Photocollage by Matthew Chase-Daniel, 2009

I slipped off my robe in front of everyone. My husband stood enraged, ready to jump the platform and wring my neck. But I knew when students began scratching their newsprint paper with conté, he’d have to teach.

There in his shirt and tie. His unassuming look. Complete with glasses. But in his head, flustered, wondering how I did it.

It didn’t take much to replace the scheduled life-drawing model. A hundred dollars to not sit naked for strangers was easy money. She had taken the cash and wished me luck.

I straightened out the folds in the platform’s covering sheet.

“Imperfections create depth,” he said, taking the robe from my trembling hands. I grinned, understanding his attempt to appear civil. He turned the small heater towards my flesh. I watched his every move, but sat still.

When I posed with my back erect, hands planted and eyes gazing upward, he circled the classroom. His words scattered. Distracted, by his wife spread out, breasts, ass, and pubic hairs exposed.

“Remember the darkest dark,” he said to a student who had his eyes fixed on my neck, just above a scar. Only a few weeks ago, that scar was a cut accompanied with a black eye and a busted lip to match.

“Next pose.” He said. His eyebrows raised and lips receded back. When I posed, he grimaced.

“What are you doing?” He mouthed with his teeth shut. “Stop it.” Everyone froze and looked around. But it only took one student to start drawing for the rest to attack my unusual pose.

I recalled every kick to my stomach, every punch to my face, every whack with an object to my body. And my eyes watered. He dashed from his position, knocking over a student’s easel and we caught a glimpse of my figure on paper.

My gaping mouth, the darkest mark on the page, I imagined he saw first. My hair, a mix of light and dark, yanked back with one hand. My back arched and knees spread out, pulled against the sheet causing what he called – depth. And the crosshatch shading on my skin, to me, resembled bruises.

“Professor?” A student shouted. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and tensed my muscles.

And with a bang, the classroom door shut and he was gone. I stood up, slipped on my robe, and looked out at my audience. And for the first time, when my heartbeat returned to a normal pace, I spoke openly about my husband’s artistic work sketching my scars.

Christopher Searles has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and creative writing. He also studied visual art at Seneca at York. For the past three years, he wrote short fiction while teaching English in South Korea. When he wasn’t teaching, or writing, he was learning about new cultures travelling throughout Southeast Asia. He currently returned to Toronto as a freelance writer. This is his first publication.

Read our interview with Chris here.

Beach at Scopello, Sicily by Matthew Chase-Daniel, 2000

I signed up for a yoga class for writers because I needed to focus.

I’d successfully written a novel; it was even published. But for the past year or so, I’d been unable to concentrate. During the first class in the series, which was about sound, Lisa, the instructor, rang a bell and we listened until the walls soaked up the ringing. We ohm-ed three times as a group, and the room vibrated with sound. We could feel it against our skin. We stretched and repeated the sun salutation; our bodies morphed into snakes, cats, dogs, and children.

For our first writing exercise, we sat in pretzel legs as my kids say. Our backs were straight; our hands palms up on our knees, thumbs and index fingers touching. Lisa instructed us on how to breathe. Inhale and fill the belly, exhale and bring the bellybutton toward the spine. I focused, in and out. How difficult could it be? But of course my breath was choppy. My belly expanded as I exhaled. I tried again. Perhaps Lisa saw the frustration on my face. She said, “Breathe without judgment, but with compassion.” I’d been breathing all my life, so I must have had some idea how to do it. I just lacked any grace in the matter. I persisted and tried to look upon myself with compassion.

We stayed seated, breathing and listening as Lisa put on John Coltrane’s “In a Sentimental Mood.” I’ve always loved Coltrane, but hadn’t listened to him in a while. I sat breathing, breathing, and then, crying. I bit my tongue and tried to keep my jaw from quivering. A tear escaped and I wiped it away, then another. I was no longer focusing on breathing, but on not crying. While I loved the music; I didn’t have an emotional connection to it. I wasn’t listening to it at the birth of either of my children, it wasn’t playing at my wedding, and I didn’t immerse myself in Coltrane following a rough breakup long ago. So why was I crying?

