Prose

Marlene Olin

The Squirrel On The Driveway

When your eight-year-old daughter finds the squirrel on the driveway, she doesn't scream or shout. Instead her mouth looks like she's sucked in a bullet. Her face is white, her fists clenched. Mom, she says. Come look.

You see the mail truck swing by your neighbor's house and spot the telltale tire tracks on the street. Then you inch closer. The squirrel is a pulp of blood and fur. Its eyes are open and glassy. It looks like someone already stuffed it and stuck it on a shelf.

First, you blink. Then you taste vomit and feel woozy. You curse your husband for being at the office and wish you were anyone and anyplace else. Turning your head, you see the sun setting. Your footprints on the asphalt loom ten feet in the shadows. This is your job and yours alone.

Hurry, Mommy. Please.

You mutter to yourself as you go inside the house.  Crap. Crap. Crap. You grab a shoebox and a pair of yellow latex gloves. Then you return outdoors where your daughter's keeping vigil. You take a deep breath and with your index finger nudge the squirrel onto the cardboard. You're almost there...you're practically there... when the two hind legs flinch.

Jesus! you scream. You stumble backwards and the world tilts. Then a memory from eighth grade Biology surfaces. The picture's in black and white like a 50's sitcom. Your teacher is wearing a mullet and a frog's on a table. Even the dead have reflexes, the teacher tells you. The frog, to your shock, jumps when you cut it. Meanwhile your lab partner looks greener than the frog.

It's alive, says Rachel. I told you. It's still alive!

Your daughter is now inches from the squirrel. She's leaning in like she's going to start mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Thoughts of rabies and the bubonic plague race through your head. Don't move, you hear yourself pleading. Don't move an inch.

Your internal GPS repositions and sets a new course. You go back inside the house, retrieve a shovel from the garage, an old towel from the laundry room, a bigger box, and thicker gloves. Then you scoop up the squirrel, cover it with the towel, and over your daughter's objections place it in the trunk of your car.

The vet, a person you should keep on retainer, is located fifteen minutes away. While you race there, your daughter starts praying. Please God, let our squirrel live. Please God. Don't let it die.

You park the car in a space that says Don't Park Here You Will Be Towed because there's no other place to park. Then you and your daughter walk into the office. When you're carrying a box of squirrel guts, people tend to cut you a wide swath. The doctor sees you at once. Then she takes one look and shakes her head.

You guys did your best. But I'm afraid it's too late to save this squirrel.

Your daughter glares at you like her life is over. Then she stifles one last sob. Can I keep it? She asks. I want to take it home and bury it with my other pets.

The room moves in and out. Beyond your patio, lying in the shade of an olive tree, is the family pet cemetery. A host of corpses wrapped in newspapers lie in a shallow grave. Saltwater fish. Freshwater fish. Turtles. Gerbils. Guinea pigs. Hamsters. Sweat pours down your face. Then you find a chair and drop like a stone. Somewhere in the distance, the vet speaks. You hear her through the fog.

I think I can give it the perfect burial right here, Rachel. Let me take care of this one. Then she turns towards you and winks.

Hand in hand, you and your daughter head back to the parking lot. You find yourself strangely surprised that your car is still there. It could have been towed but it wasn't. Your car ride home is uneventful. You could have been rear-ended by a drunk driver or slammed by a truck but all is well and you weren't.  Your daughter grabs a granola bar from the kitchen, slides onto the couch and turns on the TV. Finally, there's a lull in the chaos. You take a deep breath and scorecard your day.  Compared to other days, it could have been worse.

Then you turn to tomorrow. As usual you list the known unknowns.  You could slip on a sidewalk. You could trip on a pothole. You could find a lump on a smooth stretch of skin. You think of all the misfortunes and all the missteps that await you. And while there's a good chance none of them may happen, chances are some of them will.

Marlene Olin was born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University of Michigan. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of The Net, Best Small Fictions, and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Her twitter handle is: writestuffmiami.

Chelsea Catherine

This Won’t Matter

I am twenty and an intern the first time they kill someone at the office. It’s a new procedure, something other states have been doing forever but Massachusetts just now is leaning into. Our CEO hangs the man in the courtyard of the office building after someone catches him eating lunch on the clock after two hours of no productivity. It’s a quick way to die, relatively painless. At least, that’s what the doctors say. 

At twenty-eight, I rejoin the organization as a specialist and within two years I move into a Director role. It’s spring when it happens – the old unit director hanging in the courtyard, a curse word uttered at the CEO in passing – and the leaves are just starting to perk towards the sun. The walls in the office are all glass, so anyone can see in. From my desk, I can see the Mount Holyoke range in the distance, soft and blue hills that crest between the greenery. 

My office is on the fourth floor, next to Devon’s, the Chief Administration Officer. Through the glass wall separating us, I can see her moving about in the space in her heels and pantsuit. A three-foot-tall prayer plant rests in the corner, next to a skinny, black lamp. It is the only decoration in the room. 

When she sees me staring, she pulls out her phone and sends me a message. 

Ok? She writes. The text is a risk: we are not supposed to contact one another outside of work or through non-work sanctioned means. But Devon is older than me by twenty years. She knows how to do everything here. If she is not scared, I don’t have to be.  

Lots of pressure, I write. 

When I look up from my phone, she is at her desk, her back to me. She has a cowlick at the back of her head that I love, this curl like the fine errant hairs of a baby’s head. Just follow the rules, she writes. If you follow them, nothing bad will happen.

I tell her I will. The sun peeks through the clouds. I lean back in the chair, letting it warm my cheeks and forehead.

*

Spring breathes heavy on us. It’s cool and then it’s warm, giving the earth little time to adjust. Cars kick mud up onto the side of the road. The world is covered in a grey haze for a week straight, and then the mud and faint frost sink into the brightness of spring. From behind the glass wall in my office, I stare out at the changing landscape during meetings, where I sit on mute, my computer screen angled so no one quite knows what I’m looking at. 

I spend my mornings reviewing reports and numbers, combining them all for submission to my supervisor, Angela, the Chief Data Officer. One report is wrong once. Instead of emailing, I visit the analyst down on the second floor, where she sits in a cubicle surrounded by dozens of other workers. Down here, it is much darker, louder. There is a persistent hum that comes from the number of computers and monitors. 

Let’s touch base? I ask her. 

She swirls in her chair, looking around the room. A few others have turned to look at us. There are almost no Directors who will do this – come down here, talk face to face. I haven’t seen one do it since a few months after starting here, but I am convinced this is the way. With us looking at one another, human to human. I did something wrong? she asks, and the fear in her voice makes my chest tight. 

It's okay, I tell her. We’ll fix it together.

She hesitates. There is a splotch of red trailing up her throat. Please don’t tell Angela. 

There’s no need, I say. Let this be a teaching moment.

*

The Director role feels strange on me, like a suit jacket that is too tight. I pinch at presentations and small talk around the fourth-floor water cooler, uncouth with my phrasing, always wondering what the stares on the other fourth floorer’s faces mean. One day, I stay in my office the entire shift, just to avoid them. 

The reports are correct and on time, Angela says when I ask her how I’m doing. 

But am I fitting here? 

She blinks at me from the screen. Her office is right on the other side of this floor, only thirty feet away. Her hair is loose, curled, hanging just below her ears. Her lips are constantly pursed together; I have never seen her smile. Darling, it doesn’t matter, she says. At least, it shouldn’t. 

She changes the subject, bringing up a fiscal form I’ve been using incorrectly. Her eyes flicker off screen, almost no emotion in them. It’s hard to watch. There is something stiff about her mouth that makes me feel unsafe with her. 

Figures, my brother says when I call him about it later. People at that level are always serial killers. 

They are not. 

Are, too, he says. Didn’t your CEO kill someone for you to get that position?

I exhale. Gabriel lives out in the Adirondacks, where he makes goat cheese and builds brick ovens for restaurants in the area for money. He was born knowing how to put brick and cement together, unlike me. Those workplaces have much lower kill rates. But I can’t change jobs. I can’t quit. This is the only thing I’m good at. I need the money, I tell him. 

The money? he says. They’ll kill you before you have a chance to do anything with it. 

*

During lunch one Friday, an analyst breaks down sobbing in the lunchroom. I watch him from my seat with my back to the glass wall, the mountains stretching behind me. From this spot in the lunchroom, I can see everyone. It’s a quiet lunchroom, even with the sobbing. Not many people speak, and the ones who do, speak in whispers. 

It is the first time I’ve noticed the quiet here, and it makes me want to go up to him, to put my hand on his shoulder or buy him a tea, but no one else is approaching him. It’s just this stillness and the quiet, all of us looking but no one acting. 

When I bring it up at a post-lunch meeting, one of the Vice-Presidents says, Directors don’t eat in the lunchroom. If you want to eat lunch somewhere, just sit at the communal table on this floor.

I glance from my screen to the small, circular table that sits with no privacy, surrounded by quiet, sterile offices. Does anyone know if he’s okay? I ask the group. If I see something like that again, what do you think I should do?

I would let HR know, another Director says. That’s really inappropriate and probably made everyone uncomfortable. 

They switch back to talking about a new software we need for an upcoming project. My work phone goes off, so I turn to take it, muting the meeting. Someone has screwed up a report. They’re scared. Just send it over, I say. We can fix it.

When I return to the meeting, everyone is talking like I’m not even there. But in the chat box, I find one of them has written: How long do you think she’ll last in this position? 

My stomach burns. I sit back in my chair. They keep talking like nothing is wrong; I stay quiet. 

*

A month later, I am at a work cocktail party when one of the VPs tells me she thinks I’m a bad fit for the agency. You’re just… she pauses. So sensitive. Later that night, when I’m on my second drink and waiting for Devon to finish her conversation with a board member, one of the other Directors comes up to me and says, If you’re going to continue drinking like this, I think someone should take your keys.

It's my second drink, I tell her. And I took a rideshare. 

