Creative Nonfiction

UNDERTOW by Tara Stillions Whitehead

April 1, 2021

We pinned their name tags to our knitted sacks. Reynolds. Solomon. Childs. Kennedy. We wrote their room numbers on our wrists and waited for them on the cement benches near the commandant’s office. We sat with our legs crossed, condoms in our back pockets, while they marched the line in their parade uniforms. We tracked sand from dorm to bedroom sheets. Someone's mother washed their civvies and kept them in the guest room or the pool house, convinced we were the ones doing the civilizing.

There were boys whose names we couldn’t share. Boys whose names we’d seen taped inside other girls’ lockers. Boys whose hips were like rip tides. Boys with thirsty eyes. Boys in beach stairwells and stolen cars. Boys in bathroom stalls above the fire pits at Coyote, behind the air hockey tables in Mr. Peabody’s.

Wharton. Claussen. Holt. Phelps.

We carried their desire. We carried the sea.

When they were expelled or graduated or disappeared, we pinned their names between the Christmas lights on our bulletin boards. We cocooned ourselves in our salty-air bedrooms and drank wine coolers and collaged, high on unspent touch, sweating them out like a forever hangover. We kept their parents’ secrets and sent encrypted letters, silently thanked God for cigarettes and earthquakes and all things California.

Today, I write their names on a receipt with crossed out numbers and a long-past pediatrician appointment scribbled in the corner. Heinneman. Daltz. Prescott. The spellings don’t look right, but when I dig through the few boxes harboring those fugitive years, the photos are too blurry for confirmation.

I search Google and find an article about the boys the commandant gave whiskey to and took home. My chest rises and falls with the surge of events I thought fear and shame had erased. The boy who drowned in the undertow by academy barracks. The dime bags he kept in his beret. The boy who touched so long as I didn’t touch him back, his moaning in the beach stairwell, his blank unrecognition when I saw him at the winter formal. There was the boy who sold pills. The boy who bought and could not stop taking the pills. The boy who got so drunk he told us what had been done to him. The boy who slept with his rifle. The boy who fucked his rifle. The boy who wrote poems and was sent to the desert. Somewhere in between, sometime after, there was the boy who called me to tell me he’d been released from prison, to tell me he is not a boy anymore, that he never was allowed to be a boy then.

In the article, I see the commandant’s face for the first time. I read his name in the caption, five times in the article, one for each charge against him.

I do not see the boys’ names—McKee and Smith and Wright—but I hear them—Webb and Fritz and Oh—calling from the Mariana Trench, whispering just below the surface, translating the language of sand far from the sea.

WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE A GUN AND NOT A TARGET by Sutton Strother

March 19, 2021

He’s the only other person you know who loves David Bowie. Not like your friends tolerate David Bowie for your sake or how your mom only knows the radio hits. He knows all the albums you talk about, every deep cut. “Modern Love” is his favorite Bowie song (killer drums, he says right before the first verse kicks in), so on days when there’s a test in his class you listen to it while you dress for school. It reminds you not to hate him, no matter how difficult he makes the questions. There’s power in the not-hating.And when your step-dad slams your step-brother's body against the side of the family van, he listens. And when your mom gets knocked up, he listens. He listens during lunch and after school and on his planning period (he won’t rat you out for ditching history to visit him). You sit together on the tables of his empty classroom, your leather platform boots kicking the toes of his Payless loafers.He lets you steal his CDs – not just Bowie but The Police and Peter Gabriel and The Who – and brings you DVDs from home. He tells you what to love about everything, and you repeat his opinions back to him like a clever parakeet. He compliments the haircut your friends say is butch. He tells you your singing voice is beautiful when you practice “Kashmir” for the talent show. When the bell rings, he stops you in the doorway of his classroom to finger the sleeve of your new satin blouse and whisper his approval.He signs emails with Love and his first name.He smells rotten. It’s nothing you’d notice if he weren’t hovering over your desk to murmur an inside joke, but he hovers so much. Sometimes you catch yourself putting distance between the two of you, avoiding the radius of that stench. You’re never quite sure where on his body it’s coming from, but it’s bad enough to keep you from doing something stupid. Not that you want to do something stupid, although at seventeen you’re aching for some wildness that could set you apart from the Christian girls in Abercrombie. The joke, of course, is all those girls are getting laid while you’ve wasted two years pining for a boy who doesn’t want you and a girl who can’t want you. Nobody will ever want you. There will only ever be him with his stink and his weak chin and the swirls of back hair peeking through his cheap white dress shirt. You don’t want him. There’s power in the not-wanting. You wrest his desire from his own hands to wield against him. You mock it with friends who call you a cock tease, and even then you say things like What if I’m not teasing? then cackle when they shriek Who would ever fuck him? Certainly not you.Though if you did, you wouldn’t be the first. When you were a sophomore, all the seniors told you a soccer player sucked his dick for a college recommendation letter.But that might not be true.And anyway, you wouldn’t. Not that he was asking (the smart ones never ask, you’ll learn from some feminist blog when you’re twenty-two). He talks a lot about giving up teaching to become a doctor. Some days he means it, and on those days, you come home and cry.You wish he were your step-dad, real dad, foster dad. He’s barely old enough to be any of those things.And he’s too old to marry. Isn’t he? You sometimes imagine it anyway, more thought experiment than wish. It would mean living with his mother, but she would die eventually. It would mean never leaving your hometown. It would mean a partner with a steady job and a music collection you didn’t hate. You could do worse than that. Your mother did worse than that. But there’s the stink of him to consider (maybe it’s halitosis, you and your friends posit, maybe it’s a glandular thing). You think of curdled milk and mummy wrappings. You couldn’t endure it for very long. Then one day you’re in a crowded room somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, watching a robot from North Carolina battle the robot your classmates built, and suddenly the stink is everywhere. It stings your nose, trickles sour down the back of your tongue, clogs your pores. It settles on your hair and clothes like smoke. Two hands grip your shoulders from behind and begin to knead them. You remember the day sophomore year when he taught your class about chromosomes. The boys all laughed and said you were so mannish you must have been born with an X and a Y. He laughed too, but when you gave them all the finger, he didn’t frown or tut or send you to the principal’s office. You let yourself believe he was on your side.You lock eyes with a friend across the room. She’s taking all this in, biting into her lip like she’s holding in a scream (I was jealous of that attention, she’ll confess fifteen years later, I just wanted someone to love me, even a creep like him) and you’re holding in a scream of your own (you’ll tell her you wanted the same thing). He slips his fingers beneath the collar of your T-shirt, and no one is stopping him (he will kiss your face at graduation, in the middle of another crowded room). You’re not stopping him (next year, when you’re at college, he’ll tell his students lies about you). This moment just won’t stop happening (you’ll hear a rumor that he’s sleeping with one of those students). You bite your cheek and keep holding in the scream (this time you’ll know it’s true). You believe (he has probably done all of this a dozen times before), you have got to believe (he is probably doing this right now), there’s power in the not-screaming.

