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MY MOTHER TOLD ME YOU COULD ONLY KNOW THAT ORANGES WERE GOOD IF THEY SMELLED LIKE FLORIDA by Megan M. Garwood

April 19, 2021

At the grocery store, I am buying whole milk and skim milk because I like to put whole milk in my coffee and I like to use skim milk in my Smacks. I am reaching for a gallon jug when I feel someone grab my butt with a heavy hand. I turn around to see a man with little expression pat my rear. I ask him what does he think he is doing and he smiles and tells me to have a nice day. I am scared but also complimented. I am in the cereal aisle now, and I think I deserve more than just Smacks. The boxes are colorful bounty and I am a robber on lookout. I see a toucan who is sledding into a bowl of colorful donuts. It must be Christmastime. I thought it was summer. I feel a hand on my breast. I look down and see bright pink nails, like claws, with airbrushed flamingos on them. She squeezes again and says, honk! honk! Her smile is big like one of those lawyers on late-night TV. I don’t understand, I say, but I don’t think she hears me and says, thanks for the feel. Normally, I would run away, but where would I go? I suppose that is a question I must answer. Instead, I turn to a familiar face that I haven’t seen in a while: Count Chocula, levitating white marshmallows with his mind. It really must be Christmas. Now I’m in aisle three. I promised myself I would not be in three, but I am here, looking at the chocolate bars. I pass the fancy ones because who needs to pretend to want coconut sugar. It is okay. It is for someone else: she’s probably wonderful, and she probably squeezes her own orange juice and maybe she pours it into little juice glasses for her family, but I am trying to make it to the checkout without dying. There are Santa Clauses filled with whipped peanut butter. I pause. There is a Santa filled with marshmallow. I wonder. There is an angel filled with toffee. I feel a hand again, this time on my upper thigh, like it is guiding me into a yoga pose. I look down. It belongs to a teenage boy, acne like volcanos erupting. Tongue out, he pants like a dog. I think this is illegal, and I worry about cameras. I ask him what he wants, and he barks at me and squeezes the soft flesh under my stretch pants and asks what it’s doing there. Now I am sad. I feel useless, and I politely ask him to remove his paw. I reach for the Santas with peanut butter, the Santa with marshmallow, and the thin angel filled with toffee, and I cry a little on the walk to the checkout. I forgot orange juice and I remember that I will never be someone who juices my own fruit or chooses the coconut sugar over the chemical, and I wonder how people do their makeup every day. I decide I am going to do it, I am going to juice an orange, and when I take an orange to my nose to smell for ripeness, I feel a pull at my hair, and a hand dig to the root to fill its fingers with my uncombed mane. I turn to see the hand belongs to the manager of the store, and he tells me that we can’t smell the fruit before we purchase it. I ask him how, then, does one know if the fruit is good without feeling it or smelling it. I tell him how my mother told me you could only know an orange was good after you smelled its navel and it smelled like Florida. His response is to pull my head back hard until I look up to the industrial beams and iron-looking light fixtures and see a little bird tweeting and it looks like it winked, but I cannot be sure because it is so far away, but I would bet on it. So I go over to the cold section, and I bend down to look at the juice selection and someone hooks their finger into my mouth and pulls at the corner until I snarl. I see it is a man in a suit with a nice gold watch and shiny leather shoes like a banker. His eyes are dreamy, and I think maybe I deserve this, so I cock my head, flutter my eyes, and lick his finger, but he says, gross; you’re too old! And I say, I’m sorry, I thought this was what you wanted. And he says nice try but that it was too late for me, and I agree. When I get to the checkout, I smile at the cashier and ask how her day was and she says, umm okay, and I say that’s great, then I say, guess what? I got fired today for being unlikable by upper management. The cashier says, cool, anarchy, and kind of raises her fist in the air. (more…)

SINK by Elane Kim

April 16, 2021

When my brother was young, I fed him fruit that fell from the trees in our backyard. What I fed him wasn’t really fruit, but the buds of what would be sweet in the spring, and the not-fruit didn’t really fall from trees in our backyard, because there was no backyard. Back then, we lived in an apartment complex with studded walls and a pool that yawned and stretched past the pale sun. The children all thought the pool was haunted, including me, because somebody’s son drowned in it in the 60s or the 80s or some other era we saw through blurred television screens. We all knew the water was always awake: green and unmoving, glass-eyed and watching.

