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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Angel's Diner Stephen Wunderli It is the hitching season, or so the old timers used to call it. A time to hitch up all dogged-out farm equipment in the fields and drag it into the barn for repairs. Snow will fall and moving anything abused through the summer into the barn where it can be repaired is essential. Field work slows. Coffee flows. God waits somewhere above the names carved in stone over the mine entrance to comfort the sons of Greeks who died in the great tunnel collapse. They will return. SAM Sam called Darius and told him to be at Angel’s Diner a few minutes early. He had a favor to procure, and he didn’t want the rest of the boys to hear it. He pulled up under a rust-colored sky, shuffled through the slush, and slid into a booth with orange vinyl stretched painfully over benches. Darius was already there. It was six in the morning at a truck stop between two towns that serve petroleum trucks, umbilical gas lines pumping diesel into their bellies and entertaining locals with near disasters as the land whales shudder southbound tourists onto the shoulder of the highway when they pass. “Nicky is dying,” Sam told Darius, his winter-swollen hands folded in supplication around his coffee cup. “The doctors said some kind of cancer they have never seen around here.” “I’m sorry,” Darius said. “Can we pray?” Sam leaned his meaty face into Darius. “No need yet. Now about this favor. It’s complicated. can’t have Kelli hearing of it, not with the restraining order. She isn’t to come near either of us. If she gets wind, she could throw the gears off Nicky’s last days.” Darius sat back. His rounded shoulders, big as a steer, leaned forward, his black head mounted securely in the middle. “The kid is only nine years old. What does Kelli think?” “I don’t know,” Sam said with the kind of deep-seated contempt that puts up fences between neighbors. “She hasn’t been around since she had a go with you.” Sam paused and let his emotions die down, looking out at the diesel exhaust hanging in the air. He smelled of it. He always smelled of it. The three layers of flannel went the winter without a wash, the belly pulling his shoulders forward. “You know nothing happened,” Darius said, squinting into the hurt Sam was feeling. “It’s quite a thing to watch a life get away from you, isn’t it?” Sam asked. DARIUS An apparition was steaming on the window where Darius rested his forearm. His broad, black face flowed in folds down his neck, hiding the sinews that tightened when he talked, drawing his jaw back slightly into a nonthreatening position. He was a strong, good-looking man of good proportion except for the few extra pounds he carried about the middle. Trucks exiting the freeway threw waves of slush as they carved their way to the stop, miles of gray wash behind them and gray frags burrowed into fresh snow as if after an explosion. The dawn seemed stalled against the roiled fog; brackish and heavy, shouldering against the sun. Darius was rarely up for one of Sam’s favors. It seemed he was always the first to be asked and the last to get thanked. He pushed his hands out on the table in front of him in supplication. “You know that, right? That nothing happened between me and Kelli?” Sam looked away from Darius to watch Angel tabbing receipts, balancing plates of eggs and holstering the coffeepot in her apron tie. “Don’t matter one way or the other. I don’t want Kelli gobbing up the boy’s life now.” “She is the mother,” Darius said. “Don’t pick sides, big man. You know the woman can’t hold herself up, let alone steady the boy. What’s done is done, and what’s right is right.” Darius sat back, his big body taking up most of the bench built for men a hundred years ago who worked all day in the mines on a cup of coffee. He knew Sam was shaping the story about Kelli to his advantage, the way he always did. Pushing the truth of things. The bit of truth in a lie is what mattered to Sam. Darius had seen it before and he knew challenging Sam would only earn a smug “that’s your way of looking at it.” Silence. “Should I tell his baseball team,” Darius went on. “Do something special, make one of those blankets everybody can sign?” “No. He wants to see Bigfoot,” Sam said. “Judas, Bigfoot? That’s the boy’s dying wish?” “Let’s get to my favor before the other boys show up.” Darius leaned forward with the girth of his chest rested on the booth table. “Let’s have it then.” “Kelli can’t know about it,” Sam said, leaning over his coffee. “She’ll be digging at you looking for answers. Don’t pick up the phone.” Darius nodded. Kelli’s number had been scratched from his phone months earlier. They had been talking, way back when the war between Sam and Kelli began, with Darius as peacekeeper so Sam could stay on the road. It was a year after Nicky was born when Kelli unleashed her insides. Darius had witnessed the scrapes on Sam’s face the width of fingernails and the bashed-out headlights on his truck. More than once, he found Sam asleep in the café in the early morning. Kelli called Darius late at night with her long, breathless complaints when Sam tired of yelling into the torrents of Kelli’s accusations, but he never went over to comfort her in person, no matter how many dishes she broke on the floor for him to hear. SAM “It come on him in the hospital,” Sam started, his face sagging under the weight of the topic. His stubble was coarse enough to fray his flannel shirt. “He shows up for chemo once a week and has nothing to do but sit there and be quiet. So, he picked up a magazine that’s been in the waiting room for ten years and reads about some Bigfoot sighting. It was like a drug. It just got hold of him. It’s something you know a bit about, how you can’t control the next thing you’re gonna say or do.” Darius looked at Sam, his eyes tired, weakened by the weight of denial. He breathed out long. “And there’s a favor in this story?” “I’m coming to that. It takes some time. That’s why I asked you to come early.” Darius used his thick hand to prop up his face and give his neck a rest. Drops of moisture from snowflakes colliding with the big windowpane were spotting the outside gray and breaking up the fluorescent lights. “He spent a month in the library. He’s got newspapers laid out like treasure maps in his room,” Sam said, spreading his arms out wide like he was measuring a fish. “Course you can’t say nothing to a boy in that state, so I’m letting him piece it all out in his head.” “Sounds serious.” “Oh, it is.” Sam sat back and sucked in air like he was storing it for later. “It is.” The weight of losing his boy was suffocating him. It drained all reason and logic, pushing him into abstract unknowns he could not plumb or measure. A tanker pulled up to the side of the café, splattered with brown highway slush and wobbling to a stop. “There’s Jim,” Darius said. “Better get it out before he walks in here.” “Alright. So here it is. I need you to be Bigfoot.” Darius put his hands on the table like he was showing he had nothing to hide. “Me? Why not Jim?” Sam leaned forward. “Because you are a big Black man, and you owe me one.” “Judas, Sam.” “It’s the kid’s dying wish, Dee. God honest truth.” “You want me to be Bigfoot?” “You’re the best I got. Jim would blow the whole thing up, dance like a rodeo clown, or worse, holler something out in his real voice and my boy would be pulverized. Nicky is whip smart. He reads.” Jim eased in beside Darius and patted the middle of the table. Angel set a coffee cup down and filled it. “What’s got you fellas quiet this morning? School bus broke down again?” “No, not that,” Sam said. “Just a day like any other.” “Sam says I’m a big Black man,” Darius blurted out. Jim leaned back and eyed Darius. “Well, you don’t say. I never noticed until now. Damned if he ain’t right.” Darius chuckled and let the steam from the fresh coffee rise to his face. Sam tightened his lips until the wings of his mustache readied for takeoff. “He just wants a favor for his boy, that’s all,” Darius said. “How is Nicky?” Jim asked. “I know he’s sick.” “He’s dying,” said Sam. “But he still has some strength.” “Damn. I’m sorry about that. He up for a ride in the tanker? I could take him on a route?” “No,” Sam said. “He wants to see Bigfoot,” said Darius. “It’s his dying wish,” Sam added. “Don’t ask me why. I’m not good at this at all.” Jim looked at Darius, stared for a moment at the thick beard, the broad, dark face. “You know there’s no such thing as Bigfoot.” “There is now,” Darius offered resolutely. “There is now.” “You want to let the other boys in on it?” Jim asked. “No,” Sam answered. “A conspiracy ain’t a conspiracy if the whole town knows about it.” “Okay, let’s go then,” Jim said, standing up. “We can talk about it at the truck bay. I’ve got to wash the whale.” Darius raised his hands like he was calming a horse. “Nobody’s said yes to anything yet.” JIM Compressors sputtered on and off and mist hung in the air. The spray gun dripped. The sky was a cement gray. The boys