Past Lives... That's Still a Thing, Right? by J. Diego Frey In my most recent past life, I was almost exactly the same I am now (same job same body shape and fear of spiders same wrinkled cotton wardrobe) except that my hair was curly my name was Margery and my beard was longer. Oh, and I had tentacles where my ears are now. Personal-sized octopus arms, about the thickness of a Marks-a-Lot brand magic marker and long enough to hold in front of my face a cob of buttered corn, which I would eat using the same chewing motions that I do now. In the life before that, prior to the great gene wars of the 2050s, I was shorter, and chubbier, hairier in all the wrong places. And I sold pet insurance to the nervous widows of Omaha. There must be some record of the life that proceeded that but the ether is murky. I was a sort of famous vaudeville act a few lives prior to that. On stage, animal noises would resonate through my enormous, hairy proboscis. In make-up, I had the head of a donkey. My showbiz-name was J. Donkey Frell. A big nose and a fey artistic tendency described my person through an extended series of lives during a dozen generations preceding this, always one of many similar, short, hairy men, weak of will and chin falling always to the sad symphonies of war or at least the singing telegram of venereal disease. Little known fact: Chlamydia…got its name from a character in an unpopular satiric opera I wrote in Vienna in the 1800s. Mostly, though, the spirits describe me as just a surfer of the lower to middle layers of society in a succession of Balkan territories. Notably, once, in the 17th century, I was, due to a clerical error, the Pope for three weeks. Remarkable—my eyeglasses prescription has been almost the same in every life. I don’t want to brag but the gypsy told me that a few thousand years ago, I was a red show pony named Fernutis— rumored to be quite handsome. The gypsy rules our lives. She twists the fabric of time and reality into dental floss. Do not forget to tip the gypsy. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This is a newer poem by me—first draft written maybe 3 years ago. It’s a much longer poem than the previous example. I’ve always felt more comfortable with the short poems, always worrying about overstaying my welcome. But lately I’ve been trying to stretch things out a bit. Mark Doty talks about pushing yourself past the end of your draft to discover where the poem is going to go after your current last line, and it turns out that can be a fun exercise. Mostly I hope that I am keeping the energy all the way through this poem. It starts out with a nice juicy image, so most of my revisions have been along the lines of enriching the subsequent imagery (hmmm…just noticed how close the word imagery is to the name Margery…). Thanks for sticking with the poem over all 23 stanzas! I hope this poem will be an anchor for my new, yet-to-find-an-interested-publisher collection, Froot Loop Moon . .................................................................................................................................................................................... J. DIEGO FREY is a poet living in the Denver area, which is where he grew up and never completely escaped. He published two quite likable collections of poetry, Umbrellas or Else and The Year the Eggs Cracked with Colorado publisher Conundrum Press. jdiego.com Next - Interstellar by David Romtvedt Next

Decoration Day by M. L. Liebler A couple of days after The news reached the States, His mother’s heart broke Never to mend itself. With his last breaths, He took his family and friends Hostage into the darkness Of the world’s sin. There’s no turning back The clocks. They cannot be Adjusted to read the present Time, when the future has died, alone Somewhere, in another place. And the newspapers will write About it and the TV will Talk about it, but no one Will ever tell this story he way it happened. The way it was supposed To have happened in a town, In a life somewhere, unknown. And this business of murder Bruises each rising sun Above every American town. Towns that were never More than small dots On small maps, routing death To innocent lives that Will be forever lost In the rapid-fire Of the jungle night. Because everyone can’t Believe it, That doesn’t mean it didn’t Happen! Because everyone didn’t See it, It doesn’t make it Untrue! Because everyone Hurts, Doesn’t make it Stop! Because after twenty years They’ll have forgotten your names Doesn’t mean you never Existed! Because you did live, Doesn’t mean You’ll remain A memory! Because it is, It is! And you can’t reappear For the benefit of the few Who doubted all along. Injustice is the law here Dear boy. Here where You grew up where You dreamed, not where You died. Not where They took you, Laid you out, Neatly uniformed, Placed you in the funeral Home of the Far East. The whole thing planned, Planned to the smallest detail, Except for your mother’s broken heart. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Published in Written in Rain: New & Selected Poems 1985-2000 (Tebot Bach Press, Los Angeles 2000). Back Back to Current Issue .................................................................................................................................................................................... M.L. LIEBLER is a Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer. His 15 books and chapbooks include Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream (Wayne State University Press, 2008) which was awarded The Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence and The American Indie Book Award for 2009. A Wayne State University Distinguished Scholar, he directs The WSU Humanities Commons and The Detroit Writers' Guild. mlliebler.com Next - Decoration Day by M.L. Liebler Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue The Awful Thing Christina Robertson My mother, Liz Carthage, was used to looking great. She’s an ex-dancer, married for forty years to a successful art dealer. She had adopted a kind of chic built upon exposure to interesting shapes and ideas. Elastic waist pants and cotton/poly sweatshirts were not part of her wardrobe as they are now. Not that she’d notice the difference, but I decided to bring her stockings and a new blouse today, and after searching her drawers, managed to track down a pair of earrings that matched. She tries to put her hands in the stockings now, thinking they’re gloves, but she holds perfectly still while I comb back her hair and pin it, and apply a dab of color to her dispirited lips. Despite her general confusion, she seems to have a deeply embedded recognition of what we are doing. That is to say, she nods and seems pleased. The woman who attends the holiday party won’t be the cosmopolitan of yore, no, not the head turner she once was, but will be, without doubt, the most attractive woman in the Day Room. I remember her dressed to go out with my father to an opening, smelling powdery and lovely, in a bottle green hourglass dress, her dark hair swept back in a sleek chignon. I think of her even before that, before she was Lizzy to my father, Peter. I like to think of her as the woman who wanted to be prima ballerina, but was to become my mother; a young dancer with aspirations and flaws, who likely didn’t look or smell so perfect after six hours in the studio, her feet bleeding through nearly shredded pointe shoes. That woman was separate from me. She was a heartbroken woman seated in an orthopedic surgeon’s office, a woman bewildered as to what to do next if she could no longer dance. She was the woman who, soon after, found the rabbit had died and came to the realization that she was in possession of the seed for another sort of creative life. Now she knows herself only in fragmented refractions. Left to her own devices, she’s a mess, adrift on a sea of holes. She’s the product of neurological devastation and, in a cruel ironic twist, my salvage. I have become the mother. As we approach the Day Room, I feel pride at what remains of her dancer’s posture. That quickly fades into the sad reality before us. Surveying the gathering, I see that Liz Carthage is just another entry in the turtle races, the only difference being that I’d painted her shell. Gentlemen, such as Harmon, are wearing crooked bow ties and have their hair plastered down as if they are in first grade, circa 1935. Ladies’ hair has been sculpted into virtual helmets in shades of peach and beige and ice blue. They are wearing their best faux pearls, their least stained shirts, their old leisure suits. All in safe heels or dismal slippers, all at a loss for what they are celebrating. My mother had been living on 4 West for nearly a year when the Reverend Harmon Triplett arrived. She didn’t (and still doesn’t) know anybody on the unit, not the staff nor the other residents, but this is because she has advanced Alzheimer’s Disease. Most of her “neighbors” on 4 West don’t know her either. Frequently they reintroduce themselves as they pass each other in their never-ending loops of the hallway. The formality is touching, as if they are forever trying to make a good impression. The day Harmon Triplett was brought to the unit, I had just finished combing my mother’s hair, which I often find limp at her shoulders. She still insists on dying it black, though she hasn’t fooled anyone in decades with that. Still, if we don’t keep coloring her hair, don’t take care of those white roots, she has been known to attempt to do it herself—with