Image by Dawn Estrin

Macaroni and cheese. She wanted the solace of her grandmother’s macaroni and cheese and rummaged through cookbooks until she found the three-by-five From the Kitchen of Katherine Blair card with the recipe.

While the water came to a boil, she trimmed mold off one corner of a block of sharp cheddar and sliced it into strips. Small elbows, slightly cooked. I’m sorry, Mama.

Her mother stood at the stove, making macaroni and cheese. It’s nothing, Sweetie, it’s only macaroni. We’ll make some more, but not cook it quite so long.

Not the macaroni, Mama, I’m sorry I disappointed you.

She’d like some wine, but her mother was there by her elbow, assembling the ingredients on the counter: saltines, butter, salt and pepper, milk. Now, grease the baking dish. That’s the way.

She wondered how it would taste if she substituted Ritz for saltines, if she added some garlic, suspected this was why hers never turned out well. For one who’d had most of the advantages, Elaine hadn’t turned out very well, either, and knew she hadn’t lived up to her parents’ expectations. Their expectations were those of the insular campus of a small state college where she’d grown up. She wasn’t published. She didn’t hold a chair. She’d ended up in health care by default, not design. Not like her sister, Mary Beth, who led a charmed life because she followed The Plan: finish school, land a teaching position, get married, buy a house, then think about children, but by then Mary Beth was thirty-seven.

Where did waitressing at Denney’s or packing dispensers at the Dixie Cup factory fit into the plan?  At thirty-seven, Elaine still hadn’t finished her degree. At thirty-seven she’d been weaning herself from Stelazine and working her own plan for leaving John, and Susannah had been gone for three years. All the while, her sister had been secure in their parents’ world where everyone knew the rules, where their mother had known the idiosyncrasies of Mary Beth’s washing machine, had known that in her sister’s house the coffee mugs were on the second shelf, corner cabinet.

Where do you keep the colander?

Elaine couldn’t remember where she’d put it, looked in the cabinet, found it in the drawer under the oven.

Now drain the macaroni and put a layer in the bottom of the dish.

She did and felt better in the repetition of this act of communion.

Now, a layer of cheese, a layer of crushed crackers. Dot with butter. That’s the way. Salt and pepper.

Is this the secret, Mama, these layers? Or the cheese, perhaps, and though she wondered how Monterey Jack would taste, Elaine followed her mother’s instructions. This time she followed her mother’s instructions to the letter, except for the lying. Mary Beth had no reason to lie, her life spread before their mother, a life as honest as a line-dried sheet on a double bed.

I couldn’t tell you what it was like. You wouldn’t have understood. I always tried to call you, timing my calls when John wasn’t home. The time you called and I told you I couldn’t talk because I was expecting twelve for dinner, that was a lie. There was never a dinner party. John was drunk. I was afraid you’d hear him in the background. Is the secret the cheese?

There’s no secret to it, Sweetie. You just follow the instructions.

In her heart Elaine knew Susannah’s leaving was her fault, that she had never been the mother her mother had been, hadn’t taught her how a lady removes her gloves, how to pour coffee and serve dessert, how to play bridge. She knew it was her fault as surely as she knew she could’ve left John the first week they were married, the night he cornered her on the couch and made her tell him everything she’d done with every man she’d ever been with, and then hurled a coffee mug against the wall. She could have packed her red American Tourister and taken a Greyhound back to Bronxville. She could have told the dean she’d made a foolish mistake and begged to make up the work, and the dean would have understood and said yes, and all would have been forgiven. She could have walked past Freddy the gardener, past the endowed tulip beds, and up the steps to her corner room in Gilbert.

The second layer’s the same as the first, but you add milk before the crackers so they don’t get soggy, and put the butter on top so it melts down on everything and makes it good and buttery.

How for years her mother had been distracted by Mary Beth’s job and Mary Beth’s new house and hadn’t noticed that Susannah was never there to talk on the phone, such a social butterfly, they’d say; ball games, and play practice, and has Mary Beth chosen drapes yet? Wallpaper for the guest bedroom? Have they thought about a baby?

Then you bake it at 350 for twenty-five minutes.

Fresh from the oven the macaroni was bubbly hot, its top gilded with cracker crumbs, and Elaine sank a spoon deep into the dish and watched the cheese trail as she lifted it to her mouth. It tasted just like she remembered, like three generations of love, and tears filled her eyes from the pepper and the heat, the roof of her mouth blistered.. Mine never tastes like this, she said.

Her mother smiled, tossed a dish towel across her shoulder. That’s because you don’t follow Grandmother’s recipe. You’ve always improvised. She combed Elaine’s hair out of her eyes with her fingers. That’s one of the things I love most about you.

Elaine tucked the card back into the Junior League of Little Rock cookbook, remembered how she’d finally broken down and confessed her whole ugly life and begged for forgiveness and for money to get out while she could, remembered that her mother had asked how much she needed, sent a check for twice that amount and included in the envelope this card: a From the Kitchen of– card with the recipe for Grandmother’s Macaroni and Cheese.

Lu Livingston teaches English at University of Arkansas-Fort Smith and is a life-long student. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University, Charlotte, NC, and is pursuing advanced studies in Scottish literature at Orkney College, UK. Her current pursuit is to transmute her novel about a southern U. S. biker club into Gaelic bardic metre–an eerily natural fit.

Read our interview with Lu here.

Image by Dawn Estrin

Breathing can be severely compromised if your soon to be ex-husband’s knee happens to be in the middle of your chest, pinning you to the couch, as he wraps his fingers around your throat and squeezes.

