From the Jeopardy! category SPOILER ALERTS

Julie Marie Wade

First, the light & how to describe it—part Manila envelope, part Ticonderoga pencil. Casserole golden at times, then orange as a giant brick of cheese, then brown as tater tots crammed into cargo pant pockets. Idaho may make you squint & squirm, crave some nachos, drink raw eggs from a glass. Yes, the chickens have large talons. It’s an underdog state fit for an underdog story. Note the tetherball sun & the boondoggle clouds. Note the iconic llama cameo. (There’s a small chance our cat is called Tina because of this film.) Second, the plot & how to recount it—Uncle Rico never did throw a football over them mountains, never did strike it rich selling knock-off Tupperware or breast-enhancing supplements. But Pedro shaved his head & became class president. Kip & LaFawnduh fell in love online, then boarded a Greyhound bus together. And our eponymous protagonist, unlikely hero of the Gemstone State, won a talent show dancing to Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat.” Preston seems a sparse, dry place, far from the grid, nary the site of a tourist’s pilgrimage. Dust coats bicycle tires & Rollerblades, hovers above the highways like an unholy halo. It would be nice if you could pull me into town. Third, the supporting cast & how we remember them—Grandma breaks her coccyx on a dune buggy ride; Starla blushes at a Bust Must testimonial; Rex dubs himself sensei of his own dojo while clad in Hammer pants fashioned from an American flag. Critics called it a “quirky charmer,” a “one-hit wonder,” a “weird-ass fairy tale.” They’re not wrong. If you got it, odds are you drew some ligers in your notebooks, too, took some Glamour shots in your basement once upon a time. Now just imagine you’re weightless, in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by tiny seahorses. If you loved it, you’re probably more Deb than Summer Wheatley to this day. More enterprising than prize-winning perhaps, but with a certain staying power, the paradox of which is the way it helps you leave. (Even then, Deb was earning money for college with her home-woven handicrafts.) What amazes me is how we all know a Summer Wheatley, don’t we? Mine was Marissa Sheldon, was Kendra Kostrich, was Julie Winder—who still lives in my town & works at the bowling alley. The other two are unfindable on Facebook. They were cheerleaders way back when, with ESPRIT sweatshirts slipping off their slender shoulders & Keds tennis shoes forever bright-white as the day they bought them. They washed their hair with exotic products like Pantene & VO5 clarifying shampoo. Somehow they always chewed gum the teachers never confiscated, ate Funyuns & SweeTarts by the carton but never gained weight. These were the girls who had it easy or made it look easy—it’s hard to know which. They never seemed to sweat or stink or spill on their clothes, let alone bleed. Whatever they said became Gospel. Whatever they did set the newest trend. But they don’t make many movies about the goodfits, do they? Summer Wheatley isn’t a film in my Netflix queue. I wonder about her, though, like I wonder about Marissa & Kendra & Julie, who shared my name but not my story. Is Summer snickering at her boss from behind her Steno-thin cubicle walls, sending NSFW memes at work, cyberbullying on the Moms of Preston message board? Or maybe she’s flirting with customers at Big J’s Burgers, some of whom remember her when, one of whom offered to pay for Botox if she’d spend one night with him. “What do you think this is—Indecent Proposal?” But then she did it because Trisha, her still-BFF, said she should. Both of them are tired of the old joke: “Is it I-da-ho or you-da-ho?” Tired of guys who stop by for some curly fries & to reminisce about the Happy Hand Jobs Club. “I swear that’s what it was called,” Don smirks, like he’s been smirking all his life. Maybe Summer married him right after high school. Maybe they have a tribe of towheaded children by now. Or maybe they’re divorced but still fight daily over the phone. Can’t stop running into each other in their one exit ramp town. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that you can make a piñata of whomever you like. Better, perhaps—a piñata of whatever you want. Don’t ask the principal for permission. Just go outside, close your eyes & strike with all your might.

“What is Napoleon Dynamite?”

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Interview with Mark Powell, Author of Hurricane Season

Hurricane Season is a noir thriller about fighting and addiction, prison and drugs; but more than that, it is a love story set in the carnage of an America wrecked by inequality.

Hurricane Season was published by Shotgun Honey Books in October 2023. To purchase Hurricane Season, and support Orlando local bookstore Zeppelin Books, click here.

Below is an interview with Mark Powell, author of Hurricane Season, and Blake Sanz, a fiction writer teaching in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

SANZ: At the heart of this novel is Shy, a young Florida woman who emerges out of poverty and obscurity to become a UFC fighter, and who attains some fleeting level of greatness in mixed martial arts. This passage, early in the book, struck me:

Professional fighting is a world of misogyny and expensive t-shirts, of collapsed sinus cavities and unhappy boys. But it is also a world of the occasional genius, someone who seems to have sprung from the skin of a Grecian Urn, nervous system as hair-triggered as a peregrine. That was Shy.

What interested you about writing this world and such a fascinating character from within it? What was involved in becoming well-versed enough in that world to feel confident in depicting it as you do?

POWELL: Fighting is something that has fascinated me (and that I have dabbled in) all of my adult life. There are many activities (for lack of a better word) that are both brutal and beautiful, and thus representative of the complexity of being alive in this world. But I don’t know of any that make that paradox so starkly alive and immediate. I wanted to sit with that, particularly since–at least as I see it–the job of fiction isn’t to smooth over moral complexities but to dig into them. I also wanted to sit with the idea that there are far more brutal aspects of the world around us. Perhaps, though, they aren’t quite as visible. Which, I think, speaks to a willful blindness on our part.

SANZ: As a newcomer to Florida, I found myself taken by the deftness with which you depict so many areas of this state in so many detailed and interesting ways. From ramshackle houses on the Saint John’s River to the workout scene in Miami, from political fundraisers at wealthy politicians’ homes to the drug-addled regions of rural central Florida, and from rare books shops in Winter Park to small-town churches, the state itself works on your characters in profound ways. What do you see as the connection between the places these characters inhabit and the changes those characters undergo?

POWELL: I spent eight years in Florida, and I think there’s a way in which those of us not born there see and experience the state a bit more intensely than native Floridians. People sometimes talk about Florida as this strange otherworldly place–and I get that. But, in truth, Florida is simply an intensification of the greater United States. Different cultures, different geographies, ridiculous wealth abutting shameful poverty—it’s all on full display. My sense is that living in such a place has a similar effect on us humans. Florida may be the geographical equivalent of what the theologian Karl Rahner called “limit states”: moments, and places, as the case may be, where human behavior moves toward extremes. It’s also possible I’m imagining all of that and just spent my time there drunk on all that sunlight and chlorophyll.

SANZ: The narrator of Hurricane Season spends many pages invisible to us, focusing largely on giving us the story of other main players: Shy the fighter and Thomas Clayton the drug-addicted doctor, in particular. Eventually, though, the narrator tells us the story of how he came across these and other characters—through teaching writing in a prison—and also describes various versions of this story that he considered telling. How did you land on this writer character, Jess, as the point-of-view character, and what did you feel he afforded the narrative that other points of view might not have?

POWELL: I didn’t want to tell the story like this. It felt cleaner to simply tell it in alternating third person points of view, and I had plenty of readers who told me as much. But the more I’ve written, the more I’ve gotten interested not just in the stories we tell but why we tell the stories we tell. Why do some stories or moments or experiences linger in our minds while others don’t? The story the narrator tells shouldn’t hold such power over him, yet it does, and he needs to find out why. If, as Joan Didion wrote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, it seems equally relevant to examine which stories we tell ourselves. That was my hope with the narrator.

SANZ: Various characters have moments of solitude and quiet that seem elevated, somehow important to them and to our sense of their otherwise chaotic lives. I’m thinking, for example, about Doc’s routines in prison, which include reading philosophy and contemplating Kafka’s mandates to quietness, and also about the narrator’s romanticizing of his time in Thomas Merton’s monastery in Kentucky. Could you describe the importance of making space for quiet moments in a novel filled with intense moments of big action and dire consequences?

POWELL: So much of the book is physical—fighting, training to fight, Doc’s addiction, Doc’s violence—I wanted some balance to such. I didn’t want the book to be a thriller or crime novel that was all gas from the first sentence; rather, I wanted something that balanced the idea of an inner and outer life. And, of course, something that considered the notion that our distinction between the two may be no more than a false cultural inheritance.

SANZ: The novel depicts various forms of drug addiction in a contemporary setting. What are the challenges of representing lives altered by drug use on the page, and to what extent were you aware of writing toward or away from preexisting notions a reader might have about the various cultures of drug use and distribution that the novel portrays?

POWELL: Any book about opioid abuse is in danger of great cliché. But so too is any love story. Or any prison story. Or any whatever else. I hope I’ve taken situations we generally encounter in the abstract—statistics about overdoses or incarceration or what have you—and made those particular. I didn’t want to write a book that put forth the notion that “this is what drug abuse looks like” so much as I wanted to say “this is what drug abuse looks like in this particular place, to this particular person, in this particular moment.” I hope that specificity, that granularity of detail, humanizes the characters since it’s harder to condemn people, harder to damn them when you know them.

SANZ: Hurricane Season feels literary and reads like a thriller. Did you consider the notion of genre as you wrote this book? Do you hope the book will be read as coming out of any particular literary tradition?

POWELL: I certainly wanted a noir feel, but, more than that, my hope was to write a book that moved quickly plot-wise without sacrificing too much character or intellectual depth. My models for this are the great short novels of Joan Didion. Didion is rightly lauded as a writer of nonfiction, but I’ve always felt she was grossly underestimated as a novelist. She wrote serious meditations on politics and power but somehow packaged them as political thrillers. The writers I find myself returning to do the same: Robert Stone and Denis Johnson. Dana Spiotta and Francisco Goldman. I once heard the great Bob Shacochis say he wrote thrillers for people “paying attention.” I aspire to the same.

SANZ: You invoke Don DeLillo with your epigraph: “If you think the name of the weapon is beautiful, are you implicated in the crime?” How is this book in conversation with that question?

POWELL: When you write about suffering, when you write about people who have been exploited by large structural systems as well as by each other, you like to think you are writing against such, that you are part of a sort of resistance standing for basic human dignity and against faceless, soulless, aggregated power. But I think one has to be mindful that in exposing suffering or exploitation that you aren’t also participating in it, that you aren’t wallowing or glorifying. This is another way in which fighting lays bare the truth of the world, the way it can be both beautiful and abhorrent at the same time. There are times I’ve watched fights and thought, as Joyce Carol Oates put it about the third Ali-Frazier fight, that I was watching the analogue to King Lear. There are other times I’ve watched fights and thought, as Shy thinks late in the book, I was watching two poor kids trying not to die. An honest book about fighting, an honest book about anything, I suppose, has to be willing to sit with the moral paradoxes that exist around and within us. Which means acknowledging that we are all deeply implicated in suffering.

SANZ: In how you pace action, you often toggle between scenic detail and a quickening of action via summary, all while keeping us bonded with the consciousness of the characters whose actions you describe. I’m thinking particularly of this paragraph:

Her mother died on the tenth of May and was buried two days later across town in the great retaining pond that was Memorial Gardens. Shy stayed alone in the house for several days but this was not a good thing. She let her phone die, got distracted and left the refrigerator door open, the lights on, and the food she never ate forgotten and dissolving on the shelves.

Here, we pass over a death and a funeral with style and grace, but we also get a scenic sense of Shy’s emotions in the week thereafter. This fluidity, this ability to dip in and out of days and into moments is a hallmark of how the book moves. Can you speak to your instincts for when to zoom in on action and when to zoom out, and how and when one versus the other (or both) seems like the right way to tell part of the story?

POWELL: I think a lot about how time compresses into realized precise moments and how it expands and slips by us, both in fiction and life. My usual sense is that if you want a reader to simply know something, you tell it as economically as possible. But if you want the reader to feel it, you have to slow time and show it in a scene. When to do which, though, is a tricky matter. No one is better at this than Alice Munro, and I’ve tried to read her in such a way that I absorb some of her technique. It hasn’t worked, by the way. But I do think that the more I’ve read her, the better intuitive sense I’ve developed of when to move quickly and when to linger.

SANZ: What did you think this book would be about when you started it, and how much did your idea of the book change over the time it took to complete? What core ideas carried through the drafts to the final version, and what new ideas emerged?

POWELL: Hurricane Season began as two distinct books. I had written a short story for Hunger Mountain about Shy, and I felt like there was more to say. At the same time, I was still haunted (I guess haunted is the word) by the years I’d spent teaching at Lawtey Correctional in North Florida. I thought maybe that was a different book. Then interesting parallels, interesting connections between the two stories, kept popping up (or maybe I kept imagining them). I was sensing some thread between the idea of addiction (and pain management) and fighting (actively seeking pain). Whether I was hoping or imagining these, I don’t know. But without fully realizing it, I began to merge the two stories. And the deeper I got, the more I felt like one complimented the other so that only together would each be fully realized. That was the idea at least. But as Denis Johnson put it, writing a novel is like trying to cross a large ocean in a small boat. Success is making it across, even if you don’t make landfall where you intended.

Mark Powell is the author of seven novels, including Lioness, Small Treasons–a SIBA Okra Pick, and a Southern Living Best Book of the Year–and Hurricane Season. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation to Slovakia and Romania. In 2009, he received the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian literature. He has written about Southern culture and music for the Oxford American, the war in Ukraine for The Daily Beast, and his dog for Garden & Gun. He holds degrees from the Citadel, the University of South Carolina, and Yale Divinity School, and directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University.

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The Star Buyer

Will Musgrove

The cop told me it was a Hollywood myth that you only get one phone call after being arrested. He said I could call anyone I wanted, even a lawyer. But I only needed one call. I called my son and asked him to put my granddaughter on the line. He did, and I told her to go outside and look at the stars.

A few weeks ago, I bought a bunch of stars at fifty bucks a pop. After reading a few science articles on space travel and Dyson spheres, I calculated how many greats were needed until humanity left planet Earth behind. I’ll never be rich, not on a bus driver’s wage, but my great-great-great-great-grandchildren could be.

The stars showed up yesterday in the mail. Well, their locations showed up, written on filigreed certificates. You get to name the stars you buy, so I named them not after people I know, but after people I want to know, my future grandchildren. I read each name aloud and placed the certificates in a Folgers coffee can. With the can in one hand and a shovel in the other, I walked outside to bury the stars in my backyard as a sort of celestial inheritance.

My next-door neighbor, Frank, raised his head over our shared fence and asked if I was digging for treasure. I shook my head and told him I was burying it, told him about my not-so-quick get-rich scheme. In a few hundred years, what would be the difference?

“Oh, Bridget and I saw the same infomercial,” he said, pointing at the ground, a gesture I took as stay there.

Frank disappeared into his house, which looked exactly like mine, like everyone else’s on the block, and returned carrying a picture frame. He turned the frame, revealing a star named after his grandson, George.

“His birthday is coming up, and we wanted to get him something special,” Frank said.

His star’s location seemed familiar, so I opened the coffee can, and, sure enough, Frank’s star matched one of mine. Frank scratched his chin like, How do you have my grandson’s star?

I went in and dialed the infomercial number. A man answered, and I explained the situation.

“Stars are really big,” the man said. “Can’t you share?”

I imagined my future relatives traveling light years in stasis only to wake to a flashing sign reading: Welcome to George, the Brightest Star in the Universe. I said no, I couldn’t share. I said I wanted my money returned, and the man hung up. When I called back, no one answered.

Online, I looked up the address of the star-selling company and scribbled it on a Post-it note. I got in my car and drove. I wanted a refund, or else a different star. I imagined the man on the phone searching star maps for a replacement, imagined him describing the light each star gave off. I wanted to make it right. I wanted my future grandchildren to point at their stars and say, “Boy, my great-great-great-great-grandfather sure was a savvy guy to make such a smart investment.” I wanted them to look at their stars and think of me.

Driving down the highway, I considered light, how it takes millions of years for the light of a star to reach us, how, by the time it does, the star might not be alive, how the light might be nothing more than a memory. Red and blue stars pulsed behind me, and I thought about light, about going so fast I stretched for millions and millions of years.

I imagined my future relatives basking in my light, saying to one another, “Can’t you share? Can’t you share?” And me, by then no more than a bundle of particles and photons, replying, “No need. Don’t you see all this light? Look at all these stars I bought you, and for only fifty bucks a pop.”

“Pull over,” came the voice over a speaker.

In my rearview, I counted half a dozen cop cars. My speedometer read 110 miles an hour. Not quite the speed of light. A line of yellow barrels protected the median. Swerving, I bumped one, then grazed the side of a police car, and, boom, I went supernova, exploding into a burst of glittery stardust.

Guns drawn, the cops approached my car and ordered me out of my vehicle. I did as they said, and they cuffed me before bringing me here. Now, I sit beneath humming florescent bulbs, telling my granddaughter to look up, look up, to never stop looking, to remember that, one day, the light of those stars will light her children’s children’s children’s children’s way.

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At the Delachaise


Julia Johnson

You tell me your husband is really a leopard.
I tell you that you've had too much wine.
You insist that he has all of the qualities and attributes and characteristics
and the coloring of a leopard. And that he loves you for your beauty.
I ask why you didn't know this when you first met him
and you insist you did and I ask why you would marry a leopard.
You say that you knew no one would want to meet him but that you
had to marry him. I tell you I can't wait to meet him
and I promise I really do.
I really do want to meet him.
We share a tall cone of fries in white paper.
At the end of the night, we take off our masks and step onto the sidewalk,
and kiss each other in the air instead of touching.

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Soft Eyes

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Review: All Bird: Brandi George’s The Nameless

Review of The Nameless, by Brandi George. 
Kernpunkt Press, August 2023, 199 pages, $18.00
Review by James Brock.

The late Dean Young famously instructs poets, “We are making birds not birdcages,” in The Art of Recklessness, expressing a gravity-defying Warner Brothers Cartoons ethos and New York School surrealism. Young committed to those ideas since his days as a graduate student (and one year as a nursing student) at Indiana University, some forty years ago. His ideas about recklessness broaden the scope of poetry, embracing creative processes that are truly disruptive, chaotic, comedic, and thrilling. (Anne Carson, Thylias Moss, and Denise Duhamel were busy with their own poetic larcenies those days as well.)

Meanwhile, there lived a punk-goth farm girl, haling from Ovid, Michigan, with living visitations from faery tale creatures and Old Testament demons; a Lady Gaga little monster who survived exorcisms and sexual abuse and suicide; a love-wrecked and love-worn lovechild of Walt Whitman and Thumbelina; and, eventually, a professor and Ashtanga practitioner. She would write unlikely long books of poetry, improbably to have them published. And that poet, Brandi George, has now gifted us with an incredibly demanding, rewarding, pleasurable, harrowing, and funny book of poetry, The Nameless. It is a monumental book that is all bird.

Part bildungsroman, part memoir, part enfevered vision, part nature study of fungi, and so, so much more, The Nameless is also the work of a serious, careful versifier, one whose mastery of iambic meter is as light and feathery as hydrae. It is also a book that runs some 200 pages, a visionary accomplishment published by Kernpunkt Press—a press that must be praised for its faith in the most unlikely.

Structurally, The Nameless operates ostensibly as a memoir, divided into two sections, and subdivided into short, individual chapters. And while one is to distrust the autobiographical in poetry as being merely factual, clearly the effort here by George is to construct a poetic record of her life. The speaker in her book is self-identified as “We”—and while that first appears to be a nod toward a gender-neutral self-naming, the “we” who speaks is a dissembling of voices, polyphonic, amorphous, and morphing. This expansive idea of self, certainly Whitman-like, finds its operative metaphor in the mushroom, in fungi. Yes, inside the pleats of the cap of a mushroom are ungendered spores, where 10,000 individuals can fit on a pinhead, and a single fungus constitutes the largest organism on earth, covering an expanse of over four square miles.

George’s “We” constitutes a self that is wracked with auditory and visual hallucinations, an identity we might consider as post-structurally fractured or profoundly schizophrenic, but one that becomes a representation of the poet, a being who is something of a receiver, without the usual filters, who hears the language of air and death in everything and who must then sing.

The book begins with death, where We, as a child, is the victim of sexual molestation—her parents instruct her to forget it—and, from that moment, death’s spores enter We’s body:

                          so now when we
completely forget      it Happened

the Thing forms      a fairy ring
inside our body     Now Death

lives inside us

Invariably, then, Death attends, embodies, and accompanies We through the book—a fact of her life that she has long been taught to ignore and deny. And, of course, in Ovid, death is everywhere, within and without, but with the promise of change and metamorphosis. For We, this means enduring an exorcism at her parents’ behest, the parents convinced their adolescent daughter is possessed by demons. They burn her poems. The irony, it seems, is that We is indeed possessed, but by Death in all its recombinant manifestations.

The book chapters are often prefaced by George’s brilliantly fractured tales of Thumbelina dying a new death with each iteration. We clearly identifies with Thumbelina—the strangest of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales—whose queer desires and chaotic imaginings are continually corrected by her elders. George’s Thumbelina is “genderless, many-faced, guiltless, green, and as mysterious as twilight,” a runaway spirit who meets death recklessly, fully, casually, and intentionally.

And in this large book, there are abundant touchstones for We beyond Thumbelina: Kurt Cobain, tarot cards, success and the po-biz, and even animal husbandry. This is a poet’s memoir, after all, a testimony of the empathetic spirit, and here, with death living inside her, We’s empathy is almost debilitating. She feels too much (and this seems to be her chief sin, at least by her family’s reckoning). For instance, We recounts her work at a dairy farm, where her job is to separate the male calves from the female calves, after which the baby bulls will be sold for veal:

back in the barn we try to console the new calf
name him     Bocephus    after Hank    but without his mother

                                            he’s petrified
trembling    we hold him to our chest like a child

           his grief is so deep we can feel it    glacial    nothing will ever
absolve us of this

As much as We disassociates herself from her family, from middle-America banality, and from the grind of capitalism, she is inescapably complicit. Where others in her family and community routinely deny responsibility, she feels it keenly—it is the death in her. The poet’s task, it seems, is to receive everything, to name it, to own it.

Even so, much of the book is doomful, doleful love poetry, a tribute to We’s beloved Annette, an equally wild spirit (and later to We’s husband Michael, who co-authors several poems in the book). Here, the poetry is tender:

In the backyard we practice
flipping our hair
She-Ra mermaid rock star
it’s our thing hair      then eyes then

will we ever be beautiful?

          our longing for beauty is
crush of petals down our shirt
     leaves under our feet
dandelion heads on the sidewalk
                       sunburn like a hand

So, amid all the chaos, the disorientation of hallucinations, and the broken wheel that is the self, George’s reckless poetry continually finds its purchase in these fleeting moments. This unguarded work seems the very product of Muriel Rukeyser’s question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life?” The world that Brandi George has split open contains all the invisible names of death, all the fecund beauty we long for, and a billion seeds that will germinate from the dead.

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Interview with Melanie Bishop, Author of “Home for Wayward Girls”

Melanie Bishop is the author of Home for Wayward Girls, winner of the 2021-2022 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award. Home for Wayward Girls is narrated by Amelia, a young girl, and follows a family during a tumultuous time as they open their home to a couple of girls who are in need. As Amelia’s family takes in these girls, she explores what it means to be a female growing up in the South.

Below is an interview with Bishop and Nicole Neece, a PhD student in the University of Central Florida’s Texts and Technology Program.

NEECE: In a 2013 entry on your website, you note that you went through “at least three, and at most ten, drafts of every story” in your larger short story cycle, Home for Wayward Girls, from which the title story, and the contents of this chapbook, emerges. What element(s) did you find yourself revisiting most during your revision process?

BISHOP: While the chapbook published for the Jeanne Leiby Award contains only one short story, the entire story cycle in the question goes by the same title and contains eight stories, just under 200 pages. So, in most of what we discuss here, I’ll be referencing the short story, “Home for Wayward Girls,” with brief mentions of other stories in the cycle.

