Category Archives: Essay

“Jury Duty” by Len Joy

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Jury Duty Eclipse 1998

“Eclipse” by Suzanne Stryk 1998

Prologue

The last time I served on a jury was in 1977. I was an alternate. For two weeks I drove to felony court in Harvey, Illinois and listened to testimony in the case of the State of Illinois v. Melvin Thigpen. Mr. Thigpen was charged with abducting a high school girl from cheerleading practice, driving her out into the country, where she was raped, thrown into a ditch and shot three times.

The state laid out their evidence. For two days we heard testimony from police, evidence technicians, and medical professionals. Some of the witnesses were clear and precise, others fumbling and inarticulate. The evidence was delivered without emotion or drama. On the third day we heard from Carly Simmons. She was the victim.

Carly was poised and soft-spoken, but her voice carried, perhaps because it was so quiet in the courtroom. She had given the police artist a detailed description of her assailant. The sketch that the artist created bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Thigpen.

Carly described how she had been grabbed in her high school’s parking lot, held at gunpoint, and driven off into the country. She described the nubby texture of the car’s upholstery and the paisley pattern of her assailant’s nylon shirt. She explained in extreme detail how she was raped and then dragged from the car and thrown into a ten-foot drainage ditch. As she lay in the muddy ditch, she heard a gunshot and felt a burning sensation in her side. Then two more shots. One bullet hit her in the thigh and one grazed her neck. She played dead, and after several seconds she heard the car door slam and the sound of spitting gravel as her attacker drove off.

When she had finished testifying, the State’s Attorney asked if the assailant was in the courtroom. Carly looked at the defense table, raised her arm, and pointed to Mr. Thigpen. Her face betrayed neither anger, nor hate. She was not afraid. She was serene, triumphant. She had survived and now she had her day in court. That was thirty-five years ago.

The next five days of the trial were taken up with procedural arguments and we spent much of the time in the jury room, not discussing the case. The defense took one day to present their case and we listened to impassioned closing arguments by both sides before the judge gave us his instructions. The jury was escorted back to the jury room and I, as an alternate, was sent home, like one of those Survivor contestants who don’t make the grade.

The next day I called Ron, the foreman of the jury and an insurance adjustor for Allstate who I had lunched with on several occasions during procedurals. He told me it had taken them three hours to find Melvin Thigpen guilty on all charges. There had been no dissent among the jurors, except towards Ron who insisted they go through all the evidence before they voted.

For weeks I checked out the local news to see if there was a report on Thigpen’s sentence, but there was none. I figured I would never learn what happen to Melvin Thigpen.

Ten years later I was reading an article in The Wall Street Journal on career-development in prison. In their lead they featured an inmate in the Joliet Correctional Facility named Melvin Thigpen, who was serving fifteen to twenty years for rape. The Journal writer reported that Mr. Thigpen had become an accomplished watercolor artist.

 

Jury Duty – The Notice

Last month I received a notice from the court that I had been selected for jury duty again. In the intervening years I had been called several times, but was never needed. Just as well. I had bought an engine remanufacturing business in Arizona, which consumed all my time. It would have been difficult to be stuck on a jury for two weeks.

But my work schedule these days is more flexible and I wouldn’t mind serving on a jury in Skokie or even in the Loop. The notice indicates I’ve been drafted for criminal court on the southwest side, thirty miles from home. When I call in the day before, a recording tells me that if my last name starts with the letter D through M, then they want me. So I cancel my Friday activities – spin class and a personal training workout – and figure out when I need to leave the house to make it to the courtroom by 9:30 a.m.

 

The Questionnaire

Jury notice includes a questionnaire, which we are to fill out and bring with us. They want to know such things as age, occupation, marital status, age of children, whether we have ever been convicted of a crime, or been a party to a lawsuit, or whether we have any family in law enforcement. And the last question is whether we or any member of our family has been a victim of a crime. I have to think about that.

When I had the business in Phoenix, we were the victims of crime every week. Our plant was in a rough industrial neighborhood. Scavengers would scale the razor-wire fence and dump our valuable engine cores so they could steal the wood pallets. Most of our employees were honest, but like any business, a small percentage was not. Our trusted core buyer embezzled $50,000 and one of our financial managers falsified borrowing certificates.

Those weren’t trivial offenses, but they are nearly forgotten. What I remember from those fifteen years is the murder of Alma Hernandez.

Alma was eighteen years old. She had just started working for us as a piston installer. One day in August her ex-boyfriend came by during the morning break and asked to see her. When she met him in the parking lot in front of our office he shot her in the head and then made an insincere effort to shoot himself, but missed. One of the customer service reps rushed to Alma’s aid, but she died before the paramedics arrived. There were over a hundred employees at Alma’s funeral.

I know it was Alma and her family who were the victims of that crime, but her murder touched everyone in the company. Even so, I decide it doesn’t qualify as a crime against me or my family so I check the “No” box.

 

The Commute

There are six million people between me and the Criminal Court building. Half of them are on Interstate 94. It’s a one-hour drive if I leave at 6 am, but then I’d get there before the building opens. I roll out of my driveway at 7:30. It takes ninety minutes, but I’m sitting in the Jury room by 9:10. I’m the third juror to arrive. The lady at the front table takes my questionnaire and hands me a sheet of paper identifying me as part of Panel 3. I take a seat in the back behind the vending machines, next to the window.

 

The Vending Machine Challenge

I’m ten feet from the coffee machine. I know the coffee will suck, but it smells really good. The machine is complicated. There are different sizes and the usual choice of sugar or cream-like substance or decaffeination. There are a bunch of options for flavoring the coffee with hazelnut or maple or chocolate so it won’t taste so bad. I just want black. The coffee is hot.

A few minutes later, a stout black woman, who has squeezed into jeans several sizes too small, approaches the snack machine. She stares at the selection of chips and cookies and candy and looks very confused. Finally she turns and mumbles something at the professional-dressed young lady who is tapping on her laptop at the table next to me. The woman stops tapping, but doesn’t look up. “I don’t know,” she says. She sounds unnecessarily harsh, and maybe she realizes that because then she adds, “Sorry,” but the other woman has already turned back to the machine.

I look for someplace to perch my coffee so I can help her, but then I hear the sound of Doritos falling from their hook into the bottom of the machine. Vending success achieved, the woman ambles back to her seat.

 

The New Yorker

I have two dozen unread novels on my Kindle and I’ve brought five magazines, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. I could be sequestered for a year and not run out of stuff to read. All I really need is The New Yorker. It has everything. I always check out the short story first. As I’m thumbing through to the story, I see an article about a convicted hit man serving a sixty-year sentence.

It’s a typical New Yorker feature. About twice as long as it needs to be, but fascinating. The hit man is candid with the reporter. He describes his crimes in great detail. He worked for drug dealers who hired him to kill other drug dealers. He just walks up and shoots them. Several times. Other than the fact that he has committed, by his count, a dozen murders, he seems like a nice guy. Good family man. Doesn’t do drugs or alcohol. Loyal to his wife. Devoted to his five-year-old daughter.

 

The Call

At 11 a.m., a young man in a wrinkled suit stands at the front of the room. He delivers a speech that sounds memorized. He thanks us for showing up and plays a video about what to expect if we are called for a trial. My panel is called. They line us up in two rows, like a kindergarten class, but instead of marching us to our courtroom we are told to go to lunch and report back at 12:45.

 

Act of Kindness #1

I opt for the cafeteria on the second floor, grab a roast beef sandwich, chips, and a lemonade. The woman from the vending machine is two ahead of me in line. She has eight dollars’ worth of food and hands the cashier four crumbled one-dollar bills. The cashier, a pleasant-faced white-haired lady tells her she needs more money, but the woman just frowns, confused. The cashier hesitates, then smiles and waves her on through. She tells her she will take care of it, but the woman doesn’t hear her.

 

Act of Kindness #2

The lady in front of me gives the cashier an extra dollar. “For that woman’s bill. That was a very nice thing you did,” she says. The cashier thanks her.

 

The Courtroom

After lunch we’re escorted to Courtroom 206. It looks like a small chapel, with stone walls and windows on the west side. It’s bright and cold and the acoustics are bad. The judge tells us we have been called to serve as jurors in the trial of William Bancroft and Ronnie Washington. The two men have been charged with first-degree murder. The judge explains that Mr. Washington will have his own jury, but for some of the testimony both juries will be present.

The judge introduces the bailiff, the court clerk, the stenographer and the three state’s attorneys – two men and a woman. The judge introduces Mr. Bancroft and his two attorneys. The defendant, when introduced, turns to the jurors (we’re seated in the gallery) and says, “Good afternoon.” He’s a young black man. Good looking and fit. He wears a dark suit with a white shirt and tie. He looks more professional than the two male state’s attorneys, who both have a stubby, rumpled Chicago-pol look. Actually, he looks a little bit like the hit man in The New Yorker article.

Bancroft’s lead attorney looks like Linda Hunt, the diminutive actress who plays the boss on NCIS: Los Angeles. Hunt always plays smart characters and I find myself thinking that Bancroft has a good lawyer.

 

The Judge

The judge is affable and also sort of rumpled, but robed, which helps. He acknowledges the room’s poor acoustics, then does nothing to help us hear him better. He talks fast and has an unusual cadence so it’s hard to realize he’s asking us a question until he finishes and says, “Anybody have a problem with that? Okay, no hands, no questions. Moving on.”

He asks us to stand to be sworn in. A juror raises his hand. Glasses, salt and pepper short-cropped hair. Earnest. Sort of a bookkeeper look. “Your honor, no disrespect, but I can’t take an oath.”

The judge sighs. “Can you affirm?”

The man repeats that he can’t take an oath.

“Whatever,” the judge says. He is clearly annoyed, but moves on to his next order of business, which is the pep talk.

 

The Two Brians

The judge tells us a story about two Brians. One, we’ve heard of, Brian Urlacher, and one we’ve never heard of, Brian Anderson. Long story short, one day the judge is watching television and sees Brian Anderson get off a plane returning from Iraq. He’s a triple amputee and his message is, “Life is good.” The judge tells us if Brian Anderson, with all he has endured, can have that kind of attitude, then we jurors have no reason to complain about the inconvenience of spending a week on jury duty.

It’s a good point. Perhaps he might try to slant it a little more positively. After all, none of us have complained or raised any problems (other than the guy who can’t take an oath). It takes the judge ten minutes to tell us the story. When he finishes I’m still waiting to learn what happened to Brian Urlacher. I decide not to ask.

 

The Lottery

There are sixty jurors in the two panels. The judge shuffles the questionnaires and picks fourteen. I’m the third juror called. There are eleven women and three men. When the recording asked only for jurors with last names from D to M, I wondered how that might affect the jury pool. None of those great Chicago names that start with Z or W or X are in our pool. But the fourteen of us called are a cross-section of Chicagoland. We are Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, Black, East Indian, Hispanic; employed, unemployed, retired; a tattooed biker, a white suburban dude (that would be me), a PTA lady, an insurance adjuster, and a legitimate blonde babe wearing tight-fitting jeans with lots of holes in the thighs.

The judge interviews each candidate. If we are married, he wants to know our spouse’s occupation. If we have married children he wants to know what their spouses do. He asks what we watch on television, how we get our news and what we read. No one has been the victim of a serious crime, although the biker had a cousin murdered twenty years ago.

The judge asks me what kind of work I do. I tell him I’m a writer. I figure this is not the time to share my angst over whether I should call myself a writer or say that I’m TRYING to be a writer. He asks me what I write and I tell him I’ve written a novel about a minor league baseball player. He asks me who it is, and then he says, “Wait, you said it was fiction. Never mind.” So I miss the opportunity to plug my book. Then he asks me what I’ve been reading. I suppose technically I should reveal that I’ve been reading about the hit man from Detroit who looks like the defendant. But I don’t. I just say fiction and the judge moves on.

The woman who had trouble at the vending machine is one of the fourteen selected. He asks her if she has ever been on a jury. She huffs something that sounds like it might be yes. He asks her if she reached a verdict. She doesn’t say anything. He frowns at her for upsetting his timetable. “Did you listen to testimony and decide whether the defendant was guilty or innocent?” She still doesn’t say anything. Finally he concludes she was just in the panel but had not been selected. I think he’s probably right, because I can’t imagine anyone accepting her as a juror.

We are given a ten-minute break while the judge and the attorneys go into his chambers to discuss us.

Thirty minutes later we’re back in the jury box waiting for the judge and lawyers to emerge from the judge’s chambers. The judge instructs us to follow the clerk to the jury room and says the clerk will read a list of those who will be given a check and dismissed. Those not called should report back to the courtroom at 10 a.m. on Tuesday to begin the trial of Mr. Bancroft.

My guess is they will keep everyone except the biker, vending machine lady, the black woman who said she read the bible every night, and maybe the Indian woman who ran the mini-mart with her husband.

Biker dude is the first name called. He smiles and wishes us all a happy week as he takes his check. The next name called is the blonde with the nice jeans. I have to admit I’m a little disappointed—she could make a good character if I write a story about this experience. The bible-reader goes next. And then the clerk calls my name. She hands me a check for $17.20. I feel like I’ve been fired. Vending machine lady makes the cut.