leaned against the side of the sweating tanker, freshly sprayed down. Jim’s beard drained droplets onto the front of his T-shirt, into a void the flannel could not cross. “You’re right about the boy dying with a smile on his face. That would be my wish.” “Not here to talk about the dying part,” Sam said. He had not let himself go to that place where his boy lay in coffin sucking the life out of the world. Jim held up his hand to overrule the conversation. “Just saying that it’s hard to get a corpse to smile. Ask Winifred. She embalmed a hundred people in her life, and she’ll tell you it’s better if they come in with a natural smile.” “It’s why we’re here,” Sam said, not knowing where to put his hands. They were roughhewn and worn and he was trying to stow them somewhere without success. “The boy deserves the best sendoff I can give him. Something that keeps him smiling all the way to Heaven.” “You’d think seeing God would be enough,” Jim said. “No one asked you,” Sam snapped back. “The boy’s not even old enough to drink coffee but he’s old enough to know that Heaven is waiting for him.” “If I had a boy, I’d want to make sure he died happy and not be all tangled up in stuff that doesn’t matter.” “Like how?” Sam demanded. Jim stepped back from the tanker. Darius calmed the tension by offering to help. “Where do I fit in?” Sam tugged at his trucker jacket and drew a magazine page out of his pocket. He pressed it against the side of the tanker. “I stole this from his stash. This is what Bigfoot looks like.” Jim fished in his shirt pocket for his readers. The boys stared at the photo. “Where do we get the costume?” Jim asked. “No costume. It has to look real,” Sam insisted. “Nicky’s got a sharp eye. An ape suit won’t do it.” “You’re talking a Hollywood makeup job there,” Jim said. “The best this town has ever seen.” “The boy is worth it,” Darius said. “Damn cancer. We could get Debra over at the Kut and Kurl.” In the photo Bigfoot’s arms hung long, the hands flapping like a kid wearing his dad’s mittens. The head coned comically upward, and hair grew unnaturally over the kneecaps, something that would not happen in the wild to an animal who spent any time rooting around for grubs. “My hell, Sam. He’s way too clean. We can do better than this,” said Jim. “A beast in the wild would have briars and tagalongs on its fur.” “We have to make the best Bigfoot people have ever seen,” Sam said. “We can do the trick with horsehair from the groomer and some glue. We’ll send Darius out early to pick up a few thorns and thatch to look authentic.” “Hold on,” said Darius. “You got to give me a say in all this.” The three men stood at the edge of the concrete. Cheatgrass pocked the snowy field behind them, rising toward the foothills they could not see but knew were there. A scramble of sage and scuttled boulders were cloaked in the skirt of fog, buried under a blanket of snow draped on the mountains. A series of storms was moving in from the west where they would be pinched off by cold dropping down from the north. Spring was struggling to arrive on the earth tilting slowly toward the sun, changing temperature and time. The days would be getting longer. The milky tears of sleet ached to be spring rain. Beyond the fog was a place Bigfoot could live in the mountains; a place where a boy could find him. “We’ll do it,” Jim said. “Me and Sam will set it up so it’s believable. You’ll see.” NICKY The night light in Nicky’s room seemed to float the boy in the air in front of the window where he stood with head dark against the glass. “Can’t sleep?” He heard someone ask. When he turned around, he saw his father sitting in a chair in the hallway. “Can’t you?” The boy asked. He was thin, sixty-three pounds, and the knots of his knees stood out unnaturally because he was just beginning to grow when the cancer overran his immune system. “No,” Sam said. “If you can’t sleep, neither can I.” “I had that dream again,” Nicky said, walking to stand in front of his father, the man he had watched grab a mangy mare by the neck and wrench it to the ground so the vet could draw her foal out with a cable and jack. He climbed onto his father’s knees and let his pale legs dangle like that foal’s, his mop of blonde hair falling against the father’s barrel chest. “It seems like I can’t wake up when I’m having it, but then I open my eyes.” “Tell me about it again.” “There’s this boy in a cage and there’s all these other cages but they are empty. It’s like somebody forgot to let him out, the only one. That’s it. And I’m just watching him, and nothing happens. He doesn’t even ask me to let him out. He just stares at me, and I stare at him.” “Why does it scare you?” “I don’t know. It just does.” “I’ll leave the door open. You are not in a cage.” The boy stared at his father for a long time. His eyes purple underneath where they should have been sunburned from days in the fields chasing crows with a lasso like the other boys, trying to catch something they never would. His skin bleached rather than browned by the outdoors. “Will mom come back when I’m gone?” “Get back in bed, Sam said. “It’s not your fault she left.” SAM On Saturday, Jim rocked his fix-it van to a stop at the Kut and Kurl. He carried a bag of horsehair trimmings and wore his new Justins because his wife had come home with a new pair of pocket-stitched jeans and he was due. Sam and Darius had arrived in Sam’s truck and waited so the three of them could walk in together. Nicky was at the hospital and the doctors said he couldn’t leave until tomorrow. Sam had dropped him off before picking up Darius. The radio was still tuned to the gospel channel and a drawl voice commanded listeners to doubt not and thrust their hands inside of Jesus. Sam cut the engine. Snow was falling out of the air, thick as down when Sam cleaned geese and the wind kicked up. It made him think of the elements of nature, how two things can look the same but be so different. “I brought wader socks,” Darius said. “I put ball bearings up into the toes to make my footprints look less human.” Sam nodded. He was twisting the grip on his steering wheel like he was trying to change the shape of it before he levered the handle and shouldered the truck door open. Jim hauled the load of horsehair like a bird bag full of dead pheasants. He was proud of the bounty of mane he had secured from the vet. DEBRA Debra stood at the screen door. “Of course I will,” she said. “I love that boy.” “Everybody does,” Sam said as the boys walked in, somber and resolute. “But God loves him more and wants him back.” Debra trembled, holding back emotions was not easy for her and caused her insides to shudder. She spun the chair around and motioned for Darius to sit down. “Take everything off,” she said like a nurse. “Lock the door,” Darius said, tossing his flannel jacket onto a folding chair. He pulled off his boots and struggled to roll his socks off while standing. The Henley shirt came off next, wrestled over his head releasing his round, brown belly. He dropped his Carhart pants on the floor and Jim picked them up. “Judas,” Darius said. “Everything?” Debra nodded. “I don’t believe Bigfoot wears BVDs.” Darius dropped his underwear and tossed them onto the chair with the pile of his clothes that smelled like creosote. He stood there naked, dark skin pocked on his shoulders, and creased with stretchmarks just above the hips. Debra looked at him, sizing him up. Darius sat down on the chair, the vinyl squeaking beneath his bare skin. He took a deep breath. Sam dumped the horsehair out on a table and started sorting through it. Debra cut the tip off the craft glue bottle. Sam taped the magazine picture on the mirror next to a photo of a woman with short bangs and a long mullet in the back. Debra stared at Bigfoot for a moment. Then she sucked air through her teeth and studied the mound of brown human in front of her, the belly like a mare’s, the pebbles of black hair on the chest. She shuffled back and forth on swollen ankles, eyeing the blank canvas and seeing where the natural worn spots would be if he were Bigfoot, the valleys filled with thick hair, the creases where ticks could burrow. “It’s somethin’ seeing it from hoof to hide,” Debra said. Darius took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Just do your worst.” Jim and Sam drizzled craft glue in uneven streams across Darius’ chest. Debra worked carefully on his whole body, putting hair everywhere. She was careful about covering up the private area. When they were done with the front, Sam helped Darius pull on the wader socks with three ball bearings each and they covered those too. Then Darius got out of the chair and settled his elbows on the armrest while they put hair on his back and rump. Nobody talked. It felt as sacred as washing a corpse. “I’ll go get Nicky,” Sam said. “See you at Pearson’s Perch.” Darius nodded. “I’ll be there.” SAM Sam arrived at the hospital and slid a laundry basket out of his pickup truck. It was half-full of towels. He walked in through the back door and took the stairs up to the third floor, breathing