A few years into marketing this book, I started to see it as more of a cycle than a collection, and I wondered if it might be more marketable as such. When reseeing the book as a cycle of connected stories, many things needed attention: the adherence to some central notion; the sequence; the overlap; the characters who appeared in multiple stories requiring consistent names throughout; and I had to think about whether every story was earning its keep, contributing something new to the whole. As a collection, the book was a finalist in two contests at that point, under the title The Kind of Girl I Was, but, as a cycle, I chose “Home for Wayward Girls” as the title story because it felt more inclusive of girls—not just girls like myself and my sisters, my friends and my mother—but stories about a larger experience of southern girlhood. Once I let that title inform the whole, I nixed a couple of pieces of flash fiction and another story that no longer fit. So changing to a cycle caused the most revision.

Then there are the usual revisions to individual stories. Each time you go through a manuscript, as you aim to be more concise, you find things to cut and places where there’s a better word or phrase for what you’re trying to say. You find places where a chunk of dialogue could be trimmed. You find ways to “arrive late and leave early” to your scenes, finding more spark in a dialogue exchange by cutting the first and last lines. Over many years of writing these stories, each one went through several drafts—just round after round of fine tuning. What happens in each story did not change.

There was one story that escaped revision: “Taking Care of Calvin” (coincidentally published by The Florida Review in 1990) was a story I barely touched. One draft, one day in MFA workshop, and maybe three word changes, and the story was done. Most writers will agree, this is rare.

Which wayward girl came to you first? Did the characters form around certain circumstances or relationship dynamics you wanted to explore?

The title story lived in my head for a long time before I tried writing it, and during that time, I just thought of it as “the story about Marie.” Marie was the real-life family friend who did my mother’s hair, who moved in with us, who was the inspiration for the character Renee and for the whole story. So, she was the first wayward girl. But, the narrator, Amelia, based loosely on myself at age twelve or thirteen, was the sponge, absorbing everything she could about growing up female, and about waywardness. The characters and the circumstances and the dynamics were all drivers of the tale.

Has the archetype of “the wayward girl” evolved over time? Do you believe that the wayward girls of 2023 are different from the ones in your story?

One would hope that by 2023, there would be no girls deemed “wayward,” that the moniker is archaic and has gone by the wayside. It’s one of those terms, like spinster, that has no equivalent for boys or men. Yet, though we may no longer use the term, girls’ behavior will always be judged differently than boys’.

In Sarah Perry’s brilliant memoir After the Eclipse, about her mother’s brutal murder, Perry relates family history, including the story of her maternal grandfather’s rape conviction. The time period was the late 1950s, and the girl he raped was his own thirteen-year-old daughter, the oldest of ten children in that family. While her father, her rapist, served less than five years of a ten-to-twenty-year sentence, the daughter, an innocent victim, was sent away to a “School for Wayward Girls.”

Perry notes that her grandmother visited the husband in prison regularly, but she never once went to see the daughter. When Perry asked why the victim was sent away, an aunt said, “People just wanted her out of there. People thought she’d done something wrong.” Throughout Perry’s memoir, we see that being pretty makes a girl fair game. Pretty girls are asking for it. Pretty girls make certain men crazy; and when men assault these girls, their crimes are considered, at least partially, to be the girl’s fault. She shouldn’t have been so enticing and she shouldn’t have been there, available and accessible. The takeaway: by merely existing, the girl has done wrong.

In Home for Wayward Girls, the cycle, this gender inequity shows up in other stories in the characters of the mother and her daughters and their peers.

I consulted with historian Mary E. Odem, Associate Professor Emeritus at Emory University, about her book Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885 – 1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Regarding those decades, Odem says:

“Delinquency was defined in sexual/moral terms for girls and not for boys. Girls were far more likely to be apprehended and punished for sexual or moral offenses, typically behaviors that weren’t considered crimes in the adult criminal code—staying out late, having sex, running away from home, hanging out with sailors, etc. Further, when girls were apprehended for shoplifting, they were given pelvic exams to see if they’d been sexually active and could then be charged with that. Boys, on the other hand, were usually apprehended and punished for behavior that was considered a crime—theft, burglary, assault, rape. The law did not specifically define delinquency differently for girls and boys, but the way the law was carried out did: the police, judges, reformers, etc., saw delinquency differently for boys and girls” (Odem).

While Odem’s research stopped at the 1920s, she notes that much of this thinking continued well beyond that point:

“In the 1970s, significant reforms of the juvenile justice system led to a reduction in the prosecution of girls for moral offenses, and in the extreme gender discrimination in how delinquency was defined. But the thinking around girls and sexual offenses no doubt continued in some way” (Odem).

Odem said that the places where girls were sent were often called Reformatories, but also a Home for Wayward Girls or Home for Delinquent Girls.

For fiction writers, the wayward girl is the interesting girl, the one whose combination of circumstances and personality cause her to confront the world, with or without fear. I think of Amelia in “Taking Care of Calvin,” the night she gets her mother’s car stuck in the ditch; and I think of Larissa in the title story—barefoot and braless, running in the dark toward the Mississippi River, cops in pursuit. Among them is the same cop who will later become Renee’s boyfriend and will initiate Amelia into the world of adult love and longing.

How difficult was it to find the right approach for Floyd’s predation? You blend the foreboding threat of sexual misconduct with innocent teenage romanticism so realistically. How did you navigate finding the right tone for depicting Floyd?

How do you find the right tone for any character doing anything they shouldn’t do? Characters misbehave all the time. I think I just tried to make it seem, to him, normal, or like he thought he was doing the girl some kind of favor, initiating her. I think it’s common—if you were to ask random women if they ever had an older guy come on to them inappropriately—that most women have a story about this. At least one.

When I was fourteen, there was a youth pastor who started a romantic relationship with me. And when I was sixteen, and we’d moved to New Jersey, a man was driving me home from babysitting his kids, late at night, when he passed up my street and took me to a dead end, turned off the car, and tried to kiss me. I screamed. He backed off and drove me home, giving me his card as I got out of the car, saying I should call him if I ever wanted to cut school and meet him in the city for a movie. He actually said if I wanted to “take in a flick.” This became a joke between me and my older sister: Take in a flick; then you can take in my dick. We were disgusted by this, and the joking was a way to combat the ever-present fear of being female, and of being overtaken.

As for Amelia in the story, I think girls that age are craving romance and touch and experience. And even when it comes in a way the girl would not have expected, would not have desired, it’s still a first kiss. There’s a physiological response–arousal–that happens despite the accompanying fear, awkwardness and the sense that what’s happening is wrong. It can be very confusing for the young person.

There are several pop culture references scattered throughout the story that help to establish the era. What was your process when it came to deciding what pop culture references to incorporate?

All the pop culture references occur naturally in the time period of the story. There really weren’t any choices to make; this was just the stuff of that era. Playboy Magazine for example: at our house, these weren’t hidden, but were just on the table by my father’s recliner. We were not forbidden to look at them. Curiosity was okay in our house, even encouraged. I think it was somewhat acceptable, then, for men of a certain socio-economic status to subscribe to Playboy, like it was an alternative to straying from your marriage. The Beverly Hillbillies was a show everyone knew, and board games like Candyland and Chutes & Ladders—these could be found in any home in our neighborhood.

The fifty cents per hour pay for babysitting was the sorry rate the whole time I babysat, from ages thirteen to seventeen, in the early 1970s. The musical references came right out of the stack of albums in my sister’s room. She was the only one with her own record player, and the only one of us with a collection of albums. That sister was the most assertive among us about who she was and who she was not. And her music was a big part of that. Who you listened to, what bands, what radio stations, what concerts you’d attend, these things were crucial and added up to who you were aiming to become.

What was it about the late 1960s/early 1970s period of history that felt the most fitting for this story?

I think probably it was that cusp of the women’s movement, when we were still mired in previous views on girls and women and what they could and could not do. But we were seeing a tiny window open. Each girl/woman in the book is in a different stage of what women could expect of themselves and of each other. There’s Renee who, while only five or six years older than Noreen and Gina, missed the onramp to feminism. There’s the pregnant sister who will sacrifice her teenage years to become a wife and mother. The women’s movement will skirt by that sister in the same way it missed Renee. So, in terms of why this time period is fitting, it was a very charged time to be a girl. Which kind of girl were you going to be? Were you riding that wave of the Women’s Movement or not?

How does the Southern setting inform the girls’ situation? Or does it? If this could happen anywhere, what makes this depiction uniquely Southern?

The South is key. The South is where girls, growing up, are always told to smile, to act nice, to focus on being pretty, to let men do most of the talking and heavy lifting. In the South I grew up in, girls weren’t supposed to make waves.

Extreme example of this: In my early twenties, living in Austin, Texas, I was on a crowded city bus at the end of the day, and a man took the seat next to me. He kept pressing his leg against mine. I was trying to ignore him, looking out the window, but when I glanced at our laps, so close together, I saw that he had his hand down his pants. He was masturbating. I didn’t move, didn’t say anything, just froze. To call him out on this errant behavior would’ve caused a scene and I didn’t want to embarrass the man. That is some heavy duty, deep indoctrination on Southern courtesy there. It was better, I thought, to endure this myself than to put the man through anything that might shame him. Don’t make waves. I sat as close to the window as I could get, and when my stop came, I got off the bus.

Much later, in my mid-thirties, I relayed this story to a therapist as an example of ways I’d allowed myself to be mistreated by loved ones and by strangers. The therapist told me that the story was such a common one, experienced by so many women, that another therapist she knew was compiling an anthology, and it was going to be called The Man on the Bus. I’m not saying this didn’t happen in other places besides the South, but my reaction was a distinctly Southern female reaction.

This story, Home for Wayward Girls, could’ve taken place in another state, region, or climate, but not knowing what it was like to grow up in those places, to be a kid, then a young adult, in those environments, I wouldn’t be able to write that story. I am a product of the American South, as are all of these characters. My family moved from New Orleans to Bergen County, New Jersey, when I was a senior in high school, and some of the stories in the cycle take place there, after that move, but they’d never be called regional or specific to that area. Those stories often explore feelings of dislocation after having moved from New Orleans.

Many of the girls and women in this story find comfort in the sisterhoods of their found or chosen families. Where did the inspiration for this dynamic come from?

Marie, the real-life person who inspired the character of Renee, came into my life around the time my oldest sister left to have a baby. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she filled a huge hole left in our family, especially for me and, I think, for my father. For the time we were so close, she was my found family. Sadly, as I moved deeper into teendom, self-absorption, and maybe waywardness, I outgrew the friendship and lost track of her. But she was memorable. She was “Morning Glory.” And I always knew I’d write her into immortality one day.

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To learn more about the Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award, click here.

If you would like to purchase a copy of Home for Wayward Girls, click here.

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Melanie Bishop is Faculty Emeritus at Prescott College in Arizona, where for 22 years she taught creative writing, and was Founding Editor, and Fiction/Nonfiction Editor of Alligator Juniper, a national literary magazine, three-time winner of the AWP Directors’ Prize. Her young adult novel, My So-Called Ruined Life (2014) was a top-five finalist for both the John Gardner Award in Fiction and CLMP’s Firecracker Awards. Bishop has published fiction and nonfiction in The New York Times, Glimmer Train, Georgetown Review, Greensboro Review, Florida Review, Vela, Essay Daily, Next Avenue, Carmel Magazine, Huffington Post, New York Journal of Books, and Family Circle. Currently, Bishop teaches occasional classes for Stanford Continuing Studies, and offers instruction, guidance and editing through her business, Lexi Services. “Home for Wayward Girls” is the title story of her short story cycle. For more, visit: https://melaniebishopwriter.com/2013/02/

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“Modern Ancestors” by Anne McGrath

Anne McGrath’s “Modern Ancestors,” is a series of pieces constructed from mixed materials. See more of Anne’s work on Instagram @TheAnneMcGrath.

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Review: Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson

Review: Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson
Four Way Books, September, 2022
$17.95, 102 pages
Reviewed by Thomas Page

What would happen if someone were to break down our stereotype of the male poet, the one spending his time typing away at his keyboard about his problems with his body and those he wishes to share it with? Doug Anderson seeks to find this answer in his latest poetry collection. Undress, She Said is a vividly crafted poetry collection that takes the reader down the path of the traditional masculine poet-voice and his relationship with his sense of place. This sense of place forms the backbone of the collection’s debate about how pride, sexuality, and memory impact the mind of a man in a war-dominate society. Doug Anderson opens with “Prophesy,” setting the stage for the theme of accepting fate that is pervasive throughout the collection. In support of this theme, he writes,

“There is a storm coming,
clouds opening, closing their fists.
No point in boarding up the house” (3).

The speaker in this collection is subjected to a variety of influences that make him desensitized to the many problems of the collection’s world. Undress, She Said is divided into four parts that talk about each of these influences: “Love in Plague Time,” “The War Doesn’t End,” “Homage,” and “Mythologies.”

In “Love in Plague Time,” Anderson writes about the convergence of religion, morality, and desire that complicate how the speaker interacts with his world. This is the longest section of the book and serves as a “part 1” to the collection’s themes. The content of the poems in this section ranges from mental health (“When the Plague Came”) to sexuality (“Masturbation”). This section is imbued with the apathy that comes from a life conflicted between what the speaker wants to do and what he should do. For example, in “Skeleton of Water,” Anderson toes the line between these two ideas, writing,

“I was a failure as a libertine, always falling in love,
lacked the detachment of a true rake, drank to hide
my heart’s anarchy, the knowledge that the angels
I wrestled with were divine” (30).

His technical approach in this section is to alienate the voice from his world through various snapshots of his past. The focus on the past self and the present voice helps to characterize the kind of voice that will be taking the reader throughout the reflections in the rest of the book. The speaker discusses how life in an idyllic setting can make him feel ostracized by his own people.

Anderson centers these themes of morality into the realm of military veterans who come from his society in the second section, “The War Doesn’t End.” This section is primarily focused on veterans from the Vietnam War and how the war has affected their lives. In the title poem “The War Doesn’t End” Anderson reflects on a mixed-race solider he meets in Ho Chi Mihn City after the war has ended, saying that the soldier is:

“Mixed black and Vietnamese, unwelcome here,
unwelcome there, son of a soldier gone” (65).

This “soldier gone” forms the narrative backbone of this second section as Anderson navigates through the indoctrination the Marines received (“Killing with a Name”) to how this allowed them to inflict turmoil on others (“Somewhere South of Danang, 1967”). Anderson demonstrates his narrative skill in his poetry through the lyrical story his voice tells in this section. He also connects the speaker’s problems with his life before in “Love in Plague Time” to the lack of interest in the problems of “The War Doesn’t End.”

The two sides of the speaker—the apathetic citizen (“Love in the Plague Time”) and the desensitized Marine (“The War Doesn’t End”)—melt away and meld in the third section of “Homage.” Anderson spends most of this section in conversation with Li Po, another poet, about how his life’s two previous phases have affected him. He reflects on his aging (“Homage to Li Po”) and how that affects his ultimately nihilistic outlook on life (“Anonymous Civil Servant, T’ang Dynasty”). However, in “Two Poets Drinking,” Anderson realizes that this line of thinking is destructive and that being a part of a relationship is vital to survival:

“He keeps me from stepping off the cliff,
I catch him when he falls.
And fall he will, as will I” (79).

The speaker’s journey throughout this section is to destroy and rebuild who he was in this life, revealing the ways he is trying to be a better person. The conversational form of the third section serves as a paradigm shift in the collection’s overall tone and theme. Indeed it is the bridge of the collection’s lyrical structure.

Anderson ends his collection with “Mythologies,” a contemporary reflection of the themes of Greek mythology and Biblical stories with the themes and settings discussed earlier in the book. Some of his subjects are Odysseus (“Cyclops”) and Adam. In “Survivor,” he combines the legend of Circe with the setting of a strip club:

“I saw my men in that topless bar
that Circe ran, throwing their
combat pay up on the stage,
her tucking the bills in her g-string” (96).

He circles back to the themes presented in “Love in Plague Time” under the guise of using myths and stories to reexamine the themes of alienation. The section and the collection ends with “Age is Asking Me to Give Up Love.” Much like the cyclical nature of myth, Anderson says,

“Might be easier if love gave me up.
It won’t, nor has it sublimated
into something holy” (102).

Anderson’s text is striking due to its streamlined lyricism and juxtaposition of the natural and artificial. This is well-exemplified in the line “I was shocked, thought in our madness you’d bitten my lip. But it was only blueberries” (82).

Undress, She Said will stand out to readers through its varied reflection of the male poet within the last century.

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The Chili Cook-Off

In the ninth grade my face got all trucked up in a car accident. The next year my high school let me be a judge at their annual chili cook-off. Ever since, on the eve of the season’s first freeze, I make a big pot, the beginning of two months of competition. I find the process soothing. My recipe changes from year to year. I’ve never written it down and being prone to heavy drink, I invariably forget something. My maxim is to keep it simple. This is Omaha. Don’t need to be showing up at the American Legion Hall with braised short-rib chili.

The onset of winter around here is a curious thing. There’s excitement in the air despite everyone knowing that in a month we’ll all be begging for spring. My chili season routine goes as such: on Wednesday I hit the grocery store. Thursday, I dice everything up: onions, peppers, garlic, and tomatoes. Fix a drink. Brown the meat. Refill my drink. Add everything to the stock pot, stir it real good, and let it rest in the fridge overnight. All day Friday I cook it down, adding beer/coffee/broth as needed. On Saturday I bring it to whatever cook-off is happening. Sundays I’m hungover. Monday and Tuesday are pretty inconsequential.

I’ll be up front about it, one of the buddies I was in the car wreck with didn’t make it out. He was sixteen, two years older than me, and he was driving. The other buddy, Tim Slobowski, was my age. We were on a rural stretch of road, what we called out north. Slobowski was ejected from the car. His brain went without oxygen for forty-five minutes, and he spent the next six weeks in a coma. After that they moved him to the Madonna House Rehab Hospital, where he doesn’t know who he is or where he’s at. I used to visit, but it’s been a while.

People at the Hy-Vee see what’s in my cart and give me looks of approval, the man making midweek chili. Such jaunt in my step. My go-to protein is a mixture of Italian sausage and ground beef (1:3). In the past I’ve done some wild experimentation, depending on how frisky I’m feeling. Have used everything from elk to pulled pork to brisket. Where I draw the line is chicken, white chili, which I won’t do. In a few weeks my hunting buddies will start getting last year’s venison out of their deep freezes and I’ll make a few batches with that, but until then, I’ll keep it simple. Italian sausage and ground beef.

As I exit the store, the Salvation Army bell ringer is going at it like he’s John Bonham. I wasn’t planning on donating (no idea where the money goes), but I admire his tenacity. I stop the cart and fish around in my pocket. The drummer does a triplet. He’s wearing fingerless leather gloves. The bell is vise-gripped to a hi-hat stand. He goes at it like a trap set. I bend down with my dollar. He looks at me. We recognize each other. He grins in a way that says he knows it’s me, and yeah dude, it’s him: my old friend, Doogie. He stops mid-song, looks in my cart. “Whoa motherfucker,” he says. “You making chili?”

Aside from family, I’ve known Doogie longer than anyone else. His stepdad coached our little-league team, this mustached dude who’d pitched collegiately and was obsessed with bunting. Later, Doogie and I did drugs and played in punk bands together, which is when he dropped the name William and took on Doogie.

“Doogie,” I say. “What the fuck man, I thought you were in Denver.”

“Made it nine months out there, but I’m back. Been so for a few weeks.”

I nod at the tithing bell. “The hell is this?”

“The fuck’s it look like? Denver’s not cheap.” He lowers his voice. “You still…”

“Gave it up,” I say. “Coming on two years.”

“Congrats. That’s why I moved. Worked for a while too, but you know that junk is everywhere.” He puts a hand on the case of beer in my cart. “Haven’t kicked this, I see.”

“Technically that’s for the chili.”

“Fuckin A.”

“Hey man,” I say. “Is this what it looks like?”

“Not really.” He looks around. “Actually, maybe.”

Ninety percent of my friends from his days are gone. Some left to reinvent themselves and some passed away and some got married, had kids. I spent a decade moving around. Whenever things came close to falling in place, something came up. Emergency dental surgery or a bad breakup or x, y, and z. I pull a twenty from my billfold. Doogie pockets it on the sly and gives the bell a thwack, thanks me for being a good friend.

In the three years I’ve been back in Omaha, I’ve entered forty chili cook-offs. Placed in the top three at thirty of them, fifteen of which I won. I know it’s a weird hobby, but if my biggest proclivity is an obsession with making chili, I consider myself healthy. It’s Thursday morning and my stomach is weightless in anticipation. Been since March that I last made a batch. I hone the chef’s knife, ready the cutting board. The tips of my fingers get prickly. I start my audiobook: Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s been my soundtrack for the last two chili-cooking seasons. Over the next couple months I’ll take it to the house three, maybe four times. Put it away for the year, recharged.

I am in control of what defines me. Covey hammers that. Don’t have to be defined by my past. Humans have the power to choose. That’s why I moved away. Fuckers all saw me as the dude that had been in the car accident. For many years I was erratic. Covey helped me regain control. It’s like he says, so much about who we are is determined in the split seconds between stimulus and response. And never forget that you have the power to choose.

The baseball team that Doogie and I played for—the Omaha Tornadoes—the summer after sixth grade we made a run at the Little League World Series, the event that’s televised on ESPN. All season we used the thought of ourselves on TV as motivation. A communal fantasy that grew out of control. We made it to the final round of regionals in Wichita, KS. One more and we were in. We could practically see ourselves in the nation’s living rooms, dominating with small ball. The hope for a better tomorrow. We ended up losing in the last inning of the championship game and shortly thereafter found out that we hadn’t even been competing in the tournament that climaxes on ESPN. We’d been in some rinky-dink knockoff version, lied to by our parents and Doogie’s stepdad, who knew we’d be motivated by TV. The whole experience ruined baseball for me.

I love waking up on chili cook-down Friday. Last night it was hard to fall asleep, similar to the last day of school as a kid, a memory I barely remember, but it was embryonic, the windows open to perfect weather. I put the pot on the range and slowly bring it to a boil, stirring in cumin, cayenne, and paprika. Half a Hershey bar. A quarter cup of cold brew. Couple tablespoons of Mexican coke. Last year I fucked around with soda syrup as the sweetener. It was close to what I wanted, but the line to toe was thin and it made me feel like I was trying to be something I’m not, unbearably pretentious.

All told I spent a decade away from Omaha. Went from Tampa to Lake Charles, Asheville and Pensacola—once for love, once for a bar, and the others for no real reason, reinventing who I was every few years. One of the things I consistently missed were the chili cook-offs, nothing like they are in the heartland. To the credit of Lake Charles, they had a bunch of well-attended gumbo cook-offs around Mardi Gras, but I only like that stuff in extreme moderation. At the last one I attended I was eating a bowl in front of the guy that made it—duck and andouille—and on my second spoonful I bit square into a piece of buckshot. I pulled the BB from my mouth and the guy started laughing like a goddamn maniac. I didn’t think it was funny, though. That incisor is still chipped.

I bring the chili to a hard boil and kill the heat. Add in some bone broth and work it to a simmer. I can’t stress enough the importance of a quality stock pot. I’ve got a top-end chef’s knife as well, German forged steel. Those Japanese brands look sweet, but I’ve heard they require a ton of maintenance. Even though it’s been years since my last relationship fell apart, I still fantasize about the gift registry she and I put together, sorry we didn’t stay together long enough to see it through. The kitchen we would’ve had.

The cook-off they let me judge after my accident was our high-school’s big annual fundraiser, climax of the blue-and-white weekend. The three judges are usually big-time alumni. It’s considered an honor. That’s what my mom kept harping on after I was invited. I was hesitant, but she insisted. And she was right. Whole crowd gave me a standing-o when I took my place. I was seated next to a famous movie director, class of ‘79. He’d just finished filming something with Matt Damon. It’d been the talk of our high school. The emcee put two flights of chili in front of me. The director noticed my shaking hands, leaned in and said that Matt Damon had found my story very compelling. By the time I reached the next taster, I’d settled down. I took a bite and pretended to gag, real cartoon-like. At that moment everyone in the audience knew I’d be fine. They beamed up at me, proud of the way they’d rallied around the poor kid. Helped him overcome adversity. Many years later I drunkenly tried getting in touch with the director to see if he could help me out. His people said he was on location in Hawaii, and that if he didn’t get back to me in a few months, to follow up. But he didn’t and neither did I. The whole thing was stupid. What was I expecting, him to cast me in some fucking Jason Bourne movie?