LIVER MUSH IS AN ESSAY ABOUT MY MOM by Graham Irvin

March 3, 2021

I want to talk about liver mush. Liver mush is a breakfast meat from Western North Carolina made of boiled pork parts and corn meal. It’s my favorite breakfast meat. It’s my favorite word.

Liver mush is more than pork parts and corn meal, though. There is also sage and black pepper. But, liver mush is more than breakfast and sustenance too. It’s something close to that, but not exactly.

It’s home but not home, but not exactly.

Liver mush is more than a piece of fried pork parts and corn meal. Liver mush is more than old white dinner plates in my mom’s kitchen at the table with the tile square top. Liver mush is more than feeling the sun on the top of my face and forehead and hairline, not looking out the window because I know it will be blindingly bright. It’s almost that, but not exactly. Liver mush is just a word, but the word means nothing to almost everyone and to me it means cracking open my skull and pureeing my memories into a grey mush that makes sense to the world.

Liver mush means as close as I can get you there with me at my mom’s kitchen table. It means we ride through downtown Kannapolis past the empty law offices and clothing stores. It means we stop to see the Dale Earnhardt statue and watch people get their photos taken below him and get our photos taken below him. It means my mom’s dog is loud and mean but gets used to you fast. It means my mom’s dog wants you to rub his belly now. It means my mom wants to know what we have planned and how long we want to stay and if we’re hungry and if she can help with anything. It means she hugs you right away. It means my bedroom hasn’t changed since high school. It means you’re going to make fun of the framed National Honor Society certificate because it I worked really hard to get it, and the framed puzzle of Time Square because I cared so much about New York, and the skateboard posters on the back of the door because the men are all 50 now.

Liver mush means we skip dinner with my mom and drive to Charlotte and my mom understands but we know it hurts her and we apologize but we know it’s not enough. It means we meet D and T at Common Market and sing karaoke at Snug Harbor and D and T are still together and Snug Harbor is still open. It means D isn’t surrounded by people I don’t know and living in an uptown apartment and doesn’t offer us coke. It means he hasn’t left for California yet.

It means we have enough time to get burgers and shots at The Diamond and I drive home drunk, 45 minutes on the interstate at 4 a.m., and even though we try our hardest to be quiet, we set off the alarm and wake up the dog and my mom says, “Grahamer, you okay?” and asks if I’ve been drinking when she smells it on me and I always deny it. It means we don’t brush our teeth and sleep in my high school bed together.

It means my mom still makes us breakfast in the morning, even though we’re hungover and not hungry and have to go back soon. It means I finally convince you to try liver mush because you made it this far so, why not?

It means you say it’s not that bad.

It means you say it’s actually pretty good.

It means you’re blown away by how good liver mush is with a name like liver mush.

Every time I tell my mom I have to go back I don’t say the word home because it hurts her feelings. She says, “Can’t you stay?” and I say, “No” and she says, “I was just picking.”

In my childhood bedroom, I put dirty clothes in the bottom of my overnight bag and decide to make the bed, even though my mom will change the sheets when I leave to keep busy while the house is empty.

When I hug my mom and tell her I love her and hug her again and tell her I love her again and tell her I’ll text her when I get there and tell her I’ll be safe on the drive, I feel home but not home for the rest of the day.

Liver mush means something like that.

MOUNTAIN MUSIC by Michael Seymour Blake

February 18, 2021

All kinds of warning lights are flashing on the dashboard, and the front bumper is mostly held together with duct tape. Chelsey and I are driving my cousin’s car through the Catskills, searching for a trail that leads to an abandoned hotel at the top of a mountain. It’s supposed to be crumbling and overgrown, a long-ago meeting place for communists.

It’s getting late, but we figure we have time to hike out, see this thing, and get back to the car by sundown.

