WriteAngles Conference

FLASH MEMOIR AND FICTION

FLASH! Fall/Winter submissions of flash memoir and flash fiction by writers affiliated with the WriteAngles Conference are posted below.

 

A LIST OF MARVELOUS MOMENTS IN UNMARVELOUS TIMES

by D. Dina Friedman

I.
Seriously, the tree: Half orange/half green, like the reunification of Ireland. A dream on the misty-eyed lids of the hopeful. This is what I’d like to be – hopeful. A believer in rainbows, leprechauns and pots of gold.

II.
Today, the trees are gold – birches with smooth silver bark, young and unweathered. Trees that still believe in marvelous moments.

III.
I never ate Lucky Charms because their colors were too fake to be appetizing. But in the meadow near our house, my child was a whiz at finding four-leafed clovers.

IV.
When my friend calls again, I tell him his sadness is normal. Sad droplets in the air we breathe. Sputtering words of our leader spewing abuse and infection.

V.
It is hard to contemplate marvelous moments on overcast days, but yesterday, an energy and crispness in the air, a rainfall of rainbow-colored leaves.

VI.
My friend makes lists of things to do each day to keep the sadness from encroaching:
— Look out the windows at the rain on the cityscape
— Paint the gargoyle on the other side of the street
— Count the ratio of masked to non-masked. Record the results on a chart and report to the Board of Health

VII.
In our small town, they are trying to fire the Board of Health. Infection under every fallen leaf.

VIII.
This poem has digressed from its focus on marvelous moments, even though today the sun is brilliant. I pick up leaves in the woods. They are deep red, the color of blood. In the shortening days, we soak up sun like bears getting ready for bleak.

IX.
I could spray the sun as an antidote to sadness. Sun-spray on the doorknobs, the light switches, the faucet handles. Sun wraps its beary arms from behind my body. Whispers in my ear, “You. Are marvelous.”

D. Dina Friedman received two Pushcart Prize nominations and has published in many literary journals. She is the author of two award-winning novels, ESCAPING INTO THE NIGHT (Simon & Schuster) and PLAYING DAD’S SONG (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) and one chapbook of poetry, WOLF IN THE SUITCASE (Finishing Line Press). http://www.ddinafriedman.com.

 

 

MY NAME IS JOE

by Steve Bernstein

Jimmy, Son

“My Daddy used to miss some games. He had to work. Even on my birthday. And Christmas. Can I tell you something else? Now, I pretend daddy is in the bleachers, sitting next to mommy and my nonna.”

Rosa, Neighbor

“They buy last house, end of street. Then twins come. Ah Dios! So round, so happy boys! I babysit, I make platanos, big pot, nothing left. He love my Puerto Rican food! My back is no good. I never use a shovel for snow. Now, the twins shovel, like he use to. Good man, good man.”

Sherri, Wife

“In the morning, early, I’d hear his Bronco pull into the driveway. I’d let out a breath. You know, I think I held my breath our whole marriage. In the back of his Bronco is a big old truck tire and some heavy rope. Their next project was hanging a swing off the old oak tree out back. That truck is still sitting in the driveway. His marinara sauce and sausage meatballs are sitting in plastic containers lined up in the freezer. Each one Sharpied with a date in his handwriting. He was showing the boys how to make the sauce, cutting up the tomatoes, the onions, garlic. His clothes are still hanging in our bedroom closet, but where do I put our dreams?”

Michelle, Waitress at Denny’s

“Most Sundays the whole family came in after church for a Grand Slam Banana Boat. Four spoons, four cherries. These days, the three of them come in, but . . . well, you know.”

Dan, Brother

“He was only six months away from retiring. After twenty years, six fucking months.”

Chen, Colleague

“Twelve years together, partners, side by side. More than once, he saved my sorry ass. After our shift I’d take him to my uncle Lu’s restaurant in Chinatown, up off Delancey. We only ate appetizers, his idea. Coconut shrimp, popcorn chicken, teriyaki boneless ribs, the works. We’d have a few beers. The job was getting to both of us. I’d tell him I was worried about his drinking, he’d say he was worried about mine. Come New Year’s we had a plan to check out an AA meeting together. Truth be told, he wasn’t supposed to be working that day, he was going to his kid’s game. No surprise he was one of the first to arrive.”

Sophia, Mother

“Dio mio! I never thought I’d be burying one of my boys. How can you have a funeral without a body? Figlio mio! Oh Dio mio!”

Olivia, Hedge Fund Manager at Lehman Brothers, Lower Manhattan Branch

“I saw a woman jump out of a window, smoke and noise and dust, that awful burning smell, sirens, screams, people crushing each other to get out of the tower, I made it to the mezzanine, I was crouching under some stairs, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see anything, I heard him ask, “What’s your name ma’am? Can you reach my hand? My name is Joe.”

Steve Bernstein is a retired plumber who for over three decades has been a teacher and mentor for at-risk-teens as wall as an animal rights activist and humane educator. He recently self-published STORIES FROM THE STOOP, seven adventure stories from his colorful childhood growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s. He can be reached at stevebernsteinauthor@gmail.com.

 

WE STORY

by D. K. McCutcheon

I read for 15 years without stopping

At 16 I woke to discover I’d never been kissed, and set out to find one

     Through my terrible 20’s I wandered the world searching

          At 32, on the exact opposite side of the planet, I found my kiss

               He’d been reading, but looked up in the nick of time

At 37 we had a daughter. At 41 another.

     At 50 we started thickening in inconvenient places

          And thinning in worse ones (still we kiss, still we read)

               And still we age

At 57 our youngest turns 16, stretches fingers out into the world, dreams her own explorations

     Takes terrifying steps – and prepares to leave home

          “I don’t read” she tells us firmly, absorbing stories from the ether in gulps

               Regaling us with hilarious tales of tropes and memes

We watch our eldest also unfold like a lovely crumple-winged moth

     Her trajectory metamorphosed

          By the shiny-pretty-agonizing sparkles

               Of the professional Migraineur

Every day in a dim room sound/taste/touch swap places in a slow, scintillating dance

     Her unbearable transformation begins anew; inner-life ripe to bursting

          More marvelous than our decades-round-the-world to find these girls

               Each evolving far beyond their first fairy-tale flight

At 20 she reads without stopping

     We talk about writing                 

          She dreams with eyes wide open

               Her point of view sparkling through painful shards

                    Of exquisite light

D. K. McCutchen is Senior Lecturer in The UMass College of Natural Sciences, and supports other writing teachers via the UMass Writing Program. She may be the longest-running member of the University Writing Committee. Lack of poetic-DNA led to a tale of low adventure & high science titled THE WHALE ROAD. In a literary attempt to save the world, she’s now writing gender-bender-post-apocalyptic-speculative fiction. She lives on a river with two brilliant daughters and a Kiwi, who isn’t green, but is fuzzy.

 

MY MOTHER WORE CHANEL

by Anita Pappas-Raposa

My mother wore Chanel No. 5 when she was a young woman. Sometimes, before I visit her at the nursing home, I dab a little on my neck from an old bottle that I use sparingly. I’m trying to make it last.

The elegant perfume takes me back to evenings in the fifties when she looked so pretty; sparkling in a colorful dress, wearing nylon stockings and walking tall in her high heels. She and Dad would be going out on Saturday night. Maybe to an American Legion event or to a friend’s house party, but no matter, she loved her date. The scent of her perfume lingered as they left for the evening.

What a contrast to Mom by day. She worked at the diner owned by my uncle and father; “The Day and Night Diner,” which incidentally, closed at 2:00 p.m. daily. Mom kept the customers like “Mac” Kelly, a truck driver and Mr. Brainard, the bank president, chuckling to her saucy retorts or latest town gossip.

But behind the banter was a sea of troubles. My father was determined to sell the business and move on to work in Boston as a salesman. Mom couldn’t bear to leave her mother. In small town Palmer, Mom was both daughter and confidante.

On Friday nights, Dad returned from Boston; full of his news and weekend plans. Mom would outdo herself preparing his favorite Greek foods, then getting “dolled up” for Saturday night. The Chanel No. 5 was the final touch before they made their way out.

On Sundays, after church and a large traditional dinner, my sister and I ran off to the Five Star Theater to meet friends and watch romantic comedies all afternoon. We didn’t know, consciously, that our parents were drifting farther apart with every passing month.

For years, Mom wore that cheerful mask to work, tended to Yia Yia next door, slowly losing herself as the inevitable separation occurred. We hardly noticed Dad was gone.

Mom occasionally went out with her waitress pals, Judy and Terry. The quick spray of her Chanel was her departure signal. It wasn’t the same though. She was old school and never recovered from the humiliations of Dad’s other life.

I often wonder how this beast we call Alzheimer’s selects its victims. Now, as I listen to her nonsensical ramblings and watch her fade away, I wonder if she wasn’t the perfect candidate. Maybe she slipped into a world where the injustices of love, the sorrow of loss, and the personal regrets of her own dreams, simply vanished. She lives in the moment; sometimes at peace, sometimes fraught with anxiety. She cries when sparks of old memories invade her conscious state.

On those days of sadness, I like to show her advertisements in women’s magazines. We always pause at the Chanel ads or splashy fashion layouts where women are dressed in vibrant party dresses, standing tall in beautiful designer pumps. “Mom,” I say quietly, “Remember those days? And she smiles.

Anita Pappas-Raposa is currently working on a memoir about her coming of age and small-town life in Western Massachusetts. She is a non-fiction writer and retired English teacher. She has published several essays and excerpts from her memoir.

 

FRED’S GHOST

by Joan Axelrod-Contrada

Fred’s ghost circles the room. A gust of cold air hits me in the face, and I drop a new coral-colored bra I’m packing for Date #10 with The New Guy.

The shadowy apparition dips precariously close to my head.

“Stop dive-bombing me!” I yell.

“I need to get your attention.”

“You have it.” I toss a pair of flannel pajamas into my backpack.

“I’ve been watching you.” The ghost hangs in mid-air, unnervingly, in my line of vision. His voice lacks the warmth and good humor of the old Fred. “You didn’t waste any time, did you?”

“Well, it depends how you look at it—”

“Two months after I died, and you’re dating. My body wasn’t even cold.”

I clap my hands over my face. “I can’t deal with this right now.” I rifle through my underwear drawer, but my brain stays locked on five words. My body wasn’t even cold.

“The real Fred wouldn’t say that.” I slide my hands away from my face. “You must be some kind of imposter.”

“Imposter?” Peals of laughter erupt from the direction of the gauzy form. “You don’t know how this ghost thing works, do you?”

“Maybe not. Enlighten me.”

“We’re the outward manifestation of the inner spirit of someone left behind.”

“Sounds like New Age gobbledygook to me.”

“Deny all you want. It doesn’t change a thing.”

I dig through the bathrobes on the back of the door. No way can I bring the turquoise kimono Fred bought me in Provincetown.

I search my underwear drawer again and this time find the panties.

“Sorry, honey. I just got tired of being lonely and miserable.”

The gauzy shape hovers over the lamp by Fred’s night table.

“You could have at least waited a year.”

“Stop!” I scream. “I need to pack. I can’t deal with this right now.”

“So much for thinking I’m an imposter.”

“I don’t know what you are. I just want you to leave me alone.”

The shape clings to the wall behind the nightstand. “Don’t ask me to leave you alone. Ask yourself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, I really need to pack.”

I turn to the shape. Maybe it’s just a shadow.

Sorry, honey. No one could ever take your place.

“Do you really think I’d say that thing about waiting a year?” It’s Fred’s voice. Loud and clear. No longer muffled like a ghost.

My throat chokes with tears. “I don’t know. I might want to think I was so important, you couldn’t stand the thought of being with someone else.”

“Even if I’d gone through two and a half years of losing you to dementia? You are your brain, you know.”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what I’d say about people who think widows shouldn’t date for a year?”

“Picture them as tiny gnats and stomp on ‘em?”

“You’ve got it!”

“Honey, you can lie down on the bed if you want.”

“You don’t want me to leave you alone?”

“No.”

I flop onto the bed and take a break from my packing.

Joan Axelrod-Contrada is a former correspondent for The Boston Globe and the author of over 20 books for young people. She is also the founder and editor of WriteAngles Journal. She can be reached at joanaxelrodcontrada@gmail.com.

 

THE LAST BLIND DATE

by Mary Anne Slack

I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution ever since I reread some old journals and realized that every year from the age of seventeen to thirty I wrote, “Get down to 120 pounds.” Undoubtedly I was once 120 pounds at some point, but I was most likely fourteen at the time. Reading this ridiculous goal – one I never attained – made me see that resolutions are worthless.

That being said, I am now making one: Never go out on a blind date again.

I have some very nice friends, both men and women, who have genuine fondness for me and want to see me happy. I am happy; yet for those friends who are married or in relationships, that fact is not to be believed. I must be just faking it. Hence, these well-meaning folks have continued to introduce me to men.

When I asked one of my friends if he thought I had anything in common with the proposed guy he actually said, “Well … you’re both single.” I think I turned that one down, claiming to be too busy. But most of the time it seemed easier to agree to it and so I have a long, often amusing history of blind dates. But all things must come to an end.

I agreed to meet Bruce at the Blue Plate Diner, a modest, inexpensive place in town. He was a short, bald, rather sweet man who managed inventory and shipping for a local screw manufacturer. I am a teacher and a very part-time professional singer. He seemed interested in my career but his just didn’t spark anything in me other than acute boredom. He was the cousin of a colleague of mine so I was polite and feigned interest in screw counting. Did I mention I’m an aspiring actress as well?

I’d finished my burger and all but one of my fries and couldn’t eat another bite. Bruce was droning on about his job when he suddenly stopped.

“Are you going to eat that French fry?” he asked.

“Be my guest,” I said, turning the coveted greasy morsel in his direction.

He grabbed the ketchup bottle and shook a huge blob of the red stuff on top of the fry. Before replacing the cap he lifted the bottle to his lips and, sticking out his pink tongue, licked the top of the bottle clean. I picked up my phone and took a picture of him, which he didn’t even notice. He replaced the cap, placed the bottle next to the metal napkin holder, and dug in.

I didn’t stay to watch. I got in my car and sent the photo in a group email to my friends entitled: Why I No Longer Go on Blind Dates, Thank You Very Much. It seems to have done the trick. I haven’t had an offer in two weeks and am thoroughly enjoying my happy singleness.

Mary Anne Slack is a soon-to-be-retired elementary music teacher, an avid reader, and a library trustee in her home town. She is a member of the Quaboag Writers Collaborative and hopes to dedicate her retirement to travel, writing, and spending time with her grandchildren.

 

LIES FROM THE DEEPEST SELF

by Aisha-Sky Gates

I was lying and it was best we kept it that way. After all, there were sixteen years of marriage to get through.

I tried to begin Me in college in Missouri but it was the ‘70s. I had no right to expect care for sexual-assault-in-a-dorm-room. I couldn’t say the words even to myself so I thought, “I am a woman now.” That’s what violence had declared.

I married the very next sexual predator to approach me.

Had we run away to Arkansas in shame? “She’s pregnant.” Well, not that I knew about it or wanted it. Then, the doctor told us. Then, the baby came too early in our apartment. I grieved. The nurses and relatives expected it.

Oregon. He had impregnated me again. He tries to do the same for his old girlfriend. If she can’t have him she wants his baby. My cultural inheritance kept telling me that I was responsible. Make more with less, you know.

California. Oregon. Ohio. A woman here and there. The absolute deadline for his doctoral thesis was coming up. Eight years. I have three children to care for and still no degree. Physical violence and terrorizing me with a loaded gun has escalated. He says I’m not to touch them except to feed them. I am allowed four hours of sleep each day. The children are hostages forced to stay in their room day after day. I had done the research. Now I wrote three chapters in record time. I followed up with the submission of his thesis.

Massachusetts. He got hired as faculty. The college didn’t notice his preying on students. We, the family, were good cover for him; he was amused. He gave me a thorough beating in the kitchen. My oldest asked me if what she thought had happened did. “No, of course not.”

He moved his student-girlfriend into the house with us there on campus. We self-divorced; he said no lawyers. I was made to sleep on the third floor right above him and her. I believed what he told me: no money, no friends, and nobody cared. Nine months of cohabitating later, I was forced to get out.

A year later – homeless on the street, homeless shelter, job and first apartment – I fought in the courts for my children. He told the children and anyone who would listen that I had abandoned them. What I wanted was his money. My oldest told a salacious lie about me to protect her father.

Seventeen years later my baby came looking for me. My four-year-old boy had been neglected, malnourished, and not allowed to go to school. He was routinely beaten by his father. At 21 he was undersized for his age. He was mentally unbalanced and very defensive. He would not let me help him. He disappeared after a short visit.

Twelve more years have passed. I hardly feel them. I no longer have to lie to myself about anything.

Aisha-Sky Gates is the author of UNEQUAL PARTNERSHIP: A DATING GUIDE FOR LOVING NON-EGALITARIAN RELATIONSHIPS. She is currently working on her second book, UNEQUAL PARTNERSHIPS with an accompanying mobile app. The internet is littered with her articles and essays and blog postings, which are always about intimate relationships.

 

HORSE AND BUGGY

by Mohammad Yadegari

Almost every day, I passed by the horse-drawn carriages lined up for religious pilgrimages in Iraq. My father’s business was just a block away from where customers waited in line for rides.

Occasionally, I accompanied our guests when they visited the area, and I loved the trip in the carriages. It was fun to ride in them, letting the breeze caress my face and rumple my curly black locks as they flew in the wind. Watching the horses gallop in unison was fascinating. Most of the drivers did not whip the horses. The horses knew the route and knew how fast they were expected to go. Occasionally, to impress the passengers, some of the drivers twirled their whips enthusiastically and brushed them softly on the horses’ rumps. The horses would pick up speed. They knew that at the end of the ride they would be pampered with hay and water and the loving touch of their owners.

The owners made a living, enough to feed their families, enough to buy hay, sugar cubes, and horseshoes for their animals. Then, one day, modern life intruded. Almost a dozen carriages had parked in a row in the usual place when some motorized taxis appeared and took up positions encroaching upon their territory. It was modernity versus tradition and fast versus slow. It was a war for survival.

As I was passing by, I overheard an argument that led to pushing and shoving. Then swear words were spewed, and, suddenly, I heard the crack of a whip knifing the air above the heads of the group. It hit a taxi driver in the face slashing his right cheek as if a sharp knife cutting butter. Blood poured from his face. That was all that was needed. In the melee that followed, hands, legs, and bodies were at work beating and stomping and fighting. A crowd gathered, watching the scene. The crowd knew it all had to do with money, livelihood, change, and progress. Children’s lives on both sides were at stake. I asked a person next to me why no one spoke up to support the carriage owners. Deep down, I preferred the horse-drawn carriages. He cautioned that it was not our business to interfere.

Within minutes, the fight came to a halt. It was so surprising, so poignant that I still remember the short period of noise and punches and curses. Then there was an exhausted and total silence. The carriage owners were crestfallen. Almost all of them were sitting with their backs leaning against the wall, gently sobbing. They knew and the crowd knew and the taxi drivers knew that the old way was being pushed aside. These defeated men would no longer be able to provide for their children, wives, mothers, and sisters. I was too young to comprehend the immensity of dejection that these men were feeling inside. All I knew was they sobbed for a loss that was too hard for me to imagine.

Mohammad Yadegari, an Iranian born in Iraq, moved to the United States in 1964. He studied at SUNY-Albany and NYU and then taught mathematics and history in both high school and college. This piece is from ALWAYS AN IMMIGRANT, A CULTURAL MEMOIR, to be published by White River Press in 2020.

 

THE BEAN LADY

by Kari K. Ridge

Her beans captured my attention in the bustling African market. Thousands of beans in dozens of colors, shades, speckles and sizes, overflowing from enormous burlap sacks. I was in Malawi to help women create writing circles in their villages, not to shop, but the beans were such a beautiful and surprising sight that I wanted to have a bit of this rainbow.

The dried beans were in the outstretched hands of a blind woman sitting on the dusty ground. The daily football-field-size market involves countless tables and blankets covered with wares of every kind and a riot of colors and smells: People and orangey dogs mingle with baby chicks and goats near rickety tables lined with aromatic drying fish covered with flies. Brilliantly colored cloths in a thousand colors wave in the wind like sails in a regatta, and a little plywood shack covered in the Canadian flag sells kitchen utensils, while bicycle parts are for sale against the chubby trunk of a baobab tree. Tables display bottles of aspirin next to bags of something powdery and white, jars of goat innards, tangerines and soap.

The bean lady was in the center of the activity. She was the only blind person I saw in Malawi, in an environment that constantly challenges life in able-bodied people. This woman, with a business and the experiences of many decades carved into her face, was a survivor.

She told me the price – the US equivalent of 30 cents – and I placed the kwacha in the palm of her hand. Smiling, she strummed her fingers over her beans, then plopped them, one by one, into a thin, blue plastic bag that she tied with a quick knot. As I reached for the bag containing my treasure, she clasped my hands in hers and we exchanged warm “zikomos” – thank you in Chichewa.

I kept the sealed bag of dried beans buried in my suitcase throughout my journey, thinking to put them in a clear glass vase when I got home so I could admire the colors and patterns and think of the resilience of the bean lady, of the many other Malawian women I met, and of Africa.

But the night before I flew home, I discovered the rainbow beans had sprouted – with no air, no water, no sunlight. I was saddened to abandon them, but knew I shouldn’t risk bringing the sprouts onto foreign soil. Dried, innocent beans were one thing; these mystery seeds were another. I left the blue bag on the motel room’s bedside table, hopeful the employees would plant them and have edible harvests.

The memory of the bean lady and the legumes that survived – despite the odds – remained with me and helped guide me through my own challenges back home in the United States. When the phone call came a year later inviting me to return to Africa, I jumped at the opportunity to learn more about this wondrous place where time began and life took its first breath.

Kari Ridge is a journalist, editor, photographer, and writer of fiction and memoir who serves as assistant editor of WriteAngles Journal. She teaches Amherst Writers & Artists-based workshops in Western Massachusetts and is working on a memoir about her experiences helping women and girls organize writing circles in Malawi, Africa.

 

THE MATCHBOX

by Theresa Chamberland

One day, when I’m eight years-old, I hear my dad’s voice in my head. “I better never catch any of you playing with matches.”

Less than a month later, my oldest brother Dave is in charge while Dad’s at work and Mom’s grocery shopping. If Dave sees what we’re doing, he will knock our heads together like he did last week. That really hurt.

I’m in our 1960s ranch house, with my other brothers Rick and Mark, in the front room of the cellar. They’re standing between the TV and the bar where Mom and Dad sometimes entertain friends. I’m across the room sitting on Dave’s bed, watching them playing with matches and burning things.

I want to light a match too. I’m the youngest and the only girl and I’m scared to watch them. I’m also spellbound. When they aren’t looking, I sneak over to where they are, grab a matchbox and a piece of newspaper, and hurry back to Dave’s bed. I pull out a long red-tipped wooden matchstick and drag it along the rough side of the box. Nothing happens. They don’t see what I’m doing. I slide another match, quickly this time, and it lights up. A stinky smell goes up my nose. Yuck! As the fire burns down the stick I put the flame to the newspaper like my brothers did. The paper burns fast. I panic and run over to a wicker trash basket and toss in the burning paper. Poof! A large flame shoots up and I scream.

My brothers race over, Rick grabs the burning basket, and we all run to the back room. Rick throws a blanket over the basket and the fire goes out. He looks us straight in the eyes, with big brother authority, and says, “If anyone asks, you don’t know anything. Got it?”

Mark and I nervously nod our heads in sibling alliance.

Rick picks up the blanket and we see a big black burn hole, a hole too big to hide. On the move again, Rick unlocks the cellar door Dad has forbidden us to use. We follow Rick up the steps to the outdoor trash can and Mark and I gawk as Rick buries the basket and blanket deep under the smelly garbage. He turns to us and again says, “Remember, you don’t know anything!”

We rush back inside and Rick locks the door behind us. They flop onto the couch and watch TV as if nothing ever happened. I run up to my bedroom and shut the door. Leaning my back against my door I slide to the floor, wrap my hands around my knees, close my eyes and catch my rushing breath.

I’m startled when I hear Dave curse and yank on the stubborn bathroom door. Another sudden surge of energy bolts through my body as the kitchen door squeaks open and Mom shouts, “David? Where are you? Go out to the car and bring in the rest of the groceries.”

Theresa Chamberland is a retired Director of Web Development from Mount Holyoke College. Presently she teaches Creative Writing and Memoir at the Springfield Museums in Massachusetts. She also owns and operates storycatcherstudios.com, a video production company. Her current memoir writing project is titled The Love Bug.

 

LEARNING TO SKI

by Julie Winberg

What I remember is my feet, probably in some sort of ski boots and the long, impossible skis attached thereto. I was 17 or 18 and my athletic younger sister had insisted that I should learn to ski. My idea of athletic activity was focused in the wrist, as in turning pages of my current book. I cannot remember, although we shared a bedroom as children, ever seeing my sister exercising her wrists.

But she had prevailed, and after all, it did look so easy in the movies. So here we were, on top of Mt. Tom in Holyoke, Massachusetts, back in the old days, when there was a ski resort there. And I was being fitted for rental skis. I couldn’t believe how clumsy and awkward they felt, or how hard it would be to get up after falling, my legs pointing in one direction, skis in another. But finally I made it to the instructor at the top of the baby hill (slope?). I listened carefully to his directions, a bit apprehensively, but finally I was ready. I bent my knees the way I had seen in movie newsreels, tucked my head down, thrust my poles back, and took off, right down that terrifying baby slope. Somewhere on the way down, I realized he hadn’t taught me how to stop! But the movies never fail and I remembered seeing people put the tips of the skis together in a “V”. I figured it out just before the fence, and survived intact.

As I made my way to the top of the hill, the instructor was dizzy with praise.

“Wow!” he shouted, “you were amazing! That was perfect! Are you sure you’ve never been on skis before?”

But it was the end of my skiing career: I was sure it would never be this good again. As good as I apparently was, I was terrified. It wasn’t my kind of sport. I couldn’t wait to return the skis and return to my wrist work. I had a good book waiting that didn’t scare me at all! I never skied again. Once was enough for me.

Julie Winberg is a language junkie (Esperanto, Italian, French, self-taught Bulgarian) and traveler who lived in Tuscany for 10 years and loves to write. She has published stories about 19th-century lady travelers in Esperanto, the international magazine; memoir pieces have appeared in Hampshire Life, Springfield Journal, Philadelphia’ Welcomat, and Plumb Lines.

 

THE CASE OF THE MISSING BEDSHEETS

by Tzivia Gover

Looking back I can’t help marvel at the symbolism in the fact that this story begins with bedsheets. After all, I’m a dreamworker, and bedsheets offer the perfect symbol for a story about dreams. But at the time, when I was just starting to face the fact that my mother’s memory loss was more than just a byproduct of normal aging, the situation was no mere metaphor. I was suffering, and my pain felt concrete – as in hard, cold, and impenetrable.

On this day, I had traveled from my home in Massachusetts to my mother’s in Manhattan as I’d done so many times before. But now the visits weren’t just occasions for us to catch up, shop, eat, and see a movie. Now, I was checking up on her, too, because each time I visited I was finding more evidence that her memory was challenged and her thinking was muddled.

Even still, we had our routine: When I arrived she’d have treats from the neighborhood bakery arrayed on a plate, and when I climbed the stairs to the guest room, she’d have already made up the sofa bed for me. But recently, things had begun to change. The pastries might still be sitting in a paper bag on the counter, and she’d wait until I got there so we could make the bed together.

On this visit there were no baked treats, the bed was still folded into the couch, and when I went to make it up I couldn’t find the sheets or pillowcases anywhere. I asked my mother what had happened to them, but she said she didn’t know. I searched the shelves and hamper. No sheets. Maybe she’d forgotten them at the laundry down the street, as she was now forgetting appointments, what she’d gone to the corner deli for, and even the word for thumb. Whatever had happened to the linens would remain a mystery. It was late, I was tired, and there was no choice but to sleep on the bare mattress.

I wanted to burst into tears, as I would have done decades ago as a cranky toddler in this same woman’s presence. Instead, I looked at my mother’s helpless expression, assured her it was fine, and tried to sleep. I knew that with the disappearance of the sheets, any possibility that my beautiful, intelligent, cultured mother might ever take care of me again, was gone, too.

The next morning, I woke with a dream that was as bare as that bed. All I recalled was a voice: “Nothing matters,” it said.

The things I thought were important – whether my mother remembered my birthday or my name, the names of things in general, the layers of her identity that slipped away one-by-one (educator, educated, feminist, mother) – all mattered terribly, and they didn’t matter at all.

What’s eternal – love, empathy, healing, joy – is what really matters.

Turns out it was never about the sheets or having a mother who made the bed for me. It was something else that truly mattered.

Tzivia Gover MFA, CDP, director of the Institute for Dream Studies, is the author of The Mindful Way to a Good Night’s Sleep and Forgotten Dreams: Tapping into the Power of Sleep and Dreams for Caregivers of People with Alzheimer’s. She offers dreamwork consultations and courses online and in person. More at http://www.tziviagover.com

 

FREEBUS AND SONIA

by Sue Dutch

When Mom told me Sonia was missing, I became frantic. I’d left Sonia and my other cat, Freebus, in my parents’ care in Connecticut while moving to Indiana for my first faculty position.

“Did you look for her?” I asked.

“No,” Mom replied.

“Why not?”

“Because cats can find their way back home if they want.”

I told Mom I would be on the next plane out.

Dad shot down my plan. “If you pay $500 to come out to find a cat, no one will pick you up at the airport.”

I adopted Freebus the summer before starting graduate school. I was driving down Eagleville Road, windows down, belting out the lyrics to “Maggie Mae,” when I passed a sign that said “free kittens.” I picked out Freebus on an impulse, not knowing how I would care for him.

No pets were allowed in the graduate dorms. When I was found out I was given the choice to give up the cat or leave the premises. I packed up and left the dormitory the next day.

I heard that the church doors were never locked and I could sleep in the pews. I placed Freebus’ food, water, and litter on the floor underneath where I slept. But I didn’t sleep soundly because the pews were made of hardwood, the seats were slanted downward toward the back, and the lights were left on all night. It wasn’t long before these sleeping arrangements became known to the priest. While I was welcome to stay, the cat was not.

