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.

Each of Us a Portal

By heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

“I drift, leaving the chatter, leaving my body, drift, drift, up into the pomegranate tree. There, I meet a ghost, a crying girl, La Lloronita. She has also left her body. She has been forced from her home. Banned from the fruits she once knew. Dispossessed, I’d years later learn to call it.”

At eleven years old, at a sleepover, we tell stories of La Llorona and the Lady in White, the forlorn spirits whose grief drags them around the hills and along the rivers of our hometown. We wait up through the wee hours, peeking out from our sleeping bags to see if they will visit us where we left notes for them in the branches of the backyard pomegranate tree hanging over our heads. Conversations drift from Janet Jackson to playground dramas to crushes on boys. A game of Truth or Dare dwindles into a litany of timid voices choosing truth because nobody wants to get stuck in the pressure to stay alone in the dark bathroom saying Bloody Mary’s name, or to eat ketchup blended with apples and eggs, or to run naked around the cul-de-sac one time for every letter of her name. Truths and half-truths and outright lies of pre-teen survival convert into gossip. Somebody says so-and-so is a lesbian and kisses girls, and isn’t that so gross? 

It sounds really nice, I think to myself. I cocoon into my sleeping bag. I drift, leaving the chatter, leaving my body, drift, drift, up into the pomegranate tree. There, I meet a ghost, a crying girl, La Lloronita. She has also left her body. She has been forced from her home. Banned from the fruits she once knew. Dispossessed, I’d years later learn to call it. There in the branches, we speak of separations. I read her my note to the forlorn spirits: a list of names, of lost grandmothers, never-more blossoming flowers, extinct species of fish. A keening of taxons, filamentous prayer. We peel the flesh of pomegranates, exchange the ruby gem seeds, taste the sweet juice and learn what it means, belonging: to be longing. If even for the briefest hour, we are tiny gestures of revolt, formless creatures knowing secret things, beholden to mystery. There nestled in the branches, we kiss. We are being-with and with and with. Each of us a portal to a world the other needs. She, a route of memory. I, a flesh of sadnesses through which laughter still enters the atmosphere. We are a weather of openings. 

Later that week when I am forced by the nun to go to confession, I pretend I am singular, which is to say, human. I lie to the priest again about my sins, tell him there isn’t much to report, really. I do not believe in hell and its fiery passage to which the damned are consigned, but I do, for years, feel like a blasphemous disappointment to the divine. All my yearnings, wretched; my senses kindled; nothing a biblical recitation can contain. I refuse repentance. Every amatory devotion calls up a series of ghosts, dispossessions. I become accustomed to the embrace of trees. Fruit at its ripest tastes each time of defiance.  


Now, when you bring me oranges from your mother’s garden, I hold you in my mouth. In the tree’s confection, at your affection, the world comes alive. To know such sweetness, its knowledges, is to ask, “why should our bodies end at the skin?”¹

¹ Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178.

As a queer, brown child, I often faced the suffocations of a racist, homophobic, misogynistic world that fears the sensual, and found breath and possibility and connection through my ancestrally-inherited sense of otherworldliness and aliveness all around me. We are all, human and more-than-human, potential portals to each other’s survival and transformation.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (she/they) is a queer, sick/disabled, brown/Colombian, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. She is author of The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). Their chapbook, Ephemeral, was the 2022 winner of the Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize and will be published by EcoTheo Collective in 2023. She was raised, in part, by ghosts, and wants to swim with you in the raucous and joyful possibilities of crip poetics and abolition dreams.

Editor's Notes: Passage

 

Maryna Bilak, Hug, 2014, plaster, cloth, 10x8x6"

 

Passage, implying safe passage, transition, voyage, journey, exploration, or passagio, a term in classical singing to describe the struggle to move voice from one register to the next -- the theme of this issue seemed particularly well suited to the moment when we set it out as the call for submission for issue #7 in fall 2022.

We had come through a global pandemic, many of us were going back to work places and resuming travel and seeing friends and family we had not seen in months. We began tentatively at first, to venture out, to leave our masks behind, to learn again how to be in public places. How would it feel? What would have changed? What would have stayed the same? Would a shared sense of relief be palpable? We looked forward to reading how writers would respond to the call for this issue.

Over the months, we have been overwhelmed by the strength, vitality and experimental power of submissions that have been rolling in.

Especially since, in the months that followed the initial call, an age closer to anxiety than relief seems to have descended. The war in Ukraine has continued with stunning harshness, death and destruction. Here in North America, climate change has finally come too close to ignore—fires and floods and heat waves are changing life as we have known it. Then there is the ongoing attack on the basic human rights of American citizens in our democracy. We are a society in tumult; hopefully, at least in part, because we are a society in the process of change.

Now more than ever, we believe in the power and importance of the written word and of all of the arts to passagio – to bridge lower and upper registers of voice and sound and feeling for the fullest and richest expression.

Here at the magazine in the past year, we have had our own passages through the year. Between moves, and job transitions for the editorial staff, we've had to slow the pace of the magazine down. We remain committed to being 100% independent which means we have editorial freedom but no working funds save those we raise ourselves. We apologize for inconvenience caused by our slow editorial process this past year, and ask for your patience as we have worked through this transition.

Happy to announce the theme of issue # 8 Bloom

What blooms besides flowers and algae? Love blooms, of course, but so does the Corpse Flower (every 7-10 years). Bruises bloom, unfortunately, but so does a blush and hope and the future. Blooms die sometimes from a late frost, but if you want to view something at its most beautiful, consider cherry blossoms at the the height of bloom, right before they fall, before the wind carries them away, which in 15th century Japan became a zenith of Japanese aesthetic culture mono no aware - the intense beauty of impermanence.

Leila Philip, Co-editor
September, 2023

Bloom

 

Photo by T.H. Ponders

Let the wind carry your thoughts on this blooming mission. Send us your blooms...  let them carry us away.

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

 

EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT COMPOSTING YOU LEARNT FROM WATCHING A 38 HOUR LONG FILM, AND EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT BEING ALIVE YOU LEARNT FROM COMPOSTING

By Jaimee Edwards

“She was very serious about the composting. There is more and always more. Each reel wants the viewer to see her hand at work, there is no magic of movie making in Five Year Diary, more of more is the intention. It is tending.”

It is patient work, this composting. It is much more than collecting your food scraps. You have discovered that to make compost you must work toward the movement of things, specifically the movement of green and brown matter, carbon and nitrate, transferring, transforming and going in multiple directions. You must live within the passage of time, the duration of breaking down.

The surprising part is how much brown matter you need. The food scraps are collected easily enough, but you have really started thinking differently about egg cartons. With hard fingers you assess the paper that comes into the house, you strip it of any plastic tape or stickers, and you tear it to confetti. Or you don’t, and whole toilet rolls go into the plastic bucket on the kitchen bench that temporarily holds what is destined for the compost. In go coffee grinds, gooey pumpkin seeds, eggshells, avocado skins and seeds, the parsley stalks, the onion skins even though you aren’t too sure if they should, the banana peels, the broken crackers, those toilet rolls, moulding bread. The bucket shows distinct layers of brown and green, brown and green.

You take your bucket of scraps to the large, shared compost bin in the garden. You lift the lid and much of what has been added is starting to look unrecognisable as the form of things has slipped away, given over to the forces of digestion. Microorganisms and worms are at it, in stages. If you are being diligent, you will get the pitchfork and give the compost a good tun to oxygenate it. If everything is going well, then the compost will be breathing, kind of. You want to feel hot breath in your face. The heat is an indicator. The ideal temperature is between 135-160 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s when everything begins to stew. If there is sufficient oxygen, then volatiles such as hydroxymethyl furfural will smell of the forest floor, woody, sweet, just a hint of tobacco and it will be pleasant. If the oxygen is low and the matter compact, then the compost will become anaerobic and produce methane and hydrogen sulfide and smell putrid, like rotten eggs.  This would be the wrong kind of break down and when you are composting you need to understand the right kind of breakdown. Composting is the right kind of break down. 

There are other break downs that can happen before your very eyes and as difficult as they are to witness, you must try and understand that they too are the right kind of break down. Wholeness is overvalued. An over determined emphasis on a whole centred self shouldn’t be held in ideal contrast to the scattered decomposition to our many selves. Contradiction, inconsistency, pointlessness, non-truths, fantasy and dreams as divination all do very well in offering a passage out and away from the demands of composure. The break down’s value is in disruption that makes wormholes connecting disparate points. And the wormhole itself? Well, it can be straight or follow a higgledy-piggledy path to transformation.

One day you are in the garden listening to a podcast and you hear about this mad film that is thirty-six hours long and the whole thing is about gardening and cooking. You make a run for the internet and look up what turns out to be Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary, the Super-8mm film that chronicles her life between 1981 to 1998. When you look at the jittering frames on your laptop screen, so full of life and its end, you can see that the film has an affinity to compost, alive and decomposing - the effluence of breaking down. The film isn’t really about gardening and cooking, although there is plenty of that, it’s about life, it’s about breaking down to fertilize your own life. Robertson used the Diary to save her life, she said so herself, “Making my diary has literally saved my life.” 

The Super 8 camera was the technology of home movies, of domestic spaces, of amateurs and their spontaneous exigencies. That’s what Robertson liked best, that the form was already a diary. But Five Year Diary isn’t spontaneous, it isn’t a home movie and it isn’t really a diary. Or it is, but its crude materiality is shaped and athleticized to make a thing that is neither fully realized nor unfinished. Both style and method are always approaching. With Robertson before and behind the camera a sense of being both, of approaching for its own sake is always accumulating. The film’s sound is in excess, your ears try to catch this word and that, your sensorium is overloaded. Hold on, its a little sick making. Radio and records and two tracks of audio; on one track Robertson reads her diary, on the second track her voiceover comments on the film’s images. The images are grainy and unreliably focused, they document her manic and depressive episodes, her hyper attention to her weight, her yearning heart, her glorious garden, neglected after being in hospital or thriving from tending, here she is cooking, here she is taking meds, here exercising, there she is doing the weeding, and there she is bent over the compost. She was very serious about the composting. There is more and always more. Each reel wants the viewer to see her hand at work, there is no magic of movie making in Five Year Diary, more of more is the intention. It is tending. 

In reel 22, ‘A short affair and going crazy,’ Robertson films herself composting food, a leather jacket, household items, to “return to the earth.” All the excess of an unrequited love affair, the dinners made for love and then after, the scraps and peels are gathered in an open bucket decomposing. Robertson is adding to the compost bucket but also searching through it, looking for items to recover, a silver cross and some sable brushes. What kind of repository is this compost bucket? A grave? An incubator?

Over the scenes of a composting you listen to Robertson’s voice, doubled, echoing, possessing itself, saying, “the worm. I speak for the worm, who is a nicer version of me.” The compost is the home of the worm as well as its source of nourishment and purpose. Yet you are struck by the notion of a worm being a nicer version of anyone. Niceness being both insipid and ideal. Niceness, the affectation of receiving without complaint. The worm makes its way through the receiving matter that is compost quite nicely. That is, if you are going to consider a worm on these terms. But shouldn’t you rather consider the worm on its own terms? Perhaps what Robertson was really getting at, was that the worm, her wormself, was a model of conduct. Recall what Dodie Bellamy wrote in Bee Reaved (2021), “I imagine existence as a boundless expanse of dirt and I’m a worm burrowing through it, gorging on it on one end, shitting it out on the other.” And this is just it. The regenerative powers of a worm as it makes its way through the compost, breaking down matter, matter that is story to create soil to support growth. 

Over the 16 years that Diary was filmed, composting became a motif of a life in a perpetual state of gestation. It’s the kind of thing that Robertson liked most to do, working on what is expansive, always burrowing, making passages through time like all those hours of film. Just because Diary has a ‘last’ reel doesn’t mean it has an end. You go back again and watch the film from the middle and stop, then pick it up later, somewhere near the beginning. Film and compost are both technologies of animation. You are learning to compost, you are watching this glorious film, you are stewing in life’s readiness. 

Drawing boundaries between a practice of writing non fiction, day dreaming and the everyday labours of gardening no longer make sense on a planet that never had any use for human boundaries anyway. In the break down of boundaries our imagining and our critical work are one in the same. To immerse myself in the work of the film maker, Anne Charlotte Robertson, I reached for the practices that she practiced: composting, cooking, gardening. And across time and space we comingled, broke down, and became some thing new.

Jaimee Edwards is a writer and independent researcher living in Sydney, Australia on unceded Gadigal land. Her writing focuses on the difficulties and joys of living during our climate emergency. Her writing has appeared in Best Australian Short Stories, Australian Literary Studies, Philament Journal, Wonderground and numerous Australian media.

My bullet, He’s Come Home.

