Enrique woke to a scraping, pounding, and a sigh. Even with his eyes closed, he recognized the sound of the mortar and pestle. He recognized the sound of Dolores’ desperation, too, even from another room. He sat up in bed, moved his legs over the edge, and was still for a moment. Then, despite the ache in his groin, he went into the kitchen to find her.
On the kitchen table were an assortment of things; honey, annatto seeds, wine, and molasses. And the mortar and pestle. And, of course, Dolores, looking as pained as her name. He knew she was bleeding again. He could always smell it before it happened: the ripening of her ovaries, the thickening of her empty womb. He never told her when she was ovulating, but he didn’t need to; she knew her body better than any other woman he’d ever been with. For those few days of her cycle, she was pregnant with possibility and so happy. But she was rarely pregnant with anything else. The bleeding would come, and the annatto seeds would be back on the table. It was a recipe she called ancient, though she didn’t know how old it was. He knew she got it from her grandmother, who likely got it from hers. Did the Taino crush annatto seeds beneath rocks for what ailed them? Enrique thought they must have.
Before turning to Dolores, he poured himself some juice and offered her a sip. She shook her head.
“Is the bleeding that bad?” he asked, gesturing to the items on the table.
“No. But I’m still anemic, and that won’t help…” Having a baby. She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. Their entire life had been about babies for the past two years. And they had one, a baby, for a while. For what felt like a second. Then the bleeding.
Once, early on in their relationship, Enrique found a spot of blood on the bathroom floor. He pointed it out to Dolores so she would mop. Instead, she laughed at him and rolled her eyes. “You’re bothering me over a spot? Boy, that’s nothing. I’ve got an ocean inside of me.”
Dolores wasn’t sassy like that anymore.
Enrique sat across from her, spinning the bottles of honey and molasses. “What’s the difference between these anyway?”
“The sweets?” Dolores paused her crushing motions. “Molasses has a lot of iron, but it’s thick. Busy.”
“Busy?”
“Complicated.” Dolores scrunched up her face. Enrique could tell she was trying to find the right word in English. “Complex.” She smirked, pleased with herself. “It’s complex.”
“And the honey?”
“Just sweet. Thinner.”
“Are you going to do this forever?”
Dolores looked at him through her bangs. He wanted to push them out of her face but feared she might bare her teeth if he got too close. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s good for me.”
It’s futile, Enrique wanted to say. Instead: “What does the wine do?”
“It’s fortified. Plus, it helps with the taste.”
“We could be getting drunk with this, you know?”
“Is getting drunk going to help?”
Carlos had been conceived while they were drunk. It wasn’t the time to bring that up. Enrique pointed to the mortar and motioned for Dolores to hand it to him. “Let me help with that.” He had never made an iron treatment or ground anything but weed, but he wanted to help. Dolores smiled—a genuine smile—then pushed the mortar across the table. With every roll of the pestle, he thought of ways to tell her.
I was so worried.
The doctor said another pregnancy could kill you.
It was a quick outpatient procedure.
The vasectomy can be reversed.
Enrique knew he’d never say that last one, even if he said the ones before it. He kept crushing and pounding until the annatto seeds were powdered and stained his hands a delicate, translucent red.
Jess Silfa is an Afro-Latinx, disabled, nonbinary writer from the South Bronx, currently living in Nashville. They have received a Displaced Artist Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Ricardo Salinas Scholarship. They are working on a novel about a community rocked by the war on drugs and a chapbook about the sterilization of Puerto Rican women and infertility.
Here’s Pap, sweaty and slagged. Back home from another day on the floor, retrieving Grandma’s copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking from the cupboard. His own aching back gives him as hard a time as the language on the pages. “If I’d have known a shallot was just a goddamn fancy onion, I would have pinched a fat one from Nick’s roadside stand rather than drive fifteen miles to the Giant Eagle in Cruikshank,” he says. Spare a thought for the teenaged employees at the Giant Eagle in Cruikshank. Stacking paper towels in the late afternoon, watching a pair of overalls covered in asbestos approach with an ingredients list for quiche Lorraine.
Fifty years of this: Grandma wakes up at 4 a.m. She makes them both breakfast before they leave for work—him at the steel mill, her at the injection clinic. He eats a pan-fried egg then packs his lunch—a ham sandwich, warmed over the arc furnace. “All these recipes up here,” Grandma says, touching her head. “All this talent.” Pap claims the world isn’t any less dangerous when it’s predictable, and change is like a cold breeze blowing through a cracked window. He insists their lives are hard enough without introducing little whirls into them. “Yes, yes, my darling. I understand,” Grandma says. In the evenings Pap presses her feet. Lets her be the patient for a change. He asks her, “left arm or right?”, and kisses the spot where she points. His appetite never wavers, for fried eggs or otherwise. I imagine him hunting the house for cracked windows, slamming shut the mouth of time.
What Death lacks in tenderness, it makes up for in courtesy. It takes Grandma by the hand. It escorts her to work, and when she can no longer work it keeps her company on the living room sofa. It shows up in X-rays, biopsies, and MRIs and says, “I just thought you’d might like to know that this is where I’m headed next.” Death helps her choose the best photos. The one where she and Pap are at the swim club as kids, and her hands are cupped, pouring water over his slick blonde locks. The one where he’s giving her a piggyback through the threshold of their house, her bridal gown cascading onto the empty wooden floor. Death helps assemble the album. When it is complete, Grandma gives it to Pap and says, “Remember it like this.” I imagine him confused at the transparency of Death’s work. Every day he wakes up and there Death is, in bed with him, breathing softly as the day before. Whispering good morning with a wounded voice. Good morning, Death, he thinks. Perhaps if I made you breakfast . . .
That album is on my lap now and I’m flipping, flipping. There’s a photo of Pap and Grandma dancing at the Lion’s Club for a church fundraiser. He’s dipping her impossibly low, verve bursting from the Kodachrome. There’s another one clipped from the local paper—she’s kissing his cheek outside the Giant Eagle in Cruikshank, and he’s dressed as Santa, ringing the bell for the Salvation Army. Here’s one of him alone, wearing work overalls outside his house, hands behind his back and smiling. Looking like borrowed peace.
I imagine Pap retired, pricing out trailers in the classifieds. Looking for something a few hammer swings away from a chicken coop. He cooks his own eggs now, after all. Scrambled, shirred, over easy—why pay for them anymore? Every Sunday he invites me over to try something new, something he wishes he’d have let Grandma try when he could. But more than anything I imagine him happy, covered in scale on his last day at the mill. Right before the rollers jammed and shot a white-hot cobble into his chest, into his wrought iron heart, a French omelet recipe sealed in his pocket. Finally free of change, Death, and this slaughterhouse country.
I flip to the last photo in the album. There’s Pap and Grandma, young again, sitting on the front stoop of their house at night. Snow shovels in hand. A stolen moment between digging out their cars for work the next day. His arm is around her and she’s tilting her head back, marveling at something right above them. The quiet, or the falling sky, or how the sky was accumulating ceaselessly beneath their feet. This is the coveted world. The one he sees when he closes his eyes, the storm in the gears building up behind him. Thinking about how nice the eggs poached in red wine were settling in his belly, right where they belonged. Returning to the stoop on that night, and how her breath felt so warm in the raw atmosphere. How eternity was big, but it had a shape he could just make out on the road. How, through his mittens and her coat and their layers and layers of sweaters, he could still feel her pulse humming in her waist, going on and on without end, like the gentle white earth unfolding all around them.
