< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Imagined Scenes Mary Behan Ever since she read about it, riding the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok had been on Jennifer Fowler’s bucket list. She was fascinated by train travel, and no other rail journey promised such a bigger-than-life experience, chugging across that vast expanse of Asia, where a single color dominated the world map. She imagined a few days in Moscow to buy necessities for the ten-day trip, a final check of her paperwork, and then that electric moment as the train moved slowly out of the station, gaining speed through endless grey suburbs, and finally bursting free into a landscape that stretched for thousands of miles to the Sea of Japan. In her mind’s eye each scene along the way had its own vivid color, smell, and sound. Endless forests and snow-covered steppes punctuated by remote train stations; the curious faces of Russian farmers pausing to stare at the speeding behemoth; the lurching carriage with a samovar steaming quietly in the corner; the smell of sweat and damp wool and urine and garlicky sausages. Excuses came and went. At first it was money—never enough—but as her career progressed, time became the limiting resource. Her Chicago law office was small, and if she took more than two weeks of vacation, someone else would have to attend to her clients. Colleagues were always willing to pick up the slack for a wedding or an illness, but for anything else, they tended to be less generous. And so the Great Railway Bazaar scenes faded gradually as the years went by. This had been a particularly challenging winter for Jennifer. One of the attorneys in her office had slipped on the icy sidewalk early in December and broken both wrists, leaving her unable to work. Much of her caseload had fallen to Jennifer, who had little choice but to work fourteen-hour days, dragging herself home each evening through the grinding cold of a Chicago winter. By the time her colleague returned to the office in mid-February, Jennifer longed for a break from the relentless routine. That afternoon, as her client’s voice continued to drone on in the telephone receiver, she allowed her mind to drift. This was the third phone call with this man in as many days. He was a needy man, she thought; someone who liked the sound of his own voice and didn’t seem to care that every minute of her time came with a price. Absentmindedly, she scrolled through her e-mails. Pausing as one caught her eye, she double-clicked on the link that opened to a brochure for a conference in New Orleans the following month. The topic was only tangentially related to her area of expertise, but it piqued her interest. Her gaze drifted towards the window again. Yesterday’s snow was already melting, merging with the gray of the sidewalks. In the distance the L-train wound its way between buildings, looking for all the world like a model railroad. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of those two images in her brain, but by the end of the phone call she had made a decision. She would go to the conference in New Orleans—by train. * * * The tiny sleeper compartment would have been cramped with two people, but as she was travelling alone, it felt spacious. Two comfortable seats faced each other in front of a large picture window, beneath which hung a folding table. The porter who showed her to her roomette had stowed her suitcase deftly in a corner of the compartment, assuring her that he would take it out later when he prepared the cabin for the night. “My name is Joseph, Ma’am. If there’s anything you need, just let me know. You can press that buzzer or just walk towards the back of the train. You’ll find me for sure.” His broad, toothy smile left her feeling safe. Remembering those erstwhile Trans-Siberian dreams, she had brought a bottle of wine, and as soon as Joseph closed the compartment door, she opened it and poured herself a generous glass. The train lurched briefly, prompting her to grab both glass and bottle, but then it relapsed into a steady movement as it trundled out of Union Station into the Chicago suburbs. A tiny spark of excitement rippled through her. Her desk was clear for the next few days and nobody expected to hear from her. She was free. It was the absence of movement that woke her in the middle of the night. Drawing aside the curtain, harsh lights illuminated a railway yard, and for a moment she wondered whether something had happened. A derailment on the tracks ahead perhaps, or something more ominous? The app on her smartphone showed the train in Memphis, Tennessee, close to the Mississippi River. She listened for any sounds of alarm but the corridor was silent, so she went back to sleep, sliding down between crisp, white sheets and pulling the woolen blanket up to her chin. The next time she woke it was daylight and the view outside had changed dramatically. This was the hidden America—hamlets where trains no longer stopped, settlements that shouted poverty and abandonment. The train moved slowly through this blighted landscape, allowing her to imagine how her life might have been had