< Back to Breakthroughs Issue A High School Madrigal Naomi Ulsted Derek and Stephanie were in their usual eight-fifteen in the morning position: Stephanie pressed up against a bank of lockers, Derek’s hand on her ass, as they proceeded to eat one another’s faces off. At least that’s what it looked like to me. Frost clung to the grassy field beyond the lockers, but Derek and Stephanie didn’t mind the cold. I focused on getting past them and into the choir room. Slipping on a spit wad, I stumbled through the doors into Mr. M’s choir room. Unlike most of the teachers, Mr. M. opened the doors early so kids could hang out in the warmth. He rummaged through a haphazard pile of sheet music. “Morning, Mr. M.,” I called. He glanced up, giving me a distracted wave. Mr. M. was always fidgeting, rummaging, starting to review music, then jumping up to plunk notes out on the piano, then patting the pockets of his corduroy suit jacket as if searching for something, then darting into his office for his briefcase, then without opening it, returning to the pile of cluttered papers on his desk, a whirl of constant movement, anxiety, and distraction. And I loved every bit of it. In the bathroom, I checked the bandages on my shins. I was out of clean pants, so I’d had to wear a skirt, even though that meant I couldn’t hide my shins. After a massive argument, Mom had finally relented on her vow that I wouldn’t be allowed to shave my legs until I was eighteen, but she wasn’t happy about it. She had left a handwritten notecard. “Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” – Proverbs 31:30. During my first shave, I’d sliced myself up good. Punishment for my vanity of wanting smooth legs. I took up my usual spot next to my best friend, Theresa. She offered me a slice of green pepper from a plastic bag. Theresa and I had basically been inseparable since second grade. We shared a locker, ate lunch together, and spent nights at each other’s houses at least a couple of times a month. I was grateful our school schedules were nearly identical because without her, I was awkward, silent, and withdrawn. In classes, surrounded by kids on the bus, or even at home with my own large and loud family, it was like I couldn’t figure out where to place myself in the scene, or what my role was. I really only fit as one half of a pair with Theresa. Mr. M. kneeled down, so his bald head was level with me. “Have you injured yourself?” His eyes darted to my legs. “Oh,” I said. “I was shaving.” I blushed. “With a machete?” He winked at me and then darted up to the front of the room as the bell sounded. I moved into my place in the front row of the soprano section. “Adams!” Mr. M. barked. “Put that lighter away before I set you on fire with it!” John Adams was several rows behind me, and as I turned, he threw a wad of paper at Stacy, whose hair flipped back as she swore at him, laughing. Stacy and her senior friends were loud girls who wore heavy eye makeup and talked about “partying,” and I was quite sure they weren’t virgins. They used profanity, which I figured was an indicator. John’s hair was long and flopped into his eyes, which were such a light and gentle blue that they were nearly transparent. I had fallen for him the day I walked behind him while he sang “Still Loving You” by the Scorpions. He was a senior and had only said possibly ten words to me, and those were words like, “Hand me that pencil, will ya?” Yet, there was something I loved in the sincerity of his singing and the earnestness of his face as he tried to pick out the tenor melody. “Jasmine!” Mr. M. hollered. “Give us an E.” Our foreign exchange student from Brazil, who had perfect pitch, sang out an exquisite E note. It was only during choir that we heard Jasmine’s voice. She was painfully shy otherwise. Much like me, but without the benefit of a best friend. She almost always had her nose in a textbook and she never laughed. Mr. M. closed his eyes, savoring Jasmine’s clear voice, then raised his arms, and without taking roll, without greeting the class, and without preamble, he launched us into our first madrigal of the day, “My Heart Doth Beg.” Mr. M. had a fondness for fifteenth-century madrigals. They presented four parts moving within one another, forcing us to pull together the frayed ends of our harmonies. When we were so bored with “My Heart Doth Beg” that we pleaded for a different madrigal, he’d have us learn one another’s parts until we could see how the piece was complete with the four lines interwoven. As usual, I wanted Mr. M. to know how well I’d learned my part. I was desperate to be heard and to stand out in his mind as someone special. Contradicting my mousy and withdrawn self, my voice could be wild and out of control, demanding attention. I belted out my part, but I was clearly overzealous or off-pitch because I immediately got “the hand.” When a singer was too loud or off-key, Mr. M. would raise his palm toward them. If the singer didn’t back off, he’d get closer until, if you were in the front row like me, the hand could be right in your face while Mr. M. crinkled up his own face in what could only be physical pain caused by atrocious sounds coming from your own voice. That’s what I got now, and I forced my voice into a near whisper. My failure still stung at the end of the period as Mr. M. reviewed our upcoming trip's details. The following week, the choir would take an overnight trip to perform at a middle school a few hours away. At home, this event had been preceded by multiple conversations with my mother, where it took all my persuasive arguments to get her to sign the permission form. She did not think it appropriate for girls and boys to be spending the night together, even though I explained, not so patiently, that we would all be on a gigantic gymnasium floor with the girls on one side and the boys on the other. Plus, there would be tons of chaperones, so it’s not like people would even have the chance to be fornicating. Well, Derek and Stephanie would probably figure something out, but I didn’t mention that. Finally, after promising to attend church on both Sunday and Wednesday nights the weeks before and after the trip so my Christian defenses would be ready for whatever temptations the choir trip would bring, she agreed to let me go. Theresa and I were beside ourselves with excitement, spending most of our time talking about which of our classmates would be the most fun to ride with on the bus. For Theresa, I knew that it was Bob Dietz. As we left the choir room, he swaggered in front of us, swinging his bangs out of his eyes. In a “secret” survey passed around the school last year, Bob’s ass had been voted the best in the junior class. The great divide between the junior and sophomore classes wasn’t the only thing keeping Theresa from talking to him, though. He had been voted Junior homecoming prince and was forever surrounded by his pack of popular kids. In the social hierarchy of high school, Theresa and I weren’t at the bottom, but we were nowhere close enough to the top to be allowed to speak to Bob. He was just as out of reach for her as John was for me. So we just kept to our own world and watched from a distance. We boarded the bus a week later as early morning mist rose from the grass and floated over the baseball field. The parking lot was empty except for cars belonging to upperclassmen. My dad had dropped me off on his way to work after we’d spent the forty-five-minute drive in silence. I’d glanced at him through the window as he pulled away, but it was dark, and he was shadowy behind it. It was the way things were with us. Theresa and I found a seat in front of Tim Anderson, who had already fallen asleep, his head resting against the seat in front of him. It was warm and quiet inside, and nearly everyone dozed. When I woke, Tim was placing tiny paper airplanes on my head. Theresa whispered he’d been doing this for several minutes. I was mildly flattered, but Tim was even lower in the hierarchy than we were. He wore jeans hiked up high on his waist, yet they seemed to be drawn downward, and when he bent over to pick up his duffel bag, I would see more of Tim than I wanted. “Knock it off,” I said, flicking the airplanes away. “Hey, Mr. M.’s telling a story.” Up in the front section of the bus, I could see Mr. M.’s bald head scrunching up and his hands gesticulating wildly. I knew right away he was telling the snowball story. Theresa and I made our way up front, and soon, a group of us was squeezing three or four bodies into the seats closest to him. Mr. M. told our class a story about once a week, although we begged for one every day. “Tell us about the loogie in the sandwich!” we’d say, or “Tell us about the one when the cow gets shot.” He repeated his stories often, which no one minded because his telling of them was so detailed and full that we felt like we were living it anew each time. Sometimes, his stories stung with sadness, and we’d file out of the choir room subdued and foggy, distractedly making our way to our next classroom. More often, though, his stories were full of tiny details that left us rolling with laughter. Mr. M. opened his eyes comically wide as he described the truck driver’s eyes as the snowball barreled toward him. He ducked from view behind his seat to show how the driver disappeared when the snowball hit its target. By now, our group had grown, so seniors, freshmen, and everyone in between were squashed together around him. A couple hours later, we stood in a close semi-circle in the school’s gymnasium. It was an hour until our performance, but Mr. M. wanted to hear the acoustics. We focused on him as he pulled us in tighter, pleading with us to listen to one another, hear one another’s parts, and remember what the song was about. Mr. M. always made us dissect the madrigal’s lyrics, pushing us to feel the passions of the fifteenth century. “Live it!” he would shout. I sang with zeal, watching him for signs that I should back off or, hopefully, sing more enthusiastically. Theresa was across the semi-circle from me, and I could usually pick out her part, but this time, I could only catch it faintly. I grasped my own part and sang confidently until Mr. M. gave me the hand, and I knew I’d blown it again. Defeated, I headed to the locker room with the rest of the girls. Theresa had gone ahead of us, and I looked for her as I stood in the mirrors, my reflection small and childlike next to Kathy and her perfect hair and