After a few minutes, Lisa asked us to write about the music, or about the other sounds we’d experienced in class. My first sentence was, “What the hell was that about?” I kept writing. Writing was why I had come. I needed to get back to it. For the past year and a half or so, I’d been unable to concentrate. I’d become a caregiver, not only for my children, but for my husband who at forty was diagnosed with cancer, and then later his mother, whose lymphoma had returned. Caregiver is too strong a word; it makes it sound like I did more than I did. But after all that had happened, I was emotionally bankrupt. I was empty.

Why Coltrane? I wrote. Why tears? Perhaps Coltrane was speaking to me; he understood about the past and about what was lost. I realized that it wasn’t the music alone that made me cry. It was the breathing. It was me breathing. Me, after all that had happened, catching my breath.

The class ran late, so when I arrived home our company was already there. The couple sat at the kitchen table with my husband. The children were playing upstairs.

“We’re swapping cancer stories,” my husband said.

I sat in my yoga pants with a glass of wine. Our company was a couple we’d met through friends and had seen a few times. The reason I like them is that they are unapologetic about really loving each other. The wife had thyroid cancer a few years back. Her torture was hormonal more than surgical, months of treatment, then finding the right balance of medicine so she could return to stability, to her family and life.

My husband had chemo and radiation, and four surgeries in the past year and a half. Sitting at the kitchen table, Peter was only up to recounting his second surgery, the one that was supposed to be a “procedure” followed by a few days in the hospital. Then we were to join our children down the shore. Two days after the surgery it was apparent something was wrong. My husband was a grayish green, panting and sweating, barely able to walk 100 feet. The day before he’d lapped the hospital floor fifty times. As he talked, I pulled myself into a ball on my chair and felt acid rise to my throat. I wanted my husband to tell his story. And I really didn’t.

It is all too raw for me and I find myself back in the hospital recliner, wedged between his bed and the windows, the overcast day showing on his face. Peter is asking me to stay overnight. He’s afraid and I act like I’m not. I watch him barely sleeping. He’s been the perfect patient. Everything up to this point has gone as planned. This procedure was to be the end of a yearlong ordeal. But it isn’t. He’s dying, I think, and I can’t do anything. I walk the hall and ask the resident to check him again and again. They take him into emergency surgery the next day; he’s in septic shock, then he’s in the ICU. Twelve days all told and we don’t meet our children down the shore.

In graduate school, I frequently got into discussions with my fellow fiction-writing friends about whether to write autobiographical stories. I was adamantly against it, for me. My argument was that I needed more time to process what had happened in my life, possibly for a decade or two, before I could incorporate it into fiction. Meanwhile they seemed to be able to write the story as the door closed behind their lovers or the ambulance pulled away.

Joan Didion says she writes to know what she’s thinking. After listening to Lisa, and my breathing, and to Coltrane, sitting at my kitchen table, I thought maybe I don’t need to process before I write, maybe I need to write in order to process. It won’t be fiction, at least not at first. I may never share it. But I need to write to know what I’m feeling, and maybe to let go of all that was lost.

Listening to great jazz is like listening to conversations. Sometimes it’s an argument, sometimes wooing, sometimes goodbye. That afternoon, Coltrane was whispering to me: tell me. Tell me everything. And in the quiet of my own messed up breathing, I heard him.

Susan Barr-Toman is the author of the novel When Love Was Clean Underwear, winner of the 2007 Many Voices Project. She was born and raised in Philadelphia where she still lives with her husband and two children and where she teaches creative writing at Temple University and Rosemont College. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Visit Susan at www.susanbarrtoman.com.

Read an interview with Susan here.

