Creative Nonfiction Archives

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? by Allie Zenwirth

January 20, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

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.

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THE COLLAPSE OF A STAR by Jamie Etheridge

January 15, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

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.

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ON THE STREET CORNER by Lina Lau

December 30, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

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.

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LOW VISIBILITY by Jillian Luft

November 18, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

We’re in a blizzard, the sheer white of it haloing our Nissan Maxima as we careen across the northeast interstate, miles and miles away from the tropical green swelter of our backyard, the cicada buzz of Florida. Starting somewhere in New Jersey, the weather blots out the roads, swallows exit signs, engulfs my parents, younger brother and me in its silent magic. Our burgundy sedan skidding slightly as our mouths open in unison to the light falling soundlessly outside. For the first time in our lives, we feel like the lucky ones. Sole witnesses to a quiet miracle, a record-breaking weather event. This is a real indoor thrill ride, an attraction the likes of Mickey Mouse and company have never seen. Stay off the roads, the voice within the radio warns. Black ice and low visibility. And that poetic caution just encourages us further. As we pass rest areas and off-ramps, a collective thrill electrifies our innards. We’re probably the only car on the road, my mother brags. Mom’s body, nearly healthy, can now journey distances. Untethered from her bed and hospital rooms, she craves the foreign frozen white she’d once seen as a child. And now it falls endlessly. A gift.

The warm air streaming through the vents smells like burnt Doritos. I layer the tiny worlds of pop songs playing on the radio over the large natural one zooming by outside and everything seems to matter more. I press my face against the window, the cool against my cheek as close as I’ve come to touching snow. I don’t even need to, I think. This is enough. My family and I cozy in our puffy jackets, the nylon squealing with our every breath, the vast and beautiful emptiness of the landscape moving past us, the vastness of this moment.

This memory I trust because of the comfort it offers--the illusion of a comfortable family, bonded through adventure, united through endearing naivete. It’s everything after the snow melts and the trees disrupt the sky and the mountains choke the horizon and the Man and the Woman and their Boy and their Girl greet us from the front of their smalltown New York home that eludes me, that blurs at the edges like a lucid dream. We meet this family through a sick neighbor of ours, an older woman dying of breast cancer. It is the Man’s mother. Every month or so, the Man and his family fly down to Florida to visit the ailing woman and her husband. When she eventually dies, we get closer to the Man and his family. Well, it’s mostly the Man and Mom that become close, soft murmurs in living rooms, secret jokes exchanged, exaggerated laughter over telephone lines. Illness connects people, I guess. The whiff of death like pheromones. The last name of the Man literally means “fair one.” Synonymous with snow.

It is the Man’s idea that we make the trek up north and explore his roots. Most memories from this vacation are faint but pleasant: day trips to a dairy farm and abattoir, hikes across rocky streams, rollicking down unpaved roads in the center seat of the Man’s big truck, safely wedged between him and Mom while the trees grow taller and thicker, snagging us in their spidery canopy. My dad follows close behind in the Maxima. I catch his face in the rear view but can’t tell what his mouth is doing.

