Category Archives: Archives

“Near Home” by B. Chelsea Adams

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Near Home-
“Ellis Island” by Penelope Breen

I.

In the hotel of unchanged sheets
strangers sleep together, one room,
having the same hungry nightmares,
some they do not wake up from,

sharing that same fear of morning,
the struggle of muscle and bone,
movement out-of-doors,
across pavements,
being lost
in the city they grew up in.

II.

One old man wobbles down the block
up to a first floor walk-up.
The porch threatens to separate
from the house. He wonders
if this is the big wooden door that was
too heavy to open when he was little,
that is too heavy for him to open now.

Farther down the street,
apartment buildings have been renovated.
The park has a new name. The old man
isn’t sure it is the same pond,
the willow tree,
the same ducks.

The jungle gym and slide
are new, and the swings.

He knows he would become dizzy now,
swinging. He knows
the mothers huddled near one another
on the benches
are made uncomfortable by him.

Old man in torn clothes.
They won’t allow a vision
of one of their children
growing into him.

III.

His visions when
he hung by his knees
from the old jungle gym
were of baseball cards,
that one Saturday at the Polo Grounds,
the arrival of the ice cream truck,
school, where he was math king,
and, of course,
climbing the willow tree.

IV.

Who would have imagined
these stained trousers,
shoes Goodwill won’t take,
the hotel of unchanged sheets?

 

 

B. Chelsea Adams received her MA from Hollins College in Creative Writing and English. Chapbooks of her poems have been published: Looking for a Landing by Sow’s Ear Press in 2000, Java Poems celebrating her addiction to coffee in 2007, and At Last Light by Finishing Line Press in 2012. Her stories and poems also have been published in numerous journals, including Poet Lore, Potato Eyes, Albany Review, Southwestern Review, California State Poetry Quarterly, Clinch Mountain Review, Union Street Review, Wind, Lucid Stone, Rhino, and the Alms House Press Sampler. She taught at Radford University for over 23 years.

 

“A Rose Named Gary” by Timothy Eberle

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A Rose Named Gary
Image by Penelope Breen

Ahem. If it can be said that art represents humanity’s collective attempt to reconcile its own existence with an otherwise cold and uncaring universe, then it stands to reason that tragedy is art’s truest manifestation: watching the human ego fail to connect with anything other than itself. I gleaned this pearl through a steadfast and sustained personal study of ABC’s “The Bachelorette.”

Actually one specific, unscripted moment in the scripted reality of “The Bachelorette”: the first rose ceremony that concludes the debut episode of each new season of the show. For the uninitiated, the “rose ceremony” is the device through which the aforementioned Bachelorette—the most recent of whom happened to be a Mid-Western real estate developer named “JoJo”—determines which of the show’s contestants will remain with her on her journey towards true and everlasting love and which contestants will be sent home packing. Human connection, in this pantomime, becomes a scarce resource. To the keeper goes the bloom. To the losers, so many losers, go all the imaginary blooms that they thought they would be holding before JoJo cuts them loose.

Loathe as we may be to admit it, ours is a conclusively lonely existence: one fraught with sorrow and disillusionment in search of the proverbial one rose. That’s the torment heard in Juliet’s deathbed soliloquy, the longing behind the chords of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the panic in Edvard Munch’s “Scream” and the sadness beneath the sunglasses of Guy Fieri. And that’s the sense of soul-crushing desperation underlying perhaps the single most heart-wrenching, fully-realized American tragedy of this (or any) generation: one dramatized scene in a hit reality series, through which the most esteemed of a human gender—He with the Bright Smile teeth, He with the rippling ab-shield worn by a Grecian god on earth—is revealed as a grotesque creature in false clothing. He is an animal with a lifespan, and he is destroyed for lack of a flower.

I anticipate with mutual horror and fascination this first rose ceremony because, in every other rose ceremony to follow, the Bachelorette’s decision as to whom she’ll either extend or deny a rose will be an informed decision—based on a careful consideration of factors like compatibility, shared goals and interests. (As an aside, the episode wherein the “artistic contestant” inevitably writes a poem that attempts to rhyme with the Bachelorette’s name—in this season, “My JoJo” with “My Mojo” – approaches revelation. It is a stunning bit of wordplay that will echo through the halls of our literary canon.)

But the first rose ceremony is just a gut-call firing squad. The first rose ceremony is a human house-cleaning wherein JoJo, operating on intuition alone, makes a knee-jerk determination that there are several men in this house about whom she knows nothing except that she finds them immediately unappealing. She would strongly prefer that she never have to see them again. And so she never has to. It’s the human equivalent of those sticky chicken claws that get pushed around on Dim Sum carts in Chinese restaurants. You know that it’s technically food, but it’s also extremely unappetizing, and you really wish that the waiter would take it away so that you can go back to eating dumplings like a person.

Then it happens to the unsuspecting. Comes the rose, and I have shed tears for garbage-appetizers-of-men, dismissed on less than a whiff.

I cry for them not out of embarrassment but out of a genuine sense of loss, as their mouths slowly close and the light softly fades from their eyes. These men very clearly did not expect this to happen. (In fact, they very clearly expected the opposite to happen.) Why else would they have flown to California—abandoning their careers, their bars, their fitness routines—if not because they were fully convinced that what they brought to the table—their backstories, their personalities, their synthetically inflated pectoral muscles— would be sufficient to satisfy the romantic ideals of not only their season’s Bachelorette-Du-Jour but also those of an adoring American public?

I cry for these men because they bear the collective burden of embodying what may be the single harshest truth underlying our shared human experience: the image of ourselves that we think we’re projecting into the world is so comically divorced from the reality as to merit its own show on a major network.

We all think that we come across better than we do. We have to. It’s a necessary by-product of our self-preservation. If any of us were ever forced to honestly acknowledge the way that the world sees us as individuals—how visible our flaws, our deficiencies, our cartoonishly bizarre proportions—none of us would be able to muster the simple strength required to get out of bed in the morning. Maybe that’s the reason why the phrase “The Kind Of Place Where People Don’t Even Lock Their Doors” holds great currency in today’s real-estate market. It isn’t because of some overwhelming concern for personal safety. It’s because a world of unlocked doors is one in which we would never be forced to backtrack to a friend’s party, where we’ve just said our goodbyes, to retrieve a forgotten set of keys and stumble into a room where the people we love have already begun saying horrible things about us.

We’re all objectively terrible people. Those carnies at the amusement park are sketching our real faces. Yet, most of us operate under the delusion that we are somehow beloved, that we alone are exempt from the piles of judgment that we have no problem heaping on everyone else. We tell ourselves that, in our case, our worst traits are somehow actually assets. “I’m not annoying. I’m quirky.” “I’m not dumb. I have alt-smarts.” “I’m not trying way too hard. I’m really pulling off this indoor jean-jacket.”

No one thinks that they’re the person who’s going to be sent home on night one. Look, it isn’t as if we’re wholly unaware of the image that we present. We generally have the basic outline down. It’s just that, somehow, we’re encouraged to see our reflection and then completely forget it. The devil, they should say, is in our details.