My brother was the smallest of us all, and the most afraid. Of drowning, I thought, or of the stillness that would follow. I knew he was young because he still believed in ghosts and spirits and mothers with mouths that said no. My brother was most like himself when he was with me: always hungry, always swallowing. The day my brother stopped being young was the day our mother left him poolside in midsummer. On that day, the sun was a rotting orange. I watched him sink like fruit, surfacing as white foam. I watched the water swallow him without ever having been hungry.

When my brother was young, so was I. I fed him not-fruit from not-trees and he ate and ate. That was before he knew wholeness in the arms of a mother, before he became the stillness of water.

WHEN WILL MY RAPIST’S CLOSET BE CLEANED? by Meg Tuite

April 15, 2021

“Hysteria comes from the Greek root hystera, meaning ‘uterus’. Originally, it was believed that hysteria and hysterical symptoms were caused by a defect in the womb, and thus, only women could become hysterical.” –Shalome Sine

Vivid and startled, blood spits out a song, a sigh, signals a stale rustle of corruption. A pulse rouses itself from the uterus. And those subterranean tubes palpate the last fumes of incessant weather before swirling the rays of dusk down the toilet. I am a girl of fugitive parts. Cut with a straight knife. Glue fists the slit where loot, diced and unkempt, is hacked out bit by bit.

Welcome to the trail guide for hysterectomy. I am a girl whose inner wilderness is cohabiting with feral beasts. They attach to my uterus. My surgery is a uterectomy. There is no hysteria to remove.

Predarectomies: removal of the predator. It’s a goopy, ugly, long procedure. No one visits and flowers do not arrive. There’s so much to remove.

DENOUEMENT by S.S. Mandani

April 14, 2021

“Sure, I’ve eaten cookies well into adulthood. Some days all I eat is one cookie. I break little bite-sized pieces off and revel in the ‘gasm that is sugar, butter, salt, flour, chocolate, pecans, jam, or what have you. I eat chocolate chip cookies, of course, but lace cookies are my current obsession. My taste buds ride a buttery, crispy wave, cresting into a smile. I have disliked certain cookies. Usually, though, I get over myself, and find a redeeming quality. Growing up, I hated those jam cookies served with chai. You know the ones? But one day the light hit a certain way. The jam sat glossy; a sphere in the middle. The soft white light of the clouds refracting off the glistening surface coaxed a bite from me. Through the shortbread, to the center, I kept at it until the whole tin was empty. What are they called again? Not jammie dodgers. Not cave cookies. Butter drop raspberry jam cookies, that’s it."

I consulted my list of “Untried Cookies.”

"I’d like to try a millionaire’s shortbread. In Scotland they just call it a millionaire. Nice to be able to eat a millionaire for $5.99 USD. Maybe I’ll poop money. That would solve everything. The credit card debt. The mortgage. The money owed to family, friends, friends of friends, anyone I could convince, really. The guy with the torn baseball hat and trench coat at the cardroom. Roy, I think his name was. I owed him a couple hundred bucks. And just like that, I owed everyone something. Even people I didn’t know at all. The internet’s a wild thing. Online applications for credit with the government stamp and all. Anyone that would help, really.”

The guy collecting my house and everything in it to pay my debts, or at least a portion of them, was listening good. His eyes in a crinkle, his mouth pursed in a pity smile. His face was empathetic. In the end, he just asked me, “Where do you want these?” And I said, “I get to keep them?” He nodded. I didn’t know if they were worthless or he felt bad. Maybe both.

In my recently vacated three bedroom, two bathroom house of 2,200 square feet, all I had left was me in front of a pantry filled from floor to ceiling with cookies from around the world. The places we had visited. Coyotas from a woman outside of a mezcaleria in Puebla. A box of empire biscuits from a quaint shop in Inverness. A case of authentic fig rolls from a street side hawker in an open-air bazaar in Cairo. Fortune cookies from Wo Hop in the Lower East Side. Macarons and macaroons from Ladurée in Madeleine, Paris. We had 'em all. Really we did. Well, it was just me. Zafira had gone. The kids were grown and gone. They were all perfectly fine. Everyone just had their own lives. And I had my cookies. Each with a memory from when life was golden and time was slow like honey.

