Star Coulbrooke < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Aerobics by God Star Coulbrooke 00:00 / 02:10 Aerobics by God Star Coulbrooke It was a class for women only, women in the same church honing their bodies for husbands who told them God said it was good to be fit, and ever since birth control, women could be. So every Tuesday morning they followed a church-approved leader through ladylike routines in new leotards and ballet shoes, embarrassed at the sight of butts and legs they’d never seen before, their shapes always having been covered in Sunday pleats and gathers. Gradually, as confidence crept in with dance steps mastered to such easy routine they could have walked it in their sleep, their thoughts began to wander, endorphins they hadn’t owned since puberty pushing them into loving their muscles, liking their new form–such energy! A few of the ladies quit, went off to the fitness center in town and started working out with weights. They bought cross-training shoes, aerobics and lifting on alternate days. Made excuses for not going out with the family on weekends, went running on Saturdays, hot-tubbing Sunday. They were looking sharp, feeling like they could conquer the world. One ran for public office, two divorced. I burned up a new pair of shoes every six months, got so tight and sinewy I stopped my cycle, no more monthly bleeding, just energy, energy and power. I could carry six bags of groceries to the car myself, no cart, no sweat. I could stay up until midnight baking, doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom. I’d fall into bed, sleep hard until five, get up and go like hell. One day my man voiced his usual complaints and I decked him. All from a church-ladies gentle aerobics class ordered by God. "Aerobics by God" was published in Both Sides from the Middle (Helicon West Press, 2018), Perspective s, Center for Women and Gender online magazine, Utah State University, and Logan Canyon Blend, Blue Scarab Press, Pocatello, Idaho. The breakthrough that made this one a classic to perform was the realization that I could stretch the facts in my poems to get at the truth as well as the humor of a situation. Writing the poem in this style was empowering for me, a divorced woman going back to school in my forties, especially when my mentor, the late Ken Brewer, former poet laureate of Utah, got such a kick out of reading this poem to audiences across Utah. Previous STAR COULBROOKE was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah, and is founder/coordinator of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory, Both Sides from the Middle , and City of Poetry. mappingliteraryutah.org/utah-writers/star-coulbrooke Next

Star Coulbrooke < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Red Camaro Star Coulbrooke 00:00 / 02:47 Red Camaro Star Coulbrooke Monday, September 1st, 1997. I’ve had this Camaro ten years to the day. Got it when I was thirty-six, in the prime of my life. Red Camaro Sport Coupe with a story. Today I’m selling it to my neighbor for his daughter’s sixteenth birthday. The daughter, pouty smile, dark curly hair, bare feet, and a wild reputation came over for a test drive Friday night. Said, when she came back after fifteen minutes, My dad told me if I liked it I could have it. I really like it. I’ve liked it too. I’ve loved that red Camaro. Loved it and depended on it, bought it from a friend, used it for my job selling insurance and investments. That car was the wild card I drew when my husband, who had a couple of lucid months toward the end of our 23 ½-year marriage, my husband who was feeling magnanimous said, Why don’t we refinance the house and buy you a car? You choose the one. My husband, chastened by his last few escapades against the doctrine of marriage and continuing in a rare stretch of generosity, did not complain when I added to the mortgage loan our daughter’s wedding and a full set of furniture for our recently-finished basement. By the time his mood swung back to surly, I’d made my plan of escape. The title was in my name. I had the keys. I stepped on the gas pedal and raced right out of my old life. Kept the new furniture. Found an apartment I couldn’t keep—couldn’t pay rent and utilities working part-time and going back to school—so I gave the furniture to the married daughter who sold it when she ran into hard times. Now I’m selling the red Camaro, my symbol of freedom. It’s a blood-letting. I’m weak and shaky with anticipation. That wild young neighbor girl will drive it to school and boys will chase her and she’ll get in trouble. But it will give her new freedom, that car, and maybe it will give her life new meaning. Yes, this is the way I’ll imagine it all. The men in her life will find they don’t own her. Just like I did, she’ll escape in that declaration of red Camaro, that symbol of wildness and freedom, that independent woman’s car. When Covid hit in March 2020, I retired from my job at Utah State University, helped my husband build an addition on our house, and took care of him until he died from cancer in June 2023. I thought I had lost my ability to write poetry. But I turned to memoir writing and started mining pieces from my old journals. They have turned into prose poem memoirs, a new style for me, a real breakthrough. Previous STAR COULBROOKE was the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, Utah, and is founder/coordinator of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory, Both Sides from the Middle , and City of Poetry. mappingliteraryutah.org/utah-writers/star-coulbrooke Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Nevah Bettah Paula Harrington Not long after my mother died, my father bought himself a Panama hat. That might not seem like much of a sign. But he was a lifelong New Englander—a Bostonian, no less—and his usual headgear was an Irish tweed wool cap. So as soon as I saw his new straw affair, I knew it meant something. But what could that be, beyond the life-altering fact of my mother’s death? We were standing by the old electric stove in the kitchen, and he’d just put the kettle on to make himself “a cuppa.” No one else was up yet. He gave me that sidelong look of his and said—suddenly, as if the thought had just occurred to him—“Wait here a minute, Peach. I’ve got something to show you.” And off he walked to the back-hall closet. I watched him reach behind the woolens my family had kept jammed together on the top shelf for decades—mittens, gloves, scarves, caps—and take out a cardboard box. He brought it back into the kitchen, opened it on the counter, and put the Panama hat on his bald head. “Whad’ya think?” he asked. Well, all I could actually think at that moment was, where the hell did he find it? (This was back when nobody ordered online.) In Boston. In the dead of February. With snow blocking the front door. But find it, he had. Even at 76, Dad was a resourceful guy. “Lookin’ good,” I said, our family joke about appearance. “Thinking of taking a trip? “I’ll keep you posted,” he said, and proceeded to make his tea. Milk, two sugars. With his hat still on. The next morning found us near the same spot. Kettle going again. Panama hat put away. I’d woken up thinking I should say something about it, though. Try to find out more, make sure he was okay. He was standing at the sink, gazing out a window that looked down over a row of backyards receding in a slow slope to the Fore River and beyond that to the Boston skyline. It was a typical dreary February day, almost comically classic funereal weather. I took the leap, venturing to speak for my siblings as well as myself. “Dad, about the hat. About anything you do, really. Now that Mum is gone. We want you to know that whatever you do is fine with us. You did a great job taking care of her the whole time she was ill. So don’t worry about us. And, judging by how long Gramma lived, you could have fifteen more good years.” “You could be right.” He turned and looked at me with eyes that were still lively. “ I might live just about that long. If my luck holds.” And that was it, as far as this daughter and father could go in acknowledging all they had been through. The next day I flew back to California, where I’d been living for many years. It didn’t take long to learn where Dad was headed in his Panama hat. He was coming to see me. Well, not exactly. I was also his cover story. A week after I returned to California, he was on the phone. Which in itself showed we were in new territory; my mother had always been the one to call, with him pitching in a few words at the end. “How’s ya doin’, Peach?” “Good, Dad. You?” “Nevah bettah.” I laughed. He was back to his old jokes. And he had an announcement. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. And I’d like to take the train across the country. Never done that.” “Wow, Dad. Sounds like fun. Have you looked into it?” “I’m going to this week.” A week later, he called back, sounding more animated than I’d heard him in years. “Got all the particulars on my trip,” he said. “It’s looking good.” For the first time since I’d moved west two decades before, my father was coming to visit. It took him a few months to do it. Not due to second thoughts, though, just winter weather. In the meantime, he called me with updates. “I bought a ticket with an open date.” “Don’t think I’ll bother with a sleeper. It’s just three days and I can recline the seat all the way back.” “I have to change trains only once, in Chicago.” “I’m taking just one bag.” “The train’s delayed. Too much snow in the Rockies.” “I’m looking at late April.” Then one day he called and said, “I arrive on May 6th.” I scoured the platform for the clean-shaven father I'd known my whole life. When I didn’t see him, I started to worry. Could he have missed his transfer in Chicago? Not a chance. A man about Dad’s age and size was standing a few yards off; his hat gave him away. What fooled me at first were his mustache and goatee. “How d’ya like my new look? Somebody told me it’s called a Fu Manchu, but I think it’s a Van Dyke.” I was speechless for a couple of seconds but recovered quickly, as was our family practice. “Lookin’ good, Dad. But what I really like is your Panama hat.” He turned his head from side to side to give me the full effect: wide brim, blue band, jaunty tilt. You couldn’t miss the statement it was making. “Meet the new me, Peach.” “Yup,” I grinned. “I knew he was in there. Welcome to California.” As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person the new Dad was coming to see. My mother had a sister-in-law named Mary, who had married her brother Dan soon after he came home from World War II. Mum once told me he’d never been the same afterward. “His body was in one piece but his spirit was in bits,” she said. Still, he went on to meet and marry Mary, who’d become good friends with my mother during their wartime jobs as secretaries. Soon after that, my uncle and aunt struck out for Southern California, where they raised four children, cousins we barely knew when we were growing up back in Boston. Many years later, I too was living in California and had just gotten married myself. Uncle Dan’s health had deteriorated—apparently he drank a lot in his post-war years—and they moved in with their oldest son, who at that point lived about an hour from me. Then my uncle died. Soon Mary started flying back with me to see her old friend, my mother, who had become gravely ill herself. And on my final visit home before Mum’s death—the one that ended with her funeral and Dad’s new Panama hat—Mary was the only other person in our house besides our immediate family. She slept upstairs in a small bedroom that had once been my parents’. (Mum was sleeping by then in a hospital bed in the dining room, which we’d converted into a home hospice.) After my mother died, Mary stayed on with Dad for a couple of weeks. To keep him company, so my siblings and I could all return to our lives. She was a comfort to all of us. You can probably guess where all this is heading. Dad had traveled across the country not just to take the train trip or to visit me, the only one of his four kids who didn’t live in New England. He’d also come to see Mary. To find out if they might have a future together. True, she was nothing like Mum in most ways. She wasn’t as funny or as fierce. Not as smart or intellectual either. And she hadn’t been a redhead with freckles all over. But wasn’t that a good thing? Because who could compete with all that? Luckily, Mary had no urge even to try. She too had loved our mother and, besides, she was clearly her own person. Her way was to appreciate the humor and fierceness in others. She’d been a dark brunette with bright blue eyes, and proud of it. But she did share one important trait with Mum: Mary was just as kind. So it was that, a few days after Dad arrived, he and I drove down to see Mary at my cousin’s. Then we scooped her up—that’s how I always think of it: scooping her up, like a delightful child—and took her off with us. I recall the rest of that trip as if the three of us were traveling in some charmed bubble, a string of enchanted days that ran together with the soft beauty of a watercolor scene. I drove them all around the Bay Area, from Half Moon Bay to Richmond. Showed them places I’d lived over the years, Pacific beach cottages and Berkeley brown shingles. From fish shack to bridge lookout point we went, from a lighthouse hostel to a restaurant that had once been a brothel. And everywhere we stopped, Mary would give Dad and me the sweetest of smiles. “Oh,” she’d say. “This is so lovely. Thank you for taking me here.” I chuckled to myself, trying to imagine my mother in a state of such simple wonder. At Point Montara, I turned around to say something and caught sight of them holding hands. For about a year after that, they went back and forth from Boston to the Bay Area. My siblings and I knew what was happening but pretended not to. “Let them tell us in their own time,” one of my sisters said. Finally, when I was home for one of my visits—so strange now without my mother there—Dad called us all into the living room. Mary sat beside him on the old plush sofa, bolstered by pillows a neighbor friend had crocheted too many years ago to count. “We have something to tell you.” My siblings and I couldn’t look at each other for fear of grinning. “Mary and I have decided to live together, and we’d like your approval.” Then we told them how pleased – but not surprised – we were. Of course they had our “approval.” After that, the fabric of our family became seamless. Their lives—and now ours—flowed into each other's back and forth across decades. Mary told us stories about who our mother had been before any of us, including Dad, knew her. How Mum got a kick out of correcting boys in her class when they were wrong. How she’d taken a shy Mary under her wing at work, warning her to be careful of their bosses getting “handy.” How she’d fallen in love with a young Jewish man and been heartbroken when both families forbade a “religious intermarriage.” Our favorite story, of course, was the one about how our parents met. No surprise that Mary had been there. It happened at a USO dance at the Monhegan Hotel in New London, Connecticut. Dad was doing some training across the Thames River at the Groton Naval Base – he would go on to serve in the Merchant Marines in World War II – and our mother was working, along with Mary, in nearby Harford. Still sad about her ex-boyfriend, Mum didn’t want to go, but she was the only one with a car. So, in her kind way, she drove Mary and a couple of other girlfriends to the dance. As our mother always told it, Dad, who had a full head of black curls in those days, asked her to dance. The first thing she said to him was, “Who does your hair?” She still thought that was funny, forty years into their marriage. Mary, however, had a different version of the story. In hers, our mother had been taken by our father, a charming seaman, from the start. “I danced past once and saw her sitting at a table talking with him. Then I was amazed to see her still there the second time I went by. And the third. Your mother didn’t talk to just any guy, you know.” We didn’t, but we could imagine. Dad and Mary got married in the living room of my old house in Maine, where my husband, two kids, and I had moved a few years earlier. The pull of my family, the four seasons, and the Atlantic Ocean finally proved too strong. He was 86 when they made it official; she was 84. They stood before the mantle in our high-ceilinged living room with