NorCal a year after that, which goes to show how short-lived any fantasy really is or something. Moving doesn’t change much, I try to tell you, but nobody ever believes that. I said we couldn’t live together because you needed to get cleaned up and because I couldn’t trust you. Both were true, and I didn’t want to derail my life every time your world began to warp and spin. That’s why I sometimes don’t pick up. I liked it better when I was too ashamed to say what it all really was. I should have just told you it wasn’t a good time, or that I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick around. Around as in the area. Around as in at all.

***

Our mother is still married to our father. They divide the house and interact once a day. I don’t care if it works for them or if they’re happy. He hates how loud she gets when she’s excited or anxious, which is often, and she gets irritated that he always cuts up his meat into incredibly small pieces before eating it. You’ll note, in this essay, he is scarce. Our mom is boisterous and foolish because she drinks like a knife carving a mind out clean, and it’s second nature and I forgive her but you don’t, sort of. You like her better. Maybe to you there’s something still to lose. This is when I begin to believe I have too little heart.

***

You are not the arch or the pillar. You are the leaves I raked in fall. I would jump into each pile like in stories/not like in stories. Crunched leaf pellets, burlap bit my skin. When you first put me together, we would duel and play pretend. We built giants, climbed stairs like ascending cityscapes. You unwedged a wooden box to frame me. Now you greet me and say you are a mountain, at eye-level. You imagine I am proud of you. You have been ignited. You come back each season and collect in clumps. You are dead nature, a lazy line, a relentless loop. I am in and out of the room.

Our mother is body language and microfibers and the moments before. I remember it in pieces: dropping acid, hours alight, coming home later than expected. I walk through the front door with my ears off and turn the corner that leads past the living room. It’s a room where nothing happens, a place of excess with chairs and wood floors and paintings done by who-the-fuck-knows that are meant to make it all feel full. I hate that room.

***

Mom is embarrassed that she’s broken a bottle of wine on the floor. There is another empty one on the side table nearby. There are messages on her phone from me about AA meetings and sobriety and how much I love her when we talk honestly. There are two children who share her home and her booming voice and her impulsiveness. There are victims of her choices, voices heaving to find language when people surface but drown anyway.

She ought to hate herself, and it’s weaving into a diatribe in my head as I pick her up from her mess. This is where I misread analogies. Embarrassment is to anger as anything is to anything. On impulse, I try to steady her. “It’s okay mom,” I say, “I think you’re good, let’s get some water.” I touch her shoulder but do not regard her as feral, though I should, and so when she whips around I stumble back, and when she lunges I hardly flinch. I am silent when she stabs me.

***

The broken bottle sits lodged in the front of me even when she lets go. I pull it out, all of it, like a fish from water or a metaphor from a metaphor and I bleed like torn prey. Hours later, I pluck loose shards from my lower belly. Now the wounds are only crooked lines. She never apologized.

***

We took mushrooms together once and you couldn’t remember my name. You laughed but couldn’t speak, and as sometimes happens I was afraid of you.

I touched your shoulder to feel safe but you pulled away and I asked why. Dad bruised you there you said, twice with his hand while you shrieked. I hugged you carefully, a new design. I told you what mom had done with the bottle and you asked if it was true, eyes wider even than echoes, and I told you yes and you turned away.

***

It’s so silly what we are: you, fractured, unstill and innate and me, silt-stomached, cluttered with jar gems. We are put together with too many pieces to feel anything whole, I promise you, and there is no puzzle or complete but there is a chronic and a terminal. No one can keep anything exactly as it is or was, but it’s wonderful to stretch across time with another person.

Jack Maes is a Latino teacher and writer from Southern California living in Northern Virginia. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from the College of William and Mary and an M.S. from MIT. He is one of the co-founders of Fast Flesh Literary Journal.

Eugénie de Rosier

Queen Uncaptured by Bishop

      2006                    

Often, I saw two men playing chess in the early afternoons under the overhang of store fronts on Magsaysay Avenue in Iba on Luzon. Today, they sat outside the barber shop, just across from my landlord’s business, Ebalo Printing Press, where I’d dropped my monthly rent. As I left the press, I strolled over to watch the chess game. An intermittent cool breeze blew, but the men—one young and one older—were wise to be sitting in the shade. The Philippine sun was hot. The younger player was warm and handsome with chestnut skin, while the elder, mid-sixties, I guessed, was less so. 

The board and pieces on the small table were well-used. Some of the brown and white chessmen had dull edges, smoothed with wear, and the board’s leather corners had softened.

The men looked up, and the young one stood and asked me to take his seat.

“No thank you.” Was his challenger wearing him down?

The elder asked, “Do you want to play?”

“Yes, but not now. I’ve an appointment.” Due at a mountain village water system project, I’d hail a tricycle and leave town in minutes.

He stared at me with intent and at length, but I didn’t understand what the look meant. Perhaps, my being foreign explained it. Filipinos commonly stared at those who looked different, probably a human practice.

 “My opponent’s a master,” the younger man said, which was followed by the elder’s comment that he was the pastor at Iba’s Church of Christ. I barely knew his church from the Muslim mosque that was going up.

“May we play sometime?” I said, despite little experience. Would he have the patience for an amateur?

“Yes.” He raised his eyebrows in what looked like evaluation.

*

I didn’t see the pastor for weeks and came across him in the vast public market on the south end of Magsaysay, amid a busy lunch-time crowd. Once, the entire market was housed inside the roof, but the fringes kept spilling out farther as the population increased and more merchants wanted stall space. Vendors sold a wide variety of products beyond food: clothing, toys, shoes, housewares, new and black-market CDs, and more. Colorful, loud, cramped, I tried to avoid its late-afternoon rush hour, but this place had an appeal. It throbbed with all of life’s richness and mess.

I stopped on the outer ring of the market to buy produce first. Eying the vivid green beans, I bought some and chatted with the merchant. Her black hair, supported by a thick bright yellow ribbon, charmed her face. Nodding goodbye, I turned as the pastor approached me from behind.

“You haven’t come back to play chess,” he said, all business.

“I’ve had no free time. A water project and business start-up talks keep me running.” He knew I was a foreign worker with the islands’ Department of Trade and Industry. I’d been in town four months, the only white woman among 35,000 residents.

“I really wanted to talk to you about being saved.”

Startled, my body stiffened as I eyed him with skepticism.

We stood at the corner of two busy cross aisles, and he backed up into a less-crowded one

for more space, indicating I move too. I didn’t.

“Do you believe you’ve been saved?” he asked in a heightened tone.

That’s why he’d stared at me so long when I spoke to him the first time. From his perspective, an American woman, or maybe any foreign woman needed reform. A friend’s irritated voice flashed through memory, “Ignore the priests.” Another man who was afraid of women.

He asked me again. Arrogance and malice left his tongue in a slow, casual way.

Glancing right, the merchant served another customer, but she’d heard his every word.

“Yes.”

He asked again, as if he didn’t like the answer, and I responded, “Do you think you’re saved?”

“Oh yes, of course.” He lifted his closed lips up in a half smile, his eyes filled with self-satisfaction, implying, how could you doubt it?

 “I’m as sure as you are that I am.”

I didn’t know if he was searching for souls or thought me too bold to approach and greet two men playing chess in a public place. What a strange conversation to be having in a market.

“My work comes first, so chess with you will be delayed, and I don’t need help changing myself. Good day.”

I never wanted to lay eyes on him again, and turned, continuing down a stall or two in the aisle, focusing on the colorful food displays: carrots, eggplant and mangos, jackfruit, pomegranates, lettuces, bananas and melons, onions and tomatoes and oranges. The variety and plenty seemed endless, but my thoughts still held his unpleasant face.

Sexism ran high in the Philippines and patriarchy was numbing in its pervasiveness.

More than a handful of men I’d met here—colleagues, business owners, neighbors—held preconceptions of American women as sexually wanton.

I focused instead on the produce, the breeze-blown palm fronds, the soft blue sky. Nectarine fragrance sailed under my nose and pushed against my dark feelings. I bought four and slid them into my cloth satchel slung over one shoulder.

Other women colleagues had told me of their experiences. One young worker with an MA in psychology and engaged with women’s groups, north of Iba on Luzon, was frustrated when any man started running with her, uninvited, as she exercised. She didn’t care a wit about a training directive that we should never express criticism to a Filipino directly. She wanted to trip any man who bothered her. Fair enough. He was infringing on her preference to run alone.

Another incident occurred at a business meeting where we planned to discuss specific ideas among a good turnout of 30 hotel and restaurant owners, including some of my clients. Before adjourning, the chair, Ben Farin, early 50s, asked me if I was interested in meeting some men. Taken aback that such a question was said aloud in front of a roomful of people, many of whom I didn’t know, I replied no. Then a woman I knew piped up from across the room and asked me the same question twice more. The chair had set me up and she was following his directive. She saw the glint in my eye and stopped. Ben didn’t like my independence. The culture was invested in women being part of a couple so they could be controlled. He presumed he could direct the situation in a public forum.

After the meeting, as I waited on the curb for my ride, someone approached and stopped several feet behind me. 

“Hindi, hindi, hindi,” he said, speaking louder, irritated.

Hindi is no in Tagalog, my answer to his invasive question. I turned to see who was speaking. It was Ben, now hard-eyed. Frowning at him for his sexist misdeeds and surprised he’d carry his frustration outside, I entered the car. Days later, I spoke to him in private and called him on unprofessional behavior. He demurred, amused, and claimed it was a misunderstanding. We knew that was a lie.