mascara, eyebrow pencil, even pen. Blue pen. I helped her choose a top to go with her brown polyester pants and a necklace that probably belongs to someone else here, and put a smudge of lipstick on those thinning lips. The makeup thing is more for myself than for her. It is similar to putting candles on a cake, a hopeful contrivance, a fantastical effort toward making a wish come true. The Reverend Triplett was to be moved into Room 18 on the “Green Wing.” My mother is in 2 Yellow, just across from the elevators. When the doors opened, and the Tripletts stepped tentatively out, a familiar aroma came wafting up through the elevator shaft. If ever an odor can make you feel as though you are swimming with rocks in your pockets, it’s nursing home turkey loaf and creamed corn. The family still smelled of the autumn world outside. I wished I could bottle it for them. Belle, the charge nurse, employed her well-rehearsed congeniality in greeting the Tripletts. She was all warmth and breeziness as she had been with us a year ago, and dispersed assurances all around like air freshener. The Reverend was a big man, more than six feet, and had retained the sturdy bones and musculature of his younger days, though it was apparent gravity and illness were conspiring against him. He stammered in an effort to reply and seemed embarrassed that he couldn’t say what he sensed he was supposed to. He shook his head and laughed, handing the whole exchange off to his adult daughter to navigate. I’d liked the look of them, Triplett and his daughter. They were unexpectedly earthy. I don’t know why I automatically assign stereotypical attributes to ministers. Like they all use Ivory soap and sing hymns in the shower, and display exemplary moderation in their approach to everything. As if they are thoroughly benign beings, plain donuts. Reverend Triplett’s Birkenstocks and faded shirt were retro-hip, and the small paunch resting on his belt looked as though it came from drinking good beer. He had a boyish, almost mischievous, smile and prominent cheekbones, evident in his carelessly beautiful daughter as well. His heavy thatch of hair was snow-white. All in all, his appearance was that of a kindly king in humble disguise, a hero out of a storybook. I was instantly fond of him without knowing anything about him. If his presence had that effect on me, it seemed to awaken an even stronger response in my mother. She approached the group, staring up at the Reverend from her height a good foot below him and quietly took hold of my hand, an expression of what appeared to be dismay and relief on her face, as if she had been waiting for him. “This, him, it’s upping. I am going up. I have haunting in here,” she said to me and pointed at her heart. Belle reached out for my mother, drawing her petite body into the fold. As she did, the Reverend’s wife appeared out of nowhere or maybe from his shadow. She was also small, with a broad, concerned face and arthritic hands. Her wiry hair was growing out from years of dark brown dye and her hastily applied rouge deepened the creases in her cheeks. She was introduced to us as Gail. She acknowledged us graciously and grasped her husband’s arm. “This here is Ms. Carthage. But we call her Liz, don’t we?” Belle gave my mother’s shoulder a squeeze. She responded like an eager child. “Ms. Liz, this is Reverend Triplett. He’s joining our community here.” Everyone was cordial, except perhaps Mrs. Triplett whose smile began to tremble. She was, after all, about to leave her husband on a locked dementia ward, hardly the “community” she’d been dreaming of for their retirement. Of course it could have been due to the fact that my mother and Harmon Triplett were looking at each other like Maria and Tony at the dance in West Side Story. The Reverend had enveloped my mother’s hand in both of his huge bear paws. He was a man well past his prime, but the strength in his hands was definitely still pulsing. Neither spoke beyond a polite murmur, still, if this wasn’t my eighty-year old mother who tried to put socks on over shoes, I would have said there was electricity there. His daughter Laurel and I introduced ourselves to break the ridiculous tension. I wasn’t sure if she was reading things the same way I was, but the arch in her eyebrows told me she was. I created a quick diversion, ushering my mother around the corner into the Day Room where, I had insisted, she had wanted to join the others watching a Sing Along with Mitch video. I could feel Gail Triplett’s eyes on us as we left. Facing the opposite direction, my mother had already forgotten the Reverend, but Mrs. Triplett likely hadn’t forgotten my mother. That night, about nine o’clock, I received a call at home from the evening nurse, Carin. After lights out, she reported, my mother must have gotten up and wandered out into the hallway, seeking god knows what. Harmon Triplett was also awake, also anxious over his inexplicable surroundings. They were found sitting side by side on the glider at the end of the Blue Wing under the moonlit window. They were holding hands, my mother’s head on his shoulder. Seeing my mother and Harmon Triplett over the next several visits, receiving the obligatory notifications from staff that she and he had had to be separated, that they had found him missing from his room in the middle of the night and discovered asleep in the vacant second bed in my mother’s room, that she trailed along like a stray dog, distressing Mrs. Triplett during her visits, began to make sense in a primitive sort of way. Their affinity, despite the inability to communicate coherently with each other, had taken on substance. I’d begun to get it. There was something compelling in Harmon Triplett that reminded me of a fairy tale hero, but also, unaccountably, of my father. Alzheimer’s Disease is the Ash Borer of the human experience. Slowly, determinedly, its toxic plaques wind in and disrupt the flow of neurological signals, all that informs people about their own lives. They are gradually hollowed. Sapped of what they know in order to thrive, then even to survive in the world, these people become a shell. The shell is affected too; shapes and contours distorting, falling prey to repetitive pacing, lost teeth that they hadn’t realized were decaying, then lost dentures, poor eating habits, fractures from falls or walking into things. All form of mysterious bruise and lump, mirroring the scratches and dents, pre-4 West, they had been shocked to “discover” in their cars, dents they hadn’t any idea about. I am finding the experience terrifyingly similar to what I imagine it would be like to witness my mother drown. I stand on the shore and throw ropes to her, but she has no idea what to do with them. I try to swim to her, but she only moves farther away. I bring in family photo albums and we go over and over the old faces. Sometimes they set a spark off in her darkening mind and she smiles. Other times she shakes her head forlornly, or in utter consternation, pointing at a pink-faded picture of my dapper father, and asks, “What is that doing?” I opt then for the answer that might give her momentary peace of mind, He’s coming later, after the gallery closes. There was a day, after Harmon had settled in, that I came toting the albums, but she wasn’t in her room. After a quick sweep of the Day Room and the nurses’ office, I went in search of Belle. And there I found my mother. She was in a chair in Mr. Klein’s room, blocked by the Nurse’s ample hips, looking slightly annoyed. “I’m keeping her with me,” Belle said. I had come to read nuances in Belle’s tone. There was a problem. “She’s helping me make my med rounds…it seemed like a better idea than spoiling the Reverend’s visit with his wife.” She raised an eyebrow, then chuckled off the whole state of affairs while dosing Mr. Klein with Aricept. My mother looked cross. “Oh boy…again?” I said. “It’s nice to go to vote out there.” My mother tensed her jaw and gazed out into the hall. “Honey she loves that man! It’s gonna come to no good I think.” Belle shook her head. I wasn’t surprised. I’d caught her myself, two days before, in the green wing, ten paces behind the Tripletts, her hands relaxed behind her back as she strolled, not particularly focused upon Harmon or his wife, simply enjoying a parrot’s constitutional. She’d gazed up at the banal, nostalgic prints fixed to the walls, as if they were flowering trees along a parkway. If someone else passed, she nodded politely. If the Tripletts stopped, she stopped as well, evidently satisfied just to follow in his wake. I took my mother from Belle’s supervision back to her room. The plastic mattress cover made a crunching sound as we sat on her bed. She had no interest in the photo album or the chocolate I brought. Instead she was turning over my hand, examining my nails, saying, “Those cans are floosh.” I pulled a book from her bedside shelf, a book of Brancusi sculptures that had been one of her favorites back in her real life. Just then there was a gentle knock at the door. I looked up to see the medical director, Dr. Voss, edging her way into the room. Behind her, Harmon was maneuvering to gain entry and Joyce, an aide, was trying to entice him away. It had to be something important to bring Dr. Voss up here outside her monthly round of the unit. Of course, I had a hunch. The doctor is a smallish woman in big heels, besieged by freckles she tries to hide with makeup. She was clutching a stack of files against herself like a shield and smiled politely at Harmon before closing the door on