For the months of July and August, I slept in my sedan, a white Datsun. With the cat food on the floor of the passenger’s seat and the litter on the floor in the back, it was a good arrangement. But when the nights became hot and the windows needed to stay open, the mosquitoes made a feast of us.

I eventually found an apartment but spent most of my days in the library. Freebus was at home alone, so I adopted another cat, a female Siamese kitten I named Sonia.

Six years later Sonia was missing. I’d planned for a friend to pick me up at Bradley airport, drive to East Hampton and help in the search. But the next morning, before I left my apartment in Indiana, Mom called. She’d gone to the wooded area at the edge of the house lot and called for Sonia. When she heard a cat crying, she found Sonia hiding in a culvert. Mom bought a carrier large enough for both cats and sent Freebus and Sonia out to me by jet.

Some people think I sacrificed too much for my cats, but, for me, it’s always been an easy choice. Growing up on a homestead, my parents taught us that, even on the coldest winter mornings, we weren’t to eat our own breakfasts until the animals had been fed first.

Sue Dutch has lived in the Pioneer Valley since 1981. A professor emeritus of Westfield State University, she writes rhyming prose and memoir. She is an advocate for homeless companion animals and currently shares her time, space, and treasure with two frisky felines.

 

LAST LAUGH

by Diane Kane

When Mr. Munson moved into the decaying farmhouse, he was driving an aging white van with a handicapped plate. Each day, I delivered mail to his battered mailbox that hung precariously by a single rusty nail. As time went on, the paint on the old farmhouse peeled, and Mr. Munson’s van sat permanently with the hood up. Even the trees around the house grew weary and regularly dropped limbs across the driveway.

Years passed, and Mr. Munson had his mailbox moved to his front door. I maneuvered my mail truck around discarded waste and forged a path up his unmaintained walkway in all seasons. Then, he started to get packages of medication that needed his signature. Spouting obscenities, he opened the door only enough to extend his wrinkled hand. With thick yellow fingernails he grabbed the slip, scribbled his name, and shoved it back. He grasped the package and slammed the door shut.

Finally, he let me in. He sat in a wheelchair, sparsely dressed in only a white tee shirt. I could see his two amputated legs. As time went on, I knocked and entered. He lay on his couch with an old Western movie blaring on the television.

One day I knocked, and something didn’t feel right. Opening the door a little wider, I peered over to where Mr. Munson lay sprawled out on his couch with his usual lack of clothing. His head was tilted back, and lifeless, foggy blue eyes stared back at me.

I stumbled to my truck and called my supervisor, “My customer is dead!”

***

The police officer entered the house and came back out shortly.

“Mr. Munson states that he is very much alive.”

“But he looked dead.”

“To tell you the truth,” the officer said, “he looked dead to me too until he sat up and shouted, ‘What the hell are you doing in here?’”

“I guess I have to deliver his package.”

“Ahh,” the officer hesitated. “Mr. Munson is in a state of undress.”

I laughed. “Mr. Munson is always in a state of undress.”

Collecting my nerve, I headed for the door and knocked. Mr. Munson’s gruff voice shouted for me to enter.

“So, you’re the one who reported me dead, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did I scare you?”

“I’m still shaking!”

He let out a bellowing laugh.

“Well, I ain’t dead yet,” he said and pointed to a picture on a shelf amidst the clutter. “I’m pretty tough, you know.”

I waded through the debris on the floor to take a closer look at a picture of a proud young man in uniform. I turned to the withering body of that same man and wondered what had gone wrong between then and now. I knew I couldn’t fix any of it, but it warmed my heart to see him laughing now, even if it was at my expense.

From then on, each time I brought him a package, Mr. Munson would chuckle and say, “I ain’t dead yet.”

Diane Kane is the publisher and co-author of FLASH IN THE CAN, NUMBER ONE, a book of fictional short stories. She chases her dreams of writing in the woods of Massachusetts and on the rocky shores of Maine. Follow her on Facebook at Page of Possibilities and online at WriteofPossibilities.com.

 

QUIETLY SLIPPING AWAY

by Beth Ann Jedziniak

When Nathan was a little boy and having trouble sleeping, his mother would lie down with him, read an extra story, sing an extra song and then, when he was all snuggled and warm and sleepy, she would gently move his little arm and quietly slip away.

His mother had thought that she could do the same when Nathan and his little brother were grown and settled into their adult lives. She thought that she could escape the war going on in her head by hoarding her sleeping pills until it was safe to quietly slip away unnoticed.

In the distance Nate’s mother heard a sound but couldn’t quite place it. When she finally realized that it was the doorbell, she looked at her phone to check the time. 10:30 pm. Jumping out of bed and into the jeans and t-shirt she had thrown off just an hour ago, she stubbed her toe on the kitchen chair, cussed under her breath, and yelled, “I’m coming. Be right there.”

When she clicked on the porch light, she saw a frantic young woman. “Is Nate here?”

Disoriented, his mother opened the door and asked, “Who are you?”

“I am a friend of Nathan’s, and he and I were texting earlier this evening when all of a sudden his messages started to lose structure and sense and I’m worried. Is he here?”

Suddenly wide awake, Nathan’s mother asked to see the young woman’s phone and read the messages for herself. From his jumbled words it was clear that he was in trouble so they sent a text hoping that he would give a clue as to where he was. He did. Barely.

It was a miracle that his mother found him in time. But there he was on the floor of the hotel room, alcohol and empty pill bottles lying next to him, a self-scathing note scribbled in his leather-bound journal — his words poignant and biting, a bitter mix of poetry and pain, his army uniform crumpled on the floor.

Nathan had fallen between the wall and the bed of his hotel room. His mother slid down beside him and pulled him into her arms. He was in and out of consciousness. He begged her to leave him there to die, to just go home and pretend that she had not found him. She told him that that was the one thing she could not do. She could not leave him — not now, not ever. Then she did the only thing she could for him, what she had always done — she held onto him, talking and singing until the ambulance arrived.

His mother had saved him but unbeknownst to him, he had saved her that night as well by reminding her that you cannot quietly slip away unnoticed from the ones you love.

Beth Ann Jedziniak has a passion for the written and spoken word. Her speech titled “My VaJourney” was recorded for Claim the Stage podcast and will be published in the forthcoming book SECRETS OF THE SISTERHOOD: 50 STORIES OF LOVE, TRUTH AND POWER due out in November of 2019. Most evenings you will find her in her loft playing, writing, painting, and drinking copious amounts of tea.

 

SELLING THE LAND

by Mary W. Mathias

There was a sense of timelessness in the view to the west, back when we bought the land on Salem Lake with our friend Bill. We could sit outside on any clear evening and watch the sun sink down and disappear behind Owl’s Head Mountain, twenty miles away. Yes, we had bought the best land, the best view, and we were filled with a certain pride.

Our land partner, Bill, framed up a cabin on top of the knoll, with a porch on front, and a good roof. The stove pipe had a jaunty little cap on top that rotated with the wind, so smoke would never blow-back down into the tall cast iron heating stove inside, standing up as smartly as it could on its four stumpy legs. Homesteading, with no electricity and no running water, we became back-to-the landers.

For seven years we enjoyed that view we thought we owned. When an RV park went in on the west, trailers and Winnebagos became part of the view, along with a big fat laundromat building we could not un-see.

Bill planted a row of trees: maple, birch, balsam fir, white pine, and spruce. If clipped to just the right height, there would be no RV park, but still plenty of sunset, and Owl’s Head in the far distance.

In 1970, Bill married, and put his dreams of the land on hold. He moved back to New Jersey for work. In 1972, Robert and I joined the commune craze; we too moved off the land.

Something happened to Bill in New Jersey, perhaps a crisis of hope for which he had no remedy. He drove his car into his parents’ garage, and closed the door. His widow and two young sons came to the knoll with Bill’s ashes. What was left of him came home to Vermont to be buried under a white cross behind the cabin. And the row of trees on the west grew and grew, and all the little seedlings and saplings that had dotted the slopes and top of the knoll stretched high until the abandoned cabin was slowly pinned into place by a forest pressing in around it. Squatters found it, both human and wild. Weather and rain worked their way in. The porch roof sagged, foundation timbers rotted and bowed towards earth, the stovepipe lost direction and fell, taking the weathered cross down with it. For fifty years, land taxes were the only thing that kept the two families connected.

When we sold the land this August, the buyer wanted to know, “What’s that fallen cross?” Bill’s son answered: “My father’s ashes are there, but not my father. It’s not a place I care to visit. I have four beautiful children – in them I see my father every day.”

Satisfied, the buyer remarked to no one in particular, “You know, I bet if we mow down a bunch of trees, we’ll have some great views.”

“Could be,” we said, as we went our separate ways.

Mary W. Mathias is a retired dairy farmer and social worker who lives in Brattleboro, Vermont. She participates in two great writing groups, without whom she would get much less writing done. She works away at her memoir of the years spent at Frog Run Farm in the Northeast Kingdom.

 

MADDIE

by Ellie Dias

Maddie blinked hard to stop herself from daydreaming about Paris. She was standing by Dad’s casket, surrounded by her infirmed grandparents, his friends, colleagues, and two gossipy girls she never spoke to. Appearances hadn’t changed since her mother and sister’s funeral – black clothes, waxy faces, puffy red eyes.

The spray of flowers made of lavender roses and deep purple was intended to be an expression of gratitude for time shared. She had hoped it would alleviate the sadness but discovered its beauty hid the truth her heart couldn’t bear. Her father was dead, and she was alone.

After standing gamely for three hours accepting hugs and condolences, Maddie arrived at the local restaurant for the planned buffet. The smell of the food assaulted her senses. A hand over her mouth, she turned cold overhearing the two catty girls discussing the deaths of her mother and sister to anyone who would listen.

“Do you remember how some sicko murdered Maddie’s mother and sister? And now losing her father to cancer? It’s a wonder she hasn’t lost it.”

She had to bite her tongue from yelling, “You have no right to be here.”

Growing weary of the quiet pretense of coping, she made the obligatory rounds of “thank you for coming.” While everyone was busy eating and talking, she slipped out unnoticed and drove back to the cemetery.

She made two bouquets from the casket spray and tied them with greenery. Buried two feet away were her mother and sister.

Katherine Lynette O’Dell

October tenth, 1918 ∼ September 28th, 1952

“A mother holds
her children’s hands for a while,
their hearts forever.”

Wasn’t a while supposed to mean more than eight years? She knelt in front of Annie’s headstone with its carved cherub sitting on top:

Annie Grace O’Dell

August 13, 1950 ∼ September 28th, 1952

“So Small, So Sweet, So Soon.”

The statue did nothing to soften the bitter fact of what lay beneath it.

Twelve years ago, Maddie stood here. Tears had fallen to the ground, and the same pain had been absorbed by the earth. She looked at the rows of gravestones. Left and right, front and back – it was like a sea of the dead. Some were smooth marble with new black lettering. Others crumbled from too many years of weathering. How could a place be so full and empty at the same time? It was a cruel irony when lives were supposed to be marked with something so cold and immobile.

The cemetery was intended to be a loved one’s final resting spot – where you could still feel a deep connection. To her, it was a place separating the living from the dead and would never be one to bridge the loneliness. Tears came heavy and endless. Whatever she came for was not here.

Trudging back to the car, the unsettling echos of “thank you for coming” crowded her brain. The words were too trivial for what this day called for. Ready to leave this misery behind, she decided to keep her father’s promise to fulfill her artist’s dream to see Paris.

Ellie Dias’ career has been focused on health and wellness as a biology professor, pediatric nurse, clinician working with families whose babies were at risk for SIDS, and division VP of a women’s health care company. Author of BIG RED: HOW I LEARNED SIMPLICITY FROM A SUITCASE, she has completed her first novel, WHERE DARKNESS LIES.

 

LAME BIRDS AND BLOOPER BEES

by Catherine O’Neill

I grew up in Ireland, an island heavily salted with saints and lightly peppered with scholars incapable of teaching sex ed. As a mother, I shadowed my son, Jack, who was in the fifth grade. I had signed off giving him permission to attend “the talk” with his school nurse and principal. I was determined history wouldn’t repeat itself.

Nothing had prepared me for sex education, I wrote in my diary about Miss Horan, the science teacher who ambushed me at age 14.

“What is menstruation?” she asked.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” I answered hoping she’d move on, but she zoomed in with the mirrored glee of an alien abduction ship.

“What is menstruation?” she repeated.

“I’m afraid I don’t know that one,” I responded for a second and third time, hoping she’d take a polite hint. Menstrual cycle wasn’t on the radar.

“Say the word slowly.” She urged me to break down the syllables.

“Men-stru-ation – Does it have anything to do with men?” I sighed.

“You’re hilarious,” she said. The class laughed hard. The joke was on me.

“The talk” day rolled around for Jack. He returned home and went to his bedroom before I called him for dinner hours later.

“So, so how was your day?” I asked.

“Okay, you know the usual,” he said, giving his artistic ketchup signature to his burger .

“Well I meant, how was “the talk?”

“Okay. The girls sat on one side and the boys sat on the other side of the class with the school nurse and Mr. C, the principal, at the front near the blackboard,” he said.

“Hmmm, so did you have any questions?” I asked.

“No, I think I’m good,” he said and started tracing the tracks of the ketchup with mustard.

“Good, so everything was cool on the playground then?” I asked.

“Not really. The girls didn’t want to play football anymore. Awkward, you know what I mean? The boys went to one side and the girls went to the other side of the playground – And the boys kept giggling every time Mr. C said the ‘A’ word.”

“The ‘A’ word?” I thought of all A words remotely related to sex.

“Yeah you know the ‘A’ word.” He took a large bite of his burger.

“Well, I think I know what the ‘A’ word is.” I wondered if my fifth grader had learned about anal sex or anus. “So did Mr C write the word on the blackboard?” I interrogated.

“Nope, he just said it.” He answered.

“Hmmm – tell me what your ‘A’ word is, and I’ll tell you if it’s the same as mine.”

“A-Jac-Ulation,” he answered, making a doodle of ketchup and mustard. I choked a silent giggle. Mr. C should have written it on the board and saved me sweating it out.

“Mine is the same, except I think it might begin with an E.”

For weeks, I doubted whether either of us was ready for sex ed. Is anyone?

Catherine O’Neill is a debut author working on her memoir, Zero Balance, about the effects of gambling. Catherine returned to her love of writing in her forties, graduating Grub Street Memoir Incubator program in 2017. She received an honorable mention in an IWWG (International Women’s Writing Guild) literary contest and read at Tell-All, Boston.

 

BLACK LEATHER BOOTS

by Betsy Smith

I open the closet and catch a glimpse of the pink box buried under a pile of Dansko boxes. The longing returns.

The box holds a pair of knee-high black leather boots. Shiny, low heeled with a narrow calf – the leather soft and supple with an intoxicating and expensive scent. I coveted these boots for weeks while conjuring mental images of myself wearing them with a long black skirt, or dark jeans with a crisp white blouse and wool blazer. I take the box out and inhale remembering how I patiently waited for the end-of-season sale allowing such an extravagant purchase. Even the sale price was above my self-imposed limit of $100 for any footwear. When I did buy them, I recall a little bit of pain in my right foot while trying them on, but it did not deter me. I was too in love.

Once the boots were secured, I started my search for the imagined outfits. The long black skirt was quickly found, and a deliciously soft gray and black cashmere sweater discovered on a clearance rack soon followed. Finding the jeans of my imagination was not so easy. My body type, with a protruding mother-of-big-babies belly, was not pretty in a pair of skinny jeans. I looked good in them only from the knees down. Jeans that were more flattering on my physique had wider legs and bunched up at the top of the boots making me look like a Musketeer. It was not the slim, sexy, and sophisticated look I was going for. Maybe leggings and a very long top with a colorful and concealing scarf would work.

I frequently took the boots out to prance around the house wearing them while in my pajamas just to experience the pleasure of owning them. I would put my nose on the leather and sniff. My right foot always reminding me that something was not quite as comfortable as the left.

Summer came and with the warm weather, the boots were put on the bottom of the shoebox pile. Even in lightweight sandals, sneakers, or flip-flops, the pain in my right foot escalated. My eventual inability to walk without crying forced me to see a doctor and ultimately have surgery. The surgery left my right foot bigger than my left; a discovery I made when I finally attempted to put my beautiful boots on while wearing my flowing black skirt and soft sweater. My foot stuck in the shaft and my inflexible plated toe was unable to make the turn. No amount of pulling or shoving was going to work. The boot was every bit as special as a glass slipper and I was clearly an ugly stepsister. I had totally missed the ball.

That was five years ago. Every so often I take the boots out to inhale the scent, put the left one on while wearing my boot-cut jeans, and strut through the house chanting, “All for one, and one for all.”

M. Betsy Smith began her writing career three years ago after retiring from a career in insurance. This story is the result of a prompt from Jacqueline Sheehan, at a recent Writers in Progress Sunday morning gathering.

 

HOW MY VOCABULARY WAS EXPANDED BY SAILING LESSONS

by Amy Gordon

I learned the word atrocious when I was eight on the day we were being taught to tie knots. Something about a rabbit coming up through holes, or diving down through holes, or going around trees. All the kids around me were directing their rabbits perfectly. My rabbit, evidently, was seeking greener grass. My rabbit was wrong. Atrocious said the handsome instructor.

I learned the word goddammit when I was eight on the day the wind caught our boat in its teeth and dragged us up, then flung us down, one gray mountain after another. I curled up, soaking, in the bow, head down, watching water lap between the floorboards. Goddammit, pull the sail in, yelled my brother.

Being in the grip of fear when you are eight – is it like being in the grip of grief when you are seventy? Similar helplessness.

I learned the phrases Get your ass back in there and It’s your funeral when I was eight. Our little fleet set sail for the islands. It was meant to be a fun day, a break from the daily fare of diagrams drawn with magic marker on large sheets of paper. Lots of arrows, lots of talk about right-of-way. The puzzle of why a word like leeward with its two e’s would be pronounced loo-ard.

I developed a prejudice against loo-ard as it is the side of the boat that first slides into the lake when you are about to capsize. Where I always had to sit as the water with its gleeful fingers beckoned me. Come drown, it whispered.

On our fun outing, loo-ard was where they put me in a boat with older kids, but the great god of wind favored me that day. All around, all around on the deep blue sea (lake actually), only inertia. Our sails were sad and listless. Floorboards too hot to sit on. Teenagers laughing, making jokes I didn’t understand.

Something snapped.

I jumped out of the boat. To the islands I would swim. Yes, brave heroine, striking out on her own. Handsome instructor came by in the motorboat. Get your ass back in there. Generally, I was an obedient sort. I clambered back on board and we paddled to the islands.

When I was eight, I knew those islands well. I had often rowed to them on my own. Huckleberries grew there. Huckleberries are to blueberries what Huck Finn is to Tom Sawyer. Wilder, more truthful. They are darker, with more seeds. Something a crow would eat. I was picking them when the handsome instructor said What the hell are you doing? Those could be poisonous. I was amazed by his ignorance. They’re huckleberries, I said. It’s your funeral, he said.

He’s long dead now, and I’m hoping his funeral was a nice one.

Amy Gordon lives and teaches in Gill, Massachusetts. She directs plays with young people and conducts writing workshops. She is the author of numerous books for young adults and children. Her first chapbook of poems, DEEP FAHRENHEIT, was released by Prolific Press in 2019.

 

SHIFTING GEARS

by Sharon A. Harmon

I called my dad for help finding a job.

“You used to drive the big yellow school buses,” he said. “I know you can get a state job driving the big highway trucks.”

So I filled out an application and wrote a letter to my state senator asking him to help me get the job because I was a healthy 36-year-old newly divorced mother of two who didn’t want to be another person on welfare.

Meanwhile, I pounded the pavement in search of jobs. Armed with only a high school education, I applied to be an apple picker at a farm where the owner told me I was over-qualified. He never hired people with a high school diploma because he felt they would soon tire of the physical work and quit.

Finally, I landed a part-time assembly job at a table-making factory. I fed the table legs through a sander over and over. My 17-year-old son watched my eight-year-old daughter while I went to work during their summer vacation.

I was glad to have found a job, but it wouldn’t make ends meet. The kids and I survived on ramen noodles, chicken noodle soup, apples, and freeze pops. Sometimes we had hamburgers or hot dogs and consumed large amounts of macaroni and cheese. I was always sinking money into my junky car, but I kept up with my rent. I tossed and turned many a night worrying about winter approaching as I would definitely need money for oil and Christmas. I never missed a day of work or went in late.

Nevertheless, at the end of three months, I was called into the office. “We have to let you go; you just aren’t working out,” my boss said.

I sat on the kitchen floor and cried through the telephone to my friend who had lived all her life in the town where I worked. “I worked there once,” she said. “Almost everyone in town has at one time or another. After three months when your nickel raise comes up, they make up some excuse to let you go, then they hire new help so they don’t have to give you the nickel raise.”

Six months after I’d sent my letter, I received a call from one of the state senator’s aides who told me their office would be trying to help me. “Hang in there until you hear from us again,” he said.

The very next day I received a letter in the mail from the state informing me that I had been hired to work for the state highway department. It had taken me nine months to “birth” this job.

“I knew you could do it, kid,” my dad sad.

I shifted the gears on the truck into drive and got on the road.

Sharon Harmon is a poet and freelance writer. She writes for the Uniquely Quabbin Magazine and teaches workshops. She spends a lot of time around campfires, writing, and gardening. She is currently working on flash fiction mysteries, her third chapbook of poetry, and a children’s picture book.

 

PIECE OF CAKE

by Siegfried Haug

I am reading a segment from my latest book, BAD SLEEP, a suspense novel set in Key West, Florida. The scene involves a couple of suspicious men and a fair amount of mayhem for my two main characters, Sue and Rosie.

Sue looked frantically around the restaurant for a place to hide from the two thugs.

“Whatever you’ve got, honey, stick it right in here,” Rosie said, indicating a seat and an almost foot-high slice of key lime pie.

It turned out to be a sweet hiding place for Sue’s flat rectangular device.

As they squeezed nonchalantly by one of the thugs, he grabbed Sue’s Baggallini right out of her hand and ran the other way. She had not looped the strap over her shoulder after burying the flash drive in the pie, and now bag and assailant were gone before she could yell for assistance. It did not help that she had not finished swallowing the heaping spoon of Blue Heaven’s best Rosie had forced on her for fortification purposes.

“Oops!” was all Rosie said.

That’s as far as I got with the reading when Jane, my wife, tapped her Timex.

It was time for Q&A. Then on to the signing.

The library annex in Flushing, New York was three-quarters full. An overdressed couple sat way in the back.

The couple did not want their copies signed. While my wife got her dahlia arrangement ready to come back home, they sidled up to me and flashed palm-sized faux-leather wallets. The woman’s identified her as Special Agent Duda.

“That flash-drive? The one in the pie?”

“Yes?” I said.

“It is evidence in Mlle. Thibodeau’s murder investigation.”

I experienced a slightly scary sense of disorientation.

“You need to hand it over,” she said.

“But . . .”

“Failure to do so will result in your arrest.”

“But . . .”

“Stay out of this, Ma’am.” This the guy-agent to my Jane bearing flowers.

“There is a disclaimer, in the front of the book!” Me, a little too loud. “It’s all fictional . . . fictitious . . . there is no drive.”

The agents did not bite. The difference between fiction and reality was lost on them. I myself had stumbled over audience questions pertaining to the same issue.

“I don’t have it,” I said. “It may still be in the pie for all I know.”

“You witnessed the scene. That makes you an accessory. . .”

My eyes pleaded with my wife. Am I crazy?

“Rosie took it to Singapore. Sorry,” she said.

Siegfried Haug is the author BAD SLEEP, a suspense novel published in 2019 by Levellers Press. He is also the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. Retired now from clinical work and teaching, he lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in the foothills of the Berkshires. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.

 

BUT YOU LOOK SO GOOD!

by Joy Sakamoto

No one asks me about my scars

Except doctors, but that’s their job

Though sometimes, even they take them for granted

If they’ve read my chart, they know to expect them

If they haven’t, there’s a brief moment of shock

A pause

Only once has someone sucked in a breath and exhaled

Slowly

The rest let their doctor masks fall into place

Before the fabric ones come on

 

The questions begin

About my history

My eating habits

My weight

Past diagnoses

Past prognoses

Past labs and endless tests

 

No one really asks about the scars

How they can hurt when the temperature drops

How they bisect my body upwards and now sideways

We used to joke they should just install a zipper

So they could go back in whenever they want

No one asks how it feels

Every morning when I look into the mirror

Sometimes I see a warrior

Sometimes all I see is pain

But most of the time, my eyes just glaze over

It’s just another day after all

And it’s time to get dressed.

Joy’s mission is to live up to her name. Her career took a few turns — from aerospace recruiter to music journalist, executive assistant to student and sometimes radio dj. Writing has been her constant, whether on a Macbook, a leather journal, or a bar napkin using a hotel ball point. She can be contacted at shadeofcat@gmail.com.

 

ORDER ON THE COURT

by Steve Bernstein

After an early dinner at Anthony’s apartment, we walked over to the basketball court in the projects. It was a warm early spring evening, April 4th 1968, still light out and the park was jumping.

Anthony knew a couple of the guys and started talking us up. They looked over at me, the little white kid, snickered, looked at Anthony, and then came back with some cash to lay the bet.

It had been a few months since me and Anthony had done our basketball hustle. After no less than two minutes into the game, we were back. Same as before, maybe better. Our plays were flowing to perfection. We were up by three, then five, and then it was ten to four ours, point game.

The sounds of Motown filled the air. A transistor radio, coat hangered to the chain link fence, was blaring Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and the Temptations. As I was about to take the ball out at the foul line to finish these guys off, the music stopped.

After a second or two the announcer came on and said, “The Reverend Martin Luther King was shot and killed today in Memphis by a white man.”

The park turned eerily silent. The basketballs stopped bouncing. It seemed like even the busses and cars out on University Avenue and the Cross Bronx Expressway stopped. The ball players stood still, intently listening to that radio hung on the chain link fence.

As usual, I was the only white kid on the court. I saw the faces of the other kids go from shock, comprehension, sadness and, finally, to rage.

Anthony processed it all. Then he got busy. He took the ball from me and coolly placed it on the foul line. Without revealing any panic, he firmly grabbed my arm and calmly walked me side-by-side out the park gate, down the walkway to University Avenue.

As we left the court, we heard a chant rising, “Whitey killed the king, whitey killed the king.”

In less than five minutes, we got to Anthony’s apartment. We barged in and collapsed on the living room floor. Everybody was home. Ma, all the kids, and the dads were crowded around the staticky black and white TV. They were crying. On the TV, Walter Cronkite, just about in tears himself, was relating to the whole world what happened to Martin Luther King.

The family stared at us, startled, eyes unfocused. When they realized it was us, they jumped off the sofas and chairs and got up off the floor and, all together, reached out to us in one big family embrace. It lasted a long time.

Finally, Anthony said, “Ma, we’re gonna’ keep Steve here for a while, until things die down and it’s safe on the street, safe enough for him to go home.”

One of the dads slowly backed out of the circle and walked over to the apartment door behind me. I heard him lock the door. Click. Click.

Steve Bernstein is a retired plumber who for over three decades has been a teacher and mentor for at-risk-teens as wall as an animal rights activist and humane educator. He recently self-published STORIES FROM THE STOOP, seven adventure stories from his colorful childhood growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s. He can be reached at stevebernsteinauthor@gmail.com.

 

ANGEL OF MERCY

by Ann C. Averill

In first grade, the first thing I learn is that reading means groups. The first group gathers around the front table with Miss Fontaine. Their hard cover book, The Little White House, displays a boy in a cowboy suit riding a pony as if reading is galloping fun. Betsey Baum raises her hand and canters through the first paragraph. Miss Fontaine beams. The other Betsy, Betsy Biermann, reads next at a steady trot.

The following group brings up their blue paperback primers. Maria Costello raises her hand and reads, “Oh, Tom. Oh, Susan. See Flip in the wagon.” There are no more volunteers to read the rest of this fascinating story.

My group is last. My primer, the color of a stop sign. As I lift the lid of my desk, the smell of its scarlet cover brings up a sour burp. My hands sweat. Miss Fontaine selects Butch La Brie to begin, but her weak, “Good job,” cannot convince Butch or anyone else that his halting syllables are really reading.

Before it’s my turn to sound out, I raise my hand, “Can I go to the nurse?”

Mrs. Lundgren, a solid woman wearing a starched white cap, appears at my classroom door and leads me along the trail to her office. I lie down on a green vinyl cot behind a privacy curtain. Underneath its canvas, I can see her white-stockinged ankles beside her steel desk. My stomach threatens to heave as the clock tick tocks. When will reading group be over? I can’t tell time yet.

Mrs. Lundgren peeks inside the curtain. “Want a Saltine?”

I climb onto her crisp, white lap and lay my damp forehead on her cool, pearlescent buttons.

After a few nibbles, she says, “Feel better?”

I nod my head in resignation.

She extends her hand, “Ready to go back?”

Reluctantly, I slide off her comfort zone, and she brushes the crumbs from my green plaid dress. Together we walk down the dark hall, her white nurse shoes silent, my Buster Brown saddle shoes slapping each gray tile.

This isn’t the first time we’ve done this, Mrs. Lundgren and I, but always, before she leaves me at my classroom door, she bends to my stature, places her wide palm on my little back, and whispers, “I’m here if you need me.”

Looking through the long pane besides the doorknob, I hesitate. Betsy and Betsy hunch over penmanship worksheets that mean reading group is over. Butch’s head swivels around the room. When he spies me outside the door, he broadcasts, “Miss Fontaine, she’s back!”

I gaze down the hall, but my angel of mercy is gone. I’ve no choice but to open the door and get back in the saddle again.

“Angel of Mercy” is an excerpt from Ann C. Averill’s upcoming memoir, BACK TO THE GARDEN: A BABY BOOMER’S SPIRITUAL COMING OF AGE. She’s a former teacher who hopes she’s been an angel of mercy in some measure to her students. Ann lives in the paradise of Western Massachusetts.

 

ON TOP OF THE WORLD

by Jack McClintock

Call me, Ishmael. My wife and I had taken a berth aboard the Ioffe, a converted Russian spy ship, in order to pursue my dream of visiting that legendary part of our planet. We boarded at Resolute Island well above the continental landmass and traveled north for seven days.

During the two weeks we spent in the Arctic, we landed at places that never before felt the presence of humans. The temperature remained at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun never left the heavens. The ocean was perpetually calm, and the weather fair. Our surroundings were usually cloudless, and fog or snow squalls, when they did occur, typically burned away by mid-morning.