Days later at lunch, I was with three of my DTI colleagues and we discussed Ben’s bad behavior. I liked the two men, and the woman, Malou Arcega, who was becoming a close friend.

Malou said, “The men must think you’re very conservative.” She spoke with calm. If she, who knew me best thought this was the natural course of things with American women—as a foreign sexual initiator—and as the pastor’s opinion of American women was low, then the town’s expectation of me seemed clear, as I was the first American woman it had had in a neighbor. 

The two men—Sixto and Ed—didn’t say a word, just stared, indicating they believed the same. No consideration was given to the notion that the men were out of line, but would a woman expect anything less?

That’s why Sixto was sometimes skittish around me if we were ever alone outside

the office. He wouldn’t share a double seat with me on a bus, but rather sat directly across the aisle. And it’s why when I walked after dinner, as dusk fell, 20-year-old boys, middle-aged men—my contemporaries, who should have known better—made gestures and called out to me, with what sounded like course comments in Tagalog.                        

The flower stalls were ahead offering a wealth of scent and I bought a bouquet. The bright purple anise hyssop’s stems and spiky leaves with licorice-mint smell caught my eye, but I moved on to the blue flax and chose them.

I emailed several women co-workers, who were located outside of Iba or on different islands, to learn what their experiences were with the Philippines’ discrimination against women.

Eve Bass, a smart, attractive woman, 60, and a special-education teacher in the Visayas, wrote back:

“The view here that everyone must be in a couple hides the reality. The crux is the loss of freedom for women to be independent. Self-determination isn’t a wise assumption to make, especially as a foreign woman. Men’s coarse words, the insistent matchmaking, and the errant Catholic Church enable the Philippines to maintain the status quo. I wasn’t aware that the consciousness in the demeaning remarks, and the treatment of women—as some kind of interactive toy—would be so personal. Women making themselves independent is vital for the future development of the Philippines.”

The market’s center, where merchants sold fish and meat, was popular and it had one entrance that extended along the outdoors. It pleased me to step inside this wet market and stand in the maze of aisles. Sunlight reflected on an array of fish sheen.

Crabs, lobsters—with their orangey-red bodies and strong tails—clams, tilapia, shrimp, oysters, scallops, grouper, tuna, tropical fishes, and seaweeds were abundant, low-cost, palate pleasing. Fresh-fish scents let me inhale the South China Sea’s fragrance, as the steady eyes of the catch stared. Green smells with hints of sand and oakmoss from the ocean meadows wafted.

Another friend in Brussels, Suzi Hagen, who’d worked internationally for American companies and had been in the Peace Corps, replied to my survey:

“You’ve learned hard truths about being a woman in a foreign country. Some cultures are worse than others, but women carry the burden. This is made harder by the behavior of too many of our male colleagues, who on the one hand are viewed as a ticket out by local women, and, on the other, view local women with little regard. Most men my age are married, so I have coffee or lunch or dinner occasionally with a male colleague, but have never found anyone on three continents to date.”

I came to the meat sellers who displayed chicken, beef, pork, goat, the odorless duck, and other poultry. The merchants bought dressed, wholesale cuts of meat, shank, rump, chuck, and brisket, and slit them to customer requests. This market was regulated and clean, routinely inspected. One of my DTI colleagues was a market inspector.    

The wet space gave off a mild moist smell, and floors drained rivulets of water and blood as fishmongers and butchers sliced portions, but this was no slaughterhouse. They hosed the floors to keep their stalls sanitary. I imagined the pastor’s lips curving up as I watched the water spiral down a drain.

There was as much pornography and as many prostituted women here as elsewhere. The videos I saw, promoting karaoke for evening relaxation at business conferences, featured lyrics flicking across the screen and scantily dressed white American women in a come-hither routine. None were Filipinas. If I’d seen these videos, the pastor had.

We aid workers had a training week every six months and outside our primary site. It became clear that when I left Iba for a first training, some business associates presumed I’d lied and was meeting a man. Ben and a hotel manager, a client, saw me enter at a next business meeting and approached me, eager to ask where I’d been. They knew I’d left town and spoke to each other in Tagalog, counting on my lack of understanding.

“Did she get married?” One said to the other, looking for a ring.

“Hardly,” I said. “I’ve been learning how to construct and install bio-sand filter water systems and taking progressively difficult oral Tagalog exams.”

 American men here were often despicable, too. Weeks ago, as three male colleagues and I drove to a Manila trade fair, the radio aired a story about a Filipina’s testimony of being raped by a U.S. soldier. He’d violated the military’s rules of conduct and damaged a woman’s life, but was given a furtive exit from the islands to avoid prison.

Two of my colleagues were sure she’d been asking for it.

“She likely started it,” the third said.

“Oh, with her youth and petite stature opposite his tall, brawny build?” I shot back. “Women don’t want to be raped. Consider yourselves in a similar circumstance. You’re being forcibly sodomized by a man twice your body size. What would you feel as your clothes were yanked away, as his penis tore your skin?”

They were silent.                                       

“Manok?” a merchant questioned. Chicken in Tagalog. I knew this vendor and smiled.       

“Yes. Two pieces, please,” I said, designating each, she wrapped them.         

Beyond the fish and meat, the building’s interior broadened to an array of dry goods as I walked back to the open-air stalls lined up like row houses.

Stall owners hung bright green and blue tarps to screen the brilliant sun. The tarps were like awnings, accommodating merchants and customers. A thick wooden rod held up the outer end of each awning, while two free-hanging arms gripped the top.

Holding the flowers in one hand with my groceries on my shoulder, I wasn’t looking straight ahead and walked into a wooden rod, which smacked me in the forehead. Stunned, I stood still, massaging the wound as the Filipina merchant with her hair held by the silky lemon strip said, “You’re too tall.”

I laughed, despite the pain. She was right.

“And just after that pastor asked you if you’d been saved.” She wrinkled her nose and dismissively shook her head back and forth.

There was little privacy in the islands, but I was amused again and appreciative, as I savored her solidarity.

Eugénie de Rosier’s work has appeared in the Antioch Review, Huffington Post, the Mantelpiece (Iceland), Arial Chart International, Big Muddy. Other writings have graced the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star, Philippine Daily Inquirer, elsewhere. She’s received numerous first-place awards from the National Association of Government Communicators and is a book reviewer for Peace Corps Worldwide. A former Norcroft resident, de Rosier’s short story collection was a finalist in Holy Cow! Press’ (Duluth) sole collection contest, 2018. She is pursuing publishers for an essay collection and a short-story manuscript. In summers, she races in the Minnesota and the National Senior Games in the 5000-meter and 1500-meter power walking sport.

Sharon Lee Snow

Small

Myra pulled the dead man from the pool at three o’clock on Friday the first of May. At first, she didn’t know what she pulled, just that the net dragged downward, and felt heavier than the detritus of a normal pool skim. She held up the dripping net crowded with sharp brown leaves from the poolside bougainvillea plant—some turning to slime in the acidic water, a smattering of fine blue fake pebbles from the bottom of the pool that were coming undone with age and the suction of the pool pump, a drowned cockroach, and something else. She squinted at the unknown find, wary of the tiny ringneck snakes that had once burrowed a home beneath the deck. Then she saw something silver catch the sunlight, a shiny buckle on a tiny brown shoe.

 She plopped the skimmer net on the pool deck, spreading it open with curiosity. At first glance, it didn’t look like her son, Louis’, action figures. And daughter Lucy was too big for dolls. Maybe it was just a lizard, distasteful as that was, with weird markings. Drowned lizards, frogs, and snakes were to be expected when you owned a pool in Florida. She had been trained through the years to look for the obvious, the most logical. After all, her husband Stuart, a statistician, was all about the predictable, the known.

She pulled apart the leaves, wincing at the slimy feel, avoided the roach, and there it was: a grown man just a little larger than the size of her index finger tangled in a piece of green vine. Myra looked around, her heart slowing then starting back up with a painful thump. She laid a finger gently on him as if to keep him from running away. Her phone was on the table. She should call out, call for someone, call for Stuart, but this had to be a toy one of the kids next door had tossed it in. She reached in and grimacing, put her hands underneath the tiny figure and pulled it out onto the pool deck.

Myra knelt over him. Hard to really see, but still, he was gorgeous in his small perfection. Whatever he was. He had curly brown hair that the water hadn’t been able to flatten. His eyes were closed, his mouth in a thin line as if life had become bitter at the end and he hadn’t been a bit surprised. His cheeks were pale with just a hint of cyanosis, the touch of blue starting around his well-formed lips. She touched him softly, running a finger lightly over his arms inside a brown suit coat. He gave a little under her touch; clearly he was made of flesh and bone. He was not a toy. What was he? How had he died in her pool? And could he still be saved?

She considered again the short dash to her phone. Without thinking further, she picked up the little man in her hands, , afraid to crush him. She turned him over like she’d seen an officer do a baby who had fallen in a pool on a TV show. On the slope of her left hand, she draped him downward and lightly tapped him between his shoulders. So finely was he made, his bones light as a hummingbird’s, she tapped trying to remember the song rhythm. Stayin’ Alive? Stay alive, stay alive! Ah ah ah ah stayin’ alive! she commanded in her mind. She turned him over and his eyes remained closed, his chest still. His face took on a darker hue. Myra began to panic. Call 9-1-1! What would they do? They didn’t have any instruments for a three-inch man, no oxygen masks, or tubes. No IV needles. Call Stuart? No, he was the wrong choice; she was sure of that.

