the essays

With each passing year I have come to realize with shining clarity that no matter what metaphorical skins I have sloughed off or put on over the course of my life, my lodestar was established a long time ago, and my life’s journey so far has been in making my way back to my roots. By roots I mean the essence of what is important to me, what was taught to me as a child through myth and folk tales and stories my mother made up on the spot for me about the everythingness of existence. By roots I mean the ways in which I came to understand those non-negotiable essentials such as love and friendship and kindness. These roots are the ones that anchor me at all times, the ones to which I intentionally return when I need reminding. The essays in this issue are about roots of all sorts—the inviolable ties between parent and child, the transcendent connection with the elders, the sacred bonds of love of all kinds. I feel privileged and proud to have encountered these essays and to be able to share them with you. I hope they resonate and recharge you and remind you of the power and beauty of your own roots.

— Ranjana Varghese
Editor, Creative Nonfiction

The essays in this issue have come about from a journey into the insular intimacies of what makes a life. The writers have gone deep into themselves with a stunning vulnerability to bring these stories into being and we are so honored to usher them out into the world. The world today is such a turbulent place, with everything around us in constant flux, the kind of pace one gets lost in. It is so crucial—now more than ever—for us to dive deeply into things that center us, and remind us who we truly are. And that is exactly what these essays show. We have peered into the most tenderly beautiful worlds—those that tell of the epic vulnerability of young queer love, of hands gingerly held on tentative nights that bloomed into joyful mornings. We have seen the marking of skin by women in ancient societies, what it says of them, that they are the ones who mark our bodies with the things that remind us of home. Of returning to self. Like the young woman who does the herculean task of choosing herself in a world that has never taught us to do that. We witness the blooming of new and unusual relationships that fill a void within us whilst mirroring unto us the necessary work of re(building) bonds that our souls thirst after. We are once again reminded of the timeless power of nature and its effect on a young mother and her child as we observe the beauty of symmetry with our world and with each other. It has been a great pleasure of mine to discover these stories and it is with great pride that I present them to you now.

— Mofiyinfoluwa O. 
Editorial Intern for Creative Non-Fiction 

Neighbor Danger

Lori White

We’d lived on Furman Avenue for nearly a year before I met our neighbor, Moe, next door. I’d spied his old El Camino between the thick hedge that divides our houses, felt the rumble of its engine each morning at nine when he started it up and took off, not to return until evening. I’d catch a glimpse of him behind the wheel, his aviator glasses and narrow mustache. That was all I’d seen of him, and that was enough.

patterns of love

autumn duke

I woke up before her, as I have since we were seven years old. The morning sunlight from her bedroom windows brushed the room in buttery yellow. We were sleeping body-to-body despite the relative grandeur of a queen-sized mattress. I moved to make myself comfortable, carefully avoiding waking her. Her dark, curly hair was everywhere, under my head, on my shoulder. The familiar scent of her shampoo filled my nose. She was snoring.

batok: micro-essays on indigenism, craft, and matrilineality

narisma

1. The Kalinga province remains shrouded by the humid forests of northern Philippines, where, unlike dozens and dozens of other Filipino ethnic groups, the various sub-tribes of this mountainous region have retained much of their original culture. A combination of brutal terrain and combatant nature have allowed them to remain relatively untouched by centuries of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonization. Violence is really only one aspect of Kalinga survival.

a sin of thought

Stephanie couey

Each evening, when I get out of summer classes, the boy I’m in love with, a Jack Mormon from a rural neighboring town, waits for me on the bridge. He and I walk to the Jackson’s gas station, buy cartons of chardonnay, head to the Boise River, and strip to our underwear while it’s still light out. We float and drift in the shallow warm water until it’s black and speckled with gold from the campus lights.

walking away

rosalie petrouske

I began walking with my daughter before she was born. 

On autumn mornings in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we walked along the shore of Lake Superior. On one of these outings, I felt her move inside me for the first time. The delicate motion made me think of the butterflies I once cupped in my palms when I was a child, and how their wings brushed softly against my skin as I held them gently before letting them go. She felt the same way, a subtle quiver in the small of my belly. I stopped and stood still, anticipating the movement again, my hand touching the rounded curve where she waited to be born.

 Neighbor Danger

Lori White

We’d lived on Furman Avenue for nearly a year before I met our neighbor, Moe, next door. I’d spied his old El Camino between the thick hedge that divides our houses, felt the rumble of its engine each morning at nine when he started it up and took off, not to return until evening. I’d catch a glimpse of him behind the wheel, his aviator glasses and narrow mustache. That was all I’d seen of him, and that was enough. 

I never wanted to live in this neighborhood. I missed our trailer by the lake where, from my desk, I could watch the deer and the hawks and the feral black cat drag squirrels and gophers into its den behind our wood pile. There were no blinds to close or lawns to water, no blue recycle cans, no gardeners every Wednesday to mow and blow. And no neighbors. Now, the most entertainment I got was obedient parents pushing their kids on tricycles and a man in a beige windbreaker walking his yellow Lab twice a day. And Moe next door. Moe and his El Camino. Moe who stopped leaving his house back in September. Now he sat in his garage and watched the same sidewalk I did. He waved when I pulled in the driveway, and I politely waved back on my way to more important business: dogs to let out, groceries to unload, dinner to cook. I’d been making up stories about my neighbor stranger and why he no longer drove the El Camino. With so little to feed on in our neighborhood, I was reluctant to relinquish those stories I dished up in my head. 

The truth is, I have a way with strangers, which is also to say I have very few friends. Strangers are temporary, disposable after they’ve answered a few of my questions, like the checker at the grocery store who just beat cancer or the tattooed girl at the AM/PM who’s two years sober and likes to call me Honey even though she’s easily twenty years younger than I am. I get enough answers to start a story in my head, without having to answer any questions in return. One friend of mine (I have a total of three, all a plane’s ride away) took me with her to the radiation clinic where she was being treated for breast cancer. She wanted me to get the story on the receptionist at the front desk, a puzzle she’d been trying to solve for weeks. By the time my friend was zapped and back in her street clothes, the receptionist was telling me the details of her ex-girlfriend’s affair.

But the problem with neighbor strangers is they’re too close, too permanent, too demanding, so I kept my distance, politely waved to Moe, and went about my life. Then one sunny October day, Moe was sitting in his garage when I came back from a walk, something I’d promised my therapist to do at least once a week. This time when he waved I went up his driveway to introduce myself. Maybe it was the endorphins, stirred from my walk, or maybe it was loneliness. Later on, he’d tell me he’d been waiting patiently, like a spider, to catch me in his web. A chilling simile but for one fact: I could easily outrun him. Pulmonary fibrosis had him leashed to the house on fifty feet of oxygen tubing.  

Someone had told us Moe was Jewish (short for Shlomo?), a widower whose wife (Esther?) had died one month after our escrow closed. It might have been the man we bought our house from who abandoned the mezuzahs nailed to the front and back doors. Maybe he, like I, refused to remove them, not because of Jewish tradition, but for fear of the bad luck that could ensue. 

As it turned out, Moe was a nickname some schoolmate had given him more than seventy years ago. He was Mexican, not Jewish, which was fortunate. I already had my hands full with one 85-year-old Jewish man: my father.

A few months ago, I went back to my therapist, the one who had taught me how to get along with my parents; now that my parents were aging, I needed her to teach me how to say goodbye to them. They’re in their 80s: my mother is slowly losing her mind and my father is slowly losing his life to prostate cancer. He’s got a few good years left, the oncologist assures us, and that’s enough for my father to carry on as usual. He still drives my mother to doctors’ appointments and the grocery store (and to Palm Springs and San Francisco); they still walk their precious dog and go out to dinner with their (shrinking) circle of friends. 

