3/31/2024 swallow’s nest by Kaydance Rice vivek jena CC
swallow’s nest i sit in a bean bag at youth group as a pastor tells us about the natural consequences god brings. how disobedience will lead to punishment in one way or another. how even for christians, who won’t go to hell, god still understands the concept of karma. i bite on my nails. i check the time on my phone. i count all the ways i have sinned and keep counting after my nana picks me up. despite my nana’s relationship with her father being a rocky one, she tends to mythologize his childhood. she talks often about the bravery and hardships he faced after the nazis invaded the netherlands. she talks about how he was only ten and hiding out during air raids. how he and anne frank lived on the same street. she says all these things as if it brings their relationship any type of context — as if it gives a reason for who they both are now. i don’t blame her for this either — it might. i’m not going to pretend that i know cause or effect but what i do know is that nana chews on the inside of her cheek when she lies, no matter how small it is, no matter who it’s to. when i’m ten, nana and i play bible trivia on her back porch every week before church. which disciple denied jesus three times? simon-peter which didn’t believe he rose? thomas which betrayed him first? judas how did he die? from shame. how? hanging. nana and i sit in the pizza hut parking lot as she tells me i understand god better than the rest of our family. i’m maybe eight at the time so she uses a cousin i’ve never met as an example. she says that after he got divorced, he found god for a while and then lost him again. after the second time, he began to drink until he shot himself in the field behind the high school that summer. she says this is what our family is, and always has been. she says that god’s role in our lives is to stop it from happening. nana says once she retires, she’s going to study theology every year, nana’s christmas tree is full of birds and crosses. she says when she ascends to heaven, she hopes to grow wings. i don’t know how to tell nana i don’t believe in god. nana spends four days a week at church, volunteering. she spends two of those days teaching the homeschooled kids and two of those days in bible studies and sermons. on tuesdays, she provides counseling to local kids who are considering lifestyles outside of god’s way. this means, on tuesdays, my nana tries to convince kids they aren’t really gay. my own queerness didn’t come to me as want in the way the other gay kids i know did. for me, queerness was always classified as indifference. i don’t mind kissing girls as much as i don’t mind kissing boys or anyone else for that matter. according to the bible, wanting things and selfishness is the root of all sins so i decided very early on that’s exactly what i wouldn’t do. i wouldn’t want to kiss anyone, but i would let them kiss me. the bible might then classify this as a type of altruism. nana would likely classify this as being a slut. when i was a kid, nana and i would walk through the butterfly gardens and she’d point out the anatomy of each one. she told me about how they interact with the ecosystems and i don’t remember much of it now, but i do remember how big it made the world seem, how big it made her seem. nana wanted to be a housewife and after that a painter. nana still paints when she can, and takes pictures when she can’t. her website tagline is to honor god through capturing his creation. and while i’m sure this is the conscious intention, i can’t help but think there’s something deeply human about taking the act of creation into your own hands — proving to god that you too can create the earth and make it more beautiful than he did. this might have been his intention, but i like to imagine nana engaging in sacrilege without knowing it. another act, i guess, that feels deeply human. when i’m in sixth grade, nana decides i’ll come with her every wednesday to church. she says there’s a lot i could learn and that i would really benefit from a community like that one. she says the people there will welcome me and they’ll show me god’s real way and even though i already go to a different church, i agree. what was eve made from? adam’s rib what was adam made from? dust what day was he made? six what was the original sin? talking to the snake even though i don’t believe in god, i still pray every night. i can’t tell if it’s because as a kid, i had god so scared into me he still sticks or if it has something to do with actual faith. most of my prayers start with something along the lines of “if you do this thing, i’ll believe in you again” and of course the thing happens and of course i don’t stop praying and of course i don’t start believing. i like to think god and i have a routine at this point — like we’re playing tag. i don’t think he likes me enough to make me believe, but at least he’s having fun. nana gets mad at our family for praying wrong. she says it doesn’t come from the heart and that’s why we don’t do it as much anymore. she calls us casual christians, which is worse than being an atheist. she says you have to be willing to give your life up for god and mean it when you say it. it’s hard to tell if she actually means it either. we use a basic family meal prayer and an even more basic bedtime prayer. even after years of shoving the bedtime prayer down my brother’s throat, i couldn’t say it from memory. nana would say this is another piece of family history that will die with her — despite the fact that she hates it whenever we use it. artistry is what’s connected nana and i throughout the years. she insists that i’m just like her because of it. she says we’re essentially the same, that we’re unique. she thanks god that i’m someone she can talk to, she was starting to get lonely. nana and i are sitting at the beach and i’ve just hit puberty so she’s telling me why i should never trust men. she’s telling me all the betrayals of her ex husband, her father, her step father, every ex boyfriend, every ex “friend”. she’s giving me every piece of evidence she has. i make a joke and tell her i wasn’t planning on it and i immediately want to sink into myself. i can’t tell if she knows this is because i’m gay or because of something more deeply rooted. she doesn’t laugh but nods as if she understands and holds the cross around her neck a bit tighter. how many animals did god have on the ark? 2 of each. where did noah find all of them? the earth wasn’t as big yet. how many people were on the ark? noah and his family. where did all the birds go? some stayed out, not all the trees were underwater. what bird brought back the olive leaf? the dove. nana and i are hiking down a trail and we come across the carcass of a goose. it looks newly dead, like it just fell to the ground, we imagine all the ways it could have died. we know bird flu has been going around lately. we keep walking and find another one, this one is more visibly aged, with ants all over it. nana asks why it’s always the birds that have to die and i don’t think this is true but nod and agree anyways, like she said something profound. once, in 8th grade, i was praying in the park and above me were all these bird nests, full of swallows. i prayed to god telling him to prove he was real when a swallow fell to the ground, on its back, with a thud. nana never kept her own birds but she always said they were a sign for when god was watching. the louder the bird chirped, the closer god was to you. she kept her backyard filled with seed so that she could make sure the birds would keep coming back. nana talks about finding god in her garage after her husband chases her out of the house with a gun. nana screamed on the floor praying to god to prove he’s real until she heard a voice telling her to leave. let me take care of you. she gets into the car and drives off with no gas in the tank. i can’t help but think i would’ve needed more proof but i’m also a skeptic. nana has a very specific version of god that could only be truly understood by her. nana’s god while loves you, loves you conditionally. he loves you more when you go to wednesday night church than when you don’t and loves you less if you didn’t spend at least half of your week praying and the other half reading. nana’s god tells you the dresses you look fat in and the ones that made your legs look nice. nana’s god sets you up with boyfriends and takes you on trips to haiti. nana’s god screams at you for hours on end if you ask for too much and makes sure you know how selfish it is to want. nana’s god says you’re his favorite because you know the bible best and eventually you’ll just have to be a good christian and agree to worship him. now god lays me down to sleep. i pray my lord, my soul to keep. if i die before i wake, god himself, my soul to take. god bless my family, my friends and my pastor and let him be with us until we go to sleep again tomorrow. god bless everyone, and good night. in my brother’s version, he says to bless everyone except anyone god doesn’t like. i always assumed god would do that regardless of what i had to say about it. nana doesn’t tell many stories about her father after his childhood. she only says her father was cruel, especially to her. she says she doesn’t understand how anyone can be that cruel to their child when they haven’t done anything. she thinks it’s because he’s jealous of her connection to god. she thinks maybe she was just born wrong. if i were a different person this is where i would write my coming out story. i would say i sat down with nana some weekend towards the end of the summer so i would know i wouldn’t have to see her again for a while afterwards. i would explain a relationship to queerness that i myself don’t actually understand, i would tell her about its flexibility, how i’ve never liked anyone that much — regardless of gender. i would tell her that despite being gay, i was still a christian, who knew better than to want. of course, i didn’t do any of those things, but maybe i could’ve. instead, my version of coming out was cutting all my hair off, dying it blue, and going to arts school. in the last three years since i’ve been here, nana’s visited once and spent the entire time talking about how disgusted she was in the way the students mutilated their bodies. she asks if there’s any way for me to go to church and i say yes, that i go every sunday. we both know this isn’t true but she nods as if it is. she says she knows how strained my soul would be without it. a few weeks later, i got a dvd in the mail with a sermon on it about the necessity for christians to be together. once, nana described all the ways people deal with their lives. she said some deal with it by ignoring it entirely, other people find an outlet like art or writing, some do drugs, some just get angry like her father did. nana said she deals with it through god, that’s why she believes so hard and so much. she knows she’s centering her life around a coping mechanism, but isn’t that better than having a life not centered at all? how many people? noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. do you not know how to count? 