By Georgie Fehringer

“I can make connections between fears. Between cars skidding on gravel and my cousin driving off a cliff. Between camping and hunters in the trees. Between hitting a hookah full of weed, walking barefoot through the woods, calling the fire department for sunstroke, and dying in a classroom full of kids.”

It’s a level of bone-deep exhaustion running on fight or flight for half of your life. I go to the club and I dance. I drink and I dance and I sweat and I drink and I try not to think about how every bass hit is followed by a gunshot, and I repeat this until I no longer worry. This isn’t an argument per se,  I'm not laying the groundwork to change anyone's mind. I am drinking and dancing and bracing. My mind has already been rewired. I am an obsessive circle of thought; these are only a series of moments: I am dancing in the club, or sitting in a classroom or sleeping on a couch and staring so long into the living room light I am no longer anything but the adrenaline running like the legs of a stray ant down my neck and arms and out through my fingertips.

When I was an undergrad someone threatened to shoot up my school and the mass evacuation led to the rewire and it led to other issues and this is a true story: I inch closer and closer to being the one teaching in those rooms. This is just one moment out of many moments that put together the things I try and forget, the snatches of memory that float behind the eyebrows I manicured this morning. I have many more bad just like anyone else. I have many more good too, I suppose.

What is an acceptable fear? Spiders, or darkness or drowning? Meeting new people, going new places, driving a car, pumping gas. Forgetting to turn off your oven, triple-quadruple checking the locks, ordering at a restaurant, public speaking, speaking. Being alone in your living room, shadows moving in half sleep states, getting pulled over, police, bullets piercing your back, dancing, not dancing, being seen too little or too much or out a window you don’t know you’re being seen through, walking a dog, making a phone call, the parking lots of places you’ve never been, car crashes, liars, loneliness, brain shocks, shocking scandalous hometown heroes turned neo-Nazi been neo-Nazi, Swastikas at the swap meet, getting stabbed on the corner of 4th and John, smoking outside, pick up trucks, falling in heels, cancer, swimming in lakes and getting a flesh eating bacteria, liver failure, losing your cell phone, school shootings, shootings, death threats– again, or ever, death and dying both state and process, mental and physical– pain, numbness, roofies, alcohol poisoning when the shakes set in, debt, failure, success, sticking your arm out the window in the car so you hand explodes on the metal posts you pass, running your car off the freeway–into the back of a semi, sunburns, racists, being forgotten, Florida, kidnapping, going outside, locking yourself out of the house and falling from heights.

I can make connections between fears. Between cars skidding on gravel and my cousin driving off a cliff. Between camping and hunters in the trees. Between hitting a hookah full of weed, walking barefoot through the woods, calling the fire department for sunstroke, and dying in a classroom full of kids. And I’m not a journalist anymore, never really was, but I might have been in a newsroom or two and I might have received a death threat or two and it might have taken two hours to evacuate if we hadn’t driven the car straight through the grass. And I am tired of remembering: their sincerest wishes for all monkeys to hang — the way I remember valentines from elementary school. Sharp spots through a thick veil. I don't think I'd give it up in a redo; I'd just rather remember the champagne. But when my mother called and I told her I was receiving death threats, she didn't want to celebrate with me. Not the first time or the second. It’s not the first time or the last. 

I’m not a journalist but I know how to use the inverted pyramid, the hierarchy of information. I know all our places within it and how we must be paced. So if you asked me to try, though I’d rather not. If I was to try, only for your sake really, it might look something like: America winning war for right to be first thought on citizens’ minds and within its rights to make mental adjustments to anyone who might forget; 28-year-old, five years in still triple checks doors from the inside of an empty house.

Speculation is a natural companion of anxiety and that is especially apparent as a writer who has anxiety and writes about it. In fact, I’d go as far as to say a significant portion of my anxiety disorder is based on speculation, what ifs, and unanswered questions, and reactions to unanswerable questions. 

There is a direct path from speculation to anxiety. Like, what possibilities does an unlocked door have? And how does that thought lead to the need to set traps around my house to catch this fully fictional intruder who now exists in my head? And how does that lead to a fear of windows? And how does that lead to an absurd few months where I can’t cross my living room without a taser, because what if someone crawls through the window? It’s never happened before but there always this moment and the next and the next.

When I write about anxiety I like to use lists, stacking question after question to show the rapid and thick accumulation of anxious speculation, the physical manifestation of how things build, the walls and weight, and heaps of thoughts that can trap me under their collective pressure. There is a speed to a never-ending list and to anxiety that both feels too fast and too slow at the same time, like running with a weighted blanket on the ocean floor.

This piece is about living with the consequences of living. Of continuing to exist and dance in the shadows or under the spotlight.

Georgie Fehringer is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, an Iowa Arts Fellow, and the 2022 Melbourne Emerging Writers Festival Writer-in-Residence. Their writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Chicago Review of Books, The Rumpus, and TIMBER among others. They live in Iowa City with their (very) clumsy cat Mushu. You can contact them at GeorgieFehringer.com or on Twitter @Gigifehringer.

On Mothers, Chickens, and the Thai Alphabet

By Max Pasakorn

“There is no sound in English exactly like ก. Entering this lone letter into Google Translate produces two English consonants closest to it: the ‘g’ sound; and the ‘k’ sound. ก is an in-between of the two, a queer hybrid sound.”

When I was nine, I saw a trans woman for the first time. I was at my mother's hawker stall, where she sold flavourful Thai dishes to hungry Singaporeans. She was always busy cooking, but she found a way to pass her time. A sitcom was rising in popularity among her friend circles. And it was there, on the small laptop screen powered by the spottiest internet connection, where I saw her. Her name was Golf, and she was a maid.

Golf, portrayed by Thai comic Tongtong Mokjok, was a caricature of the working-class Thai kathoey. Though this label may be translated as "ladyboy," Golf was a trans woman: she ended her sentences with feminine particles, introduced herself with feminine pronouns, and used the women's bathroom. But, unlike common media portrayals of kathoeys servicing expatriates in bars and clubs, Golf's world was purely domestic. Golf was hired by the show's titular protagonist, the handsome Pentor, to clean their apartment, run household errands and socialize with other female characters. The jokes she delivered were usually about men who would never reciprocate her affection. In the first conversation Golf had with Pentor, she said, matter-of-factly, that she had a new phone number. When Pentor asked for it, she gushed, placed her hands on her cheeks and exclaimed exaggeratedly: "Wow! It's the first time a man has asked for my number!"

Golf was always the stooge, the butt of the joke, estranged from other characters through her own queerness. The 2004 sitcom centered the themes of love and lust, but Golf sat at its periphery. She watched other heterosexual characters sleep around, but never developed a successful romance herself. Her few short-lived relationships ended prematurely with her boyfriends swindling her of her savings. It was as if she was cursed with poverty and loneliness. But such betrayals never bothered her. She might experience short periods of grief, but within the next few episodes, she would return to her cheery self, thirsting over the man whose waist she gripped onto tightly while she rode on his motorcycle. No matter the setback, she could laugh it all off.

As a child, I watched Golf radiate that unexplainable joy from my mother's laptop screen. But when we discussed the show, my mother would warn me against following Golf's footsteps, that a life like hers would be treacherous, painful, and difficult. Such was my first impression of queerness — that it should only exist on the TV screen, in a world shaped by fiction, and that I should not be a part of it.

Golf's effeminacy made me reconsider my gender. Once, she articulated a distinction between how men and women used the bathroom. Because men stood up when they peed and women sat down, allowing herself time on the toilet bowl made her feel more like a woman. I tried that as an adolescent, choosing to pull my pants all the way down and plop my butt cheeks on the toilet bowl. It was more troublesome than it was affirming, but I found pleasure in thinking that I had agency over my gender in the actions I performed in my day-to-day. I might use the men's bathroom, but it was what I chose to do inside, in my privacy, that showed who I was. Gender could be interpreted through me and by me.

My parents probably never envisioned this relationship to gender when they imprinted masculinity into my first name: Pasakorn. In Thai, the name is made of two parts: Pas, which refers to the sun; and Korn, which refers to being a son. To be labeled Korn is a wish placed onto me. I was to grow up a man of value, to hold true to the gendered male tradition. When I first started learning Thai, I was fascinated by this word. Unlike most Thai words, it had no vowel in its written form. The word consisted of only two letters, ก (making the 'k' sound) and ร (which usually symbolizes the 'r' sound, but here creates the 'n' sound). The round 'o' sound was invisible. To an early student of Thai, it is an impossible word to pronounce, like a secret codeword one must memorize to access masculinity. But they would at least know the first letter, ก. It is the first letter of the Thai alphabet, and possibly the most peculiar one.

There is no sound in English exactly like ก. Entering this lone letter into Google Translate produces two English consonants closest to it: the 'g' sound; and the 'k' sound. ก is an in-between of the two, a queer hybrid sound. Gk. To the native Thai speaker, the sound is easy to pronounce; it is everywhere. The Thai name of Bangkok begins with the Gk sound: Gkrungtaep. Beyond sound, the mystery behind ก also unfolds in its written form. To write ก, I place the tip of my pencil at the bottom of the stipulated line space and draw a straight line halfway up. This is unusual because most Thai letters begin with a small circle, allowing the character to sprawl outwards from itself, as if the circle was its home. The circle in ก is absent, making it a letter with a missing center, one that exists bravely, independently, from convention. At the line's peak, I create a quick notch inward, to the right, before resuming the line's original path, upward into a rounded top, then allowing it to fall to the bottom of the space. The result is an alphabet, but also a symbol. When one learns the Thai language, one knows that ก is affiliated with the chicken. When one sings the Thai alphabet song, one would sing, "Gkor Aei, Gkor Gkai." Gkai is chicken. Look closely at the letter and you will see it too. The notch is a beak, and the rounded top is the chicken's head. ก is one of few Thai letters that looks like what it represents. In writing ก, the chicken comes to life. I imagine it moving, its left-facing beak giving it direction, bobbing its head as it rears the rest of the alphabet behind, a parent. I do not know why ก begins the Thai alphabet. Perhaps it is because the chicken is the first to rise every morning, and its daily crowing wakes the rest of civilization. ก represents the leader. That is why it begins the word Korn. To be masculine is to be a leader, a spearheader, provider of families, solver of problems. With my name, I bear the responsibility of the strong and prideful chicken.

I have been called a chicken many times. But, in English, a chicken is stripped of its reverence. It is reduced to a creature that stomps around the farm, maniacally flapping its wings, as if it is naturally afraid and always on the cusp of panic. To be called a chicken was a peer pressure tactic intended to leave me swimming in doubt, a method of emasculation. I was a chicken for declining things I did not want to do, when I turned down invitations to physically demanding hikes or said no to flirting with strangers. With one word, I was a land- bound bird, with one foot squarely out the door, always ready to leave uncomfortable social spaces. To be bound to a fat queer body, limited by physical capabilities and homosexual desires, was a curse I had to bear. I never had problems demarcating my boundaries, but I could hear the uncontrollable annoyance that left my peers' lips in sharp airy sounds: "Tsk!" Like the clicking one made to call an animal to one's feet, to assert one's power over the excited being that hopped gently on the ground, waiting eagerly to be fed. With a single metaphor, I became a domesticated animal and understood my queer place in this straight world.

It was only recently, through Wikipedia, that I learned how Golf's name was spelled in English. Before that, I thought it was Gkob; that was how her friends said it. In Thai, there is no ending consonant 'f', so the natural substitute was a 'b'. The first letter of Golf's name is ก. Because of the consonant's thickness, pronouncing her name felt less like the posh image of the socialite swinging a golf club — probably what she intended when choosing the name — and more like the unintentional sound a chicken makes when traversing ground: Gkob, gkob, gkob. Golf's name expresses a peculiar duality within her selfhood, the blurring between her imagination and her reality. She was a trans woman, but some still think of her as a man, so much so that men who treat cis women kindly would threaten to beat her up should she make any romantic advances. Yet, she did so anyway, selectively, carefully, spending her life playing this game of relationship minesweeper. She did nothing immoral but was constantly punished by the men around her. But even in her precarious position, Golf was a person who found belonging on the TV show's domestic space. People laughed at her jokes. She was accepted fully and wholly by her straight employers, who supported her through heartbreaks. In Golf, I see both chickens: the chicken in English that was a metaphor for being put in one's place; and the Thai chicken, the first letter of the alphabet, the one that stood unruffled, proudly herself, leading the charge, queering and bending gendered norms to exist unashamedly on her own terms. As a child, I listened to my mother. I knew being queer would be difficult. But I also saw the side of Golf that displayed the possibility of living purposefully within a marginalized queer body. Through her, I learned that there was room for nonconformists. To the nine-year-old boy who probably knew deep down of his queerness, Golf was someone to look up to. She showed me how to live joyously, to laugh despite life's challenges, to be so confident of her selfhood that she could shrug off anything. Golf was both chickens at once, but she also transcended beyond them, to a being undefinable by our limited language.