Headwaters of the Colorado by Matthew Chase-Daniel, 2009

When I picked my mother up at the small airport just outside of Yellowstone I felt like something of a veteran already. Of course I was excited to see her and glad she’d be experiencing the remainder of the trip with me, but I couldn’t help considering her a newbie.

Oh my God, look at the bison!

Yeah, I know—there’s a whole herd of them near the area where we’ll be camping.

They’re so cool! Can we get a picture?

If you want, I said. I have a bunch I took already.

She was excited, so I obliged. We stopped and took pictures on the side of the road with all the parked campers and SUVs from Nebraska and North Dakota. It was a little embarrassing, pulled over like a tourist. I felt like a teenager at the mall with my mom, and I hoped no one saw me, though I wasn’t sure whom I was afraid of being spotted by.

When we got to the campsite my mother wanted to call my grandparents to check in on them.

They’re fine, I assured her. Uncle George is stopping by after work.

I’d feel better, she said.

It was a tough spot for my mom. My uncle worked a lot, so he couldn’t be there as much to help out. My grandpa took good care of Grandma most of the time, but she was sick and needed extra care. It didn’t seem fair that my mom did most of the work. In retrospect it feels pretty awful that I considered it work. I love my grandparents, it was just frustrating. For both of us.

George doesn’t do things like you do, they’d confide to my mom. How long did you say you’d be gone?

All of this built up to a tremendous load of stress on my mother. I was just as needy as my grandparents, and I suppose we were pulling her apart. That was part of the reason she decided to take the time off from work to come out here and meet me. With me in college and her firmly tied down at home we were beginning to drift apart.

I set up camp in a flash. By the time she got off the phone everything was ready.

You’re pretty quick, she said.

Lots of practice.

I could set the tent up solo in 2-3 minutes. My mom brought a sleeping pad. I had been sleeping on the floor of the tent. I loved the firmness of the ground. We built a small fire and stayed up late catching up and scouting for meteors.

I love the smell of campfire, I confessed. Sometimes after camping I’ll re-wear my clothes for a few days before I wash them to hold on to that earthy smell.

It’s a nice smell, she agreed.

The night was quiet except for the occasional car driving down the road and idling when it came to an intersection. Crickets would stop their chirping and lay still in the dry grass when a car passed, and when everything was still again they sang.

The next morning we decided to rent a canoe from the outfitters up the road. My mother had never been in a canoe before. I knew a little about paddling from the times I’d gone with friends in the Adirondacks. We clumsily carried the canoe to my car with lifejackets slung over our shoulders.

Careful, I said. No, LIFT it! The lip of the canoe fell hard on my roof. I can’t lift it by myself.

I’m sorry. I’ve never done this before.

I knew she was right and I felt sore for it.

We strapped the boat to the roof. The bow and stern stuck out over the front and rear windshields. I knew it would make visibility worse when we removed it from the lake in a few hours, and the wet bow would rain down on the window, but for now it was only a looming shadow. We cranked the red straps through the doorframes so tightly I wondered if the rubber gasket would permanently scar and keep the door from closing right.

It was ten minutes to the lake. Even at low speed the wind was making the red straps vibrate like piano wire. I tried to steady one with my free hand while I steered with the other, but the tremendous reverberation felt like it would gash through my palm. It sounded awful. We turned up the radio to drown it out, but the straps overpowered all other sounds. I could have crashed into the fattest bison in the park and not heard more than a ripple in the road.

The meadows were packed with sagebrush and the wind was sweet with the smell of it, but sunscreen tainted the air everywhere we went. From the lakeshore we got the canoe into the water with ease. Moving it proved to be the hard part.

No, you paddle on that side when I’m paddling here.

Sorry.

No, we’re going in circles!

I’m sorry! You seem like you’re having a miserable time. Maybe I shouldn’t have come out here to meet you.

Don’t say that.

