Category Archives: Archives

“Intertwined” by Ron Burch

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Final Girl (How to End Your Marriage)

I remember you smashing dishes in the kitchen, one by one, a wedding set. Blue tipped apparatus sitting on the white bathroom sink.

Traffic on Olympic is heavy, parking lot type, horns going off like car alarms. It’s a one-story brick building on the south side of the street, a white-capped gas station one one side with a tire rack near the back pumps and a desperate narrow alley for those who need a quick getaway.

You broke all our dinner plates that night. Crying in the bathroom with the door locked without me knowing why. I still don’t know why exactly.

On the drive, an old Muddy Waters song played, I don’t remember what it’s called, the funny things we remember, some old blues song playing on the radio because the car is silent, you staring away out the window, the brown curl of your hair coming up at the end when I looked over, the chorus went something like I don’t know.

The promises you made in a hotel room in Ohio after an old man died, a funeral to attend and ill talk of a wedding, an old man has died and we spoke of a possible marriage that we said we both saw the same way, the same way when the marriage took place on Ronald Coleman’s old estate where John F. Kennedy once honeymooned and how that marriage was too entwined with a death, the death of a stepfather the day after, one bad omen after another, marriage and death intertwined.

Back in the car something about a big leg woman on a simple acoustic guitar, the anger mine because of the lie that you had told me, of what was to be soon undone, what was soon to be taken, the lights of glass stars that had hung down over the vows, of you in the wronged white and me like an undertaker in a black suit while a few witnesses looked on and shared the thing that was not ultimately meant to be. You refuse to look at me on that car ride down Olympic and I too refuse to speak as well, anger wrapped tight in the fist around the black steering wheel as I remember those glass stars that we had hung above us from their chains with yellow candles burning within.

Later you found the hormone in your urine and you cried, you cried for fear of being trapped and pinned like one of those butterflies on those old boards that they had in the 60s, afraid that your freedom was taken by another or your fear of what it would do to the damage that was already done and damaged doubled was no end of trouble and what the fuck could you do: there were promises made, made in that wooden square house with the glass stars and the wedding guests, catered meals and flowers you had to buy yourself because they were forgotten, that same building that later burned down in a fire that no one knew how it started but like everything else in this relationship, life entwined with death and no symbolic rebirth, not here, not as we stop at the light on Olympic near the old Spanish-looking church and the small park with the children on the swing sets next to this busy street.

Only a few more blocks until we are there, and you still say nothing to me, the hate a silence, the silence an ultimatum that I had lost as you refused to discuss it any further, and Muddy Waters is still singing softly as he did in the Ohio hotel room the day of the old man’s funeral when those vows were made and promised only to come undone like poorly-wrapped gifts.

And the car pulls up to that small fucking brick building that I hate in my dreams and imagine I could burn down, if brick could burn, and you turn to me but still say nothing, and I open the door and, as I move, you shake your head. I stay in the car as you go in and I don’t know what to do to make the time pass so I drive around the block, once, twice, more and more, so many times that I lose track until I end up again in front of that brick building and you’re breaking plates as if you were counting out the number of pills into a pale hand or the adding up of a long unaccounted for checkbook, the ceramic white plates chipping the tiles of the floor as you drop them from a height as if to see how fast they could fall.

I sit in the car, cupping my eyes, trying to be hard because a man does not do those things except to wait and bear it out like an old tree and you come out, two hours later, the legs wobble and you look pale and frail like a ghost and I think about getting out of the car to help you but I wait as you wanted. Let you have what you want so I let it happen even though I didn’t want it to happen and I could do nothing to make it not happen but on the steps from that damned brick building you walk and put out a hand as if to grasp a rail that is not there and I bolt from the car to grab you before you fall faint from the loss of blood and more and the loss that I will feel and the loss that I don’t know if you feel and that neither of us, neither of us, will ever be able to account for ever, ever again.

 

 

 

Ron Burch‘s short stories have been published in Mississippi Review, Pear Noir!, Eleven Eleven, Pank and others.  His first novel, Bliss Inc., was published by BlazeVOX Books.   He lives in Los Angeles, where he is Co-Executive Producer on a TV show for DreamWorks Animation.  He is also a produced and published playwright.  Please visit:  www.ronburch.com.

Archives – Winter 2015

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Malignancies

winter 2015
vol. xii. no. 1

Caregivers

Fiction

“Quesasomethings” by Mary Lewis

“Treatment” by Douglas Shearer


Poetry

“Bathing My 20-Year-Old Son After He Has Broken His Arm” by Cecil Sayre

“At the Piazza, I Remember You” by Laurin Macios

“Rescue Dog” by Roy Bentley

“Sevenling” by Annie Bolger

“Overdue” by Mikayla Davis


Essay

“Your New Face” by Ojas Patel

“The Polarity of Incongruities” by Laurie Easter

“Malignancies” by Emily Rich

“Fifty-four Weeks?” by Annita Sawyer


Shorts on Survival

“A Few Simple Questions” by Danielle Dugan

“The Youngest Boy to Ever Fly to Space” by Jonathan Levy

“Hope” by Matthew S. Rosin

“Born This Way” by Amy Newell


“Sevenling” by Annie Bolger

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Sevenling

I devoted to you
an entire page of an ancient diary,
a small part of a soul.

You gave to me
deliciously generic compliments,
a plastic blue-beaded necklace

and mononucleosis.

 

 

Annie Bolger is pursuing a BA in English Literature and Classical Studies at Swarthmore College. She is currently the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Swarthmore’s daily newspaper, The Daily Gazette. She recently hand made and published Dated, a chapbook of her poetry. Her work has appeared in Prisms and the Swarthmore Review.

Read an interview with Annie here.

“Malignancies” by Emily Rich

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Malignancies

It was all happening too fast. My mother was dying, I’d just been diagnosed, and my husband, Curt, was standing in the living room saying, “You need to call your parents and tell them to cancel their visit.” He was right, of course, but it was all happening too fast and I wanted a minute to just think about it. Or avoid thinking about it, really.

Curt had jaw set and his chest puffed out the way he did when making non-negotiable pronouncements. Enormous and serious in his dark suit and tie he stood like a wall between my troubled past and a now frightening future. Focus on what’s most important, his bulk was telling me. He’d just flown across the country, cutting short his meetings in Sacramento, so he could be with me after the diagnosis had come back. Because it really was cancer, just like my mom’s.

“Your parents would be too much stress for you now,” he said.

“But my mom…” I started.

“Look, If it was just your mom I guess it’d be ok,” he cut me off. “But having your dad here is too much stress on you now. Hell, I’ll call them myself and tell them not to come if you want.”

“No I’ll do it,” I said. I felt a pit of dread and sadness now growing as surely as the lump in my breast. I’m not a bad person, the type who abandons her dying mother in her hour of need. I don’t want to be seen that way, and yet, things are so much more complicated than you can imagine.

My parents had already left their home in Denver and were staying with my younger sister, Aggie, up in Philadelphia. Their plan was to head to our home in Northern Virginia next. They were calling it a farewell trip because Mom didn’t know how much time she had left now that her cancer had metasticized. And that was her trick, banking on pity to get around my edict that she not bring Dad near my kids.

