Fourth Issue ................................................................................................................................................................... "BREAKTHROUGHS" - 2025/2026 AT THE END OF OCTOBER Dennise Gackstetter Read RECONSIDERING GOD Dennise Gackstetter Read A HIGH SCHOOL MADRIGAL Naomi Ulsted Read GLAMOUR SHOTS Naomi Ulsted Read THE CITY HAS CHANGED Mona Mehas Read THE CURSE OF SEVENTY EIGHT Mona Mehas Read FRANK'S BUICK David G. Pace Read THE LITTLE HOUSE WE DANCE IN David G. Pace Read HAIRBRUSH David Romanda Read AWKWARD David Romanda Read REV. T. SCOTT KINCANNON KEEPS SOME SECRETS FROM HER FLOCK Michael Shay Read GEORGE RUNNING POLES Michael Shay Read THIS HORSE IS THE BOSS OF ME Mike Wilson Read FIRST RESPONDER Mike Wilson Read RIVER DOG AND SHADOW MAN, a story Michael Henson Read DEAD MAN'S MONEY Michael Henson Read STREET IMAGINATION Stephen Ruffus Read ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY Stephen Ruffus Read ISINGLASS Austin Holmes Read WATCHING FOG Austin Holmes Read SUMMONING Shari Zollinger Read FOUND Shari Zollinger Read REACHING Terry Jude Miller Read SPRING CLEANING Terry Jude Miller Read STILL LIFE WITH FLY Shawn Dallas Stradley Read PAINTING THE CAVE Shawn Dallas Stradley Read EXHALING CAREFULLY Christina Robertson Read THE AWFUL THING Christina Robertson Read JUST SO YOU KNOW Carol Coven Grannick Read WHEN HE HAD TO TRAVEL Carol Coven Grannick Read REAL ESTATE Marjorie Maddox Read TIP Marjorie Maddox Read THE DYING ROOM Paula Harrington Read NEVAH BETTAH Paula Harrington Read PURSED LIPS Robert Cooperman Read LETTERS FROM HOME: Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, New York, 1957 Robert Cooperman Read THE GARDEN YOU MADE Maureen Clark Read LET'S SAY Maureen Clark Read GOING SOUTH George Amabile Read COMING OF AGE ON MY 84th BIRTHDAY George Amabile Read TO MAKE IT NOW David Romtvedt Read NO MORE BLOWS David Romtvedt Read POURQUOI MOI E. D. Lloyd-Kimbrel Read RUTHLESS E. D. Lloyd-Kimbrel Read FROM COTTON TO WOOL ... and Beyond Alex Barr Read THE OLD MAN AND THE FENCES Alex Barr Read BECAUSE WE CAN Brock Dethier Read TIGHTENING SKATES Brock Dethier Read FIVE DAYS INTO THIS NEW ADMINISTRATION Alexandra van de Kamp Read SAFE GRAVY Alexandra van de Kamp Read EXTRAS AT THE GATES OF EDEN Alison Moore Read AT ABU ALI Alison Moore Read CHARYBDIS Mike Alexander Read LAST DRIVE Mike Alexander Read BACK TO TOP

Third Issue ................................................................................................................................................................... "BREAKTHROUGHS" - 2025/2026 POEM APPROACHING FOUR PAST TENSES Lauren Camp Read SIGHT Lauren Camp Read HYMN FOR LORCA klipschutz Read BALLAD OF U AND ME klipschutz Read STONES Mike White Read DOUBLE LIFE Mike White Read BOY Jamison Conforto Read ANTELOPE BOY Jamison Conforto Read CHALK-WHITE, CANYON-DEEP Nano Taggart Read ON SELECTING THE CONTENTS OF CARE PACKAGE NUMBER THREE Nano Taggart Read TRIGGER ALERT Robert Okaji Read RELENTLESS Robert Okaji Read OUR BIG TOES Barbara Huntington Read SHIFT Barbara Huntington Read A WHISPERING BEETLE Nancy Takacs Read SWEET PEAS Nancy Takacs Read AEROBICS BY GOD Star Coulbrooke Read RED CAMARO Star Coulbrooke Read LAST MEAL Stacy Julin Read ALMOST Stacy Julin Read IT'S OKAY Andrea Hollander Read LIVING ROOM Andrea Hollander Read BLOOD DRAW Karin Anderson Read YES, EMILY, HOPE Jan Mordenski Read INCUNABULA, MOTHER TONGUE Max McDonough Read ONE SMALL CHANGE Max McDonough Read HARD TIMES Lev Raphael Read COLD MARBLE, HOT MEMORIES Lev Raphael Read IMAGINED SCENES Mary Behan Read STARGAZING Mary Behan Read I SAW HER STANDING THERE Scott Abbott Read AN AMICABLE CORRESPONDENCE Scott Abbott Read HOW TO TURN A HATE MARCH INTO A JUBILEE PROCESSION Dana Henry Martin Read FIVE COWS, TWO CALVES FOUND SHOT DEAD IN PINE VALLEY Dana Henry Martin Read ANGEL'S DINER Stephen Wunderli Read THE BIRDWATCHER Stephen Wunderli Read FACING IT Shanan Ballam Read THE LONG HAUL Shanan Ballam Read BIRD NEWS Cynthia Hardy Read RUDE WEATHER Cynthia Hardy Read GHAZAL WITH COYOTES, GAZA AND HEALING HERBS Pamela Uschuk Read BLUEBIRD ABECEDARIAN Pamela Uschuk Read Review of EL REY OF GOLD TEETH by Reyes Ramirez Willy Palomo Read MAMA'S HANDS Willy Palomo Read VOCABULARY Robbie Gamble Read GAMBLE PATRILINEAGE Robbie Gamble Read DEAR CARLEY Beth Colburn Orozco Read THE WHIZ KID Beth Colburn Orozco Read HUNTINGTON BEACH, MARCH 2 Shauri Cherie Read WEST ON PICCADILLY Shauri Cherie Read CRASH RUMINATIONS (excerpt) Karin Anderson Read HOW TO MAKE A BASKET Jan Mordenski Read BACK TO TOP

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue AN AMICABLE CORRESPONDENCE Scott Abbott amicable : good-natured, harmonious, cordial, agreeable, good-humored, kind, polite No, none of those. I mean something with more bite, more room for spirited exchange. This amicable correspondence will be between amici , prijatelji , Freunde . amicable : between friends. In 1826, officials in Weimar decided to clean out an overstuffed mausoleum that housed the remains of various notables, including those of Friedrich Schiller, who had died twenty-one years earlier. When they could not identify Schiller’s bones in the chaotic crypt, a doctor named Schwabe gathered 23 skulls to examine at home. Schwabe had known Schiller, he had his death mask, but still he was unable to identify Schiller’s skull with any certainty. He finally chose a skull that distinguished itself by its large size and fine, regular form. Großherzog Karl August recommended that the skull eventually be housed under glass next to Leibniz’s skull in the Royal Library. In the meantime, Goethe borrowed the skull and in the night of September 25th wrote a poem in honor of his friend, exploring the shifting relationships between nature and spirit, between matter and mind. Wilhelm von Humboldt saw the skull in Goethe’s possession and wrote to his wife that Goethe was having a burial vault built in the hopes that he and Schiller could eventually lie there together. In the end, the friends never shared a grave. DNA analysis in 2008 proved that the skull in question belonged to someone other than Friedrich Schiller. I decide to translate Goethe's poem. The dense rhymes of terza rima and the rhythms of iambic pentameter are integral formal contributors to the content, but my attempts to reproduce them in English are a disaster. I opt for a more straightforward form. While Contemplating Schiller’s Skull It was in the somber ossuary that I saw skulls aligned with ordered skulls; old times, I thought, gone grey. They stand fixed in rows, once mutual foes, and stout bones that clashed to kill lie athwart, rest subdued. Dismembered shoulder blades! what they bore now lost, and fine and lively limbs, the hand, the foot, scattered, disjointed. In vain you lay down tired, they left you no peace in the grave, drove you again into daylight. No one can love the desiccated shell, whatever splendid noble germ it protected. Yet for me, the adept, were inscribed sacred meanings not revealed to all, as I, amidst that unblinking multitude sensed an image wondrous beyond imagination, and in the clammy hall’s constriction I was warmed, refreshed, as if life had sprung from death. How mysteriously the form ravished me! The divinely ordered trace, preserved! A glimpse that carried me off to that sea whence figures rise transmuted. Mysterious vessel! Orphic oracle, How am I worthy to hold you in my hand? Lifting you fervently, ultimate treasure, from corruption and into the open air to freely muse, turning myself, devoutly, to the sunlight. What more can one attain in a lifetime than that God-Nature reveals herself? How she lets what is firm pass away to spirit, How firmly she preserves what the spirit engenders. (to be continued) Translating the poem from German to English and from the distance of two centuries, I enjoy an opening of sorts. As opposed to my largely monolingual habitation in the American West where I was born and raised, my friends Žarko Radaković and Alex Caldiero live at linguistic junctures. Žarko, who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia and whose native language is Serbo-Croatian, lives in Cologne with his German wife Anne. An uncompromising novelist, he is also a devoted translator of works by Peter Handke. Alex, who emigrated from Sicily to Brooklyn at the age of nine, lives in Orem, Utah with his Russian / Turkish / American wife Setenay. His poetry performances are legendary and his translations from Sicilian include the delightful “Bawdy Riddles and Tongue Twisters of the Sicilian Folk:” Trasi tisa / E nesci modda — It goes in hard / And comes out soft. !Pasta). I have been the fortunate friend of these emigrant / immigrant / translator / artists for more than four decades. 8 December 2017 I show Alex my new hearing aids. He points out that because his right ear is still his worst one, the fact that I can now hear through my bad left ear won’t change the fact that I’ll need to walk on his right side if we’re walking and talking. He has some technical questions. And then he gets to the heart of the matter: What if this destroys our friendship? What do you mean? What if our friendship is based on miscommunication? What if we’re friends only because I’ve been hearing you poorly and you haven’t been hearing me correctly? While contemplating that possibility, I tell Alex about Goethe’s poem written while contemplating his friend Schiller’s skull. My mother, Alex responds, had a burning desire to see her father’s bones. We were in Licodea, Sicily, and she insisted that we go to the cemetery where the family crypt is. My grandfather’s casket is in the ground-level room of the crypt, directly under the altar. She asked a cemetery official if she could open the casket. You can do anything you want in your family’s crypt, he said. I did my best to dissuade her from opening the casket. You know how close to an emotional edge I live; imagine my mother 100 times closer to that edge. She finally acquiesced and we didn’t open the casket. When Schiller died, Goethe was 55 and Schiller 45. Goethe was 76 when he contemplated Schiller’s skull. Žarko, Alex, and I are 73, 69, and 69 respectively. None of us is likely to write a poem with the other’s skull on our desk. Schiller’s first letter to Goethe (first of more than a thousand letters subsequently passed between them), dated the 13th of June, 1794 and sent from Jena to the neighboring town of Weimar, addresses Goethe as High Wellborn Sir, Highly-to Be-Honored Privy Councilor . The letter is a request for contributions to Schiller’s proposed literary journal Die Horen (The Horae). Schiller mentions co-publishers—idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the linguist and eventual founder of the University of Berlin Wilhelm von Humboldt. He signs the letter Your High Wellborn, most obedient servant and most sincere admirer F. Schiller . Goethe responds on the 24th of June and then again on the 25th of July. He offers a token of friendship and assures Schiller that he is very much looking forward to a frequent and lively exchange of ideas: "I shall with pleasure and with all my heart be one of the party." Several letters follow and in September Goethe invites Schiller to visit him in Weimar. Schiller responds enthusiastically on September 7th, but with a caveat: that Goethe not rely on him to meet any domestic timetables. Cramps during the night disturb him so seriously, Schiller writes, that he finds it necessary to sleep the entire morning and cannot commit to anything at any given hour. "You will, then, allow me to be a complete stranger in your house . . . to isolate myself so that I can escape the embarrassment of having to depend on others. . . . Excuse these preliminaries. . . . I ask for the simple freedom of being allowed to be ill while being your guest." And with that the friendship that proved so valuable to both men was begun. Goethe later told Schiller that he had given him “a second youth and made me a poet again, which I had as good as ceased to be.” Schiller, thinking perhaps of his delicate health and uncertain future, wrote that, “I hope that we can walk together down as much of the road as may remain, and with all the more profit, since the last companions on a journey always have most to say to each other.” Years later, while Goethe was editing their correspondence for publication, he asked “what could be more amusing than to see our letters begin with the pompous announcement of the Horen . . . . And yet, if there hadn’t been that impulse and will to document the times, everything in German literature would now be very different.” If the Serb hadn’t invited the American to contribute to the literary journal Knjizevna kritika , if the Sicilian and the American hadn’t begun neighborly conversations about poetry, and if the Serb and the Sicilian hadn’t conversed one morning in the American’s house, everything in the field of Serbian-American-Sicilian literature would now be very different. This opening section of my half of the book We, On Friendship (Elik Press, 2022) , co-written by Žarko Radaković and with contributions from Alex Caldiero, led to a surprising integration of Goethe’s and Schiller’s correspondence into the correspondence between the three of us. For more about the three books Žarko and I have published in both Serbian and English, see our website . Previous SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor emeritus of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next