It’s funny the things that run through your mind. You think about the already packed bags and boxes ready for their escape at the front door. You think about the empty apartment waiting for you. You imagine the rooms and how safe you will be there: alone. You wonder what the police will say because you are wearing these old lady pajamas with lace on the edges of the sleeves and pant bottoms. You wonder if your daughter will see you and be embarrassed that you are wearing the ugliest pajamas in the world when your body is found and she will have to live with that image burned into her brain for the rest of her life.

The snowy affect that signals you are about to lose consciousness flickers in the corners of your eyes followed by a swishing sound drumming in your ears. You realize this is your heartbeat as you gasp to get oxygen into your blood stream. You think your life is going to flash before your eyes like a sleek and dark thirties noir montage. But that doesn’t happen. Out of the din two very clear, decisive thoughts will rise to the surface as you feel your eyelids begin to close. The first is that you realize you are going to die. Which is rapidly followed by a voice somewhere deep within you that says, “You ain’t going out like this, not at the hand of this little motherfucker.”

You don’t know this now, but for years, you will wake up in the middle of this nightmare, and hold your breath, unconsciously. Your throat will close and you will not be able to breathe. You will have to think about letting out the air you are holding in your lungs. You will try to expel this memory when you exhale. Then you will try to flush it with a deep cleansing breath. But this memory will persist as if it has been encoded within the syntax of your DNA. It is always with you; in your breath; in your lungs, clenching at your throat like these fingers that grip you now. You will always wonder if this memory is real and when you touch your throat, you will expect those finger depressions to always be there. You wonder if the purple finger shaped bruises will rise to the surface again and again, changing from red, to purple, to green, to yellow.

When you get out of bed from the nightmare those marks will not be there. You are no longer in that time or place. Your breathing softens; comes easier. Your chest unclenches. Your knees stop wobbling. Sweat dries up. Your hands stop shaking as you splash water onto your face, chest, and wrists. You will tell yourself “It’s okay. You are safe now. You can breathe.”

You also don’t know that it will take seventeen years before you will be able to get close enough to anyone to remarry. That this future husband will never think to wrap his hand around your throat, or pin you down with his knee. His hand will gently hold yours, caresses your face; hold you close while you sleep. His knee will fold into the back of yours in a spoon that holds you tenderly and for the first time you will feel safe. And although you do feel safe, you wonder if he senses your urge to run when a sudden movement spikes your flight reactions. Does he see you break into a cold sweat when you realize you are standing in a hallway and he has moved his hand in a harmless gesture that you catch in your peripheral vision? At these times, you will be caught in the grip of memory from this moment. You will have to remind yourself, constantly, that his hand, his knee is not the other. You are safe, here. You can breathe. And then, you will quickly run out of the hallway, just in case.

But right now behind this knee, this hand, this theft of your breath is the person who promised to love and never hurt you. Promised he would never hit you.

“I would never hurt you like that, ever.” He says, ironically, after the first slap to the back of your head. The second is your fault, he tells you, because you get him so mad. The first push is in a supermarket because you don’t agree on the brand of peas to buy. Your six-month pregnant belly bouncing in front of you as cans fall from the rack he shoves you into in the local PathMark. You assure the janitor rushing to your aide that you are fine. You must have tripped. You keep losing your balance because you are so big and pregnant. You giggle and hold your breath, afraid that the janitor will call the police, which will only make it worse when you get home.

“Mind your own business.”  He says to the janitor.  “Stop talking to my wife.”  And the janitor exits into the shadows of the back room through the strips of thick-clouded plastic hanging in the doorway that clap together in a dull, distant noise.

All of these followed by the delivery of flowers, flourishes of he’s so sorry, please don’t leave, and promises that it will never happen again: until it does. Next, it will be a hand wrapped around your throat, shoving your neck against the wall. He will catch you in the hallway, halfway between your bedroom and the living room. His lips against your face telling you how easy it would be to just squeeze all the breath out of you; and that maybe, then, you will shut up. You will feel the veins and arteries pumping against the pressure. Feel the power of his palm against your throat. When you swallow, the muscles will contract as they push their way through the constriction as if you are swallowing a baseball. You will gasp at air, unable to breathe.

You will notice your two-year-old, sitting up in her bed, watching. Your eyes will meet for a second. But you will look away from her. When you look back, she is lying down, with her back to you. How can you let her see this? How can you let her think that this is acceptable behavior? One night, looking into her eyes, you think maybe it’s time to go. You realize if she sees this, she will grow up thinking it’s okay. You will make the decision to leave because of her, not because of you. You are stubborn and have become used to living your life without breathing.

So, this is what you have come to: the knee that once bent to the ground in adoration with a marriage proposal now pins you down. This same hand that slipped on the wedding ring vowing to love and honor, wraps itself around your throat constricting airways and speech. These hands and knees are now enemies stealing your breath and threatening your life; this is the worst theft of them all.

So, you lie here and think that this is the end. You are going to die, at his hand.

In this place, there is no breath. This marriage has led to this deathbed.

So, this is where your life must begin again.

You tell yourself don’t give in now.

Take in a deep breath and push—him—off.

You ain’t going out like this: not at the hand of this little motherfucker.

Joan Hanna was born and raised in Philadelphia. She has a BA in Writing Arts with a concentration in creative writing from Rowan University and is currently attending Ashland University’s MFA program in Creative Writing for poetry and creative non-fiction. She recently had the poems “Dragonflies” and “Ghosts” published in Common Threads. Joan is a reader for River Teeth and writes reviews for Author Exposure, Poets Quarterly and Examiner.com.

Image by Dawn Estrin

I consider myself a suicide even though I’m, obviously, alive and, actually, not someone who has ever made a serious attempt.

Since I first read Sylvia Plath, probably, and thought along with her how the tulips were stealing my air and the sea poured bean green over blue, I have been one. Since I first read Anne Sexton, definitely, and realized that I never asked of the do-it-yourself dead, “why build?” only “which tools?” I have been her kind. Or most likely since Freddie Prinze, who must have been my first suicide.