There is an answer to the age-old riddle: which came first, the chicken or the egg? The riddle perplexes because the chicken and the egg represent distinct parts in the same life cycle. Without the egg, there would be no hatched chicken; without the chicken, there would be no laid eggs. The answer lies in how the Thai alphabet is ordered. The first letter, ก, is the chicken. The second, ข, represents the egg. The riddle is solved not by considering the linearity of life, but rather the two beings' inter-dependence to survive in the same generation. The chicken does not just lead the rest of the alphabet. It cares for its unborn successor first, like a mother tethered to her child. While ก is sometimes the rooster, the one who crows first, the initial line of defense against the unknown terrors of the night, ก is also the mother hen, who cares fervently for the eggs that follow behind, who nurtures them and encourages them to become stronger, better chickens than their parents. A single symbol represents both mother and father; a single symbol for the complex layers that make up our gendered life. If the ก in Korn is a wish of masculinity, ก also holds the key to breaking out of it, to allow me to transcend beyond its barnyard shackles and live unmarred by gender. When I saw Golf on television, it was not just her charged courageousness to live openly and queerly that struck me, but also how much of myself I saw inside her. We were both low- income fat Thai gender nonconformists, whose inherent joy multiplied when our friends laughed. Golf was not just a rooster, but also my mother hen, the one who walked first with her taloned footsteps, leaving behind a pathway for me to follow and dream with. Like my mother, she echoed how life could be lived: painfully. Unlike my mother, she showed me how life could be rich and rewarding as I traversed the passage through that pain.

When I was fifteen, I lost my mother to cancer. Her departure thrust me out of the nest she had precariously built. At that age, I still felt like an egg. But life had forcefully cracked my shell open to reveal a chick yellowed by the absorption of its own yolk. I had no choice but to enter an adulthood characterized by short, underdeveloped wings. Without a mother, I was exposed and directionless.

When I was twenty-six, reflecting on childhood in a writing workshop, I was reminded of Golf again. I remembered how I interpreted her existence as courage to exist unperturbed in an antagonistic world. I looked up the TV show's episodes on YouTube. On my thirteen- inch laptop screen with much more stable WiFi, I discovered that the show was still running, eighteen years after its pilot episode. And Golf was—is—still very much alive. She has lost weight with age, but she still wears the same outfits: a bright T-shirt; a pair of dark pants; a brown bob wig; and the slightest smidge of makeup. Golf, despite her aging body, still delivers jokes with the same cheekiness, the same amount of life. Almost twenty years later, she is still thriving. Persevering on the TV screen has made her a queer elder. She is a chicken that transcended its limited lifespan to teach generations of young children what queer joy could look and feel like.

I turned to my closet mirror. Just past my quarter-life, I saw so much of Golf in myself. I had fallen in love with a non-binary person, experimented with makeup, and wore bright, attention-grabbing clothes. I embodied her humor, poking fun at myself in everyday conversations, finding joy in the boisterous laughter I shared with my friends. To my mother, Golf was a warning sign. But to me, she was a roadmap. I reached my hands up to the plumpness surrounding my jawline, feeling a sudden sense of security. Golf had led me to a present where I could find solace and joy true to my queer identity. I could not help but wonder how many young children, like me, grew up watching her beautiful, extended reign on television as a sign that we all belonged somewhere, that our own bright futures were just ahead of us.

I have dreamt about my mother more times than I could count. She passed away in her late forties. At the funeral, relatives surrounded me with watchful eyes, as if I too had been forecasted with a death too early, too unmerciful for a living being. But the exciting thing about death is that memories — the best ones — become permanent. Memories of the deceased are installed in one's being, the way eggshells remain in nests even after chicks leave them. In those dreams, like the playing and rewinding of VCRs, I relived moments of joy we shared together as mother and child. These vignettes had no greetings or farewells. We just enjoyed each other's company. She was the mother hen that knew to watch out for danger, to never relinquish her lifelong duty despite death's sullen tearing us apart. When I woke, breathlessness would fill my lungs, as if I was again learning how to breathe for the first time.

A child, once separated from their mother, becomes their own complicated being. The child must chart their own journey in relation to the rest of the world, an inevitable independence from the maternal tethering they've relied on. And yet, the child still knows nothing without guidance. That is when they turn to other mothers, similar to them not through biology, but through inherently resonating selves. When I watched Golf on television as an adult, I instinctively saw a future to aspire towards. It was then that I moved, searching for a trail to follow. Golf became the hen to line up behind. It was by walking in her footsteps that some parts of me found their footing. I became a hybrid of multiple mothers, dead and fictional, a singularity converging upon their unspoken influences. Watching Golf again made me realize that it was in the intersections of Golf and my mother's motherhoods that my identity as a queer person was truly founded.

In the weeks before she passed, when my mother could still converse, she asked if I could put on an episode of the sitcom. She had missed it while she was in the hospital. When Golf appeared onscreen, my mother let out a weak but prominent chuckle, the air in her lungs thin and waning. Golf triggered a joy in her that she had forgotten, her body having been in a constant battle with pain. As I lay in her lap, she ran her fingers through my short hair, as if combing the little crown of a rooster. I could feel her conferring onto me her hopes for my future. But it was different this time. No longer was it about strictly following the path she had laid out for me: to be a scholar and settle down with a nice wife. None of those details mattered against the immanence of death. With each gentle stroke, I could feel that she was letting me go, telling me to begin dreaming of a life I had always wanted to live.

I looked up at the screen to see Golf laughing at her own jokes. For the first time in a long while, I felt energy re-invigorate my mother's frail body. In that moment, I felt happy, thinking that my mother was on her way to recovery. Only years later did I understand what that moment was — a child handed from their dying mother off into the outstretched hands of another prominent female figure. When my mother finally believed in a femininity that was greater, queerer, and more complex than any of us could understand, she created a confident passage into my future.

From young, I have been aware of the symbols and metaphors within the building blocks of the languages I speak: English, Thai and Mandarin. When I first discovered the nonfiction form, I was enamored by how the latent meaning in everyday language could be treated as evidence in building universal human experiences. That instinct, combined with a curiosity to understand my inner femininity, made speculation the glue that threads, weaves and holds the varying sources of evidence together into a comprehensive argument about selfhood. Speculation is the lens that allows us writers to uncover indefinite layers of meaning from the real world.

Max Pasakorn (he/she/they) is a queer, Thai-born, Singapore-based essayist and poet. Max's writing, predominantly about their identities, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the SFPA Rhysling Award and can be found in Chestnut Review, Strange Horizons, Defunkt Magazine, Freeze Ray Poetry, Fifth Wheel Press and more. Max's most recent nonfiction chapbook, A Study in Our Selves, won the OutWrite 2022 Chapbook Competition and was published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2023. Max is currently pursuing their BA in Arts & Humanities (Creative Writing) at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Read more about Max at www.maxpasakorn.works.

Ten Reasons

By JV Genova

“I go for a walk in a familiar area and realize how now my body feels unfamiliar to me; it’s a home in which I know all the vessels, all the nooks and ways of movement but again I find it difficult to rest as I am hyper vigilant, like waiting for the baby to cry except now it’s my body crying.”

0. Haunted by so many questions, I went for a walk in an unfamiliar town in the hopes I’d find myself. Why does a body revolt, begin to eat itself away? The Greek root of the word tumor is onkos, which really means burden. Instead of finding myself, I found two deer lying in the shadows of a dark gray church. They curled their bodies in the green grass below the stained-glass windows, under a spreading crabapple tree, and never once moved their antlered heads, though they watched me closely. 

1. When I remember my hometown, I remember the oil refinery on the south side. Stack after gray stack rising into the deep blue sky, tendrils of smoke and flame rising from the tops. In a field below, visible from Interstate 25—where some people made their escape, speeding out of town—cows grazed in the shadows. I often wonder what those cows thought—if anything—the day there was an explosion at the refinery. I often wonder how many of those cows had tumors, or if they were slaughtered for steak before the tumors got big enough for anyone to notice. Many days, the wind blew hard enough, the smell of the refinery wasn’t too noticeable. But on a sunny day, if we decided to picnic in the park or toss the Frisbee, the sulfur, rotten egg odor would permeate, the air thick with its chemical smell. 

2. Mom always kept the ashtrays in the house clean. It was rare to find an ashtray with more than a butt or two in it. There was one red glass ashtray, oblong, that was rather pretty. I loved when it sat empty on the coffee table. If the sunlight filtered in and hit it just right, it would cast red prisms on the walls. But it never stayed empty. In a photo album somewhere, there’s a photo of me as a baby, plump and pink skinned, grinning up at my mother, who appears to be about to change my diaper. My mother leans over my small form, smiling, her permed brown hair a poof around her. To her right, next to the baby powder and wipes and stack of diapers, sits that red ashtray. A cigarette rests in its one notch, smoke rising next to me. It gives my chubby face a cherubic haze. 

3. It’s sometimes difficult for single mothers to feed their children. Sometimes, there isn’t quite enough money to last the entire month. The cost of being poor is doled out over time in a number of ways. After school, the best days meant a processed frozen chicken patty pulled from a box, warmed in the tiny oven and topped with a slice of American cheese—plasticity turned to gooey warmth on top. But even on payday, in the shadows of the refinery when the midwinter sun sits hovering—trying to hold its place in the relentless and unstoppable wind—there are perhaps a few frozen Salisbury steak dinners, maybe canned green beans or corn. If it’s summer, a treat in spaghetti squash with meat sauce. During the really good years, there might be fresh summer corn. In middle school, lunch is a warm pretzel with hot molten cheese-like sauce that holds like rubber to the dough, salt sitting unmoving in the orange congealment. In high school, if I remember to bring a dollar, lunch is a bag of Cheetos and a Mountain-Dew; if the right people asked me to lunch, it meant a Big Gulp from the 7-11 down the street filled with Mountain-Dew and cheap vodka. This might help me get through math class, where it’s become clear what my strengths are, and they aren’t in that room. What I’m saying is: I didn’t see a bulb of garlic or a stalk of fresh asparagus or the green and rippled leaves of spinach until I moved to California in my twenties and drove past farms there. And I know now more than ever what my strengths are. 

4. Other potential strengths often had to be magnified: long hair blown dry and held in place with hairspray that came in aerosol cans that fogged the bathroom and left sticky, clear, paint-like droplets on the cabinets and walls and fumigated the entire house with a chemical, slightly pleasant smell. Or thick makeup applied to cover every last pore, followed by carefully applied eyeliner the color of black ink, except for that brief period in which mascara in an unnatural blue hue was all the rage. Lotions, creams, and powders, man-made and man-approved and intended to catch the attention of men. Little pretty containers of endocrine disrupters, because the future doesn’t really matter when there’s a party tonight, and K.C. says he’ll drive me with his other friends. (I wouldn’t have known what endocrine disrupter meant, anyway.) I will sit in the front seat, next to my cousin whose hair is even taller than mine and holds even more Aqua Net. The floorboard of the huge old black Lincoln is worn away by rust, a hole in the steel that spreads to a width of two feet and is covered by a big piece of cardboard that flies up and into my face when K.C. drives through a puddle. It splashes everyone, but everyone just laughs, and when the police car behind the big old Lincoln glows red and blue and we realize we are being pulled over, everyone drops their cans of Black Label and Busch beer into the empty speaker holes in the doors. The holes, gaping, are there because K.C. took the speakers out to put in better ones but never got around to actually putting in new ones. The cop lets K.C. off with a warning (maybe his last, as last I heard, he’s in prison) but the cans will forever rattle around inside the doors and that old car will always smell like beer. At the party, there will be drinking card games and a bottle of Night Train and K.C.’s bicep tattoo that reads clits tits and bong hits and this should really tell me everything I need to know about him, but it does not save my cousin from having a baby with him before she graduates from high school. 