I am disappointed, but after two hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-94, I start to feel a vague sense of relief. Someone – from the defense or the prosecution – decided I wasn’t a good choice to sit in judgment of William Bancroft.

I think they’re right.

 

 

Len Joy lives in Evanston, Illinois. His novel, “American Jukebox,” about a minor league baseball player whose life unravels after he fails to make it to the major leagues, will be published by Hark! New Era Publishing in 2013. His blog, “Do Not Go Gentle…” chronicles his pursuit of USA Triathlon Age-Group Championships. In June 2012 he completed his first Ironman at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

**Note: All the names were changed, except for Melvin Thigpen’s.

Read an interview with Len here.

“Hiding from Breast Cancer” by Stacy Lawson

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Hiding from Breast Cancer. Little Wing

“Little Wing” by Suzanne Stryk, 2005

Home Breast Exam

I handle my breasts in the shower more than an adolescent boy touches his penis. I pretend that I am just washing. I make a round sweep with soap from the outside of each breast to the center, a gentle squeeze of the nipple, up under the armpit and down the side. This is my version of a no-stress home-breast exam. I reason if I wash daily, I’ll notice any lumps, bumps, or changes. Will I?

 

Stage Fright

Before awareness, there’s a dawning, a sliver of a line between not knowing and knowing—enough space for a dim light to seep in and expose a threat not yet seen, heard, smelled, or spoken. I can’t remember when I first heard the words breast cancer. I’m guessing that it was discussed in whispers before I had breasts or even breast buds. Maybe it was when Phyllis, a close family friend, died from metastatic breast disease when I was ten. I don’t remember anyone telling me that she was sick or that she was dying or that her sickness started in her breasts with a cluster of cells that turned into a lump; this was well before mammograms became a yearly event.

Odd, when you consider that I grew up with a one-breasted bubbie. My mother’s mother lived to a well-ripened age of 91 with a lone plump breast that dangled to her waist and sat opposite a red- and white-scarred flatland, and, yet, I never connected my grandmother’s missing breast with Phyllis’s death.

I recall my grandmother leaning over a white industrial bra and dropping her long breast into the deep cup and nonchalantly tucking a beige pad into the other side. I never asked after a second breast, and no one mentioned that she had once had two. Now, breast cancer would be obvious, but 45 years ago, there were no pink ribbons, pink rubber bracelets, breast cancer walks, postage-stamps, tins of tea, and bottled water screaming out grave statistics.

Back then, breast cancer wasn’t discussed in stages that sounded algebraic—Stage 0, 1, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 3C, and 4, or more typically as Stage 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. Stages are a shorthand way of discussing severity and survival with few words: Stage 0-1: Very good odds. Stage 2: A little worse but very doable odds. Stage 3: Serious. Stage 4: A life sentence with no cure possible.

I wonder if my grandmother’s cancer was staged as doctors refer to the process now. Would she have been a Stage 1 or a Stage 2? Before the mid-60s, mammograms didn’t exist; any lump or bump was biopsied. Clusters of abnormal cells were studied under the microscope. My 84-year-old mother wonders if her mother had cancer at all.

When I was eight or nine, I had a Barbie doll, a Stacey doll, my namesake, or so I wanted to believe. She was a top-heavy straight-haired platinum blonde who couldn’t have been further from my Russian-Jewish genes. Stacey, like Barbie, was sexy if you were into plastic. She was manufactured from 1968 to 1971, which coincided with my infatuation with top-heavy dolls, and measured an impossible 39-18-33—a body that appears naturally only once in every 100 000 women. It’s hard to believe that Barbie, the ultimate shiksa, was created by a Jewish woman, Ruth Handler. (Handler had breast cancer and invented right and left prosthetic breasts. Makes sense. We wouldn’t wear our left shoe on our right foot. Yeah, Ruth!)

Alas, my physical blueprint is closer to a matryoshka, a Russian stacking doll, than to a Barbie. I wonder if dolls will ever be made with a single breast to reflect the reality that some little girls and boys will see when their mothers or grandmothers disrobe in front of them.

 

Once Upon a Time

In Egypt around 1600 bce, breast cancer, described as ulcers of the breast or tumors, was first detected. Centuries later, doctors began to understand the circulatory system and linked breast cancer to the lymphatic system, the sprawling super-highway of lymph nodes (key agents for infection control), which runs throughout the body. In the 18th century, scientists discovered that this super-highway could also spread disease like a reversible lane on a modern freeway. William Stewart Halstead performed the first radical mastectomy, termed the Halstead radical mastectomy, which involved the removal of the pectoral muscles, all breast tissue, and the underarm lymph nodes; this was supposed to reduce the risk of the cancer spreading. Halstead radical mastectomies were routinely performed until the 1970s, when Rose Kushner was diagnosed with breast cancer and refused the one-stop biopsy and mastectomy surgery that had become standard practice. The journalist challenged the invasive, disfiguring surgery, which had been used for 70 years with no scientific evidence to back up the practice.  She made breast cancer into a political issue and pushed for legislation that would offer women choices in treatment. She pushed for coverage of annual mammography by Medicare. She pushed for more dollars for breast cancer research. Her work lead to the change in protocol from the Halstead radical mastectomy to the modified radical mastectomy

Kushner figured out that not all breast cancers are equal. Could my bubbie’s breast have been spared? Was this a matter of your breast or your life, ma’am?

Science and medicine march forward at an unnervingly slow pace, and we wait, holding our breath, having few other options.

 

Patricia Calderon

Patti was my best friend from age 12 on. Sex-crazed boys at the Turkish synagogue where we hung out on Saturday afternoons teased her mercilessly for her large breasts.  She wore high-neck t-shirts and sweaters, careful never to show cleavage until she was nearly a middle-aged woman. She refused to hide behind frumpy blouses like the other girls with unseasonably large breasts. Behind her back, the boys came up with a long list of breast terminology­—twins, tits, sisters, headlights, hooters, coconuts, casabas, cantaloupes, boulders, berthas, melons, and knockers­—while they made smacking sounds with their mouths and squeezing gestures with their hands. “Vavavavooom!” They’d explode when Patti or another amply developed girl came into view.

Who knew then what her future would hold?

 

Offerings

On the same day that my younger son, Shiah, was born, my friend Bobbie’s sister, Tina, died of breast cancer. Tina had offered up both breasts to the stainless-steel surgical altar a few years earlier to no avail.

At three-days old, Shiah was the color of a watery-yellow bruise. He was diagnosed with severe jaundice, which required another hospital stay for treatment in the neonatal intensive care unit. While he was laid out like a plant in a light box­ until his bilirubin count dropped to a normal level, he drank far less milk than I produced.

I pumped my breasts every few hours, placed the bottles of milk in the pockets of a flimsy hospital robe, and smuggled the liquid gold into the maternity ward where I skirted around the nurses on my way to visit my friend Johanna who had just given birth to her fifth child. Smiling, I pulled out my still-warm milk and offered it to her. Johanna had had a bi-lateral mastectomy, both breasts removed, four years earlier during pregnancy. Her third son was delivered early a few months later, so Johanna could undergo aggressive treatment for aggressive breast cancer.

Five days after Shiah was born, Patti’s mom called. Patti, of large-breasted fame, at age 42, was on her deathbed in Manhattan. She had been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer in her late 30s. Her medical team had urged her to have a complete mastectomy. She had opted to have one breast removed and take her chances.

A few days later, Patti’s mom called. Patti had died. I was sitting cross-legged on the couch, nursing Shiah, talking to my in-laws and my husband. Noah was next to me, his shirt flipped-up while he nursed his doll named Baby.  I shook and sobbed uncontrollably. I wiped my nose with my sleeve and tried to pass Shiah to Steve, but Shiah was clamped to my nipple, not yet finished with his afternoon tea.

 

Who Knew that We knew?

Rachel Carson began writing Silent Spring, her epic environmental book, in the late 1950s. It traced the path of the chemical agent DDT through the food chain to humans via land, air, and water. She concluded that DDT was causing cancer and genetic damage. Her book was serialized in the New Yorker in 1962, a year after I was born, two years after Patti was born. Initially, no one was interested in Carson’s work despite the fact that she was a highly respected author. Her ideas were so out of line with the prevailing knowledge that they were dismissed as if Carson had lost her way, if not her mind.

Shortly after Silent Spring came out, Monsanto, the multinational agriculture biotech corporation, and the producer of the herbicide Roundup, published a parody of Silent Spring called Desolate Winter, which aimed to discredit Carson’s work. Monsanto asked what would happen in a world where bugs, famine, and disease ran amok because of the elimination of DDT and other pesticides. Did anyone in the Press question Monsanto’s motives? Where were all of the other scientists who knew better? Was there other conflicting research that was hidden or stifled? Did money change hands? Was the threat of cancer so little known back then that it didn’t ring any alarms? How many times has the same scenario unfolded since then? How many dissenters, like latter-day prophets, have tried to get our attention and failed? Rachel Carson died at age 57 in 1964 after a long battle with breast cancer.

From 1960 to 2003, the rate of breast cancer rose 181%. According to a 1993 study by the National Cancer Institute, “breast cancer is strongly associated with DDE (a form of DDT) in the blood.” In the early 70s, DDT was banned in the US; decades later, traces are still found in the environment, the bloodstream, and breast milk.

Because of the many changes that must occur to make healthy cells cancerous, breast cancer can take up to 30 years to develop. Why did it take science decades to conclude what Carson knew in the early 60s? Who knew that we knew so much back then?

My personal list of breast cancer tolls and loses rolls continuously like credits at the end of a movie. My mother-in-law had ductal carcinoma in situ a few years after Shiah was born. In April 2007, two friends, Anna and Little C, were diagnosed with breast cancer. Three more breasts removed. In 2008, my friend Sarah got a call after her mammogram. She had calcification sites. A biopsy followed. Thank God no breast cancer, but because she has dense breast tissue, she will likely repeat this cycle many more times. In 2011, my friend Em was diagnosed with HER2, an aggressive form of breast cancer. Soon after it was my friend Ren. Now, my dear friend Gee is recovering from a lumpectomy. My friend Maggie is waiting for the results from her surgical biopsy after having 2 mammograms, an ultrasound, an MRI, a needle biopsy and then the surgical biopsy. She waits. We wait.

Consciously and unconsciously, I recite the Hebrew phrase from my childhood, b’li ayin hora, literally translated as “without an evil eye,” an incantation that I use to protect my two small breasts and all breasts. I know far too many women whose shirts lie against flat chests, dented chests, foam, silicon, or saline. I wonder who declared this war on women.

 

No Matter what You Call It

Four years ago, Jules, one of my favorite students, came to a yoga class I was teaching for cancer patients, survivors and their caregivers. She wore a pin that said, “Not yet dead,” from Monty Python’s show Spamalot, which she had seen in Las Vegas with a group of women who were living with metastasized breast cancer.

Many of my students have or have had breast cancer.  The stages and diagnostic names sound industrial and mechanical, as if named by an engineer in a steel plant: ductal carcinomas in situ, lobular carcinomas in situ, Paget’s disease, ductal and lobular carcinomas, inflammatory breast cancer, angiosarcoma and cystosarcoma phyllodes, estrogen-negative cancers and triple-negative cancers. Breast cancer, the catchall phrase, oversimplifies the highly variable disease, the treatment options, the side-effects, the variety of outcomes and chances for survival, recovery, and recurrence.

Jules has lived with metastasized breast disease for ten years. In 1999, she was diagnosed with Stage 2, a diagnosis that she thought meant she’d be fine after treatment, but it didn’t work out that way. Three years later, she had a sore leg, which felt like a pulled muscle. An x-ray showed extensive bone metastases in both of her femurs. An MRI revealed she had metastases in her skull.

When Jules arrived to class with her Monty Python pin, we wanted to laugh and cry in the same moment. Jules spoke our fears when she said, “I sometimes wonder when the other shoe will drop.”

 

Reaping and Sowing  

Washington State is known for apples, asparagus, airplanes, wheat, timber, coffee, computer genius, marijuana, and BREAST CANCER. According to the Center for Disease Control, women in Washington State (me) have the highest rate of breast cancer in the nation. Typically, we delay childbearing (me) or skip having children altogether. We drink more alcohol (not me). We absorb less vitamin D due to lack of sunshine, and more of us use hormone replacement therapy to beat back the effects of menopause­—all of these factors are known or thought to increase the risk of breast cancer.

Ashkenazic (Eastern European) Jewish women (me) have a higher rate of breast cancer than the general population. Five to ten percent of all women with breast cancer have a gene-line mutation gene. The genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 when normal and healthy protect breast and ovarian cells by being tumor suppressors and ensuring genomic integrity. Genes, made up of thousands of DNA letters that run down the DNA double helix, can become delinquent, dangerous, and deadly with the deletion of a single DNA letter.

Long, long ago, when Jews were called Hebrews and wandered in tribes through ancient Israel, DNA letter 185delAG was accidentally dropped; but unlike a stitch in knitting, we’ve not been able to pick it up, and it’s been a deadly error. Translation: Women with the BRCA1or BRCA2 gene have up to an 82-percent chance of developing breast cancer by the age of 70.

A few months ago, I went to the doctor for a sinus infection, and for a dreaded round of antibiotics. My doctor rifled through my chart as though looking for something she had lost.

“I don’t see your last mammogram here.”

“I had one last year with my annual.”

