Category Archives: ShortsOnSurvival

“Arriving” by Tommy Dean

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Unfinished Business (Tommy Dean)
“Unfinished Business,” oil on canvas, Darwin Leon, 2010

Jake pulled into the driveway and  saw Ruth sitting on the front porch steps, bundled in her parka, wool mittens, and a black stocking cap. Her arms cradling her legs, she looked like a child waiting on her father to arrive home from work. In the headlights, her eyes were radiant in the brisk chill of the coming dark. He cut the engine and scrambled out of the car. The snow crunched under his feet.

He placed his briefcase beside her and sat down on the step, careful to avoid the melting snow. She leaned her body into his and he put his arm around her. He couldn’t feel the heat of her body through the heavy fabric of their coats.

“You missed them. They built snowmen.”

In the neighbor’s backyard sat four snowmen in different shapes and sizes, each, he imagined, made to represent a member of the family. He concentrated on their features and was mildly shocked by the placement of the eyes, mouth, and nose on the smallest one. It looked like an expressionist painting, with everything slanted to one side. If it were his child’s he would have waited until the boy went inside and then corrected it.

“How long have you been out here?”

“An hour, who knows. After the appointment…I don’t know.”

He was amazed at the airy silence; shadows brave against the dying sunlight bounded around corners as the streetlights popped on. The search for the perfect excuse stirred in his hands keeping him warm. The snowman made him anxious, as though its imperfections would somehow ruin his explanation.

“I was sitting here trying to think of a way to hide it from you, but when those children came plowing out the  door, I lost it.”

He stood then and looked down at his wife; her face veiled in his shadow; her eyes liquid; her cheeks wind burnt and chapped, and then she shivered.

“Ruth, I’m sorry. That couple showed up late and there was all that snow melting on the hardwood floors. I couldn’t just leave it that way.”

“It doesn’t matter. Forget it, okay?”

She stood, wrapping her arms around his waist. She looked up at him. A strand of hair came out from underneath her hat, resting over her eye.

“Dr. Lesko went over our test results again and there are just too many of those things. God I can’t even say the word.”

“Cysts?” he asked, his voice sounding too loud in the muted darkness.

“Yes. God, cysts.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

“If there was something I could do…”

“So you’re off the hook.”

“But, I’m still you’re guy, right?”

“Oh hell, you know what I’d love?” she said. “I’d love to wake up tomorrow and look out the window and see them gone.”

In front of him a vista of white decorated the neighborhood like a baker’s frosting: cars, roofs, yards, and scaly tree branches doused in confectioner’s sugar. Above and below him, sky and ground shimmered like tiny  penlights.

“I could do that, I could.”

“God, I’m so…so utterly…Don’t I deserve to be angry?

“What if we had something else to concentrate on?” Jake asked.

“Not you, too. Don’t patronize me, not now.”

Staring down the street, he thought of all the parents putting their children to bed, giving them a quick kiss on the forehead, before heading off to their own rooms, where they’d cuddle together under the heavy covers. They’d fall to sleep knowing their children were safe and warm, happy to have another day in a happy life. Well that pissed him off, because he wanted to know just who had decided that they couldn’t have the same damn things.

“I can’t look at them anymore. It’s like they’re watching me,” she said.

“Go, then.” He softened his voice. “I’m right behind you. I just need to get something from the car.”

She sighed, her breath turning to fog then dissipating into the night. “Take your time.  That’s all we have left.”

She clomped her shoes on the porch, creating watery footprints. After she closed the door, he watched her walk into the house, coat and shoes still on. The water from her shoes would hide in the carpet and later he would step in it, soaking his socks and freezing his toes, his circulation too slow to keep his feet warm. Every winter they went through the same thing, he’d ask her not to wear her shoes past the kitchen and she would claim to forget. Ten years of marriage and nothing had changed.

He dashed across the street, almost slipping, but regained his footing and stood in front of the two smaller snowmen. He raised his foot and kicked at the base. A chunk of snow collapsed to the ground and the midsection shuddered and canted to the left. He punched and pawed at the baby until his hands were cold, red, and raw with the crust of melting snow. A carrot, broken in half, lay at his feet near the squished Oreo that used to be its eye. He turned his back on the mess and walked away, knowing that his footprints would harden overnight, and that tomorrow when the neighbor stood on their porch they’d forget, for just a moment that nothing would change.