5. The office that housed the local equivalent of Planned Parenthood—though it was not that; it was run by the county health department and may or may not have been a response to the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the nation—was where we all went for care once we passed the threshold of thirteen. A squat nondescript building, it was one of the most popular places in town for teenagers. A fishbowl full of condoms sat on the counter where local teens would be able to grab a handful without condemnation or questioning; a nice lady in a white coat would give us a pap smear and birth control pills even if we were only fourteen. She might note that I wasn’t a virgin, but she would do so without judgment—questions of consent were never raised in earnest. While questions of consent might never be offered and I would leave without fully understanding consent, I would leave with a seashell shaped container of subdued pink containing color-coded pills. These pills I down with Mountain Dew after stubbing out a Marlboro Light because strokes and other terrible medical things only happen to other people. Because I live in a place where to question what might be healthy or unwise is really just being not strong enough and so I power forth, going to the best parties which are always on the south side in the trailer park. There, the kegs go in a bathtub full of ice and the bathroom door never locks and no matter how you time it, someone will need a beer when you need to pee so it’s best if you take a friend to the bathroom with you—to hold the door closed, unless you want a hallway full of people with red solo cups to see you sitting on the toilet mid-stream, which at that point in my life would be the worst thing ever, but only because I had no idea what’s to come. So I took the birth control pills with a self-discipline better applied to other areas of my life, and I did this for so long it becomes difficult to track or remember how long those little pills have been a consistent part of my day, every day, until the years stack up and even though I know there is a slightly elevated risk of breast cancer, that pales in comparison to being like so many other girls I knew; girls who got pregnant young and then got stuck because the baby’s dad always took the nearest exit and it’s so much harder to leave town unless it’s on your own two legs only. Anything else would just slow me down, make me feel like leaving is too scary, until at some point when I might look around and stop seeing that town for what it really is: a place somehow both stagnant and windy, small but firmly rooted in the wide-open plains that make it seem like the sun is plopping down for the night right across the next hill. 

6. According to my mother, in a story I’ve heard in different iterations over time, she was resting, pregnant belly large and looming, as my father, his mother, and sister sat at the kitchen table. Mom overhead their discussion, which turned on what I should be named. Various highly femininized names were tossed about, names such as Tiffany or perhaps Debbie. Angrily, because it was offensive to her that they might discuss the naming of her baby without her input, Mom walked into the kitchen and said, the baby’s name will be Jonnie, whether it’s a boy or a girl. I share the name of my father, though with a different spelling. I also share the middle name of my mother: Lynne, a name that was predominantly male until after the start of the twentieth century. Being a female with a conventionally male name has offered both benefits and challenges, such as when I was a child and would ask a friend to spend the night but if I had not yet met her parents, sometimes I would be asked to come meet them just to prove I was actually a girl. Did your parents want a boy? I am often asked when meeting a new person, and despite the number of times I’ve been asked, I do not have a response. I do not know. But what I do know is this: Men can get breast cancer, but it is one hundred times more likely to affect women. In about half the cases, the woman has no known risk factors. While a family history of breast cancer increases the risk of developing breast cancer, no one in my family had breast cancer that I know of. Simply being a female is a risk factor, regardless of the standard gender of your name. 

7. Red solo cups. Red dye number 40. Plastic Big Gulp cups from 7-Eleven lining the cabinet. Bright red Slurpees, after driving across town to the nearest 7-11. Might as well buy a pack of Marlboros while there. Grab a bag of Doritos to eat while driving home, sunroof open, refinery smell wafting into the car while “Baby Got Back” or maybe some Lynyrd Skynyrd plays loudly. Canned green beans. Leftovers—including the canned green beans, if there is a vegetable—heated in the microwave in plastic containers until piping hot. Red Bull and vodka, shot after shot until one day I think I might vomit just from the smell of the Red Bull when a guy at work drinks it. Red licorice. Red hot dogs, spinning in their case in the convenience store next to the place where I work, hungover and craving the spicy, greasy meat. I walk there through the shop where motorcycles idle and the smell of exhaust remains on my clothes, outside to where the refinery stands sentry, pillows of fumes and bright orange flames rising. I walk back with the terrible spicy hot dog, sipping a giant soda, through the exhaust and the mechanics smoking their cigarettes, past the pictures of naked women they all have hanging up in their mechanic’s stalls (until the boss says they can’t have naked photos anymore, maybe because I was hired and am the only female, so they all take those little stickers that are intended to repair a hole torn in a piece of notebook paper so you can put it back into a three ring binder, and they use those stickers to cover up nipples and assholes and spread legs and they think this is funny). I bum a cigarette from the service manager who keeps a pack in his shirt pocket after eating this hot dog. 

8. And one day I find myself taking yet another birth control pill, except now I’m in my late twenties and washing it down with a Miller Lite that functions as a sort of appetizer for the Jim Beam later, both of which will be dinner. And then I blink and I’m washing down the pill with a big glass of red wine which might be followed later by whiskey, and I do this even when it doesn’t taste good anymore and it’s not fun anymore but because what else would I do? 

9. Due to my fears of having a child too young, I determine I must never have one, until I meet a man who makes it seem as if it might be possible to have a child and not totally fuck the kid up. A man who might not leave suddenly, or cheat, or lie. This is an unexpected thing, this unexpected man, and it takes some time to determine what to do. No woman in my family—with the exception of my grandmother—has been married fewer than three times, some as many as six or eight times, and because of this and the men* I’ve known, it has been relatively easy to determine marriage is a doomed prospect. But then this man asks me to marry him, and though I fully expected to panic and either say no or just not go through with the wedding, I did go through with it, because he is steady and calm both in life and in his love for me. And after several years together, including five years of marriage, he says he wants to try having a baby, and I decide that maybe it would be fine to leave this one to fate. I assume—oddly, given my nearly incessant fears of pregnancy—that somehow, I won’t get pregnant easily. And when the little stick you pee on six weeks later shows two faint lines, I am shocked not only that my body has taken part in this creation, but also that I managed to wait this long. Just be sure you have a baby by the time you are thirty-five, the doctor had said, because it just gets risky after that. On a sunny, green August morning, I deliver a daughter, and the following month, I turn thirty-six. This allows me to believe—close though it may be—that I have dodged the risk inherent in later-life pregnancy. I was thirty-five, after all, when she emerged, crying and presenting herself to us in much the same way my shock at becoming a parent did: messy and loud, refusing to be ignored. 

*These men have included, but are not limited to: the one who did not like it when I said no, and so he ignored it and kept going as if he did not notice my tears that wet his naked shoulders and made my mascara run and my voice stop working, then later stalked me when I broke up with him; the one who cheated on me on every possible occasion, because men have needs and it’s evolution, we’re supposed to scatter our seed; the much older men who didn’t seem creepy at the time, because I was so young and didn’t really know any better and just wanted someone to tell me it was all going to be okay. 

10. The baby cries a lot. And though—or maybe because—I nurse her like a champ, she only really seems to sleep when she drifts off on my chest after nursing. In the middle of the day, sitting on the sofa while the dog sleeps at my feet, I nurse her until she falls asleep and if I remain there, where she can keep her head upright and her forehead resting just below my collarbone, it’s fine. But I find it so hard to sit still, to not do other things while the baby sleeps, so I move, gently and slowly, to lay her down in her crib, where she can rest with the door closed and the baby monitor on alert. As soon as I lay her down, she begins to cry, and after a few days, we’re both so exhausted neither of us can think straight. At night, I must sit up to nurse her or she doesn’t stop crying. As soon as I move to lay her back down, she begins to cry. In desperation, I put her in her car seat and this works. The pediatrician says she has reflux—lying flat is painful for her. They call in a prescription, and I hesitate to fill the little dropper and give her the drug because she is so perfect, so rosy and innocent, and I am trying so hard not to be the kind of parent who keeps an ashtray near the baby’s changing table, so that I somehow (in my exhaustion) don’t recognize that the medicine is not the same as secondhand smoke or other chemicals. I’m trying so hard to do the right thing, and though I eventually cave in and fill the little dropper to the marked line with a white liquid from a brown glass bottle, placing it carefully just inside her little pink lips and dripping the medicine into her throat, I feel terrible that this seemingly flawless child needs something to ease any pain—where did I go wrong? So even when I can sleep, I don’t, because I feel guilty that she’s in her car seat when she isn’t even in the damn car, car seat resting on the floor by my bed. I don’t sleep because I worry that any second she will wake up crying, and my eyes stay open for so long they hurt when I blink them. All these things happen until one day, a palpable lump can be found, and I find myself contemplating the reasons for this lump, for the ways in which this body has revolted and attempted to cave in on itself, consume itself. I go for a walk in a familiar area and realize how now my body feels unfamiliar to me; it’s a home in which I know all the vessels, all the nooks and ways of movement but again I find it difficult to rest as I am hyper vigilant, like waiting for the baby to cry except now it’s my body crying. I want to lie down in the cool grass outside this church, a different church, a white clapboard church, to sit like a deer unmoving, curled under the branches of the crabapple tree. 

We live under an illusion of control. Perhaps it’s simply human nature to speculate, especially during crisis: there is a need to be able to explain the things that upend us. Maybe it’s a way of making sense of chaos—of working to instill order on that which cannot be controlled. When there is no easy answer, the “what ifs” can feel like an endless hamster wheel of chances and there is rarely one capital-T truth. I’m always looking for the gray area, the shadowy possibilities. I am trying to center the experience of this fear and a tendency to try to put into order countless probabilities.

JV Genova holds an MFA in nonfiction from Colorado State University. She recently decided to leave academia for government work. When she isn’t writing, she dabbles in photography and grows potatoes. She cannot believe she is someone’s mother. She can be found on Twitter @jv_genova and on Instagram @jv_genova.

A Blonde and A Brunette Walk into a Cancer Care Center with Their Big Feet

By Laurie Rachkus Uttich

“Lety loves Lilith, Adam’s first wife, the one who was created from the same dust as Adam, his equal who liked being on top during sex. There are many versions, but the story we like best is when Lilith leaves Adam after he demands her submission, and she flies out of Paradise and wanders off to live a solo life by the Red Sea.”

It’s Chemo Day and my sister-in-law Lety and I walk into the center like we own the place. We don’t do hoodies or Crocs or silk scarves. We do big wigs and black tanks and RBG t-shirts and bellbottoms and blue eyeliner and red, red lipstick no one can see under our masks, and we fucking bring it. We’re the energy we need and they can say Stage Whatever all they like, but we stopped accepting other people’s definitions of us years ago.

This is Chemo #8 and the clothes change, but we wear the same boots every time, because the chemo is working and we’re not superstitious, but we know how to leave well enough alone. Lety wears combat boots like the warrior she is, and I wear flower cowboy boots like the hippy former Midwesterner I am. We’re Yin and Yang, soul sisters, and she might have a sleeve of kickass tattoos while I meditate and carry crystals, but I’m also the granddaughter of coal miners. My boots might be pink, but their tips are sharp. 

Today, Lety’s a blonde and I’m a long-locks brunette, but I still wear the Pussy Hat one of her student’s crocheted over my wig, because it makes her laugh and we’re headed back into battles we thought were already won. A man in the lobby stares when I walk by, but I don’t drop my eyes like I usually do, and the moment passes and the words I want to scream remain stuck in my throat.

Chemo takes a long time and we do random things. I try to write, she draws. I scold her badly-behaved boobs like I do every time for getting us into this mess. We both have journals and books and backpacks with almonds and Pringles and one honey crisp apple we won’t eat. I look at our boots and think about how big my feet are for a woman just 5 foot 2, and I remember the African proverb that says, Never marry a woman with bigger feet than your own or she will become your fellow male.

I tell Lety and we roll our eyes and I remember this Spanish saying that advises a man when selecting a woman—or a sardine—to pick the small one, and then we wonder if we talk about how toxic masculinity also hurts boys and men enough and how crazy it is that Margaret Atwood’s still right and men are worried we’ll laugh at them and we’re worried they’ll kill us… and, Jesus, when did it all start? We’re tired of the way Eve’s still being blamed for that apple. I mean, who wouldn’t want to tap a Tree of Knowledge while Adam ran around naming things that didn’t need names? And then blame became shame and women became naked and men named them “weaker vessels” and witches who couldn’t say no to Satan… and they hanged them or burned them for their “forcible speech” and did you hear that the Taliban in 20-fucking-22 just made women journalists in Afghanistan cover their faces on the news? And, let’s not forget our own Marjorie Taylor Greene in the Land of the Free and her “We came from Adam’s rib” and “Women are the weaker sex” horseshit… and, God, Lety and I, cannot wait until one of Marge’s daughters grows up and calls her on her bullshit and we both agree it’s women like Marge who convinced women to bind their feet for a thousand years… and, by the way, did you know Barbie’s shoe size is a 3? and isn’t it weird there’s no Knocked-Up Barbie or June Cleaver Barbie? I mean, Marge tweeted, “The greatest choice a woman can make is becoming a mother,” and, sure, she’s batshit crazy, but it looks like the Supreme Court agrees… and is it good or bad Barbie took a pass on parenthood? We’re not sure and we’re happy mamas, but we still like that Barbie had 72 jobs and no babies.

We’re quiet for a while. History is so heavy to carry, especially while you’re living it. And then I say, “You know, I feel like I’m Lilith, but I’ve lived a life as Eve.”

