I’ve been thinking a lot about fire in the past several months—wildfires consuming areas the size of small countries, urban flames captured on and shared through cell phone photos and videos, smoke and fire aimed by armed forces at peaceful protesters, fires from history that burned books and crosses and human beings whose very bodies were sites of resistance. Fire is also cleansing and full of hope, the way forest fires renew and restore, create growth and new life. I see this kind of fire in the courageous, committed souls who use their bodies and voices to stand up to injustice, totalitarianism, and fascism across the globe, and in particular, in our own country which has, from its inception, been an evolving experiment in democracy, equality, and freedom. These fire-starters are continuing the work of those who through the course of history set fire to notions of inequality, injustice, and hatred. They are the fires that will quench what I hope is just the extinction burst of hateful, extremist fundamentalism. They are the fire of a movement towards something better, greater than what we have allowed ourselves to imagine. The essays in the fourth issue of Oyster River Pages capture this historical moment perfectly—they tell stories of deep loss, terror, fear, compassion, empathy, awareness, resistance. They resonate profoundly in this period of indefinite uncertainty, acknowledging all that is broken and hopeless while seeking out and praising that which is transcendent and merciful and forgiving in this world. I hope these essays will remind you, as they did me, that to live in this world is to open ourselves to inevitable loss and yet persevere, and that in spite of everything, hope in something beautiful is an act of resistance, and ultimately, of redemption.

Ranjana Varghese
Creative Nonfiction Editor

The pieces in this issue have shown me yet again that the threads holding us together, whether in uncomfortably incendiary or warmly relieving ways, are space and love. The writers of this issue invite us to see these threads strain against each other when they are at odds, crowd each other out when unacknowledged, and even intertwine and meld together into one when allowed. The images we see woven from these threads span a spectrum of exhausting strength, welcome isolation, gutting loss, hard-won peace, and homecoming. Much like the world that these pieces came out of, these essays illustrate the dynamics between space and love with fierceness that is full of emotional contradiction— that renders stories too difficult to place into neat categories. The truth, I’ve found, often has this quality. This fullness is increasingly necessary in the face of the catastrophic effects of rampant misinformation, oversimplification, and reductive, bigoted logic. The fullness of the truth is the only way to do justice to life, and to me, that is what lies at the heart of these essays. It is what allows for a breath, for an acknowledgement that wherever we go from here, those threads of space and love–that interaction–will go with us. I’m so honored to have that reminder, and hope that you, as a reader and another being existing in the complex tapestry of this time, feel the same.

Yamilette Vizcaíno
Creative Nonfiction Intern

the essays

paddling

chelsey clammer

Before Tulsa was put down around noon, she went down in the morning. A deaf, mostly blind, malnourished, twenty-four-year-old horse got on her knees at some point early in the a.m. and was lying on her side by the time the cops arrived. Neither of the two officers was the cop who showed up last week in response to an animal report. That cop will do a follow-up in a few weeks. These cops were responding to a new call. Apparently the neighbors have noticed some things.

Tulsa was being unintentionally starved. Accidental neglect.

the entertainment center

john means

Odz had told me it was just a bookcase we’d be hauling away in my pickup. I expected it to be sitting out on his carport, but there was nothing there.

Instead, it was down in the basement rec room, and it was no bookcase. A monstrosity of particle-board shelves, platforms, and compartments with little doors. Odz said it had been their entertainment center.

Had been. Odz was too old to be getting a divorce, too overwhelmed to navigate the minefield of a real estate settlement, too alone to be moving off to another town alone.

advice about grapefruit and getting dumped

anna nguyen

Grapefruit are always cheaper in Atlanta than in Nashville, so without fail, my grandmother always returns home with a whole laundry basket full of them. After a big hug and some chiding about how I’ve gained weight since my last visit—“Khánh, your arms are manly!”—she leaves me to carry in her luggage. I awkwardly heave her bounty of grapefruit out of the car’s trunk and into the living room, where she sits on a plastic footstool between the couch and coffee table. “The cushions are too soft,” she’d say. “Too soft for Bà.” 

 Advice about grapefruit and getting dumped

anna nguyen

Grapefruit are always cheaper in Atlanta than in Nashville, so without fail, my grandmother always returns home with a whole laundry basket full of them. After a big hug and some chiding about how I’ve gained weight since my last visit—“Khánh, your arms are manly!”—she leaves me to carry in her luggage. I awkwardly heave her bounty of grapefruit out of the car’s trunk and into the living room, where she sits on a plastic footstool between the couch and coffee table. “The cushions are too soft,” she’d say. “Too soft for Bà.” 

My grandmother speaks exclusively in Vietnamese around the house, and for a few futile months after I’d started kindergarten, she insisted that I do the same. By now, fourteen years later, the rule has stopped holding up— she still speaks to me in Vietnamese, I just answer in English. I’ll always call her Bà though.

Bà is dressed in her typical below-sixty-degrees-outside garb: matching light gray sweats and sweater; a flimsy, blue scarf; and a dark gray beanie that rarely leaves her head during the months of November through February. The television’s on Channel 2, morning news: women in blazers and old, coiffed men discussing weather and churches or something. Bà picks up a grapefruit from the basket and turns it this way and that in her palms. The bright yellow grapefruits look hefty and plump on their own, but in her small hands they seem gargantuan.

She thrusts one of two knives on the coffee table toward me, like she doesn’t care if she stabs me, though her gaze isn’t threatening. I gingerly take the knife. Looking at her now, I could see that an odd milkiness had overtaken her once clear brown eyes with filmy splotches of blue. Her left eye was constantly watery—a side-effect of her new glaucoma medication, she told me, when I asked her earlier if she was crying. 

I settle onto the couch, and we begin peeling grapefruit. She grips her knife entirely by the blade as she works through the thick rind, a technique I have neither the callouses nor confidence to attempt. 

“How do you pick out a grapefruit, Bà?” I’m humoring her. My fingers are already sticky from piercing the fruit’s flesh with my amateur knife-work.

“I always choose the heavy ones.” She pats the one she’s already a quarter done with. “They should have smooth skin and smell like heaven.”

Bà is always eager to give advice, solicited or otherwise. She’s never shy to point out that she could die soon, so I’d better listen carefully while I could. I call her morbid; she calls herself honest.

“How’s your friend, Sam?” Bà asks as she begins artfully peeling away swathes of white pith from her grapefruit. I know she means boyfriend. Sam’s actual name is Sarah, and she’s definitely not a boy, but I’d sooner die than tell Bà I’m a lesbian. She’d probably keel over. Not that I had to worry anymore about her finding out during Christmas dinner through some grand gesture.

“I got dumped last month.” 

“What does ‘dumped’ mean?” She’s asking genuinely. I sigh.

“Sam broke up with me.”

Bà turns her whole body to look up at me from her footstool. She’s not peeling anymore. She puts the knife down and takes one of my sticky hands into hers. Her hands are very knuckle-prominent and veiny. I’d never seen her without her gold wedding band on her left ring finger. Whether that dedication was for sentimental reasons or because of arthritic pains, I’d never asked. For some reason, I feel the urge to apologize.

Instead, I ask, “Bà, how do I get over heartbreak?” My mouth is set in a sardonic smile, as if I wasn’t actually desperate for guidance. 

She isn’t matching my smile. “What happened?”

I’m finished peeling my first grapefruit before she is. Victory, at last. The flesh is a pale pink, and she was right: it smells like heaven. My eyes are starting to sting though. Bà is staring at me intensely and gripping my hand like she’s afraid I’d slip away. 

I answer, “I don’t know. It was sudden.” It’s been twenty-three days since then. Sarah and I were lying in bed together when she turned to ask me if she ever made me feel lonely, and the night went downhill from there. She stopped answering my calls last week. I pinch the bridge of my nose with my free hand and squeeze my eyes shut.

“You really loved him.” She lets go of my hand to pass me a box of tissues.

“I still do.” I wad up two corners of a tissue and stuff each end up my nostrils. I tend to cry with my nose. My tears are salty and usually leave my skin feeling uncomfortably tight as they dry.

“It takes time,” Bà says. She raises herself up to sink into the space on the couch beside me. Every single one of her joints announces itself along the way. “Pop, pop, pop,” she says with a laugh. I begin to crack my knuckles in solidarity, but she lightly slaps my hand. That’s why Bà thinks her knuckles have all ended up pointing in the wrong direction in her old age: cracking knuckles. I’m still not sure I believe her. 

The Price is Right is on now. I hope those middle-aged men and women know how much dish soap costs. They’re certainly eager to try. We watch in silence. Bà picks up her unfinished grapefruit, and I begin to pull apart my own. Occasionally, she reads out words on the screen during commercial breaks, practicing her pronunciation. “Misconduct… Energize… Credibility…” She hangs onto every syllable with extreme care. If she gives me a certain look, I offer corrections. 

“Bà, I keep dreaming about her—” I drop a slice of grapefruit and it falls onto the dusty rug. Oh god, the pronoun slipped. At least in English, the sounds of “him” and “her” are similar, easy enough to pass off as mistakes. In Vietnamese “anh” is the hard and strong male pronoun while “em” is the soft, lilted female one. I glance at her out of the corner of my eye. She hasn’t turned away from the television, but there’s a thoughtful look on her face.

That’s the worst part of it all, really—the dreams. During the day, I could redirect my thoughts. Distract myself. Go on long walks. Throw around heavy dumbbells. Drink. Write angry, sobbing journal entries, tear them to shreds, burn them, eat them, fold them into sad, soggy paper cranes (not in that order). 

At night, I’m at my treacherous, self-sabotaging brain’s mercy. Dreams are limitless realms of possibility, but all I’d been able to imagine was Sarah. Sarah’s hazel eyes that warmed my heart, but also which I teased her about as being only second in cliché-ness to some icy-blue-eyed protagonist in a shitty romance novella. Sarah’s almost-violent snort that awakened whenever I told a bad joke. Sarah’s apologies when I leaned my head on her shoulder because she was “all bones, no meat,” to which I’d sometimes respond by squeezing her boob and wiggling my eyebrows. Sarah’s right, pale hand, marked by three round cigarette burn scars that I’d kiss and kiss again and again until we were both on fire. Sarah curled up on the front porch in that dumb, gray, over-sized Snuggie knock-off while she smoked and we watched the snow falling, shining in the orange glow of street lights. Sarah saying that she loves me. Sarah shouting that she LOVES me. Sarah crying that Monday night, twenty-three days ago, when she whispered for one last time that she loved me.

“Dreams are useful reminders,” Bà says, breaking me from my reverie by taking my hand in hers again, “They remind us of what’s lost and what’s yet to come.”

“That’s not helping.” I sniffle loudly and pull out three more tissues in quick succession. The pile of white, snotty wads of paper beside me is ever-growing.

“Khánh, if you’re strong enough to continue loving her, then you’re strong enough to let her go. Life is too short, pumpkin. Too short to hang onto pain. You’ll grow from this, and she will too. Save your tears for when I die.” She uses “em.” She knows. I’d be much happier about this, under different circumstances. 

I lie down and rest my head on Bà’s lap, my legs cramped up against the end of the couch. “What if I don’t want to let her go? I don’t want to stop loving her.”

Bà laughs quietly and gives my head two solid pats before resting her hand right above my ear. “Then you’re strong, and you’re also an idiot. But we both knew that already.”

We sit in silence. The material of Bà’s gray sweats is itchy against my cheek. I have no idea how she wears that all day. She turns the television back on. I don’t remember what the news segment was about, only that in that moment I wish that I could pull off a plum blazer like the one the lady was wearing and get away with chopping off all my hair. 

Bà dangles a piece of grapefruit above my lips. I open.

It’s a little bitter and sour enough to burn the small cut on my lip, none of which I could tell by smell alone, but the sweetness of it all brings me back to earth, and I begin to breathe more softly. I fall asleep to the sound of her knife squeaking and scratching against the rind of another grapefruit, the smell overpowering everything. I can no longer taste my tears. 

 mothering in the pigwood

barbara felton

“My daughter would love to see the pigs!” The woman glanced down at the child beside her, a girl of about seven years standing in front of the counter. Wearing jeans and sneakers, she was dressed for a visit to the pigs but her face reflected none of her mother’s enthusiasm for the venture. 

On Saturdays, our farm store draws steady customers and we offer shoppers the opportunity to visit the farm animals. My husband staffs the store—he can answer every quirky question about how cows grow and how the cuts have been specified and why we raise our cows and sheep on grass and our pigs on open pasture—and I escort people to see cows, sheep, or pigs, depending on the visitors’ preference. On that Saturday, a warm day in autumn, the pigs had gotten the nod.

As the three of us set out for the pigwood, I suggested we collect some apples to feed to the pigs. We’d had a bumper crop and, lacking the person-power to harvest them, I was grateful for any use anyone could make of them.The girl took to the task immediately, using both hands to pick up the apples that had fallen in great numbers at the base of the tree by the shed. Energetically plucking apples from the grass, she didn’t appear to be in any rush to get to the pigs. 