My father is still as handsome as he was forty years ago, though his blue eyes are more hooded, and his thick black hair is silver now. He’s still a whirlwind of nonstop motion. He needs to do things—take the Volvo in for service or dash off to Costco—though my mother can no longer keep up with him. He makes sure she eats her breakfast and takes her pills, then prods her to shower and dress. He hurries her along, reminding her of their agenda for the day. Sometimes he pushes too far and she turns on him, angry, and accuses him of controlling her. That’s when my father calls me. I’m the one (thanks to the therapist) who knows how to calm down my mother. 

I get dressed and drive the forty minutes to their house. I make some coffee and sit with my mother at the kitchen table to answer the same question on loop—How’s school?—three or four times until my father comes downstairs from his office and rescues me. Then the three of us go out to lunch. My father introduces me to our waiter, who already knows what my parents want. My mother looks at me searchingly when she can’t remember the drink she likes. Before I can answer, the waiter suggests an Arnold Palmer, and she shouts, That’s it!

In the afternoon, I sit with my mother—this time in the living room—and tell her about my classes a few more times while I spy my father through the windows as he dashes back and forth across the yard, checking the pool filter or the sprinklers, always busy, always moving, always doing, doing, doing. Not even prostate cancer can slow down this man.

These are our end-game years, the time with my parents I’m supposed to cherish, when we open up and share stories about ourselves before we run out of time. Only now my mother can’t remember those stories, and my father refuses to stay still long enough to tell them.

That October day when I introduced myself in Moe’s garage, I stood while he sat in a barber’s chair from the shop he had to close in September after 58 years of business. This was why the El Camino sat in his driveway every day—mystery solved. His health had made it impossible for him to put in a full day of cutting hair. He offered me the wooden stool he had his feet propped up on, but I declined. Accepting a seat at this point would have been too much of a commitment. 

He asked if I worked, since I seemed to be home most of the time. I told him I was an adjunct English teacher at the community college. This led to questions about my background: high school, college, jobs, and graduate school at mid-life. I slipped in a few details about my partner to test the waters, saying she’s a firefighter with the Forest Service, where she’s worked over twenty years. He nodded, impressed, then asked me how I felt about Obama, the candidate he’d voted for in the last two elections: message received. 

Eventually, Moe steered the conversation to food. He wanted to know if I liked beef stew, and I said yes, unaware of the trap I’d stepped into. A few days later I was in his kitchen, browning short ribs and cutting carrots according to his specifications while he sat at the table, rising occasionally to look into the pot and deliver his critique. Next came meatloaf and macaroni salad, followed by barbecued chicken wings and a selection of smoked fish from Whole Foods I’d arranged on a platter with capers and red onion and three kinds of crackers. His daughter in Sacramento called to thank me for all my help. There was a tightness in her voice, suspicion, perhaps, or guilt, that a perfect stranger would be doing so much for her father. I assured her Moe was no trouble, that I was going to the grocery store anyway. I had a gift for putting people at ease. By the end of our conversation, she said she was nominating me for sainthood—Saint Lori, the Jewish patron saint of packing twelve pounds on her father. 

Each week, Moe pondered his cravings, his appetite stoked by TV commercials for Applebee’s and Pizza Hut that aired between episodes of Storage Wars and The People’s Court. On Friday, I’d pick up his list and head to the grocery store, then to Trader Joe’s, then to the butcher on Main for a pound of thick slab bacon.

In exchange, Moe scoured his house for gifts he thought I’d like. When I showed up with his groceries, he’d have something waiting for me on the kitchen table—a cigar box or a 70’s trucker belt he’d found years ago at The Bargain Box. Once he dug up a sweatshirt (tags still attached) from Cal, my alma mater. He liked to lead with this detail about my education when he told his customers about me (he was still cutting hair out in the garage, a few heads a week), his Jewish-lesbian-English professor neighbor who was hunting down kielbasa and a special brand of sauerkraut (Krüegermann’s) he’d seen on a rerun of Huell Howser’s show, California Gold. 

His customers parked their Mercedes or Lexus in front of Moe’s house and took a seat in the barber’s chair while Moe scooted around on his stool, clipping and snipping. Moe had moved the El Camino up the driveway so I’d have a clear view of the garage from my office window. Of course, this meant he had a clear view of me as well. He’d spot me at my desk and call me to come over so he could introduce me. I knew he wanted to show me off, but I’d decline, say I was busy grading papers. This was the last boundary I could protect, the line between the stories Moe told me about his customers and the actual men sitting in his chair, the ones with unhappy marriages and disappointing children: daughters who didn’t come home for Thanksgiving or sons who’d gotten caught up in drugs or get-rich schemes. These men told their secrets to their barber, the man who, later that afternoon, after I poured him a few drinks, told those secrets to me. 

Only now do I realize the system I’d designed: I’d been investing in a new source for my imagination, shopping for him and cooking for him and driving him to the dentist and the doctor, in exchange for stories about strangers I didn’t actually have to meet. 

I honed my talent with strangers by studying my father, though our styles differ. My father likes to call the strangers in his life by their first name: Sylvia at the grocery store, Jesús at the cleaners, Pej at the watch repair shop (a regular stop we all must make), and Bud at the strawberry stand on Wooley Road. When he can’t remember a name, he goes with Amigo! which seems to work just as well. And these strangers also know my father by name. I’ve tested this on several occasions, at his behest—Tell them you’re Ron White’s daughter! When I say this to, for example, Yesenia at Manhattan Bagel, she asks how my dad is doing—What a great guy!—then tosses in a couple pumpernickel for him, free of charge. 

These strangers—the ones who serve my father—are eager to talk. He begins slowly with polite bits about the traffic or the weather or the skyrocketing gas prices. Only later, once he knows them well enough, does my father disarm them with more serious questions, the ones about the grandson in the army or the daughter with the good-for-nothing husband who got a job on an oil rig and took off for Texas. If I’m with my father, say, at the bank, he introduces me—This is Lori, my youngest—and they are quick to tell me how lucky I am to have a guy like Ron for a father. I say I know, maybe pat him on the back (good ole Dad!), then watch as my father leans in, his voice lower, to inquire about a mother in hospice or a son-in-law recovering from a heart attack. I nod along with the story, pretending I understand how difficult it must be to live with such pain. On our way to the car, my father fills me in on the rest of the story—the mother drank her life away and the workaholic son-in-law missed quality time with his wife and kids—as though shaping some cautionary tale for me to heed.       

Apart from school, I rarely left the house unless I was on an errand for Moe or off to my parents’ house to settle some spat. My therapist was concerned about my isolation. She suggested ways for me to connect with the community. I could join a book club or take up a new sport—paddle boarding or Pilates. She said I needed to get out in the world and make new friends, but I don’t think Moe was what she had in mind. 

Every afternoon, I went next door to check on him. We sat in his front room with its view of the neighborhood. A worn leather sofa and matching ottoman was his command central with enough space for his telephone and a stack of newspapers and magazines. I sat in an old desk chair he’d wheeled in for guests. 

At five o’clock, I lowered the blinds and made him a drink. Once I was settled, he started on the list of stories from that day: shows he’d seen, friends he’d called, or songs he’d been thinking about and could I please make a CD for him on my computer? He went through an opera phase, followed by 50s rock and roll, and Motown. During the day he’d come up with different money-making schemes, and then at night, over a cocktail, he’d run them past me. He took out ads in the Pennysaver for his extra oxygen machine and his wife’s imitation oak jewelry chest. The junk scattered in the backyard or buried in the garage—a ceramic Purex jug or an ancient water pump—became precious antiques based on an episode of American Pickers. There were some rumblings about whether I could set up a Craigslist account for him, but I squashed that idea fast. 