Another person would need me to explain this, but Lety says, “Oh, God, write that down so you don’t forget it,” and I try not to cry about the gift she is to me. Lety loves Lilith, Adam’s first wife, the one who was created from the same dust as Adam, his equal who liked being on top during sex. There are many versions, but the story we like best is when Lilith leaves Adam after he demands her submission, and she flies out of Paradise and wanders off to live a solo life by the Red Sea. 

God decides taking a rib from Adam might make the next woman more compliant and creates Eve, Adam’s second wife, the one who stays by his side, even as they’re evicted from the Garden, and raises his children. I look at my big feet and think of my three sons who grew up and evicted themselves from my own little Paradise. Barbie ran for President seven times. And me? I was Team Mom twice.

Today, Lety tells me one myth says Lilith is a demon who goes on to murder babies and, God, we’re so, so tired. “Really?” I ask her, already beginning to Google where I learn Lilith also swallows the sperm of men who sleep alone. And, of course, that’s the story. A woman who saw herself as an equal, a man who disagreed, and a society that created a context-free, cautionary tale of what happens to women who think their bodies are their own. And, of course, the man is sleeping and not responsible for even his sperm.

Is it possible to live solo by the Red Sea? Is it even habitable? I wonder, but Lety’s on her last infusion now and she looks tired, so I don’t ask.

I sit and I watch this warrior I love, this witch with forcible speech, this truthteller who never covers her face, this inquisitive Eve, this oh, hell, no Lilith… this Latinx, this artist, this advocate, this teacher of Title One school kids, this mother of three, this wife who holds my brother-in-law’s heart. I watch the chemicals flood her body and I will them to drown the cancer, to split the sea into a Before and After. And I bless her feet, even bigger than mine, and I thank The Universe there’s nothing small about her.

###

This essay is primarily a love story for my sister-in-law, but I wouldn’t be able to look outward and extend beyond the self without speculation. Likewise, I wouldn’t be able to look inward and connect traditional myths and current events to my role as a woman and feminist without speculation… and I wouldn’t have landed in a place that makes me question my own complicity. I’m drawn to speculative nonfiction, because it engages the mind at work and at play and when you get out of your own way, something unexpected happens. You might even call it magical.

Laurie Rachkus Uttich writes poetry and prose and is the author of the poetry collection, Somewhere, a Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt (Riot In Your Throat, 2022). She teaches at the University of Central Florida and leads creative writing workshops at a maximum-security correctional center for men in Orlando.

Funeral & Its Traditions

By Micah Dela Cueva

“The living build a house to provide shelter in the afterlife. Houses for the dead are nicer than the living. I’ve seen golden-plated door frames. Air-conditioner. Flat-screen TV. Someone tells me that reburial ceremonies were more common before colonization.”

So still. My Lolo. So dead too. A lizard chills on the ceiling right above his casket. I'd shoo it away with a broom but I think this is its home. We're just borrowing the place. As a whisper, I say: Thank you.

None of my cousins, including me, look similar. Our family genes are finally dying. Do genes shrink until they're no longer recognizable?

The casket is squeaky clean. So new. White. I peer in. His hands look peaceful. Pressed barong. The detailed embroidery on the thin cloth makes me wonder how expensive it was. Pressed fresh flowers everywhere. If fake heaven existed, this would be it.

 

If fake heaven existed where you thought it was heaven for real until someone tells you it was all a test, this would be it. This funeral isn't real. Though I guess that's how it's always been for the living.

My cousin Ally asks me: Why are you thanking the dead? Weirdo. It's too awkward at this point, so I let her believe whatever she wants.

If I walk away from the casket too soon, I feel like a Tita will tell me to spend more time. I imagine the scenario. I'd say with an attitude: With whom? He's dead. I would so get away with it since I'm so American now. The lizard crawls away; my cue to dip.

 
 

There are traditions I've forgotten. I'm to take an elderly's hand while bowing and press the back of the hand on my forehead. A blessing, but sometimes they give you a lesson, so I humble my eyes.

At first, Lola didn't want to go to her husband's funeral. No divorce because it's illegal in the Philippines. I never saw her cry or lost her temper.

Throughout my younger years, I admired and despised Lola so much that I think I'm becoming just like her. Cold. Calculating. Superficial. A mountain can be so lonely and no one would ever ask how it's doing because it would never break anyways.

 
 

I sometimes wonder who or what a mountain would lean on. Metaphorically. But also like if a real mountain collapses? Would its children offer peace offerings? Would the moon lower itself from the sky to offer solace? Would nearby villages find it an inconvenience? I catch Lola sitting on one of the chairs beside the casket. A small smile. Weirdo.

Are dead hands allowed to look peaceful when they've pointed a gun at their wife? How does a mountain form? His dead hands look like they never knew violence. Fingernails so clean. My eyes trickle toward his face. My first time truly seeing him that I'm almost embarrassed. I barely knew him.

I see Ally sitting in the front row with drooped shoulders. My mom and her siblings cater to the guests: Eat some more. We need to refill the hot water Where are the cups? So many flies. I tune them out and focus on Ally whom I haven't seen in ten years. When we hug, I squeal under my breath because I can't be too excited. I remind myself, this is a funeral.

On the first night, a worn out cardboard box appeared in front of the casket. I notice the word Balikbayan was right in the center of one of the sides. Balikbayan: An overseas Filipino returning to the Philippines. I sit next to Ally on the first row and watch her watch the box as if she's on guard duty.

 

If I had a heart for Lola, I'd keep her company. Is that bad to write? I watch her say something to Lolo as if she's remembering a memory. Earlier, she introduced me to the guests: This is my youngest daughter's daughter. Her features are from the other family. I sweetened my smile. She was right, though the punch still hits me and continues to sting.

There are two other funerals happening in the next two rooms beside ours. I watch Lola checking the food of the one next to us. She takes a sample of the sweets. When someone notices her, she points at our own funeral. More people gather around her. So easy how she makes friends.

 
 

There are patterns in each family’s generation. The well-off family branch is the one that has the stone from my great-grandfather Mamay. For the drama, the stone was stolen on his deathbed. By now, it's a superstition, though everyone is paying the price for it. Stones live inside us and are passed down as tumors, kidney stones, etc. When I'm bored, I believe all of it.

Back then, daughters were married off to men who came from wealthy families. People learn to either love or tolerate the person they marry. It's easier to be lonely by yourself. Nothing is absolute in this world but loneliness. Is that too emo? Ally tells me she doesn't remember her dad. She was too young. I only know Tito Jun from my mom's stories. In my mom's memories, she lost all their fights.

 

Ally looks so lonely while staring at the Balikbayan box, it's almost pathetic. I've seen this loneliness before in my own reflection. She reaches for my hand. As kids, Ally and I both lived in our grandparent's house, though she was always the favorite, so only I'd get in trouble. We fought a lot. She was a biter. I was a hair puller. In my memories, I won all of our fights.

Lolo's sister ushers all of his grandchildren to sit and stand in a line. Two girls in front. Two boys behind. Two girls at each end of the two boys. She looks at my black satin among the whites that my cousins are wearing. Lolo's sister opens her mouth to say something when I power struggle with her through a staring contest. She readies her camera. No cheese for the photo, but one of us smiles.

 
 

I also half-smile to see what Lolo's sister will do. She lowers the camera: This is a funeral. No smiling. We redo it. By the fourth time, I'm ready to lose it. In my writing, Ally and I are always holding hands, but I'm the one reaching for her. I'd never admit that I need her more. My mom finally notices the box. She rips the corner and wiggles her finger in. Ally says: my dad is in there.

I snort and tried to pass it as a nervous laugh. My mom flips her head back at us: Who!? Ally's dad, dead and already buried. I straighten my lips as it curves into a slight smile. Only Lola can ask for something so ridiculous and get away with it. In the afterlife, family members are separated. All randomly teleported. Believe this with me. Don't worry, afterlife heaven has nice streets.

 
 

The living build a house to provide shelter in the afterlife. Houses for the dead are nicer than the living. I've seen golden- plated door frames. Air- conditioner. Flat-screen TV. Someone tells me that reburial ceremonies were more common before colonization. I'm trying to rewrite this story with more grace toward Lola.

The second morning, the box is opened. There is a skeleton body sitting next to Ally. I blink again. Maybe I've caught a lesson from an elderly. The skeleton has no meat hands, just bones as half- fists.

I told Mama to wait. Before I could say anything else, it's been done. I heard the oldest brother say. The heavy atmosphere is hiccupped by Lola's snores. Tito Jun walks toward the room where we rest from the guests. He doesn't open it or can't. I cackle. He shifts his whole body to look at me. I roll my eyes while I get up to open the door wider.

 

Tito Skelly sits in one of the two chairs beside Lolo. Ally slouches and has already accepted the new reality. I approach the empty white plastic chair across from him. I look at his ribs first—dry, dirt- stained with grass. I make my way to where his heart is supposed to be, his chin, where his eyes have been taken out.

We're definitely in fake heaven. My mom and her siblings call for Tito Skelly to join them, so he does. They offer him food but he shakes his head. They do this three times before they give up and start eating.

One of the siblings isn't in the blame game. He just carried out what Lola asked. I loiter inside the room. Tito Jun blocks the door entry, so Ally and my other cousins peek through his ribcage. Who will inherit the guilt? A sister asks. I pout at Tito Jun. So this is where I come in. They are still their mother's children. The guilt is left to the next generation.

Ally and I watch someone's purse bump into her skeleton dad. A piece of his elbow chips. The sound of the chipped bone shuttling through the tiles makes us laugh. He is now looking at us. I semi- bow my head for good karma points. Ally demands: Go get it. I side- eye her because I am still eight months older than her.

You go get it. You're his daughter, he won't haunt you. He loves you. She looks at me to see where the lie is, but even in the lie, there is a truth. My cousin reluctantly follows the chipped bone trail.

I close my eyes. So still, I could be dead. Before the sun wakes, I offer my sleeping spot to a Tita. I sit on the farthest chair from the casket and Tito Jun. Does he miss Ally or his other siblings? My mom leaving me at the mall with him? All the girls used to say: He is so handsome. Too bad he has a child. He'd get annoyed but would still babysit me.

 
 
 

Tito Skelly is sitting again beside his dad's casket. One by one, a sibling sits across from him. Perhaps they tell him stories of what he's missed or some sort of confession. Isn't this what we all want in the end? Not so much to have the dead back, but to have one moment with them again, even if we can't squeeze their hand.

Only when a mountain is smoothed to a stone, does a new mountain rise? Lolo's sister hands Ally candies shaped in a flower. She says something him. The skeleton smiles. I believe this because she smiles. I don't know what I should say to him. Thanks for showing up?

They're all silent, though it feels like everyone but me has come to an agreement. I will inherit this stone. The night before the funeral, my cousins sleep on the floor where three futons are spread out. I drew the short stick to sleep on the end. Lola warns us not to sleep at night during a family funeral or we will wake up with the body next to us.

I rush to get the candy flower. In front of Tito Jun, nothing comes out but a soft: Thanks for taking care of me. I smiled because I believe he smiled. At the burial, the white box is lowered with the casket. I still take the stone. Its rough edges on my palm. I am to swallow it.

 

I wish I could miss the dead the way that everyone does. My mom and Lola argue about whether or not to say the rosary. The guests watch. An open white-clothed medium box is propped next to the casket. Everything feels so muted. Ally tells me the instructions while we line up in front of the casket. I kept asking her to repeat it.

When I picture Tito Jun, I see him with long ravened hair. Always fiddling with his guitar pick. How nice. For him to be home with Lolo. Everyone cries but Lola and I. Ally reached for my hand. In my memory, he takes the multi-colored candy flower-turned-bouquet.

 

When I only wrote the reality of the memorial service for my grandfather and the reburial of my uncle, it felt too controlled, as if I had arrived at what I already knew rather than an unexplorable, possible truth. What might I give space to if I lessen my focus on the heavy emotions? And so, speculation bridges truth and grace by exploring the compartmentalization of grief and the inheritance of memory and guilt.

Word Weaver Micah Dela Cueva was born in the Philippines with the ocean on her skin and mountains on her back. Her writing has a gentle nature that is often contrasted by the harsh reality of her stories. She has an MFA in Writing and Publishing at Long Island University, Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Hunger Mountain.

 

The Blackest Light: A History of Helium, Helios and Henry Smith

Editors Note: This essay features a horrific historical event, a lynching that took place well over a century ago. We at Speculative Nonfiction do not take lightly the dissemination of traumatic images, but in this case, we wish to honor the author’s wishes to include this image with his essay. You might feel that such an image would be too confronting for you, and so we wanted to give you this warning. Although images of racialized and ethnic hatred are all too available to us each and every day, we should never become inured to them.