8. how many people died in the flood? all of them. how many? a lot. nana has a mural in bedroom of what i think is a beach in brazil. after she got it installed, she added hundreds of tiny birds to the skyline. to make it more realistic, she said. nana says all sin, while inevitable, must be accounted for — that god understands the concept of karma. that no matter how hard you try, the sin will come and you will be punished thoroughly for it. nana can tell the severity of her sins when she was young because if they weren’t, she wouldn’t have the life she’s come to live now. i lost god in the park in eighth grade when a swallow fell out of its nest and onto its back. i couldn’t tell what it had broken but it looked like it was having a seizure, it couldn’t stop convulsing back and forth. at first when it fell, i thought the movement was because it couldn’t flip itself back over so i put it on its feet but the shaking continued. i knew once that i had touched the swallow, it would be rejected by the rest of the birds so instead, i prayed. i asked god to keep it alive until someone else could come and save it. i prayed to let the death not be on my hands alone but it still closed its eyes as i dialed the number for the wildlife rescue center. i thanked god for the confirmation, and buried the swallow at the foot of a tree, covered in some leaves. the next day, i came back to the park to find its corpse being eaten by ants. why did god send the flood? because the world was full of sin. why was the world full of sin? because god gave humans the option to sin. why did god give humans the option to sin? because god wanted proof that humans loved him. did he get that proof? only from noah. we’re getting ready for church and i’m brushing my hair out. nana’s telling me how pretty i look with this dress on and i’m choosing to believe her. i have to borrow her shoes because i wasn’t supposed to spend the night and i only have flip flops. she stuffs pieces of tissue in the toes of the flats and asks me to spin around. she smiles at me in the mirror and i can feel the warmth. god, i’ve decided, is just wanting someone to be there. Kaydance Rice is a writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has been recognized by the Poetry Society of America, Middle West Press, Albion College, and the Alliance of Young Artists and Writers. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the Taco Bell Quarterly, YoungArts Anthology, Eunoia Review, voicemail poems, and elsewhere. In her free time, Kaydance enjoys playing the viola, rambling about existentialism, and spending time with her plants. 3/31/2024 Joyride by Mary Ann McGuigan vivek jena CC Joyride I don’t know how fast we’re going, because I can’t see the speedometer, but it has to be twice as fast as the law allows on Pelham Parkway. I’m in the backseat, directly behind my brother-in-law Brian. He doesn’t have a death wish; he’s just drunk, playing chicken with his brother Conor, whose big black beat-up ’54 Dodge is racing alongside us. Brian has his arm stretched out the window, ready to toss another paper cup full of Pabst Blue Ribbon at Gloria, Conor’s girlfriend, sitting in his passenger seat. She’s armed with her own full cup, and the Dodge is moving perilously close to the side of our Chevy. My hair is already tangled from the wind and wet from the beer because I rolled up my window too late. I want to scream at them, tell them this game is dangerous. But I’m only eleven years old, with no say about anything that happens in my life, no matter how close it comes to hurting me. The back of Brian’s neck is red and so is Gloria’s face as they bark their laughs into the wind. I’m not the only one in the car not laughing along. My sister Irene, two years older than me, is cursing under her breath and gripping my knee each time the car swerves. Just when I think my kneecap is ready to pop off, the car jolts and she can’t take anymore. She leans forward over the front seat and pleads with our sister Kathleen, “Tell them to stop. Please.” But the radio is blasting and the pounding beat of “Maybellene” is so loud I don’t think Kathleen even hears her, because she doesn’t answer. She leans toward the passenger side door to avoid getting wet as Gloria sprays another twelve ounces into Brian’s face. His T-shirt gets soaked, so does the steering wheel. “I can’t grip the fuckin’ wheel,” he shouts at the Dodge, his head out the window. The air rushing in feels even colder now, and I reach for my blouse to put on over my bathing suit. We’re on our way to Orchard Beach, at least that was the plan, but I’m scared we’ll wind up flying over a guardrail instead. I glance over at Kevin, my little brother. His face has no color, and his mouth is partly open like he can’t make up his mind whether to scream or piss his pants. Maybe he figures Brian decided to skip Orchard Beach and head out to Coney Island instead. Maybe this is a Steeplechase ride. It sure feels like one, because I’m ready to puke. My niece Erin is bouncing happily in her spot between Irene and Kevin. She’s pulling at Irene’s ponytail and looks pleasantly mystified. She’s just a toddler, maybe the only other person in the car besides Brian who doesn’t understand how close we are to getting killed. Kathleen usually makes a stink if Brian drives too fast when Erin’s in the car. But he was already feeling good when we left Bathgate Avenue an hour ago. Crossing him when he gets to that stage isn’t a good idea, not for Kathleen, because he’ll show her who’s boss again, and it hurts. Brian is always jolly at first, the kind of drinker who can fool you into thinking he won’t get nasty if he has a few more. Everything is a joke. Until it isn’t. Brian pours more beer into the cup between his legs, spilling a lot of it, then firing what’s left at Gloria. His brother slows the Dodge down, lets Brian pass him, then speeds up next to him again so his bombardier can try for another volley. Neither one of them seems to be watching the road. They’re too busy honking their horns, cutting each other off, cursing out the window, and laughing their lunatic laughs, baring their teeth like inmates let loose from the asylum. That’s the way men laugh when they’re drunk, when the drinking erases the rules, makes them feel like they can cross the double line, ignore the speed limit, bloody women’s faces. Kathleen moves both hands through her hair and says something to Brian. But I can’t hear what she’s saying because Chuck Berry won’t stop pounding, won’t stop singing about his Cadillac, how it’s racing and rolling, bumper to bumper. Every muscle in my body is tight. My jaw is locked, my arms are heavy and so are my legs, like they’re stuck in cement. Everything hurts. Powerlessness does strange things to me. And it’s always the same. Like the nights when Daddy comes home drunk, knocking over tables, searching for enemies. At first I watch him throw things, my fists clenched, stomach burning, but then a kind of surrender takes over. I know I have no control, no way to stop anything from happening. Even my prayers end in mid-stream and after a while I’m suspended in a place where the pain—or the fear of it—loses its edge. It isn’t acceptance or anything like that. I know what’s happening is terrible and dangerous, but it’s as if something else is holding me up, something outside of me, outside of that moment. So I watch the trees blur as we speed ahead of the Dodge again, hear Chuck Berry pleading with Maybellene, feel Irene’s grip again on my knee, and I see Kathleen crying, shouting, and this time I hear what she says, pull over. The car lurches, slows, then speeds up again then pulls sharply toward the shoulder. We come to a stop just past an exit ramp and Kathleen gets out, slams the door behind her. The silence is sudden, explosive. No more Maybellene, no pounding beat, not a word from anyone. For a moment I wonder if she’s going to keep on walking, head up the highway, abandon us to the insanity. But Brian slides over to the passenger side, muttering something about a fuckin’ bitch, and Kathleen gets into the driver’s seat. “You used to be fun,” he mutters, but she doesn’t take the bait. She adjusts the mirrors and gets us to the beach. There aren’t many times anymore when I’m as afraid as I was in that car, so that feeling of being insulated has become mostly a memory, certainly nothing I can summon. Meditation offers promise. But sitting still is torture, no matter how much incense I burn, because the nervous energy you acquire when you grow up the way I did can never be subdued. But I’ve had glimpses of it, when I’m sitting still as the candle flickers, or playing blocks on the floor with my grandsons, watching them thrill at how tall the tower rises, at the anticipation of knocking it down. I may be unsettled, worried about things that may happen or things that never will, but I keep breathing each breath, keep listening to the boys giggle. And there it is, that merciful suspension, that sense that no matter how close the danger is, it isn’t all there is. Mary Ann McGuigan’s creative nonfiction appears in Brevity (forthcoming), X-R-A-Y, The Rumpus, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. You can find her fiction in lots of journals, including The Sun, Massachusetts Review, and North American Review. Her collection PIECES includes stories named for the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net. THAT VERY PLACE, her new collection, is due out in 2025. Mary Ann’s young-adult novels are ranked among the best books for teens by the Junior Library Guild and the New York Public Library. WHERE YOU BELONG was a finalist for the National Book Award. She loves visitors: www.maryannmcguigan.com. 3/31/2024 Inflatable by Matti Ben-Lev rabesphoto CC Inflatable We stole an orange, inflated, rubber balloon from a car dealership and put it in my silver, 2004 Toyota Matrix, the same night you confessed you wanted to die. We sat in my car, at the entrance of a state park, at two a.m., and you spun a horror story that I almost believed and you spoke so softly, a hushed rasp in your voice, that I could feel your words vibrating across each individual vertebrae as we gazed out at the dirty gates, the park’s gaping mouth. You whispered and then you shrieked and my heart skittered to the backseat and a part of me left my body and a part of me knew that I wanted to die too and a part of me understood, with the certainty of fabric, that the two of us didn’t belong together, but the pull was irresistible, like stretching rubber. Inflatable. We returned to our apartment and carried the balloon and the tall black pole that cradled it. Only later, we discovered that the pole was sprinkled with fiberglass. We soaked gummy bears in green apple Smirnoff and sat on my bed watching horror movies until our eyes fluttered with scraps of sleep, with bits of tangerine gelatin stuck between our teeth. I spent weeks digging the painful glass crystals out of my fingers with a pair of tweezers. For the next four years, we would watch each other go in and out of hospitals, killing ourselves slowly, until one of us got better. I return to that night in my car, as if remembering could blunt my guilt for getting better, could bring back the intimacy at the pit of captured air and orange rubber, could resurrect the moment before we popped the balloon, dragged it to the curb. Matti Ben-Lev earned a bachelor's degree from Towson University, where he studied creative writing. His work has been published in 34th Parallel, The Rumpus, and Corporeal. During his final year at Towson, he worked as a poetry editor for Grub Street. He currently works as a copywriter at a climate action nonprofit while he preps for his MFA at George Mason. He lives in Baltimore, MD and loves music, reading, and poetry. 3/31/2024 I Amsterdam by Natalie Robinson Bill Reynolds CC
