Sympathetic Resonance

by Mariah Gese

“I feel caught in an altered state of gender. I’m being in my body in a way I didn’t know I could.”

and neither any [ ] nor any
holy place nor
was there from which we were absent
no grove [ ] no dance
                 ] no sound
            [
—Sappho, trans. Anne Carson 


My hearing began to disintegrate in my mid-twenties, around the same time as my gender. Disintegration is the distinct and tactile feeling I’m left with—I held them both in my hands and watched them crumble apart. It feels strange to talk about it, so I don’t. Words leave me by a somewhat treacherous path. When they arrive on my tongue they are crumpled.

Now I only catch the tail end of the things you say. I have to fill in the rest myself, a game of imagination that’s lately become interpretive too, my recursive obsession with what I didn’t hear you say. It’s maddening.

I love listening to you. I eavesdrop on everything. Sometimes I write down what you say, sometimes I don’t. My notebooks are full of fragments of other people’s minds—a sound bank, a levee built without knowing it.

I prod the crumbling loss like a loose tooth. What else have I missed hearing, what else will I never hear again? At certain times in my life I have been a musician. I have a frightening nostalgia for those times now, and to soothe this fear I think of ancient music. Will the sounds I once heard be forgotten too, warped by my memories? I search for context to help me put aside my fear, jealousy, anger. I know I’m fading in good company, part of a thousands-year long echo.

The Colossi of Memnon are twins, two stone brothers crumbling into the desert. One used to sing every day at dawn, defying the loss of his original name, his waning connection with others. Sound connects us insidiously. It brought tourists to him, to hear the voice of god or be given ancient advice. It brought Septimus Severus, Emperor of Rome, who wanted that connection so badly that he restored the decaying statue. He restored it to muteness, repairing the stone and unknowingly stealing its voice. It’s unreasonable to hold a grudge for over one thousand years, and yet I resent Septimus Severus. I would have liked to hear the colossus sing. Historians tell me it might have sounded like a lyre string breaking, or a slap against the rock—a raucous voice. 

I like being talked to. It never ceases to flatter me. I befriend cheerful, noisy people. I admire that they always have something to say. 

We know the brain is recursive, thinking in echoes and echoes. Repeating fragments to itself until, like a centrifuge, meaning is sifted out. Why do we never tire of this? We make repairs to history with what detritus we can find in the widening gyre.

Of all the ancient characters, I think of Echo the most. Too talkative, too distracting, she was cursed by the goddess Hera into silence, able only to repeat fragments of what she hears. I can only hear fragments of what is said. Like Echo, if I wish to be part of a conversation I have to be imaginative. I feel a recursive connection to her, imagining over and over what she can’t say.

When Anne Carson translated Sappho, she was accused of liking the gaps more than the words. I don’t blame her. Who could resist setting to imagination what could never be set to paper?

In her essay “The Gender of Sound,” Carson reminds us that Sophocles described Echo as “the girl with no door on her mouth.” She outlines the ways feminine noise has been sculpted since antiquity to be heard as monstrous, lewd, and wild. This echo still reverberates in us, “putting a door on the female mouth,” as Carson says.

My hearing and gender are things I rarely thought about before, assuming they’d always exist in the feedback loop that made them. Here I am, carelessly letting them break apart into their components. No, I believe I am taking care—I’m taking my time, I’m watching things unfold. Maybe something can be salvaged from this.

Narcissus looks into the pool to be reassured that he exists, and he is enraptured by this impulse. Gazing into his reflection is what creates it, or rather, what makes it his. His understanding of himself is reflected back to him, and he is relieved to find it whole and beautiful. Perhaps envy is what draws Echo to him, not love. She is only the reflection, severed from self. Echo cannot collect herself into a whole. She is untethered resonance seeking a sympathetic ear.

The purpose of hearing, because I’d like to give it one to help me think, is to protect the body. It’s to keep us from the closing jaws of the predatory animal, to make sure we’re always in on the joke. Hearing is not special this way—all of our senses work towards this purpose. And yet we don’t need this from all of them, because of our sympathetic resonance with each other. We pool our waxing and waning resources, our senses. It gives me relief to think this way, to recognize my personal abilities as adaptive and communal.

Community is the mythic protector of the body, mythic because we often fail to believe in it.

The purpose of gender is not to protect the body, but to reflect the self. To sound the depths of being and be reassured that we are there. Community can also reflect the self. It can be a beautiful flower-strewn reflecting pool; it can be a cacophony. 

I struggle to articulate my relationship to gender, its purpose in my life. When I looked at it too long, it fled. Echo retreating to watch from among the reeds. I like to think of my gender as a novelty plate I can take to the thrift store and abandon, knowing someone will come in and need it, delight in it. Knowing it could soon inhabit a landfill. Once my gender is an object, it can be unmade. I like to understand the components of things, to know how their parts can be reused. 

Looking at the components, I learn that hearing functions by vibration. Every object vibrates at its own peculiar frequency, and resonates with like objects. It’s strange to think about our bodies vibrating, even though sometimes we can feel it. I know my eardrums vibrate to conduct sound through my body, to my brain. I have to think about this subtle, constant vibration in order to accept its strangeness. It’s not strange to think of my body as an object—this thought doesn’t give me pause like it used to.

We learn from training astronauts that too much vibration can shake your body into sickness. Perhaps it could shake you apart.

I’ve become more sensitive to the vibration that accompanies sound. I’ve become more sensitive to how gender is experienced by my body, and that is a vibration too. In affirming moments, I’m aware of my gender through sympathetic resonance, a reflection of sorts. Imagine the pleasure of feeling and hearing a harp string plucked. Synchronicity. A sense of being tuned in.

When I’m around other genderqueer people, I resonate with them. We are like a full set of strings, in tune and making a vibrant chord. I don’t remember this about being a woman. 

When Echo sees Narcissus for the first time, she’s already been struck dumb. There’s nothing to say. Instead she resonates with him, with her whole being. Maybe love at first sight is just that, bodies resonating the exact same. Love at first frequency.

Like the ego, gender takes on substance and matter. The ego is abstract until it’s too big. Gender is abstract until—what? It’s too what? Standing in front of a full-length mirror in the wrong outfit, on the wrong day, I’d say it’s too ill-fitting. I look like I did when I wore my cousins’ basketball hand-me-downs. I look small to myself, drowning in a dumb shirt from the early 90s. Other times I echo my late teens, slinking into a too-short dress to impress someone that I know is not me, that I didn’t care was not me. Gender can be too revealing. 

At what frequency does my gender resonate? 52 Hz like the loneliest whale? Her voice is too high to be heard by other whales, who sing at 15 to 25Hz. Her only recourse is sight. She can only look on as her Narcissus wastes away to his own reflection, staring down, listening past hearing. 

Further down. It makes sense for gender to resonate lower than most people can hear. Perhaps 19Hz. Perhaps this is what causes the gut reaction I sometimes see at the bank, the grocery store. I resonate on “the fear frequency.”

We can hear from 20,000Hz down to 20Hz. The high shriek of a dolphin to the low rumble of an elephant. Both exist outside of our range too, dolphins above and elephants below—animals with secrets to keep. Elephants use infrasound to communicate across large distances, making noise that is essentially a vibration, felt deep though the earth. 

Infrasound is a warning. Lower than the growl of a predator. Sound reduced to feeling. At 19Hz, a sound is no longer a sound, it’s the hair-raising feeling of a ghostly hand on your neck. The lurch of someone stepping over your grave. 

Some scientists think infrasound could explain many supernatural phenomena. Being exposed to infrasound can make you afraid. It can make you ill. It can begin to shake you apart. 

The engineer Vic Tandy was terrorized during a late night in his lab, suddenly aware he was being watched. He looked up to see a chilling gray shape floating at the edge of his vision. In a panic, he fled. The next day, he reverse-engineered the cause to a broken fan in the lab, sending out waves of infrasound. The gray shape had been a hallucination of vibrating eyes. Unsympathetic resonance, a silent cacophony.

Unease, revulsion, nausea, chills, discomfort, a prickling sense of impending danger. All symptoms of a sound we can only detect in an unfamiliar, frightening way.

Is there an infragender, resonating too low to understand? If infrasound is their conduit, it makes sense that the only emotion a ghost can communicate to any living body is fear.

Here’s where the metaphor falls apart, of course. We can understand. 

I’ve always been more of a ghost hunter than a scientist. A rapt listener in the shadow of the campfire, collecting scary stories with glowing eyes. Beyond fear there is an exultant clarity, an addictive knowledge that you’ve braved the wilds of your mind and found some glittering object, some rare prize. A relief. We love to laugh at our own fear, when the mood is right.

Is fear why Hera cursed Echo? Because of Echo, Hera failed to catch Zeus on any of his frequent affairs. Echo was commanded by Zeus to distract Hera—I don’t know, flatter her, say things women like to hear. It was easier to silence Echo than contend with Zeus. To void communication and choose fragments of things already said. Echo enacts Hera’s silence.

Sometimes, if you want to hear a dead sound badly enough, you can resurrect it. There are archaeologists who study lost sounds, or rather, the trailing empty echo of where they once rang. Archaeo-acoustics. A field I will be an expert in later in life, my subject being myself, my primary sources being my memories of each noise I can grasp before it fades. 

Noise can be used this way as a tool. Ancient oracles used it to create mystical and lasting authority, prudently anticipating their own decline into history. There must be smoke, aesthetic chanting, drugs, and a hallucinatory tool we left in the past—ultrasound. Sound engineers now tell us that many neolithic structures may have been constructed with resonance in mind. 

Ultrasound soars above our fear frequency, resonating at something like 111Hz. In a telling binary, this one has been dubbed “the holy frequency.” Loving reconstructions of a more complete Stonehenge tell us that the mythic quality of the stones may have been enhanced by this holy vibration. Feelings of awe are tricks of the body, feeling what it can’t hear. 

Some speculate—I too speculate—that ultrasound was used by ancient priests to induce an altered state of consciousness in their followers, a spiritual awakening. To erect a presence where the crucible of the body has reduced sound to a hair-raising awareness. Are gods and ghosts just our bodies responding to a feeling we cannot name? On one side of the coin, a trick; on the other, transcendence. 

If altering your state of consciousness is experiencing your mind in a new way, the same can be done with other states. I feel caught in an altered state of gender. I’m being in my body in a way I didn’t know I could. It feels exhilarating, maybe inexplicable, and like drugs, heavy with judgement. To alter your mind and body can be dangerous—an altered state of body we all experience is illness, death.

Echo’s curse is always expressed this way: she can only repeat the last thing she’s heard. It never says she has to. 

Would choosing silence compound Hera’s crime against her? Echo loved to talk. I love to be talked to. I would choose other people’s words over none.

Echo can pick and choose which hand-me-down words to make hers. I pick and choose gender expressions the same way—the face I see most often in the mirror is wry, attentive, unrelenting. People tell me I always look upset, and I am. How could I not be, worrying that being known is a vulnerability too great to risk, and too important to deny?

The relentless urge I feel is towards neutrality, invisibility. Outside of the binary of perception, on another frequency. I relent with the guilt that comes with this craving, with all of my cravings. I’m not a neutral person, and I wouldn’t want to be, but I’d like to feel empty, at peace, calmed. 

To altar my body, my mind.

The story ends in shame—Narcissus did not want her. Echo fled, the resonance she’d felt now beating down on her like a drum. Shame because she felt it still.

I admit I’ve tried to alter the state of my mind. Armed with chemicals, my mind can shake free of guilt and doubt and fear, a bodily relief. There’s such pleasure in that, in releasing the guilt, like the feeling of sunlight on your winter skin. This feeling follows me back to my standard mind, thinking, should I feel ashamed that the only time I can revel in a non-sexual bodily pleasure is when my body shakes me free of it? In my notebooks, I write over these thoughts in a different color—you don’t owe shame your existence. You don’t owe.

Some unrelenting pleasures: the thrum of an instrument against your body, cradled to you to coax out sound. The metal press of strings into the meat of your fingers, the echo of this sting days later. I don’t like playing guitar, but I do like to hug one sometimes. Strum. Pulling a bow across the lowest string of a viola, feeling the growl of horsehair grip metal and then give way.

In a symphony orchestra, you become one vibration in a sea of many. The first composer I resonated with was Beethoven; I felt us resonate in a chorus, myself and the other child musicians. We were lifted out of ourselves. I felt such a community with that orchestra, made of teenagers from nearby towns, whose names I didn’t even know. 

I think of him again, now that I hear less every year. I like to wear his famous scowl. My gender expression is sometimes Beethoven. His friend Anton Schindler encapsulated his drama perfectly for us, in the title he scribbled over one of Beethoven’s manuscripts: “Rage Over A Lost Penny.”

The intensity I felt while playing Beethoven didn’t crystalize for me until later in life—I had been feeling passion, joy. Bodily, completely. Perhaps at that time I’d resonated on the holy frequency, the recursive act of creating vibrations in turn buoying my own.

In the end, Echo loses her objectivity. Fleeing Narcissus’ revulsion, she sheds her body too. She becomes her voice, and in the way of myths, the shadow of everyone’s voice. She leaves her body and becomes everywhere. I hope there was some kind of raging joy in this transformation for her. I hope Hera still hears Echo in every resounding answer to her own ever-embodied voice.

I wonder if I’ll always feel the resonance of gender, or if that too will cease to be an object—a string I will stop plucking or snap. Perhaps it will exist only as a fading sound, a social memory, an echo. Can I exorcise the ghost of my gender by changing the frequency at which it vibrates? I could dredge it up from infrasound and reign it down from ultrasound, like tuning a radio, making it visible and familiar to others. I suppose we all have something we’d like to distance from fear.

I have very good pitch. I am now a relentless listener. I can believe that this is my purpose, to preserve my echoes before they fade, in case they can be of use.