By Isaiah Rivera

“Henry Smith was another demigod - a handyman, an eclipse charged with forcing its darkness onto a new planet, a Negro burned at birth by his Phaethonic gene - and he was scorched during the worst lynching period in United States history. But there was no Zeus to save Henry from his brilliance, no redemptive thunderbolts, no weeping poplars to witness their brother burn.”

Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right. I am all other men, any man is all men…

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Shape of the Sword’

//

We are concerned with light. Whether it be artificial or natural, spectral or spiritual, light consumes the whole of our existences. We are interested in purity, in divinity, in the godly sheen of inspiration, but the light that burns brightest - or darkest, as it were - is not simply holy. It is the light of madness, of despair, of death. The kind that blinds with its belligerence - a light so pure that it renders your gaze dark, striking you with optical blankets of black. This is the light of poetry and fiction, of entire worlds constructed in the dark safety of our disembodied REM cycles; the light of gods and angels, of ancient verse, of inspired worship in temples and shrines; the light of the sun, our cosmic golden boy bestowing his blistering beams upon us all. 

This is not pristine, easy white light; but instead, a violent brilliance that kills, so radiant it destroys you completely, exploding your brains into a million illuminations which shoot across the atmosphere, past our universe and into new ones, and then keep going. A light that produces darkness - a light that necessitates darkness. A mutual, gaping wide expanse of polarities: absence and presence, progression and regression, reality and fantasy. The lines blur within light shadowed by darknesses so profound, so heavy, they could crush a mind, return it back to that unnameable place where the unborn dwell.

That is the light I want, the light I need - which means, too, that I want its concomitant darkness, perhaps more so. Perhaps at the core of a quest for light is a quest for darkness - the clean comfort of a blank slate, the freedom of the void. Light and dark constitute our realities, right down to the elements. The two of them, in tandem, are the only way anything can be discovered.

//

It is light that brings us to our elements. 

Helium was first discovered in 1868 by French astronomer Pierre J. C. Janssen while observing a total eclipse in what is now Andhra Pradesh. Deep in the darkness, Janssen noticed bright yellow spectral lines in the chromosphere, the colorful second layer of the sun’s atmosphere. Later that year, English astronomer Norman Lockyer surmised that these bands of light could not have been produced by any known element at the time; thus, a new element was born. Lockyer, in collaboration with chemist Edward Frankland, named the unknown element ‘helium’ after the Greek personification of the Sun, helios.¹

Darkness reifies light; light is defined by the dark.

//

In Greek mythology, Helios is the son of titans Hyperion and Theia, crowned with a radiant diadem that shimmers across the firmaments every day and night as he drives the sun, tucked away inside his chariot, pulled by what ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar described as ‘fire-darting steeds’ with equally ablazen names: Pyrois (‘fiery’), Aeos (‘air’), Aethon (‘burning’, ‘blazing’, or ‘shining’), and Phlegon (‘to burn brightly or shine like a fire’).

Helium, too, is a fire-darting steed, leading the way for its nuclear titan that is the sun, energy explosions and galactic blasts of protons emitting from every direction. The color of the sun’s celestial beams dictate what elements are present in the atmosphere. Electron energy levels are visible through the use of a prism, which splits up and slows down white light to create a rainbow spectrum. Whichever rainbow bands are missing from the pattern become the defining elements to name, hence helium’s discovery. Once he observed that which already existed in the dark, Janssen saw beyond the light. It is only through absence that new elements may be found.

//

Helios is not a very remarkable Greek figure, compared to the fall of his son Phaethon (from the Greek phaethô, ‘to shine’). A restless youth, Phaethon begged for just one joyride in his father’s chariot until Helios acquiesced. C’est la vie - Phaethon lost control of the reins and crashed into the earth, engulfing us in fire. The worst of the blaze struck Africa, whose fruitful plains were scorched to dry desert and whose men were charred ebony as an eclipse. 

The Earth called to the heavens for protection from further destruction wrought by an insolent young demigod; accordingly, Zeus struck down a fatal thunderbolt that flung Phaethon’s flaming black body into the muddy river-waters of the Eridanos.² After Phaethon’s extinction, the Heliades (‘children of the sun’) gathered in grief, and the gods mercifully transformed each of them into poplar trees, to forever weep amber tears for their dead black brother.

//

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. It is colorless, odorless, and so light that gravity cannot hold it down. It is the most effective element to inflate balloons because unlike others, if exposed to fire, helium does not burn.

//

It started like it always does, with a lie - a black man accused of raping and murdering a white girl. Myrtle Vance, 4 years old, daughter of veteran police officer Henry Vance, known to be a hard and brutal man. Vance arrested Henry Smith, a mentally disabled local worker known to be innocuous and serviceable to his white counterparts, for murder; a sentence already bad enough to warrant execution, but Vance and company decided to exaggerate the facts of the case, declaring that Myrtle had been violated before death. A local figurehead, Bishop Haygood, completely falsified an account of her disarticulation: “First outraged with demoniacal cruelty and then taken by her heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity.”

In fact, Myrtle’s poor little body merely had neck lacerations, likely the result of strangulation. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted by anyone, let alone Smith. But the local white community clung to this bit of fake news to justify what happened next. Later in a sobering polemic, anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells would write of the killing: “Never in the history of civilization has any Christian people stooped to such shocking brutality and indescribable barbarism as that which characterized the people of Paris, Texas, and adjacent communities on the first of February, 1893.”³ 

February 1st, 1893. The day Thomas Edison built the world’s first movie studio, The Black Maria, with a retractable roof meant to let in as much light as possible.

February 1st, 1893. The day a different kind of light let itself into Henry Smith’s body and shattered into a luminous genealogy soaked in paraffin, licked by the flames of history, undone by time.

//

When we swallow helium instead of air to change how we talk, we actually speed up the sound of our voices. Normally when we speak, our vocal folds vibrate in our voice box and the specific sounds they make come together with our particular vocal tracts to give our voice a timbre, our own distinct sound quality. Helium particles flatten that timbre. The more we swallow, the less ourselves we become. If too much is swallowed, you could lose yourself completely.⁴

//

The day after his death, The New York Sun reported the details of Henry Smith’s lynching. The reportage took on an almost epic quality, as Smith’s torture and execution were relayed:

The negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne, and, followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster known in current history. The line of march was up Main street to the square, around the square down Clarksville street to Church street, thence to the open prairies about 300 yards from the Texas & Pacific depot. Here Smith was placed upon a scaffold, six feet square and ten feet high, securely bound, within the view of all beholders. Here the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him, cottonseed hulls placed beneath him and set on fire. In less time than it takes to relate it, the tortured man was wafted beyond the grave to another fire, hotter and more terrible than the one just experienced.

What does hell look like for an already scorched man, condemned to life on earth? How bright must that fire beyond the grave glow in its endless rage? How can someone be burned again and again for eternity, never to stop sizzling? Would there be an audience? Could there be an audience? And would they stand in silent admiration, or applaud? 

The Sun’s account of Henry Smith’s death is the closest any of us will get to an answer:

Words to describe the awful torture inflicted upon Smith cannot be found. The Negro, for a long time after starting on the journey to Paris, did not realize his plight. At last when he was told that he must die by slow torture he begged for protection. His agony was awful. He pleaded and writhed in bodily and mental pain. Scarcely had the train reached Paris than this torture commenced. His clothes were torn off piecemeal and scattered in the crowd, people catching the shreds and putting them away as mementos. [Myrtle Vance’s] father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh. It was horrible - the man dying by slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh. Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons. The mass of beings 600 yards in diameter, the scaffold being the center. After burning the feet and legs, the hot irons - plenty of fresh ones being at hand - were rolled up and down Smith’s stomach, back, and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat.

That kind of hell is unfathomable, yet it happened right here on our chariot-charred earth in Paris, Texas. Henry Smith’s tormentors donned its light, white and pernicious, with pride. Imagine hating someone so much that it required you to not only kill them, but to torch them, inside and out, to blind them, and, most insidiously, to mute them, even knowing that, had you simply left them alone before it all, they’d still be just as voiceless.

//

Henry Smith was another demigod - a handyman, an eclipse charged with forcing its darkness onto a new planet, a Negro burned at birth by his Phaethonic gene - and he was scorched during the worst lynching period in United States history. But there was no Zeus to save Henry from his brilliance, no redemptive thunderbolts, no weeping poplars to witness their brother burn. The Texan demigods were not powerful enough to grant such a comfort. They were primordial creatures, drunk with country, armed with iron brands. Vance and his family, along with the white crowd, possessed no empathy, no restriction, no mercy. They drenched Henry Smith with oil and lit him on fire. They burned him. Then, thinking he deserved more, they forced the scorch into his eyes and throat, the ultimate explosion of light. They tormented him until he was little more than a snuffed-out torch. Henry gave his best effort to escape; he could only dream of being a noble gas, free from the wrath of fire. Perhaps he thought that on him, God would shine a holy light that would, if not save him, ease the pain of his imminent fate. Perhaps God did - perhaps that light radiated from within his trembling body; perhaps it gushed from his emptied eyes and blackened throat, and then the townspeople pulled him back into the flames.

//

For a long time, I wanted to die. I wanted the most garish, unforgettable curtain call you could imagine, so that all of my tormentors would see me and be starstruck, humbled even, by the sight of my broken bones and splattered innards across an imaginary stage. I always knew I was a marked man, in more ways than one. After all, faggots and poplar trees burn with similar verve. I knew what was destined for men like Henry, like me, and before getting scorched by angry white throngs, I wanted my body to join the elements. 

For hours, I search for ways to expire in the most theatrical manner possible. That’s when I found helium. 

Since 2007, deaths by helium have been steadily rising.⁵ If you were to suck helium from a pressurized tank, that could potentially be your last breath. The results would be brutal. Your body would burst like a balloon touched by a flame - ruptured lung tissue, concentrated gas in the bloodstream lodging into the brain, initiating stroke, seizure, and death. No chance of recovery. No more burning light - only the soft consolation of darkness.

I took comfort in that knowledge. What a spectacle of carnage I’d be - bloody bits of black demigods shooting across the violaceous morning skies, looping around the sun with ethereal prominence. Such a dark discovery I’d be. My light would be unbearable. No souvenirs to be found.

//

On a rickety stage, I stand before a legion of top-hats and umbrellas baying for my blood. Thousands of nondescript salmon faces, yellow grins, and red-shocked eyes teeming to the rafters. Before me sits a table covered in a black sheet. In the crowd, horses whinny and children cry. A breeze wafts across my neck, cooling my pulse as I raise my left hand. With my right, I reveal what’s beneath the sheet. A crude display of annihilation: knives, drills, hammers, pliers. A gun lying next to a flamethrower. A buzzsaw beside a crossbow. The top-hats cheer, tossing popcorn in the air. I run my finger along each one, considering its might, the crowd jeering me. Then I flip the table on its side. The weapons clatter around me as the crowd protests. They whistle, they spit, they moan. They begin to chant, “Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.” But I have a trick up my sleeve; or rather, down my throat. I face off the crowd, open my mouth, and expel a stadium’s worth of helium. My body becomes lighter and lighter as my throat swells with gas. The audience breathes in my performance, writhing and sputtering, churchgoers inspired by a rousing sermon. Elsewhere, I hear the rapt sound of a singular pair of hands clapping. When I am finally empty, the lights cut out. In the rising darkness, I extend my arms and sigh. It is time for the show.

//

It’s been years since I first learned what light can do to a person like me. And still, the reverie of its power haunts me as presently as a fresh, gaping wound. Still, the anguished cries of men I’ve never met, whom I very well may meet again in that hereafter that burns along an infinitude of stars, echo in my ears. Still, those Boschian lynching crowds engulf my thoughts with a rapt immediacy, as real as the blood flowing in my veins, the sun on my skin, the light I can never escape.

Notes

¹ Matson, Michael and W. Orbaek, Alvin. Inorganic Chemistry For Dummies. 2013. 1st Edition.

² Coolidge, Olivia E. Greek Myths. 1949.

³ Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. 1895.

⁴ Matthew Soniak. ‘Why Does Inhaling Helium Make Your Voice Sound Funny?’ Mental Floss. 2009.