So I took all the cookies and moved into the woods out back. There was a cabin no one knew about. Not even the collectors. It wasn’t listed on any papers. A place high up where I could keep an eye on the house that wasn’t mine anymore. I just wanted to know that someone would move in and act appropriately. Cherish it. Build a family, maybe. But they didn’t have to. They could just enjoy the house alone, too. Long as they maintained it. Two months later someone did and I moved further into the woods to another invisible cabin. I couldn’t see the house anymore. I just had a few cookies left. Eventually, I fed them to a rabbit. The rabbit was happy for a few days. Then I ate the rabbit, and I was happy. That rabbit taught me all about hunting and foraging and how to live in the woods. I became self-sufficient. A woodsman. I was officially off the grid and every night I cooked with fire. I didn’t have to explain myself and hardly ever talked aloud. I hummed songs from my childhood. I became the person I was supposed to be. And eventually the cookies, all of them, became a funny memory of a time when I owed everyone something and had a family.

One early morning there were flurries. Outside of my cabin door, sitting in a tuft of freshly laid snowfall, there was a blush box with a ribbon white as snow, as if it had been born from the ground itself, along with a note. The note was from my family and a few old friends. A happy intervention on paper. The words didn’t ask me to come back. They wished me well. I opened the box and those butter drop raspberry jam cookies fell out one by one, cinematically, onto the snow. The red jelly centers charmed me. I salvaged them before they got soggy, brushed the snow off, and put the blush box on the makeshift wood mantle above the fireplace.

Later that winter there was a severe snowstorm. The radio said there would be feet upon feet of snow. I surely didn’t have time to plan for dinner, but I did have the cookies. I sat on the tattered maroon leather armchair by the fireplace and savored each one, leaving all the centers until the very end. I stacked all of them up and held the jam jellies between my thumb and index finger, like I used to do as a kid. Forming a roll of lifesavers, I placed them in my mouth to enjoy, dreamt of a cup of chai, and leaned back to close my eyes for a long winter sleep.

“IT” by Michael Seymour Blake

April 13, 2021

A REVIEW OF JOSHUA DALTON’S I HATE YOU, PLEASE READ ME by Selena Cotte

April 13, 2021

Joshua Dalton’s debut collection I Hate You, Please Read Me (House of Vlad Press, Feb 2021) can also be read as a novel in fragments: It uses tweets, direct messages, flash-length stories, and a much-anticipated closing screenplay to communicate a pitiful, media-saturated existence.

While never explicit, it seems clear that the stories and interactions all exist in dare-we-say anti-hero Marshall Crawford’s world in varying degrees of intimacy, to paint a character portrait of self-pity, self-awareness, and self-abuse. Even stories about other characters appear as representations of his own self-image, merely presented from an angle, using TV tropes and dripping with other symptoms of a media-poisoned lifetime. After all, this book is highly informed by internet culture, with its periodic collections of tweet-like fragments that simulate the very experience of consuming online content. Read a few articles, scroll through your Twitter feed, send a few messages, repeat.

The book’s fragments also work to simulate borderline personality disorder, a highly misunderstood condition marked by unstable relationships and the rapid cycling of extreme emotions. Dalton identifies himself as a “borderline writer” in his author’s bio, and Marshall refers to the disorder both directly and indirectly throughout the book. He experiences the higher senses of grandeur and extreme worthiness (in his lack of care for those around him, as well as his implied self-comparison to Batman) as well as the degrading and self-abasing lows that come from his unstable relationships and inability to create meaning from anything in his life. It is a circular problem, as his attitude informs his life, and the poor conditions that this creates informs his attitude. A difficult cycle to break.