Karin Anderson < Back to Breakthroughs Issue BLOOD DRAW Karin Anderson 00:00 / 25:59 BLOOD DRAW Karin Anderson My first whole image of my mother: my just-older sister Marti and I sit on our knees on the window seat at the front of our “nursery school” on the high end of C Street. Our teacher, a thick-shouldered woman with a European accent, has set us there to watch for our “mama,” and here she comes, walking slender and composed up the hill: knee-length white dress, white hose, white shoes. A stiff white cap with a black stripe pinned to her dark brown hair. We wave madly. We fog the plate glass. Our mother sees us at the window and smiles, happy to spot her little girls. Then, as now, she is amazed that she is an object of love. The teacher holds us back until our mama reaches the stoop, then releases us to run into her arms. My memory fades there, but I know we trekked on up the flatiron slope, a maternal hand for each of us, home to the basement apartment above the blue-green desert city. Our dad went to work too, but what he did there was unimaginable. He came home to kiss our mother. He threw us high and caught us. He’d put one of us in the rattletrap kid-seat strapped to his ten-speed to ride the steep pitches of the Avenues. Dad was either not here or he filled the atmosphere. But I knew that when our mother was gone, she was a nurse. She made sick people in white beds in clean rooms in long hallways get better. One day after work she told us about delivering a baby, following through with placenta, cord, and clean-up all by herself in the delivery room, because it just came before the doctor managed to arrive and wash his hands. She said she was fine, knew exactly what to do, but when the shift was over she had a shaky little breakdown in the parking lot. Before she was married, she’d worked with the Red Cross, traveling in the Bloodmobile from rural town to town. In that circle she was notorious for her aim—she could find a vein and enter it when no one else could. Also she once rebuffed a man who hung around after giving blood: he was waiting to tell her she had the most beautiful breasts he’d ever seen under a uniform. I don’t think he said “breasts.” Once, as she walked toward the hospital doors, she thought an enormous bird was flying overhead, but she looked up to see a grown man falling through the air. He’d jumped from a high hospital floor—my mother’s arrival was coincidental. But I believed this was the sort of thing my mother did in general: run toward people who dropped from the sky. It was kind of true. She had a way of being at the perimeter of disaster, as if she attracted it. She may believe so too, somewhere in the vault she won’t—can’t—open. It started young. Her mother died, dead winter night in their Idaho farmhouse, heart failure at thirty-three. Mom doesn’t remember her but recalls her father sitting at her bedside, pre-dawn, bearing the news. Mom was four. Her sister was eight. “Daddy” said he was going downstairs to call Mr. Kiser, the undertaker, and then she understood he wasn’t teasing. When she was sixteen she fell in love with the high school Apollo. His name was Keith, which sounded to me like teeth. She’d taken some abuse from local mean girls, so she was amazed that he loved her back. He proposed, gave her a ring. Her father and stepmother weren’t as thrilled as she’d anticipated. He came from a good family. An upright boy. Girls her age got married all the time. But her parents told her to go to college for a year. She was about to turn seventeen and had skipped a grade, way back, so graduation was near. She was a good student, a good daughter. She obeyed her parents and returned the ring. Next October she rode the bus home from college classes, thirty miles. She was eager to dress up for a date with her guy. She stepped off the northbound bus with her younger sister, crossed the train tracks on foot a hundred yards from their new home below town. Mom saw Keith’s car coming south, stopped to wait. Somehow no one saw the train, right there. It was just getting dark, light swirling snow. Aunt Karleen says the train’s lights should have reflected on the steel rails, but it came from the Underworld: no lights, no horn. The boy turned at the tracks. The train slammed into his car. Mom ran to him, half-ejected from the shattered window. His neck was broken and she wrapped her coat around him as he died. Our mom told us this story when we ran our hands over a pieced lap blanket draped over the back of our sofa: squares of burnt-orange felted wool. Pieces of the coat that comforted the dying boy in the smashed car. Her stepmother had cleaned and crocheted them together as a keepsake. When she was heavily pregnant with Marti (the first of us), Mom was walking across State Street in Salt Lake City, two steps behind an older man dressed in a suit and nice shoes. A car ran the light, hit the old guy, missed Mom’s extended stomach by a few inches. Mom watched in slow motion as he flew up, face to the sky. His glasses dropped at her feet and shattered. And then the man came down, she said, with “a sickening thud.” I could go on with this; my childhood was street-lit by other people’s disasters. My parents settled, three more siblings beyond Marti and me, in a small Utah town fifteen miles of no-shoulder roads from a hospital. Doesn’t seem that far until a kid spurts blood from the head after falling off a horse, or a jagged tibia sticks out of a sloshing irrigation boot, or a baby comes too quick in the house across the street. Or a middle-aged father of six is gasping through a deep-night cardiac arrest. People in our town knew the first thing, before calling an ambulance or piling a bloody mess into the car for a drive to the hospital, was to call Nadeene Anderson. … For all the blood, the only time I saw my mother saturated in it was the Sunday she backed the station wagon into, and almost over, my two-year-old sister Teri. It was the first time I saw my mother descend into paralysis, like other people did, in the face of horror. Where we lived, everyone went to church together. Neighborhoods belonged to the same congregation, attended meetings at the same time. Walking home from church with the girls my age—fifteen—was a way to free-wheel an extra hour of a waning weekend. Halfway home on long, narrow Grove Drive, my friend-enemy Melinda said, “Is that your Mom and Dad?” just before I saw our brown Ford station wagon coming back from driving the rest of my family home. I saw my dad honking the horn, scattering cars and people as he sped past. Incapable of discerning between a gag and a crisis, I waved as my parents blazed by. I laughed it off, maybe nervous, until our neighbors, following more slowly, stopped to address me. Sister Seeley said, “It looked like something happened to your little sister. Do you want to go to the hospital with us?” I got in, stunned, and was more shocked when I saw the station wagon in the Emergency drive-up. My father stood in the corridor, pale. He said, “Come sit with your mother.” I dissolved when I saw her, cowering in a dark sitting room, her gauzy dress soaked in blood at the cream-colored bodice, spreading down to muddle the floral skirting. In a weird way now this is just a run-of-the-mill five-kid family story of losing track of a toddler at the wrong moment: everyone thought someone else had seen her in. Teri wandered around to the back of the car. Mom backed out for yet another church meeting, and the bumper knocked the baby to the ground, a bad thump to the head—still gives Teri a look of gazing in different directions. The chassis went over clean but then the turn of the front tire scraped her face along the concrete until my father came out, shouting as he ran. Mom hit the brake, Dad picked up the bleeding child, held her as bait to make Mom move to the passenger side. She held tiny Teri, barely conscious, as Dad rushed them to the hospital. A story like this acquires many renditions, and we’ve all spun it in the decades after our little sister recovered. But I don’t think Mom did. Recover, I mean. I think it was the first irreversible crack in the stone. Dad cuffed it off on the other side with, “It’s hard to kill a kid,” but Mom never found a way to speak of it. We’ve come to understand that there’s a lot she will never speak, never release. Her mouth tightens into a lipless line, compressed at the corners. Primal, livid smoke behind the eyes. Fierce and strange as her people are, I’ve never seen this in anyone else—no one related to her, no one raised with her, no one who emerged from her. It's not just awful stuff like almost killing her toddler daughter. She presents the same livid blankness when her fine hair grows too long and “clings to her neck.” When she used to reach to brush my ragged teenage hair out of my eyes, restraining herself, I think, from slapping my cheek. When we folded towels the wrong way. She cloaks when we smirk at her idyllic portrayals of our father, the fairytale man who rescued her from the bleakness of what she also, in dissociated stories, portrays as her happy, glorious Idaho origins. … She returned to hospital nursing the year I went to college—partly to keep her license from lapsing but probably also because I was expensive. Marti was halfway through her two-year nursing degree. I was a flighty maybe-art / maybe-French lit major. Dad was doing fairly well as a small-town real estate guy but the enterprise was always up and down—another story but it called on my mother’s talents for consistency. She worked part time on the medical floor of the local hospital for less than a year before being recruited as Director of Nursing at a new long-term care center. It pushed the final decades of her career into geriatric care, and Nadeene slayed as usual. Wherever she took charge, state accreditors ranked her work as the best in the state, again and again. Like her house, my mother kept her institution spotless, efficient, calm. Her staff, like her children, knew what she expected and found it inarguable. She loved the residents in the pragmatic ways my mother loves—never sloppy, a little strict, undramatic. Everyone showered, or got a thorough bath in bed, every day. Everyone ate, at least a little bit. Everyone got dressed, all the beds got made. Everyone who could possibly get up, got up, at least for an hour, because it was good for them . I don’t think she particularly liked being in charge of things. She didn’t crave control over other people—not even her children. She was generally reluctant to call us out, resented confrontation more than the inciting crime. … Her career kept arcing as my father’s disintegrated. In their late fifties, our charismatic, gregarious Dad dipped into a years-long depression no one was allowed to notice. It must have been garish for him and my mother. He read Time and Sports Illustrated on the sofa in the open loft of their late-life foothill “dream house” while the TV blared ESPN. Sometimes he’d buck up but mostly he was in the loft, TV so loud no one could speak over it. Mom worked so long into her sixties I thought she’d never retire. She must have been exhausted, and fearful, and I know she was simmering over her children’s religious defections. The vulnerability made her more impenetrable. She came home after work to make dinner for her husband, clean it up. She went out to the yard with Dad to plant flowers, or pull weeds, or help with a little construction. After a pipe broke and their basement flooded, they worked together to clean it up, repaint, get it ready for Teri and her husband to move into the apartment they made of it. A lovely endeavor until Mom lost her footing on a stepladder, went down hard on the concrete floor, broke both arms at the elbow. Teri moved in, wiped Mom’s butt in the bathroom until the casts came off. … Our mother just turned