its leaded glass windows, my siblings and our spouses surrounding them. Mary wore a blue dress to match her eyes; Dad was in an Irish fisherman knit sweater. Our neighbor, an online minister, came over to do the honors. Then we all toasted them with champagne. “Welcome to the Harrington family,” my brother laughed. I remember that at one point, Mary leaned over and whispered to me. “I know your mother is looking down and smiling.” I can’t say I shared that belief. But I did know one thing. Mary wasn't only making our father happy, she was keeping our mother present in our lives. In the end, Dad and I had called it about right—he lived to be almost 91. So he and Mary did have nearly fifteen good years together. And, unlike my mother and uncle, both died quickly. Neither lingered or diminished into a different person from the one they’d once been. I was in the room at the hospital when Mary passed. Dad, of course, was there too. He held her hand in one of his own and gripped mine with his other. He kissed her on the forehead. “Goodbye, my girl.” Dad died a year later but I couldn’t be there. I was living in Paris with my family on a research grant, which had made him immensely proud. He’d fallen and broken a hip, and he chose not to undergo surgery and what would be a grueling, uncertain recovery. Instead, with his doctor’s agreement, he refused treatment and nourishment. Dad said his goodbyes on the phone to my husband and both of our now teenaged kids. Then they handed it to me. “I don’t want you to feel bad, Peach. This is what I want. I’ve had a good run.” Not even an hour later, my sister called back. “He’s gone.” I went and sat on the sofa in my Paris apartment. Let tears run down into the smile that was also on my face. I thought of him in his Panama hat on the train platform all those years before, how he’d kept moving when so many other people would have stayed put. I carry that image like a talisman. Because, as he might say, ya nevah know . A kind of companion piece to “The Dying Room,” "Nevah Bettah" tells the story of my father’s final chapter after my mother’s death, and my unexpectedly happy role in it. If her dying taught me to let go with love, his life afterward showed me the wisdom in moving forward. So my breakthrough came through his example: simply put, stay open and keep going. Previous PAULA HARRINGTON is a Maine writer and the former director of the Farnham Writers' Center at Colby College, where she also taught writing and literature. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris and is the author, with Ronald Jenn, of Mark Twain & France (University of Missouri, 2017). Her essays have appeared in Grande Dame Literary , Colby Magazine , and the Mark Twain Annual . Before entering academia, she was a newspaper reporter and columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue The Dying Room Paula Harrington Our father was seventy-six when our mother died. For almost three years, he’d been taking care of her while her health failed and her mood plummeted. She morphed from a fun-loving, kind, irreverent redhead into a cranky, frightened, white-haired old woman. The whole time, Dad somehow managed to remain solicitous of her. He loved to cook, so he would make her tasty little treats. A pioneer in the kitchen, he was hip to small plates long before most Americans knew they existed. His real agenda, though, was to get our mother to eat something. Anything. Her illness had made her lose her appetite, so whatever he cooked—no matter how tempting — she’d turn her nose up at it. He’d bring her a ramekin of ratatouille, say, with a flaky fresh biscuit on the side. Or a half-serving of baked stuffed scrod with two spears of steamed asparagus and a dab of lemon aioli. Maybe a few spoonfuls of his trademark pea soup flavored by a hefty hambone. “Here, Peg, try this,” he’d say, as if she were his taster and he was seeking her professional opinion. She would take it politely and thank him. But we all knew she didn’t mean it. What she really wanted to do was throw the food to the floor and never touch any of it again. But as furious as she was about getting sick and enfeebled, she did her best to fake it. She’d scrunch up her face, take a careful nibble, then concoct some excuse for putting the food aside. “Mmm,” she’d say. “Very good, Kev. Maybe just a little too salty.” Or “Oh, scrod. Wonderful. Did you remember to put dried parsley in the breading?” So Dad realized he had lost the woman he loved—the “real Peg”—well before she died. And we all knew we had lost our beloved mother. The day she finally left us for good, we dressed her in a coral-colored nightgown and matching robe. She lay all afternoon and into the evening in a hospital bed we’d set up downstairs while friends came and went to say goodbye. One brought her yellow roses, another rubbed sweet-smelling cream on her hands. She was already in a morphine fugue, though, only letting out the occasional noise that sounded like a cross between a mumble, chuckle, and growl. I guess you could say we gave her an old-fashioned Irish wake while she was technically still alive. After night fell, our brother came over with his guitar from his home nearby. Then he, my two sisters, and I sang Mum out. Our last song, I remember, was “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. There is a road, no simple highway Between the dawn and the dark of night And if you go, no one may follow That path is for your steps alone. Like a child again, I cried to myself, No, Mum, no! Don’t find that highway. But, of course, she already had. When she breathed her last, Dad was upstairs in their bedroom of forty years. We had encouraged him to get some rest, but the truth is I don’t think he wanted to be there when Mum actually passed. My brother didn’t either; he went home around 2 a.m. I understand how they felt. If you’d told me I could have been in the same room when my mother died, I would have said, impossible . Now I am glad I was there; it seemed only fair. She brought me into the world and I helped send her out. I found a poignant symmetry in that. So, in the end, only my sisters and I were present. Just the women of our family, which also seemed about right. For all our adult lives, the four of us had stayed up together whenever I, the family wanderer, came home to visit. My sisters would drive down from their homes in New Hampshire and Maine, and we would chat away with Mum about our lives, family friends, politics, books, and world events until we fell asleep in place. On the sofa, in the arm chairs, sprawled on the rug, flopping against each other, sharing sofa throws and pillows for bedding. That last night of her life, it felt only natural for us to lie down on the floor around her bed. We looked at each other and knew what to do. “The party’s over, Mum,” one of my sisters said. “We’re shutting our eyes and going to sleep.” Then we stayed still and quiet until, minutes later, we heard her death rattle. “The dining room has become the dying room,” my other sister whispered. Then we got up from the floor, linked arms, and went to tell Dad. "The Dying Room" first appeared in Grande Dame Literary Journal . It tells the story of my family's coming together for an old-fashioned Irish wake for my mother while she was technically still alive. My personal breakthrough was that I could be present in the room when she actually died because "she brought me into the world and I was helping to bring her out. I found a poignant symmetry in that." Previous PAULA HARRINGTON is a Maine writer and the former director of the Farnham Writers' Center at Colby College, where she also taught writing and literature. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris and is the author, with Ronald Jenn, of Mark Twain & France (University of Missouri, 2017). Her essays have appeared in Grande Dame Literary , Colby Magazine , and the Mark Twain Annual . Before entering academia, she was a newspaper reporter and columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Street Imagination Stephen Ruffus Night is a hood after a day’s exile stepping over broken glass. I scratch fractured stories on brick walls, sidewalks, the underpass for pigeons to sing to. They are all that I am, my only letters to the world. A library is a good place for hiding. You can tear pictures from art books of the famous paintings far across the East River tape them onto your bedroom wall and feel like you’re something. Make a few holes in your t-shirt before someone does it for you. Scuff up your brand new PF Flyers and deny all others the pleasure. At the corner store buy a Mission orange soda. No one will steal a swig. I’ll spit in the bottle first. Here you keep what is yours by corrupting it. First published in Hotel Amerika. In "Street Imagination," I describe the loneliness and vulnerability I felt as an adolescent growing up in a New York City neighborhood, and the small ways I challenged its threats and asserted my own identity to survive. Previous STEPHEN RUFFUS is the author of a chapbook, In Lieu Of (Elk Press, 2024) His work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly , among others. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work also received two awards in the Utah Original Writing Competition. Stephen was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West . Originally from NYC, he still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects, and currently lives in Salt Lake City with his wife. Next