she grown up here. A dilapidated shack, its wide porch cluttered with sagging chairs, a washing machine, and a stack of empty beer crates was a chastening reminder that not everyone had a chance to live the American Dream. Joseph helped her with her suitcase as she alighted from the train at the Union Passenger Terminal in New Orleans. She thanked him sincerely, feeling a momentary pang of apprehension at the prospect of leaving his care. She reminded herself that she wasn’t stepping off into a remote Russian city but, rather, a familiar American one. She was a successful lawyer in her mid-thirties, about to attend a conference where she would be respected, if not admired. She straightened her shoulders and walked out of the station into the mid-afternoon sunshine. The unaccustomed feeling of warm air on her skin made her smile. She decided to walk the eight blocks to the boutique hotel in the Warehouse District where she had made a reservation. Signs of post-Katrina recovery were everywhere, although little seemed to have been achieved in the three years since the hurricane. By comparison with Chicago the city felt hostile, and she walked briskly, her roller bag rattling on the uneven pavement. That evening she had an early meal at one of the more exclusive restaurants in the city. It was the sort of place that normally required a reservation, but by going early she hoped they would seat her. She dressed carefully for the occasion, and as she expected, the maître d’hôtel scrutinized her before seating her in a quiet corner of his dining room. Leaving a little over an hour later, she paused at a street corner to watch a scene playing out that could easily have been in a Hollywood movie. Two police cruisers had pulled up behind a battered-looking sedan, their lights flashing. The occupants of the car—two young black men—got out slowly and stood beside their car, waiting. Four white police officers emerged from the cruisers, their bulky gear making the process slow and awkward. One of them approached the two men; the other three stood slightly at a distance, their hands on their guns. The tension was palpable. Jennifer watched in fascination, waiting for someone to make a move—a wrong move. She didn’t notice the woman behind her and was startled when a voice spoke quietly. “Perhaps we should watch from a little farther away. It might be safer. I think we’re in the line of fire here.” Jennifer turned to see a tall, elegantly-dressed woman around her own age with vivid blue eyes and short blond hair parted to the side and slicked down, giving her a vaguely masculine appearance. She was very beautiful. “Maybe you’re right,” Jennifer responded, giving the woman a warm smile. It was true. A stray bullet could easily hit either of them or any of the bystanders who had also stopped. The woman touched her arm gently and led her across the street to a safer vantage point. For the next fifteen minutes they watched the scene play out, exchanging comments as to what might be going on and speculating as to how it might resolve. Suddenly, as if on cue, all six men got into their cars and drove away, the cruisers turning left and the sedan continuing on straight past the two women. The crowd of onlookers began to disperse, but the two women lingered and continued their conversation, which by now had progressed to the rehabilitation efforts that were being undertaken in the Warehouse District. Jennifer was about to say goodbye when the woman said, “I have an apartment just around the corner. Would you like to come up for a glass of wine? We have a lovely rooftop garden; you can see the boats on the river.” She tilted her head to one side and looked inquiringly at Jennifer, the side of her mouth turning up slightly with the hint of a smile. There was an awkward pause. “I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself earlier. Veva Kiuru.” She extended her hand and Jennifer shook it, offering her own name in exchange. The name sounds vaguely Polish, Jennifer thought, yet this woman didn’t remind her of any of the Poles she knew in Chicago. Normally she would have refused an invitation like this, claiming an early morning meeting or some such excuse. But to her surprise, she found herself agreeing. Something about Veva intrigued her, and the prospect of doing something totally out of character was exciting. Besides, she reasoned, it was still relatively early in the evening and while her hotel room was charming, it offered little besides a large TV. Five minutes later they arrived at a four-story red brick building that, from its outward appearance, had once been a warehouse. “My husband bought the apartment soon after Katrina,” Veva said as she punched in a code on the panel beside a pair of heavy, wooden doors. “Nobody wanted to come downtown in those days, so it was a bargain. We live across the lake—Lake Pontchartrain—but this place is convenient when we go to concerts.” Any sense that the building had once been a factory disappeared as the doors swung open and automatically closed behind them. After the busy street noise, the silence was striking. A faint perfume of some