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.

Row of Petals, image by Karen Bell

As usual, you’re late. You take the wooden stairs two at a time, round the landing, and stop in front of the director’s office, where you gulp air and try to look confident. (It doesn’t work.) Then you knock. Nobody answers. You dither in the hallway for a second, then decide to wait for her.

Once your eyes have adjusted, the office is frighteningly venerable. Shelves and shelves of voluptuous bottles glow in the afternoon sunlight, all shining with their own importance. The empty Jim Beam black label might have come from the grocery store down the street, and there’s even a whole row of PBR cans, which is surprising, it’s so mass-appeal and pulpy. But then there are the true exotics that let you know you’re in the Workshop director’s office: emerald-green absinthe bottles with necks like lamps. A diamond-shaped blue flask, almost knee high. A series of tiny bottles that look like they should hold perfume. All of them beautiful rarities, and all of them expect something of you.

You sit down at the long wooden table, run your index finger around one of the many beverage rings. It occurs to you that hundreds of people have sat here before and many of them have never been successful. You’re very late. It seems impossible that she could be this late too. You are just starting to really panic when something thunks against the door. When you open it for her, she blinks in surprise, then says, “Hello! I almost forgot we were meeting!”

It’s still really strange to see her in person, but today, she looks nothing like her black and white photos. Her arms are packed with what’s got to be student work: cans clank in an empty 30-rack of Rolling Rock, and a 40 of malt liquor is tucked under her elbow. She lets all of it tumble in a pile next to her desk, then opens a drawer and pulls out a fifth of Absolut. The Director pours four fingers into a glass, adds ice, then tops it off with a splash of kiwi juice and some strawberry-flavored Sobe water from the little refrigerator. It’s an innovative, gorgeous combination, and frankly you are filled with jealousy.

“Just got to finish this up for this afternoon,” she says. “Deadlines, you know?” and she rolls her eyes conspiratorially.

You thank her for seeing you. “I’m having trouble.”

“Mm-hmm,” she says, sitting down behind the desk, neither confirming nor denying what she knows. And so, for the first time, you start to talk about your problem.

“Sometimes I set out to, you know, start early. The way the really successful people do it.”

The director raises her eyebrows. She has pulled a square of knitting out of her bag, but somehow it’s not stopping her from sipping at her cocktail.

You forge on. “You know – you know how it goes, right? You just get in the store right when it opens, pick up bourbon or rye or whatever. At first it’s great, it’s going like gangbusters. You just sip away at it, little by little, just like the manuals tell you to.” You point at the empty Bulleit Bourbon on her shelf. “Last workshop, right, I thought I’d finish one of those. Just something real classic, mixed with a little coke, over ice, in a nice glass, savored on my porch. I’ve got a great porch.”

“Aren’t porches nice?” she murmurs, rounding a row.

“But you can’t drink all the time. You’ve got to take a break. There’s sort of a digestive process in which you set it aside, give the old stomach a rest, mull it over….” You sound like you do when you’re teaching. She nods.

“Me, though?” You gulp, and your stomach starts to churn like it did around 4 am last night, when you knew you had to see her. ”This keeps happening. Every time I’m up. Like, I buy the thing, but I get a few sips in, barely a dent, and I – I just become convinced it’s all wrong.”

“Huh,” she says.

“I think, like, this isn’t what I’m meant to be drinking. It’s not me. And I just get disgusted with myself, and so I start out on some other project. Beer mixed with lemonade in Hickory Hill Park, say. Or… six Long Island Iced Teas at the gay bar, washed down by Jack and Coke. Or something exotic, really exotic…”

She finishes the sentence. “Absinthe, or something.”

“Yeah, like absinthe.” Or something. “So – so I start off on all of these projects, and then sooner than I realize workshop is coming up, and I panic, because though I’ve, you know, started a lot,” you’re exaggerating, “I’ve finished nothing. Sure, I’ve gone to Prairie Lights a few times, just to be seen drinking, but what do I really get done there? Just a Houndstooth or two…” The truth is, it’s getting oppressive on your porch. The open bourbon bottles are gathering dust, and the red wine is filled with odd chunky flakes. “The morning I’m due, I panic. I open the same bottle of bourbon I started with, and just resolve to really do it right this time.”