For example, despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary—evidence suggesting that the image that I actually present is that of a “bookishly approachable stranger you can rely on for accurate directions to any Banana Republic in the tri-state area”—I simultaneously maintain the completely unfounded illusion that I project a palpable sense of danger. Last week, walking down Atlantic Avenue in a blue bandana I’d recently started wearing in an attempt at a look that can only be described as “recently unemployed adjunct professor,” the thought crossed my mind that someone might see me and worry that the tree-lined streets of Brooklyn Heights had suddenly been infiltrated by a street gang.

I own a seltzer maker. I have a “tea connection” in Connecticut. I’ve started more than one conversation with the phrase, “You know, if you really stop and think about it, Matchbox Twenty is a pretty underrated band.” None of which stopped me from having the very real thought that, “I hope that no one sees me in my blue bandana and thinks that I’m in The Crips.” (I’ve been in gangs over the course of my lifetime. But they’ve been gangs made up of people who look like I do. Also known as “improv troupes.”)

Which brings me to my own personal moment of devastating self-realization. The moment when the entire facade I’d spent years carefully crafting for myself came cascading down in a crushing avalanche. The moment when, confronted with the entire set of options available to her, JoJo looked me in the eyes—squarely, deliberately—and mumbled, simply, “Nope.”

I was in Charleston, South Carolina, in town to perform a show I’d written and absolutely confident in everything I was bringing to that particular Southern table—my accomplishments, my personality, my New York City residency—would have everyone I met immediately throwing themselves at my feet begging to be regaled with tales of “life in the big city.” The night before the show, the cast and I decided to soak in some local culture and soon found ourselves at a bar in the company of Brittany and Elena: two beautiful HR recruiters in town for a consequence-free Girls’ Weekend. (Which is, it should be noted, exactly the type of experience I thought I could provide for them.)

From the moment I inserted myself (unasked) into their conversation—a conversation that was, I could only assume, severely wanting for some fascinating insight into “the time I saw Joaquin Phoenix on the subway, because, you know, I live in New York City, and that’s the kind of thing that happens all the time in New York City, where I live”—I could tell that Brittany and Elena were enchanted. I was witty. I was charming. The banter between us flowed as seamlessly as dialogue in a less-preachy Aaron Sorkin drama.

So engaging was the interaction, so ripe with potential, that on my way back from the jukebox, where I’d been queuing up a Matchbox Twenty playlist, I realized that I’d never found a window in which to properly introduce myself. (A fact that I, a longtime proponent of kill-or-be-killed improv comedy, sought to ameliorate by proposing that, instead of me just telling them what my name was, why didn’t they see if they could guess it based on whatever impression I’d left them with over the course of the last twenty minutes.)

I leaned back against the bar smugly, a cocky Rumpelstiltskin waiting to be anointed with a name like “Pablo,” “Jean-Luc,” or “Javier Bardem,” some name evoking mystery and adventure and the type of forbidden dalliance heretofore confined to the pages of the Kama Sutra.

The name that I was actually given (and given, it should be noted, with a deliberateness and speed in defiance of everything I thought I knew about the physics of sound) was Gary.

Fucking Gary.

Has there ever been a name that connotes an image of a more sexless, amorphous, broken sack of human desperation than Gary? Gary isn’t the name of a person you flirt with at a bar. Gary is the name of a guy who wears sweatpants to the Olive Garden. Gary isn’t the guy who fulfills your romantic fantasies. Gary is the guy who gets hernias playing office kickball. I don’t care what small town you live in, if there’s ever a headline in your local newspaper reading “Area Man Falls Into Yet Another Sinkhole,” the name of that area man is Gary.

If Gary were an instrument, he’d be a used tuba. If Gary were a band, he’d be—I can now say with the benefit of hindsight—he’d be Matchbox Twenty.

Here are a series of phrases that have never been directed at anyone named Gary:
“Well, the results are in, and they aren’t terrible.”
“Congratulations on not getting trapped in another Ponzi scheme.”
“Please Gary, just a minute. My body can’t handle another bed-shattering orgasm.”
And lastly, perhaps most devastatingly: “Gary, will you accept this rose?”

There would be no rose, I could tell, in the offing for me that night in Charleston. No sun-drenched evening horse rides, no walks along the beach. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that perhaps Brittany and Elena were simply compensating for their intimidation at being in the presence of a comedy genius who might also be in The Crips, but I couldn’t maintain the mental delusion longer than it took for the last strains of “Push” to fade from the bar’s speaker system. (And, though I can’t say for certain, I distinctly remember the song that played next was Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”) My mouth closed.

Though I stood in that moment alone, I can honestly say that I was not lonely in my disgrace. Because somewhere, I knew…I know, is a man with teeth like dreams boarding a plane for California with a one-way ticket to the Bachelorette Mansion. And to that man I say this: “It’s nice to meet you, Gary. My name is Gary, too. I live in New York City, but I suspect you’ve already guessed that from my cool familiarity.”

 

 

Timothy Eberle is a New York based writer and comedian, like everybody else who lives in Brooklyn. His writing and performances have appeared in McSweeney’s, Splitsider, the Santa Fe Literary Review, Jewish Life Television, Jewlicious.com, Heeb Magazine, and the Madcap Review, among other credits. Most recently he was seen performing at The Peoples Improv Theater in “I Am Not a Man” (a sad show which he wrote alone), and in the review “Sad Men and the People Who Love Them.”

 

“Into the Fire” by Kyle Laws

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Into the Fire
Image by Penelope Breen

after being named for a woman jazz singer

Around a Philadelphia piano bar sweaty with beads
off glass, towards the end of the last set,
the singer and her voice became what Mother wanted
for a daughter, something in the name,
something her father said about their Irish ancestry.

I became clay to shape for the fire
when she gave me the name Karl in Gaelic,
but not even Mother could bring forth a goddess
in urn with all the wood of a forest.
By the time I budded breasts,

I didn’t want to be a girl who played with dolls,
but the woman astride a horse leading—
if not a nation—her family to what they could be,
more than what they were, more than drinks
around a set of black and white keys.

Three quarters past midnight, it would be easy
to focus on a man who walked away
in a piano bar tune. But it would be me,
a woman descended of Druids, the one stones
are circled for, the one for whom fires are burned.

 

 

Kyle Laws’ collections include This Town with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017); So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015); Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014); My Visions Are As Real As Your Movies, Joan of Arc Says to Rudolph Valentino (Dancing Girl Press, 2013); and George Sand’s Haiti (co-winner of Poetry West’s 2012 award). With six nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.  www.kylelaws.com 

Read an interview with Kyle here.