She turned a few more pages and said, “You haven’t had one since two thousand and eight.”

“Shit! Are you sure?” I was stunned. How could I of all people have missed even a single mammogram? I looked at my doctor thinking she had misread my chart.

“Really” I asked again.

She nodded. “Really, two thousand and eight.”

Women and some men will continue to be diagnosed with breast cancer each and every day and each and every year. I see breast cancer in part as a collective karmic return for environmental misuse, arrogance, lack of awareness, and greed, but it’s also an opportunity for change. As we pollute and defile our world or watch others do it, and pass it off as an unavoidable complication of modern life, we suffer and rack up negative karma. Karma is the cause and result of our actions. Think of it as a self-perpetuating loop that can be stopped if we take action. To believe that things have to be the way they are, to believe that we have no choice, to believe that we are stuck with what we have, is to live without hope.

 

 

Stacy Lawson is a yoga instructor and writer living in Seattle with her husband, two sons, and dog. She is the founder of Red Square Yoga, a by-donation studio focusing on therapeutic yoga. Stacy’s work has appeared in Under the Sun, Drash Northwest Mosaic, The Seattle Star, and Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers.

“Horizon” by Cary Waterman

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Horizon (Househunting)
“Househunting” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

“Pursuing the horizon without interruption inevitably
prohibits landfall, harbor, home…”
~Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry

I go to the apartment roof alone and always look west, inland toward the lime-green hills of the Connecticut valley in spring and summer, and the burnt colors of fall. I could have looked east – over the tenements and factories of Bridgeport to Long Island Sound and Seaside Park with its bathhouse and rocky beaches. I could have looked to the sunrise, but didn’t. I looked west, the horizon unreachable, enclosing and not enclosing. What was beyond those hills? And what was I really seeking, up on the roof of the four-storey apartment building alone, walking boards laid down over black tar?

~

I am a fat, fingernail-biting girl—bloody nails, flabby arms, thick unruly hair that will not lie flat. I go to the edge, look down, imagine falling, then flying. It is not impossible. I would jump. And I would fly. Or at least somersault and land on my feet. There are pigeons, roosting. Slate-grey birds with feathers the color of an oil slick. One day in third grade, the boy behind me taps my back and when I turn he holds out the severed pigeon head he has made into a finger puppet on his dirty hand.

I wear the apartment key on a string around my neck. Once I lost the key and my mother was sure someone would find their way to our apartment door even though there were hundreds of doors, each one identical to the next. After that, I would go to another apartment after school one floor up where ‘Aunt’ Maude lived and wait there for my mother. Aunt Maude had a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary in her bedroom. The Virgin, hands outspread, stood on the earth, her feet crushing the snake. I wanted a statue like that. Aunt Maude also had a bright red kitchen and Victorian loveseats and chairs. It was all so neat. Once I arrived at her door, legs crossed, needing to pee. I ran to the bathroom, leaving a trail of mud I would have to get on hands and knees later to clean up.

~

I was not afraid on the roof and to this day I’m not sure why I didn’t jump. I was surrounded by other brick apartment buildings, each one a colossus along Washington Avenue. The Sanford, where one-eyed Peter’s father was the Super. And the Fleetwood, where Joe Black’s mother worked. He was older than most of us kids and had dark eyes and black hair. One day he offered to ride me on his bike all the way to Seaside Park but I was afraid of him and ran away. He was taken away one night after he chased his mother up and down the halls with a butcher knife and was sent to Newtown, the hospital for the insane where my mother threatened she would end up if I didn’t behave.

My mother told people we were Cliff Dwellers, hoping to evoke /images of Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, not the ruins of the Anasazi. She said this to give an air of luxury to the fact that four people (mother, father, brother, and me), one collie, one parakeet, and, for a few months, two rabbits that ate the kitchen linoleum were crammed into a one-bedroom apartment. This was the same apartment my parents had moved to as newlyweds, and the apartment in which my brother and I (and our stillborn sister) were conceived, and the apartment our father returned to after his Marine glory days stationed in Honolulu during WW II, eligible for the GI Bill providing low-cost home mortgages with no down payment. But we did not buy a house. We looked at houses. We spent decades of afternoons and weekends driving around with realtors. But my mother would not choose. Something was always wrong. A hill in the backyard where there could be mud slides. Not enough windows. Too many windows. Way out in the suburbs. Too close to the city. Not a colonial. Not this…not that. No, no, no, no. I begged and pleaded. I cried for my own room. No. No. No. Finally I gave up. The apartment became my mother’s (and my) particular hell where I would live until I was eighteen and left for college. This was also the year my parents would finally buy a house.

~

Our building was U-shaped, two gargoyle wings jutting from the entryway. It had once been fancy with brass railings and a lighted foyer with a bank of mailboxes, each with its own little key. But the building was beginning to run down. The white subway tiled floors weren’t washed as often. The Super spent most days in the basement by the coal furnace with his cronies sitting around and drinking beer. He had cordoned off a little clubroom with a card table and chairs and hung girlie calendars on the walls. Everything was dirty and when I went to the basement to get my bike, if he was there I’d look away as I passed the pinups. If he wasn’t, I’d stop and stare, titillated by the fleshy women, breasts and buttocks spilling out into coal dust.

In our apartment, the first room off the hall was the bedroom where my brother and I slept opposite each other in twin beds we had to sidle around. My mother slept on the couch and my father on a roll-away in the living room. For a long time there was a crib in the bedroom with a mesh top that could be latched to keep a child in. It was used for clothes storage. There was also a baby carriage jammed up against my bed. It too was filled with outgrown stuff. Every spring my mother would drive a load to the Little Sisters of the Poor but the piles continued to grow and consume the room. The closet was packed and had over-the-door hangers on both sides for more clothes to hang.

The bathroom was the only room with a lock. I spent a lot of time in there, protected by the lock on one side and the bubbled window on the other. I would stand on the edge of the bathtub and look at my breasts in the mirror over the sink. Compare myself to the pin-ups Mr. Haskell had in the basement.

The living room had a couch, two tiered maple end tables, assorted chairs, a dining room table, the old black telephone, a high chair and playpen when my brother was little, a black and white TV, and the folded-up bed where my father slept. My mother would paint this room several times when my father was gone for the weekend skiing, always making it darker and darker from tan to hunter green to finally, maroon.

At Christmas, my father and brother would lay down a big piece of plywood in the middle of the living room for my brother’s American Flyer train. He had boxcars and coal cars and a log dump car and a red caboose and a station that lit up and an engine with a horn and a headlight that could blow smoke. I can’t remember how we navigated the living room at Christmas, the four of us and the dog, the decorated tree, the train going around and around.

~

Perhaps my mother, a petite redhead, enjoyed the attention of the realtors. This idea that only occurs to me now makes my mother’s inability to buy a house more acceptable. These men were obsequious, if frustrated with her. She was lonely, and, as she often told me, felt unappreciated. There was power in being the potential buyer, even though she never bought. Her favorite was Mr. Ryan. She drove around with him looking at houses for twenty years. I remember one of the hundreds we looked at. It was a brand new split-level and had wall-to-wall carpet, a mudroom, and a balcony in the living room where you could look down when you came out of your bedroom. But there was a hill in the backyard, not too close to the house. What was over that hill? My father, who rarely came with us, liked this house and he and my mother fought about it. She said who would want to come into a house through a mudroom. And what about mudslides from that hill? For some reason I have forgotten, I took my mother’s side in the argument and can still see the disgusted I-give-up look on my father’s face. I remember it because I knew at the time I was wrong, that the argument was not about the house. It was about power and I was playing sides and the side I wanted to be on was my mother’s. But why? Or was I just arguing for the sake of argument? Arguing to see if I could win. My father used to say I would make a good lawyer. But really, it was all about losing.

~

The U-shaped apartment roof was covered with a boardwalk that led to laundry lines. Cold December afternoons, my mother, her hands angry-red, would ride the elevator carrying her wicker basket of wet laundry, then climb the last flight of stairs to the roof to hang our clothes, sheets, and towels. She would curse coming back later to find the laundry covered with black dots of soot from the big chimneys that heated the building and made the radiators clang. She cursed about a lot of things—my father’s drinking, my ungratefulness, my loud voice, my taking up too much space. Judas Priest was her favored expression and one that, attending Catholic school as I did, confused me. When she was really angry she’d threaten to leave and take my brother but leave me with my father. We were alike, she said. We deserved each other.

~

I never had friends come home with me. Through high school, I met my dates outside on the street and kissed them goodbye in their cars. I never invited anyone to the roof. There was a shelter up there with a bench facing predictably east, sunrise, new day. I sat there one night with my father after another violent argument with my mother, perhaps the one when I kicked out the glass of a mirror that was propped up against the cramped bedroom wall. I stormed (or fled) the stifling apartment, ran down the dirty hallway to the elevator, pushed the button and rose up before climbing the last flight of stairs to the roof. My father came up later and sat with me. He said my mother was changing. I don’t know if he actually called it the change of life. I wouldn’t have known what that was. But I was changing, too. My mother would dry up as I was beginning to bleed every month into possibility, my poor father in-between us, a fulcrum of sorts, except that he would become more and more absent to Ski Club meetings or bowling at the Algonquin Club before adjourning to the bar.

I could not be patient. I loved my mother. And, I hated her. I was surrounded and adrift. After my father and I looked out to the sea and he tried to reason with me, he left and I turned to look west. What was out there, all those miles and miles of fields and hills, all that landscape? And finally, all that horizon which did not seem a limiting thing, the curve of a bowl, the furthest circumference. It seemed instead possibility, freedom, escape.

 

 

Cary Waterman is a poet and creative nonfiction writer. Her published books
include The Salamander Migration (University of Pittsburgh Press), When I Looked
Back You Were Gone (finalist for the Minnesota Book Award), and, most recently,
Book of Fire (finalist for the Midwest Book Award). Her work appears in many
anthologies including A Geography of Poets, Poets Against the War, The Logan House
Anthology of 21st Century American Poetry and 150 Years of Minnesota Poetry. She
has won awards from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and the
Minnesota State Arts Board. She has had residencies and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre
in Ireland and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches in the Augsburg College MFA
Program.

“Cry Like My Wife” by Paul Austin

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Cry Like My Wife (Flying Carpet)
“Flying Carpet” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

The surgeon holds out a gloved hand, palm up, and says, “scalpel.” He makes a smooth, long, incision across my wife’s belly, below the umbilicus, and above the pubic hair. Skin spreads. The thin layer of fat glistens yellow. Small red dots appear along the edges of the skin. One spot blossoms larger, and blood trickles into the incision. The surgical assistant touches the spot with the electrocautery pen, and there’s a tiny blue buzz, and a small puff of smoke. The incense of burned blood.

The latex gloves have smears of red, but not enough to make them slippery. The exact and silent movements of the surgeon and assistant become more urgent. They dissect and tug. Grip and cut. Down through the muscles of the abdominal wall, grasping, stretching, and digging quickly, down to the hard purple muscle of the uterus. Then there’s a pause, followed by a low transverse cut, and a gush of clear fluid that sloshes out across table. The room is quiet, save the slurping sound of the surgeon’s hand plunging into the belly, up to the wrist.

The surgeon gropes around, blindly finds the head, and then pulls upwards, wrestling the baby out through the wound.

~

Sally is in a bed in the recovery room. I’m standing next to her. They’ve taken the baby somewhere. Dr. Gage[1] pulls the curtain open, and the guides in the aluminum track make a clicking, clattering sound. He’s taken off his OR hat, and his forehead has a red arc across it. His green scrubs have dark sweat stains under his arms.

“I checked on the baby,” he says “Congratulations. She’s beautiful. She seems healthy, had great APGAR scores.” He pauses. “She has two small heart murmurs – probably a small VSD and a patent ductus.”

Sally and I are both medical people, so we understand – two small holes in the heart.

I take a deep breath. Maybe it won’t be too bad. The VSD may close on its own. Same with a patent ductus.

Sally turns her head a few degrees to the side, keeping her eyes on Dr. Gage.

“We’ll get an ultrasound of the heart,” he says. “Make sure.” His voice is gentle and clear.

“And?” Sally says.

“She has Down syndrome.”

Sally shrieks. Fists at her side, neck veins bulging, she takes a big gasp of air, and screams again.

Sally’s wailing fills the room. Her face is ugly and red. Cracked lips open wide.

My heart beats fast. I lean down, and place my forehead next to hers, hairline to hairline.

She continues wailing.

I keep my head touching her head. Her screaming is full throttle.

Her gasps for air become more frequent.

I close my eyes.

~

A nurse brings the baby into the recovery room, to feed.

“Do you want to hold her?” the nurse says.

I shake my head.

Sally reaches out. “Hello, Sarah.” Sally’s voice is musical, and hoarse from the screaming.

Sally grabs the bottom edge of her gown, pulls it up, and tucks it under her chin. Her breasts are swollen and heavy, with faint blue veins visible through the pale skin. “Let’s see how we do,” she says.

The nurse watches as Sally grasps her breast.

“Farther back from the nipple,” the nurse says. “Sarah needs to get a big mouthful.”

Sally holds Sarah close, and brushes the baby’s cheek against her nipple.

Sarah opens her mouth wide, like she’s yawning, and Sally pulls her into her body.

