Letter to the Ukrainian People

Children at the River Ikva, Rivne Oblast, Ukraine, 2018. 35mm film. Sonya Bilocerkowycz.

In 1890 the writer Lesya Ukrainka wrote an iconic Ukrainian poem about hoping regardless of the evidence in front of you. "No," she says, "through all my tears I still shall laugh, / Sing songs despite my troubles; / Have hope despite all odds, / I want to live!" The speaker in the poem describes the urge to plant flowers amid the frost and water them with "bitter tears."

Maybe, she speculates, the tears will be warm enough to melt snow. At the time Ukrainka was writing, Russian imperial policy had effectively banned the publishing of creative works in the Ukrainian language.

In 2022, as Russia engages in a war of terror against Ukraine, we stand with the Ukrainian people in their struggle for freedom. Ukrainians remind us that hope is itself an act of resistance.

Marble Solitaire

by Penelope Cray

“This game, Marble Solitaire, that I was drawn to play—that I looked forward to playing all year in that final month I somehow imagined as having all these extra, empty days in it, all this extra time—defined winning as the elimination of all others from the sphere of play and measured my success as a player by how well I ended up alone.”

Every year, and more often in December, when the circular board joins other festive wooden objects on my coffee table, I try to solve the marble solitaire. December arrives with different rules. I listen only to seasonal music and dress the home in ornaments I ignore the rest of the year, wrap in paper and store darkly under the stairs. I anticipate a stretch of days without work, and I savor it, set the time aside for play.

In this month of feeling together, the game of marble solitaire requires that I end alone, with one marble in the center well. That's me—the solitary glass orb who has leapt artfully over all others to land in the center of her life, disposed to survey each once-occupied and now empty well. So says the game.

The wooden board contains thirty-seven wells. I start with thirty-three marbles—none in the center well, where I hope to end up, and none in four peripheral wells, creating room for jumping the others and arranging the original marbles in the shape of a fat cross. Festive. From the start, every marble in play is hung on it.

The marble solitaire was a gift to my son from his paternal grandparents several Decembers ago. The game was selected by me for them to give to him. Mostly, it has been a gift from me to me. The game came with all red marbles, but I have raided my son's collection to play with colors and patterns—cat’s eyes, cloudy swirls, speckled eggs, pearls—with a few original reds thrown in. I don't get attached to which marble I aim to land alone in the center. So far, in my life, I have landed alone nowhere. The fewest marbles I've landed with in marble solitaire are four. I think: me, my husband, my son, my daughter. None of us at the end of this un-won game are close enough to one another to be leapt over and thereby stripped from the board.

For years, I’ve played this game and not solved it, by which I mean I have not ended up alone. It is not like solitaire with a deck, where in the end every card is neatly stacked in ascending order in its own suit. I’ve won that game loads of times, putting same with same. I’m drawn to games with the word “solitaire” in their titles—the “debonair” of wallflowers and late bloomers. But I’ve never lost enough marbles to win this game.

I could, of course, at any moment of any day of the year, look up the solution online and step-by-step make just the right moves to end up all alone in the center. Every inconsequential puzzle of my life has a solution online. Many solutions are not good, but their positioning as solutions still recommends them to me.

Year after year, I proceed unwittingly. As often as I am left with four marbles, I am left with five or six or seven. Who are they, I wonder, left behind with me and my family in this foiled game, each also at a distance that does permit me to jump them and thereby eliminate their influence? What are these last stubborn numbers that are so difficult to be rid of?

When I eliminate an insufficient number of marbles from the game, I reset the board to play again, every marble miraculously restored to me, as in playing with a full deck. At the end of these non-winning games, I remain a collection of differently colored marbles, each fixed by a wooden well, not one marble rolling off, as marbles do. Should someone bump the board, the game catches them in the long circumferential well where all those eliminated gather together for their next turn at play, when one among them might finally be defined by the absence of all others, which is called winning.

Some games have rules that require me to lose even when I win—the kind of game my father played through insults and self-ostracization and won by making his very last move with his own hands. Why try to win a game that aims to land me all alone?

I play as slowly or as quickly as I like. I play instinctively, then strategically. The outcome is always the same: loss, no fewer than four remaining, over and over, the game ever available to be played again, to lose as often as I like. The moves are there, waiting to be taken, to lead me to the same mode of impasse. I must get all the peripheral marbles to the center, I counsel myself, so that there, I can pick them off one by one and claim the center well for myself, fill it with my last marble.

This, according to the rules, is the only way to win. If I eliminate, via jumping, every other marble but land finally in a peripheral well and not in the center, then I will not have won, remaining, in this scenario, still at a remove from the main action of being entirely solo and under no one’s influence but my own. This would not be gaining the center but simply losing all my marbles, all but one. And yet I have not managed to get even this far.

I torture myself: I’ll never win this, and, If I win this, I’ll never remember how I did it, and, If I look up the solution online and win that way, even if I forget the solution, if I win again, I’ll never be able to experience it as a real win, as mine, and, If I look up the solution and memorize it, I’ll never again have any pleasure in the game.

This is, after all, a game of pleasure, of being in play with oneself.

I have yet to win this game. And each time I begin, there is no single marble I call myself and avoid skipping over and removing from play. I remain, for another season, potentially every marble on the board.

---

Games are great sources of speculation because their rules provide something to push off from, as from the edge of a seawall into open water. This game, Marble Solitaire, that I was drawn to play—that I looked forward to playing all year in that final month I somehow imagined as having all these extra, empty days in it, all this extra time—defined winning as the elimination of all others from the sphere of play and measured my success as a player by how well I ended up alone. What is this impulse, I began to speculate about myself, to play by the rules of Marble Solitaire at precisely the time of year most associate with gathering and drawing closer to loved ones and family, to be with rather than to be alone. In the end, writing this essay—another solitary endeavor—was the winningest bet.

—

Penelope Cray is the author of the short prose collection Miracles Come on Mondays (Pleiades 2020), selected by Kazim Ali. Cray's poems and short fiction have appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, New England Review, Ocean State Review, Green Mountains Review, Bartleby Snopes, Pleiades, and American Letters & Commentary and in the anthologies Please Do Not Remove (2014) and Roads Taken (forthcoming). She lives with her family in northern Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home.

These Dirty Shoes Will Take You

by Natalia Rachel Singer

“I have come to see that all literature is a form of travel writing. We engage with the world through sensory rich language and whether each place we bring to the page is one we’ve seen or only imagined, we’re always speculating about its contours and customs.”

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living. 
―Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

1.

Cold floor.  Hot face.  A child crouches at the window watching the sky.  Wishing to inhabit another body, another lifeform, another time and place.  To be the blue heron, posing, taunting from shore.  Or the branches moving in sync, then still.  Or the river where they meet, bird and willow.  Sometimes at night now when the outside comes in, I remember that child, those first longings.

2.

Once upon a time an ambitious girl left home.  On that perilous, stop-start voyage out she could not understand why she was so often condescended to, and not just by men.  Where is love, she asked?  Where is the sailboat?  The menorah-lit window?  Another hobo to share a canteen with after hopping the train?  Run.  Jump.  Ride.  It’s hot in those leather chaps.

Leaving home was the first step in the long journey for which she was shockingly unprepared and continuously amazed.  A journey latticed with Do Not Enter signs.  She tried Wonder Woman belts, outlined her eyes with kohl, raged against broken systems.  No one wants to hear this.  Sometimes she changed the subject but never the voice, that old hooligan. 

3.

At twenty, I was the youngest attendee of a writers’ conference in Connecticut.  I was soon befriended by the oldest writer in attendance, a poet and aspiring novelist.  Only she and I weren’t writers, we found out; we were women writers.  My workshop teacher, high on the success of his third novel, scheduled my manuscript critique for after dinner in his room.  He pointed to the imagery he liked, a line about the cat-shape a woman’s discarded sweater made on some man’s floor, then pointed to his bed.  I could have fled, I should have fled, but I went along with it for the story.  I thought everything was a story, even the final cocktail party where I hid out in the claw-tooth tub of some stranger’s mansion to sooth the pain of my first-ever UTI, and the grandma-age writer drove me to the ER, and the bill, which cost more than the conference itself, followed me around for years as if to say, remember me? unlike the novelist, who, for the duration of the workshop, never spoke to me again, and my story of early achievement and adventure turned into a cautionary tale: a story I never told anyone, until now.

4.

In the Languedoc region of France I was drawn to the Cathar heretics who called out the pope and his bishops for their greed and bloodlust and hypocrisy and sought refuge in hilltop castle ruins where juniper, box, and rosemary perfumed the wind.  They chanted their prayers as they jumped into the flames, insisting no one could tell them what to believe.  Witnesses thought they still heard them singing long after their flesh was ash.  A story came to me on one such hilltop.  Contemporary star-crossed lovers, classmates, and a father and daughter encamped in this remote, medieval ruin.  I saw the story as clearly as a feature-length film and the characters became my imaginary friends.

The couple who owned our Languedoc rental invited my husband and me over for drinks.  We sat in their garden and talked about the renovations.  As dusk gathered around us, the wife of the duo watched me watch backyard oak branches tremble in wind, purple petals gesture like hands, and said, “Vous êtes sensible à lieu, Madame.”  You are sensitive to place.  Some years later an editor turned down the novel I took half a dozen research trips to get right because it had too much France in it for an American audience.

5.

 In Varanasi the outside came in on our dirty shoes.  Sometimes it was the cremation ghat where dogs foraged for charred human kneecaps and sadhus carried sacks of their own shit to the sacred river to unburden themselves.  Grief was a second sky, a widow’s veil, smoke, beggars’ chants, incense in temple urns, the hope of bereaved pilgrims.  Tea came in clay pots you could break on tile floors with a satisfying ping, chai its own currency, a city onto itself.

City walks past bison and cows and catcallers and rickshaw wallahs—“Ride, Madam?”—and Madam wanted to devour everything with her eyes, but how?  To attempt to see everything at once is to see nothing at all.  Nothing would have stopped her from coming here, not even the foreknowledge of falling ill after the Shiva priest made her sip blessed Ganges water, or near-strangulation from her long silk scarf caught in the spokes of the rickshaw bike.

I thought I came to India to write a story, something outside myself I could make by hand, but India became part of me instead.  Now I have an altar in my writing room.  Brass Hindu gods watch me churn cremation smoke into language, panic into fire.   If we are composites of all the places we have lived and traveled, where does our truest inspiration dwell?

6.

They say god speaks in tongues but god comes to me in stillness, the way my dog leans against me in sleep, and how when I listen without strain I hear what I need to know and can walk on ice and sooth myself on moonless nights when I press my hot face against the window hoping for a sign, until finally my own heartbeat reminds me that all this panic about failure is the path I’ve chosen, and there is no why.

7.

A well-meaning friend suggested that if I gave up writing, I would have more free time.  I could see more concerts and plays.  I could take my dog to volunteer at hospice.  I could hike more mountains and stay in better touch with my friends.  I was so shocked and enraged when she said this, I couldn’t speak for the rest of our walk.

8.

To live without writing would be, for me, to drift through the world without inhabiting it fully.  Moving from room to room to dog walk to seminar table to departure lounge unaccompanied by the voice, that old crank singing the hilltops and rivers, birds and sparring humans, cosmologies and migration patterns, mating calls and burial customs.

Perhaps life really would be simpler if I could quelch all the yearning and striving, stop shape-shifting myself into other times and places.  But then I remember that I haven’t yet been to Karpathos, Berlin, Fez, Copenhagen, Istanbul, or Kathmandu, and there are six unopened Mead composition books on the bookshelf beside my altar in my writing space.

9.

This essay was supposed to be about courting the world—the voyage out—not the word, yet the word persists, stubborn and wild.  Hope is not the kite that glides above my beach but the jagged shells at my feet that I stomp through because there’s no practical way to step around them.  The knowledge that this world that is too much with us travels at its own velocity, and it’s just when we think we will never reconcile ourselves to its cruelties that grace arrives.  This morning I cross the lawn to my studio with my dog and my mug of coffee, open the door, and it’s all there: the turquoise-and-rose swirls of the Kashmiri stair runner I custom-ordered in Dharamshala, the picture books of château ruins from France, the brass gods on the altar.  I see the amber of my dog’s eyes as she follows me up to the loft, the wings of the great blue heron outside on the riverbed, and as the voice inside insists some more, I climb to where these dirty shoes will take me.   

---

Place has always taken center stage for me in my work.  The narrator of a novel I’m completing this year is a travel writer, and in my investigations into her character and back story I’ve mined my own past for places on the map where our lives intersect. I have come to see that all literature is a form of travel writing.  We engage with the world through sensory rich language and whether each place we bring to the page is one we’ve seen or only imagined, we’re always speculating about its contours and customs.  Like so many of us, I had to cancel a number of planned trips these past couple years, including some research trips for the novel, so instead of doing my usual due diligence of fact-checking my work by actual leg work, I employed speculative nonfiction techniques that stretched my capacity to delineate here from there.  Imagining yourself into a landscape that feels far-off via time or geographical distance is also a journey to the unknown places within.  

In this essay I was exploring the journey out and the journey in at the same time.  As a woman writer, it’s never easy to work and travel in a world filled with misogyny and danger, but what keeps me going are two things besides my innate stubbornness: the eagerness to go back to my studio each morning and lose myself in the task of pushing words across a page, and curiosity about the world I’ll find there.