She sighs, understanding. “And then you have to finish the whole thing, and you’re too wobbly to get down to Rye House, and your friend has to pick you up.”

“Literally.” Has she been watching you? “This isn’t how it’s supposed to work, I think. And once I get there, here’s the worst part, I think it’s all gone, I’ve done what I needed to do, but once we’re sitting around the table, I look at the bottle in my hand and it’s, like, two-thirds of the way there. It’s not even finished, and I can’t even sit up straight. All the while there’s Ethanol Grainin sitting across from me, two bottles in and he’s fine, he drank them on the treadmill this morning for God’s sake…” You breathe.

Sam Changover nods. She bites her lip, then lifts the knitting from her lap. Somehow, while you’ve been talking, she’s knitted an entire baby sweater. Then she looks at you, and she says, “Have you heard of Arthur Pullock?”

Politely, you say, “What?”

“Arthur Pullock,” she says again.

It’s like that time her agent asked you which drinkers you most modeled yourself after, and it was like your mind had nothing in it. You just opened and closed your mouth for a minute and then what came out was “Amy Winehouse” and the agent laughed and said “Sure, if the singing hadn’t gotten to her…”

Finally you say, “Nope.”

“Well.” She finishes the cocktail, then pours another. “Not many have. But I think you should really look into his work. You’re from Minnesota, right?”

“Er, Wisconsin, yeah…”

“Well, Pullock was Minnesotan, and your stuff kind of reminds me of him. He did a really interesting body of work with bourbon in the fifties. Look him up – he just, he drank in a lot of fascinating places,” and she spins for you a narrative of Pullock’s ability to swig bourbon in the bath, while plowing, while copulating, to stay out in bars til half past three even though the town was a dry town and the speakeasy closed at ten. “He was just– so forceful with his habits. Of course, you’re young, I’m not expecting you to…”

“To be a Winehouse,” you say. “Or a Churchill.”

“Of course not – you’re young. But really: look into Pullock. And we’ve got a lot of cool drinkers coming into town for the festival, maybe you’ll find a role model there.”

You breathe, because she’s not quite getting your problem. It’s not like you need more inspiration. You’ve been to John’s, you’ve seen the wall of possible drinks – the problem isn’t drinking them, it’s finishing them. And the worst are the times when it just all becomes too much and you pull out a notebook – then, when you look at the clock, it’s five a.m. and you have a drunk due at noon the next day and you don’t even care.

“Can I borrow a beer?” you say. “Sorry, I just want to get something down.”

“Of course,” she says, and she rummages around and hands you a cold PBR.

You click it open and take a swig. And sure, it feels right, the way it did when you were just a kid, sitting in your mom’s garage, but it doesn’t come as easy as – as other things. “Professor Changover, can I be honest with you? I’ve got – I mean, I think I’ve got – a writing problem.”

She furrows her brow.

“I mean, I don’t think this is insurmountable, not at all,” you assure her. “I was born to drink. It runs in my family, my mom could’ve gone pro if she hadn’t had to support us.”

“Of course. You’re in at the Iowa Drinking Workshop,” she murmurs. “Best program in the country.”

“Yeah! And I know a lot of famous drinkers have writing problems. I mean, I saw the series downtown last year, and half of them were just reading through all of it. One guy got so excited I didn’t see him pick up his gin-and-tonic once in the second half, he was that into reciting some epic poem.”

“Hm,” and she sips carefully around the little umbrella. “Well, they do seem to go together, writing and drinking.” But you know she’s never had a problem with it. Maybe she’s thinking of the really successful drunks in your program – the ones who maybe, like, write a page or two in the company of others, but then they go on home, finish their twelve-pack for workshop, then start a bottle of wine, two. Just as a side project.

“I’ve got to confess,” you say, your throat gulping, “that it’s bigger than that.”

She looks up.