 


Tommy Dean works as a high school English teacher. A graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program, he has been previously published in Apollo’s Lyre, Pindeldyboz, Boston Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, and 5X5.

 

“Coffee” by Stephen Ramey

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Coffee
Image courtesy of Victor Juhasz, first published by Sleeping Bear Press.

He looks out over the city and thinks of death. Somewhere down there in the pit of this valley someone’s dying, curled into a ball in that dead end alley next to Ralph’s Surplus maybe, or leaning lopsided with a Lucky Strike still smoldering between veed fingers.

“Donut?” the counter clerk asks.

He pulls his gaze from the window. She’s pretty in a homely way, with curling brown locks that look entirely unmanageable, and a determinedly defiant jaw. Her skin is caramel brown.

“A dozen?” she says. Her eyes are bright somehow, like the lull in a storm when you can see lightning so clearly without having to endure its lash.

“Coffee,” he says.

“What kind?”

He squints at a menu that makes no sense. “Black?”

“Half,” she says without batting an eye. “My dad’s white.”

An intense embarrassment overcomes him. His tongue twists, looking for words.

“I’m just joshing with you,” she says. “You want sugar in that coffee?”

He nods mutely. She turns and drains coffee from a stainless steel urn into a Styrofoam cup. He watches her move, the way her hand goes to the swell of her hip. She’s been on her feet too long. Her hip aches, there in the hollow beneath the ribs.

He can’t help but think of the pain his wife endured in those final months after they gave up on chemo. He can’t help but recall the pain his son expressed this morning. Another argument, another slugfest, only this time he’d landed a punch, a real one.

“One lump or two?” It’s the clerk.

“No,” he says. It’s the shortest answer. She fits a lid to the cup; she slides his coffee across the counter.

“A dollar-fifty-nine,” she says.

He digs through his pocket for change. Three quarters, a dime, six pennies. It’s not enough.

His thoughts go purple, a throb like the swell growing on his son’s pudgy cheek. Death, he thinks. Death of flesh, death of love, death of dignity. He’s stared into the black eye of a gun a couple times, but hasn’t been able to make that coward finger squeeze.

“I can’t…” Words fail him. A rope constricts the pit of his belly, fibrous strands poking from a smooth weave. Coins clatter to the counter.

The clerk slides them onto her palm. She opens the register, deposits them.

“It’s okay,” she says in a voice gone quiet. “The shit isn’t worth what they charge anyhow.” Her teeth are far from straight, but they remind him of his wife’s.

She touches his hand. “Rough day?”

He looks at her fingers, the knuckles weathered, fingernails chewed to stubs. She has her own problems. Still, he can’t help it. He nods. He meets her gaze. For just an instant it’s like staring into the barrel of that gun, only it’s light inside, not dark. He thinks of that time he helped his wife plant a black walnut sapling where the elm came down. He thinks of their gloved hands touching.

And then the moment is gone. “Thanks,” he says. He takes the cup, feeling its warmth, thinking how muted it must be compared to the boiling liquid inside.

Life he thinks, turning from the counter. The clerk swivels her attention to the next person in line.

 

 

Stephen Ramey lives in an 1870s Victorian home on the edge of New Castle, Pennsylvania’s Historic North Hill District, overlooking a Pizza Hut and two wonderfully  complex church buildings. His short fictions have appeared in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Bartleby Snopes, Pure Slush and Caper Literary Journal, among others. He edits the annual Triangulation anthology from Parsec Ink and blogs about that process at http://www.stephenvramey.com

Read our interview with Stephen Ramey here.

 

“Target” by Maria T. Groschup-Black

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Target
Image courtesy of USAF Art program and Victor Juhasz, artist.

The ending is always the same: Two shots to the chest, one to the head. He falters.

Two to the chest, one to the head. I’ve hit him. Why doesn’t he stop? Six to the chest and reload. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t bleed.

I wake up. I am sweating; my heart is pounding. The beat echoes in my head like the rhythm of a bass drum. Every muscle is tense. I pull my lover close and whisper “I had the dream again.” I used to have that dream a lot, but I don’t sleep much anymore.