heavy when he reached the top, his mind envisioning every step of his escape as he passed the children’s paintings of winged angels hung in the stairwell. He held the basket low as he passed the nurse’s desk and slid the glass door back and stood over Nicky. “There’s been a sighting,” Sam said. “A what?” Nicky sat up weakly, surprised but glad to see his dad. “Shhhhh,” Sam whispered. “There’s been a sighting out to Pearson’s Perch.” “But…” “Do you want to go?” Nicky was pale, his lips gray. “Bigfoot?” “Yes. We’ll only be gone an hour.” Sam tossed the towels onto the bed and set the basket on the floor. Nicky slid down and curled up in it, his eyes unnaturally wide. He folded himself like a baby bird in an egg. Sam covered his son with towels and unplugged the monitor from the wall. A faint beeping noise sounded. He hoisted the laundry basket onto his hip and ducked into the hallway while the attending nurse looked over her shoulder but continued her conversation with the other nurses. Sam lumbered down the stairs, wobbling with the boy in front of him. He shouldered Nicky at the bottom, hurried out the door and set his frail son on the front seat of his truck. “Stay down,” he said. Nicky giggled. It was the first happy sound he’d made in two months. They moved slowly out of the parking lot and Nicky poked his head up, perched in the basket and looking out the window at the snowflakes turning to water when they hit the glass. The cold made his face grayer than in the hospital. He shivered. Sam turned up the heat. They made new tracks in the snow on the highway. “I brought you some boots and coveralls.” Nicky rolled out of the basket and started getting dressed. “She,” Nicky said. “Bigfoot is a she . Everybody thinks otherwise, but it’s a mother. That’s why it’s so hard to get a look at her, mothers got a way of being invisible.” Even though Nicky was excited to reveal this bit of information, Sam began to weep. He didn’t want to hear about mothers and all their willful love. It reminded him of Kelli. He steered with one hand and pawed the moisture away. “Makes sense,” he said. They motored slowly off the highway and up a sheep road to a gravel turn-around, the snow falling in lager flakes, some the size of aspen leaves in the high altitude. “Down this slope in Negro Bill’s Canyon where they saw him last,” Sam said, when they were climbing out of the truck. “They don’t call it that anymore,” Nicky said. “I saw it on the news. Now they call it Shadow Canyon since it is so narrow and the sun only gets there part of the day.” “Old habits. Old ways,” Sam answered. “I don’t think Darius liked the old name.” Nicky said. “He might prefer Bill’s real name, William Grandstaff.” “You read too much. I don’t think he minds one way or the other.” Snow was falling on the trail and Sam inhaled snowflakes when he breathed in. The large flakes held their shape in the thin air, compressing under their feet, wafting before them as they hiked. Nicki walked forward awkwardly, bundled in the insulated coveralls, and work gloves. A towel around his neck for a scarf and oversized work boots. He looked into the cloud of snow. “Let me lead,” Sam said. The two worked their way down the rocky path that overlooked the choked canyon. The ground was slippery, and the dried Juniper branches damp and brittle, buried like steel game traps. They moved carefully, the father testing every step and the son placing his feet in his father’s footprints. Sam reached for a juniper branch to steady himself, but it gave way. His feet slid; his weight teetered. He put an arm out to break his fall, but the cross hatch of branches gave way, and he went down hard on his hip and a bank of snow followed him over the edge. Nicky could hear his father thrashing through the brush and scraping on the shale while a rivulet of high mountain detritus flowed down the furrow Sam left plowed. “Dad!” There was a long, dead silence. “I’m OK, Nicky,” Sam’s voice floated up from the bottom of the narrow ravine. “I’ve jacked up my ankle, son. Stay there. Stay right there!” “I can get help,” Nicky called out. “Stay there,” his father called back. “I’ll get up to you. Just give me a minute.” NICKY Nicky fanned the deepening snow around him and stomped a waiting place. All things in the cold were shrouded. He listened to his father grunting and turning and kicking loose rubble. He could hear the labored breaths, the air sucking through his father’s mouth into his lungs, the coughing. Nicky cocked his head and listened to a new sound, the shuffling of feet not far from him, a strange and soft sound. His boyhood years in the brush had taught him to see with sounds, gauging size and distance. He turned his head to the sound as it moved along the bottom, around a stand of oak brush until it was below the rise of the trail that dipped steeply. Through the veil of snow, he could see his father’s form on the shoulders of some beast he could not make out. A dark head appeared, covered in hair. A broad chest, bare in the snow, head facing down, a barrel body covered in hair tangled with briars, snow knots and mud. The beast moved awkwardly, the snow churning in a wake behind him. The beast did not look up. Nicki could not see its eyes. It opened the truck door and dropped his dad inside. Sam was passed out from the pain. His foot bent at a right angle at the shin bone. Nicky stood facing the beast. “Will he live?” “Yes,” said the beast, letting its eyes be seen. “You’re Bigfoot?” “Maybe.” “You could be Negro Bill.” “He died a long time ago,” Bigfoot said. “Maybe he didn’t die,” Nicky said. “Could be. I have heard of such things.” “His mother then,” Nicky said. “Mothers live forever.” “Yes. And they always come back.” “For sure?” Nicky asked. Bigfoot nodded. “Will you live forever?” Bigfoot looked out toward wilderness he could not see. The veil of snow hung thick in front of him. “I guess that depends on who you ask. Sometimes I’d like to die.” “Well, I am dying,” Nicky said. “And I’m afraid.” “There’s worse things.” “What’s worse?” Nicky asked, now waist deep in snow. The beast crouched on its haunches and tried to look out at the canyon, lonely and eternal. Thick hands of snow fell, pressing downward while small gaps of gray light drifted upward. “We should be going,” Bigfoot said. He collected the boy in his arms and set him in the laundry basket on the hood of the truck. Sam woke and moaned in pain, his lower leg now swelling. “I lost the key when I fell.” “I’ll go get help,” said Bigfoot. He hoisted the basket packed tight with boy and white towels onto his shoulder. With his free hand, he brushed the snow in front of him, clearing a trail in the waist-high drifts, the whiteness floating up and falling at the same time. ANGEL “I seen the creature come in off the foothills through the snow. It was white as steamed milk, couldn’t even see the mountains. He appeared, trudging like the creature he was, and it was clear that my place was his destination. “His head was down and his fur like a bison’s was covered in snow knots. On his shoulder was Nicky, wrapped up like the Christ child in a laundry basket. He opened the door and the glass fogged. He set the boy down like a doorstop where the warm air could rush over him and walked back on the same line he came in on, like he had some inner compass directing him back through the snow. I dropped the coffee right there; you can still see the stain of it on the floor. I slid the boy in, and he told me the whole story. God’s angels aren’t what you seen in Sunday school, feathered wings and white and floating. Some, I guess, are brown and hairy and strong enough to trudge eight miles through the snow to save a boy. Those such things happen here.” I write to discover those things that change us, the little breakthroughs that give birth to redemption at best, and a new way of seeing things at the least. The epiphany comes in the action of writing, muddling through sentences to try and discover an out to a dilemma. Previous STEPHEN WUNDERLI is a freelance writer for The Foundation for a Better Life. He is the recipient of the United Nations Time for Peace Award, the Bridport Prize in Literature and an EMMY. Next