—

Natalia Rachel Singer’s most recent nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, Speculative Nonfiction (Issue 2), and an anthology of essays about the war on terror, Globalizing Collateral Language, edited by John Collins and Somdeep Sen. The author of Scraping by in the Big Eighties, she is currently finishing a new collection of essays, Stubborn Roots, and a novel set in 2020, Origin Stories.  As a professor of creative writing and environmental literature at St. Lawrence University, she has led study programs in France and India.

Essay That Was Once Called "How to Write about Joy" But My Friends Said They Didn't Get the Connection So Idk Lol

by Gyasi Hall

“Speculation isn’t just a function of the future (prediction) or the past (reconstruction) but of the present (curation). Everything is always happening all at once. By writing about it you are actively choosing what to focus on.”

Me and the homie are sitting on the couch watching a video called Try Not To Be Satisfied and God knows we ain’t fail that yet despite the fact that every test this land can give us shows us its fangs and drools and rips entire neighborhoods to shreds

but we ain’t fail yet and over by the door there is a stain oozing out from under the ramp and the stain is an entire country and it ain’t been dry for weeks the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the waters will come to take your children away along with everything you’ve built for them it ain’t matter how hard you hold on

the mold is summoning its divine fungus and establishing colonies and chanting to the gods of this lowered ceiling but maybe none of that matters now cause someone’s building a perfect vase by hand on Alex’s laptop screen and maybe that’s all we ask for; the chance to build perfectly or be perfectly built

and Alex’s girlfriend comes in and sits down and starts talking about her day and she is all laughs and smiles pulled straight from his chest and this is the happiest I’ve seen him since we first met in this dorm lounge 30 feet off the ground surrounded by playing cards and a thick night sky and enough grief between the two of us to take us away

the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the only perfect thing the water’s ever built was the crater I carved myself out of and last night I had a dream where I was kissed by someone I haven’t seen in a long time and then we just kept kissing

and the man I drove across town on an empty tank of gas to eat ice cream with once said Once you know what it is to be lonely it’s hard to unsee that which serves as a reminder that you were not always and this man is not Alex or my father or anyone I’ve lived with This man is a poet that I did not know three years ago and who now knows me well enough to eat ice cream with me and I am still alive and blessed

and watching Alex kiss his girlfriend with the kind of Joy we once reserved for parts of ourselves we thought we would never see again and the stain is still expanding and sopping and threatening rot and suddenly three men come in with tools and belts and all kinds of answers and one of them looks at the stain and its constant evolution of mold and says Holy Hell and the second guy squints at me and asks if we’ve met before and we haven’t so I say no I don’t think so and he says huh you must have that kind of face and I have been called many things by strangers but never familiar and the third guy leaves

and back in the day a dude named Paul wrote a letter to a dude name Timothy and said decry false teachers and help the widows and give yourself wholly to them so that everyone may see your progress

and maybe he was talking about leading a church or maybe he was talking about the Holy Ghost being the only force worth surrendering to or maybe he was talking about the way a perfect river of honey kisses a plate and disappears back into itself as it lays flat but regardless me and Alex are 7 minutes into this video and we still ain’t fail yet the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the water makes a soldier out of all who survive it or maybe not maybe the flood is just a flood and the rain is just the rain and maybe the only war is war

but before I can make up my mind the third guy comes back in with a machine and a hose and starts gathering the stain’s stagnant offering and throwing it into the kind of tornado you can pick up and take with you and I’ve always preferred calling it the Holy Ghost because nothing divine is never haunted and Alex’s laptop is now over on my side of the couch and his girlfriend is sitting on his lap and their eyes are closed and they are holding each other with the kind of tenderness that makes you realize you are lonely but you were not always and it isn’t awkward in any sense of that word or any other and the second guy is talking to the first guy even though no one can hear anything over the tornado’s violent conquering of that which the stain defiled for so long it learned to call it home the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the water makes a fist around every atom of sanctuary and dares the universe to make it let go

but the tornado is winning even if it has to cross the lake several times and Alex and his girlfriend look like they are trying to build a cocoon out of complete stillness and the lack of space between them and 8 minutes into the video petals of white sugar bloom on a cupcake and it is perfect and maybe grief is a kind of flower maybe everything is a rainbow maybe sadness isn’t always just sadness and Paul wrote Timothy all those letters because he was an apostle born out of due time a homie late to the party but still not satisfied and he missed his friend they nailed him to the kind of tree you can pick up and take with you and they made him cross an entire country just to get to the hill he was destined to die on and they killed him while his mother watched and wept

and my mom weeps sometimes my mom crosses entire countries just to see that I am still alive and blessed and there are hill’s I still haven’t even seen but then again I’ve never saved anything except my dinner for the next morning so maybe that makes us even and even when he was being killed he gave himself wholly to them so they might see his progress and he screamed forgive them father they know not what they do and I don’t know what I do or how I’m still doing it I just woke up one day watching a country disintegrate while two people build a silent monument to the only force worth surrendering to

the rain don’t stop the flood don’t stop the water only uses the word ‘Love’ when it is absolutely necessary and maybe Grace is never something you can internalize but the stain is now a damp echo scarring the carpet and the video is over and asking if we want to watch it again and Alex asks me if I want to join them for lunch and I say sure 

---

This was actually one of the first essays I ever wrote; at the time I still considered myself to be primarily a poet, and so had just begun to ask myself questions about genre and truth and the expression of truth, had just begun tracking what it all meant and how it all felt. I began to become more confident about playing with time and space and what’s considered important: vacuuming carpet stains AND God AND loneliness AND weird ASMR videos. Speculation isn’t just a function of the future (prediction) or the past (reconstruction) but of the present (curation). Everything is always happening all at once. By writing about it you are actively choosing what to focus on. What informs those choices? What if everything weighs the same? How many moments can I stack onto this moment and have it still be one moment, a vertical tower instead of a horizontal spread? How big can I make it? How small? What happens if I sit in these questions instead of immediately trying to answer them? 

—

Gyasi Hall is a Writer of Stuff™ from Columbus, Ohio. Their essay “Alas, Poor Fhoul” was the runner up for the Black Warrior Review 2020 Nonficiton Contest, and their debut poetry chapbook, Flight of the Mothman: An Autobiography, was published by The Operating System in spring 2019. They are the lead nonfiction editor for The BreakBread Literacy Project, and they currently reside in Iowa City where they are pursuing their MFA in creative nonfiction. 

Side Effects of Being Dunked On

by Evan J. Massey

“A lot of what I remember is fragmented. Memories come to me in pieces, morsels even. Though, rather than fret over my inability to fully recollect a single moment, it gives me the chance to stitch and sew numerous memories and moments together.”

Can include: 

1. Death of all hoop dreams. 2. Nightmares of being dunked on in succession. 3. Awaking in a hot sweat, your arms shielding your face, crying out mercy. 4. Anger toward your JV point guard teammate—even after all these years—for getting his ankles broken, allowing the kid who dunked on you an open lane to your demise. 5. Unparalleled embarrassment when, after you got yammed on, your JV coach subbed you out. 6. Never being subbed back in. 7. Trading basketball for soccer, where the possibility of being dunked on is far less likely. 8. Increased rejection of pick-up games when friends invite you to hoop. 9. Decreased invitations to hoop. 10. Isolation. 11. Slow perishing of your basketball soul. 12. Watching nothing basketball-related for weeks, months. 13. Trashing the Adidas you were wearing at the time of the incident. 14. Striking an agreement with yourself to never again ball in Adidas. 15. Early retirement at age 16. 16. Feeling that maybe you had it coming. 17. Feeling, at the time, like life itself was dunking on you. 18. Conjuring the memory of your ex-stepmother, for no reason at all, lying to your Pops about you not opening the door for her when she locked herself out. 19. Your Pops believing her over you—his own flesh and blood. 20. A fist fight between you and your Pops. 21. Stuffing a backpack full of clothes and running away. 22. Decline in grades, injuring your chances at college straight out of high school. 23. Increased possibility of panhandling on a street corner with a sign: “I’ve been dunked on. Lost Everything. Anything helps.” 24. Mending your relationship with your Pops via email while on deployment to Afghanistan. 25. Mortared at midnight one night. 26. Debriefed in the morning that the Taliban mortared the basketball court. 27. Grieving over grave-deep craters from hoop to hoop. 28. Secretly being thankful that the chances of you being embarrassed on that court were suddenly very slim. 29. Researching what it feels like to be dunked on. 30. Experiencing emasculation. 31. Afraid to play one-on-one with anybody. 32. Dreading athletic inadequacy. 33. Irrational fears that even Tee—the old baller at the YMCA, who wore hulking, old school knee pads and perhaps lost his hops years ago—will dunk on you. 34. Confusion over the lack of trauma support groups for dunk victims. 35. Thoughts about starting one and naming it “Dunked-On Anonymous.” 36. Chances of posterization. 37. Thoughts that maybe that kid had a poster printed and said poster, to this day, still hangs in his bedroom. 38. Researching the first person ever to be dunked on. 39. May, because of a grainy black and white YouTube clip, cause you to settle on some puny player that Hall-of-Famer Bill Russell—who because of his overwhelming intensity used to throw up before games—completely jumped over and dunked on. 40. Figuring that said puny NCAA player might, perhaps thankfully, be forever unknown. 41. Deliberation that a dunk isn’t impressive unless you’re under 6’0. 42. YouTubing clips of Spud Webb, standing at 5'7, and Nate Robinson, 5’9, who’d spring a whole foot and a half in the air. 43. Thinking back, reluctantly remembering the kid who dunked on you was 5’9 or 5’10. 

---

The other day, someone asked me something about my childhood. Sadly, I replied, 'I don't really remember.' It hurt to say. A lot of what I remember is fragmented. Memories come to me in pieces, morsels even. Though, rather than fret over my inability to fully recollect a single moment, it gives me the chance to stitch and sew numerous memories and moments together. The blank page absorbs these miniature memories and closely associated anecdotes. This concentrated accumulation allows me to assemble a more vivid and complete memory. 

—

Evan J. Massey is a US Army veteran who served his country in Afghanistan. His work can be found or forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Bat City Review, The Pinch, Indiana Review, Speculative Nonfiction, and various others. He holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and teaches Upper School English at The Rivers School.

She Ran Like A ______

by Caite McNeil

“This is a story born of regret over lost time and temporary loss of self. It is a travel narrative of the speculative sort, where the narrator imagines her way away from the pain and dysfunction of her reality.”

M is on his fifth IPA and he’s sullen drunk, brooding. His business, a surf shop in a tiny, well-heeled North Shore town, is failing and he is sure I’m cheating on him.  He watches me from the corner of the couch. On the coffee table are the dahlias we stole from our landlord’s garden. That was weeks ago. Today they shed their browning petals and slump. So heavy, those Fibonacci spirals, that ridiculous, mathematical beauty. M’s hair is long and salty, framing his long salty face, and there’s wanting and hate and desperation in his eyes. 

“Where are you going?” he asks when he hears me opening and closing my top dresser drawer that sticks. For a run, I say, while I work my hair into a tight ponytail. I don’t love you anymore, I add, then I take the spiral stairs out of the carriage house, and haul out of the town where we live but don’t belong. Past the landscapers and their droning leaf blowers. Past the beach where my students splash, laze and eat sticky snack-shack fare. Past the yacht club where I picked up some shifts, evenings and weekends, serving gin and tonics to men in shorts, laughing at their jokes and enduring their leers. This after teaching fifth grade all day, all week. Let’s write a simile, kids. You finish this sentence: She ran like a_____. 

My family, my friends, they’re all to the north, but I can’t call on them now. I’m too far gone, and there’s a warm southerly wind beckoning. To get where I’m going, I must pass M’s surf shop, where one of his teenage groupies slouches behind the counter, watching stylized 1960s surf porn on a mounted flatscreen. Was that his boss’s girlfriend running by? Or a momentary eclipse of the sun? I am a flicker of light outside the shop window, and by the time my shadow recedes, I am blocks away. It’s my school that I pass next, just as a late basketball practice lets out. Coach Peters does a double take in my direction, but all he gets is a faint memory of somebody’s pale, bouncing ponytail. I am gone, out of town, before I was ever there.

 Born in a south-facing house on the banks of a river flowing due east, I am easily oriented, and it’s easy enough to keep the ocean in my left hand, a bit of seagrass in my right. Hemming New England’s coast are sidewalks, backroads, bike-lanes, deer paths, beach paths, freeways, runways, cobblestoned one-ways, and private ways. But none of that matters. Nothing tires me, and I am too swift for even the long legs of private property laws to catch. Once I’m out of New England, folks don’t much mind my running through their grass or along their beaches. I’m low impact and there’s no funny business. I don’t want to fish or sunbathe. I’m not interested in their boats or private boardwalks. Security cameras might capture me as a beam from a headlight, a gust of dusty wind. Dogs will sometimes follow me for a stretch of road, not out of malice, but compulsion. They too were born for this. Their company is nice, to hear their panting, their doubled footfalls, the jangling of tags on collars. Otherwise, I am alone. Settling into my breath, a jaunty, allegro played in 4/4 measure. 

There’s a spot far out on the Delaware Bay where the houses dress like mothers of the bride--all turrets and gables, cupolas, and gold filagree--and the land comes to an abrupt end. Bells sound from the grey clapboarded church named for Saint Agnes, and the front doors open, spilling forth Pachelbel and applause. A bride flies through the open doors, her veil and train ablaze, and heads straight for the ocean. It’s sandalwood and burning silk I smell as she rushes past me. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she says, her voice shallow and staccato. I cannot see her face behind the conflagration of her veil but can imagine her eyes: wide and scanning. My hand, the left one, outstretched in a gesture of aid that comes to me too late, is singed by a jumping cinder. The burning lace wraps around the base of my second, the ring finger, and I clutch it to my breast, embarrassed by my proximity, branded by my complicity. 