It looks sloppy. 

I look around the room. Everyone else has a drink in their hand, too. I’ve been monitoring it, trying to pace them: one of the VPs is on his fourth or fifth. Another is laughing loudly in the corner. The room is dimly lit enough that I can’t see the very back corner. There are no program people here. Just the fourth-floor folks. 

The tickets were too expensive, I tell Devon while walking her to her car. 

They were, she agrees. I wouldn’t blame anyone for not coming.

I pause at the edge of her Ford, my hand on the hood. It’s still faintly warm from when the engine was running earlier. Someone told me I drank too much, I try, just to see her response. 

She looks me up and down. Devon has a hard face in a certain light. Her nose and chin and eyebrows are all sharply angled. Her eyes, too. They cast her dark, even with her light blonde hair. She looks dangerous with the night floating in the background. Well, she says. Have you?

No. I mean, I don’t think so.

She reaches out, squeezing my arm. We are not supposed to do this. We are not supposed to congregate out here, away from anything that could be deemed work. We are supposed to be individual, alone, separate. I think you’re good for this place, she says. Just be careful. Okay?

*

We go some months with no deaths. Then, the analyst who was crying in the cafeteria that afternoon is summoned for a coding error that potentially could’ve leaked company information. The office goes quiet as the rumor spreads. Even the fourth-floor workers are quiet, barely looking outside of their glass lined rooms. 

I take one meeting while pacing back and forth along the glass wall. By the time my third meeting of the day rolls around, there is an uncomfortable tension at the back of my neck. By three p.m., a company-wide email goes out saying there will be a hanging in the courtyard at five p.m. Everyone is required to attend. 

What if I went home sick? I text Devon. 

Don’t, she writes. You know that wouldn’t turn out well.

It is an average spring day. The leaves are coming in full on the trees, which now block some of the view of the mountains. It is just boisterous greenery everywhere, all along the roads and sidewalks, covering the train tracks that run next to the office building. 

They are still shaking from a passing train when we gather, the sun at an angle. I stand near the back of the crowd that gathers in the courtyard that afternoon. Devon and the rest of the C-Suite are at the front, opposite us, lined up like a row of chess pieces. 

The analyst’s name is Josh. He cries as they bring him to the rope. He says he has a family, children, but one of the Directors shouts at him that this isn’t true. He lives at home with his mother and grandmother. You should’ve been more careful, the director says. She sounds so angry, and I can’t figure out why. 

When they drop his body from the platform, there is a snapping sound, and for the first time in ten years, I realize how familiar that sound has become, how used to it I am, and how much that bothers me. As his muscles go slack, I look away, studying the line of dirt that wedges between the stone walkway beneath my feet. When I look back, the CEO is staring at me. 

*

My apartment is five hundred square feet and smells of the ivy that grows fastidiously along the northern windows. The light has just receded behind them when Devon shows up at my front door, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She wears no makeup, and beyond her, the sound of an ambulance siren roars. They found out about some form you’ve been doing wrong, she says. 

Angela showed me how to fix it, I tell her. It’s fine.

She pushes the door open behind me, then steps inside. Did you say something to him? she asks. The CEO. You know better.

I never talk to him at all.

He’s upset with you. She puts her hand palm down on my kitchen table. She has short fingers, strong hands. You look at them and can tell she played sports in high school and that it has lingered with her, even into her early fifties. What did you do?

Nothing, I tell her. 

He’s angry. 

I care about the people there, I say. I’ve done nothing but try to help them.

She looks around the room. It scares me to see how scared she is. Do you have… she gestures indeterminately. 

I pull a bottle of whiskey from the freezer and pour us both glasses. It’s a special brand, something my brother sent me, smelling of sweet things like cinnamon and fruit. She takes the glass in her hand and swallows it back without hesitating. 

You should never have moved into the Director role, she says. It’s too high profile.

I’m good at the job. 

That doesn’t matter, she says. 

She pours herself another glass, then sits perched on the edge of my kitchen table, her arms pulled tight around her stomach. I keep asking her what he said, but she doesn’t answer. The ambulance sound comes again, this time like it is right outside the apartment. It fills me with an unnamed dread. 

*

The spring moves into a heavy summer that bleeds rain at every juncture. The humidity stays on the glass walls at work, coating them like frosting on a cake. I stop looking at the views so and start working longer hours, avoiding the lunchroom. People stare when I pass by, like they did with Josh. The meeting invites slow, then fall off altogether. There is just something in the air; it is like static electricity, a bad smell clinging to me. 

Devon doesn’t talk to me. Angela doesn’t show up for our weekly check-in two weeks in a row. At night, I walk back to my car with my shoulders tight, waiting for someone to pop out, to slip a knife through the slats in my ribcage while I’m not looking. 

It’s like this every day for two months, and then the summer takes a turn for the worse, the rain trickling away, leeching the riverbed near the office dry until it is nothing but dust. I think of running to the Adirondacks and hiding out with my brother, but the laws will not protect me. If they are already collecting evidence about me – about my imperfections – there is nowhere I can go that they won’t find me. 

Something bad is about to happen, I tell Gabriel on the phone one night. Even the crickets are quiet. 

In general? Or to you?

I exhale, staring up at the barren ceiling from my double bed. The window is open and night bleeds in. It smells of dirt and trash, the kind of heat that sits and sits and never moves. When I was a kid, I dreamed of being here in the city instead of out there with Gabriel, under the soft pines we grew up with. Were things this bad when we were kids? I ask. I don’t remember it being like this.

It was, he says. You just didn’t know back then.

I wish I could go back to the not knowing, to waking up in the morning and being excited about things, to not having this fear hanging over me every second of the day, the snapping sound of a rope lingering in the back of my head. 

*

A week later, it storms all night long. I stay awake, watching the bolts of lightning strike at the ground around me. In the morning, the tension seems to have evaporated. I am calm. There is no escaping this, the whole thing. I could leave the job and mess up at another. I could leave and then end up unable to pay my rent. I could escape to upstate New York, where the same challenges would follow, all of it present and threaded through every single part of life in every single state in this nation.  

By three p.m. at work, the email goes out. Almost immediately, Devon turns in her chair to look at me. It’s impossible to know what she’s thinking. Her eyes are dark, maybe close to crying but I will never know because she turns shortly thereafter. Because we are not allowed to care for one another, because even this basic measure of human decency – a glance across two offices when one of us is about to die – is too much, too threatening, forbidden.  

Just before five, when the CEO’s secretary approaches my office. He’d like to see you.

It has stopped raining by then, and I imagine the smell of it is still on the pavement. The secretary gestures, and I follow her into the large corner office on the opposite side of the floor. The office emptier than Devon’s, just a massive wooden desk with some printed paperwork. The CEO sits behind it. He has salt and pepper hair, a forgettable face, except there is something angry in his gaze. 

You don’t have to do this, I say. 

The email’s already been sent out. 

Sun peeks out from behind him, landing in a line on the floor of the office. I wish then that I had tried harder to not fit in. That when Josh was crying, I had reached out. 

He stands. I slip a razorblade out of my trousers, expertly hidden in the port of my laptop while coming in today. I hold it to my forearm, press. It glints under the ceiling lights. The blade is smooth, never used, small but sharp enough to do the job. It is the one thing that is still possible for me, the only choice I have left. I won’t go quiet, you know.

When I glance up, the look on him fills me with delight – panic. It spreads from his eyes down to his mouth, the stubble and thin lips, dry even in the humidity of the day. This won’t matter, he says. You know?

I tell him it matters to me. 

Chelsea Catherine is a native Vermonter who has lived all over the country. In 2018, they won the Mary C Mohr nonfiction award through the Southern Indiana Review and their book Summer of the Cicadas, won the Quill Prose Award through Red Hen Press. Most recently, they spent a month in Alaska at the Alderworks Artist Retreat. They are part of a cohort of ValleyCreates artist grantees in Western Massachusetts.

Charisse Baldoria

Elements

In August, billows of green rise from the mountains with tufts of rust and gold. We’re headed to the town park but encounter the river instead, where mountains and trees grow from hazy, inverted versions of themselves, a vision that stretches left and right as we march like converts toward the bank. 

It is 2012. My husband Dave and I have just moved to Bloomsburg, a small Pennsylvania town in the Ridge and Valley Appalachians, where I accepted a one-year position to teach piano at the university. We’ve never lived in the countryside before and I feel more at ease getting lost in a foreign city than in a forest which I imagine will swallow me whole. 

A tree clings to land’s edge but curves down toward the mirror, crowding the frame. It doesn’t look like water; it’s not blue, unlike the seas surrounding the island where I was born. Or maybe it’s blue in parts, depending on where you look. As we get closer to the bank, the sky reveals its waterborne self, a stealthy sea.

Our one-year stay will turn into more than ten. A decade later, I will tell my friends that when I die, I want my ashes spread in three places: the Susquehanna River here in Bloomsburg, the woods behind our garden not too far away, and the coral reefs in Anilao, Philippines just sixty miles from where I was born and where I used to scuba-dive. Bloomsburg scores two out of three: an accomplishment for an adopted home.

But at this moment, there are no thoughts of death, no commitments to a place, no fears of getting lost. 

No screaming in my veins as when an old man seated on a bench facing the river will yell “Charlie!” to Dave years later, and Dave, a Filipino like me but born in America, will explain that it’s a derogatory term for an Asian person: short for “Victor Charlie” or “Viet Cong.” I’m not about to rush to confront the man, and Dave will not hold me back to say we should keep our heads down.

We haven’t yet lain down on a mat looking up to treetops and the sky or slept in a hammock we tied to trees by the water, oblivious of the world. We haven’t seen concerts at the park with friends who will leave, or paddled down the river feeling like we’ve entered the mouth of God.

Now, we stand on the cusp between river and land, restlessness and arrival. The mountains, the sky, and their shadow selves glimmer in the evening sun transmuting our bronze skin into copper. We breathe, take it in, and release.