Do you remember him? Senior, not junior. He was the Puerto Rican actor and comedian who was such a huge hit in the ’70s. “Chico and the Man!” He made everyone laugh until he shot himself in the head. I loved him and it hurt that he died.

And Kurt Cobain, of course, our great complainer. His death ended my adolescence, which had probably been hanging around too long anyway. I stopped playing in a rock band. It was hard to get excited about anything. I became serious and dull. Adult. I began making contributions to a pension plan. Thankfully, it didn’t take.

I’m hurt every time I hear of it, but I’m never surprised by suicide. That people are happy, that’s what confuses me. I don’t get it. I like it, happiness; I wish I were a fountain of the stuff. I cultivate it in others and even in myself sometimes. But it’s strange alien stuff. What I am made of, is the dark familiar.

Last summer gay man after gay man jumped from his high-rise apartment in the gaybourhood and I walked to work down Church Street nodding. How many of my own clients have I held back from the edges of permanent solutions to temporary problems? Hundreds, by this point in my career. But that doesn’t change what I am made of.

I’ve always thought I would die by my own hand since I heard of the idea. My mind is made of self-destruction. Even when I’m trying hard to think positively about life, a snarl of it leaps up between the cracks in my happy. An image—stabbing myself in the neck with scissors—makes me step back from a colleague’s desk on an ordinary work day.

If death takes me with its own devices, and it may—I’m getting old—I don’t wish to be wiped from the register of suicides, parted from my beloveds—Virginia Woolf with her pockets full of rocks, Shaquille Wisdom the black teenager from Ajax who was thrown in the trash can for being gay last year and who then hung himself after school, Christian Fox the straight actor who starred in gay porn through the 80’s all the while being so deeply attractive and unhappy, Martin Kruze the man who was among the boy sex abuse victims of the Maple Leaf Gardens and who made the scandal public and then threw himself from the Bloor Viaduct—I won’t be parted from them. These are my people.

If death takes me with its own devices, and it may—I have high blood pressure and brain abnormalities and the propensity to wander into accidents—don’t ever let them say, “He was no suicide.” Every day of my life I was a suicide.

Surely a random death won’t trump my essential self-annihilation. Being hit by a truck and killed on the way to the restaurant doesn’t mean that you weren’t hungry. Count me among the death-starved. Cover me with the luminous veil from the Bloor Viaduct. Float me out into the Thames with flowers in my hair. Yes, that is a smile on my bluing lips. Know that I am free and would have freed myself but for circumstance.

Andrew Tibbetts is a psychotherapist and writer living in Toronto. His work has appeared in The New Quarterly, This Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Descant, The Malahat Review and Moods Magazine. Twice nominated and once winner of the gold prize for fiction at the National Magazine Awards, Mr. Tibbetts is open to be your friend on Facebook. This piece is part of his ongoing magnum opus, the multi-volume auto-fictional essay, The Phenomenology of Loneliness.

Image by Dawn Estrin

You will never be the one with the overweight wife, whose hips jiggle as she walks down the aisle of your granddaughter’s christening – your out-of-wedlock granddaughter – unashamed because at that size, what other choice does she have in her tented paisley dress.

You will never be the one whose hairline rolls slowly back like an eyelid opening onto God from the underskin of your scalp. Yet, somehow, you are that one you swore you’d never be.

She, fat. You, bald. What do you have to show for yourself? An also-bald grandbaby from the too-young mother who still has temper tantrums at home and dates a clerk from the 7-11, not the baby’s father, and she won’t even tell you who that is for fear you’ll take the twelve-gauge to his house. And the girl might be right about that, so you can’t say she’s totally brainless. She knows her father. You. Bald, sort of. Not fat, really, but with a few love handles that were merely a God-forbid image ten years ago, hell, not even five, and you wonder what the exact day was when you turned, the day you got old, the day your life ran away from you. There you have it. This is the thing. This life you’re living is not yours at all, but here you are, sucker. Tough shit, tough guy, this is your life. What other choice do you have?

And what choice does she have, worrying every weekday about a layoff, her vindictive boss, her ailing parents, sitting still for ten-hour shifts at her call-center monitor, fielding unhappy customers while a line of coffeecakes calls to her from the grey counter in the break room? Oh, you’d like to blame her for it, but those voices must sound pretty good during a shitty day, loving, comforting, especially when you’re the jerk who can’t always get it up in the evenings. And the worst part is that now it sometimes doesn’t even bother you that you can’t get it up. Oh well, you think. Sorry babe, you say. Guess I’ll go clean the garage, you think. And this is your life. Bury yourself now or suck up and live with it.

You understand her. You know those thighs, the ribbed lip of her C-section scar, those swollen breasts that hurt like hell, that you rubbed Palmer’s cocoa lotion into when she was nursing your slut of a daughter, back before the girl could even utter the word sex. Back when she could only suck her mother for milk. Innocence. Man, weren’t you all innocent back then?

Back then, you didn’t know how hard it would be, and you’re glad nobody ever told you, or you might’ve cashed in your chips early and checked out. Back then you had the luxury of dreams, the dreams your daughter is giving up far earlier than you and her mother had to give them up. Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. Those dreams are not your life. This is your life.

She hurries up the aisle, her paisleys swishing across her hips like flags, having forgotten her purse in the ladies’ room with the ceremony about to start. You look at her face. She’s smiling at you. She sails toward you like some sturdy ship, her eyes and everything in her smiling, as if you aren’t the man with love handles, as if your head is not staring up at the sky like a slowly opening eye. She smiles like that day never came, the one where you must have lost it all. In her, you are yesterday and today. You are less scared about tomorrow. She smiles at you like you are the man you always secretly wanted to be, but feared you never were.

