Hand of Smoke

by Lesley Wheeler

It felt like a warning. Later I speculated that the ban encompassed other kinds of obsession and intimacy.

Some girls play light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board. Others compare intelligence about boys. Paper-doll girls loll on the basement shag of the Womack split-level, held aloft by artificial fibers, but there are also curvy girls, fleshed with foresight, and sleepy girls, and cuticle-chewers, and midnight gigglers hopped up on cola. Danya is my kind of girl. She and I withdraw to the bar to continue our research into psychic phenomena.

In our eleventh year, Danya Brown and I are scholars of extrasensory power. We try to hypnotize one another then take long walks analyzing our trances. Every Sunday night at seven, we practice automatic drawing. At 7:15, we spin the rotary dial, stretch the spiral telephone cord to its fullest length, and compare pages. I sense Danya’s eyes fastened on my back whenever she walks into the tiny town library, a repurposed church shingled with cedar, where we devour every book about telekinesis, clairvoyance, and poltergeists. One day I will edge away from the parapsychology shelf toward the bin of rock and roll records, but that’s the future, when our friendship dissolves because Danya fantasizes about killing herself. I tell my mother. My mother invites Danya’s mother to our house for an awkward conversation over coffee. Somebody’s overactive imagination, Mrs. Brown says, and Danya and I stop examining each other’s dreams. Decades later, a search will reveal that my middle-school collaborator remains perfectly alive, a homeowner, married to a man. Like me. Adolescence, a hallucination.

But at the slumber party, we shiver alertly. Danya lectures me about Zener cards: circle, cross, wave, square, star. One person sends and the other receives. We are using a normal deck, and when I stare at the hearts and spades and numbers, trying to beam an answer into Danya’s skull, she rarely guesses correctly. Shadows deepen around the glossy basement bar and its chrome fittings. Across the den, sex-talk becomes soft and drowsy.

Maybe we should switch positions.

Once Danya begins sending images, I predict card after card after card. She becomes so excited she throws off sparks like a radio tower or a galaxy being born. The charge between us mounts until my skin prickles. I am light-headed, queasy, but I keep calling numbers and suits until two things happen at once.

The birthday girl’s beagle, Happy, waddles down the stairs and breaks out howling.

A smoky shape coalesces around me, and I register the pressure of a forbidding hand knocking me off the barstool. Too close, it says. 

Spilled to the floor, I am too unhinged to soothe the dog, but other girls stir. A sleep-deprived Mrs. Womack, wild-haired in a floral nightgown, materializes to silence us: it’s very late, settle down. But who are you talking to, Mrs. Womack? I am one girl blurring into another. 

---

Hold up, the invisible hand seemed to say. For years I thought it meant that Danya and I were approaching real power, cracking open the secrets of the universe through our psychic experiments. It felt like a warning. Later I speculated that the ban encompassed other kinds of obsession and intimacy.

—

Lesley Wheeler’s new books are The State She’s In, her fifth poetry collection, and Unbecoming, her first novel. Her essay collection Poetry’s Possible Worlds is forthcoming in 2021. Her poems and essays appear in Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, she lives in Virginia and posts at @LesleyMWheeler.

Marrow

by Bryn Grey

What is the tangible weight of grief? Where do we hold space for our grieving?

The AC is out when I arrive. The windows are all open but it’s newer construction, built for curb appeal, and there’s no real means for a cross breeze. The house is already heavy – we have gathered because another’s son has died. I’m sleeping in C.’s room. The air is oppressive, but I drape myself in one of his chef coats, hanging pressed in his closet which I crawl to the back of, to cry and flip through cookbooks, hotboxed in with memories and still, stale air. 

He’s undeniably here: I smell him, feel the dense air thicken as his spirit stirs. At night I lay motionless, frosted with tacky dried sweat, as silent tears run in a constant stream, pool itchy in my ears. From beside the bed I hear a low, persistent sob. I listen all night and as dawn breaks I whisper: “Sweetheart, it’s not supposed to hurt anymore.” Soon he’s gone from the floor where he never really was.

“I must be going crazy,” his father challenges me, eyes wide and feral. “Every time I’m falling asleep or watching TV, I hear C. say: ‘I’m sorry.’”

“Do you tell him it’s ok, or do you tell him that you’re sorry too?” 

 Dave won’t answer. I see his pupils flinch but his face doesn’t move. He turns away, doesn’t speak of it again. 

In the music room the Steinway is cloistered. I long to lift its lid, stroke the keys, but because I can’t play well I don’t dare. Instead I pull out the cardboard box containing C.’s ashes, still in the box they were shipped in from the morgue. Thick white cardboard, a piece of printer paper taped to one side, identifying its occupant. The tape has failed: one corner of the label flaps, dog- eared. This makes me inexplicably sad. 

Inside he is ensconced in heavy, clear plastic; I think of the belts he would fashion out of cling wrap, smile. I feel the weight of him, of the box that constrains him, whose paper corners dig into my thighs. Rake my fingers across his ashes like a desktop Zen rock garden from a novelty store. The only other remains I’ve ever seen were my father’s, the edited-for-TV version, sieved and sifted into fine grey ash, resting in a hand rubbed pine Shaker box on my mother’s credenza. All of C. is here: shards of bone, nubs of his impeccable teeth (dad’s a dentist). They mingle in the grainy silt that was once his face and hands and hair. I turn my head to divert my tears so as not to sully his ashes, clump them like cat litter. Sweat rolls down my back and I feel wholly liquid as I hold the box of parched dust that was my lover closer, grasp it tight until my sweat softens the cardboard. Another corner of the label gives way as the box bends, ever so slightly, into my embrace.

---

What is the tangible weight of grief? Where do we hold space for our grieving? How do bodies respond: why are different senses triggered for different people, as we reconcile the same loss? Why do we constrain grieving with notions of what is proper; why does self-awareness factor into our most private moments of sorrow, when no one except our ghosts are watching? How do we learn to lean in to grief and let go, as we continue to hold fast and stay tethered to ourselves?

—

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Bryn Grey is a graduate of the Boston University College of Fine Arts with a degree in music performance, and the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, with a concentration in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Speculative Nonfiction. After extended stints in Chicago and New York (and shorter but no less impactful ones in New Haven and Paris), she presently finds herself living and writing in New Orleans, in the company of a very hefty rescued pit bull named Phelps.

Rubber Trees Will Grow Again

by Chengru He

Instead of seeking confirmation of factual materials, the practice of speculation endorses personal memories and meditation and honors the unknown in history.

when young Yingying was sent down to the South, she was seventeen. she wouldn’t know

that she would be gone for seven years, stay with soil, corn fields, rubber trees. she would come back thirty years later, then again forty years later – this time with her daughter. the bowls are tied tight to the rubber trees. it takes ten seconds or so for a drop of milky white latex to tap the bowl. the bowls are new, so are the trees.

that it would take nine days on the road, train from Shanghai to Kunming, then bus from Kunming to Mending. three days and two nights, black faces after hundreds of caves. the green train used coal. not everyone had a seat, some slept under the chairs. the bus would keep going in the daylight, rest at night. the roads were bumping, narrow, higher and higher, climbing the mountains. mountains after mountains. rocks, trees, corn fields, trees, rocks. she got so scared about the height, as if the bus would crash any second. she probably ate something on the road but couldn’t remember what it was. when they arrived, there was nothing but the bamboo sheds and bamboo beds. did she cry, or was her sobbing too shy that it was lost in the weeping of every seventeen? it was green there. she brought a can of cocoa that she would consume for the next twenty months. the only luxury that took her back home in a midnight dream. in times she had nightmares, she tried not to toss herself about, or the bamboo bed would squeak.

that all the seventeens became friends in no time. they lived together, ate together, worked together, laughed together, cried together. they shared one bicycle. tall and cranky. she was soaked the first time she cycled through the rubber tree woods in dusk. the Sun was dying fast. the shortcut to the town was long. in spare time they weaved pillowcases, table clothes, curtains. all the threads from Shanghai transformed to new shapes and bodies. when they sang in the evening, the company commander would knock on the bamboo door, xiaogui, what’re you singing?

that she would pick up Sichuan dialect, sua for hangout, sazi for what, zuosa for why. in the morning she fetched water from the well behind the sheds. a few drops of water splashed here and there from the tin bucket on the way back. the dirt road became muddy on rainy days. it rained a lot. it probably rained too much. be careful not to step onto water buffalo pats. plantain leaves wobble like elephant ears, mangos dangle like green hearts. it filled itself up every morning, fed hundreds of seventeens. in forty years it would dry up, look small, tiny, shrunk in the weeds and summer breeze. moist South, even the wind is wet.

that she would be scared to death in the field. leeches slid into her pants, sucked on her skin. she jumped around and clung onto Squad Leader Feng. she spanked the leeches off for her. she was still scared, of leeches, of slippery creatures, of water. all she wanted was a pair of tall rain boots. what a luxurious dream. Feng and her became close friends and families. her kitchen was her kitchen, was every seventeen’s kitchen. Feng’s husband lived alone on top of the mountain.

veteran, big, used guns, had contagious skin disease. he didn’t like people liking his garden but indulged her and her friends for free sweet potatoes from the soil.

that her glasses would be laughed at. take off that stuff while you are in the field. the farmers never wear glasses, never need glasses. in seven years the application for returning would be approved – highly nearsighted. she wore a pair of black half-frame glasses. each pair of glasses looked the same. hair style the same. blue outfit the same. she looked like anyone and everyone.

that she would be allowed to go home every two years. fifty-eight days off, eighteen days on the road, forty days home, shared a room with the siblings in a Shikumen unit. not everyone was home. the patriotic third brother wrote a blood letter, sent himself to the northern border. the engineer big brother, supervising the construction of new roads, left the construction site for half an hour, found everything under mud-rock flow when he returned. everyone was somewhere, by mission and assignment. everyone was edging toward future, an impossible dream of possibilities. once the dandelion is blown away, the seeds find their own way in the wind.

that she would have rice for breakfast and that’s all they could have. for breakfast, lunch, dinner. rice and a soup with not much veggies. cabbage for three months, then a different kind. she made effort to swallow. in Shanghai she had congee or paofan, something not dry in the morning. she got scared and embarrassed every month. how was she supposed to talk to the company commander? how could she ask an afternoon off, mention period without mentioning period? in forty years she would still remember this.

that she would work in the cookhouse for years. shake the spoon three times when serving the meal to her fellows. the seeds of rice do not find South home. glutinous rice is sticky, stickier than glue. shake the spoon so the sticky rice comes off to hungry plates. in thirty years the cook’s family moved to Shanghai. they meet for meals and memories at a restaurant. all the seventeens then are now in their sixties. the restaurant is in the air. so many plazas and tall building in this city. every road is paved. one hardly sees the traces of season, the mark a falling leave could mark on loose soil.

that in forty years the girl who was forced to marry a Wa man would still be living in the village, deep in the South, on the border of China and Burma. she would get up in the morning, go to the market for fresh veggies, cook for the family, join the plaza dancing in the dying Sun. every zhiqing from Shanghai knows about her. occasionally the girl who was forced to marry a Wa man is mentioned over get-together lunch. someone met her decades later. she does not respond too much. she lives there and in scattered conversations. no one used the word rape.

that in forty years there would still be rubber trees. the ones they planted were cut down. the new ones occupy the same side of the mountain. the Sun comes up, shines through the woods of rubber trees. they are no longer sweetheart for economy. synthetic rubber is tougher and cheaper.

she wouldn’t know any of these. she wouldn’t know the world needs so many rubber trees, rubber trees grow fast and tall, produce milky white latex for twenty-five years. after twenty-five years of service, they are cut down, removed, replaced.

she wouldn’t know any of these. would she go if she knew? like her friends, she didn’t have a choice. she doesn’t have much choice in just about everything, school, no school, sent-down years, job, marriage, job, retirement. she gets up in the morning preparing breakfast for her family. something not dry. the Sun is lazy behind the tall buildings. she drinks black coffee and likes an extra spoon of cocoa.