Dan Shields is from Middletown, Pennsylvania, home of the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown of 1979. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, WAS, Sky Island, and others. Find him on Twitter @DanDotShields.
Do you know what halmoni means? Because I did not. Even as the cold water somehow sealed me in, locking the sun and air away as I sunk. Even as a vague burning began to rise deep within my ribs. Even as I opened my screaming mouth, foam from my lungs mixing with the churned ocean, replacing air with water, eyes straining in their sockets. Her surprisingly strong hand (did I mention how little she was? Even as I was dying, I thought to myself, huh, she is tiny) grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the surface with the determination of a mother leaving a store with a tantrumming child. Suddenly still, I watched the back of her head as her long ponytail trailed her. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, the clothing surprising me for some reason more than her appearance at that moment, she did not look back at me but tightened her vice around my wrist as the ocean tossed us around. The brine in my mouth turned to barley, the waves became current, my battered lungs letting out the last of the air in perfect bubbles as we approached the surface. I watched the bubbles wobble in tired disinterest.
Keeping hold of my wrist with one hand, her other hand curled under my chin, delicate and knowing, tilting my head toward the looming sun. As the surface gave way to air, she hooked her finger along the back of my mouth, searching for sea and retirement, and then brought my whole body against hers, her tiny hands patting my back, humming gently as she waited for water to rise from my throat, and I gasped those ragged first breaths of someone who forgot to breathe. As my breath slowed from gasp to rhythm, she let go, her warmth turning into memory on my skin.
Eyes that looked like mine stared through me through time. You are not done, she whispered in my air in a language I did not know. We have not come this far to lose you now.
On the earth with my grandmother, who I have never met
I inherited these three dimples from her that only appear when I purse my lips just so (rarely) or force myself to smile (less often these days). Three dimples, a fading ellipse, trail down the side of my chin, pointing us up or down. I inherited these three dimples and the ability to run full steam into a burning house and gather what is precious to me, forthcoming scars and all.
I was running amid familiar flames, and she grabbed my wrist in her unending way. The now and suddenly familiar ache blooming in my shoulder as I closed my eyes.
“That fire is not for you,” she whispered, her breath skimming only my sweat-soaked ear.
The fire is now sliding its tongue against a charred knife blade as I begin to slow. The heat pushes the moisture from my body, my slick arms a mirror in which the blaze disintegrates and reorganizes. I look at her, maybe for the first time (though I saw her once before and a thousand times before), and see three dimples, a fading constellation on the side of her chin. My breath settles as I trace lines along her forehead, a repetition of longing, and peer into eyes dark like the ends of time.
Everywhere with my grandmother, who I have never met
My grandmother plucked at a lone guitar string and sent it shivering into the cool, dark expanse between then and now. She sent a note that only I could hear, a note that sent my spine straight as I sat at my desk and rain pitter-patted on that Friday morning.
My grandmother speaks to me in a language I cannot understand but feels like home. She wants to tell me about a child left with wolves and a house on fire. She wants to tell me about soft, crying bodies under hard men, something about a space above your body you can go to in order to survive.
Her fingers comb through my unbrushed hair, occasionally touching my shoulder blades where wings used to be, as she gently pulls apart tangles. She tells me about a child that laid in her arms that lit up the sky and a heartbeat free in the wild wind. She begins to braid my hair, a rhythm of closing in and letting go, as she tells me about a land that is warm and curves around her body like a mother’s hand.
We watch a small, brown bird glide overhead as twilight and dawn tangle through our hair, and she tells a story of forever in a language I do not understand yet but am starting to hear. Her words somehow make their way through and stick, building me a house. Mun is door. Ib is mouth. Ttal is daughter. 보 금 자 리is our home.
Eun Jung Decker was born in Korea, adopted to Minnesota, and found home in Southern California. She is one of those people that believes passionately in our shared humanity, even when, you know, everything that happened in that past 6 years happened. She loves to write in different genres, sometimes at the same time, with wildly varying degrees of success.
Was down on old highway 395, they said, a car aflame and just driving along. As much fire as there was Chevrolet. This was after the thing with Claudia Trach, Lisa Trach’s oldest—such a tragedy, there where the white cross still in the dirt and always the bouquet flowers dying, blowing, and becoming part of the brush. So because of that and now this, people think like one-thing-after-another. The word about. Jawing away. But what Mr. Avery reminded them was: no collision. From his place up Via Cantamar, Mr. Avery said he had watched the car wind up 395 blazingly bright, pretty much—on that dark night—the only source of light this side of the freeway. Be hard to say what was wrong besides the car being on fire. Consistent across all accounts was something to the effect of, Engulfed in flame. Not smoking and a little glow, not hot tongues licking from under the hood, no: entire. Wild. A fireball.
A couple boys parked for some midnight chow who saw it roll past the Nessy Burger said the car stopped at a stoplight and then went at the green accelerating slowly the flames large enough to obscure even a glimpse of the driver. If there was a driver, repeated Margaret Godert who had not herself seen the car. I felt it in my teeth, knew it was a fire and thank the lord it was only the car dry as the canyon is this year, there’s nerves you know run from the lungs to the teeth, haven’t you ever heard that? It’s a famous feeling.
The oldest Brae-Landry sister awake with her chronic pins-and-needles witnessed it, she said: as close as you and I are standing, and she was certain there was no driver. Up the hill away, almost to Gopher Canyon, she saw it. And she was just as certain it was teenage Epicureans—as she said: behind it all. Can’t you see—there’s always been talk, small town west. Lips moved by corruption, the things which move in the brush. Things from before.
Naturally, the giggling that followed didn’t slow her down, in fact, naturally, she went on something of a tear positing and spitting and connecting dots as far flung as the collapse of the community center’s roof, the gastrointestinal troubles epicentered at the Greek Chicken, the freeze which uselessly dropped so many avocados from their branches, all those cracked concrete chimneys folks had to have removed at such expense, burst pipes, strange men door-to-door offering to repave your driveway, dead birds floating in bird baths, the coyotes those coyotes, the gas prices, and thirty plus students at Mae Ellis who were pathologically unable to stop crying.
Hearers snickered. Audient to such things as these and saying, how peculiar, without ever setting their minds to wander the paths—the obvious paths!—from one to the next.
Christians! Contagious crying and you laugh, she said, call yourselves Christians and contagious crying makes you laugh. Are you an Epicurean, Hugo? They knew where she went to church and they knew where she went to church before that and why she left that church and vowed never to and so on. Those that knew her, really knew her, laughed along only nervously.
Ivan heard it from Alex Lee about Mrs. Brae-Landry being on the news and thought it would be good for a laugh, but they really let her talk longer than he could recall any one head on the morning or evening local. No footage of the car—just the old bat flapping her kisser, wasn’t it in someone’s power to cut her off anyways, so he changed the channel. Comes the thought he didn’t watch the news much anymore or TV at all. An odd occurrence not to have been texted a link. Did Alex watch the news? Or had she simply passed on a tip that someone had given her? What were these channels—anyways—these channels, what were these movies and commercials, what were these products being hawked, where were the handsome hairdos, and what were these channels on which: for example, a woman who threw oranges at two men on an escalator, an ad for a burger with animated livestock, a student who pulled a knife in shop class on other students grabbing at each other’s testicles and such things, people stretching their mouths behind the reporter for the camera opened wide for the camera.