I never told my father about Moe. I was worried he’d be jealous, and I’d feel guilty. I did feel guilty. I’d been paying too much attention to a perfect stranger: a cardinal sin. My father had taught me that friends are temporary, but family is forever. Only my family isn’t forever, at least not anymore. I could see the end of forever now, and my father refused to slow down.

Moe and my father were both born in June 1930, three days apart. If they had met, I imagine they’d swap jokes about me, little barbs at my expense. My father would have plenty to say about my wardrobe. He liked to roll his eyes and crack jokes about the paint-splattered pants or patched jeans that I had, no doubt, paid too much for (and he would be right). I let him have his fun. Had my father approved of my clothing, or worse, said nothing, the relationship we’d constructed over fifty years would have crumbled. 

Only once, after the funeral for a close family friend, did my father’s criticism go too far. At lunch following the service, he leaned across the table and asked me how it was possible a woman my age didn’t know how to dress properly for grief. That afternoon, I folded my jacket, sweater, and slacks—all in tweedy shades of maroon and honey brown—and carried them outside to the trash.   

It was early January, a new year. After three months as his cook, chauffeur, personal shopper, and healthcare advocate, Moe and I were officially going steady. He moved on from stories about strangers to stories about himself: his infidelities during his marriage and his regrets after his wife died. He spared no details—though there were moments when I wished he would. He had a penchant for blondes, women he met through his customers at the shop or at hair conventions in LA. One time his daughter, around eight or nine years old at the time, wanted to go to a convention with him. Moe talked a vendor into watching her so he could sneak in a quickie upstairs in the hotel. When I asked if he thought his daughter knew what was happening, he said he didn’t know. They never talked about things like that. 

Moe and I were sitting in the lobby of his doctor’s office building, making up stories about the people going in and out of the elevators. The doctor’s waiting room made him claustrophobic, so the receptionist agreed to come get us when they were ready. Moe fished around inside the fanny pack that held the extra batteries for the oxygen machine and pulled out a silver signet ring. He’d bought it seventy years ago with the money he’d earned selling newspapers and had it engraved with his initials. 

Accepting the ring could have consequences from Moe’s daughter. But the real risk was the responsibility I felt for Moe, who now had me on a leash shorter than his fifty feet of oxygen tubing.

I convince my father to let me go to my parents’ doctors’ appointments. I need to hear for myself what the doctors have to say. My father gives the same report after every appointment: Everything’s fine, we’re going to live forever. He’s gotten good at ignoring the seriousness of my mother’s dementia. I’ve joined my father in this fragile world he’s constructed, even though I know its ending will not turn out well for any of us. I hide the keys when my mother insists on taking the car to town. I whisper the names of old friends we see in the grocery store. And when she forgets I’m her daughter, I fetch a photo album from the living room to ignite her memory, then hold her while she cries. 

I try to keep one foot in reality. I enroll in classes for families of the cognitively impaired that teach me to agree with my mother’s version of the world no matter how crazy it may get. I ask my father to go with me, but he has better things to do. He reassures me that my mother’s memory loss is just age-related, a phrase he’s picked up from a New York Times article or a segment on PBS NewsHour. For now, he has his own way of managing the slow erosion his cancer and her dementia has on our family by pretending nothing at all has changed. 

The other neighbor strangers on our block were getting too friendly. As I unloaded Moe’s groceries and a pizza from Tony’s, the man in the beige windbreaker walked his yellow Lab up the driveway to ask if I needed any help, and mothers on their front lawns stopped playing with their kids to wave as Moe and I drove by on our way to the bank. 

Then one evening, Moe’s daughter called to say she’d found live-in help for her dad, someone who would shop and cook and clean. As she rambled on about how thankful she was to have had Saint Lori in her father’s life, I straightened Moe’s ring on my middle finger. Its heavy signet listed to the left and rubbed against the diamond horseshoe ring my father had given me for my eighteenth birthday. 

I still had another old man to cook for in exchange for stories, a stranger I’d known my entire life—if only I could get him to sit still long enough to tell those stories to me. 

Released from his charge, my visits with Moe dwindled to once or twice a week. He had full-time help now to cook for him and pour his drinks, someone new to give instructions to after each meal for what to do differently next time. When we were alone, Moe complained about the new caregiver, how she couldn’t boil an egg right and didn’t understand that meat needed browning before braising. Then he’d take a sip from his drink and turn his attention to me and what I had planned for dinner that night. 

In late March, Moe’s desire for food disappeared, and a hospice team moved in. He told me there was no reason left to keep living when the only thing he’d lived for was gone. A hospital bed replaced the sofa in the front room, and the blinds remained open, day and night. I wanted to tell the nurses he liked them closed in the evening, but stopped myself, unsure whether the correction was for my sake more than his. 

By April, the jacaranda tree in Moe’s backyard was in full bloom, fuller than it had ever been. Saturday night was Passover. My father’s plan this year was to make it easy on all of us and go to a community Seder hosted by the new temple in our little town. We checked in and took our places at a table, my mother sitting between my father and me. The rabbi retold the traditional story of the holiday: the Israelites’ exodus from the land of Egypt, when Moses parts the Red Sea for our people, then closes its waters behind them, swallowing the Pharaoh and his army. 

We read the Haggadah, answering in unison to the rabbi’s calls, my mother’s voice trailing just behind the rest of the congregation. She giggled at this, and my father shushed her. I had to pull her hand back from the table’s plate of matzo and hold it in my lap until the rabbi finished the blessing over the bread. 

Dinner was about to be served when Moe called me. I told my father I’d be right back and went outside. “Where are you?” he asked softly. 

When I said I was at Passover with my parents, he apologized and said not to worry, it was nothing. I told him I’d come over in the morning, or tonight if it wasn’t too late. When I returned to the table, my mother was complaining to a woman at our table that the lamb was too tough to eat. My father asked if everything was okay and I nodded. 

Family is forever. 

It was already seven-thirty. We still had to finish the service before dessert was served. 

The light was on in the front room of Moe’s house when I got home. I stood at the end of his driveway, watching the nurse bend over his bed to adjust the covers. It was after ten. I’d go over in the morning after the nurses changed shifts at seven. 

Instead, his night nurse came to our door at six the next morning to tell me Moe had passed. She wanted me to know that he’d called me the night before so he could say goodbye. 

After the semester ends, I move in with my parents for the summer to help out with my mom. I decide to tackle the cakes my grandmother had made for my father when he was a kid. She’d scrawled the recipes on index cards for my mother years ago. The cards are oil-stained and yellowed now, but I can still make out her ragged handwriting. I start with her signature recipe, the tall, yeasty, chocolate coffee cake, its proofing and baking times my biggest challenges.  

The next morning, my father takes off for the grocery store with my list and doesn’t return until the afternoon. I busy my mother with lunch. I let her tackle the salad until she chops the lettuce so finely it nearly disintegrates and I have to take over. My father comes home before five, in time for drinks while I start making dinner. 

My first coffee cake is a success. I take a picture of my parents beside my towering triumph, both of them smiling blankly at the camera as though unsure of the occasion. I carry the cake to the breakfast table and cut the first piece for my father. He praises the cake’s airiness and its ratio of cocoa to walnuts. Then, he pokes at the crust with his fork and says it could have used a little longer in the oven. I don’t ask him if he knew this from watching his mother; if she had waited until the cake was so brown it nearly burned. 

Instead, I’ve decided to focus on the present, our day-to-day life together. Some stories aren’t meant to be told, except by strangers, like Moe and his customers, who can tell the truth about their lives without repercussion. The rest are left to our imagination, to wonder what was and what will be, when there are no days left to ask.