Other memories are visceral reels of film unspooling in my brain. So vivid and surreal that I wonder what’s been erased, replaced and edited and for what narrative purpose. For instance, the boys at the bottom of the hill. We view them from across the road, standing in their makeshift tool shed, the gaping maw of the open garage. The Boy, the eldest of us four, asks them to play. They answer back with spit and cussing and dark curls threatening and rosy mouths sneering. The slightly bigger one wields a hatchet, says he can cut us up. Says his parents aren’t home. Says we better start running. And then, inexplicably, these dark and curly child demons are chasing us through the graveyard that snakes along the Boy and Girl’s property. With hatchet in hand, the bigger one sprints, intent on violence. The smaller one appears to be walking on all fours. My feet scramble over the homes of the buried, the Girl with the name of a poisonous tree pulling at my hand, her golden ponytail fleeing from her neck in panic. We run and run, zigzagging through the names of the dead. I think of the monstrous men from horror movies who chase children with weapons that maim, that slaughter. There’s a fence, wooden rungs just tall enough for us to clamber over. And we do with gelatinous knees and oily palms. The Girl presses on my shoulders, pulls me down onto the icy earth behind a large tree. The Boy and my brother are there too, crouching and speaking loudly with frightened eyes despite the controlled clench of their rounded jaws. The Boy puts his index finger to his lips to calm and soothe us. His hair is spiky blades of grass that do not waver. I think I’m in love. The boys from the garage do not jump over the fence. Their profanity fades, the thud of their sneakers on hallowed earth vanish. Breathless, we head back to the house. Our parents have been there the entire time. Drinking wine and talking about that TV show where everybody knows your name. No one mentions the bone-aching terror we just experienced. We were just playing, we say as we enter the indoor warmth, removing our shoes and gloves, our outerwear. The adults nod dumbly, their glasses empty.

But it is the last night of our trip that plays in eerie soft focus and slow motion, unvarnished by time. The events recounted are impossible to confirm. The Boy has since died and he was the source. The Girl and I nestle in sleeping bags on the Boy’s bedroom floor. My brother rests on the bottom bunk and the Boy perches at the top. The wood creaks beneath our tiny bodies with the ginger movements of the adults downstairs. The smell of pine and flannel mix with the herbal and gamey scents leftover from dinner. Like a miniature sun, the boy’s night light burns, casting us all in slabs of shadow, as he tells us what he saw. His eyes raised to the ceiling, his voice small and hesitant as if it’s his own weighty confession. I can feel him growing older and wearier as his words grow brighter in the fiery orange light. Each utterance sparks and singes, then quickly turns to ash. Sometimes, I get confused and think I saw what he did, too. My mother and the Man sharing a furtive kiss, mouths briefly touching as the kitchen faucet runs, an undried dish in my mother’s manicured hand. The Man holding my mother’s face like a jewel to the light of the moon through the bay window. Deer meat from the Man’s early morning hunt thawing on the counter.

No one says anything except the Girl who asks what it means. No one answers her because we already know. Like the graveyard chase, we never speak of this again. I don’t recall sleeping.

On the ride back to Florida, I spy on my mother in the side view mirror. She’s upset because the cassette she bought at the mall is warped and my dad is driving too fast. Her mouth is a firm terracotta. She wears sunglasses and stares straight ahead because there’s nothing left for her to see. Decades later, I find a poem she wrote during this time in her journal. It’s on a random page near the back in careful blue lettering. The first line: “He’s moved your heart again and/the moon casts a shadow/over a grave.” I flashback to that house on the hill bordering the resting place of the dead. I never consider that this poem could be about my father.

The last stanza reads unfinished: “Does he dream your dream?/Are you just a memory?/Only you aren’t what he remembers.” I try to parse each line and insert myself into the shared dream of my mother and the Man. The dream of not being forgotten or misremembered, of time staying sweet and static, the present incapable of defiling the past. I cling to the Boy’s remembrance, his glimpse into this shared dream. I imbue it with vibrant color and detail as if it belonged to me.

My mother ejects her tape, meets my eyes, and limply waves. I raise my hand before skating my fingers along the passenger window, thick clear lines cutting through the mist. The shapes recede as the pane fogs over. Messages unseen.

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C by Lisa Lerma Weber

November 16, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

It was another sweltering summer night in our godforsaken little town, the odor of cow dung and hay heavy in the air. My maroon Ford Escort was sitting in a dimly lit corner of the McDonald's parking lot, a bunch of misfits standing around it, trying to figure out what trouble to get into. You and I were lying in the trunk next to a pile of scratched and scuffed skateboards. I turned towards you and smiled. You smiled back. You were always smiling, something I liked about you. We leaned into each other, our lips meeting for a brief moment. There was no tongue involved and you didn't grope me, just gently placed your hand on my hip. We didn't feel any way about each other, didn't need to. We were just high on youth and rebellion. You were probably high on something else, too.