Sally smiles.

“Like a pro,” the nurse says.

I let out a pent-up breath.

Sally looks down at Sarah. In oil paintings of the Madonna and Child, the light is soft, and the shadows softer, and breastfeeding looks peaceful and quiet; it suffuses a radiant calm. But surrounded by the pastel stripes of this too-bright cubicle, this meeting of saliva and skin, milk and tongue, is a slurping, grunting, air-whistling-through-the-nostrils affair. And it’s a cold bright light that shines down on this baby.

~

It will be twenty-two years before I cry for my daughter like Sally did. It happens while I’m at a writers’ conference working on this book. I’m in a workshop taught by Nick Flynn, a writer I have long admired. He assigns an exercise in which we cut our manuscript into chunks of text – actual paper and scissors – and rearrange them. The empty spaces are supposed to open up our minds. At first, it seems precious – gimmicky. But Nick’s writing is so brave and clear, I decide to give it a try: see if it works.

We’re at The Atlantic Center for the Arts, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. About two miles inland, the Center is a small cluster of buildings, all redwood siding and angled rooflines jutting into the sky. The buildings seem to float in a sea of plant life – the spiky fans of palmetto palms, wild magnolias, scrub oaks and Spanish moss. The illusion is enhanced by the weathered wooden walkways between buildings. Without the waist-high railings one might expect, they look like piers, jutting into the lush green foliage.

Our workshop meets in a small and narrow library, with two walls of books, and two walls of windows. For this exercise Nick has arranged for us to use one of the artists’ studios. It’s a large open room with a concrete floor, natural light, and five long tables splattered with paint, giving the place a Jackson Pollock feel.

I start out calmly enough, laying out two rows of blank paper, stark and white against the reds and blues and yellows of my workspace. I glance around, and my classmates are all busy cutting and taping. I enjoy the summer-camp feel of the activity – the absorption of scissors and tape.

I cut several paragraphs free, and spread them out onto the pages. They look like chunky fortune cookie slips. So much white space and so few words. I glance at my classmates’ work. They have more pieces of text, and they are all busy moving the pieces around, rearranging them. My pages look bare. I turn to Nick, who is pinning pieces of a poem onto a wall. “Can we use pictures?”

He turns. “Sure. Whatever helps.” Turns back to his work.

I go to the computer center, and print off pictures of the things I’ve been writing about. Three portraits of John Langdon Down, the “father of Down syndrome.” He’s wearing a frock coat and a black bowtie. Two photographs of Jerome Lejeune, the scientist who first discovered the extra twenty-first chromosome that causes Down syndrome.

I print out the karyotype that Sarah’s geneticist gave me after she was born. It’s an eight-by-ten photograph of her chromosomes all lined up two-by-two, except for the twenty-first chromosome – it has three. I print a snapshot of Sarah, dressed up as a wicked princess for Halloween. Another photograph of Sarah, 22 years old, living in a group home. She’s sitting between two framed movie posters – one with Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor skipping forward in yellow slickers, umbrellas twirling – Singing in the Rain. In the other, Audrey Hepburn poses in a slinky black dress, neck encircled with diamonds and a tabby cat, black gloves all the way up to the elbows – Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I place these pictures on the near-blank pages, and step back from the table. Stare at the pages. Try to let the process work. I lean forward to jot a note to myself in blue ink on the white page. Stare some more.

The picture of Sarah’s chromosomes entirely fills the page. I lean down and write, “This picture looks so big. So real.” I look over at a snapshot of Sarah. It looks so small there, askew in the corner of an empty page. It hits me that from the day she was born, I’ve seen a diagnosis instead of a daughter. This strikes me like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree. I feel as if something in my chest has been riven – my aorta torn away from my heart, or my trachea ripped free from my lungs. I do not know my daughter.

I feel tears coming. I leave, pushing thorough the door of the studio, and out into the sun. I make it partway down the unrailed walkway. But this feeling in my chest is too big to control. I jump down into the bushes, pushing alongside a building, the branches scratching my face, vines catching my feet, crying, and sobbing, till I come to deck, a bare platform without railings. I stop and wail. I am undone. Unhinged. Bereft. I hear my howls swirling out of my body and into the air. The shrieking finally slows to sobs. I become aware again of the sand under my feet, and the thicket I’ve stumbled into. I take a gulp of air. The breeze is soft against my face. The trees sway gently.

“Are you okay?” I hear someone call from the walkway, a disembodied voice coming through the tangle of plants.

“Yes,” I call back. I take a deep breath. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” I say. “Thanks.” I hold my breath. I don’t want anyone to see me.

I hear a few footsteps on the wooden pier, and then a door in the building I’m standing next to open, and then close. Fuck. I’ve been wailing right outside someone’s workshop.

I blow my nose on my fingers, and sling the snot into the bushes. I wipe my fingers on the cuffs of my jeans. Wipe my face and cheeks with my shirtsleeve. I feel empty inside. Clean.

I push through the bushes back to the walkway. No one is there. Good. I climb up onto the walkway. Find a bathroom. Splash my face. Dry it.

The studio is empty: they must’ve gone back to the library. At my table, I stare at the photograph of Sarah, and gently straighten it on its page, glad that it’s not too late. My daughter will forgive me. It’s the way she is.

I walk back to the library. The group is sitting around the table. Nick looks up.

Thought we’d lost you,” he says. “Did you go to make more copies?”

“No,” I say, gesturing outside. “I was needing to cry.”

He looks at me and nods, as to say, “that sometimes happens.”

I feel calm and expectant, like that glittering moment right after a thunderstorm, when the trees and sidewalks and streets have all been scoured clean, and new. I’ve been given a second chance.

At lunch, Nick walks up with his plate and silverware. “Can I join you?”

“Please.”

“Mary Gaitskill’s workshop heard you.”

I wince. “Sorry.”

Nick waves it away. “She thought it was an animal caught in a trap.”

“Not far off,” I say.

“You’re in the middle of it.” He takes my shoulder and gently shakes it. He smiles. I feel as if he is welcoming me into a new place.

“Yup,” I say. It’s Sarah’s shorthand way of summing up a complicated truth. I am eager to get home. Get to know my daughter.

 

 

Paul Austin’s first book, a memoir, came out in 2009 “Something For the Pain: One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER” (W.W. Norton) and received a starred review by Library Journal. The Boston Globe called it “a stunning account of the chaos of the emergency room.” He has attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference as a contributor, a waiter, a scholar, and a fellow. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Discover Magazine, The Florida Review, The Gettysburg Review, Creative Nonfiction, Ascent Magazine, The Southeast Review, and turnrow. “Cry Like My Wife” is an excerpt from Paul’s upcoming book, Beautiful Eyes, which will be published in late 2013 or early 2014, by W.W. Norton.

 

[1] The names of family members are unchanged. All other names are changed to protect their privacy. Dialogue is recreated as accurately as memory will allow.

“If Ever You Decide You Should Go” by Elizabeth Dalton

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If Ever You Decide (Spirit Sisters)
“Spirit Sisters” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

The first question on late spring mornings is this: Can we go barefooted? We look out of the living room window. The porch and front yard are still shady, but spots of sun stipple the grass. An old woman across the street sweeps her sidewalk, but it’s early; there are no kids outside yet. Our mother calls us into the kitchen and tells us to sit and eat. The room fills with the rhythmic whoosh of percolating coffee. Down the hall, we hear our father shut the bathroom door and turn on the shower. While we chew and slurp from our cereal bowls, I try to get glimpses of the backyard as Mom moves between the table and the storm door. The yard is yellow with light. The grapevine curls around its arbor and the bush in the far corner is in full leaf. Can we go barefooted?

We are sent to our room to find clothes, as few as possible, which we pull on in a hurry. We are told to brush our teeth. When we return to the kitchen, the bowls have been cleared from the Formica dinette set to make room for Mom and Dad and their cups of coffee.  In the window framing their heads, the persimmon tree moves in what I hope is a warm morning breeze. Mom looks up and briefly inspects me. With a dishcloth she wipes the last of the toothpaste from the corners of my mouth, and, using a formula that seems to include thermometer readings, newspaper weather forecasts, and perhaps an actual field test, she determines that we can go barefooted today.

I push the metal door handle and burst out of the kitchen. Molly and I run tiptoe down the steps, dropping our rag dolls on the rough concrete, push off the sidewalk and land in the grass. We stand for a moment caught between horror and delight as the late spring soil embraces our feet, sending chills up our shins. Here we pause, feeling the last remnant of the winter’s cold and snow, then we run to the jungle gym and climb the ladder, our toes curling around the warm metal bars as we reach for the trapeze or the white plastic hand rings. We swing through the air, dew drying from our soles and the crevices between our toes.

We tire of the swings and brave the wet grass again. Our feet are light, more like wings than paddles and so we dash around the perimeter of our universe: along the alley in back of our property, along the side of our yard adjacent to the Dennys’ weather-stripped, haunted house, behind our garage, up past the back door again, around the persimmon tree where the roots punish our heels, and then the length of the old grape arbor that is too shaky for us to climb. We relearn our world, where we are likely to stumble or twist ankles, as well as where the dog’s bathroom is.  We find patches of clover and ugly crabgrass, and the occasional thistle. Here and there are bald spots where, later in the summer, we’ll find ants coming and going as purposefully as the fathers in our neighborhood.

We stand on the step for a moment, the soles of our feet making perfect wet prints on the concrete. Molly’s are almost the same size as mine, even though I am older, almost done with first kindergarten while she can’t even write her name yet. We sit down, pulling our dolls into our laps, and I scratch at my ankles, where my skin is crawly with dew and the itchy memory of grass blades. Sunlight the color of lemonade finds its way around the small persimmon leaves, leaving spots on the concrete and grass around us. A couple of birds tussle in a branch overhanging the pastor’s side of the fence. In his kitchen we can hear plates and silverware being placed on a table, and the occasional rush of water from the faucet. Across the alley, some neighbor kids run outside and stand blinking in the sunshine. The back door slams behind them. Down the alley, a dog barks and another answers. The day has begun.

Molly’s rag doll has blond yarn for hair while my doll’s hair is dark brown. Otherwise, they could be twins. Both have felt eyes and velvet dresses over white bloomers we almost never make them wear. They are big girl dolls with rosy cheeks. Mine is older, like me, and likes to fly because she is a superhero, and so does Molly’s. Simply running with them does not work, we’ve discovered, for they hang limp in our hands no matter how fast we can sprint, and we are fast. Instead, I hold mine by her hand and spin just like a tornado. She flies at the end of my outstretched arm, her pink legs kicking in the wind. Molly’s doll flies, too; I catch glimpses of her blonde yarn-hair as I turn. I yell encouragement to my doll, and Molly does, too. The house and tree and yard flash by my eyes over and over again until I give in to the urge to close my eyes and tilt my head to the side, which makes me feel like I’m being tickled from the inside out with a little sick thrown in.

I turn a few more times until my knees give and I tumble into the wet grass. Molly, our dolls, and I lie there, behind the garage, catching our breath and staring into the sky, which is a lot like staring into a lake. Instead of darting fish and rolling puffs of algae there is an occasional jet, as slim and silver as a minnow, and the clouds, big enough to make their own shadows on the yard. From where we lie we could simply push off and dive right in.

~

My sister gave her notice the day before she died. A dark stocking cap hugged her scalp and a white hospital blanket puddled around her body. Well-worn socks kept her feet warm in the seasonless hospital room. My short-sleeved yellow dress and the evaporating warmth of the sun on my arms were the only indicators of the spring day that had opened like the dandelions in our lawns that morning. I sat in a chair right next to her bed, but reaching her was like talking to someone through a closed door. She wiped at her eyes with a tissue and tugged the blankets up under her armpits with a hand so thin her wedding set slid up and down the length of bone between her palm and the first knuckle of her ring finger. This is no life, she said. If I can’t get better, I’d rather die.

No you don’t, I said. But I knew she was losing ground. Watching her walk through the house during the past month had been like watching an unsteady toddler. She struggled to negotiate the single step between her utility room and kitchen, sometimes clinging to the wall with both hands for support, after she started the laundry. Her long legs were emaciated and skin draped across her collarbones into the hollow of her neck. Worst of all, she had nearly dropped the baby a few weeks earlier as she carried him to his crib, and since that time she had been terrified of holding him while standing. Instead she had to content herself with watching from the depths of her recliner as the rest of us swayed with Jesse in our arms. Her eyes followed us until the morphine overpowered her, and her restless hands fell still in a pile of crochet thread.

She never left her home alone now, this thirty-year-old woman who, five years before, had hopped planes on a whim and pointed her rackety hatchback in any direction that looked interesting.  This girl who was as likely to be in Chicago as Muncie on any given weekend, letting none of us know about her journeys until well after her return. Her travels within Muncie were just as adventurous, at least as far as I was concerned: Drum circles, dim living rooms full of smoke and philosophy, alternative rocker venues with gypsy friends—people with long hair and antique jeans—who moved through a haze of patchouli. People who traveled lightly and often.

Later I learned how she wept when Dad drove her to the hospital earlier that day. Even now, I cannot bear to think about this home-leaving—the last look around the place, the last shallow breath full of the smell of her new family, a last touch of the doorknob marking an entrance to the familiar and safe. The instinct to die privately is one even animals understand. None of us chooses to begin or end a journey from a strange place.