“See… I spent… just a lot, a lot of my stipend this year on it.”

“Mmm.”

“I know. I got the Mel Gibson fellowship and that meant you expected so much of me, and really it’s just weighing on me, how badly I’ve disappointed you. But what am I supposed to do, left alone with two thousand extra dollars?” You croak, “I spent it on a… a really nice desktop.”

It’s waiting at home. It’s got an extra monitor, even. You are such a hedonist. You wait for her to fire you.

“Look.” Sam Changover places a hand on yours. It’s cold from the drink. She says, “If you’re serious about drinking, well, it will find a way. But there’s only so much we can do for you, you know? When it comes down to it, the only person swallowing those quirky little cocktails is you.”

“Silly derivative fluff,” you choke.

She smiles. “Look up Pullock. Sometimes you’ve just got to drink through the derivative stuff in order to get to what you’re really meant to do.”

Though you’re swallowing beer over the lump in your throat, you cannot help but feel inspired. You suppose she’s the Drinking Workshop director for a reason.

“Well,” you say, your voice quavering, “at least I’m not turning in the crap my students do. The other day, I had a girl show up for workshop with, like, four half-drunk cans of Miller Lite. Can you beat that?”

“Sometimes you teach them, and sometimes they teach you,” she says, unraveling the sweater and starting over again even though it looked great the first time.

Jessie Hennen recently received her MFA in fiction (and other subjects) from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before her time at Iowa, she worked in Munich, Germany, first as a nanny and then as a marketing project manager. Her work has or will appear on The Millions.com, in Untoward Magazine, Fiction365 and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She is currently at work on “Flight,” her first novel.

Yellow Grass Field, Chromogenic Print by Karen Bell

Hoa leaned down and snatched another stem. Her fistful of flowers was leggy, tattered, but brilliant. Gold, orange, red. Just seven years old, she stood in the center of the path, her toes sunk into the fine pale dirt. She waved the flowers at me.

“Jaymes-man,” she called. “You take picture?”

Earlier in the week I’d let her wear the thin leather camera strap around her neck and take pictures of her father and mother, her aunts and uncles, the cooking fires, the rice fields, earthenware bowls of pho, even me. I’d developed the film and made enough prints to share. From each, faces peered, looking down, laughing, pointing. In one, Hoa’s grandmother offered a bowl of steaming noodle soup, fogging the lens and catching the moment before everyone squatted to eat. In another, a baby brother was hidden under his mother’s blouse, the blur of his small kicking feet a contrast to his mother’s silent gaze. And one without faces, only cumulus clouds, sunlight, a sweep of green grass and purple cattails.

Assigned to my battalion as a photographer, in the field I carried the Kodak I brought from home, a dozen film canisters, an M-16, ammunition, and a pair of canteens. I’d signed on as an infantryman, but my CO caught wind of the camera, decided I was better suited to capturing images than VC, and put me in charge of changing the mood. “I’m talking morale, Williams. Get these men’s fucking bravery and honor covered; you’ll do better there than covering their asses.” Stars and Stripes published nearly everything I gave them, only a tenth of the photos I took. The other percentage was out of focus, or out of bounds, the negatives sealed in envelopes and filed in heat-resistant boxes.

It was Year of the Rat, and we all became water rats, sinking in rivers and rice paddies, my camera and film bag held above my shoulders along with my rifle. We had wit and curiosity, and we were nervous and aggressive. Tagging along behind the point man, itching for a fight, smoking in order to stay quiet. Waiting, listening. I measured my steps, I refocused, I balanced my load, so much smaller than some. The light meter gave me a reading; I adjusted the viewfinder; I pressed the shutter release, advanced the film, and just as quickly discovered the next image, a fraction of the field before me, the picture as contained as the war was wide.

Sometimes you have to go away to come back.

My orders were to honor men and make them noble by documenting their actions. “Now let’s get this straight, Williams! We are not talking about combat. We are not talking about the goddamned beauty of the battlefield. We are talking about survival and making sense out of this mess.” My orders were to look through a lens into men’s souls. “These are not your friends, goddammit! These are heroes. Make it so.” My orders were to hump into the hills with my own platoon, with my own rifle, with my own canteens and 35 mm camera, but not with the lump in my throat that came from seeing and hearing and disbelieving.