 Patterns of Love

autumn duke

I woke up before her, as I have since we were seven years old. The morning sunlight from her bedroom windows brushed the room in buttery yellow. We were sleeping body-to-body despite the relative grandeur of a queen-sized mattress. I moved to make myself comfortable, carefully avoiding waking her. Her dark, curly hair was everywhere, under my head, on my shoulder. The familiar scent of her shampoo filled my nose. She was snoring. I pressed my shoulder against her back, seeping warmth from her body like a snake on a rock. I could have gotten up, could have started breakfast or read from one of her piles of books, but I didn’t. I took slow breaths and spent the time wondering if we could stay here all day.

I always slept with her at sleepovers. In a group I too-hastily claimed my place beside her and when we were alone it was never in question. We used to sleep in the finished basement, on the gray suede couch with chairs and poufs arranged to increase the number of people who could cram into it. On one of these nights, in the eighth grade, with our friend asleep on the other side of the couch, we lay beside each other, legs tangled up together in the same armchair we were using as a footrest. I was turned away from her. She absentmindedly stroked circles on my back, marking some invisible pattern onto my skin. I held my breath. It felt illicit, it felt terrifying, it felt amazing, and I knew that if she knew any of that, everything would be over. So I held my breath and let her draw patterns of love onto my back.

We came out to each other in hushed voices in the dark. It was a roundabout sort of coming out, each of us offering a small piece of the puzzle as we talked through it, finally creating the first picture of queerness. Were we proud? Maybe, but only because of the false strength the darkness gave us. It is so much easier to say these things when you do not have to look someone else in the eyes and no one is looking into yours. In the light, in the day, in the halls of our middle school, it did not so easily roll off the tongue.

We were always touchy. We sat next to each other in class, leaned on each other during long bus rides, gripped each other tight in crowded halls. It had always been this way, nothing had changed. But everything had changed. She slipped her hand – sweaty, soft, familiar – into mine as we walked down the sidewalk of our small town. Someone else’s warning echoed in my ears – what if people think you’re a – and I wrenched my hand away. My palm was cold and damp as the sharp air hit skin that had just been touched. I flexed my hand, ignoring her confused look, ignoring the twinge of guilt in my chest. When she reached for me again a few minutes later, more out of reflex than anything, I swallowed the creeping anxiety and squeezed her hand back. She rubbed her thumb over the soft skin of my wrist. I was glad that I had not pulled away again.

Our friends liked to play a game where they ran away and hid from us, even though we just wanted to talk to them. We were all a bit old for this kind of thing. They ran ahead of us and ducked behind the benches on the playground, giggling. I walked slowly beside her. The sun was distant and just barely warm enough to keep us outside. She hated this game. The popular girls had played it, too, when they were trying to distance themselves from her. She had tried to explain this to our other friends, but they never listened. I listened dutifully and remembered to tell our friends to knock it off later. It did not matter. I would never have run away from her. I spent my time with her absorbing every second.

In a tent in the back lot of our friend’s dad’s house, we and three other girls played the time-honored tradition of Truth or Dare. There were the standard questions – who do you have a crush on? Have you ever kissed a boy? – and the standard dares – eat this, go stand outside for x number of minutes in the dark. And then there was my dare, a sentence that haunts me to this day. I dare you to kiss me. It did not come from nowhere – the questions and dares had been leaning this way – but it makes my stomach twist with anxiety now as it did then. Our only light came from an electric lantern. Our only guidance came from television and movies. It was strange and sweet, and our teeth knocked together uncomfortably, and our friends followed suit. We did not discuss this night again for seven years. And that is how we became each other’s first kiss.

In the eighth grade, our English teacher made us write letters to our future selves. He would deliver them to us when we graduated high school. I had switched schools and then back again, and he did not know where I was, but he had her little sister in his class at the time. Remembering me, he remembered her, four years since the last time he saw either of us, and gave the letter to her little sister. She handed it to me while I sat on the floor of her bedroom helping sort through her clothes for college. I read it over, laughing at my overly confident future plans and desire to get better hair. But the last line made me stop. Now onto the most important thing – Lilly. More important than college, more important than family, more important than dating. You had better still be friends with her. She came out of the bathroom and asked why I was crying.

I took her to the prom. We laughed, we ate, we danced a bit. During the first slow song, I danced with her and our other dateless friend, pretending to tango them each in turn. During the last one, Lilly put her arms around my neck. I put mine around hers. I stopped functioning for a minute, anxious and tight as a coil. I knew what people thought about her and what they thought about me and it terrified me for a moment. I pictured eyes on us, imagined the assumptions made and what that would mean. She held tight, though, and I held tighter. In spite of it all, we danced. That night, at the after-prom, when we all split up to find a place to sleep, I called the spot next to her in the back of a Subaru Outback. I woke up before her. Hungover, stiff and full of joy, I lay as still as possible and listened to her snore until the sun reached in through the windows and woke her up.

 Walking Away

rosalie petrouske

I began walking with my daughter before she was born. 

On autumn mornings in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we walked along the shore of Lake Superior. On one of these outings, I felt her move inside me for the first time. The delicate motion made me think of the butterflies I once cupped in my palms when I was a child, and how their wings brushed softly against my skin as I held them gently before letting them go. She felt the same way, a subtle quiver in the small of my belly. I stopped and stood still, anticipating the movement again, my hand touching the rounded curve where she waited to be born.     

Senara arrived in January, two months early. At first, she was unable to breathe without oxygen, but she was a fighter and was soon gulping air on her own even though she was confined in an incubator. The following October, when she turned nine months old, I put her in a backpack attached to a metal frame and walked with her through the wooded island up to the black rocks. Her small hands felt like the silky touch of a feather as she parted the long strands of my hair, then pressed her mouth against the skin on my neck, making soft kissing noises.

 “Shhhh! Listen,” I said. “If you’re really quiet, you can hear the squirrels scampering in the leaves. They’re getting ready for winter, storing away all their food.”  

She stared with big, brown eyes, pointed, and giggled. Her high-pitched voice sent the fat, gray squirrel running for cover. 

When summer came, we again spent each day walking by the lake. Senara never liked to take naps or go to sleep early, so I pushed her for hours in her blue stroller until my arms and legs ached. Sometimes I pushed her into early evening. Unlike the city I live in now, at night the sky was spangled with stars and if the conditions were right, the northern lights made their appearance against a landscape of dark lake and even darker sky.  

“Moon,” I told her, pointing to its white, round orb.  

“Mooo-nnnn,” she’d answer, tipping her head to look up.

Sometimes, I'd sit with her on the front steps of our big blue house and listen to the comforting sounds as night fell—a cricket chirruping under a juniper bush, a tree frog belting out summer's last song. Once a hoot owl in the evergreen tree nearby hooted six times, paused and hooted again.  

“Oh, oh,” Senara clapped her hands, and the owl grew silent.

My grandmother and my parents taught me to respect nature. As an eight-year-old, I wanted to live in a log cabin in the forest seeking only deer, raccoon, and wolves for company. I could never imagine needing anything more than a stream of icy spring water to run by my house, and hours to sit on a stump observing the beetles and butterflies conducting the business of their orderly insect lives. I’d often wonder if Senara would find comfort in the natural world as she grew up. For no matter what adversities have come my way, there has always been a moment where I step out into the morning, inhale the scent of lilac, and the sweet smell of moss dampened by a summer rain, to find the subtle beauty surrounding me, quieting my turmoil.