My brain worries thoughts like an animal worries a bone. If exorcised onto the page, I call that speculation--worry I've sharpened into a point. A thought doesn't have to be true to be worried, shaped, and it's a relief to find a purpose for that thought after all.

Mariah Gese is an artist and writer from a haunted swamp in New York. They received their MFA from Indiana University, where they were the Editor in Chief of Indiana Review. They like plants, math, and other scary things. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Adroit Journal, Split Lip Magazine, The Offing, Cleaver Magazine, and Lunch Ticket.

A New Song

by Anesu Mukombiwa

“It does not matter what we do—perhaps we argue about the patriarchy and my mother and I demolish the boys’ argument. Perhaps we watch the rain and speak of Western politics. Perhaps we tease him for being so old and he pities us for being so young—but we are together.”

Writing as process. 

Writing as a way of muddling through. 

This version of his death occurs on a good day. There is laughter and banter and beer.

There are wrinkles in the corners of his eyes now and I’m glad he looks this way, I’m glad he is older and softer and still here. Even as his voice quivers a low baritone now, it still possesses that commanding tone that could instantly reduce my brothers and I to silence. He can still make us listen. He isn’t any less of the man we knew him to be now—in fact, he is more. Unencumbered by the toil of guiding and providing for a family, he can finally move  back to his childhood home in the country with his love, a dream he spoke frequently about.  

It happens on a day when we know to expect it. God tells us it will happen and so we  are prepared. 

On this day, my brothers and I decide to carpool to the house on a blistering summer day. We stop frequently on the road to pick up some of my father’s favourite things—some  fire roasted corn from the vendors on the side of the road, some ripe mangos from Food  Lovers’ Market square, some Maheu from the Murehwa growth point. We blast reggae music and all sing our own personalized version of the lyrics like he taught us to. He always used to say he was ‘editing the song’ to make it better. 

When we get there, we find him and my mother curled up on the porch on a rukukwe. His face lights up as we all tumble out of the car, bearing the trinkets of his joy. On this day we have time to be together. It does not matter what we do—perhaps we argue about the  patriarchy and my mother and I demolish the boys’ argument. Perhaps we watch the rain and speak of Western politics. Perhaps we tease him for being so old and he pities us for being so young—but we are together. 

When finally, we are satisfied, when we feel there is nothing more to be shared, we say our goodbyes. I thank him for teaching me a love that clothes and cultivates. A love that can be tasted in an apologetic cup of lemon tea after a silly fight; a love that humbles itself  for the sake of its children. I thank him for being my best friend.  

In this version of his death, I am there.  

There is another version, the one my aunt recounts to me on the phone. It is the one where he suffers a heart attack in the parking lot of the Mbuya Dorcas hospital, mere feet away from the building that saves lives. It is the one where my mother watches in disbelief as  he breathes his last in my uncle’s arms. It is the one where I ignore his last two calls. 

The one where I never get to say goodbye.  

These are the real lyrics, the ones my brothers and I refuse to sing.  

I am editing the song to make it better. 

Coming to terms with our present reality involves forfeiting the many alternative realities we wished for instead—it involves laying down the what ifs. But considering what could have been is a great way to accept what is.

Anesu Mukombiwa is a multimedia storyteller and communicator from Harare, Zimbabwe. While her primary medium is creative nonfiction writing, her passion for storytelling has driven her to explore a variety of other forms, including videography, video editing, and audio editing. Currently, she lives and works in Boston, MA, as a Social Media Coordinator for College Year in Athens, a Greece-based study abroad program.

Editor's Notes: Bloom

 

Rachael Bohlander
The center cannot hold (gotta keep the devil down in the hole)
40in x 30in x 1.75in. Acrylic on paper on wood panel (2024)

Some plants take longer to bloom than others. Recently, the magnificent yet odiferous plant known as the “Corpse Flower” blossomed at the Botanical Gardens in New York City. The giant corpse flower, which takes years between its performances, is so-called because when it blooms, it releases a scent like rotting flesh, before its flower collapses after only a few days.

When I think of “bloom,” I don’t imagine rotting flesh, but something lovely coming to fruition. Still, corpse flowers are so precious because they remind us that even in the natural world, there are occurrences, however peculiar, that make their mark boldly. The corpse flower keeps us guessing, teases us with subversive notions of what a bloom can or should do.

As editors of this journal, we know the limits of a central metaphor, and do not wish to associate too intimately with the corpse flower. We would prefer in most instances to associate with cherry blossoms. Still, we admire the corpse flower’s stealthy yet daring existence, and this is something we would emulate, blooming daringly (and not always on schedule), but still worth the wait.

There’s frustration in anticipation, but satisfaction, too, when the blossom finally opens.

That’s all to say that we have been anticipating this issue for quite some time as we know so have some of our contributors and readers. The essays herein are striking, each in its own lovely and peculiar way, in the best speculative sense of that word, “peculiar.” Ultimately, we hope that this bloom both meets your expectations and challenges them equally.

We also want to take this opportunity to introduce Will McDonald, our new Managing Editor, and our Assistant Managing Editor, Olivia Roy.

Robin Hemley, Co-editor
February, 2025

We are happy to announce the theme for our next Issue #9:

Promise

Thank you and welcome to Speculative Nonfiction Viewing Season.

Consider the promise as widely as you can imagine. Promises made, promises lost, promises broken, promises never uttered, promises made mute by time, promises betrayed, promises reaffirmed. 

Promise is one of the few words that has no direct opposite. It is not a Janus word, meaning two things at once. You can break a promise like a locket, but can a broken promise be repaired?

The Editors of Speculative Nonfiction

PROMISE

Rachael Bohlander
Turning point
68in x 48in x 1.5in. Acrylic on canvas (2024)

The Latin word for promise is promissum from “send forth” so ponder, imagine, explore

and send forth your promising speculations. We eagerly await them. 

March 1 through June 15th

As always, please interpret this theme as you wish. To submit, click here.

 

"Time" is the Most Common Noun in the English Language

by Daniel Olivieri

“Just as fitting as the inventor of the watch being a locksmith is that the mythological Fates were weavers. The shortest threads sewing shops sell are 1800 feet long, the length of five football fields. Can you imagine how unwieldy it would be to handle all that thread if we didn’t have spools to wrap it around? The months, weeks, and years are the spools we wrap our time around. Without them, time would be as unmanageable as a tangled clump of thread.”

It is no accident that the inventor of the watch was a locksmith. A similar impulse underlies both contraptions. A lock keeps your possessions safe; a watch keeps the time. The difference, of course, is that while a lock will stop your valuables from being stolen, the best a watch can do is let you observe the exact rate at which your most valuable possession is taken from you. Has there ever been a thief as thorough as time? Masked and gloved, the cat burglar tosses a grappling hook through an open window, scales the brick wall of your home, and sneaks off with your diamonds, your grandmother’s antique silverware, your whole collection of Mughal era coins. Time needs no mask: it is invisible already. It needs no gloves: it has no fingerprints. If it did, those fingerprints would be on everything; it would be an accessory to every crime. With no bag to put it in, time takes not just the silverware, but the table. Not just the Mughal coin, but the Mughal empire. As they say, everything we’re ever given in this life we’ll one day have to give up. Time is what we give it up to. So who wouldn’t want to resist this robbery? Who doesn’t understand the wish to lock time away like a stash of jewels, to put manacles on it, to grip it with both hands?

It is our most idiosyncratic dimension. Distance and weight politely comply with the demands of the metric system. They are happy to be sliced into even tenths. Time is not so compliant; it refuses to be decimalized. The French National Assembly attempted this during the revolution—instituting ten hour days and ten day weeks. But the seven day week would not go into exile. It went into hiding instead. Priests kept calendars in secret. Instead of resting only on the tenth day, the décadi, some citizens rested on décadi and whatever day Sunday happened to fall on. The only person who proposed a workable schedule for leap years was guillotined before his suggestion could be accepted. After twelve years, Napoleon nixed this newfangled calendar and returned to the Gregorian one. The French had fought the days of the week and lost. This is no surprise: everyone loses to time eventually. And so we give time the concessions it demands: leap years, daylight savings, the occasional leap second. We cannot avoid it. Stand as still as you want: time will move you forwards nonetheless. Anyone who has ever barely missed a train or hurt a friend with a careless word is familiar with how utterly unforgiving time is. You want to shout at time to go backwards. “Just ten minutes! Just five minutes. Can you make an exception, just this once?” But time does not bargain. If it did, I would happily exchange half my afternoons for more mornings and evenings. And February—is there any market, foreign or domestic, that I can trade in my Februaries? I'd even do it at an unfavorable exchange rate. An extra twelve days of June, maybe? The closest one can get is to do what Arctic terns and wealthy people do and just switch hemispheres to get twice the usual allotment of summers per year.

But if time is eccentric and unforgiving, then at least it’s quite dependable. With their uniformity and certainty, calendars feel like periodic tables of time. You can see the last days of the previous month and the first days of the following month at the beginning and end, looking a little embarrassed to be caught in a picture in which they don’t belong. But while next year’s calendar might feel full of promise (who knows what I might be up to on August 7th next year?), the next millennium’s calendar registers as eerie. I do not know what cataclysms, invasions, and extinctions will have occurred by September 20th, 3025 but I do know that it will fall on a Tuesday. How odd is it that we say that a particular date “falls" on a day of the week? As if someone were holding the dates of the year aloft and dropping them down one at a time onto the unending scroll of week days.

But what if this person were to lose their aim? What if time were to abandon its trademark dependability? Thursday might overstay its welcome, squeezing Friday into just a few hours. Tuesday could get lost and not show up on time. The Sunday you had expected not due to arrive for another week. “Sorry, our mid-week yoga class is canceled—we ran out of Wednesdays to have it on.” This type of chaos has happened before. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the Julian Calendar into the Gregorian calendar, removing ten days from the middle of October in the process. But he didn't sew up the wound: he had October 4th directly followed by October 15th. But this is far from time’s only regularly scheduled irregularity. The days don’t always fit snugly into the year resulting in misfit days with no week or month to call home. The Baháʼí calendar has four or five intercalary months a year known as the Ayyám-i-Há during which believers exchange gifts and celebrate the transcendence of God above His attributes. The ancient Egyptian calendar had five epagomenal days which existed outside of any year. The ancient Babylonian calendar would occasionally have an intercalary month added to it by royal decree. While our ways of marking the days of the year have changed, so have the days and the years themselves. During the Cretaceous, the year was 372 days long and the day was 23½ hours long. The Earth is slowing down.

Just as fitting as the inventor of the watch being a locksmith is that the mythological Fates were weavers. The shortest threads sewing shops sell are 1800 feet long, the length of five football fields. Can you imagine how unwieldy it would be to handle all that thread if we didn’t have spools to wrap it around? The months, weeks, and years are the spools we wrap our time around. Without them, time would be as unmanageable as a tangled clump of thread.

Imagine if you were one of the Fates and you chose to unwind the universe? To spin the years back onto their bobbin, one week at a time. Sunday Saturday Friday Thursday Wednesday Tuesday Monday. Planes would move backwards across the sky, orca whales would open their mouths to let their prey spring forth suddenly unharmed, baseballs would fly back from the out field to tap against the batter’s swing and then zip back into the pitcher’s hand. Sunday Saturday Friday Thursday Wednesday Tuesday Monday. Workers would scurry around the pyramids, removing blocks. They would go back to before the Babylonians invented the seven day week and keep on going, adding the days of the week post hoc to the eons that came before it. Sunday Saturday Friday Thursday Wednesday Tuesday Monday. At some point, you would get back to the Big Bang itself and see whatever being, deity or demiurge, set it in motion and note down exactly what day of the week it all began.

But what if we pointed our attention in the other direction? A friend gave me a pirated copy of photoshop that had been hacked in a surprisingly sublime manner. They’d done it by somehow getting access to the variable that determined the number of days the free trial would last. That variable had originally been set to seven. This hacker had changed it to eleven million. That’s about thirty thousand years. I found this a bit disconcerting. One expects to confront one’s own mortality in a graveyard, not in a photo editing application. The Sumatran Rhino will go extinct, Gamma Cephei will replace Polaris as the Northern pole star, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, every word in every language currently spoken will fall out of use, Chernobyl will become safe to return to, the red giant Antares will supernova, and only then will I have to start paying for photoshop.

While it’s difficult to comprehend the passage of time on that massive scale, it’s also just difficult to comprehend the passage of time at all. Look out the window of a plane or from the top of a mountain and you’ll see space spread out beneath you as far as you care to look. But where do we go to get a panoramic view of time? How could we ever look at something we can’t possibly see? 

This is how my family did it. 

We always did it in the morning because my sister had learned in third grade that gravity slowly shrinks you throughout the day so that we are a centimeter shorter when we go to bed than when we wake up (we knew it was scientific and correct because it was in metric). Part of the ritual was that right before putting the pencil to the tops of our heads, my Dad would jokingly check to make sure that we weren’t standing on our tiptoes. The implication was that we’d grown so much that the possibility of cheating had to be considered. Once he’d confirmed we were not playing a trick, we would stand up very straight. It was satisfying to feel the wall flush against your back. I can still remember the pencil against my scalp as he’d move it back and forth to draw a messy line. Stepping away from the wall to look at the new line felt like opening a gift on Christmas or getting a new book out of the library. There was a special joy to that third of an inch of painted wall. It wasn’t just a little bit of wall. It was the difference between who you had been and who you were now. But when had this change happened? What could be more familiar than Monday afternoons and Wednesday mornings and Friday evenings? But these two pencil marks on the wall reminded you that as you ran for the school bus in the morning and cut out construction paper in art class and talked about your day at dinner, without you even knowing it, you were making your way up that wall. Each day seemed to leave you unchanged, but each year you felt immensely different. Who wouldn’t want to study this subtle, omnipresent force that existed nowhere but affected everything? Can’t we understand the need to create calendars and wristwatches and epagomenal days to have some way to comprehend this mysterious force we are all always caught inside?