makeup. “Hey, Steph!” Kathy shouted. “Let me borrow your eyeliner, bitch!” “Only if you twist my titties!” There was raucous laughter, and the eyeliner flew above several heads to Kathy. I recognized Theresa’s shoes under the stall and knocked. “Are you okay?” “My stomach hurts.” Theresa opened the door and sat down on the bench. She was white. “Do you have the flu?” “I guess,” she said. “I don’t know.” “Are you going to sing?” I asked. “Do you want me to tell Mr. M. you can’t?” “No.” She was unusually closed-lipped. My hands lay helplessly in my lap as if they didn’t know what to do. But as we walked on stage, it felt like every one of those middle-schoolers was clapping for me. Jasmine’s soft doe eyes locked with Mr. M.’s, and she sang out our starting note. I watched Mr. M. and I lived the lyrics, and I barely noticed anything else. Until partway through the second song, when Theresa quietly walked off stage as if she had a pre-arranged appointment. As I watched her disappear into the locker room, I faltered and lost my part. Mr. M.’s eyes had followed her, but now he scowled at me, and I struggled to re-find my place. After the performance, I found Theresa doubled over the bathroom stall, full-on sobbing. “I think you need to get someone.” We waited in the emergency room for what seemed like an eternity. The chaperone who had driven us had returned to the gymnasium, as we were evidently understaffed after all, and there was a major concern that without proper chaperoning, there would be fornication or drinking. The chaperone had already asked a couple of pointed questions about whether Theresa might be pregnant and seemed doubtful when Theresa had adamantly shaken her head. I had never been in an emergency room and was surprised at the amount of sitting and doing nothing involved. A middle-aged woman read Cosmopolitan as she waited. The cover advertised an article about the “10 Sexiest Things for Celebrities.” I wondered if that was different than the 10 Sexiest Things for Derek and Stephanie. Theresa rocked back and forth without talking, her head down. Every time the nurse entered, I was sure her name would be called, but it was not. Tears were dropping onto Theresa’s arms she had clutched around her middle. I went to the front desk, staffed by a woman with dull eyes. “My friend has been waiting a long time.” “We’re just a little busy right now,” she replied. “We’ll get to her as soon as possible.” I felt a twist of panic. I gripped the counter. “Something is really wrong with her. She’s not pregnant, she’s not on drugs. She needs to be seen right now. If she isn’t taken care of now, I don’t know what is going to happen.” My voice broke then, and embarrassingly, I stood at the counter and cried. But I saw a little life flicker in this woman’s eyes, and she went into the back. A minute later, she returned. “We’ll see your friend now.” I didn’t see Theresa again until she was in the recovery room following her appendectomy. Her skin was still pale, and her hospital gown lay sloppily, exposing her shoulder. I looked down, and the black and white tiles of the floor began to rush up toward me, and then there was a nurse holding my head down in between my knees. When I could stand, she guided me out of the room. I arrived back at the gymnasium long after our classmates had stopped laughing, shouting, and trying to sneak over to the other side of the gym. Theresa’s parents had offered to let me stay with them at the hotel and return home when Theresa could leave the hospital, but I had chosen to continue the tour. I still wanted to sing. But now, standing in the dark, listening to snores and trying to see which lump was my own waiting sleeping bag, I wished I had gone with them. I was relieved when Mr. M. appeared to guide me to my bag. As we made our way through sleeping bodies on the floor, I wanted to tell him the whole story. I wanted him to know how scared I’d been. I wanted to cry. I wanted him to hug me. But as soon as we were at my spot on the floor, he said, “Get some sleep,” and disappeared. I wondered where John was. Even Tim would have been a welcome conversationalist. But no one appeared. On the bus the next day, I sat in the seat with Jasmine as we drove down the highway. I was exhausted and felt out of place without Theresa. I leaned my head against the bus window. “What kind of music do you listen to?” Jasmine’s voice startled me. It may have been the longest sentence I’d ever heard her speak. “Only madrigals?” “Um, no. I don’t really listen to madrigals outside of choir.” We talked, working slowly through her struggles with English. I noticed that she laughed easily, just quietly. She wasn’t serious at all. I saw John making his way to the front of the bus to listen to Mr. M.’s stories. “He walks like, what do you call it? A big spider,” Jasmine said, mimicking his swinging arms. “You aren’t like I thought,” I said. “I thought you studied all the time.” “I just never have anyone to talk to.” Just then, Stacy plopped into the seat in front of us on her knees, her chin resting on her hands as she looked at us. “Hey,” she said. “Hi,” I offered. I couldn’t imagine what Stacy wanted with us. “You want a Twinkie?” She held a Twinkie out toward me. “They gave them to us last night and you missed out. I got an extra, though, so you want it?” “Okay,” I took the Twinkie. “Thanks.” “That must have sucked last night.” Stacy’s heavily lined eyes were kind. Right now, she didn’t really seem like a wild and promiscuous partier. Even if she did swear and use bad words. “God,” she said. “Where are we even going?” The bus was taking a detour. Mr. M. knew of a church with good acoustics in one of the tiny towns the freeway blew past. He’d arranged for us to have access to the sanctuary. Inside the domed church, sunlight shone through stained glass windows, and a quiet reverence filled the space, silencing our jokes and laughter as we filed into the center of the sanctuary beneath the high domed ceiling. The only audience member was a church secretary sitting in the back pew. Mr. M. drew us into a huddle and placed his finger over his lips. He waited until we were completely silent and then raised his hand to Jasmine for the starting note. The sound was incredible. It rang up and throughout the dome, bouncing from one angled section of the roof to another. One full measure later, as I began my second soprano part, I could still hear the ringing of the first note. The sound swelled through the room and seemed to move around and between us, even as we stood shoulder to shoulder. I closed my eyes and heard Jasmine’s first soprano dancing across the melody. Stephanie’s deep alto voice established strength and consistency. Kathy’s second soprano sang a note slightly under mine, and I recognized it as truer, so I matched it. John’s tenor played off the melody, and I heard the desire in it. I missed Theresa’s alto, but Tim’s bass struck a confident chord that anchored me. I listened and let my voice blend with the others. I realized I hadn’t been watching Mr. M. and no longer needed his gestures and facial expressions. Together, our voices wrapped around each other and became something beyond our own individual wishes, our loneliness, our restlessness, our confidences and confusions, and rang out; our voices rose up and into the dome of the church, then outside past the school bus and outside over the fields into the clear, clean air. When the last note stopped ringing, I opened my eyes to Mr. M beaming. He pointed a long finger at me. “Yes!” he said, “Yes.” “A High School Madrigal” has looked for the right home for many years. It was one of the first chapters I wrote in my memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest , forthcoming from High Frequency Press. During one of thousands of revisions, I removed it because it didn’t fit in the book's arc. However, I still love this story about belonging. High School is such an interesting time when you define who you are while you find the space where you fit. The breakthrough I had, where for a moment I stopped seeing people through their differences, but instead, through what we were as a whole, was pivotal for me. Previous NAOMI ULSTED writes fiction and non-fiction. She’s the author of the YA novel The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). Her memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest, will be published in Spring 2026 by High Frequency Press. She lives on the southern coast of Oregon. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Glamour Shots Naomi Ulsted I had spent my morning fantasizing about the UPS guy. He had thick dark hair and a natural smile, and he usually arrived at the office around ten in the morning. While booking reservations at La Quinta hotels across Texas for the children’s theatre show I worked with, I made sure I was in the front office in case he was just running late. After lunch, I gave up and was in the back room reorganizing our costumes when I heard the door open. I draped my sparkling green witch costume over an office chair and darted to the front, ignoring the office manager’s disapproving look. She didn’t care for me bolting in or out of rooms. She pursed her lips as I slugged back Gatorade, suffering from the after-effects of an evening dancing down on Sixth Street. My new life in Austin was days of bland mediocrity punctuated by dancing on Sixth Street and the UPS guy’s arrival. Sadly, it was only a salesman selling Glamour Shots from the mall. So maybe I bought them because I was consoling myself about the UPS guy. Or maybe because the office manager sniffed with disdain as I reviewed the package they were offering: a professional sitting that included makeup and dress for up to three people and one eight by ten print, all for a flat rate of sixty dollars. I handed over my credit card. It’s not like I was dying for a photoshoot. I hadn’t wanted to be a model since I was twelve, but my little sisters were coming to visit. They were eleven and thirteen years old, and I’d convinced our mom to let them fly from Oregon to Texas to spend two weeks with me. I imagined us dressed to kill, looking sophisticated and elegant. I felt very adult as I tucked my credit card away and returned to my shimmering costumes. I picked Leah and Tanya up from the airport, where the three of us crammed into the cab of my pick-up truck and let their suitcases slide across the bed. We stayed up late drinking root beer and feeling our way