After three hours of simmering, I give the chili my inaugural taste. Swish it around like a wine snob. As anticipated, there’s something missing. Always happens with the season’s first batch. Last weekend I emptied my pantry, which I do at the beginning of every October, keep the spices and toss the rest—hard to innovate while constipated with yesterday’s shortcomings. The pitfall is that this chili needs something I don’t have. It’s no problem, though. Hy-Vee is close and maybe I’ll get to see Doogie again. Been thinking a lot about how I got off the path we were on and he didn’t. The emptiness he must be feeling. I’ve been there.

After the dust from the car wreck settled my parents hired an attorney. The hairpin turn we wrecked at wasn’t labeled. No guard rail either. Everyone’s assumption was that we’d been drinking, but we hadn’t been. My buddies and I were just out for a joy ride, Nebraska in early April, looking for sandhill cranes. When we launched off the road my stomach shot through my throat. Time elongated into milliseconds I could see and touch. There wasn’t any calm or clarity, or whatever people tell you they feel in the moments before death. It’s all a lie. I only felt terror and all I wanted was to be alive. Then we crashed in a soy field and started rolling. My attorney was a real bulldog. The county was on the hook. My folks put my settlement money into a trust. Every month until I turn forty I get two grand. It’s been a blessing and a curse.

This time when I approach the entrance to the grocery store there’s no Salvation Army bell ringer. Honestly, I’m disappointed. The vision of Doogie’s face has been in the back of my mind. How worn down it looked, like an old catcher’s mitt. I shouldn’t have left him in the lurch all those years ago when I up and moved away, cutting ties with who I was. From eighteen to twenty-five, he and I travelled the country pursuing punk-rock fantasies. Taught a bunch of shit-hole bars a thing or two about having a good time. Made caricatures of ourselves and called it profound. Swore we were pursuing the life we wanted, fast and hard. Paycheck to paycheck. Then the pixie dust wore off and I moved away without saying much. Just needed a change.

I meander through the grocery store. Grab some high-end bone broth, a couple ghost peppers, another can of tomato paste. An orange (for the zest). When I’m leaving the store I hear someone wailing on the bell. I’m thrilled. Can barely contain myself as I turn toward him. He’s wearing a necktie as a headband, Judas Priest long sleeve under the Salvation Army vest. Drums a line of blast beats.

“Doogie!”

“My dude. Back again.”

“Needed a few things for my chili,” I say. “How’s it going, man?”

“Nice as shit out today. I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s any correlation between weather and generosity. Far as I can tell, it’s random.” He swings the donation kettle back and forth. “Bunch of fucking cheapskates.”

“Dude, you know what I was thinking about after I saw you the other day? Remember that year we almost went to the Little League World Series?”

“Twenty-three years ago,” he says. “It’s like they say, time flies when you’re having fun.”

“You want to ditch this and come over for some chili?”

He fidgets around. “Got any of that beer left?”

“Eighteen at least.”

He removes his vest and says, “I’ll hop in with you.”

The neighborhoods we used to live in are nice now, full of street tacos and cocktail bars. Our drug house was gutted and turned into a vinyl-listening library, $79 a month, one of the best record collections in the Midwest. When we lived there, we were constantly having to scrape together extra money to get the utilities turned back on. Place had revolving doors. My room was on the top floor. Doogie’s drum set was in the basement. Despite sound proofing it with egg cartons and junked mattresses, I heard every beat of his practices, and he was always at it. Ever since I’ve needed a box fan to sleep, that dump was so loud all the time. Makes me glad it’s something pretentious now.

Immediately upon entering my house, Doogie says, “Good fuck. It smells fantastic.” He checks out my trinkets. I’m a collector of several things. Bobbleheads and postcards and koozies, most extensively. When I started accumulating them, I stopped getting tattoos. Win-win. I’ve got koozies from all over the country. Some from places Doogie and I went together, like the bar in the lobby of the heart-shaped hot-tub motel in Jackson, MS. First time we tried meth.

“You really hate having a warm beer and a cold hand,” he says, looking at all of them. “I’ll give you that much.”

“See the one from Slims in Raleigh?” I say. “That place was insane.”

“Oh man, I still feel bad for that guy. Dude who put us up. He didn’t deserve that from us.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I forgot about that. Certainly not my proudest moment, but he had money and was an asshole to begin with.”

I get us a couple cans of beer. The chili is simmering on the range. I prepare the fixins: a bowl of Fritos, Crystal and Tabasco hot sauce, fine-shredded cheddar. In Nebraska it’s customary to serve cinnamon rolls with chili—they get us started on it in elementary school—but I don’t play by those rules. Fuck that. I put the chili in front of us, normal fixins. Before taking his first bite, Doogie wafts it under his nose. “What’s that I detect,” he says, “nutmeg?”

“Maybe.”

He wolfs the bowl down without another word. I’d go so far as to say I knocked it out of the park. Again.

“Well,” he says. “Pretty decent.”

“Pretty decent? Variations of this recipe are going to win a ton of cook-offs.”

“I’m no chef de cuisine, but it seems like you over handled it a bit. Folks want a robust, simple chili. This tastes like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. You know what I mean? It lacks an identity.”

“Yeah?”

“The fuck do I know, though, I’m a Hormel man.”

“Get out of here with that. Seriously?”

“You like what you like.”

The guy’s got dirt under his fingernails, sniffles a lot. Almost forty-years old and still rocking a Judas Priest shirt. He’s as lost as I once was, an addict. I shouldn’t fault him for the Hormel comment. He doesn’t know any better. I grab us another couple beers. “Listen,” I tell him. “I think I’ve got something that could help you out.”

“Less cumin in the chili?”

“Funny,” I say. “I’m trying to be serious for a second.”

I keep several copies of Seven Habits around the house for this very occasion, a friend in need. I hand him the multi-disc audio edition. He holds it like a problem child with the body of Christ. “You might think it’s bullshit,” I say. “But it worked for me.”

“Worked like how?”

“Helped me get in control of everything. I had a victim’s mentality for pretty much my whole life. Bad things kept happening to me because bad things always happen to me. You know what I mean? That type of philosophical outlook.”

“Fuckin A,” he says.

“Friend to friend, I’ve been where you’re at.”

“Look, man,” he says. “I thought we were here to eat chili. If I wanted to be proselytized, there’s any number of people more qualified than you that I could’ve gone to. No offense.”

“Trust me, I was the same way. This shit, it can take a load off.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“I don’t want unsolicited life advice. Especially from someone like you.”

He’s the same way I was, hardheaded. Covey helped me realize that.

“Just take it,” I say. “Do whatever you want with it. Doesn’t matter to me. But take it, just in case.”

—

I won the first two cook-offs of the season. Spent three weeks honing my recipe and then boom, I took O’Leavers on the first Saturday in November—$100 bar tab—and The Winchester the following weekend, where this biker in his seventies finished second. By the time they announced the results the biker was damn near incoherent, prison-sleeved and in the throes of what appeared to be a psychedelic trip. For winning that one I got a toilet trophy and fifty bucks. The biker got a bottle of blackberry brandy. He had a tough time figuring out what it was.

I am a well-oiled machine. My house smells delicious all the time. If they made a chili-scented candle, I’d be the target demographic.

I kicked the shit out of The Sydney’s cook-off. They never stood a chance. Two different yahoos had chickpeas in their chili. To them I said, “Why does the sexual deviant like your chili so much?”

Huh?

“Because the chickpeas.”

And I rode off into the sunset, gift card in my pocket.

Bribery and ass kissing are rampant in the competitive chili scene. It’s always better to have a panel of judges than audience voting. No telling whose team folks are on. Another pro tip: invest in a decent crockpot. Nothing too expensive, but nothing too shitty. People judge at either end. What can I say, they eat with their eyes. And if the cook-off benefits charity, do a little research first. Or just avoid them altogether. They bring out some serious amateurs. The ones at old-school bars are where it’s at.

Oh, and don’t show up with bean-less chili. Whenever someone does, we talk shit behind their backs.

I open the year six for eight. Lost two to charity, but what the hell, they were for good causes. Not like it’s my fault that the parents of the Kingswood Athletic Association have unsophisticated palettes. Keep your crown, you well-done assholes. And never again lie about how the baseball season could end. None of those cook-offs matter anyways. My green jacket, the creme de la creme, is this weekend at the Homy Inn. Culmination of the season. The place is an institution, beloved by the types of lawyers/doctors/rich folk who give big at my high school’s annual fundraiser. While most cook-offs get between ten and twenty entrants, the Homy will have upwards of fifty, judged in stages. $500 on the line. I’ve never won. Last year I took third. For it I’m breaking out the big guns. I started my prep work a week ago. Went and bought a pork butt that I cut into inch-thick strips. They’ve been curing in crab boil and canning salt in the fridge, a cup of sugar. I’ll smoke the slabs into tasso a few weeks from now. What I’m after in the meantime are the shoulder blades. Left a good amount of meat on them. They’ve been in the curing solution. I’ll add them to the chili at the very beginning, let them season everything. All told it’s a two-week process.

They ought to crown me champion now, Friday afternoon. This batch is incredible. The pork bones worked wonders. After a few hours of simmering, I was able to shred the meat right off. It’s got a feathery texture, packed with flavor. Perfect complement to the Italian sausage and ground sirloin. I should’ve been writing down my recipes all along. For posterity. Maybe open up a chili parlor someday. Write a cookbook and have Matt Damon blurb it. At the very least, I’d be able to see what the changes say about who I became, no longer the brooding dude on the verge of an episode. I am the chili master now.

On Homy Inn Saturday I wake up at the crack of the sparrow. Begin the day with thirty minutes of yoga on YouTube. Follow that up with fifteen minutes of mindfulness, guided by YouTube. Then I take a hot shower. After the shower I pull the chili from the fridge and put it on the range, slowly bring it to temperature. I eat a bowl straight up, no garnishes. Phenomenal stuff.

The cook-off starts at two. I show up at one, bring it in the front door. The bartender takes it to the back, where they’ll transfer it to a quarter tray, to be labeled and served from steam tables. The right way to do things. Total anonymity. I settle into the bar, have a beer and a shot. My chili might be superfluous, but when it comes to drinking, I’m a meat and potatoes guy. More and more people arrive with chili. Some look like straight-up yokels. I rule them out. The rough looking ones are the ones I’m worried about. That old-timer with the neck tattoo, for example, he ought to get a first-round bye. Respect for the lifers. The bar’s capacity is a tight 175. Today they’ll reach that. The bartender brings me another beer and addresses me by name, asks how my chili turned out.

“Pretty good,” I say.

I’m tempted to tell him how awesome it is, but I’ve overheard a bunch of contestants running their mouths and in this arena I want to be the strong and silent type. As Covey would say, the choice is mine.

Forty chilis have been entered. The bar is wall-to-wall. A couple sore-thumb tourists pump money into the claw machine, nothing in it but a big pink dildo. What a dive, they laugh. Folks always act surprised when they realize said dildo is greased, which should probably be a given. The Homy has been putting this on for over twenty years. They’ve got it down pat. Chilis have been separated into groups of ten. The first round will be judged by the audience. Every attendee has been assigned a flight and given a scorecard. Top three from each will advance.

Minutes before it’s about to start, the front door swings open. Standing in the gust of frigid air is my old friend Doogie. He’s carrying a greasy crockpot, balances it against his stomach with one hand. Fist bumps the door guy with the other, who then hustles it to the back. Doogie catches sight of me. I raise my glass. He gives me a stern-faced thumbs up, goes and registers with the event coordinator—the octogenarian proprietress who takes absolutely no shit from anyone. For the past fifteen years she’s made a pot of chili for people to eat during Monday Night Football and for my two cents, it’s pretty good. I expect her to give Doogie a hard time, but she doesn’t. In fact, they seem to have a rapport. He comes to my side and orders a drink and I say to him, “Didn’t know you were into making chili. Which number is yours?”

“You know it’s against the rules for me to divulge that information prior to the completion of first-round voting. I may be a fuck up, but I’m no cheater.”

“What do you say we get a little side bet going?”

“I don’t approach making chili with a results-based mindset. I trust what I cooked. For me, the joy is in the process.”

“You listened to the book,” I say. “Awesome, man.”

It’s vintage Covey. Always act with the end in mind.

“The hell I did,” he says. “What’s the bet? I’ll take your action all day.”

“Forget about it. You’re right about being process based. It’s all in good fun. I’m glad to see you’re doing well.”

“Five-hundred,” he says.

“You’re good for that?”

“Here he goes again, Mr. Shit-Together.”

He does look healthier. Not as strung out.

“Fine,” I say. “Five-hundred it is.”

I’ll take this dickhead’s money. Kickstart him into helping himself.

“I don’t even care for chili,” he says, “but having tasted yours, I know I can beat it. Someone has to put you in your place.”

“Yeah?”

“See you at the finish line, asshole.”

I’m starting to remember why we had a falling out. Dude’s kind of a prick. Only reason he started at second on our little-league team was because his stepdad was the coach, the mustached man who orchestrated the whole ESPN lie. I’m sorry to say it, but his stepson is about to lose five-hundred bucks.

Will I make him pay?

Goddamn right.

The emcee starts the event. First round will take an hour. It’s warm in the bar, spirited. These things aren’t really about winning. They’re about Midwestern camaraderie. The shared misery of another winter, born to die in Nebraska. This bar regular I’m friendly with, Rat-faced Johnny, plays Motörhead from the jukebox. He knows I’m a fan. “Here’s to pissing in the wind and shitting where you eat,” he says. Motörhead ends and Iron Maiden comes on. Rat-faced Johnny does it again.

I sample all ten chilis I’ve been assigned. Have a sip of Aperol spritz between each. Don’t care if the drink looks ostentatious, it’s a great way to cleanse the palette. Three of the chilis are decent. Four are palatable. And three are downright lousy. If they’re any indication as to how these people eat at home, I feel sorry for them. No doubt I’ll advance to the next round.

Doogie shuffles to my side and says, “I know which one is yours. Heavy on the cumin again.”

Before I can retort, the bartender cuts the jukebox—Rat-faced Johnny is not amused, middle of his favorite Black Sabbath song—but they’re ready to announce the first-round results.

“You think you made it through?” I ask Doogie.

“At this point,” he says, “it’s outside my control and therefore, I am unconcerned.”

Another of Covey’s tenets. Even if he’s mocking it, at least he listened.

“By the way,” I say. “That was a bullshit move your stepdad pulled. Convincing us we were going to the Little League World Series.”

“You’re telling me,” he says. “I had to live with the fucker.”

The emcee fumbles around with the PA system. People are mirthful. Days are getting longer. We’re past the peak of winter. In no particular order, the emcee calls the numbers of those that have advanced into the finals. Of course I am among them. Doogie stays calm throughout. “You make it through?” I ask.

“Man,” he says. “Why’d you have to bring up my stepdad? I’m not trying to think about that guy right now. Fucking ruined my day. That’s a bullshit move.”

The last thing I expected was tenderness. “You’ve been a prick all afternoon,” I say. “I was just giving it back.”

“I know why you’re obsessed with this chili cook-off bullshit. It’s because they let you judge that one in high school after the accident went down. Got me thinking, man, when’s the last time you’ve been out to see Slobowski?”

He knows not to go there. I shake my head.

“Just a question,” he says. “I’m genuinely curious.”

“You know the answer.”

It’s not a conversation I care to have with anyone, let alone an old junky buddy.

“Anyways,” he says, eagle eyeing the barroom. “I’ve got to go catch up with some folks. Good luck with the next round.”

The bartender kicks the jukebox back on. Rat-faced Johnny raises hell, says it skipped his songs and ate the remaining credits. Now it’s playing some bullshit Aerosmith song and everybody in the state of Nebraska knows he hates them. Johnny’s nickname isn’t flattering, but it sure does fit. The bartender tells him to settle down. Not like the jukebox is going anywhere.

The judges take their places at the head table. Two of them I recognize, the chef from the Boiler Room and this stout guy named Dario, owner of Dario’s. Best steak frites in town. The third judge I’ve never seen before, some lady who teaches culinary arts at the community college. Over the years I’ve learned not to overthink what the judges might be thinking. There’s nothing their reactions can tell me about chili that I don’t already know. I lean back and enjoy my spritz. Peace be the journey. I order a refill on Doogie’s tab.

The judges head to the backroom to deliberate. I sample all ten of the finalists. Seven are solid. Sometimes I get too cocky and underestimate my competition. Wouldn’t be the first time hubris has fucked me. Three of them even, I wouldn’t be ashamed to lose to. One seems to have hit exactly what it’s going for. Perfect combination of heat and flavor. This brilliant texture to it. Oh wait, it’s mine.

Nice.

The judges emerge with their results. The emcee has an envelope in hand. He delivers a little hoopla. Thanks us for being here. Says they couldn’t have asked for a more qualified panel of judges. And what a way to kick off the homestretch to Spring. My nerves ratchet up, suspended in the in-between while this guy finishes his spiel.

No matter the outcome, I know in my heart of hearts that I am a winner.

I advance into the top five. Those that have been eliminated go and collect their consolation ribbons. The emcee whittles out two more. I’m in the top three. Soon they’ll be etching my name on the plaque, forever part of something bigger than myself. Doogie is stone-faced. I have no idea if his chili is still alive.

Just name the goddamn winner already.

And then they do.

William “Doogie” Donahue.

The audience gives it up for him.

Son of a bitch.

He tries to accept it stoically, but has a teenager’s sheepishness when he takes the trophy. Looks out into the crowd and raises his arms. I’m pissed off, but oh well. I’ve got to admit, his chili, #6 of the finalists, was good. Nice and hearty. Midwestern. I put my hands together for him, my old friend.

There’s always next year and the next year and the one after that. Adapt and survive. Maybe I’ll open a chili parlor when my two-grand allowance runs out, call it Slobowski’s. I’ll go out to the Madonna House to see him soon. It’d be nice to catch up with his mother as well. I know she was bummed when I quit visiting, disappeared in pursuit of something I never found. Didn’t even bother returning her calls. But I’m back in control now, helping old friends win chili cook-offs. Some much-needed meaning in Doogie’s life.

The bar settles down. Empties by about half. It’s 4:30 now. In an hour it’ll be dark. For finishing second I got a $200 tab, which I’m putting to good use. Gave rat-faced Johnny permission to drink on it until it’s gone. Would’ve thought he won the lottery when I told him.

“It was a well-fought battle.” Doogie comes up and shakes my hand.

“You showed me,” I say. “I apologize. Got ahead of myself.” It’s important that I be the bigger man. “You do Venmo?”

“Cash only, bucko.”

He follows me to the ATM. I hand him the five hundred and say, “I guess we’ll see each other when we see each other. Until then, be well.”

“You know what my chili was?”

“What?”

“Just Hormel that I doctored up a little bit, you self-righteous son of a bitch.”

“Motherfucker.”

He walks away—middle finger up—out into the dregs of winter, a champion.

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Review: Marble Orchard by Emily Corwin

University of Akron Press, May 2023

68 pages

Emily Corwin’s third full-length book of poetry, Marble Orchard, subverts expectations of how we talk about anxiety and depression. This graveyard is divided into four sections that tackle mental health issues and physical ailments: “delicate as organ,” “my black sleigh,” “the wicked accident,” and “a field walks through me.” Each of these corresponds to a different framing style: a formal presentation of “lunacy,” ekphrasis of film, a collage of voices overheard, and the ekphrasis of paintings.

Though ekphrasis, the use of art as a framing device, is often used as a tool of distance, in Corwin’s latest collection, pieces feel personal and universal. One notable piece, “Kat Harvey,” named after the protagonist of the 1995 Casper movie, is a portrait of the namesake character:

to go. Dusty star anise, eyebright, the rosarian says,

good morning. And you, what were you like as a living thing?

I’d like to make contact. Can you hurt me? Can I hurt you?

Slither with me to the Lazarus machine, primordial muck.

I’d like to see you not see-through. Can I keep you? Earthy as a

cabbage rose—my woody perennial, my mortal slow dancer.

Corwin uses “Kat Harvey” and Casper to consider the separation of the mind and the body, and resurrection after a physical and even metaphysical death. The poem uses the movie to craft a painting of herbal medicines such as “dusty star anise,” that suggest healing properties. Death is only addressed with a rhetorical question: “What were you like as a living thing?” The biblical reference to Lazarus, the name of the machine designed to bring Casper back to life, arises again as “a/ cabbage rose—my woody perennial.” Here the reader may note “perennial” is a type of plant that comes back to life every spring and could signify the cyclical nature of mental health struggles.

The opening section of the collection, “delicate as organ,” begins with a bang and contains some of the most compelling pieces in the collection. Its first poem, “Lunatic as Abecedarian,” sets us up thematically for the rest of the book. The speaker of these pieces, “lived against it – a/ brutal music; I lived in it in/ clinics, in dresses disposable.” This section examines “lunacy” and “lunatic” by employing a myriad of forms that challenge us to reframe our relationship with these words.

Corwin is at her best when she deconstructs and rebuilds the world around her. In one of her “Lunatic as Erasure” pieces, readers see an “erasure of Fluoxetine medication guide” that takes medical packaging to create a portrait of what it is like being on an antidepressant.

“there may be change in mood, behavior,

actions, thoughts, or feelings, especially severe.

acting on dangerous impulses”

Corwin captures the possible contradiction of antidepressants, stabilizing mental health—while potentially delivering terrible side effects. She notes, “if you take too much, call poison control,” highlights the fiction between pill as “medicine” and hazard.

The “wicked accident”, which consists of a multi-page poem constructed out of conversations overheard in public spaces, was another high point in the collection. Whether Corwin’s intention or not, this piece evoked the motif of “voices in your head” that is often associated with lunatics, a thread established at the beginning of the book. “I wasn’t there when it happened. You see where the crack started.” Corwin’s disembodied voice chimes two-thirds of the way through the piece. This brilliant landscape skips to a Betty White reference and the meme of the actress being older than sliced bread: “That was the old Wonder Bread Factory. We used to drive the turnpike/ to visit Betty.” Corwin subverts expectations, offering us a voice that is reflective, witty, sarcastic, and left me wanting to “cross my fingers,/ I mean, cross my heart.”

Corwin’s Marble Orchard delicately balances themes of mental illness with art and found poetry. Though its first section ran slightly long in its dissection of lunacy, Corwin’s meditation on mental illness offers a strong collection that will likely resonate with many readers.

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Review: I Felt the End Before it Came by Daniel Allen Cox

Viking Books, May 9, 2023
240 pages

In his tenacious and sharply written memoir-in-essays I Felt the End Before it Came, Daniel Allen Cox details his experiences as a queer man struggling against the lasting effects of his childhood indoctrination into the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Cox’s fifth book and first memoir is a culmination of what he describes as “a lifelong project to redefine words that had once been used against [him].” Throughout the book, Cox trades the church’s Paradise for a Paradise of books and music, and a theology of shame for “a theology of queer tenderness.”

The memoir’s episodic essay structure is original and inspired. Each piece focuses on how Cox experienced and ultimately rebelled against a different method of indoctrination. “A Library for Apostates” highlights the Witness’s suppression of Cox’s education, and details how he became a writer and educator despite this. In “The Witness is Complicit,” Cox criticizes how the Witnesses use the promise of salvation from Armageddon to recruit new members, then ties this to his experience writing against the church during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cox’s effort to balance information and anecdote often results in a satisfyingly profound insight.

“The Glow of Electrum” powerfully delves into how Cox was shamed by members of the church for his early speech impediment, which made him, in their eyes, a “defective missionary,” then explores how he eventually “allowed strangeness of speech” back into his life. The essay does an especially good job of seamlessly moving between anecdote, research, and synthesis, never staying in one mode too long, and plays with language in a way that fits well with its themes, defamiliarizing the experience of stuttering. “Not all hesitations are composed of the same materials,” Cox writes. “A filler word can sound like the real thing. Sometimes the body continues moving through a word; the mouth freezes but the foot taps on.”