I found a plastic bag in my back pocket and handed it to her.

“Let’s go,” said her mother, tugging the youngster forward, and we moved toward the woods. 

The pigs greeted us with their usual enthusiasm. They raced away from us when they first caught sight of us, putting up great piles of dust as they fled, and then quickly turned around and rushed back to see who’d arrived, curiosity winning out over caution. Mother and daughter seemed impressed by the frenzy created by our forty pigs, the mother beaming and the daughter taking a step backward.  

I stepped over the foot-high electric wire and went in with the pigs.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked, eyeing the mother’s suede pumps. I’d offered her alternative footwear down in the store—plastic boots to slip on over her shoes—but she’d declined, so here she was, ready to enter the pigs’ enclosure wearing low flats. 

“Oh, can we?” The mother stepped right up to the fence edge, delight in her face as she peered at the bobbing, milling herd. If my job was connecting visitors with farm animals, I’d already succeeded as far as the mother was concerned. Not that I’d done anything. Some people, I’d learned, bonded with pigs instantaneously upon meeting them: they giggled, exclaimed, gurgled, cooed, or laughed outright. This woman was one of them: she’d been captured in an instant.

The daughter watched the bustling animals surrounding my feet, frowning as a few of them nibbled on my boots. The youngster’s eyes took in the scene while her feet stayed firmly planted on the non-pig side of the fence. She grasped the bag of apples with both hands.

“Oh, come on in,” mother said to daughter. The mother lifted her slender legs, clad in ballerina-style tights, up and over the fence and tried to pull the child forward.  

The girl made a gesture as if trying to step over the fence. She raised one chubby leg toward it but quickly planted it back down.

“I can’t,” she said.

“We’ll lift you over,” offered the mother, making me her accomplice. The mother in me hesitated at the woman’s insistence, but I took the girl’s arm and together we helped her over the fence. Once inside with the pigs, the girl stood stiffly, holding her arms and legs rigid but moving her eyes across the swarming herd. She flinched as a pig rubbed against her coat. 

The mother dove into the herd, eager to engage the pigs. She quickly learned to reach beyond a pig’s ears to scratch its head, avoiding the direct approach that sent the pig recoiling. She sighed a sympathetic “ahhh” as the pig she was scratching leaned into her touch.  

“Give the pigs some apples,” the mother called to her daughter, gesturing with one hand toward the bag the girl was holding and keeping her other hand on the neck of a bristly Berkshire.

The girl remained frozen. Except for her darting eyes, she was a statue, holding herself in the smallest space she could possibly occupy. Couldn’t the mother see her child’s fear?  

Standing in the gap between mother and daughter, I judged the scene. I tasted the bilious fumes in my throat—the acrid emanations from the toxic pool of mother-guilt that lay at the bottom on my stomach—but ignored the poison’s warning. Foolishly, and incredibly, at that moment in the pigwood, I acted as if I, the mother of a child who’d committed suicide, was free of maternal guilt. Yes, I had resolved much over the years: our deceased son had had obvious internal struggles, his brother had grown into an estimable young man, no one blamed me. I could pretend the missed moments in my mothering, all of the lapses, misjudgments, distracted missteps of regular motherhood and the weight of our older son’s death, had lost their force and meaning.

So I ignored the fumes of my own mother-guilt and pronounced judgment upon the woman among the pigs. She had shed her mother skin. She’d ignored her daughter’s fear and moved off, slipping away to indulge her own delight. Wasn’t this a clear case of negligence—the mother ignoring her child, looking away, missing the messages her child was sending her? Surely abandonment was a cardinal sin of motherhood. Wrong, so wrong of her to be so oblivious to her child. 

“Here. Give me an apple,” trilled the mother to her daughter. “I’ll show you how to feed them to the pigs.” The mother held her hand out for the bag, but the girl continued to clutch it tightly to her coat.

“I want to get out,” the girl said in a small voice.

I could see the disappointment in her mother’s face. She remained unaware of her daughter’s fear. The taste of bile persisted, and meanly, I wanted to savor this mother’s failing. That sulfurous pool, that smelly, sloshing, liquid legacy of mother-guilt burbled up in blame. But I was the farmer, not the mother or the daughter, and so I pried myself away from motherhood and focused on my task here. Fear of pigs is not easily remediable. Mollifying people’s fears of cows is far easier, and I had much ready ammunition for that task. Cows don’t bite. They don’t even have upper teeth. They’re vegetarians. Pigs were tougher to shape into benign beings. They were irrepressible: not only did they not back off at a human’s approach, they hung around in an ever-moving mob and bit into the toes of your shoes, as the herd at the girl’s feet were doing now. When one of the larger pigs grabbed her shoelace, the girl gasped. I was helpless, I saw, to connect this young lady with the elemental joys of life among pigs. 

I turned to the girl.  “I’ll help you out if you want to leave the pigs,” I said.  

She nodded vigorously and I walked toward her to help her back over the fence. Halfway across the low barrier, her body turned fluid and she stepped outside the fence with ease. 

“Well,” said the mother. She had turned to take in the view of her daughter on the pig-free side of the fence.  

“I guess you could throw the apples to the pigs from over there.”  

The girl’s shoulders had dropped but her eyes continued to move across the teeming herd as if seeking assurance that the animals were going to stay inside the fence. Slowly, she put the bag of apples down on the ground, and after a cautious glance at the pigs, pulled one out. She threw it into the mob. As it hit the ground the apple drew the attention of a few pigs, and one or two nudged it with their noses, but all soon went back to milling about, one seeking out the mother’s attention by pulling on her leggings.

The girl threw another apple and the pigs greeted it with the same brief interest and then moved away. The girl had a decent pitching arm, I thought. She was still watching the pigs.

“Smash an apple with your foot,” I said. “The pigs’ mouths are too small to bite into a whole apple. They need you to break it apart for them.”

The girl stared at me and then placed an apple on the ground. She stamped on it. Her foot slid off the shiny surface on her first try, but she stamped again with greater force. Crunch. The red globe gave way to her foot and broke into several juicy pieces. She took out another apple and stamped on it. Smash. She grabbed another.

The girl’s mother and I reached over for the apple pieces and gave them to the pigs, spreading them around the heaving, gobbling mob. The girl continued to pull apples out of the bag and set them on the ground. Smash, smash, and smash again. She stamped and smashed over and over.

“Look at the pigs, honey!” cried her mother. “They love the apples!”

The girl glanced toward the animals, then turned back to the apples. Smash, smash. She’d found her pursuit here in the pigwood. Awakened by some internal force—impatience? anger?—she’d acted, taken hold of a task and forged a role for herself. She placed another apple on the ground: smash. Finally, she’d emptied the bag.  

She straightened up, looked at me, and beamed. I picked up the plastic bag and returned it to my pocket.

“Let’s go, Mom.”  

The mother winced slightly and hesitated. She glanced around at the herd as if searching for some last inducement to get her daughter over the fence and in with the pigs. She reached toward the largest one, stopped, then looked at her daughter and stepped out over the fence.

As we made our way downhill from the pigwood, the mountain range at the far edge of the pasture stood in solid curving arcs above the heads of mother and daughter. We regained firm footing on the farm lane and the mother took her daughter’s hand.

“What else do think the pigs would like to eat besides apples?” asked the mother.

“Oreos!” shouted the girl.

“How about pears?” Mother asked.

“Bananas!” came the reply.

Mother and child were connected again, no longer separated by pigs or electric fences, and no longer separated in the mind of the judgmental farmer-mother. How stupid of me to think I’d transcended guilt, escaped that liquid legacy, kept it from distilling into blame. I’d witnessed no crime in the mother’s solitary pursuit of pleasure in pigs.

On the ground, in real life, bonds between mother and child were stronger than those in a stranger’s imagination. Leave-takings—of mother from child as well as child from mother—were simple facts of life, inevitable. Separations didn’t need to be mutual or reciprocal. Mother pigs shook their sucklings off their teats and walked over to their trough when they got hungry.

Inhaling deeply, I could smell the scented ingredients of farm life: sweet grass and pungent manure. Fresh air was life, the fuel for renewal, available at every moment with a simple inhalation. That was the beauty of breathing, its revivifying of cells and organs, its restoration of life, both animal and human, of pigs and people and apples, of children grown and growing still, all ever possible because of breath, air. 

The girl burbled on with her imagined diet for pigs: chocolate ice cream, peanut butter sandwiches, candy apples. My head was clear. Fresh air was the answer. And fresh air was everywhere.  

Barbara Felton is a farmer and writer in Warwick, New York. She began writing creative nonfiction in 2014 following careers in psychology (NYU, Department of Psychology) and mental health administration. Her personal essays, on matters of farm life, grief, and mental illness have been published in journals including Psychiatric Services, skirt!, Dirt Magazine, Duende, Pulse, HerStry, Tupelo Quarterly (contest finalist), and The Southampton Review.

 to hold my mother’s fear

elias lowe

My mother’s voice trembles. She raises her hands above her face and shakes them back and forth, fingers wide and strained, making an “eee ooo” squeamish sound. “Pray for me, pray for me,” she says after my stepfather, driving the golden Toyota, reminds me to be grateful for the pain I’ve just complained about. He says, according to recent studies, I am less likely to get Alzheimer’s since I have consistent menstruation periods. “I’m in the opposite boat,” my mom growls from the passenger seat as we pull up the drive to Pittsburgh Airport. She reminds us once again that she bled irregularly throughout her life. “Lucky you,” I cackle and crouch as my ovaries are strangled by an invisible stone. We’re on our way to Mexico City to meet a family friend. On this trip, I notice my mother’s increased obsession with the health of her body, her paranoia about death running deep through our days.

“In that case, just take me out on a cold, cold day and walk me into the woods and leave me there,” she says to me as we approach the topic of her acquiring some type of neurodegenerative disease. This conversation is far too dark, too soon. “I really don’t like to talk about this type of thing,” I say, over and over, which elicits literally no change in the frequency of her mentions of death and aging.

My mother fears death like no one I know. Her mortality is always present. But perhaps her greatest fear of all is developing dementia. She can’t stand the thought of my sister and I caring for her, even though we’ve been caring for her all our lives. 

Dementia and Alzheimer’s impact more and more people every year. Every 16 seconds someone develops Alzheimer’s. Between the years 2000 and 2017, deaths from heart failure went down and deaths from Alzheimer’s increased 145%. I imagine how these numbers ring in the head of my mother, how they wiggle and float on her yellow ceiling as she fails to fall asleep most nights. She tosses and turns for hours before taking Trazodone and Klonopin to keep the stats from ringing loud. Each night she waits, prays, listens to podcasts before taking the medication that may weaken her liver, she reminds me. I made the horrible, deeply regretted mistake of telling her that sleep deprivation can impact the likelihood of developing dementia, which, of course, worsened her life-long insomnia. To hell with my liver, I need my brain, she whispers to herself as she tosses a pill down.

My mind is now crowded with the image of me, my mother, and a winter day. I already have a location in my mind’s eye, as if abandoning her in the woods were a feasible option. My mom, in my mind, looks just as she does now, of course. She’s wearing black yoga pants and faded brown boots. Her navy blue coat is half zipped up, with a piece of duct tape on the left sleeve barely holding in the cotton that begs to pile out, looking perfectly strange. Her golden-gray hair is half held up in a ponytail, half tangled at the side of her head. We walk down the hill in Kingsley Park where my sister and I went sledding as children. I hold her by her arm and we walk through the snowy opening in the trees that swallow us in. The ground is pure white. Huge, swirling snowflakes fall from the sky like a winter wonderland. My scarf flies backward behind our bodies in the wind. I begin to cry. We walk. 

In addition to her coat, there’s always a new duct-taped “fixed” object appearing in the house. First, it’s the toilet seat. The toilet seat in the purple bathroom connected to my mom’s room has been stained for as long as I can remember. It’s one of those toilet seats that always looks like there is pee on it, consistently causing mild aversion, until one realizes it’s permanently marked and harmless. I never commented on the seat and I’m not sure that anyone else did either. But one day, I came home to find blue-penguin duct-tape covering it. “Isn’t that fun?” she would ask me later. Next were the cushions on the flimsy old kitchen chairs. Blue-penguin duct-tape all over her house. Now the penguins march with her on her ripped coat sleeve, down all the roads she ever walks on, down the snow-covered trails in Kingsley Park.

My mother is “chaotic-good.” Her heart is too big for her body. It literally beats far too fast, which she doesn’t let me forget. “My heart rate is too fast. My heart rate is too fast. My resting heart rate is over 90 bpm. Did you know that?” She asks me all the time. I always look away. “That’s normal, it’s healthy, it’s within the safe range,” I assure her, over and over, as if it’s true, as if I know. 

The traffic is deep and dense in Mexico City. The week we are there, it’s the pilgrimage of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the most visited Catholic pilgrimage site in the entire world. People walk and crawl on their hands and knees for many dozens of miles, for many dozens of days, to the shrine of “Our Lady,” as a commandment and commitment to their faith. Enormous paintings and statues of Mary are tied to their backs as they crawl and sob along the side of the highways. The sound of their weeping is both moving and disturbing. My stepfather insists that we, too, are pilgrims—which we, of course, are not. 