The GPS has us turn up a narrow, dirt path that circles the mountain in a steady ascent. We tell ourselves all the private property signs are probably just more abandoned relics from a bygone age. Soon, there’s a sheer drop to our right and jagged walls of rock to our left. The car trembles as we gain altitude. It feels like there’s an earthquake under our asses.

“Didn’t your friend come here once?” I ask. “She mention anything about this?”

“Not that I remember.” Chelsey’s chin juts forward with determination, and her red hair is filled with dying sunlight.

Last week, while we ate dinner on the floor in front of the TV, the demons above us in 3B got into another scuffle. Flakes rained from the ceiling as they tumbled around up there, screaming at each other, “I’ll kill you this time. I’ll kill you!” We don’t have the money to move, and they’ve already declared war on some of the other tenants in our building who’ve complained, so our tactic is to huddle down and turn up the volume. “This city has been closing in around us for a long time now,” Chelsey had said. “It’s starting to feel like I can’t even stand up anymore. What the hell is left here for us anyway?”

“We are,” I’d replied.

This afternoon, when the hot water turned off unexpectedly for the fifth time this year, we came up with our last-minute Catskill Mountains escape plan.

We go round and round, creeping up the exposed path at a crawl. Big houses appear now and then on our left, each with chunky-tired, tough-looking vehicles parked on long, rugged driveways. This is no place for a borrowed, beat-up Nissan Versa hatchback.

“This must be a mistake,” I say.

“You think everything is a mistake. Relax for once.”

I turn on the radio. The Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music” is playing.

The path bends to the right and then slopes upwards at what seems like a seventy-degree angle.

“No way,” I yell over the Doobie Brothers.

“What?”

“No way are we making it up this thing.”

“We’ll be fine,” Chelsey says.

And for a short while, we are.

But then the car comes to a rumbling standstill about twenty feet before the path levels out. Up ahead, there’s another one of those long driveways leading to a house that’s all wood and windows with a big balcony overlooking the green treetops and thin, wormy roads below. A man in a silk robe watches us from that balcony. We’re churning up explosions of dust and rocks, not making any progress. Chelsey hits the brakes, but instead of stopping, we start rolling backwards. The gritty sound of dirt against wheels pierces through the music.

Chelsey’s eyes widen. “I don’t like this, I don’t like this,” she says.

I tell her to give it some gas, which she does, but we’re still losing momentum. And the curve in the path below is too sharp to navigate backwards without any traction.

I notice a small, snowflake-like chip near the top right corner of the windshield, and beyond that, the blood-bright leaves of a distant red oak waving in the breeze as if to say, “Bye-bye, dummies!”

I’m struck with the possible reality of us leaping from the car seconds before it plummets down the rock face. This is not an option. The speed of life returns as I realize that no one is going to save us except us.

I jump out, slide down into the cloud of debris, and throw everything I have at the rear bumper. Pebbles ricochet off my skull. With the bitter taste of dirt and dust in my mouth, I yell, “Floor it.”

The man in the robe is gone so I figure he’s on his way over to help. I’m thinking, If this thing goes over with Chelsey inside, I’m jumping after it. Then I realize I’d probably be crushed before I even got the chance to jump.

I attack the car with everything I’ve got as The Brothers continue to belt it out. Even on the verge of physical and financial disaster, some part of my mind is still cognizant of how good this song is.

I give one more big push. Blood surges through my small frame. My temples throb. “Come on you son of a bitch,” I yell. Then the engine roars and the car blasts off like a Roman candle. Chelsey cuts to the left just in time, skidding to a halt at a strange angle across the man’s driveway. I scurry up after it.

Chelsey stares straight ahead, still gripping the wheel. I reach through the window and turn off the music. The man is back on his balcony, but now he’s got a mug.

“You OK?” I ask Chelsey.

“Yeah,” she says. “You?” She places her clean hand over my filthy one.

The man sips whatever’s in his mug.

“Fuckin’ guy would have just casually watched us fly off the mountain,” I say. “Not this time, buddy.” I pat our car’s scalding hood. “Not this time.”

“Now what?” Chelsey asks. “GPS says the trailhead is only ten minutes up that way.”

“The only thing up that way is certain death.”

“That’s it then? After all this?” she says, but I can tell she agrees. We’re done here.

“Want me to drive?”

She climbs across the center console to the passenger seat.

“Hope you enjoyed the show,” I say to the man before getting in.

He makes no indication that he hears me, but as I buckle up and shift to reverse, he raises his mug to us and nods.

I pull out of the driveway, and we begin our sliding descent down the path, past the boulders and out of the woods, back to our world of nightmare neighbors and crumbling ceilings and shitty jobs. But we still have rolling wheels and a working engine and oxygen in our lungs and bones that aren’t crushed. Things could be worse. Duct tape can work wonders, and we’re not finished yet.

Windows down, we watch the sun cut into the horizon and the sky burn orange.

PET by Danielle Chelosky

February 15, 2021

The night we met, I showed up at your apartment with fishnets shoved inside my bag. I was too nervous to wear them as I walked from my car to your door. I got catcalled three times anyway.

Catcalling is really bad over here, you told me while we ascended the stairs. You took the lead; I followed timidly. I couldn’t take in your apartment as we stepped inside because I had too much going on in my mind. Your room, though, came across as beautiful—the light soft and careful, your bed sheets floral and muted, your walls white with art strewn about. I complimented the painting above your desk; it’s overtaken by a brown so dark it looks black, and two figures stand in the bottom left corner, hidden but visceral. You thanked me and said no one ever noticed it. I looked at the books stacked on your shelf against your wall. I was still awkward and scared, but I was at home.