Mouth-to-mouth was out of the question. She turned him on his side and then on his back, doing chest compressions with a light finger, her heart about to burst out of her body with the effort to not use effort. Tears stung her eyes as he grew rigid, even as she gently turned him upside down to let gravity pull the water from his lungs.

Finally, she picked him up with the gentleness reserved for the little lizards who thanked her efforts to save them from her dog by dropping their tail, wiggling and bloody, on her hand as they scampered away. She put him on the round glass deck table and stood next to him, poised for flight. Her phone buzzed. Work. She ignored it. Who to call? A man had drowned in her pool. Her pool was a crime scene. A mystery species. She ran her hand over her forehead. Shit.

Myra knew the drill. She’d seen enough science fiction movies. The government would want to know all about him, would dissect him and mount him on the wall like a butterfly or put him in a jar with formaldehyde like the frogs in her first-year college Biology class that had made her gag. The cold-eyed, black-suited men would tear up her pool deck, hunting for his family, for his community, for whoever had crafted his exquisite brown suit. And the men, she knew, being men, would never stop.

She looked at his face with its expectation of pain, exquisite even in death. A man at his prime. A man so small that he could have ridden in the phone pocket of her purse with plenty of room to spare. She sighed, feeling a clutch of pain, a quick squeeze of sorrow as she smoothed his hair, so fine her fingertips could not register it as hair, but maybe as the soft top of a cotton swab. Could she save him? Had she tried enough?

She tried the light thumping again, but it was no use. He remained stiff and cold. A tragedy. A mystery. Stuart would hate it. She sighed deeply, sucking in the humid air of the pool with its touch of chlorine. Clean. Stuart expected things tidy, like his numbers. Life was about to take a new, untidy turn. For just a minute, she delayed that change, a change that she knew would change everything forever. She knelt down by the little man so she could look him in his face, afraid of handling him further. What was his name? He had died alone in her pool. Why? She closed her eyes, feeling the pull of grief and horror. What could she do to make this right? A kindergarten teacher, she and her students often talked about doing what was right. She opened her eyes and reached out instinctively to hold his hand, but his hands were so small that she was afraid to touch them. Then she saw the gold band.

She yelled for help. First came Stuart, yard clippers in hand.

“Good God, Myra, what is it?”

Myra showed him. She watched his eyes grow wide, then narrow. He whistled lightly and then poked the dead man in the chest.

“Gentle! He’s tiny!”  

Stuart stared at her. “I can fucking see that, Myra. I have eyes in my head. But what the hell is it? And more importantly, why is he dead in our pool?”

The kids came up next. Lucy, who was twelve and pragmatic like her father. Then Louis, seven, a dreamer like her.

“Call 9-1-1, Stuart,” Myra said, tears finally coming. “I tried to save him, but it was impossible. He’s so small, and I don’t think they have any equipment his size–”

“Cool! We’re going to be on TV!” Lucy put her earbuds in her hand and appraised the little man. “Maybe they’ll name it after us!” She gestured dramatically. “Hominus Lucy!”

Myra stopped her teacher instinct to correct Lucy. Hominin. Hominid. Homo sapiens? No, not that. 

Louis crept closer to Myra. He laid his head on her arm. “Why is he dead, Mom?”

“He was in the pool,” she said, as if that were the answer, putting her arm around him.

Stuart had been pacing around the deck. He pushed back his hair. Then he stopped and stood in front of them. “We’re not doing anything. Not right now. We need to figure this out. We don’t need the Government tearing up my new azaleas or patio pavers and putting us on surveillance for the next ten years. I’m under enough scrutiny with the audit at work.”

“But he’s a miracle! He might be like a borrower or elf! Maybe the university–”

“Myra, he could be a bad project from the government. He could be an extraterrestrial. Who the fuck knows? But what I do know, is that we don’t need any drama. Not right now. My firm is already under the gun enough. We can’t afford any trouble.” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He was obviously upset. He had started smoking again during the audit of his firm where he was the co-owner and lead statistician. They had many government contracts. 

“Audit!” she said, as Louis moved away from her. She watched him cover the little man in the softest of tissue blankets. “How can you worry about an audit at a time like this?” She pointed to the man. “We have a miracle and a mystery. Plus, he was a person.”

Stuart snorted, cigarette smoke streaming from his nose in two dragon-like tendrils. “You and your miracles. You live in that fantasyland with your kindergarteners. What he is is a problem. Besides, he’s dead. There’s nothing we can do for him. Dead is dead no matter what.”

“He’s got a community and family,” Myra said. “He has clothes and a wedding ring.”   “I want to see the wedding ring!” Lucy leaned in closer, squinching her eyes. She kicked the ground, disappointed. “I don’t see any rings, Mom. He’s too small. How do you see it?”

“Great, an infestation,” Stuart muttered, looking around the pool as if roaches had suddenly started goose stepping across the pool deck. “Lucy! Go get a plastic container for this little guy and we’ll put him in a safe place while we figure it out.”

Lucy came back with her father’s favorite bento box, earning her a sharp curse. Myra took it back and rummaged through spaghetti sauce-stained plastic tubs until she found a new one in the back. Louis lined it with the tissues he had gathered, and Myra gently picked the little man off the table and laid him in the tissue nest.

They stood, silent.

He had been born to someone. He had married someone. Someone would miss him. Someone loved him, Myra knew. She felt the tears again.  “We should say a few words,” she said, her voice wobbling. “This man died.”

“This is no man!” Stuart said. He shook his head. “This here,” he pointed, “is not a human being.”

“He drowned in our pool, Daddy,” Louis said, looking about to cry too. “That makes us responsible as Pastor Donald would say.”

 Myra was proud of Louis. She was about to say so when their neighbor’s lawn mower started up. Stuart frowned. “Look here,” he said, talking quietly. “We need to settle down and keep our mouths shut until I figure this out. Tell nobody. Especially not Pastor Donald. Or your teachers, friends, or students!” The final with a glare at Myra. With that, he put the red lid on the container and snapped it shut. Myra and the children followed him to the old refrigerator in the garage where they kept their sodas and beer. He opened the freezer compartment and put him on the middle shelf behind an old tub of expired chocolate chip ice cream.

“Not a word!” he said with a black look at the three of them assembled in front of the fridge. He grabbed a long-handled pool brush and some acid, muttering as he headed to clean the pool. He coughed, a deep inside rattle that had started to worry Myra. She knew better than to bug him about it again. After all, he knew statistics.

 “Could there be more of them?” Lucy peered around, half excited, half worried. 

“I imagine so,” Myra replied, desperately wishing they would leave. She wanted to check on the little man again. Maybe there were clues as to what he was.

If she were to be honest with herself, she wanted to behold the miracle again.

The kids stood in front of the closed fridge for a few more minutes then went off to play video games inside.

Myra waited until the door to the house clicked shut then she opened the fridge. She pulled out the container and opened it. “I’m so sorry,” she said. Sorry about the container, the pool, the fridge, her husband. “I’m so sorry.”       

She left him for a minute to rummage in the kitchen desk for the scratched old magnifying glass that the kids once used to hunt insects. She remembered Lucy excitedly showing her the sad broken wings of a dragonfly, as beautiful and mosaic as a cathedral window.

Myra placed the man on his tissue bed on top of Stuart’s tool cabinet. She pulled out the magnifying glass and gasped. He was so magnificent, she thought, scanning his face, handsome in repose, with dark butterfly wings of brows, tiny elfin ears, dark curly hair. She touched his tiny hand, smoothed his beautifully detailed jacket and trousers, which looked between a 16th-century men’s courtier suit and a Wall Street investor’s suit, with fancy piping in designs so minute that they were only an impression. She touched his shoes. They had been the first thing that she had seen in the pool. She squinted. They were dark brown with a silver buckle and narrowed slightly at the tip with a short heal. They, like the small man, were exquisite too, stylish if possible.

A miracle in her home, tragic though it was. Pastor Donald did not believe in the miraculous outside the confines of the Bible. They were not Catholic. He deeply disapproved of relics and saints. 

The wedding band caught her attention once more, and she zeroed in on it. It was bright. Did they have forges? Mines? Or were they like the Borrowers from kids’ books—taking small things from big folk? Or the Littles? How her children loved those books with people smaller than them, living in a children’s sized miracle world. The tiny ring shone brightly like eighteen karats or more, a deep rich gold against his pale finger.

Myra clenched her hand unconsciously, hiding her dull band.  She had married Stuart straight out of college and life had continued on a predictable conveyor belt in their hometown: marriage, work, children, yards, and school events.

And now this, this small man.

She couldn’t explain it, but she wanted this time alone with him. Myra wasn’t dumb. She knew they would have to disclose it, have the government come and take him where he would be studied, dissected, and their home surveilled and dug up as Stuart predicted. She smoothed back his hair and the pain in the beautiful face was almost ecstatic, like the martyrs of saints in ancient paintings, paintings obscene and blasphemous to poor Pastor Donald. What had the man thought when he got caught in the pool? Was he aware of them? Why was he there?

Myra crept back into the kitchen and to the junk drawer again. Stuart was dumping buckets of sulfuric acid around the edges of the pool. She could hear him muttering, the acid rising in smoke around the edge.

She quickly came back to the garage, shut the door, and pulled up the magnifying glass. Using their most delicate tweezers, she nudged gently at the wedding band. It moved to his knuckleMyra pulled again but it was stuck. She didn’t want to harm him further and was going to give up when she tried once more, and it tumbled over the tip of his hand onto the tissue. Using the tweezers, she  guided the ring into a Ziplock bag and  hid it in her purse. Then Myra carefully smoothed him into his tissue coffin and put him in the container.