The sky was brilliant azure, the sea a deep cerulean blue, and, at some point nearly every day, they would merge imperceptibly along the horizon, giving the sense that the vast ocean flowed into the sky, or the vaulted canopy overhead curved to slide noiselessly into the sea. This was a pristine, crystalline world of indescribable beauty, where you could see hundreds of feet into the depths, and the sun sat like an all-seeing eye that warmed and illuminated everything from the tips of your toes to the deepest reaches of your soul.

The water there is cold enough to kill a man in ten minutes, but that was nothing to the polar bears we saw hunting seals along the way. In late August we met the southern face of the Arctic ice shelf as it retreated between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Our coordinates left the captain and scientists aboard incredulous, because those coordinates were the highest ever sailed by any surface vessel in history. During the silence which accompanied that realization, all of us – sojourners and sailors, adventurers and recreational explorers – recognized that we were in a part of the ocean never before open to navigation.

We were witnessing the reality of global climate change, and at that moment, in this most unlikely location, something happened to explain what we were seeing. Like a symbol of man’s impact on the planet, an emissary of progress came fluttering by in the light breeze. There, at the very top of the world, we watched as a solitary four-quart plastic shopping bag blew slowly across the water less than a hundred feet off the bow. Arctic vessels aren’t allowed to carry such things, and so it hadn’t come from our ship, but there it was as if it had been waiting to greet us since the beginning of time.

The plastic bag floated in the breeze like some tiny white sail as it skipped away into the unknown, unexplored, uninhabitable reaches. In the absence of heat, manmade materials like plastic don’t degrade. Encountering such a thing, in so remote a place, was shocking. It was as if Mary Shelley’s monster had come alive, paid us a brief visit, and then slowly receded back into the frozen wilderness from which it came.

Jack McClintock has practiced psychotherapy for decades. He’s worked in rehabilitation among hardcore substance abusers and in psychiatric hospitals with patients too distressed to be released. He’s worked in maximum security prisons with some of the most dangerous people alive and in urban schools with kids K through eight.

 

FAKE FUR AND GAUDY RINGS

by Beth Ann Jedziniak

I received a catalog in the mail last week. As I thumbed through, I found a section with furry sweaters that I would never wear but yet I almost ordered one.

In the 1980s, my mom had the ugliest fake fur coat. It was off-white-ish with yellow and brown clumps of fake fur. It went just past her hips, and when buttoned all the way up, the collar rose up high on her neck. She strutted around in this hideous coat as though it were made of real fur — head held high, shoulders back, the girls proudly leading the way in their Maidenform bra.

I recently bought myself three new rings. The first was big and plastic, gaudy and green. The second was small and plastic and gaudy and green. And the third, plastic, gaudy, and green.

As a child, I had put a quarter in a gumball machine, opened the little metal door, and reached in to get my prize, a beautiful green ring that sparkled under the fluorescent lights.

I wore it proudly wherever I went – head held high, shoulders back, talking dramatically with my hands, my ring finger pointing the way.

But one day, as happens with most gumball toys, it broke. I had been so careful with it. But yet, there it was, in pieces. I was heartbroken.

We were visiting relatives in New Hampshire and all the adults were busy doing whatever adults do. I know they were busy because when I tried to say that my ring was broken, they said, “We’re busy right now.”

Everyone but my uncle; he said that he would fix it. He brought me up to his room, placed my broken ring on his night stand, and promised to fix it later. He never fixed my ring.

As an adult, whenever someone disappointed or hurt me, I’d think to myself, “I can fix my own ring.”

When I finally understood the origin of that thought, the search began. And ended in a little shop in New Hampshire where I found my third and final gaudy green ring. Something about finding it there – in New Hampshire – made it feel full circle. I was lost but now am found.

I now wonder if that fake fur coat represented more to my mother than just something to keep her warm on a cold day. It did make her spine straighten just a little when she put it on. Was she trying to get back something that she had lost as a child? Was she trying to fix something that was broken? What did she see in the mirror when she put on that coat?

I didn’t buy that furry sweater from the catalog last week. I just smiled and thought back to my mother and her coat. I know I can’t recapture a moment with her by wrapping myself in fake fur. I know this, and yet, I smile as my gaudy green ring catches the light.

Beth Ann Jedziniak has a passion for the written and spoken word. Her speech entitled, “My VaJourney” was recorded for Claim the Stage podcast. Previously, she was the founder of Operation Fat Monkey. Most evenings you will find her in her loft playing, writing, painting, and drinking copious amounts of tea.

 

PLUM-COLORED CORDUROYS

by Joan Axelrod-Contrada

I hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my favorite plum-colored corduroys and yanked with all my might.

“Come on,” I muttered, determined to show who wore the pants in the family.

The cords cooperated reluctantly as I shimmied like a go-go dancer to get them over my thighs. So far, so good, but they clung to my hips, then refused to budge.

Maybe a shoe-horn would help. Too bad I didn’t have one.

Ten pounds of emotional eating had left me with a fall wardrobe a size too small. How could I resist a late-night binge of chocolate and peanut butter when my husband, Fred, was deteriorating, inch by inch, of a degenerative neurological disease? How could I say no to warm dinner rolls and dessert when he could barely talk? Truth is, I needed comfort wherever I could find it.

I gritted my teeth and worked doggedly to avoid the dreaded rip, rip, rip of the fabric. Slowly, I wiggled the pants over my hips. but a gulf the size of the Grand Canyon separated the two sides of the fly. I could hear the pants moan “We’re spread too thin” like I was some ruthless sweatshop boss making them work overtime.

I sucked in my stomach, and, through sheer grit (and the durability of modern-day textiles), zipped up the fly. The fabric buckled, leaving horizontal lines like rutted tire tracks along the front of my legs. My stomach bulged like an overstuffed sausage. Fortunately, I found a tunic top to hide the evidence. Tada.

That afternoon, I went grocery shopping and loaded my cart with enough greens to feed an army of rabbits. In the checkout line, I gazed at the tabloids. “Lose 24 Pounds This Week!” one of the headlines blared. Right, my sarcastic self snorted. Something inside me tossed the magazine on the conveyer belt anyway. I refused to go up a clothes size. No way would I let Fred’s monster of a disease get me, too.

When I got home, I read the article in the tabloid about former firefighter Rip Esselstyn’s Engine 2 Diet. I ordered the Engine 2 book from Amazon and began eating tons of high-volume, low calorie foods that filled me up. My new guru, supposedly named after Rip Van Winkle, was on a mission to prove that vegetables can be manly.

I gradually lost five pounds my first month without feeling deprived – at home anyway. Going out to eat was a different story. I yearned for my favorite pan-fried filet of sole at Paul & Elizabeth’s and the Cobb salad at Sylvester’s. So, I developed my own system of flexitarianism. Vegan at home. Omnivore everywhere else. On a recent trip to New Orleans, I sampled char-broiled oysters loaded with butter, a definite no-no on Engine 2.

My plum-colored cords fit better these days. They don’t exactly swim on me, but they no longer complain bitterly when I pull them up. Finally. I was learning how to wear the pants in the family.”

Joan Axelrod-Contrada is a former correspondent for The Boston Globe and the author of 20 books for children. She is also the founder and editor of WriteAngles Journal. She can be reached at joanaxelrodcontrada@gmail.com.

 

STILL SEARCHING

by Fanny Rothschild

One day my pregnant daughter and my son-in-law were living with me in Buenos Aires, Argentina and the next day they were disappeared. One evening we were eating bife and pasta together, and the next I was staring across an empty table. One night a green Falcon hovered below my window and the next I was alone. One night the police dragged my pregnant daughter and my son-in-law out the front door, and the next there was silence.

That’s when I began The Search. I trudged from one government office to another. Each one gave the Official Story: my renegade children had fled the country. I knew deep in my heart my innocents were in prison, my daughter about to give birth. I was beyond distraught. I began to march every Thursday afternoon with Las Madres (The Mothers) and Las Abuelas (The Grandmothers), circling La Plaza de Mayo outside the generals’ offices. We protested weekly despite the severe danger.

Some days lately I feel like a goddess; others like a fish encased by the glass of an aquarium. The glass may be transparent, but where my grandchild is living is an agonizing mystery, so close yet in a different, unreachable dimension.

This nightmare began 43 years ago. I still ache in my bones for my flesh and blood grandchild. I know now that my children were murdered, and their stolen child raised by the military, police, or some people among these men who preyed on our young. Over the past four decades, The Grandmothers have asked – at times demanded – that everyone question whether they are in the “right” biological families.

On April 10, 2019, the 129th child reunites with a blood grandparent. When is my turn? When will my grandchild be the 130th? I continue The Search. I visit The Grandmothers’ office every week. They keep my DNA on file. They have become my Sisters. Still, I put an ad in the newspaper; I even get social media savvy and send out feelers online. Other days I simply walk, sending off pleas through the breezes that my grandchild recognizes me. I cannot stay put in my apartment peopled only with photographs of ghosts, themselves encased in glass.

The phone rings. Dare I answer it? I do.

People pour inside my apartment, all ages from baby Patricia to 100-year-old Aunt Vivi. Today my table is full. The cars parked outside are not green Falcons. I ache to dance with the photographs of my daughter and son-in-law. I want them to break through the glass and eat some bife and pasta with their child. Dinner ends and I cling to my grandson; he looks like his parents. He looks like me. With our precious new member, mi familia finally feels free.

Yet I cannot sleep. I resolve to return tomorrow to march with my other Sisters: Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. It will be Thursday again with 370 Grandmothers still searching. And I will be with them.

Fanny Rothschild lives in Western Massachusetts where she balances and brings together her work as writer, human rights activist, and editor. Her ongoing efforts include the novels TANGO LESSONS, a depiction of the disappearances in Argentina, and GOING KUKU, a mosaic of a refugee family’s journey from Sudan to Massachusetts.

 

RECOVERY

by Anita Pappas-Raposa

I am haunted by a small bird that flew into my chimney. I came home from the hospital on a Thursday, a day early. Not because I’m so well; just couldn’t take the noise. Exiting the car, I see cheerful roofers flinging shingles into a large black net in the front and rear of the unit. There must be six of them banging above. My desire for rest vanishes. Looking heavenward, I curse my rotten luck, which has beset me for months after falling. My stapled neck is collared, immovable. Spinal fusion will allow me to move like my old self. I take pain meds and sleep more hours in a day than in twenty-five years.

Saturday morning is brisk and sunny as I watch my grandson and husband throw a football around. A paralyzed vocal cord renders a whisper of a voice. I’m trying to keep quiet; feeling restless and confined. I’m moody and bemoaning my missed “Girl’s Trip” to Siesta Key.

Suddenly, I hear a flutter behind the fireplace screen. “Oh God,” I shriek, “There’s a bird in the house.” I hobble outside and signal for help. Young Andrew responds with shrieks. “Yia Yia, the bird’s going to die!” Frightened, he retreats into the bathroom. “We’ll get help.” I look to my husband who begins to swear. He places towels in front of the screen.

The requisite calls begin: the police, the fire department, the Animal Control agency, even the Wildlife Association. Nobody works weekends, or it’s not “what they do.” A sweet girl at the animal shelter tells me to place a little water behind the screen or call a chimney sweep company. She adds, “They can live a few days; call on Monday.” We fortify the screen, but the bird has gone quiet. Unless we tap, all is still back there. We leave the bird alone.

On Sunday morning, I stand near the screen to check on my bird. My sister and husband visit, and she, an animal lover, wants its release. I keep thinking of the Maya Angelou poem “Caged Bird” and wonder if the silent bird feels trapped or is accepting its fate.

Monday morning, I call Animal Control. A pleasant young voice tells me that Animal Control can’t come inside. My hoarse pleading whisper weakens her position. She arrives in half an hour with a large blue fishnet in hand. She hears the frenzied flutter as she peeks behind the screen. When she guides the screen away, I stand back fearing the bird will attack its jailor. But it doesn’t. It eludes the net and flies straight toward a glass-paned door. She opens the door; the bird flies into the bursting blue sky. “Hmm,” she says quietly. “That’s unusual.” “What?” I ask. “It’s a dove.” I try to thank her with a contribution she refuses. “No, but I hope your voice comes back.” I reply, “I do too.”

I have cursory knowledge of doves, but I feel stronger and calmer now that the bird is free. Emily Dickinson was right, “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

Anita Pappas-Raposa is currently working on a memoir about her coming of age and small-town life in Palmer, Massachusetts. She is a nonfiction writer and retired English teacher who attends The Museum School. An excerpt entitled “My Mother Wore Chanel” from an earlier memoir was published in the Palmer Journal in 2017.

 

VOLKSWAGON VAN

by Aine Greaney

The Volkswagen van was sapphire blue with a line of dirty windows under a white vinyl roof. When we kids raced across the farmyard to investigate, the VW’s interior stank of old vinyl.

Our house and farm sat at the end of a bóithrín or dirt road, behind our country village in south County Mayo. Except for school and Sunday church, days went by without seeing anyone outside the family.

Days also went by without seeing our father, who worked two jobs as a farmer and a truck driver.
The VW arrived because a farm neighbor had asked my father to keep an eye out for a roadside deal on something that could be converted to a backyard chicken coop.

I have no idea where my father found his van deal or how much it cost or how far he had to haul it home. I just know that the vendor offered a two-van deal or nothing. So our neighbors got the red and we got the blue, and there was some chat about how we, too, could use our vehicle to raise fluffy new chicks.

Then my father went on the road again, so our hatchlings never got bought and our VW sat there, immobile and unused. Set there among our ancient trees and stone sheds, the VW looked as bizarre, as wrong, as a just-landed spaceship.

Three generations of us lived in that tiny thatch-roof house, where, to my young mind, there were far too many rules and after-school chores and adult secrets.

With the chicken plan abandoned, I saw and seized my chance. I stacked the back of the VW (it had no rear seats) with my library books and paperback novels. From the house I stole women’s magazines and a disused commode and a tartan blanket. Now I spent my afternoons lying on that blanket, blissfully kicking my legs and reading.

My reading transported me across the Irish sea to the British moors and the misty Cornish coast where my novels’ fictional characters spoke in plummy English accents. They held gourmet picnics and outfoxed the local constabulary to solve grown-up crimes.

Two years later, we moved to a much larger village house that sat within walking distance of the farm. When or how did my VW reading room get dismantled and hauled away? I cannot remember.

Two decades later, in a noisy American bar, a hippie-haired man bragged that he had learned all about sex in the back of a Volkswagen van.

I recalled my British-published magazines and their women’s problem pages full of letters about pre-marital sex and marital infidelities.

“Oh, me, too,” I told my hippie man and let him think whatever he was thinking.

For years that VW van stood for everything I had abandoned or risen above.

But now, in middle age, I find myself time-traveling back there to reclaim that place and that girl who loved and trusted all those words on the page.

Aine Greaney is an Irish-born writer who lives on Boston’s North Shore. She has written five books and published and broadcast many essays, short stories, and features in publications such as Creative Nonfiction, The Boston Globe Magazine, Salon, and WBUR Cognoscenti. Her personal essay collection, GREEN CARD & OTHER ESSAYS, has just been released (Wishing Up Press, 2019), and her website is at ainegreaney.com.

 

A DINNER INVITATION

by Mohammad Yadegari

As Iranians living in Iraq, every summer, when school was out, and occasionally in between, our family would take a long trip to Iran.

Our long-distance relatives outdid themselves trying to make us feel welcome by hosting lavish meals. They argued with one other, vying to be the first to invite us to their homes. After much back and forth discussion, they would finally agree who would host and on what day. The food at these gatherings was plentiful and delicious and the presentation was elaborate. The host would graciously entreat us to eat, and it was understood that it was our duty to eat.

We were instructed by our parents to be polite, but we were not quite prepared for the scenes that unfolded. Outside the house, we were asked again and again “How are you? How have you been?” The host feigned subservience by saying, “Welcome, my dearest. Welcome to my humble home. I am your servant and at your disposal. I kiss your feet and the ground upon which you walk.”

As a teenager, I was amused and would chuckle quietly. Of course, my parents were aware of their parts in this charade. They reciprocated with elaborate routines of their own.

“After you, my dear master,” said the host.

“Absolutely not, you go first, great scholar and best friend,” my father replied.

“No, no, no. I am here to serve you and fulfill all your wishes. You are our most revered and honored guest.” The host and my father patted each other’s backs, each applying a light pressure trying to get the other to move in, and yet each resisted.

Inside, a long tablecloth called a sofreh was laid out on the floor over a large Persian rug. Cushions were placed as seating around the sofreh, and bowls of fruit were artfully arranged on the sofreh. There were watermelon and honeydew melons cut from the rind into small cubes, as well as apples, cherries, all kinds of berries, and oranges. After we had eaten our fill of fruit, the sofreh was cleared and removed. Another sofreh was laid out. Four main dishes were brought out: eggplant with stewed lamb, lamb and parsley stew, duck cooked in pomegranate-walnut sauce, and okra with tomato and stewed chicken. These were accompanied by three kinds of rice dishes: rice with greens, rice with lima beans, and a crispy orange rice.

The main sofreh was cleared again, and an elaborate dessert sofreh was laid out offering baklava, halva, various pastries, and several kinds of cookies.

“Eat, Mohammad, eat,” our host urged me again and again. I was too full to eat more than one piece of baklava but was “forced” with kindness to eat more. Cup after cup of tea was served.

As I ate, I glanced across the sofreh and saw the host slouched across his cushion snoring. Apparently, the great scholar and best friend was exhausted by the meal and his duties as host.

Mohammad Yadegari, an Iranian born in Iraq, moved to the United States in 1964. He studied at SUNY-Albany and NYU and then taught mathematics and history in both high school and college. This piece is from his recently completed cultural memoir, A TALE OF THREE CITIES.

 

ICE BLUE SECRET

by Ann Averill

During Christmas vacation I slept with a boy – for the first time – for all the wrong reasons.

After Christmas vacation, I come home from school, turn on the tiny TV in the den, and change the channel to Dark Shadows, the soap opera I used to watch with my best friend, Linda. Flopped in the chair, my hand deep in a can of Charles chips, an Ice Blue Secret commercial pauses the plot. I see a young woman seated at a dressing table facing a round mirror. She wears a poufy wedding dress. Her veil, swept back over a tiara, looks like a crown. Her mother stands next to her in a sedate mother-of-the bride suit with matching pill box hat, demi-veil and silk pumps. The mother hands the daughter the deodorant, leans in to whisper, and the daughter smiles. The ad’s intent is clear: to link the long-awaited thrill of the wedding night with the need for an anti-perspirant able to withstand the impending steam.

The implied bliss of course requires a pristine bride whose snow-white purity has never been melted, a figurine bride waiting atop a wedding cake for her perfect groom. A princess awaiting her prince, no portcullis lowered by pot or alcohol, no pressure vented, a young woman entering the marriage bed at full throttle.

When the ad is over, I turn off the TV, pull on my coat, grab my mother’s snow shoes, and head towards the bird sanctuary at the far end of the neighborhood. In the frigid air, I walk through the small clouds of my own breath. At the edge of the forest, I strap the awkward rawhide netting to my feet and climb into deep powder. Tramping through the trees, I hear the coo of mourning doves, the squawk of blue jays, the chick-a-dee-dee-dee of small black-capped birds. A bright red cardinal slashes my view, and as the winter sun begins to set, I confess to no one, that by abdicating the virgin throne atop the afore mentioned cake, I am secretly damaged. My ice blue conclusion – I’m no longer worthy of true love.

Ann C. Averill is the author of Broken, 180 Days in the Wilderness of an Urban Middle School. “Ice Blue Secret” is from her upcoming memoir, Breadcrumbs, A Baby Boomer’s Path to Jesus. An original fairy tale will appear in Cricket. For more of her essays go to annaverill.weebly.com.

 

CASSOULET

by Don Lesser

I never made cassoulet for Mitch, and now I never will. Mitch, a real-estate lawyer in midtown Manhattan, was married to my cousin in a happy second marriage for both. Mitch could be nasty, but he loved my cousin and, when he saw that I did too, accepted me into his inner circle. He liked that I was well-read, knew the music he knew, and, most importantly, knew how to eat.

Mitch followed chefs the way cinephiles follow directors. He’d take us to a place and give us the pedigree of the chef, not caring that since I don’t live in Manhattan, I didn’t know the restaurants or the chefs. I cooked for them sometimes at their second house in Connecticut. For years, whatever I made, his response was usually, It’s good, but it’s not cassoulet. I made cassoulet twenty years ago, but that was way before I knew Mitch.

Cassoulet is a French country dish of white beans, preserved duck or goose, sausage, pork, and toasted breadcrumbs. If you have the duck confit, it’s not too hard to make, but it does take a couple of days. I promised to make it when he visited me, but Mitch never left Manhattan willingly. He was like some small-town boy whose small town was Manhattan. He rarely went to Brooklyn and once spent an entire trip to the Island arguing that we should blow off our relatives and go to the Second Avenue Deli with him.

Meat and bean dishes are common to many cultures, from Boston to New Orleans to cholent to feijoda. You take something that isn’t enough for dinner (the meat) and something that is plentiful (the beans) and slow cook them into a savory dinner for 10.

The Larousse Gastronomique lists three types of cassoulet, but they vary mainly in the meats they use. You assemble the different meats and beans, top them with bread crumbs, and bake the dish forever, stirring in the breadcrumbs when they are crispy. Several applications of breadcrumbs later, the dish is ready. It’s hard to make authentically in America. Preserved goose and pheasant may have been common to 19th-century France, but in New England, not so much.

Mitch contracted kidney cancer, lost a kidney, and spent the next eight years on a regimen of chemotherapy and blood transfusions. He tired more easily, but when I visited, there was always a restaurant. The cancer couldn’t even kill him. He died of a heart attack. The last meal we ate together was at the Second Avenue Deli.

So, I designed a cassoulet for Mitch. It will have white beans and the sausage and meats more common to my region. I’ll take a tip from Sienna Restaurant and use toasted croutons in place of the bread crumbs. I’ll make it for my family and we’ll toast Mitch before we eat. I’ll be sorry that he’ll miss it.

Don Lesser has been writing all his life. He has an MFA in Fiction, has won awards for his food writing, and was a professional technical writer before the IBM PC. He writes and cooks in Amherst.

 

FAKING IT

by Sara Denne-Bolton

It all started with the not finishing. He would get up in the morning to find the kettle boiled but not poured over the coffee, the wet clothes from yesterday’s wash in the dryer, which wasn’t turned on, the toast half buttered and left on the plate, the toothpaste on the unused brush.

Yet she still walked to work every day. Her office building was at the end of two blocks and across the street; it must have been ingrained in her mind. Sometimes she seemed so normal, but he really didn’t understand why no one at work had said anything about the changes in her. Was it due to politeness or obliviousness? Could they really not have noticed anything? Was it possible that she could be only half present and still be taken seriously at meetings? It must be because of her profession, he decided. Academia tolerated all manner of eccentricities. Absent-mindedness spoke of a great brain occupied with loftier things than the mundane day to day of keys and toothbrush, spectacles, and toast.

The day came, however, when she left for work and came back ten minutes later, a look of bafflement on her face. At first, she didn’t say anything and acted as though she had meant to come back for something, but, when he pressed her, she wailed, “I can’t find my office! I don’t know where to go to work!” And then he knew, beyond doubt, that her illness was not simply a charming character quirk but something deeper and more sinister.

They limped along for a little while after that during which time he would walk her to work, meet her at lunchtime to take her out to lunch, and return at the end of the day to walk her home from the office. He made sure she had her name on her office door and desk so she knew where to go and where to sit. But eventually, he knew the charade could not continue and began the process of seeking out a diagnosis and prognosis and solutions temporary and permanent. He coaxed her to the doctors on the pretext of a check-up and sat with her as the verdict fell on her uncomprehending ears.

As soon as the bed in the home was ready for her, she was gone. It happened so quickly.

In the quiet, lonely years that followed, between sad visits to sit with her in her confused absence and long uninterrupted nights at home, he missed her. He had plenty of time now to wonder what she had done in the office those days when they pretended everything was normal. Of course, no one had been fooled by their hoax, he realized. It had only served to expose her, the brilliant academic, once commanding admiration and respect, as a woman losing her wits. But she was beyond caring about such matters, he knew now, on the rare days she let him hold her hand. Embarrassment was for him alone.

Sara Denne-Bolton comes from Ireland and read anything she could get her hands on since she was three. A dizzying life of travel and wildly varied work experience ranging from janitor to diplomat have given her ample material for writing. Her husband is an artist and they live in Vermont.

 

THE ORANGE THREAD

by Madelaine Zadik

I know my aunt Helga in black and white. All the old photos, except for some in that sepia color, have kept her grey for me. I never saw the tones of her flesh, the brown of her hair, and suddenly I realize that I don’t know the color of her eyes. Were they blue like her sister’s?

One photo of her at about 16 was colorized, so she had pinkish cheeks and brown hair staring out from a picture frame, frozen in that stare, never blushing in embarrassment or drained of all color as I imagine her when she finally realizes she can’t escape what they have planned for her.

Orange was the color of embroidery thread that she used to fill her days of solitary confinement while awaiting trial, stitching in and out and in and out, hour after hour, through the white cotton of the circular tablecloth. Did she have a choice of color? Did she love orange? Did orange become her nemesis, something she couldn’t escape, threads taunting her, or did she come to love the orange strands that became her companion, providing distraction from being stuck inside those walls, all alone. There were no fresh fruits or vegetables. The thread substituted for apricots, oranges, and yams, and perhaps lit up her existence deprived of orange sunlight – no vitamin C or vitamin D in that cell, just that orange line between her fingers.

Growing up, I noticed orange was my mother’s favorite color. Bright orange and white bedspreads illuminated my parents’ bedroom. I remember an orange couch, an orange dress. Was there a connection – conscious or subconscious – to that tablecloth carefully stored away? Could the love of orange fill the big empty hole left by her sister’s disappearance from her life? Or was it that my mother needed brightness to counteract the drab void? It seemed to work; Mom had a sunny disposition, lighting up with joy at the world around her. She found such pleasure in orange, and it spilled over onto everything else.

I, however, never felt drawn to orange. Actually, it was my least favorite color. Although I never understood my mother’s attraction to it, I respected her love of orange, so easy to make her smile.

Now I recall, my first car was an orange Toyota. It was more of a puke color, not the bright hue of that embroidery thread. How much of my dislike of orange comes from that tablecloth, which represented Helga’s torture and ultimate demise? Yet, it probably transported her out of her situation. While creating that masterpiece, she had no idea what the future held for her. She didn’t know she was creating a legacy, that her sister’s daughter, who wasn’t yet born, would one day hold that cloth, wishing it could help her to know her aunt and what she once thought and felt. Helga didn’t know that niece would one day be wondering what her aunt would say about the world today and whether the two of them would have liked each other.

Madelaine Zadik is currently writing a memoir focused on her relationship with her mother’s sister Helga, whom she never met except through letters written from prison while serving sentence for high treason in Nazi Germany. This piece is an excerpt from that work.

 

PREDNISONE

by Siegfried Haug

“Looks like gout to me,” Herman, my doctor, says.

I had gingerly, very gingerly, pulled down my sock for him.

“I’ll give you some prednisone. Start with 60 milligrams. Then you titrate.”

I was in pain and uncharacteristically compliant.

Not being a pharmacology devotee, I opt for a supplementary alternative addition: Four little black round pills that my dreadlocked acupuncture person had suggested at an earlier chi-impasse.

Huang Lian Jie Du-something.

That, though, was later in the day, hours after the first six prednisone pills had hit my system. At that point I already had accrued a modicum of mental/spirituality alacrity. Awareness on steroids.

As I pour four hamster-poop-type globules into my left palm, one escapes the inner crease of my hand, the extension of my heart-line, actually, and does this gravity-thing down to our wooden kitchen floor.

“Blip – blip blip — blipblipblip – blipblipblipblip . . .”.

As tonal/spacial intervals shorten, volume decreases — and then there is pill-spin, materializing, as I watch in fascination, as a corresponding body-twist. And concomitant pain. For grounding.

The tiny manifestation of ancient Eastern pharmacological wizardry bounces with barely concealed mathematical precision. As it moves, it moves ME.

This is where I come to real-ize that this is a kairos, a sacred moment.

The pill rolls in a slow circle around me.

Clockwise. Clockwise!

It is a fractional helix. This, folks, is the very same cosmic gesture we witness in galactic expansionism.

Energetic fields, I know, inform and affect each other.

Me, the Dropper-of-the Pill, now, by virtue of an observing self (“awareness, awareness, awareness” — the nexus of all spiritual real-estate) am now slightly torqued, compelled to partake in this non-linear process.

There is pain involved in this synced twist.

There is, of course, always pain involved in trying to be in sync with the non-self. Narcissism might well be a kind of gravity. Going beyond it hurts. Catalyzed, this experience is, by a micro/macro cosmic interfacial pivot for a sphere, earthbound via my very heart-line.

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

And then and there, here and now, I recognize her. It is the wind-pill. Remember Chinese medicine 1.01? Earth, fire, water, air.

And at her/my painful, agonizing terminus (we are one), I am forced to bend.

Bend down deeply.

Way beyond my comfort level.

This is not metaphorical bending.

This is not a metaphorical pain.

This is mundane, podiatric, one might quip: pedestrian discomfort of gout-like proportions.

I need to catch my breath before I pick her up. Not a cleansing-breath, this, more like a gasp, really.

Pain waters my eyes.

Wind, spirit, prana, ruach, sacred wind. All rolled into one.

Ah, oneness.

Yes, I am picking you up.

In a sacred manner I will pick you up.

I am emotionally drained.

Tomorrow, with food, it is only going to be five prednisones. 50 milligrams of steroids.

A metaphysical countdown of sorts.

Six — five — four — three — two — ONE.

Siegfried Haug is the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. A suspense novel, BAD SLEEP, will be published in early spring, 2019. Retired now from clinical work and teaching, he lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in the foothills of the Berkshires. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.

 

DIARY OF A KITCHEN

by Barbara Corrigan

Okay, here she comes. I know her routine. She puts on the Keurig coffee pot and grabs a banana. She is always the first one up. She used to put on the TV, which interrupted the silence I felt all night. I am so old now that I am happy when it is quiet. Actually, I am over 95 years old and have quietly been there with all those people who have spent time within my walls. I do like the sounds that have always been there, like the hissing of the radiator, the water from the running faucet and the whir of the refrigerator, but other noises just make me nervous.