him. Joining us for some together time on the plastic bed, she tilted her head sympathetically. I felt my back molars ache. “Can we talk?” “Of course,” I nodded. “It’s come to my attention that your mom has been a little more…agitated…lately,” Dr. Voss began, setting her files on her lap. “The fact is, the Triplett family is a little concerned .” Her credentials swayed on her lanyard as she gave my mother’s shoulder a folksy rub. “I think hearing that the Reverend had pulled his pants down in her room last night might have done it.” Until then I had been distracted by the way she held her foot, flexed, when she crossed her legs, the heel of her shoe spiking out menacingly. Suddenly we were staring at each other in an accord of alarm and suppressed laughter. “What?” How could I not have heard about this one? “The staff report says that when Joyce came in to do her eleven o’clock well-being check, your mother was asleep and the Reverend was in the room taking off his pajamas. This wasn’t the first time they’ve been caught.” “Wait a minute, ‘caught ’?” It took effort to tamp down irritation. “I doubt very much that either are capable of anything premeditated.” I tried to take any sharp edges out of my voice. A moment of silence followed. I looked at my mother. There was no reasoning with her about this. She wasn’t following the conversation. She looked at me, politely smiling as if I were a slightly boring guest. “What do we do now?” I said. “I need your permission. I’d like to tweak her meds,” Voss said. Tweak always meant add. “Really? She’s not hurting anyone. She’s definitely not any more confused. In fact, on some level, she seems pretty clear. It’s… almost like an improvement.” I shot back, forcing a little levity. She smiled weakly. “I have an obligation here. Gail Triplett has asked me to intervene.” “I guess I can imagine that. My mom is giving her a run for her money.” More silence, though I’m convinced Dr. Voss wanted to laugh. I kept my eyes on her. “What about Harmon? Will he be prescribed a little saltpeter with his meals?” I knew I’d officially stepped out of line with that one, but the doctor let it go. “I would really like to avoid loading her up with more drugs,” I said. “She’s already taking enough medication to sideline a football player.” This elicited a cautious, but respectful nod. The nursing home had rules and standards, but I had Power of Attorney and the checkbook. My mother was trying to eat a wadded-up Kleenex. When I took it from her, I realized there was a cookie wrapped inside. She looked sublimely happy when I gave it to her. “I like quickies!” she said taking a bite. It was decided that, when at all possible, a staff member would sit outside both my mother’s and Harmon’s rooms at night, and my mother would spend the Triplett visits in the nurses’ office with Belle or Carin or whomever was available. This, we agreed, would carry us through the holiday, and with luck, would disrupt the pattern enough to end the “affair." And, for a while it worked. This afternoon’s New Year’s Eve party is in the Day Room. Occasions here are typically observed with shiny cardboard decorations, themed cookies, and Blue Cow ice cream cups. However, today the Day Room is particularly festive. They are serving non-alcoholic champagne, fruit punch out of a crystalline bowl, and pizza. Awkwardly draped “Happy New Year!” crepe paper banners, silver plastic ware, streamers, and white balloons force a kind of undeniable, if manufactured, cheer upon us. Many have donned glittery party hats and hold onto noise makers. The gala began at four, making us fashionably late. Adherence to a schedule is kind of ironic since the staff and visitors are the only ones with any concept of time. The staff are good humored, loose and giddy, the music an amicable compromise of golden oldies—the likes of Glenn Miller and The Andrews Sisters—and the best of Earth Wind & Fire. Carin and Beatrice from Housekeeping are dancing with each other and any of the spit-shined residents they can coax up out of a chair. Visiting family members coax as well, or sit dutifully beside their vacant mother, father, sister, brother, or spouse, trying to share the mock excitement, or perhaps just trying not to cry. I can’t bear to look at the sallow faces of those residents who are totally lost, are petrified wood with beating hearts. Instead I paste on a smile and step aside, allowing my mother to make her entrance with the dramatic flair of her youth. It’s been two weeks since the pants incident, and a full week since any “improprieties” have been filed by the staff. As far as I know, equilibrium—as defined by no one dropping their pants—has been restored on 4West. All we have to contend with is…everything else. My mother glances at me, then toddles into the sea of dithering revelers, a twig wearing red lipstick. In his aged, graying body with its slight jowls and sags, Harmon’s eyes shine like polished onyx when he sees my mother. He is sitting in the circle of chairs with his wife who holds onto his hand. Laurel is standing nearby, talking with the nurse’s assistant Joyce, and nibbling at a square of waxen-looking pizza. Quivering and quaking, he suddenly makes an effort to rise. They are playing Moonlight Serenade . Observing her father’s sudden effort to stand, Laurel reaches for him, helping him up into a dance. She hasn’t noticed my mother’s arrival, and Harmon seems to have promptly forgotten it. He looks down at his daughter with a warm, slightly vacant expression. Gail watches them together, her face frozen in better times, her knobby hands folded pleasantly in the lap of her burgundy tweed skirt. Having declined a party hat, the stretch of silver roots at her part gleams beneath the florescent ceiling lights. It underscores a vulnerability, her irreversible journey. At the same time, I can’t help noticing a strangely threatening flicker in her gaze as it eventually comes to rest on her rival. My mother is, of course, oblivious. A change in rhythm introduces the Chattanooga Choo Choo and Davis, the activities coordinator, charms my mother onto the “dance floor.” She grins as she is led in and her confused mind is reunited with this familiar tune. She picks up the beat and, leaning to and fro, jazzing it up, she shows him the correct steps as they come back to her. It is a known phenomenon that people with dementia seem to recall and respond to music—especially of their youth—with mysterious clarity not available to them otherwise. I watch Gail watching her. The envy is unmistakable. As the music downshifts to Nat King Cole’s I Love You for Sentimental Reasons , her husband begins making his way from Laurel to my mother. Gail gets up from her chair. Nervous, I start toward my mother. It’s painfully obvious she’s on the path to certain conflict. But Davis grabs me, whirls me, then snaps me back in, apparently determined to show off what my mother and a few of the other ambulatory ladies have taught him. Meanwhile, I watch Harmon take my mother in his big shaky arms, her little head barely coming to the center of his chest. He doesn’t look clean, but she burrows her cheek into him. They couldn’t have been more besotted had they been seventeen. Joyce looks at Laurel, Laurel looks at me. Before I can free myself, Davis dips me and I almost end up on the floor. Clutching at him, feeling annoyed and more than a little ridiculous, I get a tilted view of Gail attempting to pry the id-driven lovers apart. “No! Go…there!” my mother protests. “This is my husband.” Gail Triplett tries to say with patience. “My husband,” she repeats, pressing her hands to her heart. “No,” my mother says, shaking her head slowly, as if Gail is the deluded one. “This is the one for me.” More coherence than I’ve heard from her in months. Harmon smiles at her with idiotic devotion. The tape leaps into a groove by Earth Wind and Fire and he bobs clumsily in time. Say that you remember dancing in September… “Harmon…sit down,” Gail instructs. Harmon blinks, trying to figure out what is happening. Then, cooperative as a spaniel, he complies, taking my mother with him. “Let go of her hand honey,” Gail says, patience diminishing. “I want my wife,” he answers, clearly concerned that this woman with the silver streak is trying to pull a fast one. “I’m your wife, Harmon…I am .” He doesn’t look convinced. Love was changing the mind of pretenders…chasing the clouds away My mother is on fire now. She is in Gail’s face. “This, you…it’s a bad cookie!” Everyone freezes. I shake Davis off. Remember how we knew love… “You don’t even know what you are saying. Get away—shoo !” Gail flicks her hand. “You’re sick !” Laurel swoops in, her smile desperate, trying to de-escalate things. With extra-drippy deference she asks my mother to show her some of those dance steps. My mother, adrenaline pulsing, musters the presence of mind to be disgusted. She ignores Laurel and turns away. Tere is a collective exhale from the staff. Then, abruptly, she swings around and slaps Mrs. Triplett across the face. “Shuume!” she says in a voice quivering with rage. No one insults Liz’s intelligence and escapes unscathed. Ba duda, ba duda… Without realizing it, Laurel and I have grabbed onto each other. There is a throbbing heat in my face, a rapid sinking in my heart. Shaken, Gail falls into her chair. Laurel rushes to her. Joyce goes for an ice pack. Belle lures my mother away with the offer of ice cream and an extra dose of Ativan written all over her face. The unit social worker appears as if summoned from a magic lamp and