I listen to music in the back seat of our friend’s car after he picks us up from the airport and watch the pilgrims moving in every direction. The singer of Krill commiserates with me through my headphones in his song “Mom”: but if god brings you joy, then by all means, go with god. why would I stop you? why would I stop you?

My mother’s fear of death feels so expansive and pathetic that I impulsively appease it with any means necessary. Often, I talk about heaven or the divine connection with God that is to come. “I know, I know, I will be with Jesus,” she says with such certainty. But my mom has doubted her faith plenty. Once she told me that when she was young, she slept at the ocean in New Jersey all alone, looking for a sign from God. She sat on the shore as the waves tumbled, profoundly loud as the salty water stacked and crashed, accentuating the silence of the universe, which is sometimes composite with my definition of God. 

“Disbelieving is toilsome. It can be a pleasure for adolescent brains with energy to spare, but hanging on to it later saps and rigidifies,” Peter Schjeldahl writes in his own reflection of his terminal lung cancer. I don’t know what this means for me. But I am even more eager to assure her, to neutralize the saps and soften the rigidity of her aging bones. When she says she will be with Jesus, I nod with the certainty of 100%, while believing with 8% of me that any of it is true.

This is not a lie that hurts, though. When my mother and I talk about the politics of religion, I speak my truth. I don’t believe in Jesus. I don’t believe in idols, although I might believe in something. X thing is oppressive, Mom, while X thing is liberating, I explain. I remind her that I will never worship any male figure any more than I already worship masculinity, accidentally, quietly, in passing moments on the street, in my bed, in my dreams. But when she talks about her death, there is only Jesus—love and Jesus, and I am complacent. I must allow her this.

I turn death into a positive, wonderful thing when talking to my mother. It’s comical, almost absurd how I insist. “Don’t fear death, Mom, it’s the birth of eternal life and peace. You should look forward to it!” The corners of my mouth are forced upwards and I look toward the horizon. Her worry and grief are far too big for me. This helps mask my own fear, too.

When my good friend died when I was in high school, it was sudden and in a car. From this, I know grief. The grief was all at once—less grueling, awkward, and anxiety inducing than my mother’s aging. But this grief filled me up as if I were an empty glass.

It goes like this: You don’t even know you have a drop of space in you. You think you are a full human. You don’t know that you aren’t already filled by the other heartbreaks, pains, coughs, and colds. But you are, in fact, entirely empty and ready to be turned new. Now each drop of your hollow body is filled up, in a flash, with grief. It is impossibly full and it might burst. Death, death, death.

My mom’s processing and ongoing anticipated grief of dying goes more like this: death, death, organic smoothie, trip on a plane to Mexico City, death, novel about divorce, duct-tape, death, death, supplements, death.

I know that grief is big but I try to convince myself that grief is not pure bad. And while I’m not certain of the promise of eternal heavenly life, I am not convinced that death is “bad” either. I’m aware of how unique our society is in the way it has identified death as the ultimate worst thing that can happen. I’m also aware of how the silencing around death is so related to the other violence of the world—the rise and spread of global capitalism and its cultural hegemony. Death, in modernity, has been gradually separated, erased, and disappeared out from our everyday lives and rituals. We try to pretend it doesn’t exist, which makes it that much more terrifying. Through politics and markets made up of myths of infinity and linear, ongoing progress, we have projected ourselves as necessarily, materially, ongoing, too.

We keep death far away: hidden inside medical, funerary, insurance, or government industries. While walking the streets in Mexico, I notice how different Mexican shops are from the U.S. in the way that they bleed out onto the sidewalk. I see many funerary stores with visible coffins of all different sizes and colors: bright blue miniature coffins and huge mahogany ones. I’m almost shocked, briefly offended at the sight of them. How can I integrate the pain these symbols hold into my afternoon walk? How can I turn the grief into something that is neither rescued by god nor hopelessly lost to the harrowing winds of tragedy?

My mother and I are getting off a plane together, returning to Pittsburgh, and I’m already standing in the aisle, anxious to get away from the smoky fumes of the plane. People are scrambling all around, knocking each other’s elbows, reaching toward the overhead bins. Over my mom’s shoulder I watch her click on an email with the subject “How to overcome fear of aging,” when my grandmother calls her on FaceTime. 

My grandmother has some form of dementia that hasn’t been diagnosed, but she lives in a state of bliss, in song. The iPad which she calls from in the nursing home is never angled correctly. We can see her only from her mouth down. Her ancient mouth opens wide, disgustingly, letting out laughter and tender words. “I love you,” she says, and we repeat it back. And I lean away, walk forward, do what I can to escape the view of the camera, as if it would make me actually absent and far away from the awkward grief that is the relationship between my grandmother and me.

My mother’s fear of death stems from the delusional, cultural dream of immortality, combined with a ferocious love of her children and of life. I know that her father’s sudden death five years ago and her mother’s subsequent, steep demise into illness and dementia have accentuated her fears. But despite my mom’s life-long depression and anxiety, her love of life is impossibly grand. Her heart is so beautifully impacted by the subtle things: the colors of the buildings in the sunlight, the rough and low sound of Spanish-speaking voices in the taqueria, the length of my hair. The sensual details. These are, in fact, what make human life, human. Full in its aliveness and unique to other conceptions of existence that my mom can fathom, even in her faith. It’s cold in Pittsburgh, so we stand just inside the door to escape the bite of the wind as we wait for a ride from the airport. “I just need to get you and your sister into your nineties, and then I’ll be able to die,” my mom says after she has an emergency trip to the bathroom, her bladder noticeably weakened by years. I throw my head back in laughter and we cringe and smile at the Christmas music playing, and I cringe and smile at my mom’s aging, as tender as it is haunting.

 paddling

chelsey clammer

Before Tulsa was put down around noon, she went down in the morning. A deaf, mostly blind, malnourished, twenty-four-year-old horse got on her knees at some point early in the a.m. and was lying on her side by the time the cops arrived. Neither of the two officers was the cop who showed up last week in response to an animal report. That cop will do a follow-up in a few weeks. These cops were responding to a new call. Apparently the neighbors have noticed some things.

Tulsa was being unintentionally starved. Accidental neglect. A lot has been going on ’round these parts—this six-acre property out in the middle of nowhere, Texas. Eleven deaths in eight months. Two cats, five chickens, two goats, a horse, and one mother—all dead in the past 195 days. I did the math. That’s an average of one death every 17.1 days.

After her mother died and one goat died and two cats died, Courtney, the official property owner of the now neglect-riddled ranch, found an oar in the chaotic clutter of her spider-webbed and dirt-coated barn. The oar was the perfect opportunity to paint and decorate, a thing to express how she felt at that point. Art therapy of sorts. She glued some letters on it. “SHIT CREEK,” it reads. The oar is hanging outside her bedroom door where Courtney’s mom bled to death in her arms 195 days ago.

So with a mother dying and cats dying and goats dying and chickens dying and a dog dying during these past eight months, the horses fell to the wayside. They were put to pasture, left to fend for themselves, to graze on the brittle grass and drink from the muddy pond. Out there, they were forgotten about more often than not. It’s the “not” that led to Tulsa turning skeletal. That led to the neighbors making calls. Too malnourished, too old, too many pre-existing health conditions; the horse is now a corpse.

A green tarp is draped over her body as we call an organization whose specialization is hauling off dead horses and is called—get this—Final Ride.

Earlier this afternoon, before I helped Courtney cut off the hair on Tulsa’s lifeless tail—a common keepsake among country-living folk—I watched the vet stick so many drug-filled needles in Tulsa’s neck that blood oozed out of the new wound. She took a long time to die. Courtney says that horse was always stubborn. Finally, there were a few final grunts. The heartbeat stopped, and her lungs and nerves twitched themselves until there wasn’t enough life in Tulsa to keep twitching.

Her ribs were clearly visible. Hipbones jutting out just so, that they reminded me of supermodels because when it’s not in reference to animals, malnourishment in our society is sexy. Approved of. Praised. This is more than appalling.

Though it is not as appalling as how the high, sharp peaks of Tulsa’s hipbones arrived because of forgetfulness and distraction—a common thing ’round here now that Courtney’s mom suddenly and unexpectedly left her daughter to fend for herself.

Grab your oar.

Tulsa’s death was inevitable—all deaths are. But like Courtney’s mother, Tulsa too died too soon. Even though a sixty-nine-year-old woman isn’t the youngest thing, and neither is a twenty-four-year-old horse, they’re still young enough to assume there are a good number of life years left. Their final ride doesn’t seem so close. But life isn’t a certainty.

The day my dog and I moved into Courtney’s house to keep her company was the day Codi died in his doghouse. Heatstroke, I suspect. Another issue of neglect. And so on the day a puppy arrived on this property, the four-year-old dog who was living here left.

There was an equal amount of animal arrivals and departures that day.

There have almost been as many departures in these past 195 days as there have been survivors.

The survivors: ten cats, two horses, two chickens, one duck, two dogs, and one daughter. Eighteen life-sustainers. Though staying-aliveness is obviously not a given in this house. 

Along with humorously decorating discarded oars, Courtney recently discovered a new crafting obsession—fake floral arrangements. There’s something to say here about the certainty you feel when you know—without a doubt—that something won’t die on you.

The fake flowers hanging around the house haven’t died.

Yet. 

Final Ride finally arrived. It’s been two days. Two days of the tarp over the dead horse. Two days of sun crashing down on the covered corpse. Two days of decomposition and so when we pull the tarp off Tulsa, I’m surprised by how much better she looks. Her gut is bloated, and aside from the sack of whatever that is hanging outside her ass and is filled with liquid and please God don’t let that thing pop, she looks good. Not a rib in sight.

Never did I ever think I’d watch a woman wrap a cable around a dead horse’s neck and pull the horse—its eyes still open, dead blue orbs piercing my vision—up onto a flatbed trailer, like it’s a car being towed. Within minutes, Tulsa is whisked away for her final ride to the horse cemetery and Courtney and I go back into the cluttered house to pretend we didn’t just see that.

And now it’s a few hours later, and Courtney and I are in the dining room talking about whatever when Skylar, my dog, starts barking ferociously at the closed blinds that cover the sliding glass door that leads out to the backyard. 

“What the hell are you barking at, dog?”

Probably Casey, the half-German shepherd and half-great Pyrenees who lives in that back section of the yard. I peek my head through the slats to assess what Skylar is barking at. I don’t see her at first, but then—oh look. There’s Casey. The top of her big white head poking up from the other side of the deck, and there are her big black eyes, staring right into mine.

Unblinking.

She’s still staring.

And there’s the chain she’s tied to, wrapped around the post of the railing. A sliver of her pink collar seen.

She’s still staring.

Unblinking.

Chain. Collar. Post. Four-feet-tall deck. Just the top of her head poking out.

And those eyes still staring at me.

Unblinking.

Click.

“Casey’s not okay!” I scream.

The horror doesn’t end there. It doesn’t end when Courtney rushes through the door. It doesn’t end when she screams, “Casey!” Or when I ask, “Is she okay?” even though I know the answer. Or when Courtney says, “She’s dead,” and I put my dog in her kennel and go back out to Courtney who is sitting on the deck steps, sobbing.

The horror doesn’t end when I see Casey’s stiff body on the ground—it only gets stronger when I notice the bloody chew marks in the side of the deck, right next to where her head was.

There is no end to this horror because I will never be able to un-see those desperate, bloody gouges in the wood, the blood on dead Casey’s teeth. And I can never un-see those eyes, unblinking. Her final look as she gasped out her final breath—pleading.

Courtney and I consider the timeline. Neither of us heard her struggling, so she must have died before we came back into the house. Which is to say that as we were watching a dead horse get winched up onto a flatbed trailer, a dog was getting hanged to death on the other side of the house.

Math update: 12 deaths in eight months.

That’s 1 death every 16.1 days.

Skylar barks from her kennel—it’s music to me. It means she’s alive—which is apparently an extraordinary feat to achieve in this house. Her barking breath is a reassurance. Never have I ever loved her barking as much as I do now.

Courtney’s mom died and now Courtney’s animals are dying because she doesn’t know how to live. I look at the squalor all around me. The way I must brace myself for another death. Or steady myself so I don’t trip over the messes that list to the left. Piles of junk swaying to the right. Everything is everywhere and so Courtney’s days are spent in a continuous cycle of questioning, “Have you seen _____?”

Her items are as lost as she is.

The main thing dying here is Courtney’s spirit. And the effects of it are rippling out, literally killing everything around her. I think of the concept of a catalyst. Regina’s death. Courtney’s trauma. A short matrilineage of death. Courtney has no children, so next in line are the animals. They’re dropping faster than the flies that circle the broken sink, the piled results of a hoarder, the fermented bag of grapes that was sitting on the counter for weeks. “I’m gonna clean it,” Courtney declared. After another couple of weeks, I gave up on seeing her intentions come to fruition and I threw the mush and ooze of green grapes out, hundreds of gnats and dead fruit flies included.