I get up.  I pour myself a drink.

Some say the dream is “insecurity.” Some say it represents a “lack of skill.”  Others say “fear.”  For me, the dream is much more.  Targets don’t bleed.  No matter the interpretation, they all say it is a common dream among police officers.

I’ve been on the force for twelve years. Twelve years is a long time. I am callous. I am indignant and arrogant. I shout at the television.

“You weren’t there, Asshole!  What do you know about my job?”

My lover tells me to calm down. I pour myself a drink.

A suspect high on drugs and alcohol resists and beats an officer with his own nightstick. He is shot. The public calls him “Martyr.” They call the officer “Murderer.”

And I? I pour myself a drink.

I get ready for work. My lover whispers “come home to me.” These words say it all. Without them my night is empty. We’ve been together a long time.

“Come home to me.”  She says.

“I will.” I promise.

I come home.

“How was your night dear?” She asks.

“Nothing special” I say.

I could tell her the stories, but I don’t talk about work anymore.

I want a drink. I go to a meeting.

I am angry. The public I have sworn to protect has turned its’ back on me.

“Walk in my shoes!” I shout.

They question my every step, my every method. They ask me to protect them, to solve their problems and to counsel them. I protect them. They want me fired.

“Walk in my shoes!” I shout.

I need a drink. I go to a meeting.

I go to meetings a lot now. I tell them I am angry; I am indignant.

“You did this to me! You, the public I serve and protect! Who will protect me?”

I tell them I am powerless and go home.

I wake up. I am sweating; my heart is pounding. I hear each beat echo in my mind.

Babump! Every muscle is tight.

Babump! I scream.

Babump! I pull my lover close.

Two shots to the chest, one to the head. He falters. Two to the chest, one to the head. He stops. He bleeds.

And I? I pour myself a drink.

I don’t sleep much anymore.

 

 

Maria T. Groschup-Black worked for 18 years in San Diego local law enforcement, first as Deputy Marshal and later as a police officer for the S.D Harbor Police. She currently resides in Spring Valley with her spouse of 10 years and their 3 children ages 10, 7, and 6. Her credits include articles written for and sold to Police Chief Magazine and Fire Chief Magazine. When not at work, Maria spends her day repairing the damage caused by three rambunctious boys while squeezing in a few moments of time for reading and writing.

 

“God’s Forgottens” by Maureen Lougen

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Zues
Image courtesy of Victor Juhasz, artist, first published through Sleeping Bear Press.

This ain’t a place miracles ever happen. This ain’t a place anything good ever happens.

Even the cops don’t like coming here, and they gotta come here, least once or twice a month. We get fist fights, knife fights, heads cracked by pool cues, shoulders broke by slamming chairs. Hell, two or three times a year there’s always some damn concerned citizen talking about shutting the whole place down on account a the drunks and drugs and fights and body bags that spill out into their nice clean world. But the clientele we get here, don’t nobody want ’em nowhere else, so we don’t never get closed down.

Tonight’s being quiet, all things considered, and I can tell some of the fellas are gettin’ antsy. We got all the regulars tonight. Knife and Chainsaw – don’t know as I know anybody’s real name – are at the pool table, with Godzilla holding up the corner, waiting his turn. Mercy (’cause he’s got none) and Harley are playing cut-throat poker. Crank’s sharpening darts on his boot and Shirl is at the table closest to the door, being available to her own brand of clientele as they come and go, and the rest of God’s Forgottens are taking up space across the barroom floor, smoking and drinking and doing things their Mamas wouldn’t approve of.

It’s gettin’ late and just as I’m thinking this night might end and no blood on the floor, in walks Soccer Dad. Young guy, thirty if that. Clean hair, trimmed nails, clothes that seen an actual washer and dryer. He’s so far outta where he oughtta be, he might as well be on a different planet. Half the place turns to look at him, like wolves who suddenly notice supper. I’m feeling generous –  and I don’t want the cops back less’n three days after the last go-round – so I go over to tell him that if he don’t want to be tomorrow’s ‘identity withheld’ he better turn tail and run.

Especially since he’s headed right towards Godzilla.