I didn’t know how to tell her. How to make her understand that I’d been on the road for almost a month, living out of my car and tent and more than one dirty motel off the highway with minimal human contact and how I’d gotten so used to being alone that I forgot how to interact with other people. We were floating in the shadow of one of the craggiest mountains in Wyoming. This was the kind of experience that was meant to be shared.

I’m sorry, I offered. I’m glad you’re here. Really, I am.

We cut through the inverted reflection of the peaks and I steadied the rims of the canoe and lifted my legs over the sides. The water was cold. I let it flush between my sweaty toes and up over my ankles.

Dip your feet in, I suggested. It feels great.

When Mom called my grandparents that night she told them about our canoe trip, her first, and about the mountains and the clear sky and clean air.

It sounds beautiful, my grandma told her. I’m glad you two got to go on this trip.

Mom felt guilty for leaving her parents for two weeks, but hearing those words—I’m glad—seemed to make everything better. She enjoyed the sights more and we both let down our guard.

That night we watched for meteors again. I didn’t see another shooting star until a few months later, back in the Adirondacks, the same night I got the call from Mom that Grandma had died. It was dark outside and I took a walk in the woods along a well-worn trail through white pines and maples. When I came to a clearing, I turned off my flashlight and lay on my back on the sandy soil. The grass was cold with wet dew and the sand stuck in clumps on my back and legs. It was a moonless night and the sky was dark and thick as ink. Far above me a steady stream of shooting stars blanketed the atmosphere, burning bright like broken angels, and if I blinked I might miss their icy blue streak as they faded away into the night.

Brian Pietrus recently graduated with undergraduate degrees in Biology and Writing. He is currently enrolled in the Creative Nonfiction MFA program at Eastern Washington University. He has since made an enthusiastic outdoor explorer of his mother and they often go on hiking trips together. Brian also enjoys photography, playing music, traveling and exploring.

Read an interview with Brian here.

Beach at Selinunte, Sicily, 2000

In the café, you complain about your husband. A year ago, I nearly died. Dr. Moller sliced a tumor the size of a cantaloupe from my abdomen.

You talk about spying on the cheat and order a latte and ask if I’d like one. My system can’t process the acid. I order decaf green tea.

You suggest we split the tab. Sure.

On the street you say you’ll confront the creep directly, no fooling around, no games.

My eyes follow sunlight on gold leaves shifting among branches.

What if Gary were having an affair? After eight months of not leaving my side, of delivering me to the emergency room, camping by my bed, accompanying me to doctors’ appointments, labs, scanning and imaging centers, he deserves a tall brunette with tits that look implanted but aren’t, creamy legs that sprout from black stilettos and disappear under a short, satin skirt. Someone whose voice purrs, whose gestures slice the air in clean, graceful arcs, whose eyes, under heavy lashes, hint at mischief. Optimistic, with few demands. Reasonable, but generous. Kind.

I’d set him free in an instant.

Alas, he’s stuck with me. Sixty-seven. Breasts sad as teardrops, face weathered and lined from working outdoors. The clichéd arms, thighs and neck of a skinny older woman. Old woman.

Not just old, high strung and bothersome – to a quiet man. My mind swims in an ocean of gray matter, poking among reefs for endless possibilities, various approaches, seeking the best solution to minute problems, until time runs out and I opt for one of a thousand final decisions. The process aggravates a black-and-white thinker who seldom asks a question, the consequences of curiosity not worth the emotional or intellectual engagement called upon to engage in the string of thoughts my response might unravel.

Yes, I’d set him free. But he doesn’t ask for that. And I don’t offer.

Bev Magennis was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1942 and immigrated to the US in 1964. She received her MA in Art from the Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California. After a 30-year career as a visual artist, she started writing. In 2009 she was accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Graduate Class. She was awarded a 2010 Pen USA Emerging Voices Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2011, she received the Norman Mailer Fellowship in Fiction, Provincetown, MA. She has lived in New Mexico for 35 years where she has written two novels and is currently working on a third.