Simply, we vow to return.

*

In its several-hundred-million-year life, I’m not the only one the Susquehanna River has enthralled. I imagine the giant-armed tyrannosaurs, colossal duck-billed dinosaurs, and armored nodosaurs feeding along the rivers of Cretaceous Appalachia whose mountains had, by then, eroded to almost a plain from their Himalayan heights a hundred million years back. And after the earth’s secret motions uplifted the sloping fields over the millions of years that followed, after ice sheets marched and melted, the first peoples roamed and settled along the rejuvenated river for millennia before white colonists took over its banks and established their towns.

I haven’t found many Filipino settlers here though I’ve recently discovered some: a woman from Manila who came in the 60s when her white husband became a professor; a woman from Pangasinan who, at sixteen, married a serviceman in a U.S. base and moved here in the 70s to his parents’ home; a couple from Iloilo who relocated from New York in the 80s to work and raise a family; and more recently, a woman from Nevada who married my husband’s co-worker and now lives in their countryside compound. Some have worked at the university or hospital though I don’t know how many of them stay.

I don’t know all their languages. The Philippines, with its 7,600 islands, has at least 130 languages, forty of which are dying. I speak only the national language (Tagalog) and write in a colonial one (English). My husband, one-hundred percent Filipino by blood, speaks and writes only in English. He was born in Connecticut to an Ibanag mother and Pangasinense father who speak Tagalog to each other because they don’t know each other’s languages, even if they’re from the same large island. They wanted Dave and his brother to fit in so they spoke only English to them.

English may very well be the language that unites us all. Though our brown bodies were not born in this valley or descended from its original peoples or its colonists, though we did not grow up in the farmlands or coal country and our forebears didn’t fight in the American Revolution or Civil War, it is a place where we have begun, where we begin again, this meeting place of mountain and river older than the supercontinent of Pangea.

*

In Tagalog mythology, it is said that a Charon-like figure ferries the soul of the dead across a river to the other shore, where the sun drowns every evening. But where does the river go? From where does it originate? 

I imagine the river as an artist: how it shapes the earth, cuts into ancient bedrock, deepens faults and folds, sculpts edges, and splits mountains as it strives to find the sea. It even takes the sky and transfigures it. 

Equipped with an inflatable kayak and buoyant spirits, we go on the Susquehanna’s voyage in microscale: a forty-five-minute leisurely paddle from one park to the next. We pump up the tandem kayak in seven minutes; at the end, we deflate it, roll it up, and throw it in the back of our car, then pick up our other car at the start point. On the water, we sometimes imagine we’re Viking conquerors or Amazon adventurers surrounded by piranhas. Real-life bald eagles and blue herons occasionally make an appearance but on a typical day, we listen to birdsong and row with a family of geese. 

One late summer evening, not ready to break our post-dinner ritual, we set ourselves on the river on a race against the vanishing sun when swirls and eddies of strawberry, orange, lemon, and lavender spill like a sunset under out boat. We glide as if on glass, fling ripples on a mirror that never breaks. Like fingers, our paddles caress a sky of silk; they rise and fall with the river’s breath. There are no other boats in sight, no other breaths. Is the river dreaming and are we in its thoughts? Or is this what it looks like after death?

We have stumbled upon a secret; no one was supposed to know. Above us is a watercolor haze but with us is the sun-spilled sky, bright and clear.

*

This improvised song will never be heard again though there will be more sunsets, more singing, more nights. It is dark by the time we end our journey at the town park, a stone’s throw from the site of eighteenth-century Lenape settlements and of Fort McClure built by colonists during the Indian War. The Lenape, and perhaps, the Susquehannocks and other peoples before them, must have paddled in canoes of hollowed trees, must have glided past these walls of woods and mountains softened by the river’s face. How many meetings have taken place on these banks? How many wars?

On weekends, when we start in the morning, we have a picnic at the end of our ride then lay on a mat facing the sky. Sometimes I go alone when Dave is at work. I lean against a tree and I read and write. I am drawn into the water, the words “perfect” and “content” pooling inside, penetrating the rocks of my bones. When I’m on or by the river, I want nothing else.

It may not be a coincidence then: my Tagalog ancestors were riverine. Tagalog likely originates from taga-ilog, people of the river. Towns in the ancient Tagalog kingdom were built along the Pasig River: Maynila, Sapa, Tondo. After Spain conquered Maynila in 1571, they built a fort where the kingdom’s fort already stood, along the river’s mouth that opened to a bay. 

The walled city—and the rest of the archipelago—would be “owned” by Spain until 1898, when Filipinos declared independence after two years of revolution. But America promptly occupied it and raised its flag there, then bought the Philippines from Spain for $20 million.

Wars and dirty deals for a perch along a river are not unusual, I learn; neither are meetings, migrations, and flights. In times of peace, a river can mean hope. It can even mean homecoming or a pleasant escape.

One Labor Day weekend, as we needed to take a break from our drive, we stop at a rest area a few miles down from the confluence of the Susquehanna’s north and western branches and find a picnic spot overlooking McKee’s Half Falls. We sit by the river, the sound of the rapids reminding me of the sea. Then two buses of Mennonites empty out and flood the scene: they lay down packs of food and drink on the tables, mount a volleyball net, and spike the ball in dresses and suspenders. We try to not look too curious. Amish or Mennonite? We couldn’t tell at first.

We catch them looking at us; perhaps they too were trying to make us out. A few women walk past our table toward the bank. One was carrying a baby, another a cellphone. I get up the nerve to converse and learn that they’re Mennonites who had chartered a bus from upstate New York just for this riverside picnic. The young woman with the cellphone says their ancestors were from Pennsylvania. 

Since the seventeenth century, when William Penn solicited settlers for his new colony, members of a radical, pacifist wing of the Christian Reformation—the Mennonites—had been fleeing Germany and Switzerland to escape persecution. They built their new lives by Pennsylvania’s rivers and some settled along the Susquehanna, near Lancaster. Then some left to establish farms in New York; their descendants come to visit now and again. 

The young woman stands on a rock several feet from the rapids, clutching her cellphone while her other hand balances with grace. She laughs and her floral green dress flashes like a portent of spring, even at summer’s end. We all laugh and speak, a provisional circle of women in pastels over the tug of the wind and the roaring waves. We are the river’s daughters come home yet far away.

*

I grew up in Quezon City, Philippines, in a tropical valley near Manila, just west of a fault line and a river. It’s like a Pennsylvanian summer year-round, only hotter and stickier. We have two seasons: rainy and dry. In the dry season, it doesn’t rain as much.

The fault by my childhood home is locked, bound. Its last release was in 1771, while Pennsylvania was fighting for an independent America and the Philippines was a captive of Spain. Its confinement has forced it to store stress—until it no longer can. One day it will break. One day, the apocalypse will come home.

I am shocked to discover that there are two fault lines around Bloomsburg. When Africa collided with North America around three-hundred million years ago, the crust crumpled into the Appalachian Mountains and these faults likely formed. But as the continents spread, their restive temperaments were stilled. Now, their presence is merely inferred through sheets of sediment that are “out of order,” through exposed layers of tightly folded rocks. Will they reawaken, like the return of the dark lord to an unsuspecting Middle-earth? We might have to wait several hundred million years to find out.

Our first Bloomsburg home was on a mountain. On the western slope of Turkey Hill, near Bloomsburg’s highest point, our apartment lay against a slope of sandstone and shale: remnants of Appalachia’s oceanic past when it was submerged under a shallow sea. From our balcony and windows, we could see the fiery curves of ridges during sunrise and the crown of old conifers at sunset. The Catawissa Mountain always dominates the scene, framed by another curving tree bowing to the sky. It’s a view I never tired of. When composing, I used to turn sideways from the piano as if to take dictation from outdoors. It gave me a crick in the neck.

Mountain and river are my twin fixations, I soon discover; I found myself captive to both in New Zealand’s South Island where much of Lord of the Rings was filmed. After my alpine adventures in Middle-earth, Bloomsburg was simply the Shire and the magnificent Catawissa Mountain no more than a mound.

But the Shire has a charm all its own, even if our area’s inhabitants look more like giants than hobbits. After hiking around the waterfalls at Ricketts Glen up on the Appalachian plateau where leaves have just started to turn, we drive valleyward past a big sign that says “Pig roast today.” 

Filipinos love pig roasts. One of my earliest memories was of a whole pig spread out across the dining table with an apple in its mouth. Dead and roasted, of course, its now-chestnut skin glowing with crisp perfection. I am starved. 

Dave makes a U-turn. Following the signs, we park in front of a barn. Dave’s old Toyota Camry stands out from the trucks, bales of hay, and cowboy hats. It looks like a private party, not a festival as we’d assumed. “I feel awkward,” I tell Dave who starts to back up. “Wait! All the more I want to stay!”

A smiling man walks up and welcomes us to the fold. It’s a fund-raising party for his twelve-year-old girl who as she goes to an Olympic wrestling camp in Puerto Rico. “It’s five dollars and you can eat as much as you want!”

We pay the fee, help ourselves to the buffet, and go for the prize. Instead of a pig on a spit, we find one all neatly chopped up—it would have to do. We amble toward a picnic table, saying hi to everyone we pass. An old man with a friendly drawl and NRA cap sits with us with his wife. We chat to the twang of Willie Nelson who the DJ plays all afternoon. While we munch on succulent pig meat and skin that remind us of lechon, he regales us with tales of his dog GW (the former President is to blame) and the black child they recently adopted (“He’s very polite,” he points out).

A young man sidles up to talk about guns. The host, gregarious like a town mayor, comes up to chat. The man with the NRA cap is his father and the “mayor” has eight children, four of whom we get to meet, wrestler included. 