I don’t know Godzilla’s right name, and that ain’t even a name he give himself. I call him that – not to his face – ’cause he’s huge and seems near always in a bad mood. Right from when he first set his butt on my barstool, it was like he rolled in off the thunderclouds what was hanging over the street that night, and the dry lightning flashing red to blue, cloud to cloud and back again, like it was Heaven and Hell playing keep away with the thunderbolts.

I took him for military, Godzilla, right from the jump.  It was his boots that looked it, sure, but it was more than that, too. Something hard to describe, but something – or a lot of somethings – one old soldier recognizes in another. Not that Godzilla’s anywhere near to the years I got collecting behind me. Not on the outside. On the outside, couldn’t be he was any more’n twenty-five. On the inside though, I could tell he was old. Same as everybody else ever set up shop in my place, Godzilla was seen too much, done too much, lived too much, old.

Being fair, he’s got niceness in him. Might be he’s bad tempered most of a day, but he’s never mean to somebody isn’t mean first. A person nice to him gets nice given back, sometimes outta two hands. One time he asked was I okay after the old woman laid me open with a beer bottle. For a whole coupla nights after that he did any heavy lifting it was I needed around the place n’wouldn’t even take a drink on the house for it. Shirl sure done got her a special place for him, even with her being old enough to be his Mama, or even his grandmama. Godzilla holds her chair and her coat and the door whenever it is she needs it, and it ain’t that I think he ever bought himself any of what it is she sells, but if it ever was he did, I’m thinking it’d be his for the asking.

But those that mess with him get messed back. He don’t like being crossed, he don’t like being touched, hell, sometimes he don’t hardly like being talked to. Since he’s been coming here all this past summer, he’s broke two arms, three noses, and six fingers. Other people’s. That I know of. Don’t get me wrong – they all had it coming. Just didn’t none of ’em see it coming. Nobody, not even Mercy, messes with Godzilla.

And Soccer Dad is headed right for him.

“Hey Buddy -” I try. I put my hand on his shoulder, meaning he should leave while it’s still in its socket, but he throws me off and keeps walking.

‘Your funeral.‘ I think and follow close for ringside seats.

Godzilla’s paying nobody no mind but the pool game. Soccer Dad grabs his arm and pulls him around and Godzilla comes up swinging and I’m thinking the game is on. Soccer Dad don’t even flinch – he don’t care, he stands there glaring at Godzilla, and Godzilla’s car-sized fist stops dead just before it wallops him.

“What the hell?“ Soccer Dad demands and Godzilla’s face does something I ain’t ever seen it do – it goes soft, like that day Eyeball found his Mama’s wedding ring he thought he lost for a week, jammed up under a loose board under the pool table. Godzilla goes soft and looking like he don’t know what to do and drops his hand and don’t even try to look Soccer Dad in the face.

Mercy ain’t having none of it though. Tonight’s been quiet and he don’t like quiet and could be he’s taking Godzilla’s idleness personal. He shoves Soccer Dad but no more’n asks, “Who’re YOU?” before he’s on his face with Godzilla’s foot in his armpit and his arm twisted back around the wrong way and Godzilla saying, “He’s somebody you walk away from. Understand?“

And it ain’t until Mercy snivels ‘Yessir’ practically that Godzilla lets go and goes back to stand in front of Soccer Dad, looking soft and worried and like he got caught after curfew.  By now they got the attention of the whole barroom, only neither of them don’t notice or don’t care. Soccer Dad don’t say nothing, he only just keeps glaring, like he can burn an answer outta Godzilla. It was then I seen the resemblance. Soccer Dad don’t have more’n a couple-three years on Godzilla, near to as tall, that same dead-on stare I seen Godzilla blasting folks with, and it’s on me to figure Soccer Dad is Godzilla’s brother.

“Tell me you got amnesia.” Soccer Dad snarls at him, like Godzilla ain’t got inches and attitude on him and it comes on me that Soccer Dad is only what he shows to the outside. There’s death under the clean clothes and trimmed nails, I can tell. “Tell me amnesia is why you’ve been back five months and didn’t even let us you were alive.”