Dalton treats his readers as Marshall treats those around him: We are simultaneously invited into Marshall’s existence and then pushed out just as quickly. Sometimes we are kept at arm's length, with surreal shorts such as “Regression” and “The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Trauma,” both appearing in succession early on in the book. Other times, we are dragged down into the mud of these emotions, asked to stand witness to Marshall’s most intimate moments, both including the small admissions that he knows what he has done wrong and the equally off-putting depiction of anal douching before a “date,” in full explicit detail. It should not surprise you by now that making himself vulnerable in the latter form seems easier for him than the former.

In “Regression,” we see immediately that our protagonist is not interested in painting an empathetic portrait of himself. He is visiting a therapist who is visibly ill, and not mildly; he blows his nose at one point to find blood in the tissue. Many would become alarmed at this sight, but the narrator of this story does not break from his self-absorption to ask about it.

“Yuck, I thought. But I pressed on,” is how he responds to this moment, continuing on a diatribe about how difficult and unpleasant communicating with others is for him.

“The Apple” reads more like a nightmare, as it’s even further disconnected from any kind of reality (either ours or Marshall’s), painting the world as an almost comically horrifying place of despair and hopelessness. Through his bleak and tragic depiction of child suicide, which only keeps occurring at younger and younger ages, followed by more and more sudden births to replace them, one can understand the futility and nihilism Marshall feels, ironically more intimately than when Marshall tells us himself.

But more realistic depictions of Marshall’s life are also mediated through indirect communication: In the opening story “Showrunner,” we are immediately introduced to the notion that he views his life as a film or television show, a motif that repeats throughout the book. His character Max Collins is a thinly veiled version of himself, and the longest story of the book is the final screenplay that shows him stalking an ex, stealing from his mother to pay for a male prostitute, and using his homosexuality as a deflection away from the more despicable act of transgression: the theft, which he would actually have to take responsibility for, unlike his queerness which could reasonably be chalked up to “I was born that way, Mom.”

But it’s not enough to depict these events alone. Dalton/Marshall, through his screenwriting direction, wants us to know that he is aware of the nuance here. He knows what is really wrong with the situation, he just can’t help himself. Or so he wants us to believe.

It’s this kind of emotional spiraling that can make borderline personality disorder so devastating to experience, either personally or in a loved one. Dalton replicates the experience with empathy and ultimately, a kind of frankness that will ring true to anyone who has experienced such swells of complicated emotions. I Hate You, Please Read Me shows a deep understanding of how humans communicate their emotions (or utterly fail to), and most importantly, how self-awareness is not the same thing as self-acceptance.

Find I Hate You, Please Read Me here.

THE MARRIAGE TEST by Bailey Bujnosek

April 12, 2021

In a long-forgotten society, there was a test people had to pass to get married. The test had one question. The question was multiple choice. If you were a woman, the question was: You have one plank of wood. Do you:

Affix it to the wall to support your husband’s golf trophies?
Burn it to provide warmth for you and your family?
Ask your husband what he wants to do with the wood?

You know from other records that the question and answer choices were different for men. You also know that there was a correct answer that, if circled, would allow the test-taker to get married. However, since no answer key or specific records of the test survive, you are left to hypothesize the answer.

The marriage test was discovered fifty years ago. No one’s taken as much of an interest in it as you. You dream about the test. You can’t hear the alphabet without thinking of A, B, and C, golf, fire, deferment.Your husband does not care for the history of marriage law. You try to engage him during dinner by passing him a handwritten version of the test and he almost chokes on his shrimp scampi, laughing. You frown, your face the color of the shrimp on your plate. Upon noticing this, he calms himself and skims the paper.“Who would have thought they had golf back then?” he says with a smile.You explain that this is a loose translation of a sport closer to croquet than golf.“Why don’t they just translate it as croquet?”You’ve wondered this yourself, though you don’t admit it. You shrug. Say, “Maybe they thought it would be more understandable because it’s more popular.”Get no response, not even a hmm. Return to your food.

