Creative Nonfiction Archives

LETTERS TO MACKENZIE by Blake L. Bell

September 17, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

We were wild girls. Raised with dirty feet, tangled hair. Our dogs followed us down the roads we walked, but our mommas rarely did. We played hard, fought hard, loved hard. Fate cheated us from being sisters, so we bound ourselves together with blood ritual. We couldn’t go downstairs to the kitchen to get a knife, afraid of waking momma. Instead, we broke a jar in the upstairs bathroom and sliced our thumbs open; our skin peeled back, vessels bursting and spilling over. We pressed our cuts together and imagined our blood forever combined. “Soul sisters,” we said, sucking the ruby blossoms clean.

Our world was complicated. Drunk, aggressive father figures. Stressed, underappreciated mothers. Unchecked tempers, overactive imaginations. Our world was filled to the brim, but it was never full without each other.

Our favorite spot was the pasture. We hung out by the ditch which split the open field from where the silos were. We were terrified of those silos. “People die in them,” our big sisters told us. On the opposite end of the field, a wooded area backed up to Gigi’s house. We rarely went there either. “When trees are that close together, something’s hiding in them,” our sisters said.

We named the cows we recognized: Dippin’ Dot the spotted, Esmeralda the jeweled, and Hercules, the Brahma bull. We made up stories about them. Hercules was the dad or the husband, depending on the day. “Hercules! Buy Esmeralda new jewelry. Her nose ring is gettin’ crusty.”

“Stand on top of the hay bale and wait till they get close, then we’ll jump on their backs.”

But the animals were usually impartial to us. Except the day they charged us.

The cows and bull were up by the ditch, and we were walking across, closer to the wooded area. The next minute blurs. Hercules charged, and the cows followed. We ran for our lives hoping to reach the fence in time. Our bare feral feet crushed the leaves beneath us and tore on the fence as we clamored over it, chased by a stampede.

III

We were so much alike. We looked alike, laughed alike. Our wavy brown hair and round blue eyes fooled strangers into believing we were sisters. We had rotten tempers and little impulse control.

Our savagery at home never matched how we were told to behave in school. We went to equally strict Catholic schools for elementary and middle. We neither liked nor understood their many rules. We may have been somewhat neglected at home, but in that, we found a freedom that set us apart.

We went to the same high school in ninth grade, the Durham School: an expensive, non-denominational religious school, a disaster, for both of us. We didn’t have a prayer of fitting in with our divorced mothers and our middle-class-income households. We lacked the social manners those kids had. While those kids knew how to behave, we were still in the pasture.

We befriended Katy, who lived in the Country Club of Louisiana and was a Durham kid through and through. “Y’all don’t have promise rings?” she asked before long. “We all have them.”

“What’s a promise ring?”

“Your father gives it to you for protection. It’s a promise between you and God. You know, not to do stuff with boys.”

We didn’t trust promises. Not all fathers were protectors.

Her mother disliked us almost instantly. Our families were not like hers. They respected my attorney dad, but their noses wrinkled at my two-time divorcee mom with her four children and beat up Suburban, which she proudly called “The Beast.” Did it matter that she was a lawyer, too? Your dad played and coached rugby, laughed at blood pooling in grown men’s mouths. Katy’s father cleaned our cuts and complained when we came home dirty and bleeding from a neighborhood romp.

You were jealous of each other. Who was the best friend? I’m sorry I chose Katy’s side. She was new, and maybe we were sick of each other? Of liking the same boys? You must have been sick of reassuring me I was beautiful too, that they wanted me, too. I was jealous of both of you, but the green monster on my back shrank around Katy, lighter sans the years that fed, piled on flesh, around you.

We defaced each other’s lockers with hurtful words and gave our best withering glares. Our cold war heated up at lunch one day. We met by chance, outside between the lockers and the cafeteria. You turned to me, asked, “Why did you write “slut” on my locker?”

“Because it's true.” I’m still sorry for that.

The next thing I knew, I was catching your fist from hitting my face. Frustrated, you turned and punched Katy instead. Hysteria broke loose after a girl in our grade yelled into the cafeteria, “Fight! There’s a fight outside!”

Katy cried and cried and cried in the principal's office; I could hear her pleas from the next room. I shut down, turned vacant as the disciplinarian ranted, already desensitized to angry men and too young to untangle fault and blame. I pictured my mother’s weary face. My father having to pick up the phone once again. Another call from an authority, another possible expulsion. I don’t know what you did in there, but you were quiet. I imagine, maybe romantically so, you behaved similarly to me.

Katy’s mom smoothed things over with the principal. She was the victim, and we were the perpetrators. No matter that most of the writing on your locker was in Katy’s handwriting, no matter that Katy and I had done most of the instigating. She wasn’t punished, but we ended up with in-school suspensions, and by that time, we were sneaking out of our respective cells to chat and joke with each other. All was well again, almost like our fights when we were kids.

Our parents referred to us going to the same school as what it was: a failed experiment. I made terrible grades and was often in detention; you struggled with the commute from your house. You transferred to another private school in your neighborhood, and I ended up at a public school close to mine. We made new friends and lived in different worlds. After our freshman year, we slowly went separate ways through the rest of high school. We’d talk here and there but never like we used to. There was no defining moment or dramatic exit, our friendship just faded.