I tried my best, and still, the CO kept on yelling.

“He just loves you, Williams, bro,” Shields promised. “He just wants to get all up inside of that sweet shiny lens himself.”

“Why don’t you get some pictures of the girls for us, Jamesy-boy?” McPhee licked his fingers and squeezed one eye closed, as if he were aiming a camera instead of an M-60. “Slide up under some ao dai and see what they have to offer.”

I did take pictures of women, in silhouette, from afar. Women in yellow, red, white ao dai, like flowers, their long black hair swept under their conical hats, shadows over their faces. They walked through the markets and called out to the merchants, laughing, taking green papayas into their arms, silver fish into their baskets. Sometimes they looked at me—me trying to frame their eyes, their burdens—but mostly they looked away.

I was the grunt, the new boy, the one chosen to shoot pictures, rather than people.

The children in the villes found me curious and stared and followed me when their elders let them. Children standing at the front gate of a school, waving and calling out until their teacher called them back inside. Children in flooded rice fields, their trousers pulled waist-high, catching crabs and small fish. Later these same fields were flooded with light, that of the moon and artillery fire, the petals of water lilies scattered with the scales of dead fish, the carcass of a buffalo calf, and men’s bodies hidden beneath the tall, silent grasses.

I’d heard about the bamboo jungles, tigers that appeared shining like bright butter in the forest when all was quiet. I’d heard of the meadows of poppies, opium available in rooms above the bars in Saigon, an long arm’s length away from Long Binh Jail. And I learned there were tunnels that reached under the earth for miles and miles, and pits covered in thatched grass to hide the punji stakes. Firsthand, these became my education, better than that of a classroom, and I memorized each breath of each day, laden with salt from the salt tabs in our packs, laying low under sniper fire, old timers telling me to stay down if I wanted to see the sun set.

“Williams Jaymes-man,” Hoa said. “You come home soon?”

I had been in country for barely a month and had almost the full tour still in front of me.

I knew how to fish in Florida mangrove swamps. Hunting for Charlie was something entirely different. The underwater roots of the Vietnamese mangroves hid leeches, not bonefish. Straight from the bottle I had my first taste of backwash whiskey, on the banks of that brown-water stretch of river, in a downpour that outclassed any thunderstorm in the Keys. No matter the tropical heat, I shivered under the standard-issue rain poncho, in a daze of fever and confusion, not sure whether to hold my rifle or camera.

“You got to take your Monday pills, baby boy,” Shields said.

Monday pills. CPs. Chloraquine-Primaquine. Anti-malaria pills. Another standard-issue item that hadn’t gotten lost in the mail between boot camp and the boonies. I had been given the dosage, same as everyone else.

I shook harder, and Shields raked me with his stare.

“You think you’re going somewhere, Williams? You ain’t going nowhere, man. You are staying right here in this shithole, just like the rest of us.”

McPhee was bad enough; Shields was worse. Shields was bad news, trippin, kick-em-til-they-die crazy, one re-up too many. Sly slept with one eye open, Torchdog with the other eye shut—partners in crime. Tibbs wrote in a notebook that he rolled up inside his sleeve after each entry. Baker hummed under his breath, and hid a harmonica in his pack. Mankiewitz kept quiet and then kept us all guessing.

Mankiewitz, who in the middle of one already miserable sodden night, sent incoming our way by yelling, “Come over here and light up my landing zone, Little Miss Saigon!”

The same night Shields broke down and kissed the ground one final time. The same night marionettes danced in the jungle and not just in my mind. The same night the rain spiraled down in strands, like those beaded curtains in that one-time bar. The same night poppies grew from my chest and bloomed bright and vermillion right there in the mud. The same night the dust-off flew out one KIA and one WIA.

“Jaymes! You go away long, long time?” Hoa stood on the road and waved her flowers. I held up my camera, but didn’t wave back.