 

“One of These Days! To the Moon, Alice!” by Roy Bentley

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One of These Days
Image by Penelope Breen

A windsock for dreams, this Brooklyn bus driver.
A hope of getting one of those dreams made flesh
rides alongside him at a time they say Frank Sinatra
exudes light, that hope seeping through his capillaries
like the noises through a wall. To him, there is a power
to being a man and having Alice for his wife: the power
to haul your ass out of bed and press on after prolonged
sleeplessness. Through a humming New York City dawn.
And this is what Ralph does when he isn’t palling around
with a sewer-stinky Norton whose atriums and ventricles
lubdub an urban poo with a faint whiff of antiperspirants.
Surely, you’ve caught the reruns. Melted at least a little.
And if White Privilege is propping up Ralph Kramden,
which it is, The Honeymooners is a backdrop to falling
in love and fucking after the shades are drawn because
your Alice is frightened or Catholic. In 1955, you have
about what you want: stable employment to prison you
before and after the shudder of thrusting into her stops.
Maybe driving a bus is the metaphor for what happens
when any two hearts share quarters where one partner
has a name stitched to a uniform and the other doesn’t.
In 1955, men don’t use words like metaphor and a man,
any man, has a right to discipline an insubordinate spouse.
Ralph has seen the cowering women and called it bullying.
Then seen himself as an offender and remorseful penitent,
without referencing a nineteen-fifties idea of conscience,
though conscience—like Alice Kramden—had shouted
to be heard over the hubbub describing the cityscape.

 

 

Roy Bentley was born in Dayton, Ohio. He is the author of four books and several chapbooks. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Blackbird, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review and elsewhere—recently, in the anthologies New Poetry from the Midwest and Every River on Earth. He has received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA (in poetry), as well as fellowships from the arts councils of Ohio and Florida. These days, he makes his home in Pataskala, Ohio.

 

“White Lightning” by Jackie Craven

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White Lightning
Image by Penelope Breen

The first sip flamed into another sip like a sun storm—
like an Olympic medal—like Pompeii—
like Pompeii before lava made love groan
beneath the weight of heat—made love eternal
in its heavy gray embrace—Sweet Jesus that sip
turned the scent of gasoline into the sound of gasps—
my lips had been an iron gate—my lips a Syrian desert
shriveled into a frown—my tongue a slug
curled in the hollow of my cheek—Hell
I was nothing but a hotel sign flapping on a rusty chain
a fleabag room—curtains pursed—but that wet light
flashed like resurrection hollering hallelujahs
in Japanese—That hot juice hit high notes
from the very first sip—shrill and trembling—singing
goddamn Götterdämmerung—squeezing music
out my pores till my skin stretched to cellophane—
that tight that transparent—Vesuvius
spitting jalapeño breath—hot and bright and dark too—
dark on top flames stoking underneath swirling me
through a wormhole—time swallowing its tail
blindness turned inside out—that sip—if some Higher Power
cracked the world open like an egg and you felt your soul
swim up from your ribs—felt your soul rear on hind legs—
a clash of crystal horses rearing and charging and taking off
on fourteen-foot wings—Teratornis wings—
God help me one sip and I was Nithhogr I was Smaug
melting mountains into cream—Oh yeah I lit the sky
like Nine-Eleven like Armageddon like a fucking
Jabberwock—no bones no skull only eyes—nothing but eyes
and a wide wet smile

 

 

Jackie Craven won the Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Award for Our Lives Became Unmanageable, a chapbook of fanciful tales that explore themes of compulsion and recovery. Her poems appear in many journals, most recently in Nimrod, River Styx, Salamander, and Water~Stone Review. Visit her at www.JackieCraven.com.

Read an interview with Jackie here.

 

“Shoalwater” by Anders Carlson Wee

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1

shoalwater
“Shoalwater” by Pat Zalisko, 6′ x 10′, oil on canvas

Waves grind the shoreline and darken into pools.
Crabs shuffle sideways, lost in the washed-up eelgrass.
Seagulls spit littleneck clams to the rocks
and don’t even eat the shattered bodies.
They fly as high as the clouds and wrap talons
in the wind. But this kind of love isn’t rare.
When I dream about my brother he disappears
if I look. He wears a bird-bone bracelet,
but I only know this by feel. Even his hair
is something I imagine. His nose occurs solely
as contours. I walk down the beach
and throw stones at the oncoming waves.
This is the best we can do. We leak every time
we are opened. Out just beyond the waves,
love says the same of itself. We can only witness
the implication, only feel for the shape.
Love is a pigeon nestled beside a dead pigeon
at night in the wet corner of a warehouse.
Blackness and the texture of feathers.
The thud of a body surrounded by hollow.
Love is a clamshell’s first touch against rock,
whatever tenderness can be found in that contact
before the crack. It’s been years since I was last
out on the water. The night sky tightens
like that familiar mouth. Clouds hide their bulk
on the backsides of islands. Each wave is real
the way his body is real. Made of something
not itself. Something bigger. Call it water.
Call it wind. Call it tendon-flexing of the moon.
Each wave lifts as he lifts, crashes as he crashes.
Love exists in the way seagulls hold still
in the wind. The way crabs carry pieces of clam
through the moonlight and vanish sideways into sand.

 

 

Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Best New Poets, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Narrative Magazine, which featured him on its “30 Below 30” list of young writers to watch. Winner of Ninth Letter’s Poetry Award, Blue Mesa Review’s Poetry Prize, and New Delta Review’s Editors’ Choice Prize, he was runner-up for the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. His work is currently being translated into Chinese. He lives in Minneapolis, where he’s a 2016 McKnight Foundation Creative Writing Fellow.

“Shoalwater” first appeared in The New England Review.

 

“Write to Save Someone” by Terri Muuss

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write-to-save-someone_georgeave
“Georgia Street” by Pat Zalisko, 48×48, Acrylic mixed media on canvas.

Say something about the blade, the shine under
the opalescent moon.

How when you moved it
like a see-saw back and forth in your fingers
it caught fire, sent a pearl of light to dance
on the ceiling above you.

Say something about how it mesmerized you

for a second
& made you forget
your plan.

Say something about having a plan.

Say something about how you cried
& felt nothing.
your breath—

how it stilled in your throat,
how you breathed
like a master yogi—

Say something about irony.

Talk about the razor between your two
still fingers, held like a lover’s
eyelash to blow away for a wish.

Say how you took it at first
& moved it above
your wrist, sawing
the air for practice.

Say how you let it kiss your skin—
how you let it whisper a salted ocean breeze,
how you began the dance of trajectory
though a vein you didn’t know had so much
ocean inside.

Tell how you began—
a creator—to birth
the wet, sticky foal
that is your heart.

 

 

Terri Muuss is a licensed social worker, writer, actor, director and motivational speaker. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Paterson Literary Review, Apercus Quarterly, Atticus Review, Stirring, Long Island Quarterly, and Red River Review, and five anthologies, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in poetry. She is the author of Over Exposed (JB Stillwater, 2013) and the one-woman show, Anatomy of a Doll. Anatomy of a Doll was named “Best Theatre: Critics’ Pick of the Week” by the New York Daily News and has been performed throughout the US and Canada since 1998. As a licensed social worker, Muuss specializes in the use of the arts as a healing mechanism for trauma survivors She is married to writer Matt Pasca and her two ginger-haired boys, Rainer and Atticus were former Ellen Show “Presidential Experts.” www.terrimuuss.com

Read an interview with Terri here.