 “I’m sorry,” she said out loud again, wondering once more if she should pray or say some words. Did he have a religion? Who was his god? Stuart had stopped clanking around outside and would be back. She put the little man back behind the ice cream, sighing as she shut the door.

At dinner that night the kids couldn’t stop talking no matter how much they could tell it irritated Stuart.

“Where’s he from? Where’s the rest of the family? Can we have a funeral?” This from Louis.

“We should call the FBI and get some kind of reward,” Lucy said. “I’ll bet he’s a fugitive alien monster!” She looked for her father’s approval of her monetary genius, but he was doggedly focused on his hamburger, eating it as quickly as he could. An unlit cigarette lay on the placemat, ready to go as soon as he could break free.

Myra poured herself a large glass of Chablis and chugged it down. She coughed as it burned, going down the wrong way. Her heart wouldn’t stop pounding. She stared out the window where the yard looked suddenly foreign to her. What was in that hedge? Was there a small city in her azaleas?

“I’m done!” Louis said after chomping down his hamburger. He raced to the door.

“Where are you headed?” Stuart demanded. It was unusual for Louis to go outside unbidden.

“Thought I’d go looking for his family. See if there are any more.”

Lucy put her fork down. “Me too!”

Stuart glared at all of them. “You are not going to stir up any more trouble. I’ll go out after dinner and see what’s what. These things could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Myra said. “They’re tiny.” She didn’t often talk back to Stuart, but the wine emboldened her. And she was hurt at how he’d dismissed her discovery.

 “Have you heard of the plague, Myra? God knows what these things carry.” And he pushed away in a huff that ended in a hacking cough.

She found him later inspecting the pool deck, prodding carefully into an armadillo hole, looking at the line of bushes with suspicion. He had the same grim determination he had had with his hamburger, with how he created his own company from nothing, with how he managed life as the survivor of a horrific, abusive, chaotic household of alcoholic parents. Order would be had, she knew it. She went back into the house quietly, leaving him to his inspection.

The next day Myra woke up early and checked on the small man. His frozen face upset her, and she shut the door.

Driving to work, Myra felt agitation moving through her. They couldn’t keep a discovery like this, she thought, it wasn’t right. They needed to share it with the world, with her students, other nations. She spent her free hour on the Internet. Fae people, borrowers, Celtic lore. There was precedent, in human mythology, in Native American beliefs. Some myths called them gods. Many were dangerous to humans. And others said they were fallen angels. Mostly they were no good.

There were ways to protect yourself, she found. Cold metal, pieces of bread. Bells. Not offending them. Staying out of their way. She glanced up. This man—person, had died in her pool. Were his people now plotting revenge? She read on. Shakespeare’s plays. Even her hero from college lit, William Blake the poet, spoke of a fairy funeral, believing it real, to his contemporaries. Fairy funerals, she read, could portend death. 

Myra paused. Maybe they should carry a piece of bread. Especially the kids. Just in case.

But then, thinking of the tiny speck of a wedding ring in her purse, she thought of his family. She stopped her internet search and stared out the window, tapping her finger on the table until the bell rang for class.

Every day for the next week, the kids ran to the freezer to check on the little man when they came home from school. Every night they talked nonstop about him until Stuart screamed at them to shut the hell up. Every night after cleaning the dishes, Myra would read up on little people lore until Stuart would catch her and she’d close her computer.

That weekend, Lucy refused to practice her swimming lessons in the pool even though it was warm enough in southern Florida and she had swim team coming up. But she also refused to carry a crust of bread in her pocket. Stuart blamed Myra for “perpetuating nonsense” as he drove Lucy to the neighborhood pool to practice.

***

  At night, when Stuart was asleep, Myra would creep downstairs. She’d open the freezer and look at the little man. She would hold him sometimes, wishing he would open his eyes, which she had decided were blue. She would study him under the magnifying glass and could now discern the exquisite details in the swirling pattern of their stitchery, how the elaborate stitches curlicued from each side of his coat, how the fine stitches swirled in strong patterns, and embellished the improbably minute collar of his white shirt.

 Then she’d put him back up and hit the internet. Story after story, how men small and large had lived together throughout history, in uneasy ways. Violent ways.

She began to fear for him—the little man she called Adam, first of his kind (in her yard that she knew of at least), for as the children forgot about him by the next week, she knew that her husband had not. At dinner, Stuart was jovial again, glad that they were talking about the safe topics they used to peacefully negotiate a family dinner: classes and tests; soccer practice, and choir practice. And swim lessons. 

One night Stuart sat with a beer in his favorite chair, enjoying his favorite cooking show. Myra watched him. He’d been coughing more lately and brushing off her concern. She’d noticed that he was pale too. But tonight, he was in a good mood.

It seemed like a good time. “You know, I’ve been reading more about this,” she said. “All human cultures have small folks legends. The Native Americans, the English, the Germans.” She didn’t tell him about the dangers, the scary things, the harbinger of death stories. “I think it’s time,” she said. “It’s time to tell the world about the man. We need to share this miracle and learn about him. Treat him with dignity.” “You might become famous,” she added, thinking of Lucy’s hopes, knowing his ego was more geared to winning an audit, but still. 

Stuart didn’t take his eyes off of the television. He guffawed when a contestant’s creation fell apart into tiny pieces of fricasseed mess in the fryer, ending in a short coughing fit. He paused to consider her. “You might be right,” he said.

The next day she came home from work to find a small crowd in her open garage about her fridge. Bob, the IT support guy from next door, and Cecil, the fireman from across the street, were standing around the cabinet. She could see the open container, the little man dripping on top of the cabinet. The men leaned over him, clutching beers.

“Damn, he’s tiny!” Bob said, taking a chug from the can. “I wonder if we have any around our house.”

“What the hell is it?” Cecil asked, and he nudged the little man.

Her husband caught sight of her and gestured. “Come on over, honey! I thought we’d show the neighbors what’s happening in our neighborhood.”

Myra threw down her purse and marched over to the men. Adam looked pathetic, half-thawed, dripping onto the wood of the cabinet. She gently picked him up and put him on his tissue bed. She snapped the lid and put him back in the fridge.

“He’s not a freak show!” she said. “He’s a person who passed away in our yard and deserves dignity and our help figuring this out. Cecil—you of all people should get that. Everyone out!”

The men stared at her.

“You said we should share him with the world, Myra, and I did! What’s your problem?” Stuart smiled a little.

 “The problem is, Stuart, that he’s special, not a toy to be played with. He is dead and someone is missing him. He deserves respect and dignity.”

The other men drank their beer and watched in interest.

Stuart shook his head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Myra! You used to be rational. You’ve lost your mind over this thing, and it’s got to stop! Remember Occam’s Razor, Myra? Nothing magical is happening here. Nothing magical ever happens. The most sensible explanation is the actual explanation. What is statistically likely? This is either some damn government abomination we want no part of, or a freak of nature we want no part of. That’s what it is.”

Stuart considered himself a sort of neighborhood intellectual, Myra knew–Socrates with a beer in hand dispensing his wisdom to the neighbors who were becoming increasingly blue collar. An annoying trait, but often he was right. This, however, just incensed her.

“I’m calling the police, Fish and Wildlife, the university–”

He grabbed her phone. “No one’s calling anyone until I say so!”

Myra lunged for her phone, but Stuart held it out of reach.

Bob looked like he was about to say something, but he shut his mouth. He knew his friend.

“You could charge money” Cecil said, thoughtfully taking a swig of beer.

 “That’s what I’ve been saying!” Lucy said. She was hanging on the step by the door, ready for a quick breakaway for the house if the adults rebuked her for eavesdropping. “Dad says we will barely have enough money for college with interest rates being what they are.”

“Enough from you,” Stuart said to Lucy, not at all pleased for his neighbors to think he had financial issues. “Fetch us some more beers, honey,”he said to Myra, as if nothing had happened. He handed her phone back. “Let’s just enjoy the evening. You got your wish to share your “miracle” with some friends. Consider this his memorial service.”

Bob snorted in his beer at that, but Cecil looked gravely at the little man. He’d seen some things in his career.  

Myra stayed frozen, as if a spell had stopped her in place, her mouth suddenly not working. She had never openly defied her husband in the twenty years they’d been married. And, she’d noticed how this little man had emboldened her. But now, she felt stuck, confused. Stuart’s reasonable tone struck her as right. It had always been right.

Lucy left her perch and came over. She touched her gently. “Mom? You okay?”

Myra ended up not only fetching the beer but making tacos for everyone.

 “Why are you so worried about this audit anyhow, Stu?” Bob asked four beers later. He crushed an empty beer can and tossed it in the garbage can. “Should be no big deal if you’re on the up-and-up, right?”

Stuart smiled. “Of course. It’s just a hassle, Bob. You know how it goes.” Then Stuart

practically pushed them out of the garage, wishing them good night, swearing them to secrecy.

They mumbled goodnight and everyone knew that they, like most people, were inherently untrustworthy as they stumbled home. Myra caught a look of triumph in her husband’s eyes she didn’t like.

Later that night, Myra sat down on the bed, twisting her wedding band. She set it on the dresser top. “Stuart, you only married me because I never change,” she said quietly. The swirled patterns on her comforter reminded her of  the little man’s ornate suit jacket, so small yet so full of art. Adam, so small yet full of wonder.

