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 I was grateful our school schedules were nearly identical because without her, I was awkward, silent, and withdrawn.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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Still Life with Fly Shawn Stradley Two concrete strips separated and edged by weeds run between red brick walls, past a corrugated steel garage door, bare lightbulb, crooked wood door, past the weed patch of leftover space at the end of the dead end. Why there's a garage door alongside the alley is a good question, no vehicle could make such a tight turn. Raised, the door provides ventilation, natural light. Closed, it secures. Inside, two dusty double-hung six- over-six divided light windows look out to morning glory, sow thistle, other brick walls, let in muted light, cast shadows. For consistency and night, a couple of flood lights on poles provide directed light, harsh and bare, or softened with a scrim. Tea cups, angel wings, fabric, rusty train shock springs, spoiled fruit, skulls––one human found in a basement among medical school training supplies, one cat found in the corner of the weed patch by the downspout, one beaver found by the river––old books, empty vodka, whiskey, wine bottles. Mason jars filled with marbles, fortunes, rocks, air, pennies, turpentine, thinner. Dolls' arms, radio tubes, bones––vertebrae, jaw, femurs from deer or cow––statues of saints, rosaries, forty-hour candles wrapped with prayers, used coffee filters, condom wrappers, a shopping cart, mannequin torso, the ball cap left by last Saturday night's trick, dead flowers. Stretched canvases lean against bare brick walls, too much accumulated amid the buzz of a single fly. The couch sags. Open beer flattens. There's not enough time to paint it all out, step back, take it all in. Turpentine rags stained crimson, violet, fern and blue, used to clean brushes, wipe up spills, unstain hands, litter the floor like jock-straps in a strip-club backroom––spontaneous, combustible. "Still Life with Fly" was published in Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art . The personal breakthrough in this poem was derived from the concept that the next thing always belongs. If that is true, then why not keep going, keep adding? So I did. I’ve always been fascinated with artists' studios, the mess, the clutter, the curiosities, all the bric-a-brac, the inspiration. To me, these spaces have always held an air of potential eroticism. It’s all so exciting? Based on my many studio visits over the years, I imagined and I wrote, and I brainstormed, and I kept writing, and adding. In this case, even the gradual increase in line length keeps building to the chaos, the clutter, the potential. After the additions though, there is always the work of revision, grammar, sentence construction, flow, enjambment. Are these tools helping to build, helping to hold together? In a "kitchen sink"-type poem, I believe they have to. Previous SHAWN DALLAS STRADLEY grew up in Utah and California. He holds a B.S. in Horticulture from BYU, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from University of Colorado. In 2013, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Shawn began writing poetry at age 16. His mystical fascination with the natural world weaves throughout his work, and mixes with the urban. Shawn became active in the Utah poetry scene in 1997 and published his first full-length poetry book in 2003: Beyond October (Black Rock Books). Shawn has worked with poets and artists to produce chapbooks and a collaborative catalog for the art exhibit, The 9 Muses . Two chapbooks of Shawn's poetry were published in 2025 by Moon in the Rye Press, Fragile House and a group collaboration, When Cupboards Open . His poetry has been published by City Weekly , Exit 7 , Panorama , The New Era , Nine One One , The Poeming Pigeon , and My Kitchen Table. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Glamour Shots Naomi Ulsted I had spent my morning fantasizing about the UPS guy. He had thick dark hair and a natural smile, and he usually arrived at the office around ten in the morning. While booking reservations at La Quinta hotels across Texas for the children’s theatre show I worked with, I made sure I was in the front office in case he was just running late. After lunch, I gave up and was in the back room reorganizing our costumes when I heard the door open. I draped my sparkling green witch costume over an office chair and darted to the front, ignoring the office manager’s disapproving look. She didn’t care for me bolting in or out of rooms. She pursed her lips as I slugged back Gatorade, suffering from the after-effects of an evening dancing down on Sixth Street. My new life in Austin was days of bland mediocrity punctuated by dancing on Sixth Street and the UPS guy’s arrival. Sadly, it was only a salesman selling Glamour Shots from the mall. So maybe I bought them because I was consoling myself about the UPS guy. Or maybe because the office manager sniffed with disdain as I reviewed the package they were offering: a professional sitting that included makeup and dress for up to three