I Amsterdam Piper has my headphones. I gave mine to them because theirs were broken and then I did not have any. I took some from a shop in the airport, put them brazenly in my bag. I’ve already paid, I told myself. I’ve already given everything up to Piper and honestly I need some of it back. I don’t know if this means I’m losing my mind or reclaiming it. I would like to worry less. On the plane I took photographs above the clouds as the sky moved through blue to mauve, to black. I would send these pictures to friends to convince them: I’m getting on with my life. I felt unafraid of flying and observed that this was because I did not care if I lived or died. In a way, I thought, I am already dead. I stayed with my friend Ana and her partner Farhad; their apartment was in what Ana calls the ‘onion rings’ of the canals, on a street lined with trees that were full of green parrots. I spent the first day talking about how to disappear. That’s not how I understood myself at first but at some point Ana described what I was doing like this: you are talking a lot about how to disappear. In an art exhibit that withheld its own meaning, or was just in Dutch, I stepped behind a curtain and hoped for a second that I might. There was a free short story in a brown paper envelope at the gallery exit. The story was titled ‘Vuur’, which translates to ‘Fire.’ I took one. It started with the sentence: the image haunted her. I put it back in the envelope. Later, sat at Ana’s dining room table, we planned out our exit from society. We would take cash, throw our phones away, get on a train, a boat, become untraceable. We could start right here, get easily to Rome, hitchhike from there down the boot of Italy to the tip of Sicily, get on the sea, move south from Algeria. I would dye my hair dark, wear different clothes, choose another name. When I brought this up again the next day, Ana said: I’m not interested in that anymore. I drank port even though I know I shouldn’t, cannot. I threw up all over their futon. The morning after, I dragged myself through the shame-shadowed hangover I know so well. I smoked a cigarette on the balcony and my legs gave out beneath me. I got back into bed. I text my mum in a moment of despair and said more than I wanted to and cried a bit in Ana’s arms. I said I was heartbroken and that it felt like grief. This might have seemed extreme, but it was true. I messaged Piper: ‘Stop it.’ At the Science Museum, I ate fries with mayonnaise and watched Chinese children stand in a freezing cold fountain. Ana was outraged at the parents and confused by the children: How can they let them stand in the water like that? Do these kids not feel the freezing cold?! I didn’t know. I’d been certain that what Piper and I had was real. That although we didn’t say the words, I love you was this felt thing: it was this visceral breathtaking gutpunch, this actual soul connection. It was being totally present in my own life; it was bending and stretching time to suit us; it was a delicious kind of fate. That was the hill I had died on. How could I have misread this all so badly? I watched a man walking, wearing a protest sign like a tabard. He had written with green Sharpie in English: You are killing us and you are lying. Ana said: that’s very unspecific. I thought: well, at least it’s reusable. I started reading a book I had brought with me. It was about cuckholding, being a ‘cuck’, a ‘beta’ and I over-identified with the main character. He seeks power over his powerlessness; he speaks eloquently about it and also gets to the point. He pins down some of my own urgency; he says: “rescue me from the puzzle of the dance.” 1 1 Darryl by Jackie Ess (2021) I realised I don’t have the energy anymore to show up and entertain people. I sat in silence for an evening, turning pages. I worried that if I stopped trying most of my relationships would just cease to exist. Ana went to bed. I watched Farhad and his Mexican friend ‘Z’ work all day on a project proposal, something about science and the pandemic. Ana made pancakes with hand-whipped cream and later, arranged a cheeseboard, Spanish meats, calamari. Then there was Persian pasta - spaghetti boiled and also steamed and always called ‘macaroni’, regardless of the shape. Z held up his calamari and told me that the octopus has disrupted scientific consensus on what constitutes intelligence. Rather than being a social animal the octopus has become, over time, its own self-regulated little system. It has independently thinking tentacles, whatever that means. It plans ahead, he said, carries a little coconut on long journeys to hide from predators. Or more likely, I thought, to get some alone time. This was useful to me because now I can imagine I have my own coconut. Walking with Ana, for example, but I’m in my coconut. I said: calamari is actually squid. I took a long shower with the door open with the curtains to the adjoining bedroom open, willing somebody to watch. I was unsure if Ana now hated me for ruining the futon. I watched her make coffee in the morning on their barista-style machine. It was sunny and light filled the rooms. I said pointless things about the day and offered desperate compliments: so bright in here!! So lovely. She replied, affirmative but short. I wondered if I felt more familiar with Darryl from my book. I considered staying in Amsterdam forever. I would like to sit by these expensive long windows, drinking coffee and looking out at the rain. We took the Metro a couple of stops to collect Ana’s car from a parking garage. It had sat there undriven for two months. It took a while to find because she had forgotten where she’d left it. We walked up and down and I lost hope and then we found it. It was her cousin’s car, borrowed and old, jarring with her outfit and the rest of her life as I saw it. We planned to drive out to the wide flat beach in Haarlem. An overpowering smell of damp and decay hit me when I opened the passenger-side door. The car was full of mould, white blotches ruining the seats. We took the train instead. Stood on the platform I dropped my ticket; the wind blew it onto the tracks. I looked down at it. A siren sounded, loud. Ana told me it could be heard through the whole city - weekly or maybe it was monthly. I half-joked that it was signalling a different emergency, another apocalypse. She said no, it was just in remembrance, or a test. In Haarlem, we went through the station barriers pressed together, using Ana’s ticket. An alarm went off and I imagined it heard by the whole town. We walked a long stretch of the beach, the wind blowing at our backs. We walked up and into a national park that was made from land reclaimed from the sea. Miles of shell-scattered dunes. The October sun made the landscape muted. We walked through an RV park, full of cars and trailers but absent of people, like it had been abandoned in a hurry. I was fascinated by the aesthetic and could have stayed longer, but Ana was unbothered, or annoyed with me or sad or just wanted to be back on a trail. I really could not tell. After a while, Ana told me a story about staying with travelling communities in the mountains in Iran, about women making butter from milk so slowly, about wolves coming at night, about men firing guns into the air. I watched blonde twins play on a climbing frame at a restaurant in the middle of the park. I ordered a toasted sandwich called ‘Portobello’, with mushrooms and ‘rode ui’ which I learned was Dutch for ‘red onion.’ I tried to eat consciously, keeping pace with Ana. We walked 5km back into the old town. Somewhere on this walk, I decided that I have to close the door to my feelings for Piper. I had reached that point. But I have said that before. I said it in Auckland, in New York, in Dijon. I have said it and said it. Ana said: you have to see the red-light district! Back in the city, behind a large church we saw women in the gaps made by red velvet curtains. I found it hard to look and I felt distressed. I didn’t know any more if we should protest or fight for the right for their bodies for sale, or just keep out of it. I felt dizzy with the politics and with the who am I to tell you you’re contained. Mostly people were looking for the novelty. They took photographs in front of the women: selfies. I watched a man exchange words at the door and enter; I imagined his trousers down around his ankles, not even all the way off. I met one woman’s eyes and she smiled with them. Ana pointed to the floor: this is my favourite sculpture in the city, she laughed: it’s a single breast. We went into the church. It’s €10 in, said the man behind the desk. No! I surprised myself, more aggressive than I’d intended. I tempered my tone: but what if we just want a quiet space? What if we wanted to pray? €10, he said again. Back at the apartment, we watched a show about poison in kitchenware, in ski coats, in coffee cups, in everything. We watched the rolling news. Everywhere everyone was dying, especially people who weren’t vaccinated. The news seemed to say: look how stupid these people are. Lying and dead. The Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded. Farhad told us this when he returned from work at the university. The prize was going to scientists who had found out how we experience ‘touch’ in our nervous system. Farhad told us about the picture he had seen with the announcement. That it was of two people hugging, that it was cute. I Googled and saw two men, side by side, not touching. We watched a documentary about Britney Spears. We talked about her mental health, her unfreedoms. I found there was not much to say that had not been said before. Farhad said: Britney shaped our generation. I lost my internet connection and waved my phone in the air. I thought, maybe Piper has messaged and I haven’t received it. I watched Ana cut the stems on her three-day-old lilies, remove some of the wilted flowers. She watered them and hit the books on the shelf, cursed. Farhad answered a work call. Ana told me that normally, the lilies will last for over a week. I never buy them, I replied, because they are toxic for cats. I do not have a cat. What is wrong with me? I woke up late or woke up and avoided facing the day for some time. When I walked into the living room, I said self-effacingly to Farhad: good afternoon. He shouted: Is it afternoon already?! His project deadline loomed. It was 11.37. Ana was working from home. She pointed to her AirPods and said: I’m in a meeting. I walked to the Museuemplein because I felt that I was expected to do something touristy and also to leave the apartment. If nobody was looking I would have read on the sofa all day, under covers. Sometimes it’s good to have witnesses to your life. I took myself to Moco - Amsterdam’s Museum of Contemporary Art, of street art, of mainly Bansky. There was an installation of lights and mirrors like something from a funfair or bad dream. I took a picture of myself in amongst the colours and posted it on my Instagram. I wrote: digital disorientation. I walked through the gallery too quickly for the price I’d paid for the ticket. I looped around again and sent some pictures to a friend: I’m in an art museum. I stood for a long time in front of this text: Sex: if you want it badly that’s how you’ll get it. I read the information card to the left: it told me I wasn’t entitled to another person just because I wanted them. I thought about Piper and wondered if it was still mutual, if really it ever had been. In the gift shop I slipped a pen into my pocket. On the side of it in yellow print were the words: take the risk or lose the chance. I felt calm and justified and ironic. In the gardens it was raining hard. I stopped for a moment by a sculpture of a small boy eating a rabbit. The caption read: did you think this was a toy? I wondered if it meant the boy or the rabbit or both. Rabbit, probably. I supposed I did and then I didn’t. It was creepy but it was intended to be and so then it lost its impact: it had tried too hard. Maybe that was the point. It was difficult to tell what was art. I took a picture of a small sign that said: ‘do not touch.’ I found a cafe with robust umbrellas and outdoor seating. I ordered an Americano. It arrived with a complimentary Biscoff biscuit and a small plastic creamer. I thought about the last time I was in Amsterdam, almost two years ago. I was applying for jobs here, was ready to relocate, or was pretending to be. My trip was a reconnaissance mission, or I was pretending it was: where to live? Where to brunch? I imagined otherwise for a weekend. I remembered smoking half a joint in a coffeeshop full of men and trying hard to navigate back to my Airbnb. When I got there, I lay on the bed with the great world spinning around me until I’d finally passed out. I was trying to get over Piper. How many trips like this will it take? The rain banged down around me as if the whole fucking sky was falling. I wasn’t dressed appropriately. I was wearing an oversized hoodie over black leggings and appeared to have spilled something down the front of me. I thought of my friend Rachel’s anecdote about a colleague who’d suffered a psychotic break. How it started. She said: he turned up at work with stuff spilled all down his clothes. I had hoped these few days away would change something profoundly for me. That on return I’d feel refreshed, have renewed perspective. That this would feel like a weight lifted, like clouds parted etc. That the space Piper takes up in my psyche would shrink a little at least. But instead it just allowed me to see this more clearly: the mess behind me and ahead of me still. At what point does your personality become a disorder? I walked back to Ana’s, thought I could find my way without Maps; I imagined a trail of breadcrumbs. I missed her street, walked too far and had to double back, used the pin-drop after all. Despite the rain, I stopped and stood and listened to the green parrots. I couldn’t see them but they were loud. Ana had told me how she had heard that they shouldn’t really be here, had escaped captivity somehow, a long time ago. I had heard a similar story about parrots in San Francisco. Parrots prone to escape-artistry. Living in exile, camouflaged amidst parrot-coloured leaves. Ana was in another meeting. I lay down on the sofa and tried to read the rest of the short story. I read it in fragments entered into Google Translate. I skipped most of the middle. It ended with the sentence: inside stops disappearing. What did that mean? I didn’t totally understand. It read like a cheap fortune. Maybe that was the point. On the Metro on my way to the airport I watched my reflection flash in and out of focus. I thought: I have been trying to appear to myself in the world. They say: wherever you go, there you are. But this ‘they’ are nobody in particular, this ‘wherever’ is nowhere specific and this ‘you’ is free-floating, unreal. Is it possible to step outside of cliché by living authentically? I want to reassociate with the here and now. At Amsterdam Zuid I bought a Kitkat and a Coke with my remaining money. The man at the kiosk laughed and said something I heard as: sugarproof! I smiled back and he explained to me how to recycle my bottle. He explained this to me so sincerely. On the plane I felt ambivalent as I watched the oxygen mask drop in demonstration. I thought: show me the person who survived because they paid attention to the safety spiel. I walked up and down the parking lot, pressing my key fob, listening for the unlock, looking for the orange flare. I lost hope and then I found it. I turned the engine on, listened to it purr. I drove into a city lit up red: the buildings lining the Liffey, the Samuel Beckett Bridge, red reflecting off the water. For what, I wondered. For stop it. For I love you. I Googled: it was for Fire Safety Week. Fire / Vuur. In my post-box was a postcard from Rachel. It was a snowy scene despite her holiday being in the sun. She had written: no picture-taking is allowed here so you might have to visit yourself. I laughed and felt something like relief flood my senses, or perhaps it was friendship. I opened the door to my apartment, holding my phone to light the space in front of me. I stepped into the room. Natalie Robinson is a writer currently based by the sea in Dublin, Ireland. You can read more of her work on Instagram @natalierobinsonpoetry vivek jena CC On Dating (And Breaking Up) in Your Twenties Dear twenty-something woman entering the dating world, I am writing to you in between five-dollar mimosas and bites of a bacon, spinach, and cheese omelet at the restaurant my sorority sister works at. I am two drinks in, waiting for my third, and I’m pissed about my romantic life because drinking makes me think too much and when I start thinking I cannot stop. My friend sits across from me, and we are both doing some writing and drawing doodles while simultaneously discussing our recent dating lives—or lack thereof. We are mostly discussing the struggle of meeting any decent people in college and in the city of Wilmington—the city which we are doomed to until we graduate and are let off the leash of academia—which has inspired me to write this letter to you. I believe there are only a few ways to meet people as an undergraduate student in your twenties—if you know more, please reach out to me.
I don’t know if you will find what you are looking for in college. Most people don’t. In fact, only 28% of college graduates end up marrying their college partner—my DIVORCED parents being a part of that percentage. You might find the person who wakes you up in the morning with a kiss on the head or you might find a person who will kick you out the night before because they have an 8 a.m. class the next morning. It’s cool either way because you’re supposed to play it cool in your twenties. Don’t fall too hard or fast because you most likely will not marry that person anyway. You are probably still caught up on your high school boyfriend because his mom won’t stop commenting on your Facebook posts, causing you to remember you loved his family more than you actually loved him and DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT LOVE IS? YOU ARE TWENTY-SOMETHING FOR GOD’S SAKE. I have learned a few things about relationships thus far, such as: just because you have a decent first date does not mean you will have a good relationship (boys are only putting up a front so that you will go home with them); staying with somebody because you are simply comfortable is not a reason to stay (know the difference between love and attachment—I personally do not know it yet); and, it's better to just stay single than to stay with a boy who doesn’t see value in you (I believe everyone has a soulmate. Maybe even more than one). Do NOT waste your time trying to make a boy better or waiting for him to become better. Settling will only make you weaker and boys take advantage of weak women. When you finally meet the person who you think might be the one, you might tell all your friends about them and suddenly get ghosted. This is OK. Shit happens. And it’s not you. REALLY. It’s THEM. Every time. You are never a problem, and you are never asking too much. You have simply just chosen somebody who didn’t understand what “enough” was. You must ask yourself constantly: what do you want? What is going to be best for you? I WANT TO MEAN SOMETHING TO SOMEBODY. IS THIS TOO MUCH TO ASK? No. It is never too much if it is right for you. Yes, we all want to be more than a one-night stand or a “nice ass.” We all want somebody to take care of us, damn it! My friend sits across from me still, and sparks a new topic: “situationships.” The term “situationship,” according to Urban Dictionary, is when two people start a relationship but do not label it, in order to avoid making things serious. This is bullshit. So this is what “dating” looks like in your twenties: …we’ve been seeing each other for a while now and we’re not technically dating, and we’ve never established that we’re exclusive, but we’re only seeing each other. I sleep in your bed every night, or you’ll sleep in mine, and we lay skin to skin and kiss “goodnight” but we’re not dating. You know everything about me like what every inch of my skin looks like and how important Taylor Swift is to me, and I know your favorite football team and the brand of your underwear because I watch you take them off every night, BUT we absolutely are not dating. Sometimes you like to kiss my forehead and whisper secrets in my ear and tell me how badly you need me in your life, but I don’t say it back because we’re not dating. The worst part of all of this is that I am in love with you, and I think you are with me but neither of us can say it because we're not dating because dating in your twenties is “difficult.” So instead of begging you to love me and show me common decency, I take what I can get, like sleeping naked on your chest every night and eating the scrambled eggs you cook for me in the morning. I’ll walk right past you on campus or at work and pretend like I don’t know what behind your ear smells like or the brand of toothpaste you use because people don’t need to know that I sleep in your bed because we are NOT dating. That is a situationship and it is like that until one person decides to tragically end it. The best part about dating in your twenties—and this is subjective—is breaking up. It’s like a revelation. It’s like finally seeing things with clarity, like drinking water after running a marathon, or a sip of alcohol after a really freaking long week. The fresh haircut, the new set of nails, the shopping spree, giving your number out at the bar, finally spending more time with your girlfriends, writing, singing, dancing, just having fun again. Yes, breakups ARE difficult, but you have to find peace in the little things like finally having the bed to yourself so you can pick any TV show you want—for me it’s Bob’s Burgers and Bridgerton. That’s the best part of the relationship; when you realize you are no longer TIED DOWN because you never needed that person as much as you originally thought you did. But this is only if the relationship was previously draining you, much like the