sweet-smelling flower, the name of which escaped Jennifer, hung in the air. The spacious, dimly-lit foyer ended at a marble staircase that angled upwards into shadow. “You don’t mind if we take the stairs, do you?” Veva asked. “There’s an elevator but I prefer the exercise.” The apartment was on the top floor of the building and consisted of a spacious, high-ceilinged loft with a row of tall windows that spanned the whole length of one wall. Facing the windows was a galley kitchen, separated from the room by an island at which stood two high stools. A hallway led off the room, presumably to the bedroom and bathroom, Jennifer thought. Decorated in a minimalist style, the floors were of recycled lumber sanded to reveal the dark wood grain. An L-shaped sofa dominated the center of the room, strewn with cushions in muted colors. In the angle of the sofa stood a large glass coffee table, empty except for a pair of silver and bronze stirrups with an intricate Arabic design carved into their sides. Beside them lay a shield and sword, both equally stunning. An image of Genghis Khan flashed into Jennifer’s mind, seated astride his horse and looking fierce and magnificent. As she followed Veva towards the kitchen, she ran her fingers delicately over a slab of cream-colored wood supported by a complex arrangement of stainless-steel cables and posts that looked to be a writing desk of sorts. It felt like silk, the surface hardly registering on her fingertips. Pausing, she stared at the object on the desk, which she recognized as a Japanese suzuri, the ink stone nestled into an intricately carved dragon whose eyes were fixed upon a golden egg. Beside the suzuri lay a calligraphy brush. She looked over at Veva, who was watching her. “It’s very beautiful,” Jennifer said, gesturing towards the room. “I like beautiful things,” came the response. Jennifer watched as Veva reached upward to slide two wine glasses from the rack hanging above the island. The movement was fluid and practiced and despite her own petite frame, she felt awkward by comparison. “Your name is very unusual. Is it Polish?” Jennifer asked. “Finnish.” “What do you do…for work I mean?” “I work for the government,” came the reply, but something in Veva’s tone seemed to discourage further inquiry. “And you?” “I’m a lawyer. We do mostly health care stuff…representing hospitals and clinics. The laws around health care are changing all the time.” Veva nodded. “You drink white?” she asked, opening the refrigerator. “I have red if you prefer.” “White would be lovely.” She took out a bottle of wine, glanced at it, and uncorked it with practiced efficiency. “It’s a New Zealand wine and a good one. I promise.” Her blue eyes lingered on Jennifer for an extra few seconds. Then, with glasses and bottle in hand, she walked towards the hall. “Follow me,” she said without looking back and disappeared into a small passageway from which a spiral staircase led upward. The rooftop garden was a surprise. Each of the apartments in the building had its own private space, separated from neighbors by tall, wicker partitions. On opposite sides of Veva’s garden, a steel and glass wall allowed for an uninterrupted view of the New Orleans skyline. A trellis festooned with lush greenery covered much of the tiny space, shading a table and two chairs. Veva poured a generous measure into the glasses and offered one to Jennifer. She raised her own glass. “To safety,” she said, the corner of her mouth turning up slightly. For the next two hours they talked. Veva was a good listener, prompting the conversation with thoughtful questions, but offering little information about herself. Something about the rooftop—a sense of removal from the world—allowed Jennifer to open up in ways she never had before. Neither confessional nor therapy session, it felt more like a conversation with her inner self. She could hear the disappointment in her own voice as she talked about her divorce seven years earlier and the few men she had dated since. All the while Veva’s intense blue eyes held her attention, and for some reason she couldn’t explain, she found herself yearning to elicit that unique smile. The temperature had dropped slightly and the wine bottle was empty. Veva stood up, stretched her arms above her head, and arched her back. She walked to the rail and looked towards the river. Silhouetted against the darkening skyline, Jennifer thought she looked magnificent, like a character out of an Avengers movie—feline, predatory, powerful. “Come join me,” Veva said, turning around to look at Jennifer. Although it was said softly, it was a command not a request. Standing side by side at the railing they stared into the distance, neither speaking. Then Veva turned towards her and gently stroked her face. The caress carried a question and at the same time an expectation. Jennifer held her breath, not certain whether she wanted the scene to progress. But her body had already decided. A warm ache made its way through her, bringing a flush to her face. Then Veva kissed her. Her tongue explored Jennifer’s mouth, withdrawing to linger over her lips, then plunging greedily again