Johnny’s older brother told them and told it a little witchy so Gilbert, Johnny’s best friend ignoring Johnny’s texts pleading to come with, he drove alone to where some said the car had later rolled to a stop and burned up. Shaking nerves himself, Gil set his buzzing phone to silent and slowly with reverence walked the boundary lines of a blackly burned rectangle. After mending fences with a gift of dino chicken nuggets, hot plate, he repeated to Johnny that he had not disturbed the square. Johnny tried to fit as many dino chicken nuggets in his mouth as possible, a feat that returned the meal to mush. Gil laughed. They kissed each other’s dino chicken nugget slick lips so quietly in the basement even though things weren’t so secret anymore.
By now, the idea of the burned square held as much intrigue as the inflamed stories of the night of. Kids went out there. Weird part of town, nowhere safe to park. No sidewalks. Bit by a dog while kicking the dirt near the small burned square where some said it, the car, had settled and completed its immolation, Randall Krieger the little shit deserved to be bit by a dog some said. Nobody not even a mother can talk sense into that kid so everybody who had ever tried took pleasure in the nonsense he cried at the dog’s behest. Mutt held on too. Locked on till Clark showed up, but Clark more or less let him split, made a racket and didn’t fire his gun. Drove the bastard Krieger to the hospital, but wasn’t about to wing a local hero, man or beast. When the nurse asked about the look of the animal, Clark hemmed and hawed a little . . . foamy, he said. Rich dark fur but mangy, yeah, mangy. Wild bloodshot eyes and what’s the word: rabid. Earned that Krieger extra time with their instruments.
Thing is, Norma Dover told a friend, I’ve seen that dog again and again there, where the brush is burned to the car’s cold rectangle, and it’s clean and it’s smart and it knows something about it all. I’m thinking I’d want to be dosed up with something somehow spiritual just as much as medical.
Who had told Vincent about the burned square, he couldn’t recall. Car sized; a rectangle burned black on the roadside. He recovered from the scene a hubcap pulled from beneath ashy soil he dusted clean like an archeological find one of those old spokey looking things of a style he’s sure is now considered tacky. It was imperfect. Burned a bit, with spokes fused some at one end or the other of the radius. He told only Joe, oldest pal, and otherwise denied its existence to the folks to whom Joe’s wife had spilled. It leaned for a while against the wall on the mantel, but such a traditional place of pride seemed to diminish the object’s secret powers and after he relocated it to a shelf of no note in a dark closet, he felt a strength in the rundle return.
Jenny Jacobs sorta forgot about the car but the oldest Mrs. Brae-Landry mentioned it in her living room when Jenny Jacobs was visiting. Once they were seated, she set her tea to the side and looked at her notes and stated her premise again: we’re supposed to ask people who’ve lived in the community for a long time, like you, about what you think has changed. In the community.
The woman talked at length. The house was busy, Jenny couldn’t stop seeing while she listened: the wallpaper and its patterned bougainvillea, framed photographs of family members and pet rats as well as postcards with sweet mottos about pet rats, cherubic statues and crystal candy bowls and crystals, stars made of sticks strung together—at one point, a younger Brae-Landry sister, of course also technically elderly, came through dirt-caked mumbling and drooling cursing the critters that consume everything living and green. Might have been the sister that a few years ago got everyone at the First Methodist on Church Row so worked up for prating a whole little cadre of old ladies into utter devotion to that Polycarp who had heard and recorded the accounts of the disciples—a convincing kind of directness maybe, after all: from the mouths of! A saint who, apparently nonflammable, had to be stabbed to death. What a medium, she’d say, what a channel! A little off, if you saw her, the younger, walking to the Ralphs, you might point and say something. Some of Jenny Jacob’s classmates thought this assignment was bottom tier.
But she was inclined to listen to old ladies and was generally inclined toward their accoutrements, their stories, their ceremonial insistence on offering food, inclined to help where she could too. It really wasn’t much—changed a light bulb, removed from the oven cookies of which she was then invited to partake, things such as that. On a visit the following winter, Jenny used a strangely hooked tool to loose the catch on an old fashioned flue in the Brae-Landrys’ chimney. Although the fireplace seemed long out of use, it was a simple turn and a satisfying click. All it took. Unseasonably cold and a bug going around—people were convinced—on the very chill of the wind, or so said the mayor, an unelected volunteer of an unincorporated township. In any case, the oldest Brae-Landry expressed her gratitude again and at length: how nice to sit in that glow again.
As Jenny sat scraping clean a second bowl of homemade ice cream, the oldest Brae-Landry opposite stroked gently a soft brown and white rat that had scuttled up onto her knee. Do you remember, Jenny, the car aflame and driving down old highway 395? She nodded—of course, she was also aware how the story had changed, how the list of witnesses had grown long improbably including so many of her classmates, how the height of the flames had grown as well as, in some cases, the number of fiery drivers and the number and fierceness of their devilish eyes, some indeterminate shifting colors to the glow cast in the canyon, descriptions of a tentacular being with biting, reaching beaks to nip passing pedestrians, and how dull it became to listen so quietly to all these really identical variations. Nodded, a wandering eye, and a muttered word about the habits of liars. This sister Brae-Landry liked Jenny and said so often, and she wanted to help Jenny and said so often, threatened spells, offered the powers of her speech.
The woman lowered the cup from her lips, smacking energetically. Any calumners among your peers, Jenny? Or—slanderers. Do you have bullies, Jenny Jacobs? They’ll prey on your sweetness, I’ve seen it. Heard such things when they can’t recognize what’s powerful.
No. The rat closed his eyes and flexed his claws and wriggled in such a way on the fabric of the woman’s skirts that the sound that replaced the silence seemed like the lapping flames. Just an association maybe. No, Jenny insisted.
Mrs. Brae-Landry set the rat on the floor, and it disappeared beneath the furniture, and the woman writhed over to kneel in front of young Jenny Jacobs and say:
If ever you have such foes, little sister: say to me their names and I’ll see to it they live long and talkative lives in this town.
The TV, a newish flatscreen, which Jenny had helped to wire up played an old game show where contestants had to guess someone’s job. An applause sign that hummed neon, maybe. The host was growing frustrated with the obvious. Before long, the township had no mayor at all.
Up the road, a neighbor who mostly kept to themselves had begun to wave at Jenny Jacobs on her way. This neighbor’s hedgerow, obsessively maintained, afforded such a view of comings and goings. To themselves they had begun to note the time, almost accidentally, the regularity of it. Waved to each sister Brae-Landry when she passed too, always solemnly, discretely, day after day—without record.
Jace Brittain is the author of the novel Sorcererer (Schism 2022). Their writing, poetry, and translations appear in Dream Pop Journal, Apartment Poetry, Snail Trail Press, Deluge, dadakuku, and others. In collaboration with the poet and book artist Rachel Zavecz, they run the small press Carrion Bloom Books. Twitter: @jacebrit, Instagram: @ jace_brittain.
In the van at night, I watch my husband play poker on his phone beneath the blanket. I watch like most women watch, silent and allowing, unwilling to enter another fight as if we weren’t in the desert in a discount van to leave his desire for luck and chance behind. We’d told our families that we sold our two-bedroom, with enough land for future children to grow, so we could travel before settling down. How delightful it was, my husband had said, to shed our earthly burdens. He’d bet everything, even my retirement, on the cards that never turned up in his favor. I close my eyes and wait for the desert to cleanse us both.