There was no exchange of awkward words after the kiss. You just gave me that sweet, childish smile of yours before everyone yanked us out of the trunk so we could move on to a party spot hidden in the dark outskirts of town, where only the stars could watch us consume all the beer we could get our misbehaving hands on.

That same summer, you walked to my house in the middle of the night. B and I were sitting on his skateboard, our sweaty backs against the stucco exterior wall of my garage. We quietly talked about everything and nothing, the crickets chirping along with us. Then you appeared out of the darkness, rounding the corner of the deserted street, your eyelids drooping, a crooked smile on your face.

"Dude, where'd you come from? How did you even get here?" B asked.

"I don't know," you said.

The three of us laughed our asses off, high on something or another, the moment perfect in its imperfect splendor. We talked for a while, the words spilling out of our young, urgent mouths. It was about 1:00 in the morning when we all walked down the quiet street and I watched you both continue across the empty dirt lot towards town; B, tall and thin, his shoulders slightly hunched, and you short, your head lowered. I stood there for a while as you became shadows in the distance, then I walked back to my house, picturing you wandering around town, concentrating on the ground in front of you because you were so faded.

Three summers after that night outside my garage, my sister called me at work to tell me the news. I walked out the sliding doors and sat down on a cold concrete bench in front of the store. The sun was too bright, the sound of passing conversations and laughter too loud. I thought about the shy kiss we shared in the trunk of my car. I thought about you wandering the streets in the middle of the night, not knowing how you ended up at my house. I thought about that mischievous, little boy smile that never seemed to leave your face. Then I cried, people staring at me as the tears and snot fell faster than I could mop them with the sleeve of my dress shirt.

I went back home for the funeral. Afterwards, a bunch of us got together for a house party. We drank and smoked as we shared the details of our post-high school lives. Later in the evening, a few of us gathered and shared memories of you, desperately trying to navigate our collective grief. At one point, B became overwhelmed.

"Fuck, I can't do this," he said as he stormed out of the room.

I was sitting on a medical bed that had been stuffed into the room, probably after it's occupant had passed. S was sitting next to me, our hands touching. When everyone else walked out, he and I turned towards each other and kissed. We made out for a while, our hands all over each other in the darkness, both of us wanting to feel the heat of life, to escape the icy grip of sorrow.

As night turned into early morning, we all kind of fell apart, drinking until we could no longer stand. I stumbled around a few bodies on the floor towards an open spot on one of the sofas. I fell onto the soft cushions and closed my swollen, red eyes. I thought of your smiling face before slipping into the oblivion of sleep.

I think back to that hot summer night in the McDonald's parking lot; you and I lying in my skateboard filled trunk. If only I'd taken your face in my hands, looked you in the eyes, and told you it would all be ok. But at the time, I was still trying to convince myself of that. I didn't know about the fear and pain that was slowly poisoning you. You hid it so well, your smile like a star in our lonely desert sky.

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I DEFINITELY NEVER LOVED YOU by Cory Bennet

November 6, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

It’s that time of year when California burns. It will peak in the Fall when the shadows begin to grow longer. There was a lightning storm across the Bay Area last night and fires today and ash falling from the gray sky. My knee is torn up from skating but I’m restless tonight so I cruise the neighborhood inhaling the poison air.

Once the fire had torn through my parents’ neighborhood, we tried to return but the cops had all the roads closed. My stepdad knew a way through an orchard. We came upon the house and it still stood. The land was black and smoldering in places. There were two deer trapped between our fence and the fire line. Twisted limbs, charred skin, organs exposed. My stepdad and I dug two graves and buried them together in silence at dusk.