When this family first moved here in 1972 they were very noisy. They put up a cuckoo clock on my wall. It drove me crazy. Then they got a dog called Tootles who barked wildly whenever the little cuckoo people came out of the clock to dance. Finally, one of the children pulled the chain, and the clock broke forever. Thank you, kids!

Now she puts on soft music, which makes me happy. The coffee pot she uses is much noisier than the old one she had when they first moved in. In the early days they used the stove to make coffee. It was a gentle perk like bubbles popping. She would turn it down and let it perk for about 8 minutes. Then she would pour the coffee into a cup for herself.

There was a lot of noise once the kids got up. She would make them cereal and toast. She would also put something called “pop tarts” into the toaster. They smelled really good, especially the blueberry ones. Once the people went outside, it got quiet again except for Tootles who barked when everyone went by.

When I was in my seventies, I had a makeover. Some men came and ripped down the Styrofoam ceiling and again I had a high ceiling. The lady ripped off the old wallpaper and had my walls painted. I also got a new ceramic floor and new Formica counter tops. I looked a lot younger then.

The lady and man don’t work anymore. The lady likes to spend a lot of time with me. In fact, I heard her say that I am her favorite place in the house besides the front porch and her bed. She likes to make soup and cookies. She watches cooking shows while she cooks. The man also spends time with me when he does the dishes while he watches his news shows which are loud and alarming to me.

I am happy I am still hanging on and have the man and lady keeping me company. The three children, who are grown up now, come to visit with their families. The lady cooks a lot when they come. They laugh about the way I looked when I was a lot younger. They are amazed at how good I look at my age. They still enjoy sitting around the table and eating. It makes me feel good that I can make them happy.

Barbara Corrigan, a retired nurse, discovered her interest in creative writing as she journaled about her experience caring for her parents. In a later attempt to chronicle memories of her own life and her ancestors, she developed a collection of personal essays while attending the Springfield Museum School Writing Workshops.

 

CRYBABY

by Sarah Cooper-Ellis

During the summer that my mother was pregnant with her fourth child, my older sister and brother and I were left to play alone. As the youngest, I was the target. “Crybaby,” they called me.

We loved to explore my grandmother’s barn. One day, my brother and sister decided to jump from a platform onto the barn floor below. They dared each other to do it and landed safely. Then it was my turn. I sat with my legs dangling into the frightening space. I could hear them giggling behind me. I felt a pressure on my back, and I was launched. I landed face down, pain jolting through my wrist bone.

That year, we lived on the campus of the boarding school where my father taught. In the evenings, my mother sat nursing our baby brother while the rest of us got ready to go to the dining hall for supper. But our father was angry at our mother taking such intimate time with the baby. One night he exploded and put his fist through the wall.

The next year, we moved to a house off campus, and Jane’s family came to occupy the house with the hole in the wall.

Jane and I were in the same class at school and often played together. One day we squatted over puzzles on the floor of her bedroom, which had been mine. I stared at Jane’s pale skin and strawberry blond hair. I thought she looked soft, weak. Chickenpox craters etched her cheeks, and tiny beads of clear sweat filmed her forehead.

That must have been when my plot to hurt her was hatched. I remember a see-saw on the playground, a co-conspirator friend, and Jane on the ground bleeding. And a secret that I carried with me as I grew.

Sixty years later, I saw Jane at a reunion. I sought her out. She was prettier than I remembered, with a strong jaw.

“Do you want to talk about how you were mean to me?” she asked. There went my hope that maybe it hadn’t been a big deal – hadn’t stuck with her as it had with me.

“It’s the seesaw time I remember,” I said.

“I got blood poisoning,” she told me, “With a very high fever. I stayed in bed for a week. People brought me all sorts of toys and presents!” Oddly, we laughed. But was I forgiven?

“I’m spending time out here this summer,” Jane said. I knew she lived on the other coast. She told me she had an autoimmune disease and had to move out of her apartment. She told me she had a boyfriend who drank too much.

We sat across from each other in the shade of an elm tree. I noticed her eyes – the color of a summer pond – green, dull. I could never know her, I realized.

“We’re burying my sister next Saturday,” she said. “You should come.”

I thought about Jane all week, but I didn’t go to see her again.

Sarah Cooper-Ellis writes from a deep regard for the natural world. She lives in Putney, Vermont with her husband Abijah. Her first novel, LANDINGS, is forthcoming in 2019.

 

THE BOMBER JACKET

by Anita Pappas-Raposa

My father was a big man in a small town, well-known as a Veterans Agent and local politician. Brassy and bold, funny, and high-spirited; everyone seemed to know “Peter, the guy who got things done.”

In the first eighteen years of my life, there was little talk of World War II and none of his role as a gunner’s mate in the war. His leather flying jacket was just a cool relic packed in the basement with a case of medals. Dad literally breezed in and out of town, leading a bustling salesman’s life far removed from his years of military service. We didn’t start fighting about the jacket until I entered college in 1968 and thought it was chic to wear around campus. So began our history.

It is a rich brown, crusty, wrinkled bomber jacket that he wore while serving as a flyer from 1942-1945 as an Army Air Force Sergeant. The insignias are everywhere. On each shoulder are small detailed flags, red, white, and blue patches that still hold their faded yet strong colors. Over each breast pocket are large round badges and on the left is a bronco-busting cowboy waving his hands in the air. Very appropriate for my dad.

Inside the jacket is a tattered Asian flag with Chinese characters that identify his squadron and country. Across the back is a large, faded American flag of silk, tattered and toned to a creamy shade of coffee. The jacket now hangs between outdated party dresses and coats.

I have worn it on and off since 1968. At 18, as a college student, it was part of my uniform for demonstrations at Westover Air Reserve Base. It was a perfect, authentic symbol completing an outfit of faded jeans, flannel shirt, and moccasins. I remember the disapproving glances of older, wiser vets as I marched around demonstrations casually wearing the jacket. Dad was mortified when he learned his tail-gunner’s mate jacket, which had flown more than thirty missions in the China-Burma Theater, was donned for anti-war rallies. In anger, he said, “Bring my jacket home.” It went back in the closet.

Ten years later, I convinced him to lend it to me to share with my students as I taught the poems of Randall Jarrell. I would again dramatically wear the jacket, and the young men in particular, would marvel at this historical artifact from a war of which they knew little. A colleague informed me that my father flew harrowing combat missions. “He’s a hero, ya know?” I didn’t know.

Over time, I came to understand my flawed, complicated father and all the jacket represented. Forever marred by war, his life was spent pursuing the integrity achieved in those years. He’s gone now, but I treasure the mystery and adventure woven into the bomber jacket.

Anita Pappas-Raposa is currently working on a memoir about her coming of age and small-town life in Palmer, Massachusetts. She is a nonfiction writer and retired English teacher who attends The Museum School. An excerpt entitled “My Mother Wore Chanel” from an earlier memoir was published in the Palmer Journal in 2017.

 

THE CABIN AND THE CANE

by Beth Ann Jedziniak

Yesterday morning on the elevator, a woman said, “I love your cane. Where did you get it?”

While my cane is made of wood and looks hand-carved, I purchased it off the shelf at Walgreens. She seemed disappointed with my answer so I added, “But perhaps I should come up with a better origin story for moments such as this.” Then the elevator doors opened and we both went on about our day.

As a child, I lived in a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire with my uncle and my grandmother. For two years I lived in that cabin with no running water and a scarcity that ran deep. Though there was plenty of good food to go around and leftovers to spare, my younger brother and I weren’t allowed to eat any of it. Cornflakes and unpasteurized milk was our daily breakfast. No sugar allowed. The sugar was for them. Bologna and bread for lunch. Rinse and repeat, day after day.

I had known times of scarcity before the cabin, but, whatever my family had lacked in basic human needs, my mother had made up for with an abundance of love. Here, in this cabin in the woods with my grandmother and uncle, there was no love. Your name was screamed and screeched as though you were an offense that could not be forgiven. With each touch, a toll was exacted on my mind, body, and innocence. The extent of the loss would not be discovered until much later. It is a debt that I am still paying.

They’re all dead now, my mother, grandmother, and uncle though the scarcity created in that cabin still lives in me even as abundance calls my name.

This morning, the same woman who asked about my cane ran onto the elevator just before the doors closed. She said, “So, what is the story of your cane?” She was searching for that improved origin story but I had completely forgotten our conversation from the day before until that very moment.

Off the top of my head I said, “As a child, I lived in a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire, and I would sit under a huge tree by the pond and read my favorite books over and over again. When I injured my leg, my uncle took a branch from that tree and carved this cane for me. My healing and wholeness was that important to him.”

I continued, “As a matter of fact, I recently returned to that cabin in the woods of New Hampshire and sat under that tree, my cane by my side, and reread one of my favorite childhood books.” She asked for the name of the book so that she could read it. I looked at her and smiled. She had completely forgotten, for a moment, that this was a story made up for her benefit and, perhaps, for mine.

Beth Ann Jedziniak has a passion for the written and spoken word. Her speech entitled “My VaJourney” was recorded for Claim the Stage podcast. Previously, she was the founder of Operation Fat Monkey. Most evenings you will find her in her loft playing, writing, painting, and drinking copious amounts of tea.

 

MY VOICE

by Amy Gordon

My voice with the dancer’s waist
and antique grace always told me
how every cricket creaks before dawn,
how oak trees shed their acorns.

And my voice liked to tell me how worms boast
how they ate through the eyes of Aristotle,
would eat through them books of his, too,
but too much education makes the skin tough, slow
to decompose, you know—but Voice,

I was following the map of your song,
when I stopped listening and began to listen
to judges
adorning the top of a poplar tree.
They kept squawking:
Look at that man’s footprint.
Look at that woman’s stiletto heels,
punctuating whole fields of snow,
You must speak like them.

I walked and walked in a forest, alone.
No bliss in green moss
emerging from white snow because
I lost you, my voice, until you came a-knocking,
at my door saying Let me in—

That was the heart inside my voice,
speaking to me. If you let me in,
you will see lizards, parrots, bromeliads,
Capuchin monkeys, a tribe that has lived undiscovered
for 100 years, and you shall know that all of these, even you,
are faultless.

Oh my voice, I will let you in, and I will follow you,
follow your waltz across the sands of Araby,
or your trek across the high plains of the Himalayas, yes,
this time, I shall follow you.

Amy Gordon lives and teaches in western Massachusetts. She directs plays with young people and conducts writing workshops. She is the author of numerous books for young adults and children.

 

WHY I’M A SUPERHERO

by D.K. McCutchen

One chilly second-Sunday in May, I complained, “Why can’t I hotflash on demand?”

And my daughter said, “you’re not a superhero, Mom.”

But I AM!

Menopausal-Mom! Forgetter of small facts, able to power small (sweaty) cities for minutes at a time!

I flipflop between the guilty miracle of air-conditioning – magical moments when the chemical burn hits and instead of flapping and swearing I punch the AIR button, HIGH, COLD, Ahhhh – or using my ice-block hands to cool nuclear reactors. My thermostat’s off. So, my theory, which is mine, is that I’m simply a metaphor for the larger system. Global change is a menopausal planet.

Think about it! The see-saw’s out of whack, the temp in the terrarium’s varying wildly. The northwest passage opened and Gary Larson’s penguins are about to meet polar bears. Floods of temperamental tears are raising sea-levels, and there’s a whole lotta lost car keys out there. Let’s not even mention the bits that’re drying up or erupting.

So what do we DO for Menopausal-Mom, kids? We help reduce stress. No room for dithering! When sweat rolls off the proverbial brow, it’s DANGER-WILL-ROBINSON! Our path is clear. Drastically reduce emissions, NOW. Shrug off that greenhouse sweater, FAST! Or Menopausal-Mom’s gonna meltdown, and the homefront’ll be even more unlivable.

After all Mother Earth’s done for us, least we can do is be good kids – not bicker about who gets what. We’re all responsible. In fact, Menopausal-Mom needs YOU to be the superhero, ‘cause she’s busy trying to remember where she put that … thing….

So – yeah – imperfect metaphor here! Earth’s a superhero, you’re a superhero, Mom’s a Menopausal Superhero who’s gonna do … something … soon as she remembers what!

And yup! Global Change – Just like Menopause! Let’s hope we can sweat the changes or we’re … kinda done here.

Happy Mother’s Day!

(P.S. Send chocolate.)

D. K. McCutchen is Senior Lecturer in The UMass College of Natural Sciences, and supports other writing teachers via the UMass Writing Program. She may be the longest-running member of the University Writing Committee. Lack of poetic-DNA led to a tale of low adventure & high science titled THE WHALE ROAD. In a literary attempt to save the world, she’s now writing gender-bender-post-apocalyptic-speculative fiction. She lives on a river with two brilliant daughters and a Kiwi, who isn’t green, but is fuzzy.

EFFECTIVE WORDS AFFECT ME

by AM Grout

When I pick up a pen, I consider if the words are worth writing. I make this decision by how the inspiration and the influences that surround the idea of writing them affect me. Some ideas appear in dreams like the one in which I was running military-style to give a message to the man running in front of me. Because both of us were running military-style, I could not reach my hand to touch his shoulder. Yet, when he turned the corner in his dress blues, I recognized his profile.

When a dream affects me to the point that I must sit and write, I set a timer for twenty minutes and do it. I seldom pause when writing with a pen in hand. Therefore, the scribbles are most likely only legible to me. I once tried to learn shorthand so that I could write faster, but the dashes and slashes and symbols were too foreign to understand.

The cool thing about handwritten drafts are that I can use a private symbol or abbreviation such as “ELAB” or “R” when I want to elaborate or research more for the typed version of a story. Typing the rough draft is easy; editing not so much. When typing the words, I slow down, seeing the edits that need to be made such as punctuation, verb tense, and spacing. However, I often begin to rewrite, which wastes time. Once I spent two hours editing only to realize I had already edited it and saved it under a different file name.

Being me has made it difficult to hand editing over to others, but the feedback has helped to clarify my words. However, I am still the one to make the final edits, something I need to let go of. When editing, I can get sidetracked with the aesthetics of the layout. Playing with fonts, margins, and sizing is fun, but then the urge to just finish reminds me none of that is important. The truth is stories need to be more complete than just the visual effects of the words on the page.

I believe every story brings a piece of peace when it ends. But the reality is that even the most effective words only affect readers who understood the story. When I wrote “Dear Baby, Get Out!” my hope was to share the final days of pregnancy in a humorous story so that the reader, hopefully an overdue mom-to-be, would be able to relate.

My stories are inspired and influenced by moments reflecting what ifs, whys, and what would I have done in that circumstance. In “An Angel’s Journey,” the reader contemplates if there is more to life after death. There are stories in the air that certainly have affected me, or I wouldn’t have picked up a pen.

Author, florist, and mom, AM Grout sees family, flowers, and faith as the core of her existence. Sharing thoughts, dreams, and experiences inspires her to write. Often a quest for answers creates “what if” scenarios that fuel her imagination and her pen.

 

THE ROBIN HOOD STORY OF QUINOA

by Tamara Stenn

It is 2019 and, after centuries of wandering, Robin Hood finds himself high in the Andes Mountains of Pachamama. The Earth Mother’s skirt folds as he seeks new ways in which to distribute resources and build equality. Pachamama is massive and encompassing, holding the world and all its inhabitants, ecosystems, and life in her arms. Robin does not even realize she is there. He merely thinks he is traversing a landscape.

“Oh, I take from ye rich an’ give ta’ ye poor,” he sings to himself as he ambles along.

Robin is in search of a Grain of Gold he had heard about from a condor, a sacred Andean bird of prey. The other day he had helped Condor untangle himself from a ski lift tow rope that had been left at the foot of Chacaltaya, once the site of the world’s highest ski slope but now just a barren, rocky plain — another victim of global warming. Condor got tangled up while seeking his favorite snow cave perch which had melted. Lucky for him this funny guy in green tights and a pointy hat with a long feather showed up just in time. Condor was getting cold and hungry with his long talons hopelessly tangled.

At first Condor thought Robin was a duende, an Andean leprechaun, ready to tease him with tricks and mischief, but Condor was relieved to learn that this was just an earnest, though lost, chap seeking to build some economic equality in the world. He liked Robin, and when both realized neither was a threat to the other, and after some creative rope cutting, they settled down and had a chat over a hot cup of coca leaf tea. It was the perfect thing to take the edge off of the cold, high altitude.

Learning that Robin was into economic equality, Condor mentioned that there were “grains of gold” nearby. Robin was delighted.

“A new opportunity to redistribute riches!” he exclaimed.

Condor spilled a few drops of tea on the rocky ground. He said he was sharing it with “Pachamama,” an earth goddess who lived nearby. Condor then offered to drop off Robin at the salt flats far below, closer to where the grains of gold were. Robin gladly climbed onto Condor’s back and away they soared. After all one good turn deserved another, did it not?

And so Robin continued on his way. “Around the volcano, past the dried seas, to the foot of those red and orange hills,” Condor had directed.

Robin is happy with his good fortune of having met Condor the day before. He thinks about the Grain of Gold. Whatever could it be? A coin? A seed that grew gold? Like a money tree? Wouldn’t that be something to show Maid Marian and the merry men back home? Filling the Sherwood forest with money trees! He would rename it the ‘Share Would’ Forest to make sure everyone would share all they found there. His head was swirling with good thoughts.

Dr. Tamara Stenn is an economist, social entrepreneur, author, researcher, and Business faculty at Landmark College. She is the founder of KUSIKUY, a handknit alpaca clothing company from Bolivia. Her new book based on three years of Fulbright research on Bolivian quinoa growers comes out in the fall of 2019.

 

SMALL-TOWN VOTING

by Siegfried Haug

“Name?” Shirley asks.

Shirley knows my name. We’ve been hanging out for years at various small-town functions: lunch at the Council for Aging, Greenwood Music Camp . . . today, though is voting-day as she flips through our list of registered voters. All eight pages of it, and she has a hard time with my last name. “H-A-W ?”

“No,” I say, “H-A-U.”

We do that every other year. In between we are strictly on a first name basis.

“Address?”

We are going through these steps as if walking in a religious procession. There is nothing of the silly rigamarole it could be. It feels like a larger-than-life ritual. It is voting day. Tuesday, November 6, 2018, a day of reckoning.

At 7 we drive up to Town Hall. It is drizzling, and there is still a parking spot by the library door. Fifteen minutes later, after a bit of post-ballot chatting and a doughnut, all 12 parking spaces are full, and people have to half-jog over from the general store. Shoulders hunched. Braving the rain.

There was a bit of a hold-up before my ballot could be cranked into the old strong-box. The red-head senior who has to ascertain name and address one more time also thinks she knows how to spell my name.

“No, Pam, it’s H-A-U-G.”

Flustered she flips pack and forth in the voters list, ruler poised to keep her lines straight.

“By the end of the day,” I say, “you’ll know your alphabet.” Pam gives me a wry smile. She was an English teacher not too far back.

And then there is Serious-John who cranks the ballots into the box.

“No,” He says. “The other way around.”

From year to year I forget which way around to feed the paper.

Daryl, our youngest cop, sits to the left of the voting machine and hands out stickers. “I VOTED.” He overheard the crack I made to Pam and allows for a minimalist smile. Maybe Pam was his teacher. Maybe young cops are not supposed to smile. Maybe he honors the collective gravitas.

A young woman, a teacher at Hingham, rushes back in and cuts the line: “I forgot my sticker! It’s for my colleagues and students,” she explains, teaching by example. I voted, did you?

This particular mid-term Tuesday has a different feel. The person we are voting on is not even on the ballot. It feels more like a cross-partisan, all-American effort to affirm common decency. We might not see eye to eye on tariffs, but we do know that taking children away from their mothers is wrong.

After decades of ambivalent rhetorical spins we are now back to basics. What a costly way down to what we all know to be true. I believe it might have been worth it.

Siegfried Haug is the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. A suspense novel, BAD SLEEP, will be published in early spring, 2019. Retired now from clinical work and teaching, he lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in the foothills of the Berkshires. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.

 

D-DAY

by Elaine Reardon

Early June brings my sister’s birthday and memories of D-Day. For those of you who didn’t have a father who landed on the beaches of Normandy, I’ll explain that my sister’s birthday is June 3, and D-Day quickly follows on June 6. While one usually doesn’t celebrate D-Day, because it was so important in my Dad’s memory, my sister and I still commemorate it by calling to say “Hello, It’s D-Day.”

Since my father passed away, important books and movies about D-Day have been popular. But my memories are quite different. They are safe snuggly stories I heard when my father tucked us into bed. The telling was age-appropriate, and I felt very safe with him.

Many of the stories took place where Dad camped out in Dartmoor, near the river. It was beautiful there, and I suspect it reminded him of Ireland. It was certainly the closest he’d been to home since he’d left. He told me stories of the waiting. There were tall ferns growing, rabbits ran by, and Dad was once lucky enough to get a chocolate bar in his rations. It was a special treat, and he packed it away in his pup tent to save for special. Later, when he retrieved it, he found the mice had enjoyed it first. It was almost all nibbled away. Each time I nibble on chocolate I think how dear that chocolate bar was and how sometimes we hold onto things that are precious too long.

Dartmoor sounded like paradise. I imagined rabbits and mice dashing through field of ferns and a field filled with small tents to crawl into at night. And all the bright stars above to see. I’d drift off to sleep holding Dad’s hand.

I heard how the troops landed on the beach and scaled the cliffs. Later I heard how they marched into Paris, right by the Eiffel Tower. Dad kept in scant touch with his brothers, all fighting in different countries. I remember one story about his group walking down a country road in France at the same time the Germans were leaving. Everyone was tired, hungry, and on edge. They finally came to a farmhouse but didn’t know who was there. The owners were hiding in the cellar as they didn’t know who was coming down the road. Luckily the family shared their food. Now I share this smattering of old memories with you.

When the war ended Dad returned to Boston and married my mother. After a time, my sister and I came to be, and the stories about D-Day began as each June approached.

Years later I was on a retreat in Totness, England, and I traveled downstream to Dartmoor on a passenger boat. You could have knocked me over with a feather when the captain pointed and said, “That’s where the Yanks were camped waiting for D-Day.” I had come to the field of rabbits, nibbled chocolate, and fern and was finally able to walk here myself.

Elaine is a poet, herbalist, educator, and member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. Her chapbook THE HEART IS A NURSERY FOR HOPE won first honors from Flutter Press. Most recently Elaine’s poetry has been published by Crossways Journal, UCLA journal, and Automatic Pilot. She has a website.

 

LESSONS FROM BIG RED

by Ellie Dias

It’s an ominous sight. It’s red, incredibly red, and huge. It’s packed to the hilt and looks as if it’s going to explode on contact. For the first time, I see it fully packed. It seems bigger and heavier the closer I get. It appears as if I could fit inside with ease, if it were empty, which it’s not. Suddenly an inner voice speaks to me. It’s way too heavy, Ellie. You’d better take some stuff out. Meet the Big Red Suitcase, hereafter fondly referred to as Big Red.

I reach down to open the red monstrosity, unsure of what I can jettison. Before my hand even touches the zipper another voice asks me, Ellie, how can you travel without all your must-haves, the safety items, color-coordinated outfits, rolls of toilet paper, bags of candy and trail mix, all so crucial for your trip of a lifetime?

My husband, Ron, calls. “Come on Ellie, we’d better get started if you don’t want to miss your flight.” I groan as I wrestle it upright again and pull it out of the bedroom for its first meeting with Ron.

“I know it’s a little hefty.” I say.

“A little?” he replies.

“Yes, but I need everything in that suitcase; besides it’ll all make me feel at home.”

Ron looks at me. “For the jungle?” he asks.

For this, I have no answer. I offer to help. As we heave it into the hatch he says, “Really, Ellie, this thing is unmanageable.”

With Big Red hunkered down in the back, we head to Boston’s Logan Airport, where I will depart for JFK in New York, where my long-planned travels to the fabled Three Kingdoms of the Himalayas will begin.

We arrive at the airport where the big guy at the check-in counter moans when he lifts Big Red on the scale. “Miss, your suitcase weighs in at 95 pounds, way over the domestic weight limit. Would you like to remove something? If not, it will cost you one hundred dollars.”

I consider for a moment taking out the three cans of mosquito spray along with the half-gallon jug of Permethrin to protect me from dengue fever, or the ten bags of trail mix, power bars, crackers, and cheese. Should I risk getting dengue fever or pay the hundred bucks? No choice there. I pay the hundred-dollar excess baggage fee believing it’s a small price to pay to stay true to my conviction that I need absolutely everything in Big Red.

It never dawns on me that my packing does not jibe with the fact that I am about to spend almost a month exploring a part of the world that warrants only t-shirts and jeans. Nor do I ever stop to think that I must pull, push, and somehow lift this mammoth beast, by myself, through twenty-two airports. Only when it is too late, will I realize the one thing I needed most – and should have packed before anything else – is common sense.

Ellie Dias is a devotee of Buddhist philosophy. Her career has focused on health and wellness as a biology professor, pediatric nurse, clinician working with families whose babies were at risk for SIDS, and division VP of a women’s health care company. She lives with her husband Ron in Massachusetts. This essay is an excerpt from her book BIG RED: HOW I LEARNED SIMPLICITY FROM A SUITCASE (Buddhapuss Ink LLC, 2017).

 

SARDINIA 2018

by Siegfried Haug

The man squints and takes his cigarette out of his mouth. It is a signal for his neighbor to lean in a bit closer. The bar spills onto the sidewalk, steps away from our door.

“Gatino.” I can see the lips forming the word. Kitten.

Both men hold a morning-glass of Vermentino in their fists — nothing long-stemmed here — and, looking over their left shoulder, watch me limp by.

“Buongiorno.”

Everybody at the cafe nods a polite buongiorno.

It is ten in the morning in Seneghe, Provincia Oristano, Sardegna, Italy, and the Americans have arrived at the Mastinu’s.

The white-haired one – meaning: me — stepped on a kitten’s tail. He twisted his knee, the left. He is hobbling off now with his drawing-pad.

Which is correct. All of it, and I am off to sketch the Chiesa Santa Maria Della Rosa. The church is abandoned most of the year except for one day in spring when serious men ride large horses round and round its weedy grounds at breakneck speeds. It goes way back this commemoration, hundreds, maybe thousands of years — a Saracen invasion? Arab pirates? The Arragonese?

Our adoptive family has lived here for many generations.

A sepia wedding picture shows a young couple sitting on a horse. She looks like one unhappy bride. “She never got over her misery,” Maria says. “She was just a girl.” And he so dashing! And her clothes so diligently made!

It is all so romantic, so picturesque, so history-soaked, so family-bound.

I am sketching an ancient iron door-knocker on a ratty gate — blue bale-twine secured — when Maria, my brother’s Sardinian wife, sits down next to me.

The gate, she says in German, our one common language — vowels just a smidgen too long — the gate goes into Beppo’s property. Beppo goes out only at night, and only to water his cows.

“With a wheelbarrow.”

“Mhmm,” I say.

Presumably watering cows with a wheelbarrow makes Sardinian sense.

For Maria to sit with me, mid-morning, on a stone wall opposite Beppo’s is only permissible because she sits with ME, the American-Who-Draws.

Her people have lived here for a hundred years and she had never been in Via Pippia just around the corner from her house.

“There was no reason to.”

A good reason would have been going to the store or visiting a relative. But the store is behind the church and the closest relative is incommunicado because of an ancient inheritance dispute.

“Beppo asked me the other night which of the wires – she lifts her chin towards the house wall — belongs to me and which is Josephina’s.”

I look up from my sketch.

“He wants to cut hers.”

“What?”

“Because he got a parking ticket.”

“He the guy who always parks on the bus-stop?”

“He thinks Josephina ratted him out.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because he talked to the major about her.”

I give her a blank look.

“Because of her flower pots.”

She grows still. Sardinia, rural Germany – it’s stories like these that made me leave home. I look over at my sister-in-law. How well I know this: being-of-two-minds.

Leaving home as a young man is one thing; returning home in retirement, as Maria has, quite another. Holding on to that condo in Milano as they are, might be wise indeed.

Siegfried Haug is the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. A suspense novel, BAD SLEEP, caught the interest of a local publisher. Retired now from clinical work and teaching, he lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in the foothills of the Berkshires. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.

 

HALLOWEEN

by Ann C. Averill

Halloween costumes, my mom made them all. Second grade, a hot pink gypsy skirt with black rickrack at the bottom and clip-on hoop earrings that I hoped made me look like dusky Mrs. Tuthill, the only mom I knew in my 1960’s suburb with pierced ears. Third grade, a glittering green tunic over pink tights, a tight bun, and a magic wand like the one Tinker Bell waved over Disney’s castle. Fourth grade, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, in a brown cotton shirt fringed at the bottom like buckskin and a dime-store coonskin cap. Marie, my fourth-grade best friend, powdered her face funereal white and lay down in a Salvation Army wheelchair as a corpse. I marched behind, lamenting the fact that our teacher let another kid, who happened to show up as a grave digger, push my friend in the Halloween parade.

By fifth grade I was a hobo like all the big kids. No more mommy-made costumes. Just Dad’s ripped flannel shirt, a pair of work pants stained with WD40, and a crumpled fedora. Finally cut loose to dash through the dark with the pack, I buzzed every doorbell to catch the mother lode of free candy pouring from every front door: Baby Ruths, Snickers, Pay Days, Milky Ways, whole Hershey Bars, Almond Joys, Coconut Mounds, Mary Janes, Mike & Ikes, Good & Plentys, Jujubes, Tootsie Rolls, Fireballs, Sugar Babies, and Sugar Daddies – until the bewitching hour when the last lady of the house turned off her porch light and said, “Isn’t it getting a little late?” with nothing left in the bottom of her bowl but a few puny lollipops and a roll of licorice Necco Wafers.

Reluctantly I dragged my loot home and organized it on the living room rug in preparation for serious sibling trading.

Next morning in math, sucking on a Red Hot, how I grieved the return of plaid dresses, saddle shoes, and cafeteria ravioli as my teacher droned on about finding the lowest common denominator.

As a second-grade gypsy, I suppose I wanted to stand out from the crowd like exotic Mrs. Tuthill. Little did I know that’s why she fled the Nazis in her native Hungary. As Tinker Bell, I declared that ordinary life wasn’t good enough. I wanted to wave my wand and fly to a world where goodness always triumphed, and magic never ended. As Davy Crocket, I marched behind Marie’s pretend dead body, a prescient mourner unable to fight off the breast cancer that would one day bring my bosom friend to premature death. As a hobo, perhaps some pre-pubescent dawning whispered we are all alike, homeless beggars before a gracious God.