In a gas station, we learn of the Father. A leader of a community of devout men, devout to the earth and its harvest more than to a higher power. My husband would never pass on the opportunity to meet such a fruitful man, so we get directions scrawled on a napkin that I interpret even in the dark. I am happy to visit a commune, to stay at a place without cell service and to meet someone who can help my husband find our purpose.
When we arrive, the Father opens the front door to his home and gladly welcomes us in. A black hole of dread opens in my stomach when, in the front room, I see an ancient beige desktop monitor set up on a betting screen. No matter where we drive, it seems, we always end up closer to trouble than further away.
After introductions, my husband sits down with Father eagerly to play. Father is a silent figure, dressed in a white smock dotted with dirt or some other earth-stain. I’ve never seen a man look like he’d be more at home on a stage, his gestures too wide and his voice too big, hesitating after speaking like he is waiting for applause or a laugh or a groan, which I, in my discomfort, oblige.
I chew my fingernails as my husband wagers what little we have left: pocket change, his wedding ring, a traveler’s check from my mother I’d hid underneath the passenger seat of the van. He comes close to winning each time, and I feel the odds almost turning in our favor, but Father always, humbly, comes out on top, clicking to flip over his better hand.
It is drawing close to midnight when my husband’s shoulders sink pitifully and he says, “Father, I’m all out of money. I have nothing more to lose.”
Father shifts in his seat, the wooden legs creaking on the floor. “A man with such a beautiful wife is still a very rich man,” he says.
My husband kisses me on both eyelids and then bets me on his hand. He clicks and clicks and I watch and listen to the fake sounds of a casino tinkling through the speakers. It’s dry and warm as an oven in the front room but when he loses me, I go cold and wet all over.
The Father leans back in his chair, crosses his ankle over his knee so I can see the bottom of his foot, calloused but surprisingly clean. He tells my husband he can stay for the night but will leave me behind in the morning.
“I lost my love, my lovely,” my husband says, kneeling to hug me around the waist.
“You can’t have loved her so much if you wagered her like pocket change,” Father says. Husband weeps into my stomach, I hold his head and stare at our three clear figures reflected in the large windows. I feel only a sorrow so expected and heavy I want to lie on the ground and be buried beneath its weight.
*
*
In the morning, I wake to my husband tying his shoes, propped up close to my face on the mattress. I watch his thin fingers fumble with the knot. When I ask him to promise that he will return for me, he kisses my forehead and leaves through the door.
I stand behind Father and watch as my husband climbs into my van, our van, the van I bought off Craigslist when I decided I wanted to travel, to get away from my home and my life before my husband pleaded that I take him too, that we could find our love again on the road. I believed him because I wanted to be loved, so I got out of the van and handed him the keys that he now starts the engine with while I look on over Father’s shoulder.
Father holds up his hand in one solemn wave, but I can’t see my husband’s face in the glass, and I don’t know if he’s looking at me, if he’s crying or stoic, if he knows he has made a mistake. The tires churn up rocks that skitter across the path as he pulls away. I remember the feeling of driving the van home for the first time, the way it shuddered on the highway and I was jittery with adventure and then desperately trapped by my own fear, the huge unknowing that stretched before me like rows of shark teeth. I was so aware of my fleshiness and all of the ways I could get hurt going it alone. I hope my husband feels that too now, the danger of freedom, of being just one body adrift in space. I hope this fear will bring him back to me.
I meet the Brothers later, after I am shown the kitchen in Father’s home and how to cook his favorite breakfast: oats, thick with goat milk on the stove. After I’ve cleaned up, I follow Father out to the fields behind the house. He calls them fields, but they’re not quite fields as I know them—I’ve driven through stretches of wheat, shifting like dancers in the wind, so careless I wanted to pull over, lie down, and wrap myself up in rustling. These fields are bare-cracked desert that flake up in fine clouds when I stamp over it in my sandals, and I wonder how they could prophesize anything will grow.
Men sprout slowly into view, dotted across the desert in denim pants and jackets, deep blue faded to a near-white. It’s so warm that the blood in my hands pool by my sides and I can feel my wedding band, department-store silver, tighten around my skin.
Father removes his hands from their tuck in his sleeves and gestures towards the men who take off their hats in welcome. “This is our livelihood,” he says, so solemnly that a shiver tickles the underside of my biceps, the weight of this mission holy as a church. But I don’t see anything living, beyond the men, for miles.
I shade my eyes from the sun, my moist forehead sticking to the curve of my hand. “Father,” I say, “What livelihood? I don’t see.”
A man, who Father introduces as Brother Seven, approaches me with a long-handled rake. “Don’t worry, Mother. Father teaches us all how to see.”
I take the rake in my hand and little splinters prickle my palm. My chest tightens with the way he calls me mother. It feels heavy in a different way, like the prayers I’ve whispered into my knuckles on a walk home alone late at night. Father pats me on the shoulder. I emit radio waves, extend out across the plains, around the earth and up and out into the universe. I imagine how they’ll never stop traveling, they’ll only grow weaker with distance and time. “Go now, my child,” Father says, “Brother Seven will teach you the way.”
*
*
While we work the fields, Father sits on a lifeguard tower above the desert. It’s a classic tower, white and wooden, paint whipped and chipped from the beating sun and storms. He holds a rusting umbrella in his right hand and binoculars in his left, and he watches us as we rake back and forth. I wonder, with him being so far above, if he can see something we can’t, if we’re making our own little messages for someone much bigger and higher to read.
I rake quick lines like I’ve been told, but by the time I’ve reached the end, the wind has smoothed my effort, like I’d done nothing at all. When I grow frustrated, Brother Eleven smiles so knowingly I want to crush a small animal between my hands. He tells me that it happens to us all. I watch his metal rake grind, twinge, and bump off rocks and other small things hidden beneath the surface. I think this work will never be done.
It’s only been a few weeks, so I try not to worry, I need to have faith that my husband will return for me. He’s never lost me on a game but he has left me behind at a table as an IOU. He hasn’t left me this long, but it’s different now. I was the last valuable thing he had to lose, and I imagine him, sweating at a poker table, waiting for luck. This faith keeps me from collapsing in despair underneath Father’s gaze.
I run backwards with my rake to catch up with Brother Eleven. He’s the youngest Brother, with a soft, freckled face and a preference for overalls, the jean still dark blue and endearing. My rake snags a rock and jolts up, twisting the muscles in my wrist. In the tower, Father blows his whistle. I slow down.
I ask Brother Eleven why he joined the Brotherhood.
“Same as you,” he says. His breath comes fast and quick, whistling somewhere in his throat but he smiles calmly, like they all do, like I’m a younger, simpler sibling.
“On a bet? Is that why Father keeps a PC in the doorway?” I ask.
“No, Mother Three,” he says gently. “I mean it was destiny, same as you. It doesn’t matter how we got here. Only that we’re all here together now.” His face is round and warm with the work.
“I understand, Brother, but where are you from? What is your family like?” I ask. I want to know what he dreamed of being when he grew up, his favorite color, his real name. I want to know all the little pieces that make him up.
We reach the end of the plot. Brother Eleven turns and starts back down the row, but I stop to catch my breath. Over the grinding of his rake, Brother Eleven shouts, “We are not what divides us.” His powerful knees pump out at the sides, propelling him backward, his taut arms pulling evenly. “We are what brings us together.”
I twist the rake in the hot sand, resist the urge to bite my hand. This is our solemn prayer, an everyday anthem like the pledge of allegiance I had to say hand-over-heart every morning in class. I also do not fully understand what it means or how it binds us together. Father blows his whistle. I spit into the dirt. I turn and pull my rake through the field. Under my breath, I savor my divisions, juicy like an overripe peach: Florida, loud but loving, marine biologist, forest green, Rowan.