When I returned to the hospital early the next morning, I found my parents in the oncology waiting room wearing the same clothes I had left them in the night before, and I discovered what it means when an official-sounding voice on the phone tells you a loved one has taken a turn for the worse. I sat down on one of the upholstered foam sofa cushions and tried to feel my way around the tinnitus that reverberates in my head when I am confused or distressed.  I watched my parents, helpless with grief and sleep deprivation, and saw the shape of my family shift.

I drifted down the hall to find a phone. It didn’t seem possible that the sun could shine in the windows of the rooms that I passed. It didn’t seem possible that other patients in that ward could still be talking, watching daytime television, or breathing while my sister was cut off. Her door was closed and a white notice was taped to it to keep hospital personnel from bumbling in on mourners such as my brother-in-law, whose heartbroken sobs brought me up short. I ducked my head and kept moving toward a bank of phones at the end of the hall. There was weeping elsewhere, too, and later I learned a counselor was brought in to work with the nurses, who were also horrified by my sister’s death.  I was gratified by this, glad that even the professionals recognized this death as one worth noting in a ward where death is far too commonplace.

I was the last of our family to sit with Molly that day. I pushed through the door and entered, frightened as a child. Sunlight streamed through the bank of windows highlighting the scene of a struggle. Chairs crowded against the scuffed wall and the wastebasket gaped in its corner. The bed was askew.

I took the chair next to my sister and rested my forearms against the bedrail. I looked at her for a long time and I said her name. There was the face I had always associated with her name, and the hands, slim and well cared for. There was her nose, thin as a knife-blade, and the thyroid scar in the hollow of her throat. How many times had I watched her sleeping during our childhood years? How many times had I sighed loudly or elbowed her to wakefulness just to ward off loneliness in the middle of the night?

In three days I would reach my 31st birthday, and after that would come the Fourth of July, and then Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The whole merry-go-round would spin in its place as it always had, largely insensible to her absence.  Yet, in those few moments at my sister’s deathbed I became aware of a silent universe surrounding the spinning calendar of seasons, birthdays, obligations, and family gatherings. Sitting as I was in the center of the rush and noise, I couldn’t make out much but the blackness of this expanse. Still, I knew it was there, just as I had felt the vast Atlantic at my feet the first time our parents had taken us to see the ocean. We had arrived late at night but insisted on going to the beach. Rooted in the sand, the wind teasing my hair, I could see nothing but blackness, nothing to separate the sky from the sea, the sea from the land. Now, as then, I crouched at the edge, peering into that swirling darkness beyond and wondered about the brave and marvelous beings that moved there.

The muffled scrapings and shufflings of the hospital staff seeped beneath wide door. Dust motes drifted through the light streaming onto Molly’s bed. The business of the day was picking up. Everyone, including my parents, who, God help them, had arrangements to make, was waiting on me. I looked around the room one last time for some sign of my sister, but I could see her body was as empty as a pair of overalls she’d unfastened and dropped to the floor before stepping away.

~

Night trains sometimes drag me up from that deepest, unknowable stratum of dream into the realm of the half remembered. On those occasions, I am as much girl as woman, still sister to a sister. We drive along the flat, sun-parched roads—Molly and I—after a late band practice, roads that have become narrower and darker throughout the summer as the corn walls rise alongside. Now and then the corn drops back to reveal a tired farm spread out before us on both sides of the road: Harvestore, white barn and weathered farmhouse, cows knee-high in muck, two dogs dashing senselessly at our spinning tires. I bear down on these places like a plane, and swoop past them, honking at the windows’ watery reflection of our dust-streaming car. Windows down, we sing along to Top 40 songs written just for us—beautiful teenage girls, fresh and full of everything the rest of the world craves. But we are flying down the road so quickly nothing but the sun can keep up with us. Even the songs themselves are gone before they have time to play themselves out. As soon as we are bored with the lyrics, Molly turns the dial to find something else. Our tiny forearm hairs glisten against our skin. Gravel thunks along the undercarriage but I slow down only for stop signs and the occasional oncoming vehicle.

The grill parts the late summer air in front of us, and the evening sun nestles into the woods in the distance. Molly twists the radio dial, settling on the a cappella voices of the Eagles. “There are stars in the Southern sky,” we sing. “Southward as you go…” The old song, older than we know, streams past us and I think about a road with seven bridges, one in the country just like this, where moonlight pools in the fields and time seems to hang like dew gathering on a leaf. A place a child would run to, a place we might run to, if need be. So we sing, our voices serious and full of meaning we don’t really understand: “There are stars in the Southern sky—“  Molly pushes a strand of hair off of her sweat-spangled forehead and jumps up to the harmony line: “And if ever you decide you should go/ there is a taste of time sweet as honey/ Down the Seven Bridges Road.”

In this way, we make an angular spiral toward home, following the derelict country roads in an ever-narrowing square until we find ourselves bumping down our own sticky blacktopped road. The light is on in the kitchen and our mother’s silhouette moves from stove to table. Sun gilds the tops of the catalpas, but night is already growing beneath them. We taxi up to the garage and step out onto the warm driveway with our shoes in our hands.

 

 

Elizabeth Dalton’s work has appeared in a number of literary journals, including PMS: Poem/Memoir/Story, Earth’s Daughters, New Millennium Writings, River City, Sliver of Stone, and Clockhouse Review.

Read our interview with Elizabeth here.

“Smoke Break” by James Damiani

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Image courtesy of Dariusz Klimczak

For three straight days, I stepped around the man lying in the middle of the hall. All the staff did and I followed their example. On the fourth day, something made me stop and speak to him. Maybe I had finally decided to actually acknowledge being the new psychiatrist on the ward.

“Why are you lying on the floor?”

He didn’t answer my question. I tried again. No response. I tried again. His head twitched as if my words were a mosquito, bothering him. His thick white hair lay spread out on the tile floor above him. He resembled a mop one of the staff had dropped on their way to an emergency.

I changed my question into a warning. “This is a hallway here at the hospital and people might step on you.”

Still, he said nothing.

A puddle of urine formed under him.

“Is that your urine?” I asked. Not the most ingenious question, but born of a more spontaneous impulse than the first few.

“Of course it is.” The anger oozed out of him. “Who would ever lay in someone else’s urine?”

“Good point,” I said. He believed he had silenced me with his sarcasm, but one of my best traits is being able to follow up one dumb question with a second even more inane one. I have found it can be very helpful for a psychiatrist to be a little off socially. My patients are trying to manage hallucinations and delusions in hidden worlds. They don’t have time for the polite lies and the confusing social niceties the sane world asks of them. Unbowed, I came back.

“So what are you doing lying in the middle of the hall in your urine?”

”I am trying to meditate, and achieve Nirvana by not breathing.” Bam. He might as well have said, “Take that, Uninvited Doctor Shrink Who is Trying to Fit Himself  Where He Doesn’t Belong.”

“Oh.” I nodded. How could I have forgotten this common piece of medical school wisdom? Still as his new physician and responsible for his health, I wanted him to be more interested in breathing. Admittedly it was self-serving, as it would make my job as his doctor easier if he continued breathing, but my motivations weren’t all selfish. My mother had suffered from depression my entire life. Watching her had given me an understanding of broken brains and a heartfelt acceptance of their plight. Taking care of mentally ill people seemed to be where I fit best.

I paused and carefully thought about what response to give, how best to let him know I could “relate.” I wanted to impress him with just the right healing words. Just then, one of the staff came by, prodded the man with a foot and said, “Smoke break Monk, let’s go.”

Monk’s eyes flashed open. He resurrected himself with a hop to his feet. Standing, he was about 5’5”, but you could add four inches if you counted his still erect hair. The worst and stiffest case of bed head I had ever seen. How his long fine white hair could stand straight up and defy gravity seemed to me the craziest thing. Thinking of a cigarette took his toothless face from long and drawn, and folded it into a squishy wide smile. Monk took in a deep cleansing breath, rattled himself like a boxer before a fight and then bumped me as he headed to the patio for his hourly cigarette.

While the patients were outside smoking, the floor got cleaned, beds were made, and trashcans emptied. Monk, after being dried to a crusty stink by the Florida sun, came in, got his clothes changed, lay back down on the floor and people once again stepped over him. Meanwhile I kept trying to find those magic words.

(There is a chaotic balance that exists on the psychiatric ward of a state hospital, a fragile harmony between people and ideas. I hadn’t known if I was going to last long enough at my new job to justify inserting myself into the equation. Adding myself to the mix would require the ward to come up with a new balance and I wasn’t sure I wanted them to go to all the trouble of fitting me in if I wasn’t going to last. But with nowhere to go and a family to feed, I decided to stay, or at least not leave right away. Monk, the other men and I began our negotiations. I first needed to learn more about them.)

Besides meditating, Monk got his nickname because he claimed to possess a divine ability. He didn’t bi-locate or levitate or live without food on a pole for six straight years like other famous saints—make him go more than an hour without the earthly pleasure of a good smoke and he got mad as hell. No, according to Monk his unique other worldly ability was that he would never defecate again.

I had seen and heard stranger things than Monk’s story. But the sane thing about Monk’s insanity was that, he told the truth, sort of. Our emaciated saint had survived surgery for colon cancer but been left with a colostomy. As a result of his operation, he would, as promised, have a permanently closed rectum.

As the days grew into weeks at my new job, I learned to follow the patients out on to the patio during their smoke breaks. I told the men about the hazards of smoking and how we could help them quit if they wanted to. Given his past history of cancer and how unfiltered Camels were delivering new carcinogens directly into his lungs daily, Monk became the focus of my anti smoking campaign.

“You know smoking is really not good for you.”

Monk laughed. “These Camels are good for me. Every time I smoke, I cough up more and more phlegm. Camels clear my chest.”

How could I argue with his logic? Smoking did cause him to cough up phlegm. Truthfully I secretly didn’t want to, because once an hour, while smoking, he looked so normal, so peaceful. All the men did. The General, a man constantly at war with his own labile moods, professionally scissored his cigarette between his index and third finger and waved it about reminiscent of a movie star. Smooth would pinch his between his thumb and first finger, especially when trying to suck out the last little bit of pleasure. Quincy used his to blow halos like my dad would, a magic of the tongue I still don’t understand. Somehow, for a brief time, the delusions which had been running rampant, lessened. We were an average group of men enjoying the breeze, ogling women and wondering what was for dinner.

I have never smoked, but I would sit out on the patio risking cancer with my patients, just to be with them. In time, Monk’s choice of Camels made perfect sense. All the men’s choices made sense. It got to the point that when a new man came I could guess if they were a Lucky Strikes guy, or a Marlboros man or a Kools fellow. My dad smoked Winstons. He and I might have found at least one way to connect had I been able to tell him I understood, at least about the Winstons.

Monk always sat on the edge of the bench, crossed his legs, and became a Rodin Thinker. He rested his left forearm on his thigh and drew lazily from the Camel held in his right hand. He would let the ash grow on the end of his cigarette. Just before gravity spilled it all over the ground, he would employ his thumb and with just the right amount of pressure flick the burnt tobacco into an ashtray. Monk loved his Camels and even shady love heals. The whole experience fascinated me, and it cost me.

“You owe me ten trillion dollars.” Monk blew a cloud of smoke off to his right.

“I don’t have that much on me.” I countered.

“That’s okay. You can pay it in installments.”

The degree and nature of Monk’s mental illness shifted often. His insanity had a dial. Each day the knob got spun and landed on a new setting. One day the pointer would land on the traditional: don’t breath until Nirvana happens, and he would lie on the floor for hours. The next day the meter might read: march until one o’clock, which he would do faithfully. He had, lean to the right days and even perform the odd religious ritual day.

“Monk what are you doing?” Emma the housekeeper screamed.

“I am sprinkling holy water on the ground.”

“That ain’t holy water from a cup, that is your colostomy bag and yuck.” She called for help and got the staff to replace the bag on Monk’s side. A blessing for all us rats maybe?

Life wasn’t all healings, sacraments and riches though. Sometimes the other residents reached inside Monk’s head and grabbed his thoughts. To defend himself he hit them as they walked by. Monk didn’t have many friends on the ward.

But Monk didn’t care about other people’s opinion of him, he had too much else to deal with. There were days when the evil stuck, when people stayed in his head, not just stole his thoughts. Those times Monk shut down, focused on not breathing and lay in his puddle. One especially dark day, I encouraged him to leave the ward for some fresh air, hoping a change of scenery might loosen things up for him. Five minutes later, he came back panting so hard it scared me.

“What happened?”

He didn’t answer. A long line of snot reached from his nose towards the ground. No amount of cajoling worked. He walked away and in a rough whisper said, “Demons.” The devil often tried to possess him. Trying to rid himself of evil drove Monk to act in unusual ways.

“What you doing, Monk?” He stood in front of the mirror performing jumping jacks.

“I am exercising the demons out of my head.”

“Oh.”

He flopped to the floor, did a few push ups, and popped back up. As he jogged in place he watched himself in the mirror, waiting for the demons to fly out. The devil might be in the details, but according to Monk, Satan could be exorcised with exercise. Now, I understood his search for Nirvana through not breathing. Devils can’t possess a brain filled with nothingness. No one could steal his thoughts if he didn’t have any.