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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Dear Carley Beth Colburn Orozco My daughter turned four the day before my scheduled trip to Honduras, where I had accepted a teaching position at a secondary school in El Progreso. The paperwork, pictures, and letters I saved from my pregnancy and her adoption were scattered on my bed. Packing would have to wait as I studied her baby pictures taken by her adoptive parents and sent to me through the adoption agency. In one, she was propped up against sofa cushions holding a baby ring with plastic keys, her chocolate-brown eyes and chunky cheeks smiling back at me. The guilt and shame acted like trained assassins hired to kill me. I thought of canceling my trip and curling up among her things. Instead, I picked up the little wristband she wore at the hospital, searching for parts of her, hoping her DNA, like a map, would lead me to her. I had chosen her parents from a stack of letters from people wanting a family. I wanted a family, too, and had promised myself, while in a Milwaukee courtroom, signing away my parental rights, that I was making the right choice. I was wrong. I was in my twenties when I got pregnant, squandering those precious young adult years with the wrong people while making one bad decision after another. For years, I worked in restaurants and bars. Living on tips, I worried about making rent and car payments. I didn’t have a safety net or a place to raise a child. My friend Tammy got pregnant during her second semester of college. She was raising her little girl in government-assisted housing with the help of welfare assistance and food stamps. One morning, I stopped by with donuts. A little pink bike with a banana seat, a flat tire, and mangled training wheels lay on its side on the front stoop of the apartment building. I dragged it into the yard. Tammy and her daughter lived on the second floor. The dingy linoleum stairs and hallway were filthy, and the walls were in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. The apartment door was ajar. Tammy’s little girl sat on a tattered rug, eating a bowl of cereal, and watching Scooby Do. Tammy’s feet dangled off the sofa. She was asleep. I set the bag of donuts on the floor just inside the apartment. Tammy’s little girl never looked up. Outside, the broken bike lay on the grass like a wounded animal. Instinctually, I placed my hands on my belly to protect my baby. I’m not raising my daughter like this. The memory of the broken pink bike, an image stacked among so many I collected like tarot cards during that time, reminds me why I chose to give up my daughter. I named my daughter Carley after seeing Carly Simon singing “Coming Around Again Itsy Bitsy Spider” on an MTV video: I know nothing stays the same / But if you’re willing to play the game / It will be coming around again. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Kelsey. That name belonged to someone I hadn’t held in my arms at the hospital when she was born. I was unable or maybe unwilling to accept the truth. For years, my journal entries would begin, Dear Carley . I picked up the journal given to me by a dear friend who would, years later, die from colon cancer while her three children were still in school. It wasn’t fair. There was a single entry because, even though I had promised to write, it was too painful to address my daughter in such a concrete way. I scanned the entry for clues to help me understand how I came to surrender my baby. Then, as now, it makes no sense to me. March 3, 1992 Dear Carley, -If I wrote to you each time I thought of you, I would have volumes of letters to share. -[The day I gave you up] was the worst day of my life. I felt alone and empty. I also felt about ten years old and that at any minute someone was going to start making decisions for me that would take away the pain and guilt. -Before I had you, I always had a net or web under me to catch me if I fell: My friends and family, even things like money, a car, and a job. But all the security I had could not help me make the decisions I made with you. In many ways, I had to grow up. You have helped me do that. -I am sorry. I am sorry I wasn’t there to hold you when you couldn’t sleep. I am sorry I wasn’t there to catch you when you took your first steps, and I am sorry I won’t be there to answer all the questions you will have about your adoption. There wasn’t time to sink into the dank well where I often treaded deep, dark waters. There was still so much to do before I left in the morning. I gathered the papers and photos and returned them to the adoption box, a plastic tote I kept stored in my closet. I debated taking it to Latin America, but the box was insurance that someday I would return. I would never leave my daughter behind again. I slid the journal along with a few notebooks and a pocket-sized calendar I purchased at Walgreens, into my backpack. It was time to finish packing, and it was time to untangle Carley from the past. I would take her with me as a traveling companion rather than a symbol of grief I had worn like a heavy talisman around my neck for so long, I had forgotten what a privilege it was to have brought her into this world. "Dear Carley" is an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir, The Seasons of my Bones . It's been thirty-six years, yet I still struggle with these words: I gave my daughter up for adoption. In this essay, a breakthrough occurs when I decide to look toward the future rather than dwell on the past. Previous BETH COLBURN OROZCO teaches literature and creative writing at Cochise College in southeastern Arizona. Most recently, her work was published in The Ana and was accepted for The Letter Review shortlist. Beth's short stories and essays have won awards, and more can be found at bethcolburnorozco.com . Next