*
*
In the pit, I lie on my back and shield my eyes from the sun. I miss the trees more and more each day, real trees, not the bent and gnarled Joshuas that mark these fields like crucifixes. I miss the lime-green wide stretching canopies that knit together to shield whole ecosystems from the sun. In the pit, I can feel the earth on my bare arms and calves. Whenever I dig deep, I find a coolness I crave and can’t always understand that the earth has a core, that somewhere deeper inside it’s bright and hot like the sun. The earth too has a heart.
The Brothers stand above me in a ring and pray. I can barely tell them apart because of the brightness, their shifting jean-blue shapes, and only Father in his white smock and glinting glasses stands out. Father was the one who told me I would be baptized today, a celebration and acceptance into the Brotherhood, a formal relinquishing of my sinful divisions. I told him I had already been baptized, I was a good Catholic girl, but he shook his head and smiled the all-knowing smile that told me I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t ask any more questions to try to. They like me best when I don’t know.
The chanting slows and the humming reverberates against the shallow walls of the pit. A slick film emerges on my skin. The sound reminds me of 14th century Gregorian chants I listened to on YouTube back in college, before I met my husband, when I still wanted to know what it felt like to be held.
Father leans over the pit, his head blocking out the sun. “I will now ask you three questions,” he says. I nod, my hair rustling in the sand. “Do you believe in the one true purpose?”
I nod.
“Will you live and serve the Brotherhood, with light and kindness in your heart?”
I nod.
“Will you turn away from sin, renounce your name, and obey the Father for the rest of your life?”
I nod and feel a drop of his sweat land against my top lip. Then, the chorus rings out, “Father, thank you for giving us Mother Three and her light for the rest of our days.”
They throw in handfuls of hot desert sand, bouncing sharp against my bare legs, arms, face, and I close my eyes and my lips tight together to keep it from working its way in. I do not believe what I agree to, but how could I say no? There is only desert for miles.
Sand works its way into my mouth, dry and a little salty, crunchy between my teeth. I wonder how long they will keep throwing it in, and how long I will be in this hole and if I will crawl out myself or if someone else will reach in. And I imagine my baptism from their perspective and can feel the sand in my fists, and for a moment I’m terrified that I’m being buried rather than coming into a new life.
*
*
I am not surprised when Father informs me of our marriage. At night I sit beside him while he gambles online. He sits in a wooden kitchen chair and I sit cross-legged on the floor, working my way through patching the Brothers’ clothes. In the first few weeks, I had to teach myself how to sew, and now I can patch all types of problems with only the tiniest little scar left behind as witness. I watch the screen as best I can for my husband’s username without poking my fingers. I imagine him, searching the infinite lobbies, playing and betting and folding until he finds the Father. Until he can play and prove how good and loyal he is, and then I can go back home. But I know this is a fantasy; I have no loyal husband or two-bedroom home.
The needle slips into my thumb and I hiss air out of my two front teeth. Father turns to look down at me, pressing his palm into my scalp. I suck the blood on my finger. “My child, we will be wed. And then you truly will be Mother, as the Brothers have taken to calling you.”
Mother Three is what they call me, and I’m not brave enough to ask what happened to the other mothers, and if they’re counting up or down. Sometimes I walk by my baptism pit out back in the fields behind the dormitories. They never filled in the singular pit, and it’s the size of a body. Out there alone, I swear I can feel the other mothers turning below my feet.
“But Father, I’m already married,” I say, stretching the fabric between my thumbs. “You won me from my husband, remember?”
Father shifts in his chair and looks above the clunky monitor. There is an embroidered fabric rendering of the American flag and over it, in uncertain red stitching, reads: ᗯE ᗩᖇE ᑎOT ᗯᕼᗩT ᗪIᐯIᗪEᔕ ᑌᔕ. It looks like a child’s hand, or like my own stitching when I first arrived here. I try to picture the Mother’s hands, I wonder if they’re dry like mine, dappled with scars like mine, if the same needle I now patch socks with too slipped from her control, jammed up into the tender flesh beneath her nail. Some nights I feel more like the other mothers than myself.
“What husband?” he says, “You were grown in the desert, by the brotherhood, like the rest of us. We harvested you from the field together. This is our livelihood.” He steeples his smooth fingers before his face, purses his lips so the corners of his eyes fall. I do not think he is praying. I think he is only pretending to be a man of deep thought.
I do feel grown in the brotherhood, out in those fields every day, dragging the rake back and forth over the sand. The desert is in me, I cough dust and my skin is cracked like salt flats, my bleach-blond hair growing out a reddish brown. Sometimes I wake in the night to a prickle in my hip, the underside of my foot, behind my shoulder blade, and when I touch there, I pull out cactus thorns like gray hairs.
Father returns to poker. His wanting eyes shimmer, the animated cards reflected upside-down in his glasses, distorted and hungry. I hate the desert and my Brothers, the Father and our livelihood, and the senseless repetition, playing the same games and the cards that never turn up in my favor. Father grumbles and goes all in, I poke my finger with the needle. Blood puddles up and I squeeze it out onto the fabric, glistening and cough-syrup red. One husband was enough, I think. I will never be married again.
*
Transcript of 911 call placed on Tuesday, September 21, 2017 at 14:09pm
Transcribed by James Marlboro, Dept. of Public Safety
Dispatcher: 911, what is the emergency? Caller: Hello? Dispatcher: This is 9-1-1. Are you in need of fire, police, or EMS? Caller: Um, I don’t know, I didn’t know who to call. Dispatcher: You have to speak up, ma’am. I can’t understand you. Why are you calling? Caller: My husband lost me but he hasn’t come back. And I waited awhile but I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s coming back. Dispatcher: (typing) Are you presently in danger? Caller: (pause) No, not like that. But the wedding is soon and I’m in the middle of nowhere and I have no way to get out. Dispatcher: What is your location? Caller: With father, on the farm…I’m in the desert, and (inaudible) Dispatcher: Ma’am you need to speak up. Can you explain to me again how this is an emergency? Unidentified person: (unintelligible) Caller: Uh (pause). Never mind, I have to go.
Ended by caller at 14:13pm
*
The night I leave the Brotherhood, I am afraid. I’ve watched enough true crime and lived long enough in the world as a woman to anticipate all the violent ways leaving can go. Father has been good to me, mostly, because I did what I was told—I obeyed my husband’s forfeiture, I paid his debt, and I cooked and cleaned and kissed and raked and gave up my clothes, my name, my sins. But even when I am lying beside Father in our bed, I fear that as soon as I slip off the creaking springs, he’ll sit up, knife in hand, ready to hold me down. Since my husband left, I had felt powerful in playing the good wife, stoically accepting my fate. I’m afraid of truly understanding what it will be like to be owned.
Father does not stir when I get out of bed and put my shoes on. My heart beats so quickly I tremble, bump into things, my hands unsteady enough that it takes five tries to unlatch the door. Then I’m outside, the cool night air tickling my skin like ghost hands, my neck prickling with expectation of being caught. I walk into the darkness toward where I think my husband and I entered so many weeks ago, in the opposite direction of our fields, of my Brothers. I don’t look back but I imagine the night like a black hole swallowing the ranch, the dormitories, then the fields with my baptism pit, gaping and empty, until I am alone.