“On Transmutation” by Haley Yelencich

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on-transmutation
“Hrabove 7-14” by Pat Zalisko, 38×38, Acrylic on canvas.

Look. My wall is cracking open. The ancient plaster is splitting, creating a fissure from ceiling to hardwood, sending pieces of yellowed paint sailing to the floor. Look at the dark divide grow—how the wall crumbles to chalky dust as it separates. Hold on … do you see it? Right there in the middle of the chasm. It’s a book bound in buckram cloth … I think it’s for you. Metamorphoses: Book IV is written on the spine. Reach in. Reach in. Do you know that story? I have a decaying memory of it. What does it say?

But wait. Let me tell you a story that I just remembered. It may disintegrate before you bend that antique binding, and it may be important.

~

I was nine when I cautiously watched an uncle of mine from the swing set that was placed in a clearing of the woods that surrounded my childhood home. He and my sister were standing near the house, away from the others, and I watched her discomfort as he wrapped his arms around her and reached for the back pockets in her light cut-off jean shorts. She shrugged him away. It was her thirteenth birthday.

Grasping onto the snake-like chain that was covered in blue plastic, my body casually wavered back and forth, but my mind walked around them. I saw his thick mustache move above his thin upper lip, and I heard him tell her that if she wanted her birthday card she would have to let him put it in her back pocket. Otherwise, she wouldn’t get the money that waited inside.

My eyes turned to ice and my stomach turned to stone as she stood frozen. He put his heavy arms around her, and slipped a white envelope in the back pocket of her jean shorts. Hate raged through me and shook the tree tops.

This was our initiation.

~

Oh, but Metamorphoses … I only remember a little of it. Ovid, right? There are three women who weave stories of immobilized love—women who reject Bacchus as a god and are punished for their lack of worship.

Their burdensome fabric consists of a woman who has sex with the sun and is buried alive because of it, while another, who is in love with the same star watches the golden light stream from the sky and beat on the grave until she silently transforms into an inanimate plant. In between those strands lives a girl who prays to be with the boy she loves until she melts into him, losing her independent identity.

But wait … you’re not paying attention.

Why do you act so disinterested? Don’t you think that this is important? This is what we’ve clothed ourselves with, the leaden stories we’ve worn for years and years and years. These are our heavy uniforms, the words we cover ourselves in, the things that drag us down.

~

Let me tell you about something you might find more intriguing. Outside, over there somewhere, I left a friend’s house on my way back to an apartment that I rented. It was nighttime and winter. The city lights stained everything in hues of orange and purple, including my diaphanous breath that dissipated into the frigid air.

It wasn’t too late, but it was late enough. I trudged past an alley that was lined with trash cans and peppered by three men who seemed quite a bit older than myself. As I walked past, I glanced sideways at their silhouettes, outlined in a subdued burnt orange, shining violet light irradiating from between their arms and legs. And at that same moment, they spotted me.

There are moments where we can see ourselves, and very quickly I saw myself for what I now was: a young woman in an old ill-fitting peacoat and sluggish boots with holes wearing in the soles, walking alone at night. I was, from outside myself, unknowingly an invitation.

The men walked out of the alley behind me. I kept my pace, quietly counting down the blocks until I would reach the train. One of them hurled some words at me, which I ignored. I could hear them laughing, but I refused to look. Back straight, head high, with my heart trying to tear out of my body, I walked. Counting three, two-and-a-half, two.

My hands were in my pockets, and I hoped that they would think that I was holding onto something sharp, when finally one of them threw, in a sing-song voice, a phrase that actually hit me. Out of the purple gelid air in a sweet melodic tone came the words—with the last two drawn out for dramatic emphasis: “We’re going to rape you.”

I knew that he thought he was joking by the way he crooned it and by the way his friends laughed, but I, alone, in my cumbersome boots and jacket-one-size-too-big, also knew what happened to women like me in situations like that, and finally my pace, every so slightly, quickened to reach the train station.

As I sank onto a seat in the fluorescent-lit train car, I looked up to see that a different man was hovering over me, holding onto the bar in-between where I sat and the door. He was staring, and he would not stop.

~

Are you watching as the split in the wall grows, as the dark line snakes and weaves around the window-frame and the doors? I’ve watched this wall crumble only a few times, and never as much as right now. This will have to be a big repair.

Do you know how to fix a plaster wall? It helps to know what lays underneath, because if you simply cover the gash it will reappear at some time or another, often when you least expect. Inside the wall, beyond what you can see, behind the paint, the outside color and solidity, are laths of wood that hold the whole thing together. Somewhere in there lay strips of wood layered on top of each other that the plaster rests over and creates the wall that you see. In order to prevent future cracks, you have to reacquaint the plaster with the laths. You have to recognize the invisible laths existence, and then affix what is visible to them. That’s the only way to make sure this thing stays whole.

~

I used to know less about walls and more about what goes on out there, but certain events recurred at such an alarming rate that I decided to abandon my mindless exterior explorations and turn indoors. You see, it happened again on a different night on my way to the same apartment that I’ve mentioned before. I was standing outside of the building and talking to a friend on the other side of a phone because I didn’t want to lose her on my way up in the elevator. I wrapped my arms around the loose-fitting white tee-shirt that I was wearing—(this, if you’re not aware, is a detail that many people may find important)—and watched as drops of rain cut through the luminescence of the light in the lamppost above me.

Again, three men somewhat older than myself approached me. Again, they were laughing amongst each other. Again, I acted as if I was unaware of their presence. But this time was different, and not only because of the rain or what I was wearing or who the men were. This time, they surrounded me. This time, one of them leered over me and repeatedly asked, “How much? How much?” despite my best efforts to ignore them all into non-existence. This time, one of them wrapped their fingers around my arm and dragged me towards him.

“Don’t touch me!” I heard my voice cry from someplace deep within. It seemed to have stemmed from my stomach and shot up through my throat, sprouting higher and higher into the damp night. My friend, somewhere further away in the city and on the other side of the phone, expressed her helpless alarm.

Two of the men stepped back, but the other reached towards me again. A rage, one that I was not altogether aware had been germinating within me, shook my every limb. As it grew, I felt myself become lighter and lighter. I could feel my face contort and my self transfigure in fury. The city seemed to spiral around me. I thrashed the man’s hand away and shouted, “Get the fuck away from me!” For a moment, he paused, and my hand clenched into a fist at my side. I watched as he slowly backed away. My whole being was alive and twisting in and around itself. Every particle was sparked with indignation.

But then all three were laughing. And as they walked away from me the last one said, “That’s exactly what I wanted.”