No she can’t come. Of course she can’t. But how on earth was I going to make that phone call?

I’d last seen Mom the past Thanksgiving at Aggie’s. Her hair white, thinned from the oral chemo drugs. Her shoulders were slumped and her bosom concave because she’d never gotten reconstruction after her initial mastectomy. But her starling-bright eyes were alert and lively and she toddled around common room of Aggie’s husband’s church greeting all the guests with a warm smile. A kooky little garden-gnome grandma, you might marvel if you saw her. How much harm could she be?

Yeah, but that’s the problem! (I might answer in this imaginary conversation) She looks like the perfect person to set down in front of the grandkids with a book of nursery rhymes. But you have no idea how dangerous that woman’s powers of denial can be. How she could watch my father savagely beat her children, then blithely explain away our bruises and strange behavior to any teachers or neighbors who would ask. She fell when she was hiking at the cabin. She was sliding down the banister—so careless! She likes to kick herself in the shins, can you believe it? I don’t know how we stop her.

“Oh, it’s best not to talk about family issues outside the family,” Mom would tell us with a conspiratorial smile. We’re all in this together, you girls and me, being the implication. Like Dad’s abuse was some kind of fun secret bond that we shared.

* * *

But I didn’t want to share anything with her. Not as a child, not now. I wanted to cut her off, but god love her, she always found a way to intrude back into my life. You have to come see me, I have cancer. You have to see me because the cancer’s come back. You have to see me because I’m dying…

Then one morning in the shower, possibly right as my parents were boarding their plane for their East coast visit, I felt a pea-sized lump in my left breast. That’s not insignificant. How could I not have noticed that before? I thought in a dizzy panic. I knew immediately it was cancer.

“Mom’s done this to me!” I thought, irrationally. “To force a connection between us at last!”

It was late May, and the summer semester had recently begun at the community college where I taught. My own children had left for school, and I had only about 20 minutes to get out of the house and make it to my class on time. I shook myself out of my daze and with trembling hands, I dried my hair, dressed, gathered the things I would need for the day’s lesson. Then I put in a rushed call to my doctor’s office.

A blur of medical visits followed, each scheduled for me with an unsettling tone of urgency: You’ll need to get a mammogram, a sonogram, a biopsy…right away.

There had been signs. The night sweats, low grade fevers, the fatigue. I brushed them off. I take good care of myself, I reasoned. Eat right, exercise. My body wouldn’t betray me! I’m sure nothing is wrong.

“Aren’t you supposed to get regular mammograms?” Curt once asked. “You know, because of your mom’s cancer history?”

“Yeah, I will,” I would answer, without actually planning to. “But Curt, you know, I don’t think I’m at risk. I’m nothing like my mom.”

* * *

The final stage in the diagnostic whirlwind after I’d found the lump was a sonogram-guided biopsy to be performed by a nervous, almost apologetic radiologist with startled round eyes and thinning black hair.

“I see your mother has had breast cancer,” he said, scanning over my medical file. The room was dim and chilly, something typical, I would learn, with these high-tech exams: they don’t want to overheat the machinery. On a wall opposite the exam table a gray image of my breast tissue glowed on a lighted display board. “How old was she when she was diagnosed?”

“56,” I answered. I used to take comfort in that number. It sounded so old. Postmenopausal, I’d told myself, when that phase of life had seemed eons away.

“Umhm. And how was it treated?”

“She had a radical double mastectomy… chemo therapy… and I don’t know, maybe radiation too.” I cringed, self-conscious about how little I actually knew of my mother’s disease, despite the fact that I’d been with her for her initial surgery.

“And is she still living?”

“Yeah, she’s, let’s see, 70 now. But she’s not doing well,” I said. “The cancer returned and it’s in her bones. And maybe her lungs too.”

The doctor’s face emerged over the manila folder he’d been holding. His round eyes serious and sad. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

I felt both irritated by and protective of this doctor’s feelings. At 43, I was relatively young for cancer, and now here I was with a mother also stricken by the disease. The tragedy of genetics! There is only so much you can control.

* * *

In October, 1993, I was 28 years old, and had only recently returned to work from a three-month maternity leave following my second daughter’s birth. One day, out of the blue, my mother called me at the office.

“It would be nice if you could come out and see me for a few days,” she’d said. Her tone was even and pleasant, betraying no signs of distress.

“No Mom, I really can’t. I’ve only been back at work for a month. I don’t have any leave left.” I was trying to keep my voice hushed, to keep this intimate family phone call within the confines of my gray cubicle walls. There was nothing she could say that could get me to go out to family craziness in Denver, of that I was certain.

“Well, I’d really like you to. I could use some support.”

“Support? What for?” Here we go again, I was thinking. Some issue with Dad.

“I have breast cancer.”

“Oh God.”

“I’m scheduled for surgery this Thursday.”

“Thursday? Mom that’s in less than a week! Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”
I felt trapped. Mom springing this news on me at the last minute so I didn’t have time to react, calling me at work so I couldn’t raise my voice at her. Aggie was out of the country then, teaching English in Bogota, Colombia. Everything seemed calculated to leave me with no way to refuse my mother.

“This is bullshit, “ said Curt. “You shouldn’t go.”

“How can I not go? My mom has cancer.”

“Don’t take the kids, then.”

But he was working such long hours as a Senate staffer on Capitol Hill and I was still nursing.

In the end, I agreed to fly out Denver with my little daughters.

I wonder to this day what is it about my mother that made me so weak?

The cancer had been fairly advanced by the time Mom felt the lump in her breast. It had already spread beyond the breast tissue into her lymph nodes. She was scheduled for a radical double mastectomy, a disfiguring procedure in which the breast tissue, as well as the muscles beneath the breasts are removed. I now know the procedure is rarely performed unless the cancer has spread into the muscles, but at the time, my mother downplayed the seriousness of her situation. In fact, as I sat with her in the pre-op waiting area, she seemed giddy with all the attention being paid to her. Dad was mopey and sullen, slumped in a corner as if he’d sprung a small leak and was slowly deflating into his chair. But Mom was all smiles, like a queen for the day, chatting with the nurses from her hospital gurney, introducing them to four-month-old Rachael, who’d been allowed to accompany us.

Once the surgery was over, I retrieved two-year-old Isabel from the home of an old high school friend who’d been watching her, then returned to my parents’ house, where my father was waiting.

That evening, we ate a tense dinner, with Rachael asleep in her infant car seat on the floor and Isabel in the old wooden high chair we’d brought up from the basement.

The dining room was familiar with its odd clutter of things, from the brushed metal Scandinavian-style display shelves, the framed Japanese ink drawings, the old wrought iron chandelier. My father was sad and quiet, yet the anxiety of being so near him knotted my stomach so I could barely eat a mouthful. Picking up on the tension, Isabel squirmed and pushed her plate perilously close to the edge of the high chair tray. I sprung for it in a panic over what would happen should her dinner spill onto the floor.