I had my own demons and my own emptiness. A neglected childhood and a genetic predisposition to depression left me in a lifelong battle with the mood disorder. For decades I said rosaries every night, went to mass several times a week and prayed endlessly. In public, I hid behind career and achievements. But over time the loneliness had grown and slowly bled me of my will to live. This new job at the hospital was, in many ways, my settling into my seat on a train headed for a bridge where the tracks had been washed away by a raging river. Monk had gotten on the train earlier, but now we sat together and realized how similar our life journeys were.

Like Monk, I was anxious at times.Also, we each prayed endlessly, unclear about the effect of our petitions and we both got spontaneously aggressive with others for no logical reason. Finally, we both had hopeless times where we just wanted to disappear. Actually, Monk was me, multiplied. The small but crucial difference was that my brain chemistry just happened to be a little more predictable.

After this realization, even more tender feelings filled in the background of my dealings with Monk. I saw him “exercise” his demons and wished they would leave him alone. He let me watch him. Once, he stared at himself in the mirror and told me a cab driver had just driven into his eye and he couldn’t get him out. I didn’t know how to evict stubborn cab drivers that ride into brains, but I knew how a crazy idea could get in your head and stay there. I listened knowing what it felt like to have a painful thought bully me into sadness.

I made it my mission to be kind to Monk. I used a lesson I had learned from becoming a father and having children. Every morning I greeted him with the same genuine enthusiasm my family greeted me with each day. When I walked up to him, a warm feeling would spread through me, and I would say.

“Monk, how is the meditating going?” My smile would have disarmed most anyone.

Monk responded to my greetings with no more than a grunt. I didn’t care. It did me good to value him. No matter what the other voices said I knew he would hear one voice saying kind things to him. It comforted me to believe the evil things we believe we see in our reflections aren’t always accurate. Monk and I belonged, even if it was to a group of two outcasts. My mission made me immune to Monk’s frequent rejections. I kept wooing him any chance I got. I, his doctor, even lit his Camels at the hourly smoke breaks (sometimes more than one an hour but don’t tell anyone).

As much as he could, Monk warmed to me over time. I changed in a way too. I grew comfortable with a new reality. “I know Monk, I can’t believe some asshole put crap in your colostomy bag, let me help you clean it out.” “Yes, I imagine lying in your urine starts off warm but ends up being cold.” “I never knew Jumping jacks were the best exercise to exorcise demons.” These lines fell off my lips with a tone that bordered on boredom.

Thoughts of changing or curing him of schizophrenia never entered my mind. Not what you want to hear from a psychiatrist I suppose, but him being healed didn’t seem realistic. Forty years of non-stop psychosis outweighed any realistic expectation medications might suddenly work. No, a more reasonable first goal seemed to be greeting him happily for one straight year.

Our relationship stayed “normal” for several weeks until one particular day. We had stepped outside for a smoke break. Monk wore a frayed straw hat, a floral patterned shirt with a ripped pocket and massively wrinkled blue shorts. He also wore a pair of those flimsy oversized sunglasses people wear after having cataract surgery, though I had no idea how he got them. In short, picture a scarecrow on vacation in Hawaii who just stepped out of a hurricane.

The strangeness began when one of the more disorganized and psychotic residents, Ed, started begging Monk for his cigarette. The staff and I gasped. Was Ed suicidal? How could anyone dare try to get between Monk and his Camel? Monk looked at Ed and got very still.

I panicked when I realized we weren’t going to make it to Ed in time to protect him from the coming blow. Monk raised his hand, and gave Ed his one and only Camel. Not only that, Monk zipped Ed’s pants, buttoned and tucked in the disheveled fellow’s shirt and straightened Ed’s crooked collar. Having soldiered up the beggar, Monk blessed Ed’s shoulder with a warm squeeze as he walked past him and went back inside.

The pride pricked the hair of my arms. The schizophrenia had lifted long enough for Monk to connect to another person and that was a miracle. Monk’s eruption of innate kindness forced me to reconsider where prayer led. It also asked me to reassess if the train tracks, instead of being washed away, might still be there.

 

 

James Damiani’s work has appeared in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, The Gainesville Sun, and Journal of American Academy of Dermatology, and has been anthologized in Flashlight Memories.

Read an interview with James here.

“The Twisting Path” by Jim Brega

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“Non Iron” Image courtesy of Dariusz Klimczak

At the door to the procedure room the smell of blood comes into my nose. Ever since I lost a rock fight at age six and went home with blood streaming from a gash in my head, my body has given this warning sign whenever my brain senses danger.

The room in front of me, though small, dim and cold, doesn’t seem particularly threatening: gray and white walls, cabinets, counters, floor. It could be a medical room anywhere; it has the same expectant efficiency as anything made from stainless steel. Near an examination table in the center of the room is a small, wheeled cart holding a battered monitor that reminds me of the oscilloscopes repair shops used to use to test television tubes. The anachronism is almost funny, like visiting the cockpit of a jet to find the navigator using a sextant.

The nurse who led me here is standing near the middle of the room, looking back at me in the doorway, waiting with diminishing patience, confusion beginning to cloud her expression. I’ve hesitated too long; it’s time for a decision.

There’s still time to flee. How would I do it? I could just say, “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind,” turn on my heel, and go. No one would stop me. They might be pissed; what do I care? Sure, it would mean choosing ignorance, rolling the dice, betting the pot on a hidden card. It would be dangerous, but the danger would be imagined and therefore, for a time at least, unreal, not believable. There is freedom—from dread, from responsibility, from necessity—in ignorance.

There’s one thing I do know: that by stepping forward I would start down the twisting path prescribed by modern medicine, a path that could lead from this room to others like it. A hospital room, an operating room, a radiation treatment room. Like tipping the first in a line of dominos, crossing this threshold could sweep me along in an accelerating rush to the final tumble. On this path, knowledge can bring confusion rather than understanding, false comfort instead of certainty, slavery in place of freedom.

My pause at the door to the room is becoming uncomfortable for both the nurse and me. I’m embarrassed, then angry for being embarrassed. In the end I can’t make another choice: I follow the nurse into the room.

“You can take off your clothes in here,” she says, pointing to an open door on the other side of the room. “You can keep your socks on but take off your shoes put on this gown and lie on the table on your side.”

Now that I’ve committed, there’s a perception of things slowing down. My mind becomes sluggish. As though drugged, I struggle to separate the nurse’s words into sentences that make sense. I try to remember the symptoms of shock, and crosscheck them in my head: a dazed state, narrowing of attention, inability to comprehend stimuli, disorientation.

Slow-walk to the small changing room, relieved to see that it includes a sink and toilet. I pee as soon as the door is shut, then again three minutes later after changing into the standard gown, opening in the back. The fabric is rough against my skin and smells of disinfecting detergent. I wonder how many people have briefly worn this gown—and the dozens of others I glimpsed in the closet—for similar reasons. I imagine a number in the thousands. Now it’s my turn, my uniform; putting it on I give up my uniqueness, become one more in those anonymous ranks.

When I open the door the nurse is waiting for me.

“Lie-on-the-table-on-your-left-side-bend-your-knees-slightly-would-you-like-a-blanket.”

“No, thanks,” I answer. Why is she talking so fast?

My response was too quick, too eagerly compliant; I want to be the perfect patient. I realize that I’m bargaining mentally for a better test result, and feel ridiculous. Lying on my side on the table, gritting my teeth to keep them from chattering from a mix of cold, nervous energy and dread, I think about the nurse’s words. Has she said them ten times this morning to ten other patients? Will she say them again, in exactly the same way, another ten times this afternoon? Is her rapid-fire delivery intended to imply brisk professionalism—something I’m supposed to find comforting—or bored disinterest? Does my over-eagerness endear or disgust her?

My back is toward the door to the room; my near-naked rear end, peeking through the limp gapping edges of the gown, will be the first thing the doctor sees when he comes in. I tug ineffectively at the rough fabric, trying to cover up. Everything here is a struggle; maintaining even a shred of dignity is a struggle. I should have said yes to the blanket.

Noises of the nurse going about her business: taking medical devices and instruments out of drawers, tearing open plastic bags of metal tools, clanging them onto a small roll-around metal table, all (purposefully it seems) just outside of my field of vision. Are the items on the table so frightening that I’m not  allowed to see them? Now that she’s behind me, I try to remember what she looks like. Wanting comfort, her short plumpness immediately transforms my image of her into a memory of my mother. If I ask her, will she pat my arm, place her hand on my forehead, tell me everything is okay? Is it something I could ask of her?

I realize I don’t know her name.

“Woodjew-likkapillo-foururhed” she says.

What’s she saying, what’s she saying, what’s she saying? I chant to myself.

“Um… sure,” I answer out loud. She gently lifts my head to place the pillow underneath. It’s something.

Suddenly the door flies open, the end of a loud conversation in the hall.

“Okay, we’ll talk next week!” the voice booms. I recognize it as belonging to my doctor; he sounds cheerful.  I decide to be cheerful too. The door swings closed and latches, returning us to dim isolation.

“Good morning! How are we today?” Brisk walk around front, quick handshake, my grip already tentative, weakened by uncertainty, then the sound of rolling metal wheels as he sinks onto a short round stool and slides across the floor behind me.

How are we? What a stupid question! You’d have to be brain dead not to be terrified of what’s going to happen here.

“Um… fine!” I wonder how many of us in the room I convince.

“Good!” Snap of latex gloves. “I’m just going to start with a digital exam.”

His index finger is in and out in a matter of seconds.

“Okay!” – to the nurse – “I think we’ll do 8 needles.”

Then to me: “This is the ultrasound wand.” He waves a metallic-looking stick about an inch in diameter and ten inches long in front of my eyes. A cord exits the end he holds in his hand and is connected to the monitor I noticed earlier on the small table. “I’ll be using it to get an image of your prostate on this.” He pats the ancient box. “It will help me get the needles to the right spots.” For emphasis he works a small button near his thumb, and a thin needle pokes out of the other end, retreats.

“Are you ready?”

“Um… I just want to mention that when I get anxious I have to pee.”

“You’re not anxious now, are you?” Big laughs from everyone but me. “Well, this won’t take long; we’ll be done before you know it!”

Yuk it up!  I don’t tell him that already this morning I had peed when I got up, again before I left the house, once when I arrived for my appointment, once more before I was called into the procedure room, and two times in the changing room. By my count that was six times in about two hours, the last time now at least ten minutes ago. I figure I have ten minutes, max.

The insertion of the ultrasound wand is surprisingly easy.

“OK –when I take a tissue sample you’re just going to feel a little pinch and hear a ‘snap.’ Are you ready?”

I can’t even imagine what being ‘ready’ for this would mean.

There’s a click-snap, and I feel a piece of my insides snatched away. I’m shocked at the idea that the needle’s tiny hook has punched through tissue walls, membranes, organs that are supposed to be separate from each other. I feel the trembling that betrays a ballooning anxiety begin in my shoulders and legs. I know that if I don’t do something to stop  the shaking, it will become violent. Almost immediately I feel the need to pee.

“That’s as bad as it gets,” my doctor is saying. “Are you going to be okay?”

There’s a metallic shuffling of needles in and out of the handle end of the probe going on behind me. Can I make it through seven more needles without peeing all over everything?

“I have to pee,” I answer.

“OK, we’re going to be done here in a minute. Can you hold on?”

I weigh the urge growing within me—like a wave building to its break—against my mental clock, which seems to have come to a complete stop. I know he’s lying about the “one minute” estimate.

“I don’t think so.” I feel a flush of shame at my admission of failure, at my inability to control myself. Immediately the urge becomes stronger.

“We can’t have a wet operating table.” Annoyance is creeping into his cheerfulness. “Grace, do we have a urinal in here?”

Grace! I think. Of course.”

Cupboard doors open and close. I catch a glimpse of the plastic vessel in the nurse’s hand.

“Don’t worry,” my doctor says. “Grace has a two-year-old boy.”

I’m too desperate to try to understand his logic as Grace’s chubby fingers reach under the front of my gown and find my shrunken penis.

Grace, Graciella, Gracia mi salvador I chant in my head as my urine streams into the plastic bottle.

§

The diagnosis comes two days later. I’m standing on my back patio when the doctor calls.

“I want to give you the results of the procedure we did the other day.”

This is going to be bad. He can’t say the word ‘biopsy.’

“Sorry to give you this information over the phone, but I’m afraid the pathologist found cancer in two of the eight cores. Twenty percent of each of the two cores is involved. All the cancerous cores are from the right lobe.”

I realize I’m not breathing. As I look east across the valley, the sunlight and sparse clouds, like karma-dealing shadow puppets, create changing patterns on the mountains. The day is warm for March; the heat is teasing the scent of sage out of the winter-toughened leaves of the canyon brush. Fragile, lemon-green shoots carpet the normally powder-dry and odorless soil that a recent rain has turned dark, moist, and fragrant.

I draw a deep breath through my nose as the doctor continues. Suddenly the air feels cooler, and I recognize the metallic smell of danger as fear causes the tiny veins in my nose to fill with blood.

I have cancer I say to myself. Another breath: cold iron. The doctor’s voice drones on in my ear, talking statistics, grade, Gleason score. I stare across the valley toward the nearest hills, wooly with a coat of new green that looks farcically unrealistic. The next row of peaks is darker; the blues, blacks, and purples like massive bruises, unaffected by the changing sun and clouds. The third row of peaks is faint, hardly discernable; it’s difficult to tell where the earth vanishes and the pale blue-gray sky begins.