Chattering guests duck through the sacramental sprinkling of rice and paper confetti, and bat at their smoldering sleeves, their wrists weak, as though swatting at flies. Bride-shaped steam rises over a hedge of Ragusa roses and Pachelbel’s three violins climb and weave and congratulate each other’s finger work. In the driver’s seat of a borrowed convertible, the groom waits for his bride to collect herself before they speed off up the road to the Howard Johnson. The band is already playing Beach Boys hits. The ice sculptures melt. And I’m off running again, like a runaway bride with a weeping wound where a wedding band could have been, might have been.

Weddings were never good for M and me. The tension was in the silent conjectures of others. His parents: How long before they’re married?  My parents, everyone else: How long before she leaves him? The last wedding, my best friend’s, he seethed all night, shooting me death glares while I played beer pong with the bride. I heard him laughing a high-pitched, mocking laugh from across the room when I joined in the singing at an acoustic guitar circle. They were folk songs, mostly, from our parents’ era.

“Your friends are fucking snobs,” he said when it was time to sleep in our dorm room. 

The groom was a Harvard man, so he never stood a chance with M. And the wedding was at the boarding school where my best friend and I met. 

“You all think your shit don’t stink. You think you’re so fucking special.”

This Land is Your Land was on loop in my head, which was swimmy from beer and grasping at some kind of refrain to settle me. The room was dark but for the red illuminated emergency exit sign, and our yelling was hushed, but full of bodily effort. This land is my land. He chased me around the dark, fumbling over heavy oak desk chairs, and threw me onto the unmade twin bed. From California, to the New York Island. Pinned to a mattress that crinkled and stuck to my sweaty back, I weighed foreplay against fear. From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream waters. After some time in a headlock, I broke free and ran out the only door, the emergency exit. 

My blows were verbal, and cut absolutely to his weak, sad soul. His blows, verbal, sometimes physical, only wounded my soul, but I swear he could have killed me in that dark, red dorm room while Woody Guthrie watched from some tall mountain, shaking his head in disappointment.

Long about Virginia, I grow thirsty, my skin parched, freckled thirsty for mountain air, a stream baptism. Mountain music plays in the west, and I say farewell for now to the sea breeze that called me forth. Mountain paths are slower going. My feet stumble on roots, my legs ache from elevation gain, but afternoon rains fill my coffers, turn paths to streams, offer respite for sore muscles, offer drink to belly, breasts, shoulders, throat and brow. Primordial, these trees, these woods, this forest floor. Profound this mossy ground. And the fiddle ascends, descends, and the banjo plucks an age-old tale, and I’m sleepy and ready to give myself over to the ballad. It’s a duet, sung by pines and the ghosts of chestnut trees, their voices resigned, prophetic:

 Oh Willie, oh Willie, I'm a feared for my life-

Oh Willie, oh Willie, I'm a feared for my life-

I'm afraid you mean to murder me, and leave me behind.

Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly, you guessed about right-

Polly, Pretty Polly, you guessed about right-

I've been diggin' your grave, for the best part of last night.

 Limbs heavy, ground soft, I’m sinking, swallowed up by the bosom of the mountain, and just as I permit my body to rest, my eyes to close, I feel a nudging at my cheek. The warm lapping of a rough tongue. A heavy kneading of my chest and belly. Mama? I say, and I am moved to tell her everything, as if freed by a fever dream. She lifts me by the flesh of my neck, and breaks the skin, not because she lacks tenderness, no, I am different from her other babies. Easier to pierce, slower, less nimble. I cannot speak, nor can I stay. The male cougar is near, is hungry and less abetting of the weak. My scent is too strong, too easy to track, so she nudges me on toward a riverbank. Swim, she commands with her yellow, slitted eyes. And I do.

At the confluence of the Mississippi, Red, and Atchafalaya rivers, where cyprus and tupelo grow out of standing water and drape themselves in veils of moss, a young woman approaches by airboat. I’m standing in ankle deep swamp, the rivers’ swirling movements disorient me. 

“You need some help, hun?” she hollers, pulling her boat astride me in the shallows. A sign on its side spells “Airboat Tours” in black, hand-stenciled spray paint. She must yell for the motor, the fan of her boat, and her voice is polloped from daily strain and cigarettes. Those, the cigarettes, are packed safely in a Ziplock bag and duct taped to the side of her captain’s chair. 

“There’s all kinds of snakes and gators here, hun. Hop in. I’ll take you somewhere?” She kills the motor then reaches over the side of her boat to help me aboard. Her forearms are strong and sinewy, her shoulders tanned deep, her hair, peroxide blonde, is dark at its roots and sticks to her neck. “Sorry there is no room to sit, sweetie. It’s my boyfriend’s boat. He’s a goddamn slob,” she says, clearing from the boat’s benches fishing poles and lines, faded kiddie life jackets, unmarked cardboard boxes.

“You one of them environmentalists trying to shut us down for noise pollution?” she asks with her back to me while her shaky hands make work of untangling, respooling invisible fishing wire. “I don’t really care if you are. It ain’t my gig anyway, it’s my boyfriend’s.” She tosses the still-tangled wire into a cardboard box and reaches for her cigarettes. “And he’s a fucking deadbeat.” Two shaky flicks of the lighter and it’s lit. She’s quiet for the first few drags, her mouth a rectangular grimace, her face scanning the sky.

The nicotine seems to calm her shakes, seems to help her think. Big black sunglasses obscure her eyes, but I’m certain she’s looking past me. Judging the currents, probably. “You got a boyfriend, hun?” The boat drifts, does a slow half turn. “Ehhh, you’re better off. Sometimes when he leaves in the morning, I pray my boyfriend gets eaten by a gator and never comes home.” She stubs out the cigarette on the bottom of her flipflop and drops the butt into an empty beer bottle. “The dickwad’s home right now, sleeping one off,” she says, unwrapping a stick of gum. “It’s a Tuesday morning and he’s probably still drunk. I’m not like that. I gotta move. Hustle. I have business sense.” 

It’s Tuesday morning, I think, and I’m missing recess duty. Missing hot dog lunch and round one of the spelling bee. Miss Caite? Miss Caite just disappeared. 

It’s quiet for a moment, then the plop of a fish jumping, and with that she’s moving to the back of the boat to start the engine roaring again. “Hang on to that box of hats, would you hun? That’s where the money is, I’m always telling my boyfriend. ‘The money’s in merch!’ I say. It’s true. Those hats, they’re gonna feed me and him’s kids someday.” 

My driver is back at the wheel and we’re in motion, gliding overtop waterlilies and lotus flowers, above alligators and water moccasins, astride rafts of ducks and a single, stoic heron.  “Where we going, hun? Vegas?”

Away along the Gulf of Mexico my ribs begin to ache. They never quite healed after M broke them that day I was acting crazy, hiding in the carriage house bathroom, lobbing insults at him through the heavy oak door. He was just trying to get me to stop, to calm down, but he was too strong and so angry. There’s nothing to do for a broken rib, except lie to everyone about how you got it and wait for it to heal. But I’m tired of waiting and I’ve got places to be, so I reach under my sports bra and yank it out. It’s loose, anyway. Like a tooth, and it’s a part of my body I don’t need anymore, so I run out along another spit of land to the farthest point on Galveston Island. There are children and a beach park here too. And a place to recycle your fishing wire. I send the rib off on lapping wave, give it a little shove with my pointer finger and watch it float away, into the Gulf where the next hurricane will pick it up and some more fanciful god than the one everyone talks about might spin it into, not so much Eve, but a fearless, roaring creature. 

I cross the southern border at night and the ground is hard, unforgiving. I follow a coyote path, winding and soft, past a child’s lost shoe, a bag of clothes, scattered papers. Floodlights blaze and flashlights flicker in the distance. I run through sunrises, sunsets, the words for which I learned as a sophomore in college when I studied in this vast and varied country: Amaneceres, Atardeceres. Through deserts, forests, past twin volcanos till I arrive again at the sea. It’s somewhere in Veracruz that I start to feel hunger again. There’s a beachside restaurant in Playa Hermosa where the red snappers’ gills are still moving when they hit the plancha. I eat fish after fish with my hands, lick the garlicky oil, the lime tang from my fingers, fold flaky fish into tortillas the size of my palm. My beer bottle sweats in the heat and goes down oh, so cold. I haven’t eaten, not like this—to the point of fullness, of warmth and nourishment, in years. “Hay hamacas, si quieres descansarse,” says the woman under the thatch-roofed bar. “No? Bueno, pues, comete,” is her loving command, and I do. Then I dance, the triangular steps of cumbia, the dizzying turns of salsa. I am whirled and spun by strangers until the music stops and the elotes vendors arrive to fill me up once more.

 “Stay,” say the strangers. “Hay hamacas.” We could sleep on the beach. We could sleep or not sleep. We could consider the southern constellations. Hay hamacas. Hay baile. Hay comida. Hay amantes. But there’s someone I have to see, and she’s close. And my belly is full and my hair is tangled wet and wild from dance and the sand tinkles off me and glows in my wake. Leaves a shimmering path where my feet barely touch down. It is dark, but for the six stars of Crux and I am off once more. Running south. A vortex of sand, of music, maize. A fearless woman. A new moon.

Sex with M was rowdy, always bordering on violent, and tantalizing in its straddling of sacred and profane. Early in our relationship, we fucked in the fifteen-passenger van he used to ferry his surf-campers to and from the beach. Sand beneath my knees, a seatbelt in my face, somebody’s lunchbox on the seat next to me. Not somebody, but a kid named Carter (his name spelled in all caps (his mother’s handwriting) with permanent marker). I giggled, thinking of forgetful Carter, sitting in that very seat come Monday, holding his paper bag lunch, daydreaming of the waves he might catch, wholly unaware of the moans, the sweat, the hardness of body-parts on the fabric upholstery only hours before. Fucked in our landlord’s dahlia patch. Risky. But those flowers, those Fibonacci spirals, they were alive and audacious, their divine proportions tumbling all over each other. M was jealous of all my relationships, was sure I was screwing my coworkers. He read my emails and forbade me certain friendships. We fought till he cried, or punched a wall, till my nose bled or my ribs broke, but the sex, it could save us. I lived within a spiral of lust and hate, of loneliness and proximal beauty—the dahlias, the sea. The spiral was infinite, repeated when magnified. Turns out, a Fibonacci spiral only breaks if, as it grows, it changes shape.

Chiapas is foggy, or smokey, or both, and I’m closer to her latitude: minutes, degrees, footfalls closer by the day.  It’s here on the cold, cobbled streets of San Christobal that my menses begin again. They retreated with M; I was too skinny, too sad to feed them, but the blood needed somewhere to go. Instead of bleeding once a month from my vagina, I got nosebleeds: a vengeful ebbing of menstrual fluid. Sometimes immediate were the nosebleeds: from the strain of screaming at M. Sometimes accumulative: from the strain of forcing down hate into a too-small, heart-shaped vessel. Once I was teaching a lesson on timelines, negative numbers and such. I was standing along a line of masking tape on the floor, to the far left of zero and a student’s hand went half-up, her face concerned, embarrassed. “Um, Miss? You’re bleeding. Your nose?” Another time in a Zumba class at the Y: there I was, a too-skinny white lady dancing to a Reggaeton song, bouncing, fist-pumping, blood on my face, on the floor all around me. The instructor, the other ladies stopped dancing. They stared and a murmur undergirded the hard, bomba beat. My eyes were closed and I had to keep moving. To stop would be to answer to all these somebodies’ mothers, so I left, I ran the long way home, five, six miles to the carriage house out on Rockyhead Neck.

In Chiapas I bleed again, the way I’m supposed to, and it aches, but it’s a proud ache, as my body remembers itself. But it is also one of deep regret. Through cobbled streets, past vibrant colonial edifices, through soft jungle paths, astride roaring tiers of waterfalls, I pass husk after liquid husk from my loins. You’re free to go now, I tell each egg as it exits my body, leaving a trail, red as the conquistador’s sword. I’m sorry I held you so long, I tell them. I’m sorry for all the noise, for all your hunger. The blood sticks to my thighs, to itself, collects and coagulates in my sneakers.

I bleed and I run across another nation’s border to a farther mountain town, Chichicastenango, “place of the nettles,” and my pace slows because this run is ending soon and the air is thin, cold, and I’m near empty.

It’s market day at the Iglesia de Santo Tomás where women in hand-woven trajes arrange their wares on the stone stairs of the church. They sell bouquets of chrysanthemums and bundles of chamomile, candle sticks in as many rich colors. 

There are twenty stone stairs to climb. I’m so weary by the top that I crawl, approaching the altar like a child. So weary, I lay myself at the foot of the shrine where incense burns for The Virgin of Guadalupe and for Ix Chel, both. To them, I offer my blood, my ribs, my sore and blistered feet. I am whole, alive, and awake to this morning.

---

This is a story born of regret over lost time and temporary loss of self. It is a travel narrative of the speculative sort, where the narrator imagines her way away from the pain and dysfunction of her reality. I lived for several years with the man in the story, M, and during that time I was in the best physical shape of my life. When we fought, which was a lot, I took myself on long runs, often tacking on extra loops, extra miles to delay my return. In those days, my runs offered temporary reprieve. For this piece, I wanted the run to yield real liberation for the narrator, not in an easy way, because running is not easy, nor is escaping and recovering from abuse. She must gain space and change shape to be whole again, and the run is the conceit that allows for self-reckoning, grief, and transformation.