He, the man you married, wakes you up in the middle of the night. You feel uncertain of your shape. You are both veiled by darkness. How do you know you’re not changing, disfiguring?“C’mon,” your husband says, and his voice is like snow falling. “What’s the right answer?”“To what?”You roll over. Press your palms against your ribs. Nothing suddenly sharp or absent. You’re still whole, full of caged organs.“You know what,” he says.“There isn’t one we know of.”“You’re kidding.”You pull your hands out from under your shirt and breathe. You tell him you’re not kidding. Wait for the next question, the one you hoped he’d ask at dinner. What do you think the correct answer is? He snores like waves against rocks. It is worse than silence.

Your research into the marriage test hasn’t won you any grants or awards. You can’t yet call yourself doctor. You tell yourself you aren’t in it for those reasons, but seeing Dr. Jeff dance around the library celebrating his second grant of the month isn’t a joyride. You wish you could chuck him out of the archives room. He sweats on all the rare books.You mention this, the sweating, to the librarian one day. She gives you a stare like your fly is down. You hope she will not tell Jeff.Jeff’s area of study is marital fashion. His numerous grants of late are due to his writings on corsetry. He’s working on a book about how all wedding dresses are metaphorical or literal shackles and bonds. You know this because he has run his grant proposals by you numerous times. He claims you have a good ear for arrogance and aren’t afraid to call him out on it. You have yet to find a nice way of explaining how hard it is to sound arrogant when you’re begging people for money.

If you would’ve had to take the marriage test, would you have failed? This question haunts the back of your throat. You blurt it out to the cashier at the grocery store.The cashier says if he had to take the test, he wouldn’t care if he passed or failed. He is scanning the third bag of shrimp when you realize you didn’t grab anything else. On the way home, you pick up cheesesteak sandwiches.“I’m sure you’d pass,” your husband says that night, when you voice the question to him. “You’d figure out the right answer.” He does not say what he thinks the right answer is.The cheesesteak is a bloated sponge in your hand. Too much cheese. You choke and your husband watches you give yourself the Heimlich maneuver over the back of your chair. He tells you you’re very brave for saving yourself.You think if he took the test, he’d fail, and you think of a singledom full of cats and baths, of soap operas and saving yourself from all kinds of pitiful near-death experiences. But, you think, he would not take the test. He would just get married. Jeff, too. They’d simply be unable to comprehend why anyone had the power to control their lives like that.

One boiling day in the archives, Jeff theorizes that the correct answer is C. His justification is that deferment to a husband is probably what was expected, “back in those days.” “Only it wasn’t like that in all cultures,” you say. “Maybe it’s B because a wife should check her husband’s wants against the family’s needs.”“But what if you take the test in the summer?” Jeff asks. “Then there’s no point in a fire for warmth.” He’s sweating more than usual. His nose is soggy like a dog’s. You lean over your half of the textbook between you to protect its pages.“It’s symbolic,” you say. “You’re not letting the husband have the wood.”“What if you choose C knowing your husband will burn the wood?”You don’t know. To change the subject, you point at a picture on his side of the page. The picture shows a woman in a dress made of canary feathers, popular in the weddings of a now-extinct tribe.“That’s pretty,” you say.Jeff says the feathers were plucked from live birds, says the dress had to be stitched by the bride’s father, says if the feathers weren’t the right shade of yellow it was grounds for canceling the ceremony. You’re jealous of his answers. You pine for a textbook on the marriage test. Maybe when you pass out from heat exhaustion, you’ll dream one up.

Your husband stages an intervention after the fifth shrimp dinner of the week.“Why are you so out of it lately?” he says. He doesn’t realize that:

You’re actually as ‘into it’ as you’ve ever been, which is to say you never cared much for shaking up dinner and just got careless this week.
Because being out of it is equivalent to finally finding something you’re truly passionate about, even if no one else is, even if it never amounts to anything, because you care. You care so much.
Ask your husband what he thinks.

You choose C.“You’re blaming me now? What did I do?”You repeat yourself: “What do you think?”Your husband sleeps on the couch. Neither of you clears your plates from the table or washes the dishes. In the morning the fetid smell greets you like a slap.Your husband is gone. He left a note: Going to my brother’s for a few days.