~

To reject a person is often a troublesome and hazardous thing. The three women weavers in Metamorphoses know just how difficult defiance can be. They refused to refer to Bacchus as god and, as punishment, their threads were transformed into tangled vines and their bodies were turned into those of bats. But – pay attention – their resistance was the cause of their metamorphosis. And the result was not as unfortunate as some would like you to believe; their thin membranous wings carried them away.

Do you know who else you’ll find in that book? She is not exactly a character as much as she is a memory. Perseus, the protagonist, only refers to her existence to explain how he destroyed her. He only tells her story to relate how she came to be worthy of execution.

Medusa, he recalls, was not always a horrid monster that stalked through the fields with her hair of snakes and fatal stare. Once, she was beautiful, and Perseus deduces that this was the direct cause of her rape by Neptune in Minerva’s temple. (Today, they might say that he “had to” do it. That he “could not help himself.”)

As a punishment for desecrating her temple, the male poet Ovid tells us through the male hero Perseus that Minerva transformed Medusa’s alluring hair into an angry nest of snakes and cursed her so that any potential suitor would turn to stone after setting his eyes on her. Minerva then set Medusa’s image on her breastplate to fill her enemies with fear.

Through Perseus’s words Medusa is woman, desecrator, monster. She was one part of an aggressive sexual act – the victim – and so we will punish her for centuries. We will push her away into the fields, angry and afraid of her, and we will leave her there to her fate and death.

Meanwhile, Neptune will be free to rule the seas.

~

You see, I stay within these walls because it’s comfortable. I can safely stand right here and watch the tree branches cut across the sky like wrinkles in an old woman’s face. I can watch the sun bathe over them. I can watch them slither in the wind. And I can dream that one day I’ll see what they see. These walls may separate occasionally, but I can always patch them up. I can always fix what happens inside of them. But out there I may find myself in a situation that I can’t get out of, one from which I may never return. People have ways of grinding you into the ground. It may be a fault of mine, but I much prefer to sit up here in this room with you—the person I’ve let in.

~

He was someone that I did not feel thoroughly comfortable with, but I was more uncomfortable with being alone. My insecurity did not arise from any feeling of risk or hazard, but instead from feelings of inadequacy. You see, I was young, and still unlearning the things that I had been taught by uncles and strange men.

He was physically non-threatening and had a soft voice. His dark eyes shone a light from deep inside. He was well-liked and friendly and a little bit shy. We were interested in the same things—art, books, oddly beautiful things. I was unsure if I was good company, but I knew that I was good enough.

He invited me over, and I took the train an hour away from where I stayed. I calmly watched as the electric lines cut across the starless night sky, and wondered where exactly I was going. When I arrived at his apartment I discovered that there were four other people living within it, so he invited me to watch a movie in his room where we might be more alone, and conclusively, more at ease. His room was sparse with various little trinkets set upon the windowsill and a bookshelf, and his desk was littered with sketches and books. I don’t remember what movie he turned on, but I do remember discussing and agreeing that we would unquestioningly not sleep together that night.

Soon, the lights were off and his arms wrapped around me. We rolled over each other and our mouths pressed together and other things happened that sometimes happen in dark bedrooms when you’re nineteen and twenty-something or older or younger—things that happen no matter how old or young you are, or what you look like, or who you are, or where you’re from. These are the things that take place in all of our lives to certain degrees whether we like them and want them or not.

After these things that I was OK with transpiring had occurred, I heard him reach into one of those shining little trinkets. Then the sound of his long fingers fumbling with the plastic wrapper of a condom reached my ears. I sat up. “We agreed we weren’t going to do that,” I reminded him.

I don’t remember whether he seemed tense or tranquil, serene or excited. I don’t exactly remember what he looked like in that moment, other than the blue light of the TV screen shining over his thin frame. I don’t remember what I anticipated, or even if any solid thought was traveling through the folds of my brain. What I do remember are the words, “I have to fuck you,” emitting from his mouth and his hands pushing me down and burying me into the mattress. I remember the sounds outside the door. I remember not saying anything, and not feeling much at all.

~

Sometime before, the sky moved slowly. Slunk back on the hill by the house and slurping sun-soaked iced tea and orange slices, I watched the occasional car as it barreled down the dry dirt road, kicking up dust. The sky steadily drifted away, skimming the tops of the trees where the leaves swung and saw things differently.

The house that I grew up in was surrounded by oaks and maples, but there was only one tree that I could climb – only one branch that I could reach on tiptoe in my jelly shoes and hand-me-down sundress. Tiny calves flexing. Small fingers reaching. Pulling myself up as my feet clambered one over the other on the shaded ground. I needed to be further up and away. I needed to hide in the tree-tops, be swept up into the clouds. I dreamt of scaling to the top and flying off into the wind, weightless and free. But one day the only branch that I could reach broke off of the dying trunk, and I snapped awake. I realized then that it would be a difficult time trying to get all the way up there with everything else trying to keep me on the ground.

~

It all reminds me of the time when an older cousin of mine found me playing on the floor in our grandparent’s bedroom. A soft winter light streamed into the dark room as I leaned intently over a colorful toy of some kind. I suddenly felt a dense weight fall over me, and a heavy hot breath blow into my ear. He had bent over and wrapped his arms around my small frame constricting his large arms tighter and tighter until I felt suffocated.

“Let me go!” I shouted. My body was pushed so that I was hunched over myself. My knees pressed into my chest. His body held me down, crushing me towards the hardwood floor. He laughed and said something in a teasing manner, but he did not let go.

“Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!” My arms jerked behind me in attempt to hit him in the stomach, and still he laughed. He pressed me further into the ground, and still he did not let go.

~

And there was another time, one much later, a different “he” held me down on his rich friend’s expensive couch as they drank in the next room. “You think you’re so strong,” words seethed from gritted teeth. Golden light dripped into the room from the hall, and crept upon his face, distorted his drug-addled features. An overpriced clock ticked from above. “You think you’re so strong.” He held my arms down to my side, and hate streamed from his eyes as I struggled to get out from underneath him.

How did it happen? Did something spark through his mind and transmit behind his eyes so that he could see what he was doing? Or did he fall into a sudden stupor? The latter, it seems, is more likely. Although I can’t recall exactly how it ended, I know that it did so abruptly. And the next moment, I was waking up from an uncomfortable sleep with his body laying calmly next to mine.

~

I can see that you think this is excessive. You seem to be in a state of disbelief, but I promise you that stories like this are alive and flourishing and they do not stop just because you wish them to. I understand if it makes you uncomfortable, but I do not apologize.

For too long we’ve heard the story of the woman or girl as seductress or femme fatale or succubus, no matter how young, and it’s come time that you and I and everyone around us begin to listen to other stories. They’ve been trying to be heard for years and years, but somehow they get buried underneath other words. The tales and myths that have blanketed us for centuries are old and tired—and the interpretation of them is often the same. It’s time to listen to new yarns, and perhaps the myths that we do know would do well to be reexamined and told from a different perspective.