---

How does personal narrative represent history? How do we avoid the formula narrative of collective memories? Instead of seeking confirmation of factual materials, the practice of speculation endorses personal memories and meditation and honors the unknown in history. The narrative mode itself is also a journey of exploration.

—

Chengru He 何琤茹 (penname何羲和 Siho Ho or Xihe He) is a poet and translator from Shanghai. Her English poetry has appeared in People Say, Tint Journal, and elsewhere. She has published two books of translation and other projects of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. A former ESL teacher in Shanghai, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. She will be joining the University of Utah for a Ph.D program in English Creative Writing as a Vice Presidential fellow, specializing in poetry.

Even a Hollow Object Will Displace Water and Air

by Jenny Apostol

I thought I was writing a piece about resistance. But I came to see the writing more genuinely concerned with negative space.

What holds the body together? I’ve been learning about the fascia, a three-dimensional web of fluid and fiber that encases every muscle, bone, vessel, and organ inside the body. A system of membranes embedded with nerve cells that signal to one another, connecting each separate part into a whole. Fascia are permeable and flexible so we can move, yet strong enough to keep all our pieces in place. If one were to extract all of this material—our organs, muscles, vessels, and cells—nothing would be left inside of us except the fascia’s whitish structure, which would resemble a complete body like an illustration or a hologram. Or as a body worker explained it, like a negative space of whatever is in your body. 

/

My mother was a potter who sometimes used a technique called wax resist to etch a design into her ceramics. Wherever wax adhered to the clay it repelled glaze; color could not saturate the entire exterior of the pot. By keeping part of the surface gravelly and raw, porous to air and light, my mother was making a statement about materials; that stoneware is as beautiful naked as when dressed by the strange alchemy of heat and silt, pigment and glass. She was exposing the contours of form within a form, training the eye on a two-dimensional outline of surprising clarity onto a three-dimensional shape. It was like drawing along the edges of a central figure, holding off an expectation that everything be filled. In this way, my mother accommodated the negative spaces, the parts you overlook. Did overlook. Where beauty hides, waiting to be sought. Not come upon randomly. Searched for. Found. 

My mother was a seeker of beauty who remained resistant to control—by systems or people or religion. She abhorred allegiance to a spiritual group, found no communion with any circle of believers other than artists and visionaries bent on rebellion and a way out. To escape whatever held her. Where did faith come in? From an original way of being? Devoid of any desire to conform, she had no circle to complete, tail to head, her art could remain open-ended. In perpetuity. 

All of my mother’s ceramic pieces were experiments. She kept notes, recorded what she mixed, all her trials made permanent by firing in the kiln. On Saturdays, I stood near her in the dank basement studio as she opened the oven’s brick-lined door. Felt excitement as she removed pieces, now cool to touch, each one a portrait of a recollection, a confirmation, or surprise. She found herself there, reflected in earthenware’s rounded shapes, in brush strokes that meandered from base to rim, allusive of substance. 

I was an only child; a legacy of pearl slipped from her shell, my mother’s best artwork. She was good at making three-dimensional things that held other things, like food, or flowers, or other precious objects. Cast an airy scaffolding where I flourished unfettered, to grow into, or away from, my own light. As a teacher, she held spaces for other people’s creative expression. She used to comment that a few of her students looked held, by which she meant partially immobile, holding on or back some physicality of themselves, stiff and unfree, as if lacking sufficient fluid that glides us through youth. 

Art was the only thing my mother believed in and she leaned upon its shifting contours. And then, suddenly vulnerable to life’s inevitable push-backs after all, she gave up resistance to her body’s systems. Felt the grief for what had slipped from her grasp, let go. 

I had only one dream after her death where my mother came back to me clearly. I was running down a winding path inside a park, looking for a place for her to hide. I came upon a pine tree with a wide girdle draped to the ground. For a moment, I crouched underneath it, breathing the scent of damp, broken needles on pillows of moss. Sound stilled by branch cover and shade. I turned to fetch my mother from her apartment which was inside a stone building, very like the library in the neighborhood where I grew up. She was still in her bathrobe, not quite as old, standing in her galley kitchen near the front door, making coffee. “Come, come now,” I urged her; tugged at the soft of her arm. She laughed, one elbow raised to pour water into the machine, as if to say, relax, I’ve got time, coffee first. Or perhaps she felt resigned to being taken away. What happened next, men—officials like police—came and escorted her from the second story. Outside the window I could see the wide pine nestling the park path. Mother, exposed and raw, and now unprotected, had chosen not to resist. I couldn’t spare her. Shield her inside a space carved from nature, alongside the smooth, familiar surfaces of glazed windows, cream-colored stone, and hexagonal pieces of gravelly pavement. The fine, curved intricacy of the tree’s limbs in the park had reminded me of a book I’d loved, one found at the library when I was perhaps four years old; a Norwegian fable about a gnome who spoke to animals in a language only they could understand. The blue liquid shroud of his snowbound winter, the gleeful shelter of fir, the hush secret that allowed the gnome to keep his animals alive. We returned again and again, my mother and I, to renew the book so I could hear a story about being understood even when there were no words for what you could see. A private language not held by sound. What child wouldn’t grasp the beauty of that?

/ 

Our bodies are adaptive. The same stimulus can produce different, even opposite effects. For example: exposure to cold. Fall through the ice on a pond, trapped in freezing water, your body will quickly die. But some people seek out immersion in cold water for its stimulating, rejuvenating effect. Instead of stiffening, the body perks up, releases tension and pain. Perhaps such exposure feels good because cold hijacks the mind into a state of delirium, or suspension of logic. We lose our resistance to it. Our breath shallows, from anxiety or from calm. 

/

There are two different kinds of resistance. One is to hold on for dear life, the prey animal threatened by predator, freezing or walling up. The other, like the wax resist of my mother’s glazing techniques, is a refusal to hold, more a yearning to reveal, to line, uncover. I felt the strain of my mother’s resistance my whole life. I preferred believing that what held me upright could not be seen or touched or filled up.

On certain days, I can still make out the leafy pattern of her dress, shapes like the shadows that dappled the sidewalk where I took my first steps. Just beyond us flowed the East River, its passage rippling fingers run over tiny stones. Water crested the lip of the pier. Wind blew so hard off the harbor, walking into it my small face could barely breathe. Until I let it blow through my body, weightless and cold. 

What space does any child hold for a mother? How long does it take to claim our own? Such an almighty idea: self-possession. How we hold ourselves together in the world. Even a hollow object will displace water and air.

---

I thought I was writing a piece about resistance. But I came to see the writing more genuinely concerned with negative space. Not the same thing, though the two ideas still blend in my mind. How we feel we know things we cannot see or touch. What remains when parts are carved away or interrupted. The flow between solid and permeable. Something to do with not being held to the logical ways we define ourselves—these ideas were all calling me to imagine the inside of my body. The fine, white mesh that is both a container and an outline spoke to me. The scaffold of my mother’s legacy that was there, inside me, all along.

—

Jenny Apostol’s essays and poetry have been published in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction: "Sunday Short Reads," River Teeth Journal: “Beautiful Things,” Haibun Today, Blood Tree Literature, and Flatbush Review. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop, at Pacific Lutheran University. Previously, Jenny produced innovative, popular nonfiction television about the natural world for National Geographic Channels. She lives outside of Washington, D.C.

In the Garden

by Lucy Schiller

Associative logic is what draws me again and again to the essay as a form, because it feels, often, like the "realest" part.

We all loved the Garden, and, by extension, the furred part of the state in which it sat as an emblem. The time I spent there was neither long nor fully pleasant enough to resurrect wistfully later. Still, I see myself do it, certain days, accumulating the big details first. I see the ocean, obviously, a brighter blue than I had seen elsewhere, almost acrid, and I see the wild sweet peas flopping around on the sides of the roads. The trees holding a smell of warm dust loosed by their psithurisms. The specific emotional mixture undergirding nearly everything, it felt, everywhere I went—the mixture was of pride and oncoming danger. People seemed proud to live here, in part because it was dangerous. Do not hike off-trail into hidden caches of marijuana. Thick rattlesnakes hide in the woodpiles ready to clasp your wrist in their fangs, and you might have to take your axe to the thrashing snake, and then, depending on your proximity to a hospital, to your arm, as Gordon did in desperation while the venom flooded towards his heart. Abalone diving: all the more poetically rich for its treacherousness; people died frequently this way in the rough surf, their wetsuits weighed down by the shining bounty they stuffed inside. A preponderance of motorcycle crashes and drunk drivers, logs spilling off the thundering lumber trucks, freak accidents, which seemed to happen regularly, not freakishly at all, really, except in their occasional unexpected gruesomeness. And a mountain lion, too, roaming the cliffs in the early morning. Imaginings here had a lot to do with death, because reality had a lot to do with death. 

Everyone called it the Garden. I lived on the grounds of the Garden. I had imagined I liked plants, and had secured a summer job there. The Garden was a robust collection of plants on the rocky edge of the coast, and it was swept by a fine, salted mist for hours each morning. Certain plants thrived in these conditions. When the Garden hired me, I took it as a sign, of course, that I, too, could grow, could expand, into a new direction I had not before predicted. I was likely the only person to have applied to the summer job, and had no experience with plants beyond liking them, and no real skills, besides in Microsoft Word, that I could claim as my own. I liked, I knew, to stay passive, to watch as things happened around and to me. I could slip on, slip through, to the next.

Many years later, I would read about Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream, a book from 1499 created by an unknown author, though most have guessed him to be Francesco Colonna, an otherwise unpublished poet-priest. You can look at the book online and notice two things immediately: the visual floridness of the language and the clean lines of the woodcut illustrations, most of which feature plants as much as they do humans. In this book, Poliphilo wanders a dreamscape after his lover. Actually, he dreams inside the dream, and wanders around in there. “The overall literary merit of this work is debatable,” writes a librarian at the Glasgow University Library, which featured Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as their book of the month a few years before I was to work at the Garden, “and some critics have dismissed it as unreadable.” Marcel Proust’s biographer, George Painter, thought otherwise, expressing that Colonna, if he was in fact the author, “felt that reality itself is mysterious, and may legitimately be described in terms of mystery; that only perplexing symbols, labyrinthine narrative, and intentionally impenetrable prose-style can express the night-world of the unconscious mind.” I have never gotten more than few pages into the text. Colonna, or whoever, wrote in a flowery, idiosyncratic mixture of Italian and Latin that many readers across the centuries have found bizarre and off-putting, like a flourish upon a flourish upon a flourish. (It occurs to me how often we reach for the language of the plant world to describe the ornate: flowery, flourish, florid, tangled, thorny, thicket…) A dream within a dream within a dream. I have looked repeatedly at the illustrations. These—the strange but clear beauty of the gardens through which Poliphilo wanders in search of his love—are somehow even more mysterious than the text, and were drawn by a separate anonymous person, an artist who clearly loved plants, and saw how the shape of a knotty cypress could imitate the shape of a human, or vice-versa. 

Is it just restating Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, not to mention the transcendentalists, to say that finding and losing can sometimes feel almost interchangeable? So many times now as a full adult, I have attempted to imagine myself at the tops of the trees, wanting out of this realm. But also, I think, wanting to find something that goes otherwise unseen. There are many people, it turns out, who lose themselves among plants in order to find something they are missing. Beyond a very small staff, the Garden was tended to by volunteer retirees, mainly elderly women, who began to hand me things they imagined I needed: a basic eggbeater I still have and use, a million brilliant abalone shells. Though I mostly worked alone, when the retirees came around, we deadheaded rhododendrons together. The Garden was known, in fact, for these rhododendrons, whose flowers announced themselves in every shade between paper-white and the dark purple of certain dogs’ tongues. Though their names are altogether lost to me, I became close with the elderly women here, two of whom shared a house in easy, happy, longtime love. I yard-sat; I watered their garden, small and gem-like, and tended to their Santa Rosa plum tree, which produced black fruit so swollen with water you barely had to touch the skin for it to break. 