This essay is essentially a 1900-word long highlight reel of my favorite time-themed facts spliced with my favorite time-themed daydreams; it's research merged with reverie. My life often feels like one long reverie that's only occasionally interrupted by the real world, so essays like this give me the chance to invite other people into the state of mind where I spent quite a bit of my time.

Daniel Olivieri is a software developer living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, The Avalon Review, Fourth Genre, and Litro, among others. The collaborative novel he contributed to, Mikado, The Cartographer, & the Attachment Postal Service is currently available from La Piccioletta Barca. His hobbies include carving owls out of wood and sewing pillowcases. You can find more of his work at www.epigraphing.com.

Painted Scar

by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

“Coyote inks a tattoo so aware of the pain he cannot stop talking endless questioning from music to weather to artist to art everything but the needle spinning in his arm he does everything he can to ignore the procedure…”

1 - 

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO as legend as map as path as coordinates through winds pushing back through labyrinth shadows across white bedroom walls descending again into nostalgic pull calling him back to haunted beliefs to jagged ruts to mud-memories to guilt to regret to sources unsure to the center of the maze to a smoking blur if only he could write it just one more time he could say it right he could break this rhyme as the needle bites into his pale arm he looks to wings to rise beyond —

2- 

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO of mixed-message meanings of inner wisdom of transformational change of intuition of unnatural luck of crossing worlds between living and dead the figure most favored by the bruja crone a shape-shifting creature beneath a silent moon with yellow eyes almost human a swiveling head a mid-flight demon if you ever see one make the sign of the cross yet when he was a boy in his living room cot the broken stray his mother adopted to heal sat atop her perch as he drifted to sleep a feathered shadow he could barely see a night spirit presence ushering in dream —

3- 

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO through the smoke of piñon through wings gliding silently through his childhood home to an aspen bark crescent split by lightning where the nightbird watches over his family through unflinching eyes a widowed mother rescuing her past an artist uncle inside him a priest an older brother fleeing their dead father’s spirit their whispering three sisters gathering closer to hear it an orphaned grandfather who once slept in a cave a restless grandmother whose rosary would save and the boy with the pencil chasing shifting shapes these hidden faces she revealed with her gaze —

4- 

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO a lifetime too late to mark a passing he can never quite face on a cloudy day in August 1964 his father turned to his mother beside the hospital door through a mist of rain with a final cancer breath unable to explain the man he had been to the five young children he left behind each bequeathed an absence to define from a cardboard box in a hallway closet a tarnished ashtray a broken watch but with a split-toned pigment written on skin his negative space becomes a gift —

5- 

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO so aware of the pain he cannot stop talking endless questioning from music to weather to artist to art everything but the needle spinning in his arm he does everything he can to ignore the procedure while the point he knows is embracing fear yet he looks away as he always has blind to blood perhaps it will pass this belief this illusion his one true faith until the piercing scratching hits him full in the face the depth of losses he hoped to avoid sink deeper with denial into an insatiable void when he finally turns he can finally see how a permanent wound can help him feel —

6- 

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO of opposing elements of obsidian black against the eggshell of his skin his mother’s New Mexican soil his father’s Iowa escape of one foot where he stands of one finger where he blames more blurred than blended than he initially seems which is itself is the problem the identity underneath this inner conflict now drawn as a badge to complicate his appearance at the last minute he adds a middle hue from the color wheel a shade of mixed blood to make it real —

7-

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO from an image he stole like the shards like the wire like the stones he pulled with his mother from the llano in the name of rescuing a vanishing culture an erasing of land yet never did they consider this a violation because his mother is rooted in ancestral sand yet only now guised as the trickster-thief can he see the irony behind his misguided belief and now with the borrowed imprint of an indigenous design he wears the evidence embedded in skin —

8 - 

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO to mark a transition from gate to door to border to intersection from one shape to another one stage to the next in passing in crossing in turning on his path to walk through the mirror to emerge from his past his constant searching for a place he can rest with this ceremonial symbol etched upon his arm to guide him through an obsession to depart to return his animal mask to its origin place so can he walk this earth with one true face —

9- 

COYOTE INKS A TATTOO that makes him smile when his eyes pass over the geometric design so precise the clarity so defined the line so perfect the balance he sought to find now manifest beneath his forearm sleeve for all to see its symmetry the wide-eyed owl with wings in flight its talons spread wide to grasp desire a painted scar at last revealing his own transcendence through perpetual reaching —

This might sound odd for an essayist and memoirist to admit, but I’ve never felt comfortable writing directly about myself. I came to nonfiction through journalism. The first-person “I” has never felt quite right. So I’ve had to find other ways into my work. “Painted Scar” is part of a hybrid collection exploring notions of self, ethnicity, culture, trespass, and personal reckoning through the shape-shifting persona of “Coyote,” New Mexican slang for “mixed” (or “mutt”), a label given to the narrator as an adolescent. The essays repurpose the derogatory elements of the slur into a mask through which the narrator views the liminal elements of his identity – real, perceived and imagined as well as past, present and future. Speculation, like the language, syntax and form, is akin to reaching for me here – reaching toward empathy, insight, resolution, and a sense of belonging that might never be realized. Like the essay form itself, it’s the speculative endeavor that interests me most - the attempt, not the destination, nor the grasping of a thing, but the seeking, which can become its own revelation.

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso for My Father , Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, and Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between. His work has appeared widely in such venues as New Letters, TriQuarterly, Brevity and Puerto del Sol. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation as well as the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize, Colorado Book Award and New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. He teaches at Colorado State University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

FLYWAYS

by Rose Michael

“The bird mimics, me. Birdly. Stands still on the windowsill as rain picks up. Pours down. Feathers pasted together with some evil effluent into … lawyer’s robes.”

March fires have bird bodies washing up onshore. Black cockatoos, rainbow lorikeets, crimson rosellas. Iconic natives – usually found on postcards or biscuit tins – cast onto our back beach. Not coated in oil but 

turned to coal. 

‘They look as if they’ve flown too close to the sun?’ you try. 

I reply: ‘as if they might emerge, Phoenix-like, from flames.’ 

The ocean dumps them, like a farmer tipping dead livestock – drought-damaged crops – onto the steps of parliament house. Evidence of an extinction event. Our ecological catastrophe

brought home by backhoe. 


‘Cockatiels are massing in the west,’ you say in April. We hear them on the radio, screaming down the wire. Native to wetlands, scrublands, bushland, their numbers fell when clearing began – for a while there few remained, but then: farmers’ crops proved as tasty as the diet they’d lost. 

And now? 

‘They’re making a comeback,’ I suppose. ‘Early settlers called them the Nymph of New Holland.’ 

You look at me with your head on one side. Bird-like yourself. It’s easy to see why you might be puzzled: cockatiels are hardly maiden-like. Quite the opposite. They aren’t so different – in size – to standard cockatoos. Only slightly smaller. Only slightly less likely to curl their crest aggressively. No wonder everyone assumed they came from the same family. But they’ve recently been reclassified. Not that I, of all people, am a stickler for taxonomies. 

‘Nymph is what scientists call immature insects. Cockatiels look female until adulthood.’ Though they can breed well before then.

And have been. Wild birds hooking up with their semi-civilised cousins – those raised in captivity, who’ve learnt expletives from bogan owners. Not just inter-species, but cross-class copulation!

‘A poor man’s parrot, they’re highly sociable and easily bored.’ I guess. Keen to put their nut-cracking beaks to bad use. Red-gum decks provide the perfect fodder for mongrel birds. Causing cages to be flung open and our rejected feathered friends – the distinctive colouring identifying housebound variations – let loose. To reproduce 

with local gangs.

Some city-siders believe the birds have it in for them. The detritus from their foraging – acorns and sticks and … shit – raining down on roads. A distinctly Aussie pestilence. 

It’d be funny if it weren’t so 

something else. 

At the thought of talking birds targetting cars you turn your head towards me: homing in. Reminding me of all the aberrant females – nymph-like or not – found in nature. 

‘Some species, in the western desert, are giving males the flick.’ I speculate: a scarcity of resources? Inefficiency of sexual reproduction? But if cloning were the answer, creating a society of queens who reproduced via virgin births, why did only one in a thousand species do it? 

Because closed communities have higher deformity rates. Less resistance to parasites. Like a photocopier constantly reproducing an original until pixels become blurred; eventually distorted beyond recognition. I imagine: 

chains of DNA strands uncoiling, uncoupling, 

a blueprint fading to faint watermark. Sexual reproduction was expressly designed to create genetic difference – between generations, as well as siblings. Inviting variations which, might, result in atypical versions better equipped for new conditions. Mutations. Able to tolerate unforeseen, and unforeseeable, environments. 


‘The brown butterfly?’ You open May hands. Is this a conversation? We exchange facts like a frontier trade. Swapping trinkets, trifles, titbits of flying things that neither of us quite knows how to use. Scientist-me meeting scientific-you; neither neurotypical.

A flight, a flutter, of amateur naturalists. 

‘A one-degree rise in temperature has our plain old garden butterfly – the one with orange wings – emerge from cocoons a week earlier than last century.’ Which doesn’t sound too bad, but potential mismatches with other species could have a cascading effect. Unless connected animals and plants shift in sync, as temperatures rise and new weather patterns unsettle natural cycles, the whole ecosystem is at risk. 

Was. Will be.

I mirror your palms, press mine together too. Think of kindergarten artwork: a page, folding closed. 

‘As well as appearing earlier, our … common––’ I baulk at the word ‘butterfly can be seen in other areas.’ The indiscriminate feeders, which eat both native and introduced grasses, are already ubiquitous across eastern states. Where hadn’t they gone? Where wouldn’t they go?

Until it becomes so hot they estivate, undertaking that rare thing: 

reverse 

hibernation. Hiding from the heat of summer. Only emerging, now, to lay their eggs. 

‘I see them,’ you say, ‘on hot days. In the early morning and late afternoon. On the ground, near garden sprinklers, orange-ing the air.’


June brings a fairywren. ‘Male?’ It’s hard to tell when they’re in autumn eclipse. Have shed the black and blue plumage that gives the superb blue its fairy-tale name.  

‘Bird?’ You ask, as if it’s a verb. To bird. 

As if it’s imperative: bird! 

Our cryptic communications are as close as we come to this … catastrophe. All your friends; one day gone.

The smallest ever feathered hops forward and back. Fearless. So much food, why should she sleep?! No need to conserve energy when the air positively pulses with insects. All around us: trilling. 

Thrilling.

‘They are so picturesque, particularly when perched together for warmth in winter. Our favourite bird.’ We voted it so again. 

You peer into the bush where its nest must be. Or: 

not. They’re famously unfaithful. I school my smile:

‘Those frisky fairies, living lives of torrid affairs and deceit!’ Consider the tiny, tufted wren. Or absence of it in the empty nest. ‘They rear families monogamously – chicks from one crop helping feed the next brood. Both parents frequently disappearing into neighbouring territories on romantic forays. Only returning home to roost shortly before dawn.’

I sense as much as see the passerine dart into darkness. Infidelity in animals is more common than people think, sexual reproduction in the plant world more rare than anyone would care. We are all just trying to survive – different ways of working towards

true difference.

‘The wrens?’

‘They’ve seen no side-effects from our endless urban sprawl. Are outcompeting sparrows in the capital.’ Everywhere you look: wild things winning out. ‘Colonies can be found across the city’s parks and gardens. They’ve adapted to our changed – changing – circumstance. Pretty cunning, for something so cute!’ I chuck you under the chin. Love stopping my heart. ‘Have learnt to respond to the noisy miners’ alarm calls, while ignoring their many other vocalisations.’ 

Clever, very clever. It almost makes me hope as you 

watch her rodent-run, adopted to distract predators.


In July, we spy: a moonbird. Bodyweight doubled means she’s ready to fly 

north. 

‘The eastern curlew is nick-named for how far she’ll travel,’ if she lives: to be twenty. ‘To the moon and back! She doesn’t glide or soar but flaps like mad in her epic migration from our intertidal mudflats to her breeding ground in Siberia.’ 

She – we? me! – isn’t really a waterbird at all. If she falters over the ocean … Which more and more do, as the bird’s preferred feeding grounds are turned into factories and farms, city ports and holiday homes. We might have one of the longest coastlines in the world –live within coo-ee of it – but the beach that occupies our national psyche isn’t the stretch essential to the largest shorebird in the world. 

‘Her internal organs shrivel to almost nothing, saving precious grams of weight. She digests her own muscles on route. Saves nothing for the way back.’

All that way – home or away: depending on which continent you consider her’s. 

Unless, you’re right: 

‘her home is the flightpath itself.’


A lone … crow? Watches us. Walks across an August garden. Hops onto the other side of sill. Beating black wings and looking at me – through me – with red-shot eyes. Warbling an earthy, unearthly, melody. 

There is something familiar about our visitor. 

And something foreign. 

No carolling comes back. It’s bad luck, a single bird: I bob head, respectfully. Offer an almost, kind of, curtsey. 

‘Birdy?’ you ask.

The bird mimics, me. Birdly. Stands still on the windowsill as rain picks up. Pours down. Feathers pasted together with some evil effluent into … lawyer’s robes. ‘Crows have consequence for coming journeys,’ but I can’t remember what. But I can’t remember who 

ever knew that.

You aren’t listening anyway. Hands sudsing up her wings till nails turn talon with the stuff. Fingerskin crosshatched as avian feet. As she begins to sing. A sweet, fluting sound that lasts a minute or more. Our now-pied piper invites you to join in. Fluffs breast feathers. Pecks and picks to help clean and preen her emergent magpie self. 

Not Corvid, but: related. Shifting from one leg to the other, so humanly. As if, we are!, family. 

‘Their brain-to-body mass equals that of the great apes.’ I pass my old non-knowledge on. The ancients were right: highly intelligent. Singing so well – she, too, two!, sings so well – it’s no wonder they thought the birds would speak English … 

if you could only cut that drop of devil blood from their tongue. Tongues.