back to the comfortable rapport we’d had before I moved away. Tanya, the eleven-year-old, sat on my only piece of furniture, a large papasan chair. She curled her tiny self into the nest of it, eating microwave popcorn from the bag. Leah and I sprawled on the floor, our root beer bottles sitting on a square block that had been part of a book display at Barnes and Noble, where I’d worked before the theatre job. It served as my dining room table. The soles of Leah’s feet were thick and calloused. She rarely wore shoes, preferring to toughen her feet on the unforgiving terrain of southern Oregon, priding herself on her ability to walk on the thistles that grew rampant across thirsty dirt. “So, how are things with Rick and Mom?” I asked. Our mom had married Rick a couple of years ago. When I came to visit, I rarely stayed for more than a couple of nights. Rick was snide and derogatory toward me. I hated him for being in my sisters’ lives. “He’s an asshole,” Tanya said immediately. “They fight all the time,” Leah said. “As if you even hear it,” Tanya said to her. “You just hide in your barn all the time.” Leah kept vast quantities of animals, including goats, rabbits, and sheep. She secretly housed and fed a black widow spider in a jar in a dark corner of the barn. “He eats mayonnaise from the container,” Tanya said as if that ended any and all discussion of our stepdad’s character. Which, in some ways, it did. “Screw him,” Leah said. “He said I was mean to my animals and told me I’d never be a veterinarian.” Tanya curled up even smaller. “He told me I probably wouldn’t graduate from high school. He said statistics prove it.” “What statistics?” I asked. “Girls from,” and she raised her fingers in quotations, “lower economic backgrounds .” She gestured to my barren studio apartment. “I can’t wait to live on my own.” I had two bachelor's degrees and spent my days researching La Quinta and waiting for the UPS guy. On performance nights, I wore my glittering witch costume and danced on stage, expertly twirling my witch’s broom. But performance nights were only a few times a month, and the rest of the time, it was just mediocre old me. Austin wasn’t cheap and once I’d paid for rent, I usually only had enough left for food and liquor. I had a refrigerator with cheese, dill pickles, and Shiner Bock beer. A recent photo of myself showed thin legs and too prominent shoulder bones. Weak and brittle. “It’s not all that,” I said. On the day of our Glamour Shots, we made our way through the mall. My sisters’ reaction to my big photoshoot idea was underwhelming. Grudgingly, Leah had put on shoes for the trip. Tanya asked if we could go to the arcade instead. I tried to make up for it with my own false enthusiasm. “It’s going to be fun,” I bubbled as we navigated through crowds of girls wearing crop tops who laughed loudly at jokes made by boys who sauntered as if they knew their place at the top of the hierarchy of mall goers. Which they did. As we passed by a group of girls emerging from J.J. Jeans with packages dangling from their arms, one of them narrowed her eyes at Leah’s overalls and sneakers. She nudged her friend and giggled. Leah reddened, shoving her hands further into her pockets. “Oh, look,” Tanya said, glancing toward the girls. “There’s a sale on Barbies.” I had imagined Glamour Shots would be located in a posh studio, but this place had as much elegance as the Standard Optical shop next door. The receptionist wore pancake makeup and long false lashes. She raked her eyes over us as if overwhelmed by the exhausting task before her. “Okay,” she said in a tired voice. “We’ll get you dressed.” We had been encouraged to bring our own clothes, but since all we had were overalls, jeans, and sweatshirts, we’d decided to choose from their wardrobe. We squeezed into the dressing room and rifled through our options. Too many sequins. Too much gold lamé. The receptionist-turned-stylist held a leather dress toward me with six inches of fringe hanging from the bodice. I shook my head. Tanya pulled out a red denim dress cut scandalously low, raising her eyebrows. Leah stared blankly at the racks of clothes as if someone were speaking in Swahili to her. Feeling the whole adventure was going sideways, I began yanking dresses out and holding them up to her. “Try this velvet one,” I pleaded. What if they never wanted to visit me again? What if they went home feeling worse than when they got here? What if the UPS guy never came back? What if I never did anything but call LaQuinta so I could pay another month’s rent? What if my sisters started to believe Rick? What if the statistics were right? Finally, we settled on three black dresses. They were cut lower than I’d like for us, but this was Glamour Shots, so we didn’t have much choice. My dress sagged around my thin frame, so the stylist tightened it by fastening it in the back with a binder clip. Tanya stuffed wads of toilet paper into her bra to help fill out her dress. Leah refused to put her shoes on, and the stylist finally relented since they wouldn’t be in the photograph. She hiked up her dragging skirt as she padded toward the hair station. There was hairspray, thick foundation too dark for our skin, more hairspray, contouring, shading, more hairspray, a thick coating of mascara, bright red lipstick, and then we were done. My face felt like it was a pound heavier. Leah coughed her way toward me through a final cloud of hairspray. Tanya looked like a child prostitute. I thought I might have seen our photographer doing Jello shots on Sixth Street. His wavy hair fell over one eye, making me wonder if it would impair his photography skills. He hoisted a blank screen behind us and situated us close together. A strand of Tanya’s hair got in my mouth, and I tasted chemicals. The photographer squeezed us together. As he moved Leah into place, she reached behind me to steady herself on the stool, accidentally brushing her arm against Tanya’s face. Her arm came away with a smear of makeup. Tanya tried to inch her way behind me to hide her cleavage, but the photographer kept pulling her back out. The lights were hotter than stage lights, and I wondered if all this makeup was going to slide down my neck. The camera began to click as we tried to maintain the awkward stances he’d shoved us into. “Okay, now smile,” he said. We tried. “Close-mouthed smile this time, Ladies. Give me some sexy!” Leah’s grip on the stool slipped, and she stumbled out of view. The photographer glanced at his watch. “Come on, ladies, show us your glamour!” We tried for glamour. We smiled with closed mouths. We smiled with wide-open grins. He turned on the fan so our hair wafted behind us in gentle waves. Tanya sneezed. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let me take a look.” I felt a small wave of nausea in the heat of the lights. I wondered what to do tonight to keep my sisters from getting bored. “Hmm,” the photographer said as he studied the photos in his camera. “Your eye,” he said to me. “You’re kind of blinking.” He brought the camera to me so I could see the small photos. My right eye wasn’t open as wide as the left. I wasn’t actually blinking, but it was definitely noticeable. “Let’s try a few more,” he said. Leah sighed as we arranged ourselves again, trying to be glamorous and seductive and elegant once more. He snapped a few pictures and then checked them in the camera. “Same problem,” he said. The receptionist joined our group, and the five of us peered into the camera at my stubbornly drooping right eye. “That’s one unglamorous eye,” Leah said. “Can you try opening it wider?” the receptionist suggested. So, for the next round of clicks, I concentrated on opening my right eye wide. When the photographer checked the shots, his brow furrowed, and he glanced at his watch again. “Well, I think that’s what we’re going to get,” he said. “You can view the final photos at the kiosk out front.” “I can’t wait to get this shit off my face,” Tanya said as she removed the toilet paper from her bra. Leah unclipped my binder for me, and I hung the dress up. I felt a pinching and a sudden urge to cry. My stupid eye. Ruined the whole thing. We gathered around the kiosk monitor to view the final photos. “I look like a porn star,” Leah said. Her cleavage was pushing up, and as she had been leaning awkwardly, one boob especially was getting a lot of exposure. “You could have a new career ahead of you,” Tanya said. We flipped to another photo where Tanya leered into the camera seductively. She was drama and sex. She was striking. She was a child beauty pageant nightmare. And then, photo after photo of us dealing with my eye. It drooped and sagged. The photos where I tried to open it were worse. My eyebrow raised, but my eyelid sagged even further. My left eye tried to compensate by opening wide as if I was shocked. My expression was pained and stressed. My teeth were bared in a strained smile. “You look like you’re peeing your pants.” “You look like you just stuck a fork in a light socket.” “You look like you have a massive wedgie.” “You look like you just walked in on Mom and Rick having sex.” As we flipped through the photographs, we began to laugh and couldn’t stop. Tanya laughed so that tears cut through her pancake makeup. The stylist-turned-receptionist gave a withering glare, but we laughed so hard that customers at Standard Optical stopped trying on glasses and squinted our way. Leah gripped the monitor to steady herself, bent over in hysterics. “Oh, look,” I said as I flipped through the photos. “It’s the double child hookers and their very surprised pimp.” “I need double copies of each one,” Leah said. “This was totally worth the toil of putting on all this makeup.” “We are such trouble together,” Tanya said. The three of us huddled around the monitor, cackling so that our laughter rang up and past the annoyed receptionist and through the mall, casting its spell, causing workers and shoppers to stop and look around curiously. I took out my credit card and bought $150 worth of prints. Back in our normal clothes, with our voluminous hair still sprayed into place, we headed into the mall. We passed Jordache and Guess, and Versace. Every now and then, we’d take a photo from the package and burst into laughter all over again, stumbling and crashing into each other as we howled. Mall girls moved out of our way. A man trying to give out face cream samples called to us, but I silenced him with a glare from my evil right eye. We bought candy apples and strode down the middle of the aisle in our coven, and as we crunched through the red shells with our sharp teeth, my empty apartment, our stepdad’s words, and every statistic holding us back disappeared before us like wisps of smoke in moonlight. “Glamour Shots” was originally published in the blog Sacred Chickens in February of 2021. This is one of my favorite memories of my sisters. It happened soon after I’d left home, glad to be free of the challenges of childhood. However, on my own, I felt powerless in a different way as I struggled to pay the rent or do anything “interesting” with my life. That day, with my sisters, I felt that together, we could take on the world. Rise above the world’s expectations for us. That breakthrough, that feeling of power, gives me strength still. Previous NAOMI ULSTED writes fiction and non-fiction. She’s the author of the YA novel The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). Her memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest, is forthcoming from High Frequency Press. She lives on the southern coast of Oregon. Next