relationships that I have experienced, because like I said, these are all immature boys who are not ready for mature relationships (I may just have bad taste). You are not pasta water; you should never let a boy drain you. Even better than the post-breakup-clarity, is realizing you have a support system waiting for you. When I went through what I thought was the worst breakup of my life—I’m sure there will be more, and I am sure they will be worse—I was surrounded by women who would never get tired of hearing me rant and cry. Women who brushed my hair and cooked me dinner; women who binged watched reality TV with me while we ate our weight in popcorn and finished double bottles of wine; women who held back my hair after one-too-many post break-up dirty shirley’s at the bar; and women who would say things like “he doesn’t know what he’s missing.” and “he will regret this.” But most importantly, I was surrounded by the women who told me “You should never let a man drain you, and if he does, then he is not yours.” This was all happening while I was dodging calls from a contact called “DO. NOT. ANSWER.” (I answered most of the time anyway because I thought I loved him). The best advice I can give you now is to choose the people who choose you. You should NEVER have to beg somebody to love you. When you experience a break-up, you don’t even realize that you have friends hiding in plain sight. The girls in my English class who wanted to take me out to coffee or the ladies in my publishing lab who rubbed my back while I cried before class. The girls at work who soiled my ex’s name in the work Facebook group. The girls in the bathroom who, in between slurred words, told me how I deserve better—which I ALWAYS knew. I honestly don’t know much. I do know that my dad found love again at fifty. I know that my mom fell more in love with HERSELF when she became single after twenty-eight years of marriage; the two of them are the happiest I've ever seen them. You may not find love now, in your twenties, but it's out there, and it is waiting for you. Trust me, the 5’6'' business major you met in the dining hall is NOT the love of your life. The love of your life is a man you can confidently stand beside while wearing high heels—or maybe that is just the love of mine. Do what you will with this information, whether you use my advice or not, it's OK, either way: I am drunk. Best regards, Twenty-something woman who is boycotting dating. Sarah Grace Hook is a senior at The University of North Carolina Wilmington. She will graduate in May with a BFA in creative writing and a certificate in publishing. She writes themes of humor within mental health. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, and spending time with her nephew. 3/30/2024 Half of What You See by Paula Finn Torsten Behrens CC Half of What You See “He called out your name three times,” Staci, my father’s private nurse, tells me on the phone. “The last thing he said was, ‘Tell Paula I love her. I’m just ready to go into a deep sleep.’” The news leaves me stunned, nauseous in disbelief. An hour later, I’d receive an even bigger shock--one that would irreparably shatter a reality I’d trusted. * I’d hired Staci nineteen months earlier. My mother had just had a heart attack and my dad was diagnosed with dementia. Mom died a week later and in the tumult that followed, Staci was a godsend to my father and me in our grief. She stayed on as Dad’s live-in caregiver and companion through several temporary hospital, nursing home, and rehab stays, while I divided my time between my apartment in San Jose and extended visits to my parents’ L.A. home. At 39, Staci was still pretty, her looks enhanced by black eyeliner and bright red lipstick. The moment she met my father, she had an instant rapport with him. She offered to shave him and as she was doing it, I mentioned that he’d written for several iconic comedy TV shows. “I’m shaving a celebrity!” she exclaimed. “Can I have a lock of your hair?” “I can’t spare any,” he said. In contrast to my dainty, demure mom, Staci stood almost six feet tall and was loud and bawdy. She wore her jet-black hair as short as a boy’s and she sparkled--all the way down to her toe rings. She was funny, and her husky voice and Georgia accent make her seem even funnier. When Daddy tells her he doesn’t mind the sunroof open in her Nissan she says, “You don’t mind your hair blowin’ in the breeze?” I have to laugh. All that remains of my dad’s hair is a few wisps of grey fluff. When we’re out and she trips over a step, he admonishes her, “What have I told you about drinking in the daytime!” They’d joke back and forth all day. She told us once that she’d been home schooled. From then on, whenever Daddy corrected a mistake in her grammar, she’d point to her head and say sadly, “It’s that homeschoolin’!” They’d both laugh. * When his neurologist first told me he thought Daddy was developing “cognitive impairment,” I was horrified. My poor father, always so glib, now showing signs of impairment without realizing it. Or worse--maybe he did realize it. Even tragedy couldn’t stop him from thinking comedically. After my mom died, we took him to the mortuary for the viewing. His last words to her were “Honey, I’ll see you in heaven--if I go in that direction.” While his body shrunk to translucent skin and bones, his sense of humor and personality would remain strong. That first Thanksgiving, the three of us had dinner in my parents’ midcentury kitchen. Thirty years earlier Mom had redecorated it, adding blue and lavender floral wallpaper to coordinate with the powder blue Formica counters. Staci cooked a small steak in the ancient Thermador wall oven. When my father announced that he might remarry, she promptly raised her hand from across the table. “I’m over here!” I enjoyed her pearls of wisdom. She often reminded me, “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” Other favorites were, “A sociopath is someone so charming you want to meet them again,” and “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Openly affectionate, she frequently kissed and hugged my father. Never physically demonstrative, he started hugging me and for the first time, accepted my hugs unself-consciously. I’d squeeze his fragile frame tightly. “Hug away,” he’d say with no embarrassment. “You hug hard!” “Tell her you love her,” Staci prompted him at the end of every phone call with me. He’d never ended a conversation that way in his life. Before long, he was saying it on his own. He even came back on the phone once just to hear me tell him I love him again. “One more time!” he laughed. * As co-owner of a caregivers’ agency, Staci had responsibility for hiring, firing, and paying other helpers as needed. I got the impression Gail and Carol didn’t like me and I can’t say I was fond of them, based on the things Staci said. At one point she told me Gail threatened to burn my house down. When she was let go, Carol told Staci she’d “put the fear of God in me” if I ever spoke to her again. Staci related to me the other nurses’ hateful comments about my “cheapness” and desire to keep expenses reasonable, though she herself understood and respected it. “Girl, you’re burnin’ a little wattage!” she joked when I turned on an extra bright light. I looked to Staci as my best friend and my rock, the one constant in a parade of short-term workers. Her detailed, humorous anecdotes about the fun she and Dad shared always lifted my spirits; their trips to the beach, going to see the Christmas lights, eating pie at 2 a.m.—and all the laughter. I made written notes of everything she told me; I wanted a chronology of my father’s final months so I could never forget that she and I did our best for him. During Dad’s in-patient hospital stays, Staci frequently ran into his physician Dr. Berg when he made hospital rounds, or while she helped with Dad’s physical therapy. She even started seeing Berg as a patient herself and told me about her visits and all the lab tests he ordered for her. * Memories from my father’s final months still stab my heart. At home, he spent most of his days doing crosswords or reading, sitting up straight in the living room’s gold wingback chair, his thin legs crossed at the knees. I picture him in the grey designer silk pajamas I gave him: shaky and frail, he wore them proudly, running his hands admiringly over the fabric of the sleeves. Mother had made all his pajamas from material she found on sale. Decades earlier, he’d stood tall in elegant clothes. His closet brimmed with long abandoned Saks Fifth Avenue suits. I’d later donate them along with all the European leather shoes he’d polished so lovingly. He had no fear of death--just the opposite. “…If a doctor told me I was dying, I’d walk out of his office as happy as when I went in.” When I placed a vase of fresh roses at his bedside he said nonchalantly, “Look at those beautiful flowers. I wonder which one of us will die first!” * Before I’d hired anyone, a geriatric case manager cautioned me to put away anything I didn’t want to lose because, “They will be taken.” One day Staci suddenly said, “Gail’s wearing your mom’s shoes--so if anything’s missing in the house, don’t come to me!” I rush to look through Mom’s closet and discover two pairs of expensive unworn shoes missing. The three most beautiful vintage dresses are also gone. My boyfriend had given me a crystal heart in a velvet box which I kept in the den. One day I opened the box and discovered the heart gone. The thief was clever enough to leave the empty box so I wouldn’t immediately notice anything missing. I had no idea how long ago they’d taken it. I always brought my most valuable ring to L.A. My mother had it made for me of her engagement ring diamonds and my paternal grandfather’s large, Russian diamond. It was the only thing I had to remember him by. I was shocked to open the ring’s case one day and discover the Russian diamond gone, the prongs that held it pried open. Also missing from the house was the vintage cash register piggy bank Daddy put his spare change into throughout my childhood. When I told him it was gone, he instinctively made the gesture of pulling the lever down. Through the haze of dementia, he remembered, clearly. By the time I discovered the check fraud, my parents’ bank account had been cleaned out. Books of blank checks were stolen and forged by several people. Staci had three other workers helping and she fired them all. We weren’t sure which one of them was responsible, but they all seemed suspicious for different reasons. * In dementia, Daddy sometimes enjoys the delusion that I’m still a child. “Do you have school tomorrow, honey?” he asks as I help him to bed one night. My father always wanted to see me get married. I don’t dare tell him that I’m 49--and still single. I dread the times he asks about Mom. “Your mother…where is she?” I hesitate and he says, “She’s gone, isn’t she. My mind knew it, but I didn’t want to believe it.” In addition to Alzheimer’s, he’s diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and grand mal seizure disorder, he’s at risk of aspiration pneumonia, requires frequent mucus suctioning, and is fed through a tube. In his chart, a hospital nurse describes him as “gravely disabled,” requiring maximum assistance. I still insist on bringing him