By our first semester of college, we hadn’t spoken in well over a year. That first day, I walked into a spacious auditorium with hundreds of seats and hundreds of people for Art History 101. Feeling overwhelmed, I picked a random row in the middle of the room. At the center, your fishbowl eyes and long, curly brown hair looked up at me. You made that face you always have, where your eyes bulge and your mouth opens, where excitement and energy surge across those high cheekbones. “No way,” you said.

We hugged each other tight. It would not have been strange to see each other on campus, as we would many times throughout the coming years, but we had chosen the same class section, the same row, and ultimately, the same seats. We took this as a sign and skipped our classes to hang out. We never were productive together. Our relationship existed only in a state of play. We had no idea how to be serious, to work, or to function in the outside world around each other. “We should do this more often,” we said, back at your friend’s apartment, high, and laughing together again, as if years had not passed between us. But after that day, beyond stunted waves on campus, we didn’t see each other for a long time.

Did something pass between us that afternoon? Some subconscious thing that knew our lives were changing? The older I got, the more I resented memories of our childhood, of the extent of my stepfather’s violence. Happy memories of choosing to play in the pasture with you transformed into desperate longings to get out of the house. To separate myself from my mother sobbing over dirty dishes, from my baby brother’s broken foot, smashed between the folds of a kicked recliner. Did he ever hurt you, too, Mack?

From what mom says, we were still alike in our early twenties—we were unmoored. Is that true? Did you do too many drugs? Did you surround yourself with men who only loved parts of you? I only saw you once during those years when you happened to be dating my friend’s cousin. Did you worry about me, then? Maybe I should have worried more about you. Did he ever hurt you?

Years have passed since we have seen each other face to face. Your dad died this summer. Before him, your maw maw and your stepbrother, too. But more recently, your father, Mason. You found him on the floor in his apartment. Sounds of ten-year-old you, crying for him that night at the beach—when you got so homesick, he drove to Alabama to pick you up three days early—echoed in my ears, as if I’d strapped two conch shells to the hollows of my head, desperate to hear the sea.

But he didn’t always come get you, did he? Doesn’t matter now. Your memories of him will tinge with sadness and pride. His anger: righteous indignation. His inconsistency: genius. You’ll measure time by his passing, the prized befores, the distorted durings, the long afters. There will be so many afters.

Let’s transform these truths into one of the scary stories we used to tell each other at night in our tent at the beach. None of this was real. Your dad was alive behind that apartment door you knocked on before breaking in. He is alive, headphones on, music blaring, smoking a joint. Oblivious to the world around him and blissful.

Maybe this kind of thing should or could bring us together, but I appreciate and fear the gulf between us. The thought of you is too heavy. Discomfort comes with an oldest friend. You know all the smells of our childhood—grass, blood, whiskey.

I accepted your friend request on Facebook last month and combed through careful, new photographs of a luminous you, showing all your teeth in Cheshire grins mixed with equally careful pictures of your family, the living and the dead, mingling still in your photo albums. I heard your elastic voice in messages you sent me filled with smiley faces and exclamation points. I know I said I’d call, but I won’t. Guilt is only enough to spur my hand, to write, to reminisce. My world is too full, and I fear your added weight would send its contents spilling over the edges like blood rushing out of old wounds.

x-r-a-y magazine

MY MAMMAW’S BOYFRIEND by Dalton Monk

September 13, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

He looks like Stan Lee. And we call him that behind his back. Stan Lee’s real name is Marvin. Right now I’m in Marvin’s truck and we’re parked at the grocery store. He goes inside, and I stay in the backseat of the truck, which is old, the fabric cutting loose in the corners. It’s full of long cucumbers and cobwebs and ants. And a putrid smell that can only come from an old man, specifically an old man that looks like Stan Lee and wears Stan Lee glasses. This is an old man I hardly know. I sit in the hot truck for a while, comparing this man I barely know who looks like Stan Lee to my Pappaw who is dead. Stories often spill from Marvin’s lips at the dinner table. He’ll say things like how he just about had to knock so-and-so’s block off and how he’d told so-and-so to get lost and how he, Marvin, was so suave. He has a grandson named Trevor that comes to Clendenin with his Tonka trucks and toys and his speech impediment. I can hear him now saying his own name and he sounds like this: Twevol. Marvin is old or maybe he just looks old. And all of us think Mammaw is out of his league, which is an interesting thing to think about your Mammaw.

So, here I am in Marvin’s truck. And I’m twelve and the backseat smells and I’m sweating from the summer heat and closed doors and from being surrounded by all the odd-looking vegetables.

But I’m remembering now. I’m not twelve. I’m twenty-four. And that truck probably now belongs to Marvin’s son or maybe even his grandson Trevor who says his name like this: Twevol. Or maybe the truck sits in a junkyard, still filled with vegetables, still just as ripe as ever. Or maybe another old man bought the old truck and he’s dating someone else’s Mammaw and maybe he also looks like Stan Lee.

Marvin doesn’t own the truck anymore because Marvin is dead. He fell off the roof of Mammaw’s house—I don’t really know what he was doing up there except trying to prove to Mammaw what a man he was. I imagine him saying something like, “Look at this, this’ll be a story, won’t it.” And it is, I guess. He fell on the gravel beneath the gutters where my cousin Daniel and I had, just earlier that summer, picked up the smallest rocks and tried to throw them into the Elk River.