officiates damage control. Daughter of the damned, I stand by wordlessly, like another balloon. Not able to track all this, poor, addled Harmon appears only mildly stunned. He pets his wife’s head as she begins to weep. “Good,” he says. The party is over for my mother. She’s served a tranquilizer with a cup of Hawaiian Punch in her room. I’m frightened, baffled, outraged, mortified, and, in the distant ozone layer of my mind, proud, the emotional cacophony that is the Alzheimer’s theme song. I know I owe the Triplett family an apology, but can’t really hang my hat on why. Blame seems pointless. Like blaming two goldfish for swimming in the same direction in their bowl. I sit at my mother’s bedside in my party hat, watching her fall asleep, knowing when she wakes it will be a new year. It will always be the same year for her. Before she closes her eyes she says, “You are a swede baby.” My tears rise. Later, and with the profound sadness that can only exist on a holiday, I punch in the pass code for the elevator down to the lobby. I’m retreating, deserting, going home. As usual, shame lurks just behind relief. My grief tonight is a dark heat though, the dying embers of a forest fire. Strains of an old Lawrence Welk Hour tape running on the TV in the Day Room don’t help. Just as I am settling into a deep loneliness, Laurel startles me, poking her head around the corner. She has a positive urgency and flashes an impish grin. Her eyes are like her father’s. “I’ve been waiting for you!” she says, approaching. Mournfully I surrender. “You probably want a piece of me…” I answer, mostly in jest. She laughs. I’ve gotten good at diversions. “I truly apologize! It’s crazy…I don’t know why this is happening.” I am lying only a little. “Please tell me your mother is doing…better.” I wince, embarrassed at the inadequacy of my words. “She’s alright. Really.” Laurel reassures me. “Yours?” “Wow. Kind of you to ask. She’s asleep…Ativan.” Her eyes brim. As if she, herself, has shot my mother with elephant tranquilizer. “It had to be.” I concede, though I can’t deny my emotions around this are still raw. “You know,” Laurel begins, “I’ve been thinking and, well, I guess I’m not feeling like it’s an awful thing... that your mother is drawn to my dad, and he…” She paused, “ to her.” We are both silent as we mull this over, blind acceptance being our only shot at adapting. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I mean, does it? So my mom thinks he’s Gregory Peck, that isn’t so terrible.” Our limp smiles surrender to the miserable humor of it all. “Exactly,” she says. “I don’t care…I’m glad, in fact.” I can’t help but think of poor Mrs. Triplett. “But what about…” I say. “My mom?” Laurel says. “I’ll get her to understand. Or I won’t.” There is a ding and the elevator door slides open. A catatonic resident, crusty with spilled food, is wheeled out by a clearly depleted family member. We make way, and at that moment we both know the awful thing here isn’t love. The call I get later from the evening shift is to alert me to the fact that Harmon and my mother have been “caught” together trying to figure out the elevator pass code. They were trying numbers and naming saints. Then, the staff reports, they kissed and wandered away into the blue wing in search of, well, something. Maybe the moon. "The Awful Thing" was published in Bellevue Literary Review . In this story, two dementia patients on a locked ward in a nursing home fall in love. The families involved, including a living spouse, must find a way to accept an incomprehensible, seemingly unacceptable new reality. Acceptance comes in the form of an assessment of what is and is not the truly awful thing here. Previous CHRISTINA ROBERTSON is a half-Greek agnostic tree lover, a former therapist and ex-floral designer, a writer, and a bit of a divining rod for the absurdity beneath so many of life’s darker moments. Living just outside Chicago, her professional background in psychiatric settings ignited a fascination for nature's terrible and fragile beauty as it exists within people, which informs her writing. As a member of the long-running Off Campus Writers Workshop and Fred Shafer’s short story workshop, Christina's Pushcart-nominated short fiction has appeared in Pleiades , Bellevue Literary Review , and Tahoma Literary Review , among others. Next

Vespers in the Great Basin by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky Bald eagles gather among the elms with soft whistles as they glide over snowfields of thistle and jackrabbits, settle on branches, umber wings folded against their bodies, albino heads tucked from the wind. Each winter we watch them fly across the valley to this empty ranch, stretch their wingspan beyond six feet, their darkness growing in sunset until Venus appears in the west. Driving home, your right hand fumbles with my fingers as if with a rosary, while your left keeps the wheel in check. Out the window I see a brown quarter horse lean against a fence in snow, haunches turned to the wind. Our silence meets the coldness that blows in through door jambs, the chimney. Next January when mountain peaks glisten beneath miters of ice we’ll return to the elms as eagles gather across the river and the riven valley—they’ll hunch together on racked branches of winter trees, still believing they can keep the cold at bay. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue First published in Sugar House Review , and Drift Migration (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). This poem describes how bald eagles winter over in the valley west of Cedar City, Utah, while also referring to a marriage. In this poem, I like how I paid attention to both the imagery and the sound. I admire poetry lines that have “echoes” of sound patterns, such as alliteration or assonance. In the first two lines, such echoes exist in the words “whistles,” “glides,” “snow fields,” “thistle.” I worked hard on the fifth and sixth lines to create a sense of expansion that leads into constriction as the eagles’ bodies become too dark to see in the sunset. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY is the author of Drift Migration (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). She teaches Creative Writing at Southern Utah University and directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values. danielledubrasky.com Next - Kayaking on Hebron Lake by Marjorie Maddox Next

Hiroshi Tanahashi by Jerry VanIeperen echoes travel across the icy sea foam in cherry blossom sundown the Dome crowd quakes Hiroshi Tanahashi leaps from the top rope falling in love, frog-splashed against the mat in magnitudes in cherry blossom sundown the Dome crowd quakes Tanahashi wasn’t born a constellation falling in love, frog-splashed against the mat in magnitudes all the neon signs illuminate the borders of ropes Tanahashi never born a constellation when the world swoons in uncharted patterns of lava and stars all the neon signs illuminate the borders of ropes the sweat and spectacle captured in a camera’s eye when the world swoons in uncharted patterns of lava and stars Hiroshi Tanahashi leaps from the top rope the sweat and spectacle captured in a camera’s eye Tanahashi echoes a constellation over the icy sea Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue I arrived at a point of liberation where I decided I was going to write poetry about pro wrestling—former Utah Poet Laureate David Lee said that may be the greatest oxymoron of his time, which I took as encouragement. I watched wrestling with my grandpa, it was the topic that got me back in touch with a dear friend after years apart, and it was also common ground, for a time, I shared with my son. So, it’s fairly meaningful to me, and I’m especially proud of how this poem about a Japanese pro wrestler turned out. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JERRY VANIEPEREN lives heartily in Utah with two children, two dogs, and one wife. He earned an MFA from the University of Nebraska and was a founding editor of the poetry journal Sugar House Review . Next - Pissing Towards the Sky by Jerry VanIeperen Next