***

You said I was like a cat—the way my eyes wandered, my attention small. I laid my legs on top of yours, and you smiled.

***

We stayed inside. Our love remained within the walls of your room, though I would never say it was restricted or confined. In the summer, I wore denim shorts and tank tops. I found closer parking spots. I got catcalled by a man skating one day but I didn’t mind. I smiled. I’d sweat on the forty minute drive to you; my car’s AC was broken and I’d decided that was fine.

I sat on your floor, painting on a canvas. It was for my art class. I looked at the corner where your bed met the walls. I stared at it, perplexed, trying to understand the geometrics. I was never good at compositions or technicalities. My professor called my work funny, so misshapen things became my style, unintentional or not.

You laughed at me sitting on your floor with all of my supplies set up. You look like my pet, you said, in your little nook.

***

I was a stray cat who frequented your home. You fed me, quenched my thirst, offered your affection as treats. I got dopamine rushes when you pet my hair or stroked my cheek. You bought us bottles of wine when I was used to liquor. Suddenly, the whole summer eluded me—the sunny days, the hot air, the sweaty freedom—and it morphed into a Yellow Tail blur.

You were eleven years older than me. I wanted to know what it felt like to be taken care of—to follow, to be someone’s shadow, to be given love that was bigger than what I knew. Once I felt it, I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t be on my own. I wanted to forever keep my head in the crook of your neck, your hands wherever they want to be on me.

***

You got me my first toy. Your present came in, you said. I felt so small, so silly. I wasn’t going to let you use it on me; I wanted to be the first for myself. And then we got drunk. And then I was on the edge of your bed open and curious like a butterfly. You pleasured me in new ways—you were solidifying your authority, securing our bond, hypnotizing me into being yours. I curled up and rolled around in ecstasy, purring.

***

I’m gonna get you a cage, you said, fucking me, and a collar and a leash.

The reward of your love and attention eclipsed the pain of trying desperately to elicit it. Mornings without you, I was with you—only in a one-sided kind of way. I lived in my head where I played moments of us over and over. I brought dead memories to life. I clung onto what I could from the nights that didn’t turn into a black haze.

***

One of those summer painting afternoons, I leaned on your windowsill looking out onto the street. You’re like a cat, you said again. I waited for people walking to look up and see me. I was naked. No one did. You came up behind me, touched my shoulders.

***

I don’t know if you know, but you do this thing, you said. You’ll wake up and start making these noises, and if I touch you then you’re quiet and you go to sleep. It happens every time you’re here. You were upset, not well-rested. I apologized; you said that you’re just trying to find out what’s wrong with me. What was that term you used, you asked, which I thought just applied to dogs when their owners are away at work and they bark a lot? I said: Separation anxiety? You said: yeah.

***

I am sitting on the edge of your bed and, without turning your head, you tell me to stop looking at you. I am waiting, I am begging—I am thinking of what trick I could do for you to give me a treat.

Still, in this restless desperation I find pleasure. I like when you tease me, when you’re mean to me. I love when you pay no attention to me, I love when you hit me. I love the one-sided tunnel vision I have for you, I love the pain and the neglect.

It’s winter now. I think I will spend most days wandering around in the snow.

THAT’S ALL YOLKS by Alex Juarez

February 11, 2021

I think about crawling into Arizona’s skin. It would be easiest to go through her eyes. A few years ago, I read an article about a girl who while on meth performed self-enucleation. Her pastor found her screaming, “I want to see the light,” while holding her eyes in her hands. I don’t want to hurt Arizona, but I think if I could slip inside, we would be easier.

Before our alarms go off, she has a headache, so she presses her palms against her face and groans. I mirror it to make her feel like our emotional bond is strong.

“Do you want some Advil?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

We don’t say anything else because maybe, after eight months, there is nothing left to say. Instead, we lay down shoulder to shoulder and try to not touch each other.

Outside, the flowers are coming back to the trees, and I watch them without moving. If we were forced to stay in bed like this forever, it wouldn’t be terrible, but I wouldn’t volunteer to do it. An alarm is waiting to make us move in a few minutes. Tomorrow, I will get on a plane and then we will never be in love again.

I turn to look at her. If I could get to her core, I could grab the headache and pluck it out. Back when we were more in love than this, I would place my head in her lap and she would tweeze my eyebrows. When I shower at her place, I leave long strings of my hair all over her apartment, so that she’ll have to remember me.

Last night, we watched a horror movie and she closed her eyes the entire time. As the girl on screen chewed on a finger like a drumstick, she said that we don’t have any of the same interests. I asked if that was a bad thing.

After the alarms, Arizona’s headache stops, and she asks if I want something to eat. I kiss her cheek, just under her eye.

“No, I’m okay. I don’t really want to get up.”

She nods and unsticks the mess our legs have made; our skin peeling apart with sweat.

“I’m going to make eggs.”

She gets up and walks into the kitchen. I roll over onto her side of the bed and imagine how warm I would be inside of her. I wonder where we could hide the zipper that I would use to get in and out; how I could shrink for the extra three inches.