In the darkness, I feel weightless like I did that time I drove the van home, when the true freeness of my life cracked open like a nut before me. I was so afraid of leaving and testing the Father I didn’t anticipate the fear of being out here in the desert alone at night, the flat vast expectation of the earth and the choices I will need to make. I feel the same terror of the endless responsibility for my body, keeping it clean and fed and alive and happy, when all I want is to stop growing in space, to crawl back somewhere quiet and safe.
The desert shifts below my feet, uncertain and slippery so my ankles ache from trying to keep stable. Only my husband ever made me shrink down, I fit nicely into his comforting palms. I want him again, I want to know with a yearning so deep if he tried to reach me like I tried to reach him. I want to know that he has never felt so empty, that he hasn’t found something better to fill his palms. I want him to stumble upon me in the dark and guide me home by the hand.
My foot catches on a rock, sending a vibrant wave of pain through my knee but I don’t fall, I keep walking forward. It will be dark for many more hours but I hope when the sun rises I will have caught up with that shifting horizon, and I’ll peer down and see a whole city, wide and shining before me. But for now there is only darkness, the howl of night creatures, and the feeling of growing, the electric fear of my body stretching too far.
*
A message caught between radio stations while driving through the desert at night —
Mialise Carney is a writer and MFA candidate at California State University, Fresno. She is the senior fiction editor at The Normal School and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Booth, and Barren Magazine. Read more of her work at mialisecarney.com.
They say that through a storm’s arrival a true woman will wear her butterflies.
Leaves turn themselves over, socks and underwear still on the line. The fabrics discolored, bleached, discolored again.
At some point you’ve been out in the wind. Do not return to the stove; inside is where the wildness is.
Oh ———, stranger, do not accidentally set yourself ablaze. Remember, it is someone’s sixth birthday. The mineral solvents have as low a flashpoint as charcoal starter fluid.
What has all this traveling come to? It is the year when they eat from the dog’s bowl.
2) NONE OF US
So I didn’t love that country my family’s families put on like a bad hand-me-down, their small bodies always swimming.
I didn’t love it then on the blacktop alone, then under the stark watch of a flagpole, then when they slaughtered my name on the intercom,
then when the right man won the presidency—for who were we kidding; it was always a man—
and when streets and schools and shopping malls erupted anyway with bodies, bodies laid low by shiny white trigger fingers,
and the summer was ever-hotter and
none of us
could find a
way home.
3) INVENTORY, PART TWO
The counting of all the goods, materials, etc. kept in a place.
Dried black beans. / Dried pinto beans. / Dried kidney beans. // Whole spelt flour. / White spelt flour. / Almond flour. // Honey. / Maple syrup. / Sucanat (since 1978).
I am an animal in a web, a system. Naples opens like an oyster², though I am not there. Apples grow, more-than-human, from horizontal branches: not needing an interpreter.
All bodies burn,
their exploded substance
burst painfully into meanings.
The butterflies that matter are not the ones on the housedress.
¹ Gibson, James William. A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature. Holt, 2009. ² Iovino, Serenella. “Bodies of Naples: Stories, Matter, and the Landscapes of Porosity.” Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Indiana UP, 2014.
Suzanne Manizza Roszak’s creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Burnside Review, Colorado Review, The Journal, New Letters, ROOM, and Verse Daily. Suzanne did her MFA at UC Irvine; today she is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands and an editorial assistant for Seneca Review.
Patient may have permanent heart damage post-surgery. It’s too soon to tell. Patient should closely monitor heart activity when exercising, walking, & sitting. Regular appointments with doctors should be kept.
Q: What is not punishment but feels like it?
A: Knowing someone else is kissing the person you want.
My heart is better broken all the doors open
My heart is better melted drip drip rain pelted
My heart is better blocked inside a wooden box
Patient’s heart reached 180 bpm while she was at a poetry reading. Patient’s heart reached 182 bpm while she was thinking about him. Patient’s heart reached 194 bpm in her sleep. She was dreaming about sex. Patient’s heart reached 192 bpm when she opened her dresser & found her mother had rearranged all her lingerie while she was in the hospital, folded it neatly, & put it in the bottom drawer, including the corset, the straps. Patient’s heart reached 210 bpm while sitting on the couch thinking about sex with him. Recommendation: patient needs to stop thinking about him & what her mother thinks.
Q: What brings people towards you? A: Fantasy.
We collaborated on sourness. The mystery of the lemon. The passion of the lemon. The brutality of the lemon. The sideways glance of a lemon. The pretending of a lemon. The army of a lemon.
We collaborated on moons. Young moon. Bird moon. Done moon. Vicious moon. Hungry moon. Summon moon. Cruel moon. Leather moon. Bring us together moon. Bite moon. Pleasure moon. Treasure moon. Sigh moon. Tide moon. Patient moon.
We collaborated on thirst. We drank the desert to be together. We were one-armed saints praying.
Diary entry May 5th 2020: I can’t wait to touch a person again. I can’t wait to touch him. Diary entry December 29th 2020: he’s the only person I’ve touched for a year.
Q: What pushes people away from you? A: Reality.
Reality: patient has depression + low self-esteem + CPTSD from adulthood formed in chaotic romantic relationships with partners with substance abuse + domestic violence+++++++++ ++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Reality: he prefers his women less traumatized, & 10 years younger than me. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Reality: no heart restoration is available. Learning to live with changes.
Patient’s heart reached 165 bpm walking. Patient’s heart reached 180 bpm while crying. Recommendation: more walking, less crying.
Q: What feels like a leash but isn’t? A: Attraction.
The tourist attraction of my body. I now keep it closed to visitors. He was the last person to enjoy my unscarred body. He has the only photos of my unscarred body. Part of me worries he deleted them. They’re the only record of me before all the pain. I need that version of me to exist somewhere. I want to ask him to keep them, keep them for my sake, but we’re not even speaking. How can I ask him to hold a version of me that is already gone? A version I couldn’t even keep?
Q: What feels like a collar but isn’t? A: When his energy lingers.
August 2022 to: suzanne @…………… @gmail.com
Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii silence. I am just bad iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiline. My own feelings are easy biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. I fear iiiiiiiiii the wrong tiiiiiiiiiiii not enough of the right eiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii Silence is iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii intending silence. Iooooon meaning t…………………………………..
I do think about you a lot … I miss ooooooooooooo I miss oiiiiiiiiiiiiii with you. I miss tiiii………how ……………………… secrets like how I………………………….e flying n ………………………………….h is validating.
I……………. write more bu…………………… I should g………………… Maybe we could t……………………….. I miss you.
My heart is better wicked perfectly restricted My heart is better ridden like a wild horse in submission My heart is better wishing searching, static, transmitting
Patient’s heart reached 176 bpm while laughing with her friends. Patient’s heart reached 177 bpm while riding her bike. Patient’s heart reached 186 bpm while watching her friends get married. Recommendation: normal-ish.
My heart is better stone found in the ground like bones
My heart is better anchored like a shoreline it grows fainter
Ekphrasis Watching Youtube Video of Woman Cutting off Her Submissive Binding Collar:
the subject slices the master the obedient lacerates the king the meek subverts the chief the leatherette squeezes the dominant the passive jeopardizes the upper hand the limited ravages the rules & yet, she cannot stop crying while she’s cutting.
My heart is better loved wide open turtle dove
Suzanne Richardson earned her MFA at the University of New Mexico. She is a writer living in Binghamton, New York, and a Ph.D. student in creative writing at SUNY Binghamton. Her writing has appeared in Bomb Magazine, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Florida Review, DIALOGIST, Columbia Journal and New Ohio Review, among others. Find more of her writing at suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com. Catch her on Twitter as @oozannesay.