Third Issue ................................................................................................................................................................... "BREAKTHROUGHS" - 2025/2026 Poem Approaching Four Past Tenses Lauren Camp Read Sight Lauren Camp Read Double Life Mike White Read Stones 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 Almost Stacy Julin Read Last Meal Stacy Julin Read Ballad of U and Me klipschutz Read Hymn for Lorca klipschutz Read It's Okay Andrea Hollander Read Living Room Andrea Hollander Read Blood Draw Karin Anderson Read Yes, Emily, Hope Jan Mordenski Read Aerobics by God Star Coulbrooke Read Red Camaro Star Coulbrooke Read How to Make a Basket Jan Mordenski Read Crash Ruminations (excerpt) Karin Anderson Read Incunabula, Mother Tongue Max McDonough Read One Small Change Max McDonough Read facing it Shanan Ballam Read The Long Haul Shanan Ballam Read An Amicable Correspondence Scott Abbott Read I Saw Her Standing There Scott Abbott Read Cold Marble, Hot Memories Lev Raphael Read Hard Times Lev Raphael 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 West on Piccadilly Shauri Cherie Read huntington beach, march 2 Shauri Cherie Read The Birdwatcher Stephen Wunderli Read Angel's Diner Stephen Wunderli 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 The Whiz Kid Beth Colburn Orozco Read Dear Carley Beth Colburn Orozco Read Imagined Scenes Mary Behan Read Stargazing Mary Behan Read BACK TO TOP

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Letters from Home: Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, New York, 1957 Robert Cooperman Knowing I was lost-puppy homesick, my mother wrote every day, breezy letters to let me know that she, Dad, and my kid brother missed me (about which I was dubious) and were hoping I was enjoying myself, (I wasn’t) and eating healthy, delicious camp food, which, if she were fed that slop she’d have rescued me immediately from that Sing-Sing. I read her letters once, reassurance there was still a world beyond the metaphorical barbed wire of the camp, and didn’t look at them again. The one I did treasure was from my dad, his chicken-scratch not my mom’s pen-beautiful cursive: a man who wrote only when figuring out his piecework-pay for the week. He told me how the Dodgers— recently absconding for L.A. like sneak thieves—were doing; both of us wishing them rat-chattering torment in the NL cellar, forever, and confided he’d made a big score on a bet, and had a surprise for me when I was freed from that pit of deepest hell: my reward for sticking it out and not whining, too much. "Letters from Home" is part of a forthcoming collection entitled A Tale of Two Summers . Some kids love going to summer camp. I wasn’t one of them. So I cherished the letters I got from my mother, and even more, the one I got from my father since he never wrote anything except to figure out his weekly pay and to work the daily crossword puzzles. And of course I cried my little wussy eyes out with each letter. Previous ROBERT COOPERMAN, "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife, Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. Next

Fourth Issue ................................................................................................................................................................... "BREAKTHROUGHS" - 2025/2026 River Dog and the Shadow Man, a story Michael Henson Read Dead Man's Money Michael Henson Read Frank's Buick David G. Pace Read The Little House We Dance In David G. Pace Read Still Life with Fly Shawn Stradley Read Painting the Cave Shawn Stradley Read Awkward David Romanda Read Hairbrush David Romanda Read At the End of October Dennise Gackstetter Read Reconsidering god Dennise Gackstetter Read On the Second Anniversary of His Passing Stephen Ruffus Read Street Imagination Stephen Ruffus Read Just So You Know Carol Coven Grannick Read When He Had to Travel Carol Coven Grannick Read The Awful Thing Christina Robertson Read Exhaling Carefully Christina Robertson Read The Dying Room Paula Harrington Read Nevah Bettah Paula Harrington Read The City Has Changed Mona Mehas Read The Curse of Seventy-Eight Mona Mehas Read The Garden You Made Maureen Clark Read let's say Maureen Clark Read Pursed Lips Robert Cooperman Read Letters from Home: Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, New York, 1957 Robert Cooperman Read BACK TO TOP

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Pursed Lips Robert Cooperman My diminished stamina? I take in too much breath to expel, but you show me how to blow out, pursing my lips, not holding my breath and exhaling in a giant explosion— like a whale through its blowhole— ineffective and exhausting. Along with a pulmonologist’s inhaler, my pursed lips let me exercise, though I’ll never run a marathon, not that I ever did, but at least I don’t feel like I’ve gasped through twenty-six miles when I climb a flight of stairs. But what I can’t get out of my head: those pursed lips: remembering seeing To Have and Have Not as a kid, Bogie telling Bacall to walk around him, taunting he comes with no strings attached, and she comes back with, “If you want me, Steve, all you have to do is whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” her mocking purr. “Just put your lips together and blow ,” and now all I want to do is purse my lips and kiss and kiss and kiss you forever. I’ve been suffering from shortness of breath for quite some time, but recently got good advice from my wife Beth about one way to deal with that problem, and also from a pulmonologist. Also, for our 50th anniversary, I thought a poetic tribute to Beth was very much in order. Previous ROBERT COOPERMAN, "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife, Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue The Little House We Dance In David G. Pace Cheryl’s daughter slips me a personal check for a thousand dollars. This before she leaves for home without her son, our grandson, per usual. I toss it on the bureau in one of the two small bedrooms on the main floor and eventually go to bed in the little house we dance in. In the morning, I get ready for work, thirteen-year-old Derek—for that is what I will call him here—gets ready for school, and Cheryl moves into the small kitchen to make breakfast. That’s where the dance begins. The kitchen is about ten-by-eight feet, if you don’t count the counter space, and she makes herself coffee at the sink which is angled into the corner. Soon Derek is standing in the middle, cold feet the size of boats on the tile, his Simpsons cotton pajama bottoms getting too short. His voice is lower than it should be, hoarse this early in the day. Cheryl turns from the sink, takes her mug to the opposite side of the kitchen, to the microwave above the stove. Derek steps back, yawning, hair a mess. There is the whir of the microwave, then she’s back to the sink as if she’s made a giant oval pass in a single move. There is his voice again, saying something at an improbable pitch for a boy his age. And then I step onto the floor. This house seemed large when we first bought it four years ago. But then everything seemed large after our one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Now it has settled in to be the cottage that the real estate agency called it—nine hundred square feet on the main floor, nine hundred in the nearly finished basement. We didn’t have enough furniture to fill it and went shopping for extra beds, a sofa for the TV room downstairs, chairs and lamps to fill spaces that looked blankly at us for weeks. Now we all live in the kitchen, it seems. Like the designated emergency gathering spot for airline crews outside a hotel, it is the space we migrate to when we aren’t sure where else we should be. I was furloughed from the airline two years ago, and while looking for full-time work, I’ve been an adjunct at two local colleges. Cheryl is making lunches for me and Derek and is to the immediate left of the sink at the bread board above the utensil drawer, which is where I’m trying to get for a spoon. She’s halfway through cutting a tomato, and she swings the lower half of her body for me to the left. Derek moves back by the far wall next to the door that leads to the basement. He has an itch on his back, and both arms are wrapped around him, trying to get at it through one of my T-shirts that, because of his lank, has shoulder seams dropped halfway down his arms. I merge the spoon into my shredded wheat and move to the opposite side of the kitchen—to the door leading to the dining room—but I stand there to eat. We all stare at each other for a moment, and then the dance starts up again. I considered it a small victory when I began to think it was no longer an imposition to have Derek in our home full time, that I was getting something from the experience completely unexpected and filled with a kind of haphazard grace. But the conversations in my head with his mother, my daughter—really my step-daughter—continue anyway: furious, sarcastic, mean. Always I return, a bit sheepish, to the only fact I need to hang onto, a fact I share with those who ask. Derek’s mother is unavailable to him. That is all. Unavailable. And now I have this check of hers. So, Derek lives with us in this cottage in a Salt Lake City neighborhood far away from the life