Karin C. Davidson‘s stories have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Passages North, Post Road, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Lesley University, Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, and awards including the Orlando Prize for Short Fiction, the Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, and the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her fiction has been shortlisted in several writing competitions, including the Jaimy Gordon Fiction Prize, the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition, and the UK Bridport Prize. A chapbook of her story collection was a finalist in the 2012 Iron Horse Literary Review Single Author Competition. Originally from the Gulf Coast, she also writes at karincdavidson.com.

Read an interview with Karin here.

Female Statuary – Versailles, Chromogenic Print by Karen Bell

She sleeps with the bedroom door open because her children have night terrors. It’s how Nina hears the intruder in the hallway. Less than a week in this new house and they’ve found her.

The clock/radio says it’s 4:08 AM.

Nina planks in bed and bites her tongue to stop from yelling: waking her son and daughter in the next room would just get them killed, too.

The recent spate of death threats ricochet through her mind. She left Guatemala before but work drew her back. Thirty-four years old and she doesn’t want to die like this, not like this, not when she’s finally making a difference.

Already it’s too late to search for a weapon and the intruder pauses in the bedroom doorway shapeless as spilt ink, then clumps his steel toecap boots across the yawning floorboards toward her bed, lighted now by the claret haze of the clock/radio, this man stands to her right and leans his face toward hers. He wears no mask. Wants her to see him. The whites of his eyes full-moon bright, glossy as hardboiled eggs.

No point calling the Policía Nacional Civil because this man is a uniform-wearing officer. He’s one of the You-Don’t-Know-Me. In every level of government. Used to be the Civil Defense Patrols back when the death squads operated with impunity.

He leans closer, their faces almost touching now, and stutters hot breath on her wet skin.

He has eaten hotdog. Drank guaro.

The officer moves back a step, towers over Nina, studies her supine form wearing panties and bra, too hot at night in this house to have sheets. She moves her hands onto her belly, covers what little she can. And waits.

4:12 AM.

4:16.

4:20.

He leaves.

Oily cologne lingers.

~

Nina stands at the kitchen window and watches vehicles conga line at a roadblock. Mixed Army and PNC on patrol. A daily occurrence.

Eight-year-old Jairo and his younger sister Flor are sitting at the breakfast table.

“Was someone here last night?” Jairo asks.

Nina moves a wall of black hair behind her shoulder. It’s middle-parted like a grade school teacher’s, and everything about her features seems crumpled like an overworked checkout operator, everything except her espresso-dark eyes.

“Yes, a man was here.”

“Did you know him?”

She bites her lip and turns back toward the window and the tears are hot and wild in her eyes.

Jairo stabs the fried egg on his plate and mops the yolk with a corn tortilla. Flor pastes refried black beans on her tortilla but gets most of it on her hands. Nina wets a dish cloth under the tap then remembers the water isn’t safe and instead uses a wet wipe.

“Does this mean we have to leave again?”

~

“This is 2005,” the caller says. “It’s almost nine years since the ‘96 peace accord. The only thing changing is everything’s getting worse. More people poor. More Mayan farmers killed and displaced.”

The line clicks dead.

Nina’s morning show on Radio Universidad, nine-to-noon daily, has no one waiting on the switchboard to speak. When she started a year ago, there were always too many. But the recent trouble, the murders, has scared them off.

“The terror structures remain as they have during the war,” she says into the mic. “Operating with impunity. Their members hold key positions in political parties, the Supreme Court, the media. Unless we fight for reconciliation through truth, this evil will never leave our country. Our memories, your voices, are the only way we can ensure history does not repeat itself. These evil people are hidden and they think that because we don’t know who they are they’re safe to keep doing what they’ve been doing forever. But we know who they are. We know.”

A switchboard light blinks with a caller.

“I was there in 1982 when Montt’s military personnel attacked my village, Dos Erres. Montt was looking for Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes. There were none. We were ladinos, mixed white. A small village with two churches, Catholic and Evangelical. Carlos Antonio Carias, the army commander, gave us a proclamation. Join his civil-defense patrol. We refused. Two hundred and fifty were slaughtered, men, women, and children. I was twelve. They let me live because I was lighter skinned and have green eyes…”

He stops speaking.