Claudine Guertin lives and writes in Chicago. She earned her M.F.A. at Queens University in Charlotte. Her writing has appeared in Chicago Social, Capper’s, Permission and other journals and has received an editorial nomination for storySouth’s Million Writers Award. She recently completed her first novel, entitled Lakers.

From The “Grapevine” May 2006

What It Was Like…

These days, I don’t so much fall asleep as pass out.

I go to work because my legal career is the Potemkin village of my denial.  As long as I’m working, I’m not an alcoholic. I don’t think this, of course, because it never occurs to me until much later that I might be an alcoholic. There are other strategies, too, all of them so transparent in retrospect that it’s embarrassing to mention them unless I’m in a roomful of alcoholics, all of whom understand this type of thinking.

I’m not an alcoholic, for instance, because I don’t drink in the morning. Unless it’s a weekend morning, or a holiday, of course, in which case lots of normal people drink, so I can, too. These morning drinks are festive but are not necessary, or compulsive. They sport vegetables or umbrellas. They carry the names of flowers and contain juices.  Mimosas, for instance. A mixture of good healthy orange juice and the most celebratory beverage around–cheap champagne. Or Bloody Marys. Good normal morning drinks. There’s a stalk of celery in a Bloody Mary, for God’s sake. It’s a breakfast food.

I’m also not an alcoholic because I don’t get drunk every night. This, of course, by now, is strictly untrue. I do get drunk every night. But I don’t intend to get drunk every night, and that’s nearly the same thing. I’m going through some tough professional and personal times right now and I haven’t always gotten drunk every night, and I certainly intend to stop getting drunk every night once my therapy and the new medication gets me through this rough spot.

Because I’ve had to give up a lot of reasons why I’m not an alcoholic, the list at this point is pretty short. I drink alone, for instance, so I can’t say I’m only a social drinker. And I pretty much always drink until I’m drunk, though I’ve lowered the bar on this one–I don’t consider myself drunk if the bed doesn’t spin like a Tilt-a-Whirl on the Santa Monica pier when I’m ready for sleep. I guess by this point the only other convincing reason I’m not an alcoholic is that I never have liquor in the house. Meaning, I don’t keep liquor in the house because I am going to stop drinking tomorrow. Same for the cigarettes, and for that little nightly marijuana habit I’ve had since my divorce. Five years ago.

So, this is my routine. Most days I make it into work. I’m working by the hour now so I don’t have to feel guilty if I have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. If I don’t work, I don’t earn. It’s up to me. I’m in control of that. When I do work, I’m the same hard worker I’ve always been. I mean, I’m a pretty good lawyer. I should be. I learned how to practice in a semi-drugged state–prescription pills, mostly. Valium. I’m serious about this, but won’t realize it until later. If you learn to swim with lead weights attached to your arms and legs, you build strong muscles. I genuinely was a good lawyer, as long as I showed up.

So I’m working for this one-man law firm in Westwood, California, right on Wilshire Boulevard across the street from Westwood Village, the little college town at the foot of the UCLA campus. I’m in therapy with a woman who specializes in substance abuse. I picked her because I used to have some substance abuse problems. A little amphetamine addiction when I was nineteen, cocaine at thirty, cigarettes on and off. Someone told me once that I had an “addictive” personality and I’m down with that. But marijuana isn’t a drug–even the experts say it’s not addictive–and the drinking? Well, like I said, I might have a little drinking problem right now, but an alcoholic? Not quite.

I’ve known alcoholics. My best friend in high school, Alice, her dad was an alcoholic. You knew he was one because he didn’t work, just sat at home in front of the television set during the day, a dark presence we tiptoed past on our way to Alice’s bedroom where, in exchange for a donut, she deigned to tutor me in geometry. Alice’s dad has been dead for some time. I still remember him pretty vividly, though. It was at Alice’s wedding, when I was in law school in the late seventies, when I last saw him. Robert was his name. Bob. I’ll never forget that day. Partly because those were the days when bridesmaids were forced to wear homemade dresses the color of after-dinner mints with fabric that poofed up in the shoulders and sleeves. So I remember the day because of just how awkward I felt, hiding from the wedding photographer and feeling foolish.

But this is what I remember the most clearly. Alice’s dad, Robert, watched his daughter’s semi-formal garden wedding from his wheelchair on the wide veranda of his mother’s Victorian mansion in San Diego. I remember thinking what a waste his life had been. He’d been working on his Ph.D. in psychology pretty much the whole time I knew Alice–ninth grade through college, and then graduate school. He’d tried that anti-alcohol medication, the pill that makes you violently ill if you drink. But he’d still drink and get violently ill. Or skip taking the pills and drink. He never got sober. And there he was, the victim, finally, of something other than his own alcoholism. A stroke. The mother of the bride, Alice’s mom, who supported him, along with the rest of the family, for nearly thirty years, was caring for a true invalid. It was really sad. So, you see, Robert was an alcoholic. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to put myself in that league. It might very well have been a relief to have a problem I could do something about. But alcoholism clearly wasn’t among them.

What Happened. . .

The day I stop drinking begins like any other. (My refrigerator usually contains only alcohol and things to eat with alcohol–finger food: canapes, frozen dumplings, that sort of thing. Last night, however, I had a rare visit from old friends who knew me well enough to bring their own non-alcoholic beverages with them.) Picturing the cranberry sparkler, I’m thinking it might be a good day to ease up on my drinking a little. Just for today, I tell myself, I won’t drink.

When I open the refrigerator door to grab a sparkler, however, my hand closes instead around a nearly full bottle of chardonnay. I pop the cork and pour a glass. Since I’m “not drinking” on Saturday afternoon, I might as well fire up my bong as well.

