Archives

I SEE A FIRE AND I TRUST IT: An Interview with Charlene Elsby by Matthew Kinlin

October 29, 2024

Matthew Kinlin: In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Death states to Max von Sydow as the medieval knight: “Most people think neither of death nor nothingness.” Your new collection of stories, Red Flags (House of Vlad, 2024), offers characters the opportunity to think about their own deaths as experienced, often occurring in gruesome and funny ways. What motivated you to write about this confrontation with death and non-existence?Charlene Elsby: Hello, Matthew! It’s funny I should hear from you just now, which I’ll explain in just a moment. But first the answer to your question. I was at home when the Facebook group for the neighbourhood started showing up in my notifications, as a woman had been hit and dragged at the intersection outside my apartment. Now I’ve always been a little taken aback at how we’re all able to go about our lives, given that death threatens us nearly constantly. And it reminded me of a pamphlet that I was given at a palliative care house when we were watching my stepmother pass. For a couple of weeks we were there nearly constantly, my father sleeping in a chair next to her bed, and I going home nights and returning in the day to bring food and allow him time to go home to bathe. The pamphlet told us that we should not expect our loved ones to have any new or profound thoughts or insights as they approach the other side–and that while we often expect this of the dying, it is unfair to impose upon them like that. Thus I wrote the first story of the book, and the other seven following the same general theme.Now it’s interesting that you should bring this up now, as I’ve just awoken in my chair and, in that space between sleep and waking, I saw my stepmother’s head in what turned out to be a scarf bunched around a hanger on the drying rack. A psychic told me three months ago that there was a woman with short, curly hair watching over me, and I believed that it was her. When she passed, I used to have dreams that she was calling me from farther and farther distances away, until one day she appeared in full opacity, to tell me that she was fine. Those dreams completely ended after that final encounter, so it was strange to be thinking of this when you wrote to me.Does the air seem to have a strange scent where you are?MK: There are some strange coincidences in what you have just described. As we are speaking, there is a thunderstorm. It is the first one in a long time. This week has been unusually hot for England in September, I assume due to the climate crisis. It was really hot this week and that changed today to an intense heaviness and a charged smell in the air, some atmospheric tension. I can hear thunder breaking. I am staying at my boyfriend’s family home today and as I got out my laptop, his mother’s scarf fell off the end of the couch. I have been having vivid dreams over the last few weeks but they are hard to recall. It’s emotional to hear about the dreams of your stepmother calling you and her then telling you she was OK. Do you believe in coincidences? The narrator of your story “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” states: “I was supposed to be here.” Are the most trivial of details, such as a crease in a scarf, part of some predestination? I’m also thinking of the initial name for August Strindberg’s Occult Diary, which was Strange Coincidences and Inexplicable Events. Today’s date is Saturday 21st September. When I look at Strindberg’s diaries, he writes on September 19th, 1896: “Letter from Hedlund about the Cyclone in Paris… The night after this a storm broke out at midnight and lasted until 2.” He writes nothing again until September 23rd. Strindberg often seems to link scarves and death. He writes: “In the morning when I awoke I saw Harriet life-size dead on my sofa. She had a white scarf across her mouth; in a white blouse with a black skirt.” Like yourself, he saw a human face in a scarf: “On Tuesday 28 April in the morning I saw a skull (made of my scarf and petit Larousse).” Finally, he writes, “A woman by the stream when we were about to leave: she had a scarf over her head but a light band across her forehead with a red circle and a half moon; looked like a blood stain.” Upon reading this, I thought of the photograph of yourself in Red Flags, completely covered in blood.CE: I do believe in strange coincidences. I believe we are supposed to be here, discussing scarves beneath Magritte’s The Lovers II. I bought the print after seeing it in Belgium and according to the curator’s note at the museum, the people in Magritte’s paintings are covered in cloth because they are dead, and one of the people in this painting is his mother.That same journey, I happened by accident upon the portrait of Strindberg by Edvard Munch in the Museum De Reede in Antwerp. I recognized it immediately from the cover of the Penguin translation of Inferno and From an Occult Diary I used to carry around as a teen. But never before had I noticed the spelling error in Strindberg’s name–and it’s because it wasn’t there. At some point, the error in the lithograph was corrected but in person, there it was, or rather, there it wasn’t–a missing R. I’d like to know where that symbol has gone. Does a missing R mean anything to you?The blood has been there since Hexis, Matthew. I filmed a reading and put the screenshot on Youtube. A still from that video was already used on the cover of Excuse Me Mag. This is another still that Brian took from my Instagram. The blood is still there, Matthew. Get it off, get it off, get it off. Do you have a scarf I could borrow to wipe it away, or are your scarves woven with death in the fibres?The coincidences increase in frequency the closer to our fate we become.MK: I can feel these coincidences intensify as we speak. I have the same Penguin edition with the same Munch cover. This week, I have been watching over and over a scene from a 1980 TV movie of Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven about a man whose dreams can distort past and present reality. In this scene he is put under hypnosis and told to have a dream about a horse once he hears a specific word. The word is Antwerp.I keep thinking about the dream you had. I keep thinking how red flags are technically the same as red scarves. Maybe all scarves are woven with death.The missing letter R has meaning to me. When I was a teenager, a dog in Mallorca tore my hand open. There was blood then too, Charlene. When I think of R, I hear the growling sound of the dog. I think the nurse in Romeo and Juliet (two dead lovers) calls the letter R, “the dog’s name.” When I look in Strindberg’s diaries, he puts dog, horse and Munch all together in two lines on 21st February, 1896: “The carnassial tooth = the horse’s hoof fell after much noise during the night. The dog in Munch’s yard.”His next line is: “The magic whip in Luxembourg.” I’m starting to feel afraid. Are we being punished by some unknown daemon? In your story “A Little More Spontaneous”, the narrator states: “Fate is laughing at me.” What is this conspiracy? Are we being whipped? I’ve just found out that the first German and Portuguese editions of Le Guin’s novel translate as Die Geißel des Himmels and O flagelo dos céus, which literally means: “the scourge [or whip] of heaven”. The second edition translates as: “the other side of the dream”. Maybe the dead live on the other side of our dreams.CE: I refuse to dream of a horse. I won’t have it! All that sobbing. The coachman will continue to beat the horse as soon as you let go of its neck. It’s all in the unseen.You’re right that we are being whipped, and I think maybe it’s because I’ve been missing something. I have always supported the concept of an other side that is the unseen aspect of the visible / conceivable. But the way in which someone or something appears in a dream is another form of presentation. If that’s where the dead are, it would explain a lot. A lot of a lot.In the dream, there is some other form of action in which we are not engaged. And by that I mean that while we act, the action is passive, and I seem to have no control over what is occurring or what it is that I do. If consciousness is the realm of activity and there is another realm where the activity is passive, then that explains how death as the ceasing of action finds its place on the other ends of dreams. But what if we pulled the cord?(I think we have to.)MK: I’m afraid again, to pull the cord. It would be like unravelling the thread of a scarf and I am not sure where we would end up. Where the scarf ends or the air begins? There’s so many molecules in heaven. I remember finding a paperback copy of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata in a second-hand shop as a teenager. It filled my mind with a strange green fog.Nietzsche wandering from his residence to the Piazza Carlo Alberto on 3rd January 1889. It was here he saw the horse being whipped. It was inside this elegant square that his mind unravelled in red threads. Is consciousness a square or a circle? Only a few months before Nietzsche met his pale horse of Death, he started writing letters to Strindberg in the winter of 1888. Nietzsche wrote to him, “I believe that I have become familiar with more evil and more questionable worlds of thought than anyone else, but only because it lies in my nature to love what lies apart.” What is this land of exile where death dances with madness? What is this realm where activity is passive? I am trapped inside my dreams. I have dreams of the dead too, like you told me before. In the dream, I am by the sea. I have never lived by the sea. But in the dream of the dead, there is always water. Where are we floating to? In your story “A Little More Spontaneous”, you write, “Being a dead person was as free as it gets.” A person at the moment of death. It’s like waiting to fall asleep; we are unable to pinpoint the moment when the sea sweeps us away. I wonder how it felt when the azure sky came crashing down in Turin. CE: If consciousness were going to be any shape, it would be a sphere, but I can’t help but wonder at the next step that goes beyond our three-dimensional representation of perfection. You know that the code for all that is, is contained within the ratio of the diameter to the radius, and that the “heavens” as they were called (Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc.) are embodiments of the equidistance from centre that defines material perfection. The human head approximates their shape as best it can and tries to reach those other spheres in the skies, sitting atop the human body as it does. I’m tired of this emaciated notion of causality that puts all precedence in the past. The future is as much a cause of the present as anything that’s happened before, and it is what chains us and confines us in all present actions. The threat of it drowns us in limitations and contrives to bury us in limitations–the fact that it does not exist is not a limit to its power. We must instead conclude that what does not exist is a primary and immediate cause of all that is. Have you read By the Open Sea? I’ve just opened it to a random page that makes me concerned for you: “He slept badly in spite of all his attempts to regulate his dreams by strong auto-suggestions before falling asleep. Sometimes he awoke from a dream that he was a bell-buoy, drifting and drifting in search of a shore on which he could be thrown. And in his sleep he had pressed close against the bedstead, so as to feel the contact of some object, even if it were an inanimate one.”It seems very lonely.MK: I’ve not read By the Open Sea but will do so. Strindberg is a strikingly lonely figure. I think about The Ghost Sonata where spirits appear in bright daylight. My dreams are lonely realms. I think Deleuze spoke about the aim of his teachings was to reconcile ourselves with our own solitude. The open sea brings me back to Bergman and to the opening of the interview where a man meets Death, which brings me back to Red Flags. Consciousness encounters non-existence for a few fleeting moments which are like an eternity upon Death’s oceanic cloak, the endless crashing of waves upon a stone beach. In this interview, we have come upon the following possible points:

1. The dead exist on the other side of dreams.2. Death, like dreaming consciousness, as a form of passive activity.3. Death, like the future, as a form of non-existence acting on the present.4. Death corrupts the metaphysical rules of causality.

What is the solitude of death? I think of the stars above the sea, globes of fire that as you say, mirror the imperfect human head. Archimedes writing On the Sphere and Cylinder, which mirrors the human head and trunk. Cicero cleaning away the overgrown bushes on his tomb. Every equation is like a grave. Where are the stars leading? In Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly, Karin explains: “The door opened, but the god was a spider.”One door at the end of a corridor. What do you see?CE: I see a fire, and I trust it. It is unlike the fires that consume materiality, that burn us. This fire consumes the psyche, and relieves it of our bodies. It is contained in the room where I left it and the only flame that hasn’t yet disappointed me.Go for a walk?MK: I will trust the fire too, for it is like a mirror or an ocean. I am walking beside you. With burnt hands, Strindberg writes: “Seven roses, Seven fires and a white dove.” Any final thoughts?CE: Just that we might summon the doctor, as did the Strindberg of June 1908: “Dreadful days! So dreadful, that I shall cease to describe them! Pray God simply to be allowed to die! away from this horrible bodily and spiritual pain!”Doctor summoned.Exeunt.Order 'Red Flags' by Charlene Elsby here