—

Caite McNeil is a writer and illustrator. Her work is place-based and often humorous, pulling inspiration from a childhood spent in rural Maine, and an adulthood in Northern California. She is a teacher, a long-distance runner, and an enthusiastic home-cook. Caite lives in Mid-Coast Maine with her husband Josh, daughter Nina and little dog Bowie. Her work has appeared in The Dewdrop and the Stonecoast Review.

A Survival Manual for Drowning

by Bunny McFadden

“In snatching the tool of speculation from my writer's toolbox here on the kitchen table, I've inadvertently made something raw rather than crafted.”

When people compliment me on how well I’m drowning, I grin and show them the bloody gills I’ve carved in my chest.

The madness runs in my family. I was told the tale of La Llorona when my body fit in half a bathtub, squeezed among my three older sisters. The fear of our mom drowning us stood in the corner, but it never introduced itself until I was much older. I was drinking the kind of beer that makes your heart burn in the tiny German kitchen of my sister Jordan, who was named after a baptismal river. We sipped things that tickled our tongues, things that reminded us of how our mother drowned her sorrows in alcohol. And in that hazy underwater clarity, I saw how close I’d been to death.

My mother loved us. Before I dive in too deep, I will tie this anchor tight around me. If I don’t, I’ll drown in remembering. When I wrote my doctoral thesis, I’d often use critical artifactual literacy to recenter myself, though sometimes the pictures turned to hard cement blocks around my feet. In the crafting of speculative nonfiction, artifacts can become gateways to sensemaking, but they can just as easily become the talismans of doom that ease us into catatonia. This is why I am using memory without swimming aides to guide this speculative nonfiction.

I was a stunted child who never learned to swim. One of my first memories was a communal pool the color of Santa Fe turquoise. My sisters called me farther and farther, convinced that luring me to the deep end was the way to teach me how to survive. Instead, as my toes tickled the scratchy concrete, I inhaled water. It’s never really left my lungs; I still cough up goldfish, these cursed luck charms, when I talk about my childhood. This was my first memory of drowning. 

My mother drank. I do, too. 

The stream of cheap beer she sat under would pour into her eyes, coat her tongue, and transform her into a sneaking, biting fish. She’d snap, gummy and toothless, all the while trying to swim upstream to home. We moved a dozen times, closer and closer to the Rio Grande. And each time, her whiskers and scales and guppy mouth grew more apparent, til she was more fish than mother. 

Speculative nonfiction is the twin of autoethnography, but the mother’s womb deprives it of air. It’s born with red skin, dying, drowning before it can be logged as a living soul. When I write about myself, I armor myself with the airy life jackets of reflexivity, made puffy with my own hot breath. This is the methodology of autohistoria. But speculative nonfiction is made when you wade out into the water with a life jacket made of a burial wreath. It is poetic, and seemingly ornamental, but only if you focus your goal on survival. When you write to let go, it is cathartic to let yourself drown. 

My dissertation was meant to be a survival manual, but instead it is a passenger log of the people I’ve been who have drowned among the wreckage of my life. I wrote; I wrote because each word was the oar of a lifeboat cutting into the choppy water, offering itself to me as a way to escape. But only looking back at this autoethnographic dissertation within the speculative nonfiction methodology do I see the ways I wrote my own autopsy. Waterlogged, decomposing in the waves, picked at and nibbled by the schools of houndfish who formed my cohort; my autoethnography is crystallized in sea salt, the delicate pages turned to something that looks solid and steady, but will crumble if you poke at it. 

The work of Gloria Anzaldua helped me unpack my role as a white-passing, straight-passing, cis-passing queer chicana, but I soon realized that the comfort with which I took on this identity revealed my internalized colonist. What I thought was an autohistoria dresses itself in brag: look how well I pass, look how well I can model the colonizer with my language. Look at me taming my tongue, putting on the “bridle and saddle” (Anzaldua, p. 53).

I came to recognize myself as non-binary in the last months of my dissertation, which ironically focused on autoethnography as a practice of surgically uncovering the deep tissue that choked up my voice box. I’d survived the flaying required by academia by writing about myself. It was as protective as the way I cut my ankles when I was 13: a safe way to self-harm, something easily dismissible as a natural consequence of performing gender, of performing in general. Only at the end can I look back and see that instead of a survival guide, I wrote an obituary. When you cut yourself open for academia, remember how they treat your body as a specimen.

I started my drowning in the dark waters that birthed me. Ostensibly, my thesis was about decolonizing pedagogy using storytelling, but I carefully avoided writing about the water I was in. I wrote about its depth, its chill, its dirt and grime, but never did I write about it as a living body of water that threatens even today to roll over my head. In everything I’ve read about drowning, there’s a moment of calm and peace. I find myself there now.

Some who were raised with Spanish in their hot gasping breath will be angry with me, but I can only tell the stories that survived my mother having her mouth washed out with soap. In school, she told me, any chattering Spanish brooks would be brutally dammed by the teachers. When I asked my mother to teach me Spanish, she told me that it would only make my scales glitter. Anonymity was the cure. She gave me the whitest name she could. I, too, was named after something with water, but mine was the name of a bridge.

When I wrote my thesis, I spent weeks wondering about the words she taught me in Spanish. Did she really not know the English equivalent? Was it intentional that I grew up not knowing the English word for chupos (house slippers) or pala (shovel / dustpan)? Was this her way of slipping messages into the stream of our matriarchy?

My mother was drowning herself when she raised us. We were her baptism, the rebirth made possible through that sacrifice of air that comes when a baby learns to live by crushing your ribs. Each of her four daughters offered hope: Misty, named after the cigarettes she smoked. Token, named after treasure at the arcade where I imagine she hid when her husband beat her. Jordan, a river where followers of Christ were baptized. Chelsea, a port by the ocean; a bridge; a boat. All of us raised near the Rio Grande, all of us seven generations deep in the muddy water of colonizer & colonized; Mexican, Spanish, & indigenous. I wrote about the water but never about drowning. 

A cousin drowned in Storey Lake. It became a cautionary tale. A fire raged in my auntie’s shrine to Saint Francis of Assisi. It became a cautionary tale. My mother turned into a fish. Her daughters are only half transformed now, stuck in between. It became a cautionary tale. 

When we were young, my mother took us to swim in the Rio Grande. That evening, scrubbed clean and tucked into the double twin bunk beds, the four of us kept our eyes shut tight and listened closely to the news that played on the television in the other bedroom. They’d found bodies up the river from us. The same water that had squelched between my toes and dripped from my hair also hid two unnamed indigenous women. In my academic work, I remember this moment because it reminds me that they’ll drown us all, indiscriminately. The only way to survive is embracing the transformation into becoming a goldfish, even if that means carving my own gills. 

Speculative nonfiction itself is an act of decolonization. It plays with epistemology, with perspective and control of the narrative. I spent half my autoethnography on words that would keep it afloat when the academics came to sink it. But with this essay, I find myself slipping underwater. I no longer fight to name these tributaries, because classifying them with mortal words does not strengthen or weaken their powers.

The embrace of ambiguity is something Gloria Anzaldua writes about extensively in Borderlands. Her work is a testament to the decolonizing nature of speculative nonfiction. I read it again and again and again. It is my manual for drowning. 

---

In snatching the tool of speculation from my writer's toolbox here on the kitchen table, I've inadvertently made something raw rather than crafted. It harkens to primacy and feels like I've let my inner child crawl out to speak. 

—

Dr. Bunny McFadden (she/they) is a Chicana mother who tinkers with words for a living. In addition to being the winner of the 2021 Golden Ox and being published in horror & scifi anthologies, they’ve written widely in academia & hosted workshops on storytelling. They’re the assistant editor of a magazine for incarcerated folks. Their website is DocBunny.com.

Things That Glow

by Brenda Miller

“My mind naturally speculates whenever it wanders from the task at hand. I’m always in the ‘what if’ frame of mind.”

We’ve kayaked out from the Bowman Bay boat launch in Deception Pass State Park, my friend Nancy and I, wrapped in life jackets and spray skirts, our paddles held lightly as the guide instructed: push with the top hand and twist, igniting the big muscles of the back and core, rather than straining the smaller muscles of the hands and arms. With nine other boats, we finally edged out from shore, all of us smelling of damp and tides and beached seaweed—awkward animals in these first moments of transition from land to water—but once we start paddling in a rhythm that works, we glide as a flotilla out toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. 

It’s 8 p.m. on an August evening, after days of smoke have dimmed our summer, winds shifting to bring evidence of wildfires all around: British Columbia, Eastern Washington, Oregon. We’ve come to expect it these last few years: that at some point our Pacific Northwest summer—the season we look forward to all year during months of rain and dark—will be shut down by smoke, and we’ll huddle inside next to air purifiers if we have the means to afford them, or fans, windows shut, blinds drawn. Quarantined once again. But today, at the edge of the earth, the smoke has begun to rise from sea level, and we set off gamely, paddles dipping into the bay. The more expert among us are able to do so with little splashing, but I already feel my nylon sleeves soaking with cold salt water. It feels good, though, after so many days of unprecedented heat. 

We nose our way through the center of the cove, following the shoreline of Rosario Head. I crane my head to make out the trail I’ve hiked dozens of times through those stands of Madrones that lean forever precarious over the bluff—trees that have been there for as long as I’ve known this place, their bark peeling and peeled, orange wood smooth as skin. These trees only grow well in the wild and usually in places of transition: earth to air to water. Whenever I find myself next to an elder Madrone I stop and place my hand on a hefty branch, feeling the slight tremor of ancient life. Madrones glow in the light off the water because they are often so naked. 

We paddle along until the bluff opens up to reveal a bright red sun. We all gasp at the sight of it melting toward the horizon, some taking videos with their cell phones. It looks (there’s no other way to say it) apocalyptic, like the cover of a science fiction magazine. Its beauty is the beauty of the unnatural, of something gone terribly wrong. Coral red, alive with movement that I know must be smoke or clouds, but looks like the lava I saw once on Hawaii’s Big Island as we stepped carefully over volcanic stones in the dark. The lava flowed beneath us, an incandescent river of heat, yet somehow we walked there with hundreds of others, taking our chances, wanting to be in the presence of something this big and primal, something that cared little for us humans who hopped along like fleas. As the sun reaches the lip of the water, light oozes out as if the orb has cracked, fire flattening until it disappears. 

Dusk. Twilight. High cirrus clouds glow with red curlicues. We’re out in open water now, rounding Rosario, waves swelling and crashing against the rocky black shore. Our guide, Melanie, leads us to a kelp forest as we wait until the full dark that will reveal what we’ve come out here for: bioluminescence. I’ve never seen this phenomenon before and have only a vague notion of what it will be. Melanie tells us this particular bioluminescence happens when small plankton that live in coves like these create a chemical reaction in response to intrusion, sending in effect a “burglar alarm” that lights up the swarm. We’re out here during the best window for seeing the water alive with light. This light carries no heat, and can be the only source of illumination undersea. 

While we wait for optimal viewing conditions, our kayaks bump over immense stands of bull kelp, with thick stems and shaggy manes. Melanie tells us these groves of kelp provide shelter for many creatures, such as the kelp crabs. She invites us to lift up a bunch and I do; the shafts are heavy and cold, thick as rope, and the bouquet of olive-green strands drips across our hulls, uncannily like the messy tresses of a woman’s hair. Melanie tells us the myth of the seawoman whose likeness is depicted on a large totem at Rosario Head; the maiden who sacrificed herself to the sea in order to save her village; she became more sea than human and transformed herself into these strands of kelp to protect the creatures who sustain life. I pull out a strand from water, tear off a strip to taste its salty flesh. 

The darkness deepens, and with it a hymn begins to unspool in my mind, a hymn I’ve often sung as part of a group known as the Threshold Choir; we hold vigil at the bedsides of those who are nearing death. Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, lord with me abide… We blend our voices into one voice, the vibration more important than the words as we put our full attention on the recipient of our songs. Often, we can see their bodies changing bit by bit, a glow radiating from a source that is no longer the body or mind. The darkness deepens, and it’s often only in darkness that we can discern this kind of light. 

The waves seem to swell bigger now as we paddle back toward Bowman Bay, a gentle roller coaster that makes us feel a little seasick. Melanie asks us to crack the glow lights she handed out earlier so that we can keep track of each other through the gloaming. One by one, small beads of light pop up around us, but try as I might, my arthritic hands aren’t strong enough to crack the hard plastic tube. I resign myself to unglowing until I can catch up to Melanie and ask her help. The guides’ lights are blue so we can distinguish them within the flotilla, and we keep aiming toward Melanie as she bobs ahead of us. 

To the west the moon has appeared, a waxing crescent gilded in gold. Again, I know that  dirty smoke cloaks this moon in unearthly beauty, but it is beauty nonetheless. The gold finds its way to the water, glitters there on the rippled surface. I turn my gaze away from it, afraid my eyes won’t acclimate enough to see the light we’re seeking. 

We’re out here in an element not our own, at a time of day we’d normally be inside doing whatever it is we do in the privacy of our homes when darkness falls. We’re out here in August 2021, at a time of strange transition and uncertainty. The fourth (or is it the fifth?) wave of Covid is surging in our county, just when we thought the vaccine had freed us to leave our homes and resume a semblance of life as it was in the before-times. At the hospital down the street from my home, over a hundred anti-vaccine protestors rally in front of the ER, while inside that building nearly every bed is filled, and the staff cares for 37 desperately ill Covid patients, including breakthrough cases of the vulnerable vaccinated. A new death is recorded nearly every day in our small county. 