people and one eight by ten print, all for a flat rate of sixty dollars. I handed over my credit card. It’s not like I was dying for a photoshoot. I hadn’t wanted to be a model since I was twelve, but my little sisters were coming to visit. They were eleven and thirteen years old, and I’d convinced our mom to let them fly from Oregon to Texas to spend two weeks with me. I imagined us dressed to kill, looking sophisticated and elegant. I felt very adult as I tucked my credit card away and returned to my shimmering costumes. I picked Leah and Tanya up from the airport, where the three of us crammed into the cab of my pick-up truck and let their suitcases slide across the bed. We stayed up late drinking root beer and feeling our way back to the comfortable rapport we’d had before I moved away. Tanya, the eleven-year-old, sat on my only piece of furniture, a large papasan chair. She curled her tiny self into the nest of it, eating microwave popcorn from the bag. Leah and I sprawled on the floor, our root beer bottles sitting on a square block that had been part of a book display at Barnes and Noble, where I’d worked before the theatre job. It served as my dining room table. The soles of Leah’s feet were thick and calloused. She rarely wore shoes, preferring to toughen her feet on the unforgiving terrain of southern Oregon, priding herself on her ability to walk on the thistles that grew rampant across thirsty dirt. “So, how are things with Rick and Mom?” I asked. Our mom had married Rick a couple of years ago. When I came to visit, I rarely stayed for more than a couple of nights. Rick was snide and derogatory toward me. I hated him for being in my sisters’ lives. “He’s an asshole,” Tanya said immediately. “They fight all the time,” Leah said. “As if you even hear it,” Tanya said to her. “You just hide in your barn all the time.” Leah kept vast quantities of animals, including goats, rabbits, and sheep. She secretly housed and fed a black widow spider in a jar in a dark corner of the barn. “He eats mayonnaise from the container,” Tanya said as if that ended any and all discussion of our stepdad’s character. Which, in some ways, it did. “Screw him,” Leah said. “He said I was mean to my animals and told me I’d never be a veterinarian.” Tanya curled up even smaller. “He told me I probably wouldn’t graduate from high school. He said statistics prove it.” “What statistics?” I asked. “Girls from,” and she raised her fingers in quotations, “lower economic backgrounds .” She gestured to my barren studio apartment. “I can’t wait to live on my own.” I had two bachelor's degrees and spent my days researching La Quinta and waiting for the UPS guy. On performance nights, I wore my glittering witch costume and danced on stage, expertly twirling my witch’s broom. But performance nights were only a few times a month, and the rest of the time, it was just mediocre old me. Austin wasn’t cheap and once I’d paid for rent, I usually only had enough left for food and liquor. I had a refrigerator with cheese, dill pickles, and Shiner Bock beer. A recent photo of myself showed thin legs and too prominent shoulder bones. Weak and brittle. “It’s not all that,” I said. On the day of our Glamour Shots, we made our way through the mall. My sisters’ reaction to my big photoshoot idea was underwhelming. Grudgingly, Leah had put on shoes for the trip. Tanya asked if we could go to the arcade instead. I tried to make up for it with my own false enthusiasm. “It’s going to be fun,” I bubbled as we navigated through crowds of girls wearing crop tops who laughed loudly at jokes made by boys who sauntered as if they knew their place at the top of the hierarchy of mall goers. Which they did. As we passed by a group of girls emerging from J.J. Jeans with packages dangling from their arms, one of them narrowed her eyes at Leah’s overalls and sneakers. She nudged her friend and giggled. Leah reddened, shoving her hands further into her pockets. “Oh, look,” Tanya said, glancing toward the girls. “There’s a sale on Barbies.” I had imagined Glamour Shots would be located in a posh studio, but this place had as much elegance as the Standard Optical shop next door. The receptionist wore pancake makeup and long false lashes. She raked her eyes over us as if overwhelmed by the exhausting task before her. “Okay,” she said in a tired voice. “We’ll get you dressed.” We had been encouraged to bring our own clothes, but since all we had were overalls, jeans, and sweatshirts, we’d decided to choose from their wardrobe. We squeezed into the dressing room and rifled through our options. Too many sequins. Too much gold lamé. The receptionist-turned-stylist held a leather dress toward me with six inches of fringe hanging from the bodice. I shook my head. Tanya pulled out a red denim dress cut scandalously low, raising her eyebrows. Leah stared blankly at the racks of clothes as if someone were speaking in Swahili to her. Feeling the whole adventure was going sideways, I began yanking dresses out and holding them up to her. “Try this velvet one,” I pleaded. What if they never wanted to visit me again? What if they went home feeling worse than when they got here? What if the UPS