An hour later, with the early afternoon sun streaming through the French doors to my balcony, I am once again sitting at my computer–drunk and stoned.

Why?

This obvious question pops into my mind for the first time in my adult life.

Why?

Why am I sitting alone in my apartment at the age of forty-two, on a beautiful Southern California day, disabled, for all intents and purposes, from doing anything productive, or even fun?

Like Philip Roth’s paranoid writer character in Operation Shylock, I can think of only one thing to do when a panicky new thought arrives. Sit in a chair, at a desk, and attempt to “tame temporarily with a string of words the unruly tyranny of my incoherence”:

I was once addicted, I write, to amphetamines. 

When I dropped out of college at age nineteen, I took a job in downtown San Diego alphabetizing “trade slips” for a small stock brokerage firm. The speed nailed my otherwise notoriously short attention span to this mind-numbing task. Drinking was just becoming a big part of my life and the speed helped that, too. I could drink with more energy, stay awake longer, and felt nauseated less often. One pill a day, however, quickly morphed into five. I stayed high all week and crashed on the weekends, crying in bewilderment in my small shuttered studio apartment.

Three months later I was sick, unemployed, and evicted. I put my tail between my legs and moved back home. There, under my mother’s disapproving stare, I kicked the habit cold turkey and re-enrolled in college. I did well, met my first husband, and headed off to law school.

Then the eighties arrived. I fell in with a fast and “sophisticated” crowd of hard-drinking trial lawyers, figuring that if I emulated their lifestyle, I’d be capable of mimicking their cross-examination skills. In a matter of months, I was sitting in my living room at 3 A.M. while my husband slept, watching old movies, drinking .from a cold half-gallon of Chablis and scraping cocaine dust off the Oriental carpet.

Here’s the thing, I write: I’ve never been able to moderate my use of any substance.

I think about this for a while, take a drag on a cigarette, grind it out in an old ceramic saucer and light another. I take a deep breath and watch the smoke rise to the ceiling.

I think, I continue, that I am an alcoholic.

Suddenly, it seems so simple. Easy even. The thought opens a floodgate of exhaustion, demoralization and, most importantly, surrender. I am–as I’ll later learn Bill W. was–simply “beat.” My “battle with the bottle” is over. At five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in early February 1994, I head off to the bedroom where I sleep, on and off, the rest of the weekend.

That was ten years ago, and I haven’t had a drink since.

What It’s Like Now . . .

Hundreds of AA meetings later, I have my own business as an attorney-mediator and am genuinely happy doing what I love–helping people achieve peaceful and economic resolutions to the inevitable conflicts in which we all inevitably find ourselves. I’m also a student again, earning a master’s degree (an LL.M.) in dispute resolution at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

I’m recently married and have acquired two of the most beautiful and loving stepchildren any woman–particularly this childless woman–could ever hope to have. My life is full of challenges. And it is full of joy. I am active in AA, work the Steps with my sponsor, and help a loving and courageous group of sponsees work their Steps, too.

I am of service and I am at peace.

He had never belonged anyplace, and that realization was slowly dawning on him. Of all the places he had been in this whole land, East Coast to West Coast, border to border, foothills or river’s edge, none came charging up in his memory rugged with warmth, none touched longingly at him; no village, no harbor, no vast plain running off to the far horizon, no collection of people near such places.

This time out of the barn he had been moving for close to two months, hitching rides generally north, new stars and the wash of pine trees in April’s breath calling him on. The contradiction came at him again as harsh as a fist: of all the places he had been, he had been no place. His mind kept telling him the same thing the way a canyon echo sounds, distant, muted, out of a deep solace, hollow, near metallic. It was, he was ready to say, as if he had never stopped long enough to listen.

Now, near the foot of this day, the tidal flats wide and enormous, the sun at odds with itself on Earth edges, he could hear something. It was universal. It bore intelligence. It caught at his attention.

As usual he was alone and swore he was the only one attentive to that thing and seeing all this around him, the late sun splattering gold on every surface, moving or still, for as far as his eyes could see. Though he was not unkempt, he was not headed for the boardroom either. A worn but decent dark blue jacket hung on his slight frame, over a red plaid lumberjack shirt buttoned at the collar. The pants were brown corduroy and shiny at the knees and at the thighs. Brown ankle-high boots dipped up under his pant legs. A roadman he obviously was, a hitchhiker, but one apparently who spent his nights abed under cover, his clothes not covered with strange bed residue. This day a shave had been accomplished at some place back down the line. Under his arm he carried his baggy Matilda of sorts, and a vast marshy area spread before him, just a few miles up-river from the ocean. The sea salt and reed grass of the brackish land were stiff as knuckles at his nostrils.

Where he had paused, at the side of Route 107, along the mile-wide marshes, a sign stood its ground as heavy metal. Cast iron most likely, he was thinking as the last of the sun flung itself in reflection. It had a gray field and black letters about two inches high that simply said, “Saugus,” and some part of its beating called upon him. An Indian name, he was convinced in his own reflections, thinking some names have importance, some do not. His name, for that matter, was Chug and he was a loner, acknowledged, as he often said, as the loneliest feeling a man could have. For him there were no roots, no wispy grasp at footholds, no family beachheads he could remember. A loner. It might have been that he had not been long enough in one place, or had never let his past catch up to him. No such determination as yet had fully surfaced on that account.

But now, in the late afternoon, the name Saugus drew him on. It stuck in his mouth. What else was there? Where else? What place could he belong? A trucker‘s horn suddenly startled him. “How far you going, pal?” The rig was a Diamond-T, a monstrous breed of new redness and shiny chrome sitting beside him on the marsh road, and a hum under that giant hood as deep as a cement mixer. The driver, leaning at him from behind the wheel, half filling the cab, presented red hair and big eyes with shaggy brows and a smile as wide as the window. Chug looked again at the cast iron sign. “Saugus,” he said, quixotically, and then with serious conviction added, “To the middle of Saugus, wherever that is.”