Godzilla’s throat is bobbing like he can’t swallow something and he won’t look at Soccer Dad and his head tilts like he’s trying out excuses in his brain until finally I guess he finds one that might pass muster.

“Up ’til now, I didn’t know I was alive.”

Whatever that means, it means more than anything to Soccer Dad ‘cause he gets a look as soft as Godzilla’s. He wants to say something, he wants to say a lot of somethings, but he ain’t gonna say ’em here.

“Let’s go.“

He turns like that, like his word is law and I guess it is, ‘cause Godzilla follows him. He even puts some hurry into it like Soccer Dad might just go on and leave him behind, never mind what he just went through to get him.

I follow ’em to the door and a little beyond, ’cause I know this ain’t something I’ll ever see again.

Godzilla follows Soccer Dad to the curb where they need to cross and Soccer Dad puts the back of his hand on Godzilla’s chest, saying with no words to mind the traffic. And Godzilla, who I know can crack glass just by looking at it, smiles.

The whole barroom is quiet, hushed like we all just maybe witnessed a miracle, and I don’t know, I think maybe we did…’cause one of God’s Forgottens got remembered after all.

 

 

Maureen Lougen started writing in fourth grade. When other kids were actually doing their schoolwork, she would pen a juvenile blend of her favorite TV shows on scraps of paper instead of paying attention to the teacher. She lives in a little town that’s seen better days, about a quarter mile from Lake Ontario. During the summer, the town smells like dead fish. (Which might explain why she’s still not married.) She shares her aged house with her too-smart-for-his-own-good son, a beagle that needs a C-Pap machine, a beagle-basset that suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and two cats that hate each other. An avowed busybody and Nosy Parker, Maureen steals her ideas from other people’s lives and plunks them down in the middle of her stories just as they are. It’s just easier than doing research.

 

 

“Dissolving” by Tania Hershman

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Shakespeare with Champagne
Image courtesy of Victor Juhasz, artist

When she had had an afternoon drowning in the feeling of being the imaginary lover of an imaginary man, she took herself out to the nearest place that would fill her with liquid and she drank forever. When the last had gone, swindled away in a nonsense moment, she swayed back into the virtual streets and bound her cells for home. There, thinking he might find it comforting to hear the music he was used to, she weighted his voicemail with old 50s songs, crooning into the receiver. When hours passed and he did not answer, she curled herself up with her own double helix and dissolved back into the air.

 

 

Tania Hershman is a former science journalist turned fiction writer. Her first book, The White Road and Other Stories,(Salt Modern Fiction, 2008), was commended, 2009 Orange Award and included in New Scientist’s Best Books of 2008. She is currently writer-in-residence in Bristol University’s Science Faculty and has been awarded an Arts Council England grant to work on a collection of biology-inspired short fiction. She blogs about writing at TaniaWrites.

Read an interview with Tania Hershman here.

 

“Pose” by Christopher Searles

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Cattle
Photocollage by Matthew Chase-Daniel, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Read our interview with Chris here.

 

“In the Café” by Bev Magennis

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In the Cafe
Beach at Selinunte, Sicily, 2000

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

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

You suggest we split the tab. Sure.

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

My eyes follow sunlight on gold leaves shifting among branches.

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

I’d set him free in an instant.

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

“Stella Blue” by Brian Pietrus

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Stella Blue
Headwaters of the Colorado by Matthew Chase-Daniel, 2009

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

Oh my God, look at the bison!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d feel better, she said.

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

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

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

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

You’re pretty quick, she said.

Lots of practice.

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

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

It’s a nice smell, she agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry.

No, we’re going in circles!

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

Don’t say that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Read an interview with Brian here.

 

“Catching My Breath” by Susan Barr-Toman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Read an interview with Susan here.

 

“Touching Margaret Atwood” by Valerie Fioravanti

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If there is one benefit to a Brooklyn upbringing, it’s a loud, booming voice.

You learn to be heard in the schoolyard–if not the cradle. In a world where sidewalk territory was conceded square-by-square, where insults were merely the foreplay of torment, I developed a knack for exposing secret shames.

Bully bed wetter? You can’t hide that smell up close.

Vet older brother caressing lampposts in the twilight? I’m not worth the risk.