My housemate on the grounds of the Garden was a middle-aged man, British, the Director, whose life, though it was in close proximity to mine, remained mostly unknown. It was widely understood that Director was recovering from a death in the family over in England. I saw him only occasionally around the house. He seemed to be losing weight quickly. The Director did not seem to be a steward of any kind, but a distant god, maybe, ruling from a great ways away. How he spent his days, I didn’t know. Where he went, I didn’t know. My days, meanwhile, were often spent on a single small patch of the Garden, where I focused on weeding, deadheading, watering, before moving to a new patch the next day. Like this, I covered the Garden. 

I learned how to perfectly coil a hose—the layers crossed in a particular way to avoid unprofessional tangling—and what it meant to thoroughly water a plot. One late afternoon, I was struck suddenly by how attractive heather could be, planted like this in strips of pale color, swept and nurtured in its way by the saline wind off the cold ocean. Just like in England, I imagined the Director, my housemate, thinking, as I did the thing with the hose that you do with vacuums, and spatulas in cake batter—moved it back and forth with a weird internal, mathematical urge not to leave any part untouched. That same evening, from the upstairs bathroom window, I saw the Director pee gleefully off the back deck—after all, the bathroom was in use—and into the lavender border.

Gardens are places for all people, both the petunia-heads and those who surge past the daylilies and into the sea holly, the anemones, the dripping amaranths, the lemon cucumbers. This latter tendency towards specialization, exoticism, and expertise bloomed among the ranks of the elderly women with whom I briefly roamed that summer through the cliff towns marveling at heirloom roses. They argued with real violence over the Latin names of things and they trespassed over fences to smell, like a pack of unruly grazing goats. Why they liked plants so extremely they did not feel the need to explain. We love you!, they crowed to me, also without explanation. Never leave! To admire the elderly endears you to them, yes, they love you, and crucially, you love yourself, too, for loving those who are otherwise often shunned, pushed to the side, looked away from, disregarded. I know this now, having lost someone old to a virus I could have never imagined when I worked at the Garden. I had not seen it before, but I saw a glimmer of it there, the way that eager visitors rushed invariably to the “famous” rhododendron collection, missing out, I felt, on plants like Angelica stricta “Purpurea,” a gigantic self-seeding monster prone to expansion and constructed of oxblood vascularity. Gardens are designed so that the boundaries between natural and artificial become confusing. What is emphasized can be unclear. Even weird wonders like the Angelica stricta are part of a larger whole, harder to see in their specifics. 

Like a museum, the Garden was a place where a stultification could set in quickly, particularly if you worked there, but also if you visited. Something about the wind, and the largeness of the grounds, and the number of plants to look at, and the general silence of wandering through open, cultivated space. A landscape historian wrote about Poliphilo’s journey through garden dreamscapes that “like garden visitors generally, [Poliphilo] is not…able to pace or place himself appropriately, either in his movement or his thinking.” I saw guests heave themselves, exhausted, into the patio chairs we had set up for lemonade consumption. Paul, who had a long ponytail, and was one of my immediate supervisors, advised early against the kind of rest that I might be tempted to take. There is always something to do here, he told me, in the way of all supervisors everywhere. If I really had nothing to do, he said, I should gather plant specimens to photocopy in the office and create my own identification almanac. 

What are you doing, asked the officepeople immediately. They were less tanned than the rest of us, though my face, I imagine, briefly turned bright white in the light of Xerox machine, the top of which I held pressed against a dirty, crumbling piece of heather. The work of the outside was not meant, they told me, to come in here. In the flash of the fluorescent light, and their eyes, I saw suddenly what I had become. The Garden’s natural soil was a fine, salty dust that got in everything, and streaked me up and down. Sun had turned my hair, which I had dyed at the beginning of the summer, a horrific orange. Each day I donned a sweatshirt advertising the Garden. I had bought it with my own money, though I had an employee discount, and what I could afford was the largest child size, which did not exactly fit. I had come here to find myself, I thought, but I did not totally recognize myself. Years later I would stare at a photograph from this time. Unnatural-haired, I stood proudly in waders and held a monstrous waterlily I had, with a machete and great difficulty, severed from the bottom of the small water feature in the Garden’s parking lot. 

It was as if they saw me as up for some kind of adoption. People found me, invited me, wanted to show me things. I did not claim for myself the knowledge of how to refuse. A middle-aged local man insisted on taking me sea-kayaking one afternoon, despite the fact that we didn’t know each other. It was said in town that he was a friend to the transient people like me, someone who was “good to know.” That morning was a beautiful morning, I think, and the man friendly, but I found that I resented being there, resented being asked to bend, to be polite, to be charming, to be in (rightful) awe of the things that, without him, I never would have seen. At the shore, attempting to reel in my kayak amidst the smooth stones and locally famous seaglass, I suffered a gigantic spasm of the muscles in my back, so painful I could not speak but to scream. The man regarded me with wordless horror; I apologized for my own weakness, holding onto the shore. The elderly deadheaders did not ask such things of me. 

I began to eat entire loaves of bread for dinner and nap in the thickness of the wild grass atop the cliff, where no one could see me. It was like returning to something: not to childhood, exactly, though. Something feral, meant to be unlooked at. Tasked with keeping Paul’s carefully propagated young heather specimens well-watered while he was away, I alternately drowned and baked them. I had lost something: the ability, maybe, to pretend passivity? What had happened I could not pinpoint. Paul returned and screamed. He did not talk to me then, for weeks, and I busied myself pruning the rhododendrons on the Coastal Trail until it was nearly time to leave the Garden.

Once, meaning for a long time, this entire region was known for its natural timber. Fifteen miles away from the Garden, last summer, I think, or maybe it was the summer before, a long grove of redwoods separating the coast from the inland part of the county went up in flames. I read about it from my screen, aghast. The trees had been the sign, I remembered, that you were transitioning somehow into a different place: they were a barrier of a kind between the ocean people and the valley people. The redwoods were so obviously fragrant in the way of warm redwoods, dust motes, needles, sunlight, winding road, etcetera, that you knew to roll your windows down, driving through it for those few minutes. And then out the other side stretched the Anderson Valley. Like the coast, but less touristed, the valley was a region in which life and death seemed to coexist more vividly than elsewhere, and it was between the two, here, that a language named Boontling rose. Boontling was a “deliberately contrived jargon,” according to a book that someone, once, pressed into my hands. It was dying; almost no one spoke it anymore, and the book (Boontling: An American Lingo) explained that “the popular notion in the valley [is] that the lingo should be allowed to die with the generation which spoke it…Boontling is largely, perhaps irrevocably, tied to a certain collection of people in a particular place at a particular time.” 

Like the trees, the lingo had once been full-blown and was now gone or dying. It had been comprised of hundreds if not thousands of words that people spoke regularly in the early decades of the last century. Two large wars and the automobile shot through area, scattering people, disrupting the place’s sense of nestled-in-ness, in which certain things, like gardens and languages, grow. Whether they are artificial or natural it is hard, in the end, to say. Still, it was remembered enough later by the children and grandchildren of the old-timers that a dictionary could be cobbled together. Not a complete one, but an attempt at cultivation. The texture of life, in a particular place at a particular time, comes through in what remains of Boontling, even if no one speaks it fluently anymore. At the very least, there is a document. Serowlsh, from “sour owl shit,” designated “anything which is no good.” A lighthouse was a briney glimmer. Moldunes were large female breasts. Tweedish, childish. Walter Levi, a telephone, for the first man in the valley to own one. Fog-eaters lived, as I did, very briefly, on the coast. 

I couldn’t exactly say why the language’s details had a felt similarity to the names of the plants, but understood it had something to do with resistance. It’s not like they gave me anything back, but even the names of the fuchsia cultivars I worked with—Danish Pastry, Son of Thumb, Devonshire Dumpling, Baron von Kettler, Salmon Cascade—maintained a kind of antagonism to reason, and to the present, and even to linguistic beauty, that I admired. It was like a dream within a dream within a dream, encountering these names, spinning a narrative between and beyond them. 

I have never been good at holding onto things. That’s not right—it’s that I don’t try to hold on. I have moved from place to place like a ghost whose house has been bulldozed. All the jobs, the little corners of places, the specific languages learned, they pile up somewhere out of sight. I don’t know what I’m trying to find anymore. What I’m trying to see. It was irresponsible to lose the language I found, to lose the names of those old women I worked alongside for a few months more than ten years ago. I can’t even summon their faces. I have not visited the Garden since leaving, but I can remember its basic layout if I try, the rounds of plantings and the sour-smelling mulch, the mowed paths of grass and the rare, wind-beaten, dark bishop pines; I follow a tiny imaginary version of me, young, wandering, turning around when I can’t figure out what I am meant to see, and so finding again the familiar to hold: a field of grass, and plants, and the noise of the ocean, and a figure in the distance, maybe, slightly stooped.

---

Associative logic is what draws me again and again to the essay as a form, because it feels, often, like the "realest" part. The older I get, the more I look for associations to be felt, implied, even just barely sensed, rather than spelled out and neat. For a few years, I've been having this weird thing happen: out of nowhere, just a flash of a place I've been—a corner, an image, an intersection, a tree I once walked past—reappears to me for seemingly no reason. Why? How? It feels like my brain is composting, or something. But these half-memories hold strange associative power. This essay started from one. And I want to examine my own mind, I want to speculate about how I get from (in this case) a garden I barely remember to a dying lingo. I know the connection between plants and language is there—something about cultivation, something about oldness, something about the fertile place in which both grew. It seems to me that I'd much rather stay murky than clear, very often, in most ways—as a writer, as a person. I don't want to look at a tree and think "tree." I want to speculate about what it feels like to be at the very top of that tree, swaying around among lichenous branches I can't clearly imagine. As a writer, my tests and speculations don't often result in a clear answer, which I far prefer.

—

Lucy Schiller is the 2020-2021 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in nonfiction writing at Colgate University, where she is finishing a nonfiction manuscript on oldness and music, among other things. Her work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, the Baffler, the Iowa Review, Literary Hub, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming from DIAGRAM and West Branch.

North Pole

by Ilana Bean

There’s something that feels sort of pleasant and humbling about describing our experiences and labeling it speculation—saying, this is what I think is going on, but I could believe something entirely different tomorrow.

In my first dream, the 6th amendment of the US constitution was about the North Pole. In my next dream, I wore my largest winter coat and it still wouldn’t keep warm.

When I google “North Pole” one of the suggested questions asks: Is going to the North Pole illegal?

It isn’t— the 6th amendment pertains to a fair and speedy trial. The North Pole is governed by the same laws as all international oceans. Canada thinks the North Pole might actually be Canadian, but no one else agrees, not even the US. In 2007, Russia planted a flag. The nearest land depends on what you consider to be land: are semi-permanent gravel banks land? If not, the closest land is off the shore of Denmark. If land must be permanently inhabited to count, then it’s an area in Canada’s far north, called Alert, like the state that is ready to shift into fear at any moment. Although Alert has been permanently inhabited since 1950, the individual inhabitants who live there are temporary.

Recently, Russia’s new and enormous icebreaker, Arktika, sailed straight to the North Pole after passing the coast of Norway. The hope was to test the capabilities of the ship with some serious ice. Is there nowhere else to find serious ice? During the Cold War (of course) two Russian scientists are said to have parachuted down to the North Pole. Classic!

Like flight and like the moon, the North Pole is a matter of many hotly debated firsts. Much of what has happened at the North Pole is only said to have happened, and then said by someone else to have not happened after all. Like the paradoxically large interior of a house that will drive its occupants mad, the calculations never add up. It’s very hard to check up on the North Pole. Because of the limitations of mercator projection, it was left off even the omniscient eye of Google Earth for years.