“What’s your tag?” the trucker said, re-adjusting the sun visor, shifting gears from the dead start, clutching, gassing, leaning back in his seat. Artistic, thought Chug. “Mine’s O’Malley Fighorn, and ain’t that some moniker,” he laughed. “My mother sure as hell wasn’t letting go her last bit of Irish. My brother’s name is Sullivan, Sullivan Fighorn, Mal and Sully, that’s us.” Deep from his chest rose a laugh as though he was remembering something special, someplace special.

Chug said, “Chug,” like it was a simple flake of rock falling off a cliff face. “Chug it’s been forever. Plain Chug.”

“What’s your real tag?” Mal Fighorn bowed his head and looked at Chug as if something else special was waiting on him. Crows’ feet almost crinkled with sound at his eyes. A bump sat prominently on his nose, proud badge of badges. Looking ahead at the stoplight now green in the distance, he downshifted the rig, then looked again at his rider. He had shared his name and expected, it seemed, his rider to do the same thing for him.

“Tylen,” Chug said, caught by that charge, the depth in the driver’s eyes, the fan of crinkles friendly in its marking. Then he added, his breath coming out of his chest like it had been saved up for a long time, “Tylen Brackus.”

The two grown men looked into each other’s eyes and began to laugh. They laughed all the way up to the red light with an arrow saying “Saugus” beside it. The arrow pointed north. The tears rolled south on Mal Fighorn’s cheeks, and on the cheeks of Chug Brackus.

“Ain’t we the friggin’ pair!” Mal Fighorn said, as he swung the rig into the northbound road, a huge hand pawing the shift lever with adroitness, his feet tap dancing on clutch pedal and gas pedal. “Tylen Chug Brackus, you and me, pal, are having dinner with my dad. Lives here in Saugus, loves his company.  And get this,” he added uproariously, shifting again, tap dancing again, his brows heavy over bright eyes, “his name is Montcalm Fighorn. He’s friendly, he likes his beer and wears twenty years of beard.”

They laughed all the way into the Fighorn driveway on the far edge of town, near the Lynnfield line. Laughter had taken them right through Saugus Center, past a veterans’ monument at a green rotary, past a stately old Town Hall bearing late traffic, past a handful of quiet churches.

Tylen Chug Brackus, loner, felt again that unknown sweep of energy come across his chest or across his mind. He could not be sure which avenue, but it swept at him and by him in the long driveway, making him think he was in a kind of wind tunnel. Once, long ago, someplace in his travels, that sweeping might have been known. He could not remember where. Out back of the house was a barn and another truck, looking like its last mile had been run, sat beside the barn. Painted sign letters on the body of the truck had faded to an unreadable point, pale as old scars. Its tires were flat. Chug thought about old elephants going off alone to die. His mind, he thought, could never compute how many miles of service the truck must have delivered. Now it did not seem so important; it was just rusting away as much as the barn was decaying, though not seen the same way.

A bit later a delicate spring evening hovered around them as they sat on the porch, long and screened-in with at least a dozen chairs scattered its length. He’d bet that some evenings every chair was occupied, it was that kind of house and that kind of porch. In the distance clusters of fireflies dominated the dark landscape. Across the road and up a steep hill, in the growing darkness, an owl called out. Chug thought it to be a place called home.

“So you got a name thing, too,” Montcalm Fighorn said, pouring beer from a quart bottle into three frosted mugs still wearing shadowy clouds. “They’ve been calling me Monty since I can remember. Never by my real name. Hell, I never called this boy by his real name. Enda, my good Enda, never called him anything but O’Malley. And Sully had it the same way.” Toward a bit of darkness off the side of the porch, adroitly, in modest ceremony, he tipped his drink, and the tipping was understood by those who saw it done.

Chug drank slowly and deliberately, and the bearded Monty Fighorn watched his guest drink with dainty sips after the healthy meal. “Don’t be bashful, Chug. End of the day’s the time for a good swallow. Have at it.” He raised his mug and drained off the contents. “Best damn part of the day,” he vouched with certainty, poured another full round, and then raised his eyebrows at his son who went to the small icebox at the end of the porch and brought back another imperial quart.  “I’m not the real curious type, Chug, but wonder where you’ve been, what you’ve seen. Mal says you spend the winter in Florida. That so?”

“Two or three places down there. Sometimes they put up with me and sometimes they don’t. I have a special delivery box and they hold all my mail. Usually it’s just a few retirement checks from Uncle I use to try to get through the winter.”

“You in the service, Chug?” Even as he asked the question, Monty knew the answer. The signs were there. Besides the bracelet Chug wore, it was written on the man. His clothes might have been second-line, but he was shaved that very day, and his hairline cut half moons high over the ears. The boots, beat up as they were by the road, were not long from a spit shine. He’d bet there was a pair of dry socks in his small bag if not pinned to the inside of his jacket.

“Twenty-six years in the Army.”

“I got me one of those,” Monty said, pointing at the bracelet on Chug’s wrist. “Where’d you get yours?” The wreathed Combat Infantryman’s Badge, its blue field long since faded, curved loosely on Chug’s wrist. A small chain kept it in place. A circular stain was on his wrist.

“Couple of places were good enough. But first with the 31^st in Viet Nam. Then in the desert in the Eighties. You?”

“Nam, too. Four oh first. Caught a bit of hell and was rolled out of there in a hurry. Think I was pinned down for two months then on my way home, on evac. Had one friend, talking about nicknames, who was transferred to first battalion of your outfit. We called him Grunt before we had grunts.”