⁵ Karolina Nowak, Pawel Szpot, and Marcin Zawadzki. ‘Suicidal deaths due to helium inhalation.’ Forensic Toxicology, 37, pp. 273-287. 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11419-019-00473-2

What does one do when language fails to express what fire does to the body? Scream? Sit in silence? Speculate. But speculation is not a method, nor a cure. It is a wish; the kind you make with your eyes closed, expectant, knowing that, no matter the outcome, you have made the concerted effort to blow that fire out. In this piece, I wish for another kind of light, via three cultural reference points: the discovery of the element helium, the Greek myth it takes its name from, and the lynching of a disabled black man in Texas whose death was photographed, souvenired, phonographically reenacted and commercially disseminated for over a decade. I wish for a different dispersal of Henry Smith's death, because I believe Dionne Brand and Christina Sharpe when they tell us to defend the dead. I wish for a new passage of death, a funeral rite, a ceremony for men like Smith, like myself, whose mythologies have been irrevocably bloodied by the imperialist settler-colonial history of the United States empire. I wish to honor the stories of those to whom history cannot—will not—pay respects: the genocided, the deracinated, the ostracized, the always-already unmade masses. It is up to us, the inheritors of that explosive light, to tend to those fires and those graves. This is our debt. This is my attempt.

Isaiah Frost Rivera (He/They) is a scholar, maker, and black digital speculator hailing from the forgotten borough of Staten Island, New York. He is currently pursuing his PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Isaiah's fiction has been featured in the online magazine Lolwe, and his poem "The Commuters" won first prize in the 2018-2019 CUNY Labor Arts "Making Work Visible" contest. To read more of their work, visit Isaiah's WordPress blog The Poetic Xenolith, where he writes critical essays about film, horror, and popular media.

A swimmer’s passage and indecision

By Kendra Tillberry

“While my friend and I are childless, we each carry something heavy with us every day, the weight of the future in our arms. I like to speculate that we are building strength to someday carry something else.”

At the edge of the pool, feet dipped in the water and resting on the ledge, I sit. I hate myself in this moment, like I always do when my feet first feel the cold water. Why am I here? I could be wrapped in a warm blanket in front of the TV rather than be half-naked, shivering on the pool deck. I start my routine: lean forward and dip the pink swim cap into the water. Turn it inside out. Let it fill, watching as every bit gets covered in water. Empty the water slowly while holding the cap high into the air. My ritual is to repeat this twice, mesmerized by the water dripping, droplets splash onto my legs, as I warm up to the idea of my entire body surrounded by the cold. Holding the inside of the cap at my forehead with both hands, I start the delicate maneuver to bring the silicon around my skull, tucking in my ponytail, covering much of my ears. 

The thick black guiding line at the bottom of the pool in the middle of the lane stares up at me. 

I savor one final breath unencumbered by the slosh of the water, as I lean down with one hand, grab the wall, and gently usher myself into the water, welcoming the cold. The discomfort. I submerge my whole body, all of me committed now. One more quick breath, then I take off – my arms in quick succession, my left whipped down at my side, my right arm sneaking to the top of my head as both legs push off from the pool wall. My arms meet, extended, at the top of my head leading my body in a perfect streamline, buttock tight, abs engaged, inviting a light butterfly kick: my whole body waving hello to the water. 

∞

My mind wanders. Sara’s text flashes in my mind. I see the blue and white bubbles back and forth to each other. My best friend of sixteen years, Sara, is fourteen weeks pregnant and contemplating baby names. This is a baby of IVF, a miracle after two years of nonstop struggle. The decision of what to name her, like all Sara’s decisions, requires weeks of planning and deliberate rules. It must be a girl name. It must end in “a.” It must be compatible with the last name. It cannot sound anything like her sister- or brother-in-law’s babies’ names. I send her ridiculous ideas like Bella (the name of her parents-in-law’s dog), imagining her laugh at the prospect. At least once a week, I pitch “Kendra” again, praying this baby and I can share my name; wondering if it’s big enough for the both of us. 

∞

A few strokes in and muscle memory takes over. Everything I do, I’ve done a hundred thousand times before. Halfway down the length of the pool, I start to get comfortable with the temperature of the water. My body blends into the cold. 

It makes sense of course that I’d think about babies and the possibility of one day becoming a mother while I’m swimming. Motherhood and swimming are near-perfect opposites for me. I know exactly how to place my hands with each freestyle stroke so that I protect my shoulders and get the best pull. Being in the pool is the only place in the world where I feel tall as a 5-foot 3-inch-tall woman because I know exactly how to move my body and elongate every stroke. In the pool, I’m confident. At ease. But parenting? I wouldn’t even know where to begin. No muscle memory could help me. Every movement would be new. 

The black line at the bottom of the pool turns into a T, indicating that it’s time to switch directions. Nearing the flip turn, I take one stroke with my left hand, breathe on the right side, take a final stroke with the right arm as I wait for the wall to approach, and whip my arms forward as my body throws itself into a somersault. The angle of my feet on the wall is all wrong, as it always is for the first flip turn of a swimming session. This time, I’m too close to the wall, like a spring wound too tightly, I push off with hardly any momentum. I break out of my streamline too early, my body still too deep in the water. My left arm fumbles, too deep to break the surface. Awkwardly, and frustratingly, I break out of the stroke and lift my body upwards, left arm pulling to the side, right side breath, right arm pull, left arm pull, right side breath. Body parts moving simultaneously in perfect rhythm as I rock from side to side at the top of the water.

∞

Sara’s voice still echoes in my mind from our conversation on the phone last week as I take another stroke. “That’s a decision you and Jordan will have to make,” she said. I asked her if she thought my husband, Jordan, and I should go through the IVF process just like she did. 

“One thing you have to weigh is that you could go through this entirely invasive process and wind up with embryos with the genetic mutation,” she said. “There are no guarantees. $20,000 is a lot to spend for potentially nothing…”

The genetic mutation in question is CDKN2A, an autosomal dominant gene that accounts for the melanoma I developed on my back at age 29 and the yearly pancreatic cancer screenings I receive. People with this mutation have a 70-90% chance of developing melanoma and a 20% chance of developing pancreatic cancer in their lifetime. Four of my mother’s cousins died of pancreatic cancer – one at age 32 and another at age 40, painfully young deaths of a virtually incurable disease once diagnosed. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is 11%, meaning 11% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are still alive five years later. I speculate about my odds, and the odds of my prospective children.

If I decide to have children, create them of my own flesh and blood, there is a 50% chance they will also have this mutation. Before even getting the chance to give them a name, I could pass along a potentially deadly mutation. 

∞

After completing a 200 of freestyle, or down, back, down, back, down, back, down, and back, I begin my first set of the swim. Ten 100s individual medley style: down butterfly, back backstroke, down breaststroke, and to round each 100 off, back in freestyle. In my first butterfly strokes of the day, I feel loud on the water, protruding my body with each breath until I remind myself to correct my stroke, hover on the surface, and don’t come so far out with my arms. My whole-body kicks are powerful. It’s a dance where my shoulders press down, my butt pushes upwards breaking the surface, creating a strong wave, until my feet pop out of the water, and I start the pattern again. My arms pulse at the surface of the water in between kicks and then I move my arms down the span of my torso, pulling incredible amounts of water, trailing my arms wide at the top of the water as I begin again. Each stroke becomes a belief in my body’s ability to do hard things. Each lap reinforces that belief. 

∞

Pancreatic cancer screening doesn’t really exist yet. It’s more of looking through either an MRI or an endoscopic ultrasound to inspect the pancreas. “We search for funny-looking lesions,” was how my doctor at Mayo put it. 

But the risks are numerous. It’s possible they find a “funny-looking lesion” that is cancerous, they operate to remove it, and my life is saved. It’s also possible that they find a “funny-looking lesion” that’s benign, they operate and remove it, and I undergo a difficult surgery that requires 3-4 weeks of recovery in the hospital and could kill me, all for something that wasn’t medically necessary. Right now, my doctor, a world-renowned Mayo surgeon and leader of pancreatic cancer research, says sometimes the “funny-looking lesion” could be a 50-50 chance that it’s cancerous or benign. He’s working to discover biomarkers within the pancreatic juice (yes, that’s the official term for the fluids floating within the pancreas), which might indicate to researchers if the lesions are malignant or benign, but it’s still in the early stages.  

∞

After a length of butterfly and almost a full length of backstroke, I see the flags and begin to count my strokes. I know it’s about 4.5 strokes until I hit the wall. If I’m doing a 50 of straight backstroke, I’d normally take four strokes, turn onto my stomach for the final stroke and flip turn. But because this is an individual medley, there are no flip turns. Instead, I take my four strokes – left, right, left, right – hold on my right side and kick with fury the last extra half stroke to the wall and push off. I hate that it’s 4.5 strokes and long for the certainty and reliability of just 4 or even 5 strokes. 

∞

“But if I do IVF, I would know if the embryos have it or not,” I remember saying back to Sara on the phone that night. “I would know and could decide to move forward or not.” 

Brené Brown said once that when people start polling other people about what they should do, it’s a sign that more self-reflection is necessary. “That polling habit has become my indicator light that I need less input and more silence and stillness so I can hear myself,” she writes in a Facebook post. “… when I can't connect with what I'm thinking or feeling - that's when I get into dangerous default territory (either standing too far back and not deciding, or letting others decide for me).”

It’d be easier to have someone else decide this one for me. I wish I could ask Brené: what’s wrong with others deciding for us? 

∞

I hold my streamline, and there’s this moment of peace that only comes from the breaststroke pullout. I used to be able to hold that pullout half the length of the pool, letting the momentum of the turn propel me through. My capacity to hold my breath has declined in the years of not swimming daily. I take one light butterfly kick, pull my arms down wide ending beside my hips taking a massive pull of water with them. Then, I breaststroke kick my legs at the same time pushing my arms upwards, begin the arms circle pull and surface my head for a quick breath all while looking down at the pool floor, the black guiding line staring back up at me. 

∞

Every year for the rest of my life (or until doctors change their screening procedures for high-risk patients), I’ll undergo an MRI and endoscopic ultrasound to look for abnormalities in my pancreas. Every three months, I see the dermatologist who often takes 10 moles each visit with almost all of them on the path toward cancer at varying levels. I’ve had six surgeries for melanoma or pre-cancerous moles leaving scars across my body. There’s a mole in my eye that my ophthalmologist just found so I must go in every three months to see if it grows. My dentist and gynecologist look for moles every six or twelve months respectively, because yes, moles grow there too. There’s a mole on my right hand, the bottom of my left foot, 10-15 moles they are watching, taking pictures of to see if they change. A tech at my dermatologist office described the moles they are watching on my back as a “constellation of moles,” and like the constellation of stars I rarely see due to light pollution where I live, I also can’t regularly see the moles on my back. I worry they are changing, growing, morphing into something new behind my back. 

The moles on my face scare me the most. My mom regularly gets moles frozen off her nose just like her mother. My aunt has a three-inch scar at her jawline from her melanoma. Seeing my grandma’s, mom’s and aunt’s scars remind me to be just as tough and brazen as they are. We share this journey wherever it might lead. 

Every day I look at the moles on my face in the mirror and wonder which ones will do me in, how many more will grow from nothing, which ones will get cut off, and which ones will do nothing but haunt me the rest of my life.

It’s not a bad deal, I reason to myself. As far as diseases go, this one is heavy in prevention, but it’s not all bad. It could be worse. 

But then I imagine my adult child. I speculate what kind of a person they will be, how much of me will pulse through their veins. I imagine justifying this choice to them while staring into their beautiful blue eyes that look just like Jordan’s. That I had more than enough money in my savings account to prevent this. And wonder, did I make the right decision?

∞

Arms and legs in syncopation. I move my arms, my head and my torso lift for a breath, I kick my arms forward and begin again. A mothering voice in my head tells me, “Catch your breath – get what you can here, because the next length, we push.”  

I hit the wall, open face turn and sprint back to the wall. Freestyle is made for sprinting. Breaststroke with its single breath for every stroke is made for reflection and pause. With freestyle though I can take as many strokes as I want and breathe at least every two strokes if not three, four or even ten. 

Breathlessly, I get to the wall, take ten seconds of rest, and begin again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat until I’ve done 10 or what I think is 10 because sometimes I miscount, probably often deliberately. 

∞

There are three options. Well, these three options present a million variations, but for simplicity’s sake, there are three. 

Option one: Have children. When, how many, at what time, and under what circumstances are all variables to this plan. It’s a terrifying endeavor. What if I regret it? What if they die before I do? What if I physically can’t handle giving birth or taking care of another human that is so fundamentally needy? And of course, under what circumstances is incredibly important – IVF or naturally? Are we fucking with genetics or just fucking? Might we choose to adopt or foster?

Option two: Don’t have children. It’s simple. Life goes on as it has for the last thirty-one years. Jordan and I take on projects, I write books, and we travel extensively. But what will I do with all this extra time? What if I regret it? What will my legacy be? Children aren’t the only way to build a legacy of course, but without them, I’d have to shape and be more deliberate about what my legacy would be.  