The more I read about the North Pole, the less I feel like it even exists. To say it’s where Santa lives is to say Santa, too, is neither real nor plausible. It’s a space without a recognized time zone and with days that last months. It’s not even one thing, but three. The earth has a geographic North Pole, a magnetic North Pole, and a geo-magnetic North Pole. To make matters worse, the North Pole would actually more aptly be described as a north-attracting pole. It’s the part of the Earth’s magnetic field that wants north magnetic particles to draw near— which means, the North Pole, is in fact, actually a south pole. We have been looking in the wrong place! All this time! The North Pole is Antarctica and the South Pole is the ice where polar bears will run 60 kilometers per hour to rip you to shreds.

Another thing about both the North and South Pole is that they could, at any moment, reverse. The South Pole would become the North Pole and the North Pole would become the South Pole, which it technically already is. This has happened 183 times over the past 83 million years, and the most recent occurrence was 780,000 years ago.

A polar reversal would throw off migratory patterns and cell phone signals alike. I first learned about this in Geosystems, a class in my high school that was nicknamed “Rocks for Jocks.” I remembered none of the mechanics, but years later, held onto the enormous discomfort. I signed up for an easy A, not a paralyzing fear of magnets! Polar reversal was one more strike against this whole thing. This is not my first North Pole dream.

It went on the list with Yellowstone exploding, with the impending earthquake that could wipe out the Pacific Northwest, the disappearing honeybees. I was and am so tremendously afraid of them all that I can barely distinguish between them—a photo exposed so brightly that forms appear featureless. Although none of them individually are likely to get me, surely one of them will. Sometimes I find it hard to think about anything else. The list goes on: the weakness of recycling programs, the idea that water distribution will be solved if we all turn off the tap when brushing our teeth, Zoonotic diseases, global pandemics.

The geographic North Pole is the point where Earth’s axis of rotation meets its surface. It’s where all of the longitudinal lines converge. It’s the point that feels like it is the very top of Earth’s head, if Earth had a head. If circles had tops. If there was one obvious orientation of viewing a sphere, if that concept itself did not defeat what feels like the whole point of spheres. Within northernness, there is often this concept: topness, upness. When I think of up in the room I am sitting in it means away from the ground and towards the sky. Which would make the downmost place of the earth a molten core and the up-most place of the earth not even the earth at all, but everything beyond it.

One therapist suggested that, to mitigate apocalypse fears, I should consider the sources of media I’m consuming. Are they profiting from my anxiety? It’s a fair guess.

She encouraged me to start following a publication that shares exclusively good news. I did, and found that the good news around us was mostly stories about dogs diving into bodies of water and pulling drowning humans out. This made me even sadder, like, That’s the best we’ve got? The goodness of the story wasn’t even that good, just a near aversion of something terrible. Maybe the essence of heroic acts lies in taking on more than what should ever be your responsibility, or even your right. Still, I’m happy to say that both dog and man are now okay.

Another therapist sent me lists of cognitive distortions and asked me to circle which ones my apocalypse anxiety fell into. I didn’t like this because I felt like maybe it wasn’t a distortion and was just the truth of what was happening and a better approach might be from the perspective of oncoming grief— not to say the earth isn’t in danger, but to learn to live with that sadness, to live with the idea that the world is bigger than what you’re able to change.

A third asked me why I was more worried about drowning in a catastrophic flood than other forms of death, since all death is death. There are answers, like, for example, a fear of total obliteration, experiencing death not only as an erasure of self but an erasure of context, but I found this question somehow comforting.

The geomagnetic North Pole is an antipodal point where the axis of a best-fitting dipole intersects the surface of Earth. I almost know what that means. It’s close to the magnetic North Pole, but not the same thing. The whole point feels more theoretical, like where the math says the North Pole should be if the North Pole was a place that made any sense. Perhaps the idea that North is up is taking the perspective of the sun, imagining its roundness as another head which, like our own, is more comfortable when oriented in one position than another, feeding on hydrogen, which, like so many things, is not unlimited.

For all the fear of apocalypse I had been practicing most of my life, I would have thought that when the pandemic arrived I’d handle it either particularly well or particularly poorly. I knew we would eventually have a global pandemic because in 2016 an Uber driver once told me one was coming while I was on the way to the airport, and this fit well into my framework of the world. Still, I didn’t come away with a lot of actionable ideas. It didn’t really change anything when it hit.

My roommate showed me a video on her phone of her toddler niece learning that she would soon be a big sister and I immediately started crying, thinking about how I was a big sister too and thinking about family and how scared I was for my own. I thought about my dad’s asthma and my brother in New York. I thought about a dream I used to have over and over where my sister falls off a cliff in New Mexico and grabs onto its rocky ledge. When I reach my hand out, she can’t quite grasp it. Her hair is curled; she is seven again and dressed up for my brother’s bar mitzvah. Some dreams are nonsensical; others are just heavy handed. I said to my mom on the phone, “I’m really struggling this weekend,” and she said, “Yes, so is every person in the world.”

One summer when I was eight or nine, my family went to North Carolina and found a group of snakes on the rocks. They gathered around them for what felt like ages, and I stayed on the other side of the creek, positive they would be bitten by something irreversibly venomous. Because I couldn’t think of any other way to stop this, I stood on my rock screaming and screaming and screaming until my family came back to me.

When I was a kid, my dad told me about the story of Baucis and Philemon. It’s one of the myths where commoners— a husband and wife— act kindly to a disguised god and are, in turn, rewarded. Their greatest wish was to die at the same moment, to never face the pain of existing without each other. And so, while an enormous comet would bring total obliteration, on the other hand, there is also this.

The magnetic North Pole is also horrible because it’s always moving. The magnetic North Pole is the point where the planet's magnetic field points vertically downwards. When you get here, the compass needles drop. The reason I think that it is so horrible that the magnetic North Pole moves is because what that means is that Earth is moving on its axis— that the Earth, in fact, wobbles. I hate this. There are so many real things to worry about but I also worry that the Earth will wobble so much that one day it will break off the track and start hurdling outwards, that there is no bar of iron holding anything to anything, that there is only electricity and magnets and thousands of feet of water, melting ice and Cold Wars and no land on which to build. I worry everything I depend on is halfway made up; a research station perched on a surface that will disappear into the ocean in the spring, that was never built to last in the first place, mapping a point that won’t hold still, that ships sink searching for and no one will believe you really found. If I could, I would make the North Pole illegal. I would amend against this whole thing. Get a time zone, North Pole! Join Canada!

When I write about the unsteady orbit of the earth, I feel a non-metaphorical tingle along my scalp. I feel the presence of my heart, which is here too, which is moved by electric impulses in muscle. Even the concept of the North Pole can shift the physiological parameters within my very real body, which, like all matter, has a magnetic field of its own. My feet are the bottom of my body for their proximity to earth, and my head is the top for its distance. I pull up Google maps and find that because of the way sitting on my bed, cross-legged and leaning, the northernmost place of my body is my right knee. This is the last warm week of October; the Northern hemisphere that holds me is turning away from the sun. Small black bugs bite my arms and legs in the days before the first frost.

---

I’m interested in figuring out how to live in a world that’s fundamentally unstable and unpredictable—because I have to and we all have to and that’s the task we were given, and my human brain is hardwired to search for narrative, even though one narrative that I find generally convincing is that the whole hunt for narrative is pretty futile in a world that’s so complex and unruly. I think our need to orient ourselves in the world we live in and our actual ability to do so is wildly mismatched. There’s something that feels sort of pleasant and humbling about describing our experiences and labeling it speculation—saying, this is what I think is going on, but I could believe something entirely different tomorrow.

—

Ilana Bean is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Iowa, as well as a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship and Stanley Fellowship Award. Her work has appeared in Nashville Review. She is a nonfiction reader for The Iowa Review.

Crows Rearrange Themselves on Branches

by Stephanie Sauer

I turned to the speculative with this piece before I thought to report the event to police. It did not once cross my mind, in fact, to call the police. Thirty plus years on the planet had taught me that the speculative was my only recourse.

I can breathe along the river, even this crowded river with a road busy at rush hour, used condoms and Styrofoam strewn across the dirt. I can let my guard down, relax into the pedals, the motion, the dry valley heat. I can admire the crows lined neatly on branches. Just an hour, that is all I need. That’s all I can give myself on this day. So I set my mind to resting.

I bike twenty minutes south along the Delta, free from thinking. I look ahead to gauge my passing on the left of a parked pickup, as there is no shoulder. I notice this pickup has a broken side mirror. I pedal on, watching the fields to the west and how the angles change them. I veer left again, notice the same mirror. How does one accidentally bust out a side mirror, I wonder. But I do not think much of it because I am trying not to think. I pedal at an easy pace and watch crows rearrange themselves on branches. I veer left again, notice the same busted mirror. Blood rushes to my palms. The skin on the blades of my shoulders pinches tightly. A heat burns fear into anger. It registers: I am being followed. I pedal on, refusing to let whoever this is make me feel small, restrict the space I can inhabit in the world. I refuse to let this silver pickup truck spoil my ride (read: health). I want to scream I don’t deserve this shit! I have put up with enough crap already in one short life! So I pedal at a quick clip and, when the truck passes again, resolve to look this fuck in the face and sass back, tell him off (I’m already assuming it’s the ever-leering him of every woman’s horror story scenario). I see him parked again. I pedal hard, then slow enough to turn my head, ready to shout. Instead, I see the silhouette of this man’s penis (of course it was a man) erect against the western sky. It takes a moment to register, but I realize this man has rigged his front seat to recline all the way back and elevated it to eye level for just this purpose. He probably punched the side mirror out himself.

Panic sets in. I notice that there are few other cars around me. I’ve biked far enough south to have found peace but am now playing out the scene in my head: Young woman biking with no phone along levee road brutally raped, mutilated, dumped in Delta. Investigation to follow. People sigh what a shame as the next bit of news slips me into a statistic. And all because this man feels entitled to terrorize. Decades of minor slights and unacknowledged horrors double my blood as if to give birth. I stop pedaling. I pull my bike to the opposite side of the road, plant both feet at its sides and face in his oncoming direction. I brace the handles and thrust up my chin. Enough! I throw lifetimes of rage in his direction. The truck erupts in flames. The man cannot escape. The rigged seat has caused the lock to malfunction. He is trapped, arms flailing against the window, flesh bubbling. I sit back on the seat of my cruiser and pedal at a leisurely clip. I watch the crows rearrange themselves on the branches and smile at the sun setting on the fields out west.

---

I engage with the speculative as if by instinct, which is something I say as if by instinct I did not mean a skill I learned to survive in a culture that teaches women that we are not protected, that what we say will not be believed, and that we deserve and must expect myriad horrors. I came to the speculative from a young age as a way to exist at all, somewhere. I turned to the speculative with this piece before I thought to report the event to police. It did not once cross my mind, in fact, to call the police. Thirty plus years on the planet had taught me that the speculative was my only recourse. When I finally did call the precinct, only after witnessing the reactions of men in my life—reactions that betrayed the expectation of one who feels entitled to live in a world that does not regularly terrorize them, reactions I had been cut off from enjoying—the officer did not bother to make a report. The officer, in fact, asked me what I expected him to do about the situation as he laughed. I hung up. 

Turning to conjecture is not passive nor escapist. It is not only about survival. Writing the speculative allows me to consider what it might be like to inhabit a world in which gender violence and terror are held to immediate account. There, I can imagine what it might be like if power and privilege were distributed evenly among humans. I can imagine what it would feel like to exist free of the looming threats of sexual assault and murder. Together in groups, alone in their rooms, and alone together across media, women have been speculating for centuries, our questions rising in frequency: What if there were consequences? What if I had power? What if we sought justice? We imagine the world we want into being. We speculate about how we might shape it. The speculative is a precursor to action. It is a requisite for lasting change.

—

Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary artist and author of Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press) and The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force (University of Texas Press). She teaches prose writing in Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas program and is a co-founding editor of A Bolha Editora in Brazil.

Giddy Up, Horse Boy

by Lulu Dewey

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 definition of the essay always resonates with me: "a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular or orderly composition." It sounds like a horrible and embarrassing issue originating in the bowels, which I think mirrors my writing process perfectly.