‘Maggies can recognise a hundred faces,’ I say, so pseudo-wise. ‘Are less likely to attack those they know come September’s swooping season.’ 

Our solitary songbird has become 

one of us. 

‘Why?’ you ask, persistent, insistent, when I say a single sighting is considered bad luck. 

‘---’

‘The other-era Victorians nearly hunted them to extinction.’

‘Why?’ 

‘---’

It’s my turn to shrug – look at me, learning from you. ‘Because death was thought contagious? Foreboding came from – with – their battlefield foraging.’

‘What battle? What field?’ My frame of reference is, thank God! not yours. 

‘It was said they were left off the Ark for being neither raven nor dove. For not wearing proper mourning. Non binary bird!’ 

Apparently they sang as the saved were herded in. And swore. 

Maggie can mimic four-score species – including human. You are right to make salutations, instinctively in keeping with the traditions of faraway ancestors you never knew. Never saw. Cawing loudly – as if you are her missing mate! Flapping wing arms. Blinking rapidly so you see – caw! – two birds instead of a single ill-omened one. Perched together at the end of the world. Repeating words, 

becoming bird. 


October plovers nest the dunes. Cute hooded dotterel hatch in the sand, run along the shore. Fluffy puffs of blown foam racing before

an unseen wind. 

‘The canine curfew has had the desired effect.’ I say, to myself these days. 

The extinction debt’s still there, though: new numbers may not be sustained. It’s a risky business – they have the longest incubation of any sanderling. Chicks can’t fly for the first month and are so very vulnerable, feeding at the water’s edge. Foraging in the seaweed wash.

Particularly if parents spend too long baiting humans away from their eggs. Leaving unhatched young to cook in the sun.

‘The loss of wildlife in what was once the state’s most biodiverse patch––‘

‘where ’roos were so plentiful they flocked like sheep’

––is on the turn.’


Wedge-tailed eagles breed. A November family circles us from on high. 

‘See!’ I – eye, aye! – spy. Pointing skywards. Words drying up. 

The one bird in the world that will win against drones – which the government swears are only for monitoring, by agriculture and mining industries. Only to 

observe.

‘Sea!’ ––eagles float on dream thermals overhead. Suspended, supported by the close-pressed air. Ready to turn on a dime and 

dive.

‘Fledgeling wedgies wingspans,’ I whisper, beneath human hearing, ‘can become twice that of metre-wide unmanned aerial vehicles.’ 

Take comfort in the thought. Feel hope, a giant winged thing, beat. And rise. 

‘Larger, if they’re female.’ Mother raptors always are the most aggressive. 


Raptors, in the top end, pick up burning sticks and twigs – firebrands no bigger than your finger. Drop them into dry grass to jumpstart a fresh blaze. 

Firefighters catch them on camera. Solo and co-operative attempts. I say nothing, not wanting to give 

the game away. 

Black kites too, use smouldering branches to drive lizards and insects into their path. The birds having cottoned-on to how a fire front flushes out a feast. Barbecuing our favourite foods. Smoking out victims – smaller birds too: there is no species loyalty; let alone inter-species allegiance. We lick avian lips and fly fly fly betwixt.

‘This is a true story’, I thought when I finished my third literary spec-fic novel Else. ‘It just hasn’t happened yet.’ What did I mean? That I set out to write about climate catastrophe, but instead wrote into neurodiversity. From the biggest (im)possible perspective, to cognitively estranging conversations closer to home. Hope was a conscious decision. A tale about the end of the world became, somewhere along the way, the birth of a new one. For every fact that seemed incontrovertible, I dreamt an alternative. I sought species on the brink of extinction to find a way in to an alternate future. Words are concrete, and allusive. Conclusions elude. This extracted experiment is my ‘speculative fabulation’, as demanded by Donna Haraway: a way of testifying and replying to our lived and living environment. Flyways is – more, and less – coalesced into an imagined, multiple, metaphoric truth. Home is … at either end of the road, or neither end of the road? Home is the road. And the way, the writing, flight itself.

Rose Michael is the author of The Asking Game and The Art of Navigation. She has published spec fic in Island, Griffith Review, Best Australian Stories, Meanjin and spec crit in The Conversation, TEXT, Sydney Review of Books. She is a senior lecturer in writing and publishing at RMIT and publisher of micropress Arcade Publications.

Sometimes A Child

by Rachel Tellus

“She smiles, though she is filled with worry and dread, the sinking feeling in the pit of her belly that says something bad is going to happen.”

The following is inspired by Tim Hurons' "Sometimes a Wild God.”

Sometimes a child comes to the table, all set for tea with tiny plastic cups and matching saucers, a pot of air off to the side. She wears yellow footy pajamas and clutches a stuffed toy monkey to her chest, her long golden hair tied back into pigtails.

She has something to tell you, something you need to know but don’t want to hear. Instead of asking questions, you lift the empty teapot and tilt it forward, pouring invisible tea. It could be cinnamon, all warmth and comfort, like Christmas morning. It could be mint, sharp and fresh and made of springtime. Either way, she lifts her cup. She brings it to her mouth. Her soft pink lips pretend to drink. She clutches her monkey closer and her eyes grow wide, as wide as yours did the first time you let yourself remember. They are the same shape, the same brightness, the same shade of blue. You recognize her tight smile. Her fleshy round cheeks and that button nose. You want to hug her, feed her, tell her everything is going to be fine. What happened back then can’t happen now. She is here with you, and you will keep her safe.

Sometimes a child sits at your feet, folding her legs in front of herself on the carpet like in kindergarten class, where the teacher once made fun of her because she couldn’t whistle. She’s waiting for you to notice her, to see her pastel-colored Holly Hobbie dress and her crooked blonde bangs, her small pearly teeth and skin as smooth as orchid petals.

She wants you to know that she’s scared, that she feels shame, that the people she was supposed to trust have hurt and abandoned her. She wants to tell you that her father drinks, that he comes home drunk and tickles her on the couch when her mother isn’t home, that sometimes during all that tickling her skirt lifts up and she tries not to laugh but her body laughs anyway. Her body betrays her. You close your eyes and wince, pulling back the black curtain that has always been there in your mind, shielding you from the worst of it. The curtain has protected you for years, for decades, but now the child is here, asking you to see what’s been hidden. Asking you to believe what she’s showing you. You get up from your comfortable chair and sit down next to her on the floor, crisscrossing your own legs so she can curl up in your lap.

Sometimes a child rides in the car, swinging her feet to the rhythm of music playing on the radio as you make your way to the grocery store, the post office, the swimming pool or the hiking trail. She smiles, though she is filled with worry and dread, the sinking feeling in the pit of her belly that says something bad is going to happen. She tries to be good, to behave, to do all her chores and homework. She tries to be perfect. Then maybe her parents will be proud of her. Maybe her father won’t drink. Maybe they can all get along like those families on TV.

She stares out the window, watching palm trees sway in the afternoon breeze, watching cars zoom through the city. She’s a long way from home, from the place where promises were broken and boundaries were crossed, where her father put a lock on her bedroom door to keep himself out, where her mother stayed asleep instead of waking up and asking questions, where no one said anything about anything because that would have made everything worse. You remind her there is nothing to be scared of anymore. She can say whatever she wants to say now. She can cry and scream and swear. No matter how mad she gets, no matter how lonely or sad, you’ll just keep driving the car.

Sometimes a child meets you in the garden, wandering among tangled zinnias and daisies, starflower and thyme. She touches the ripening tomatoes, the painted riverstones and the butterfly sculpture, its copper wings frozen in mid-flight. She tells stories that make her life sound normal, make her family seem whole. She keeps secrets so her mother won’t know the truth, so she won’t have to choose between husband and child.

You tell the girl it’s all right to be happy now. It’s all right to let go. She can leave the bedroom light on whenever she pleases. She can scatter toys and games across the floor, watch the dishes pile up in the sink. She can throw the front door wide and let every last secret spill out. No one will yell or punish. No one will make her feel shame. 

Then one day you find that the child is gone. She’s not at the table or in the car. She isn’t hiding in the garden or playing in the yard. You call her name, but she doesn’t answer. Instead of panic, you feel peace. You feel stillness and ease. She is where she belongs now, in her own past, in her own place. She may come back, and if she does, that’s fine.

Rachel Tellus is a freelance writer and essayist living in southern California. She holds a masters degree in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. When she isn't writing, she is listening to a podcast and/or trying to grow the perfect tomato in her backyard. You can follow her on Twitter @TellusRachel

Dear Nina: A Re-memory

by Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall

“Half-breed. Mongrel. Mutt. Banana. Mulatto. Oreo. Diluted. Hybrid. Mixed blood. Hafu. Us.”

1/16th

I want to share your story. The one of you, Nina, a mixed-race teenaged lesbian locked in a Japanese-American internment camp in the 1940s. But I cannot find you. Not among my stacks of history books, memoirs, ledgers, fictional accounts. I look closely at photographs searching for a longing glance between women. A girl holding hands with another girl. I see none. But I know you were there. And that I would have been too, among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned. Would you have found me, another mixed-race queer kid? Don’t worry, I’ll find you. This is me finding you.

Figure 1.  A White man points to an anti-Japanese sign in his barber shop [1]

You are ¼ white and ¾ Japanese, and I am hafu. Look at the asshole in this picture with that sign: “We don’t want any Japs back here—EVER!” Do you have compassion for people like him? I’m just glad he’s gone by now. If my mom ever had to see that sign, I would hold that image in my mind for a lifetime. That image of her body tensing, her lips pursed as she says not a word but looks him in the eye—something uncustomary in her home culture—just long enough and then leaves. That feeling of her holding my hand tighter, as I can sense her hoping with all her heart that he says nothing to me about being a half-breed. That image is seared into my brain, even though it didn’t happen. It could happen. It did happen to your mom and so many mothers and fathers. And to you.

Maybe you never knew that anyone who was 1/16th Japanese or more was interned if they were living in the designated at-risk areas, primarily the West Coast. No one told you that a person whose great, great, great grandparent was Japanese would have had to go due to the risk of being disloyal to America. Somewhere between 600 and 800 mixed-race families like ours were incarcerated. [2] I bet you never knew because you didn’t have radios or much trustworthy news beyond the camp’s newspaper the Poston Chronicle. 

Were you ever featured there? When I was your age, I was in the local paper for academic accomplishments like winning debate tournaments. I was never sporty like you with your strong running legs. My mom would cut out the tiny sliver in which I was mentioned. But this would not have happened if I were there with you. I would not have traveled around the state debating other kids about prison reform or retirement security. Ironic topics given that we would be in prison, our parents having lost all sense of financial security.

2/16ths

Or 1/8th. My sister’s children’s children will be at least 1/8th Japanese, possibly more. They would have been incarcerated with us. Bound together through the rules of blood quantum. Our blood cut and measured. Dissected. This is my blood. This is your blood. This is our test tube of queer Japanese blood. It is as godly as any other. If spilled on a white cloth, it stains. Stains the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt whose lesbian wife Eleanor tried to convince him that internment was not the answer. A New Deal for us, indeed.

3/16ths

What did your dad’s parents think of him marrying a fully Japanese woman? Is that what they wanted for him? What about your mom’s parents? Did they care that your dad was half white? In my family, we didn’t talk much about it. There was some tension between my mom and my dad’s mom. I knew they didn’t get along, but I figured it was your average mother-in-law strain like my grandma complaining that we didn’t’ visit more often. As an adult, I learned the root of the unease. My white dad’s mom was at first unwilling to even meet my mom, the Japanese woman my dad had chosen to marry. Grandma was not going to go to the airport to pick up my parents upon their arrival from Japan, where my dad was based in the military. As you always say, “that’s a bunch of horseshit if I ever did smell it.” I like the farmer in you from your dad’s side. My mom says she doesn’t blame my grandma for her chilly reception. Even when you were there in Poston, it was still unconstitutional in most states to marry across race. It wasn’t until 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws were determined federally unconstitutional. My parents married a mere three years after this court decision. Maybe my grandma would have one of those signs up about Japs like the guy in the barber shop. She loved me though. She did. 

Meanwhile, my mom’s parents who had every reason to be upset that their daughter was marrying a man from America, a country that bombed theirs, were welcoming of my dad. They welcomed him with food and said they could tell how gentle he was, how kind his heart. This even though they could look out their window and see people doubled over from poor bone growth due to radiation contamination. This even though my grandmother sat pregnant with my mom in an underground shelter as the A-bombs fired. And, you, your mother’s family close to Nagasaki. 

4/16ths

I have kids, Nina. They are ¼ Asian. They do not have Japanese ancestry like us; my white wife (Yes, wife!) birthed them, and our sperm donor is half white and half Filipine. If I had to be interned, I don’t know what she and I would’ve done. I asked Jen what she thought one night. It had been a long workday for both of us, and she was generous enough to sit and methodically untangle a multilayered necklace that had been sitting in my jewelry box for months. She said, it isn’t fair to speculate because it might sound as if we were passing judgment on the actual families who faced these harrowing decisions. She gently pulled a silver strand around a silver bead. She thought we would probably first think about our kids’ needs. Would they be more traumatized by being separated from me or by witnessing the camps themselves and perhaps not fitting in with the Japanese kids. We stopped the conversation because it was making her sick to her stomach. I speculate I would leave my children with my wife and go alone, our only chance to keep our kids out of the camps and our home from getting ransacked. And that is exactly what some mixed families did during the war. They split up. I clasped the untangled necklace around my neck, went to the kitchen, and cried. I wore the necklace to bed. 

5/16ths

One mixed-race woman, Virginia (Ginny) Matsuoka’s parents, remembers how quickly her neighborhood was cleared: “I was in school on a Friday; Sunday morning, I was in camp.”[3] In Ginny’s case, her Japanese father taught martial arts and moved to Colorado before the call to evacuate. So, he was outside of the military zone. Her white mother stayed behind to keep the family farm afloat. And Ginny and two of her brothers were sent alone to Tanforan Assembly Center, where the other kids wouldn’t play with her because she looked different. It was that way for you as well. The other kids keeping you at arm’s length because your hair a dark brown rather than black. And then, your queerness. 