In some stretches of the book, Cox will focus on information more than memoir, or memoir more than information. In “Moonwalking to Armageddon,” Cox spends much of the chapter on Michael Jackson’s and Prince’s experiences in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “The End of Times Square” is almost entirely focused on the story of Cox’s time as an adult photography model in late 90s New York City. It can feel like these parts lose focus on the book’s project to serve as a blueprint for identifying and overcoming indoctrination, but they give a satisfying picture of the inner workings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and an intimate view of Cox’s life, and keep the book from feeling monotone.

Cox’s memoir is smart, funny, and gripping throughout. “We Are the Ones Held,” an essay about his alcoholism, is filled with moving self-indictment and cultural critique, while also showing off Cox’s knack for choosing details that show his humorous, yet always sensitive and empathetic, view of himself and others: “I dismantled the wine rack in my bedroom and put it on the street, where someone picked it up within the hour, no doubt to set it up in another bedroom nearby.”

The most memorable essay in the book is the aforementioned “Moonwalking to Armageddon,” about how Jehovah’s Witnesses view the supernatural. The essay abounds with fun anecdotes and juicy insider strangeness, detailing, among other things, his church’s enmity with The Smurfs. Cox is especially playful with his barbs here. He suggests, for instance, that Witnesses might be “jealous of Smurfs because they live an exclusive Paradise.” The irreverence of the essay elevates a critique of the Witnesses’ hypocrisy by showing it at its most absurd.

In I Felt the End Before it Came, Cox ruminates with wit and insight on the universal themes of shame, identity, censorship, control, and emotional manipulation, while telling the story of his ongoing attempt to define his life outside of the church’s dogmatism. His meticulous approach to dismantling and overcoming methods of control and manipulation will feel cathartic to many readers.

Parts of I Felt the End Before it Came appeared in The Florida Review vol. 45.2 as “Death Trap”

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The Purported Magic of Broccolini

When, on several occasions, my Twitter crush tweets that he’s eating broccolini, I feel intrigued. I’ve eaten broccolini a couple of times, in restaurants, but never prepared it at home. I begin looking for broccolini each time I visit the grocery store, with no luck. After two months, broccolini becomes available from my online imperfect produce delivery. Jackpot!

I become very excited about the broccolini, which I must wait three days to receive. Although I’m no longer in full pandemic isolation mode, I work from home, am single, and see friends only occasionally. Most of my waking life is spent indoors, staring at a screen, or on long, slow walks that I hope counterbalance those other hours.

To combat loneliness and keep my spirits up, I try to give myself a continual stream of small thrills — walking a new route, photographing a neighbor’s rose mallow hibiscus bush, listening to a musician I’ve never heard before, and, now, exploring the purported magic of broccolini.

I search for information about broccolini online to fuel my excitement as I wait for the order to arrive, like a child would research a gift they are expecting for Christmas. I know what I’m doing is a little silly, a contrived effort laid forth as part of a larger attempt to maintain mental and emotional health. But don’t we all need a little silliness sometimes? For me, at least, researching broccolini has healing properties.

Since I’d heard broccolini referred to as “baby broccoli,” I’d mistakenly thought it was the broccoli plant harvested at a young age. But I learn broccolini is not young broccoli. It’s actually a hybrid of broccoli and gai lan, another Brassica vegetable also called Chinese kale or Chinese broccoli.

Further, the word broccolini is trademarked. This hybrid vegetable, only legally allowed to be referred to as “broccolini” by the company Mann Packing, is nutritionally similar to broccoli, providing protein, fiber, iron, and potassium. But because broccolini is denser, you’d need to eat nearly twice as much broccoli to receive the same amount of nutrients.

Mann Packing isn’t the only brand that trademarked a term for my virtual crush’s favorite veggie, though they seem to be the most successful. Other companies have trademarked “bimi” and the aptly named “tenderstem.” Those who prefer not to use branded terms for this piece of produce may call it broccoletti, Italian sprouting broccoli, aspiration, and — my personal favorite, albeit slightly inaccurate — sweet baby broccoli.

When my broccolini arrives, it looks slim and long. The stems end in playfully floppy, round florets. After examining it closely, I put my broccolini in the fridge. When I take it out the next day at dinnertime, I see that tiny yellow flowers have bloomed around the edges overnight. An internet search shows the yellow flowers indicate the broccolini has aged, but is still safe to eat.

I sautee the broccolini in oil for only a few minutes as the internet had instructed, strain it, and spoon it into a bowl. Although I rarely use butter, I drop a pat on top of the slightly charred aspiration, watching the pale yellow square melt onto the green stems and bright yellow flowers. I squeeze a few drops of juice from a halved lemon over the dish, then grind sea salt on top.

I decide to eat my long-awaited broccolini at the dining room table, like it’s special, like I’m special, and not someone who eats most meals either at her desk while looking at the computer or on the couch while watching television.

The first bite is soft and warm on my tongue. I eat slowly, with my eyes closed. The richness of butter, the tang of lemon, make the vegetable taste luxurious, sultry even.

All of my excited preparation no longer feels the least bit silly. My effort was well worth it. The broccolini tastes like I picked it on a walk through a field rather than ordered it online. As if I prepared it over an open flame outdoors rather than in a suburban kitchen. I feel like I’m in a fairy tale — “The Woman Who Eats Yellow Flowers” — and I don’t want to leave.

I consider standing back up to get my phone for the purpose of taking a photo of the dish and tweeting it at him with the text, “You’re an influencer!”

I refrain. This moment is mine.

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Review: Origami Dogs by Noley Reid

Autumn House Press, 2023.
Paperback, $17.95, 216 pages.

Origami Dogs, Noley Reid’s fourth book and her second short story collection, is not about dogs. Through Reid’s clean, often razor-sharp prose, the characters’ animal companions trudge alongside their emotional turmoil, both witnesses and hostages to the ways they love and harm each other.

Still, even as the animals are not the focus of these stories, they often serve as vessels, important points of connection that convey the characters’ emotions. In the title story, a young girl, Iris, is overwhelmed both by working in her mother’s breeding farm and by her first experiences with boys. After losing her virginity leads her to be ignored and neglected by her two romantic prospects, Iris names every dog and pup in the barn, breaking her mother’s rule to only refer to them by numbers. The pain of her own objectification leads her to break the cycle of distance and humanize those around her, reclaiming her own agency in the process. Similarly, in “Movement & Bones”, even as the narrator, a recent amputee, struggles to connect with her husband, her dog mirrors her movements, offering physical comfort and also representing the barriers between them: “He moves his body up against mine, as much as the dogs in between our legs allow.”

The connection between human and animal doesn’t always provide consolation. In “The Mud Pit,” when the narrator’s boyfriend’s old dog, Kizzy, passes away, she offers to replace her as an emotional safe haven, but he rejects the offer. “You can’t be my safe haven from you,” he says. Indeed, there is no safe haven for these characters: their relationships float on the page, tinged with melancholy and an unfulfilled sense of longing. Devotion, from human to human, manifests as a heavy weight that the characters struggle to carry.

In the more experimental second-person narrative “How Trees Sleep,” Reid carefully paints the portrayal of a young girl lying next to her mother, stopping herself from asking more of her. And in “Once It’s Gone,” a husband grapples with his wife’s past infidelity, having raised a child that isn’t his. As he contemplates leaving his family, he watches an elderly woman from the neighborhood feed a group of ferocious stray cats. “I don’t stay to see her scared to cry out for fear of chasing them away,” he says. Instead, he returns home, since, as all these characters, he must sit with his hunger.

Amidst the longing for human connection, perhaps inevitably, parenting emerges as a major theme. The narrator of “Once It’s Gone” is partially motivated by his hurt over his stepdaughter’s decision to have an abortion—not out of a religious stance, but because, as he says to his wife, “it could have been ours.” It, the nameless fetus, could have been what the narrator craved, something to fulfill his desire for a deep relationship. Similarly, the protagonist of “The Mud Pit” hopes to use her unborn child as a way to connect with a dead childhood friend. Another piece, “No Matter Her Leaving,” features a father grieving his runaway daughter, waiting alongside her old dog Malone. In her absence, the dog withers. Before the narrator is forced to put him down, he watches Malone put his nose inside a bowl and glimpses a trace of hope: “Have I found something he can love?”

This question looms over the collection. The characters search, untiring, for the love they crave, whether from a distant partner or a conservative mother. When the narrator’s daughter returns in “No Matter Her Leaving,” the piece—and by extension, the collection—ends on a note of hope. Brimming underneath, though, there is still the sense of something inherently tragic, in an unrelenting, animalesque sort of love.

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Two Poems

Halloween: Ends

Michael Myers at the 711 filling up his SUV.
Michael Myers at Home Depot buying fancy drill bits he doesn’t really need.
Michael Myers sitting in the back of the room at the PTA meeting, scrolling through Tinder.
Michael Myers doing taxes.
Michael Myers scrolling through Facebook in the movie theater.
Michael Myers at couple’s counseling.
Michael Myers letting the dog out one night and telling the kids it ran away.
Michael Myers killing all the sex workers in Grand Theft Auto.
Michael Myers sitting in the back pew at church, scrolling through Tinder.
Michael Myers mowing the lawn on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
Michael Myers wearing an apron that says I Rub My Own Meat.
Michael Myers getting drunk at his Superbowl party.
Michael Myers explaining the differences between a bratwurst and a sausage to a woman looking at her phone.
Michael Myers renting Saw IV again on Amazon Prime.
Michael Myers taking his mask off to have sex but leaving his socks on.
Michael Myers toweling off in the locker room.
Michael Myers rubbing against people on the train.
Michael Myers at the hotel bar explaining the difference between bourbon and whisky to a woman looking at her phone.
Michael Myers calling up toiletries and answering the door in his bathrobe each time.
Michael Myers ordering his burger well-done.
Michael Myers sending his food back twice.
Michael Myers not tipping.

Another autumn

after Mikey Swanberg

walking the mile
to work,

freezing in the morning,
sweating on the way back,

each step a stitch
quilting the heavy blanket

of our unhappiness.
Nothing has happened,

and still—

I imagined my lover

might show up

in my office
before I left,

shut the door
and we would fuck

quietly on the desk

to the rhythm

of the copy machine.

In another version,
he’d walk out to me

halfway along the mile,

stitching his own path,

and say something
he was never going to say,

that he had changed, and I
had changed, but

all for the better,
and we were stronger for it,

as though love
were a sourdough,

dying then restarting,
grown through being given away.

How long did I believe that time
was the most costly thing.

What a hard bargain
to find it is the only thing.

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75 Simple Steps to Positive, Growing Change

1. Consider not reading the e-mail from your cousin Tommy, but then read it. Discover that your Uncle Dave has died. Of an embolism. Very unexpected, as is the case with these things. The e-mail notes the date, time, and location of the funeral. It is signed “best, Tommy.” Struggle with how this makes you feel. It’s been at least ten years since you’ve seen any of your relatives. Your mother’s funeral was the last time. You can’t believe how long it’s been. Ask yourself what you’ve even been doing in all that time. Decompressing is the only answer that comes to mind.

2. Take a Greyhound to Harrisburg to share Tommy’s grief as well as the grief of your Aunt Joan and Tommy’s twin sister Linda. Your own grief is of course less severe than theirs, but you are family and are grieving in appropriate amounts. Think about how your mother would have admonished you if you told her that the funeral were being held at a particularly bad time in your life, making it very inconvenient for you to attend.

3. Struggle to maintain your composure during the service, which is as anxiety inducing as anyone could have purposely arranged. Wonder who these people are. Assume they’re probably wondering the same about you. Shake hands with Tommy but don’t approach Linda or Aunt Joan, who seem almost too bereft at the cemetery, under a purpling sky that feels so close you could touch it. Imagine yourself being carried off by birds.

4. After the service, just as it begins to rain, accept a ride to the house from one of the other funeral attendees, a solemn man in his 50s, perhaps a business acquaintance of Uncle Dave’s. Tell him that you are the nephew. Smile and nod when he says, “Oh, the one from the city.” Thank him for his kindness when he offers his condolences. In the car, a twenty-year-old Acura kept in good trim, when he asks whether you mind if he smokes, ask him whether he minds if you vomit. Drive the rest of the way in silence.

5. Stand in the living room eating finger foods and drinking cocktails. The rain is falling in unbroken sheets, white noise humming in the background like classical music played at low volume. The boyfriend or fiancée of one of Linda’s friends, Dom or Don or something, hovers by the rolling bar and threatens with a drink anyone who ventures too close. Due mostly to these predations you’re on your third gin and tonic, which he keeps calling G&Ts. “Need another G&T?” he asks, you’re sure only trying to be of help in your family’s time of need. “Looking a little dry there, my man.” Watch him pick up some ice cubes with his fingers, which someone really ought to talk to him about—the tongs are right there. But, trying not to think about vectors of germ transmission, accept the drink, thank him, and then stand inconspicuously in front of a cluster of family photos. The largest photo is of Linda and Tommy at Epcot Center in their 90s clothes, lorded over by Uncle Dave and Aunt Joan. Picture their teenage resentment as a heavy, opaque liquid oozing right out of the photo.

6. Notice how the house feels like a place of pretty negative juju. Likewise Harrisburg in general, which you haven’t visited since you yourself wore appalling 90s clothes. You’ve come to associate both the house and Harrisburg with many painful instances of youth. Recall the day in 1992 when Uncle Dave body shamed you in front of basically the whole family. How afterwards you’d imagine him stealing away into the night to gleefully commit crimes. You did this to deflect his criticism, to make these the savage words of a vile criminal rather than the casual insults of a family member. But also, if he had no compunctions about reducing his only nephew to tears, imagine what he must have been capable of doing to complete strangers. Or his children. Looking at the raggedy group of mourners, wonder what they actually know about him. Walk to the buffet table to gnaw on a baby carrot.

7. While gnawing, try to remember past instances of positivity and bonding with your cousins since they are currently consumed by grief. Or so you imagine. Your uncle was not a warm man. No one would ever have said that about him, yet here people are in his home, or more correctly former home, celebrating his life. Recall a weekend visit when Uncle Dave pulled Tommy’s arm behind his back at a cruel angle for some offhand comment he’d made about the Penguins. How Linda had tried to intervene while you only sat there frozen to the spot. Remember how she yelled, “Let him go, Dad!” and the speed with which he then turned his anger on her for merely trying to defend her brother. Over hockey, no less!

8. Recall how you dissociated from the scene, even though back then you lacked the word for it. How you saw it instead as a tableau, not anything you were involved in or even necessarily present for. Witness it from a remove, as though watching it on TV or through the illuminated dining room window of a house you are walking past at night. Note your uncle’s hair, how the word that comes to mind is “yellow” rather than “blond.” See Aunt Joan smiling nervously—but at who? At you?—as though this gesture would exonerate Dave, excusing his behavior—his violence towards his children, to call it what it was—as a small peccadillo, as “Oh, you know how Dave gets sometimes.” See Tommy, dark haired like his mother, thin still at the time, having not yet started to lift weights in the garage, something you only now realize might have had to do with his father. See brave Linda, who looks like a beautiful and young female version of Uncle Dave, which she did her best to rid herself of at some point in her twenties when she got a wholly unnecessary nose job and began dyeing her hair red. She is the one to challenge him, not Joan, not Tommy, certainly not you. Note your relief and surprise when Uncle Dave suddenly lets the whole thing go, drops Tommy’s arm and reaches quickly, automatically for his beer, and how you all eat in silence until, finally, Aunt Joan turns to you and asks if you’re looking forward to seeing Santa at the mall the following day.

9. No. That’s not it. You weren’t a Santa-visiting child then. You were older. You and Tommy and Linda were in your early teens. Instead of Santa, you would have gone on long aimless walks together with some of their friends and smoked cigarettes and shared a small bottle of pilfered peppermint schnapps, you always on the outside of the group, the interloper, unable to really talk to anyone except for Linda. Recall their Harrisburg idioms, the slang you struggled to make sense of. The inside jokes you were not privy to, because Tommy made it abundantly clear that bringing you along was an obligation and not something he would have preferred to do.

10. Take a moment to acknowledge your gratitude for Dr. Becky and the tools she has given you for addressing and processing your trauma. Recall the body shaming incident again, only now recall it without the shame. You did not deserve that. Let it go. See? See how much processing you’ve done already? Take another sip of the G&T.

11. Also acknowledge that, despite the processing and healing, your current level of distress is exacerbated by the realization that Tommy has surely inherited some of these traits from his father. Things like that are passed down, cycles perpetuated, etc. Dr. Becky insists that part of what we must do to achieve healthy personal growth is to identify and nullify negative patterns. Tommy is clearly the victim of very powerful negative patterns, as evidenced by the time when, as kids, he deliberately pushed you into a patch of nettles. Recall your mother holding a cold washcloth to your lower back.

12. Wander back to the photos. On the same wall is a shelf on which sits an award statuette engraved with Uncle Dave’s name. Realize there is a lot you didn’t know about him. We are, after all, complex animals. Wonder what you could do in your own life to one day be worthy of an award. Consider doing something for children. Or better yet: orphans. You yourself are an orphan, which strikes you as an odd thing to be at 37.

13. Turn around when someone clears their throat behind you. Discover that Tommy has snuck up on you, which you take as further proof of his dilapidated mental state. “Gary, what are you doing with Dad’s award?” he says. You’re surprised to see that you’re holding the award—a hunk of Lucite in the shape of two hands doing a handshake bearing the words Harrisburg Order of Civic Friendship, Dave K. Lowry, 1997. Even with Tommy standing there with an accusatory look on his face, take a moment to run your fingers over its delicate edges. “You know Dad loved that award,” he says, “so maybe don’t mess around and break it, huh?” This could be a humiliation technique, but he’s not entirely wrong. There are some clearly flimsy parts sticking out at the ends of the Lucite arms. They could snap off. “You think I need this today?” Tommy says, eyeing your G&T. He holds out his hand and you put the award in it. “The glass, Gary,” he says and hands back the statuette. “Back on the shelf, and watch the drinking, okay?”

14. Mentally replay one of Dr. Becky’s DVDs, the one in which she says that inner growth often results from placing oneself in unfamiliar surroundings and seeing how one gets on under the duress of not knowing anybody or even knowing where to go for a decent sandwich. Here you are in Harrisburg, which has grown unfamiliar over the many years of your absence, trying to glean positivity at a funeral. You’ve read that this is how boys become men in Africa. Not by traveling to Harrisburg, but rather by going off into the wilderness to fend for themselves and possibly entering into combat with a lion, and additionally without the convenience and security of their houses and families. And when they return to their houses post-wilderness, they are changed. Positive, Growing Change. Although more likely they live in huts.

15. Careful to avoid detection by Tommy, head to the rolling bar and accept Dom’s (?) offer of another G&T. Then, in need of some peace, sneak off to the pantry where instead of peace you discover Linda crying into a large sack of flour. Wonder briefly about appropriate levels of grief and about catharsis and the various ways in which we as damaged human animals express our many emotions. It’s been years since you’ve given any thought to Uncle Dave’s penchant for casual cruelty or whatever his specialty was, but being here now, supporting your family, you can feel in your bones that he has misused people in bad ways. Wonder if there’s a sense of relief in Linda’s tears. Could a human even discern that? Maybe one of those cancer-detecting dogs could. Gulp down the last of the G&T and pat her reassuringly on the shoulder. When you do this, she jumps like a frightened kitten and looks at you with huge red eyes. “Oh, Gary,” she says, her shock giving way to arms being thrown around your neck.

16. Take this embrace as a sign that the healing can begin. Linda must acknowledge the awfulness of the past in order to begin the rebuilding! Over her sobs, say, “That’s right, Linda. Let it out.” And boy, does she. Soon she’s practically having a seizure. Recall how Dr. Becky says that sometimes when our pain has been sublimated for too long an inner dam must first break before we can allow the river of our emotions to flow once again at a healthy rate. Tell her she’s not alone. Tell her you know all too well that her father was a monster.

17. Feel how, with this avowal of solidarity, her sobs lessen. Her river resumes its correct path! Feel proud that you’ve taken the first beautiful step of an important journey, together as family. She pulls away. “What did you just say?” she asks.

18. Say to her, “We can overcome our trauma!” Say to her, “Your dad can’t make you—or anyone—suffer anymore!”

19. Smile as she calls out for Tommy. Maybe you’ve misjudged your own cousin. Surely he’s suffered as well. Been victimized at great length and intensity, etc. He must be in need of some dam-breaking, too. Identify and nullify, is what you will tell him. This is where it begins! Tommy arrives in seconds.

20. Listen as Linda says, “Gary, tell Tommy what you just said to me.” Here’s your chance. You’ll do Mom proud in terms of familial supportiveness! Put a hand on each of their shoulders. Say to them, “I know how hard this is. The complex emotions, the years of trauma. But we can change this.” The looks they’re giving you? These are grateful looks. Say to them, “Whatever awful things your dad did, we are not hopeless! We can heal.”

21. Take note of Tommy’s confusion, as though conflicting sentiments are waging an important inner battle. Ask him, “He body shamed me, do you remember that?” Ask him, “Did he beat you?” Turn to Linda, knowing that no amount of hurt and damage is unrecoverable from, and ask her, “Did he…touch you?” Watch her eyes go glassy with tears. The healing starts here, is the message you are getting in huge neon letters even as Linda again erupts into sobs.

22. Wonder how you should react when Tommy says, “That’s it. Get the fuck out of here, Gary.” And before you realize it, he’s got you by the arm, painfully jostling you out of the pantry.

23. Protest as he drags you through the house, but do it quietly so as not to bring up family skeletons in front of strangers. But even so, everyone turns to watch this parade of misunderstanding, because that’s surely what this is. Experience genuine confusion when the buffet table gets knocked over. Look in the direction of the breaking China, and as you’re being pushed out the door, see Aunt Joan’s questioning expression. Resist the urge to struggle as Tommy hands you off to Dom, who gives you a weak smile as he escorts you down the driveway. Accept that he’s just trying to be the good guy here, but he doesn’t understand. He’s not family. Up on the porch, see Tommy with his arms around Linda and Aunt Joan who are both crying, clearly in the midst of catharsis, now framed by a bunch of moochers and gawkers.

24. Yell to them, “We need to address underlying traumas! We have to acknowledge these things in order to heal!” Dom, you’re almost certain it’s Dom, pushes you into the passenger seat of his Nissan. Accept that leaving is for the best. You’ll mend fences later, at a less fraught time. Tell Dom that you’d like to go to the Greyhound station.

25. Be surprised to find yourself, again and again, thusly on fire, despite your widely acknowledged talent for flammability.

26. Consider worrying about how Dom drives, because surely he’s driving too fast for the road conditions. You don’t know how safe a driver he is on a good day, let alone now, in this downpour. His instincts could be way off.

27. “Look,” he says, “it’s a rough time for everybody right now. You gotta let the family work through their grief without adding to it, is what I’m saying.”

28. Doing your best to conceal your fury, say to him, “The family? I am the family. I am facilitating! What about you, Dom? You’re a stranger picking up ice cubes with your fingers!”

29. Accept the rightness of your argument when he doesn’t respond, and instead turns on the defrost. Listen to the whooshing air. “It’s actually Don,” he says after a while.

30. Unbuckle your seatbelt when you arrive at the station. As you open the door, Don says, “Seems like you’re carrying around a lot of sadness, man. I hope you can work through that.”

31. The gall of this guy. The absolute nerve. Let this remark go, however, because what are you going to say? What could you even say to this kind of gross oversimplification? Who isn’t carrying around lots of stuff, Don? Exit the car and walk through the rain with your dignity intact.