There is so much that’s going wrong here. These things shouldn’t be happening. But they are. They keep happening. All I can wonder is when God will stop beating a dead horse.

The sunset is gorgeous tonight, by the way. 

Beauty found in a diminishing thing.

Chelsey Clammer is the author of Circadian (winner of the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award) and BodyHome. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist who has been published in Brevity, Salon, The Rumpus, Hobart, The Normal School, Essay Daily, The Water~Stone Review, and Black Warrior Review, among many others. She teaches creative writing online with WOW! Women On Writing. Clammer holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rainier Writing Workshop. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.

 blinkies

stephen policoff

We bought the house in Ulster County because Kate yearned for a place where we could get away from the city, where she could garden and grill and take walks in the leafy expanse of upstate New York, not far from where we both grew up.

The hapless real estate guy first showed us many unappealing options. One house in Hurley featured several bats sleeping upside down in the windows. Another, near Woodstock, had the pungent odor of unrestrained mildew. We saw tumbledown mansions in Pine Hill, and a glorified ski hut in Boiceville. The last place he showed us was a fading green house on a little cul-de-sac outside the village of Phoenicia, with amazing pine paneling in the dining room and a vast, somewhat raggedy lawn where lovely lilac bushes bobbed; this house made Kate smile. 

It was 1992, years before Phoenicia was written up in the New York Times as the next happening place. The turbulent beauty of the Esopus Creek was down the street, but the town—where now galleries and gourmet restaurants flourish—was kind of run-down, inhabited by an odd mix of old hippies, exiled New Yorkers, and mountain men who would not be out of place in Appalachia. But looming above the dusty main street were the lustrous peaks of the Catskill Mountains; red-wing blackbirds skittered on the side of the road.

We spent most weekends there, and many holidays too, except when the bitter winters froze the pipes under the street and replaced the friendly aura with icy darkness. After we adopted Anna from China in 1995, we spent whole weeks up there during the summer, laughing at the news reports of grotesque humidity back home in Manhattan. 

“That’s why the Catskills were invented,” Kate liked to say.

Anna loved the house—my housie, she called it. We spent hours sitting in the hammock, pushing her on the swing set we built for her, watching the blue jays and squirrels fight over peanuts we lovingly placed all around the yard. Most of all, Anna loved being carried—and later loved traipsing—down to the creek, where we sat on flat rocks, dangled feet in the water, skipped stones, and bobbed in tubes on the edge of the torrent.  

“We’re going to the keek!  We’re going to the keek!”  she would chant.

We did not yet know that Anna was born with the terrible genetic disorder, Niemann-Pick Type C, which would take her from us before she reached adulthood. We knew only that she was not a typical child, that her speech and movement were a little strange. She did not say much at all till she was almost three, but when she did speak, she had a strangely poetic turn of phrase—halting, not quite the way you would say things, but oddly evocative.

One Saturday evening in late June, when Anna was about 4, Kate and I were sitting on the Adirondack chairs in our yard; Anna was scrambling back and forth between our laps, as she liked to do. We were watching hummingbirds hover above the patch of tiger lilies which appeared every summer, and just as the sun set, a bloom of fireflies arose from the greenery around the orange flowers, as if conjured by some idle magician for our amusement. There must have been fifty of them, and Anna’s eyes widened with amazement.

“See!” she said, “Blinkies!”

I laughed. “They’re called fireflies.”

“Blinkies!” she said.

“Like flashlights, right?” Kate said. “Because they blink off and on?”

Anna opened and closed her eyes rapidly, as if in demonstration. “Blinkies,” she repeated, then laughed her glorious, raucous laugh.

Every summer after that, we looked for blinkies—in Washington Square Park near our apartment, in the fields upstate, and later, with her little sister Jane; we collected them in jars, then let them flutter back out.

In 2012, Kate died suddenly. Anna’s illness overcame her three years later, leaving only  Jane and me and a house still haunted by the absence of the two who loved it best.

I held onto the house, thinking maybe I would be able to go up there again at some point without plummeting into sadness. But in 2016, I finally recognized what a futile thought that was. Houses need to be lived in, and I could not envision ever living in the green house without Kate and Anna.

Jane and I went up there that summer to gather a few beloved possessions and sigh loudly in every room. Right before we left, we walked through the overgrown garden where Kate planted impatiens each May, where morning glories used to snake up the swing set. As dusk descended, we saw little darts of light. I bit back the word “Blinkies!” and when I looked over at Jane, I saw her eyes welling, maybe thinking the same wan thought, that comical word gleefully echoed each summer by her sweet sister.

Recently, I was sitting in the garden near my apartment with a new-ish friend, someone who knew only vaguely the story of my truncated family. As we chatted, little pinpoints of light began flitting through the purple summer evening.  

“Blinkies!” I blurted out.

She laughed. “Fireflies? Or lightning bugs, right?”

It’s a recurring conundrum: do I always need to tell my tale? Does my desire not to eliminate Kate and Anna from the discourse of my life outweigh the clumsiness of having to explain the fraught fragments?  

Once, not so long ago, a neighbor approached me, someone I had not seen for a while, and asked where Anna was, and why she never saw her beautiful smile any more in the halls of our building. When I told her, she burst into tears, and, weirdly, I found myself having to comfort her for my own loss.

So, this time, I just shrugged.

“In my family, we always called them blinkies.”

 the entertainment center

john means

Odz had told me it was just a bookcase we’d be hauling away in my pickup. I expected it to be sitting out on his carport, but there was nothing there.

Instead, it was down in the basement rec room, and it was no bookcase. A monstrosity of particle-board shelves, platforms, and compartments with little doors. Odz said it had been their entertainment center.

Had been. Odz was too old to be getting a divorce, too overwhelmed to navigate the minefield of a real estate settlement, too alone to be moving off to another town alone. I confess, I envied him, so we started the loading up. And up it was. I worked from the top, backing up, and we heaved it out of the basement, one step at a time, with a rest between each. We were both too old to be up to something like this. Odz at the bottom was lifting most of the weight and was in a dangerous position.

However, as we wheedled it up, I was thinking, yes, work could still be done by old men. The trick was to break the task down into small increments and to expand the time factor. In physics class about sixty years ago I had learned that power equals work divided by time. In our case the work was raising a lifeless mass, a dead weight, against the force of gravity from its past life at a lower potential energy in the basement rec room upward eight feet to a higher state of potential energy in the carport. Potential energy of a mass is determined by its elevation above a lower reference level. A boulder at the top of a high cliff has greater potential energy than a boulder of the same mass resting at the base of the cliff. The higher boulder has the potential to fall, accumulate velocity and kinetic energy, and then transfer that energy to a body at the cliff base. Like a Road Runner cartoon.

Heaving the monstrosity required us to put energy or work into the system. A winch could raise the object from Odz’s former rec room up a plywood incline on the steps to the carport in three seconds. Two teenaged boys such as Odz and I sixty years ago could tote it straight up the steps in about fifteen seconds without even thinking about resting, much less a failed marriage. Odz and I at age 75 required five minutes to heave-step-and-rest it up to its higher level of outdoor freedom from its lower level of failed marital incarceration.

Each of the three methods requires the same amount of work or energy, but the power ratings vary greatly. Do the math and we find that the winch is 100 times as powerful as 75-year-old Odz and me, the testosterone teens 20 times as powerful. This last is a sad proportion on what we have lost.

But more can always be lost. As I neared the top step, I realized we had muscled considerable potential energy into the system, and my old hands were losing it. If I let the monster slip, it had the potential to boulder down and crush poor Odz, still mostly in his basement. I’d never get him out, but I know him well, and in his last seconds, he would appreciate the irony.

The entertainment center was, for Odz and me, an ungainly and encumbering contraption. We might have tried to explain and warn the 20-times-stronger teenagers that entertainment in marriage took work and had precarious potentials, but zipping up the steps with ease, those boys would have been mightily bored by the old-man backstory. Their work was a lark, “no sweat.” Ah, a lifetime of entertainment lay ahead for them.

My wife and I had also spent a lifetime in our rec room with our entertainment, a console TV. Maybe our lives revolved more around this furniturized picture tube than it did around our daily work, children, schedules, arguments, commutes in traffic, ballet and Little League, arguments, dishwashing and laundry, appliances, insurances, arguments, service contracts, income taxes, credit cards, and lawn mowing. So much power consumed, so much entertainment deserved, even though most humans who have ever lived upon the earth have neither known nor heard of evening entertainment.

A wife and a husband might not know what to say to one another or might have let slip how to speak love. Or one might dare not say a single word. But always the center is there with its hours. Each knows it better than the other. It is where they touch and share their days alive together. 

I was afraid that at the loading dock of the Rescue Mission Store, Odz might cloud up. It would be goodbye. Any man could cry giving away, donating things that had measured out his life.

Then there’s the Abyss. Gravity and good solid ground always have potential, but not the free fall into the Abyss. Then what? When the measures and the credits are over, the obituary snipped from the newspaper for future reference, will the subsequent hours be people still flickering in drama or the emptied-out entertainment center being hauled out?

The Rescue Mission Store was in a converted old warehouse. All we had to do was slide the old remnant out the back of the pickup onto the concrete loading dock. Driving over, I had decided to depart quickly so that Odz would not have a chance to look back on his life.

“Can’t take that,” a voice cut in when we had it halfway slidden out. He was a rough-looking character, and his dog was at us, teeth bared, lunging, blitz-barking, his head jerking from my balls to Odz’s, back and forth, inches away, maniacal, two-headed. The leash pulled him back a bit, but he did not let up.

Then I saw the tail, straight up, erect but whipping back and forth. Was it covered with rattlesnake hide? A rattler rattling at its end? The snake going to bite?

“Entertainment center. Nobody wants them no more. Went out with recreation rooms.” He smiled, shook his head at us, pulled his dog back. “You old boys come to the wrong place.”

We slid it back in and left in a hurry, as planned. Next stop, Goodwill, a block away. There, a sign informed us donations were now received at their regional facility across from the airport. They had gone upscale, into a brick office building and warehouse terminal that had previously housed a trucking company. It no longer looked like an organization that needed donations, and they even had a nice secretary, who told us where to drive and enter the gate.

A cordial man greeted us, “Welcome, I’m Pete.” No dog.

This time, before we slid it out again, we asked if they took entertainment centers.

He was agreeable, and we moved it half out the back again. He leaned over and inspected its exterior. He scraped with his fingernail at a couple of blemishes on the door of the VHS-tape storage compartment. He leaned down closer and scanned the damaged front edge of the TV platform. He stood up and faced us, not barking.

“Sorry,” he smiled, “but we cannot take it. My boss says not to accept damaged pieces. They don’t move. They sit for what seems an eternity and take up space we need for items in good condition. This piece has a damaged finish.”

Only if you look, I thought. Back into the truck. Odz said for me to take him home. I backed into his carport and we slid it out again. We walked it over against his house. Perhaps it was meant to be part of the house under contract.

Odz did not say much. He shook my hand and thanked me. I wondered where the old piece would end up after being the center of attention for so long a time and then being turned away in so short a time.

As I pulled out onto the road I looked back and there stood Odz in his carport, alone with his empty entertainment center against his house, which would soon be empty itself. He waved goodbye to me. I returned his wave but he had turned away.  

A week or so later on a swirling, blustery day with rain squalls, I was out Odz’s way so I drove by his house. It was not yet settlement day, but the house looked empty. There were no curtains, and I could see straight through from the front picture window all the way to the kitchen and out the back door. His car was gone, but the entertainment center still sat where we had put it, Odz and I.

Rain was blowing in on it. One of the lower compartment doors was waving willy-nilly, back and forth in the wind. The only thing moving.

Nobody wanted it. A damaged finish.

John Means has published haiku, short stories, poems, novel excerpts, and two geological guidebooks—Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Parks and Roadside Geology of Maryland, Delaware and Washington, D. C.

 the place where I’m from

mai serhan

I’ve never been to where I’m from. When my father was alive, he would reminisce about a huge manor with a horse stable and wine cellar. I was told my grandmother, Ibtihaj al-Qadi, took her children and fled through olive trees under a hail of bullets in 1948. My uncle, Nabil Serhan, then six years old, was shot in the palm of his hand, or so the story goes. As for my grandfather, Faris Serhan, he chose to stay behind to fight with the rest of his village. Years later, I picked up Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury and found a detailed account of the battle for our village: “If we’d fought throughout Palestine the way El Kabri fought,” it read, “we wouldn’t have lost the country.” The record can be found on page 166, now along with a yellow Post-it bearing a huge smiley face and the proud word, Jeddo, Palestinian for Grandpa. 