I had Bobby cut the sleeves off my Ceremony long sleeve in his apartment on a day I couldn’t stop crying. We bought snacks from the dollar store and watched Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Passing me the joint he asked what was the matter. I said, “Everything.”

I’ve been reading about Catholic saints and the desert fathers. The Shobogenzo is on my nightstand, and I understand none of it. I've read it twice. I pray, I speak to my dead friends, I sit cross-legged on the hardwood floor, I think of my father swaying from his noose like a metronome.

It’s the violence, my mother told me once, that my blood has collectively faced. It’s the drugs. It’s the gutshot my great-grandfather took and his daughter's lethal abortion in an alley off Market Street. It’s the fact that it becomes a list. Categorical. I did not believe how violent lives, violent deaths, could be transmitted through cells. Mom told me I had a weak imagination and placed her cigarette on the edge of the table to watch the ash collect and fall.

My father once said I kept him alive and I wonder what changed that. He told me once he would never go back to prison. Six years ago he was looking down the barrel of a 25 year bid. He kept his word.

I go entire days without laughing, without cracking a smile, without moving my mouth at all. Not even to eat. Only rubbing my tongue in the space where a tooth got kicked out.

I can see the stadium lights of my high school from the backyard. My ex-girlfriend’s parents live up the street.

Last night I was taking out the trash and the orange cat who hangs out in my wheel well was laying in the driveway. He was dead, it was obvious in how not alive he looked. I didn’t know if he belonged to any of the neighbors so I knocked on doors but no one answered. I grabbed an old shirt from my closet and draped it over his body, muttering something I remembered from Catechism: ...and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety.

After I read the Gucci Mane book I texted Juice: Guwop prolific as fuck. He said What? The Young Thug song? And I said Nah man, Gucci Mane, East Atlanta Santa. Juice believes the real Gucci is dead, and the sober and healthy Gucci is a replacement, a replicant. I ate an Adderall and took a sip of my diet coke, tonguing the hole in my mouth where that tooth used to be.

I had to get out of bed. It was my dead friend’s birthday and some of us agreed to have dinner, but I didn’t want to go. One year ago I had my hands around his neck, trying to keep him from hemorrhaging when he got stabbed in the throat. I lost. His frantic eyes searched but couldn’t focus. I told him it was okay and that we’d look after his family. He died and I left before the ambulance arrived.

I got dressed and ate some more Adderall and pocketed a Klonopin and nicotine patches. I thought of shards of glass in the blades of grass. I thought of cumming on lusty lady death.

I’m just so bored of everything. Nothing surprises me anymore, even when it does. I clip my toenails and gather them to place inside an empty diet coke can. I ejaculate indiscriminately on my socks. I sit slouched in NA meetings and feel grateful for absolutely nothing.

I was watching my mom’s house for a few days during the week in the middle of August. I took the days off work so I could hang out with the pets and get stoned. She lives out in the country on about five acres of pasture at the bottom of a valley, with my stepdad who is there for her and always comes home at night.

There was a thud at the window and Mila barked and ran to the door. I got off the couch to see what it was. Outside the window, a tiny bird lay on the ground, its tiny beak opening and closing. I knew it was going to die but felt panicked like I had to do something. I couldn’t just wait it out. I scooped the bird into my hands and submerged it in my dog's bucket of water. I can’t say if dying the other way would have been better. The corpse floated to the top.

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GRIEF IS AN EMPTY SHELL by Robert Julius

November 2, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

When I left for California in the summer of 2013, I knew what I was leaving behind. I was abandoning a home that had grown toxic over the years, from my mother’s addiction and the ensuing fights between her and my father. I was leaving behind the rural countryside of western Pennsylvania. I was leaving behind two best friends, two brothers, two parents, and a sister who had been in and out of prison for the last five years. I was also leaving behind an old me, and all my old pastimes, including my terrarium of land hermit crabs that I had taken care of for the past ten years.