Five dollars seems a small price to pay for this experience so we walk over to the auction and splurge twenty. I notice cows roaming in the distance, the fields and mountains locked in a loose embrace. I am warmed by the openness, enjoy the spark that comes when different lives and landscapes meet and touch, even if spurred by the shared appreciation of roasted swine. We’d come back if invited—they were so welcoming and friendly—but after Trump’s election three years later, there’d be no way we’d ever crash a pig roast again.

*

Two soldiers who fought in the Philippine-American War, which resulted in 775,000 Filipino deaths, died of dysentery before their scheduled return to Bloomsburg in 1900. A Protestant missionary, who attempted to convert Muslims in southern Philippines and teach them to read and write their own language, was featured in the New York Times after his death and his diaries are now in our university library. A friend who spent a few years in the Philippines as a child fondly remembers her Filipino nanny. These are the area folks I’ve discovered who had connections to the Philippines other than a spouse.

*

“Our home needs to have a mountain view,” I assert. My one-year-position was converted to tenure-track, and eventually, I earned tenure. But the move away from our mountainside apartment we call “The Highlands” would be eight years in the making as we battled fears of job loss and our own fussiness. “Our new house must agree with Feng Shui principles, meaning no cul-de-sacs, no entry doors that open to stairs, no L-shaped houses…” And so on. The classical elements must be in balance at home; ch’i must move freely and energize the space. We needed all the help we can get.

We decide to build, thinking no existing house could possibly meet all our “needs.” Fascinated by what is old yet fond of the new, I design a colonial-style house, a wannabe architect attempting to incorporate into Anglo-American tradition new technologies and principles of Feng Shui. We didn’t want to be far from the town or river but it shouldn’t be too close to the river either due to flooding. Though the country lots had beautiful views, they frightened me: not only would I have to give up my sporty sedan so I could go to work in winter; I feared that racist folks would attack us and we’d be all alone.

Perhaps the fears were unfounded but they were nevertheless there. In Spring 2020, while the world was in a pandemic lockdown, we stumble upon a listing for an in-town Colonial Revival with hardwood floors, molding, an interesting history, and a lush garden looking out to a forest of tall, sturdy trees. Though it no longer had a mountain view (the trees and the neighbor’s house took care of that) and laundry was in the basement, it had enough to enchant us, good ch’i included. And we’d have neighbors.

Neighbors who’d welcome us with flowers, fruits, gardening tools, plants, and pumpkins. Who’d share their homemade jams. Who’d water our plants and shovel snow off our driveway while we were away. Who had “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on their front lawn. Considering that Pennsylvania would have the highest level of white supremacist propaganda in 2021, I take these as huge wins.

Throwing my painfully thought-out house plans aside, we decide to buy this home and deepen our Pennsylvania roots. 

On our first spring, though a germaphobe, I cup the earth with my bare hands; my fingers caress the rich, riverine soil. I add leaf compost onto the planting bed, surprised I’m playing with dirt. This is where my tomatoes and basil will grow, where dahlias will explode with flowers year after year. 

On this land where branches arch and spread like dancers’ arms, I study light, dappled light, and shade, noting their movements through the seasons when trees are robed in green or ring rust-gold, haunt in sepia or bewitch in white, break into buds or lapse into leaves. The black walnut and Norway maple take the lead but oaks, maples, sycamores, dogwoods, redbuds, and more fill the stage. They take me to the tropics in the rush of summer rains, transport me to holiday heaven as they wrap their arms with snow.

These woods are now my mountains; my music takes on their curves and hues. They woo like lovers and watch like sentinels. I whisper thanks.

*

A Bloomsburg-born Filipina artist carves delicate lines on wood. Ridges and valleys form petals, thorax, wings. She rolls ink onto the ridges and presses them into being like a sky coming down onto nubile earth. The sky-sheets are tattooed with earthly shapes that live on walls, frames, cards, the stage where I will perform music inspired by birds. Nature is our mutual inspiration, it seems. I will attempt to write music about a Tagalog legendary bird and she will try to accommodate.

*

Dave and I renew our vows in front of the Japanese maple as summer greens morph into scarlet. Our neighbor officiates. We celebrate not just our love but that of our friends with whom we spent the pandemic: the Zoom happy hours, the outdoor gatherings even in winter, the social-distanced indoor thanksgiving dinner with windows open and the heat cranked up. The woods watch and wonder. Again, we say I do.

We haven’t kayaked much in the two years since we moved. But we go back to the river like pilgrims of the seasons and admire the ways the mountains and trees rise from their other selves. A double-vision. Two selves co-exist, like the Tagalog’s two souls: one tied to the body, the other free and unbound. Or is it one life that’s mirrored, or magnified, or split?

Perhaps we, too, are the river. Inside us are fragments of a braided past—land, language, heritage, home—and we wash them away, fossils found further downstream, minerals deposited onto some forgotten terrace. 

The river inside: ever-ancient, ever-new. It will move and carve, sculpt and split. It will gather and let go. It will cut and it will double. It will bring me the sky in a dream. It will be forded to reach another shore.

I will flow along. 

Pennsylvania: the basin that holds both worlds—perhaps all my worlds. Sky and river as one, rocked and cradled by the earth, the mountains touching all. Mountain, river, earth, and sky: the dwellings of sacred spirits, according to my ancestors, they, too, are my Pennsylvania elements. Irreducible, primary, primal.

Let the river wash me away. Let the forest swallow my remains. Let the ocean not let me rest.

Charisse Baldoria is a classical pianist, composer, and educator who loves the written word. Born in the Philippines, she came to the United States for graduate school in music as a Fulbright scholar. Now a music professor in Pennsylvania, she has performed on five continents and loves to travel. She writes about her attempts to find equilibrium in displacement and a home in music. Drawing upon Philippine history and culture, she investigates questions of heritage, home, and identity. Her prose and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Windmill: The Hofstra Journal of Art & Literature, The Good Life Review, The Asian/Pacific American Women's Journal, 3 Cup Morning, and Northern Stars.

Richard Weems

You Wish

I refuse to join any club that would have me as

a member.
—Groucho Marx

As if being vouchered into this gentrified tenement hadn’t further ostracized your nonbinary, ‘they’-preferring POC ass already, worldwide pandemic necessitates that you clear a 6-foot zone (spherical? cubic? dodecahedral? the governor’s edict never specified) around you at all times.

The timing could have been worse, but not by much. It wasn’t that you’d just broken up with that spindly Florence. It was that you’d broken up with them five months ago. And since then, you haven’t managed a single date, exchange of @’s or even a deliberate meeting of the eyes across a bodega shelf.

So now you’re sealed in, knowing already how it feels to have no one touch you. The lockdown order came about so suddenly, you never even got a chance to throw aside your abysmal self-esteem and plunge into a Mardis Gras of sluttery.

You wish the goofy-faced, balding governor could have at least set a precise deadline. Maybe he could have displayed a timer ticking down to isolation, like in those Purge movies or that OG Star Trek where people had a mandate to pillage and scream maniacally, “Festival! Festival!” You could have made a dramatic scene for yourself, galumphing down the fire escape during the final sequence of bongs to snatch up the first available companion, even a feral cat who’d only subquarantine beneath your bedroom Koppang. But when has a white man in power ever shown much concern for your demographic?

So you leech wifi off the downstairs coffee shop, the Ground Floor, and you doubt there could be another YouTube vid or TikTok out there to consume. You’ve pursued every position on your Balkarp and queen-sized Liervik to its uncomfortable conclusion, your vision dry and crinkled at the edges. When it comes to the necessities of physical survival, you are well stocked. Your impoverished upbringing and general reluctance to face the barely contained white rage of your neighbors means you habitually hoard mac and cheese, canned produce and Lipton powder, and you can utilize every fiber of a square of toilet paper. Your cis-hipster neighbors post stickers on their doors promoting coexistence and lives mattering, but they never thought one of you could ever become one of their neighbors! Did they know that in the basement of this very building, pre-gentrification days, you sucked cigarettes, Sol and your first lovers? The antivax couple in 12D hold their children close to them in the elevator as though you are the infectious one. The Karen in 6C, who voted against Hillary for robbing Bernie, calls the police every time you lock yourself out and follow her into the lobby.

Still, you need someone. Just one other human being to confirm you’re still in the club.

*

So maybe mitosis is the answer. You have serious doubts about the level of attraction your sack of guts could incite in anyone else, but maybe half of your sack of guts to the other? The principle of mass conservation dictates that two of you should take up no more space than the sole original, but some video of cell division you remember faintly from your Recommended for You queues suggested parts greater than the whole. Thus, your studio apartment could become twice as constricting, your supplies twice as likely to run dry. You could have a fight for screentime on your hands, and would your practiced proficiency with TP really carry over into another entity?

But at the end of every thread of doubt stands the question: what do you have to lose? The need for companionship trumps all (what a tainted verb that is nowadays).

*

Unsure as to how to proceed, you first hold your breath. Then you hold your breath while trying to push it out, as though to clear your ears. Nothing. So you gulp down a full glass of water, the bowl of a spoon resting on your nose, because that’s a damn fine cure for hiccups. Still just you. Next a headstand, a handstand (granted, against the wall). You try humor, the funniest jokes you can think of (ie, two popes are fucking a dead alligator on the uptown bus...), but no joke is ever funny to the person telling it. Next, a trust fall, in hopes that maybe another you will manifest to catch you, and while lying on the floor waiting for your skull and back to recover, you break wind, all three holes. You throw a Santoku knife in the air, close your eyes and wait as long as you dare to open them, to induce a panic reaction that will force your body to run off, cartoon-like, in separate directions.

All for naught. And now a knife sticking in the laminate.

Takes some doing, but you find that cell division video, or its kin, and note these suckers make no effort when they divide. No preamble, no windy suspiration of cell walls. Casual, laidback, Oh damn, did I just multiply?

So you sit back, mindful of your breathing, and improvise a mantra. In--I am a mountain. Out--I am an eggplant. In--I am unlovable. Out--I am a freak of nature and alone. In…

And just like that, there you are, on the other end of the Balkarp, identical in clothing, plaid toe socks, even the MacBook with the rainbow sticker next to the trackpad. You look at you, and you look back, both of you so identical you really can’t be sure on which end the original sits. Is your hair really that scraggly in the back?