Take a look at that book that you hold in your hands, the one that you found hidden in the walls. The story of Medusa might’ve been transmuted while in there. Instead of a young woman who is punished for being raped, a plot-line that we sadly still allow both in fiction and reality, you might find someone different. It will still be Medusa, and she will still have serpents as locks, but you might find the reason for transformation different.

Neptune still commits his crime against Medusa in Minerva’s temple, and Minerva still witnesses that crime. But instead of reshaping Medusa’s image out of wrath and anger, Minerva changes her appearance in order for her to express and exert her agency. Minerva gives Medusa the means to protect herself from others who would commit the violent act she experienced (and by now, I hope you agree that we can surmise that there would be others). The gaze of misguided men and potential male aggression is now stopped and turned against them.

In this way, we will no longer treat the assault survivor with hatred and disgust but as living beings, and recognize the power that they innately have. And we will no longer allow each other to be held down, but we will turn those who like to bound us to the earth into stone.

~

I’ve watched this wall so many times. White light hits the plaster and exposes its rough features, every bump and wrinkle. White light shines from the curtain-less windows where, outside, beautiful trees reside. More and more are being planted each day by strong hands and even stronger voices, and we can watch them grow.

Don’t worry. I have not given up the idea of one day living in those top branches, where things are viewed differently. The women who weaved their stories rejected the old male god and they flew away. They were rid of him and they flew.

 

 

Haley Yelencich was raised in rural Michigan and grew up in Chicago, IL where she obtained a B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia College. She currently lives in New Orleans where she writes, draws, and sings to her cat, Shark.

 

“FINE” by Mary Lynn Reed

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“FINE 11-16” by Pat Zalisko, Acrylic on Canvas

You have so many things to rant about you can’t figure out where to begin so you decide to just jump in like this typing without stopping Just now you were thinking about acting Not acting like an actor but acting like a survivor That’s what survival is right it’s just acting Here I am standing on this ledge and I should jump I should really jump but then someone comes around the corner and says Hey, how ya doing, how was your weekend, and then you’re talking like everything is cool and you’re telling this guy about a movie you saw without mentioning that you wept through the whole thing clutching a beer and a tub of popcorn with the windows open listening to the pack of raccoons that lives in the woods behind your house the pack you have nightmares about sometimes the nightmares that usually involve burglary and danger and fear but Yeah that movie was great and the actress was amazing She should have won that Oscar she was really robbed You just don’t see great acting like that anymore and yeah thanks You have a good day too Hello Hi yeah it’s a beautiful day Yeah everything is just fine Yeah I can’t wait to get started on the next thing The next really important thing we all need to do Let’s get to work let’s get that thing done because that’s why we’re here This place is the best and we are all doing Just Fine.

 

 

Mary Lynn Reed’s fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Colorado Review, The MacGuffin, Whistling Shade, Jellyfish Review, and Smokelong Quarterly, among other places. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Maryland.

 

“No Place Left to Hide: Meditations on a Shore House” by Sue Eisenfeld

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“Growing Into Truths,” Image by Dawn Surratt

1. The floorboards creaked, though none of us were home. A stranger—to us; she knew the shore house well—had broken in through the side door, stolen to the basement, and thrown a rope around a pipe just below the living room floor.

The house was built in 1929 with a cinderblock foundation, which is not often today’s method of choice. Most new houses are constructed entirely on wooden pilings, as was the newer sun porch out front, circa 1963. But the basement, like the tiny, single-level, cedar-shake cottage, was built based on codes of its era, back before the days of massive coastal development, back before the days when we had any real fear that the ocean could take the Jersey Shore away.

In 1973, Neil’s father decided to cut a hole through the living room floor and put a set of stairs into the basement, the two-car garage. In the decade earlier, he had already added a concrete slab floor to what was originally just sand and a cinderblock retaining wall that held back the dune outside. He had replumbed the pipes with little Neil’s help, bought a washer and dryer, and knocked down that back wall, shoving it farther into the dune, closer to the beach by 15 feet. In that extra space, he built himself a workroom to tinker with his fixtures and wires. He built a storage closet for linens and sunscreen and a storage room for bikes and boards, plus a small, enclosed, full bathroom with a stand-up shower that had sand in the floor paint for traction and when the garage door was open you could have the illusion you were showering outdoors.

When the stranger entered the basement—the garage—with its grey concrete floor and grey cinderblock walls, and the unfinished ceiling joists above, I’m sure she could hear the muffled ocean, could imagine its spray, could conjure all those summer days for one rental week at a time, or maybe two, when she sat out on the deck and read a book and picked crabs and drank white wine with her feet up, under the umbrella, with the dune grass rustling in the breeze. Yes, even the basement was filled with the lure of the sticky salt air of the shore, without even one window.

The police arrived at the house a day after her husband reported her missing. She had been diagnosed with uterine cancer, he had said. And she had been unable to bear children. He had strayed in their marriage, and she was suffering from depression. They were estranged from one another, far away in some other town. But he knew her well enough to tell the authorities that, even in winter, if she were to flee anywhere, she would flee to this house, which she had loved many times and had always loved her back.

 

2. In Arlington, Virginia, we braced for the storm.

Weeks prior, I had made plans to go to the shore house that weekend with my dad and stepmother from Philadelphia. It was to be a Friday-to-Sunday trip. On Wednesday, October 24, we looked at the forecast: simple rain. On Thursday, October 25, we debated our options. We wondered whether we would still enjoy ourselves if we couldn’t take our morning walks to the bay, that sepia stew of jellyfish and biting flies in the still air; our afternoon walks on the beach toward the mansions of Mantoloking in one directions or the ghosted face of the Ferris wheel at Seaside Heights in the other; if we couldn’t spend our nights spending our money out on the pier spinning some sort of wheel or shooting something up to win a stuffed animal and then stuffing gigantic triangles of Maruca’s pizza into our gut.

If I had been planning to go to the shore house just with Neil, we would have gone anyway that weekend, with what we knew then. We would have stayed in and listened to the ocean and to music and read books and watched the storm. Yes, we would have sat near the windows of the sun porch—all seven of them on three sides—and we would have watched the weather come in. We would not have turned on the TV because we’re not TV people. We would not have listened to the radio because we’re not radio people. If we had Internet service, we would have definitely logged on, but the connection might have been spotty. Maybe the police would have made announcements on a loud speaker, or maybe not. Without any year-round neighbors in shouting distance to warn us, we may have marooned ourselves in that house as the weather picked up. And when the lights began to flicker and the wind tore the first shingle off the side of the house and the ocean started eating away at what we thought was the ground, the earth, that solid yet moveable stuff that the deck and walkways were built on, it would have been much too late.

Instead, my dad and stepmom—wise people—suggested that it wasn’t worth all the hassle for a rainy-weather trip—five hours’ drive for me; them having to pack up again after having just been there on their own the week before, using up some of the empty days on the rental calendar. And so we didn’t go to the shore.