Option three: Delay the decision. This is my favorite option. Being 31 years old means I have the luxury of sitting on the pool deck with my eyes on the water for at least another four years at which point doctors have scared women into believing they can no longer reproduce. Is that enough time? What if it’s biologically too late? What if I can’t or don’t want to ever jump in?

∞

It’s time for my second and last set of the workout. This one is my favorite: 5 x 200 lung busters. The first 50 I breathe every three strokes, the next 50 I breathe every five, the third 50 I breathe every seven, and the final 50 I breathe every nine. By the time I get to the last 50, I’m breathing just twice each length of the pool. 

I kick off. Right arm pulls, left arm pulls, right arm pulls, lean to right and breathe on my left. The first breath on the left side feels uncomfortable like my body is fighting muscle memory, everything it knows to be true. 

∞

One summer night a year ago, a friend of mine who was trying to get pregnant and I were crowded around a bonfire in my backyard, an orange glow lighting up our faces. I’d been wobbling back and forth about the idea of kids for many minutes as we talked and speculated about our futures. 

“If you aren’t sure, you shouldn’t have them,” she said in a sharp, indignant tone. Her words stung on my face, a slap of shame for my indecision. I tried to remind myself that this wasn’t personal – she has wanted children all her life and can’t have them when she wants them. It’s as though I was sitting on the pool deck wondering how the water feels, and she was sitting beside me wanting more than anything to jump in but couldn’t. I realized I must hold more care and concern when I talk about this decision because people are dealing with the complexities of their own choices and decisions. 

While my friend and I are childless, we each carry something heavy with us every day, the weight of the future in our arms. I like to speculate that we are building strength to someday carry something else. 

∞

Flip turn, and I’m suddenly in the second 50. I’m always amazed at how quickly I move when my breath is restricted. Each stroke is a demand on the body. I exhale at the fourth stroke, every bit of air releasing from me at just the right time so that when I turn to my side to inhale, I’m ready to receive the air. 

∞

Jordan and I talk about kids more and more lately. I have a list of baby names. Two girls’ names that I don’t tell anyone anymore, because those are the ones. Bits of poetry I’ve come to wish on, little prayers that I whisper in the air. I pray the names expand, grow from a beautiful idea into something more. I hope the names are big enough. 

Jordan finds one of those names acceptable. 

∞

Sometimes I like to think about this ceiling light fixture in my office. I replaced it myself. My dad taught me how to rewire fixtures and do simple electrical work when we remodeled a room in my basement. I have enough knowledge about electrical work to be dangerous. When I replaced the fixture, I first turned off the breaker for that room, tested it to make sure it was no longer live, removed the screws from the old fixture, and began to hastily disconnect the old fixture. As a sloppy handywoman, I realized when I looked at the wires hanging from the ceiling, that I no longer knew which one was the hot wire. I should’ve marked them off as I was disconnecting the old light. With knob and tube electrical wiring in my old house, both wires were black. With a big sigh, I knew what I had to do. I called my dad. 

After sheepishly explaining my mistake, I asked, “So what do I do now?”

“Well… you guess.” 

“What? No…” 

“I’ve had to do this before. You could kill the fixture, but you don’t really have any other choice. You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. So… guess.” 

“Well… okay,” I responded in disbelief.

“Call me back after you try it.” 

I chose one of the wires to wrap around the black wire of the fixture and another to wrap around the white. Then I went downstairs to flip the circuit and came back up. The moment of truth had arrived. A flip of the light switch would tell me if I guessed correctly. Either the light would just turn on or it would spark and blow the light. With a big inhale, I willed up my courage and turned on the light. I realized my hand was covering my eyes, and I slowly removed my hand to peek. 

The light cast a beautiful glow into the room. The brown wicker shade of the new light fixture was a perfect addition to the space. I moved my hand from my eyes to cover my wide-open mouth as I gasped. 

I remember thinking as a tear rolled down my cheek… Maybe having a child will be just like flipping a light switch. 

I smiled as I called my dad back with the good news.   

∞

The third 50 is where the exhaustion sets in, but the adrenaline creeps up. As I round the second to the last flip turn on this 200, I begin my fourth and final 50. I need air. Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, the pain sets in, stroke, stroke, let all my air out that I’ve been so carefully holding onto, final stroke, and breathe. Pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, my body wants to shut down, pull, pull, pull, and seeing the T at the bottom of the pool, I lean to the side to sneak one quick breath before I flip turn and begin my final length of the pool. I rest a while at the wall.

I repeat the four 50s. Again. And again. One last time for good measure. 

∞

I think back to Sunday morning when Jordan and I were in bed, thick duvet cover up to our shoulders. My arm crooked up under my face, I stared at him as he started to wake up. I combed his two gray eyebrow hairs with minds of their own, wild eyebrows he inherited from his grandfather, and I gently smoothed them into place. We talked about the plans for the day, the whole day available to us, nothing but possibilities before us, if we choose to get out of this big comfortable bed. 

No decisions were made, except for one. We pushed back the duvet and started the day.

∞

With my workout done, I take a few more lengths just to float and play. I move in the water with no specific stroke in mind, no rules, just me and my body moving through this gravity-less space. 

I float back to the wall, taking as long as I can to reach it. Every muscle aches. I take off my goggles, peel back my swim cap and take out my ponytail. Leaning back, I float, letting my hair spread wide on the top of the water. The thoughts start to dissipate, detangle, and release. I imagine them floating away from me. After a few minutes, I pace to the edge of the pool deck and slowly, painfully peel myself out of the water. 

Worrying about the future can easily lead to an unproductive spiral, but speculating allows for the storytelling part of my brain to ignite. Speculation offers the tools to build a vision for the future I want. I chose the braid of lap swimming in this essay to ground the experience within the body and to remind myself that I am both a body moving through the world and a mind trying to make sense of it. The guiding black line at the bottom of the pool symbolizes wanting that kind of clarity in my direction in life. Which way should I go? As I reread my essay, I wonder how being in the water might be like a kind of womb -- a perfect place for me to speculate about one day becoming a vessel for someone else.

Kendra Tillberry holds an MA in creative writing from the University of St. Thomas. She was awarded an Artist-In-Residence from Crater Lake National Park in Oregon in 2019. Her work has also appeared in How We Are. Kendra lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her partner Jordan and little dog Nana.

FELICITY ACE FALLS OVER & SINKS, TUESDAY 9am

By Shena McAuliffe

“Would the humans come for this tremendous thing they had lost? Would they come for the copper wires, the batteries, the rubber tires? Would they send robot emissaries from their bright, dry world above?”

1.

In February, Felicity Ace was speeding across the bright Atlantic south of the Azores when somewhere in her cargo hold (no one saw it happen) a spark ignited and grew into a flame. Soon Felicity Ace was burning, smoke billowing and tangling in the sky like the windblown hair of a fairytale witch. The smoke was white, but it blackened the paint around Felicity Ace’s shoulders, which had been pale and stalwart back when she set sail from Emden, Germany two weeks prior, headed for the tiny snip of coast called Rhode Island. Felicity Ace was a cosmopolitan ship, built in Japan and flying the flag of Panama, sailing since 2005.

The Portuguese Navy used ropes and straps and baskets to evacuate her crew of 22 humans, lifting them into the air and onto a helicopter, the blades of which ruffled the surface of the ocean in a wide circular patch. Working from other boats and other helicopters, firefighters tried and failed, tried again and failed again, to extinguish the flames. And so, for a week, alone and emptied of her people, Felicity Ace drifted and burned, burned and drifted.

Emptied of people, but she was full of expensive, custom cars that waited on her many decks.  Porsches, Audis, Mercedes Benzes, and Bentleys gleamed from headlights to tailpipes, cars that had not yet been driven on an open road. Every engine spotless, these cars had been built to hum on Autobahns and interstates, to wend along seaside cliffs and between hillsides thick with olive groves and grapevines, everything glistening under the sun. Waiting, the cars dreamt of the chignoned ladies they had been promised they would one day hold in the soft palms of their leather seats, women with graceful arms and white teeth and big, dark sunglasses, women with silk scarfs tied over their hair. The cars dreamt of the gloved hands that would one day grip their steering wheels, and the gentle but insistent pressure of loafered feet that would coax them to ever-faster speeds.

But adrift on the blue ocean, Felicity Ace burned, and the Portuguese harbormaster blamed the cars. Most likely, the fire had been started by their lithium-ion hearts, he said, by the burning hot dreams of the electric cars.

A week passed, and the smoke subsided, and a group of salvage workers descended onto Felicity Ace’s deck, lowered from the air, and crept from level to level, looking for flames. Finding none, the pronounced that the fire was out, and they hitched a pair of tugboats to the ship to pull her in to harbor, where workers could scavenge what was left of her, and what was salvageable from the cars. But Felicity Ace wanted none of this drag-tail humiliation. She did not want to be sliced and picked and scraped to her bones, did not want this slow spectacle of disassembly. Charred and exhausted, she began to list starboard. And then, seemingly all at once, she tilted firmly and went down all at once and disappeared into the sea, cars and all.

Felicity Ace was a 650-foot roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) Cargo Ship carrying 4000 custom cars, 2200 tons of fuel, and 2200 tons of oil. Together, ship and cargo sank 3000 meters to the bottom of the ocean.

2.

A shadow had drifted overhead for two weeks, but now the sun slanted through the water again, its rays refracting through plankton and algae for a few hundred meters, casting prisms through schools of fish who flashed their sleek fins. Deeper down, the ocean remained as dark as always, and Felicity Ace sank and through the blackness. She stirred up sand and grit that swirled, then settled again, around and upon her body that was so much bigger than the bodies of the sharks or whales that occasionally came to rest at the bottom of the ocean after the animals died. Beneath Felicity Ace, the ocean floor compacted. Sea cucumbers, worms, moss animals, deep-sea octopuses, shrimp, anglerfish: some of these were crushed beneath the ship, but others swam or drifted until Felicity Ace settled, and then they quietly returned.

Would the humans come for this tremendous thing they had lost? Would they come for the copper wires, the lithium-ion batteries, the rubber tires? Would they send robot emissaries from their bright, dry world above? Could machinery even function here in the deep dark quiet, two miles down, at the bottom of the ocean?  Saltwater licked the lost human things like lozenges, but would the human things ever dissolve?

The ship waited. The cars waited. The starfish and sea cucumbers waited, but in the meantime, they explored the smooth surfaces of the ship and the cars. They crawled over the charred flanks and squeezed into the seams of doors and trunks and hoods. An octopus took refuge in the underbelly of a Bentley. The metal and fiberglass and plastic, the wires and buttons and glass belonged to the sea creatures now.

One day, in a time unimaginable to us humans and inconceivable to the deep-sea creatures that crawled and swam over and under and into the ship, saltwater and tentacles might wear through the tanks and tubes of the human-made machines. The sealed tanks and batteries might, in seeps or gushes, leak their chemical bile and blood through pinholes and cracks. They might release their toxic fluids, their heavy metals. Or maybe the machines will somehow hold their poisons tight.

In a wish, a dream, a figment beyond us, Felicity Ace forgets her name and how she once traveled on the bright surface of the sea. She becomes a new and softer thing—a reef, a playground, an undersea garden. A mothership blooming in a dark, unknowable, untouchable world.

I consider this piece a hybrid of fairy tale and essay. In part 1, I hew closely to the news story that inspired my writing, an incident that took place in February 2022. Speculation (or imagination) sneaks in immediately when I personify the ship. In part 1, I also establish a fairytale tone and the narrative distance that allows me to speculate more boldly later in the essay. In part 2, I imagine the unseen, long-term fate of the ship and the ecosystem that it disturbs and settles within. The Felicity Ace sank to a depth of about 3000 meters, which is the Bathypelagic zone, where the only light sources are bioluminescent animals and bacteria, but this is also the zone in which there is the most sea life. At this point, it hasn't been verified whether the cars or the ship have leaked oil or other toxins, but this seems an inevitable eventuality. In the dismay I felt when I read about the Felicity Ace, I let myself imagine this human-caused disaster outlasting us until it becomes something beautiful, along the lines of the abundance of wildlife now living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or the coral reefs that thrive on ancient shipwrecks. Corals can live as far down as 6000 meters, but most reefs grow at shallower depths, in places where the sunlight reaches, no deeper than 50 meters below the surface, so this speculation seems an impossible dream. Within the piece, I openly acknowledgement that this is a desperate sort of wish—that the non-human world might recover from the damage we have wrought—is what allows me to still think of this piece as nonfiction, as an essay that first documents an event and then traces the movement of my thoughts through both research and speculative imagination.

Shena McAuliffe is the author of the novel The Good Echo, the essay collection Glass Light Electricity, and a collection of short stories, We Are a Teeming Wilderness, winner of the Press 53 Prize for Short Fiction and forthcoming in May 2023. She is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Union College in Schenectady, New York.