My verbal abilities became protection and rescue from the neighborhood, and they served me loyally through college. Then I trailed a lover to Switzerland, home to four languages not my own. In that strange land of starched traditions and tight-lipped disapproval, words failed me habitually, publicly, until they sputtered to a complete stop, even on the page, in English.

The overarching Swiss aesthetic is one of attainable perfection. I couldn’t order bread without being marched through pronunciation and grammar lessons, my baguette dangled outside my reach as I repeated phrases a dozen times or more.

Je voudrais du pain, s’il vous plaît.

Non! Je voudrais du PAIN, s’il vous plaît.

Non! PA-in.

Alors, JE voudrais du pain.

My enthusiastic attempts to communicate blighted their ears, and even my partner, his native traits emerging on home soil, suggested I focus on pronunciation over vocabulary, as if a thing that wasn’t said elegantly wasn’t worth saying. This implication cut as deeply as any comeuppance I’d ever inflicted.

I didn’t fight this notion like the rebel I’d always believed myself to be. Instead, I channeled Bartleby, refusing to engage in daily corrections with my neighbors. I pointed at items I wanted in shops, and relied upon my honed urban glare when challenged. I grew more and more mute until I spoke rarely, at home, among friends, or otherwise. When I finally fled the Swiss, I found my silence a difficult habit to break. I had lost sight of words as my gift.

I was home a week when I learned about a “master” class given by Margaret Atwood. I believed my favorite writer, a Canadian concerned with the silence of being from that other country, could guide me back to my former place of surety. I had missed the submission deadline by one day, but I went to the program office to plead for consideration. In my mind, Switzerland was a nation of torment, yet invoking my time living abroad didn’t elicit sympathy or an extension from the program staff. I persisted, hoping to shake off the rust, to appear worthy of Margaret Atwood’s time.

“I can read you the first paragraph, and if you don’t think it’s good enough, that’s fine. I’ll accept that. The name Ainsley is an homage to my favorite character from The Edible Woman.”

They called security.

I trailed Margaret Atwood through her NYC appearances to promote Alias Grace. If my own words had failed me, hers remained a delight. She made time to read at an independent bookstore, a haven that would not survive the release of her next book. The crowd she drew was larger than the space, so she had fans circled around her on the floor.

The microphone wasn’t working properly. Whenever she spoke, the treble squeaked and bleated, but the noise of the bookstore and the Broadway street bustle meant she couldn’t be heard without it. Twenty minutes into the equipment troubles, Ms. Atwood rested her hand on the head of a young man with wild, shoulder-length curls, and the noises disappeared. The audience whooped. When she moved her hand, the bleating returned, but the big-haired boy scuttled away.

“Was it me?” she joked. The feedback heckled her laugh.

The space around her had widened, and my friend elbowed me. “They’re never going to fix that thing.”

I tripped over my own backpack, practically tumble-salting to her side, but the audience applauded my bravery. Ms. Atwood put her hand on my head, and the mike quieted. She swatted the tech crew away.

For a delicately featured woman, she had a firm, sure touch. I was in the grip of someone in command of more than her words, and I wanted that assurance to seep into me. As she read, her description of 1850s society women— jellyfish ladies—as lovely illusions moved me so literally that the feedback returned. She adjusted my head without interrupting the rhythm of her sentences.

I thought of the women who teetered through my neighborhood, heels high and hair higher. They appeared tough as they sashayed for attention, but that attitude was its own lovely illusion. They were modern jellyfish ladies desperate for rescue, and I longed to write them beyond such outdated notions. As my left hand itched for a pen, I wanted to sweep Margaret Atwood up and dance the mad-jig of inspiration. Part of me thought she could do this without missing a word from the chapter she was reading. She had powers, that one. I believed.

After the reading, she took my hand in hers and mouthed, “Thank you.”

I beamed my reply. Words didn’t fail me. They were unnecessary.

 

 

Valerie Fioravanti writes fiction, essays, and prose poems. Her linked story collection, Garbage Night at the Opera, won the 2011 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction and is forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2012. Her nonfiction has appeared in Eclectica, Silk Road, and Jelly Bucket, and she is working on an episodic memoir of sorts. Margaret Atwood remains her literary idol.

Read an interview with Valerie here.