You take a dry erase marker and on the fridge you write out the marriage test. Swap out golf for croquet. Run your hands through your hair. Pace. Wonder what Jeff has won today. Tell yourself not to care, but care anyways. Someone knocks on the door. It’s your landlord looking for the rent check. He follows you into the kitchen, reads the refrigerator while you scurry to the bedroom and find the check in your husband’s sock drawer.“What’s with the piece of wood?” he asks, pointing towards the question on the fridge. You fumble something about lumber being a useful resource.“Still don’t get it,” he says. You hand him the check. When he leaves, you wipe the test off the fridge with your sleeve.

Your husband comes back unshaven, closer than ever to a wild animal. He holds a plank of wood in his hand. Drops it on the kitchen floor with a dull thud.Your husband does not play golf or croquet. It is hotter today than it has ever been in your life. You know deferring to him again is useless. This is your choice.You pick up the plank of wood and drop it in the kitchen trash. You ask him if he will cook dinner for the both of you. He says yes.

VALUATION by Kayleigh Shoen

April 9, 2021

My mom used to say if you don’t own anything worth stealing, you never need to lock your doors. In our neighborhood, the breeze at night could travel the entire length of the street in and out through the screen doors of unlocked houses. It was that kind of place.

There were three thefts that summer before the police would even file a report. They kept saying it was probably a misunderstanding; what thief leaves cash to cover the object they stole? And if anything, the amount left was probably too much: $50 for the Zeiglers’ oinking cookie jar, $25 for the Sweeneys’ moth-eaten throw, $13 for an ashtray one of the Thompson kids stole from a diner on vacation.

But as the thefts continued into the fall, the items became more personal. Beth Smyk found an envelope with $7 in exchange for her hairbrush, still full of hair. Cal Washington got $9 for his lucky socks. Greg Tsu reported a stolen baseball cap to the police. But then a week later he found the cap in his trunk and realized his wedding album was gone.

The most distressing thefts were the unidentified ones. Some victims spent months searching their homes, and memories, for the missing item whose value matched the money in the envelope. Figures like $3, $15, and $42 took on new mysterious significance to the neighbors we watched through their windows opening cupboards, pulling out drawers, perplexed.

Even after all that my parents never locked our doors. It had only been a year since my sister succumbed to cancer, and maybe they thought this larger loss exempted them from petty theft. They didn’t seem to believe that the crimes that affected our neighbors could touch them, too.

Meanwhile, new signs were cropping up on the neighbors’ lawns, advertising their new “securely monitored” status. One day the Kimballs brought home a dog with sharp ears and a metal collar. The Johnsons sold their house to an older couple who built a wood slat fence and kept behind it. The neighborhood was becoming a different kind of place.

I never told my parents about the envelope I found in our front hallway. I still remember the feel of the morning sun on my neck as I weighed the stack of bills in my hand, both too heavy and too light. I thought about all the cheap, priceless objects that still cluttered my sister’s bedroom down the hall. Without counting it, I put the cash back in the envelope and buried it in the trash.

BUSINESSMAN by Jim Windolf

April 8, 2021

My father told me, when I was fourteen, that business was a language anyone could learn. I never got fluent. So there I stood, a thirty-six-year-old man with not much in the bank, at the side of a hole in the ground as they lowered the coffin that contained his body.

He had run a small empire in our New Jersey town. His main business was an insurance agency. There was also a travel bureau, a movie theater, and a restaurant. Of all his businesses, I probably liked the travel bureau best.

He took me there now and then on summer mornings when I was six or seven. The place had a smell of paper and perfume. I would sit on a swivel chair at an unoccupied desk, tapping at a computer keyboard, watching the green letters jump across the dark screen, while my dad spent time in an interior office going over things with the mustached man who was the travel bureau’s president. A pair of sisters who worked there would put their faces close to mine. They also gave me candy from their desks, sour balls and Mary Janes, and they teased me about my curly hair, saying it was wasted on a boy.

After college, with the idea of eventually moving up in my father’s organization, I went to work in the warehouse that supplied his various businesses. But it turned out I was only ever good—unusually good, that is—at two things, sports and sex, and I have ended up making my small living at both.

I fell into sex work nearly ten years ago, during a cruise-ship vacation I took with my parents, my sister, and our baby brother, who had just finished high school.