ninety. We threw a big party for her at the condominium clubhouse. Dad died twenty years ago; they had a sweet final season after she retired—sold their house, bought the rather murky tunnel of a condo and paid for it, no mortgage. Took road trips to national parks, slept together in a pup tent on an inflated mattress. Spent a year teaching medical and business English in China. Went to Europe with Mom’s sisters and their husbands. I picked them up from the airport when they returned from Europe. Dad came down the escalator pale. Disoriented. Mom, in a state of denial that rendered her unrecognizable, insisted it was just travel fatigue. She had to know better, but the next day she drove him to Idaho for her class reunion, of all things. He slept in the back seat both ways. Marti, who became the fierce RN she was taught to be, insisted against Mom’s addled protests that they meet her at the emergency room. I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven Marti for that; maybe in some thread of magical thinking she believes that if the whole thing had remained unsaid it would have not become real. The ER, where Marti had once worked for eleven years, transferred Dad to the veteran’s hospital in Salt Lake City for testing. How it takes a full week to discover a melon-sized bleeding tumor in an unnaturally distended stomach, I don’t know, except protocol is test by test, elimination by elimination. And, maybe because Nadeene, who acquired her clearest contours when disaster hovered like a leering corpse, who managed mortal and immortal crises step by step, was suddenly amoebic. This isn’t the story of my father’s death. It’s a wincing glance at my mother’s living death twenty years beyond—another boundary fight as she clings to the diminishing phrases, anecdotes, and insistences that cloak her in being-ness. … She remembers her grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s names. She recounts a rote repertoire of memories that make church people coo at her spunk and charm. She knows her accounts and bills to the penny. She calls to remind my sister and me of upcoming medical appointments, and she’s dressed and ready to go when we arrive to take her there. Lucid. But there are eerie lapses. Ten years ago Marti and her kids took Mom, eighty, to a Fourth of July fireworks show. An older man a few family blankets over had a heart attack in the melee. Medics arrived to administer CPR and prepare the man for transport. Mom stood up like a sleepwalker and homed in, hovering unsteady over the medics, staring but saying nothing. Marti ran to her, took her arm, eased her away before anyone had to shoo her off. Mom followed, expressionless. She sat down contritely but as soon as Marti turned her attention, Mom paddled right on over again. Stood silent and entranced at the edge of the action, as if trying to recall something. A medic told her to stand back, but Mom held position, transfixed, until Marti reached her again. … Since then Mom has shattered both shoulders, one by tumbling backwards down her basement stairs because she insisted on carrying up a snowman jar. Again by falling hard on the asphalt as she walked the short distance to retrieve her daily junk mail. The falls were so brutal, the surgeries and recoveries so debilitating, I don’t know who but Nadeene could have bounced back. The bones in her hips (one artificial) and in her spine are rubble. The battle over her car keys nearly put me down for good. I told her I was terrified that she’d crash into a car in another lane, or worse, hit a neighborhood child. She said, “Well, sometimes terrible things just happen. We can’t control everything, you know.” Until just a few weeks ago she’s insisted on lurching along with her walker when we show up to do her shopping, or go to the drugstore, or to the many doctors (why she sees an ophthalmologist—two of them, in fact, when she’s almost completely blind, her irises silver as her hair, I do not know. She won’t let us take her to the dentist to tighten her lower teeth). But this month the pain has kept even her from clambering into the neighbors’ car for a ride to church, from coming along to “do her own shopping.” After the second shoulder break, our brother Tom said, “Look, we’re all bigger than her. We outnumber her five to one.” We assembled at her house—Tony and Teri took long drives—to lay down the law. She needed full-time access to medical care. We were there for her, always would be, but we couldn’t attend every minute, night and day, trying to prevent the next fall, the next terrible accident, the next internet scam, the next social media fiasco. Straight from the black hole: No. She doesn’t want to spend our inheritance. She “doesn’t want to be a burden.” She just won’t drink very much water so she won’t need help getting to the bathroom on painful hips. She has a nice supply of vanilla protein drinks, so she won’t need to wield a knife, or a can opener, or raise her stiffened arms too high to retrieve a plate that she won’t leave on the counter, or turn on the stove. She gives herself a “sponge bath” every morning although it’s clear there are places she can’t reach, or forgets to. She’s disintegrating in place, in her formerly spotless house she can’t see to clean. Watching it is my personal definition of Hell. … Marti ordered a hospital bed for her, bendable in ways Mom perfectly understands and knows how to operate, complete with a bubbling vinyl pad to distribute pressure across the skin. Handsome young men came in and set it up quick as a wink near the bedroom window. Marti had a wheelchair brought in, and a commode that fits high over the low-slung toilet. The commode: sure. The bed: Mom won’t even look at it, won’t even deign to say no . It just isn’t there. She sits in her green armchair, gazing over the invisible bed toward the window. She still prays out loud at bedtime: Please, dear Heavenly Father, help me to endure all that thou requirest of me so I may return to… … My mother is a high-def constellation of hyper-specific recollections. Behind the bright stars: dense velvet black—not because she’s ninety but because she became herself, at four years old, by learning what to configure and what to shroud. No memory beams forward from the event horizon, that winter night in 1939. Whatever Nadeene was or might have become before her mother vanished is erased. Here in her place is the child who shielded herself behind a tapestry of perfect compliance—good girl who did her chores, smart girl who skipped first grade in a one-room country school, resourceful girl who walked ten miles home along the darkening Yellowstone Highway in winter after a piano lesson, because she missed her ride and didn’t dare call her parents to come get her. That child became our mother. That child is gaining on our mother. Not the one who must have acquired form before the morning her father called Mr. Kiser. The child who is our mother is secretive and wily. She plays us against one another. She lies low, keeps a mild face. We’ve each been taken down by it at one point or another, or another, but there are five of us, and we love her, and up to now we’ve been able to spell each other off. Bring our separate kinds of best to her. A bedsore was not the breakthrough any of us wished for. Mom knows what a bedsore is, and she understands the cause. But she eats, sleeps, sits rapt for the next Masked Singer episode in that heinous green armchair, week after week, night and day, waiting for Dad to come shining through the window right there above the nice bendy hospital bed. After seeing that nasty mess, Marti, the sibling who deserves the most validation from the mother she emulates, called me to say she needed a change of guard. I drove down a few hours later. Mom greeted me from her chair, blank and benign. Didn’t say a word about the broken, festering flesh she was sitting on. Didn’t yield a wince, a grimace, a tear. … But it’s ruptured something besides the skin. She’s fallen into a simpler, more contrite childlike state. Last week we convened in her room, a couple of us sitting on the comfy hospital bed, to hear her wishes for resettling into assisted living. For leaving her home. She said, “Whatever you decide will be fine,” and then she gazed over our heads and breathed, light. … I’m convinced she’ll live forever, in incremental forms only she can inhabit. That tight cable of self-protection, the defiant thread of vitality she spins like a spider is all I’ve ever known as Mother. We’ll come together soon to help her move, and she’ll continue to drive us crazy and break our hearts. But nurses will surround her. We’ll make the little apartment look like her own house, with her own dishes and sofas, kitchen table and all the framed photographs of our father, of our father and her, our parents and us, enshrined. Her own TV, pre-set on America’s Got Talent. We’ll bring the monstrous green chair, because it’s hers. … Oh, wait. Never mind. She’s feeling much better! She’s not going anywhere. No. No. … This morning I drove the forty miles from my house to hers on ever-nasty I-15. She needed me to drive a check to the bank, bring back the cash. She wanted me to stop by WalMart, which I hate and she knows it, to buy a box of cheap apple fritters. We go to her, errand or none. We check on her. We sit out the excruciatingly dull but dangerous hours, because we love her. Mom was on the bathroom floor, leaning against the tub. She’d fallen backwards trying to pull on a clean pair of pants. Didn’t hit anything but carpeted floor but she couldn’t get back up. She guessed she’d been down five minutes. She’d already pushed her little emergency button, so I sat with her against the tub until the fire truck roared up. Seven calendar-worthy EMTs jogged in. She looked up at them, burly angels, nearly swooned as they picked her up—so gentle, so powerful, so handsome (she knows handsome, even blind)—and helped her balance at her push-along walker. They followed her back to that damned green chair, settled her in, and disappeared. I texted my siblings. Everyone called. The neighbors flocked in to make sure everything was okay. Grandchildren texted, told us to read their messages to her. Mom says she wants to die; she wants to be among the people she believes will greet her in heaven if only she endures what she’s been called to endure. But I think she’s also terrified—this woman who has forever skimmed the boundary of death, one corpse after another after another. She’s not the one who dies; she’s the angel of death. And times like this—everyone gathered, everyone swooping in, all the reassurance that she matters even though she’s a burden : she’s radiant as a four-year-old child, astonished that we love her. She wants to stay forever. Usually I measure a little cooling time for certain experiences before I try to write about them. I’ve written about my mother before—more detailed or episodic renditions of some elements of “Blood Draw.” But writing about her now, in the deep stream of this painful, dire yet deceptively serene season of her very old age, feels unruly and surreal. Previous KARIN ANDERSON is the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams , What Falls Away , and Things I Didn’t Do , published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY Stephen Ruffus It begins in a car speeding across the plains in the summer heat until the sun rests along the horizon. He waits to be born on an early morning, the nickel of the moon tacked low in the sky. On an empty street I see his shadow barely lit walking slowly toward me from a long distance. He is in the hallway in the place where I once lived. On one end he is the man he was. On the other is the child who favored dreams to bedtime stories I would read him, whose dreams now form the book written in words ever trespassing across the shifting landscape of my sleep. It is the second anniversary of my son's death, and I am dreaming of him as both a child and an adult simultaneously. The images in the poem, particularly the one in which I see him in the hallway of the apartment where I grew up, are meant to reflect my ongoing struggle with his loss and my understanding of who he was. Previous STEPHEN RUFFUS is the author of a chapbook, In Lieu Of (Elk Press, 2024) His work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly , among others. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work also received two awards in the Utah Original Writing Competition and was a finalist for the Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award. Stephen was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West . Originally from NYC, he still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects and currently lives in Salt Lake City with his wife. Next