I do not especially care for horses—they are far too spooky with their long snouts and clippy cloppy feet, their whinnying and neighing and whiskery jowls, and their devastating propensity to grow too old and be made into glue, like poor Boxer in Animal Farm, or to go lame and need to be shot in the head, like Black Beauty’s brother Rob Roy. 

I hate for an animal to suffer, and I especially hate the way that horses suffer, with their frothy mouths and the whites of their eyes all showing. If I see a horse out to pasture, gamboling around with its long legs and shiny mane, I’m thinking about how close it is to death—any moment may be its last, and there’s a man waiting around every blade of grass with a well-oiled gun to put it out of its misery.

So you understand that I do not especially care for horses, and I especially abhor rodeo and horse racing and any other equine sport that will certainly lead to the hot crack of a bullet or a quick trip to the factory to be mashed into black-market burger patties. And that’s the other thing: I don’t know why we insist on treasuring horses, why we can’t bear to eat them, but then go ahead and ride them around like meaty bicycles and force them to do all manner of uncomfortable things, like jump over hurdles or carry children around at the county fair. With cows, at least, I know that they’re left alone for most of the day to chew cud and eat alfalfa, except twice a day for milking for dairy cows and the final trip to the slaughterhouse for beefy ones. At least they can live their own lives without being bothered by polo players or jockeys or cowboys. But it pains me equally as much to think of horses locked up in a stable alone at night, in the dark, dreaming only of the wild hillsides that their ancestors came from.

Worse than the horses themselves must be the horse people, who are everywhere, at every turn, inescapable: buying horse biscuits at the pet store or discussing dressage over dinner. First there was Sienna in third grade, who had hair like the silky floss from a corn and who brought her velvet horse-riding helmet to show-and-tell, and then Ms. E., my beloved fifth grade teacher who had a chestnut roan named Minuet, and then Emmeline from middle school who also had the velvet helmet and the silky corn hair, and Stephen, but we don’t need to talk about him, and I guess nobody from high school or college or beyond because people outgrow their love of horses temporarily once they hit puberty only to come back even stronger in middle age, renting a spot in a stable just outside the suburbs so that they can spend each weekend braiding manes and shoveling shit from beneath the heaving flanks of their dear quadrupeds.

Despite having consumed some significant quantity of horse meat in her childhood, my mother is one of these horse people too. She’s been in the market for a horse lately, the same way that when I was a child she was in the market for asthmatic guinea pigs, trios of rats, furious bunnies, cats plagued with increasingly bizarre neuroses, and even a deformed basset hound named Lola who likes to wipe her anus on the living room rug and who once ate an entire brie off the kitchen table before a party, leaving her bloated and flatulent for weeks.

These animals are good fun, and they make good company, and I’m glad that they found a home with us, despite the deranged rabbits sinking their teeth into my buttocks and the many animal funerals we’ve had to hold over the years. But I draw the line at horses—I absolutely draw the line. Have you seen a horse penis? They are monstrous and obscene, enough to make Ms. E send her dear Minuet straight back to where he came from, although I’m sure he’s on his best behavior every time she comes to visit him at the stable. And a horse could scarcely fit in my parents’ little backyard, which means they’d have to find a place for him to live somewhere out in the country, and I can just imagine that poor thing left all alone for weeks at a time while they work each day to house him, a single tear making its way down his unnervingly lengthy snout as he contemplates his own isolation.

Even without taking into account these questions of storage space and penile length, there’s no doubt that my mother’s affection is already spread too thin between the other animals and my saintly dad, who has been known to gently roll up a stray rat in a tiny blanket or catapult the dog across the fence to protect her from the neighbor’s blind and perpetually enraged beagle. There’s no way he could handle a horse amidst all this. Not to mention us three children, who require just as much love and care as the latest creature to cross the threshold, if not slightly more considering my lactose intolerance which has been especially bad this year with all the ice cream socials I’ve been invited to.

And I want to remind my mother about Stephen, what a disaster that was—how heinous it was when he ended up choosing Emmeline as his date to the Spring Fling instead of me, how my heart was torn to shreds, and how awful I felt for years afterwards, imagining them together on horseback, jumping hurdles and careening through fields of wildflowers, her poor hymen battered to bits by the impact. I’d never ride a horse at that age—what a risk. Not that I’m saving myself for marriage or anything, I’m not that sort of girl either, but there’s something so tragic about having your precious gift taken away from you by a horse, especially with Stephen on the premises.

In the end, the true tragedy was having my invitation to Emmeline’s 12th birthday party revoked because I struck the back of her neck with a ruler in Geometry class, having worked myself into a frenzy watching Stephen gape at her from across the room. Her silky hair did nothing to soften the blow, although I’m hardly a hard-hitter when it comes to acts of violence. Stephen though, with his riding crop and tight little horse riding pants, might be capable of anything. Stephen might have leapt across the classroom and turned my own ruler on me, leaving me weeping and bruised on the linoleum floor. But he didn’t, did he? He just sat there, blinking slowly at us with those long buttery eyelashes so that I wondered if he might be in the wrong math class, if basic arithmetic might be more at his level, and whether he was even a true horse boy if he didn’t have enough sense to giddy up when he needed to.

When the day of the party came and my classmates filed into Emmeline’s minivan to head to the stables, I stood on the curb waiting for the bus home and cursed the horse people for betraying me so fully. I swore off horses, chucked my sister’s copy of Seabiscuit in the garbage, and began spending my afternoons draped over the railing at the skatepark, sure that the antithesis of Stephen with his soft hands and elasticated waistbands must be one of these rough and tumble skater boys, clad in all black and smoking pot behind the bathrooms.

But you can’t escape the horse boys, no matter where you turn. My latest boyfriend has begun talking about getting a pair of thoroughbreds when he’s rich, which may be sooner than I’m ready for on account of his bulging bank account and rapid ascent to the top of a financial firm. When he drifts off to sleep each night I press the heel of my palm against his throat, leaving him gasping for breath, and whisper into his half-conscious head no horse no horse bad horse bad horse you hate horses bad bad bad until he stirs, and then right on time I curl up sweetly into a little ball and feign sleep. I like to think I’m doing us both a favor—with a pair of thoroughbreds in the picture he’d lose me for good, like Stephen and Emmeline did all those years ago. I’d much rather he went and slept with the 23rd floor conference room receptionist again, bent over her desk after sharing a few too many lines of cocaine at the office happy hour, than come home with not one but two horses, leaving me last in his affections.

So you see, there’s no use for horses. There’s no reason for my mother to go out and buy one, like a loaf of bread or a flowerpot, only for it to take up all the space in our living room and get pride of place in the family Christmas card. I’m much more useful than a horse, I want to remind her, and I don’t take up much room at all, especially now that I’ve restricted my diet to celery strings and sultanas. When I come to visit I tidy the house while she’s at work and only whine a little when I’m feeling tired or the sun is shining the wrong way at me in the back seat of the car. A horse wouldn’t even fit in the back seat of the car, and a horse certainly can’t help my mother choose out a new pair of shoes while she’s on her lunch break. A horse can’t clean or cook or bring her a cup of tea in the morning when she’s just waking up. A horse can only wrap its weird lips around a handful of hay, and stumble across the pasture like our Uncle Bart after a few too many drinks.

I suppose it would be nice to be reborn as a horse, just to see what all the fuss is about and never have to worry about being loved. I’d have lots of time for contemplation, and people would come and feed me fresh carrots or handfuls of grass, desperately trying to stroke my flanks and whispering sweet nothings into my peachy soft ears. Death, when it came, would be swift and merciful, and I’d be mourned like an only child, even if I ended up at the glue factory when all was said and done.

People are always talking about the intimate connection between horse and rider, after all. I like the sound of this connection, like a centaur or a two-headed snake. I like the sound of any connection, really—especially if it doesn’t involve too much small talk or sustained eye contact. My mother keeps sending me self-help books about making friends and being bold, or having “grit,” or being the type of person who walks into a room and makes the rounds shaking hands and passing out business cards. I want to tell her to send me a book about horses, so that I might slowly learn how to become one.

But I hate the way that horses suffer, with their frothy mouths and the whites of their eyes all showing. And I hate the way that I suffer, steeped in bitterness and vitriol, even though Emmeline ended up engaged to Derek at the Toyota dealership and Stephen is long gone somewhere, probably working in HR or actuarial science miles away from the nearest horse. Most of all, I hate the thought of my latest boyfriend in bed with the 23rd floor conference room receptionist, who for all I know might spend her weekends at the stables too.

---

I lean heavily on a particular narrative persona in both my fiction and nonfiction writing, which means that even my most sensible attempts at nonfiction tend to end up out in the ether. This is definitely the case with “Giddy Up, Horse Boy,” whose neurotic, horse-hating narrator exists in that lovely interstitial space between truth and fiction and allows me to embrace a sense of absurdity in the ways in which she relates to others. It’s this act of channeling, whether of a specific character or a mood or point in time, that feels most speculative to me.

And finally, Samuel Johnson’s 1755 definition of the essay always resonates with me: "a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular or orderly composition." It sounds like a horrible and embarrassing issue originating in the bowels, which I think mirrors my writing process perfectly.

—

Lulu Dewey holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a BS from the University of California, Berkeley. Her essays, stories, and journalism can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, DIAGRAM, Iowa Public Radio, and elsewhere.

Hold Your Body

by Aekta Khubchandani

The narrator needs to prove her hurting and wants to make sure that the reader feels it too. How else would you believe her?

A white man cradles a cat like a baby. Her limbs face upward, straight and unmoving. Her eyes don’t move either. You think it’s a stuffed animal or toy. It’s not. The man shows you his lovely cat. She seems very obedient and quiet while he holds her and places her in a small basket. To show that she is real, he laughs before pinching her private part. The cat widens her eyes but doesn’t make a sound. You see all of this on a video shared on social media. It doesn’t alter the horror.

/

Think about the color of fear.

A dictionary meaning of fear— something that chokes you, leaves you gasping for breath but doesn’t kill you. Fear is the subtext in this white-man-cat-story. 

Or [the color of] fear washes over when you walk by the Hudson waterfront and take the exit that leads you home, you see the face of a white man in a big black car calling you out, screaming at you. Or next day when you walk by the Hudson waterfront and you take the exit that leads you home, that big black car honks loudly and flashes its headlights on; you’re overcome by fear. This one syllable emotion can trigger past trauma. It is also capable of creating new trauma. The color of fear is a powerful white. Dictionary further informs you that fear is associated with words like unpleasant, danger, threat, anxiety, sudden attack and safety concern. 

/

You think about the color of crying. Why did the cat not cry or scream? How much fear does it take for you to give up on crying? You remember your childhood. Crying hadn’t helped or your memory [like your skin] is muddy. You must’ve lived in fear. Color is defined by its intensity and opacity. Tears are translucent, made of salt and emotion. Still, when you think of the color of crying you think—blue. You’re most alone when you’re crying. Your body becomes small, bends inwards. Like a comma or an apostrophe. You become a punctuation. You’re not even a word with energy. No one cries with their back straight. A photograph of you crying is a memory of defeat. You lived a helpless childhood. Blue floats between alone and lonely, empty and repetitive like the sky. You’re used to this feeling. 

The cat must be used to fear or that man must be used to exercising his privilege. Or it is both these realities. 

/

How much space can a word hold in a sentence? How much space is dominated by fear in your life? Fear is both a noun and a verb. The reaction to fear is death because a part of you dies after this. How much has the cat died by this point in the story? When you read cat or recollect her story, the graphic memory of [your] assault plays in your head. Going by this, you and the cat have less of yourselves than you did a few sentences ago. 

This is why crying seems like a temporary solution— a pretend act of letting go. Empathy must blotch a huge part of blue. When you understand things, you know more about the flawed world, the privilege of being a man. You were physically small, once. You’re diverted by how small the cat was. You were an age of eight or six. You liked how your brother was treated. You wanted that treatment for yourself. You went to the bathroom and tried to pee like your brother.