On our frequent outings back then, I presented mini lessons to my daughter. We’d gather fallen leaves in autumn and bring them home, then press each one between sheets of waxed paper. She’d trace her tiny finger over the ridges and veins in each leaf, while I explained photosynthesis using simple words she could understand. I plucked a goldenrod gall for her to look at and showed her the small hole where a gallfly had escaped. We sat on the steps watching sparrows make their nests in the eaves of our house and picked sprigs of prairie fire in early spring. I bought a guidebook so I could show her pictures and name the birds we encountered on our travels. She clapped her hands when she saw the Baltimore oriole claiming the orange halves we left in the composting pile, listened thoughtfully for the song of the black-capped chickadee, or stared intently to catch a brief flash of a blue jay’s bright wing as it flitted from branch to branch. Senara grew as fast as the little ospreys in their nest high above our street. We watched as the osprey mother and father hid nearby while their little ones took their first tentative flights, tumbling out one by one, flapping their appendages awkwardly. They stuttered and bumped into each other like slapstick comedians making me hold a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. Like the ospreys, Senara wobbled down the sidewalk going faster as she gained more confidence until I finally had to run to catch up, scooping her into my arms, and planting a kiss in the caramel-colored curls at the nape of her neck.

Just before she turned two, she began speaking in full sentences. I carried on long conversations with her, never at a loss for company. While I was still a child, my grandmother used to tell me I was an “old soul.” With the concept of a soul being vague to me then, I wondered what she meant until she explained that someone who is an “old soul” is wise beyond their years. My daughter was also an “old soul.”

At three, she liked sitting in the grass running the long squeaky strands through her fingers or watching a woolly worm in October scrunch its fuzzy body across the sidewalk. I’d laugh when she’d touch the caterpillar, and it curled into a tight ball. I told her the story my father told me, about how the Native Americans taught the pioneers to predict the severity of the coming winter by reading the bands of color on a woolly worm.  

“My father, who would have been your grandfather,” I said, “always told me the thinner the brownish red bands, the harsher the winter will be. However, if the worm is mostly brownish red, it will be a mild winter.”

“Then, I think it’s going to be a bad winter, Mom,” she said, touching it gently with her finger, giggling when the little fellow scrunched up, and then slowly scuttled away.  

A few months later, Senara’s father decided he no longer wanted to be with me. “We have grown apart,” he said. The excitement of our first meeting, the passion we felt had somehow dulled. “I’ve tried to make this work,” he told me. “But for me, it’s not working.” I realized I was not the person he thought I was, nor could I be who he wanted me to be. Feeling resentful and angry, I moved with Senara out of the big blue house with its views of Lake Superior to a little apartment in a wooded subdivision.   

It was January; bitter cold for Northern Michigan and snow fell thickly all winter, piling as high as our window sills. I grew tired of scraping ice from my car’s windows. When the winter thaw came in February, as it usually did before another blizzard hit, I took Senara sledding, pulled her through a stand of evergreens, their branches heavy with dazzling icicles. We scooped up handfuls of snow and tossed them at each other. I showed Senara the magic held in a crystal; intricate patterns too delicate for the eyes to see. We tracked rabbits and raccoons as they darted in and out of the woods, admiring their distinct prints in the snow. Back home, we left seeds in our bird feeder on the porch for the white-breasted nuthatches, who braved the sub-zero winds to visit. Slowly, I began laughing again, and as the first long winter we spent without her father passed, I realized once more nature had softened the rough edges around my heart. I felt hopeful I could begin a new life, and felt worthy of loving, and being loved by someone.

Some lessons were difficult for Senara. She arrived home from preschool and told me proudly, “We’re studying the life cycle of the monarch butterfly.” Every day the children watched as caterpillars formed a chrysalis and then waited for the butterflies to appear. One day, Senara, in her eagerness, reached into the glass case and grabbed at a silken globe. When I came to pick her up, my tearful child stood next to her teacher.  

“She crushed the chrysalis in her hand, even though she knew she was not supposed to touch them,” Mrs. Terry said.

“I’m sorry, Mommy.” Senara brushed at her tear-streaked cheeks with chubby fingers. 

Even though her teacher felt her actions were willful and careless, needing discipline, I took her out for a chocolate shake and explained to her how fragile life can be.  

“Think about the cobwebs when they cling to the lilac bushes in the summer,” I said. “They’re strong because they hold the dewdrops, but if you brush one away, it snaps with just a touch. The same thing happens when you pick a bluebell. If you pull up the roots, the flower will never grow back. Now the caterpillar will never become a butterfly,” I said. “And that’s very sad.” 

“Am I fragile?” she asked, wiping clumsily at a tear trickling down her cheek.

“Yes, you are more fragile than anything,” I replied, giving her a hug.

“I promise, Mommy, to be more careful next time, and to never hurt anything again.”

I carry that promise with me, always.

The years slipped by quickly—Senara, once a toddler, was now a third grader, and then a thirteen-year-old in middle school. We lived in different places, far away from the lake we both felt connected to, but during those years, we spent many quiet times walking together along rivers or wooded trails, or across the open fields in a little prairie town in Kansas. Senara went from clinging to my hand to sometimes strolling sullenly ahead of me while I jogged to catch up. No matter where we were though, or at what stage in our lives, we always stopped to pick a flower, or sit on a bench and breathe in the subtle perfume of air scented by lavender and magnolias.

Now a sophomore at my alma mater, Northern Michigan University in the Upper Peninsula, she still has naturally curly hair, and often gets frustrated with its thickness. How the long strands fall sometimes like corkscrews when the weather turns damp. No longer the color of melted caramel, it’s more a burnished shade of brown with a touch of red gold when the sunlight slants across it at certain angles. In the summertime, she cliff dives off the black rocks into Lake Superior. During the winters, she drives through snowstorms, and walks out under the northern lights.  

“I want to live up here when I graduate from college,” she tells me.

“Do you ever want to move away?” I ask her, thinking of how at her age I wanted to see the world, and leave the small town I lived in far behind.  

“No, I want to stay here,” she says, “get married, raise a family someday, and find a way to make a living.” 

Often, I call her just to hear her voice, to know that whatever she is doing, she is safe and warm. When she answers, she sounds faintly surprised because I have called when she is busy with homework, and she has no time to talk.  

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she says. “I have a big exam, and then I’m going out to dinner with some friends. I’ll call you later, maybe tomorrow.” There is silence on the other end of the line, and I realize she has already hung up.

It seems to me once it was spring and I walked by the pond looking for pussy willows with her, the same way my grandmother used to walk with me; then I looked away, and it was autumn, a blur of red and yellow leaves swirling past my window.

A light snow is beginning to fall, and a winter sunset streaks the western sky. I hook on the dog’s leash and the two of us step off the porch into a white and peaceful landscape. As we head up the sidewalk, making the first footprints along the path, I feel my daughter’s presence at my side and if I look down, I can still imagine I see another set of footprints matching mine with each step taken.

Rosalie Sanara Petrouske has authored three chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being What We Keep (Finishing Line Press, 2016). One of six finalists in the 2020 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize sponsored by Cultural Daily, this past year she was also a finalist for the distinction of U.P. Poet Laureate for 2021-22. She is a Professor of English at Lansing Community College in Lansing, Michigan. She usually uses her Facebook author page as her social media handle: https://www.facebook.com/authorRosalieSanaraPetrouske/?ref=page_internal or @authorRosalieSanaraPetrouske

 Batok: Micro-Essays on Indigenism, Craft, and Matrilineality

Narisma

For Whang-od Oggay

1. The Kalinga province remains shrouded by the humid forests of northern Philippines, where, unlike dozens and dozens of other Filipino ethnic groups, the various sub-tribes of this mountainous region have retained much of their original culture. A combination of brutal terrain and combatant nature have allowed them to remain relatively untouched by centuries of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonization. Violence is really only one aspect of Kalinga survival. Protection and safekeeping, community and filial duty; there are so many more dimensions to the agonizing process of self-preservation.

   a. Sometimes I think about the person I would be if my foremothers never left the province for the city. Imagine what it would be like to wake up inside a bahay kubo instead of a bed here in urban Manila. It is both a marvel and a tragedy that my skin bends towards metropolitan sunlight, and not the morning sky that my people first knew. Who would I be if my foremothers never stopped plucking rice and corn from that endless meadow? How much of my reality is shaped by the decisions my ancestors have made? 