Robert Okaji < Back to Breakthroughs Issue TRIGGER ALERT Robert Okaji 00:00 / 00:53 TRIGGER ALERT Robert Okaji Trigger alert: I'm dying. I am dying , and nothing will change that, not philosophy, not chemicals, not will. Not even the sky nor the ground it beguiles somewhere out of sight. Consider the horizon as loneliness, as line curved through eyeshot and smoke. As nexus of sun and diagnosis. Of relief and slumber, the pain in my wife's smile when she kisses me goodnight. I am dying , and I cannot picture the universe without me, or me, nonexistent, bodiless, simply not here. "Trigger Alert" first appeared in Stone Circle Review . I wrote the poem about four months after receiving a diagnosis of late-stage metastatic lung cancer, a terminal illness. It's one thing to be told you're dying, and another to admit to yourself that your being is indeed finite, that one day, not far off, you'll no longer smell the morning coffee, you'll not feel your wife's body next to yours in bed, you won't cheer for the inept Dallas Cowboys, you won't do anything, you will not be anything, you simply will not exist. Previous ROBERT OKAJI has late-stage metastatic lung cancer, which he finds terribly annoying. His poetry may be found in Threepenny Review , Vox Populi, and other venues. robertokaji.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue MAMA'S HANDS Willy Palomo scrub toilets until you can see your face as you piss, until her hugs smell only of rubber & bleach. Her knuckles are rougher than my father’s, tougher than anything behind a dumpster with Timberlands and a metal bat. At nine years old, the sound of her car leaving the garage would wake me up in the morning. Her shift ended at midnight, so at bedtime, I would take out all my toys and wait for her and play with dinosaurs on the couch. But the morning would come with the crank of her engine, again. I’m sorry, Mama , I’d blink, knotting myself deeper into my sheets, but I couldn’t breathe & keep my eyes open at the same time. I’m sorry , I’d stomp, crushing snails after school, I didn’t love you enough to stay awake . When night came again, I’d yawn, pull out my triceratops, and vow to see her before bed. I thought I would never make it. Then one night, the door broke open like a promise, the light behind her head darkening her face as she lifted me numb from the sofa. I twitched, maybe managed a smile, as her hand stroked the left side of my face—rough. Published in Crab Orchard Review . The literal breakthrough in the poem is a door opening and a pouring forth of light, one that also creates a chiaroscuro "darkening her face" in the frame of a promise broken open. Previous WILLY PALOMO (he/they/she) is the author of Mercury in Reggaetón , winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, and Wake the Others (Editorial Kalina/Glass Spider Publishing, 2023), a winner of a Foreword Prize in Poetry and an International Latino Book Award honorable mention in Bilingual Poetry. A veteran of the Salt Lake City poetry slam scene, his fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and songs can be found across print and web pages, including the Best New Poets 2018 , Latino Rebels , The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States , and more. \He has taught classes on literature, rap, and creative writing in universities, juvenile detention centers, high schools, and community centers. He is the son of two refugees from El Salvador. www.palomopoemas.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE WHIZ KID Beth Colburn Orozco “To thine own self be true.” Ray had tried. Sheri set down a bottle of Miller Light and a shot of whisky in front of Ray. A twitchy kid reeking of cologne tossed a twenty on the bar. “They got happy hour?” Ray downed the whiskey. “Two for one tap beers.” Payday Friday, and the place was packed. The railyard was under construction. Union Pacific had brought in an outfit from Milwaukee to get the job done. These young bucks had shitty attitudes and money to throw around. Ray reached into the top pocket of his jean jacket, hoping to find some cash. Instead, his fingers landed on the one-year AA chip. He traced the raised triangle with his thumb. Unity. Service. Recovery . He’d failed at all three. A stream of yard rats in greasy Carhart jackets strutted into The Tracks. This had been going on for months. At eight o’clock, the crowd would file out like a herd of cattle when the new club across the street opened. If he could hold out until then, maybe Sheri would take him back to her place. She’d done it before. They had gone to school together, he and Sheri. Back then he’d been famous, a local celebrity. He hadn’t made time for Sheri or girls like her, the quiet types who grew prettier as you got to know them. No, he’d gone for the curvy girls in tight skirts. Bimbos , his mom had called them. Gorgeous girls who shined until they didn’t, which usually happened right after high school. Sheri poured him another shot. “Are you okay?” she asked. She hadn’t judged him. He’d sat at the bar for a year ordering Cokes she served in pint glasses. Last Thursday, he’d set down a fifty and ordered a beer and a bump. “You sure?” was all she said. Ray had punched a smart-ass drunk in the face at a local hockey game. Broke his nose and was court-ordered to attend AA for a year. Well, at least he’d done that. He’d managed to stay sober for a year. And he’d paid for it. The nightmares got worse. He’d thought about killing himself, even adding it to the to-do list in his head. Last Thursday, the year ran out on the judge’s order, and Ray got back on the proverbial horse. He studied the crowd through the chipped mirror behind the bar. O’Sullivan owned the place along with half the buildings in this rundown section of town. Ray had gone to school with him. He’d paid Ray for copies of his homework. O’Sullivan was still cutting corners. The Tracks was a dump. The Budweiser clock above the pool table read half past six. It was set fifteen minutes fast. Sheri yelled Last Call early six nights a week, and six nights a week, some drunk complained. “They sure got you hustling tonight,” Ray said. A bear of a guy in overalls bent over the bar and waved an empty beer bottle in the air. “I’ll be back.” Sheri pointed at Ray’s beer mug. “Slow down.” Ray caught a whiff of cologne and turned around. The kid had a fighter’s face. His nose was off-center, and a scar ran horizontally along his left cheekbone. He was wiry and built for speed. “I’ll flag her down.” Ray held up his empty shot glass. “But it’ll cost you.” Sheri appeared, and the kid ordered a round for his friends who had commandeered the table in front of the big screen TV. “And get your friend here a shot of Crown.” He slapped Ray on the back. “Thanks, man.” Talking to this punk could set off the fireworks in Ray’s head. It had been a long time, and he didn’t need that kind of trouble. No one did. Ray folded his hands. He counted to ten in his head—a trick he’d picked up in an anger management class, another court order the judge had thrown at him. He knocked back the shot. The whisky worked its magic, numbing the hard-wired parts of his brain. With it came regret. The kind that left his insides itchy and led to more whiskey. It was pathetic, this cycle he’d been rolling around in like a pig in shit for most of his life, but he didn’t know how to stop it. That was the plain truth. Tomorrow morning, sometime before he popped open his first beer, he’d try to talk himself out of it. Try to negotiate with the bastard who lived inside him. The guy he’d become after that last shot. It wasn’t Sheri’s fault. She’d pour him drinks until she was forced to take his keys if it came to that. Ray watched her full, round breasts bob up and down as her hips swung side to side. Something akin to youth stirred inside him. Sheri caught him staring and rolled her eyes. She could still make him blush. Sheri knew his story, at least part of it—the whole town did. If he’d just left after high school, things would have turned out differently. Maybe. Ray and his mom had left the apartment above his grandparents’ house and moved to Cedarville in the fall of 1965 after his old man died. Ray was six and started first grade the following day with a sea of rowdy kids. A week later, a package arrived. Inside was a brand-new, leatherbound 1964 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia Volume 1 (A). A note was taped to the front cover of the book. Hey Kid, Your grandma says the whole world is inside these books. Hope you learn a lot. Be good. Grandpa Lou Over the next year, he received the whole set of encyclopedias. Ray marveled at the countless photos, drawings, and diagrams. He was transported to faraway places and respected the important people he read about. His teachers said he had a photographic memory. He’d learn much later that it only pertained to the things he read. The stuff that happened to him, the important things, lived inside him like shadows. By junior high, Ray was the smartest kid in school. His encyclopedic knowledge was something folks talked about at the grocery store and Fred’s Barber Shop. He had no trouble accessing the thousands of pages of information when it came to answering questions on tests. Name the seven continents . They were located on page 801 in Volume 4 (Ci to CZ) . Name the capitals of all fifty states . A chart titled “Facts in Brief about the States of the Union,” including state birds and state flowers, was on pages 52-55 in Volume 19 (U-V) . Ray had been a local superstar by his junior year in high school, the same year the varsity football and basketball teams were in the state semi-finals. It didn’t matter. All attention was on Ray, "the Whiz Kid"—a nickname dubbed by a local newspaper reporter. It was the seventies. Middle-class suburban sprawl was devouring Midwest farmland with planned subdivisions and strip malls. Cedarville ended at the tracks. On the other side was Glenwood with its new movie theater and indoor community pool. In contrast, Cedarville was a workingman’s town still dependent on railroad jobs and contract work for the Oldsmobile plant in Michigan, a town quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks. The people of Cedarville needed a local hero, and by all accounts, Ray fit the bill. He was a tall, good-looking kid who was smarter than any of those yahoos over in Glenwood. Ray’s mother was a sickly, nervous woman who feared the intrusion of her son’s celebrity into her otherwise private life. Ray was on his own when it came to teachers, reporters, and college recruiters. He didn’t know what to make of all the attention. Girls threw themselves at him. He was voted prom king, class president, and grand marshal for the local Fourth of July parade, which his mom did not attend, complaining of a migraine. It all began to unravel with his junior year standardized test results. Mrs. Dombrowski, the high school guidance counselor, had scheduled an appointment to meet with Ray and his mom. Ray showed up alone. He was surprised to see the principal and his calculus teacher at the meeting. Ray’s scores were impressive, but he had failed miserably on the essay portion of the exam. What happened? Mrs. Dombrowski asked. Ray saw the questions in his head: Discuss The Great Gatsby as it relates to American culture today. Which country was most affected by World War II and why? Who was the most influential world leader of the nineteenth century? Discuss how his leadership has changed the course of history. He remembered closing his eyes, looking for pages that would help him, but the words and phrases muddled together in a thick alphabet soup. It was like someone had gathered up the books in his head and walked off with them. His calculus teacher sat sizing up Ray as though the two had never met. The principal had written a letter on behalf of Ray to Columbia University’s admissions board. He wanted answers, but Ray didn’t have any. Mrs. Dombrowski was a kind woman with meaty arms and short, red hair. She had stood in as Ray’s surrogate mother when it came to his future. Sitting in her office, he felt as though he had failed her; that he had failed the whole town. Ray didn’t share what he saw in his head. The questions on the exam required that he think for himself. He had never been good at that. He finally asked to be dismissed. Mrs. Dombrowski’s pity bored holes in what little confidence he possessed. The last semester of high school was agonizing. No one knew of his meeting with Mrs. Dombrowski, but then there was the incident in history class. His teacher, during a discussion on famous United States monuments, asked Ray how tall the Statue of Liberty stood from the base to the top of her flame. Ray accessed Volume 17 (S) from the memory bank in his head, which felt disconnected from the rest of him, and found very little. He glanced around the room, a collective pride radiating off his friends as they waited for his response. “I don’t know,” Ray stammered. He found the problem once he got home. The information was in Volume 12 (L) under “Liberty Statue of”, but it was too late. Ray felt like an impostor, and kids, like dogs, sensed it. The attention and admiration faded just like it did for those pretty girls he’d slept with. After graduation, he took a job on the railroad as a gandy dancer, until he was promoted to switchman after memorizing a manual he found in the breakroom. That ended when he got into a bar fight with his boss. Ray glanced at the Budweiser clock. Fifteen minutes to go, and these boys would head across the street. For years, he had depended on locals to buy him a beer and bump after answering trivia questions. “Hey, Ray. Who was the twelfth president of this great nation?” some old codger would shout out. A two-page photo spread of the Presidents of the United States was in Volume 15 (P). “Zachary Taylor was the President from 1849 to 1850.” Taylor was also on page 48 in Volume 18 (T). Ray had looked him up after learning he’d only served a year as President. “He died suddenly on July 9, 1850. He’s buried in a family cemetery near Louisville, Kentucky.” “Buy that man a beer,” someone else would holler. Ray accepted the challenges with pride and secretly referred to his good fortune as The Pavlovian Tavern Experiment. Answer a question and get a free drink. Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth President of the United States after Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963. Remarkably, President Johnson was in the 1964 publication of The World Book Encyclopedia . A lot had happened since then. Ray couldn’t remember the last time someone asked him a question. Sheri looked tired. They weren’t kids anymore. Their forty-year class reunion was coming up, and what did he have to show for it? “Hey, sweetie,” Ray lifted his glass, “when you get a minute.” Sheri shook her head and turned to help the kid who was back for a third time. Ray swayed a bit when he stood. The kid laughed, and the fireworks lit up inside Ray’s head. He sat back down, clasped his hands together, and started counting to ten—this time out loud. Sheri came out from behind the bar. Ray rested his hand on her shoulder to steady himself. She shook it off and grabbed the kid’s arm. “You and your buddies need to leave.” Another fight could land Ray in county jail. But if the kid threw the first punch, Ray would flatten him. The kid read Ray’s mind and nodded. “Settle your tab and get out of here,” Ray said. The kid rummaged through a wad of cash, handed Sheri a fifty, and disappeared through the side door. Sheri turned around and snatched Ray’s truck keys off the bar. “Why do you have to act like that?” Ray knew the answer to that question, and it had nothing to do with those damn encyclopedias or the kid. He reached for the keys. Sheri tossed them in her tip jar and pointed at the door. “You’re cut off.” Ray grabbed his jacket from the barstool and fumbled with the buttons. Sheri stood with her arms crossed. “I liked you better sober,” she said. Ray looked up from the buttons. He’d seen that expression before. Sheri had sworn at him, threatened him, even thrown a beer mug at him once, but this was different. Like Mrs. Dombrowski, Sheri pitied him. Whatever screwed-up connection and history they shared, it was over. He searched his head for something to say. Sheri didn’t wait. “Go home, Ray.” Ray had learned a few things during his sobriety. The dull ache of arthritis in his joints and the sharp pains left behind in his bones from long-forgotten fights had made him feel alive, like his being on this planet accounted for something. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He stepped out into the moonless night, where the cold air blew out the fireworks. Like Russian nesting dolls, there was the story inside the story. The one no one knew about except his mom, but she’d been gone three years. The cancer had eaten her organs like a parasite. He had prayed on her deathbed that she would take The Nightmare with her. God had other plans, so he was stuck with it. He walked along the tracks, pulling the collar of his jacket up to cover his neck against the cold. He navigated the railroad ties on his way to his apartment as his thoughts stepped aside, making room for the parade of red and white Old Milwaukee pull top cans. He rubbed his eyes. The image remained like it always did. He felt sweat pool at the base of his spine despite the cold. Whether sleeping or drunk, like he was now, there was muscle memory to The Nightmare, and he jammed his hands into his jacket pockets to steady the shaking. “Four hundred seventy-eight! Four hundred seventy-nine!” he shouted, into the black night. Counting railroad ties did nothing to dampen the memory. For Christ’s sake. Ray was only six, a little boy, when his dad tossed a can of Old Milwaukee to him. “Drink up, kid,” he said. Ray held the cold can between his legs and counted eleven dead soldiers at his dad’s feet and three on the coffee table, resting on their sides. Ray’s mom was in the kitchen pulling chicken pot pies out of the oven. She swore under her breath. Something about burning her hand to feed that good-for-nothing S.O.B. Ray looked up from the can of beer he still hadn’t opened. His dad was slouched over in the plaid lounge chair, passed out. Ray didn’t dare move. His grandparents owned the bungalow and lived downstairs. They had a window air-conditioner in the living room. Ray’s dad said it was a waste of hard-earned money. The heat was stifling. The cedar paneling oozed a spicy aroma that got on your clothes. Ray wanted to go outside. His best friend, Benny, lived next door. They had made plans to catch bullfrogs in the creek that ran through their backyards after supper. His mom dropped something in the sink, and Ray’s dad pulled himself upright in the chair. The muscles in his arms strained against his T-shirt as he snatched a beer from the metal cooler he took everywhere. “I said drink up.” He held the can like a fastball and eyed Ray as home plate. Ray fumbled with the pull top. The beer was sour. He held out the can to examine. He didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. His dad leaned over, resting his elbows on his knees. His eyes wide open now, he studied Ray. “Like this, son.” Ray watched his dad take a long draw. Ray thought about going to the kitchen to be with his mom, but he knew his dad’s moods like he did the predictable bird that poked its head out of the little door of the cuckoo clock above the sofa. Ray raised the can to his mouth like his dad had and drank until a warm fuzz coated his belly. His dad winked, finished off his beer, and crushed the can under his work boot. “That’s my boy.” “Dinner’s ready,” his mom called out from someplace above Ray’s head. “Come on, son. Food is on the table,” his dad said. Ray pushed himself up from the sofa. Without anything to grab onto, he reached for his dad. “That’s it, little man. I gotcha.” In the cramped hallway between the living room and kitchen, Ray leaned against the maple door leading down the steep stairs to the garage. His mom stood in the sunlit kitchen wearing a yellow dress and holding a pot of green beans. Ray kept a hand on the wall to steady himself as he shuffled toward the yellow dress. “Ray, what’s wrong?” The pot banged on the red Formica tabletop. Ray covered his ears. His mom bent down and, with gentle fingers, pried open his eyelids. “My God, Lloyd, what did you do to him?” “I feel funny,” Ray said. She kissed Ray’s forehead. “Go to your room.” His dad stood next to the sink, a wild look in his eyes. Ray seized his mom’s hand. A sharp smack rang off the kitchen cabinets. Ray ducked. His mom tumbled backwards into the counter next to the stove, cupping a hand over her mouth. His dad loomed over her with fists raised. “Run!” his mom hollered. Ray bolted to the door. Yanking it open, he contemplated the steep stairwell. Ray’s dad staggered toward him. The slap to the back of Ray’s head nearly sent him headfirst down the stairs and registered through the drunken fog as danger. Ray side-stepped, leaving his dad standing where he had just been. Ray’s thoughts sloshed around as though submerged in warm water. “Mom?” he called out. “Shut up, kid.” The crack to his cheek burned. Ray squared his shoulders against a second blow. His mom appeared from the kitchen with a swollen lip. Blotches of bright red smeared her yellow dress. Blood , he thought. Mom’s blood . Ray pushed his dad out of the way and ran toward her. Groans and thuds came from the stairwell, filling the apartment and stopping Ray in his tracks. Slowly, his mom made her way to the stairs, passing by Ray as though avoiding a chair that stood in her way. Ray turned. His mother stood at the top of the stairs; her mouth opened to scream but nothing came out. “Mommy?” Ray scrambled to her side, grabbing her hand to steady himself at the door’s threshold. His dad lay crumpled against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. Ray waited for him to move, to start yelling. Ray buried his face in the folds of his mother’s dress. “I’m sorry, Mommy.” “It was an accident, son,” his mother said. Ray ran to his bedroom. Sitting on his bed, he saw his mother slam the door to the stairs and retreat to the kitchen. The apartment was quiet. He felt alone. When the police arrived, Ray’s mom came to his room. “Stay put,” she said and closed the door behind her. Ray imagined being dragged from the apartment and going to jail, a place where bad people were sent and never heard from again. Ray scurried under the bed. He heard voices in the living room and outside the house. When the officers left, his mother went to her room. She never looked Ray in the eyes again. After all these years, the sick feeling of paying for your sins still whittled away at him. Eight hundred forty-two, eight hundred forty-three railroad ties. Counting eight hundred fifty-one, Ray turned left. O’Sullivan also owned the old Union Pacific rooming house. The city completed an inspection after numerous complaints about a clogged toilet on the second floor and a roach-infested kitchen on the first. The building was a state historic site. O’Sullivan was forced to bring the building up to code. Ray did maintenance work and harassed crappy tenants until they left in exchange for a rent-free studio apartment on the second floor. Ray walked up the back stairs to the landing and cursed his frozen fingers as he worked the key into the lock. The apartment was freezing. He turned on the space heater, grabbed a six-pack from the fridge, and plunked down on the sofa, one of a handful of things he took from his mom’s apartment after she died. The television shorted out during a thunderstorm the previous spring. Ray sat in the yellow glow of the railyard lights. A bookshelf he’d fashioned out of scrap wood and cinderblocks held his encyclopedia collection. All that encyclopedic knowledge didn’t do him squat. The books containing the world stage before 1964 were still in his head. The information was outdated, and much of it useless. If he were being honest, most everyone he knew would agree that Ray and those books had a lot in common. He sucked down an Old Milwaukee and opened another. He closed his eyes. The memories following his dad’s death appeared in disjointed snippets. His grandparents had been at the VFW playing bingo and got home late. His grandma’s shrills came up through the vents, making Ray tremble. There was the funeral where Ray was forced to wear a wool suit that pinched under his armpits and caused a rash that itched like crazy in the heat. The ham dinner afterwards was held at Dick’s Dockside Tavern. Lots of strangers were there. His mom’s parents showed up. Ray had never met them before. They were rich. His grandpa Lou had called them fancy , like it was a bad word. Sometime after the funeral, he and his mom packed up the apartment in boxes they picked up at Dean’s Supermarket. Cedarville was across the river, where Ray’s mom found a job as a secretary at Linden Quarry. During it all, his mom seemed to shrink before his eyes until Ray all but replaced his dad as the man of the house. His grandpa Lou had said as much when he dropped Ray and his mom off at their new apartment. “You take care of your mom. You hear me.” Ray had thought