It was the first time we had gone on an extended family trip as adults. I couldn’t shake the feeling we were trying to re-create our vacations of years earlier, although we must have been aware we had lost the old everyday mix of conflict and ease that animates families when they are young. So instead of playing hide-and-seek in a churchyard near a shingled seaside rental, or finding ourselves in the silence of nature as night fell and the blood thrummed in our veins, my siblings and I would put ourselves through three-hour dinners, sometimes at the captain’s table—meals that started with cocktails and crystal dishes filled with puckered olives and radish slices flavored with olive oil and flaked salt.

The ship was pushing through the northern Atlantic at one in the morning when I looked up from a craps table and into the eyes of a woman who must have been twenty or twenty-five years older than me. I was the last member of my family in the little casino, and she might have assumed I was alone in the world. I wasn’t surprised when I ended up in her cabin for what remained of the night, but it did catch me off guard, in the morning, when she lifted her head and aimed a glance at a stack of bills on the black coffee table. I took the cash as if I had done it before, and by the end of the next cruise, which I had booked solo, I found I had made more than I had spent.

After three years at sea, I knew the major ports and hated my morning reflection. When I heard about a job opening at my old school, I decided to apply.

***

My father, still firm, with a senator’s handsomeness, died of a mysterious illness in his seventy-third year, a week after undergoing hip surgery in October 2019. Six months later, while under quarantine aboard a small ship in the Mediterranean, I couldn’t help wondering if he had contracted an early case of Covid-19.

The memorial service took place on a crisp morning, with sharply outlined clouds parading across a marine blue sky. I didn’t see anyone crying at the grave site. He had been too large a presence for that. We felt like a mountain had been blown off the earth. The next day I went back to the high school where I had been employed six years — the same school where I had set records, since broken, as a member of the cross-country, basketball, and baseball teams.

The 7:45 a.m. faculty meeting was the usual mix of administrative talk and rank gossip about troublesome students and their parents. I got nods of concern from colleagues between the P.E. classes I ran. At 3:15 I drove the rowdy cross-country boys in an Econoline van to South Mountain Reservation for another practice. I felt like an orphan, now that I had no father, but I also felt the same.

The routine that had kept me in line since I had left the ships remained in force until the Monday morning when I got an email from the principal inviting me to see her in her office. We had not spoken in the weeks since the death of my father, and the first thing she said was, “I was so sorry to hear about your loss.”

I knew something else was up when her grave expression didn’t fade as we arranged ourselves in the deep leather chairs. She took a large smartphone from a blazer pocket and held it to my face. I saw screen shots of certain text messages between me and the mother of a boy on the cross-country team.

“I think this is a private thing,” I said.

“I'm not so sure about that. We received a batch of similar texts and emails going back roughly to the start of your employment.”

I wondered how my correspondence with the moms had ended up in a single file. I tried to figure out who would have sent it to my boss, and why.

“How would you like to do this?” the principal said.

“Do what?”

“I can accept your resignation. Or the school can terminate your contract.”

***

When I was a teenager, sort of as a joke, I started calling my mother “Ma.” She said she hated it and gave me light punches to the shoulder whenever I used that word. I stuck with it, though, and I think it helped set our relationship apart from the ones she had with my siblings. And so when, more than a month after Dad’s death, I told her I had lost my job and was going away, she insisted on seeing me off. I’m not so sure she would have done the same for my brother or my sister.

“I wonder if I’ll ever see you again,” she said.

“Don’t be dramatic, Ma.”

At sixty-seven, she was still a good driver, able to zip her Audi from lane to lane of traffic-clotted Route 3 and sneak between the rival buses, trucks, and cars on the helix that led to the mouths of the Lincoln Tunnel. Just as I had done as a child on drives to Manhattan, I kept an eye out, as we pushed through the rightmost of the three Lincoln Tunnel tubes, for the painted tiles marking the border between New Jersey and New York.

“I don’t understand how a person loses their job and then goes on a cruise. What will you do for money?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I don’t understand where you got this wanderlust.”

“Maybe you and Dad shouldn’t have taken me on the cruise that time. Or maybe it was the travel bureau. I always liked it there.”