6/16ths

Did anyone know about you and your girlfriend? How did you ever steal a kiss, an embrace, when the cell walls didn’t even reach the ceiling, and the swarms of people always aware, the ever-present guards watching, watching, watching? But maybe you couldn’t kiss for fear of being deemed mentally ill, a pervert with possible consequences as severe as lobotomy. Perhaps you did find a way. The two of you kissing underwater in a pond with darkness above. You were able to feel the softness of her lips.

7/16ths

Isn’t it odd how in the camps our race is obvious, but outside the camp, governments across the West went to great lengths to help soldiers and non-Japanese citizens  distinguish between Japanese and Chinese people—the two largest groups of Asian in the U.S. at the time? One racist military pamphlet offers the following advice for spotting a Japanese person:

I imagine us sitting together under a mesquite tree laughing at the images, getting mad about them. “Right now, I do expec[t] to be shot. . . and [am] very unhappy about the whole thing,” you’d say. I would lament not having a pronounced waistline, neither of us does. We giggle that we must be Japs through and through. I touch your shoulder. “I know you have a g-string hidden somewhere.” You protest. “Nah, but you know I’m trying to grow this beard, but my yellowness just won’t.” We inspect our toes for the tell-tale gap between the first and second. None. I put my arm around you. Your skin is pulsing warm.

“You know,” I insist, “we really can’t be JAPS.”

You laugh. “Because of our dads?”

“Because there is not a single woman in any of these pamphlets and posters.”

8/16ths

Half-breed. Mongrel. Mutt. Banana. Mulatto. Oreo. Diluted. Hybrid. Mixed blood. Hafu. Us.

How brave you are to live at a time when Asians and Asian-Americans were not legally allowed to marry Caucasians in most states due to anti-miscegenation laws. California had some of the most stringent laws in place. The hundreds of revolutionary, interracial Japanese and White couples in the camps traveled to Washington, New York, or other states that did not have such laws in order to marry. Those marriage licenses were honored in other states. Remind me to tell you about how LGBTQ people bucked the system in a similar way before gay marriage was legal on the federal level. Ironically, a marriage license was required if a Caucasian spouse of a Japanese-American internee wanted to give up their white privilege and enter or stay at one of the internment locations with their Japanese family. That means my dad, if he had gone to the camps with his family, would have had to show a marriage license. I don’t know if your dad would have had to do so.

9/16ths

I contacted my parents to see if my dad would have gone to the internment camps with me and the rest of us. Would he have stayed back and tried to keep our home and the family’s livelihood? Would my parents have tried to somehow petition to have my sister and me remain home even though we would likely face even more anti-Japanese taunting? These are not easy questions to ask in a family where painful topics are only whispered about, if ever spoken of. 

My mom, dad, and I are on speaker phone. I’m already sweating with worry that I’ll be shut down or that one parent or the other will say something accidentally racist. My mom, who still carries her Japanese accent, teases that she would go back to Japan by herself. “Goodbye to you guys,” she laughs. She used to joke about going back to Japan a lot when my sister and I were naughty. More seriously, she said she would likely go to camp by herself, but my dad then jumped in for the first time to insist we would all go together and left it at that. “Don’t ask me a crazy question,” my mom added. I was happy she answered my question at all. 

A month later, I read these words by writer and scholar Matthew Salesses: “The lesson here is that silencing a story makes the story impossible to change—and that all you need to do to silence a story is to pretend that it is over. The story of incarceration, and what it revealed about American desire, is a story that continues to haunt Japanese Americans, and the nation, generations later. This is racial and national melancholy.”[5] And I am haunted and asking “crazy” questions. I want to unsilence the stories.  

10/16ths

We might’ve had the chance to get out of Poston early! 

About three months after evacuation orders were declared, the government announced a Mixed Marriage Policy in memorandum form that allowed for some mixed-heritage couples and individuals to leave the camps and either move to the Midwest or East coast or possibly go back to their homes, depending on the assessment results. Original exemptions included the following:

1. Mixed marriage families composed of a Japanese husband, Caucasian wife and mixed blood children may be released from the Center and directed to leave the Western Defense Command area. [later revoked]

2. Families composed of a Caucasian husband who is a citizen of the United States, a Japanese wife and mixed blood children may be released from the Center and allowed to remain within the Western Defense Command area providing the environment of the family has been Caucasian. Otherwise the family must leave the Western Defense Command area. 

3. Adult individuals of mixed blood who are citizens of the United States may leave the Center and stay within the Western Defense Command area if their environment has been Caucasian. Otherwise they must leave the Western Defense Command area. [6]

11/16ths

Modifications were made to the policy over time such as specifying that adults (and usually children) of mixed-blood needed to be ½ or less Japanese to go home. Also, the leave allowance of a family with a Japanese husband and non-Japanese wife was revoked. The head of household had to be a U.S. citizen or citizen of a “friendly nation.” [7]

Nina, these legal changes mean you would have had to stay. You, being more than half Japanese and having a hapa dad, would have had to stay, and I, being only half Japanese with a white father, would likely have been able to leave. Neither of us poses a threat to national security, yet I would get to leave because whiter and supposedly more culturally Caucasian. Will you hate me for leaving? Is this why it is so hard to find you? 

12/16ths

You were never told that applicants had to demonstrate they had lived in a “Caucasian environment” prior to internment. Let me show you an application filled out by the staff based on an interview with an interned family:

Environment: 

Acquaintances – 70% Caucasian – 30% Japanese 

Diet – 100% Caucasian 

Customs – 90% Caucasian – 10% Japanese [8]

I guess this family couldn’t indicate knowing any Latine (Spanish in your day) or black (Negro in your day) people. But we both know mixed Latin American/Japanese families were there. I laugh with you about the staff trying to document how a family who was friends with us would ever calculate the race of their acquaintances. We couldn’t quite do the math on the fly. 

As a kid, my chart would have looked something like this:

Environment:

Acquaintances: 70% Caucasian--2% Japanese--28% F!@# the rest of y’all

Diet: 65% amazing Japanese food--30% Depression-era white people food (via my paternal grandmother)--5% unchartable in this schema

Customs: 60% Caucasian--40% Japanese with a dash of crazy

But ask me again even two weeks from now, I might give different percentages. My sister also would likely answer wildly differently from me given her access to Japanese culture near her California home. Plus, it seems that only the proudest Japanese patriot would say their environment was fully Japanese knowing that doing so would eliminate their chances of leaving the camp early. Then again, you likely didn’t know the rules of this roulette. 

13/16ths

In addition to noting the internees’ pre-war environment, many camp managers commented on the appearance of mixed-race families to help determine exemption or incarceration. A few of the descriptions from the applications as reported by camp staff:

  • Definitely of Caucasian appearance

  • Definitely Caucasian in appearance

  • Italian

  • Spanish in appearance

  • Appearance: All Mexican [9]

My sister would, I think, have been labeled as “definitely Caucasian in appearance.” She’s 5’10”, for example, which would have been unusual for a Japanese woman of the time. I might have passed as well, though my eyes appear more Asian to many, and my skin is browner than hers. Officials might have worried that placing my sister and I--half white--into the Japanese environment of the camps would taint our paternal Caucasian upbringing. We might become indoctrinated by Japanese ways and loyalties, by families like yours. The original intent of the MMP was, in fact, to protect mixed-race kids from being in a fully Japanese space. The goal was assimilation to white American, Christian norms. “Oh, Nina.” We laugh as I pack my bags. We cry as I pack my bags.

What strikes me about the details and debates around the Mixed Marriage Policy is the government’s desperation to be able to identify and define Japaneseness, but always and only in relation to whiteness. Defending and protecting whiteness seems to have been the primary objective of these policies, with possibly freeing some Japanese-Americans as an incidental subplot in the larger narrative. It is no mistake, for example, that the modified policy allowed only mixed-race families with Caucasian male heads of household to return home, while households including a Japanese man and Caucasian woman as a couple were denied release. It’s no mistake that an adult had to be half Japanese or less in order to leave, unless they were married to a white man. It’s no mistake that the Executive Order did not incarcerate swaths of white Germans or Italians.

14/16ths

14/16ths or 7/8ths. Sacatra was the term for a person who was 7/8ths black and 1/8th white. Well before either of us was born, Plessy of Plessy vs. Ferguson who was asked to sit in a separate train car due to being 1/8th black, was 7/8ths white. The one drop rule in action. An American concept that influenced the creators of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which allowed only people with “German or related blood” to become citizens. 

While the consequences of racial discrimination are devastating, “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” [10] A Japanese person may have more in common DNA-wise with a Norwegian than they do with a fellow Japanese person. You might have more genetically in common with a Caucasian guard at the camp than you do with the Japanese person sitting across from you in the mess hall. The same goes for Germans and Jewish people. 

15/16ths

Toni Morrison explains that history cannot always be trusted, as much of it remains untold; some accounts go “memoryless.” The history told by government records on the internment are facts, but not, as Morrison would say, “truths.” Writers are left to imaginatively “fill in the blanks” to give voice to the truths of the interior lives of those whose accounts have been lost, or nearly so. [11] Morrison speaks here in “The Site of Memory” about neo-slave narratives, however, her ideas shine light on a similar process of the lost personal accounts of Japanese-American internment.

16/16ths

This is my invention of a past that might otherwise disappear. This is my speculative account of you as your family interviewed for early release.

“I’m a girl,” Nina tried not to roll her eyes as she stood in her fitted white t-shirt and denim overalls. She could see the guy trying to decide. Can’t this idiot see my boobs?

Nina’s mother glared at Nina as the interviewer looked down at his clipboard.

“Sorry, manager Smith. We didn’t realize you were coming. My daughter would have dressed more appropriately.” 

“Alright, ma’am. Where is the head of household?” 

Nina jumped in, “Oh, my mom is. She does the finances and everything.” While Nina and her mother didn’t get along, she had always been proud of her mother’s independence. She liked that her family held to the Japanese practice of the wife handling expenses.

“Oh goodness, sir. No, my husband handles most of the expenses. I just handle the food and clothing costs. He is using the facilities at the moment and should return shortly.”

Nina turned to look out of the small window in their 20 x 20 unit, the morning sun catching the copper highlights in her brown hair. Rows and rows of rectangular barracks. She couldn’t see her friend Carol’s from this side. She could barely concentrate on anything other than the fact that they had kissed. They had kissed. She smiled. She couldn’t wait to tell Carol all about her mom’s pandering. How she wore a stupid flowing robe and high heels in the desert. And not just a low chunky heel. A narrow one. She turned back around when she heard Officer Smith’s voice. She stood up tall, hoping the officer could not detect what happened between she and Carol. 

“Ma’am,” Smith regarded Mrs. Mori. “I just need to ask you a few questions. Are you full-blooded Japanese?”

“Please sit down,” her mother motioned to one of two chairs in the room. “Well, I am an American through and through, sir. I almost became a Hollywood actress.”

Nina held back a sneer. Her mom was an extra in one movie one time. 

“Mom, you have to answer the question.”

“And I’ve sewn dresses for a few in the industry.” 

Smith nodded. 

“Write that down,” Mrs. Mori urged. Smith looked a little startled, but appeased her. 

“Alright, Mrs. Mori, it seems that your family has been at Poston for about two years.”

“Yes, but we really don’t belong here. My husband is half Caucasian and doesn’t look a drop Oriental.” Now Nina rolled her eyes. No wonder the kids made fun of her if her own mom was denying their Japanese origins. Nina hadn’t heard about mixed families possibly getting out of the camp early.

Nina’s dad walked in the door and reached out to shake hands with the officer. 

“How can I help you, officer?” Her dad remained standing. 

“I just have a few questions here for you. It looks like you are about 5’9” and 145 pounds? And what is your racial ancestry?”

“Yes, give or take five pounds. I’m half Japanese and half Caucasian. My wife is full-blooded Japanese, and Nina is, of course, mixed blood.”

Mrs. Mori folded her arms across her body and scowled for the briefest of moments. 

“Officer,” said Mrs. Mori, “We are very Americanized.”

The officer gestures toward Nina, “So, she is ¾ Japanese blood.” Nina’s hazel eyes went icy at this impersonal description of her. She sat on the cot made of old military body bags. Mrs. Mori gestured for her to stand back up. Nina felt like yelling, “Yeah, I’ve got ¾ Jap blood, and I kissed a girl. Take that, you pig!” Instead, her eyes glossed with tears and then she sneezed.

“Outside of the camp, before the evacuation, what percentage of your acquaintances were Japanese?” Smith asked Mr. Mori.

“Nina,” Mrs. Mori interrupted, “Where is your handkerchief? Ladies use handkerchiefs.”

Mrs. Mori passed a fresh cloth to Mr. Mori who passed it to Nina who grabbed the cloth as undaintily as she could and proceeded to blow her nose loudly. If she’s going to embarrass me, I’ll kick back.

Her dad seemed not to notice the jab, but her mother’s mouth fell open. 

Her dad responded, “Well, we mostly kept to ourselves. I worked as a copyeditor at the newspaper where there were no other Japanese. My wife had her own business as a seamstress in Japantown.”

Mrs. Mori stepped forward. “We had planned to move. We were working on moving.” This is the first Nina was hearing of any real plans of moving. She wasn’t surprised that her mom was actively lying. She almost expected that her mom would try to claim a Caucasian great, great-grandmother. She wasn’t sure which person she was madder at, her mom or Smith. 

As the officer left, Nina didn’t really want to shake his hand. She thought about bowing just to piss off her mom. But she did shake Smith’s hand because she wanted to see his notes. 

17/16th

A Meditation in Honor of Two Poston Girls in Love

I. 