But this is where the old man named Marvin who was dating my Mammaw and who looked like Stan Lee fell, where the pain caused him to go into a coma, where the healing caused him to get better, so much better that he was at the next Thanksgiving dinner, telling stories that all of us knew were lies, where the healing then turned back into something that was killing him, something that made him go back to the hospital, which is where he died, but here he is, actually, not dead, but very much alive, getting back into the truck with me in the backseat where I’m keeping my arms at my sides, a loaf of bread placed in my lap, and now here is Mammaw, who I forgot had come with us, and they’re both in the front seat smiling and the day is hot and Marvin starts telling stories and Mammaw listens and I listen and we both know he’s lying, but we hang on to every word because whether it’s true or not, whether he’s remembered something the wrong way or in a way that romanticizes everything, it’s a story, and it makes us forget about the sweat on our arms, the musty smell in this truck, and the death before us and the death to come, and we just breathe and we listen and we listen and we listen.

x-r-a-y magazine

SONG FOR AN EMPTY WORLD by Miles Coombe

September 4, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

The road is lit with street lamps. It's weak, bulbs on the edge of giving out, but the glow is still there.

I am in his bed, a fresh bruise over his eye this time, and curled into his side. He feels smaller with my arms around him. My eyes are closed and I see an explosion of grey in a room too white to be real, and where I know there should be screaming, my own included, there is only static. He wakes, with a hammering heart and a cry on the tip of his tongue. Something inside him has fractured and a crack in his skin slips from the corner of his eye and falls over the bridge of his nose. I think my chest is caving in, that my lungs have stopped working. Something about the glassy look in his eyes makes me feel exposed. He was beautiful in a sort of starving way, like there was always something more he needed. Clearly, he was more lost than I was. Sometimes he stared at nothing and cried. He was gone, into his head, curled into a ball on the floor.

Something builds inside me. A storm, a tornado, untamed and unchecked, threatening to burst free. It’s the feeling that pushes at my skin when I can’t sleep, when I feel like I can’t breathe, when my ears are ringing.

The world spins so fast it turns to a motion blur of shadows and dim lamp light, and the off-white colour of the wall has turned blue. My head is spinning, everything is spinning, I feel all the air from my lungs recede, and stars swim in my vision. Time narrows down to a single point, a tape recording over itself.

The city lives and breathes on around us.

you were still in the ambulancewhen the cops suggested you’re the onewho tried to burn it down

All I could hear was the empty horizon and his warmth that filled it to the brim. He was nearly there, close enough he could taste the gray on his tongue like cotton wool. The edges of his voice tinged with a gentleness only reserved for the sweetest, prettiest things he saw. There are patterns in my periphery as the world bends and sways around me, like branches of young trees caught in the wind. The evening is quiet now, a sort of careful stillness that would be so easy and awful to break. He welcomes its hold, falls limp and boneless as it swaddles him in its folds. Eyes shut, mouth parted, it’s peaceful in this deep silence, weightless and still.

here I blur into you

I kiss him until the kiss consumes us both. The music has long since stopped and neither of us notices. The lethargy of the high washes over us in gentle waves and we fall asleep curled around each other. I’m falling into him, against him, under him, at his knees, on his back. Everything is falling, everything is collapsing and sliding and slipping, losing grip and sinking, one last point of contact, one last kiss, one last chance, one last abyss to topple into. When he kisses me it's desperate, it's pleading, it’s begging, every midnight cross-faded wish pressed between us like a prayer.

If there was a colour to those days, a colour for me and him, a colour for kisses and pills and dying, it is every colour of pink and blue, the dark lights and the pale shadows in the almost darkness. The memories are blurry but the colours are still there, cutting like knives. I am aching. I feel like I’m drowning and on fire at the same time. I just know that the space around my heart, where all the horrible things build up, thick, and wet, and poisonous - the space I flooded with opioids, weed and pills - is suddenly, blessedly empty. As though someone has reached in and scraped it all away.

he’s spent too many nights in too many places curled up around himselfwishing someone else was thereand now someone is

When he presses against me, terribly thin body, yet grounding as a heavy blanket, his mind slips into my own, his eyes are shut, but not tight, and his mouth is open slightly. I can feel the shallow rush of breath over my skin. If not for the frenzy he had been in a minute earlier, I might have believed he was sleeping. If not for the wet itch of tears running onto my neck, I might have believed he was peaceful. His words hurt, they burned like a brand, but I shut my ears to the flow of his voice and try to ignore the pain in it. I look the boy dead in his eyes, searching for an answer behind the tortoiseshell. There's a desperation at the edge of his iris, fear evident, but he still doesn't look away. Eyes raking over inconspicuous bandages, brushing fingertips over bruised faces, running lips along bloody knuckles. Another collision. A car crash, our bodies strewn across the road, across the mattress, blood on the asphalt, teeth pulled blood up under the skin, gasoline in the air, the scent of sweat. Sharing bottles, cigarettes, forehead to forehead with breath intermingling, afraid to make it real, until we had nothing left to lose.