guy never came back? What if I never did anything but call LaQuinta so I could pay another month’s rent? What if my sisters started to believe Rick? What if the statistics were right? Finally, we settled on three black dresses. They were cut lower than I’d like for us, but this was Glamour Shots, so we didn’t have much choice. My dress sagged around my thin frame, so the stylist tightened it by fastening it in the back with a binder clip. Tanya stuffed wads of toilet paper into her bra to help fill out her dress. Leah refused to put her shoes on, and the stylist finally relented since they wouldn’t be in the photograph. She hiked up her dragging skirt as she padded toward the hair station. There was hairspray, thick foundation too dark for our skin, more hairspray, contouring, shading, more hairspray, a thick coating of mascara, bright red lipstick, and then we were done. My face felt like it was a pound heavier. Leah coughed her way toward me through a final cloud of hairspray. Tanya looked like a child prostitute. I thought I might have seen our photographer doing Jello shots on Sixth Street. His wavy hair fell over one eye, making me wonder if it would impair his photography skills. He hoisted a blank screen behind us and situated us close together. A strand of Tanya’s hair got in my mouth, and I tasted chemicals. The photographer squeezed us together. As he moved Leah into place, she reached behind me to steady herself on the stool, accidentally brushing her arm against Tanya’s face. Her arm came away with a smear of makeup. Tanya tried to inch her way behind me to hide her cleavage, but the photographer kept pulling her back out. The lights were hotter than stage lights, and I wondered if all this makeup was going to slide down my neck. The camera began to click as we tried to maintain the awkward stances he’d shoved us into. “Okay, now smile,” he said. We tried. “Close-mouthed smile this time, Ladies. Give me some sexy!” Leah’s grip on the stool slipped, and she stumbled out of view. The photographer glanced at his watch. “Come on, ladies, show us your glamour!” We tried for glamour. We smiled with closed mouths. We smiled with wide-open grins. He turned on the fan so our hair wafted behind us in gentle waves. Tanya sneezed. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let me take a look.” I felt a small wave of nausea in the heat of the lights. I wondered what to do tonight to keep my sisters from getting bored. “Hmm,” the photographer said as he studied the photos in his camera. “Your eye,” he said to me. “You’re kind of blinking.” He brought the camera to me so I could see the small photos. My right eye wasn’t open as wide as the left. I wasn’t actually blinking, but it was definitely noticeable. “Let’s try a few more,” he said. Leah sighed as we arranged ourselves again, trying to be glamorous and seductive and elegant once more. He snapped a few pictures and then checked them in the camera. “Same problem,” he said. The receptionist joined our group, and the five of us peered into the camera at my stubbornly drooping right eye. “That’s one unglamorous eye,” Leah said. “Can you try opening it wider?” the receptionist suggested. So, for the next round of clicks, I concentrated on opening my right eye wide. When the photographer checked the shots, his brow furrowed, and he glanced at his watch again. “Well, I think that’s what we’re going to get,” he said. “You can view the final photos at the kiosk out front.” “I can’t wait to get this shit off my face,” Tanya said as she removed the toilet paper from her bra. Leah unclipped my binder for me, and I hung the dress up. I felt a pinching and a sudden urge to cry. My stupid eye. Ruined the whole thing. We gathered around the kiosk monitor to view the final photos. “I look like a porn star,” Leah said. Her cleavage was pushing up, and as she had been leaning awkwardly, one boob especially was getting a lot of exposure. “You could have a new career ahead of you,” Tanya said. We flipped to another photo where Tanya leered into the camera seductively. She was drama and sex. She was striking. She was a child beauty pageant nightmare. And then, photo after photo of us dealing with my eye. It drooped and sagged. The photos where I tried to open it were worse. My eyebrow raised, but my eyelid sagged even further. My left eye tried to compensate by opening wide as if I was shocked. My expression was pained and stressed. My teeth were bared in a strained smile. “You look like you’re peeing your pants.” “You look like you just stuck a fork in a light socket.” “You look like you have a massive wedgie.” “You look like you just walked in on Mom and Rick having sex.” As we flipped through the photographs, we began to laugh and couldn’t stop. Tanya laughed so that tears cut through her pancake makeup. The stylist-turned-receptionist gave a withering glare, but we laughed so hard that customers at Standard Optical stopped trying on glasses and squinted our way. Leah gripped the monitor to steady herself, bent over in hysterics. “Oh, look,” I said as I flipped through the photos. “It’s the double child hookers and their very surprised pimp.” “I need double copies of each