Of this I’m sure, how I loved that one hallowed eve when every child, dressed in their hopes or fears, could walk straight into the heart of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Ann Averill is the author of the e-book, BROKEN, 180 DAYS IN THE WILDERNESS OF AN URBAN MIDDLE SCHOOL, based on a true story. She is at work on a memoir, BREADCRUMBS, A BABY BOOMER’S PATH TO JESUS. Check out her blog at annaverill@weebly.com.

 

A THREE-DOG LIFE

by Diane Kane

I have lived a three-dog life. I know others who’ve had more, but three is enough for me. Growing up I never had a dog, but after I got married, I said to my husband, “I want a dog that looks like Ole Yeller.”

Bear was a yellow lab puppy with paws of great expectations. He was my constant companion through the unbearable heat of the summer of 1980 while I was pregnant with my first daughter. Bear and Shannon grew together, and he was the best big brother any little girl could have. Two years later, Danielle was born, and our family was complete.

Bear grew to be a giant of a dog, and like most big dogs, he didn’t live long; ten years, not long enough. We buried him in our backyard with his toys and a piece of my heart.

Eventually, the girls wanted another yellow lab. Cody bounded into a house of active children and fit right in. He was nothing like Bear, but then no dog could be. I tried not to love him, but I failed. Cody was a social dog and an escape artist as well. We would come home from work to messages of Cody’s escapades.

Cody died unexpectedly when he was nine years old. “Cancer,” the vet said, although he’d never shown any symptoms. My husband dug the hole near Bear and gently placed Cody into it with his favorite blanket, all his toys, and another piece of my heart.

Several years passed, and we were dogless. I didn’t think that I could love another. Then, our girls left for college, and the house took on a quiet that wouldn’t go away.

“I need someone to greet me at the door with a wagging tail,” I said to my husband.

Milo, half pug, half beagle – Puggle – had a tail that won’t stop; until one winter day when he was four years old. Milo jumped off our six-foot high deck and ruptured his back. We drove to the emergency vet through snowflakes and tears.

“You have two choices,” the vet said, “We can perform a costly operation that might save him, or we can put him down.”

The operation was long and complicated. Milo pulled through, followed by more than a year of successes and setbacks. My husband and I took turns with his daily physical therapy until he could finally walk on his own. Afterward, we agreed it was all worth it to see his little tail wag again.

Milo is twelve years old now. We reinforced the deck railings so he wouldn’t take that trip again. His legs still go out from under him when he gets too rambunctious, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

Sometimes I look at him and wonder, How big will the hole in my heart be when he is gone? After all, it really doesn’t matter. I will always be thankful to have lived a three-dog life.

Diane Kane is submissions coordinator for Quabbin Quills and co-producer of their two anthologies, TIME’S RESERVOIR and MOUNTAINS AND MEDITATIONS. She also writes food review articles for the Uniquely Quabbin Magazine. Diane’s latest accomplishment is her self-published book of flash fiction stories, FLASH IN THE CAN.

 

THE CHICKEN KILLING EPISODE

by Mohammad Yadegari

In 1963, I visited my brother, Hadi, and a friend, Mahmood, in Germany. One problem that most Muslims traveling in Europe had was finding acceptable food to eat. All meat must be from animals butchered in a particular manner to be “halal.” A person must face Mecca, recite “Bismillah” (“in the name of God the Most Gracious the Dispenser of Grace”), slit the animal’s throat, and hold it upside down to allow the blood to drain.

Hadi and Mahmood were not eating meat because there was no halal meat in the stores. So we ate a lot of bread, cheese, and eggs. I pointed out to them that the Quran allows the consumption of non-halal meat when traveling if halal meat is unavailable but they were steadfast about maintaining their piety.

Mahmood found a local chicken farmer who would sell us a chicken to slaughter ourselves and I volunteered to do the job. This undertaking turned out to be one tragic comedy of “chicken killing.”

When we arrived at the farm and saw a bloody wooden chopping block set in the middle of a yard, I felt nauseous. I had never before slaughtered a chicken. I was getting cold feet so I was pleased that neither of us remembered to bring a knife.

“Good,” I thought to myself. “This is my way out.”

Mahmood was insistent. I had promised to kill a chicken, and I was obligated to do it. I was trapped. He chided me loudly, “We were so happy when you volunteered to kill the chicken, and now you’re chickening out?”

“What’s wrong?” we heard the farmer inquire, interrupting our heated discussion.

“We forgot to bring a knife,” said Mahmood, his face as red as a lobster. The kind farmer produced a very small knife.

I was still looking for an excuse to be relieved of my obligation. The poor chicken, which surely knew her life was in my hands, started wriggling and squawking. I tried another approach. I complained about the chicken’s uncooperative behavior saying, “We should just let it go. I can’t control it.” Mahmood grabbed the chicken with both hands and shouted, “Just grab her head and say ‘bismillah’ before you cut it off.”

I had no choice. I made an attempt. I can swear that, if the chicken could laugh, she would have burst out in a loud guffaw, making a mockery of the two of us. The knife was so dull it could not pierce the poor chicken’s throat. Again, I thought I was off the hook. I shouted that the knife was too dull. The kind farmer understood and rushed into his shed to find a sharper knife.

We finally did the job and, emotionally spent, headed home with our chicken. I conveniently neglected to tell Mahmood that we forgot to face Mecca and I am still not sure if our chicken was halal.

Mohammad Yadegari, an Iranian born in Iraq, moved to the United States in 1964. He studied at SUNYA and NYU and then taught mathematics and history in both high school and college. “The Chicken Killing Episode” is from his recently completed cultural memoir, A TALE OF THREE CITIES.

 

COUNTRY ROADS

by Opal Gayle

I have not been home in twenty-three years. So, I’ve forgotten how to get to Red Grung, where the guava trees, pregnant with fruit, would droop towards earth. And where the pond fills up with water during heavy floods, and children are warned to stay away lest the giant whirl in the middle sucks us down into the belly of the earth.

I don’t remember what my father and our neighbor Mas Sweetie, argued about that rainy Sunday morning, but, after that, I was forbidden to set foot in his yard again, and I had to hide and play with his daughter Natalie.

What I do remember is walking those sparsely paved roads with my father and never arriving anywhere on time because he talked to everyone. They would discuss their health: the pain in their neck and back, the knee that had been bothering them for a whole month. The rising price of kerosene, Bay rum, and Tiger Balm. The corn on their toes that squeezed no matter which shoes they wore. And the left eye that had been twitching since the last time it rained.

And they would remember the good ol’ days when for only a shilling they could buy bread, salt, and a whole stick of butter. When saltfish was so cheap that people used it to shingle their house tops. When the days were longer, and Christmas had more Christ in it. The good ol’ days when children had manners and knew their place.

They recalled when Sir Alexander Bustamante, Jamaica’s very first prime minister, was in power and the labor party ruled. When the English pound was only five dollars, and people would wear a three-piece suit and their good church shoes to get on an airplane. The roads were in much better condition then, and the voting districts did not report more ballots than the amount of residents that the census bureau documented.

And if ever my father met a stranger they would dig up graves in their heads, naming all their relatives and going down the family tree until they discover that they were both cousins of Philemon Rumble, not the Philemon Rumble that Miss Dinah’s donkey kicked in the head. But, the Philemon Rumble who married Mary Lee, a dignified woman who was too proud to pass gas in public, so she held it with all her might, and it went back into her body, traveled up her spine, and into her head where it busted a blood vessel and killed her instantly.

No, I have not been home in twenty-three years. And yet my mouth waters every June because my taste buds remind me that it’s mango season. And I travel back in time to the sidewalks where the street vendors lined the roads with the blood-red otaheite apples and sing praises of their sweetness and unbeatable prices. And, today, when twilight comes, I lament the lack of ceremony as I flipped the light switch upwards. And I remember fondly the days when I baptized the soot-filled lampshade into the soapy water, and it emerged, the timeless message still impressed on the glass – “home sweet home”.

Opal Gayle grew up in rural Jamaica. She is a graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Saint Louis University. A poetry and language aficionada, she has been writing with Writers In Progress for over a year. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she teaches Spanish and French. Ongayle@hotmail.com

 

EDDIE ASKS THE OCEAN FOR HIS GIRL BACK

by Ernie Brill

In the San Francisco summer of 1965, Eddie and Coral met at a party of fellow artists and writers and fell magnetically in love, dancing like one person. She painted and made jewelry: obsidian necklaces, turquoise earrings, carnelian bracelets. He was halfway through a short story collection about growing up in a Brooklyn project.

They spent a mostly naked week in a cabin with no heat or electricity at an ocean meadow north of San Francisco. Her rosy creamy complexion was the lighter part of an opened strawberry. She had sexily crooked oversized front teeth like a beaver eating chiclets.

They found a ratty stinking six room apartment in a condemned building on a street no longer there. They cleaned. They washed the ceilings and the floors. They tore out the linoleum and found newspapers announcing Hitler’s invasion of Poland. They hit the Goodwills and Thrifts for furniture. They painted all the rooms white, except for the kitchen and bathroom. She painted the stove and refrigerator flaming orange. She painted the bathtub purple and the toilet red, humming.

When his salesman uncle visited he smiled benevolently the whole time, then reported to the family back East that Eddie was “shacked up” in sin with a crazed hippie very attractive on the hefty side but what’s with the red toilet.

Coral painted big, seven by four feet, sumptuous purple-blue hills and sundry sultry round forms. She made “stained glass for poor people,” playing with small colored glass windows to fit half a regular window curliqued with rice paper, then used gouaches, watercolors, and oil to experiment with light.

Coral claimed kinship with the ocean. Often, she’d go before dawn, strip, and, for a long time, sit in the surf, singing although she couldn’t carry a note to save her life. She desired to give the waves gifts.

One breezy night with friends they went to the beach and built a fire. She and Eddie strolled in the surf then, splashing, raced down to the beach. Four breathless dunes down, she stripped and entered the ocean, ignoring the undertow sign, plunging into the black-green waves. She swam; a full moon lit the ocean. She dove, surfaced, dove and surfaced again, dove.

Suddenly, Eddie saw only enormous silence. He called her name. He heard only the waves. He walked rapidly, then ran in little circles. Panic surged. Loss of breath choked him.

Eddie stared at the ocean, hard.

“Give her back.”

He frowned at the black waves.

Some waves turned dark green. A slight whiteness flowed near, closer. She swam calmly then rose from the water. At the shore, he ran and took her in his arms. She smiled, her eyes faraway as he rubbed her shivering body.

“I had this feeling you weren’t coming back.”

“Me too,” she whispered.

As she dreamily sought her clothes, Eddie faced the ocean.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

Ernie Brill is finishing a novel about a tumultuous strike against racism at San Francisco State College. Ruby Dee performed for PBS his story “Crazy Hattie Enters The Ice Age” from his collection I LOOKED OVER JORDAN AND OTHER STORIES (South End Press, Boston). He has widely published stories and poems in small presses.

 

I WORRY ABOUT THE COACH

by Steve Bernstein

The same week the young soccer team got stuck in those caves in Thailand, our government was putting kids in cages over here. Cages here, caves there. I had a feeling the cave kids would be okay.

Along with the rescue teams, the people of Thailand joined forces, cooking food, washing clothes, supplying transportation and doing whatever they could. The world was pulling for this young soccer team. I felt a little hopeful.

But I worry about this young coach. A diver lost his life trying to rescue the kids. I wonder how much guilt the coach is walking around with? How’s life going to be for him? He encouraged the team to explore the caves. The kids’ parents reached out and consoled him. No blame. They understood.

The whole thing threw me back.

It was 1968. South Bronx. July. I was fourteen. It was hot. Real hot. I was out in the street and went into the bodega to buy a cold soda. Pappo, the owner’s kid, came up to me and asked “Yo bro, you got that big wrench to open up the hydrant? “Nah man,” I said, “Wish I did.”

Being the only white kid on the block, I needed some street cred. One of those credentials was that I had that special know-how to open up the fire hydrants with my old man’s big ass monkey wrench. Opening that hydrant was our version of making a swimming pool out of the street, giving us kids a way to cool off. Even though it was only six inches deep and trash and dog shit was floating around, we didn’t care. It was wet and the water that streamed out of the hydrant was cold and hard. Refreshing.

But my old man wasn’t around, neither was his plumbing van that had the wrench. So I said to Pappo, “I got another idea. I know this little place under the old High Bridge where we can jump in the river and swim around and cool off.” Me, Pappo and his two buddies walked the few blocks up the E. L. Grant Highway and I brought them to a little spot under the bridge where there were giant rocks holding up one of the supporting bridge pillars. I thought I was hot shit having this cool secret swimming hole nobody knew about.

It was me, Pappo and his two buddies that jumped in. Didn’t matter that the river was slimy, it was at least wet. It was me and Pappo’s two buddies that came out.

Pappo drowned. I didn’t know he couldn’t swim. I brought him there. I couldn’t save him. Even though his dad forgave me, just like those Thai parents forgave the coach, I’ve been carrying this guilt around with me for fifty years.

That’s why I worry about the young coach.

Steve Bernstein is a retired plumber who for over three decades has been a teacher and mentor for at-risk-teens as wall as an animal rights activist and humane educator. He recently self-published STORIES FROM THE STOOP, seven adventure stories from his colorful childhood growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s. He can be reached at stevebernsteinauthor@gmail.com.

 

SWINDLED: A FRACTURED FAIRYTALE

By Marya Zilberberg

Welcome to “Ye’ Old Pumpkin” trailer park! I’m Roxanne DeBree, the super. You look like a nice fella. Want some coffee? Pull up a chair.

Tell you a secret: I was married once. To a wealthy man. You heard of him.

Don’t go! They never believe me. What a world… Oh, thanks. I didn’t know you could buy hankies any more.

You think it’s easy to be someone else? I was Mrs. Charmoff! I had everything – looks, money, a fairy godmother. Look at me now – a washed up bleach-blonde in leopard-skin tights and a flower print. Managing a trailer park! I wouldn’t wish this on my stepsisters.

Oh, now you want to know what happened. Hmm. You remember the glass slipper? He found me and we got married, right? Well, the honeymoon in Maui was fabulous: ocean views, balls. The fireplace in our suite? Self-cleaning! Bernie… Yeah, Bernard L. Charmoff. The third. He was everything – handsome, smart, a prince!

We came home to a penthouse on Central Park West, you know, in the high 70s. Not a bad wedding gift, hey? A year later – boom, Wilhelmina. Beautiful baby! She’s right next-door. Minnie, come here! Baby, fix your shirt, your bra is showing! Bobo, unfold that chair for your Ma! My grandson, Bobo. Shake the nice man’s hand! His father did marketing for Bernie. Dartmouth, Wharton, blue-eyes, a charmer. So he was married… Anyway, here is our Bobo; isn’t he a love? Bobo, we don’t point guns at our guests. Go get a Coke. Hey, Minnie, light me one of those, will you?

Right, where was I? Oh, yes, three years later we had Bernie Junior. The fourth. Hmm? Where is he now? Good question…

Bernie was a great father! Never wanted to leave the kids, worked from home. Traveled, though. Yeah, went back to Fairyland. A lot. Always thought he was bopping that harlot Rapunzel, but… You know, he had lots of clients there. They were nice, except some of them were real pigs. He loved that family with the gland condition. “Bernie’s bears” he called them. The wolves, the dwarves – they preferred “little people” – they all loved my Bernie. ‘Cause he was one of them.

I don’t know what went wrong. That night the feds came… Hey, Minnie, light me another one, honey, would you? Where’s that tissue?

Where…? Oh, yes, the feds. We lost everything. What am I supposed to do with these kids now? Look at me: trailer park, fake name! Yeah, I had to, ‘cause Cynda Rella-Charmoff was hangin’ in every post office! Oh, that’s funny. Yeah, sure, my name de plume.

Hey, don’t look! I said don’t turn around! Minnie, is that that old queen again? Yeah, Snow White’s stepfather. He’s a bounty hunter now.

Whew, lock the door, honey! Don’t open the curtains! Is he still there? Oh, god, I shoulda married Red. Can you believe her? Madam Secretary of State and she’s still sweet-talking a buncha wolves!

You want another cup?

Marya Zilberberg is a health services researcher, poet, and writer. She is the author of BETWEEN THE LINES: FINDING THE TRUTH IN MEDICAL LITERATURE. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Cleaver, Vox Poetica, and The Blue Hour, among others.

 

I AM FROM

by Carla Savetsky

I am from asphalt and tar, dark apartments in Queens and Brooklyn, suburban blocks with large, Tudor homes and old growth sycamores. I am from peasant stock, those from the old country where the borders of Austria and Romania and Poland converged and shifted many times over, like the tectonic plates that lay beneath them.

I am from tragic loss, the unspeakable atrocity of six million Jews gassed in the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau. From the silenced lips of Ukrainian Jews who had their land and businesses confiscated by the Cossacks and then went into hiding — eventually fleeing to Israel and Hong Kong, Chicago, and New York. I am from this resilient strain, the heartiest of refugees, having lived through Siberian winters in unheated rooms with nothing to eat but the soup of old bones, boiled over and over again. I am from a lineage of women who crossed the Atlantic in the bowels of an ocean liner, overcome with a nausea all-consuming, inflicted by the tiniest of lives growing in their wombs.

I am from the aftermath of that era, and all the darkness and grief and sorrow that had no luxury of an outlet. My body was created from the children of those who’d imbibed the purest of evil, taking up residence in their cells and tarnishing them a permanently darker hue. And in the New World of hope there was no room for the cloying despair, where all was a bit too bright, a visceral dissonance.

I am from that progressive suburban town just two generations down from the pogroms, the slaughter, the dictates of Adolph Hitler, with integrated school systems, “open classrooms,” accelerated math, and Homecoming. I am from packs of teenage boys and girls that drank until everything went black, and smoked hashish out of sparkly pipes, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on repeat for hours at a time, smuggling munchies from the kitchen and then smoking some more.

I am from Greek diners on treeless highways, Chinese restaurants on the Upper West Side, and bohemian cafes along the foggy Mission, cloaked in a long black cape.

I am from a sacred line of women healers woven through many past lives — midwives and nurses, witches, and plant-shaman. I was dreamt into being through the mind of the high priestess in the long purple dress. Her understandings have been passed down through my very essence, living in my teeth and bones.

I am from the scorched earth in an unforgiving desert and sunny fields of dandelions with golden medicine in their stems. I am from a pink-tinged star blinking in a distant solar system and the shimmering moonlight on the clearest of black nights.

I am the abyss.

Carla Savetsky is a holistic women’s health specialist, healer, mother, singer, and writer. She is currently finishing the second draft of a memoir about spiritual guidance in the face of a life-threatening illness. She lives in Amherst with her teenage son and pet snoodle.

 

NATURE COMES A-COURTING

by Joan Axelrod-Contrada

Freddy courted me with nature. He took me to Breakheart Reservation in Saugus on a crisp fall day in 1983.

“Did you ever notice how the woods smell like cornflakes?” he asked.

“No, but I like that.” A breeze blew through my hair, and it felt like happiness.

Freddy’s brain worked sideways, not just up and down, and I liked that.

He took some birdseed out of his pocket and put it in my hand, then instructed me to outstretch my arm. A chickadee landed in my palm. Its little clawed feet tickled, and I let out a little squeal of delight.

No longer was I just the career-driven, city slicker, muckraking journalist I saw in the mirror every morning. Freddy helped me rediscover the nature girl in me, the one who’d grown up on a dead-end street, catching grasshoppers with the neighborhood boys.

Next, he brought me to the Ipswich Audubon Sanctuary where we watched river otters dive and somersault like underwater acrobats. They belly-flopped onto land, then slid back into the water.

Freddy put his arm around me, and we breathed together, and I stopped pining away for the artsy hipsters who brought me to smoky jazz clubs. I smiled every time Freddy called “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” to the little black-capped birds that answered back.

We talked about our favorite birds. I adored woodpeckers for their drumming abilities and patch of red on their heads. Freddy went for novelty, which fit with his adventurous spirit. He’d spent his twenties working odd jobs and writing novels like his hero Jack Kerouac. “The most beautiful bird is the one I’ve never seen before,” he said.

One Saturday in the dead of winter, Freddy called and asked if I wanted to go see the snowy owls at Logan Airport. His cousin Rudy worked in security and knew the places where they nested.

“Sure,” I said.

I’d already met cousin Rudy’s dad. Uncle Rudy had kissed my hand and offered me a shot of Frangelico.

Cousin Rudy greeted me with hug. I told him how I’d been totally charmed when his dad kissed my hand. I half expected him to recoil with embarrassment like the jaded rich kids I knew, but instead he beamed affection for his dad. I wanted Freddy and Rudy to adopt me as an honorary Italian.

Rudy drove us to a deserted stretch of runway where the owls migrated south from the Arctic tundra. Silence blanketed the desolate land. We saw what looked like cotton balls in the distance. Rudy kept driving until the white fluff took on distinctly owl-like shapes. We tumbled out of the car to get a better look. I stared into the closest one’s yellow eyes. The feathers around its neck looked soft and furry.

I hugged Freddy and whispered, “Thanks.” Something in me had changed. I’d reconnected with my old nature-girl self but also discovered a whole new world.

That’s the day I fell in love with him.

Joan Axelrod-Contrada is a former correspondent for The Boston Globe and the author of 20 books for children. She is also the founder and editor of WriteAngles Journal. She can be reached at joanaxelrodcontrada@gmail.com

 

THE INVITATION

by Amy Laprade

“You seem like you could use a friend.” His eyes stroked her pale freckled thighs that’d spilled below the frayed hems of her denim shorts. “You know, you could hang here … you know, if you like to party … you could cut school and uh, I got cold beer and uh, I could turn you on to some reefer.”

She’d just turned thirteen, and it was a year for busting out. Her clothes from last summer no longer fit. Neither did her attitude at home. How to belong to the in-crowd at school was a mystery to her, but she wasn’t sure that she cared enough to try. Busting out. Boys. Freedom. Cutting school, eh? Needing a friend, eh?

His eyes, the color of rain, had turned sleet and were slick and hard like two panes of glass. He held his gaze from the cracked, concrete stoop. His Harley was parked under the willow that’d shielded the pink, paint-peeled house from the baking heat. The half moons on the window shutters made her think of lidded eyes.

She folded her arms, nervously cupped her elbows, and wondered where his girl Maxine was. She’d never not seen Maxine around. The two were inseparable. Their leather. Their boots. His long hair and the delicate strands of pewter that laced through his beard. Her fabulous fashion sense. Inseparable.

Except Maxine was gone, along with that ear for listening patiently to her adolescent woes whenever Mother wouldn’t, and here he was and far too old.

“Umm, thanks, but I have homework.” She mounted her bike, feeling his eyes on her back as she pedaled away.

Amy Laprade is the author of the novel So Nice to Finally Meet You…. Her work has appeared in Canyon Voices, Plum Literary Journal and Meat for Tea, the Valley Review. Her second novel, Behind the Magic 8 Ball, is forthcoming through Human Error Press.

 

THE GENIUS FAILED TWELFTH GRADE

by Mohammad Yadegari

It was June 1962. Three years had passed since I had moved to Tehran in accordance with my father’s plan to move the family gradually from Iraq to Iran. Whereas women in Iraq wore heavy veils in public, many of them covering their faces and avoiding talking to anyone who namahram (Any man not permitted to see a woman without her chador), females in Tehran oozed sex appeal and loved to be the center of attention.

I did not attend school in Tehran as often as I should have. At first, I found the material and teachers boring. The students seemed aloof and stood around striking poses, trying to look like American movie stars. Combing their hair constantly, the boys tried to look like James Dean or Elvis Presley.

I passed the tenth grade without studying or even attending class on many of the school days. Eleventh grade was a bit more difficult but no big problem. All I wanted was a passing grade. In twelfth grade, I began to encounter some difficulties. No problem again. I enrolled in a school that did not set high standards. But, still, I hit a wall. I failed. It was hard for me to understand why. I had been told that I was smart. I knew I was smart. I had been well read. Even in those years that I pursued carnal pleasures, I still read hundreds of books. Reading was my hobby. I was even writing, translating, and publishing articles while still in high school. How could I fail twelfth grade?

The day I learned that I had failed twelfth grade, my father was visiting. According to his plan to move his businesses out of Iraq, he took periodic trips to keep tabs on his places of business in Karaj, Iran. As soon as I entered the public bath and greeted him, I leaned against the counter behind which tea, coffee, and sweets were being served. He was sitting in a comfortable chair puffing on his Kent cigarette. He asked me if I passed. I ignored his question. He repeated it. I mumbled in Arabic (because strangers were around) that I failed. But my nerves were too frayed and my voice was too weak and stuck in the abyss of my throat to articulate the startling truth.

He repeated again, “Did you pass?” I informed him softly that I had failed. I looked at him indirectly. His eyes were piercing. His silence was louder than screams. His disappointment was overwhelming. “YOU, MOHAMMAD, FAILED?” he exclaimed in disbelief, emphasizing and accenting every word. While this seemed a rebuke, and while I was embarrassed to face him, I sensed something more. I sensed his high expectations. Never before had he expressed such confidence in me. My father was always too busy to tell me he loved me. And now, here, expressing his disappointment in my failure, he told me what every child wishes to hear, “I love you, son.”

Mohammad Yadegari, an Iranian born in Iraq, moved to the United States in 1964. He studied at SUNYA and NYU and then taught mathematics and history in both high school and college. “The Genius Failed Twelfth Grade” is from his recently completed cultural memoir, A TALE OF THREE CITIES.

 

TREASURED ITEM

by D.K. McCutchen

My cranky high schooler visits my class during her break. Her friends are away. My college students ignore the newcomer with pointed glances. I want to brag: Mine-mine-mine! So cool in her hand-stitched “Black-Lives-Matter” jacket and eyebrow piercing.

My chest feels full. She could easily pass: Tall, telltale red hair hidden under a watch cap. Nothing to link her to me, and outside students have sat-in before. I’m not allowed an introduction. I’m sneaky though.

“Pippin. Can you open the window?”

She frowns (no dummy) and another student opens it instead. She joins the class exercise as an objective observer, meant to comment first when the persuasive role-playing game is over. I’m more reticent with her than with my students, as we drift from group to group, eavesdropping on their private plans to a) negotiate, b) steal, c) go to war over a treasured item.

The game goes in an unexpected direction and war is never mentioned, to our mutual surprise (my daughter has played this game before). Sharing is an obvious goal on both sides, though I’ve forbidden it (hoping they’ll break the rules, move beyond the framework, find their voices in opposition to instructions). For once, the aggressors negotiate. For once, the pacifists don’t just stonewall (a common practice when one owns the prize).

They’re so reasonable! If war is a failure of negotiation then, given time, both sides would have won. In this game, each side has to give a little, break a rule or two, to get what they want. As we leave the classroom colosseum, my teenager and I have a quiet moment acknowledging this, before we head home, drop all pretense of negotiation, and mutually gird our loins for war.

D. K. McCutchen teaches writing for UMass College of Natural Sciences. Lack of poetic-DNA led to a tale of low adventure titled THE WHALE ROAD. In a literary attempt to save the world, she’s now writing gender-bender-post-apocalyptic-speculative fiction. She lives on a river with two brilliant daughters and a Kiwi, who isn’t green, but is fuzzy.

 

TARZAN

by Ann C. Averill

When I was a little girl, my family ate dinner at 6:30 every night. A meat, a vegetable, a starch, and a homemade dessert like tapioca pudding or apple brown betty. Often my brother and I watched The Early Show from 5:00-7:00 PM featuring movies like Mothra Meets Godzilla. That meant just before every climax, we’d be called to the dining room to place napkins on our laps, and say, God is great, God is good, and we thank Him for our food.

What I really wanted to pray was, God, please, let me finish the movie.

On one miraculous occasion a Tarzan movie, starring Johnny Weissmuller, aired the same night we had a babysitter, so my brother and I were allowed to eat in the den on folding trays. We ripped into TV dinners and ate Salisbury steak, tater tots, and green beans right in front of the television while Tarzan swung from vine to vine to his tree house on the escarpment.

Jane, played by Maureen O’Sullivan, waited for her man in an animal-skin mini dress, ready to serve roast wildebeest and mashed bananas. Tarzan sat at the table in his loin cloth. After a day of swimming raging rivers, wrestling alligators, and fighting off greedy white hunters, it was good to relax with his mate and Cheetah, their chimpanzee child.

In high school, one morning in May, the kind of morning that makes you want to blast the stereo and tan on the roof, my friend Marie called, “Wanna skip school?”

“Sure!”

So, while our peers were turning the pages of Great Expectations, Marie led me to a stone wall on the edge of her neighborhood. Over the ledge lay a mansion and, ensconced by a carefully pruned privet hedge, a built-in pool. In an era of public pools full of baby pee, this was luxury reserved for movie stars. We scaled the wall, stripped into our suits, and dove into the deep end.

Then as Marie sunned in a chaise and I balanced on the tip of the diving board, a maid appeared through the shrubs. “Mr. Cushing would like to know if you’re friends of his son?”

Marie shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare, “Of course.”

Fortunately, Cushing junior was away at prep school and couldn’t contradict. The maid retreated and returned with poolside chicken salad sandwiches, no more questions asked.

Years later, I learned that Maureen O’Sullivan’s second husband was Mr. Cushing, the gracious host who’d provided us trespassing liars a free lunch. I swam in Tarzan’s wife’s pool. Yet, what a letdown to find Jane living in the suburbs.

As a child, I dreamed of living in a tree fort, like Tarzan, able to talk to animals, capable of a blood-curdling cry that could call down an elephant stampede on my enemies.

As an adult, I realize that paradigm is age old—Eternal Eve, her hunk Adam, keepers of a pristine paradise where God is great, and God is good.

This piece is an excerpt from Ann’s upcoming memoir, Breadcrumbs, A Baby Boomer’s Path to Jesus. Ann is also the author of the e-book, Broken, 180 Days in the Wilderness of an Urban Middle School, based on a true story. You can read Ann’s blog @annaverill.weebly.com.

 

MANCHURIA

by Siegfried Haug

“Your Manchurian ancestors,” my grandmother said, “when they were lucky enough to come across a flock of turkeys were overjoyed. Positively overjoyed.” She looked up from stirring her pot.

It never occurred to me — towheaded southern German farm boy — to question her sketchy family tree.