THIS MINE OF MINE by Brandon Forinash

October 28, 2024

You wouldn’t guess it looking at me now, but I had a pretty ordinary childhood and early adulthood. My parents weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. I grew up in one of those suburbs where every house is a variation of four basic designs. I went to a state school for college and took out student loans. I got a job in a satellite city which had nothing to do with what I studied in university. Along the way, I had several more or less serious relationships which, by the time I was twenty six, made me rethink my definition of love.Anyways, all of that changed, kind of got lost in terms of my identity, when I became a mining camp in South America.I should explain.I did one of those DNA/ancestry tests and found out, along with the fact I’m not even a little bit Irish, that my body contained a very scarce earth mineral. I didn’t know anything about the mineral at the time. For legal reasons I can’t tell you what it was. All I can say is you probably interact with it every day. It is used to make a very small but essential component in a technology you could certainly live without, but with a markedly lower quality of life.So I found out I was largely Scottish (what?!) and I also contained this random mineral and I needed to cut back on sugars because I’m genetically predisposed to diabetes, but I got on with my life. I stopped eating cereal for breakfast and the movie Braveheart hit somewhat different, but other than that, no big deal. Except I started to get these letters and emails with offers to buy the mineral rights to my body. I ignored them at first, because it seemed like a ridiculous premise, but then the mayor showed up at my door.“James!” he said. “May I call you Jim?”“It’s the same number of syllables, but sure.”“Jim, I’d like to talk to you about a little proposition.”I could see where this was going. “Sir—”“Now hold on a second. I want to ask you to sell your mineral rights to the city. Opening a mine in your body would be a big thing for our town. It’d mean jobs for a lot of people and growth for our struggling businesses. Not to mention, it would help me out a great deal in the upcoming election, and then I’d be in a position to help you.”I could see the reasoning. It weighed kind of heavy on me. But I also didn’t want to be mined, didn’t know what I would be after the process, so I politely refused.“Jim,” he said, “I am so disappointed in you.”So they filed a petition for eminent domain to obtain the rights to mine this rare essential mineral from my body, and they won. They had vastly better lawyers. In retrospect, I like to imagine my lawyers, by comparison, as hand-puppets who are comically bungling the legal process. A flurry of felt and misplaced documents while the tall one flapped, “I thought you were supposed to file the grievance for harassment of our client”, and the short one would respond, “Harassment? You’re the biggest ass I know!” Sorry, I harbor a lot of resentment from the experience.We lost in court. I couldn’t stop it. And even though I was opposed to it, there was a kind of wild exuberance in those early days. Hungrily, they used pressured water to blow off my top soil, revealing rich veins of ore for the drills and bulldozers to excavate. They carved great pits in me ringed by long ramps for trucks to haul out the essential minerals from my body. They used blast charges to break up the larger rocks and expose deeper deposits.Everybody made money, and not just the people directly profiting on my scarce earth mineral. The local university received a nice endowment and brought in some of the top minds in engineering. A wife of one of the big-wigs in the mining company was a former ballerina, I think, so her husband helped build an opera house near downtown. This whole new arts district sprung up after that with nice restaurants and boutique stores and increasingly expensive art galleries that locals couldn’t afford. After a few years, I could sense the city’s feeling about the mine, and me, had shifted. I would be at a party in the backyard of a small old house, the kind of house realtors now described as “craftsman” when they listed them for 3x their old value, and somebody would say something. About how the city had lost some of its charm, or how a lot of the poorer (if I’m being honest, minority) residents were being priced out of their homes and businesses by all the affluent (white) newcomers. Who were always referred to as Californians, even if they weren’t. Somebody would mention that they have a friend who’s a doctor and their friend had told them they were seeing more and more children born with heart defects and they think it was from the runoff at the mine.And then people would remember that I kinda sorta am the mine (people would sometimes forget because by then I wore a lot of baggier clothes to hide my scarred landscape). They’d apologize and do the whole, “That’s just what I heard,” thing.And I would say to them, “No, I get it. I agree! But there’s nothing I can do.”There would be an awkward feeling at the party after that. The taste of the local craft beer would be less hoppy. I’d make some excuse to leave early, and then I made excuses to not go in the first place. And then I stopped getting invited to things at all, which I told myself was what I wanted.At that point I was in my early thirties, still paying off the student loans, and the city had grown out and then surrounded our satellite (not a little bit fueled by the mine). The scandal with the runoff and the heart defects briefly made national headlines. A question actually got asked about it at one of the Democratic national debates—I really liked what Elizabeth Warren had to say (sigh). There was a protest at me for a couple of weeks, if you can imagine how that feels. And then they closed the mine and sold my mineral rights to a firm out of China. I had some suspicions, had seen a lot of new faces in and around the mine, and then the mayor confirmed it.“Jim,” he said, “The city council, the city planner, the railroad commission…well, we all talked about it and we think the best thing we can do for the city is move on from the mine.”I didn’t know what to say at first. And when I did, I thought better of it.You might disagree, but I’ve learned from past relationships that when someone says they’re leaving you (or, in this case, that you’re leaving them) it’s pretty pointless to argue and can only lead to hurt feelings. You ask what you did wrong, what you could have done better, and find out she doesn’t like how passive you are. And when you say you were just trying to go with the flow, she asks why, in finger quotes, “going with the flow”, means that every evening y’all get dinner delivered and watch Netflix/HBO/Disney+. You suddenly have to revise everything about yourself and your relationship, because you always appreciated those evenings settling in on the couch with her, coming home from a job you didn’t fully understand.So I didn’t make a fuss about it. I left this city my essential mineral had helped build, and the Chinese firm placed me in a narrow valley which had been carved by glaciers over many millennia. The glaciers were all gone now, but the mountains remained, and a river ran between them which emptied into the sea through a Pacific port city (I can’t remember the name. I never had a chance to visit). It was rather stunning and for a while, as they brought in the mining equipment and built sheds and a refinery out of aluminum siding, cinder block dormitories and outhouses for the miners, brought in modular housing for management, as miles of pipes were laid to bring up water from the river—Forgive me, where was I?So they placed me in this valley carved by glaciers, and while the camp was being built, I got to hike the hills, go up into the mountains. I’d look down at the mining camp, look down the valley at the local village, the adobe and rust colored buildings, the green and yellow fields being farmed. I would turn to my security contractor—one or more would always accompany me—and I would point and ask if we could visit. And they would shake their heads. Just to eat, I would gesture. No, no, they would shake their heads.Still, it was a nice break, rather joyful being up there, the smell of the earth. But once the work got started, I didn’t get out much again. My experience as a mine had been different when I was located outside a major city. I would watch the trucks go in and out of me. As each new pit was dug I could feel the detritus, the tailings, moved and dumped into the last disused pit inside me. But there was so much I hadn’t seen which I had been kind of oblivious to as I was locked in my day-to-day or sat at home, scrolling Instagram, ordering food for delivery.There at the mining camp, there wasn’t any hiding it, that rough work reopening the mine. The filled pits were dug out again. Dams were carved into me and filled with the runoff and debris, the water variably a metallic yellow or azure blue. Great mounds of tailings were set around me. When the wind came through the camp it would create a cloud of dirt and gravel which would hang at the level of your mouth and eyes until it rolled down the valley, following the river.At night local diggers would mine with picks and shovels and buckets. They built these shacks or set up tents at the periphery of me and dug down, made rough mine shafts into my fingers and toes. I wouldn’t feel it while they dug during the night, but in the morning there was tingling in my extremities. Even though I didn’t tell anyone, couldn’t tell anyone, didn’t speak the language, I watched as more and more uniformed men with guns showed up around the camp.I think I knew what was going to happen.And then everything did.The security forces cracked down on the local diggers. The locals protested and blocked the roads into the mines. More security forces and the military came in to break up the protests. The protesters threw rocks. The military had guns. The roads were cleared, but costs had gone up and output had diminished. The company cut staff, denied raises. The miners went on strike. The local diggers continued to dig, but had to take greater risks. There were accidents. Some diggers lit tires on fire to try to break up some rock. They were poisoned by the smoke and nearly died. The strike was broken by the government with some concessions made for raises, but corners were cut at the mine. Farmers complained that some of their cattle died after drinking at a nearby stream. The company trucked in water. I saw all that coming. I didn’t expect the flood.I don’t know what I could have done. Even if I knew, I didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t have much of a chance to learn. The miners had enough of their work from the day to eat with me in the canteen. There was a security contractor I nicknamed Kurt, and some evenings he would sit down with me and play cards while he worked on a fifth of vodka or rum. And I would try to talk to him, but he didn’t really say anything. Therefore, ‘Kurt’.Still, when the dam failed and the tailings flooded down into the river, and the river flooded the village downstream, it was my dam. It was my inattention to detail, my callousness, my attempt to cut corners, maybe knowing that if the dam broke, it wouldn’t have to be me who paid for it. Because I didn’t want to pay so much for it, for the lifestyle I’d had growing up in the states that I didn’t think, or really didn’t care, to live without. So it was my dirt and debris and polluted water, flooding that village and killing those 17 people.I think they were mostly the very old or the very young.The company paid those families the cost of a life, about 120k, and they built for the villagers a brand new village. And the mining continued, until at some point there wasn’t any more me left to mine. It actually took going past that point. It took the cave-in of my left cheek, for my lungs to collapse, and finally a dip in the stock market, an inevitable tragedy experienced by a few after several tragedies of the many, before the mining actually stopped.Nobody told me it would happen. It didn’t happen all at once.At first the equipment left, and then some days later the workers, and then the security personnel. I was empty for a while, there in that great valley carved by glaciers, amid the slanted cinderblock buildings. But then armed rebels came in and claimed me. They brought in local diggers who surveyed my last ribs, talked about mining into the spine of me. They shook their heads. The rebels pointed their AK-47s and then the diggers tried for months.They tried, painfully, and the rebels became increasingly quarrelsome with the diggers and each other, until the winter/summer rains came and they quit the mine, went off to raid the local villages once more for supplies, and then go north. It rained and rained. I waited for something to happen. I watched the muddy road that ran up to me and tried my best to stay dry. And then an old woman, definitely a local, came and she placed flowers against the heart of me, and she got down on her knees, there in the mud, and she prayed. I am sure she was grieving the death of a digger, but the way I felt, I was a thing to be grieved too, and not totally for myself, for the death of the mine too, and all the potential that I had carried so deeply.What I’d become, I don’t know how to put it into words. I had been beautiful once. I know that isn’t attractive for a man to say about himself. But I look back at old pictures of me, and I really was something to look at, even though I didn’t know it at the time.I’d stopped looking at myself in the mirror a long time ago. I think I disassociated from my body. I think it was something I needed to do or else I would have lost it. But for once I took a look at myself. Everything that had been done in the mine was written into my skin and muscle, fat and bone. What hadn’t been excavated was mostly debris. There were these rivulets of waste running off my abdomen, pooling around my hip bones.But more than that, people had died in me. I was a crime scene. I was a cemetary. I had been gutted and fished and swallowed up, time and again. I had been displaced, not only my being, but also the various parts of me, across the world. I didn’t know how to talk to people anymore, because—let’s say that you ask me about the weather—I don’t know if you mean the weather here or at my elbow, my left shin, behind my right ear. I stammer. My fluency—let me try to get this right—my ability to speak and to talk about myself and my place in the world and all of the things going on in it.I’m sorry. Please forgive me.I really meant to say something just then, but I can’t tell you now what it was. There’s so much to it, and so little left of me.So I watched the woman pray in the mud, and I tried to pray with her. She crossed herself and then got up and then she walked away.And so I got up, and nobody tried to stop me, and I used every last dollar and sol that I had hidden away, and I went home, back to the U.S. It took a long time, and there was some hard going along the way, but I finally came home, and I found the city had prospered. It had shaken off its roots as a mining town, and it was now this beautiful gem of a city, but the mayor had lost his seat (which I was happy to see). Where my mine had been was now a golf course and a shopping complex.I was getting a coffee with a friend there just the other day. We spent the afternoon catching up; she’d recently gotten engaged and I was so happy for her I didn’t really go into my stuff. It was late November and she asked if we could talk and shop. We were in a store, I won’t tell you which, but I had this undeniable feeling a certain product contained a very small part of me. I picked it up; I turned it over. I looked at the price. I tried to calculate how much it would cost to buy back everything, all of me, to pay for all of the damage to everyone and everything. The math was beyond my imagination.So I put it back. I can’t really afford to be frivolous right now. I’m still paying off my student loans.