Nuclear fuel containers are known to crack. If not properly contained, nuclear fuel may seep out into its natural surroundings and have disastrous effects (e.g., cancer, blood disease, bone decay). Once nuclear fuel has aged sufficiently, it may be transferred to dry cask storage.
hey spent nuclear fuel container how thick are you?
People who like to call themselves “God-fearing” typically advertise belonging to two nuclear families in one lifetime: the one in which they were raised, and the one which they create with an opposite-sex spouse and two point five well-behaved children. As the Bible saith, Nuclear begets Nuclear, and so on, ad infinitum. Unless waste overtakes the planet, and the ARKK disintegrates, and we are all* swimming with the flora and fauna in human-made power-sludge, until we deteriorate in a glowing halo of our ingenuity.
*The oligarchs chosen few will inevitably board tiny, penis-shaped rocket ships and embark for gravity-less pastures to jizz themselves into.
Nuclear is derived from the Latin word for “nut.” Likewise, to go nuclear means to go nuts. The Ides of March are come.
are you old enough to experience dry cask storage?
If absorbed into the atmosphere, nuclear fuel can rain its toxicity down upon faraway lands and upend ecosystems. Thus, nuclear fuel can create largescale panic and send people fleeing for their lives. Yet, many nations continue to depend on nuclear fuel, despite its dangers.
are you cracking at the seams?
As the sooths of Social Media saith, we are all, sometimes, in one way or another, toxic. Are youin a toxic relationship? Is your ex toxic? How to know if you’re the toxic one. We are all, sometimes, they profess, like plutonium and uranium derivativesstraining to break free from our concrete and steel containers.
swipe right it was meant to be
Maria Elena Gigante (she/her) is a queer, nonbinary writer who teaches at Western Michigan University. Her previous publications are in rhetoric and composition, and she recently began writing micro memoirs and flash essays. Her first creative piece can be found in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.
Alt 1) We are never taken away from our birth parents:
But we are poor, and our birth mother is bipolar. After an ever-escalating set of violent episodes ends in the emergency room, our birth father has our mother institutionalized to protect us. But he himself escapes into drugs. Our little brother, Eddie, is autistic. With both parents incapacitated, he is left without a caretaker. I drop out of school at sixteen to take care of them all. Cricket runs off a year later and gets pregnant. The baby is taken away, and Cricket dies strung out under a bridge.
I never stop believing the world is flat.
Alt 2) Mommy takes me and Cricket away from our birth parents, her son and daughter-in-law, but her real daughters, our aunts, never die:
I am an angry child, but I am put into therapy where I learn how to process my anger in a healthy way. At the suggestion of the therapist, Mommy takes me for regular one-on-one adventures down by the beach until I feel safe. We walk along the shore, our toes burrowing into the soft white sand, ice cream dripping down our arms, collecting the colorful little butterfly coquina shells. She teaches me how to tell the difference between grey stingrays and harmless brown water skates so I don’t have to discover by stepping on one. She throws me elaborate Jimmy Buffet-themed birthday parties. I feel loved.
She still divorces Papi, but her daughter Titi Lauri comes to live with us and she spends special time with me, as well. She teaches me how to tap holes in coconuts to drink the milk while preserving the meat and how to press hibiscus flowers between the pages of my diary. When her son, Baby J, is born, we all live together, and he is like a little brother. He never becomes a drug dealer, and he never gets violent or mean. And nobody ever touches me down there. And I never go hungry or have to hide.
I am not bullied at school in this timeline, either. In fact, I am popular. I’m even a mean girl. I graduate top of my class. I go to Duke and become an art critic. I get married and have a family. Cricket gets married and has a family. Baby J is a bachelor for many years, but even he, eventually, gets married and has a family. We all go up to the family reunions in Mayberry each year. We are not the nicest people on the planet, but we are, for the most part, quite blessedly boring.
Alt 3) Mommy takes us, her daughters die, but she doesn’t leave Papi:
She emotionally abandons both me and Cricket and clings to him for emotional support. They are both alcoholics, and Cricket and I are both left to run feral. We make mischief in the neighborhood—throwing golf balls through windows, smashing kumquats and grapefruits on neighbors’ cars. By eleven, we’re stealing beer and cigarettes from the Seven Eleven and getting caught with them in the school bathroom. I get suspended for fighting some bitch at the bus stop who taunted Cricket about dirty clothes and hair.
I break the bitch’s nose.
I am sent off to boot camp at fourteen. The authorities decide I am a bad influence on Cricket, so I am put in a group home where I learn to light girls’ hair on fire when they cross me. It’s a wake-up call for Mommy who gets clean long enough to help Cricket finish high school, go off to college. Everyone shakes their head about how I ended up (in jail for robbing a liquor store at twenty which morphs into drug charges, theft charges, violent and disorderly conduct. I never really get out.) But they all agree there was nothing to be done.
Some seeds are just bad.
Alt 4) Mommy takes us, her daughters die, she leaves Papi, but that middle school science teacher who noticed I never smile realizes it might be because something’s wrong at home, so she files a report with social services:
I am still abused by “Uncle Bob.” Mommy still loves Cricket, not me. I am still left to run feral through the rough sawgrass. I still find ways to let Papi back in, to hero-worship him because I need someone to love. He still teaches me to drink and shoot cans off old stumps at the dump. And I still let him touch me, and I still crave that closeness. But the authorities see his DUIs and Mommy’s depression and Bob’s abuse. A medical exam confirms I am malnourished. I am taken away to live with a non-kinship foster family. Cricket, who’s not found to be in the same danger, is allowed to stay. I never find out how they end up, because I never see them again.
My new foster family is OK. They live in a gated community and have a kid of their own, so I never feel like more than a rescue dog. But I’m put in therapy and a caseworker actually meets with me weekly. I also have special “classes” at school to work on my anger and social skills. I graduate from high school but don’t go to college. I end up working as a grocery clerk for many years, but I always keep writing a little on the side. I start writing letters to the editor, and eventually he tells me I have some promise. I become a local reporter in my forties. I get married a little late. We never have kids (or much of a sex life), but he’s kind.
It’s not a bad life.
Alt 5) Mommy takes us, her daughters die, she leaves Papi, Baby J comes to live with us, but my high school choir teacher knows something is wrong, and she won’t shut up until somebody listens:
All the bad shit happens—the abuse, the neglect, the rape, the violence—but I am legally emancipated at sixteen. I go live with my choir teacher and her partner. I help them with their musical theater company. We ride all over town setting up equipment, rehearsing, singing songs from Victor, Victoria. I learn about the Indigo Girls way earlier, and I’m obsessed. I am half in love with them both. They put me in therapy and help me sue Florida Child Protective Services for negligence. I am wealthy by eighteen.
When I graduate high school, I go to Sarah Lawrence and study musical theater. I become a high school choir teacher and playwright. I work my shit out and meet a beautiful woman with black, black hair, like the song. We’re married beneath a blooming poinciana tree, its top, the color of blood and love. We adopt a toddler out of the system and love her to pieces. (She’ll seek therapy of her own for this smothering in her late twenties.) When I am thirty, I write a play called Feral about my life. It’s optioned and made into a movie.
I buy a fucking yacht.
Cricket and Mommy and Papi and Baby J all end up just as they ended up, but I don’t blame myself for it in this timeline. I know what happened to me was fucked up.