Neil and I did not watch TV because we don’t have cable, and we did not listen to the little, old-fashioned hand-held battery radio after our middle-of-the-night check-ins. The radar imagery we saw online of what happened was colorful, but so abstract. We did not see information or photos in the newspapers on that first day after the storm, or even the second, about the full extent of damage; they mostly published generalities and focused on our local Washington DC area and New York City. And so two days would pass before it would occur to me to seek information about how the tiny, eight-block town of Normandy Beach, New Jersey, fared in the storm.

 

3. I closed my eyes, and the surgeon slipped a scalpel into my face. In my mind’s eye, I could see the shape he was cutting: a half moon to the left, a half moon to the right. Then he cauterized the bleeding—fumes of burning-flesh taking hold in my nose—and took the segments of skin away.

They were working on the tip of my nose. I wouldn’t know at the time that future surgeries would take segments from my left eyebrow, twice, then from the nose again. My chest, my arm. Once from the leg. These were my souvenirs from my summers in the sun, the ones when my face puffed up like a blowfish from my second-degree burns, peach-colored and fuzzy too with skin peel, and the ones when I could put a hand to my chest or shins and pop like Rice Krispies the tiny, white water blisters that formed there. Bruce Springsteen never sang about what happens to all the beach bunnies at the Jersey Shore twenty or thirty years later: their leathery skin, white splotches, cataracts, skin cancer. This surgery aims to take the blemish away, but the scars and the memories are forever.

In 1973 and 1975, the years when Springsteen released “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle” and “Born to Run,” I was at least ten years too young for its words of teen angst. The 3” x 3” square, white-rimmed family photos from Avalon or Stone Harbor—a week or two each summer each year of my youth—show me in pigtails, with an orange-tinged visor over my face, and it’s the smell of Bain de Soleil, SPF 4, that I remember: island fruit punch and burnt sugar, a thick, meaty, orange paste. My mother and I sat together in our low beach chairs at the water’s edge near our hotel in our bikinis. Each time the water rose, I collected clams the size of orzo before they burrowed back into the sand.

By the early 1980s, I was wildly staring at cute boys from across the courtyard of our rented summer apartment or at the neighborhood hangouts of my best friends’ parents’ low-slung rental houses a few shores away, living out silent romances in my head. There, I was the girl bopping down the beach with the radio, blonde and bronzed in satin stripes, watching men watching me, poised on the boardwalk rails with the rattles and rings and greasy, fried, sweet scents behind them.

The love that was wild, the love that was real, strapping my legs around anything—none of that would happen during the years I wished it. It happened at the shore house with Neil, unsnapping my jeans under the floorboards in the basement, the aurora rising somewhere outside behind us. By then—after my doctor had warned me that basal cell carcinoma, like that on my nose, liked to keep the same company with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer—I had mostly abandoned the sun, affirmed by Neil’s influence as an avid non-sunbather and the kind of man whom a tan did not impress. I did not even venture to the beach, except for walks. Instead, I luxuriated in being able to stay on his family’s oceanfront shore-house deck, jutting out deep into the dune grass and hovering over the crest of the dune with a panoramic view of the Atlantic under an umbrella—with a shroud of terry cloth over my entire length, with a book and a constantly refreshed icy drink and snacks from our stash in the kitchen. I could tuck inside to the sun porch for relief anytime I wanted, with windows wide open, piping in the metronome music of surf.

The shore house was my tether. It kept me from harm.

 

4. Neil always said we should sell the house. Though other siblings enjoyed the place with their kids, he and I didn’t use it much, as it was too far away. Any time we went, it always seemed to ensnare him in a D-I-Y home improvement project, eating up our few precious hours. And it didn’t hold childhood memories Neil wanted to relive: the youngest of the clan, being dragged there by his mother every summer, far from his hometown friends.

But it is a family house, owned jointly by the four distant siblings after the death of their grandparents, who had bought the house in the 1940s, and then their parents, who inherited it first. Global climate change, Neil would whisper in their ear whenever he could, at a rare family event, over an occasional email correspondence. But the idea never took. Even with the framed black-and-white photos in the sun porch that showed the storm of 1962, which tore off the original sun porch addition, projecting their wisdom down upon us as we lazed in that outermost room against the shore, inertia reigned, as it is wont to do.

It was a dark house with small windows, wood-paneled walls, and castoff antique mahogany furniture from fancy aunts. It was not a modern beach house, not a place of new-fangled things. It did not try to put on airs; to say, I’m better than you because I’m taller, wider, fancier, or closer to the sea. It was none of those things. It was old money, and old money does not brag. Old money buys one of the first houses in Normandy Beach, not to keep up with the neighbors, because there aren’t any, but because the air is good for lungs and the sea is easy on the mind, and because it is a slightly eccentric thing to do during a war. Old money was Neil’s maternal grandfather, a banker in Trenton, and when he bought the house, the beach now crowded with Spanish-tile- and faux Tahitian-thatched-roofed mansions was empty, flat as a surfboard against all horizons. From the kitchen window, Grandmother could see him coming down the road in his car from miles away.

Another thing old money does is not try to be young again, not sell out to the highest bidder. It understands that new, brown cedar shakes will go grey with time, salt will corrode anything that shines, and that, with dignity, old money will die on its own terms.

So the siblings—the descendants: unflashy, unassuming, middle-class—did not really consider (not now, not just yet, the time is not right) or agree on selling the oceanfront double lot for one-and-a-half million dollars or two, the lot made of sand dune so deep and vast they we never really knew—until all the sand was gone, like if we were to shave our furry cat and suddenly see its real, skinny form underneath—that the wood pilings holding up the front half of the house had stood in sand 12 feet deep; that the sand at that depth had once stretched more than 70 feet across the property. The house was scantily insured. When it was all over, the family would receive the amount that the tiny, old cottage alone without its oceanfront land was probably worth, for wind and rain damage (the policy did not cover flooding), calculated based on the depreciated value of the property lost. Checks disbursed stood in for commiseration, and correspondence between the four siblings mostly ceased thereafter.

Each year since the early 1990s, each sibling has had to pay a few thousand dollars in property taxes to the state of New Jersey. The tax rate on second homes in New Jersey is high, as is the benefit for those who make use of the place—and the risk. We paid for a constant stream of new shingles, shutters, and appliances; cleaning, construction, cable, and spotty Internet, and the opportunity to go whenever we wished. It was an investment, we reasoned when the payments came due; an always-open option, a future, and a family peacekeeping measure as well.

The giant, towering house next door, two stories higher than ours, which we dubbed “The Monstrosity,” looked down upon us, out the second or third story windows, and called our place “That Thing,” for its relative shabbiness. In mid-October, a week before the storm, the last time anyone inhabited our house, when my dad and stepmom used that fateful empty week for their autumn getaway, the owner of The Monstrosity casually mentioned to my dad that he’d like to buy our shore house land. He said he’d like to raze the building, pave the grounds, and turn it into a parking lot to give his guests from New York City more room for their cars.