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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Exhaling Carefully Christina Robertson Steadying his hand wasn’t easy, but the coffee was blazes and Robert didn’t want to scald himself. He found he could sometimes hold off the shakes, which still came and went, by taking a deep, slow breath. Unfortunately, taking a deep breath just made him crave a cigarette. Slowly, cautiously, using both hands, he set his stained china mug down on the brick ledge of the back stair landing and reached for his pack of Kents. He took one out with his teeth, returning the pack in one elegant motion to the lower pocket of the canvas flak jacket he wore. He’d unearthed the crazy thing, an old Gunga Din costume piece, from his basement storage unit, thinking it might be useful. Quitting drinking was a bitch. He needed all the fire power he could muster for this battle. Hard candy (he found Lemonheads surprisingly effective), a small sketchbook, the remaining half of a Faber-Castell 4B pencil. Cigarettes, for sure. He wouldn’t be giving those up anytime soon. The jacket had enough pockets for everything, even a small patch the right size for the smooth jade “worry stone” Solveig had given him upon his release from the atrocious county detox center, when, somewhat cavalierly he thought, she’d agreed to become his sponsor. Of course, she was pretty woo woo, but dammit, he had to admit rubbing the daft little thing with his thumb was rather soothing. He stood erect on the landing, chin up, skillfully, meditatively drawing off his cigarette and exhaling carefully, as if delivering a delicate brushstroke onto a canvas or letting go of a child’s hand as she takes her first step. He was observing the young woman, Radha… or was it Rasha (he’d been told at some point, but hadn’t really been paying attention), hanging laundry to dry on the pitiful second floor landing across the alley. An array of small white t-shirts and larger sleeveless ones, mostly. She called and her little boy came bursting outside with extra clothes pins. He fixed his gaze on Robert, a familiar face, and at his mother’s prompting, waved. A wiry, antelope-eyed little guy. Robert hammed it up, saluting back. As she moved, the woman’s sari, a deep malachite green, fluttered in a lovely way. However, as she worked it, the ancient pulley mechanism (indeed he couldn’t believe this antiquity still existed) squeaked, killing his reverie, replacing it with irritation. The boy disappeared, answering the call of an onerous voice from within. Robert put out his cigarette. He was supposed to be working on filler cartoons for a couple of trade magazines, locking down a piddling check or two. He was moved instead to portray Radha—as a revelation, the way she ought to be, no dreary undershirts, no weathered gray porch, no torn window screens. Pastels were the mood: lots of burnt sienna, blue-green, and gold. She didn’t know, never would, that she was actually Princess Devi, “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Well, at least considered so by LIFE Magazine a few decades ago. By noon he had three decent portraits (the more loosely-rendered his favorite), barely a nub of sienna left and ink stains on his fingers. This flight had left him with a mean thirst for a bit of the devil. He needed to make it to four o’clock. That is when the dried-up losers club, to which he has ostensibly recommitted himself, meets over in the church gym. There he would enjoy a donut and ease his mind, focusing on some other poor schmuck’s problems. And maybe, though jury was still out on this, unload a few of his own. There had been a growing list of frustrations, Robert had to admit. For one thing, people were being nice. He found it particularly grating in his encounters with his typically disapproving downstairs neighbor Mrs. Georgioulis and Mrs. Cudjer, the janitor’s overly-solicitous wife (Cudjer himself wouldn’t speak to him since he’d set a small fire in his apartment). Word had gotten around the building that Robert Galen, alcoholic has-been artist, had finally hit rock bottom. Whereas he would’ve thrown his ass right out on the street, they were attempting to buoy him with grotesquely unoriginal platitudes. “It’s the first day of the rest of your life, Galen.” It takes a village. Swallowing the annoyance, he exercised basic decency toward them, just resented having to squander that capital on unimaginative do-gooders. Their sunniness gave him a headache. He was convinced their gestures of kindness were really intended to shame him; the filling of the terra cotta pot he used as a cigarette butt receptacle with a geranium, healthy meals left at his doorstep, landmines of vegetable and rice dishes. The neighborhood was changing, and how. Robert recalled, in a hazy way, the optimistic, clear-eyed couples who bought into this co-op building at the time he and Aggie did. That was back when Aggie was doing costume work for the Goodman Theater and he, ridiculously gel-haired and narrow-tied, had begun to sell a couple of his paintings. The other rosy chaps were a young architect and a newspaper guy, a feature writer for the Tribune, their wives essentially little cherry blossoms on their lapels. Aggie, with her heavily mascara-ed eyes, punky black hair, and vintage clothing, couldn’t relate to the wives’ bland chatter. They, in turn, considered her exotic. Perhaps a bit dangerous, Robert chuckled. The newspaperman, Wynn or some such ridiculously WASP-y name, had gotten Robert some illustration assignments for the Trib company; work intended to supplement the elusive income of a serious painter, but which, more often than not, Robert admitted with some shame, disappeared at one of his favorite downtown watering holes. The clear-eyed couples moved on, needing to claim their rightful places in some horrible, vapid suburb, and the immigrants started moving in. Robert had nothing against them being foreign, indeed not. He found researching their presumptive histories a fascinating and worthy occupation. Especially since it seemed forsaking the devil’s tea left him with more time on his hands. Of course Aggie had taken their computer and laid claim to most of their library, but Robert held to the classically written volume anyhow; impressive, if musty, stacks piled up beside his armchair. Ancient Celtic Heroes had been helpful when the Drumgooles moved into the garden apartment; Ancient Greek Gods and Goddesses (Georgioulis notwithstanding) was spot on in revealing timeless failings within human nature. Nothing contemporary (but then Robert was convinced nobody knew how to write anymore). The problem was that these transplants were all so damn loud. Loud when they cooked, when they laughed, when they fought. Loud televisions. Loud lovemaking (just the men, he’d noted). He had painted many of them, in dignified postures, layered over old unsold canvases. But in the breathing world they only interfered with his meditations. They seemed deaf to the transcendent robinsong each morning. They interrupted with their pots and pans and yammering, his experiencing the iridescence of twilight, tearing into the expansiveness of his thoughts during his evening smoke. He went to the refrigerator for some orange juice. Out the kitchen window he could see the woman Radha again, lecturing her son in their native tongue. Hindi? Urdu? In any case, nearing an octave above human tolerance. Her diatribe could be heard from within his third floor apartment. The sound reminded him of the grating, relentless, tiny machine gun fire scoldings of the wrens that darted into the knotholes of his youth in Indiana. The poor kid was seated on a folding chair beneath the string of undershirts. Their whiteness, in reflection, made narrow rivers in his neat black hair. Robert could tell this wasn’t his first rodeo, his face shut down, his thoughts no doubt elsewhere. He must be around ten, Robert guessed, probably wondering what his friends are up to, or fantasizing about how he’d like to remove his mother’s voice box. “People of color!” It was his knee-jerk reaction. Then, reproaching the world as he often did, Christ in an elevator, we’re all people of color! He reckoned with indignation, the term insinuates “white” people lack color. As an artist, he did not lay down Titanium White and call it a day. He used greens and blues and mauves when mixing paint to capture a fair complexion. Black people! Brown people! He smiled derisively. Lazy misnomers. On canvas, he built those subjects layer upon gorgeous layer, using umber and sienna surely, but also plum, ochre, ultramarine blue, warm gray, even a shimmer or two of aqua or ivory. He thought it a pity—and an ignominious product of the world’s rush—that nobody seemed to take time to honor the amazing palette out there. Nature’s spectrum is a goddamned miracle, yet we idiots consistently miss it! Years back, he’d done an impressionistic portrait of their little Pauline in gradations of the dusky purple he noticed beneath her huge eyes, under her chin, and along the side of her nose; a child made of shadows. It had grounded him, drawing or painting his daughter; she was his, no matter what hues he chose to use or omit. The things inside her, the light and the pain she was made of were the things he valued, what he connected to. Those are the things that people should attend to, if only they weren’t in such a goddamn hurry. Radha’s lips were paling. Yet there she was, scolding away, a