Yet, here we are, a couple of dozen people gliding through dark waters, waiting for brilliance to show itself. 

I’m seeing it, Nancy calls out from her seat behind me. Look at your paddle. I watch my paddle dip and pull, but I see only what looks to me like bubbles roiling in the disturbance, or the reflection of sunlight on the water. But then I remember there is no sun; this light is coming from below the surface. I’m still not sure what I’m seeing. Melanie leads us to the darkest part of the bay, in the overhang of a wooded promontory. We can’t really see each other now, just faint outlines of boats, the glow sticks, the swish of paddles in the water. I’ve gotten disoriented and really have no idea where I am, where the landing place might be in all this darkness. 

When I thought about bioluminescence, I imagined it would be a floating blanket of luminous algae, like the northern lights in liquid. I thought this scrim would part and rejoin with every swipe of the paddle. I saw the northern lights once, decades ago, after a season of working in Alaska, around a bonfire with my co-workers as we said our goodbyes. We looked up and saw ribbons of red, purple, and green unfurling across a deep black sky. Like any sighting of something normally hidden, we whooped and raised our plastic glasses of wine in a salute. To what, I’m not sure—to each other, to a glimpse of whatever watches over us?

As we head deeper into the darkness of Bowman Bay, I see it now: bright confetti, sparkles of light that infuse the water. It’s hard to assign the proper simile: like stars, like diamonds? None of these captures what I can only call the purity of it, the way light scatters in the sea and rises toward us. These sparks bloom in darkness always, but we see them only when we make an effort to venture where we don’t normally belong. 

Even Edith Widder, a marine scientist who has made it her life’s work to study bioluminescence, finds the image difficult to describe: “Since my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task.” She has invented submersibles that go down beyond 350 feet in the ocean, that area called the “edge of dark”; she then extinguishes any manmade light to see the varied glows of this alien world. It turns out that so many creatures make their own light from within, such as fireflies on land and many species of underwater translucent creatures, such as the firefly squid or the comb jelly. “It's a little-appreciated fact,” she writes, “that most of the animals in our ocean make light.” And each light, each pattern, communicates different purposes; it is a complex language, conveying danger, desire, or hunger. 

The prow of our kayak makes a brilliant white wake, and when I drag my hand in the cold water my skin sparkles like a cartoon. We tip our heads back to see stars above mirroring stars below: Big Dipper, Cygnus, faint wash of Milky Way. They all make a timid appearance, glowing dimly then slightly brighter as we watch. The moon sidles closer to the horizon, backing away, making its exit from the party. We’re out here during the annual Perseid meteor shower, and so for a few minutes we keep our gazes upward, hoping to see a star detach from its mooring, but all that activity is happening behind closed doors. Our eyes have adapted to darkness only as much as they can; we don’t yet know how to look beyond our own limitations. So, we turn back to the salt water, where thousands of glowing creatures hang suspended now, visible even without our bodies to disturb them. 

We won’t stay out here much longer. We’ll land our boats in the dark, after passing underneath a pier slated for demolition. The guides will drag us ashore, and we’ll once again be land-based creatures—damp, lumbering awkwardly in our water shoes over stones and driftwood in the artificial beams of our headlamps. But for now, even in a world that seems to darken by the day, we’re allowed to glide a few moments longer between layers of light—illuminated above and below—aglow.

---

My mind naturally speculates whenever it wanders from the task at hand. I’m always in the “what if” frame of mind. In writing, I aim to show not the “truth” of experience, but the possibilities of experience—how to find a center point in a world that is increasingly fragmented. As I kayaked in the bay, there was so much I could not see, and this essay is my attempt to peer around the edges of things, find a different kind of light.

—

Brenda Miller’s most recent book, A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing on Form, was published by University of Michigan Press in July 2021. Her book of collaborative essays with Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, is forthcoming from CSU Poetry Center in Fall 2021. She is the author of five more essay collections, including An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her poetry chapbook, The Daughters of Elderly Women, received the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Brenda’s work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and Associate Faculty with the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com. 

My Old Kentucky Home

by Billie Pritchett

”A series of recurring dreams takes place in my childhood home, sometimes involving my wife and our daughter, and sometimes transplanting all of us, my wife and daughter included, to the place where we live now. Only we do not have a daughter.”

1.

In this dream, my wife Rumi is standing with our daughter Hannah on the patio at the back of my childhood home in Kentucky. From the back as in the front, the home looks like a doublewide trailer. But this is not so terrible in the dream, because the exterior affects a positive atmosphere, the vinyl siding whitewashed, though never in real life, never as brilliant. On this late afternoon, the weather is good, there’s a cool breeze, and despite the dipping sun, the sky is blue, and light breaks through the clouds as in all those glorious cards of Christ’s ascension, tucked away in the backs of pews, picked up by children at funerals.

Hannah pats Rumi’s arm and asks if she can swim again. Rumi says “Sure,” gets in with her, and the two of them splash and play. Hannah closes her eyes and spits out water and cackles. A silent moment follows. Hannah and Rumi glance toward the road. The pool is above ground, and the road is visible from here. Cars pass. The powerlines hum. Rumi picks up Hannah and walks with her, moving slowly, the current strong against their bodies. Hannah looks into Rumi’s eyes, touches her eyelids. “Stop touching my face,” Rumi says.

“Mom, am I Korean, too?” Hannah asks.

“Absolutely.”

“Dad isn’t Korean. How am I?”

“Because I’m Korean.”

“I’m a Kentuckian,” Hannah says.

“Where did you hear something like that?”

“From my teacher. She said we’re all Kentuckians.”

“Noooo,” Rumi says. “You’re a Masan girl. That’s where I’m from. And my parents. Our ancestors were yangban. Do you know? Nobility. That’s our family myth, anyway.”

“And Dad?”

“His ancestors? European. From Ireland and Wales. They were poor, I think.”

“Did you grow up in a palace, Mom?”

Rumi laughs. “Not at all. One of my grandmothers has farmland, but she grew up very poor during the Korean war, and her home is modest. There’s an outhouse.”

“Sounds nice.”

No matter what my wife has said since to the contrary, our daughter imagines Masan a magical place. This started when Rumi told her about the octopuses. She said there were markets where you could buy a live octopus from a tank outside a restaurant, and someone would scoop it out with a net and bring it inside the restaurant, where you could eat it, still alive. “There’s nothing like that in Kentucky,” Hannah said to me.

“But what about fishing?” I said. “Reeling in a fish isn’t so different than scooping up an octopus.”

“It’s not the same,” Hannah said. “There aren’t any octopuses in Kentucky Lake. And we don’t eat our fishes alive.”

“We might if they’d live long enough out of water,” I said.

“Dad,” she said to me crossly, “don’t joke that way.”

Hannah’s hair is wet and thick, flooded with pool water. Rumi pushes it back from her forehead and pretends to whisper, though the whisper is loud, and both their faces are two feet apart. “Did you know you speak Korean with me?” she asks.

“Do I?” Hannah fake-whispers back.

“You’re a beautiful fool,” Rumi says, and presses her head against the softness of Hannah’s face. Then Rumi and Hannah get out of the pool and dry off, and Rumi puts her sun hat on Hannah’s head and guides her through the patio door and on into the kitchen. “Take a shower and put on some clean clothes,” Rumi says. “Dad should be home soon.”

Before heading to her room, Hannah turns and says what she has said before, this sentence becoming something of a refrain: “I’m worried about Dad.”

“Dad is sad and maybe needs time to be sad,” Rumi told her recently. “Depression is what it’s called. It appears sometimes when adults feel overwhelmed. Sometimes it’s because of responsibilities. Or sometimes people are born with it. I don’t know which is the case with your father. Maybe both. Don’t tell him I told you.”

Children understand when adults have problems. When they’re born, they enter a world replete with baked goods and porcelain, precious objects they have not bought, not made, not arranged, but which can be tipped over with a heavy foot or hand.

2.

My wife has said daughters are closer to their mothers than daughters to fathers. This isn’t a competition, and certainly what Rumi said is true with her and her mother, but from what I know of Hannah, I want to believe she is as much me as she is my wife. She does Tae Kwon Do not because it’s a Korean sport but because I did it when I was five. Of course, she says since she’s Korean, she’ll succeed where I failed. I was never very good at any sport, I told her. She said don’t worry, she would be good enough for all three of us.

One day, she said she wanted to learn about Murray, because this is where I grew up. Oh, I see, I said. She said isn’t it interesting that she’s growing up in such a small town.

“Twenty-thousand people isn’t so small. And we have our own university,” I said. “Besides, where else might you have grown up?”

“Anywhere else,” she said with a shrug. Then she said, “Alexander Graham Bell didn’t really invent the telephone. It was a man from Murray. His name was Nathan Stubblefield and he sold watermelons and he was a genius.”

“I heard the same thing when I was in school,” I told her.

3.

Even in the shower, Hannah hears the living room door open. The house is so small a person can hear the front door open from one side to the other. She turns off the water, dries, dashes to her bedroom (my childhood room), gets dressed, and darts into the hallway. Her plan: to sneak up on my wife and me in the living room now that she knows I’m home. She peeks around the corner of the hallway.

More than hugging, I am holding on to my wife, my head over Rumi’s shoulder, eyes closed.

“What took you so long?” she asks.

“I just went driving,” I say.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

For Hannah, our conversations have become secrets from which she’s excluded. One night, as Rumi and I lay in bed, I shared memories of my father. Nothing good. I regret I shared nothing good. I regret I only have bad memories. “At least three times,” I said, “in the living room, our living room, I saw my father sit in front of the TV entertainment center, wearing a white sleep shirt and his underpants as he turned a rifle on himself. One in a series of mock suicides. I recall one scene like this. I was sitting on the couch where my father would sleep every night. My mother was laid back in the recliner, along the wall, farthest from my father, who had finished cleaning his rifle with his special oils, and then, either provoked by something flip that I or my mother said, or perhaps it was just something that was on his mind, he loaded the barrel, lifted it, put it in his mouth, and maneuvered his toe toward the trigger. My mother declined her chair, I hopped up from the couch, and we both ran to his side to plead with him to stop.

“This was my father’s way of letting us know he could take his life at any moment if we didn’t love him enough.

“Once, he’d gone outside and fired his rifle in the air. My mother and I thought he had killed himself. We ran out onto the patio, thinking we would find his body flat on the slab. But outside, he was only standing there looking at us. My mother beat at his chest. The situation seemed dangerous with the rifle still in his hands, but my father looked more scared of my mother than she of him as he backed away from her toward the pool.

“‘It was an accident,’ he kept repeating. ‘I didn’t mean it.’”

“My father was the kind of person who would have been unhappy wherever he was,” I said at last. “I have him in me. I hope I’m not the same way.”

I wouldn’t have shared any of this had I known Hannah was lying prone at the foot of our open bedroom door, listening in on our conversation. When I noticed the tilt of her head from the floor, I acted as though I didn’t notice. Inwardly, I was angry, not at her but at myself for not keeping our door closed. A family habit. When I was a child, my parents had always kept their bedroom door open, probably at my mother’s insistence, in case I called out for help.

Hannah sees me see her lying in the hallway as I hold Rumi. Her face begins to flush. Pulling up her shirt by its ringed collar, she covers her eyes. Only her bangs are exposed.

“Say, what are you doing there?” I say in singsong, hoping to show Hannah no harm has been done.

“Don’t talk to me,” she says. “I’m invisible. I’m a ghost.”

“If you’re a ghost, how come I can see you?”

“Because I want you to,” she says, pulling down her collar.

The irony is I cannot see her well. I must have left my glasses in the car. But I want to see the child my wife and I have created. I go to her, bend down, pick her up, my left arm a cradle. “You’re getting too heavy for this,” I say.

“Then put me down.”

It’s impossible in the dream without my glasses on to look into her eyes and see my reflection there, yet somehow I know, maybe because it is a dream I just know, I look very much like my own father with his long nose and squinty, mischievous eyes, and somehow I know Hannah can intuit this, this link between me and my father. She strokes my whiskers, kisses my nose. I don’t cry, but I could, so I put her down.

Rumi points toward the dining table overlooking the patio and tells both Hannah and me to sit down. From the stove, Rumi removes the premade dinner plates she has wrapped with tinfoil, then unwraps them and sets the table. As she puts the plate in front of me, I pat her leg. She’s wearing the dress full of sunflowers. “What have you got on there?” I ask.

“Your favorite. I’m like a flower garden,” she says, with a hint of adult connotation, lifting the skirt helm slightly with a curtsy.

Over dinner, Rumi mentions that Hannah earlier asked if she was Korean.

“What did you tell her?” I ask.

“Absolutely she is,” Rumi says.

“That’s right,” I say. “She’s also a Kentuckian.”

Rumi calls me stupid in Korean.

“Mom, you know how I said there’s magic in Korea?” Hannah says.

“Mm-hmm,” Rumi says.

“I think there’s magic here in Murray, too.”

“You’re right,” I say.

Clicking her teeth three times, my wife says, “What is magic, anyway? What does it mean to call something magic?”

Hannah raises her hand. “I know a meaning. My name means unification in Korean.”

“That’s right,” I say.

Our girl is hyper. “How did Nathan Stubblefield make a telephone?” she asks.

“Nobody knows,” I say. Though of course this is foolish to say, of course someone knows, there are plenty of people who have researched the truth about him, but the fact is I don’t know. There are some things a person doesn’t let on about to five-year-olds because they might never stop asking questions.