“I would think you’d want to do something a little more useful.”

“I’ll be useful.”

She found a metered spot on West Forty-Second Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, and we walked under a gray sky toward the Hudson. I used my left hand to steer the boxy rolling suitcase that trailed me and my right to carry the soft hanging bag that contained the three suits I had bought online, not to mention the tux I'd worn on formal nights during my earlier years at sea.

“Got your passport?”

“Got it.”

“Can I wave to you from shore? Like people did in the old days?”

“You might have to wait for me to go through the safety thing, with everybody sitting in an auditorium, wearing life preservers.”

“I’d forgotten about that.”

Near the spot where the U.S.S. Intrepid was docked, we waited for the white walking man to show up on the sign before crossing the West Side Highway.

We turned right. Now coming into our view, partly obscured by a concrete structure, was the ocean liner and the great ropes that held it to the city. It seemed strange to me that no else was walking toward it.

“What’s the first stop?”

“Bar Harbor. Then Greenland.”

“How long till you make St. Petersburg?”

“About three weeks.”

“Will there be Russians on board?”

“Let’s hope.”

She gave me a light punch on the shoulder, the way she used to, which somehow made me want to cry, and she said, “I really don’t see how you can afford this kind of thing.” I didn’t reply but imagined myself saying, “I’m what they used to call a gigolo,” and I pictured her bursting out in laughter, and I heard her laughter die as her eyes took on a sudden look of clarity, and I saw myself moving closer to her, saying, “It’s just business, Ma. I’m a businessman, too.”

Our farewell hug lasted a few seconds longer than I had expected. I believed she was sending me a telepathic message to tell me that she knew, that she understood, that she thought my way of life was not ideal, but that it was all right, given my particular skills and weaknesses, traits unsuited to running a business but sufficient for getting a person through the days more or less unharmed.

“If you can wait here, I’ll wave from the deck."

“I’d like that.”

"It won’t be like the old days, when everybody waved handkerchiefs as the ship pulled away, but it’ll be close enough.”

"That's O.K."

It turned out I was the last passenger to sign in and step through security. A crew member told me I would have to go through the safety session with the other stragglers. I nodded and moved on to the gangplank.

The horn sounded, and from the top deck I saw my mother, thirty or forty feet below, holding her hands to her ears. I leaned over the rail and waved as the ship started to move, and she waved back with a wild hand. I remembered something, the white handkerchief in my jacket pocket, and I waved it with an old-time flourish, and I saw her laughing in a way that seemed to say she loved me, even if I didn't measure up.

THAT WAS THE YEAR WE by Eric Scot Tryon

April 7, 2021

That was the year we went to Colombia to visit her parents. Her mom had just had surgery on her hand and couldn’t cook, so we spent a month eating empanadas from the little market on the corner, the one with the blind dog that always lay across the open door. Perfect golden-brown crescents, we devoured them on the small white plastic table outside with a cold beer or we ate them as we walked around the town square. She would tell me the history of the church or about the protests that happened there when she was a kid.

That was also the year she got pregnant. We loved to think it happened on that trip, maybe one of the nights we were away in Anapoima. One of the nights we walked to the tiny bar atop the hill. The bar that was just six poles, an aluminum roof and a large ice cooler. Walls and windows and doors are not always necessary. Yes, maybe it happened one of the nights we got drunk there and chatted to the locals until the darkest hour of the night. She, already talking in cursive, would translate their stories back to me, and we all laughed as if speaking the same language. One of the nights we stumbled back to the tiny four-room hotel with paper thin drapes that blew into the room like ghosts.

But that was also the year she got unpregnant. That’s what we decided to call it. She lay in bed for weeks, often FaceTiming her mom, longing to be back in a place where she had childhood stories, back in a place where the soil and the trees and the drunk locals with missing teeth all spoke her native tongue. I didn’t always feel welcome during those calls and that was fine. Some things shouldn’t be translated. Instead I spent those days on YouTube, in the kitchen, flour dotting my forehead, watching videos on how to make empanadas. Perfect golden-brown crescents. The kind that crisp when you bite into them, a little bit of heaven wafting out with the steam.