“Tips for Writing About Loss” by Jessica Handler

Tips for Writing (CIwinter8)
Coney Island Winter #8, Archival Inkjet, by Karen Bell

**Excerpted with permission from Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss by Jessica Handler. St. Martins Press/Griffin, 2014.

 

“I don’t know yet” was my sister Sarah’s de facto motto. She didn’t know when a set of lab tests would come back or what new information they might show. The unpredictable nature of her illness kept her from ever being sure she could attend a class, go to a movie with friends, or if a minor discomfort meant something greater. In a larger sense, our whole family didn’t know yet what would happen to any of us. Write whatever you like in those early brain-spark sessions, and as you do, remind yourself that you don’t know yet what shape your story will take.

TIP: Perhaps no one asked you or encouraged you to tell your story. Go ahead now and give yourself permission: invite yourself to tell your story. Just as there is no “right” way to grieve, there is no “right” way to remember. Your memories are your own. Writing your story is just that – your story.

If your story matters to you, then that’s more than enough reason to write. Writing from your perspective is your privilege. Writing through your grief and loss allows you to claim the way the things happened for you. If you write with honesty and attention to character, imagery, plot, and theme, your memoir will resonate with your family, your friends, and if you choose to write for a wider readership, your story will matter to people you don’t yet know.

Early in the process of writing my memoir about my sisters, our mother gave me a box of Sarah’s journals, calendars, and school notebooks. Mom wanted me to have all the material I might need to tell our family’s story. I had lost my two sisters, and she had lost her two youngest daughters. Our stories were similar, but they were profoundly different.

“I have Sarah’s writing,” Mom told me. My husband helped her carry in a battered cardboard crate. The box was piled high with folders and notebooks. Although my mother is traditionally organized down to the last file folder and rubber band, this box wasn’t labeled with her usual black marker pen and taped-on index cards. The box wasn’t labeled at all.

The crate lurked on the floor of my writing room for more than a month while I debated with myself. I wasn’t sure that I had the right to read the contents or if I even wanted to. Sarah’s diaries, yearbooks, creative writing assignments from high school, her entrance essay for college, and submissions for a writing workshop she was ultimately too sick to attend would have put me in close touch with her most intimate thoughts. Her words would tell me in her voice exactly what had been on her mind and in her heart.

I couldn’t deny that I had the rare opportunity to see into my beloved sister’s heart and mind. She was no longer here to answer my questions in person, and I missed her terribly. Maybe the answers would be on those pages, in her deliberate, rounded, cursive handwriting, but I couldn’t shake the mental image of my little sister not-so-playfully slapping my hand and laughing, telling me, “that’s private!” She wouldn’t have let me read her diaries if she were alive.

Ultimately, I read her death certificate and a few writing-class essays, knowing that those items had already been seen by others; the death certificate by the Suffolk County, Massachusetts medical examiner, the essays by writing teachers and classmates. But I chose to respect Sarah’s personal diaries by not reading them. I put the box in my attic, because the story I wanted to write was the story of the sister who survived. That is my story. My sisters lives and deaths are central to who I am. Their illnesses and deaths shaped our family, and that was what shaped my memoir’s plot.

Permission to write meant not reading Sarah’s diaries, and not pretending to see the world through Susie’s eyes. Permission meant agreeing with myself that this would be my story, told the way I saw it.

 

 

Jessica Handler (Tips for Writing About Loss) is the author of two books of non-fiction, Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss and the memoir Invisible Sisters. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and her essays and features have appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Full Grown People, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Jessica lives in Atlanta, but frequently travels to teach workshops and give readings. She is techsavvy—tweeting @jessicahandler and ready to Skype with book groups, bloggers and journalists. Learn more at JessicaHandler.com.

Read an interview with Jessica here.

“Sleight of Hand” by Mickey J. Corrigan

Sleight of Hand (Moth on Polaroid Sky)
Moth on a Polaroid Sky by Karen Bell

All warfare is based on this:
deception. Tonight, your mask
alcohol and brass and disarray
to hide your self-impersonation.