 

5. On Wednesday, October 24, unbeknownst to any of us in Virginia, or Philadelphia, or possibly even in the various places where Neil’s siblings live, near and far from the Jersey Shore, Weatherboy—a news personality on Facebook—predicted that Hurricane Sandy would strike the northeastern United States with “brutal force,” “perhaps being one of the most catastrophic fall storms in the region on record.”

On Thursday, October 25, the day my dad, stepmother, and I definitively decided we would rather not spend the weekend at the shore in the rain, which was the weather forecast we had heard—whether on the radio, on TV, or the Internet, I don’t remember—Weatherboy wrote that Hurricane Sandy would bring widely scattered tornadoes, widespread destructive winds, and extremely high storm surges, on top of high astronomical tides.

“Residents of …New Jersey…should rush their hurricane preparation plans to completion as soon as possible—your life and property is at risk from a potentially historic storm,” Weatherboy reported on Friday, October 26, when I would have been making the five-hour drive, either alone to meet my dad and stepmom, or with Neil, had we been the travelers. I had not yet subscribed to Weatherboy, however, and none of us—which is unbelievable in retrospect but 100 percent accurate—had heard the dire predictions for the storm. “In the primary impact area,” Weatherboy warned, “people should be prepared to have no electrical power (and perhaps water, gas, and heat) for many, many days…Historic disaster unfolding,” he said. “Its trajectory onto the Garden State is a ‘worst case scenario.’”

And further: “Beaches will have life-threatening conditions for a prolonged period of time—do not visit nor stay near beaches!”

On Saturday, October 27, what would have been the second day of the trip that very nearly happened, Weatherboy announced that “Hurricane Sandy continues its forward march, gaining size and intensity as it does so… with a storm force wind-field of historic proportions.” It is the “second largest tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Atlantic” at this time and is “on track to become the largest ever.”

Neil’s sister and husband and family, local to the Jersey Shore area, finally corresponded with us about the dire predictions, and on Sunday, October 28, descended upon the shore house to board up the oceanfront windows. On the same day, Weatherboy reported on Governor Christie warning New Jersey residents statewide to expect power outages lasting up to 10 days, with roads blocked due to downed trees and wires, and basic services “unable to function for a prolonged period of time due to power outages: gas stations, banks, and food stores.”

At the end of that day, the shore house stood dark and alone, abandoned, its future depending solely on Neil’s sister’s last-ditch storm preparations, a contractor in the 1960s for its sun porch re-construction, and some unknown builder in the 1920s who saw fit to locate a seasonal family cottage at the lip of the ocean—“frighteningly close to the water,” as a friend once told me.

“Brace for impact!” Weatherboy warned on Monday, October 29 and predicted that the storm would make landfall around dinnertime. Then the web site fell silent for the night, as if a hush had settled over the land.

 

6. If the stranger had picked Monday, October 29, 2012, to drive to her beloved shore house rental and hang herself in the basement, it would not have been a smooth transition from one life to the next.

She would have heard the surf alright, but it would have been rougher than expected. She would have heard the howl of the wind, felt the vibrations in the earth from the pound of waves, even through the concrete floor.

If she had gone out on the deck first, before her final gesture, for one last look at the landscape she once found so serene, she may have been scared for the first time at the shore house, scared to see the ocean coming ever closer to her sanctuary. Scared at the way her hair swirled around as if her finger were stuck in a socket, scared that the flagpole at The Monstrosity next door would fall. Scared to see the snow fence that once held back our big dune getting undercut by the water, starting to lean into the beach, then getting dragged away into the darkness.

If she stayed outside long enough, holding on to the rail of the deck to keep her steady, she may have begun to feel the deck move beneath her, like the rumble my dad and stepmother felt when they were at the shore house during the Mineral, Va., earthquake the previous year, an uncomfortable undulation, as if the deck were supported by rolling logs. The pressure and vortex of the wind may have begun to hurt her ears. The blowing sand would have stung her face.

At some point, she would have had to run inside because it would have been much too frightening to allow the storm to have its way with her, the uncertainty and chaos of it all, and if she had run early enough back into the house, she would not have quite have seen how the ground, the earth, that solid yet moveable stuff that the deck and walkways were built on, was melting into the sea like sugar crystals dissolving in hot water—right under the sun porch door. Looking out into the abyss, the new ground far below would have been like looking down from a high dive onto the bottom of a pool. The sea scoured the shore as flat as the highway onto the island, now busted and breached by the waves.

Perhaps she would have already been indoors when the wind lifted up the first of the roof shingles, tore off the first of the side cedar shakes, broke the first of the unboarded-up side windows, uprooted the first of the dune plants, scoured away the first of the side stairs, split the first crack into the concrete furnace-chimney, sprayed the first of gallons of rain water and sand into the living room, or heaved the first of six inches of the sun porch apart from the rest of the house.

Only one thing would have mattered, if she had been in the house that night: Was she in the basement, the garage, when the ocean—freed from the protective barrier of dune—laid out its thousands of pounds per square inch of weight and collapsed the cinderblock wall to allow the salt water through the foundation. Because if she were already in the process of arranging her final fate or already martyred, the ocean would have pummeled her like a deranged husband or waterboarded her to death.

But the stranger was not in the basement that night, had entered her own heavenly home years before. She did not get an earthy or on-the-way-to-heaven-ly view of the ocean’s lashing tongue pushing the washing machine and dryer out into the street, along with the bikes and boards and old lamps and fixtures and all of Neil’s late father’s old tools. She did not have to endure the indignity of wooden doors and sheets and towels and bottles of sunscreen gushing past her in a fast fury, with seaweed wrapping around her neck and legs. She’d never have to report that the Cadillac a neighbor had stored in our garage, to protect it while he wintered in Florida, was stripped by that ocean thief and abandoned in the middle of Ocean Terrace like a beached whale.

And she would never have to know that the bathroom with a cinderblock shower with sand in the paint to prevent slippage and a countertop that Neil and I made love on during the wild summer nights when I finally could be that bouncy, bronzed beach beauty I never was would end up in pieces scattered across the street in the neighbor’s yard.

The suicide would remain a private affair. If she had been there that night, the body may still have been attached to the pipe, waterlogged, for all the world to see—those few who stuck it out on rooftops or in fire halls, the rescue squads searching for survivors. The storm surge and record-high tide drove straight through that lower level of house, tearing a hole through it like a fist, leaving behind a floor-to-ceiling view from street to sea, an uninhabitable body of broken bones. A thread—golden, faded, or black—pulled forever from the fabric of our lives.

Years later, it sits there still; a wound still raw, a salvation waiting to be salvaged.

 

 

Sue Eisenfeld is the author of Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal and a contributor to The New York Times’ Disunion: A History of the Civil War. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Gettysburg Review, Potomac Review, and many other publications, and her essays have been listed among the “Notable Essays of the Year” in The Best American Essays in 2009, 2010, 2013, and 2016. She is a five-time Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a member of the faculty at the Johns Hopkins M.A. in Writing/Science Writing programs. www.sueeisenfeld.com