And before you can relish in your own company, you watch yourself sit back, close your eyes...and now three of you line the sofa. Maybe four--could you have just divided yourself at the same time you did so? You hesitate from turning the other way--you just might be sitting there, over on the Nordkisa, ready to split again. Sharing your supplies presented only a minor concern at first blush, but now you’re growing by exponents (this dividing shit is just so easy!), and you start appearing all over the place: in the corner, on the Karljan by the window, standing in the shower. A row of you sitting along the countertop, like chickens coming home to roost. MacBooks fall and clatter on the floor by the dozen. In that video on cell division, you heard they can divide only so many times before they fizzle and die. What did the reserved, English-mannered narrator call that? The Hayseed Limit? Haytick? Hayflick? You have no idea how far you can take this.

So why stop now? The world has given you so little indication of wanting you in it. Shouldn’t you offer it a whole new pandemic? Shouldn’t you be the social cancer they’ve labeled you as? So one of you starts an online petition the rest of you will sign. Another opens a window, yanks down your Spongebob pj’s to moon the streets--or are you about to take a shit on this world that has rejected you in every way it can think of? A good dozen or so of you huddle around the dining room table, discussing plans to piss on that Karen’s welcome mat and stuff used Maxi’s under her door.

But one of you has taken on a look of fright while huddled by the window. This one is the most recognizable to you, for you realize this is the look you’ve lived with for years. They look ready to step onto the sash and bail out into the air, twelve floors up, at the prospect of the mass tumor of you burbling your way in their direction.

Good riddance. Fuck them, if they can’t accept this new normal.

Richard Weems is the author of three short fiction collections: Anything He Wants (finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize), Stark Raving Blue and From Now On, You're Back. Recent appearances include New World Writing, On the Run and Flash Fiction Magazine. His fiction and essays have appeared previously in North American Review. He lives and teaches in New Jersey.

Timothy Laurence Marsh

Groundskeeping

She was an old woman who lived from a cart at the end of our block, where the fields began. The two rumors were that she washed her hair in puddles and rubbed crushed cherries against her cheeks to feel pretty. There was also one about eating pigeons.

She wore a heavy waistcoat even when it was warm. When she came down the street she’d push her cart with one hand and clasp her coat shut at the collar with the other. The cart made a loud rattle and we could always hear it coming, even from inside our houses.

Nobody knew her name. A person like that can hang around for years and nobody will learn her name. She stayed around the fields during the day and at night she took her cart and went somewhere else. She never said hello or looked at anyone.

Our mothers got nervous because we liked the old woman. We liked to go to the fields and spy on her cart of junk. There were colored jars and dented soda cans, books without covers. We wondered where she got them and how she cooked her pigeons.  

Our mothers were young and pretty. They grew fat cabbage roses and waited for our fathers to come home from offices. They had told us: Never go near that old woman. Never take anything from her cart or give her anything from the house. Never let her touch you. 

After so many warnings we thought we understood. Our mothers were scared because the old woman wasn’t like them, because she was thrilling and strange like the newts and toads we brought home from the gully; because we liked the newts and toads, liked all the wild things that were different from us, and wild things were dangerous. 

So right away that afternoon, when we saw the police car come down the street, we knew what it was doing there. We stood at the edge of our driveways and stared into the fields where the blonde policeman had found the old woman sitting by her cart, clasping her coat by the collar. The policeman had his hands on his knees and was speaking softly. We couldn’t hear what he was saying. 

After a minute the blonde policeman took the cart and dumped all the jars and cans into the trunk of his car. He tossed the books in there too. Then he pulled the old woman to her feet and stuck her in the car as well. He put her in the back where bad people went, then slammed the door shut and drove away, waving as he passed. The empty cart stayed in the field. Weeks went by but the woman never came back for it. We didn’t see her again. 

Our mothers were happy to see the woman go. It was better for the neighborhood, they said. You couldn’t have something like that hanging around children. Our mothers talked about the old woman as though she was a shrub of poison oak that all the kids were bound to get into. It was best to have the shrub removed before it touched us and made us sick.   

After the policeman drove away we went down by the gully and talked about what we’d seen. We weren’t sure how, but we knew our mothers had made the old woman disappear, had made the blonde policeman come to our neighborhood, had made him take her pretty jars and shiny soda cans. It was strange to us how some people could make other people disappear like that, even if they did eat pigeons or crush fruit against their faces. 

We thought about it for hours. And the more we talked the more we began to sense how difficult and dangerous the world could be. And we grew afraid of it then: afraid of its pretty mothers and handsome police and powerful worriers, afraid for all the wild creatures, for the newts and toads that gave you warts, for the cats that had claws and dogs that had teeth, and for ourselves and what it seemed we had to do: that the only way to survive was to be exactly what was expected; that from thereon we would need to take perfect, terrible care to only present the roses of ourselves and purge everything else from sight: our weeds and burning nettles, our native poison oak.

Timothy Laurence Marsh is a professor of English at Texas Tech University - Costa Rica. His stories and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, The Los Angeles Review, Fourth River, Ninth Letter and Grist. He currently splits his time between New Hampshire and Costa Rica.

Leah Harris

Built to Last

I bought my first pair of Doc Marten boots in 1990, with money I saved up from babysitting the local Orthodox rabbi’s children. Standing in the footwear section of The Black, a cluttered alternative shop in Ocean Beach, I was at first overwhelmed by the array of Docs in all heights and colors. But as soon as I glimpsed them on the shelf, I knew I’d found my talismans. Eight-holed. Oxblood. Steel-toed. Fuck. Yes. 

Their dried-blood hue and their signature yellow stitching mesmerized my fifteen-year-old self. The bite of their new leather scent intoxicated me. I turned them around, marveling at their heft, admiring their every detail, down to the black and yellow AirWair tag flapping from the back of each boot. When I strapped them on, their bouncing soles became twin life-rafts for navigating the turbulent rapids of my adolescence.

If the rabbi, his wife, or my Jewish family had known the truth of their origins, they would have never approved of me wearing boots designed by Klaus Märtens, a Nazi doctor in the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces. When Märtens began manufacturing his shoes in the 1950s, he fashioned the original bouncing soles from surplus Luftwaffe rubber. Most American Jews, including my own family, continued to boycott German products long after World War II was over. 

Although no one in our immediate family was murdered in the Holocaust, my mother was haunted and hunted by Nazis. After one too many bad trips on LSD, another Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, the notorious “Angel of Death,” began to speak to her from the television set. These nightmarish visions eventually led to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia in 1970, when she was just 20. Even worse than her visions of Nazis, Mama then had to adapt to her status as a “head case,” as she described it; to the revolving-door hospitalizations and heavy doses of Haldol and Thorazine she was compelled to take. The drugs did not cure her visions, but instead bludgeoned her mind and body into sedation and submission.

*

Mama could not ward off the prophecy of unfitness that was leveled at her. By the time I turned five, the courts had severed her parental rights. My maternal grandmother and her second husband became my legal guardians; they secreted me as far away from my mother as they could, deep into the sunny, serene, San Diego suburbs. I was systematically taught to fear her madness. She became a human cautionary tale. Don’t end up like her. 

But I felt her madness within, glimmering. It took on a life of its own, pulsating within my young bodymind. My large-bosomed, loud-mouthed Jewish grandmother, a former kindergarten teacher, had no idea what to make of me. When we snuggled on the couch reading Word Power books, I was rapt, joyful as we studied grammar and sounded out each word together, accumulating new treasures for my brain. But the world beyond books and words made little sense to me. I feared the other children on the school bus, keeping my head down and eyes averted as I navigated the aisle, prompting the neighborhood bullies to call me weirdo and freak. Just ignore them, my grandmother said. I learned how to disappear myself within my own body, so that the words passed through me like ether.

I read far above grade level by the time I was in kindergarten, which earned me the admiration of adults and the label of gifted. This label created in me a pressure to be perfect in all things. When I was around seven, I remember trying to play “The Petit Minuet” on the piano. My hands would not cooperate with what my mind demanded of them. I’d practiced, but now I froze over the keys mid-song, fingers poised, uncertain. 

“It’s ok, Leah. Let’s start from the beginning, said my piano teacher, Mrs. Liebowitz. Her voice sounded encouraging, but I could detect the currents beneath her words: Annoyance, with an edge of anger. Her tight smile confused and disoriented me. No amount of encouragement would return my fingers to the keys. Frustration volcanoed inside my small body until I exploded into tears. I threw myself to the floor, wailing and flailing like I was trying to swim away. Mrs. Liebowitz stood several feet back, silently watching me melt down. Embarrassed and furious, my grandmother ushered her out, apologizing: I don’t know what gets into her!

What’s WRONG with you? She hollered once we were alone, gazing in disgust at me writhing on the carpet. Get up! And when I could not get up, she intoned sadly before walking away, You came to us as damaged goods. Her words dug and burrowed into me, sticking at the cellular level. 

*

In eighth grade, I was briefly accepted into a trio of normie girls with perfectly hairsprayed bangs. They turned on me seemingly overnight, sending me into a kind of psychic whiplash, loudly talking shit and laughing at me as they followed close behind in the hallways. On the bus, I watched their faces swing in my direction, lip-glossed, brace-filled mouths moving, threatening to kick my fat ass, although they never did. For the rest of that year, I practiced making myself ever more unseen.

*

In 1960, the British company that purchased the rights to manufacture Docs anglicized the name by removing the umlaut in Märtens. Hence, the de-Nazified Doc Martens were born. By the 1970s, they were the go-to footwear for working-class British folks, the early anti-racist skinheads, and the police. Docs later became an emblem of neo-Nazi skinhead culture. When I was in high school in the early 1990s, it was well known that you identify the neo-Nazi kids by their black Docs with bright red laces, strung horizontally.