I wonder if today is the beginning of my own slow vanishing, of the gradual diminishment I’ve watched in a lover, then one parent, then the other; the relentless but almost invisible daily wearing away of personality, of vitality, of hope. I wonder what accommodation I’ll have to make for the disease: will my life be ruled by drug schedules, chemotherapy appointments, radiation treatments?

“Do you have any questions at this time?”

I stare at my feet, where large cracks vein the concrete patio like crazing in an old teacup. It looks unstable. I imagine the cracks widening, becoming ruts, ditches, gorges, and struggle to keep my balance, to avoid collapsing into them.

I realize this silence is my turn to speak, though I catch the perfunctory tone of the question. He’s busy. He wants to move on.

I imagine this topic being covered in the fifth week of year two of medical school: How to Deliver Bad News. “Explain the situation clearly and completely,” the textbook would say. “Give the patient the opportunity to ask questions, though there may not be any during the first conversation.”

I listen to the white noise of my doctor waiting, breathing, waiting.

It’s to be the twisting path, then.

In my mind I imagine the sound of one domino falling against the next.

“No,” I say. “No questions.”

 

 

Jim Brega earned his BA from San Diego State University and an MFA from the University of Illinois. His work has been published in A Year in Ink 5 and Foliate Oak, where his story “Little Red Bird” was selected for their 2012 “best of” anthology. He lives in San Diego with his spouse, John Castell. The two recently created the catalog for a large local corporate art collection. You can follow Jim’s progress on his blog, jimbrega.com.

Read an interview with Jim here.

“Lovin’ You’s a Man’s Man’s Job” by Jon Pershing

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“Oldman,” Image courtesy of Dariusz Klimczak

I check her out at some quasi-church’s quasi-auction of used goods. I don’t belong to said church nor do I hunger for said goods. In my mid-thirties, never married, no kids, no assets greater than the car parked out back that Kelly’s Blue Book tells me is worth less en masse than the new clutch I put into it six months past. It seems I’ll go pretty much anywhere as long as there might be one single woman there. I look at her face and she looks at mine and I think to myself, “Now here’s something interesting.” But then I glance down to take in the rest and see a tow-headed urchin hanging his little arms about her waist and everything falls apart before it can get built. I’ve got nothing against children, love a slew of them who call me “Uncle” though I’m no such thing to any of them, but a child with a woman usually means there’s a man with the woman as well, and it’s that that I’ve something against. “Fuck,” I think, “One more woman one more man beat me to the punch to,” and I turn away and fix my gaze on the worn cowboy boots up for sale.

Of course, there’s an equation I haven’t considered. While woman-plus-child almost always equals man, woman-plus-child only about half the time these days equals husband. Fifty/fifty chance, more or less, and today’s my lucky day. I hate the knuckle-to-toe thrill that comes over me when I overhear her say she’s filed for divorce, know it’s not right to feel glee when somebody’s else’s shit hits the fan, but it’s just that she’s got dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes and a great smile and even a greater laugh—and she is laughing: just filed for divorce and yet she still manages to have a sense of humor—and it’s been so long since any similar situation yielded me even the least of results, I just can’t help but feel good. Like the sun is shining. On me, for me. And that’s even before I turn my back on the boots and find her looking at me—at me.

So I make a few moves and she makes a few more and before long I’m officially “dating Mommy,” though it’s months until we go on anything even resembling a date. Instead, we wait all day and half the night for her child to go to sleep, ride the couch as hard as we can when he does, wear ourselves both down to the nub with our late nights and our early mornings and all the beautiful wanting in between. There’s soccer and swimming and play dates and the park; there’s her job and my job and her soon-to-be ex-husband’s job of making her life Hell. I get to be a kid with her kid and it’s great. In time, we find other times to be alone; we plan dates; we prioritize. We laugh more than we have any right to laugh. She’s got a second lease on life and she’s investing it and I’m the beneficiary. Finally a woman who knows what she doesn’t want. And I’m not on that list.

I learn more about being a man from a man who isn’t being one than I ever did from those who were. Her soon-to-be ex-husband’s got himself convinced that the trouble with their marriage, and thus the trouble now with their impending divorce, has everything to do with her and nothing to do with him. He’s a forty-year old recovering pothead, a skater punk who never grew up, unemployed and living with his mother, a born-again woman with little love for her former daughter-in-law and no eyes to see what her son has been and still is and maybe always will be. He’s also filled with a tempestuous rage no Jonas could ever calm, part medical, part mental, a sufferer of both bipolar disorder and “small-man’s disease,” the latter caused by being physically smaller than the pack and feeling the need to prove your toughness, your manliness. Unlike mellow potheads the world over, the dope riled his mood-swinging self up, and so, already pissed, he grew even more so and directed his rage toward his wife who was slowly killing herself in a constant attempt to make him well. He contacts her a dozen times a day, leaving voicemails and sending text messages, not to check up on his son, but to berate and belittle her.

Her son, at times, is a spitting image of his father. Just five years old, his favorite words are “idiot,” “freak,” “stupid,” and “hate.” Fond of light sabers and pirate swords, he wields them with impunity, and when he can’t get to them because his mother has placed all potential weapons on top of the fridge, he resorts to his fists and his feet, punching and kicking and tossing his favorite words like daggers into the air. “You’re an idiot,” he says. Punch. “You’re a freak,” he says. Kick. “You’re stupid,” he says. Punch. “I’ll hate you forever,” he says. And on it goes, the little guy working himself into such a rage he loses the ability to speak and simply screams instead. He thinks the whole world is out to get him and is as hard on himself as he is on his mother, calling himself “stupid” at the slightest mistake.

I don’t see much of this—really see it—at first, of course. She’s upfront with me about her soon-to-be ex-husband and his problems, but she hasn’t yet gained the proper perspective to see what’s going on with her child, and so when he occasionally says he hates me or attacks me with a sword all she can say is, “I’m sorry: he’s five,” as if that explains it. For now, for her, it does. And for the most part, it does for me as well. But as the months go by and I spend more and more time with her and her son, I bear witness to what is starting to become a never-ending barrage of verbal abuse (often but not always coupled with physical aggression). I measure his tantrums against those of my friends’ children, which I’ve seen many times, and the only similarity I find is the depth of the emotion behind the outburst.

He scares me, this raging little five-year-old, even more so because when he’s not talking trash and hitting out at whomever’s in reach, he’s a great kid, funny and loving and creative, innocent and sweet, and I can’t help but think of the man he will become if only his father would stop fucking him up. But what can I do? “It’s none of my business,” I tell myself, and I try not to think about it when I lie alone at night waiting for sleep and wishing she was there beside me, but I hardly ever succeed. When the phone calls start rolling in, she turns to me for comfort, and I hold her and listen to her talk and offer support but never say what’s really on my mind—that I see no reason to believe her husband’s behavior and actions towards her will change once their divorce is finalized; that the excuse that her son is five doesn’t hold any water; that if she doesn’t do something to alter his behavior now he will go from an angry toddler to an even angrier teenager hell-bent on hurting anyone in his path, including himself.

There’s nothing in this woman that deserves any of this shit. I see their future as a carbon copy of their past, forever tied to the anchor of a man too selfish, too bitter, too full of rage and frustration, to realize the consequences of his actions. And if this is their future, what then of my own? “Better men than me have walked away from far less,” I tell myself.

“If this is all too much for you, I understand,” she tells me. “If you don’t want to deal with this, just pull the band aid off quick.” But I don’t want to lose her. If, as Flannery O’Connor believed, a good man is hard to find, then the same is true about finding a good woman. And I’ve found one—a great one.

Six months after we first met and after a lot of foot-dragging and nasty phone calls and text messages and threats of refusing to sign the papers from her husband, her divorce is finalized, but the drama rolls on. During our Spring Break at the university where we both teach, we meet her husband at a halfway point in Virginia and hand over her son for a week. Afterward, on the six-hour drive home, she is subjected to numerous angry calls from her ex-husband, and when she finally refuses to answer the phone, to angry text messages, all of which turn her into a jumbled mess of tears and worry, fear and sadness.

To distract her from the mess she claims she’s made of her life, I tell her for the first time in detail about the mess I made of my own before we met, of how I fell for a Christian fundamentalist girl-woman and spent the next five years being dragged deeper and deeper into the muck of her family’s Christian Right Hell. A high school teacher by profession, this girl-woman belonged more in the rows of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds in their small desks than she did behind the big desk at the front of the room; indeed, the last time I saw the inside of her bedroom door, it was still pasted over with magazine cut-outs of hunky movie stars and bare-chested jeans models she had hung there as a teenager even though she was two months away from her twenty-eighth birthday. A triune controlled her life, but it didn’t consist of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Instead, her family, the Bible (literally interpreted but only by piecemeal), and Fox News called her every shot, especially her family, especially her domineering mother and sister, who made sure she had no time to invest in our relationship. This triune dictated when she could move out (when she’d earned enough money for a down payment on a house of her own); when she could have sex (not until she was married); who she could vote for (Republicans only); whether or not she could take the medicine a doctor prescribed for her bronchitis (she could, but only after much debate); when she could spend time with me (only when her mother and sister were busy); what movies she couldn’t watch (nothing by Michael Moore); who she could have romantic relationships with (in theory, only fellow fundamentalists); and what wars she could support (all American ones, no matter the casualties, no matter the cause). And because this triune ruled her roost, I slowly allowed it to rule mine as well.

No, she never beat the shit out of me, but, by her refusal to be her own person and her insistence that I give up my personhood as well, she abused me all the same.

“For five years with this woman,” I tell her as we drive, “I never got to be a man. I never got to be a man because her family wouldn’t let her be a woman. All this shit you’re going through, all this shit I have to go through to be with you—it’s shit, yeah, but at least it’s adult shit. I can handle adult shit. And so can you.”

The next weekend, she goes alone to Virginia to retrieve her son, where her ex-husband screams at her and repeats his now standard litany of how she’s fucking up their son. Never mind the fact that as he rages and calls her a “fucking bitch” their son is witness to it all. Never mind the fact that for the first four and a half years of his life her son bore witness to hundreds of similar scenes of verbal abuse. Never mind the fact that she suspects he may be using again, that he might be high right now. In his mind, she is to blame for everything, always was, and always will be.

Her son, upon return, is a nightmare of rage and confusion. I can tell he’s worse than usual, but, more importantly, so can his mother. “Is he different since he got back?” she text-messages me a few nights after their return. “Or am I just finally seeing what’s always been there?”

“A bit of both,” I reply. The next night, a regular babysitter comments on his behavior and attitude, as does the woman who runs the daycare. That night, we talk long and hard about the most important thing in her life: her son. I tell her everything I’ve wanted to tell her but didn’t think it my place to. She calls a local non-profit organization that deals with abused women and children. She meets with her therapist, who specializes in children, and schedules a series of sessions for her son. She treats him as she always has, with nothing but love, but now with an added dose of preventive and corrective parenting. Her ex-husband keeps giving her Hell, but for the first time in ten years of dealing with the man, she doesn’t back down or give in. If she only sensed what was at stake when she decided to leave him, she now knows it with all her beautiful heart.

In the days ahead, there will be more bullshit and drama. There may be the legal battle she hoped to avoid when she settled for an 85/15 split of custody. There will be things that neither of us can anticipate. I don’t know what will happen to us, to her, to her son. All I know for sure is a man—a real man—doesn’t do this to a woman, any woman, and he certainly doesn’t do it to his child. Obviously, it takes a man to know this, and, right now, her child’s father is no such thing.

But what about the child himself? What does he know? What can he know at age five? It will be years before he will be old enough to understand that the words his father used to explain why his parents were getting divorced—“Mommy doesn’t love Daddy anymore”—weren’t an explanation at all, only another attempt to shift the blame to the child’s mother. At what age will he realize something every parent and teacher knows, that it’s usually the kid who’s quickest to point the finger at somebody else who actually performed the misdeed? And, when he does, will he be able to apply that knowledge to his own world, to his present, to his future, and, most importantly, to his past? Will he come to know his father’s failings and strive for something different for himself and for his family? Will he become the man his father might never be?

This man will do all he can to see that he does.

 

 

Jon Pershing is the pseudonym of a writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in MARY: A Journal of New Writing, Inside Higher Ed, Love Poems and Other Messages for Bruce Springsteen, Artichoke Haircut, Ray’s Road Review, and Lunch Ticket.

Read our interview with Jon here.

“The Shrink Who Killed Gazoo” by Michele Whitney

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“It’s all my fault.” When I say this to my  therapist, she frequently replies, “Seriously, Michele, you are not the center of the universe. You don’t have that much power.”

I’ve heard that choosing a therapist, counselor, or more affectionately known as a shrink is kind of like choosing a mate. Luckily I have been more successful in the shrink department than the mate department, but that’s a whole other story. So yes, I admit to having psychologically courted a few counselors until I finally found The One.

There is no shame in this.

Or maybe there is.

But at least I am working through my issues.