The Serhan family relocated to Beirut. The apartment on Barbour Street was a much simpler affair. The hilarity of the name does not escape me now. I, being raised in Egypt, speak Egyptian; “Barbour” in Egyptian means “booger.” I wonder today how that small apartment managed to contain four fiery boys and their equally hot-tempered sister. She was the cleverest, but money was tight after Palestine, and since the family needed to prioritize, she stayed home while her brothers pursued university degrees. What a rowdy home it must’ve been before they all disbanded. I used to stay in that apartment during my summer holidays after the Lebanese Civil War. What remained of that grand life my father so fondly spoke about was a very robust Palestinian kitchen and a portrait of Faris Serhan on the wall wearing his tarbouche. The day Jeddo died, my father sobbed until his nose bled. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry. Looking back now, I know he cried then for much more than a father; he cried for that place where we’re from. 

The idea of that place slowly receding from memory troubled my father for the rest of his life. I remember that one time in Beirut when he asked me to go down to the supermarket to buy labban and I came back with a bottle of milk. My father looked at me in horror, before horror gave way to rage. You see, labban, where I’m from, means yoghurt, and halib means milk. But I, being raised so far from where I’m from, knew labban as milk. 

When the Civil War broke in Lebanon, Ibtihaj al-Qadi was forced to pick up and leave once again, this time to Limassol, Cyprus, where she waited for the war to end for fourteen years. Every summer, my cousins and I would descend on this pretty beach town from all corners of the earth. My father would line us up and ask us, one by one, to come forward, say our full names and where we’re from: “May Nizar Faris Nayif Mohamed Ali Khayr Serhan. Palestinian from El Kabri,” I would say. 

Ibtihaj al-Qadi died exactly two decades after her husband, ironically, of Alzheimer’s disease. Her sons all died shortly after, leaving my Aunt Nadia as the last surviving witness to Palestine. I visited her recently in Beirut. We drove her down to Saidon in the South of Lebanon, the Israeli border providing a cutting backdrop to her non-stop stories of exile. “We entered through that border,” she said, “in a truck. We didn’t know we’d never go back.” 

The Internet tells me that El Kabri had 400 inhabitants and many springs: ’Ayn Mafshuh, ’Ayn Fawwar, Ayn al-'Asal, and 'Ayn Kabri, which together formed the largest freshwater source in Palestine. It was a bountiful place with lush fig, olive, pomegranate, apple, berry, citrus, and banana trees. I look up and imagine my father running freely across the valley before stripping down and jumping into the crystal-clear river. He would then come out to dry under the sun before plucking fruit off the trees on his way home. But that could very well be an embellishment too. 

When Jeddo left Palestine after its fall, those who left after told him that the Haganah, or the Jewish underground militia, were showing his photo to people, asking about his whereabouts. “Tell Faris Serhan, we will hunt him down,” they would say to some as they fled. They sure tried to hunt him down. I was told they once left an explosive gas cylinder under the stairs of his residence in Beirut. My family name will likely prevent me from seeing that place where I’m from. So, I’ve learnt to cope with this reality in the little ways I can. I named my daughter, Nadia, after my aunt, the last surviving witness to Palestine. 

 subsidence

R. gene turchin

Subsidence occurs when the ceilings of the spaces carved out of coal seams collapse to the floor. The earth above shifts and sinks downward to fill the voids. Inside it is a minor cataclysmic event without observers. A violent cracking, inside the hollowed out spaces of the mine, echoes with the screams of shifting earth as the roof falls. On the surface, the ground dips and seeps lower, forming small potholes, divots, and depressions. It happens with the slowness of warm summer days. Houses ultimately suffer from the quiet straining. A small crack in a foundation wall grows into an errant branch and becomes age lines on the face of the home.

We moved into a house in West Virginia, a place heavy with wood and cast iron radiators. Thick oak boards framed the beveled glass doors and windows while small crossed wood inserts adorned the glass. Wood floors creaked underfoot. On the bank above the street it squatted like a sumo wrestler centered on a street slashed high on a hill surrounding the town.

Its aged wood and small rooms closed in on us like dank storm clouds. My mother’s dream home back in Pennsylvania was a modern ranch, a bright jewel in a spacious, sun drenched field. The chaos and newness of the move blinded us to the contrast of this old, heavy place.

My mother, Kathy, left behind her dream house, the one which, when completed in our old small town neighborhood, would have conveyed a status of success. Dad had done much of the construction himself, laying foundation block and putting up walls. It was unfinished when the Pennsylvania mines barricaded and sealed their portals with concrete block during the recession of 1958. Dad did odd jobs to keep the family afloat, but there wasn’t enough money for the mortgage and food. He traveled further away in an ever-widening circle of despair until he eventually found work at a small mine near Glenville in West Virginia. He sold himself as a mechanic. Machine maintenance was considered skilled and so paid more than regular labor. He exaggerated his experience with the thick steel machines. At home he confessed he’d seen them operated and knew what they were called. It was a small lie to learn and muddle his way through.

At first he navigated the twisted roads on weekends to come home for a few days and return to the hills on Sunday afternoon. He joked about how the highway people had followed a snake through the mountains to build the roads. Nothing straight. Nothing linear. It was the path of our life, blind twistings and turnings leading into unknowns.

During the time he was gone, she lived a transitory life in a half finished house with plywood floors, scant furniture, and two boys, my younger brother and me. Uncles drove us to the A&P store for groceries and we walked to church and school. We lived this for a year until Dad bought the old house near the top of the hill on a street, unnavigable in winter months. He made the purchase without her input, perhaps thinking it would be a pleasant surprise, to unite us again as a family. Before that he’d rented an apartment near the mine. The long drive each weekend wore on him, drawing rivers on his face and making his voice like coarse smoke. Once he’d taken us to the apartment, five hours to show us the single room in a plain white building above the Sand Fork Post Office. Mom’s unfinished house had closets bigger than the apartment. Her eyes wide, she said that a spot in the road would not be a place we could live.

Weston was a small valley town filled with the runoff and detritus of the hills. The house on the high street was within walking distance of both the single yellow brick Catholic school and the newer red brick public one. The Catholic church, an anomaly in the heart of unyielding Protestant central Appalachia, supported the out-of-place Catholics. From our point of view, only heathens and pagans attended the looming red brick structure of the public school. St. Patrick’s was a fortress. During that time, canon law forbade Catholics to set foot in the buildings of other denominations. Somehow we would be tainted by their spartan buildings. What we experienced was culture shock.

Mom felt the change hard, like the deep pressure of still air before a summer storm. She was far from her friends, her family and, except for the church, we were unwelcome strangers. Even there, the parishioners were Italian and Irish who could trace long histories back in time while we were “Hunkies,” two steps from the old country and of indeterminate origin. We reeked of strange, cabbage-laden foods and customs. Newcomers, birds not of this flock.

It broke her. No single incident. An amalgamation of small losses wore her down, wind and sand blowing against her psyche, etching at her skin and the fabric of her soul, leaving behind a pitted, scarred surface.

After we moved, the modern ranch house was either sold or repossessed by the bank. I was too young to be privy to the details or comprehend impacts. With her life disconnected from everything familiar and safe, she floated, her soul flotsam on a muddy river. She became susceptible to opportunistic diseases. A failure of mental immunity laid a path to physical collapses. Asthma. Suddenly without cause, nights became wheezing endurance battles, her breath ragged and choking, catalyzed by the fire of an internal raging anger.

I began to dread those dark nights when Dad worked the late afternoon or night shift. He called it the “hoot owl” shift.

My brother dove into innocent sleep while I worried myself awake. The hall that connected our bedrooms with Mom and Dad’s was a dark tunnel with no overhead light. The single bath, a study in old porcelain and white tile, sat on the right. A trap door in the hall served as a basement entrance and lifted to the side like the lid of a coffin. The floor creaked and groaned with steps at the entrance. A constant fear of the door giving way, subsuming me into the dark below whispered at the edge of my thoughts. I always stepped along the wall as I tiptoed to her room with visions of a roiling pit of alligators from some old horror movie lurking in the darkness. The boiler lived down there in a dark shadow under the kitchen, the same heaving furnace that supplied radiator steam in winter. There were dark things under that floor that terrified me but perhaps much less than the thought of losing my mother as she choked.

In the doorway.

“Mom, are you all right?”

Gasps and wheezes. An engine failing. No answer as she struggles to pull air through narrow pipes.

Black phone. Lifted handset, a sigh, the night operator. 

“Number, please.”

“We need an ambulance. My mother has asthma. She can’t breathe.” She asks our doctor’s name. The town is small enough so she knows whom to ring. Flashing red lights caress the ceiling through the windows.

Doctor, white shirt, rolled up sleeves. Calm and confident. Magic black leather bag. 

“Kathy,” he asks. “How are we doing?” A flicker of a smile dashes across her face. Injecting emergency epinephrine. The first time is the hardest, but there are repercussions. Doctors cost money. Some nights she was angry at me for calling. Gasping to the doctor, “I told him not to call, but he doesn’t listen.”

A sidelong glance from him and a nearly imperceptible nod allow me some validation.

Other days she hung on until Dad came in from work. I waited till one o’clock, listening and praying for the sound of his car pulling up. He found her gasping to breathe on the bed. I lay in my bed with a blanket clutched in my tight fists, hoping for him to come sooner.  He carried her to the car after coming to our room.

“I’m taking your Mom to the hospital. It’s okay,” he said and touched my head. “Keep an eye on your brother till we get back.” I wondered some nights if she would return.  

Much of West Virginia is undermined with coal seams. Houses, streets, hillsides slowly sink lower to fill the voids, a phenomenon called subsidence. 

Our family experienced subsidence. It takes years; after all, the voids are not huge. A collapse of a ceiling in an excavated section, earth, dirt, rocks, pushed by a trickle of water, filter down to replace the fall. Damp dust in the dark.

The thin tether that kept my mother from sagging down finally lost the ability to keep her grounded and she slid into the pit.

 stuttering in isolation

isabel armiento

I’ve always loved words but dreaded speaking. Ever since I can remember, people have told me there’s something wrong with the way I speak. Most people would call it a stutter, though people who don’t know me may think that I stammer through my words because I’m shy, or painfully awkward, or simply lying. They hear speech disfluency and think of insecurity—Did I stutter?—or anxiety—Piglet’s frightened Oh d-d-dear, though my stutter looks nothing like the endearing repeated syllables of animated anthropomorphic pigs. 

My childhood speech pathologist said that I suffered from what was called vocal blocks: sometimes, the word I want to say simply won’t come out. To illustrate, she handed me a Chinese finger trap, watching as I wriggled my fingers into the contraption’s outer holes and struggled to pull them back out. She explained that the finger trap was like my vocal cords, my fingers like my words: the harder I pulled, the more tightly stuck they were. 

I try to appreciate the silver lining to the pandemic: rather than stammer out half-baked insights in front of my peers, I can now type them up into a virtual classroom, even edit them for clarity. But somehow this virtual conversation doesn’t feel anything at all like, well, conversation. As my spoken words dwindle, they become precious—even the ones that stick in my throat, like fingers in a trap. 

As a writer and a stutterer, I’ve developed an ambivalent relationship with language. I fear it, as any writer should, and yet I am obsessed with it. When I speak, I’m constantly running through lists of synonyms in my head, searching for the alternate word that will emerge from my lips unscathed. I quickly determine the pattern of words that will slide smoothly off my tongue, eschewing words that begin with hard vowels in favor of those that begin with voiceless consonants. Often, my stutter forces me to choose a word I wouldn’t have otherwise used—sometimes a better word, always a fresher word. 

My stutter has affected me in countless ways, mostly insignificant. This year I tried a pumpkin spice latte for the first time (it was delicious)—I’d been robbed of the pleasure as a teenage girl simply because I feared the Starbucks barista’s inevitable question, Could I get a name for that order? (like most stutterers, my name is the word I dread saying most). Mostly, I’ve learned to control language rather than simply fear it, using synonyms or carefully-constructed sentences to minimize vocal blockage. My name is Isabel, rather than simply Isabel, the soft s sound in is mellowing out the sharp i sounds that follows. I have become so accustomed to constantly consulting my built-in thesaurus that I often forget how deeply my stutter affects me.  

Stuttering slows things down. Friends often become frustrated when I hit a vocal block, offering me the word they suspect I’m struggling with rather than waiting for me to wrestle it out myself. Having a conversation with me means disrupting the fast pace of your life. It means slowing down and waiting, which for many people feels uncomfortable, even impossible. In the attention economy, every writer is fighting to prove that their words are worth taking time out of your busy day to read. I am doing this not only when I write, but whenever I open my mouth: fighting to prove that my words are worth the extra time it takes to listen. 

But now the attention economy has been put on hold, and not by the latest tech innovation, but by something organic, visceral. An illness. No razzle-dazzle is necessary to catch our attention now—we’re desperate to give it away. The lockdown has slowed everything down, and I’m letting myself slow down too. For the first time in a long time, I’m letting myself say exactly what I want to say, rather than dancing around it with safer words and softer consonants. Hungry for conversation, I’m allowing myself to stutter because my words are worth the extra time—and because now, others are truly willing to slow down and listen.