32. In the station, watch as a man chides several children while attempting to wrangle an old woman displaying all the classic signs of dementia; watch a teenaged boy hiss racial slurs into his phone; watch an elderly couple carrying garbage bags and disintegrating suitcases held together by peeling duct tape. But regardless of this cavalcade of misery, the station is a relief. It’s times like this when you are thankful that you do your shopping almost exclusively with a Citizens Bank Mondo Mileage Card. Travel-related purchases are easily reimbursed with bonus miles, and, thanks to this, attending Uncle Dave’s funeral has cost you only $14 round trip. Change your reservation to the next available Pittsburgh-bound bus, another thing that’s a snap with Mondo Miles. Luckily, there’s a bus leaving in 40 minutes.

33. After retrieving your ticket, hold a free weekly newspaper over your head and step back into the rain to find a liquor store. Circumstances being as they are, you can justify a pint of bourbon. Allow only a small amount of guilt to creep in. There’s actually a whole DVD chapter devoted to stress-propelled intoxication (Disk 4, chapter 2: What Not to Do [Although We Desperately Want To]!). Your sense, however, is that Dr. Becky would understand the need for the occasional drink, given that what you’re aiming for is incremental progress. Going “cold turkey” would be a bit much to ask of anyone, despite Mom’s near constant assertions to the contrary. So allow yourself a drink when necessary and ask quietly for understanding. You can’t be too hard on yourself all the time, is the thing.

34. Back in the station, stealthily sip bourbon from the bottle, which is camouflaged in your backpack. Count the minutes until you’ll be at home and can process the day’s events in a productive manner. Listen to a garbled voice spit out departure information from an overhead speaker. Watch the other Pittsburgh-bound passengers make their way to the gate. Take your place at the end of the line. Sip bourbon from your backpack.

35. Notice, just as the line starts moving, a sudden and insistent discomfort in your bowels. Run, they instruct you with grave seriousness, evacuate with all possible haste.

36. Clutch your stomach as you rush past a row of urinals. Observe each one flushing in turn—a salute to all the times you have communed with toilets! Consider how urine is sterile when it leaves the body—the purest part of you escaping. Bright like liquid sun hitting the gleaming white porcelain and slowly dissolving the innocent pink of the urinal cake. Then the flush. Water rushing your urine seaward in subterranean rapids. Part of you joining the biggest thing in the whole world, the sea, and it is changed by you, not you by it.

37. Attempt not to dwell on the condition of the stall. Refuse to dwell. Think instead of the kind and thoughtful inclusion by the restroom designers of a dispenser full of hygienic seat covers. But then, before you can even make use of them, an announcement crackles through the speaker: Final boarding, 12:45 bus to Pittsburgh. Last call. Since you cannot fathom missing the bus, continue clenching and run.

38. Step carefully onto the bus. Shuffle down the aisle. Notice the other passengers looking at you, possibly sensing some inherent weakness of character for being the last person onboard, for being so borderline irresponsible. Go directly to the toilet but stop when the driver says sternly through the intercom that passengers must remain in their seats until the bus is moving. Find a seat and try to ignore the rumble of the engine. The driver lists all the stops you’ll be making, really taking his time with it, but then, mercifully, pulls out of the station. Get up and lurch down the aisle while the driver casts his evil eye at you in the mirror. Decide that you don’t care. Let his curses come for you! Lock yourself in the claustrophobic’s nightmare masquerading as a toilet. Breathe through your mouth as you drape the seat with hygienic covers and then drop your pants and sit. Briefly consider thanking God for small miracles such as this. Allow yourself a few sips of bourbon.

39. Wake to an insistent knocking at the door. You can’t deny that you are quite drunk. Slap the life back into your legs. Exit the bathroom to discover half a dozen surly passengers waiting. Consider apologizing but don’t. A man in a western shirt with a braided goatee sneers at you. Does he know what you’re going through? Of course not! This is another life lesson: Reserve your judgment! You do not know how hard others have it! Walk back to your seat. The duo of teenaged girls sitting across the aisle look at you and giggle. They have no idea what unpleasantness awaits them, and you don’t want to be the one to tell them of all the heartbreak and job loss and stretch marks in their futures even though you are feeling more than a little pained by their behavior. As you approach Pittsburgh, take solace in watching the landscape grow familiar and soothing, the aqueous quality of the light that is particular to the Steel City.

40. Let your thoughts turn to Tommy, Linda, and Aunt Joan. You have to believe they’ll eventually be able to acknowledge their pain. They’ll see that your actions, even if perhaps the timing could have been a bit better, were only in service of ripping the Band-Aid off to allow the healing to begin.

41. Transfer to a city bus that stops three blocks from your apartment. Ride with your forehead resting against the window and feel the grease of the last forehead to rest there, but accept that the soothing coolness of the windowpane is more important than any potential forehead bacteria. Downtown on a weekday afternoon is so awful you can hardly stand it and yet there are people all over the place, completely at ease, closing business deals or whatever, all without a single thought to the probably impending cataclysmic events in their lives. Or maybe they’re not worried about that. Maybe they’ve already found Positive, Growing Change. At a red light, watch a man kiss a woman on both cheeks as they meet crossing the street. Right in the middle of the crosswalk! It’s the most European thing you’ve ever seen.

42. Arrive at your apartment and acknowledge your gratitude that you have not, to your knowledge, been burglarized. Lock the door behind you, slide the deadbolt shut, and plop down into the comforting embrace of your sofa. Open your backpack for the bourbon and, along with the bottle, find Uncle Dave’s award. Become aware of the hot buzzing in your head, the grotesque cramping in your stomach: the hallmarks of an impending shame-spiral. This is not due to the guilt of having “stolen” a cherished family keepsake, but due to the embarrassment at being thought of by the family as someone who would steal a cherished family keepsake. Become sickened by the idea that you might be judged so unfairly. You can offer no explanation for the appearance of the award in your backpack—this alone should exonerate you! Accept the overwhelming need for a drink. The bourbon is all gone except for a doleful little swish. Drink it and hope for the best.

43. Dr. Becky says it’s good to have a support system in place for when we are handed lemons. Look at the clock. Almost 6:30pm, which is too late to call Gil Zwieback at the counseling center to ask for advice on alternate support strategies. You’ve called him at home before and he seemed genuinely surprised by it. But you told him his phone number was there on the internet as a matter of public record. He said that you should probably talk about boundaries.

44. Become aware of your growing anxiety. You need to find your center, reevaluate, and concentrate on how to return the award unnoticed and unblamed. Put on the Your Power to Heal! DVDs, starting right at the beginning—Disk 1: You Are Also Worthy of Love and, By the Way, Your Emotions Are Valid, Too. Notice your anxiety already beginning to ebb during the opening credits. Dr. Becky is a godsend. Feel a pang as she appears on screen. A pang of what? Comfort? Desire? Can it just be a non-specific pang? A slight but not unpleasant pain in your side.

45. Follow Dr. Becky’s guided meditation and gradually feel a renewed sense of calm. You will find a way to address the award. Even though at this very moment Tommy is surely impugning your character to anyone within earshot, even though your family is surely already referring to you as a petty thief, deepening their suspicion that you are the “black sheep,” you will find a way to fix this. Do the focused breathing exercises and a round of affirmations. With each wave washing over the rocks (the DVDs are filmed on an inspiring Hawaiian beach), feel your desire for calmness manifest itself. Repeat Disk 1’s mantras: I am alive in this moment! I am present! I will persevere! She speaks softly but confidently over the crashing waves, but not in a sexual way, although who can say what other people find arousing? Repeat aloud: I am here, and no one is any more deserving of happiness than me.

46. Meet Dr. Becky on the beach. The waves lap at your bare feet and together you intone mantras over the roar of the ocean, drowning out all the cataclysm and disharmony that the world holds in store for anyone. Then, just as the sun dips into the water: a swell of fiery Hawaiian drumming!

47. Wake up in the dark, the weight of the Lucite hands on your chest, the sunset replaced by the DVD player’s logo slowly floating across the screen, caroming from wall to wall. Note the discomfort in your head. Your phone chimes. Six voicemails from Tommy. In addition to the hangover, find that your right ear is completely stopped-up. This has happened before. Thanks to a mishap in the bathtub a few years ago, you have a perforated eardrum, and this, coupled with chronic sinus issues, sometimes leads to your ear becoming stopped-up, plunging you into temporary partial deafness. It’s maddening—the deafness, the loss of equilibrium, the pressure in your sinuses that feels like a leather strap being tightened. There’s also nothing you can do about it except take a handful of Mucinex, put a hot washcloth over your ear, and wait it out. But that can take hours to have any effect. Stand up a bit unevenly and pace the length of your apartment. Rap your knuckles along your upper jaw hoping to loosen the clog of fluid. You’ve been here before. Every time this happens you’re sure it’ll be permanent. Panic overtakes any rational part of you and even Dr. Becky’s mantras can feel useless.

48. Spin in circles in the middle of the living room. You don’t know why or how spinning ever became a coping mechanism, but when the sinus/ear thing happens it’s never long before you find yourself doing it. It must have helped on some unremembered occasion. Peeking over the top of your panic like it is a wall, think that if you just spin quickly enough the centrifugal force will eject a globule of mucus and you won’t end up being discovered deaf and dead of a panic attack, alone in your apartment.

49. If Dr. Becky has any plans for another DVD installment, which you sincerely hope she does, realize that she’d do well to address this intersection of emotional and physical discomfort. She could even include you as an expert on the subject. Return to the beach. She’ll say something like, “Friends, with me today is a very special guest. A man who is no stranger to suffering and in fact has met his own personal demons head on to come out the other side like a phoenix rising from the ashes of personal trauma!” And you will nod wisely along.

50. Say to the camera, “Trust me when I tell you that no matter how bad you have had it or are currently having it, I can empathize! Do you want to talk about negative life-changes coupled with physical ailments? Let us not even talk about that! Let us instead talk about our ability to surmount these challenges! Let us instead talk about how no amount of suffering is too great for us to overcome!”

51. Think about how you’d act if you were ever to meet Dr. Becky in person. Would her hair smell like you’ve imagined, like coconut? Her face is the very embodiment of inner calm and personal fulfillment. Consider how you’d thank her for her DVDs, acknowledging how helpful they’ve been for you. Although it’s not as if you were some basketcase slob before the DVDs. You were simply in need of some extra tools. You’ve been through a lot. Your mother’s death, for instance. Recall her in those final months. Mostly she was this zombie presence in the house, lying like a small bundle of sticks in her rented hospital bed, out of her senses with morphine. Recall the occasional lucid moments in which her eyes became unclouded and she was able to lament all the things she would never have the chance to do now, like visiting her favorite beach in Maine again, like the bird painting class she’d looked up online. Recall how you became thankful for the morphine because, at least, it dulled those regrets for her.

52. Remember going to Darlene’s apartment, who, even though you hadn’t seen her for years, was still kind enough to obtain marijuana for you, which you then baked into a batch of cookies and fed your mother tiny bites of. She could hardly swallow anymore because of the tumors, but smoking it would have been impossible. Recall how, after she choked down a few bites, nothing happened for a long time, but then just when you thought the marijuana would have no effect on her she asked to be taken for a drive. So you bundled her up in her heaviest coat, although by then you could have fit two of her in it, she was so small, and you half carried her to the car and drove. It didn’t matter where, she told you, she just wanted to look at the clouds. They were so interesting all of a sudden, she said.

53. Think back on how grateful you were later that night once she was asleep and how you called Darlene to thank her for the marijuana. But she couldn’t talk, she said, because her baby needed to be bathed.

54. Recall your rage at your mother’s pancreas. That bullshit little organ. Wonder if it’s even an organ. What does it do? How can something so seemingly inconsequential—does anyone aside from doctors even know what the fuck it does?—decimate a body like that? What goddamn right does it have?

55. Continue spinning, continue hoping to dislodge whatever is clogging your ear. As you gain speed, marvel at how the meager interior of your apartment is transformed into a wonderful pattern of horizontal stripes. The room blurs, close your eyes and keep going, gaining speed.

56. Hit the wall with your head and collapse. As you look around, confused, watch the room gradually right itself. You’ve knocked a photo off the wall. The glass is intact so you pick it up. It’s you as a little kid, Mom and Dad on either side, arms thrown around each other and you, too, in some approximation of a group hug. Look at yourself and wonder who this smiling little doofus even is.

57. Touch the right side of your forehead and locate a hot, tender bump. Your head is chirping like it’s alive with grasshoppers, and for a moment all you can think of is mid-summer and Darlene, and the time you went to that bed and breakfast in the Poconos. There were grasshoppers chirping everywhere at night, so loud you’d have to raise your voice to make yourself heard. But then you got used to the chirping, you got used to Darlene, to her lying on the four-poster waiting for you, and now here in your apartment the chirping fades as well and you hear only a dull noise like some piece of metal that’s been clanged and left to ring itself out. A distant, imperfect bell.

58. Recall Uncle Dave and Aunt Joan welcoming you into their home once, when Mom and Dad were fighting especially badly. They’re both smiling at you as Mom drops you off and without a word gets back into her old yellow Malibu to return to Pittsburgh where she will fight some more with Dad and then leave him at the end of the summer and then you and Dad will spend the fall alone together, him sitting often in brooding silence staring out the window, until Mom comes back to get you and you move into an apartment with her and then Dad eventually moves to Scranton. Wish that you’d had Dr. Becky back then.

59. Feel the inexplicable need to go outside. Maybe the nighttime air will let you work on positive solutions. Maybe being outside will give you the necessary space to process everything that happened at Uncle Dave’s funeral and the unpleasantness associated with trying to foster an environment conducive to healing. Maybe you’ll be able to address the accidental theft of the award and the shame surrounding that. Maybe the stopped-up ear too. Identify and nullify!

60. Marvel at Pittsburgh at night! Dark and humid and quiet. There’s no one on the street, not even raccoons. Feel grateful for the solitude. Walk unevenly, which is now partly due to the ear and partly due to the head konking. Notice that within a block the cool air is already working its magic! Keep walking. Feel the blood rushing around inside of you. Think: If walking is this beneficial, imagine what running will do!

61. Run. Soon there’s something happening. Your hearing isn’t back yet, but over the rush of blood in your head tell yourself that you can hear your footsteps. Tell yourself that you can hear the control boxes at each intersection clicking over to change the traffic lights as you pass. You haven’t run in years! It’s wonderful. Think back on other times you’ve suffered from the ear thing. Wish that you’d thought to run then. Watch as scraps of litter blow along the street seemingly under their own power. Look down Franklin Street and see the broken discs of light from streetlamps where they spill from the sidewalk onto the asphalt and wonder if this is all simply what God, in whatever personal way we each conceive of a higher power, has planned for you. Perhaps these trials are yours to endure and this suffering will eventually make you a better person; no more need for coping mechanisms or mantras. But until that day comes, if it comes, tell yourself that you’ll go on bearing your specific crosses with hopeful dignity. You will repeat your mantras and, when necessary, run. Your ear hasn’t drained yet, but it will. The pressure will lessen with a long triumphant squeal. You’ll spit the mucus, tinged with iron-tasting blood, victoriously into the sink and that marbled glob will slide down the white porcelain into the drain and be gone. Another part of you joining the water, rushing seaward, home. And likewise, at some future point your family issues will be resolved.

62. Notice Uncle Dave’s award in your hand.

63. As you run, holding the shaking hands, think about how maybe you could still return it unnoticed. Tommy’s voicemails might be unrelated. They might be his guilt manifesting itself at having treated you so unfairly. Maybe he’s been calling you over and over (six times!) to apologize. You could take the next bus back to Harrisburg, slip into the house, and put it back. Tommy probably hasn’t even noticed that it’s gone. Things are never beyond repair. Maybe you could all go for brunch!

64. Allow yourself to be buoyed by the sudden thought that despite the feeling of permanence in each individual moment, eventually things may change. The idea that things will never change is something that’s been ingrained in us since birth. You know this for a sad fact, just like you know there are hands at the ends of your arms—you’re not saying that will never change, who knows? Your hands could get chopped off tomorrow! You’re just using it as a point of reference. But through lots of hard work utilizing Dr. Becky’s system you’ve learned that things frequently do change, although more often than not in ways we don’t like. For one, you’re not getting any younger. Kid yourself and say, Your hair’s not thinning up top! No one you’ve ever loved has left or died! These are changes you could do without. Ask God to let you keep your hands, let them stay, let them not leave you at an inopportune time!

65. Look about 100 yards ahead of you—someone, a young woman, is standing on an overpass looking down onto the train tracks. Could she also be suffering unjustly from some manner of panic or injury? But even if so, what can you do? Interact somehow? Place a sympathetic hand on a stranger’s shoulder? That didn’t even work so hot with cousin Linda earlier! But still, slow down and walk cautiously her way. Sharing even just a small moment of human interaction might help during whatever personal life issue she’s undoubtedly facing. Maybe just a quick nod? As in: Even though we are both in this moment alone, in a different but equally valid sense we are also not.

66. Become struck, the closer you get, by this woman’s resemblance to Dr. Becky. It’s uncanny. Reconsider approaching. Decide to just watch for a moment from a discreet distance because, after all, despite any desire for commiseration you recognize that sometimes the best thing is simply to be left alone with your thoughts. She might even lash out, misunderstanding your intentions, irascible and confused as God knows we all have every right to be. She really does bear Dr. Becky a striking resemblance despite how you’ve never once seen Dr. Becky standing on an overpass at night. But even lacking the proper context this is somehow comforting. You’re not thinking of the stopped-up ear or Tommy’s yelling or even your guilt about the award. You’re simply aware of your heartbeat and breathing and how both are now slow and even. This isn’t either how you would have imagined Dr. Becky being dressed in her private, off-camera life. You’d have thought she’d be wearing perhaps a skirt and blazer. A power suit. Or is it called a pantsuit now? The woman on the overpass has on frayed jeans and a sweatshirt that’s several sizes too big.

67. The thing is, the look on her face is just awful. Your heart goes out to her. Despite whatever personal shortcomings you’re plagued with, or even perhaps because of these shortcomings, you can recognize suffering in others and feel that someone should help alleviate that suffering if the opportunity presents itself. Realize that in this moment you want nothing more than to be the cause of this woman feeling any amount of, you guess, less aloneness. If you can do something to affect any kind of Positive, Growing Change for her, it would also surely lessen your own burdens. That must be how Dr. Becky feels. Approach her with a deep sense of calm and purpose, pushing all your feelings of reluctance down into a tiny ball that you will address later at an appropriate time.

68. Watch as she cranes her head to look further down the tracks, perhaps even hoping to alight on some small background detail that will provide her with solace. A bird taking flight, a cloud teased into a pleasing shape. But instead of that you see what she’s actually looking at. An approaching train. As it gets closer she swings a leg over the overpass’s low wall.

69. Overcoming whatever social constraints exist in cases such as this, shout at her: “Hey!” She looks at you with you don’t know what in her eyes, but is maybe fear? Drop into a sprint as she looks down at the tracks again. Shout: “Wait!”

70. She’s got both legs out over the tracks now, the laces of her dirty white sneakers dangling untied. With maybe 30 yards between you still, you can finally see her face clearly. She’s young but her forehead is crisscrossed with lines. Her lips are pale and thin. Her eyes glow dully under stringy bangs. Realize that she looks nothing like Dr. Becky. She looks like Dr. Becky post-hunger strike. Dr. Becky’s cousin on her third round of chemo. Yell, “No, wait!” She looks up again. Yell, “Hey, no!”

71. Run. Close the distance between yourself and this woman as she scoots tentatively forward. Take this as a sign that she hasn’t made up her mind yet. Feel your heart beating wildly. Ignore it. 20 yards. You’ll throw yourself forward and catch her because you have no choice. See yourself doing this: Leaping, diving, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back onto the overpass. Because if you do this, do only this one thing, then it will be okay. Then so much will be okay. You’ll lie together on the sidewalk and she’ll realize what a mistake it would have been. She’ll cry on your shoulder, probably getting snot all over your shirt in the process. You’ll stroke her dirty hair and gradually it will get better. Your ear will drain and your family will be healed and whatever wound has driven her to this will begin to scab over. Whatever fluids you need to expel, you will expel and send home. You’re thinking so clearly now as you fly across those last few yards. It’s almost dawn. The sky brightens, the streetlamps click off, and all your apprehension melts away like frost on a windowpane. Her hands tense on the wall to push herself off. You follow.

72. Manage just barely to make a fist around the shoulder of her sweatshirt. And yes! Yes! She’s heavier than you thought, or maybe you’re weaker than you thought, but you’ve got her. The sweatshirt’s pulled tight but she’s squirming. You have to get a better grip. The collar’s choking her, she’s spitting and gasping but you can hear her clearly over the sound of the train that’s now just beneath you. “Let me fucking go! I want to go!” Think: No way, José! You have to get a better grip. Look down at your other hand.

73. Let go of Uncle Dave’s award and then reach over. Pull with both hands. She’s fighting, squirming, punching. Her wounds must be so deep that this seems like the only way out. But that’s not true. This is just her dam breaking, it has to be. Strain, with every ounce of strength you have, to pull her the rest of the way back as the train finally passes. Collapse together onto the sidewalk. Gasp for air. Your lungs are burning. Your heart, beating its way out of your chest. See Uncle Dave’s award on the ground next to you, broken into pieces. The hands still whole, doing their handshake, but the rest in shards.

74. Look at the woman. She’s on her feet now. You want to tell her about Dr. Becky, about mantras of perseverance, but before you can do this she spits on you, calls you an asshole, and runs off with an arm raised high throwing a middle finger in her wake, her sweatshirt pulled all out of shape, hanging off her like a tarp.

75. Stay where you are and work to get your breathing under control. It’s okay. There it is. You can do it. Notice that your ear is unclogged. You can hear everything. So many tiny miracles! A car alarm down the street; the retreating train siren—both suddenly miracles. Look up as a car drives along the overpass and slows near you. See the man driving it roll his window down. Hear—hear!—him laugh at you and then watch him speed away. But what is this if not evidence of his own personal trauma? And what is trauma if not the opportunity to heal?

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Heirloom

Catherine-Esther Cowie, Heirloom, Mixed Media Collage

Catherine-Esther Cowie, Auntie G. My Dahomey. My Amazon., Mixed Media Collage

Catherine-Esther Cowie, Hello Again, Blès, Mixed Media Collage

Catherine-Esther Cowie, The Queen of All the Dirt, Mixed Media Collage

I work in collage for its accessibility, for its infinite possibilities beyond working solely in paper but incorporating ink, watercolor, textiles and 3D elements. This series features cut-outs from fashion magazines, images of orchids and magenta India ink. I seek to map the emotional landscapes of my subject matter, women, immigrant women, Caribbean women and the complexity of emotions/states that simultaneously exist: shame and pleasure, loss and strength, beauty and ugliness.

The portraits in this series began as a form of play: I wanted to see how paper and ink could work together. They represent fears, griefs, memories, self-perceptions etc. The piece titled, “Hello Again, Blès” explores how I experience trauma. A sneaky buried wound…then a trigger…through a body now. “Blès” means internal wound in St. Lucian Kwéyòl.

Naming this collection “Heirloom” gestures to a writing project that I am working on that explores what we pass on or give to another generation: ruin and/or redemption. What was carried in the bodies of my mothers: their fears, trauma, loves, afflictions, histories. How some of it is transmitted through story, through their bodies— their way of moving and being in the world. These portraits explore what I carry around in my body…what I may or may not pass on…

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House Sitting

Kim asked me to housesit for her parents while they took her on a Hawaiian vacation. They were personal friends to a celebrity shooting a movie there. She promised me: no houseplants to water, and their hound’s anal fissures had cleared up.

When Kim put her hand on my forearm, two things happened: Everything under my skin turned rotten and sweet, and I knew Kim could ask me anything for anything. All she had to do was be everything I wasn’t.

I hated dogs. But Kim’s didn’t know that, and her parents paid up front. I was broke because I was always broke. Rent was twice my parent’s mortgage before they lost their house and moved into a motel.

The dog’s named was Bundy. She barked for no reason. Kim’s parents lived on a street where nothing happened. But Bundy barked at a moth giving itself to the porch light. I walked her along empty, immaculate sidewalks. No crickets sowing songs in the grass. I left her shits where she made them, if only to show that something there was alive.