Mahogany bar, sports on twelve
flat screen TVs.
Happy hour cheese
hard to the touch.
Tiny cold
hot dogs on sticks.
Drunks laughing,
your face
unreadable,
gaping mouth socked,
duct-taped eyes full
of ancient shadow.

You’re growing older
younger
than your parents did.

You pose, display what’s on tap
for the night. Bog woman.
Out of your black cave
into the ragged firelight.

Now you see her, now you don’t
see a woman in a bar,

You are the retribution artist
dead rabbit in your hat,
bloodied rags up your sleeve.
Pull out
a moment of distraction, false
impressions, fake confessions,
jokes
on you.
Now you see it
now you don’t,

the usual toast
just another wet defeat.

Always, a man appears
out of nowhere
lacking the gold doubloon
of his own mutiny.

He slides over, leans in,
handsome after three drinks
delightful after more.

You: up for whatever
comes after that.

You call the shots.

 

 

Mickey J. Corrigan publishes pulpy fiction with presses with names like Breathless, Champagne, and Bottom Drawer. Her most recent novella is the spoofy romantic comedy F*ck Normal. A coming of age novel is due out later this year. Poetry and short fiction have appeared in literary journals. Visit at www.mickeyjcorrigan.com or on Goodreads.

“Spelunking” by Danielle Collins

Spelunking (lava park)
Lava Park, BC, Chromogenic Print by Karen Bell

We are 30 feet underground in a lava tube named “Catacombs” in the county of Siskiyou. For hours, my husband and I carefully walked and crawled on rivers of solidified lava, exploring the depths. I am cold and tired, and suggest we trace our steps back to the entrance. He disagrees. He reminds me that he is a map man, one who is directionally gifted. My husband leaves to find a short route back to the surface, to the high desert wilderness of junipers and sage.

To conserve batteries, I turn off my headlamp, and with a simple click the cave disappears into darkness. The absence of light is so profound that my eyes do not adjust. I wave my gloved hand in front of my face and see nothing, but in the process my wrist hits the side of the ragged cave wall. Unlike many caves, those in Lava Beds National Monument are covered with ridges of sharp stone.

For a moment, I feel amorphous, disembodied, and a prehistoric fear fills me. I listen for goblins and hear only my beating heart. I breathe in the darkness and feel the cool skin on my forearms. Not a big deal, I tell myself. He will return soon. And there, in the depths, I realize that a part of me wants to be free and alone, to disappear into this darkness — to retract like the lava in these tubes, leaving only a memory.

I imagine that for days, my name will bounce off these walls, called out frantically by my husband and would-be rescuers. “She was right here,” he will say, “I think she was here.”

Then he will stammer with less certainty, “I’m pretty sure I saw her that day.” And then, always the victim, “She was a flicker you know. A shape-shifter, a chameleon. Really, just a ghost of a woman. Sometimes I saw her, other times not so much.”

“Actually,” he’ll finally admit, “I haven’t seen her in months. But that’s normal, right?”

I close my eyes and re-open. Still nothing but darkness. I could meld with these curtains of basalt right now. I cross my arms to soothe myself, and my cool flesh and bent elbows remind me that I am corporal. I am still here. I am still here. I am still here.

 

 

Danielle Collins originally hails from Virginia, but has lived in Northern California since 1994. (Little of her Southern accent remains but every now and then she will gleefully say “y’all.”) Previously, she practiced Africanized beekeeping in Paraguay. She also earned an MA in Communication Studies from the University of Michigan, and enjoyed a past career as a fundraiser for nonprofits. Today, she is pursuing her writing and photography, and lives with her fiancé, Pete, and her wild dog, Boo.

Read an interview with Danielle here.

“To His Wife” by Mark McKain

To His Wife (mars_va)
Mars/VA Sampler, Direct Digital C=print by Karen Bell

If you could see them in the thousands,
doll-eyed, dressed in body-fitting uniforms—
are they even birds?