home. Only a licensed nurse certified in endotracheal suctioning, IV drug administering, and tube feedings can lawfully provide his home care. Staci is all those things. * During a temporary nursing home stay, Daddy forgets that he’s not allowed to eat. People leave sweets lying around and he gets none. One day I try to distract him with a bingo game. He’s frustrated, impatient, bored. My father, who taught me gin rummy and played and won poker games against celebrities, doesn’t understand bingo. I lead him away in his wheelchair, past a plate of cookies. He reaches to grab one, and it breaks my heart to deny him that pleasure. Back in his room, I avert my eyes as a nurse pours liquid food down the plastic tube protruding from his belly. When he asks for something to eat, she gives him a lemon-flavored swab to keep his mouth moist. Later, while he dozes, I sit on the end of his bed alternately staring at the stained grey linoleum floor and endless I Love Lucy reruns on the TV. When he opens his eyes, I tell him, “Your smile is worth a million dollars to me.” “Because of the gold in my teeth?” he asks. I shake my head, “No!” as we both laugh. But my heart sinks to hear his self-deprecation. “I’m not worth much. I’ve done nothing productive.” “I’ve always been deeply proud of you, Daddy!” “No reason to,” he says. One of the first things I learned to say as a toddler was, “Daddy’s so wumsy.” I’d gotten it from my mother; I couldn’t pronounce “clumsy.” I grew up with that image of him. In my forties I learned he’d been a champion athlete headed for the Olympics until he broke his ankle in his high school’s final competition. Mother wasn’t subtle in communicating how inept and useless she thought he was. Over the years, my childhood best friend Karen and her parents often came for dinner. Karen remembers that every time, right off the bat, Mother handed her dad a hammer or other tool and asked him to fix something in our house. Decades later I mention that I’ve heard from Karen’s father, with whom I’m still in contact. Deep in dementia, Daddy immediately says, “I wish I could do something right. I painted the bathroom; I have to finish it.” At the age of six, I’d started telling him, “Don’t be sad.” Already, I sensed the pain behind the jokes he wrote for a living. Perhaps more than was healthy, I cared more about his well-being than my own. I’d always felt responsible for making him happy. Now that it was getting down to the wire, I was trying even harder. I deluded myself into believing if I packed his last months with fun and enough praise from me—he’d die feeling better about himself and his life. For this reason, I begged the doctors to do everything possible to cure his frequent bouts of pneumonia, even though they suggested comfort care over more treatment. I ask what it would take to make him happier. “If I were gainfully employed.” “You’re eighty-nine! You’ve earned the right to enjoy yourself.” “That depends on the life I led. Some people would say I don’t deserve to live comfortably now.” I keep hoping for positive answers. “How do you see yourself?” “I’m a nobody. Nothing to recommend me.” I argue that that’s far from true, but he negates my words. I’m leaving for a quick trip up north that night. The last thing I hear him say is, “I wish it were Saturday or Sunday. Because then my conscience would let me take a day off.” * The next month, Daddy’s in the hospital with another pneumonia and I’m in San Jose, planning my return to L.A. in a few days. Staci calls and mentions that the shower door in the house leaks. She knows my preference for avoiding toxic chemicals and the shower guy will use a toxic sealer to fix the door. I decide to postpone my trip to L.A. until the job is done. “This is so hard on me, Paula, I am just worn out,” she tells me at one point. “The shower door company keeps cancelling and rescheduling their appointment, and I can’t stay home and wait for them when I need to be at the hospital with your dad.” She goes in to do his morning care, assist in all his physical therapy sessions, and keep him company at least ten hours a day. She calls me daily to report on his progress. “If your father stays in bed too long, we risk congestive heart failure. It would have set in by now if I weren’t getting him up more times than they are…They don’t have the help to do it. When I left him last night, he was fine. He’s recovering so great; all his labs are normal. He’ll be discharged any day now,” she assures me. Two days later, I wake up to Staci’s voicemail. “Hey Paula, it’s Staci. We lost our dad this morning at 9 o’clock.” She’s nearly hysterical. I’m reeling from shock. How could he have just slipped away from us? It seems impossible. A torrent of regrets floods. I should have been there! If not for that stupid shower door, I would have gone down sooner… The only comfort is that Staci was with my father as he passed. An hour later, Dr. Berg calls. In the course of our conversation, I bring up the subject of Staci being his patient. “No,” he says. “I don’t treat her. She’s never been to my office.” An eerie sense of disbelief and shock creeps over me. “I’ve never even met her!” he tells me. “I’ve spoken to her many times on the phone.” From deep in my throat comes an anguished sound. “…Then she was never there when you visited my father in the hospital?” “No, never met her.” “And she seemed like the most trustworthy of all the workers!” “Oh my God.” he says softly. “She sounds like she’s on speed or something, I don’t know…” A nursing home administrator had once described Staci as “bouncing off the walls.” But I’d always admired her for her energy. For the first time in my life, I’m hyperventilating. The reality I’d depended upon for nineteen months is unraveling at a dizzying speed. I insist to Dr. Berg that Staci was so convincing. “So then at least you don’t have to think of yourself as a patsy. You got fooled by the best.” “I’d love to know the truth someday and I probably never will,” I say, calming down a little. “It’s probably better that you don’t.” * I call the hospital and leave a message for the nursing supervisor. When Jean returns my call, she says there’s nothing documented in my dad’s chart about a sitter at his bedside. “I couldn’t find anyone in physical therapy who’d ever seen her. I talked to different staff members, and nobody had seen her. The nurse who was on the morning he passed said nobody was there.” “And Staci didn’t do his morning care?" I ask weakly. “No.” “Oh God, what recourse do I have? Could I get this in writing?” She tells me the nursing staff would not be allowed to sign anything. She says Staci had called them twice a day to ask how my father was doing. That’s how she found out he’d died. I hang up defeated, trying to digest an incomprehensible reality. Fooled by the best? It was small consolation. If I’d known Daddy was alone his last five weeks…nothing would have stopped me from being in L.A. And I’d been so close to coming back. Staci knew the story about my shower would keep me away, given my fear of toxic chemicals. I’d later discover that the shower had never leaked. A year earlier, she’d said my father had contagious scabies: another ploy to keep me from visiting. * I call Staci and confront her over her lies. She’s obviously prepared a defense and she denies my accusations. But as she talks, her defense becomes less and less credible. Ultimately, her story about missing my dad’s death changed every time she told it: she’d stepped into the bathroom, she’d gone across the hall to wash her hands, she’d been away for two minutes, then twenty, she left for coffee, she went home for lunch… Listening to her with a new perspective, I could hear the disconnect, the mania, the craziness…the lies. * I’d been so invested in keeping Staci as my dad’s nurse that I’d stayed in denial despite what would have been obvious red flags to most people. She appeared to be running things efficiently and I was reluctant to rock the boat. And most important, my father loved her. Once when she and I had visited him in the hospital together, she asked him, “How are you, Honey?” Her big brown eyes gazed at him with concern. She teared up when he said, “I’m great…now that you’re here!” But now, doubts I’d pushed aside came flooding back: the days I’d visited my father in the hospital and I’d “just missed her there…” the times she said Daddy was articulate with her, yet I’d seen him earlier the same day and he’d seemed aphasic…the times she didn’t know he’d been transferred to another room in a facility… I’d suspected she wasn’t always putting in the hours she claimed. But was her deception a lot more insidious? She’d gone with me to the bank to report the fraud. She’d driven me to the Honda dealer when my car was vandalized. Was she behind that as well? One day the car suddenly started smoking and was undriveable. A mechanic told me someone had put water in the car’s oil tank. At the time, Staci was the only person who had access to it. And there was the cassette tape I’d left on my dresser. Staci knew it was worth $2400 to me if I played it for my CPA. The morning of my appointment with him, I discovered the tape was broken. Panicked, I called a repair place and said I was bringing it in. The technician who spliced it back together told me someone had cut it in half with scissors. When I got home, Staci told me she’d redialed the last number I’d called and spoke to the technician herself. It could have been a mechanical failure, she said. “I wouldn’t want you thinking I broke it, since I’m the only one in the house!” she laughed. * I remember the phone call from Holly, a nursing assistant who worked for us briefly. She’d quit because she thought Staci had Munchausen by proxy syndrome and was forcing ER visits and other treatment on my dad he didn’t need. Out of the blue she called one day to report that Staci was stalking her. “She’s sitting in her car, parked in front of my house. She’s dangerous, Paula,” Holly tells me. “If she does it again, I’m calling the cops. I saw her in the coffee shop around the corner, too.” She says Staci’s wearing an orange top. The idea’s absurd. Staci’s at the rehab center with my father. I’m so amused by the conversation that I call her to share it. “Staci’s not here,” the facility informs me. An hour later I look out and see Staci sitting on my porch steps. She’s wearing her orange scrubs. “I don’t have any idea in the world where she lives!” she exclaims when I tell her about Holly’s call. That night, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I remember Staci told me when she hired Holly that she lived a few miles from my father’s house. Her address was on her job application. All the things that seemed odd at the time added up to a hideous realization. Staci had never been my friend. She was a master con artist. A colorful storyteller. A gifted actress. AND a criminal. The horror was my father’s loss: he’d received so much less than I’d intended. Hardest to accept was the image of him lying in bed alone all the hours I’d presumed she was with him. A sickening thought comes to mind. Staci had talked about other nurses medicating their patients to have a good day themselves. Had Daddy been out cold during all those “fun times” she told me they’d had together? Another possibility fills