Barbara Huntington < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Our Big Toes Barbara Huntington 00:00 / 03:01 Our Big Toes Barbara Huntington I look down at my toe disgusting thing, although it joggles a pleasant memory my husband, before his death despite his Parkinson’s shaking head his delight, surrounded by giggling girls, the deer-in-the-headlight fear in his eyes briefly replaced by what? Lust, memories perhaps of a youthful paramour, remembered sighs? When I could no longer trim his thickened nails that taunted him my friend said “don’t fool with it take him where they have tools for it” Thus, after our trip to the Apple store where geniuses seemed to want to help him more than their mostly younger clientele we walked back to the parking lot where a manicure salon reached out pulled me in and I pulled him no other customers in the store I never frequented places like those rarely manicured fingers or toes a mountains and garden gal, I relished mud between my toes and besides, my nose rebelled at the chemical smells that filled those places A young woman asked me what I would like, probably assumed Fred would leave, busy himself at a restaurant, store, or maybe the library almost next door But I pointed to his sandaled feet size ten to match his 6-2 height which wasn’t his size any more stooped, twisted neck, face forced toward the floor suddenly all the girls gathered round him smiled, giggled again, and showed him to a chair and Fred obeyed and grinned at them But among the smiles one face was cross An old woman stared, perhaps the boss, Gave me a glare, pointed at my feet so I nodded, sure, as she hustled me to a chair, then pulled out her stool and what looked like a very dangerous tool I soaked and watched the fun young women flirting with Fred He, happy as a clam or maybe a knight, a ladies man pampered and bathed, perhaps he imagined girlish hearts being won I closed my eyes, soothed by the soak until I awoke with a gasp of pain water turned red with the nip of her implement I swear that old woman had an evil grin but I apologized did not want my predicament to spoil his fun assured them all I was ok as she applied some herb and Fred maintained his goofy smile and mollified, I hid the pain Then I waylaid a laughing attendant whispered my plan and she conveyed to the rest my bequest and by the time we left Fred was enchanted by the happy face painted on his big toenail No longer depressed, a happy male That’s the day the fungus found my big toe but oh I’d let that old woman repeat her crime if I could see Fred’s happy faces one more time "Our Big Toes" was published on Vox Populi . It was a breakthrough for me because I could remember my late husband and laugh again instead of crying. I had fun with the internal rhyme. Sometime poems take me forever and sometimes they just flow out. This was the latter. Previous BARBARA HUNTINGTON was born in Albequerque, NM and recently retired as Director of the Preprofessional Advising Office at San Diego State University. She has written poetry, children's books, memoir, and a handbook about how to get into the school of your choice, and her students who overcame tremendous odds to become wonderful healers as physicians, pharmacists, dentists, veterinarians, physician assistants, optometrists, chiropractors and naturopathic doctors. Next

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ALIEN EXCHANGE PROGRAM - HOST APPLICATION by Naomi Ulsted It’s extremely important that we choose a good host match for our aliens. This is the inaugural year of our Alien Exchange Program where we hope to facilitate mutual learning and understanding of these new neighbors we’ve discovered. Please answer the following questions honestly. 1. Do you plan to turn over your exchange student to the Federal government or any other for-profit or not-for-profit organization planning to conduct experimental exploration on our exchange student? Yes (you may turn in your application now) x No (go on to the next question) 2. Even if they offer you extremely large sums of money? Yes (you may turn in your application now) x No (go on to the next question) 3. How did you hear about the Alien Exchange Program? It was at the mall. Which is odd because I hardly ever go to the mall. I find the mall suffocating, with the cloying Cinnabon scent, the crowds of women flocking Bath and Body Works, the teenage boys cruising the walkways with slouching bravado. Not to mention that since our species have taken to using semi-automatic weapons with bump stocks to gun down large numbers of each other in public spaces, I’ve been especially reluctant to visit the mall, a concert, a movie, or any other crowded area. If I had the money, I’d pay for the virtual reality mall, where I could turn off the Cinnabon smell and if someone gunned down my avatar, I could just respawn somewhere else. But like most people in my social circles, I can’t afford that luxury. I won’t tell my alien how we like to kill each other here. That day I was in desperate need of a new pair of sand boots, so I threw my Glock in my purse, hefted myself into my bullet proof vest and headed out to the mall. I found the Alien Exchange Kiosk right next to the kiosks where young, beautiful men call out to middle-aged women like myself, offering samples of lotion and salt scrub. They’ll apply it themselves if you let them, rubbing your skin with their smooth hands. They can always sense their customer. We’re the ones wearing jeans from a decade ago. Our faces show we haven’t grasped the concept of contouring. We’re the ones with credit cards with high limits. If I could afford the virtual reality mall, I’d use a male avatar carrying a broadsword. Those lotion guys wouldn’t mess with me then. As it is, I try to walk in the aisle far from them, pretending I don’t hear them targeting me. As I passed by the Alien Exchange Kiosk, it placed images of the aliens’ planet into my mind. The planet’s surface was iridescent green and lush, not parched and withered like this one. As I came closer, the Kiosk’s smooth marketing voice resonated in my head asking, Do you have a thirst for adventure? Do you want to connect with another world? I thought about the words. I wanted to connect. 4. Have you experienced inter-stellar travel? (We know that only the top 1% of the country can afford inter-stellar travel. Or a house in the suburbs. Or post-secondary education. So if you choose, you can speak to international travel in your response to this question, as opposed to inter-stellar travel.) I have not experienced inter-stellar travel. When I was in college, I took out extra student loans so I could drink my way through a series of European pubs, but since I’ve grown older and more mature, I’ve redistributed my debt to involve less travel. Not less alcohol, mind you, but expenses in the form of living quarters, an iPhone, elementary curriculum feeds for the kids. Every day is planned and routine. When I traveled, I didn’t have plans. I woke up and perused a map over coffee. I shouldered my backpack and delved into the unknown. Now, when my alien comes to stay with me, we’ll have coffee in the morning. I don’t know if my alien wants scrambled egg protein for breakfast. I don’t know if my alien will even eat or if she’ll have an enlarged forehead and horizontal ovals for eyes, like in the old science fiction movies. I hope my alien isn’t slimy, but if she is, I’ll put a towel down on the kitchen chair. Come to think of it, I don’t even if know if my alien is female. Even we are evolving past binary constructs, but still, part of me hopes she’s female, like I’m still identifying. But I do know that as we regard one another in my kitchen, it will be like looking at that map in the morning, shouldering my backpack and hiking into the world of possibility. 5. While your alien is staying with you, we’d like him/her/them to feel as though he/she/they are a part of the family. Unless your family is completely dysfunctional, which may cause the alien to deliver a negative report about humans to his/her/their superiors. In what family events do you plan to involve your alien? In my extended family, there are no more weddings. The siblings have been married at least once, sometimes twice. Actually, we’re excited about a pretty big divorce happening soon. I’m hoping my alien can attend our divorce party after the trial. She can help me roll canapés and pour champagne to celebrate a new beginning. She can give us an alien blessing of some kind. A special symbol from her culture of a new start. She can stand or hover or whatever she does, in the circle with us, exchanging hugs. Of course, if the trial doesn’t go well for us, then I’ll keep my alien away from that function. My sister will return home to seek solace in one of her many online worlds. She’ll don her dragon slayer skin or a pull up her sexy spy avatar and forget about what just happened. My other siblings will sit and scroll through their phones like normal. But I will come home to my alien to see her playing Connect 4 with my children. We’ll make root beer floats and play charades and I will laugh and laugh, and forget the world is burning around me. 6. We want our alien participants to enjoy their time with you and the wonderful attractions our world has to offer, although we don’t want them to enjoy our world so much that they decide to come down here and colonize us. Can you speak to the types of attractions you plan to show your alien? Over a decade ago, I spent many afternoons downtown. I rode the city bus to the bookstore where I worked alongside the bookstore collie dog, re-organizing the New Age section and looking for attractive book covers to face out. For my lunch, I brought my cheese and pickle sandwich out to the park square. The benches were shiny burnished metal. The water from a bronze fountain depicting two leaping salmon sparkled in the sunlight. A pigeon gave me the side eye and cooed