They love the zero degree, the chase of squid and krill.
Springing onto the beach, they flap, preen,
gossip in groups, then begin the trek to stony outcrops.

(Yes, they waddle. Yes, they sway like a bowling pin,
falling. They could out race you up that hill,
gloved feet built for snowy ascent.)

Glaciers and leopard seals watch their march
as the colony blares its complaint; eggs,
chicks, regurgitated fish, ammonia-

reeking shit, binding pebbles and down
as the adults sing HATCH HATCH HATCH
loud as a great refinery,

bold experiment in penguin replication.
We have not replicated. We are the comet,
the alien invasion, the avant-garde

of billions who do not love basalt,
thousand-foot ice sheets; have no blubber
against impossible cold, fear sky-veined bergs,

blue foggy light, the season of night,
leviathans wagging a monstrous tail.
If you were here, holding my hand

like those crossed wings, listening to love calls,
we would pray to Darwin, whisper to our DNA,
implore our worse, our better instincts—

let them live!

 

 

Mark McKain has had work appear in The New Republic, Agni, Subtropics, Cimarron Review, The Journal, American Letters & Commentary, Cortland Review and elsewhere. He was recently awarded a Writing Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The Center for Book Arts published a limited edition Broadside of his poem “Wild Coffee,” and he is also the author of the chapbook “Ranging the Moon.” He teaches screenwriting at Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida.

Read an interview with Mark here.

“Minnows” by Lauren Jo Sypniewski

Minnows (Bird in Clear Box)
Bird in Clear Box by Karen Bell

Start with an idea. Say, the idea of forever.

No, too big. Go simple, go small.

Say, now. Say then. Weave in and out, create that metaphoric, clichéd tapestry—eccentric shades, muted beneath a light layer of dust. Unused loom cornering the shambled edges where floor, walls, and ceiling collide. Not unlike lives.

I grew up a mile from the edge of Lake Michigan, and yet I was surrounded by half a dozen small lakes. A country girl at heart, I took refuge in the outdoors: the fields, maples, sparse evergreens; the water was no exception to the rule. I called them “swimmers,” the minnows that infiltrated the shallows of lakes: Sand shiners, Bluntnose minnows, Emerald shiners—the ones with the iridescent green backs.

I’d roll up the pant legs of my brother’s hand-me-down jeans, treading gingerly into water and brushing the rolling hills of sand with the flats of my feet. Furiously, the swimmers flickered away for cover, backs rippling like the surface of water in sunlight. And I would wait. Ever so slowly, they’d weave back into sight, congregating at my ankles, occasionally lapping my skin with their translucent fins and their puckered lips.

I wanted to catch one. To cup it between my palms. To know the power of suspending a fish above water and then putting it back safely into its liquid home. But they were always too fast, and too free.

Our rusted green van shimmies backend first into one of the small parking spaces. I don’t want to exit the car. In the midst of a conversation via text, I enjoy the distraction. In fact, I fixate on the green word bubbles: the way they pop onto my phone like pebbles plopped into a river. The way they tell me intimate things I’ll never know to be real. But mostly the way that they aren’t anything to do with what awaits outside the van.

“Come on, get out,” my father says. My mother, my brother and sister-in-law are already near the complex’s doors. I slide my phone deep into my winter coat and hasten across the lot without looking back.

My father catches up to me.

“Don’t forget to thank Grandma for giving you her car.”

“I know, I won’t.”

“She really, really loved that car, you know. She even kissed it goodbye before I drove it away.”

I force a chuckle. “Yea,” I say.

Unusually bright, the snow reflects a little too cheerfully, as though I’ve walked into the last scene of a sappy Christmas movie. The crisp, wooden cherries that cling to the frosted miniature evergreens don’t help the situation—their rounded bellies curl close to the fake green plastic needles sprinkled with fake plastic white. Everything about this place disgusts me, right down to the uniformity of the buildings and the landscaping poking above the snow. Right down to my family name in block letters written over her mailbox in the entryway. Right down to how the handwriting isn’t recognizable. Though if it had been her scratchy, small, perfectly indecipherable cursive, I would only hate it more. It would be a sign that she checked herself into this place. That she is okay with it.