Perhaps from the dark hill or out of a field now gone into the night, the sweeping energy came on Chug again. Almost electricity, it ran right over the porch as if the fireflies had let everything go. Chug knew a rustling at the screening, a possession of sorts, at the very spot Monty had tipped his mug. “Talking about names, his wasn’t Billy Pigg, was it?” He could not bring back a face, but a piece of it, a nose.

The energy, the sweeping, told him the answer even before Monty Fighorn came up out of his chair. “Damn it, guy, don’t tell me you knew Billy Pigg! Hot damn! Thought about him a thousand times. Old Kentucky Billy Pigg. Great boy he was. Marksman of all marksmen, I tell you. Often wondered about him. Often.” The plea was in his voice and he nodded again at his son sitting there, the son’s mouth agape, his eyes wide in the darkness, wondering what the hell had made him stop and pick up a hitchhiker off the marsh road, the end of the world itself. From the corner of the porch Mal brought back two more imperial quarts of beer and poured the round himself.

“Hate to tell you, Monty,” Chug said, setting down his mug, as if his right to drink had been suddenly halted, perhaps his welcome stopped in place. “Died in my arms, not quick, not slow, but long enough to ask me to bless him with water. I did, from a canteen, and him leaking badly, one of them old sucking chest wounds that’ll never let go. Said his daddy picked him up one day, about to walk into the river with him and do it up proper, when his daddy keeled over from a heart attack and never got him wet. All that time, it seems, it was all he could remember, being on the grass and not wet. But I got it done for him. Boy had a nose been smashed all to hell before he even got in the army. That your Billy Pigg, Monty? That the one you knew as Grunt, nose broke up all to hell?”

Chug was aware again of the spot Monty had tipped his mug to. The unknown sweeping was coming through the same place, the rustling, the net of screen separating sounds and energies, paying them due respects. And he and Monty Fighorn, old soldiers at the pair, had a sharing of lasting memories coming at them in pieces.

Chug said, “Tell me about that old truck out back. Looks like an old soldier in the Old Soldiers’ Home, just waiting to go the last mile. Serve you that good, did it, not letting it go?”

“You’re right on that account, Tylen Brackus,” Monty said, and laughed loudly, his laugh ranging the porch and out into the night. “Was a hell of a rig in its day. Brought us a little freedom, worked so long and good. It ain’t going no place before me, and that’s a given.” Turning to Mal, he said, “Tell him that’s so, son.”

“It’ll turn to rust in that spot long as I’m around. Bet on it.” He tipped his mug, but it was not at the dark space just off the porch. It was more at an idea.

All of it, Chug thought, was measurable.

Monty swung around in his dark red Adirondack chair. Chug heard it creak. “I got an idea I want to run by you, Chug,” Monty said. “No strings attached, as they say. Got lots of room here, most of it going to waste.

Boys here got business I don’t want to get into. They do their thing and I do mine. I’m willing to let you have a room for the summer, go and come as you please, go off as you like when you like, doing your road thing if you have to, and head back down to see your friends come fall or late summer. It’s no charity farm nor the Old Soldiers’ Home. You cut some grass, you do some dishes, make your own bed and do your own laundry, and you got a place to drop your head come of a night. And you don’t plan to drink all my beer. Can’t lose anything from where I sit.” The chair creaked again as he stood up and said, “Want to show you something.” He went into the house and toward the back of the house.

Mal said, “He’s going to show you his,” pointing to Chug’s bracelet. “We had it mounted on a piece of cherry wood a lot of years ago. Sets some store by it, he does. Makes me think you should think real serious about his offer. Doesn’t do something like that very often.”

“I’m just a guy barely out of the tank, Mal. Doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. Why make me out so special?”

“He knows you a lot better than you think, Chug. You and him, you’re like blood brothers maybe. I’m sure you share something I might never know, though it might be like Sully and me. He’s a good man and he finds stock in you. Hell, man, there must be some of that in me, too. I picked you off the side of the road, could have gone right by. Usually do, these days. I have no idea why I stopped. Something in the air, I guess. Would you believe it?”

Only Chug Brackus heard the rustle at the screen, the promise of sound in a small shrub, with a host of fireflies coming closer to the porch.

And so it was, practically for the first time in his life off a post or station, for more than four months of belonging, Tylen Chug Brackus sat on the porch at night with Monty Fighorn. They listened to the fireflies almost, to the owls on the hill, to the old truck turning to honored rust, and every now and then, from a distance, like down a one-way street, to the limitless, endless charge of energy finding its way to a couple of old souls.

In the dread heat of late August, the heavens at rampage, electricity beating about the skies like a thousand cannons at battle, one bolt of lightning followed another bolt through two aged hearts.

Mal told Sully over the phone, “Damned won’t believe it, Sull. Neither one of them spilled a drop of their beer. It just sat there beside them, waiting to get sipped up like it was last call.”

Tom Sheehan is the author of Brief Cases, Short Spans, a short story collection, from Press 53, 2008, and From the Quickening, another collection, from Pocol Press, 2009. Epic Cures, short stories from Press 53 earned a 2006 IPPY Award. A Collection of Friends, memoirs, Pocol Press, 2004, was nominated for Albrend Memoir Award. He has nominations for ten Pushcart Prizes, three Million Writers nominations, and Noted Story nominations for 2007 and 2008, received the Georges Simenon Award for Fiction from New Works Review, a Silver Rose Award for Excellence in fiction from ART, is included in the Dzanc Best of the Web Anthology, 2009 and nominated for Best of the Web 2010. He appears in the new anthologies from Press 53, Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform (sharing space with Jim Salter, Tobias Wolfe, Tim O’Brien, Kurt Vonnegut and others) and in Milspeak: Warriors, Veterans, Family and Friends Writing the Military Experience. He served in Korea, 1951-52, and has published 13 books.

“What do you want to burn?” Tara asked as she handed Jack strips of white paper.