On our third date, we sat in a pierogi shop until 4 am. Over blue cups of sour cream and onions, I told her about my murdered uncles. I said, “It’s twenty years this month and I feel like I am supposed to be more upset, but I didn’t even know them.” She didn’t say anything, and at the time, I imagined that meant that she was digesting me completely.

When I don’t hear anything from the kitchen besides the bursts of hot oil and the fridge opening and closing, I get up.

I bite her shoulder as she cooks. I am supposed to be in love to the point that I can’t help but want to put my teeth around her.

Arizona shrugs herself out of my mouth and makes her eggs, scrambled.

“Do you ever think about how yolks are fetuses?” I say into her hair.

I want her to want me like this. Or for her to pretend to want me like this. My deep desire to amalgamate controlling everything and every thought. I want to see what the reciprocation feels like.

“No.”

After tomorrow, Arizona and I are not going to see each other for two months. I know that she won’t write me any letters. A dull, persistent pang births at the base of my throat and seeps into the rest of me. I move to the table.

“Would you ever eat your own body?” I ask her.

“What?” She turns away from the frying pan. Her invitation to crawl into me is open. “Why would you even think of that?”

I tell her that I read an article about a man who had his leg amputated and he kept it to make tacos. He invited his friends over, and they all ate him. I add that I wouldn’t do it, but I don’t believe myself.

She turns around and flips off the heat.

There is a cup of juice from the day before on the table and I want it inside of me. Last night, I asked Arizona to put her fingers in my mouth or around my neck; she didn’t and then we both cried.

In a few months, in a bathtub in Cheyenne, she will tell me, “You said we were soulmates, and I wanted to believe you. But I think I’m just someone who loved you without being mean.”

She slides the eggs onto a plate and squeezes some ketchup on the side. Then, she sits down at the table with me and looks into me. I put my feet on her thighs to see if she will do anything.

IMAGINE THE SECOND COMING by Stevie Trujillo

January 25, 2021

Silencio, our guide whispered.

Just then, we were ambushed by hundreds of orange bursts, swirling and darting in every direction, while thousands more blossomed in the pine branches overhead. The sound of their powder-thin wings fluttering so close to my ears tickled the back of my neck, like angel whispers. I raised my shoulders and giggled.

Adult Monarchs normally live three to four weeks, but the ones that migrate south are part of a special generation born towards the end of summer, called the Methuselah. They live seven or eight months—about nine times longer than the average lifetime.

Imagine living for 700 years.

The butterflies, like us, had started their 3,000-mile journey from the United States to Mexico four months prior. In my mind, we were an inter-species diaspora, escaping harsh conditions. Unlike us, however, the Monarchs would only stay until March when they and their progeny returned north, whereas Tree and I would continue onward in our van to Patagonia. We’d lost nearly everything in the Recession—my fancy sales job, Tree’s investment property, our ability to pay rent and stay solvent. Forced to live in our van to make ends meet, we decided to head south of the border where our dollars would go further, and there was less shame in being poor.

Standing in that storm of endangered butterflies ten years ago, Tree and I felt alone in our failures. But the truth is, we were legion; a whole generation in distress. And, now, I’ve read that researchers at Pew are already wondering whether the coronavirus pandemic will become to Gen Z—our daughter’s generation—what the Great Recession was to us, by which they mean a festering wound that hobbles their start in a ruthless race.

Yet, isn’t what’s coming so much more devastating than that?

On March 14th, we suddenly found ourselves locked-down with our seven-year old daughter in an apartment on Tenerife, a small Spanish island off the coast of Africa. Within days, she began experiencing night terrors—anxious manifestations from not being allowed outside.

“Mama! Mama!” she shrieked, night after night, thrashing wildly with her eyes open. I rushed into her room to help, to hold her, to tell her it was all going to be alright but, stuck in liminal consciousness, she couldn’t hear or see me. She kicked and screamed and choked, her voice strangled in the fight against an unseen monster.

Even now, on our walks through the city, the invisible boogieman hides on hard surfaces and floats in the air.

“Stop touching your mask,” I gently scold.

Unbeknownst to my daughter, the baby of Gen Z, a million people worldwide have already died of the virus while the U.N. warns that the number of people dying from hunger could double this year from the financial fallout of confinement. The boogeyman has presented grownups with a horrifying dilemma: keep the economy open at the risk of spreading disease or keep the economy closed at the risk of mass starvation.

Again, I’m reminded of the Monarchs.

Like the Methuselah who journey far to breed in the sanctuaries of the south, my husband and I are raising our daughter abroad where we can afford to give her a better start in life. Geographic arbitrage, it’s called. And, yet, the Monarch’s path has been overbuilt, sprayed with Roundup and stripped of milkweed, just as my daughter’s path has been paved with crisis. There is no escape; fancy terms be damned. In fact, if we could take the long-view of the biblical Methuselah who lived 969 years, we’d see that this current rupture of our “normal” lives is only a preamble for the Second Coming, Yeats' infamous “rough beast” slouching towards Bethlehem to be born: the global food shortages, the mass migrations, the devil that scientists under the current administration are forbidden to name. We talk of “flattening the curve” while the Keeling Curve, the graph that shows the ongoing change in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, continues to rise.

As the Earth gets hotter, conditions favor the spread of infectious disease and the start of new pandemics.

Imagine going extinct.

Over the past 20 years, there’s been an 80 percent total decline in the North American Monarch population. As they teeter on the edge of an extinction tipping point—in which numbers drop too low for the species to recover—scientists warn that habitat loss and human-caused climate change are to blame. In fact, as many as three-quarters of animal species could be extinct within several human lifetimes, imperiling the very systems that keep people alive.