Before Thirty by Patrick Ramsay I streak through a golf course in nectarine light and self-destruct a little bit. Not in a Salamander Letter type of way, but like an old truck whose engine blows right after the warranty is up. I cancel the party. Detonate my relationship. Call in sick. Call my old therapist with the tattoos. Ask him if he’s still engaged. Send up a flare. Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to realize the word hello and help are one autocorrect away from twinhood. I kiss everyone. Kiss goodbye to my savings account. Greet one thousand new hobbies with the fervor of a young dog. Tongue out. I only have so much time left to be reckless in my twenties. I was twenty-eight the first time a twink told me he loves older guys. This. This is why all the queens call thirty gay death. I feel too young, too childless, too cut loose to be someone’s daddy. But maybe he was right. My mortgage, the chicken coop, the poodle-mutt rescue dog. I used to be stupid. Gloriously, aimlessly stupid. But at some point along the way: A bungalow, a career, a real live-with-me, go-to-weddings-and-farmers-markets-together partner. Someone must have tricked me. Tricked me into learning what a 401k is. What a deductible is. How to become interested in interest rates. I’m going to be sick. Sick and grown up forever. And thirty is a perfectly fine age. It’s the death of the I did this in my twenties thing that I’m mourning. Who damned me to grow up this fast? To man before I really was done boying. This is the part where I’m supposed to assure you that a job can be a dream, and mowing your own lawn, also a dream. But gut laughs, mushroom trips, occasional sex with strangers—also, also a dream. I know I know, that growing older grows on you, but youth is a temporary meadow with soft scruff, and I guess this is the long way of saying I’m afraid of losing something I didn’t know was worth anything. Anyway, call me when you get this. Need to borrow your drill again. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This unpublished poem came out fully formed, like a platypus frog or a nervous confession. I was one week from turning thirty and wrestling with what that meant. As a gay man, aging is such a prickly arena, and many men treat thirty like a sunset of their dewy youth. This poem reflects on all the glorious stupidities of my twenties and what it means to realize (maybe a little too late) that you might just have become a man before you were really done boying. And I still don’t own a drill. .................................................................................................................................................................................... PATRICK RAMSAY is a queer poet & owner of the indie shop Happy Magpie Book & Quill. He explores land, community & heart in Ogden, Utah. patrickramsaypoet.com Next - Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room by Paul Fericano Next

Tuesday Night Bieber by Joe Sacksteder We’d been scrimmaging for ten or fifteen minutes, and so far no Biebs. But his bodyguards were watching the game, so there was still hope. Tuesday night, Park City, Utah. I’d positioned myself in the net closest to the lobby, trying to catch glimpses. The lobby did seem to be hosting an unusual accumulation of very attractive people. A potential posse. When Eli, the other goalie, lugged his bag into the locker room and made the announcement, I’d assumed that Bieber was the nickname of some local hockey player everybody except me knew. He needed gear, Eli said. The only hockey store was down in Salt Lake and had been closed for a few hours. “I can’t focus,” I told Tommy after sucking in warm-ups. “I can’t stop thinking about Justin.” I’d subbed in net on Sunday for the bar league team most of the good Park City guys play on—so I’d been looking forward to an asterisk of flattery on their usual shit-talking. I mean, in addition to what Park City Tuesday night drop-in usually does for me. How it gets me away from slogging through grad school reading and reminds me that I have a body. How I feel like I’m in a space shuttle some nights as I drive up a mountain and leave behind Salt Lake’s smog. How just getting on the ice regularly is more and more important as I enter my mid-thirties. How for now I know that, yes, my competitive career is probably behind me, but give me three months and I could still be as good as I ever was. I write mostly fiction, but I recently realized that almost all the nonfiction I’ve put out into the world concerns my few minor brushes with celebrity, as if life isn’t worth much unless it’s happening proximal to someone famous. I’ll further interrogate what this tendency says about me—but later, and privately. This essay is about the moment I heard a gloved fist pounding on the plexiglass behind my net, and I turned around, and there was Justin Bieber. I didn’t know how to act. I was kind of impressed that we didn’t have to sign any papers or get a lecture from the bodyguard detailing what would happen to us if we damaged one of the world’s most precious commodities. I was tending net for the dark jerseys, so Justin would be on my team until Eli and I switched sides halfway through. I saw him introduce himself to the two guys sitting on my team’s bench, bump gloves. A buddy from Justin’s crew was playing on the other team. Their gear was brand new, the nicest stuff. I would later find out that his handler called the owner of the Player’s Bench in Salt Lake and convinced him to drive two sets of new gear up a mountain at 9 PM. Justin sort of had a baby Bambi thing going on with his ankles. He started off mostly on defense, hanging back, occupying relatively deserted sectors of ice surface. He slapped his stick on the ice frequently, calling for passes when he shouldn’t have. Were they avoiding passing him the puck? Guys… Pass Justin the puck. I’m always looking for circuitous routes into the NHL that don’t involve me having played Division One hockey a decade ago. I was entertaining fantasies that Justin would see how good I was and tweet a picture of the two of us with the caption: “Best goalee eva,” after which I’d receive an invitation to practice with the Maple Leafs just as, like, a joke. The human mind exposed on the page is a sick and pitiful thing. (I’m also very brave.) Same reason why when Tommy got a breakaway, I was telepathically blasting at him YOU WOULDN’T DARE SCORE ON ME IN FRONT OF JUSTIN! Tommy hit the crossbar, but someone soon fired one past my glove, and immediately I looked up expecting to see Justin crestfallen and speechless. He was skating to the bench. I couldn’t say for sure whether or not he even knew his team had been scored on. Every time Justin leapt over the boards, his bodyguard would pull out his iPhone and start filming. Then, when he returned to the bench, he would curate the footage. His posse had dispersed throughout the rink. Two stylish guys were sitting in the stands, a stunning blonde/porcelain wisp of girl was hanging out by the doors that led to the locker rooms, and a half dozen or so Beliebers were keeping warm in the lobby. He slashed someone really hard in the shins, which alarmed me until I realized it was his buddy. Finally, Eli and I switched sides. Justin had not scored on Eli, and by now he had abandoned any attempt to play defense. Drop-in hockey is not usually a showcase of defensive skills, but a few of the guys were taking extra special care to keep the Biebs from getting any good chances. Every time the puck got poked away from him, he would slam his stick on the ice and kind of, like, puff up. Like a territorial bird. I’m not sure that he ever even breached his team’s defensive zone in the second half of the scrimmage. He spent all his time “cherry-picking” up by the red line. Come on, let him get past you just once. He dealt Hagn a beachball-strength check in the corner, perhaps only half realizing that drop-in, where most of the guys don’t wear shoulder pads, is pretty no-check. “He wasn’t even looking…” I said to one of my defensemen after a particularly fine save. At one point, Justin’s stick got swatted and went flying. He hesitated for a moment, before strut-skating to the bench. This is not something a hockey player would normally do, just leave an unbroken stick on the ice during a noncompetitive game. Someone eventually pushed the stick over to the dark team’s bench. “Pick it up,” Tony heard him say. For a second, Tony thought Justin was talking to him. No: his bodyguard. Look, I’m being hard on the Biebs. Yes, he bought thousands of dollars of equipment that he might never use again. Yes, he refused photographs and signatures with the very few non-posse people in the lobby. Yes, he was obviously image conscious. But he was basically friendly, and he was probably having as normal a night among strangers as is possible in his world. Oh, and he really wanted a goal. In my head I’d been revising over and over the status update I would post immediately upon arriving home that night (and of course whether or not he got a shot on me would have significant bearings). I was thinking about that ridiculous story a few months back where Vladimir Putin scored seven goals on his birthday in a game against former NHL-ers. Was I going to let Bieber score? Maybe if he scored a goal we’d take a photo afterwards, just the Biebs and me. In the end, I didn’t have a choice. In the end—if a heartthrob pop icon scoring a goal on you is shameful—the actual goal was as unhumiliating as it could have been. Sometimes the assist is the real goal, and I think it was Heimo who ended up feeding him what was basically a backdoor tap-in. I lunged over to my glove side, but the Biebs had a lot of net to shoot at. A hyperbolic analogy seems to be called for, but none are really game-ready. All the air left the rink? My life divided into two? Nope. They call it drop-in hockey, and sometimes it’s Justin Bieber who drops in. And scores a goal on you. He was very excited. He threw his hands up in the air, shouted, “That’s what I needed !” If my dignity needs preserving, I can at least report that I stopped him on a half-break a minute later. Left pad save. But, as his posse immediately rolled out after that shift was over, it was clear that his work was done. If the incident was reported by some desperate news outlet, the report would be that he scored a goal. That’s what he needed. As I would joke later, “After he left… what was the point?” We still had another twenty or so minutes of drop-in, and maybe it was mental exhaustion that caused me to basically turn into a garage door. In the locker room afterwards, we tried to decompress. We had to navigate a tricky situation: be starstruck—but not too starstruck. Make light of the fact that every single one of us would regale future family members and friends and strangers with the story of tonight for the rest of our lives. A few of the guys hid their obvious celebrity crushes behind