The surprising thing is that after years of going back and forth with different counselors, I found my “one” in an older white lady who had years of experience, but in my mind would never be able to help someone like me. When I say someone like me, I’m not saying I’m an alien or anything, but our culture and background on the surface is different. Or so I assumed. I am black, she is white. I am young, she is old…or older. I soon found out that I was wrong.

Once I was in a session where I was crying over a man who, for whatever reason, did not want me, but who I knew was perfect for me. Why oh why? What is wrong with me? I don’t understand why he won’t give me a chance.

My therapist simply told me, “He’s fucked up.”

“What?”

“It’s not about you; the guy is just fucked up.”

Is my therapist supposed to use the F word?

It didn’t matter because that was the recipe I needed to get me out of my rut. The main course was “the truth” for a gentle jolt out of my pity party. Add a side order of compassion to nudge me back into reality. And finally a shot of laughter to wash it all down.

Moving on to a different therapy session and me sulking over the same guy. Perhaps he really wasn’t attracted to me; maybe he just slept with me because he felt sorry for me.

“Did his penis work?”

I laughed. “Yes.”

“Then I would say he was very much attracted to you. The penis doesn’t work if there’s no attraction.”

Oh yeah.

~

A couple of days ago, I was in a therapy session where I was blaming everything on myself. I’m just the kind of person who thinks that everything is my fault. Perhaps it’s the conditioning of my conspiracy-theory-filled mother or the paranoia I formed from growing up in an alcoholic home. Or perhaps I’m just crazy. But if there is a conflict, I think it’s my fault. If there is tension, anger, sadness, or fear being expressed…it is my fault. If I experience loss…again, it’s my fault. An otherwise sane person would not think this way.  But I have associated myself with every bad thing that occurs. And it gets really extreme sometimes.

I could probably find a way to blame myself for the war in Iraq.

I never said it made any sense. It’s just what I do. I think it provides me with a level of comfort when things happen that I cannot explain.

My therapist told me that this “all my fault” thinking is called “magical thinking.” I was intrigued. I like to think of myself as a pretty magical person, so I thought at first it was a compliment.

But then she explained to me that I was thinking like a child…

I was a bit offended. But then I thought, I kind of feel like a child when I think this way. Children can be pretty self-centered.

You are not that powerful.

My therapist went on to ask, “Why is it that you believe you are at fault for so much?  Don’t you know the truth?”

I didn’t have a concrete answer. I sat there for a few minutes. Dammit, I was going to explain to this woman why everything is my fault! What kind of analogy could I use? And then the craziest thing popped into my head. “Do you remember Gazoo?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Gazoo. Do you remember the cartoon The Flintstones? Well, there was this little character called Gazoo that used to fly around and sit on Fred’s shoulder.”

“I remember the Flintstones, but I don’t remember Gazoo.”

The character’s name was actually the Great Gazoo, and he came in the last season of The Flintstones. He was this little, cute, flying green guy from outer space that spent most of his time with Fred and Barney and constantly caused trouble. He wasn’t bad, just a bit of a pest, and when he tried to help, he would always end up causing more harm than good.

So I told my therapist that my thinking goes that way when I’m visited by what I call the Bad Gazoo (as opposed to the Great Gazoo). So this little green guy sits on my shoulder and fills my head with guilt, shame, and blame, even though I know the truth. He thinks he’s helping me, but he’s really not. Gazoo is the little bugger that causes me to “magically think.”

I was satisfied with this theoretical explanation. But my therapist was not.  She leaned forward and calmly said, “I think you need to murder Gazoo.”

When she said that, I had the best belly laugh. I laughed so loud that I’m sure it echoed through her waiting room. My soul was smiling.

My shrink had done it again.

And so, as I write this, my shrink and I are planning the capture and ultimate murder of Gazoo. Rest in peace.

 

Michele Whitney is a writer, blogger, and musician from Chicago. She is currently a PhD candidate for public service leadership at Capella University where she is working on a dissertation titled: The Human-Animal Bond: A Phenomenological Study of People’s Attachment to Companion Animals. Her writing has been published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and other venues. Michele’s message of emotional healing, recovery, and connection can be found in her blog, Words of Compassion, Creativity, & Knowledge. Her free time is spent playing the flute, cooking, and practicing aromatherapy. She resides with her mom and her feline kid named Samson.

Read an interview with Michele here.

“The Deer Cabin” by Justin Kingery

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Today, in a Chinese city of fifteen million people, I step onto the biggest airplane I’ve ever seen, spend thirty of the most uncomfortable hours of my life running to gates and hitching connecting flights, and finally settle down into the back seat of my mother’s car.

I have been studying overseas for six months, and I have never felt so torn. In the black night as we drive the eighty miles home, I try to sleep, but every time I close my eyes, I see the faces of friends I will never see again. We all said we’d find each other again someday, somewhere, maybe in Mumbai or Singapore or Istanbul—hell, maybe even back in the filthy streets of Dalian or Beijing—but I know better. Back in the Midwest, snow is on the January ground, and I can once again see the stars from my middle-of-nowhere home.  I feel far away from everything. I make no sound. For the last few days, I have longed for home, for family, for a bed with a mattress, and a view of trees with green leaves. It’s a strange, uncomfortable sensation to feel comfort neither here nor there, to want nothing more than to go and also to stay.

At home, I sleep for two whole days. My biological clock is broken. My mother wakes me to make sure my heart is still beating. I tell her I am unsure. My bedroom is unexpectedly familiar, dull. When I came back from the East, I hoped to be surprised by the person I was before. I secretly longed to be like someone awaking from a coma or cryogenic hibernation who returns home to find that he remembers very little about who he once was. I imagined myself sifting through my own belongings as a stranger, struggling to piece together stories from a former life from nothing more than photographs in dark wooden frames or coins in a glass jar. But nothing has changed. I still remember where to find socks, favorite shirts, CDs. I left Missouri so I would come home and find that everything had changed, that I’d forgotten it all, but I was wrong. Everything is still the same. Even me.

I am depressed. I miss the energy and the smell of the city. I look out my window, hoping to see hundreds of people I will never meet, talk to, or see again, but all I see are open fields of white and Charolais cattle nosing around in muddy patches of snow. Missouri has never felt so lonesome. I think about my friends on the other side of the world cramming themselves into city buses, eating at unusual restaurants, trying to communicate with taxi drivers with nothing but severely broken Mandarin and hand gestures. I smile and remember the life I led just a few days before, the same funny things, but they feel like dreams and become foggier and foggier the longer I am awake.

I have lost all sense of the comfort of home, and I fear I may never find it again.

~

Some old friends, real country boys I grew up with, drive out to the house and pick me up. They’ve planned a night out at the deer cabin, and they want to hear about all the little “Chink gals.” I’m torn between offense and ennui. Nothing can ever be explained. I would rather not talk about any of it.

They take me out into the snowy woods for the night. Three of us ride in a small truck, and scents of tree bark, wet dirt, and fire smoke linger in the air. As we drive through a field and stop to unlatch three gates, I see the moonlight has covered the landscape in the same blue hue often used in nature calendars for the month of December—a solemn blue night scene to symbolize the death of the year. As the truck pulls up to an open spot in the field, there are others waiting for us, feeding wood to a huge bonfire out in front of the old wooden cabin, which is inhabited mainly during deer and turkey hunting seasons, with its patchwork tin roof, wooden stoves, kerosene lamps, and mismatched antique furniture. All around the 2500-acre piece of land are food plots, deer cameras, hunting blinds, and other things I don’t know much about. But I have spent many nights at the cabin over the years, just hanging out around the fire, listening to my friends, the outdoorsmen, tell stories of the hunt. A lone liberal amongst rural conservatives, I was the only one who didn’t hunt, but my disinterest was never questioned. We had grown up together over fifteen years with other things in common—schoolteachers, summer jobs, and baseball. We knew everything about one another. We were like brothers.

The fire outside the cabin grows tall and bright, and no one can stand too close to its heat. A few of us stand with our backs to the flames, turning like sausages when one side becomes too hot. There are eight of us out here, the sun has long gone down, and someone asks about the skillet’s heat. Chad violently shakes meat in a ziplock bag full of breading and yells that we’re going to have a feast. I ask what’s on the menu. Suckers, rabbit, venison, turkey, dove breast wrapped in bacon, chips, and cans of Coke. Garret even brought some crow meat in reminiscent celebration of a disgusting dare I had taken a few years back. He promised to eat it with me this time, to share the grotesque glory. They had been saving all this food and planning this night to celebrate my return from the East. For the first time in a week I smile and laugh and dodge surprise swats to my groin. We laugh and wrestle. Their voices are so incredibly familiar.

Around the fire we sit on pieces of wood or in camping chairs, our laps holding Styrofoam plates. A few boys eat within earshot on a wooden porch swing to keep an eye on the meat still in the deep fryer. They ask me about China, if I was a giant, if I ate any dogs or cats, and more questions like that, but they also ask where I lived, what the Great Wall was like, and if the food was any good. I give them my answers and tell them in my best words what life was like there, what my experience had been, what it meant to me. I let them know I am still trying to understand it all myself. They listen in near disbelief, say the things I am telling them—some of my stories—are hard to believe or crazy, some sound like fun, but my friends make it clear that they could never do it, that they could never go off on an airplane over the ocean to such a strange place away from here, that they could never leave this land or their families for any period of time or accept any danger of maybe never making it back. Too much at risk. Too much to lose. They would be here forever, but they would gladly listen to my stories when I had them to tell.

We eat and eat. My friends cook fresh meat like five-star chefs. They talk of different culinary oils, meat rubs, and the cooking herbs they grow in small gardens and on windowsills. They have honed their outdoor skills throughout their entire lives, and I have always been fortunate enough to reap the rewards, the edible final products. This is the first time I have eaten a hearty meal in more than half a year. “You’re skinnier’n a snake,” they tell me. We each eat twice our fill, and there is leftover food we will take home to our families tomorrow.

A few friends disappear around the back of the cabin as some of us are packing leftovers. A minute later, I hear laughing and look over to see them coming around the corner of the cabin pushing the golf ball cannon Chad and Adam’s dad built. Their family owns the cabin, so I have seen the black iron contraption before, with its heavy chase and dark bore. It’s secured somehow to an axel between two old bicycle wheels and has some other pieces of metal rigged up to absorb the kick—no doubt a personal project their father created during down time at the local steel plant where he’s worked for over thirty years.

With the cannon in place, Garret brings over a square hay bale and places a rotting pumpkin on top of it. Chad explains they had been saving the pumpkin for this occasion since Halloween, even though their mother complained of the flies it attracted to her porch. They pour black powder down the barrel and shove a white Titlist golf ball inside. Everyone stands back and covers their ears as Chad touches a fiery stick to the vent. Nobody sees the golf ball. The pumpkin explodes and a resounding boom travels across the fields and meadows where it will be heard miles away and someone will undoubtedly call the local police department and complain. Slimy chunks of pumpkin rain down all around us, onto our shoulders and into our hair, and we laugh. Chad and Adam tell a story about a neighbor more than a mile away who had found a lone golf ball in his field while out walking. They swear it had to be theirs.

The cold night gets colder. Once the cannon is wheeled back around the cabin, we all go to warm ourselves near the fire and talk some more. The focus shifts from my adventures in China to deer hunting, then to duck calls, then to crappy beds. I am happy to listen and watch my friends laugh and carry on, telling their own stories. Looking around, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot out here in the middle of nowhere—an old cabin, a snowy woodpile, a couple of old rusty burn barrels, a saggy barbed-wire fence—but still, I cannot imagine myself never being here again.

Talk dwindles and we begin to nod off in our camping chairs, so we rise and surrender to the cabin. There is no electricity and only an old pot-bellied wood stove for heat, but the beds and down mattresses strewn throughout the rooms are covered with heavy homemade quilts to keep out the cold. Two hours before, Chad had built a fire in the stove to warm the cabin. We find our places on bunk beds and on couches, and Chad, the oldest of us, argues and wins his spot closest to the hot stove. I follow my two closest friends up the homemade ladder to the attic that holds the stove’s rising heat, where, in two beds, a few boys can sleep “pole to pole or hole to hole, just not pole to hole,” as Adam chimes like clockwork, an essential piece of his camping dialogue. The three of us laugh, having heard him deliver the line so many times throughout the years. The fire outside is still burning brightly, and light from the yellow flames enters though the small attic window and dances on the low ceiling. There are spider webs in all the corners, everywhere. Garret recalls a time a few summers back when we all ran out of the cabin in the middle of the night and slept in our trucks because the cabin was full of brown recluses. We share a nervous chuckle.

Once our bodies settle into the feather mattresses and under the heavy quilts, we talk quietly for a bit, retell old stories. As usual, Adam falls asleep first. After minutes of silence, Garret asks me if I miss China. I tell him yes, that I do, but maybe not as much as yesterday.

Without speaking, he and I listen to the fire outside crackle and die down. The wood is burning away, and early in the morning when we awake to a cold stove and pull the quilts up over our numb faces, ash, smolder, and blackened Coke cans will be the only signs of our time.

 

Justin Kingery recently completed the coursework for a PhD in Technical & Professional Discourse at East Carolina University, where he also taught composition and nonfiction writing, and soon after left academia to pursue a career in writing in his native home state of Missouri. His essay published here was originally written in 2006, after a study-abroad experience in Dalian, China.

Read our interview with Justin here.