Stuart turned then, and Myra was surprised to see that she had his full attention. “Myra,” he said, shaking his head. He looked at her like she was an alien. He sighed. “You know I’ve always loved you just the way you are. I don’t know what’s gotten into you. You’re normally such a sensible girl.” He began to cough, a deep hacking cough that brought up something from deep inside him that he spit into a tissue. Before she could ask how he was, he’d gotten up and made his way to the bathroom. The toilet flushed. Stuart left the bedroom without looking her way. She could hear the clink of his whiskey glass, smelled the smoke of another cigarette. He wouldn’t be back until late, she knew.

The next day, Myra had an early faculty meeting. Her uneasiness grew during the day at school and she rushed home at dismissal. When she got to her street, her dread grew. A small armada of service vehicles were staged in front of her house. Parking next to a pest control truck with a large cockroach painted on the side, she ran inside her house, dropping her purse on the floor. Stuart was whistling cheerfully as she yanked open the back door, her heart pounding, a sickness coming over her as she surveilled the destruction.  Azalea bushes lay tossed on their backs, roots splayed out under the sun. Around them, the earth stood mounded up in dark heaps  A man in a uniform was spraying the perimeter from a big hose, the smell of toxic fumes was overwhelming; Myra coughed, gasping, unable to breathe. Another man knelt down, filling the armadillo hole with chicken wire and concrete. He waved at her.

She had failed to act, which was a kind of action, she knew. Myra went slowly to the garage and opened the freezer. It was empty, as she had known it would be.

“It’s all clean, Myra,” Stuart said to her as he joined her. He looked stronger again, color in his cheeks. He looked satisfied like when the numbers all made sense. “I know you wanted to share it with the world, but Cecil already told half the station. It wasn’t safe.”

Myra blinked but found she couldn’t focus in on him. She squinted hard, but she couldn’t see him whole, he blurred and faded in and out like a warning light in the fog.

“Everything’s back to normal. I took care of it.”

She blinked. He put his hand on her arm. “Now will you finally settle down?”

Later that evening, sitting alone on the patio with a wine glass in her hand, at twilight, Myra heard the music, high—almost too light to hear. She followed it to the front of the yard and saw the garbage can had fallen, the Tupperware container open on the pavement. She watched as a stream of tiny people moved swiftly across to the field beside her house. She knelt down. They were carrying a small coffin, it was tiny, but the shape was clear to her. A hawk called out from the tree, but the music continued. She tried to point it out to the people, but she realized that she must be larger than a mountain, inconceivable to the small people. And the hawk wasn’t wasting his breath on them.

 She squatted down low, and put on her bifocals, focusing in on them, their perfect elfin features, so normal yet so miraculous. She knew that her voice, even soft, would boom like a cannon, would be as incomprehensible as the locomotive roar of a tornado.

Myra knelt deeper on the soft grass and gestured. The line stopped marching and they turned, all of them, watching her. They could see her! She pulled out a tissue and flattened it with her hand on the grass. She reached into her other pocket and pulled out the Ziplock bag. She shook out the bag, and the little gold ring fell like a miniscule gold bead in the middle of the tissue. Myra watched the widow advance, her black veil half-covering her face, her lacy black dress, her matching black shoes. The woman scooped up the ring and looked at Myra from under her hat’s netting for a long minute, and then put the ring in her bag. As small as she was, Myra could see that she was beautiful. They all were beautiful.

The widow didn’t smile, but she didn’t frown as she joined the rest of the funeral party and disappeared into the woods. Myra listened as the last notes drifted away and she stood up, feeling big, bigger, expanding, filling up the sky.

Pushcart nominee Sharon Lee Snow earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her award-winning short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Jelly Bucket, Passengers Press, New Plains Review, Glassworks, South 85, Gulf Stream, and other journals. She currently is working on a short story collection, a collection of poems, and a novel set in Tampa. Connect with her on Twitter (X) and Instagram @sharonleesnow and her website www.sharonleesnow.com

Yifan Li

Dear Mama (The time is soaked in blood and semen)

Dear Mama,

Every time I write, I put a knife in your heart. So I choose not to write, not to you, not anything about you.

But you are there, you are everywhere. Every night, in every long dream, I see our souls intertwined. I want to touch your silent shadow, but I don't know where to begin. I reach my hand out, I grab the clouds. And in the air, and between the twinkling of the stars, there’s your last tenderness.

Mama, my memory is crushed, like a film, like a song, like a gust of wind, like a rain, like a gentle and yet maddening haunting.

Moon shadows on the waves, quicksand in the palm of my hand.

The very first memory of my life, well, perhaps it was just a dream.

I was a baby in your embrace. I was not crying or pondering, I was not even opening my eyes, I was just savouring with my lips my mother’s wet breast.

The big guy is a volcano, and I am a mountain goat stuck in the crevices of rocks. His legs pass through under my armpits, and a giant hand presses down on my head. I stick out the slender tongue of the goat, drawing circles on his nipple, moistening an entire field.

The peak squirm, emitting a tremendous roar from the deep valley.

When I was left outside, I had to walk alone.

No clue how long it took; I just recall the sun burning in the sky, passing by a marshy land, along the river. The wind swept over and through everything in the world, but got trapped in the edgeless field of reeds.

No clue why you were angry; No clue how you found me. I just recall your face covered in sweat, and the sweat, as you hugged me, dripped into my eyes.

In the blurry world, I had a clear vision of a monster diving into the water.

The short guy is a nimble squirrel, or perhaps in a dumpster a raccoon mad with hunger. His lungs are shrinking, so he has to deprive the oxygen between our mouths. My teeth keep clashing against his lips, only to be pushed away by his tongue. Sweat saturates the backseat, and all the flesh pressed against us is soaked.

I hold onto him as we roll out of the car, like two conjoined boulders tumbling down the slope to the riverbank. The rocks crush my back, sweat crawling down my spine like ants climbing a tree. I grab his neck and bite his lip.

Blood.

A grey bird shrieks, cutting a black swath through the black sky. He sits beside me, staring at the black surface of the river.

No ripples, no fish, no plants—what is he looking at?

I see my own shadow swaying, like a corpse in slumber.

Remember at that creek, you threw pebbles, creating many ripples, spinning, and ripping the white clouds away from my mind.

This river was once captured by a famous painter, but it has left no legend there. It looked like a small, abandoned snake, meandering through a vast meadow.

Have you ever heard that story? You asked, not looking at me.

I threw a pebble too, but it disappeared into the water.

When I used your razor to cut open my arm, I remembered what you once told me, when you were still willing to sleep with me and tell me stories. One evening, you said to me, that the bond between mother and son is thicker than blood, and the same blood runs through our veins.

I hid my wound before you came back, but you must have seen the blood on the sink when you broke through the door, and you said nothing.

I remembered the time you stabbed your finger while making me clothes, you put it in your mouth and sucked on it. You said to a staring, curious me that you were a vampire, and I thought, then you'd never die.

When we sat by the window, sipping beer, across the woods where smoke still billowed from the distance.

The factory closed down, I need to find a new job, you said.

Sooner or later this mountain will be hollowed out, but until then, spiders have left their webs under the ledge, vanishing into the long night.

I once read in a book:

The sheet is soaked in blood and sperm, like the blood of Jesus mixed with the milk of Mary.

The bearded guy is a raging panther. He invades my land and toys with me.

His claws grip my neck tightly until everything in front of my eyes turns white, then he lets go, then he grips again, then lets go, then again, and again. He presses his elbow down on my body so I can't move, his furry hand covering my mouth in death, saliva dampening his fingers.

I had seen the same scenario in a documentary.

A snow leopard caught a rabbit, and instead of killing and eating it outright, the leopard played with it, keeping it returning between life and death. Then, in a moment of relaxation for the snow leopard, the rabbit grabbed its paw and pressed it against its chest.

Don’t stop! The rabbit said.

When we were at the river that night, you told me an old tale about this land.

A mother and son lived here. One day the son decided to leave, he wanted to become a stronger man, and the mother said she would wait here for him. The son eventually became emperor, and when he returned to the mountain, his mother had disappeared. In a fit of rage, the son had his army burn down the entire forest.

In the flames he realised that his mother had been there all along, she had turned into a towering tree, now with only burning nubs left. Before the tree, the son knelt, and his tears turned into this river.

I put my feet in the cold water, your tears fell into the river and flowed with the waves, away, away.

I avenge because I love.

My body is a shield, my words are a spear.

When you threw me out, it was snowing on the mountain. People said it rarely snowed this much there.

You said, man sleeping with man was against nature. You said, I had betrayed you and betrayed this land. You said, I was bound to get that blood disease, that God would punish me—that this land would punish me.

Mama, why didn't you see it? Nobody betrayed this land. It was this land that swallowed both you and me.

When you threw all my things out of the house, my red guitar landed on the snow, with a good loud whimper.

And when you coughed, the blood that surged from your lungs made everything quiet again.

The glasses guy is a penguin, and his body is always cold. He is forever chewing with a cup of ice.

Crunch, crunch.

He spits out a piece of ice that falls onto my warm chest. It quickly starts melting, sliding down to my navel where there are still remnants of uncleared semen, and my belly spasms. The penguin gently holds my hand, keeping me from moving.

Crunch, crunch.

I watch as the ice falls into the milky pit, like the dark coal mine that was covered by a white snow- made blanket, and then it lies there quietly, without struggling, slowly dying.

It makes no sound.

Mama, I stood at your grave, I said to you, Mama.

I once read a story about Kiyohime, who, in her pursuit of the man she loved, Anchin, transformed into a giant serpent and eventually killed him. I know another version where Anchin hides in a bonshō, and Kiyohime sneaks in to make love with him.