tough words about what a little shit he was. “At least you guys didn’t get scored on by him,” I groaned, mortified-proud. We were all pretty sure that the bodyguard had accidentally stowed his phone during the shift Justin scored—which is the reason why several thousand people did not watch footage of me getting scored on by Justin Bieber that night. Thankfully? At the Boneyard (yes, that’s the name of the bar where we go to jerk each other off), we tried to drink the night real. I splurged on a seven-dollar Unibroue because that’s how I roll now. We looked at Justin’s Instagram account. Tommy’s girlfriend can be seen sitting in the stands in one of the photos. That girl totally thinks she’s got a shot at the Biebs , was one comment. I attacked an abandoned plate of fries. An “extra” beer was put in my hand by the waiter. The Sabres game was on replay. I didn’t care one iota about the forty-pages of George Herbert poems I wasn’t going to read for Genealogies of the Lyric the next day. I’m a referee too, and I like to complain about how often the scheduler sends me up to Park City. Six percent grade is rough on my roller skate of a car. “Once you accept a Park City game,” other refs have told me, “you’re screwed.” So I gripe, but I never do anything about it. Maybe it’s my hibernating Hollywood ambitions drawing me to the home of Sundance. Or the other life I might have led where I go skiing more than once every five years. Or maybe it’s because, on the way home, I can put my car in neutral from Parley’s Summit all the way to Foothill. Ten miles. And, at the late-night / very-early-morning hour we say goodbye to the Boneyard, I can ease off the brakes, slaloming the inside lane on every twist and turn. Just the feeling of heading west— Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue If I have a "Freebird," it's this short essay, which appeared on Hobart soon after December 1st, 2015, the night that Justin Bieber scored a goal on me at drop-in hockey in Park City, Utah. It remains meaningful to me, not just because of the novelty of the event it depicts, but because it seemed to get at something about the sense of promise that accompanied the difficulties of a PhD program, with a final two paragraphs (cut by Hobart's editors) that likewise best encapsulated my weird, sudden infatuation with the West. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JOE SACKSTEDER is the author of the short story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books), the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press), and an album of audio collages Fugitive Traces (Punctum Books). His experimental horror novel, Hack House, is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. joesacksteder.com Next - Hiroshi Tanahashi by Jerry VanIeperen Next

READINGS BY AUTHORS FROM THE NOMAD Intro - Ken Waldman Austin Holmes Jennifer Tonge Kase Johnstun Rachel White Karin Anderson Lisa Bickmore Maureen Clark Ken Waldman 00:00 / 00:28 00:00 / 08:06 00:00 / 10:03 00:00 / 07:43 00:00 / 05:52 00:00 / 08:20 00:00 / 09:55 00:00 / 07:15 00:00 / 23:40 UTAH BOOK FESTIVAL

The Problem with Mrs. P by Michael Shay First problem: nobody was home to help. Not her two daughters, off to school. Not her husband Robbie, who hadn’t been home for weeks, probably right this minute at that whore Gloria’s house. Second problem: she was seven months pregnant and bleeding like crazy. She pressed a cream-colored towel against her crotch; it bloomed with a red chrysanthemum of her own blood. She stood in the bathroom doorway, eyes sparking, knees shaking. Third problem: her damn husband had the car. Not that she was in any shape to make the seven-mile drive into Cheyenne, ten if you factored in the hospital which was downtown. Fourth problem: the telephone was dead, thanks to Robbie not paying the bills like he was supposed to. She had her own prepaid cell phone with a few minutes still left on it. But it was downstairs on the kitchen table. Just the thought of negotiating the stairs brought a throbbing to her abdomen. Fifth problem, or maybe it was the first: she and her baby boy might be dying. She tried to bite back the tears, but they came anyway, raining down on her nightie, the blood-soaked towel, the tiled bathroom floor. It was all so ridiculous. Why had this happened? She should have known better than to let him back into her life, even if it had only been two weeks. He came back to her, all humble and lovey-dovey. She took him back into her bed and then he was gone again and there she was, pregnant again, standing in the doorway, bleeding to death. Her main problem was getting down the stairs to the phone. Clinging to the wall, she made her way out of the bathroom and down the carpeted hallway. To the left was her daughter Kelly’s room. She grabbed the doorknob of the hall closet as she slowly passed. There were only twelve stairs but it looked like a million. Maybe if she just sat on the top step, and bumped her way down….She sat, a good thing since a swoon was coming on. She waited for her head to clear, then carefully slipped down the carpet onto the second step, then the third one. On the next one, her left foot caught the hem of her wool nightgown. She fell back, then felt herself slipping down the stairway; her feet, her butt, her shoulders bumping with each step; wincing in pain as the vibrations traveled to her belly. When she came to a stop, she noticed the quiet of the house. There was some sort of noise coming from outside the front door. She didn’t know what it was but she stood and, after letting her head clear momentarily, stepped slowly through the sparsely furnished living room toward the door. Which led to the morning’s sixth problem: she passed out, sliding to the floor like a wet sack. * * * Mrs. P! Mrs. P! She opened her eyes. A big hairy head swam in front of her. Maybe she was dreaming. Mrs. P! Mrs. P! It was the big head’s voice. For a minute she thought it was Robbie but her husband was thin and had a buzzcut in keeping with his role as a punk musician on the make. Who was it? And where was she? For a minute, she hoped she was safe in bed. But then she felt the rough carpet under her, the stickiness between her legs. There was a big hand on her shoulder, shaking gently. Mrs. P! The hairy head’s voice again. She wanted to say: My name is Liz, short for Elizabeth, and not Mrs. P, short for Politazzaro, Robbie’s last name which he had hung on her, presumably forever, and which everyone seemed to want to use in the abbreviated form, making her seem old before her time. She could see the man now. It was Big Ed, her landlord’s goofy son. The Retard, Robbie called him, as if he had a right to call anybody that. Big Ed was a lumbering overgrown kid, slow, who probably had a birth defect or something. But, last summer, he had been dedicated to mowing the weeds that passed for their lawn. That winter, he had pursued the snow with a vengeance. He unclogged toilets and hauled the trash. The girls had been afraid of him at first. Six-foot-five if he was an inch, and built like one of those no-neck linemen you see on NFL football. And that hair, a mass of wavy red curls that framed that moon face of his. But one summer afternoon he came over driving the tractor with the haywagon attached. He asked the girls if they wanted a ride and they said yes and they tooled around the property as she watched from the kitchen window. A few hours later the girls came in screaming, waving something that looked like a rope above their heads. Snake! Snake! they yelled, then told her how Big Ed had whacked the head off a rattler with a hoe and skinned it right there on the spot. He gave the girls the skin and the rattles. This is one big freakin’ snake, Mommy , said Kelly, the youngest, sounding just like her father, New York accent and all. Mrs. P? What are you doing here, Ed? Heard you yellin’ while I was shoveling the snow. Was I yelling? He looked puzzled. Somebody was. Call the hospital, Big Ed, she said weakly. I’m bleeding to death. Hospital , Big Ed muttered. It was strange voice that blended a kid’s cadence with the huskiness of a man. She felt his arms slide under her and, next thing she knew, she was being transported through the living room and out into the cold bright winter day. You’re light , he said, pressing her in his arms. Get my towel, Ed , she said. And I need the phone. Don’t have a phone , he replied. Big Jim took it away. Said it was costin’ him an arm and a leg. Big Jim was his father, their landlord, a big fat guy who seemed eternally pissed off at his slow son. Get my cell, she said, motioning back to the house. It’s on the kitchen table. And the towel, Ed, for the blood. I know where the hospital is, he said. I drove Big Jim there. Remember that time the tractor rolled over on him? She didn’t remember and it didn’t matter anyway. Big Ed had plans and there was nothing she could do. Die on the bathroom floor. Die on the way to the hospital. She opened her eyes and saw ice crystals glinting in a blue-drenched sky. She heard the crunch of Big Ed’s boots in the snow. The wind slapped her bare, bloody legs. I’m cold, Ed. Get you in the van and warm it up, he said. They stopped. Ed’s right arm shifted and she heard a door being pulled open. Crud , he said. Gotta move some things around. She could feel his indecision. This might be too much for him. We can still call 9-1-1 on my phone . No need , he said briskly. She felt a tug, then Ed was arranging something on the ground. He put her down on something cold and plastic, then placed