“I wanna go,” she pouted.

“Ok,” I said. “Time for bed?”

“I don’t mind cleaning up,” Dad said, not looking up, his jowly face sagging, his voice deep with despair.

“Thanks Dad, guess I’ve got to get these girls to bed.” It was only eight o’clock, but I felt exhausted myself from all the emotion of the day.

I lifted Isabel out of the high chair, then gathered sleeping Rachael up in my arms.

We went through the dining room and living room toward the stairs. Then Isabel noticed Calypso, my parent’s Standard poodle, curled up on the rug in the front hall.

“Doggie!” Isabel exclaimed.

“Yes, that’s our old doggie,” Dad said. He had shuffled out from the dining room behind us.

“Doggie! Doggie!” she said again, and clapped her little hands. Calypso opened her eyes and lifted her head slightly.

“Hi doggie!” Isabel reached forward and Calypso—startled–growled and snapped her teeth. Isabel shrieked and I grabbed her arm, pulling her toward me, at the same time I felt the presence of Dad close behind. He lunged forward and landed a swift kick into Calypso’s side. She yelped in pain.

“That’s no way to behave!” he bellowed.

“Dad!” I shouted. Isabel clutched onto my leg.

Calypso got to her feet, trembling and cowering and backing toward the wall. Dad kicked her again, and I saw that look come over his face, that look that said the rage had taken over and there was no turning back. He bent over and pummeled the dog furiously with both fists, making grunting sounds as each blow landed, while the dog barked out high-pitched, human-like cries. Isabel was screaming and screaming and pressing herself into the back of my knees. Shifting Rachael to one arm, I managed to pry Isabel loose with the other, then, clutching her hand, I hustled her toward the stairs.

“Stop it Dad! Stop it! You monster!” I cried, the anger ripping at my throat, “You’re a goddamned monster! You’ll never change!”

I ran into my old bedroom, and slammed the door behind me. Mom had set up the room for our stay, with a portable crib lined with pastel bumpers and a little wind up polar bear that played Brahms Lullaby. My heart raced and my limbs quaked with adrenaline and fear and memory. How often had it been me on the receiving end of that rage the way poor Calypso had been tonight?

Why did you agree to come here? I scolded myself. I knew something like this would happen, that Dad would not be able to contain himself. It was so stupid of me to put myself in this situation! Now what was I going to do? I thought about calling my friend who’d watched Isabel earlier in the day to see if we could spend the night with her, but there was no phone in the room, and I was afraid to go back downstairs. I silently cursed my mother for manipulating me into this ordeal.

All night I sat on the bed in a state of alert with my back against the wall and a
sleeping daughter on either side. Around five o’clock the next morning, I gathered up our things and prepared to head out. With just the glow of a tiny night-light plugged into the socket by the door, I packed my bag and the diaper bag, zipped the girls coats over their pajamas and crept down the stairs. I dialed a taxi from the kitchen phone, then went out into the still black night to wait.

We got to the airport ten hours before our scheduled flight home, but the funny thing was, the girls acted like angels, as relaxed and relieved as I was to be out of my parents’ house.

The night after my biopsy results came back, I tossed and turned in bed. I held my breasts, soft and warm in my hands, and wondered what their fates would be.

My mind was unsettled, unable to land on a comforting image. When sleep finally found me, I dreamed of hospitals, of white halls, labyrinthine and impersonal. I dreamed myself a prisoner unable to reach Curt and the children.

My mother was there in the dream. I couldn’t see her but I felt her presence looming near like a scepter in her hospital gown, her thick googly-eye glasses and her Eleanor Roosevelt smile. Isn’t this fun? We’re in here together, she was saying.

I woke up drenched in sweat.

“You had a fitful sleep,” Curt said. He had his legs over the side of the bed, feet on the floor, his white undershirt was pulled taut across his broad back and he rubbed his hands over his dark hair, across his bearded face. My great bear of a husband, rousting himself for the day. I wanted to crawl up inside him, to wear him like a protective cloak.

“I know. I’m stressed.” I hadn’t stirred from my sleep position, lying on my back, my arms folded across my chest under the covers. I stared up at the blades of the ceiling fan whirring above our bed. Should they be turning that fast? Everything seemed to be spinning out of control.

“Did you call your mom yet?” he asked. “I’m sure once you do that you’re going to feel a whole lot better.”

“I’m going to,” I said.

* * *

Still in my pajamas, I padded my way into the kitchen and dialed Mom’s cell phone. She answered in the way she always did, as if she’d been suddenly startled awake. “Oh! uh, Hello?”

“Hey Mom, it’s Emily.”

“Oh, Emily! How are you?”

“Not good Mom. Look, I’m sorry, but you and Dad aren’t going to be able to visit this weekend.”

There was a pause. “Why? Is something the matter?”

“I’m sick.”

“Well, you know Dad and I are staying in a hotel. We won’t be any trouble.”

“No, I mean I’m really sick. I have breast cancer.”

There was a brief, stunned silence, then, in a lowered voice “How do you know?”

“I found a lump. I just had it biopsied. It’s cancer.”

“Oh, honey. Well, isn’t there something I can do?”

I sighed. Mom, always pretending—no, actually believing—that she could help me out with things.

“No, Mom. I just need to relax and be with Curt and the kids this weekend. I can’t entertain visitors. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t put up much protest. “Well, I…” she said, her voice trailing off, “I guess I feel somewhat responsible…”

God, why did she have to express regret right now? If she’d started arguing, I could have fended her off. Instead, her voice, so sad and resigned, nearly brought me to my knees. A deep, gut-level anguish overtook me. If ever there were a time I needed a mother’s embrace—or my mother needed a daughter to be partner and friend—it was now. And yet it could not happen. The weight of our personal history was just too much. We said goodbye and I stood in my empty kitchen mourning the loss of what I never had.

 

 

Emily Rich is the non-fiction editor of Little Patuxent Review. She writes mainly memoir and essay. Her work has been published in a number of small presses including Little Patuxent Review, Welter, River Poet’s Journal, Delmarva Review and the Pinch. Her story “On the Road to Human Rights Day” was a notable entrant in the 2014 edition of Best American Essays.

Read an interview with Emily here.

Archives – Fall 2014

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Cover3

fall 2014
vol. xi. no. 4

Appalachia

Fiction

“Mouseskull” by Ann Pancake

“The Beginnings of Sorrow” by Pinckney Benedict

“Elemenopy” by Sylvia Foley


Poetry

“Alternative Therapies: See ‘Juicing'” by Hannah Baggott

“There Is No Such Thing As Spring” by A. Inguanta and S. Squillante

“SAGO: Buckhannon, WV–January 2, 2006: 6:30 a.m. ET” by Mark DeFoe

“I Tried to Drag Back” by John McKernan

“Pas de Deux” by Patrick Bahls


Essay

“No Such Thing as a Small Secret” by Debbie Bradford


Shorts on Survival

“The Survival of Uncle Peachy” by Laura Long

“Sitting in the Sandbox” by Eva Marino

“In the Waking Hour” by Keith Rebec

“Pillars of Salt” by Margaret Frey


Homepage Fall 2014

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Cover3
All images appear in this issue courtesy of the artist, Mike Quesinberry.