She greets us, hunched, nearly fifty degrees from vertical.

“Hiya, sweetie.” Her head stretched back and eyebrows raised, she tries to see up into my face when her posture forces her to look constantly at her feet. I wrap an arm gingerly around her frame; she can’t weigh more than eighty-five pounds. She moves back into the doorway and shuffles about the assisted living apartment to break out snacks: Chex mix and Cheese-its, chocolates and nuts. None of us are hungry.

Scattered about the apartment, she has managed to decorate for Christmas—a significant holiday in terms of decorating for my grandmother. Various nativities used to snuggle into corners all about the old house. The small Christmas tree with the Peanuts ornaments and half-shelled nuts with photos cut and glued to the flat surface.

She catches me looking at the decorations.

“You can take anything you like.” She looks around at the room. “I hope I’m not here to put them up next year.”

I am startled by her apathy. Or is it exasperation? This is the woman who kept a rifle above the front door to shoot “those pesky red squirrels” that smuggled their way into her countless gardens: vegetable gardens, fruit gardens, and into the day lilies. This is the woman who tended her land for hours a day, who raised six children while working for the city, taking classes, and receiving her associate’s degree. Who went hunting for “stumpers,” mushrooms that grew at the base of oak and maple trees, canned them, and cooked with them. Who became a skilled painter and antique collector, and began to refinish furniture.

And now, stooped over the edge of the couch, I want this woman to be the same. To be untouched by time. I don’t want to recognize her as my grandmother.

“Joey, you’re the smartest man I know.” Her head quivers from side to side as she looks up at my father. I no longer understand what is happening to her. After the cancer, there were issues: in and out of the hospital, gastrointestinal problems, paralyzing anxiety, her husband’s sudden death. But I don’t ask. “I feel like I’m going crazy,” she tells my father. “I need your help.”

It’s hard to say whether the shaking is from her age or her desperation or the anxiety, but what I am sure of is the look. It is the same look I gave my father growing up, standing waist-high with blonde pigtails: the look of total dependence.

My body shakes inside, somewhere deeper than my gut as though small creatures were brandishing my nerves like rattles. Slowly, it seems—in the most inexplicable way—as though my grandmother and I are trading places. Around me, no one speaks. I don’t want to be the one to talk, because I can never make words sound better than silence.

“I’m going to do everything I can,” he says to her.

She looks him in the eye. “You know, I don’t care if I die. I don’t want to live if it is like this.” Wide and distracted, her eyes remind me of a thread from that never-ending tapestry, vibrant once, but cloudy and disowned now.

My mother huffs in a way that is meant to be supportive, in a “you’re being silly” sort of way. I stare at the carpet. Anger and shame battle inside me: anger for her disinterest and shame for feeling the anger. For wanting to grab her frail shoulders and shake. But I can’t say anything.

Instead—as my father details to my grandmother what other prescription options she has, what hospitals she might go to for a second opinion—I step out of the living room into a side room that my grandma seems to be using primarily for storage.

Memories fill picture frames on the shelves and walls. My father and his siblings caught in their youth, bordered by white matting, thick glasses that are sure to come back into style. Family weddings. My grandparents at benefit dinners before his passing five years ago. Cousins’ middle school class pictures. My own face looks out at me, maybe nine years old, in a sunflower-patterned dress stuck in a cedar tree. And I know it is asking me something, but I can’t hear the words.