a covering over her. Tarp and sleeping bag, he said. My camping stuff. I keep it in the van. Camping? Well, she was getting warm on the snowy ground. She could see Big Ed shove his body in the van’s side door. His shoulders moved like a machine. She had seen this van dozens of times. Usually she heard it first as it came down the county road and into the dusty drive, its rackety Volkswagen clatter floating in the window across the open Wyoming prairie. She had often wondered why he had this old hippie van and not a huge mud-spattered pick-up like his dad. Ed, I can sit up front , she said. We do need to get to the hospital. Take a minute, he said. Got a mattress in here and everything. She wanted to laugh. There was a racket of shifting and moving. Then she was up again, fitting neatly through the van’s open door. She was on the mattress, which was comfortable and didn’t smell, which surprised her. She looked up and saw Big Ed smile as he covered her with the sleeping bag. Hurry, Ed, she said. Please . A look of concern flashed across his face as he slammed the door shut. Another door opened, and she felt the van shift to the driver’s side. Big Ed was on the bus, taking her to the hospital. They would be there soon and all would be well. She wouldn’t die and the baby would be born and she would call him anything except for Robbie and maybe she would get a divorce and go back to work at a grocery store where she used to make pretty good money. Crud . That was Big Ed. What’s the matter? Van won’t start. Don’t worry. I know what’s wrong. So she was going to die? Don’t worry, Mrs. P. This happens all the time. She heard him fumbling around in the front, obviously looking for something. Then he said Ah-ha and she looked up to see him brandishing a foot-long screwdriver. The sun glinted off its metal shaft, giving it the look of a knife. Go ahead, she thought, plunge it right into my heart and get it over with. The van leaped up as it lightened its load. She heard his boots crunch the snow, then a couple of grunts. The van shifted slightly, and she figured he was underneath, groping for some gizmo or another. Then came the dreaded word again—Crud— and after a few grunts and groans, he was back with his head shoved into the driver’s side. Got a problem, he said. Need you to turn the key as I do this. Do what? Bridge the solenoid. What the hell, Ed, she said. I’m bleeding to death here. Hospital , he said. Gotta get the van started. She breathed deeply. She had a tom cat for a husband. Her father abandoned her decades ago. Now her life depended on this dimwit? Men were such worthless creatures. And she was going to give birth to another one? It didn’t make any sense but she would be damned and damned again if she would stay here and die. She wanted to be with her girls. She wanted to be anywhere but here. Mrs. P pushed herself off the mattress. Fireflies danced in front of her eyes. Her big bloated body felt as if it belonged to someone else, or something else, like an African elephant or one of those strange looking sea lions she had seen at the zoo when she was a kid. But she moved, slowly, inching her way out of the van and onto her bare feet in the snow. Where you goin’? asked Big Ed. Inside to call the ambulance. Or walk to town. Anything but this. You can’t. I can. She still was bleeding, that was a fact, but she knew from experience that she wasn’t in labor, which was good, because the last thing she wanted to do was deliver this baby two months early in the snowy yard with only Big Ed for assistance. Although she hadn’t felt any of the baby’s trademark kicks this morning, intuition told her that he still was alive. The house was a hundred feet away and if she could just reach the door and get inside, she could get to her cell phone, call the ambulance, and then take her chances. But those chances were better than the ones she had now. She walked five steps—she was counting each one— before a whole flock of fireflies filled her vision and the house kicked up at a strange angle, flying off into space, leaving her on her side in the snow. * * * She was nineteen —that wasn’t even ten years ago—and home from college for Christmas break when she had met Robbie. He was bass guitarist for the group that was playing at the local bar on New Year’s Eve. She was with her high school girlfriends. They all thought the band guys were hot so they hung around after midnight and bought the band some drinks and at 5 a.m. they found themselves at some dumpy house in Jericho, she and her girlfriends making out with the band guys. Robbie was a good kisser. He wanted more, of course, but she wasn’t that looped and she liked him when he didn’t press her. He even gave her a ride home in the band’s van, startling her mother when she sashayed into the kitchen, carrying her shoes in her hand. I’m in love, she said, which surprised her and made Mom cry. The tear ducts really opened once she learned that Robbie was a rocker with pierced lip and nose. She shared that last part with her mother, just to see if the response would measure up to her expectations. It did. She was two months pregnant when they got married that June. Nobody knew yet, except her mom and maybe one or two of her closest friends. Robbie’s band, The Spectral Losers, played at the reception. The honeymoon was short. Robbie was awake all night banging away at her, even when she was dozing off from the champagne. She shouldn’t have been drinking. Her mom told her to cool it a couple times. She promised that she would quit right after the reception, which she did, except for a couple little sips of wine now and again. The morning after she puked her guts out with morning sickness while Robbie snored away in the motel’s vibrating queen-sized bed. Not a terrific start to their marriage. She and Robbie were split up when Katie was born. She was living with her parents and her mom took care of Katie when she went back to work a few weeks later. She was just getting back on her feet when Robbie came back into her life and she turned up pregnant again. That’s when her mother kicked her out. She and Robbie found an apartment closer to the city, so Robbie could go in nights and play at the clubs and not come home until dawn. She could not believe they were in that apartment for three years. Robbie brought home most of his pay. She was working, although a good chunk of it went to daycare for Katie and Kelly. Still, they were making it. Taking the pill helped put a damper on any more baby-making. Then Robbie came home one day and announced they were moving to Wyoming. She about hit the ceiling. One of Robbie’s friends owned a music store in Cheyenne. He liked the idea of going West. So they had moved cross-country and here she was, bleeding in the snow like some pioneer woman from the olden days. But she wasn’t in the snow anymore. She was moving along on some vehicle that wasn’t the van. She shifted her body and felt the crunch and crackle of something underneath. She opened her eyes to the bright sunlight. Hey! It was Ed’s voice. She pushed up on her elbow. She was stuffed in a sleeping bag, surrounded by a tangle of hay stalks. Weathered gray boards marked the wagon’s periphery. She craned her neck to the front to see the massive frame of big Ed bouncing on the seat of a green tractor. The tractor’s engine had a throaty roar that actually sounded good to her. At least they were moving. Got your cell phone, he yelled. What? Phone. Big Ed jerked a thumb over his right shoulder. She looked down and saw the cheapo black cell phone resting on the dark-green sleeping bag. Her mother had sent her a gift certificate and she had used it to buy this pre-paid cell phone which she kept hidden from Robbie, especially after the regular phone service was cut off. She picked it up. The plastic phone was cold in her hand. She dialed 9-11. It rang twice before a mechanical voice said from somewhere very far away: Your Celluphone pre-paid calling service has expired. Shit , she said. Had there been more minutes on her phone? Or had she just imagined it? What? yelled Big Ed. The computerized female voice said: Dial one if you want to add minutes to your service with your credit card. Fat chance, she muttered. Dial two if you wish to talk to a customer service representative to renew your service. She punched two. A few clicks followed. Then she heard a new voice: All our customer service representatives are busy. Please hold on and one will be with you shortly. Canned music came on the line. She felt like heaving the phone into the prairie. She imagined it sailing over the barbed wire fence and falling into a patch of snow-whipped weeds, right at the feet on those blankeyed black cows she always saw wandering the open fields. But not today. She liked the little phone. It was her only link to the outside world, which was very remote. She suddenly realized why Robbie had moved them so far away from town. She and the girls were isolated, dependent on him. He had the car 90 percent of the time. Got a gig, babe, he would say, then be gone for a week. They would be down to their last crust of bread when he would magically arrive laden with grocery sacks. Junk food, mostly, heavy on donuts and ice cream and chips. His idea of dinner was warming up some macaroni and cheese, maybe cutting up some hot dogs, mixing them in. She got queasy just thinking about it. Dinner would be over and Robbie would be off again to a gig or recording session or God knows where or, maybe, she did know where. You okay? shouted Big Ed. Just