about tossing the encyclopedias. They were the last vestige of his past that he’d sever if he could. But among the memories, a red-hot ember still glowed, illuminating the truth. He kicked the coffee table. His mother’s voice cut through the haze. “It was an accident, son.” It was no accident. Ray still sensed the heat radiating off his dad’s sweat-soaked T-shirt on the palms of his hands. He’d pushed with all his might and shuddered in amazement as his dad clawed at the air like a mighty bear to steady himself. Ray crushed an empty beer can in his fist and opened another. The images of his dad’s broken body were hazy, but the grunts and moans coming from the stairwell still sucker-punched him in the gut. His dad appeared before him across the room in the soiled plaid lounge chair from his grandparents’ apartment—the left side of his face mangled; the flesh peeled back, exposing bone. A thick smear of crimson stained his white T-shirt. Those same wild eyes Ray remembered from that night in the kitchen, judging him. Ray threw an empty can at the chair. “Leave me alone, old man.” Ray stumbled to the encyclopedias and reached for Volume 8 (G) . The book flopped open to page 166, the page he’d referenced countless times, hoping his memory had failed him. He found the word that struck his nerves like a match. GHOST is believed by some people to be the unhappy and often harmful spirit of a dead person . Ray fell to his knees. With eyes closed, he lifted his head and waited for a sign, a message—anything to release him from The Nightmare. Ray sat back on his heels and retrieved the AA chip from his pocket. All those meetings, five times a week for the first three months, hadn’t changed a thing. He managed to talk about the fight and the court order. He even admitted to being an alcoholic. But The Nightmare he’d take to his grave. The heater had done its job, and the warmth burrowed under his flannel shirt against his skin. He opened his eyes. The chair was empty. For a moment, Ray felt worthy like great men do when there is no one else to answer to. But he knew the truth. Some night soon, his dad would return. Ray grasped the chip and folded his hands in prayer. The World Book Encyclopedia’s definition of God was in the same book on page 229. The Supreme Being, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, All Knowing, All Powerful, Infinite, and Ever Present . Maybe so. But Ray, for all his cursing and pleading for forgiveness, had never heard from Him. Like a thunderbolt, the cheap, fluorescent tube above his head exploded, raining down shards of soda-lime glass like sand. Ray didn’t see it that way. Instead, the wings of fallen angels brushed against his skin in the darkness. Clutching the AA chip, he crawled on his hands and knees to the cordless phone on the floor next to the sofa and called his sponsor. “I’m out of coffee,” he said. The gruff voice on the other end, a lifeline Ray had batted away too many times to count, chuckled. “No problem, kid. I just made a fresh pot. Can’t sleep for shit anymore. I’ll be there in twenty.” Ray sat in the dark and waited. Sometimes a haunting childhood can cause us to shapeshift into someone we never imagined. Ray, a middle-aged drunk, finally finds a path to redemption on a cold and snowy night in "The Whiz Kid." Previous BETH COLBURN OROZCO teaches literature and creative writing at Cochise College in southeastern Arizona. Most recently, her work was published in The Ana and was accepted for The Letter Review shortlist. Beth's short stories and essays have won awards, and more can be found at bethcolburnorozco.com . Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue STARGAZING Mary Behan “I’m going outside to look at the stars. Do you want to come? It’s a perfect night for it; it’s still warm and there’s no moon.” Marilyn tried to inject as much enthusiasm into her request as possible, knowing that the invitation to her husband to walk uphill to the meadow behind their house was probably not going to be accepted. Each evening after dinner when he had cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, Kenny settled into his upholstered recliner with a sigh of pleasure and switched on the television. Within a few minutes, the authoritative voice of a male presenter describing a car restoration project would drift into her “lair,” as she liked to call her sewing room. Years earlier when she had been bitten by the quilting bug, Kenny had added a room to their bungalow. It was a bright, sunny space from which she could just see the hilltop meadow, the colors of which, as they changed with the season, gave inspiration to her quilting designs. This room was where she spent most of her evenings, and much of her days since retiring from her job at the local bank. “I’ll pass this time, if you don’t mind,” Kenny said. “There’s a program I’d like to finish watching. Remember, I told you about my ’64 Corvette? The one this guy is working on looks exactly like mine. Same color too.” His audible sigh was followed by, “Boy, I should never have sold it.” Passing through the living room, Marilyn gave him an affectionate peck on the cheek before pulling on a fleece jacket and going outside. Theirs was a happy marriage of nearly forty years. Each of them had been married previously, but as neither had brought children to their union, their love was focused on each other. Kenny gave her hand a gentle squeeze, his fingers lingering for a moment before releasing her. “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she said, but doubted her comment was heard over the sound of the television. Outside, the air had a moist, nutty smell – a harbinger of the approaching Winter. The silhouette of a massive maple tree guided her towards the path. Passing by, she noted that the leaves were devoid of color whereas earlier in the day she had been stunned by their range of hues, from pale yellow to vibrant red. That morning she had watched, enthralled, as dozens of leaves detached themselves in a spontaneous gesture of exhaustion, and drifted to the ground in a blur of color. All through the day she had mused over how she might translate this visual miracle onto a canvas of cloth. The quilt would feature a pile of colorful newly fallen leaves, together with the figure of a child, their arms outstretched in a moment of joyful abandonment. It was an easy climb to the meadow. Cresting the hill, she went a little farther so as to block out any stray light from the house. Here there was a natural dip, deep enough to be sheltered from any breeze, yet shallow enough to see the full panorama of sky. She lay down on the cool ground and deliberately closed her eyes. From previous experience, she knew this would hasten her dark adaptation, and maximize the experience when she opened her eyes and looked up into the sky. It was easy to keep count of the seconds and minutes. For some unexplained reason she was able to hear her heartbeat in her right ear — a steady sixty-four beats per minute. The tinnitus had developed after a routine ear cleaning, but her doctor reassured her it was nothing to worry about and that it would likely go away. But it hadn’t gone away. During the day she could ignore it for the most part, and at night had taken to sleeping on her right side to muffle the sound. Now as she listened, the steady pulsatile thrum dominated the night sounds — the hoot of an owl, a coyote’s howl, some small creature rustling in the grass, the plaintive wail of a train. One hundred beats later, she opened her eyes to view her personal planetarium. A tiny gasp escaped her as she tried to absorb the immensity of the sky. Her eyes first sought out familiar constellations, starting with the Big Dipper and from there following a line to the North Star. Orion with its distinctive belt was just beginning to appear over the edge of her horizon. She recognized Cygnus to the east, a grouping that often eluded her, but this evening did indeed look like a swan. High above, the irregular “W” shape of Cassiopeia came into focus. But it was the Milky Way that held her gaze, sweeping across the arc of the night sky from north to south. It was easy to understand why Native Americans from Chile to Alaska had thought of the Milky Way as a pathway for departed spirits, connecting the earth with the otherworld. Staring at it now, it seemed to engulf her, sucking her into its swirling interior. In the stillness, she listened but could no longer hear the beating of her heart. * * * It takes some time to get used to being dead. For a start, the whole idea of time is different. It’s not linear like in life, but seems to be interrupted, as if you were reading a book and skipped a chapter or two, leaving you struggling to reconnect with the story. The past is irregular too, like watching tiny snippets of black and white movies punctuated by blank sections. There’s no future, or at least I don’t recognize it. Sometimes I feel as if I have been dropped magically into an ongoing stage play, where none of the actors notice my presence. They just continue with their lines, moving through me without missing a beat, and yet I am there on stage with them. I can remember that final evening on top of the hill behind our house, lying on the ground looking up at the Milky Way. I came back to the house and went into the kitchen where a light was still on; the rest of the house was in darkness. Things seemed a little out of place. A book I had left on the counter, planning to return it to the library the following morning was gone, but I guessed Kenny had put it in the car so I wouldn’t forget it. A couple of other things had been moved. But the biggest change was that he had replaced the toaster on the countertop by the sink with a brand-new air-fryer oven. He had talked about getting one for me at Christmas, so this was a lovely early present. In our bedroom I could make out his bulky form under the comforter, but resisted the urge to wake him and tell him how pleased I was. Instead, I lay down on the sofa. I became aware of two voices coming from the direction of the kitchen, neither of which I recognized. When I looked, a young couple was sitting at the table, the remains of a meal around them. He was tall and dark-skinned, and had a pronounced Indian accent. She was short and pretty, her voice carrying the rounded consonants and dragged-out vowels of the Midwest. “Who are you?”, I asked, “and where’s Kenny?” I was irritated by their intrusion and annoyed with Kenny for not letting me know we were going to have guests. They ignored me and continued talking. I walked to the table and stood awkwardly between them, looking from one to the other. Again I asked the question, this time more forcefully. Still they didn’t make any effort to respond, so I grabbed the man’s arm and shook it. “Look here. I’m talking to you. How dare you…” It was then I realized that I couldn’t feel his arm, that my hand made no impression on the sleeve of his shirt. I reached out with my other hand, this time tentatively, and tried to pick up the knife that lay beside his plate. Nothing. I returned to the living room and looked around more carefully. For a moment I thought I had developed cataracts. The room had a washed-out appearance, like you might see in an old photograph — not quite black and white, but what little color there once was had faded. The furniture had been rearranged to face a huge flat screen TV, something Kenny and I had sworn we would never buy. I continued down the corridor to my sewing room. On the large work table where my sewing machine sat, all traces of quilt-making were gone, replaced by a laptop computer and neat stacks of papers and journals. I could still hear their voices in the kitchen as I went through every room in our house, searching for signs of Kenny or me. There were some — pieces of furniture mostly — but any sense that we had lived in this house for almost forty years together was gone. I know it sounds ridiculous, but when I couldn’t find our electric toothbrushes in the bathroom, I glanced in the mirror. It was only then I finally understood: I had died that night under the stars. But why had I come back to my house as a ghost? I asked that question again and again over the next several months. Even though time had little meaning, I knew that months were passing because I could see Mary Anne’s belly getting bigger. The couple now living in our house were Mary Anne and Arjun and she was pregnant with their first child. From conversations I overheard, I gathered they had met while they were at university. Now they were working at two different Biotech companies in the nearby city. It wasn’t as if I deliberately eavesdropped. It was just