*

By high school, I fully embraced the weird, the queer, the occult, black lipstick and blood-red boots, tumbling headfirst into 1990s youth misfit countercultures. My Docs became my most beloved accessory, punctuating every outfit with a fierce exclamation point. Wearing them, I felt temporarily able to stomp through this world like I didn’t give a fuck. Hoor! My grandmother hollered when I ran out the door wearing a shiny black flight jacket and ripped black fishnets under denim shorts. I felt nothing. In parks and 7-11 parking lots, I dared stoned skater boys sipping sweet malt liquor from paper bags to stomp with all their weight on my steel toes with their Vans-clad feet. They laughed as they did so, unable to move me. 

*

But the talismanic power of the boots was not sufficient to hold my damaged goods together. The body-memory of family separation, the flesh-echo of it, ballooned into an unbearable churn of dread in my gut, a driving need to escape my skin. I sliced crisp red lines into my arms with razors to make myself feel, or not feel. Three months after I acquired my Docs, the death-wish rose up like a tsunami and filled my mouth with pills. 

In the adolescent psych ward, at first they let me keep my boots, sans their laces. It took the staff a few days to realize that my boots were steel-toed. When they finally did, they took them away. They could be used as a weapon, a blonde psych nurse said sternly when I protested. I was given paper slippers. No defense against anything. Footwear for the mad. 

I had never before thought of my Docs as a weapon, more as my armor, my protection. But once that idea was implanted by the psych nurse, I could not let it go: the image of a steel-toed boot, sailing through the air in slow motion, striking hard on the side of her perfectly-coiffed blonde head, knocking her to the ground. I held that picture in the kernel of my amygdala where rage lives. It gave me a burst of secret satisfaction every time I saw her on the ward. When they finally let me out of that place, strapping on my Docs again felt like a rebirth. 

*

Soon after my release from the hospital, I was wearing my boots when I fell into the deep end of a swimming pool. I was dancing chaotically to Siouxie and the Banshees, tripping on acid with a bunch of kids I’d met at Denny’s while skipping school. The weight of the steel toes was dragging me straight down to the bottom. In my altered state, this seemed like almost certain death. A soothing siren voice said: This is what you have always longed for. For a few moments, breath suspended, I felt at peace. I was ready to surrender to the Reaper.

But as the air bubbled out of my lungs, my survival brain bypassed my well-worn suicidal neural pathways and the LSD swirling in my bloodstream. I pushed off the bottom and sloshed over to the shallow end of the pool, dragging my weighted feet behind me while flailing my arms around like a confused mer-person. No one else seemed to notice. It felt like lifetimes until I reached the shallow end where I could stand, gulping in panicked, hallucinogenic-fueled breaths. I hoisted my legs up one at a time and somehow managed to extricate myself from the boots. Distracted by someone projecting green laser beams onto the side of the house, I climbed out of the pool in my sopping wet clothes and socks.

As I began to come down in the early hours of dawn, settling into consensus reality’s bite, I wandered in search of my Docs. I finally spotted them, two oxblood blurs waving in the pale blue. From above, the soles appeared to be pressed down against the bottom of the swimming pool, as if an invisible version of me was still standing in them.

I dove in to rescue them, but it was too late. Water had seeped into the leather, warping it. I took the boots home and put them in the sun to dry, praying for their survival. As if to punish me for drowning them, the Docs shrank, no longer able to contain my feet. The steel toes pressed down on my human ones, pinching them unbearably after just a few steps. I mourned those Docs as if they were lost pieces of my own flesh. 

            A few months after my sixteenth birthday, I saved up enough babysitting money to buy another pair of Docs. This time, I chose black leather eight-holes, not oxblood, not steel-toed. Less armored, but they’d do. They propelled me through the remainder of my adolescence and into young adulthood, when I began to imagine the possibility of a life beyond psychiatric patienthood.      

*    

When I was twenty and a student at UC Santa Cruz, a phone call from my grandfather jolted me out of dreams. Sunlight poured in through the window, saturating the entire room, as he informed me that Mama had died in her sleep the night before, at age 46. I’d lost her not once, but twice — first, when the state separated us, and then, to death. The double loss opened a yawning chasm in the space between my heart and my throat, turning me into a restless, feral creature. 

For the remainder of that semester, I’d dress in all black, streak on black eyeliner, and lace up my Docs for long, solitary evenings, walking and smoking my way through the streets of downtown Santa Cruz, a ghost weaving among the living, laughing crowds of students and families. I was seen only by other spectral people, the groups of unhoused runaway youth who congregated on the corners, swarming around me to bum my Marlboro Lights. Those walks ignited a rageful desire to tell the truth of what happened to Mama, to me, to us—a longing that burned hotter than my desire to die. Within a few years of Mama’s death, the spark propelled me to start advocating for liberation and justice, in solidarity with my fellow mad and disabled folks. 

My Docs walked me through a rotating blur of seasons, of years, until one day, I was staring down my mother’s death age, utterly convinced that I’d meet the same fate, to die young in my sleep. The bouncing soles moved me steadily through the surreal portal of my 46th year; reaching the age of 47 felt like a second chance at life. If this little piece of history would not repeat itself, what else could be different, possible, in my remaining numbered days?

*

The black eight-hole Docs have been my steadfast companions for over three decades. A mirror image of the deepening lines in my forehead, the tops of my Docs are now cracked and worn. But I can still comfortably slide my middle-aged feet into the spaces my sixteen-year-old ones once occupied. When I press my feet down into the boots, I flash upon the many versions of me living out their timelines inside this aging body-mind. The child who found refuge from damage in words. The suicidal teen who sought safety in a leather boot invented by a Nazi. The chain-smoking, motherless adult with eyes rimmed in black, whose grief demanded justice. And the menopausal human I am now, a year older than Mama ever lived to be, still learning to coexist with my damage, to source strength and protection within this ephemeral human skin.

Leah Harris (they/she) is a mad, queer, disabled writer, advocate, and facilitator living on stolen Manahoac land. Their work has appeared in the Disability Visibility Project, Rooted in Rights, Mad in America, the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel, The Progressive, and the anthologies Fat & Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives, and We’ve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health.

Christine Aucoin

Predestination

“Do You WANT Me??” the pop-up ad demands, women tangled together, flashing like a cop car. She snaps the laptop shut. In the next room, her parents’ air purifier screams because it knows she’s there, the largest germ, just out of its cleansing reach.

Her browser history is littered with evidence. If im a girl can I. Can two girls. What if im a girl and. Pieces of a horrible whole. It needs to be purged. She eases the laptop’s lid back up, blue light obliterating the sweet dark. But He can see her just fine in the dark, she thinks as the ad strobes in the center of the screen. Capital He, lowercase her. Before the thoughts crawled out onto the search bar, He could see them festering.

The cursor dances over her four options: Clear THE LAST HOUR. Clear TODAY. Clear TODAY AND YESTERDAY. Clear ALL HISTORY.

When babies are baptized at her church, penny-smelling water dissolving the kernel of original sin that God put in their fontanelles, people cry with relief. But when she tried to dunk her head in the stoup, her father bit his ragged nails into her arm. “Don’t,” he hissed as congregants dipped their fingers in. “That stuff’s dirty.”

“Do You WANT Me??” the ad asks, and the purifier howls with rage. She knows the answer is YES and He knows the answer is YES and so what does it matter if she clicks YES, a virus cannonballing into the downloads folder, a thousand tabs exploding open to tell her what she’s won. The truth is if she’d clicked NO, or CLOSE, or REPORT FOR SPAM, the virus would’ve spread all the same.

Christine Aucoin is a fiction writer and playwright, most recently seen in The Molotov Cocktail. Her play Regulars, developed through the Dasha Epstein Fellowship at New York Stage & Film's Powerhouse Festival, was a semifinalist for the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting. She lives in the Bronx with her wife and two cats.

Noémie Boucher

The Turtle

There were a handful of us packed shoulder to shoulder on the speedboat to Tortuguero. The boat rocked as the crew of dock workers loaded the last of the luggage at the back. My seat was on the outside and only partially shaded by the turquoise hard top.

I recognised a few passengers from the flight to San José and almost everyone from the bus ride to La Pavona. An American woman shuffled into the spot next to me. She had a southern accent and a voice that carried through the boat. She twisted over the back of her seat, “Now, kids,” she said to her three young sons, “boat ride to Tortuguero is gonna be ‘bout an hour. If you start to get sick, let mama know...”

The streak of sun hitting my thigh was starting to sting. The day was hot. I mean witheringly hot. The kind of heat that makes you stop seeing straight. I dipped my fingers into the cool water and watched a stream of purple fuel float past. I’d always loved the smell of fuel, it reminded me of summers with my grandfather.

The engine groaned and the boat twisted out of the dock. On either side of the channel were curtains of lush vegetation, behind which I could hear the howl of monkeys and the cries of other animals unknown to me.

You could only get to Tortuguero by boat or small plane. I’d seen it in pictures countless times, I’d read every literature, every pamphlet, heard every story. Tortuguero was an outpost in the jungle, with a couple of tin roof homes, some hotels, and a collection of international researchers.

“Honey, looks like you’re gettin’ a burn,” the American woman handed me a bottle of Coppertone, her curly blonde hair was glued to the sides of her face.

“Thanks,” I said, squeezing some into the palm of my hand.

“You by yourself?”

I nodded.

“What brings you to Tortuguero?”

The boat was starting to pick up speed.

“Coming to see the turtles,” I yelled over the rush of humid winds.

“What?” she shouted.

Wedged beneath the woman’s sandal was a pamphlet for the Tortuguero Conservancy with a collage of sea turtles on the front. I pointed.

The truth was that I hadn’t come to see the turtles, but a turtle. The Tofino. I’d waited all my life to see her.