“How did you survive?”

He weeps, chugs like an engine turning over. The call ends.

“Without strong individuals like that we will never know the truth… Our next caller, please, take your time, tell us anything you want.”

The woman says, “What makes you qualified to ask these things?”

~

Nina’s father dies in an accident. He’s a university professor. Her mother is distraught, has five children to provide for. Nina is nine.

She’s thirteen and in the library. Researching. Nina always asking questions. She finds an article about her father that says a death squad entered the college and cut down seven professors, knocking them like bowling pins, and it happened out in the open for all to see. Her father was murdered.

Her mother, traumatized by the incident, has lied all these years.

Nina graduates from university with a degree in journalism. She still has no way to get the truth about her father out. She goes to the biggest radio station. Nothing.

For three months she pursues the director of Radio Universidad. She gets a meeting.

“Your listeners need to hear someone young, a woman.”

He laughs. “And who is that going to be?”

She smiles and raises her hand as if answering a question at school. “Me!”

~

“Some records suggest that over two hundred thousand, mostly Mayan, lost their lives during the civil war. But no one knows for sure. We need the victims, those who have witnessed, endured and suffered to call in and tell us their story. The truth is the only weapon we have.”

~

Nina enters Jose Miguel’s office. He’s the editor of Prensa Libre newspaper, has thick plummy lips and a solid eyebrow across his forehead like it’s been drawn with an eyeliner. He is sitting on the edge of his desk, waiting for her.

“I’m worried you’re making too much trouble for yourself.”

“It’s the truth.”

He lifts a printout of her previous article and reads: “Since 2001, in just four years, a thousand women have been murdered. Ninety percent have been raped first.”

“I have a daughter. I don’t want her growing up in a world like this.”

“If she ever gets to grow up.”

Nina pulls back her hand to slap him. He doesn’t blink but his cheeks redden.

“I shouldn’t have said—”

“Maybe I should just run back to the US?”

He places the printout on the tabletop. Sucks his teeth while he thinks. “This other article you have sent me…” He lifts another printout. Scans through it.

Civil Defense Patrols. Paramilitary groups. Countless murders. Control of supreme court, customs, immigration, import/export, the drug trade. Refusal to be dismantled as per the 1996 peace accord. Evidence of terror structures still operating with impunity as they had done during the civil war. The main difference: instead of acting directly for the state, they now have free reign. Powerful enough to have breached political parties and the media.

“I would ask you not to publish it,” he says.

“Are you scared?”

“Nina, the fallout from this will be terrible. You would need to leave Guatemala first.”

~

Nina kisses Jairo’s forehead; he sleeps with his thumb in his mouth. Flor clutches a stuffed lion. Nina watches her sleeping children for a long time in the hard light of the naked hallway bulb. Their breathing is slow and regular like ocean waves.

She steps into the hallway and the rough-sawn floorboards creak.

“I don’t want to move again,” Flor says. Nina faces her daughter but she has rolled onto her side and is looking away. “I’m tired of moving.”

“Is the man coming back tonight?” Jairo asks. “I can stay up and keep guard.”

~

“Are you not afraid?” the caller asks.

“I’m terrified.”

“You have a family. Do you not worry for their safety?”

“I had to publish the article,” Nina says. “And I can’t keep running. None of us can keep running.”

“What if they take you?”

“They won’t,” she says. “I’m in the public eye. Media attention is keeping me alive. But the people I ask to call into this show, the ones without protection, they’re the one who are in danger. Calling in, telling what happened, that takes courage I don’t have.”

~

Nina is at a market stall.

“Licuados en leche. Sin hielo.”

The man next to her is staring. He’s watching her and is making a point of letting her know he’s watching her. She avoids eye contact, snatches her fresh fruit shake and rushes off.

The man follows.

She darts through a gaggle of students.