lecture on behavior it seemed, though Robert couldn’t make out any English words save a phrase sounding something like “street boys.” In contrast, the kid’s face was darkening. Tears boiled over and suddenly, defiantly, he tore off down the stairs, knocking over the chair. His mother leaned over the porch railing, her blue-black hair coming loose, and issued some sort of shrill warning in that up-down, run-on language of theirs. Robert could feel the slap within her words. Until recently he’d heard her address the child in a mellifluous tone, sounding to him much like a lullaby. Lately however, her voice had developed a sharpness. Didn’t she understand that boys need to be a little bad? Radha let the screen door slam. He could still hear her accelerated speech as she entered her apartment, letting off steam. A moment later a man stepped out. Compact and well groomed, he was the color of bitter chocolate, Robert observed, heavy on the violet and burnt umber. Robert hadn’t really seen him before, Radha being the one most often outside. The man leaned out, over the railing, the whites of his eyes flashing as he summoned his boy with clipped authority, “Aarev!” He brandished the flat of his hand. Robert decided he’d heard enough. This sort of thing tightened his jaw, reminded him too much of childhood years best forgotten; the disappointment he’d been to his own father, a cop and night watch supervisor at the university. That is, before his father drank himself to death. Robert didn’t need to go down that road…his nerves were already in a precarious condition. Heredity obviously stacked against him, the raw chaos of others’ lives was certainly not going to be helpful in his sobriety. He conjured what had, to him, become a mantra, Solveig’s words, walk away from bad intention . These two malignant nincompoops were probably just doing their lousy best to raise this kid in this godawful world. Still, Agatha would never have allowed the entire neighborhood to bear witness like this. And she’d certainly held Pauline to some lofty standards, the child growing unnaturally quiet and submissive. Or maybe it had been his erratic behavior that had done that. In his absence or, more likely in the frightening face of his inebriation, she may have believed she existed as her mother’s only consolation. In any case, his little piccolo, an adult now, and faraway, had been absorbed into the ranks of the proper and compliant. And so these nincompoops would lose Aarev. The boy could be a mischievous bundle, no doubt. Watching from his smoking spot on the landing, Robert had delighted in the half-baked pranks he came up with when his mother wasn’t watching, attempts to court the attentions of the neighborhood gang with whom he apparently wasn’t allowed to play. Sometimes Robert snuck a quick hand signal, an encouragement, and the boy’s face brightened. This little guy wanted street cred like the dickens. Though sympathetic, he had to agree with Radha here, that lot were a herd of pre-pubescent little shits with one thirteen-year old bad influence at the helm. There was something dreamy about Aarev. Robert caught it in the way the child hummed to himself, and paused coming up the back stairs after school, his eyes carefully following the sounds of those off at play, trying to figure out where the day’s gathering spot was. It evoked memories, Robert’s lonely boyhood. Centuries ago it seemed, he too had been his mother’s only child, skinny and wistful, ostracized, his artistic leanings willfully misjudged by his own father. He’d eventually earned the respect of his peers by one-upping them in the poor choice department. Easier once his dad had successfully potted himself. Restless, Robert went to his books. Between a forgotten copy of Mother India and a disintegrating paperback translation of the Bhagavad Gita , he was able to decipher the boy’s name. Aarev: Peaceful. Jesus in a cab. He stood up from his armchair and tore off his reading glasses. He paced, lingering over some pictures of his long ago Paulina Piccolo. Conscience, resurrected, was pulling at him. He grabbed his cigarettes and scrounged matches from the front pocket of yesterday’s pants. He made sure he had an extra pencil and clean gum eraser in his flak jacket. To be sure, he’d much rather have been setting off on one of his blind adventures, travel mug of Jameson in hand. Diligence. Four o’clock, he reminded himself. With exasperated resolve he unwrapped a Lemonhead, opened the door and stepped out in search of the boy. The alley, once paved, was all cracks now, fractured and uneven. Pebbles and fragmented glass ground to sparkle filled fissures and scattered its length. Dull green dumpsters loafed, wide-hipped and dented, along the back walls of all the buildings. It had become a dirty, desolate canyon in which, ironically, every aroma was captured, every conversation could be overheard, and echoing bedsprings betrayed the tossed and turning at night. He didn’t want to imagine his neighbors in bed. Aggie, on the other hand, he summoned to mind frequently (and torturously), as he did now for a streak of a moment. Young Agatha Holmes. The lustful little sprite had been intoxicating. God she could excite him back then—tease and then accommodate him, anywhere. During the feverish onset of their relationship they’d clasped each other in a theater dressing room, sopping and ecstatic, costumed, an irrepressible nun and priest. But his absences, lost in the drink, and the soul-sucking responsibilities he’d left her with, had served to cool things between them until, after a point, sex was only a concept they fought over. These days he mostly thought about Solveig; her enormous hazel eyes, the subtle colors of a landscape, set into a face like a sunrise. Aggie’s face had been so different, fox shaped, pale, like the moon at night, her hair chopped and blackened and defying direction. Sol’s was a honey-brown tumble reliably falling out of tails or twists, an invitation. She was deliciously abundant. She was balm, as soulful and beckoning as music. Still, he’d never cross the line. She’d hardly fall for costume-love, or any of his old school seductions. He’d hazarded a flirtation once or twice, fortified by Jack Daniels, but held back. Beneath Solveig’s tough kindness, her unsparing honesty, was a pulsing resilience, an essential belief he couldn’t share or risk damaging. It seemed to him that addiction hadn’t quite toppled her pillars as it had his. That wholesome determination made her unattainable, and precious. He’d come to rely on her dependable rejection of his bullshit. Beyond her sponsorship, Sol was his friend, his Achelois, she who drives away pain . In empty moments though, he couldn’t stop himself from the fantasy, now that he was sober, that she might come to him. He knew this was fairy dust. She was surely fond of him, but as a niece might be fond of a curmudgeonly uncle. At fifty-seven he was certainly old enough to be that. And bourbon hadn’t done his looks any favors. When he bothered to glance in the mirror, he met a ragged man, worn out and gray. A face deeply lined and veiny at the nose. Someone in need of help. He slowed, hearing a cough echo down a shadowy gangway. Bending sideways, Robert cautiously peered into the vaguely urine-scented shaft. Sitting in the gloom, his knees drawn up tightly, was Aarev. His little arms were glistening wet, he’d been wiping his face with them. Even in the dim light Robert could discern the child’s thick eyelashes made blacker by tears. He cleared his throat, sending the boy’s head burrowing into his knees. “My dear fellow,” Robert began. He knew he sounded like someone from another time and place, a better one. His intention. He got no response. “I got pretty good at hiding when I was your age.” At this the boy looked up with one eye. Robert brought out a pencil, casually sliding it behind his ear. He listed for Aarev some of his more inspired hideouts. On days when teasing—and life—had seemed merciless, he admitted hiding inside his locker to avoid recess. “The locker vents were just at my eye level. I saw some pretty entertaining things from there.” He finished with a dance of the eyebrow. Aarev whispered, “Like what?” “Oh well, lots of things.” Robert chuckled, deliberately enticing his audience. Aarev was hooked. Tell me. “One particular day, I saw my teacher—a very strict disciplinarian, I might add—slip off her shoes and dance in her stockings down the hall with Mr.