By the time we unloaded the boat, the sun had started to set. The jungle turned two shades darker. I rolled my suitcase through the town, which was one short strip with shops selling Pura Vida T-shirts and ice cream, and stray dogs wandering languidly by trashcans or curled up on doorsteps, and overcharged telephone poles running into palm trees, and multicoloured stucco homes, with neon lights, and the smell of dinners cooking, and residents dancing out front to reggaetón. The day had cooled enough that you could dance now.

Most of the people from the boat ride ended up in the same lodge, which was on the ocean side of Tortuguero rather than the river side. That just meant that the water was bright blue in the daytime and that you could hear it crashing against the shore, rather than the brown, slow-moving river that had taken us there.

I opened the door to my room, a wave of heat spilled out. I pulled the cord on the ceiling fan and opened the shutters. There was no glass on the window, just a screen. The walls were dark wood panels that had absorbed the humidity. I showered off and went to dinner.

Dinner was held beneath a pavilion a hundred meters from the shore. Everyone at the lodge was seated at a long table and were served plates of grilled chicken, gallo pinto, and fried plantains. We were travellers from all over, sharing stories, laughs, rising clatter as the meal went on, more beers, cocktails, fruit juices with rum, coconut with rum, straight rum.

“You’re a writer?” Asked a woman from Hamburg. She was swaying a bit beneath the arm of her fiancé.

“I am,” I said.

The salsa music got louder. She wiped sweat from her freckled chest, swaying rhythmically.

“Did you come here to write or to travel?” The makeup was melting off her face. But it didn’t matter. We were all worn-out and sweaty from the day, loose from the alcohol, and intoxicated by the night. “Let me guess,” she stuck out an arm and pointed, “you’re alone,” and with a motion, she’d knocked down her drink, setting off a roar of laughter.

“Come,” her fiancé said, getting up and lending her a hand. They stepped out from under the pavilion where the air was blue in the moonlight. The fabric of the woman’s dress twisted beneath her shifting hips, her steps entwined with her fiancé’s. It wasn’t long before the others joined, and I slipped away.

I laid on my bed and blinked hard. The room spun. I could still hear the salsa music, but it was faint compared to the hum of the jungle.

I dozed off and when I came to again, I couldn’t get back to sleep. My lips were sweet with rum-and-something, but the room had stabilised. I flicked a small dead cockroach from the desk, turned on the lamp, and buried my nose in a report about the last Tofino nesting.

She was going to be nesting again tomorrow night. The Conservancy had invited me to write about it, to help raise money.

It wasn’t just anybody that could witness the nesting; the Tofinos only nested in Tortuguero, and they only did it once every seven years. It was going to be a half dozen researchers and I.

*

A knock at the door. My mouth was open and a stream of drool ran from my cheek onto the desk. Someone from the Conservancy. I got up and rubbed my cheek, feeling the imprint of my sleeve.

“Alex?” said a woman’s voice through the door.

I wiped the drool with the back of my hand and brushed my hair with my fingers.

“Good morning,” I opened the door.

 Standing there was a young woman with braided hair stood in a green Conservancy polo shirt. “I’m Marcia,”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, slipping my feet into a pair of sandals.

“Closed-toe shoes is best,” she said. I paused and looked at her. “Fire ants,” she explained.

“Right,” I shook my head. I knew that. I’d read every book ever written about the place. I’d heard my grandfather’s stories. “Right, sorry.”

The Conservancy was a short walk from the lodge. 

“I can’t tell you how excited I am,” I said.

 “Me too,” Marcia opened the screen door to the Conservancy. “How did you hear about the Tofino? Not many people know about it,”

“My grandfather. He was a researcher, a marine biologist, actually. Came here in the 60s,” we rounded the corner where the other researchers were getting their things ready. They were all in green polo shirts, with dark rings around their armpits and chests. There were a couple of ceiling fans that did nothing but swish the hot air around. I could feel sweat starting to trickle down my back.

“Everybody, this is Alex,” said Marcia, “the last member of our crew today.”

“Hi, I’m Luke,” said a blond man who was leaning back on his hands. “From Australia,”

“Alex, from Canada,” I said.

One man laughed, “We know who you are.” He was packing a water bottle into his backpack, “I’m Pierre-André, also from Canada,”

“But we call him Papá,” Marcia added. “And I’m from Peru,”

“Gin, from the States,” said a woman with short black hair and a quiet little voice; I couldn’t tell I if she was timid or just unhappy.

I waited for the last man to introduce himself. He was sitting at the back with a pout. While the others were probably all in their mid-to-late twenties, he looked to be about a decade older.

“That’s Víctor. He’s from the capital,” Marcia explained.

I looked at the man expectantly, hearing nothing but the swish of the ceiling fans. Marcia smiled politely and picked up a backpack, “Ready?”

The others got up, slinging bags over their shoulders.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Puerto del caimán,” Marcia filed out the door.

“The biological field station,” Pierre-André said in passing, “a short ride from here.”

“Thanks, Papá,” I said and Pierre-André smiled.

I let the others leave first and followed behind Víctor.

“How long have you been working in Tortuguero?” I asked.

“We work all our lives to get here,” he replied. “This isn’t a vacation for us.”

“It’s not a vacation for me, Víctor.”

“My colleagues call me Víctor. You call me Doctor Rodriguez.”

We boarded a skiff in the river. Víctor was in the back, steering from the lever on the engine. The paint on the sides of the skiff was cracked and scaly. The engine putted for a bit before starting. Marcia and Pierre-André untied it from the dock and sat with me in the front.

“Sorry about Víctor,” said Marcia, “he doesn’t like that you’re here.”

“Really?” I laughed. “I couldn’t tell.”

The river was shaded from the sun. Here, the jungle was loud; screeching birds and insects, and dripping leaves, and shaking branches. There were vines draping into the water, trees coiled above us, reaching across the river. And life everywhere. Eyes everywhere. Eyes in the trees, and in the branches, scales sticking out of the water, birds swooping passed and catching glances, lizards masquerading as leaves, and quieting monkeys watching as though we’d interrupted their conversations.

The river narrowed as we snaked deeper into the jungle. When we squeezed around a bend, the water became glassy, and a second boat doubled in its reflection –a row boat with three young men. Theirs glided silently along the surface. One turned, as though he knew I was looking.

“You’ll see, Alex” said the man, “you’ve never fallen in love until you’ve seen her.”

I leaned forward, peering at him. I’d seen him before, except not quite. This man’s cheeks were tanned, his hair was brown and thick. This man I’d only seen in photographs. My grandfather. He was in the red wool sweater that he usually wore around Christmas. He was so young –younger than me.

“The shell is bioluminescent, meaning that it glows,” he spoke as though he was telling a bedtime story. And I was small again and imagining myself in his path. “And she’s bigger than you or me, bigger than the two of us put together. You’ll see.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder, “Careful there,” said Luke with a nervous laugh, “Here we are.”

The field station was a two-storey wooden structure resting on the river bank. It wasn’t much more than a port with a couple of beams and a rusting metal roof. Hanging from the top were two sun-bleached panels that read Puerto del caimán, Caiman’s Gate.

Víctor cut the engine and the skiff bumped against the rubber tires along the edge. Luke and Pierre-André hopped out, tied up the skiff, and started up the stairs. On the second floor, there was some research equipment.

We made our way across the jungle, emerging on the Caribbean side, where the waves crashed with a thunderous roar and the shore was littered with coconuts. Birds skipped along the sand cawing to one another.

They set up their equipment and passed sandwiches for dinner. I thought about my grandfather. There were no trackers when he came. He and a few other researchers had camped out on these shores for months, waiting to see her. And when she finally came, “I knew why I had been put on this earth,” he had told me once, “she was my raison d’être. My reason for being. She was as big and bright as the moon. And the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

My grandfather devoted his life to the Tofino. He stayed in Tortuguero for years, researching her, living as an unshaven recluse. That was before he met my grandmother and moved to the mainland. My grandmother used to say that he only fell in love once and that was long before he ever met her.

To be struck by something so powerful as to make you devote your life to it. That’s what I wanted.

“We have a few more hours before she comes,” said Pierre-André through mouthful of bread.

“I say we share stories. Makes the time go by faster,” I said. “Wanna go first, Doc?”

Víctor looked at me with an air of disgust, then he swallowed, “Okay,” he said, “A century ago, there were many Tofinos in these waters. They came by the dozen to nest on the shore. But one day, a captain on a passing ship looked this way and was convinced that the stars had fallen out of the sky. He ordered the ship to get closer and discovered that they were turtles. They were unlike any he’d ever seen before. And, what did he do? He went home and told all his friends about them. And soon, others came, travellers, and poachers. Mesmerised by their beauty, they waited for the Tofinos to swim out of the water and massacred them. The shells were broken and sold for jewellery and the flesh was used to make soup. The Tofino was nearly extinct, and the population was never able to recover.”

Víctor took another bite of his sandwich.

“Are you trying to tell me that you came here to make soup?” I said with feigned seriousness.

 Víctor pursed his lips, wiped crumbs from his lap, and went off.

“Alex,” said Pierre-André, “how about you tell us a story,”

The others agreed, “Yeah,” “Come on!” “You should be good at this.” Even Gin nodded and smiled –she was timid.

I looked over my shoulder to where Víctor was fiddling with the research equipment. He was an earshot away.

“You got it,” I said. “There were four of us growing up, my parents, my brother and I. My parents were musicians. Good ones. I mean classically-trained, met-at-the-Royal-Conservatory, voices-that-could-make-an-angel-cry, sort of good. So, there was always music at home. We had every instrument; piano, guitar, violin, harp, you name it.”

“The harp?” Asked Marcia.

“Yeah. My mother played,” I replied, “Anyways, it seemed only natural that my parents should teach my older brother and I how to play. We learned to read music before words. And when family or friends would come over, my dad would play the piano, and my mom, brother and I would sing. I didn’t care much about music, but it made my parents happy. The thing was that I could sing and my brother couldn’t. And he tried. And my parents tried. They put him in choir. They got him a voice coach. He used to drink honey. He would do anything if he thought it would could turn him into a good singer.