we had in New York, and as he grows the house continues to shrink. As he moves through its tiny rooms built in 1950 in what was originally a Dutch enclave of the city, it trembles under his weight but somehow holds as he jumps the last four stairs to the basement with a mighty thud that rattles the new windows we finally had cut into the foundation—for more light in this little house with gray wood shingles for siding. And even downstairs where it is carpeted and slightly more spacious and where we congregate in front of the television for yet another viewing of Derek’s favorites (Die Hard and Ocean’s Eleven ), we navigate around each other in a series of complicated steps. Step back, twist to the right, step up, fold to the left. We move around great-great grandfather Daley’s leather-strapped trunk serving as a coffee table for Cheryl who is sashaying through with a basket of laundry. We perform a two-step on the way to the corner office around a pile of videos being organized in the middle of the floor by Derek. “Bow to your partner, one, two, three . . ..” And then there are the cats. How soon we have filled this little house that once seemed so spacious compared to the jigsaw puzzle of a New York apartment with boxes of Christmas wrap carefully stored with Cheryl’s picture-framing equipment under the bed. The owner of this little house before us, a young man, actually had a punching bag hanging from the door jamb leading into the office downstairs. Room to throw a punch, for God’s sake. Now, Cheryl and I share the office and Derek occupies the bedroom with Jimmi Hendrix in skintight pants posted on the door. The cats are like a credit card ad—“everywhere you want to be.” Not unlike my daughter, I suppose, whose absence is what’s everywhere. In fact, from time to time she still makes a phone call or sends an email to inform us of something all people should know about pre-teens, a summer program that would be good for Derek (and that we will have to pay for), how important it is that a child understand the “natural consequences of his behavior,” a new book out on attention deficit disorder. Through the receiver I can hear the television in the background, the raucous laughter of her boyfriend; the categorically fecund breath of the university where she is a hot shot undergraduate “single mother” at 34. She graduates soon. This is what she can do as a mother. Make a phone call. There is a conversational arc I travel in my head with my daughter. It is the same every time, and it comes across as sanctimonious and angry, a litany of her crimes and of my woes. It ends with “tough love” demands that start with, “And you will . . ..” I am the good father even though I’m hard and pressing, which is my job, damn it, to make sure my love for her is earned, not granted as with her mother’s. After all, the world works that way. You have to earn the love of the world. This is how the conversation actually goes this time between us. We are in the park the previous summer which is between our cottage and the house that Derek does not want to live at. We are at a picnic table. I have asked for the meeting. She is smoking a cigarette. “I know you think all of this is okay with me,” she says. “That I don’t care.” “I’m not thinking anymore,” I say. “I’m looking for you to actually act. Not just talk about what you’re going to do as if just talking about it lets you off the hook.” She pulls out a piece of paper with a list. “I’ve brought notes.” “What are you going to do?” I say, jabbing at the paper. “Itemize our crimes?” “I never asked you to take Derek in.” “I’m not talking about me and your mother. I’m asking you to be a mother to your son. “You step in without my asking and then expect my gratitude . . . “Gratitude?” “ . . . when you’re really just making me look bad. “To whom? Who is it this week?” She searches over her notes, as if for the answer. Turns her head to take a drag. Blows. “Robert? Is that his name?” “I didn’t ask you to take Derek in!” “That’s right. Derek moved himself in. Took him a year. But he’s not a dumb kid.” “He wouldn’t do anything I needed him to do. He’s . . . incorrigible.” “What story do you need us to tell Robert when he asks about your son? That he’s ‘incorrigible’. . . “I’m not dating “Robert”! “ . . . when he finds someone he doesn’t know passed out in bed below his bunk? You can’t even pick him up on time at school.” “I’m a single mother!” “You were ninety minutes late. He was alone. And it wasn’t the first time. You showed up with a guy he doesn’t even know and then argued with your son that McDonald’s for dinner wasn’t what someone named ‘Mike’ wanted. Do you know that at night before bed your mother has to walk your son through the house checking the locks? He sleeps with a baseball bat.” She stands up. “I didn’t ask you to take Derek!” Maybe it doesn’t really matter how the conversation goes. Only how it ends. My pounding the table and raising my voice so that someone walking by looks at us. Something about “single mother, my ass. Try ‘no mother’.” Her saying something that sounds as if she pulled it off of Dr. Phil like, “This relationship costs me too much” as she tries to juggle her bike, her cigarette, and the two pages of now crumpled notes. And she is leaving. If there were a door, and she had an extra hand, she would be slamming it in my face. But it is I who wants revenge even though it is disguised as foresight. “You need to take care of your son for yourself,” I announce to her back. “You need to be his mother for your own sake as much as his!” But she is gone. I will apologize two days later, but the damage will have been done. My gunning for revenge has only triggered her spite. Turns out that saying what I’ve been thinking for a long time isn’t the right thing to do. Clearly, I’m not good at this. That was last year, in the spring, when dinner could be taken on the back deck. Now we are back inside, in the eight-by-twelve dining room off the kitchen. There is a seam between the dining room and the living room where, incomprehensibly, there appears to have once been a wall. Impossible to imagine one more wall sectioning off another part of the house that is already . . . so . . . small. We sit at this table for everything right now—dinner, breakfast, homework, model car making. My laptop sits here after two of the four shelves collapsed under the weight of books in the office Cheryl and I now share since moving Derek into my original office downstairs. This is my daughter’s fault as well, somehow. The collapsed book shelves with everything now on the floor. When my books are on the floor, I can’t seem to get anything done. Another convenient excuse—along with the TV just outside the door next to Derek’s GameCube with spidery cords spread eagle—not to get my prep time in, or not to work on my novel before I go to class. I consider not cashing my daughter’s check. If I do cash it, don’t I legally accept the terms of the transaction, and in turn, the arrangement? But we need the money. Derek is expensive. We’ve seen an attorney, but her advice is not to anger either of Derek’s parents (whoops ). To let sleeping adult children, well, lie, no pun intended. So not only is there no child support, but we don’t qualify for state assistance either. Whenever I attempt to tell the story of how we moved back here to be closer to our grandson after his parents’ divorce and how we are now raising him, none of it sounds convincing, especially to myself. Somehow my brilliant but conversationally elusive daughter has perfected the narrative that makes us look as if we are just mid-life co-dependents. Why aren’t we putting our foot down? people ask. Why aren’t we claiming our grandparent lives? Why don’t we go to court? Why is our house suddenly so small? Why do we put up with it? It was eighteen months into my furlough, the summer after my conversation in the park with Derek’s mother, and our little family of three manages to go on vacation, my first in over two years. We drive across the high desert, down through the appropriately named and plunging Virgin River Canyon to Las Vegas and into the San Bernardino Mountains and then to LA where we land on Hollywood Boulevard. Universal Studios theme park will claim our lives for the next two days. We are out of the house but into a single motel room in Little Thailand. One bathroom, one television, one short fuse. Derek has the impossible task of exulting in movie-land while still maintaining “cool.” It’s not unlike my dilemma. How do I love this boy but not feel taken advantage of? To love him, to care for him—doesn’t that mean I’m absolving my daughter of any responsibility? Am I not telling her by my actions, by being here with her son while she’s out gallivanting, that it’s okay what she’s doing? We’ve been on the Jurassic Park ride. We’ve visited the Backdraft exhibit . . . thrilled at the spills at Waterworld, eaten ribs the size of mine at a Flintstones’ eatery. And I hate this place. It represents everything that is wrong with America. Gluttony, living vicariously through movies, the materialism approaching hedonism of a culture that must, I’m convinced, fire the imaginations of an Islamist suicide bomber flying into the World Trade Towers across the river from our Brooklyn neighborhood and sending the airline industry into a nose dive. Derek, on the other hand, is ecstatic. High on sugar, going ballistic over the Back to the Future ride—twice. He’s pushing and pulling me. Demanding this and that. In a frenzy that he’ll miss something. In short, he is a twelve-year old en extremis , every angle of his body jutting out above over-sized feet. He’s entered that place where he likes to slug me in the arm as if determined to figure out where he bodily ends, and I begin. And then the Blues Brothers are in front of us. A half hour review of their songs built around the bare bone’s references to a long-lost narrative from the 70s. It’s live, and, finally, there’s something for me to enjoy, the music, the singing. And I can tell Derek is jumping out of his skin, craning to go over here, busy himself with something over there, head out for the Terminator 2 Pavilion to don 3-D glasses to see the Governor of California in leather. The Blues Brothers show appears to be winding down. It’s hot—LA is insufferably hot in July. And Derek starts pulling on me. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Now he’s pushing me, this kid almost my height with elbows the hardness of squash rackets. It goes badly from here. I grip him by the back of the neck with one hand and take his upper arm with the other. I start walking him somewhere, away from where he was pulling me. I get my mouth very close to his ear, behind him. He can’t see me; he can only hear and feel me. He attempts to wriggle free, but I have eighty pounds on him. He attempts to say something back, but my grip gets tighter to shut him down. When he’s completely overpowered, I can actually let go and he does exactly what I say because he can’t control his shaking. Cheryl has moved away, furious with me. Only temporarily resigned to the situation, she knows that Derek is spent, but more critically, so am I. She knows, at any rate, that I will only try to defend myself to her and will be angry with her for taking Derek’s side. As if there’s a war going on between me and a twelve-year-old. Or something like that. Now that I have made Derek cry, and Cheryl has walked away, helpless, I become the soft-spoken psychologist that I have learned to hate. And like the soft-spoken psychologist the conversation is designed to make sure that the patient (Derek) knows that my intentions are good, but that he’s just pushed me (the lay shrink) too far. That my bad behavior is not my fault, but his. The optics are: Look good (the parent at Universal Studios quietly decompressing with a visibly distraught pre-teen), get what you want (revenge for having descended as a former flight attendant from five miles high to this parental road where I am both the asphalt and the rubber), and finally, don’t be at fault (he made me do it). None of this is my fault for one very important reason, I think, but it is my trump card: Derek’s mother is not my daughter. She’s Cheryl’s. Derek is not my blood grandson. I am not really a part of any of this. That it is I who can’t stop myself from seeing red, and then acting on it, escapes me in the moment. It will take a long time before Derek starts to trust me again, if he ever does, completely. His “Poppa” is explosive, like the man who fathered him before exiting his life. What’s more, his Poppa does denial like his mother, but his Poppa has less of an excuse than either of his birth parents: I have a young person in my charge, supposedly under my protection. They do not. At least not any longer. At least not for now. During the trip home I mentally disappear into the Mojave Desert. For Derek, he ventures further into Hollywood on the portable DVD player he has in the back seat that Cheryl scrimped together for weeks to buy him just for this trip. He has some good moments after my blow-up in front of the Blues Brothers pavilion. A competition between us of swimming underwater in the hotel pool. A calming moment at an aromatherapy salon, the two of us plugged into the bubbling, bright liquids of jasmine, lavender and citrus. A retro lunch at Hard Rock Café where Cheryl makes us apologize to each other for “the incident” while she is shooting me her mother bear look. She’s right. I have failed the boy, and it makes me want to run away from him, just as others in his life have done. To run back to the choices I thought I was making even after I got laid off from the airline. To be childless. To somehow be a writer. To not ever have to visit Universal Studios. Back in the little house we dance in, we have been gearing up for another school year. There are school fees, clothes and shoes to buy. We need a new bed for Derek. He’s outgrown the daybed we folded out for him before he migrated over full-time. We are getting ready to take a mortgage out on the house we bought for cash with the money we got from selling our co-op in New York. And there is the second appointment coming up with the orthodontist who will require another two thousand dollars up front, out-of-pocket, none of which either of his parents has offered. Until now. My daughter’s check is here, waiting to be acknowledged, redeemed, and it’s the very embodiment of her myriad avoidances, the latest of which has turned me into an abuser of my grandson. Derek trusts me less, of course, digs his heels in more when I do anything other than agree with him or let him have his spurious, now nearly-thirteen-year-old way. I am one who overpowers and shames, one who digs in his heels as well. Someone who wants to win, and who propels every conversation, every interaction into a competition of sorts. A sick contest between an adult and a child. But my daughter is right. I didn’t have to take on Derek. And now that I have, badly, I have become the very thing I’ve come to despise in her. Today, it’s the first day of school and we are dancing again. Derek is eating eggs, bacon, and toast that I’ve made for all of us before the start of a new year, to get us all off on a good foot. I am standing at the stove, the frying pan hissing and spitting, and Cheryl comes up behind me with her coffee. I shift to the right even before her hand rests gently on my back to signal her arrival. She opens the microwave to warm her mug and pats me twice so that I know she’s retreating backwards in a tango step to our internal rhythm. I move back into my space for two beats. Then Derek arrives to get juice out of the fridge, the door of which opens into my hip which I bump back just enough to send it closed as he turns to the counter with the jug, looking for a glass, which Cheryl gets for him since she’s now standing at the counter wiping up crumbs. From cruising altitude, it must look like a hive—bees frantically filling in cells, intimate, humid. Or it looks like the choreographed chaos of a street scene in a musical. These are steps comforting but terrifying as well. This is the little house we dance in and will dance in forever it seems. Constrained, constricted as we are but at times calmed by kinetic familiarity. “We need a bigger house,” I say to no one in particular and flip an egg. “I think we should look for something with a bigger kitchen at least. Maybe something on the other side of Liberty Park.” Derek stops short, a half-filled glass of juice in his hand. He is a different boy than he was this past summer at Universal Studios when he followed the patron saints of the American dysfunctional family, The Simpsons, as they waddled away from signing autographs with their four-fingered yellow hands. He had padded after them like a puppy as they disappeared following the photo op behind a fence, and he stood, as if in jail, hands on the vertical bars, his pale forehead pressed into the cool steel, his cheeks still stained with dried tears from our ugly encounter. Now, standing with his juice held half aloft, he is something of a cross between The Beaver (a TV boy sanitized from irony) and a mountain-bred surfer dude (coolness bordering on nihilism). “No way!” he growls as only a man-boy can growl. “We are not moving from this house. I love this house. This is our house. You’re going to give it to me when you die.” And then he grins. And those four-thousand-dollar braces go a-glint in the kitchen light, and I have a stab of gratitude for the slip of paper signed by my daughter and sitting on my bureau less than a simple, modified foxtrot away. # This nonfiction piece is an unpublished excerpt from my book-length narrative nonfiction Cold Desert: An Interstate 80 Picaresque , which placed second in the Utah Original Writing Competition. It tracks a breakthrough between me and the step-grandson my wife and I raised as our son in the early aughts. How does a non-blood grandfather acting as a father care for a boy when he doesn't feel like he (the author) had a choice to do so? That "Derek" demonstrated to me that "the little house" the three of us danced in was now HIS house, was the dam that broke into a wash of tender paternal feeling and bonding. Previous DAVID G. PACE is an essayist and fiction writer located in the Mountain West. His collection of short fiction American Trinity: and Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor (BCC Press, 2024) was a winner in the Utah Original Writing Competition, and won the 15 Bytes Award for fiction . Pace holds an M.A. in Communication/Rhetoric and is the recipient of many awards, including two for his first novel, Dream House on Golan Drive (Signature Books, 2015). davidgpace.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Frank's Buick David G. Pace I’m not sure when my late father-in-law’s town car became our car. It wasn’t when we wrested it from Mom, who we decided couldn’t safely operate it anymore. It wasn’t when we changed the title to my name. For even after that, I saw it as Frank’s Buick, a.k.a. the Batmobile, so named because of its dual automatic “ComforTemp” controls in the front seats (leather), its “Twilight Sentinel” feature that turns the headlights on and off depending on how light it is outside, the heated windshield, the cruise control with automatic reset, the illuminated entry system around door locks, the electric radio antennae that telescopes into hiding every time you turn off the radio. The sexy stereo system. Actually, the stereo is one I had installed, complete with a CD player. The old one, which came with the car in 1991, freakishly shut down with a pop while I was listening to the radio and approaching the Verrazano Bridge from the New Jersey side in 2001. It was at night, just days after the terrorist attacks on New York City and, of course, the first thing I thought was that there was another downed transformer on top of a burning skyscraper. Embedded as I was within those many pounds of Detroit excess, I still felt vulnerable. When I replaced the stereo, I actually wondered what Frank Daley would think, what style he would prefer. I winced after it was installed when I realized it didn’t mesh too well with the dashboard, designed at a time when CD players were probably a thousand dollars each and Americans were still getting tangled in their cassette tapes. I didn’t think of the Batmobile as ours even after we made arrangements for Mom to live in a rest home in Western Massachusetts and took the car home to Brooklyn, where we hobbled it with a newly bought “club” on its steering wheel. The maroon monster with the runners on top of the trunk sat parked on Prospect Park Southwest as a persistent reminder of the suburban car culture I had fled. My wife, Cheryl, and I talked about never using it except to visit Mom. That it was a gas guzzler and the size of a small pachyderm and therefore couldn’t