Dear Readers,

Welcome to our Fall 2014 “APPALACHIA” issue. We’re incredibly proud to present to you the wonderful and diverse array of voices in this issue, all complimented by the beautiful photographic art of Mike Quesinberry which he has graciously donated for this issue.

We’re featuring work from some of my very favorite Appalachian writers as well as hearing from an array of new voices. For the first time ever, we even have an audio file of a short story: Ann Pancake’s terrific story “Mouseskull,” read by the talented voice actor Gina Detwiler. We’re exploring the oldest mountains in North America and having loads of fun in the process. You should find a lot to enjoy in this issue. I hope that you will take the time to explore it.

Our January 2015 issue will be themed CAREGIVERS and our April 2015 issue will have the theme of WOMEN. Thanks for reading.

Yours in Recovery,

Mary Akers
Editor-in-chief

Archive – summer 2014

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Cover Image (Recent death)

summer 2014
vol. xi. no. 3

Endangered

Fiction

“The Stars at Noon” by David Jauss

“Squandering the Fellowship” by Jessie Hennen

“Roadside Flowers” by Karin C. Davidson


Poetry

“Recovery” by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

“Breathing Without Air” by Leslie L. Nielsen

“Sleight of Hand” by Mickey J. Corrigan

“To His Wife” by Mark McKain

“Starry Night” by Jillian Ross

“Age of Consent” by Bill Glose


Essay

“I Am Always in Transition When Disaster Strikes” by Vyshali Manivannan

“Tips for Writing About Loss” by Jessica Handler

“Minnows” by Lauren Jo Sypniewski


Shorts on Survival

“Spelunking” by Danielle Collins

“Just Enough Hope” by Toby Van Bryce

“Reassurance” by G. Evelyn Lampart


“Alternative Therapies: See ‘Juicing'” by Hannah Baggott

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Alternative Therapies

You and I fight in the kitchen—juice splattering the walls,
kale flesh on the floor, ginger dripping down our vertebrae—

because I had taken too much Ritalin, but it’s fine;
the neurologist said it’s fine, it’s fine. And I am crying

over the dirty dishes in our old sink that doesn’t drain well.
Recycled saline, I say. But your fingers whisper small circles

behind my ears, singing bluegrass hymns over the train whistle
we hear every hour. It’s okay. It’s okay, you say, holding up

a straw to my deaf mouth. After, my teeth beet-tinted, I shiver,
so you run the shower hot because you know

how Solumedrol makes me cold and Interferon makes me cold
and IVs make me cold. You take off your clothes

and mine; the carrot juice washes off my hands like rot.
Then, you see the bruises— the space

between the skin and the veins pooling to shades of blackberry
and eggplant. You trace the holes.

I tell you how yesterday, I watched the blood spray out
at the sweaty nurse in the faded scrubs.

I keep seeing him jump back and goddamn,
forcing gauze so fast on the opening,

I thought I burned him. You’d never burn anyone,
you say, planting your feet to rinse the brine off us both.

 

 

 

Hannah Baggott, a Nashville native, is a poet of the body. She is pursuing an MFA in poetry at Oregon State University while teaching writing courses. She has received awards for flash fiction and critical writing in gender studies. Her work can be found in Tupelo Quarterly and other journals. Learn more at hannahbaggott.com.

Read an interview with Hannah here.

“The Stars at Noon” by David Jauss

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The Stars at Noon (Frozen Feathers)
Frozen Feathers, image by Karen Bell

She had been sleeping, it seemed, then she heard someone cough. Who is coughing? she thought. Then she realized: it was herself.

Silly old woman. Silly half-dead old woman.

Then she noticed that she was sitting up. Why? She looked around the hospital room. The vaporizer breathing the menthol odor of death. The late afternoon light on the linoleum like the outline of someone killed in a highway accident.

Anastasia shivered. Why did she have to think such thoughts? This was no time to think like that. This was a time for joy.

She lay back into herself, hugged the chill inside her. It wouldn’t be long now.

Now what was that? Nurses talking in the hallway? She raised her head from the pillow and strained to hear what they were saying. But she couldn’t make out the words over the hiss of the vaporizer, so she lay back.

Then it wasn’t nurses talking. It was cicadas buzzing in the trees around her father’s farm.

She’d heard that ratcheting hum every August when she was growing up. Once, she and Tom collected the brittle, umber-colored husks left in the elms after the humming stopped. She stood under each tree holding one of their father’s empty cigar boxes while Tom shinnied up and found the desiccated husks. At first he crushed a lot of them, they were so fragile; later, he learned how to cradle them in his palm.

She had that cigar box full of them somewhere. Where?

And who was this?

The nurse’s face hung before her like a question waiting to be answered. “Sister Anastasia? Are you awake?”

Why did nurses wear white, nuns black?

“You have a visitor, Sister.”

Hovering beside her in the half-light: Sister Beatrice. The children are right. We do look like blackbirds. She watched Beatrice pull a white handkerchief out of her black sleeve and blow her nose. The old nun laughed, then coughed. She hugged her ribs until she stopped coughing.

Was this how Tom had felt? Dry and ready to crumble?

“Sister Anastasia?”

It was that big-nosed nurse again. What do you want now?

“It’s time for your afternoon chest rub, but I’ll wait till you’re through visiting. Whenever you’re done, just buzz for me, okay?”

He would drop down from the tree with his hands full of husks.

“I’m dying,” she said, but Tom was gone.

“Pardon me?” a voice said. “Did you say something, Sister?”

Anastasia turned to the voice’s face: it was Sister Beatrice. Then she laughed. A blackbird with wire-rimmed glasses. She had to tell the children.

The children—she had almost forgotten the children. How they would suffer when they heard she was dead! She remembered how hard they had cried last spring, when the touring company of the Black Hills Passion Play performed the crucifixion at their school, and she imagined them at her funeral: the boys, bravely blinking, and the girls, their faces in their hands.

What was she thinking of? How could she think such a thing?

“I am an old sinner,” she whispered. “Forgive me.”

“For what?” Beatrice asked. “You’ve never done anything to hurt me. You know that.”

Anastasia looked at the young nun. She was about to explain, but the coughing started again. When it was over, Anastasia was sitting up. Beatrice helped her lie back.

“Are you all right?” Beatrice worried.

“I need a priest,” Anastasia said. She’d been asking for Last Rites for two days, but all she’d received were more pain pills. “Call Father Switzer. Please.”

“Don’t you talk like that,” Beatrice scolded. “Dr. Gaertner says you’ll be fine in a week or so. You’re going to be under the weather awhile, but what do you expect when you don’t wear your shawl when you should? You can’t say we didn’t warn you—and time and again.”

Anastasia smiled at her stern look. No wonder her children ignored her when she disciplined them: no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t look angry, not with that baby face.