After crying and pouring yourself out, you're tired to feel anything, even fear. You wonder if the cat resonates with this. It’s been raining for two days. There’s no account of the sun. You’re reminded of that big black car with tinted windows. Crying/cry is both an adjective and a noun. How much space does crying hold? You question if your body has enough water after relentless crying. Was the cat once beaten until she was bruised blue? The commonality between fear and crying is grief that the [form of] body gets consumed with. Whether you cry or fear, your body becomes a vessel containing grief.

/

You’ve known the power a man [gender] carries throughout childhood. This story is heavy with the weight of white. You fill yourself another glass of water. You want water to hold your body and nothing else. You drink on behalf of the cat. You couldn’t see the white man in the car. Is the white man in both stories [metaphorically] the same? You sip through the crying until you can’t.

---

If a bad thing happened and no one recorded it, did it really happen? Can trauma be enough evidence? I leave that for the reader to sit with. I’ve revised this story a few times now. I’ve moved the beginning, middle, and end to see what could happen. But I knew it had to start with the white man cradling the cat like a baby. The order of happenings is a reflection of the hierarchy of power [of gender, race, privilege]. There’s a lot of thinking that the narrator engages in. Trauma lives in the [relentlessly thinking] mind but it is a response to people and their behavior. I’ve used the speculative lens to process these thoughts and emotions— what is fear, how small can crying make you feel, how small did you feel when you were physically small [re: a child]. That informs the gender privilege. It’s introspective— the story. The narrator needs to prove her hurting and wants to make sure that the reader feels it too. How else would you believe her?

—

Aekta Khubchandani is an Indian poet and writer. She is matriculating her dual MFA in Poetry & Nonfiction at The New School, NY. She teaches creative writing to students of High School of Economics & Finance with WriteOn NYC. Her fiction “Love in Bengali Dialect”, the winner of Pigeon Pages Fiction contest, is nominated for Best American Short Fiction Anthology. Her poems were awarded the winner of honorable mention by Paul Violi Prize. Her work is featured in Passages North, Epiphany, Jaggery Lit, Kitaab Singapore among others. She has performed spoken word in India, Bhutan and New York.

Editor’s Notes

In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand.

Robin & Leila

The Mother Tree

In about 1877, before the orchard was an orchard, someone planted an elm tree in the center of the far meadow. It was common practice for early American farmers, from colonial times on, to plant shade trees throughout their fields to provide respite for work horse teams and pastured animals. When my grandfather transformed our farm into an orchard in 1911, planting blocks of apple and pear trees, he left the elm and many of the other shade trees standing; they towered above the steady lines of fruit trees like guardians. When I was sixteen, the tree was about a hundred years old. For hours the tree held my attention as I tried to capture the mystery of it, to draw its likeness with a twig dipped in ink, following the lines of branch and trunk with my eyes. When the drawing was finished, I framed it within in an ivory-colored mat and gave it to my mother.  She hung it on a wall in an upstairs room. Years later, when she could no longer climb the stairs and moved her bedroom to the first floor, she hung the drawing there. When she died I took the drawing of the tree and hung it on the wall in my study.

I don’t remember why I set out to draw the old elm, or what I was thinking when I drew it. The drawing has a lonely feel which was probably how I felt at the time. The tree held my attention because of what was not known, could not be known, or understood, because of all the questions that circled without answers, not even formulated yet as questions, because there was a feeling, an affinity, a pull, the desire to look again and again, a tug at the heart, or a sudden rip of fear. The tree was a mystery.

In 1997, the scientist, Suzanne Simard, published her first article on tree communication in the journal Nature. The article, which caused an immediate sensation, identified the ways trees in a forest make use of vast underground fungal networks, called mycorrhizae, to trade nutrients.

Her discovery was quickly dubbed the “wood-wide web,” and set in motion years of subsequent research. Now, in a recent book titled Finding the Mother Tree, Dr. Simard details the ways in which these fungal networks do much more than serve as conduits to exchange carbon and photosynthates; they facilitate inter-tree communication. Yes, what used to be considered in the realm of fantasy has now been scientifically proven by researchers like Dr. Simard who spent years labeling trees with radioactive isotopes—trees demonstrate intelligence and tree behavior has cognitive qualities. The word intelligence comes from the Latin verb intellegere, meaning to perceive and comprehend. Yes, I used the right word–trees exhibit intelligence, they demonstrate perception, learning and memory. Trees communicate by sending chemical signals through a fungal network, and these signals, which are created by ions cascading across fungal membranes are not unlike the neurotransmitters that operate in a human brain. Trees relay messages back and forth that include defense signals to warn one another of potential danger. At times they shuttle allelochemicals or poisons through the network if an unwanted tree intruder enters the forest. Perhaps the most stunning of Simard’s discoveries is that elder trees in a forest, what Simard calls “Mother Trees,” are able to recognize tree neighbors that are genetically related, are kin, and they can send more or less resources to their kin, either favoring or disfavoring them.

When I finished reading Simard’s new book, I swiveled around in my chair to stare at my old drawing of the elm, the “mother tree” on our farm that I had drawn so many years earlier. What holds our attention is important even when we don’t understand why. And even if we may never fully understand.

It is May as I write this and here in New England the trees are leafing out again, green and luminous. We bring you our latest issue, curated around the theme of “hold.” When we sent out the call for this issue, as usual we meant for our call to be a spark and a launch rather than a directive. We had anticipated that we might receive some pieces on the theme of holding on, of perseverance during dark times, the months of living through this pandemic. To our surprise and delight, we received a powerful celebration of speculation, of the power of what holds our attention, whether it is the paranormal, a re-imagined memory of fear, or the mystery of a garden.

Welcome to issue #5: HOLD.

Leila Philip, May 20, 2021

Simard, S., Perry, D., Jones, M. et al. “Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field.” Nature 388, 579–582 (1997).

Simard, S. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Knopf, 2021. 

Program Slam

by Kunlyna Tauch

They’ll enter my “house,” cuff me, escort me to another part of the prison and toss everything everywhere. You know the way someone treats things that do not belong to them.

I’m at my sink doing laundry when I hear, “Program slam!” A porter comes to my cell and informs me of the latest news and walks off in disgust. The statement insinuates that there will be no movement, no more phone calls, possibly no showers and worst of all, no yard. 

“This is bullshit!” I hear him yell off in the distance, probably mad because what program slam also means is everyone’s cell will be searched. 

I go back to washing my laundry in the sink. What’s new? I think to myself. This is Pelican Bay after all. This is a level 4 maximum security prison after all. This is... I scrub some visible stain off my clothes. Apply soap provided by the state, then scrub a little harder. Or am I just institutionalized? This is a question I ponder often. To the incarcerated it means one has been so far removed from freedom that one loses touch with reality. The word itself is as stigmatized as it is long. Institutionalized. Have I become so conditioned that the thought of being trapped in my cell for two weeks barely fazes me? Should I be hysterical?

Soap is overflowing down my sink and toilet. For a second it takes me back to Long Beach, reminding me of the froth when the wave from the ocean hits the sand. Still 9:00 a.m. and everyone is rushed home in a frenzy. Cell doors close in succession, the bangs all too familiar over the years. Then everything is quiet, dead. I don’t like it. I turn on my TV/CD player hoping to escape to the frequencies of music. After laundry, I clean up the soap scum and face my 8-inch fan towards the wet clothes while they hang dry. 

...Missing metal (allegedly). I wonder when they’ll come up with a better excuse. I mean I should take it more seriously. Hypothetically speaking, missing metal infers someone has made a knife—a nice one too—and intends to use it. You kinda have to if you’re brazen enough to do that. But as someone who has done more than ten years, I have doubts about whether there really is someone hiding a knife. I speculate that missing metal is always the go-to excuse for searches that were going to happen anyway. At this point they are an inconvenience more than anything else. 

I know the administration is only doing their jobs, choosing to protect our “little gated community,” but it would be nice if they didn’t leave my cell such a mess afterward. I start to arrange my things and prepare for the ensuing raid. They’ll enter my “house,” cuff me, escort me to another part of the prison and toss everything everywhere. You know the way someone treats things that do not belong to them. One time I found all of my court transcripts (thousands of pages) shuffled like a deck of playing cards. Another time I discovered my cell “totaled,” as if a hurricane had just left. At a loss for words and feeling defeated, I sat down and didn’t know where to start or how I would ever put my home back together. 

My peers do not like that I refer to their cells as their house/home. I guess they fear that they’ll become accustomed to this style of life, this oppressive state of being, I get it. But I’ve been a ward of the state since I was 12, and as sad as it is to say, my current living arrangement has been my most stable, the place I’ve lived the longest without having to move my whole 32 years of existence. Plus, my roommate is someone I’ve known since I was 14, never mind the fact that we were gang members then. 

So, although a random stranger will come and ransack my home, I’ve long since accepted it is an occupational hazard of this lifestyle. I mean, these COs have a job to do—so do we. Most of them don’t want to do it just as much as we do not want them to do it. Which is probably why I’ve also come to accept that some random individual will impulsively steal metal from some place that they’re not supposed to (allegedly) and because of it, we’ll go on lockdown. 

I pour myself a cup of water from the hot pot, spoon a mountain of dry freeze Folgers into the cup and sip in satisfaction. I do another quick assessment for the oncoming invasion. I move some things around, hoping that it’ll help the lucky correctional officer navigate and quickly conclude that I have nothing out of the ordinary. In my younger years, it was a game of cat and mouse. Now in my old age, I don’t have time for that. Now, I operate with the ease of a Zen monk at a tea ceremony. Sip. Inhale, exhale. I am one with the force and the force is with me. 

Am I institutionalized? Have I conformed into this drudgery of existence, awaiting the inevitable while lacking motion? Or have I transcended prison itself and the very idea of it, becoming present with my version of life, my version of beauty, and my version of peace? I’ll let you decide. 

---

—

Kunlyna Tauch is a Cambodian-American from Long Beach California. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 2009 and is serving 50 years to life at Pelican Bay State Prison. During his incarceration, Tauch has earned his associate’s degree from the College of the Redwoods’ Pelican Bay Scholars Program. He participates in the Pelican Bay UNLOCKED podcast, Anti-Recidivism Coalition classes, Dell’Arte’s Prison Arts Program and Hustle 2.0, an entrepreneurship program. He also volunteers as a peer Buddhist member at the Arcata Zen Group.

Inventory

by Tan Tuck Ming

For me, the question of nonfiction hews closely to the question of living in a world in which we are continuously produced as subjects of race, of gender, of capitalism, of power: to what and whom do I owe fidelity?