I tell this story to the scarred guy, and then I turn into a serpent, wrapping around his body so that we stumble and make countless noises inside the bonshō. When I am about to release, he asks, if Kiyohime was chasing love.

I don’t know; I think she would never love, her heart filled only with desire, resentment, and death. She was born in hatred, and loved by hatred. How could she love anyone? But I think, well I guess,

love is hate.

So I breathe out flames, burning the person inside the bonshō to death.

When you took me to that temple, you were not so sick and I could still pretend to be your good son, you had a blind monk read my fortune.

He said I would marry a gentle wife and bear a sturdy son.

He said I would be filial to my mother.

When we got home we sat in the yard. I remember the sky strangely bright, with not a single cloud in sight, and no sun.

You took out a wooden box to show me—rings, necklaces, and even a gold bar inside. You said this was your dowry, meant for my future wife and my son.

I said I love you, Mama, I wasn’t lying.

Mama, I am helplessly in love with you.

Mama, I am a faggot whore who loves you more than any soul in this land.

The very last memory of your life, well, perhaps it was just a dream.

I was sitting on the rooftop, it was drizzling, no wind.

You were curled up in my arms. And Mama, you looked like a hideous monkey, your face so wrinkled and your body somehow so tiny.

Raindrops fell into my eyes, moistening your heart.

Yifan Li is a Chinese queer writer. Holding a BA in Theatre Studies from the University Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, Yifan is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Kristin Kovacic

On Power

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”

“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.

“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

 Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together. —Genesis 22:6-8

Perched in the rafters of a church, I pray for the pink line not to appear. I don’t believe in God. The church happens to be where I live now, in an apartment carved out of a former Catholic sanctuary–two bedrooms hovering above the altar, my kitchen. But I’ve got 15 minutes to kill, so why not send a Hail Mary to whatever higher power may be lurking in the eaves?

I remember precisely thirty years and nine months ago wishing fervently for such a line, a blue one, to appear, and it did. And a child was born, as they used to sing down below me, my only son, who has hopped the Amtrak back to New York after celebrating his birthday here in Pittsburgh. It was a good visit, the kind a mother pines for–walks and talks and a few unhurried meals with the gentle, towering man I used to cradle in my arms. Maybe it’s because I don’t see him very often, or maybe because his height takes everyone he encounters a little aback, but his physical presence always breaks me open, revives in me the shock of his incarnation. Where once there was no one, a time I remember but can no longer imagine, now there is him, this giant gliding among us. I will never get over it.

Since the apparition of that light blue line, to be someone’s mother has been a perpetual surprise to me. My wonder is, of course, as old as humanity; many religions, especially the one once practiced in my house, have birth as a core astonishment. The Virgin Mary’s blue line was delivered by the descent of a terrifying angel, and her child was born, quite unexpectedly, in a barn. Imagine the shock of Abraham, centenarian, when he learned that his ninety-year-old wife, Sarah, was with child, a child he was later–surprise! –commanded to sacrifice.

Today, my faithless prayers draw down the dark pink line on the test stick, proclaiming that the Covid germs my departed son picked up on the grimy trains from Brooklyn have indeed wafted into my loft, which once overlooked a congregation of supplicants, and settled into me, this ancient maternal body which once housed him.

I am more peeved than alarmed; this is my second dance with the devilish virus. I don’t want to do what I know I must, which is to isolate from everyone else I love, including my husband, with whom I live, and especially my very elderly parents, for whom I care.

Cast out of my family, my bed, my side of the two-sink vanity, I feel punished for something I didn’t do. I will have a lot of time to indulge this resentment, dumb as it is, and to ruminate about, well, everything–my five-day isolation starts tomorrow, which means it’s really six. I scope out the boundaries of my cell–our spare bedroom/office/tv room–and try not to cry. The virus will have its way with me, regardless of how I feel, which is like a child, which is to say, powerless.

*

Twenty-six years ago, when he was four years old, we noticed our son moving in strange and mysterious ways. He would tip his head far to the side, closing his eyes, occasionally rolling them up and fluttering his eyelids, like a mystic in communication with spirits only he could see. His preschool teacher brought this tic, a kind of reflexive twist, to our attention; until then it had seemed to us a part of him, of his childish, physical vocabulary. Sometimes during dinner his whole body would tilt, and we’d find him hanging upside down off a kitchen chair, a stunt for which we often scolded him. When asked what he thought he was doing, he had no idea what we were talking about. When pressed, he once said, “my elbow helps me.”  

 Pediatricians, neurologists, and behavioral therapists scratched their heads over this odd, unconscious behavior. One of the many worries we carried around with us, from specialist to specialist, was that he was by most measures a happy child, not visibly ill. Whatever the problem was, we feared creating a new one of self-consciousness, or, as one child psychologist helpfully put it, “seeing himself as sick.” And so over many months we performed the agonizing dance of both observing him carefully (and trying to catch his puzzling spasms with our camcorder for the doctors to examine) while pretending that we weren’t really looking.

When we noticed his breath smelling of vomit, it became appallingly clear that our son was trying to swallow, using his whole body (his head, his neck, even his elbow) to invert himself so that food coming back up from his stomach would go back down again. A diagnosis of reflux, common in infants but rare in four-year-olds, was finally made. We were fortunate to live in the neighborhood of a major medical center and already had sea legs from navigating the ocean of medical specialties–we’d learned to dress up for our first appointments, for example, in order to be taken seriously from the jump. Through proximity and savvy, we got our son taken as a patient with one of the country’s leading researchers of pediatric gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).

This researcher, much in demand, for whom we waited hours in chilly examination rooms at the prestigious Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, prescribed, over several years, all the drugs then available for reflux– lansoprazole (Prevacid), ranitidine (Zantac), cimetidine (Tagamet), and cisapride (Propulsid)–in experimental combinations. Between one appointment and the next, she’d sometimes double or triple his doses. At the time, drug companies did not test their products on children, so there were no recommended dosages for them–pediatric specialists had to, as our doctor put it, “make it up as we go along.” When our insurance company balked at covering prescriptions in amounts above those commonly recommended for adults, the researcher went to bat for us.

We modified our son’s diet to exclude reflux-triggering foods–pizza, hot dogs, chocolate–the menu of every child’s birthday party. Yet he continued to tilt and wrench himself, even when absorbed in other tasks, like practicing his handwriting, or singing “Rockin’ Robin” with his kindergarten class on stage, or even playing soccer. There is a bruise on my heart that still flares when I recall him tearing down the field after the ball, his head pinched to his shoulder, elbow tucked into his ribs. Though we briefed his coaches and teachers on his involuntary condition, we knew there was a clock ticking towards the day when the other kids would mock him.

The researcher was fascinated by his obstinate case. She designed an overnight study just for him–with an EMG on his abdomen, a phProbe threaded into his esophagus, and a hidden video camera recording all of his movements–that resulted in a poster and paper she presented at GI conferences. Of course, I had to sign my consent for the study and the publication, which featured a photo of our son in a hospital bed, his eyes redacted but his cocked, tousled head and favorite cowboy pajamas easily recognizable. (There is another bruise on my heart in the form of this image.)

We felt lucky to be on the leading edge of research into his condition–a center of focus in the vast and bewildering medical universe. To compensate for our own adequacies, we made our own observations and notes, preparing for each appointment as if it were a dissertation defense and checking every after-visit summary against our understanding. Impressed by our diligence, the researcher asked me to sit on a national GERD advocacy panel that was forming and flew me to Chicago to meet with other parents whose children suffered from our son’s affliction.

 Still, his suffering persisted–through test after test, drug after drug, year after year. Then, at a birthday party (where my seven-year-old was sulking because he could eat nothing on offer), another kid’s father, who happened to be a gastroenterologist, took me aside and kindly asked what the matter was. I gave a condensed history of our medical odyssey and dropped the name of the well-known researcher.

“She’s studying him, you know,” the father said.

 “Yes!” I said, reflexively coughing up my gratitude and sharing a bit about the research–headed then towards trying antidepressants as reflux inhibitors. But then there was a pause, during which the father held my gaze, and I properly heard his tone–warning. There’s a difference between researchers and clinicians, he explained, then gently suggested we get another opinion from a specialist whose focus would be treating, not studying, our child.

*

From the fold-out couch of my sick room, I am doing some research about my house. At the turn of the last century, the plot of land on which I am quarantined was secured from the city of Pittsburgh by Andrew Carnegie as a site for one of his first libraries, to be erected for workers near his steel mill on the South Side (though Carnegie’s magnanimity did not extend to giving them the time off to read). When Carnegie found a better site by the river, a small band of Slovak Catholic immigrants, glass and iron workers, pooled their money to buy Carnegie’s corner lot at Mary and 19th Sts. Roman Catholic churches abounded on the South Side–St. Michael’s and St. Peter’s, built by German immigrants, St. Casimir’s by Lithuanians, and just a block away the Poles had erected the massive St. Adalbert’s. But the Slovaks wanted their own parish– a sanctuary in which to pray in their language, a school where their children could learn to read and write it, a convent for the nuns who would teach it, and a rectory for the Slovak priest they would petition the Vatican to send them from the old country, to whom they could fall to their knees and articulate their sins.

A history written in Slovak and English for the parish’s Golden Jubilee in 1955 recounts the enormous effort it took in 1904 to fund and build this dream. Nine parishioners signed over their entire life savings as loans for the down payment to buy the land (purchase price $20,330 dollars). To construct the church, families whose wage-earners were bringing home $1 a day were assessed $35 per year, and donations were solicited from among them to purchase the two-ton bells ($1,139), statuary ($575.50), stained-glass windows ($650), and altar ($700), over which would be inscribed a verse from the book of their patron saint, St. Matthew–Come to Me, all you who labor.