Carol shoved her head under the pillow in the night and wished for Nina, blocks away. But the sound kept coming. Her brother’s soft snores. The newlyweds fighting and then the rhythmic sounds of a man and woman fucking. The cries of an infant. All resting on old military body bags. She didn’t know what to think, feeling a little motherly, a little aroused, a little embarrassed. A little morbid. “We are sleeping on death,” she noted to herself to write in her notebook in the morning. Our beds await our dead bodies.

II. 

The moment she tried to speak, she tasted and chewed stray sand that blew into her mouth, the wind pushing both her dress against her body and the sand into her open jaw. She tried to spat, but the spit wouldn’t form. The heat had stolen the liquid from her tissue, leaving her skin deflated and early old. She had never tasted sand before now, before Poston, not like this. Before, in California, she could sense the dankness of seaweed in the beach sand. But here it was Earthly powder like the taste of her girlfriend’s brown skin. She opened her mouth wider.  

III.  

Sunday morning chores. Every week, Carol and Nina met in the pink light to wash their family’s garments. Carol carried a bucket of her little brother’s soiled underwear to the wash area. The runny stench of sick intestine stuck to the fabric. She held her nose with one hand and carried the bucket with the other. She made it the laundry room and began to rub out the stain and awaited Nina. Nina arrived and didn’t say a word. She wrapped her arms around the washing girl.

“We can’t afford more for him.” The washing girl looked down.

“I know. I know.” Nina dunked her hands in and started scrubbing.

IV. 

“Green,” she says. Green. Have I seen a green thing for real? Or just envy, growth, newness inside. Have I seen green in these two years in this place of deep sand? Sand in my nose, in my hair, between my toes. There is tan. For miles. And white barracks with sand blown walls. Floor holding its grit. But where is the green? It is in this dress. This dress that I wear as I turn 17 in this dry desolate space. Green is outside the fence. Pine needles, dollar bills, thick wheatgrass, bamboo even. My little brother says we are the green monsters of this place. Nina says, “You are the green of this land. You are the lush, the new, the fecund.”  

V.  

Carol and Nina jumped fully clothed into the night pond. Carol waited for weeks to kiss her again. Her want was so strong now that she didn’t care if anyone saw. The feeling of her girlfriend’s lips on her neck, the water lapping at her waist. They sank deeper. She could feel her lover slowly lifting her slim dress up her legs, the fabric softer now. Fully soaked. She pushed her hips against her lover’s thigh. The rhythm of the water matching the rhythm of their desire.

Works Cited

[1] Yam, Kimberly. “These Anti-Japanese Signs Are a Warning Against Bigotry Today.” HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/pearl-harbor-japanese-americans_n_5a283fb8e4b02d3bfc37b9f6. Kwon 2011, 160.
[2] 2 Kwon, Eunhye. “Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954.” Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954, University of Florida, University of Florida, 2011, pp. 1–257.
[3] Laughlin, Alex. “Transcript: 'I'm Not a Jap, I'm a Half-Jap'.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 5 May 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/05/transcript-im-not-a-jap-im-a-half-jap/.
[4] Both figures from Burns, Iain. “Shocking WWII Propaganda Pamphlet on Spotting 'a Jap'.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers, 26 Oct. 2017, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5020743/Shocking-WWII-propaganda-pamphlet-spotting-Jap.html.
[5] Salesses, Matthew. “Fate and Desire in Asian America.” Catapult, Catapult, 23 Nov. 2021, https://catapult.co/stories/matthew-salesses-love-and-silence-column-fate-desire-agency-free-will.
[6] Deu Pree, Ashlynn. “White by Association: The Mixed Marriage Policy of Japanese American Internees.” UC Santa Barbara, Department of History, Undergraduate Research and Creative activies, nd, pgs. 6-7. https://www.duels.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/sitefiles/Deu%20Pree%2C%20Ashlynn.%20White%20by%20Association%20FINAL.pdf. Original: Memorandum from Herman P. Goebel, Jr. to A. H. Cheney on the release of mixed marriage families, July 12, 1943, MMP.
[7] More than 2/3 of those interned were U. S. Citizens. “About the Incarceration.” About the Incarceration | Densho Encyclopedia, Densho, encyclopedia.densho.org/history/.
[8]  Deu Pree nd, 8.
[9]  Qtd. in Kwon 2011. From Mixed Marriage Policy Files 291.1, Box 28, Record Group 499, Central Correspondence, 1942–1946, Wartime Civil Control Administration and Civil Affairs Division, Western Defense Command and the Fourth Army, Records of U.S. Army Defense Commands (WWII), National Archives at College Park, Maryland. 

Kwon, Eunhye. “Interracial Marriages among Asian Americans in the U.S. West, 1880-1954.”
[10] Kolbert, Elizabeth. “Skin Deep. (Cover Story).” National Geographic, April 2, 2018, 28–41. http://search.ebscohost.com.mctproxy.mnpals.net/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=128265709&site=ehost-live.
[11] Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.mctproxy.mnpals.net/lib/mspcc/detail.action?docID=6062471.

This piece began with my search to illuminate the lives of mixed-race, LGBTQ+ teens who came of age in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. My research was thwarted by undocumented histories. Thus, as Toni Morrison explains, the writers must do the remembering, “as in recollecting,” “as in assembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past.” In a way, similar to Morrison’s words about Beloved, “The effort to both remember and not know became the structure of the text.” Dear Nina is my attempt to remember in the face of not knowing.

Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall (she.they) has won several literary awards including a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and was a CNF Fellow through the Loft Mentor Series in 2018-2019. Her essays have been published in HIPPOCAMPUS, CATAPULT, AND MUTHA magazine, among others. Her recent essay "There Are Girls Like You in Japan" was nominated a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Mimi also enjoys writing children’s picture books and is a member of SCBWI. She is a queer, mixed-race, Asian-American, mom of twins. Website: mimiiimurovanausdall.com.

At the Edge of an Old Growth Forest

by Emily Carlson

“Amnesia of the moment. Amnesia of the decade. Forgot what he had done. The pain that rippled over her body in reds in oranges didn’t stop there. My body felt it, too. ‘Wake up,’ I pleaded.”

Our first time alone together for almost ten years. My mother and I stay in a hotel at the edge of an old growth forest. After dusk, we follow a path into a grove, tips of white pines vanishing in the moonless dark. A friend has told her, “If you photograph the trees at night you’ll see orbs.” 

Before leaving her husband she wants proof she isn’t alone in the cosmos. 

An internet search for “orbs” yields another term: backscatter, an optical phenomenon resulting in often circular artifacts on an image, attributed to the camera's flash being reflected from unfocused motes of dust, water droplets, or other particles in the air or water.

As soon as I tell “what happened” there’s this nagging feeling that the story I’m telling isn’t true. The experience falls away, the world falls away. All I can do is hold the realization in my hands.

I held my mother’s stories as if they were her. As, for example, the time when—

Mom leans over the page and whispers: “Don’t tell the neck part. It’s not even accurate. Charlie didn’t put his hands around my neck when I was in the shower, he—”

“Maybe you could say instead, ‘He put his shoe in her mouth.’ Or, ‘One afternoon, standing in their backyard, the great drifts of white cloud looked to her like a woman being choked by a monster.’” 

Casting him as a monster I could say, He is what I am not.  

Like Deepfake tools that let users manipulate visual and audio content, animating old photos of relatives, etcetera—an eraser, a line break, white-out, the delete key replies: He is what I am / not. 

Mom washed our clothes and hung them out to dry. The line sagged with their weight. Washed and dried so many times the shirts became translucent. 

As I walked toward them, I couldn’t see the shirts at all. As if they hadn’t existed in the first place. 

Had I grabbed someone else’s load and mistaken it for ours?

The mind holds the I like a shield as if to say, Here is something.
What if it isn’t? 

You know the expression, “Don’t air your soiled laundry.”

Carbon is the lifeblood of soil and the second most abundant element in the human body after oxygen. It first formed the interior of stars.

The metal trinket on her necklace spun. 

Amnesia of the moment. Amnesia of the decade. Forgot what he had done. The pain that rippled over her body in reds in oranges didn’t stop there. My body felt it, too. “Wake up,” I pleaded.

It happened over and over. For what seemed like a very long, geologic time.

After he stopped yelling and her dog stopped scratching to escape the house, mom would scrub bloody paw prints from the wall, the floor, the stairs. 

My emotions? I put them out, like a dog in the rain. You cannot come in, I told them when they pawed the door. You stink. There’s no room for you here. 

“I was taking a shower and he came at me and his hands came through the water and grabbed my neck.”   

MOM: Don’t tell the neck part. It’s not even accurate. He didn’t put his hands around my neck when I was in the shower. 

In the kitchen one night he pulled his fist back and said, “I’m going to kill you.” 

The performance of a neural network is measured by its ability to reconstruct the original image from its representation in latent space.

As in: His head appears too large and more pixelated than his body. 

I approach a wall of photographs at his mother’s house and see, to my horror, someone has made mom’s face an inky smudge, a few curls of her hair left sticking out.

Whose face have I made an inky smudge?

For a long time, nobody said, “That never happened,” because in the first place nobody said, “That happened.” 

In the old growth forest, mom and I want the photographs she takes to reveal what we can’t see with our own eyes.

But, here in the dark, among the trees, I see the orbs. Aloft, floating, exuberant things, in varying colors and sizes. Over and over I point. 

“Where?” Mom spins around. Although she can’t see them, she snaps photos of the air.

When I pointed, mom never said, There’s nothing to see. 
Mom said, “Where? Where?” Believing. 

Later, in the hotel room, we sat on the edge of her bed. On the camera screen: around the trunks of trees, dark night and circles of light like stars, some small enough to fit in a hand. The orbs I’d seen in the forest. “Look at this one!” mom exclaimed again, magnifying the image. Although I loved her excitement, I grew tired. What could she see that I was missing, her eyes welling with tears? 

And she left him.

I saw the story I was telling myself: White light, deep blue. It wasn’t the invisible made visible. But the visible made invisible made visible again. 

I have made majestic cuts. I have changed some names, made real people composite characters, transposed events, imagined dialogue. It happened, but not in this way. Not like I say it did.

As Thich Nhất Hạnh writes, “An electron is first of all your concept of the electron.” How can we “see” a person beyond our perception of them, beyond the limits and limitations of our own mind? What does it take for a person to become real to us? For us to become real to ourselves?

A story. A gust of wind lifting the branches. I shaped it into something that I can hold. The truest story isn’t always told according to the facts. The heart feels beyond.

Emily Carlson is the author of Majestic Cut (Fernwood Press, fall 2025), Why Misread a Cloud (Tupelo, 2022), winner of a Sunken Garden Chapbook Award, I Have a Teacher (Center for Book Arts, 2016), winner of a Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition, and Symphony No. 2 (Argos Books, 2015). Emily is the recipient of the University of Pittsburgh’s Syria-Lebanon Nationality Room Scholarship, an Envisioning a Just Pittsburgh award, and was a 2024 Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Artist-in Residence. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Denver Quarterly, The Dodge, Fence, jubilat, Poet Lore, Swamp Pink, and Vox Populi. Emily teaches poetry in a public school in Pittsburgh, is the director of Art in the Garden, an LGBTQ+-led and joy-centered program, and with friends runs the Bonfire Reading Series. Emily lives with her partner and their three children in a cohousing community centered around a garden. 

LET ALONE BEAUTY

by Donald Morrill

What follows is the opening passage of Let Alone Beauty, a six-part book manuscript, that incorporates varieties of original prose and imagery. The work seeks the intimate hinterlands where literature and art illuminate without either merely serving as a commentary or illustration on the other.

Donald Morrill is the author of four books of nonfiction, including The Untouched Minutes (Riverteeth Nonfiction Prize) and three volumes of poetry, including Awaiting Your Impossibilities (Florida Book Award). His debut novel Beaut won the Lee Smith Fiction Prize and was published by Blair. He’s been the Bedell Visiting Writer in the Nonfiction Program at the University of Iowa and Writer-in-Residence at the Smith Poetry Center. donaldmorrill.com

Floating the Breaks

by Sarah Stanbury

“Derek Pearsall, the great Chaucer scholar, once said there are only two mental activities in life: Making Things Up and Finding Things Out. I share this pleasure in Finding or Figuring Out.”

I wrote the following account more than twenty years ago, working from notes I took as we floated down the Missouri. Bob and I made the float in August. The winter before, my sister Pam had died.

***

Yellow gumweed and blanket flower caught the sun on the bank: in the Montana Breaks, where the summer comes late. August was high season for daisies, asters, and sunflowers of many kinds. The river rolled away. Yellow warblers flitted through the cottonwood and a stick that I’d been looking at five feet offshore disappeared and then rose up again—the head of a snapping turtle. A pair of Canada geese drifted past near the south bank. A great blue heron flapped awkwardly out of sight. A nighthawk soared high in the late afternoon sky. Semper festina lente. Always hurry slowly, a Medici motto. I was here to be slow. I’d put away my watch. I was here to be...what? To learn how to be with him in a new way. It was 28 years in a marriage. How to be when it’s him and me and the kids are gone. Packing up for the trip, it struck me how roles had reversed, our son Jeremy staying home because of his summer job and college, looking after the house and feeding the cat—as Bob and I sorted gear for a week-long river adventure. Lydia, spending the summer at a tennis camp in New Hampshire, where she was camp cook, couldn’t come. For me, this river sounded just right. Float the Missouri Breaks— with its beautiful oxymoron and sinister unknown. Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark expedition had also made this Montana stretch of the Missouri into mythic time, America as it created itself and came to know itself, dreaming, stepping out and hauling west. I would have stepped down from an administrative job that sucked away my freedom of spirit. Lydia, the youngest, would have graduated from high school. This would be the moment after which nothing would be the same.

It was also Bob’s idea.