She wiped long-fingered hands on her blue-plaid apron after banking the wood in the cooking fire. Turning toward me slightly, Oma, as I called her, held up a wooden spoon, one of my grandfather’s whittling creations. He was very particular and carved only even-grained pieces of firewood for these items of elevated purpose. That spoon, Oma said, was a godsend and she couldn’t see how she’d ever do without it.

She scooped up some of the Manchurian turkey stew, brought it to her lips and tasted it in such a seriously focused way, I felt compelled to hold my breath.

“Mmh …” she said, “Turkey á la Manchuria — needs some fresh parsley.”

Everything she cooked needed fresh parsley. That, and early in spring, when it needed fresh chives. Chives that were so young and tender they cried watery droplets when you cut them.

Grandmother had pointed out their tears to me and asked: “Tears of joy or tears of sorrow? Hmm?” I remember searching her eyes, trying to guess what answer would please her. But they were soft and fierce, her eyes — all at the same time — demanding more than being pleased.

“Where is Manchuria, Grandma?”

She got that faraway look I knew so well.

“It is a very far away land with soft long hills and wide, wide green valleys for riding horses.”

“Wild horses?”

“Wild stout ponies with fire in their eyes,” she said. Just by looking at her you could behold the wild fire. “The hills are full of wild parsley, wild chives, even wild garlic.”

Nobody in the family liked garlic, just grandma and me.

She shook her head in wonder, “and ancient wild apple trees in hidden groves.”

I had no idea how a hidden grove needed picturing, but grandmother started mincing one of those wrinkled, winter-dried apples from the windowsill and folded it in with the last of our Christmas turkey leftovers.

“Oh my God,” she said, awestruck, and held out grandfather’s tasting-spoon for me.

I didn’t like turkey at the time, especially the gamey dark meat in her stews, but it’s wildness had merged with the wildness of Manchuria, and, sweetened by the apple, a new culinary world opened up for me.

Oma’s brown Huguenot eyes watched if I could see it all: the turkey hunt, the spines of long, green, parsley covered hills. If I could feel the bracing Manchurian air in my blond hair and ken — a Celtic goosebump-word if there ever was one — and ken the sorrow of longing to be somewhere else, wide-horizoned, unpeopled. Parsley scents exploding from under galloping ponies’ hooves.

Siegfried Haug is the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. A suspense novel, BAD SLEEP, caught the interest of a local publisher. Retired now from clinical work and teaching, he lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in the foothills of the Berkshires. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.

 

WALKING ON WATER

by Ann C. Averill

My first memory is of a rented cottage on a skinny point jutting into the confluence of the Housatonic River and Long Island Sound. I’m afraid of the snails that pock the beach in front of the gray shingled shack, so when we swim, Daddy carries me into the water. When we sail, we need a dinghy to get to the sailboat moored on the riverside of the point.

One day we’re sailing to a picnic island, but there’s no wind. Our sails luff as we bob over glassy swells. Wearing my red polka dot sunsuit, I’m leashed to the mast, so I can’t fall overboard. I’m hot and starving by the time a fog descends. Then suddenly there it is, a narrow spit of sand rising to a crown of stunted pine.

Daddy lifts me out of the boat, and before my little sneakers hit the ground, I inform him, “This is where the leprechauns live.”

I’ve heard the stories. An emerald isle covered in mist, surely there are men less than half my height just out of sight.

While Mommy unpacks the red metal Coke cooler, Daddy and I comb the sands for teensy footprints. I climb over driftwood hoping to surprise a miniature man in knickers and a waistcoat. We turn towards the tiny forest. I lead. Daddy follows.

“Time to eat.” Mommy’s voice pierces the magic.

But how can I turn back when so close to their secret kingdom?

I admit, potato chips are all it takes to lure me back to our army blanket.

When lunch is over, Daddy folds his tide tables. “Quick, gotta go.”

Mommy packs.

But I dawdle, my ears perked, my eyes wide, for any sign of wee men.

The slight breeze grants me a lingering search of the shoreline before releasing our vessel from the island’s grip.

It’s low tide when Daddy secures the sailboat to the mooring.

The skim of brackish water is too shallow to float the dinghy to shore, so Mommy holds my hand as we slog through stinky black mud up to my thighs. How many sucking steps before we get to solid ground? Daddy tugs the little boat through the muck while Mommy strips off my soiled sunsuit and turns on the outside shower. Staring at my feet, shivering in the frigid water, I realize my sneakers are lost in the mire.

Mommy puts me into pajamas and readies my cot in the living room. Time only for cereal and a bedtime story. Through the window, the sun slips below the horizon. Waves crash on the snail-speckled beach. Windchimes tinkle, and I think, if only.

If only I hadn’t turned back for potato chips, surely, I would’ve found my leprechaun, and if only my parents hadn’t tied me to the boat, I could’ve walked on water all the way home.

In the wake of that long-ago voyage, I see my child’s heart already on the hunt for the divine.

Ann Averill is the author of the e-book, BROKEN, 180 DAYS IN THE WILDERNESS OF AN URBAN MIDDLE SCHOOL, based on a true story. This piece is an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, BREADCRUMBS, A BABY BOOMER’S PATH TO JESUS.

 

WATCHING FOR GOOD TIMES

by Siegfried Haug

Many people have asked me how I came to invent the now omni-present Good-Times-Watch. Truth be told, it was a fluke.

As I look back I can see a confluence of circumstantial happenstances – a veritable conspiracy of trivia – affording me that breakthrough in mind-technology: the harnessing of good-time-power. So, in all fairness The Watch was not an invention proper, it was more in the nature of a fortuitous find.

At the time, I was on my way to The Corner Restaurant on Route 9 for an early Saturday breakfast. My windshield still frosted, and the wheel so cold, I steered with my fingertips.

Fall had finally evacuated the hills before the advances of yet another winter.

A pale full morning-moon hung over the Berkshire hills, quite faint, but clearly watching us. Squinting at the road through my windshield’s thawing left hand corner, crouched like a hunchback supplicant, cold fingers poised on wheel piano-virtuoso-style, I beheld the Judds’ red barn.

Their brown mare breathing clouds of steam, framed, in the half-door of her shed. Low sailing remnants of this night’s fog slinking away… Limp strips, raggedly torn from an old sheet. So nonchalantly did they expose the curves of still golden-green meadows, it took my breath away.

One part of me drove, solitarily ensconced and with exquisite care, another, vaster, part partook in the unveiling of a new, luscious day. I was transported, you might say, in more than one way.

I am certain this non-ordinary perspective was necessary for me to notice, what now has become a commonplace experience: that tell-tale electric tingle, so central to my invention — the manifest surge of Good Time Power.

From there on in all it took was simple electro-mechanics, a bit of IT, and the marketing genius of my wife.

Thus, friends, your Good Time Watch was conceived, gestated and in due time born: Reading, quantifying, displaying and instagramming your dopamine-spills indicating a good time/place for initiating sane and empowered choices.

I am sure it is also no accident that my invention came at the heels of the fit-bit craze. In retrospect, a somewhat pedestrian attempt at clocking precursors to physical well-being.

Still, it did set the stage for the Good Time Watch experience, priming a generation for the next step: mental fitness for enlightened choices.

Today we are celebrating the 10.01 upgrade of that simple gadget with such vast spiritual/political implications. As history has proven, Good Timers soon lose their taste for a cortisol-driven existence, and the icons of stress, anxiety, and yes, despair, previously so addictively prevalent, are no longer populating our collective mental desktops.

I feel blessed to have been the one stumbling upon Good-Time monitoring.The time, it seems, to unleash powers for doing good had come.

To think that the dark, cortisol-driven times almost prevailed … is, well, unthinkable.

Siegfried Haug is the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. A suspense novel, BAD SLEEP, caught the interest of a local publisher. Retired now from clinical work and teaching, he lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in the foothills of the Berkshires. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.

 

IT CAN ONLY BE SEEN IN DARKNESS

by Amy Laprade

Once, during daylight hours, a maintenance man named Niles heard strange noises inside the walls of the church: sighing and whistling – not the sweet, melodic kind but the perverse kind, followed by cat-calls and wheezing. The sounds made his neck muscles stiffen, his flesh crawl, and his saliva turn metallic with fear. He ran.

Safely outside, he caught a whiff of something sour as the rear door swung shut. He never wanted to step inside of that church again. He didn’t have a choice.

~

Tonight, there are burn marks in the red-carpeted aisle. The choir books are slick with mucus and strewn across the pews’ cushions, their pages torn off at the spine like limbs from a paper doll – hymns of holy worship reduced to confetti – the aftermath of an unholy celebration, attended only by an empty nave and chancel.

Hammer in hand, eyes darting about, Niles begins his work when a fuse blows and he is plunged into darkness. He hears the noises. He looks up.

A creature, the size of a cat, quivers between the pews like sea-foam in an ocean breeze. Its iridescence reflects the sky by moonlight. Its bubbled, membranous flesh trembles in the cool draft, bulges and then pops. Effluvium fills the air. Niles gags. He thinks about bolting but the glowing EXIT sign watches him like a red, angry eye from the rear of the church.

Niles has spent his entire life running: from a son he’d had with his first wife, but never met – from a second wife who never forgave him for the affair he’d had with a girl who was half his age … and now his third wife is ill with a respiratory disease and the medical bills are mounting. He’d be fired if he left early again. The boss didn’t care about strange noises inside of the walls.

Niles’ heart begins to pound when the creature slides, quick and furtive as a Black Racer, toward the altar. Its opossum-like tail, atrophied and dragging, paints wet streaks on the carpeted aisle. The streaks would later leave more burn marks.

The creature reemerges from the shadows, illuminated by fingers of moonlight that seep through the window of stained blue glass. Sensing the man’s presence – as incongruent among this place of worship as a songbird lighting on a solar flare — the creature flattens itself against the wall, below the framed Mother of Mary.

Imagining the dour look on his boss’ liver-spotted face and the shunt in his wife’s abdomen, Niles gazes at the creature’s iridescence, noticing his own reflection in its faceless head. Horrified by what he sees, he raises the hammer. He brings it down.

Amy Laprade, winner of the Michael Doherty Award in Poetry, received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has, for over ten years, taught fiction and poetry to students of many ages and backgrounds. Her work has appeared in Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Canyon Voices and Plum, Literary Journal. In 2016, her debut novel, SO NICE TO FINALLY MEET YOU …, was published by Human Error Press.

 

JOÃO o DOIDO DISCOVERS AMERICA

by Norma Sims Roche

Once there was a boy named João who lived in a fishing village on the coast of Portugal. João was the youngest of three brothers, and he was clever and curious. He would climb as far up the hills behind the village as he had time to do between chores, and he would look at the ocean and wonder how far you could sail before you reached the edge of the Earth.

When João was old enough, he went fishing with his father and brothers. The fleet left the village in spring and roamed the ocean all summer in search of the best fishing. The boats came back in the fall with their holds full of salt cod, which the people ate all winter.

One day, after sailing out of sight of land for a long time, the boats found a huge school of cod near a low island. After filling their nets many times, they landed on the beach and began to spread out fish to dry.

“I’ll bet no one has ever been here before,” said João.

“We have. Last year,” said his eldest brother Jorge.

“No, I mean no one but us. We’ve come all away across the ocean. This is the land on the other side of the ocean!”

“You’re crazy,” said his second eldest brother Manuel. “João o Doido.”

“What do you care?” asked Jorge. “It’s a good place to catch fish and dry fish. That’s all that matters.”

“No, I’m serious, brothers!” said João. “We’ve discovered a new land! I can’t wait to tell everybody at home!”

“You’d better not, doido!” said Manuel. “Then all the ships from the other villages will be coming here after our fish. Now shut your mouth and get back to work before I come over there and knock some sense into you!”

So João never told anyone.

Norma Sims Roche grew up on Cape Cod, but has lived in Northampton since graduating from UMass Amherst many years ago. She’s an editor of college science textbooks and a Class III whitewater kayaker. She writes mainly memoir, personal essays, poems, and fiction based on true events.

 

KALEIDOSCOPE

by Don Lesser

Now that “Kaleidoscope” is everywhere – websites, textbooks, the new Whitney – after Anne Marie’s tell-all biography and Michael’s predictably fulsome one, and after, god help me, its own calendar, there is really nothing new to say. Still, I remember when Georges and I first saw it.

Anne and the solid Michael were living outside the city. Her studio was a long and narrow former chicken coop attached to the main house. She’d been working on the painting for months it seemed, without comments or peeks or even a sigh or two of frustration. Georges, the critic, and I (merely an old friend) were up for dinner. When we drove up, she met us by the door, zipping that old barn coat she always wore, car keys jangling in her hand.

“Watch Anne Marie,” she said to us. “I’ve got to pick up some things for dinner.” She paused and turned back to us. “Oh, and it’s done. Take a look if you like.”

We ran to the studio before her car was even out of the driveway. “Kaleidoscope,” the painting, was huge, 10 feet long and 6 or 7 feet high. In the lower left corner, the artist in quarter profile from behind had opened a door onto a riot of colors and floating images. From Madonnas to Frank Stella, from Dutch still lifes to Mondrian, it was all there, the artists she loved and the paintings she had yet to make. They all paraded across the canvas, some very detailed, others just suggestions, each one different, each one bearing her own stamp, pushing themselves across the painting, flowing one into another.

It was breathtaking. These days, there is an academic game of nailing down each reference, but Georges and I ran back and forth, exclaiming over each luscious swirl of color, each dotted and smashed brush stroke, each line and angle, laughing as we recognized the quote.

Back and forth, we pointed to details, her sure and confident hand, her private jokes, her cat sometimes recognizable, sometimes just a couple of brush strokes, slyly, wisely looking on, from the edge of a stage, from a pile of bodies, behind a bush, out of a color. Laughing, exhilarated, we pushed and pulled each other. We drank in that painting, sputtering gibberish. It was the first time “Kaleidoscope” had any other eyes on it and any solemnity to the moment was drowned in the sheer pleasure of seeing it.

And then Michael, good old Michael, was there, fresh off the train, still in his suit.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked, eyes shifting from Georges to me.

Georges looked at me helplessly. What do we think? I shrugged.

“We like it,” I replied finally. “It’s good.”

Don Lesser has been a professional nonfiction writer for a long time. He has an MFA in Fiction from UMass Amherst and awards from the Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers. He finds flash fiction very appealing and well-suited to his current level of distraction.

 

OTHERWISE

by Peter Murkett

I had long run my own company, but business was changing. Up walked Otherwise, darkening my door. He was a big man with a ripple effect, a force with a field. But he carried himself well, sigh. He entered, we shook hands, and got down to work. He was at ease with acronyms and algorithms, the ether, his future.

Ether! That’s what they used to put me under for my tonsillectomy, 1952. The wet cloth on my face, my weightless body vaulting through space, beyond pain. Mommy, what happened?

My company made things. On the assembly floor, workers moved parts on rolling carts, walkways were clear, and completed work glided along the conveyor between the bench-rows. Workers were close enough to chat, and far enough apart not to. They sat on metal stools or stood before their benches, working. It was not a lab-coat place; at the end of the day the floor was swept, not scrubbed.

My office was in a corner, and three of its walls had windows. There were storerooms, of course, and the woodshop, also packing and shipping, but those had their own floors. Workers had benches; I had my desk. My one to their many.

Jane knocked. She was three months on the floor, her work deft, her product perfect. She had a stellar effect on her coworkers. I would have wanted my bench next to hers. I waved her in, and she sat down to talk, nothing particular, her work-life, the company. She arched her back, adjusted her jeans. She fingered her top button, smiled directly at me. I let my head down onto my desk with a deliberate, gentle thunk. Jane went out.

Had I seen what I saw? My thoughts were never pure, but I managed them. I always managed.

My oblong factory building (wooden frame, old but not classic) lay northeast to southwest, with two rows of workbenches at an angle down the center, a giant chevron. Big windows marched up one side of the building and down the other. Morning and afternoon sunlight slanted across the bench-tops. The east-side windows looked out onto fields, a distant tree-line, and, beyond that, low, round-topped mountains. West-side windows faced rolling, open land, and a river that glinted in winter.

The timeline at my desk was vague. I looked back on my survival, occasional prosperity; I looked forward into dense fog. The timeline on the floor was short, and wasn’t that sweet? Place six to eight products, ready for finish, on the belt every day. But maybe the workers’ timeline was too short, mine too long. Rewards for repetitive work are elusive, despite the many cycles of life itself, the days which soon make seasons, then years. Plant, grow, harvest – over and over again, no?

There was Otherwise, talking to Jane at her bench. She leaned into him, and he into her. He might indeed be wise. If merely clever, just another buck, I would not be around to find out.

Peter Murkett is a writer and woodworker living in the Berkshire hills.

 

ALTERNATIVE TRUTHS

by Siegfried Haug

Tammy, the waitress, says: “She is such a dear.”

I know whom she is talking about: the diminutive lady in an Icelandic sweater and matching hat. She eats breakfast at Ms. Flo’s every time I am there.

“Lydia,” I believe, the staff calls her; the “girls” slip into the booth to write down her order. Toast mostly, whole wheat, and a cup of coffee.

Lydia’s wrinkled face lights up when I nod good morning. There is so much undiluted warmth in that smile that I sometimes wonder about ‘second childhood’.

I grieve the time when I was no stranger to such kindness.

“She comes in here every day,” Tammy says. “All the way from Holyoke.” (From Holyoke up Route Five through Northampton into Florence, that’s got to be a good half an hour’s drive. Or more.)

“In a big old car, and I mean bi-ig. And every day she leaves a tip of thirty or forty dollars, depending on what she is having.”

Tammy leans closer into the couple she seems to know.

Their heads come up and they put their forks down.

I, the eavesdropper, also frown and give myself away. Forty dollars? Tip? Every day?

It doesn’t compute.

“We talked to her daughter who came up from New York once. ‘Let her do it,’ she said. ‘It makes her happy.’”

I am driving back up into the hilltowns — yet a jacket colder, as my mother used to say — and huddle around the story like someone protecting a candle flame from ill wind.

My bread has risen in our cold house. I can smell yeast.

The only place dough will rise these days is right under the kitchen cabinet where our furnace breathes warm air.

This very morning, in this unlikely spot yeast cells have multiplied a million-fold.

I wish this story was yeast.

Siegfried Haug is the author of I WANT TO SLEEP, a workbook for insomniacs. A suspense novel, BAD SLEEP, is presently, well, suspended due to writers’ frustration. He used to be a therapist and taught at a Jesuit university before retiring. He lives with his wife, a ceramic artist, in one of the hilltowns. When warmth is hard to come by they migrate to Key West.

 

TO MARCH: TRAMP, TRUDGE, PROTEST, PICKET, ADVANCE, PROGRESS, STEP-OUT, STRUT, SWAGGER

by D. K. McCutchen

January 21, 2017; the crowd was so jammed together that rocking foot-to-foot was difficult. On tip-toes, pink pussy hats blended the sea of heads into lilac, interspersed with rainbow signs:

I Am Very Upset; Just No; Get your filthy laws off my silky drawers; I’ve Seen Sturdier Cabinets at Ikea; Put Government Under the Microscope; Climate is Changing Why Aren’t We?; There Is No PLANet B; Celebrate Diversity; Deport Hate; Ya Basta de Discriminacion; Girls Just Wanna Have FUNdamental Rights; The Future is Nasty; Men of Quality don’t Fear Equality; Womens’ Place is in The Revolution. We Can Do It. We The People.

There were no edges to this crowd. Everyone’s focus was on a stage we couldn’t see, speakers we could barely hear. We vibrated to the roars of the crowd and thousands of hands fluttering in the air. Helicopters overhead filmed the lilac sea covering Boston Common – a place older than the Constitution, one speaker reminded us.

I heard a yell and turned to see my six-foot, 13-year-old daughter drop her “LGBTQ Against BiGotry” sign and slide to the ground; face grey and eyes dilated. Someone, somehow, got a message to the medics. An impossible isle opened, and we carried her through standing waves of people to the medical van. The waves crashed together behind us as we marched through: Immigrant father, migraineur eldest daughter (reliant on healthcare), a veterinarian, a librarian, a teacher, and the medics carrying my youngest (who resists labels and plans to be a Chef). Strangers patted my back.

That was my Women’s March. That was the crowd of diverse, peaceful, concerned people who were also immigrants, reliant on health care, professional women, fathers of daughters, LGBTQ community, and so many others concerned about their endangered human rights and environment.

My daughter rallied, and we struggled through the crowd to the Beacon Hill Bistro to watch what the helicopters saw on CNN. Pulling back allowed us to see our lilac sea repeated in DC, Chicago, Denver, New York, Austin, LA. Soon images were coming in from the entire nation. Scenes of smaller (sometimes braver) protests flashed from across the planet, (seven continents, including climate scientists in the Antarctic: “Penguins for Peace,” “Seals for Science”). The newscaster returned us to a Boston Commons looking like a snake swallowing its tail as talks ended and the March tried to begin along a route already overflowing with people.

My daughter wanted to MARCH again so we dived back into the crowd until we hit the roadblock of Beacon street where no one was moving at all. Miraculously, we spotted my mustachioed husband in his homemade pink pussy hat bulling through the crowd like a dad making way (supporting laws) for his daughters, just as the March finally gathered momentum in a swaggering, strutting progress of 170,000, in a national movement of 3 million, in a world that showed its solidarity – and we along with them.

D. K. McCutchen teaches writing for UMass College of Natural Sciences. Lack of poetic-DNA led to a tale of low adventure titled THE WHALE ROAD. In a literary attempt to save the world, she’s now writing gender-bender-post-apocalyptic-speculative fiction. She lives on a river with two brilliant daughters and a Kiwi, who isn’t green, but is fuzzy.

 

SOME THINGS REMAIN THE SAME

by Diane Kane

I grew up in the 1960’s when ottomans were called hassocks, and Borderline Personality Disorder was still known as Schizophrenia. The hassocks of the 1960’s that I remember were hard, with blunt edges, and bright patterns. The ottomans of today are soft and rounded, in calming colors. Although they serve the same fundamental purpose, the name is less harsh more appealing. It’s like that with Schizophrenia also.

The first time I heard the words Borderline Personality Disorder, I was sitting in the office of a therapist who was seeing my mother. “Look it up,” she said. “I think you will find that the description matches your mother.”

“There’s nothing borderline about my mother.” My mother was the master of manipulation. I used to think she should have been in movies. She would have been the best actress in the world. “My mother is extreme in every way,” I smiled the smile that comes to my face when I know no one will ever understand. “With my mother, it’s like, ‘Come here darling; I love you so much, let me stab this knife into your heart.’”

At the time that the therapist had called and asked to meet with me, my mother and I were in a period of estrangement. It was one of the hundreds of times that she had worked up to a rage that always ended with “I disown you!” and she would throw me away. Most times it was a relief. The build-up to her eruptions was draining and degrading. She would find something that she disliked. It could be an idea or something as small as a word. If she couldn’t find anything real, she would make something up. Then she would proceed to pick at it like a scab. Ever so slowly, she would obsess on the subject, little by little, poking and prodding, waiting, hoping for a response, relentless in her pursuit of turmoil.

When the therapist called me, she left a long message, “I’ve been seeing your mother for the past six weeks. She has given me permission to talk with you and meet with you if possible …” My mind said no way, but I listened to the end. “I … I just …,” her voice broke. “I just want to know how you have survived all these years.” I listened again, and again, so I could hear her last sentence.

We talked for over an hour, and she asked again. “How did you survive in such an abnormal environment?”

“It was my normal.”

Borderline Personality Disorder, the therapist, had called it. I didn’t look it up right away. I didn’t need to. She had given me something more important than a diagnosis. She had given me validation. Mental illness has different names, that change with the times. It’s not as important what you call it, as it is just to keep talking about it.

Diane Kane writes short stories and poetry. Her self-published children’s book BRAYDEN THE BRAVE is featured at Boston Children’s Hospital to help families dealing with medical issues. She belongs to two writers groups and enjoys sharing the love of writing with others. Diane has been published in Goose River Anthology and is one of the co-producers of TIME’S RESERVOIR, a Quabbin Quills Anthology.

 

THE DAY MY SISTER DROWNED

by Mohammad Yadegari

Most houses in Karbala, and the Middle East in general, are built around a central courtyard and have a howz (decorative pool), usually in the center of the yard. From the Taj Mahal of India to tiny village homes, the howz is a universal feature of Muslim architecture. The howz might be simple in an ordinary home but it is usually ornate in the homes of the wealthy. Most of them are rectangular but some have other geometric shapes. A faucet provides running water for ritual ablution before prayers. There are also similar shallow pools in mosques and schools.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when my little sister drowned in a howz. I couldn’t have been older than four. My sister was around one year old, still crawling, and the delight of all who knew her. It has been so many years that I seem to have even forgotten her name. Maybe my memory refuses to remember it. Raziah sounds familiar.

My mother had taken her along when she walked to a seamstress’ house in our neighborhood to arrange for a dress to be made and to pick out cloth for the dress. My sister had crawled out of the room without being noticed. My mother swore that she had kept a watchful eye on her all the time but like any accident, it happened quickly. Maybe it was because of that tragedy that my mother always reminded us to be careful. “Accidents happen within seconds and if they do, nothing can reverse them.” I don’t have to tell you that people can get busy talking and chatting about serious as well as trivial matters and forget to be watchful.

The howz at the seamstress’ house was rectangular, approximately eighteen inches deep, built in the middle of the yard. While I did not go on that day, I had been there with my mother several times. According to her, on that particular day, it was full of leaves that had fallen from nearby trees. The seamstress had not cleaned them out. Though relatively shallow, the howz was deep enough to drown a crawling baby, my young sister. The water shimmering in the sun or newly fallen leaves floating on the water may have attracted my sister. Crawling babies are not afraid of anything. They don’t know what danger is. One second she was alive and exuberant and the next she was floating unresponsive on the surface of water. That is how my mother found her.

When she was brought home, my sister was laid out on the floor. Her small dress was torn away so that her body was bare. She looked soft, her skin fair, her stomach smooth, but she did not move. My mother was constantly patting and kissing her on the lips, on the cheek, on her abdomen. I stood there, a little boy in a circle of weeping women. I did not cry because my feelings were numb. I did not know how to react. All I knew was that she was dead. She was dead and gone and she did not move.

She did not look at me, the one who had been her constant companion and playmate. On the night before, this little sister of mine had been so happy when I put her on a big metal serving tray, and spun her around and around as I pushed the tray around the room. She had laughed loudly, her squeals of delight making everyone turn and look and smile. My mother had stopped me. Some people say that spinning a child on a tray brings bad luck. Call it superstition, call it a mother’s intuition, call it whatever you wish. I distinctly remember my mother stopping me and saying with a nervous smile and a worried look that it was not good to put a baby on a tray and push her around. Something bad could happen to her.

And there I was with my wide eyes looking down at my sister’s abdomen because I couldn’t understand why mother kept kissing her there. It was white and soft and different from mine. A woman next to me slapped me lightly on my forehead. “Stop ogling her bare body,” she shouted. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” I could not understand why. I was bewildered at the whole affair. I had never seen my mother so sad, wishing she’d been the one who had drowned instead of her daughter. And then I heard a wail that seemed to swell up from the depth of her soul. “Leave Mohammad alone! My dear son, you want to look? Look, look, look. She is beautiful.” She bent down again kissing my sister’s cold abdomen. Less than four years old, too young to understand, I witnessed the pain that a mother feels at the loss of her own flesh and blood.

It was over seventy years ago and no one knew about CPR. And by all accounts, I can surmise that my poor sister had no chance of survival at that point anyway. My mother pleaded with God. My mother was calling on God but He did not answer her pleas. A short silence was followed by a weak sigh of desperation and resignation. Only later, when I had children of my own and could comprehend the finality of life and death, did I begin to imagine what really went through my mother’s mind during that fateful moment.

My mother never wore the dress she had ordered that day. And, though time heals all wounds, she never forgot that awful moment. I doubt if she fell asleep that night. I am also sure that, although she did not voice an objection to the will of the Master of the Universe, she still blamed the city of Karbala, that city of agony and calamity, whose earth was always thirsty for new flesh.

Mohammad Yadegari, an Iranian born in Iraq, moved to the United States in 1964. He studied at SUNYA and NYU and then taught mathematics and history in both high school and college. “The Day My Sister Drowned” is from his recently completed cultural memoir, A TALE OF THREE CITIES.

 

Editor’s Note: The Tree House at Rolling Hills is a condo complex in Lenox where the author goes to write every winter. The condo’s owners call it their tree house because it’s on the second floor, and the sliding glass doors face the woods.

THE TREE HOUSE AT ROLLING HILLS

by Betsy Smith

They have filled it with treasures and art

Orange paisley walls; faded oriental rugs of reds and browns

Candles in fancy silver and brass vintage candlesticks lined up like soldiers – with collars that will never catch dripping wax

A coveted baby grand from a past life wedged in a corner; yellowed sheet music propped in place; venerable metronome sitting “as is” whispering imagined beats of time

Knick-knacks thoughtfully arranged on little wooden tables

Paintings of familiar places and parts unknown:

Hunting dogs on one side, and odd little Macaroni men posed on the other

Pen and ink of ancient cities and structures; pastel seasons of China from a trip meant to heal

Colorful posters of past events at special venues

Leonard Bernstein

A mirror strategically placed facing a glass door; trees visible inside and out

The reflection as if a painting that constantly changes with the days and nights

This is their tree house; their summer home left behind

The leaves fall from the trees, and the cold seeps in

A writer comes to hibernate in the dark of winter

Quietly making art of her own.

Betsy Smith is a retired insurance professional finally able to pursue her dream of writing. She did not attend college, so everything she participates in is a new and exciting learning experience. Her first essay about one episode in her journey as the mother of an alcoholic son was recently published by Refinery29.

 

NANA

by Wanda Fischer

My grandmother did not bake cookies. She didn’t wear a white apron and read stories to my sisters and me.

My grandmother was a resident of the state hospital for the mentally ill in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. She was committed in 1940, when my mother, the youngest of her four children, was 12.

Every Sunday, my mother would pile my sisters and me into the family station wagon and retrieve Nana for Sunday dinner. Ma had to go to the office to sign out Nana for the day. She would lock us into the car and tell me, the oldest, not to open the doors.