The Jubilee program extols the sacrifice of their immigrant founders, those who labored day and night for poor pay in the fiery furnaces of Pittsburgh’s mills. “But the Slovaks didn’t complain,” the program notes. “Slovak men are sturdy, hardworking men, accustomed to long hours of work. They accepted their lot, not only with resignation, but with gratitude in their hearts.”

For a $100 commission, the architect Marius Rousseau sketched a no-frills structure–a rectangular box with one central steeple–simple enough to be drawn by a child and to be erected within one year. Side windows framed into sturdy red bricks, laid by parishioners themselves, arched to crude gothic points, nudging the handsome building towards grace.

I peer out of one of them now, from within a fortress built to protect an entire culture, and I think about the primal desire that called forth such sacrifice and toil. It wasn’t faith but orphanage, I decide, that raised this church up from bare ground. It was a keening need to be sung to in your mother tongue, to be rocked in the cradle of the only sounds that soothed you.

*

 When you become a mother, you develop a patter, a narration of the parade of mysteries flying rapidly past the infant’s virgin eyes and ears. See the kitty? That’s the garbage truck! You begin to understand the colossal task you’ve set yourself–naming the world, as well as habituating your child to its countless shocks and disturbances. Here comes the choo-choo! Time to turn out the lights! From the moment my son was delivered into my arms, I started chattering, constantly and purposefully, cutting the bewildering forest of all creation down to size and making a soft nest of it, with my voice.

Talking all the way, I steered our listing child around the medical-industrial maze for four years, until finally, reluctantly, we turned from the prominent researcher and towards a highly recommended clinical gastroenterologist, a doctor, as it happened, within the same hospital practice. I felt guilty about losing faith in the researcher after receiving so much of her work and concentrated attention. But I couldn’t shake that father’s warning, and I wondered, as my husband and I both had over the years, whether the copious amounts of drugs–flavored like cherries but not officially recommended for children–we encouraged him to swallow morning, noon, and night, would someday call forth their own afflictions.

Our new doctor matter-of-factly explained that given the persistence of our son’s GERD and its resistance to therapy, he could benefit from surgery–a Nissen fundoplication, which ties the top of the stomach around the bottom of the esophagus–to spare him a lifetime of corrosive acids lurching up from his stomach and to avoid the unknown long-term effects of reflux drugs. This decision was ultimately ours to make, and we buckled under the weight of it. We asked for time to mull it over and took our little family camping for the summer, armed with a three-month supply of our son’s medications, the burden of which became its own kind of argument. And we watched him more closely than ever–straining to stay balanced on his bicycle, staggering around after a Happy Meal–as we weighed the prospect of permanently changing his anatomy against further fiddling with his chemistry. When we returned, still wavering, but desperate to imagine a path forward, we agreed to the procedure.

 Our son had just turned eight; a racetrack on his birthday cake formed the number. Over the years of his diagnosis and treatments, he had endured many grueling tests, with me by his side, coaching–cameras threaded through his nose and down his throat, magnets clanging around his head in the MRI’s sterile coffin. Once, a flustered nurse’s assistant pricked every finger on his left hand with a needle stick, each time failing to catch the single drop of blood she was aiming to collect–while I watched, narrating and reassuring, and my own panic rose. When quiet tears started rolling down my son’s still cherubic face, I fled the examination room, hiding my own tears, and found another nurse to take over.

Of all he’d been through, our son was most shaken by those bungled blood tests. As the day of his surgery approached, and a pint of his own blood was required as an emergency reserve, I determined not to let him suffer needlessly again. I scheduled his draw at a phlebotomy lab, where I was assured there would be highly competent technicians to pierce his fragile veins. Driving to the lab, I turned my motherspeak up full blast, describing what would happen–no big deal and one of several errands and yes there would be a needle but if he stayed still all done in a jiffy and then milkshakes and soccer practice and later crepes for dinner– promising the small thrills of family life in return for his courage and best behavior.

At the lab, he sat down in the wide, one-armed chair as instructed by the phlebotomist, a brisk and matronly woman with a purring Eastern European accent whose obvious competence put me immediately at ease. She talked him through the procedure as I would have, calmly and evenly, describing everything as happening just as it should. I watched my son listen to her, his eyes wide and unblinking, his body perfectly rigid. It was an enormous act of concentration for my twisty kid, and I was proud of him for being so brave and controlled. I allowed myself to imagine a future not promised by anyone. Even if the surgery worked, the prominent researcher had cautioned me when I told her of our decision, our son, like the horses she trained that shied, might retain the tic he’d developed over years. But here he was, entirely motionless as the phlebotomist did her work–snapping the rubber tourniquet around his arm, tapping the tender skin on the inside of his elbow, swiping the icy alcohol swab there, inserting the long stinger of the needle, drawing the bright, warm blood up and out and into a translucent bag, telling him he was a good boy, a very good boy, and that it would all be over soon.  

As I had hoped and as she had assured us, the ordeal was swift and efficient. My son chose his own bandage with Spiderman on it. Then we were out on the street, headed to the ice cream parlor, and I let out the breath I had been holding to resume my patter. “That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?” I asked him. “Sure better than the last time, right?”

But he did not say “yes.” He said, “Mom.”

And I said, “What?”

And he said, “When she said she was going to put the needle in my arm, I thought she said my eye.”

And that was all he said, but it cast his behavior–his utter stillness and his blinkless stare–in an entirely different light. He hadn’t moved a muscle, not in bravery but in terror, or in the terrified performance of obedience, expecting at any moment a needle to penetrate his eye.

 “Ramsey!” I cried out. “No one will ever put a needle in your eye!”

And he said, wearily, “Ok, Mom.” Because he was a good boy, a very good boy. My body shook with the sudden awfulness of this fact. His stillness had been a calculation–the only way to survive whatever this strange woman was going to do to him that day, his mother chirping merrily all the while. How could he think otherwise? He was good because he was powerless; years of our benevolent coercion had taught him so. And now a surgeon was going to open up his belly, detach his stomach from its wall, twist it around the esophageal sphincter like a cravat, then stitch him up and hope for the best. And his mother would be there, with her soothing, imperturbable voice, letting him know there was nothing he could do about it, telling him he was good.

*

In late summer 2018, Attorney General Josh Shapiro released the report of a grand jury investigation into child sex abuse by Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses, including Pittsburgh’s. The report, like every other inquiry since the Boston Globe “Spotlight” story exploded in 2002, was based on records compiled and cached by the Church itself, along with new testimony from victims. In incidents spanning from the 1950s to the early 2000s, more than 300 offending priests and close to 1,000 child victims were identified, though given the particular nature of these offenses, those numbers were assumed to be wild undercounts.

Quarantined and curious to know if any of the offending priests ever served in the building where I lay my head at night, I scroll through the report, then find myself reading the entire document, composed of graphic narratives of each priest’s specific crimes, interviews with his victims, and the correspondence of the bishops who managed and obscured his transgressions. As I advance deeper into the reading, I experience the mounting horror of the jurors, ordinary citizens and likely many of them parents, tasked with wading through seventy years of the church’s documented depravity, the scale of which defies the imagination while the vile particulars pummel the conscience.

In the Diocese of Pittsburgh, 99 predator priests were named, including, yes, a Reverend Casimir F. Lewandowski, who served just one year at St. Matthew’s (1945-46), a year during which, according to the church’s history, “though of Polish descent, [he] made great efforts to learn Slovak and to preach to the older parishioners in their native tongue.”  Lewandowski, according to the grand jury report, was later assigned to a Polish parish, where he raped a 12-year-old in the church rectory, the following details of which were remembered by the victim: the priest’s erect penis, semen on her yellow dress, and his parting comment to her: “you’re a dirty little girl, aren’t you?”

 In the 1970s and 80s, a group of at least four Pittsburgh priests, the report reveals, operated as a cartel, grooming and abusing altar boys and passing their victims around. They used “whips, violence and sadism” in their assaults, then marked their prey for one another with gold crucifix necklaces bestowed upon the children as special gifts. George, once a “tough kid from the South Side,” testified to the grand jury that as a fourteen-year-old boy he was forced to stand on a bed in a Munhall rectory, just upriver from St. Matthew’s, strip naked, and pose as Christ on the Cross for the delectation of four priests who surrounded him, taking Polaroids to add to a collection of pornography they shared amongst themselves. What they told George, though, was that they were making a “study” of his body–for artists who would carve statues of the Savior.

  For forty years, George told no one of these humiliations. When asked why by the grand jury, he said, “I don't think there was anybody I could trust to tell, number 1. There was never–who do you tell?”

Shame and reverence and faith were the mists obscuring this rampant, deviant behavior, occurring over decades in the little parishes of the South Side and all over the world under the steady, grateful gazes of the devout. According to the Boston Globe and other reports, priests mostly targeted boys–not, as was once widely believed, because the priests were homosexuals–but because they had freer access to boys–as altar servers, choristers, seminarians–obedient kids they could take away unchaperoned on fishing trips, to their private rooms for special tutoring, on long car rides to get an ice cream cone. Predator priests also knew their secrets were safer with boys, who were stoic like George, or compliant like my son. All of the victims understood, and legions have now testified, that priests were considered by their families and their entire communities as deities who walked on earth among them. “It’s very lonely,” said one of the Pennsylvania victims. “It’s like your word against God’s.”