and again. Jennifer could taste the wine on Veva’s breath. She closed her eyes, and in her mind saw the scene unfolding in slow motion, like a drop of water creating gently expanding waves. She gasped as every cell in her body ached for this sublime feeling to go on forever. Veva’s mouth was still on hers, her arm around her neck, holding her in a tight embrace. Then she pulled away, took Jennifer’s hand in hers, and led her towards the stairs. At the bottom of the spiral staircase, Veva turned to her. She was smiling. “Let me blindfold you.” Her eyes were bright, her mouth slightly open as if expecting Jennifer to refuse. But there was no protest. She slid the silk scarf from around her neck and held it out in her two hands, like an offering. Jennifer took a deep breath and accepted, raising the scarf towards her face. Veva helped her tie the knot and whispered in her ear, “Trust me.” Jennifer could feel the warm breath followed by the tip of a tongue deftly probing her ear. A thrill of pleasure erupted in her core. There was a gentle pressure on her back pushing her forward, and instinctively she held her hands out in front of her. A finger caressed her outstretched palm, threading its way to her wrist and closing around it like a manacle. She felt a slight pull and allowed herself to be drawn into the bedroom. Like Alice falling down a rabbit hole she had no sense of what might happen next, but she was willing to give herself up entirely to whatever might unfold. * * * She knew Veva was gone as soon as she woke the following morning. It wasn’t just the absence of sound; it was as if someone had sucked all the life out of the apartment. For a few minutes Jennifer lay there thinking about the previous evening. Her hand moved toward her center, which was still wet and slightly bruised. She rolled over on her belly, inhaling Veva’s scent from the smooth sheet. Every fiber of her body craved the exquisite pleasure she had experienced. This is what jonesing for drugs must be like, she thought—a gnawing pain that begged to be satisfied. But there would be no antidote to ease her back into her previous life. She pushed the thought aside and got out of bed. In the living room, propped up against a tall glass of water, was a card-sized piece of cream-colored paper. The letter ‘V’ had been inscribed on it with a perfect brush stroke of black ink. She turned the card over but it was blank. Jennifer made a final tour of the apartment, trying to sear every detail of the space into her mind. She reached out to touch the suzuri, tracing the dragon from tail to head, her fingers lingering on the golden egg. The calligraphy brush lay beside it, still slightly damp. She took the card and slid it carefully into her purse. Then, with a feeling of immense loss, she left, closing the door decisively behind her. The next day was filled with people and presentations, welcome distractions that served to keep a maelstrom of conflicting thoughts at bay. Up to now, all of her sexual encounters had been heterosexual, and as Jennifer searched through scenes from her past, nowhere had she ever felt attracted to a woman. The evening with Veva had been more pleasurable than anything she had ever experienced. Although sex with her husband was satisfying, it had been unimaginative. None of the men she had slept with since her divorce had made her feel the way she had with Veva, and she wondered if it would change her life in any way. But this was something she didn’t want to dwell on, at least not yet. On the second evening of the conference, Jennifer arranged to have dinner with a friend from her law school days who was also attending the meeting. They hadn’t seen each other since before her divorce and spent an enjoyable couple of hours catching up. After dinner, he offered to walk her back to her hotel and she agreed, steering him on a circuitous route through the Warehouse District with the excuse of showing him the architecture. As they walked past Veva’s apartment building, Jennifer stole a glance upward, but the windows were unlit. On the final evening there was a cocktail party for the two hundred attendees in the ballroom of the conference hotel. Waiters carrying trays of canapés and glasses of wine wove their way expertly among the crowd. Jennifer stood at a tall bar table with a group of colleagues, not quite engaged with their conversation. Looking around the room at some of the now-familiar faces, her heart missed a beat. Staring at her from across the ballroom was Veva, a tiny smile lurking in the corner of her mouth. Their eyes locked for several seconds until the crowd closed in and Jennifer lost sight of her. She abruptly excused herself and rushed to the spot where she had last seen Veva, but she had disappeared. The following morning Jennifer took an early flight back to Chicago and by mid-afternoon was seated at her desk. Looking out her office window later that afternoon as the light was beginning to fade, she watched as the L-train threaded its way through the commercial buildings. Closing her eyes, she allowed herself to remember, and as the scenes unfurled like flowers, a world