questioningly at my sandwich. Across the street, the theater marquis advertised the current production. I only made minimum wage at the bookstore and couldn’t afford shows, but being downtown in front of the theater, in the midst of the park blocks surrounded by sharply dressed business professionals made me feel like I was a part of something important. I would like to show my alien that place. She could relax in the bookstore, the dog sniffing her curiously. I’d buy her a book on chakras. She could reach her hand, or her appendage or appendages, out to the water in the fountain and splash with the children who wouldn’t be afraid of her, because they’re children who don’t fear things yet. I’d like to take her there, but it’s different now. I unplugged my children from their entertainment feeds recently and dragged them down there to see an actual show with real human actors in that theater I can now afford because most people prefer to escape home through their virtual reality systems. Bookstores are long gone and only Outside Dwellers have real dogs, since most people can afford a virtual pet. After the show, a nostalgic production that featured an old-style public school before institutionalized public education put children’s lives at risk, my children dragged me toward the salmon fountain. The water hasn’t run in it since the shortage years ago. Pigeons scavenged through the cracked and grimy tiles of the fountain without giving us a second thought. There were several Outside Dwellers lounging around the park square. Most Outside Dwellers are harmless. Scruffy and stinky for lack of water or dry soap, bare feet black with city filth, muttering stories that make sense only to themselves. That day several of them shared a six pack of 4 Loco. But you never know when a group of Outside Dwellers may be shooting up, not just smoking weed. Or when the story one of them is living in his mind may paint you as a threat. My kids wanted to play with the pigeons and my boy jumped from bench to bench, until I dragged them both away from the city square and the Outside Dwellers. We went back home where I hooked them up to their entertainment feeds again, nice and safe. If I took my alien there, she probably wouldn’t be afraid, like I am. She’d likely even sit down next to one of those Outside Dwellers, joining him on the grungy bench and sharing a 4 Loco. Maybe with her next to me, I’d be brave enough to hang out with the Dwellers, sharing stories and watching the light change as the sun dipped down into the smoggy sky and then dropped behind the towering skyscrapers. Twilight would fall like it’s fallen every evening, regardless of who is sitting in the city square, be it an Outside Dweller, an alien, or me. 7. There are hundreds of applicants for the Alien Exchange Program. In what way are you an especially good fit for this program? As I sit here in my living quarters, inputting these answers, I guess I can think of lots of people who might be a better fit. The families with money to take the alien to the places in our world that are still beautiful. Places with waterfalls, lakes, and piped in rain. I ’ve heard they still exist in some areas and the top 1% get to immerse themselves in those lakes, feel the spray of the waterfall on their bare arms. But when I was 13, I watched E.T. in the movie theater. Later, I watched more gruesome depictions of extraterrestrials, like those in Aliens, but my heart stayed with that waddling big-eyed, neck-stretching E.T. At night, even though I was 13 and knew better, I held up my finger to the window and searched the sky. I imagined my finger lighting up like Elliot’s and I reached it up toward the stars in search of an alien. Decades later, I know she’s up there, her own finger shining brightly. Please send me my alien. I need to meet her. Your application will be reviewed, and you will hear from us in four to six weeks. Should your application be selected for further consideration, alien placement will be contingent upon a home visit to ensure you can provide adequate facilities. This includes a fully functioning hydration pod, as aliens cannot adjust to our arid climate. You will also need to demonstrate bandwidth and networking links capable of reaching the alien’s home planet. Your signature will be required on our “Liability Waiver Contract” where you will agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Alien Exchange Program should you personally befall any harm from or as a result of actions taken by the alien. Thank you for your interest in the Alien Exchange Program. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Originally published in The New Guard . I love this piece because even though it's been five years since its original publication, it still feels just as relevant, both to the state of our society and to me personally, as it did then. It still feels as though we are searching for a connection that has proven difficult to find in this environment of fear and distrust. I had so much fun diving into this darker theme using the format of an application. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NAOMI ULSTED writes young adult fiction and personal essays. She is the author of The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). naomiulsted.com Next - A Twist of the Vine by Naomi Ulsted Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue How to Make a Basket Jan Mordenski for Henry Taylor Take a walk down Canal St. Buy one of those crispy horn-shaped buns from the lady at the corner bakery. Eat it as you watch the two boys dangling their lines off Salmon Weir Bridge. Sit inside St. Benedict’s. Watch the sputtering rows of vigil lights, the way the wax bends the air as it evaporates. Take delight in tangled things: your daughter’s coppery hair, the fading lines of your fingertips, the trail a swallowtail makes as she tastes the asters in the garden. You need not concentrate on strictly rural images. Park across from the power plant; follow the grimy path of one fat black pipe. Keep your eye on the red Trans Am as it volleys down Telegraph Rd. This is easy. Move on, now, to the more difficult preparations. Study openings, memorize the patterns of house windows, the shifting lulls in your conversations. Dwell on one vast vacant area: your own loss of hearing, your inability to understand, the memory of the palms of your mother’s hands. Then go into the field. Find something that grows, something long and aspiring that points to the sky, tries, in fact, to be part of it. Explain to it how it will be better this way. Take it in your hands, not reverently exactly, but with respect. And keep it wet. Remember that little thrush you saw this morning at the edge of the canal? Try to see her now: a disoriented worm in her beak, her claws, two tiny scythes, gripping the gentle mess of twigs and feathers and string into which she put her children. Hold all this as you begin the chosen pattern. "How to Make a Basket" was first published in BLACK RIVER REVIEW . At my father's suggestion, I had enrolled in a few classes in basket-making and that (like many crafts) provided time for reflection - on my homelife, teaching, writing. I came to realize how many separate aspects of life are actually interwoven . This poem celebrates that breakthrough, and one of my poet-mentors, the great Henry Taylor. Previous JAN MORDENSKI was born in Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of the chapbook The Chosen Pattern (Quadra-Project, 1988). Her poem "Crochet" was published in Plainsong and in Ted Kooser's series, “American Life in Poetry.” Next

Junk Email by Nancy Takacs A Robert J. Smith wants to give me a free $500 shopping card at Costco, me and a million others. I picture him eating an everything pizza alone, sleeping with a book of passwords, pressing a white shirt before going to his church, The Truth Seekers. I don’t respond to his offer. But this Sunday my record skips in the background on the turntable, Mick Jagger cawing Hey, you over and over, when I notice that my bank balance is gone. I change all passwords named for my former dogs to names of old hurricanes, call the credit union, the card company, leave urgent voice mails. A blue beetle crawls across my screen’s blank statement to my right finger. I lift her onto a thyme leaf so she’ll live in its fragrance away from today’s winds. This is a desert town where wind never really dies. I like feeling swept. But then there are garbage bags from neighbors plastered to my fence, dangling on my trees, until they whoosh into the atmosphere like black balloons. Now we’re getting a snow squall. I open the door, step outside. Visibility zero. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This poem is a recent one. After losing my money (which could not be returned), I had to write this poem. After letting it sit for a few months, I kind of like it because the speaker is like most of us – vulnerable to hacking, without being aware of how easily it can be done with the touch of a key. In my case, which hasn’t been resolved, the bank said a good hacker got hold of my password because I used the same one on another site. I now change passwords at least once a week. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 . nancytakacs.org Next - Belief by Mike White Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Mama's Hands Willy Palomo scrub toilets until you can see your face as you piss, until her hugs smell only of rubber & bleach. Her knuckles are rougher than my father’s, tougher than anything behind a dumpster with Timberlands and a metal bat. At nine years old, the sound of her car leaving the garage would wake me up in the morning. Her shift ended at midnight, so at bedtime, I would take out all my toys and wait for her and play with dinosaurs on the couch. But the morning would come with the crank of her engine, again. I’m sorry, Mama , I’d blink, knotting myself deeper into my sheets, but I couldn’t breathe & keep my eyes open at the same time. I’m sorry , I’d stomp, crushing snails after school, I didn’t love you enough to stay awake . When night came again, I’d yawn, pull out my triceratops, and vow to see her before bed. I thought I would never make it. Then one night, the door broke open like a promise, the light behind her head darkening her face as she lifted me numb from the sofa. I twitched, maybe managed a smile, as her hand stroked the left side of my face—rough. Published in Crab Orchard Review , Vol. 23, No. 3. The literal breakthrough in the poem is a door opening and a pouring forth of light, one that also creates a chiaroscuro "darkening her face" in the frame of a promise broken open. Previous WILLY PALOMO (he/they/she) is the author of Mercury in Reggaetón , winner of the Light Scatter Prize, and Wake the Others (Editorial Kalina/Glass Spider Publishing, 2023), a winner of a Foreword Prize in Poetry and an International Latino Book Award honorable mention in Bilingual Poetry. A veteran of the Salt Lake City poetry slam scene, his fiction, essays, poetry, translations, and songs can be found across print and web pages, including the Best New Poets 2018, Latino Rebels, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and more. He has taught classes on literature, rap, and creative writing in universities, juvenile detention centers, high schools, and community centers. He is the son of two refugees from El Salvador. www.palomopoemas.com Next

Fireflies by Kevin Prufer He was fifteen and feeling hassled and he asked his mother to please fuck off, so she slapped him hard and told him to get out of the car because he could walk home. + As he walked, his anger smoldered. He imagined her car crushed against a tree, he imagined her pleading for help as he strode right past toward home exactly as she’d commanded— + and half an hour later, as he rounded the corner to their yellow house, he saw her blue Honda in the driveway, and knew she was already at her desk because + it was evening, because she had homework, because she had her accounting class early in the morning at the college and still he was angry, though his anger had lost its focus— + why had he said what he’d said? Why had she slapped her own son? Anyway, he wanted to hate her + but it was a beautiful summer evening, the chirring of crickets, the fireflies— he would remember the fireflies years later rising and falling in the gloom, + his old gray cat uncurling on the porch steps, walking up to him, purring and rubbing her cheek against his leg there beneath the streetlamp. + The cat was long dead, but his mother was still alive. Just today he’d brought her another mystery novel, then sat with her in her hot little apartment while she went on about what someone or other said to someone else, he didn’t try to keep track, + but as she spoke, his mind reached back to that evening long ago, how he’d stood in front of their old yellow house in the hot evening, his hatred dissipating among the now-extinct fireflies that rose and fell above the rhododendrons. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue I’ve always been interested in the way a poem can move through time, making use of white space and shifts in narration to accomplish that movement. Also, how memory works in a poem—how, in this case, the boy’s conflict with his mother in his memory is every bit as real as the present day, when she has grown old and reads mystery novels in the hot little apartment they never lived in together. It’s this telescoping of time and memory that excited me as I wrote this, and the complex dissipation of childhood anger. .................................................................................................................................................................................... KEVIN PRUFER'S newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Sleepaway: a Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Among his eight other books are Churches , which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them , which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry , The Pushcart Prize Anthology , The Paris Review , and The New Republic , among others. He also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long forgotten authors. kevinprufer.com Next - Automotive by Kevin Prufer Next

A Twist of the Vine by Naomi Ulsted We seemed to be stopped in the middle of the road for no reason. I leaned over my baby brother Adrian’s chubby legs to peer out the window while he shoved at me. Outside, just past the dirt road where our wood-paneled station wagon sat motionless, was a wall of forest. The air smelled of recent rain, but late spring sun dried the droplets trying to cling to the dense mass of underbrush leading into the damp darkness of the forest. Well , Mom said, turning around in the front seat to face me. What do you think? Think of what? I asked. Mom’s long brown hair was fixed in my favorite style, with two sections pulled into a gold clip at the back of her head. The remaining strands fell over her shoulders. Adrian, who had been clambering around the back seat during the thirty-minute drive from my grandmother’s house, reached hands smeared with teething biscuit toward her hair. She absentmindedly pushed them away. This! she announced, gesturing her arm out the window toward dense woods. The property for our new home! I thought of my grandmother’s tidy lawn with its perfectly rounded shrubs and straight mowed lines in the grass. I suspected the surprise Mom had been promising me today was not going to be a fun surprise, like a trip to The Farmette for an ice cream cone. This was going to be one of those grown-up surprises that are kind of boring until they are kind of complicated, like when my brother came along or when I got my new dad. Even though I thought Mom and I had been doing just fine on our own. You see? she went on, smiling back at me while Dad leaned over the steering wheel, trying to distance himself from the gooey teething biscuit my brother was waving. I told you we’d get our new place before you started second grade. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be seeing. There were only trees and dusty road, but my mom was happy in a way she usually wasn’t. We had moved from Nebraska a few months after she and my brother came home from the hospital. After barely surviving Adrian’s birth, Mom may have wanted the extra support from her parents, who lived here on Camano Island, in Washington. Camano Island is a large island located in the Puget Sound and, at the time we moved there, was populated primarily by people who wanted to live off the beaten track. People who didn’t want close neighbors, people who lived in log cabins or A-frame houses, surrounded by towering trees and deep moss. Nearly equidistant between Seattle and the Canadian border, both seemed equally foreign to me, as Camano was pretty much our whole world. Although we lived on an island, as I grew older I found I often needed to explain we didn’t get there by ferry or some other kind of boat. Rather, there was one road off the island that crossed a bridge into the town of Stanwood. Even the bridge wasn’t particularly stunning. Although Port Susan was to the south of the bridge and Skagit Bay to the right, the bridge itself basically crossed over a large cow ditch of stagnant water. Although Stanwood was home to a population less than 2000, it was our hub for shopping, school, and supplies. Nonetheless, Camano was a small and as of yet, undiscovered oasis. A short drive from anywhere on the island would take us to the edge of the Sound, where we could play in the placid waves, gather driftwood and look for tiny crabs. Although I’d been born in Seattle and coming back to Washington meant coming home, it didn’t feel like it to me. Mom and I had moved from Washington to Oregon, then to California where I got my new dad, then back to Oregon, and then to Nebraska where my new brother was born. So for us no state felt like home. For me, only Mom and her yellow Volkswagen Beetle felt like home, and the Beetle had been sold to help pay for Mom’s wedding. I tried to muster more