—the principal. They um—,” Robert thought better of going on. Aarev shrugged, unimpressed. “My teacher dances all the time in class. And we do hip hop in Friday gym.” Adjusting to these concepts, he scratched at the stubble on his chin. He searched for something meatier. “Well…I once got on a bus, didn’t know where in hell I was going.” Silence. “Were you scared?” “I was desperate, sir. Anxious to get away—my father was tough. Didn’t care for how I chose to spend my time. Mad as hell I didn’t want to play baseball like the other boys. I wanted to draw.” He tapped the cover of his sketch pad. “I stayed on that bus to the end of the line, then took another.” Aarev’s brows lifted, then gathered. He was digesting this. It occurred to Robert he’d come off as endorsing such a flight. “But that I don’t recommend!” This lurched out in a gruffer voice than he’d intended. Aarev shifted a preoccupied gaze out, toward the alleyway. Great, Robert thought, I’ve given the kid the notion to run away. He didn’t need that on his plate. It was trying enough to handle the damage he and booze had done to his own daughter. He was still figuring out how to make amends for managing to miss almost all her school events, the damn dances and award ceremonies; all the terrible words he’d inflicted upon her and her mother, spurting out uncontrolled, like diarrhea; his final act, wasted and untouchable, plowing into another car. He was haunted by the look of terror on her young face seeing him after the hospital, blackened and sutured and trembling in withdrawal. He couldn’t be responsible for this child. “Don’t you do that, now,” Robert repeated, holding an earnest tone. “You know there are seedy sorts out there. Anyhow, best not to run from your problems.” (He didn’t miss the irony in this). “I know a better way to get yourself lost.” Beckoning, he drew the pencil from behind his ear and flipped open his pad. Robert’s head had always swum with characters on dangerous romantic missions. They trod the pathways of his mind, old time villains and displaced princesses, explorers, travelers on amethyst mountains, in magnificent bone-scattered caves, conquering treacherous seas, encountering (of course) the swarthy eye-patched and wooden-legged, those disenfranchised, misunderstood heroes. They were his fascinations, his companions, frequently finding their way into his artwork. Alcohol had only made it easier to go there. He glanced up from his paper, self-conscious over the small but noticeable tremor in the hand holding the pencil. With his practiced eye, he sketched out a majestically turbaned boy riding on top of an elephant. He set the pair on a city street, a bus lumbering behind them. Aarev rearranged his limbs, rising, his curiosity drawing him nearer to where Robert was scribbling away, into the light, straining for a look. Whisking his 4B pencil back and forth, here and there, Robert added shading, then lowered the pad so the boy could see. “Oh, man!” The child’s voice hadn’t dropped yet. “You can do that?” Slowly, dramatically, Robert produced the other pencil, holding it out. He was entranced, the poor little scab. Robert felt a sudden bristling at the idea of committing to something beyond the moment. A failure at cooperation, it had taken him years to tolerate the dried-up losers club with equanimity. Eventually he’d reasoned that if AA could tolerate him , Robert Galen could force himself to reciprocate. He could see this little cartoon was being taken as some sort of an invitation. He hesitated. “We’ll see, my good man.” Their shoes—his, desert boots he’d lovingly preserved since the 90’s, Aarev’s, checkered slip on sneakers—crunched the loose gravel in sync. They took time going back. Aarev was busy telling Robert that he’d actually never ridden an elephant, nor had his father or uncles; that in school they’d had a big discussion about how those kinds of pictures are “assum-shins” and “stereo-tyfes.” This stopped Robert in his tracks. Discussions at school! Back in Indiana in his own prehistoric youth, he was told to memorize out of whitewashed books; expected to accept everything imparted by whatever old battle axe handed down the grades, stuff designed to turn children into little narrow minded agree-ers. It dawned on him how misled he’d been, how many false trails he’d followed. How absurdly rigid and out of step he’d become. Not so different from the rule-followers and conformists that gave him gas. He’d been wallowing in self-pity for so long, his whole life it seemed suddenly. Comparing himself to manufactured folk heroes! He’d gotten lazy, allowed his powers of observation to dull, his brain to shrink! Taking a deep bow, he offered this young man an apology. With ceremony he drew the sketchbook and pencil from their pockets. He got to work adding an abundance of shaggy fur to the elephant and lavishly arced its tusks, transforming the beast into a mastodon. He erased the turban and gave the image of the rider a three cornered hat with a fantastic plume and an eye patch. He tore the picture out and handed it to Aarev, who giggled at first, then slowly looked up “You can give me lessons?” Visited by memory; mornings when Pauline was very young, mornings he’d been too hungover to go outside and they’d drawn pictures together in shared silence, Robert found himself assenting. “You have to ask your parents.” He said, though hating the necessity, the dismal properness. A light in the boy’s face dimmed. He paused. “Please. Wait?” The request must be as much about having backup as expedience, Robert thought, watching the boy climb the stairs. He checked his watch. It was approaching four o’clock. Remaining at his post as promised, Robert waited, rubbing Solveig’s worry stone. As it warmed in his hand, he heard voices rise from Aarev’s apartment. This time the loudness didn’t annoy him, it concerned him. His own father, Supervisor Frank Galen of the bloodshot eyes and unforgiving hands, had doled out whippings, but had much preferred humiliation, calling him “Mona Lisa” in front of other kids. He realized he was clenching the worry stone, in his fist. Above, big voices overrode small. A dissonant wail followed by a door slamming, hard. Feeling the weapon in his hand, Robert took aim. The tiny missile, launched impulsively, missed the window and dropped tick-click to the pavement. Solveig’s words rose like a flock of birds. Walk away from bad intention. As heinous as this situation was, was he really anyone to judge? After all, he had hurt his own child, badly, irrevocably, if not with his hand, certainly with his own ogre-isms and excuses. The blunt force of the voices upstairs was tearing open old wounds. All the painful places inside that alcohol had scabbed over. Grabbing the fallen piece of jade, he swiftly took the old gray staircase. He thought or could imagine, mournful sounds muffled within the apartment. Boldly, he rapped the stone against the door. The forcefulness created an echo in the alley. Inside, things got quiet. Radha came, but kept the screen door latched between them. Her eyes were wide, expression tight. Robert exhaled and forced a smile. “Hello…Radha…” “Mrs. Bedi. My husband isn’t here.” They both knew she was lying. “I think you may have seen me before,” he went on, certain she too knew his lie, the real reason for his visit. She nodded. Clearing his throat of its usual gravel, he said, “I like to think of myself as an explorer of man.” She stared uncomfortably. “I have been thinking I’d like to learn about your culture. I’ve been reading, but my books are quite a bit out of date. I’m out of date,” he smiled ruefully. Radha looked confused, impatient. He got to it. “I had a conversation with your son about some important things he’s been learning in school…left me wondering if I might continue that discussion—here, on your porch, of course.” He motioned to the decrepit folding chair. A strategic touch, he thought, especially in light of his having materialized, a stranger uninvited, outside their door. “I’m sorry, this is not a good—” “Your boy Aarev…an excellent young man…could share with me what