Holding these thoughts fills me with dread. Like my child, I, too, wake terrorized in the middle of the night, strangled by an invisible monster. If this pandemic has laid bare one thing, it’s that we’ve yoked our survival to the survival of the economy—and this economy will kill us all. How will we Houdini our way out of this existential double-bind?

To anyone paying attention, the answer is obvious: we need systemic change. Super-size-me, carbon-based capitalism isn’t working. So, maybe what I mean to ask is, by what sorcery will we extricate ourselves from this corporate chokehold to do what’s necessary and right by our children before it’s too fucking late?

The curve is rising.

In the mornings, before we begin our new normal of homeschool and Zoom calls, my daughter sits on her bedroom floor, surrounded by sticks, an empty wine box, and a hot glue gun. When lockdown began, she started mining our recycling bin daily to create something—a three-foot tall sled-dog, an extended family of dragons, a pregnant fairy with a peg leg (the obvious favorite)—from our waste. An alchemist in her underwear, she turns what was base and broken into gold.

“What are you making this time?” I ask.

“A birdhouse. I’m going to put it on the balcony so I can adopt a little bird but not put her inside a cage, because that makes me sad. Birds should be free,” she explains, without a hint of irony.

Imagine a sustainable future.

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? by Allie Zenwirth

January 20, 2021

A

I used to get these pangs of want, filled with unnamable desires. You would find me jumping. You would find me erratic. I want to make something. I want to dance with somebody… I want to feel the heat with somebody… yeah... With somebody who loves me. Я хочу. I want… I want… I want… I don’t know… I want… If you were that stranger at the bar you would ask me, “How do you have so much energy?” and I would say, “I don’t know,” and then jeté away.

Now I’m drained, all my juice is gone. Instead of yelling at people to, “Wake up!” I’m alone in a desert of darkness, amputated, stuck on scalding asphalt, bleeding as I push myself forward by my stumps one inch at a time into a never-ending nightmare. Nobody’s home inside me. My voice is deeper and flatter, allowing my new apartment-mate to clock me as trans:

New Apartment Mate: Can I ask you a question?

Allie Zenwirth: Sure

New Apartment mate: Your voice is very thick

Allie Zenwirth:

New Apartment Mate: (winks, gives thumbs up)

I am in a manhole of wanting to die. The lid standing between me and the street weighs 249 lbs (as manhole covers are wont).

My therapist points out that my suicidality is reasonable.* That makes me feel better.

*he phrases it differently.

B

In the beginning of 2020, Corona Time, New York was the epicenter. I stayed with my Russian professor in Yonkers for a month, and during one particular dinner, as I talked everyone’s heads off about the Community, I got a text.

Father: How are you feeling?

I announced: “Guess who just texted me?” I consumed everyone. “That’s a weird text, right? The first time in months: ‘How are you feeling?’ How should I respond?”

From my father’s perspective, a concern regarding my health was reasonable. About half of the Chasidic community was infected by the virus. He was. My mom was. His brothers were. My mom’s siblings were.

I had a follow up call with my father who said he’ll call me back, but he never did. However, the virus gave my mom an excuse to talk with me again. We hadn’t spoken in a year.

C

For a while, her disembodied voice was a grounding presence. She was someone to talk to when I moved back to my room in Jersey City. A windowless basement room in which I couldn’t stand upright, without A/C, and infested with both cockroaches and ants. Housing-wise, things improved when I paid the extra $150 and moved up to the second floor. I was still unemployed, alone, without many friends.

D

Throughout my years at Sarah Lawrence College, I would be on the verge of homelessness during the winter breaks when the campus closed, relying on the kindness of strangers. During the break my senior year, January of 2019, I called my mother, asking her if she wanted to get together. Just like the year before, she asked if she could think about it and call me back. After three days, she decided she would be down to meet, but just like the year before, it would need to be in secret. We discussed our options and my mom determined it would be as if we were to have an affair. We would book a hotel room.

The following Wednesday morning, after eating two egg and cheese English Muffins I had gotten from Dunkin’ the night before, I looked out the window of a room in Hotel Le Blu and watched as a woman approached the hotel. She had gained weight. As usual she was wearing body-covering dark-colored clothing and false hair.

My mother entered the hotel and came up the elevator. I found her in the hallway, looking lost. I hugged her as if she were a pillow. Going into the room she put down her bags of Greek yogurt for herself and homemade cookies for me and we sat down on chairs facing each other. She got straight down to what she wanted to tell me.

Mom: I love you.

Me: I love you too.

Mom: I like talking with you on the phone.

Me: I like talking with you too.

Mom: I know you are well intentioned, but you writing a memoir has been incredibly hurtful to me. I know you think you’re doing it for the right reasons, but I don’t think it’s ok that you expect me to keep talking with you.

Me: Is it because I am writing about you? I could use a pseudonym.

Mom: Being written about is part of it. You know I’m a private person.

Me: (nods unsure)

Mom: But...

The real problem? I would be writing negatively about the Community.

E

Talking with my mother in the bowels of my basement room was not all bliss. We would argue in almost hour-long bursts. Strangers would look at me strangely as I broke the silence of the night, making laps around my neighborhood, raising my voice in vehemence. She argued that I wasn’t Paul Revere rousing the colonials, that my memoir was not whistleblowing, that I was sharing with the world a warped version of the Chasidic Community, one driven by hatred and personal grievance.