Outside the market, Nina crosses the street. She checks to see the man is gone and takes a breath. She had forgotten to breathe. A police officer collides with her and she clatters to the pavement. A young couple come to her aid, demand to know why the officer did this. The officer spits on the ground and sets his hand on his holstered pistol.

Nina springs to her feet and runs.

~

The single room hut is constructed of bare blocks and contains two beds for five people. A single rack of shelves behind a curtain contains everything Nina owns, everything she could grab before fleeing her home. There’s a single bare bulb for light and a portable TV in the corner with aluminum-foil rabbit ears. The kitchen is outside and has a wood fire. Water for the pila comes from a hose in the street.

Jairo and Flor are playing in the backyard. It’s walled in. Relatively safe.

The day after Nina’s article appeared in the Prensa Libre, her radio show was canceled. Intimidation escalated. Bullets pinged her car. She was uninjured.

“I have nowhere left to go,” she says, “nowhere to turn. I can’t go outside because they’ll find us.”

The man who has come to help her doesn’t respond, keeps watching out the window, scrutinizing the street.

“I want to leave,” she says. “You can get me and my family across the border?”

“You have friends here,” Eliseo says. “We have arranged a meeting with Amnesty International. They want to help, maybe they can make you into a spokesperson. The others won’t dare hurt you then.” He carries a holstered sidearm and they have arranged to take turns manning the perimeter.

~

Lunch is a chicken taco and a little pile of shredded lettuce topped with two slices of tomato – all that ever passes for a fresh garden salad. Nina is getting used to it. In the US they had a never-ending array of vegetables, but here they are surprisingly rare.

“You have been staring at the lettuce for an hour.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Get the story out,” he says. “Same as you always have.”

“But there’s no radio station. No newspaper.” Her hands tremble. Couldn’t help but think about her father, how hard it had been to get to where she was, to get her story out.

“You already have a radio station. And a newspaper.”

She glances at the laptop which was given to her by an anonymous friend. There was no box and the charger was from a different model.

~

Hello Dolly.

The first post on her blog is about Nelson Hernández López, an indigenous union and campesino leader murdered on return from a protest march.

An hour later, a reply to the post reads: It doesn’t matter if the guerrillas were going to turn Guatemala into another Cuba. Rape, torture and murder of all civilians, whether they supported the guerrillas or not, is indefensible. Montt must be brought to justice and tried for these abominations he carried out on behalf of the state.

Nina receives an email: Encarnación Quej, indigenous Tzutuhil leader, is murdered by masked men on his way to work today. She broadcasts the news on her website.

More emails. Gerónimo Ucelo Medoza, leader of the minority Xinca indigenous group, is murdered and five colleagues kidnapped. They are still missing. The group had been demonstrating against mining operations by a Canadian company.

The next day, Nina starts Familiares de Desaparecidos which is a forum in memory of the disappeared. She writes, “After decades of questions without answers, and a growing list of victims, we create this forum so that the memory of the disappeared will remain. Their stories will be remembered.”

She conducts an interview with the New York Times: “Forced disappearance in Guatemala still happens. In fact, it has expanded. And it relies on silent collaboration. It’s a means of social control and political dominance which has gained the power of impunity because of the vast political and commercial powers that finance and conceal these crimes.”

~

Knuckles rap the door. There is always someone knocking. Nina opens it. Outside is an injured woman, a woman who has come from the protest at Cuatro Caminos intersection. Her head is bandaged with a man’s white cotton shirt and there are freckles of blood. She wants to speak about the army killing unarmed protesters. Today it is a friend outside but Nina knows one day they will come for her, same as they did for her father. At least she will know who they are.

Michael McGlade grew up in an Irish farmhouse where the leaky roof didn’t bother him as much as the fear of electrocution from the nightly scramble for prime position beneath the chicken lamp, the only source of heating in the house – a large infrared heat lamp more commonly used for poultry. He has had 36 short stories appear in Green Door, J Journal, Ambit, Grain, Downstate Story, and other journals. He holds a master’s degree in English from Queen’s University, Ireland. You can find out the latest news and views from him on McGladeWriting.com.