From the beginning, one of my jobs in our partnership was to go along on outdoor expeditions into the wild. His dream, when he was a kid, was to trap beaver at the Arctic Circle. He kept a life-list in the front of his Peterson’s Bird guide. Back when he was in medical school, we’d get up at 5 AM, in early May, to catch the end of the dawn chorus. His were the solo pair of binoculars. He’d pass them to me after he’d ID’d the myrtle warbler high up in the birch. I’d maybe see it, likely not. I knew he would keep me safe. Save me, if I needed saving. His hands were big and square. He’d worked summers since he was eight for his dad, a carpenter, and he knew how to hammer a nail. On our first camping trip, which was to Assateague Island on a March weekend back when we were in college, he borrowed a pup tent from one of his friends. I’d supplied a one-person Sears and Roebuck cotton sleeping bag. It had a flannel lining patterned with ducks. As he brought more sticks for the fire and I cooked the bacon, he called me Eternal Woman. I called him Eternal Man. The sun poured down during the day. At night the temperature dipped to freezing. We slept with me underneath him, and him underneath the thin flannel sleeping bag, both of us shivering all night.

On the river Bob, from the stern, said he was going to get some sun on his body. A few minutes later I turned around to reach my water bottle and he was paddling Adamic. We’d seen no one for three hours on the river. Still and all, his outdoor excursions in the buff had been uncommon. He looked good even if his tanning patterns gave him a yin/yang, light dark bicolor. Sort of like a Hereford. It had been a year, maybe longer, that I’d been fully away from the sound of the gasoline engine.

River mile 55

No wind this morning. The day before it was blowing 20, and the river, whipped up by a good wind from our backs, rippled olive green and opaque. It was perfectly still. Patches of spit-colored foam swirled slowly in the eddies and bits of weed floated slowly by below the surface. Already it was heating up. I’d used my blue chambray shirt to refrigerate the cooler by dipping it in the river and laying it over the lid. Now the shirt was crisscrossed with silt lines. We were supposed to make 29 miles. I wasn’t feeling especially interested in hard physical labor and preferred to float along listening to the quiet sounds of Bob’s paddle dipping in the river behind me, a mourning dove, an occasional moo from a cow along the bank, the trickle of water beneath the bow like a small hillside spring, the mid-level hum of grasshoppers.

Floating past in silence, both paddles in the canoe, we listened to the cooing of rock doves nesting in holes high above, along the rock face. White Cliffs rose like castles,“chalkwhite,” like Sir Bertilak’s enchanted castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Some were elephant gray, topped far above us by a thick band of prairie earth that from below looked like thatch on the roof of a Suffolk cottage. Merriweather Lewis, the first person to leave a written account of this part of the Missouri, was amazed by the White Cliffs. Lewis describes them in his account of May 21, 1805:


The hills and river Cliffs which we passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance. The bluffs of the river rise to the height of from two to 300 feet and in most places nearly perpendicular; they are formed of remarkable white sandstone which is sufficiently soft to give way readily to the impression of water....The water in the course of time in
descending from those hills and plains on either side of the river has trickled down the soft sand cliffs and worn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little imagination and an oblique view, at a distance are made to represent elegant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary....

I’ve stripped down and am floating shirtless. It feels good and also risqué, like that first warm day in May when you go outside in shorts and a tee and feel undressed. Three black cattle watch as we float past. One drops a crap in the water. Bob was quiet in the back of the canoe. When we first knew each other, I would sometimes ask him “penny for your thoughts.” We’d be driving up over the mountains of West Virginia to visit his family for Thanksgiving and the silence in the car would get too much. We were, then, living inside each other’s skin. How could he have a private life or thoughts he might not share with me?

On one of those trips, driving the Opal Kadett his parents had given him, already years old when they bought it, when he started medical school, I noticed that the white jeans I was wearing were turning grey. We were driving up across the mountains. Our Opal could chug 20 mph on the uphills, then zoom to 70 on the downs. The air in those mountains seemed pure and clean. Why the grey? When we stopped for gas, I pulled up the rug under my feet in the passenger’s seat to peek underneath. Asphalt. The undercarriage had completely rusted away. Under the rug my feet were resting on, the road. Once we got to Ohio, Bob’s Dad helped him weld angle irons to the frame underneath the car. Bob introduced me to riveting. Though we hadn’t thought about rust on the chassis underneath, we both knew about the patches of mottling the Opal’s silver paint with what looked like brick dust. We spent our holiday visit riveting steel plates wherever there was significant rust. The car, solid when we turned around to go back home, looked like an armored truck. Driving it around Durham, where we lived at the time, I was proud of this distinguished feature. I felt secure. Bob had made our car safe.

We floated past Citadel Rock on the right. Used since time before memory as a landmark, once by the Crow in bullboats, then by Lewis and Clark as the Corps of Discovery hand-hauled canoes heavy with provisions and scientific gear up river against the steady current, and later by steamboats that worked the Missouri up and down through the Breaks until the middle of the 20th century, Citadel Rock thrust up from the river’s edge to tower 60 feet above our canoe. Igneous intrusions, almost black and rough as lava, fissured out through the smoothed sandstone skins laid down by living organisms, when all this was an inland sea.

High noon. We were getting a system. Bob paddled in the stern while I did lots of other things, like trimming my nails with a jackknife, identifying flowers and shrubs, soaking my shirt in the river to cool myself down, writing in my notebook, rubbing in #15 sunblock, melted to liquid in the heat. Mostly, though, we drifted downstream, making about two miles per hour.

We passed Slaughter River Campsite, a Lewis and Clark camp both in 1805 and again on their return trip back down river the next year, after a wet and tedious winter spent at the mouth of the Columbia River, on the Pacific coast in what is now Washington. Slaughter River takes its name from a journal entry by Lewis on May 29, 1805:


Today we passed on the Starboard side the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffalow which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still their remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses they created the most horrid stench.

The story is one I recollect generically, either from the Westerns I watched as a child or from western stories by Will James and Ernest Seton Thompson. Always, it seems, the Indians are yipping and hi yi yaying the thundering herds to the lip of the canyon, where the great shaggy animals tumble over, somersaulting head over hoof to the canyon below in a dusty apocalypse. Beached at this campsite was a group of six canoeists we met at the beginning of the trip, also floating this stretch of river. “There go the Maniacs,” I heard one of the women say on the shore as we floated past. When we met the group, they commented on my tee shirt, which said, Maine: Finest Kind. She and her husband were from Portland, and had even vacationed on the island where we shared a family vacation house.

“Why aren’t you there now?” she asked.

How to explain that we’d just come from Maine, where’d we gone to disperse my sister Pam’s ashes. Or that we were making this trip to see if we could be alone together in a way that was more than “Pass the salt” or “How long are you planning to work before bed.” I wondered what they made of us: a single couple, middle-aged, out alone. Our friends and family were surprised to hear we were going to make this trip. When I realized that the trip was to be just the two of us, I was unnerved. Wouldn’t I be bored? Don’t I know everything in his mind? More than half my life had been spent with him. He can be pretty quiet and I’m talkative. He prefers to be alone or with just me. For him, my company is enough, while I’m a heat-seeker. He reads intensively about the wild places of the world and longs for a jungle or forest or open arctic tundra where wild creatures live in a primordial balance. He dreams of an expedition to the northwest territories to spend time among the great caribou herds of the Yukon and their following of wolves. For me excitement in the wilderness comes in finding signs of human life: an arrowhead or a trade bead, glinting among the pebbles on the shore, that tells me someone else has been here.

When we first knew each other, we’d cut class, borrow his roommate’s Thunderbird, and drive out to the Pine Barrens or take the bus far from West Philly with its sirens and its dirt to a wildlife sanctuary, rolling green and rich through the Main Line. As two professionals, years later, we lived much of our lives in separate spheres, coming home from work to walk the bounds of common ground. When we made a date to go out to dinner, just the two of us, we talked about familiar and safe things, the expanded territory we shared between us: how well the kids were doing, irritations at work, the house, always a neglected child in need of paint and fixing up, and most easily and happily, plans for vacation trips, scheming and dreaming life elsewhere. On the occasions we found to be alone, we still talked over the static of others whose voices come with us. Since starting the float, neither of us talked about work or the kids. In those conversations, we always knew what the other one would say.

Judith Landing Campsite

Three hours after waking up at six and we were off. A light rain was falling under a stratus sky. The day before at Judith Landing we got talking with a USGS crew of about ten ecologists, camping here for two weeks to study the cottonwoods, whose status was the subject of ecological debate. Were the trees holding their own, or slowly succumbing? I envied the crew their jobs: out on the river for two weeks, a camping life, work that can achieve a material good. While we were drinking a beer with a crew member, leaning against the flatbed supply truck, the rest of them floated downriver from Judith Landing to the boat ramp, bobbing along in their lifejackets. Later we tried it, dusk streaking the sky to the west with rose, as we let ourselves be swept down the river, feet buoyed behind us in river shoes, washing off the bug dope and the sweat.

As we did up our dishes in the dark with just the light of a candle lantern suspended from a low cottonwood branch, one of the crew started up a harmonica. He didn’t miss a note and played tunes that I love to hum: “Summertime.” “Amazing Grace.” “Streets of Laredo,” the sweetest and saddest cowboy tune. “Oh Shenandoah,” which now we understood as a homesick song of exile, the longing for Virginia by a pioneer to Montana: “far away the wide Missouri.” “Amazing Grace” was the song we sang just before the pallbearers carried my sister’s casket out from the Quaker Meeting House. The Cherokee flutist had begun to play the tune, but couldn’t hit the high notes. He tried again. “Me” of “wretch like me” still came out just a whistle of air. Then one voice from the congregation started to sing, though singing wasn’t in the program. Soon everyone in that packed meeting house was singing. I once was lost, but now am found, was lost but now can see.

***

Pam was the youngest of my siblings. We were five. I was the middle, and Pam was the baby. Pam lived with Dave, her husband, and their two young girls outside Washington, DC. Pam, we all knew without anyone ever saying it, was Mom’s easiest, most loved child. Much had always been expected of the rest of us. Pam, in our parents’ eyes, was free to just be Pam. When, fifteen months before Pam died, the phone call came saying she was in the hospital, it was one of those hits or smashes out of the clear blue, where you always remember where you were when. Bob and I were sitting at the kitchen table finishing dinner with Bob’s roommate from medical school. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Ken had just come up to Boston after visiting the Vietnam War Memorial for the first time. “I didn’t go to Vietnam. There were all these names. And I hadn’t gone.” He started to cry.

Martha, my older sister, was on the phone. The telephone hung from a wall in the kitchen. From the minute I heard Martha’s voice – flat -- I knew something was very wrong. “Pam’s in the hospital. She just had a hysterectomy. She has cervical cancer.” 

Ken was crying at the kitchen table. Martha, on the phone on the kitchen wall, was telling me Pam had cancer. What do you say to the room, when sadness comes in from all sides?

From then until Pam died, fifteen months later, we tried to save her. We thought we could. Bob and my dad were both medical men. Bob and my dad talked and talked. This regimen, That one. They sat on our porch that summer on hot evenings, heads together talking about this or that possible courses of treatment. Pam told me, again and again, she was going to beat it. She had hardly ever been sick, before this. I remember Dave once telling me, after he and Pam had returned from a river rafting trip in Costa Rica, how sick he’d been with the flu.

“Your sister has no mercy,” he said. “I was green with a fever and she has us still going down the river.” I recognized this syndrome. Growing up in my family, illness didn’t get much sympathy. Fevers, colds -- we were packed off to school. If I came down to breakfast saying I had a sore throat, Dad would palpate my neck for swollen glands. If he found them, I got to stay home. No swollen glands, off to school.

Dave was sure they could beat it. They had to. He and Pam had two beautiful little girls. Those girls, Margot and Julia, aged 8 and 6, were their blessing. Pam called them her munchkins. Pam and Dave had had trouble conceiving and had been told by doctors that the problem was DES. When our mother had been pregnant with Pam, in 1954, Mom had been hospitalized for a near miscarriage. At that time, in 1954, DES was a standard treatment for miscarriage. Now it is known that DES has terrible downstream consequences: infertility for female offspring; a risk of cervical cancer for those girls when they become adults. At that time DES was judged perfectly safe. DES was a blessing, in that my mother didn’t have a miscarriage, and carried Pam to term. Years later, DES was something else. After several years of trying, Pam had finally been able to conceive, and Margot was born. Then she had Julia. Six years after Julia, Pam had cervical cancer.

Our mother was never told she was given DES. “I never took it,” she still says. “I never took anything when I was in the hospital.” Back then, they would have slipped DES into her ginger ale. They wouldn’t have bothered to tell her.

In May, months after Pam’s Thanksgiving diagnosis, I came home from a long trip abroad to learn Pam was back in the hospital. I got on the train from Boston to DC the next morning. Pam lay on her back in bed in the hospital. Her abdomen was swollen with fluid, a condition called ascites. I had never before seen the look of the tragedy mask on the face of any real, living person. She said, “I’m not worried about the girls. Dave will be a wonderful father. I’m afraid of dying in pain.”

She didn’t die in pain but lived in pain for most of the next nine months. Because we all believed we could save her, and she wanted to believe that too, she refused pain meds until almost the end. “I want to fight this,” she said. Pain meds, she and Dave believed, would weaken her resolve. From May, when she was briefly hospitalized, until she died at home nine months later, she was unable to eat. Her various courses of chemo made her sick, but the intestinal blockage responsible for her ascites made it so she couldn’t keep food down. Every night Dave hooked her up to an IV, which pumped her with nutrients. When I visited, I slept on a mattress on the floor in her room. The swoosh of the pump, like a heartbeat, was strangely comforting, and I will never forget its sound. The one thing she asked for after she got sick: never to be alone. We all took turns visiting, and she always had somebody with her. Near the end, on one of my visits, she said from the rented hospital bed where she lay most of the time that she wanted to write a cookbook for cancer patients, with recipes for all the things she fantasized about eating. She had been an exuberant, imaginative cook. She and Dave, who were both anthropologists, had spent years in India and Sri Lanka before their time in DC. Their house wafted with the fragrances of cumin and cardamom.