“When he was thirteen, he wanted to show off how much he’d learned, so he and his voice coach rented a church hall, and invited all our family, aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole deal. And he sang for us.”

“And he was good?” Asked Luke.

“No,” I said. “He was awful. The guy’s tone deaf.”

They laughed and finished up their sandwiches. “How did everyone end up in Tortuguero?” I asked.

“My parents took me here on a family vacation when I was little,” said Gin.

“For me,” said Pierre-André, “I saw a documentary about this place that was really popular in Québec. And I already knew I wanted to become a researcher, so I applied here. I was just lucky,”

“Very lucky,” added Luke. Gin giggled.

“What?” I asked.

“Marcia and Pierre-André just got engaged,” said Luke.

“Congratulations.”

Pierre-André wrapped his arm around Marcia’s shoulders.

“So, you guys thinking of settling down here? Raising your kids in Tortuguero?” I asked.

“No,” Marcia said. “People don’t stay here. We come for a few years then go back. We have families, friends back home. We want to raise our children near them.” Marcia looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice, “Maybe not Víctor. This is his life. He’s been here since he was twenty.”

It was much cooler now that the sun had set. When Víctor came back, he put the tracker on his lap, and sat down next to me, “Is it true? About your brother,” he asked.

“No,” I told him. “I don’t have a brother.”

“Then what was the point of the story?”

“Some things you can’t teach,” I said. “When I was younger, all I wanted to be was a marine biologist, like my grandfather –like you guys.”

“Is this a real grandfather or a fake one?”

“Real,” I smiled. “So, I filled my room with National Geographic posters. I read everything there was about marine life, specifically sea turtles. I watched every documentary. I even joined a marine biology club. But after all that,” I said, “you know what I learned?”

“What?” Asked Víctor.

“I wasn’t any good at it.” Víctor smiled. “I didn’t understand organic chemistry. I confused taxonomies. My grades weren’t there.”

Víctor’s tracker started to beep, and his expression snapped back to serious. “Twenty-five meters from the surface,” he said and the conversation fell to a hush. Everyone got up and stepped back. “Twenty,” I felt butterflies in my stomach. “Fifteen,” my dreams swimming to shore, “ten,” a bright blue glow beneath the wake.

She rose from the water like the moon. Bigger than any animal I’d ever seen. Her carapace was a kaleidoscope of blue-green luminescence. She settled on the sand and began to dig.

Then she was gone again. And the shore was dark. And the only thing that had changed was a mound of sand on the beach.

I thought about my grandfather again. His presence was here, but it wasn’t with me. In a few days, I’d return home, write a couple of pages about her, and that was it. I wasn’t in love. I looked over my shoulder, Víctor was wiping tears from his cheeks.

Luke applauded. Then Pierre-André and Marcia, Gin, me, and finally Víctor.

Pierre-André unzipped his bag and passed around headlamps. We packed up the equipment and started on the short trek back.

Víctor lingered on the shore.

Noémie Boucher is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. Her work has appeared in Yolk Literary, the Dillydoun Review, and the Hoxie Gorge Review. She is currently pursuing an MFA in screenwriting from Loyola Marymount University.

Debbie Feit

Thirteen Days

You sit bedside playing her favorite music on an old boom box you didn’t know your parents still had and probably thought they should have gotten rid of long ago but here you are placing a Helen Reddy cassette, yes a cassette, in the damn thing. Helen fills the room and your eyes fill with tears because for thirteen days you sit at the table beside the hospital bed that’s been delivered to your parents’ home. The bed where your mother will spend her remaining days while you sleep in the bed in the guestroom, not that you’re a guest, you’ve landed a front row seat to the horror show and have quickly been promoted from ticket holder to director. You sit at the table beside the hospital bed and eat tuna sandwiches that your aunt makes and you think it strange that she adds garlic powder and pepper but you enjoy the taste and you realize that it’s the combination of garlic and pepper and tuna that you find more surprising than the fact that your mother is non-responsive and lying in a hospital bed in the living room but you’ve never had tuna prepared that way before and your mother in a vegetative state, that has been going on for months, that is something you’ve become accustomed to and it’s the garlic and pepper and tuna combo that is far more novel. You eat pizza. You eat deli. You eat Chinese food. You eat all this and more because it takes thirteen days for your mother to die. Thirteen days of three squares and grocery shopping and buying rain boots at the mall. Expensive Hunter boots that your sister insists you both purchase, using your parents’ credit card, because that’s what your mother would have wanted. Your mother who found so much joy in shopping for you, cute blouses with pretty embroidery, battery powered candles, a washer and dryer more than thirty years ago when you moved into your first apartment, wouldn’t have found it inappropriate that you and your sister drove out to the mall to shop for yourselves in between waiting for her to die. You’re spending thirteen days overseeing homework long distance because your kids are in Michigan and you’re in New York and you exist in the in-between just as your mother does.  You’re spending thirteen days paying bills and making phone calls but you’re no longer doing any research because you’ve already spent fifty-seven days on that, trying to understand what went wrong, how the doctor fucked up, you’re contacting anyone who will listen, anyone who might be able to advise, including the physician who treated former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who, like your mother, also ended up in a coma, and it doesn’t occur to you for a moment not to contact the former Israeli Prime Minister’s doctor because it can’t hurt to ask and because you’re desperate to save your mother’s life and she’s your mother so she rates way higher in importance than the former Israeli Prime Minister or even the current Israeli Prime Minister as far as you’re concerned and you’re ecstatic when the doctor agrees to review your mother’s medical records but that is short lived because he cannot offer anything new to try and he doesn’t understand any more than you do how a simple knee replacement resulted in your mother never complaining about her knee, never complaining about anything else, ever again, and it’s crazy to realize that the surgery was actually successful, it actually got your mother back on her feet momentarily, even from the brief shuffle from her bed to the bathroom you could see that she would be able to walk more easily, walk with less pain but that was before she walked to the other side, before she walked you and your dad over to the funeral home to select her casket. You’re spending thirteen days paying bills and making phone calls, phone calls, phone calls and playing so many games of backgammon with your niece who has no idea that she is giving you a gift by playing the game almost every evening. She has no idea that playing backgammon with her means you get to think about your next move on the board and not the next step you need to take with the doctors or the hospital or the rehab centers and that is truly a gift. The hospital gives you a list of rehab centers to contact, which you do and you quickly learn that every place on the list is basically a parking lot for people like your mom and you have to find a place that offers rehab for brain injury on your own, which you do. You find a place that will take her and it takes them two weeks to evaluate her and report back to you and offer, for the first time in almost two months, an accurate description of what her quality of life might be with treatment and after that meeting you and your sister and your dad and your aunt go to lunch to talk it over and cry over your sandwiches and it doesn’t take long to conclude that it’s finally time to let your mother go and that’s when she and the hospital bed arrive back home where she’ll spend thirteen days while you spend each of those days watching crime procedurals on TV where the serial killers and pedophiles and rapists are a welcome reprieve. And you wonder when your mother will finally have her reprieve from the in-between, when you and your sister and your father will have your reprieve and when you will finally consider the small glass bottle in the fridge that arrived with the hospice nurse, you consider it for many days, you consider it with your therapist by phone because like your husband and children she is also in Michigan while you are in New York and you’re not sure what to do even though you very clearly know your mother would not have wanted this, would not have wanted the feeding tube and the months in the hospital and you very clearly hear her voice saying that if anything were to happen to her that you should pull the plug, but still, she’s your mother and you want to do what’s right, do what she wants, but part of you is struggling so you talk with your therapist and she reframes the situation for you, she explains that the glass bottle will make your mother more comfortable, it will ease her breathing but this conversation is leaving you breathless because you can’t stop sobbing, you’re sobbing as you listen to her give you assurances that it’s OK to make this decision, she serves you up assurances just as calmly as you serve your mother the drops. And then you wait. You wait to see how much longer it will take, how much longer until you reach the end of this nightmare, you sit bedside with your father as he tells your mother that it’s OK for her to go, and more days go by and you can’t spend all of them sitting with her so you go upstairs and take refuge with your serial killers, pedophiles and rapists, you watch them on the TV in your parents’ bedroom, you sit on your mother’s side of the bed, knowing that you will never again watch TV with her, she will never again scratch your back, the two of you will never again laugh as she calls you a bitch and that’s when you hear your father screaming your name and you run downstairs and you learn she is gone. You learn it took thirteen days on hospice for your mother to die, plus the fifty-seven days in the hospital and rehab before that, you have lost your mother, you have lost entire concepts like loyalty and love and complete unadulterated acceptance, you’ve lost comfort and stability and history, you’ve lost the ground beneath your feet, your mother has left this world and you are left to navigate it without her, to redefine your family now that it has been reduced, but that doesn’t have to happen today, today you can mourn your loss and be with your loved ones, eat fried chicken brought over by your mother’s best friend and wonder how the hell you will ever write her eulogy, how you will ever be able to pour your insides onto the page and then share them with a room full of people, but for now, you just need to eat a drumstick (and you wonder how you’ll do that too) and there’s only one thing you no longer have to wonder about and that’s how long it will take your mother to die because you learned that today. It takes thirteen days.

Debbie Feit is an accidental mental health advocate, unrelenting Jewish mother and author of The Parent’s Guide to Speech and Language Problems (McGraw-Hill) in addition to numerous texts to her children that often go unanswered. Her work has appeared in SheKnows, Insider, Kveller, Emerge Literary Journal, The Aurora Journal and Words & Whispers, as well as on her mother’s bulletin board, with forthcoming pieces in Five Minutes. She is at work on a novel whose completion she fears may also be fictitious. You can read about her thoughts on mental health issues, her life as a writer and her husband’s inability to see crumbs on the kitchen counter on Instagram @debbiefeit or at debbiefeit.com