The house was nice in a boring way rich people like. The couch and carpet and curtains were comfortable and gray. Within thirty minutes, I’d found a garage full of craft beer and about three grand in bad hiding places. I debated renting a nice car, dialing up some people to drive around and drink with, but I couldn’t think of anyone to call.

I didn’t have friends, except Kim. The bar where we’d met was a dimly lit refuge for the unloved. Her sorority had planned a “dive-bar crawl” and accidently ended up at a real dive. You could feel the avarice of spirit hanging onto the place. I was drinking the last of my last paycheck from a scammy sales gig when they came in on a gust of colorful noise. They ordered drinks no bartender in that shithole had ever made.

Kim’s earring fell and twinkled between a barstool’s legs. Real diamond I could’ve hawked and kept drinking for a week. Instead, I tapped her on the shoulder.

Kim bought me a grasshopper—my “good-deed reward.” For her own opaque reasons, she asked me over to her Kappa-Theta sisters’ corner booth. They smiled like I was something to eat—all teeth and small, small talk. Sales had been an easy job because I was good at lying about myself: I told her I loved animals, volunteered at a dog shelter; my parents hadn’t died last year in a cheap motel; Kim and I shared a birthday. What wild chance—us both wandering into this rattletrap. If I hadn’t loved her immediately, I wouldn’t’ve gone to the trouble of inventing someone worth knowing. But that’s how we became friends.

Kim whispered to me that a man at the bar was dying; she’d eavesdropped on his death-wheeze and sneaked a pic on her phone.

“This place is great. We’ll have way better stories than those Omega bitches.” Kim composed her face for a selfie and said “You don’t need to come back here.” There were classier ways to die, if that’s what I wanted. Then she leaned in and sniffed my neck. “No,” she said. “As my grandma would say, ‘there’s still some vinegar in you.’”

And I didn’t go back. Because after meeting Kim, I didn’t want to die. From then on, she never let me go too long without a visit. We got ice cream; we did drugs she paid for; we threw coins into public fountains, making the most absurd wishes we could think of. Each time, I got a little farther from where she’d found me.

Now, her parent’s hound shit on the carpet, baying like she knew something awful had happened. Kim didn’t respond when I texted that Bundy’s annal fissures had flared up.

Her return date came and went. My calls, straight to voicemail. Bundy snuffled my knees, trying to tell me an accident had occurred on their celebrity friend’s movie set, and the family had been mauled by Bengal tigers.

I drank beers in their hot tub until steam worked into my skull and fogged over the night sky. Brown bottles littered the back yard like abstract dog turds.

Somewhat outside myself, I rummaged through Kim’s childhood bedroom. Everything she owned smelled like crushed-up Smarties. Leafing through her yearbooks showed me a teen-horror film scrubbed clean of blood and misery, where the serial killer is never even born. Friends signed the back pages with such professions of love, I felt embarrassed for them.

Tucked into the back of senior year, were rubberbanded Polaroids: Kim, all cheekbones, elan, and flammable youth. She carried a chalice. Another girl, a knife. A circle holding hands. They murdered someone’s hamster and wrote blood-oaths of friendship on one another’s backs. Downstairs, Bundy moaned that Kim was gone, drowned beneath a Hawaiian riptide.

Days passed. Bundy had started grief-chewing the furniture. She licked my knuckles. Her droopy brow wrinkled like sadness kept going in waves. Didn’t I understand? Kim’s heart had stopped with a nosebleed on a plush hotel carpet.

After a week, the silence took on a mournful density. I sat still for hours without hearing a car go by. The next time Bundy cried, I cried too.

I held onto her neck and asked where were life-long friendships? Where was black magic as Kim floated up from her body? Did she meet my parents, passing into the firmament? Did she tell them how she’d fished me from a slow death’s pocket?

But Bundy only whimpered and licked her bleeding asshole.

The stars came out. But I couldn’t configure familiar constellations. The planet wobbled around the sun, shedding a million or two mothers, fathers, and friends, along the way. The rest of us poor suckers bobbed in the long wake, staring up at diamond fields too distant and bright to console us of anything.

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west country

the bad thing is too big to look at. the bad thing is heavy. when i kick the bad thing, its side caves in like an old football. i put the bad thing in my backpack. i walk with the bad thing to the train stop. the bad thing and i buy a pasty from warrens. i throw the wrapper away, but i can’t throw the bad thing away. at church the bad thing lights candles. at home the bad thing holds my hand. when i talk to the bad thing, the bad thing talks back sometimes. when i read to the bad thing, the bad thing listens. the bad thing likes television. the bad thing likes location, location, location. the bad thing says it might go away if i took it on a country walk, but the bad thing is lying. the bad thing sings to itself, very softly, under its breath. the bad thing wants me to listen. i don’t want to listen to the bad thing. i want to leave the bad thing alone, by itself, in an empty room. the bad thing likes this room. the bad thing helps me close the door, so that we are in this room together.

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Rain

Correlation is not causation, but few things correlate more to a mood than rain.

Do people still come down with “a case of the vapors”?

What is weather if not causality in a landscape?

When it rains it pours. How does the Morton Salt Girl maintain her kicky attitude, happy under that umbrella and never bored with life?

Half the idiots in charge of this country don’t even know enough to come in out of the rain.

The Great Plains are basically a desert and thus Nebraska is a fairly dry state. In Lincoln, my Grandpa Boo was obsessed with his rain gauge, and therefore I, too, obsessed became.

Raining cats and dogs may come from the Greek cata doxa, “contrary to experience or belief.” I can’t believe how hard it’s raining!

Swipe a fingertip heart in the misty windowpane.

I hate to be the one to say it, but your parade’s going to get rained on.

Never have I ever been so depressed as when I lived for one year in the Pacific Northwest. It literally always rains and people metaphorically are always taking rainchecks. The Seattle No, I later learned it was termed, aka the Seattle Freeze.

A rain of arrows. Soot and ash raining down. What is life but a rain of blows?

This is the third year in a row that the rains have failed.

A peer-reviewed study found that of all 50 states, Washington ranked 48th for the trait of extraversion.

Gentle rain on the roof is as pleasing as alliteration, day or night, right as rain.

Does rain like being the external correlative of sorrow? Of pain? That feeling of tears going into your ears when you’re lying on your back and crying.

When you listen to “Famous Blue Raincoat,” what shade of blue do you see?

At this point it’d take a meteor shower to get the earth really clean.

Droplets stitch the day with gray silken threads. Come rain or shine, the hits just keep coming.

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Interview: Dantiel W. Moniz

In Milk Blood Heat, Dantiel W. Moniz populates the state of Florida with characters as distinct, flawed, and capable of beauty as the peninsula itself. Writing about fraught relationships of all sorts, set against the heat and humidity of North Florida, Moniz builds out complex emotional challenges—ensnaring characters in the grips of loss, deceit, indecision, violence, revenge—and each time forces us to see them as whole people, rendering a startling and affecting portrait of Black femininity that holds nothing back and demands our attention. The Florida Review asked Dantiel about getting honest about the human body, the rise of “Florida lit,” and what it means to write against national perception.

Milk Blood Heat was published in 2021 by Grove Atlantic.

Steven Archer for The Florida Review:

The first and last stories, “Milk Blood Heat” and “An Almanac of Bones,” feature friendships scrutinized by disapproving parents on the basis of difference, cultural and otherwise; the former others the white family, the latter othered by the white family, and both protagonists grapple with seeking in their friends’ families what they lack at home. Could you share a bit about what that dynamic means to you, from a cultural perspective? Did you mean for these stories to be inverses/ bookends?

Dantiel W. Moniz:

It makes so much sense that I write about grappling with whiteness in the ways these characters do in both of these stories, as I feel I’m still in the process of unlearning so many conditioned thoughts and habits that have rooted within me just by being alive in America. If you grow up anywhere in the world, and in the particular brand of it that this country produces, you are steeped in whiteness from birth, in every facet of life, explicitly and implicitly, and that invisibility can be one of the most dangerous parts. The ideology and systemic privilege of it (or the disadvantage of its lack), and the internalization of its supremacy, both in desire and repulsion. I think Sylvie (the protagonist of Almanac) falls a little more into this latter camp. While she absolutely uses Kit and her family as a measuring post in some ways, she also inherently understands that what she has, though viewed as lesser than, is powerfully her own, and having that normalization would actually be the lesser thing. I don’t think anyone’s work has to “deal” with the idea of whiteness (though I wish more white author’s works would), but right now, it’s still a project of mine. I want to make its effect on the lived world, the macro, micro, and everything in between, a little easier to see.

“An Almanac of Bones” was written before Milk Blood Heat was ever conceived of, so there wasn’t any conscious creation of echo, but definitely after having completed drafts of each of the stories that would make the collection, I noticed there was a lot of mirroring happening throughout, in these two pieces and beyond. I always knew I wanted Almanac to close out the book, but it was only due to both my agent and editor’s insight that I realized MBH should open it. I love cyclical stories, so I’m glad it worked out this way for the collection as a whole.

TFR:

You write about bodies in such a refreshing, fascinating way, leaning into honest renderings of the human body without resorting to the gross-out. I’m thinking specifically of “Thicker Than Water” and its exploration of scent—discharge smelling of egg, armpits of onion or celery. How important was this choice to you, especially with your women protagonists? How did you go about it from a craft angle?

DWM:

But bodies are gross sometimes! And I think if we were more honest about this, or at least more willing to admit this as human, we would all be better off. Women are conditioned to uphold the importance of being clean and sweet 24/7. It’s almost like I came into the world knowing I needed to be mindful of how I looked, how I smelled, even how I tasted; it’s an absurd pressure to put on a human body, which is generally unconcerned with anything other than its survival. And sometimes, those necessary functions are anything but pretty, the same way grief can be unpretty, anger, wanting. These rigid standards also make it harder to lean fully into pleasure. At the beginning of dating my husband, when we were 19 and 20, I remember him making this joke like, “Whenever you’re in the bathroom for a while, I’ll just tell myself you’re taking a long pee,” and I corrected him immediately, saying, “No, I’ll be taking a shit. Just like you do.” And though that was something I might not have ever said in previous relationships, I’m glad I did, because it’s so important to be able to take something for its fullness. It’s the only way to really love someone. It’s the same for my work. I have to let the characters be full in order to be real, and I especially wanted to honor that for the women and girls who people my collection. From a craft perspective, I’m thinking less about “how not to gross out my reader” and more how I think of crafting sentences and images in general: how does this sound, what’s the rhythm of this, and does it hit on the larger idea I hope to convey?

TFR:

So many of these stories feature moments of consumption as catalyst, catharsis, or climax—the blood rite in the title story, the octopus in “Feast,” the snails in “The Hearts of Our Enemies,” the bone fragment in “Thicker Than Water,” milk from a distant mother in “An Almanac of Bones.” Could you touch on how this motif found its way into your work? What draws you to write about eating, feeding others, being fed, especially when it comes to ingesting weird, weaponized, or non-food items?

DWM:

This is a beautiful question. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked this before. So much of my writing comes from an instinctive place. It’s often hard for me to see what’s coming up until I have it all in front of me, so I’m not sure, in its creation, why this element came into the work. But this question makes me realize, I am interested in how we nourish our bodies, or starve them. What we put into ourselves and what becomes us. With Feast, there was definitely this Phoenix choice, of wanting rebirth, a new opportunity to start fresh, and often we can’t have that if we’re clinging onto a damaged foundation. This motif kind of reminds me of the Tower card, which can be scary in a reading, but it really means transformation, if you’re willing to let go. With food, there’s also this element of connection; it can be a love language (which is why it’s so savage when it’s used as a means of revenge). Even the blood pact in MBH is about transformation. Let me become a little more you. Let us be the same. What we eat, who we feed, and what we desire in that feeding, can say a lot about a person or their world.

TFR:

While perhaps the most intense use of food and eating comes in “Exotics,” I wondered more in this case about how form and genre served the piece; it is the shortest piece in the collection, as well as its only speculative/ fabulist piece, and is arguably the most direct in its portrayal and exploration of the interaction of Black and brown people with excess, privilege, and sacrifice. What went into the inclusion of this piece in the collection? Could you talk about distilling one of the collection’s more subtle running threads in this way?

DWM:

Definitely one of the moments in my writing where I had to pause and think, Am I allowed to do this? Fun fact, there was actually another story in the book that I cut, that I think would have been described as speculative, and I wonder if it had stayed in, if people would have accepted Exotics as a necessary part of this book more readily. Probably not though—I’ve witnessed that people thrill to be snobby about mediums they perceive as genre. I think what lends this piece a lot of its speculative coloring is that I’m doing directly what I’m doing more subtly in every other story in this book—examining capitalism, race, class, consumption, how we cannibalize youth, and our complicity in these systems—which makes it feel surreal. I think people often don’t want to look at these things in their own lives and neighborhoods, so it makes it particularly unpleasant to have to in this way. For me, this story belongs in this collection. It’s right at home.

TFR:

The stories in your collection feel distinctly Floridian, and yet often get away with not name-dropping the specific areas in which they take place. What aspects of the Florida landscape, culture, and experience felt most important in capturing such an authentic portrait of life in the northern part of the state?

DWM:

I am a person who situates herself through landmark and memorization. I very rarely know street names and my sense of direction is…not the greatest. Mostly because I’m focused on other things and when I’m really present where I’m at, more ephemeral elements come to me. Like noticing the color and quality of light or how tree bark feels under my palm (if you have ever walked somewhere with me, you know how often I stop for trees). So being super specific about names and buildings or even particular cities wasn’t a priority for me. I was most interested in capturing the quality of heat of my state, its presence and aliveness, and how it enacts on the characters. That type of omnipresence becomes a mood.

TFR:

On a related note, so many of these characters come to life as vivid, well-realized, believable members of assorted Black and Hispanic demographics without being explicitly tethered to one background or another, even when one could hazard a guess using markers like the fish dreams in “Necessary Bodies” or the refrain of “por la sangre” in “Thicker Than Water.” Was this ambiguity a conscious choice? Did you find yourself writing with specific groups in mind, even if they were ultimately unnamed?

DWM:

In my work, I’m writing mostly around Blackness and its intersections. I was born a writer, it’s natural to me, but it took me a very long time to begin writing stories about characters that shared aspects of my identity. And once I understood I could do that, it opened up so much for me. I had been reading books all my life that characterized certain people only by their exclusion from whiteness, which itself was allowed to remain invisible. “The girl walked into the room” vs “The Black girl walked into the room,” and that being the main point of distinction visually or otherwise, like once you say that one thing, you should be able to see her. And I suppose readers could, if they had in their mind some catchall for Blackness. Even when I didn’t have the vocabulary for why, that used to upset me. So in my work, I don’t feel I have to be explicit in that way. My characters’ Blackness is not the biggest thing about them, though it does shape and direct their experiences.

TFR:

Last Spring, Milk Blood Heat was taught as part of a graduate course on Southern, Appalachian, and Florida literature at UCF, alongside the work of writers such as Steven Dunn, Jesmyn Ward, Leah Hampton, and Carter Sickels. What does “Florida literature” mean to you, as part of, or removed from, “the South”? How do you see your work in conversation with this emerging literary canon, and how might you hope to see that canon expand?

DWM:

This breadth of writers is so interesting, especially when you consider that each of the regions that make up what people consider “The South” is diverse and face the challenges that come with their particular national perceptions. Like, what Leah has to deal with in people’s discrimination against Appalachia, or Jesmyn Ward writing about Mississippi, is different than what I deal with in the perception of Florida, but they all stem from the same place—ignorance or indifference about the intentional repression or resource-stealing/shuttering from these places. What I’m excited for in the expansion of the canon of Floridian literature is the same thing I’m interested in for my human characters—a chance to explore its wholeness. To allow stories of people there to be as common as stories of people wandering around New York or other bigger, better regarded coastal cities. There are people trying to thrive even in the chaos of that place, and those people and their stories matter, regardless of its governance.

TFR:

Beauty and hostility appear in equal measure throughout Milk Blood Heat, in your portrayals of girls, women, mothers, siblings, and marriages, certainly, but also in your portrayal of Florida is a whole. Kids die at pool parties and nearly drown at the beach. Aquariums and museums full of nature and discovery are host to historical horrors, Klan activity, fiery destruction, black holes. Massive diversity and divisive politics; abundant wildlife, dyed water, pollution. With Florida being so often the butt of the joke, a shorthand for all things backwards and dangerous, did you feel at all compelled to temper or reclaim Florida’s image through your writing? Did any part of this book come out of a desire to engage with national perception?

DWM:

Absolutely. I think this question and the last are connected. And yes, I wanted to reclaim and to assert, but not to paint some idealized picture of Florida, but to show it for what it is, honestly, its dark and its light. I didn’t grow up with the perception that my state was literary or that any writing of artistic merit might come from where I was from. I grew up thinking I might never leave my city, let alone my state, but what that means is, everything I am now started as seed in that place, even though I wished to, and did eventually, leave. And what I and other artists, thinkers, and creators there have to say is valuable. I think its especially critical now, in light of all the legislation that’s being put in place to stop people from doing just that—from learning, feeling, thinking and most of all, connecting. That scares the people in power. So I hope, in even a small way, my work might encourage someone who might not be encouraged otherwise because they’d been overlooked.

TFR:

I was delighted to read, in your previous interviews, what a big influence film and television are in your approach to writing. What are you watching these days? Do you think film and TV are given a fair shake in literary or academic spaces?

DWM:

So here’s a fun thing I learned recently about symptoms of anxiety—you have a higher tendency to re-watch instead of starting something new. It makes a lot of sense to me on that level, the comfort of the familiar, but also for me, there’s the chance to analyze the same slant differently now that I know the story; even through the expected I usually come away with something new. Some always rewatches for me are Mad Men, Insecure, Veep, The Florida Project, and right now I’m rewatching Castlevania during flights. But I have been watching new shows and films too. Bones and All, both seasons of White Lotus, season 2 of Russian Doll, the latest of The Crown. These works offered exactly that slice of human emotional fragility and darkness that I come to the page for. In the summer of 2021, after stumbling upon Season 20 of Survivor and never having seen a single episode before, I started streaming from season 1 and now I’m on Season 41. Another thing I’ve learned is that I don’t really believe in this idea of trash tv. Like the Real Housewives of Atlanta is not supposed to be like Sharp Objects, although they both revolve around how women position themselves in power within their communities and families using socialized tools. I’ve learned so much about performance, conditioning, and gaze from reality TV, so I think it’s less about what you consume but how you consume and metabolize it.

To that point, I think more literary and academic spaces are making the explicit connection between these art mediums, and there’s definitely more attention paid to the writing that goes into image-making because there’s such an overlap between literature and adaptation. I’m actually teaching an undergraduate course on image this semester, teaching two books (We the Animals and The Virgin Suicides) and their film counterparts.

TFR:

Is there one piece of writing advice—something you hold dear, or perhaps tell your students—that you might share with us here?

DWM:

The writer Naomi Jackson once told me, “If someone can’t see where you’re going, they can’t help you get there.” Write for yourself and remember to protect that beginning space that’s just you and the work. It’s so important to get intentional about what the work is and what you hope to move toward before a community of writers can be useful to you. Be open to critique (this is so important) but remember you only have to take what resonates. And the best way to recognize that resonance goes back to understanding your intentionality for the work. One more thing—remember to play in your writing, remember you like this.

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Shards

Artist’s statement: This 8-page sequence, “Shards,” is part of a longer graphic memoir (in progress) titled InQuest. The memoir documents my own experience in a psychiatric hospital during a particularly intense mental health crisis, and my slow reentry to life routines after returning home.

I can still feel those experiences in my muscle memory. I vividly recall the sensations of fear, confusion, desperation, and dissociation. I could tell I was not making sense to those around me, but did not know how to change that. I was flooded with perception and realization, but could not find a coherent way to express what was happening in my mind.

One image that has stayed with me ever since this time is that of a sharp squiggly shape, like a shard of glass. When I imagine this shard shape, it represents fragmentation of thought and of self – which is what that experience felt like to me. My thoughts were not missing or meaningless simply because they did not make sense to those around me. My thoughts were there and they had meaning, they were just splintered. It would take time to reassemble them – and myself – after that splintering.

What I hope comes across in this work is the message that all parts of ourselves are valid and meaningful – even the shards and splinters. It may be tempting to dismiss or discard the sharper, more painful pieces of ourselves, seeing them as dangerous by nature. But if we discard these pieces, we are discarding pieces of our full selves. If we deem those shards as “dangerous” by nature, then what are we saying about ourselves?

Instead of dismissing people during their most difficult times, we must strive to accept and support folks for precisely who and how they are in the moment. Mental health is not an end goal. It is fluid and messy and unpredictable. It is not contingent on everything going as expected. Acceptance and support, then, shouldn’t be contingent on that either.

To see the author discussing the work in context with the larger project, click below:

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Interview: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

Kolluri’s touching and exquisitely crafted story collection invites readers to imagine the lives of animal characters. Themes of trauma and grief, of time and friendship intersect as the unique voices Kolluri builds for every narrator embrace the mystery and estrangement of animal lives with magic and wonder. The Florida Review asked Talia about the process of making unreal things feel real, the art of crafting non-human voices, and the potential of fiction to address the climate crisis.

What We Fed To The Manticore was published in September 2022 by Tin House Books.

Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira for The Florida Review:

The book features a variety of animal-human relations. Some are on the more positive end of the spectrum, like Hafiz and the donkey and the pigeon and the Toy Man. But we also see the pain humans can inflict in animal lives, such as with the poachers in “May God Forever Bless The Rhino Keepers” and the boat in “The Open Ocean Is An Endless Desert.” So I’m curious about how, when approaching an animal’s perspective, you decide what kind of role humans will play in the story.

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri:

When I was writing this collection I made a deliberate choice to decenter human perspectives, so I always began writing each story with the idea that the animal experience would always be primary. But the crucial foundation upon which all of these stories rest is the fact that humanity has impacted every ecosystem on the globe, even in places where we have yet to travel. So in that sense, humanity has played a role in every one of these stories. But when I wrote humans (or humanity’s impacts) directly into a story, their portrayal was more likely to be negative when I was portraying a human system, and the human role was more likely to be positive when I was writing an individual human character. I think lots of individual people can be very compassionate stewards of nature. But we live in a world full of systems that are destructive and this is ultimately what I wanted to call attention to.

TFR:

Some stories, like “The Dog Star Is The Brightest Star In The Sky” and “The Hunted, The Haunted, The Hungry, The Tame” focus on relationships and bonds between animals of different species. How do you set out to define these relationships, and how do you keep them from coming across as too “human” while also keeping the reader emotionally invested.

TLK:

Early on in my process, I worried a lot about writing characters that came across as too human. Anthropomorphizing animals has long been viewed with varying degrees of skepticism and occasionally perceived as unserious. I wanted my characters to be believable. And while I love reading work that uses animal narratives as an allegory for a human situations, I didn’t want my work to be read that way. I also did not want my inter-species relationships to be viewed as superficial or cute. I wanted them to have emotional depth and nuance the way all of my own relationships do. Ultimately the best way for me to achieve this was to do solid foundational research in animal behavior and use that to shape how my characters behave. I kept their senses and general actions as close as possible to what I could learn from research. And when it came to the emotional texture of relationships, as long as I could keep their reactions within the framework of realistic animal behavior, I felt they could be believable.

But also, as I continued writing, I stopped worrying about my characters and their relationships seeming too human. In the wild world, a lot of different species interact and have lives that overlap. In some cases they have a history of collaboration, in others they may have a more neutral but regular interaction, and in some they have a mutually beneficial co-existence. In all of these cases, I have a hard time believing that animals don’t notice each other. And if they notice each other, perhaps they have significance to each other. Often when we describe something as human, it’s because we assign emotion to a reaction or interaction, and emotion is something that we are reluctant to assign to animals and instead hold only for ourselves. But why is that? I suspect we might be the only species that stubbornly insists that we are not animals at all, but are instead something above and apart from animals. But it just isn’t true. We are animals too. And if we respond to our surroundings and our interactions with emotion, and we assign meaning to things, then other animals probably do something similar.

TFR:

The spectrum of climate change is present in the book, like in “The Dog Star Is The Brightest Star In The Sky.” How do you view the role of literature in the ongoing political conversation surrounding this topic?