Yes, Lucas was Lucas. He drank vodka from the bottle at 11am. Snorted pills off the floor. Spoke Dutch while high. Was often dangerously malnourished. Had unexplained bruises in blues and yellows. Sniffed glue in the park after school. He was loud and obnoxious and loved hitting people in the face. That was daytime Lucas, Lucas while awake. But at night, it was Luca. Maybe I comforted him because I knew he was haunted by thoughts of the street and the memories of all that came before. But perhaps we both felt this way and, for some reason, I comforted him the way he did me. Two jagged pieces of a puzzle that together make a complete picture. The nights were broken, fragments of shattered sleep and soaring highs. When I would gasp for breath and be unable to shake the fear out of my face and arms because I was still falling, it was he, Luca, who, with bruised yet nimble hands, caressed my face to still the fall. The nights were the best because it was when he and I were in each others’ presence the longest and in a strange way, most lucidly. At night, when he was illuminated by the moonlight, he was totally different. At night, when we were tangled together, he was all the stars in the sky, soft angles and gentle otherworldly melodies. A song for an empty world.

a low humming settled over the empty housessomething he's never heard beforeit sounds almost like stirring, like waking

And then, the sky would turn from navy to indigo, violet to magenta, amber to yellow, and yellow to that horrid oversaturated, fragmented blue. And in the light, as all supernatural creatures do, he would retreat, to the kitchen, to get a morning cup of black coffee, splashed with vodka. And when I followed him, Luca was lost.

It was Lucas again.

We stand there, looking at each other in the middle of the empty street – two boys, one high and the other sobering, words on their tongues that do not make it out into the waking world.

loneliness grows around us like mouldhe only used my name when he knew I was sinking

The night is suffocating, the sky too wide above him and the houses too big. He picks up the pace, staring intently at the asphalt beneath his feet. He’s running, almost tripping because he can barely see. The tears don’t fall, that would be too certain, he thinks. That would make it all just a little too real.

The road is lit with street lamps. It's weak, bulbs on the edge of giving out, but the glow is still there.

x-r-a-y magazine

HAM SANDWICH, DRY by Caroljean Gavin

August 29, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

One day, in the middle of the week, a Wednesday or a Thursday, in the humid summer, with the air conditioner broken, and the ceiling fan so feeble, I fell asleep under my down alternative comforter and had a dream of walking through a lush field, thick blades of grass slithered against my legs, dandelions swung in the breeze, little hammocks for lazing bees, and when I woke up, covered in a loose sweat, I walked down the stairs step by step, blinking my eyes open, open and closed, flexing my fingers, balling my fists, and I went to the fridge, drew out some ham, folded it out gently over the white bread I just bought the day before, two loaves for the price of one at the Harris Teeter, and you know what, I didn’t have any tomatoes, or any lettuce, and guess what, I didn’t have any mayonnaise, so guess what, I just ate it like that, just dry, and guess what, that was completely bullshit, all of it, every word I just put down, complete bullshit. This is supposed to be nonfiction, and I’m supposed to tell the truth and only the truth so help me god, so help me, God, the truth is none of that happened, the truth is that I tried to write as boring an opening to this essay as I could think of so you wouldn’t make it this far, and the truth is I gave this the most boring title I could come up with so when you came to it, you would look at it and you would think to yourself, “Snore!” and your eye would jump to one of the other titles, surely, something with a big, bright, unusual noun would pop out to you, and you would be happy with that, and I would be safe, but the truth, the no-bullshit thing is I am never safe, even though I am really good at manipulating words, and saying things that are technically true, like when my husband asks me full of disbelief, “You don’t look at other men?” and I say no I don’t, and he fills in his own meaning, which is that I’m a weirdo, but at least he doesn’t have to worry about me cheating, and I don’t tell my secrets, I don’t tell them to myself, I don’t say, “No, that’s not why.” I flirt with the truth, “I don’t watch much porn, I don’t like watching men and women have sex,” when the truth is I like watching women have sex, and I don’t watch much porn, because women don’t have sex like that, because I want to see two women who are genuinely hot for each other, who fall all over and into each other, who don’t look up at a camera, and don’t lick their own lips and trace their long, sharp finger nails up their own naked thighs, and the truth is I want to see two women truly caught up in making love, in fucking, and the truth is I want to be one of those women, and the truth is I’m not straight, not even a little, even though I stand by the “I want to fuck Eddie Vedder” note I wrote to my friend sophomore year, and the truth is I’m out as bi, well kind of sort of, to some people, not really, and I know, I know I should claim myself, my identity, who I am, and I should probably leave my husband, even though I love him, and I should let my kids see me happy no matter who I’m with, but my own happiness has never in my life been the first happiness that matters, and I am not young anymore, and I am not cute anymore, and no woman would even want me anyway, so why tear up my family’s life like that just to be profoundly lonely on my own terms, and even all that isn’t true, because I started writing this so I could write, so I could finally tell the one secret I’ve been keeping my whole life, and I was going to get to it right away, but then I stopped myself, hey, there’s this other thing, it’s a pretty big secret, and it’s risky, my husband might read it, or his mom might see it, and other people might be angry at me, might think that I’m telling people that they don’t need to live their own truth, which is not what I’m saying at all, and I know you really are getting bored with me, and I know you really are getting tired of me, and believe me, believe me, I am trying to tell you, but my heart is racing, and my littlest kid is running around and he keeps digging his nails into my arm and hopping on the table and taking my fingers off my keyboard, and I think I’m going to cry, and I think I’m going to be sick and the thing is I know, that day, that summer day years and years and years and years ago, a day in the middle of the week, when that girl Melanie who lived in the same apartment complex as us came over, and there was a card table folded out in the middle of my room with a blanket over it, and we hid under it and pretended like we were camping, and she thought of a game which was to take off our pants and touch each other on our privates, and I know that as far as kids go, that happens, but the thing also was I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t like how it felt, and I didn’t like that we were hidden, that even in the moment I knew it was a secret I was going to keep all my life because it was meant to be, and I felt so much shame, I felt like all the people who touched my mom on her privates when she didn’t want them to, because I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know my mom was molested by her father and brother and raped by boyfriends, and I knew this was a sex thing even at 5 or 6 and I was dirty, and that was what I was supposed to feel with sex stuff, and the thing is, and I didn’t even know that when I started writing this, but here it is, sex was not supposed to feel good, or pleasurable, so when I felt that way, later on, with men, again and again, I knew that was just the way it was, just the way it was supposed to be, and so I never really questioned my attraction to men, of course women aren’t attracted to men, that was the assumption I always went on, of course we’re not, because men are gross, and blank, and rough in the bad ways, no woman is really attracted to a man is what I thought, but they’re what we have, what we’re stuck with, so we say we have crushes on male celebrities that kind of look like girls or women our own age and when we’re older we wonder if straight people are drawn more to movie characters they identify with or those who they want to want to sleep with, and we remember the first time we saw Ghostbusters and Sigourney Weaver and we Google things like, “How to tell if I’m gay,” when the answer is, “If You’re Constantly Googling to See if You Might Be a Lesbian, guess what, YOU ARE A LESBIAN!” but I don’t like labels, and I’m not going to call myself a lesbian, I haven’t earned it, I haven’t earned identity, don’t you see, I let myself be swallowed, I make it happen. I can disappear so quickly I didn’t even realize I missed the mayonnaise until I finished the sandwich and a snack bag of salt and vinegar Lay’s and was so thirsty I had to drink two full glasses of water before I went back up to finish my nap.