When we ask if objects have souls what we are asking is if it is made in China. When we ask if it is made in China we are asking if the object has a soul. The question of extraterrestrial life orbits in tandem with Chinese satellites. In thinking of the instructive power of light, touch the lightbulb that is made in China. Walk a body out over the night, defended from insects and unseen riot by a chemical plumed in China. Shower repeatedly with the powerful Chinese nozzle. Do you still turn away from God? Take a piece of paper and turn it over and in its whiteness you can read that it is made in China. Take your clothes out of the laundry basket and your experience of emptiness is not foreign to its production in China. China does not believe in a deficit of want because it is constantly machining desire. For the white noise machine. For the fake plastic plant. For the sheep placenta and the modern office. For the two-headed vibrator the Amazon reviewer sits on his Chinese-made bed to describe as I guess this has two ends so it’s really up to you. For the hole. For the extravagance of holes. For soap. For simple puzzles. For the handle of anything. For the time of year that is blue and loving. For the mouth teething grass. For the eyes listening to the length of your walk. For the bone gnawing for bone––my bone a bone stuck for bone and my body a body. Everyone knows the body, made in China, is the best specimen for exhibition. It is a shape and a future. Shapes and futures are conceptually Chinese, an abstract expressionism. At sundown, you are singing English with a Chinese voice made in China. You are five generations of diasporic progress. You eat the soil. You want to live. You want to love and you fear death and your mind flutters freely, uncontrollably, because liberal democracy is made in China. Martin Luther King Jr., the Chinese agent. The Pope, working overtime shifts for China. Octomom is a Chinese agent. Your mother is a Chinese agent. Hindsight is a Chinese agent. When you hit your head with your hands and cry, you are the endpoint of a shame, which is a supply chain beginning in China. In Chinese villages, old and young women are crying so your eyes can open out into water. The moan is not how one expresses pain in China. We live silently and shatter. Pain is a decision, which was calculated centuries ago in China. So is the lie. There are newer ovens. This is a good feeling. If you are dreaming of becoming an insurance broker or opening a Dairy Queen or renting a studio apartment, you are being dreamed by a laborer named Larry in Shenzhen. He is the enabler of love, or wonder, or what the woman ambling in the park calls the Chinese virus. All these things are part of an express delivery system: Everywhere, people have been receiving seeds in the mail from anonymous Chinese vendors, this century’s frontiersmen. When the seeds are planted in the ground, a forest bursts upward, already expertly wired. It takes three days for the internet to connect. You wake up, look in the mirror and realize there is no possibility left but to go around and be Chinese. Everyone is asking but there is no return policy. This is the requirement of cost-efficient Chinese production––only forward motion. Where could you even go? You watch the trains running all night to Xinjiang. You see the edge of the map where a person disappears, then more. You sit on a Chinese tree stump. A brisk wind that leaves you is like forgetting a word you need to say but cannot know. It travels around the world once and returns on your other side. 

---

In nonfiction writing, reality is often put forward as an origin that we should seek to represent, but it’s more the case that there is no single origin but a multiplicity of narratives we are adjoined to and must contend with. For me, the question of nonfiction hews closely to the question of living in a world in which we are continuously produced as subjects of race, of gender, of capitalism, of power: to what and whom do I owe fidelity?

I wrote this piece as someone who is part of the Chinese diaspora in Western, majority-white contexts, where the discourse of China is increasingly twisted and loaded. To be part of this diaspora is to find kinship with all of these other objects, ideas, and sensibilities that are said to also come from China. It is, in this way, to be fastened to a point of origin that I do not clearly know or remember, to a word that is less a place than a specific narrative device. Writing about this honestly is less about sorting out the real from the not real but to project my own notion of China by working backwards from its many stray references, like a dog sniffing a scent, to speculate what came before me. The tools of speculation allow me to get closer to an unreality that bears its own truths of double-vision: the country that seems less a homeland than a relentlessly productive machine; the dwelling that seems both intimately near and impossibly far; an origin that can only be traced by scattering yourself in many directions.

—

Tan Tuck Ming is an essayist, poet, and an MFA graduate at the University of Iowa. Born in Singapore and raised in New Zealand, his current work is interested in the shifting structure of the family, especially in the context of migration, displacement, and welfare. His work has been published or forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the Pantograph Punch, and A Clear Dawn, an anthology by Auckland University Press.

No Kind of Good Trouble

by Shabrayle Setliff

I have a habit of imagining what it would be like to live somewhere other than where I sleep: I have never fully dwelled in mind where I reside in body.

To say that I grew up in a suburb of Oklahoma City would give, perhaps, the wrong impression. I grew up in a low-income suburb. We were car dependent, and that was one of the only cultural similarities we shared with other suburban communities. My first car was a complete clunker that a woman at our church was going to give away as a tax write-off, but then a charity walked into church on two legs, and so, because of her generosity, I had a rusted Nissan hatchback with one headlight. I was ecstatic. Not only did I need a car to get to my job as a cashier at Target, but it meant the freedom of long, aimless drives as long as I could keep it filled with gas and oil, which was a constant task because I could only afford to put in a few gallons at a time, a half tank at most, and it leaked a couple of quarts weekly. It was like feeding a child. 

I had to drive nearly twenty minutes to my Target job. There were no Targets in my neighborhood. Within two miles of my home, there was a laundromat, a car wash, a Taco Bell, a Church’s Chicken, a payday loan agency, a 7-Eleven, a cemetery, a discount grocery store, and at least five Baptist churches. These establishments catered to a diverse clientele, not in terms of class, but in terms of race and ethnicity. Del City was and remains mostly white; however, currently, almost 20% of the population is Black, 6% is Hispanic, 6% is made up a racially diverse groups, and 2% is Native American. For a town in Oklahoma, this was diverse, and whether or not those numbers were the same when I grew up there in the 80’s and 90’s, they feel true. As a biracial kid, part “Indian”—my mom was born to Quechua parents near Cusco—and part Black, I fit in with many of the biracial military kids who were there because their fathers were stationed at Tinker Air Force Base, just as mine was. 

Despite the diversity, there was no attempt by most of my white neighbors to conceal their belief in their supremacy. Memories of overt incidents abound, but looking back, the racial animus particularly congeals in a moment when I was in the 8th grade. There was a “race riot”—someone actually yelled, “Race riot!” as about thirty Black kids and fifty white kids lobbed racial slurs at each other over a chain-link fence at lunch one day. The white kids definitely had darker material to work with, while the Black kids were limited to variations of “Cracker!” and “White trash!” laced with expletives to lend them more potency, more sting. 

I stood on the side with some of my friends, who could not or would not claim membership with either group of kids. I felt an obligation to leave my group of friends and back the Black kids; although, the previous year, when I tried to join a group of some of the same Black kids at lunch, thinking it was finally my time to join my own group of people after spending my childhood in a mostly white elementary school, I was ignored. Backs turned to me when I spoke. This lasted for about a week before I decided to go it alone. A couple of gregarious white girls on the pep squad ushered me into their fold, and from there we created an inclusive group of friends comprised of Native Americans, Filipinos, and white people. I was the only Black member. 

/

I have often been the only Black person in the spaces I occupy, as is the case now. I live in a real suburb—economically, culturally, in terms of housing density and home ownership—in Fairfax County, located in northern Virginia, called NoVa by some locals. Fairfax is exurban sprawl. There are planned communities, such as the subdivisions near me with homes containing more bathrooms than bedrooms and as many bedrooms as a bed and breakfast. They have three-car garages, and every bit of labor is hired out—lawn, housecleaning, and maintenance. There are also more modest suburban homes, with two-car garages. There are three-story townhomes as well. A new townhome subdivision was just completed this summer. They start in the low $700,000s. There are some apartment complexes. A studio can be had for about $1300 monthly, which is unaffordable for many people, so there are often requests for basement dwellings, and there’s plenty of stock—mortgages are high. 

I live in an accidental neighborhood, which is not quite a neighborhood, and more like a U-shaped street with about thirty dwellings. Our U doesn’t connect to any other neighborhood streets. It is fed by and feeds into a busy four-lane road that stretches even further into the exurbs and carries commuters into the nearer suburbs. Our neighbor is the longest living resident on our U. She grew up in the green, one-story, two-bedroom house next door to us, which she shares with her husband. She’s been here for over forty years, close to fifty. There are also a couple of mini mansions on this street—I define a mini mansion as a dwelling that my house could fit in three or four times—and a couple of micro mansions—my house could fit in one of those twice--but most of the homes are similar to my own: a few bedrooms, a few bathrooms, a couple of thousand square feet, take or leave a few hundred. 

Racially and ethnically, my neighborhood is diverse. For the first time since we moved here seven years ago, I’m not the only Black person. A Black man moved into one of the rentals across the street this past spring. A little over half of my neighbors are white, but the rest are first-generation immigrants from around the world: Korea, India, Germany, China, and parts of the Middle East. There are language barriers, but we wave… sometimes. Mostly, the white people talk to each other and the women from countries in the Middle East talk to each other. Everybody else does their socializing completely outside of the U, my husband, our two boys, and me included. Suffice to say that I don’t exactly fit in, but I don’t know if anyone else does either, including my neighbor who’s been here for decades. 

There is no “in,” and in the absence of a sturdy culture able to frame our interactions with one another, we here in the Fairfax County, one of the richest and most diverse counties in the nation, must rely on other cultural points of cohesion, namely class, and the middle and upper-middle class culture insists on order. 

/

The last weekend of this past May, George Floyd’s murder garnered increasing media coverage. I could see footage of protests erupting in major cities, but nothing was happening in Fairfax. Everyone went along as though everything was right because for the residents of Fairfax, everything was right. By Sunday of that weekend, I had become disquieted by the order in this overly resourced place, so I made a sign with the faces of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd and set out to walk nearby Braddock Road. My husband, Nick, who is white, began getting his shoes on as soon as I got mine on. I was relieved. I hadn’t really talked to him about what I was doing. I just started doing it. I had married someone who understood the need to respond without me needing to ask, who was flawed—after all, he admitted that he never would have thought of doing anything if it weren’t for me—but teachable. 

/

Our little demonstration was uneventful; one honk of support but nothing more. However, this most recent racial eruption was still new, and as the days unfolded that first week of June, many segments of the country seemed to lift out of their collective pandemic torpor to engage with this most current incarnation of white supremacy. White supremacy being an idea that for many white people seemed consigned to the past. Nick joined a group called SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice. They had planned a demonstration at the Fairfax County Police Department Headquarters in the middle of that same week. When Wednesday arrived, we got on our face masks and headed over to the multi-level glass and brick complex. 

A friend of ours, Dan, a plain-clothes detective, who works for the Fairfax County Police Department, texted Nick, telling him, “It’s a shit show!” He’s a part of a tactical unit, but for this event, he was “intel.” Fairfax had morphed into a place that was home to something other than planned residences and shopping mall complexes. Three miles away from our house, there could be unrest if Dan’s observations were correct. 

We parked in the lot next to the headquarters and followed the stream of mostly white people onto the grounds. Most of the Black people who were present were from Grace Covenant Church. There were a few other Black families, but the majority were not Black. Before I understood that Grace Covenant was there at the behest of the Fairfax police chief, I thought that their presence had lent an air of credibility to the whole thing, and I felt more comfortable being there as a Black person. It felt like a coalition, not performative protest. 

They had set up in a section of a nearby parking lot, unloading boxed lunches and bottles of water from church vans. We would later learn that the church had a relationship with Chief Rossler.  This was an attempt, according to a statement put out by SURJ, to garner positive publicity for the police department. I believe that the church was handing out food and water out of a sense of goodwill and support for the demonstrators, but it did seem as though they were being deployed strategically, regardless of their intention. The police department’s use of the group, given that the police were armed and that there was one officer for every three protestors, was a part of a multipronged approach—and I was sure someone had probably used the word “multiprong” when coming up with it. 

When we stepped onto the grounds, we saw socially-distanced demonstrators listening to the vice principal of a local school speaking about racial justice and the responsibility of white people to start getting active. She occasionally gestured to the news helicopters overhead and to the police officers lining the perimeter of the building and stationed on rooftops. There were about thirty officers. The crowd numbered about two hundred, but despite our friend’s account, we didn’t see a “shit show.” We saw friends and families huddled in their quarantined islands, straining to listen above the sound of the helicopters, trying to move closer to the speakers, but, understandably, not wanting to risk getting COVID. The demonstration was scheduled to last from 6 to 7 p.m. It promptly ended at 7 p.m., and we all flowed back to the parking lots nearby as though we were leaving a concert or a baseball game. 

“That was the most sanitized demonstration that I’ve ever been to,” I told my husband. He agreed that it was odd. It was nothing like we’d experienced when we’d been to demonstrations in D.C. where crowds overtook streets, some protestors with expletive-laden signs and protest chants, others praying and singing familiar protest songs, and all were committed to a proper disruption. This demonstration was disruptive in that it existed at all. To police officers who had never heard a peep of protest from residents, it probably really did seem like a “shit show” at first.

Dan, whom we never spotted, revised his first assessment, texting that the whole thing was “underwhelming.” He was cut loose at the end of the event. Nick responded that they, “expected too much from rich, white folks.” Dan replied, “They spent so much money on overtime for that.” Nick noted that they’d get nice paychecks. I realized that our friend worked for the state, and I’d never conceived of “the state” before realizing how little it took to conjure its presence. His job was to observe and suppress any perceived upheaval, or what some might call a step towards necessary systemic change. 