I wasn’t with her when she died, at home in her hospital bed, but Martha was there. Martha, who isn’t a religious believer, says she felt Pam’s spirit float up and off. “It was palpable,” she said. After Pam’s death her body was kept at home for two days in a ritual based on Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy, a leave-taking Pam and Dave had planned. Friends and family took turns around the clock keeping vigil in the room where her body lay, surrounded by candles. Passing through the kitchen to get a glass of water, I spotted Julia crouched like a wild animal under the counter. She looked up at me with her wide blue eyes.

All day long visitors stopped in to pay Pam their respects, and we sang hymns at the piano. We hadn’t been able to save her.

***

Derek Pearsall, the great Chaucer scholar, once said there are only two mental activities in life: Making Things Up and Finding Things Out. I share this pleasure in Finding or Figuring Out. At home I figure things out all the time, like what to cook for dinner, but the problem with home figuring is the little gerbils running in their wheels rattling out the litany, Oh Lord we have left undone those things which we ought to have done. On the river there wasn’t much else beyond the task that we were doing at the moment. I repaired the inward-facing clips on my dry bag, set backwards by a dry bag factory worker on a bad day. This little job took complete concentration for a few minutes. I pulled off the clips and studied how they could be reinserted on the straps and still work.

Bob was the map keeper and reader of signs and water, keeping track of where we were on the river. He calculated by time and our estimated speed (six mph if both of us paddle, four mph if only he paddled, two mph if we were just floating). I remembered this formula from word problems in math: t x r = d: time multiplied by rate equals distance. Here t x r = location. Where we were, which is the here and now. Figuring it out.

###

We pulled into the boat launch at James Kipp Recreation Area about four PM. Or really- Bob pulled up. I couldn’t see the launch ramp, because I’d made a head net out of my bandana, secured over my face by my baseball cap and tucked in under my shirt collar. Through the fabric the river and sky were a soft purple. No-see-ums banged up against the cloth and crawled over it, but I was OK observing their silhouettes, knowing they were out there and not inside. At Kipp we hauled canoe, paddles, cooler and life vests up the bank, hosed them down. Bob changed into a bathing suit and turned the hose on himself. We washed the mud off the gear and tried to pry the mud from our river shoes. I changed out of my pants, worn for four straight days and mottled with foodstuffs and ash from our campfires, but refused the cold shower. My front tingled with sunburn in places that had seldom seen the sun. I was in no hurry to bathe.

In English, the earliest uses of the word “speculation” refer to sight and vision: “the faculty or power of seeing; sight, vision, esp. intelligent or comprehending vision.” Oxford English Dictionary, I.1.

Sarah Stanbury taught in the English Department at the College of the Holy Cross and is the author of many critical studies on Chaucer and other medieval writers. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, she divides her time between Providence, RI and Isle au Haut, Maine. Her float through the Missouri Breaks is one of many treks in a canoe, a kayak, or a pair of hiking boots under the weight of a backpack.

Photos by Robert J. Smith

A Brief History of April

by Nicole Walker

“Everyone knew that January would still get what January wanted. She would be so long and full of dates and dualities and frames that she remained Supreme Court months and lasted as long as Justices do, which is seemingly forever. ”

In the beginning, there were but three months—January which lasted for 180 days, June, which lasted for 30 and August which lasted until January came around again. January is named after the ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus, who is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings, so technically, you could name the whole year January and do away with the small business of June but my mother and my mother-in-law were born in June and thus, without June, I would have no children. My children were once so small I could carry them on the head of a pin—smaller than the small brine shrimp that my sister Paige hatched for me in a specimen cup full of distilled water. Tiny things have specific needs—zygotes love a thick uterine wall into which they can sink their teethy cells. Ecoli need a frothy stomach environment in which to grow. Chads, those tiny bits of paper that stuck to Florida ballots, counting as non-votes, needed a particular kind of Supreme Court to give them meaning. 

It was because of the small things that we needed to continue to divide the year and the country I halved and then halved again. Each month/coalition coalesced around particularly small things—September took apples. October took the leaves of Oak trees. November took raindrops. December, stars. Not real stars, mind you, but the kind of stars kids stick to the ceilings of their bedrooms that glow in the dark, similar to regular stars, but smaller. January didn’t have to choose. Everyone knew that January would still get what January wanted. She would be so long and full of dates and dualities and frames that she remained Supreme Court months and lasted as long as Justices do, which is seemingly forever. January also took a few days from February because the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land. Poor February only got minerals, which are not as beautiful as October’s leaves or blossoms, which belong to May. Nor did February become November’s recycled rivers which fall on our heads like light rippling through waves. But minerals at least are useful and February will make big bucks on selling salt, lithium, and copper, as long as the Supreme Court continues to part surface rights from deep ground rights and water in order to chill the ground and heat the outside air. In February, everything gets turned upside down.  August keeps the monsoons of the northern hemisphere and the frogs of the southern. July was happy to keep the microorganisms. Someone had to be in charge of the gut biome and the soil. 

But in the great court battle of ’68, this is where March and April had to throw down. Easter said one. Passover said the other. Back and forth they went, tribaling their way through the beginning of hurricane season and the end of winter. They tried all forms of compromise: Leg wrestling. Arm wrestling. Mud wrestling. But when they emerged from the wrestling mat, as all creation myths require forms and mud, the Court was called to the sidelines.  March made her case. Lions and lambs coexist in my heart, March claimed. I contain multitudes. Give me 31 days of certainty. I will pull those chads straight from the ballots. I will keep the buds of the apple trees tucked into branches. I will be the constancy that April can never provide. 

April, shy and bloody, promised foxes and tulips and wind and snow. She promised rainbows and unicorns, ticks and lightning. She promised kindness, and, of course, she promised cruelty. The Justices voted down ideological lines. 6 justices voted to uphold April’s inconstant nature, but to punish it for its relentless wavering. Poems would be written about it. Cliches would be spun. Every year, a clamoring of surprise about how unfaithful she was. She got none of the small, palpable things those other months got. Instead, the hot air of criticism. Three Justices dissented but majority rule is as intractable as nature. April’s main claim to fame is that it leads to the flowers of May, and now, as climates shift, rain showers are rarely in the forecast. 

I wrote this essay while working on a book called Writing the Hard Stuff, which is probably why February shows up in mineral form. In the book, I include Moh's Scale of Hardness that runs from talc, being the least hard, to diamonds, being the hardest. But the hard stuff isn't really a competition. What is talc to one may be diamond to another. In the face of the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity, after Roe was overturned, as we were fighting for our lives, or what lives we thought we would lose, it was necessary that the stuff of the world be real, the hardness palpable, but the orientation of the matter be recast. Without a different set of rules and a different kind of imagination, we'll be stuck in whatever season the authorities dictate.

NICOLE WALKER is the author of the forthcoming books, Writing the Hard Stuff and How to Plant a Billion Trees, both from Bloomsbury. She has also published the essay collections Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster from Torrey House Press, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet from Rose Metal Press and Sustainability: A Love Story from Mad Creek Books as well as Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and a book of poems This Noisy Egg. She wishes she'd gone with the original title for her collection of poems, "Comeuppance," so she only had one book with Egg in the title, but like eggs or chickens, the poetry collection came first.

Next Time

By Marin Sardy

“And I’ll listen as she tells me about a woman who was born into the sea and raised by its creatures, a woman all blue, who in my mind will shimmer though my mother won’t say that she shimmers. Instead she’ll say the woman grew strong and built an army of crustaceans and mollusks.”

The Next Time I Watch The Walking Dead

I’ll wait until someone clever is on screen and I’ll press pause and ask them what people do about allergies in the zombie apocalypse. “I have terrible hay fever,” I’ll say as I climb into the television, wondering why I never thought to do that before. Then I’ll sneeze, twice, and say to no one, “I’ll have to raid a lot of Walgreens to stay supplied in Zyrtec.” If I find myself looking after the orphaned kids, I’ll tell them a story about a crow that ate an artichoke and was transformed into a woman. The kids will be enthralled, so I’ll keep going, saying, “but not a woman, quite—at least, not for sure.” Though she wouldn’t know what else she might be if not that. Something she couldn’t name, something for which no word exists. 

The Next Time I Leave the House

The street will be empty, so I’ll walk down the middle, between the dashed white line and the solid yellow one, until I realize I’m not wearing my mask. Then I’ll stop and stare down at my feet in my flipflops, notice my toes, and bend to paint my nails—robin’s egg blue. I’ll get tired and kneel on the pavement, pulling out my phone to check my latest Instagram post and finding my mask in my pocket. Feeling dizzy, I’ll lie flat, face down, pebbles poking into my breasts as I try not to mess up my toenails, though that will be hard when the street turns inward, everything rolling toward the center, sliding sideways. And of course, it’s when all this is happening that I’ll get a text from my mother. So with my free hand I’ll call her, and lying there I’ll find myself repeating earnestly that she should not take the chicken out of the oven too soon. 

The Next Time I Go Back Home

I’ll wind up in the kitchen at my dad’s house, wincing at the white of the countertops and hungry for something I haven’t craved since the year I saw the top of Everest. I’ll open the pantry and find the food exactly as I left it twenty years ago—the plastic jar of crunchy peanut butter, trail mix with raisins and M&Ms, boxes of Cheerios and Bran Flakes in a row above the carafe of salad dressing and the shelf full of spices. For the thousandth time I’ll be relieved that Dad isn’t home. Surveying the fridge, I’ll notice I forgot to take the can of orange juice concentrate out of the freezer. But there it will be—already thawed, next to the gallon of milk. And as I fall into a magnet-pinned photograph, I’ll understand that for so long these things have been happening without me.

The Next Time I Go Camping

I’ll squat close to the ground, taking a stick and poking around in the grass and dry leaves. I’ll squat like a very small child, able to stay that way for an hour without falling backward like a grown-up. And when I hear the scratching of chipmunks, I’ll follow them to the place on the mountain where the view is enormous—but I won’t look long because I’ve seen so many views. 

Back by the tent I’ll find the kids playing cards, which will make me think of the last time I was surprised, pre-pandemic: one night years ago when the hillside was on fire and from our balcony you could see it—a ribbon of orange, wavering in the dark. Crawling, that’s what it was doing, across the night. And I’ll be stunned to know how rarely I am stunned. Then I’ll dig out the German potato salad, feeling pleasantly sure that the kids will love it, and I’ll cover the picnic table with a red checked cloth. And as we sit with our burgers I’ll watch their faces, so absorbed in the world, and I’ll want to say to them, “It’s been such a long time.” But I won’t say anything. Instead I’ll bend down and give a little piece of burger to the dog. 

The Next Time I Visit My Mother

I’ll unlatch the screen door myself, from the outside, by this time accustomed to reaching through things. She’ll say, “Oh!”—a little alarmed—but then will let it go because I’m her daughter and she is forgiving. 

I’ll sit in her living room, sideways in a paisley armchair, as she lies on her daybed in the way that she does. And I’ll listen as she tells me about a woman who was born into the sea and raised by its creatures, a woman all blue, who in my mind will shimmer though my mother won’t say that she shimmers. Instead she’ll say the woman grew strong and built an army of crustaceans and mollusks. Then she’ll let out a little sound, like her stomach hurts, but I’ll be looking past her through the sliding glass doors, out to the pond and the kingfisher sitting low on a branch. When she asks what’s the matter, I’ll say, “How do I get up onto the roof?” And it’s from the roof that I’ll see it coming—the wave. Really a body of water, a planet of water, the kind my mother mispronounces as “tusami.” I’ll spot a distant figure and for a moment I’ll think, That’s me, up there on a surfboard. But no, it’s someone else. And I’ll decide I should have gotten a mohawk long ago. Should have pasted it up with egg white, the old way, into a blade that could slice through the water like a fin.

The Time After the Next Time I Watch The Walking Dead

I’ll climb into the TV again, not just to anywhere but to a cabin where some of them hide out, and I’ll wait until the children have fallen asleep. Then I’ll go around back and find Daryl Dixon in his angel-wing vest and I’ll try to seduce him because he can’t be seduced. I’ll step close to him as he’s crouched there in the woods by his fire, and I’ll wait for a certain look to come into his eyes and then I’ll ask what he has to say about crustaceans and mollusks. And maybe I’ll like his answer or maybe I won’t, or maybe I’ll write his reply myself and have him read it from a cue card. Then with his crossbow he’ll reach suddenly past me, so that as I turn I’ll see his arrow pin a squirrel to the post holding up the clothesline. And just as I’m giving up on this seduction idea, the children will run out because they were not sleeping, because no one can sleep at the end of the world. They’ll all run to Daryl, swarming around him, saying they want to tell him a story about a crow that swallowed an artichoke. 

For me, the most difficult part of the pandemic was the period in which it aligned with summer in Tucson, where I lived for eight years. That's the time of year when people are driven indoors for months, forcing an intense domesticity that I had always found difficult. When that was compounded by the closing of businesses and the need for social distancing, I started playing around with writing exercises that enabled me to access my feelings in different ways, searching for something that made sense in that strange context. I quickly landed on the use of future tense, as it spoke to the ways I had come to live in the future (and the television) as means of escape—all the things I imagined and envisioned I would do, if I could only leave the house. And since the future is always already a fiction, this speculative mode freed me from the need for fidelity to physical reality, which similarly felt appropriate. Given the surreal nature of the pandemic and of Tucson's summer heat, it was only natural for my speculations to turn surreal as well.

Marin Sardy is the author of the memoir The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia (Pantheon, 2019). Sardy’s book was excerpted in the New Yorker online and her essays have appeared in Tin House, Guernica, the Paris Review, the Missouri Review, and many other journals, as well as in two award-winning photography books. Sardy has been granted residency fellowships at Hawthornden Castle and Catwalk Institute and has three times had her essays listed as “notable” in the Best American series.