LITTLE FLOWERS by Gillian O’Shaughnessy

October 25, 2024

In the dry years, my teeth begin to fall from my mouth. Not in a clatter, but softly. I collect them in the blue enamel pot we used to keep for tea leaves, bury them beneath the kitchen window, scrape furrows in the dirt with my fingernails. When the weather breaks, perhaps they’ll sprout. Perhaps they’ll grow. Mother doubts it. She says it might never rain again. Sometimes she tells me stories of when water fell freely from the sky, when pools and puddles collected in the street for anyone to see, when flowers bloomed in pinks and butter-yellow clouds, when parks were lined with sweeping trees, when lush green grass frilled the roadsides. I try to recall, but the pictures are faded and grey.We bathe in sand, eat beans from tins with rough oatmeal biscuits soaked in the sauce. The Government trucks in water to town for drinking, and milk to the school for the children. It comes in trays once a month. Row after row of small bottles with golden foil lids that glint like jewels in the sun. I love the feel of the glass, heavy and cool against the skin of my palm. I save my share of milk for Mother, who rightly demands it. She gave her teeth to the dry and her bones are brittle, she’s a tumble weed that whispers through the streets in the desert dusk. No matter what I do, the milk always spoils in the heat before I get home. Mother doesn’t mind. She waits for me in her chair on the veranda, blinking. Brown dust cakes her dress and settles deep in the folds of her face. She tilts her head like a hungry baby bird, and I spoon yellow curds into the puckered crevice of her mouth. She clutches my hand, flicks her dry tongue over her lips, seeking every last speck. When we’re done, she closes her eyes and coos.The University sends a doctor to our class to check our bones. A dentist to look at our teeth for his studies. We gather beforehand to watch the clouds of red dirt billow on the horizon as they approach. We grin gap-tooth when they alight in their fresh white coats. I line up with the others, allow the doctor to run probing hands up and down my spine. I reach to touch my toes. I squat. When the dentist asks, I open wide. He doesn’t like what he sees in my smile. The teeth I have left jut crooked, this way and that, wooden fence posts battered in a flinted wind. He says if I hope to save any, I need fillings and braces and both in a hurry. I laugh. It’s as likely I’ll sail a clipper ship down the cracked creek bed.When the last of my teeth come loose, I clamp my jaw together to try to hold them in a little longer, savour the click, click, click as they meet. My gums itch and ache, they feel the loss already. The skin of my lips and my cheeks is soft and sinking. Mother comforts me as I cry, catches my tears with her fingertip, sucks at each one like it’s spun sugar candy. She takes my face in her hands, kisses my mouth and counsels my surrender. She reaches in with her tiny clawing fingers, wobbles each tooth gently, ready to tug them all free. I ask her to wait until they fall on their own, but she refuses. She tells me it won’t hurt. Like pulling little flowers, from a bed of soft, damp soil.

THE THING by Nick Ekkizogloy

October 24, 2024

When we caught what I can only refer to as the “thing,” I was fishing the outflow of the Micalgi Dam with my soon-to-be-pregnant wife Tonya who was mainly hauling in fingerling catfish and red-eared sunfish but whose cheeks were blushed from all the Chablis we’d been drinking. We were fishing with cut up hot dogs, a trick I learned from my uncle, an ichthyologist, which is a fancy name for a fish scientist. Man, what I wouldn’t give for him to have been there when I pulled in the “thing.” He was dead by then, having been poisoned by something over the years, perhaps from overexposure to the mercury that pooled in the guts of the fish he worked on, it’s hard to say. So, this creature comes in and it looks like a caterpillar if the caterpillar was nine pounds and pink and gelatinous as a huge earthworm with flute holes along its side in the style of a woodwind instrument or an ocarina. I landed it on the rocks, and it started oozing and undulating, staring up at us in amazement with two oil-black eyes the size of half dollars. Tonya looked at me and I looked at Tonya, and we both looked down to the thing. It had a round suck hole framed with rows of small translucent teeth, and it was working it open and closed horribly, joking to itself in a sound I can only describe as a squishy bleat. The fishhook was stuck through the side of the grotesque mouth and red blood leaked out in spurts, like it would on a human, suggesting that, at the very least, inside the thing was a beating heart. When it first appeared out of the water, Tonya was all, “No fucking way Wayne, no fucking way! Cut the line,” but something about it was mesmerizing. I stood dumbfounded and Tonya’s calls trailed off as we both stood before it and watched. “Strange things live behind dams,” prophesized my uncle so long ago. He’d been the clean-up man, the scientist to come in after some idiot dumped a bunch of car batteries into the river or when a fertilizer plant was found to be dumping forever chemicals into a waterway. Fisheries restoration was always a growth market. So, we’re looking at this thing, this mutant, this monster, and Tonya turns her head. “Did you hear that?” she whispered. “It said something.” Tonya and I were drunk but not that drunk. Squish, squish. Bleat, bleat. Then I heard it. The bleating, the thrumming sound, the squishing, the bleating again, and then it spoke as blue-bird clear as the Montana sky. “MA-MA.” Ho-Lee-SHIT! “Kill it!” Tonya yelled, the blinking lights alongside the dam casting her face red. I picked up a boulder and held it over my head. I held it there for a minute. The thing spoke again and bleated and squished, and I got caught in its black-eyed gaze and felt my elbows wobble from the weight of the rock. “Do it!” she yelled. I slammed the rock down across the thing’s make-believe face, and we hauled ass out of there. The next day, after a fitful night’s rest and a lot more wine, I poured through my uncle’s books. I found something in a chapter called, Outflow Oddities, a freshwater lamprey. But it didn’t look the same. The lamprey looked more like a shark, but it had the flute holes on its side and the mouth with ringed teeth, a potential fish cousin. I wrote the whole thing off as a pollution-induced freak show and we went on with our lives.