of possibilities began to emerge. "Imagined Scenes" was previously published as "Scenes in a Movie" in my collection of short stories, Kernels . In this story, the breakthrough is an awakening as a young lawyer from Chicago has her first non-binary sexual experience with a woman she meets in New Orleans. Previous MARY BEHAN was formerly a professor of neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now writes fiction, memoir, and short stories. Her books, published by Laurence Gate Press, include Abbey Girls , a memoir she wrote with her sister, Valerie Behan, about their childhood in Ireland; A Measured Thread set in Wisconsin and Ireland, which was named a Top 100 Indie Book, a finalist in the Page Turner Awards, and an eLit medal winner; Kernels , a collection of short stories; and Finding Isobel , a companion to her first novel, was published in 2024 and awarded a gold medal for best adult fiction e-book by the Independent Publishers (IPPI), a silver medal in women’s fiction from Readers Favorite, and Outstanding Literary Fiction Winner in the Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. mvbehan.com Next

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

Nano Taggart < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Chalk-white, Canyon-deep Nano Taggart 00:00 / 02:29 Chalk-white, Canyon-deep Nano Taggart The nightmare isn’t darkness. And in this version, I’m frail enough to fall all the way down the precipice I’d skipped along the edge of since well before the fear was named. It’s white. So white I can’t distinguish its corners, its edges, its end, or its source of light; but my feet sink into something— having fallen from wherever it was that was was before. The fear doesn’t freeze, exactly, it’s the scared-to-to-trembling sort where I can smile, even laugh in a suddenly social setting. Anxiety strikes just as memory powers down. But only Natalie can tell. (The trembling is my schtick?) Then someone wants to know what I think about some dire whatever, and all that I can offer is, “I don’t know. But I think she sells sea shells by the sea shore.” People laugh, because I’m funny sometimes, and thankfully, the conversation moves on, moves past me and the nightmare-white I’m inside. Or—like accretion—that I’m supposed to be. How planets form. Little bits stick together and collide then stick together again-n-again- n-again; and even here, in here , addled with too many pronouns, I’m terrified of my voice’s pale echo or not-echo. Like I’ve gotta hide that my path crossed Rakim before “Ode to the Wind.” I’m walking around like—we’re all walking around like—like these blank pages are a way out. Out of here, out of the dream I can’t leave: it was a room that’s so white I can’t see its corners, just one incandescent band burning from under what must be a door with its otherwise-undetectable edges. That’s it, that’s the nightmare. Then the sandy dryness in my mouth and throat. So dry I can’t swallow, or call for help, or discern if that place (this place?) would allow—or cause—my voice to echo. One of the byproducts of my mental health struggles is crippling creative anxiety. This combined with my belligerent inner critic makes it difficult for me to write. Naming and acknowledging these things, and addressingthem directly, has been a topical breakthrough. It's kind of a cheat code to be able to write about these devils, and it's a deep to be panned. "Chalk-white, Canyon-deep" is a breakthrough in its confrontation of my childhood nightmare and the anxiety of influence. Previous NANO TAGGART is a founding editor of Sugar House Review , and would like to meet your dog. Next

Lauren Camp < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Poem Approaching Four Past Tenses Lauren Camp 00:00 / 01:53 Poem Approaching Four Past Tenses Lauren Camp Later agrees to be the change of subject. On Thursday a fever adored him and then it didn’t, and now it does again. His soft bit of electric hair. His erasing. Two days more and fluid is swimming his lungs. How still we are. Invisible in the soon or very soon. The day nurse gets up, props him up, and up and up in bed, and hums and nests a white towel across him. Obedient oxygen accedes through a tube as a current and I want him to sing to me. A riff from Sinatra, a prayer. His breathing lands in even froth, the whoosh and pecking. I understand it. Or how long I have been making a life in his shadow. First day of spring and brooches of green. I speak close and loose, all calm exits versed beyond our past knots which still halve my mind. I make up the difference of his loyal not talking. I daughter. I squirm. I shape words into harmonics and within each scale a proverb. I watch his hands gesture. His mouth doesn’t know questions. Here I am watching some edge of being apart to being farther apart. A hot pink sun comes in urgent to land. It’s interesting to me to look through my drafts of this poem that deal with the end of a life, the actual final days or moments. I changed the title four times, looking to recalibrate my thinking. The poem went through a number of other revisions, too, though “past tense” was there from the start. At one point, I got more interested in exploring that term, and discovered there are four past tenses. This gave me a new way to consider a subject so close to my heart. Previous LAUREN CAMP serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry. www.laurencamp.com Next