From middle school well into high school, I had been a land hermit crab enthusiast. I could explain the difference between the many species that lived around the world—how both Coenobita clypeatus and Coenobita brevimanus possess large purple claws but can be differentiated by the eyestalks and other exoskeletal differences, how one is native to the Caribbean and the other to Indonesia. I had collected crabs from all over the world, investing thousands of dollars into their care. My favorite crab, Mako, had belonged to my colony for an entire decade. I watched him grow from the size of a gumball to the size of a large apple.

Land hermit crabs are a tropical species. Though sold in pet stores and beach kiosks for cheap, their proper care is costly, and their survival demands expertise. They require constant monitoring of humidity and temperature, access to both freshwater and seawater, as well as moist substrate deep enough so that a crab can completely bury itself in order to molt. Even when given the most proper care, no member of the Coenobita species will successfully reproduce in captivity, which means that all land hermit crabs sold in pet stores or beach stands have been taken away from their native tropical habitats. California showed me how a single year can undo a decade. When I returned home from college that first summer, all of my hermit crabs—some dozen of them—had passed away under my mother’s care. Grief is an empty shell—or in this case, plural. Shells.

Part of me knew my mother wasn’t fully capable of caring for them herself, even with the detailed instructions I had left. They dried out, or starved, or were kept in a climate too cool. I didn’t know. Besides, by then, I had changed. I had given up my passion for biology and had chosen to pursue writing. I was in a stable relationship with a boy I loved. I was thinking of California and how I couldn’t wait to return. Orange County beckoned. My sophomore year was going well until October. I was woken by a call from my father. My mother had been hospitalized after complications from her gallbladder surgery.

“It’s serious this time,” he said. We were used to my mother’s frequent hospital stays, but I knew the implication these words carried.

I flew back to Pennsylvania. One day later, my mother drew her last breath.

After returning home from the hospital, I saw my terrarium, still on display in the living room, even a year after the colony had passed away. My father said that he liked the way it looked. The set-up was beautiful, crafted over the last decade to mimic the hermit crabs’ native environments, but without the familiar crawl of the crabs, the terrarium lacked spirit. Appalling, I thought, to stare into the tank and see only the empty seashells of the hermit crabs that had once lived in them.

Taking care of the hermit crabs had coincided with some of the hardest years of my adolescence. I had spent many long periods observing the crabs, calming myself on the nights that my mother would land herself in the hospital for drinking too much. I liked trying to understand their habits and what motivated them. There were friendships and pairings, as well as enemies. Sometimes, there was even cannibalism—one hermit crab would dig up another while it was in the fresh molten stage, a time at which the exoskeleton is at its softest, and tear the vulnerable crab apart, limb from limb. They were a mystery to me as much as they were something I could understand.

Days after my mom passed away, I finally lugged the 55-gallon terrarium into the basement with the help of my brother. Upstairs, the living room now appeared emptier without it, but in those weeks following my mother’s death, was there any part of life that emptiness had not touched? I fiddled through the shells that were left behind. There was a polished jade shell, as well as a long turritella I had put in as an experiment, not thinking any of the crabs would actually make use of it because of its impractical length—but Mako, like me, was something of a fashionista, and made it his home. Then, there was the great triton shell which had been home to many crabs—first, a Coenobita violascens rescued from bad pet store conditions, then belonging to Mako (of course) and finally, another crab who lived in the shell until the colony collapsed in my absence. The shells weren’t just shells. They were sentimental, physical objects of memory. Hours of my life had been spent gazing at the crabs who animated these shells, shells that had come from land and sea, produced by the great mollusks of the world. That great triton shell, named after the son of the Greek god of the sea, had first existed somewhere in the Indo-Pacific islands before the snail died and made room for a hermit crab to transform emptiness into something habitable.

We can live here, they seem to say. We can make this a home.