Then Beatrice’s chin began to quiver and the stern look dissolved. Taking out her handkerchief, she turned away. “I’m sorry, Sister,” she said. “I shouldn’t cry; there’s nothing to cry about.” Then she began to cry even harder. She turned back to Anastasia. “Oh, Sister, I hate to see you so sick!” she sobbed, and threw her arms around her.

Beatrice’s wide wimple blocked the last bit of light from the hospital window, and Anastasia felt the darkness settling around her. She had been waiting for it, and it had finally come. She breathed it in, felt it fill her hollow cheeks and lungs.

But Beatrice rose, wiping her tears, and the light came back.

“I’m not supposed to tell you this,” she said, “but I will. We’re planning a big birthday party for you when you get back. We’re going to decorate the lunchroom with balloons and crepe paper and signs, and the kids are going to sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and then we’re going to have cake and ice cream and play some games. Sister Rose is going to bake a huge cake, and I’m going to decorate it. I had the best idea ever: I’m going to spell out your name with candles! Can’t you just imagine how beautiful it’ll look when all the candles are lit?”

If a candle was still burning after you tried to blow it out, that meant you had a secret boyfriend. And if the stem of your apple snapped on the third twist, that meant his name began with C.

A young man was once in love with me, Anastasia said. Or did she? Sister Beatrice did not seem to hear. “I know I shouldn’t have told you,” Beatrice was saying. “It was supposed to be a surprise and everything, but I just wanted you to know how much we care about you.”

She shouldn’t be thinking about Carl now: she didn’t want to spoil her death with thoughts of old boyfriends. She was a nun, not a housewife. But everyone else who knew her when she was young was dead: Tom was dead, Mother and Father, her friends. Everyone. Carl was the only one left who would remember what she was like when she was a little girl.

Why did that matter?

The fall from innocence was fortunate; it was sinful to regret it. Adam and Eve banished to Heaven. The discarded apple making cider in its bruises.

What now?

Beatrice was patting her hand. Nice puppy.

“All the kids miss you terribly, and so do we,” she said. “I know Antoinette Marie is short-tempered with you sometimes, but she doesn’t mean anything by it, and she misses you as much as Camilla and Rose and I do. And Father Switzer—you know you’ve always been his favorite. Just this morning he said he can’t wait to see your smiling face again.”

Anastasia thought she heard Father Switzer’s lisping Latin. She rose to her elbows. He’s finally here. It’s finally time. She looked around the room for his shock of blond hair and boyish face.

But it was only the vaporizer, hissing its dark litany. What a foolish woman! Anastasia lay back into a laugh. She knew she’d start coughing again, but she didn’t care. It was too funny. She was too funny.

“What is it?” Beatrice asked.

Anastasia crossed her hands at her neck, trying to strangle the cough before it began. But it began anyway, and she coughed until she was dizzy, until green and gold burned neon under her eyelids.

She thought: so much pain. But what was this compared to the agony in the garden, the sweating of blood, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the crucifixion and death? No, it was wrong to complain about a little cough. Her suffering was meaningless. She wished she could cough blood, to make herself more worthy of death.

“Are you feeling all right now?” Beatrice said. She was wiping the old nun’s face with a hand towel.

Anastasia couldn’t speak for a moment, and when she did, the words seemed heavy, as if she had to draw them up from deep in her lungs. “I don’t know how to die,” she said.

“You’re not going to die, Sister. You’re just sick and overtired, that’s all. You’ll be back to normal in no time.”

The laity at least had the luxury of making wills, disposing of property. But she had nothing to will, she had given everything, even her will, away. Be it done unto me according to Thy word. All these years she had been exhilarated by that surrender, and her subsequent nothingness, but now she was frightened. She remembered the afternoon Tom lowered her into Grandpa Emery’s dry well so she could see the stars: only from the vantage point of darkness could you see the light buried within the light. And she had married the darkness, worn its black habit, so she could be reborn into that light. But what if she had not really surrendered but only given up?

After Tom died, she was the dead one. His absence was so complete it was presence, but no one noticed her, the true ghost. Father sat on the porch rocker, smoking and staring into the night, never saying anything about him or even mentioning his name. But Mother couldn’t talk about anything else. She’d sit in the kitchen and talk for hours with Mrs. Willoughby about him. He was born to be a priest, she’d say. When he was little, he’d pin a dishtowel around his neck like a chasuble and pretend to celebrate Mass, distributing cookies to the neighbor children as if they were Hosts. And he was always praying. Sometimes he’d even talk to his guardian angel as if he could really see him.

How could she tell her parents she too was no longer of this world? Something had died in her when Tom had died, but something had been born, too. A vocation. She stood in front of her bedroom mirror and practiced her announcement for days before she finally told them.

“You must be cold, Sister. Your lips look a little blue. Do you want me to get you another blanket?”

Tom had not been afraid of death and neither was she. But she was almost ashamed to die. Tom was so young, he might not even recognize her. He had been only seventeen when he died. A year later, her first in the convent, she was seventeen too, and all that year she had cherished the thought that they were twins, in a way. But now she was old enough to be his grandmother.

“Why, you are cold. And it’s so warm in here!”

Just then a cough caught in her larynx, choking her. She opened her mouth and gulped, but there was no air. She gulped until her ears rang, until air no longer mattered, and then she lay quietly, watching Beatrice’s white hands flutter about her wimple.

What was that silly girl so excited about?

Then Beatrice lifted her up and her breath came back in sobs. Each swallow of saliva scalded her throat.

“Oh, Sister, are you all right?”

She had almost touched bottom that time. She had come so close, so very close, and Beatrice had ruined it.

Beatrice’s lip was quivering now. “I hate to see you like this,” she said. “You mean so much to me . . .”

Anastasia lay back. I want to die now. Why won’t you leave me alone?

“You’ve been like a mother to me. I don’t know what—”

“I’m just an old nun,” Anastasia snapped. “I’m not your mother.”

“What’s wrong?” Beatrice asked. “Did I say something wrong? I didn’t mean—”

“Why don’t you just go away? Can’t you see I’m tired?”

Beatrice took out her handkerchief again. Tears, tears. Won’t she ever stop?

“I’m sorry, Sister, it’s just that I love you.”

“What do you know about love?” Anastasia said. And she remembered how once, when they were playing Statues, Carl kissed her to make her come alive, and she fell giggling into grass so green it shone. But that was before, that was when they were still children. Years later, he took her for a buggy ride behind her father’s big chestnut mare and, stopping in the woods, kissed her twice before she could say a word. All the way home, the wind lifted the pale underbellies of poplar leaves, and the woods purred.

But the last time she let him kiss her was the Sunday before Tom died. It had rained while they were in church that morning, and the hay in the loft smelled pungent and musty. It was the smell of loam, of a freshly dug grave, and each time Carl kissed her, he drove her deeper into the hay, deeper into the smell, until she couldn’t breathe. She thought of Tom lying in his hospital bed, and asked God to take her instead of him. He was the good one, the holy one: he should live, not her. All the while Carl kissed her, she prayed for her death. She let him kiss her a long time, until he began to moan with the desire to do more. His moans confused her: they sounded like Tom’s, though they came from pleasure instead of pain. That didn’t make sense to her. But nothing made sense to her anymore, except her desire to die in Tom’s place.