***

Later, years later, after Tonya and I’d failed to bring six pregnancies to completion, we’d resigned ourselves to fishing together and loving one another. The doctors had a few theories on why we couldn’t have kids, a few newfangled options to try, but at our age we decided to let it be and to focus on ourselves.We fished a lot, and I never forgot the “thing.” Sometimes I hoped we could catch another one to talk to, perhaps to keep and study. Tonya never made mention of it again, but I knew it haunted her in the way she reacted each time she caught a big fish. We didn’t talk about the encounter with the “thing” like we’d probably should, and we grew older, into people who only fished, only drank beer and wine every night, only worried and fought in tiny drunk outbursts about our legacy as a family.

***

One day, when the water was roiling behind the dam, frothy with milky bubbles and mud, and when the red light stopped blinking and stayed lit, Tonya hooked into something. The reel unspooled in a frantic whine, emptying her line nearly to the bare arbor knot. The dam was opening. A siren sounded. She kept fighting the fish. The few others fishing the outflow packed it up.“Ya’ll should leave, now,” hollered a dam worker standing on a catwalk alongside the spillway. One guy waited to see what Tonya pulled in. We all held our breath.Then, in a great magnanimous leap, a rainbow trout broke the water and flashed its scintillating sides like a model before runway flashbulbs. A real hog. A moment later, Tonya had brought the fish to hand, held it close for a minute and cried softly. It was a beautiful thing, too unnecessarily beautiful. “What are we going to do?” I said, referring to keeping it or tossing it back. She released the fish slowly, holding onto its tail for a few seconds as the thing ran water back through its gills, wobbling back and forth, playfully. “Keep fishing,” she said, wiping her tears away. She finally let go, but just before its form totally disappeared, when all its colors smudged into the singular gray of river rock, the waters from the dam released in a thunderous display of the power of nature.

ECOPOETICS AND COMICS: a Book Review of Carolyn Supinka’s ‘Metamorphic Door’ by Ryleigh Wann

October 23, 2024

Carolyn Supinka’s debut poetry collection, Metamorphic Door (Buckman Publishing, 2024) examines and imagines the more-than-human world—through stones in rivers, geese in flight, wildfire season in the west, and the concern of making a plan for the looming climate crisis. These poems are introspective, as if the speaker’s inner monologue and cyclical thinking are displayed on the page—similar to reading someone’s journal. They also remain all too relatable for anyone carrying the weight of environmental concerns. That said, this collection isn’t all doom and gloom. It balances anxiety-inducing climate changes with poems that marvel at the awestruck wonder this planet provides, even in its burning. The poem “Can you wake me for the meteor shower” begins with ‘At two AM, staring into the city-bleached night / I saw one and screamed at the sudden dazzling.’ Metamorphic Door holds poems of worldly curiosities, thoughts on relationships, and self-reflection. It beholds something for everyone. What I find most engaging about Supinka’s collection is how it’s paired with her artwork. Metamorphic Door is a book of poetry and poetic comics, bringing these words even more to life. While reading this collection, I kept wondering: how does artwork intertwined with poems impact the language? How does it further give these poems power? Are these comics their own poems, or do they only hold power within the context of the words on the next page? To me, it felt like an act of trust to read someone’s most intimate thoughts on the page, and the comics made it feel even more vulnerable by showing a reflection of who the poet/artist was at the time of writing this—it offers a deeper understanding of the way she views the world. With this collection, Supinka is saying, “This is how I see our world—do you see it, too?” The collection opens with a comic that sprawls across a few pages and shows infinite linework featuring things like houses, legs, moths, and wine glasses. The final words of the comic set up the tone for the rest of the poems: ‘I am done with writing / the word remember. Instead, / here is a road.’ The drawing spills from a square frame onto the next page, with rocks (circles? Tiny planets?) getting smaller and smaller before the white space.I first interacted with Supinka’s work while serving as the comics editor for Ecotone, the award-winning literary magazine that reimagines place. I found Supinka’s comics online and knew I wanted to solicit her art for the lit-mag, which had started publishing comics again. I remember being compelled and somewhat unnerved by the artwork and language—these were concerns that were constantly on my mind, especially during the height of the pandemic. I was doom-scrolling on my phone or wondering about the logistics and skills I might need to someday live off the land—I can barely start a fire and lack a green thumb, and these worries infiltrated my thoughts while trying to sleep at night. Supinka’s fine-lined artwork contrasted with the daily expectations of operating under the long emergency of climate change, which was something I hadn’t quite experienced in poetry before. Her debut delivers on these themes with an identifiable voice and craft of comics; they consider our existence on this big rock, and her poetry comics in tandem with language are a refreshing, honest, and inspiring way to articulate a concern that is occurring in real time. Ecopoetry, in simplest terms, is a poem that delivers a message and is focused on environmental concerns. While this is not a new way to write poetry, the term has gained more attention in recent years. There are plenty of excellent sources on ecopoetics out there, but John Shoptaw’s essay in Poetry Foundation does a good job of exploring ecopoetry in detail. To summarize with a quote: “Ecopoetry doesn’t supplant nature poetry but enlarges it.” Metamorphic Door is a book of enlarged, nature poems with a delightful pairing of artwork. The collection is split into parts with comics planted throughout—artwork that feels like it spills off the page and into your lap. The comics are chaotically at ease in the sense that the linework is scribble-like in some moments (a woman with an infinity line leading to a table, a lamp, the things going on in her mind) but evoke relatable emotions, and I continue to find new meaning within the art. These drawings are exploring, sprawling, searching, and reaching out to the reader, providing a sense of comradery and comfort in this landscape. For readers who are interested in research, Metamorphic Door also includes an index in the book. When was the last time you read an index in a poetry book that wasn’t a book on craft? The index is poetic in and of itself—a full catalog of terms and pages, of course, but also poetic definitions and ponderings. Take the word “Dune” for example: “The difficulty of abundance, a life in which the landscape is transformed as soon as you are in it.” Words like “ghost,” “karst,” and “night” have micro-poems beside them and lovely, little comics, like a spilled mug releasing butterflies—or moths—depending on how you choose to interpret it. The definition of “Threshold” has a drawing of a doorframe on fire, followed by page numbers. I’d recommend Supinka’s collection to anyone who likes to read multiple books at once. I found the conversation between Metamorphic Door and Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (HarperCollins, 2022) to be both heavy and cathartic. These poems beg the question: what does it look like to love the world around us? US poet laureate, Ada Limón, recently edited and wrote the introduction for an anthology of nature poems titled You Are Here (Milkweed, 2024). Nature poetry or ecopoems are needed now, perhaps more than ever. Air pollution from bombs, food waste, ocean acidification, deforestation, technology that uses resources at alarming rates, and global warming from fossil fuels—all rampant problems. I don’t have an answer to combating all of it, but I do have an enormous amount of trust in readers and writers to accomplish meaningful, action-oriented work. Knowing that poets are concerned with the environment—and will continue to use language as a tool to spread urgency and awareness—makes me feel hopeful and inspired for what’s to come, despite the challenges writers face in an industry that feels like it is, at times, against us (thanks, AI). To read a collection like Metamorphic Door makes me grateful to know there are writers who value the natural beauty of their surroundings to such an extent, that they will never stop celebrating and defending it. Artworks excerpted from Metamorphic Door, published by Buckman Publishing © 2024. Used with permission.Buy 'Metamorphic Door' Here