enthusiasm than I felt. Great! I offered. I had to pee, and I hoped we could just appreciate the trees through the car windows and go home. Out! Adrian demanded, fiddling with the door handle where he’d been riding on my mother’s lap. Come on, Chuck , Mom said. Let’s explore . I almost asked to stay in the car, but didn’t think that would go over well, so I got out and we all stood at the side of the road, dwarfed by an imposing wall of ferns, pine and fir trees, nettles, wildflowers, and blackberry bushes. Although it was still warm, as days in June were long, the sun dipped low in the sky. Follow me, Dad said. Blackberry bushes rose thick and imperious, although the berries were only hard green nubs. As I stepped onto a trail leading into the woods, a loud buzzing from inside the bushes that towered over all of us, even Dad. Mom picked huckleberries from bushy clusters of tiny leaves as she held Adrian’s hand and he toddled along until he toddled into a stinging nettle and shrieked in pain. She picked him up and continued to chatter about the five acres they’d just purchased. We just have to decide where to build our house , she said. We thought we would build on the south side of the property, but if we built a little farther from the road, we’d get more sun. We’ll need to put in a nice long driveway . Her hair caught in a blackberry bush, and I helped her untangle it as she went on. Besides, a long driveway will keep us away from the noise of the road. It will be nice and quiet. Although the drive from my grandmother’s was only around thirty minutes, for the last fifteen we’d swapped the smooth pavement for a series of dirt roads that became dirtier and bumpier as we went along, passing fewer and fewer cars. As I would find, the school bus wouldn’t even drive all the way back into those woods. Instead, I would walk the two miles to the junction where the dirt roads met the paved roads, my sneakers streaked with dust in the early fall, or mud the rest of the school season. When a truck passed by me, clouds of dirt billowed behind it, swirling like a mini version of the tornadoes we’d seen in Nebraska. I bent down to pick a stem of wild peppermint. I crushed its leaves and breathed it in, then popped it into my mouth. When we lived in Oregon the first time, Mom and I had eaten greens we gathered from wooded areas surrounding whatever apartment we were staying in at the time. Mom hadn’t had any kind of traditional job since I was born. She forced me to attend daycare for three weeks once, so she could go to work as an administrative assistant. However, after paying for rent and day care, where I sobbed at each drop off, there was barely enough left to buy food. So she quit her job and went back to receiving her monthly welfare check, which gave us lots of time together to search for herbs. She made tea from the tiny yellow chamomile buds, which I would drink after stirring in large spoonfuls of honey. I once picked some from my grandmother’s driveway and brought a handful to her to make for tea, but she just asked me why I was dragging weeds into the house. This was all before my mom met my new dad, who married her last year and adopted me. Up until then, it was just us two, gathering herbs in the woods, selling crafts at outdoor markets, moving from one apartment to another. I didn’t think about the empty space where a “dad” was supposed to be. My mother and I had grown from the rich dirt of the forest together, all at once. We were like one organism, flitting from place to place, spinning in our homemade skirts, drinking in the sun and the rain as though that were all we needed. Then Mom told me she was marrying Dad because I needed stability. Because I needed two parents and Mom was not enough for me. I pleaded with her to let us keep just being one thing together, but I knew the real truth. I was not enough for her. Dad stopped abruptly, causing me to nearly run straight into his backside. Here , he said, waving his arm in front of him. Linda , he put his arm around Mom. This is the perfect place for a new house. The tiny trail continued ahead, flanked on both sides with deep woods. There was a scurrying sound in one of the bushes near me. Where? I asked, confused. It will be perfect! Mom said. We just have to clear it. As we stood peering into the bushes at nothing I could recognize as house-worthy, Dad reached around and tugged me close to him, He pressed my face into the scratchy denim of his jacket for a moment, until I pulled away. I reached around Mom’s middle to hold her tightly. My head was now just past her waist. Leaning into her soft side, I breathed in chamomile and sunshine. She shifted Adrian over to her other hip where he kicked me solidly in the head. Let go , she said, barked at me. I’ve told you I can’t have you clinging to me when I’m carrying the baby. Chuck , she said, what do you think about putting in a nice deck? Looking out over the garden? I was ready to go back to my grandma’s house. She was making my favorite tonight - fried chicken. Should we have the garden on the south side? Dad asked. Where should we put the greenhouse? It was also Tuesday night and we always watched “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley” on Tuesday nights. Well, don’t forget we need to have a space for cows and sheep, Mom replied. I want them to have lots of space to exercise and be comfortable. As they continued to talk about houses, animals and gardens that didn’t exist, I felt my own needs becoming more pressing. Mom , I said, I have to go to the bathroom. Honey, it’s the woods – go ahead and go. Where? Go behind a tree. If you have to go number two, wipe with a leaf. Although we had spent time gathering plants in the woods, I still wasn’t used to just dropping my pants in the middle of nowhere. In first grade, I’d held my bladder all day once because I couldn’t go to the bathroom if there was a girl in a neighboring stall. I’d just sit there on the toilet, panicking until I gave up, my face reddening as I washed my hands for no reason. I walked a few feet off the trail into the woods. Adrian sat on the trail poking at the ground with a stick. He lifted it toward me, waving. Finding a tree I thought might be large enough to hide behind, I squatted down, feeling exposed, thinking of snakes and centipedes and spiders. I tried to relax. And peed all over my shoe. Shifting my feet, I snagged my sneaker on a vine, lost my balance, and toppled over, landing stomach first on a sharp snag poking up from the ground. The vine that had entangled my foot spread across the forest floor, sending tendrils up and around the tree truck. I lifted my shirt to see a spot of blood right above my belly button. I wailed. Dad appeared, shoving his way through the underbrush. What happened? he demanded, examining the large welt on my skin and the tiny drops of blood. I tried to pull up my underpants, but Dad picked me up and hauled me toward the trail. What’s wrong? Mom said, annoyed. She just took a spill , Dad said before I could respond. You’re fine , she said. Pull up your pants. Dad set me down and I pulled up my pants. I picked a large leaf and wiped at my wet shoe. Can we go home now? I asked. This IS your home , Mom snapped. I meant Grandma’s house , I said, lamely. I really hadn’t meant to say “home.” We had been living with my grandparents for two months we’d been back in Washington. In Nebraska my new dad had been doing public relations for a friend’s non-profit. Although it was better money than working as a stringer with the newspaper in Santa Cruz, California, where he was paid by the line, it wasn’t enough to support a family of four. So when Mom’s parents offered to let us live with them while Dad found a job, we crammed everything we could into our station wagon, gave the puppy I’d only had for a few months to the neighbor, and drove away from the flat yellow of the Midwest to the tangled woods of Washington. Dad had just gotten word he’d be starting his new job as a draftsman. My grandma had nodded approvingly at him and the house seemed a little less crowded after that. Although our noise and dirt and clutter clashed with my grandparent’s perfectly color-coordinated home, I loved being there and wasn’t in a hurry to leave. But now I saw the two lines form between Mom’s eyes that always appeared when she was angry. Grandma’s house is NOT your home. Now, stop whining and act your age. She turned and walked deeper into the wood. I sat down with a plop in the dirt. I’d make her turn around and come get me. But when I peeked up, I saw only their backs, Mom holding Adrian on her hip. They were talking again, already forgetting me. I dug in the dirt with a twig, then touched the swollen welt on my belly gingerly. Finally, I got up and scuffed over to join them. Mom reached out and stroked my hair as we all gazed at our imaginary new home. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue This is the first chapter of my memoir, A Bouquet of Weeds: Growing Up Wild in the Pacific Northwest (High Frequency Press, forthcoming in 2026). Although part of a larger work, it stands-alone as well. I love this piece because of the child narrator’s voice used. I really enjoyed telling the story of my mother’s attempt to transition from a wandering lifestyle to one that would be more settled and stable, albeit the wild environment she and my stepdad selected doesn't feel either settled or stable. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NAOMI ULSTED writes young adult fiction and personal essays. She is the author of The Apology Box (Idle Time Press, 2021). naomiulsted.com Next - Something to Surrender To by Austin Holmes Next