After Carl left, she went to her room and waited for her parents to come home from the hospital. By the time they returned, she had a fever, but she did not tell them: it was her secret, her private miracle. She wept herself to sleep, imagining her funeral. But the next day her fever was gone, and four days after that, Tom was dead.

Beatrice was drying her eyes again. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You’ve always said you loved me like a daughter. So why can’t I say you’ve been like a mother to me?”

Later she went to the loft alone and lay in the one window’s shaft of sun, sweating in the prickly hay. Dervishes of dust spun in the stained light, descending on her with an almost suffocating weight. She had never realized how omnipresent, nor how active, the dust was.

“Maybe you wish I didn’t love you,” Beatrice sniffled. “But I do, and I always will.”

Anastasia looked at her. She was young and pretty, her whole life ahead of her. She’d never pray to die in her place. She’d never beg God to let her lie on this bed, her skin wrinkled and liver-spotted, her lungs congested with pneumonia, her heart running down like a clock.

“No, you don’t,” she said.

“Why are you saying these things to me? You know I love you.”

Anastasia tried to answer, but she couldn’t. Where was her breath? She tried to cough, to open her lungs, but the noiseless spasms only made her throat hurt. It ached the way it did when her children knelt at the communion rail for the first time and stuck out their tongues for the Host. There was a throb at the root of her tongue, a desire. But for what?

Then she coughed so hard that something seemed to snap in her chest. A knot of phlegm humped onto her tongue. It tasted like rust.

Beatrice’s face wavered in front of her, stippled with sweat. “Please be all right, Sister. Please.”

Anastasia spat onto the bedspread and turned to the wall.

At the wake, old ladies dressed in black hovered in the vestibule like crows. They hugged her and said they were so very sorry, Tom was such a fine young man, he would have made a wonderful priest. Their mouths were crumbling, their yellow skin smelled like sour milk.

“I’m sick of your sympathy,” Anastasia said. She closed her eyes. “I’m sick of you.”

“How can you say such a thing?” Beatrice said. She was wadding Kleenex to wipe up the mucous. “Try to think how I feel.” And then her thin-glass voice broke: “What have I done?”

If he had lived until his ordination, he would have been buried in complete vestments—cassock, surplice, amice, alb, maniple, chasuble, and stole. Not a black blazer and bowtie.

“Why are you so angry at me?”

It had to be a mannequin in the casket; it couldn’t be Tom. It had to be a mannequin wearing Tom’s clothes.

“His skin looked like plastic, but I kissed him anyway,” Anastasia said.

Beatrice stopped. “What did you say?”

Anastasia refused to believe the diagnosis. The doctors can’t be right. He doesn’t look sick at all. See how big and strong he is?

But in his marrow, a blizzard of white blood cells.

“Please tell me what’s wrong.”

A hand on her shoulder. Anastasia looked up. Beatrice again: her face fish-belly white.

The old nun turned over onto her back. “Leukemia,” she explained.

Beatrice put her hand to her forehead. It shook as she rubbed her eyebrows with her thumb and forefinger. “No, Sister, you don’t have leukemia,” she said. Then: “I think we’d better call the doctor.”

“Just let me die,” Anastasia said. And then her phlegm-clotted lungs closed up. But this time she did not struggle for air. This time she closed her lips into a thin smile.

Her lungs were gray cocoons about to burst. Inside, the soul’s wings beating.

My Lord, my Lord, take me for Thy most humble bride!

Beatrice clutched her handkerchief as if it were holding her up. “Oh, Sister!” she cried, and hurried out of the room, her habit scything the last light.

This was it. This was what she had been waiting for all these years, the end of all that passion and memory. She had no fear of dying. She was a bride of Christ: death was her dowry, nothing more.

All day she had been travelling backward, a flower folding back into its bud. For years she had thought only occasionally about Tom and Carl, but today she had returned to that age when she thought about them daily. And now she was almost back to her birth.

Tom: the husks of cicadas’ songs in his hands. A touch could shatter them to shards. Oh, what music the soul must make as it shucks the body!

All she had to do was shut her eyes and the earth would close over her, and she would be lost, perfectly lost. She did not need Father Switzer or Carl or anybody. She laid her hands palms-up at her sides and waited for the last ecstatic moment. Then the dark began to murmur as if it had silt in its throat. She closed her eyes. What joy! she thought. And she sank into the darkness until the whining of the winch stopped and Tom’s head appeared over the ledge. “Didn’t I tell you?” he shouted down the well. “You can see them, can’t you?” But she didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. She just clung to the rope and swung there in the darkness, staring up at Tom, his hair blond as an angel’s, and beyond him, the stars in the noonday sky.

 

Father Switzer drove down the exit ramp of the hospital parking lot, paid the middle-aged woman in the booth, and turned out onto the boulevard.

“The painters just finished today,” he continued. “I think they did a bang-up job. They’ve changed the whole atmosphere of the lunchroom. You wouldn’t believe the difference.” Then, as if he’d just thought of it, he added, “Say, why don’t we swing by the lunchroom before I take you back to the convent? That way you can see for yourself how nice it looks.”

Anastasia noticed a smile starting around the corner of his mouth. The smirk of a boy who tells a lie that is technically true. The pleasure of sin without the guilt.

“It’ll only take a minute,” he persisted.

She looked out the window of the station wagon. The houses they were passing were among the oldest in the city, but none of them had been built before she was born. Some of them had For Sale signs stuck in their brown lawns. She thought of the children in their art smocks, painting signs for her birthday party. She couldn’t say no, but neither could she say yes.

“How could we afford to paint the lunchroom?” she asked wearily.

But he was ready for that question. “Some of the parishioners volunteered to do the painting, so it cost us almost nothing,” he answered.

She knew he was grinning now. She continued to look out the window. I will do it for the children, she thought. For the children and Beatrice.

But when Father Switzer wheeled her into the lunchroom and she saw the balloons dangling from the undulating rows of crepe paper streamers, the banners that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY!, WELCOME BACK, SISTER ANASTASIA!, and WE MISSED YOU!, the tables set with pink and yellow paper cups and plates, and the children in their party hats leaping up from their chairs shouting, “Surprise!” and twirling noisemakers, she could not act surprised or happy. She tried to clap her hands to her face in a dumb show of shock, but they stopped halfway and fell back into her lap like broken-winged birds.

Rose and Antoinette Marie welcomed her back. Camilla took her hand and pressed it softly between hers.

But where was Beatrice? Anastasia looked around the room and found her standing by the far table, pretending to be supervising her third- and fourth-graders. She put her finger to her lips unnecessarily.

Just then, Father Switzer raised his hands in a pontifical gesture. “Quiet down, children, quiet down.” The students sat back in their seats heavily. Father Switzer waited until the chairs quit squeaking, then looked at Anastasia and winked. “Didn’t I tell you the painters did a great job? Just look at these signs. The boys and girls spent half the day painting them. Not to mention blowing up balloons and hanging crepe paper and whatnot. And Sister Rose has baked a gigantic cake.”