Stuttering has taught me to be better at conversation by forcing me to slow down and to listen more than I speak. I’m realizing that stuttering has taught me something else, too: that conversations aren’t perfect, and in fact, they shouldn’t be. Have you ever listened—truly listened—to a conversation that you weren’t part of? If not, try it—better yet, try transcribing the conversation. Whether the speakers are stutterers or not, the result will likely be nonsensical: a smattering of half-finished sentences and absurd noises. Conversations aren’t sequential; they don’t logically flow from one idea to the next; they aren’t grammatically correct. Conversations can even be wordless, composed entirely of gestures and unintelligible syllables: a nod, a grunt, a sigh. 

A conversation meanders; it has no endpoint, works toward no goal. It lives in the pauses between words, the facial expressions. It lives in the silent spaces filled with meaning, spaces for people to listen to one another and react, making noises that mean, I see you. Spaces for people to feel connected—and isn’t that the point? 

Because of my fear of speech, many of my most meaningful conversations are not conversations at all. They are emotional letters written to loved ones, clever one-liners shared over social media, virtual dirty talk, text messages that say I love you. 

Isolated in our houses, we are retreating from real, in-person conversation—and we are missing it keenly. Conversation is not an edited paragraph shared with peers over a chatroom/classroom hybrid. It is not messaging your best friend over Facebook to offer exciting news. There is no space for real conversation in these logical, typed-up bytes of information, bound up in texts, emails, or tweets. Without space—for the pauses between the words, the nonsense syllables, the weird stutters and tics—we’re not having conversations at all.  

In isolation, I am learning to appreciate my stutter. I am grateful that I learned to listen, to savor the slowness and imperfection of conversation. It is what makes us human. A bot can send an articulate email, but that bot can’t make a noise that simultaneously conveys hunger and excitement. 

Today I texted my best friend, I miss you. Unsatisfied by the hollow words, I called her. Our conversation was full of nonsense words and ungrammatical phrases; full of abstraction and illogic and pauses and meaningless-yet-meaningful sounds. It was full of stuttering, and it was beautiful. 

Isabel Armiento studies English at the University of Toronto, where she founded a campus literary blog, Mnerva, and is editor-in-chief of a campus newspaper. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Walrus, The Mighty Line, Adelaide Literary Journal, and elsewhere. she was a winner of the Hart House Literary Competition for prose fiction.

 living a life in cars

kurt schmidt

I am eight and experiencing the first of many traumas in my father’s old Pontiac. One night, on a family trip to visit relatives at Christmas, Dad slams into a deer, throwing my sister and me to the floor in back, leaving us bruised and frightened. The second trauma months later is more serious. Again in my father’s Pontiac, this time returning from an autumn foliage excursion, Mom implies my father is failing as a beer salesman. She starts the argument by saying she’s having trouble paying the bills. 

The rationales for spending or not spending escalate until Dad’s shoulders jerk back. “So you’re saying it’s my fault then. So you’re saying it’s all my fault. Okay. If I’m such a failure, then I see no point in living. I’m going to kill us all.” And then Dad jams the gas pedal to the floor and rockets our old Pontiac down the road until the steering wheel shimmies. I try to comfort my whimpering sister by saying he’s just trying to scare us. Ultimately he lets up on the gas, deciding he doesn’t want to die after all. Riding in a car with a crazy man makes me an anxious child with an indelible memory.

A few rocky years later my father buys a Studebaker. Vanilla-colored with white-wall tires. It has a shiny cone-shaped front that makes it appear like he is driving a rocket. When the snow arrives, my father can’t drive the Studebaker up any hill in town without getting stuck. No matter how fast he starts at the base of the hill, the car’s rear end fish-tails like crazy by the middle of the hill, causing my sisters and me to cling to the back seat as if we are riding the whip at the county fair. Then the car smashes into a snow bank, shooting a white tornado into the air. As he spins the tires and tries to back the rocket-nose Studebaker out of the snow bank, he swears as though life is against him. He tells us kids to shut up when we comment about the folly of this vehicle. He insists that Mom get out and push while he spins the tires.

Just before I turn sixteen, when I will be old enough for a driver’s license, I take my high school driver’s education class during which Lizzy Fulghum lets go of the steering wheel and screams half-way through a turn. Like others in the back seat, I brace myself for the crash. Mister Hazen slams down on his set of brakes from the passenger’s side. The next time Mister Hazen pushes his set of brakes, I’m driving down a snow-covered hill. He sends the car into a skid deliberately. I turn the wheel slowly one way and then the other until the car is straight again. I’m ready to get my driver’s license.

My father makes it clear I won’t be driving his Studebaker. So, by default, I’ll drive Mom’s old Dodge. I don’t care what I drive. I just dream about the day when I can stick keys in the ignition and drive down the road. When I finally do that, the snow banks are still high on the sides of our snow-slick country road. On a straightaway, I jam the brakes and yank the steering wheel hard left, causing the car to spin until it hits the snow bank. Each time I repeat these spins, I feel an astonishing exhilaration that is crazier even than learning how to French kiss weeks earlier on a double date in my friend Stuart’s car with a stick of girl named Sweetie Pie who told us a French kiss was “an upper persuasion for a lower invasion.” 

My father keeps the Studebaker until my parents divorce during my senior year in high school. His next wife makes him buy a practical Ford station wagon.

My first car is a dirty-white Oldsmobile with a missing front grill that exposes the radiator. I buy it for $115 at a used-car lot in Lansing, Michigan because it has a Michigan State University faculty sticker on the rear window, allowing me to park anywhere on campus. And with wheels, I can move from the dormitory into a ranch house with a couple of fellow engineering students. I am a twenty-two-year-old transfer from Annapolis. 

Weeks later, in the Holiday Inn kitchen where I work off campus, Norman the cook sets me up on a blind date. One evening, after making out at a drive-in movie, this nineteen-year-old waitress removes her clothes, folds them in her lap, and sits quietly while I drive toward the ranch house. Her motivation may be the summer heat, even though the car windows are open and a night breeze is blowing in. Having escaped the monastic Annapolis existence the previous year, I am naïve about uninhibited women with exhibitionist tendencies. In fact, it’s really a dangerous distraction if, like me, you’re trying to concentrate on the road. Even though it’s a rural road where pheasants fly up sometimes, I worry that some Michigan state trooper is out there, just waiting for a naked woman to go flying by. I don’t even know if it’s legal or illegal to transport a naked woman. 

By the end of the following summer, I have somehow managed to graduate with a BS in mechanical engineering despite the myriad distractions of college life. But the Oldsmobile’s steering wheel doesn’t turn the car to the right anymore. So I drive it from East Lansing to a junkyard in Lansing by making only left turns. The junkyard gives me fifteen dollars for the car.

I fly to Detroit then with considerable optimism about my future. However, as a trainee with IBM, I visit a new car showroom and purchase a red British sports car called a Triumph Spitfire, even though the training managers have suggested its future sales engineers should purchase General Motors cars (we might have to take a GM customer to lunch). I suppose it is partly the foreign car purchase and partly my indifference to punch card machines that leads to my expedited demise at IBM. After returning home to New Hampshire, I soon find a job troubleshooting water purification equipment for a Boston company while flying to exotic cities like Buffalo and Omaha. I’ve always dreamed of having a beautiful woman next to me in the red Spitfire, the top down, the wind blowing our hair. When that eventually happens, the beautiful woman decides riding in a sports car is stupid if it doesn’t lead to marriage. We begin arguing in the car, which reminds me of my parents. Eight months after we part, I quit my job, sell the sports car to a high school kid, and fly to Europe, embarking on a one-year road trip that includes staying initially with my German pen pal and her family and then traveling by train to the Volkswagen factory to pick up the new VW Super Beetle that I’d ordered through the Europe by Car organization. 

After leaving Germany, I often give rides to young students traveling in pairs. From Athens I transport two Oxford University women through Greece and over a mountain range to Dubrovnik. Along the way these British women request toilet facilities where there are none, causing me to worry that bumpy roads and their refusal to pee in the bushes will injure their urinary tracts and possibly damage my car.

Then there are those with larger problems. On the French Riviera I spend time with a young Danish woman who struggles with depression and tried to kill herself at fifteen, when she became pregnant by a disingenuous older boyfriend and her stepmother kicked her out of the house. In Munich it is a German mother who’d had an emotional breakdown when her husband said the scratches on his back were from “a real woman.” In London I drive the MINI Cooper of a Qantas airline pilot who seems a nervous wreck from simultaneous relationships with too many women in England and Australia.

Perhaps the most enigmatic individual lives in Dubrovnik—a volatile Robin Hood character named Misha, who borrows my VW to transport stolen building material and side-swipes a tourist bus, crunching the left front fender.

After I ship the VW back home, the damaged fender becomes a conversation piece, and at a singles’ nightclub, I bump into the same sophisticated Boston woman who’d ridden in the Spitfire. Although she owns a red Ford Mustang, she doesn’t mind riding in a battered VW as long as it leads to marriage. Two years after our wedding, we move from our Boston apartment to my abandoned childhood house in New Hampshire, where I give the VW to a neighborhood kid because the head gasket leaks and my love for a car with 90,000 hard miles has faded. 

We live for a couple years in the house of my childhood ghosts while I try to sustain a writing career. I object to bad problems in our marriage. My wife and I split up. She drives her new Ford Pinto out west with a dog named Droopy, and, at age thirty-five, I’m left with a friendly beagle named Pupper, a balky typewriter, and a three-speed bicycle. No car. My recently published YA novel provides little impetus for another book. As writer’s block sets in, I talk mostly to the dog. I think perhaps I need to get out of the house.

So I ride the bike four hilly miles to the local inn and get a job there, doing work such as cleaning the swimming pool and eventually tending the front desk, the bar, and even subbing as the chambermaid. I ride the bike all summer until the inn’s owner sells me a Ford station wagon that has so much rust as to imply that a multitude of crazy people probably oxidized while riding in it. The inn is where I meet the future next wife, and we sometimes go skiing with our skis in the back of the big Ford wagon. She drives a faded VW Beatle. 

By the time I leave the inn for a better-paying job as a magazine editor, the Ford wagon has too much rust to pass inspection again. So I sell it to a kid who wants the car’s 350 hp engine, and I buy a new Fiat 128. It’s a peppy, dark blue sedan that feels almost racy but is designed to ultimately set itself on fire. Some crazy Italian designers have installed a cooling fan near the engine, which can switch itself on and off as needed, and they’ve mounted the spare tire in the front, over the engine. The new Fiat takes the future wife and me on a camping trip out west, including a sputtering and stalling ride to the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado (no carburetor adjustment for the thin air), a stop in San Francisco to visit my cousin, and a drive up the coast to Vancouver Island to visit my sister and her husband who flies a logging helicopter. But the following summer there is a slight gasoline smell from the engine, and as I drive through town one day, there is a small pop, the car slows to a stop, and flames rise through the air vent in front of the windshield. I jump out and run away, forgetting my most recent manuscript. I should have let the novel burn, but I run back for it and watch at a distance as flames eat into the tire mounted above the engine, causing the largest black plume of smoke the town has ever seen. The cooling fan in the Italian engine had kicked on with a little spark. Leaky carburetor, a little spark, and voilá. The local volunteer firemen chuckle and advise me to buy an American car.

So after moving to Massachusetts temporarily while the future wife works on her master’s degree in Occupational Therapy at Boston University, we buy a new Chevy Chevette hatchback and turn in her old VW Beetle. As a low-budget purchase, the Chevette comes without air-conditioning and with a pea-size hole in the rear wheel well, allowing the tire to spin rain water through the little hole into the back-seat area. When I tell the dealer about it, he says they will spray some crap under the wheel well to seal it. But the hole is still there after the spraying and, hating confrontations with auto dealers, I find some goop at a hardware store and stick it in the hole. But while the spitting hole was temporary, the black vinyl upholstery is permanent, making the car a hot box in sunny weather and causing Pupper to pant and drool each time he has to travel with us. 

Our marriage takes place on a drive-up mountain six years after our first meeting, with some flat-landers from Ohio being antsy about driving their cars up and down. Our son is born six years later, after we move back to my run-down boyhood house. We still have the rusting Chevette, but my technical writing career raises our financial status to the degree of affording a new Toyota Camry wagon in which to drive the baby home from the hospital. And because the Chevette has a badly rusted shock absorber mount that is close to breaking through the fender on the next bump and sending me to my death in some deep ravine, I take advantage of a dealer who says you can tow any old junk into their establishment for a couple thousand dollars trade-in on a “fleet” Mitsubishi Mirage that has only 11,000 miles on it and will never set itself on fire. 

The Camry wagon is the family vehicle in which the infant boy, strapped into his car seat with books, stuffed animals, and a snack bag, hollers periodically, “When are we gonna be there?” The repetition of this question hundreds of times within the confines of the vehicle feels like God’s threshold test on the road too long. As if on autopilot, the Camry wagon screeches into every rest area so that the boy can speed across its terrain. Then one of us straps him in again. He seemed incredulous that each rest area is not the journey’s end.