be trusted on the narrow, pocked streets of New York. Its very presence suggested that we weren’t really New Yorkers who take the subway everywhere. I wondered what my late father-in-law would think if he knew that his ten-year-old car, which cost more than his pre-fab in a Florida golf village, was sitting on the streets of New York and dodging yellow cabs on the monthly trip up to his boyhood home of Florence, Mass. to see his widow. It was shortly after the Buick’s Brooklyn era started that I found Frank’s auto log. It was in the glove compartment, and in it he had put the history of the car’s maintenance: the lube in 1992 shortly after he bought it at a Ft. Pierce, Florida dealership; the wheel balance later that year; the replacement of this with that. It was detailed, fastidious, and very Frank— the type of man who labeled his Christmas storage boxes with reminders of which ornaments he’d hung each year. I found this log scoffable, coming as I did from a family whose patriarch was lucky to remember to put gas in the car, but months before the stereo got replaced, I found myself adding to the log as the car needed service: Re-set RF wheel speed signal code (2/11/00) Horn button replaced (9/21/00) Inspection (10/03/00) I would return the small pencil—expertly sharpened with the pocket knife I had inherited from him—to the wire rings of the notebook and wedge it back into the glove box as if the car would fail to turn over unless its history were kept intact. Frank Daley’s story was one largely written by the time I met him in 1992. The Buick was barely a year old, and I remember standing with him behind the trunk that automatically closed and locked itself, a cooler of drinks on the runners, watching Fourth of July fireworks over a saltwater river. He had a natural fascination for celebrations, which brokered easy conversation with me, someone I’m sure he thought was just his daughter’s summer boyfriend. She was twice divorced, and I was nearly twelve years her junior. I kept my distance from this short, stocky man. At the pool earlier that day, Frank, white and hairless, was nearly luminescent next to the blue tile, his body a network of scars that crackled from the notch in his throat through his sternum and to his left leg, where they had stripped away a vein. I knew that Frank had developed a seizure disorder late in life and had suffered more than one heart attack, the first when he was just fifty-three-years old, which forced him into early retirement from his work as wonder-boy salesman for Rustcraft Greeting Cards. In Brooklyn, I got a lot of respect driving around in the Batmobile, even though for the first month I had to reassure myself vocally that I had the right to drive this car that wasn’t mine and that my mother-in-law sorely missed. The Buick was sleek, its nose tapered from its grill to the center of gravity over a muscled chassis. Its maroon color was all sheen except for a couple of nicks that Frank had judiciously touched up with a tube of car paint he kept boxed in the trunk along with every imaginable car care and travel item, including a chamois, hub cab cleaning foam, flares, and an impressive first-aid kit. The car’s trunk was big enough to hide not one, but two bodies. Only twice did I wheel my luggage past the Batmobile to the subway for the two-hour commute to JFK International where I was based as a flight attendant. After that, the siren call of convenience lured me to its side, all sheen. As I shot down Caton Avenue and Linden Boulevard, I actually had people flagging me down, thinking that with a town car, I was operating a car service. Other vehicles moved the hell out of the way when they saw me angling into a lane or chasing a yellow light through a busy intersection with Flatbush Avenue. That is, until one day about a year after I started taking the car to work. I was on North Conduit, the final feeder of my trip before hitting the straight shot to the airport, and I was late. The chaos of late afternoon bore down on three lanes becoming one, and the world narrowed to this stream of fenders, a mass migration of diverse species nosing into one another’s paths. A man in a Celica was performing the infamous New York Ace: entering the flow of traffic by assuming that if you ignore eye contact with the driver you’re cutting off, he will have to brake for you. I’m not sure if my aggression stemmed from my anxiety over being late, or if I resented that this four-wheeled gazelle would so easily ignore me, a far superior animal bearing down on it—and with the right-of-way no less. The game ended with the gazelle’s left hoof implanted just behind the right shoulder blade of my leopard, the Buick. There was much honking and yelling while the rest of the herd instantly re-directed itself around the new obstacle. “What happened to the Batmobile?” asked Cheryl, who often claimed that when she wanted to lose weight she sat in the passenger seat of Frank’s Buick while I drove. “Bummer, huh? Somebody hit me in the parking lot at work. Didn’t even leave a note. Gotta love New Yorkers.” Frank would have been disappointed, but not because I lied. One of his many maxims to my wife was, she reported, “Lie to others if you must; just don’t lie to yourself.” He would have been disappointed that first, I was driving his Buick on the streets of an uncivilized city (after meeting his wife in New York City on leave during World War II, he never bothered to visit the city again), and second, that I had been so stupid as to crash a car. That was something his wife did, or a man of lesser character, a man who would never be driving a Park Avenue Buick in the first place. Repairs to right quarter panel (6/04/02) $250.00 deductible. Frank and Mabel had lived well, even after Frank was disabled in the late seventies. One could fairly say that in their salad, G.I. Bill days, Frank made “more money than God.” That they could summer on an island every year even while maintaining their home in Rhode Island was a testament to just how much money there was. That after selling both homes they moved into a Florida don’t-call-it-a-trailer trailer was a testament to the price of his disability. The new Batmobile was the final imprint of the life they once had. When Cheryl and I married, we would visit the folks in sodden Florida, where we seemed to hydroplane in the Buick to go marvel at the manatees, to visit the water locks, to lunch at the crab houses before cruising back to the gated village’s swimming pool in which, at the time, I was technically too young to swim (under thirty-five). “If he’s a writer, why is he still working for the airline?” Frank once asked Cheryl who, by sheer dint of character, would always defend me. For me, the question, even second hand, lodged in my cranium like a foul ball pounded into the metal fence behind home plate. And by sheer dint of character, I defended myself to myself: “Why did he hang onto a town car when he lived in a golf village with a five-mile-per-hour speed limit and refused even to pick us up at the airport?” Frank and I had little, if anything in common. I was almost young enough to be his grandson. I was from the West and Mormon, while he was a Yankee, originally from Massachusetts and Episcopalian. I was a romantic with ambitions to write while Frank was all business—in more ways than one. But a writer is a good listener and a former salesman is a talker. True, at times I had to struggle to decipher his “dole-house” from “doll house,” his “khakis” from “car keys,” but I could listen to my father-in-law, and we could watch TV and I could help him paint the garage door at the island house. It was early January 1997, two weeks after Cheryl had returned from a marathon session of changing her parents’ pre-fab into a hospital-away-from-hospital, that the phone rang. It was Mabel. She told us Frank had died in the night. Congestive heart failure. There was no money, only a few investments, insurance, a double-wide fast losing its value in a golf village. The $35,000 Batmobile. We moved Mabel to the rest home near Northampton, Massachusetts, where Cheryl could visit her. Meanwhile, we invested what was left of the money to keep Mom off Medicaid. Except for a fender bender in Florence, Mass. and my secret one in Queens, the Batmobile remained unscathed. After nearly ten years, it was approaching only 60,000 miles, less than half of what most cars had at that age. Still, even after a full year of driving it, I had to remind myself whenever I drove that I had a right to Frank’s Buick. Perhaps I felt that I deserved Frank’s Buick only when I started getting mail from credit card companies addressed to “Frank Pace,” a creepy confusion in the system resulting from the transfer of funds from Frank’s name to mine. If I had to take his name, then certainly I was welcome to take his car, even if it was one that I would have never selected myself. I couldn’t sell it. For one thing, we needed a car to get to Mom, and this one was paid for. Finally—surprise, surprise—it got over thirty freeway miles to the gallon. The Batmobile sat street-side, braving vandals and snowplows in equal measure until Mom died and we decided to return to the West. It was a year after 9/11; the market had been good to us, including the real estate market for our Brooklyn co-op, and the Batmobile was growing on me. I liked the big engine, the big trunk, and the way it plowed through the snow. I liked how Adam from the writers’ group was clearly impressed with its digital temperature control that beeped like a microwave whenever you adjusted it. I guess I liked it because, for me, it was contact with luxury, even as I rolled my eyes at it as “the clunker we inherited from my mother-in-law.” The trip to Utah was not kind to Frank’s Buick. The moving company lifted it right into the semi behind all of our other stuff, then placed a “protective” false ceiling over it so that boxes wouldn’t fall on the car’s roof. Instead, the Batmobile bounced over 1,800 miles, its top rubbing against the unpadded wood ceiling and grinding it raw. Frank would have been appalled. The moving company dodged any and all compensation, so the roof still sports the bands of paintless metal suffered from the car’s prairie crossing. Despite the Buick’s mounting bruises, my relationship to Frank, now deceased for five years, was improving. Though he made over twenty Atlantic crossings during WWII as a cook on the USS Wakefield —we have a picture of