At this, one of the boys let out a whoop. Antoinette Marie rolled her sleeves up her plump red forearms and frowned in a parody of discipline.

Father Switzer was getting serious now. He had his hand on Anastasia’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t be telling the truth, Sister, if I didn’t say we were all pretty worried about you. We spent a lot of time on our knees, especially after you had your close call.”

Anastasia closed her eyes. The reflector on the intern’s forehead had shone like the eye of a monstrance. She’d heard Beatrice say, “Is she breathing?” and then the oxygen mask descended over her nose and mouth like a new, unwanted face. A horrible face. She tried to push it away, but it fit too tightly. And now the face was hers, though no one else could see it. She opened her eyes and saw that Beatrice was watching her. She tried to smile, but Beatrice looked away.

Could Beatrice see it too?

“But God heard our prayers,” Father Switzer was saying, “and now you’re back with us and we can finally celebrate your birthday. I know we’re a few days late, but we hadn’t counted on your illness. In any case, we intend to make up for lateness with style.” Father Switzer grinned and nodded at Antoinette Marie. “Ready, Sister?”

Antoinette Marie produced a pitch pipe from her pocket and hummed the key of C. Then, flourishing her arms and vigorously mouthing the words, she led everyone through two choruses of “Happy Birthday.” When they were through, some of the children jumped up and swarmed around Anastasia’s wheelchair. “I’m so glad you’re not sick anymore,” a skinny blue-eyed girl said. “Me too,” said the boy standing next to her.

Anastasia looked from one face to another. She couldn’t remember who they were. She had been away for only three weeks and already she had forgotten their names.

“I’m happy to be back,” she managed.

Beatrice stepped into the circle of children. “Let’s not tire Sister Anastasia, children. She shouldn’t have too much excitement right away.” She turned her wrinkled brow to Camilla. “Perhaps we should have the cake sooner than we’d planned.”

Camilla looked at Anastasia. “All right,” she said. Then she turned to the children. “Let’s bring out the cake and ice cream!”

“Yay!” cried the children.

“Take your seats,” Father Switzer ordered, and the children scrambled into their places. Antoinette Marie and Rose disappeared into the kitchen.

“Are you all right?” Camilla asked Anastasia. “You don’t seem yourself.”

“I think she’s overcome with surprise,” Beatrice answered for her.

The children cheered then, for Sister Rose had just emerged from the kitchen, carrying an enormous sheet cake. Antoinette Marie followed her out the double doors, pushing a cartload of vanilla Dixie cups and tiny wooden spoons.

“Stay in your seats, children,” Father Switzer commanded. “Sister Rose, the first slice is for our guest of honor.”

They set the cake on the table in front of Anastasia. There was only one candle on the cake, stuck in the middle of waves of chocolate frosting. Rose struck a match and lit it.

Anastasia looked at Beatrice. “Where are all the candles?” she said.

“We wanted to save your breath,” Beatrice answered, and looked away.

“Come on, Sister!” some boys shouted. “Make a wish and blow it out.”

The old nun stared at the candle. The cake was so big, the candle so small. In the dark frosting, the flame’s reflection flickered, a dying star.

“Come on, Sister!”

Anastasia clasped her shawl tighter around her neck and leaned forward in the wheelchair. For a moment, everyone was silent. She felt them all watching her, waiting for her to blow out the candle, and she closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, the darkness was private and peaceful, a refuge, and she wished everything were so dark that no one could see her, not Father Switzer or the children or even Beatrice. She wished she were invisible, there but not there, a darkness inside the darkness, like Tom, like God.

“Sister?” Father Switzer said.

With an effort, she opened her eyes and looked at the candle’s puny light.

“Have you made your wish?” he asked.

She nodded. Then she took a deep breath and blew the flame out.

 

 

David Jauss is the author of the short story collections Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories, Black Maps and Crimes of Passion, and two collections of poems, You Are Not Here and Improvising Rivers, as well as a collection of essays, On Writing Fiction. His short stories have been published in numerous magazines and reprinted in such anthologies as Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards: Prize Stories, and, twice in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, three fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council, and one from the Minnesota State Arts Board. His collection Black Maps received the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction. He teaches creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Read an interview with David here.

“I Am Always in Transition When Disaster Strikes” by Vyshali Manivannan

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I am Always (Flower Petals and bugs)
Bugs, Leaves, and Petals by Karen Bell

This is what I’m thinking, melodramatic as always, while Rajani and I watch Tsunami: The Aftermath. It’s mid-October 2009, the weather is strange and warm with warning signs, and I am laying into this miniseries as I have never laid into anything before. How the camera preens the hotel guests like royalty, exoticizes the Thai people in the midst of routine: the way they slice open the bellies of fish, wait on rich guests at the luxury hotel, fold trawling nets over and over onto themselves like elaborate curtains. Everything is a portent, or a mistake. Rain dripping from a palm leaf. Birds a black spiral in the sky like snow crash. How a little girl crayons a picture of her family splashing happily in the bright blue water, when the series is told in reverse, starting with Sophie Okonedo’s character running through debris, screaming for her husband and daughter, gashing her leg open on splintered metal.

“Oh, fuck this,” I say, “Really? A fucking flashback? They started with a fucking flashback?”

We see the hotel guests dining, complaining about minor issues, and it all seems like an obvious rhetorical device. Look how happy these people are, how unsuspecting. How the story, in spite of the one Thai character native to Khao Lak, gives us a Western perspective of trauma.

Later we are shown a Buddhist temple, the grounds strewn with bodies, the monks, of course, serene in the face of death. “Helloooo, stereotype,” we say. They are seated in a prayer circle, the Thai journalist prays too, and then the white Western journalist sees they are cremating Western and Thai bodies alike and insists on taking a photo because Western people like to bury their dead. Maybe have an odd prayer or two. The Thai journalist is incensed at around the same time Rajani and I are, he snarls, You syndicate that photo, you slam us back to being a Third World Country. It doesn’t matter to you. You’re not Thai.

Later the British ambassador says, My priority is the British nationals.

Maybe this is the point.

When the tsunami struck in December 2004, I was on layover at an airport, Minneapolis, I think, on my way back to college after Christmas break, wearing jeans and winter boots and headphones blaring Dir en Grey’s “Kasumi,” and I glanced at the TV and saw CNN’s footage of the Sri Lankan coast, ravaged by water. I was standing then, my Discman popping open on the floor and ripping the headphones from my ears. People around me staring. I must have looked possessed, walking up and down the length of my departure gate, on the phone with my parents, voice shrill and rising, waiting for a word or inflection to make me believe everyone was all right.

Of course it never came. Was it then or later that I learned about a temple drifting in the current to the shoreline, a family of seven plucked from the beach? We took a picture with them when we visited. The children were small and dirty and curious. They had that look about them already, like nothing would surprise them.