2. Batok: a traditional Kalinga art of tattooing using indigenous materials.

a. Whang-od’s brown fingers work deftly on the customer. She taps the charcoal-and-water pigment into the skin using a pomelo thorn. Like a needle in the doctor’s office, stabbing the same square of flesh, over and over again. The instrument was chosen from one of their trees—a squatting thing made of ripe fruit and barb. Both beauty and blade. Ancient, Whang-od’s technique is more painful compared to modern machines. But how else can we connect to the spirits of our past?

i. Fi-ing refers to batok done on male Butbut warriors who have slain an enemy. Whang-od practiced this until headhunting was eventually outlawed in the 1930’s. Fatok refers to batok done on women for beautification. 

ii. Whang-od only does fortune telling and chants when tattooing her own people, but she still welcomes Buscalan tourists. If you are ever blessed to be in her presence while she’s working, you can still hear prophecy and old song, hanging in the air and clinging to the water vapor. 

3. Most people agree that batok takes about a month to heal. If your flesh did not riot during the actual ceremony, then you still have the following week to deal with inflammation and tenderness. You are advised to keep the tattoo out of sunlight or water for long periods of time, so as not to ruin the final outcome. I like to consider batok a way of reconciling with our earthen roots. Returning to the soil from which we came. After years of trying to wrench the wilderness out of our bodies, there is still a fragment of yearning, of first light, of first dirt.

a. The first time I saw someone my age with a tattoo was my junior year of high school. We were in the gym together and as he lifted his arms up overhead, I noticed the small black cross on his ribs, right beneath his left nipple. This felt strangely intimate, although I realized that this wasn’t an uncommon tattoo for white pubescent missionary boys. I’ve seen at least four guys all with the same design in the same place. My fifth grade teacher also had a tattoo—a dove on the back of his calf. Spread-winged, as though it were trying to escape the flesh. So many of us choose to mark ourselves publicly to the world, but I think half the time, no one knows what their own brandings mean. 

4. As a young woman, Whang-od had a lover, Ang-Batang. She was his tattooist upon his first victory in battle. It is said that the elders opposed them, seeing her bloodline as impure. Like an act of mockery, Ang-Batang was arranged to marry Whang-od’s best friend, Hogkajon.

a. Think of all the times love has been bruised in the name of avoiding miscegenation. My father is a foreigner, my blood runs from two sides of the globe. Think of how we must carry ourselves, how my bones refuse to be bartered. No, I am not defiled. No, I am not incomplete. No, I am not a half-breed son. 

b. Ang-Batang died in an accident when Whang-od was 25 years old. And although they never reunited, I imagine that the forest grieved with her. From Abra to Isabela to Apayao, the motherland mourned. Our trees wept kalamansi and our anthuriums folded closed.

c. Rebecca T. Añonuevo wrote, “Ibang pagkamatay / Ang sadyang pagpatay sa pag-ibig / Hangga’t maaga.” Another death / the deliberate killing of love / as early as possible.

5. Whang-od’s batok designs are known to be intricate lace-works of art. Besides basic geometric patterns, she also uses forms existing in nature. If your body was stamped with an age-old rune, would that make you something of a spell yourself? Earth to skin, a transference of life found in soil, wood, and water. Our primordiality is preserved in how we wear our people’s essence on our own bodies. An origin for an origin. An etymology floating to the surface.

a. Whang-od received her first tattoo as a teenager—a ladder and a python. As a child, I recall my grandmother hating snakes. She called them minions of the devil, wicked. But growing up, I was always fascinated by them. Their winding, limbless bodies; how they glide from land to water and back again. Their soft hissing like a secret spilling from scaly lips.

i. The Bakunawa is a sea serpent in Philippine mythology. It is said that the god Bathala made seven moons for each night of the week, but the Bakunawa would rise from the water with its gigantic jaws, eventually swallowing all but one of the lights. When the Bakunawa tried to devour the last queen of the sky, the people on earth moaned, banging their pots and pans. The Bakunawa finally spat out the moon, and the people screamed in joy, lifting their hearts to the heavens. This was believed to be the reason we have solar eclipses. 

6. At over 100 years old, Whang-od is considered the last mambabatok (traditional Kalinga tattooist). She performs simpler designs now. Her signature tattoo is composed of three dots, symbolizing herself and her two apprentices. An art form for survival, a memory kept alive.

a. Whang-od began tattooing at the age of 15. Tradition dictates that only men with batok ancestry could learn the art. Despite this, her father, a master tattooist, recognized her talent and trained her, whereupon she swiftly turned into a master in her own right. 

i. My sister and I were raised as equals. Her light for my light, her blood for mine. My grandmother was a pastora and high elder in our church. Her daughter received a degree in theology at the age of forty. The other became a computer whiz and raised my sister and I as her own. My entire life has been marked by the victories of women, and their legacy shall be protected.

b. Whang-od’s chosen students consist of only women, unshackling her Kalinga sisters from patrimony for the first time in recorded history. Whang-od never married or had children; the Kalinga believe that a family’s tattoo skills can only be inherited through lineage, or the tattoos will become corrupted. Thus, although she has about 20 students, her grandnieces Grace and Ilyang are her true apprentices. They are the only known remaining learners of the craft. 

i. Hundreds of tourists, even from overseas, have traveled to be graced by Whang-od’s presence. They are always warned beforehand of the journey that lies ahead of them. From bus ride to jeepney to mountain hike, the trip is not for the faint of heart. But still, people flock to Whang-od’s village to witness the living miracle themselves. Her art can now persist in more ways than she’s ever imagined. 

ii. “Ibang pagkamatay / Ang sadyang pagpatay sa pag-ibig / Hangga’t maaga”

I. If we have the chance to save the love of two young dreamers, then we can also save the love of our people. This heritage, this labor—may it never grow cold again. 

7. Aside from tattooing, Whang-od is a village elder. She helps feed the pigs and chickens, and works at the rice farm. On some nights, she pulls out her tongali and blows melodies into the cooling air strewn with fireflies. 

a. I believe that my grandmother’s hands were like Whang-od’s. Tan with a thousand lifetimes of sun; creased with wisdom and silver and old age. Oftentimes, while crossing the street, my grandmother would grip my arm in a peculiar way, with her fingers clenched around my forearm. To this day, I feel her warmth on my skin. Even now, her evening prayers burn in my chest. In my dreams, she’s still smiling. In my dreams, she’s still here.  

Notes:

Bahay kubo: nipa hut; indigenous Filipino stilt house

Kalamansi: a type of Filipino citrus fruit

Pastora: a female pastor

Tongali: Kalinga nose flute

Narisma is a 20-year-old writer and artist from the Philippines. His work has appeared in various publications including the Atticus Review, Body Without Organs, and the poetry anthology, Remnants of Home by Untwine Me. He is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in the Scholars Program at Brooklyn College, New York. You can find Narisma on Instagram or Twitter at @_narisma_, or his website https://narismawrites.blogspot.com/.

 A Sin of Thought

Stephanie Couey

Each evening, when I get out of summer classes, the boy I’m in love with, a Jack Mormon from a rural neighboring town, waits for me on the bridge. He and I walk to the Jackson’s gas station, buy cartons of chardonnay, head to the Boise River, and strip to our underwear while it’s still light out. We float and drift in the shallow warm water until it’s black and speckled with gold from the campus lights.

Pruny and drunk, I tiptoe across the rocks, still hot from the sun. We find used condoms and an empty tub of potato salad from the kids who live under the bridge. In the distance, a man plays bongos.

We put on our clothes, and Aaron says wants to impregnate me “with little Mormon babies” so I can’t go anywhere. He stumbles a little, says he’s joking “but not really.” I freeze for a moment, before walking back to the shore, the sand sinking beneath my feet.