fine, she said. Just dandy, using one of the westernisms she’d learned since coming to Wyoming. She was not going to cry, no matter what. I am not going to cry, she said out loud. I am not going to cry. What? called Big Ed. Nothing, Ed. What? They moved slowly down the rural road, but she felt each bump. The clouds were traveling faster than they were. Any increase in velocity and she might go flying from the haywagon. A man’s voice finally came on the other end of the phone. Thanks for calling Celluphone, he said cheerily. How may I assist you today? She almost laughed at that. Assist? Hah! Get me off this wagon and into the nearest hospital. Hello , said the voice. Hi , she said weakly. I’m here . I see that I am talking to a Mrs. Politazzaro of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Yes , she said. Nice Irish name, he said. Listen…. Call me Mark , he said. Mark Aloysius Kincannon is my full name, but they tell you to use only your first just in case we piss people off. Listen, Mark, I’m in a bit of a fix here…. We have a variety of payment plans to fit your needs. A wind gust rocked the wagon. Mark, are you reading that? They give us a script, if that’s what you mean. Where are you, Mark? Denver , he said, in a little airless, windowless room in the basement of a gray building. Guess where I am, Mark? In a cozy kitchen baking cookies? Don’t hang up, she said. Please. I got a real problem here and I’m asking for your help. There was another pause. This is real, isn’t it? His voice had changed, serious now. It’s real. She gave him a condensed version of the morning’s events. A haywagon? he said. Riding to the hospital in a haywagon? Down a nice country road, she said. Nice winter day. Can you go faster? It’s an old tractor, Mark. Are you passing any houses? You could stop at one and get some help. Nice suggestion, but Big Ed won’t stop. He’s determined to get me to the hospital. He’s a little slow, in the head. Is that what you mean? That’s right. You’re not going to make it. That’s right, she said, trying to imagine, for the first time, what Mark might look like. Okay , said Mark, suddenly businesslike. Give me your position and I’ll call it in. Promise? Promise. Now, where are you? On a country road north of town. Which one? What do you mean, which one? Listen, uh, what’s your name anyway? Mrs. Pol……… Your first name. Liz. Listen, Liz, there’s got to be more than one road north of town. What’s its number? She raised her head and looked for a sign along the side of the road. Nothing but fence posts. Hey Ed! she yelled, taking the phone away from her ear. What? he said, turning to her. His shaggy red hair billowed like a wind-whipped fire. What road is this? She could not see Ed’s face, but she imagined it scrunched up in some sort of thoughtful look. But this thought was taking its time and she was running out of it. Ed! she barked. Some call it the Old Chugwater Road. The Old Chugwater Road, she repeated into the phone. What about a number? She cursed under her breath. Does it have a number, Ed? Don’t know a number. No number , she told Mark. She heard chatter on the other end. Look , said Mark, coming back on the line. I’ve got another CSR on the phone to the Sheriff’s Department and the dispatcher says there are two Old Chugwater Roads. Two? Yeah, one still goes to Chugwater and the other doesn’t. Which one are you on? It’s north of town, she said brusquely. It’s where you go out north on Yellowstone Road and it turns into a two-lane and you come to a stop sign and you keep going out that rural road another five miles or so. Our little farmhouse is just before you come to that big curve…. Hold on, Liz, Mark said. More chatter on the other end. County Road 237? If you say so. We should tell the ambulance to look for a tractor pulling a haywagon, right? Can’t miss us, she said. Green tractor, with Big Ed driving. Me bleeding to death in the haywagon in the back. He laughed. Not so funny, Mark. Right. I’m sorry. More chatter on the far end on the line in Denver. The ambulance is on its way, Mark said, almost breathlessly. No joke? No joke. Stay on the line and talk to me. Okay, sure, I’ll talk to you. Then he was so quiet she thought the line had gone dead. Got a family, Mark? she said weakly. Got a five-year-old boy who lives with my ex-wife. That’s nice, she said. Think we’ll get our names in the paper? Ha ha, she said. Names in the paper. She removed the phone from her ear. Ed! What! Big Ed answered. Ambulance on its way. What? At least that’s what she thought he said. The wind shredded the words on their way from his mouth to her ears. Waaa , it sounded like. Then wawa , just like the word the girls used for water when they were toddlers. We want wawa Mommy , and she would get them water in those little paper cups she kept by the kitchen sink. The girls would spill it and there would be wawa everywhere. W awa , she said to the wind, the sky, the wagon. She was so thirsty. Her head ached. The cold crept through the folds of the sleeping bag. She heard a voice and didn’t know if it was Ed’s or Mark’s or the lowing of a cow or something she had never heard before. Waaaaa! she heard, wondering if it was just in her head or maybe, just maybe, was the distant wail of an ambulance. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue I wrote “The Problem with Mrs. P” for my first collection, The Weight of a Body (Ghost Road Press, 2006). It was included in a 2010 Coffee House Press anthology, Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams . It’s about a real event that happened to a friend. I transformed it into a short ction with invented characters. It’s set during winter in Wyoming, a season for adventures and misadventures. When I read it in public, I like that it elicits both laughter and gasps. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL SHAY writes short stories and essays. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams from Coffee House Press. His first book of short stories is The Weight of the Body . He recently completed an historical novel set in 1919 Colorado with the working title Zeppelins over Denver . Next - That Time We Got Married at a Tent Revival by Michael Shay 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 (forthcoming in 2025), published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. karinandersonauthor.com Next

The Black Flies of Home by Brock Dethier Black flies dance in the air between my head and my brother’s, distorting the view. We sit on pinkish granite smoothed and sloped by retreating glaciers ten millennia ago. Below us, the Rocky Branch of the Saco River, then the ridge that leads from Stanton and Pickering all the way up to Davis, Isolation, and Washington itself. Farther west, the ski trail scars of Mt. Attitash, still the new ski area, though it opened in 1965. Black flies are small, hard to see, quiet. They like warm sheltered places-- behind your ear or knee. They follow the blood others have left. And bite. I react with large hard itchy welts that I scratch bloody in my sleep. Mosquitoes are everywhere but I’ve never seen black flies outside New England, so their presence is a special “welcome home!” to the region. Around us, blueberry bushes with subtle flowers-- little cream bells that will become the fruit of the New Hampshire gods-- rhodora about to brighten the ledges with cerise blossoms, grus eroded from the ledges filling the cracks between them, sweet fern. I wasn’t aware of being bitten but I find blood behind my ear. Within our view, we’ve skied both downhill and cross country, canoed, floated, kayaked, swam, hiked of course. We were born just out of sight to the left. We’ve come in search of iron mines and leave with sparkly ore, black fly bumps starting to itch, and a few crystals to take back west to what still seems after 26 years a temporary home. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Issue 1 Few who have experienced New England’s black flies would argue that they make the world a better place, yet for people who have grown up with them, the flies mean home. Having spent half my life in New England and half in Utah, I’m interested in how we think about “home,” and this unpublished, personal poem tries to illuminate the complexities of the concept and to highlight the irony that sometimes what bugs you may come to signify home for you. .................................................................................................................................................................................... BROCK DETHIER retired from Utah State University after directing the writing composition program for 11 years. His publications include From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music (Heinemann, 2003), First Time Up: An Insider’s Guide for New Composition Teachers (Utah State University Press, 2005), Twenty-One Genres and How to Write Them (Utah State University Press, 2013), and two books of poetry, Ancestor Worship (Pudding House Publications, 2008) and Reclamation (Popcorn Press, 2015). Next - Fireflies by Kevin Prufer Next

Nominations for the Pushcart Prize Anthology Best of the Small Presses From Issue 1 "July" by Shannan Ballam "Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room" by Paul Fericano "Missa Brevis" by Kimberly Johnson "The Little House: Crystal City, Texas" by Jeff Talmadge From Issue 2 "Knotted Wrack" by Maureen Clark "Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us" by Kase Johnston Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link