When I got off the phone I went to the bathroom. Sat on the toilet with my jeans around my ankles, stared into my underwear, dug my nails into my thighs searching for pain. I thought about all the things I called mine: dorm room, laptop, bed, clothes, pencils and pens, dinner plates, prescription pills, furniture, a sorority house full of sisters, a real sister, stuffed animals and action figures, parents who loved me. When I returned to my dorm room I unfolded the Internet like an origami crane, stripping image away from image until I found the one I wanted: titled Merry Christmas, a wet slab of dirt-strewn concrete, palm frond tatters, the top half of a Sri Lankan man’s head, resting on the pavement on its shredded half-jaw. One white eye rolled open. The other shut and bulging. Had he seen the twelve-foot wave coming for him? Was he looking at it when it swept him up? Was he looking at the ground beneath him, praying each time his feet struck the pavement that they would bear him up to safety?

It wasn’t so arbitrary, surviving the wave. If you ran, you died. If you climbed, you lived. If you held on, you left it up to luck.

 

I am reading all I can about Harvey Dent, who made his own luck every time fate dealt him a bad hand. I’m mixing my metaphors now, cards and coins, but it all amounts to the same thing. Plausible deniability. Everyone gets to claim they never saw it coming.

 

On 9/11 I was in transition too. I was starting college, I was on a bus full of rising freshmen, I was making friends. We sat in the back and parodied boy bands as we rode back to the campus lodge after a class trip mountain hiking. Our bus was stopped by through-hikers and we groaned because we were starving, we thought the bus had broken down. We couldn’t see or hear anything, but suddenly a hush cloaked the entire bus, and our chaperone got back on and stood at the front. The World Trade Center has been hit by two planes, she said. If you live in New York, we’ll arrange transportation for you once we get to the lodge.

It was on her face, that look.

I was born in New York. I didn’t buy it. But a girl who lived in Soho started to cry.

For the rest of the ride I looked out the window and tried to remember all the movies I’d seen where the towers defined the New-York-at-night skyline. I couldn’t remember any. There was no television at the lodge, so it wasn’t until we got back to our dorm rooms the next day that I could pull up the footage online, and read the accounts of people who survived, or who were so close when the planes hit they claimed they could see, amidst the black smoke and flames, the shapes of human figures leaping to their deaths.

This disaster turned everyone into me: people searching for reasons and patterns in anything, trying to make the tragedy theirs. Satisfying their urges with the numbers 9 and 11, which made for an answer better than We have always been vulnerable. 911 is the emergency hotline, they say; or 9+1+1=11, which is the number of martyrdom in the Koran, or 19 al-Qaeda terrorists plus 4 planes minus 3 buildings hit is 11 again, and the number 911 is a Sophie Germain prime and an Eisenstein prime and a Chen prime, and whatever that is it has to mean something, right?

Read backwards, as 119, it can be plucked from Biblical Hebrew with number theory to mean the perfect sacrifice.

 

They say most people remember where they were when they first hear of national tragedy. One of my grade school teachers told us he was in sixth grade, in class, when his teacher made the announcement that Kennedy had been assassinated. His teacher, a man, was crying, and that impressed him more than the fact that the president was dead. Class was dismissed early, and he treated it like a holiday except when he got home his parents were crying too.

Kennedy died on November 22, 11/22, which added together yield 33, the age of Christ at his death.

When ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka exploded into war I was four months in the womb. The year was 1983. As many as 3,000 Tamils were killed in organized massacres. My parents, Tamil, stayed in America. The street number of their address was 33. I was born on November 13, 11/13, which added yields 24, a semi-perfect number, the number of hours in a day, and the age I was when the bus bombings in my parents’ hometown became newsworthy. When the tsunami struck I was 21, coming of age, able to drink and vote and go solo to R-rated movies. Four months prior I had almost drowned.

4. 9. 11. 13. 21. 24. 33.

When we know what we want them to mean, we always force the numbers to work.

 

I didn’t cry for 9/11. Not for the tsunami. Not even for the bloody end of Sri Lanka’s civil war. The only time I did was in January 2009, when I read the full text of newspaper editor Lasantha Wickrematunga’s posthumous essay about journalism, politics, risking your life for the truth, accepting that for this you will be killed.

The line where he says: No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism… Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened, and killed. It has been my honor to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

And I had tried to kill myself for so much less.

 

For months after the tsunami, I found myself singled out by white people, standing in line at the grocery store, for the bus, for a seat at my favorite diner, asking, “So what do you think about the tsunami?” as though there is anything to think. I’ve been asked this about the end of the war, too, by a woman who on the same breath added, “It was so hot when we traveled there for the first time; we were so uncomfortable!”

No one asks this about 9/11. It’s an American tragedy. This makes it global. We all know how horrific it is without having to ask.

 

Toward the end of the second half of Tsunami, the British ambassador says: While no one will forget what they have seen over the last six days, out of tragedy has come the most astonishing resilience and strength. The overwhelming love and care of the many volunteers who have been brought together by this sequence of events, and the extraordinary selflessness and compassion shown by the people of Thailand to perfect strangers has been very humbling. I’m proud to have been a part of this. None of us will go home the same.

The mini-series was filmed on location in Khao Lak, Thailand, one of the hardest-hit areas, to the protests of victims and grief counselors who thought it was too soon. It was filmed and released in 2006, barely a year after it actually occurred. Others thought it provided employment, could help speed up the healing process, raise awareness. They recreated part of a hotel to destroy it, and then used a hotel that had been rebuilt since the wave struck. They may have used amateur footage of the wave.

My problem is that it seems to say that not all victims are equal. The only Asian character, the only one who loses everything, family, house, job, land, is sidelined by the foreigners’ grief.

It’s equally true that when I first heard about the tsunami I was waking up at home, groggy and uncaffeinated, to the sound of a CNN anchor talking about tragedy. No mention of airports or razor blades. And I remember, just as distinctly, huddling on the couch next to my mother on the morning of December 26, she in her housedress and me in my ratty plaid pajamas clutching my coffee mug as it slowly cooled.

Maybe, my shrink says, You saw a clip on the news the following week, when you were on your way back to school. It made the top headlines for a long time.

If I think too hard about it I’m no longer sure if I saw the amateur footage of the wave or the aftermath flashing across the airport TV screens or the decapitated head of a man who looked like an uncle who’d already died. Or when I heard about my kid cousins pointing out the corpses washed up and floating on the veranda. Or if I even did.

You have a right to your feelings, my shrink says.

Do I? I was never there.

In the end Tsunami is what I have been constructing all my life: a composite of fiction and fact, real location, special-effects waves, real photos, characters inspired by real journalists, survivor stories, footage that could have been lifted from the camcorders of hotel guests and workers, who filmed the wave unsuspectingly, though even if they’d recognized it for what it was, it probably wouldn’t have saved them. But it is, apparently, the only way the story can be told.

 

 

Vyshali Manivannan is a Ph.D. candidate in Media Studies at Rutgers University. She has published and presented scholarship on comics and animation, Internet subcultures, and the value of transgression, most recently in Fibreculture. Her first novel Invictus was published in 2004, and she has also published work in Black Clock, theNewerYork, Consequence, and DIAGRAM.

Read an interview with Vyshali here.