A few years later, while returning from one of his baseball games in my silver Mirage and noticing that the engine area is steaming, the boy asks if the car is going to blow up. I say no, that the car probably just needs a new water pump, but as soon as I bring the car to a safe stop, the boy jumps out as if he doesn’t believe me. At 170,000 miles, the Mirage is my trade-in to a grumpy dealer for a new Honda Accord.

When the Camry eclipses 200,000 miles, we donate it to an outfit that collects old cars to support the Special Olympics. Its replacement is a new Honda Odyssey van, the vehicle that eventually pulls a small trailer to transport the boy’s Kawasaki dirt bike to local motocross races. Race time with the boy is when my wife and I most question our sanity and competence as parents.

When the boy acquires a motor vehicle license, it is the Honda van that he drives alone for the first time to an evening high school function. As he pulls out of the driveway, my wife and I wave to him from the window, fighting queasy stomachs because he’ll be returning after dark. My wife puts her arm around me and says, “Our little boy is growing up.” 

“I don’t want to think about it,” I say, remembering that when I first got my license, I deliberately spun my mother’s car on this same country road to feel the thrill of crashing into high snow banks. I hope the boy will satisfy his need for thrills through the controlled environment of his dirt bike racing. If so, he’ll have no need to use a car as a means to that end. 

The boy’s first vehicle is a Toyota Tacoma truck that he uses as part of his high school senior project, designing and installing a dashboard computer system that will play his recorded music at the touch of a button. Subsequently, he drives the truck from home to a local college and to dirt bike races for four years.

We drive mostly older Toyotas now—Camry, RAV4, and Tundra. The boy’s 10-year-old BMW Z3 convertible is a bargain used-car purchase that he says can be a mild-weather car and uses less gas than his big truck. Now an adult software engineer employed by a prestigious company, he also owns a Mazda race car that he runs at various speedways with an abandon not meant for the eyes and ears of aging parents.

I drive my 98-year-old mother each Tuesday afternoon in my Camry for a grocery shopping excursion. Though her eyesight is poor, she still runs her own house and steers her own shopping cart along the route of semi-independence while I shop for my family’s food. While riding with me, she tests her eyes by attempting to read bumper stickers on the cars ahead. One day she squints at the tail of an SUV and says, “I like that one. ‘I don’t brake for Yankees fans.’” Then she cackle-laughs all the way to the supermarket, sounding as if she is some demented old lady who believes life is actually funny. As her sole caretaker for ten years, I know life is less about comedy and more about endurance. Although comedy helps.

Mom dies six months after her 100th birthday. I miss the cackling old lady who used to ride with me. 

In September I become nervous about teetering on the edge of a Grand Mesa cliff in Colorado. My brother-in-law is driving us up a narrow mountain road with no guard rails to protect us from plunging into a deep ravine. His left hand holds the steering wheel of his old SUV, and the right hand, a cup of coffee. Occasionally he looks out across the ravine to point out some scenic wonder to my wife, who is in the front with him. My sister and I are in back, tensing up. In the novel, The Art of Racing in the Rain, the author says, “They say your car goes where your eyes go.” Our car is drifting. My sister shouts. But a long career as a helicopter pilot has rendered him almost deaf. When he finally hears her, he turns his head and says, “What?” After a steep, winding descent from the mesa, we relieve our anxiety by soaking in the Ouray hot springs. 

Kurt Schmidt published the autobiographical novel. Annapolis Misfit, when he was twenty-seven and then spent many years as a technical writer while raising his family and writing a memoir about becoming a dad at forty-seven. After retirement, he wrote memoirs about his vagabond relationships in Europe and another about a dysfunctional childhood. Excerpts appearing in various journals can be viewed at www.kurtgschmidt.com.

 have been, have being, to be: meditations in the mountains of jemez

benjamin green

The planet floats within a swirling and whirling universe. The land moves, migrates: as continents, as mountain ranges, as single rocks falling, as grains of sand flowing in a river, or as particles of dust flying in the wind. The cosmos is a force; it shapes, it shifts, it puts creatures in motion (birds and whales and pronghorns and elk). Sometimes they crawl up-mountain and down, like our local tarantula migration from mesa top to river bottom every fall; sometimes they swim upstream and down, like salmon and steelhead in the Pacific watersheds; sometimes they fly from north to south along the Rocky Mountains. Every year, sand hill cranes fly from New Mexico to Montana, and back. I am not immune to the moving force of the universe. I cite the spirit as the trigger that motivated the migration to my new canyon home.

Migration can be a determination bound by hours of sunlight, or angle of sunlight, or by temperature, food, body weight, or maybe even the position of stars, or some balance of hormones in the blood: one spring morning the sandhill cranes all leave to fly north. Somewhere in Montana, in the early fall, they fly again, back to New Mexico. But migration must also be memory, consciousness, intelligence, imagination, an expression of what it means to be a sandhill crane. And what is true of cranes is true to any, to every species, and it is true of me. Migration is a reminder that I am alive in the world.

The elements here are simple: red dirt, the density of cottonwoods in the river bottom, the verticality of the rocky canyon wall, the ponderosa-studded flat mesa rim, and sky. 

It is a pretty big place to try to keep company with, and I keep moving. I keep walking, I wander through the elements, but the landscape does not change; the emptiness, especially, goes unaltered by my presence. It is still empty. I change. The place alters who I am.

The simplicity I see here makes me want to keep quiet. The less there is surrounding me, the larger the vacancy, the more I want to be alive, to be born again, to see the red dirt with a child’s eyes, to see the twisted density of the cottonwoods as if for the first time, to see the canyon walls give shine to color after a rainstorm, to balance on the mesa top, to feel the wind move the sky.

I am most like myself when knowing and understanding elude me. I am a newcomer and a stranger here. No wonder I feel so at home.

This morning, a new wind blusters, forecasting some real weather. The sand creeps, leaves descend. I watch to see what happens, what the world will do to itself. When the sun slips behind the mesa, the sudden change of light feels like something has closed its eyelids.

A new element arrived in the canyon today: an obliterating, almost white cloud freezes into swirling globs of wet snow absenting the blue desert mountain air, erasing the mesa top, vanishing the vertical face of canyon rock, misting over the angled buttress of red rock scree, covering the red dirt at my feet. Only the nearly leafless cottonwoods remain in sight. The few remaining leaves, having gone from yellow to gold to bronze overnight, fall and drift with the snowflakes; the sinuous riverine trunks branch as dark blurred silhouettes in a white world. Great slabs of cloud drape down into the canyon, flowing like the creek, spilling huge flakes of snow.

Every day until the solstice the canyon eats a little more sunlight. Winter bares its teeth. Birds still thicken the cottonwood branches, resembling leaf shapes, and I still hear song, but the air is a razor, it cuts; my lungs burn and my lips bleed. A shadow on these cold days is a blunt blade; the darkness in the canyon cast by the mesa walls is an axe. I am bruised and scabbed, and night is still to come.

The sky tastes of dirt and ice. The clouds thin and pale; the moon blurs behind them. Cold air continues to pour into the canyon and the snow swirls down and the piles grow deep on the ground. The drifts are composed of weightless crystals of white, so nonexistent they do not even melt but just disappear, all two feet of them, leaving the red dirt just as dry as last summer.

One spring day, snow drops the clouds into the canyon and they cling in wet masses to the canyon walls, and as rain falls on me, I can see the snow stick to the ponderosas on the high mesa rims. Below my feet, the red dirt turns darker. Higher up, the rocks turn gray. The trees turn gray. The storm lasts, and I see white; the absence of color covers the mesa tops.

I cannot mirror a colorless world. I cannot reflect even this little canyon, or one rock in it. But the world, the canyon, every rock— mirrors me. I see myself in bird-flight, in fish scales, in insect hatch, in rock fall, in leaf shimmer.

I wonder if the cottonwood roots know where they are heading? The cottonwoods join creek to sky: roots dig into the earth until they dissolve into the river, they drink deep; the trunk divides and branches; and leaves, like golden hands, hold the sky.

Today, the wind is a messy rake. The wind talks, but says nothing. Am I a fool to repeat it? The wind has no intention to sing, but it has stirred the cottonwood leaves into song. The creek sings, too, a jazzy scat over stone, and the sunlight dances over the moving surface of the water. A sudden gust of wind causes leaves from the cottonwoods to fall and scatter like sparrows.

Summer, and the air in the canyon’s marrow thickens, warms, and vibrates a luminous blue. I witness ravens carrying clouds up the canyon in the morning for the afternoon thunderstorm. The cloud-bottoms eventually scrape the mesa tops, scratching off charged atoms and climb, filled with electricity, toward the moon. One spark of lightning, one loud clap of thunder rumbles down the canyon, turning and echoing within the rock walls. The air shudders. I can feel it before I can hear it.

Next morning, the sky nests in puddles: the canyon floor becomes a tunnel into sunlight. Things here, they all inspire me, and I try hard, but usually fail, to not see them as a sign. This canyon is not a symbol or shorthand for anything else. It is what it is and now I am a part of it.

Voices. I hear voices. Sometimes I hear an unspoken language of silence. Sometimes I hear a speech so full of words breeding like cockroaches that climb walls when the lights are out and then hide in dark corners with the sound of a door opening, or a light switch. (When I hear words spilling on the floor like that, I know I am merely talking to myself and do not need to pay attention). Sometimes the voice I hear grabs me with nothingness, the way a frog can climb a window, or better, because it evidences muscularity, the way a snake climbs a tree. Sometimes I hear voices that hurtle me with the force of the wind (which makes me feel like so much inert matter being moved).

The coyotes speak after dark, they are the voice of the canyon tonight, talking to the sky. I do not know why they bother questioning the moon, she gives a different answer every night. Today was so dead that nothing moved, not even the wind. The canyon was a quiet place: the birds whispered, the trees hushed like a feather falling, rock and sand were practically silent.

Vibration, heartbeat, doors opening, windows closing, tick-tock of aspen or cottonwood leaf in the wind, tides, waves, seasons, aging, the light and dark of sun and shadow, of moon and reflection, growth, birth, death, love. I hear voices.

Forces of nature wrinkle the land over time. My body is mostly water, and I live here at the risk of being reduced to dry, red dust. In the meantime, time scars my skin; I have wrinkles. The land tells its stories, everywhere, and there are those who have lived here long enough, listened hard enough, to hear more than geology. They hear the universe.

The earth’s heart resides in stone. It is easy enough for me to connect to rocks and soil: I walk on them, dig in them, touch them with my hands. It is more difficult to connect to meaning, but thought is a light in the shadows.

I spent the night reading, then thinking; I missed the early stars and a late rising moon. This morning: red dirt, cottonwood density (aglow with the season again), canyon wall bright with sun, mesa top studded with ponderosa, and an almost colorless sky. On my hike: my thoughts are cairns, small word piles that sometimes achieve an idea, become a landmark.

I rarely speak, while, every day, this canyon says the same thing over and over again. I wonder why it bothers. The place must know itself, and understand itself, so perfectly that there is no need to speak, no need to articulate. So, why? Maybe the canyon does not sing the refraining chorus to benefit itself, maybe it sings for the sake of others. Maybe it sings for me. Then, again, maybe the canyon is like a bird—singing for the pure joy of the song. What do I know? I am here to find out.

I am a world-shifter. My focus changes my image of the world. I go on a hike and transform the cottonwood bosque into a square foot of bark with an unknown caterpillar climbing up-trunk. I climb the mesa and turn the landscape into two ravens circling in a gaping chasm of air.

I came here for inspiration, but the thing I like most is how little I want to say. Some days I go for walks. Some days I look out the window. Both days, it is the same arrival: I come home.

When it rains, the water does not sink, it floods off the surface, gravity bound toward some passage. Within minutes the normally dry creek beds fill and flow with thick brown water. Later there will be pools that last for days, surrounded by animal tracks. The landscape here seems equally impervious to my description. My words pool on the hard dry surface of rock and sand.

Yes, I hear voices. Words speak in every atom. I hear the grammar of the universe. How many million, maybe billion years—and always the same speech, the same word said in many voices, one verb: to be. And, I think, if you are lucky: to live. I used to give my writing students a list of words to avoid. Sometimes those words blossom into meaning: have been, have being, to be….

The longer I live under these canyon walls and study the ponderosa-studded mesa tops and the glow in the shimmer of cottonwood, the more expansive is the world into which I become insignificant.

 what i wished i knew about the one-child policy

pei ja anderson

This summer, my parents and I saw the premiere of One Child Nation, a documentary that revealed the brutal human implications of China’s one-child policy regime and its legacy. As a Chinese adoptee, I thought I was prepared; I knew I was one of the hundreds of thousands of unwanted baby girls born under this policy. Children were discarded and left to die while others fell victim to infanticide. International adoption had saved a portion of a population of girls who would otherwise have been killed. What I was not prepared to learn was the prevalence of abduction: that there were babies who were torn from intact families and used as a tactic by the government to extort money from families who could not afford protection from the corruption of the one-child policy. My mind began to spiral.