one,” Leah said. “This was totally worth the toil of putting on all this makeup.” “We are such trouble together,” Tanya said. The three of us huddled around the monitor, cackling so that our laughter rang up and past the annoyed receptionist and through the mall, casting its spell, causing workers and shoppers to stop and look around curiously. I took out my credit card and bought $150 worth of prints. Back in our normal clothes, with our voluminous hair still sprayed into place, we headed into the mall. We passed Jordache and Guess, and Versace. Every now and then, we’d take a photo from the package and burst into laughter all over again, stumbling and crashing into each other as we howled. Mall girls moved out of our way. A man trying to give out face cream samples called to us, but I silenced him with a glare from my evil right eye. We bought candy apples and strode down the middle of the aisle in our coven, and as we crunched through the red shells with our sharp teeth, my empty apartment, our stepdad’s words, and every statistic holding us back disappeared before us like wisps of smoke in moonlight. “Glamour Shots” was originally published in the blog Sacred Chickens in February of 2021. This is one of my favorite memories of my sisters. It happened soon after I’d left home, glad to be free of the challenges of childhood. However, on my own, I felt powerless in a different way as I struggled to pay the rent or do anything “interesting” with my life. That day, with my sisters, I felt that together, we could take on the world. Rise above the world’s expectations for us. That breakthrough, that feeling of power, gives me strength still. Previous NAOMI ULSTED writes fiction and non-fiction. She’s the author of the YA novel The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). Her memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest, will be published by High Frequency Press in the fall of 2026. She lives on the southern coast of Oregon. Next

Missa Brevis by Kimberly Johnson If I prayed harder. If I prayed in Latin, in its syntax a rosary chain of convolutions. If I learned all the old vocabularies of supplication. If strove in koine simplicity, if surpliced my pleas in the psalmist’s supple play. If I prayed harder. Prayed better. If I learned all the holy, ancient tongues of desperation. If I learned new ones. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This poem just never made it into any of my books. I wrote it in about 2006, when I was researching the circulation of scriptural texts before the period of formal canonization and noting the recurrence of certain figures of speech across language traditions. I like that this poem never reaches a conclusion about what might happen if it finds success, that it instead finds itself primarily focusing on the medium of the effort itself. .................................................................................................................................................................................... KIMBERLY JOHNSON is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her work has appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate , The Iowa Review , PMLA , and Modern Philology . Recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, and the Mellon Foundation, Johnson holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Kimberly Johnson lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. kimberly-johnson.com Next - Foley Catheter by Kimberly Johnson Next

Nancy Takacs < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Sweet Peas Nancy Takacs 00:00 / 02:00 Sweet Peas Nancy Takacs Some would say just a noxious weed taking over that bare space where I put some seeds two summers ago in the meadow beyond my garden. ~ This year vines crazy with rosy heads, each blossom scored like two wings over labial hoods, seeds held under, hidden, waiting to drop. ~ I cut some from tangled vines for my kitchen table, to breathe their cool fire on the cloth embroidered by a Croatian woman, her flowers in purple floss straight-stitched, faces with eyes in between wide-open butterfly wings. ~ Her tablecloth swirls under my salad – the woman, her daughters and sisters living in that small wild country I flew to, its border fought over for decades, its past and its future haunted by torture and rape. ~ Each frigid winter our tour guide Marija said women embroider, embroider hundreds of daisies, sweet peas, bees, and Monarchs, prick fingers, careful their blood does not ruin the linen. Tablecloths like my Hungarian grandmother once made, just twenty, thirty dollars blowing on clotheslines on the bank of the Danube. A crucifix around each woman’s neck as they exhale cigarette smoke, some holding babies, bartering with us, begging us Buy another! to dress our foreign tables with their blossoms and wings. ~ I buy five with dollars they hold close, empty my suitcase so I can fit them in. How can I not fly them back across the dark waters of our terrifying world? This poem came to me long after a solo trip to countries near the Danube. It has gone through many revisions, but I always kept the ending. In a sense, the poem is connected to my