TLK:

I’m glad you asked this because I feel it is absolutely vital that literature directly bear witness to the astonishing uncanniness of the climate crisis, that is in fact becoming the ordinary texture of all our lives. For many of the years that I was writing the stories in this collection, I thought about Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. Ghosh writes broadly of the ways that contemporary literature, and fiction in particular, has failed to reckon with the climate crisis and the colonial history that lit the first spark of the crisis itself. Despite it being a pervasive and escalating part of our reality, it is primarily addressed in non-fiction work, and when it is included in fiction, the very real features of the climate crisis are often deemed too extreme and too unbelievable to be included in fiction intended to depict reality. Instead, it is categorized as something more like science fiction. In other words, unbelievable because it couldn’t be real. This isn’t to say that science fiction doesn’t show us aspects of our reality, or that our futures don’t eventually converge with things we once imagined to be impossible. But Ghosh’s point is that the impacts of the climate crisis are being felt right now, and despite that, fiction that describes it plainly has been treated as deviating from reality.

Early in the book he writes, “[i]n a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight?” I read this passage and felt as though he was writing directly to me, and telling me that my desire to write human impacts from inside the minds of creatures who have no agency over what humanity does, was a worthwhile artistic pursuit.

I think that confronting the climate crisis through fiction has the potential for magnified emotional resonance. I can read books and articles about ecology, and the science of climate change. I can watch the news and see the real-time impacts of droughts and superstorms. But all of these pieces of information will come to me from a distance, filtered through a medium that tells me that none of this information really applies to me. If I am watching coverage of a flood from my untouched home, then no matter how much empathy I purposefully cultivate in myself there is still some distance between me and the crisis because it is not, in fact, happening to me. But here is where fiction offers an opportunity. If I read a story where the characters face some aspect of the climate crisis, and I do what I always do, which is imagine myself as one of the characters, then suddenly the crisis becomes real. Because although it is not actually happening to me, the experience of imagining that it is creates an emotional response that brings me closer to the experience of the events themselves. I am less removed. My perception is less sterile. Instead of being reminded that it is not happening to me, I am instead reminded that it could and it might. And this difference is important because a person that does not see a vast distance between themselves and the climate crisis is a person more likely to be inspired to take action.

TFR:

Two of my favorite stories, “What We Fed To The Manticore” and “Someone Must Watch Over The Dead” employ, in addition to the animal perspective, elements that veer on the fantastical and mythical. What is the process to incorporate those elements in your work, and to decide when you’ll take a more realistic approach as opposed to a more magic one?

TLK:

I think my default way of writing is to write in a more mythical style. That’s what came to me naturally for most stories. But I found that some of them needed to be rooted in reality more than others, so in a practical sense I found myself having to deliberately incorporate realistic elements, instead of the other way around. I also find that myths, and fairy tales, and stories from various religious traditions are where animals stories most often live. I think the human heart hungers for magic, and there is truly something magical about wild spaces. Animals and birds and sea life are all so fantastical when I think about them long enough! I did find that I was more likely to discard mythical elements when I included human characters more prominently. Perhaps that’s because humanity holds a little less magic for me. Animals are still such a mystery to me and in mystery lies wonder and enchantment.

TFR:

Time is a recurring theme in some of the stories. In “The Good Donkey” you have a stunning scene of a drone attack that is rendered in the style of a rewind; “A Level Of Tolerance” is all about a wolf stuck in a time loop. What fascinates you about playing with time in your writing?

TLK:

Time is a tricky thing, isn’t it? I have noticed that the older I get the more I am aware of how elastic time is, how it speeds up and slows down according to how I feel, and how my perception of time has changed over my life. I also know that while time can be measured, it isn’t as rigid as we make it out to be. For instance, the time at the bottom of the Mariana Trench does not pass at same speed as the time at the top of Mount Everest. The other thing I think about often is how through memory and imagination, we are often traveling through time. If I recall a conversation from last week and I spend part of my day thinking about it, what time am I living in? Is it today? Have I returned to last week? Is it both? What if I’m imagining something three months from now? What time am I living in then? And what does trauma do to our perception of time? For those who suffer from post-traumatic stress, the memory of a traumatic experience can often feel as though it is happening again, in the present, in real-time. And this feeling can occur over and over. And perhaps after trauma, there remains the desire to undo the traumatic event. I wanted to find a way to convey the way that time is elastic, and also the way elastic time can bind someone in place when something painful happens.

TFR:

In your author’s note, you frame the notions of wildness and tameness as matters of dependence and communication. How did this influence your approach to dialogue in the book, and the process of finding each animal’s voice?

TLK:

I used this framing most often to imagine how well my point of view animal understood human life and all of its features. The closer an animal was to humanity, the better they understood human speech, human objects, and human choices. Perhaps the closest to humanity is the donkey. He began as a working animal but ultimately became more of a companion to Hafiz. In my mind this meant that the depth of their emotional connection would allow them to communicate directly. I also think that we are more likely to make an effort to communicate when it’s necessary and I imagine it could be the same with animals. But I don’t know that my ideas about interspecies communication had any real influence over how each character’s voice emerged. In a lot of ways, characters and personalities emerged organically. To me, writing fiction is a lot like playing make-believe. In each instance, I was pretending to be all the animals in every story, in pretty much the same way I would play all the characters in a game of pretend when I was a child. I think the difference here is that I could make all of the characters feel real to myself because I had a fuller understanding of their environments and how their senses worked. When I was small and I pretended to be a lion, for example, I understood what they looked like, and had an idea of how they walked and a superficial idea of what they did. But I had no real understanding of lion pride social dynamics, or what animals they had to compete with for food, or whether their habitat was dwindling or not. I just really wanted to be a lion. Now, I can take that same desire and fuel my game of pretend with a full spectrum of animal and habitat facts that I have gathered over the years, and maybe this is how the animals voices find me.

TFR:

I’m impressed by how evocative and memorable the titles in this collection are. How is your process for choosing a piece’s title? Is it usually something you come up with in the beginning of the story or after finishing it?

TLK:

I wish I had a process, but in most cases, the title arrives fully formed at the beginning and haunts me until I write something. Usually it ends up representing an idea that the whole story crystalizes around. In several of my stories, the title ends up embedded somewhere in the text, probably because they’re so linked to something I’m trying to communicate. The one exception is “A Level Of Tolerance,” which is a story I really struggled to find a title for. Instead of being haunted by a potential title, I was haunted by several lines that are now in the story. So, when I first wrote it, I gave it a working title of “832F” which is the identifying number of the wolf that inspired it. But my first readers had a really hard time connecting the title to the story and it seemed out of place to many of them, so I felt I needed something different. I ended up pulling the phrase “a level of tolerance” from a document that talked about wolf culling and discussed the idea that culling is used to bring wolf populations to “a level of tolerance,” meaning a level that the human population is willing to tolerate. I felt that phrase was a very sterile and detached description of how to think of an endangered animal population. I used it because I don’t feel very detached and emotionless when I think about the possibility of wolf extinction. Instead, I feel devastated. I thought the contrast was interesting, so I used it as the title.

TFR:

In the end of the book, you include sources related to every story. When writing about animals, how important is it to you to make sure you’re adhering to their biological realities? Is there any example of a story in which the science made it difficult for you to write out your ideas for the characters?

TLK:

It was incredibly important for me to make sure I was writing my animals as accurately as possible from a biological perspective. I am asking readers to take a series of very large imaginative leaps with me. I am asking them to believe that animals can tell stories, that they have their own mythology, that they can commune with the dead, that they are chased by mythological creatures, they can talk to people, and they exist outside of time. I am trusting the reader to take these leaps with me. But if I am asking them to jump, I must give them a firm foundation to leap from. I wrote a lot of unreal things, but I want them to feel real. And if they’re going to feel realistic, they need to be grounded in facts that can be verified. I want readers to wonder if vultures actually can understand how their carrion lived through eating. I want them to wonder if whales really do live inside a song net. But a reader may not ask these questions if nothing in the story feels believable. This is not to say that fully fantastical stories are not wonderful, because they are! I love stories that lean all the way into the miraculous and strange. But if there’s nothing concrete for me to hold onto in a story, then I understand it as something wonderful that will never be real. I wanted my stories to include the possibility that everything in them could be true, which I think comes from knowing that some of the things in them are true.

However, the story where I struggled with this the most was “The Open Ocean Is An Endless Desert.” Whales are amazing, and fascinating, and strange, and completely unlike humans in an astonishing number of ways. But the difference between whales and humans that was hardest for me to grasp was how precise their hearing is underwater, and how imperfect mine is. When I was writing this story, there was one afternoon where I jumped in a pool with my spouse and had him talk to me underwater to see if I could understand him. All I could hear were indecipherable noises enveloped in a strange echo and even though I saw where he was, I couldn’t hear exactly where the sound was coming from. I had to return to research to learn more about whale ears and whale communication and how they sing to each other over distances before I could come up with a way to describe their lives and community. But I’m glad I did because as much as I loved whales before, I am so much more in awe of them now.

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Call and Response

It is a hinge.

It is a flash splintering

the sky,

then a rumble.

Under ripe light,

it is pollen

furring the bees.

It is a wood thrush’s

song rising

from the backyard’s

green pulpit.

Over and over

one calls, insistent.

Then another

parses, flute-like

as the head

bobs. Tail flicks.

It is the link

embedded in us.

Think of

the old gospels

which require

a beating heart,

church hands

to answer.

No matter what

form it takes

it seems impossible

to disentangle.

And still the God-weld

split, despite my bows

and prayers

to save my son.

You were silent.

This poem originally appeared in our 46.2 issue, and was a runner-up for The Florida Review‘s 2022 Humboldt Poetry Prize.

Prize judge David Keplinger’s citation: “In this delicately achieved lyric, like the prayer it references, rife with “pollen/furring the bees,” and the “backyard’s/green pulpit,” the natural world is imbued with sacred qualities, though the speaker’s calls to save the unnamed son are not answered. Nevertheless, the poem honors the tangled music of this realm, offering the song of the wood-thrush, “flute-like,” as embodiment of this grief.”

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Sunset

After Jim Harrison

On this excursion my hands were folded,

I tried not to see anything, didn’t pick up the pole,

let him do all the work, he took every turn

for the both of us—promising I would be amazed

at any moment, soon enough, and I fucking doubt it

I replied, wanting something more from my time,

as though each of my moments were precious

and meant to be filled with golden sap, we,

through mangrove canals where pregnant

wolf spiders ran their fingers through my hair,

and blackened crabs climbed from root to root,

the water moved past our boat like soft hands

swimming in still water, paddled toward the sunset

when two boar, nose-to-tail, took to the water to cross

from shore to shore oblivious of us one way or another

and now is a good time to define what our time is worth.

This poem originally appeared in our 46.2 issue, and was a runner-up for The Florida Review‘s 2022 Humboldt Poetry Prize.

Prize judge David Keplinger’s citation: “On a miserable excursion through mangrove canals, rife with crabs and spiders, what seems a resistant young person sits with hands folded as an older figure tries to amaze and awaken them; and they do; they do awaken to the worth of this moment with its boars crossing the shore “oblivious of us” in that instant of marvelous connection with the natural world.”

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Two Poems

Witness Statement

And, behold, in the year
of unencumbered plague

those who trafficked in wickedness
did so on palatial golf courses.

An orphan cried for succor
and received spit.

Nothing of this was new
or profound, only more naked.

And, lo, I fed my son a breakfast
bar on a dying planet.

And on a dying planet
the wicked watered

my son’s playground with poisons.
They hallowed his oceans with lead.

Tell me what should I have done
but bathe bread in peanut butter

mince Flintstones in a cup of cola.
And, lo, the wicked thought only

of my boy as a horsetail dreams
of flies. His chest rose and fell

as we both tacked the garbage
truck rumbling its track.

In this was no sin.
In this was only another

form of hunger: the truckness
of the truck begetting wonder

begetting want. Oh, felt my boy
with every rattling atom.

And the wicked kenneled
a brown boy so like my son.

I said, I am sickened.
I said, I will maim you

with my claws before you
take their boy, my boy whose laugh

turns this truck ripe with refuse
to some radiant blessing.

Anubis at the DMV

Let me be blunt:

fate is no whim.

It is the voice of

a thousand bureaucrats intoning

now serving 554.

If diligence is a knife

you are our bread.

if service is a repeating decimal

a herd of digits flashed to life

you’re dead last.

Ultimo.

The sarcophagal cero.

Each attendant is a monolith

in a desert you wander

an hour, a lifetime.

Who can know?

The intervals grow

immeasurable.

Think of a cat

toying mindlessly with a string

an entire day

bored

somnambular.

Past the grave

vice or virtue is simply

the dust we brush off.

Let it accumulate.

Let the carpet fiber

crack beneath your feet

Now you want to know

how much longer

a day, a year, a league.

Like all dictators

I simply push the beads

across, then back.

Who am I

to enumerate

your wait time?

Who to tell you

how to spend your death?

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“For Happiness” and “Self Absorption”

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Did You Miss Your Saturn Return

There is a spectrum of brightness. You might not have realized
that gleam is stronger than glimmer. The latter suggests movement,
like when sunlight hits an unstill surface and we call it dancing.
Similarly, I know water isn’t blue, it just reflects the colors
around it. And I know it isn’t solid—it just invites being touched.
Yes, I’m talking about hope again, and you are in your bed all day.
I’m googling the concept of a Saturn return because, thematically,
I like the idea of reaching an age where it’s acceptable to change
my mind. You don’t believe in astrology. I’m not sure you believe
in anything, and I worry you missed the chance to see it all fresh.
I’m worried it’s easier to try to fix your problems instead
of sitting and feeling mine. I’m not a good swimmer because
I struggle to breathe through my panic. I struggle to let my chest
loosen when I walk down the street. My chest, surely it was tight
any time you touched me and we pretended water was solid, blue.

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Hog Suit

One morning, I found one of my pigs outside the pen. He wanted to get back inside; he was tapping on the fence with his snout and his grunts sounded distressed to me. When I let him back into the pen with the others, he seemed pleased. A weird little episode, but I didn’t think much about it.

The next day two pigs were outside the pen. I checked the fence again; the fence was just fine. I put the two pigs back. Easy.

The day after that, there were two pigs missing. One of the pigs was right outside the fence wanting to get in like on the other days. But the other pig could not be located. There were no hoof prints. He was just gone.

So, I looked around my property until I heard some oinking. But the oinking was coming from above me. High up. I’ll stress that oinking ought not come from above. I looked up and there was my pig in a damn oak tree, looking worried. I got the ladder and brought him down—which wasn’t easy, he was a heavy boy—and put him back in the pen. He was relieved to be back with his buddies. But I didn’t sleep well that night. I was up late thinking about the moment I saw him on that branch like a nightmare bird.

The next day a sow was outside the pen, and she was in bad shape. She had injuries on her ears, little cuts. They almost looked like words, but I couldn’t make them out. I looked for predators. There were none, and there were tracks, either.

The next day, a sow was outside the pen, and she was hurt—she had cuts on her back and on her ears. I patched her up and set her back with the others. I looked around and found some tracks, but they vanished right at the edge of a pond. I thought whatever had done this might be in the pond, but it was a shallow pond, and I didn’t see anything in there worth noticing.

That tracks looked like bear prints, but then they also didn’t look like bear prints, not at all, because there was something humanoid about them. The arch, the narrowness. But it wasn’t human either. In the end, I concluded that the tracks were of an indeterminate character.

The next day, the pigs were inside the pen but there were three pigs stacked up on each other. What it was was a tower of pigs: a little tower, but still. They were in some sort of hypnotic state, standing on each other. When I gasped, they snapped out of it and fell. The tower crumbled. It took an hour to get them to trust me again and to get back into the pen.

The next day a pig was in a tree, the same tree as before, and another was dead, pale from being drained of all blood, missing its ears. There were no footprints: no boot heels, no wolf tracks, no bear tracks. I thought what in God’s name.

I had a vet come over. Same vet I been using for years. Good man. Bad divorce recently but knew lots about swine.

What do you think? I said, as he was examining the corpse.

Weird shit, he said.

He said the ears had been removed with surgical precision. They didn’t have any teeth marks on them. They weren’t torn or ripped. They had been removed with a sharp blade and a straight edge of some kind.

No animal did this, he said.

The next day I had two pigs outside the pen, each drained of blood and missing eyes and ears. The eyes and ears were nowhere to be found. They had been removed from the premises and carried to God knows where. This must have been traumatizing for the other pigs. I knew it was for me—I had nightmares.

There was no blood in the pigs. Not a drop. It was like someone vacuumed in there. I showed my wife; she was in disbelief. She accused me of doing it. Are you sleepwalking, Harold? Are you sleepwalking and performing savage acts?

Later we found blood in our lemonade pitcher. As in, the lemons, water, and sugar mixture had been replaced (or transubstantiated) into blood. You better believe we didn’t drink a drop of that concoction.

I called a scientist over to do some tests on the blood. The scientist knew his pigs inside and out. It was pig blood sure enough, he said. But he said there was a some magnetic field around the blood.

What does that mean? I asked.

He didn’t know.

He did a battery of other tests. These were inconclusive. I asked him if he had any advice for what we should do. He said the missus and I should try to love the pigs while I still had them, because you never knew what was going to happen. This seemed like decent advice, though not scientific like I was hoping.

Word got out and soon the Hortonville Gazette was talking about my swine displacements and mutilations. Nobody believed me; they believed the events had occurred, but they disputed the cause and minimized the impact on me. They said it was predators or teenage vandals. They said there was a rational explanation for everything. They published a hurtful cartoon in which I am sneaking into the field and night and putting my own hogs in a tree and cackling about insurance fraud. I wrote a letter to the editor complaining about the cartoon and the tenor of their coverage. But they didn’t print it. They thought I was a loon, and why would you publish the words of a loon in your paper? I wouldn’t. The only thing is, I wasn’t a loon, at the time.

I was in a quandary: some unseen force was removing my animals from their pen, without harming my fence, and placing them in trees or mutilating them and, in addition, swapping out my lemonade with real blood. Who or what would do these things? And who or what could?

I installed a security camera and pointed it at the pen. My wife was sure that we’d see footage of me sleepwalking out there, some dark part of my personality expressing itself all over my pigs in the middle of the night. I thought maybe we’d see a new kind of wolf. But the camera kept shutting off before it got anything good. Upon investigating, I discovered that the wires were frayed. I bought another camera and the same thing happened. None of the cameras picked up the other pigs that got lifted out of the pen, treed, or mutilated. None of the cameras survived the night.

I bought another camera and pointed it at the cameras that were pointing into the pen, so I could at least see what was happening with the mutilated cameras. In that footage, you could see the lights go off in the pig-pen-directed cameras, and that was about it. A figure was seen by my wife in one of the frames. A hand coming out of the darkness. I didn’t see any hand no matter how hard I looked at the footage, but my wife said it was a hand and I believe her. At least she no longer thinks I sleepwalk in an evil way.

Next, I bought myself a hog suit online. It wasn’t cheap. It was the best-looking hog suit I could find via the Google search engine. The suit was extremely life-like—the skin texture, the bristle hair, the snout, the ears. I donned it and I felt like one of my animals.

That night I went inside the pen. I wanted to be with my pigs when the malevolent force arrived so I would have an opportunity to confront it and, hopefully, shoot it in its head with my .38, which I had covertly duct taped to my realistic-looking underside/teats region.

The first night nothing happened: I just oinked around and got weird looks from the other pigs. And man did it smell bad in there. The second night I was tired. I was asleep on my haunches. I knew I had to stay vigilant, but I couldn’t help it. I laid down next due to some sows and it was quite comfortable. Here I am among my pigs, getting a brand-new perspective on life, I thought. I dozed with the pigs and dreamed their dreams.

I was awakened several hours later by a breeze playing at my hooves. I looked down and noticed that the ground was many feet below me. I was being levitated in the night air, and I could see the moon shining clearly above me as I made my way to the top of a forty-foot oak tree. I could not see the thing that was lifting me into the air. I was placed on a branch in the tree. And then I watched as the other pigs were lifted, one by one, over the fence and into the tree. But I couldn’t get down. I fired off my thirty-eight, but it didn’t stop the force from getting the pigs out. I decided I’d make a jump for the branch right below mine. I figured I could move from branch to branch if I was careful. However, the pig costume was cumbersome and did not allow for the acrobatic maneuvers I was envisioning. I fell.

I woke up in the hospital. My wife showed me a picture of strange, cramped handwriting on tiny parchment. What is this from? I asked. She said it was from the back of my ears. I felt my ears and there were cuts already scabbing over, raised like a braille. Then the nurse came in and told me I’d been drained of blood and spinal fluid. Not the whole way, but a little. But she didn’t have to tell me. I felt different, lighter, lesser. I didn’t even ask about the fate of my pigs.

I believe the cuts on my ears spell out a message, though from who or what I have no idea. Are they legible to you?

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Dawn of the New Age

Three hours after learning the museum has secured a major grant, based largely—the Director assured her—on Luisa’s late night, visionary sketches of a wing for the new space age exhibits, this phone call, or something like it, was due. Bringing the world back in balance: a reporter, asking questions about her husband, about his participation in a reality show called Astronaut Academy. Luisa asks the woman to explain the show to her, though she read an article on it just that morning. It is being produced in partnership with the Space Force, the reporter says. A dozen competitors from around the country, going through the challenges any astronaut would encounter on their training: stints in the Buoyancy Lab, in zero gravity, in Earth-bound models of the shuttle they will ride if victorious. The winner will receive a seat on the Mars shuttle, and the same pay and benefits and stature as the traditionally trained astronauts. “How do you feel,” the reporter asks, “about your husband pursuing what would likely be a one-way mission?”

“Proud,” Luisa says. “How else should I feel?”

“But you weren’t familiar with the show?”

Luisa is silent until the reporter weakens and explains that this is all for a human-interest story. She wants Luisa to share more insight into her mental state, which is a thing Luisa privately feels incapable of sharing even with herself. “Maybe it’s better if we speak in person,” Luisa says, not wanting to volunteer for this additional torment but not knowing how else to extricate herself. “I’ve never been very comfortable speaking across distance.”

“That will make things difficult, won’t—”

“I’ll talk to Jon,” Luisa says. “We can find a good time for it.”

—

Against her wishes, he is on the sofa when she arrives home. “Go celebrate!” Robert, the Director, told her when she asked to leave before lunch—to which she could only offer a faint, gummy smile, allowing him to think the grant was the cause of her distraction. Sitting on the ottoman, bag between her feet, she waits for Jon to explain the show. Instead he describes meeting the neighbor’s dog that morning; the persistent slow drain of the bathroom sink.

“Is there anything else?” she asks. A part of her wants him to say there isn’t, so she can catch him in the lie.

“I do have news,” Jon says. He seems to believe that more detail will absolve him of any wrongs, and so he talks her through the joke of his application. The physical trial and mental assessment, a process that lasted months and which he performed without her notice, taking advantage of her lengthening workdays. “I thought I would flunk out sooner or later.”

“A reporter wants to interview us,” Luisa says. “She’s writing a human- interest piece.” She doesn’t want to touch Jon or even look at him. It is tempting to label her feelings the inevitable result of his subterfuge, though in truth she cannot recall the last time she wanted to let her body be near his. For the last few years of their marriage she has had the vague sense of them being broken in some elemental way, the thread of attraction that existed between them having snapped while she was looking in a different direction.

“You spoke with someone? You knew?” He reaches for her, then shakes his head. “Never mind. Okay.”

“When does filming start?”

“Two weeks. But we’re due out sooner, for publicity.” He picks at a zit that has scabbed to the surface near his Adam’s apple.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me you wanted to do something like this?” Luisa asks, but then she remembers: he has. On one of their first dates, crowded into a two-seater in a taqueria, a lime-green margarita sweating between her hands, licking salt from her lips. She laughed when he began talking about the prospect of a one-way journey into space, how he would happily volunteer himself for such a mission. He was a biologist, the most earthbound profession she could imagine, but he spoke of “the greater good” like a man with conviction. “Anyone can see we’ve taken things too far on this planet,” he said, and maybe that much was true: the western half of the country had already been abandoned to forest fires, and the southeastern states to the hurricanes and rising tides. Life was pressing in closer and closer every day, it needed an outlet.