x-r-a-y magazine

VEGAS by Mackenzie Moore

August 27, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

I shudder, feeling the heat as I approach the straightaway where all you see are the shells of casinos looming. Blink-182 cranking, asking me what my age was, again. I keep ticking past billboards that tell me when the buffets will return. I jam my foot down on the accelerator. Tempt fate with out-of-state plates.

I think about five months earlier when we peeled away, me from the curb at Terminal 2, and him off to the Mirage for the weekend. It feels like years. I-15 north is an unavoidable corridor, but I hadn’t considered that I’d get a visual reminder of how much we’d splintered in a couple dozen axial rotations. How it doesn’t take a flight, or a drive, or much at all. You can survive thousands of miles apart and months on the road, only for it to blow up in your face less than a mile from home. Tell Zoom to use that as their marketing hook.

The wheeze of a beige Super Duty trying to edge me out of the left lane would piss me off, usually—it would underscore how tiny my car is, and that in it, I’m basically flyswatter bait on the freeway. But the growling hum at the bumper just feels like another twitch, or tremble, like the ones radiating up through my floorboards back in LA. You know, like when the downstairs neighbor turns the air conditioner from dehumidify to cool. A nuance so distinctive you’d bet your paycheck on it. When I merged out of LAX those months ago, the transmission seized immediately, the tach shot to 4. I should have known, because just like the floorboards, it’s hard to deny when the Earth shudders, but why linger on some small roll indicating a piece of life is about to go sliding out the door.

***

When you stay long enough, you become salaried on estimating limits, knowing where the plateau levels off matters; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Because sticking your thumb on the exact moment of how long someone can drive without getting drowsy, or how long you can wander on foot before devolving into hungry-tired bickering matters. It means you’re really fucking great at anticipating, at predicting patterns, at working within reason.

But approximation is an art. Science dictates you’ll only go so far, so fast on medium grade gas. You’ll keep moving, sure, even if you skimp on maintenance. Thing is, the little corroded pockets will keep digging deeper, and only later—maybe once you’ve finally started to spring for premium when you’re deep in airport traffic, or alone in the Mojave desert, will the shudders come.

And maybe with 1,000 miles to go, hearing the low reverberations that confirm something was wrong, you’ll finally pay attention to the low roll, preparing you for when the tectonic plates start shifting.

x-r-a-y magazine

DEAR ALISON by Stephanie Parent

August 24, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

I’ve used you so many times. In college application essays, you were the tragedy I experienced early in life, the loss that made me wise beyond my years and allowed books to speak to me so deeply I was determined to become a writer myself.

(I wasn’t wise beyond my years, and I never wanted to write as much as I wanted to read.)

I recycled those same essays for graduate school applications, but when I actually made it to a master’s program and depression snuck up on me like a springtime drizzle, then slammed down all at once in a summer thunderstorm, there you were again: you were the explanation for all my psychological deficiencies. Who wouldn’t believe the world was an unsafe place, a gauntlet they weren’t strong enough to handle, after someone so important had died when they were only three years old?

I kept on using you, all throughout my twenties, in and out of therapy and half-formed career goals and dead-end jobs. You were the reason I couldn’t be a responsible adult, couldn’t make something of myself. I had spent the first two decades of my life trying to please my parents, to make up for your death, to keep them from worrying about me. I was always ahead on homework and ready for every test, never chugged a beer or smoked a joint. Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude. I had to run out of steam eventually, right?