me with fear. I remember coming home one day and hearing Staci yelling angrily at her daughter on the phone. It surprised me to hear her so enraged and so completely out of character. Had she ever talked to my poor, trusting father that way? She’d accepted thousands of dollars pay for services she didn’t perform. Why didn’t I report her for fraud? I was afraid of her retaliation. She’d often told me, “I’m not an angry person, Paula. I’ve never had one angry thought toward you.” According to her, all the other workers hated me, and she didn’t understand why. I’ve since realized she’d conveyed her resentment of me by putting her words in other peoples’ mouths. The vicious threats she attributed to the others had all come from one person: Staci. * After Daddy died, my boyfriend and I moved into my parents’ house. One afternoon, a young real estate agent came to the door, canvassing the neighborhood for homes to list. “Your sister had only good things to say about you,” he tells me, smiling. “I don’t have a sister.” He says he’d come by the house in January and talked to a woman who said she was my sister. She told him I was very shy and didn’t want to talk to anyone, so he’d be dealing with her alone. She said she was in the family trust and wanted to sell. She requested a print-out of the neighborhood comps, she invited him in to show him the whole inside of the house, and she asked for his appraisal. He describes Staci in detail, including her accent and toe rings. “I’d known something was wrong with her,” he says. “The red lipstick, all that costume jewelry…” Daddy had been in the hospital the entire month of January. Staci had no reason to be at the house. As I listen, the familiar surreal feeling of sickness envelops me. Daddy died before the house was listed for sale…but could Staci have gotten away with stealing it? The chilling answer: not while I was still alive. * Staci came into my life when I was most vulnerable: my mother was dying and I was alone, 400 miles from my own home and support system. I needed someone to step in immediately and she seemed perfect. I’ve since learned she has a criminal record of grand theft and has gone by several aliases. In the last phone conversation I had with her, she volunteered that her daughter Chloe took my diamond when she spent the night at my house. I know for a fact her daughter never spent the night when I was there…and I had the ring with me at all times in San Jose. Chloe had grown to know and love my father. Recently out of curiosity, I looked up her social media. The first thing I saw on her Instagram page was a picture of her holding up a photo of my dad taken with Marilyn Monroe. The caption reads, “The best gift my mom ever gave me!” Staci stole it from my parents’ bedroom. Staci had answered the house phone a few times when my Aunt Rita called from Florida, and I believed that was the extent of their acquaintanceship. When my aunt died a few years later, her guardian sent me her personal effects. From among the old black and white photos, out popped an 8x10 color photo of Staci with her daughter. Staci knew Rita had money. How close were they? Not all of Staci’s crimes were to enrich herself, but to gain the satisfaction of seeing me stuck with a large bill. She told me her husband noticed termites in my garage and a family of rats under the house, presumably so I’d hire an exterminator. A free inspection found there were never any pests. A neighbor said Staci was complaining to people about how cheap I was. I’ve realized she hated me for my frugality. * The reality I’d trusted was mostly lies, a few truths…but I’ll never know which was which. Staci knew my dad’s humor and speech patterns well enough to make up his words in conversations that never took place. Even today, I’ll remember one of her heartwarming anecdotes and smile. I have to stop and remind myself that that too, probably never happened. In sharing this story with others, I've learned how prevalent caregiver fraud is. Horror stories abound. I refuse to let my experience make me overly paranoid or suspicious, but it did teach me something Dr. Berg had advised: “A little skepticism always does you well.” And it’s forced me to learn the difficult task of forgiveness. I’ve forgiven myself for the actions—and inaction—that allowed such a grievous outcome. And as forgiveness is a gift to ourselves, I’ve forgiven Staci--not because her crimes weren’t horrific--but to enable me to move on. My father’s death brought me one step closer to my own. It’s time now to make myself happy. Life is too short to carry resentment or regret. The good news is that Staci lost her nursing license so she’s not conning other families. “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see,” Staci always said. I don’t know about “half”—but from everything I saw, my father adored her. Rather than torment myself with imagined scenarios, I choose to focus on my own memories of Staci and Daddy together, making each other laugh, and seeing him so happy with her. It’s all I have. It has to be enough. Paula Finn is the author of Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of Television Comedy (Rowman & Littlefield). She’s written nonfiction for magazines and blogs including HuffPost, Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, and Script magazine. Her poetry has appeared in Spank the Carp and has been chosen for publication in an upcoming issue of Breath and Shadow. She’s authored ten gift books and has licensed her inspirational writings worldwide on popular gift products; her inspirational quotes can be found at Twitter.com/PaulaFinnquotes. She's a Summa Cum Laude UCLA graduate. 3/30/2024 What Were You Wearing by Savannah Sisk Danielle Henry CC
What Were You Wearing I have always found the question of “what were you wearing?” especially ridiculous. Men often make extremely unprovoked passes on me at work. I work at a grocery store. I’m wearing an apron and a hair net. Really attractive, I know. . . You wouldn’t think that part of the job description of a cashier is “successfully do your job while a very creepy sixty-year-old man attempts to flirt with you,” but I can assure you that it is. Just the other day I was standing behind the register five hours into a shift, shifting my weight from foot to foot, when a guy who couldn’t have been younger than seventy walked into my line. I asked, “Hello, would you like your groceries in plastic?” He proceeded to not respond, and instead peer around at the other cashiers. “Um. Is everything okay?” I had the misfortune of asking. He smiles. “Yeah, I was just making sure I had the prettiest cashier.” And then he winks. I am sixteen. What’s worse, I look like I’m sixteen. My skin crawls; I duck my head and avoid eye contact. I do not have the freedom of a floor worker at Artesia; I can’t just walk away. I remain, speechless. This happens all the time. It’s uncomfortable. Not for him, just for me. He feels no shame or disgust or, in the worst of circumstances, fear. He has no idea what it is to be a woman, to be constantly disrespected, to be made so insignificant in another’s mind that they think treating you this way is acceptable. This example illustrates my concern well: Women, especially those in the service industry, receive completely unwarranted and very much so unwanted flirtation all the time. The problem? These men don’t respect women. It isn’t only older men- I was once told point-blank by a guy who couldn’t have been more than thirty that ‘washing dishes is for women.’ I scanned his Scrub Daddy and bagged it for him. If men did respect women, then incidences like these would not occur. The problem is not all men, but it is some men. Men who, no matter their age, have no idea what it’s like to be harassed. Worse, they don’t bother to try and understand what it’s like to be hit on or catcalled because they don’t have to. Their privilege renders them blind, these men whose flirtations do not come across as compliments. They are not ‘just being nice.’ No one smiling at you like that has your best interests in mind. In order to end this epidemic of disrespect, I ask the men of America to treat their women cashiers, servers, concierges, and floor workers with the utmost respect. Please, do not flirt with us. We are tired and we do not appreciate it. The next time you push your cart into the checkout line, unload your groceries, make polite conversation, and check out- just not the cashier. It should not be up to the cashier to confront the customer, to do what my coworker suggested I do “the next time this happens.” I should not have to look men in the eye and say, “I’m sixteen, that’s disgusting.” They should already know that. Savannah Sisk is a sixteen-year-old woman living in the American South, where she spends the majority of her time daydreaming about ways to move to New Zealand. She has loved to write ever since she learned to hold a pen. Her work has been published in the Alcott Youth Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine and Across the Margin Literary Magazine. Her work is forthcoming in the Academy of the Heart and Mind Literary Magazine. 3/30/2024 The Tricks of The Craft by Tetman Callis Jes CC THE TRICKS OF THE CRAFT There’s a lot about those days I’ve never written about. When I have, I’ve written it out as fiction. Smooth the rough edges, apply the tricks of the craft. Call it fiction so I can tell the truth and still feel safe. Just say, “Oh, that’s fiction. How true is it? It’s as true as you want it to be.” This is not fiction. This is the story that I can’t tell you. So I will tell you. The day I poured the almost-full, very recently purchased fifth of Southern Comfort down the drain, the kitchen sink—this story has everything, including a kitchen sink, ha ha—this was the day I called AA. The man on the phone told me where the nearest AA place was, and told me that even making that call, the call I was making right then, was an important, vitally important, step to take. To have taken. To be taking. I never went to AA. That call was the closest I got. When I poured, when I called, I had a wife. We met in 1983, wed in 1985, divorced in 1991. Valentine’s Day of 1991. When I poured the Southern Comfort down the drain, that was October of 1988. The things we remember. I remember I told her about it when she got home from work that day. Told her what I had done. She said she would help me any way she could. • I just want to tell you a story. It’s about a man. He’s a writer. He’s also a father and a husband. He’s other things, besides, but there’s no point in calling him names. It took me a long time to understand where it all came from. Why had I crawled into a bottle to hide? What was I so afraid of? Jesus, I was scared half out of my wits. Not the pants-wetting, screaming and sobbing scared that would have made my fear obvious, but a slow-burn scared like a piece of iron rusting in the rain. There were sunny days, too. But sunny or cloudy, at the end of them, I had lost my home, my business, my wife—and the time. All that time. All that time that I was too drunk to get off the couch, or the floor. Too drunk to do anything other than stay drunk. Too drunk to change a diaper. My wife and I, we had a son. Our baby boy. I was his primary caregiver. A stay-at-home dad, when it was