RETURNING MY MOM’S ROUTER WHEN SHE DIED by Ryan Riffenburgh

October 22, 2024

“Do you know for a fact that the store will take it back? I don't want to walk around the mall with a router.” My sister nods. We sit on the floor of an empty room, my sister across from me with her back to the wall. I watch the dust swirl around the last lamp in the room like cicadas in the summer. We pick from the trash; working out what holds meaning using a perverted equation of sentimentality vs. space in our respective apartments. I lean towards the smaller objects: a passport photo to cleanse the image of her skeletonized body in hospice, restoring color to her face. Tactile things like clothing that I can run my hands across like braille. Nestled on top of my pile sits the router, its multicolored cables spilling out. I take the router and head for the door, scooping the cables in a bunch. I sit the thing on the passenger seat and turn down the road. The AT&T store is not far from the apartment but I dread the walk through the mall among the empty stores and stale air. I park close to the store, working off childhood memory alone, and find a spot in the dark garage. There are way fewer cars than I remember ever being here; like catacombs, the cars are sporadic every five to ten spaces. It makes sense; it’s a Wednesday afternoon. Middle schoolers, who migrate in from across the street, are on spring break. There’s something unnerving about the emptiness and the sounds of tires on the road blocks away. I wrap the router in my hands, feeling finality cloak the situation. It’s weird to me that you never own it; it’s just given to you to borrow. Holding the router, I push open the door to the mall, its cables begging to slip from my hands and fall along my legs. It wants to drag against the floor and walk along the tile next to me. The router and I slowly pass each store. I keep a cool pace that mimics the child in front of me. He’s tugging on his father’s sleeve, mesmerized by all that's surrounding him. He’s walking so slow to download everything he sees, to lock picture into memory. Just a pair of glossy eyes facing skyward. His obtaining and my releasing seem so distant, yet there’s a symbiosis in how we’re both moving and observing. Mutually pulling on something that soothes us. I come around the corner to the store. The router doesn’t beg for me to turn around. It’s almost comfortable being back here. It doesn't throw its cables around anymore; it just sits there next to me on the cold wood chair facing the iPhones, calm, waiting for the man with glasses to help. I watch the overhead light diffuse into the matte black of its sidings and bounce off the shiny front parts. Folding my legs, we wait together. “I need to return this router to you guys. It’s not mine. I—it's for my mom.” The man looks at me then the router, piecing together what's going on. “So we can’t actually take back the router in the store. You’re going to have to go to UPS. Just give them this account number,” he says as he grabs a Post-It note, hastily scribbling numbers. He’s almost sympathetic as he looks at me with gentle eyes. It’s uncomfortable, even agitating. The surrealness of the man pinning me down begins to deconstruct walls of denial I've so carefully built through paperwork, cleaning, and phone calls. I leave the store in a rushed attempt to contain any security I’ve formed for myself.All the empty walkways and escalators stare back with the icy cold of metal. I’m confused and faint from the lack of food and sleep I’ve missed in the past weeks. My jaw is slammed into its other half, crunching with anxiety. All I want is to finish; I want to return the router and be alone again. There's a fog around the whole place. What permeates the skylights is a translation of the gray marine layer outside. I brush the router's thin brown hair out of its eyes as we walk. I cradle her in the Panda Express line and apologize. Last time we were together when she was still cognizant I was high on pills from the night before. We had breakfast that day and all I can remember was being so comfortable, my new humor making the smile lines that ridge her cheeks grow. She even texted me that morning saying how good it was to see me, punctuating her thankfulness with emojis. I can't stop apologizing to her for this as I sit across from her at the food court table. I can’t escape her last memory of me being a direct consequence of drug use. A moment blanched of real love, the last visual she’ll be buried with. The curtains closing on a sad act of my derangement—all the worse, one she believed in, one she responded to with outstretched arms. At Panda Express, I think maybe if I plug her in somewhere around here then her lights will blink in sequence, shaping constellations in an otherwise blank sky. Instead, I gather the cables in my arms and head outside.It’s in the front seat on the way to the UPS store. I buckle her in so she doesn’t fly through the windshield and break into a million tiny pieces if I crash. The speakers play something I won’t remember later. Memory screens back images without sound sometimes; as if you’ve lost the right to deserve your complete past. I will only deserve a small allocation of these moments, portioned out thin enough to still want. More than this would be gluttonous, less would be hollow. The UPS man is similar to the AT&T man except I love this one like family. I can’t figure out why, but his voice is soft and the afternoon sun drapes across him through the window like a thin sheet. I gently place the router in his arms. A little too gently. He holds her as she leaves my fingers, hands me a receipt, and explains it will all be taken care of. I step outside into the rest.

THE LAST MONKEY by Sarah Carriger

October 21, 2024

The cruise ships circle the island like sharks. Full of wealthy refugees. We watch from the rooftop of the five-star resort where we’ve chosen to spend the end of our money and the end of the world. Loquats from the branch that overhangs our balcony and the limited room service menu provide sustenance but little pleasure. I choke down the yuca, the bitter greens, the thin soups that taste of dirt or chemicals. The kitchen staff pretend not to speak English when I ask about ingredients. I dream of meat—sweet breads, foie gras, suckling pig, rack of lamb, steaks so rare they’re blue. My husband says it’s because I’m iron deficient. “I’m a carnivore,” I say, baring my teeth.He snorts. “You couldn’t say boo to a goose.” My husband doesn’t like me to walk in the garden—says it’s not safe for a woman alone—but I’ve begun to sneak out when he’s asleep. The guard, Enrique, patrols the perimeter with a machine gun. Children beg for food by the fence. I often catch him dropping loquats from the pocket of his fatigues into the small hands that protrude. Sometimes we share a black-market Marlboro under the star-studded sky. The cruise ships drift past. Floating palaces. “Let them eat Twinkies,” I say to Enrique, who gives me a quizzical smile. There used to be monkeys, he tells me. Small, brown monkeys who lived in the loquat trees. But they started falling. He mimes something plummeting from a great height.It upset the guests, he says, so they had to move the rest. “Move where?” I say. “Move,” he says, slicing his hand across his jugular. He was able to save one. He will show me if I come back the next night with more money. I agree, and he disappears into the blue-black shadows as a cruise ship blocks out the moon. The next night my husband stays up reading The Wealth of Nations, and apparently it’s a knee-slapper. He keeps chuckling every few pages, which grates on my nerves. I sulk on the balcony and scan for the glow of Enrique’s cigarette. Finally, a soft thunk as the book slides to the carpet and my husband’s purring snore. I find Enrique playing patience at one of the garden tables meant for moonlit drinks. He makes me wait while he finishes his hand. He’s become somewhat fickle since we’ve grown closer. Finally, he looks up. Into his open palm I drop three Franklin Mint silver dollars from my husband’s Discovery of America set. I know I’ll be in trouble when he finds them gone, but I find I no longer care. Enrique bites down on a coin and grins. I clutch his waist as we jounce through the night on his gleaming Schwinn. After a lifetime, a cluster of shacks. Enrique stops without warning, and I spill onto the gravel. “Shh!” he says. But helps me up. My blood shines like black beads in the moonlight. We slink around corners and past candle-lit windows. No dogs to give us away. A child shrieks like it’s being skinned alive.He guides me to his hovel and pushes me inside. I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake. But he only lights a candle and points to a dark corner, fenced off to form a cage. He rubs his fingers together. Mine for the right price.At first I don’t see anything, but then in the depths something stirs. I creep closer. “There, There,” I say, holding out my hand. The monkey moves into the light. Its face open like a pansy. “There, there,” I say, as I reach in to wring its neck.