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LACERATION by Victoria Buitron

November 1, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

When an iguana’s tail falls off after a scare, I’ve wondered if it feels the pain of a halted human heart or the shame a woman feels after being sexually assaulted in public. On many mornings, I’ve rested on a hammock below robust mango trees hoping an iguana didn’t fall on me. If a branch buckled under its weight, the crack of thin bark would reach me before I could see a green smear plop onto the ground. I’d cover my head with my arms or a book in startled anticipation. Once, my dog woke from a nap beside me and began to chase an iguana until it escaped up a tree, leaving the remnants of its panic behind. Tiny reptiles left parts of themselves around my house—shreds of their peeling skin and minute tails—but never green and black-lined flesh more than a foot long. It trembled a bit at first, as if it didn’t know yet it had been dislodged from a body, the cells still hungering for new oxygen. Eventually, it became still, leaving me to wonder what threshold of fear is required for self-amputation. How many times had I been frightened enough throughout my life that a part of me would have severed? Here I was, with those moments and my body still with me, although no longer whole, quivering at times like a loose tail after being chased.

An iguana’s stump remains a wound the first few days until it slowly begins to mend. The new tail grows the color of spoiled lime, darker, like the healing matte of a scab. The former part of them is out there, most likely in the spot they were most afraid, wasting away, and perhaps they look back at this new self, hoping there’ll never be another scare to fragment them once more. Because—if it were to happen again—how much of them would be left?

I was on a bus from Guayaquil to Milagro, and a man sat next to me and began to speak. I could tell we used to share the same skin color, but he looked so tan it seemed like he had been chafed by the sun. He showed me his ID and talked about how he was a different man from that photo. He had angered his parents by getting dreads and making the beach his home. I nodded, looked out the window as if I’d never seen the fields of banana around us. Whenever the door opened, a thick heat engulfed us as men with sweat dotting their lips sold empanadas withered by the sun. Before we arrived in my town, he announced he was getting off. I was relieved that I could enjoy some silence for the rest of the ride, but as he got up, positioned one foot in the aisle and one in our row, he grabbed my head with his hands and collided his mouth with mine. It happened so fast that I could barely push him off me, but it was enough to leave his spit on my lips. I heard him cackle as he scurried off the bus.

Maybe the difference between an iguana and me is that although we are both capable of fear, only one of us is capable of shame. The fear rushed through me when he was still on me, then came the shame, and by the time I got to the bus stop, my feelings were tangled in guilt. I shouldn’t have said a word. I should have put on headphones. I shouldn’t have given him a chance. I wanted to leave my lips behind and grow new ones, gargle vinegar until my face became numb and his taste fled my mouth. Instead, I simmered myself within scalding water—my body a fragmentation of what it was when I woke up that day. In the adrenaline of thoughts, I wished that my hair had fallen off in his hands as evidence of what he took from me. Take it, I would have said. May the sever haunt you.

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ALTO by Kathryn M. Barber

October 12, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

We’ve spent this summer in your house, the one that belongs to your father, the one that’s brimming to the top with a hundred thousand ghosts. Memories haunt this house: your parents, still together; your brother, asleep down the hall; your college girlfriend, alive, her laugh echoing across the staircase. We sleep beneath a framed photograph of that girl you loved so much, the one whose car went off that bridge we drive across every day. She’s the only thing that reminds me you’re capable of love, that it can even exist inside you. The way you grieve her is the last living thing that makes me not afraid of you—and I am, I’m so afraid of you: I was afraid that night on the pier, that night out on the highway, every time your hand reaches for that handgun beside the bed. I’m afraid of the way you laugh when I’m angry.

The only time I’m not afraid of you is when you play the piano. Your fingers trace those keys you know by memory, and I worship the sound that comes out of it, bathe in it, roll it over on my tongue and suck it in and out through my teeth. It suffocates me, and I hold my breath. As long as that music is moving through you, you’re something else, someone else, somewhere else.