Even though Rumi looks a little annoyed at my response to Hannah, I try to lighten the mood by humming “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight.” But Rumi doesn’t like the song. I understand. Maybe I don’t like the song much either. She clicks her tongue three times.

4.

In real life, we don’t have a Hannah, but maybe one day we will. Maybe this is her earliest incarnation, her avatar in that Land of Nod. Or perhaps her soul exists in heaven and awaits an earthbound body, in which she can forget her perfection, only to discover it again in time, as learning lets us do. Regardless of my earlier protests, Hannah is more a composite of Rumi than of me. One need only note her sweetness, her playfulness, her interest in my hometown, an interest my wife shares, a place we may visit someday, my old Kentucky home. We may visit but not now. There’s no urgency. We are here in Masan because we need to be. I am here because I need to be. It was love that brought me to her.

Isn’t that what your mother said, sweetheart? Didn’t she say we must have been friends in another life, that in another life I must have been Korean? Remember what she said? I must have been searching for you a long time before I ended up here with you, in this bayside city, in a three-room apartment we call home.

In the dream, we have finished eating and move to the door, not to the door of my childhood home but of our home here. Here is me trying to set the world right-side up. See, the birthday cake has fallen, a little icing has smeared across the tile, but nothing is ruined. Rumi hands me my glasses, which I had left on the sink when I rinsed my face. There’s a small space in front of the door where all three of us stand and try to locate our KF94 masks. They’re on the top shelf of the shoe cabinet. Then we try to locate the right pair of shoes, and struggle to put them on without any inadvertent heel kicks to one another’s shins. I depress the electronic door lock. It jingles. We step out into the hallway. The fluorescents above paint our skin an unhealthy orange, and there’s a draft about the hallway like a wind tunnel, it sends shivers up and down us, despite the summer season. Instead of the elevator, we take the stairs, spiraling down to the first floor, seven flights, our echoes following. At the mouth of our apartment building, where mortar meets lot, swarming gnats form an aureole around the lights high atop the utility poles. The powerlines hum. Helmeted drivers zip by on motorbikes, delivering food during this, the last of the pandemic. The blasts from their exhaust interrupt the interstitials of calmness our minds try to occupy. This must be fine. The noise is part of it. I pick up Hannah. She’s heavy in my left arm. I sling my other arm over my wife’s shoulder. We go for a walk in the neighborhood.

---

A series of recurring dreams takes place in my childhood home, sometimes involving my wife and our daughter, and sometimes transplanting all of us, my wife and daughter included, to the place where we live now. Only we do not have a daughter. Yet through the dream, I can sometimes glimpse the world from our daughter's point of view, and it is at these moments I see the father figure as both myself and my own father, about whose mental health issues I have only recently come to sympathize and about which I have only recently tried to understand. This essay is my attempt to come to terms with the inscrutable emotional logic of this series of dreams, turning accident into ornament, as Nabokov called it, through the speculative essay.

—

Billie Pritchett is an assistant professor of English at Kyungnam University in Masan, Korea. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Murray State University. His recent work appears in Concho River Review, Delmarva Review, and Pensive.

Deadwood

by Coyote Shook

“What are the limits of introspection in a moment of crisis? How do the intersections of personal crisis and environmental crisis create rich fodder for speculation?”

---

What are the limits of introspection in a moment of crisis? How do the intersections of personal crisis and environmental crisis create rich fodder for speculation? When I saw Minnie Callison's grave, it felt like one of the banal interactions that one might have with human remains in a cemetery. My mind hopped from the loss of an important friendship to what I imagined this woman's life had been. It was in the untidiness of two lives overlapping in a land parched from climate change droughts that speculation was most orienting.

— 

Coyote Shook is a cartoonist and PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where they are working on a graphic novel work of speculative nonfiction that examines intersections between disability and the ocean in American cultural history. Their comics and visual essays have appeared or are forthcoming in a range of American and Canadian literary magazines and journals, including The Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly Review, The Puritan, The Maine Review, The South Dakota Review, LandLocked, and Hunger Mountain Review. 

Editor's Comments

In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand. —Robin & Leila

OPEN

“Open” is not the theme of this issue – this is meant to be an open issue, without a specific theme, but in thinking about this issue’s non-theme, it keeps suggesting itself as one regardless of our original intentions.  What I mean is that you might be hard-pressed to try to fit the rather wondrous speculations of this open Issue into the theme of “Open” or perhaps you might not. I haven’t tried but you’re welcome to do so. 

We have a tendency at Speculative Nonfiction to settle on one-word themes for our issues. We like to think of these themes as open, in and of themselves, to interpretation, as evocative suggestions for our contributors and readers, as speculative fodder. Our previous issues were: “Dwelling,” “Hold,” “Erasure.”  

I feel similarly about Open, though I know it’s not our theme.  Or maybe it is a theme in a more meta fashion. What I mean by a “meta” theme is that open fits the ethos of what we’re trying to do here, actually what any journal attempts: peer into, chronicle the cultural moment, and perhaps to influence it.  Journals such as ours are open to forms of expression and speculation that might find a rougher reception in the marketplace. Not that we’re trying to breathe only the most rarefied literary air or that we are trying to be so profound that even we don’t even understand what we’re publishing. God no.  That’s the stereotype, right?  In fact, what you’ll find in this issue, as in all our issues, are open-hearted essays that are playful, funny, sorrowful, yearning, wondering and wandering, none of them oblique (well, except for . . . ). But okay, yes, intellectual (which can be a dirty word in some circles, but which we embrace).  By which we mean, that we strive to understand things about our place in the world that can only be approached with an open mind.  Isn’t that what speculation is all about?  Isn’t it our collective super power, the ability to project ourselves backwards and forwards, to mull over, to make our lives nimble.  

For me, the best part of each issue is not this moment when we present the issue to you, though we hope it is the best moment for you. The best moment is not even when we start to read the submissions that come in, though maybe that’s a close second. For me, the best moment is when we decide what our next theme will be. Something as yet unformed starts to come together then, and we don’t know exactly what it is. Open. Yes, that’s as good a theme as any.  

While this isn’t the most elegant of segues, I see it nonetheless as an opening to announce our next theme, which we now declare (imagine us lighting an Olympic torch) “Open,” as in ready to receive, but not open in the previous sense: 

Passage. 

Make what you will of this theme, and in the meantime, we wish you a safe passage through life, though not necessarily through this issue, because we like to think of ourselves as agent provocateurs in the guise of somewhat mild-mannered editors. And with that, we invite you to peruse the passages herein.   

Robin Hemley, Co-Editor

Speculative Nonfiction

Nina Simone on the Colorado: Tributary Duchesne River

by Nicole Walker

“For me, by speculating that Nina Simone visited me in Utah, it allowed me to think about appropriation, the history of music, the persistence of cover songs, and what it would be like to have a friend who saw things from a different perspective than I or the Utahns I knew.”

My mother, who has been told looks like Faye Dunaway, but kids can’t know what their parents really look like, listened to Nina Simone like she was her best friend. She sang along in her careful-to-stay on key voice while scrubbing the kitchen floor. I knew most of the songs too because so many were covers. I could cover my mom singing, who covered Nina, who covered The Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun, George Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy, Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, and House of the Rising Sun which was a traditional folk song covered first by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1925, then Woody Guthrie, then Lead Belly, onto Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan. 

When my mom and I weren’t singing to Nina Simone, we were singing along to the musicals on videotape we owned: Jesus Christ Superstar and the movie version of Hair. Mom, sitting on the couch, with a book in hand, sang “Manchester, England England across the Atlantic Sea” without so much looking at the screen. I, who was seven in 1979 when the film came out, sang along to “White Boys/Black Boys.” When Nell Carter, whom I knew from the TV Show Gimme a Break, sang “White boys are delicious. Black boys are nutritious,” I sang right along. Mom interrupted to say that Nina would have been good in that part. “Do black people always have to play black people?” I asked. She said, “Judas is played by a black guy in Jesus Christ Superstar but a white guy sang the Judas role in the concept album” and the “White Boys/Black Boys” song grew more complicated in my mind. I still know all the words but I still don’t know if it’s racist or not. I mean, everyone is delicious in that song. The white girls love the black guys. The black girls love the white guys. That must be good, right? Music is a history of uncovering and recovering the history of skin color. Nina, sliding away from Tryon, North Carolina, took cover by playing cover songs in New York City—until she needed to take cover elsewhere. I offered her distance and remove in what she would later call the most beautiful place in the world but when she first arrived, she called the middle of nowhere—and truly, the middle of Utah, not on the TV or film screen, is where I found her. 

My grandpa, step, but still, my primary and only living grandpa, Walter Mayhew, was born in Duchesne to a family who came from England to colonize that part of Utah. By the mid-1870s, the white, Mormon colonists had pushed the Utes onto a reservation, less than 9% of its former land. The Mormons buried the original name of the town and county for a kind of French Oak, which is pronounced in the French way, Doo-Shane, but everyone calls it Doo-Chez-Nee to make fun both of the French and our Utah selves for wondering who the hell thought settlers from Missouri and Illinois didn’t love their consonants. Burying names and people is a different kind of cover story that most people in Utah do not want to sing loudly about. 

When my grandpa came of age, he left Duchesne on a Greyhound bus and never looked back. Not even when he became a Greyhound bus driver himself.. When you are a kid, you think your grandpa only lived the one life—the one with you in it. It’s disorienting to imagine that he lived in the middle of Utah instead of Salt Lake City, where I grew up or southeast of Evanston, Wyoming where my mom grew up and where he met my grandmother who would become his second, or maybe third, wife. In Utah, we sometimes elide the number of times married. The ghost of polygamy drapes a great veil. 

The only time I went to Duchesne, at least until I got married and Erik and I took our honeymoon trip on the backside of the Wind River and Uintah mountains, was with my boyfriend Darren. Darren and I dated for four years, from when I was 14 until 18. In some version of Utah, that would count as a proper age to marry, but Darren and I refused the Mormon church and thus stayed at least marriage-celibate. 

Darren, who was three years older than me, worked at McDonald’s flipping burgers for Big Macs. Not quite graduating high school, he left home to rent an apartment in Holladay, Utah. He brought his waterbed from his dad’s house in Taylorsville, and a set of pots and pans his mom left behind when she moved to Pueblo, Colorado. At 15, I made my first no recipe meal—bites of steak with gravy, poured over rice. I sat on his couch, finishing my German homework, while he watched episodes of Cheers on TV. When our friends, Rebecca and Trevin came over. I kept doing my homework. Rebecca and Trevin wrestled and Darren kept watching cheers. Sometimes, when I didn’t feel like cooking or when we ate psylocibin mushrooms, the four of us dined on bowls of Grapenuts, laughing until we spit them out, crying about how much chewing made our jaws hurt. 

On a warm summer’s eve, Darren’s dad, Rex, called the apartment from jail saying that Darren had to go to Duchesne. “You have to ask your grandma for the bail money. You have to go get it.” Rex was from Duchesne too although I have no idea if my grandpa and Darren’s families’ paths crossed. I imagine they must have. How many Davises and Mayhews live in a town of 1500 people, give or take a couple hundred, depending on the decade? 

It’s only an hour and forty-minute drive to Duchesne from Salt Lake but it felt much longer. As teenagers in Salt Lake City without a lot to do, we drove a lot back and forth across the streets of Salt Lake but longer trips were confined to driving the thirty minutes from Stansbury Lake to Windsurf with my old boyfriend, Monty, and his new wife Maria. An hour and forty-minute drive seemed monumental. We may have as well gotten married, spending that much time together alone in a car. 

We arrived at his grandparents—a ranch house that may have been farm-adjacent at one point. People didn’t do much but ranch cattle in Duchesne but his grandparent’s house seemed more suburban than rural. Darren got out of the car, not waiting for me, and knocked on the door. 

His grandmother did not embrace him. She held the door wide open for him to step through. She poked her head outside to see me standing beside the car, having no idea what to do with myself. 

“You may as well come in too.” I dragged my shoes through the dust bunched up against the walkway, the grass having burned off a long time ago, hoping that if I took long enough, she’d give up on me and leave me to wait by the car. But she stayed door open until I slipped by her, my arm brushing against her bulbous stomach—the direction I suspected my stomach would go too when I was her age and lived in a ranch style house. 

Darren, his grandma, and I sat on a green velour couch that promised to suck me into its cushions and lose me where the change went when it too wanted to avoid strangers and difficult conversations. The grandpa sat at the edge of theLazy-Boy that he kept unreclined. It was clear we would not be staying for dinner. 

No one said anything. We had no stories. I was a sophomore in High School. I could have told them I studied German but they might ask why and I’d have to explain about Joel, who took German and convinced me that it was the language of geniuses. I wanted to be a genius. Or at least convince Joel to think I was. 

Darren’s grandparent’s house smelled like all houses of grandparents, except these grandparents, being members of the LDS church, didn’t drink coffee—instead, a layer of mildew, hairspray, tuna fish and maybe a hint of urine wreathed around the room. If sound had boomed, or even whispered, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed the smell but lack of ordinary sensation highlighted the weirder ones. I kept my feet on the floor and tried to keep my posture straight to suggest Darren had done well by himself. A girl with good posture is worth diamonds. 

If Nina had been there, she would have said something. She would have made us all say something. “How long have you lived like this?” She would have said. “You can’t stay in a house all day, sinking into couch cushions. There is too much mercury in tuna. Twice a week. That’s all you can eat. Now, let’s see if we can get a drink around here.”