We watch ourselves in the cloudy thrift store mirror in his room, and after, he nestles onto my chest. The sunlight washes our bodies in gold, and goats bleat and maa outside. We smoke from a dirty glass pipe and Aaron says he wishes we met when we were fifteen. He says he wishes we were each other’s firsts and had waited until we were married so that we could be together in the Celestial Kingdom.

Neither of us are even allowed in the Latter-Day Saints Temple. We’re too defiled. For me, this is an unemotional truth, but for him, it is something to grieve.

My mom sees his headshot online and comments on how handsome he looks. She says she won’t tell my dad. 

I fill out the paperwork to go see him, and two weeks after his arrest, I’m driving through overgrown cornfields to the Canyon County Correctional Facility.

I move through the lengthy security process, I am scanned and patted down by an unsmiling woman close to my age, her hair pulled back tight.

Four young women go through the same process along with me, two with small children in tow. There are two older men, maybe fathers. One holds his cowboy hat to his chest, speaks hushed Spanish with a male guard. There is one young man in a knee-length Tupac shirt, maybe a brother, a son.

Before entering the visitation room, we are firmly instructed to not touch the inmates. If we want to buy them something from the vending machine, we have to do it ourselves. We are allowed one quick hug at the beginning, and one at the end. We cannot touch each other’s hands.

They release us into a room filled with large desk tables and beige plastic chairs. We are told to sit where we like. A metal door opens and the inmates file in one by one.

Aaron sees me and smiles without restraint. When we hug, he wraps his arms entirely around my body. We hold each other for longer than our allowed five seconds, and a guard scolds us. We keep holding, and the guard barks again. We let go and Aaron says, “I wish I could kiss you right now.”

He is unshaven and has gained a noticeable amount of weight in just two weeks. We sit unnaturally across from one another, our hands not touching, our feet not touching. He tells me he’s on an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, and takes a sleeping pill before bed. He says it makes it all a lot easier. That he knows he’s fucked, but he’s able to deal.

“It’s also simpler in here in a way,” he says. “You know. Not even having the option.” 

I say, “I didn’t know it was such a struggle,” and the words are tiny shards in my mouth.

When Aaron first comes to my summer dorm, he is abhorred by the dust on the windowsills. He says his mom used to clean offices, and this kind of thing just makes him crazy.

She died in a car crash just a year before we meet. His dad was driving and he and two of his siblings were in the car. It happened on highway 84 in Nampa, flanked by corn fields, on the part of the freeway that smells sharply sweet from the sugar beet mill. 

He shattered his back, his sister sustained major injuries, and his older brother’s face, though still handsome, was never the same. His mother was ejected from the car. 

In the hospital, Aaron was denied sufficient pain medication because of his addictions, and often, especially when we lie in bed, he twists in pain. Sometimes I wonder if his back will ever fully heal, or if the injury is so inextricable from his mother’s death that it won’t ever leave his body.

We have our first date at a coffee shop, and he tells me then. He says it like a question.

“My mom died?” 

He looks like such a kid in his striped orange tee shirt, looking down at a glossy pastry. He strokes his coffee cup with large fingers and doesn’t look at me. 

Neither of us knows how to be in this moment. I resist uncrossing and recrossing my legs. I try not to breathe too loudly. I try to get my mind around him having a dead mother. How his lifelong physical injuries collide with immutable, searing, dumbfounding loss. How at the peak of pain, he was denied the medications that could bring relief. I try to force understanding, but in this moment of stillness in a sunny, warm coffee shop, I can’t.

I’m more in love than I’d ever been before. At twenty-one, I feel like that really means something.

Before I go home for Christmas, we have our own tiny, very Idaho holiday. I wear a white turtleneck flecked with little Christmas trees and candy red lipstick, and Aaron wears his dad’s green wool sweater. We buy a fake white mini tree from Fred Meyer and decorate it with ornaments we make ourselves out of old coffee cups and cardboard coasters, and pipe cleaner, glitter, and pom poms from the Dollar Store. I make Christmas Crack with Saltine crackers, brown sugar, butter, and melted bars of milk chocolate. It snows nonstop.

We open presents next to our glittering little tree and take pictures of ourselves kissing with an actual camera, smile lines punctuating our young faces. I give him a shirt from Urban Outfitters, which we consider fancy and expensive, and he gives me a baby-soft, mint green scarf from the boutique downtown that he’d bought with earnings from delivering Chinese food. More than anything, I’m over the moon that he spent a chunk of money on me that he could have spent on drugs. I know he thought about it.

He admits that he is always tempted to take all my Prozac that I keep next to bottles of calcium and multivitamins in my pantry. He sounds like he’s showing me the most loving gesture when he says, “but I know my baby needs her Fluoxetine.”

The first time it happens is the hardest. I drive to his house to spend the weekend together. We’re planning to go to a rodeo, to wince at cows being wrangled and celebrate the “real” Idaho. It’s hot in late summer, the overgrown grasses and blooms commingling in a lush, rural perfume.

The front door is open, and no one is home. The entryway echoes. His yellow lab Butter is gone, so I figure he’s taken her for a walk. I let myself in, settle into the couch, and read from a fiction anthology until the midday sun starts to dip. I study the floral feminine décor of the living room, the framed illustrations of horses, the doilies beneath crystal bowls of potpourri. 

His mom must have decorated this room, and I wonder if she’s here with me. I wonder if she can see me loving her son, outside of marriage, in his room upstairs. I wonder if she would approve of me, if she approves of me now. And I wonder if she can see that while I love her son fully, I love him fearfully. 

Aaron had recently shown me the “temple garments” that she and his dad wore on their wedding day. These modest white underclothes are encased in glass and framed but kept private. I feel a pinprick of shame at having seen this part of her and her marriage, these relics of intimacy. They carry a spiritual life I don’t understand and am not supposed to see.

I get up to pee, and Aaron’s dark urine is still in the toilet with the seat up. There is a partially eaten bowl of Lucky Charms on the kitchen counter, the gray pieces tripled in size, and my heart skips. He never leaves food uneaten.

I list through the possibilities: that maybe he ran into a dealer from forever ago that he owes money to. Or the waiter at the old-timey sandwich shop he used to do meth with. Or that he’d been arrested, but I couldn’t think of for what. He’s with me most of the time and has even stopped smoking weed. His mania episodes are more pronounced without pot and he’s smoking more cigarettes than ever, but each day he tells me how good he feels without drugs, how excited he is to wake up in the morning, how he’s relieved and proud to not have to hide anything from me anymore.

I call him, just twice, knowing he would pick up if he could. Eventually, the sun sets, and I think of calling his sister Clara, but I don’t want to say I’m scared or cause panic. She and her husband and children are probably just setting down to a nourishing family dinner – roasted meat, cheese-laden Funeral potatoes, glasses of milk and seltzer water.

I return to my car and see a book lying face-up in the street. It’s The Book of Mormon, a dark blue, softly bound book with gold lettering. “Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” it says.

I grab the Book and drive back to Boise, past the llama pastures we love, beneath a sliver of moon. When I get to my apartment with exceedingly thin walls and ceilings, one of my classmates who lives beneath me, Cory, loudly fucks his girlfriend.

I make tofu bacon I can’t touch and try to drown out their slaps and gasps with Season 2 of Weeds. But after a while, I turn down the volume and listen closer. I grip my phone tight.

Later, Cory plays guitar and wholesomely sings to her. It is too beautiful to be obnoxious, and I fall asleep aching.

He isn’t allowed a phone call to anyone for the first twenty-four hours, so I don’t hear from him until the next afternoon. I can hear the slump in his shoulders as he tells me he was taken in for driving his dad’s truck under the influence of alcohol and nicked prescription Xanax.