that when they were in the house, I was aware of them and heard everything they said. It struck me as odd that I could both hear and see, yet I had no ability to feel anything or move an object. Smell and taste were also absent. In life that would have been a hardship, but now I hardly noticed. It was the absence of touch that affected me the most. Time and time again I would reach out to stroke a piece of fabric or put my hand over the stovetop and try to capture its heat. The absence of any sensation was a cruel reminder of my new state. I could still watch clouds drifting across the sky, see pine branches trembling in the wind, or look at birds alighting on the feeder — all things I used to enjoy when I was alive but now gave me little pleasure. What did give me pleasure was hearing Kenny’s name or mine. Little by little I pieced together what happened to me that night. I had a cerebral aneurism that burst, ending my life instantaneously. Even if Kenny had found me, it wouldn’t have made any difference. As it was, he slept soundly through the night, only realizing that I wasn’t beside him in bed when he woke the following morning. He blamed himself for not going with me, choosing instead to watch that television program. But the aneurism could just as easily have burst when I was with him, perhaps when I was driving which would have ended both our lives. I think he might have preferred that outcome, for, according to Mary Anne and Arjun, he was depressed and had lost all interest in life. I might not have been able to feel, in the sense of feeling an object, but even as a ghost I could still feel . Just as with the faded images and scenes, my emotions were also diminished; but they were still there. I still felt love for Kenny, and I missed him deeply — the pleasurable anticipation of seeing him when I walked into the room, a smile lighting up his face when he saw me. I missed basking in his loving gaze, touching his hand, kissing his cheek, being hugged by him. * * * Mary Anne looked up from her computer and stared out the window of her home office. The maple tree that dominated their backyard was at the peak of its Fall colors, she guessed, noticing a few leaves drifting gently to the ground. She decided she would ask Arjun to hang a swing from one of its thick lower branches next year; that is, if they were still living here. For several weeks now, they had been negotiating with Kenny to buy the property. Meanwhile, his nephew had advised him against a direct sale, pointing out that he could get far more money if he listed the house with a realtor. As renters, they would have to leave once a sale was finalized. In her mind’s eye, Mary Anne could see herself swinging back and forth lazily, surrounded by color, while her son played in the circle of leaves beneath the tree. Lost in this vision, she didn’t hear the car on the driveway and was startled when Arjun burst into the room. “He’s going to sell the place to us!” Arjun said, stooping to wrap his arms around his wife. “We don’t have to move.” The relief in his voice was palpable. She looked up at him, her eyes wide with surprise. “At the price we offered?” “Yeah.” Arjun nodded vigorously. “After all, it’s not as if we’re asking him to fix any of the things the building inspector came up with. Still, I was afraid he might change his mind at the last minute. His nephew has been talking to him again.” “It’s a fair price, and I think he likes the idea of us living here, especially with the baby coming.” Mary Anne moved Arjun’s hand to her belly. “Can you feel him kicking?” Arjun kissed his wife on the lips. “I am the luckiest man alive.” “You are indeed,” she replied, with a laugh. “Actually, we both are. And we’ll never be able to thank your parents enough. I know they have lots of money, but still…” Arjun kissed her again. “They love you, and now that they’re going to have a grandson, they love you even more. Besides, it’s now that we need their money, not in fifty years’ time.” Groaning slightly, Mary Anne got up from the chair. “Tell me about the visit with Kenny. I feel badly not going with you, but the place depresses me. I’m certain the baby feels it too.” She stroked her belly protectively. “It’s alright. I don’t mind going there. I know in the beginning I had an ulterior motive, but over the past few months I’ve come to enjoy our chats. Kenny is an interesting old guy with lots of great stories. Today when I got there, everybody was in the day room, so I asked if I could take him to the conservatory — that glassed-in area off the dining room. It was a little chilly, but at least we had some privacy. We had a good conversation and in the end we shook hands on the deal. He’ll call his lawyer tomorrow and get things rolling. He asked how you were, by the way. I think he likes the idea of a new baby in the house. He and Marilyn never had children; I think his nephew is the only relative he has.” “Did you tell him he can come and visit any time he wants.” “I did of course. But to be honest, he’s so weak, I doubt if he’ll be around much longer. All he talks about now is that he’ll be with Marilyn soon.” “That’s so sad.” Mary Anne made a wry face. Arjun shrugged. “He believes it. I suppose that’s all that really matters.” * * * The thought of my husband spending his final months in a nursing home surrounded by strangers made me sad. I wondered what would happen to him when he died. How would he find me? Up to now I had never encountered another spirit, neither in the house nor in the surrounding farmlands. There was nothing more to learn indoors, so I began to roam the woods and fields around the house, often at night when the absence of light made little difference to my wandering. One night I made my way to the hilltop pasture and the spot where I had died. I lay down in the grass and looked up into the vastness of the universe. The Milky Way was shimmering above me, and as I stared at it, the banner of stars seemed to descend. I raised my hand with fingers outstretched as if to touch one end of this band of light. For a moment I wasn’t sure, but then I felt something. I felt something. Fingers brushed against my hand, then entwined themselves in mine. I brought Kenny’s hand to my lips and kissed it. In this story, the breakthrough is from life to death. An elderly woman dies, and returns to her home as a ghost. She searches for her husband, but new owners have moved in. Her search is eventually rewarded, and the couple is reunited. Previous MARY BEHAN was formerly a professor of neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now writes fiction, memoir, and short stories. Her books, published by Laurence Gate Press, include Abbey Girls , a memoir she wrote with her sister, Valerie Behan, about their childhood in Ireland; A Measured Thread set in Wisconsin and Ireland, which was named a Top 100 Indie Book, a finalist in the Page Turner Awards, and an eLit medal winner; Kernels , a collection of short stories; and Finding Isobel , a companion to her first novel, was published in 2024 and awarded a gold medal for best adult fiction e-book by the Independent Publishers (IPPI), a silver medal in women’s fiction from Readers Favorite, and Outstanding Literary Fiction Winner in the Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. mvbehan.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue LAST DRIVE Mike Alexander Rain fell from the gulf up east Texas, to drown the gravesite. I stood in the backwash. The ashes just arrived a little late. No hole readied for my father. Under water anyway. No words prepared. Not yet. I only read the stones of his father & mother. Some wordsmith. I backed a few feet away, to a dry path, to talk to the minister. Waters covered the earth. * * * Drove like mad from Houston, ahead of the storm. Turned off the highway. Along the way, farm roads & supply depots, reservoirs, sites unseen by satellite navigator. I crossed over county lines. I bought gas & tooth- brush. I drove two hundred seventy seven or so miles, with rain on my tail. The storm caught up. * * * The house on Jefferson abandoned, stripped, side door hanging open to the elements, like a drowned mouth leaking water, back acre garden now dead dry, where once he sat to watch the lightning approach, to hear thunder’s crescendo, heaven’s music threatening to wash away constant sermon. An angry baptism. … At the graveyard driveway, two vultures guard an armadillo’s shriveled shell, its legs aimed at a gunmetal sky. I show up like a cliché. The son, dragging his feet in soggy shoes, returning to stand under a dark umbrella. He left this town a life ago. Returned disintegrated. I too am only half here. Ready to leave. Up to "Last Drive," I was having a bit of writer's block, if such a thing exists. I'd retired, which ignited a world of concerns. I was travelling in California when I got the call that my father had passed. This led to more travelling, & a binge of introspection. All culminating in my father's funeral(s). A major milestone, & yet, when people said they were sorry for my loss, I felt more, not less of him, like he was inhabiting me, an echo of a melody. He & I looked together on his "resting place," & then we moved on. Previous MIKE ALEXANDER lives in Houston, Texas. His poems have been published in River Styx , Rattle , and Measure. He is the author of a full-length collection Retrograde (P&J Poetics, 2013), and several chapbooks, including We Internet in Different Voices (Modern Metrics Press, 2010). Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FROM COTTON TO WOOL ... and Beyond Alex Barr It was the worst year of my youth, and who did I end up working for? That blustering mountebank Aeneas Kelly.* When we first met, I was a bus conductor. The job was meant to fill the summer vacation between second and third years at university, but now there was no third year. I had dropped out. For a year I had endured a weird eye disorder with no physical cause, which made reading almost impossible. Because it was labelled ‘psychosomatic,’ I was having psychiatric treatment. This consisted of an hour a week lying drugged alone in a small room spouting rubbish, and taking mysterious red and blue pills. My fiancée was cooling on me and would soon break off our engagement—not that I blame her. The Garrick, an amateur theater in my hometown of Stockport in the North of England, said I had to spend a year working in the scene dock before I could audition for a part, so no relief there. Aeneas did public relations for my father, who ran a laboratory researching felt for hats. I don’t know why a competent, self-sufficient scientist like Dad needed such a charlatan to promote his work. But by 1960, few men wore fedoras, so maybe he worried about his future. He certainly worried about mine, which was why he arranged the job with Aeneas. Trainee management consultant, office junior, gopher? My role was never defined. I still see Aeneas enter the office, weary from some expedition. He looked like a cross between Nikita Khrushchev and Danny DeVito—round head, chunky body. He would put down his briefcase, stand hunched in his black wool overcoat, and sigh heavy exhalations which blew out his top lip. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, but it seemed life wasn’t treating him fairly. There were four strands to his organization: management consultancy, light engineering, PR, and ‘research facilities,’ whatever they were. He had been ‘in cotton’ all his working life and now had an office in Manchester’s Royal Exchange, ten miles from my hometown. When that office oppressed me, I would hurry down to the vast empty floor where cotton was once traded, and study the display—like a giant scoreboard—of the last day’s figures. An elegant theater now occupies that floor, and playgoers can still see that relic of ‘Cottonopolis.’ Ah, Cottonopolis. Back then in 1960 the title was fading. In the city of dark satanic mills and gritty businessmen, replacing old machinery was uneconomical and labour was cheaper in the East. Maybe there was bad karma from the blockade-running days when Manchester needed slave-produced cotton from the Confederacy, even though the workers, despite being laid off, supported the Union. But I cared for none of this. The red and blue pills made me bovine and apathetic. I dated a few girls but must have seemed halfhearted, so nothing gelled. I was still in love with my fiancée. The office number was one more than her house number, so I felt fate had thrust me away from her. My work with Aeneas felt like a penance for failure. He sent me to a dismal trading estate, to a factory where pressure vessels were lined with lead. He had devised a Byzantine bonus system for the workers which he wanted me to understand. He also wanted me to learn the rudiments of estimating lead-lining, to the annoyance of the head estimator, who complained, “You’re training as a management consultant, Barr, not an estimator!” But there was worse to come. In Aeneas’s company prospectus, with its glowing assurance of splendid service, was the sentence All our employees are graduates. So to save the phenomena, he said I had to finish my abandoned physics degree. The red and blue pills left me no energy to resist. In a grim classroom at the College of Technology in Manchester’s sooty twin town of Salford, I experienced what T.S. Eliot calls “the rending pain of re-enactment.” I lasted a few weeks. The eye problem lingered. I still couldn’t leap the hurdles of quantum theory and vectors. And anyway, I realized the prospectus was false. It conjured up a bustling headquarters out in the Cheshire countryside packed with graduates, the Manchester office being but a branch, but whenever I phoned the alleged HQ to relay a message, the same voice answered: that of a middle-aged woman who sounded (was it my imagination?) less receptionist than housewife. The red and blue pills made me sleepy and I was glad when Aeneas went out so I could doze in his inner sanctum. I sometimes woke with a start when he returned from an outing. (He reminded me of that when our relationship reached its dénouement.) On one expedition, he found a small machine for printing information on the ends of spools of cotton thread. He bought the patent and sent me to buy oil-filled bearings. A mildly spoken middle-aged engineer appeared, commissioned to take the machine and build more like it. Meanwhile Aeneas sent me to a printing-ink firm to ask whether we could print several spools from one charge. (Why?) I was told printing ink is designed to release in one go. I heard no more about the project. He gave me a weird task I was too compliant to resist, which in these days of photocopiers, office printers, and word programs seems medieval. I had to type identical letters to mill owners, inviting them to buy a tension meter for warp threads on looms. A most inefficient process, and I was no great typist. After I produced dozens of letters he sent me to sell the machine. The idea was to place it against a warp thread, pull the trigger, and read the dial. A mill owner tried it, the thread broke, and he said mildly, “It’s no bloody use.” I had no answer. When I reported back, Aeneas just grunted. Another project I heard no more of. He turned to cotton converting—buying raw woven cotton and finishing it. I thought I would see him bleach fabric to make lighter colors, starch it for body and shine, mercerize it with sodium hydroxide to strengthen the fibers, calender (industrial iron) it, and even print it with colorful patterns. A nattily dressed Egyptian appeared with his charming wife, and Aeneas took the couple to lunch. A few weeks later, a hefty roll of raw fabric four-and-a-half feet long was deposited in the inner sanctum. There it stayed the rest of my time there. The cloth was full of end-breaks, little knots where broken warp threads had been tied. Egypt, it seemed, had need of the tension meter. There was also the novel. Aeneas told me, “In 1939 I had a play about to go on in the West End. The war killed it.” His latest oeuvre was handwritten in those familiar six-by-four exercise books with shiny red covers and avoirdupois weights on the back. Thanks to my limited typewriter skills he had employed a secretary, a modest young woman from the West of Ireland, and asked her to type it. If her Catholic sensibilities were disturbed by the hero “exploring the welts of Miss Jones’s stockings” as prelude to sex, she gave no sign. I sneaked a look. There was something familiar about it. The characters worked for an organization offering management consultancy, light engineering, PR, and research facilities. I don’t know what became of the novel. The Irish secretary left and was replaced by a girl I dated—until she ditched me because I laughed at finding her hair full of hairpins. And because I squeezed her breast (this being the pre-pill purgatory of the early sixties). I never explored the welts of her stockings. Cotton failed to satisfy so Aeneas turned to wool. In my pill-induced stupor I didn’t realize this transition would change my life, and that after drudgery as a pupa I could take wing. My boss had spotted an opportunity. One of his PR clients made shrink-resistant woolen garments. He decided to start a magazine promoting the entire wool industry, with backing from the Wool Industries Research Association, Bradford Dyers Association, makers of industrial dryers, and anyone else he could lure in, while sneaking his clients in under their skirts. The Wool Record and Textile World was the technical voice of the industry—this new magazine would be the trumpet (or puff) of hope. He sent me across the Pennine Hills to sell advertising space to hard-headed Bradford wool men. I don’t think he expected results (and there were none), just wanted me to know it’s a tough world out there. Back in the office I practiced writing articles. One exercise was to explain the manufacture of terry cloth, another to describe the contents of a fashion brochure. I struggled with words that seemed uncontrollable and felt waves of panic in case my eyesight let me down, but at last felt the satisfaction of a piece coming together. I learned to choose typefaces, lay out pages, edit text to fit them, create halftone and line blocks, use Ben Day dots, crop photographs, and deal with a printing firm. Something in me woke up despite the pills. I tried to imagine living in Bradford and decided the first thing I would do would be to join a drama group. I passed my driving test and borrowed Dad’s car to take girls I dated to dances at the Winter Gardens in Buxton. With one girl the relationship even lasted several months, and only fizzled when a letter from my ex unsettled me. It came from Switzerland where she was a courier for a travel firm. She asked whether I remembered early mornings when we went jogging together. My reply saying I still loved her probably landed after she left the hotel. Would arriving in time have made it alter my destiny? I doubt it. Much later, in a letter saying she was about to marry, she wrote, “I had all the time I was in Switzerland to think about it.” Aeneas’s wool magazine arrived from the printers looking good. Fate was on my side when I ran into an old pal from my days in the Scouts. (His nickname Elzy was short for Beelzebub, I have no idea why.) He showed me a book called How to Get a Better Job . I took its advice and applied to be an editorial assistant on a technical magazine in London. Preparing for the interview I sat in the echoing rotunda of Manchester Central Library and studied a copy. The title was in a font called Chisel which has an air of reliability. Chisel is rarely seen today, but a local boatyard uses it and it brings back the excitement of those days. I showed the wool magazine at the interview and got the job. When I returned Aeneas was furious. “You’ve done nowt for me except fall asleep!” “I’ve produced a good magazine for you.” “Get out. Now !” So I went. I’m grateful to Aeneas for starting my career in journalism, which reached its zenith four years later when I was wire editor of The Wichita Beacon (after which I became an architect). And for memories: the din of a shed full of power looms, the twitching of the leather straps driving the shuttles, and the tang of hot oil, the scent of lanolin in a wool-combing shed in Bradford, and other sights, sounds, smells, and personalities of a vanishing textile empire. I don’t know what happened to the wool magazine. I don’t know when Dad ended his PR contract, and it’s too late to ask. I discover that Aeneas died in North Wales in 1981. Calling him a blustering mountebank and charlatan is unfair—like him, I’ve had projects and plays come to nothing, I too scribble in notebooks and indulge in fantasies, and I often sigh blowing out my top lip. When I moved to London I was given the lead in an amateur production of The Winter’s Tale . Quite a change from The Garrick. At the same drama group I met my future (and present) wife, who urged me off the pills. My ex faded into the past without regret. I remember that on the train to that interview in London I read Peyton Place, in which a character says moving to a different city makes you a different person. It does. *Not his real name, but with the same flavor. This memoir records my transition from academic failure, a broken romance, and despair to a breakthrough into hope, a rewarding new career, and a new lasting love affair. Previous ALEX BARR 's publications include two short fiction collections and three poetry collections, the most recent of which is Light and Dark (Kelsay Books, 2024) . He is assembling a collection of nonfiction. alexbarr.co.uk Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FOUND Shari Zollinger I entered psychedelic space for the first time with a microdose. Alice, who once fell through, was offered a red pill or a blue one. Adriana offered me gray green on the morning of an eclipse. My body clearly and without hesitation chose which dose (a tiny bite of a tiny piece of filigree fibrous cap) and which environment (supine on a brown leather couch in the middle of the living room with the Moab red rock desert reflecting through). Time travel was/wasn’t possible? Eyes closed. What if we’ve left parts of ourselves out there, along the continuum? What if the cold-framed window in the Taipei, Taiwan hospital waiting room still existed and she was still waiting there looking out at the night? What if, along that continuum, there were points where it was possible to make changes? Scroll back along the thread-gauzy timeline, web-filamented, to check for the nodes that need attention. In astrological terminology, eclipses were both omen and boon. We don’t know if this is true, yet it seems to hold across the timeline when we’re looking for possible wormholes, when we’re bending back toward where she sat waiting. Where she’d waited a long time. It was a surprise to see her there. Had it been 15 or 20 years since she’d gone to the Taipei hospital to seek assurance, wondering how fast and furious the body breaks, how quickly the psyche can sit down like a cipher without language sturdy enough for meaning? It was a thing to recognize her. Wonder how she’d passed the time. How many names for the color of night she had coined and counted out that window. Did she always know someone would return for her? Did she count time or build mnemonics or hear the distinct click of a metronome reminding her that she wasn’t exactly alone? And how did she know what to do? The first thing—to walk out into the sunlight that was there beyond the hospital night, because it could be there because she was found in-continuum where narrative couldn’t demand length or cord or fibrous linearity, where the weather could change every second and day and night could click in time with the metronome. Sunlight came to her skin first as fire. And she said watch as her body burned down like an incense cone starting with her head, a thousand points of ash scrolling down her frame as she gave herself permission to translate into a substance that the wind could move. And finally, she moved. Each piece companioned to the unseen. And she said the thing I didn’t know then was that it was okay to let a piece of me die. It was okay to blow away. She left a small diamond on the concrete sidewalk outside the hospital in Taipei, Taiwan. I took the carbon remnant in hand—returned to the brown leather couch, to Moab, the supine position, my own unmoving body making its way from closed eyes to open where I saw red rocks obscured by night. "Found" was written after attending a lecture on the lyric essay, a medium I'd been curious about but hadn't spent much time with as a writer. I've enjoyed exploring the genre, defining and redefining its framework to fit the needs of my writing. It was a breakthrough to crossover into this form, and the piece itself was written at the crossroads between breakdown and breakthrough. Previous SHARI ZOLLINGER is a Salt Lake City-based poet, essayist, and bookseller whose work examines memory, place, and the traces we leave in both landscape and life. She currently reads for Sugar House Review and has spent 25 years in independent bookselling as a buyer and community advocate for literary programs. Her work has appeared in Sugar House Review , Redactions: Poetry & Prose , The Shore Poetry , and Ephemeral Magazine. sharizollinger.substack.com Next