Instead of taking us tothe liquor cabinet or the bar, because in Duchesne, there is neither, Nina would have marched us out to the banks of the river. The Duchesne River contributes to the Green. The Green merges just a little bit south and east with the Colorado. This may be Nina’s first visit to any arm of the big river. Here, she would have found the four-color palette of the Rocky Mountains: tan, blue, green, and silver. In this part of the U.S., the desert asserts itself. Trees grow, grasses thrive, the sky rounds, but sand weaves its color behind and under, through and beside all the others. Dirt is the canvas and there is not enough paint to go around. 

Truly, Nina would probably not deign to visit Duchesne. If Utah in general hasn’t much Jazz, Duchesne has negative zero. What would she want with cows, beige sand, and a green couch? But I would have loved for someone to have taken me to the river—to get me out of that house. To show me an eddy in the river. To show me how to see fish through water. Being from the arid west, I knew only little about streams although I did have a gift for finding salamanders. It’s something to look for when you’re digging in window wells of houses whose water table once rose to the level of foundations. 

Nina might sit on a slab of granite sticking out over the river. “You have no idea how good you’ve got it,” she might say, waving her arm to usher my eyes toward the river and the vast hills and mountains beyond. “You could lose yourself in this place for days.” In Tryon, North Carolina before she left for Julliard, Nina’s dad took her fishing on the Pacolet for largemouth and spotted bass, black bullhead, and catfish. In 2017, a large die off of catfish occurred along the river. Fish and Wildlife attributed the fish deaths to disease which they imagined would be “self-limiting.” It was not “self-limiting.” The fish keep dying. The clarity of the water covers a host of upstream sins. 

For Nina, whose time on her river preceded the times of dead fish, fished her limit. But if Nina could sit with me on the river, there was a sense even this western water was not the pure water that it once had been. As Heraclitus said, you never step in the same river twice. Lucretius would not have believed in purity. Nina sung a song about that. It was called Ain’t Got No. I Got Life. She sang that even without shoes, or wine, or friends or money, one still had their eyes and their feet. And their life. The water clicked around the river stones to the beat. The Green River pulling her voice up and out like it pulled the Duchesne toward it. I watched them both flow toward the southeast. “I’ve got my hair,” she sang. 

“I know that song,” I would have told her. “My parents make me listen to the Hair soundtrack like once a week.” 

“I saw the show in the city.” 

“New York?”

“Mmhmm. Then after their show, I took Lorraine with me to The Village Gate, that old club on the corner of Bleeker Street and Thompson, where I played that song for the first time. I did indeed have my hair. And my lungs.”

“My mom said she saw them. Penises. In the aisles. During the Broadway show. I wish I had been there.”

“But you’re not even here. You’re inside, sitting on a couch, waiting for someone to tell you where to go? What’s the point of stones if people aren’t going to come out and look at them?”

I would have picked up a stone, set in my palm. I did not want to be one of those people. I wanted to be one of these people. A Nina and a Nicole by the stream, singing the soundtrack to Hair that my parents listened to, and mom sang to, once a week. 

But instead of actually investigating the lime in the stones by the river, I stared at the plastic cowboy arranged on a shelf above the television that looked like it might have once been Darren’s dad’s toy. Or maybe it was a tchotchke of the Eastern Utah kind.  Darren stood up from the green coach, signaling it was time to go. His grandfather handed him an envelope which I assume was full of money. Who trusts an eighteen-year-old boy and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend to drive cash across half a state? Who lets their eighteen-year-old son take that cash to the bail bondsman? 

His office was across from the library, down the street from the bar. The sign flashed Bail. Cash. Open 24 Hours. Not only in New York City. In Salt Lake City too. 

This time, I did stay in the car. Nina slid into the driver’s seat to sit with me. 

“First bar I went to was down this street,” I told her. “Juniors. Jamee Kidd who got pregnant in high school. Her face was so open and full of joy. She was a great mom.  Married at sixteen, divorced at twenty, married again, divorced again, finally changed her name to Moon so she and her face could stay that way—single and inviting. Her husbands did not like her effervescence. They both spent a lot of time trying to cap those bubbles, flatten that soda.”

“I knew a girl like that, back in North Carolina. She had five kids by the time she was twenty-seven.”

“Oh, that’s a song too. Emmylou Harris. Red Dirt Girl.”

“No, that song is about a girl in Alabama. This one is in North Carolina. She served eggs and hash browns at a diner. Chicken fried steak. Grits. That kind of thing. Her mama took care of the littlest babies. But five! Five kids.”

“It’s too many. She would have fit out here pretty well. Five kids is the norm. Heck, Darren is one of four. His slightly older sister was named Rexanne. Just in case the male heir never arrived. But he did, in the form of Darren. And now Rexanne lives in Venice Beach.”

“Here’s a fact: If you have four or five kids, you’re going to lose one or two to Venice,” Nina would have said.

“I’ve never been to Venice,” I admitted.

“Here’s a true fact: I had to post bail once,” she said.

“Did you get arrested for protesting the government?”

“No, for tax evasion. The U.S. government can find you even in Switzerland.”

“Did you go to jail?” I asked. 

“I posted bail. $10,000. Then I returned to Europe and played a few shows. I wired the rest of the money. Eventually.”

“Too bad Darren’s dad doesn’t sing. Maybe he could pay his own bail that way.”

“Not everyone can remember words to songs,” she said, cutting Rex some slack.

“Or how to play the piano. Not everyone can go to Juilliard. Or be Young, Gifted and Black,” I teased.

Nina sang the tune of the title song a couple of times. Nothing more of the song than the title because singing so might infringe on copyright. Record companies are notorious for going after writers who quote lyrics in their book. Write your own damn words, they seem to say. 

“That is another true fact,” Nina’s voice lilted just a bit. Not enough to call it a song. Not enough to call the police. 

Darren came out with a sheet of paper. He opened the door, pulling the veil that kept Nina there with me out the window. She left me with nothing but questions.  Did we have to go to the jail now? Did we exchange paper money for official looking paper that we could exchange for his dad? 

Darren shook his head. There’s a system for knowing when someone posts bail. 

“Do you think he’ll pay your grandpa back?” 

Darren put his yellow 1971 Volkswagen Beetle, the car I was learning to drive on, into first gear. He didn’t answer. Even though we’d been back and forth across half the state, I made it into the house almost on time. 

My dad sat in his blue recliner, bluer than Darren’s Grandfather’s in Duchesne, tilted all the way back so his body was mainly horizontal, a re-run of MASH flashing blues and greens from the TV. Even prostrate, my dad could pull his glass of Chardonnay to his lips, sip and not spill.

“How was your day?” he asked, just a little bit slurring.

“It was fine.”

“Good.”

I nodded and sat on the couch until the theme song spilled out of the TV as the credits rolled. Nina didn’t appear to sing but I knew the words anyway. I could play the song, croaking out, “Suicide is Painless”. It brings on many changes. But I can take or leave it if I please” on the piano that my parents kept in the basement—where I could be alone, imagining Nina Simone at The Village Gate on the corner of Bleeker and Thompson with a hundred people around to sing with me.

I heard a knocking on the sliding glass door that opened onto the deck that my dad stained with linseed oil every summer. My dad, too happy with his chardonnay and Lazy Boy, didn’t hear the soft knuckle against the door. 

“We have to get out of here,” she whispered. “If you stay here, you will have that show’s theme song stuck in your head the rest of your days.”

So I slid out into the night, tiptoeing down the linseed-oil massaged wood of the deck onto the manicured grass of the backyard. At the back fence, Nina lifted her long skirt, leveraged her foot on a cross plank and pulled herself over the top. I followed, saying, “we could have used the gate” as I jumped down to meet her on the blacktop surface where the church goers parked and the boys played basketball at the Ward House that shared a property line with mine. Or my father’s, rather. 

“We can get out for a little while.” 

I sized up my free sense. I looked at her and said, “I think we’ll need bicycles.” 

She agreed. 

We rolled my bike and one of my sister’s from the side door. Nina lifted her skirt. I tucked the bottom of my jeans into my socks. Maybe we could make it back to the river by daylight. 

---

Growing up non-Mormon in Utah, I often felt like I had to speculate a culture for myself. My parents, who had lived in New York City, returned to Salt Lake, disappointed to leave the diversity and culture of Utah. But there is diverse history in Utah--much of it imported, some of it buried, some of it ignored. For me, by speculating that Nina Simone visited me in Utah, it allowed me to think about appropriation, the history of music, the persistence of cover songs, and what it would be like to have a friend who saw things from a different perspective than I or the Utahns I knew. 

—

Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021) Sustainability: A Love Story (2018) and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. (2019). She has previously published the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013),and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story (2019) with Sean Prentissand Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013) with Margot Singer. She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a noted author in Best American Essays. Her work has been most recently published in the New York Times, Longreads, and Ploughshares, among other places. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.

Paternity

by David Shields

“Man is weak, and when he makes strength his profession, he is weaker.” — Antonio Porchia

So you’re a son, obviously, but you’re also a father.  Do you agree that all male writers are finally either sons or fathers?

For example, Thomas Mann was a father; Kafka was a son—see what I mean?

Or Obama saying that all men are trying either to win their father’s admiration or overcome their father’s mistakes—where do you fall in the patrilineal line-up? Obama said he was doing both, of course.

You have only one child—is there a cruelty involved in such a decision?

A selfishness, I suppose is what I mean?

How do you and your daughter get along now that she’s 27 and an accomplished memoirist in her own right?

In this regard, how easy is it to swallow a bit of your own medicine?

Where does she live now?

How about you?

Primarily in your own head, I’m venturing?

What sort of parent was your father?

He was in and out of mental hospitals your whole life, is that correct?

Thirty-three shock treatments over 99 years—almost impressive, in a way, isn’t it?

Do you see yourself inheriting his bipolarity to any degree?

Is that why you take such a high-powered SSRI, to ward off the demons?

Does your daughter ever worry that the bipolarity has skipped a generation?

How do you deal with that worry on her part?

Are you close to her, would you say?

What sort of father are you compared to your father—please tell me not equally AWOL?

How is that going—your new relationship with your half-brother, whom you barely knew until you were 50?

When your dad died, did you cry?

Why not?

But you did go through a weird psychosomatic illness at that time—some sort of high fever?

Do you and your half-brother compare notes on your father from different points of view?

How old was your father when you were born?

Was that uber-awkward—people thinking he was your grandfather?

How have you tried to make amends for that?

How old were you when your daughter was born?

Same age as you—your wife?

Are you still married?

Your thirtieth anniversary would have been next year; what gemstone is associated with the event if the couple is divorced?

Are you aware that your daughter identifies herself on her Instagram page as “kinda jock, kinda emo”?

Ring any bells?

Do you have a philosophy of fatherhood?

A teleology, I suppose I’m asking?

What do you think of Borges’s view that to replicate oneself via paternity is an act of vulgarity?

Do you find the truism true—children never want to read their parents’ books?

Any explanation for this phenomenon?

To me, “father” means distracted; what does it mean to you?

“Vacant”? Yoiks.

How did you react when a translator of one of your books asked you if “Daddums” meant “molten fool”?

Would you call your father a man of letters, journalist, ad man, publicist, gun for hire, or hack?

Shit My Dad Says is disposable piffle; why do you persist in praising it?

How did you avoid serving in Vietnam?

Oh, so when were you born?

“A part of me has been born that never would have been born if I hadn’t had the chance to gaze at my infant child”—can you react, please?

Are you in a sense addicted to crisis or at least tension, and how have you avoided (if you have) passing this tendency on to your daughter?

Oh, I see—a “blunted affect”?

Have you escaped the liar’s paradox or the narcissist’s dilemma, is, I suppose, what I’m asking?

Do you hate or love Schopenhauer’s dictum “The truth shall prevail, though the world perish”?

How about you—how badly do you want to perish?

To what extent, if any, do you gild the lily when speaking to your daughter?

Do you discuss these issues with other men, other fathers, other writers?

Is love the answer?

---

This chapter is excerpted from The Very Last Interview (New York Review of Books), forthcoming in 2022.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of two dozen books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2022. He wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance. Shields’s work has been translated into two dozen languages.

Irôko

by Faith Adiele

My project as a multi-racial/cultural/national nonfiction writer has always been to challenge Eurocentric myths of objectivity, history and linearity, so rather than use a Western psychological lens to explain suppressed memory, I interpret it through Nigerian, specifically, Igbo, philosophy.

At the green tip of an island in Brazil, Africa a mere 3700 miles away, my Spirit Double decides to speak. My Chi has been mysterious-quiet for twenty years, ever since our first trip to Nigeria. They’d spent two-and-a-half decades trying to pull us home, after all. Twenty-six years trying to conjure our unknown father and siblings. And I’d done a poor job holding up my end of the bargain, the weak-fleshed human part. The part that knows how to accept what you’ve spent your entire life praying for. 

Now, during this second trip to Brazil, as I dangle my legs in the shallow blue bay midway between my home in California and my father’s home in Nigeria, they see their chance.  Blinding-bright, they approach over the sparkling sea, voice humming high-static. Sistah! they growl, you final ready for tell dis tale true? 

Throwing up my arm to shield my eyes, I recognize the timbre of the voice. Deep in the forest, these islanders still hold traditional ceremonies, members of secret societies draping themselves in raffia, pulling nets over their faces and allowing Egun, ancestral spirits, to enter them. My first visit to Brazil, the workers at the artists’ colony had been fascinated to learn that my father was Nigerian. At midnight, the cook and driver tapped on my bedroom door: “Vamos ver Egungun!” Throwing on some clothes, I met them in the muddy lane, tiny pond frogs crying as loud as the farm cats I grew up with, and we off-roaded high into the mountains to huddle in a candlelit barn in a field and wait.