Mike White < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Double Life Mike White 00:00 / 01:03 Double Life Mike White No man ever steps in the same river twice. -Heraclitus If anyone and I mean anyone knows where she is . . . pleads her father on the news, and I curse under my breath, releasing incomprehensible hosannas of Good God Good God before invoking his only child, Jesus Fucking Christ, who in my childbrain had once led a secret double life as a lamb. In the early spring, ice can give way, so it does, a red snowsuit here one minute and the next and the next and the next until only the river keeps moving, a river that is never the same . . . up to his waist, a father still calling and calling her name. “Double Life,” is a brand new poem, and comes at the theme with a particularly literal rendering. Previous MIKE WHITE is the author of How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Next

klipschutz < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Ballad of U and Me klipschutz 00:00 / 00:52 Ballad of U and Me klipschutz You did not want me for an ardent suitor Yet you did not want me to forget you to forget you and your green eyes You did not choose me over any other But your brow forbade me to abandon you to abandon you and your red mouth You did not see me underneath your window When you summoned me to look up at you to look up at you and your black skirt I did not chase you through the mails or meadows For to make you mine without knowing how— green eyes red mouth black skirt Romance: the headiness of infatuation: the pursuit; catching up and being caught up with. Falling into each other’s arms: a mutual breaking down of resistance. Previous klipschutz (pen name of Kurt Lipschutz ) is a poet, songwriter, editor, and occasional literary journalist. He has been based in San Francisco since 1980. klipschutz.com Next

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

Day Dreaming by Stacy Julin My mother told me not to day dream. I know you love Grandma, but she’s a dreamer. Stay in reality, day dreaming does no good. Still, my grandma painted forests with water colors, and she would play songs on the piano that she dreamed in her sleep. She read a book to me with a picture of little girls with red hair like mine, poems that stayed me and filled my dreams with words. I felt my heart move when we read from those books. She had lived alone most of her life, but she could create lovely things. I know why grandma day dreamed. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link A poem inspired by my grandmother, whom I loved. My own life has mirrored hers in ways I would never have imagined. Back Back to Current Issue .................................................................................................................................................................................... STACY JULIN'S work has been published in Oyster River Pages , Pirene’s Fountain , Sweet Tree Review , Southern Quill , and Word Fountain , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Pebble Thrown in Water (Tiger’s Eye Press, 2010), Visiting Ghosts and Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Things We Carry (Finishing Line Press, 2024). She lives with her family at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains. Next - A Love for Loneliness by Stacy Julin Next

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

Bone Suite by Austin Holmes Staring at these bones in the utter rhythm of sun they seem inevitable, but only might have been. In the Montana mountains scanning a meadow for barbed wire I stumble upon a half-devoured carcass a meal not yet completed. I suddenly feel not so alone in that vastness. I look to the spaces between the trees for eyes in the dark night, there is rain and mud, obscure shapes of their parietal art hovering in scorched shadows, jackrabbit jawbones not quite half-moons. The underside of pelvis bones shaped like owls, these bones and bones and bones, bleached fragments on the edge, stiller than the breath of stone. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Columbia Journal . I’ve always had a fascination with bones and wrote this after some time spent in Centennial Valley. There were many moments of vulnerability in that land, both physical and emotional. Sometimes it takes feeling small in vast spaces to understand that, as Jim Harrison said, “To have reverence for life, you must have reverence for death.” .................................................................................................................................................................................... Next - Village Fiddle by Ken Waldman Next AUSTIN HOLMES lives in southern Utah, where he spends life with his beloved partner and their dog. He contemplates what he can and falls in love with the sky daily anew.