I quit playing piano when I was fifteen, when I could still hear the notes of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” coming from the piano in my parents’ old house, the one we lugged all the way from my grandmother’s house in Mississippi. My aunt would come from Richmond, and her fingers were the same as those ivory keys; she had grown up inside that Yamaha. You quit and you’ll regret it the rest of your whole life my mama said, and I didn’t believe her then but I do now, because I understand now that somehow, if I could still play, I wouldn’t be here sitting, listening to you. If I could make the sounds you’re making right now, I’d be long gone. If I could remember the notes written inside your hands, in your every vein, if I could remember how to be on my own, I wouldn’t need you.

I had four piano teachers, kept starting over time and time again. The first one, Mrs. H, taught violin and piano, and while I was waiting for my turn, I’d sit out in the horse stalls with her daughter, my best friend, and we’d brush the horses’ manes, braid their tails, shovel out the barn until her mama had to come outside and get me. We were eight and her parents’ house was on the state line, and because her parents’ bedroom fell on the Tennessee side, it was long distance for me to call her fifteen minutes down the road on the Virginia side. We only got to see each other at church on Sundays, when we’d share a Frostie root beer from the drink machine in the hallway, and it would taste sour in our mouths after Mr. Bowling gave us pieces of Big Red chewing gum on the way into the sanctuary. Her mama was my favorite until her daddy convinced the deacons to convince my daddy to resign his church and start over somewhere else.

There were two more piano teachers in between that first one and the last one, between missing shoveling those horse stalls with my favorite friend and the one who taught me I didn’t need notes to play music.

The last one was my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs Rodeheaver. She was Pentecostal and she told me she could teach me to play by ear and I didn’t believe her. She said we didn’t need to read music when we could feel it—said she could teach me to feel music in way it that my ears would hear it and my fingers would know how to play it , that all those years struggling to read music wouldn’t matter anymore, that I wouldn’t need those mnemonic devices Mrs. H taught me to remember which keys were which letters.

I didn’t mean to quit. I was just taking a break during tennis season; the practices kept conflicting. I didn’t mean to never resume those lessons in that Pentecostal church sanctuary at the bottom of the hill. I didn’t know then it was my last lesson. I can feel music now harder than I ever could back then, but I can’t remember how to make it come out of my fingers, can’t remember which ones go where and which ones make which sounds, can’t connect my heart to my head to my hands like she taught me to. That last day, we were standing by the piano, and Mrs. Rodeheaver was telling me to sing louder, sing louder, and my weak airy soprano voice squeaked and faltered. I couldn’t make the notes come out right. I could feel them, could feel them in every centimeter of me, couldn’t make them come out loud, strong.

Louder, she said.

I sang the note louder.

No, she said. Louder. From your diaphragm. From deep down inside of you. From the deepest parts of you.

I sang the note again.

Louder, she said. I want you to break these stained glass windows.

So I did, I did, louder, louder, louder. She kept making me sing that same damn note until we could both feel my voice coming back off those church pews. Until I felt like the secondary version of my own note could’ve knocked me over.

You’re not a soprano, she told me, grinning. You’re an alto.

I asked her why she didn’t just tell me that the first week we started, months ago. She smiled, made me keep singing those notes over and over until I found the strength of my voice, understood. She never really answered me, but she didn’t have to, I knew then what I know now: that sometimes you have to sing the wrong note over and over again until it comes out the right way and then you know things your brain could never have known because the music told you. Because the music told you. Some things you can’t know until the music tells you.

You’ve never heard me sing, never seen me inside any song except yours: the way I swing my body when your fingers glide across the piano I can’t remember how to play. Every song we listen to, every track we play, belongs to you,. None of it is mine. You don’t know anything of the basement I was lying in the night I fell in love with Deana Carter or the back porch where only Garth Brooks held me or the lined shuffles of my boots across that beer-sticky dance floor just off I-75. You’ve never heard my voice echo across a church sanctuary.