Now, in my thirties, I’m still using you. You’re the ghost haunting my every decision, my every regret with your stale, back-of-the-closet smell. I’m wringing you out like an old washcloth, the one I used to mop up the mess of my subconscious. I’m eking out every musty drop in the hopes you’ll yield emotional resonance. Or at the very least, provide some justification for the stupid choices I made. For all the money I spent, the good jobs I stopped looking for, the resumes so half-assed I might as well have ripped them up and let the pieces float off like tumbleweeds.

I really am a shitty sister, aren’t I? For someone who lived less than two months, who never developed a personality, someone who was born when I was too young to remember you, I certainly have put a lot of pressure on you. How much worse would it be if you had lived?

(Hey, I said I was shitty.)

I’m angry with you for coming to our world so briefly, arriving with the first soft snow flurries of December, and melting away before spring could even arrive. I’m angry you left me with the knowledge of how fragile life is, and how people can go on living with a part of their souls tucked away behind the winter coats. I’m angry at my parents for never talking about you. Maybe if there had been a funeral I could remember, a grave I could visit, a picture on a wall, I wouldn’t have to carry you inside me like a thousand buttercups that never opened, yellow hearts that withered on some March morning when the frost returned.

You died because you stopped breathing, when you were six weeks old, a few months after I turned three.

I’m not sure I ever learned how to breathe.

x-r-a-y magazine

SITTING ALONE by D.T. ROBBINS

August 23, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

I had a dream about you. I sat in a pew that only had enough room for two people. Its red velvet had faded, its wooden frame splintered.

Someone played piano, sang a song for you, about you. The congregation sent up a crescendo of angel voices, enveloping the atmosphere, like a child wrapped around her father’s leg.

And me? I lost it. I bawled, wailed.

I’d saved that seat next to me for you, but you never came.

The dream-song, a melody I’d never heard before, stayed in my ears after I woke. I considered whether or not to remove the guitar from my wall, excavating the song’s chord structure from my sleep. The tears I wept, hollow-chested and heavy-limbed, cascaded into reality, like watching the ripped remains of matter spewing from the other side of a black hole. Because the truth is, I fucking miss you.

You were the whole of my youth, my adolescence. I would pray like you said to, you would stir my soul with mystery and revelation, wisdom and understanding. The elders prayed over me at 13. Never look to man, they said, because man would always disappoint me. Keep my eyes on you and you alone. They said the devil would shoot fiery arrows at me my whole life, but you’d protect me.

And the devil did speak. From pulpits he decried the extent of your grace and compassion. And I, if I truly believed, was to revile and denounce so-called abominations that the world fell victim to. Despite your freedom, I put on chains. He criticized the expectation of your power and presence. Miracles became blasphemous. Mystery was ignorance. You were the light, but I only saw darkness.

He spoke from behind the desks of those who said they knew you better, were closer to you. As if my relationship with you was a thing to be measured and scrutinized like the subject of a clinical trial. Charisma was favored over personal experience. Could I preach a three-point sermon? Was the inflection in my voice enough to evoke an emotional response? How many bodies could I bring into the room? When was the last time I jerked off? Who was I fantasizing about? Did I touch her before she wore a ring? Was I drinking in public or at home? Did I cause someone to stumble with my secret sins?

My questioning and challenging their teaching, the methodology, blacklisted me. It seems as though you’re a flash in the pan, they told me. This isn’t working out, they said. You’re not a strong enough spiritual leader, she said. Whatever the hell that even meant.

The devil’s voice grew louder, silencing yours. I quit listening to you both. I chose my own voice. Of my anger, my disappointment and disillusionment. You became a distant memory, a nightmare, a gravesite.

I watched as those who believed they knew you better ended up knowing nothing of you and even less of themselves. Their egos crucified their missions. They vacated their callings, falling from their pedestals. Some by choice, others by force. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t find some restitution in it. One friend, who stood witness to my eventual dismissal of faith, said to me, You were the one they said would go nowhere and do nothing, look where you’re at now, how well you’re doing! And where the fuck are they? Their names are forgotten, reputations buried. Maybe I’m wrong for that. Maybe you reap what you sow. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

But now I can’t shake that song, that dream. I keep seeing that seat I saved for you. I keep wondering if you’ll show. If you’ll remember me like I remember you from the days of my innocence. If you’ll remember my innocence at all. If you’ll remember my voice the way I remember yours. Or if it’s too late. If I’ve become like that pew, faded and splintered.

The seat belongs to you and, whether I like it or not, no one else is capable of occupying that space.

I’ve been sitting here for so long.

I hate sitting alone.

x-r-a-y magazine

HEAVENLY LAKE by Kristen Loesch

August 17, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

It might be June, or it might be July. I can no longer keep track of the days. It’s that halfway point of a Hong Kong summer, when the heat turns everything soupy. The days and nights run together, and the usual strictures of time and space begin to crumble. How long have I been with my British boyfriend? Long enough for him to have bought a new camera. He’s an avid photographer, one who’s always itching for a worthy subject to capture. One day he finds one: Let’s go off the beaten track, to Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, to a remote lake called Tianchi, he says. He tells me what Tianchi means, but the way he pronounces it, it means something else. I don’t correct him. Maybe he knows my own tongue better than me. Maybe that’s why he often speaks for me.