It was five in the afternoon when my family and I watched co-director Nanfu Wang interview a Midwestern couple: a mother and father of three adopted girls from China, who had started a company with an online database to connect adoptees to their birth families using adoption records and DNA. Their business is powered by the desire of adoptees, like me, seeking answers. We see shots of the couple’s office and various Excel spreadsheets charting adoption agencies, provinces, Chinese foster families, as well as hundreds of headshots of baby girls. 

It was standard practice for orphanages to take these baby pictures to send to soon-to-be adoptive parents. Pixelated on their computer monitors and hung up all around the office were photos of children with shaved heads in white onesies against maroon cloth backdrops. At this point, my dad shook my shoulder gently and my mom laugh-cried in tears as we turned to each other knowingly. Inside a photo album sitting on the top shelf of my mom’s closet was a picture of me, just like this, red backdrop and all.

It was the picture which, my parents, after receiving it in the mail, had cherished and shared with friends and family during the 24-month process it took to adopt me. The kind of photo shown to you so often during childhood it becomes a memory. Seeing these headshots, my photograph, multiplied across the walls of these strangers’ homes, was a punch to the gut. My adoption was no longer mine. For the first time, I was made to confront the fact that my story wasn’t unique or individualized or special; it wasn’t the beautiful, cut-and-dry narrative that I had been told my whole life. I was a faceless, nameless girl born under China’s one-child policy. 

The story of my adoption has been told to me countless times and, in turn, I have recited this story to countless people throughout my life. This is the elevator-pitch: there are no records of who my birth parents were or why I was put up for adoption. For cultural and political reasons lots of baby girls were given up by their families during this time in China, but fortunately, I was given a wonderful life by parents who loved me. My mom and dad like to say that they were always my parents and I was always their daughter; I just happened to be born a country away. 

I had never put my adoption into historical context because there was never a need to. There was no reason, before this, not to be satisfied with the story I grew up knowing and believing. My parents were honest people, my adoption was never hidden or made secret. I didn’t know other sides of the story existed until then.

The film progressed and my thighs inched further and further off the edge of my seat as I leaned into the screen, watching this documentary dismantle piece by piece the story I thought I knew by heart. In gruesome detail, the film created a new version of my story. Women were carried to their local family planning officials in ropes, bound like pigs, to be forcibly sterilized. Doctors performed late-term abortions against mothers’ wills. Healthy newborns were killed minutes after being birthed on the operating table. The bodies of maggot-infested babies piled up in dumpsters and on highway medians. 

In the next scene, Wang’s uncle recounts how he was coerced into abandoning his newborn child at an outdoor market. He describes how, after the birth of his only daughter, his mother, so compelled by the party’s policy, told him she would commit suicide if he didn’t give the baby up.

That there was loss and violence on the other end of the story did not make sense to me. I had never known the unimaginable sacrifices or intimate pain these women faced. Selfishly, I couldn’t help but think there was a possibility, among so many that seemed to be unfolding, that I could have been an abducted child. I had imagined the reasons why my birth parents may have given me up, but with each revelation in the documentary, the possibilities grew infinite. Hovering above it all was the guilt I felt for leading the privileged life of an “all-American girl.” I was ashamed for even being curious. 

When the movie ended, the lights came up in the theater and I booked it to the bathroom. Hysterically, I pulled at paper tissue to dry my eyes and compose what little dignity I felt. I was glad to be alone. I didn’t want to walk out with my parents by my side for fear a fellow audience member would notice that we were a real-life manifestation of all the multi-racial families they had just seen: a white couple with an Asian child. I didn’t want to be looked at as an accessory of white guilt, and I especially didn’t want to admit to my parents that this is how I sometimes felt next to them. 

The fabric of my identity was unraveling before my eyes and I could do nothing to stop it. I didn’t expect to be falling apart in the public bathroom of a movie theater and I certainly didn’t expect the crippling sense of shame that stayed with me for weeks after. 

The documentary had provoked a litany of questions, to say the least. Two weeks later, in search of consolation and answers, I checked out Nicole Chung’s memoir, All You Can Ever Know, from the library. The memoir is a reflection and meditation on adoption and how being an Asian adoptee has shaped her life. I finished the book in one sitting and found myself in uncontrollable tears. Alone in my bed in the middle of the night, I continued to read through sobs that seemed to be pulled out by the truth of her words. Chung had managed to articulate the anxieties and discomforts about adoption that I’d never had the courage to voice. The door of my childhood that I had marked “Do Not Disturb” for twenty years was beginning to crack open.

After finishing the book, I was emboldened with a new set of vocabulary, a language to talk about adoption that I had never possessed before and never realized I lacked. Finally, I had the words to fill the silences that punctuated the drive home from the movies the day my parents and I went to see One Child Nation. 

I would have said, “My curiosity of wanting to know more about my birth parents never stemmed from a belief that you weren’t enough.” I would have told them, “We owe it to each other to have conversations about the fact that my existence is irreparably tied to the political agendas and propaganda of the one-child policy.” 

For fear I would hate myself if I was different, my parents insisted on my sameness. The story I had told people growing up had always held an underlying defensiveness about it. I presented myself to people as the natural, biological daughter of two Caucasian people, no further questions. Out of fear someone would hurt me, they blinded me with love that protected, but erased the distinctions they never knew would be important for me to accept in order to gain a fully-realized understanding of my adoption.

I am just beginning the process of reconciling this new story with honesty and forgiveness. I am learning that thinking critically about my adoption doesn’t threaten the place in my family in which I have always felt secure. That criticizing my parents or putting into question their love for me or my love for them was a futile task, but being diligent in learning more about Chinese culture and history was necessary. Being adopted was a part of my identity that did not have to be a point of shame or pride, but exploration. It was not the simple story of heroes and villains I thought it was, or wanted it to be. It feels possible, now, to question this story without feeling like I am erasing myself or the pain that I now know was silently carried in the lives of people who lived under China’s one-child policy.

 banana republic

vahni kurra

When my amma told me that she had grown up in a banana republic, I thought she meant the clothing store. I was probably seven or eight years old. At that point, I had only encountered the Banana Republic as an establishment of the Indianapolis mall. I pictured my mom sleeping under racks of cashmere sweaters and dining on Annie’s pretzels for every meal. She loved junk food and ate it with the guilty relish of a child, sucking crumbs from her fingers. She also adored Banana Republic. She thought their clothes were classy, though not as nice as J. Crew’s. It made sense too, because my mother had told me that she had come to America with only three dresses as a child. From this, I reasoned that my mom, aunt, and grandparents had been storybook poor. The Banana Republic was probably the only place they could afford to live—as the benefactors of a generous store owner or maybe as squatters. Eventually, she clarified that she was talking about Suriname, the former Dutch colony where she had lived for the first eight years of her life. This did little to correct my view of her childhood, as Suriname might as well have been a made-up place. Once, I asked my mom to point it out to me on the plastic globe we had at home. She pointed to a place on the upper crest of South America, covering the entire country with the tip of her finger. Somehow, this felt more ridiculous than the idea of my mom squatting in a high-end store. 

People often have a hard time deciding where my amma is from. She has large, almond eyes, slightly frizzy, black hair, and skin the color of Warm Honey, according to her foundation shade. Her name is Suneetha, but she’ll often say it’s Sunny. She doesn’t speak with an accent. Latina women sometimes approach her in the grocery store in breathless Spanish, only to walk away disappointed. Indian people can usually identify her as one of their own, but no one easily guesses that she grew up in what was once a Dutch sugar colony. Suriname is a small country smothered by plantations and thoroughly mixed up by the many nationalities that have landed on its beaches: Indian, Dutch, English, West African, Javanese. In its fledgling colonial years, African slaves were brought by Europeans to grow sugar, cacao, and coffee, supporting the wars and sweet tooths of Holland. After the abolition of slavery, Asian indentured servants were brought to harvest rice, mine gold, and, eventually, yes, to pluck bananas. The story is not unique. The same dynamics were franchised out to Honduras, Haiti, the Caribbean, and all along the South American coast. I wonder if this mass-marketed violence gets too soft in our re-tellings of it. 

The stories my mother told me about her childhood were always casually tossed into our daily lives. We’d be at the laundromat or going home from a day at the mall when she’d say something like, “You know, I used to be really good at hide-and-seek. One time, I was playing with our family maid and I hid so well that she couldn’t find me for an hour or so. When my mom and dad got home, they were completely freaked out because this was during the coup and there was a curfew and they thought I had run outside. My dad said he would go look for me, but your ammama begged him to stay inside because there were men patrolling the streets with machetes and he could get killed for breaking curfew. I knew then I was in trouble, so I came out of my hiding place. Oh, your thata was so angry with me. He was so scared that I’d been killed.”

The tone of her voice would remain even, as if she had just reminded me that we needed to pick up bread. I couldn’t see how this story fit in with the mundane activities of her life now. There was no place for it in my world of convenience stores and planned neighborhoods. I already had a hard time understanding where my mother was from, let alone envisioning its streets and smells and maids and military men.

“They were targeting Indians,” my grandmother said, when I asked her about it in my aunt’s house in Michigan. “We knew that the radio station had been bombed and that the Indian-owned businesses were attacked.” 

Her voice was graver than my mother’s, but not enough for me to fully believe it. I was twenty-two when she told me that. I had learned about the Holocaust, the Trujillo regime, American slavery, the British Raj, and other atrocities that were decidedly tragic and true. But I had never heard about what happened to Indians once they entered the Western hemisphere. In looking for proof of what my family told me, I have only been partially satisfied. Wikipedia’s page on “1980 Surinamese Coup D’état” tells me that it was led by Dési Bouterse who overthrew Prime Minister Henck Arron with the help of sixteen generals, known unimaginatively as “the group of sixteen.” Hoefte’s Suriname in the Long Twentieth Century devotes one chapter to the subject. It mainly talks about the economic downturn and corrupt parliament that lead to the coup. It then throws in a gory detail about a sergeant being made to march in his underwear before being shot on a gurney. There is hardly any mention of Indians except to say that the “Hindustanis” opposed independence and began leaving en masse in the 70s. And still, my grandfather once jumped to calling the police because I had hidden too well in their Indiana home, 3,000 miles from Paramaribo. 

People Magazine, November 14, 1983

It's Bye-Bye, Jeans, and Hello, Khaki, as the Banana Republic Stages a Coup in Safari Rags

Worried that the Banana Republic is somewhere near Belize or Suriname? Take a deep breath. There are already five Banana Republics scattered up and down California.

When I ask my grandmother about why they left Suriname, she doesn’t talk about the coup. Her goal was always to get to America, and they left because my grandfather’s boss found him a new position at Alcoa’s Warrick Operations in the States. Their time in Suriname was the “golden years,” she says. Work always ended by two and they could dance to Donna Summer all night long. But America was Heaven, she said. They had already made it from India to the West, and they couldn’t stop just at the Pearly Gates. It is in these moments that I see her dark eyes sparkle and hear the longing in her words. 

This is how I know I will never understand where my amma grew up. Having been born in small-town, Midwestern Heaven, I often forget how high above the rest of the world we Americans are. This height is not because we are happier, smarter, or more enterprising, but because we are simply good at hiding. In Suriname, my mother saw the dark cloth of a military uniform and knew it meant danger. She saw the sea curling its waves into the sand and knew it meant adventure. My grandmother saw that she was the head of the Department of Agriculture, that her husband was an important man about town, that she was happier and freer than she had been in her Indian village, and knew the value of what she was leaving behind as well as what lay ahead. In America, I can see a store called Banana Republic and only know that khakis are the new denim. 

I had learned about the lives of Anne Frank and Gandhi, the ones whose suffering was most direct and visible, but I had never written the names of my family down on index cards to memorize for World History. In this country, we understand atrocities by the victims and the perpetrators. Only some choose to recognize the adjacent people. These are the ones who stick in the margins of our pages; the ones who witnessed terror, but managed to evade it, the ones who felt the ground shaking, but did not fall through its cracks. Their stories are fragmented, not quite fitting into any narrative. My mother and grandmother do not get emotional when they talk about Suriname because they know that they are passers-by in history. When I ask them to tell me about their past, they invent new ways of explaining the world, finding touchstones they hope their American girl will understand. This is how I come to think my mother grew up in a high-end clothing store. This is how it takes me twenty-two years to Google, “Suriname coup 1980s.” 

My amma and I don’t go shopping much together anymore. She lives in South Dakota while I’m in Ohio, and she knows I hate the mall. We still take long drives whenever I visit her, and I still ask her questions about growing up in Suriname and then America. We wind through the twists of the Black Hills, stop for fries at McDonald’s, lick the salt from our fingers. Sometimes, we daydream about taking a cross-country road trip once I graduate from college. I think about us traveling down the highway indefinitely until we run into the sea, but my imagination stops there, at the edge of known Heaven.