And you won’t hear the breath I’ll let out as I turn up my radio and drive away from your house for the last time. You won’t hear the songs I’ll sing a few weeks from now under North Carolina skies as I let you go—no, not you, the hope of you, what you could’ve been. What I hoped you were. You won’t be able to name the piano medleys in the songs that carry me to sleep. You’ll never know the ballads that fortify my bones, deteriorate my fear of you. You’ll never see the record player by the window, the screen that separates the porch swing from stacks of country records that remind me I am free I am free I am free.

For now, for tonight, you’ll keep playing the piano, and I’ll keep suffocating in you, and I’ll keep singing soprano. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll hear Mrs. Rodeheaver saying you’re an alto you’re an alto you’re an alto and I’ll sing that note over and over again until I remember who I was before you.

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CONDEMNED by C. Cimmone

October 7, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

My mother smoked her favorite cigarettes in the kitchen. Smoke billowed out into the living room and crept down the halls. A small television muffled the evening news as the three of us chewed away at overdone meat. Splatters of hot bacon grease slid down our throats as my father hurried through tough threads of roast. He ran the tractor after supper; and my mother splashed hot water around in the sink as she yelled at me for not finishing the black-eyed peas. “Black eyed peas are good luck,” she’d belt.

Holiday evenings were much the same. “Too much sage is good for the gut,” she’d remind us, as she broke cornbread into a large dish. She made one dish without turkey for my father. She made a second dish for him to carry to work. She made a third dish for the rest of us. My brothers leaned against my mother’s kitchen cabinets, laughing at stories she let out in little slivers. Her hands shook with an audience, but my brothers’ wives smoked cigarettes in the kitchen, too, and she was happy to hand them her lighter across the dining table.

Sometimes, when the kitchen offered German Chocolate cake, my mother pulled out a foggy plastic bag filled with red dominoes. My aunt Rita laughed at my mother’s stories and my father shuffled the red chunks as loud as he could. The white dots banged into each other as my mother grinned, lighting another cigarette and shaking her head at my father. My father grinned at my aunt Rita and for a moment, we were glad my mother was not mixing or wiping.

When the kitchen was empty, calls would come in. My mother pulled the long, curly line across the kitchen floor. The line tapped the linoleum tiles as she rested in her kitchen chair. The crisp cellophane crinkle of cigarettes held until she announced, “Dorothy has died.” My father and I watched the television in silence on these evenings of grief; and the kitchen gears paused.

After years of the kitchen exhausting itself between moppings and meals, crying children and daily newspapers, my mother’s bones stuck here and there. Her fingers cracked like eggshells and her eyes served as measuring spoons. She crept down the hall and curled herself into a bed, hidden away in the back bedroom. Her kitchen chair sat empty as black tar spilled like burnt grease down my mother’s face.

With no oil, the kitchen gears began to rust. The linoleum on the floor began to peel up at the edges and the oven hinges refused to do anything but screech. The dining room table began to collect crumbs along its midline and the closed cabinets held their breath of cigarette smoke. The lights from the ceiling began to sag, long screws pulling heavily from the sheetrock. Everything in the kitchen sagged. Everything moaned.

My father sat alone with his grief. The living room chugged along with his vanilla wafers and tiny wrenches. He took the phone from the wall, wound its long cord around the base and the receiver, and placed it in the hallway closet. He took his meals at the coffee table, as the refrigerator--now empty--hummed in place of the kitchen’s small television. The sink tarnished near the drains, but still overlooked the window as, “having a window over your kitchen sink is good luck.”

The roaches crept in as the lights began to flicker out of life and a rat made his home in the bottom of the oven. Pale acidic powder grew from behind the hands of the clock and the kitchen counters began to rot out small crevices for new life to sneak in with sticky legs. Like a dying branch, the kitchen darkened and calloused. The remaining pieces of the house were still green and growing, as the kitchen bore a hole right through its center.

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