The faces overwhelm me, berating me with the idea of “what is left?” Being a Sypniewski feels as though it means something, something that I have to carry on. I’m just not sure what it is yet. I am overwhelmed by the idea of time: poured, caught, and steeped in my temporal pockets, struggling to store it up like Halloween candy for the rainy days that I never actually wait for. Thinking if I hold onto something hard enough, long enough, I can make something—an idea, a feeling, a person—last forever. And then how do I let go, accept, something—someone so close—when she’s already let go of herself? I feel as though I’m standing in the lakes of my youth, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of minnows. I try desperately to catch–barehanded–just one swimmer. So I can let it go again. But they are already free, and everything feels so backwards.

At the age of seventy-five, writer and feminist supporter Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide by chloroform. In her suicide note, she wrote: “No grief, pain, misfortune, or broken heart, is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

I rebelled against this. Not only the thought of taking one’s own life, but the idea that there’s an acceptance to ending, and that an ending can be mutually agreeable.

I thought, then, of my other grandparents. My grandfather died suddenly five years ago. I never knew my mother’s mother. My mother’s father died of lung cancer when I was seven. Mom tried so hard to be there with him when he went. She had told him, “Dad, I know you’re hurting. And I’ll be back on Tuesday, but if you want to go home to Jesus, that’s okay too.” My grandfather died on a Monday, the day before my mom was to return to town.

My mother said, years later, that she completely understands the idea of wanting to die.

“Why can’t you?” she asked me.

And while I could understand wanting to die, I couldn’t accept that my grandmother would desire to have an end when I didn’t want that. That she could be ready when I wasn’t. And I didn’t know what I was supposed to carry on for her, what memories and traditions. I never asked her what she wanted me to carry forward.

I make my way back into the living room when I feel as though this is as calm as I’m going to get. They’re talking about books now, trying to remember Nicholas Sparks’s name. Grandma tells me I should read him, that I’d really like him. I catalog it in the back of my head in the file under “I never want to read, but then again I actually do because it’s the one thing she asked of me.”

We have to go soon, and I want to talk to her desperately. I lean forward near her hunched and bony shoulder. I want to know every story she’s ever been a part of; all of her joys and troubles. All of her traditions.

I say: “Thanks for the car, Grandma. It drives really nice.”

 

 

Lauren Jo Sypniewski grew up in woodsy and earthy Northern Michigan before moving to Boston to obtain her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she also taught writing. Since then, she’s wound around the world searching Australia for new words, new moments. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The American Council for Polish Cultural HeritageDiscovering Arguments, and the Pine River Anthology.

Read an interview with Lauren here.

“Starry Night” by Jillian Ross

(Vincent Van Gogh – 1889)
“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.”

Starry Night (Vision Fire)
Vision Fire, Inverness Ridge, CA, Gelatin Silver Print by Karen Bell

Sheltered in cypress,
the pastor’s son clings
to the trunk of his faith.
Lightning grabs the night sky,
fires off a brilliant chaos.
Stars flow in whirling rhyme
from the white spire of truth.

Elastic rhythms reassure him,
but his mind cannot sustain
bright hope. Trembling
at the crackling sabotage,
he weeps as his wild symphony
disintegrates. Bewilderment
cowers in the closet of despair.

Elixir—a green glide through
aqua sky to amber field.
Stained hands clench
the revolver aimed inward.
For two days, life leaks
through quiet hands as
heart fails, mind dissolves.

Epiphany—he soars
into his starry night
soothed by a maze of grace
through stained glass tunnels
where all his colors meld
into pearlized reunion with the Son.
Sheltered here, Vincent shines.

 

 

Jillian Ross is a perennial writer and garden designer. She finds writing—like design—to be a combination of art and craft, enhanced by a dose of inspiration. She strives to combine these elements in her work and keep the weeds under control. Jillian earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Fairfield University in 2013. Her work has appeared in Dappled Things, The Noctua Review, Dogwood, The Penwood Review, Extracts, Poetry Quarterly, Mason’s Road, Weston Magazine, The Country Capitalist, Fairfield County Life, and Connecticut Gardener. Jillian lives in Connecticut with FaxMachine and CopyCat, mirror-image tuxedo cats who are fascinated by the working sounds of technology.

 

Read an interview with Jillian here.