he is learning in school, and in exchange perhaps I could give him some…art lessons? I was an artist, you see. I’m, well, I’m retired now.” Through the crumby screen he saw Mr. Bedi appear, lurking dusty purple behind her. In a blur of emotion the man was indistinguishable from his own father and he resisted an urge to call the asshole out. Instead, Robert girded himself, and turned up his volume, making certain he could be clearly heard inside. “Your child is bright. He seems to take school seriously. I’m afraid my schooling left much to be desired.” Bedi shouldered his way forward then, holding up the drawing. Beneath his bristling, Robert could recognize some of his own existential burdens mirrored in the man’s deeply creased forehead. “You gave this to my son? He doesn’t know you. What do you want from him?” There was some explaining to be done, Robert owed Bedi that much. He hated that the world had become so ready to excavate a nugget of ugliness from an offering of fellowship. Then again, why in Lucifer’s name shouldn’t people be paranoid? Look at how pervasive rank behavior had become, and how boldly committed. With a friendly air (that required a little effort), he recounted how he happened to run across the child seeming in low spirits. The drawing, Robert explained, had been an effort to cheer him up, coax him home. He wasn’t sure Bedi was buying it. It was clear he’d never be able to share his portraits of Radha with the man. “And why do you care?” Bedi glowered, puffing up his chest. He decided to ignore the man’s bluster and addressed himself to her. “I’m not much, but I once was a—” He couldn’t cop to it: a painter. “I made my living doing illustration.” The boy was nowhere to be seen. Shut in his room, Robert assumed, silently fuming at the idea. The man began to examine Robert as one might an anonymous letter. “This is not a usual thing…” Radha spoke to her husband in that mellow tone Robert had heard her use in the past. With a gesture of her hand she excused them both for a moment, backing her husband into their apartment and closing the door. Robert was left hanging with the undershirts. Shaking and a bit damp under the collar, he craved a smoke like a bear craves salmon, but resisted diving for the pack. Instead, he took a deep breath and looked up into the clouds. He imagined Sol’s hair, true gold under the gym lights. Half the time that was what got him through the damn meetings, the golden mayhem of her hair. And her laugh, a deep cough and twinkle of the eye. How she owned her alcoholism as if it was a bad knee, as if it was something she’d brought upon herself, trying too many impossible leaps. It was four o’clock when they returned. Aarev was with them. He seemed smaller, subdued, didn’t say a word. His deep creature-brown eyes riveted to Robert’s while his mother grasped his shoulders with nervous, gold ringed fingers. Her hair was smoothed again and her smile was trained. The man of the house did the talking. He came out onto the porch. Robert extended a hand, but Bedi, obviously still suspicious, anchored his on his hips. “I will agree to this. Aarev would like to learn how to draw. This is better for him than running in the streets.” His expression was stern, wary. Radha spoke softly then. “He’s a good boy.” She ran a hand over Aarev’s hair and the boy, embarrassed, tilted his head away, touching his palm against the frayed screen. At the sound of his wife’s voice the furrow in Bedi’s brow eased. He gave a nod. “My wife and I will share with you about our culture, if you are interested.” *** Robert had been stewing. It was bothering him to be collaborating in any way with a parent who seemed amenable to raising a hand against a child. As a survivor of it himself, bullying topped any disdain he might have for obligation. Something new was willing him forward though, something he was uncovering or recovering. He wasn’t clear on it all yet, just that he’d allow himself no escape hatches. Lessons were to begin Saturday and would include dinner with the family. Robert had feigned delight when agreeing to the terms. It seemed requisite to live a life with other people in it, one has to abide by conditions and learn from them, to blend. On Saturday he collected an assortment of his old colored pencils, in various states of diminishment, but usable, and purchased a large pad of newsprint and a gum eraser wrapped in glistening plastic. He gathered together a small portfolio of his own work…for legitimacy’s sake. Wisely omitted were the pastels of Princess Devi, vision beneath the laundry lines. Solveig had convinced him to share this development in his life with the dried-up losers. Wanting to please her, he’d stood before them at last night’s meeting (having finally made it there), fighting past his fear, then furious at their applause, the silly sea of nodding heads. For Chrissake , he hadn’t even done anything yet, let alone succeeded at it. “Yes you have, Robby,” Solveig smiled. “You have.” Traversing a landscape, not of magical vistas and soon to be rescued princesses, but one pitted with injury and regret, inhabited by the unalike as well as the painfully relatable, he’d need to carry her belief in a pocket inside himself—next to those that embrace his faraway Pauline, and this boy, Aarev. Another patch to sew upon his deep blue heart. He’d taken himself to the library. Aware that Mother India was most certainly not an accurate, full account of a people, just one long-outdated perspective, he needed an infusion. He had to come at this thing with an open admission of his complacency, with humility, Christ knows , and with respect; a starting place. He made certain then, on Saturday, that he’d showered and shaved, his jacket pockets emptied of cigarettes and equipped with hard candy. Antacid would be practical (for god knows they spice up their food). Battling an epic battle against old demons, he toiled through the damn Serenity Prayer. He didn’t want to screw this up. Now, in the narrow hallway leading from the stillness of his bedroom, he stared into his hand, ruminating on the green clouds captured within the dint of the smooth jade worry stone. He slipped that into its place as well. He would give it to Aarev. The boy could use it, the strange, warm, secret strength it carried. In "Exhaling Carefully," an antisocial middle-aged has-been artist and recovering alcoholic has an epiphany while trying to help the young son of immigrant neighbors with a personal problem, and finds that he is the one who benefits most from their arrangement. 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Hairbrush David Romanda I hand her a hairbrush (her brush). You have the floor , I say. She says, Brush or no brush, you’re going to interrupt me before I can finish. That’s bullshit , I say. See? she says. You finished your sentence , I say. At least twenty seconds pass. She’s holding the brush, but doesn’t speak. I reach for the brush. She shakes her head. She says, I’m not finished. “Hairbrush” was originally published in Columbia Review . Often, when you’re fighting (arguing) in a relationship, neither party is completely “following the rules”—that’s the breakthrough in this one. Previous DAVID ROMANDA 'S work has appeared in places such as Columbia Review , Poetry Ireland Review , and PRISM international . He is the author of three books, including Your Lover Stabbed in the Streets (Frontenac House, 2025). Romanda lives in Kawasaki City, Japan. romandapoetry.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue When He Had to Travel Carol Coven Grannick I remember how I’d pat the sheets— dark green—when he was gone, a rhythmic touch with gentle beats I remember how I’d pat the sheets read poems brimmed with love conceits and woke alone at dawn. I remember how I’d pat the sheets— dark green—when he was gone. “When He Had to Travel” is a poem that marks a breakthrough in my journey with the man I was dating. He travelled a lot for his work at that time, and this triolet marks the night I decided I wanted to marry him. I wrote it in the last year during his final illness, and read it to him. He loved it. Previous CAROL COVEN GRANNICK is an award-winning poet and children's author of Reeni's Turn (Fitzroy Books, 2020). Read more at carolcovengrannick.com . Next