still considered a very unusual and by many persons a socially unacceptable way for a man to be. My wife and I, we were pioneers of the new social order. She kept her maiden name after we got married. (Loan officer at a bank in Texas said, “I didn’t know that was legal.”) She was the breadwinner. Accountant. CPA. Major firm. She supported me while I wrote. I couldn’t write worth a damn. Didn’t help I was so often drunk. Couldn’t read much that way, either. Riddle me this: what kind of writer is a writer who is too drunk to read and too drunk to write? • I’m trying to tell you a story. I’m running out of time and I have to tell you this story. Are you still there? My wife’s job frequently took her out of town. Routinely she was assigned to spend weeks in other towns, auditing the books of Native American tribal entities. She would leave on Monday mornings, return on Friday evenings. She knew her husband was a drunk. Before we had our son, she knew this. So picture this: young mother, job requires her to be out of town, away from her baby boy, who is being cared for by her husband whom she knows to have a problem. Ah, but I was a crafty one. A sly bugger. She’d leave on a Monday morning and the first thing I would do after she was gone is I would drive to the supermarket and buy a case of beer. Twenty-four cans, each can twelve ounces. That’s two gallons of beer, and a quart extra. Leave the boy in the car in his car seat while I popped into the store. First thing in the morning, no crowd, I’d be in and out in a jiff. It worked every time. Thus would begin that week’s boozer. That case of beer would last however long it would last—a couple days, I think—then I would want— “Want,” hell. What kind of “want” was it to want something no one in their right mind would want? It was a need. Pure and simple. I had conjured myself up one fierce need. A man who had everything he needed, but still needed to have a need. Monday it would begin. After she left, so she wouldn’t know. (Did she know?) It would last through Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday was for sobering up. Friday she’d be back and her husband would be sober. (But did she know?) • I was going to tell you, so I will tell you, the state we lived in allowed liquor stores to have drive-through windows. Any drunk in such a state knows what a gift it is to have a drive-through window at a liquor store. You can be too drunk to walk and still be able to sit in the driver’s seat of a car and drive. Too drunk to drive? Yes and no. And driving anyway. The nearest liquor store with a drive-in window—I mean, drive-through, not drive-in—was in the next town over, ten miles away. When I was too drunk to walk and it was late Wednesday afternoon and I knew I wouldn’t make it through Wednesday night because I would be coming down when what I needed to be was passing out, I would put my baby boy in the car seat—after having changed his diaper for the first time in so many hours it was sopping wet—and I would make sure the car seat was firmly in place the way it was supposed to be and I would drive him and myself out of our town on the hill and down to the next-door town in the valley and to the drive-through liquor window where I would buy whatever I was getting—at this point in the boozer it would be whiskey or brandy or vodka or rum—and I didn’t have to get out of the car. It was so easy. Drive. Stop. Roll down the window. Say, “Pint of Jack Daniels black.” Pull out the money, give it to the man. Take the bottle and the change. Roll up the window. Drive back home. Try not to break any laws—I mean, any that would get me stopped by a cop who would quickly discover the other laws I was breaking—and try not to have any accidents. Worked every time. What’s the story? God looks out for children and drunks? Maybe sometimes God does and maybe sometimes God does not. That’s God’s business. Not mine. This happened. Driving back from the liquor store, three days drunk, baby boy in the back seat in his car seat. Northbound on the highway, two-laner, speed limit 45 or 55, I don’t remember. Turning left across oncoming traffic to get into my neighborhood. I was pretty sure I could make it, and I did, the oncoming car’s horn sounding a long and dropping note as it sped past behind me. But I didn’t hear tires screeching the scream of slammed-on brakes. So everything must have been all right. • There was a bottle of Amaretto—a Christmas gift, loving drunken husband to (still-)loving wife—thrown in anger by the wife onto the living room carpet, and the drunken husband on his hands and knees, picking the slivers of broken glass from out of the weave. Oh, does this make me a hero? Does this make me a good guy? Or—The Good Guy? I don’t know what to say to that, other than, No, it does not. There were two incidents. The first came before the bottle of Southern Comfort and the second came before the bottle of Amaretto. First incident: My wife was out of town on assignment. The usual, Monday out, Friday back. She was traveling with a co-worker. Early Wednesday night, I woke from my pass-out on the couch and knew I needed one more bottle to get me through the night and into Thursday’s sobering up. I could take a quick drive down to the supermarket and get a bottle of wine. My baby boy was asleep in his crib. No need to wake him and change him and put him in the car seat and bring him along. I would be back in twenty minutes. Twenty-five at the most. If I wrote this up as fiction—what’s about to happen—what did happen—if I wrote it up as fiction and you were my editor you would throw it back at me and tell me, “That doesn’t work. You have to cut that. Rewrite it and make it believable.” I don’t know how long as I was gone but I think it was twenty minutes. Twenty-five at the most. It was Wednesday night. She wasn’t supposed to be back until Friday. I drove up the street to my house and there was a pick-up truck parked in my driveway. Right away I knew what had happened. I thought for a moment to keep driving. Just keep driving. Run away and never come back. That thought was only for a moment. There was no place to run to, no way to hide. My baby boy was in that house. I had to go there and face up to what I was going to have to face up to. Does this make me a hero? Oh, please, enough of that. I was caught, is what I was. I don’t remember if the front door was open. I think it was. I do remember the kitchen light was on. The living room lights, too, though I probably had left them on. I have only a vague recollection of what my wife’s co-worker looked like. Young woman, same as my wife. Longer hair. I haven’t thought about this in a long time. Not in detail. When I’ve thought about it, it’s simply been, This is what I did, This is what the truck in the drive looked like, This is what I thought to do, This is one of the two ways I wrecked my marriage. I think I remember that my wife’s co-worker was standing in the living room and my wife was down the hall. I think I remember hearing my wife saying from down the hall, “He’s not here.” I think I remember her saying she had checked on her son—our son—and he was sound asleep. I remember I was carrying a small shopping bag with a bottle of wine—Mouton-Cadet, a sentimental favorite—and a canister of toasted onion rings. I stashed the bag in a kitchen cabinet. I don’t remember when I drank that wine and ate those onion rings, but I know it wasn’t that night. It was almost certainly the next time my wife went out of town. I remember that my wife’s co-worker left shortly after I got back home. I don’t remember what else happened that night, except I don’t remember there being any shouts or screams or tears. I must have reeked. The second incident came at the end of the year. Friday evening. Company Christmas party. Not my company, I was “self-employed.” My wife’s company. By now she had left the major accounting firm and was working at a major bank. A bank that would fail the following year. All things that fall must converge. I was so drunk. I showed up that way. My wife was at work all day. I was to come to the party early that evening, after dropping our boy off at a night-care center. I did this. Down the hill from out of our town and into the city where my wife worked and where the night-care center was located. Drop the baby off. Motor on to the party. I don’t remember what it was I was drinking before I got to the party. What I was drinking while I had been on duty as a writer and a baby’s sole caregiver. Active duty, dereliction of. A punishable offense. I do remember the look of alarm and dismay, tinted with horror, that crossed my wife’s face when she saw me crossing the office space to where she stood socializing with her co-workers. She hustled me out of there real fast. We went and got our boy. I remember that I drove, but that can’t be right. She must have driven. We got our boy and stopped by an Arby’s for dinner. I remember being sheepish and apologetic. I may have said, “I don’t know why I did it.” At the time, that was true. At the time, I didn’t know this incident was the last straw. Later, I saw this sign: in photographs I took of her after this happened— “Happened”? This didn’t “happen.” I did this. No one else did this. In photographs I took of her over the year we were to remain married, she never any longer looked at the camera. • This is not the entire story of those days—not even close—but I have run out of time. I wouldn’t have wanted any of this to be true. Is there any happy ending here? Consolation that it wasn’t worse? That I didn’t kill anybody? That my wife remarried and had the husband and family she had wanted to have and once thought she could have with me? That our son grew up to be a capable and intelligent man? What’s done is done. There’s no trick, no craft, that will change that. Tetman Callis was born in the Northeast and raised in the Southwest, his father a soldier and his mother a homemaker. He holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Texas at El Paso. His work has been published in various magazines, including NOON, New York Tyrant, Atticus Review, The Writing Disorder, BULL, Book of Matches, and Anti-Heroin Chic. He is the author of two published books -- the memoir High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner's New Mexico (2012, Outpost 19), and the children's novel Franny & Toby (2015, Silky Oak Press). He lives in Chicago with his wife and her cat. 3/30/2024 Photography by TJ Butler church street dog bird tree dandelion
TJ Butler is a writer and photographer who lives part-time on a sailboat on the Chesapeake Bay. She writes fiction and essays that are not all fun and games. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as Huffington Post, Insider, and various literary journals. She has a degree in a field she will never return to, and she was one of those kids who wanted to be a writer when they grew up. Her black-and-white photography mimics her writing’s gritty, hardscrabble themes. Her short story collection, Dating Silky Maxwell, is available at tjbutlerauthor.com. Find her on Instagram at @TJButlerAuthor. 3/30/2024 Artwork by Rhea AdriRhea Adri is a self-taught artist, born and raised in Los Angeles and currently living and working in Oakland, CA. |
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