On the sunlit pier, my Chi growls, the sound rattling my head. That night the Masquerades howled in Yoruba and shook the wide barn doors, before bursting inside to dance up the aisles, brandishing switches. As the cook clutched my arm and hid her face, I stared hungrily, risking a beating to see Nigerian spirits in the New World. 

Listen well-well, Sistah! Chi shrieks. After twenty-six years not knowing our father, you spend another twenty forgetting what he dey. Me, I go carry heavy memory on backward-feets into de spirit-world. 

Alarmed, I pull my legs from the warm water and leap up from the dock. Feet pounding the weathered wood, I sprint toward the white stone gate of the artists’ colony and my studio beyond. 

/

Every morning a male peacock struts leisurely through the studio, trailing iridescent tail-feathers. Once in front, he levitates them in slow, rustling waves before shuddering into full jeweled display. Then he throws back his tiny, crowned head and baby-cries three times. 

But I tire remembering alone!

Abeg, make you no vex me!

Time for wake up!

Inside my studio, sliding doors open to the manicured grounds, the peacock and peahen, the dock stretching into the horizon, I paw through the stacks of research I’d tossed into my luggage back in California. The embossed, leather journal I kept that first visit to Nigeria. Plastic envelopes of documents—my fellowship award for overseas study, my application to the University of Nigeria, the address of a host family. Manila file folders, their brittle labels sloughing off like autumn leaves. 

I run my fingers over the journal’s gilt-tipped edges, looking for something to explain Chi’s ire. I unfold the long tails of letters I photocopied onto A4 paper before entrusting them to the Nigerian mail. I discover words in my handwriting that I have absolutely no memory of having written, about things of which I have absolutely no memory.

18 April 

My father is pretty cool. Though there’s a lot of Igbo proverb speaking. He’s an Anglican priest! He’s been around the world, including dinner in South Africa with Joshua Nkomo, the father of Zimbabwe. 

23 April

Scratch that. Turns out that while he was saying he was trying to protect me from gossip and exploitation, he was actually scheming. He got me to agree to stay off campus until he could “inform people properly and naturally” but has no intention of doing so. Whoever tries to talk to me is quickly bundled away. 

My father, whom the journal calls The Priest Who is Supposed to Be My Father, apparently traveled with a second priest, called Bad Priest. Any day now, Bad Priest assures the girl in the journal, Your Father will invite you to leave this host family and stay with his family, your family, openly.

When he leaves, the host family shakes their heads. “No, Faith,” the father spits angrily. “He came to us in secret and said he suspected you of posing as a student to smuggle drugs.”

“They plan to keep you from being seen and registered until you violate your student visa and are deportable,” the mother adds, her soft face and voice drooping. 

I slap the leather cover shut, as if it were a book of bad spells, and clutch my chest. The room swims. Upon meeting me for the first time, my father, the great educator and freedom fighter, did this? This? And if this is true, how did I ever forgive him and join the family? And if this is true, how did I ever forget that it happened in the first place?  

All surly-silent in the spirit-world.

/

In the afternoon of my second visit to Brazil, the program coordinator of the artists’ colony taps on my door. “Vamos passear,” he says, inviting me on a field trip. He suggests the ruins of the island’s first Catholic church, established by Jesuits in the mid-1500s. “You’ll enjoy it,” he promises, gesturing with his leather man-clutch. “Our island is actually what Vespucci ‘discovered’ and called the New World.” He laughs a rich, easy laugh. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”

I grab my hat and daypack. “In that case!” 

As the ruins come into sight, my body starts to prickle. It’s that feeling when the cook splashes bright orange palm oil into a pot. When I see Baianas on the cobblestone streets of Salvador in their all-white dresses and head-ties selling food I recognize from Nigeria. When I hear the drums of Candomblé, that New World fusion of Yoruba religion and Roman Catholicism, summon singing, clapping worshippers to the beach. It’s like a forgotten name dancing on the tip of my tongue, a shuddering as my Chi slips backward into the spirit-world. 

“Who lived here?” I ask. 

“The Tupinambá,” H explains. “They had a flourishing fishing community. A Tupinambá priestess set fire to the church twice.” He waggles two fingers. “But the Jesuits rebuilt each time. On the same site.” 

We grimace at each other, and he points with his middle finger to a network of massive tree roots erupting from the leaf litter around us. The roots undulate over the ground, clustering in thick braids in the corners of the church and forming a trunk that shoots through the exposed roof, tall as a skyscraper. “But finally,” he says with a wicked grin, “a tree prevailed.” 

Thin creepers rappel across deteriorating walls and doorways and windows, digging fingers into every crevice. Veiny bursts pulse over exposed brick, pushing out the streaked, sooty walls. It’s both terrifying and beautiful. 

“Wait, I think I know this tree,” I mutter. “Wait, do I?”

And suddenly Chi is back, hovering and humming in the branches like leaves in the breeze. Eh, you sabi dis tree well-well. 

“I do?” I don’t know plants. 

Perhaps it’s not the tree so much as what it’s doing. I remember visiting Ghana with my Nigerian sister and seeing a giant petrified Strangler Fig. After living as a sticky seed on the branch of a host tree, the fig eventually shot up leaves that stole the sunlight and shot down roots that wrapped around its host’s, slowly suffocating them. The victim died, rotting away until the Strangler was left standing, holding the original tree’s shape. Is that what I’m recognizing?

High above, leaves rustle. Or is it my Spirit Double laughing at the metaphor?

I hear murmurs and turn to see two women whispering near an opening in one of crumbling church walls. One pulls a headless plaster-of-Paris figurine from a market bag and places it inside. The other crosses herself, plants a kiss atop something in her hand that’s the right size to be the head and sticks it in after. 

We saunter up to the pair, who step aside to let us peer in. Inside the wall, a cluster of bearded Magi and turbaned disciples with decapitated heads and severed limbs leans amidst rocks and hardened pools of candle wax. It’s a lopsided Nativity scene as played by the Island of Misfit Toys. 

H unzips his clutch and hands out business cards. The women palm the cards and explain that the church ruins are still used for Catholic masses, as well as Candomblé ceremonies performed by Yoruba priests. And that once broken, figurines blessed by the church should be burned or buried here, their safe disposal returning them to God. 

I gesture at the tree surrounding us. “Que árvore é essa?” 

They lean together and whisper a soft barrage of nasally X and Sh sounds, like the waves gently lapping the fishing boats a few hundred yards away. Their Portuguese vowels are long and lazy, but faster than I can follow. 

“They don’t know the kind of tree,” H translates, “but one says she knows the name of the Orixá that lives inside.” Seeing my surprise, he explains, “This is the sacred tree of Candomblé.”

I give my wrist three quick shakes, snapping my fingers loudly. All three recognize the gesture of excitement and grin. “I’d love to know the spirit’s name,” I blurt. As an Igbo, I only know a few Yoruba deities, but there must be a reason I recognize the tree. 

The woman is still grinning when she says, “Irôko,” and I stagger back, struck dumb.  

/

Finally! I go watch you stagger-stagger and slap palm atop mouf. Yes, now! Irôko, our Igboland tree dat endures all. Dat gives its skin for powder, its blood for medicine. Irôko, who can reach 20 meter and 500 year! 

How can this be? This Brazilian Irôko standing amidst the rubble where Nigerian Orixás and Portuguese Catholics and Tupinambá Shamans meet isn’t the actual same genus of tree. The Nigerian tree immortalized in Achebe novels is actually two different trees, both of which produce Irôko wood. 

The first Irôko is Milicia Excels, a shade tree with a buttressed trunk and wide, flat crown. On my first visit to our ancestral village, my stepmother brandished a fistful of long, ridged leaves and explained that they treated conditions from heart problems to abdominal pain: “Any bad thing the body is holding and needs to let go!” 

The other Irôko is Chlorophora Excels, a giant prized for the medicinal properties of its leaves, bark and sap, an entire life cycle: The roots treat sterility. The bark acts as an aphrodisiac. The leaves increase a mother’s supply of breast milk. 

But other than being equally tall, the only thing Nigerian and Brazilian Irôko have in common is the spirit that lives inside. So how am I recognizing a tree I’ve never seen? 

At the same time Portuguese Catholicism was sending creeper vines over Vespucci’s New World, the Portuguese were spreading over the sea, clinging to the shores of what would later become Nigeria. There, they loaded human cargo into the holds of ships and sailed to Brazil. Upon landing, the kidnapped spirit climbed into the canopy of the tallest tree it could find and held vigil over its people for 500 years, the lifespan of an Irôko.

 /

Back in my studio, Chi won’t shut up. They careen through the room, scattering papers and slamming drawers. Heyyy, finally! I make you open file, make you see Irôko, make you remembering. 

We inspect my haul, a series of eerie photos on my phone and fistful of dry leaves gathered off the ground. Irôko lives in the tree canopy, limbs reaching so high it’s considered the throne of God. If you cut its tree-home without asking permission, it may drag you to the spirit-world or drive you mad. If you build your house out of Irôko, you may hear the trapped spirit calling from inside the wood. Which can drive you mad.

The leaves of Irôko are eaten to treat insanity. I touch the tip of my tongue to one, and Chi conjures a memory like movie footage: 

The Priest Who is Supposed to Be My Father says: 

I can’t believe 

you don’t see that the secret police are tapping my phone 

and following you 

and will ruin us both 

through trumped-up charges.

I say: 

I can’t believe

that after 26 years of neglect, you think you have the right 

to ruin my academic record 

through forcing me to forfeit a grant.

He says: 

I will lose my job. 

The priesthood. 

My pension.

I say: 

You lied, 

pretending to claim me

when actually you are hiding me.

How do I know this is true?

He says: 

You don’t know anything 

about Nigeria.

I say: 

You don’t know anything 

about me.

He says: 

You have no right to return 

to this country without my permission.

Your roots are me,

not a country or a university.

I say: 

You have no right 

to tell an adult woman she can’t come to an entire country 

on her own, 

not even looking for you.

He says: 

You saw your roots; 

it’s me. 

Now you can go.

I say: 

I didn’t go to your house. 

You came to this house 

looking for me.

How do I not have any recollection of this? As the sun drops, red and full into the blue bay, leaves rustle, peacocks scream, frogs mewl, and my Chi departs. I drop to my chair and feel a dull burn as memory shoots budding leaves up to my brain and suffocating roots down into my belly. My breath rasps, signaling a rage twenty years too late. 

/

This Priest Who is Supposed to Be My Father says that if I transfer to a university in the North, he will visit me and take me to our village, where the whole family will welcome me. 

Because it’s been established that I don’t know anything about Nigeria, I wonder, how can I switch my international fellowship to another university, without any connections or protection? 

“Alright,” I say. I will transfer, provided he obtain permission from my fellowship sponsor, get me admission and a research advisor, find me housing and an Igbo teacher, and drive me there. “And in case the sponsor doesn’t agree,” I add, “you should pay the money I forfeit.” 

What happens next, I do remember, no Chi necessary.  

This Priest Who is Supposed to Be My Father springs to his feet, clutching the blocky outline of the pacemaker over his flesh-heart, and starts to scream. “Nigerian children have no right to speak to their fathers this way!” he shrieks, waking up the spirit-world. “NO RIGHT!” His weathered face scrunches up like a child about to bawl; his missing-one-tooth-mouth crumples and caves.  

My host mother leans forward in her chair, soft, fleshy hand outstretched: a tableau of alarm.  

My host father crosses his arms over his chest, narrowed eyes unblinking: a tableau of skepticism.  

Bad Priest shakes a fist, bellowing about foreigners who will bring bad luck and scandal.

I stuff my hand into my mouth to stop myself from screaming too. This Father/Not-Father is going to have a heart attack and die right here in the parlor, among the plastic doilies and hum of the generator, and it will be my fault. 

Shhh, no wahala, Chi soothes. Let go any bad ting. 

So I clench my fists and stopper my mouth for twenty years. I hand my Chi the sticky seed of memory to hold, to tote for us. And when this priest stops shouting, chagrined, and clasps me to his tiny, machine-powered chest and says that he loves me, I start to cry sea-salty tears because I know that he doesn’t really but I want him to and I want to trust him but I can’t though I have to pretend that I do and so I lean into his pacemaker-embrace while he slaps my back with awkward open palms and I cry some more. 

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While working on my memoir at an artists’ colony in Brazil, I was stunned to uncover that I had blocked out a huge detail about meeting my Nigerian father for the first time. My project as a multi-racial/cultural/national nonfiction writer has always been to challenge Eurocentric myths of objectivity, history and linearity, so rather than use a Western psychological lens to explain suppressed memory, I interpret it through Nigerian, specifically, Igbo, philosophy. I transformed our ontological belief in Spirit Doubles into an actual character I could employ to make sense of the mystical encounters I kept having in Brazil and to challenge the fictional narrative of colonial “discovery”. My fondness for structures that allow for multiple cultural realities and temporal spaces seemed particularly important in this situation, where I felt like a tourist to my own memories.

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Faith Adiele is author of The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, a humorous e/audiobook about fibroids, and Meeting Faith, a memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun that won the PEN Open Book Award. Her media credits include My Journey Home, a PBS documentary about finding her family, Sleep Stories for the Calm app, and HBO-Max series, A World of Calm. Named as one of Marie Claire Magazine’s “Five Women to Learn From,” Faith resides in Oakland and teaches at California College of the Arts.