He placed them on the kitchen table and said, “I don’t know. I feel stupid doing this.”

“Jack, the idea is to write all the bad things that have happened to us – all the things we want to put behind us – and burn them.” She smiled at him, lightly touching his shoulder.

“Hell, it’s not like it’s gonna change my luck.” Jack said. He waved his hands toward the ceiling, causing the paper to scatter.

“Sweetie, just give it a try for me – for us.” She said as she bent over to pick up the pieces of paper. “It’s symbolic. I think it will help give us a fresh start for next year. A positive state of mind might bring positive results.” Tara’s stomach quivered as she saw Jack pour a glass of Crown Royal over ice.

“Sure. Why the hell not. Guess it can’t hurt. You write ‘em down and let me know when you’re ready to blaze ‘em. I’m gonna relax and watch the game.”

Tara was beginning to regret not accepting an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party at the Eldridge Hotel, an annual event that she attended pre-Jack. She missed those times and wondered why she ever let that tradition slip away.

Well, it’s too late to go now. Just stick with your plan, girlfriend. Everything will be better next year. It’s got to be better than this year! Suck it up and follow through.

It wasn’t just the symbolism of this act that moved Tara. She had convinced herself that she could alter their karma by physically burning the bad events they had experienced, welcoming only good.

Tara walked into the living room and sat next to Jack. “Well, what do you want to purge? If you could eliminate anything that has happened to us, what would that be?”

Jack was flipping the channels, looking at the television. Without turning his gaze, his hand felt for Tara’s knee and patted it, “Whatever you want, babe. I trust you. Write whatever you want.”

Tara sighed and returned to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of red wine from a box in the refrigerator and sat at the table, staring out the window. She gazed at the sleet illuminated by the alley floodlight.

It’s probably just as well we didn’t get out in this weather. I didn’t really want to go out anyway. Surely Jack will stay awake for the whole game. I just need to keep him up until midnight so we can do this.

Jack poured himself another glass of whiskey and sat beside her.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to blow you off. You know I’m not good at this kind of thing. I trust you to write it down for both of us.

You know what I’d want to write.” Jack hugged her. She could already smell the alcohol on his breath.

“Grab your wine and the papers and come watch the game with me,” Jack said.

Jack knew she couldn’t sit still watching a football game on television, but she was certain that she needed to stick close to him tonight if she wanted him to join her at midnight.

Tara and Jack rarely cuddled on the couch any more. Tonight, however, she thought she would give it a try.  After all, it was New Year’s Eve. Most couples were out celebrating together, kissing at midnight, bringing in hopes and dreams for a new year.

She sat close to Jack with her left side touching his right. She consciously sat on that side, knowing he would be using his left hand to control the remote. Jack did not put his arm around her or his hand on her knee, as he had just moments before. She remembered how he used to wrap his arm around her shoulder or weave his fingers into hers. Not tonight. She wondered if they would ever have that tenderness again.

She cocked her head to look at Jack, “Honey…do you want to cuddle like we used to?”

“No, you go ahead and write down your purgings or whatever you called ‘em. I’m good.”

Well, there’s your answer. Dammit. Why do I even try? Tara pulled her body slightly away from Jack’s.

She picked up the pieces of paper and wrote down every awful thing she could think of that had happened to them; not just this year, but in all the years they had been together.  Jack’s accident. Infertility. Cloe’s death. She tore two additional pieces of paper to add the rest. Tara covered everything she could think of except for one. Could she sneak that one in without Jack seeing?  She shuddered when she imagined him finding it.

No, I can’t do it. Not yet. I want a baby. Besides, if we can adopt, I just know it will change him.

Tara picked up her book, The Bridges of Madison County, and read.  Jack had several more drinks and passed out by 10:30.  Tara left him to sleep on the couch while she gave herself a facial, took a bubble bath, and drank another glass of wine.  After putting on some sweats and a heavy tee-shirt, she sat in bed and recorded all the words she had written on tiny slips of paper earlier in the evening, adding the one she had omitted.

At 11:45 she quietly walked downstairs. The familiar patterns returned. Wet underarms.  Dry mouth. Erratic breathing. Quaking stomach. Her pulse beat faster. She could easily turn around and return to bed.

You are such a chicken shit! Go on. Wake him up. You NEED to do this for both of you!  Think of the baby we could adopt.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and gently shook Jack’s shoulder. “Jack, honey, it’s almost midnight. I’ve got everything ready for us to burn our bad karma.”

Jack snorted and his body jerked toward the back of the couch. She shook him again, with a little more force. “Jack, it’s time. We need to do this, honey. Please get up.”

Each time she moved him, his snoring increased. He was out for the night. Tara knew if she wanted to do this, she was on her own.

Tears in her eyes, Tara grabbed her coat and put the strips of paper and a lighter in her pocket. She picked up an empty coffee can from the kitchen table before going out.  As she opened the back door to the deck, she raised her head; eyes fixed on the sky, and smiled. Despite the freezing temperatures, she was warm inside. God had blessed her.  There were stars in the sky and the moon was bright enough she did not even notice the floodlight. With a new resolve, Tara pulled one scrap of paper at a time from her jacket pocket. She read each entry out loud before putting a flame to it, and dropped them one at a time in the coffee tin, allowing one to die out before adding another. After the final piece had burned, she set the can on the ground, looked up at the sky and yelled ALCOHOLISM!

Cheri Byard has been an elementary school special education teacher for over 20 years.  A painter, writer and poet, Cheri’s poems and essays have appeared in various publications including Awareness Magazine, Words-Myth Literary Journal, and the anthology Mentor’s Bouquet. She is currently at work on her first novel, from which “New Year’s Eve” is excerpted. Cheri resides in Kansas with her husband and young daughter.