I never learn forgiveness.
Alt 6) Everything happens just as it happened except they don’t all die when I leave:
I never stop hearing their voices in my head. I never stop believing everything that happened was my fault. That I was evil. That I was unlovable. I run as far as I can, as fast as I can. I cut all ties. But I never really stop hearing them.
This is the only timeline that might end by my own hand.
Alt 7) It all happens. Nobody intervenes:
At eighteen, I run away to a tiny school in the New Mexico high desert where I can read the Classics with just the coyotes and Chihuahuan ravens to keep me company. Within four years, Mommy, Papi, and Baby J are dead. Cricket and I are estranged. For twenty years, I run from state to state, job to job, college to college, bad relationship to bad relationship; anything to keep from drowning. When I run out of energy for running and places to hide, I finally realize God was waiting all along.
I am baptized and join a church where I learn about community, intimacy. Mommy and Papi and Baby J’s ghosts haunt me for years, but I finally see their pain and the truly impersonal nature of their crimes. An elderly woman from my church is a medium. When I go to tea at her house, she invites them in over the cross-stitching, and I forgive them. Mommy asks what she should do now; we tell her to go towards the light. I spend years in and out of therapy, but I doubt I ever really get it all worked out. Just as I doubt that I ever get married or score a movie deal. But I do start to write. Somebody reads one of my essays and understands a piece of her own life, like I did when reading The Language of Flowers. I eventually learn all the names of my mailman’s children and share coffee over my camp stove with the homeless woman at the end of the street.
I die without family but surrounded by love.
P. L. Watts escaped the Florida foster care system and worked her way through college and graduate school. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Lambda Literary Fellowship for Emerging LGBTQ Writers. Her personal essays have appeared in Ruminate, New Letters, The Florida Review, Nightmare Magazine, and elsewhere. Her queer, gothic novella THE BONNY SWANS was released from Cemetery Gates Media in January 2023 as part of Mother Horror’s My Dark Library series. Find her work online at plwatts.com
I’ve told the receptionist my full name and date of birth, so I know there’s a problem when she pauses, then asks what time my appointment is for. I tell her.
“Has anything changed?” she asks.
“No,” I say. I’m not sure when I last came to this clinic, so it’s not a lie, exactly, but I doubt it’s true. Some recent changes, depending on how you define recent, are: I’ve gotten married, I’ve changed my legal name and gender, and I’ve had a hysterectomy and phalloplasty. Why did I tell her no? I know why, though: there’s a woman at the next window over who’s checking in multiple children for appointments. I don’t want to out myself to her, and besides, my receptionist has already been sighing and asking me to repeat myself due to the noise of the adjacent check-in.
“Actually, I’m gonna need to see your ID, too.” Relief. My driver’s license is up to date. She can see my name and fix anything outdated in the system without me needing to say it out loud.
In the hallway to the waiting room, I shoot my wife a quick text: the worst is over
In the waiting room, there’s a slender, lightly muscled person with short, brown and blue hair, whom I register as likely kin, sitting along one long wall, and some guy sitting along the other. I take a seat in the middle.
After a few minutes, a medical assistant emerges for me.
“M——?”
Oh fuck. Fuck! I can’t answer to that. I won’t.
In the more-than-a-year since I legally changed my name, I’ve never been publicly deadnamed. I look up at the MA reflexively, the horror on my face probably telegraphing that I have some connection to this name, even though I won’t acknowledge it as my own. To correct her, though, would be to announce to the other patients in the room that I’m trans, not to mention granting them the intimate knowledge of who I was before I transitioned. I can’t. I won’t.
She calls it out again. This time I pointedly ignore her. I ignore everything, especially the man sitting somewhere across from me. I let the MA walk back into the clinic without a patient.
I sigh deeply and immediately regret it. Great, more evidence for the other patients that whatever just happened, it was about me. Trying to keep my affect perfectly even now, I text my wife that they deadnamed me. What do I do? I don’t need this appointment. I’d be fine with walking out, but I have to let some time pass, or I’ll make myself even more conspicuous to the other people here. I’ll walk out, but I’ll give it maybe 15 minutes first.
The MA is back.
“Kevin?” Across from me, Kevin rises and follows her back without issue or complaint. Kevin. How nice for Kevin.
The MA is back for me before long.
“Last name R——?”
I have to acknowledge this, I think. I rise reluctantly and come to stand near her in the hall, not passing through the door yet.
“And what was the first name?” she asks.
“Birch,” I say, trying not to let the humiliation or frustration show; it’s not her fault the paperwork she’s looking at has the wrong name.
But it’s someone’s fault. My doctor’s referral would have been for my legal name, my correct name, my real name, and the receptionist should’ve seen my name on both my driver’s license and my insurance card. Maybe this is the receptionist’s fault.
“How do you pronounce that?” the MA asks. It’s a reasonable question for my deadname, but not for the one I just told her.
“Birch,” I repeat. My deadname is multisyllabic and sounds nothing like Birch.
“And date of birth?”
I answer, although my legal last name, the only one anyone in the medical system has ever heard, is a lot more distinctive than Rosen. This isn’t a case of two people who just happen to share a last name, and I think we both know it, but neither of us break from the charade.
“Okay, it just has a totally different name here,” she says. “Let me just go back real quick.”
I return to my seat, keeping my body language as neutral as possible while directing my gaze down and straight in front of me. I’m keenly aware there’s still someone else in here waiting, who’s overheard all of this, who knows I’m M——. I know they can see me, so the best I can do is not see them.
“Doctor’s offices, huh?” a voice from behind me says.
I don’t have casual conversations with strangers. I crave the ease of connection with the cashier, the barber, the person in front of me in line, but it’s rarely my experience. Most small talk I could make (what I do for work; what I’ve been up to, today or ever) is only one or two questions removed from my transness. It’s not that the topic is off limits, just that I’m selective about who I allow to engage with me about it.
But I turn around in my chair, remembering for the first time the specifics I observed about the only other person left in the room with me. Blue Hair here has instantly become my new best friend, a witness who actually understands. With Kevin gone, this waiting room is a two-person trans space.
We’re both masked, so I put as much expression as possible into my answering eyebrow raise and eye roll. I hope my smirk comes through. I sigh loudly, on purpose this time.
“‘How do you pronounce that?’” I quote back, bringing a hand to my forehead and allowing my previously stifled exasperation to overtake my face.
“Not like that!” Blue Hair answers, roleplaying as me. Bless you bless you bless you. “That’s the worst way to pronounce it!”
Their levity restores me to myself. I don’t thank them out loud, the words in my heart feeling both too much and not enough, but I hope they can see what they’ve done for me.
The MA returns, this time asking for Birch. I give Blue Hair a masked smile and a little wave, which they return, on my way out of the waiting room.
The appointment, despite the pain it’s already caused me, is as quick as I’d imagined—over within five minutes—and as pointless, yielding a benign diagnosis I don’t care about and a follow-up care plan of never coming back here.
I look for Blue Hair on my way out, but they’re gone.
I wish I’d asked their name.
Birch Rosen (birchrosen.com) is a trans nonbinary writer living in the Seattle area on the unceded land of Coast Salish peoples. Their work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and From the Waist Down: The Body in Healthcare (Papeachu Press). They are the 2022 winner of the King County Library System poetry contest and the author of the zines Boobless, T&A (Transitioning & Attractiveness), and the Trans Restroom Rants series. Find them @birchwrites.
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