/

But what the hell could I say? Nick works in the defense sector as a human geographer. We met in the military. We were just as much a part of these oppressive systems as our friend. Many people in Fairfax profit off of working for the government, suppressing disruption, maintaining order, and we all have our reasons for doing so. Nick and I grew up poor and went into the military. This is where we landed after that. It never seemed like an immoral thing to do. If we were going to continue to support our family here and provide marginal financial support to relatives back home as needed, Nick would have to continue working. Other jobs that paid a livable wage for his experience and education had not materialized. 

A week after going to my first suburban protest, my friend, Sarah, who is white, invited me to join her and her oldest son, Wyatt, to another. The demonstration, located at another wealthy northern Virginian suburb, near the Whole Foods, was organized by an ad hoc group of white women. There were explicit instructions to stay socially distanced, remain in designated areas, and protest peacefully. When I arrived, I was shocked to see the number of people crowding along the sidewalks along two busy intersections in this high-traffic, commercial area. Passing cars honked approval and people rolled down their windows to yell, “Black Lives Matter!” I never imagined that I would see this swell of response in a suburban setting, and I felt supported in that moment, like the whole enterprise to overturn the basis of this country, its white supremacist foundations, might actually gain enough traction to make a difference.

Then I found my friend. She and her son were occupying a circle, drawn with white chalk, next to a tall bush, which we used for shade. The white circles lined the sidewalk at six-feet intervals. We were repeatedly reminded to stay in our circles to prevent COVID spread. Again, understandable. Everything in the suburbs has a purpose; everything is considered and planned out, but it was unlike any demonstration that I’d been to during the pandemic, where we more or less kept our distance from one another--although, not quite six feet. At the protests in D.C. we had relied on mutual trust that we would try to keep each other safe.

Sarah, Wyatt, and I read each other’s signs. Mine said, “We cannot build together until we dismantle together.” Sarah’s said, “The Power of Love is greater than The Love of Power.” Wyatt’s said, “Bigotry Is the Disease of Ignorance --Thomas Jefferson.” One sign seemed wishful to me, and out of touch; the other, given who the quote was attributed to, was offensive, but in neither case did I blame either of them. Wyatt was young, and still held Jefferson in high regard despite his history as a slaveholder. What mattered to me then was that they were trying. Perhaps, this level of allowance was social survival. I’m increasingly coming to understand the cost of survival. 

Two other friends of ours joined us, Kristen and her daughter Dora. Like me, Kristen was in an interracial marriage. She is Filipina and her husband is white. He had been less receptive to the moment and was basically waiting for it to pass, so Kristen and Dora had started demonstrating on their own. We pushed our signs upwards and yelled, “Black Lives Matter!”, but gradually fell into various conversations. As Sarah and Kristen caught up with one another, I started talking with an older white woman who was in the circle next to ours. We both realized through the course of the conversation that we had been at the same protest at the Fairfax Police Department Headquarters the week before. 

“I wish the officers had kneeled,” she said. 

“I don’t,” I replied. 

She was shocked, “Why not?” I explained that kneeling was an empty gesture at best, and a public relations strategy at worse, but most importantly, it didn’t change anything. I wanted to see a real investment in harm reduction and accountability for abuses of police power. She nodded in understanding, but our conversation quickly turned to other things after that. Middle-class, suburban conversation is agile, able to evade conflict before it becomes too uncomfortable, too disruptive to the moment of pleasant dialogue. She suggested doing a demonstration closer to where I lived since there weren’t many. “We should organize that,” she said, but then we departed without exchanging a single bit of contact information. 

Before we left, a group of young people, older teens and people in their early 20s, hijacked the whole event in glorious fashion. They burst onto the streets, stopping cars and disrupting commerce. They chanted, “Black Lives Matter!” and “Fuck the Police!” Surprised and uneasy, many of the sidewalk demonstrators laughed uncomfortably and exchanged glances. “Finally,” I said, “This is amazing.” I was glad, but I did not stay to join them. I said goodbye and went to my car parked in front of the Panera Bread. 

/

Now, a few months removed from May, the moment of change and disruption in the suburbs has been smoothed over for the most part. My friends Sarah and Dan have one of the few Black Lives Matter signs in their neighborhood, but their neighborhood is fairly progressive, and most yards already display the catch-all sign that reads: 

In this house, we believe: 

Black Lives Matter

Women’s Rights are Human Rights

No Human is Illegal

Science is Real

Love is Love

Kindness is Everything

Sadly, this sign is ever current in this country, and, therefore, very practical. It allows households to perform culture with ease, signaling in and out groups and ideologies. It’s so common that it could hardly provoke anything in anyone, positive or negative. 

The Black Lives Matter sign in my yard is the only one in the U of its kind. A couple of white neighbors stopped saying “hi” to me, and a couple started saying “hi.” I felt that while it didn’t necessarily plunge our tranquil U into a disruptive space, it did force a sort of acknowledgement that American flags and lawn ornaments are statements, too. Ever since I came to this U, I’ve known nothing but an uneasy peace, and I’ve wanted to leave. I want to unsettle our lives, get new jobs, move to a place with more class diversity, with people willing to engage, where the collective is lived out because proximity demands it. 

There is an inviolable pact of safety and order here. A deep reliance on the myth of individualism.  A commitment to comfort. Despite my unease, there is a part of me that wants to rest in this place, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s wrong. I sometimes find that I’m satisfied to give money and time, call it mutual aid, go to demonstrations, put up a sign, and say that I worked for something, when I know that as long as eruption in the world never leads to disruption in my own life, it’s not true. 

I recently went to Wegmans to pick up a few things. It’s a grocery store the size of a warehouse. It doesn’t convey surplus; it conveys abundance. I was tired and did not want to go inside the store whose aisles expressed too much possibility for me to handle. Instead, I sat for a while and looked at the evening descend into blushed hues. When I finally found the will to get out of the car, I opened the door, looked down and realized that even the partitions in the parking lot were landscaped with annuals bursting profusely with late season blooms. When they become too overgrown, they’re torn out and replaced. It’s a way to mark the seasons here.

---

I grew up in one house for two decades, and I used to say that I’d take it with me wherever I ended up. I imagined uprooting it and dragging it along some highway. That little house was home, but the place where it was situated, Oklahoma, did not feel like home. I have a habit of imagining what it would be like to live somewhere other than where I sleep: I have never fully dwelled in mind where I reside in body. The sense of dwelling is a complex process where one feels as though they are fixed in a fixed space, at least for a time; and while I long for that state, I’ve never been satisfied with myself or with a place long enough to appreciably enjoy the illusion of dwelling.

—

Shabrayle Setliff is a nonfiction MFA candidate in the George Mason creative writing program. She is the assistant nonfiction editor of the intersectional feminist journal, So to Speak. She currently teaches undergraduate writing and literature classes and homeschools her two sons.

Persephone

by Carson Pynes

Our Earth is a sacred network of life. Speculation allows me to connect my experience as a soul dwelling within a human body and my place within this intricate nexus.

The hive is in the skeleton of a tree. Hollow, the hum of the colony a faint tingle at the base of my skull. 

Today is my birthday, and my father is showing me the newest beehive. 

I was born during the days between winter and spring when the bees are dormant and the plants hide beneath the soil but the sap quickens in the trees and every day the light lingers a few low heartbeats longer on the horizon. This is the time when Persephone kisses Hades goodbye. 

No one thinks of Persephone missing Hades, but I’ve always thought of her as goddess of both life and death. She encompasses both creation and quietus. She knows this balance is vital. 

Each spring she pays Charon with dripping, golden wedges of honeycomb to ferry her across the dark river, a note left behind. To wake the dreaming bees, she whispers into the mouths of hives. For months, she toils to coax a riot of color from what was bare. But the creation of life requires rest, eventually. A deep tranquillity. So she returns. She pays Charon marigolds to take her home. What is death but birth, in reverse? 

“They brought out their dead this morning,” Dad says, “There was enough sun for them today.” 

Their corpses litter the entrance, crumpled bee husks excarnated at the mouth. I imagine apiary funeral rites. Bee Priestesses, all daughters, dancing of death.

I step closer. The hive is so wide I could never stretch my arms around it. Pale wood and gnarled, lopped-off branches, rings like the whorls of a fingertip. When I peek into the knot-hole, I glimpse blonde honeycomb, like the cornsilk hair at the nape of my husband’s neck. 

Three days ago, sprawled in our bed, he told me he wants us to start making babies. He’d mumbled into my neck, hazy, then rolled over and slid into sleep. I’d lain awake until moonset, turning over, restless. When I finally slept, I dreamed of flowers sprouting in time-lapse, flash-blooming, crumbling into ash.

I want to stroke the wax of the tree colony with the backs of my knuckles but I’ve been stung enough times to know better. When a bee stings to protect her colony, she dies a brutal death. Her barb stays embedded in flesh, torn away from the rest of herself.

“They were in a snag that fell,” says Dad. His voice is a swirl of over-educated academia and Texas twang like Beethoven played on a banjo. “Over down the highway a-ways, back towards town. I got a call, some people were sawing into the tree with a chainsaw when the bees came out and told them that they were there. I just loaded it into the back of the truck.”

I shuffle around the hive widdershins, wordless. Frowning. I reach out my hand and then draw it back.

“What did you name them?” I ask. 

Dad only names some of the hives. The tropically-evolved colony, what some call “Africanized." He named them “The Punks.” When I was a defiant kid, he would tell me, swallowing a smile, that I was being a punk, too. Of all our bees, The Punks are the most likely to survive. They’re adaptable, hardier than the others. 

Dad shrugs. “Nothing yet.”

No name. A bad omen.

Four years ago, there were 13 colonies. 

Now there are six. 

What to name a colony that may be doomed, alive for now in a long-dead tree? Cared for by a beekeeper during an era of ravenous, galloping climate change, one that will kill half the species on this planet by 2050, after Dad is gone and it’s only me left here, desperate to keep the colonies alive. Will my own daughter help me tend the bees? Will I know enough to save them? 

What right do I have, to bring a baby into this? Will there be anything left for me to place into her hands? 

I press my palm against the grain of the wood, seeking vibration. There is only a low thrum. Where there should be a thunderstorm contained within the bark, I feel only a soft, tickling murmur. 

I will name the colony. They deserve a chance.

I try again. Closing my eyes, my fingertips sense the throbbing tide of black-and-gold bodies, the queen in the center like a dark jewel. I see Persephone, somehow both ruler of the underworld and goddess of spring. She is grinning like a skull, like a child, the flowers in her hair bloom and wither and bloom again. My husband, sleeping, his hand on my belly. 

A small girl with cornsilk hair. 

When I bend down to whisper the name I have chosen into the mouth of the colony, their buzzing surges from a gentle susurrus to an electric roar of wings. With their name, they wake.

Today is my birthday. Three decades ago, a beekeeper named me after his favorite author. I was born in the liminal space between winter and spring when the bees bestir themselves and the plants scream upward from the soil and the light returns to kiss the sleeping earth awake. 

It’s the time of year when death transforms herself, once again, into life.

---

A beehive is never just that. She is kaleidoscopic. Myriad. Teeming. She is vast; symbiotically balanced with wildflowers, raindrops pattering on leaves, sun that warms the loam. 

Within the vibration of a beehive is the knowledge of our profound connection to this planet. Our Earth is a sacred network of life. Speculation allows me to connect my experience as a soul dwelling within a human body and my place within this intricate nexus. It allows me to express both my deep anguish for the destruction of our environment, and my obstinate hope that we will find a way to harmony. 

—

Carson Pynes lives in the heart of the city, near the place where the veil between worlds is thin. A former resident of the Land of the Morning Calm and the Emerald Isle, she is currently studying creative writing at a university in the Southwest. She is usually outdoors with her partner and two beings which, at first glance, resemble rescue dogs.