I argued that the Chasidic Community was a place where human rights were being violated.

In August of 2020, when my mother recruited an aunt and an uncle to help refute my claims, when three people telling me that my experience in the Community was my own fault* became too much, I told my mother so. I told her we could continue to speak but I will not be gaslighted. She stopped calling me.

*My mother will laugh. How predictable: another conversation that I warp and misconstrue. What else is new?

F

So now here I am in September of 2020, isolated, with a deadness all too familiar. My feelings blend with those of my still-in-Community-self, the mirage of pain I left behind in 2016, when I escaped. An experience I hoped would never return.

G

In 2011, when I was thirteen, I would sit beside Halberstam, a rabbi who was also a therapist, in the uncomfortable chair besides his desk, waiting. The darkness that had surrounded me since the age of five had turned into a throbbing pain. I was waiting for Halberstam to tell me why. To prescribe me some Advil.

Like a pediatrician walking into a room saying, “Hi, how are you doing?” who would hear a few symptoms then confidently declare, “So here is what I’m going to do,” Halberstam found the problem: it was my parents. They had been putting “interjections” in my brain, programming me to believe that I deserved to be miserable. He implied that I was abused. I had never liked my parents, but I never realized their terribleness. “Oh boy, poor me.”

Halberstam’s abuse theory was not based on anything I said. I found out later that my mother had been seeing him as a patient as well. He must have based it on what my mother told him during her therapy. Something real. Unwilling and unable to tell me the truth, he turned it into something vague, which turned into “my parents are abusing me.” He didn’t bother to check in and see if that was my lived experience. He didn’t bother to check in and see if that was what made me unable to see anything but bleakness.

H

In 2014, after my second hospitalization in a psych ward, at sixteen, my mother and I became friends. Prison inmates. My mother shared that she never wanted me to be born. I was grateful she told me as it meant I wasn’t making things up. For a while, that was all that was mentioned of it. Then, in 2020, during the few months we resumed talking, my mother added that she didn’t want to get married either. She described her increasing dread as the wedding date had drawn nearer.

I

In 2020, when we would be on the phone, I argued that the Community was to blame for her marriage and my birth. The Community made her get married to someone she didn’t know at 18, and made her pump out one kid after the other. But in her mind the fault was her own. She could have decided not to get married and be ostracized. She chose to get married because deep down she wanted to. “We all need connection.” She could have gone on birth control even though she wasn’t allowed to without permission from a judge. She chose to have kids to prove to the world that you can have kids and not love them.

J

Sister Cathleen (Margaret Qualley) is a novice in training at a nunnery in Novitiate (2017). She is intimacy repressed to the extent that she can’t bear hearing the object of her desire, Sister Emmanuelle (Rebecca Dyan), read the bible. One night, Sister Emmanuelle wakes up to a knock on her door. She opens it a crack.

Sister Emmanuelle: (whispers) You can’t be here

Sister Cathleen: (inaudible pleading)

Sister Emmanuelle: Okay

They both sit down on the bed nervous. LONG pause.

Sister Cathleen: Do you remember… Do you remember when you asked what I was starving for? I just want to be comforted… please will you just comfort me… please… please will you just… please will you just… please I just want to be comforted… please will you just comfort me... Please… Please… Please… Please will you just comfort me… Please will you just comfort me…

Unable to shut up until she is held, kissed, smothered, and eaten.

I feel that.

THE COLLAPSE OF A STAR by Jamie Etheridge

January 15, 2021

We sit in the van parked on the railroad tracks not knowing if the train is coming, or if you are going. You want to die. You said so and we believe you. Momma cries out, “Bill, please,” over and over and we wait, inhale then hold, for you to decide.

It was always like that. Random moments of drama; life or death, on the side of the road. That time in Texas in the middle of the worst blizzard in thirty years. The truck’s engine exploded and we were stuck, freezing, as semis whooshed past on the highway and the truck rocked in the aftertow. ‘Bill, please,” she pleaded as the baby cried in her lap and we huddled in the back of the cab, fingers crackling in the cold.

The FBI mailed out wanted posters. Later, when I finally got the files: thick black lines redacting my childhood alongside the names of the agents who’d tracked you. I found facsimiles of your face, eyes front, turned to the left, turned to the right, and your aliases, pages and pages of them. You were always a good storyteller, a natural whipsaw with a lie.

There were pills and booze and cons. And days when you could hardly get out of the bed in whatever cheap motel and whatever cheap town we’d drifted to, and Momma had to scratch out breakfast, lunch and dinner for us on the $10 she had hidden in her wallet.

There were joys. You driving us through the looming hush of the redwoods of northern California, explaining how the dinosaurs scratched their bellies against the Cretaceous bark. Or the sound of your cowboy boots crunching on the gravel as we followed you to the edge of a cliff in the Cherokee National Forest, your smile wide as the vista over the valley below.

The melancholy of Willie Nelson singing about angels flying too close and your voice, melodic and on key, despondent as a star in an empty universe.

I can still smell the smoke from your Winston King trailing out the open window as we children slept folded against each other like paper bags. The infinite hours, days, weeks, months and years we cruised I-10, each mile bringing us closer to, or taking us further away from, what you couldn’t face.