Gradual "Just one word....plastics." The Graduate, 1967 by Natasha Sajé I wrench and cut the clear thick film— envisioning its path to trash. And next? The hiding place where no one ever goes. This stuff gets smaller and smaller… micro to nano to who knows what. Every way you look at it you lose. 1% of me is probably it already, seeding cells with particles, through infinitesimal scissor-teeth. The vision that was planted in my brain. In Latin, sapiens means wise. The future will call us something else. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in The NonBinary Review. From The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo Press, 2023). The poem “Gradual” began about ten years ago with my thinking about the micro-plastics humans ingest. I recalled the scene in the 1967 film The Graduate where Mr. McGuire says to Benjamin, “One word: plastics…there’s a great future in plastics.” He was right: in the 60s we still used wax paper and foil, glass and ceramic. Today it’s hard to buy anything edible that isn’t wrapped in plastic. The film uses Simon and Garfunkel songs, so I spliced in lines from “Mrs. Robinson” and “The Sound of Silence.” The last line of the poem, with a switch, became the title of my book. .................................................................................................................................................................................... NATASHA SAJÉ is the author of five books of poems: The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo, 2023); Vivarium (Tupelo, 2014); Bend (Tupelo, 2004); Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994); and Special Delivery (Diode Editions chapbook, 2021). Her prose books are a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014) and a memoir-in-essays, Terroir: Love, Out of Place (Trinity, 2020). Honors include the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals including Kenyon Review , American Poetry Review , The Paris Review , Ploughshares , and The New York Times . natashasaje.com Next - You Oughta Know by Brock Dethier Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue Hard Times Lev Raphael Fifty+ years ago, I was bullied in fifth grade, but not by other students: My teacher was the culprit, and she seemed to take special delight in tormenting me. Today I wonder if she knew I was gay decades before I did, given my obvious crush on our dazzling class president, and it revolted her. Thanks to the alphabet and our last names, I sat right across Michael who was tall and curly-haired, with blue eyes and brilliant white teeth. I was nothing like him. Sitting in the row furthest from the door, he seemed to always live in a penumbra of light from the giant windows piercing the nearby wall of our neo-Gothic elementary school. I longed to be his friend without being able to articulate that to myself or understand it could mean something vital about who I was. Mrs. Zir must have observed me fawn over him—when I could—like the time he dropped a pencil and I stooped faster than he did so I could grab the precious yellow cylinder and hand it to him, hungry for a smile. He was kind in an off-hand way. Mrs. Zir herself was scarier than Cruella de Vil though she lacked the sharp angles and swirling robes. Muscular and six feet tall with a large, oval, sneering face and thinning gray hair trapped in a forbidding bun, she loomed above us kids like an adamantine, implacable god. Zir's clothes were almost always some shade of gray that matched her hair and her derisive eyes. In a horror movie today, I think that CGI would be used to make her an alien storm cloud roiling with nauseating thunder and lightning, disguised now and then as a human being. This woman with the harsh last name stalked our classroom in big-ass sneakers you felt could crush you as easily as one of her savage, nonverbal put-downs. When she shook her head at your wrong answer to some question, that gesture said you were hopeless and she was disgusted. Mrs. Zir seemed to especially enjoy humiliating anyone who couldn't think fast when she swept up and down the five rows of six desks each, jamming a cruel index finger your way and demanding an instant answer to a multiplication problem. "Six times six! Five times seven!" It was a tsunami, and if you hesitated, she abandoned you to your ignorance and shame, turning instantly away to torture someone else. Just seeing her start this inquisition left me sweating and breathless because I was so anxious to begin with in her class. Arithmetic was like a black hole to me and written quizzes were my doom no matter how much I studied beforehand: hard-core proof of my inadequacy. The classroom with its scarred wooden desks--so old that they had inkwells--felt like a prison that whole year of fifth grade. Zir bullied me and anyone else whenever she got the chance. She was the queen and we were her lowly subjects, or most of us were. She had her favorites, the pretty girls and handsome boys (like Michael) whose parents apparently flattered her at parent/teacher conferences. Mrs. Zir knew that my parents had lived in Belgium, and when she said something to my mother in French at their first parent/teacher conference, my mother acted puzzled: "What language are you speaking? It's not familiar to me." That reply apparently left my teacher speechless. My mother relished this anecdote when she reported it to me at home because she thought Mrs. Zir was pretentious and a snob—on top of having an atrocious accent. As much as I enjoyed hearing an adult mock my teacher, I quailed inside when I heard what took place at the conference because I knew there would be revenge. It followed swiftly. In auditions for our class's production of The HMS Pinafore , I was cast as Ralph Rackstraw, the lowly seaman in love with the captain's daughter, but Mrs. Zir barely heard a note before silencing me: "You can't sing!" I was crushed. I could have been relegated to the chorus even if I wasn't a great singer, but instead, she gave me a prominent role and undermined it by keeping me mute onstage. Still, the cruelest thing she did was destroy my writing. I was an advanced reader and proud of my poems and little stories. I expected to take them all home when fifth grade was over to start a personal library, but Mrs. Zir wouldn't let me have mine. She said that she was keeping everyone's portfolios, and I was too scared to ask why or report her refusal to my parents. But when I finally steeled myself to venture one floor down to her classroom the next year when I was in sixth grade, she dismissed me with a casual "Oh, I threw all of that out." Decades after fifth grade, I am courageously taking voice lessons with a young graduate student in Michigan State University's College of Music and he couldn't be more different from the severe Mrs. Zir. Fair-haired Felix is relaxed, encouraging, witty, clear-headed, loves to laugh and can sometimes read my mind, as when he notes I might be overthinking a line in a song rather than feeling it. I had almost completely forgotten Mrs. Zir until the day Felix is talking about mental blocks interfering with the free production of sound and I find myself sharing Mrs. Zir's damning verdict that kept me silent. He shakes his head. "But you have a beautiful voice! There's so much music in you!" And I suddenly feel as liberated as if I've been under hypnosis and the magician has just snapped his fingers to bring me out of it. Sometimes opposites can inspire an essay or short story that I write, and that's the genesis of "Hard Times." I take voice lessons at a community music school connected to our local university, and it's staffed by faculty and graduate students from the College of Music. My most recent teacher has been ideal: inspiring, thorough, focused, friendly, and blessed with a great sense of humor. Those qualities have helped me improve my resonance, my legato, and my understanding of the poetry in each song that we work on, whether Schumann or Sondheim. One day during vocal warm-ups, his polar opposite, the worst teacher I ever had, just popped into my head. I hadn't thought about her in, well, what seemed like forever, but realized out of the blue that I was the one with power now because I could use the writer's magic to turn her into words. Previous LEV RAPHAEL is an editor, mentor, writing coach and the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery. writewithoutborders.com and levraphael.substack.com Next