My boyfriend hopes that Tianchi is so high in the mountains that nobody can breathe up there, that there won’t be any tourists. He dislikes an audience, and he never takes pictures of people with his expensive cameras, though he’s taken plenty of me. I am slightly less of a person than other people. One evening I tell him I’ve heard about a recent flare-up of violence in Xinjiang between members of its two main ethnic groups, Uyghurs and Han Chinese. Riots are breaking out. If things get bad, military will be called in. My boyfriend laughs. Maybe I’m being funny. Nothing to worry about, he says, and he should know. He wears suits to work and keeps Bloomberg blaring as he showers; he’s up-to-date. I like history and old houses. He is firmly in the present, while I am half in the past. Maybe I am his shadow. Maybe I should just stay close.

On our way to Xinjiang we have a layover in Guangdong. My boyfriend corners another couple to ask directions and they struggle to respond in English. I finally step in to help. I’m sorry, sometimes I forget that I have a voice, I say, and they smile. I’m being funny again. They warn us not to travel to Xinjiang, but when I translate this message for my boyfriend, he shakes it off like light rain. My parents ring my mobile as we wait for our connecting flight. Come home, please, don’t go with him, they beg me. I ask if they’ve heard about the unrest, the riots. They have not. The humidity in the airport is high. I lean my head on my boyfriend’s shoulder, feeling sweaty, slippery. Maybe I am melting into him. Maybe I am disappearing.

We land in Xinjiang’s capital city. We take a taxi to the hotel. Large groups of men prowl the streets, armed with bats and clubs and what look like chair legs. At the entrance to our hotel the staff is standing guard. We eat in the restaurant and I overhear guests at the next table whispering that there’s no Internet access, that the phone lines will be cut off. The food is buffet-style. Mostly noodles. The chef is busy guarding one of the doors with a knife. Later my boyfriend takes pictures from our room, panoramas of a suddenly silent city. Outside, it remains quiet for days and days, but inside, it is loud: The television volume on high. The shouting. The cursing. The breaking. And other times, his laughing. Maybe I’m just too funny. Maybe it is all my fault.

At last the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army roll into town. A curfew is imposed. Our lockdown ends. My boyfriend hates the idea of martial law, but I don’t mind. I don’t know what I’d do if I were completely free anyway. In fact, I can’t even remember what life was like before everything went quiet. My boyfriend and I make our way up to Tianchi, but there are plenty of tourists, large groups snapping pictures and hats flying off in the wind and old men hawking bottled water. My boyfriend is so frustrated that he cracks his own camera lens, but I’m glad we came. The lake is clear as a mirror. There are no waves, not even a ripple. But this is only what people can see; there must be life beneath. I tell myself that maybe later it will show on the surface.

x-r-a-y magazine

GOD VISITED ME IN BALDWIN, NEW YORK by Ryan Norman

August 15, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

A sad poem picked me up at the train station. I missed my stop and he was annoyed that I wasn’t paying attention. It was my first time traveling alone. The day was long. I traveled two hours into Grand Central Station and had to get to Penn Station to catch the LIRR. This was before Waze and Google Maps. I was lost before I started, but there I was. Eighteen, standing in front of someone I met at college orientation. I melted in his eyes—already a puddle from five hours of train travel—making connections, walking in the summer subway halls, tile lined, the floors covered in hot piss. Finally, with a poem, torqued verse twisting my emotions. He connected his iPod to the car radio and serenaded me with, “Dirty Little Secret” by The All-American Rejects. It was 2005, can we fault him for his opening number? Later I would come to find out he meant it. “Who has to know?” A lyric to deflate my confidence.

***

The truth is, I was my own dirty little secret. I had only come out to friends at this point in my life. My cover story was going to Long Island to stay with a friend I met only a month earlier to visit the beaches. It was seen through, of course. I later came to find out that my behavior was written off as a phase.

***

I remember sitting in a pizza place making small talk. He was kind enough to feed me. My stomach was full of electric butterflies. Eating wasn’t my priority; I wanted to be alone with him as he whispered sonnets directly into my heart. Somewhere we could be ourselves without ears signaling into our conversation. We had known a lot about each other. He went to a Catholic Prep school and played lacrosse. I had made all my sacraments up to that point and was on the rowing team. That’s not a lot, but for Queer folk, someone always feels some kind of way about the Church. I felt guilt. He did what felt right. We left lunch behind and headed to his home.

***

In Sunday School when I was eleven or twelve, the Church curriculum included sexual education. Sex is an act to be performed between men and women. My teacher had said that the Church wanted her to tell us that using condoms is sinful, because sex is meant to produce children. She leaned in and told us that if we are ever going to have sex, that we should use a condom. It was her way of being responsible and spreading the safe message. In my secular high school, years later, I would receive a much more thorough education on sex. But that was the word of the Lord. Amen.

***

We drove back to his house listening to all the best from Warped Tour. We were, after all, just a couple of Punk Rock Princesses. The house was lived in. It was nothing I was used to seeing growing up and visiting friends’ homes in spotless rooms. I met his parents and sister; they were all very nice. His mother offered me a spare bedroom, but this poem that crawls into your soul and sits there lied and said I’d be sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. I guess he wasn’t lying about keeping me his dirty little secret. We went to his room and staged sleeping bags on the floor. I was then complicit in the lie.