WE LOVE KIMBERLY by Tam Eastley

October 18, 2024

Kimberly keeps her cowboy hat in the trunk of her car for emergencies. Emergencies like a last-minute invite to a rodeo, or line dancing at Ranchman’s.Other items in her car include: stickers from the local radio station, an old Cosmo magazine, bear spray, and a dinner knife. She doesn’t know about the dinner knife though. It slipped under the seat after she helped set up her nephew’s birthday picnic in the park two years ago. Like most things in Kimberly’s car though, the knife doesn’t have anything to do with this story.Her car is also home to dozens of lighters that she’s stolen from various people over the years. But Kimberly’s vice isn’t smoking; she’s barely a social smoker. To tell you the truth, she goes out less than she lets on. No, Kimberly’s vice is biting her fingernails. She bites them down to the nub and chews the flesh around her cuticles. Her fingertips bleed and ache. They’re sensitive to the touch. Cosmo tells her that it’s important to identify her nail-biting triggers. Her underlying issues. But when Kimberly sits idle in her car and thinks about it, really thinks about it, her mind goes blank and her fingers find their way to her mouth. Is life an issue, she asks. The very act of being? And you’d think we’d give her some sort of answer, but we don’t.A few weeks ago, Kimberly went to a hypnotist. She heard him advertising on that same local radio station where she got all her stickers, and he boasted about the ability to cure anything with just one session. She made an appointment right then and there at the 14th Street traffic light that always takes forever to turn. Later, she’ll realize it was like her nubby fingers dialed the number on their own, seemingly taking matters into their own hands. Like swarm intelligence or those clouds of birds she sees on Instagram, their tiny bodies morphing into dramatic drops of ink in the sky.The hypnotist was strange, as hypnotists are, but he didn’t wear a cape or anything and he didn’t make her squawk like a chicken. He had her lie back on a lounge chair and count down from ten. Then she sort of… drifted. She woke up seventeen minutes later. “Do you want to bite your nails?” the hypnotist asked.And to Kimberly’s surprise, she didn’t. Not even when she stared at herself in the elevator mirror, sat in traffic, or waited at the drive-through.And you’d think we’d be proud of Kimberly, and we are in a way, because we love Kimberly. But unfortunately, something else will now have room to grow, and that’s not quite the ending we wanted for her.Kimberly keeps her cowboy hat in the trunk of her car for emergencies, and yesterday, she put it on. But there are no last-minute invites to bars with mechanical bulls looming. No. Our dear Kimberly is on the run. And if she’s going to be on the run, she’s bringing her cowboy hat with her.Kimberly’s nails are long now. They’re red and pointed and they have a mind of their own. They tap against countertops and demand respect. They flash stolen credit cards and hypnotize—yes, hypnotize—with their otherworldly glow. She can’t stop them. Her nails are opposing magnets to her mouth. But when she thinks about it, really thinks about it, she realizes she doesn’t even want to trim them, let alone bite them, these precious nails. They’re sharp enough to be weapons.Kimberly races down the highway. Confident she’s not being followed, she pulls over on the side of the road. She flicks the metal wheel of one of her backseat lighters, chucks it into the car, and walks away. Her nails sparkle and glitter with the obliteration of her previous life. When the bear spray explodes she doesn’t think of the knife from her nephew’s birthday party, because, if you remember, she doesn’t even know it’s there.Kimberly hitches a ride one town over. She ponders the majesty of her nails as she slices the neck of her unsuspecting driver, as she digs his grave by the light of the moon. They’re just so powerful, she gushes as she drives away in his car, turns on the radio, and searches for a new station. And because we love Kimberly, even after all this, we find her something good.

TWO MICROS by Amy Barnes

October 17, 2024

Gone FishingBefore they bury your father, you eat plastic bags of goldfish, stack tuna fish sandwiches into stomach skyscrapers, slurp salmon off wood boards, down sardines from sharp containers, sing duets with big mouth bass, lick rainbow book fish, and laugh as clown fish swim in your belly.When there’s no room for bait or folding fortune-telling fish, you see fish floating in your blood, ichthyology meshed with humanology, swimming upstream, upcolon, eyeballs bulging behind yours. You sleep, flopping restlessly on your deck, fish guts and blood as a mattress. You beg fishmongers to swing your legs and arms across 5:00 AM catch-of-the-day piles. You pretend your eczema is scales and scratch until there are patches all over.You buy a mermaid tail for your niece, but wear it first in your clawfoot tub with its Poseidon feet and trident legs. You plan a trip to a mountain stream to battle bears for salmon.The funeral parlor owner holds his nose when you arrive in a Mrs. Frizzle fish-patterned dress and fish hook earrings. You bring tuna fish sandwiches for the after-service potluck. A long-haired man hands out fish and bread. You consider asking if he knows Jesus’ other miracles, especially the one with Lazarus.The fishing schedule is printed on your dad's program next to scriptures about the Leviathan. He missed opening day by a week, we always went together, you tell your cousins and aunts. There are fish swimming in his clear coffin like a toilet seat cover full of plastic fish. He’s wearing his Hawaiian fish shirt, the one your mom picked for the last family vacation luau.You can’t find farewell words because you're too full of fish. A rainbow trout falls out of your mouth and catches all the light in the room. Bereavement Fare Your shoes are white when you board. You have no luggage. No one fights to get on the plane first. Two people are dragged on. The stewardesses wear dark wigs with bangs that make them look like spies. Fishnet hose and black airplane-issued shoes. Some in slacks, others dark crinolines. All in jaunty death scarves imprinted with skulls.Their faces are as pale as yours, with Raggedy Ann blush blots. “Welcome aboard,” they say.One hands you a warm cloth. It unfolds into a damp American flag. Small children carry Colorform books with coffin and skeleton stickers. You step through coffee grounds smushed into your shoes. At seat 6, the grounds are replaced with the odors of potting soil and black mulch mixed with manure. Your nose burns. When you sit, a sea of darkness rises to your neck.You pull the airsick bag out. Your mother’s high school graduation picture is on the back next to her obituary. She’s smiling. Your seat mates stare at their grandmother and uncle. Died doing what she loved. Wife. Mother. Friend. Teacher. The plane takes off. Stewardesses stumble with tuna casseroles in aluminum pans and pound cakes in frozen foil. Black coffee in floral teacups. Your seatmates sleep because they’ve ordered sedatives. You didn’t.A Star is Born plays on everyone’s screen. Then, Steel Magnolias. The stewardesses have shovels with airplane logos. They slide coffins into the empty dinner compartments and toss in dirt. The plane is landing soon. They announce. But no one’s listening. They’re eating lukewarm casserole and crying over Shelby. The plane lands. You pull a carved wood box from the overhead compartment. The second passenger in your row is refusing to get off the plane.Everyone else exits, leaving behind only black footprints on the gate’s carpet.