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Rude Weather Cynthia Hardy 1. The weather changes and changes again— just when our skin has opened its pores to heat & tanned from wildfire smoke-- rain 2. Rain softens the profile of mountains, blurs the day so that everything’s as in a dream— birds flit through the overhang of eaves—delphiniums droop—the greenhouse drowses 3. In a drowse, I hear the news—some tragedy in a place where the air overheats and neighbors pass with rude stares. I nestle the cat. I do not call my neighbor to ask how her tomatoes grow 4. Tomatoes form a wall of green at the back of the greenhouse— the dark and jagged leaves hiding yellow blossoms, thumb- sized fruits. A dragon- fly beats against the translucent roof 5. A dragonfly lands on my knuckle—a skeleton of black chiton—wings iridescent paddles, mandibles moving, slowly chewing a yellow striped sweat bee 6. The bees are silent. The neighbor’s hive has swarmed—the gray sky and rain damps down their buzziness. I long for a finger full of fireweed honey—so light and clear and nectar-sweet. This poem was written as a response to a challenge I gave my poetry students: moving from one image to another, letting the poem drift. It was a poem I could have just tossed away, but didn’t. Perhaps that’s the breakthrough—or that, in its own loose way, this poem represents an attempt to add order to my usual unstructured process. Previous CINDY HARDY writes from Chena Ridge, Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published poetry and fiction, teaches occasionally, rides horses, and gardens all summer. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue facing it Shanan Ballam I’ve lost the ability to walk I can’t do stairs or go uphill or downhill I’ve lost my beautiful penmanship but I can let go of things with my right hand I used to grip so hard the handrail in rehab— I’ve relearned how to use chopsticks I can open pill bottles and La Croix cans I haven’t lost the ability to write poetry I made it up and down little mountain cascades of birdsong and then silence graceful arcs silver spray of sprinklers in the far field three sandhill cranes flying in unison three sandhill cranes dissolved into the mountain a skunk plumes its luxurious black and white tail a deer bounding a monarch butterfly up close for the first time flashing its wings opening and closing its wings perched on an elm leaf mesmerizing near the river perched on an elm leaf opening and closing its wings near the river opening and closing "facing it" appears in my chapbook first poems after the stroke . I survived a massive stroke in January 2022 that robbed me of the use of my entire right side. It also stole my language. It’s been three years since the stroke, and I still have trouble going up and down stairs and up and down hills, but I have regained the ability to write in cursive, which was one of my goals. This is a poem I wrote in the early stages of my recovery, and the breakthrough is that I wrote down all I had lost for the first time. Previous SHANAN BALLAM is the author of the poetry manuscripts The Red Riding Hood Papers (Finishing Line Press, 2010), Pretty Marrow (Negative Capability, 2013), Inside the Animal (Main Street Rag, 2019), and the chapbook first poems after the stroke (Finishing Line Press, 2024). shananballam.org Next