Sometimes, while waiting, residents would surround our car. We felt as if we were in a fishbowl, but we were also scared. I had no idea what I would have done if one of them had taken a rock and smashed the window. Were they insane enough to do that? Were they violent? Sometimes one of them would put hands on the windows and peer in, as if looking at window displays at Christmas at Jordan Marsh. We were the animated, electrically-controlled beings behind the glass, being moved by something, anything, just like the cartoon characters in the store windows. I didn’t realize then, but in retrospect, I now know that we gave them joy, a bit of normalcy, at a place where they rarely saw people who were not “like them.”

The residents all looked the same. Pale, white faces, drooping skin and blank eyes. Blunt-cut hair hanging just below the ears. Short-cut bangs. The women wore shift-type dresses and plain black shoes with stark white ankle socks. They shuffled their feet as they walked – an effect I would later learn was directly related to the drugs they were fed daily.

The men wore the same black shoes and droopy, castaway pants and messy shirts that always seemed to be mis-buttoned, with pants often too long, so when they shuffle-walked, they trip-walked as well.

They all had terrible teeth.

On the way to our house, we would stop at the original Dunkin’ Donuts in Quincy and buy my grandmother two jelly donuts.

I recently saw photographs of a similar abandoned insane asylum. The photos depict the dereliction of the building, demonstrating the way the edifice had decayed because the state had stopped taking care of the brick-and-mortar structure. The photographer took great pains to show details by using light and shadows within the building, and I closed my eyes, trying to imagine what my grandmother’s life must have been like when she lived in a place like that until her death in 1972.

The hospital in Jamaica Plain was closed, then demolished in 2003. The last time I drove by, it appeared that a housing development was about to be built. I began to think about the residents who walked the grounds, peering into our car. If new houses are built on that land, will their spirits put their ghost-like hands on the windows and look in at families as they eat their Sunday dinners and celebrate birthday parties? Will their wispy hair blow in the wind as they watch children living in a place where they once walked? Will they want to go to Dunkin’ Donuts for jelly donuts?

Wanda Fischer has hosted “The Hudson River Sampler” folk music show on WAMC in Albany since 1982. She’s retired from her “day” job in PR/marketing and has just released her first novel, EMPTY SEATS. She’s an avid baseball fan and tennis player. She and her husband live in Schenectady, New York.

 

LOVE, LIFE AND DEATH ON THE AMAZON

by Steve Bernstein

10/14/15, Amazon purchase: Family Life by Akhil Sharma, Kindle $9.14
We were on call for both moms 24/7. One of the remaining joys my partner and I shared was reading a book together in bed. She read aloud. I nodded off. Dodger lay between us, snoring and chasing squirrels in his dreams.

1/23/16, Amazon purchase: Sleepmaster Memory Foam Getaway Folding Guest Bed, $238.90
Converted mom’s one-bedroom apartment to accommodate live-in aides. She’s 88. Multiple sclerosis is taking its toll.

12/5/16
My brother called, “You might want to come over. I think mom’s having a hard time.” As usual, my brother’s Asperger’s understated reality. When I got to her apartment, she was writhing on the floor, hallucinating.

2/9/17
Got my mom to the hospice home.

2/14/17, Amazon purchase: Office Star Multipurpose Rectangular Table, 4-Feet Long, Height Adjustable, Center Folding, $58.42
My partner of 17 years dumped me. Life and love were always a burden for her. Our relationship, on top of caring for both moms, was just too much for her. She was getting ready to actualize her thirty-year fantasy of committing suicide after her mother dies. My ex moved into my mom’s apartment, used the folding table as a temporary desk, and for seven weeks, slept on the Sleepmaster Memory Foam cot.

3/28/17
Mom died.

4/3/17, Amazon purchase: Hold ‘Em up Dog Harness, 35-70 pounds, $100.00
At 17, Dodger’s rear legs were shaky. We had our first big talk about life and death.

8/14/17
Dodger’s rear legs gave out.

8/15/17
Dodger said no to food.

8/16/17
Dodger and I had our last talk on the floor of the vet’s office. She put the needle into his shoulder.

8/23/17
Dodger’s ashes arrived. The paper bag is sitting on the floor of my office, next to the bag with my mother’s ashes. For now.

9/5/17, Amazon purchase: 8 x 8 Cloth Photo Album, w/Front Picture Window, $24.95
A birthday gift from my ex to me loaded with 17 years of Dodger photos.

10/5/17 Amazon purchase: The Peaceful Pill Handbook: End of Life Strategies, 2016 Edition, $50.16
A birthday gift from me to my ex.

10/19/17
Got my ex’s mother to the hospice home. Just like with my mom, me and my ex share her care, two doors down the hall from my mom’s old room, seven months earlier.

10/22/17, Amazon purchase: Astroglide Organic Oil-Based Personal Lubricant & Sensual Massage Oil – Experience Pure Pleasure – Ultra-Hydrating Natural Lubricant with Ylang Ylang Essential Oils, Coconut Oil, and More! $13.99
My ex came into our old bedroom as I was packing to visit a new love interest in Albuquerque. “Don’t forget the lube you just overnighted from Amazon. It’s for your trip, right? Hey, I can’t help it if I saw the Amazon order.” Busted. We then agree, its time for separate Amazon accounts. My ex made sure I packed the cute underwear she bought me for my trip. Amazon didn’t have the kind she liked, so she got them at Target.

Steve Bernstein is a retired plumber who for over three decades has been a teacher and mentor for at-risk-teens as wall as an animal rights activist and humane educator. He recently self-published STORIES FROM THE STOOP, seven adventure stories from his colorful childhood growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s. He can be reached at stevebernsteinauthor@gmail.com.

 

KAMPA GIRL’S STORY

by Tsultrim Dolma

I was born in the late 1960s in a small village in eastern Tibet. From a small age, I heard and saw that our town officials did not treat their own villagers well. It made no sense to me. Why were they punishing their people who had done nothing wrong?

I didn’t understand because family and neighbors were afraid to tell me in case town officials overheard. When I asked questions, I would get slapped because the grownups were afraid.

There weren’t many old men in the village. They had died fighting the Chinese or were in prison. Some young boys dressed as girls so the Chinese would not kill them.

The Chinese took people’s land away and made it communal. They made my father work in a different town and my mother had to work the farm. When she went to work, she wrapped blankets around my brother, my sister and me and tied our legs so we wouldn’t get hurt. She would come home to feed us lunch and then go back to work in the fields until night.

Everybody was hungry. Their faces were so swollen from eating grain that you couldn’t see their eyes. I remember kids lying on the road because they were too weak to move. Thankfully, this wasn’t true for my family. My parents had a little barley and a yak so we had milk to drink. My parents fed me overnight and then we’d go outside to get the smell of food off so the town officials wouldn’t take the food away.

I wanted badly to get an education. There was no school in our village, but I could get an education in the nunnery in Lhasa. I ran away to Lhasa without telling my parents. I had to walk for over a month. When I got to Lhasa, I saw protests with flags that said, “Free Tibet” and “Chinese go home.” I wondered who the Chinese were, because no one spoke of this in my village.

For three years, I lived with my aunt who was a nun. I became her student and learned about our people’s history. One April I joined a protest demanding Tibetan freedom and human rights. The Chinese threw tear gas and took us to prison. They handcuffed us behind our backs, tied our ankles together and beat us. They came to interview us every day and used different torture methods. They kept us in the sun all day with no food or water. They used electric shock.

I was in prison for about four months. When I returned home, the people in my village secretly thanked me and gave me food, but they said I should leave because it was unsafe. Some told me to go to India because the Dalai Lama was there. Others said to go to the U.S. where there was always food, lots of land, and beautiful sunsets.

I walked for almost a year and escaped to India. If the Chinese had caught me, they would have put me in prison for life or killed me because I had spoken out. In 1992, I was able to come to the U.S. In 2002, I became a citizen.

A lot of Tibetan people have the same story.

Tsultrim Dolma is from Tibet. She has lived in Amherst since 2008. She works at UMass from 5:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. five days a week. She comes to The Literacy Project, Amherst, four days a week from 9:15 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. When she was young, she worked on a farm with her mom and papa.

 

CAREGIVING AND SHIPWRECKS

by Joan Axelrod-Contrada

My husband, Fred, banged on the wooden gate blocking off the stairs.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“My nail clippers,” he said.

I rushed upstairs, then heard a noise that made me cringe. A chair dragged across the floor. No, not again.

I found Fred with one foot on a wooden chair and the other straddling the bannister. Doctors had diagnosed him with Lewy Body Dementia, a sort of cross between Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. My formerly bright, vibrant, black-belt-in-karate, newspaper-reporting, fiction-writing, mountain-climbing husband had become a confused and frail shadow of his old self.

I sat Fred in his armchair in the kitchen and brought over his book of columns. As a columnist for the Springfield Union-News, then The Republican, he’d written about his outdoor adventures, experiences hitchhiking cross-country, and connections to friends, relatives, and people around town. Reading aloud, his voice was muted. I couldn’t listen to it. I wanted to run away. Jump ship. Get back my old life. Instead, I did the next best thing: Grabbed my cellphone and checked my e-mail.

Seeking Authors for Series: All-Time Worst Disasters

Had some editor in the sky heard that my life had become a disaster? I clicked and read about a new series of books for children with seven titles. My eyes swept past floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, landing squarely on shipwrecks.

I joined a caregivers’ support group and talked about all the times I felt thrown overboard. I joked about how our ship was always springing a leak. Strange compulsions and delusions took over Fred’s mind. He tapped on water bottles and shredded their labels. He heard violent jingles in his head. He confessed “impure thoughts” about other women.

Then, like a beacon in a storm, I remembered Paul Newman’s quote about being faithful to his wife. “Why go out for hamburger when I have steak at home?”

Filet mignon was more like it! The women who swirled in Fred’s brain were chopped liver. I had a snappy comeback I could use like a life vest to keep my head above water.

I made Fred my research assistant on the shipwrecks project. Most shipwrecks, I learned, had resulted from human error. Ships packed way beyond capacity sank when they hit rough waters. Caregivers, too, risked death from over-exertion.

Fortunately, Fred had accrued so much good karma in his 65 years that friends, relatives, and colleagues put themselves out to help. Our 26-year-old son, Rio, moved back home from LA. A former colleague, who’d left the paper to go to culinary school, brought over home-baked pies. Another former colleague started a blog. My Dream Team of friends and relatives rented us a house on the Cape.

I hired private aides, too. At first, they brought Fred on hikes and to karate. Then, as Fred’s balance worsened, hikes gave way to strolls and karate to Tai Chi. Everything got harder. Aides came and went. Hopefully by the time my book on shipwrecks comes out, I’ll have subsidized aides to keep us afloat.

Joan Axelrod-Contrada is a former correspondent for The Boston Globe and the author of 20 books for children. She is also the founder and editor of WriteAngles Journal. She can be reached at joanaxelrodcontrada@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

STAY TUNED

by Opal Gayle

My father did not know how to read so he traveled the world with his ears, nose, and bones. His bones, he said, told him when it was going to rain. His nose told him what was in the tiny phials that he bought for his clandestine healing missions. And, at his insistence, the ten o’clock news took us both around the world.

We learned of the aftermath of the Cuban revolution in our back yard, Jean Bertrand Aristide’s victory next door in Haiti, the bombings in Sarajevo, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, and Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa.

At first, I only tuned in because he made me.

“Two things in this life nayga man must always know,” he cautioned, “where him come from, and what going on roun’ him.”

But, I spent the early years terrified of our radio, wondering how the little people got inside and how many there were. Still, I mourned their death the day my brother Bobby accidentally spilled hot cornmeal porridge on the small rectangular box with pieces of Formica on the sides. The next day when we knocked it to get it to work, a large intrusion of cockroaches came tumbling out. There was no more talking; all the little people had perished.

But, soon after, my father came home one day, beaming, with a gigantic, shiny four-speaker boom box that even had a cassette player. We listened to the BBC, and I wondered why all the people sounded like they had a cold. But I was sure it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be cured with one of Father’s concoctions — rum, ginger, lime, sarsaparilla, and a drop of oil-of-something from one of his mysterious little bottles.

On JBC, our local station, I loved to hear the voice of correspondent Rose Coombs. “Rose Coombs for JBC News,” she always ended her reports. She was from my parish, Clarendon, and I imagined what she looked like, how long her hair was, and wondered how in the world she ended up inside the radio.

As the years rolled on, I took a genuine interest in all the broadcasts. I fantasized about Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection. I walked around terrified of being burned alive by the ozone layer. I tried on different last names for size: Castro. Thatcher. Gorbachev. And I started to look up places like Germany, Ethiopia, Chernobyl, and Yugoslavia in my school atlas.

Between the news and my Mills & Boon and Harlequin romance novels, I already knew I would never be interested in the boys that sat on the walls along the road all day doing nothing but yelling catcalls. I longed for places I had never been. I read aloud the Spanish instructions on the green Baygon roach spray can. And I scoffed silently when my stepmother said that at best I would become a street cleaner. Because I had already started to dream of bright lights and far-away places.

Opal Gayle grew up in rural Jamaica. She is a graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Saint Louis University. A poetry and language aficionada, she has been writing with Writers In Progress for over a year. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she teaches Spanish and French. Ongayle@hotmail.com

 

THE LAST PICNIC

by Richard Wayne Horton

Pulling into my driveway I saw the ambulance next door. Med guys rolled Tom out. Oh, no! No more Thursday card games.

We helped the widow in the next few days. I mowed the lawn over there.

Feeling very sorry for the widow, we drove her out to the lake for a nice picnic just like in the old days. Oops! Maybe reminding her of the old days was a mistake. We should have talked this thing over. I take full responsibility. I was about to hurt a tree for firewood but the widow took hold of my sleeve. Her eyes looked up. “No! Leave it be! Its arms … no!” I let go of the arm (branch). Sorry. I rubbed my hand against my pants. Then I walked around and opened the car trunk. I could at least pop beers for everybody. “Heeeyyy! How bout a cool one!” But when I saw the beer chest (casket) I thought of the cemetery hillside. The umbrellas, rain, big tree, hole. The beers in the ice. Waiting… The widow sat on the picnic bench and looked out at the placid water. Her shoulders drooped and her hands lay limply in her lap. Looking at the water myself, I noticed. How peaceful it was. I wanted to get away from it.

I kind of made a suggestion. “Want to move on?” (Oops! Damn!) I waited a moment, then took a chance and said, “There’s a place further on where there’s some dead … (gulp!) … well, some deceased wood for a fire.”

The widow’s silence was answer enough. No, I thought, don’t talk. Whatever you do, don’t talk.

But the decision was made. We would move. I jumped into action and went a little crazy, closing the trunk lid, and snatching up the potato chip bags. All the kids ran around and yelled. Me too. Everyone hopped in, laughing now. God forgive us. The doors slammed, and I hit the gas. I’m gone now. There’s no one here at the picnic table.

Tom gets nonchalantly up. He watches my car till it disappears around the bend, then thinks, “At least I won’t be paying on that damn life insurance policy any more. Or arguing with Lucy. It was me. I drank.” He strolls down to the edge of the water. “Bet I’m in trouble now. I cheated too. But what the hell! Now’s as good a time as any.” He puts his polished funeral shoe carefully on top of the water. It’s scary taking the first few steps out, on top of the water like that. How’s it even possible? No, don’t answer that. He pauses, teetering unsteadily. Then he thinks a cigarette would taste good about now. He pats his tuxedo pocket but then remembers,“Oh, yeah! I quit! That was stupid. I’m dead anyway.” Without a cigarette, he strolls as bravely as he can pretend, toward the disturbing thing the sky is doing.

Richard Wayne Horton has published a chapbook, STICKS & BONES, available from Meat For Tea Press. He has published in Southern Pacific Review, Meat For Tea, Danse Macabre, and others. He was nominated for a Pushcart. Contact him at albumsandsuch@gmail.com.

 

UNRESOLVED

by Diane Kane

“Jeff and I are getting a divorce.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Mom, it’s complicated.”

“Can’t you work it out?”

“We’ve tried,” Shannon said. “There’s no other solution.”

I grieved over twelve years of marriage and two children, broken. What could I do? There was no room for my pain. After all, it was my daughter’s heart shattered. Why then did I feel so betrayed?

When introduced to a charismatic young man who told me he loved my daughter, I believed him. His eyes sparkled when he looked at her. There was tenderness in his arms that held her.

Jeff was in the Army when they met, stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville N.C. They couldn’t wait to be together. After only a few months, they eloped to be married. Shannon still wanted a big wedding. So six months later, when Jeff was on leave, she had the wedding of her dreams. I never had a son; now I had a son-in-law.

I rode the train to North Carolina to visit them often. When he transferred to Fort Stuart, I traveled to Georgia. He hugged me and told me he loved me. I welcomed him into my family and heart.

Six years later, they announced with joy that I would be a Grandma soon. Casey was born, and two years later Finn completed the family, so I thought. But things are not always as they seem, are they?

I had not witnessed the slow painful stretching of the moral elastic band that had held their marriage together. I was not the one dishonored and deceived when that band finally snapped. Still, I felt the sting.

Shannon asked that I remove his pictures from my walls. Carefully I packed away the evidence of happy times — their wedding, vacations together, and birthdays. I put them in the drawer and closed it. Jeff had disappeared from my life, but not my memory.

Unlike a son who never stops being a son, Jeff became my ex-son-in-law. He moved in with his girlfriend and her two children. Shannon doesn’t mention his name. My grandchildren rarely talk about him in front of me. At ages seven and five, they already seemed to understand the separation of families — perhaps better than I.

A judge decided the final particulars. Assets divided, as well as bills. The children’s schedule with each parent made, including holidays. Details set, divorce final.

Why does it seem so unresolved to me?

Diane Kane’s self-published children’s book, Brayden the Brave, is featured at Boston Children’s Hospital to help families cope in emotional times. Diane’s short story, The God of Honey: A Love Story, is published in The Goose River Anthology 2016. She is at home in rural Massachusetts or on the shores of Maine.

 

ELEGY

by Kevin Cooke

It was dusk, and I was done. Totally emptied. There wasn’t an emotion left in me. I grabbed a beer and headed out onto the deck. October had been cool enough to keep the mosquitoes down, so sitting out there was tolerable.

The house was set high enough above the dunes that I had a good shot of the water to the west, with a barrier beach on one side and a flat calm bay stretching away to the horizon. I sat and waited for the water to extinguish the sun.

I took a deep pull on the beer and set it between my legs, safe from spilling. Watching the sun at this time of the evening didn’t seem as dangerous as at midday. I’d still wake up in the morning with my sight intact. It didn’t matter to me. Nothing much did anymore. I didn’t even pay attention to my breathing. At this point, my body was on its own, and if it wanted to keep going, that was fine with me.

My world had started with my boat and the sea. It was on the way up that I took on Meredith, and the sun shone twenty-four hours a day for quite a while. Along the way, she brought aboard a dog, along with all of the unconditional love that goes with such a creature. The weight of the dog’s big head on my leg at night was great comfort.

It took me four months to lose Meredith. She was more of a trouper than I was, and even though I promised her, I couldn’t make that voyage out to scatter her ashes on the water that we had sailed together for so long. I kept her, right over there in that pot. Jordie made it for me, and for her to live in while I’m still around.

A storm took the boat, and a long life took the dog. I wake up these days when I have to, still feeling the weight of her head on me. I remember her as I make the morning coffee and stare out over the deck at the water. There’s no reason to look there. The dog, and for that matter Meredith also, are wherever I’m looking. They often go romping over the horizon before me as I walk along the beach.

The sun is touching the water now, and I imagine great billowing clouds of silent steam rising up to the sky. The roiling of the sea just makes the dark come faster. I take a sip of the beer, gone warm by now, and the bottle drops back down as I focus on the sun disappearing into the water. There is one final, brief flash of light as the dark takes us both to rest at last.

Kevin Cooke is a graduate of Syracuse University and Antioch Graduate School. Kevin lives in Belchertown with his wife Linda, and has been writing with Kathy Dunn’s Main Street Writers group in Amherst for six years. His collection of short fiction, Sweet Caroline, will be released this spring by LifeRich Publishing.

 

DOORWAYS

by Sally Sennott

Janus had double booked a barber appointment.

He stood me up for a haircut.

Janus is the god of time.

The new lunch date showed promise.

“I was up and fully dressed,” Janus said,

“With face washed and beard trimmed.”

But Janus has a secret he doesn’t share.

“I think I’ll lay down for just a second,” flashed in his head.

“Take me down the passageway…”

Janus is the god of doorways.

He says he couldn’t hear the doorbell,

Or the persistent knocks on the door.

He didn’t hear the cell phone ringing

Three times in quick succession.

Deep in a heroin nod, Janus dreamed on.

Nirvana is his preferred reality.

He simply spaced out again.

Janus looks forward and back.

“So very sorry I missed our luncheon date,” he says.

“Are you okay?” I loyally ask.

“Don’t leave me,” Janus pleads.

Should I walk away?

Will I catch my breath?

I will not go through his revolving door.

It’s time to turn and walk away.

Sally Sennott is a graduate of Duke University and lives in Milford, NH. She is a retired newspaper correspondent and editor of a local museum newsletter. Sally has written two plays as well as a children’s story that were produced into videos and featured on the local cable access channel (AOTV).

 

TEN THOUSAND JOYS, TEN THOUSAND SORROWS

by Jody Callahan

On the third day after going blind, Rita felt relief. For years her sight would return only to be lost again. This time the doctor confirmed it would not be coming back.

It wasn’t her faith which kept her upright, not her god or her religion but something inside her, she knew, made her wake each morning expecting joy. Every life has ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows as the Buddhist saying goes but each joy, each sadness, is not equal. The fear of complete, irreversible blindness had been a constant and now without it there was this, unmistakable relief that the worst thing that could happen to her had, and yet here she still was, breathing, looking forward to her morning cup of coffee.

Now nearing fifty and finally legally blind, Rita went at the state’s expense to a center to learn how to adapt to her new life. She learned how to cook blind, something she had rarely done sighted, and received mobility instruction on how to get around independently with the use of a white-banded cane.

At the center she met other blind adults in group classes and therapy and found herself falling in love, an emotion she hadn’t realized had been missing all of these years. Perhaps the fear of going blind had dulled her sense of losing herself in someone else but now it was back.

Gerard was another who tended to look at the bright side of things. “Did you know,” he asked her the first time they met, “that the blind don’t have to pay for stamps? That’s right! The blind get to mail, for free.”

He had Matilda, a sweet German Shepherd as a guide dog. “Did you know,” he asked Rita, “that I don’t have to pick up Matilda’s poop? The blind are given a special exemption. Yup it’s good to be blind!” he roared. “Easy street!”

The morning after Gerard first slept over, he took Matilda for a walk and to buy them bagels for breakfast. Mrs. Conti from upstairs knocked on Rita’s door immediately. She had always been nosy but with Rita’s newly blind status had felt it her duty to double her intrusiveness.

“That man!” Mrs. Conti said.

“My boyfriend?” Rita asked.

“Oh!” Mrs. Conti said, grabbing one of Rita’s hands and holding it prisoner with her left as she stroked it annoyingly with her right. “He’s black you know.”

“He is?” Rita asked with a mock horror that failed to register with Mrs. Conti.

Mrs. Conti gasped. “He didn’t tell you, did he!”

“Maybe he doesn’t know,” Rita suggested.

“But he should! Someone should tell him!”

“I’m afraid it can’t be me,” Rita said. “I’m color blind, Gerard will never believe me.”

Mrs. Conti paused in her patting of Rita’s hand for a moment and almost, just almost, accepted the sarcasm in Rita’s voice.

“Don’t let this being blind change you,” Mrs. Conti said.

Now that, Rita knew, she never would.

Jody Callahan’s writing has appeared in the online literary journals Liars’ League London, Liars’ League Hong Kong, Gemini Magazine and Story Shack and in the anthology Foreign & Far Away, and Writer’s Digest. She lives in Northampton and is currently at work on a satirical novel tentatively titled POINTLESS PRAYER.

 

THE GOOD THIEF

by Rose Oliver

Thou shalt not steal. It’s a commandment of the Lord posted over the blackboard along with nine others in Sister Perpetua’s third grade classroom.

“Stealing,” she said, “is a mortal sin. Children, be free from all sin. This is called being in the state of grace.” That was the state that Sister told us made God smile.

Well I was not making God smile. Already I’d stolen two dollars and thirty-five cents. I was a third grader bent on a life of crime.

It started as a nickel and dime operation. My parents were in the habit of leaving pocket change on top of their dresser. Pilfering a nickel or dime at a time, I amassed a small fortune. Each time I approached the dresser to rob my parents I confronted my reflected image in the mirror — a scrawny bird-like girl with uneven bangs. My portrait seemed destined to hang in the local post office along with the other criminals.

I was purchasing popularity. My schoolmates followed me like a gaggle of geese after school to the corner store. I bought them Mars bars, Three Musketeers, Bazooka bubble gum – whatever their greedy hearts desired. I was widely acclaimed for my generosity.

Every Saturday I kneeled in the dusty stuffy darkness of the confessional box. Father Murphy pulled aside the small curtain that separated us. It always reminds me of the start of a puppet show. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned.” I say that I am heartily sorry. I always receive the same penance – three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.

The stealing went on unabated. The threat of hell fire and damnation proved not to dissuade me. Death and the afterlife seemed eons away. Besides, I’d have plenty of time to repent.

One day after school I arrived home ravenous. My mom was in the kitchen cooking dinner. I opened the Frigidaire and stuffed an entire hot dog in my mouth. I was in a big hurry. I needed to get to the dresser to continue my thievery before my father came home.

I couldn’t breathe. I was choking-choking to death.

My mom delivered a sharp rap to my back and the hot dog became an airborne projectile depositing itself in the sink.

“What,” my mom asked, “were you thinking?”

“Just eating a hot dog.”

“Today is Friday!”

Uh-oh. Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Friday. It was a mortal sin.

What if I’d died with the hot dog still in my throat? I’d be spinning around forever on a rotisserie in hell. The shiny pile of nickels and dimes went untouched.

I now knew third graders could die and not have time to repent. I vowed to live a life free from sin. I doubted my biography would find its way into the Lives of the Saints.

And as for making God smile – doubtful. But I was growing more and more certain that I could make God laugh.

Rose Oliver is a retired psychiatric Registered Nurse who lives in rural Western Massachusetts with her partner, but her heart lives in (tired cliché) San Francisco, her home for several decades. She writes poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her idea of paradise is a library.

 

DEAR EX-HUSBAND

by Tara McNamara

Although we are still legally married,
I am writing to inform you that,
Regretfully I will no longer be available to you.

I must gracefully decline your offer
Of employment as dishwasher and sock folder.
Also, general household maintenance and personal chef,
I will not be around to fulfill.

As the benefits that were previously arranged
You have failed to provide (see marriage vows).

As for accounting services,
You may decide to pay your own bills online,
And I do not have your email account password.
I believe you can locate it under gojumpoffacliffyoulazys**. com.

In other words, my employment
Under the umbrella of “housewife” has expired and
No further action on your part is needed.

I am providing this notice to you
Because you seem to have forgotten
That I left this position last year.

If you are still having trouble filling it,
I suggest you take out an ad in the back pages.
They do excellent work.
I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.

With the utmost regards,

Me

Tara McNamara facilitates and participates in writers’ workshops for women previously incarcerated and/or in recovery. A compilation of her work titled God Doesn’t Draw in a Straight Line, so Why Should I Walk One is her latest project. She loves sharks and resides in Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts.

 

A CAT NAMED SAM

by Anne Pinkerton

When my brother died, he was unmarried and childless (or “childfree,” as he likely would have framed it). David had spent his adult life working long hours as a radiologist in part because he loved science and helping people, but in equal part because the associated paycheck and vacation time afforded him the life he really wanted: that of an elite athlete. He had traveled much of the world competing in mountain biking races, ultra-marathons, and adventure racing quests. He had many girlfriends, but never yearned for a traditional family life, to the disappointment of said girlfriends. When at age 47, David fell from one of the “14ers” in Colorado – a range of 54 spectacular, jagged 14,000-foot mountains – he left behind a sizable bank account, a largely unlived-in house, and a small orange tabby cat named Sam.

Once upon a time, David had had a dog, a black lab called Harley, who was genuinely his best friend and a companion on many journeys. Harley had hung himself on his own leash by jumping out of the bed of my brother’s pick-up truck where David had tethered him while he hiked nearby. After that accident, David never wanted another dog. He probably didn’t even want a cat, but one of those girlfriends had picked up a teensy, flea-covered stray and convinced him to keep it. Despite his resistance to the vulnerabilities of love, he fell hard for Sam.

My six-foot-tall, rugged big brother would cry out girlishly, “Squeaky! Squeaky!” to summon Sam when he got home from work. The nickname came from Sam’s high-pitched voice. David would scoop him up and kiss his head and scruff loudly, unabashed. Because he often left Sam behind for extended periods when he traveled, I’ve always wondered how long it must have taken for Sam to realize he wasn’t coming back that last time.

It took months to figure out what to do with the abandoned kitty, not because he wasn’t wanted, but because both my mother and I wanted him so desperately. She and I are nearly equal crazy cat ladies. We were equally in love with my brother and equally devastated by the loss. But in the end, she won out by convincing me that a plane trip to my house would traumatize Sam more than a car ride to hers.

Last night, eight years later, Sam was barely breathing. “Do you think I’ve paralyzed him?” Mom asked me, desperation in her voice as she described his condition over the phone. She had given him twice as much pain medication as prescribed after he suffered a long bout with lymphoma, willing him to die at home rather than at the vet’s office today.

She got her wish. A text message this morning confirmed the little orange cat had left his body: I’m feeling sad . . .  I am too, saying goodbye to Squeaky, saying the last goodbye to my brother, wondering what shred we will hold on to now.

Anne Pinkerton holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University and is currently working on a memoir, a chapter of which was published recently in riverSedge Literary Journal. She is contributing writer for the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, and has a blog called True Scrawl.

 

EATING DIRT

by David H. Coulter

I was in the back lots with my new friend Bobby Peru playing in the dirt on a hot summer day.

As Bobby was scraping a little pile together he wiped tiny beads of sweat off his face and looked up at me.

“Hey, if I eat this spoonful of dirt will you eat one too?” he asked right out of the blue, startling me.

Eat Dirt? No one does that – it has to be awful.

“Boy this smells good enough to eat,” he said.

Oh boy, now he had me wondering if you really could eat dirt.

“No, I don’t wanna, you do it . . .” I said, looking down at some dead ants.

Then it happened.

He put the spoon of dirt in his mouth and it came out it clean. Then he opened up and the inside of his mouth was covered in slimy mud. It was a fascinating sight.