love of embroidery that my Hungarian immigrant grandmother taught me. Little did I know at that time, this art was a way for women to make a living, and that the Hungary she left when she was sixteen, to come to America, was a scary place, easily taken over and over again. I learned this much later on. The embroidered cloths are emblematic of the women’s protection of their families, earning money to keep the wolves away, or if possible, to travel to “safer” places. They depend on tourism to live, getting their beautiful artful cloths into the hands of other women. The breakthrough comes as the poem progresses, a realization by the speaker that her privilege is fragile. She must support women any way she can. Dominion over women around the world is happening in devastating ways now in our own country, and sadly, it is imminent everywhere. Previous NANCY TAKACS is an avid boater, hiker, and mushroom forager. She lives near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin, and in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah. Her latest book of poems is Dearest Water (Mayapple Press, 2022) . nancytakacs.org Next

northern climate II by Gabriela Halas New morning ice floats the bay, or old fragments that calved as we blinked the days past. The scour of stranded crystals unfold as water resigns to stay. Once this bay held fast as I moved the dogs across — unsheathed the shape and shiver, the steadfast lock of mid-winter. Now I watch the land emit another kind of chorus, a cacophony of flats and sharps unfamiliar to my ears. The dogs, unable to match the measure, fall through thinned aufeis, halt in lead — my urging ended in spurious falsetto. Lungs work at half capacity, the patterned inhale and exhale of an un-patterned bay. Faithless in a future we thought would never arrive. The water, bewildered, as loosened methane destabilizes what we once trusted. Lost in a seismic language, untranslatable as a colonizer’s tongue. The dark imprint of unrequited ground. I hear an old man speak of glacier’s gone: will the river flow, it’s steady lilt, by rain alone? We should fear the shoals who rock glinting bodies out of time. In the retreat of all named matter, I hear the discord rumble on — the fight of voices gathers. A recoil from our role in all things large, mysterious. The dogs turn to me, huddle in question, eyes as brown as an Arctic March. No answer for the soft ground pressed between their toes. I unhook each in turn, let the lead run on, while the others collect in whimpered harmony. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue First published in The Louisville Review. "Northern Climate II" is about being on a northern landscape and witnessing change. The body feels and conveys all in these poems. .................................................................................................................................................................................... GABRIELA HALAS immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in British Columbia. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including The Antigonish Review , Cider Press Review , About Place Journal , Prairie Fire , december magazine , and The Hopper , among others; fiction in Room Magazine , Ruminate , The Hopper , and subTerrain, among others; and nonfiction in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Whitefish Review , Grain , Pilgrimage , and High Country News . She won first prize for her poetry chapbook Bloodwater Tint from Backbone Press (forthcoming). She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives and writes on Ktunaxa Nation land. gabrielahalas.org Next - Some Things to Do in the Face of Death by Jim LaVilla-Havelin 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 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

Jamison Conforto < Back to Breakthroughs Issue boy Jamison Conforto 00:00 / 01:26 boy Jamison Conforto When I was a boy it was just the two of us under that hot Utah summer sun, blazing high the smell of rain and warm rabbitbrush heaven a synonym for him, for afternoon And when I was a boy clinging to the fence watching my best friend run away in real time smaller and smaller through the wheat until I couldn't pick him out from the horizon And when I was a boy crying in my bed wishing with all my heart that I had gone with him disappeared together into the wheat instead of picking the coward's way of things I'm no longer a boy crying for the dead but I still think of what could have been if I had traveled through that rabbitbrush if we had run away together when we had time "boy" is a true story from my youth, when I watched my best friend run away. That day has been a landmark event in my past and a keystone of my inspiration for as long as I can remember, so to finally be able to put it into words is a breakthrough for me personally. I like to think the layers of resonance between the stanzas is a breakthrough in the development of my poetic technique as well. Previous JAMISON CONFORTO is a writer from the Salt Lake Valley. You can follow his poem-a-day journey at @the_year_365_in_365 on Instagram. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Gamble Patrilineage Robbie Gamble B eginning with James, of Scotch-Irish stock, shipped out to America from Enniskillen at sixteen, following the magnetic call of Manifest Destiny, pulling up on the stockyard banks of Cincinnati. There he learned the soapmaking trade, and soon fell in with William Procter, candlemaker. They pooled funds, and in 1837 co-founded the Procter & Gamble company. Energetic, shrewd stockpilers of materials, they grew the business well, filled coffers in Civil War contracts on the Union side, shipping bar soap and candles downstream into the maw of the conflict. And when the armies stumbled home they expanded as the nation, reconstructing, flexed its wealth westward. D avid, son of James, born into wealth amidst the bright industrial flush of household goods, cradled high on the bow of flagship Ivory Soap, while America scoured itself clean, striving toward a fresh end to the century. David served P&G as company Secretary, retiring in 1893 to sail the world with sons, overseeing Presbyterian missions charged with Oriental evangelization. Disembarking, he shuttled between showcase mansions in Cincinnati and Pasadena, the latter now a national landmark, the Gamble House. C larence, son of David, unexpected youngest of three. Prodigal, self-possessed, he posted first in his class at Princeton, 1914, then second through Harvard Medical School. His generation unburdened by the reins of soap production, instead he got a trust fund, his first million at twenty-one. Clarence caught the bug of Eugenics, pseudo-science of race and class superiority, dreaded humanity being dragged down by bad genes. He never built a medical practice, instead became a population-manipulator of one, urging for more babies amongst the educated, testing new contraceptives for the poor, funding rogue clinical trials, advocating sterilization of the feeble-minded in the rural South, always striving to constrain human sprawl in worrisome backward societies around the globe. W alter, son of Clarence, third of five redheaded siblings, the quiet, studious one. He lived for scientific questing; like his father he studied medicine, and unlike him he kept at it, specializing in pediatric cardiology, designing new pacemaking devices in the 1960s to impose strict rhythms on sick kids’ faltering hearts. He kept a hand in the family’s Great Cause of world population control, sitting on their foundation board, rattled about in his research lab with a menagerie of subject rats and cows, rounded on patients, and biked in to work in all kinds of weather, for over thirty years. R obbie, son of Walter, first of three boys, came into unexpected millions at eighteen. He grew deep discomfort for his wealth, shifted from Harvard to the Bowery in 1982, to work among homeless folks, and with his first wife Martha gifted away a fortune. He became a nurse practitioner to better care for people scraping at the margins, raised three kids, lost a marriage and a brother, discovered Anna, an orchard, a shining reverence for words. If there’s a breakthrough in the unpublished poem “Gamble Patrilineage,” it’s in the influence of my first wife, Martha, who helped me to see through the constraints of the patriarchy and the trappings of wealth, and turn away from family convention to become a more authentic agent for change in the world. My family has an almost biblical sense of self-importance, and I find it useful to coopt that narrative with an over-the-top generational structure that shows the undue focus given to the men on the family tree. Previous ROBBIE GAMBLE is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). He is poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine . robbiegamble.com 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 Bird News Cynthia Hardy A thump against the cabin wall. I find the body, palm-sized, warm yet, on the porch. One eye glistens, the beak open. Someone says, "If a bird flies in your window he's come to tell good news." But, if the bird dies, and the news is never spoken? Or spoken late, words of comfort flung against a window they can’t pass through? I see your mouth move, like bird wings: the news shatters as it flies. As children we filed into halls nestled among coats and boots, our heads between our knees cradled by our arms. We recited the bad news silently. The skies shone clear and empty. The worst threat-- one not seen--comes in joyous blue. All we love can vanish, empty as the sky. I lay the bird on a clump of moss. Next time, I say, there will be no window glass. Next time the bird flies in free and clear, singing. This poem was written in response to the statement quoted in the poem. I was surprised at where the poem turned, and then, that the poem was published in the Heartland section of the Fairbanks Daily News Miner in 1986 (when they regularly published poetry). This poem was also published in my collection Beneath a Portrait of a Horse (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2010). Previous CINDY HARDY writes from Chena Ridge, Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published poetry and fiction, teaches occasionally, rides horses, and gardens all summer. Next