He tells me I won’t be able to visit for at least two weeks. He says I can write and adds cheerfully that he’s already written me a letter and has made me a drawing of his room. The lightness in his voice makes my ears hot. This is nothing, his voice says. This is nothing.

His letters always arrive at least three weeks after he writes them. Sometimes he draws his surroundings or his meals, and he writes about how he gets extra bread or desserts because he always trades his meat with someone. He talks about how he’s been reading more than ever, but it’s hard to score a good book. Sometimes he reads the dictionary and says that if you look at any word for long enough, it becomes an onomatopoeia. He never writes about his mom. Mostly, he writes about how much he misses me and all the things we can do together when he gets out. The “many yyammas we will pet.” He only vaguely alludes to the things he wants to do to me, as our correspondences will be read by the mailroom staff.

My first letter is sent back because there is a lipstick kiss next to my signature. Along with my vetoed letter is a yellow slip of paper with the rules of writing to inmates: “letters may not be decorated in any way”; “letters may not be sprayed with perfume”; “letters must be sent in a standard business envelope”; “sender’s name and address must be on both the envelope and the letter”; “inmate’s ID number must be on both the envelope and the letter.” I am reminded that anything I send will be inspected before it is delivered to the inmate. If I want to send a book, it must be a paperback. Aaron tells me the pens they are given are “bendy” to deter stabbings.

In the next letter, I include a photo of myself which Aaron, embarrassedly, tells me his bunkmate immediately stole. Pictures of women, I hadn’t realized, are particularly sought-after. I don’t send another.

He had already been in jail, but for a crime he committed before we met. Something about stealing firearms from someone’s open garage to sell for drug money. We both know if he weren’t white, he wouldn’t have been sentenced only to county. Neither would my brother, who had once set a Volkswagen on fire in the California desert. Their delinquencies remained somehow defendable, forgivable, surmountable.

I don’t press for details. I’m just glad when he shows up at my front door with his belongings in a plastic bag. I’m just glad when I see him feeling like a whole new man with a fresh pack of cigarettes and a new outlook on life.

We sleep together all day, in and out of sex. I cook us healthy vegetable-filled dinners, and we skip parties. We binge watch Weeds on DVD, and he gives me full body massages and groans along with me. He talks about how much he loves taking care of me.

We dream of moving into a trailer together, having children, staying in Idaho. I’d be a writer, and he would do manual farm labor, or maybe work in the oil fields. I’d make it big with my first novel and he would stay home, a proud, sun-kissed dad while I’m off on my book tours.

He never tells me that every day is a struggle. But when we try to watch Requiem for a Dream, he winces, looks like he’s going to be sick, and says we have to turn it off. 

He says he didn’t “really” do heroin. It was mostly meth or anything to be found in a medicine cabinet. But scenes of heads thrown back, pupils dilating, and deep sonorous sighs set off an agonizing hunger in him. What I see in those shots is painful. But what he sees is unparalleled release.

I have to think of his addiction as different than my oldest brother’s, his cycle as different. C. would leave vomit on the family couch before stumbling out of the house and disappearing for days. He would yell sexist epithets my way if I ever suggested he needed to change, to seek help, to stop shitting all over his family. After my mom and I picked him up from the hospital after he had almost bled out from punching through his ex-girlfriend’s fish tank, high out of his mind, he only treated all of us worse than ever. He could spit vitriolic words like no one I’ve known before or since. And he could apologize when convenient with the command and charm of a prince, careful to not admit wrongdoing.

When Aaron gets out in early November, he holds my head to his chest and cries through apologies. He says the worst feeling is knowing that his actions, his lies, his addictions all bring me pain.

At the time, no one realizes that what he needs is emergency medical treatment for addiction. That he needs grief and trauma therapy for losing his mother, and for the physical and psychological injuries endured by his family. That he needs an unbreakable network of care upon having left the Church. Otherwise, relapse is inevitable.

He asks if I want to be his parole officer’s contact, “in case it’s easier that way,” knowing it will happen again.

I try to imagine what it’s like in the Temple, and I know I’ve got it all wrong. 

But in my mind, I am deep inside in a tiled room, accompanied by women. They braid warm oil into my hair. They lower my body into a beautiful blue pool. They do not smile, but the way they touch my hands communicates love. 

They are preparing me for marriage.

I step into my own white temple garments, warm and freshly pressed, and feel a thrill at the cloth on my skin.

I look up to the high, muraled ceiling and feel utmost contentment in God. In my husband. In the future before me.

He is taken in again the day before my birthday. I am reading on my snowy balcony when I get the automated phone call of a woman’s voice asking if I “accept a call from an inmate at Canyon County Correctional Facility.” Over time, the cycle becomes both less painful and less bearable.

He comes to almost like being in there, even though when I see him, his depression is palpable. He says it’s more confusing out there, without clear boundaries, without clear definitions of right and wrong, and where so much is just there for the taking.

It is an echo of the “friends meeting” we went to that he hated. We had gathered with other formerly LDS youths, ate artisanal olive bread, drank actual wine, and read passages of secular literature. A slight boy with bracelets all up his arms read aloud from Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: “Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.”

The last time I visit him there, it is the day of the last prison execution in the state of Idaho. The death by lethal injection is to take place at the maximum-security prison, a few miles down the road from Aaron in county.

As I drive through the now-familiar cornfields, I wonder if that man is still alive. I had Googled him the day before and slapped a hand to my mouth. The descriptions of his crimes made me unable to breathe.

As the country road rolls on, I think of Miguel, who I had met in an airport on the day of his release. He was flying to Colorado to see his now-grown children. He had been sentenced to fifteen years in federal for stealing a television set. His neck and forearms were covered in tattoos: a stunning Mexican Venus, roses and thorns, a realistic portrait of an older man. He wiped his eyes and told me about all the baptisms, Quinceañeras, and weddings he had missed. Wanting to lighten the mood, he gestured down to his sneakers, Nike Cortezes, and said, “this shit is still in style though – hah!”

Had Miguel been Aaron, he would have been sentenced to county. He would have been housed on the same road, but he might have been pushed through the broken system rather than kicked under it. It becomes more and more clear that none of this makes sense, for anyone.

When I pass the maximum-security prison, a massive white complex, my throat burns. I envision the murderer, so physically near, strapped to an examination table beneath fluorescent lights. Following two quiet injections, a ghost rises from his body and evaporates through the ceiling.

I am conditioned to cry, to crumble, to suffer quietly and politely.

Anger is a pain I am not used to. It is sharper and more urgent than despair. It is being pulled apart. 

I see myself being drawn and quartered. My hands and feet are tethered to the legs of shining, muscular horses. Hot irons, timed all at once, sear the horses’ hindquarters and I am split into pieces.

At some point, I consult The Book of Mormon about anger, both not expecting and expecting to find guidance. The Book says that anger is a sin of thought. That it is a choice, a weakness, a selfish emotion, and that is most often destructive.

But my anger, I become certain, is protective. 

I don’t blame Aaron for the ways he needs to cope. Rather, anger at something bigger than us, something tangled, something else, pulls my body away from his. It makes me unable to desire him, severing what I thought was an inseverable attachment.

It is anger that lets me recognize that the cycle, regardless of the love there, is something that, in all its familiarity, I can’t hold.

It is not clean or simple or without guilt or ache, but anger, in all its heat and wild pain, allows me to step away. It allows me to recognize that there is too much I can’t fix, and it halts me in my tracks when I try regardless. 

Without anger, my own limits are kept mysterious and unknowable. Without it, they remain open to doubt and susceptible to sacrifice.

Stephanie Couey is from Riverside, California. She obtained an MFA in Poetry from the University of Colorado, Boulder and she is now a PhD candidate in English. Her poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction are published or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, The Hunger, Anamesa, and elsewhere.