***

My church wasn’t openly homophobic. It was not something the priest or deacons talked about while reading from the Bible. Or if they did, it was when I was young, and I have no memory of it. But that sly wording in Sunday School sexual education made it pretty clear. Some of the kids I went to Sunday School with would bully me, mostly outside of church and in school. I know now that they learned it from their families. So, at the parishioner level, homophobia existed. But I persisted quietly along the walls avoiding attention.

***

We touched briefly, exploring new clothed bodies in an embrace. The butterflies were back, and they electrocuted every inch of my skin. It was going to be dark in a few hours, and we had plans to go to Jones Beach. We left the safety of a bedroom locked with a WrestleMania XX folding chair jammed under the doorknob. I changed my clothes. He didn’t look away.

The car ride was more of the same. Music. Touching. Lights lined the highway in a rhythmic pattern of spotlight glow and the dark space between, the car passing through checkpoints like a video game. When we got to the beach, the sun had already set. The ocean rolled in a silver-white shimmer tonguing the shore. We walked, fingers woven, along the crashing waves. The surf licked my heels. Together we climbed a lifeguard’s abandoned post and sat close for warmth, as the sea breeze wet our lips. He gently grabbed my face and kissed me. “I’ve never done this before,” I said. The moon illuminated my first kiss and pulled me closer to a poem that unfurls in your heart.

I sat awed and tingling. No one was around to see us trespassing on a beach at night, as a memory built under the moon. We drove back to his childhood home and kissed some more. Eventually, we fell asleep, but something woke me. Light filled the room and I shook. I pressed my nakedness against his, and he pulled me close. Two crescents waxing full. My tears evaporated on his flushed skin. God visited me in Baldwin, New York, as I lay naked in a bed with some guy I met at college orientation.

Nothing was said. Just a light floating at the foot of the bed watching me. I don’t know if it was a warning or a blessing. But I laid there against a poem to warm a cold night, silently crying. The guilt got to me, but it felt so right.

x-r-a-y magazine

INCANDESCENCE by Evan Senie

August 12, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

We set the fire up in your backyard with only three logs, two on the bottom and one perpendicular across the top. I was quiet around you then, cautious. I’m afraid I still am, forever worried about possible endings. The fire burned for hours once it got started, but initially it was stop-and-go. We fed pages from the phonebook into the empty spaces, watched the flames cause each to curl inward, the ink running down in a purple wave until it burned itself out and was replaced. When the logs caught, it was just their edges, little strands of wood glowing, and I blew on them, softly, tried to protect them from the breeze. The sun wasn’t down yet but the air was cooling. When we were sure the fire would stay lit, that it wouldn’t go out when we turned our backs, we settled into lawn chairs next to each other. I wanted to kiss you but instead I opened the beer I’d taken from your refrigerator. I sipped at it, bitter and metallic and cool.

For a while the logs hummed and clicked in the evening air and the sun sank lower and there was hardly any smoke, only flames licking at the impending dusk. I said that the wood must be dry, cured in this Colorado air, but I was wrong, and soon they started hissing. The smoke came at us in waves and you leaned away but I didn’t, saw no getting around it and so leaned in, taking it into my lungs and my pores until my eyes were dry, until I could smell nothing but the wood burning in my childhood fireplace where I used to sit with my brother and read or watch television, and I thought about how I always wanted to be closer to the fire than he was, afraid he might get burned.

When the sun was gone but there was still enough light to see each other, you asked about him, or maybe I brought him up. I told you what he told me once, that he could only see one end to his life, that if not for me he’d already be gone. I think that’s true. I didn’t look at you while I spoke, instead staring into the fire and letting the smoke be a curtain around me, and for days afterward, in the steaming shower, I would smell it rising up off my hair.

In the darkness we left our chairs and settled again on the bricks around the fire, side by side, close enough to touch the burning logs. We stared with envy at the center, at its moving and changing glow that we could never touch for all that heat. I wanted to heal the fire, preserve it, because every change is a type of loss, but we stayed at the periphery, looked in from the outside. You pointed to a field of glowing crystals, and said that orange is a color only beautiful in its element, always transient and natural and I knew that you were right, that it was the destructive power of combustion that gave off such warmth, projected such beauty, that even the sunset is a type of elegy, and I recognized the ugliness and the desperation in asking for permanence.

I stared at the glowing crystals until finally whatever held this structure together succumbed to the pressures buried inside and the whole thing shifted. I didn’t know yet what was coming, the breakup and the reunion, standing with you in an oasis in the middle of a desert, crying on my bed, watching the sun set over the rocks on a beach in California, waking up next to you and wanting, for the first time, to be exactly where I was.

Together we remembered the beginning, when sparks ate words off the page, but it was long gone, so we settled for watching tiny fires that bubbled up through the ash, light in places we thought had already burned to nothing. We listened to the crackling and popping and huddled together until we were touching, knees, shoulders, almost hands, and despite our gaze the fire finally became only embers, and it was after that that I kissed you, for the first time, there in your kitchen, and I mourned the loss of everything that exists, the very nature of heat itself, even before it left my lips.

x-r-a-y magazine

« Previous 1 234 5…9 Next »