*

Like the straight-A student I always was, I learned as much as I could about our son’s condition, asked questions, and kept a binder full of documents and notes (the internet, though invented, was not yet at our fingertips). I still have it, a fat blue repository of some of the most difficult days of my maternal life, here on a shelf in my quarantine cell. The binder reminds me of many lost details, of dosages and test results and treatments, but mostly it recalls my only faith at the time–that telling the story of my son, precisely and repeatedly, to just the right people, was the only tool I possessed to fix him. I also believed, as I once did as an earnest teacher-pleaser, that if I studied hard and showed my work, I’d earn the respect of the only gods within my reach–the doctors I needed to do everything within their power to cure him.

But what I did not know was how the potent elixirs we were hoping would one day heal our son got into the brown plastic bottles in white paper bags we picked up every week at the Rite-Aid. I did not know that one of the drugs he was prescribed, Propulsid (cisapride), had only been on the market since 1993, the year our son was born, and that by the time we took our four-year-old to the research specialist, the FDA had already warned the manufacturer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a division of Johnson & Johnson), of side effects that had caused multiple infant deaths. I did not know that Janssen was not required to warn doctors or to recall Propulsid, which was hugely profitable, but merely to not directly market it for children. I did not know that’s why they promoted the drug indirectly, providing it free to pediatric researchers like ours and funding advocacy efforts–like that conference I attended in Chicago–to encourage “off-label” use of their product for infants and children. In 1998 alone, pediatricians wrote over half a million prescriptions for fruit-flavored, liquid Propulsid, even though Janssen claimed they manufactured it solely for geriatric patients.

On Thanksgiving morning, 1999, nine-month-old Gage Stevenson, one of 100 infants enrolled in a double-blind reflux study directed by our son’s doctor at Children’s Hospital, was found unresponsive in his crib. Two months later, his grieving mother happened to read in the newspaper that the FDA had just started warning doctors that Propulsid was the cause of 70 known deaths, 11 among children. The drug’s chief side effect, heart arrhythmia, was most acute in patients who took Propulsid along with other drugs, particularly cimetidine (Tagamet). Four months prior to Gage’s death, he had been moved from a control group in our doctor’s study and into a cohort of babies taking Tagamet and Propulsid in combination. Though his parents had consented to his participation in the research, they had no idea that the drug being tested on their son posed grave, documented risks, nor, they claimed, did they know that it had not been approved by the FDA for use in children, though the consent form they’d signed said it had.

A year prior, the same researcher had prescribed our son the same combination of drugs that Gage took–Propulsid and Tagamet–and we coaxed him to swallow them four times a day for precisely the same length of time–four months. Like every other therapy we tried, it provided no visible benefits, so she (“making it up as we go along”) moved him on to a mix of other medicines. At the time of Gage’s death, our son was taking Prevacid and Zantac at the upper limits of adult doses, and without yet knowing anything about Gage or the FDA warning, on our own we were starting to worry about the long-term effects of these improvised pharmaceutical cocktails.

On September 10, 2000, just two days before we got a second opinion with our new gastroenterologist, Gage’s parents filed a lawsuit–against Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Children’s Hospital, and against the researcher who’d been studying both of our children and whom I felt so conflicted about abandoning. Propulsid was quickly pulled entirely off the market. Our doctor was cited by the FDA for poor clinical practices. We didn’t know any of this as we mulled a surgical intervention for our son, and our new doctor did not bring it up, though he was in the same GI practice as the old doctor–both of their names grace the letterhead on every communication in my binder. Now I see that he must have known, and that shadowing his advice that we take a path towards surgery was the knowledge that the path we had been on had gone tragically awry for at least one family in their care.

***

The story of Abraham and Isaac is a foundational one for three of the world’s major religions–Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are called Abrahamic because of this shared ancestor, this fond father who was ordered to do the unthinkable:

 . . . God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!”

And he said, “Here am I.”

He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”(Genesis 22:2)

 I locate these verses in the Bible I received at Sunday school more than half a century ago, also archived on a shelf in my sick room. The stiff naugahyde cover is embossed with my name, but the religious formation it promised never took. Today, I read Abraham and Isaac’s journey as a horror story, its dramatic irony and creeping dread calling up all my old parental terrors. As they climb the mountain, Isaac himself carrying the wood that will be used to burn him, Abraham reassures his son with white lies to keep him moving––God himself will provide the lamb– and I recognize my own voice, my mothering prattle, disguising both my power and my despair.

 Because an angel swoops in at the last minute, staying Abraham’s hand, this story for believers is a hopeful one; it’s about faith, about trusting in the providence of God. It affirms the kind of faith that built my house and sustained generations of souls who worshiped here. A trust in God the father, a hunger for the Mother church, can instill superhuman courage and endurance in even the weakest among us, clinging to the promise that all will be well.

When I try to fathom the experience of the victims of abusive priests, or the emotions of the parents of these children, I can scarcely touch the bottom of their anguish and their fury. And yet I feel I know something about being cornered into faith, and about the need to give up some of your terrible power as a parent to forces larger than your own. From the moment the gasping, writhing child emerges from your body, you are overcome by the fact of his weakness. It is literally too much to bear, this power we call love. It’s why, I suspect, we appeal to gods, in whatever form they may arrive, to help us carry the burden.

To be exploited for this need is an unspeakable cruelty, is the darkest fear at the darkest hour on your darkest day as a parent. It’s a fear, I realize, as I surrender to the stiff consolation of our sofa bed, that still pulses in me, still exhausts me, thirty years after my son gave it life.

***

The surgery we agreed to out of desperation was much more successful than we dared to hope. After a harrowing recovery in the hospital, days during which I was hollowed out by panic, by the knowledge that whatever fate befell my son had been delivered by my own hand, and after a month of serving him cheeseburgers through a straw, our beloved child returned to us–upright, steady, well. He got on with his spectacular little life–kicking balls, riding skateboards, gnawing the heads off chocolate Easter bunnies.

And in the wake of all that, as we watched our son thrive and grow (and grow), we tried to figure out why it took us so long to dodge the slow-moving chemical bullet that was clearly heading towards him. Zantac, another drug he once took, was also pulled from the market after cancers were associated with its long-term use. It was harder, in many respects, to forgive ourselves than to forgive those we entrusted with his care. The death of Gage Stevenson from Propulsid became a touchstone legal case for the ethics of testing, or not testing, pharmaceuticals on children. It highlighted the paradox we and our doctors were living in–without testing, children are at risk of overdoses, but the testing itself can cause injury. Since Gage’s death, changes to the FDA’s licensing practices for pharmaceutical companies have encouraged more controlled studies of drugs for children before they go to market, and accurate doses for some popular drugs, like famotidine (Pepcid), which our son also took, are now in place. Our research doctor, flawed as she was, was part of a larger system, nominally pure but corrupted by actors whose merciless agendas were beyond even her power to control.

Still, we should have seen it coming. I should have thrown my body between my child and those who eyed him for their profit–sooner, surer, and without apologies. This regret, still so raw, means something, I’m sure, but it may be too late to figure out its message. I’m sixty now (and somewhat sick), so I doubt I’ll ever get to understanding, not to mention forgiveness, for decisions we made and events that transpired so very long ago. About all I can do is parse the story of Abraham for its secular resonance and solace. Just as Isaac, bound to the altar pyre, is about to be killed, the angel of the Lord speaks to Abraham.

“Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”

The sacrificial beast that then appears, I am startled to discover, caught in a thicket by his horns, is not a lamb but a ram. This is essentially the name we gave our son, the tiny song we composed for him to sing every day of his life on earth. By bestowing Ramsey upon him, did we prophesy the wages of our love? Unlike Abraham, I don’t fear God, because I don’t believe in him. But the terrifying work of nurturing and safeguarding a life has forged in me, perhaps, a kind of Abrahamic vision. There is by design, either earthly or divine, a limit to your power as a parent. At some point you must surrender it–to fortune, to their own desires, to a future you cannot share with them. And in this way the world continues, world without end, as far as you can see. Your mewling infant strides off into the wilderness of Brooklyn. And you drift off finally, into sleep, above the altar, over the ashes of your power and your glory.

***

Sources:

CBS Evening News, “Heartbreaking Heartburn Drug,” aired July 5, 2021. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/heartbreaking-heartburn-drug-05-07-2001/

______“FDA Criticized for Delay Pulling Drug,” aired April 25, 200. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-criticized-for-delay-pulling-drug-26-04-2000/

 Greene, Robert, dir., Procession, 2019; Good Friday Films, Netflix streaming 2024.

Harris, Gardiner and Koli, Eric, “Lucrative Drug, Danger Signals and the FDA, The New York Times, June 10, 2005. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/business/lucrative-drug-danger-signals-and-the-fda.html

The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version: Containing the Old and New Testaments. The Melton Book Company, 1952.

Investigative Staff of The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church. Little Brown & Company, 2002, 2015.

Larson, Sarah, “‘Spotlight’ and its Revelations,” The New Yorker, December 8, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/sarah-larson/spotlight-and-its-revelations

Pennsylvania Attorney General, 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury Report, Number One, Redacted, May 2023. https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/report/

Robinson, Marilynne, Gilead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Willman, David, “Propulsid: A Heartburn Drug, Now Linked to Children’s Deaths,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2000. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-122001propulsid-story.html

Zlatâe jubileum Kostola sv. Matâuésa, South Side, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1905 - 1955. Historic Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Library System, https://historicpittsburgh.org/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735066234042/viewer#page/128/mode/2up

Yifan Li is a Chinese queer writer. Holding a BA in Theatre Studies from the University Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, Yifan is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.