Anyone would have laughed, she tells herself now as she leaves her bag slumped on the floor, walks to the bedroom and shuts the door. He was twenty-five, a boy in a world that seemed unlikely to ever offer the opportunities he imagined for himself. So she laughed, and was endeared, and slept with him even though it would be months before she felt really compelled in his direction. By the time they married she had forgotten that conversation. She had no concept that he might one day reform himself into this person he had imagined, this person she is now unable to follow.

—

Checks are signed, champagne uncorked. The donors to the space age wing, invited to the museum for an exclusive tour-slash-soirée, all want to meet Luisa—not because she imagined so many of the exhibits their money will fund but because they have all seen the interview and know her husband may be one of the men who supplies these artifacts. Suits and goggles, Martian rocks, a replica of a shuttle that will never land on Earthen soil. All of this a departure for a museum that to date is best known for its textile exhibits.

“I couldn’t believe what they made them do on the last episode,” says Muffy Van der Barg, a woman with a rumored inheritance over a quarter- billion dollars. A fist-sized stone, strung on near-invisible links, rests on her creped chest.

Luisa has to apologize. She doesn’t watch the television show—

“My poor dear,” the woman says, “of course you don’t. Who would want to?”

About forty million households thus far, if the ratings are to be believed. Luisa excuses herself before Muffy can launch into a description of this show she has been studiously avoiding. She retreats farther and farther, until she is outside the museum, cigarette trailing from her hand, watching the parking lot that will be one day be her new wing. Sweat gathers in her elbows and the small of her back. Heat waves rise from the pavement, distorting the streetlamps’ glow.

Robert appears at her side, his soft-soled loafers having silenced his walk down the marble steps. “It must be hard,” he says, handing her a fresh glass of champagne.

Luisa sips, the bubbles fizzing unpleasantly at her nose. “We weren’t doing well, before he left. But I can’t say that.”

“No,” he says, “I suppose you couldn’t.”

She twirls the glass, watches sweat bead to its surface.

“You really don’t watch?” he asks.

“I feel like I’m watching a character.” The first episode is the only she’s attempted so far, and she didn’t make it further than the first challenge before shutting it off. The way Jon described himself in his introduction, the way he smiled for the camera, even the way he held his shoulders back as he walked to the suit room, where they competed to select the correctly- sized outfit—none of it felt familiar to her. The man on screen looked like Jon, but at such a remove that she couldn’t connect him to the person she’s known for the last decade.

“For what it’s worth, I think one of the women will win. The crew is only a third female right now.”

“Sure.” She can guess at his reading: an op-ed from just that morning, decrying the sissified nanny state that led the Space Force to refer to “crewed” rather than “manned” space flights.

“Political correctness usually wins. Natasha would be my bet.” Robert offers a hand and Luisa ignores it.

“I was joking. She’s the most capable, clearly—come on.”

And, because Robert signs her paychecks, Luisa lifts a hand to his. “I don’t think I’ll mind if he wins,” she says. “We can call it the Jon Gonders Memorial Hall. We can put a wax figure of him in the entrance.”

“A statue out front. Maybe a fountain, throw in your coins. Subtle fundraising.”

“We can offer a widow-led tour for our major donors.”

“There’s an idea.” Robert’s gaze vanishes into the parking lot for a minute, the streetlights bolting off his glasses, before he leads her back to the party, the donors, all the things he likes to label the “dirty business of philanthropy.” The widow’s tour, Luisa thinks as they step inside. She is almost pleased with her idea, and with the thought that this event is her first opportunity to practice the role.

—

The week after the fundraiser, Jon begins to call at night. “Is this being recorded?” Luisa asks. “Is this going to end up as footage to make you seem more compelling?”

“No,” says Jon. “I mean, they’re filming on my end. But the call isn’t being recorded.”

Luisa doesn’t believe him. But she can sit on the line, she figures, and wait him out. “How do you feel?”

“Not bad. The rations are getting old, but that’s part of it, I guess. And I’m worried about the isolation challenges.”

“You should be good at that.”

Jon’s exhalation is almost violent against the receiver. “They’re telling me I have to go,” he says. “I love you.”

To Luisa’s surprise his calls continue, every night between seven and eight. To her surprise, she looks forward to them. When they cease after a few weeks, when she realizes he must now be in the isolation phase of the competition, she is adrift and unsure how to move through their apartment. It isn’t the feeling that she’s lost him, because she’s felt apart from him for so long; it’s just that the loss now feels somehow reiterated.

The second night without a call, Luisa doesn’t resist tuning in to the now-constant stream of the competitors’ activities. Each astronaut sits in a dimly-lit capsule so small they could stretch out their arms and press their hands to opposing walls. A chyron at the bottom of the screen encourages viewers to vote for their favorite astronaut, and to text donations to the Space Force. On the righthand side of the screen, a public comment stream flows too quickly for Luisa to make out more than a word here or there: love, WOW, Jon! When the feed shifts to Jon, she moves closer to the screen, trying to sense in his hunched shoulders, the book open on his lap, whether he is struggling, or thinking of her, or thinking of anything at all. She can’t tell, and when the feed moves to the next contestant she turns off the television. She does not cast a vote.

—

Luisa does not in her heart believe the Space Force will succeed. NASA hasn’t launched a mission in decades, and a rebranding seems insufficient to staunch its woes, however popular Astronaut Academy may be. She suspects Robert doesn’t believe, either, but is pleased that their unspoken doubts don’t stop either of them from pursuing the museum’s new wing. Reality need not place any limits on their ambitions.

The parking lot vanishes, replaced by billowing dust and torn asphalt. One of the junior curators sources a basketball-sized meteorite, which Luisa exhibits alongside a glass case in which patrons can stuff dollar bills. She plots an exhibit around the textiles of space: fireproof astronaut uniforms, and waffle-weaved long johns, and the inflatable living capsules promised to be part of the Martian mission. Trying to form a bridge between the present-day textile museum and Robert’s imagined rival to the National Air & Space.

It is Jon’s tenth day in isolation when Robert asks Luisa to stay late. “We might have a new funder,” he says, “and this man has some ideas.” She thinks, at first, that the funder is only a figment Robert has crafted to distract her—but the man is real, a major yarn manufacturer interested in donating if they can assure him the woolen arts will be properly highlighted in the new wing.

“We can do a case on merino t-shirts,” Luisa says. “Wool air filters. I’ve already been working on long johns.”

Robert writes this: merino, air filters, long johns.

“How much are they donating?” she asks.

“We’re looking at a million.”

“From wool?”

“And a gift shop partnership. Stuffed astronaut sheep. Wool keychains that look like comets. That sort of thing.”

Luisa leans her chin into her fist and watches Robert. She has worked for him almost as long as she has known Jon, a fact that has never previously occurred to her—how much of her life tracks alongside these two men. “Do you think people really want to see these things?”

He stops writing. “Maybe they aren’t so interested in seeing it,” he admits. “But make it interactive—let them touch the suits, or wear an astronaut’s t-shirt—that’s different. People want to feel like they’re a part of something.”

Luisa tries to recall what type of shirt Jon was wearing, the last time she watched Astronaut Academy. It’s been over a week, and her memory of him is vague. Just the top of his head, his hand turning a page. The show has slogged into a stretch with no obvious challenges, only the interminable wait for four of eight contestants to declare themselves unfit for the lonely rigors of space. Instead of their usual gossip, Luisa’s colleagues have begun to complain about the unbroken, indistinguishable nature of time on Astronaut Academy. “They could just be showing the same day again and again,” her assistant said that morning.

“Maybe I can get us one of Jon’s shirts,” Luisa says. “From the show.” As soon as the suggestion emerges she regrets it. She is not sure what compelled these words from her. But then Robert smiles. He reaches across the desk and for just a moment rests his hand on top of hers, not in a way that feels romantic—Luisa assures herself of this, when she thinks of it later—but in a way that only feels human, and comforting, and necessary.

—

Jon is not sent home. For two weeks it seems none of the contestants will fall and then, all of a sudden, they do: the strain of isolation is heightened as their televisions and books are taken away, as lights turn on and off at random hours, as an oppressive and total silence is piped into their private chambers. The producers have broken their own promise to not revise challenges once they’ve begun, but no one seems to mind—there is general agreement that mere isolation cannot break this pandemic-reared generation, and a relief that the show is once again progressing. In an article debating the chances for each remaining candidate, Jon is described as possessing “a quiet, monk-like strength.”

The million-dollar check from the yarn manufacturer is signed. A banner unfurls on the chain-link fence surrounding the former parking lot, with doctored photographs of children wearing merino “space t-shirts,” asteroids flashing across their chests. Jon calls the night after the fourth contestant has left, surprising Luisa at her desk.

“It isn’t that hard to be alone with your thoughts,” he says. “Which I was worried about.”

Luisa toggles between a few uncharitable responses, settling at last on, “No, I guess it isn’t.” Thinking of a conversation she once tried to have with him, her fear that her body had toggled off a switch without permission, leaving her with the barest memory of how desire had once unspooled through her, touching him. The loss a thing she had never known to anticipate. “Is that so different, really, from before?” he’d said, before claiming it was a joke—as if that was somehow better, to make a joke of her.

The office is empty and feels private, with the motion-sensing hall lights switched off. She sets the phone to speaker and rests it on her desk, staring at her second monitor and deleting emails as Jon talks. He describes his tongue’s adjustment to the bland food, how over two weeks in solitary the minutes and hours and days turned into an amorphous span of time that he was unable to separate out into its component pieces. He talks for so long that Luisa believes him on this point, that he has lost the ability to measure time or his place in it. “It sounds like you’re ready to go to Mars,” she says. “There isn’t anything holding you back now.”

“I still have to do the zero-gravity test. That’s tomorrow—where we go up in the plane.”

“Right,” Luisa says.

“They call it the ‘vomit comet.’”

“Right.” She deletes three more emails. When she looks up, the hall lights have clicked on and Robert is in the door. “I have to go,” she tells Jon. “Good luck with tomorrow.” She feels a need to cover herself, despite her sweater and suit jacket.

“Do you have someone to talk to?” Robert asks. He is still in the doorway. “About all of that?”

Luisa is tempted to tell the truth, which is that she talks to him; but to say that feels like opening herself a degree too far. “I don’t know what I’d say.”

He pulls a chair to her desk. Her phone screen fades to gray, and then black. “He’s got a one-in-four chance now. You should have someone to support you. A therapist. Family.”

But what would Luisa say to them? That the thought of her husband leaving in this way is almost a relief, because it frees her from the slower work of understanding and then extricating herself from the husk of their relationship? That she has felt closer to him in the month of his absence than in the three preceding years? That a part of her wants him to succeed? “I’ve been thinking,” she says, and tells Robert how they might build on the textile exhibit to focus more broadly on materials in space. “I have so many ideas,” she tells him, hoping that he will listen—to her ideas, and nothing else.

—

Two contestants are so violently ill, vomit unspooling through the air before it slicks, in the increasing gravity, down the front of their suits, that they are both eliminated from Astronaut Academy. One contestant, a man the rough size and shape of a professional linebacker, is not ill at all. Jon vomits in a restrained fashion following the final flight, and is allowed to continue to the final challenges.

There isn’t any doubt now, not for Luisa. “It’s going to be him,” she tells Robert, after watching the clip at his desk. “The other one, he’s just too big.” She has a vague idea that astronauts are a compact class of humans, not on the same scale as jockeys but certainly not so far away, either. Jon, who has always exaggerated his height to 5’10”, is the correct size for interplanetary travel. His competitor is not, and she wonders that he was even allowed to join the show in the first place.

In that case, Robert says, they should begin planning in earnest for Jon’s departure. “I don’t mean to be insensitive,” he says, before describing Jon’s mission as a coup. “It’s only that no other museum can promise such a close view of the rigors and costs of space travel.”

When Jon calls that night, Luisa doesn’t mention his increasing role in the museum’s new wing. Robert is envisioning a rocket suspended from the ceiling in direct imitation of the Kennedy Space Center’s Atlantis shuttle, a video of Jon—“our own civilian astronaut”—on loop. She doesn’t want to expose Jon to any of these ideas, to the suspicion that she might use their relationship for her own gain. She thinks the imagined exhibits are too expensive to ever produce, and in any case Jon will be well-flung toward Mars before they come to fruition. Instead, for the first time, she tells him a different truth: “It’s going to be you.”

“No,” Jon says. “Rick is at just another level of fitness. He’s clearly better.” But even as he speaks, Luisa can locate the lie threading his words. Knows that he feels it as clearly as she does.

“Do you remember when we met?” she asks.

“Tell me,” he says.

“I was at the coffee shop. I went there every Saturday to apply for jobs. And this one day, you sat at the table next to me. You asked if I would drink a coffee with you, and I said I already had one. So you asked if I would get a drink with you instead.” It is hard for her to recall Jon’s face from this day, back when it was only a face with no real significance. A collection of ears, eyes, nose. Mouth. She can more clearly remember the burnt cardboard taste of the coffee.

“You left some things out.”

“I know,” Luisa says.

“I couldn’t think of a way to talk to you. And then this Saturday, I’d finally decided, but every seat was taken. I just sat at the bar, watching in the mirror the whole time for when I could sit with you. And I still didn’t know what to say.”

“Do you ever wonder,” she asks, “what if that man hadn’t left his table?”

“No.”

Luisa has. They met a month before she accepted the job at the museum, a time when she felt faced only with possibility, when it felt like a comfort to close off some of her paths. She wonders at this now, why she felt so sure in dismissing her body’s cues, at how easy it is to accede to a person, a job, a life, knowing they aren’t right. “I’m going to miss you,” she says.

He is silent.

“Tell me about your next challenge.”

He tells her how in the morning they will be repeating mental challenges to exhaustion. They’ll be suited in the pool to simulate zero- gravity, and beneath the water they’ll manipulate torso-sized Rubik’s Cubes, they’ll draw foam puzzle pieces into position on the tiled floor. Challenges with enough of a visual element that viewers won’t complain again of boredom.

“Do you feel prepared?”

“Sure,” Jon says.

She doesn’t think he is being honest. She doesn’t think he really feels prepared. How could anyone? When they hang up she sees they have talked for twenty minutes, their longest conversation since he left for the show and possibly their longest conversation in years. He is leaving, Luisa reminds herself. He is leaving for a year’s flight, he is leaving for a planet so cold that she is only able to comprehend it as a kind of heat—as a cold that burns. He is leaving for a planet where he will, suddenly, weigh seventy pounds instead of nearly two hundred. But these are only facts, and though she cannot stop herself accounting for them, she is no longer sure whether they mean anything at all.

—

The wool manufacturer sends a box of micro-fiber merino shirts. The enclosed letter details their resistance to odor, allowing them to be worn for weeks on end. “There’s no laundry in space” is underlined twice, a fact which Luisa stores for use in a future exhibit. She tucks one of the shirts into her purse and later, in the bathroom, slips it on beneath her sweater. The fabric is silken and cool. “What about selling these in the gift shop?” she asks Robert when she brings the remaining garments for his inspection. Each one costs hundreds of dollars, money woven into the moisture-resistant wool and stitched into doubled seams. He likes the idea enough that Luisa’s assistant spends the afternoon on the phone with the manufacturer.

When Jon calls that night, Luisa doesn’t want to hear about the challenges. He describes them anyway. She is at their apartment, holding the hem of her shirt between thumb and forefinger as Jon talks about trying to slot puzzle pieces into place with the weight of all that water pressing down on him. “It won’t feel like that in space,” he says. “None of this is anything like what it’ll be in space.”

What he is saying, but isn’t saying: that he made it through. That it’s going to be him. “You’ll figure it out,” Luisa says. “They’ll put you through the normal training program, with everyone else.”

“But they won’t.” He explains one of the puzzles, how he couldn’t figure it out. Which way to turn the pieces, the water’s weight, how he could hear his own breath percolating through the suit. He will be home tomorrow.

Luisa smooths the shirt’s fabric. For so many days she has told herself the story of his going, and now she is unsure how to compose herself to this new reality. Perhaps it is not so different from the old reality, how things were before he left. “I’m sorry,” she says, first because she thinks she should and then because it is true. “I’m so sorry. You must feel—”

“They’ll still want to do some interviews,” he says, “since I was a finalist.” He tells her to expect a call from one of the producers, they’ll want to interview her solo, and then together. A special episode rounding out the contestants’ lives.

She wears the shirt to bed. Before lying down she opens the closet and each dresser drawer, thinks of how they would have looked half-emptied. Not bad.

—

Jon’s loss is big news. It is the only news. Former astronauts appear on television to discuss the difficulty the winner, such an oddly-sized crew member, will present—how he won’t be able to share in the store of standard-sized suits the astronauts normally use. There’s an exhibit in that, Luisa thinks, and when she shares the thought with Robert he touches the back of her hand in what she now recognizes as his only available gesture of sympathy. It is a move, she suspects, that she will one day find illustrated in the dog-eared managerial handbook wedged amidst the knitting books shelved behind his desk. A page labeled “consensual non-sexual touch,” she thinks, sliding her hand back to her lap.

She leaves work early to be home when Jon arrives with the producers. The cameras appear first, armed with questions: “How did you feel when you imagined your husband was going to be a hero of the space age? Did you always see Jon’s interest in space travel? What do you think he might have contributed, as the first Martian biologist? How do you feel, with him coming home?” There is a role to play here: the woman rescued, at the last moment, from grievous widowhood. Though she has just left the office the producer insists they return so she can be filmed typing at her desk, and standing before the wasteland of the future wing. The makeup woman, who between every shot runs forward to powder Luisa’s forehead, hands her a jacket they say Jon wore through most of his trials. “Hold it to your face,” the woman says. “Smell it.” For minutes Luisa presses her nose to the jacket as the cameraman gathers angles. It is glossy, it smells like detergent. They blot wet Q-tips around her eyes, “for the shot,” and when they drive back to the apartment and Jon is waiting for her Luisa is surprised to find herself crying, really crying. Her face blotching but the producer happy.

“I guess I should apologize,” is the first thing Jon says, brushing her ear so the mics can’t pick it up, and she doesn’t know how to answer—how to explain that even she isn’t sure why the tears.

“I was ready to donate all your things,” she says, but this isn’t right. There is no way to reach the place she wants to go—to imprint her story on him in the way he has her. For the rest of her life, she thinks, she will be only the wife of the man who nearly went to Mars; for the rest of his life he will remain himself, Jon Gonders.

The crew follows them inside, to see them side by side on the sofa, hands clutched. Leaning into each other and sharing a beer, Jon’s first in months. After they leave, Luisa is unsure how to behave or even where to look. To speak to Jon’s face feels unnatural after so many weeks with the phone pressed to her ear. “Are they going to air it?” she asks. “All our conversations?”

“Maybe,” says Jon, and then, “Yes.”

He pats the sofa, as if trying to remember it. The top button of his shirt is still undone from when they unclipped his microphone. Luisa cannot feel her face beneath the layers of powder.

“I can sleep out here tonight,” he says.

“Robert will probably want you to come out for the exhibit. You’ll be such a big draw. It’ll be a real boost for the museum.”

By eight they are both feigning exhaustion. Nothing more to say. Luisa starts to collect the extra blankets and pillows for him, but of course he knows where these are, it’s his home as well, and finally she retreats herself to the bedroom where she can listen, from this safe distance, as he readies himself for sleep.

—

The launch is confirmed for early June, only six weeks away. The new wing won’t be complete, but Robert decides they can still open the exhibit to coincide with the launch: they will use temporary cases, it will be a final fundraising push. Astronaut Academy airs updates on the winner’s training, and updates on the losers, and because of this—because of all their conversations packaged for public consumption—Luisa feels no guilt at driving boxes of Jon’s clothes and video games and books to the museum. “On temporary loan” is how the pieces will be labeled, but they could stay forever, that is her thinking. She and Jon move around the apartment like wrong-sided magnets, always bumping away from each other, and there must be an action to perform or a decision to make but there is so much work at the museum—and Jon has so much to do as well, figuring out his next step in life, calling his former employer, submitting dozens of job applications, managing interview requests about the show.

Luisa outsources most of the launch planning to her assistant, billing it as “a great development opportunity.” This a piece of trickery she recalls from her own early days at the museum, when for eight hours a day she sat before the door of Robert’s predecessor and would seize on any non- administrative task offered. The girl reports her progress daily, telling Luisa all about the loaned screens on which they will stream the launch (“life- size,” supposedly) and the plastic champagne flutes with clots of starred black galaxy trailing down their stems. “It sounds amazing,” Luisa says, and “You’re doing great work.” Increasingly she finds that she wants only to rest her face on the desk and remain there, prone, until all these responsibilities have passed her by. She thinks all the things she cannot yet muster the strength to say: I don’t care about wool, and I’m tired of this exhibit, and I want a divorce.

With two weeks to go, in late May, the apartment’s air conditioning breaks. It is already broaching a hundred degrees, and watching Jon prod at the unit like he’s equipped to repair it, Luisa has this moment—just a moment—when she thinks of the alternate version of his life. How close he came to being someone with a bolded name buried in a history book, the first man to raise potatoes and crickets on Martian soil. “I can figure it out,” he insists, and for days Luisa swelters in her space-capable merino shirt before he admits defeat and calls the landlord. How is it possible, she wonders, that this man was nearly declared humanity’s future, and all because he can sit quietly in a room by himself. She can do this as well as him and all their days feel like they are trying to prove this to each other, their ken for silence, the minutes and hours dragging uncomfortably behind them until they arrive at launch day, when they stitch themselves into their black tie wear and make the apposite remarks on how nice they look.

Her recent involvement has been so slight that Luisa is able to feel something like awe, seeing the exhibit. All the construction equipment is gone, and the watered ground has a Martian tendency, dirt tinted red by the temporary lights staked around the site. Blue-lit Lucite boxes hold ribbed gloves and boots and helmets, just one item per box both to stretch the collection and, she thinks, to give more room for reflection. “This is what we’ve made.” One broad rectangular box holds twenty Merino shirts, all facing forward above a drawing of the rocket’s path to Mars. Waiters in white jumpsuits circulate with glasses of wine, and despite the evening swelter and the crowd, all their questions and babble, Luisa admits that her assistant has done a good job. More than a good job, she has done a better job than Luisa would have. She couldn’t picture any of this, and now here it all is, the launch screen positioned so it’s framed by the museum’s white columns just across the street, so that at no point in the evening can their guests forget where they are, who made this night possible. She holds a glass of wine, Jon has vanished into a cluster of potential donors, the wool manufacturer is at her elbow wanting to discuss the gift shop partnership. A collective gasp, hundreds of breaths as one, when the screen flickers on to the launchpad, its trembling rocket.

Robert finds Luisa before she can think herself invisible: already, he has a fifty thousand-dollar check folded in his pocket. “And more where that came from!” he exclaims, toasting her. She recalls her first days at the museum, when Robert was a Special Projects Manager and would walk her through his exhibits, hand brushing her lower back, guiding her.

“That’s amazing,” she says, and reminds him that it was her assistant who did all this work. A glimpse of Jon, encircled and enthralled, it looks, by his own story. Everyone is gathering, as if by instinct, before the screen, and then the audio comes on—there is a moment of silence and then the sound of all that future, thrudding beneath their feet. “Excuse me, excuse me,” Luisa whispers to people who are not listening, overcome by the need to not be in this crowd, to not be among them in the moment.

On the street, the sound falls away. No one is out, everyone is watching the launch; no cars or buses pass. Luisa finds herself on the wrong side of the screen, but gazing at it she can find the outlines of the ship and imagine its trajectory. The faint tap of heels to her left, at the other end of the screen: Jon. For a minute they look at each other, she looks at him and marks all his features she must by now know: ears, nose, mouth. They are beginning the countdown. Ten, nine, eight… She turns away to face the screen. It is beginning, now.

*This story originally appeared in The Florida Review 46.2.

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