Then the time in Vegas when you disappeared for two or maybe three days, I can’t remember. We ate cereal and milk and watched endless episodes of Knight Rider and Three’s Company on the small, staticky TV in the motel room. We knew you’d come back. We hoped you’d come back rich or at least with enough money to buy food.

You almost died in Arkansas.

Why do they call it that? I always think of the ark of the Covenant and the followers of Moses. Here are some rules to follow: Never tell anyone your real name (I didn’t know mine until I was nine years old.) Help your mother take care of the little ones. Always stay close in case we have to leave in a hurry. Don’t sass your father or you’ll get a slap. One day when I’m gone, you’ll be sorry.

I’m sorry, Daddy.

The heart attack came on so swiftly that your face turned blue with the pain, and your eyes, already bulging, bugged out and scared us all. The nitroglycerin pills weren’t working and Momma called the ambulance and they took forever to come. Seven children left behind in the motel room, too terrified to talk, hungry and squabbling over the television because at least that was something we could control. They airlifted you to Tulsa and Momma said there would be an operation. They would slit open your heart, chip away at the blockages the way miners dig for gold.

But in the night you stripped the IV from your arm, ripped out the catheter, painting the ICU floor and walls with your blood until they called security and Momma, and she flew to the hospital with your clothes and boots. We woke up in the morning with you in the bed, in the motel room, smoking, your skin like drain water after a fierce storm. We knew nothing and yet understood that everything, everything, was wrong.

You said you dreamed you would die on that table, an open heart at 5am and so you kept it closed. The doctor yelled after you that you wouldn’t live to see tomorrow. 365 tomorrows are what you got instead.

After that you wouldn’t leave the South but circled in a meandering loop between Florida, Georgia and Alabama, between your parents, her parents and other relatives. Life being relative, we knew by then. We stayed close to ‘home’ in case something happened.

Only you were our home, the blazing, burning sun of our universe and when you collapsed finally, sinking in upon yourself, the morphine dimming the light in your eyes, the doctor shaking his head slowly from the doorway, our world went dark. And like planets long orbiting a dying star, we were freed to float away, off into the silent, empty universe, or to collapse ourselves into the hole at the center of the world.

ON THE STREET CORNER by Lina Lau

December 30, 2020

To see him again—tall, lean, crinkling eyes, thin lips tugged into a smile, always dry from working outside high up in the trees, a ‘tree doctor,’ he called himself—my stomach drops like it did when we first met at seventeen, him walking into the shoe store where I worked, later returning to ask me out, the first time picked up by a boy meeting my parents and we strolled the boardwalk in and out of circles of lamppost light, illuminating, fingers intertwined, his large hands enveloping, and now two decades later on the street corner in front of his parked work truck, white instead of black like the one he bought when we were together, so big he hoisted me up at the used car dealership, chuckling, the first truck I ever drove, perched and squinting out too-dark tinted windows, picking him up downtown at the end of his serving shift when his tip money was stolen out of his locker, a weekend job to save cash for our daydreamed trip to Belize, we catch up—his wife’s new hospital job, high daycare costs for his kids (I don’t reveal I know about his wife and kids from curious social media searches over the years), and my recent engagement (I keep the ring hidden under my gloves, he doesn’t ask)—then reminisce, his downcast embarrassment when his car ran out of gas on our third date, trekking the highway shoulder together carrying a red plastic gas can, the stocking I made for his first Christmas celebration, having renounced his mother’s religion just before we met, his name sewed in bold block white felt letters like the ones from my own childhood, eating soggy sandwiches under flat-bottom clouds in Saskatchewan during a cross-country drive, slurping warm chicken noodle soup on New Year’s Eve while he sprawled under a navy blanket on the couch sick with shingles, how I watched the X-Files through outstretched fingers covering my face curled beside him, always seeking his protection, stuck at the top of Blackcomb mountain, scared on a double-black diamond run in my stiff snowboard and boots, him holding me and coaxing me down, stripping mint-green paint from an old dresser, a thrift store find, sanding it bare and refinishing in hazelnut, something hearty and new, a dresser I still use, and now our belly laughter deep and full, talking over each other, words tumbling, so we don’t notice the crisp November air but shove hands deeper into pockets and step closer, my chattering teeth overlooked, work appointments ignored, my chest tightening as he removes his work helmet, tousling greying hair, and then a pause—his lowered voice asking, “Why did we break up again?”— and we remembered me leaning against the kitchen counter while he paced the grey speckled tiles, looking everywhere but at me, voice cracking, that after nearly nine years he didn’t want to settle down, he wasn’t ready, not in his mid-twenties, reasons now evaporated, and then for years, out-of-the-blue phone calls, dinners and concerts, pinkies linked, new boyfriends compared, each time wondering if this was it, hopeful, surprised at details he remembered about me that even I forgot, his memories a tether, getting tattoos, two colorful swallows on his chest facing each other, the crest of a blue wave on the inside of my left ankle, ebb and flow of tides, permanent reminders, and yet another night together, entangled and familiar, falling asleep as always with one leg draped over his, bodies warm and clinging together with sweat, hot breath in my neck, after he hosted a going away get-together before I moved away for grad school, grilling burgers for my friends, and I remember not our first kiss, but the one when I first knew, outside his sister’s apartment door, his back against the wall, me leaning in on tiptoes, him pulling me close, the weight of his clasped hands behind my back, the taste of cigarettes, and now we gaze at each other across a long silence, and when we hug goodbye, we each hold tight before letting go.