him in the galley with Jack Dempsey—Frank was otherwise not a traveler and would have found it inconceivable that his wonder machine, bought in the twilight of his life, would have survived not only the Big Dirty Apple, but also the 4,500 plus-foot elevation of Salt Lake City. Just the ski rack on top of his beloved Park Avenue would have enraged him. So in my mind, I explained all of this to my postal namesake. How the Buick was now Frank’s vicarious time machine, taking his spirit to places he had read about but for whatever reason, found impossible to visit. How he and I were having an extended conversation with each other as father and son, a conversation that motored beyond time zones and dimensions, beyond my life and his death. I realize now that I’d been conversing with him all along, ever since I took over the Batmobile: those harried rides to work through the heart of Brooklyn; that time in Manhattan when he and I sped up the West Side highway and ogled the runners and rollerbladers along the Hudson River, the hard-bodied men cavorting with bikini-topped women—or more shocking, with other hard-bodied men. I imagined that he sat in the back seat on our way up to Niagara Falls and Mormon Country, when I tried alternately to detail and defend my background to him. I could hear him chiding me on my reckless driving, more than once, through Times Square, as if there were any other way to move through that crossroads of the world without at least appearing reckless. He even wept with me right out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel when we were detoured away from Ground Zero, but saw Buddhists on the wooden, West Side Highway platform conducting a purifying smoke ritual for the three thousand dead. And then we were in Utah, and I could hear him berating me for thirty minutes for having pushed the car so hard up from Las Vegas and into the high desert that the right front tire gave out and tore a hole in the front panel to the tune of a thousand dollars. But he was also the one prompting me to give twenty bucks to the two penniless sixteen-year-olds halfway home from Las Vegas in a broken-down Monte Carlo they forgot to put oil in. “By the time their Mom makes it down from Brigham City to pick them up,” I remember him whispering to me, “they will have learned their lesson. Meanwhile, they have to eat.” And in the Wasatch Mountains, he forgave me for installing the ski rack when we rounded a corner to Sundance and he saw, for the first time, the mighty scalloped backside of Mt. Timpanogos, cyanic and terrible in the frigid February air. At Arches National Park, I left him at the aptly named, free-standing Delicate Arch, where he insisted on taking pictures of all the hikers and finding out where they were from, and marveling with them: “There isn’t anything like this in the East!” “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said. In the end, we parted company for good out in the desert two hours west of Salt Lake, where the world’s fastest cars shoot across the salt flats at, literally, rocket speeds. It was hard to know what would have appealed to Frank more, the awesome vastness of the desert, or the fact that man had scored it with his fast, rocket-propelled cars. The flats, white and carrying the form of tiny waves in their crystals, extend for miles to the dusty range of mountains below ribbons of high clouds trailing east. The wind is all around in a place like this, solitary tumbleweeds bumping across the hardened surface of an inland sea that in its horizontality must have reminded Frank of the sea off Peaks Island where he summered, or the sea beyond the bulwarks of the Wakefield as it plowed through the Atlantic before it was eventually torpedoed and sunk. In a place like this, even a New Englander—perhaps especially a New Englander—can let go and leave this world, can imagine that unlike the sea, this is the real end of the world, of the hard-baked rock that we call home. From the edge of Interstate 80, I honked the car horn for several long minutes. I motioned him back to me. But he wouldn’t return. I saw Frank Daley standing out there in his flak jacket and cowboy hat he’d taken to wearing since his removal to the West. Finally, he motioned for me to leave. To take his Buick and return to civilization where it belonged. Where it belonged, and where he no longer lived. So I did. The engine turned over, and the Twilight Sentinel flipped on the headlights automatically like it does. A bit of a clunking noise was coming from the back near the gas tank. The muffler maybe? I’d have to get that checked. And get to the paint shop before the roof started to rust. That’s what I was thinking as I babied my Buick up to seventy-five miles per hour, hit the Dynaride cruise control, and settled in. # "Frank's Buick" was first published in Alligator Juniper . This essay follows the author's continuing and somewhat strained relationship with his now dead father-in-law through the inheritance of the older man's prized Buick. When does your deceased father-in-law's car become your own after its title is handed over to you? Answer: years later, on the salt flats of Utah near where you've relocated, two thousand miles-plus from where the car's original owner is buried. Previous DAVID G. PACE is an essayist and fiction writer located in the Mountain West. His collection of short fiction American Trinity: and Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor (BCC Press, 2024) was a winner in the Utah Original Writing Competition, and won the 15 Bytes Award for fiction . Pace holds an M.A. in Communication/Rhetoric and is the recipient of many awards, including two for his first novel, Dream House on Golan Drive (Signature Books, 2015). davidgpace.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue let's say Maureen Clark there is not a happy ending here the man stuck upside down in the cave will die what then? you will keep living more empty days you’ve begged before and no one came to save you there was no stretcher hauled out with a body breathing but broken mud and dirt worth the life how do you walk away without the rescue live the rest of your life with the always lost In trying to find new ways to deal with difficult subjects, I wrote in the Italian Rispetto form: eight lines, eleven syllables in each line. I like the way a very complex idea fits into this container, like a bento box. "let's say" was published in Sonic Boom . Previous MAUREEN CLARK is the author of the poetry collection This Insatiable August (Signature Books, 2024 ) and has received two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her memoir, Falling into Bountiful: Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon , is forthcoming from Hypatia Press. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue The City Has Changed Mona Mehas the city where I grew up has changed for the better I don’t remember coffee shops where poets read their work or parks with gazebos where drummers taught children I recall empty storefronts and homeless people on park benches the nicer parts of town were hidden or possibly off limits growing up poor produced a mindset difficult to leave behind the place has had an upgrade but I’ve moved away I visit friends from childhood my hometown seems foreign turn back time to the days of my youth I want the new town an area rich in culture and art music flowing from shop doors I want to grow up there in that improved city perhaps then I would change for the better "The City Has Changed" is a poem about the breakthrough experiences that made me see my hometown in a different light. For a while, I refused to believe it but after more time, I finally opened my eyes. Previous MONA MEHAS , a Pushcart Prize nominee, writes poetry and prose from the perspective of a retired disabled teacher. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Resistance and Resilience--Redacted (LJMcD Communications, 2026) . Mona has also written two science fantasy novels and is President of the Poetry Society of Indiana, as well as the Indiana co-Leader of Authors Against Book Bans. monamehas.net Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue The Garden You Made Maureen Clark we planted our oak tree saplings on the same day our husbands raced their carts to the garden center check-out they grew even when we were no longer speaking and were still growing when we mended we always knew they would outlive us our little lives short by comparison to their ringed calendars I would not be surprised if they met on moonless nights to gossip about us our human foibles and I wonder if our oak tree sends messages of condolence to yours now that both of you are dead and the garden you made is gone In "The Garden You Made," the breakthrough I had was the ability to write in a more minimal style, leaving out much of the detail to get to the emotional truth of the poem. Previous MAUREEN CLARK is the author of the poetry collection This Insatiable August (Signature Books, 2024 ) and has received two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her memoir, Falling into Bountiful: Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon , is forthcoming from Hypatia Press. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue The Curse of Seventy-Eight Mona Mehas My sister just turned seventy-nine; I called on her birthday, said congrats. “I broke the curse!” she said, “Damn the stats!” I’m afraid to take this as a sign. Sperm-donor passed at seventy-eight; my sister just turned seventy-nine. Sisters called him Dad, with blood aligned— no, his sperm does not a dad equate. At seventy-eight, our mother died; she’d a weak heart and a crooked spine. My sister just turned seventy-nine— I’m growing old, my age amplified. First sister, same age. Was it bloodline? At dinner, unspoken, thinly veiled superstition and fear, now exhaled— my sister just turned seventy-nine. "The Curse of Seventy-Eight, from my book Hand-Me-Downs (LJMcD Communications, 2024) , deals with the day I came to grips with my own mortality. Previous MONA MEHAS , a Pushcart Prize nominee, writes poetry and prose from the perspective of a retired disabled teacher. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Resistance and Resilience--Redacted (LJMcD Communications, 2026) . Mona has also written two science fantasy novels and is President of the Poetry Society of Indiana, as well as the Indiana co-Leader of Authors Against Book Bans. monamehas.net Next