“It’s good,” he stammered. “Try it.”

“C’mon don’t be chicken,” he teased. “It’s good, honest.”

I put the spoon of dirt right in my mouth.

Oh my God.

It was the worst thing I ever tasted in my entire life. The sheer dryness and grit was horrifying. I was going to choke to death and my mother was going to be really mad at me for being so stupid.

I tried to spit the dirt out but it wouldn’t come out. In fact it only got worse. It was glued to my tongue and teeth or something and was choking me to death.

I looked at Bobby who was standing up now and spitting out muddy dirt out and making gagging noises. I ran over to the hose and turned it on full blast but when the scalding water came out I threw it down and stomped my feet in frustration. Bobby grabbed it and shoved it in his mouth and started spitting out dirty water.

Was I stupid or what? I couldn’t believe that I’d actually eaten dirt and was getting really mad that I let Bobby trick me like that.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was so awful?” I yelled, wanting to hit him.

“I wanted to see if I could get you to do it, that’s all,” he said pointing to me and laughing hysterically.

“No one eats dirt; you’re a big idiot,” he taunted then sprayed me in the face with the hose.

Then it dawned on me why I liked my new friend so much. He actually put dirt in his mouth and pretended that it was good just to see if he could get me to do it – and he succeeded.

He was really crazy but I liked him all the more for it.

What a summer it was going to be.

David H. Coulter is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and the former owner of Coulter + Bass Design, an award-winning design studio based in Providence. For the last several years he has been writing novels and short stories. He resides in Massachusetts with his wife and their cat Coco.

 

BOOBS

by Alice Knox Eaton

Sherry says, “He finally figured out I have two boobs.” She is talking about Jimmy, the boy I like. She has spent two afternoons making out with him in the backseat of his friend’s car. His friend and another girl had the front seat.

Sherry is from the city. She is visiting my friend Jeanette over spring vacation. It is March and muddy and gray. We wait for rides to wait at playgrounds for someone to bring us booze or pot. No one brings anything. Maybe cigarettes.

Jeanette and I both like Jimmy, but he opts for Sherry from out of town. I don’t really want to make out with Jimmy, though, so I am sort of relieved. I don’t have boobs. I wear a 32AAA bra that makes camouflaging lumps in my shirt. I don’t want anyone under it.

Jeanette pretends she doesn’t care and says Sherry is still her best friend. They have known each other since they were three. That means I am not Jeanette’s best friend, though we spend every weekend and afternoon together, unless we fight and take a break.

Jeanette knows people who can get us pot, or maybe vodka, though I prefer pot. So I forgive her when she hangs up the phone while I’m talking. Maybe not forgive, but I forget. Whatever.

Jeanette is hilarious when she’s stoned and I laugh and laugh.

This vacation is a bust. We wait on playgrounds in the drizzle. I don’t smoke but I smell like everyone else’s cigarettes. I crave the deep burn of dope in my lungs. Tobacco is just lame.

Jimmy looks like the picture of Romeo on my copy of Romeo and Juliet. Dark hair, smoldering eyes. Only the advanced ninth graders are reading Romeo and Juliet. In Jeanette’s class they are reading To Kill A Mockingbird. I saw the movie and had to look up rape in the dictionary. So rape is what white Southern girls accuse black guys of doing – well, back in the thirties. So we shouldn’t talk about rape. I like a black guy in tenth grade, Kenny B. He’s smooth and quiet, smiles kind of sideways. But I don’t really talk to guys, except lame ones.

I don’t think I will ever get boobs

Alice Knox Eaton teaches writing and literature at Springfield College. She has published essays in the First Person column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, fiction and creative nonfiction in the online journals Flash Fiction World and Mothers Always Write, and academic articles on Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer.

 

MRS. GAMBLE’S GRAVE

by Martin Henley

I am seventy years old. The preceding sentence is simple and declarative, yet for me it is as unfathomable as time itself. How did I get to seventy years, and why am I still here while some of my closest childhood friends have died? These were my thoughts as I stood over Mrs. Gamble’s grave. Her tombstone is a simple gray granite marker. Wreathed with grass and leaves, it lies flush with the ground. The inscription is brief. In letters worn smooth from 145 years of weather, it reads: “Mrs. Gamble, Died Dec 17th, 1798.” Her simple stone is the only visible marker in a neglected colonial cemetery in Syracuse, New York.

In 1955, when I was twelve, stately elms and shady chestnut trees dotted the open green fields of the cemetery. Kids from the neighborhood made it their playground and called it “the Park.” In the fall we played football, and during the winter the diminutive cemetery hills bristled with sleds. Summer was the best. Baseball games followed the sun. We started early, suspended play for lunch, and resumed until supper. We chose sides by picking the two best players as captains. Chosen last was a temporary humiliation quickly dissipated as we embraced the flow of the game. The batting order was determined by the quickest to speak up. “I got first ups,” “I got second ups,” the chorus continued until the sequence of “ups” concluded with the last batter. For the rest of the day the cemetery resonated with the crack of wooden bats on rawhide baseballs and the shouts of hooting kids.

We devised several ball fields, each with its own set of ground rules and golf-course contours. On one field a ball hit over a path was a home run. On another fly balls bounced through tree branches. An improbable catch earned a week of bragging rights. Trees, rocks, and stumps served as bases. In my favorite field a chestnut tree was first base, a forlorn baseball mitt served as second, and Mrs. Gamble was third base. My friends and I sailed together through the boundless summer joking, teasing, swearing, and playing. They were precious times, and we knew it.

These days I travel to Syracuse infrequently, but when I do I visit the cemetery. It is quiet and empty. Kids don’t play there anymore. I clear off Mrs. Gamble’s tombstone, and I look around recalling the bittersweet days of my youth. The neighborhood has changed. The big red house I lived in on the corner is divided into apartments. Surrounding houses look worn and weary. The Irish and Italian families who were the backbone of the neighborhood moved to the suburbs years ago. The park seems smaller, shrunken. Blight destroyed the elm trees. A few stunted chestnut trees still stand. Only Mrs. Gamble is unchanged. Her solitary tombstone remains, an obscure memorial to the joy of childhood and the melancholy of old age.

Martin Henley, a Vietnam veteran, retired as Professor Emeritus from Westfield State University in 2009. His retirement presented him with the opportunity to pursue his passion for history. He has authored several books on educating at-risk youth and, at every opportunity, pursues his lifelong challenge of hitting three good golf shots in a row.

 

BROKEN PIECES OF MY LIFE

by Diane Kane

I knew her well. You can’t live in someone’s body for nine months and not know them. I felt the anger. I smelled the sadness and tasted the salt that would burn in a lifetime of my wounds. With no choice; I was born, living in constant fear of the woman who bore me. I would be the target of her displeasure.

I survived in silence.

“Diane’s so shy,” she told people.

Silence would not save me.

“You have to learn to walk down the stairs,” she told me.

I kept falling.

My father tried to protect me – a little.

“Your father says I have to go to work to be away from you,” she told me at three years old.

She had days off.

“I told you not to do that to her ever again,” he said to her when he came into my bedroom and saw my naked five-year-old body.

She worked nights. At seven years old, I discovered if I was quiet I could get myself ready for school before she woke up. After school, I went to my grandfather’s, (her father). He knew, but he didn’t talk about it. My father would take me home after she left for work. I could go five days without seeing her like this.

Then I would see her.

I wouldn’t smile. My happiness enraged her.

At thirteen years old I ran away for the first time.

I walked the streets, used my thumb to hitch rides, slept in the woods or the houses of people who didn’t know my story and didn’t want to ask. Police would bring me home. They didn’t know what else to do with me. I couldn’t tell them why. So I ran away again and again.

“Diane’s spoiled,” she told people.

I got married. I moved, not far enough.

“I’m glad you had a girl so now you can know what real disappointment is,” she told me the day I came home from the hospital with my first born.

I cried. She laughed.

I never cried in front of her again.

I couldn’t put it into words. If I could say, who would believe me? Sometimes I wondered if I was the one who was insane. Then she would hurt me again. Never forget, I told myself. But I would forget a little, and I would hope. Hope that this would be the last hurt. Hope that she would change.

Fifty years later I hit the limit of my resistance. “No more. No more. Go away. I won’t let you hurt me anymore. “

“Diane’s crazy,” she told people.

My life shattered into a million tiny pieces.

Everything changed. Without her who am I?

Lost, wandering, unsure, I keep trying to puzzle together the broken pieces of my life.

Diane Kane is an author of short stories and poetry. Her work has been featured in local media and periodicals. Diane’s newest short story, The God of Honey, was recently published in The Goose River Anthology 2016. Diane has a home in Phillipston, Massachusetts, and is a seasonal resident of York, Maine.

 

WOLF

by Steve Bernstein

As usual Jimmy’s presence put me on edge. He was leaning against the storefront of my dad’s plumbing shop, drinking Colt 45 out of a brown paper bag, an unfiltered cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. His lips formed a smug grin, barely hiding his rotten, brown teeth.
I never understood why my dad kept Jimmy around for so many years. He was in the habit of stealing my dad’s tools and then selling them to junkies who usually sold them right back to my dad. And, he’d still have his job the next day. Jimmy was my dad’s drinking and whoring buddy. One time, Jimmy tried to get me to do some heroin. Another time, he was fooling around with a woman in the back of the shop and told me to join in.

I hated Jimmy. And he knew it. Although I was only fourteen, I let him know to stay the hell away from me.

Just behind Jimmy, the front door of the shop was propped open with a wooden chair. Inside, the fluorescent ceiling lights were glaring. I could see old meat hooks still hanging from the ceiling. The worn and stained butcher block counter had been converted to a workbench with a pipe vise on one end. Wrenches, black steel pipes, pipe fittings and liquor bottles scattered all over. The door of the walk-in meat freezer, where all the valuable plumbing tools were locked up, was wide open. The stink of rotten meat still very present. Towards the back of the shop, I could see my old man snoring on a makeshift bed, an empty bottle of scotch dangling from his hand off the side of the cot.

I knew this shop all too well. After school and on the weekends my job was cleaning up and re-arranging the mess from the previous week’s work.

I looked right past Jimmy, through the broken plate glass window to the shelf where Wolf slept. I couldn’t see him. Only the leash and collar were on Wolf’s shelf. His empty food and water bowls on the floor. No Wolf.

I screamed at Jimmy, “Where’s Wolf?”

Jimmy was all too eager to answer, knowing how much I loved that dog. With a smirk, Jimmy said, “He’s gone, man.”

My fists and teeth clenched. “What do you mean, gone? Where the hell is he? What did you do with him?” I was frantic. I almost reached into my pocket to get my knife. I wanted to slit his throat. Because I knew.

“I didn’t do nothin’. It was your daddy,” he said with a smile. “Yeah, he got good and drunk, and lost your dog in a card game.”

It felt like a kick to the stomach. I ran wildly, crazy with fear and rage, all over the neighborhood, in the alleys, in basements, up and down the block, down in the schoolyard. No Wolf.

I went upstairs to the apartment and collapsed. The house was dark. I didn’t cry. I do now.

Steve Bernstein is a retired plumber who for over three decades has been a teacher and mentor for at-risk teens. The full length version of “Wolf” is one of six true life adventure stories from Steve’s upcoming memoir, STORIES FROM THE STOOP, about his gritty childhood in the South Bronx in the 1960s.

 

KALEIDOSCOPE LOVE

by Christian Escalona

My mother never chased me with a garden rake like my second cousin after his college mental breakdown. Her type of sickness isn’t caused by the abnormal tangle of blood vessels in her head. Her type of sickness hides behind the guise of brain surgery aftermath. Her type of sickness rules my mother’s life and often her family’s lives too.

I remember when I was 5 years old, my mother, step-father, and I were having a pillow fight in our condo’s living room. I swung my pillow, full of goose down feathers at my mom, embracing the rare moment of levity in our home. My pillow smacked her across the back of her head, right along her incision line. Everything changed abruptly. My mother stumbled like an intoxicated bar patron.

“Lisa? Are you okay?” My step-dad ran over to her. In that moment, she might have considered him an intruder.

“Who are you?” She questioned, backing away from him.

“Lisa . . . It’s me. Your husband.”

My mother looked around frantically before grabbing the lamp from an end table. She yanked its cord out of the wall and wielded the lamp at him.

“Stay away from me!”

My step-dad held his hands up.

“Okay! Okay! Just calm down . . .”

“Mommy?” I uttered.

My mother turned around and stared at me before dropping the lamp to the floor.

“My baby . . .” She kneeled down and hugged me tightly. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

I shook my head and cried. My mother rose from her knees, filling our living room with an energy that could stifle the most fearless person.

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY CHILD?” She cornered my step-dad.

“Lise,” he choked up. “I didn’t . . . We were all having a pillow fight and your head was hit. Look around.”

My mother took in the scattered pillows across the living room floor. She walked over to her Steinway piano picking up a photo of her and my step-father.

“That’s our wedding photo, baby. Do you remember that day?”

She dropped the wedding photo to the floor. She turned and looked at both of us completely vacant, existing anywhere but in that living room.

“Do you want to go to the beach?” My mother asked me in a cheery tone. “Let’s go to the beach.”

“Mommy, it’s nighttime.” I pointed to the window.

“Lise, maybe you should sit down.”

My mother ran and jumped onto our couch and then without any warning, urine flowed out from under her nightgown and onto the cushions.

Fifteen years later, I moved 3,000 miles away from my California home. I fell for a woman who reminded me so much of my mother, I missed home less and less. After our first breakup, I turned to outside help for the first time breaking my mother’s pact for silence. My therapist would guide me through four breakups with the same woman as I worked to make sense of my own mother.

Christian Escalona is a business manager by day and a writer by night. After completing author Dori Ostermiller’s manuscript course, Christian continues work on his first memoir: a young man’s transformation against the backdrop of an unstable mother. He is a collector of good vibes, transcendent experiences, and high quality tattoos.

 

THOUGHTS OF THE DAY

by Laura Poth

I woke up this bright, sunny Massachusetts morning with not one cloud in the sky.

I have all I need to live well enough. My family enjoys good health. Though life does have its high and low points, it generally gives us much joy and happiness.

Why, then, do I have this feeling of desperate hopelessness? A cloud of doom hovers over me. I am filled with longing for something almost too difficult to describe.

I lack control. That’s not me, typically. Whenever life presents problems, I usually find a way to take care of things. I can usually find a way to choose a positive path to the best possible outcome.

News that streams to me minute-by-minute via cell phone, newspaper and television instantaneously informs me of shootings, stabbings, graft, greed and corruption worldwide.

I am 70 years old.

What can I do?

I am one of the first baby boomers. We were the generation that was to change the world. Those born after me were the flower children. With all the love-ins and talk of peace; with all the desire to end hate and racism, war and injustice in the world. . . . I was filled with hope back then.

What went so wrong?

Why can’t we all get along?

Laura Poth grew up in Connecticut, received an A.S. Degree at Dean Jr. College and a B.A. at Westfield State College in Massachusetts. A true believer in continuing education, she appreciates the little things in life that are often most important.

 

ICE FLIGHT

by Leoma Retan

The sky was as dark as the inside of a closet. Sue’s flashlight provided just enough light to see the single-engine Mooney’s ice-coated wings.

“Don’t worry, the Mooney’s a great ice hauler,” she said.

There wasn’t supposed to be ice on our route from Van Nuys to Oakland, California. No sane person plans to fly a small plane into icing conditions. Ice adds weight and changes the shape of the front edge when it builds up on the wings, reducing lift. When lift becomes less than gravity, the plane can’t maintain altitude.

The report when I called flight service for the weather at noon mentioned icing. It was expected to move east, away from our destination, within a few hours. There were still icing reports at two o’clock. And at four o’clock. The cold front moved away slower than predicted.

We waited.

Sue considered buying an airline ticket even though she didn’t want to fly commercial. “That’s no fun,” she said. But it was her mother’s eightieth birthday and Ruby was having a party at her women’s club. Sue needed to be there.

At five p.m., the go/no-go time for the three-hour flight, flight service said that the icing had moved east into the Central Valley. We could fly.

We’d head generally north, keeping Interstate 5 on our right and the coastal mountain ranges on our left until we reached the north end of the San Joaquin Valley, then turn west over the Diablo mountain range and into Oakland. It was six o’clock by the time we took off; we’d definitely be late.

For the first half of the flight we took turns flying and napping as the winter sunset. We didn’t discover that the weather prediction was wrong until we turned west. The cold front unexpectedly stalled. Rime ice formed on the Mooney’s wings; it thickened with every minute. Air Traffic Control changed our flight path, then our altitude, trying to find us a safer way through. Flying became a two person job. We shared the controls. Sue frequently checked for ice; I talked to Air Traffic Control.

The lights in Fresno, east of us in the central valley, beckoned with the promise of safety as the ice build-up grew to a quarter inch. But Sue promised her mother we’d be there for her party. We flew on.

God smiled on us that winter night. Less than an hour from Oakland, about to give up and divert to Fresno, we reached warmer air, an end to the icing. No trace of it remained by the time we touched down and parked.

We arrived at the party at eleven o’clock, barely in time to have dessert and wish Ruby “Happy Birthday.” We didn’t know that it would be the last time.

That night Ruby, who had been ill, was taken to the hospital. A few weeks later she died. Because we continued despite our fear, Sue was able to share that one, last good time with her mother.

An engineer by day and a writer by night, Leoma Retan continuously adds to her bucket list because so many items from the original are complete. For the past three years she’s helped to plan the WriteAngles conference. She is currently working on her first fantasy novel, DREAM SONGS.

 

LOVE POEM

by Lisa Papademetriou

You are eating that cookie just to infuriate me,
Aren’t you?
Chomp, smack, slurp, smacksmacksmack.
I can’t believe you would chew that way
When you know it makes me crazy.
Especially after you
Said that thing
You said.
Well, I’m giving you
The Silent Treatment.
I’m not going to tell you how much your cookie eating
Irritates me, because then you will
Get angry and we really will fight.

Once I asked my mother
Why she divorced my father.
What was the final
Straw?
It was
The way he ate cheese,
My mother said.

I can see that now.

Why do people get married?
Is so different from the picture that lingered
In my childhood mind.
There, marriage meant never having to say you were sorry,
Because you were never sorry
Because you and your husband
Always agreed
Of course
Of course.

It has been two hours, and you haven’t even noticed
That I am giving you The Silent Treatment!

There you sit, at your computer, typing away.
Working.
Working at bedtime!
Working,
After you ate that cookie smacksmacksmack
And after you said that thing
You said.

I am lying here, hugging a pillow,
Staring at the window
When you finally pull back the covers.
Your arm snakes around me.
A soap bubble kiss shimmers at the base of my neck.
I wrap my foot around your ankle.
I feel your chest rise and fall against my back.
Your body radiates heat.
Your breath is even.
In. Out. In.
Out.
In.
My breathing falls into your rhythm.
This way, at last,
We fall asleep.

Lisa Papademetriou is the author of the CONFECTIONATELY YOURS series, A TALE OF HIGHLY UNUSUAL MAGIC, and many other novels for young readers. A former editor, she serves on the faculty of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and is the founder of the humorous grammar site IvanaCorrectya.com.

 

GIANT LEAP

by Tim Parker

Somehow, as a guy from a small New England town who ultimately became an aerospace engineer, I found myself center stage before the Apollo 11 launch in 1969 for the first lunar landing. Standing in front of a myriad of press microphones and cameras under the hot lights at Cape Canaveral in Florida, I explained what a space suit was and why it was necessary to protect the astronauts from the hostile environments of space and the lunar surface.

In government parlance, the suit was called a Pressure Garment Assembly. An Integrated Thermal Micro-meteoroid Garment is worn on top of the PGA for additional protection. At this joint press briefing, DuPont’s corporate marketing people were there to field questions on their high performance materials developed for use in the Apollo Manned Space Program to get astronauts to the moon and returned safely. I was surprised to see so much interest expressed by the international journalists. If their enthusiasm had been bottled. the excess energy could have supplied the Saturn V rocket with an extra boost off the Kennedy Space Center launch pad. Due to their excitement, the foreign press couldn’t seem to ask enough questions. Many scribbled notes as fast as possible, but most extended their arms with tape recorders through the sea of flashbulbs so as to not miss a bit of information.

Then I had a call that my one-year-old son was in the hospital and I had to race home. Among other things he had a heart defect. At that time, if it became worse, he would have needed open heart surgery to determine if it was a valve problem or a hole in his heart. Recently my brother had a catheterization where a tiny pressure transducer was threaded up through an artery to measure blood pressure differentials in the heart. The miniaturized transducers were developed to monitor the astronauts in flight along with a zillion other advances from the space program which allows things like a room full of 1960s computer power to sit on your desktop.

Since my son has been an adult, he has asked how does it feel to reach my goals in life? I’m certain I gave him a strange look when I replied, “What?” He started to list:

You were a rocket scientist and helped get people to the moon and back.

Your pictures were in World Book Encyclopedia under Aerospace and Engineering.

You have the Apollo Achievement Award for contributions to the space program.

You hold numerous patents.

You wrote “the great American novel” twice so far.

I told him that none of that was planned. What I did wasn’t in anyone’s crystal ball before I did it. I just kept meeting challenges head-on and had a lot of fun solving problems. After I was hurt, writing was one of the few things I could do at my own pace because I didn’t know when I would have a good day to be able to work. Now I’m in the process of writing my aerospace memoir to encourage the next generation to solve tomorrow’s problems and meet new challenges as they are encountered.

Tim Parker grew up on a farm in western Massachusetts and worked his way through college. An aerospace/industrial career in engineering and management followed. After an accident, he started a writing career. Combining his diversified background and experience at running businesses, he addressed conflicting world environment to protect our shores.

 

MEMORIES OF MÉMÈRE

by Sarah Whelan

Though it’s been twenty years since her death, I feel like I’m still learning about the woman I called “Mémère.” When I was younger, my grandmother was a simple person to understand. She was patient and kind — never critical or judgmental. No word of complaint ever left her mouth – even when she was in physical or emotional pain – even when she knew others were.

She would sit politely among the well-nurtured spider plants and precisely arranged knick-knacks on the shelves of her home. She sat on the very edge of her chair, with legs pressed together and angled daintily to the side. Her hands lay atop her lap in a decidedly feminine pose. Her closed mouth formed the slightest smile in its freshly applied lipstick, and her short white hair was styled and neat. She wore a straight, dark skirt that reached just below the knee, and her modest, rose-colored shirt ended in petite ruffles at the neck and wrists. All evidence suggests that she was incapable of slouching.

She would engage in pleasant conversation until the coarse, obtrusive voice of her husband, who was perpetually smoking outside on the porch, forced its way into the room. “Irene, get me a drink,” or “Tell those kids to shut up.” Then, she would gracefully rise, all five feet of her, and without complaint, without a change of expression or emotion, without saying a word, do exactly as he said.

Years later, with her husband dead and her home lost, my cousins and I could always count on Mémère to listen to our teenage-variety problems and give much-needed hugs. Even when she knew we were in trouble or sick or even in danger, she would heed our appeals not to report the information to our parents and refrain from any criticism or judgment. She would, without complaint, without a change of expression or emotion, without saying a word, do exactly as we said. And we loved her for it.

It is true that my Mémère was patient and kind, but I now realize that these traits were a consequence of the true nature of her character. Above all else, Mémère was acquiescent. She was submissive to her husband and to nearly everyone else. She did what was told without protest, even if it resulted in physical or emotional damage to others.

I was a young adult when Mémère died, and my naïveté ensured that my appreciation for her was both uncomplicated and unchallenged. As I look back at her life now through the more mature eyes of a mother, I am developing a broader and more accurate understanding of the person she truly was. I no longer think of Mémère as flawless or saintly, as she was by no means perfect. But instead of diminishing my feelings for her, this evolving understanding is increasing and reshaping my love for the woman I called “Mémère.”

Sarah Whelan is a professional grant writer and freelance author. She has an advanced degree in Criminology and writes for both business and pleasure. Her articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including New Jersey Family, Bay State Parent, Police and Security News, and International Association of Chiefs of Police Magazine.

 

FALLING

by D. K. McCutchen

I was dancing in the Land of the Long White Cloud. Just dancing. The Otago Zoology Department dress code seemed to be dowdy nightgowns and frayed tweed. My eye was on the one other outsider stomping out a Haka in black motorcycle leathers (dear reader, I married him).  An almost-friend burst into the hall, pale with news, and bee-lined straight to me. “Simon fell off the cliff at Taiaroa Head.” I stared, speechless. “Banding Albatross. He chased one downhill in the dark.” And fell 100 meters down into black waves, headlamp still burning — like my ears while I listened; but not closely enough. Albatross — planet gliders — with a four-meter wingspan, who might hope to catch one? “You never listen,” Simon said, two weeks and a new girlfriend later. She’d been there for him. “You’re a bad friend.” Mr. Motorcycle Leathers had broad, gallows shoulders built to endure tears. When the chanting of the Haka finished, he listened to the echoes reverberating far out past the cliffs, like soaring birds calling out “no, no” at dusk. Years away from the hall of dancers, he remembers the plunge from the cliff, and the updraft that carried him half a world away from home.

D. K. McCutchen’s publications include THE WHALE ROAD, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book & Pushcart nominee, writings in Fourth Genre, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rosebud, Identity Theory, Fish Publishing anthologies, The Mossy Skull, Small Beer Press, etc. In a literary attempt to save the world, she’s working on a slipstream series.

 

WHAT AIR-CONDITIONING TOOK FROM US

by Marty Damon

My grandfather’s big white-washed brick house in Oklahoma was where I spent much of the summer during my pre-air conditioning childhood. My family drove across country from our home in Virginia, the hot summer wind whipping through the car. When our car finally pulled into the hotly shimmering slate-covered drive, my grandparents would come smiling out of the kitchen door to greet us.

If the day’s heat had set in, we would visit in the living room, the French doors to the porch closed against summer’s bake. This was a house built when you had to gather up the rare cool breeze of an Oklahoma July any way you could. In the dining room there were also double doors, and on cooler days they might be opened during dinner as we drank our iced tea with the mint I’d gathered from the garden.

The double porch ran across the back of the house, enveloping both the living room and my grandfather’s study. One floor up, it ran outside my grandparents’ bedroom and the next door guest room where my sister and I slept when we all came for a visit. There was no screen on the window and I was fascinated by the fact that I could climb through it onto the porch.

The second floor porch held only two plastic-wrapped beds, folded in half and rolled up against the wall. This was not a place for socializing, like the one below with its green and white metal chairs and swing. This was a sleeping porch, for nights so hot you had to sleep with arms and legs akimbo, as though you were making snow angels on your sticky sheets.

One evening, when it was especially hot, I climbed through the window, leaving my more dignified older sister behind in the guest room. Grampy then opened up a bed for me and pushed its head against the house and its foot closest to the screening of the porch.

He tucked me in with a kiss and reminders about sleeping tight and bedbugs, and wrapped plastic over the sheet at the bottom half of the bed. I lay there, awake now not from the heat, but the sensations around me. Adult voices drifted up from the porch below, the cicadas called to one another, and June bugs as big as peach pits thunked harmlessly against the screen. I could smell a new dampness in the weak evening breeze – a storm was coming.

First came the heat lightning high in the sky as the blackness beyond the screen was filled with flashes and distant thunder. The wind picked up and soon the rain was there in earnest, throwing itself against the house in bursts. It cut through the screen, but I was dry, my top half positioned against the house, my legs enveloped in my plastic cocoon. I lay there, safe and sheltered, and storing a memory that I would keep forever.

Marty Damon is amazed and delighted that after twenty years of standing at the front of an English classroom, she still has something to say. She lives in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, where she is happily retired and working on her third mystery. Her first book, EARTHLY NEEDS, is available at Amazon.

 

MY CITY

by Laura Elizabeth Nelson

O New York, my mistress, my summer lover
How many times must we say
Farewell?

You take my hand, pull me into your blistered masses
You ask me to remove my shoes
And I do
I follow you
I walk along in bare feet across tapestries woven
In blood in dreams in ambition and broken glass
My own trails the streets
You absorb me

O New York, my child, my winter’s desert
Do you miss me when I am elsewhere?
When I am thinking green thoughts,
Crisp enough for birds to perch on their vibrant edges
You are a chill wind sending the birds away from me

O you sleepless city, you bitch, my spring fever
I watch you rise from the morning haze
All spires and plot points

You reach for me across the hours
I feel your grungy palm, smooth, chameleon
My body turns, my shoulder the pivot

Sink into the ocean, love
Fall down
Drown
Do it
For me, for humanity

And please
Don’t forget to take us with you

Elizabeth Nelson is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, theatre director, and communications professional working in New York and the Berkshires. Graphic designer: SDC Journal. Published: FUGUE, A TEN-MINUTE PLAY (Black Box Press), THE GOING PRICE (Stage Rights). Elizabeth is a playwright with the Playwright Mentoring Project of Barrington Stage Company.

 

TEXAS TWO-STEP

by Patricia Lee Lewis

Uncle Blake, red nose, bright hooded eyes,
that funny smell I now know was booze,
I was crazy about you. You can drive
this thing, Sugar, of course you can,

with those long legs of yours. Just git up
on that seat and push the pedals. I need
some help down at the River Corral. Don’t
be a sissy, come on. It was like being

set free: you cussed and drank and played
gin rummy until your head fell over, so
there weren’t rules for me
either. Oh, Uncle Blake, I think you were

my first real love. But it wasn’t you
I loved so much as it was me. When I was with you,
river stones sang, mesquite leaves shone silver
in the hot, yellow sun, and bleating sheep

moved slowly, eyes like amber watching
as we rode on by. And you could dance!
Like a great bear, light and swaying, belly
hopping over your belt buckle, caked boots

remembering the day’s work: you’d grab me
and away we’d jump to a Texas two-step. It’s a long time
since you died. These days, I have to remind myself
to watch light dawn on folded mountains

and not shade myself. But today, the sudden
thought of you, cussing, teasing, fills my belly like a sun;
and in its heat I toss my head and stretch
my legs and dance, heart hopping, with the bear.

Reprinted from A Kind of Yellow, Patchwork Press. Patricia Lee Lewis offers writing workshops at Patchwork Farm Retreat, Westhampton MA, and writing & yoga retreats internationally. MFA in Creative Writing, Vermont College of Fine Arts; BA, Smith College, PBK. Founding member, Straw Dog Writers Guild. Award-winning poet. Books: A Kind of Yellow, and High Lonesome. Patricia’s photo by Bob Marstall.