“Roadside Flowers” by Karin C. Davidson

Roadside Flowers (Yellow Grass Field)
Yellow Grass Field, Chromogenic Print by Karen Bell

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Sometimes you have to go away to come back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

Read an interview with Karin here.

You Don’t Know Me

You Don't Know Me (Female Statuary, Versailles)
Female Statuary – Versailles, Chromogenic Print by Karen Bell

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

The clock/radio says it’s 4:08 AM.

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

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

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

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

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

He has eaten hotdog. Drank guaro.

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

4:12 AM.

4:16.

4:20.

He leaves.

Oily cologne lingers.

~

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

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

“Was someone here last night?” Jairo asks.

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

“Yes, a man was here.”

“Did you know him?”

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

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

“Does this mean we have to leave again?”

~

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

The line clicks dead.

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

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

A switchboard light blinks with a caller.

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

He stops speaking.

“How did you survive?”

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

~

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

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

“It’s the truth.”

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

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

“If she ever gets to grow up.”

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

“I shouldn’t have said—”

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

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

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

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

“Are you scared?”

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

~

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

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

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

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

~

“Are you not afraid?” the caller asks.

“I’m terrified.”

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

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

“What if they take you?”

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

~

Nina is at a market stall.

Licuados en leche. Sin hielo.”

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

The man follows.

She darts through a gaggle of students.

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

Nina springs to her feet and runs.

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

“I don’t know what to do.”

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

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

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

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

~

Hello Dolly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

 

 

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

Contributors, Summer 2014

Karen Bell
Karen Bell (Illustrator) received her MFA in Photography from RISD.  Her photographs and artist books have been exhibited widely including: The Brooklyn Museum, Rosenberg & Kaufman Fine Arts, Ellis Island Immigration Museum, White Columns, NYC; The Alliance Gallery, Narrowsburg, NY; Phillips Exeter Academy, NH.  Public and private collections include Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, Ellis Island Museum, Pfizer Pharmaceutical, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP.  She has received grants from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council/Governors Island 2011, The New School, Womens Interart Center, NYC and fellowships to Yaddo; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Karen teaches at The New School and The Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City.

Toby Van Bryce
Toby Van Bryce (Just Enough Hope) attends the University of San Francisco’s MFA Creative Writing Program. His work has appeared in Knock Magazine.

Danielle Collins
Danielle Collins (Spelunking) originally hails from Virginia, but has lived in Northern California since 1994.  (Little of her Southern accent remains but every now and then she will gleefully say “y’all.”)  Previously, she practiced Africanized beekeeping in Paraguay.  She also earned an MA in Communication Studies from the University of Michigan, and enjoyed a past career as a fundraiser for nonprofits.  Today, she is pursuing her writing and photography, and lives with her fiancé, Pete, and her wild dog, Boo.

Mickey J. Corrigan
Mickey J. Corrigan (Sleight of Hand) publishes pulpy fiction with presses with names like Breathless, Champagne and Bottom Drawer. Her most recent novella is the spoofy romantic comedy F*ck Normal. A coming of age novel is due out later this year. Poetry and short fiction have appeared in literary journals. Visit at www.mickeyjcorrigan.com or on Goodreads.

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

Bill Glose
Bill Glose (Age of Consent) is a former paratrooper, Gulf War veteran, and author of the poetry collections Half a Man (FutureCycle Press, 2013) and The Human Touch (San Francisco Bay Press, 2007). In 2011, he was named the Daily Press Poet Laureate. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Narrative Magazine, Chiron Review, and Poet Lore. Now a full-time writer, he undertakes intriguing pursuits—such as walking across Virginia and participating in a world-record-setting skinny dip event—and writes about them for magazines. His website (www.BillGlose.com) includes a page of helpful information for writers.