GREEKS by Caitlin Boston Ingham

October 15, 2024

My daughter-in-law Susie bought me a voucher for an adult educational course at the local evening school. Susie had studied herbalism there last year. She suggested I try it too. Susie had been married to my son for six years, but I struggled to connect with her. She wore pigtails in her hair and never smiled with teeth. She discussed her reproductive system with a near-pornographic reverence. I did not want to study herbalism. I didn’t want to learn to make wildflower seed-balls or my own callus balm with essential oils. What I wanted from Susie was a lesson on the subject of my own son, Jon, who was impenetrable to me. Silent, large, permanently bored, Jon had arrived on the earth like that: a baby IT manager.I selected the course in Greek Mythology on Wednesday nights from 6-8pm. The teacher had dyed black hair and a chain that linked his belt to his wallet. Athena was the best starting point when looking at Greek Mythology, he told us. Zeus had swallowed Athena’s mother whole because he didn’t want kids. But then Athena popped right out of Zeus’s forehead, wearing a helmet and holding a sword. When I told the group that I related to this experience of parenting, they laughed more than I had expected them to. That weekend, I saw Susie on the street, carrying a bundle of wild-weeds in her arms. She seemed baffled as to why I hadn’t selected the herbalism course. I grinned, perhaps baring my teeth a little too much. “What are the nettles for?” I asked.She looked at them and sighed. “They promote healthy ovulation.”Her pigtails had little wooden cubes on each hairband. Were these ornaments a representation of my son’s taste? Every time I saw Susie, it was all I could do: scrutinise her for signs that pointed to my son’s character.“Some people say that ovulation is a lot like religion,” I offered. “Best not overthought.”Susie didn’t have anything to say to that.Driving home from work, I thought about Athena’s mother. She had crafted Athena’s helmet and armour right inside Zeus’s stomach; the hammering sound gave him a headache. It must have felt gratifying, I thought, passing down something to one’s child. I’d never experienced anything like that. I remembered picking up Jon once from a week-long school trip to Wales. All the other kids were homesick and crying, desperate to come home. But Jon stood there among the weeping children, gormless, unaffected by their tears. His teacher told me that he’d gone around double-lacing every single child’s pair of shoes on the bus ride home. Some students had tried to kick him off, others had patted his back like a little donkey. I was stunned. I couldn’t even remember if I’d taught him to knot his own laces yet.In another evening session, we were asked to go into breakout groups of two to discuss Circe. Circe was an enchantress known for her knowledge of potions and herbs. She could transform her enemies into animals—mostly squealing pigs.The teacher asked us to choose partners for breakout sessions. Looking around, I realised I didn’t know anyone’s name. As I watched my classmates buddy up with each other, it dawned on me that many of them were not here to learn about myths.After a while, I noticed a man sitting alone in the corner. He was fidgety and had blackheads on his nose. Thinking he was shy, I approached and asked if he wanted to link up with me. It was maybe a poor choice of words. As soon as I said this, the man leered, raising his eyebrow.“You know,” he said, smirking, “according to the Greeks, the world started when the earth fucked the sky.” Then he winked. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to hit on me.I bumped into Susie in the same place I had the time before. Our routines were clearly in sync. This time, she was heaving a grocery bag on her hip. “What’s in there?” I asked her, trying to sound kind and approachable. I hoped maybe she’d invite me to dinner at her and Jon’s house.“Night ointment,” she said. “Homemade. For Jon. Lavender oil base and roughage from pink corn skin. I’ve been working on it for several weeks.”I thought of her in bed with Jon, rubbing the ointment all over his enormous back. His face against the pillow, expressionless, still.“And it helps him sleep?” I asked.Susie shrugged. “That’s the hope.”I hesitated. “Well, can I try some?”Susie smiled cautiously. “Really?” She seemed reluctantly pleased.“Oh, please! I’m a terrible sleeper,” I lied, laughing too loudly. “Like mother, like son.” We learnt about Icarus in class that week. It was one of the few stories I’d remembered. The father who creates a pair of wax wings for his son who then flies too high in the sky and comes crashing down. A story about ego. The teacher described Icarus flying with a lot of gusto, emphasizing the joy of escape and the temptation of the sun. I shut my eyes and tried to picture Jon flying high like that. I tried to picture him in a state of bliss.In the car after class, I sat in the driver’s seat for several minutes. I looked down and noticed the large bottle of Susie’s potion on the passenger’s seat. I’d tossed it there after seeing her. Brushing the hair from my face, I pulled off the lid and smeared it all over my forearms. It smelt like a first aid kit. The liquid stung my skin, which I assumed was purposeful. The pain felt vaguely correct somehow.Trying to breathe evenly, my arms lathered up, I took out my phone to text Jon. Tell Susie thank you so much for the lovely ointment. She’s a witch! In a good way 🙂I waited for a few minutes. He didn’t text back. The sores didn’t appear immediately, but when they started to come through, they were red, pea-sized lumps, almost geometrically abundant, like a raging breed of honeycomb. I couldn’t figure out whether bandaging them up would make them worse, so I wrapped up one and left the other bare.By the time the next class came around, Jon still hadn’t responded to my text about Susie’s lotion. I assumed he was ignoring me, as he usually did. I thought about texting him with a picture, typing, Look what your wife did to me, but decided against it.In class, I felt tearful, aggrieved. I kept catching other members of the group staring at my blistered arms, the looks of concern and disgust on their faces. The wounds seemed like burns. I thought about what had happened with Susie. I had not flown too close to the sun, I don’t think. I had barely gotten a peek through the clouds. Whilst the teacher was introducing us to Theseus and the Minotaur, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Jon had texted me back. The message was a picture. I leaned over and opened it. He’d sent me a photograph of his arms, irritated and bumpy, just like mine. They looked as if they had been dipped into a bucket of mild acid. He texted, Do you think this is normal? Susie made it. I can’t stop scratching. I put my phone back into my pocket. The teacher was telling us how the story ended with King Aegeus throwing himself into the sea when he wrongly presumed that his son Theseus was dead. I pictured the Aegean Ocean, riotous turquoise, limestone soft enough to sleep on. I imagined floating in the warm sea, the water buttery on my skin. I pulled out my phone again to look at the picture from Jon. I hoped that nobody would notice how much I was smiling.