Jessica_Handler
Jessica Handler (Tips for Writing About Loss) is the author of two books of non-fiction, Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss and the memoir Invisible Sisters. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and her essays and features have appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Full Grown People, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Jessica lives in Atlanta, but frequently travels to teach workshops and give readings. She is techsavvy—tweeting @jessicahandler and ready to Skype with book groups, bloggers and journalists. Learn more at JessicaHandler.com.

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

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

Evelyne Lampert1
Evelyne Lampart (Reassurance) lived to become a clinical social worker and had clients in hospitals where she was a patient at one time. After 20 years in the field, she happily retired, and now runs an art workshop in the mental health clinic that served to help her heal so many years ago. Her life has turned one hundred and eighty degrees more than once.

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

Mark McKain
Mark McKain (To His Wife) has had work appear in The New Republic, Agni, Subtropics, Cimarron Review, The Journal, American Letters & Commentary, Cortland Review and elsewhere. He was recently awarded a Writing Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The Center for Book Arts published a limited edition Broadside of his poem “Wild Coffee,” and he is also the author of the chapbook “Ranging the Moon.” He teaches screenwriting at Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida.

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

Jeanetta C Mish.jpeg
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (Recovery) is a poet, writer and literary scholar. Her first poetry book,Tongue Tied Woman, won the Edda Poetry Chapbook Competition for Women in 2002 and her second poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible (West End Press, 2009), won the 2010 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry, the 2010 Western Heritage Award for Poetry from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum and the 2010 WILLA Award for Poetry from Women Writing the West. Mish has published poetry in The Fiddleback, Naugatuck River Review, Concho River Review, Poetry Bay, Blast Furnace, and others. She is also the editor of Mongrel Empire Press and Director of The Red Earth Creative Writing MFA program at Oklahoma City University. www.tonguetiedwoman.com

Leslie Nielsen
Leslie L. Nielsen (Breathing Without Air), originally from Ohio, immigrated to Denmark in 2013 where she continues editorial work for Poets’ Quarterly and River Teeth Journal. Her poems have appeared in journals such as r.kv.r.y., The Missing Slate and Literary Mama.  She holds an MA in English Literature from The Ohio State University and an MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction from Ashland University. She teaches writing, leads workshops in creativity, and occasionally blogs.

Jillian Ross
Jillian Ross (Starry Night) earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Fairfield University in 2013. Her work has appeared in Dappled Things, The Noctua Review, Dogwood, The Penwood Review, Extracts, Poetry Quarterly, Mason’s Road, Weston Magazine, The Country Capitalist, Fairfield County Life, and Connecticut Gardener. Jillian lives in Connecticut with FaxMachine and CopyCat, mirror-image tuxedo cats who are fascinated by the working sounds of technology.

Lauren Sypniewski.jpeg
Lauren Jo Sypniewski (Minnows) Lauren Jo Sypniewski grew up in woodsy and earthy Northern Michigan before moving to Boston to obtain her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she also taught writing. Since then, she’s wound around the world searching Australia for new words, new moments. Her essays and poetry have appeared in The American Council for Polish Cultural HeritageDiscovering Arguments, and the Pine River Anthology.

“Age of Consent” by Bill Glose

Glose (Garden Path #2 - Versailles
Garden Path #2, Versailles, Gelatin Silver Print by Karen Bell

Easy to forget how young I was
when asked to kill or be killed.

The past is a window caked with
ashes of spent years. Tutankhamen

clasped his first golden scepter
at ten. Released it at nineteen.

Framed by a striped Nemes headdress,
face on his sarcophagus is confident,

wiser than time. Our own pyramids
were built atop recruits fresh

from high school, more comfortable
holding a rifle than a razor. Wars

are always fought by children. A kid,
once dared, will leap from a rooftop

into a pool. Regret is a word
in dictionaries of old men.

 

 

Bill Glose is a former paratrooper, Gulf War veteran, and author of the poetry collections Half a Man (FutureCycle Press, 2013) and The Human Touch (San Francisco Bay Press, 2007). In 2011, he was named the Daily Press Poet Laureate. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Narrative Magazine, Chiron Review, and Poet Lore.